Category: Crime

RECORD HOMICIDES IN CITY AFTER CITY

With three weeks still to go in 2021, at least 12 major U.S. cities have broken their annual homicide records. Two other cities are on the verge of doing so.

The cities that have already suffered a record number of homicides are:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Columbus, Ohio
Indianapolis, Indiana
Louisville, Kentucky
St. Paul, Minnesota
Portland, Oregon
Tucson, Arizona
Toledo, Ohio
Austin, Texas
Rochester, New York
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Five of these cities — Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, Toledo, and Baton Rouge — broke records set in 2020. That was the year when homicides increased 30 percent nationally, the largest single-year jump since the FBI began recording crime statistics 60 years ago.

The two cites that are likely to break their annual record before the end of the month are Minneapolis and Milwaukee.

Chicago will not break the record it set way back in 1970. However, it leads the nation with 739 homicides as of the end of November, a small increase from 2020.

What do the 15 homicide-plagued cities mentioned above have in common?

Every one of them has a Democrat demoncrap as mayor.

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What you subsidize, you get more of……….
And to paraphrase Mencken, you’re apt to get it good and hard.

Brutal, brazen crimes shake L.A., leaving city at a crossroads.

rews of burglars publicly smashing their way into Los Angeles’ most exclusive stores. Robbers following their victims, including a star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and a BET host, to their residences. And this week, the fatal shooting of 81-year-old Jacqueline Avant, an admired philanthropist and wife of music legend Clarence Avant, in her Beverly Hills home.

After two years of rising violent crime in Los Angeles, these incidents have sparked a national conversation and led to local concern about both the crimes themselves and where the outrage over the violence will lead.

“The fact that this has happened, her being shot and killed in her own home, after giving, sharing, and caring for 81 years has shaken the laws of the Universe,” declared Oprah Winfrey, expressing her grief over Avant’s killing to her 43 million Twitter followers. “The world is upside down.”

While overall city crime rates remain far below records set during the notorious gang wars of the 1990s, violent crime has jumped sharply in L.A., as it has in other cities. Much of the violence has occurred in poor communities and among vulnerable populations, such as the homeless, and receives little attention.

However, since the start of the pandemic and more rapidly in recent months, crime has crept up in wealthier enclaves and thrust its way to the center of public discourse in L.A. — against a backdrop of COVID-19 angst, evolving political perceptions of what role police and prosecutors should play in society and, now, a holiday season upon which brick-and-mortar retailers are relying to stay afloat.

Some wonder if this could be a turning point for California, which for decades has been at the center of the movement for criminal justice reform, rolling back tough sentencing laws and reducing prison populations.

Polls in 2020 showed that California voters largely support many of these measures, and both San Francisco and Los Angeles have elected district attorneys with strong reform agendas. However, those concerned about crime and those who believe liberal policies have contributed to its rise have grown more vocal.

It is a discourse defined by glaring differences of opinion and, at times, a yawning disconnect between the perception of local crime and the reality on the ground.

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Student kills 3, wounds 8 in east Michigan school shooting

OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. — A 15-year-old sophomore opened fire at his Michigan high school on Tuesday, killing three students and wounding eight other people, including a teacher, authorities said.

The three students killed were a 16-year-old male, a 14-year-old female and a 17-year-old female. Police said two people are currently in surgery for their injuries and the other six are in stable condition. A deputy has been assigned to each of the families.

The student was in class on Tuesday prior to the shooting, police said.

Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe said at a news conference that he didn’t know what the assailant’s motives were for the attack at Oxford High School in Oxford Township, a community of about 22,000 people roughly 30 miles north of Detroit.

Officers responded at around 12:55 p.m. to a flood of 911 calls about an active shooter at the school, McCabe said. Authorities arrested the suspect at the school and recovered a semi-automatic handgun and several clips.

Police say they were unaware of any warning signs and it is unknown if the victims were targeted.

“Deputies confronted him, he had the weapon on him, they took him into custody,” McCabe said, declining to share more detail about the arrest.

Authorities didn’t immediately release the names of the suspect or victims.

Tim Throne, the superintendent of Oxford Community Schools, said he didn’t know yet know the victims’ names or whether their families had been contacted.

“I’m shocked. It’s devastating,” the shaken superintendent told reporters.

The school was placed on lockdown after the attack, with some children sheltering in locked classrooms while officers searched the premises. They were later taken to a nearby Meijer grocery store to be picked up by their parents.

McCabe said investigators would be looking through social media posts for any evidence of a possible motive.

Robin Redding, the parent of a 12th-grader, told The Associated Press that there had been rumblings of trouble at the school.

“He was not in school today. He just said that ‘Ma I don’t feel comfortable. None of the kids that we go to school with are going today,’” Redding said.

Authorities say they’ve reached out to the parents of the shooter, who did not want to speak and are getting an attorney.

“I hope we can all rise to the occasion and wrap our arms around the families, the affected children and school personnel, and this community,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer through tears at the 5 p.m. press conference.

“This is a uniquely American problem that we need to address,” she said. “But I think it’s too early to talk about policies that might need to change as a result of this. At this point, we need to focus on the tragedy at hand.”

More information is expected to come at a press conference at 10 p.m. EST.

Killadelphia Update

Last year, the per-capita homicide rate in Philadelphia was worse than Chicago. It takes a lot of effort to be worse than Chicago, but Philadelphia — a/k/a “Killadelphia” — is up to the challenge, and is now on pace to break the city’s all-time annual murder total of 500, a record set in 1990 at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. Basically, you could put police crime-scene tape around the entire city; every sidewalk in Philadelphia is covered in chalk outlines of slain victims.

OK, maybe I got a little carried away there, but it’s difficult to exaggerate how deadly conditions are in Philadelphia now:

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said on Monday that whoever was responsible for killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child as she was unloading gifts from her baby shower will face two counts of murder.
The victim, identified as Jessica Covington, 32, was shot 11 times in the head and belly on Saturday night in what police believe was a targeted shooting.

Deputy Police Commissioner Christine Coulter demanded that progressive DA Krasner take action amid a massive surge of gun violence.
‘Children are getting shot, unborn children getting shot, what is the city doing about this?’ she asked.

Police were said to be questioning a suspect in connection with Covington’s killing on Monday, but no arrests or charges have been announced as of late afternoon.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Krasner said Covington’s killing made him ‘sick.’ He said the person or persons who took the pregnant woman’s life and that of her unborn baby will ‘very likely’ face two counts of murder.
He praised police for ‘working nonstop and doing an amazing job with this case.’

Krasner has cut the number of prosecutions for gun crime and cops are blaming him for a huge spike in shootings a homicides.
Police in Philadelphia have made a record number of arrests for illegal gun possession this year – but the suspects’ chances of getting convicted dropped to 49 per cent from 63 per cent in 2017, analysis by the found.
There have been 491 homicide victims in 2021 – a 14 per cent increase from last year’s number of 436, and 283 in 2019.
Krasner boasts on his website that he has cut incarceration rates by 24,800 years, cut supervision by 102,400 years, never used the death penalty and helped exonerate 23 people.
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has said that Philadelphia’s criminal justice system has become a ‘revolving door’ for repeat gun offenders since Krasner was sworn into office in January 2018.

This is the problem with Democrats talking tough on gun control. You hear them talk about “getting guns off our streets,” but they don’t want to prosecute the people who are actually committing crimes with those guns — because all the criminals are Democrats.

Dana Pico at First Street Journal has been following the grisly “Killadelphia” death toll, and Ed Driscoll at Instapundit calls attention to the role of “progressive reforms” in the nationwide crime wave:

[Milwaukee County DA John] Chisholm, who was elected in 2007, supports deferrals for some misdemeanors and “low-level” felonies in order to cut down on incarcerations. And he’s taken credit for inspiring a new wave of prosecutors in cities like San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia who have enacted similar reforms. Chisholm congratulated San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin following his election in 2019, and the pair spoke at a forum earlier this year on the status of the progressive prosecutor movement.

Chisholm and other progressives support reforms to the cash-bail system, which they say criminalizes poverty. He has acknowledged that his reform-minded approach could put murderers back on the streets of Milwaukee.
“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. “You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
The Milwaukee DA said his office recommended $1,000 bail for [Waukesha massacre suspect Darrell] Brooks following his arrest on Nov. 5 on charges that he punched his girlfriend in the face and hit her with his vehicle in a gas station parking lot. The woman is identified only by her initials in court papers, which indicate they have a child together. Brooks was also charged with eluding police officers when they arrived to take him into custody.

What Democrats don’t want to admit is that crime is a people problem. It is easy to focus on guns, but the inanimate object does not kill people. Democrats have trained their media allies to mindlessly repeat the phrase “gun violence,” but my guns are not involved in violence. My podcast partner John Hoge has a rather substantial arsenal of firearms, none of which has ever been involved in “gun violence.”

Rhetoric that demonizes law-abiding gun owners is necessary to the Democratic Party agenda of absolving themselves and their constituents of responsibility. Nothing that goes wrong in Philadelphia — or Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, etc. — is the fault of the people directly involved, because those people vote Democrat. The voters who elect Democrats must be held blameless for their problems, and the blame must be transferred to scapegoats — which is why phrases like “white privilege” and “systemic racism” have entered the political lexicon.

The kind of “reforms” implemented by Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner are aimed at ending the “racial injustice” of putting criminals in prison, as if there were something deliberately unfair about the demographic profile of the prison population, as if law enforcement and the court system were letting white criminals go unpunished. Well, where are all these white murderers in Philadelphia? What has Larry Krasner done to end the “white privilege” that lets these perpetrators get off scot-free?

These are rhetorical questions, obviously. The population of Philadelphia County is 44% black and 34% non-Hispanic white. Fifteen percent of the county population is Hispanic and 8% are Asian. But these other demographic groups are not implicated in the “gun violence” epidemic that has Philadelphia on pace to set a new homicide record.

In 2020, Joe Biden officially won Pennsylvania by a margin of 80,555 votes. He got 603,790 votes in Philadelphia County.

So the dishonest blame game will continue, and the bodies of homicide victims will keep piling up in “Killadelphia,” because Democrats like Larry Krasner don’t want to arrest the criminals whose votes elect them.

Alarming rise in follow-home robberies in upscale L.A. prompts police crackdown

Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced Tuesday he is setting up a task force to apprehend follow-home robbers, saying the department has not seen violent hold-ups “like this in decades.”

The troubling trend, which has targeted celebrities and upscale restaurants in recent months, turned deadly in the predawn hours Tuesday when a man was gunned down during an attempted robbery outside Bossa Nova restaurant in Hollywood.

Moore told the city’s civilian oversight Police Commission he was creating a follow-home robbery task force of more than 20 detectives from elite investigative divisions, including Robbery-Homicide, Metropolitan and specialized gang narcotics units, to identify and stop the growing threat to public safety posed by organized groups of criminals.

The department is already investigating at least 133 such robberies from areas including the Sunset Strip, Melrose Avenue, the Jewelry District and Westside shopping areas.

In the latest incident, a man was sitting inside his vehicle, along with a female passenger near Bossa Nova. The woman stepped outside, and eight people approached her from a car and tried to rob her, police said. The man, who was described only as a 23-year-old, “was coming to the aid of a female who was being attacked” by the robbers when he was fatally shot shortly after 2 a.m., Moore said. A Police Department spokesman said the man who was shot was armed.

Robberies are increasingly turning violent, and many are occurring after a person is followed from an establishment to their car or home, the chief said. “The impact this is having on the sense of community, or safety, is profound,” Moore said.

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Main stream media being deceitful… again?
Where’s that Gomer Pyle meme when you need it?

‘But CNN said …’ Yet *another* media narrative goes up in smoke as Waukesha Police set the record straight on suspect Darrell E. Brooks

In the wake of the deadly incident at a Waukesha Christmas parade yesterday, media have been circling the wagons around suspect Darrell E. Brooks, touting a narrative that Brooks may have driven his SUV into all those people because he was fleeing from the scene of another crime. Because if that were the case, it would mean that he didn’t mean to injure and kill anyone.

A lot of outlets were going with that.

 

 

 

Well, according to law enforcement — like, law enforcement willing to go on video, on record — Brooks was, in fact, not being pursued by police when he mowed down parade attendees:

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This has been known to be the case – nationwide – for several years. A very small percentage of a certain demographic commits the vast majority of crimes and murders. Black males in the 15 to 35 years of age range, involved in the illicit drug trade that already have long criminal records whether or not they’re a member of a gang.

Nearly half of Columbus’ homicides in a nine-month stretch of 2020 involved a very small number of very violent individuals

Whenever crime is in the headlines, we find anti-Second Amendment politicians directly responsible for addressing crime in their cities running to the microphone to blame the existence of firearms. The truth is, as gun owners already know, the problem is people, not the gun.

A team of researchers with the National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC) recently worked with the Columbus Division of Police to review 107 homicides between January and September of last year in an effort to pin down who is driving the city’s lethal violence.

The Columbus Dispatch gave details from the study:

They found that about 480 total members of 17 gangs — roughly 0.05% of the city’s population — were confirmed or suspected to be involved in 46% of the homicides, either as victims, perpetrators or both.

Dispatch writer Theodore Decker goes on to dispute Mayor Andrew J. Ginther’s assertion, upon the release of the report, that “the violence we’re seeing today is different.”

The mayor talked about this as though it were unplowed ground. He said that in response, the city is assessing existing anti-violence strategies and beefing up newer efforts to target that core group of individuals who are most at risk of being victims or perpetrators of violence.

That is a valid approach, but it is not a new one. Criminologists have recommended variations of this strategy for many years, and in Columbus, some of them were rebuffed by city leaders nearly 10 years ago.

Columbus, like other cities, has seen a sharp rise in homicidal violence both this year and last. But the trend is not entirely unprecedented.

If the current pace keeps up, we are certain to surpass last year’s record 175 homicides. Should we reach 200, which looks likely the way things are going, the per capita breakdown would come close to 22 homicides per every 100,000 people.

We hit that same rate in 1991. While 139 homicides occurred that year, the city was much smaller. In that sense, the current level of violence is not unheard of.

And to suggest the violence today is inherently different, as the mayor would have us believe, contradicts much of the report.

In addition to the information — it was not a revelation — that much of the violence is driven by a very limited pool of violent actors, the study found that homicides often were tangled up in petty beefs and interpersonal disputes.

That also is not new.

In more than half of the killings, the victim and suspect knew each other. They are overwhelmingly male.

Not new.

Also not new, Decker says, were many of the names on the list of 17 gangs, some of which have been known for decades:

“The violence we’re seeing today is different, and so we need a new plan,” the mayor said on Tuesday.

No, the violence isn’t different. But clearly we do need a new plan. And as for Step 1, perhaps we could be direct and honest about the history and nature of the problem.

The Columus Dispatch and Decker don’t have a stellar track record when it comes to accurate reporting on firearms legislation and Second Amendment issues, but this article calls a spade a spade, and I am thankful for it.

Police Chief Daniel Thompson has stated: “It is unknown if the incident has any nexus to terrorism” which is legalistic non-answer. No name has been released, so all I’ll say right now is that running a car into a Christmas Parade sure makes one think from the past attacks on Christmas celebrations, that there’s a ‘nexus’. When a person is charged, and then named,  we’ll be in better position than only being able to speculate.

Multiple fatalities, more than 20 people hurt after car drives through crowd at Waukesha Christmas parade

UPDATE 8:04 p.m. — Waukesha police have said that they have a suspect in custody. [actually they say they have a ‘person of interest’ in custody, and there is a major legal difference]

They added that of the victims, 11 are adults and 12 are children. Police also said multiple people are dead but did not say how many. The shelter in place order has been lifted. An officer did fire their gun at the car to try and stop the driver. There were no other shots fired.

More than 20 people were injured after a car drove through a crowd at the Waukesha Holiday parade Sunday evening, according to Waukesha police.

Officials said at least one person died. Ambulances, police, and family members drove the injured to local hospitals.

Waukesha police have recovered the vehicle and are aware of a person of interest.

The incident was live-streamed on the City’s Facebook page. A video sent to TMJ4 shows a car driving through a busy section of the parade and hitting least half a dozen people. The car continued to drive through the parade and then the video ended.

The incident happened on Main Street beginning at Barstow and going past Gasper. The vehicle had to drive past a barricade to get into the parade.

This was clearly ‘something personal’ as we can see the deadhead was waving out of the way what turned out to be an off duty cop that TCOB.
‘Stupid is as Stupid does’

Also, lesson learned from other’s experience?
‘Check 6 isn’t just for fighter pilots’

Hero off-duty Baltimore cop kills gunman who fatally shot barber

The gunman, identified as Carlos Ortega, entered The Bladi Style barbershop in Baltimore’s Medford section Saturday afternoon with a handgun and “fired it at one of the barbers” working there, killing him, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison told reporters Saturday.

An off-duty cop in plainclothes who was getting a haircut from another barber reacted immediately and “with great bravery produced his firearm” and fatally shot the attacker, Harrison said.

Cops identified Ortega, 38, early Monday as the man who killed barber Rafael Jeffers, 33, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Investigators believe Ortega was tied to two earlier Saturday shootings, including one that left one person dead. Another victim was listed in critical condition following gunfire near the city’s Greektown section.

If more guns caused more crime, we would know it.

BLUF:
The violent crime rate fell by about 38 percent over two decades while the number of guns sold each year almost doubled. The implied number of gun owners also doubled. If anything, this data shows that firearms sales cause a decrease in violent crime.

Gun Ownership versus Crime in the US 2000-2019

I’ve seen analysis that relates guns and crime. In particular, the data looks at the growing number of firearms in civilian hands in the United States. It compares gun ownership with the rate of violent crime across the country. Unfortunately, that data is a few years old. It is easy to get raw numbers, but it is very hard to get good data. This is what I found.

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Just to point out, in case you were wondering. Drs. Wintermute & Hemenway are leftists and rabidly anti-gun/anti-self defense .

More Than Gun Violence That Differs Between US, Other Places

So-called gun violence is higher in the United States than in other first-world nations. It’s a point that is continually brought up, in part because we also are the only first-world nation to actually respect people’s gun rights.

As we’ve noted in previous posts, ABC News has been running a series about rethinking firearm-related violence here in the United States. We’ve poked an awful lot of holes in some of their stories, and today’s isn’t likely to be any different.

You see, they’re focused on comparing the United States to other countries on this subject.

The United States has a gun violence epidemic, and it’s not one shared by its peers. The nation that by one estimate has more guns than people has the highest rate of firearm deaths compared with other high-income countries. Mass shootings, an all-too-common occurrence in the U.S., are also exceedingly rare in peer countries — where governments have often been quick to pass gun reform in the wake of such tragedies.

“Compared to the other peer countries, basically what we have is lots and lots of guns, particularly handguns, and we have by far the weakest gun laws. Not surprisingly, we have huge gun problems,” David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told ABC News. “I think if we had basically the gun laws of any other developed country, we’d be better off.”

It’s unclear if gun prevalence definitively impacts gun violence, though research by Hemenway’s center has found links between a large number of guns and more firearm homicides, suicides and accidents. The implementation of new gun restrictions has also been associated with a drop in firearm deaths, a 2016 review of 130 studies across 10 countries found.

The U.S. is “not necessarily a more violent society than others,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, told ABC News.

“What we have is unique access to a technology that changes the outcome — firearms,” he said.

It’s not uncommon to compare the U.S. with other developed countries, especially after yet another horrific mass shooting. There are developing countries with higher rates of firearm deaths than the U.S., though comparing gun violence among peers helps to control for other factors, Hemenway said. And while there are lessons in other nations’ policy measures that could help address the problem here, because the U.S. is on such a different plane when it comes to civilian gun ownership, it will also take more research and multiple, targeted solutions to address the scope of the problem, experts said.

“Other countries do better. We should be able to figure out how to do better,” Hemenway said.

Hemenway is essentially arguing that the only real difference between these other nations and the United States is our lack of gun laws and that we really should embrace how the rest of the developed world treats firearms.

Well, that might be a compelling argument if it wasn’t premised on such a faulty concept.

The United States is a unique experiment, one that may look like the other developed nations of the world, but isn’t, and for a number of reasons. One of those is indeed our Second Amendment protections of our right to keep and bear arms, but there are other differences as well.

For one thing, we tend to be more racially diverse.

England, as an example, is 87.2 percent white and only three percent black, three percent Indian, 1.9 percent Pakistani, two percent mixed, and 3.7 percent other.

Meanwhile, we’re only 61.6 percent white, 12.4 percent black, 10.2 percent classified as multiracial, six percent Asian, 8.4 percent other, 1.1 percent Native Americans, and 0.2 percent Pacific Islander. Then, by ethnicity, they have 18.4 percent Hispanic. In other words, we’ve got a lot more ethnicities trying to share this patch of land.

Now, I’m not saying that any of these minorities are more prone to violence than anyone else, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that all these ethnic groups rubbing together may create some kind of tension that we just haven’t resolved that results in that violence. After all, we live in a time when everyone is accusing everyone else of being racist. It’s possible that racial animosity–which goes in all directions–may result in people feeling like they don’t have to play by the rules.

Or, it may have no difference. We simply don’t know, but it is a data point that shows there are differences between us and many other developed nations.

But that’s only one potential difference.

Let’s also talk about poverty. America is the land of opportunity, but it’s also the land of falling on your butt if you’re not careful. Many people do just that and rebuild. Others don’t and some start off on their butts and foster resentment.

Among the 38 nations that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the majority of which are developed nations, the United States has the fourth-highest poverty rate. The three nations with more poverty? Chile, Israel, and Mexico. Of those three, only Israel can be universally considered developed and they have a problem with violence as well, though theirs comes in the form of terrorism.

So it’s not difficult to see that the United States has some stark differences that separate it from other developed nations. Poverty alone may account for all of the difference. This holds up upon more localized examination.

After all, we think of cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Saint Louis as being extraordinarily violent, but even there, you’ll see that the violence is generally localized. Where? In the poorer neighborhoods in the city.

In other words, poverty within our cities also seems to have a direct correlation with violent crime in our country. That’s poverty that doesn’t show up in other nations for various reasons.

Where is that in Hemenway’s examination?

It’s not there because it’s not useful for him to push his preferred narrative. It’s just that simple.

And I haven’t even gotten into all the nations with strict gun control laws that have much worse violent crime rates than we have.

So don’t come to me about what other countries do or don’t do. Those countries aren’t the United States, so their experiences are largely irrelevant.

Here’s the part that is seen so often
It’s like it’s not a bug, but a feature.
Kongsberg: Bow and arrow suspect known to Norway police

A man arrested over a deadly bow and arrow attack in Norway had converted to Islam and there were fears he had been radicalised, police say.

The 37-year-old Danish citizen is accused of killing four women and a man on Wednesday night in the southern town of Kongsberg.

Police were in contact with the man last year over their concerns.

The suspect has not been identified, and police are working to establish whether it was a terror attack.

Meanwhile, flags were flown at half-mast on Thursday while flowers and other memorials were placed in Kongsberg’s main square.

The victims were all aged between 50 and 70, regional police chief Ole Bredrup Saeverud told reporters.

Residents have told local media that the close-knit community has been deeply shaken by the violence.

Police confronted the man six minutes after the attack began at 18:12 (16:12 GMT) on Wednesday, but he shot several arrows at the officers and escaped. He was caught at 18:47 – 35 minutes after the attack started.

All five victims are believed to have been killed after the police first encountered the man. Officers fired warning shots before he was eventually arrested.

Man armed with bow and arrow kills five people in Norway attacks

OSLO, Oct 13 (Reuters) – A man armed with a bow and arrow killed five people and wounded two others in a series of attacks in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg on Wednesday, local police said.

The suspect was in custody, police added.

“The man used a bow and arrow … for some of the attacks,” police chief Oeyvind Aas told reporters. The police were investigating whether other weapons had also been used, he said.

“The man has been apprehended … from the information we now have, this person carried out these actions alone,” Aas added.

One of the wounded people was an off-duty police officer.

Newspaper VG showed images of an arrow that appeared to be stuck in the wall of a wood-paneled building.

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Watch how quickly this drops off the radar with the perp not fitting the gun-grabber narrative since he’s the in the wrong demographic subset.

Texas high school shooting injures multiple, suspect in custody, Arlington police say

The suspect has been identified as 18-year-old Timothy George Simpkins. Police say he likely fled the scene in a 2018 Silver Dodge Charger with license plate PFY-6260 and anyone who spots him should dial 911. 

A suspect who fled after opening fire inside a Dallas-area high school, which sent students and staff running for their lives, was taken into custody Wednesday after an hours-long manhunt, authorities said.

Arlington police say cell phone video obtained from a student shows that a fight broke out inside a classroom at Timberview High School around 9:15 a.m. Wednesday before 18-year-old Timothy George Simpkins drew a weapon. He fled the scene and was believed to be driving a 2018 Silver Dodge Charger.

Authorities said Simpkins was caught following a manhunt and is expected to be charged with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He was being questioned by detectives Wednesday afternoon, officials said.

St. Louis New Murder Capital Of U.S.

When we talk about violent cities, I usually bring up Chicago. Sometimes, I’ll add in places like Baltimore. Both are famously violent cities, after all, so it makes sense to bring them up.

However, it seems someone else is the murder capital of the United States for 2020.

Homicides in the U.S. in 2020 increased nearly 30% over the previous year according to new FBI figures and St. Louis City is reportedly the U.S. city with the highest murder rate.

St. Louis City had 263 homicides in 2020 with a homicide rate of 87 per 100,000 people.

The murder rate hit a 50-year high for the city but fell short of its all-time record of total homicides of 267 in 1993. The city’s population has declined since 1993 so the homicide rate was higher in 2020.

It’s not just murders, nationwide violent crimes in 2020 went up by a more moderate 5.6% over the previous year. In St. Louis, the increase was less than the national average at 3.8%.

Dr. Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, points out that while the homicide and violent crime rate are up, those crimes are rare. He stressed it is important to note the rate of other, more common crimes dropped.

The FBI data shows property crimes continued a nearly two-decade decline, falling 7.8% between 2019 and 2020. St. Louis saw a 6.3% drop in those types of crimes as well.

Dr. Roenfeld actually makes a perfectly valid point.

Few people deal with homicide in their lifetimes at all, but most will be the victim of some form of theft and those rates are declining, so that’s a very good thing.

Yet people don’t rest easy because they no longer need to be concerned if their lawnmower is going to get stolen. They get jumpy about things like murders and violent crime in general, and those rates are going up.

Some will likely use this to point out that due to preemption laws in Missouri, the city of St. Louis can’t really do anything about violent crime. That, of course, is a cop-out. After all, if the lack of local gun control were the problem, every city in Missouri would be damn near as bad as St. Louis. It’s not.

What happens is that you congregate a lot of people in a fairly small amount of space and they’re going to find excuses to clear out the competition for resources. I suspect it’s something bred into our evolution to some degree as a way to prevent resources from being stripped from an area too quickly or something, though I have absolutely zero evidence for that.

Regardless, stuff like this is an issue in larger urban areas, not rural parts of the state, which tells me there’s something about the cities that’s the issue.

It’s not the lack of gun control, it’s the cities themselves that appear to be the problem.

Besides, I’m sure next year it’ll be Chicago or Baltimore again and St. Louis will be down the list a notch or two, all without any changes in the laws.

Unfortunately, this blind focus on gun control means no one is interested in looking a little deeper so as to find out the truth of these things.

FBI: Over 3.5x More Killed with Knives than Rifles of Any Kind

FBI data released Monday in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) show over three and a half times as many people were stabbed to death in 2020 than were killed with all kinds of rifles combined.

The UCR shows that 454 people were shot and killed with rifles in 2020 while 1,732 were stabbed or hacked to death with “knives or cutting instruments.”

Breitbart News reported that the previous UCR release showed over four times as many people were stabbed to death in 2019 than were killed with rifles of all kinds.

The exact figures for 2019 were 375 killed with rifles while 1,525 were stabbed to death with “knives or cutting instruments.”

On September 30, 2019, Breitbart News reported that the FBI’s UCR for 2018 showed a similar finding, with over five times as many people stabbed to death with “knives or cutting instruments” as were killed with rifles of any kind.

The broad categorization of “rifles” includes a broad swath of firearms, from bolt action rifles to lever action, pump action, breech action, and beyond. It also includes semiautomatic rifles that take a detachable magazine, which the left often classifies as “assault weapons.” Yet three and a half times more people were stabbed to death in 2020 than were killed with all of these various rifle types combined.

Remember this?:
Blinken Admits Most Afghans Were Not Vetted Before Boarding US Evacuation Planes

Assault on female US service member by male Afghan refugees at Fort Bliss under FBI investigation

An investigation is underway into an alleged attack of a female U.S. military service member by several male Afghan evacuees being housed at Fort Bliss.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed to Fox News it is investigating a referral from a Fort Bliss Afghan refugee housing complex in New Mexico alleging that a woman, whose name and age are unknown at this time, was assaulted on Sept. 19 by a “small group of male evacuees.”

“We received the referral from Fort Bliss and our office is investigating the allegation,” FBI Public Affairs Officer Special Agent Jeanette Harper told Fox News.

Officials at Fort Bliss confirmed the report of the assault to Fox News.

“We can confirm a female service member supporting Operation Allies Welcome reported being assaulted on Sept. 19 by a small group of male evacuees at the Doña Ana Complex in New Mexico,” the 1st Armored Division and Fort Bliss Public Affairs said in an emailed statement. “We take the allegation seriously and appropriately referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The safety and well-being of our service members, as well as all of those on our installations, is paramount.”

The statement added that counseling and support has been provided to the service member.

“Task Force-Bliss is also implementing additional security measures to include increased health and safety patrols, additional lighting, and enforcement of the buddy system at the Dona Ana Complex,” the statement continued. “We will cooperate fully with the FBI and will continue to ensure the service member reporting this assault is fully supported.”

Rep. Yvette Herrell, a Republican congresswoman who represents New Mexico’s 2nd congressional district, called the news a “vetting failure.”

“My prayers are with the courageous soldier and her family. This is yet another tragic failure in the vetting process for Afghan nationals,” Herrell tweeted. “The American people deserve answers.”

The alleged attack comes on the heels of two Afghan refugees housed at Wisconsin’s Fort McCoy being indicted for federal crimes including sexual assault on a minor and domestic assault.

Bahrullah Noori, a 20-year-old Afghan evacuee, is being charged with attempting to engage in a sexual act with a minor using force against that person, along with three other counts of engaging in a sex act with a minor, according to a statement from the Department of Justice. Additionally, 32-year-old Mohammad Haroon Imaad is being charged with assaulting his wife by choking and suffocating her on September 17.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have reacted to the news of violence carried out by Afghan refugees being housed in the United States with demands for answers from the Biden administration.

On Thursday night, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford and four other Republican senators sent a letter to the Biden administration seeking more details on the way Afghan refugees are being vetted.

“How many Afghan nationals are waiting on background checks at a transit site? How many Afghan nationals have been paroled into the United States?” the Republican senators asked. “What specific categories, classes, or criteria constitute the Administration’s definition of ‘vulnerable Afghans’? How many individuals who have been paroled into the United States fall under each category, class, or criteria?”

Earlier this month, an official with the Biden administration categorically denied anyone “of concern” had made it into the country, saying there is a “second layer” of screening once a refugee gets to a U.S. entry point.

“No one has gotten into the United States or entered that is of concern,” the official said. “The administration is working with urgency and with care to enhance the screening and vetting operations to make them more efficient without compromising U.S. national security.”

Strict laws absolutely will not stop someone bent on mayhe

Man Kills 5, Himself in UK’s First Mass Shooting in Decade

LONDON (AP) — A young man who killed five people, including his mother, and then took his own life in Britain’s first mass shooting in over a decade had complained online about difficulties meeting women and being “beaten down” by life.

Police said Friday the motive for the shootings was unclear but there were no immediate signs that the crime was an act of terrorism or the 22-year-old gunman had connections to extremist groups.

They identified the shooter as Jake Davison, 22, and said he had a gun license, but revealed few other details. Witnesses reported that he used a pump-action shotgun, police said, though they wouldn’t confirm what type of weapon it was and whether it was the one Davison was licensed to use.

Gun crimes are rare in Britain, which has strict firearm control rules.

Police responded to multiple emergency calls at 6:11 p.m. Thursday arrived six minutes later at an address in Plymouth’s Keyham neighborhood, where Davison had shot and killed his mother, 51-year-old Maxine Davison, also known as Maxine Chapman.

According to police accounts, Davison left the house and immediately shot and killed a 3-year-old girl, Sophie Martyn, and her father, Lee Martyn, 43. He then shot and wounded two other people down the street whom police haven’t identified.

Police said Davison moved on to a park where he shot Stephen Washington, 59, who died at the scene, and then to a nearby street, where he shot Kate Shepherd, 66 on a nearby street. She died later in hospital.

Eyewitnesses reported that Davison shot himself before police arrived. He was licensed to use a gun last year and police are checking whether he had the license before then.

Shaun Sawyer, chief constable for Devon and Cornwall police, told reporters that investigators are not sure what Davison’s motive was and keeping open minds but do not think extremist ideology prompted the attack.

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