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Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Meanwhile in Omaha

posted by on December 5 at 16:09 PM

OMAHA, Neb. - A man opened fire with a rifle at a busy department store Wednesday, killing eight people before taking his own life, in an attack that made holiday shoppers run screaming through a mall and barricade themselves in dressing rooms.

More here.

RSS icon Comments

1

guns dont kill people, people kill people

Posted by blaire | December 5, 2007 4:13 PM
2

Holy crap. Westroads was where my mom did all our shopping when I was a kid.

Posted by laterite | December 5, 2007 4:14 PM
3

from the linked story:

TV station KETV reported that the note said he wanted to "go out in style."

Mission success. Thanks to all the media coverage, with the suspect's name and suicide note details included (with a biography soon to follow), the next asshole who might do this is now validated to also "go out in style".

Posted by Mahtli69 | December 5, 2007 4:31 PM
4

Thank God we have the second amendment so we can all go out in style. Constitutionally!

Posted by unPC | December 5, 2007 4:37 PM
5

And they say online shopping is unsafe.

Posted by K | December 5, 2007 4:42 PM
6

Guns don't kill people, flying bullets kill people.

Posted by Sargon Bighorn | December 5, 2007 4:43 PM
7

Well thank NRA was looking out for the purchasing rights of this asshole.

Posted by Jake of 8bitjoystick.com | December 5, 2007 4:51 PM
8

Ah, what a shame. I used to hang out at Westroads when I was a teen. It's a huge mall with a big central atrium where they used to have "dancing waters" shows. (It was a much simpler time)

Von Maur is the "Classy" store at Westroads. It wasn't there in my day (in my day, the classy place was Younker-Kilpatricks, which is long gone), but I did go to college with one of the Von Maur boys.

Predicatbly, the Omaha message boards are full of comments from people saying that if everyone was armed, this never would have happened. That's the way the think there.

Posted by catalina vel-duray | December 5, 2007 5:04 PM
9
...that made holiday shoppers run screaming through a mall...

Why do they always have to make these situations sound hilarious?

Posted by Mr. Poe | December 5, 2007 5:15 PM
10

@8 : So glad my parents escaped when they did...

Posted by laterite | December 5, 2007 5:21 PM
11

Catalina:

"Predicatbly, the Omaha message boards are full of comments from people saying that if everyone was armed, this never would have happened."

They're right. If everyone did carry guns, there would be less violent crime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns%2C_Less_Crime

Nebraska already has Shall Issue laws but they clearly need to take them more seriously if they want to prevent these sorts of tragedies.

Or we could just let the mall cops take care of it.

Posted by Big Sven | December 5, 2007 5:40 PM
12

Why is this news?

Today more people were killed in Iraq, in much more grotesque ways, using our tax dollars.

Posted by Will in Seattle | December 5, 2007 5:49 PM
13

@3 - no kidding. If the media had any sense or taste, they wouldn't name the shooter at all. Why fulfill his dying wish?

Posted by tsm | December 5, 2007 5:53 PM
14

@12, these were white people, not Iraqis. You need to understand the TYPE of people that are tragic to use. Iraqis are just the cost of Bush doing business.

Posted by Just Me | December 5, 2007 5:55 PM
15

White people being killed while performing their most sacred of duties in preparation for their most sacred of Holidays is a far greater outrage than some dead brown people killed for the last few drops of oil on the planet. White poeple gotta get to the mall somehow.

Posted by White People!!! | December 5, 2007 6:03 PM
16

Actually, troops and civilians being killed during a military occupation isn't news at all. It's unjust, but it isn't "news".

On the other hand, some psycho shooting up Christmas shoppers in a middle-American mall? It's flamboyant, it's sensation, it's tragic, and it's totally news.

Posted by Dougsf | December 5, 2007 6:03 PM
17

Americans are out shopping...gunshots break out. This seems to be standard news these days. God only know.

Goto godstilllovesus.org

Posted by louks | December 5, 2007 6:22 PM
18

I think God may just be a tad indifferent to me. It's okay, the feeling's mutual...


...OF OMAHA.


Just talked to my brother..I guess his apartment is close to Westroads. Luckily he was just leaving the hospital after pharmaceutical case rounds when it was going down. He summed up the situation as "sad". Couldn't agree more.

Posted by laterite | December 5, 2007 6:40 PM
19

hmmmm..... I'm not sold on that theory Sven. I think it would end up a circular firing squad. People can talk all they want about how they can handle a gun, but in a situation like that, all bets are off.

As far as crime is concerned, it sure seems like Omaha has a lot more crime than we do - or at least a much more hysteria-ridden evening news.

With that said, I'm not anti-gun. I'm all for people having them. But I don't think they are the solution to everything.

Posted by catalina vel-duray | December 5, 2007 6:41 PM
20

Yes, relative to its size, Omaha has a pretty lively crime rate. Not as bad as someplace like Baltimore or New Orleans, but maybe along the same lines as a Kansas City or St Louis. One thing people around here also don't realize is Omaha, like other mid-size Midwestern cities, is segregated as all hell, with pretty much everything west of 72nd lily-white cookie-cutter suburbs that put Bellevue or Redmond to shame. NE Omaha is strictly for "the coloreds" while south Omaha/Bellevue is where "the spics" reside. Barf.

Posted by laterite | December 5, 2007 7:05 PM
21

How did we have discussions before the internet?

http://www.crimetrends.com/id4.html

Omaha: #159/310, 416.2 violent crimes / 100,000 people

Seattle: #160/310, 415.9 violent crimes / 100,000 people

Statistical dead heat. Both middle of the road.

Posted by Big Sven | December 5, 2007 9:29 PM
22

So doesn't your statistic prove that more guns doesn't mean less crime?

Posted by catalina vel-duray | December 5, 2007 10:23 PM
23

laterite @18:

hahahaaah about mutual of omaha!

Posted by Coco | December 5, 2007 11:09 PM
24

Perception before knowledge. We're the same as Omaha! Cool!

Posted by laterite | December 5, 2007 11:15 PM
25

Cat, I don't know how to determine if Seattle has more guns than Omaha. We have Shall Issue nowadays, also.

I was just trying to answer your question about whether Omaha has more violence than we do.

Posted by Big Sven | December 5, 2007 11:31 PM
26

When I was in the UK I brought a 1.9 inch pocket knife with me for cutting cheese and bread while I was traveling. It had a locking back, because most American pocket knives do and because a locking back is safer. And because it just didn't occur to me that it would be an issue with a knife smaller than Tony Blair's dick.

Long story short, when I was waiting to board the Channel Tunnel train to France a security guard spotted the knife, pulled me out of line, confiscated the knife, and told me he could have had me arrested. Because the knife had a locking blade, and that makes it a "dangerous weapon."

To be clear: I'm 6'4" and I bench about 400 pounds. I could've pulled this guy's head off with my bare hands. More than that, I was actually lightly armed with a plastic weapon that's designed specifically for travelers, because it can be taken through metal detectors and looks like something other than what it is. They totally missed that one, and it's a lot more dangerous than the knife they confiscated.

In the UK, they have "Knife Amnesty" days, exactly like our gun amnesty days, when people can bring weapons into the police department and turn them in to be destroyed. But they do it with knives. Can you appreciate that? The most basic tool, a tool created and used by primates before the evolution of modern human beings, is not only illegal in the United Kingdom, but there's a perfectly serious effort to remove them from circulation altogether.

Shit happens. Deal with it, or end up like Great Britain.

Posted by Judah | December 6, 2007 7:09 AM
27

If anyone points out that massive gun controls laws work very well -- that Canada, Japan, Europe and such have far lower violent crime rates that the USA -- just stating this fact will result in massive irrational flaming attacks.
So Big Sven, we aren't going to point out the obvious fact that all countries with good gun controls are much safer.

And tell me this -- why didn't anyone with a gun take down that dude in the Omaha mall?

Answer: (a) they were afraid (b) they couldn't pull off a shot before the dude killed 8 or 9 people. Shit, you got to draw first! (c) they were afraid that if instead of running away, they stood their ground and shot, then maybe their five year old daughter standing next to them (stupidly unarmed) might get hit in the cross fire.

We do have guns all over America and we have the crime, so the facts are, having guns everywhere does not result in lower crime.

Posted by unPC | December 6, 2007 11:10 AM
28

unPC, I'm glad my record of disagreeing with you 100% of the time remains unbroken.

If you think that gun liberalization is the sole reason why we have more violent crime than Japan, Canada, "Europe" (by which I assume you mean Western Europe) than you know *nothing* about economic, social, and racial injustice.

But I will point out the fact that I posted an actual academic argument for gun liberalization, while you just listed off some of your own opinions and called them "facts."

Posted by Big Sven | December 6, 2007 3:46 PM

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