This from Today:

Survivor stories: Victim of JCC attack had to come to grips with being shot ‘because I was Jewish’

Mindy Finkelstein was 16 years old when she was thrust into the national spotlight in 1999 after a white supremacist opened fire at a Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles.

Finkelstein was a counselor at the JCC, a teen looking forward to her prom and dreaming about where she would go to college The gunman was Buford O. Furrow, who on the morning of Aug. 10 walked into the JCC and fired 70 shots with a semi-automatic weapon.

I’m not going to lie, that’s tragic.

The shooting turned Finkelstein into what she described as “a poster child” for the national debate over gun control. It was a role she was not ready for, during a time when that type of violence was an uncommon event.

As Finkelstein was being rushed to the hospital that day, a realization hit her.

“I was shot because I was Jewish,’’ she said. “That’s painful in a different way.”

Being the victim of Antisemitism, or any other hate crime, sucks.  But let’s be honest, knowing that she may be hated for who she is can’t be too foreign a concept to her?  Was she never taught Jewish history?

“I grew up surrounded by Jews and knew about the Holocaust and the KKK, but I had never come into contact with it until that moment,” she said.

A week after she was released from the hospital following the shooting, Finkelstein was in a wheelchair at a cousin’s bat mitzvah. She found herself receiving hugs from a group of Holocaust survivors in the family.

“They said, ‘You’re one of us. We are survivors because people don’t think we deserve a chance to live our full lives,’” she said. “It really got to me in a way that I look forward every day to being Jewish, instead of running from it, because it stands for something more than just a religion, and it stands for something more than just a culture. It’s a survival.”

Finkelstein’s parents and the parents of other survivors became vocal advocates for gun control legislation. The shooting also galvanized the Million Mom March, a national movement calling for common sense gun policies that held marches across the country on Mother’s Day in 2000.

Finkelstein and her mother, Donna, threw their efforts into working with Women Against Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence and the The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Finkelstein didn’t realize the toll it would take on her when gun control bills continuously failed to pass at state and federal levels.

This is where this all goes south for me.  This happened in California in 1999.  The Brady Bill and AWB was still in full effect.  Bill Clinton was President.  Between California and the Federal Government, she was living under some of the strictest guns laws in the country.

Still bad things happened.

Rather than learn that Jews need to defend themselves, she launched into “take away guns from everybody else.”

There is a huge cultural gap between Israelis and Liberal American Jews.  This attitude is part of us.  US Jews rarely join the military, Israelis have mandatory service.  US Jews are vehemently anti-gun.  Israel loosened its gun laws when Jews were getting stabbed.

American Jews still don’t grok the need for self defense.  They think that they can legislate safety.  Israelis understand that sometimes you just need to shoot a motherfucker or drop a Hellfire on his ass.

While many survivors of mass shootings refuse to make any mention of the gunman, Finkelstein believes it’s important to remember Buford, who remains in prison.

“I understand why people refuse to say the name of the shooter, but I don’t do that,” she said. “In my situation it’s important to understand how he came to be the way he was and make sure that’s publicized.”

Simply surviving has served as a rebuke of what Buford stands for.

“They tried to kill me because I’m Jewish and this is like the ultimate way to stick it to them,” Stepakoff said. “You tried, and you failed. I still am here, and I still am free to practice my religion.”

Yeah… no.

I prefer the Israeli approach.  Shoot the son-of-a-bitch until he’s dead.  Send the message to the next person who gets the itch to kill some Jews that they will end up spending the last few moments gurgling their own blood on a sidewalk.

Last year’s march by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, served as a reminder that the issues raised by the JCC shooting nearly 20 years ago are still an ongoing concern across the country.

Anti-Semitic incidents surged 57 percent in 2017, from 1,267 across the country a year earlier to 1,986, marking the largest single-year increase since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking the incidents in the 1970s.

See?  Buy a gun, get a CCW permit, learn to shoot, carry on.

Finkelstein does her best to share her story with other survivors of gun violence to show them there can be hope after the horror.

“I try to be as honest as possible about what transpired in my life and how difficult it was,” she said. “But I also talk about all the success I’ve had despite what happened to me and also because of what happened to me.

“People feel like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t feel that way. I feel there was a reason that happened to me. (Buford) was at the wrong place and I was in the right place.”

And this is why I don’t get along with so many in the Jewish community.

I’d be demanding that the JCC hire a director who is retired IDF and an alumni of Baladia and put a rifle in his office.  Let me put a gun in my gym bag at the JCC when I work out.

No amount of gun control will some a very motivated asshole from going on a rampage.  A few well placed bullets will, however, stop his rampage.

I feel bad for Finkelstein.  What happened to her is terrible.  But to work for gun control is to put her head in the sand and pretend that it is making her safer.  It’s not.

It seems local PD was aware of the guys, they started after him, he got away, got in the coffee shop, attacked the woman, got shot by the civilian, ran away and it was finally tased down by the cops.

However, this is troubling:

 As for the “Good Samaritan”, Hansen said he did have a concealed weapons permit, but investigators will need time to determine if deadly force was required in this situation.
“Once we look at it to see if that helped stop the attack on the clerk, those kinds of things will make the determination on how that all plays out,” Hansen said.

‘Good Samaritan’ shoots man attacking Starbucks barista

When they use quotation marks, you know they are really putting down the gentleman.  Maybe the local PD is pissed because a 70 year old managed to do what they could not or simply they have a hard on for CWPs.

If this is Wednesday, I don’t want to imagine the weekend.

Via Tom Givens.

Deranged subject uses barista as punching bag.

MILLCREEK — Shelby Hamilton’s first thought as she lay bruised and bleeding on the ground of a Millcreek Starbucks was that she didn’t want to die this way. It would be a painful way to go.

It all began while Hamilton was working an early morning shift at the coffee shop near 3900 South and 900 East Thursday morning. Hamilton was standing behind the counter when a “haggard-looking” man entered, she said.

Instead of coming to the register to order, the man came behind the counter and asked Hamilton if she knew who he was. When she replied that she didn’t, he became angry and began beating her with his fists, she said.

“It was all just kind of random. I didn’t really know him. … He just came in the door and hit me in the back of the head from behind,” Hamilton told KSL.com.

see what Corporate Bending Over for the Criminal does to the Starbucks Worker? But fear not: The Starbuck spirit intervened and she surely was helped by her coworkers.

She backed up and tried to put distance between herself and the man, but once she reached the end of the counter, she was trapped — and he continued hitting her. Hamilton’s co-workers, however, remained frozen, unsure what to do, she said.

“I started to think why no one was helping me, ‘cause he was only hitting me, and I felt kind of angry for a moment,” she said.

Ooops! My bad, never mind.  So what happens next?

Before Hamilton had much time to ponder the question, however, the man picked up a metal supply basket and hit her on the side of the head. Hamilton crumpled, and the man continued kicking her in the back. The only thought left in her mind was: “I don’t want to die this way.”

OK, she is toast. Surely now her coworkers spring into action:

As soon as she fell to the ground, however, her co-workers ran out the door and began screaming for help.

We never saw that one coming, right guys and gal?

The next thing Hamilton knew, the man had stopped beating her and gone back around the counter.
Soon after, she heard a gunshot.

The police must have arrived and saved the day!

Unified Police Lt. Ken Hansen confirmed later that the attacker was shot by a man in his late 60s who saw what was happening while visiting the shop for his morning coffee. The customer drew the man’s attention, and the attacker began to approach him.

As he came closer, the customer pulled out a gun and shot the attacker once in the chest, Hansen said. The man then stumbled out of the store.

Wait one frigging minute.  A client with a concealed weapon who was in full violation of Corporate policy by being armed inside Starbucks, shot and stopped the one guy that is allowed to be in Starbucks without buying anything (as per the same  Corporate policy) beating  the shit out of a female employee. #WarOnWomen kinda fits here.

Good Guy with a Gun saves another life.

LeBron James (Or as I call him, Cabron) got all peaceful gansta three years ago:

“I know what I see. I know how I feel.
“Obviously you’re not going to be able to take every gun out, I don’t know how you can do that,” James said. “There’s so many around now, today. But if there’s some stipulations behind it or some penalties, some big time penalties or rules or regulations about carrying firearms, legal or illegal, people will second-guess themselves.”

But it seems all is not good in paradise:

Amid a rash of burglaries at the homes of celebrities in the Los Angeles area, LeBron James has hired armed guards to protect his property, according to a report.
TMZ Sports reported Thursday that the Los Angeles Lakers star’s security team includes off-duty police officers and that NBA also is assisting in security.

LeBron hires armed guards for L.A. home: report
Doesn’t that sound just like Michael Bloomberg’s detail?  Hmmm. Interesting.

Of course, the irony will not face him one bit.

Taking a break from other news of the day, we turn to Starbucks.

If you didn’t think that Starbucks going woke was bad enough, becoming a homeless shelter that sells overpriced coffee is now literally risking the lives of employees and customers.

Starbucks baristas poked by discarded needles

Image after image provided to KIRO 7 reveal what three baristas claim they dispose of nearly every day while on the job at Starbucks: hypodermic needles they say were left behind by drug users.

All three employees also produced hospital, pharmacy and insurance receipts that show they took anti-viral medications to protect them from AIDS and hepatitis — after all three were poked by needles while on the job.

“(Needle users) put them in the tampon disposal boxes in the bathrooms, and we have to dig them out,” one barista recently said.

WHY!?!

Look, I’ve worked around a lot of dangerous things in my life, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, various explosives.

If my boss asked me to stick my hand into a bin full of used tampons to fish out needed used by junkies to shoot up, my only response would be “fuck you, I’m out” and then walk out the door.

I can’t imagine asking a barista to do something like that.

Only one was willing to be interviewed on-camera, as long as her identity was hidden.

“I don’t want to lose my job for being the only one willing to say, ‘Someone listen to me. Do something about this. My friends are at risk,'” she said.

At the employees’ North Seattle-area Starbucks, co-workers document when needles are found, leave notes asking “How many more baristas have to get poked before we get disposals in bathrooms?”

I get a restaurant having a sharps disposal for diabetics to use (I have diabetics in my family so am sympathetic to this need).  But providing a place for junkies to shoot up?  No.

For a while, they even shared medication to avoid illness if pricked because in the past 12 months, three baristas have been, according to medical documents provided to KIRO 7.

That practice was abandoned as soon as the employees learned sharing medication could get their manager in trouble.

Great move Starbucks.  Not just are your employees getting needle sticks but you are not even giving them enough anti-HIV drugs to keep up with the occurrences.

However, the frustration remains.

“That’s three of us now, in one location,” the barista who spoke on camera said.

She and the two other baristas would like Starbucks to install locked needle disposal boxes in all restrooms, especially in cafes where drug use is more common.

How about giving the baristas batons to beat the junkies until they leave?

I can’t imagine there are many paying customers in a cafe in which the guy on the couch shoots up and then passes out and shits himself.

“I’m pretty sure it looks worse to have your baristas continuously exposed to HIV and hep C and hep B” than to have locked boxes for needle disposal in areas open to the public, the barista said.

How have they not sued the ever-loving-living-fuck out of corporate?

Starbucks spokesman Reggie Borges confirmed to KIRO 7 that at least two Seattle-area baristas have been poked by hypodermic needles while on the job, but Borges claims that since early 2017, all employees have been retrained on what steps to take when hypodermic needles are found.

Burn the store to the ground.

He also disputed baristas’ claims they must “dig” needles out of trash bins. If an employee is “ever in a position where they don’t feel comfortable completing a task, they are empowered to remove themselves from the situation and alert a manager,” according to Borges, who would not agree to an on-camera interview.

Says the guy who works for the company that sided with the people yelling at one of their employees with a bullhorn inside.

With intravenous drug use on the rise, locked needle disposal boxes are widely sold online.

Many Seattle parks now have them to protect parkgoers.

Note to civilized people: don’t use the parks in Seattle.

However, L&I’s Church admits, even when the public has access to locked needle boxes inside bathrooms, employee safety is not guaranteed.

Just ask the people getting poked on public transportation in San Francisco.

Such boxes “deal with some of the issue, but I don’t think they deal with the entire issue,” Church told KIRO 7. “You’re still going to have a certain number of folks who are going to take that needle and throw it in the trash, so you can’t take a sharps box and assume the problem has been solved and not teach your employees to handle garbage safely,” Church said.

“How to empty the trash without getting poked by a heroin needle” shouldn’t be part of the job training for a barista making $15/hour.

According to Borges, all Starbucks cafes already have sharps boxes in employee-only areas so baristas can safely dispose of any needles using gloves and tongs.

So he admits to the needle fishing.

That development is welcome news to the baristas KIRO 7 interviewed, who all said the needle problem has grown since Starbucks opened its restrooms to everyone — even nonpaying customers — this past May.

“Because you don’t have to bother with purchasing anything, needles have definitely increased,” one said.

No shit.

In response, Borges told KIRO 7 that Starbucks’ Third Place Policy — which opened its restrooms to all — still has rules that must be followed.

The baristas, however, claim it’s difficult to enforce those rules behind a locked door.

So someone who is wiling to break the law and do heroin is willing to violate a corporate policy?  I’m shocked.

It’s not going to be long before the baristas ask you “So you want a [coffee beverage], would you like HIV or Hepatitis C with that?”

Ladies, don’t go to Starbucks.  Do not risk getting stabbed with a hypodermic needle when doing your lady business in a Starbucks restroom.

According to 18 USC § 1621 – Perjury Generally

Whoever—
(1) having taken an oath before a competent tribunal, officer, or person, in any case in which a law of the United States authorizes an oath to be administered, that he will testify, declare, depose, or certify truly, or that any written testimony, declaration, deposition, or certificate by him subscribed, is true, willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true; or
(2) in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1746 of title 28, United States Code, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true; is guilty of perjury and shall, except as otherwise expressly provided by law, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. This section is applicable whether the statement or subscription is made within or without the United States.

Perjury is a crime.

Law Info describes perjury this way:

While many people consider perjury and lying to be interchangeable terms, they are different. Perjury is a federal crime, and like all federal crimes, certain elements must be present in order for a person to be guilty of the crime. The federal crime of perjury is defined in the U.S. Code at 18 USC 1621. According to that law a person perjures himself if:
· He has taken an oath before a competent tribunal, officer, or person,
· In any case in which a law of the United States authorizes an oath to be administered,
· That he will testify, declare, depose, or certify truly, or that any written testimony, declaration, deposition, or certificate by him subscribed, is true, and
· He willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true.
Therefore, all lying does not constitute perjury. A person must have taken a proper oath promising to be truthful and the untruth must be about a material fact. For example, if a person lies about the number of children he has to hide the fact that he has an illegitimate child and that fact is not pertinent to the car accident case in which he’s testifying then the fact is likely not considered material and a perjury charge is likely unjustified.

You must be convicted of perjury.  Evidence must be presented that you lied about a material fact under oath.

Keep this in mind as the Left is running around screaming like their hair is on fire how Kavanaugh committed perjury because he said that a Devil’s Triangle is a drinking game and not what Creepy Porn Lawyer Tweeted it means and how Senator Whitehouse’s wife likes it.

Really, this sort of insane distortion of the truth and hyperbole fits in with all the progressive newspeak definitions we’ve seen since 2016.

From the people who brought you:

Nazi/Fascist = someone who believes in free speech and equality under the law.
Russian Bot = Middle American Republican voter

Now we have:

Perjury = I don’t believe Republicans
Rape apologist = someone who believes in the presumption of innocence