A debate about gun control was held by students at the University of Chicago. The Republicans were against it and the Democrats were in favor of it (big shock there) and apparently our side won. From The Maroon:
Rico Gardaphe, a second-year in the College and a member of the UC Dems, served as debate moderator. Gardaphe refused to take a side but, admitted, “Because [the Republicans] base was much bigger, they had much better floor speeches.”The general consensus among the audience in Bartlett Lounge after the debate was that the Republicans had won. “I think the Republicans busted a cap in [the Democrats’] ass,” said Sam Dolgin-Gardener, a first-year in the College and a Democrat. “The Republicans did a great job of framing the debate.” Dolgin-Gardener lauded the Republicans for leading the debate and criticized the Democrats for addressing their opponents’ points rather than bringing up substantial, separate proof of their own case.
...Fletcher called the Second Amendment “archaic” in light of non-lethal defense technology now available, such as tasers and mace. In the Democrats’ final statement, Mellen explained how a well-ordered militia is not necessary for society’s upkeep: “This is not up to vigilantes; this is the police’s job.”
Why not, right? Seems to be the gun-control de jour of the moment. From the Chicago Sun-Times:
Anti-gun lawmakers are seeking a ban on .50-caliber "sniper rifles," saying they're favored by terrorists and can shoot down aircraft from a range of more than 2,000 yards -- though they don't appear to be tied to any crimes here in the last decade, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis shows.A spokesman for the National Rifle Association, which is pushing dozens of its own bills in the General Assembly, vowed to fight the sniper-rifle legislation backed by Representatives Elaine Nekritz (D-Northbrook) and Beth Coulson (R-Glenview).
"There isn't a single person in the United States that I know of who has been killed by one of these firearms," said Todd Vandermyde, an NRA lobbyist in Springfield.
Read that first paragraph again, the journalists don't say, "gun control advocates" or "concerned legislators" or such. They start right out with "anti-gun lawmakers" which is the type of phrasing a blogger such as, uh, I would use. It typecasts the proponents of the bill right off the bat.
They quickly follow by stating that according to their own research, the guns aren't implicated in any crimes. That's all within the first few sentences. Wow! Then they quickly follow with quotes from the NRA. That's before they quote the anti-gun lawmakers, er, I mean concerned legislators.
Folks, this is in the Chicago Sun-Times, no friend to gun owners in general. I'll have to give this another mention on my Weekly Check this coming Tuesday.
Please don't hate me, I promise this is the last word on Michael Jackson. From ABC News:
A woman who had suffered a massive heart attack died after hospital personnel moved her out of a trauma room to accommodate a flu-stricken Michael Jackson, the patient's family said.Jury selection in Jackson's child molestation child had to be temporarily postponed Feb. 15 when the pop star was taken to Marian Medical Center in Santa Maria, Calif., complaining of flu-like symptoms. Manuela Gomez Ruiz, a 74-year-old grandmother, was moved from the primary trauma room and taken off the machine ventilator, with her breathing instead assisted manually by hand pump, until she was relocated to a smaller room nearby, her family told ABC News.
The larger room was kept for Jackson, the family says. Hospital records show Jackson, 46, told emergency room staff he had severe abdominal pain. His body temperature, 96.9 degrees, was below normal and he had tears in his eyes. The initial emergency room report said he could go home anytime.
I'm not going to try to find all my links about this cool astrophysicist but tonight on Coast To Coast with George Noory (a much, much better interviewer and nicer guy than Art Bell) my favorite science guy is on for the first hour, Dr. Michio Kaku. This show starts at 1:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. Be there if you are like me and live for the night... Kaku is my favorite guest on this show. You'll enjoy him.
Interesting article from the Kansas City Star:
The national debate over gun rights, for decades among the most searing and divisive of political issues, appears to be all but over in Congress.That means that the assault weapons ban, a signature achievement of gun control advocates that expired last year, probably will not resurface anytime soon.
Conversely, congressional leaders and the Bush administration haven't put a priority on efforts to expand gun rights.
“There's a perception that Washington is not the place to take the debate at this moment,” said Saul Cornell, a historian who is director of the Second Amendment Research Center at Ohio State University. He said that politicians on both sides see little advantage in pressing the issue.
Democrats, desperate to regain their appeal to middle America, are moving away from the party's long identification with gun control, much to the relief of many beleaguered Democrats in states like Missouri.
“It's a loser,” Rep. Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat, said of gun control.
“There is a potential for backlash,” George Connor, a political scientist at Southwest Missouri State University, said of the Republican two-step. “They can't go too far.”Connor pointed out that Republicans basically have already “gotten everything they wanted. They wanted to protect the rights of gun owners and average citizens, which they've done. … I don't think they're going to push any farther than they already have.”
While Bush and many Republicans voice support for a bill that would give gun makers immunity from civil lawsuits, the bill is not a priority of Republican congressional leaders.
Conversely, we see other states passing "shall issue" concealed carry laws, laws protecting ranges, and in some states, allowing a homeowner greater leeway in defending themselves from burglars and other invaders.
One problem for those of us on the pro-gun side of the aisle is that the anti-gun states tend to be populous, with the result that they have a lot of congressional districts in The House. A future election where the Republicans lose power and the Democrats take over could easily tip the scales back towards much more gun control measures flooding Congress.
This is one reason why I wish Republicans would moderate themselves on other issues that polls have shown the public really isn't all that interested in, such as a constitutional amendment against gay marriage or even Social Security reform. Pushing those hot-button issues too much could alienate a lot of voters in the future and we could wind up with a Democrat back in the White House.
I suppose it shows that I'm nearly a one-issue voter since I don't want moderation on gun rights, just on any other legislation that could endanger gun rights by reinvigorating the liberal base of the Democratic Party. Maybe I'm not expressing myself clearly. I fear that any position that pro-gun Republicans take on other issues that could cause them to lose power is a threat to the successes we've had WITH gun rights.
Does that make me a bad person?
I mentioned a couple days ago that there was a bill in the Virginia assembly that would protect rifle ranges from local noise ordinances. That bill would also protect future planned ranges. Now, a bill has been introduced into the Vermont legislature that would protect existing ranges from lawsuits, criminal prosecution, and harassment. From the Bennington Banner:
Bennington-- Two local legislators are introducing a bill today in Montpelier that would protect the state's gun clubs, although its effect on Shaftsbury's lawsuit-entangled Hale Mountain Fish and Game Club is unknown.The bill would give more teeth to statutes already on the books that protect gun clubs from criminal prosecution resulting from noise pollution if they are already in compliance with municipal and state noise ordinances, said Rep. Joseph L. Krawczyk, Jr., R-Bennington, a co-sponsor of the bill.
Hopefully, it would prevent clubs from having to go to court and pay thousands of dollars in legal fees in cases they will undoubtedly win, he said.
Krawczyck and the bill's other sponsor, Rep. Mary A. Morrissey, R-Bennington, had gathered 60 signatures by Monday. They hope to have 80 by today when they introduce it on the House floor. Both are concerned that if shooting clubs disappear, law enforcement agencies and the National Guard who practice and are certified there will be at a loss.
So will hunters needing to take safety courses, said Morrissey.
"If you don't keep them open, you'll have people doing target practice wherever they want. It creates a serious hazard," she said.
The bill also says that people who bought property near an already-existing gun club have no right to bring nuisance action against the club for noise pollution. In addition, municipal regulations on the use of firearms would have to be consistent with state law.
You're taking a bath, there's a knock at the front door, you answer to find an angry guy threatening your family. Another guy joins him pointing a gun at you. You rush him to defend yourself and wind-up in jail for "assault". That's the British way? From icseftonandwestlancs:
POLICE arrested a father who fought off two strangers and was threatened with a gun.Stephen Christer had taken a bath and was watching football on TV when there was a knock on the door of his home in Blackgate Lane, Tarleton.
He answered it to find a young man asking to speak to his son.
Mr Christer said: "There was a knock at the door and there was an aggravated person looking for my son. He was telling me what he was going to do with myself, my household and my son.
"One thing led to another and we ended up fighting - bearing in mind I was in pyjamas and bare feet."
As the two of them struggled a middle-aged man got out of the car parked outside Mr Christer's house.
"My wife screamed," said Mr Christer, a civil engineer.
"The guy in the car had got out a hand gun. He pointed it at me and he threatened my wife and my 14-year-old daughter.
"I rushed the guy. You might say I was defending myself. The three of us ended up on the floor."
[...]
They found Mr Christer standing on the pistol, which turned out to be an imitation weapon. All three men were arrested."I'm facing an assault charge now," said Mr Christer, after spending two-and-a-half hours in custody and being released on police bail.
"It's just so annoying that I was not only assaulted, but they came to the door, wouldn't leave, pointed a gun at me and then I'm arrested because they were complaining I had hit them.
How tiresome. Another bill has been introduced to the California Assembly to require something that sure smacks of ballistic fingerprinting, this time onto the spent shell casings. From the Sac Bee:
Hoping to find shooting suspects more quickly, California may become the first state to require semiautomatic pistols to stamp their make, model and serial number onto every cartridge they fire.Proposed legislation would require semiautomatic models produced after January 2007 to carry the innovative microstamping technology.
When peace officers find empty cartridges - shell casings - at crime scenes, the identifying stamp could help determine what gun fired them and, through an existing database, who purchased the weapon.
"We expect that it will be a very valuable tool and will help solve hundreds of additional crimes, if it's implemented," said Assemblyman Paul Koretz, a West Hollywood Democrat who proposed the bill.
But critics claim AB 352 would raise the price of handguns without having much practical effect, because criminals could simply buy old guns, replace firing pins, or alter firing pins to erase identifying markers.
Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California, denounced Koretz's bill as the latest in a series of legislative bids to discourage gun ownership by raising costs, expanding registration requirements or making production more difficult.
We've seen time and again that ballistic fingerprinting doesn't work. It didn't work in Maryland -- in fact, they're thinking of scrapping their regulation. It won't help with old guns, guns that are stolen, guns where the pin has been filed down, revolvers, or just mutant criminals who clean-up after themselves by collecting their shell casings.
This is just another round-about registration enhancement scheme that will add cost to firearms and burden the law-abiding while being ignored or side-stepped by criminals. I could see a whole blackmarket in "unregistered firing pins" springing up.
The article says that Gov. Schwarzenegger hasn't weighed in on the measure but given his track record, I'm sure he would support it.
A bill introduced in Virginia would set statewide standards for the noise level of rifle ranges. It was introduced at the behest of the Virginia Shooting Sports Association. From the Washington Post:
House Bill 2282, sponsored by Del. William R. Janis (R-Goochland), would establish a statewide noise standard for outdoor shooting ranges. The measure would prevent local governments from setting their own noise standards.Instead, the state would set an average of 64 decibels as the maximum allowable sound a gun range could register at the border of its property. The noise level generally equates to a television at medium volume or an animated conversation, researchers say. It would be one of the tightest levels in the nation, supporters say.
The legislation also would prevent nuisance lawsuits related to gun-range noise if the proposed state standard is passed.
The bill will be reviewed today by the Senate Committee on Local Government. It pits sportsmen's clubs, which called for the legislation, against representatives of local governments who say it would infringe on their ability to set noise regulations based on community standards. The measure passed the House of Delegates 85-13 this month.
But the bill would also protect future-planned ranges or expansions. At first glance, I would still support the measure but then my logical side takes over and objects to it as an intrusion into local zoning regulations. A town does or should have the right to set their own standards as to what sort of development they want to see within their borders. Think of this as a local version of what Congress could (and unfortunately often does) impose on the states in the way of rules and regulations.
If state government can control local range developement then the federal government can control gun regulations at the state level. I'm against both but I'm willing to listen to your arguments...
As my Winter Fundraiser continues, I just wanted to publicly thank the three kind folks who hit my Tip Jar in the past couple days. It really helps out and don't worry, I'm not planning to retire after it's over.
If you have a few spare dollars and you enjoy what I do here, please consider a donation to the pro-2A cause by visiting Yosemite Sam on the right. Thanks!
Via Drudge comes this Columbia Spectator story of a New York Times editor's recent speech:
On the state of print journalism in America today, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, said, “This is not a time when editors swear off alcohol.”Keller was the keynote speaker at Friday night’s Blue Pencil Dinner, an annual Spectator fund-raiser held in Low Rotunda. The event served both as a chance for Spectator staffers to learn about journalism from insiders and for alumni to reconnect with the paper.
[...]
Keller also sees “blogging,” or online writing that blurs news and commentary, as a mixed blessing. While he celebrated the blogger’s ability to uncover breaking news, he noted that a blog’s inherent bias might be detrimental to the reader. “A blog is still a view of the world through a pinhole,” he said, noting that it can sometimes fall as low as being a “one man circle jerk.”
And certainly the New York Times leads the way. Excuse me a moment: Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah...
Gosh Mr. Keller, the New York Times certainly didn't show any bias in the way they've covered the recent election, George Bush, or the war in Iraq, have they?
And there certainly isn't any bias in their coverage of gun ownership and the Second Amendment, is there? Oh, there is, actually. In fact, the NYT bias is one of the reasons Alphecca has been able to carve out a niche in the blogosphere; reporting and setting the record straight on your newspaper's biased reporting on such 2A issues.
And if the public is to trust journalists, then how does the New York Times feel about having given Dan Rather a free-pass with almost no reporting on his clearly biased agenda to swing the just-past election into Kerry's favor by broadcasting about phony documents relating to President Bush's National Guard service?
What's changed, Mr. Keller, is that the playing field has evened up. No longer is the public held hostage to a few liberal national newspapers and three liberal networks.
Now we have Fox, which swings the other way, and talk radio and bloggers which fact-check the Main Stream Media every step of the way.
It must suck, huh, not being the only game in town anymore?
If you guys were really doing your jobs right, there wouldn't need to be any bloggers.
As an example of just how awful the New York Times is on Second Amendment issues, of just how biased they really are, read a post I wrote about an editorial of theirs a year-and-a-half ago titled Quick, the smelling salts!.
And that would be fine if their opinions were limited to their editorials. But they aren't. Their bias creeps into their news stories every day. And not just the articles, but where they're placed, when they appear, and IF they appear at all.
I couldn't think of a good header, sorry. But here in rural America our small, local TV stations have their priorities correct. Many of you living in Red States know this already but even here in Vermont, when a bunch (almost 200) of our proud Vermont National Guard finally return home from their tour in Iraq, it's big news. After 13 months of duty, our local station is there to capture the joy of over a thousand family members greeting their (and our) brave soldiers:
I'd like to know if the liberal area stations in NYC and LA and SF have done the same? Somehow I doubt it.
I don't need to see Katie Couric and Matt Lauer meeting up with the Gadget Guru or some endless blather about Michael Jackson. I need -- want -- to see our local Vermont heros coming home (alas, not all of them, and not all alive) to the welcoming arms of their loved ones. And I love them too. God bless them.
This is the part about middle-America, that huge red-zone of -- nothing ordinary about them -- people who still care about our country and each other. Liberals will never get it because they're so consumed with hatred for the U.S. and democracy and civility and family that all they can do is sit in their coastal ivory towers and "goof-on-us" from afar. And it is "afar". God bless America and our soldiers and their families.
Incidentally, originally the returning soldiers were going to be bussed from Fort Dix to Vermont but the commander of the Vermont National Guard told them that since they flew them out of Vermont to serve, they could fly them back to return. The Army agreed and did. Heh.
Gosh, I just realized that I've put up a pile of posts over the last four days. I think I'll go have a nice lie-down...
I'm not doing a Weekly Bias this week because starting tomorrow I'll be in meetings for several days at the company where I work. But that doesn't mean that I can't report on a bit of media bias this morning... From KGBT TV (TX):
Texas Federal officials say weapons smugglers, drug dealers and illegal immigrants are taking advantage of Texas laws.
The feds say the smugglers are using middlemen to buy the guns illegally because Texas doesn't require any state registration to purchase a firearm. That makes it relatively easy for someone to buy a gun for a person who's forbidden to own one in a deal known as a "straw purchase."The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms says exact data on such purchases aren't available. But A-T-F spokeswoman Franceska (fran-CHEHS'-kah) Perot (pur-ROH') says strict Mexican gun laws have created an active black market for American weapons.
Secondly, if Mexicans are taking advantage of straw-purchases to obtain firearms, it is only because the Mexican government has determined that while their country is overrun by drug dealers and criminals and corrupt police officials, their subjects are not entitled to the means to protect themselves. Well too fucking bad if their citizens sneak across the border to obtain some protection for themselves.
The "Feds" as this writer puts it shouldn't even be concerned if guns are flowing into Mexico. It's not their business to care about the problems of another country unless that country threatens the U.S. I don't see President Fox and his cronies giving a rat's ass that drugs are flowing from Mexico into the U.S.
It was only a few short years ago that Connecticut banned condoms. They couldn't be sold in stores so Connecticut residents had to drive to NY or MA to obtain them. How silly was that?
Massachusetts residents constantly drive across the border to New Hampshire to buy stuff because NH has no sales tax. Is that a problem for NH? Quite the opposite, it's allowed cities such as Nashua to grow into retail giant meccas. The problem is Massachusetts'. Maybe they should consider scrapping their own sales tax and cut their spending to reasonable levels.
Mexico denies their people the right to self-defense. Those people will -- rightly -- seek it where they can. But that's a problem for the Mexican government, not the U.S. government. To blame the State of Texas for "a problem" in another nation is just plain bullshit.
By the way, how stupid do the writers at KGBT4 TV think we all are that they have to put the phonetic pronunciation of a name into the news story? If I was a viewer of their station I'd be truly insulted and I'd let them know it. Talk about a condescending and derogatory attitude towards your consumers!
Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has committed suicide.
[...]
Besides the 1972 classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was "Dr. Thompson," a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.Thompson is credited alongside Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism — or, as he dubbed it, "gonzo journalism" — in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.
Thompson, whose early writings mostly appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, often portrayed himself as wildly intoxicated as he reported on such historic figures as Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
For some reason I seem to remember reading recently that he was ill (physically) but I can't find any reference to it now. I suppose that many will say that suicide is "the coward's way out" but I like to think that he lived hard and played hard and with the hand that fate dealt him, he knew when it was time to fold...
So I guess that if Andrew Sullivan can hold fundraisers, so can I. The difference is that I'm not planning to close-down shop afterwards... If you'd like to help support Alphecca, please hit the tip-box (Yosemite Sam) on the right sidebar. Thanks so much!
The Ten Ring visits a MA gunshow. And a good time was had by all.
Speaking of CNN, which I wasn't, TriggerFinger is all over the CNN .50 rifle story. Just head over there and start scrolling. Read this for background from his site. Here's a quote from TriggerFinger to give you a taste for how a CNN reporter broke multiple laws to make a gun-scare story:
So, CNN sends a reporter to conduct an out-of-state purchase from a private seller in order to obtain a .50 caliber rifle for their story. (I wonder if, maybe, they tried to obtain one from the manufacturer and Barrett refused?) To see their video clip, you'll have to look on the right of this search results page. Suffice it to say, after they get the rifle, they shoot at an airplane door and proceed to demonstrate that just about any rifle is powerful enough to put a hole in an airplane's thin aluminum skin.
No, not that kind. I've just finished a six-day stint at work. Normally I'm off on Tuesdays so I can do my Weekly Report and Cam's Show but this week the company I work for has it's quarterly meeting so I'm off tomorrow (Monday). So what, right?
The weatherman is predicting a snow storm tomorrow. Up to eight inches. Not big by our standards but still a pain-in-the-ass on the day most of us hate -- Monday. Call me vicious but there is something so nice about being off on the day of a snow storm. I don't have to get up early and clean-off my car and battle unplowed roads. I can lounge around and watch The Today Show all morning and look out the window at the flakes falling and the people struggling to work and know that I don't have to do a damn thing all day. I have all the food I (and my cats) need and I can sit this one out.
I know that doesn't endear me to those of you who DO have to battle the weather tomorrow and I really do feel for you but I'm deriving some small perverse pleasure from being able to vegetate for the day.
Sorry about that. For those of you in my area, please drive carefully and don't tail-gate the slow-poke (I'm one of those) in front of you.
Was that last post too deep for you people? And by the way, I didn't receive one single Photoshop contribution to this post. I'm just joshing.
Hey listen, if you enjoy Alphecca (or Tarazet) I'd appreciate your help by hitting the PayPal tipping jar on the right. It's the Yosemite Sam icon. I don't clutter up my sites with blog-ads or other advertising so your contributions are the sole means of support. So far, I haven't received any donations this month which is a bit disheartening...
Anyway, I think I've blogged enough for one week. See you soon and just a reminder that there won't be a Weekly Check this coming Tuesday. Have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by!
Update 2/20: One kind person hit the tip-jar today (so far!) and I really thank them. Thank you! Alphecca: Supported by readers like you! (Kinda' like the PBS slogan, eh? Except that I'm on your side of the political aisle and gun issue.)
Hey, enough gun stuff for one week. I just realized that I forgot to celebrate National Waste Water Month. Yup, you always thought February was a shitty month anyway, right?
Now is a good time to start since February has been designated as Wastewater Month by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, which includes septic management.
Bloggers get a LOT of email. Sean at The White Peril has advice regarding yours. Heh.
Having read Michael Crichton's State of Fear I tend to not believe a lot of the "conclusive" evidence about global warming. Sean at Everything I Know is sceptical too. And Robert at Backroad Blog questions scientific bias as does Dean Esmay. And I finally broke down and tried to register to comment on his site yesterday but my comment (it would have been the first) got eaten...
The Beagle Express has the latest two installments of his continuing series on Internal Ballistics up with Gunpowder - Smokeless and Cartridge Assembly.
In this past Tuesday's Weekly Check, I had mentioned a Smallest Minority post on fear of gun owners. Now, Denise at The Ten Ring has a follow-up to it calling for more outreach. And Posse Incitatus also jumps in with this post.
Meanwhile over at The Shooters' Carnival (which I've been really lame about not contributing to) there are good new posts by Say Uncle on homemade magpuls and Publicola on sprucing up old stocks.
In today's NY Daily News comes this story of a cop on trial for manslaughter:
Scared and alone in a cavernous warehouse without even a bulletproof vest or uniform, a police officer pulled his gun on an unarmed civilian to prove he really was a member of the NYPD, the cop told a grand jury last year.Officer Bryan Conroy, who is charged with manslaughter in the May 2003 shooting death of Ousmane Zongo, a 43-year-old West African immigrant, conceded in his grand jury testimony that Zongo initially posed no threat to him.
[...]
Assistant District Attorney Armand Durastanti told jurors in his opening statement last week that Conroy's own grand jury testimony would persuade them that he acted recklessly.Yesterday, they heard this grand jury dialogue between Durastanti and Conroy:
Durastanti: "Did the man do anything threatening toward you at the point that you first saw him, took out your gun and pointed it at him?"
Conroy: "No, he didn't. Like I said, I only pulled out my firearm to identify myself."
Now, it's true that Zongo eventually charged at this cop to grab the gun, but that was only after this police officer -- no badge, no i.d., no uniform, no nothing but his claim that he's a cop and "here's my gun as proof" -- chased him through the building.
This policeman should have simply called for backup and allowed Zongo to escape. After all, it wasn't as if the victim was threatening or armed. In fact, as it turned out, he worked there and had committed no crime.
Does this mean that anyone who pulls someone over or barges into their home or stops them in an ally and pulls out a firearm should be considered a cop just because they say they are? I think gang-bangers have just been given a new strategy for finding victims.
If some guy pulls a gun on me and offers that as the only proof he's a cop, he better hope I don't my own in hand.
This is astoundingly bad judgement or training or supervision on the part of the NYPD. This cop deserves to be on trial BUT SO DOES HIS SUPERVISOR.
Vermont filmmaker and blogger Bill Simmon has rolled me -- thank you -- so into mine he goes! And from his professional page, checkout the assault camera.
This doesn't happen often so don't think I've been turned or something, okay? As scientists unravel the human genome, it has or will become possible to spot which people are at risk for certain diseases. That should be a good thing since it would give them a "heads-up" to be on the lookout for such a condition. It could be heart disease, various cancers, etc.
The problem arises that -- for instance -- health insurers or employers who worry about health insurance costs could use such genetic test to discriminate against folks applying for a job or insurance.
The US Senate has just passed a bill which the President supports that would bar such bias. From Reuters:
The U.S. Senate on Thursday unanimously approved legislation to bar health insurers and employers from discriminating against people with a genetic predisposition to disease.Sponsors said a growing understanding of the human genetic code created a need for protections to make sure scientific breakthroughs were used to promote health, not discrimination. Scientists believe every human has some genetic flaws.
The bill prevents health insurers from excluding people from coverage or charging them higher rates due to a genetic risk or predisposition to a disease. Insurers could not require customers to take genetic tests.
Employers would be barred from making hiring or firing decisions based on genetic information.
The measure covers public and private health plans, employers, employment agencies, labor organizations and training programs. It also tightens protections on the privacy of medical information.
The bill itself simply concerns predispositions revealed when such testing becomes the norm and ensures that those folks are not discriminated against solely based on such.
The legislation is supported by Ted "the lifeguard" Kennedy.
I support it, too.
Update: Matt Rustler disagrees with me and says:
...Insurers charge smokers more because smoking equals risk. Insurance companies stay in business by being better at determining expected costs -- a function of risk -- than their insureds. In short, they stay in business -- or outperform their competitors -- by being good at discriminating on the basis of risk. And genetic predispositions equal risk.
A genetic predisposition to specific diseases does equal a risk but the difference is that it is not of the person's choosing. By allowing an insurance company to charge more for something encoded within the genome places an unfair burden on the insured who has -- through no action of his own -- been told that everything in life will be more difficult for him, from the cost of health insurance to -- to extropolate the logic -- being prevented from obtaining employment because if we allow insurers to discriminate based on genetic inclinations then, since companies must make hiring decisions partly based upon how much that employee might cost them down the road in health care costs or lost days of work, they would also (if this legislation doesn't pass) be allowed to refuse to offer a job.
So now we have someone who -- again, through no direct action of his/her own -- might not be able to afford the insurance others have and in fact might not be able to find employment. Now, that person will have to be treated for any conditions with tax-payer dollars and supported (since employers might not hire them) by the state as well.
Or, should we require genetic testing of unborn children and if that fetus shows possible genetic problems should the state (the government) then require that the parents abort that child to minimize the risk of it becoming a burden to tax-payers in future years? A policy such as that leads to requiring couples considering marriage to submit to genetic testing for approval to have children and if they flunk then perhaps the state should require that one of them be sterilized before the marriage license is granted.
Obviously I'm exaggerating what could happen but remember that these ideas are the possible logical outcomes of allowing for genetic discrimination and are the seeds of eugenics.
There are some instances where the costs of potentially high-risk individuals must in fact be spread-out to all in society.
To use a more life-sized example, society as a whole -- that is, all taxpayers or developers or building investors -- are required to bear the cost of making new structures (schools, apartment buildings, stores) handicap accessible. If we were to decide that -- sorry, but you were born with out use of your legs -- those who cannot climb stairs must by themselves bear the cost of installing ramps or elevators in these buildings to make them wheelchair friendly, would you still say that was fair? Would you favor such an approach in our country?
The measure of civilization can often be measured by how the sick and the elderly are treated. We do a pretty good job of it now, worse then some nations, better then others. I'd hate to see us reduced to a herd of gazelle leaving the wounded behind for the predators.
Making it harder for someone who was simply born to afford insurance or find a job does not benefit society as a whole and would probably cost it much more in the long run. It would also encourage more abortions since many parents wouldn't want to give birth to children who started out with the deck stacked against them. Since I am pro-life, that gives me further stimulous to support this bill.
Davids Medienkritik (which I've mentioned before) is a terrific German blogger who is pro-American and publishes dual versions of his blog in both English and German. He will be taking part in a demonstration in the City of Mainz to show support for stong German-American relations. For those who haven't checked the blog out, he focuses on the German Media and their bias against the US, against Jews, etc. relating to politics. Sort of a much more ambitious version of what I do in a small way examining US Media bias against guns.
Speaking of bilingual blogs, Ryan, formerly of SoundFury, has a new blog titled Gringo Unleashed! which publishes in both English and Spanish and examines politics. Good stuff so check him out.
If they can't get it at the national or state level, the gun-grabbers just keep trying at the local level. From Ohio News Now:
The Columbus City Council is once again taking its aim at assault weapons.The council's Public Safety Committee is wrapping up open meetings to consider regulating such guns on the local level.
Thursday night's speakers focused on law enforcement statistics and laws defining assault weapons. They were also worried about some of the people trying to get their hands on the fire-arms.
One speaker says, "They are not after this weapon to win marksmanship medals. They are after the ability to kill or main as many people as possible in as shortest period of time possible."
Folks, that's the kind of nonsense and misconception we have to fight everyday. I'm just surprised that Chuck Schumer lives in Columbus...
James R. Rummel at Hell in a Handbasket reports on attempts at building a silent shotgun. He has photos, too. Interesting.
Fortunately I haven't had to deal with roaches since I left NJ many a years ago but I feel for those who still do. Now for some good news from Reuters/Yahoo:
The sexy scent used by female cockroaches to attract males could be the best tool yet against the creepy pests, U.S. researchers said Friday.They made an artificial version of the mating pheromone used by the bugs and hope it could be used to lure them into traps.
"It would prevent the need to spray poison widely," said Fran Webster of the State University of New York, who led the study. "You could use it when and where it was needed most."
You don't need to leave a real email address to post comments. Make something up if you like. And you don't need to leave a URL. Remember that if you get the dreaded "questionable content" thing when trying to post, the most obvious suspects are words such as drug names, sex acts, dept consolidation type things, etc. Sorry, it cuts down on spam.
You also don't need to register with PayPal any longer to use it to *ahem* buy me a beer or two. See Yosemite Sam on the right. Thanks!
A friend was getting rid of a couple guns to raise cash. He offered me a .25 caliber pistol for $100. I said, "no thanks". He dropped the price to $75, then $50. I said no. He finally asked what would I be willing to give him for it? I told him, I think .25 caliber ammo is the shittiest ammo ever created. It's weak, unreliable, inaccurate, worthless. I would never rely on a .25 for self-defense and a gun like that is no fun for target shooting because even clamped onto a bench-rest you're lucky if you hit the border of a target 7 yards away. He walked away dejected. Sorry, that's just how I feel.
See, here's how I feel about Congress passing and President Bush signing the class-action tort reform bill: There are legitimate suits out there deserving high compensation but because of the stupendous abuse and greed of trial lawyers (and their clients) this legislation has become necessary. The professional victims society and their trial lawyers and their frivolous lawsuits are the direct cause of the bill signed today:
President Bush on Friday signed a bill that he says will curtail multimillion-dollar class action lawsuits against companies and help end "the lawsuit culture in our country."
[...]
Under the legislation Bush signed, class-action suits seeking $5 million or more would be heard in state court only if the primary defendant and more than one-third of the plaintiffs are from the same state. But if fewer than one-third of the plaintiffs are from the same state as the primary defendant, and more than $5 million is at stake, the case would go to federal court.
See, I just knew it. From Yahoo/Health Day:
Ever get a gut feeling something just isn't quite right, and make a decision accordingly? Science is beginning to suggest those instincts may have roots deep in the brain.Research in young volunteers points to some kind of "sixth sense" -- a mechanism in the brain that picks up on subtle clues, then sends out subconscious signals of trouble ahead.
The finding could help explain certain intuitive phenomena seen among humans. For example, in the recent Asian tsunami, aboriginal people sought out higher ground in the moments before the disaster, as did many wild animals. Could subtle changes in weather or the environment have warned them early on?
Just such an early warning system may exist in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area important in processing complex information, according to a report by psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis. Their findings appear in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science.
Yet another... From the Daily Comet (LA):
A Clinton area woman shot and killed a man who beat and stabbed her after breaking into her house early Wednesday, an East Feliciana Parish Sheriffs Office spokesman said.Det. Don McKey said Arthur Sanford, 44, of Clinton, died from a gunshot wound suffered during a struggle with the woman around 2:20 a.m.
It happened on Plank Road, south of Clinton, McKey said.Sanford had apparently crawled into the home through a fireplace wood box that opens inside and outside the house, McKey said. The woman was treated at a hospital for her injuries and released.
Fox Butterfield of the New York Times could learn a lesson from these reporters. Of course, he would never bother writing about people properly defending themselves with firearms. That doesn't fit in with the agenda of the New York Times which is to only show guns as evil things that only cops should have. [What about that story from yesterday of the cop selling guns illegally?]
Another for the "Here's How It's Done" files. From the Indianapolis Star:
MISHAWAKA, Ind. -- An 84-year-old man fatally shot a burglar breaking into his home, who then fell onto the elderly man, knocking him to the floor, police said.
The shooting of James Rosebush, 40, by Robert Birtwhistle was justified, St. Joseph County police said.Birtwhistle said he was awakened about 1 a.m. Wednesday by the sound of someone trying to kick down his front door. He grabbed his handgun and went to investigate.
"He was trying to kick the front door in," Birtwhistle said. "I told him that if he didn't stop, he was going to get what was coming."
According to investigators, Rosebush eventually was able to break the door loose, prompting Birtwhistle to fire at least one shot through the door.
The shot mortally wounded Rosebush, who fell onto Birtwhistle and knocked him to the floor, police said.Birtwhistle then called 911, and Rosebush was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.
Officers at first took Birtwhistle into custody, but later released him.
Well, new to me. Welcome iBurlington.com to the blogosphere. Good wrap-up of what's happening in Burlington, Vermont.
From the "Here's How It's Done" files comes this NY Post story:
Rockland County jeweler Barry Fixler will not be prosecuted for shooting a robber who was aiming a revolver at his head, cops said yesterday.Detective Lt. Charles Delo said a review of the shooting on surveillance videotape at the store in Bardonia showed it to be justified.
Fixler had a permit for his gun.
The suspect was in serious condition after surgery at Nyack Hospital but was expected to survive, police said.
Two alleged accomplices who fled the scene were arrested within 12 hours.
Fixler said he feels he did what he had to. "I'd be dead," he said. "My life was going to be over. That's what I thought about."
Matt Rustler at Stop the Bleating finally gets his Virginia concealed-carry permit. He relates an incident that explains why. Then, in the comments to the post, a lefty moonbat says... (Well, you'll just have to head there and read.)
My dinner tonight consisted entirely of eating half a jar of peanut butter with a spoon as I sat here putting up posts. Does that make me a bad person?
Ken Summers over at It Comes In Pints? is all over some more hypocrisy. Actually he's all over all sorts of stuff so just start scrolling...
Notice the question mark above... Let me start off by saying (again!) that I think the whole war on drugs is one of the stupidest, costly, least effective, most anti-constitutionally intrusive battles here in the U.S. Having said that, reading the first two paragraphs of this Union Leader story sent my blood-pressure soaring:
MANCHESTER — City prosecutor Kenneth Bernard, brother of an accused murderer and brother and uncle of three murder victims, is charged with three counts of possessing marijuana.Bernard, 34, is free on $1,000 personal recognizance bail and is to be arraigned on March 10 in Manchester District Court, where he prosecuted individuals on violations and misdemeanors, including possession of marijuana.
The investigation began Nov. 30 when Bernard’s wife, Donna, called police. She directed officers to the top left drawer of a bureau in the master bedroom, where they found a bag of marijuana, Sgt. Richard Charbonneau wrote in an affidavit.She then escorted the officers to the basement and showed them a partly burned marijuana cigarette left on a shelf.
The Bernards are in the process of getting a divorce. Last October, however, Mrs. Bernard asked the court to put the divorce proceedings on hold because of several deaths in the family.
On Oct. 4, Bernard’s sister, Trisha Doyle, 30, of Hooksett and her children, Gillian, 4 and James, 2, were found stabbed to death in the home of Christopher M. Bernard, 35, of 61 Johnson St.
Christopher M. Bernard is Kenneth Bernard’s and Doyle’s brother. Christopher Bernard is charged with three counts of first-degree and remains detained in the Valley Street jail.
So I don't really know what to believe in this story and as Bernard's lawyer has pointed out, so far only one side of it has come out.
I don't smoke pot. I'm allergic to it. But I know a lot of people who do. Some of them are cops who have busted other people for smoking or possessing it. That is the hypocrisy that makes me crazy. And I have to tell you something, if I was a cop, I'd much rather deal with a pot-head than a drunk.
While I'm sorry that Gonzales is now the Attorney General -- since he's anti-gun -- I am glad that Ashcroft is out. His harrassment of states that passed "medical marijuana" laws was unconscionable and a clear violation of states' rights. That Bush supported his actions pissed me off no end too.
I love it when the left blames the "gun show loop hole" or gun makers for the FLOOD of illegal firearms that criminals obtain. I love it because then we get a story like this one from CBS TV:
A school teacher and his wife, who is a police officer, were arrested Thursday as part of an undercover operation to crack a gun trafficking ring that included the teacher’s brother-in-law, authorities said.Five rifles were sold for $9,200 over the course of the investigation, according to court papers.
FBI agents found a 9mm handgun in the coat pocket of the teacher, William Mayes, as he was preparing to leave home for his ninth-grade class at Success Academy, part of West Side High School in Newark, Special Agent Steve Kodak said.
Mayes, 41, and his wife, Irvington police Officer Cynthia Owens-Mayes, 27, were arrested at their Irvington home. Also arrested was Jed Smurda, 43, of Bethlehem, Pa., a painter and landscaper who had been an Army military police officer and federal police officer at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., authorities said.
“It is a sad day when we arrest individuals who hold positions of public trust and are responsible for the education of our children with grave crimes such as these,” said Joseph Billy Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Jersey operations.
I don't know if it will happen but from the Albany (OR) Democrat-Herald:
A bill that would shield gun makers and dealers from being sued when the firearms they sell are used in crimes drew no opposition at a hearing in front of a House panel Wednesday.Legislative lawyers, though, say the measure is flawed because it clashes with citizens' state constitutional rights to take legal action to seek compensation for injuries.
Rep. Robert Ackerman, D-Eugene, House Judiciary civil law subcommittee chairman, said the panel will rework the bill to try to resolve the conflict.
Lawmakers need to protect the firearms industry "from frivolous lawsuits aimed to run it out of business,'' said Rep. Chuck Burley, R-Bend, the bill's main sponsor.
Burley said he hadn't been contacted by any gun control advocates opposing the measure.
The bill is patterned after a similar federal measure that was passed by the U.S. House last year but died in the Senate.
Solomonia has two interesting posts showing how anti-semitism is steadily on the rise at our institutions of higher learning. Well, we all knew that because that is the currency of the left. One is of an award from the National Lawyers Guild to Northeastern Professor M. Shahid Alam and the other is about reaction to a lecture at Columbia University. *Sigh*
Sorry about that. Normal service will resume tonight.
Please welcome a new addition to my blogroll, YoungPundit. The proprietor, Willis, is a thoughtful student in MD. See his post about blogger envy by MSM.
A group of Austrian and German victims of the Asian tsunami disaster are to file a lawsuit demanding that Thailand, French hotel chain Accor and US forecasters prove they reacted adequately to the disaster, their lawyers said.
The suit, naming Accor and the US-run tsunami early warning system in the Pacific as well as Thai authorities, will be filed in a New York district court this week, the lawyers said in Vienna.'We found that serious lapses were committed,' said Herwig Hasslacher, one of the three lawyers for the group.
[...]
The case was presented as the first of its kind arising out of the Dec 26 disaster, when a powerful undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent huge waves pounding into coastlines around the Indian Ocean.Nearly 290,000 people died, including several thousand Western tourists who were holidaying in Indian Ocean resorts, notably in Thailand and Sri Lanka.
The suit will be filed on behalf of 15 Austrian and four German victims of the disaster.The targets are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Washington and its Hawaii-based tsunami warning centre; the Accor group of hotels where some of the victims stayed; and the Thai government.
The NOAA is accused of having registered the earthquake but failed to alert Indian Ocean countries of the impending tsunamis as the Hawaii centre covered only the Pacific.
A nothing rag of a newspaper, Tulsa World is threatening a blogger with copyright infringement and "unauthorized linkage" or some such nonsense. Commentary on it is at Confederate Yankee and it concerns blogger Michael Bates.
I guess these newspapers would rather we "paraphrase" what they are writing -- and who knows what bias or inaccuracies could be introduced by doing that -- then to quote them directly. And as for "unauthorized links", well, I think common case law has shown that if you are posting anything on the internet, you can be linked to.
I don't notice the assholes at Tulsa World (oops! Another unauthorized link!) suing Google or Yahoo or any other search engine. Jerks. And newspapers wonder why their readership is going down. They're so frightened of anyone looking over their biased shoulders that they resort to chickenshit threats to shut down the same First Amendment rights of others that they wrap themselves in. Idiots.
Welcome to the February 15th edition of The Weekly Check on the Bias.
When the now extinct (national) "assault weapons" ban was created, it's purpose was to convince that part of the US public that feared firearms that lawmakers "feel their pain" (this was during the Clinton years) and were taking meaningful steps to protect them. What they actually did was to draw-up an arbitrary list of guns they considered scary looking. The models banned had features such as collapsible stocks or a handgun style grip; cosmetic features that had little to do with the operation of the gun.
In fact, all semi-automatic rifles operate in pretty much the same fashion. You pull the trigger and one bullet comes out. Then, the gun chambers another round. You pull the trigger AGAIN and that bullet comes out. And so on. Therefore, it could well be reasoned that ALL semi-automatic rifles are "assault weapons" since they all do the same thing. That being the case, if Congress had really wanted to be consistant and protective, all of these rifles should have been banned including almost every garden-variety hunting rifle.
But they didn't. They focused on a few cosmetic attributes and designated a new category of firearm called the "assault weapon". Under such specious argument, NO rifle is an "assault weapon" since their list was completely arbitrary. All cars operate with combustion engines. Just because some have speedometers that go up to 140MPH doesn't make them any more dangerous then your average Honda Civic. It's all in how it's used. If a drunk gets behind the wheel... And we already have laws to deal with such a situation.
In the past, I've argued that any firearm that is used for evil purpose is assaultive. Many years ago a nut-case in Salt Lake City murdered several people with a common Sturm Ruger .22 caliber handgun. So -- in that instance -- that favorite of target shooters around the world was an "assault weapon" but not because of how it operates but instead because of how it was operated. A knife is frequently an "assault knife". And when a crime is being committed, a car becomes an "assault automobile". When mutants broke into a Florida home and beat several people to death with aluminum baseball bats, Congress didn't pass the "assault Louisville Slugger" act.
A couple of days ago I posted about a woman charged with assault for injuring a man with a frozen pork chop. We all had some fun with that but the point is more serious. When the average gun-fearing person hears a reporter say "assault weapon" then suddenly some scary image comes to their mind. Reporters know this and love to use the phrase since it draws readers. The problem is that it focuses attention away from the criminal and onto the object used to commit the crime. When Bernie Goetz used a .38 to defend himself on a subway in NYC way back when, the media didn't focus on what kind of screwdriver the mutants were attacking him with.
Generating all this blather on my part is the story from this past Sunday of a mutant who entered a shopping mall about an hour south of Albany, NY and opened fire with a rifle. See the previous post for the early details. As I said then, fortunately only one person was seriously injured. I feel very bad for him. But this incident could have been MUCH worse. The lone gunman apparently wasn't actually trying to kill people. Imagine if he had been? It could also have been much worse for those of us who defend the Second Amendment because thanks to one police spokesman who described the weapon used (a Hesse Model 47) as an "assault weapon". Needless to say, almost every single early media story quoted him with glee. Ahah! they thought, another reason why we NEED that "assault weapons ban" back on the books! Here's the official police photo of the rifle:
A man who opened fire in a crowded shopping mall with an assault weapon, wounding two, seemed to have a "lurid fascination" with the Columbine High School shooting, a prosecutor said today.Robert Bonelli, 24, is accused of wounding two people and sending shoppers scurrying for safety Sunday after shooting his way into the Hudson Valley Mall, then giving up when he ran out of ammunition.
Some newspapers aren't content to leave it at "assault weapon" and escalate the hysteria to:
A lone gunman armed with a high-powered assault rifle went on a shooting rampage Sunday at a busy shopping mall, wounding two men before casting the weapon aside and surrendering to mall employees, police said.
Think I'm joking? Last September I predicted that one of the guns on the AWB "list" would eventually be used in a crime and the hysteria would start. It has. From the Times Herald-Record:
Anybody could have bought that gun.It's not illegal to buy it or to own it.
Authorities say Robert Bonelli Jr. bought the Soviet AK-47 knockoff about four months ago at a gun show somewhere in the area.
Typically, he would have spent between $250 and $275 for it.
That's cheap, experts say.
Police say Bonelli used a Hesse Model 47 semiautomatic rifle to terrorize patrons Sunday at the Hudson Valley Mall.
Sources said Bonelli, 24, from Glasco, bought the gun in October, a month after a federal 10-year ban on assault weapons expired.
[...]
A background check was done at the time the gun was purchased from a dealer at the gun show, federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officials said. ATF officials are assisting in the investigation.Bonelli didn't have a gun permit, Ulster police said. But Tony Tantillo, former owner of a Lloyd gun shop, said a permit isn't needed to own such a weapon.
[...]
In the wake of the rampage at the mall, Sen. Chuck Schumer called for federal legislators to revisit a ban on assault weapons, which expired in September."(Sunday's) horrific shooting is the latest example of a military-style assault weapon being used to shoot large numbers of people," said Schumer, D-N.Y. "And we need to renew the assault weapons ban so that (Sunday) doesn't repeat itself over and over again."
The 10-year ban on certain assault weapons would not have made it illegal to buy the gun that police say Bonelli used, ATF Assistant Special Agent Delano Reid said yesterday.
The ban, did, however, make it illegal to buy magazines containing more than 10 rounds.
Reid would not comment on when Bonelli might have bought the ammunition. But since the ban expired, 30-round clips can be purchased legally.
And speaking of fund-raising, here's how the Brady Bunch responded:
Where did he get the gun? Wherever he wanted to. On the same day he walked into the Best Buy store at the Hudson Valley Mall, gun sellers across America were offering weapons so powerful and advanced that they have been the subject of recent global security complaints by the United States government.The same day Bonelli shot two shoppers in New York, arms merchants at a gun show just outside Washington, D.C. offered for sale not only AK-47s and other clones like the Hesse Arms Model 47 Bonelli brandished, but also 50-caliber sniper rifles, capable of penetrating an airliner or a nuclear reactor from half a mile away and costing $25,000. Michael Barnes, the President of the Brady Campaign, attended "The Nation's Gun Show" at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia and inspected the 50-caliber rifle. Barnes noted that not only were many AK-47s and Ak-47 copycat weapons for sale, but also conversion kits to allow the guns to operate as machine guns.
What is interesting is that when a firearm is used to save life, suddenly the media could care less what type of gun it is. From Delaware Online:
A burglary suspect, already wanted on drug and weapons charges, was shot in the face while trying to stab a Smyrna-area resident and his neighbor, police said Monday.The incident occurred about 11:30 p.m. Sunday outside a house on Cathleen Drive in Burtonwood Village, south of Smyrna.
A 58-year-old man saw a stranger inside the shed next door and armed himself with a .38-caliber revolver before going to alert his neighbor, said state police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Oldham.
[...]
As the suspect lunged toward the men, the resident tried to close the shed door to protect himself, but caught the suspect in the doorway, Oldham said.With his upper body outside the door, the intruder kept jabbing the knife at the men, Oldham said. They told the man repeatedly to drop the knife, but he kept trying to stab them, Oldham said.
The neighbor then fired his gun once, hitting the intruder in the face, Oldham said. The resident and neighbor both stayed with the suspect until state police and medical personnel arrived, he said. They were not injured.
Here's some of what's happening in the blogosphere:
In keeping with the theme of today's Weekly Report, Zendo Deb at TFS Magnum reports on the criminal use of assault bats, 2x4's, etc. We need SPF Control NOW!
The Fuz at WeckUpToThees! is offering his impressive credentials as a candidate to the NRA Board of Directors. He's got my vote!
Kevin at The Smallest Minority has an interesting essay on the politics and philosophy of gun-fear. I'd like to think that I try to dispell some of that here, myself...
Geoffrey at Dog Snot Diaries reports on one way (besides banning guns) to cut down on suicides as suggested by the SAF. Heh!
Naturally, the tireless Say Uncle has some gun porn up.
And Kim du Toit has his top-ten list of why guns are better than women. Send those emails to...
Okay, it's ten o'clock and I better get this up. Just a reminder that there won't be a Weekly Report next Tuesday as I have meetings at work... Thanks for stopping by!
The big news today is the story of the mutant who went on a shooting rampage in an Upstate NY mall. Even a casual search brings up a slew of newspaper stories about it. From the Poughkeepsie Journal:
KINGSTON — A man armed with an assault rifle started shooting in the Hudson Valley Mall yesterday afternoon, wounding two people, before being tackled by mall workers.The 24-year-old gunman, who started shooting in the Best Buy store, apparently ran out of ammunition, giving mall employees a chance to restrain him, police said.
An Army recruiter was shot in the left leg, but was not the target of the attack, said Lt. Col. Paul Fanning, a National Guard spokesman. The recruiter was evacuated by helicopter to an Albany hospital where he was listed in critical condition. A state police captain said he may lose his leg.
Another person, a 56-year-old man, suffered superficial gunshot wounds to his left arm, thigh and leg. Neither victim has been identified. Authorities said the gunman was taken to Ulster police headquarters for questioning. He was not immediately identified, but police said he was from the nearby Saugerties area and was expected to be arraigned by today on felony charges of assault and reckless endangerment.
Police said they recovered "an assault-type weapon" at the scene, but would not elaborate.
Fortunately, mercifully, there were no deaths and only one serious injury. This could have been much worse, both for the innocent people at the mall and for those of us who support the Second Amendment. *Sigh* This mutant could have caused the same ammount of damage with a simple revolver or a kitchen knife or almost anything. I have a feeling Main Stream Media won't realize that, though.
Quick, who just spent the last half-hour stating that 9/11 wasn't an attack on freedom or liberty but rather was the fault of American "Imperialism" and interventionism -- that is, America was to blame for the attack herself? And who then went on to blame Israel for most of the other problems in the Middle East?
No, it wasn't Ward Churchill, it was Pat Buchanan on Meet the Press. The transcript should be up by tomorrow. And to think that anyone really considered that mutant for president...
First they came for our handguns. Then they came for our long guns. Then knives, swords, nail-clippers, spear guns and everything else that could possibly inflict injury. Well folks, they missed something:
Police charge woman over pork chop assault
A man is in hospital after being hit in the head with a frozen pork chop in Queensland's south-west.A woman has been charged with assault.
Police say the 45-year-old man was helping his son move out of a block of units in the south-western Queensland town of Roma when he was attacked with a frozen pork chop.
His son and some friends had been evicted from the unit and were moving out when a dispute erupted over a fridge which belonged to one family and the meat which belonged to another.Police allege a woman aged in her 30s used a frozen chop to hit the man.
He has been taken to hospital requiring stitches.A woman has been charged with assault occasioning bodily harm and is due to appear in court on March 8.
We HAVE to ban food and eating! It is the only way to prevent the terrible carnage inflicted by dangerous food. "Oh the humanity".
Australia (where this happened) and England and San Francisco take note!
Update 2/13: I found this:
The Semi-Automatic Pork Chop
"Why do they need so many pork chops?"
Rats! I couldn't find any newspaper that actually had a photo of it but anyway, from Yahoo/AP:
GLEN AUBREY, N.Y. - An explicit six-foot-tall snow sculpture depicting male genitals in a yard on a rural road north of Binghamton had some drivers doing a double-take this week.One neighbor, Bob Hodges, told a Binghamton radio station that the much larger-than-life icy display "was the talk of the town for a while." Hodges said many people who saw it just chuckled.
But the artwork provoked a frosty reaction from one woman, who called the Broome County Sheriff's Department to complain about what she described as an "offensive" snow sculpture.
A deputy who went to the home was told by a mother that the unconventional display was the work of her sons. While the mother said she wouldn't knock it down, she told the deputy she'd have her sons take care of it.
The sculpture was gone the next day.
Update 2/13: A little image googling turned up a few other images though. And no, I won't print them here because this IS a family-like blog...
Currently under Florida law, if you shoot a home intruder, you'd better be able to show that you felt your life was in immanent danger. A bill working it's way through the state legislature would change that. From the St. Petersburg Times:
TALLAHASSEE - More than a decade has passed since Sen. Jim King woke up to find a man pointing a gun at his head.It's been 15 years since Sen. Evelyn Lynn woke up - twice - to find intruders in her home.
But both remember the events as if they were yesterday, prompting both to vote Wednesday for a bill expanding the rights of Floridians to use deadly force when threatened in their homes and cars.
The bill (SB436) passed the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice unanimously.
It must pass one more committee before heading to the full Senate. An identical bill is working its way through the House.
Under current law, homeowners cannot use deadly force unless they believe an intruder intends to kill them or a loved one, or severely harm them. Although criminal case law tends to favor homeowners, anyone who kills an intruder can be arrested.
Under the bill, anyone who breaks into an occupied house or car would be presumed to have deadly intent. Victims would no longer have to determine the intruder's intent.
"You can't expect a victim to wait and ask, "Excuse me, Mr. Criminal, are you going to rape me and kill me, or are you just going to beat me up and steal my television?' " said Marion Hammer, lobbyist for the National Rifle Association.
The bill has law enforcement support because it does not allow homeowners to shoot law officers who legally break into homes, such as when they believe someone is in harm or evidence is being destroyed.
"I think if you talked to the average Joe or Jane Citizen they would say, "There ought to be a law.' This is your chance to make a law," said David Murrell, lobbyist for the Florida Police Benevolent Association.
The bill does not allow people to shoot intruders outside the home.
While this story was mostly unbiased -- indeed not at all from our standpoint in that they didn't include a single negative comment about the proposed law -- I didn't like the implication the Lead Writer put onto the story, "Bill would paint target on backs of intruders. I think most of us would agree that if we were to surprise a common-variety burglar "in the act" and he turns to flee, we would (well, I wouldn't) shoot him in the back. I might order him to "freeze" and hold him for the police since we all want him off the streets. But to shoot someone who (unless you've discovered that they just murdered your family or something) turns and runs from you is not grounds (to me) for justifiable homicide.
And he should know, coming as he does from a family replete with it. From Crosswalk:
(CNSNews.com) - U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy implied Tuesday that congressional colleagues who do not share his support for a failed gun ban being reintroduced in the House are mentally ill. The Rhode Island Democrat also accused lawmakers who oppose the anti-gun legislation of not caring about police safety.Kennedy is the son of U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, both of whom were shot to death.
The younger Kennedy made the comments at a Capitol Hill press conference to promote the reintroduction of the "50 Caliber Sniper Rifle Reduction Act." The bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), would ban the manufacture of such rifles and severely limit the sale or transfer of existing .50 BMG rifles except for those owned by the military or civilian law enforcement agencies.
"Any policy maker who, on the one hand, says that they are for combating terrorism but, on the other hand, will not back this legislation, backed by Representative Moran, to me has a lot of explaining to do," Kennedy said "In fact, I think it would be the definition of insanity to say that."
I remember all the coverage of the sick actions of a father who set his young son on fire many years ago. He's back in the news. From ABC News:
A man who went to prison two decades ago for setting his 6-year-old son on fire in a custody dispute was found guilty Tuesday of illegally possessing a gun a conviction that could send him to prison for life.Charley Charles, who was known as Charles Rothenberg when he burned his son in 1983, said he needed the gun as protection from vigilantes bent on retaliation for the crime against the boy, who grew to adulthood severely disfigured.
Charles, 64, testified that he bought the .38-caliber pistol in 1997 after he was shot at twice, once by a gunman who yelled, "That's the man who burned his son!"
Despite a proliferation of gun registration requirements, bans on specific firearms and "zero tolerance" policies for guns in schools over the past three decades, the jury is still out on whether these laws help prevent gun violence, according to a new review of studies in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.The review by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services concluded that there was "insufficient evidence" to determine whether any of the federal, state and local gun laws reviewed had an effect on gun-related deaths, violent crimes, suicides and other outcomes.
The report's lead author, Dr. Robert Hahn of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says "it is critical to note" that the review does not mean that gun laws are ineffective.
"We mean simply that we do not yet know what effects, if any, the laws have" on gun-related violence, Hahn says, and that the Task Force does not recommend that current laws be changed in any way "until effectiveness can be demonstrated one way or the other."
Studies on the effectiveness of gun laws are plagued by poor or missing data, confusion over which laws affect which jurisdictions and underreporting of violent gun-related crimes, the task force researchers say.
In addition, says Hahn, "laws are a challenging area to research," especially since researchers can't control who would be "exposed" to a particular law, as they might in other types of experiments.
Hahn and colleagues reviewed studies published between 1979 and March 2001 of firearm laws and violence prevention. The studies compared rates of gun-related violence among groups of people who had lived under the laws with those who had not lived under the laws or who had little exposure to the laws.
The studies included laws to ban certain types of guns or ammunition, such as fully automatic assault weapons and the cheap handguns commonly known as "Saturday night specials." Others studies examined laws that restrict certain people from buying guns, determine waiting periods for gun purchases, require gun registration, allow for concealed weapon and impose "zero tolerance" for firearms in schools. The task force also reviewed studies that looked at combinations of these laws.
Would that the people who so vociferously defend the First Amendment spend a little time defending the Second. And vice-versa, by the way.
Also from Australia, where they've taken everyones' guns, knives, swords, and shish ke-bab skewers, comes worrying news that spear-guns may be next. From the Australian:
A TEENAGER who allegedly threatened a group of western Sydney residents with a spear gun has been charged by police.The man, 19, was allegedly pointing the weapon at people shortly before officers arrested him about 4.30pm (AEDT) in the front yard of his Auburn home yesterday, police said.
He was later charged with a number of offences including the possession of a loaded spear gun in a public place and resisting police.
Gun-free Australia continues to be plagued by gun crime. From News.com.au:
THE daylight robbery of a man at gunpoint near a busy train station has renewed fears of a rise in gun crime in Sydney.[...]
New South Wales Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said more than 40,000 weapons were seized in major crackdowns across the state last year.
Mr Moroney said a major audit and compliance check of all firearms in NSW, combined with the State Government's gun buyback, had seized and destroyed 43,000 weapons.
A number of private security firms had also closed following a police audit of the industry and its weapons, he said.
Premier Bob Carr said the Government was working with police to reduce the number of guns in the community.
When asked if there were too many guns on the streets, Mr Carr replied: "Absolutely".
"If there is one person with malevolent intentions and one gun in his possession, that's one too many," he said.
Opposition leader John Brogden said gun crime was surging in Sydney and the Carr Government was trying to spin its way around the problem.
"Sydney will end up like New York or Los Angeles if we keep going the way we're going," he said.
Basic Gun Safety May Reduce Teen Suicides.
So would showing them a little love and attention once in awhile.
Chan Eddy at Weekend Pundit reports on another attempt at permitless CC in the Granite State. Good news if it goes through this time although I don't know about the new Governor there... Naturally, living on the border, I'd like to see my brethren and sistren enjoy the same right we have in Vermont. Chan has the background and history on the move.
In other news, a bill in the NH legislature would require name tags (so to speak) on all hunter's tree stands and blinds located on private property. From the Union Leader:
Currently, permission from landowners to place tree stands is not needed unless the stand will damage the tree, said Maj. Tim Acerno, assistant chief of law enforcement for the Fish and Game Department.At a public hearing yesterday Acerno said landowners don’t generally object to tree stands being in the trees, but want to be able to contact their owners in case of tree harvesting. It is also important to have the letters large enough so that a landowner doesn’t have to climb the stand to read them, Acerno said.
“Hunters in general must recognize the important balance between themselves and private landowners who are willing to share their land, and if they fail to do so, we’ll see an increase in ‘No Hunting’ and ‘No Trespassing’ signs,”said Rob Thomson, owner of the Thomson Family Tree Farm in Orford. He believes it’s the responsibility of hunters to seek permission from property owners before placing a tree stand on another person’s land.
Opposing the bill was Lawrence Guaraldi of Caanan. Guaraldi said the bill would over-regulate and punish the sincere hunter for the acts of a few. Guaraldi told the committee that landowners are supported by hunters and the tax breaks they get from putting their property in current use.
Welcome to the February 8th edition of the Weekly Check on the Bias. Here's where I examine some of the media stories about guns, gun control, and the Second Amendment. This is also the first week for my Weekly Report at it's new Tuesday schedule, timed to coincide with my weekly appearances on the NRA Live Show.
One of the pleasures of discovery about what to write here is that I learn something new, or about someone I was unfamiliar with, every time I simply type the word gun into the Yahoo news search engine. And that brings me to the top subject for this week's report.
I thought I'd start by asking a question: Who IS this guy?
Needless to say, the articles linking to him didn't come from the New York Times or the Washington Post. Last Thursday he gave a lecture at Ohio University (Athens campus) that was, alas, poorly attended, especially by those he was hoping to target. He was invited by the Ohio University Second Amendment Club. None the less, the local Athens, Ohio newspaper gave his talk a mention. In fact, they quoted him quite a bit and there was only one "semi-negative" comment from one student at the end. From the Athens News:
Gun-rights advocate Reginald Jones used humor and a dynamic, informal speaking style to deliver his inflammatory message -- "Gun control is racist" -- at Ohio University Thursday night."People are surprised to hear that," Jones told a small crowd of about 25 people in Baker Center's 1804 Room. Jones maintained that gun-control laws were used to keep blacks from defending themselves against the Ku Klux Klan in the old South and against the "criminal class" in the urban ghettos of today.
[...]
"The inception of (gun-control) laws were to keep blacks down," he said. "Blacks are at the mercy of the criminal class. We can't hold criminals accountable, so we hold guns accountable."
Jones noted that no one supports the banning of knives, which also can kill.
Jones advocated getting rid of mandatory trigger locks and waiting periods for firearms sales because they violate the Second Amendment by restricting a citizen's ability to arm him- or herself.
"Sure, I support a five-day waiting period for guns. I also support a five-day waiting period for free speech," he quipped. "What if I get mugged on the third day (of my waiting period)? Do people even think about the folly of the stupidity of these laws?"
Even the independent student newspaper printed some intriguing quotes. From The Post Online:
Post Online Photo
"Whatever guns it was more likely for black people to afford, they (the government) banned them," Jones said.He used past and present examples to explain how guns have saved lives and have exposed corruption in administration.
Jones said guns are not the only weapons people use to harm others.
[...]
He said education about founding principles and rights is "sorely lacking" among young Americans.
"What's there to prevent the government from walking into your home now and rifling through your stuff? The law? No one can be that naive," he said.
Jones said gun laws are not effective because criminals do not care what the law says.
"We are leaving people in the inner cities prey to the criminals," he said.
...And while he is fringe even among those students, 40-year-old hip-hop entrepreneur Reginald Jones — who says the Iraq invasion was unconstitutional because Congress never declared war and who decries post-9/11 security measures as infringements on our freedoms — has become one of the most popular figures among the young right. His raucous seminar on the evils of abortion, taxation, the Democrats and "milquetoast" Republicans — as well as the pleasures of NASCAR — didn't end until 2:30 one morning.
I just want to mention one last thing, the issue of gun control. One of the most racist laws in this country is gun control because the first laws on gun control were passed to disarm black citizens especially after World War I and World War II, and especially because they had lynchings, because they realized if we are going to lynch them, they can’t be armed. They might shoot us.Monroe, North Carolina: In 1957 the Klan went to a man’s house to have a lynching party. A caravan of 80 to lynch the man, because he was protesting the fact that blacks were paying taxes that were going to a swimming pool that they were not allowed to swim in, and in rolled a caravan of 80 vehicles up to this man’s house. What they didn’t know was that they were war veterans that had 600 gas masks, helmets, mortars, rifles, machine guns, and the like, and they had built a trench around the man’s house so when they got out of their vehicles they let out a hearty “Hee-haw!” The black citizens, the black people that lived in the house opened fire and total chaos ensued. There was not another lynching in Monroe, North Carolina, after that.
Okay, time for a quick James Taranto type thing...
The headline: Gun in School Drawing Update
I wonder what the second place prize is?
Okay, never mind. So much for my feeble attempt at humor...
Turning to the continuing story of the City of San Francisco's attempt to outlaw handguns, I seem to recall that the main reason given was that gun crime was rising. How then to explain this Fox News story?
A renewed enforcement of a 10-year-old law has reaped big new benefits in San Francisco, where police cite it as a primary factor in a recent drop in homicides."Triggerlock," as the federal law is known, allows police to arrest suspected violent criminals on lesser charges. After an arrest is made, police search the suspect for guns. If they find even one, the suspect can be sentenced to 10 years in prison, effectively keeping him or her off the street.
San Francisco take note of yourselves!
That sort-of brings us to a a fine editorial by Walter Olson in the New York Times:
N January, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed a bill passed by the City Council making gun makers and dealers liable for crimes perpetrated with their products unless they adopt a "code of conduct" that, among other things, would limit the number of handguns they can sell to one person and require background checks on prospective buyers at gun shows. The strange thing about this new law is that it applies not only to sales within New York City, but also to sales in other states and cities.
AdvertisementThis new law is too clever by half and it's also shortsighted. It insults the right to democratic self-governance of the 273 million Americans who don't live in New York City. Moreover, it may have a consequence that Mayor Bloomberg and other gun-control advocates have not foreseen: it could be further impetus for a bill in Congress, nearly enacted last year, which would pre-empt local efforts at gun-control through litigation.
[...]
When the issue returns in this year's (more pro-gun) Congress, Mr. Bloomberg's new law is likely to serve as a prime exhibit of the case for federal pre-emption on the issue of gun liability. The new city law makes it absolutely clear that anti-gun enclaves intend to inflict their will on other states. Lawmakers from the rest of the country will then, appropriately, move to defend their states' preference through federal legislation.
The mayor and City Council of New York seem to think they can make laws that bind the rest of the country. That's an arrogant stance - and when the rest of the country is heard from, it's apt to be a losing stance as well.
Now, I happen to believe in the concept of States Rights but certainly Olson is correct that when local municipalities decide to exceed federal or even state laws on firearm control, a good case can be made that some federal oversite is needed. Of course, THAT invites possible controls that exceed what many states have now such as where I live, Vermont.
San Francisco take note!
Denver take note!
So now it's time for my Here's how it's done feature:
A man authorities allege participated in a home invasion was shot in the upper torso early this morning by one of the residents he was trying to rob, police report.About 1:30 a.m., Burlington police responded to a reported burglary in progress at 1109 Rosenwald St.
Officers found a man later identified as Tele Richmond, 22, of 231 Kerr Chapel Road in Burlington, lying in the front yard suffering a gunshot wound to his torso.
Richmond was one of four men who entered the Rosenwald Street home and tried to rob the residents at gunpoint, police said.
One of the residents, apparently acting in self defense, fired at the suspects with a handgun, striking Richmond, police said.
The other suspects were last seen running north toward Sharpe Road.
So here's what some others in the blogosphere are talking about:
Publicola is featuring his new Garand in a post of gun porn.
Say Uncle has some of his own too!
Denise at The Ten Ring explains the joy of shooting.
Glenn Reynolds has good news and bad news on arming pilots.
Bruce at mASS Backwards gives a perfect example of why states need to adopt "shall issue" laws regarding firearms permits.
Carnaby Fudge discovers that KFC has a subliminal pro-gun message. Now if that doesn't make you hungry, nothing will...
Confederate Yankee has lots more on ActionFigureGate.
Kirk at Fun Turns To Tragedy has even MORE gun porn. Rather a smutty week here in the blogosphere!
Okay, time to get this posted. See you soon and thanks for stopping by!
I've had it. I'm throwing in the towel. I'm... just kidding! But I am making a schedule change. From now on my Weekly Check on the Bias will appear on Tuesdays instead of Mondays. I hope this isn't too traumatic -- remember that originally, for more than a year, it appeared on Wednesdays.
The reason is quite simple. Up till now my schedule at my real job changed from week to week. I would start putting the Weekly Report together on Sunday nights and finish it Monday mornings, often racing the clock because I had to get to work. (Mondays are a must at my job.) Not always, but often it can take 4-5 hours to put the report together. Between searching the web for stories, crude Photoshop attempts, writing and editing, and checking other bloggers for the links at the end of the report...
Because of my gig on NRA news, I've now arranged with my job (thanks to a promotion) to have Tuesdays off permanently. This will allow me a set schedule and time to prepare the report Tuesday mornings at my leisure. This should allow me to include more stuff too. Also, it makes sense for the report to appear the same day I yack about it later on the radio. Consolidation is good -- I only have to give-up one of my days off now for the Weekly Check.
So to summarize, I'm moving the Weekly Check on the Bias in media against guns, gun ownership, and the Second Amendment to Tuesdays. It will usually be up by Noon. And then don't forget to listen to me on Cam's Corner later in the afternoon. I will usually be on about 3:20 PM Eastern Time but his terrific show (now) starts at 3:00.
Lastly, a heads-up that there will be no report on February 22nd as my company has our quarterly manager meeting.
Okay, really lastly, I can't search or read everything. If you -- my wonderful readers -- find a story you think I might be interested in, do email a link to it to me at gunnut at alphecca dot com. I won't and can't use everything you send but if I think it fits in with the theme of my Weekly Report then... Thanks!
I'm dating this post for Monday so it stays at the top for awhile.
Ted "the lifeguard" Kennedy was just on Meet the Press and every time Tim tried to pin him down on whether Social Security is in trouble, Ted kept saying things such as, "let's talk about Medicare" and "do you want to hear what I have to say about Medicare?" He didn't give a straight answer about anything.
By the way, just for the record, I personally don't think SS is in trouble IF receipts (taxes) collected for it were to stop being raided and added to the general fund.
Les Jones has this week's Gun Links up. All sorts of interesting links to check out.
Michael at Gay Orbit has been all over it (plus lots more) so just head over there and start reading.
Oh, well, I guess the title says it all. There's a new blog called sfgunban.com dedicated to reporting on all the nonsense the SF city council is up to and the whole sorry attempt to ban handguns there. A definite read. When government behaves badly, the blogosphere responds!
Individ has a post about the youth vote and religion where he reports on a study showing that many of the old stereotypes about college kids today are wrong; many are embracing religion in various degrees (no pun intended). Interesting statistics. Head on over and offer your comments.
Could mankind leave a dying Earth through a wormhole to find new digs elsewhere? I've mentioned Professor Michio Kaku before. Anyway, he's got a fascinating cover story in Prospect Magazine this month so if you're into physics, and astrophysics, check it out.
Two gun rights groups are battling over proposed legislation that might restore the right (after one year) to own a firearm after a domestic violence conviction. From the Aberdeen News:
Two groups that champion gun rights split sharply Friday on a legislative solution seeking to restore gun ownership and the ability of some South Dakotans to hunt again.A 1996 federal law contains a lifetime gun ban for people convicted of domestic violence, whether felonies or misdemeanors. But officials say the federal government will allow exceptions if states have their own laws providing gun penalties for harming family members.
South Dakota has no such law, but SB43 is the vehicle legislators hope will allow the state to circumvent the federal lifetime ban on guns.
A proposed amendment to the bill, which was initially reviewed Friday, would establish a one-year state ban on gun ownership for South Dakotans convicted of domestic violence. It would restore any lost civil rights one year after convictions, and those earlier convicted of domestic violence will regain their guns rights one year after the measure becomes law.
Well, okay, I will say that anyone CONVICTED of true physical domestic violence (and I'm not talking here about all the phony restraining orders many estranged spouses take out on each other) should lose the right to own or have a firearm for many years, until the court or a psychologist is satisfied that the person has not since and will not in the future engage in physical violence.
I'd be interested in what you folks think about this...
Well, it was a cap-gun but I still think the teacher might have had a little too much coffee that morning, plus suffered some brain damage. Anyway, this happened in Barbados:
A teacher at Combermere School, who allegedly pulled a gun on over 20 third form students on Thursday, has been suspended.Chief Education Officer in the Ministry of Education, Wendy Griffith-Watson, said yesterday that investigations were being carried out.
A student from the class told the SATURDAY SUN the weapon was a cap gun, but angry parents said it had not been confirmed if the gun was real.
The student said while the teacher was writing on the board the class was being noisy.
"He turned and said: ‘You know, a teacher could really come in here and shoot all a wunnah,’” the student said.
It was then, he continued, that the teacher bent down and removed what appeared to be a cap gun from his sock and pointed it at the class.
The student said the teacher put the weapon back in the sock, and threatened that one day they would make him angry enough to “bring the real thing”.
"Then he walked about looking at the students’ work, and when he get to certain people he said: ‘I gine shoot you,’ but to others, he said: ‘I will not shoot you, you are nice,’” the student said.
I haven't mentioned the whole Michael Jackson thing because, frankly, I just don't give a shit about him. In my opinion, if he's guilty, he's just another garden-variety mutant pedo -- albeit a wealthy one who can afford lots of lawyers. But I gotta tell ya, look at this fucking guy:
You know why I think, in my opinion, that he's guilty? Because if he was innocent, then after the first accusations of child molesting years ago, he would have closed down his little boy palace Neverland and never been seen near a kid again. Certainly he wouldn't have continued to invite them to sleep-overs at his home.
From what little I know about the subject, I've read that pedophilia is a compulsion, and pedos have to keep doing it. That's why the ones that get out of prison keep going back to their old perverted ways.
And then there's this:
Michael Jackson barred his ex-wife Debbie Rowe from seeing their children or from talking about his alleged drug use or sex life when the couple divorced, court documents obtained by a website showed.In return for a multi-million-dollar financial settlement, Rowe agreed to keep silent about the intimate details of the eccentric Jackson's life, the star now on trial for child molestation, according to thesmokinggun.com.
[...]
The confidentiality pact bans Rowe from talking publicly about "paternity, Michael's mental or physical condition, purported drug use, sexual behavior" or the lifestyle of her children, according to the document filed by Rowe's lawyer.
Jackson should just take whatever money he has left and escape to some small island somewhere and get the fuck out of my face. But NO! Now we'll have to sit through endless TV blather about the trial for the next year-and-a-day. What a freak!
Countertop Chronicles announces the death of gun control. Talk about optimism! Dean was good on the subject as governor but when he ran for president he did state his intention to renew the AWB so... But it's nice to fantasize.
And John R. Lott Jr. is reporting on the death of Ballistic Fingerprinting over at NRO. For more background, read what I wrote here a long time ago. This, too.
Kim du Toit reports on the possibility of permitless concealed-carry in Wyoming. One state at a time we are reclaiming our Nation's principles.
San Francisco take note!
I was hit last night with a pile of trackback spam from a "personal injury lawyer". The only good thing is that I discovered that Jay Allen's terrific MT Blacklist, which I use, also de-spams trackbacks. Weird, I had never toggled that pull-down menu on the de-spam page until now.
Fighting comment spam and now trackback spam is a time-consuming endeavor. We bloggers need to fight back legally!
I mentioned sometime last year that I wondered if anyone could devise some sort of legal notice that could be put on our blogs, comment templates, etc that would state something like:
Comment posting is for non-commercial comments only and may only reference non-commercial web sites. Any comment or trackback which is placed soley to advertise or direct attention to a commercial site such as (debt consolidation, porn, viagra, etc blah blah blah) will be charged standard advertising rates of $10 thousand dollars per incident payable immediately. Generic comments left in multiple posts featuring the same wording and listing a commercial URL for the author will be considered commercial advertising as well and is billed at the same rates. By posting a comment or trackback featuring commercial advertising or a for-profit URL, you agree to be bound by the terms of this contract, etc... Decisions as to what is or is not a commercial advertisement or trackback are the sole determination of the owner of this weblog...
(By the way, don't try using some of the words I just did in your comments -- they're on the Blacklist!)
(Kind of a theme thing going with posts of the past couple days.) Eric Scheie discusses the SF gun ban and the Pink Pistols and civil rights.
According to the BBC, a group of "stars" is filming an "End the Gun Culture" video:
Pop group Sugababes are joining rap and hip-hop stars to film a video calling for an end to gun culture in Britain.Asher D, Big Brovaz, Maxi Priest and Kele Le Roc will also star in the video for SE14-8's single Put Down Your Guns - Let The Light Shine In.
[...]
The song will be released as part of a gun amnesty planned for April, allowing people to hand in firearms before tougher new laws are introduced.There were 10,670 recorded firearms offences in England and Wales in the year to September 2004, according to Home Office figures.
This was up 500 on the previous year.
Maybe instead they should work towards encouraging the government to allow the law-abiding to own guns again -- and use them against the gang-bangers. That would put some fear into the mutants. Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.
Over at Samizdata, a good post about a visit to an LA range.
I really consider the overreaction of things like this ridiculous. Reader Jack sent me this link to a story from the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle:
CHEYENNE - Two 16-year-old students at Cheyenne's Central High face consequences for driving on campus Thursday with an unloaded rifle in their vehicle.As the juveniles drove through the campus parking lot, the .22-caliber rifle remained inside their truck, officials said. The rifle was not taken inside the school, Cheyenne police Sgt. Mark Munari said.
The juveniles, whose names were not released, didn't threaten anyone with the gun, Munari said. No ammunition was found. But bringing a weapon onto school property is a very serious offense, he said.
"We cannot allow weapons to be brought onto school grounds no matter what the circumstances," Munari said.
The weapon was on campus for as long as it took someone to drive through the parking lot, drop off a student and drive off again, Cheyenne's Central High Principal Rick Porter said.
Kin's Kouch is reporting that Britian is loosening their self-defense guidelines. When I'm fully recovered I'll probably have my own take on this.
Please welcome two fine bloggers to my blogroll, Cowboy Blob's Saloon, Humidor, and Shootin Parlor and North Georgia Dogma. Because you can't have too many good places to go to find gun chatter...
I've been under the weather the past couple days, hence the lack of postings. I'm also way behind in reading emails. Sorry about that.