Fox News:

The director of the Federal Air Marshal Service is resigning after being investigated for his role in an alleged operation to acquire guns for officials’ personal use, FoxNews.com has learned.

Director Robert Bray’s home was raided in December in connection with the ongoing probe. Law enforcement and congressional sources told FoxNews.com that Bray’s recently announced resignation, which is effective in June, is directly related to the investigation.

Bray allegedly is among several officials who were obtaining weapons through this operation.

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general probe — which also is believed to involve the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — stems from whistleblower accusations involving federal Air Marshal supervisor Danny Poulos.

He is accused of using the agency’s federal firearms license and his relationship with gun manufacturer Sig Sauer to obtain discounted and free guns. He then provided them to high-up agency officials for their personal use, according to whistleblower documents obtained by FoxNews.com and interviews with multiple officials with knowledge of the ongoing probe.

Let’s see: avoiding form 4473 for his friends (check), using influence and power for personal gain using tax dollars (check), potential bribery to obtain government contracts (check), cronyism and corruption (check).

Because laws are for little people.

Just another crook in a position of power.  Are there any honest, hard working people in the Obama administration … anywhere?

It has been reported on several news outlets that the Bureau of Land Management has deployed “snipers” against Cliven Bundy over cattle.  I haven’t weighed in on whether Bundy has a case or not, and I won’t.  But I wanted to comment for a moment on this notion of government “snipers.”

They aren’t snipers in the sense of the word that I use.  When Daniel was in the Marine Corps he had a friend named [name redacted] who was a Scout Sniper.  All MOS 0311 Marines have to qualify at 500 yards with iron sights.  Daniel scored highest in his Battalion every year he was a fleet Marine.  He also went to Designated Marksman school, where he learned many of the same shooting and sighting techniques that [name redacted] did.  He was a DM in spite of the fact that he was a SAW gunner because he was such a good shot.

But as for [name redacted], he went to the entire Scout Sniper school, and one incident he shared with me involved him crawling in a ghillie suit for endless hours to target, and he inadvertently crawled on top of a red ant hill and had to endure being bitten hundreds of times by red ants in order to keep from giving away his position.

Hey, here’s a note to the idiot LEO who believes that American hunters aren’t good enough to cull deer (if the state of New York calls them in and asks them to kill all bucks less than 6 points to control herd size), and so a SWAT team needs to be called in.  And the same note applies to the supposed BLM “snipers.”

You aren’t really snipers.  Not really.  You might be wearing fancy tactical gear, and your bosses might have bought you really expensive Night Force scopes, and really nice bolt action rifles, and you might wear some fancy patches on your sleeves.  But the likelihood is that your just a middle age or old man who goes home and watches sitcoms at night.

Go qualify with a rifle using iron sights at 500 yards for starters, and then come back and tell me you’re a “sniper.”  I know how to sight a rifle in too, and what BDC means.  Perhaps you even believe that heavy objects drop faster than light ones because, you know, you work for the DHS rather than having taken college physics like you should have.  You may be a better shot than I am, but with the same gear I’ll bet not by much.

I have one final note concerning this report from The Blaze.

Claiming that all other options have been exhausted, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. National Park Service responded to Bundy’s inflexibility on the issue by calling on federal agents and contract cowboys to restrict access to the public land and to confiscate Bundy’s “trespass cattle.”

I belly laughed when I read this report.  You’re having to pay “contract cowboys” because you don’t really know anything about animals, do you?  No, really.  You seriously don’t know anything about animals?  You call yourselves Bureau of Land Management and not a single one of you knows how to ride a horse or handle cattle.  How disgusting and ridiculous.

The Salt Lake Tribune:

A fully automatic M-16 rifle went missing from the Davis County Sheriff’s Office, probably sometime before 2006, according to an investigation by that office.

The U.S. Department of Defense provided 20 M-16s to the sheriff’s office in 1998. Except for a few training exercises, the rifles sat in storage until 2006, when they were issued to deputies.

But there’s no record of the missing rifle having been issued, according to a report from the sheriff’s own detectives.

“This investigation has been inconclusive as to where the missing weapon is,” a detective wrote in his report’s conclusion. “The weapon is listed” in a nationwide law enforcement database “and if that is how it is located, then a criminal investigation will commence.”

Davis County Sheriff Todd Richardson said last week it’s only a matter of time before the rifle is found. And anyone who knowingly possesses the rifle will be prosecuted, even if that person is or was a peace officer.

“If it was procured by somebody who found it,” Richardson said, “they are in possession of a stolen rifle and they’re going to suffer consequences for it.”

The Pentagon provided the rifles through its 1033 Program, which gives surplus weapons and other gear to law enforcement. Sixty-two Utah law enforcement agencies are eligible to receive equipment through the program.

Of course, there is a solution to this problem.  Stop the military surplus program for law enforcement, and make it illegal for them to have fully automatic weapons if we can’t.  The Hughes amendment that is good for the goose is good for the gander.  On the other hand, that wouldn’t stop incompetency by the LEOs, just incompetency affecting fully automatic weapons owned by LEOs.

I can’t solve all problems, just some of them.

The Marine Corps issued a new MARADMIN concerning firearms after the recent Fort Hood shooting.  The summary is taken from Marines.mil:

Local directives will contain provisions that:

• Prohibit privately-owned firearms in all federal facilities, to include government-leased spaces and government vehicles.
• Prohibit carrying privately-owned firearms as concealed weapons aboard Marine Corps installations.
• Ensure all privately-owned firearms stored aboard Marine Corps installations are registered and on file with the provost marshal’s office and the Marine Corps police department.
• Prohibit storage of privately-owned firearms and ammunition in bachelor enlisted quarters for noncommissioned officers and below. Storage within bachelor officer or staff noncommissioned officer quarters is at the discretion of the installation commander.
• Reemphasize compliance regarding storage of privately-owned firearms and ammunition in government family housing.
• In all cases, privately-owned firearms will be stored in a fully-encased container that is capable of completely enclosing the firearm and must be locked with a key or combination lock. All firearms will be fitted with a trigger lock.
• Ammunition must be stored separately from firearms and in a container capable of being locked with a key or combination lock.
• Privately-owned firearms will not be stored in privately-owned vehicles.
• All personnel will continue to comply with all applicable federal, state and local laws for the purchase, registration, transportation and storage of privately-owned firearms and ammunition.
• Transporting privately-owned firearms is authorized in POVs to and from an authorized storage area or to an off-base location consistent with federal, state and local laws.

If I am not mistaken NCOs could never have personal weapons on reservation property, and officers could only with base commander approval.  But what this MARADMIN appears to do is expand the stipulations even farther.  Take note of the requirement for “government family housing … privately-owned firearms will be stored in a fully-encased container that is capable of completely enclosing the firearm and must be locked with a key or combination lock.  All firearms will be fitted with a trigger lock.”

This expands the rules to property off of the federal reservation, and if you live in housing that is in any way subsidized by the government for families, your personal weapons must not only be in a container large enough to contain the whole of the weapon, and locked, but it (or they) must also have a trigger lock(s) on it (them), even while inside the container.

Damn.  Heads of households had better hope they aren’t the victims of crime.  Their families are completely unprotected and unsecured.  This, from a Marine Corps Commandant who is alleged to be trying to secure his Marines from harm.  Oh well.  This is also from a Commandant who was allegedly involved in illegal command influence in investigations under his charge.  Readers already know what I think of airman Amos.  When Daniel graduated from Boot Camp I presented him with a present.  It included several things signed by Marine Corps Commandant Alfred Gray, with personalized notes to him.  I’ll never request anything like that from Amos.

Perhaps someone else I regularly read alerted me to this, but if so, I certainly overlooked it.  This one slid under the wire with me.  Comments close at midnight on April 7th, so these comments will have to suffice.  Prince Law Offices filed an objection to the rulemaking, and their filing is worth reading.  They observe that “few in the Firearms Industry wanted to take a stand against this new notice of proposed rulemaking.”  Perhaps so, but I’m not in the “industry.”  And I do indeed take a strong stand against this rulemaking.  Herein are my comments to the ATF.

The ATF is not the appropriate bureau of the executive to make decisions on adjudication on metal health of any sort.  Furthermore, even qualified individuals disagree with the notion that this will ameliorate crime or other nefarious uses of firearms.  Witness the following list of experts.

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.

Attempts to restrict firearms ownership for the rightful and God-granted purposes of self defense suffer from lack of legitimacy (since ATF isn’t the right place for such rules to be born) and outrageous prejudice and bigotry, evil features of mankind’s sinful nature that have no place whatsoever in American society.

Since propensity to violence isn’t in any way able to be correlated to mental health issues, and since the mentally ill do not in large measure commit acts of violence at a higher rate than those who are supposedly mentally sound, this rulemaking is unjust and no more than an abortion.  Violence is a function of evil rather than mental soundness, something that an ATF questionnaire or doctor’s examination cannot quantify or repair.

I previously argued against John Lott’s procedure (especially when it is employed as an exclusive-use procedure) to demonstrate that gun ownership and crime are inversely proportional.  Go back and read this article again if you need.

Kurt Hofmann sent me this wonderful note in response to the article.  I have always claimed that my readers are better writers and I am (and especially so with Kurt), and so it behooves me to paste in his entire letter without further commentary from me.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that keeping and bearing arms suitable for self-defense is a bona fide individual right. If so, the fact that 100,000 people a year murder others with firearms, while one man alone uses a firearm to save a life, provides no basis for curbing the individual liberty to own and bear arms. Each individual must, because of his inherent, autonomous ethical freedom, be respected as an end in himself; no prior restraint may be imposed upon his right to own and bear firearms.

 

Actually we can go further. Under an individual right view, the fact that 100,000 people a year murder innocents with firearms, and no one uses a firearm to protect himself or others provides no basis for a prior restraint. Individuals must still be possessed of a right to own firearms because their ethical freedom contains the potentiality of using firearms for good. That is, people can use this tool for good, if they turn to it with a good will. 

David Codrea:

Thousands of gun owners, many lawfully armed, rallied at the State Capitol in Hartford on Saturday to protest gun laws enacted in Connecticut. Organized by the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, the rally served to introduce activists to legal measures being taken in the courts to repeal those edicts, to promote support for politicians pledging to support the right to keep and bear arms, and to give fed up gun owners a public forum to voice their defiance of orders to surrender their firearms.

David was the keynote speaker and his speech (embedded at Examiner) is well worth the listening time.  Part 2 of the speech is on YouTube.  I appreciate David going and representing all of us, especially with a very good speech.  I must say that although I consider him to be a friend, I have never met him in person (a fact which I must remedy one day).  I find him to be persuasive, a good speaker, and well-presented, even if he isn’t as good looking as I am.

Kurt Hofmann:

Rabidly anti-gun Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA), though, has another idea. She suggests that the Obama administration exploit Yee’s alleged crimes as justification for more restrictive gun regulation.

Of course.  What else would a good collectivist do except argue for more government control?  Kurt uses his powers of logic to upbraid the whole notion raised by this hag.

Mike Vanderboegh has a very interesting take on the recent racially motivated beating in Detroit.  I recall seeing this, and I sent myself a link with the subject line if you’re white you don’t belong in Detroit.  Mike invokes the memory of the Rwandan genocide, pointing out that the victims didn’t have guns.  And I recall thinking about these fellows in Detroit that a gun might have saved them from this beating.  Also we shouldn’t forget that the folks who perished under the evil Idi Amin in Uganda weren’t armed.

Rob Pincus recently did an interesting video concerning use of the AR pistol.  I found myself wondering why anyone would worry about the legal use of the weapons when you are under threat (is it legal to use three points of contact?) just because of what lawyers inside the beltway say.  Of course, Rob points out that the ATF weighed in on this issue, stipulating that use doesn’t matter.  I still wonder why, under threat, anyone would stop to worry over whether you shouldered the weapon.  I understand that it has to do with whether Rob trains folks to do that, but I would train to do whatever saved my life.

Examiner:

On Sunday, the Logandale, Nev.-based Moapa Valley Progress reported that Dave Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, was arrested while taking photographs of his family’s cattle that are being rounded up by federal agents. According to the report, Bundy was violating an arbitrary “First Amendment” zone that had been established by federal agents. Worse yet, federal agents also deployed snipers against the man.

“He was doing nothing but standing there and filming the landscape,” Ryan Bundy said of his brother Dave. “We were on the state highway, not even off of the right-of-way. Even if they want to call [the area that we were filming] federal land; which it’s not; we weren’t even on it. We were on the road.”

None of the family members on the road were armed, but 11 BLM vehicles each with two agents arrived and surrounded him as he began filming the cattle, Paul Joseph Watson said at Infowars.

“They also had four snipers on the hill above us all trained on us. We were doing nothing besides filming the area,” Ryan added.

Bundy also said federal agents told them they had no First Amendment rights except in the areas so marked.

BLM snipers.  Because people filming are such a danger to everyone.  And because shut up.

Apparently these folks have never read that we have a due process right to record law enforcement activities.  Oh hell.  They wouldn’t care about it even if they did read it.

Esquire:

What is not working, as Secretary Hagel formulated it, is America’s gun culture. All of these mass shootings took place with privately owned weapons purchased without any sort of serious screening or taken from their rightful owners — a mother or a father, by theft or murder. In essence, you can be a complete and total nutcase and acquire a gun pretty easily …

here is where I think it is time to make my first realistic suggestion on this topic. I already tried polemics, and that got mostly nowhere. So what I put forward is a practical suggestion stemming from my time in the States last month.

Last month I was traveling, in part with my wife and daughter, and I began to notice something. There were a lot more concealed weapons there than I remember seeing before. Four times in the space of just a few days I noticed men carrying pistols under their shirts, in restaurants, stores, and even in a children’s play area of a shopping mall. This craze, which seems new to me because I have been serving overseas for so long, is taking place not just on the streets or in bars, but in family restaurants and places where we all shop. So that is a part of the solution.

What we need to do is make owning guns impractical for everyone. The simple solution for this is not a new law or judicial ruling. It is “voting” with our wallets.

I started to do it last week when I was in a nice seafood restaurant that had food that was so good I was thinking of writing it up and also telling my friends about the place. As an out-of-the-way joint, they could certainly use the free publicity, though they certainly pulled in their share of locals for a blustery Sunday morning. Then I saw the guns.

Nope, not going to do it, I decided on the spot. And I am also not going to bring my kids or my wife in there ever again until they decide that guns are not allowed in their restaurant. And that, friends, is the solution.

I’m not sure what Bateman means when he says “complete and total nutcase.”  Nutcases have had guns before, witness Bateman himself.  But as Bateman knows full well, he is being a prejudiced bigot by defining mental health issues as revolving around propensity to violence when so many mental health professionals know better and have said so.

But this isn’t the point that should have grabbed your attention.  Notice that he began with the killing at Fort Hood, and ended with advocating that people use their purchase power to keep guns away from restaurants.  But only law abiding people would honor a law which stipulates that they not carry in an establishment, and so Bateman has targeted people who would willingly not carry in order to punish law-breakers like the Fort Hood shooter.

Bateman’s gun control isn’t about stopping shootings or reduction of crime.  It’s about his collectivist political beliefs, and he knows it.  And just to top it off, he is a liar and knows it.  He doesn’t really want making the ownership of guns impractical for everyone.  He wants the state to have plenty of them.  He just wants it to be impractical for you and me.

Prior:

Response To Robert Bateman Concerning Guns

The Iraqis, Their Weapons And Gun Control

The Blaze:

On July 9, 2013, a bill to recognize Illinois gun owners’ right to carry concealed firearms was passed by both chambers of the state Legislature. Illinois became the last state in the nation to allow public possession of concealed guns.

Gun control advocates warned that high-crime areas, like Chicago, would only see more violence if residents were allowed to carry guns in public.

In reality, the opposite may be happening.

On Tuesday, the Chicago Police Department announced that the city experienced its lowest murder rate since 1958 in the first quarter of 2014. There were 6 fewer murders than the same timeframe in 2013 — a 9 percent drop — and 55 fewer murders than 2012, police said.

Further, there were reportedly 90 fewer shootings and 119 fewer shooting victims compared to last year. There have also been 222 fewer shootings and 292 fewer shooting victims compared to the first quarter in 2012.

[ … ]

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy called the drop in crime a “trend.” He attributed the drop to the “talent level of individuals” on the police force, “intelligent policing strategies” and other programs. He did not mention the concealed carry law.

It makes sense, of course, but here is the problem with such reports.  John Lott is mentioned, and he continually makes claims about the prevalence of guns being inversely proportion to crime.

Whatever.  I’ve made the point that what happens to society at the macroscopic level is immaterial.  My rights involve me and my family, and don’t depend on being able to demonstrate that the general health effects in society are not a corollary to or adversely affected by the free exercise of them.

It’s insidious and even dangerous to argue gun rights as a part of crime prevention based on statistics because it presupposes what the social planners to, i.e., that I’m part of the collective.