Police said the cars were trying to stop the limo when several shots were fired from the Chrysler.

Two men in the limo, Malik Wilson, 21, and Kendrick Handy, 27, were hit.

The limo driver pulled out a handgun and fired at the Chrysler as the limo sped away. Police did not release the limo driver’s name but said he had a concealed weapons permit.

While trying to phone 911, the limo driver happened upon another crime scene near Queensboro Avenue S and 31st Street. There, about an hour earlier, investigators had found an empty, bullet-ridden Nissan Maxima with cocaine inside…

…Inside, police said, was Anzio Fabian Dale, 17, who had been shot. Police said they also found a gun in the vehicle. The rest of the people in the car had fled.

via Night on the town ends with four shot in St. Petersburg | Tampa Bay Times.

Several lesson to be learned here:

1) Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.
If you read the whole article, you’ll find out that the patrons behave stupidly by flashing cash and calling attention upon themselves. That attracted the wrong kind of individuals and less than hilarity ensued.

2) You cannot predict how you will be attacked.
Let’s face it, two cars with multiple attackers trying to stop the limo is some crap out of Hollywood that we easily dismiss as bombastic storytelling. Reality bit hard but at least the driver of the limo reacted well. This also bring us to…

3) The need for lots of ammo in your gun.
I have no idea how many shots the driver needed, but there was a huge potential in this case for more than seven or ten shots for self-defense. Again, we have multiple attackers in moving vehicles already shooting at you, the potential for shots not hitting the A Zone of an attacker is high. Only Bruce Willis shoots a moving helicopter down with two rounds of .38 special out of a snubby revolver…or was it only one?

4) Sometimes, no matter how much you avoid it, feces happen and come to visit you.
The limo driver did not initiated the events or acted stupid, he was just doing his job. Still he got caught in the middle of the events created by others and that Ladies and Gents is one more reason why we carry. I am a great believer in Avoidance, Deterrence and De-Escalation as a way to live one’s life, but I am not deluded enough to think that is all it takes. We carry a handgun because it is the most efficient & allowed instrument of last resort when life is threatened.

So, congrats to the Limo Driver. He survived and go to go home unscathed. And we got to learn some important lessons.

Hat Tip to Gun Saves Lives.

Why? It is a matter of policy. As Chief Inspector Colin Greenwood points out here, the Home Office believes it unfair to brand a man a murderer until he has been tried, convicted, and exhausted his appeals.

As a result, murders that have not been solved are not included.

via Compare US VS British Murder Rates | Extrano’s Alley, a gun blog.

I knew that Europeans played loosey with their crime stats. But this is beyond the pale.

Orwell would be so “proud.”

Hat tip to The Smallest Minority

A burglary suspect was shot and killed Thursday morning at a home in northwest Miami-Dade. 

According to Miami-Dade County police, Ernest Holdman tried to burglarize a home at Northwest 112th Street and 18th Avenue. Neighbors said Holdman, 31, climbed onto the roof of a trailer and tried stealing the homeowner’s yard tools.

Dennis Law, the 49-year-old homeowner, then shot Holdman, police say. He was dead when police arrived.

“He’s a good guy, you know,” said Lynn Eason, Holdman’s sister. “He never really hurt nobody or went out of his way to be mean or nasty to anybody. Maybe he did get caught in the wrong situation, but I think it could have been handled differently, better than that.”

“He wasn’t armed. I mean, lawn equipment?” said Melissa Jones, a friend of Holdman. “It doesn’t make no sense to kill somebody for a weedwacker that cost $110. C’mon. That’s somebody life.”

We, members of a society, made a choice to live under certain set of rules. The finer points of the rules may vary, but one of them is “You Shall Not perpetrate Malum In Se against your fellow humans.”  When you choose to violate that simple rule, you open yourself to possible consequences that might no be of your liking. And yes, sometimes people make the wrong decisions, pay for them and hopefully they learn from their mistakes and live a productive and peaceful life. But if you choose to repeat the same conduct that got you in trouble in the past and you paid for it, then you are opening yourself to more of the same consequences or even worse as in this particular case.

“It doesn’t make no sense to kill somebody for a weedwacker that cost $110. C’mon. That’s somebody life.”

He did not get killed for a weedwacker. He got killed because he violated the sanctity of a neighbor’s household, violated the safety of the neighbor and decided that the property was his for the taking dismissing the hard work that the neighbor put to acquire that property. Basically he made a series of purposeful choices that ended his life and there is nobody else to blame but Mr. Holdman himself.

And yes, Mr. Holdman might be going through a rough time in his life and needed the money, but so are many people in out country and they made the conscious decision of not going the criminal way and to hold on to whatever figment of dignity and morality they had left rather than trying to victimize somebody else. I did a quick check and found no less than 10 churches in Mr. Holdman’s neighborhood and there was one from his domicile to where he ended up dying. At any of these churches he could have found, if not God, at least a helping hand, a friendly ear or even a meal and a chance for hope.

He chose poorly.

I have a love/hate relationship with target stands. In fact, you might say it was a target stand that got me started down the road to the life I’m currently living. That’s because my first handgun buddy used to take my family and me out into the woods for a day of casual plinking. A contractor by trade, he hand-built the target stands we used. After the third or fourth trip, he told me that I’d better go take a class, because he was tired of me shooting his target stands instead of his targets. (Ouch!)

via Target’s last stand | Cornered Cat.

Kathy is a hoot. I have the pleasure of knowing her and she is a great instructor to boot.

And don’t forget to buy her book or I shall be displeased.

In the Miami Herald ZOMG! files we find this article starting the following way:

Picture this: teachers packing heat as they teach children their ABC’s and 123’s.
The scenario has many parents and teachers envisioning a nightmare, and they have gone out of their way to tell state legislators so.

So pundit/writer/BSer/Journalist?(nahhh!) Kathleen McGrory colors her piece from the start. The rest of the article, specially the “interviews” are a headache to follow. So what’s the legislation about?

The House K-12 Education Subcommittee voted 10-3 in support of a controversial bill that would give principals the power to choose certain teachers and school employees who would carry concealed weapons on campus. The schools would have a choice of either arming a school employee or hiring a separate safety officer, who would also carry a firearm.

But all was not lost. At least one Democrat used her brain:

I imagine that being a teacher, she felt that just standing in front of a shooter with nothing more than a ruler and a shush might not be the best way to go home alive.

For a proposal that is all about choice, it is amazing that most of the pro-choice party hates it. Then again it is only a valid choice if they impose it.

And you wonder why kids are sucking at school.

Just got back from WallyWorld doing ammo hunt, specifically for 22 LR for SWMBO. I was lucky since they just had finished putting in the shelves the ammo they just got from the regular shipments.

Six solitary boxes of Tula 7.6sx39.

That was the whole shipment. Six boxes. At least I have a boomstick that eats that particular ammo so I asked for the six boxes…..nope, I could only buy three and at $5.16 per box which is double what I paid the last time I bought per box.

And on my way back to my vehicle (with barely two magazines worth of ammo) I heard the following exchange between a Mom and her 8-9 year old son in the parking lot:

Mom: “Stop acting up or you’ll get it!”
Son: “You hit me and I’ll press charges.”

God is wise. He did not see fit to bless us with kids…. mostly because if a kid of mine would have said something like that to me or his Mom, I would waterboard his sorry ass with kerosene.

When the cost of guns increases, buy ammo. When ammo is too expensive, buy training. When you can’t afford training, invest in practice.

via Unit cost averaging | VolkStudio Blog.

A short and very sensible post by Oleg Volk. It is obvious, yet we miss it. I hate when that happens.