Chicago’s Pointless Handgun Ban
From Reason.com:
When Chicago passed a ban on handgun ownership in 1982, it was part of a trend. Washington, D.C. had done it in 1976, and a few Chicago suburbs took up the cause in the following years. They all expected to reduce the number of guns and thus curtail bloodshed.
District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer told The Washington Post in 2007, “It’s a pretty common-sense idea that the more guns there are around, the more gun violence you’ll have.” Nadine Winters, a member of the Washington city council in 1976, said she assumed at the time that the policy “would spread to other places.”
But the fad never really caught fire—even before last summer, when the Supreme Court struck down the D.C. law and cast doubt on the others, including the…
U.S. Supreme Court Set To Extend Gun Rights
Handguns. Photo: Joshuashearn (CC)
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a landmark gun rights case that could apply the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms to both cities and states. Warren Richey reports for the Christian Science Monitor:
The US Supreme Court appears to be on verge of extending the constitutional protection of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms to every jurisdiction in the nation.
During an hour-long oral argument at the high court on Tuesday, several justices exhibited a willingness to enforce their landmark 2008 gun-rights decision at the state and local level.
If they do so, the decision may doom not only the Chicago handgun ban at the center of Tuesday’s case, but other handgun bans and some of the toughest state and local gun-control laws in…
Guns at Starbucks? Pushing the Right to Bear Arms in Public
Don’t be “flashing your piece on the lanes,” kids. These Starbucks cowboys have every right to carry those pistols, but does anyone really want to live in a community where they’re always reminded that people have the ability to easily murder each other? It makes me a bit uneasy, but I would rather be uneasy than lose the right to be a cowboy myself.
From The Christian Science Monitor:
Small groups of armed Californians have been turning up at cafes and coffee shops with handguns holstered to their belts to raise awareness about gun rights and what they call unfair limits on concealed weapon permits.
The loosely organized “Bay Area Open Carry Movement” will gather in the Presidio, a national park in San Francisco, on Saturday, just days after a new law took effect allowing…
67-Year-Old Grandpa Holds Off Three Marijuana Robbers
Thanks to disinfo.com reader Steve Elliott for the news tip! Steve Elliott writes on Toke of the Town:
If you plan on stealing James Tillman’s marijuana, you’re going to need more than three guys. They’re not going to get James Tillman’s weed.
Tillman, 67, on Sunday shot and wounded one of three burglars who broke into his Sacramento, California home to steal his medical marijuana, reports Elyce Kirchner of CBS13.com:
The other two fled and haven’t been seen since. Mr. Tillman was definitely having none of their nonsense. After all, his grandkids were at home.
Dirty Harry’s Favorite Gunmaker’s Punk Move
From TheStreet.com’s Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street:
Something dirty is going on at Dirty Harry’s favorite gunmaker.
Amaro Goncalves, Smith & Wesson’s vice president for sales, was one of 22 individuals indicted by the U.S. Justice Department Tuesday for violating federal bribery laws involving the sale of firearms. Goncalves and crew were charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering involving the sale of guns and body armor.
The indictments were filed in December after agents worked undercover last year to expose the ring. The individuals were arrested on Monday in Las Vegas and Miami.
Go ahead and make our day, because a Dumbest entry rarely gets cooler than this.
According to the indictment, an unidentified business associate who was a former executive for an arms manufacturer set up…
More People Will Die in Haiti This Week Than Hiroshima
Bob Ellis writes on ABC’s Drum Unleashed:
Fewer deaths occurred in Hiroshima in August 1945 than in Port-au-Prince last week and more people will die there soon than in Rwanda in 1994. Yet the modern global world was unprepared for it, so busy were they with Terrorism, which has killed fewer people in the last thirty years than quarrelsome Americans with handguns in the last eight months.
When are we going to get the arithmetic right, and distinguish what threatens us mightily from what threatens us barely at all?
Cuba, a socialist state, is well-prepared for natural disaster and few die there in the hurricane season, and rebuilding happens quickly. The United States, a capitalist nation, was ill-prepared for Hurricane Katrina though experts had warned for years of broken dykes, inundation, chaos, disease…
High-Tech ‘Ears’ Listen for Shots
Cara Buckley for the New York Times:
BANG! The shot rang out after midnight, sending revelers who had spilled from a house party screaming and running down a scrappy Long Island street. Four miles away, in a concrete bunker 25 feet below ground, an emergency dispatcher jumped at the sound, and homed in on its source.
Within moments, a police car, its siren wailing, was racing to the scene, in the heart of Uniondale. A second shot went off. Four men were arrested as they tried to speed away. The officers also found two guns, both illegal, their muzzles still warm. No one had been hit.
The dispatcher had heard and mapped the shots using ShotSpotter, a gunshot tracking system that has been adopted so far by 45 cities, universities and government sites…
Fort Hood Gunman Shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ (Video)
CBS News’ Harry Smith spoke with Lt. Gen. Bob Cone, the Fort Hood Base Commander, about what happened during the deadly shooting. He says that witnesses reported that mad gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before unleashing the bloody rampage.
Colt 45: The Gun That Beat Inflation
John Ittner, MarketWatch:
There is an old and apocryphal saying that “a good handgun is worth an ounce of gold” and it turns out to be true — at least it has for the past 136 years.
Because it is basically unchanged after 136 years of continuous production and because there is a healthy, liquid market for it, a good example of this case can be made by tracing the price of “The Gun that Won the West,” the Colt Single-action Army revolver. The venerable Peacemaker turns out to be a better gauge of inflation than gold is and a better investment. President Ronald Reagan even named a missile after it.
The correlation of gold and guns can be traced back at least to 1873 when Colt’s Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Conn., introduced…
How Gun Possession For Defense Backfires
Think that carrying a handgun could help protect you in a high-crime area, if, god forbid, someone attempts to rob or assault you? In fact the opposite could be true.
The American Journal of Public Health discusses a new study from the University of Pennsylvania which shows that in cases of assault, victims who are in possession of a gun at the time are a whopping 4.5 times more likely to get shot than victims who are unarmed. And, “In cases where the victim had at least some chance to resist, this adjusted odds ratio increased to 5.45.”
The conclusion, obviously, it that the idea of walking around with a concealed firearm for the purpose of self-defense is nonsensical. Not that this is going to change many gun owners’ minds.
…
Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Daniel Gross suggests that anti-Obama paranoia is good for at least one business, writing in Salon.com:
In recent months, there has been a lot of talk about what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “the paranoid style in American politics.” To believe the Glenn Becks of the world, the Democrats and their Commie, tree-hugging comrades are going to take away Americans’ guns, confiscate private property, enslave free thinkers, and generally destroy the nation. Of course, most sophisticates don’t give much currency to such arguments. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying to monetize the phenomenon. Fox News Channel has boosted audiences by narrowcasting to birthers and tea partiers, and it has seen an increase in ads from gold companies (the metal is thought to be a good hedge against Obama destroying the…
Fascism Watch: Police and Military Lining Up Against Obama
Klint Finley writes for Mutate:
To their credit, the “Oath Keepers” acknowledge the Patriot Act’s erosion of civil liberties as well. But where were they during the 8 years that Bush was president? Obama gets 400% more death threats than Bush but still lets people carry assault rifles around him, and the Oathers think that they’re being persecuted? Bush had people hauled away for wearing the wrong t-shirts.
I have little good to say about Obama, but I can’t say that his administration is less tolerant of dissent than Bush’s.
From the Oather’s Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey: “We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects — such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.”
I take this…
