I’ve been busy and haven’t briefed folks on the Taser-happy crowd for some time; it looks like the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD is having a whale of a time with its shock-inducing, deadly device.

A Statesville man died after being shocked multiple times by Tasers at the Iredell County jail over the weekend, sources say.

Anthony Davidson, 29, was unresponsive when he was taken to Iredell Memorial Hospital Saturday afternoon. He was put on life support and died late Sunday night, police said.

His death is the second Taser-related death this year in the Charlotte area. In March, 17-year-old Darryl Wayne Turner, died after Charlotte-Mecklenburg police used a Taser on him at a Food Lion store in Charlotte.

If you read the whole article, it’s clear that Davidson was having difficulties—he was unable to pay for groceries at a local store, rolled the cart out—but drove away without them. He was followed and then

When officers caught up with Davidson a short time later, he was carrying an Applebee’s gift card from the store that hadn’t been paid for, Anderson said.

Officers took Davidson to the Iredell County Jail where he appeared before a magistrate on a larceny charge. Davidson was behaving abnormally from the time officers first encountered him, Anderson said.

While being booked, Davidson became “physically aggressive and was communicating loudly,” Anderson said. That’s when officers used one or more Tasers to get him “back under control,” police said.

He was hit three times and according to a nurse was “under the influence of some type of impairing substance.” Davidson was unresponsive when he was taken to the hospital, where he went into intensive care. He was taken off of life support that evening.

More below the fold, including another Taser death caused by cops shocking a man covered in gasoline, setting him on fire.

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A Vancouver woman had a Barack Obama sign in her yard, and that was all that was needed to set off some sleazebag(s) to key her car in the driveway of her home. (KPTV also has video):

The words “white power” and “I’m gay” were etched into the car of Karen Wastradowski last Saturday. Wastradowski had left her car in the driveway of her home when the vandals struck.

She filed a report with Vancouver police. Wastradowski said a blue “Elect Obama” sign in her yard could have caused the crime.

Jon DeVore of Horse’s Ass said this about the climate in that area:

There are a couple of things worth noting here. Yes, Clark County has its share of unrepentant bigots. Earlier this year the son of a Battle Ground city council member was charged with cyberstalking over virulently racist emails sent to a black council member and other community members. So while vandalism is not exactly an unusual thing during the summer months, it’s also not acceptable to just shrug off racist defacement of private property as “just kids being kids.” They learned it somewhere.

...In a larger sense, if someone can’t place a yard sign for a major party candidate in front of their home without this sort of thing happening, we don’t really have much of a democracy.

Down here in NC, I’ve got an Obama sticker on my car and it hasn’t been defaced. The yard signs are hard to come by around here, but I’d put one out if I had one. Also, maybe you recall my post from last November, when I put some new badges and stickers on my car.

I asked this question:

Kate and I are thinking of starting a pool to see how long this stays on the car before some wingnut around here removes it. Any guesses?

Guess what? They are all still there, intact—for now.

The shooting at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church by domestic terrorist Jim D. Adkisson brings out the worst in the knuckle-dragging Freepers—after all it was a faux Christian UU church, right? There are quite a few offers of prayers and sympathy, but the hardcore swamp-dwellers focus first on why more parishioners weren’t armed, and then focuses on the fact that it’s a progressive church and thus somehow, it brought the horror onto itself.

The filth is below the fold.

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Out & About, Tennesee’s LGBT paper, reports one aspect of the high-profile tragic shooting at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church that I didn’t see when I flipped on the TV to see coverage on CNN this AM. While you probably heard that Jim D. Adkisson, 58, opened fire with a shotgun during a church event killing two (more than 200 people were attending a performance of “Annie”), the Knoxville congregation had also recently put up a sign to publicly welcome LGBTs to worship.

Greg McKendry, 60, was killed when he confronted the gunman as he entered the church.  Knoxville Police have charged Jim D. Adkisson, 58, of Powell, with first-degree in the death of McKendry.  Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said Adkission shot eight people with a 12-gauge shotgun. Of those shot, all were adults- four women and three men.

...Knoxville Police have not yet released a motive for the shooting. The church is the site of some gay affirming activities. A member of the congregation wrote in a national blog that the church just recently put up a sign welcoming gays. One of the goals of the church’s long range plan is to “Increase congregational participation in human rights programs forgay/lesbian/transgendered persons.”

That church member was Elrod of The Moderate Voice:

I was not there this morning as we had friends visiting from out of town. But we seriously considered attending with our friends. This is such a shock to the community here. Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church is such a welcoming community. Though it’s decidedly more liberal than East Tennessee as a whole, we have very good relations with the rest of the community. I don’t understand why anybody would do this. All we know right now is that the suspect was not connected to the church in any way. I have no idea if the man had some sort of political or cultural agenda (TVUUC had just put up a sign welcoming gays to the congregation), or if it’s just some lunatic acting for no reason at all.

Before opening fire, one witness said Adkisson shouted something to the congregation that suggests he was there for a purpose—“It was hateful words. He was saying hateful things.”  The FBI is officially investigating whether this brutal attack in a house of worship was a hate crime.

More after the jump, including additional information about the church from Out & About.

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The summer heats up as pols and pastors get caught with their figurative pants down.

Milwaukee: Deacon exposes himself to undercover cop while cruising for homosex

Here we go again—another moral leader of his religious community lands in the pokey for a lewd act. Jerome Pitchford, 48, a youth counselor and deacon of Milwaukee’s Holy Redeemer Church of God in Christ was caught in a police sting in a park known for cruising. (WISN):

Police said Pitchford apparently does not practice what he teaches in Sunday School. Police say after church at the Holy Redeemer Church of God in Christ on Sunday afternoon, he was arrested and charged with lewd and lascivious behavior at Milwaukee’s Estabrook Park.

The criminal complaint says he was looking for sex with another man. He exposed himself, to what turned out to be an undercover police officer. “They initiate either by you know grabbing the officer, which is fourth-degree sexual assault or exposing themselves, which is lewd and lascivious behavior,” said Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Deputy John Nelson.

One neighbor had this reaction, laying the groundwork for a “the devil got into me” defense:  “I can’t believe it, but I hope that he will get … a little therapy and get himself straightened out.” The video report is here.

Another tale from Maryland is below the fold.

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From a Press Association headline:

Yeah.  Raped-not-raped-11-year-old victim.  What the fuck? 

Is it me, or are these sort of misogynist outrages becoming more routine?

(Hat tip.) 

Let me preface this by saying that on the issue of gun control, I’m often and unusually agnostic.  I think pro-gun control people make a lot of intellectually dishonest arguments, such as when they deny that an armed citizenry would be a good thing to have against a tyrannical government, especially when they point to government tanks and missiles.  That fails to take into account how police states generally work, on a more person-to-person level where armed citizens would be helpful.  But anti-gun control people are also intellectually dishonest when it comes to crime.  They’re always running to “protect yourself” arguments, which fail to take into account the statistical reality that crime gets worse, not better, when you introduce a bunch of guns into the equation.  This is true of street crime, but also in the case of patriarchal violence against women, such as rape and domestic violence. 

I bring this up, because I found out through Dana that Megan McArdle is making criminally stupid arguments about guns somehow equalizing power between men and women, making them super-feminist.  Which is a favorite argument used by sexist pigs, often in service of arguing against measures that would actually work to reduce rape and domestic violence.

I’m hardly the first person to make this observation, but I don’t know why it isn’t noted more often: guns are the only weapon that equalizes strength between attacker and attacked. It’s the only time when men’s greater speed, strength, and longer reach make no difference; if you pull the trigger first, you win.

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I just want to believe this man was high or mentally ill because the abuse this two-year-old baby was subjected to is beyond belief. Sergio Casian Aguiar, a 27-year-old grocery store worker in Stanislaus County who had never been in trouble with the law before, not only kicked his child to death, his behavior was so unhinged that police had to take him out because he would have continued attacking the baby to get the demons out. (SFGate):

[Witness Deborah] McKain, of Crows Landing, said she drove past Sergio Aguiar’s pickup Saturday night on West Bradbury Road and, at first, thought he was “kicking garbage or something.” But she said her boyfriend, Dan Robinson, told her to back up and put her headlights on Aguiar.

“Sure enough, he was kicking a baby around,” McKain said. She said the child was unconscious, his clothes falling off, and looked liked a “rag doll.” Robinson, a volunteer fire chief in Crows Landing, showed Aguiar his badge and ordered him to stop, but Aguiar calmly said something like, “It’s just trash,” McKain said.

Aguiar also said, “Look how they make toys now,” McKain said, and at one point asked Robinson for a knife.When Robinson went into the pickup to turn on the hazard lights, Aguiar stopped kicking the boy, helped him find the flashers, then went back to his attack, McKain said.

You just don’t know what to say.  Another slice of insanity is after the jump.

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Well, this is a new one.  Most of the trackbacks I get from people not accusing me of blogging about what they want me to blog about—-it goes without question that their judgment on my obligations is better than mine—-comes from people accusing me of not blogging enough about how we should liberate Muslim women from head coverings through bombing aimed at liberating them from their earthly existence.  Occasionally I get a leftist lamenting that I spend too much time making this place entertaining instead of a nobly unread drag that posts to a non-existent readership, but mostly it’s the right wingers demanding that I free Muslim women by blogging against their right to live free of being killed by American shrapnel.  But this guy is accusing me of wasting my time exposing religious nuts who want to deprive both men and women around the entire globe of pretty much every freedom you can name, and instead suggesting that I don’t—-get this—-write enough about rape.  That I write about rape 1000% more often than any other blogger with this much traffic, except maybe the fine ladies at Feministing is no matter.  Because by my neglectful inability to dwell non-stop on a topic that’s, let’s face it, pretty fucking depressing, I’ve personally caused the abysmal sexist politics that have resulted in a 6% conviction rate for rape in Britain. 

Horrible “American Feminists” at Feministing (where Jessica is also editing a book confronting sex negative/misogynist attitudes that contribute to rape) did in fact cover the story, which has so far not led to a dramatic reversal for the criminal justice system in Britain.  But I promise that if they could change things, they would.  It seems in fact that the conviction rate has been sliding over the years, so I suspect what’s going on is a similar situation to other reactionary movements such as the ones that sprung those obviously guilty of lynching or war crimes.  In other words, if our nutball friend actually cares about convicting rapists, he needs to quit ranting about horrible, no good feminists, because it’s precisely those sentiments that encourage reactionary backlashes that lead to these situations. 

Interestingly, because of ineffective American Feminist bitchy worthlessness, the rape rate in the United States has been going down consistently since feminists ineffectively made it an issue though they probably didn’t want to.  Like 85% gone down.  Despite annoyingness to random internet assholes with strange agendas, it turns out that American Feminism has something to do with the decline in rape.

I flashed for a moment of how much things have changed in the U.S., and why this probably has so much to do with the significantly lower rape rate here, something you should want if you are really concerned about rape.  I was listening to the Datarock CD and they ironically quote the lyrics to “Summer Nights” from Grease.  It’s been years since I’ve heard that song or a reference to it, I guess, because my mind really tripped on the casual crack about rape in the lyric, “Did she put up a fight?”  Granted, the lyric is there as a 50s historical detail, but even so, the casual reference to the traditional battle between guys who want it and girls who want to preserve their reputation—-and the acceptance that it culminates in rape on a regular basis—-gave me pause.  In the 70s, they put it there to suggest how much sexual mores have changed.  Now gender and power mores have changed that the 70s wink and nudge is nauseating.  Witness: On the show “Mad Men”, there are regular cracks from male characters about women “putting up a fight”, and instead of being a colorful historical detail, it’s supposed to make the audience queasy.  If that shift in attitudes about women’s rights and sex hasn’t contributed to a lowered rape rate, I’d be shocked. 

Why this has resulted in a misogynist backlash in Britain, I can’t say.  I don’t know enough about the cultural or legal differences to offer an opinion.  Maybe British readers have some sort of insight?