Don't bring a barstool to a gunfight

[sdprof]

I'm sure Dave Workman will have something to say about this, as it happened in his locale. Fellow starts shooting in coffee bar, one patron tosses stools at him.

Yes, that tactic helped, but tossing 180 grain hollowpoints probably would have been better.

Story here.

When Ian Stawicki started shooting at a Seattle cafe in a spree rampage that would leave him and five others dead, one man stood up and tried to stop him by hurling coffeehouse stools at the gunman, police said on Thursday.

A day after the shootings in the Cafe Racer, police said the actions of that man - whom they are not naming - ultimately saved three lives and were a bright spot in a violent series of events that ended when Stawicki shot himself in the head.

[Old Dog]

This incident is HUGE up here. Seattle's mayor McGinn is now repeating calls for new gun control efforts in his city and the state -- including proposals to ban semi-auto rifles, once and for all to close the "gun-show loophole" (which really doesn't exist here since the organization that runs the region's premier gunshow, the WAC, requires background checks for membership and only members can buy/sell at shows), among others ...

Local news pointed out that the previous mayor, Greg Nickels, lost in the state supreme court when the court reaffirmed state preemption and ruled that the city's ban in parks and city buildings was unconstitutional.

The shooter in this case (now referred to as the Cafe Racer Shooting Spree) also, according to his family, possessed a valid CPL and was a gun collector.

No mention anywhere that this issue is really about how mental illness is treated in this country and is not about the "prevalence of guns in our culture" (per the Seattle PD and City Council public statements).

[Lanius]

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/arc...-or-really-bad

The guy was losing it, apparently.

It started on February 27, 2008, when Stawicki's then-girlfriend of three years stopped by a female friend's house after work. "The suspect had followed the victim and... was enraged that the victim had not come straight home to him," writes responding SPD Officer James Moran in his report. After the visit, the woman returned home to find that Stawicki was "in the process of destroying every single thing in the home that they both identified as belonging to [her]," Moran's report states.

When his girlfriend attempted to dial 911, Stawicki allegedly punched her in the face. "Suddenly, I was on the ground and my nose was bleeding, and Ian had my phone," she wrote in her police statement in tidy all-caps script.

Except, how can you help someone who doesn't want to be helped?

[Bart Noir]

Yeah, like Ol' Dog said, it is a big deal here in the Seattle area.

But unfortunately there was nobody shooting back at the killer, so it was not a gunfight.

I sure wish that a patron of that cafe would have been a legal concealed pistol carrying citizen, to shoot back and put a stop to that slaughter. It might have saved some lives.

Bart Noir