As usual, there’s a lot going on, but I’m going to take a break from the political horse race. I’m not going to talk about the Olympics either, other than to note that the two male boxers in the women’s boxing competition beat the tar out of their opponents, and both won gold medals.
Unexpectedly! (Also, go friend yourself, Olympic committee.)
Instead, I’m going to make this a Crime Stories Monday column. I always enjoy a good “stupid criminal” tale, and today I’ve got several that I’ve been saving, along with a couple stories that elucidate leftist vs. conservative reactions to crime.
First up is a story from last fall in Dallas, where a Korean guy named “Kim” (unexpectedly!) owns a small beauty supply store. The store has been plagued by a lot of shoplifting, and Kim has tried at least one strategy that would work in Korea: public shaming.
The front of his shop features a photo lineup of local ne’er-do-wells who have been caught stealing in the store, with a sign saying, “Best Shoplifters.” Though I’m not sure he’s got that right, since the really good shoplifters don’t usually have full-color pictures of their big stupid faces caught in the act of stealing plastered all over the store.
But I digress.
This story starts when Kim saw yet another low life trying to shoplift. (She was wearing what looks like a shower cap and flip flops, so you know that she’s really focused on accentuating her natural beauty.) And just like AOC and many other lefties with ten-cent heads often tell you, she was just stealing food to keep her children from starving.
Oh no, wait. This was a beauty supply store, and she was stealing fake eyelashes and lash glue.
Don’t laugh: everyone knows that wearing a big ol’ set of false eyelashes is one of the best ways to distract from your hideous shower cap. I mean, other than not wearing a hideous shower cap out in public.
So Kim confronts Zsa Zsa and tells her to put the lashes and glue back, and she says something like, “Oh no you dih-unt,” and punches him in the face.
Now I don’t know Kim’s specific lineage – if you can forgive an old white guy’s ignorance, he looks exactly like every other Korean I’ve ever seen – but I’m guessing that he’s related to my heroes, the famous Roof-Top Koreans. (Those were the guys who got up on their store roofs with long guns when violent mobs of looters approached during the LA riots 30 years ago. And the mobs became peaceful protestors out for a non-rioting stroll until they got out of sniper range.) (Unexpectedly!)
This Kim apparently never got the memo about how you can’t hit a thief after she steals your lash glue and punches you in the face. (I think that’s a bit of English common law going back to the Magna Carta.) Because he gave her a stiff right jab that knocked her out of her flip flops and onto her arse. He followed up with a spinning right kick.
Each time I watch that kick, I do my best Bruce Lee impression, saying, “Hoooh ahhh” as his kick catches her shoulder.
And it’s a good thing he kicked her, because she was in the process of pulling a gun out of her purse, which she fumbled with and managed to fire into the floor before he knocked it away from her. Kim then laid on top of her until the cops came and arrested her.
She was charged with first degree armed robbery and held on a $75K bond. I haven’t been able to find anything else about the story.
The previous July, in Norco CA, 80-year-old liquor store owner James Cope was doing some paperwork at 2:47 a.m. when he saw a car pull up and four armed thugs jump out with rifles and rush toward the front door.
Because he is not AOC, Cope didn’t assume that they were there to steal food to feed their children, and he grabbed his shotgun. When the first thug through the door – a Rhodes Scholar called Rasheed DaShawn Belvin – started to point his rifle at Cope, Cope coped with his stress by firing his shotgun.
Whereupon Belvin and his buddies all ran out to the BMW, leaving a trail of urine in their wake, with Belvin yelling repeatedly, “He shot my arm off!”
Tragically his arm was not shot off, and he was caught and arrested later at a hospital, where doctors were able to save his arm.
The best part of the story? A local entrepreneur raised money for Cope by selling t-shirts bearing the words, “Don’t Mess with Norco – We’ll Shoot Your Arm Off!”
Which brings me to Mandeville, Louisiana last week, where a criminal with an amazingly great criminal name decided that he’d give home invasion and assault a try. Police say that Careyunius Smith – how can you not smile when you say that? – was skulking around a garage when one homeowner confronted him.
That homeowner yelled, and when a second homeowner came out and told Careyunius to beat it, he started beating on the first guy instead. So the second guy goes back in the house and comes out with his gun.
And then Careyunius – which does not quite rhyme with “genius” – decides to charge the armed man. As one does.
Then yada yada yada, Careyunius gets a bullet removed from his abdomen and goes to jail.
These three stories remind us of the eternal truth that most criminals are idiots. But an equally eternal truth is that most leftists’ reaction to crime is idiotic.
Take the example of Encino, CA, a formerly safe area that has been experiencing a wave of home invasion burglaries lately, culminating in a homeowner being injured by two invaders, before shooting and critically injuring one on July 9th.
Local government officials then released an apology for not keeping law abiding citizens safe, and supported the homeowner who shot the criminal.
HA! I kid because I love.
In fact, LA Mayor Karen Bass said that “spectacular-type crime” like brazen smash-and-grab robberies in the same area creates fear mostly because it’s “exploited by the press, and particularly the conservative press that wants to paint…Democrat-run cities as though we are in a crisis of crime.”
Yes. That vaunted “conservative press” that has dominated California, with its misleading statistics, facts, and video of crimes as they occur, falsely suggesting that everything in Dem-run cities is neither hunky nor dory.
An LA cop spokesman took the same approach, scolding residents that “people tend to overreact to spikes and dips in crime all the time.” When asked about the 40% recent increase in burglaries in Encino, he said that the media have “overreported the situation.”
It’s that kind of brilliant reaction that is making even the most hemorrhagic of the bleeding heart CA liberals considering the previously unheard of strategy of defending themselves. Resident Sam Avishay said, “All of this has made me rethink my long-held belief that I should not be a gun owner.”
Ya think? How’s that Ben Shapiro saying go? “Facts don’t care about your long-held beliefs?”
Let me close on a more optimistic note, because reality is conservative, even in California.
Exhibit A: On July 30th in Oceanside, a jackass armed with – and I quote – “a rock and a stick” broke into a home occupied by a male and a female. He threw the rock at the male, hitting him in the head. Whereupon the male shot and killed him.
Which illustrates why there is a lot more suspense involved in playing “rock, paper, scissors” than when playing “rock, stick, gun.”
Exhibit B:
When a bunch of pro-Hamas protestors shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in April, they trapped hundreds of commuters on the bridge, including a disabled school kid stuck on a bus for four hours, a surgeon who had to cancel and reschedule all of his surgeries that day, and a brain tumor patient who had to delay his surgery appointment.
Now – mirabile dictu! – San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins (who replaced commie disgrace Chesa Boudin after he was recalled) announced that 26 of the moronic, narcissist protestors are being charged with crimes, and 8 of them with felonies.
That’s not enough, and I’ll believe it when they get convicted and receive long sentences.
But it’s a start.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 