Café Racer Shooter Had Concealed Carry Permit
USA Today reports that Seattle’s Café Racer shooter was a concealed carry permit holder. But as usual, the rush to affix blame on a little plastic card conveniently avoids many truths behind this sad incident.
Previous brushes with the criminal justice system highlight his troubled past:
- The shooter had two assault cases dropped when victims recanted.
- His family claimed the shooter was “mentally ill” but never had him committed.
These two points show how important citizen participation is for society to work. Perhaps those not pressing charges are also responsible?
To punish all concealed carry holders for the acts of this shooter is bigotry. What would happen if, after Sylvester Griffin was convicted of raping and murdering a woman, the USA Today or LA Times wrote something like “we just can’t trust blacks and should restrict their civil right of self-defense”?
(Actually, state regimes in the Antebellum and post-Civil War South—and North—did say just that, enacting draconian Black Codes that severely restricted black freemen’s ability to carry any weapon, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Outside some lunatic fringe, media understandably wouldn’t do this. So why is it okay to paint an entire demographic group with a broad brush? It’s also curious that anti-rights propagandists are so quick to convict. What happened to innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?
Unfortunate and even catastrophic things happen, despite our best efforts to avoid them. Welcome to the Physical Plane. To affix blame on inanimate objects conveniently allows the non-functioning mind to avoid examining the complexities of the social contract.
Knee-jerk rhetoric allows a temporary feeling of smug superiority, since it conveniently avoids self-examination and the messy, effortful process of analyzing the problem and creating a more effective solution. And God forbid anybody should examine history and a plethora of modern datasets, and realize that gun control doesn’t work as advertised!
To affix blame on those who have committed no crime is to deepen the wound and delay healing, because it attaches one’s mind to an alternate reality where something should have been different.
That’s a great way to create mental illness.
Getting mental health information into the appropriate data base is a best inconsistent. Standards for who should be entered and the completeness of that which is entered differs from state to state. It seems to me that in cases of doubt the information is not entered.
Should reporting standards improve it is doubtful that these incidence of an active shooter with or without a permit will be eliminated. That is supported by the numbers of active shooters in other countries without concealed carry laws and far more restrictions on firearms.
Mental illness alone is not sufficient to prevent permit issuance in most states (although perhaps it should). Normally, there is a requirement for an involuntary commitment or observational hold.
We would need to fix a broken mental health system first. There’s a world of difference between intermittent and highly manageable depression and being sociopathic. Right now there’s no distinction between types of mental illness and mental health in popular culture and everyone who has any condition is treated alike. People can have their fundamental rights revoked by a doctor based on just his say-so with a very long and uphill battle to have any restoration of those rights.
What century are you writing from? A doctor can have you held for observation in California on his say-so (Cal. W&I Code sec. 5150), but long-term commitment? No.
Sarah Brady and her gang will have a blast over this one. He will be their poster boy for showing gun licensing doesn’t work.
“Sarah Brady and her gang will have a blast over this one.
He will be their poster boy for showing gun licensing
doesn’t work.”
Your right, they don’t work. All they (CCW permits) do is usurp an individual’s rights and create government abuse.
States need to get rid of their permits and respect a person’s rights. Look at Vermont as a good example. No permits, unconstitutional background checks, or other “requirements”.
Howard,
Not only is your commentary “spot on” topically, but the articulation is exquisite!
Thank you for keeping us a) informed of the news and b) seeing the issue clearly for what it is.
What is exactly any relevance that the shooter had a concealed carry permit to the shooting?
Was he pulled over by police on the way to the shooting and allowed to carry on because he had the concealed carry permit? No.
Since people use cars to drive wrecklessly, speed, and commit felonies; is the fact that they have a drivers license relevant to the crimes? Does the lack of a license in prohibit them from driving the car? Again No.
What if someone in the door had a concealed caryy permit and stopped the slaughter, now that would have been news that would not have been reported.
The real tragedy here is that there was no one in that cafe at the time who was carrying concealed and prepared to stop the killer. So many lives could have been saved if there had been a ‘sheepdog’ present.
Personally I think private citizens carrying should be encouraged, if not required as some old laws did, so that where ever some nut case decides to start killing random people there will be a few people with guns present to stop them.
It’s the only sensible solution, cops can’t be everywhere, citizens can.
In Seattle?
Oddly, if you check the book stores and magazine racks, that area has to have a large, conservative population, or else those books and magazines would not be on those racks.
They are just laying low, or accepting the “no guns” social rules. It’s costing.
Those who want to affix blame to concealed permit holders should apply the same logic to cops and legislators. CCP holders are less likely to commit a serious crime (felony) than the legislators who enact the laws or the cops who enforce them.
Though the number of concealed carry permit holders dwarfs the number of cops (over 920,000 permits in Florida alone), the number of serious crimes committed by CCP holders is lower than for cops or legislators.
So if we’re going to start banning guns, we should start with cops and legislators.
Family can’t have someone committed. You might look at my recent article in Engage about the mass murder consequences of deinstitutionalization.