Self-proclaimed vampire brings out Seattle SWAT

My guess is that the girls won’t be swooning over this cat.

Ex-cop pleads guilty in Katrina shootings

A former police lieutenant pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiring to obstruct justice after federal officials say he helped cover for officers who killed two people in the chaos following Hurricane Katrina.

Federal investigators say former Lt. Michael Lohman knew two people shot to death as they crossed the Danziger Bridge had no weapons, but he and others filed false reports to make the shootings seem justified. Four other people were wounded.

To serve and protect.

Minneapolis police officer Timothy Edward Carson was late to work on Wednesday because he was robbing a bank. Sources say he could be connected with “at least a dozen” bank robberies in the past couple of weeks.

“The bottom line with police work is ethics and trust and respect. He blew every one of them,” said Lt. John Delmonico, president of the Minneapolis Police Federation, of which Carson is a member. “Good luck to him in jail.”

Carson was stopped for a license plate violation, let go because he was an LEO, and robbed a bank. The officer who had pulled him over earlier and let him go was responding to the bank call when he spotted Caron’s vehicle headed away from the bank.

Busted.

Friend

Hero dog saves boy, 11, from cougar attack

A golden retriever named ‘Angel’ took on a pouncing cougar in British Columbia. A RCMP constable shot the cougar. Luckily, their office was nearby and he was able to respond very quickly.

“The dog and the cougar were all kind of tangled up as one unit,” he said. But he was able to see the big cat’s hindquarters and fired one shot, hoping to sever the animal’s spine.

When the cougar kept up its attack on Angel, Gravelle moved around to get in front of the cougar, which was less than 6 feet away.

“It was really dark out, and I was just trying to line up my shot as best I could. I could just see about two or three inches of the cougar’s head sticking out from behind Angel, and luckily I was able to get a good shot off,” Gravelle said.

Somehow, the dog managed to survive. She needed surgery, but it sounds like she’s going to be okay.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (Oct. 27, 2009) Army Sgt. Brad Paxton and Sgt. Tim Brooder, assigned to Superior Training for Superior Response (STSR) and Goose Creek Police Department, provide instruction on how to utilize the high/low technique to maximize spread of fire toward aggressors to students assigned to Naval Weapons Station Charleston. (U.S. Navy photo by Machinist's Mate 3rd Class Juan Pinalez/Released)

Get a load of the rifles they’re using.

Story here: NWS Charleston New Police Officers Complete Tactical Training

Via Random Nuclear Strikes, we find this Seattle Times editorial concerned with recent shootings of police officers:

A constitutional right to own a gun does not carry a subsequent right to put others at risk, or to amass a personal armory with a lethal capacity beyond some hypothetical need for household defense.

Got that? The Seattle Times editorial staff thinks that A) household defense is “some hypothetical need” and B) the right guaranteed legally by the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution should be limited to the absolute bare minimum for personal safety.

I wonder if they believe that other “constitutional rights” should be so severely limited. Say, for instance, the one about freedom of the press from government abridgment. Should the 1st Amendment be interpreted to mean that the press does not have a capacity to print stories beyond some hypothetical need for household safety?

Big order by DHS:

The Department of Homeland Security has placed an order for 200 million rounds of pistol ammunition (.40 caliber, hollow-point) over the next five years for use by its Immigration, Customs and Enforcement division.

Let’s see now, ICE has approximately 15,000 employees. Not all of them are licensed to carry firearms, but just to keep the math simple, we’ll divide the whole shebang into 200 million. That works out to a little over 13,000 rounds per employee over five years, or approximately 2,600 per employee per year.

Someone points out that they’d be ordering FMJ if it was for training, but another commenter says that they use hollow points for training, too. Here’s more:

According to my source, who used to be a firearms trainer, each agent must qualify quarterly with his or her Sig P229R .40 caliber pistol. Each qualification requires 120 rounds. 4 x 120 x 10,000 x 5 = 24 million rounds. In addition, each agent is issued a least one 50 round box quarterly for practice. Most use considerably more. So if we conservatively estimate 100 rounds per quarter, we have 4 x 100 x 10,000 x 5 = 20 million rounds. It is not uncommon for conscientious agents to expend 250 to 1000 rounds a quarter in practice. Accordingly, it would be reasonable to expect that ICE would easily use 50 to 100 million rounds (or more) of the Ranger ammunition over five years.

Regardless, big government orders won’t do anything to help alleviate high ammo prices for civilians. But I also don’t mind seeing companies getting nice big government orders, either.

Via Instapundit.

I don’t think this is a big deal at all:

With the approval of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Sig Sauer gun company has released specific information about the model of pistol that Federal Air Marshals will soon be carrying – data that both current and former Air Marshals say puts the Marshals and air passengers at risk.

“This is the last thing you want to give to anyone who wants to carry out an act of terror,” said Frank Terreri, president of the Federal Air Marshal Agency, a trade group representing the Marshals. “Anyone who wants to take over a plane can be proactive and research that type of weapon, basically know everything about that weapon before going on the plane,” said Terreri. “You really don’t want to give that playbook out to your enemy.”

This isn’t some super-secret classified weapon we’re talking about here, it’s a Sig P250. Were they thinking that no one would ever know which off-the-shelf gun Air Marshals were carrying? Getting worked up over this is just plain silly.

On the other hand, there was some other “improperly-redacted” information that should not have been released involving how many bags are physically checked, weaknesses in the x-ray equipment, and what size of wire can be missed by screening machines. Letting that out could cause serious problems.

TSA says that that version of the manual was outdated. Sure it is. Now, anyway.

Hat tip to the reader who sent this in.

West Virginia:

The veteran officer was using a Glock 21 .45 caliber pistol with out of country ammunition at a shooting range outside of Moundsville, [Chief Deputy Kevin] Cecil said.

It’s believed the ammunition was bad, causing the receiver to blow apart in the sergeant’s hand.

Ouch. Link sent by a reader.

On JeremyBell.com:

If you happened to be walking by my office last night, you may have noticed a little police activity. A co-worker said she saw at least 6 SWAT, 2 uniformed officers, 2 undercover and a chopper in the air. I’ve since been told that the surrounding streets were blocked off with five cop cars in total, two ambulances, and a dozen cops all taking positions of cover around the office.

Ya, I’m a little embarrassed to say this was all for me, as last night I got arrested by the SWAT team because of a Lego gun.

(It was in Canada.) Go read the whole thing.

What I find most interesting about this, even more than the idea that SWAT arrived to deal with a guy with a Lego gun, is the fact that someone had to call it in in the first place. It apparently was a guy in a neighboring apartment who could see in the office building window.