Not that it makes a huge difference, but the article states that the police were flagged down by witnesses, and not called by the well-regulated octogenarian militia, who it seems waited safely in his car until the officer arrived before attempting to rain down civilian justice.
Anyway, what's the difference between this guy and Phoenix Jones? Except that our superhero doesn't carry lethal weapons?

Also, perhaps less relevant, recently we stopped in to a Taco Bell in Lake Stevens. A 30-ish dude walked up to the counter sporting a Bluetooth earpiece, cellphone holster and a pistol on his hip. Had an insecure swagger about him. After rudely giving his order, he realized he left his debit card at the ATM and dashed out embarrassed, never to return. Another responsible good guy with a gun.

It's creepy, and I'm not comfortable with anyone attempting to shoota fleeing person in the back--nevermind when other people are running around. Maybe the old guy can't be charged. Maybe he shouldn't be. But I sure hope no one treats him like a hero.

Wait why the fuck can't the old guy be charged? He not only discharged a fire arm in public, he disrupted Police business in doing so.

Here in Spokane awhile back, a guy shot & killed someone who had stolen his truck out of his driveway and was driving it away. The truck's owner was still able to say he was in fear for his life, so he shot the thief through the back window of the truck and killed him. A jury acquitted him of manslaughter: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/ap…

There was just another case where a homeowner shot a guy (not fatally this time) basically for being a drunken asshole and refusing to leave his yard.

I don't see this getting better any time soon (unless you call people shooting people for trespassing "better" than shooting them for theft, in which case shooting them for I don't know, graffiti, might be even "better").

@5:

The truck's owner was still able to say he was in fear for his life, so he shot the thief through the back window of the truck and killed him. A jury acquitted him of manslaughter:

There must be something in this case I don't understand, but it is generally allowed for a person to kill another person committing a felony. Ref:RCW 9A.16.050:

Homicide — By other person — When justifiable.


Homicide is also justifiable when committed either:

(1) In the lawful defense of the slayer, or his or her husband, wife, parent, child, brother, or sister, or of any other person in his or her presence or company, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished; or

(2) In the actual resistance of an attempt to commit a felony upon the slayer, in his or her presence, or upon or in a dwelling, or other place of abode, in which he or she is.

So what the fuck is your point, Chicago Fan?

Are you saying that Chicago, while running neck and neck as the murder capital of the world decade upon decade with the most restrictive gun laws in the nation outside of D.C. (which were struck down on Saturday as unconstitutional) is somehow working?

Are your laws effective? Yes or no?

Do you believe that law abiding citizens don't have a right of self defense to protect themselves against violent criminals?

Well?

What the fuck is your point? Tell me the mechanism that you propose that will be effective in what it is that you're trying to prevent.

@9 please register, if you're so inclined. That was entirely worth reading, and doesn't deserve to be skipped along with the rest of the cesspool of unregistered commentariat.

Citizen shooting at an actual armed robber = bad.

Cops hosing random pickups with bullets = good.

That's the gun grabber world. When using their guns, police consistently fire more shots with less accuracy than civilians.

Or am I supposed to be upset that the armed robber was in danger?

@ I'll limit myself to correcting only one of your wild misstatements.

It wasn't just the armed robber who was put in danger by the gun wacko. It was also the police officer and any other bystanders who might have been around.

@8 - Herpy derp.

@8: his point was in his summary: "this is the American the gun nuts want us to live in: bullets flying everywhere."

@14: calling for the militia to be regulated well is not "gun grabbing". no one's getting their precious confiscated.

86 year olds firing guns at fleeing property thieves. sweet jesus.

Is there a shortage of apostrophes in Chicago ?

You don't need to pass an IQ test to get a concealed carry license, in fact you don't need to pass any test at all. In Washington, even a blind person can get one -- provided he brings along a sighted friend to fill out the application form.

Some people watched too many wild west movies as children. They believe that gunfire solves problems when the truth is usually quite the opposite.

CF,
No, the scenario you describe isn't paradise for gun-nuts or anyone else. But neither is the opposite, criminals wielding guns and actually getting away with their crimes unless stopped. Consider this:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/natio…

A psychiatrist who had a gun in his office shot and killed a suspect who had shot & killed a caseworker. Neither the octogenarian nor the psychiatrist are necessarily heroes. But both arguably, prevented more carnage by using a firearm validly.

I don't like either situation but we have two less criminals. I'm not celebrating that.

@16

I'll concede this one. At the time of writing, my BAC was probably about .28.

Good news is that in general nobody gets hurt via drunk posting on the Internet.

Derp indeed.

Good thing no cell phones were lost! The system works!

"Remember, this is the American the gun nuts want us to live in: bullets flying everywhere."

No.
That is your fantasy about people that you disagree with and wish to denigrate.
Which is why you keep using the term "gun nuts".

I get that you're all between 14 and the aged and decrepit 30 something's among you. I get that anything over 50 seems ancient beyond imagining. I'm 40 and 86 seems old to me, so I get it.

But this gentleman, whatever else you think of his choice, didn't send bullets wildly through the air. With a pistol at night he placed two rounds well and possibly saved an officers life. Pistols aren't easy to be accurate with, a nighttime urban setting isn't a shooting range- and this guy did pretty well with his weapon.

For those wishing our 2nd Amendment rights removed, have I got a deal for you! We actually have a process within the Constitution for altering that document! Go to it, kiddos.

But don't hold your breath. I'd hate to see your parents lose you from asphyxiation before you have a chance to eventually grow up.

@7 - reason #2 works I guess. Looks like it could even work if you saw someone stealing somebody else's car. ("Howdy, neighbor --- I saw someone stealing your car, so I killed him.")

The defense's main point was that the defendant was in fear for his life even though the thief was driving away from him --- IIRC he thought he saw the thief pull a gun. The thief turned out to be unarmed, but the shooter is now kind of a local hero, and pretty much everyone (those who like it as well as those who don't) expects to see more of this kind of behavior.

WTFAYTA @31?

From what dark, fetid depths of your pea-sized brain did you dredge up the notion Mr. Octogenarian "didn't send bullets wildly through the air. With a pistol at night he placed two rounds well and possibly saved an officers life"? If you had actually bothered to read the article, at no point does it report the shots were "well placed" - they didn't hit his intended target, that's a certainty - and in point of fact it specifically notes the officer had to DUCK THE FUCK BEHIND COVER after he heard the two rounds go off, because he had no idea where they were coming from or who was firing! Had he been in a slightly more open position, it's entirely possible those rounds might have hit him instead!. So, rather than save the officer's life, this guy actually put both of their lives at risk!

Furthermore, according to a follow-up article, even licensed firearms trainers are criticizing the shooter for acting recklessly and potentially putting both himself, LEO's, and innocent bystanders in harms way, in direct opposition to the standards and procedures firearms training courses are designed to instill.

You can go on-and-on with your paranoid fantasy that the Black Helicopters are coming any minute to confiscate your legally-owned guns (something gun-nuts have been anticipating with feverish glee for decades now - even though it never has and never will happen), but this is clearly a case where the shooter should have his CC license revoked and his weapon taken away, as he has provided unequivocal proof that he is incapable of using it safely.

Correction noted. Though your facts are presented selectively to support your biases, I just misread the facts. Being conservative facts and reality matter to me, so I am embarrassed.

And, like racism, 'homophobia' lack of compassion and all the other straw men you folks construct when reality ain't what you want- I never claimed any conspiracy to take guns from citizens. Still, slow deterioration of a right is more effective and lasting than a frontal assault on that right. If your ilk had the popular support to repeal the 2nd, ask yourself why it hasn't and won't happen. (Hint- you don't in fact have the popular support.)

@36 --- Getting killed by a good guy with a gun is better than a bad guy getting away with a bag full of cell phones.. Ask any good guy with a gun.

@35:

If getting the facts wrong is truly a source of embarrassment for you, I can only imagine how you must feel to be in a continuous, perpetual state of chagrin.

@35 summed up for those who don't want to read a seattleblues post:

"Ok, I was completely wrong, but somehow this still means that I am righteous and you are stupid."

I love SB's BS. His logic is so contorted that I imagine him squirming physically as he comes up with reality-defying excuses for his fantasy worldview.

And once again SLOG argues with the lunatic lying sack of shit who maintained —for years— an insane fiction of owning a mythical house in Italy.

Remember: Every time you argue with Seattleblahs a kitten dies of leukemia.

@25 - Kudos sir. I hope your recovery was kind to you. :-)

@8: LIAR LIAR.
I'm sick of gun nuts branding Chicago as the "murder capital of the world". Just in the USA alone there are TWELVE cities of over 250,000 population with higher murder rates. But no, you ignore Detroit and New Orleans and Oakland and Atlanta to go after the Windy City because it fits your narrative.

@21: That's sort of the point, actually. If the state requires a license and a background check in order to legally acquire a firearm, it makes it harder for criminally-inclined persons to get weapons and makes it easier to track guns that end up used in crime.

@35: "I just misread the facts"
Well THAT's nothing new. What is interesting is that you actually admitted your mistake this time. Your usual modus operandi is to make an unsupported claim and then completely ignore any counterargument or rebuttal.
If you actually cared about accurately reading the facts, you'd be more open to the ideas that sexual orientation is fixed in early development, that the Earth's climate is changing for the worse as a result of human industry, and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt left the USA better than he found it.

@38: The police spend a big chunk of time training themselves to react properly in dangerous situations. Don't you go claiming that Joe Boomstick on the street has better crisis judgment than a police officer (or a soldier for that matter). Sure, police make mistakes sometimes; they shoot the wrong guy, they get jumped by a perpetrator, they use more force than they in hindsight needed to. But they have extremely hard choices to make and often times only fractions of a second in which to make them. Expecting perfection is ridiculous; all we can reasonably ask of them is that they seek to improve and give it their honest best. Armchair jockeys like you don't get to say "I could do a better job" unless you've actually graduated from a police academy or similar.

@39: I do love his insistence that "conservatism" = "caring about facts" and "liberalism" = "hating facts". He's got a very black-and-white mentality and an inability to understand people at all different from him, which is probably why he has so much trouble with difficult concepts here with us.

@45: Nobody's expecting the old man to respond perfectly. We're just saying he shouldn't have gotten involved, since it's not his job and he doesn't have the skills or the training to respond properly.
As far as police officers making mistakes go, it's the law of large numbers at work. A police officer making a snap judgment in the line of duty happens quite a lot due to the sheer number of policemen and crimes in the world, so is it any surprise that occasionally one of them fucks up? The vast majority of those are resolved well; it's the ones where the officer involved shits the bed that we really hear about. Policemen are like offensive linemen in football that way.
Are you a war veteran or a police officer? If not, stop talking shit about the uniformed services, at least until you have some understanding of what they have to deal with.

Where do you get the idea that "the police are defending the actions of the old man"? All the article says is that no charges are being filed against the old man. NEWS FLASH, genius: the police department isn't who decides whether or not charges are filed.

@47: One, a State's Attorney isn't a police officer. Two, there's a big difference between defending someone's actions and declining to press charges against them.
But no, seriously, are you a (current or former) member of the uniformed services? If not, what makes you think you understand what they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis? Either learn about cops or stop ripping on them for the occasional fuckup.

@48: Do I need to know the old man to say that he made a bad move? He fired shots that went wide of the mark, causing a police officer in pursuit of a suspect to halt pursuit and take cover. Unless the suspect was directly threatening the safety of someone, there was no reason to fire those shots in the first place.
Yeah, I know, I defend cops for making bad decisions sometimes. You know what the difference is? IT'S THEIR JOB TO GET INVOLVED. They don't have the option in these cases to sit back and let someone else handle it, an option which the old man, as much as he was just trying to help, should have exercised.

"look like a dummy spouting off a bunch of garbage trying to make yourself look smart"
I'm not the one suggesting that civilians should be better-trusted than the police to make the tough decisions.