Friday, August 17, 2012

HOW MANY DEATHS WILL IT TAKE?

LAPLACE, La. Two sheriff's deputies in Louisiana were shot to death and two others were injured in an early-morning shootout west of New Orleans, authorities said Thursday.

Five people - both male and female - are in custody, and two of them are hospitalized, authorities said. They said both wounded deputies and both wounded suspects are expected to survive.
....

Earlier Thursday, a tearful Tregre said that the incident started about 5:30 a.m., when a gunman opened fire for unknown reasons on a deputy working an off-duty job along a highway that connects U.S. Highway 61 with the busy industrial corridor along the Mississippi River. That deputy was wounded.

Tregre said someone called deputies with a description of a car fleeing the scene, and officers tracked it to a nearby mobile home park.
....

"Another person exited that trailer with an assault weapon and ambushed my two officers," Tregre said. Two deputies were killed and a third was wounded.

Two suspects were wounded in the shootout before officers subdued them, Tregre said.
The slain deputies were identified as Brandon Nielsen, 34, and Jeremy Triche, 27. The wounded officers are Jason Triche, 30, and Michael Boyington, 33, identified as the first one shot. They were being treated at area hospitals but the extent of their injuries was not known.
....

"There were more than 20 gunshots," said Col. Mike Edmonson, head of Louisiana State Police, which investigates shootings in which other Louisiana law-enforcement agencies are involved.
The persons arrested were reportedly on watch lists in De Soto Parish, Louisiana, and other states and were under scrutiny by the FBI.  The deaths of the two deputies demonstrate why so many in law enforcement would like to see assault weapons banned. The officers face danger every day as they do their jobs, but should they be at added risk from assault weapons? 
 
How many deaths will it take?  How long before we pass laws to remove assault weapons, the guns that are capable of shooting round after round of bullets, from the hands of citizens?  Those in favor of no gun control reference the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but the foundational document in which we declared ourselves independent of the British, the Declaration of Independence, states:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
What about the right to live?

4 comments:

  1. Memory eternal.

    End the Insanity re Guns!!!

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  2. This gang was bad. We should know more about them tomorrow.

    I want to live in a less violent country, and that country will not be the US in my lifetime, and I am in no position to move to a more peaceful place.

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  3. Prayers for the Triche family especially (Jeremy and Jason--must be brothers or at least cousins?).

    Not to be a contrarian but the major argument against gun control (besides the Second Amendment itself) is that they don't really work. This gang would have gotten those guns even if they were illegal. If a person wants a weapon to kill with, they will get it, whether it's legal or illegal. It may be harder to get it it's illegal, but they'll get it. The only people gun control laws keep from getting guns are the people who would not shoot up their neighbors in the first place.

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  4. The only people gun control laws keep from getting guns are the people who would not shoot up their neighbors in the first place.

    Sorry, I don't buy that line. If I were free and unencumbered, I would move to a less violent country. Our gun laws are insane. Why is the murder rate lower in the rest of the industrialized world? Are people from the US more violent than the Europeans? Make the guns harder to get, much harder to get. We've got to start somewhere.

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