The Return of the Rifleman

You all know that "The Rifleman" is one of my favorite old TV Westerns. Now I like it because Lucas McCain is always coming to town and shooting minorities and Indians and bad guys. He kills at least three or four of them every episode and nobody demands gun control. Not even the schoolmarm. How America has changed.

The plots of this half hour show are almost always the same. Something bad is happening. Maybe it is bank robbers. Or a gunfighter looking for trouble. Or rampaging Indians or Mexican criminals. The law in the form of Sheriff Micah can't handle it. So Lucas McCain takes his gun off the wall and goes to town and shoots the miscreants. No plea bargains. No protests. No Bank Robbers Lives Matters. No coddling criminals and fighting for sentence reductions. Just a couple of slugs to the gut so the scum bags could bleed out in the street.

You see the law can't handle it anymore. The Ferguson effect has blunted law enforcement and ended any realistic ability for the police to end mass shooting. Look at what happened in Vegas. Look at how long it took the cops to respond. How many TV shows have you seen where the hero cop ignores the brass and bursts in to shoot the bad guys. Well that doesn't happen anymore in real life. Now they wait for the negotiator. They wait for approval of the lawyers and the politician. Meanwhile the shooter is inside the school killing more people.

Stephen Willeford is the Rifleman. He took his AR-15 off of the wall and went out after the bad guy without a thought. He didn't even put on his shoes. He shot him and chased him off before he could shoot more babies in the head. I don't know if I could have done that. I doubt I would have been as effective as an NRA rifle instructor. It is is good to know that there are people like him still around. I bet there are a lot of good guys with guns who are going to follow his example. In the tradition of Lucas McCain.

The Rifleman lives.

Thoughts and prayers ...

From my sister's neighborhood

"Police engaged in gunfire with the man and an officer was shot in the head, but he was saved by his helmet"

Daily Mail:  A suspected Islamic extremist wielding an assault rifle and a handgun has killed about 20 people after taking party-goers hostage inside a gay club in Orlando.

The gunman was carrying a suspicious device, possibly a suicide vest, when he opened fire on the dance floor inside Pulse in the early hours of this morning.

Orlando Police Chief John Mina said authorities have not determined the exact number of people killed, but that 'approximately 20' have died. Another 42 people were taken to hospital.

An FBI spokesman said the mass shooting is being investigated as an act of terrorism, adding that they are looking into whether this was an act of domestic or international terror, and if the shooter was a lone wolf.

"Two mass shootings, two completely different standards of coverage"

"Planned Parenthood was ‘right wing terror,’ but with Islam suddenly ‘motives don’t matter’"

Last month, when a Colorado Christian entered a Planned Parenthood clinic and fatally shot three people, the mainstream media rushed to make the connection to “right-wing domestic terrorism,” even though police hadn’t made any connection and the evidence was thin.

When two California Muslims shot up a government office several days later, massacring 14, national journalists refused to call it Islamic terrorism even though evidence of the shooters’ motive was overwhelming. (read the whole thing)

"14 Dead, 14 More Wounded In San Bernardino"

Fourteen people were confirmed killed and 14 more wounded in a mass shooting at a San Bernardino community social services building.

“We do have some preliminary numbers of upwards of 14 people that are dead and upwards of 14 people that are injured,” said Chief Jarrod Burguan of San Bernardino Police.

The shooting that was first reported at about 10:59 a.m. at the Inland Regional Center, 1365 South Waterman Avenue. The gunfire erupted in a conference room being rented by an outside group, according to Mary Beth Fields of the Inland Regional Center. She said she was not aware of which outside group, but another worker told reporters he believed the group was a San Bernardino County public agency. (read more)

The Independent: Seth Rogen 'horrified' at suggestion his work inspired mass murderer's shooting rampage

"Seth Rogen has expressed his outrage at an article that suggested films he has starred in inspired mass murderer Elliot Rodger to go on a shooting rampage in California against women over the weekend."

Ann Hornaday, a film critic for the Washington Post, pin-pointed the work of the actor and famed comedy director Judd Apatow as possible motivation for the killing spree, which ended the lives of six young people and injured 13 more.

She wrote that “mass entertainment has been overwhelmingly controlled by white men, whose escapist fantasies so often revolve around vigilantism and sexual wish-fulfilment (often, if not always, featuring a steady through-line of casual misogyny).”

Seth Rogen

“How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like Bad Neighbours and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut-out of college life that should be full of ‘sex and fun and pleasure’?” she continued. (read more)

Others at stuff.co.nz argue that Mental Illness, not Misogyny, made Elliot Rodger kill.

"What to make of a disturbed young man who rants about killing women in revenge for them not having sex with him, who then murders two, as well as four men?"

There's not much to like about Elliot Rodger - entitled, self-pitying, vain, insecure, histrionic, materialistic, racist, boastful and ungrateful - yet it's difficult for any of us to judge how many of these attributes arose from mental health issues or were simply the result of a nasty little mind. Our knowledge of him is incomplete... 

Much has been made of Rodger's misogyny, yet he stabbed these three Asian men to death and mutilated their bodies. Think about the sort of mind needed to do something like that, then move calmly on to your next victims? Ask yourself if they're the actions of a sane man? (read more)

What do you believe was the cause of the murderous rampage, misogyny, mental illness, both?

News: 7 Dead in "Mass Murder" Drive-By Shootings Near UC Santa Barbara

"Seven people are dead and seven injured after a swift and deadly “mass murder” rampage by a gunman who plowed through the streets in a black BMW, spraying bullets into Friday night crowds in the Southern California seaside town of Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara."

"The gunman -- identified by an attorney for his father as Elliot Rodger -- was later involved in at least one shootout with sheriff's deputies and died of a gunshot wound to the head, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said at a Saturday morning news conference." (read more)

Suspected video of suspected now deceased gunman