A doctor living in the tony Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago was jailed on Friday after he fired a shot from a revolver through the wall of his apartment and into the one next door on Wednesday. Luckily, he injured nothing but the kitchen backsplash in that apartment. Michael Olivieri (above) told prosecutors he thought he’d replaced the live ammo in the revolver with dummy rounds when he laid it on his kitchen island. For some reason, he decided to squeeze the trigger as it lay there, telling police he “squeezed the trigger as a nervous tic like squeezing a tennis ball.” Investigating officers confiscated eight guns, including at least one rifle, and prosecutors say none of them were registered. When police came to pick him up on Friday . . .
he told them he had a ninth gun he’d forgotten to tell them about on Wednesday, stored in his car in the parking garage. He faces a felony charge of reckless discharge of a firearm and was cited for the unregistered guns. As of Saturday, he was being held on $10,000 bail.
Your Lockdown of the Day™ comes from a hospital today, instead of a school. The Hennepin County (MN) Medical Center was “forced into” lockdown for about 90 minutes Saturday after a visitor threatened another visitor with a gun. The two individuals were visiting two separate patients when they became involved in a verbal altercation in the hallway, resulting in one “making a gun threat to the other.” No more info on the nature of the threat is available, but it was overheard by staff who activated their emergency plan and notified police around 11 a.m. The individual who made the threat fled the hospital before the lockdown was in place, and during the following 90 minutes police set up a cordon around the building and searched the inside for firearms, finding none. Nobody was injured, and everyone patted each other on the back for how smoothly their procedures had been followed.
Although most of us here would loudly decry the system under which it’s necessary to operate to possess firearms in Merry Olde England, I found this case interesting in the sensibility with which it was handled. Imagine what the penalty would be if you were found to be in possession of a silencer without paperwork, or in a state where firearms registration is (unconstitutionally) required, without the paperwork for those firearms. Last week, a judge in Warwickshire, England found that there was “nothing sinister” in a man’s possession without certificates of two shotguns, a Winchester .22 rifle, a silencer, and hollow-point .22LR ammunition (all of which require certificates to own). Because of the lack of mens rea, he sentenced the man to only two months in prison, suspended for two years, with two years of supervision. Basically, that amounts to two years of probation for some rather egregious violations of their firearms laws. Even if you disagree with their laws, it’s hard to deny that this judge has his head on straight.
How well do you know your neighbors? When an aged man in Brentwood, England died suddenly on April 2nd, his 31-year-old neighbor and caretaker called police to say she thought they should come get the guns out of his house. She knew he had some, and that he kept them under lock and key, but what police found was far beyond what anyone expected. In addition to his legal store of weapons, he also had a machine gun of some sort, six deactivated hand grenades, bulk gunpowder, and a collection of World War II memorabilia that included two foot-long bombs, one of which was still live. Police called in Explosives Ordnance Department to remove and dispose of the items, while the caretaker and others got busy clutching their pearls and gasping because “The whole street could have gone up.” Why can I never find cool stuff like this?
Demolition Ranch demonstrates “The Most Tactical Reload” of a shotgun, ever. I could practice for literally days and not get this to work right.
I don’t know how many failed takes they had, but I’m just going to say that he got it on the first try, and raise a glass.
Hickok45 flings some 405 grain hardcast lead bullets at a cinderblock wall at 250 yards. What a beautiful rifle.
I absolutely love the sight of a bullet flying downrange leaving a mirage in its wake.