Now That’s Drunk!

It’s amazing that this woman wasn’t dead.  Apparently Oregon is the state for Extreme Drunk Driving:

Comer is pictured below in a 2006 mug shot snapped after a prior drunk driving arrest. In that case, her BAC was recorded in the relatively minor .3 range. In November, another Oregon woman, Meagan Harper, was nabbed for drunk driving with an extreme BAC. In her case, Harper’s BAC was measured at .55. Comer’s .72 edges out what TSG has previously identified as the highest BAC we’ve ever seen. That fallen record (.69) was held by Willard Ashley III, an Indiana man who was busted in October 2003. (3 pages)

Wow.

Water Tower Vandalism

Looks like some bozo with a rifle decided to take some pot shots at a water tower in North Carolina:

Catawba County Sheriff’s deputy Major Coy Reid said the tower appears to have been shot three times with a high-powered rifle. He said authorities believe the shooting took place early Monday morning.

I would have thought water towers would be pretty resistant to small arms fire.  In addition to the shape usually being rather roundish, I would have imagined the metal would need to be thick enough just to contain the water that it could deflect a hit from most projectiles.

The Yearly PSA

Repeated again and again in communities everywhere.  Don’t fire guns into the air, says Lynn Abraham.  Probably good advice.  We’ll never compete with Kentucky anyway.  It’s not as big a problem as public officials like to make it out to be.  I agree that it shouldn’t be done, but I have to wonder if this type of PSA (or is that PSH) is designed more to scare people about gun ownership, than it is to combat a legitimate problem.  The kind of people who do this type of stuff are about as likely to care what Lynn Abraham thinks as they are to obey the gun laws which already make this activity illegal.

MPD SWAT Raid

Other people are doing a really good job of covering this.  I’m constantly listening to complains by folks that gun owners don’t care about other rights, that we’re lap dogs of George W and his goons.  Well, how come it’s gun bloggers and other sympathetic people who are most outraged by these kinds of law enforcement tactics?  Does anyone think this Hmong gentlemen, who was the victim in all this, make no mistake, was treated gently after having shot and wounded two officers after they unlawfully invaded his home?

There are cases where you have to do raids like this, but it shouldn’t be, in any case, so routine that we hear these stories pop up so often.  Maybe I’ll have an easier time taking some folks on the left as being anything other than babbling baboons when they wake up and realize that there are very real civil rights abuses going on under their noises that have nothing to do with George W. Bush.

Copycat Killers

Dave Kopel has an editorial in the Rocky Mountain News this week which echoes some of the sentiments I talked about in this post, back before the shooting in Colorado.  Dave Hardy points to Loren Coleman, who has studied these things.  I think there’s little doubt that media coverage of these events encourages future killers.

One thing I noticed about the Colorado shootings is that the courageous actions of Jeanne Assam shifted some of the media attention away from the killer and onto her.   I’m hoping that her willingness to talk to the media, and tell her story, will put these sociopaths on notice that churches aren’t the soft targets they imagine.  I am hoping that the publicity Assam’s actions have gotten will mean we won’t see a mass shooting in another church for quite some time.

This reiterates the importance of carrying wherever you go.  The life you save may not be just your own, and the people around you.  It may also serve to shatter the fantasy of these deranged people by shifting the attention away from them, and onto you, the person who stopped them, and to let them know their intended prey might not be so helpless as they think.  That kind of attention might be unwelcome, but I find the idea of a copycat killer more upsetting.

The Guns

The deranged psycho responsible for the Church Shootings in Colorado, who’s life was mercifully dispatched with great prejudice by Ms. Assam, apparently had the following firearms:

  • Bushmaster XM15 assault rifle, purchased January 9 in Aurora.
  • AK-47 assault rifle, purchased November 17, 2006 in Aurora.
  • Beretta .40 cal. semi-automatic handgun , purchased January 4 in Colorado Springs.
  • Springfield Armory 9mm semi-automatic handgun, purchased September 11 in Denver.

The AK-47 was the assault rifle found in his car.

Purchased over the period of a year. Sometimes tells me he didn’t just come up with this idea.

UPDATE: Uncle asks “Then, how’d he die from a self-inflicted shotgun wound?”  Good question.