A White gunman who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville Dollar General store Saturday legally purchased the two firearms used in the racially motivated attack, local law enforcement confirmed.
The man, identified Sunday as 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter of Clay County, Fla., on Saturday drove to Edward Waters University, a historically Black college, but was refused entry, according to the school. He then drove to the nearby store, where he opened fire using an AR-15-style rifle inscribed with Nazi insignia, authorities said.
Police described a methodic rampage that lasted less than 11 minutes and killed Angela Michelle Carr, 52; Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr., 19; and Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29.
Jacksonville police on Sunday said law enforcement had been called about Palmeter previously in a domestic incident, and he also had been held during a mental health crisis. But those cases did not result in a criminal record, so there was no legal reason to stop him from acquiring the guns he purchased this year between April and July.
“law enforcement had been called about Palmeter previously in a domestic incident, and he also had been held during a mental health crisis”
God forbid we have red flag laws in this country. They only make perfect sense and enjoy majority support among Americans.
ERPOs are shit. Dude was held on a mental health hold, that should have been flagged in the BGC…and if the fucking NICS would be opened to anyone so you can run a BGC on people you sell firearms to, this would have way more effective than ERPOs that do nothing but give police even more reasons to do knocks and get people killed.
God forbid we have red flag laws in this country. They only make perfect sense and enjoy majority support among Americans.
Because of the gun lobby. They pay big money to ensure stuff like this does not happen.
Make guns easy to get, so all the unarmed people will be afraid of the people with guns. A lot of them will buy guns to protect themselves from the other people with guns. And the circle continues until everyone is armed to the hilt all the time.
They know how to sell guns.
domestic incident
Previous incidents included a 2016 domestic call to his home that did not result in an arrest, police said.
mental health crisis
A year later, he was temporarily detained for emergency health services under Florida’s Baker Act law.
So the shooter, Palmeter, was 21. This means the little they were able to dig up about his past comes from when he was 15 years old.
Supreme Court to Consider Whether Domestic Abusers Can Own Guns
At issue is a 1994 amendment to the Federal Firearms Act that prohibits those who are actively subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms.
California’s gov. Newsom is hellbent on changing this. Gov.CA - Newsom to Supreme Court: Uphold Law The state is having to fight these federal laws, too, as in their state they want to even more restrict the right of Domestic Abusers from owning firearms - good reason, too LA times: domestic abusers can still own firearms
I’d love to see a metric of deaths per year by legal and illegal firearms.
They’re always bought legally, by people who should not have access to them. Full back ground checks will stop these incidents, as well as more mandatory reporters
And making police mandatory reporters and holding them to some level of accountability. Some school shooter had the cops called on him 30 separate times and was BANNED FROM WEARING A BACKPACK IN SCHOOL yet somehow wasn’t on a list. Mind blowing.
Reminds me of the phrase, “We’ve done nothing, and we’re out of ideas”
Except in this case, there’s plenty of ideas, they just have done nothing because it makes them more money.
Yeah, somethings not right, and we’re just putting our thumb up our ass about it
Even without knowing what the number would be, there’s some interesting nuance to this. Eg, a lot of guns used in crimes would be taken from family members or parents bought for their kids as a straw purchase, but from the perspective of the gun sale itself, it was a legal sale (even though the user of the gun didn’t legally acquire it). I call that particular example out because it’s been prominent in some school shootings, won’t be fixed by just limiting the purchase of guns, but is still something that only exists because of US gun culture.
There’s also the fact that a massive amount of gun crime is gang violence, where it’s more likely that the guns are illegally owned. This is still a tragedy and nobody should be dying to gun violence whether or not they’re in a gang. But unless innocent people are victims (which also is often the case!), gang violence isn’t usually what people are thinking of or focusing on, since many people’s concern is somewhat understandably focused on more random gun violence, where it’s harder to understand why it’s happening.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ 28k so far this year.
Legal vs. Illegal? Much harder to say…
NPR: Major Takeaways from ATF Report
over 80% of mass shooters at K-12 schools stole guns from family members
In five years, there were more than 1 million firearms stolen from private citizens and reported to authorities.
Going into this I figured illegally obtained firearms must make up a small percentage, since I’ve read about so many mass shooting + suicide style events that include use of a legally owned AR15 or taken from a family member who didn’t bother locking it.
Nope, the illegal market for firearms in the U.S. is staggering.
Forty percent of state prison inmates admitted they obtained the gun illegally on the black market, from a drug dealer, or by stealing it. Politifact: Most Gun Crimes committed with Illegally Obtained Firearms?
illegally transferred crime guns sources sustain underground crime gun markets atf report
I’m not trying to move the goalpost here, so we can take the numbers at face value if that’s the way we want to look at it. However, I would consider guns stolen from family members that didn’t lock them up as “legally obtained” because of the close proximity of the relationship and the disregard of basic safety on the part of the original owner. I know this just muddies the water, but as for myself, that is how I would classify it. There was little to no barrier to separate the killer from the weapon, it may as well have been handed to them.
What does that have to do with this story?
Edit: my bad, I missed the “legal” part in your comment.
I’m starting to think it’s harder to buy guns illegally in the US.
Uh…. Good? It’s hard to buy guns illegally, that’s a good thing right??
Clearly not your intention but lol… no fucking shit
Whenever a Republican comes up with an idea related to gun control, you can always be rest assured that the next mass shooting will show why that idea was an abject failure.
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Hey now he was a perfectly good gun owner until he started killing those people
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Hell, half the country thinks he was still a perfectly good gun owner while he was killing those people.
Republican politicians are murderers and fascists and need to be treated as such. They and their federalist society captured Supreme Court set up this mess on purpose.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a timeline of Saturday’s events, Waters said Palmeter drove to Jacksonville in neighboring Duval County at about 11:39 a.m. and parked in a lot behind the library of the university, where he was observed getting dressed, and was seen wearing a black bulletproof vest and latex gloves.
Video surveillance footage shared by local police showed Palmeter — a heavyset man wearing a mask and vest — entering the store with a rifle and quickly taking aim.
The shooting came one day before the 63rd anniversary of one of the most heinous events in Jacksonville’s racial history, “Ax Handle Saturday,” when 200 Ku Klux Klan members attacked a group of Black people conducting a peaceful sit-in to protest Jim Crow laws in 1960.
At a Sunday church service several miles from the store, tearful mourners gathered, including Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deagan (D), and a pastor urged people to avoid letting sadness turn to rage.
President Biden released a statement Sunday afternoon condemning the attack, noting there was added symbolism in the killings “fueled by hate-filled animus” that took place on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
The attack follows at least two other public shootings in recent days, including one at an Oklahoma high school football game that left a teen dead and another incident that saw at least seven injured when a shooter opened fire near a Boston parade.
The original article contains 1,394 words, the summary contains 232 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Government always knows these people but aren’t legally equipped to stop them from exercising their God given right to slaughter innocents.
Of not, it’s the American Dream!
Where did he buy them? Name and shame.
The article details every aspect of the shooting, let’s hear about the enabling steps.
Believe it or not, the gun shops involved followed the law. The sheriff said that the domestic violence incident between the shooter and his brother were on file, but that he didn’t see a criminal record or the mental health incident. The gun shop would not have known anything was out of the ordinary.
Waters also said the suspect legally purchased two guns this year, buying a Glock 20 10 mm semiautomatic handgun from the Orange Park Gun & Pawn shop on May 6 and an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle from the Wild West Guns and Shop in Jacksonville on June 22.
Oh sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that they supplied the gun to the shooter, a key step in the rampage.
The article gives a step by step breakdown of how the shooting went down, gives the names of the targeted location (Dollar Tree store), nearby university that went into lockdown (Edward Waters University), the streets where a makeshift memorial is being set up, names of the victims and people who interacted with him, etc. Presumably, none of these people and places ever wanted to be associated with the tragedy of a mass shooting, but unfortunately they had no choice in the matter.
The gun shop that sold the shooter the gun is no different. They’re intimately involved in the shooting; they have no choice in the matter, just like all the other victims. Even if they’ve followed every law they’re still linked to this tragedy. Following the law didn’t spare any of the victims from being linked to a mass killing, why should that protect the gun shop?
There are privately possessed firearms, both legally and illegally. So long as there are, we are going to have to accept that sometimes people are going to use them to murder innocent victims.
The best we can do is attempt to reduce the number of those shootings. But that number will never be zero.
It is impossible to accurately screen legal firearm purchasers. Someone of sound mind today who buys a firearm may not be of sound mind tomorrow or the next day, month, year; and there is absolutely no way to know. Someone not of sound mind today who has yet to interact with police or mental health has no recorded background to screen against.
We can reduce the number of shootings by more diligently screening purchasers. We can reduce the number of shootings even further by not selling guns at all.
In the US, we have the second amendment. Courts have interpreted this to mean that private citizens can own firearms. Without a constitutional amendment restricting private gun ownership, we will always have shootings. Always.
