Reginald Gildersleeve (courtesy mugshots.com)

TTAG Tipster JE writes:

At 45-yeards-old, Mr. Gildersleeve was previously sentenced to a total of 35 years in prison for no less than 10 felonies. [Click here for his rap sheet.] He was recently out on bond for a current case, in the city with the history of some of the strictest gun laws and criminal laws in the nation. He was out of jail terrorizing the neighborhood. Only not anymore. He’s the guy shot by a licensed concealed carry license holder in Chicago.

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66 COMMENTS

    • The truth of the matter is that more people in the U.S. defend themselves with a gun each year than are victimized by people with guns. This situation in Chicago is just another example. Don’t take my word for it, ask the CDC.

      The truth of the matter is that gun control is counterproductive. Look at Chicago and Detroit, which have the toughest gun laws around. Don’t take my word for it, ask Harvard.

      The truth of the matter is that there is more support for guns rights than gun control. Don’t take my word for it, ask Pew Research Center.

      The truth of the matter is that the crime rate, including “gun crimes” and gun homicides is at a 30 year low despite the sunset of the assault weapon ban”, liberalized concealed carry, steady gun ownership, stand your ground laws, and ignoring the DEMANDS of the “gun control lobby”.

      Regardless – Violence and gun grabs are coming.. Obama is the biggest threat to the American way of life…Obama hates Americans, the Constitution, and free market capitalism. He destroyed our economy with measures like the ACA and immigration amnesty. The “Affordable” Care Act has been nothing short of a disaster. My health insurance bill is up to $450/month. (Compare this to my $25/month auto insurance from InsurancePanda or my $10/month renters insurance… both private enterprise!) Keep your hands off us!

      Everyday our leadership has an opportunity to look at the root causes of crime and violence such as poverty and lack of opportunity and education, the War on Drugs, our revolving door justice system including plea deals, as well as mental health and the role of SSRI drugs and enact policies to address these issues.

      It’s time to move on from “gun control”.

      • You should probably run you “facts” through some checking before you stand behind them.

        http://www.snopes.com/harvard-flaw-review/

        WHAT’S TRUE: Gun rights advocates Gary Mauser and Don Kates jointly authored a 2007 paper in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy arguing that higher rates of gun ownership correlated with lower crime rates.

        WHAT’S FALSE: The paper in question was not peer-reviewed, it didn’t constitute a study, and it misrepresented separate research to draw shaky, unsupported conclusions.

        • WHAT’S FALSE: The paper in question was not peer-reviewed, it didn’t constitute a study, and it misrepresented separate research to draw shaky, unsupported conclusions.

          Don’t buy into the liberal snopes site and the false accusations. Kleck and Gertz have refuted every one of the claims against their research. They did this first in 1997, then again even more extensively in 1998 and 2001. Here is the 1998 refutation.

          https://www.saf.org/wp-content/uploads/journals/JFPP11.pdf

          Their 2001 rebuttal is in their book Armed, chapter six. None of their detractors actually refute any of Kleck’s and Gertz’s claims, nor do they cite errors in their logic, nor provide superior evidence that contradicts any of their rebuttals.

          Actually DGUs are often underreported.

          But hey, if you don’t like Kleck and Gertz you can read the U.S. Department of Justice National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms. Their report showed the numbers were actually higher than Kleck and Gertz cited. But even if all the numbers were too high, those numbers are still orders of magnitude higher than homicides committed with firearms. And Kleck was over 20 years ago. The DoJ report was almost 20 years ago. There are many more guns now and WAY many more people carrying guns now than in the mid-90’s.

          In the mid-90’s only, what, 1 or 1.5 million people had carry licenses. Now there are over 11 million, ten times as many. In seven states you don’t even need a license to CC. In 30 you don’t need one to OC. With ten times as many people licensed to carry, and with tens of millions of more firearms today than in the mid-90’s (actually about 150 million more), do you think the self-defense encounters are going down or up?

          Don’t trust snopes on anything liberal/conservative-related. haha…

        • Sorry, you wrote Mauser and Kates and I read Kleck and Gertz. Duh. Well, same thing anyway. 😀

          Read Kleck and Gertz. Read the U.S. Department of Justice National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms. See the stats on the number of CCW licenses issued in the last twenty years. See the stats on the rise of gun ownership in the last twenty years.

    • I honestly think this may be one of those weird cases, like we see in some movies, where a guy’s been in prison for so long, he’s institutionalized, and doesn’t know of want to adapt to life outside. He had no intent to hurt to store owner, and he knows enough to know that he’s gonna either go back to jail, and/or get shot, and probably killed. It really looks, as odd as it may sound, that that is exactly what he wanted, to go back to jail or die. The oddball twist is his family complaining and wanting to sue the store owner. Oh, and I forgot to mention that other articles say that the gun he had later turned out to be a paintball gun. Without that tidbit, what I just said would look totally insane. You can look it up if you type in “Armed Robber’s Family Complains He was Shot Too Many Times “

    • that sack of sh-t deserved what he got–with a rap sheet like that he should have been put away a long time ago. Black lives matter????then why did he act like it didn’t?

    • I think the three strikes laws all went away in 80s or maybe 90s.

      I’m in favor of one strike – you commit a violent rape, robbery, or murder and you never again get to be free in society. There are certain crimes from which there is no rehabilitation, period.

      • Long incarceration is very expensive, and does little good in most cases. It rarely “reforms” people. I suggest public flogging for some crimes, restitution for others, exile/banishment for serious crimes, and execution for certain very serious crimes. Look at history and the Bible. Our current system is a very recent innovation, and isn’t working very well.

        I am sorry that this man chose a life of crime. It finally caught up with him, and we must sadly say “good riddance”.

        • There is actually plenty of evidence that shows crime and violence is on the decline since religious morality and punishment have been in decline.

        • The ‘good’ it does is it keeps people who are likely to commit 10 felonies away from civilized society for longer.

          Someone with multiple violent felonies, who is already known to the system and gets out and goes right back to it, should then be put away until he’s too old and feeble to return to the lifestyle.

          But why would Chicago’s leaders want that? The less control they *appear* to have, the more they can take from the sheep.

      • NDS,

        I support your concept in general. Please note that our “justice system” has prosecuted plenty of truly innocent people for crimes that they did not commit. I would reserve the “one strike and you are out” method for cases where the evidence is incontrovertible, as in there is video of the crime or dozens of witnesses that are all in agreement.

        Even in the case of rape where there is incontrovertible DNA evidence, how do we really know whether the encounter was consensual or rape if there are not multiple unrelated witnesses or actual video evidence? The same could apply to a murder prosecution. DNA could definitely show that a suspect was a participant. But what if their participation was righteous self-defense?

        In slam dunk cases: sure, lock them up and throw away the key. In other cases, a prison sentence is appropriate in case the “felon” truly was innocent.

        • There is no standard that reflects your suggestion as very few events happen without disagreement. We have some of the most strict due process laws in the world and the weakness in the system is that we live in an environment where too many people believe that the victim becomes the bad guy and the bad guy is the victim. Given a choice, I can think of no country where I would rather be a criminal defendant than in the U.S. We can debate the usefulness of jail time, etc. But this guy is not a good example of anything but trying to answer how we protect ourselves from a career violent felon who makes a living by robbery and burglary ( a singularly offensive crime)

      • I am in favor of Six Strikes (I’m not a baseball fan). If you attempt to engage in violent crime or violent behavior intent on committing a robbery, burglary or causing grievous bodily harm you should immediately be faced with six citizens with drawn weapons intent on preventing your error in judgment.

        Simple math – in those circumstances the only people who would commit such crimes are obviously suicidal. Give them what they want and (apparently) need.

    • Think about how many times he got away with felonies. Unless he’s the worst criminal ever, there were probably at least a few…

    • The three strikes and you’re out rule for felony violations is falling out of favor because it was putting too much of the Democratic voting base in prison – like this guy.

    • I guess it’s more like tee ball up there, where they’re not really keeping score and everyone gets a trophy.

  4. Good on the CCW holder. The right people got to go home which is what counts. The fact that the justice system obviously didn’t do what it needed to in order to keep him from being in that situation in the first place not as good. Hopefully it will give the neighborhood he was in some peace and quiet for a while.

    • Good on the CCW holder – Bad on the Chicago Tribune. If you go to the link you will see the headline (Police: Customer with concealed carry license kills robber; 6 more people shot) implies that six other people were shot in the altercation! Only in the body of the article do you learn that there were six people shot in other incidents in Chicago on the same night, nothing to do with the legal CCW holder!

  5. Thanks RF! I get tired of the clueless making BS comments about Chicago-and Illinois. THIS was positively reported on the local TV stations I saw. Then again I saw a southside roadrace called “get rid of weight & guns”. One of the runners was the tiny dancer hisself-Rahm E. So there’s lots left to do. Also just saw Leslie Stahl do a pro “smart gun” report on 60Minutes. I think she may have a broken shoulder after shooting a “smart” shotgun. And the lame Maryland dealer also featured…

  7. 45 years old and only ten felonies? What a slacker!

    And that you to the armed defender for the taxpayer relief shot. We all appreciate it.

  9. And you know, the licensed carrier did the right thing, and nobody else was injured…. I do feel sad for this guy and his family though. I know I may take some heat for that, but in the end if we would make getting a living wage job easier and more glamorous than being a banger, or living off your woman’s welfare and food stamps, there would be more happy people and less violence. I know everybody makes their own choices, but you gotta believe that our current system of education and handouts traps poor people into life choices that are dead ends, literally. Sure there’s bad people out there, and this guy was obviously one of them, but we perpetuate that situation through our failed social engineering. Vote for the hand that gives you stuff, even if they enslave you, right? And there’s gotta be a better answer to reducing violent crime than either paying more than I clear every year to house then in cells or shooting them down on the streets, doesn’t there? I have no idea what it would be yet, but obviously the current system is unsustainable, if nothing else from an economic point of view.

    • I don’t know if “Don” is trolling, but here’s a story that suggests part of the answer. (If you don’t care to read it all, the answer it create, or at least allow off-ramps for people stuck on a road to nowhere.)

      I got a great example of the problem at a computer data security society mtg. The theme was threats of breach and similar. An exploit – a way in – is just a tool. The hard problem is doing something with it. These guys had real stories of how Bad Guys had – er – exploited known exploits that all sounded like The Italian Job, Ocean’s 11, and The Great Escape.

      I the Q & A I impertinently asked: “How can I hire these guys? … not to do crime, but look at what they did: organized, disciplined, creative, flexible, identified risks and designed around them, identified opportunities and figured out how to exploit them, adjusted in real time, huge situational awareness … I can’t get that in my hiring pool at all. How can I hire these guys?”

      A: “You can’t. They’re making too much already.”

      Crime really is their best, or at least, least bad option. Or at least they think so. Cranking up penalties only goes so far. Once you’re effectively done if you’re caught, what’s the difference? “Kill him a lot!” is funny because the overkill is a sop to the guy who’s been offended. The dead guy is just as dead whether killed a little or a lot.

      In the US there are a bunch of lonely, desolate stretches of limited-access life-highway with no off-ramps. Go to a crap school and it’s very, very hard to get back on the over-achiever trajectory. Indeed, any glitch on the path from “advanced” cohort in the public schools, through “college-prep”, college, then career or grad school is near-impossible to recover from. You may have a nice life. You can’t get back on the trajectory you were on, or anything near to it, if, for example, your mother dies jr year of high school, leaving you in no state to do any of that crap for a decidingly critical couple years. (Not me, BTW. A friend of mine.)

      The ramps off the roads to perdition, or back onto roads going somewhere cool are few, narrow, and hard to find. Yes, maybe you can get a GED. Sometimes people get a GED later, in a way that puts them back on a college / selection path, and end up on a different trajectory. Darn few. We make it hard. Or a switch into a trade is permanent. Or declining to move into a trade at the right time in life is likewise near permanent.

      Too many of us are on the trajectory we are on because it is a kind of “local optimum.” Way too costly to try to move across the valley of relative suck, to take a shot at something better.

      I’m no fan of thugs. For some folks the action is the score. Etc. So, it ain’t every body or every thing, but more choices, should someone want to choose that way, will help.

      That said, I think at 10 felonies followed by a neighborhood rampage, that die is cast.

      • “Local optimum”: That’s a great way to put it. And it kind of gets to what Don was saying: In a lot of places, the local optimum is pretty darn low for anybody dumb enough to obey the law.

        So how do we, as a society, go about changing those places where local optimum is so dismal? It’s worth thinking about.

        • It may sound overly simplistic, but one key piece to the puzzle would be to replace The State as the parent and encourage responsible families again…as a cultural influence, not a “law.”

          A related, but different, piece, would be to get the Race Baiting Industry out of those neighborhoods. Those pieces of trash destroy more lives for their own “profit” than any actual white supremacist racism does in the present era.

    • I knew Reggie quite well growing up. We both moved into the segregated Marquette Park area and were turned away from Gage Park High School. I was assigned to Harper and he went to Dunbar. When you are relegated to the poorest neighborhoods and the poorest education with the poorest job options, it’s little surprise you make poor choices. One of the last conversations I had with him was an argument as I disapproved of his actions. I want to think we made up by the last time we spoke. By great luck alone, I was able to take an entirely different path. It could easily have been me right besides Mongo. I was very, very fortunate. I joined the Navy and went to college and now I am a happy suburban pharmacist. In addition, I have applied for my CHL. And if placed in the same situation, I probably would shoot a robber as well. But you can’t deny generation after generation opportunity and expect that they’ll magically have a generation of kids that will escape that environment. That’s just lying to yourself. When you owe a bill this big, it never just goes away.

  11. Like how site the dumps the report in with a bunch of illegal gun uses. Who says the media isn’t biased

    • Yep; coming here to comment on that myself.

      It sure looks like they are trying to have readers conflate “licensed concealed carrier” with “six other people shot.”

      • The title made me think the ccw holder had new york police accuracy until I read it. The. I realized they were trying to link the ccw holder to 6 other criminal shootings in people’s minds.

        • What they then reported was a lot more than 6 others, too, makes me wonder what they were thinking.

  13. See, I don’t figure it’s a good idea to be glad about this. Better that this fellow bit the dust, as opposed to any law-abiding soul, but I still feel some regret that anyone had to die. As long as we continue to treat DGUs like this as “taxpayer money saved,” we’re dehumanizing people, revolving door or no.

    • Yeah and this scum had 10 felonies-and he probably went to hell. Boo hoo…turnin’ his life around I suppose-with the barrel of a gun.

    • If Mr. Gildersleeve had been in prison with a life sentence (where he obviously belonged), then he would still be alive today.

      Maybe his family should sue the state for letting him out and allowing this tragedy to happen.

    • He initiated the incident, and it ended in the best possible way. No court costs, no incarceration costs, no recidivism. I’d be happier if it had not happened, but that was his decision, not mine, and I accept no responsibility for his actions, or their result.

      • No edit. If that earns me liberal buzz words like “dehumanizing” (guy’s dead, can’t get much more dehumanized!), then so be it.

  15. It’s them made up names. “Reginald Gildersleeve” sounds like something out of a bad DC comic. If they had named him Tyreese or Taquando he might have stood a chance in life.

  16. One less thug on the streets. Also the tax payers no longer have to pay for his life through trials and jail. Good shoot.

  17. Chicago’s once “strictest gun laws” in the nation have been largely invalidated by the courts and by state preemption. Chicago (and the rest of Illinois) has shall issue concealed carry (as the story illustrates) and no magazine limits. Compare that to New York, New Jersey or California. Still not a Texas, but much better than it was. Old stereotypes are hard to shake.

    • Dave-thanks for stating that. I can’t get certain(stupid) internet gun sellers to sell to me in Cook Co.-even though I can legally get them. Sadly I live a scant mile from Indiana and observe a great gun rights state…

      • 90% of online gun dealers know the law and have no issues with cook county sales. Biggest issue is finding local FFLs that don’t charge too much and is close by. People who use FFLs for transfers are not low information consumers, and thanks to that stupid $25 Cook County Tax, I don’t know any left in Cook. But then you have C.T.D. who told me a 5 round pump shotgun was banded in Cook County that just make me think some gun dealers just don’t want to be bothered figuring out what the law is.

        • There are lots of FFLs in Crook County. You can get some that will do it for $25 plus a $5 background check. There is no sales tax of $25 gun tax either.

  20. Mainstream media is way ahead of you guys: there are already articles out there singing the sad song of this thug’s poor family: “He never touched a gun!” “Something’s not right about this.” “He was a father and a brother, and didn’t deserve to get shot.” I wish I were joking, but you all know how it goes.

    Here’s an example:
    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-concealed-carry-20151101-story.html#

    Edit: It’s a subscription website, but if your browser has “reader view” (like on Apple devices) you can click “reader view” before the page finishes loading and read this load of crap at your leisure.

    • I didn’t have any trouble with a paywall.

      Here’s a priceless quote from the deceases felon’s stepson:
      “Some people don’t actually know how to use guns,” he said. “They go to firing ranges, but it’s not the same as a bullet going into someone’s body, it’s not the same as a bullet going into flesh. They should be able to wound first, kill next. He didn’t deserve to get shot multiple times.”

  21. If Mr. Gildersleeve had been in prison with a life sentence (where he obviously belonged), then he would still be alive today.

    Or if he had just been made to serve the 37 years he had been sentenced.

  22. It never ceases to amaze me how godless white people make excuses for the criminal immorality of black people.

    Then they will attack hard working honest black people saying they are wasting their time trying to overcome racist America.

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