Crack coverage of non-machine gun machine gun shooting in Baltimore

Two men were hospitalized Sunday and three faced charges after a birthday party in a downtown Baltimore hotel ended violently, with one partygoer shot with a semiautomatic pistol and the suspect allegedly disarmed and badly beaten by others in the crowd.

The Washington Post corrected their earlier article calling the weapon an "Uzi submachine gun;" FOX News didn't. One news site calls it a "TEC-9 Uzi submachine gun." Awesome reporting. The weapon turned out to be a semi-auto TEC-9.

There's not much to say about the shooting itself other than that this type of behavior is par for the course in Baltimore. There was a fist fight before the shooting started, but then things got ugly when the armed scumbag - on parole I might add - started shooting. The hotel allegedly was sending their finest security guards - unarmed no doubt - up to break up the fight before shots were fired.

There are some pretty retarded things said in this article at The Baltimore Sun.

At first, police thought the weapon was an Uzi submachine gun, which caused news of the shooting to spread widely online. The gun was later identified as a TEC-9, also known as a DC-9 - a semi-automatic "assault pistol" that can be converted by owners into an automatic weapon. It looks like a miniature submachine gun, and police described it Sunday as about a foot-and-a-half long. It is not on the legal handgun roster maintained by the Maryland State Police.

Would a 19 year old gang member have a gun on the handgun roster? Does he even know if such a silly roster exists? If he does, does anyone in the MSP honestly think he cares? Also, the weapon is not "easily converted . . .into an automatic weapon;" that's a lie. Wanna bet that if it was, the scumbag that owned it would have converted it? Why do you think that he didn't? Because it's illegal? The hilarity of these notions provide me with much entertainment, and are the reason I started this blog.

Next up, we have a glimmer of something resembling accurate information, but then it quickly gets mixed up with stupidity:

"They're out there, but they're not common," said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. "How does someone who's 19 years old end up with a semi-automatic pistol?"

Do Baltimore Police ponder at length about how scumbags get guns? Does officer Guglielmi think that because handgun ownership in Baltimore is practically illegal that it provides those with no care for the law some sort of barrier from buying a gun from a fellow scumbag? I do agree with him though that TEC-9s are not common, much to the surprise of the idiots who write TV shows. Why would anyone want to carry a heavy, inaccurate, clumsy weapon with crap ergonomics anyways? I mean, does anyone even make a holster for it? The shooter probably thought that this gun was cool because he saw it on an episode of CSI, or while playing Grand Theft Auto, or maybe because he read about how easily it is converted into an automatic weapon by some clueless reporter at The Baltimore Sun.

The part of the article that had me shaking my head was when Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III. . .

". . railed in frustration against "idiots and morons" with guns they're ready to use in a fight. He declared that the police are doing what they can but said authorities need everyone in the city to "help us remove this scourge."

While I would initially side with him on the idiots and morons part, I can't help but point out that a scumbag on the streets of Baltimore would have to be an idiot or a moron to not be armed. Their profession, as misguided and immoral as it is, demands that they have capable weapons. The problem here is that there is an overwhelming population of scumbags in Baltimore, and disarming everyone else hasn't done anything to remedy that. How exactly is "everyone in the city" supposed to "help remove this scourge" when the bad guys have firearms and Baltimore residents do not? I thought the police had guns so that everyone else doesn't need them? So by your own admission, the police are doing "what they can", which isn't enough to stop a teenager from shooting up a birthday party. Remind me again why the citizens there continue to be disarmed by the BPD.

This last bit though crossed the line:

"This was not a random act of violence," Fowler said. "The incident says nothing about downtown. It says more about gun culture in our country and the need to lock people like this up."

There is no "gun culture" in Baltimore, and blaming this shooting on the tens of millions of non-violent firearms owners is offensive. That's just a pathetic excuse. What we are talking about here is the scumbag culture, which necessarily needs to be armed to survive, and much of the blame for this "scourge" lies with the failure of your department to catch them. A bonifide "gun culture" exists in my corner of this country, which is very close to yours, and there are not shootouts at birthday parties, and the crime rate is not seven times the national average. You can't throw a rock in a Wal-Mart here without hitting an armed citizen, and it's not at all unheard of to not have a single murder in this county in a years time. That you consider this type of violence the opposite of "random" is a problem of itself, and confirms why I do my best to avoid visiting any attractions in your city.

I'll take my gun culture over yours any day.

The worst part about this story is that two of the people at the birthday party took down the shooter, took away his weapon, and beat his face in with it - and guess who the BPD charges with attempted murder? There may be more to that story, and I'd like to hear it, but exactly what do you expect unarmed people to do to stop "the scourge" except take the gun away and beat the scumbag with it? Let him go again like you did? That didn't work out so well. Dare I excoriate these two on this blog for failing have their rat-tailed combs at the ready?