A police investigation has shown that all nine of the people injured in Friday's shooting outside of the Empire State Building were wounded by police gunfire.
The incident began Friday morning when 58-year-old Jeffrey Johnson waited outside his former place of employment and shot and killed his former manager, 41-year-old Steve Ercolino.
Johnson then calmly walked away, around the corner of the Empire State Building to Fifth Avenue. A construction worker who saw the shooting altered police. Two police officers confronted Johnson and when he pulled out a gun they opened fire, killing him.
One officer shot nine rounds while the other shot seven. In addition to killing Johsnon, nine bystanders were injured. Three of the victims suffered gunshot wounds and the other six were hit by fragments. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "It appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police."
Six of the wounded were treated and released from the hospital while three of the wounded remain hospitalized.
As Gail Collins writes in her Saturday column,"This isn't surprising; it's only in movies that people are good shots during a violent encounter." Collins continues:
"And these are people trained for this kind of crisis. The moral is that if a lunatic starts shooting, you will not be made safer if your fellow average citizens are carrying concealed weapons.
We are never going to have a sane national policy on guns until the gun advocates give up on the fantasy that the best protection against armed psychopaths bent on random violence is regular people with loaded pistols on their belts."
4 comments:
"And these are people trained for this kind of crisis. The moral is that if a lunatic starts shooting, you will not be made safer if your fellow average citizens are carrying concealed weapons.
Bollocks. Have you ever seen a similar situation where an armed civilian drew on a gunman and accidentally wounded 9 bystanders in the process? Or anything even close? I've been visiting this site for a while, and while the number of accidental shootings from police officers or soldiers is, if anything, proportionally greater than those by ordinary civilians, there's been nothing coming close to this resulting from a civilian defensive gun use.
If anything, this incident is the reduction ad absurdum of the claim that we're all safer with guns restricted to the police and military.
http://ohhshoot.blogspot.com/2012/06/concealed-weapons-permit-holder-trying.html
1 innocent casualty - not even remotely close.
Dead. One dead innocent casualty.
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