An American diplomat in the Pakistani city of Lahore has shot and killed a Pakistani motorcycle rider and his pillion passenger, police say.

They say that the consular official fired his pistol in self-defence. US embassy officials confirmed that an American was involved.

The men were pursuing the American in his car when the incident happened.

[...]

Weapons were recovered from the bodies of the dead men.

I’m sure that this is going to do wonders for US-Pakistan relations.

Even if the shooting turns out to be perfectly justifiable and legal, there’s going to be a lot of drama.

The thieves stole my Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop (old, crappy, and heavily encrypted). Dell service tag/serial number HQN87F1 with a StuffBak asset tag of 000KHNC. Not a big deal; it’s just hardware. The data is encrypted and backed up.

However, they also stole my Glock 19 pistol (9mm, serial MLV023). It had a full magazine of Federal HST JHPs.

I normally take both the computer and gun inside at night, but I was going to have a drink or two with friends last night so I left it in the car to be responsible. That seems to have been not a good idea in this particular case.

The police and insurance have been notified, but I’d appreciate it if folks online and in Tucson are aware.

Fortunately, I keep detailed records of all my guns, and so was able to give them all the useful information. Google Docs is a good thing.

Update: I may not have been clear in the original post: I wasn’t at a bar, I was staying at a friend’s house for the week (I work in Tucson and live near Phoenix, so rather than commute ~2 hours every week, I stay down here during the week with friends) and the drinking was taking place in the house.

Since they were kind enough to let me stay for the week, I try to keep things clean by keeping my things in the car. Normally I also bring the laptop bag and gun inside, but it seemed more sensible to keep them locked in the car to keep the computer and gun away from potentially drunk people for that night. I was evidently wrong.

The alleged smuggler, who is in custody in the US, is accused of smuggling 62 guns into the UK.

The last paragraph, however, stood out to me:

Former Scotland Yard counter-terrorism chief Andy Hayman said details of the case were “genuinely shocking”.

Writing in The Times, he said: “This makes a mockery of the stringent checks we all endure at US airports, such as removing our shoes and belts, having our toothpaste confiscated and all the other irritants.

“Steven Greenoe’s guns could just have easily been bombs.”

Mr. Hayman clearly is not familiar with how things are done in the US when it comes to firearms and air travel. There are clear rules and procedures for traveling with checked firearms. In general, the firearms must be unloaded, kept in a locked case, be in checked baggage (there are certain exceptions for police officers that allow them, in certain situations, to fly with weapons on their person), and be screened by the TSA.

Since Mr. Greenoe’s firearms were in his checked luggage, they were inaccessible to himself or others during the flight. This is in accordance with US travel laws, as well as my understanding of UK laws relating to traveling with firearms. Thus, Mr. Hayman’s comments about this incident making a “mockery” of the searches of passengers and their effects is not relevant. Don’t get me wrong, I think the current passenger screening policies are absurd and well deserving of mockery, they have nothing to do with the carriage of firearms in checked luggage. While his luggage may have contained bombs, one can hope that current screening methods for checked luggage would have detected them. In addition, bombs are inherently dangerous (for example, they could explode by themselves if mishandled or if constructed incorrectly), while disassembled firearms are simply inert pieces of metal. There’s quite a difference.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and six others died after a gunman opened fire at a public event on Saturday, the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff’s office confirms.

The 40-year-old Democrat, who was re-elected to her third term in November, was hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” event at a Safeway in northwest Tucson when a gunman ran up and started shooting, according to Peter Michaels, news director of Arizona Public Media.

At least three other people, including members of her staff, were injured. Giffords was transported to University Medical Center in Tucson.

This just happened, and things are still developing. Hopefully the reports of the deaths were in error, and the victims survived. One can only hope.

This hits a bit close to home.

I really, really hope this is just some random nutjob, rather than something political.

Update (1:01pm): Reuters says she’s still alive:

“She is currently in surgery. She’s alive,” University Medical Center spokeswoman Darci Slaten told Reuters. Slaten added that nine other shooting victims were being treated at the hospital.

Let’s hope she, and others, stay alive.

Update (2:37pm): The Arizona Republic says that the Congresswoman made it through surgery, but that several people, including a 9-year-old kid, were killed. Evidently the attacker was a 22-year old male, and opened fire using a pistol with an extended magazine.

Even .40 and 10mm won’t magically stop bad guys with a single shot, particularly if the bad guys are hopped up on adrenaline or other drugs.

Practice, practice, practice. That’s how you win, not because of what caliber you shoot.

The news from AP that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger “has declared a state of emergency in San Diego County following the discovery of what police called a virtual bomb factory in an Escondido-area home,” led us to some startling reports about what’s been uncovered there.

Local authorities, reports FoxNews.com, say they may have discovered “the largest quantity of homemade explosives found in one location in the history of the United States.”

Someone’s planning a party. A hell of an exciting party.

It’s so much stuff that the bomb squad is planning to burn the house down in place (presumably with some sort of protective material around it to capture any projectiles emitted from the house), rather than risk moving the unstable chemicals out of the house.

When they do, I hope they put up streaming video. Should be fun.

David Walter, a 30-year-old Surprise resident, entered the Walmart near 129th Avenue and West Thunderbird Road around 1 a.m. While in the store, witnesses told police he repeatedly fidgeted with a holstered semi-automatic pistol.

[...]

At one point, a clerk working the electronics section told police that Walter took the gun out of its holster and then removed and replaced the gun’s magazine.

[...]

He removed the gun from the holster again, causing the magazine to come loose and fall to the floor. Walter re-inserted the magazine and continued manipulating the gun when it fired, sending one round into the ceiling…

Sweet hog of Prague, this is precisely what one should never, ever do.

If you’re going to carry, either openly or concealed, do so safely and responsibly. If you absolutely must handle your firearm, do so safely in a discreet place. Unholstering a gun and removing/replacing the magazine in the electronics department of a Wal-Mart is neither safe nor discreet. Drawing the gun a second time and, somehow in the process dropping your magazine, is even worse. Fiddling around with the loaded gun is a surefire recipe for disaster.

Don’t be like this guy. Please.

If this happened in the US rather than Britain, it sounds like a sure-fire way to get shot.

They discuss how this club teaches situational awareness, which I support wholeheartedly, and self-defense “techniques”, which I support somewhat less so. I note a distinct lack of firearms training, possibly due to the fact that it’s against state law and university policy to for CCW holders to possess firearms on campus.

If self-defense gets to the hand-to-hand stage, things have gone Very, Very Wrong. Better to avoid it where possible (hence situational awareness) or, if unavoidable, deal with it decisively.

A 110lb female college student, even with some self-defense training, is likely to be at a considerable physical disadvantage compared to a 180lb male attacker (a majority of attackers are male). A firearm — and the training and will to use it if needed — corrects for that disparity.

But no, they instead put up more “blue light phones” around campus and hand out free cans of pepper spray to female students (with no training on the proper use of it), as well as teaching self-defense “techniques” that are unlikely to work when confronted with a real attacker.

While I’m hardly an expert when it comes to self-defense firearm use, I’d be happy to take any UA student, male or female, at my expense, to the range to learn the basics of shooting. From there, I’ll happily point people toward instructors and programs that teach armed self-defense far better than I could.

The second one should be “Don’t attack the same US-flagged ship that similar pirates did a few months ago, which resulted in said pirates getting their asses handed to them by US Navy SEALs.”

The third one should be “Don’t attack French-flagged ships.” The French don’t mess around with this kind of stuff.

At the risk of pissing off the AP, I’m going to quote some bits of the article:

Somali pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama on Wednesday for the second time in seven months and were thwarted by private guards on board the U.S.-flagged ship who fired off guns and a high-decibel noise device.

[...]

An on-board security team repelled the attack by using evasive maneuvers, small-arms fire and a Long Range Acoustic Device, which can beam earsplitting alarm tones, the fleet said.

By Jove! Using firearms to defend oneself against armed attackers actually works!

Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that having an armed crew/team on a ship is more effective at self-defense than being personally armed in public (i.e. CCW), because one has less “noise” to deal with (there’s a lot of people walking around in cities who aren’t criminals, there’s not many small boats with armed Somalis cruising around major shipping lanes that aren’t up to no good), there’s advanced notice (you can spot the boats from a good distance away), you can design the ship to make it difficult to board (particularly if it’s an enormous cargo vessel), and once the balloon goes up you have at least several minutes to prepare (as opposed to a few seconds in a personal self-defense scenario).

Vice Adm. Bill Gortney of the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said the Maersk Alabama had followed the maritime industry’s “best practices” in having a security team on board.

“This is a great example of how merchant mariners can take proactive action to prevent being attacked and why we recommend that ships follow industry best practices if they’re in high-risk areas,” Gortney said in a statement.

Good.

However, Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the London-based think tank Chatham House, said the international maritime community was still “solidly against” armed guards aboard vessels at sea, but that American ships have taken a different line than the rest of the international community.

“Shipping companies are still pretty much overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of armed guards,” Middleton said. “Lots of private security companies employee people who don’t have maritime experience. Also, there’s the idea that it’s the responsibility of states and navies to provide security. I would think it’s a step backward if we start privatizing security of the shipping trade.”

It doesn’t surprise me that this gentleman is in London and feels this way.

I fail to see how it’d be anything but positive to have private security (be it an armed crew, or an armed security detail) on commercial shipping vessels. Even if there are navy vessels in the general area, they’re often a fair distance away and aren’t all that fast. Even aircraft cannot arrive instantly, and are likely to arrive after the incident is concluded, for better or for worse. The only two parties who are assured of being at the scene of the attempted hijacking are the pirates and the intended victim. The pirates are already armed. Why shouldn’t the would-be victims be permitted to have effective means of self-defense?

Mr. Middleton’s mindset makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

“Somali pirates understand one thing and only one thing, and that’s force,” said Capt. Joseph Murphy, who teaches maritime security at the school. “They analyze risk very carefully, and when the risk is too high they are going to step back. They are not going to jeopardize themselves.”

I’m not sure about how much risk analysis the Somali pirates do, but I’ll leave that in Capt. Murphy’s hands as it’s clearly a subject he knows more about than I do. Nevertheless, I agree wholeheartedly with the first sentence.

The wife of the Maersk Alabama’s captain, Paul Rochford, told WBZ-AM radio in Boston that she was “really happy” there were weapons on board for this attack.

“It probably surprised the pirates. They were probably shocked,” Kimberly Rochford. “I’m really happy at least it didn’t turn out like the last time.”

A self-proclaimed pirate told The Associated Press from the Somali pirate town of Haradhere that colleagues out at sea had called around 9 a.m. — 2 1/2 hours after the attack.

“They told us that they got in trouble with an American ship, then we lost them. We have been trying to locate them since,” said a self-described pirate who gave his name as Abdi Nor.

Awesome.

Underscoring the danger, a self-proclaimed pirate said Wednesday that the captain of a ship hijacked Monday had died of wounds suffered during the ship’s hijacking. The pirate, Sa’id, who gave only one name for fear of reprisals, said the captain died Tuesday night from internal bleeding.

The EU Naval Force has said the Virgin Islands-owned chemical tanker the Theresa was taken Monday with 28 North Korean crew.

I bet that ship followed Mr. Middleton’s advice and didn’t have any weapons on board, nor anyone trained in using them. Result: the ship was hijacked, the captain killed, and the ship and crew are likely to be held for ransom.

When will people learn that you cannot stop criminals from committing crimes by keeping the intended victims disarmed and helpless?