…He sent back a Feb. 20 email from Victor Bonett in the attorney general’s office that said, “OAG is withholding the Jan. 9, 2013 letter from Lee Levine and certain responsive emails between OAG and MPD, pursuant to D.C. Official Code Section 2-534(a)(3)(A)(i), (a)(4) and (e).”
Mr. Levine’s letter provided new information, such as that the source of the “high-capacity” magazine. “Meet the Press briefly borrowed the empty magazine from a private citizen who lives outside of the District of Columbia and who ‘Meet the Press’ understood possessed the magazine lawfully,” he wrote.
The NBC lawyer also claimed, “The magazine was immediately returned to its owner following the broadcast.”
However, according to a police “property record” document, a Kay Industries 30-round magazine was recovered from Mr. Gregory (at a redacted address) as part of an active investigation. The document is signed on Jan. 9, two days after Mr. Levine said the magazine had been returned to its owner.
So the mag they claim they borrowed was returned and yet a mag was still seized. So no matter what NBC’s story, if the DC police seized a mag, that’s all it takes to violate the law. Mere possession, and that’s it.
Good to see folks with resources, regional proximity, and ability are pursing this.
No matter how it turns out, it’s a splendid case to use for anyone who’s arrested or charged from now on to illustrate a failure of equal application of the law.
I’ve got a lot of stories saved up to blog about, but like a lot of folks, have things to do besides blog. As such, I’ve got a large number of those news stories that are still worthy of comment, but not timely enough any more for full posts. So here goes with a few of those:
There’s no longer room at the inn at a Manhattan church that’s sheltering Occupy Wall Streeters after a holy vessel disappeared from the altar last week.
When the Rev. Bob Brashear prepared for Sunday services at West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he noticed parts of the bronze baptismal font were gone.
In a fire-and-brimstone message to occupiers later that day, he thundered, “It was like pissing on the 99 percent.”
In Brooklyn, at another church housing OWS protesters, an occupier urinated on a cross, according to Rabbi Chaim Gruber, who has angrily abandoned the OWS movement.
…
The artifact vanished just three weeks after a $2,400 Apple MacBook vanished from Brashear’s office. He told the occupiers that even when the 100-year-old Upper West Side church extended help to addicts during the 1980s drug scourge, no visitors touched its $12,500 sacramental instrument.
“Not even crackheads messed with that,” he said.
Occupy Wall Street: Piss-spraying desecrating thieves that are worse than crackheads.
‘This is a very private room,’ he said. The next thing I knew, he was standing in front of me, his face inches away, his eyes staring directly into mine.
He placed both hands on my shoulders and guided me toward the edge of the bed. I landed on my elbows, frozen halfway between sitting up and lying on my back.
Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and…
And if you don’t believe it, notice the video is from Stars and Stripes. And so is this story:
This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers.
Army enlisted leaders all over the world are being ordered to take the Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training Exercise Leaders Course, or PPPT, according to U.S. Army Medical Activity Japan health promotion educator Jana York.
Somewhere, there is a balance to be struck on gender issues between having a Democrat president exploit his position to overwhelm and overpower a 19 year-old girl and the PC-gone-totally-weirdo idea of strapping a “pregnancy simulator” on Army Sergeants.
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(Yes, technically field daying the folder would mean cleaning it into nothingness, but I’m just going to use it as a term to title & tag these clean-up posts.)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Boston Marathon bombings cast a shadow Friday over the start of debate on legislation to remake the U.S. immigration system, as some Republicans argued that the role of two immigrant suspects raised questions about gaps in the system.
There was no suggestion that the two suspects, brothers who had lived in Dagestan neighboring Chechnya in southern Russia, had entered the U.S. illegally. And authors of a sweeping new immigration bill, which got its first hearing Friday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued that their legislation would improve U.S. national security because the estimated 11 million people now living here illegally would have to come forward and undergo background checks.
Those 11 million living here illegally can never pass a background check. Their first step into the country was to violate US federal law. They fail. Every one of them.
There are plenty among that number who have committed further crimes, in fact, there are huge numbers who have committed crimes. “Sanctuary cities” that don’t turn over illegal aliens to ICE for deportation are full of them, in no small part because local law enforcement does nothing to them.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence arrest and conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity to deport Tsarnaev but evidently didn’t feel he represented a big enough threat.
Other reporting confirms Tsarnaev’s arrest for domestic violence but we’re seeking confirmation of a conviction. Nevertheless he would have been subject to removal for the arrest itself.
Of course, the immigration bill is about amnesty for illegal aliens and creating more Democrat voters, cheap labor for businesses, and changing the nature of the nation into one that has a huge underclass to rule, and a ruling overclass that distributes the handouts looted from the evaporating middle class. It’s how socialists stay in power and how socialism and class warfare works. Whether or not terrorists stay in the country is irrelevant to them.
What’s going to happen when you start “background checking” all these illegals and find out they’ve stolen social security numbers, have numerous arrests for DUIs, have numerous arrests for domestic abuse, and such? It’s all very prevalent among illegal aliens, because many of them tend to be low-class unskilled laborers who well know they can commit crimes because the police will do nothing to them because the politicians will deny the law.
To give a perfect anecdotal example of the sanctuary city mentality, a friend of mine rode with state troopers in WI. The trooper encountered a car that wanted to race with his unmarked police car, and he obliged just enough so he could make an arrest and take the idiot straight to jail. When they hit a high enough speed (in a safe area), the trooper pulled over the racer. Turned out the racer, doing 100 mph as his top speed, was an illegal alien. No arrest. The illegal alien walked because it’s WI state policy to not arrest illegals.
Every Democrat immigration bill is about expanding their base. It’s about destroying the nation and securing Democrat power through the Curley Effect, and it’s about giving away the nation because the Ruling Class Democrats don’t feel like you’ve earned your life – no matter how hard you worked or fought for it, so they’re going to give the nation to someone they feel is more deserving. After all, you didn’t build that.
Everyone knows it wouldn’t. Police train with modern pistols, and are well aware that it takes little time to reload, and that criminals won’t follow laws limiting magazine size anyway.
This has already been demonstrated quite well at Clackamas Mall (where the CC holder didn’t even have to shoot) and Trolley Square (where the CCer was an off-duty cop carrying illegally against mall policy).
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) mocked Second Amendment rights activists while announcing his support for a ban on assault weapons and limits to high-capacity magazine clips on the Senate floor today.
REID: In the 1920s, organized crime was committing murders with machine guns. So Congress dramatically limited the sale and transfer of machine guns. As a result, machine guns all but disappeared from the streets. We can and should take the same common-sense approach to safeguard Americans from modern weapons of war.
Starting from the end of this statement and working back, modern weapons of war aren’t legal (without a lot of licensing) precisely because of the National Firearms Act of 1934 that Reid is alluding to. But wait, you say – the National Firearms Act came out in 1934? Yes, yes it did.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”
Early progressives had decided that intemperance needed to be squashed, even if it meant murdering some 10,000 citizens who drink by having government poison them.
The 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, and just like that, the revenue stream for bootleggers and organized crime evaporated overnight. Coupled with the beginning of the Great Depression exacerbated by FDR’s policies impacting the entire economy, organized crime wasn’t making the same kind of money and thus it wasn’t the same threat it was in the 1920s.
Reid continued saying he’d vote for Feinstein’s “Assault” Weapons Ban:
That is why I will vote for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban – because we must strike a better balance between the right to defend ourselves and the right of every child in America to grow up safe from gun violence. I will vote for the ban because maintaining law and order is more important than satisfying conspiracy theorists who believe in black helicopters and false flags. I will vote for the ban because saving the lives of young police officers and innocent civilians is more important than preventing imagined tyranny.
There is no “balance” as you move towards tyranny, even if you mock those who warn of tyranny. There can be no right to grow up safe. These are wonderful abstract concepts that are high-minded, but impossible. You cannot “grow up safe”. The world cannot be made into a safe place.
“Maintaining law and order” would mean enforcing laws first. Obama doesn’t even enforce gun laws. Mocking people who oppose the bill as conspiracy theorists just means you don’t have an argument.
Lastly, Reid claiming to want to save the lives of young police officers by destroying the Second Amendment they swear an oath to – as part of the Constitution, just means that he cares about protecting organs of the state but not about the rights of the people – the same rights that cop swears to uphold.
As to “saving the lives of innocent civilians” being more important that “preventing imagined tyranny”, scroll back up and read about the Chemist’s War. The US government actively poisoned people in order to push its Progressive “good idea” of Prohibition, whether people wanted it or not. The same time that the Senate was looking at banning machineguns, the same government was poisoning people. Also in the early 1930s, not only was the government banning the right to own machineguns “for the greater good”, they were also infecting black people with syphilis as guinea pigs in the Tuskegee experiment. There were also forced sterilizations and such going on in the name of eugenic racial improvement, another Progressive idea, all “for the greater good”.
Reid, just like politicians at that time would’ve, is arguing that people should surrender their rights for their own good because government really wants to help them… It wants to help them so much it murders them for their own good – from poisoning people to support Prohibition to sending guns to narcoterrorist cartels to kill people to support gun control.
There is no “imagined tyranny”, there are just increasing levels of tyranny. With history as our guide, we know we need to stay well-armed to stay safe, and we know that a government that mocks us ultimately means us harm. They aren’t by, for, and of the people.
Harry Reid is also indulging in the Broken Window Fallacy. The complaints he makes today about protecting children and cops are ones that are visible. The tyranny that others warn against isn’t here yet, and takes time to materialize. But this isn’t some Manbearpig fantasy, we have all of human history to see the repetition of tyranny as Innocents Betrayed illustrates above. We know what happens when governments get powerful. We have seen the US government in the last four years send guns to narcoterrorist cartels and hush it up afterwards. We have seen the US government poison over 10,000 people just to push Prohibition.
There is no imagined tyranny. It exists, creeping, always encroaching, and always there.
The New York Times caused a sensation with its kazillion-word, March 17 article by Michael Luo on the failures of state courts to get guns out of the hands of men in domestic violence situations.
The main purpose of the article was to tweak America’s oldest civil rights organization, the National Rifle Association, for opposing some of the more rash anti-gun proposals being considered by state legislatures, such as allowing courts to take away a person’s firearms on the basis of a temporary restraining order.
It’s a new position for liberals to oppose the rights of the accused. Usually the Times is demanding that even convicted criminals be given voting rights, light sentences, sex-change operations and vegan meals in prison.
Another recent Times article about communities trying to keep sex offenders out of their neighborhoods quoted a liberal saying: “It’s counterproductive to public safety, because when you have nothing to lose, you are much more likely to commit a crime than when you are rebuilding your life.”
But that was about convicted child molesters. This is about guns, so all new rules apply.
Oooh, snap.
As is usually the case when liberals start proposing gun restrictions, they assume only men will be disarmed by laws taking guns from those subjected to temporary restraining orders. But such orders aren’t particularly difficult to get. It doesn’t occur to liberals that an abusive man could also get one against his wife, whether or not his accusations are true.
People in domestic disputes lie and abuse the legal system? That this has never occured to the left is fascinating.
Liberals’ advice to rape and domestic abuse victims is: Lie back and enjoy it.
The Times’ advice is: Get a protective order.
The NRA’s advice is: Blow the dirtbag’s head off. Or, for the delicate: Resist with a gun, the only effective means to stop an attack.
A Colorado Senate committee on Monday passed a measure that bans ammunition magazines of more than 15 rounds after several hours of testimony from a barrage of experts, law enforcement officials and victims of mass shootings.
House Bill 1224 passed on 3-2 party line vote and moves to the Senate floor on Friday.
There’s no such thing as a pro-gun Democrat. Most of the rest of the story is Democrats saying how they want to save teh chidrenz from teh gunz; and the usual leftist-statist “needs” for expansion of government power and restriction on the citizen.
Republican senators saved special scrutiny for David Chipman, a former agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms who testified in support of the bill. Chipman said the limit on magazine sizes would stop some shooters from becoming “killing machines.”
But Sen. Steve King, a Grand Junction Republican and a career police officer, tore into Chipman, asking him if he’d ever shot someone or been shot at.
“I have not,” Chipman said.
Considering that the ATF is responsible for more murders than a dozen Sandy Hooks, it might’ve been worth questioning him on what the effects of monopoly of force by the state are as well.
People who want to commit murder will commit murders. The Aurora, CO movie theater killer went to the trouble of booby-trapping his apartment with all kinds of incendiary devices. The Bath School Disaster, still the largest school mass murder in US history, was not done with a gun.
It will stop nothing, it will save no one, and it will endanger many people who rely on modern tools for self defense. Of course, they are the unseen costs – the lives lost because they couldn’t defend themselves also go ignored.
…Collins couldn’t aim her gun at the serial rapist who attacked her at the University of Nevada at Reno, where she was a student. That’s because, like most public colleges outside of Utah and Colorado, UNR is a “gun free” zone. The rule required her to leave her gun at home, leaving her defenseless the one time she needed its protection most.
In October of 2007, while walking to her car after a night class, Collins was grabbed from behind in a university parking garage less than 300 yards from a campus police office. The school’s “gun-free” designation meant nothing to James Biela, a serial rapist with a gun of his own, who saw Collins as an easy target. “He put a firearm to my temple,” she recounted, “clocked off the safety, and told me not to say anything, before he raped me.”
The university has since installed more emergency call boxes and lights in the parking structure, but Collins says that won’t stop an attacker who knows the campus is a gun-free zone, a policy she believes invites crime, and may have even emboldened the man who raped her.
Just months later, Biela went on to murder 19-year old Brianna Dennison in a case that received widespread national attention. While Biela now sits on death row, Collins is convinced the outcome would have been different had she been armed.
“I know, having been the first victim, that Brianna Dennison would still be alive, had I been able to defend myself that night.“
Before his rampage against law enforcement, Christopher Dorner acquired a cache of weapons with a level of ease that surprised even him.
Authorities, court documents and those who met Dorner reported he owned a variety of firearms and accessories, and was trained in their use during his time in the Navy and the Los Angeles Police Department.
He was a criminal who violated countless laws and used his position as a law enforcement officer and military officer to violate the law. That people who are issued guns by the state can find ways to abuse them is not really a surprise.
Then they get to his evil rifle:
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department homicide unit has detailed the weapons recovered from Dorner in the Big Bear area, describing multiple assault weapons, including the .308-caliber sniper rifle.Sgt. Trevis Newport of the homicide division said the rifle, which was equipped with a scope, was a “very dangerous and high-powered weapon.”
A .308 caliber sniper rifle, a very dangerous and powerful weapon, with a precision scope.
Looks different with a wood stock instead of a lighter weight plastic one.
Hey, it looks like that guy’s got one of those scary, very high powered and dangerous sniper rifles. It’s even got black on it so it must be evil.
The media thinks pretty highly of a multiple murderer spree killer maniac cop:
From his writing, Dorner showed himself to be a contradiction. He voiced support for politicians on both sides of the aisle, including presidents George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama. Even as he threatened gun violence, he called for stronger gun control laws to prevent mass shootings.High-capacity magazines, suppressors and rifles like the AR-15 are not necessary for sportsmen, he said.
“Who in their right mind needs a f—— silencer,” he wrote after describing how he had purchased several.
He compared semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 to military weapons designed with only killing in mind. Naming the shootings at Virginia Tech, Columbine High School, the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., he said gunmakers should be held responsible and loopholes in laws should be closed.
…
“In the end,” Dorner wrote, “I hope that you will realize that the small arms I utilize should not be accessed with the ease that I obtained them.”
To go back to the beginning – he was a cop. So he had access to weapons that no one has access to. As a cop with no prior record, he learned how to game the system and work around pre-existing laws. As a cop, an authority of the state, he was able to gain people’s trust who otherwise might’ve just called the local authorities on him. As a cop, he could fly armed on an airplane.
As a cop, cops can have silencers, cops have standard capacity mags, cops can have suppressors, cops carry AR15s.
Dorner was a cop – Dorner was a cop who murdered citizens. Citizens do in fact need weapons to protect themselves from oppressors, large and small.
There’s no contradiction in being a statist-totalitarian, who would favor both Obama’s big government and Bush’s big government. There’s no contradiction in someone who thinks he’s better than other people using force against them, while demanding they be disarmed.
Dorner is an example of why the citizenry should have weapons – because government, which is composed of people, some good and some bad, ultimately can’t be trusted.
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And for the unaware, some European nations mandate silencers so you don’t irritate your neighbors. They’re sound-suppressing devices so that guns aren’t going to blow your eardrums out. Just like any other tool, they’re nicer when they’re quieter.
Should it be a federal crime for businesses to refuse to hire ex-convicts? Yes, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently released 20,000 convoluted words of regulatory “guidance” to direct businesses to hire more felons and other ex-offenders.
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Most businesses perform criminal background checks on job applicants, but the EEOC guidance frowns on such checks and creates new legal tripwires that could spark federal lawsuits. One EEOC commissioner who opposed the new policy, Constance Barker, warned in April that “the only real impact the new Guidance will have will be to scare business owners from ever conducting criminal background checks. . . . The Guidance tells them that they are taking a tremendous risk if they do.”
If a background check discloses a criminal offense, the EEOC expects a company to do an intricate “individualized assessment” that will somehow prove that it has a “business necessity” not to hire the ex-offender (or that his offense disqualifies him for a specific job). Former EEOC General Counsel Donald Livingston, in testimony in December to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, warned that employers could be considered guilty of “race discrimination if they choose law abiding applicants over applicants with criminal convictions” unless they conduct a comprehensive analysis of the ex-offender’s recent life history.
It is difficult to overstate the EEOC’s zealotry on this issue. The agency is demanding that one of Mr. Livingston’s clients—the Freeman Companies, a convention and corporate events planner—pay compensation to rejected job applicants who lied about their criminal records.
The biggest bombshell in the new guidelines is that businesses complying with state or local laws that require employee background checks can still be targeted for EEOC lawsuits.
The article goes on to note that a security company that guards nuclear facilities was sued by the Obama EEOC in 2010 for refusing to hire a twice-convicted thief – even though state laws said the security company isn’t allowed to hire criminals.
Background checks for criminals going into a job where they’d be armed guards? Bad. Background checks, registration, permits and confiscation against joe citizen when he wants to exercise his rights? Good.
This leftist-progressive modern liberal agenda does invariably elevate the failed, evil and wrong at the expense of the good and successful (just as Evan Sayet said).
