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November 2013
"Well-regulated"
Pre-Heller, anyway, there was a debate about the meaning of "well-regulated militia" in the Second Amendment. One side contended that it meant "tightly controlled and subject to much regulation" and the other contended it meant "orderly," trained, that manner of thing.
I just made a little discovery. In the Framing period, "well-regulated democracy" was sometimes used, in the sense of an orderly, organized democracy, and not in the sense of subject to many regulations.
Future chief justice John Marshall, in the Virginia ratifying convention, said
"We, sir, idolize democracy. Those who oppose it have bestowed eulogiums on monarchy. We prefer this system to any monarchy because we are convinced that it has a greater tendency to secure our liberty and promote our happiness. We admire it because we think it a well-regulated democracy: it is recommended to the good people of this country: they are, through us, to declare whether it be such a plan of government as will establish and secure their freedom."
An English translation of Baron De Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws" states:
"Such is the difference between a well-regulated democracy and one that is not so, that in the former
men are equal only as citizens, but in the latter they are equal also as magistrates, as senators, as
judges, as fathers, as husbands, or as masters."
Permalink · Second Amendment wording · Comments (2)
A good video
Right here.
Another humorous subtitling of that movie
Hitler finds out he didn't draw an elk tag.
new gun auction house
Tactical Auction. Appears to be starting up, and offers listing without fees.
ATF supervisor indicted for embezzlement
Dave Workman has the story.
The guy resigned last year, after it was revealed that he'd hired a serial rapist as an informant, with the guy committing another rape while on duty. He's now charged with embezzling $19,700 from the office's informant payment fund.
Here's more on the informant. Jailed in 43 States (that must be some sort of a record), claimed to have murdered 29 people, arrested for assaulting a lady, then threatened to torture and kill her parents in front of her ... when he was released on probation, the local police were issued a bulletin warning about him as a risk to officer safety.
Permalink · BATFE · Comments (2)
Perp plays "Knockout" with a stun gun....
and gets a bullet in the butt.
"Last month, more than 400,000 adults could lawfully carry hidden handguns in Michigan. That’s one in 17 men and women 21 or older, more than since records have been kept.
An MLive Media Group investigation found that crime numbers continue to drop across Michigan, even as police ranks decline. Some see the seemingly contradictory trends as proof the proliferation of concealed weapons is deterring lawbreakers."
Gun violence: guns don't kill, the people around you do
Interesting study, by Yale sociologists.
They began with a sample of EXCEPTIONALLY at-risk individuals -- 3,700 inner city African-Americans with arrest records. Their area had a homicide rate about ten times that of the US as a whole. But within this group of at-risk individuals, there were clusters where the violence was concentrated. Just having an arrest record raised odds of becoming a victim of gun homicide by 50%. Getting arrested with someone who would go on to become a gun homicide raised the odds of being killed by 900% -- against a population that was generally very much at risk.
I suppose the final thing to be drawn from this is that gun control means trying to control the entire population, in the hopes of getting tiny pockets of lawless and extremely violent people to give up their ways.
UPDATE: it also has implications for permit systems. Assuming for the sake of the argument that those can function, their real task is not issuing permits to the especially law-abiding. Rather, it is sufficient to deny permits to a tiny core of people inclined to violent crime, a much simpler task (if only because gang-bangers with criminal records are unlikely to file an application, and thus self-eliminate). Thus, shall-issue has the same result of may-issue.
Hat tip to Joe Olson...
Permalink · Crime and statistics · Comments (6)
Yet another Bloomberg mayor bites the dust
Gordon Jenkins, Mayor of Monticello, NY, is member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
Over the weekend, he was arrested by Monticello police for drunk driving, resisting arrest, and assault on an officer. While in custody he damaged a clock at the police station, and a charge of criminal mischief was tacked on.
"This isn't the first time Jenkins has run into legal trouble. In 2011, he and Massey pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of selling knockoff Nike sneakers and bogus DVDs from his Monticello store.
....
Another case still is pending next month in Liberty court, in which Jenkins is accused of accidentally hitting and injuring a Monticello police officer during a July 2012 altercation outside Jenkins' G-Man Beauty Supply store."
That's got to hurt
Yesterday I posted regarding Erik Holder's attempt to take an interlocutory appeal from a trial court ruling that the Issa Committee's contempt suit could proceed. The trial court today denied his motion, noting
"As the authority cited by defendant indicates, the Court must objectively determine whether the issue for appeal is one on which there is a substantial ground for dispute. See In re Vitamins Antitrust Litig., No. 99-197 TFH, 2000 WL 33142129, *2 (D.D.C. Nov. 22, 2000) (“It is the duty of the district judge faced with a motion for certification to analyze the strength of the arguments in opposition to the challenged rulings when deciding whether the issue of appeal is truly one on which there is a substantial ground for dispute.”)
The Court is not of the opinion that its denial of the motion to dismiss involves a controlling question of law as to which there is a substantial ground for difference of opinion. As explained in the Memorandum Opinion, the ruling was based upon Supreme Court precedent and Circuit precedent, and it was decided in accordance with an opinion issued by another judge of this court in a substantially similar matter: Comm. on the Judiciary v. Miers, 558 F. Supp. 2d 53 (D.D.C. 2008). Defendant has not pointed to any precedent that would supply the grounds for a difference of opinion; Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811 (1997), which found that individual members of Congress did not have standing to challenge the constitutionality of a legislative enactment, does not govern this action."
Traffic stop -- possible world record
Video here. A traffic stop for speeding turns into not one but two chases, assault on an officer, attempts to smash the windows, shots fired at a van full of kids (and down a highway).
The only good news is (1) the attempt to pull the driver out of the van failed, so she and the officer did not wind up laying on the highway and being smushed by a passing 18 wheeler, and (2) the officer firing was a bad enough shot that he missed the van, the family, and everyone else.
My guess: when the officer pulled her over the first time, he didn't have his clipboard with him, so he walked back to his car. She may have interpreted that as the stop was finished, so she drives away. She does stop the second time, after all. But on the second stop, everything goes insane, so she drives away and doesn't stop until she gets to her hotel.
Armed citizen stops potential mass slaying
A 27 year old gets expelled from a party, returns with a rifle, fires several rounds outside the house, then storms in and points the gun. You won't see this on the national media, because a person inside the house drew a handgun and shot him before he could go any farther.
Permalink · Self defense · Comments (0)
EPA closes last primary lead smelter in US
Story here. On a related front, I guess copper bullets aren't green enough,either. Center for Biological Diversity, which opposes lead bullets, also opposes a new copper mine near Tucson.
A problem with polling
Dave Workman's article covers the only part of the seven hour U Conn. symposium that seems to be getting coverage: an Aggie law prof called for repealing the Second Amendment (and, the coverage leaves unmentioned, substituting an amendment saying that while States can do anything they want regarding guns, Congress can't do anything, anything, about weapons smaller than a tank).
He highlights a problem often seen in polling. At one point she asked how many in the room thought the legislative and judicial response to violent crime had been adequate, and not a hand went up. I think she took that as proof that every person wanted more gun laws, and for them to be sustained. I, on the other hand, didn't raise my hand because I thought Congress had passed many nonsensical gun laws and, apart from the Seventh Circuit, the lower courts had done a poor job enforcing Heller and McDonald. Without asking the details, the results of a poll can be quite misleading. President Obama would probably draw approval rating near zero if you polled pure Marxists, and President Bush II would poll badly among the Tea Party.
Fast and Furious: Holder moves to appeal ruling
Story here. To translate from the legalese:
The trial court refused to dismiss the suit, seeking records, brought by Issa's committee. Holder's attorneys had objected on grounds of Executive Privilege, which traditionally shields documents giving advice rather than revealing facts. "This is why we should run guns to Mexican drug cartels" would be protected, but "The Arizona US Attorney is running guns to the cartels" would not be.
Normally, you can't appeal an "interlocutory" ruling, one made during the case, but which is not a final judgment. Denial of a motion to dismiss fits under that. Appeals courts want to see the case when it is finished, all packaged up, as it were.
There are a few ways around that. One is to ask the appeals court to order the trial judge to make a particular ruling -- but that is utterly within its discretion, and it can deny the motion without any reason, and without giving one. The other is to ask the trial court to certify a purely legal question to the appeals court; "tell me what the law is, so I can proceed." I haven't seen that done in a purely Federal action (I've seen it done where a Federal court certifies an issue of State law to the State Supreme Court, and asks it to interpret its law for guidance of the Federal court). That's what is being done here.
Permalink · BATFE · Comments (1)
The politics of this should get interesting....
Rep. Polis (D-CO) introduces bill to allow firearm possession by persons with medicinal marihuana permits. GCA 68 bans firearm possession by persons who are users of marhuana, and ATF has ruled that holding such a permit was sufficient reason to bar a gun sale. The article notes that one State-licensed grower who had shotguns on premises was charged with GCA violations carrying penalties of 80 years, and was actually sentenced to 5 years.
Permalink · Gun Control Act of 68 · Comments (2)
Events at U Conn Law
It was an all-day seminar, and I think a very good one. Too tired now to say much more, but a high point came when Clayton Cramer and others pinned Richard Aborn, former head of Brady Campaign. He had insisted that he and they were never for banning handguns, that was a canard put out by NRA to scare the average gun owner, they were perfectly comfortable with law-abiding people owning handguns (so long as they registered them). Oh, and they did want to ban "assault rifles."
The pin was: how can you be in favor of banning "assault rifles," which are involved in a fraction of one percent of homicides, and not really be in favor of banning handguns, which are involved in about 50% of them? No answer was forthcoming, but only evasion.
Bill and Melinda Gates give $50,000 to gun control group
One more reason why I'm happy to be on the Mac platform.
Where I'll be on Friday
The Univ. of Connecticut is hosting a symposium on the Second Amendment.
One impressive machine gun
The German HK121. The video of the shooter firing a 7.62 NATO full auto, from the hip, without muzzle rise, is pretty astonishing.
Permalink · shooting · Comments (1)
"Think Progress" lies, and the media eats it up
The theme:: a bunch of people show up with guns to intimidate a meeting of Moms Demand Sense for Gun Control. The reality: the photo was taken from the side, they are actually posing for a photo. But the media appears to have eaten it up.
UPDATE: the New York Times runs the picture and a story:
"“I was terrified,” said the woman who helped coordinate the meeting and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she feared for her safety. “They didn’t want to talk. They wanted to display force.”"
Veteran's Day
I had a father, an uncle, and a father-in-law who served during WWII. They had varying experiences. I remember a talk my father and uncle had. My uncle, George "Bubbles" (a football nickname) Ferguson, had enlisted before the war in the Coast Guard. He figured that war was coming, and the CG should be a safe assignment. Instead, he wound up escorting merchantmen across the North Atlantic. He was on a small ship, I suppose a destroyer escort, with a depth charge projector. On one occasion they narrowly dodged a torpedo, but generally the U boats tried to get the merchant vessels rather than a small escort. Torpedoed ships almost always went down with all hands; if anyone stopped to take on survivors, the U boat would get them, too, and men froze to death in minutes in the icy waters. He talked of going past masses of dead men in their life preservers.
Back to his tale. He said that when he enlisted, his ship went to Norfolk VA. He found the bars and restaurants had signs up to the effect of "Colored and Sailors Not Welcome Here." In a segregated society, servicemen were part of the segregation. Perhaps human, but only barely.
When he was demobilized five years later, he had to return to AZ from the east coast. On that entire journey, he never once paid for a meal. He'd ask for the tab, and the owner would say "it's on the house, sailor," or "your money's not good here, sailor," with a grin. When he did get a tab, every time a civilian scooped it up from the table and paid it.
My father said that he'd been demobilized on the east coast, too, and stood by the side of the road thumbing a ride. A guy stopped, said he was heading to Arizona, too, and we can make it there in three days if we drive day and night. So one would drive and the other sleep in the back seat, then they'd rotate. The driver had no trouble sleeping while a hitchhiker drove his car ... after all, the guy was in uniform, he must be completely trustworthy.
What a change, they agreed. In 1940, a serviceman was subhuman or barely human. In 1945 he was a heroic figure who had saved western civilization.
Dad, Albert D. "Bud" Hardy, had also enlisted before the war, in hopes of seeing the world. He signed up for the Army Air Force after a recruiting sergeant claimed that he had the power to send him to the base of his choice. Dad picked the base and signed...and spent the next year asking when he was going to go to that base, and being told "later."
Then on Dec. 7 1941 he stopped asking, because he was a flight line mechanic and he'd picked Hickam Field, Hawaii, the main target of the second Japanese wave.
After the war, he never flew again. Twice he drove from Tucson to Virginia, for my wedding and for our son's baptism. He told me some tales of experiences. Once he'd been on an overloaded cargo plane, taking from a base somewhere in the South where the runway faced into a mountain. All he could see through the windshield was trees, and he heard the pilot saying to the plane "come on baby, you can make it. Come on. Come on, baby." They cleared the trees by a few feet. Another time they were having a night landing at a base which was entirely "socked in" by low clouds. Planes had no radar, so all you could do was circle and pray, as fuel ran low. Finally there was an opening in the clouds where you could see lights on the ground, and the pilot turned the plane and dove for it, luckily getting thru and finding enough visibility below the clouds to land. He said the other thing was that the cargo pilots mostly started as fighter pilots, so they were accustomed to landing planes with nose wheels, whereas the DC-3 had a tail wheel. So they'd touch down, start to lower the nose, then realize their error and jerk the nose back up.
Dad's early life was pretty rugged ... a one room adobe hut that held three adults and three kids. They slept outside except in rainy weather. Inside room dividers were blankets hung from the ceiling. No running water -- they tried digging a well with no luck. Cooking was outside, three rocks to hold the kettle or pan over a wood fire. I took him back there in, oh, around 2000, and it was his first return since he'd enlisted sixty years before. The three rocks for cooking were still there.
My father in law, Bill Avery, served in the Army, mostly in India and Egypt, as a translator (he had a gift for it, later founded the U of Maryland's Dept of Classical Languages). He'd been to Europe before the war (it broke out as he was on the boat home). While there he once had to translate between a German and an Italian guard. The guard was holding the gate at a big stadium where Hitler and Mussolini were to speak. The Italian guard was saying "nobody gets in without a ticket," and the German pleading, "But I have driven all the way from ___(Munich?) just to hear mein fuhrer speak." And here was an American, who'd soon be in service against them, doing the translating!
He talked some about his time in Egypt. One day a local tried to sell a friend a scarab, supposedly original, for a dollar. The friend laughed him off, saying you probably made that yourself. I might give you a dollar for a bag of them! Next day the guy was back with... a bag of them, and got his dollar.
In India, his closest friend was "Uncle Willy," last name probably Jordan. After the war, Willie suggested that Bill meet his sister, Frances, who was a widow. Her first husband had been Army, and was killed a few weeks after Normandy. They hit it off, and were married. After Bill's death, Fran and I took her to Florida, where she spotted a wishing fountain, the tradition being that if you both cast coins into it you would be re-united when a trip ended. She remarked that she and her first husband had done that and it hadn't worked.
Across the street from me, when I lived in Virginia, was a Navy veteran. He told me that he'd known a guy whose ship had been sunk, and who was left with what is now known as PTSD. In those days, the brass looked at him as a wimp, and sent him back to sea. One day they were in fog, and Japanese planes flew over them at low altitude. The guy panicked, and raced from the front of the ship to its stern (which had been his combat station on the ship that was sunk, "unbuttoning" all the water-tight hatches from one end of the ship to the other. The Navy still refused to let him go.
So they stationed him in a gun turret, assigned to be the guy with the headphones who heard commands and relayed them. The other guys in the turret found this disturbing, because in combat the one guy who could hear what was going on looked like he was paralyzed in terror.
Gonzaga U to re-evaluate antigun policies
A fugitive felon tries to force his way into two students' apartment (off campus, but owned by the University), and flees when one shows him a pistol, is later caught. Gonzaga summons a disciplinary board to decide their penalty, since it has a no-guns policy, then announces it will re-evaluate the policy.
The law of the west works in the east, too
"Never kileed a man who didn't need killing, never shot an animal except for food."
Article on 2013 amendments to Alabama gun laws
Right here, in the Alabama Lawyer. It sounds like there were many changes for the better, but the author notes there are several drafting glitches (which we may hope the Legislature addresses in the future).
Permalink · State legislation · Comments (0)
Taking responsibility
Reading, PA. Two masked robbers enter a convenience store, pointing stolen revolvers at the clerk. A citizen outside sees this, calls 911. When the robbers exit the store, they threaten him, and he shoots and kills both.
Now, their families demand justice:
"The two men were shot and killed by a private citizen while leaving the store, and family members want to see charges pressed.
"[William] had no right to lose his life over something that man could have called the police for," said Medina. "He took the law into his own hands and walked away scot-free."
"How about if people just start running around here, policing the city on their own? How much worse is it going to get?" said Peter Ratel, Medina's cousin.
The family members said they are hurt by comments suggesting the alleged robbers were "thugs.""
Permalink · Crime and statistics · Comments (8)
Impressive....
The military has found that M4s can fail in "sustained fire" (REALLY sustained fire) when the overheated gas tubes burst, so a manufacturer has found a way to insulate the gas tube against radiated heat from the barrel (which reduces part of the problem. I found this video of an M4 being put to the limits interesting. After firing by my count 21 magazines in four minutes, the gas tube blew. The handguard started to burn before that point....
Permalink · shooting · Comments (1)
The DC gun laws are working so well...
That the audio monitors they have to localize sounds of gunshots have only picked up 39,000 gunshots in the last six years, over 6,000 per annum. But then the system only covers the most violent one-third of the city.
Interesting Georgia case
Eugene Volokh discusses Hertz v. Bennett, at the Volokh Conspiracy. The holding of the case isn't that astonishing: a person who pled out to five felony counts (three involving violent offenses) involving illegal gun use can be denied a concealed carry permit, even if the charges technically did not end in convictions.
What's interesting is that the three judges who concur in the result specifically state that the court's analysis presupposes that the right to arm extends to carry outside the home (which other courts have treated as "we'll do this if the Supreme Court orders us to, and not otherwise.").
Articles of capitulation at Yorktown, 1781
Just came across them. This was indeed war of the 18th century. They were rather tough terms: the British had to march out with the flags cases instead of flying, and had to play one of their own marching tunes, instead of one of their opponents'. Officers and men will keep their private property, and it will not be inspected. Officers will be allowed to keep one servant each, and be allowed to return to England if they give their parole. A captured sloop will be lent to Gen. Cornwallis, but will become French property upon its return. Traders will be allowed three months to sell off their inventory.
CT man charged for having posted about a toy gun on Facebook
It's blogged over at the Volokh Conspiracy. A person concerned about lax security at a school posted to Facebook, "“Maybe I have to walk in with Toy guns just to prove a point!”
Let's see, it's not a threat, but a question. It concerns a legal action, and a toy. It's not likely to cause the reader to take action that may result in injury to others ("falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.") -- and the courts have long moved beyond that test anyway. Looks like a clear First Amendment violation to me.
Permalink · General con law · Comments (0)
This really isn't safe to do in Florida....
Serial child molester enters mother's home wearing a Jason mask. She shot a little low, to my thinking.