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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: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Monday July 27 2015, @07:29AM
"tools specifically created for murder".....tell me AC, how EXACTLY is a 120 pound woman supposed to defend herself against a guy that benches 220 and is a good 100 pounds heavier and bigger than she? Is she supposed to beg nicely after he's done raping her and maybe, juuust maybe, he might not do what this freak obviously always intended and kill her?
You can NOT count on the cops to protect you, not only can it be hours before they even show up but the courts ruled they have no obligation to even show up at all. You can NOT count on non lethal weapons like pepper spray and tasers, one trip to Youtube will show you a methhead tweaked out can blow through that shit like it wasn't even there. AAMOF a cop customer of mine told me how it once took nearly a dozen of them with clubs to drop a weightlifting ex-con pumped up on that shit, that even with LEO quality non lethal (stronger than what civilians get by a large amount) he just blew through both a tasing and being sprayed like it was nothing and according to my cop friend he basically stomped the shit out of a half a dozen big burly cops before they were able to dogpile enough of them to bring the guy down as even with a broken arm, collarbone, and 3 busted ribs he was so pumped full of that shit he didn't even feel it.
So I'm sorry but the Colt was called "the great equalizer" for a damned good reason, because it allowed the weak to protect themselves from those that would prey upon them. And all those gun ban laws ignore the rotting elephant in the room which is this...with a border so broken that you can bring everything from heroin to sex slaves in by the ton the simple fact is all gun laws do is keep the lawful from defending themselves because criminals? Yeah you see they do not follow laws hence why they are called criminals and not cub scouts! All one has to do is look at the amount of gun crimes in places that try to completely ban guns like Chicago versus cities that encourage gun ownership to see guns DO deter criminals, not to mention the last stats I looked at said the majority of violent crimes involving guns involved stolen guns, hence showing criminals are NOT deterred by gun laws in the least bit.
Finally allow me to address the straw man most in favor of gun bans bring up, the UK. To say a UK style ban would work in the USA is as insane as saying that China and the USA must be exactly alike since they are both superpowers as it ignores 1.- the UK is a small island, much easier to control what comes in than the USA with its two massive borders and 2.- the UK unlike the USA is surrounded by first world countries with (generally) strict gun laws. Contrast this with South America which has been a dumping ground of USA and Soviet weaponry for a half a century, so much so that there are places south of the border where an AK will cost less than a new pair of 501 jeans. Finally it ignores that just south of the border there is a massive civil war between the drug cartels and the (frankly equally nasty) Mexican authorities so the odds of securing that border with help from our neighbors good enough to keep out....well pretty much anything is pretty much zip.
So I'm sorry but until the day comes that we don't have violent criminals who see zero value in human life I'd much rather see our citizens be able to own guns to protect themselves. As for her being a hooker? I've argued for over 2 decades that drugs and prostitution should be legal and this certainly doesn't change my opinion, in fact if she and her fellow sex workers would have been able to legally carry firearms this scumbag might not have been able to become a serial killer in the first place.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @05:13PM
A situation where murder would be helpful is not a example of how guns are safe. Your entire post is but a red herring, completely unrelated to anything the GP said. Guns are tools specifically created for murder, that murder can help one defend oneself does not counter that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:22AM
"As for her being a hooker? I've argued for over 2 decades that drugs and prostitution should be legal"
Agree on the drugs.
The problem with the prostitution is that it has been tried in places like Germany and Holland and it actually INCREASES the amount of human trafficking that occurs, especially of children. The countries where it is legal are moving towards making prostitution illegal, or at the least much less legal, again.
The US would be wise to look at such experiments and see what works and what doesn't.