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Police “believe the shooters were carrying out a hit on one individual, who is among the deceased.” Three others were killed and 17 more wounded when they were were caught in the crossfire. “Multiple shooters” opened fire in the Five Points South area of Birmingham, Alabama. It happened Saturday evening in the city’s “bustling entertainment district.”
Gang-style hit
Police are certain what happened Saturday night, September 21, was a gang-related “hit.” They have lots of clues indicating that. Just after 11 p.m. a vehicle rolled up and “multiple people” got out. They were armed with weapons rigged to make them fully automatic.
As long as they got their target, they didn’t seem to care who else was killed. They did get their target. They also killed 3 innocent bystanders and injured 17 more, some seriously.
Birmingham Police Chief Scott Thurmond filled the press in about it on Sunday. His investigation indicates “the shooters were carrying out a hit on one individual, who is among the deceased, and the other victims were caught in the crossfire.”
Someone, he added, “was willing to pay money to have that person killed.”
So far, it looks like whoever commissioned the hit got the results they paid for and the assassins got away clean. The only way police are ever going to find the killers is if a disgruntled associate or jealous girlfriend turns them in for reward money.
“With no suspects in custody, the Birmingham Police Department is partnering with the FBI and other agencies to investigate.” They aren’t real hopeful the feds will have better luck so they’re “urging anyone with information to come forward.”
Gun conversion devices
Criminals willing to perform murder for hire don’t really care about firearms restrictions. It’s possible, Mayor Randall Woodfin speculates, that the hit team used “illegal gun conversion devices.” They call them “switches” on the street.
Like the “bump-stock” used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, “these devices can be used to override the trigger mechanism on a gun, so it functions as a machine gun.” They work on handguns, too.
Federal Prosecutors in Birmingham are swearing up and down that they have an “initiative cracking down on the devices” they started in July. By outlawing the switches, only outlaws will use them.
The hit team isn’t about to give up a device which “can convert semi-automatic pistols and rifles into fully automatic weapons in less than 60 seconds,” and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives knows it.
Violence, is at an “epidemic level” in Birmingham, the mayor laments. “I want to work with the state to solve this problem.” He should look in the mirror and fire himself. They don’t have enough money to pay police, then wonder why they have so much crime.
Birmingham Police Officer Truman Fitzgerald thinks mass shootings “have more to do with culture than they do criminality.” They’re “seeing far too many arguments being settled by bullets.” They’ll do “everything we possibly can to make sure that we uncover, identify and hunt down” the hit squad. Everything possible isn’t much. They “asked that businesses in the area provide any surveillance footage they might have.“
