Why does Bustos Media provide a public platform for a gun-crazy life-belittling radio host?
Lives lost to suicide are not as important as the public’s right to purchase firearms promptly, said Charles Heller. “You don’t say, ‘Well, a few more people might kill themselves so we’re going to infringe everybody else’s rights,’” said Heller, an AM radio talk show host who often talks about the right to bear arms.
In January of 2011, a mentally disturbed young man named Jared Loughner went into a Walmart by the Foothills Mall north of Tucson, AZ, and tried to buy ammunition.
4:12 a.m.: Loughner posted bulletin on Myspace titled post “Goodbye friends” and posted a photo from Walgreens on website.
6:12 a.m.: Loughner makes purchase at a Wal-Mart at Foothills mall, 7635 N. La Cholla Blvd., Tucson.
6:21 a.m.: Loughner makes purchase at a Circle K Store at 3712 W. Cortaro Farms Rd., Tucson.
7:04 a.m. Lougher returns to the Wal-Mart and tries to buy ammunition.
Yes, believe it or not, it turns out that it is possible to deny a customer, especially once that appears visibly trouble, the purchase of ammunition.
Jared had a history of mental illness:
Months earlier, officials at his community college had refused to allow him to return to campus until he passed a mental evaluation. Hours before he went on a shooting rampage, a Wal-Mart clerk had declined to sell him ammunition.
On local Tucson AM-radio there is a host on KVOI-1030AM named Charles Heller (more about him later), and he LOVES guns!
There is no doubt that had Jared Loughner called into Charles’ radio show on KVOI, Mr. Heller would have raised all hell and probably sued Walmart for denying bullets to Jared Loughner. Maybe a national media campaign against Walmart having the audacity to deny a white man access to guns would have pursued.
Maybe, at this point, while Heller might have raised hell for Walmart denying Loughner bullets, the Tucson Tragedy would have been avoided.
Jared had no ammunition thanks to this clerk Walmart near the Foothills Mall at Ina and La Cholla, right down the street from the Safeway at Ina and Oracle.
Since this is America, Jared just had to head down the street to another Walmart on Cortaro Rd and I-10. Just TWENTY minutes later, at 7:24 am, Jared is in Marana.
7:24 a.m.: Lougher buys ammunition and a backpack-style diaper bag at another Wal-Mart, this time a Super Wal-Mart at 8280 N. Cortaro Road, Marana, Ariz.
9:41 a.m.: Cab driver picks up Loughner from Circle K at 3712 W. Cortaro Farms Road, Tucson, and drives him to Safeway, 7100 N. Oracle Road, Tucson.
9:54 a.m.: Cab driver and Loughner go into the Safeway to get change for the fare.
10:10 a.m.: Loughner opens fire. Six people were killed and 13 were injured.
One of those injured was Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who was shot with a Glock in the head. She survived, but sadly will never be the same today. Also happening today: Gabby’s husband and astronaut was just sworn in as Arizona’s newest US Senator. Hopefully, Senator Mark Kelly takes action on any kind of gun control, although he still loves using his own Glock with wife Giffords watching on.
The lesson here is that it is possible for white men (the history of gun-aholics and slavery and racism is well documented: Even the NRA and Saint Ronald Reagan supported gun control when it came to black people) such as gun-lover Glock-owning Senator Mark Kelly to want gun control without taking everyone’s guns away.
Maybe we can start with keeping guns away from those with mental problems?
NO!
The same men who have no problem restricting the “freedom and liberty” of women’s vaginas, seeing no contradiction in government overreach to save an unborn fetus, will fight tooth and nail so that even the abstract IDEA or DISCUSSION of some kind of gun restriction is forbidden as Communism or Socialism.
Ironically these same pro-lifers seem to care more about gun rights and unborn fetuses than the lives of the already born.
A decade later we sadly have yet another tragedy involving same-day gun/ammo purchases by those with mental issues.
At a rest stop on a highway north of Tucson, Alex Sanov made his loved ones members of a club no one wants to join.
Nine days after he was released from a psychiatric hospital — a stay that had seemed to do him a world of good — the 21-year-old University of Arizona student walked into a midtown gun store and walked out with the firearm he would use to kill himself.
Stopping at his nearby apartment on Oct. 3, he left the receipt for his $260 purchase on the kitchen table, then took his final drive.
An hour later, his short life was over.
Parents and friends believe Sanov, a 2017 graduate of Catalina Foothills High School, might have been saved were it not for an Arizona gun law that permits the same-day purchase of firearms.
Was anyone else reading the Arizona Daily Star this week and appalled by the lack of concern for American lives lost through suicide by same-day gun purchase?
Remember Bustos Media’s KVOI radio show host Charles Heller from above?
Here was Heller’s response to the same-day gun purchase used in the suicide of a human being mentioned in the article above.
Lives lost to suicide are not as important as the public’s right to purchase firearms promptly, said Charles Heller, co-founder and spokesman for the Arizona Citizens Defense League, for years the most influential gun rights voice at the state Capitol.
“You don’t say, ‘Well, a few more people might kill themselves so we’re going to infringe everybody else’s rights,’” said Heller, an AM radio talk show host who often talks about the right to bear arms.
WOW! That’s a direct quote, so we’ll let his words speak for himself. We will return to the crazy insecure radio show host once again. There are possible solutions, for example, having a waiting period to get a gun.
Leave it to Heller to fight ANY attempt to save even one born American life if it means his insecure gun-requiring manhood is threatened.
Eighteen states bar same-day sales of some or all types of firearms, either by having a specified waiting period or by having permit approval process that achieves the same thing, according to Giffords, the gun safety organization led by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head during a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011. Waiting periods generally range from three to seven days, although Hawaii has a 14-day waiting period.
It’s a measure that can prevent some gun suicides, according to the limited amount of research that exists to date.
In Arizona — rated the gun-friendliest state in America the last eight years in a row by Guns & Ammo magazine — it’s a change the Legislature has never considered.
The state’s reputation as a gun lovers’ paradise is due in large part to a group co-founded in Tucson and devoted to keeping new gun safety laws off the books.
One of its founders predicts a waiting period for gun purchase will never be adopted in Arizona.
Heller’s group, founded in 2005, claims 63 legislative victories in the last 15 years that expanded the use and availability of firearms or prevented proposed new restrictions from becoming law.
In recent years, for example, the group’s website says it successfully fought a proposed purchase limit of one gun a month, a proposed civil fine for unsafe firearms storage and a proposed ban on bump stocks that can turn regular guns into the equivalent of machine guns — the same device a man used to shoot hundreds of people at a Las Vegas country music festival in 2017.
Heller said his gun group’s top achievement was a change that made Arizona one of 15 states where anyone old enough to legally buy a firearm can carry it around in public, loaded and concealed, without a permit.
Charles Heller, the host of “Liberty Watch” on KVOI, has his own history of strange behavior.
Perhaps that is why he wants no restrictions on gun ownership by the mentally ill, but back in 2004 he had his same show on 1330 The Jolt in Tucson and made news in the Tucson Weekly.
On Aug. 15, local radio talk show host Charles Heller was evicted from KJLL, “The Jolt,” while he was on the air. Listeners to his Swap Shop show could hear someone banging on the studio door for several minutes before station personnel cut power to the control board, switched to canned programming and had law-enforcement officers escort Heller from the building, permanently.
“Charles is very outspoken about being armed,” says station manager Pat Johnston. “That’s why I had the police come when he was leaving the studio; I didn’t know what might happen.”
Says Heller, who follows Swap Shop with two libertarian shows, Liberty Watch and America Armed & Free, “I’m a gun-aholic; if I can’t carry, I don’t go.”
Where did the climate-change-denying armed “gun-aholic” go after leaving The Jolt with police escort?
Over the past month, the dispute over content control escalated, and the two men couldn’t come to terms on a new contract. Heller cut a deal to move his shows to KVOI… Johnston maintains that Heller gave KVOI’s call letters on air; Heller denies this. In any event, Johnston instructed the board operator to pass Heller a note telling him not to do that. “I didn’t want to be bothered,” Heller says, “so I locked everybody out of the studio.”
That’s when the banging and yelling and police presence began.
Now, Heller’s programming package has moved to KVOI. As before, Swap Shop, his on-air flea market, airs 10 a.m. to noon Sundays; Liberty Watch follows, noon to 1 p.m.; and Heller’s time concludes 1 to 2 p.m. with his gun show, America Armed & Free.
Now it is Bustos Media that gives Charles Heller a platform, all in exchange for the money he pays to have that radio time. I just hope the armed and always angry Heller, especially after Trump’s loss, doesn’t lose it again at the radio station. Be safe KVOI employees!
