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Store owner shoots 9 year old girl getting picture with Easter bunny

shemp

a flimsy character...perfidious and despised
shemp
Joined
Nov 5, 2002
Messages
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The U.S., a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
California store owner fires at shoplifters, police say, but mistakenly hits girl getting picture with mall Easter bunny

A Southern California shoe store owner opened fire at two shoplifters, police said, but mistakenly shot a 9-year-old girl about to get her picture with a mall Easter bunny. The store owner fled the state and was arrested in Nevada, authorities said Wednesday.

Marqel Cockrell, 20, was chasing the shoplifters out of the store Tuesday evening at the Mall of Victor Valley in the small city of Victorville when he "fired multiple shots at the shoplifters," Victorville police said in a statement.

"Cockrell's shots missed the shoplifters and instead hit the 9-year-old female victim," the statement said.

The girl, identified by family members as Ava Chruniak, had been getting ready for pictures with the Easter bunny in the mall when the shots were fired, said her grandmother, Robin Moraga-Saldarelli. The girl was left with three gunshot wounds, including two in her arm, Moraga-Saldarelli said.
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Words fail to encompass the level of stupidity here.
 
9 years old is old enough to know "stay strapped or get clapped". It's her fault for not laying down fire in return and assaulting through the ambush.
 
Oh gosh!

The shop lifters were fleeing the crime scene, then Marqel Cockrell shot at them while they were running away, and Marqel Cockrell missed the thieves but he managed shot an innocent child in the process.

I expect that Marqel Cockrell is in great deal of trouble and that he will spend a great deal of time in jail regretting the stupid thing that the did.
 
That little girl is going to be so triggered every time she sees a fluffy wuffy bunny wabbit. She's going to be diving to the floor hyperventilating.

Bugs Bunny becomes a horror film giving one nightmares, or should that be nightwabbits.
 
Is a pair of sneakers worth a life? Anyone's?
Marqel Cockrell, a co-owner of the shoe store Sole Addicts, was arrested in his car at about 9 p.m. in Clark County by the Nevada Highway Patrol, Victorville police said. He was being held Wednesday for lack of $1 million bail at the Clark County Detention Center "on an extraditable warrant, for attempted murder," Victorville police said. An extradition hearing was scheduled for Thursday and jail and court records did not indicate whether Cockrell had an attorney representing him who could comment on his behalf. "I'm glad they caught him and he will definitely pay for this. I really hope they throw the book at him," Moraga-Saldarelli told KNBC-TV. CBS News link
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Cockrell's life as he knew it just sprouted wings and flew away. It's all going to be different now. A felony charge (attempted murder) filed, bail set at $1 million and lawsuits sure to come. Below is a news photo from his extradition hearing. One thing's for sure: NRA don't want no part of this guy. ;)
 

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Sideroxylon said:
A Boston Dynamics hound in Walmart livery is not going to hit the little girl. Properly equipped it could record evidence and deal out executions. May we both live long enough to see this bright future.
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The first time I saw that thing I got the heebie jeebies because I immediately thought of the mechanical hound from Fahrenheit 451.
 
Can I just say I like the part where the self-righteous store manager who tried to kill people for stealing a pair of shoes but ended up shooting a small child instead, realized what he had done and evidently thought to himself, "Oh no, I'm actually the bad guy in this movie" and promptly ran to his car and fled the scene.
 
Checkmite said:
Can I just say I like the part where the self-righteous store manager who tried to kill people for stealing a pair of shoes but ended up shooting a small child instead, realized what he had done and evidently thought to himself, "Oh no, I'm actually the bad guy in this movie" and promptly ran to his car and fled the scene.
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Yes, that does not shine a very positive light on him.
 
Checkmite said:
Can I just say I like the part where the self-righteous store manager who tried to kill people for stealing a pair of shoes but ended up shooting a small child instead, realized what he had done and evidently thought to himself, "Oh no, I'm actually the bad guy in this movie" and promptly ran to his car and fled the scene.
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I'm still kind of stuck on the idea that a 20 year old OWNS a store in a mall. Have you ever seen what rent costs in a freaking mall? Then, to have that level of investment in it, only to do something epicly stupid, and then multiply the stupidity a hundred fold by fleeing the state? Something don't add up here.
 
shemp said:
I just noticed this from my link:
I mean, I know weed has been legalized, but this might be going too far!
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LAPD 1: Check her body paint. Faded San Francisco Arte Nouveau. She must be an oldie. Are you oldy?

OLDY: Want tah hear me rap? I saw the best minds of my generation....

LAPD 2: Dig, Larry, aspirin. Better phone her in for regrooving.

...Just when you think Firesign Theater is no longer relevant...
 
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Mike! said:
I'm still kind of stuck on the idea that a 20 year old OWNS a store in a mall.
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That was my thought too, but the article refers to him as the "co-owner" so I guess he is the working co-owner while there are other profit making co-owners.

Not that this is greatly relevant. The working co-owner will do serious time, despite cheers from the cheer squad.
 
It's the bunny's fault.

Being aware that there could be ne'er-do-wells in the mall, all he brought was chocolate and marshmallows. I support legislation that all Easter Bunnies and Santa Claus should be armed.

Especially during Santacon in New York. I've seen fights break out there. Santas need to be armed in order to protect innocent bystanders.
 
It’s my understanding that the applied psychology guys have figured out that the threat of extravagant punishments do not significantly deter crime as long as there is a perception that it’s possible you might get away with your crime. Everyone’s brain tells them they are gonna be The One That Gets Away With It.

What deters crime is the perception that you are likely to be caught and made to face proportional consequences.
 
Mike! said:
I'm still kind of stuck on the idea that a 20 year old OWNS a store in a mall. Have you ever seen what rent costs in a freaking mall? Then, to have that level of investment in it, only to do something epicly stupid, and then multiply the stupidity a hundred fold by fleeing the state? Something don't add up here.
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My 1st guess is he has a rich parent.
 
I'm sure Big Bubba at San Quentin is preparing for this guy's arrival. Or, the Other Place is ("Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!"), if the authorities go for the gurney.
 
Actually, I'd say let's focus on the real problem there, rather than whether the thief deserved to die or not: the issue that people do miss their shots. Even in shootouts involving the police or FBI, last I've heard some 80% of the shots miss. Some berk who's had a lot less training, and is shooting while running, yeah, I'd expect that to be more like 90%+.

And, as evidenced by this case, some of those shots hit someone else.

And that's not even taking into account the additional danger of drunk idiots with guns: shooting upwards when celebrating anything, from new year to weddings to some local football team winning. And some of those hit and kill people on their way down. In fact, last I heard a hospital statistic, a normal gunshot wound (as in, you're actually aiming at that guy) has a chance between 2% and 6% of actually being fatal, while being hit by a falling bullet has about 1 chance in 3 (THREE) of being fatal. It may sound counter-intuitive, but the reason is simple: the latter is a lot more likely to hit you in the head.

So, anyway, the more important question for me is less whether someone deserves to die for a theft that doesn't even amount to grand larceny. (And let's also skip over the fact that we DON'T consider that to warrant a death sentence in a court of law... but apparently some berk can decide to do just that.)

The more important question is: are INNOCENT BYSTANDERS like this girl a fair price for society to pay, just to give some idiot a chance to play Judge Dredd IRL?
 
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This isn't Fort Knox or the Smallpox Biotech Lab at the Centers for Disease Control or a Nuclear Missile Solo or National Archives room where they keep the Constitution.

It was a shoe store. A goddamn shoe store.

Why do violent justified murder fantasies always involve crap that's not worth protecting?
 
JoeMorgue said:
This isn't Fort Knox or the Smallpox Biotech Lab at the Centers for Disease Control or a Nuclear Missile Solo or National Archives room where they keep the Constitution.

It was a shoe store. A goddamn shoe store.

Why do violent justified murder fantasies always involve crap that's not worth protecting?
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At a wild guess, maybe because the fantasy is to act like a badass Real Man (TM), while avoiding the risks that would actually make it badass.

Someone actually attacking a nuclear missile silo, probably is someone well armed, well trained, and mentally prepared to get in such a shootout. Meaning: take cover and shoot back. And again, they're probably some kind of trained mercenary or maybe even special forces agent, so they might actually aim better than the kind of berk whose idea of gun safety is to shoot on the run in a mall. Hell, they might even have a designated marksman. They might also lay cover fire for each other.

That's dangerous stuff. You could get killed defending that place.

Shooting at an unarmed fleeing guy is a much safer scenario to pretend one is some kind of action hero.

It's basically in the ballpark of the kind of online troll who's accusing others on some game board of being cowards or little girls if they don't play PvP. Because FSM knows that sitting safely behind a computer screen in his mom's basement is the real test of courage and manliness :p
 
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JoeMorgue said:
This isn't Fort Knox or the Smallpox Biotech Lab at the Centers for Disease Control or a Nuclear Missile Solo or National Archives room where they keep the Constitution.

It was a shoe store. A goddamn shoe store.

Why do violent justified murder fantasies always involve crap that's not worth protecting?
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Because that makes it more noble to gun nuts. The honour for them is in seeing how minor a slight the hero will kill for. It is ingrained in American culture. Look at their movies, reasons for war, or what plays out on their streets everyday.
 
I've talked in the past about the disparage between cops/gun nuts and their love of "tacticool" stuff while every single person I've ever met in the military wanted nothing more to get out of that crap the second they were allowed to.

As I said 99% of conversation with my underlings in Afghanistan was:

"Johnson put your vest back on, we're still Threatcon whatever"
"But it's sooooo hot. Man was not meant to live here."

This is similar, just with mentality instead of accessories.

I remember standing watch while legit actual Tomahawk Cruise missiles got loaded onto my ship and the last thing I wanted was to actually have to shoot someone.
 
While it's tempting to generalize over the whole USA, last I heard some statistics, even there only about 39% of men and 22% of the women own a gun. The majority doesn't. And even out of the owners, about a third don't actually have a handgun (much less carry it with them at work and all over the place), but just something like a shotgun or hunting rifle or such.

Also about 3% of the population owns over half the privately owned guns.

So basically you can't really generalize that every American is a gun nut, any more than you could generalize that every woman is a crazy cat lady.
 
HansMustermann said:
While it's tempting to generalize over the whole USA, last I heard some statistics, even there only about 39% of men and 22% of the women own a gun. The majority doesn't. And even out of the owners, about a third don't actually have a handgun (much less carry it with them at work and all over the place), but just something like a shotgun or hunting rifle or such.

Also about 3% of the population owns over half the privately owned guns.

So basically you can't really generalize that every American is a gun nut, any more than you could generalize that every woman is a crazy cat lady.
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Without going down a very bad rabbit hole, and I know this is gibberish to other countries but "Gun Nuts" represent very, very few Gun Owners in America.

One of the reasons gun control doesn't stick in America is Republicans only defend the crazy gun nuts and the Democrats only attack the crazy gun nuts and the hunters and sane self defense advocates get ignored, so nobody actually supports anything happening.
 
HansMustermann said:
The more important question is: are INNOCENT BYSTANDERS like this girl a fair price for society to pay, just to give some idiot a chance to play Judge Dredd IRL?
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I think that by referencing a comic book character you are casting this in a light that is............exactly what I'm thinking.

These yahoos are dangerous. Permits to carry guns, or to have them in public places, should be scaled way, way, back, in part because the people who really, really, want to carry a gun are exactly the type of people I do not want to carry a gun.

If he wasn't "carrying" it, but just had it in his store, same thing. I don't want these yahoos to have the option to legally have a gun near to hand when I'm in the neighborhood.
 
JoeMorgue said:
sane self defense advocates
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I must admit I question just how many people fit that description.


For what it's worth, I would be somewhat libertarian about guns in the home, but if I made the rules, leaving the house with one would be a heck of a lot harder to do, legally, than it is now.
 
Well, I suppose it does help make a point, though I was going more for accuracy than metaphor. Some people literally want a mandate to be judge, jurry and executioner rolled into one, which is the literal job description of a Mega-City One judge.

Except, of course, if you actually proposed that someone could get that kind of a government job, with all the weapons training and legal training and scrutiny and review that come with it, even the vast majority of gun nuts would instantly get butthurt at the very idea. And with good reason, I might add. But if it's one random drunk who can't even hit what he's shooting at, and whose idea of responsibility is to instantly flee the scene, no, that's ok. In fact, apparently it's what the 1st Amendment is all about :p
 
Meadmaker said:
I must admit I question just how many people fit that description.


For what it's worth, I would be somewhat libertarian about guns in the home, but if I made the rules, leaving the house with one would be a heck of a lot harder to do, legally, than it is now.
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"Sane self defense advocate" has a pretty oxymoronic ring to my old ears. Burglars, home invaders, and stickup artists reap a good harvest of shootin' irons from those jokers. And we hear with dreadful regularity about accidents and murders with some fool's beloved gun. But I'm an extremist when it comes to disarming acts.

My hope is for a change in attitudes resulting -- yes, it'll be slowly -- in a better class of politicians at city and state levels. Then perhaps we'll get saner laws, that is, laws that will gradually get firearms out of the hands of fools.

We could start by defining "fool" very goddamned broadly.
 
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sackett said:
"Sane self defense advocate" has a pretty oxymoronic ring to my old ears. Burglars, home invaders, and stickup artists reap a good harvest of shootin' irons from those jokers. And we hear with dreadful regularity about accidents and murders with some fool's beloved gun. But I'm an extremist when it comes to disarming acts.

My hope is for a change in attitudes resulting -- yes, it'll be slowly -- in a better class of politicians at city and state levels. Then perhaps we'll get saner laws, that is, laws that will gradually get firearms out of the hands of fools.

We could start by defining "fool" very goddamned broadly.
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While I am not prepared to start yet another thread about ideas and principles, and agree with many of yours, I would advise you to be careful in citing stories of homeowners shot with their own guns. It appears that this particular factoid has been more or less invented, in part on the basis of a flawed and tendentious California study - one of those things like the link between vaccines and autism, which "got away." I don't think there has actually been a good statistical study one can cite on this issue.
 
I'm not seeing any mention of "homeowners shot with their own guns." He said "accidents and murders with some fool's beloved gun." Which also covers the case when said fool is at the trigger. (Plus a couple of other cases. Such as this one: https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/po...cidentally-shot-himself-in-publix-parking-lot )

And I mean, it includes not only accidental shooting of a family member or some bystander, but also stuff like IIRC if you're an abused wife, THE biggest predictor of the risk to end up dead is whether or not the abusive husband has a gun. Yeah, supposedly he had it for self defense. Then it turned out it also was quite useful for offense. Huge surprise to NRA and their gun advocates, I'm sure. I mean, what was the chance it would happen YET AGAIN, amirite?
 
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HansMustermann said:
I'm not seeing any mention of "homeowners shot with their own guns." He said "accidents and murders with some fool's beloved gun." Which also covers the case when said fool is at the trigger. (Plus a couple of other cases. Such as this one: https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/po...cidentally-shot-himself-in-publix-parking-lot )

And I mean, it includes not only accidental shooting of a family member or some bystander, but also stuff like IIRC if you're an abused wife, THE biggest predictor of the risk to end up dead is whether or not the abusive husband has a gun. Yeah, supposedly he had it for self defense. Then it turned out it also was quite useful for offense. Huge surprise, I'm sure.
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Indeed, accidental shootings in the home are a terrible problem, as are intentional shootings by people who shouldn't come anywhere near a gun, and so is theft of firearms from private owners, and I have no issue with this. It's all real, and I think there's plenty to back it up. I simply brought up this one little peeve, because it is frequently cited when such issues get rolling, and it's one that turns out not to have much behind it. And because I do actually favor gun control, I think it's important for people who do to steer clear of poison pills that opponents can throw into the well.
 
I'll even agree with you there. Just saying that so far nobody seems to have brought that one up in this thread.
 
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