Waffle House shooting near Nashville, TN: what we know
Four people were killed and two others were injured after a gunman opened fire at a Waffle House early Sunday morning in Antioch, Tennessee, a city in the Nashville metro area.
The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said a nude man began shooting at the restaurant at about 3:25 am. A patron, later identified as 29-year-old James Shaw Jr., wrestled the gun away from him, and he fled on foot.
The police identified Travis Reinking, 29, as a “person of interest” in the shooting and said murder warrants are being drafted against him. They named Reinking publicly because the vehicle he arrived in was registered under his name.
Extract from the Original article by Emily Stewart , in Vox .
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A bad guy with a gun was stopped by a good guy without a gun... but four were already dead.
If not for Mr. Shaw, it might have been more.
And now, Antioc, Tennessee.
I wish the gun enthusiasts would explain to the rampagers how an AR15 is nothing but a harmless pea shooter and no more deadly than a butter knife.
I wish somebody would explain to anti-gunners that guns are just inanimate tools that do not kill. PEOPLE with guns kill! See post 1.2.14 above!
Yes....people WITH GUNS!!!*
*Except for the not rare occasions when a gun does go off even when a person isn't holding one.
You mean...guns aren't living things that go around shooting people by themselves?? I think you're pulling my leg, Eddy, get serious now!
My favorite is when they get shot by their dog when the pooch steps on a gun on the floor!
You cannot kill 20 people with a butter knife. If these semi-auto weapons were not so prevalent these mass shootings would not occur. If he didn't have a gun they threat would have been easily neutralized if we were armed with just a knife or his fists.
There's a simple litmus test. Agree or not with:
Think about how much fun you could have with a six hundred round clip.
I'm not sure that I agree but I understand the sentiment and I would agree with the safety. The problem is that would prohibit ownership of any pistol. Revolvers have 6 rounds and semi-auto pistols have 9-15. Many bolt action rifles have a 4 round clip and pump shotguns can have up to 5. IIRC.
That's not a bug; it's a feature!
The arms manufacturers would have an instant market for millions of three-shot firearms. Joy!
I'm glad that you confirmed what the anti gun objective really is. Only confirmed, though, we already had a pretty fair idea. Then they wonder why we don't trust them.
I love it when that happens! Maybe the dog wants a different brand of kibble?
I understand the argument. I get it. But this person with no gun, shoots no one. He should never have had the guns in the first place.
I wish somebody would explain to anti-gunners the reality of not being able to actually get rid of these weapons no matter what law they think they can pass.
Or the position they put police in, who are first to respond and find themselves outgunned!
Maybe they wouldn't find themselves outgunned if the "bad guy with a gun" was limited in what kind of gun he could get and, the police weren't limited to what kind of gun they could get. This kid had his guns taken away from him by the police, the police then gave his father the guns, his father returned them to him, if the father or, the police had not returned the guns he wouldn't have had any guns to use at the Waffle House, the "good guy without a gun" wouldn't have burned his hands on the barrel of the gun when he took it away from the kid because there wouldn't have been a gun to take away.
Agreed. There are many things the general public should not have access to and these types of weapons top the list. I don't even know why we allowed "drones" to be sold to the public.
As long as those personal drones stay the size of a Frisbee I don't mind, the commercial drones still need work so, I don't see a real heavy use of them for some time, maybe never.
All due respect but this is probably the only issue I come down hard and in solidarity with conservatives.
The complete obsession with The Bill of Rights, an inanimate object and basic human right as the genesis for violence in this country is, at best, intellectually slothful and, at worst, class war. On the wrong side.
Sadly, other than Right's love of the 2nd not many folks seem to give a rats ass about the Bill of Rights these days. For a working class goober it is one of the very few things worth going to battle over. It is a thin line of protection for us on the bottom from oligarchs, tyranny, LEO and every other entity that would like us all to just go away.
In order to alter our propensity toward violence and butchery we have to alter the entire culture.
There are plenty of long term things that could be done that would actually make a difference in our society. I fear the Right would oppose most of them and Liberals are just flat out stuck in short term thinking. So, we are probably doomed. What else is new, eh?
Really though, you folks that hate the Bill of Rights and the Right so much that you would give up liberty for a move that will not work and probably will make things worse need to think harder. Deeper. I get the feeling this is more of an emotional than rational issue with most folks who despise the Bill of Rights. Put a cork in the emotionally tsunami and begin thinking this one over.
Is this the part where we offer thoughts and prayers.....like that's going to help?
It's a lot more helpful than trying to destroy the Constitution.
Who is destroying is constitution?
And what constitution are they "destroying."
Are mass shootings a conservative right?
The very words of the 2nd Amendment specify significant regulations. What militia is he part of?
Heller vs DC. Supreme Court already dealt with it. That's an explanatory clause to give one of the reasons for the operative clause, The right of the people (not militias and not States) to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
Although some Supreme Courts (and some Justices) have gone weak in the knees and tried to get around it (not surprising since they are, after all, government employees), Shall Not Be Infringed, means exactly what it says.
No epistte, Heller isn't going to be changed, although, maybe after SCOTUS reverses Roe v Wade, we'll think about it. Now do you understand how strongly we feel about it?
Heller will be revisited within the decade. Some state will pass sweeping gun control regulations and that will force another look at Heller.
Roe v. Wade has been revisited 3 times. It isn't going away.
Neither is Heller.
Heller has a better chance of "going away" than Roe v. Wade.
Have you looked at the Supreme Court lately? It's going even farther right over the next couple of years, although you can never tell for sure. When Eisenhower appointed him, Chief Justice Warren was the hard nosed Attorney General of California, who engineered the confinement of the Japanese Americans during WWII. Look what he became.
Heller also said that there can be restrictions on the types of arms that the people can bear.
A minority part of the ruling said REASONABLE restrictions. Banning entire classes of firearms is NOT reasonable.
I do have to agree here, you never know what a justice will do once they are in that position, I mean even Scalia went left when everyone thought he would go right.
So, you wish to disarm all us unwashed peasants in a time where our government is leading us at an alarming rate toward an authoritarian police state?
Think harder on this. Play it out to its endgame. What will happen if you suddenly try to use prohibition to rid yourself of a basic scary human right and wanted commodity? How many heretofore contributing perfectly fine upstanding citizens are suddenly outlaws and criminals? Who is going to enforce confiscation or registration? Are you? Will at least half of LEO and the military resist and refuse? How often has prohibition worked with an object or substance historically speaking? What are you going to do about the gabillions of semi autos out in the country now? Do you wish to confiscate them? Are you going to help with that? Are you going to send agents as proxy into harms way? What are you going to do when they refuse?
This is just lazy intellectually. Start thinking in the long term. Do we have the collective will to alter our society? That is what is needed. Not some cowardly attack on the bill of rights.
Hmmmmm. What could we do? Lets see. The first to depose and eliminate the junta in power now. How about stopping our Assault Government from solving all its problems with acute violence? How about demilitarizing the police? How about education education education? And not the fucked up system that produces, as George Carlin so aptly put it, folks just smart enough to run the machines. And vote for Trump and his crew of nazi lovers. How about socializing medicine? How about working to get meaningful work at a living wage for us in the working class. How about making social mobility a real thing. How about teaching co-operation over competition?
How about taking all the money, land and shit of ours back from the New Age Robber Barons by any means necessary and redistributing it? How's about we work on educating the misogyny and racism right out of the public? Did I mention better education? Education. Education. Education.
And on and on and on.
Your turn. Think of the Bill of Rights, especially the 2nd, as a measure of detente against the assbags.
There's a scene in a John Ringo novel where a bunch of hillbillies load a .50 cal. machine gun in a pickup truck bed, and drive off an alien invasion.
The idea of civilians, even with AR15s, taking on a trained army is no less absurd. Pure fantasy.
In the meantime, that fantasy excuses the wide availability of rapid-fire, high-capacity firearms that have no purpose other than to kill lots of people very quickly.
The ironic thing about these people who think the government wants to confiscate everyone's guns, is that this is crazy, and anyone who thinks this SHOULD have their guns taken away!
No, this is the part where we start to use some common sense. James Shaw was fortunate and so were the people who were at the Waffle House where he was able to gain an upper hand on an armed murderer. If James had a concealed weapons permit and had his gun with him, he probably wouldn't have had to wait as long to gain that upper hand.
How can people believe the criminals, mass murderers or those who aim to kill people will ever turn in their guns? It would take decades to take the guns from all law abiding citizens or those who have no such inclination to harm people with their guns, but there would still be guns in the hands of those who did have that agenda. And if guns couldn't do the trick there would be knives, poisons or even home made bombs such as the 49 people killed in the last few days in Afghanistan at a voting center by a suicide bomber.
There would be far more people killed if the government decided to take the guns from law abiding citizens and many would become previous law abiding citizens. The result would be many previous law abiding citizens would die from the governments actions and many law abiding citizens would be killed by people with a purpose of killing them without even the possibility of interference.
Such a simple minded idea that there would have been no one killed if there were no guns is beyond me. Mass murders at schools or practically anywhere else wasn't even in my worst nightmares when growing up. There were guns at school, in the back of pickup truck windows and just about everywhere you looked there were guns.
The problem isn't guns, it's a sick society. A healthy society doesn't have the kind of senseless murders we have here and elsewhere in the world. Outlaw the guns and many people die. Outlaw the knives and many more die. A sick society has its symptoms and senseless killing of others is one of the symptoms. Until the people decide to work together to heal the sickness that plagues us and the world, nothing is going to stop the killing.
That's an assumption, not a fact. In Parkland, there was an ARMED security guard on campus....how well did that help? Not at all. ASSUMING that because someone is armed doesn't mean that they will stop a shooting. Same thing with the Texas church shooting. There was a person across the street that was armed....26 people dead. We have almost 300 MILLION guns in the hands of the public in this country, if the, "good guy with a gun" mantra actually worked, we would be free of fun violence. More guns does NOT mean less crime, it means the exact opposite. It's like saying, "well, if I want to put out this fire, I should throw gas and wood on it!!!". "If I want to get rid of skin cancer, I should sit in the sun more!!!". It's BS, it does NOT work.
I totally agree. But then, I have seen no one with any ability to actually change a law suggest we ban all guns. And as a gun owner myself, I would be completely opposed to any law that would infringe on my right to own guns. The issue is two fold;
1) Getting the guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. Unfortunately, trump repealed a law that would have made it more difficult for mentally ill people to get guns. Why? Because....Obama is the one that passed it.
2) Getting weapons like the AR-15, OFF the streets. You can still shoot a .223 round for hunting with a bolt action or rifle with a 5-6 round clip, not semi-auto. If a person HAS to have a semi-auto .223 with a 30 round clip to hunt deer, they are probably a pretty shitty hunter in the first place.
Any kind of gun regulations that are even SUGGESTED draws the ire of the far right wing. Rick Scott has repealed more gun laws than ANY governor in Florida's history, he had an "A+" rating from the NRA, but....after parkland he SUGGESTED that raising the age to buy guns in Florida to 21 and the right wing was on him like a pack of dogs on a three legged cat. Now is suddenly a left wing liberal....how shocking. [eye roll]
I said the same thing above, I agree. Though I didn't see many guns at school, just my personal perception though.
I will agree that you are half right.
1) Society is part of the problem. But our society isn't any more ill than any other 1st world country. Other countries have mentally ill people as well, they don't have mass shootings on a daily basis. The difference? The free availability of guns, lots of guns. I am a gun owner, I love my guns and I would never give them up. But there HAS to be a balance between supporting the 2nd amendment AND keeping people safe. It's not normal or healthy to live in a society where we are literally having to worry about being shot every time we go to a mall, a concert, a school, a church, a movie theater, a job....etc. etc.. Kids should be able to feel safe in school...they don't. We literally have a mass shooting, (4+ victims), every single day. 93 people a DAY die from gun violence in this country... That's NOT acceptable. My daughter is 14 years old, she said that school shooting do bother kids all over the country and it is something she worries about. She shouldn't have to.
2) A sick society is a society that thinks that all problems can be solved by pulling a gun. There was a kid murdered last year because he adjusted the thermostat.
So in part, I do agree with you.
I agree - everyone who goes to a waffle house should be packing a gun.
Common sense says that it is madness to have firearms laws so worthless that a nutcase like Reinking can get his hands on a rapid-fire high-capacity firearm.
I can go along with that. On a business trip it was the only place open when I got in on a late flight in eastern Indiana. I should have gone to bed hungry! I mean do people actually eat there ON PURPOSE??? Fortunately I had my flask of scotch packed in my luggage!
And who shoots up a waffle house at 3:25 am? At least wait until the breakfast rush.
I would have guessed LEO. That is generally the time they SWAT the wrong house terrify children and murder dogs. Then they get a vacation and absolutely no repercussion. Even if they murder humans.
As a matter of fact, it is my guess that if you are poor and working class, black or white, your chances of being murdered by the poleece is higher than getting caught in one of these crazy ass mass shootings.
He obtained them illegally.
Common sense says we should not have laws if we have not the spine to enforce them. It also says we should be locking up violent psychopaths and their enablers in order to protect their potential victims.
Just watched an interview with James Shaw...He said he knew that he was dead if he did nothing so he acted when he had the chance.
From what I gathered from the interview was that the shooter was caught last year or the year before in a restricted part of the capital (White House) and his weapons were taken from him. I believe that they were given to the family and now he has them back or others.
He is still on the loose and they suspect that he has 2 weapons with him.
Mr. Shaw is concerned for his family since he has a 4 year old daughter.
How much of this a accurate is any ones guess. Mr. Shaw's hands were burned from grabbing the barrel of the weapons and it seems that he sustained a grazing wound to his arm.
Kudos to James Shaw.
Hope that they get this nut before he kills anyone else.
True. But if he kills himself...I admit, I am good with it.
Yep, his dad gave him all his guns back. This is one family of a mass murderer for which I have no sympathy.
If that is the case, then his father more than deserves to be tried along with his son as a accessory to murder!
Supposedly this nut job's father gave the guns back to him. When those guns were originally confiscated, the only place they should have ended up was under lock and key with law enforcement. If it is true about the father, I hope guilt eats him alive.
I hope his father goes to prison too!
He should be charged with depraved indifference murder.
That's what I read as well as many on here probably have by now, but they say his guns were given back to his father, who admitted giving them back to his son. I would imagine if for once a thorough investigation was done on this killer, we would find he should have been one of the people who we should have expected to do something as irrational as he has done. You would think his father would have known him better than he evidently did.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with balls.
How long is going to take to find a guy who was last seen walking nude down the street?
Ever watch Rambo?
This guy isn't Rambo.
Not Rambo but try this one. Best scene in the whole movie. About 2 minutes into the clip.
The story behind that scene was supposedly that Ford could not get the hang of fighting with a sword so he came up with idea of gun vs sword. Genius idea.
Yep, I also heard that, when he read it, his response was that only a fool would get into a sword fight when he had a pistol right there. First rule of survival, never bring a sword to a gun fight.
I always heard he had a bad cold and didn't feel good, so didn't want to screw around with all of the action parts he was supposed to do so he talked them into just shooting the guy. Whatever the story it was a classic scene!
Well, they still haven't caught him He's proving to be at least somewhat resourceful...
Caught him 7 hours ago - he lawyered up immediately.
Apparently after his troubles at the White House in 2016, Illinois confiscated all of his guns and cancelled his licenses,
it appears that the family has since moved to Tennessee and the father gave the guns back to his son in violation of an agreement with ATF.
The father was also arrested this afternoon.