People who wanted a little bit of security in lieu of liberty.
Category: Law
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Pearl High School Shooting: Oct. 1, 1997
I am not insane, I am angry. I am a cross dresser. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. … All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. … It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can’t pry your eyes open, if I can’t do it through pacifism, if I can’t show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.
— Luke Woodham, Shootervia Wikipedia
The parallels to Newton are spooky: Smart kid starts the day by killing his mother and then going to a school to kill as many as he can.
At Pearl High School however Luke Woodham was stopped by the school’s principal who ran out to his truck a retrieved his .45 handgun.
The Wiki article is short. Worth reading. Newton could have been very very different if someone in or very near that school was armed.
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Newton CT – Day 3
I wrote something short on the Facebook page of an old friend who called for more “gun control.” He wrote back. I wrote this response.
I actually live on the “West Side” near [omitted.] My first comment on the Newton matter was to wonder why the events in Newton & Aurora get big news while we can’t get any real media attention about Chicago killing 450 black (and brown) children ever year in this city. We may not live near Fenger but we’re touched by violence. My wife was out walking our baby (now six) in a buggy when a block away a kid was shot by Crane H.S. The wife and kid were nearly trampled in the ensuing stampede of children away from the scene. She was also out walking with the baby the day that they beat a kid to death with a baseball bat or golf club or something literally on the steps of the H.S.
And that my old friend is the telling part – if the gang wants you dead they don’t need a gun to make that happen. The same day as the tragedy in Newton some wacko killed 20 kids with a sword at a school in China. Banning guns will not prevent crazy & will not stop mass killings.
There are many many things that went wrong in Newton. Mom should have been a better gun owner and kept her guns in a safe (I keep my guns in a safe.) It appears that access to the school was through a broken window. Perhaps the physical infrastructure needed to be improved. Having talked to people “on the job” I know that CPD policy in Chicago is that 1st on the scene does NOT go into the building b/c they don’t know what they’re dealing with. I think this is a bad policy. You cannot have cops literally 30-40 feet away standing around while kids are getting shot. My guess is that L.E. took a long time to “secure” the building which delayed EMS from getting to the victims. And my guess is that EMS in Newton is simply not equipped to deal with gunshot wounds the way that we deal with them here (I believe the Army still trains field surgeons at County.)
It’s just easy to blame the firearm. There are about 250 million vehicles in the country. There are about 310 non-military firearms (via CNN Aug. 9, 2012.) According to the CDC in 2010 children ages 5-9 were 6 times more likely to die in a traffic accident than by a firearm. Children are over twice as likely to drown and 1.5 times as likely to die in a fire over being killed by a gun. These are facts at the second link in my previous post. So if you’re serious about saving kids lives look at making cars and pools safer.
As for who as access and training, perhaps you raise a point. However I have been trained. I’ve completed a 4 hour class on gun safety. A 10 hour NRA class on safety and marksmanship. 40 hours on the laws in Illinois (despite already being an attorney.) I train regularly at a local range which costs $70-80 per visit (fees + ammo.) I’m fully prepared to stop anyone who should attack me or my family yet I pray everyday that I never need to. But I’m lucky; I have the means to make this happen. It is very expensive.
Self defense is everyone’s right. Recently there was this story: http://abcnews.go.com/US/kendra-st-clair-oklahoma-girl-12-shoots-intruder/story?id=17524438#.UM9OU3fzEyg This girl had no training and my guess is that her family did/does not have the means to send her and the rest of her family to training at $200 a head. This type of situation plays out everyday (the old man in the FL internet cafe also recently made news b/c there was security video.) Guns are used defensively far more often than offensively. There’s a good chance that Kendra St. Clair would be dead if she didn’t have her mother’s gun.
And that is where the NRA and the so called “Gun Lobby” is coming from. Yes, the events in Newton and VA Tech and everywhere else are tragic. But for every Newton there are 50 or 60 or 100 Kendra St. Clair’s. Battered wives and girlfriends who are able to protect themselves from abusive men. Store owners who use their guns to prevent a crime from happening simply by not being an easy target. What about these people?
When seconds count the police are just minutes away. A few years ago some kids were popping off a few shots out of a revolver in the alley beside my house. I called 911 and reported “shots fired.” It took over 15 mins for CPD to arrive. That’s the response time in an urban area to shots fired. If these kids kicked-in the door to my house we’d all be dead by the time CPD arrived… if I didn’t have the ability to shoot back (well that and our 145 pounds worth of dogs.) You can imagine what the response time would be out in the sticks. I sleep better knowing that if someone’s in the house odds are nearly perfect that I won’t need to actually shoot them. I can put two rounds into the bathroom shower and the intruder will not stick around to see where the next ones go.
Your experience at OTSC is common. I know of parents who made their kids sleep in the bathtub for fear of a stray round coming through the wall or window. But no law is going to take those guns out of the hands of gang-bangers. A good start would be to get the Democratic machine that runs this town to turn over all felons w/ guns to the feds. 5 year min law is on the books but Ms. Anita Alveraz refused to send them over to the feds. Why?
Ya see… there are a LOT of gun laws on the books that are simply not enforced. I truly believe this is b/c Rahm, Obama, Holder, and the rest of the Democrat cabal actively choose not to enforce them so they can demand new laws. It’s a sham.
So to recap:
– Guns are not the single cause of the tragedy;
– Guns are not as deadly to kids as cars, pools, or fires;
– Guns are mostly used defensively and save thousands of lives each year;
– Most gun violence is caused by illegally held guns; and
– We should start by enforcing the laws already on the books and insisting that violent offenders do real time. -
Senate Rejects United Nations Treaty, Will Do So Again
A United Nations treaty to ban discrimination against people with disabilities went down to defeat in the Senate on Tuesday in a 61-38 vote.
The treaty backed by President Obama and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas) fell 5 votes short of the two-thirds needed for confirmation as dozens of Senate Republicans objected that it would create new abortion rights and impede the ability of people to home-school disabled children.
This is why any UN treaty restricting arms trade is doomed to fail. The UN can pass whatever it likes. But there is not way you’re going to get 66 votes in the Senate to ratify it.
Everyone at the NRA needs to take a deep breath. ok?
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Cops Want Your TXTs
Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans’ text messages
State and local law enforcement groups want wireless providers to store detailed information about your SMS messages for at least two years — in case they’re needed for future criminal investigations.
via CNET News.
I find this rather troubling.
Cops addicted to power. Congress too dumb to know better. This bill has a fair chance of passing.
Of course it will not help fight crime at all. Not in the least. Criminals will simply use “burner phones” which are untraceable. Pay cash at Wal-Mart and as the song sez, F#!^ the police.
Writing that I’m thinking something needs to be made clear:
Individual police officers are heroes; as are firemen.
Police departments are jack-booted thugs who actually believe that if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide.
Your privacy is at stake here. You may want to do something.
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Pensioners Take Note, Municipal Bond Storm Coming
[B]ut California too is now starting to hand it to bondholders. Cities in California are now testing the limits of bankruptcy law, and not paying the debt nor the payments for retirees to the state system. Thus this article describes how the state retirement system (CALPERS) is suing to demand payment, and saying that retiree obligations come AHEAD of creditors (municipal bond holders) in the queue.
“The issue is, do Calpers obligations supersede unsecured bondholders?” Fabian said in a telephone interview. “There’s an awful lot of unsecured bondholders in California. If you put pension obligations to Calpers as secured and senior to unsecured debt, in effect those bonds have been downgraded.”
In the Stockton and San Bernardino cases, Calpers is arguing that pension contributions must be made ahead of payments to other creditors because they are so-called statutory liens, or debts that state law requires to be paid. Bondholders and other creditors that oppose Calpers argue that pension debt is a contractual obligation like any other.
You’d have to be nuts to buy California municipal debt if Calpers has precedence and employee retirement benefits can’t be cut, since this is the MAIN THING that is driving these cities into insolvency. In the future likely these municipalities would just contract out everything to third parties that wouldn’t pay their employees those giant benefits, but the cities have to jettison these liabilities to put their fiscal house in order today.
via Chicago Boyz.
In case this is a little tough to follow, in bankruptcy debts are paid according to a priority. There’s a decent primer here.
The “Illinois” based pensions are probably ok. e.g. ITRS. There is no statute permitting a state to file for bankruptcy protection.
However cities are corporations; they can (and do) file for bankruptcy protection. CPS, CPD, CFD employees and retirees should watch these cases in California closely. They may be getting a real haircut if they have to defer to the bond holders to get their money.
It’s all very very sad.
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Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants | Politics and Law – CNET News
A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.
CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail, is scheduled for next week.
via CNET News.
Very sad.