We need more gun control

Bob_C

https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/1760085225781018742?s=46&t=TF5YSHjB9Hq6ZBrenucnTg

WestlinnDuck

https://hardcorehusky.com/discussion/113455/we-need-more-gun-control

We need a lot more transparency about the criminal background and status of arrested perps and in particular why they are permitted to have illegal firearms. Dems have no interest in getting guns out of the hands of criminals. They do have a great interest in getting the guns out of the hands of legal gun owners.

Sledog

Useful idiots?

WestlinnDuck

Powerline does a pretty good job of getting into the details on this recent case with two dead police officers and a fire medic.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/02/who-was-shannon-gooden.php

WHO WAS SHANNON GOODEN?

On Sunday evening, police in Burnsville, Minnesota were called to the scene of a domestic disturbance. While the reason for the original call doesn’t seem to have been made public, it is widely reported (or at least rumored) that a suspect was in bed with a fourteen-year-old girl.

Police arrived at the scene and found that the suspect was armed. They engaged in lengthy negotiations with him, but he refused to come out from the house where he was holed up. At some point, for reasons that are not yet clear, the suspect started shooting. He killed two Burnsville police officers and a fire medic who came to the aid of one of them. Scott wrote about the case here.

For some reason, legacy news outlets initially decided not to identify the perpetrator, who shot himself after murdering the three law enforcement personnel. But his name was Shannon Cortez Gooden. My colleague David Zimmer explains what we know about Gooden so far:

[The 38-year-old Gooden] was the subject of a lifetime ban on possessing firearms due to a 2008 conviction for 2nd degree assault. During the incident, Gooden had attempted to stab his cousin with a 7-inch knife during a fight, then pelted the cousin and his aunt’s car with landscape rocks as they fled. This incident occurred a few years after Gooden had been convicted of two separate domestic abuse charges involving women.

In 2020, Gooden petitioned the Dakota County District Court to restore his right to possess firearms. In the petition, Gooden suggested he had matured, and wanted his rights restored so he could protect himself and his family. The court found about a dozen criminal incidents, mostly involving traffic infractions, and a few petitions for domestic abuse no-contact orders, and ordered that Gooden was not a suitable candidate to have his rights to possess firearms restored, maintaining the lifetime ban Gooden had been subject to since 2008.

It will be interesting to learn just how Gooden came to possess the guns he did, and what happens to those who may have supplied those guns to him.

Given that the murderer in this case was black and his victims were white, legacy media can’t trot out a white supremacy narrative. So they default to option number two, calls for stricter gun control. But those measures merely make life more difficult for legal gun owners who have committed no crimes. Here, the murderer was the subject of a lifetime ban, yet it did no good.

Gooden was a rotten person, but not a poor one:

Other civil court records indicate that Gooden had at least five children with two women and had entered into a new relationship with a woman who had two more children. The court had determined that Gooden was earning an average of $12,000/mo in 2023 as an employee of LaMettry’s Collision in Rosemount. Despite this sizable income, Gooden had been delinquent in several judgements against him from his bank and from previously court-ordered child support payments to his former wife.

Consider that: this guy earned $144,000 a year, no doubt considerably more than the men he killed. While it is true that crime often causes poverty, it is not true that poverty causes crime. The problem with criminals like Gooden isn’t that they are poor, it is that they are evil.

Zimmer makes a fundamental point about liberals–they love to pass new laws, but for some reason don’t want to enforce the laws once they are enacted:

This lack of concern on the part of Gooden demonstrates that laws alone will not prevent violence — it’s the follow-through in holding accountable criminal offenders who possess and use firearms in the commission of crime that matters. Criminals should be terrified of the penalties that await them if they choose to possess or use firearms. Our court system’s current feeble response to criminals possessing or using firearms in the commission of crimes does not deter criminals from doing so. I recently wrote about this concern based on my review of data from the Sentencing Guidelines Commission:

There were a record number of cases involving an offense committed with a firearm — 1,805 in 2023, up from 1,587 in 2022 and 636 just 15 years earlier. Despite this rise in the use of firearms in the commission of a crime, which carries mandatory minimum sentencing, only 30% (545) ended up with a conviction and a mandatory minimum sentence. 48% of these cases were either not charged, dismissed, or the mandatory minimum sentence was waived.

Will the liberals who now run Minnesota learn that basic lesson from the Gooden case? Don’t bet on it.

Sledog

They will call to disarm everyone. No one but can be trusted but the government. We know how that always works out.