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The Washington Post reports that an internet escort in Charleston, W.Va., may have saved her own life and the lives of many other women, when she shot and killed an alleged attacker who showed up at the woman's home on July 18 after answering an escort ad she had placed on Backpage.com. Neal Falls showed up with multiple pairs of handcuffs and a Subaru full of weapons and tools, including a shovel, knives, a bulletproof vest, a machete, bleach, trash bags, sledgehammers and axes. In Falls's pocket, police said, was a list of names of potential future victims, all of whom are sex workers who advertised on Backpage. Investigators are trying to determine whether Falls is responsible for a string of slayings targeting sex workers in Ohio and Nevada. "We are entering his DNA profile into CODIS, which is a national crime DNA database, to see if it matches any previous submissions from anywhere in the United States," says Steve Cooper, the Charleston Police Department's chief of detectives. "If his DNA has been located in any other crimes and his profile was entered into CODIS, there will be a match."
From the moment Falls showed up at the home of his latest alleged victim, he turned violent. "I knew he was there to kill me," says the victim who asked not to be identified. Falls pulled a gun on her and began strangling her. "When he strangled me he just wouldn't let me get any air. I grabbed my rake and when he laid the gun down to get the rake out of my hands, I shot him. I just grabbed the gun and shot behind me." Local authorities are treating the shooting as an act of self-defense. According to Cooper, "when we find multiple sets of handcuffs, a machete, an axe, a bulletproof vest and container of bleach, the first thing that comes to an investigator's mind is, 'This is a serial killer kit.'"
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday July 27 2015, @04:43PM
Interesting statistics. I hope you don't believe that those statistics "just happened". The whole "war on drugs", and the tactic of targeting the drugs favored by black people
Well, I would not say that. I would say that "war on drugs" targets *poor* people. Poor people are the street-dealers - they are the ones that are most likely to get caught and prosecuted over drugs. Blacks are just more likely to be poor for various reasons.
turned around against gunowmers - mostly "redneck" gunowners. I'm certain that most people have noticed that the well-to-do still have guns ...
Ideally, no one should own guns. Not the people. Not the police. Guns cause more problems than they solve. Guns are tools people use to escalate confrontations that otherwise would not have escalated. They provide false sense of security. False sense of empowerment. Look at the UK, where police did not have guns. Now, they had reported 1 death over 2 year period from gun shot wound. Something like 50 people were killed by police (guns, beatings, etc.) since 1900.
http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Documents/research_stats/Deaths_Report2012-13.pdf [ipcc.gov.uk]
Meanwhile, in the US, it's close to 700 police shooting deaths this year and we are not even half-way through,
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database# [theguardian.com]
So what is going on here? Why is nation of guns so unsafe? Is there no drug dealers in UK? No hooligans?
Seriously, gun death rates are higher in some US neighborhoods than in insurgency Baghdad with car bombs and everything. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" - the same applies to guns.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 27 2015, @09:16PM
You and I are going to have to disagree on that. I think that every responsible adult should own a weapon or two. Further, every responsible adult should carry his weapon with him when he goes to court - it helps to keep the cops and the judge honest.