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Friday, February 26, 2016

The Effectiveness of Restraining Orders

Gun control, advocates argue that women can't use guns to defend themselves from stalkers/estranged husbands/rapists and should rely on the power of restraining orders.  Another success story from 2/26/16 New York Times:
NEWTON, Kan. — A gunman who killed three people and injured more than a dozen at a Kansas manufacturing plant worked at that factory, and had been served with a restraining order just 90 minutes before he began his shooting spree, the county sheriff said Friday.

Sheriff T. Walton of Harvey County said at a news conference that the protection from abuse order, usually intended to keep perpetrators of domestic violence away from their victims, might have set off the rampage on Thursday. He identified the gunman as Cedric Larry Ford, 38, who died inside the plant in shootout with a police officer.

Mr. Ford barged into Excel Industries in Hesston after 5 p.m. and opened fire with an assault rifle, apparently not targeting anyone in particular or speaking to anyone, the sheriff said.


“He was randomly shooting people,” he said. The death toll could have been much higher, the sheriff said, if not for the Hesston Police Department officer who confronted and killed Mr. Ford. The officer’s name is being withheld pending further investigation.

How did he get the guns since he would not have passed a background check?  I heard a federal prosecutor explain that nearly all strawman purchases start out as love stories, and this is one of them:
Investigators said Friday that the gunman who opened fire at a Kansas factory where he worked received a court order 90 minutes before the rampage and obtained the two weapons used in the attack from a friend.

Sarah Hopkins, 28, of Newton, Kan., is charged with one count of knowingly transferring a firearm to a convicted felon. Prosecutors allege Hopkins, a friend of Cedric Ford, knew about his criminal history before giving him the semi-automatic rifle and handgun he used in the rampage that left 3 dead and 14 others wounded.

The Wichita Eagle reported Hopkins is the mother of Ford's two children. She moved out of her home with Ford in July and retrieved the guns from the house less than a month later with the help of police, the Eagle reported, citing an affidavit in the case. Shortly thereafter, Hopkins gave the guns back to Ford "because Ford had threatened her," the paper reported.

4 comments:

  1. Did he actually have an "assault rifle"?

    Or a semi-automatic AR-15 "assault weapon" which the media are misidentifying as an "assault rifle"?

    If he did have an actual assault rifle (capable of automatic fire), where did he get it?

    Incidentally, the reports indicate that he had a significant criminal record, including felony arrests.

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  2. I also heard one report on the radio that he had an "automatic pistol" which seems even more unlikely.

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  3. It was a Zastava Serbia, an AK-47 clone, with, as far as I know, no pocketa-pocketa switch. A woman gave it to him in spite of the fact that she knew he was a felon.

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  4. its interesting how the media wants this one to instantly go away. He's a black man with a long rap sheet and legally couldn't own a gun. The guns were intact given him by a girl friend, shades of the San Bernardino shooters. The media has actually already noted they prefer it when the mass killer is a white man with no record what so ever and thus they can make the standard gun-control/white privilege arguments. They also are saying that mass killings are primarily done with a pistol, even though they have made such print time over "assault Weapons" and their use in mass shootings. Finally, the trigger for this is when he was issued a restraining order, which the liberals say stops such things and protects people. I truly believe the media will find away to drop this shooting and go back to covering the white Uber driver who was shooting the people he just delivered with a semi-auto pistol.

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