Senate Puts Hold on "George Zimmerman Armed Vigilante Acts"
Submitted by Brady Campaign on Apr 18, 2012
WASHINGTON -- Brady Campaign President Dan Gross issued the following statement in response to the hold Senator Dianne Feinstein placed on bills S 2188 and S 2213, which the Brady Campaign believes should be called the "George Zimmerman Armed Vigilante Acts." The Senate bills, pushed by the NRA just days after Trayvon Martin's shooting death, are similar to HR 822, which passed the House late last year. They would force virtually every state to honor the concealed carry permit of every other state.
"Just a day after her staff met with three gun violence victims from the California Chapters of the Brady Campaign, and two days after 32 victims of gun violence came to Capitol Hill to demand that Congress keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, Senator Dianne Feinstein put a hold on the concealed carry bills we believe should be called the “George Zimmerman Armed Vigilante Acts.”
Once again, Senator Feinstein is making it crystal clear that she puts the safety of the American people ahead of the dangerous ”guns everywhere” vision of the gun lobby.
If either of these bills become law, and your state has reasonable regulations that might prevent somebody like George Zimmerman, a man with an arrest record and a history of violence, from carrying a loaded hidden gun, tough luck! Dangerous people like Zimmerman could carry loaded hidden guns on your streets and there would be nothing you or your local law enforcement could do about it.
On behalf of the overwhelming majority of Americans, we thank Senator Feinstein for standing up for our safety and preventing more tragedies like the ones represented by the victims gathered in Washington DC this week. And to all the politicians that do the gun lobby’s bidding, let this serve notice that we are watching you, and we are prepared to hold you accountable for putting guns in the hands of dangerous people just to make a profit." (my emphasis added - DG)
Yesterday I read this one:"Just a day after her staff met with three gun violence victims from the California Chapters of the Brady Campaign, and two days after 32 victims of gun violence came to Capitol Hill to demand that Congress keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, Senator Dianne Feinstein put a hold on the concealed carry bills we believe should be called the “George Zimmerman Armed Vigilante Acts.”
Once again, Senator Feinstein is making it crystal clear that she puts the safety of the American people ahead of the dangerous ”guns everywhere” vision of the gun lobby.
If either of these bills become law, and your state has reasonable regulations that might prevent somebody like George Zimmerman, a man with an arrest record and a history of violence, from carrying a loaded hidden gun, tough luck! Dangerous people like Zimmerman could carry loaded hidden guns on your streets and there would be nothing you or your local law enforcement could do about it.
On behalf of the overwhelming majority of Americans, we thank Senator Feinstein for standing up for our safety and preventing more tragedies like the ones represented by the victims gathered in Washington DC this week. And to all the politicians that do the gun lobby’s bidding, let this serve notice that we are watching you, and we are prepared to hold you accountable for putting guns in the hands of dangerous people just to make a profit." (my emphasis added - DG)
FBI tries to stem rising death rate of police officers
Austin Police work the scene of a shooting at a Walmart April 6, 2012 where a police officer was shot in the neck and died at the scene. The department identified him as Senior Police Officer Jaime Padron. Padron was responding to a call about a drunk man inside the store around 2:30 a.m., officials said. The suspect attacked the officer as soon as he arrived at the store and Padron didn't have a chance to even pull out his own weapon, police said. (Austin American-Statesman, Deborah Cannon)
This death may be part of a disturbing trend uncovered by the FBI: The number of police officers dying at the hands of perpetrators is climbing in the United States.
Texas ranked second in the FBI analysis, with 45 officer deaths between 2001 and 2010. That’s the second-highest, after California, which had 50 officer deaths in that time period. But it appears to be getting worse. In 2011, 72 officers were killed by perpetrators, a 25 percent increase from the previous year and a 75 percent increase from 2008, according to the New York Times.
The 2011 deaths were the first time that more officers were killed by suspects than car accidents, according to data compiled by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The number was the highest in nearly two decades, excluding those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.The city of Houston lost one officer in 2011, Kevin Scott Will, to vehicular assault.
While a majority of officers were killed in smaller cities, 13 were killed in cities of 250,000 or more. …
The Times report says that in many cases the officers were trying to arrest or stop a suspect who had previously been arrested for a violent crime:
That prompted the F.B.I. to change what information it will provide to local police departments, the officials said. Starting this year, when police officers stop a car and call its license plate into the F.B.I.’s database, they will be told whether the owner of the vehicle has a violent history. Through the first three months of this year, the number of police fatalities has dropped, though it is unclear why.
It is worth noting here that it has been the position of law enforcement across the various entities and agencies to oppose easy transportation of firearms across state lines. Law enforcement - who are, after all, the people who are most often in the front lines of those at whom shots are fired - have also opposed expansion of both open and concealed carry, more lenient licensing, shoot first laws and other expansions on the perfectly functional Castle doctrine laws. The increase is coming from both legal and illegal gun owners.
We were promised that there would be no increase in violent crime with firearms, that there would be no blood in the streets. In point of fact, we have a steady increase in deaths and injuries from firearms used against law enforcement officers. We have a dramatic increase in homicides in every single state that has enacted Shoot First laws. While those are euphemistically called justifiable homicides, under the laws of any other state, or for that matter the laws of any other civilized nation on the planet, most of those homicides would not meet the standard for a justifiable homicide.
What those have been are homicides where the shooter is wrongly excused from consequences. With the increase in the sales and manufacture of firearms has been an attendant and related slow but steady increase in the statistics of crimes involving firearms, including a slow steady rise in the rates of firearm homicides. Increasingly, there is not only blood running on the streets, but on the sidewalks, in parks and in parking lots, and everywhere else people are more frequently carrying firearms - and using them.
With my mid-morning coffee break, I read this one, following a look at an excellent op ed cartoon from 'the Big Apple':
The NRA is no longer an organization for sportsmen and other gun enthusiasts. It was hijacked some years ago at the Cincinnati convention, where it became a combination promoter of exclusively right wing agendas, and a promoter for the profit of the gun industry, rather than a critical consumer of it. The NRA puts the dumb in claims of 2nd Amendment rights and their 'freedumbs'.
It is EXACTLY the promoter of ways to increase gun sales, at the cost of death and injury, portrayed above.
Their assurances we would be safer, or more free has only resulted in a large number of mostly old and white, flabby and crabby men stroking their toys and indulging in delusional fantasies they are important instead of impotent, and powerful instead of pathetic. (In the following article, the large/bold emphasis added is mine -DG)
Here is the story behind the cartoon, from the New York Daily News
Four NYPD cops shot in Brooklyn following hostage standoff
Ex-con held pregnant girlfriend captive
By Mark Morales, Rocco Parascandola, Barry Paddock AND Helen Kennedy / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, April 8, 2012, 8:24 AM Updated: Monday, April 9, 2012, 8:58 AM
Joe Marino for New York Daily News
myspace.com
Nakwon Foxworth
Jessica Hickling, believed to be the girlfriend of Nakwon Foxworth who allegedly wounded four police officers after holding Hickling hostage.
Det. Michael Keenan (r.) and Officer Matthew Granahan were two of four police officers wounded in the gun battle.
Capt. Al Pizzano and Det. Kenneth Ayala were also injured.
An ex-con brandishing an illegal gun wounded four NYPD cops Sunday in a wild shootout inside his sixth-floor Brooklyn apartment after menacing his pregnant girlfriend and their infant son.
Three of the officers were shot in the leg; one was grazed in the face. They were all in good shape, and two were released from the hospital within hours.
Suspect Nakwon Foxworth, 33, was in critical condition, hit three times in the gunfight inside his Sheepshead Bay apartment. The apartment was strewn with baby toys — and guns.
Eight police officers have been shot with illegal guns from out of state in the past four months, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
“These are the guns that are turning our city into a shooting gallery,” Kelly told Daily News columnist Mike Lupica. “I’m tired of this!”
One of the four officers, Detective Mike Keenan, won a Medal of Valor for his part in a shootout in another Brooklyn apartment 15 years ago that stopped a terrorist plot to blow up the subways.
This weekend’s mayhem began about 10:30 p.m. on Saturday.
Foxworth, who was arriving home at 3301 Nostrand Ave. with girlfriend Jessica Hickling and their 4-month-old son, argued with two men who were moving a woman into a fifth-floor apartment and blocking the building’s service entrance.
“We had a barrel in front of the door and all of a sudden he gets angry,” said one of the movers, Kairon Decaul.
“He took the stroller, with the baby in it, and started ramming it into the barrel. He became very angry. The woman started screaming, ‘The baby! The baby!’”
Decaul, 43, said Foxworth pulled a gun.
“My friend ran, and he chased him to the truck,” Decaul said. “He came back inside and threw the gun in the baby’s stroller. He put his finger in my face and threatened me. The girl was screaming, ‘Calm down! Calm down!’”
Inside the truck, the other mover called cops. “He’s got a gun. ... He’s got a gun,” he told the dispatcher, Kelly said.
Cops said Foxworth then took his terrified pregnant girlfriend and baby up to their apartment.
NYPD investigators enlisted the help of the building superintendent, and they used surveillance footage to determine which apartment was Foxworth’s, Kelly said.
At Apartment 6-K, they got no answer. Looking through the peephole, they could see a man, woman and child inside, Kelly said. The cops settled in for a standoff and had summoned hostage negotiators when Hickling rushed out of the apartment door with the baby in her arms about 12:30 a.m.
She said Foxworth had a gun and was holding her captive.
A six-man Emergency Service Unit team end nuentered the apartment, and bullets started to fly.
“When she just left and left the door open, he started shooting,” Kelly said. “The gunfight occurred in close quarters with the assailant and the officers no more than 10 feet apart.”
Police said that Foxworth, standing in the bedroom, fired 12rounds from his 9-mm. Browning semiautomatic handgun at cops. Two injured cops and a third officer at the scene returned fire, Kelly said.
The injured officers were Keenan, 52, shot in the front calf; Detective Kenneth Ayala, 40, shot once in the thigh and once in the left ankle; Officer Matthew Granahan, 35, shot in the calf, and Capt. Al Pizzano, 49, who was grazed in the face.
“The shots were almost whizzing by my door. It was like a little war,” a neighbor said.
Pizzano and Granahan were released from the hospital Sunday afternoon.
Ayala, the father of a 3-year-old daughter, is likely to be released Monday, said his wife, Maria.
She said one bullet missed the bones in his foot, and the other bullet missed major arteries and bones in his thigh.
“I feel like it was a lucky day,” she said.
Maria Ayala said she heard the news of the shooting from her husband, who called her to say he had “hurt his leg.”
“It was very comforting to hear his voice,” she said. “It was better then hearing it from a sergeant, because I knew for sure he was okay.”
Keenan’s wife was also thankful — and relieved.
“He’s going to be all right,” she said at their Staten Island home. “Thank goodness.”
She declined to call her husband a hero. “He’s just a regular guy doing his job,” she said.
Pizzano’s family was having an Easter celebration and refused to comment.
Roy Richter, head of the Captains Endowment Association, met with him at the hospital before he was released.
“I told him I was going to go to church and thank God that he was okay, and he said, ‘I think I should go to church, too,’” Richter said.
Foxworth was in critical but stable condition at Kings County Hospital on Sunday morning.
He was charged with attempted murder, assault on a police officer, criminal possession of a weapon and menacing.
Records show he was let out of prison two years ago after serving 10 years for robbery, attempted murder and selling drugs in prison. He also served two years for another attempted murder conviction at age 15, cops said.
His sister Tyona Foxworth said he worked as a carpenter.
“He’s a wonderful person and a great uncle,” she said
She asked about the wounded cops and appeared relieved that their lives were not in danger.
Inside Foxworth’s pad, cops found a 22-caliber revolver and a sawed-off military assault rifle equipped with a sniperscope and 50 rounds of heavy ammunition.
They say the 9-mm. Browning that Foxworth used to shoot the officers came from a gun store in Wilmington, N.C. The assault rifle had been stolen in Florida before arriving in New York. The revolver had been defaced and could not be easily traced.
Mayor Bloomberg also noted that eight cops have been shot in the past four months. “All of these shootings have a disgraceful fact in common. All were committed with illegal guns that came from out of state,” said Bloomberg.
“You see our police officers putting their lives on the line every single day,” he said. “Here we were very lucky, but it could have been a great tragedy.”
With Eric Zerkel, Michael J. Feeney, Jennifer H. Cunningham, Edgar Sandoval, Ole Skaar, Vera Chinese and John Doyle
We do not need or benefit from more people carrying more guns. We especially do not need or want, and should not allow, more guns crossing our state borders, contributing to the continuing rise in firearm violence, especially homicides. We also do not need and should not permit a greater leniency in when we let civilian people shoot other people; that should remain primarily the authority exclusively of law enforcement.
The changes from the pro-gunners have not worked out as well as they claim; they continue to be part of the problem and not the solution. It is time for a different solution, a solution with fewer guns more stringently regulated. To heck with the NRA.
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