Capital View:

Most people find the shooting death of an unarmed yoga instructor by Minneapolis police to be incomprehensible. But some cops on patrol say the circumstances of the shooting, an officer poised to fire in the dark from a car seat, aren’t uncommon. And some experts say they aren’t surprised to hear that police officers are responding to seemingly routine calls with their guns drawn. (MPR News)

Before Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor shot Justine Ruszczyk through the open driver’s side window of his squad car, a woman had approached the back of the patrol car and “slapped” it, according to a court document filed Monday.  A search warrant was filed by Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators to look at the area where the shooting happened and gather evidence as part of the investigation. “Upon police arrival, a female ‘slaps’ the back of the patrol squad,” according to the search warrant. “After that, it is unknown to BCA agents what exactly happened, but the female became deceased in the alley.” (MPR News)

Well hell, that clears it all up for me.  She “slapped” the car.  I hate it when that happens to me.  I remember the last time I shot someone for slapping my car.

And it’s good to know that she simply “became deceased.”  I had thought she was murdered by a Muslim thug affirmative action hire.

Recoil:

The issue is multifaceted. First, there’s the ability and willingness of many production sources, mostly in China, to create knockoffs. This readiness to create counterfeits, though, is bolstered by unscrupulous people here in America willing to knowingly trade in them.

While United States Customs officials and other protection agencies catch millions of fakes destined for American markets, enough slip through to create genuine concern.

[ … ]

Counterfeiters make some convincing copies of Magpul’s popular slings and sights. At first glance, the fakes look just like the real thing. But differences you might not see include the use of inferior polymer materials that may fail unexpectedly …

Liptak explained there actually was a time when Magpul licensed some cheaper components for the airsoft market, intended to make Magpul-branded pieces available for use on airsoft guns at lower prices. These licensed Chinese clones weren’t supposed to create confusion about their lower quality compared to components made for actual combat or law enforcement. But they did.

“We shut that deal down a few years ago. It was potentially confusing in that something from overseas that was marked MAGPUL was actually legitimate,” Liptak said. Now, he added, people are counterfeiting the former PTS products. All real Magpul products are made domestically. This makes it easier for U.S. Customs to stop anything coming into the country.

“An even larger issue, and a safety issue, and something we’ve raised in litigation is that someone may be putting these counterfeit products on a firearm they’re trusting their life to — whether it’s a law enforcement or military firearm or a civilian firearm trusted to defend hearth and home. It’s not going to perform to the same standard as the Magpul product they thought they were getting. Not good,” he declared.

Liptak says most Magpul knockoffs are sold online. Ebay is a common venue. Even Amazon sometimes sells counterfeits. Liptak advises to always check where an item ships from and who’s selling it. Beware some of the purported consumer reviews on online retail sites. Many can be fake fluff.

[ … ]

John Enloe is Aimpoint’s manager of marketing and technical support. An 11-year veteran of the company, many fakes come across his desk, some sent in for warranty work.

“They’re sold all over the internet and at gun shows. It’s startling because there have been times when professionals, people who’ve been overseas in combat, send sights to repair after they’ve used them for a couple weeks, reporting the sight “crapped out.”

Aimpoint military equipment models are the most frequent knockoffs. He said most Aimpoint knockoffs are airsoft toys. The airsoft community likes to call them “military simulators,” Enloe said. Many fakes are products for which Aimpoint has substantial military contracts. These include the COMPM4 optic, the 3X magnifier, and the entire line of micro series optics, mainly because of the popularity with the Special Operations community.

“The companies manufacturing these things are in direct infringement. They’ve got our logos on the products. They’re mainly building them for airsoft toys, and less scrupulous people are importing them into the country, and then trying to pass them off as the real thing to defraud people.” Enloe sees rampant problems at gun shows.

Brad Romines, Trijicon’s export compliance manager, says his company has also seen a noticeable uptick in counterfeits with optics and riflescopes the past few years. They’re even finding counterfeiters selling directly at U.S. tradeshows, including SHOT Show and a major consumer show, the Great American Outdoor Show. Trijicon knockoffs are being sold throughout the European Union, the United States, and even the Middle East, he said. China is almost always the country of origin.

Read the entire article at Recoil.  And be careful what you buy and how you buy it.  I know Amazon has been caught selling fake products before, or more correctly, they put people in contact with companies selling fake products.

I have a problem with this not only because the products are inferior and may fail, but also because it’s intellectual property theft, and China is the master of it.

We all hate paying big prices for things, but if you don’t like it enough, then you’ll design something better for cheaper, and when you do, that intellectual property belongs to you, not China.

Here’s a tip for you – put this on a mental index card and file it away the next time you think about buying an important product from China.  China still doesn’t get the QA process.  They don’t have the culture to sustain such a thing.  The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) doesn’t allow U.S. nuclear power plants to procure structures, systems or components from China, and for good reason.  Nothing they build can be trusted.

What does that say to you?  Is your own safety any less important to you than the safety of your local nuclear power plant?

Firearms Policy Coalition:

In today’s Wrenn v. District of Columbia decision (a related case, Grace v. District of Columbia, was consolidated with Wrenn on appeal), a lawsuit helmed by civil rights attorney Alan Gura and backed by the Second Amendment Foundation, the Court held in relevant part that D.C.’s “good-reason” handgun carry ban laws were unconstitutional:

Of course, the good-reason law isn’t a “total ban” for the D.C. population as a whole of the right to bear common arms under common circumstances. After all, it allows some D.C. residents—those with a special need—to defend against threats both common to everyone and specific to themselves.

But the ban on ownership struck down in Heller I also made “minor exceptions” for certain sorts of owners, who could then defend their homes to the hilt. 554 U.S. at 570 n.1. That made no difference to constitutional review of the ban, see id., for a simple reason: the point of the Amendment isn’t to ensure that some guns would find their way into D.C., but that guns would be available to each responsible citizen as a rule (i.e., at least to those no more prone to misuse that access than anyone else).

So if Heller I dictates a certain treatment of “total bans” on Second Amendment rights, that treatment must apply to total bans on carrying (or possession) by ordinarily situated individuals covered by the Amendment. 

This point brings into focus the legally decisive fact: the good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on most D.C. residents’ right to carry a gun in the face of ordinary self-defense needs, where these residents are no more dangerous with a gun than the next law-abiding citizen.

We say “necessarily” because the law destroys the ordinarily situated citizen’s right to bear arms not as a side effect of applying other, reasonable regulations (like those upheld in Heller II and Heller III), but by design: it looks precisely for needs “distinguishable” from those of the community.

So we needn’t pause to apply tiers of scrutiny, as if strong enough showings of public benefits could save this destruction of so many commonly situated D.C. residents’ constitutional right to bear common arms for self-defense in any fashion at all.

Bans on the ability of most citizens to exercise an enumerated right would have to flunk any judicial test that was appropriately written and applied, so we strike down the District’s law here apart from any particular balancing test. 

***

So our approach, briefed by all the parties, is also urged by Heller I and coheres with Heller II. It’s narrower than any other basis for decision but not ad hoc.

And it would avoid suggesting what Heller I implicitly denies: that some public benefits could justify preventing people from exercising the law-abiding citizen’s right to bear arms for self-defense given the risk and needs typical of, well, law-abiding citizens. 

We pause to draw together all the pieces of our analysis: At the Second Amendment’s core lies the right of responsible citizens to carry firearms for personal self-defense beyond the home, subject to longstanding restrictions. These traditional limits include, for instance, licensing requirements, but not bans on carrying in urban areas like D.C. or bans on carrying absent a special need for self-defense.

In fact, the Amendment’s core at a minimum shields the typically situated citizen’s ability to carry common arms generally.

The District’s good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on exercises of that constitutional right for most D.C. residents. That’s enough to sink this law under Heller I. 

***

To watch the news for even a week in any major city is to give up any illusions about “the problem of handgun violence in this country.” Heller I, 554 U.S. at 570. The District has understandably sought to fight this scourge with every legal tool at its disposal.

For that long struggle against gun violence, you might see in today’s decision a defeat; you might see the opposite. To say whether it is one or the other is beyond our ken here.

We are bound to leave the District as much space to regulate as the Constitution allows—but no more. Just so, our opinion does little more than trace the boundaries laid in 1791 and flagged in Heller I. And the resulting decision rests on a rule so narrow that good-reason laws seem almost uniquely designed to defy it: that the law-abiding citizen’s right to bear common arms must enable the typical citizen to carry a gun. 

We vacate both orders below and remand with instructions to enter permanent injunctions against enforcement of the District’s good-reason law.

Circuit Judge Karen Henderson dissented, arguing in a footnote that:

Although I assume that the Second Amendment extends to some extent beyond the home, I am certain the core Second Amendment right does not. The application of strict scrutiny—let alone my colleagues’ application of a categorical ban—is, in my view, patently off-base.

I’ve always thought that Scalia left much undone in his Heller decision, and the appeals court is doing his work for him in this ruling.  Perhaps Heller is all he could get the Supremes to agree to.

Unfortunately, however, this won’t be the end of it.  D.C. will come up with something equally unconstitutional, and I’ve noted before that similar federal courts have ruled in favor of “may-carry” laws in states such as New York, Massachusetts and Hawaii.  There is much more to come, and all of this confusion could have been avoided by a more robust Heller decision.

In the mean time, how dark for a person like Henderson, whose world and life view distinguishes between “to some extent” and “core.”  How sad and abusive towards other women who are left defenseless in the face of assault by her vacillation.

Glenn Reynolds also provides some links.

Post links and talk amongst yourselves.  Be back tomorrow hopefully.

The Island Packet:

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, N.C. – Tammy Dunn was vacationing on the Grand Strand on June 18 when a mass shooting erupted on Ocean Boulevard. She didn’t know it then, but the shooting that rocked Myrtle Beach was about to shake her hometown, too.

He was shocked.  Shocked!  He had multiple interactions with law enforcement, but the police are shocked that he was a shooter.

Little has been in and out of jail since 16 when he was first arrested for stealing two pit bull puppies. But most of his charges have stemmed from property crimes. He was never accused of firing a weapon until June 18.

Police say Little worked “in concert” with 19-year-olds Tyron Elijah Daquan Steele and Raekwon Tariq Graham and 18-year-olds Jarvez Datwan Graham and Keshawn Datavis Steele to ambush a Stanly County, North Carolina, man.

Dunn reported that the feud between the groups started at least two years ago when a Mount Gilead man was killed in a 2015 shooting in Albemarle, the county seat of Stanly County.

The man convicted in that killing, 18-year-old Jimmy Jaquavis Parker, is incarcerated in the Foothills Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Morganton, North Carolina.

This just gets better and better.  Theft, and perhaps larceny.  A gang, killings, and a gang feud.  But the cops are shocked!

Parker was 16 at the time of the shooting. His projected release date is Dec. 13, 2019, according to the N.C. Department of Public Safety.

But aside from ongoing “unpleasantries” between people from both areas, Hensley said, he didn’t think Parker and the primary victim in the Myrtle Beach shooting were related.

“There’s a contingent of young gentlemen in Mount Gilead and there’s a contingent of young people in Albemarle and neither one of them get along with each other,” he said.

Police say there is a known chapter of the United Blood Nation (the East Coast Bloods gang) in Albemarle. Suspects in the Ocean Boulevard shooting are considered to be a part of the Money Chasin Gang.

“I can say that we have had problems in town with that crowd coming over, starting fights; our crowd going to Albemarle starting fights with them,” Hensley said. “There’s not like this ongoing, ‘we’re going to kill everybody’ feud. (But) there is a rivalry.”

Oh good.  It’s just unpleasantries.  For a moment it sounded more serious than that, like a gang war.  At least it’s just a rivalry, sort of like High School football.

Albemarle Police Department’s Assistant Chief Jesse Huneycutt said the shooting in 2015 erupted in a “turf battle.”

“I know there were some concerns with the school system after that about some of the ballgames and security at the ballgames and whether or not to play Stanly County in football and things like that,” Dunn said. “But, it’s sad that, you know, teenagers are involved in that.”

[ … ]

Keshawn is accused in warrants of delivering Xanax, a prescription drug used to treat anxiety, to two teen boys on Jan. 24. He was charged with two counts of selling/delivering Xanax and simple possession of a controlled substance after officers say they found three Xanax pills in his possession. He is still facing those charges in Montgomery County.

Tyron is accused of shooting a high-powered rifle into a Troy, N.C., home occupied by two men, a woman and a 7-year-old boy on April 7, according to an indictment. Later that night, the Steele family’s home also reportedly was riddled with seven bullet holes by a suspect named in a police report as Roshun Dumas, a family member of the victims listed in Tyron’s indictment.

Keshawn and Tyron were both charged with fighting, communicating threats and disorderly conduct after a street brawl on June 8, 2015, according to a police report. Then, in August of that year, Tyron was accused of possessing a cellphone stolen from a locker room at West Montgomery High School, where he was a student, according to a separate incident report. That charge later was dismissed.

Most recently, Tyron and Keshawn have each been charged with trafficking heroin, possession with intent to distribute Oxycodone and maintaining a dwelling for controlled substances in Montgomery County, according to court records.

The title of the article includes ‘guns,’ but of course, that has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this.  Lot’s of people have guns, but not lots of people commit crimes like this.  The problem begins long before something like this happens.  My own daughter was in college studying Nursing, and was later to become a Nurse Practitioner.  Her time in undergraduate studies was marked by incurring student debt and driving a “beater” Volvo 240 that required a quart of oil every time the tank was filled up with gas.  I had to work hard to keep that thing running during her tenure in college.

Her roommates were black girls, both of whom went to college for free (free for them, costing you a lot of money), smoked dope the entire time, both of whom drove Cadillac Escalades, and both of whom flunked out of college.  The apostle tells us that if a man doesn’t work, he shouldn’t eat (2 Thess 3:10).  This is righteous and morally upright teaching, but it has been violated in America for far too long, creating a class of entitled criminals who perpetrate acts like what you saw above.

It isn’t limited to blacks, and rich people commit crimes too, but the black community in America has a special cultural and moral problem.  These boys should never have been in that situation to begin with.  They have no parents to speak of, or if they do, their parents don’t care.  They don’t care because they don’t have to care.  The first time one of those boys committed the crime of theft, he should have become an indentured servant of the one he had offended until the debt was paid threefold.  As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in prisons or the concept of a “debt to society.”

If he didn’t do it, his parents should have shouldered the financial burden, and if they couldn’t, they should have become indentured servants until the debt was paid threefold.  Only such circumstances engenders responsibility and accountability, where the parents tired of being indentured servants because of crimes their child committed.  The first time attempted murder occurred, someone should have become enslaved to the one he offended, and if he refused, he should have been executed.

As for Myrtle Beach, as long as they have “senior week” where underage riff raff, ne’er-do-wells and criminals are invited in to terrorize a city, they deserve what they get.  If they want to hold someone accountable in Myrtle Beach, then hold the proprietor who gave them accommodations accountable.  Run them out of business, and then run them out of town.

As long as you have fights, shootings, naked girls running around the beach, hollering and partying all night and public drunkenness, it won’t be a place amenable for families.  So continue to cater to the criminals and gangsters rather than the families, and see what happens.  Who has the real money to spend?

Prior: South Carolina LEOs, Open Carry And Myrtle Beach Follies

Komonews.com:

PHOENIX (AP) — Gun-friendly Arizona is trying to avoid deadly encounters between police and people behind the wheel by teaching armed drivers how they should handle themselves when they are pulled over.

Arizona, which allows residents to carry weapons without permits, recently changed its rule book for the road in a bid to avoid confrontations such as the one that killed Philando Castile. The Minnesota man, who had a gun permit, was fatally shot during a 2016 traffic stop after telling an officer he was armed.

Arizona is among a small number of states instructing drivers on what to expect during traffic stops. It appears to be the first to use its driving rules to address situations in which motorists are armed.

Democratic state Rep. Reginald Bolding said Castile’s death inspired him to seek changes to the state’s driver’s manual. He said the revisions were necessary because Arizona does not require gun permits and some owners have not been trained to handle firearms.

“The goal was to create a set of standards,” Bolding said.

The new edition of the driver’s manual, published about a month ago, advises drivers with guns to keep their hands on the steering wheel during traffic stops and tell officers right away that there’s a firearm in the car.

It also tells drivers not to reach for anything inside the vehicle without getting permission first. And officers can take possession of guns, for safety reasons, until the stop is completed. The firearms would be returned if no crime has been committed.

“For safety reasons.”  And lawmakers and judges are just stupid enough to think there is something to that.  Safety first, we are all taught to believe.  But if that’s true, if this was all being done for safety, LEOs would never, ever actually touch another person’s gun.

That is the stupidest thing I can possibly imagine.  It risks negligent discharges, as well as misunderstandings.  A LEO cannot possibly know what he’s attempting to pick up – a semi-automatic, a pistol caliber carbine, a revolver, a double action semi-automatic, a round chambered or not, a 1911 with a traditional safety, safety on, safety off, a grip (beaver tail) safety, no safety at all, pistols with owner modifications, pistols with light trigger pull modifications, and on and on the list goes.

The author of this policy decision is an idiot.  This does nothing to ameliorate risk, it only increases it, and for no good reason.  If a gun owner informs a LEO that he has a firearm because that’s what the law stipulates, he isn’t the kind of person who will harm the officer with a firearm in contravention of an even greater law against murder.  A criminal will wait until there is no other option, and he won’t inform the LEO that he has a firearm.

This is simply myth-making on the part of LEOs.  Here is some advice for gun owners and LEOs as well.  Leave the gun alone.  Don’t handle the gun.  Don’t touch the gun.  Not anyone.  Don’t touch the gun.  Don’t touch the gun.  Don’t handle the gun.  Don’t touch the gun.

Understand?

Lindsey Graham is at the helm.

“At a press conference with U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., to unveil the “Dream Act” — which would provide pathways to citizenship for certain undocumented immigrants brought to the country illegally as children — [Sen. Lindsey] Graham described a moral imperative for his president and his party.”

[ … ]

And those intent on “fundamental transformation” are counting on Americans’ innate decency to allow them to continue with the fraudulent reshaping of the Republic and its laws. As for anyone who might object, most of those can be chilled by smearing them as xenophobes and racists, as if observable and demostrable truths are only for bigots.

You can call me whatever you wish – it makes no difference to me.  And this has nothing whatsoever to do with race.  I’ve explained this before.

“For historical reasons to do with the nationalisation of the land under Lázaro Cárdenas and the predominant form of peasant land tenure, which was “village cooperative” rather than based on individual plots, the demand for “land to the tiller” in Mexico does not imply an individual plot for every peasant or rural worker or family. In Mexico, collectivism among the peasantry is a strong tradition … one consequence of these factors is that the radical political forces among the rural population are on the whole explicitly anti-capitalist and socialist in their ideology. Sometimes this outlook is expressed in support for guerilla organisations; but struggle movements of the rural population are widespread, and they spontaneously ally with the most militant city-based leftist organisations.”

One of the reasons for this reflexive alignment with leftism has to do with the the mid-twentieth century and what the Sovient Union and allied ideologies accomplished.  South and Central America was the recipient or receptacle for socialism draped in religious clothing, or in other words, liberation theology.  Its purveyors were Roman Catholic priests who had been trained in Marxism, and they were very successful in giving the leftists a moral platform upon which to build.  This ideology spread North from South and Central America into Mexico, and thus the common folk in Mexico are quite steeped in collectivist ideology from battles that were fought decades ago.

Collectivists are statists, and statists require state control as part of their world and life view.  They long for their slavery, a key part of which is the complete inability to effect self defense or to hold tyranny accountable.  Venezuela is a notable exception at the moment, but we’ll see where that goes.

Since McCain is out of commission at the moment, Lindsey Graham has to take the wheel and guide the ship of self destruction.  Is it any surprise that the only other lackey Graham could get to stand with him is Durbin?  Oh, other republicans want to destroy America too, but at least they aren’t stupid enough to stand there and say so in public right now.

The Spokesman-Review:

Kimber Wood was lying in bed almost asleep Monday morning, with the TV on low-volume in the background, a handgun lying on the pillow next to her, when a faint sound reached her ears.

She heard the living room screen door swing open, hardly unfamiliar in a house where both cat and dog had learned to open the latch, she said in an interview Tuesday. But then she heard the door close. That trick, she said, her pets had not yet learned, and Wood knew something was wrong.

There had been warnings, she said. Her boyfriend, who lives in her family’s home in a rural neighborhood in the Wandermere area, had called Wood’s mother to let her know that he saw several police cars in the neighborhood on his way to work. Wood’s mother, Tina, passed a similar message on to Kimber and her father, Lenny. That’s when the family decided the 17-year-old should have her father’s gun, a .22-caliber Ruger revolver, with her while home alone.

Hasitly, Wood grabbed her dad’s gun and hid behind her vanity, to the side of her bedroom door, she said. She called her dad and whispered, “Please tell me you’re messing with me or something.”

He wasn’t. He was at work, he said. What was wrong?

Wood told him that there was an intruder in the house. Her father put his cell phone to his left ear and called emergency dispatchers with his work headset in his right ear. As he did so, Wood listened to what sounded to be a man going upstairs and then coming back down. He even went to the basement, she said, where her friendly boxer-mix, Max, was sleeping.

“It’s clear” she said she heard him say when he got back to the main level, seemingly to himself. She said she listened as the intruder left the house briefly, then returned. She said she believed he had taken his mother’s keys from her purse, but that they would have done him no good since his mother had taken her vehicle earlier that morning.

The intruder then re-entered the house, she said, and came toward the one closed door he hadn’t checked yet: Wood’s room.

The last thing Wood heard her father say was that the police were on their way. When the intruder reached the door, she said, Wood stood up and asked who he was.

He immediately ran, so Wood threw her phone on her bed and chased him with gun in hand, repeatedly asking who he was, she said.

The intruder ran back to the screen door and around the wraparound porch to the back of the house, where he was fenced in by the guardrail on the back deck.

Jumping the rail, he ran through a stand of fruit trees to a metal wire fence, Wood said. Wood was about 15 feet behind the man and fired a shot at the space between them moments before he hopped over the fence.

Over the next few days, as Wood’s story proliferated through social media, some commentators speculated that Wood “missed her target.” But Wood disagreed, saying it was never her intention to kill the alleged intruder. She described the shot as a warning to scare him away.

“I refused to be a victim,” she said.

You mean to say that she hadn’t been trained in all of that tacticool super Ninja warrior stress control training, and she was still able to defend her life with a firearm?  This means massive narrative fail on the part of the controllers.  They won’t be happy.

In fact, in order to maintain the narrative and effect their designs for a defenseless utopia, they would rather she have been raped, or killed, or both.  Everytown and Bloomberg have already told them to try to change their names from controllers to “gun law advocacy groups.”  They’re very concerned about their image these days.

However, I would recommend in the future that she not shoot at fleeing people unless she wants huge trouble with the prosecutors and courts, and for heaven’s sake, don’t fire warning shots.

Ignoring the science that informs us that gun confiscations don’t prevent suicide, Massachusetts lawmakers are flirting with more progressive dreams of utopia.

BOSTON — Supporters of new gun laws and opponents clashed Tuesday over a bill that would allow guns to be temporarily seized from people deemed at high risk of hurting themselves or others.

Rep. David Linsky filed the legislation, which would add Massachusetts to a handful of states that allow firearms to be seized by a court-issued civil order at the request of families, law enforcement officers or some health care providers.

“There is no way, if a family member goes to a police department or court, there is no legal way to remove the firearms from the house,” Linsky said. “We can close a loophole in the Massachusetts court system.”

The Joint Committee on the Judiciary heard testimony on dozens of bills under the umbrella of “crime legislation” at a crowded public hearing, including two gun suppressor bills.

Ahead of the hearing, Linsky held a lobby day to showcase support for his bill. He is pushing for the establishment of what the bill calls an extreme risk protective order. California, Washington, Connecticut and Indiana have similar laws, according to gun law advocacy groups.

“Gun law advocacy groups.”  Is that what Everytown and Bloomberg have told them to call the controllers now?  Gun law advocacy groups?  So they’re still the controllers, no matter what you call them.  You can’t put lipstick on a pig and get anything but a pig.

Jim Wallace, the executive director of the Gun Owners Action League of Massachusetts, opposes the protective order bill. He said it does not do enough to address what happens after a firearm is taken away from an at-risk person.

“You’ve got somebody who has an issue, you’ve got to drag them through this process which is going to aggravate the issue and then you’re going to take away their civil rights, and then what?” Wallace said. “What are we doing for them? Nothing.”

That’s the wrong reason to oppose this proposal, Jim.  The right reason is that it violates the constitution, which is the covenant under which we all agreed to live, and that constitution is based on God-given rights.

Wallace said the bill “does not tackle the issue of mental health” and raised questions about whether a person deemed an extreme risk should be permitted to do other things like drive a vehicle or handle chemicals.

“And here’s one nobody wants to talk about: If they’re not a citizen, are they immediately deported? Unfortunately the bill is a good soundbite but it’s not a good solution,” Wallace said.

The bill’s supporters argue extreme risk protective orders could lead people to connect with the mental health services they need.

Gun law advocates hissed as Wallace testified for two gun suppressor bills alongside National Rifle Association spokesman John Hohenwarter and American Suppressor Association President and Executive Director Knox Williams. The bills were filed by Rep. Josh Cutler and Rep. Paul Frost.

They hissed because that’s what vipers do.  I made a mistake when I compared them to pigs.  They are more like pit vipers, and you can’t put lipstick on pit vipers either and get anything but a pit viper.

Chelsea Police Chief Brian Kyes and Arlington Police Chief Fred Ryan offered joint testimony against the suppressor bills, saying they put officers and communities at risk.

“This is common sense that the great General Court should oppose this legislation,” Ryan said. “If we increase the volume of suppressors on the streets of commonwealth, we increase the likelihood that they’ll be diverted to illicit use.”

About a dozen communities in the state rely on ShotSpotter, a technology designed to detect gunfire. Kyes said suppressors would hamper the effectiveness of the tool by making gunfire more difficult to detect than it already is.

“They do a pretty good job, not a great job. There’s no way in the world it could pick up something with a suppressor,” Kyes said. “Suppressors would impede public safety.”

If this was true, it would be only because no one besides LEOs can carry weapons in Massachusetts, leaving people defenseless in the face of violence.

Angus McQuilken, a member of the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, said before the hearing the suppressor debate isn’t about hearing protection at all. He argued gun manufacturers are hoping to expand into a new market to boost sales.

“This is about the money. What is it almost always about when the gun lobby is trying to advance legislation? It is about the money.

It’s all about the money.  No shooter, like me or the ones who read this web site has ever advocated for suppressors because, you know, they help hearing protection and make it possible to shoot with ear plugs without ear muffs, thus avoiding the difficult cheek weld and get better eye relief.  So says the controllers.

Good Lord.  What an entanglement of ass clowns.  Say, what firearms manufacturers are still ensconced or headquartered in Massachusetts anyway?  Why are they still there?  Don’t they know that we don’t like the controllers?

Via WRSA, this from Reason.

Speaking at a National District Attorneys Association conference in Minneapolis Monday, Sessions said state and local law enforcement could expect changes from U.S. Attorneys in several areas: increased prosecution of gun crimes, immigration offenses, gang activity, and prescription drug abuse, as well as increased asset seizure by the federal government.

“[W]e hope to issue this week a new directive on asset forfeiture—especially for drug traffickers,” Sessions said. “With care and professionalism, we plan to develop policies to increase forfeitures. No criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime. Adoptive forfeitures are appropriate as is sharing with our partners.”

Except that the use of drug traffickers to make his point is a red herring.  Asset forfeiture has occurred with TSA when travelers carry more money than the fedgov thinks they should be, when local police get a call from a pissed off woman who wants her ex- to get his guns confiscated, local, county and state police when a person is suspected or charged with a crime (not convicted of that crime).

Sessions is using drug traffickers as the straw man.  But I have a question for attorney general Sessions.  If criminals shouldn’t be able to keep the profits of their illegal activities, then what about the federal government?  Should they keep their profits, and what makes the heavy taxation any different than theft or home invasion in the middle of the night by masked criminals?

In Scripture, kings who demanded more than God Himself (a tenth) are looked upon as evil.  So too are kings who banned weapons.  For evidence you need to go no farther than Nebuchadnezzar.  Between sales tax, local taxes, state taxes, federal taxes and FICA, we’re way above a tenth, and thus the government is a criminal organization in God’s eyes.

Turning from my question to Sessions, I would also point out as I have before that the notion of a debt to society is a wicked abomination.  In Biblical law, when someone is guilty of theft, he repays the innocent party from whom he stole multiple times over.  If not, he might just have been put to death.  Indentured servitude has a rich Biblical history, and it has to do with repaying debts.

If you raped, kidnapped or murdered someone, the town would take you outside the gates, following Biblical law, and stone you to death.  There was no notion of rehabilitation, and the rehabilitative role of modern prisons is a function of pagan philosophy embodied in contemporary men like John Dewey, who also fathered the modern American school system.  Man is a tabula rasa, and so he can be unlearned, so they say.  There is no accountability, no judgment, no justice in modern “criminal justice.”

No man owes a debt to society at large.  Society at large cannot collect a debt from an individual and call or consider it righteous, for it is not, it never was, and it never will be.  Prisons are evil, a hotbed for criminal and pagan Muslim recruitment, and the posse – the judgment of the community – far from being vigilante justice, is righteous judgment. [The use of prisons in counterinsurgency is one of the many reasons the U.S. failed so badly in both Iraq and Afghanistan].

Neither the government nor society is God, it cannot lay claim to debts from its citizens, and it cannot rehabilitate criminals.