Around 3 a.m. Wednesday, 73-year-old Abraham Venson woke up to an alarm company alerting him to someone breaking into his shed, the same shed that had been broken into months ago.
Venson went outside his home with a gun in hand. As the two robbers ran from his home, Venson saw the second man reach for his waistband. That’s when Venson fired his weapon, striking the man.
Although someone was breaking into his shed, Venson was arrested for the shooting. Under Louisiana law, it is unlawful for you to fire a weapon at someone if your life is not at risk. It doesn’t matter if they’re stealing personal property or not.
[ … ]
“Jail ain’t no place for anybody,” said neighbor Alvin Campbell, who feels the arrest against Venson was unjust.
If this report is accurate, [a] I don’t see the problem, and [b] Bob’s analysis is incomplete and perhaps flat wrong. Sure, it may have been wiser for him not to have followed the robber. That’s water over the dam at this point.
The way I read the report, he didn’t shoot at the robber for his crime of larceny. He shot because he feared for his life. This is his defense, and any good lawyer would set it up that way.
But I suspect the problem here runs deeper. I suspect that he talked to the police and said something inaccurate or damning, and thus the prosecutor has charged him with a crime, whether his report to the police was accurate or not.
Folks, do not ever talk to the police. Ever. His first action should have been to call 911 and tell the dispatcher that a shooting had occurred. The second should have been to tell the police that they can talk to his lawyer and he has nothing to say.
Please … please … learn this. Please. And watch this video one more time for good measure.
HOUSTON- A good Samaritan with a gun stopped three suspects whom held Auto Zone employees at gunpoint during an attempted robbery on Friday night.
According to authorities, three males entered the Auto Zone on Jones Road around 9:00 p.m. demanding cash from the register. A customer who happened to be pulling up saw the men holding the employees at gunpoint.
The customer, a “LTC” permit carrier, pulled his gun and went inside the store. He made the suspects get down on the ground and drop their weapons.
Deputies said he held the suspects until they arrived. All three suspects were arrested.
Wait! Ridiculous and impossible. When anyone other than a trained law enforcement officer (all of whom are experts in super secret ninja warrior stress management techniques and operating tactically during tactical operations) tries to stop crime or engage in self defense or defense of others, guns take on a life of their own and rotate as if a windmill, firing uncontrollably and randomly, killing innocent women and children everywhere. How could this happen?
But there is more.
Although deputies commended the customer for his actions, they don’t recommend this because they say it could have ended in a shootout and someone getting hurt.
Of course. Could this have ended any other way than law enforcement telling others not to do this sort of thing and to leave it to the “experts?”
Todd Orr of Montana was attacked twice by a grizzly bear with cubs. His tale can be read here. The best report comes from Facebook, and if you don’t do Facebook (I don’t either), reddit/firearms has a more detailed account here.
Both links give video he took immediately after making his way out of the wilderness. He did have a gun. The bear knocked him around enough that it got dislodged and was too far away to be of any help.
He also has some simple but obvious and interesting things to say about gun control (he’s referring to the Hughes amendment). He doesn’t often broach the subject of politics.
“I fell backward from 20 feet onto a log. I spoke to God and knew I was injured terribly. I asked for and received the strength to crawl out. I spent a week in (a Green Bay hospital’s) intensive care unit, and nearly a full month in the hospital. A surgeon fused my lower 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 vertebrae.
“They taught me how to walk again. I have seven more months of rehab ahead, and am happy with how things are going. I’m in sales and have three to five years left of full-time work. I hope people understand that what happened to me could happen to anyone. At some point when climbing trees, no matter how careful you might be, you’re vulnerable.”
Read the whole article. For my readers, this is serious business folks. Don’t climb ladders without the proper restraint and safety gear. Especially don’t do it in trees. Check your equipment before using. Replace your equipment periodically. Take the condition of your ropes as seriously as guys who climb and rappel. Most of those guys replace their ropes frequently because grains of sand get in between the fibers and cut them.
Wear fall restraints while climbing, and have redundancy in your platforms and fall restraints. If you don’t want to do all of this, then go on deer drives or stalk deer rather than climb into stands. Your life and health isn’t worth the next hunt. My daughter is involved in trauma care and trauma surgery, and she tells me it’s sad and devastating the injuries she sees during deer hunting season.
A cased rifle belonging to an officer with the Madison Police Department has been returned.
Officials say on Thursday the officer placed the gun on the back of his squad car, which he was about to drive from a MPD parking garage on Fairchild Street to the nearby City County Building.
The officer inadvertently forgot to move the cased weapon back into the squad, and it fell off into the roadway in the 200 block of South Hamilton Street. Realizing what had happened, the officer immediately went back to retrieve the case, only to find someone had picked it up.
According to police, on Friday the person who found the weapon was located.
Gosh, I hate it when that happens to me. I simply cannot tell you the number of guns I’ve lost by sitting them on the trunk of the car and driving off.
Fortunately for him, they were apparently found by a law abiding citizen. On the other hand, what’s the loss if not? The taxpayers foot the bill for everything. It’s not like it doesn’t happen to LEOs everywhere, right?
As the killer stood before him, Judge Kenneth Walker couldn’t stay silent.
“If I could I would take all the guns in America, put them on big barges and go dump them in the ocean,” the judge told the defendant. “Nobody would have a gun. Not police, not security, not anybody. We should eliminate all of them. We could save 33,000 people a year if we didn’t have guns in this country.”
Marcell Lee Daniel Jr. had unleashed 30 bullets during an afternoon drive-by shooting of an innocent man on a North Portland sidewalk. The man, Andrew Coggins Jr., 24, died.
The judge kept going.
“Australia after a major shooting rounded up all the guns, and they haven’t had near the death that we do here in this country,” he said.
“I just saw last night a statistic that 11,000 people in America are murdered each year and another 20,000 commit suicide with guns,” Walker said, referring to figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“They are a scourge of this country and no one should have one as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “There’s no defense to guns. There’s just absolutely no reason to have them. But it is a right of people in this country to own and possess them, and I will not say anything to affect that right.”
Walker, a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge for nearly 10 years and a criminal defense attorney before that for 25 years, sentenced Daniel to 17 1/2 years in prison.
The dead man’s mother, Connie Holmes, said she appreciated the judge’s comments.
Okay. You first. Let me know how the police react when you go confiscate their firearms. What? You were going to do this, right? You didn’t expect someone elseto do it for you, did you?
But just remember TheAlaskan’s dictum: “Those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not.”
I have no reason to doubt the title of the YouTube post. Holy crap! Did they leave an M4 or AR-15 leaning up against the garage door while they tried to break into the house? What was that dude in the truck doing with his time? Eating doughnuts?
I think it might have been easier and done with greater tactical fidelity if they had gone up to the door and knocked. I hope they didn’t just go in and shoot the dog, leave the door all broken and walk away like most other SWAT raids. Or confiscate an ounce of marijuana and call it a success.
But then again, remember boys and girls, only law enforcement officers are trained and qualified in tactical operations while operating tactically and stress management ninja warrior techniques and are therefore qualified to handle firearms. So who am I to talk?
Authorities say a federal agent accidentally shot a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy in the leg at the sheriff’s station in Lemon Grove while unloading a handgun that was seized by a joint task force Monday.
The deputy’s injury was not considered life-threatening, sheriff’s spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said.
The names of the deputy and the federal agent were not released.
The agent and other members of the unnamed task force recovered the .22 handgun while serving a search warrant in eastern San Diego County, Caldwell said.
But remember boys and girls. Only law enforcement officers are trained and qualified in tactical operations while operating tactically and stress management ninja warrior techniques and are therefore qualified to handle firearms. You aren’t. No, really. Don’t argue the point. You aren’t.
I’m also perplexed that FN submitted the Five-SeveN, as the gun’s 5.7×28 caliber has been thoroughly trashed by most defensive handgun experts as a niche round that fails to create adequate tissue damage to have significant immediate impact on targets.
The FN 5.7 won’t be the next Army handgun, but it doesn’t perplex me at all, and frankly I wouldn’t pay much attention to defensive handgun “experts” as they trash things. And this is as good a chance as any to post a related bit of analysis I ran up on a few months ago.
The FN 5.7 pistol is constantly maligned or underestimated in many gun forums and articles, often by people who have never experienced shooting the pistol. Subjective comparisons with the .22 magnum or categorization as a sub-par .223 round create confusion about the effectiveness of the FN 5.7.
Enough time has passed after the terrorist attack at Ft. Hood. The shooter, Nidal Malik Hassan, has been arrested, tried and sentenced. The media has moved on. Now we can begin to analyze the impact of the FN 5.7 and address the question of lethality.
Using SS192 and SS197SR ammunition (common commercial 5.7×28 ammo), several 20-30 round magazines and an FN 5.7 (shooter also had a .357 revolver but did not use it), Hassan killed 13 and wounded 32 people.
Many armchair ballistics expert criticized this result as proof that the FN 5.7 platform is not lethal enough because of the proportion of the fatalities to the wounded. Others have proposed that had Hassan use another type of pistol, 9mm or .45, there would have been more fatalities.
If you look at this Wikipedia link and look at the list of casualties, one can come to a very eye-opening conclusion.
Fort Hood shooting – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1. 11 people were shot center-of-mass (COM), one was shot in the stomach and one was shot in the head. All 13 died. All 11 victims who were shot COM did not survive.
2. 3 of the 13 people who died, tried to charge Hassan, but he stopped them with COM shots.
3. The 32 people who were wounded were hit in the arms, legs, hips and shoulders. None of the wounded survivors were shot COM.
The following conclusions can be drawn:
1. The FN 5.7 is a very lethal round CQB because all 11 victims who were shot COM died. No survivors for those hit COM.
2. The FN 5.7 is a real stopper, because 3 tried to charge Hassan at close range and were stopped by COM shots.
3. One of the fatalities was shot in the stomach, and died. The fragmentation of the SS197R round can create a hail of metal shards that can cause serious internal organ damage and bleeding in the stomach.
4. None of the 32 people who were hit in the extremities, hips and shoulders were able to muster a counter-attack because the FN 5.7 must have shattered or broken bones. The high rate of wounded vicitms to fatalities was the direct result of the shooting ability of Hassan (or lack thereof), and not because the 5.7×28 round is not lethal.
5. Sgt. Kimberly Munley (base civilian police), one of the first responders, was immediately disabled with 5.7×28 bullet shrapnels to her wrist and a second 5.7×28 bullet broke her femur. The light 5.7×28 commercial ammo showed that it can shatter large bones due to its velocity
6. According to medical personnel, there was so much blood in the room that it was difficult to get to the victims because the floor became very slippery. One can conclude that the commercial 5.7×28 rounds can fragment or tumble, causing immense blood loss.
7. It took five bullets (which I assume was a 9 mm) from Sgt Mark Todd to stop Hasan. And he survived his wounds (no available info on where he was hit, except that one of the bullets paralyzed Hasan).
In conclusion:
1. The FN 5.7 is definitely a very lethal round. 100% fatality for COM shots.
2. The FN 5.7 is a man-stopper. Three military men tried to charge Hasan, and all three were stopped.
2. The FN 5.7 is a very incapacitating round, if extremities are hit, because it is powerful enough to break the femur (which is the largest bone in the body)
3. The fragmentation or tumbling effect of commercial ammo can cause a lot of blood loss.
The FN 5.7 is a very effective weapon. It is as effective as, or arguably more effective, than any military or civilian pistols in the market.
It is unfortunate that the jihadist Hassan used this weapon against U.S. soldiers.
And as it pertains to its penetrating capability, you can see these tests for yourself (note that none of these rounds are the steel core rounds, and perhaps for maximum tissue damage one wouldn’t want to use steel core rounds anyway).
9 years, 4 months ago
