Category: Cops
I have a friend with more testosterone than sense. He and a college buddy found themselves on the Mexican border during Spring Break several years ago with some spending money and a little time. They were young, bulletproof, and immortal, so they figured they’d wander over and spend the day exploring Juarez on foot.
These two pale gringos were having a simply grand time taking in the sights. However, in short order, they got lost. These were the days before ubiquitous GPS-equipped cell phones, so they really were on their own. Soon they found themselves in a bad neighborhood with the locals looking at them all hungry-like.
Just when things seemed bleakest these two stupid American college kids happened upon a pair of uniformed Mexican police officers and innocently attempted to ask directions. In response, the two Mexican cops drew their weapons and robbed the young men of all their accumulated possessions.
You didn’t need a passport to travel to Mexico back then, so they did eventually get back over the border. However, they lost their wallets, watches, and everything else of value they had on their persons. This was their rude introduction to the realities of police corruption in a Third-World country.
Relativity
It is in vogue to denigrate and even assault the police in America these days. Quite a few politicians have built successful careers around the practice. However, we have no idea what truly bad police really look like. In America, if you get in trouble with precious few exceptions you can call 911 and some selfless guardian with a gun will show up to help you out. The rare exceptions get all the press, but when the zombies start staggering up the cul-de-sac even the most ardent police-bashing anarchist will eventually pick up the phone.
Today’s sordid episode gives us a glimpse into the dark realities of life in the favelas, the sprawling lawless slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In these strange spaces, drug cartel foot soldiers openly packing automatic weapons patrol the streets around police stations. The militarized police force conducts massive armed operations, but shadow organizations of current and former cops engage in extra-judicial killings at the behest of powerful figures both inside and outside of government. It is suspected that this corruption infects the Brazilian government at all levels.
The Target
Marielle Franco was born in the summer of 1979 in Mare, a slum area in Northern Rio de Janeiro. She began working to help support her family at age eleven. She had a daughter at age 19 and raised the child as a single mother. Franco was openly bisexual and lived with her partner Monica Benicio from 2017 until her death.
Franco held a Master’s degree in public administration and was an avowed socialist. Her resume included qualifications as a sociologist, feminist, and human rights activist. In 2016 she won a seat on the Rio de Janeiro city council. She used her political pulpit to speak out vociferously against police corruption. This made her some very dangerous enemies.
The Setting
Crime in urbanized Brazil is so extensive as to be difficult for the civilized mind to comprehend. Many to most of the refugees flowing toward our southern border are fleeing such sordid stuff as this. In the face of well-funded and ruthless gangs driven by drugs, murder, and rampant unfettered lawlessness, many police organizations exceed their official mandate. It’s like a bad movie.
Even if they originally meant well, absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the favelas of Rio, that means shadowy milicias comprised of trained law enforcement officers who undertake extrajudicial killings without due process. While many times this means dead bad guys, it also results in substantial collateral damage as well. In darker spaces, it also means that political activists are targeted for termination based upon their cultural and social influence.
The Hit
On March 13, 2018, Marielle Franco posted this to Twitter, “Another homicide of a young man that could be credited to the police. Matheus Melo was leaving church when he was killed. How many others will have to die for this war to end?”
The following day Franco and her driver Anderson Pedro Gomes were returning home from a round table discussion titled, “Young Black Women Moving (Power) Structures.” This event promoted the empowerment of black women in impoverished Brazil. Ms. Franco’s press officer was also in the back seat. From out of the traffic a Chevy Cobalt pulled stealthily up alongside.
The passenger in the Cobalt then produced an HK MP5 submachine gun and fired a total of nine rounds in controlled bursts. Four bullets hit Franco—three in the head and one in the neck. She died on the scene. Her driver was struck by three rounds and was also killed. Her press secretary was injured but survived.
Details
Movies would have us believe that highly-trained hitmen accepting contracts from anonymous clients online have raised assassination for money to an art form. Reality is typically far removed from this stylized image. In many places, criminals will kill in exchange for drugs or even the right to pilfer the pockets of the deceased. In the case of Marielle Franco, however, this job truly was professionally executed.
The kill zone was a city street amply covered with surveillance cameras. However, somebody with the skill and access to do so had deactivated the cameras covering the area at the precise moment of the hit. The cartridge cases recovered at the scene were traced to a shipment sent to Brasilia’s federal police force in 2006. Police officials initially alleged that the shipment had been stolen from a local post office though they later retracted this claim.
The HK MP5 submachine gun incorporates a fluted chamber to smooth extraction and enhance reliability. As a result, fired cases from an MP5, or any roller-locked HK firearms for that matter, demonstrate distinctive longitudinal lines. No other military weapon in common use marks its empties in this manner. This identified the murder gun as a fairly rarefied piece of iron.
The Weapon
The HK MP5 traces its roots all the way back to the Second World War and the German MG42 belt-fed machinegun. The previous MG34 had revolutionized Infantry combat. For the first time maneuver elements were afforded truly man-portable, rifle-caliber, belt-fed firepower mobile enough to keep pace during an Infantry assault. However, the MG34 was meticulously machined with tight tolerances. This made the gun heavy, expensive, and finicky.
The MG42, by contrast, was formed predominantly out of stamped steel pressings that could be churned out cheaply by semi-skilled workers. The beating heart of the MG42 was its roller-locked, delayed-blowback action. This system utilized a pair of roller bearings that cammed into recesses milled into the breech face. The end result was cheap, rugged, and reliable.
In the closing days of WW2, the Germans adapted this system to drive a prototype assault rifle. The StG 45 was an evolutionary development of the StG 44 and used the roller-locked system to fire the 7.92x33mm Kurz intermediate cartridge. Allied forces overran the arms factories where these guns were being developed, but the design was subsequently taken to Spain.
This effort resulted in the Spanish CETME rifle that eventually morphed into the German HK G3. This same action was rechambered for the 5.56mm, the 7.62x39mm, and, in 1964, the 9mm pistol cartridge. This pistol caliber SMG was originally designated the HK54. It eventually became known as the MP5.
The MP5 was first issued to German border police in 1966. It has since been produced under license around the world in more than 100 different variations and remains in series production today. Though its 800 rpm rate of fire is a bit spunky for my tastes, the MP5 remains one of the smoothest submachineguns ever produced. The takedown of the Iranian embassy in London on May 5, 1980, by the British SAS wielding HK MP5 SMGs on international television, sold untold thousands of the guns to military and LE users around the globe.
The Aftermath
Brazilian police investigated Ronald Paulo Alves Pereira and Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega in connection with the killings. Both men had been honored by Jair Bolsonaro, the current President of Brazil, for their police service in the early 2000s. Nóbrega purportedly headed one of these extrajudicial paramilitary groups active in Brazil called “The Crime Bureau.” He was shot to death after supposedly firing upon police who came to arrest him in northeastern Bahia state. Whatever secrets he held went with him to the grave.
Brazilian police also arrested Ronnie Lessa and Elcio Vieira de Queiroz roughly a year after the shooting. Lessa was purportedly the triggerman, while de Queiroz was alleged to have driven the Cobalt. Both men were former members of the military police. One was also a previous neighbor of current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in a gated luxury apartment complex in Rio. Both Lessa and de Queiroz denied involvement.
I read quite a lot about this sordid situation pulling this article together and still don’t even begin to understand it. Allegations of corruption run all the way up to the Presidency. Various players served together in either the military or elite Law Enforcement units and seem connected in ways that are impossible to untangle. However, the take-home point is that today’s American institutional Law Enforcement challenges pale in the face of true corruption.
by John R. Lott Jr.
With crime such an important issue, Americans depend on the FBI for accurate data. The crime data for 2021 is a mess, with almost 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country not submitting any data to the FBI. In California, 93% didn’t report crime data. In New York, 87% didn’t. Cities are embarrassed by the soaring crime rates, and even when they have collected the data they aren’t transmitting those numbers to the FBI.
But many more data errors are the direct responsibility of the FBI. Up until January of last year, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I found that they were missing lots of cases and had misidentified others. Unfortunately, the FBI was unwilling to fix any of these errors. Since leaving that job, I have found many more missed cases, updating the list this month.
Nor was that the first time I pointed out such errors to the FBI, and I published a list of them in a criminology publication in 2015.
These news reports relied on a series of FBI reports on active shootings put together by researchers at Texas State University.
The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit.
To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, also undertook a search for news stories. The CPRC discovered a total of 360 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021, and it found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of these. I also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard. We found these cases on a tiny budget of just a few thousand dollars. Though we found that armed citizens had stopped 11 times more cases than the FBI reports, I make no claim that we have identified all of them. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.
But no one needs to take my word for it that the FBI missed many cases. All of the news stories that my team collected are listed on the CPRC website.
While the FBI claims that just 4.4% of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 34%. I am more confident that we have identified a higher percentage of recent cases, and the percentage in 2021 was even higher – 49%.
The FBI doesn’t differentiate between law-abiding citizens stopping attacks where guns are banned and where they are allowed, but you can’t really expect law-abiding citizens to stop attacks where it is illegal to carry guns. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the percentage of active shootings stopped is above 50% for the whole period. And, again, we are more confident that we have more of the cases in recent years. The figure hits 58% in 2021.
In order to follow the FBI’s definition, I also had to exclude 24 cases because a law-abiding person with a gun stopped the attacker before he was able to get off a shot.
But there is a more basic problem in the reliance on news coverage to determine whether an active shooting was stopped by an armed civilian. The news media has a clear bias to cover cases where bad things happen over cases where bad things are prevented. The old adage is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Killings are usually more newsworthy than woundings, and woundings more notable than confrontations defused simply by someone brandishing a gun.
As an example, I examined news stories of defensive gun use data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 of this year, and found 774 defensive gun uses, fully 85% involving people shot: 43% resulting in death and 42% in wounding. Less than 4% of cases involved no shots fired. But survey data indicate that in 95% of cases when people use guns defensively, they merely show the gun to make the criminal back off. Such defensive gun uses rarely make the news.
The problem is that the FBI numbers are used by academics who do research and by the media. To see how the FBI reports alter news coverage, see the July 17 Greenwood Mall shooting near Indianapolis, where a young man, Elisjsha Dicken, used his legally carried gun to stop what clearly would have been a horrible mass public shooting. The news coverage immediately relied on the FBI and Texas State University reports to tell people Dicken’s heroism was very unusual.
“Making Dicken’s heroism perhaps even more remarkable is the fact cases of an armed bystander attacking an active shooter are rare,” CNN noted two days after the attack. “The Greenwood incident is unique, however, because it became one of the rare instances of an armed civilian successfully intervening to end a mass shooting,” claimed the Washington Post the day after the attack. But what is really rare is the news coverage of these attacks. Few know that there were at least six other similar likely mass public shootings that armed civilians stopped in the first nine months of this year.
It is hard to ignore how all of this feeds into the gun control debate. Nor can one forget about the charges of political bias leveled by whistleblowers in the FBI.
The FBI is systematically missing defensive gun uses. And it has failed to fix these errors, even when I have pointed them out. Considering how often the media cites the FBI as an authoritative source, this institution needs to do better.
– – –
John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
Photo “FBI Building” by Ken Lund. CC BY-SA 2.0.
An armed robbery attempt was foiled last month in Chicago when a business owner grabbed the suspect’s gun and chased him out.
James Suh, owner of Car Care Auto Spa in the Windy City, was at work one evening when “all of a sudden, it’s just, ‘hey give me all of your money,’” he told ABC7Chicago in a recent interview.
He looked up to see a man with a gun leveled at his face. At first, trying to de-escalate the scenario, he stalled as the man continued demanding money, explaining that a key was necessary for the cash drawer to be unlocked.
Suh is a concealed carry license holder, although his firearm was unfortunately absent during the incident.
During the verbal exchange, Suh noticed something about the robber’s pistol.
“He kinda like tries to rack his gun and it looked to me like it got jammed, the slide was locked back,” Suh explained.
In a moment that Suh later identified as a purely emotional decision, he grabbed at the gun, and the robber tried to evade him.
Surveillance footage shows the fight that ensued inside the shop, in which Suh eventually gained control of the pistol. The attacker then fled the scene.
Police are saying that while the footage has been studied, no arrests have been made yet. Luckily there were no injuries, a detail that could easily have been different had Suh not been prepared.
Emphasizing that the decision he made was risky, police instruct others to not follow Suh’s course of action if faced with a similar circumstance.
But with crime on the rise, perhaps it’s time for more business owners to get their CCL the way that Suh did — they just need to remember to have it on their person while at work!
And, to some extent, that’s true.
However, it seems they suck more at their jobs than we thought.
With inflation, prices are up pretty much across the board, but if you’re looking for a new gun for recreation or self-defense, here’s a hint: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is offering them at an absolute steal. Seriously, the federal agency tasked with enforcing firearms regulations has such poor security that thousands of guns and gun parts once in its possession disappeared in the hands of thieves. And it has yet to fully implement recommended reforms.
“Since September 2015, the ATF has utilized the National Disposal Branch (NDB), formerly the National Firearms and Ammunition Destruction (NFAD) Branch, to centralize and streamline the disposal process of forfeited and ATF-owned firearms. Each year, the ATF destroys thousands of firearms at the NDB,” the U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General noted in announcing a recent report. “The DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) undertook this audit following the discovery that thousands of firearms, firearm parts, and ammunition had been stolen from NFAD from 2016 to 2019.”
So, for three years, the agency that enforces every petty and intrusive federal regulation regarding firearms (as well as alcohol, tobacco, and explosives) let its own security personnel (“a DHS contract security guard was convicted in connection with these thefts”) pilfer its inventory.
Strictly speaking, the report isn’t about the thefts themselves, which were discovered by accident during a traffic stop. The recent report delved into the ATF’s progress in implementing anything resembling the security procedures it requires of the private gun dealers it oversees—or maybe just something more challenging than leaving “intact weapons … in unsecured boxes and unlocked containers.” So, how is the ATF doing at storing firearms at least as securely as you might expect of private businesses?
In short, not particularly well.
Now, let’s understand here that the ATF has been quick to hammer gun stores for every clerical error they can find, shutting down stores now over what would have been a warning at most a year or two back. They expect everyone to get everything perfect and if you don’t, your FFL is in jeopardy.
Meanwhile, they’re leaving guns around in boxes for literally anyone to walk off with.
I’m not a big fan of the ATF, but they exist and our tax dollars pay for them to do a certain job. That job isn’t to harass mom-and-pop gun stores into extinction. It’s to keep guns out of the hands of the bad guys.
Yet by not implementing basic security measures from the start, they’ve facilitated those same bad guys getting guns.
I mean, did they think thieves wouldn’t want to get their hands on seized firearms or something? Did someone honestly not realize this could potentially be a thing?
Now that they know, I’m left wondering why they haven’t already tripped over themselves to implement every necessary security measure possible to try and prevent this kind of thing.
What I do know is that the ATF lost any moral authority it had, not that it had much to begin with.
Over that time we’ve learned a lot, and little of it has been good news for the 30 Rock star. For example, we learned that no, there’s no way that particular pistol “just went off.”
He got some more bad news earlier this week, too. It seems investigators are wrapping up their investigation.
The Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office completed its investigation Thursday into the fatal “Rust” shooting that left cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead — and criminal charges against those involved, including Alec Baldwin, may be imminent.
“Today, District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies received the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s investigative report on the Rust movie set incident,” Heather Brewer, the spokesperson for Santa Fe’s top prosecutor, said in an email.
“The District Attorney and her team of investigators and prosecutors will now begin a thorough review of the information and evidence to make a thoughtful, timely decision about whether to bring charges.”
Brewer said the prosecutor’s focus will be “on upholding the integrity of the process, enforcing the laws of the state of New Mexico, and pursuing justice.”
Brewer could not provide a timeline on when Carmack-Altwies will have her decision ready but said there are no statutory deadlines in New Mexico that dictate how much time she has to press charges, beyond statutes of limitation.
While the announcement is short of details, Carmack-Altwies has been gearing up for a prosecution against someone with deep pockets. If it’s not Baldwin, it’s a mystery who that could be.
However, it also seems that Carmack-Altwies isn’t just focused on the high-profile A-lister. She also looks to potentially charge three others.
Yet no matter who else gets charged, Baldwin is going to be the headliner.
And frankly, it seems unlikely that he won’t be charged. No one disputes that the firearm was in his hands when the shot occurred. Even Baldwin has admitted publicly that it was.
What he’s claimed, though, is that the gun just fired, it went off suddenly and without any action on his part to cause it to do so. Yet an FBI team looking at the firearm in question said that simply couldn’t happen with that particular pistol. It wasn’t faulty or in some other state where it would just “go off” as Baldwin alleges.
So the idea that Baldwin won’t face charges while others do seems a little farfetched.
Yet the question now becomes who else faces charges. While armorer Hannah Guiterrez-Reed is a potential candidate, there’s also evidence that she simply wasn’t allowed to do her job in the first place. The state’s version of OSHA found evidence of that, which one would imagine might well impact any decision at prosecution.
However, as noted above, there’s no timeline for when charges will be formally filed. It seems clear someone’s getting prosecuted, though, which means we’ll get yet another high-profile trial to tear apart soon enough.
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- The media will tell you that good guys with guns hardly ever stop attacks. Boy, are they wrong. According to compiled evidence by the Crime Prevention Research Center, some media outlets are underreporting the number of Defensive Gun Uses (DGU) by law abiding gun owners where attacks are prevented. Some media is reporting only 10% of the actual DGUs in America by citizens.
Could this be because DGUs by law-abiding citizens don’t support the anti-gun narrative, or could it be simply due to faulty information they are given?
A look into the data provided by the FBI shows that discrepancies in DGUs are often caused by the “misclassifying of shootings” and “overlooked incidents.” Research by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows us that in several incidents, the FBI didn’t list attacks that were stopped by armed citizens when police had later apprehended the attackers. According to Crime Prevention Research Center, the FBI also has misidentified armed citizens as security officials resulting in the elimination of them being qualified as “citizen defensive gun uses.” You may remember Jack Wilson, who stopped an attack at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas. The media narrative portrayed Wilson as a security guard when Wilson himself said he was just a parishioner who had volunteered to provide security during worship.
In some cases where armed civilians completely thwart mass public shootings (meaning, not even a shot fired), the FBI simply doesn’t report them. According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, the FBI missed 25 of these incidents that would likely have become mass public shootings had it not been for the good guy or gal with a gun.
Due to these reasons for non-reporting, the FBI only showed 6.6% of mass killings being stopped by armed citizens, while the Crime Prevention Research Center shows 49.1% being stopped. In these cases, approximately half of the thwarted attacks occurred in gun-free zones.
As for those locations where citizens were legally allowed to carry a gun publicly, the number of thwarted attacks by armed citizens increased by almost 10% to 58% in 2021. What does this tell us? It tells us that gun-free zones put people in danger, and the media doesn’t want you to know when good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns.
In March of 2013, 380,000 active duty and 70,000 retired law-enforcement officers were surveyed in a PoliceOne survey. 86% believed that casualties from public shootings could be reduced or avoided altogether if citizens were armed at the time of the attack. 77% supported the arming of teachers and/or school Administrators. Wouldn’t it make sense to consider the opinions of Police Officers and those who investigate these types of crimes on a daily basis?
It’s no surprise the media would use underreported data. But they and anti-gun extremists seem all too willing to put people in danger by spreading false information. The idea that gun-free zones are safe, citizens shouldn’t carry in public, and police departments should be defunded could be putting good people in some very dangerous situations without any way of protecting themselves.
The 2nd Amendment is not a privilege. It’s your right.
Dan Wos
Author – Good Gun Bad Guy
Host – The Loaded Mic
About Dan Wos, Author – Good Gun Bad Guy
Dan Wos is available for Press Commentary. For more information contact PR HERE
Dan Wos is a nationally recognized 2nd Amendment advocate, Host of The Loaded Mic and Author of the “GOOD GUN BAD GUY” book series. He speaks at events, is a contributing writer for many publications, and can be found on radio stations across the country. Dan has been a guest on the Sean Hannity Show, Real America’s Voice, and several others. Speaking on behalf of gun-rights, Dan exposes the strategies of the anti-gun crowd and explains their mission to disarm law-abiding American gun-owners.
Some may take umbrage with my assertion, but I would propose that the human female is the most complex organism in the known universe. Stealth bombers, robot Mars rovers, and quantum computers don’t even come close. After a literal lifetime of study I can honestly say that I have no idea what makes girls tick. I am deeply thankful for the fairer half of the human population, but I will never consider myself an expert in the field of female relations. My wife would likely rate me a solid marginal. I think I should get an “A” for effort.
Despite whatever challenges I might have interacting with women, Marc Lépine was far worse. Born in 1964 as Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi in Montreal, Quebec, Marc was the son of an Algerian immigrant named Rachid Liass Gharbi and Canadian nurse Monique Lépine. He had one younger sister named Nadia. For a variety of very good reasons, Marc had daddy issues.
Monique was a former Catholic nun who rejected all religion after leaving the convent. Rachid was a non-pious Muslim. Mom later described Marc as “a confirmed atheist all his life.” Rachid started running around on Monique while on business trips, and things spiraled from there.
Rachid was a vile, violent, overbearing man who physically abused both his wife and his kids. He and Monique divorced, but things didn’t get much better. Rachid defaulted on his mortgage, and the family lost their home and most of their possessions. When he came of age Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi changed his named to Marc Lépine to spite his reprobate father.
In his youth, Marc was described as reserved, quiet, and uncommunicative. His sister Nadia mocked him mercilessly in public over both his acne and his inability to secure a girlfriend. This precipitated a deep-seeded hatred. Marc once dug a faux grave for her in the backyard of the house where they were staying. He was thrilled when she was remanded to a group home for drug abuse and chronic delinquency. Nadia died of a cocaine overdose in 1996 at age 28.
To make things worse, there were rumors that Marc might have been molested as part of a Big Brother after-school program. Along the way he acquired an air rifle and slaughtered pigeons wholesale in the neighborhood where he lived. He developed a fascination with World War 2 and openly praised Adolf Hitler. In 1981 at age 17 Marc applied for a position as an officer cadet in the Canadian military but was rejected. A subsequent statement from the Canadian Army explained that he was “interviewed, assessed, and found to be unsuitable.”
So here we have a kid with some suboptimal raw material raised in some of the most ghastly conditions imaginable. He hated his family and distrusted most everybody else. All the male figures in his life were beastly animals, while the women were abusive and distant. This was the perfect milieu to precipitate Something Truly Horrible.
The Setting
Bless his heart, Marc tried to make something of himself. He attended a variety of technical schools wherein his academic performance ranged from exemplary to absent with everything in between. By the late 1980’s he had set his sights on École Polytechnique, a respected engineering school in Montreal.
Marc had to complete a couple of classes to qualify for admission, and he pursued these prerequisites in fits and starts. During a 1989 meeting with an admissions officer, Marc complained that women were taking over the job market, displacing men from their more traditional roles. He was particularly bitter about female engineers and police officers. Somewhere along the way, Marc Lépine just snapped.
Lépine planned his vengeance over a period of months. In August of 1989 he made formal application for a permit to purchase a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. His application was approved in October of that year. He actually purchased the gun on November 21, 1989, from a local sporting goods store. This should address any lingering doubts you might have had concerning the effectiveness of waiting periods.
The Shootings
On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into a second-floor classroom of the École Polytechnique with his Mini-14. He methodically segregated the men from the women and directed the roughly fifty male students to leave. Once he had thusly winnowed the crowd he opened fire, killing six women and wounding the rest. Before leaving the room to continue his rampage he took a moment to scrawl a scatological reference across one of the female student’s project depicting his displeasure with its quality.
Lépine then went mobile, wandering the halls, classrooms, and cafeteria shooting mostly women but a few men as well. His 14th and final victim was wounded and cried out for help. In response, Lépine stabbed her to death with his hunting knife before turning the rifle on himself. The entire ghastly attack spanned some twenty minutes. In addition to the fifteen dead, there were another fourteen who were badly injured. Lépine was 25 at the time.
The Suicide Letter
Lépine left behind a suicide note written in French. Here are a few excerpts drawn from the translation—
Forgive the mistakes, I had 15 minutes to write this. See also Annex.
Please note that if I commit suicide today 89-12-06 it is not for economic reasons (for I have waited until I exhausted all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker…I tried in my youth to enter the Forces as an officer cadet, which would have allowed me possibly to get into the arsenal…They refused me because asocial [sic]. I therefore had to wait until this day to execute my plans. In between, I continued my studies in a haphazard way for they never really interested me, knowing in advance my fate…Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts…Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.
Thus it is an obvious truth that if the Olympic Games removed the Men-Women distinction, there would be women only in the graceful events. So the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier. They are so opportunistic they [do not] neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can. Thus, the other day, I heard they were honoring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontline during the world wars. How can you explain [that since] women were not authorized to go to the frontline??? Will we hear of Caesar’s female legions and female galley slaves who of course took up 50% of the ranks of history, though they never existed. A real Casus Belli.
Sorry for this too brief letter.
Marc Lépine
It’s Will again now–Wow. That guy was a piece of work.
The Gun
The Ruger Mini-14 was developed by James Sullivan, one of the original designers of the AR15, and Bill Ruger. Introduced in 1973, the Mini-14 was a scaled-down .223 version of the M14 battle rifle. While the two weapons are intentionally similar externally, their operating systems remain quite different.
The Mini-14 is offered in a variety of configurations in both stainless and blued finishes. This gas-operated rifle feeds from detachable box magazines and could be had from the factory with both fixed and folding stocks. The Mini-14 is one of the most widely accessorized firearms ever produced, and it remains in production today. In the hands of sensible folk it is a reliable utility tool.
The Aftermath
Psychiatrists have pored over the details of Lépine’s case, attributing his psychopathy to a broad spectrum of influences ranging from genetic to political. They affixed a variety of psychiatric diagnoses to the man in retrospect. Some of the labels include personality disorders, “extreme narcissistic vulnerability,” and fantasies of power combined with excessive self-criticism. It has been postulated that he had suffered brain damage at some point. Some delusional commentator even claimed that Lépine’s egregious behavior was simply the result of having been raised in poverty. Were that the case you would expect places like Burundi and Niger to be populated solely by serial killers.
There are 440 million firearms in America. Marc Lépine invested four months obtaining his gun through legal channels. In modern-day America it is not humanly possible to prevent monsters like this guy from obtaining the tools they want to commit their heinous crimes.
I don’t carry a gun every day because I am paranoid or insecure. I carry a gun because my family and I share the planet with homicidal lunatics like Marc Lépine. If you feel differently then good for you. Do whatever you want, just leave me alone to make my own choices. There was exactly one thing that could have stopped Marc Lépine on that horrible day in 1989, and it wasn’t some ill-conceived piece of feel-good legislation. It was a good guy with a gun.
New York City’s first-of-its-kind gun crime unit at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will begin work Monday and focus on testing an analysis of evidence from gun crimes, in order to speed up those cases.
NEW YORK – Beginning Monday, the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office is launching its new DNA Gun Crimes Unit.
Meant to help speed up both testing and the criminal justice process, the forensic lab is the first of its kind in the country dedicated exclusively to processing gun crimes.
“As far as gun cases, we handle over six thousand cases,” said Senior Forensic Scientist Gabrielle McKenzie.
That’s six thousand gun cases a year in New York City. Now, the city Medical Examiner’s Office has a gun crime unit that will be staffed with 24 forensic scientists.
NYC overall crime up, murders down
Although overall index crime in New York City was up, murders and shooters were down in September 2022 compared to September 2021. But the top brass said a few people are committing the vast majority of the crimes, which they say highlights the problem of recidivism.
What makes the lab new is that scientists working there are strictly devoted to processing and analyzing DNA found on guns, rather than fingerprints.
The team will get faster results for the NYPD, prosecutors as well as defense lawyers who represent accused shooters.
“We, in building this unit, are going to reduce our turnaround time in gun crimes cases from 60 days to less than 30 days and that’s revolutionary,” said Dr. Jason Graham, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner.
The unit has been created to help deal with the city’s gun crisis and is independently run by scientists.
Providing the criminal justice system with DNA results more quickly helps both the guilty and the innocent.
“That would lead to either a faster more efficient exoneration of someone who’s innocent and a speedier conviction of someone who’s guilty and maybe a threat to New Yorkers on the street,” Dr. Graham said.
“We will help to resolve a lot of crimes, and we will help get justice to people who need it,” said Vanessa Sutherland, one of the new forensic scientists on the team.
The new gun unit will officially begin its work on Monday, October 17.