There is one less dirtbag in the county and he gave you a present.
A standoff with police closed state Highway 167 from Friday night until Saturday morning and ended with a man dead.
Following up on a tip, Renton police approached two cars in a hotel parking lot. A man in one took off running with two officers in pursuit. According to Penny Bartley, spokeswoman for Renton police, the man and police both fired guns. The man hid in a swampy area next to 167. Eventually more than 40 law-enforcement officers were on the scene, as was a King County Sheriff’s helicopter.
The exchange of fire continued, but police don’t believe they hit the man. When morning came, police found the man, who was not identified, dead from a gunshot. Police believe it was self-inflicted.
Sadly, the Seattle Times did not give us a present and I’ll have to fill in some information here.
First off, it was around 2300 on Friday night that they closed the freeway until sometime around 1000 Saturday morning. Next, it wasn’t just a state highway that they closed, they also shut down part of Interstate 405 where it and Hwy 167 intersect. For those who are unfamiliar with the greater Seattle area, if you’ve been to so-cal and know of their I-405, ours is as important a bloodline for traffic as it is the only way to get around the atrocious I-5 traffic snarl that is downtown Seattle.
Also, the officers were already on the scene making buy/busts for drugs and prostitution when this jackass just walked up and started firing into the crowd of officers. Not a very smart move. The officers shot back, but the guy kept moving, crossing the interstate and going into a water run-off area full of aspen trees. After losing him in the aspen, Renton PD requested the King County Sheriff’s Office million dollar flashlight “Guardian One� helicopter.
They finally spotted him and got him pinned down in the woods and he sat there for hours, occasionally taking shots at random cars and the helicopter. There were no good shots available from either the nearby hotel or the car dealership, so they just waited him out.
A couple hours after dawn, the bird reported that he didn’t look like the guy was moving much so they went in and found him dead.
Thank you, unnamed criminal puke, for not making me have to spend my tax dollars on sending your useless ass to trial.
Having read this entry, your response to Wil Wheaton’s recent recanting, and about half of your front page, I am left with one question: do you have any plans on how to attract to your cause the portion of the voting public that is motivated by compassion instead of self-interest?
To answer your question simply, No.
To answer it complexly, I worry about my own (family/friends) first and the rest (everybody else) second. If they would worry about themselves, I would have to worry about them even less.
I pay more than half of my wages to ‘The Rest’. Why should I worry about them any further than that, or would you have it that I gave everything to them so that I only had time to worry about where I am going to live, what I am going to eat, which line do I have to stand in to get toilet paper and whose ass do I have to kiss so that I can make sure I get some time with my family?
If that sounds cold to you, tough. I’m too busy putting food on the table and trying to survive in a wannabe socialist utopia to be overly compassionate. You got the extra cash to spare, give it away. I’m working for tomorrow.
To answer it philosophically, how is me voting for my self interest not compassionate? And to go even deeper, I’m sure that you think that you vote in your own self interest, how is that any different than me voting for mine.
Your attempt to take the moral high ground will stop right here.
When I vote, I vote for lower taxes, so that my neighbor can keep more of the money he works for, I vote for removing regulation from businesses so that my and other employers can work more freely and without having to provide an office and staff for a government official on the premises (at the business owner’s expense), I vote for limiting the scope of government’s power over private property so that a landowner can build what he wants on the land he owns and pays taxes for, and last, but certainly not least, I vote against gun control so that my fellow citizens can protect themselves from people who would do them harm.
How are those ideas not compassionate? Is it not compassionate to not want government in my daily life or in the lives of my fellow citizens? Is it not compassionate to make them not have to worry about breaking the most obscure of laws, costing them time in the courtroom, money out of their wallets and possibly time in prison? Is it not compassionate to want my fellow citizens to be able to save themselves from grave danger?
Your ‘compassion’ is fake and is actually irrational sympathy.
Should I feel sorry for an adult who has chosen to break the law by selling drugs and then chooses to fire on a group of armed men who have been tasked with keeping the public safe and given arresting powers? The guy was an idiot who didn’t want to go to jail so he acted irresponsibly, thinking that he could frighten the police away with his random gunfire. When that didn’t work, he shot himself because of he was a coward who couldn’t face up to his own actions.
If he would have just took in what was happening, he could have just walked away and the police would not have been the wiser. But no, he took the selfish route and closed a major freeway interchange for ten hours with his childish ‘me me me’ behavior. Do you support that?
From your words, you seem to think that if the police should have just left him alone and let him escape.
You can take feeling sorry for yourself and pushing your inadequacies on others too far, pal.
Sending someone to detox for the seventh time is a waste of taxpayer money and a waste of the detox center’s time. Publicly housing someone for more than a year or two turns into conditioning them to expect that they can live like that forever. It also gives them more money to pay for the habits that put them in the needing place initially, it doesn’t help them learn to cover their own expenses.
Take your personality defects somewhere else, because they’ll get you nothing but laughter here.
And BTW, you should pay more attention to details, pud. Two different people wrote the two posts you mentioned.
Hmm, testy, testy.
I blame reality TV for this bonehead who thought he could outduel all the cops in Seattle.
I blame the cops for their usual “oh, so careful” approach that left this hosebag alive for that many hours, firing randomly.
The cops don’t get it: when they have an armed man who has proven himself the ultimate danger by firing at them and others, that is a major emergency. The first 3 to 5 cops on the scene need to take their weapons and go into the woods, hunt the guy down and kill him forthwith.
When are they going to learn what being behind the badge means? It means PROTECTING THE PUBLIC, and that would have been best done in this case by offing the offender immediately.
The cops have never been to the DOD SERE (Survival-Evasion-Resistance-Escape) school, but I have. I’m trained to go to ground, then sneak out of the area my enemy thinks I’m trapped in, using evaluation of their tactics to my advantage.
When I first started work as a cop, we wouldn’t have given this guy 5 minutes to surrender before flushing him out and killing him.
As my career marched on (forward?), the standard bacame “at the end of the day, we go home to Mama”. In other words, the cops now will tolerate some level of risk to the public so they can lower their own risk.
That’s intolerable.
After Columbine, the cops finally had to admit that they didn’t have the right answer with “surround and contain”. We were then trained to enter a building with a team, using SWAT tactics, and proceed with a rapid search to find and neutralize the school shooter.
If that philosophy is proper for schools (I suspect it only passed muster in liberal cities because it was “for the children”), why wouldn’t it be appropriate for any active shooter situation with any potential victims in the vicinity?
The Gummint prefers us not to arm ourselves, but every time the cops sit on their asses to wait an active shooter out, it confirms for me why I advocate EVERYONE being armed.
There have been cases like this where the shooter evaded the cops and did a home invasion with tragic results.
There was a heli up, and the observer could have had an M-14 to end the standoff.
Someone needs to sue the cops for their abysmal performance here, and don’t tell me that there is no lawsuit because their is no harm to anyone else but the shooter. Bullshit. The shooter put everyone within a definable radius at extreme risk for hours, when such risk should and could have been limited to minutes.
…and to “alphasqix”:
Enlightened Self-Interest is the definable philosophy that motivates individuals to excel, and thereby advance their society.
I’m not the first to say this, nor is AK. I believe that I got a list of such philosophers on Day One of PH-101 as a freshman.