On Wednesday morning, 40-year-old Ian Stawicki walked into the Cafe Racer restaurant in Seattle, Washington and shot five people. Four of them died. About a half an hour later, Stawicki fatally shot a woman in a parking lot and drove off in her SUV. Four hours later, with police closing in on him, Stawicki knelt down on a city sidewalk and shot himself in the head.
His brother, Andrew, said over the past five years or so Stawicki had changed. "Angry. He was really angry toward everything," Andrew said. "It's no surprise to me this happened. We could see this coming. Nothing good is going to come with that much anger inside of you."
Stawicki had been collecting guns for years and had a concealed weapons permit. He was arrested in 2008 on a domestic-violence charge and in 2010 for fourth-degree assault but both charges were dismissed.
According to his father, Walt, the family knew Stawicki was troubled, but there was nothing they could do to get the concealed carry permit revoked.
"The response to us was, there's nothing we can do, he's not a threat to himself or others, or we haven't had a report of it, or we haven't had to pick him up - call us when its worse," Walt said in a radio interview. "And now it's too late - much worse now, six people are dead."
It's sad that, in our pro-gun society, there is nothing you can do to remove guns from people who are unstable, without an arrest for a violent crime or deemed by a doctor to be mentally unstable.
ReplyDeleteYeah, innocent until proven guilty by jury of one's peers and possessing one's liberty until being formally declared mentally unfit a psychiatric professional really sucks.
ReplyDeleteLet's take your idea just a little further and lock up all the Black men. Statistics show that it's likely that they'll commit a crime...
Or pick any other thing or group or situation, it could happen scenario and let's cut it off ahead a time by preventing people from having something - guns, knives, cars, the wrong sort of book...