We know it’s working out just fine.  That’s not what we learn from this most recent report.  The cited article is from “Everything Lubbock,” and what we learn from their LEOs is important and interesting.

Assistant Chief Jon Caspell with Lubbock Police recalls similar “buzz” about the law and questions for the police department.

“There really was a lot of talk about it and the potential it might have, but really we haven’t seen hardly impact at all,” Caspell said.

Both Caspell and Palmer said they really haven’t seen people around Lubbock excercising their right to open carry.

“Even walking around in public and teaching in classes  I really don’t see anyone really carrying that way,” Palmer said.

[ … ]

Palmer explained some insight he shares with his students:

“I also explain how disadvantageous it can be if you give away the fact that you’re carrying a gun to a potential bad guy, they already see you as a threat first rather than being able to be reactionary and maybe stopping something from happening,” Palmer said.

Another facet of the Open Carry law is that law enforcement can ask people they see openly carrying to show their license.

Assistant Chief Caspell said to his knowledge, everyone LPD has checked  with willingly hands over their paperwork .

“We don’t have any reports that we’ve had any difficulty for the most part, the type of person–generally speaking– that wants to open carry is someone that wants to enforce the law. They understand what the law is therefor the reasons behind it,” Caspell said.

Caspell said he can’t speak for other Texas cities, but he believes in Lubbock, the law has been implemented smoothly.

“Lubbock seems to be more of a gun-friendly community and because of that culture here we just haven’t seen a whole lot of problems. Maybe that phrase, “in like a lion, out like a whisper,” might be a good phrase here,” Caspell said.

He added that just because someone is openly carrying in a holster doesn’t mean they are licensed. Caspell encourages anyone who is suspicious of another person they see carrying a weapon to give police a call.

There are three aspects of this report that deserve comment.  First of all, I don’t advocate open carry any more than concealed carry.  I advocate carrying the way you feel the most comfortable and tactically suited to the situation.  But if there are never any open carriers, then this right will be seen as a permission that is rarely used.  That’s not a good outcome.

Second, I’ve stated before that you get to hide the fact that you’re carrying a gun to a perpetrator is the most hideously awful argument against open carry I can conceive.  It’s tactically absurd, inasmuch as if the perpetrator intends to perpetrate a crime, he’s going to regardless of whether you have a gun.  You will still have an opportunity to prevent it, and it’s more likely that you’ll be the first to engage the perpetrator.

That’s not a bad outcome unless you wish to see women and children perish before you do.  “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  I’m not knocking concealed carriers as cowards.  Much of the time I’m a concealed carrier.  I’m knocking those who knock open carry for the reason that a concealed carrier gets to wait to engage.  I don’t carry a weapon in order to wait to engage.  You don’t hear LEOs making the argument that openly carrying their weapon is a tactical disadvantage.  Let’s don’t look stupid by making that argument for ourselves.

Finally, this attitude by the chief LEO is disturbing and possibly illegal.  He has actually gone on record advocating that people call the police for a response when no law is being broken, or at least, when no one can demonstrate prima facie that a law is being broken.  I must remind LEOs reading this article once again that the Fourth Circuit had to slap down the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department over stopping someone for openly carrying a weapon and actually arresting him for something else.

“… where a state permits individuals to openly carry firearms, the exercise of this right, without more, cannot justify an investigatory detention.  Permitting such a justification would eviscerate Fourth Amendment protections for lawfully armed individuals in those states.”

It simply could not be clearer.  Moreover, every stop must be a so-called Terry Stop, regardless of what Texas state law says.  In this way I see the Texas law as unconstitutional.  LEOs should not, and do not, have the right to stop merely to ask for identification unless they have good reason to believe that a law is being violated.  So says the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States.  I said all of this before the Texas state legislature passed this bill, and they didn’t listen to me.  I would like to see this challenged in federal court, but before we ever get to that, I’d like to see constitutional carry in Texas in order to make this moot.  If Texas delays, as I suspect they will, then someone should challenge this in federal court.

City Pages:

The first is “permitless carry,” granting anyone in Minnesota the right to carry a gun wherever they go. The gun lobby prefers to call it “constitutional carry,” and it would invalidate all state laws on carrying or possession of weapons in public.

The second is “stand your ground,” which has two prongs. In your own home, you can shoot to kill in order to prevent a felony — such the stealing of a TV or the writing of a bad check. Anywhere else, you can shoot to kill if you feel like you’re being personally threatened. You don’t have to try to run away first. And you won’t have to prove that you had a solid reason to be afraid in the first place.

These gun bills (HF188 and HF238) were both introduced in the Minnesota House on Thursday, signed by a litany of Republican authors. They do not yet have Senate versions, but the Senate too is controlled by Republicans this year so it’s may be a matter of time.

So here’s how it currently works in Minnesota.

In order to carry a gun, you have to get a permit from your county. They’ll check if you can legally have a gun — that you haven’t gotten that right revoked because you were convicted of a felony or because you beat up your spouse. Then you have to take a class and pass a range test. After that, you can walk around with that gun on your hip.

Minnesota also allows you to kill in self-defense. Obviously, if someone’s threatening your life, you aren’t expected to just lay down. But you do have to prove that you at least tried to get away, that killing was your last resort, and that any reasonable person in your position would have done the same thing.

“This is huge,” says The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence, executive director of gun control organization Protect Minnesota. “Yes, it’s bad that now you could shoot someone if you think they’re going to steal your TV in your house. That’s terrible. But the part we have to really pay attention to is this completely changes our understanding of how we prove self-defense in this state and what self-defense means.”

[ … ]

“Look at the fear of immigrants we have in this state,” Nord Bence says. “You have been told that we have to worry about these Somali immigrants because they’re terrorists, and now you see a guy who looks like a terrorist, and you have no duty to retreat before using deadly force, and the presumption of innocence is with the shooter. … It’s going to lead to a wholesale arming of communities that feel threatened by this because if you were, say, a Somali immigrant in St. Cloud right now with all of the racial tension that’s going on, this bill is reason for you to be afraid.”

Then the author (or editor) gives us this picture.

The caption reads “Please make make sure it’s not just a woman looking for her lost dog.”

I think the major problem with this discussion is that it assumes that situations of self defense can be neatly pigeonholed and bifurcated into those in which the person or persons intend to do you harm, and those in which they are in your home unannounced and uninvited but only intend to walk away with your television set.

You don’t know which situation it is if someone is in your home unannounced and uninvited, and if you claim you do you’re naïve.  You simply don’t know the intentions of the heart, and moreover you don’t know how the situation will evolve.  You cannot sit down and eat dinner while the perpetrator steals your television, only to find out later that he intended all along to rape your wife and beat you to death and burn you to a crisp with gasoline.

Furthermore, that’s my problem with LEOs who recommend that you simply sit still and allow perpetrators to wave guns around while they rob an establishment.  If you do, the breaths you take may be your last, and if you have a weapon, you’d better consider using it.  Not only may the perpetrator shoot you intentionally, he may do it negligently while he’s waving the gun around if he has no trigger discipline.

Finally, go and read the article the author uses to illustrate the point on shooting people looking for dogs.  The person who was looking for her dog didn’t break and enter, and it’s illegal to kill people for trespassing and I’m sure it will be under the new law.  In the picture shown above, the girl holding the shotgun had better be prepared to shoot, while deliberate with her judgment if it could be a family member who happens to have a key.  She better know who has keys and who doesn’t, as well as their typical schedules.

In every possible way, the articles linked here and the opinions they convey are tactically stupid.  The only real problem I see here is that Benelli M4 may knock that little girl for a couple of loops.  You’d better pack that buttstock into your shoulder, little miss.  You’re sporting the same gun the U.S. Marines used for room clearing in Now Zad, Afghanistan.

Not my words because I haven’t studied it enough, but George has.  He refers a lot in this video to the Clinton endeavors in Arkansas.  If you have the time to do it (it’s almost two hours long), you can watch this video as the best analysis of the Clinton’s nefarious activities in Arkansas and the body count that continues to rise around the Clintons.  I’ve watched it.

Remember that we extensively discussed the idiotic and immoral raid on baby Bou Bou’s house in search of someone who wasn’t there?  The horrible and inept “criminal justice system” didn’t even hold the people who perpetrated that evil act accountable for it.  A grand jury couldn’t even convince themselves that they should have continued legal action against the police, and the raid ended up crippling the poor child and causing multiple surgeries.

The police state in America is so screwed up that it can’t even learn from such a disaster as that.  “Officer safety” must return home at the end of his shift, and the war on drugs must go on.  True to form for the police state, I missed that yet another flash bang was thrown at a baby in Indiana after the raid on baby Bou Bou.  This time, at least the court had doubts and threw out the evidence collected in the raid.  Fortunately, no one was harmed.

The Evansville (IN) Police Department has seen a drug bust go up in a cloud of flashbang smoke. A search warrant for drugs and weapons, based on an informant’s tip, was executed perfectly… if you’re the sort of person who believes it takes a dozen heavily-armed officers, a Lenco Bearcat, and two flashbangs to grab a suspect no one felt like arresting when he was outside alone taking out his trash. (via FourthAmendment.com)

The state appeals court decision [PDF] hinges on the deployment of a flashbang grenade into a room containing a toddler. Fortunately, in this case, the toddler was only frightened, rather than severely burned. But it was this tossed flashbang that ultimately undoes the PD’s case. The evidence is suppressed and the conviction reversed.

Scattered throughout the opinion are some amazing depictions of the PD’s SWAT team at work — and how those officers seem to believe the violence of their entries during warrant service are somehow just the new normal.

Things like the following paragraph. First: some background. In some cases, it’s (theoretically) more difficult for law enforcement to obtain no-knock warrants. Facts need to be asserted that show that warning the occupants of a residence in any way would most likely result in the destruction of evidence and/or an armed response. Some judges are more willing than others to hand these out, but either way, the standard warrant boilerplate can’t be used.

So, here’s the difference between a “knock and announce” warrant and a no-knock warrant, as deployed by the Evansville PD.

The SWAT team rode in a Lenco Bearcat that followed a patrol vehicle to the residence. At least a dozen officers were involved. Upon arrival and prior to entry, three officers and a police vehicle approached the rear of the residence and at least nine officers, most armed with assault weapons, approached the front of the residence. At 10:30 a.m., the police knocked on the residence and one of the officers announced, “Police – Search Warrant – Police – Search Warrant,” and another officer announced over a loudspeaker “Search Warrant. 314 Illinois.” State’s Exhibit 1 at 3:55-4:00. One second later, the SWAT team knocked down the door with a battering ram.

ONE SECOND. Technically, still a knock-and-announce warrant, even though the residents had been given no chance to respond.

Within the next couple of seconds, a flashbang grenade was tossed into the front room, which contained a playpen and a baby’s car seat. The toddler was in the playpen.

After the flash bang grenade was deployed, Detective Gray entered the residence and picked up a nine-month old baby crying on top of blankets in a playpen just inside and “very close to the door.” Id. at 332. The room also contained a baby’s car seat and a toddler’s activity center in the line of sight of the front door. One of the officers moved the car seat with his foot to proceed further into the residence.

The officer who tossed the flashbang said he could see more than what was captured by his helmet cam, but still admitted he could not see everything in the room into which he tossed the grenade. This grenade was thrown within two seconds of the officers’ announcement that they had a warrant and roughly one second after the door was breached.

Officer Taylor testified that his perception of things involved a much wider view than what the camera could see. At a time stamp of 4:01 on the video, a member of the SWAT team rammed the door open several inches with a battering ram. From an angle to the right, Officer Taylor tossed the flash bang into the house at 4:02, and it detonated at 4:04. The video at 4:02 shows only a portion of the right rear of the couch and the wood floor on which it sat. The video reveals that about five minutes after the initial entry someone stated: “Make sure you get a picture . . . are you taking a picture of that?” State’s Exhibit 1 at 8:50-8:55. This appears to be a reference to a charred stain on the floor. The person then stated: “Because the baby was in this room, but I put it right there for a reason.” Id. at 8:55-9:00.

The lower court found these tactics unreasonable on the whole and granted suppression of the evidence obtained during the search. The state argued that suppression wasn’t the proper remedy and anything resulting from the “unreasonable” use of a flashbang grenade in a toddler’s room was something to be addressed in a civil lawsuit.

The appeals court disagrees, finding nothing justifiable about the SWAT team’s violent entry into the home.

The video shows almost no time lapse between when the door was battered in and the tossing of the flash bang. The door was barely opened when the flash bang was immediately tossed into the room, and the angle at which Officer Taylor was standing to the door did not allow him an opportunity to see what was inside the room. Indeed, Officer Taylor acknowledged that he could not see portions of the room in which the flash bang was placed. Specifically, he testified that he could see “from the couch over to the left, I can’t see the corner, the left corner inside the room and I can’t see the hallway in front of it, that’s why the flash bang goes in the threshold.”

That’s the flashbang, delivered two seconds after the police announced their presence. This is only part of it. The attempt to salvage the fruits of the search with a claim that the house potentially contained dangerous criminals also receives no judicial sympathy. The state makes assertions, but cannot back them up.

The State does not point us to any other evidence indicating the criminal history of Watkins or the other occupants of the house. The record contains no evidence that law enforcement could not have safely presented the person matching Watkins’s description with the search warrant during the time that he was outside the house and before he re-entered it.

The court basically gets it right in terms of the correct way to do this kind of police work.  Observe the residence, proceed with entry when no one is at home, and then present an arrest warrant to the perpetrator when he returns.

Or better yet, we could give up this ridiculous war on drugs.  Either way, it will never be necessary to throw grenades into homes towards babies for any reason under the sun, unless you’re immoral and a coward.  As for the objection that they didn’t know a baby was there (if that is indeed the objection), that is no excuse.  They should have done the rudimentary investigative work to find out.  That’s what detectives are for.

The smart people are supposed to work as detectives.  Call them first.  They can think about smarter ways of doing this sort of thing.  Finally, rather than just throw out evidence, the court should have imprisoned the officers who did this and the judge who approved it for violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the constitution.  They deserve to be in the state penitentiary with the general prison population.

The constitution is a covenant under which stipulations we are all supposed to live.  Failure to do so means that the covenant has been broken, and breakage of the covenant means that punishments are supposed to ensue.

George posts four videos for Monday.  Go watch them all.  I’ll only embed the first one, but in it George bets everything that if Steve Feinberg makes his way into the Trump administration, the entire investigation of the CIA, DynCorp and Clinton Foundation of war-making, oil plays, and drug and human trafficking will come to an end.  Of course, this would be a sad state of affairs, and God would punish our country for it.  Not just the leaders, but the country … corporately.  All of us.

Wikileaks:

NOTE: No present Wikileaks staff, including our editor, have medical, psychological or drug conditions which could lead to sudden death.

For the record, neither do I.

Casper Star Tribune:

“We need to do something about people who are going to attack us getting weapons to do it,” said co-sponsor Sen. James Anderson, R-Casper.

Anderson said he heard a presentation on the issue at a legislative committee meeting last year and asked for a bill to be drafted.

Seventy-one percent of Americans believe that banning gun sales to people on the federal no-fly watch list would be at least somewhat effective at preventing terrorism, according to a June poll by Gallup.

Senate File 75 would add people on the FBI’s Terror Screening Database — which includes the “no-fly list” — to the list of people who are not eligible to possess guns in Wyoming.

Democrats in the U.S. Senate have unsuccessfully pushed several times to pass federal legislation barring people on the terror watch list from purchasing firearms. The efforts, which were repeatedly defeated, were intended to pressure Republican senators who oppose any form of gun control.

But if the measure placed conservatives in a difficult political position, it included a further wrinkle.

Because there is little judicial oversight of the various terror watch lists included in the FBI database, several liberal and civil liberties groups — who are already often opposed to the lists — were concerned about taking away the constitutional right to bear arms from American citizens without due process.

Anderson indicated he was ambivalent about that issue.

“I don’t happen to believe that the military and the police state would make those many mistakes,” Anderson said of who ends up on the terror watch list.

So somebody in Wyoming should ask Anderson why there are “terrorists” here to begin with?  What kind of open border policy does he support that lends itself to having terrorists come into America unimpeded?

And that could lead to the next point, which is that the “watch list” is comprised no only of cross border terrorists who should be deported but haven’t been under the Obama administration, but America patriots as well who happen to believe that the second amendment is the final remedy against a tyrannical state.  Or in other words, peaceable American citizens who haven’t been tried in any court or found guilty of any crime whatsoever.

He should be forced to admit that in front of people, and then to admit that he is a gun controlling communist.  Do I have good readers in Wyoming who can press this issue with Anderson?  It looks like y’all have your fair share of trash to take out just like the rest of us do.

Law Newz:

The GOP has just risen to a whole new level of crazy. Last week, it introduced the Duncan-Carter Hearing Protection Act of 2017, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Rep. John Carter (R-TX). The bill removes gun silencers from the scope of the National Firearms Act of 1934, and refunds the $200 transfer tax to applicants who purchased them after October 22, 2015.

Yes, we’re talking about gun silencers, or “suppressors” as they are euphemistically known in the industry. You know – those things that assassins snap on the ends of their pistols in action movies to look all slick and cold-blooded. Apparently, the logic is that the world would be a much safer place if silencers were more readily available to the average consumer. Sure.

[ … ]

The people who should be most outraged by the Hearing Protection Act aren’t gun-hating liberals who knee-jerk at any mention of firearms. They are conservatives and libertarians who value their own credibility in the nationwide debate over Second Amendment rights. It is the responsibility of supporters of Heller to call bullshit on legislation that is nothing more than a marketing plan dressed up as “hearing protection.” Gun owners of integrity have an obligation to remind Congress that earplugs and earmuffs are readily available, and that claims of the necessity of silencers are as stupid as any that big tobacco should manufacture self-lighting cigarettes to prevent kids from burning themselves with lighters.

So I guess suppressors can give you cancer and cause you to become professional assassins.  Since suppressors actually do no good protecting your hearing from noise, I guess there must be another reason for them.  I’m sure they don’t allow hunters to be aware of their surroundings, like whether they’re near other hunters when they shoot.  I’m sure all of those ear muffs don’t interfere with your cheek weld.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people who know absolutely nothing about guns try to make policy and law about guns.  They have nothing to which they can turn except shoot-’em-up movies and assassins.  And suppressors are the same thing as tobacco and can give you cancer.

I don’t think there is any question that the voters put Donald Trump in office, at least in the main, because they’re sick and tired of seeing their jobs go to Hispanics and Latinos, all the while observing the cash-based society they live in where they don’t do business via official channels where they would be taxed.  And they’re tired of this cashless society since they have to endure the taxation to prop up medical care, SNAP, welfare and other support for cross-border workers.  They’re tired of paying their share when others don’t.

Paul Ryan doesn’t care about you or your views.

Congressional Republicans are working with the Trump transition team on a solution for immigrants brought illegally to this country as kids, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday.

Hundreds of thousands of these immigrants gained temporary protections and work permits from President Obama. While campaigning for president, Donald Trump promised to undo those protections, putting the immigrants at risk of deportation, although he said last month he hoped to “work something out” to help them.

Ryan didn’t detail what Congress and Mr. Trump would do about the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. But when questioned on a CNN town hall by a woman who identified herself as a DACA recipient with a young daughter, Ryan told her he did not want to see her deported.

“I can see you love your daughter, you are a nice person who has a great future ahead of you, and I hope your future is here,” Ryan said.

“What we have to do is find a way to make sure that you can get right with the law, and we’ve got to do this in a good way so that the rug doesn’t get pulled out from under you and your family gets separated.”

Host Jake Tapper pointed out that Mr. Trump, during the campaign, promised a “deportation force” to round up the more than 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. Ryan dismissed that idea.

“I’m here to tell you in Congress, it’s not happening.”

It sure would be nice if we engaged in the fabrication of machine guns in violation of the NFA, and then had Paul Ryan on our side who wanted to help us “get right” with the law.

But we haven’t yet made our voices heard in such a way that Paul hears them.  Mark my words now though, he is compromised.  I’ll guarantee it, I would bet every penny I’m worth on it.  He is involved in the deep state, and someone has pictures of him.  Mark my words.  It’ll eventually be found out.

And as for what you really need to know about Ryan, you have already heard it.  Paul Ryan advocates universal background checks.  There.  That’s all you ever need to now about him.  He is a communist.  Case closed.

George Webb Sweigert, from Portland, Oregon, has an amazing video series that I’ve linked before and will continue to link.  I won’t embed every video since the last time I posted, but I will embed two, and in these two videos George outlines a number of bad actors in the deep state, including the Council on Foreign Relations, Steve Feinberg and DynCorp, David Petraeus, The Clinton Foundation, and a number of Senators who will be found to be involved in this for various reasons, including oil plays.  All of these operations involved disinformation, lies, propaganda, murder for hire, toppling of sovereign nations, and the trafficking of oil, arms and children. Also, at The Sullen Bell, Ed Jewett has a good collection of Webb PowerPoint slides and also links to a number of source documents George uses.