Category: Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad
Delbert Waldron III, “Bert” to those that knew him, was the most accomplished U.S. sniper during the Vietnam conflict. Adelbert originally joined the U.S. Navy in 1953 where he served for twelve years and left as an E-5 in 1965. In 1968 Sgt. Waldron enlisted in the US Army as a Sergeant and headed to Vietnam as part of Company B, 3rd Battalion, 60th Infantry of the 9th Infantry Division. Sgt. Waldron qualified as an expert marksman and was sent to the now famous 9th ID sniper school that was run in country by the Army Marksmanship Unit (AMU) with the support of the 9th ID commander, General Julian Ewell. Once graduated, Sgt. Waldron then found himself back working with the Navy in the Mekong Delta in the brown water ‘Tango Boats’ and PBRs. It was in this very hostile area that Sgt. Waldron operated as a sniper.
At the end of his tour in mid 1969 the 36 year old Sgt. Waldron had 109 confirmed kills, highest among all U.S. servicemen during the Vietnam conflict. Sgt. Waldron primarily used the M-21 SWS during his time as a sniper and on occasion would use a starlight equipped M-14 or M-21 for nighttime operations. General Ewell also credited Sgt. Waldron with making a single shot confirmed kill at 900 yards from a moving Tango Boat. Adelbert ended his tour in Vietnam as a Staff Sergeant E-6 and had been awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, a Presidential Unit Citation, and two Distinguished Service Crosses.
After his time in Vietnam, Sgt Waldron taught at the US Army Marksmanship Unit before leaving the Army in 1970. He worked with several questionable contractors and eventually he divorced as well. Staff Sergeant Adelbert Waldron III died on October 18, 1995 in California at the age of 62. Not much else is known about Sgt. Waldron or his military career, which was the way he wanted it. He did not publish any books or do lectures and refused many requests for interviews, he simply did not want the notoriety for what he did. Notoriety or not, he was an excellent sniper.
CBP officer Jacob Albarado runs into Uvalde school with barber’s shotgun to save daughter
Ballsy Maxine
Meet Maxine Feldstein and Nicholas Lowe. Maxine always wanted to play cops and robbers, and recently she was able to try both sides of the coin.
Maxine Feldstein’s boyfriend, Nicholas Lowe, was at the Washington County Detention Center on July 27 with a hold for criminal impersonation out of Ventura, California.
Feldstein, who had bonded out that day, called Washington County jail staff and identified herself as deputy “L. Kershaw” with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office. She also provided a forged VCSO document releasing the agency’s hold on Lowe.
Jail staff learned of the forgery and accidental release two days later, when a VCSO deputy called to say he was on his way to pick up Lowe.
Wow, Maxine is both ingenious and ballsy. And yes, I would probably hit it like the side of a tree on the forest moon of Endor.
There is actually a real misconception of the Old West that truly needs correcting. That is the notion of an uncivilized Wild West, where antisocial and violent behavior was the norm, and where citizens were afraid to leave their homes, afraid of rampant crime and in fear for their lives.
This savage perspective turns out to be incorrect—false assumptions of the Old West based on sensationalist press, the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show of the 1880s and ‘90s, and subsequently cowboy shows and Hollywood movies. Bands of working cowboys and good citizens did not go about town in their leisure time challenging, outdrawing, and shooting each other in a systematized orgy of violence and gunfights as portrayed in the movies.
Bad men and violent outlaws did kill each other, but almost always left the good people of the towns alone. The famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona, in which Wyatt Earp, and his brothers, Virgil and Morgan, with Doc Holliday, killed three of the outlaw “Cowboys,” became a celebrated incident not only because of the unique circumstances but also because brother lawmen killed brother outlaws in a historic shootout. Even then it was newsworthy and certainly not a daily occurrence.
In his book, Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier, historian Roger D. McGrath has corrected the historic record with substantive scholarship. After studying the Sierra Nevada frontier towns of Aurora and Bodie, McGrath found that those mining towns, where audacious young men and gunmen roamed freely packing either Colt Navy .36 six shot pistols in Aurora or Colt double action “lightning” or “peacekeeper” revolvers in Bodie, were peaceful towns, except for the quarrels in the carousing and gambling saloons. Otherwise, both towns carried on well, and everyone not interested in whoring, drinking, and gun fighting were left alone.
True, the homicide rate was high among those carousing and looking for fights in the saloons, but in the rest of the populace, the old, the ladies, and those not willing to pick fights, homicides were rare. Likewise, robbery, burglary, and rape were rare. Murder was confined to the “drunkards upholding their honor.” The homicide rate for Aurora and Bodie were 64 and 116 per 100,000, respectively, compared to Washington, D.C., at 72 per year in the 1990s. Likewise, the burglary and robbery rates were 6 and 84 per 100,000, respectively, for Bodie; compared to 2,661 and 1,140, respectively, for New York City in 1980.
The townspeople, although they might have carried guns, respected each other, and townspeople did not even bother to lock their doors at night. Similar observations have been made by other researchers studying the supposedly violent and crime-ridden Lincoln County, New Mexico; the Kansas towns of Dodge City and Wichita in the 1870s; and the Texas frontier towns from 1875 to 1890.
Returning to the issue of the possible confiscation of American firearms in the current era, consider the practical obstacles, not to mention the constitutional protection. Trying to blame, register, ban, and confiscate (one step usually follows the other) over 300 million firearms owned by Americans would bring about a tinder box situation, at least an order of magnitude worse than Prohibition, for Americans obey just and moral laws but not capricious or tyrannical laws, and a veritable police state would be required to enforce the draconian gun laws that would be necessary to carry that out.
Thus, politicians who sadly continue to use the latest tragedy (and the emotionalism and the passions elicited in its wake) to push for the usual round of gun control—while ignoring the accumulated objective research published in the social sciences and the criminologic literature—are not sincerely lamenting the deaths of the innocent or sympathizing with their families, but attempting to score political points, political points at the expense of the victims or good citizens.
They are also further polarizing America and tearing apart the fabric of this great nation by using emotionalism rather than common sense to bolster their unwise, political actions. Let’s stop demonizing guns and end the shootings by incarcerating the criminals and identifying and healing the mentally ill, for much work needs to be done in the psychiatric and mental health arenas and in the task of reducing violence. Sensationalization of violence day after day by the press, the electronic media and the internet—heaped upon impressionable individuals subject to our increasingly dumbed down, popular culture and public education—is having a malevolent effect that needs to stop.
Written by Dr. Miguel Faria
Miguel A. Faria, Jr, MD is a retired professor of Neurosurgery and Medical History at Mercer University School of Medicine. He founded Hacienda Publishing and is Associate Editor in Chief in Neuropsychiatry and World Affairs of Surgical Neurology International. He served on the CDC’s Injury Research Grant Review Committee. This article is excerpted, updated, and edited from his book, America, Guns, and Freedom: A Journey Into Politics and the Public Health & Gun Control Movements (2019).
This article may be cited as: Faria MA. Gun Violence and the Wild West. HaciendaPublishing.com, February 28, 2022. Available from: https://haciendapublishing.com/gun-violence-and-the-wild-west-by-miguel-a-faria-md/.
Copyright ©2022 Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D
The New York Post says the problems originated at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Ground zero for woke district attorneys is a left-wing think tank in the heart of the Big Apple.
The soft-on-crime approach espoused by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and other progressive prosecutors in troubled Democratic cities has been nurtured and advanced by a policy center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, no less.
. . .
The Institute’s symposiums and issue papers hold forth on topics such as race, officer-involved deaths and bail reform — all in a concerted effort to change the role of the prosecutor to be more proactive and less punitive.
“No one should be defined by their bad conduct alone,” the Institute’s “Vision for the Modern Prosecutor” declaration says about the accused.
Its position papers endorse charging accused criminals with fewer serious crimes or keeping them out of jail entirely. And it recommends that offenders not be called as such, but rather something that respects their “humanity.”
The Institute’s paper on “Creating a Culture of Racial Equity” suggests that a hotline be created for district attorneys so “whistleblowers” can turn in “internal obstructionists” not on board with their boss’ woke policies.
Another treatise on “How Prosecutors Can Support a Reimagined Police Response” bizarrely suggests celebrating times “when prosecutors exonerate someone.”
. . .
The institute says in its 2020 primer on “Prosecutorial Culture Change” that the job of the head prosecutor “is not to ‘win’ cases, impose long sentences, or ‘beat’ the defense. Instead, it is to promote safety, accountability, healing, trust, and empowerment.”
. . .
One CUNY professor called the Institute elitist and said it operates with “a smug sense of righteousness and smartness.”
“All of this unravels when you take it into communities, when you deal with victims,” the professor said. “This kind of rigid ideology does not survive the battlefield of reality in the community.”
Thomas Kenniff … said fair treatment was a noble objective but “can’t be a code word for abandoning the traditional role of the prosecutor — which is to assign consequence to crime.”
There’s more at the link.
Yes, I’d say that’s the problem, right there. When you turn “woke” scholars loose in an academic ivory tower, divorced from the problems of the real world, it doesn’t take long for the iron to enter their souls – and rust there. They lose sight of the effects of their nicely theoretical policies, and blather on about “equity” and “fairness” and all that stuff. Meanwhile, those of us who have to live every day with the criminals they set free to continue their lives of crime . . . we see it rather differently.
When I worked as a prison chaplain, I used to say to opponents of private ownership of firearms, and concealed carry permits, that I wanted them to come and spend just one day at work with me, surrounded by felons of the worst kind (I was stationed in a high-security penitentiary). I told them that when they left the place that evening, they’d do so permanently convinced of the error of their former attitudes, because encountering such felons “in the raw” is an eye-opening and life-changing (not to mention frequently very frightening) experience.
They didn’t believe me, of course – the convinced liberal seldom, if ever, allows the real world to challenge his or her preconceptions – but I knew the truth, and they didn’t. I’d learned it the hard way. They’d been shielded from that.
That’s the problem with these professors. They think they understand reality. In fact, they understand only a very limited subset of reality, the liberal cocoon in which they’ve lived most of their lives. They’ve never had to live in fear of a violent felon kicking down their doors and assaulting, robbing, raping or murdering them – but that’s a daily reality in many of our inner cities.
Instead of siding with the victims, as they should, they see only the liberal shibboleths that elevate the offenders onto a pedestal of victimization, deprivation and circumstance. “They couldn’t help it! They’re products of their environment!” scream the liberals. Yeah, right. So are their victims – but there are a lot more victims than perpetrators, and none of the former developed the habits of the latter. That argument fails in the face of that logic.
Criminals gonna criminal, to coin a phrase. It’s been that way since Cain killed Abel, and nothing’s changed since then. Nothing will ever change, because human nature is the same as it’s always been. Prosecutors and District Attorneys who fail to recognize and deal with that reality are putting the rest of us at risk, and should be dealt with accordingly.
