Blue Lives Matter:

The Miramar Police Department has suspended two officers from their SWAT team for responding to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting without having orders to do so.

When the first reports of an active shooter came out, the Miramar officers were in training in Coral Springs, nearby the Parkland high school, and they rushed to assist in stopping the carnage that left 17 students and faculty fatally shot, and another 16 wounded, on Valentine’s Day, the Miami Herald reported.

The police response to the mass shooting at the school – specifically that of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office – has been highly criticized for the incident commander’s failure to use updated active-shooter response methods.

Broward County Sheriff’s Captain Jan Jordan has been criticized for ordering officers to set up a perimeter rather than sending them in to stop the shooter, whose whereabouts were still unknown.

Several police officers and medics have reported that they believed more lives were lost because the incident commander wouldn’t let them respond earlier.

Some critics have called the officers who stayed outside and waited for permission to enter “cowards,” but now Miramar police are punishing two members of their own elite unit who did rush toward danger to try to save students’ lives.

Miramar Police Detectives Jeffrey Gilbert and Carl Schlosser were suspended from the Miramar SWAT team eight days after the shooting in Parkland, according to the Miami Herald.

Both remain on active duty with the department, but working in different capacities, the Sun-Sentinelreported.

“Effective immediately you have been suspended from the SWAT Team until further notice,” Miramar SWAT team commander Captain Kevin Nosowicz wrote in a Feb. 22 memo obtained by the Miami Herald through a public records request. “Please make arrangements with the training department to turn in your SWAT-issued rifle.”

The memo said Det. Gilbert and Det. Schlosser acted “without the knowledge or authorization from your chain of command” and created an “officer safety situation due to dispatch not knowing your location or activity” by heading to the massacre-in-progress independently.

An “officer safety situation.”  Next up, a little more detail.

The human urge to aid in a disaster is strong. But it can also run counter to police training. Too much response to a mass casualty situation can create confusion and hinder responders, as recent mass shootings have shown, according to Pat Franklin, a retired Miami Beach police detective.

“This is not their area, this is not their jurisdiction,” said Franklin, who consults with law enforcement agencies on internal affairs investigations. “You don’t want to let those guys loose into something that’s chaotic where they might take inappropriate action. It is prudent to have them stand down unless there is a plan.”

Of course, given the history of SWAT engagements we’ve documented over the years, I doubt that taking inappropriate actions are of a concern to the police.  They do it all day long every day all over America.  No, the issue here is as I’ve told you before.

You can call them cowards, and they are indeed just that.  But – and listen to me again – they followed procedure.  It runs contrary to procedure to save people.  It runs contrary to police procedure to put officer safety anything but first.  It runs contrary to procedure to go outside the chain of command and take actions deemed appropriate by the professional on the scene.  It even runs contrary to procedure to enter jurisdiction not your own in order to save lives.

Here that again.  “This is not their area, this is not their jurisdiction.”  It’s not even acceptable to render comfort and aid to children being shot when you’re not in your own jurisdiction.  If you are a citizen who helps or saves someone else, if you’re holding a weapon when the police arrive and follow their procedures, you’re going to get shot.  Even if you’re a cop and you render aid outside your own jurisdiction, you’re going to get disciplined.

Because.  Procedure.  Officer safety first.  Chain of command.  And remember boys and girls, these are the people who want you to be disarmed and unable to take care of your own people.

Normally I don’t like to lift prose out of articles at length because I like to send traffic to the original post.  That’s not necessarily true here.  I don’t give a crap about The Weekly Standard for more than a few reasons, not the least of which is that they are gun controllers.  Why else would you publish gun control advocacy like this wrapped in the patriotic blanket of state’s rights?

Nino would not approve.

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia never intended for guns to end up in schools—and he said so 10 years ago. When he wrote the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, Scalia declared that the “right to keep and bear arms” was an individual right. It was a watershed moment for gun rights advocates. Scalia, ever the careful textualist, was quite specific and forceful in his 2008 decision. And while he may not have imagined a president pushing for armed classrooms, his words are prescient a decade later.

In the years leading up to the Heller decision, gun regulations had varied dramatically: a handgun legally purchased in Arizona might get you a felony conviction in the nation’s capital. Enter Dick Anthony Heller. As a licensed special police officer for the District of Columbia, Heller could carry a gun while on duty, but not while at home. The D.C. handgun ban became the central issue in his lawsuit. In the end, Scalia and four fellow conservative justices agreed: the ban was unconstitutional, and the Second Amendment was an individual right.

That’s probably what most people know about Heller. You can keep your handguns. Neither the District of Columbia, nor other cities, can take away what is a natural right. But most people probably haven’t read Heller (and who could blame them, it’s 157 pages long). If you did read the decision, you might remember that Scalia and the majority specifically staked out what limitations on guns are still in place. (For instance, machine guns are off limits.)

But Scalia also talks about schools in the decision:

. . . nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings . . .

This unambiguous statement is even repeated in the syllabus of the decision. It’s clear Scalia wasn’t pushing to turn America into a gun bazaar—especially if the guns were near schoolchildren, felons, and “sickos” (as President Trump likes to say).

Some states do have armed teachers. Trump made sure to highlight that point when he called on the governors of Texas and Arkansas during a recent televised event. But here again, the court has an answer. Scalia makes it clear in Heller that much of gun regulation is a federalist issue: “States, we said, were free to restrict or protect the right under their police powers.”

So, if Gov. Greg Abbott wants to have armed schools in Texas but Gov. Jerry Brown prefers California’s restrictive guns laws, well, fine. If the state law doesn’t violate the Constitution, then it’s not an issue for Washington. It’s not clear that Trump was thinking about such federalist nuance when he declared “Gun free zones are dangerous. The bad guys love gun-free zones.”

When I first wrote about guns in schools last month I was primarily concerned with the unintended consequences of placing half a million guns close to hormonally-challenged teenagers. Today, I’m also worried about a president who seems to view America as more of a personal fiefdom than as a collection of states with different peoples, traditions, and priorities. What’s good for San Francisco is not always good for San Antonio.

Defense of the image of God in man is always good, regardless of where it is or who does it.  The fact that The Weekly Standard published this pabulum speaks volumes on just what kind of people run the place.

I always said that Heller was weak, as was McDonald, and I can go back in time and find numerous examples of said dislike for the Heller decision.  But the constitution is a covenant whose rights are applied to all people in every nook and cranny of America all of the time.  It’s not by mistake that the progressives see rights as limited, but constitutional allowances for wars of choice, federal taxation, the CIA, the FBI, the DHS, the EPA, and on and on the list could go, from the department of education to SWAT teams and the war on drugs, to federally controlled and mandated health care, to subsidized housing and redistribution of wealth, and federal ownership of land.

The powers of the federal government (except to enforce the guaranteed right of RKBA) are unlimited, but your rights don’t even rate enough for any one to care if a state wants to violate them.

Or in other words, The Weekly Standard, like all progressives, has it ass backwards.

HuffPo:

There were 60 assault-style rifles and ammo in the shipment that arrived at Rio’s international airport on June 1, 2017 ― 45 of them manufactured in the United States. And they were all almost certainly intended for the drug gangs fighting among themselves and against local police in Rio’s favelas, helping drive a sharp spike in violence across Brazil’s second-largest city. These were Brazilian turf wars, waged with weapons manufactured in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida.

The Verge:

In the days after the Parkland shooting, users flocked to Wikipedia to learn about guns. When users searched for “AR-15” — the style of gun used during the shooting — they were directed to the page for the “Colt AR-15.” The page was viewed more than 200,000 times on the day after Parkland, a hundred times its usual traffic. But those users didn’t find much information about mass shootings or political efforts. In fact, the Colt AR-15 page made no mention of gun control at all, instead spending over a thousand words describing the technical details of the gun’s various parts.

That focus on hardware was by design. For months, the “Colt AR-15” page has been largely edited by a group of gun enthusiast editors. They joined together under the name “Wikipedia Project: Firearms,” or “WP:Firearms” for short. Expertise groups are common on Wikipedia, and in some ways, WP:Firearms fits the mold perfectly: a collection of users with detailed knowledge of a specific topic, keeping a close eye on all the pages where that knowledge might be relevant. But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.

Much of the alleged bias comes from how the articles are structured. For months before Parkland, information on generic AR-15 models was relegated to the Modern Sporting Rifles entry, which detailed various models and after-market additions, but made no mention of mass shootings or other gun control efforts. When some editors tried to include those topics, the backlash from WP:Firearms was immediate.

“Mass-shootings already have their own articles, all relevant info is, or should be, in that page and not needlessly duplicated on other articles,” one editor wrote. “If we start adding info about just one shooting incident to one tenuously-connected article, we’ll be opening a literal Pandora’s box (figuratively speaking).”

Fighting a similarly proposed edit on the Smith & Wesson page, user Trekphiler went further. “There are millions of weapons in civilian hands, including thousands of AR-15s,” he wrote, “and none of them have harmed anyone. This is the usual gun confiscator garbage.”

When users tried to detail the gun control concerns in the Colt AR-15 page, where most “AR-15” searches were still being directed, they ran into another technicality. “Sorry, this is an article about Colt’s AR-15 ™ rifle,” one WP:Firearms editor responded. “This is not the correct article for information that is about AR-15’s in general. That section of the article should be edited to remove the references to crimes that were not committed with Colt AR-15 rifles.”

The fight over gun nomenclature goes far beyond Wikipedia. Gun enthusiasts see terms like “assault weapon” as imprecise, while concrete terms like “semi-automatic” are overly broad. Even the term “AR-15” is difficult to pin down: what was a once-specific trademark has metastasized into a trans-corporate branding tool. “Modern sporting rifle,” the term preferred by WP:Firearms, is seen by many as a public relations gambit by the gun industry to downplay how deadly the weapons really are. There’s no perfect term, but as long as the two sides are fighting over nomenclature, any proposed measures will get lost in a maze of conflicting terms. And on crowdsourced and managed Wikipedia, that means heated, arcane, and tautological debates, often driven by political and cultural biases.

The title of The Verge article is “How gun buffs took over Wikipedia’s AR-15 page.”  Adam Weinstein also bitches about the throw-down he is witnessing over guns.

The phenomenon isn’t new, but in the weeks since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a lot of gun-skeptical liberals are getting a taste of it for the first time: While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between the terms clip and magazine.

Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control.

It can feel infuriating, being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions between our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons. I know this feeling acutely, having covered gun violence critically for the better part of a decade and having just buried an old mentor, killed in the Parkland massacre.

“Gunsplained and harangued.”  Ooo … if you think this is tough, just wait until you try to take them from us.  That’ll really be the bitchin’ day!

Just go cry me a river boys.  Grow a set, and stop griping over the fight you asked for on guns.  Uh oh, here comes a flock of wah wah’s.

PJM:

A bipartisan group of senators today unveiled legislation requiring federal authorities to notify state law enforcement officials when a person barred from purchasing a gun attempts to do so.

The NICS Denial Notification Act was introduced by Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and co-sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). The senators argue that those who fail the background check and violate the law when trying to get a gun — such as convicted felons and domestic abusers — are rarely prosecuted.

Only 13 states currently run their own background checks using the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System system. The rest, including the District of Columbia, rely on the FBI to screen gun buyers, meaning they have to rely on federal reporting to know when someone prohibited from gun ownership pulls a “lie and try.”

Under the new legislation, the FBI would have 24 hours to notify state authorities. Coons calls the bill “one modest, commonsense way” for senators to work across the aisle on gun legislation.

“We can make progress on gun safety while respecting the Second Amendment rights of American citizens, including better enforcing existing gun laws and responding to warning signs that we get of criminal behavior,: said Toomey. “This bipartisan bill is a critical step forward in helping to ensure that our communities can be safe from criminals.”

The legislation comes with the endorsements of the Fraternal Order of Police, Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, National District Attorneys Association, National Domestic Violence Hotline, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and Everytown for Gun Safety.

Everytown likes it, and that’s all you need to know.  So are your surprised to see Graham, Toomey, Cornyn and Rubio on this list of quislings?  No, I’m not either.

So let’s make sure you’ve got this straight.  Let’s say that a former Soldier or Marine serves his country with honor, and comes home only to be diagnosed with PTSD, like most of them who saw combat and earned a Combat Action Ribbon (CAR, so-called in the USMC), with reporting done to the NICS.  Many if not most warriors who suffer PTSD recover, and they weren’t a danger to anyone anyway.

Let’s also say that they didn’t know that it is the policy of the VA that warriors with PTSD are reported to the NICS.  Let’s also say that said warrior tries to go buy a gun at his local gun shop, only to find out that unbeknownst to him, he is on a prohibited list.

He’s now a felon just for not knowing, and not only that, he will have to fill out any future form 4473s saying that he was once prohibited by the NICS from purchasing a firearm.

That’s what these quislings want to do.  Just so you know.

ISIS fighters were gun controllers, remember.

“ISIS was telling everyone, ‘We’re all brothers,’ ” Abu Malik said. “They let people smoke and drink. At the checkpoints, they distributed presents to the kids. They ate with people, drank tea with people. They were very nice—they didn’t bother anyone. Then, a week or so after they arrived, they started confiscating weapons. They told us it didn’t matter if we’d been with the Awakening or the Army or the police—if we gave up our weapons, we’d be forgiven. Ten days later, they started taking people. Everything changed. They took my cousin. My brothers dug holes in the fields and hid. I was at my house when they came for me. It was afternoon. I saw two Hyundai Santa Fes pull up outside, and I ran out the back and jumped over the wall. That was the last time I saw my family.”

This is no different than Adolf Hitler, who confiscated weapons and outlawed a lot of other firearms hardware from his enemies.

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

Do you want more?

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.  History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.   So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.”

How about Benito Mussolini.

“The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. … They were elements of disorder and subversion.  On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind.  This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.”

We could go on with Pol Pot, communist China, Stalin, the Christian Armenian genocide at the hands the Turkish Muslims, and so on.  Suffice it to say that dictators love gun control.

What about today?

Khamenei’s “hard line” on guns is nothing new. One of the Ayatollah’s first orders of business, when he came to power, was to disarm his own citizens – a technique regularly used by “supreme leaders” to extend their tenures.

Ultimately, Khamenei makes a unique case that the Second Amendment is, in fact, an insurance policy against tyranny.

Now, of course, the left, despite being vocal on gun control for the last several weeks, embracing nearly every unqualified expert in agreement with them, up to and including members of the Kardashian family, has been silent on the Ayatollah’s expressed agreement with their agenda. But there is an undercurrent of support – as recently as early January, the Huffington Post wrote glowingly of some of the Ayatollah’s ideas.

Gun control is tyranny, and tyrants love gun control.  It’s in their blood.  It’s who they are.  Any time you hear talk of gun control, remember this and equate the advocate of gun control with Stalin, Mussolini, Turkish Muslims, Khamenei, and ISIS.

This includes any gun control measures, like advocating a ban on bump stocks.  Hey, didn’t the NRA do this?

David Codrea:

“If the only thing that comes out of this tragedy is we outlaw bump stocks and we raise the age at which people are allowed to buy an AR-15, that will be a failure,” … “Because the reality – from my perspective – is you need to do what we’ve always tried to do, which is to ban the sale of AR-15s, have universal background checks, and also take away the ability to buy these large magazines.”

Guess who said that?  That’s right.  Behind door number 1, you get a special prize to Fast and Furious.  The same guy who actually gave all of those same things to gangsters and killers in order to do the same thing in America he just said … “ban the sale of AR-15s, have universal background checks, and also take away the ability to buy these large magazines.”

From my cold, dead hands, Eric.  And no, I’m not talking about the Charlton Heston kind of cold, dead hands.  I mean as one who really believes in God-given rights to own whatsoever he damn well pleases to own.

In this Atlantic piece, James Fallows is citing readers, one of whom landed this dud.

The following passage from the person who wanted to compare plinking with guns to flying private planes stuck in my craw (passage spans two paragraphs of the original):

“…the admittedly whacked out perspective that they will fight the oppressive government should it ever come to that.  Again, the last is probably ridiculous, but it is a psychic benefit important to many people.”

To me this was the real nubbin of the argument that was being made: The idea that people are entitled to work out their issues with society by playing with lethal weapons. Think about that one.

How anyone can justify this as “well-regulated militia” is beyond me — it’s more like the opposite.

And what is the “psychic benefit”? For this, read what some of your subsequent correspondents said about white male privilege. These white guys are out in some vacant area shooting up targets or fenceposts or whatever not just for fun similar to paintball or video games, but in order to feel that they are maintaining a certain level of violent threat against others — against their neighbors, really. Let’s not be satisfied with vague talk of “psychic benefit”. This is surely what we are talking about.

The stuff about flying vs. shooting was, as far as I am concerned, a typical astroturfing argument, diverting the reader’s attention from the real point to meta-issues of logic, and thus putting the brakes on discussion rather than furthering it.

Let’s begin with Fallows’ assertion that it is a whacked out position that armed citizens can hold the government accountable.  We’ve asserted differently before.

… while the U.S. military goes about its business preparing for fifth generation warfare, they do so because they haven’t learned how to win fourth generation warfare and are planning their next engagement being a near-peer.

Do you suppose this would look like great land armies getting into formation at the edges of great fields of battle and marching towards each other?  What do you think such a messy civil war in America would look like?  Bubba would be wearing a Ghillie suit, shooting a bolt action rifle, or a modern sporting rifle, and after the shot you will never hear from him again – until the next one.  And you’ll never catch him.  Police will have to decide what side to take, and if they take the wrong one, they will be dealt with in the middle of the night when they take their dogs out to pee in the backyard.

Insurgent will be mixed with progressive statist, and there will be no SEAL teams or nuclear weapons to which you can turn because you won’t know one from another.  There will be nowhere to target a nuclear weapon, and nowhere for a SEAL team to raid.  All of their close quarters battle preparations will be for naught when their own families are in peril due to civil warfare.  These aren’t Afghan tribesmen you’re dealing with.  These are engineers, mechanics, fabricators and welders, chemists, and the world’s best machinists.  If you think Afghanistan was rough, wait to see what civil war would look like in America.

If you have ever said something like, “You can’t win because the government has a land army and nuclear weapons,” here is the moral of the story for you.  You are an idiot.  You haven’t thought through this well enough, and you need to see the second amendment for what it really is.  It is the best guarantor of peace because tyranny is mutually assured destruction.  The statists know that, or else America will suffer the consequences.

So it looks like Fallows is an idiot, but I suspected that.  Next up, let’s deal with the reader’s note to Fallows where he pans the idea that “people are entitled to work out their issues with society by playing with lethal weapons.”  So let’s play a little thought experiment.  Replace “people” with “victims” during the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turkish Muslims, Pol Pot’s regime, Stalin’s reign, Hitler’s rule, the genocide of Christians in Mesopotamia, Egypt or Uganda.  Recalling that the number of victims of mass shootings at the hands of government entities approaches 170 million between the years of 1901 and 1990, perhaps this self righteous reader would like to explain to us why the victims would have been wrong to defend themselves from genocide?  Go ahead, we’re listening.

As for the final paragraph where the reader uses the terms “astroturfing” and “meta-issues of logic,” I’m not at all convinced that he understands what those terms mean.  In fact, without more context, the entire paragraph is nonsense.

I’m sure in the thousands upon thousands of posts I’ve made something I’ve said could be claimed to be stupid, so I won’t hold Fallows responsible for one stupid article, although a pattern of stupidity is certainly self-inflicted harm.  But I surely have better readers than that, and I think it’s embarrassing for Fallows that he used this letter as an example of reader feedback.

NY Daily News:

The latest city resident to cash in on police misconduct would raise a glass to toast his victory, except he doesn’t drink.

The NYPD found that out the hard way when cops tried to charge Oliver Wiggins with driving while intoxicated to cover up for a police officer who ran a marked SUV through a Brooklyn stop sign and plowed into Wiggins’ car.

Wiggins, 33, received close to $1 million from the city for his troubles, but not before he was arrested and charged with impaired driving, had his driver’s license suspended and was hit with a repair bill for his 2004 Nissan Maxima that his insurance company would not cover because of the DWI bust.

Never mind that a Breathalyzer test he took at the East Flatbush scene on April 19, 2015, showed no alcohol in his blood.

While at the hospital, after the crash at Glenwood Road and E. 43rd St., Wiggins volunteered to have his blood tested for alcohol or drugs at the hospital. That test came back negative. Reports from the EMT and DWI technician each said Wiggins had no signs of intoxication.

That didn’t stop the arresting officer, Justin Joseph, from officially reporting Wiggins had slurred speech, watery eyes, an odor of alcohol on his breath and was observed swaying. Three months later, prosecutors dismissed the charges.

But remember boys and girls, cops are the good guys and they’re there to protect and serve.  Just don’t be in their way or make “furtive” movements around them.

Yahoo:

FBI is refusing to expedite the release of documents about secret meetings that took place between former FBI Director James Comey and former President Obama. Judicial Watch Director of Investigations Chris Farrell says the matter is of public interest.

But remember folks, the FBI wants to be known as the protector of America, the go-to law enforcement of the country, the exemplar of righteousness and all that is good.

Your tax dollars at work.  Hang them all.  The bad people are being protected by the “good” people who won’t hold anyone accountable.  Hemp rope and lamp posts, or oak trees.