Commuter shot in rush hour

[uncharted]

I just saw this on bbc.co.uk http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/6690771.stm

It's a little close to home for me.  I grew up in that area, and have used that train station dozens of times. I even bought the monitor for my A1200 from the computer shop that's in the station building.   The pub opposite is a favourite for my freinds and my family.

It's a really quiet little place, the last place you'd expect this to happen.

[motorollin]

My sister, her husband and their 6 month old son live in Rayleigh. Very, very scary.

--
moto

[Vincent]

Hope he pulls through and the guys are caught.

I was expecting this to be a US incident, or in London.

[Turambar]

Someone was shot just round the corner from my house about a week ago. He probably deserved it though. Shootings are becoming common around here, hopefully the arseholes manage to wipe themselves out.

[Karlos]

There have been about three fatal shootings within five minutes walk from here since 2001 :-/

[X-ray]

Indeed, fatal shootings have been on the increase in the UK for quite some time now, despite the handgun ban in the 90s. It seems the criminals weren't told about the ban
Whilst I hesitate to advocate the use of a firearm to protect a third party's money, I would have preferred it if the young man didn't have to resort to 'manual handling' to help the female security guard. He got shot and the robbers escaped. I wonder if the outcome would have been the same had he been allowed to carry a firearm himself.
In 2004 I had to watch two gunmen ride away on a motorcycle after shooting two people outside my hospital here in London. All I could do was give them a dirty look. I am quite confident that things would have been different if I had been armed.
But anyway, I hope the young man recovers. He is not out of the woods yet. He is on a HDU and may still face complications related to the surgery and the hospital stay. Of course he may have sustained permanent debilitating injuries as a result of this injury. I hope he hasn't, but I have seen it all too often.

[uncharted]

X-ray wrote:
Indeed, fatal shootings have been on the increase in the UK for quite some time now, despite the handgun ban in the 90s. It seems the criminals weren't told about the ban

No-one honestly thought that banning guns was going to stop criminals using them, the point of the ban was to prevent another Dunblane from ever happening again.

Whilst I hesitate to advocate the use of a firearm to protect a third party's money, I would have preferred it if the young man didn't have to resort to 'manual handling' to help the female security guard.

It isn't clear that he was aware that there were firearms involved.  Remember, this was at the height of rush hour and a very large chunk of the local population use the station to commute to London.  There were a lot of people there who weren't even aware of anything happening until shots were fired.  He could of been intervening in what he thought was an unarmed scuffle.

He got shot and the robbers escaped. I wonder if the outcome would have been the same had he been allowed to carry a firearm himself.

Sorry, but this argument is guff.  Who says that even if he was allowed to carry a weapon he would?  Who says that the situation wouldn't of escalated because of him carrying a gun?

In 2004 I had to watch two gunmen ride away on a motorcycle after shooting two people outside my hospital here in London. All I could do was give them a dirty look. I am quite confident that things would have been different if I had been armed.

We all do it, I did when I heard this news.  We all think what if...  Given the chance to do something how we would handle it.  But all it might do is put ourselves and others in even more danger.

[Nataline]

Whilst I hesitate to advocate the use of a firearm to protect a third party's money, I would have preferred it if the young man didn't have to resort to 'manual handling' to help the female security guard. He got shot and the robbers escaped. I wonder if the outcome would have been the same had he been allowed to carry a firearm himself.

The outcome could have been an exchange of several shots between "the hero" and the "reckless, very dangerous" robbers who "appeared not to have any regard for human life", in the worst case killing innocent bystanders.

In 2004 I had to watch two gunmen ride away on a motorcycle after shooting two people outside my hospital here in London. All I could do was give them a dirty look. I am quite confident that things would have been different if I had been armed.

Probably. Like "the hero" above, you also might have gotten yourself and/or bystanders killed. I don't think pointing a gun at those guys after what they had done would have been a good idea. By taking lives they had just driven themselves into a corner and would not have hesitated to try taking down a lone gunslinger attempting to block their escape.

Trying to prevent the whole thing by showing them that you were present and armed might have had the exact same outcome, if they were really determined to kill specifically these two people. If it was a random act, someone armed suddenly interrupting could have made them panic and, again, open fire at your general direction.

I won't even pretend to know what your incident was actually like, but my point is, having a gun does not mean one can take control of a potentially dangerous situation. For some reason a lot of people seem to think so.

[Cymric]

Karlos wrote:
There have been about three fatal shootings within five minutes walk from here since 2001 :-/

Five minutes..? Beat this: about three months ago my next door neighbour was shot at close range, and then stumbled/fell bleeding two stairs to the ground floor hallway, where he died shortly after. I can still see the cleaning stains on the pavement where the police scrubbed away his blood. The entire apartment (3 stories high) is now devoid of people: everyone moved out. My girlfriend heard his muffled cries, but when she came to me, puzzled about what she heard (there were two walls and about 3 m of air in between), asking me to come and verify, they had already died away. We weren't sure what to make of it until 10 minutes later, our front door was barricaded by very serious policemen. Our downstairs neighbour wasn't allowed back into  his own house and had to sleep in a hotel. We had to lean out of the window to ask the police to allow us out of our house to go shopping.

Now for the really weird part. My GF spoke to her friends about this totally unexpected homicide. One of them has a friend who works at the 112-call department (that's the European 911), and that friend was the best friend of the man who was shot, and had to accept the call of his untimely and very unnatural demise.

Small world.

As of this day, we still don't know what the reason for the shooting was, and despite the wide-eyed shock reaction of many of my friends and family members, we have treated it as a fluke of statistics, and have not made any plans to move out early because of it. It did make me wonder about the fragility of human life a little, but all in all, it just... happened, and that was basically it. My mother still vehemently disagrees with me.


(Apart from that, there have been 3 Amsterdam mob shootings about five minutes' walk away from where I live. It's rather strange to know that a cafe on some street corner was run by a 'pal' of a local bigwig, now in prison for extortion.)

Somehow, I'm always reminded of Bruce {bleep}burn's If I Had A Rocket Launcher...

[X-ray]

@ uncharted

"...No-one honestly thought that banning guns was going to stop criminals using them, the point of the ban was to prevent another Dunblane from ever happening again..."
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Well then why didn't they just simply ban ALL firearms ten years earlier after the Hungerford massacre? Whether it is a massacre or not, all these shootings are unlawful and are therefore criminal acts. If you want to play the numbers game, I can tell you that more individuals have been shot dead in the last two years by unlicensed handgun owners than in both the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres combined. There is still the capacity today for a massacre. There isn't a complete ban on firearms, but there are limits on what you can carry.


"...It isn't clear that he was aware that there were firearms involved. Remember, this was at the height of rush hour and a very large chunk of the local population use the station to commute to London. There were a lot of people there who weren't even aware of anything happening until shots were fired. He could of been intervening in what he thought was an unarmed scuffle..."
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On that point you are right. We will have to see if he knew they were armed or not. However if they weren't armed, and he had been armed, the situation would have turned out a lot better for him, don't you think?


"...Sorry, but this argument is guff. Who says that even if he was allowed to carry a weapon he would? Who says that the situation wouldn't of escalated because of him carrying a gun?..."
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Whether he would have carried a gun or not, would indeed have been his choice, not the choice of the government (as it stands now). As it stands, he couldn't carry and therefore didn't carry, and the situation did indeed escalate because the criminal had the only gun in that fight.


"...We all do it, I did when I heard this news. We all think what if... Given the chance to do something how we would handle it. But all it might do is put ourselves and others in even more danger..."
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That comes down to being responsible. I assume this man has the same responsible attitude that I have towards guns, unless proven otherwise. You may be interested to know that in all the incidents where I have pulled a firearm (not here in the UK, obviously), it has resulted in the sparing of one or more individuals serious harm or death. The score is currently 3-0 in my favour (if you'll forgive the way I describe it). You don't just pull a gun for any little reason, even in South Africa. There are penalties for illegal pointing, even if you don't shoot. You are legally responsible for every round you fire. There have been times where I wanted to help somebody but couldn't, because tactically it was dangerous. In one such incident I had to watch a man being stabbed in the street in front of me. He was surrounded by about 20 yutes and I had no clear targets.

As I said in another thread, the current laws disarm the law-abiding citizen so that only the criminal has a gun. This means that the criminal has automatic superiority of force over you and me. This is a fundamental problem that has to be addressed before you ask whether a person would want to carry and want to draw, in the first place.

[X-ray]

@ Nataline

"...The outcome could have been an exchange of several shots between "the hero" and the "reckless, very dangerous" robbers who "appeared not to have any regard for human life", in the worst case killing innocent bystanders..."
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That has happened whether a bystander has been armed or not. After the (unarmed) policeman was killed in Leeds in 2003 and his partner wounded, the gunman ran down the street indiscriminately firing at people. Recently a man did the same thing at a tube station and two people were shot. In the case I mentioned at my hospital in 2004, one of the victims was an unintended target of the assailants. It didn't matter whether I was armed or not, two people were shot, but criminally and one unintentionally. If your argument carried any merit, the statistics from SA and USA would support it. How many times do you hear of innocent bystanders shot by police?


"...Probably. Like "the hero" above, you also might have gotten yourself and/or bystanders killed. I don't think pointing a gun at those guys after what they had done would have been a good idea. By taking lives they had just driven themselves into a corner and would not have hesitated to try taking down a lone gunslinger attempting to block their escape..."
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That depends on the situation. I made the statement that things would have been better all round if I was armed, because I am aware of all the facts of the case. I wasn't blocking their path at all, and wouldn't try to do so even if I was armed. I had a vantage point on a balcony and I had the tactical advantage of cover and a stable firing platform. They did not. They were on a moving motorcycle and I would have had a clear shot. If they had fired on me, that would have been the risk I took. People had already been shot, there was nothing left to lose.


"...I won't even pretend to know what your incident was actually like, but my point is, having a gun does not mean one can take control of a potentially dangerous situation. For some reason a lot of people seem to think so..."
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Indeed, you don't just pull a gun because you have it. You've got to think about what you are doing, both from a tactical point of view and a legal standpoint.
 
 

[Cymric]

X-ray wrote:
As I said in another thread, the current laws disarm the law-abiding citizen so that only the criminal has a gun. This means that the criminal has automatic superiority of force over you and me. This is a fundamental problem that has to be addressed before you ask whether a person would want to carry and want to draw, in the first place.

I remember bringing home two pictures from the hotel I stayed at while I was in Cape Town (SA, of course) about 7 years ago. They were pictures of the entrance, and were, apart from the season (foliage) the same. They were shot within one year of eachother. The only difference: a little metal plate with the picture of a security company on it and the ominous words Armed Response underneath. I doubt things have improved much since I was there.

In any society, someone who does not abide by the law will always have an advantage over the rest. That is correct, and cannot be adequately addressed. We make do with police and law, but that's always after the fact. On the other hand, if we just give in to some right of defending ourselves or others with the use of firearms, trusting that people will act responsibly, I am at the mercy of idiots who begin 'playing' with such hardware because it's 'cool' or 'phat'. I'm also at the mercy of people I don't trust to pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions are on the sole to make judgement calls in difficult situations---roughly about 99% of the general population. Even simple arguments like making errors in traffic can spiral wildly out of control if some party is agitated and not in a state to think properly. (Here in the Netherlands a current hot issue is bodily harm of paramedical personnel. Apparently, at times the bystanders (usually family) are so high on adrenalin that they become very agressive if the paramedics don't do as they expect them to do. Now imagine someone like that carrying a gun.)

I'm not even sure I would be able to make the right judgement call, much less have the nerve to actually pull the trigger with the intent to incapacitate another human being. A rabid idiot of a human being intent on harming me quite badly, I fully realise, but even then.

I have the luxury of living in a country where firearm deaths for 'innocent' bystanders---i.e., not related to fights between criminals themselves---is relatively low. I'll take my chances of becoming an innocent bystander, allow the criminals access to guns, and live with the consequences. I'm more scared of the general population having access to firearms than I am of a criminal acquiring one and threatening me with it. In other words, a variation on 'nasty things happen to other people'.

By the way, X-ray, while I in some way applaud your courage for actually drawing and preparing to use a firearm, realise that your 'score' of 3 to 0 means bovine excrement: all it takes is for that 0 to become a 1 by meeting someone who is prepared to call your bluff. Of course, you may feel happier that you at least, if you'll pardon the pun, gave it a shot.

[X-ray]

I haven't experienced the 'phat' or 'cool' angle of some idiot producing a firearm. I think that might be the province of the rap music video. The reality is that a licensed firearm carries with it several legal responsibilities and this is taken to heart by the majority of licensed gun owners. The same applies to vehicles and drivers.
I think we fundamentally disagree on the issue of bearing arms. I prefer to entrust my defense to myself, rather than leave it to the whims of Lady Luck.


"...By the way, X-ray, while I in some way applaud your courage for actually drawing and preparing to use a firearm, realise that your 'score' of 3 to 0 means bovine excrement: all it takes is for that 0 to become a 1 by meeting someone who is prepared to call your bluff. Of course, you may feel happier that you at least, if you'll pardon the pun, gave it a shot...."
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Well, the three individuals I saved (one of which is myself  ;-) ) attach a slightly more favourable interpretation to that score than 'bovine excrement.' Of course, the criminals involved are probably attaching the quality of equestrian excrement to the fact that I was armed on those occasions.
Certainly, without that firearm I might not be here to post at all. 3-0 is certainly better than 0-1.

[Nataline]

X-ray wrote:
@ Nataline

"...The outcome could have been an exchange of several shots between "the hero" and the "reckless, very dangerous" robbers who "appeared not to have any regard for human life", in the worst case killing innocent bystanders..."
------------------------------------------------------------

That has happened whether a bystander has been armed or not. After the (unarmed) policeman was killed in Leeds in 2003 and his partner wounded, the gunman ran down the street indiscriminately firing at people. Recently a man did the same thing at a tube station and two people were shot. In the case I mentioned at my hospital in 2004, one of the victims was an unintended target of the assailants. It didn't matter whether I was armed or not, two people were shot, but criminally and one unintentionally. If your argument carried any merit, the statistics from SA and USA would support it. How many times do you hear of innocent bystanders shot by police?

Eh?

"If your argument etc"

My ...what? You wondered if the outcome would have changed had the victim been armed, I gave a worst case scenario. I'm honestly confused, what was my argument again? :-? And... "statistics"..? (Uh, maybe the fact that it's already 4.30 a.m. here has something to do with my not comprehending your paragraph.. :crazy:)

"[...] might have gotten [...] killed."
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That depends on the situation. I made the statement that things would have been better all round if I was armed, because I am aware of all the facts of the case. [...] and I would have had a clear shot. [...] If they had fired on me, that would have been the risk I took. People had already been shot, there was nothing left to lose.

What? I can't be reading this one right either.. Are you trying to say you would have shot at the already fleeing gunmen? What on earth for?
Or do you mean you would have fired upon them before they managed to shoot at anyone? A "pre-emptive strike" would make you the criminal, so probably not..
Between their killings, then? Or when they had killed twice but it wasn't yet apparent that they were going to stop there? Does the law there give you the right to make such a decision, i.e. "I think they will shoot again, so I must shoot them"? It bloody well doesn't here, that's for the police to decide and act upon.

Oh, and "If they had fired on me, that would have been the risk I took. People had already been shot, there was nothing left to lose." sounds just terrible to me. Had you fired at them, you would have taken the risk of them firing, period. I mean, in any given situation you cannot be aware of all the circumstances, including the exact whereabouts and intentions of those pesky 'innocent bystanders' that seem to pop up everywhere. Well, at least in my arguments they do, and this one is an argument - one against provoking further gunfire in any situation.

EDIT: Please note that all of the above should be "heard" in a conversational tone, not in an agitated one - that "bloody well" included. I might disagree with you, but I still don't feel like I'm arguing with a gun crazed maniac. For some reason my own words seemed a bit sharper than intended now that I've read them after actually submitting the post. :roll:

[Nataline]

@X-ray

A brief comment on this one:

X-ray wrote @ Cymric:

I think we fundamentally disagree on the issue of bearing arms. I prefer to entrust my defense to myself, rather than leave it to the whims of Lady Luck.

I likewise fundamentally disagree with you on this issue, mainly because I just can't think of the type of armament in question as "defensive". I do understand the concept of trying to use such a weapon defensively, I just think it's offensive capability is much too high if the weapon is indeed meant to be used in defense only.