Ten are gunned down in Vancouver, but "There were no innocent people who were struck by bullets." say's Vancouver Deputy Chief

The masthead of the Vancouver SUN newspaper says it all... "Gangs, Weather, Traffic Cams". Ah, the petty preoccupations of life here in "The Best Place on Earth [sic]".

Ten gangsters and guests shot at a birthday part underway at the BEST NEIGHBOURS RESTAURANT in Vancouver. Was it the ultimate payback or just a warning salvo? Hard to say, but when a man opens fire with an assault rifle and nobody is killed, but ten are wounded, it seems to indicate that the gunman was pulling some of his shots. Still, all of the wounded have buddies or boyfriends, so this is certainly has great potential for an escalation in violence. (Warning **to Vancouver municipal taxpayers - the boys in blue will be running the ass off of the VPD overtime clock this Holiday Season.)

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The recovered Kalashnikov rifle used in the restaurant shooting. Note it is a folding stock variant, which explains why none of the ten victims were killed. The inexperienced shooter could not control the bucking weapon and most of his shots went wild.

This morning we learn that a Kalashnikov assault rifle has been recovered from a stately home in Vancouver, and the residents of the multi-million dollar property have lawyered up. More intriguing is that this shooting is somehow related to the murder of Gurmit Singh Dhak, who was shot at Metrotown Mall in Burnaby on October 17. Dhak was sitting in an SUV with his wife and daughter, neither of who were hit when the shooter emptied his whole clip through the windshield.
The NATIONAL POST, which has many subscribers here in Vancouver, provided this graphic in today's edition. The detail provided for the BEST NEIGHBOURS RESTAURANT crime site more than satisfies my curiosity.

As I mentioned in a previous Blog article, the crime graphics used by the VANCOUVER SUN suck, blurring rather than revealing information. So it was refreshing to find a very helpful graphic of our Vancouver mass-shooting, in a Toronto based newspaper. I think I'll start checking the NATIONAL POST website for continued coverage of gangland shootings here in Vancouver. The most startling thing I read were comments of Deputy Chief Warren Lemke, who suggested that because "the bulk of the people", (ie. the ten who were shot), have known gang affiliations, "no innocent people ... were struck by bullets". Wow !!! Now if we can just get the mealy mouthed media to stop referring to shooters as "alleged gangsters" UNTIL they are convicted in court, then boys and girls, we will really have made progress. For my money, if a women dates or marries a gangster it shouldn't add her to the target list.


Comments attributed to Deputy Chief Lemke and to Gregor Robertson, Mayor of Vancouver. Robertson forgets that when a man is scooping a municipal executive salary and the pension points... the whole damned city is supposed to be his neighborhood.

Retribution for the execution style killing of a gangster in front of SEARS at Burnaby's Metrotown Mall is alleged to be a contributing factor in the weekend attack on a birthday part in Vancouver - ten hit by a vengeful shooter.