The revolver Dorner pawned, an Astra .38 imported by Century.
The thoroughly dead fired-cop cop-killer is still making news. Three items came to our attention, and we happened to read them in a paper from way the hell across the country from the scenes of his crimes, to wit: the New York Daily News:
- Item: a gun he pawned in Las Vegas for $50, pre-notoriety, has been auctioned for $4,000. ($4,025, to be pedantic). The gun was a cheesy Astra .38 revolver, and the pawnbroker was optimistic to give him $50 for such a second-string-brand, out-of-fashion-caliber gun. But his optimism is rewarded on Gunbroker. Was the buyer one of those guys who bids on, say, Bonnie and Clyde guns? Or one of Dorner’s ate-up fans? Yeah, that possibility is sick, but not as sick as Dornermania gets.
Shop’s copy of Dorner’s receipt.
Anyway, the seller offered to give the money to the family members of two cops killed by the angry ex-cop, but the families angrily refused, and one of the police departments excoriated the seller as “ghoulish.” Jeez, no good deed goes unpunished in this world. What was a pawnbroker — last time I checked, not someone bound by a particularly rigid code of ethics — supposed to do with a gun that turned out to be owned by a celebrity, even an evil one? Exercise for the reader: someone finds out his grandfather left him a GI bringback that turns out to be documented personal property of a top Nazi, say Göring. What’s he supposed to do with it? Exercise II: the dealer learns the gun was Göring’s after buying it. Should he melt it down because Göring was a monster only suicide saved from the gallows, a committed Nazi, one-time chief of the Gestapo?
Close-up shows finish flaked off grips and trigger with pitting. The gun was in rough shape.
Does the gun have more than mere ownership history with an evil man? Is it tainted by evil? Does it bear the mark of Cain, and no one should possess it just as all were enjoined to shun, but not harm, Cain himself?
Back to the gun itself — it was in lousy condition. This may have been because it was a Century import, or it may have been Dorner’s doing.
Several of his other guns were destroyed in the fire that killed him, or seized by police and will be destroyed. This Astra is likely to be the only gun associated with this outlaw ever to see the private market.
- Item: the LAPD’s inept response hits the city’s bottom line to the tune of $4.2 million.
LOS ANGELES — The city of Los Angeles reached a $4.2 million settlement on injury claims by two women who were injured when police mistakenly opened fire on them during the manhunt for disgruntled ex-cop Christopher Dorner, an official said Tuesday.
Margie Carranza and her 71-year-old mother, Emma Hernandez, were delivering papers around 5 a.m. on Feb. 7 when LAPD officers blasted at least 100 rounds at their pickup.
There’s a couple of ways to calculate this. Since the LAPD spray-an’-pray’d 100-plus rounds at the two small Filipinas they mistook for the single large shaven-headed black dude, you could say it’s about $40,000 per negligent discharge. But since only about a quarter of them struck the wrong-make-size-color-and-plate truck, you could say it’s $10,000 per reasonably close hit (no one knows where the 80 or 90 other rounds went, but it says something about LAPD marksmanship). But since only one round struck one of the wrong-number-color-sex-and-size “suspects,” you could say it’s a full $4-million-plus per round on target.
We guess LAPD still considers it cheaper than training their cops.
Of course, the customers on Carranza’s and Hernandez’s paper route who didn’t get their LA Times that day haven’t filed their suits yet, and the other victim of mistaken identity will also run up the score. Of course, nobody’s blaming the real ultimate cause of this, Dorner. You can’t sue a penniless dead crook; well, you can, but you can’t collect, and that’s how the plaintiff’s bar rolls.
This, too, is pretty sick, but we still haven’t hit the Dornermania apogee yet.
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Let’s keep the focus where it belongs: on four innocents murdered by a no-good sack of excrement.
Item: a kind of Dorner Fan Club met for a rally in LA. After he was cold, dead, and in the ground. Cause it’s all LAPD’s fault, you know.
That’s the rock bottom of Dornermania. Lord love a duck. The image caption (right) expresses what we think of this cretin, and the even worse people who celebrate him. We don’t want to hear that “he had a point” because “this, that and the other thing is wrong with LAPD/PDs in general/life, the universe, and everything.” That’s bullshit. Any point you ever had is erased forever when you whack some innocent person to send your message.
If you want to send a message, go to an internet café. If you want to kill people, Chris Dorner fans, start with yourselves. This has been a public service message.
Kevin was a former Special Forces weapons man (MOS 18B, before the 18 series, 11B with Skill Qualification Indicator of S). His focus was on weapons: their history, effects and employment. He started WeaponsMan.com in 2011 and operated it until he passed away in 2017. His work is being preserved here at the request of his family.
4 thoughts on “Chris Dorner’s gun, and other Dorner news”
Does anyone expect that piece of junk to go up in value? Almost nobody will remember Chris Dorner, may he rot in hell, 10 years from now. It doesn’t have value when no one remembers him. I hope who ever bought it can’t sell it for more than $25.
A wee bit more L.A. insight re: the $4.2M LAPD settlement
Item: it was 6-8 officers who unloaded on the ladies’ pickup truck in two separate attacks. First one group panic-firing, then, when the ladies survived despite the best marksmansip that taxpayer dollars could provide, and attempted to drive away from the scene of what, to the victims, appeared to be a gang shooting (and which, in point of fact, exactly was) they started to move, despite wounds and damage, whereupon the second group of LAPD officers opened fire. Without, evidently, opening their eyes.
(Nota bene that had it actually been whackjob Dorner on scene, and not two innocent unarmed paper delivery ladies, based solely on his demonstrated marksmanship vs. theirs, he’d have killed two or more cops, and escaped anyways, AFTER this barrage of sound and fury, signifying nothing, from those stalwart LAPD guardians).
Item: we know exactly where all those other bullets went. They went into numerous homes behind the target vehicle, downrange. Those damage lawsuits and attempted murder/negligent assault cases have yet to even be addressed. Considering the residents in question don’t live in L.A. proper, expect similar large lump payouts, and a plethora of absolutely justified ambulace chasers picking the City of L.A. to bits over this case.
Item: the late and unlamented fuck-up Dorner was no more the ultimate cause of this incident than the Tooth Fairy. If a report that an angry black man wants to shoot LAPD cops is proximally an excuse to unload 6+ mags at the wrong suspects driving the wrong car doing nothing even remotely threatening, with the sole probable cause being that they crossed the hapless officers’ path, then it’s time for the entire force to turn in their badges, and subcontract this job to the TSA, for the savings in salary, and the improvement in competence and diligence it would engender. (I would have said Keystone Kops, but they’re currently bidding for the new BATFE contract).
Item: The department, according to inside sources, plans on firing all the involved officers, and the police union, which usually defends serial child molesters caught on video, has shown no signs of stepping up to defend such an egregious breach of common sense, not to mention attempted homicide and aggravated assault, which normally results in prosecution and hard felony time for mere mortals (i.e. unblessed by attendance at a police academy, and possessing only a high school diploma and the willingness to enfore the plethora of silly rules of the petit bureaucracy, all for $55K/yr and all the crap they can eat). As evidenced by the fact that LAPD would hire a screwball like Dorner in the first place, and then take forever to finalize firing him, even as a unprotected (by the police union) probationary officer, when his serial total unsuitability for the job manifested itself repeatedly.
Item: Jack Webb’s Sgt. Joe Friday and Ofrs. Malloy and Reed of Adam-12 have been replaced as LAPD icons by the adoption of Ofcr. Barney Fife as the new department role model, and now even the department’s rank and file know it. The only saving grace is that the safest place to be is in front of them if they start shooting.
Item: If LAPD policy is henceforth to be that all nighttime encounters with officers will begin with 100-round volleys of gunfire with absolutely no credible threat, probable cause, nor any other rationale for ventilating everything that moves, the LAPD is going to be the second agency (after DHS) to need to put in an order for a billion rounds of pistol ammunition. At least half of which should be used for enough training to guarantee >25% chance of first-magazine hits on objects measuring 8’x20′ moving at under 10 MPH. Perhaps they could start by training officers on immobile shipping containers, and gradually decrease the target size while increasing the speed, until eventually their officers have a 50:50 chance of hitting a fat grandmother with a walker at ranges under 20′ if it’s not too dark and she isn’t auditioning for a part in The Matrix Pt. 4.
Alternatively, LAPD could immediately get 9000 weapons off their streets and out of the hands of reckless criminals by disarming their officers, and sending the surplus hanguns to a department that could really use them, such as the Constabulary of the Greater London area in the UK.
I’d love to say something, anything, in the department’s defense, if only to give sme balance, but the bare facts are that this time around, the local forest rangers covered themselves with more glory than Los Angeles’ Insane Clown Posse.
Did a list of recovered weapons ever turn up in the Dorner case? He claimed to have all kinds of semi-autos rifles, a Barrett M82, and some sound suppressors, and the media went nuts. I’d like to find out what he actually possessed vs. what he claimed.
Same question re the Dagistani Duo. It was claimed several times that they had an AR, which was why 200 rounds were fired by cops at the car. Did an AR ever turn up?
I have noticed a pattern of wild speculation about what guns these nuts have, it is treated as fact, and then no actual proof turns up.
GREAT question, Eric, in both aspects.
There was a Walther P22 with laser (or light?) and suppressor recovered after his death. Not sure if it was Dorner’s, though. A very bad picture of it is here: http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/02/15/man-finds-gun-believed-to-be-dorners-autopsy-shows-single-gunshot-wound-killed-ex-cop/
Here are some stories about weapons of Dorner’s that were recovered. The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department showed a .308 rifle with the word “Vengeance” on the buttstock (or the “handle” if you’re a reporter!), and claimed he had “10 suppressors.”
Orange County Register (needs a login to read the whole thing, which we have not got).
NBC Los Angeles (accessible to the public) claims Dorner had:
An image gallery is here at NBC LA, from the SBSD press conference. It shows what purports to be Dorner’s actual .308 (which is suppressed) and several guns “like” his. The gallery loads too slow and plays too fast, then dumps you into something Californians think is important like pop starlets’ tramp stamps, but you can pause it and click through the pages manually. The various stories said that some of Dorner’s guns were crisped with him, and others were left in various cars he abandoned as they ran him down.
For all the hundreds of rounds fired at him (or at people someone mistakenly thought was him), his body only had a single GSW, a self-inflicted pistol shot to the head.
Apparently, he bought most of his guns at the LAPD gun shop, which sells cops guns unavailable to the California public.
The story in the case of Flashbang and Speedbump is still developing. LATEST press reports say that they had only one gun, a pistol; and that they shot the MIT cop hoping to take his gun, but couldn’t figure out his retention holster and left it on him. (Mind you, the reporters who wrote these stories haven’t interviewed the only person who could credibly tell them that, Flashbang himself). Previous reports had them armed with everything from an M4 to a BB gun (all of which are de facto banned in their hometown of Cambridge, as the police do not issue the required permits. It’s Massachusetts; you need a firearms permit or license even for model rockets! And just can’t get it in many towns. No wonder astronautics left WPI and MIT behind).
And, it turns out, there WAS an LAPD-like firing-up of the wrong car. In this case a marked State Police cruiser with a statie and a Feeb inside. They weren’t hit by the fusillade.