How Could This Have Been Worse?

The alternate post title would have been: Reasons to Shop Online. I feel OK joking about this because the "only" casualty was a guy getting shot in the leg. That feels like a victory nowadays.

Gunfire erupted during a dispute inside a large Wisconsin mall Saturday, leaving one man wounded in the leg and sending thousands of people scrambling for cover on one of the busiest shopping days before Christmas. 

I misspoke, another casualty was apparently a pair of chinos.

A worker at a mall kiosk was hit in the pant leg by a bullet ricochet but was not injured, DeSpain said.

Do you suppose this would have gone better if there had been 2, 3, 4 or more good guys with guns in that mall doing their Christmas shopping? Hard for me to believe it would have. As it was, one guy has a leg wound and the shooter has been taken into custody. With just the amount of gunfire that was involved:

"My understanding is it was a chaotic scene," he said, adding that thousands of people tried to flee the area.

Shopper Evan Flood said he saw a heated argument among about 15 people and a couple of punches were thrown. Within three or four seconds a gun went off, he said.

"Myself and a lot of other people just went into whatever store was nearest, and they did a real good job of putting the gate down and getting us into the back, where we waited until police showed up," Flood said.

"There were a lot of kids actually around ... and they were in tears and their parents were trying to get them to calm down, but they were crying the entire time," he said.

I had planned to blog on this story today, but because God loves me, he gave me this early Christmas gift courtesy of Charles Pierce. I had forgotten about this story what with so much other gunnuttery going on. 

This woman opened fire in a parking lot of a Home Depot. Intent, as Jack McCoy always reminds us, follows the bullet. She's lucky her intent didn't follow the bullets right into a busload of nuns. 

Yes, this was the woman who tried to shoot down the shoplifters in the Home Depot parking lot. The story mentions that she is a sharpshooter. Fortunately for the petty criminals involved not much of one. God knows what she did hit. Not the busload of nuns either because they also have God on their side.