Posted on 04/03/2009 11:21:36 PM PDT by neverdem
A gunman invaded an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y., during citizenship classes on Friday and shot 13 people to death and critically wounded 4 others before killing himself in a paroxysm of violence that turned a quiet civic setting into scenes of carnage and chaos.
The killing began around 10:30 a.m. and was over in minutes, witnesses said, but the ordeal lasted up to three hours for those trapped inside the American Civic Association as heavily armed police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers threw up a cordon of firepower outside and waited in a silence of uncertainty.
Finally, officers who had not fired a shot closed in and found a sprawl of bodies in a classroom, 37 terrified survivors cowering in closets and a boiler room and, in an office, the dead gunman, identified as Jiverly Wong, 42, a Vietnamese immigrant who lived in nearby Johnson City.
Two pistols and a satchel of ammunition were found with the body. In what the police...
--snip--
Little was known about the assailant Friday night. Cautious officials declined to name the gunman, but there appeared to be little doubt about his identity. The name Jiverly Wong was provided by a law enforcement official who declined to be named because he was not authorized to release information.
But the official said Mr. Wong had a New York State pistol license that listed two handguns, apparently the weapons he used at the immigration services center: a .45-caliber Beretta and a 9-millimeter Beretta. The authorities matched the serial numbers of the two weapons found with the gunman’s body to the serial numbers on the pistol license. Officials said they were trying to trace the histories of the guns. Other public records indicated that Mr. Wong had also lived in California in recent years...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If the other alias was a Muslim name, expect this horrific crime to disappear from the headlines almost immediately.
**first 911 call went out close to 1030am and the cops went in at 130pm? **
When Seconds Matter, HELP is only HOURS AWAY!!!
Another thread has commented that his English wasn't very good.
This is getting stranger and stranger. He's been here this long, is hired by IBM located who knows where without speaking good English apparently, manages to get a pistol permit anyway with another alias....
I can't help but wonder if the NYS Police were involved here. The Troopers don't strike me as the hang around and wait type. Do you have any info on that?
If they can show that that happened, I hope that someone pays big time for that stupid decision. Ninety minutes is absolutely inexcusable.
Another FReeper referred to the police as Uniformed Crime Scene Investigators.
Sorry to all the honorable, hard working LEO’s that post on this site. It’s too bad that your compatriots and commanders have earned this reputation for you to have to live with.
Thanks SWAT. You guys are real heroes.
This place was an ACLU allied agency trying to assist aliens and it is unlikely the airhead do gooders who worked there would have thought to keep firearms available even if NY didn’t have such restrictive laws.
I’m just glad it wasn’t an overzealous ant-illegal alien individual who did this,because the commies would’ve been able to use that as a wedge.Now they just have to live with the fact that danger can come from any direction.Kind of blows their concept of a safe,controlled(by social engineers)environment.
The usual human filth like Schumer and Holder will start quacking about killing the 2A again.
This kind of thing is going to happen every so often in a free society.I’d rather chance it than be in thrall to the Marxists who got their boy in the White House now.
Are our "leaders" -- people in power that stupid, or are they just so fearful of an armed citizenry (or both)?
WHEN is the unarmed citizenry going to wake up and realize that they, and they alone, are responsible for their own safety and become an ARMED CITIZENRY?
Can we now finally start banning immigration?—especially from 3rd world hellholes.....
No sir we cannot we must scapegoat gun ownership and gunowners in some silly ritual cooked up by the bullying leftist pigs. And of course conservatives will blanch afraid of saying anything not PC, afraid of being bullied by liberal thugs.
Standard operating procedures for most departments is to assemble the entire SWAT team at a safe location before attempting entry.
SWAT teams treat “active shooters”, i.e. guys who go someplace just to kill a lot of people, the same way they treat a barricaded suspect with hostages. The problem is, “active shooters” don’t wait. They don’t want to negotiate. They just want to kill.
Studies have shown that in the vast majority of cases “active shooters” commit suicide as soon as they are confronted with armed force, even if it’s only a single officer - assuming they haven’t finished what they came to do and killed themselves before the first officers arrive on the scene. If the first cop on the scene in this case had gone in there’s a chance he might have saved some lives.
The sad and ironic corollary is the recent case in Oakland, CA where SWAT went in on a barricaded suspect, who was not an “active shooter” but was better armed than they thought, without making an adequate effort to negotiate or wear the guy down. Two good men got killed.
Police forces need to treat “barricaded suspects” and “active shooters” differently. Unfortunately this places the terrible burden of assessment on the first officers responding to a very chaotic and dangerous situation. Mistakes will be made and innocent people will die because of those mistakes.
As long as there are places where sick bastards know they can go and find people who are forbidden by law from defending themselves this sort of thing is going to continue to happen.
The change in police attitudes started about 20 years ago and went from to “Protect and Serve” to “I dont care how many people or dogs have to die, I’m going home without a scratch”.
It seems to reinforce my stereotype that these guys are under trained, poorly led, and over equipped.
I wonder how much the union leadership and the politicization of the police has to do with this attitude?
They kick some *ss in the movies, though...
I think they are more the victims of bad policy than inadequate training. It also seems that a lot of departments have definite leadership problems (this fact is not unique to law enforcement). Personally I'm not sure there is any such thing as being over equipped. But then if it was up to me I'd roll the M110s with every SWAT team.
There also seems to be an attitude issue with some SWAT officers; an over confidence in their own ability to assess a given situation that I've also seen in some ex military guys with 36 in their MOS. This leads some of them to misjudge certain types of situations, and seems to encourage an affinity for homo-erotic hair cuts.
Leadership is clearly the issue. But bigger/better/more toys can't overcome bad leadership.
The msm calling a receptionist who played dead and called 911........a hero.
FGS, simply a diversion from the fact that the SWAT team waited three hours, no doubt allowing people to die of their injuries.
The killer didn’t work for IBM. They never heard of him. The NY Daily News reported this morning that he worked in a Shop Vac assembly plant in Binghamton which closed in November. Fellow employees said he thought of him as the type to “go postal.” He hated America, talked about his guns, wanted to “kill the President,” etc.
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