Guns.com:

Dash cam footage recently obtained by M Live shows the 14-minute confrontation in March between Grand Rapids Police Officers and 28-year-old Johann Deffert over a legally possessed firearm. An incident which has resulted in a federal lawsuit against the city and the officers involved.

Deffert was simply taking a walk down the street on a Sunday morning after he had finished enjoying breakfast at a nearby restaurant when he was stopped and detained by police because he was openly carrying a holstered handgun, which is legal in the state of Michigan.

Officer William Moe was the first to confront Deffert after a woman called 911 to report that she had seen a man walking on the sidewalk with a gun “strapped to his leg.” The woman was surprised when the 911 operator informed her that open carry was legal in the state.

After asking several questions about what is and is not legal when it comes to carrying firearms in the state, the woman insisted that the man looked “scary” because he was wearing camo and carrying a gun.

I see “scary” looking people every day and I don’t call the police to investigate them.  There is no law against looking scary.

The dispatcher sent an officer out to investigate the report of a “suspicious person.”

As Moe pulled his patrol car to the area where Deffert was walking, he told the dispatcher that the man did appear to have a holstered weapon and claimed that the man was “talking to nobody.”

As Moe exited the car, with his service pistol drawn and trained on Deffert, he ordered the man to get down on the ground and put his hands up. “Do not move,” he instructed Deffert, asking, “Why do you have a handgun on you?”

Deffert remained calm, cooperative and respectful and replied, “It’s my constitutional right to defend myself.”

But apparently that answer was not sufficient for Moe, who continued to probe the man about why he would be walking down the street openly carrying a firearm and eventually said, “I gotta make sure you’re not a felon, right?” Deffert informed the officer that he actually did not have to check on that and even offered to show him the penal code.

I’ve got a big, big problem here.  First of all not only is Michigan an open carry state, it has no stop and identify statute.  As far as the police officer is concerned, the person could have been Mutt or Jeff.  It doesn’t matter.  The officer violated the law by stopping him for the purpose of identifying who he is.  Here is the video.

And of course the second and biggest problem is that he unholstered his weapon and aimed it at Deffert.  This is an obvious lack of muzzle discipline and highly irresponsible and dangerous.  If we do things like that we get arrested on felony charges and go to prison, which is exactly what should happen to this officer.

Deffert has filed a lawsuit against the city.  I hope he wins, but more than that, I hope that God visits his wrath on the police department.  As for their police department response, they have requested that the case be thrown out.  Of course they have.  They should mind their manners a little more.  The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department was rebuked by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals for this very thing.

Communist Cuomo in his own words.

The amusing thing is that he tried to walk this back by quoting his own words which are exactly as recorded above.  I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again.  I plan my gun purchases around not buying products made in New York if possible.

So Remington, Kimber, and any other gun manufacturers still in New York – I have one question.  Why?  Why haven’t you relocated to another state where I can once again consider doing business with your company?

Orangeburg, S.C.

South Carolina authorities are searching for seven men involved in a bizarre home invasion and kidnapping.

Police were called to an Orangeburg home at approximately 3:55p.m. on Tuesday in reference to an burglary and kidnapping.

Authorities say their investigation indicates seven unknown males with guns forced their way into the residence, forcing three adults and six juveniles to the floor. One of the gunmen struck a 52-year-old woman in the head with a gun while she was protecting her grandson. A 4-month-old was taken from the residence.

According to police, this was a targeted crime.

Renee Gilliard wasn’t home at the time but said she was horrified to learn the only thing the intruders found was her baby girl. The baby was gone for about two hours before she was found in Berkeley County by a passerby who saw the criminals discard the child on the side of the road.

Yea.  A seven-man home invasion.  If you’re toting a 1911 from room to room, you’d better be damned accurate with that thing.  I have carried a rifle from room to room before around the house, but it’s truly obnoxious.  I would carry a 1911 around the house, but in a seven-man home invasion I think I’d be better off with one of my polymer-frame double-stack pistols.

This will be a little different than some articles, a throwback to my military blogging, and very frank.  It will likely offend some people, and since it comes straight from a former enlisted Marine, there is slight language warning.

I should say up front that I like for the comments to be free flowing where readers can disagree with my views (respectfully, of course).  But in this instance I would offer up the following guidelines.  First, stick to the point of the article.  The article isn’t about the justification or lack thereof for OEF, OIF, or any other campaign or operation.  The article isn’t about politics.  Second, there will be no disparaging comments about Navy SEALs, the U.S. Marine Corps, or my son Daniel (whose assessment this is).  I will spam all such comments.  Finally, if you make comments about the “military-industrial complex,” I will laugh at you as I spam your comment.

This article is about tactics, plain and simple.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It will be frank, open, and honest.  Nothing herein is construed to malign the bravery and exploits of anyone in any operation, anywhere, at any time.  It comes from a former enlisted Marine, so take it for what it’s worth – a former enlisted Marine’s view of Operation Red Wings.  With that said, I’ll now offer up my son Daniel’s comments regarding the movie Lone Survivor, knowing the story beforehand, but commenting to me after having seen the movie.

“This operation should never have come off the way it did.  The Marines don’t take chances.  I saw a room full of Navy SEALs sitting on their assess back at the FOB doing nothing but monitoring comms.  If you set four SEALs down by helicopter, you could have set an entire platoon down.  There was no reason to limit the recon team to four.”

“I was on a recon mission in Fallujah, and we had an entire platoon.  We were monitoring a mosque for anti-American messaging, and we were beside a building (abandoned school) that AQ was using to execute leaders of Fallujah.  We were watching the mosque and someone came over comms and said, “Um guys, there are dudes with masks on that just got out of cars with some other dude who had a hood on.”  We started watching them, and sure enough, they were AQ getting reading to execute another elder.  We laid waste to them because we had a platoon, not a four man fire team.  Even when doing recon, we have enough men.  We escorted snipers to their two- or three-day post, and then escorted them back.  We didn’t want our Scout Snipers getting killed on the way to or from their post.”

“Alternatively, since you knew comms was going to be bad on the other side of that mountain, you could have set down another team of four SEALs on top of the mountain or near it, who could have then relayed comms to the FOB from the recon team.  We did stuff like that all the time.  There was no excuse to have sent a team of four.  And there was no excuse to have poor comms when you knew you were going to have poor comms.”

“Another example showing that they didn’t think ahead and plan for the worst is …” (and at that point I interjected, “Why wasn’t anyone carrying …”) a SAW (Daniel said)?  ‘Yes’, I responded.  “The fact that they had suppressed, scoped weapons shows that they were not prepared to lay down suppressive fire.  They hadn’t planned for the worst.  Marines plan for the worst.”

“Furthermore, they were laying around when the goat herders stumbled up.  If it had been my fire team, I would have said “never stop moving, but if you do, then we’re going to dig in and act like we’re going to defend this terrain to the death.”  We would have dug in in such a manner that we had interlocking fields of fire, all built around a SAW where we could have done fire and maneuver.”

“Next, about that conversation they had concerning the goat herders.  I would have ended it in a hurry.  I would have popped both goat herders and then popped all of the goats.  They could charge me later, but in the mean time the operation was compromised and it was time to leave.”  (Editorial note: Comments at this article dream up scenarios where they could have taken the “prisoners” with them and avoided all of the problems.  It’s all a day dream.  Attempting to take the goat herders to the top of the mountain would have slowed them and left them in the same situation, as well as told the goat herders that they were unwilling to shoot them, at which point the goat herders would have done the same thing, run down the mountain and tell the Taliban commanders).

He said that they badly underestimated the capabilities of the Afghan fighters.  Those folks were born there, and their lungs are acclimated to the thin air.  Given the weight of the kit they were hauling, it was foolish to think that they could have beaten indigenous men up to the top of the mountain when those men were wearing thin man-dresses and carrying nothing but an AK-47 and a couple of magazines.

I asked Daniel what the worst case was if an entire platoon of SEALs would have deployed instead of the four man recon team and the Taliban commander wasn’t in the village, and he said “So what?  Take some MREs with you, go into the village, drink chai with the elders, win a little hearts and minds, and get some intel.  Do counterinsurgency, something the SEALs think they’re too good to do.”

As for the loss of the QRF, Daniel was just livid.  The notion that the QRF lost its CAS to other missions or emergent problems is simply ridiculous.  Losing the Apache helicopters meant exactly one thing.  They lost the QRF.  Period.  If they weren’t dedicated resources, then they never really had a QRF to begin with.  And there was no reason that the C-130s shouldn’t have been refueled and circling above-head the entire time.  They dropped the four man team out there without the right support, without the right weapons (no area suppression weapon), without good comms, and finally, without applying classical infantry tactics.

“I’ve seen it before.  The CO didn’t want to hear about problems because they’re all playing the ‘my dick is bigger than your dick’ game.  They sent a SEAL team to do what they should have sent classical infantry to do.  They should have sent in a Marine Corps infantry platoon, or if you want to go all spec ops, send in Marine Force Recon.

“Or if you don’t want it to be a Marine Corps operation, send in the Rangers.  I understand that SEALs are pretty bad ass.  If you have complex HALO jumps and frogman operations, or hostage rescue, they are the guys to call.  But they don’t do classic infantry fire and maneuver, and that’s what was needed that day.  The Rangers are pretty bad ass too.  Send them in.  They know how to do fire and maneuver, set up interlocking fields of fire, develop enfilade fire, and so on.”

“I patrolled with SEALs once in Fallujah when they were looking for a HVT.  They have this attitude that ‘We’re SEALs.  We don’t need anyone or anything else.’  But that day they did.  They needed infantry, and command should have sent in enough men to prepare for the worst.  They took chances, and good men died as a result.”

Mike Vanderboegh:

Yet even the so-called “gun rights” media has been ignoring the story, apart from David Codrea, Kurt Hofmann and Anthony Martin.

I wouldn’t have expected the “prags” to cover it, of course. I have always made them nervous and occasionally, apoplectic. But there are others who I would have expected some coverage out of. Nada.

I’m not sure if I’m considered so-called gun rights media, but I’ve tried to send folks Mike’s direction and provide a brief bit of commentary here and here.  Mike is a semi-daily stop for me, as is Codrea, and you should spend a few minutes there every day yourself.

Regarding the “prags,” my experiences is somewhat different.  My article GOP Ready To Cave On Gun Control was linked by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.  Sebastian responded with Is The GOP Preparing To Cave?  The reason I know that it was a response to my article is that it was published after mine, and none of the organic links had any title even approaching “GOP Ready To Cave.”  This is what Sebastian said:

My big fear is that stories like this encourage the fatalistic among us, who will then fail to act because they think this is already a done deal, and nothing they do or say will matter. Let’s be focused on the real threats, and not rumors of threats, created by people who are drawing, to be charitable, questionable conclusions.

I don’t need Sebastian’s charity when I’m right, and I turned out right.  Cantor and Ryan pushed universal background checks, just like two GOP Senators are even now trying to push an unwarranted and intrusive expansion of mental health checks.  I know what Sebastian was thinking.  He wasn’t remembering the Barnhardt axiom (via WRSA).  At any rate, Sebastian responded to me without even linking my article and sending traffic my way, of course, unlike me where I follow proper internet protocol.  Bad form, I thought.  Still do.  The prags ignore Mike.  They respond to me without even linking.

David Codrea:

Running as an independent after being turned down for consideration by NRA’s nominating committee, Colandro promises to be the type of director capable of shaking up paid staff’s heretofore unbreakable grip on the board, paving the way for other candidates who would reform management policies away from an unsettling trend of offering compromises, political deal-making, and questionable political ratings …

David gives me a good reason to renew NRA membership, if for nothing more than to support folks like this.  As a nugget of gold, there is also a brief discussion on national right to carry in David’s article.

Kurt Hofmann:

I have never asked anyone to give my views any more weight because of my stint in the Army, and I will never claim that a person who has never served is therefore less qualified to comment on gun rights and “gun control.” Military service, past or present, plays no role in one’s authority on the issue of the right to keep and bear arms …

Oh, the progressives don’t really believe that as they claim.  They just believe that for cases like Robert Bateman because Bateman agrees with their view of gun control.  They don’t listen to those who have had military service and who disagree with their views, and they would just as soon throw Bateman under the bus when he’s finished pimping for them.  And military service doesn’t any more exclusively qualify one to comment on guns than it does for him to comment on driving a car because he drives away from the base for the weekend.

NSA phone spying is useless in preventing terrorist attacks.  But of course, that isn’t the point or purpose of the phone spying, is it?

On a different note, looks like another booger hook on the bang switch thing.

ABC News:

Having failed in an earlier effort to bar federal agents from enforcing gun regulations in Missouri, conservative lawmakers are trying a new tack this year: banding together with other like-minded states to defy certain federal laws at the same time.

Supporters believe it will be more difficult for the federal government to shrug off such statutes if more states act together.

Missouri’s latest proposal, introduced this past week, would attempt to nullify certain federal gun control regulations from being enforced in the state and subject law enforcement officers to criminal and civil penalties for carrying out such policies.

The state’s Republican-led Legislature came one vote shy of overriding Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of such a measure last year. This year’s bill adds a new twist, delaying the effective date for several years to allow time for other states to join the cause.

“We continue to see the federal government overreach their rightful bounds, and if we can create a situation where we have some unity among states, then I think it puts us in a better position to make that argument,” said Republican Sen. Brian Nieves, who is sponsoring the legislation.

Missouri’s efforts came after President Barack Obama called for expanded federal background checks and a ban on assault weapons following deadly mass shootings at a Colorado theater and a Connecticut elementary school.

Courts have consistently ruled that states cannot nullify federal laws, but that hasn’t stopped states from trying or ignoring them anyway. Last year, a federal appeals court struck down a 2009 Montana law that sought to prohibit federal regulation of guns that were manufactured in the state and remained within its borders.

A similar Kansas law that makes it a felony for a federal agent to attempt to enforce laws on guns made and owned in Kansas earned a rebuke from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

What else would you expect a federal court to decide?  And what else would you expect the communist Eric Holder to say?  We’ve discussed this before.  It is a mistake in strategy to look to the federal courts or any part of the federal government to protect your God-given rights, including your right to own weapons.

And nullification can work, but it has to have the support of the entire legislature and the Governor’s office, since the Governor is the chief law enforcement officer of the state.

These sideline discussions don’t rise to the level of strategy – not yet.  They’re still fumbling around with skirmish tactics.  If you have the full support of the state leaders, the next step is to craft the ensemble of laws for which federal agents will go to the state penitentiary.

Then when the first federal agent of any stripe attempts to enforce any of the laws in the ensemble you have crafted, put his ass in prison among the general population and throw away the key.  And then … use the state National Guard and if need be the unorganized militia to stop any further federal agents or anyone else from coming across state lines to free the federal agents from prison.

Then, and only then, will I believe that anyone is serious about nullification.  Then after other states see the success of the first state, they will learn the tactics and apply them.  And then it will be a strategy.

Since it isn’t my story, I won’t wax on about the story Marcus Luttrell wanted to tell about his brothers in Operation Red Wings.

But it is the most intense movie I have ever seen.  By the end of the movie I was left virtually breathless and teary eyed.  In an age of horrible movies from Hollywood, this one is well worth the money.

Two sidebar notes on the movie.  First, the cinematography is some of the best and most intense I have ever experienced.  You are quite literally there.  The initial five minutes or so of the close action scenes and rapid camera movement took some getting used to, but after that, it became obvious what the producers and directors were doing.

Second, the movie is very close to what Marcus intended and what he wrote in the book.  There is a bit of Hollywood drama introduced into the story, but not much, and not significant.

Review: I cannot tell the story – Marcus has to.  It is his to tell, and he does his brothers proud with this movie.  It will take its place alongside the best war movies, and perhaps it is the very best of all time.  Go see it.

There is movement on the issue of mental health and gun ownership, but we’ll get to that in a moment.  First in order to set the stage, Michael Hammond writing at The Washington Times has done a good job of explaining the stakes.

The 1968 Gun Control Act bans guns for anyone who is “adjudicated as a mental defective or … committed to a mental institution.” Unfortunately, under 2008 NICS Improvement Act, drafted by Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and its regulations, that “adjudication” can be made by any “other lawful authority.” This means a diagnosis by a single psychiatrist in connection with a government program.

In the case of nearly 175,000 law-abiding veterans, the “lawful authority” has been a Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, who, generally, will take away a veteran’s guns by unilaterally declaring him incompetent and appointing a guardian over his financial affairs. Certainly, the findings can be appealed, but most veterans don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars to hire lawyers and psychiatrists to do so.

Although the problem hasn’t yet been as apparent in other areas, police and firemen on Social Security disability for post-traumatic stress disorder, Medicare seniors with Alzheimer’s, and people who as children were diagnosed under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act program with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder will ultimately face the same fate. Even a subsidized Obamacare policy might now make Americans participants in a federal program.

In fact, that process of expanding gun bans has now begun:

One gun owner in a virulently anti-gun state was placed on the gun-ban blacklist because many years ago, police, without the approval of any court, put him in a mental facility overnight. The facility found nothing wrong with him, but that didn’t stop his state from recently turning him in to the FBI for a lifetime gun ban.

In another case, a gun owner in an anti-gun state lost his guns because of a prescription for a psychiatric drug.

Bob Unruh explains how this happens with veterans.

And just a few days ago Mike Vanderboegh provided strong evidence that this is happening on a wide scale.  Returning to Bob’s article, he asks the important questions.  “As with most things, the devil is in the details. What is mental illness? Who is mentally ill? How mentally ill must one be to warrant revocation of a fundamental human right? Who makes that determination? Who is ‘normal,’ and how ‘normal’ do they have to be to own guns?”

Now to what David Codrea reported just today about the movement afoot to make the problem even more sweeping in scope.

In a chat session this month with the liberal magazine Texas Monthly, Cornyn revealed he and Lindsay Graham will introduce a bill strengthening the NICS federal gun owner registration database and place more Americans on lifetime gun ban lists.

There are no doubt good people who believe that such a thing is good for public safety.  Cornyn and Graham aren’t among that crowd.  They know better and would sell the souls of their own mothers if it would be beneficial to their careers.  It isn’t to them that I speak.  Nothing can change them, and so the only remedy for us is to change their jobs.

We’ve dealt with this before, this notion that the mental health profession is like any other, that it can pull the right levers, punch the right buttons, and administer the right drugs to fix mankind.  But listen to them in their own words.

Dr. J. Michael Bostwick, Mayo Clinic: “We physicians generally do not know enough about firearms to have an informed conversation with our patients, let alone counsel them about gun safety.”  He continues by arguing:

• Even if every mentally ill person in the country were registered, the system isn’t prepared to handle them — and only about half of the states require registration.
• Only about 10 percent of mentally ill people are registered — and these are people who have been committed, they’ve come to attention in a way that requires court intervention.
• Literature says the vast majority of people who do these kinds of shootings are not mentally ill — or it is recognized after the fact.
• The majority of mentally ill people aren’t dangerous.

Dr. Richard Friedman: ” … there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.”

Dr. Barry Rosenfeld: “”We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York.”

Dr. Steven Hoge: “One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently.”

And National Journal notes the following.

Perhaps most important, although people with serious mental illness have committed a large percentage of high-profile crimes, the mentally ill represent a very small percentage of the perpetrators of violent crime overall. Researchers estimate that if mental illness could be eliminated as a factor in violent crime, the overall rate would be reduced by only 4 percent. That means 96 percent of violent crimes—defined by the FBI as murders, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults—are committed by people without any mental-health problems at all. Solutions that focus on reducing crimes by the mentally ill will make only a small dent in the nation’s rate of gun-related murders, ranging from mass killings to shootings that claim a single victim.  It’s not just that the mentally ill represent a minority of the country’s population; it’s also that the overlap between mental illness and violent behavior is poor.

I won’t continue since we’ve covered this in detail before.  To my readers who believe that this has anything to do with public safety, you need to be dissuaded from such foolishness.  This has nothing to do with the decreased rate of forcible admissions to mental health facilities, and nothing to do with an increase in mental health problems, and nothing to do with the availability of guns.  And it has nothing to do with turning out patients from the asylums, no matter what you’ve been told.

Crime is a moral choice.  I know this is uncomfortable for some of my readers, because it forces you to think about things like value judgments and the roots of morality.  It all has such a deontological ring to it, and it suggests that mankind may not just be the product of primordial slime – that there is someone to whom we must answer.

But I don’t care one iota about your discomfort.  The mental health profession simply cannot sustain the weight of burden you wish to place on it.  It cannot tell you who will do what, or give enough medications to fix what ails mankind.  It cannot control individuals who are moral agents making their own choices.

And those who would rule us know this too.  They know that the mental health profession cannot function in this role, and yet the sweep of the proposed rules keeps increasing, the dragnet keeps expanding, and the Senators keep going along to get along.  So what does this tell you about why they want to expand the mental health dragnet?  When will you be adjudicated mentally defective because you believe that being armed is the surest way to ameliorate tyranny in America?

David Codrea:

“Study shows over 60 percent of weapons in El Salvador come from U.S.,” a Tuesday report from inSerbia claims. “The United States government agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), along with the federal and municipal governments of El Salvador set out to see just where the weapons are coming from.”

Bah.  I don’t believe it.  David takes us down a litany of embarrassing admissions by the U.S. government, sequentially stated, where they backed down from their initial claims in the gun walking scandal (which still needs accountability from the criminals who perpetrated the crimes).

But here is an offer.  I deal with mathematics, physics, mechanics and measurements all day long as part of my day job.  And I know how to tell if the data and conclusions meet the central limit theorem (since as you know their statistical sample is a finite size which is claimed to be an adequate model of the entire system).  Send the data to me.  I’ll analyze it and report back, without charge and without bias.  If it’s true, I’ll tell you so.  If not, I’ll tell you that too.  Does the ATF want to take me up on that offer?

David Codrea:

What’s clear from the outrage and disappointment is, contrary to what the name of Bloomberg’s front group implies, it’s not just illegal guns that are being attacked. All guns, and the means to lawfully obtain them, are targets.

Of course.  It’s always a wonderful thing when the enemy self-identifies and admits to the truth.  It makes my job easier.

Kurt Hofmann:

To cover their embarrassment over the fact that every high profile shooting carried out by someone who passed the vaunted background check system drives another nail into the coffin of the credibility of the claim that “universal background checks” are the key to stopping “gun violence,” Horwitz and friends respond with the only argument left to them–not nearly enough background checks result in the violation of the checked person’s Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms.

Kurt … parting the smoke and driving to the root of the argument again.  He has a way of doing that.  And as for the enemy self-identifying, remember that this is exactly what they want.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

That’s the enemy giving his strategy away.  Did you listen carefully to him?  If not, read again.

Police tearing stuff up, at which they seem to be good.

“It’s not about money. It’s about the lack of notification,” said Elana Andrew.

She wasn’t on her property in Sheridan when the raid happened early Saturday morning. Officers in an Oregon State Police armored vehicle rammed a metal gate and plowed down a wooden fence  to gain access to a neighbor’s property.

Police were going after Michael Abo, 34, a Yamhill police reserve officer accused of abusing his girlfriend’s four year-old son.

It took Andrew filing a police report of her own with the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office to figure out the damage was from a McMinnville Police tactical operation. McMinnville Police were the lead agency, working with OSP, because the sheriff’s office couldn’t arrest one of its own. Andrew said the abuse case is tragic.

“I don’t really mind them trespassing to effect an arrest. I think that that’s important that they be able to do that,” said Andrew, “No one took any time whatsoever the next day to find out who owned the gate or who owned the fence.

“There’s a house there. This is the house I own. And to me, it would be reasonable to assume that whoever owns this fence would live in that house,” said Andrew.

She contacted McMinnville police about the damage. Captain Matt Scales responded to her on Tuesday afternoon with an email.

He wrote, “Elana, we assumed the fence was owned by Abo as this was the information we had. We had no idea who owned the gate, so notification to the property owner in regards to that specific piece of property would have been impossible in our opinion.”

Andrew wrote back, “Sure seems like you had a duty to find out. You could have started by knocking at the foot door of the house you come to after entering the gate.”

That’s what I was going to say.  Instead of tactical operators performing tactical maneuvers while they are operating tactically, why don’t they just knock on the door?

S.C. is making themselves very friendly to recent Northern transplants doing gun manufacturing.

From beat cops to cashiers to Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s newest gun manufacturer has received an “absolutely tremendous” amount of support since leaving Connecticut for The Palmetto State, according to the firm’s CEO.

Josh Fiorini, CEO of PTR Industries, formerly of Bristol., Conn., told FoxNews.com that the firm’s new facility in Aynor, S.C., remains a week away from production, but 11 local employees began sorting inventory on Monday along with a team of training personnel from Connecticut. The manufacturer of military-style rifles announced in April that it intended to leave Bristol following the passage of gun-control legislation after the shooting deaths of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown.

[ … ]

“The facility that we’re going to move into is fantastically better than the one we’re coming from,” he said. “It allows us to consolidate two facilities into one and it’s much more modern, allowing us to set up our line in a more efficient way and hopefully expand.”

So Smith & Wesson, Colt, Springfield Armory, Rock River Arms, Remington, Mossberg … are you listening?  What are you waiting for, hell to freeze over and your current environment to be as welcoming?

CBS:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie responded Wednesday afternoon to email exchanges made public earlier in the day linking a top aide to the George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal that has been under investigation.

“What I’ve seen today for the first time is unacceptable. I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge. One thing is clear: this type of behavior is unacceptable and I will not tolerate it because the people of New Jersey deserve better. This behavior is not representative of me or my Administration in any way, and people will be held responsible for their actions,” the governor said in a statement.

Uh oh.  Somebody better begin looking for a new job.  They’re getting thrown under the bus.  But why is America shocked over this?  We have known this for weeks, and some of us have known it longer (remember “Get the hell off the beach” said to people whom he didn’t have any legal right to force out?).

In 2010, John F. McKeon, a New Jersey assemblyman, made what he thought was a mild comment on a radio program: Some of the public employees that Gov. Chris Christie was then vilifying had been some of the governor’s biggest supporters.

He was surprised to receive a handwritten note from Mr. Christie, telling him that he had heard the comments, and that he didn’t like them.

“I thought it was a joke,” Mr. McKeon recalled. “What governor would take the time to write a personal note over a relatively innocuous comment?”

But the gesture would come to seem genteel compared with the fate suffered by others in disagreements with Mr. Christie: a former governor who was stripped of police security at public events; a Rutgers professor who lost state financing for cherished programs; a state senator whose candidate for a judgeship suddenly stalled; another senator who was disinvited from an event with the governor in his own district.

In almost every case, Mr. Christie waved off any suggestion that he had meted out retribution …

Just like he has done in this case.  And just to remind everyone, Chris Christie made his fame in New Jersey pushing gun control.  He is a gun grabber from way back.  And gun grabbers are bullies.  You know that, right?