Home Society Sutherland Church — Another Tragic US Shooting and More Gun Debate

Sutherland Church — Another Tragic US Shooting and More Gun Debate

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Devin Patrick Kelley

By Dee McLachlan

Las Vegas reports confirm multiple shooters at multiple hotels (including the Bellagio), plus active shooters at the local airport — a stone’s throw from the Mandalay Bay. One can hear different guns being fired together on the sound tracks, and now, even the Sheriff believes Stephen Paddock was not acting alone. The official story has been shredded.

It is very hard to make sense of these shootings, and I try not to be too cynical. But in an email today, a Gumshoe contributor said about Sutherland, “maybe they quickly put this one together to take people’s attention off of Las Vegas.”

Sutherland Neighbour

Yesterday, another “lone” shooter went on the rampage. This time in the small town of Sutherland Springs in Wilson County, Texas. Apparently the shooter, 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, started firing his gun outside the church, then went into the First Baptist Church, killing about 25 members of the congregation — including the 14-year-old daughter of pastor Frank Pomeroy, and a young mother with her two daughters. When Kelley exited the church, he was probably surprised to find a neighbour firing back at him. He fled.

The armed neighbour then waved down a man, Johnnie Langendorff, and jumped in his truck. They gave chase — reaching speeds of up to 140 kilometres an hour. Eventually getting within a few feet, Kelly slowed and lost control, coming to a stop. The neighbour had his rifle drawn whilst they waited for the police — but the shooter “didn’t move after that.”

Kelley’s Facebook post

Kelley, it appears, graduated from New Braunfels High School (30 miles away), and served in the US Air Force from 2010 – 2013 (and was dishonorably discharged). The MSM reports that he taught a Bible Study class at a nearby church in 2013.

Authorities are still trying to determine a motive. Maybe he absorbed the culture of weaponry and war from his leaders in Washington DC.

Gun Debate

This shooting quickly fired up the gun debate. But, in this case, the shooter was stopped by a gun-owner.

The debate is convoluted and divisive. This was posted by VOX this morning: “America’s Gun Problem Explained.” The article is detailed and long, so I suspect it was written some time ago, waiting for the right moment for publication. I quote:

“America’s gun problem is completely unique. No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America… Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people… Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world’s population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.”

They continue:

“…No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths. [Really!] This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:

But that statement is deceptive, and simplistic.

A Poverty Correlation

I took the Mother Jones graph (above) and looked up the list of US States in order of prosperity and poverty (and added the blue lines). Well, what do you know? Those ranking as the most prosperous have lower gun death rates, compared to the higher gun deaths in areas with greater poverty. (There are exceptions, like Wyoming.)

This is not a surprise.

Zerohedge published “Presenting The Stunning Difference In How Blacks And Whites Are Killed By Guns.” In the article Tyler Durden writes:

“…mass shootings really aren’t the problem…  ‘less than 2 percent of more than 33,000 gun deaths in [America] are due to mass shootings,’ [Trace] …there’s a marked difference between how African Americans and whites are killed by firearms. More specifically, ‘among whites, 77 percent of gun deaths are suicides. But among black Americans, 82 percent of gun deaths are homicides‘.”

  

America does have an extraordinary high rate of gun deaths as compared to other countries, and Vox provided this graph (via The Guardian) — and they then refer to Australia.

Port Arthur and the Cost of the Buyback

Of course Vox would have to write about the “success” of Australia’s gun control — and how in 1996, a 28-year-old man killed 35 people at Port Arthur. Many researchers and Gumshoe contributors have proved beyond any doubt this was a false flag, (Video here). So this event needs to be discounted from general statistics.

An article  “Are Australian Gun Grabbers the Worst Mass Murderers in the Country’s history?” on Kiwigunblog wrote:

“The 1996 ‘National Firearms Buyback Program’ took 660,959 firearms out of private hands… The Australian Constitution requires that the Commonwealth pay ‘Just compensation’ when crushing the rights of its citizens. So they paid $500,000,000.00 [Half a billion dollars] to shooters for the weapons handed in… The Government increased the Medicare levy to finance the buyback program.

“There was a damning report…  showed that more than 2000 people had died before they could have the elective surgery that they needed. It also found that waiting times in their hospitals were among the worst in the country… Fifty million would have paid for all those people to get the healthcare that they needed, without delay. Saving two thousand lives.”

More Guns Equals LESS Gun Crime

In May 2013, an article in Forbes Magazine entitled, “Disarming Realities: As Gun Sales Soar, Gun Crimes Plummet“, based on statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Pew Research Center. And in December 2015, Mark J. Perry wrote [in the US]:

“…there were 7 firearm-related homicides for every 100,000 Americans in 1993… By 2013 the gun homicide rate had fallen by nearly 50 percent to only 3.6 homicides per 100,000 population.

“Much of the decline in violence is still unexplained, but researchers have identified several reasons for the shift…  including more police officers on the beat making greater use of computers, a decline in alcohol consumption, less lead exposure, and an improving economy.”

To conclude — In Australia the average number of suicide deaths are 2,795 each year.

In 1996-97, the Australian government spent $3.3 million on National Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy — and 500 million on the buyback of guns. It present spends approximately 1.6% of the mental health-related services budget on the National Suicide Prevention Program. At least this has increased to about $110 million each year.

But the Real Debate in the US (and here in Australia) should be about the expenditure and waste on weapons and war.

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15 COMMENTS

  1. If I attended church in Texas I would have my hand gun next to my hym book and sit at the back on the left with a easy view of the entrance door……. only takes one shot.

  2. Think you got a bit carried away with your “500 billion” there. Didn’t you mean 500 million or HALF a billion? An interesting article though with some surprising statistics. Thanks.

    • I quoted the article… Common usage in Australia; billion = 109 (i.e. 1 000 000 000). I see, corrected the figure in last para. Thanks.

  3. We shall need a bit of time to elapse to see if the official explanation holds good. Following Las Vegas and New York, both full of holes, a diversion could certainly prove useful. On the other hand it could just be a deranged and disallusioned ex-military, ex-Bible class teacher, chased and shot by conveniently located, armed and motivated passer-by? We shall see.

  4. From the Asheville Citizen-Times, North Carolina, in 2014:

    “Typically, the homeowner hears a noise during the night, gets his gun and flashlight and goes downstairs with his wife hanging on his shoulder. He opens the door to the garage and sees a man trying to steal his new Cadillac and he blows him away.

    “The perpetrator is not armed, and the homeowner is now on trial for manslaughter, facing several years in jail. These scenarios happen all the time across the country because people think that they have a license to kill anyone in their home. Just last week, a local jerk told me: “If I shoot someone on my porch I will drag him in the house so I am covered”. A common misperception.”

    I think maybe the point of the latest event is to expand the scope of “It’s OK to shoot on suspicion.”

    • Every occupation has its dangers, being a thief in someone else’s house also has ‘occupational hazards’.

      In the mid-west people are reluctant to call the police, there is the 3 S rule – shoot, shovel and shut-up.

  5. As we know the greatest mass murder in Australia was designed by those in authority, not a lone-gun deranged civilian. The purpose was an excuse to legislate for the withdrawal of rifles from the citizens. However that legislation was drawn up before the massacre happened.

    It is very unfortunate for the authorities that there are police witness statements, not presented to the court (by either the prosecution or the defence) that prove the accused, Martin Bryant was not the gunman and was not even at the site of the massacre at the time. I have copies of such witness statements.

  6. If this was a genuine “lone, crazed gunman” thing then the threshold for being such and being particularly brutal has been lowered by the constant drumbeat of mass killings and their attendant coverage.

    I wonder if he was taking anti-depressants?

  7. The gun debate is not the only political issue being addressed by MSM since the the event. I have seen a fox news version that discusses the need for psychological assessments of citizens, because we all agree that the gunman “must have been insane”.

    Also I have not yet seen any presentation that shows blood, bullet holes, injured people or other signs of a real event. Sutherland Springs appears on google earth to be a real inhabited town however, and not that remote.

    My guess at the moment is :
    *CIA employed Gunman
    *Real shooting (real victims)
    *Deliberately shonky presentation designed to spark mistaken conspiracy theories.

    Please help me if I am wrong.

  8. Here’s a study by the University of Liege in Belgium called the ‘Transnational study on the link between the possession of a firearm and the rate of homicides by firearms’. It looked at 52 countries and found that “neither the severity of legislation nor the availability…seemed to have a significant link to the rate of homicides by firearm.”

    Go to page 6 to look at a VERY revealing chart, like Jamaica or Costa Rica (complete restriction, very high firearm homicides).

    https://ssaa.org.au/assets/news-resources/research/Transnational_study_on_the_link_between_the_possession_of_a_firearm_and_the_rate_of_homicides_by_firearms.pdf

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