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Turkey shoot in Georgia
Fatal shots were fired last month after several young men broke into an Atlanta home on Thanksgiving Day.
Police determined that the suspects attempted to break into a home in the Gresham Park neighborhood of Atlanta. The homeowner exercised his 2nd Amendment rights, firing on the intruders, who appear to have returned fire as well.
A neighbor said that she didn’t realize it was gunfire when she first heard the ruckus.
“I didn’t even think they were gunshots. I thought they were fireworks because there were so many,” she told FOX 5. “It’s very disturbing to see that.”
Preliminary reports stated that police were called by neighbors when shots were detected. They arrived on the scene and found several males, ages 23, 18, and 15.
All three had sustained gunshot wounds and were rushed to a local hospital, where the 18-year-old, Taneaious McCune, died due to his injuries.
Follow-up reports say another man, 30-year-old Telvin Thomas, showed up at the hospital afterward with similar bullet wounds. It has since been determined that he had also been involved in the break-in.
WSBtv reported on the events and disclosed that police say another group had been found and “were detained on the scene with the help of SWAT officers.” This group appears to have been planning to help with the home invasion.
After reviewing information, the authorities told WXIA that they deem the homeowner to have fired the shots in an act of self-defense, which “seemed justified.” No charges are likely to be filed against the homeowner.
Rather, the suspects are facing charges of criminal murder for the death of their accomplice.
The following Sunday, just days after the first incident, a candlelight vigil was being held for 18-year-old McCune. During the vigil, more shots rang out.
Police arrived at the scene to find 1 dead and 2 injured, all of them minors.
The perpetrator had left on foot, and according to The Atlanta Journal, detectives are actively working to identify the suspect.
Unfortunately for the people gathered at the vigil, no one stepped up to defend the group from the shooter. Hopefully, after these two events, residents in the neighborhood will take measures to ensure they can adequately protect themselves and their loved ones.
By Larry Keane
A New York Times conference featured a bank CEO pushing the financial industry to track Americans making purchases at retailers and monitor their “suspicious activity” under the guise of “reducing gun violence.”
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown was the special guest at the Times’ DealBook confab and was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. He’s the Times’ columnist who previously proposed the gun buying monitoring scheme and spelled out the “next steps” in a column highlighting Sims Brown’s efforts after an international financial standards board adopted her petition to create the tracking codes.
Putting even a little thought to the idea reveals the serious flaws of the plan. Implementing the enormous system to track the private financial transactions will create a myriad of privacy and civil liberty concerns and no doubt is ripe for abuse.
Gun Control Dragnet
Sims Brown lobbied the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to create a gun-related Merchant Category Code (MCC) for credit and debit card companies to use to track cardholders’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. The ISO adopted the proposal and banks are beginning to use them. Listening to Sims Brown forecast what’s ahead, her true gun control aim is revealed. It’s a dragnet for law-abiding Americans.
“We’re at the very early stages of this –,” Sims Brown told Sorkin and the audience. “But as this is implemented, those scenarios will be used.”
By “those scenarios,” she means “detection scenarios” in which a particular purchase prompts a bank to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Here’s how the MCC tracking will reportedly work. Purchases made at retailers selling firearms or ammunition would be assigned the new code for purchases. The MCC won’t identify what is in the customer’s basket, so it could be a total purchase for a firearm and several boxes of ammunition. It could also include a new tent, sleeping bag, propane stove, waders, decoys, blinds and other outdoor gear. The total cost could be flagged as “suspicious” since it might be an outlier on a customer’s purchase history. That doesn’t make it nefarious, though.
Media reported the proposal won’t have its intended effect. “The payment network and its banking partners would have no idea if a gun-store customer is purchasing an automatic rifle or safety equipment,” Bloomberg News reported. Banks aren’t saying what purchases would be “suspicious.”
Just a Steppingstone
The MCC scheme has caught the attention of Congressional gun control politicians. Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 5764, by Reps. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) and Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and in the U.S. Senate, S. 3117, by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). That legislation, The Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act, would provide banking institutions the cover they need to track purchases by requiring the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to provide “guidance” needed to institute the MCC.
“Financial institutions have a legal obligation… to have programs in place to help detect and report suspicious activity, but they have to know what they are looking for,” Rep. Wexton said.
Rep. Dean has praised the back door gun control effort, too. “Financial institutions already have proven systems in place to identify suspicious behavior and purchasing patterns,” she wrote in a release.
Still no one has offered what “suspicious behavior” or “purchasing patterns” would be flagged. The questions are endless, answers few and the threat to Constitutional rights high.
Trudging Ahead. Trampling Rights.
Sorkin hypes his work in getting the MCC code established. He told the Dealbook audience, “This is an emotional topic for me in many ways… because back in 2018 I started writing about the role of guns in our society… and the role of credit card companies and banks in financing mass shootings.”
Sorkin stated his belief that lawful firearm retail businesses and the already-highly regulated Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) which provide for the legal exercise of the Second Amendment should do their part to create the backdoor database of gun buyers – something Congress is prohibited by law from doing on their own.
“Merchants must start using the code, and not obfuscate transactions by using other classifications,” Sorkin wrote. “Most crucially, the payments industry needs to develop and refine software algorithms for identifying suspicious activity…”
There are those words again – “suspicious activity.”
The suspicion is better reserved for those who would compile lists of Americans lawfully exercising their Constitutional Second Amendment rights. The right to keep and bear arms begins with the ability to make a purchase at the retail counter. Financial industry power players, though, are twisting their roles to facilitate legal transactions into social credit scores that put Americans on secret watch lists.
The financial industry doesn’t need to be suspicious of gun buyers who already are subject to FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) verifications. This move, though, is reason enough for Americans to be suspicious of “woke” banking CEOs doing the bidding of gun control politicians.
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.
——————————————————————————– Does anybody remember voting for this guy? I don’t! Grumpy
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Stay Aware by JIM WILSON
We spend too much of our time listening without actually hearing, and looking without actually seeing.
This past summer we pulled up to our travel trailer, after dark, and unloaded our two dogs. About the time they got out of the car, the dogs got really upset. They wouldn’t quit barking, they wouldn’t listen to me and they wouldn’t calm down. I figured they were just reacting to a coyote or some other critter in the pasture next to us. Finally, it dawned on me that I ought to find out what they were upset about, and started looking around with my flashlight. Luckily, I found and killed the Mojave rattlesnake before it bit any of us. Col. Cooper would have called me in Condition White, and he would have been right.
Awareness in our everyday lives gives us time to evaluate a situation and prepare to respond to it. Away from home, awareness often helps us spot a potentially bad situation while there is still time to go the other way. Heck, you might even spot the traffic cop while there is still time to slow down and avoid a speeding ticket.
Awareness should be part of the discussion in your family defensive plan. And, it really helps to have friends and family members encouraging each other to be conscious of what’s going on around them. A criminal attack is dangerous, but it should never be a complete surprise. Tune your senses—they are some of the best defensive weapons at your disposal.
If you hang around hunting camp or the shooting range for more than, say, seven seconds, you will soon be regaled with the most outrageous fibs, half-truths, bald-faced mendacities and straight-up Category Five lies ever inflicted on civilized mankind. It’s the nature of our shared passion. Frankly, most of us actually embrace dubious storytelling as a wonderful part of the experience.
In fact, hunters are often chased out of camp by their cohorts brandishing large sticks if they have the temerity to share a tale that includes more than 5% actual verifiable fact. It’s never been done, but if a hunter ever told a shooting-related story that was absolutely true start-to-finish, it’s likely a massive rip would develop in the space-time continuum and we’d all end up exploding into icy clouds of anti-matter.
Therefore, despite my lifelong dedication to “never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” along with my status as a professional writer, I’m going to risk the universe imploding by sharing a supposedly-true story. Though I hang around with hunters, shooters, anglers and other compulsive liars, the person who shared this episode swears and affirms it is true. Where the actual truth lies, I shall leave up to the audience but I will note on humid days my friend did radiate an unusual bouquet, so perhaps there is legitimacy in his claims. Let me explain.
Prelude
The protagonist in this tale shall remain nameless but he is an older gentleman who I’ve known for nearly 40 years. We’ve grown apart over the last decade and haven’t spoken but previously, we spent many years shooting, hunting, fishing and generally committing various outdoor-related outrages together. He is also the person in my life — and we all have one — who can take a simple situation and turn it into a full-blown, four-alarm catastrophe in the name of fun. This was one of those times.
A mutual friend of ours witnessed this incident and told me about it. It occurred sometime in the late 1960s, before I knew either party, and involves a stupid and childish act — of course — but wasn’t illegal and was fairly commonplace at the time.
One fine late-winter day, the person telling the story and my lets-make-matters-worse buddy were driving out to hunt coyotes with rifles. Cruising along the backroads, they happened to spy a large gathering of turkey vultures, also known as “buzzards,” feasting on the odiferous remains of some poor creature that met its demise two weeks earlier on the country road.
Slowing to look upon the group, my friend spontaneously announced he had always wanted a full-body taxidermy mount of a buzzard to grace his home decor. Why this would be a better conversation piece than, say, a nice piece of driftwood or an oil painting remains open for debate to this day.
Before we go any further, we must note the turkey vulture is federally protected under the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, though legal protection wasn’t granted until 1972. Today, like all animals, turkey vultures have advocacy groups and a political action committee in Washington D.C. so please note our admonition: The turkey vulture is a critical part of the ecosystem, a fine fellow and generally misunderstood soul you shouldn’t harm or harass, despite the fact they smell like hot garbage, their vomit is acid enough to destroy car paint and they regularly urinate on their legs instead of bathing. So, regardless of any legitimate aversion, they are illegal to molest without federal permission.
The deed
Showing a critical lack of long-term thinking or any inkling as to how wives and future houseguests might view the acquisition, our heroes unanimously agreed potting the vulture and turning it into an objet d’art was a grand idea. Pulling over to the shoulder of the road, my friend grabbed his bolt-action .22-250, laid it over a weathered fence post and fired. At the shot, one buzzard flopped over as his frightened dining companions took wing.
Our victorious rifleman hopped the fence, walked over to the remains and gingerly picked up the stinking, gore-covered bird. Returning across the fence, the two men discussed what to do with the reeking carcass.
As vultures are known for their normal diet of rotten meat, the witness noted the smell was somewhere between unbelievable and unimaginable.
Because of last-minute mechanical trouble, the pair was driving the car of one of their wives instead of their usual pickup trucks. This meant the only reasonable place to carry the fetid beast was the trunk of the sedan. They figured they could wrap the bird in an old blanket, which they would later burn, and then use some type of disinfectant spray to rid the car of the lingering traces of stench. I’m guessing kerosene.
Satisfied with this dubious plan, the two then drove to another buddy whom they knew was an amateur taxidermist.
At the taxidermist’s home, my friend inquired if it were possible to mount the buzzard in a full, menacing, gothic wing-spread pose. The wildlife “artist” allowed that he could. After a bit of haggling, they agreed upon a price and the three men walked up to the trunk of the vehicle. There was an ominous rustling from inside as my friend turned the key in the lock.
Hostilities Commence
As the trunk lid popped open, the now-conscious and thoroughly angry buzzard stood up like the Phoenix arising to glare at the men. The furious bird then spread its five-foot wings menacingly, squawked loudly and proceeded to vomit with great force and volume.
For those unaware, vomiting is the vulture’s standard first line of defense and they are quite practiced in the art. For what seemed like an eternity, the bird swiveled its head like a lawn sprinkler spewing liquefied roadkill all over the three men and the car.
The smell was excruciating. Most of the trees within 30 feet began shedding leaves and several flying insects died in midair. To make matters worse, in the panic borne of hyper-gagging, my buddy tried to grab the now-apparently-healthy bird by the wings as it continued flopping and spewing the upchuck geyser.
The struggle turned into a short wrestling match with the bird expending its entire arsenal on his hapless tormentor. Locked arm-in-wing, the duo struggled around the driveway in a life-or-death battle as vomit, feces and urine spurted every direction — the majority of which came from the vulture.
The horrific, clinging odor seared every nostril hair within range and in turn each man added their lunch to the gory tableau. The driveway grew slippery with barf and after three or four circuits of the immediate area, the bird and man went down for good.
After several more seconds of driveway grappling, the man finally conceded defeat and curled into a ball in the hopes the whole thing would just be a bad dream — a very wet, extremely smelly, bad dream. His friends didn’t witness this as they were indisposed, crawling on their hands and knees while looking for somewhere cleaner to hurl again.
With this sudden break in the action, the bird took flight with a loud squawk. It was never seen again and no one knows why it flopped over unconscious or if it eventually succumbed to whatever wound it had sustained in the initial encounter. Some believe it just had a sick sense of humor.
Epilogue
In the end, there are several lessons to be learned. First, you shouldn’t shoot vultures because it’s illegal, immoral and serves no purpose, decorating needs notwithstanding. Secondly, if you do happen to need to shoot a buzzard under legal circumstances, as Robert Ruark said, “Use enough gun.” I’d suggest something along the lines of a .458 Winchester Magnum, though my friend now thinks only a .470 Nitro Express safely meets the criteria.
And, most of all, always warn your wife beforehand when the clothes hamper contains an extra-special surprise.
