Thread: Gun Haters Approve of Making False Police Calls to Attack Innocent Gun Owners

Gun Haters Approve of Making False Police Calls to Attack Innocent Gun Owners

By Warner Todd Huston
89:00 am October 4, 2014

It is illegal to make false police reports, we all know. But gun haters don’t much care about laws. That is why they approve of calling in false police calls to make police kick down the doors of the homes of legal gun owners. It is a campaign of intimidation, certainly, but it also puts both police and legal gun owners in danger.

When you call in a fake police report causing police to invade a home it is called “SWATting.” Police come slamming into a home, guns drawn and ready for trouble because a caller told them that there was some criminal activity or a wild fight going on in the house. Of course, if there is nothing wrong in the house but police are expecting trouble, this is a recipe for disaster. Someone could get killed and it isn’t necessarily only a cop’s life that is in danger.

But gun haters don’t care if they put a neighbor’s life in danger.

“You see a GunFilth waving its penis substitute, exit, call police. Armed robbery in progress.” So wrote Twitter user “Little Black Dog” on September 13 of this year.
The injunction was a particularly colorful one, but the idea behind it, alas, is not as uncommon as one might wish. “I see you #opencarry with a gun in public,” a man named “joe villa” threatened earlier this week, “i’m calling the cops. psycho behaving erratic. make your day.” A translation for the more literate among us: “The law be damned; exercise your rights under the law and I’ll threaten your life.”
“Take a look through the comments threads on Moms Demand Action’s Facebook page,” Bearing Arms’s Bob Owens tells me, “and you’ll see a lot of this.” “Not,” he clarifies,
from the leaders of the group. But it is a mindset popular among the followers. On there, on the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence — ironically — and on GunFreeZone.net, you’ll notice commenters advocating that people call the police and exaggerate what is going on, hoping to get the cops to come in.

For the supposedly more caring, more peaceful, less violent left their hate so easily overrides their sanity, doesn’t it? Or are they just complete hypocrites? You tell us in the comments section.

- See more at: http://www.libertynews.com/2014/10/g....ljOp887m.dpuf

Dayton-Area Walmart Shooting: Was An Innocent Man SWATted to Death?

Posted by Bob Owens on
August 7, 2014 at 1:52 pm

These facts we know to be true:

John Crawford III was shot and killed Tuesday night by Beavercreek, Ohio police officers in a Walmart.

• Crawford was holding either an airsoft (6mm plastic projectile) or BB/pellet (4.5mm/.177-caliber metal projectile) rifle sold by Walmart that he picked up in the store.
• Crawford was on the phone when he was shot.
• Crawford did not have a criminal record.

From there, the tale of what happened next diverges significantly depending upon the perspective of who is telling the story.
LeeCee Johnson, who claims that she is the mother of Crawford’s children, says that Mr. Crawford was on the phone with her when he was shot. What she heard suggests that he was gunned down with little warning.

LeeCee Johnson, who said she is the mother of Crawford’s children, said she was on a cell phone call with Crawford when he was shot by officers. She said Crawford went to the area to visit family members.

“We was just talking. He said he was at the video games playing videos and he went over there by the toy section where the toy guns were. And the next thing I know, he said ‘It’s not real,’ and the police start shooting and they said ‘Get on the ground,’ but he was already on the ground because they had shot him,” she said, adding: “And I could hear him just crying and screaming. I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human.”

According to Ms. Johnson’s point-of-view as the person on the other end of the phone, it sounded to her as if Crawford was unaware that others may have considered him a threat. She claims that she heard him address someone and say “it’s not real,” at which point he was shot and then someone (presumably police officers) yell at him to “get on the ground,” after he’d already been shot.

Customers gather outside the Dayton, Ohio Walmart where Mr. Crawford was shot and killed by police.

If this point of view is remotely true, it appears that Mr. Crawford was on the phone focused on his conversation with Ms. Johnson and completely unaware of how he was viewed by others as a threat. It also appears he was slow in responding to the police, or that they opened fire on him before he had a chance to process what was going on and respond to police commands.

Two shoppers who followed Mr. Crawford through the store—and who called 911 to report him—offer a very different perspective than that of Ms. Johnson:

April and Ronald Ritchie, in an interview Wednesday night with News Center 7’s Jessica Heffner and Dayton Daily News Staff Writer Kelli Wynn, said they were in the hardware department when they saw a man leaving an aisle and walk past them with the rifle pointed toward the sky.

“He got on his cell phone right after he walked past me,” April Ritchie said. Ritchie was on her cell phone, talking with her mother. She had broken an ankle and was riding a scooter.

“Guy. Gun. Hold on,” April Ritchie recalled telling her mother.

They followed the man at a safe distance and Ronald Ritchie, a former Marine, called 911 at 8:21 p.m.
“Anytime I saw people walking his way, I would get their attention,” April Ritchie said, waving her hands for the reporters to demonstrate what she did. She said at one point, a family was standing next to the man with the rifle, but didn’t notice the rifle. The man turned to look at them with a stare she described as if he was telling them, “don’t come near me.”

He was holding a cellphone between his left ear and left shoulder while messing with the rifle, she said. “He just kept messing with it and I heard a clicking,” she said.

Ronald Ritche said the man “was just waving it at children and people. Items…. I couldn’t hear anything that he was saying. I’m thinking that he is either going to rob the place or he’s there to shoot somebody else.” The man looked kind of serious, Ronald Ritchie said. “He didn’t really want to be looked at and when people did look at him, he was pointing the gun at them. He was pointing at people. Children walking by.”

Ronald Ritchie said the man wasn’t pointing the weapon at people as if he was going to shoot, but rather waving it in their direction as a threat.

The couple didn’t know Beavercreek police had arrived until they saw four or five officers appear in the Pets section, where the man with the rifle was standing.

“I heard, ‘put it down, put it down,’ ” April Ritchie said. “I heard two shots after I saw him turn. He still had the weapon in his hand.”

The Ritchies said the man fell backward when he was hit by the gunfire, but got back up and went toward the officer who shot him. That officer then tackled the man. Officers then handcuffed him and turned him on his back, Ronald Ritchie said.

To hear the perspective of the Ritchies, they were the reluctant heroes trailing a madman with a rifle who called 911 and prevented something bad from happening.

What I find troubling about their account is the apparent indifference of others in the store who encountered Mr. Crawford before he was shot. In the Ritchies account, the other customers did not act as if Mr. Crawford was a threat. They apparently didn’t see the rifle, or if they did, they had the ability to tell it was an airsoft rifle and not a real firearm. As for the Ritchies insistence that Crawford was waving the rifle at people, I have to wonder if that was merely an erroneous conclusion they drew based upon the scenario they created in their own heads.

What really matters, of course, is what happened when the Beavercreek Police arrived. Ms. Johnson insists that Mr. Crawford told someone—presumably the responding officers—that the rifle wasn’t real. She says that she then heard gunshots, and then orders from police to drop the rifle. The Ritchies suggest that Mr. Crawford turned upon hearing the police, and then police shot him as he still held the toy rifle.

One way or the other, the police gunned down a man who was not a threat to anyone. Whether they committed a crime in taking Mr. Crawford’s life remains to be seen. I suspect that they did not, but an Ohio Bureau of Investigation inquiry and prosecutor will ultimately be in charge of making that determination.

* * *

My fear upon hearing both of these perspectives is that the Ritchies created a situation where a harmless man with no ill intentions was, in effect, SWATted to death.

“SWATting” is the intentional practice of calling 911 and reporting someone committing a violent crime, in order to create an overwhelming police response (such as a SWAT team, which is how the term came about). We’ve discussed SWATting previously at Bearing Arms after radical left-wing talk show host Mike Malloyannounced his intentions to SWAT open carriers in hopes of getting them shot:

I guess what I’ll do if I’m ever in that situation and I see one of these half-witted yahoos walking in with a weapon, high-caliber rifle like that, I’ll just put on a berserk act. I will just start screaming Gun! Gun! Gun! Watch out, everybody hit the deck! Guns! Guns! Everybody! And then dial 911 and I will say, shots fired, which will bring every g**-damned cop within 15 miles. And then the half-wits with the long guns are going to panic and they’re going to run out of the store and if that rifle isn’t shouldered properly, the cop is going to take a look at that and put a bullet right in their forehead.

It is my fear that Mr. & Mrs. Ritchie may have profiled Mr. Crawford—a man without a criminal record—based upon his race and age, bizarrely assuming that a man armed with a real firearm would be waltzing through Walmart without anyone else calling police.

Ronald Ritchie said of Mr. Crawford, “I’m thinking that he is either going to rob the place or he’s there to shoot somebody else,” and called 911 when no one else apparently found Mr. Crawford to be a threat.

As a result of his phone call and the actions of responding police, three small children will now grow up without a father.
Was it worth it?

Update: The law enforcement agency involved in the shooting was the Beavercreek Police Department. Beavercreek is a suburb of Dayton. We’ve updated the references in the story from Dayton to Beavercreek.

Update: Authorities have confirmed that Mr. Crawford was holding a Crosman Mk-177, a pump-action BB-gun that bears a vague resemblance to the FN SCAR. One of the officers involved in the incident was involved in a fatal shooting in 2010 that was ruled justified at the time.

http://bearingarms.com/dayton-walmar...atted-death/3/

BREAKING: Video of Ohio Walmart Shopper Shooting Released

By Dan Zimmerman on September 25, 2014
FULL VIDEO AT LINK - This version does not have the full conversation between Ritchie and 911.

Video has now been release of the August shooting (at about 8:26:55) of Ohio Walmart shopper John Crawford III. A grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict Beavercreek Officer Sean Williams. But as usatoday.com reports, Crawford’s family claims the shooting constitutes a murder and now “Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced Wednesday that he is turning the investigative files over to the U.S. Department of Justice for a civil rights review. The federal government has been monitoring the case and agreed to a review.” It was already known that Crawford had taken a pellet gun from another part of the store and police responded to a report of a man waving a gun around. Does seeing the video change your view of the incident?
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/201...ting-released/

Main Witness In Fatal Wal-Mart Police Shooting Changes His Story

3:24 PM 09/07/2014
CHUCK ROSS
Reporter

A man whose 911 call from inside an Ohio Wal-Mart preceded the fatal police shooting of 22-year-old John Crawford has changed his story.

Ronald Ritchie called 911 from inside the Beavercreek store on Aug. 5 claiming that Crawford was carrying a gun around and aiming it at other shoppers.

“He’s, like, pointing it at people,” Ritchie told 911 dispatchers. He also told reporters after Crawford was shot by two police officers that the man was also pointing the gun at children.

But in an interview with the Guardian, the 24-year-old Ritchie changed that crucial component of his story.

“At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody,” said Ritchie, who now claims that Crawford was “waving it around.”
It turned out that Crawford was carrying an air rifle — and one that Wal-Mart sells. His girlfriend, also the mother of his two children, says that she was on the phone with Crawford at the time of the shooting and that she heard him tell police “It’s not real” before he was shot.

Ritchie also told 911 that Crawford was “trying to load” the gun. According to the Guardian, the air rifle was not loaded. Making matters worse, the 911 dispatcher relayed Ritchie’s claim to police, saying that Crawford “just put some bullets inside.”

Beavercreek police turned the investigation over to Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office. DeWine has refused to release video surveillance of the shooting to the public, claiming that doing so would taint a grand jury set to convene on Sept. 22.

DeWine did show Crawford’s family portions of some store surveillance video. They say that it showed that Crawford was not acting erratically with the air rifle.

“You can clearly see people walk past him, and they didn’t think anything about it. Everybody was just kind of minding their own business,” Crawford’s father told the Guardian. “He wasn’t acting in any type of way that he would have been considered menacing, if you will.”

An attorney for Crawford’s family told The Daily Caller last month that the air rifle was not packaged when Crawford initially picked it off the shelf.

They say that video shows Crawford was on his cell phone and was facing towards a store shelf for nearly six minutes when police approached him from behind, ordered him to put the air rifle down, and shot

. (RELATED: Attorney Shares Details Of Wal-Mart Police Shooting Video)

The family attorney told the Guardian that a preliminary autopsy shows that Crawford was shot in the back of his left arm and the left side of his body. That would support the family’s claim that Crawford was not facing police when they shot him.

Though many questions surround Crawford’s death, the incident was quickly obscured by the police shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Like Brown, Crawford was black. The officers who shot both are white.

Civil rights activists, including Al Sharpton, the national media and even President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder weighed in on Brown’s death, though there is evidence that he assaulted the officer who ended up shooting him.

The shooting was tragic in another way. Another shopper, 37-year-old Angela Williams, died from heart failure after hearing the shots fired.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/07/ma...ges-his-story/

Angela Williams: Woman’s Death Following Walmart Shooting Ruled Homicide

Sep 27, 2014
By NewsOne Staff

Greene County, Ohio coroner Dr. Kevin Sharrett has ruled the death of 37-year-old Angela Williams a homicide due to a heart attack she suffered when police officers stormed a Beavercreek Walmart on Aug. 5 and shot and killed 22-year-old John Crawford III, reports Dayton Daily News.

Sharrett attributes the cause of her death to acute ventricular dysrhythmia due to hypertensive and arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Described otherwise, Williams had an irregular heartbeat causing a cardiac arrest as a consequence of heart disease. The report makes no note of drugs or alcohol in Williams’ system.

The manner of Williams’ death is officially listed as homicide because of the chaotic circumstances inside the Beavercreek Walmart, according William Harden, the Greene County Coroner’s Office chief investigator.

“If she had been walking around normally and just collapsed, that would be a natural death,” he said. “She was fleeing and running.”

Harden said under the care of a cardiologist, her existing heart conditions may have been treated therapeutically or through a surgical device like a stent.

“But her death did not come from her extensive heart problems, it came because she was fleeing,” Harden said.

Williams was shopping in Walmart with her family when she suffered the heart attack in response to the officers shooting Crawford. She was taken to a local hospital where she was later pronounced dead.

As previously reported by NewsOne, even though Crawford’s death was ruled a homicide by gunshot wound to the torso, an Ohio grand jury declined to indict the two police officers, Sean Williams andDavid Darkow, who shot and killed him.

According to police chief Dennis Evers, the officers acted appropriately when they shot the father of two to death.

“The officers gave verbal commands to the subject to drop the weapon,” Evers said in a statement. “The subject … was shot after failing to comply with the officers’ commands. The quick response of officers was instrumental in containing this situation and minimizing the risk to customers.”

But the surveillance video released this week tells a different story.

Crawford can be seen on his cell phone walking around the store, browsing, when he picks up the toy rifle, which according to Special Prosecutor Mark Piepmeier, had been taken out of its box and left on the shelf.

The toy rifle was at Crawford’s side and he was turned away from police officers when they fired on him.

Crawford immediately dropped the toy rifle and ran for cover. He almost instantly pivots—it appears as if another police officer was approaching from the other aisle—and apparently tries to show the officer that he’s unarmed when the fatal shot is fired.

There is almost no time between when the officer first appears and the first shot is fired. In fact, it appears from the surveillance video that Crawford didn’t even see the shot coming.

John Crawford Shooting [Warning: Graphic Content] At Link
http://newsone.com/3056226/angela-williams-womans-death-following-walmart-shooting-ruled-homicide