Going in guns blazing Russian style may not be the answer, but neither is waiting (too long)…

Somewhere there has to be a happy medium in police response in these mass shooting incidents.

On the one hand, we don’t want the police to go blazing in blindly and shoot or gas everyone Russian style, but on the other hand waiting nearly 45 minutes as at Binghamton or waiting for a long time while children continued to be shot as at Columbine several years ago seems to me unacceptable.

(At Binghamton some survivors reportedly hid for several hours before they were freed from perceived danger. At Columbine it took police something like two hours to move in after the shooting started, even though there was some police presence within minutes.)

I’m 100 percent for officer safety, but it is a police duty to protect citizens in harm’s way, not wait until the coast is clear.

I have not studied these things and I don’t have the answer – except that I wish the answer was that there would be no more such incidents to worry about.

But I can’t get over the memory of Columbine and the video of police waiting as children screamed for help and hung out windows while the rampage was still going on.

And I recall that in the not-so-long ago Virginia Tech incident there is a famous video of a cop standing there with his gun drawn but not moving and the sounds of shots from the shooter’s weapon – the death toll rising.

And I know full well that policemen face as much danger as if they were in a war zone. Within a day of the Binghamton incident, in which 13 innocent people died, three officers were gunned down responding to a domestic dispute over a dog in Pittsburgh.

All I am wishing is that the experts use these incidents to reassess their standard operating procedures.

Rescuers need to be rescuing not waiting unnecessarily. And I already noted at the top that we don’t want to go in blindly with guns blazing and kill the hostages and get police killed in the process too, but this has become such a problem, this mass shooting business, we need improvement in our response tactics.

P.s.

And why is it that these nut cases have such apparently easy access to high powered weapons and why is it that there always seems to have been clues – comments and personal behavior – before hand that went unheeded?

I will answer my own question, in part. We live in a free country and have a right to keep and bear arms. I don’t want to lose freedom of movement and freedom of privacy and of self defense, but when someone gives off public clues, perhaps we need to listen and take them seriously.

And I would think anyone who makes threats loses some of his or her rights at that moment.

Easy to jump to conclusions in Binghamton-like incidents; I still cling to gun ownership rights, though…

It’s so easy to jump to conclusions in these mass killings as the one today in upstate New York. I thought maybe it was a disgruntled white man going after immigrant targets and then I heard the suspect (presumed dead now) was perhaps a Vietnamese immigrant himself.

Also I read that he was carrying false I.D. and that he was recently let go from a job at IBM, implying that he kind of went postal.

There’s been so many mass shootings here in the United States recently, and one in Germany — not counting the usual terrorist acts overseas — that one almost becomes numb to the news — almost.

It’s still a developing story in Binghamton, N.Y., but apparently at least 13 people were killed or 14 including the gunman. It took place at a facility where immigrants were taking citizenship tests and English classes, it was reported.

And while I am a supporter of Second Amendment gun owner rights (although I find the wording of that provision highly ambiguous), I always wonder why we seem as a society helpless to keep obviously demented folks from obtaining weapons and going on shooting rampages. And the problem is even worse when you consider how easily criminals can get hold of weapons, often with a firepower that outmatches the police. But I cling to gun ownership rights, primarily due to the historical aspect of Americans being free to protect themselves from bad guys and bad government if need be (read the Declaration of Independence). I know full well, though, that most folks don’t have guns and don’t plan to get any.

The only societies that seem to be relatively free of gun violence, among the populace at least, are dictatorships who run police states.

Even Israel where the authorities and the citizenry have had to be ever vigilent against terrorism for more than half a century because its neighbors have often vowed to do way with that country cannot stop terrorist violence.

We’ll find out more later today or tomorrow about the facts and possible motives in the  case, hopefully.

Meanwhile, we have to ask ourselves is all this gun violence on a radical increase — it can’t be all due to more reporting via the internet — and if so, why and what can we do about it?

Do we just have to accept it all as the hazards of everyday life?

(Catch my contribution to the German-American experience and call up http://vonwalther.wordpress.com )

USA’s main security threat may be Mexico and there are valid reasons to keep their trucks out…

While we are still fighting wars in the Middle East for somewhat nebulous reasons and no clear idea of our goals, the nation on our own southern border, Mexico, is in the midst of what might as well be called a civil war, with 7,000 deaths in the last 16 months, including high officials in its federal government, as well as town mayors and police chiefs, some of whom have sought political asylum in the U.S.

The Obama administration has announced a kind of token response on the border, but as I understand it, they are pulling immigration personnel from out of our interior to do so, conveniently letting the enforcement of the hiring of illegals slide as a sop to those who for some strange reason support the underground economy of illegal aliens, many of whom come from Spanish speaking nations to the south, most notably Mexico.

While some of the illegal migrants have gone back south because of the higher unemployment numbers in the USA, they face a problem in their homeland because their government is still corrupt after all these years, but it is trying to fight off drug lords, some of whom employ paramilitary against the Mexican soldiers and police.

Meanwhile, the violence is spilling across the border and is reaching into our northern cities, such as Chicago. Much of it involves illegals fighting over drug disputes, but sometimes hapless illegals, maybe not involved in the drug trade, get caught in the crossfire or become victims of kidnapings and ransom schemes, another popular line of work for criminals south of the border.

Mixed in with all this somehow is an ongoing dispute between Mexico and the United States over a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) program to allow a limited number of Mexican trucks to be able to cross the border and have a run of our country. Congress cancelled funding for the program recently, but the Obama administration has indicated it might resume the program in the future.

In retaliation, Mexico, one of our top trading partners, has applied tariffs on 90 U.S. products. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Mexico to smooth things over in the dispute and to promise the President Felipe Calderon administration there that the U.S. will help it in its fight against the drug cartels. And amidst all this, a Mexican defense official has warned the U.S. against any military incursions into his country (ala the Mexican-American War of the 1840s and the chase after Pancho Villa in the 1920s, I would suppose).

The truck program was cancelled in part supposedly over safety concerns, but probably also because the Teamster’s Union, a supporter of Democrats, was worried about the loss of American jobs.

Now before you go thinking I think this was a bad thing, think again. I was a trucker and as things stand I don’t think Mexican trucks should be allowed past our border. And I know something – not everything – about this subject, because as I said I was a trucker (and never a Teamster member) and furthermore I dealt with the border trucking scenario and know the landscape (my experience was at Nogales, Az. and Otay Mesa, Ca., and San Diego, Ca.).

Now first you need to know that our northern neighbor Canada runs its trucks throughout the U.S.

But the Canada/U.S. situation is nothing like what we face with Mexico.

A U.S. trucker can cross the border into Canada and go just about anywhere.

On the other hand, American trucks do not cross into Mexico and who would want to?

Canada is a civilized nation with the rule of law (probably more so than the USA, in some respects).

Mexico is highly corrupt (despite the efforts to clean things up by Calderon) with the bribes and intimidation as a standard operating procedure in business and law enforcement and everyday life there.

I once talked to a Mexican trucker and he told me that when he drove in his country there were no truck scales. But a policeman might stop a truck out on a lonely stretch of highway and decide supposedly by eyeballing a truck that it was overloaded and assess the fine and pocket it on the spot.

Who in their right mind would take their truck south of the border?

And working down on the border where my loads were transloaded into Mexican rigs, I got to see some of the wrecks they run up and down the highway. While not all USA trucks are up to par, many of the trucks the Mexicans use would not pass the same inspections USA trucks are given.

While they were running the pilot program allowing Mexican trucks in, I believe I saw some pretty questionable rigs running up and down our highways. I do not believe that these trucks were subjected to the same standards as USA trucks, probably due to political considerations.

Another problem is that while Canadian truckers speak English (and yes I know some of them speak French too), many of the Mexican truckers do not (they can’t even read our road signs).

(In the interests of fair play and full disclosure, I should note that some USA-licensed drivers, some of them from Eastern Europe, do not speak English. I actually watched one of these guys at a warehouse once and the freight receivers could not communicate with him. They had to make hand signals and lead him around and show him what to do with his paper work.)

And you have to understand that once you let an over-the-road truck over the border, it goes all over. It may deliver its original load into the country from Mexico at one place, but then haul other loads within the country between cities and only return to Mexico after hauling several loads.

If Mexico had actual law and order and was not corrupt, and if their truck safety standards and practices were better, it might well have a valid argument that its trucks should be allowed into our country and in turn we could also operate in Mexico.

It is unfortunate to have a dispute with Mexico because it is one of our top trading partners, but realities have to be accepted.

And back to the turmoil in Mexico. I don’t know why it has been downplayed. It threatens Mexico and it also threatens our own security.

Part of the problem is that the U.S. offers such a good market for the south-of-the-border drug cartels. Personal guns are illegal in Mexico, so guns from the U.S., to include high powered assault rifles and other powerful weapons, are basically traded from the north for the drugs from the south.

Combating the drug trade is a tough problem that we have not ever solved in the USA. I find calls to simply “legalize” illicit drugs to be dubious at best (and that was not some kind of marijuana pun – doobie is it?).

But meanwhile I don’t think we should tolerate cross border incursions, be they illegal aliens looking for work or engaged in the drug trade.

We need a military show of force at the border, as well as  a strong commitment of the various appropriate law enforcement agencies where needed to fight the drug cartels. And we should not let up on our enforcement of immigration laws at the workplace in the process.

We may well find that the biggest threat to our security is not in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan or the deserts and urban areas of Iraq but instead at our own southern doorstep.

In the long run we need to work hand in hand with the Calderon administration in Mexico, which from all reports is doing its best to fight both the drug cartels and to turn the tide on corruption that has existed so long in Mexico.

(Copyright 2009)

Oakland, other urban areas need martial law…

 AN UPDATE TO MY ORIGINAL POST:

NOW ON SUNDAY THE DEATH TOLL FROM SATURDAY’S INCIDENTS IN OAKLAND, CA. IS FOUR POLICE OFFICERS  DEAD. But also, in an even more recent update, police officials are now saying that while the fourth officer has been declared brain dead, he is still on life support.

Back to my original post:

Make no mistake, Oakland, Ca. is a dangerous place to be.

It is especially a dangerous place to be a police officer.

Three police officers were killed Saturday and a third gravely wounded (update: he has now been declared brain dead) after two motorcycle officers made a traffic stop.

There are few details as to motive and so on as of this writing.

I feel terrible for the policemen and their families.

I also feel bad for law abiding citizens who must live in constant terror in Oakland and much of the East Bay (and in so many urban areas). I suppose many of them are numb to it all after all these years.

I know the lawlessness in Oakland goes back to at least the 1960s (and I guess before).

Much of it is the result of lingering racial strife ( so much of it is black on black) and the drug trade.

A lot of high minded people, to include former Gov. Of California and former Mayor of Oakland Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown have failed to do much about it.

There have been so many times during my life where I have felt that in Oakland, Richmond (another nearby deadly community) and parts of LA and so many urban areas the only solution is martial law.

Of course that by most people is seen as a kind of hard right wing extremism – and I am not hard right wing, believe me.

But what is the alternative? The law abiding citizens have to live with constant fear and intimidation. And I am not talking race here. I am talking security for civilized humanity.

Why do the civilized have to bend to the ways of the uncivilized?

Again my sympathies to the families of the slain and wounded officers.

Why was BART cop allowed out of state???

(Copyright 2009)

The young white transit cop that shot a reportedly unarmed young black man to death while he was being subdued face down by other officers at a train station in Oakland, Ca. has been arrested in Nevada and was to be brought back to Oakland, it was reported Tuesday evening.

Some say it may be a case in which the cop mistakenly reached for his revolver rather than a stun gun.

In a strange twist of events, the transit officer resigned shortly after the incident and refused to talk to authorities.

I of course was not there and I have seen various videos and cell phone camera shots of the incident on the web along with everyone else in the world who might be interested, but I could not make out exactly what happened to any certainty – but it does not look right.

It seems strange to me that the authorities did not arrest the officer as soon as he resigned or shortly thereafter since he was no longer under any protection from his rights as an officer and no longer had the inducement to stick around for his job (indeed, he was arrested out of state).

While I will not say that it was the right thing to do on the officer’s part, I can kind of understand that he may have felt he had nothing to gain by supplying evidence to the authorities that would likely be turned right back against him (even if his actions were no more than an accident), it seems to me the authorities were wrong or inept in not taking him into custody sooner.

This thing is a tragedy all around:  for the victim of what may be manslaughter or murder, for the policeman, whom I understand was on his first job out of police academy, as a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cop, and the cop’s family who reportedly received death threats, and the community of Oakland, which has a long history of racial and police vs. the citizens problems (it should be noted, though, that this involved BART police, not Oakland police).

And as I blogged last week, I think those who took the violent approach during street demonstrations last week (not all the demonstrators did – but there is that violent contingent), were wrong. Violence is not the answer, especially against third parties, business people who had property damaged and car owners who had their vehicles torched and so on (105 arrests and no less than $200,000 damage). Even the victim’s family asked people not to be violent.

I hate to criticize the police. I understand that there are reports that people were being bothered by hoodlums on the train and the police were trying to sort everything out.

But the evidence so far seems to strongly suggest that an unarmed man already being subdued and who may not have even had anything to do with the incident police were called out on was shot to death. It is hard to figure out a way that can be justified or mitigated.

This incident occurred in the wee hours of New Year’s Day. And yet, the shooting suspect was allowed free all this time, even after he quit his police job and authorities even let him slip out of state. That does not do much to build the confidence of an outraged community.

Hopefully the authorities will now get their act together and move on this case and get this issue settled and hopefully they will improve training for all police and come up with better screening of new hires.

A peaceful demonstration is planned for today (Wednesday).

Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

P.s.  Even if the officer thought he was reaching for his stun gun, I am concerned — that such a thing could happen (there has been at least one previously reported case) and that there have been several reports of fatalities from stun guns.

P.s. Ps.  The news reports say the officer was arrested on murder charges and that extradition from Nevada could take  a few days. I also read that DA’s often overcharge so they can plea bargain down. I suspect the officer will eventually plead or be convicted on a manslaughter charge. And something I read in one account leads me to believe that he likely did get caught up in the moment and thought he was firing his stun gun. I don’t know if the victim was resisting, but this is the kind of incident that proves that it is never wise to resist the police. We law abiding citizens are in a  quandry. We need the police to protect us from the lawbreakers. But who protects us from the police?