The Violence Policy Center (VPC) calls them “Concealed Carry Killers“: Americans with a legal right to carry a concealed weapon who misuse that right and, well, kill someone. Their stats on the subject are more than a bit misleading; the VPC depends on pending charges and suicides to inflate the numbers. But it’s an extremely effective (i.e. irrational) angle of attack on legal gun ownership. Which I though the gun grabbers had agreed to acknowledge as a right after the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court decisions incorporated the right to keep and bear arms (trumps local and state law). Anyway, the VPC can add yesterday’s Seattle spree killer to the list. usatoday.com . . .
Records released today show the man who killed five people and himself in Seattle had a concealed-carry permit and owned at least six handguns, including two .45-caliber semiautomatic pistols used in Wednesday’s bloodbath.
Six! Maybe it’s time to look at legal gun ownership from the Scottish perspective. Even though Ian L. Stawicki didn’t use all six firearms during his murderous rampage.
The Seattle Times reports that the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office issued Stawicki a concealed-carry permit in 1996 valid through 2015. (Until now, obvs.) The paper also writes that he “appears to have legally obtained the permits, including two issued by Seattle police in 1996 and in 2005.”
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Emerald City bureaucrats missed an opportunity to disarm Mr. Stawicki. Records released by the Seattle City Attorney’s Office reveal that Stawicki, bought a .45 caliber pistol in 2008 in Bothell [WA] a month after a court dismissed a misdemeanor assault charge thusly
Police officers were called to the Magnolia home of Stawicki and his then-girlfriend to find the victim with a bloody nose and crying. She told police he struck her and destroyed several of her belongings, and that in recent months, he’d begun breaking things and flying into rages, according to the police report.
But the victim later recanted her story. “Ian Stawicki never assaulted me on Feb 27, 2008 or at any other time. He never punched me or hit me in the nose, face or any part of my body,” she wrote in the statement.
“I suffer from frequent spontaneous nose bleeds and was experiencing such a spontaneous nose bleed on Feb 27 2008,” she wrote. “The police must have thought this nose bleed was the result of an assault by Ian Stawicki. I told police that my nose bleed was spontaneous and not the result of any assault, because no assault occurred.”
Of course we all know that whether or not Mr. Stawicki had legal access to a gun he could have obtained one illegally to unleash his homicidal fury. Right?