Kansas City Shooting - Will anything change?

[swordfish]

Maybe since some of the shooters/suspects involved in this tragic event (that MSM coverage is now being focused on the victims, not the perps) were minors, the focus can perhaps now be on the topic of how minors (who are not allowed to legally purchase the weapons apparently used here) got those weapons and who the original purchaser was.  Only when the prosecution of those responsible for the distribution of weapons to minors are brought to trial and prosecuted can this lunacy begin to recede.  Enforce the law(s) already in existence!  Kids aren't allowed to purchase guns - How did they get em?

The problem isn't the guns, it's the criminal misuse of them.

FWIW - SF felt good seeing the crowd spring into action and catching that perp, and the one guy who actually said "It felt good" when he threw a punch or 2 at that dude laying on the ground.

There is no easy resolution to the gun debate. It’s estimated that there are about 398 million guns in the United States, and about 397.999 million of them are kept peaceably and responsibly for home protection or sport. Maybe gun haters need to start talking to those gun owners as allies rather than enemies.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/02/16/chiefs-parade-gun-control-debate/

Once again, the belligerent minority ruled. A handful of querulous malefactors drew smoke from their pockets on a Kansas City sidewalk, and now it threatens to end victory parades in all 50 states.

Remind me of exactly when anyone got to vote on that.

Police believe the shooting that killed Lisa Lopez-Galvan and injured 22 others at the Chiefs victory parade Wednesday stemmed from “a personal dispute.” The unceasing personal grievances of the belligerent few have just about chained us to our houses, made it impossible to go to a park, a train station, a school event, without our shoulders tensely riding up around our ears from the fear of violence. Public officials have responded to the Kansas City parade shooting by wondering whether such public gatherings should be shut down. That’s exactly the wrong answer. It gives the belligerent minority a near-total tyranny over the rest of us.

The occasion should have been exultant, bonding and at worst a little tipsy. But the actions of three or four dissolved a parade enjoyed by 1 million into a stampeding horror.

How do we react to that going forward? Maybe there was a clue in that crowd.

Didn’t you feel a twinge of something deeply gratifying — and inspiring — in the way ordinary crowd members chased down a suspected gunman and collectively smothered him? They undertook momentary personal risk and sacrifice and then found greater safety in numbers, as helper after helper piled on until the suspect disappeared under their collective weight.

That’s real authority, and it didn’t come from a law or a cop.

The problem with the incessant argument over guns is that it invariably dissolves into fractures as it becomes ever more personal, the endless incessant pitting of personal rights against personal rights. The fractures grow larger; the majority gets weaker; and the belligerents get stronger and more terrifying.

There is no easy resolution to the gun debate. It’s estimated that there are about 398 million guns in the United States, and about 397.999 million of them are kept peaceably and responsibly for home protection or sport. Maybe gun haters need to start talking to those gun owners as allies rather than enemies.

We can’t dictate what any city’s — or for that matter, any family’s — tolerance for risk should be. That just leads to an endless cycle of dispute. Northeasterners will talk past rurals, and everyone will feel challenged personally in one way or another. This was already starting Thursday. Sen. Bill Eigel, a Republican candidate for Missouri governor, posted a warning on social media about the “liberal gun grabbers” coming for your weapons. “NOT IN MISSOURI,” he wrote.

 

No one captured this fracture better, or was a more interesting commentator on it, than the late author and columnist for Harper’s Dan Baum. Both a gun enthusiast and an advocate for gun control, Baum wrote, “Shooters see their guns as emblems of a whole spectrum of virtuous lifestyle choices — rural over urban, self-reliance over dependence on the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, patriotism over internationalism, action over inaction — and they hear attacks on guns as attacks on them, personally.”

Personally.

So perhaps the smarter conversation about how to manage public risk in this country is the one in which people put aside their personal feelings and rights for a moment, to make a couple of concessions in favor of the majority public interest.

 

Perhaps gun haters could concede that too many anti-gun screeds push gun owners into a “defensive crouch,” to quote Baum, and that too many gun control proposals betray ignorance about specifics of actual guns. But in that conversation, perhaps gun owners could concede their gun is not a bulwark against a tyrannical government and in fact that gun recklessness is becoming a source of tyranny by the minority.

Surely, both reasonably can agree that guns should be kept locked up and gun owners liable for failing to secure them, seeing as how so many gun crimes are committed with stolen ones. Reach a consensus on that, and perhaps gun owners can become allies in the matter of gun control, the way those strangers allied in the moment in Kansas City.

The alternative is … what? No police force, no law, can truly enforce public safety. It has to be a mutual compact, a moral blockade.

 

That might sound like a small miracle, but it happens every day across the country in our sports stadiums. People congregate in rivalrous hundreds of thousands every week, far outnumbering the law enforcement inside the stadiums and arenas, and typically do no worse than jeer at each other, without anarchy or arson. Underneath it all is a silent agreement.

Football stadiums are miniature social compacts. No matter how aggrieved or unjustly wrong he or she may feel, everyone cooperates and abides (mostly) peaceably with each other.

That’s what those ordinary runners from out of the Kansas City crowd threw down on that suspected shooter: their own compact. And in doing so, they gave the feeling that, just maybe, there can be more parades.

 

[Impartial_Observer]

I’ve paid zero attention to this story, I don’t know any of the particulars, nor do I care to. But the answer to anything changing is no, the knee jerk reaction is always the same, punish law abiding gun owners. Guns are a symptom of much larger societal problems, we’ve seen, guns (guns are easy, but also against public opinion can be difficult to obtain), vehicles, bladed tools, etc. Why don’t we look at what causes people to do such heinous acts? Guns are nothing new, guns have been around, how do we go from many students having shotguns and rifles in the school parking lot and nary a negligent discharge, to what we have today?

[temptation]

Update from the MSM:   “Oh wait, it wasn’t a planned mass shooting where the shooter has little pigment and wrote a manifesto but rather a dispute between two young men of color?”

“Let’s move on to another story.”

 

 

[Impartial_Observer]

12 hours ago, temptation said:

Update from the MSM:   “Oh wait, it wasn’t a planned mass shooting where the shooter has little pigment and wrote a manifesto but rather a dispute between two young men of color?”

“Let’s move on to another story.”

 

 

If it fits the narrative it’s way to wall coverage including the memorials, if not move along nothing to see here. It’s so predictable it’s laughable. 

[swordfish]

The latest update to this almost forgotten story.  FINALLY prosecutors are going after the sources of where the firearms were actually (illegally) purchased.  12 people pulled guns that day and 6 of them pulled triggers.  I question how (at least 2 people) brought "AR-15" style rifles into a crowd like we saw.  

Specifically SF wants to point out the number of times this article utilizes the word "illegal".  This means these thugs already broke existing laws simply to obtain the weapons they weren't lawfully able to purchase, then broke more laws by carrying them on their person, then broke more laws by actually shooting them.  In other words, we don't need MORE gun laws, we simply need to enforce the laws on the books and execute prosecution when they are broke.

The case in Michigan where the parents are being charged for buying their mentally ill kid a handgun, then not being responsible enough to secure it and keep their son from carrying it to school and murdering other kids is finally the start (SF hopes) of many more.

https://apnews.com/article/chiefs-super-bowl-shooting-kansas-city-parade-57662b493b2d987288dabca4bc5fd6f1

Three Missouri men have been charged with federal counts related to the illegal purchase of high-powered rifles and guns with extended magazines after last month’s shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade and rally left one person dead, roughly two dozen others injured and sent hundreds of people scrambling for cover, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

 

Court documents unsealed Wednesday said 12 people brandished firearms and at least six people fired weapons at the Feb. 14 rally, which drew an estimated 1 million people to downtown Kansas City. The guns found at the scene included at least two AR-15-style rifles, court documents said. And U.S. Attorney Teresa Moore said in a news release that at least two of the guns recovered from the scene were illegally purchased.

The federal charges come three weeks after state authorities charged two other men, Lyndell Mays and Dominic Miller, with second-degree murder and several weapons counts for the shootings. Authorities also last month detained two juveniles on gun-related and resisting arrest charges. Police said the shooting happened when one group of people confronted another for staring at them.

Authorities have said a bullet from Miller’s gun killed Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was in a nearby crowd of people watching the rally. She was a mother of two and the host of a local radio program called “Taste of Tejano.” The people injured range in age from 8 to 47, according to police.

Named in the new federal charges were 22-year-old Fedo Antonia Manning, Ronnel Dewayne Williams Jr., 21, and Chaelyn Hendrick Groves, 19, all from Kansas City. Manning is charged with one count each of conspiracy to traffic firearms and engaging in firearm sales without a license, and 10 counts of making a false statement on a federal form. Williams and Groves are charged with making false statements in the acquisition of firearms, and lying to a federal agent.

According to online court records, Manning made his initial appearance Wednesday. He did not have an attorney listed, but asked that one be appointed for him. The online court record for Williams and Groves also did not list any attorneys to comment on their behalf.

A phone call to the federal public defender’s office in Kansas City on Wednesday went unanswered.

The new complaints made public Wednesday do not allege that the men were among the shooters. Instead, they are accused of involvement in straw purchases and trafficking firearms.

“Stopping straw buyers and preventing illegal firearms trafficking is our first line of defense against gun violence,” Moore said in the news release.

Federal prosecutors said that one weapon recovered at the rally scene was an Anderson Manufacturing AM-15 .223-caliber pistol, found along a wall with a backpack next to two AR-15-style firearms and a backpack. The release said the firearm was in the “fire” position with 26 rounds in a magazine capable of holding 30 rounds — meaning some rounds may have been fired from it.

The affidavit stated that Manning bought the AM-15 from a gun store in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, a Kansas City suburb, on Aug. 7, 2022. It accuses him of illegally trafficking dozens of firearms, including many AM-15s.