It is strange a routine traffic stop turned into a mass shooting.
It’s not unusual for people with warrants or drugs in the car to bolt away in a high speed chase with police. Shots might be fired at the police but not at random people.
I can’t think of a situation like this before. Doesn’t make any sense.
I wasn’t there, YMMV… jobs are hard to come by and loss of a job can make some people… emotional.
Could he have been driving recklessly? Could someone have called in a complaint that he was driving recklessly? Could he have been drinking?
I don’t think shootings associated with traffic stops are all that unusual, unfortunately. A quick Google on the topic reveals any number of them. This one is unusual in that the shooter got so far, and did so much damage, but people pull guns on cops at traffic stops on a fairly regular basis.
ETA: I’ll add that if the police had any reason to suspect that the shooter was a danger, the traffic stop would have been handled differently.
Didn’t one of his neighbors say he confronted her with a rifle over a dispute at the garbage area? It would have been nice for police to have intervened then.
Has anything also come out substantiating earlier reports that he was previously known to local law enforcement? And not for some criminal trespass beef 10 years ago in Waco that he got off paper for.
Why do you assume there “had to be more”? Police pull drivers over for minor traffic infractions all the time. It’s not post hoc ergo proper hoc. Sometimes routine events can trigger major events.
‘Failure to signal’ sounds awfully pretextual to me, NP. If I was told that was the reason for a stop, I’d be thinking, “Really, asshole? Not using my blinker? You couldn’t find a seat belt or window tint violation instead in the car next to me? Or the guy that just blasted by me in the other lane by 15 mph?”
It sounds like the sort of thing used as an excuse for the officer to go fishing.
Despite my dislike of drivers who don’t use them. Getting miffed at that is rather quaint, in an era where half of the drivers have their faces buried in their mobile device, instead of paying attention to the 2 ton steel death machine moving at 80 feet per second and up.
People do get stopped all the time for minor stuff. I got stopped and ticketed once because, when I made a left hand turn, I turned into the farther of two lanes, when legally I was supposed to turn into the nearer one.
I was also stopped, but not ticketed, for failure to signal.
And I was ticketed for forgetting to put the annual sticker on my license plate, Stopped by a bicycle cop no less, he came pedaling after me for all he was worth, with two teeny red and blue lights flashing. I was two blocks from home, asked if he wanted to follow and see me put the sticker on, but nothing would do but he give me a ticket. Guess he needed to fill a quota.
Failure to signal can cause collisions. Traffic cops are there to keep traffic moving safely. Stopping someone because they didn’t signal is a routine matter, just like seat belts and window tints. You either accept that the police can stop you for any of those things, or say that they shouldn’t stop until there’s an accident.
The sticker is a big one around here. Even before when registration and safety inspections had two different stickers. Not at all unusual to see cops sitting in underpass U-turn lanes, looking at passing cars for expired stickers. Always amazed me to see one jump in front of a car to get it to stop and pull over.
The State may or may not care about your driving, but they WILL get paid, damnit.
EDIT: Traffic cops are there to earn money for their municipality. Especially in garden spots like NW Texas, where I’ve personal experience with zealous traffic enforcement. Guessing Odessa Midland might be similar.
Anyway, money is the goal, though safety is nice too. See, e.g., municipalities altering light times on traffic lights to decrease safety yet increase red light camera revenue.
Perhaps it’s a difference in driving culture between Canada and Texas? It may not be a pretext where you are. It is one here.
I forgot to mention, on this one, that I am sure that I actually did signal. But I was coming out of an alley, on my way to work, in a part of town that at the time was not the best, and it was before dawn. I think in this case the cop was fishing, and when he, the white male cop, saw a middle aged white female, he decided not to press things.
It’s like one other time, when I was stopped and not ticketed. The cop said I’d gone through a stop sign at a certain intersection. That intersection, in the north/south direction, does not HAVE a stop sign, just the east/west. I was going south.
Apparently from what the authorities had pieced together he was already headed to no good place even before the termination, and he had called the FBI tipline *before *the traffic stop to rant and ramble about all the injustices he’d suffered.
Then the traffic stop happened – I can see how in his state of mind after the tipline call the traffic stop meant *“uh, oh, that was too fast catching up to me, I thought I had more time!” *and that it was time to make his move.
Shooter has been named, but not by the police chief at the new conference.
Maybe the police chief favors the Some Asshole Initiative.
Moderators did this last time. Shut down the thread because people were talking about the problem. Are you going to do that again.
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They are the best place to have gun debates to save kids shot in the face. You know why don’t you?
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