Grand Rapids police seek suspect shot during Leonard Street party store robbery

Police are searching for a man who was shot as he allegedly robbed a Leonard Street party store at gunpoint Friday evening.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the man was shot or how much cash the suspect stole from the store

I guess they mean it wasn’t released to the press how the man was shot. An update to the story indicates that a man with a gunshot wound was brought to the hospital shortly after the incident.

Here’s how the suspect was described in the story:

a 5-foot-8 male, with a very thin build

That’s it.

Christmas present comes in handy:

A teen trying to rob an espresso stand in northern Idaho met his match in a gun-toting barista.

Police say the 17-year-old confronted Sunshine Espresso owner Michelle Cornelson with a gun Wednesday morning, demanding all her money.

Plans, however, often don’t survive first contact with the enemy. This victim was armed with a Kel-Tec her husband had given her for Chirstmas. Robbers hate that sort of thing, so he ran. He was quickly caught.

Gunman kills 5 in Finland, then self

A gunman clad in black went on a shooting rampage Thursday, killing his ex-girlfriend then slaying four workers at a suburban shopping mall near Helsinki before apparently turning his gun on himself, police said.

Finnish police said one woman and three men were shot dead Thursday morning at the Sello shopping mall in Espoo, six miles west of Helsinki.

And this:

The ex-girlfriend, a Finnish woman born in 1967, also worked at the mall and had taken out a restraining order against Shkupolli, police said.

Restraining orders only work for those who abide by the law. Of course, few law abiders are really enough of a threat to require a restraining order in the first place. In any event, a court order won’t stop a determined killer any more than a law against killing will.

It sounds as if he killed the ex-girlfriend in a nearby apartment, went to the mall and killed four mall workers, then went back to his apartment and killed himself. Authorities haven’t said whether the mall workers were specifically targeted, but it sounds like he went there with a purpose and left when he had completed it.

A witness said he used a “long-barreled pistol.”

Pizza Hut employee shoots would-be robber

A police report said Spencer Simmons, 44, attempted to rob the Pizza Hut on Broadway Street at about 11 p.m. Wednesday.

The report said Simmons pointed a .25 Raven Arms semi-automatic handgun at the store’s cashier and demanded money. The cashier loaded about $720 into a small bag.

Simmons wasn’t aware that a delivery man, Michael Shaker, had heard the commotion and snuck to the back as well, the report said.

Shaker shot the robber in the back of the head. I’m a little fuzzy about how he managed that if the criminal tried to point his gun at Shaker after a verbal warning, but all’s well that ends well.

Last I heard, Pizza Hut policy forbids weapons. Will Shaker lose his job over this?

And failed:

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

When scam artist Raymond “Ready” Martinez held the MAC-10-style gun parallel to the ground, it caused the ejecting shells to “stovepipe,” or get caught vertically in the chamber, the sources said.

Ha ha. What a jackass. Via Rummel.

Florida:

Gary Wroblewski says he was watching television in the Silver Springs Shores neighborhood off County Road 464 late Monday night when someone knocked on his door.

Wroblewski slightly cracked open the door and found a man claiming he needed help with his broken down car. He says he was immediately suspicious of the man and his story.

“So I went and got my gun. I held it behind the door and I opened the door,” said Wroblewski.

Wroblewski says he tried to send the man away and suggested he go to another house or call AAA. He says that is when another man, this one wearing a mask, appeared out of nowhere and forced his door open.

Wroblewski was knocked out his wheelchair but was able to hold onto his gun and shot the masked invader.

This is a great example of why even the magic wand solution to gun control, the one where all guns everywhere disappear forever, would be a Bad Thing. The story doesn’t say whether the bad guys had any weapons whatsoever, but if the homeowner had not had a gun he would have been powerless.

The same thing goes for old people, women, and most men. You do not want to fight a bad guy on even terms.

John Allen Muhammad Is Executed in Virginia

My guess is that the afterlife ain’t all he was expectin’.

One dead, one wounded by jury nullification anarchist on Halloween in Seattle.

Fretting about the FN 5.7 reportedly used by the Ft. Hood killer, because gun control advocates call it a ‘cop killer’.

Despite the hand wringing over the ability of armor piercing ammo, to, um, pierce armor, it doesn’t seem likely that any of the victims were wearing armor at the time of the incident. So that hand wringing, like so much of it in the press, is pointless.

For what it’s worth, this gun seems like a curious selection for someone who was planning to do this. Did things go differently than he planned? Had he originally planned to do something different?

Anyway, while some worry about the dangerous model of gun he used, the rest of us will know it’s the man who is the problem, not the tool. After all, it wasn’t the ‘cop killer’ gun that made him shoot the wounded again.

UPDATE: Confederate Yankee notes that Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who was wounded while fighting Hasan, might be the first law enforcement agent ever hit by this ‘cop killer’ gun.

UPDATE 2: Wow. This ‘cop killer’ thing is getting more attention than I would have thought, given that it has no basis in reality. Should have known better.

Anyway, the ‘cop killer’ aspect, even as portrayed by the antis, only comes into play if armor piercing ammo is used. I don’t know for sure, but I haven’t seen any reports indicating that Hasan actually used AP ammo, which isn’t available through normal civilian outlets. Hasan is, of course, military, but that doesn’t mean he had access to the military and LE only armor piercing ammo. Remember that his gun was a civilian purchase.

For what it’s worth, not only is the Five-seveN an odd choice for this sort of thing, but it would probably would be LESS lethal with AP ammo against unarmored targets.

I’ve had two people say something to the effect of “it’s hard to believe this massacre could happen on an Army base where everyone is a soldier and there are so many guns around,” meaning that lots of people should have been able to defend themselves.

Obviously, these people haven’t spent a lot of time on base.

I don’t know the regs for Fort Hood, but military bases are often pretty “gun free” in the sense that personnel aren’t issued weapons and generally not allowed to carry unless it’s part of their duties. So pretty much just MPs. It’s not like all the 11B infantrymen are walking around in armor with a loaded M4.

I thought I had posted about some new rules a while back that were trying to control personal weapons off base, also, but I can’t find it right now.

Suffice it to say that the personnel on Fort Hood had no real chance to defend themselves against Nidal Malik Hasan, a lifelong Muslim who reportedly gave an “Allahu Akbar!” shout-out before opening fire.

Will we be seeing the Bradys and other anti-gun groups trying to spin this as some sort of evidence that more guns won’t make anyone safer? Probably.