News from Denver, Colorado:

Denver is about to pay up again after a confrontation between civilians and police. This time, it’s a wrongful prosecution case.

A jury awarded a family $1.8 million Friday evening for a mistaken raid on their home back in 2009. While 9NEWS awaits the officers’ account of what happened, the family involved is speaking out about the events of that night.

Jan. 27 is a date Daniel Martinez, Jr. and his family have been reliving for five years. Martinez’s son, Daniel Martinez III, says at around 11 p.m., four Denver Police officers came pounding on their front door.

“They pushed through the door and pushed my dad against the wall. Then I saw them grab my little brother and saw them slam his head through the window. I screamed, ‘you can’t do that. You can’t do that, he’s a minor,'” Martinez said. “Then, they put me in a chokehold, had taken me outside, body-slammed me onto the concrete, put a knee in my back and handcuffed me right there.”

The family’s attorney, Kathryn Stimson, says that night DPD was conducting what law enforcement refers to as a “Knock and Talk.”

She says they were following up on a tip they received that two felons were selling drugs and running a brothel inside of a home located in the 1200 block of Stuart Street. Stimson said those tenants had moved out over a month before. About two weeks later, the Martinez family moved in.

Martinez says when the officers broke into his house, he was confused and afraid for his kids.

“I felt helpless, helpless and confused, scared. I didn’t know what was happening,” Martinez said.

Martinez was later charged with resisting arrest. His sons were charged with assaulting an officer. In 2010, all of them had either been acquitted or had their charges dropped. Stimson says that is when the family filed the lawsuit.

After being awarded the $1.8 million, Martinez says he’s glad that justice has been served, but still worries for his family.

“I’m constantly looking out the window, I’m still in fear,” Martinez said. ” I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Stimson says the jury upheld the claims of wrongful prosecution against the officers but not the claim of excessive force.

So let me get this straight.  A “knock and talk” is where cops come and bust in your door and beat the hell out of the occupants of the home, and you have to fight it all in court, and you have the community ignore your bruises, and then the community has to turn around and pay for what the cops did while the cops go unmolested and without responsibility or accountability, as if it was all some sort of obscene, bizarre, reality-horror show that costs obscene amounts of money the community doesn’t really have?

Okay.  I think I’ve got it now.

Salon:

Black men are routinely shot down by police in the country, that’s the bottom line. And while it’s certainly admirable for open carry advocates to stick to their principles and defend John Crawford’s right to carry a toy gun around Wal-Mart, it’s failing to see the forest for the trees. John Crawford, Michael Brown, Kajieme Powell, Levar Jones were all unarmed black men killed shot by police in the last few months. It wouldn’t have helped them to actually be carrying guns, real or otherwise.

Surely these open carry people, however well intentioned, should realize that nice white men and women openly carrying firearms on the street aren’t being gunned down on sight by police officers. The worst thing that happens to them is they are forced to show their ID. It’s unarmed black men (and unarmed mentally ill people of all races) who are being gunned down on sight by police officers. Are they agitating for their right to shoot cops? I doubt it. Nor should they be.

The problem isn’t that people don’t have enough guns. The problem is that police are too often using the guns they have. That won’t be solved by a bunch of average suburban white people wandering around public spaces with their rifles slung over their backs. Those aren’t the people most likely to be shot by police –whether they’re armed or not. They’re missing the point entirely.

In addition to confusing the Ohio stop and identify statute, which is oriented towards a legitimate “Terry Stop” rather than just any happenstance desire for the police to know someone’s identity (meaning that the Ohio police didn’t really have a right to stop the open carriers), the author is the one that misses the point.

Read her logic again.  Because – in her estimation – blacks are “gunned down” by police more than whites, the silly practice of open carry by whites is a meaningless contribution to liberty.  It misses the problem of over-zealous cops.  And while we can agree with the author about the over-zealous cops, we simply cannot agree on the notion that carrying weapons is a meaningless exercise of liberty and self protection.

The author would deny it, but her conclusion and end result is as racist as the Jim Crow laws in so many counties where the Sheriff reserves the right to deny gun ownership regardless of liberties and rights recognized by State Constitutions.  They are all racist and need to go the way of the dinosaur.

Another example of racism came up today in Disqus comments that drove a little bit of traffic to this site.

I can’t decide whether these comments were left by a feminist Sophomore international studies student at Dartmouth or scrawny boy in his mommy’s basement who has no job.  I’ll assume for former for the sake of argument.

First of all, the only reason that someone would invoke the issue of race is because she is thinking about it.  The only reason someone would think that gun owners and gun rights advocates would care about race is that they assume we are as racist and bigoted as they are.

For the record, I know his skin color.  The man has as much right to defend his life as anyone else, and in Texas he has a right to defend life and property.  Moreover, I don’t even care if the man was guilty of the crime of which he was charged (drugs).  If he thinks that someone is breaking into his home in the middle of the night, he has a God-given right to defend his life and the lives of his loved ones.  In fact, he has the duty to do so.  What you will find if you peruse this and similar sites is a consistent objection to thuggish and overbearing police tactics.  You will also find consistent support for the right to self defense regardless of race.  Consider David Codrea.

I addressed that question in principle many years ago, on the pioneering (and long-discontinued) GunTuths.com website in an essay titled “What the Panther Taught the Eagle: A Modern Folk Tale.” It involved about 50 armed members of the New Black Panthers who were counter-demonstrating against the Ku Klux Klan in Jasper, Texas, after James Byrd, a black man, had been kidnapped by three racist whites, chained to the back of a truck, dragged for miles down a country road and decapitated upon hitting a culvert.

“The Panther’s historic affinity for Marxist dogma notwithstanding, their stand demonstrates the true meaning and power behind the Second Amendment’s guarantee that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” I wrote at the time. “The truth is, the Panthers applied the right to bear arms in exactly the way it was intended to be – in defense of their lives and their rights. Their presence deterred violence against them. They did not engage in unwarranted violence. Their stand should be applauded as an example by all who believe that this is a right of all free people.”

Consider also Kurt Hofmann:

What Sugarmann did not point out then, and is certainly not pointing out now, is that the vast majority of the murderers of African-Americans are also black (91.1% then, 89.4% now). In other words, Sugarmann makes an issue of the fact that almost 57% of black homicides are committed with handguns, while pretending to ignore the vastly stronger correlation of race. If the focus for reducing black homicide, then, “must” be on “reducing access to firearms,” then whose access must be reduced?

“No guns for negroes,” all over again, right in line with the shameful history of American “gun control.”

And shameful it is.  All Jim Crow laws should fall.  I am told that the opposition to open carry in South Carolina by powerful state senator Larry Martin was because those horrible Negros down around Charleston might open carry and thus affect the tourism industry in South Carolina.  Larry Martin is an enemy of liberty.

Now on a personal note.  As to being a “wingnut” blog and my readers being “zoo critters,” let me tell you something deary.  I chew through people like you like I chew through a tenderloin.  I enjoy it.  You feel free to step into my back yard and run with the big dogs any time you feel froggy.  Be warned, though.  We play rough.

And drop the racism.  It betrays an evil heart.  Oh, and by the way, thanks for the traffic today.

David Codrea:

After over three years of emotional torture and total economic destruction, the prosecution, representing the same Department of Justice that has stonewalled investigations into its own culpability for smuggling guns to Mexico, now demands extracting five more years out of the lives of Rick, Terri and Ryin Reese. What that prosecution has not done is explain where a government that gets its sole Constitutional instruction on arms under the proscription that “the right of the people to keep and bear [them] shall not be infringed” also finds its authority.

See the update on the Reece family and the lying under oath engaged by the Federal Government.  Sad and despicable.  When the very ones in authority will not obey the laws the Congress passes to govern them, why should we?  And this reminds me of a post Mike Vanderboegh made just recently on the role of the law in totalitarian governments.

Kurt Hoffman:

When millions of Americans, with neither the metalworking and gunsmithing skills to build firearms by hand, or the wealth to buy equipment sufficiently sophisticated (at the prices such equipment commanded until now) to do so through automation, can nevertheless produce effective fighting arms in the privacy of their homes, “universal background check” laws, “prohibited person” laws, “assault weapon” bans, etc. become meaningless. The gun ban zealots’ worst nightmare–uncontrollable, utterly anonymous access to so-called “assault weapons” is upon us, spelling the death of the “government monopoly on force” so beloved of the gun ban jihadis.

That’s a victory for humanity.

This will make it even easier to ameliorate any evil universal background check law passed by Congress.  Rock on.

Mike Vanderboegh passed on this piece on caliber debates again.  But this is a strange one.  Somebody apparently wants the FBI to begin using the .22LR cartridge.  As I said, strange.  I’ve always thought of the .22LR as underpowered, even for a varmint round.  Muzzle velocity and wound trek matter (I prefer the .22 WMR for varmint rounds), which is why the 5.56 mm (.223) is such an effective round and has served the U.S. military so well for years given its propensity to yaw, tumble and fragment into pieces leaving multiple would treks.  Related: here is a very interesting article at The Daily Caller on the history of the .357 magnum (a round which I like very much).  For the record, I shoot .45 ACP, .38 Special and .357 magnum in my handguns.