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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: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @05:59AM
Just as long as we don't do it by implementing a massive background check infrastructure that is easily co-opted for all kinds of other uses. But that seems to be the direction we are heading down.
My solution for reducing gun deaths is not popular with many -
(1) Improve mental health services - 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides, while over 90% of failed suicides are still alive 10 years later, so most of those ~20K gun suicide each year are mistakes. And then there is the fact that practically all mass shootings are a form of suicide too. Help people (without stigmatizing/criminalizing them) before they feel hopeless enough to pull the trigger and you'll save more lives than anything else.
(2) End the war on drugs. My belief, for which I have no proof other than gut feel, is that 90% of gun homicides are drug related - either gang activity (which is fueled by drug money) or in conjunction with property crimes by addicts looking to fund their addiction.
My belief is that those two things in conjunction are far and away the most effective way to reduce gun deaths. But (1) is expensive and idealogical unpalatable to a large number of people and (2) faces opposition from the billion dollar drug-war industry (DEA, cop unions, prison guard unions, for-profit prison industry, etc) and is idealogically unpalatable to many of the same group as #1.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Monday July 27 2015, @03:17PM
You have my vote, AC...
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:32AM
Agree. One reason for people refusing to seek help is that they can be essentially criminalized for it. Your right to bear arms can be permanently revoked. You can be imprisoned, drugged against your will, and essentially tortured. It wasn't all that long ago that you could also have pieces of your brain forcibly removed.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek