Arms and the Law

Story, with video, here. A Florida man with a CCW carry permit walks into a Walmart. Some guy sees him holster the gun in the parking lot, and tackles him, apparently trying for a chokehold. (Reports have it that in the fight the carrier said to him "I have a permit!") The legal carrier was black; not clear whether that mattered, but if it had been me I doubt he would have decided it was time to try to go for it. Clue: if the guy has a holster and a salt-and-pepper beard, he is probably not a risk). Good ending: police charged the attacker with battery.

Story here. Operation Chokepoint was aimed at discouraging financial institutions from dealing with certain forms of business that were supposedly likely to generate returns, credit card protests, and things like that. It quickly expanded into discouraging dealings with governmentally disfavored forms of business... including licensed firearms dealers, and coin dealers.

(I've actually stayed in the building pictured: it has a hotel-like wing, and a special deal for local universities. Never again. It was like a hotel designed by Joseph Stalin, or perhaps some architect of prisons. You had to pass a checkpoint to park the car, another to get into the building. One soda machine in the entire place.).

Sometimes you can't make this stuff up. Fourth grader is suspended for telling someone he has the ring of power and can make him invisible.

He's already been suspended twice: for mentioning that a black classmate was black, and for bringing The Big Book of Knowledge to class. As Glenn Reynolds says, in this day and age sending a kid to some public schools constitutes child abuse.

Bill Whittle's presentation on the issue may just be the best one I have ever seen.

The Washington Times has the story. The Inspector General getting involved sounds like a good sign to me. Now, if someone whose bank spurned them would file a Federal Tort Claims Act claim, citing tortious interference with contract, things might get quite lively, especially during the discovery process.

The Jay Dobyns story hit Fox News.

This morning I argued a first amendment case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; it was one of three cases argued. Video for the argument is here. My argument was the second, beginning at 1:21:30, so skip ahead.

I still haven't figured out what the first argument was about, except that it involved somebody selling software.

I realized I'd misread the court's docket: there were two judgments entered, one still sealed, the other redacted and unsealed. So here's the latter one. Pretty excoriating. Read the footnotes, too.

The court finds in Dobyns' favor, says that the BATF defense witnesses (who were all highly involved in Fast and Furious, BTW) lied on the stand, that their conduct toward Dobyns was "reprehensible." They tried to frame him for the arson of his house, knowing that this was false.

In fn. 25, the court notes that an ATF attorney blocked a reopening of the arson investigation, telling people that it would hurt this civil case (i.e., show that Dobyns was innocent of the arson), and that she covered that up from the court.

The final fn. explains why the judge ordered the judgment served on the Attorney General, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and the Office of Inspector General. He directs the clerk to call their attention to fn. 25, and says that he will put off disciplining the attorney until he sees what Justice is going to do to them.

Got into the Court of Claims docket-- here's the ruling (pdf) in which the Court accuses the Department of Justice attorneys of having committed a fraud on the Court. That's the document which the Court recently ordered unsealed.

The judgment (the order ruling that Plaintiff won) is still sealed. But it must be pretty explosive. Here's the Court docket for that time period. Notice right after entering the judgment, the Court orders that copies of the judgment be served on the Attorney General, the DOJ Inspector General (responsibility to prevent fraud, waste and abuse) and the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (charged with investigating ethics violations). I've never seen a court order anything like that.

He's the agent who infiltrated the Hell's Angels, had BATF thoroughly backstab him, and sued the agency. Much of the court files were sealed, but were recently unsealed. Here's the local news story on what the reporter found in the formerly sealed files:

Legal Insurrection has the inside scoop. DC police referred the case for prosecution, noting that they'd told NBC that possessing the 30 round magazine would be illegal, and NBC went ahead anyway. The police even swore out an affidavit for an arrest warrant. But DC's "Attorney General" wrote "declined" on it and refused to proceed.

Is out with three articles one of them mine, its theme being "why we fight."

Some guy named Bryant Gumbel, who hosts something called "Real Sports," announces he hates the NRA.

If I could just find a silver image of the hindquarters of a rat, I could keep it as a symbol of what I do not give. Speaking of which, he said it in Rolling Stone.

The Supreme Court today handed down a ruling in Dept of Homeland Security v. MacLean, essentially overruling the firing of an Air Marshal.

The marshal had been briefed on a highjacking alert... and then told that, to save money, DHS was canceling all overnight missions (that is, flight of air marshals) from his airport for the remainder of the month (the idea was to save on marshals' hotel bills when assignments were overnight). Believing that was dangerous (and illegal, since statutes said that flights of the type involved should be a high priority since they would be prime targets), he leaked the story to a reporter. As a result, DHS reversed the policy. DHS traced the leak to him and fired him.

The Court holds that he was entitled to the statutory protection for whistle-blowers, and that the exemption for whistle blowers who leak info whose release is "specifically prohibited by law" mean prohibited by law, not by agency regulation.

Police use of radar that can see into a house. In its present form, it can only report on whether someone is inside, and their distance, but as the article notes, more advanced forms are becoming available.

From the NRA Museum. Very cool.

It's because it fears what Congress would do to its budget if it did.

Good. All the solid work in this field was done decades ago by criminologists. They've had a lot to say about the CDC's produce, and none of it is good. The medical studies being cranked out ignored basic principles of criminology, and did not deal with prior criminological studies.

I found several that concluded that gun density (percent of households with guns) were positively related to gun fatality rates. The logical problem: they estimated gun density by percent of suicides that involved firearms, and measured gun fatalities to include suicide (which far outnumber murders, and make up about 60% of the total). So their real conclusion was: where guns are more often used in suicide, guns are more often used in suicide. Well, yes.

Prof. Brian Anse Patrick has thoughts and experiences there.

So reports Dave Workman. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Story here. It's filed by a chapter of US Law Shield against the City of Harrisburg. As I recall, the preemption law had problems under the State constitutional requirement that a bill have but one purpose.

Yesterday I flew next to Lt. Gen. Leroy Sisco, the CEO of Military Warriors Support Foundation. They function to give homes to disabled veterans, in exchange for them accepting financial mentoring and other help (most of these are young folks). In 2014 they set up 200+ vets in houses. (They also set them up with apartments). I recall there is some controversy about Wounded Warrior Project being antigun... this is definitely a different group. Gen. Sisco, its CEO, was flying back from an NRA Board of Directors meeting, and showed me a picture of a custom 1911 that he would soon be receiving. I don't think we have to worry about these guys being anti!