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Saturday, November 28, 2015

And the Home of Depraved, Part Three: Season's Bleedings

Here's a feel-good holiday fable involving a gun being used at a Waco Wal-Mart. Talk about coals to Newcastle.
A woman who fired a pistol as a suspect fled in a purse-snatching incident Friday outside a Wal-Mart store in Bellmead appeared at the police station late Friday afternoon to identify herself.

No charges have been filed against her, Bellmead police said Saturday.

Police plan to sit down with the woman for a more in-depth interview in the upcoming week, Bellmead police Detective Kory Martin said.

He said it appears, at least initially, that the woman fired into the air, not at the man.
Even for Texas, this is fucking nuts. Is this what we've fallen to, gunning down petty thieves in the street? Worse yet, she's just goddamned lucky she didn't hit one of the pursuers, an innocent bystander, a kid sitting in a car across the street, etc. This is a busy area in a downtown commercial district. Anything could have happened.

This is a textbook case of "the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" thinking -- except, of course, this bad guy had no weapon at all, and while he's obviously a failed turd of a human being if he's purse-snatching little old ladies a couple days before Thanksgiving, again we do not have the death penalty for such crimes. [Ed. -- Yet.]

So what you have is some dingbat trying to be the hero of whatever revenge-porn narrative is on a loop in her head, a fever-dream mishmash of Making A Difference and Stopping A Criminal. The worst part of it is that she probably has no clue that life turns on a dime, an inch here or there, a second earlier or later, and that it is just the purest of luck that she didn't hurt or kill someone with erh incredible incompetence and negligence. This is not Starsky & Hutch, you stupid twat, this is real life, and people get killed when untrained, unqualified morons go around thinking they're Yosemite Sam or some shit.

That, not to mention most of the comments in the article, is bad enough. There's an interesting cherry on this particular cake:

The man accused of attempting to steal a purse from a shopping cart, Andre Dawson, 27, remained in jail with a $10,000 bond late Saturday under a misdemeanor charge of theft of property and a felony charge of credit or debit card abuse. Martin said if the purse contained a credit or debit card, it would have triggered the credit card charge.

Now that's just a perfect example of how the law has been perverted to become more absurdly cruel, to the point where people are up for charges on crimes they very clearly did not commit. Dawson didn't get away with the purse, so not only did he not have a chance to use the debit and credit cards, he never even found out such things were in the purse.

Again, it's hard to feel sorry for someone who picks on octogenarians, but such measures are clearly in place for no other reason than to give a hardliner judge an additional mechanism to completely shit-hammer a perp he just doesn't like. And if Dawson had physically harmed somebody, anybody -- the old lady, a bystander, a child, a stray cat -- it would make more sense. But he's a fucking dumbass who got caught in the commission of a particularly stupid crime, though not especially lurid in the overall scheme of things.

In the end, it won't matter -- this is Texas, after all, so Dawson will get tagged with a felony charge for a crime he had no chance to commit, while the shoot-'em-up dunce who will never know how close she might have come to killing someone over a fucking purse won't get charged with anything at all. This should be unacceptable, but hell, she'll probably still pack heat to the damned Wal-Mart, even though by all accounts she does not have a license to carry a concealed handgun.

It's no small indicator of what this nation has sunk to, when a nation of people whose great-grandparents came here fleeing various forms of violence and persecution, are much more concerned about Syrian orphans fleeing a government that drops barrel bombs on their houses, than the day-to-day dangers lurking in plain sight. I would be much more concerned about the fat fuck trying to make some bizarre "point" by taking his AR-15 to Target to buy Oreos, or the Helpy Helperton suburban dipshit indiscriminately shooting up a crowded parking lot over a relatively minor property crime, than some "durka durka Mohammed jihad" shenanigans. But try telling that to the yahoos in the comments section, who inexplicably feel safer knowing that there are armed idiots in the supermarkets just itching for an excuse.

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