Whipped Cream Difficulties

…only outlaws will have shivs.

Seven inmates were killed during fights that lasted more than seven hours at a South Carolina prison Sunday night and into Monday morning, according to officials.

…

Though most of the autopsies have yet to be performed, it appears that many of the prisoners died from stabbing or slashing wounds from “shanks,” Lee County Coroner Larry Logan said. The official cause of death will not be determined until after the autopsies.

Seriously? A mass stabbing incident? And not in a school this time, but in a freaking maximum security prison?

More from the WP:

Lee Correctional Institution is one of South Carolina’s highest-security prisons, which means the inmates are generally tightly monitored and their movements inside the facility are limited.

…

Violence at Lee Correctional is not uncommon. During the past year, at least three inmates were killed in separate incidents, while last month, inmates held an officer hostage for about an hour-and-a-half before releasing him, according to the State newspaper.

Lawrence had much the same thought I did: why did it take seven hours to bring this under control?

I want to make it clear: I don’t take pleasure in this, and I’m opposed to extra-judicial punishments for prisoners. But if you can’t keep people from doing harm on a large scale with improvised weapons in a prison, why do you think laws on inanimate objects are going to keep people from doing harm on a large scale in the free world?

I have a theory.

If you’re going to commit a crime, make it worthwhile. Don’t throw your life away for free movie tickets or a lousy few hundred dollars. Seven figures in front of the decimal point is a good guideline.

Likewise, if you’re going to run guns to Mexico, don’t just run semi-automatic AKs and ARs. Go for all the gusto:

An Austin man, a Georgetown man and an Arizona machine gun manufacturer have been accused in a scheme that involved smuggling machine guns and ammunition to Mexico, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office.

…

Carlson worked with others to acquire and unlawfully smuggle 200 firearms including .50 caliber rifles, plus hundreds of rounds of ammunition to Mexico, the release said.
It said he worked with Fox — who is a former law enforcement officer and federal firearms licensee — to illegally acquire multiple M-134G Minigun machine guns.
The M-134G has six barrels and can fire between 2,000 and 6,000 rounds of ammunition per minute, according to the release. As part of the scheme, Fox contacted Garwood — the owner of Garwood Industries in Scottsdale — who agreed to help build the guns and supply Fox with M-134G parts, according to the release.

For those of my readers who are not people of the gun, here’s a short video of a minigun in action:

One of my friends commented last night that the M134 sounded like a great home defense weapon, and I had to agree with him: if you are attacked by a marauding rogue home, 58 rounds per second of 7.62 NATO should stop an attacking home fairly quickly.

(I’m kind of impressed that the Statesman writer got the part about the rotor housings being the serialized part right. At least, I assume he did, not being a minigun expert: but it’s generally impressive when a writer shows some understanding of what “serialization” means in this context.)

(Insert Fast and Furious reference here.)

(Insert rant about the Second Amendment covering machine guns here.)

…water slides.

This is one of those things that I intended to note earlier, but then I got busy and it got past me.

Schlitterbahn and Tyler Miles (the local operations manager for their Kansas City park) were indicted last week on involuntary manslaughter charges. This is related to the death of a ten-year-old boy who was decapitated on the Verrückt waterslide.

Texas Monthly online has a pretty good summary of the indictment and what led up to it. The spin here, based on the criminal indictment, is that these people supposedly had no idea what they were doing.

According to the indictment, lead designer John Schooley “possessed no engineering credential relevant to amusement ride design or safety,” and neither did Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeff Henry, whose emails describe a desire to “micro manage” the project because “speed is 100% required.”

Why was speed “100% required”? Allegedly, Henry was trying to impress reality show producers.

…Henry’s statements as quoted in the indictment are troubling. “[Verrückt] could hurt me, it could kill me, it is a seriously dangerous piece of equipment today because there are things that we don’t know about it. Every day we learn more,” he’s quoted as saying. “I’ve seen what this one has done to the crash dummies and to the boats we sent down it. Ever since the prototype. And we had boats flying in the prototype too. It’s complex, it’s fast, it’s mean. If we mess up, it could be the end. I could die going down this ride.”

…

…Henry seems to cast the industry’s guidelines as arbitrary and unnecessary—at one point, he’s quoted as saying, “we’re gonna redefine many of the definables that have been defined in the industry that we couldn’t find good reasons for. Like a 48-inch height rule. Why 48 inches? I could never figure out why not 47 inches. It made no sense to me. And so we’re gonna change all that now in this park, and hopefully change it worldwide in all parks and get back to rational reasonable scientific decisions as to why and how we run our facilities.” Furthermore, the indictment lists twelve different examples of the ride violating standards set by the American Society for Testing & Materials, which creates guidelines for amusement park rides. Schooley signed a document certifying that the ride was in compliance. The indictment describes the netting and support hoops above the ride as “obviously defective and ultimately lethal.”

Kind of burying the lede, and something I didn’t see reported as widely as the first indictment: Henry has also been arrested, and is charged with “murder, twelve counts of aggravated battery, and five counts of aggravated endangerment of a child”. The indictment against Henry hadn’t been released when the TM article hit the web, so indictment details are scanty.

It is worth remembering that most of what’s in the TM story is the prosecution’s case from the indictment, that Henry, Miles and Schlitterbahn have a different story that their lawyers will be presenting at trial, and that all parties should, of course, be presumed innocent.