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“I get cases every week: someone’s driving down the street and there’s an incident of road rage. People used to raise their finger and shake it at the other driver. Now they’re raising a handgun.” Wichita Police Lt. Jeff Gilmore, quoted in Police seek answers, reversal as aggravated assaults surge [via kansas.com]

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36 COMMENTS

  1. Dude’s shilling for shot spotter and shell casing DBs as “effective tools.” Where have they been effective at? Kind of curious.

    Also out of the number of aggravated assaults in 2016 less than 10% were involving a firearm. Perhaps there are other people related factors that should be examined?

    ED:It’s around 5% plus or minus a bit. Lets keep an idea of how relevant these numbers actually are. Grouping non-gun assaults in with gun related assaults is 100% numbers padding.

    • ShotSpotter is a colossal scam. The false alert rate on it is so high, cities generally end up shifting to ignoring it and then to dismantling the system altogether.

      Even if the system does happen to triangulate a position correctly, it doesn’t lead to a higher arrest rate because– and you might want to sit down for this– people who fire guns in urban areas tend to not stick around waiting for the cops to show up and ask questions.

      Oakland CA, of all places, dismantled their system, but not before hundreds of thousands of dollars have been wasted on it, so at least it’s useful for something.

      In all instances, the money would have been better spent on a beat cop’s salary.

      ShotSpotter, like gun control laws, is an easy and wrong answer that doesn’t work but makes for a quick headline that sounds like somebody whose job it is to do stuff is doing something.

      • Any US Navy Submarine Sonar Tech could tell you it can’t be done with the chump change they are trying to do it with. And yes, when it comes to something like this, hundreds of thousands or even a couple of million, is chump change. It’s a lot of money for a town or even a city, but not enough to do anything more than line the pockets of the vendors and the government officials standing on the sidelines cheer leading the concept.

      • Phoenix has used Shotspotter for many years now, and I can find only one instance when it actually helped; the man arrested was wounded and couldn’t move, so any “shots fired” call would have done the same thing. That was in 2009. I suppose it’s possible that other arrests have been made using shotspotter, but I would think the city would want to advertise that fact, both to make it look like a good investment, and as a deterrent. But, no.

        I find it interesting that so many cities are having problems getting people to make those “shots fired” calls. Probably because in so many cases, the police show up too late to catch a perp (which isn’t helped by shotspotter at all), and the people figure why bother?

        • Chicago’s wasted a metric shitload of money on the technology for years. All it does is give the powers that be something to point at during press conferences.

        • Officials who approve a system demonstrated in other cities to be useless should be charged for it when their city decides to get rid of it.

    • I’m not sure if shot-spotter is successful through bribery\connections- likely- or if it has just captured the zeitgeist in large, liberal cities that demands that the government spend tons of money or something as if that automatically helps a problem.

      • It’s Solyndra all over again but on a local basis. Just like the TSA it’s theater. Another lamprey eel on the side of government.

      • I don’t think that anybody is surprised that Chicago would spend a lot of money on ShotSpotter. You just can’t ignore that cash flow.

  2. This is the quote I would have posted:

    “The bottom line is we have got law-abiding citizens who have never owned a firearm before, that haven’t been properly trained, never been to a shooting range, never taken a class, but they think, ‘Gosh darn it, I can carry a firearm and I’m going to do it,’ ” Gilmore said. “I absolutely respect that, and I understand.”

    • Yeah, I betcha there are two, maybe even three people like that in Wichita, Kansas. Oh, the crime wave! (Here, that means waving your gun at your bud, I guess, I’m not hearing about people shot.)

  3. Before everybody on both sides gets their panties in a bunch one has to consider the novelty of open carry. I am sure there are a lot of people who have started to carry because they can who will discover that they don’t have the temperament to carry a gun. Most will give it up, some will develop the temperament and a small fraction won’t get the meassage and might be a problem. The experience of other states that permit unlicensed open carry would indicate that over the long run it has no impact on rates of aggravated assault.

    • I doubt it even rises to that low level. The original article tosses out some figures here and there, but it isn’t consistent on year to year comparisons, nor in zeroing in on data to support the specific claims being made.

      Sounds like a whole lot of paralogizing by an anti-2A LEO throwing open carriers under the bus in exchange for some new high dollar, low value toys.

  4. That article is full of hooey. Consider this example,

    Drive-bys in which firearms were used leaped 50 percent. The number of aggravated assaults in which shots were fired increased by nearly 50 percent.

    That would be gang activity. Joe Plumber and Sandy Soccer Mom do not, I repeat, DO NOT participate in drive-by shootings.

    Such criminal activity is CRIMINAL GANG activity. Any recent changes to firearm laws in Kansas have nothing to do with CRIMINAL GANG activity … nor will tweaking or repealing firearm laws affect CRIMINAL GANG activity.

    • Actually, according to John Lott’s extensive research, repealing firearm laws would probably affect gang activity. The more potential victims that carry, the less potential victimhood.

    • A 50% rise in drive-by shootings, eh? What, did they have two last month instead of one?

      Sounds less definitive if you use the real numbers.

  5. Oh sure, people who conceal carry would never (hardly ever) draw their handgun instead of a finger. Moron.

  6. Open carry is a problem? Virginia has ALWAYS had open carry because there was never a law against it. You have always been able to open carry or have a gun in your car as long as it is in plain sight. It has never been a problem or issue.

    He wants to use $190,000 to implement ShotSpotter in a very limited area to see how well it would work. Imagine how much more effective the $190,000 would be if it was spent on more police presence in the same area.

    • All shotspotter does is act as a “shots fired” call. Nothing more.
      Maybe that money could be spent on finding a way to actually get people to make those calls?

  7. This is bogus… the road ragers have always been carrying guns. That’s just as true in Kansas. Wichita has had problems with gangs and criminal shootouts between gangs and civilians too for many years. (I know someone who lived in Wichita.) To pretend all this is new is bogus on the part of that sheriff. He sounds like a political type who just wants to take away our gun rights. Here in Wisconsin, we’ve had open carry for ten years: crime rates are the lowest we’ve seen since the early 1960s. There are problems in Milwaukee, where the meth users have taken over or where the Department of Corrections releases parolees but most of the state is quite safe.

    • “Here in Wisconsin, we’ve had open carry for ten years: crime rates are the lowest we’ve seen since the early 1960s.”

      Sorry Buzz, not true – don’t know where you get that from… We’ve had legal concealed carry for just over 5 years, but we’ve had open carry for nearly 170 years, since 1848!!! Wisconsin has never regulated OC in any way, and I’ve been practicing it daily (except in winter) for nearly 7 years.

  8. I need some help. Is he perhaps talking about the “constitutional carry” law in 2015? Kansas has always allowed open carry as, basically, it is a part of their constitution. Vehicle carry has nothing to do with open carry.

    • We could correlate any increase to the 2016 election cycle, the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, or the recent 17-year Cicada brood hatch.

  9. I live in Wichita, KS and I cant say Ive heard this anywhere locally (admittedly I dont waste much time on the news). We’ve had open carry for years, and nobody cares. There have been issues in the old town area and gang related violence of course, but I wouldnt say theres been any particular rise in rage induced brandishing. Kansas is arguably the most gun friendly state in the country these days

  10. “Wichita has seen aggravated assault cases jump more than 50 percent since 2013, before the new “open carry” law took effect.”

    Not after? What’s that thing about correlation?

    Shell casings are like fingerprints for a gun? That’s a new one on me. Here’s a clue: you can often find actual fingerprints on shell casings.

    And Shot Spotter? Didn’t SF dump that?

    • “Shell casings are like fingerprints for a gun? That’s a new one on me. Here’s a clue: you can often find actual fingerprints on shell casings.”

      In some (a few) cases, casings can have markings that will identify the gun they were fired from, IF the gun has some sort of imperfection that leaves a distinctive mark on the case.
      But the actual effectiveness of this is given the lie by California’s requirement for shell casing marking (micro-stamping); and event hat doesn’t work reliably, according to the very people that came up with the idea in the first place.
      So, no, shell casings are definitely not like fingerprints for a gun, except in a very few cases. Even then, you have to actually have the gun to make any such connection.

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