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October 2014
Yet more irony...
N.C. State Fair declares itself a "gun free zone;" three fairgoers are robbed at gunpoint.
Students face expulsion over pic of airsoft guns
Yet another case of academic BS. The pic was posted to his Facebook page, not on any school (electronic) property or site. The sanction is supposedly because he "caused disruption."
Instapundit is right: it's getting to where sending your kids to public school is a form of child abuse. In this case, I'd think the academic supervisors need training course in the First Amendment.
Permalink · "no tolerance" BS · Comments (5)
Howard U Law symposium on firearm laws
It's to be held on Thursday, Nov. 6, at their law school (2900 Van Ness Street, NW, Washington DC 20008 -- the law school is not part of their main campus). Dave Kopel and I will speak, against an Orkish horde. Webpage here.
An unusual case of self-defense
Woman draws gun on neighbor, holds him, after she discovers him raping her pit bull, he announces that ISIS sent him to do the deed, and tells her that she will die the moment she kills him.
Understatement of the year: "Woodruff said the man appeared mentally ill..."
Permalink · Self defense · Comments (5)
More on anti-NRA ebola nonsense
A while back I posted on MSNBC's poppycock claim that NRA was somehow responsible for Ebola's menace, since NRA had blocked the nomination of an anti-gun Surgeon General and that somehow impaired our response.
When an agency has no top dog, an "acting" head is appointed, often the deputy top dog. Yep, there is an acting Surgeon General. It gets better. Many small agencies are organized along these lines: (1) the chief is a political appointee, given the post as a political payback; his or her job consists of traveling around the country and giving speeches. (2) The deputy chief is a careerist who knows the agency, and actually runs the place. Some checking showed the Surgeon General's Office appears to be organized on these lines.
The result is that the deputy Surgeon General, now acting Surgeon General, is Boris Lushniak, MD. He started his medical career 31 years ago as a med student with the Public Health Service, and rose through the ranks. He's served with the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, and with the FDA, as Chief Medical Officer of the Office of Counterterrorism. It doesn't look like the absence of a confirmed Surgeon General is hurting us.
Permalink · NRA ~ · media · Comments (2)
SAF files against Illinois yet again....
SAF, Illinois Carry, and Illinois State Rifle and Pistol have filed Culp v. Madigan (C. D. Ill.), challenging a feature of the new handgun carry permit system, adopted in the wake of prior legal challenges. The new system, for reasons that seem hard to understand, says that nonresidents can only apply for a carry permit if their own State has a handgun carry permit system substantially identical to that of Illinois. Attorney is David Sigale.
The suit should be a winner. It's hard even to understand how that limitation got in there. I can only guess that someone knew that carry permit systems often have reciprocity and that these provisions commonly limit recognition to permits issued by States with similar standards, or standards at least as strict as those of the State being asked to recognize them. But the provision here isn't a matter of reciprocity, but of which nonresidents can get an Illinois permit.
Permalink · Chicago aftermath ~ · State legislation · Comments (2)
Extraordinary
Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Info lawsuit regarding ATF's operation "Fast and Furious," which ran guns to Mexican drug cartels.
Extraordinary. The spouse of a government employee is not a member of the executive branch, she's a member of the general public.
Permalink · BATFE · Comments (1)
Shootout in Ottawa
Gunman storms the Canadian Parliament building -- and finds the Master at Arms is indeed armed. Nice shooting. The only thing that stopped a bad guy with a gun was a good guy with a gun.
Pennsylvania passes preemption
Story here. Sounds like the statute allows for recovery of attorney's fees, which would be an important addition.
Supreme Court takes a gun forfeiture case
The Court just granted cert. in Henderson v. U.S.. The issue: can a person who is convicted of a felony, and has firearms seized (because of his status as a felon, not because the guns were used in an offense), deal with it by selling them to another party, who does not have a felony record?
There's a recent law review article on just that topic.
Permalink · Gun Control Act of 68 · Comments (2)
Connecticut Law Review is online
Symposium issue here. Very interesting articles. George Mocsary on requiring insurance as a condition of gun ownership, Clayton Cramer on mental illness and the 2A, Michael O'Shea on slippery slope and background checks, myself on standard of review Josh Blackman and Shelby Baird on the "Shooting cycle" -- mass killings and media coverage lead to support for gun restrictions, but the support soon fades away.
Also of course some antis.
Permalink · Academic treatment · Comments (0)
Robbery in AZ has its risks
Robbers hit credit union, are departing with a sack of cash when an incoming customer opens fire and kills one. This is Arizona. When it comes to concealed carry, we don' need no steenking permits.
"ThinkProgress" has second thoughts on no-retreat
"South Carolina Prosecutors Say Stand Your Ground Doesn't Apply To Victims Of Domestic Violence." Sounds like the argument is a variant of "the statute on its face says this, but we can't believe the legislature meant this to happen." Amusing to see prosecutors arguing that. It's usually argued by defense counsel, when the prosecutor comes up with a theory that the statute, if applied very literally, would turn a jaywalking charge into a ten year felony sentence.
UPDATE in light of comment: thanks for the citation. It looks to me as if ยง16-11-400 breaks down:
A. Presumption of reasonable fear if home is illegally entered.
B. Exceptions: (A) does not apply if other person is a lawful resident, etc.
C. A person who is in a place where he has a lawful right to be has no duty to retreat if attacked.
The article may have gotten it wrong (lots of reporters think (A), which is castle doctrine, is no-retreat. But if the defense is based on (C), that subsection has no exemption for the attacker being a co-resident. And I could see why the Legislature might want to create an exemption for A but not for C.
Permalink · Self defense · Comments (3)
Zero tolerance = zero brains, part 2,356
An entirely nice female student, who has to travel though rough areas of Detroit, gets suspended from school for an entire year after she is found with a pocketknife that was a quarter inch longer than the school rules allowed.
I can't help but wonder if what we are seeing is "cracking down on the aggressive thugs in school might be difficult or dangerous, so let's crack down on the decent students."
Permalink · "no tolerance" BS · Comments (3)
Australian criminals adapt to the times
Prices of black market semiautos rise into the thousands, so criminals turn to sharing or leasing out their guns. They even do so on a contingency basis: the user only pays if he actually commits a crime with it.
Memories
Joe Foss, NRA President who earned the Medal of Honor. I got off the plane with him in DC when he was talking about the incident with airport security, and I called some folks who had media contacts.
Not in the official story: that was shortly after 9/11, when they had National Guardsmen (with, I noted, no magazines in their rifles, this was more "security theater") in the airports. Joe told me that when the airport security people gave him flak about carrying his Medal of Honor -- it had vaguely sharp points -- he called over a Guard lieutenant to tell them what it was. The lieutenant didn't know. Foss dressed him down. The lieutenant took it, which (since Foss's next stop was West Point, to give the commencement address) was probably a very good idea.
When I worked at Interior Dept, NRA had an annual meeting at Philadelphia, and one of the other attorneys had a father who'd fought as a USMC grunt at Guadalcanal, and was going to the meeting just to see Foss again, after half a century. I asked him what a man had to do to earn the Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal, where, as one writer puts it, courage above and beyond was an everyday matter. He told me that his father had related some extraordinary things, draining other fighters of gasoline by hand pump while the airfield was under artillery fire and every sane man was in a foxhole, to put gas into his own plane so he could go up and engage whatever was incoming without a wingman.
Heinlein says that there are no deadly weapons, only weapons and deadly men, and Foss was the extreme case of the latter.
Restoring rights?
Interesting. But I wish the story explained how the person lost their firearm rights. I can only think of (1) it's some State disqualified or (2) while he was incapacitated following the stroke, they had a guardian created for his property, and that was treated as being found mentally defective.
Permalink · prohibitted persons · Comments (2)
Safety concerns about some 9mm ammo
Article here. It's apparently military contract overrun, and loaded to 9mm+P levels, good in modern guns but not in all.
BATF settles with another whistle-blower agent
David Codrea has the story. The BATF hierarchy terminated Agent Vince Cefalu after he exposed illegal wiretapping. (The grounds for the firing were essentially "telling the truth while under oath"). The District Court settlement is that he will be reinstated, allowed to retire, negative references will be deleted from his record, and the government will pay attorneys' fees.
Permalink · BATFE · Comments (2)
DC gun registry operating at usual efficiency
Unless, as the saying goes, "that's not a bug, that's a feature!" The District is requiring submission of a second set of fingerprints, stating that it somehow lost the first set.
Bloomberg hypocrisy
NRA lights a fire under the former mayor.
To his mind, it's not hypocrisy, mind you. One of the traits of narcissistic personality disorder is for the person to feel that he can lay down rules, but they don't apply to him because he is "special," with unique purposes, attributes, and needs.
Permalink · antigun groups · Comments (1)
Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition....
Story here.
That's funny, I thought it was George Bush
MSNBC finds someone to blame for the Ebola scare: the NRA.
I just hope they never figure out how the virus was genetically modified in the NRA labs so that it cannot infect anyone who has recently been exposed to nitrocellulose smoke or Hoppe's No. 9.
Permalink · antigun groups ~ · media · Comments (3)