Another Shooting, But No News Coverage
 

On Sunday, 2 days after the CT shooting, a man went to a restaurant in San Antonio to kill his X-girlfriend. After he shot her, most of the people in the restaurant fled next door to a theater. The gunman followed them and entered the theater so he could shoot more people. He started shooting and people in the theater started running and screaming. It's like the Aurora, CO theater story plus a restaurant! Now aren't you wondering why this isn't a lead story in the national media along with the school shooting? There was an off duty county deputy at the theater. SHE pulled out her gun and shot the man 4 times before he had a chance to kill anyone. So since this story makes the point that the best thing to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun, the media is treating it like it never happened. Only the local media covered it. The city is giving her a medal next week. Just thought you'd like to know.


Two wounded in theater shooting - San Antonio Express-News

Read the article.

And some national news outlets did cover it. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-...tonio-theater/

I certainly don't think it was part of a huge conspiracy to surpress news of this sort.


I guess maybe some think it is heartening but it sounds like more bad news to me.

"At one point, the suspect fired at a San Antonio Police Department patrol car, Antu said.

'He was shooting at a marked unit,' Antu said. 'He knows he was shooting at an officer so that's (an) automatic (charge of) attempted capital murder.'

After the suspect reached the theater, an off duty Bexar County Sheriff officer who was working at the theater shot at him and possibly struck him, Antu said.

'She took all appropriate action to keep everyone safe in the movie theater,' Antu said.

Tara Grace, who was getting a drink from the concession stand when the shooting began, ran into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall with five other patrons to avoid the mayhem.

'We thought we were going to die,' she said."


The article kind of makes it sound like this man was trying to get himself killed by a cop but few had a clue about what to do.


Read more: Two wounded in theater shooting - San Antonio Express-News


I found it reported in national news sources. It's an AP (Associated Press) story. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-...tonio-theater/

I saw this on the news. There was coverage.

I did not see it but the Associated Press did pick it up. I (and many others) used to index PR Newswire for Information Access Company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_Newswire This looks like something that the National Media were aware of through PR Newswire and probably other sources but the facts of the San Antonio shooting look rather confusing when you do research on them.

San Antonio Movie Theater Shooting: Gunman Shoots 1 In Theater Parking Lot

[QUOTE=Figmo Bohica;601636]On Sunday, 2 days after the CT shooting, a man went to a restaurant in San Antonio to kill his X-girlfriend. It's like the Aurora, CO theater story plus a restaurant! Now aren't you wondering why this isn't a lead story in the national media along with the school shooting? There was an off duty county deputy at the theater. SHE pulled out her gun and shot the man 4 times before he had a chance to kill anyone. So since this story makes the point that the best thing to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun, the media is treating it like it never happened. :blahblahblah::blahblahblah:

_______________

After the Aurora theater shooting, there were many posters who commented that IF moviegoers had pistols of their own, the crazy shooter would have been killed in a barrage of bullets fired at him. I do not know if Colorado has a lot of people carrying concealed weapons. I am figuring that Texas (especially San Antonio) has lots of people carrying concealed weapons even in a theater. It was an off duty police officer who shot the crazed shooter - and I believe most jurisdictions require off duty officers to carry a pistol - and it was NOT one of the moviegoers who shot the crazed shooter.

It was a well-trained police officer who shot and NOT a bunch of wannabee cowboys not used to shooting under stress and no telling where the cowboys' bullets would have ended up. It could have been massive collateral damage.

[quote=buggyone;601743]From what I read there was a lot of shooting going on and very few of these shots hit anything.

Not sure of the facts though as the articles I looked at are all over the place as to what actually happened.


I am aware that in the Old West the gunfighters had huge reputations because they could remain calm and aim carefully while shooting at others shooting back in a careless manner. Most people though armed could not remain calm.

Hope 2013 brings in a new year, without all of the talk of guns and gun controls.

You make it sound like the off-duty deputy was possibly there just to enjoy a movie, perhaps..... and made the split second decision to engage the shooter. She was there working SECURITY. She did her job as she has been trained by the sheriff's dept, & I'm glad she did. This was not some common citizen with a concealed carry permit.

"Detective Louis Antu, spokesman for the Bexar County Sherriff's Office, said the shooting began at a nearby China Garden and “carried on into the theater.”

At one point, the suspect fired at a San Antonio Police Department patrol car, Antu said.

“He was shooting at a marked unit,” Antu said. “He knows he was shooting at an officer so that's (an) automatic (charge of) attempted capital murder.”

After the suspect reached the theater, an off duty Bexar County Sheriff officer who was working at the theater shot at him and possibly struck him, Antu said.

“She took all appropriate action to keep everyone safe in the movie theater,” Antu said."

(bold accent added by me)

Two wounded in theater shooting - San Antonio Express-News

some can continue to hop, wish, day dream or what ever....the gun vs anti gun argument....not discussion.....ARGUMENT....for years and the turn of a new year will have no impact on the continuation of the argument.

There may be many more of us who are trained to return fire in a shoot back situation. To pander on and on about how many are or are not is as productive as determining who washes their hands after using the restroom!!!! That exercise solves nothing nor adds value either.

btk

"There may be many more of us who are trained to return fire in a shoot back situation."

If you are trained to return fire in a shoot back situation, you would be a welcome addition to the gun carrying community. A person who just carries but is not trained in stressful shooting situations is a liability and a danger to those around the situation.

The wannabee cowboys and wannabee policemen are hazards.

“So since this story makes the point that the best thing to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun, the media is treating it like it never happened.” Figmo Bohica

“I found it reported in national news sources.” Taltarzac725

Yes, it was reported in the national press. But most significantly, the Newtown shooting received almost continuous coverage in print, broadcast, and online media, while the San Antonio shooting was reported sporadically in the press. I personally had no knowledge of the San Antonio shooting until reading this post.

“I certainly don't think it was part of a huge conspiracy to suppress news of this sort.” Graciegirl

Agreed – I don’t think there’s a conspiracy of news organizations to suppress news.

However, I do believe that one’s world view influences what one thinks is news worthy. Almost all the news coverage of the Newtown tragedy includes an implication that new federal legislation restricting gun ownership (i.e., better gun control) is the universal antidote to mass shootings/killings. And since the San Antonio news story supports a different narrative (the best thing to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun) most media deem it not news worthy...at least in terms of volume and amplitude of the coverage.

What about mentally ill people being one of the principal causes of mass killings where guns are simply their weapon of choice? Think back to many of the most recent, news-worthy shootings; many of these shootings were the work of mentally-ill individuals.

Do you remember several decades back when mentally ill people were routinely institutionalized? What happened? Well, society has undergone a long-term change called deinstitutionalization. The following passage between the **** is from Wikipedia.
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Deinstitutionalization is the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability.

Deinstitutionalization works in two ways: the first focuses on reducing the population size of mental institutions by releasing patients, shortening stays, and reducing both admissions and readmission rates; the second focuses on reforming mental hospitals' institutional processes so as to reduce or eliminate reinforcement of dependency, hopelessness, learned helplessness, and other maladaptive behaviors.

According to psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, deinstitutionalization has been an overall benefit for most psychiatric patients, though many have been left homeless and without care. The deinstitutionalization movement was initiated by three factors:
• A socio-political movement for community mental health services and open hospitals;
• The advent of psychotropic drugs able to manage psychotic episodes;
• A financial imperative to shift costs from state to federal budgets.

According to American psychiatrist Loren Mosher, most deinstitutionalization in the USA took place after 1972, as a result of the availability of SSI, long after the antipsychotic drugs were used universally in state hospitals.

According to psychiatrist and author Thomas Szasz, deinstitutionalization is the policy and practice of transferring homeless, involuntarily hospitalized mental patients from state mental hospitals into many different kinds of de facto psychiatric institutions funded largely by the federal government. These federally subsidized institutions began in the United States and were quickly adopted by most Western governments. The plan was set in motion by the Community Mental Health Act as a part of John F. Kennedy's legislation and passed by the U.S. Congress in 1963, mandating the appointment of a commission to make recommendations for "combating mental illness in the United States".

In many cases the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the Western world from the 1960s onward has translated into policies of "community release". Individuals who previously would have been in mental institutions are no longer continuously supervised by health care workers. Some experts, such as E. Fuller Torrey, have considered deinstitutionalization to be a failure, while some consider many aspects of institutionalization to have been worse.
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Another world view is to judge everything using the “black or white” model, i.e., it’s good or bad. The alternative world view is to recognize that everything (every product, every decision, every political system, and every (fill in the blank)) has both pros and cons.

Deinstitutionalization is good for the freedom of individuals. (PRO)
Deinstitutionalization is bad for the prevention of gun violence by mentally ill people who stop taking their psychotropic medications. (CON)

Gun ownership is good for the freedom of individuals. (PRO)
Gun ownership is bad for the prevention of gun violence by mentally ill people who stop taking their psychotropic medications. (CON)

SO, is deinstitutionalization or gun ownership the cause of gun violence? Or is it possible that both deinstitutionalization and gun ownership are both factors in mass shootings? Is it possible that neither is THE cause of gun violence?

Is it possible that over-simplification (gun ownership is the cause of gun violence) is not helpful to understanding and solving a complex social issue?...but that it DOES support an agenda promoted by many national leaders and media organizations?

Is it possible that the nature of the media (commercial success of for-profit news organizations is driven by the need for catchy headlines and appeal to a mass-audience) contributes to the over-simplification of complex issues?

Except that there are 57.5 or so million people who have some kind of mental illness each year according to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Sec...ontentID=53155 And, if you read much of Thomas Szasz' work he seemed to be against the type of psychiatry you would find practiced in many institutions. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/he...-92.html?_r=1&

Guns of a military type can kill many people in very little time. Is this just not common sense to try to limit access to these weapons to anyone who might pick up a weapon of this type to commit any kind of crime be it a robbery, hijacking, drive by shooting, assassination, mass murder, domestic dispute involving violence.

And, that San Antonio shooting makes it sound like no body really knew what they were doing at least the actual reports from San Antonio look like that. Maybe not the reports that have a huge political spin on them.

Let’s start with what we are trying to accomplish...what’s our goal. If the goal is to gut the second-amendment, or ban private gun ownership, then I’m against it. If the goal is to eliminate (or dramatically reduce) deaths from guns (whether assault guns or regular guns) that fall into the wrong hands by passing some restrictive legislation, then I’d support that initiative. However, I don’t believe an assault weapons ban would accomplish that.

Prohibition lasted from 1920-1933. Despite the overall consumption of alcohol declining by half in the 1920s, Prohibition was repealed. “Anti-prohibitionists criticized the alcohol ban as an intrusion of mainly rural Protestant ideals on a central aspect of urban, immigrant and Catholic everyday life.” (Wikipedia) So the national social experiment failed despite resulting in a dramatic reduction in the consumption of alcohol.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) lasted from 1994-2004. In this former U.S. law, the legal term “assault weapon” included certain specific semi-automatic firearm models by name (like AK-47s and Uzis) AND other semi-automatic firearms because they had a minimum set of cosmetic features. The gun industry easily found ways around the law and most of these weapons continued to be sold in post-ban models virtually identical to the guns Congress sought to ban in 1994.

So, how did the AWB work out? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied the assault weapon ban and other gun control attempts, and found "insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence." A 2004 critical review of research on firearms by a National Research Council panel also noted that academic studies of the assault weapon ban "did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence.” Thus, despite a desire to conclude that gun controls reduced gun violence, two independent federal entities (CDCP and NRC) were unable to reach that conclusion. It might seem like common sense; however data-based decisions are better than intuition-based (“common sense”) decisions.

Opponents of the AWB claim that its expiration has seen little if any increase in crime, while Senator Diane Feinstein claims the ban was effective because "it was drying up supply and driving up prices." This argument of raising street prices for a controlled substance has been used before...it’s the primary argument of the war on drugs. “In June 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report on the War on Drugs, declaring ‘The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.’ Years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed." (Wikipedia) So, the common-sense approach of drying up supply and driving up prices has been discredited in another context.

So, we’ve come full circle. Depending on the specifics, I’d be willing to support a legislative initiative that had some chance of reducing gun violence. But, the same old AWB isn’t going to be more effective now than it was from 1994-2004.

I’d support federal legislation that limits the rights of certain citizens to possess guns of any type. How about no guns (purchase or possession) for anyone who has ever taken psychotropic drugs or was ever admitted to an insane asylum; all convicted felons; anyone convicted of any legal offense (whether crime or misdemeanor) where ANY type of weapon was used or threatened, including juveniles whose record is eventually expunged? Then, we have to be willing to enforce those laws.