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Caution: Disturbing details in this story.
Former marine surrenders to police after killing four,
including baby in his mother’s arms
5 Sep, 2021 22:14
A self-described “survivalist” who was “totally outfitted” in body armor allegedly shot and killed four people, including a baby, near Lakeland, Florida, before surrendering after a shootout with sheriff’s deputies.
The murders occurred around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, and the victims included a man, two women and a baby boy who died in his mother’s arms, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters. An 11-year-old girl also was shot multiple times but was expected to survive after being rushed to surgery.
I will never be able to unsee that mother laying there with her dead infant in her arms.
The shooter was identified as Bryan Riley, 33, a former Marine Corps sharp-shooter who had tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He surrendered after being wounded in a gun battle with deputies. Riley told deputies after his arrest that he was on methamphetamine, and he tried to wrestle a gun away from a Lakeland police officer while being treated at a hospital for his gunshot wound.
The suspect is a resident of Brandon, Florida – near Tampa – and is employed as a bodyguard. He also told deputies that his victims “begged for their lives, and I killed them anyway,” according to Judd. The sheriff called Riley “evil in the flesh, a rabid animal.” He also allegedly killed the family’s dog.
Riley’s girlfriend told investigators that he suffered from PTSD and depression. He first came in contact with the Polk County family on Saturday, when he allegedly told 40-year-old Justice Gleason, who was mowing his lawn, that God had given him a vision that his daughter “Amber” would commit suicide. Gleason, who had no daughter by that name, threatened to call police, but Riley reportedly said, “No need to call the cops, I’m the cops for God.”
On Saturday night, the sheriff’s office got a call from the Gleason residence reporting a suspicious person. The man, allegedly Riley, told a woman at the home, “God sent me here to speak with one of your daughters.” The man was gone when a deputy arrived, and his truck wasn’t found in a search of the area, Judd said.
Nine hours later, a sheriff’s lieutenant responding to a nearby call heard two volleys of automatic gunfire. Within seconds, the sheriff’s office began receiving calls reporting an active shooter. Deputies arrived to see a truck on fire and a man wearing body armor, though they didn’t spot a gun, Judd said. He ran back in the house, and deputies heard a volley of gunfire, followed by “a woman’s scream and a baby whimper,” the sheriff said.
A gun battle ensued, and despite as many as hundreds of shots being fired between deputies and the suspect, no law enforcement officers were injured, Judd said. The sheriff lamented that Riley came out of the house with his hands up and no gun.
He either wasn't trying to kill any of the sheriff's deputies, or he was a lousy sharpshooter.
“It would have been nice if he’d come out with a gun, and then we’d have been able to read a newspaper through him and we’d have had a different conversation here this morning,” Judd told reporters. “But when someone chooses to give up, we take them into custody peacefully.”
If he’d given us the opportunity, we’d have shot him up a lot, but he didn’t because he was a coward. You see, it’s easy to shoot innocent children and babies and people in the middle of the night when you’ve got the gun and they don’t. But he was not much of a man.
After Riley’s surrender, deputies discovered the injured girl and three deceased victims -- including Justice Gleason, a 33-year-old woman and her three-month-old son – in the house. They found another victim, a 62-year-old woman, in another house on the property.
Gun control advocates quickly seized on the massacre as another example of the need for stricter firearms laws, while others suggested that the shooter wasn’t killed by law enforcement because he’s white. But Judd argued a different political lesson learned from the shootings.
“Our crime rate in this county is at a 49-year low . . ., but when you get a nut job like this, statistical data makes no difference,” the sheriff said. “I mean, this guy was wired up on dope, on meth -- you know, what those people think is low-level, non-violent meth -- here’s your sign, today, again, and he came here for a gun battle.”
We can go deeper than that! His tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a sniper turned him into the maniac that he was.
300 British troops offered hearing loss tests after
£5.5bn Ajax tank trials halted over noise complaints
7 Sep, 2021 12:46
More than 300 British soldiers are being offered hearing loss assessments after trials of the £5.5 billion Ajax armoured vehicle programme were halted due to an excessive number of noise complaints, a minister has admitted.
In a written statement to Parliament on Monday, Minister for Defence Procurement Jeremy Quin said that the Ajax tank programme, already beset by failures, had engendered adverse health effects among the troops trialing the hardware.
Quin said that while 121 personnel had previously been identified as requiring urgent hearing assessments, that number had now risen by a further 189, bringing the total to 310. In June, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) halted trials of the Army’s new armoured vehicle amid complaints that the noise of the tanks was impacting the health of troops.
He said that 248 of the 310 had already been tested and the MoD was in the process of determining the extent of the damage caused. Six personnel who had recently left the service were also being traced. A report on the issue is being compiled by the department’s director of health and safety.
“While the report has not yet been concluded, it is apparent that vibration concerns were raised before Ajax trials commenced at the Armoured Trials and Development Unit in November 2019,” Quin said.
He said that he expects a key theme of the report to be “the importance of having a culture that gives safety equal status alongside cost and schedule.” Quin added that they would fully support veterans who have been exposed to noise or vibration on this project in getting the care they needed.
While design changes are being assessed to address vibrations and noise concerns, the minister said it was only part of the solution, and “considerable work needs to be undertaken before any such assurances can be given.”
Britain signed a contract for 589 of the problematic General Dynamics tanks in 2014, with the programme cost reaching £5.5 billion. The vehicles are assembled at the US firm’s Merthyr Tydfil plant.
Earlier reports also suggested the tanks can’t fire on the move due to the vibrations. Trials are expected to resume imminently. “We will not accept a vehicle that is not fit for purpose,” Quin added.
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UK Defence Ministry spent £3.2 billion on tanks
that can’t shoot on the move – reports
24 May, 2021 15:51
Developed by General Dynamics, the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle impressed then-Prime Minister David Cameron so much that he ordered 589 of them in 2014, after receiving the Army’s go-ahead four years earlier. Delivery dates have since been missed, and the Army is still waiting to roll out the vehicles, but a Times report on Sunday revealed that technical experts have encountered numerous “safety issues,” including excessive noise inside the vehicles, and cannons that can’t fire while on the move due to vibration.
Armed with 40mm cannons and light machine guns, the Ajax vehicles are lighter and more maneuverable than Britain’s aging main battle tank, the Challenger 2. As such, an inability to fire while moving renders the vehicles useless to the reconnaissance units that would eventually use them in the field.
Nevertheless, the British government has handed over more than £3.2 billion for the vehicles, out of a total programme cost of £5.5 billion, according to Ministry of Defence documents seen by the Times. The most recent round of payments, adding up to nearly £600 million, were made this year.
Government spending watchdogs are apparently unhappy, and one of the Times’ sources suggested that payments are not linked to the delivery of working vehicles. If so, General Dynamics has thus far earned a sizeable chunk of change from the UK's defence coffers without delivering a working product.
The Ajax was conceived to replace the obsolete 1970s-era Scimitar light tanks currently used by armoured reconnaissance units, yet the future of such vehicles was uncertain even before the latest issues with the Ajax emerged. When Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled a massive hike in defence expenditure last year, he said that the government’s spending would “be focused on the technologies that will revolutionize warfare,” including a heavy investment in artificial intelligence and the creation of an RAF Space Command, capable of launching a rocket from Scotland in 2022.
However, a parliamentary committee in March excoriated the government for neglecting Britain’s conventional forces, drawing attention to the “deplorable” state of Her Majesty’s armored vehicle capability. Their report heavily criticized the cost and delays involved with the Ajax program, including the vibration issue that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace referred to late last year as “a slight pause in the area around the turret.”
“Of the vehicles we do still have, some date back to the early 1960s, when the Morris 1100 was the most popular car and Elvis was the Christmas number one,” committee chairman Tobias Ellwood said at the time. “A mixture of bureaucratic procrastination, military indecision, financial mismanagement and general ineptitude has led to a severe and sustained erosion of our military capabilities.”
Yet the Ajax boondoggle is not the first incidence of mismanagement at the MoD.
When the Ministry of Defence replaced the FN FAL with the Enfield SA80 as its service rifle in the late 1980s, problems soon emerged. The weapon would jam, its metal components would rust and deform, and it proved wholly unusable in desert environments – which became apparent when British soldiers took part in the Gulf War. After a post-war report identifying these faults leaked to the press, the ministry first pretended the report was fake, before embarking on a costly upgrade programme.
More recently, the ministry has been slammed for spending so much money on its two new ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class aircraft carriers that it couldn’t afford the planes and support vessels needed to deploy them for a year, and couldn’t modify the ships to perform amphibious landings – one of their selling points.
Furthermore, the American F-35 fighter jets that these carriers would launch have been plagued by delays, design flaws and cost overruns, to the point where the ministry has refused to say whether it will buy its original order of 138 F-35s, and declined to offer a cost estimate for the programme as a whole. The 48 jets already ordered are estimated to run up a bill of £9.1 billion by 2025, and the government has not commented on whether upgrade costs will drive that figure up further.
Good Grief!
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