Lone Tree shoplifting incident turns into hit-and-run

Font ResizeCops and CourtsBy Tom McGhee
The Denver Postdenverpost.comPosted: 12/16/2012 11:34:35 AM MSTDecember 16, 2012 6:35 PM GMTUpdated: 12/16/2012 11:34:46 AM MST

  Lone Tree police chased a pick up truck suspected in the hit-and-run of a Park Meadow's Mall parking valet but gave up the pursuit when it became too dangerous on Saturday.

The incident began at about 3:30 p.m. when a woman suspected of shop lifting at a JC Penney store left with an unknown amount of merchandise, according to a release from police spokeswoman Kristen Knoll.

The woman walked to a waiting Maroon and silver 1996 Chevrolet pick-up truck and got in.

The valet was standing in the ring road trying to take down the license plate number when the truck crossed the double yellow line, accelerated and hit the valet.

The valet was hurt, but not seriously injured, Knoll said.

Police tried to stop the truck on Park Meadows Center Drive and Yosemite Street but the driver refused to stop.

The license plate on the vehicle is 975 VNG. Anyone with information can call (303)841-9800.

Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee

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Colorado mountains face major snow storm, Denver could see snow Tuesday

Font ResizeBy Joey Bunch
The Denver Postdenverpost.comPosted: 12/16/2012 03:21:47 PM MSTDecember 16, 2012 10:30 PM GMTUpdated: 12/16/2012 03:30:33 PM MST

The Colorado high country could see new snowfall measured in feet by midweek as a strong storm spins from the Pacific and cold from the Arctic moves into the state. Snow is in Denver's forecast on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The National Weather Service in Grand Junction said Sunday afternoon that northwest Colorado could get up to 10 inches by Monday night, another foot by Tuesday night, with heavy snow continuing to fall on Wednesday.

Wind gusts up to 25 mph — and up to 60 mph over ridges and along eastern mountain slopes — could create blinding driving conditions through the region as well. The same region saw more than a foot of snow a little over a week earlier.

Summit County and the Front Range mountains are expected to get up to 6 inches Monday

As of Sunday, the National Weather Service had not sized up the Denver metro area's potential accumulation, but put the city's chances of snow at 30 percent on Tuesday night and 50 percent on Wednesday with blustery conditions.

Temperatures in Denver on Monday, however, are expected to be above average with a high temperature of 52 degrees. The average for the date is 44 degrees.

A cold front is expected to drop in from the north and push nighttime temperatures below zero in western Colorado. Denver is expected to top out at 28 on Wednesday and 35 on Thursday, with lows each night in the teens. Sunny skies and seasonal temperatures will return on Friday, forecasters said. The freshly powdered mountains should warm into the 30s for the weekend before Christmas.

While a reliable forecast for Christmas Day was not yet available on Sunday, the National Weather Service noted that a White Christmas in Denver is unusual.

An inch of snow has been on the ground on Christmas Day just 42 of the last 112 years. Snow has fallen on Christmas Day in the city just six of the last 30 years, according to weather records.

That improved the state's snowpack to 41 percent of its 30-year average on Nov. 29 to 46 percent last Wednesday, with improvement from 37 percent to 52 percent during the same duration in northwest Colorado, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Lakewood. The next winter storm should offer even more improvement.

Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch

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Dear God! When Will It Stop?

By Marian Wright Edelman Questions I Ask Myself About the Connecticut School Shooting
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Tweet Posted on Dec 16, 2012 AP/Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks

Connecticut State Police lead children from the school premises after Friday’s mass shooting.

By Marian Wright Edelman

This piece was first published on Reader Supported News.

The horrendous news from Newtown, Connecticut has pierced our hearts. Allegedly, a black-clad man in his 20s armed with two semi-automatic handguns entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School and made an elementary school for kindergartners through fourth graders the scene of the worst mass shooting in a public school in American history. Reportedly, 20 children were shot and killed, and seven adults were shot and killed. We don’t yet know how many were wounded. We do know dozens of parents are experiencing the worst nightmare any parent could imagine. We do know more than 500 young children in the school are traumatized.

Once again we are faced with unspeakable horror from gun violence and once again we are reminded that there is no safe harbor for our children. How young do the victims have to be and how many children need to die before we stop the proliferation of guns in our nation and the killing of innocents? The most recent statistics reveal 2,694 children and teens were killed by gunfire in 2010; 1,773 of them were victims of homicide and 67 of these were elementary school-age children. If those children and teens were still alive they would fill 108 classrooms of 25 each. Since 1979 when gun death data were first collected by age, a shocking 119,079 children and teens have been killed by gun violence. That is more child and youth deaths in America than American battle deaths in World War I (53,402) or in Vietnam (47,434) or in the Korean War (33,739) or in the Iraq War (3,517). Where is our anti-war movement to protect children from pervasive gun violence here at home?

This slaughter of innocents happens because we protect guns before children and other human beings. Our hearts and prayers go out to the parents and teachers and children and the entire Newtown community that has been ripped apart by each bullet shot this morning. We know from past school shootings and the relentless killing of children every day that Newtown families and the community will never be the same. The Newtown families who lost children today will never be the same. The families of the teachers who were killed will never be the same. Every child at the Sandy Hook Elementary School this morning will never be the same.

Each and all of us must do more to stop this intolerable and wanton epidemic of gun violence and demand that our political leaders do more. We can’t just talk about it after every mass shooting and then do nothing until the next mass shooting when we profess shock and talk about it again. The latest terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is no fluke. It is a result of the senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to protect children instead of guns and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence and proliferation of guns in our nation. It is up to us to stop these preventable tragedies.

We have so much work to do to build safe communities for our children and need leaders at all levels of government who will stand up against the NRA and for every child’s right to live and learn free of gun violence. But that will not happen until mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and neighbors and faith leaders and everybody who believes that children have a right to grow up safely stand up together and make a mighty ruckus as long as necessary to break the gun lobby’s veto on common sense gun policy. Our laws and not the NRA must control who can obtain firearms.

It is way past time to demand enactment of federal gun safety measures, including:

Ending the gun show loophole that allows private dealers to sell guns without a license and avoid required background checks;
Reinstating the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004;
And requiring consumer safety standards for all guns.Why in the world do we regulate teddy bears and toy guns and not real guns that have snuffed out tens of thousands of child lives? Why are leaders capitulating to the powerful gun lobby over the rights of children and all people to life and safety?

I hope these shocking Connecticut child sacrifices in this holy season will force enough of us at last to stand up, speak out, and organize with urgency and persistence until the president, members of Congress, governors and state legislators put child safety ahead of political expediency. And we must aspire and act together to become the world leader in protecting children against gun violence rather than leading the world in child victims of guns. Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect all our children.

Albert Camus, Nobel Laureate, speaking at a Dominican monastery in 1948 said: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” He described our responsibility as human beings “if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it” and “to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents.” It is time for a critical mass of Americans to refuse to consent to the killing of children by gun violence.

Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund and its Action Council.

 

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Related Entries GOP Lawmaker’s Solution to Preventing Mass Shootings: More Guns The Future of Gun Control in the Aftermath of Sandy Hook Questions I Ask Myself About the Connecticut School Shooting ‘Left, Right & Center:’ School Shooting, Susan Rice Withdraws, and More

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Questions I Ask Myself About the Connecticut School Shooting

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Tweet Posted on Dec 16, 2012 AP/Julio Cortez

Officers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., after Friday’s massacre.

By Juan Cole

This piece originally appeared on Juan Cole’s Web page, Informed Comment.

I ask myself, “Why?”

Why do U.S. cable news networks intensively cover these mass shootings, making it the only story for a day or two and prying into every detail of them, when they aren’t interested in preventing them from happening again through banning semiautomatic weapons?  Is it just, like, a natural disaster to them?

Why don’t the news anchors or discussants ever bring up the simple fact that between 1994 and 2004, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994: The Federal Assault Weapons Ban prohibited assault weapons?  The prohibition was not unconstitutional.  Congress foolishly put in a 10-year sunset provision, and of course Bush and his Republican Congress allowed it to expire.

Why doesn’t anyone blame George W. Bush for these mass shootings?  He’s the one who led the charge to let the assault weapons ban expire.  Why aren’t the politicians in Congress who take campaign money from assault weapons manufacturers ever held accountable by the public?

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Why don’t the news programs bring up the reported moves of Sen. Dianne Feinstein to prepare new legislation banning assault weapons and their accoutrements?  Are they so afraid of the NRA that they can’t even discuss the legislative process in public?

What in the world does the 2nd amendment have to do with these incidents?  Do they look like a “well-regulated militia” to you?  Semi-automatic weapons are the 18th-century equivalent of artillery in terms of their ability to kill.  Do you think people should be allowed to have artillery pieces in their back yards, too?  Is this some sort of sick joke, that you are telling us our children have to die because the Founding Fathers wanted madmen to have high-powered weaponry?

Why does complaining about semiautomatic weapons (and the means to make them fully automatic by attaching e.g. ammunition drums) being freely available always devolve into an argument about gun control and hunting?  No one minds if people buy rifles to shoot deer with in the countryside.  An ordinary, non-automatic rifle can’t produce a mass killing like that in Connecticut because it cannot get off so many rounds so quickly.  Nobody hunts with an automatic pistol, and if they do, they should be publicly shamed by, like a group of hot girls calling them wusses as they set off in their hunting jackets.

Why aren’t there more class-action lawsuits against the people responsible for the proliferation of high-powered weaponry in our society?  Lax gun laws and inadequate security checks in Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky and 7 other states meant that they supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states in one recent year.  The guns aren’t randomly acquired, and they aren’t used or Saturday night specials.  They come disproportionately from specific states. 

Likewise, a relatively small number of corporations produce and market semiautomatic weapons for the civilian market.  Why aren’t they named and shamed?

Why doesn’t anyone on these news channels ever mention that firearms are used in 300,000 crimes a year in the U.S.?

Why doesn’t anyone on television news ever simply give this statistic:  In one recent year, there were 39 murders by gun in the U.K., but 9,000 in the United States?  Why is it wrong to let Americans know how peculiar is the situation Americans have to live in?

TAGS: children connecticut connecticut school shooting gun control gun violence guns newtown newtown gun massacre newtown shooting sandy hook elementary school school shooting



Related Entries GOP Lawmaker’s Solution to Preventing Mass Shootings: More Guns The Future of Gun Control in the Aftermath of Sandy Hook Dear God! When Will It Stop? ‘Left, Right & Center:’ School Shooting, Susan Rice Withdraws, and More

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View the Original article