Which is also fair enough, as I’m sure Malia Cohen et al are aware of all that. Except:
2. A handgun connected to a 10-round magazine isn’t an assault rifle (of course) and it’s not even an “assault weapon.”
And here’s a test. Would you, gentle reader, call the guns that most of the SFPD strap on every day assault weapons? I don’t think so. So like for instance, “the sergeant drew her assault weapon and pointed it at the suspect.” If you said something like that, I wouldn’t know what you were talking about. Most likely, you’d use the term pistol or handgun or revolver or something like that, right?
So that’s why calling an everyday, run-of-the-mill handgun an “assault weapon” isn’t the right thing to do.
You’ve gone beyond George Lakoff-style “framing” all the way to Orwellian.
But the new news is that you can watch this flick for free now via the NetFlix.
It’s just released. See?
“This movie is: Exciting”
(But, sorry streamer-only NetFlix people, right now you can only have them mail you the DVD or the Blu-Ray – you can’t just stream this to your device.)
And no, I don’t think Vietnam Tom Bruso, or anyone else on the bus that day…
(So, you still can’t upload ten-minute-plus videos to YouTube? News to me.)
Anyway, last night’s SFPD Community Meeting on Broadway featured Supervisor David Chiu second-guessing the split-second actions of the SFPD and laundry-listing his obliquely-related legislation, pretty much. Oh, and also Aaron Peskin, who sounded like he knows what he’s talking about.
Click to expand
IMO, David Chiu looked like the Man from Mars, plopped down into North Beach.
Give me a chance to get (or find) something online so I can tell you about this.
And this is a small billboard for rapper TECH N9NE a couple blocks away near Stockton:
(And last night’s SFPD press conference was one block further up Broadway…)
I can’t imagine it makes sense to carry a TEC-9 around the Streets of San Francisco, so I’m forced to conclude that people get them because the name sounds bad-ass.
No matter, they’re having a meeting about Saturday morning’s shooting on Monday night, September 19th, 2011. (Is there a “community” what’s upset or something? Not sure.)
Hey, maybe BART can do one of these meetings a few days after they kill their next passenger? There’s an idea…
All the deets:
“SFPD Involved in Officer Involved Shooting 11-102 On September 17, 2011 at 2:16 AM, San Francisco Police Officers were involved in a shooting on the 400 block of Broadway.
Officers were working a uniformed foot-beat assignment near Broadway and Kearny when they detained a person they believed matched the description of a wanted suspect and whom they believed was engaged in a narcotics transaction.
After a brief contact with the officers, the suspect fled on foot. While being pursued by officer’s the suspect reached into his waist area, pulled out a “machine pistol” type of firearm fully loaded with one round in the chamber and twenty-one rounds in the magazine and pointed it at one of the officers. The officer discharged his firearm once at the suspect. The suspect dropped his firearm and was taken into custody.
The suspect was not hit by the officer’s bullet. However, an adult male and an adult female bystander were struck. The male bystander suffered a gunshot wound to the lower left leg and the female bystander sustained a wound to the upper right thigh. Both were transported to San Francisco General Hospital where they were treated and released for non-life threatening injuries.
The Broadway Corridor is a popular nightlife and entertainment district heavily populated on weekend nights. While it is still unclear why the suspect was armed, the presence of such a weapon, and his willingness to point it at uniformed police officers, made him a significant threat to the public as well as the officers.
The suspect was identified as Jesus Paredes Rodriguez, age 20, of San Pablo, California. He is currently being held in San Francisco County Jail for assault charges and weapons violations.
This incident is being investigated by the San Francisco Police Homicide Detail, which investigates all officer involved shootings, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the Internal Affairs Division (Officer Involved Shooting Team) and the Office of Citizen’s Complaints.
A community meeting will be held at the Jean Parker Elementary School, located at 840 Broadway on Monday, September 19, 2011 at 6:30PM.”
Se you there, maybe.
* “Machine pistol,” really? Make? Model? I gots to know. I hope it was a Micro Uzi – that’d make an impressive show-and-tell prop at a press conference. Here’s one used for fishing, to show you what it’s like.
I don’t know, sometimes when a police dog gets old, they’ll let a retiring police officer do an adoption deal, but that kind of thing’s not going to happen with assault weapons and retired cops in California anytime soon.
I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind living in a neighborhood full of retired cops with unnecessary firepower. It’d be just like Switzerland where every house has some sort of gun, practically. And nobody messes with Switzerland.
And wouldn’t this scene with Clint Eastwood be more effective if he had some sort of World-War I-era machine gun in his hand?
“I’m going to wear a powder blue fucking suit, and a white shirt and a red tie and a fucking breast cancer pin…”
Comes now the fight loser “Michael” (who appears to be on a first-name-only basis with DJ “JV“):
“First of all, I’d like to aPOlogize to AC Transit…”
It goes on and on, Black History Month, 5150, bygones, veterans, arthritis, murder, parole, apologies, brothers, stolen money, leaking, ass kicking, Strike Force(?) Showtime TV, 10,000 kids, cocaine - it goes on and on.
Can’t remember which morning-zoo / dawg-pound joint this screengrab came from. Oh yes, it was from WILD 94.9 FM:
Now-famous 62-year-old Bay Arean Thomas Bruso (akaEpic Beard Man, Tom Swift, and Tom Vietnam) picks fights as he rides AC Transit in the East Bay, of course, (incident video now available in high def) but he also has been known to take BART to visit San Francisco from time to time. For example, here he is near Market Street back when he was just 48, as seen by Caliber photographer Troy Holden:
“Back in 1996, I was working at the intersection of 2nd & Market. Each and every day the man pictured above would walk by my shop, wave a loaf of sourdough in my face, and scream obscenities about the San Francisco 49′ers.”
Let’s find out, courtesy of footage of Tom at an Oakland A’s game last year. Is this a proper use of a Taser? I don’t know. It ended up being a time-saver for the cops, certainly. Would they have felt justified in shooting Tom with bullets at that moment? Obviously not. The question after any Taser discharge is what would you have done if you didn’t have the Taser, right?
Speaking of Tasers and the East Bay, check out this excellent report from Demian Bulwa about how the BART Police Department ran the initial stages of its Taser program.
That’s a poorly-run operation. What about the California Highway Patrol? They seem to do be doing better with Tasers these days. For them, a Taser is just another arrow in the quiver. Check it, a CHP officer on San Francisco’s Octavia Boulevard with his two primary weapons, a Smith & Wesson Model 4006 semi-automatic and a TASER International X26:
So why shouldn’t the SFPD have Tasers? We already trust them with handguns and assault rifles, right? We’ll end up with a few more lawsuits but with fewer dead civilians. Sounds like a win, overall.
And finally, let’s hear from the RAND Coporation. They pondered the use of Conducted Energy Devices (CEDs) for the NYPD and had this to say:
“Our key less-than-lethal force recommendations:
We reviewed reports of about 455 NYPD shootings from 2004 to 2006 and identified 25 cases where we judged that had a less-lethal weapon been available, officers may have used it to subdue suspects instead of using their handguns.
We also note that when other departments have deployed Conducted Energy Devices or CEDs, commonly known by the brand name TASER, injuries to both suspects and officers have declined.
We recognize that some groups have criticized the deployment of CEDs, raising issues of safety, overuse, and misuse. As such we recommend that the NYPD undertake a pilot program for the deployment of CEDs.
Such a program should allow patrol officers in selected precincts to be trained and equipped with CEDs that can incapacitate suspects from a distance. We believe there is evidence that if NYPD officers had access to this device, some number of officer-involved shootings could be avoided, and injuries to both suspects and police officers will decline. A carefully designed pilot program conducted over six to 12 months in a few select precincts would give the department enough information to determine whether the devices would alter the way the NYPD officers apply force and whether the weapons could be used properly.”
