Update to Guns and News

Here’s another story about a homeowner defending himself with a gun, which was discussed in the last post, Guns and News — this is from Raw Story

Gwinnett County jail records obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution indicated that Phillip Walker Sailors was charged on Sunday with the murder of Rodrigo Abad Diaz.

Friends who were in the car with Diaz told WSB-TV that they were trying to pick up a friend on the way to ice skating on Saturday but their GPS directed them to the wrong address. The friends said that they waited in the driveway for a few minutes before Sailors emerged from the house and fired a gun into the air.

Gandy Cardenas, who was in the car, recalled to WAGA that the homeowner made no effort to speak to the group before opening fire.

“He didn’t talk to them, he just started shooting,” Cardenas explained. “The first shot was in the air.”

At that point, Diaz tried to turn the car around to leave, but Sailors fired another shot, striking the immigrant on the left side of the head. The group, which included a 15 and an 18 year old, said that Sailors held them at gunpoint until police arrived.

Rodrigo Abad Diaz, an immigrant from Cuba, was 22 years old. Phillip Walker Sailors was a law-abiding citizen — well, until he’s convicted — exercising his Second Amendment rights.

26 thoughts on “Update to Guns and News

  1. Now the kiddies are getting some advanced infantry training. Won’t be long before they start serving MRE’s(C-rations for us old timers) in the school chow hall and replace study hall with bivouacking.

    http://news.msn.com/us/high-school-to-conduct-safety-drill-with-simulated-gunfire

    I’m hoping that in time this kind of stuff will wear off and go the way of building your own civil defence bomb shelter. Ban assualt weapons..and you’re half way there to being done with it.

  2. I saw that early yesterday morning, and it made me sick too.

    So, now, some people pull into your driveway, and, if you don’t know them, or don’t like the way they look, some cowardly idiots figure that they’re within their “rights” to just start blasting away at the people.

    The only positive I can find in this, is that this old yahoo can’t use the “Stand Your Ground” defense.

    The lesson in all of this, is that if you’re lost, or not sure if you’re at the wrong address, don’t pull into a driveway, and fer-shoor don’t go knock on a door for directions.

    I don’t think wanting to own a simple handgun to defend your family and home, or a rifle or two to hunt with, is a sign of anti-social behavior, or having a certain level of paranoia. Ok, maybe not the handgun so much, but I’m ok with hunters. But, anything beyond that, including people who want to run around armed, or people like this old coot, who pulls out a gun for the slightest cause, do suffer from anti-social behavior, with certain levels of paranoia, and/or other forms of mental disease.

    I’m alsmot 55, raised in NY City, and lived in some pretty shady areas of NY City in 4 boroughs, right next to some in Center City in Philadelphia, and a somewhat rough part of Fayetteville, NC, and somehow, I’ve never even seen a gun out in public, and never felt the need for one to either protect my apartments, or when I went out.

    I think gun owners, who go beyond some basic handgun for the house, and a rifle to hunt with, are basically cowardly and paranoid wussies.
    Sorry gun owners, but that’s what I think.

    Most people don’t feel the need to own a gun.
    Most people don’t want them anywhere near them.
    And WE have our rights, too!

  3. It’s beginning to look to me as if the ones yodeling loudest for limitless gun rights are the same ones whose gun ownership should be limited — for the protection of themselves and others — to cap pistols and squirt guns.

  4. Not to be overly dramatic, but in a way this is the logical conclusion of the guns-first attitude. Everyone should be armed – and everyone should be a suspect. If more people are armed, there’s more reason to be armed. Ergo, everyone should have a gun and be vigilant at all times.

    Then it leads to this.

    Remember this is just the stuff we hear. How much more crazy just stays local or becomes an unpleasant incident on a police blotter?

    My big concern now is we’re in a degenerative cycle of paranoia and people piling up guns. At some point it’s going to break spectacularly.

  5. From the school of “You Can’t Possibly Make Stuff Like This Sh*t Up,” FOX sent a reporter to talk to Dick Cheney about gun control advice.
    ROTFLMAO!!!

    Amazingly, his first answer wasn’t, “Keeping guns away from an old drunken and heartless sociopathic @$$hole like me, might be a good place to start,” wasn’t one of them.
    Neither was, “Tell people the best way to practice gun safety is to not to get in the way of bullets or buckshot – especially, their faces.”

    Next up: FOX to send a reporter to interview a real fox about chicken-coop safety.

    OY!!!
    “The Onion” should close shop soon. Nothing they can do will ever top Conservative “reality.”

  6. You all forget fox news. Fear of the brown all the time. Ailes has made a fortune off the fear network. Starting with his takeover in england with the permission of the Queen. Remember the thatchers liberalizing the rights of the english about jurnolism and fraud. And Libel, and spreading of disinformation. The big yell of yellow jurnolism. Nothing against news orginazations, but then to get themselfs classified as entertainment, not news. Just as local newspapers can now be called entertainment, not news. Don’t have to be accurate, or real, or true anymore. Remember when the news was the last bastion between fantasy and real life? You haven’t heard much of them but, since the pentagon papers. Pathetic.

  7. Spot on Muldoon. Yet another whose right to a gun for safety’s sake didn’t make the owner feel safe and made someone else not so safe…like dead. Ever notice how the technical nature of the argument depersonalizes the incident so quickly that we hardly stop to consider how many people might be afflicted by this incomprehensible of hysteria? “Experts”speak of mental health but there is no real definition of insanity…either the clinical or the “normal”variety. If this gun owner is not noirmal then we have an epidemic on our hands. I’d rather there be gun zones than gun free zones. I can drive all the way to LAX to have a safe moment at the gate, live at the courthouse or attend concerts forever. And if there were a gun zone would any gun owner in it really feel safe if their default reaction to an off-white gun owner would be to shoot them? Those for whom guns are the only path to safety deserve the world they fear but not others.

  8. How soon before two of these guns-in-the-open people meet on the street and have a shootout solely because “the other guy was a threat?”

  9. How can we help FOX ratings to fall further? Until those hate/fear/despair mongers are off the air we have little chance of turning dead minds into living ones.

  10. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/gabrielle-giffords-expected-speak-senate-gun-violence-hearing-135409533–politics.html

    Ramp up the fear and dilute this issue…Anybody see a similarity to the Global War on Terra?

    Lapierre says: “Law-abiding gun owners will not accept blame for the acts of violent or deranged criminals”. Who ever made that accusation? Sounds like he’s playing the victim card. He’s a twisted little puppy..I listened to his speech following Obama’s inaugural…and he started out with a patriotic discourse about our inalienable rights, and then he managed to weave the second amendment into his speech as an inalienable right. I guess somewhere between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution owning an assault weapon became an inalienable right?

    LaPierre gives me flashbacks to High School. President of the 4-F club.

  11. “We have rights too” …..yeah right. We have the right to remain silent after our kids are blown to bits. We have the right to be held hostage and like it when we are caught in the cross fire. Yeah we have rights all right.

    You know I think the NRA may be on to something. This could work for every situation. You want to stop drunk driving? The best solution is MORE drunk people driving. You want to stop bullies? Then we should all become bullies. Less abortions? Then we must all have one, whether we need it or not! Less child abuse? We must all find a kid and abuse him/her right away in order to stop this!

    It is more important that a frightened white man FEEL safe than for your kids to be alive , don’t you get that? One wonders how , since the security situation has gotten so dire, how all these men can leave their bunkers and leave their families un safe while they spend hours at gun shows. These families they must defend at all costs can be left at risk for a gun show.

    And the all “powerful” NRA. You want to end the power of that “lobby” group? Expose their members names to the government. If the gunnies thought the government was using the NRA membership list to potentially i.d gun owners the NRA would lose members by the droves along with their “power” If we really wanted to stop this madness we could but I don’t believe we want to.

  12. It is, in the end, fear, yet there is another factor.

    I have found that people who are afraid seek power, and think that it will make others afraid of them. They then discover, unpleasantly, that others who are afraid will also stand up or push back. They cannot cope with this easily.

    When you see how people react with hysteria to common-sense ideas to limit the access of guns to irresponsible parties, you see screaming fear, you see people amazed anyone would stand up to them. Most of all, people not hiding behind guns.

  13. Sailors was a former missionary. I imagine for Jerry Falwell’s church since he was obviously filled with Christ’s love and compassion.

  14. Yesterday, a mother of six, Gayle Trotter, testified that she keeps a loaded AR-15 with a 30 round magazine, to fight off intruders.
    She testified that the AR-15 was the best gun for women to defend their homes and families with, because it’s lightweight and accurate.

    If I were a Senator, here are some of the things I would have asked her:

    I have some further questions for you, there, Ramboette.

    What you’re saying is, that what will make a woman feel secure for herself, and/or her family, if she has one, is an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine in the home.

    Uhm…
    If the AR-15 is so accurate, why do you need 30 rounds?
    Wouldn’t, oh, say, 6 to 10 bullets be enough?
    Or are you expecting a Baseball team to break in? Or ALL of the local gang of Crips or Bloods from the nearest urban hellhole.

    And what about if you have a significant other, should that person also be carrying an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine?

    So, again, what I’m hearing is, that what will make you feel secure for yourself, is to have at least one person spread a hail of lead around your home – preferrably, two people, if you have a significant other. (Now, it appears that on the evening before their Sunday game, just to warm-up, an NFL team might be invading her home)

    I’m hoping that you live out in the prairie in case this band of vicious thugs breaks in, Ramboette, and not in a suburban development, apartment, condo, or co-op complex, because if you don’t hit every target you aim for, and/or your own significant other and children, what you’ll probably hit with strays, is houses, cars, and people in neighboring homes in your vicinity.

    And, if they have AR-15’s, won’t your neighbors be returning fire on YOUR home, since that’s where the bullets threatening THEIR families are coming from?

    OY!
    TEH STOOOOOPID!
    IT BURNS!!
    IT BURNS LIKE BEING HIT BY ALL 30 ROUNDS FROM AN AR-15 BY A MODERN ANNIE OAKLEY!!!
    THIS IS SO TEH STOOOOOOOOOOOOOPID, ONLY A CONSERVATIVE COULD THINK THAT THIS MAKES ANY FECKIN’ SENSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  15. Well, we can just all drop the debate on gun control.
    Yesterday, I was informed by a co worker that guns don’t kill people any more than spoons make people fat.I didn’t know where to begin with that statement, other to say, you’re absolutely right.

    • erinyes — y’know, I have spoons like that. I’ll be minding my own business and then, out of nowhere, some killer spoon full of cookie dough ice cream flies into my mouth. Spoons are a menace.

  16. When you see how people react with hysteria to common-sense ideas to limit the access of guns to irresponsible parties, you see screaming fear, you see people amazed anyone would stand up to them. Most of all, people not hiding behind guns.

    For me, former astronaut Mark Kelly has moved beyond superhusband to supergutsy public figure. When he made a point to approach Wayne LaPierre in a D.C. hearing room to shake hands, I was reminded of the original meaning of the handshake: “I am unarmed; are you?”

  17. On Dkos the other day, an article said that there had been over 1,400 gun deaths since Newtown occurred.

  18. the AR-15 was the best gun for women to defend their homes and families with, because it’s lightweight and accurate

    And it comes in pink!

    But best of all, if attacked by 30 people breaking in at once (and provided they all get stuck in the doorway in a Three Stooges-type maneuver), Gayle can mow them all down at once!

    People are so, so afraid of they know not what.

    I, on the other hand, own some nefarious spoons like maha’s. They will probably kill me quicker than the imaginary baddies who attack in groups.

  19. This could be the year Obama tears the curtain away from the NRA. Obama got us healthcare– something even Big Dog wasn’t able to do. Including contraception! He killed DOMA as a campaign issue (see today’s http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2013/01/the-new-republican-strategy-on-marriage.html). We seem to be seeing more “staying power” on the gun issue this time. Gabby Giffords testimony yesterday was powerful. A recent survey showed most TEXANS supporting stronger gun laws — not New Yorkers; not Californians.

  20. Just ban table spoons…Why punish us responsible tea spoon users? Spoons don’t kill, cholesterol does.

  21. Pingback: The Mahablog » Remembering Yoshihiro Hattori

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