Articles by Herschel Smith

Via Ken, this ridiculous report comes as a result of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

DALY CITY, Calif. (KGO) — A Bay Area man is devastated to learn the prosthetic foot he was crafting for a one-legged eagle in Pennsylvania won’t be put to use. The golden eagle named Aura was put down at the order of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Nam Duong’s Daly City workshop makes a very specialized product for animals.

“Some call me the chicken feet maker!” He laughs.

After tinkering with 3D printing during the pandemic making masks toys, it was his love of animals and wanting to help others, that inspired Duong to turn his hobby into a prosthetics business called Pet1stProsthetics on Etsy to help more than just chickens.

“Ducks and I do help a lot of dogs, turkey, I did peacock I did goat, a finch…” he rattles on while showing off a boot made for a cat.

During the pandemic, Duong crafted hundreds of 3D-printed legs for animals in need across the country. He now also has clients around the globe in places like Japan and Europe.

Most recently, it was a request from 2,800 miles away in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania that held special significance.

“I saw it was an eagle and I was so anxious, I said this is my first one!” He beamed.

Aura the Golden Eagle, who is in the same family as our country’s national bird, the Bald Eagle had been found in a field in need of care. She was brought to the Pocono Wildlife Rehab and Education Center.

Being able to save the life of an Eagle and improve the time it had left would be a cool thing, yes?

Katherine Huler, the organization’s founder and current Director of Educational Programming says the bird was underweight.

“She would not have survived that much longer out in the wild, certainly not without being fed.”

It’s believed one of Aura’s talons got caught in a trap and was severed right below the ankle. After being seen by three doctors, her rehabbers at the nonprofit center say she was completely healed and thriving.

“Never once tried to bite, never one tired to talon. She was just incredibly soft and acceptive,” says co-executive director Susan Downing. Videos sent to ABC7 News of Aura show her calmly being bathed and interacting with humans.

Aura who was estimated to be 3 to 5 years old was on track to become an educational animal. Duong was hired to make a prosthetic as a finishing touch.

But there is no situation so bad, so dire, so ugly and desperate, that it cannot be made far worse with the presence of the FedGov.

“She’d walk without so much as a limp.” Says her rehab team.

All seemed on track until the nonprofit center received a letter from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, indicating Aura had to be euthanized because of her amputated leg.

“The order itself was received at around 1 p.m. last Thursday, and states to euthanatize immediately.

That could have resulted had we refused to cooperate with the federal order,” says Janine Tancredi, Co-Executive Director of the center.

That very night, Aura was put down much to the devastation of the rebab center… and Duong.

“I almost wanted to cry, honestly, it’s not right.” He said.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife sent ABC7 News a statement answering how the service determines if a bird should be euthanized or not.

The law states in part that euthanization must happen if a bird can’t feed itself, or move without inflicting additional injury… if it’s blind or have injuries requiring amputation.

We need federal laws for that, you see, because someone knows better than raptor center experts what needs to be done with birds of prey.

Also you see, this dovetails with the way King George sees the world.  We need to be licensed to drive on the king’s highways, we must be licensed and follow all of his rules when hunting the royal forests, we cannot enter prohibited lands (like parks or BLM) to hunt them because they are the exclusive royal forests, and finally, the royal birds belong to the king – only he can decide whether they live or die.

And upon the evolutionary perspective (which I don’t share), we’re just animals.  It’s a short hop and a skip to the FedGov deciding if its subject, like you and me, are any use to the king anymore and need to be euthanized.

When light is darkness and darkness is light.  And when your only goal is to illegally harass gun and ammo stores because you’re a communist.

And the winner is clear if the firearm and cartridge are the only concerns.  The loser is clear if your shoulder is the issue.

Outdoor Life.

Here are four examples of scam websites that were still live within the last few days: federalammunitions.com, shopremingtonammo.com, remingtonammos.com, and winchesterammosales.com.

Ammo scams aren’t the only scams out there.  For example, shotmarlinfirearmsusa.com is a scam web site.  I seem to be able to pick them out of a crowd and haven’t been taken by any of them yet.  But there’s a first time for everything.

Be diligent, and if you get wind of any scam sites, report them in the comments.

The issues of the case don’t interest me that much, although I agree that violence can only be used when there is a threat of serious injury.  For example, see Tennesse v. Garner, where the SCOTUS concluded that a LEO cannot discharge his weapon at someone fleeing.

Anyway, the more interesting thing to me is the issue of qualified immunity.  As I’ve said so many times before, qualified immunity is an obscene witch’s brew concocted by the courts with no basis in constitutional law for the sole purpose of protecting the agents and enforcers of the state.

I’m glad John is teaching a young man to defend civil rights.  I’m sure he’ll turn into a good lawyer.  Liberty University is producing some very good graduates in all areas of specialty.

It’s a Brown bear I believe.

Here’s what I suspect is happening.  That bear knows he could kill the more aggressive dog.  What the bear is instinctively thinking is this.  If I turn my attention exclusively to that aggressive dog, what’s going to happen with the other three when I take my eyes off of them?  The bear did try to keep his eye on the one behind him out of the corner of his eye.

Fighting a dog isn’t like fighting a pack of dogs.

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There isn’t any gun legislation that couldn’t be made worse by the presence of the NRA.

Can the folks in NY working to destroy the NRA please work a little faster?  Can someone tell the NRA to mind their own business, which in the best case would be stop pretending to be pro-2A, kicking Wayne to the curb, and go to work to undo all of the infringements they’ve previously engineered against us?

Quick note to the NRA: Please stay out of this and all such matters.  Pring your magazines and leave the hard work to the real men.

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection (forthcoming 2023) will (presumably) publish this pre-print by these two writers on Qualified Immunity as Gun Control.  They think they’re on to something big, and hence the obvious snarkiness by the end of their summary.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in NYSRPA v. Bruen threw the political project of gun regulation into question. Before Bruen, states could enact new kinds of gun restrictions if they passed a relatively stringent means-ends test. That is, if laws meaningfully reduced danger, while not too heavily burdening the right to self-defense, they were allowed. After Bruen, only gun controls actually in force in the founding era, and their close analogues, are permissible. Many fewer regulations will now pass the constitutional test.

Here, we suggest an unlikely source of continuing power, after Bruen, for states to disarm individuals they deem dangerous: qualified immunity. Qualified immunity shields state officers from monetary liability for many constitutional violations. In short, unless a previous case “clearly established,” with high factual particularity, that the officer’s conduct was unconstitutional, the officer does not pay. Thus, a state law enforcement officer may, after Bruen, confiscate an individual’s firearm if the officer deems that person too dangerous to possess it. The officer’s justifications may conflict with the federal courts’ understanding of Bruen or the Second Amendment—perhaps flagrantly. But unless a previous, authoritative legal decision examining near-identical facts says so, the officer risks no liability. And because each individual act of disarmament will be unique, such prior decisions will be vanishingly rare. The result is a surprisingly free hand for states to determine who should and should not be armed, even in contravention of the Supreme Court’s dictates.

Proponents of gun rights, who skew conservative, may see this as lawlessness. In the past, it has been liberals and civil libertarians who have seen qualified immunity that way. Here, as elsewhere in the law, what’s good sauce for the goose is good for the gander. Gun rights advocates may therefore either accept qualified immunity’s implications for their preferred rights or join with their usual adversaries in opposing it everywhere.

If it sounds like these authors, Guha Krishnamurthi (University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law) and Peter Salib (University of Houston Law Center) are hinting that cops just violate second amendment rights under the color of law based on the protections police enjoy virtually everywhere and in most, if not all, circumstances, you’d be wrong.  They say, “The officer’s justifications may conflict with the federal courts’ understanding of Bruen or the Second Amendment—perhaps flagrantly.”

And they don’t really mind very much that you understand them.  They aren’t hinting at latitude (not that there is any) – they are obviously and directly saying that police should violate constitutional protections if they want to, including the 2A.

They are trying to appeal to so-called “law and order conservatives.”  They’re everywhere in government, from Bill Barr (who supported red flag laws, waiting periods, magazine capacity bans, etc., and who defended Lon Horiuchi after he killed Vicki Weaver for no good reason), to “law and order conservative” judge Frank Easterbrook in Chicago, all of whom would disarm Americans.

But these are dinosaurs on the “conservative” side, or another way of saying it is that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between a communist and a “law and order conservative.”

The authors of the silly paper above presume to impale someone on the horns of a dilemma (certainly not gun owners).  Gun owners have seen the dark side of state power, from overbearing and lying cops during traffic stops, to overreach by the ATF, to the weaponization of federal law enforcement by the power that happens to be in charge at the moment, whether Obama, Biden or Trump (and here I include the bump stock ban just to ensure that I take shots at “law and order conservatives” as well as statists).

Qualified immunity is a concoction and witch’s brew of the courts because the police are agents and enforcers of state power, whether local, state or federal, not protectors of the people.

That dog won’t hunt.  The authors of the study failed, and miserably so.  Between losing qualified immunity or red flag laws, most sensible people will say, “The dilemma fails.  I don’t have to choose – lose them both.”  They have no basis in the constitution and represent the worst from the minds of men.

Liberty Doll has the details along with some commentary.

Here is also a writeup of what happened.  What you heard about the SWAT team berating the man, a pastor, husband and teacher, a normal man by any account, is exactly what these people are like.  These people are not the exception, a few bad apples in an otherwise good bushel of apples.  No, they are all bad.  They want to violate your constitutional rights.  They live for it.  They are sociopathic criminals.

Imagine being employed by the ATF and being able to look at your wife and children when you get home and look yourself in the mirror at night and be able to fall asleep with no trouble.  Imagine having your conscience hardened and soul seared with hot coals to the degree these people have.  I hope this fate doesn’t befall anyone reading this.

As for ATF Special Agent Theodore Mongell sending several SWAT teams to knock on someone’s door, I know little girls with more courage than that.