Bear Bussjaeger

I was struck by the lack of identification of the weapons used by the Indy FedEx shooter, by any official source, other than “assault rifles.” News reports cite the ATF as the source of the acquisition info, so I went to them for for more details.

1. What is the make and model of each assault rifle?
2. Which was purchased on what date?
3. How was it established that these were select-fire rifles?

Astonishingly, less than two hours later on a Sunday I got a response (if you’ve ever tried communicating with the ATF, you probably realize how amazing that is). Not that it helped much.

Please direct your inquiry to the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. Here is their email: IMPD.PublicAffairs@indy.gov .

I asked the ATF, because they’re the ones who told the press. But whatever. I sent the same questions to IMPD.

I got a response in three minutes. Not much of one, though.

None of this information is being released at this time.

I find that somewhat odd, since the sole alleged shooter is already dead and they’ve already traced the firearms. And they’ve already said they are assault rifles (yeah, right; select-fire; sure). What could be the big secret?

I asked to be sent any press releases on the subject that they may issue in the future. We’ll see.

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New at The Zelman Partisans: Priorities: Lying

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This report got me to wondering about that.

NJ Gov. Phil Murphy Pushes Ammo Purchase Database, .50 Caliber Rifle Ban
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is fighting gun crime in his state by calling for a database of ammunition purchasers and banning .50 caliber rifles.

So I did a quick search and discovered that the anti-rights Violence Policy Center has a list, “Criminal Use of the 50 Caliber Sniper Rifle”. It goes back to 1989, and was last updated in 2019. They list 51 cases.

51 criminal uses in 30 years doesn’t sound like much. But it’s even better.

• Only ten cases were criminal use of a .50 cal.
• Of those ten, one occurred in Mexico.
• Another one was the Branch Davidians at Waco. I’d call that self defense, not criminal use.
• All the other cases were unlawful possession, unlawful transfer, or the gun was found when the person was busted for something else; not use of the firearm.
• One was a stashed weapon found in Canada.

But even if we take the prosecution’s argument about the Branch Davidians, we have ten criminal uses in 30 freaking years. An average of once every three years. In two countries. Let’s drop that Mexico murder (by a cop, no less); NINE cases. In thirty years.We’ve all heard how deadly .50s are, right? In the 9 US cases, we have three people wounded in two cases, and four people killed in three cases. One of those was a double murder, but it’s not really clear that the .50 that inflicted the deaths because he also used three other guns including an SKS. No casualties listed for the other four cases.

Oh, one of those terrible crimes that didn’t result in injury, fatal or otherwise? The crime was starting a wildfire by stupidly plinking with incendiary rounds. Not the sort of thing you’d expect to hear about from the VIOLENCE Policy Center, eh? But they’ve got to get those numbers up somehow, I suppose.

30 years. Three wounded. Four killed.

That definitely calls for regulation. Especially in New Jersey where… oh. Just once case in New Jersey; felon in possession, not used.

So maybe that doesn’t call for a .50 cal rifle ban, Murphy.

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Thus speaketh congresscritter Watson Coleman [Dim-NJ]. The full quote is:

“Silencers are not tools of self-defense, they are tools of murder,” said Congresswoman Watson Coleman. “They have no legal application which is why law enforcement officials around the country have been calling for their elimination. The HEAR Act will save lives and is part of the common sense approach to firearms legislation that polls show has widespread support among voters on both sides of the aisle.”

Really? Let me quote someone else. Three guesses who it is. And my regular readers probably don’t need to guess.

“Moreover, consistent with this low number of prosecution referrals, silencers are very rarely used in criminal shootings. Given the lack of criminality associated with silencers, it is reasonable to conclude that they should not be viewed as a threat to public safety necessitating NFA classification, and should be considered for reclassification under the GCA.”

Yep, the “AFT” said that back in 2017. Suppressors (the legal term is silencer, but I prefer the more accurate “suppressor”) are used very, very rarely in crime; from 1995 to 2004, there were approximately 15 cases of criminal use of a suppressor. An average of 1.5 per year.

In that study time frame, there were roughly a quarter-million suppressors registered. That would be a criminal use rate of 0.0000006%. These days, there are more than two million registered suppressors. A sane person might think that two million cases of murder-with-suppressor are something we would -ahem- “hear” about.

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In my ignorance, I would have handled this a little differently.

It Was Worse Than We Thought: NO ONE Met Japanese Prime Minister at the White House Door Except Stationary Marine
No one met Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga at the door when he arrived.
The only one standing there was a stationary Marine.
[…]
Then when Vice President Kamala was sent down to greet the Japanese Prime Minister she spent more than a full minute trashing the US as a violent place as Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga stood next to her waiting to be introduced.

I’d have stupidly had VP Harris meet the Prime Minister of a friendly nation at the door. Then I’d have the President do the formal introduction and photo op with the first foreign leader to come to the White House. And any remarks — probably post-introduction — would have been benign mention of our nation’s friendly relations. And I suppose I’m a complete idiot, because I would have entirely skipped trashing my own country.

To clarify, in my ignorance I would have thought that not having some official of high “station” meet the PM at the door was a slap in the face.

Having the intro/photo op with the VP, not the Prez could send multiple messages.

1. The Prez doesn’t think the PM is important enough to waste his time on.
2. The Prez is rebuking Japan for some slight.
3. The handlers know it looks bad, but acknowledging that the Prez is dysfunctional is less damaging than whatever might shoot out of Biden’s mouth.

But international relations and high level diplomatic protocol isn’t my thing. I just don’t get the big picture.

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So they should have seen this coming?

The gunman, who after murdering 8 people committed suicide, was flagged by a family member to law enforcement before the attack took place.
[…]

Authorities were warned about FedEx suspect’s potential for violence in the past, wrote one CNN journalist on Twitter.

He continued by saying, “the suspect in the Indianapolis mass shooting was known to federal and local authorities prior to the attack.”

It’s CNN, so take it with a grain of salt. But it wouldn’t exactly the be first time local and feddie LE blew off warnings about a mass shooter-to-be. And yes, Indiana has a “red flag” law.

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I think I’ll need to upgrade my ear pro, too.

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It’s HR 51. I wrote on this subject last year, when that moron Norton tried it with HR 5803. Same moron, same constitutional problem.

You know what? I’ll just paste my old explanation again. Just mentally replace HR 5803 with HR 51, because the text of both appear to be identical.

---

So the news is full of reports that H.R.5803 – Washington, D.C. Admission Act passed in the House. Didn’t think about it much until I saw that it passed on a 232-180 vote. Then I started scratching my head. Because that’s a fail vote.

The “District” which is the “Seat of Government of the United States” was established constitutionally; Article I, Section 8. It’s presidential electors were granted by the 23rd Amendment. To shrink the federal District down, and grant the remaining area of the District statehood requires a constitutional amendment.

By Article V, amendments have to be approved by “two thirds of both Houses. They needed 290 pro-statehood votes, not a simple majority. It failed.

Reading the resolution makes it clear: they aren’t amending the Constitution; they’re trying to do this purely by legislation. Constitution; what’s that? We don’t need no steenkin’ constitution.

But let’s say that they can constitutionally shrink the District. In fact, they’ve done that before. But the precedent established that the “retroceded” land goes back to the state that had ceded it to the federal government originally. That would be Maryland in this case.

But if they’re going to make that diamond-with-a-bite-out-of-it into a state, Article IV, Section 3 comes into play.

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

That gets a bit complicated. I figure already-blue Maryland would go along with it, to boost the Dems in DC, but the process does have to be followed.

Instead, these idjits are using the precedent of admitting federally administered territories that were never part of a state in the first place.

I almost wish Yertle McConnell would let this pass the Senate, just to watch the constitutional/precedential/judicial shit show that would ensue. I’d demand that every judge seated in the District recuse themselves as being a party to the dispute, including every sitting Supreme Court Justice.

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…of terrorism.

“Authorities have yet to positively identify Indianapolis shooting suspect; FBI says premature to speculate on motive.”

Absolutely nothing about the shooter. No name, no description. And for some reason the FBI is involved. ATF, sure; to trace the firearm and maybe evaluate it. FBI? And no one wants to “speculate”?

Hell, in every other mass shooting, speculation (often masked as “reporting” is rampant. Oh, must be incel. Racism. White supremacy. Disgruntled ex-worker. You usually can’t shut the media and activisst — but I repeat myself — up.

So. 70% chance it was terrorism. 50:50 that it was another FBI sting gone wrong. There’s some reason no one is leaking details.

Added: Something else I noted in various reports — police responded to a shots fired call. The shooter killed himself as soon as he saw the police. But the entire incident lasted “one or two minutes.” I used to live in Indianapolis; I never saw a 1-2 minute response time. Not even the time I reported acrazy intruder actively trying to force her way into my apartment.

I suppose the responders could have already been very close by.

Added:

Mr. Miller said he could not understand what the gunman was yelling

“Allahu Akhbar”, maybe?

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Yeah. Right. Sure. This is in reference to the overnight shooting at a Fedex facility in Indianapolis. I was checking various reports, because most are largely devoid of details. Oddly devoid, considering how the media usually treats mass shootings. I have a guess as to why, but I’ll keep it to myself for now.

But I did find this.

Indianapolis mass shooting: Eight dead at FedEx facility
[…]
Local media quoted FedEx worker Jeremiah Miller as saying he had seen the gunman firing.

“I saw a man with a sub-machine gun of some sort, an automatic rifle, and he was firing in the open. I immediately ducked down and got scared,” he said.

Not impossible, but awfully damned unlikely. We’ll see.

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