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Police: Atlanta man shoots attacker after witnessing fatal stabbing

August 15, 2022 by Cam Edwards Leave a Comment

A man is in custody after allegedly stabbing a driver to death at an Atlanta gas station on Monday morning, and police say an armed citizen who witnessed the stabbing ended up shooting the suspect when he turned his attention (and knife) on him.

The incident unfolded around 6 a.m. this morning, when police received near simultaneous calls about a stabbing and a shooting in the western part of the city. Officers arrived to find a confusing situation, but were able to piece together the basics of what happened fairly quickly.

According to police, a driver stopped at the gas station and came back to his SUV to find a man inside it. Police said the man stabbed the driver multiple times and took off.
A witness to the stabbing decided to follow the man down the street. Police said the two got into a confrontation and the stabbing suspect lunged at the witness with a knife. Police said the witness fired his gun at the suspect and shot him at least once.
… Channel 2′s Kristen Holloway asked if the witness will face any charges. Police said that remains under investigation.
“We just have to hear his story. Just from the accounts we’re hearing, right now preliminary, it may look like he was doing the right thing,” Deputy Chief Charles Hampton. Jr. said. “Obviously we don’t encourage anyone to get that involved, but if the circumstances is that an individual is coming toward him with a weapon, he does have a right to defend himself.”

No offense to the deputy chief, but if this witnesses hadn’t just allowed this murder suspect to stroll away down the street without following him I’m sure there would be plenty of people criticizing him for not getting involved. It doesn’t sound like the armed citizen was trying to confront the suspect, just to keep eyeballs on him until police arrived on scene. He might have felt emboldened to do so because he knew he was carrying a gun for self-defense, but at this point there’s zero evidence that he was ever the aggressor here; instead, it appears he acted in self-defense after he himself was assaulted.

I remember last year, when Oakland, California police chief LeRonne Armstrong responded to growing attacks on Asian American business owners by declaring that what police really need are good witnesses, not armed citizens. I thought that was an absurd statement at the time, and this defensive gun use in Atlanta is just more evidence of the outlandishness of Armstrong’s thinking. There’s no reason why armed citizens can’t also be good witnesses, but they shouldn’t have to sacrifice their right of self-defense in order to help police capture or subdue a violent attacker.

In fact, I’d argue that individuals are more likely to stick around to report and observe if they have the means to protect themselves. If you want good witnesses, after all, you need them to be alive to report what they’ve seen; both to officers at the scene and in court if an arrest leads to a trial. California Democrats are doing everything they can to prevent good witnesses from being able to protect themselves, but thankfully they’ve got a different mindset in Atlanta; one that will hopefully lead to justice being done for the family of the man who was murdered when he was just trying to fill up his gas tank.

Atlanta news station: Controversial GA law didn't spike shootings

August 4, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

The city of Atlanta has sort of dominated a lot of the news around guns and gun control of late. That’s because of a festival canceling there in the city and the cancelation being blamed on state gun laws.

The fact that those laws have existed for nearly a decade and the state supreme court decision that would have impacted the festival was decided in 2019, so organizers clear had time to figure out a Plan “B,” but whatever.

However, the law at the center of all this controversy is deridingly called the Guns Everywhere law. Yet, interestingly, one of the Atlanta news stations reports that the law didn’t actually increase shootings in the city.

A Georgia gun law enacted eight years ago, cited as the reason for this week’s surprise cancellation of Music Midtown, required public parks to be among the places legal gun owners were allowed to carry firearms.
Opponents of that law said it would spike gun violence, but Atlanta crime data indicates that argument is debatable.
…
And while gun violence did go up, Atlanta police data shows that:
From 2010 to 2014, the number of shooting incidents in the city rose by 26%.
From 2014 to 2018, they rose by only 19%.
“Democrats promised that the sky would fall, and it didn’t,” said Brian Robinson, who was a top aide to Deal in 2014.

In other words, the increase following the law’s passage–it passed in 2014–is less than it had been for the same period before its passage.

Once again, anti-gunners claimed the streets would run red with blood, only they didn’t.

And really, why would they? Criminals were already carrying wherever they wanted regardless of what the law said. All the bill did was give gun owners more opportunities to carry a firearm, reducing the number of prohibited places in the state.

And really, Atlanta is kind of the crime epicenter for the entire state.

While crime rates were going up there, they were trending downward for the state as a whole. So if there were going to be negative consequences of that law passing, you’d see them in Atlanta.

Except, we don’t.

If anything, it reduced the issue significantly, which isn’t surprising either since we know guns save lives.

This makes all this nonsense about the Piedmont Park music festival so ridiculous. The law in question not only isn’t new but hasn’t led to problems either. At no point should this have happened. The fact that it did almost suggests organizers intended to stir up debate on the gun issue.

I can’t say definitively that they did, but it seems awfully convenient that someone was willing to tell the press that the issue was a law from 2014 and a state supreme court decision from 2019 despite the fact that it would make the organizers look like idiots to a lot of people.

Regardless, the law in question isn’t a problem. It’s never been a problem, and even the Atlanta media is forced to look at the facts and say, “Nope. The law isn’t an issue.”

That ought to tell you something.

Abrams blames Kemp for music festival's cancelation

August 2, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is desperately trying to recapture the magic that almost catapulted her to the governor’s mansion four years ago. However, that really doesn’t seem to be happening.

Gaffes certainly haven’t helped, such as supporting mask mandates while being photographed with school kids while not wearing a mask, for example.

Yet her latest effort might as well be categorized as a gaffe. You see, a music festival slated for Piedmont Park in Atlanta was canceled. Sources claim it was because of a Georgia law that barred the festival from banning guns in the park.

Abrams has decided to blame Kemp for that festival.

Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams took aim at her opponent Brian Kemp hours after Music Midtown organizers announced the cancelation of the annual festival.
…
In a statement posted on social media, Abrams wrote that Georgia would lose $50 million following the cancellation of Music Midtown.
“The cancellation of Music Midtown will cost Georgia’s economy $50 million,” Abrams wrote. “It’s shameful, but not surprising, that the governor cares more about protecting dangerous people carrying guns in public than saving jobs and keeping business in Georgia.”
Abrams continued, “Brian Kemp’s dangerous and extreme gun agenda endangers the lives of Georgians, and the cancellation of Music Midtown is proof that his reckless policies endanger Georgia’s economy as well…Rather than respond to increased gun violence by strengthening safety, he doubled-down on weakening gun laws.”

Except, well, Gov. Brian Kemp had literally nothing to do with any of the laws being blamed for the festival’s cancelation.

While Kemp did sign constitutional carry into law earlier this year, the law in question wasn’t that one.

The cancelation was reportedly because of two factors. One was the Safe Carry Protection Act, which drastically overhauled the regulations of the prohibited places in the state of Georgia. That particular law was passed back in 2014 and had the support of Gov. Nathan Deal and his Democratic challenger, Jason Carter.

Then, a state supreme court decision in 2019 found that a short-term lease didn’t give people like the festival organizers the authority to ban firearms in the park.

Here’s the thing, though. Do you know what Kemp was doing in 2014 when this bill passed? He was secretary of state, a job that doesn’t have any hand in legislation.

Further, he has no hand in the state supreme court, either. Those justices are elected by the people and have been since right after the Civil War.

So, in other words, Abrams is blaming Kemp for something he was literally powerless to stop.

Now, I’m not saying he would have. As a Georgian, I feel as if our rights matter far more than a music festival. Especially since organizers had at least two years and some change to find a different venue or to make adjustments and failed to do so.

But I will say that it’s beyond ridiculous for Abrams to try and make political hay out of this particular issue when, to be frank, we have much bigger problems in this state.

Then again, Abrams may well be grasping at whatever straws she can find.

Atlanta music festival cancelled after promoters told they can't ban guns

August 1, 2022 by Cam Edwards Leave a Comment

A two-day long music festival scheduled for a public park in downtown Atlanta has been cancelled by promoter LiveNation, with sources telling Billboard magazine that move is the result of a previous court decision that made it highly unlikely the festival would be able to ban firearms from the park while the event was underway.

Billboard reports that several 2A organizations have been hinting at a legal challenge if the festival took place while barring guns from the premises of Piedmont Park, a city-owned facility that likely could not have enforced the ban thanks to a 2019 state Supreme Court decision.

As part of the 2019 ruling, Georgia’s high court set a test for how the Safe Carry Protection Act was to be enforced by private businesses using public land. Businesses and groups that held certain types of long-term leases for state-owned land could legally bar guns, while businesses with shorter term leases could not. While the ruling favored the Botanical Garden, it created legal issues for festivals like Music Midtown that held short term leases for city parks sites.
The festival, launched in 1996 by Atlanta-based music promoters Alex Cooley, Peter Conlon and Alex Hoffman, had long barred attendees from bringing guns into the event. In general, most major companies will not host a festival in a location that permits gun owners to carry their weapons into an event, with an exception sometimes made for law enforcement. Some artist riders actually have specific language saying that artist will not perform in cities or states where gun laws grant attendees the right to bring weapons inside of a concert venue.
While the 2019 ruling by the Georgia Supreme Court made it more difficult for private companies to deny licensed and armed citizens access to events on publicly owned land, it did not give the city of Atlanta the authority to enforce this decision or force the festival to allow guns into the event. Instead the law created a pathway for gun carrying individuals, who had also purchased tickets to the festival, to successfully sue event organizers if they were denied entry to an event taking place on public property.
Additionally, local authorities are typically involved in security for large scale events and likely would not have been able to enforce an illegal gun ban, so the festival would have had little to no backup to keep firearms out.

The Georgia court decision has been in place for nearly three years, which should have given promoters plenty of time to come up with another venue where they could have imposed a ban on firearms. Instead, for whatever reason the promoters apparently decided to stick with the public park as their preferred location for the festival, even knowing that their short-term lease wouldn’t give them the authority to ban guns from the premises.

Of course that’s not how much of the media sees it. Rolling Stone and several other media outlets are pinning the blame for the cancellation squarely on Georgia’s gun laws, pointing to a Georgia gun rights activist named Phillip Evans, who’s complaint against the Botanical Gardens led to the state Supreme Court ruling in 2019 that differentiated between long-term lease holders and those using a public facility for a day or two. Back in May, according to Atlanta-based website Saporta Report, Evans had contacted city attorneys warning of a potential lawsuit if the festival went on as planned.

In a May 4 letter to the City Department of Law, Evans wrote, “…I’m demanding that you revoke their permit to hold the event unless they agree to follow state law and rescind this policy.”
John Monroe, board vice president at the gun rights groups GA2A and an attorney who represented Evans in the Botanical Garden case, says Evans has a case.
“Based on recent Supreme Court of Georgia precedent, Phil is correct that the Music Midtown festival cannot ban guns (or other weapons),” Monroe said in an email.
However, Monroe said, the City is likely not on the hook and Evans would have to sue the festival. “The remedy is that someone who is aggrieved by a violation is empowered to sue the violator (in this case, the festival sponsor),” said Monroe. “It’s not really the City’s obligation to “police” its permittees to make sure they follow state law.”

It was most likely LiveNation’s concern about being sued that led to the festival being cancelled, but again, promoters have had years to adapt to the Supreme Court’s decision and look for a private venue that could host the festival. The event might have been pushed out of downtown Atlanta, but odds are there’s at least one landowner in Georgia willing to make their private acreage a “gun-free zone” for a weekend in exchange for a sizable fee to rent their property.

I have sympathy for those who were hoping to take in the festival, but Georgia’s gun laws don’t pose an insurmountable problem for concert promoters. They might restrict where events like this can take place if organizers want to ban firearms from the premises, but in this case those putting together the Music Midtown festival had plenty of time to find another location that would suit their desire. I don’t know why they decided to stick to the public park given the state Supreme Court ruling, but that was their decision to make and now they’re the ones responsible for the consequential decision to cancel the festival completely.

Atlanta officials issue call for gun control

July 22, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

In the state of Georgia, Atlanta stands apart.

It’s kind of a whole different world than the rest of Georgia. They have skyscrapers and the rest of the state has peanut fields.

Yet for many in Atlanta, they’re the whole world, so it’s not surprising officials there are demanding gun control.

In the wake of an unprecedented housing crisis and growing gun violence locally and nationwide, DeKalb County District 7 Commissioner Lorraine Cochran-Johnson is urging elected officials in neighboring counties to introduce legislation to find solutions. Cochran-Johnson recently introduced two resolutions in DeKalb to implement tenant protections and gun control measures.
…
“If we are to truly ensure our society is more just and equitable, we must make common sense reforms to protect our communities from rising gun violence and the egregious effects of poverty,” said Councilman Antonio Lewis. “If these aren’t central tenets for us as legislators, we stand to lose another generation to the effects of both.”
…
According to the American Public Health Association, gun violence is recognized as the leading cause of premature deaths in the United States and a report titled Gun Safety in America conducted by the Everytown For Gun Safety organization discovered that every day, more than 110 Americans are killed with guns and more than 200 are shot and wounded, resulting in more than 38,000 deaths and nearly 85,000 injuries annually.
The proposed DeKalb County Gun Control Resolution acknowledges gun violence as a public health crisis and includes the adoption of common-sense gun control legislation and the enforcement of laws that govern the criminal misuse of guns. It also urges the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to restore funding removed under the Dickey Amendment for firearms and and gun violence prevention research.
“Healthy living is not limited to having good physical and mental health,” said Commissioner Natalie Hall. “Nobody is healthy if they are spending most of their income on housing and are living in fear due to the increase in gun violence. We legislators must do what is in our power to ensure all residents live a truly healthy life.”

I find this fascinating.

Now, understand that Atlanta can’t create their own gun control laws. Georgia is a preemption state, so their hands are tied there.

Yet they try so desperately to tie this with expensive housing.

It should be noted that on this list of the most expensive cities in Georgia, most of them are in the Atlanta area. But we’re not a housing site, we’re a Second Amendment site, so I’m going to leave that there.

So what about guns. Is there a chance in hell of these demands being taken seriously in the state? Not really.

Atlanta is a huge urban center, but as things currently stand, they’re not quite able to overpower the rest of the state. As a result, there is still a very strong pro-gun sentiment here and it’s unlikely that Atlanta can cram gun control down the collective throats of their fellow Georgians.

However, much like the housing issue, there’s a lot that Atlanta could do on their own.

Sure, preemption keeps them from passing gun control on their own, but there are a plethora of policies that the region could implement that would reduce violent crime. The fact that it hasn’t happened is very telling.

Frankly, a lot of my fellow Georgians get kind of sick of Atlanta. We might love the sports teams that call the city home, but we’re not remotely interested in having them try to dictate idiotic policies to us.