Senile Disfunction

This most bizarre story about an armed robber is so sugar coated with sweet empathy from the author that it would almost make me laugh if it weren't so fucking disgusting.

"Poor old man with a cane and an oxygen tank is so misunderstood; he's got so many health problems and all that he had no idea what he was doing."

Sometimes he disguised himself as a friendly doorman — “Good afternoon,” he would say, before drawing a gun — or a messenger or a Vietnam veteran, the authorities said. He once used two knives during a robbery.

"B-b-b-but but, HE HAD AILMENTS!"

Well, no shit, but a rabid dog has an ailment too - that doesn't mean you stand there like a goon and wait for it to bite someone's kid. You do the responsible thing and take care of the problem quickly, before it gets worse:

“He was kind of running in and carrying a gun, and told my employees that he didn’t want to kill anybody, and for them to get on the floor, and they followed his instructions,” Mr. Chamblee said. “He asked the young lady for the cash, and she gave it to him.”

"Ohhhh, but he asked the young lady for the cash, nicely and all, and on top of that he has emphysema you see? He didn't want to kill anybody!"

Yeah, I see that he had emphysema from all the crack he used to smoke right before he took property away from a human being after threatening their life with a weapon. Asking someone nicely while pointing a gun in their face is not asking nicely; it's a demand.

The gunman ordered the three employees into a bathroom and barred the door with a chair. Then he needed to rest.

"He needed the rest because he was so frail, being an old man and all. Poor guy."

The only thing that's misunderstood is why that old bastard didn't need to rest because one of his potential victims ventilated his lungs with some well aimed gun fire, instead of being corralled into the bathroom like some docile little fury critter.

“He was a good person. He prayed — preached, he did. He really served God. He served him the last 10 or 20 years.”

Actually, it sounds to me like the only thing this shitbag served the last 10 to 20 years was hard time at the behest of the very society that he waged war on, as I somehow doubt that God approves of one of his flock savaging innocent people, ass.

Back to the pity party, our preacher/pitiful old man/saint-who-must-endure-dialysis was mingling with the locals in a department store, when suddenly his senility started nonviolently acting up:

The customer bolted for the rear, where there was an exit. The gunman turned to Mr. Tezcan and asked, “You want one?” Mr. Tezcan said. And he fired, leaving a knuckle-deep divot in a metal shelf displaying shirts. Mr. Tezcan ran for the rear, too, and the gunman fired again. That bullet tore through eight suits, back to front on a rack, before stopping in the breast pocket of a ninth. A third shot also missed.

"See? The fragile choir boy is so fragile and helpless that he can't even fire a hollowpoint bullet through the backs of two fleeing people! He wasn't even trying!!"

OK, enough of the snark. Let's get down to the point that irks me even more than the gratuitous pity.

This fucker was born and raised in New York, lived a life of violence, attacked person after person after person, was thrown in prison time after time, and yet he was free again to go about harming innocent people. That about sum it up? Here's a glimpse of his stats:

In Manhattan’s Midtown North detective squad, Lt. T. J. Moroney called him a “heavy-duty career criminal” with at least 134 convictions, mostly for robbery, on his record.

Mostly for robbery, got it? Just so we're clear, this guy was known to be violent for his entire life, and demonstrated this fact at every waking opportunity, and yet a panel of morons on a parole board committed 1st degree jackassery by letting him loose on society to rob thirty eight people in two months. Brilliant!

Folks, you have to see where I'm taking this. This fish wrap of a news paper uses examples of violent people like this to advocate disarming you, so that in the end there are more unarmed lambs to be shooed into a bathroom and locked down by the same violent people.

More importantly, this is a clear example of a law enforcement fail -- it was against all common sense to let this guy out of prison in the first place. Don't public officers swear an oath to protect the United States? Isn't the United States comprised of United States Citizens? Some of those Citizens live in other states, like Virginia for instance, so it's important that states like New York be diligent in keeping their scumbags locked up so they don't come down here and fire weapons at people I care about. It shouldn't be the responsibility of a Maryland State Trooper to pursue him up to the point of his death because New York couldn't hold on to their trash.

I get that some people should get a crack at rehabilitation. I really do, and I absolutely agree with it, but they should not get a third chance. After their first chance is up and they have served their time, if they then commit some violent act on a citizen, the last signature on the documents that authorized the release of the scumbag should be the one holding the bag as personally responsible to pay the claim of the damaged family, whether it's a prosecutor, judge, cop, or multiple idiots on a parole board - they should be held personally liable. If one of these monsters from another state injures someone in my family, I'm going to find that signature and get my return.