Tag: media

This Makes (at least) Two

KevinLeave a comment

Gun carrying man ends stabbing spree

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) – A citizen with a gun stopped a knife wielding man as he began stabbing people Thursday evening at the downtown Salt Lake City Smith’s store.

Police say the suspect purchased a knife inside the store and then turned it into a weapon. Smith’s employee Dorothy Espinoza says, “He pulled it out and stood outside the Smiths in the foyer. And just started stabbing people and yelling you killed my people. You killed my people.”

Espinoza says, the knife wielding man seriously injured two people. “There is blood all over. One got stabbed in the stomach and got stabbed in the head and held his hands and got stabbed all over the arms.”

Then, before the suspect could find another victim – a citizen with a gun stopped the madness. “A guy pulled gun on him and told him to drop his weapon or he would shoot him. So, he dropped his weapon and the people from Smith’s grabbed him.”

That’s from last April. This has happened before, though. In 2005 at a Tulsa, OK Albuquerque, NM Walmart, 71 year-old Due Moore shot Felix Vigil as he attacked his wife, a Walmart employee, with a knife.

I’m sure there have been many more, but defensive gun use never makes the national news like criminal misuse does.

Interesting Commentary from Across the Pond

KevinLeave a comment

UK expat Phil B. sent me a link to an op-ed in the Irish Daily Mail, Denver shootings: the murder is in the corrupted mind, not in the legal guns. Not what I’ve come to expect from UK newspapers. Excerpt:

The Denver Dark Knight shootings: first thing to note – despite the uninformed Irish wails about American gun laws – is that the number of guns per head in America is irrelevant to such a crime.

If ownership of a weapon equalled homicidal intent, the ten most murderous countries in the world would include Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden.
The 15 most murderous would include France, Canada, Austria and Iceland.

—

The figures show that in recent years, Mexico has been down at 42 in averaged rate of civilian ownership of guns, below even Belgium and Luxembourg. Yet Mexico is so much a free-fire zone that last week the only way a nine-year old boy with a massive tumour could be taken out of gang-infested Ciudad Juarez and into an American hospital was in an armoured vehicle manned by armed US federal agents.

So if we want to know the origins of such slaughters as the one at the Colorado cinema, we need to look beyond the uninformed response of: ‘It’s all because of private gun ownership.’

It’s not.

RTWT.

Quote of the Day

KevinLeave a comment

Dr. Helen asked, What are your favorite science-fiction books? Best response so far:

I like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Huffington, and the LA Times.
CNN is also pretty good as is the BBC.
All present a very bizarre picture of an alternate reality, like a parallel universe or a different dimension loosely based on the real world.
I don’t like MSNBC because it has no connexion whatsoever to reality, it’s pure fanatasy.

Terry Eliat, Israel

Question for Aaron Sorkin – Then Which Country IS?

KevinLeave a comment

HBO has another of its independent series running, Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, where Jeff Daniels plays a composite of Dan Rather, Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman. Here’s an excerpt from the first episode, where Daniel’s character drops his pretense of impartiality and says what he (Sorkin) really feels:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMqcLUqYqrs?rel=0]
Now there are some things he says there that I agree with, but not (I am certain) for the same reasons. The question I am left with though, is if America once was but is no longer the greatest nation on Earth, which one is? And how do you define it?

Just a note: Dan Rather likes the show. (Quelle suprise.)

UPDATE: Sorry Aaron, but the United States is and remains the greatest nation on the face of the Earth, and here’s just one reason why.

Well, This Kinda Changes the Narrative…

KevinLeave a comment

Authorities say hitchhiker shot himself

A West Virginia man who claimed to be the victim of a drive-by shooting along a rural Montana highway while working on a memoir called “Kindness in America” has confessed to shooting himself, authorities said Friday.
Valley County sheriff’s officials said they believe 39-year-old Ray Dolin shot himself as a desperate act of self-promotion, but they offered no further details.

I thought the story smelled a bit ripe.

I wonder if he’s a supporter of the Brady Campaign….

So Bad It’s Good

KevinLeave a comment

I went out and caught Battleship at the matinee yesterday. As a Science-Fiction film, it suffers from pretty much every problem that has plagued Sci-Fi films from the beginning, beginning with completely ignoring science. But OK, this isn’t really Sci-Fi, it’s a summer blowup movie.

As that, it’s pretty good. And if you remember that this is a film directed mostly at pubescent boys (and older ones that haven’t grown up), it has one major redeeming quality:  it does not denigrate the military. In fact, it shows a lot of respect, especially towards retired and wounded service members. In fact one major character, medically-retired Army Lt. Col. Mark Canales, is played by active-duty full-bird Col. Gregory Gadson, a bilateral above-the-knee amputee. Col. Gadson is currently the director of the Wounded Warrior Project for the U.S. Army and not a bad actor.

Hell, I’ll admit it, I enjoyed the film, cringe-inducing errors and all.