People who wanted a little bit of security in lieu of liberty.
Month: December 2012
Propaganda Alert from The Associated Press
Shear propaganda as written by the White House in an attempt to create some news:
President Barack Obama has signed into law a five-year extension of the U.S. government’s authority to monitor the overseas activity of suspected foreign spies and terrorists. ….
The law does not apply to Americans. When Americans are targeted for surveillance, the government must get a warrant from a special 11-judge court of U.S. district judges appointed by the Supreme Court.
via The Associated Press.
This is of course the White House trying to move the news off of Hillary not testifying on Benghazi, Eric Holder selling guns to Mexico yet Obama now saying those guns should be illegal anyway (I guess to prevent Holder from selling any more to Mexican drug cartels,) and the ever present fiscal cliff.
Lest we forget, Holder is the guy who said that the U.S. government can kill you without so much as a hearing or trial. So forgive me but it’s more than just a little out of place for the same people to now try to make a big deal over taping some phone calls.
“Don’t worry. We won’t read your emails and tap your phone without a court order. … But, we can drone bomb your ass to kill you and your entire family based on the opinion of some nameless person in the administration who thinks you’re a threat. Ya, we don’t need a court order for that.”
Sea Turtle Meets A Scuba Diver
Very cool video:
Sea turtles do the cutest things. In this video posted to Reddit, a friendly sea turtle pays a surprise visit to a scuba diver. At first, the diver pushes the curious animal away with a big shove to its belly. But the turtle persists. The diver quickly comes around and starts to pet its head. Enya’s “Boadicea” provides some nice background music during the entire encounter.
Researcher Lisa Belskis, a marine biologist for NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center tell us that the the turtle in this video is an adult or maturing male hawksbill turtle.
The behavior is not unheard of, although it is less typical.
“There have been many anecdotal reports of male hardshell sea turtles approaching divers attempting to mount them, particularly during breeding season,” Belskis wrote us in an email. “From my personal experience I have found that most often turtles go about their everyday business and ignore divers. If divers notice a nearby turtle it will likely stay still as if hoping its camouflage is working and if pursued by a diver they tend to flee.”
via Business Insider.
Click the link above; I’m sorry but WP will not let me embed this video.
Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control
The U.K. and Australia:
A media frenzy coupled with an emotional campaign by parents of Dunblane resulted in the Firearms Act of 1998, which instituted a nearly complete ban on handguns. Owners of pistols were required to turn them in. The penalty for illegal possession of a pistol is up to 10 years in prison.
The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.
Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who have come into the possession of a firearm, even accidentally, have been harshly treated. In 2009 a former soldier, Paul Clarke, found a bag in his garden containing a shotgun. He brought it to the police station and was immediately handcuffed and charged with possession of the gun. At his trial the judge noted: “In law there is no dispute that Mr. Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.” Mr. Clarke was sentenced to five years in prison. A public outcry eventually won his release.
In November of this year, Danny Nightingale, member of a British special forces unit in Iraq and Afghanistan, was sentenced to 18 months in military prison for possession of a pistol and ammunition. Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action. Mr. Nightingale pleaded guilty to avoid a five-year sentence and was in prison until an appeal and public outcry freed him on Nov. 29.
-=-=-=-
With new Prime Minister John Howard in the lead, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement, banning all semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns and imposing a more restrictive licensing system on other firearms. The government also launched a forced buyback scheme to remove thousands of firearms from private hands. Between Oct. 1, 1996, and Sept. 30, 1997, the government purchased and destroyed more than 631,000 of the banned guns at a cost of $500 million.
To what end? While there has been much controversy over the result of the law and buyback, Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos, in a 2003 study published by the Brookings Institution, found homicides “continued a modest decline” since 1997. They concluded that the impact of the National Firearms Agreement was “relatively small,” with the daily rate of firearms homicides declining 3.2%.
According to their study, the use of handguns rather than long guns (rifles and shotguns) went up sharply, but only one out of 117 gun homicides in the two years following the 1996 National Firearms Agreement used a registered gun. Suicides with firearms went down but suicides by other means went up. They reported “a modest reduction in the severity” of massacres (four or more indiscriminate homicides) in the five years since the government weapons buyback. These involved knives, gas and arson rather than firearms.
In 2008, the Australian Institute of Criminology reported a decrease of 9% in homicides and a one-third decrease in armed robbery since the 1990s, but an increase of over 40% in assaults and 20% in sexual assaults.
via WSJ.com.
Gun “control” laws in the U.K. and Australia have not made those people safer. It’s an illusion. When emotion gets ahead of reason people sacrifice liberty for the illusion of security — a la TSA — and get neither.
UK Doctors’ Called For Kitchen Knife Ban
Yes, seriously.
A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.
They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.
The research is published in the British Medical Journal.
The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.
via BBC NEWS.
Who’s crazy now?
Anti-Gun laws in the UK have been an epic fail.
Anti-Gun laws in Chicago have been an epic fail.
Anti-Gun laws everywhere have been a failure.
Yet the left continues to try to take away guns from honest law abiding citizens. It’s never going to work. It’s never worked.
Obama Admin Quietly Released 8,500 Criminals, Some Killers
Qian Wu thought the man who brutally attacked her was gone forever.
She was sure that Huang Chen, a Chinese citizen who slipped into America on a ship and stayed in the country illegally, would be deported as soon as he got out of jail for choking, punching, and pointing a knife at her in 2006.
But China refused to take Chen back. So, after jailing Chen on and off for three years in Texas, immigration officials believed they were out of options and did what they have done with thousands of criminals like him.
They quietly let him go.
Nobody warned Wu, or prosecutors, or the public. The petite, 46-year-old woman learned Chen was still here when he stormed into her unlocked apartment one day in January 2010 and announced, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me.” Terrified, she called the police, and he fled. But for two weeks, Chen was free to stalk her and finally, to catch her as she hurried home with milk and bread one afternoon.
Chen then finished what he had started earlier, bashing Wu on the head with a hammer and slashing her with a knife. As she lay crumpled in a grimy stairwell, he ripped out her heart and a lung and fled with his macabre trophies.
“She lived in horror in the last two weeks of her life,” said Yongwei Guo, Wu’s widower, through an interpreter in New York. “She knew there was somebody coming to kill her and we asked the police for protection, and also the government, but they did nothing.”
via The Boston Globe.
Kudos to the Boston Globe from bringing this to light.
Armed Guards at Schools… Common
Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools — about one-third of all public schools — already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data, for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days.
via NYTimes.com.
NRA proposal not out of line by any stretch of the imagine.
Obama’s Daughters’ School Has 11 Armed Guards
The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak. …
If you dismiss this by saying, “Of course they have armed guards — they get Secret Service protection,” then you’ve missed the larger point.
The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period. And this is the reason people like NBC’s David Gregory send their kids to Sidwell, they know their kids will be protected from the carnage that befell kids at a school where armed guards weren’t used (and weren’t even allowed).
Shame on President Obama for seeking more gun control and for trying to prevent the parents of other school children from doing what he has clearly done for his own. His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.
Draw your own conclusions.
446 School Age Children Shot in Chicago
MSM Silent:
In Chicago, there have been 446 school age children shot in leftist utopia run by Rahm Emanuel and that produced Obama, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, etc. 62 school aged children have actually been killed by crazed nuts in Chicago so far this year with almost two weeks to go. So why isn’t this news worthy? Is it because it would embarrass those anti second amendment nuts who brag about Chicago’s tough gun laws? Is it because most of the kids who were shot and killed were minorities? Or is it because the corrupt media doesn’t want to show Chicago in a bad light? Amazingly, no Obama crocodile tears either.
For those of you too dense to get the point of this post, it’s to make the point about gun laws. No matter how tough the gun laws are, the crazed, nut jobs will find a way to get them and if they so chose, use them. No draconian law can stop this, no matter how well intentioned the law is, or if it’s just about leftists grabbing power from citizens and taking away their constitutional rights.
I raised this very issue right after the Newton tragedy. This guy poked around and found the numbers at Crime in Chicago (an excellent source of what’s really going on in the Second City.) I found the story at Second City Cop (which you should be reading everyday.)
Getting Serious About School Security
Treat like a fire.
“Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.
“But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”
Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.
via Police One.
This is taken from the middle of an excellent article. It starts with the historical problem and walks you through a simple solution.
Common sense for everyone, and every school.