Albuquerque police have announced that they have arrested the man responsible for the killing of Lilly Garcia, 4, in a road rage incident. Tony Torrez, 32, reportedly confessed to the crime and the police hit him with a long list of charges that should guarantee that he remains in jail most if not all of his life. Indeed, even a plea agreement at this point would likely place the sentence near the maximum level but, if Torrez confessed, there is little in terms of a defense to present without striking the confession on some grounds.
Alan Garcia was traveling westbound on Interstate 40 when Torrez cut him off in a Lexus in attempting to exit the freeway. The men exchanged words and Torrez pulled out a gun and fired at Garcia’s truck. He hit the four-year-old girl. With the witnesses and alleged confession, Torrez is toast absent some surprising development.
Torrez is charged with murder, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, assault with the intent to commit a violent felony, shooting at or from a motor vehicle, child abuse, child abuse resulting in death and tampering with evidence. He was being held on $650,000 bail.
While the actions of Torrez leaves one, again, depressed about our society, it is important to note that Torrez was captured with the help of a tip. Moreover, two nurses stopped and rendered aid to Lilly until she was taken to the hospital. Finally, thousands of people have gone to a gofundme site to contribute to the family.
Just showing the picture below is enough to secure a death penalty.
Which store didn’t get looted and burned to the ground during the 1992 riots? The one where the Korean owners patrolled the front openly armed. They didn’t murder anyone, but like DBQ said, they sent the message to looters to “come and get it.”
Obviously. That’s the whole point. Criminals move on to softer, unarmed targets.
Speaking of the NRA, they have their good and bad points, and lots of internal politics, but one of their excellent benefits is that they have some of the best gun safety training classes.
There was a scandal when a little boy in a neighboring town was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend. The social worker completely ignored repeated warnings from the boy’s teachers and others in the community.
That was a preventable murder. No firearm was involved. Banning all guns would have had no effect.
So you are for some regulations?
No one, not even the NRA, is for completely unregulated and unfettered access to guns. The current regulations require, for hand guns and other types of weapons: back ground checks, waiting period to obtain the gun and restrictions. Felons, mentally ill for examples. That the reporting of the mentally ill is not adequate, is not a problem you can place at the gun sellers feet.
In addition there are restrictions on fully automatic weapons. Seriously, no one needs a fully automatic machine gun. However, the people who are ignorant about guns seem to be confused about the difference between fully automatic and semi automatic guns, especially semi automatic hunting rifles or shotguns.
Even so, the rules are only good if people follow them. And we know that criminals by definition are NOT going to follow the laws. Therefore ALL the laws that are in effect now and every single harebrained idea that has been proposed does nothing, nada, zip, nil to keep criminals and the mentally ill from getting guns illegally.
Once you guys come up with a law that might work……get back to us until then
MOLON LABE
Max:
One of the reasons why gun owners oppose registering their firearms is because their legally obtained firearm can be decreed illegal one day. It happens all the time as various types of weapons get banned. And then the registry is a means for the government confiscating what they legally bought, unless there is a grandfather clause built in. Since the people behind many of these regulations neither understand firearms, nor support the 2nd Amendment, there is no trust that they will be able to create reasonable regulations.
“How many people have to be killed to get you to realize their death was preventable?” ALL murders are preventable, Max. If someone could have only stopped the criminal, locked them up, taken away their keys when they wanted to go kill someone with road rage, taken away their hammer, held their fists down…
Removing a firearm from law abiding citizens does not prevent murder. Otherwise, there would be no murder in countries where guns are illegal, and they would be shining utopias.
Indeed, the only countries with very low murder rates tend to have Draconian immigration laws. They are extremely selective about who they let enter the country and stay. There is no open border encouraging drug cartels and human traffickers. In order to immigrate, you have to be educated and prove you have a stable job waiting for you. I personally believe immigration should not hinge on socioeconomic status.
Max:
Yes, I support reasonable regulation. I want guns out of the hands of the violent mentally ill and violent criminals. Right now, our broken mental health system means that a mentally ill person has to actually harm someone before they can be institutionalized against their will. That’s because it used to be so easy to do so, that husbands institutionalized their wives just to be with their mistresses. So now it’s too hard to do so.
I worked with a woman who was completely certain that her mentally ill cousin was going to kill a lot of people one day. He was extremely disturbed, and had made death threats against family and other people. But although you can get a restraining order, you can’t get someone put away for that. Even when they won’t take their meds. You have to wait until they actually commit mass murder, and THEN you can get them put away. He even attempted to kidnap a woman, but he only got a slap on the wrist.
There was another woman who was a former classmate of someone I knew. She drove around all day with a sword in her car because she saw “demons.” She would violently argue with photos on the wall. Again, there was nothing the police could do until she actually harmed someone.
This is exactly what frustrates so many of us. Almost every time there is one of these mass killings, we hear about all those red flags that fail to trigger any protective action. These people are ill and need help, and protected from harming others.
Max, this Snopes is for you:
There are people who fight and forth about how the gun buyback program increased crime . . . reduced crime. But they are BOTH wrong.
http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp
“The piece quoted above leads the reader to believe that much of the Australian citizenry owned handguns until their ownership was made illegal and all firearms owned by “law-abiding citizens” were collected by the government through a buy-back program in 1997. This is not so. Australian citizens do not (and never did) have a constitutional right to own firearms — even before the 1997 buyback program, handgun ownership in Australia was restricted to certain groups, such as those needing weapons for occupational reasons, members of approved sporting clubs, hunters, and collectors. Moreover, the 1997 buyback program did not take away all the guns owned by these groups; only some types of firearms (primarily semi-automatic and pump-action weapons) were banned. And even with the ban in effect, those who can demonstrate a legitimate need to possess prohibited categories of firearms can petition for exemptions from the law.
Given this context, any claims based on statistics (even accurate ones) which posit a cause-and-effect relationship between the gun buyback program and increased crime rates because “criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed” are automatically suspect, since the average Australian citizen didn’t own firearms even before the buyback.”
Australia was originally a penal colony. It never had a constitutional right to keep and bear arms. It spent half a billion dollars to buy guns from sporting clubs, hunters, and other legal owners. What a waste of money.
If we want to keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons, then we need to do periodic unannounced checks and pat them down for guns. You know – that’s called “profiling.” You see your multi-felon standing on the corner with other multi-felons, wearing gang colors, and you, the cop, go over there and ask them 20 questions and find some reason to pat them down. Because that’s what actually makes the street safer.
But cops are not allowed to do that anymore because Liberals want to feel better. Now they can see gangs hanging out on street corners, and they have to keep on driving.
Karen S
So you are for some regulations?
Adam Lanza was also irresponsible and negligent. Her son had posters all over his walls of murder and mayhem, wrote about murder and mayhem, was deeply psychologically disturbed, so she went out and armed him. Awesome. Our broken mental health system means we had to ignore all those red flags, and his negligent mother helped him get a weapon. If the instant database was correctly updated, his mental health should have flagged him. But we don’t follow the laws we already have.
That’s like having a suicidal teenager and buying him rope, razor blades, sleeping pills, and then telling him you’re going away for the weekend.
Karen S
Look at what happened to Australia when they eliminated firearms…
Karen S
Adam Lanza’s mother was a law abiding citizen… until her son had free access to deadly weapons.
Then he killed her and a whole lot of other babies.
What happened when Chicago made it extremely difficult to own a firearm? The armed gangs took over and now it’s WWIII out on the streets every day.
But, by all means, please keep repeating this experiment.
Disarming worked out really great for the slaves, American Indians, the Jews in Germany, the Chinese, the Armenians in Turkey, the Mayans in Guatemala, those who opposed Stalin in the Soviet Union . . .
Oh, wait, even though history has repeated itself over and over again, let’s expect a different result! Especially since some of these examples of genocide occurred mere decades ago. Even though no government has ever withstood the test of time, and every great civilization has eventually fallen with pressure and time, let’s just assume that our own is the exception to the rule, and everything will be just fine forever. We’ll just assume that our voting patterns cannot possibly harm our freedoms and our republic, because it should be immune to our own folly, right? We’ll just be the only ones for no other reason than because our emotions tell us so.
Olli,
“Pure fantasy? An outnumbered, out-armed “citizenry” did just that. Oh, those crazy revolutionaries.”
The military of the British gov in the 18th century in no way resembles our obscenely armed military of today. Our current military can place a few drone operators in a building in Kansas and blow you and your house to smithereens and your arsenal of assault weapons will mean diddly.
Karen S
“WHY are people ignoring all the crimes and murders and injuries purposely created with any weapon other than a gun? WHY do people apply a completely different standard to firearms?”
= = =
How many people have to be killed to get you to realize their death was preventable?
To display the ludicrousness of this argument, let’s have a daily discussion of every time a vehicle is used for manslaughter or felony murder. And then let’s argue about banning cars.
Or let’s argue about every time someone dies from poisoning, and argue about banning all household toxins and medications.
Arguing that law abiding citizens should all be punished for the actions of criminals makes no sense there, either.
WHY are people ignoring all the crimes and murders and injuries purposely created with any weapon other than a gun? WHY do people apply a completely different standard to firearms?
The anti-2nd Amendment crowd appears to believe that guns should be banned if any criminal uses them in a crime.
But no tool can meet that requirement, including a blunt spoon and a #2 pencil. Every imaginable means has been used for criminals to harm their fellow man. So if the same logic was applied, each and every tool we have created would be banned.
doglover:
“Those who love guns should all live in a walled-in community with each other.” Actually, people in rural areas do just that, without the walls. There is extremely high gun ownership in many rural communities, including my own. I see people riding horses with firearms strapped down, and no one gets shot. You hear people shooting rattlers from time to time. Do you understand why it’s not the Wild West? Because the guns do not make us criminals. If we were all gang members, the behavior would be different. But law abiding citizens continue to be law abiding even when holding a chain saw, gun, knife, or nail gun.
THall:
“They didn’t have to be if only some common sense regulations and restrictions were put in place.” Actually, some of the highest rates of gun violence (as usual done by gangs) occur in areas with the strictest gun laws (Chicago, Baltimore, etc). Do you understand why gun laws do not affect criminal behavior? Because criminals break the law. That’s why we still arrest people for murder every day, even though there are laws against murder.
I do understand the idea that guns make people scared because in the wrong hands they can do damage rapidly. On the flip side, the reason why we created guns is to make a weaker person able to fight off a stronger attacker. Without a firearm, what is an elderly person going to do if someone breaks into their house at night to hurt them? Besides die? What about all those women who’s exes have decreed they will happily go to jail just so they can kill the women who dare to live without them? What are they supposed to do? Besides die?
People get this false feeling of security if we ban guns. But they have created soft targets that become magnets for mass shooters. They ignore all the crime – rape, murder, maiming, that occurs every day without guns. That evil man Ariel Castro kidnapped 3 young ladies, brutally assaulted them, and kept them as sex slaves for 10 years without using a firearm. He hung them with chains, gagged them until they were in danger of asphyxiating, and used a motorcycle helmet so no one could hear their screams. He killed the unborn children by punching them in the stomach.
There are sick, sick people out there. Removing a single tool does not decrease the rate of criminal behavior. This has already been studied by Harvard Law:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
So you have to ask yourself, is your goal to improve public safety, or just to remove one of the tools without having any affect whatsoever on crime?
No other tool faces a complete ban for law abiding citizens when criminals break the law and misuse them. None. And people can deny all they want that they want to remove all guns. We already have very strict gun laws in many parts of the country. That doesn’t work to stop murder, because criminals break the law. The only way to prevent a firearm from being used in a crime is to remove all firearms from the country. That will obviously not stop people from killing, raping, and maiming each other, but, by golly, they won’t use a gun to do it! That will also prevent people from living anywhere that hunting is a common source of food, or target practice, and if you have a stalker who keeps telling you he’s going to kill you, you’re just screwed. Even a skeet shooter could possibly be used to commit a crime, so no more clay target practice. Because improving the crime rate doesn’t matter. What matters is that Liberals just feel better about themselves, even while harming others. I’ve said before that I could be alive today because my father stopped a nighttime break in with his firearm. How many others are alive today because of a firearm?
Olly,
Your reply about the Revolutionary War was asked and answered. (Frontier, regulated militia.) It’s a non-starter. Again, your notion that possession of any weapon or any amount of ordinance is going to prevent the government from taking action against you is pure fantasy. It will, in fact, invite lethal force. But if you ever find yourself in that position, let us know how it goes. Best of lucck.
KFC,
I don’t know what SJW is, and I can’t stick around to find out. The phrase “well-regulated militia” has been dealt with a number of times throughout US history and not to the benefit of gun fetishists.
Only recently did the Roberts court eschew that language in favor of stripping communities of enacting laws for themselves. They have unleashed a reign of terror across the land.
Guns are the problem and communities should have a right to demand that you leave your instruments of death at home.
“I might also be able to craft a law that could have kept him from getting behind a wheel of a car.”
True, like not allowing criminal illegal immigrants from Mexico to get drivers licenses?
Need more Gunz
~ N. R. A.