Plaintiff in San Francisco Gun Lawsuit is Gay

In an interesting, and I think appropriate move, the man at the center of the new lawsuit targeting San Francisco’s gun ban law is gay. As a group, this minority is beset by violence from without and definitely need a means to protect themselves. It’s not an orientation issue, it’s a human rights issue. I wonder how the left is going to react to this one?

SAN FRANCISCO — Using the new judicial muscle provided by the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the right to bear arms, the National Rifle Association and another pro-gun group sued San Francisco and its housing authority on Friday to invalidate a ban on handguns in public housing. The lawsuit said the ban violated the Second Amendment and “renders responsible, law-abiding adult public housing residents especially vulnerable.”

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In an interesting turn in a city known for its embrace of gay rights, the chief plaintiff in the suit against the city is a gay man living in a public housing development, owned by the federal government, who wants to have a gun to protect himself from potential hate crimes.

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A city of about 725,000, San Francisco has 12,000 residents living in public housing, all of whom are required to sign a lease that forbids a broad variety of weapons, including pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, automatic rifles, BB guns, as well as nunchucks, brass knuckles and stun guns. This blanket ban was begun in 2006, and the penalty for violation of the lease is eviction.

In the case filed on Friday, an anonymous gay man said that stipulation had deprived him of “any effective means of self-defense.”

The story goes on the describe the horrors of living in the “gun plagued” projects. They quote a guy who says it’s not hard to get a gun there. If so, it makes me wonder why they haven’t been evicted if this is the case.

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Hey, Sorry about not…

Hey,
Sorry about not posting anything but the internet is out here at the real gangaizer(?) bunker. So, hopefully it will get fixed here as soon as possible, and posting will resume at that point. Hey, hope you’re having a good day out there and … listen

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BS from the LA Times

Yeah, I’m shocked too. Read it here.

Their proposal is akin to blaming auto makers for the deaths caused by bad drivers and makes about as much sense. I suppose it’s no accident the last name of one of the authors is Sugarman.

Here’s a short taste:

We propose a new way to prod gun makers to reduce gun deaths, one that would be unlikely to put them out of business or to prevent law-abiding citizens from obtaining guns. By using a strategy known as “performance-based regulation,” we would deputize private actors — the gun makers — to deal with the negative effects of their products in ways that promote the public good.

In other words, rather than telling gun makers what to do, performance-based regulation would tell them what outcome they must achieve: Reduce deaths by guns. Companies that achieve the target outcomes might receive large financial bonuses; companies that don’t would face severe financial penalties. Put simply, gun makers — whose products kill even when used as directed — would have to take responsibility for curbing the consequent public health toll.

Under our plan, Congress might require gun makers in the aggregate to reduce gun homicides from 12,000 to, say, 7,000 in 10 years, with appropriate interim targets along the way. Individual firms would each have their own targets to meet, based on the extent their guns are currently used in homicides. Or Congress might simply leave it to neutral experts to determine just how much of a numerical reduction should be required — and how quickly. Either way, the required decline would be substantial.

How would gun companies go about reducing gun deaths? The main thing to emphasize is that this approach relies on the nimbleness, innovation and experimentation that come from private competition — rather than on the heavy-handed power of governmental regulation. Gun makers might decide to add trigger locks to their guns, or to work only with dealers who meet certain standards of responsibility. They might withdraw their semiautomatic weapons from the consumer market, or even work hand in hand with local officials to fight gangs and increase youth employment opportunities. Surely they will think up new strategies once they have a legal obligation and financial incentive to take responsibility for the harm their products cause.

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G4 goes to the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot and Trade Show

Some positive TV coverage for this event, surprisingly.

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An English twit mourns the Heller ruling

Commentary from a whiny elitist twit British subject living in America. Something which irks me too is his capitalization of the words militia and arms in the 2nd amendment. Apparently people having rights is something foreign to him.

Here’s an excerpt:

“You can live in a country for more than a dozen years. You can marry one of its citizens, and watch your son grow up to be one of its citizens. Yet on occasion, here in the United States, I still feel like an alien from the opposite end of the universe.

This week provided one of those moments, when the Supreme Court threw out the District of Columbia’s 32-year ban on handgun ownership, ruling in the process that the second amendment of the country’s constitution guaranteed the right of every American to possess firearms.

A statement of the blindingly obvious, you might think, given that the gun population of the US is not far short of its 300 million human one. But that did not prevent this affirmation of the status quo being trumpeted by leading newspapers, with headlines of the size normally reserved for terrorist attacks and presidential election results.

The majority and dissenting opinions in the 5-4 decision, and the shifts from the nine-man court’s previous pronouncements on the issue, have been parsed and dissected with the zeal classics masters from my schooldays used to apply to the finer points of Greek grammar. And, it must be said, not without reason.

The crux of the debate is in the language of the amendment, second of the 10 that form America’s bill of rights, that noblest of charters of basic human rights, but also perhaps the most picked-over body of words on the planet.

It reads as follows: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Try disentangling that one, and its idiosyncratic use of commas that would have appalled my classics master had the text been written in the language of Demosthenes. How exactly are the thoughts of statesmen of the late 18th century to be divined and applied to gun control in the first decade of the 21st? Previously, the court has upheld ownership of firearms as a collective right – in the context of those citizen militias who 220 years ago were a safeguard against any attempt by Britain to regain the colonies that had the cheek to fight for, and win, their independence.”

He goes on to blame George Bush for SCOTUS ruling in favor of individual Rights and hopes that Barack Obama will be elected and change the makeup of the court so this won’t happen in the future.

No wonder we kicked their asses out of our country more than two hundred years ago!

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Sour Grapes from Arthur Kellerman

Yes, that Arthur Kellerman. Author of the flawed and much discredited study. The one who said:

“If you’ve got to resist, you’re chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to have a .38 Special in her hand? Yeah.””

The one whose study said a handgun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal. Of the 43 deaths reported in his flawed study, 37 (86%) were suicides. Other deaths involved criminal activity between the family members (drug deals gone bad).

Kellerman admits that his study did “not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm.” He also admitted his study did not look at situations in which intruders “purposely avoided a home known to be armed.” This is a classic case of a “study” conducted to achieve a desired result. In his critique of this “study”, Gary Kleck notes that the estimation of gun ownership rates were “inaccurate” , and that the total population came from a non-random selection of only two cities.

Source: Gunfacts

Guns for Safety? Dream On, Scalia.

The Supreme Court has spoken: Thanks to the court’s blockbuster 5 to 4 decision Thursday, Washingtonians now have the right to own a gun for self-defense. I leave the law to lawyers, but the public health lesson is crystal clear: The legal ruling that the District’s citizens can keep loaded handguns in their homes doesn’t mean that they should.

In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia explicitly endorsed the wisdom of keeping a handgun in the home for self-defense. Such a weapon, he wrote, “is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long rifle; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.” But Scalia ignored a substantial body of public health research that contradicts his assertions. A number of scientific studies, published in the world’s most rigorous, peer-reviewed journals, show that the risks of keeping a loaded gun in the home strongly outweigh the potential benefits.

In the real world, Scalia’s scenario — an armed assailant breaks into your home, and you shoot or scare away the bad guy with your handy handgun — happens pretty infrequently. Statistically speaking, these rare success stories are dwarfed by tragedies. The reason is simple: A gun kept loaded and readily available for protection may also be reached by a curious child, an angry spouse or a depressed teen.

More than 20 years ago, I conducted a study of firearm-related deaths in homes in Seattle and surrounding King County, Washington. Over the study’s seven-year interval, more than half of all fatal shootings in the county took place in the home where the firearm involved was kept. Just nine of those shootings were legally justifiable homicides or acts of self-defense; guns kept in homes were also involved in 12 accidental deaths, 41 criminal homicides and a shocking 333 suicides. A subsequent study conducted in three U.S. cities found that guns kept in the home were 12 times more likely to be involved in the death or injury of a member of the household than in the killing or wounding of a bad guy in self-defense.

Oh, one more thing: Scalia’s ludicrous vision of a little old lady clutching a handgun in one hand while dialing 911 with the other (try it sometime) doesn’t fit the facts. According to the Justice Department, far more guns are lost each year to burglary or theft than are used to defend people or property. In Atlanta, a city where approximately a third of households contain guns, a study of 197 home-invasion crimes revealed only three instances (1.5 percent) in which the inhabitants resisted with a gun. Intruders got to the homeowner’s gun twice as often as the homeowner did.

The court has spoken, but citizens and lawmakers should base future gun-control decisions — both personal and political — on something more substantive than Scalia’s glib opinion.

– Arthur Kellermann, a professor of emergency medicine and public health at Emory University

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UK Gun Crime Un-reported

Gun crime goes unreported

Published: Saturday, 28 June 2008, 10:22AM

A study has claimed that much of the gun crime on Britain’s streets goes unreported.

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) said many victims were reluctant to alert police in their study of data on firearms-related offences.

The CCJS, which is based at King’s College, London, called on ministers to focus on social and economic solutions to gun crime.

Its report said: “Given the frequently noted reluctance (often underpinned by fear of reprisals) of many gun crime-affected communities to provide evidence to the police, and the strong ‘no grassing’ conventions in gang cultures, it is likely that much gun crime - especially incidents involving only intimidation, or firearms discharges resulting in either no injuries or only minor injuries - goes unreported.”

The Government’s policy of introducing tough mandatory sentences may not prove an effective way of tackling gun crime, the report warned.

“Contrary to its commitment to be ‘tough on crime’… the Government’s criminal justice policy has been characterised by a reluctance to acknowledge the causal relation between income inequality and violent crime,” it said.

Report author Peter Squires, Professor of Criminology and Public Policy at Brighton University, said: “This report examines what we do and don’t know about gun crime to establish a basis from which we can start asking the right questions and developing effective policies.

“It demonstrates that the use of guns is a product of conflict and violence in deprived and excluded communities and once we understand that we can start addressing causes and not just symptoms,” he said.

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Movie Review - Wanted

**** Warning! ****

**** This review contains spoilers! ****

**** You have been warned! ****

Don’t cry to me if you read on and wish you hadn’t. I go into detail about the story and other things in the movie. If you want to know more and don’t care about me revealing the plot, continue on.

I had a free movie ticket coming and so I decided to go see the new movie “Wanted” last night.

Wanted stars Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, and James McAvoy and is rated R for Violence, Language and partial Nudity.

The first thing you should do if you intend to see this movie is forget everything you know about physics and guns. If you go in expecting to find a faithful representation of weaponry in action, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

The good guys and bad guys in this movie, both employ a technique called “bending” bullets, where you can put an “English” on the bullet as it comes out the muzzle of the gun and get it to curve around objects. Not only is this highly unlikely, but it borders on the patently absurd. Also, the representation of bullets in the movie is far removed from reality. At least twice in the movie we are treated to a slow motion flight of a bullet in which sections fall off and fins deploy like a cruise missile. Also, apparently the only thing that affects these movie bullets is a collision with another bullet, which happens with astonishing regularity. Flesh and bone do nothing to tarnish or distort these razor sharp, silvery, engraved projectiles which punch through almost any material with incredible force. Did I mention the incredible distances these guys are able to make head shots from? I didn’t? Well, let’s just say I’ve seen many cities smaller than the path these snipers bullets travel from rifle to target.

Cars in this movie fly and spin gracefully and a small sports car has enough force/mass to turn a large bus on it’s side instead of dissolving into a cloud of fiberglass and aluminum. Humans too have fantastic abilities in the movie. One man jumps through a glass window on the side of a sky scraper and flies ala Matrix to the roof of another building across the street.

Humans aren’t the only animals who do extraordinary things in Wanted. Rats, after being fed a mixture of peanut butter and liquid explosives, turn into little time bombs with just he addition of a watch and a blasting cap.

Now for the story…

One thousand years ago, a group of weavers (that’s right, I said weavers) decided to start an assassination cadre and began offing people a loom (that’s right, I said loom) tells them to kill. The hit list is generated by the loom in binary code (that’s right, I said binary code) deciphered from mistakes in the weaving. There’s no mention of what they may or may not have been smoking at the time.

Fast forward to today.

Young Wesley Gibson is a young man living in a horrible apartment in Chicago and working a crappy job while his slut girlfriend sleeps with one of his co-workers. He hates his boss Janice (Lorna Scott), an overweight, domineering woman and takes anxiety medication by the handful in an attempt to deal with his life. He is soon met by Fox (Angelina Jolie) who informs him that his long lost father, who left him when he was very young, was killed by a rogue assassin and he’s next on the killers list. Just then a rough looking guy named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann) shows up and the bullets begin to fly. What follows is a cool car chase through the streets of Chicago. The rough looking guy chases after them in a cat food delivery truck, keeping pace with an apparently underpowered sports car. Bullets continue to fly and then the sports car jumps a Police roadblock and knocks a city bus on it’s side and they make their escape. I guess that explains why the delivery truck was able to keep up with them if the small sports car had enough mass to turn a large bus on it’s side.

Our hero is brought by Fox to an abandoned building where he meets Sloan (Morgan Freeman) and is informed that his father was a super assassin and they want him to join them. When he decides to leave, they force him “shoot the wings off” of some flies buzzing around a garbage can. Apparently he can focus in on objects and his mind speeds up giving him an edge over everyone else, something he got from his father. Never mind that he’s never shot a gun in his life until that moment. Amazingly, he does this and leaves, at gun point. The five or six of them there just let him go…

The next day at work he gets accosted by his boss for a late report and he tells her off, quite satisfyingly too, I might add. On his way out he takes a computer keyboard to his (girlfriend fornicating) coworker, breaking the keyboard in half and knocking out a tooth, all in slow motion. There’s lots of slow motion in the movie… He decides at that moment to join The Fraternity. I guess the anger at his boss, not to mention the almost $4 Million which was deposited into his account by The Fraternity helped. He goes to The Fraternitie’s base, an old textile mill on the edge of town and is trained, sometimes rather brutally I might add. Lucky for him the weavers posses the technology to freeze him in carbonite…erm, heal his wounds quickly in a hot tub filled with either wax, or water with wax floating on top of it. Apparently this works wonders for he’s back on his feet again in short order. It is in these wax baths were we get to see Fox’s backside. Yummy! I’m not a big fan of tattoos, but on Angelina Jolie they look fantastic! Maybe I’m just biased…

So he starts his life as a super assassin, Fox guiding him at his side. Soon Cross takes another shot at him and after a short chase, our hero gets shot in the arm. They trace the (hollow spiral shaped) bullet to a bullet maker in Europe named Pekwarsky (Terence Stamp). That’s right folks, no run of the mill domestic bullets for them. He and Fox head off to Europe and confront the bullet maker, who under pain of being killed, sets up a time to meet Cross a the train station so they can take him out.

What follows is a running gun battle on the train in which Fox, left behind when the train started, crashes the car she’s driving into the side of the train so she can help our hero. This succeeds in damaging the train enough that it derails and several cars fall off the tracks and into the abyss below, killing hundreds. Wesley is about to join them when Cross grabs on to his hand to save his life. What does Wesley do then? He SHOOTS Cross, who then pulls him into the train car, which falls into the valley below and wedges between the two mountains. With his dying breath Cross tells our young Padawan something worthy of The Empire Strikes Back. It is then he discovers The Fraternity is actually the enemy and he makes his escape.

Pekwarsky brings him back to the USA and waxes him up real good, restoring his health. He tells him all about his dad and how he was always watching over him and didn’t want him to be involved with The Fraternity. After he leaves, Wesley discovers a plan to destroy The fraternity in a hidden room in his fathers study.

Soon after, our young hero crashes through the gates of the textile mill and releases his “Rat Bombs”, which all magically run into the building, not out of it and to freedom in the field across the street. A few seconds later his “Rat Bombs” explode, destroying parts of the factory and spreading mass confusion. He runs and guns his way into the building, killing everyone in his path until he gets well inside the building and is surrounded by Fraternity members and Sloan. He tells them all that Sloan’s name came up on the loom and he’d kept it secret, taking death orders for money instead.

It is then Sloan reveals that all of the assassins names had come up on the loom and they could either choose to kill themselves or keep killing people for money. Everyone but Fox decides to keep killing for money. The rest of them are about to kill Wesley when she “bends” a bullet, which travels in a complete 360 degree circle, shooting everyone in the head, including herself, without deforming at all. Neat trick that. Wesley chases after Sloan, but loses him.

An untold number of days later Wesley is back on the job, working late, when Sloan walks up behind him with a broom handle Mauser, of all guns, and gets ready to shoot him in the head. Wesley turns around, but it’s not Wesley, it’s a decoy. Sloan looks down at the floor and see’s an X made of post it notes and is shortly there after left with a big hole in his head. The bullet having come from a completely different zip code, avoiding obstacles and managing to fly through a donut hole, a soda can, several car windows and past many people from earlier in the movie on the way. What are the odds of that?

Wesley the turns to the camera and says something smart assed, and the credits roll. Don’t bother staying for the credits, there’s nothing to see afterward like there are in some films, Crank for example.

Did I have a good time? You betcha! I had a blast! Would I see it again? Yes again.

I give it two thumbs up, even with the above mentioned shortcomings. If you’re wanting to see a movie where reality is treated as reality, don’t go see this movie. If you don’t care and are just wanting to have a good time, check your brain at the door, you won’t be needing it.

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Judge tells woman buy a gun and learn how to use it

Judge Advises Crime Victim To Arm Herself After Attack

General Sessions Court Judge Bob Moon said Friday that crime in Chattanooga “has become so rampant that it is no longer possible for the police department to protect our citizens.“

He told a woman who had been pulled from her car and beaten in the head that she or her mother needed to “purchase a weapon, obtain a gun permit and learn to protect yourself.” The woman moved back in with her mother after the May 4 incident on E. 17th Street.

Judge Moon said, “The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that all citizens have a right to purchase a weapon to defend themselves, their families and their homes - unless there is some disqualification that prevents them from owning a weapon.”

He said, “All area of our city are subject to crime, and some areas have very high crime rates and need to be ‘overpoliced.’”

Judge Moon said Coolidge Park is one area that needs to be “overpoliced.” He said, “I frequently hear of break-ins, thefts and robberies to tourists and citizens in that area. Having a high police presence there is one way you are going to abate it.”

Judge Moon raised the bond for Dewayne Beard from $65,000 to $130,000 on especially aggravated robbery and from $15,000 to $50,000 on theft. He bound both cases to the Grand Jury.

The woman said she was driving on E. 17th Street when Beard came riding up on a bicycle and pulled a gold handgun on her. When she refused to get out of the car, he began hitting her in the head with the gun.

He then pulled her out and drove off with her gold 2001 Toyota Corolla.

Police found the woman semi-conscious with severe head injuries. She had to have eight stitches in her head and 10 stitches in her leg, where she was also hit.

Police located Beard at 4724 Tomahawk Dr. and arrested him as he walked out of the residence. He told officers the stolen car was being driven “by one of my goons.”

Officers located the vehicle a couple of blocks away on Bella Vista Drive. Blood was found inside the vehicle, and the woman’s purse was also inside.

Beard said he threw the gun out of the window while driving through Highland Park.

Beard was allowed out on an OR bond when the case was not ready for a hearing within 10 days.

On May 31, he picked up new charges of aggravated rape and aggravated burglary.

A woman said she was lying nude in her bed and a man began performing a sex act on her. She said when the man then began having sex with her using a condom, she realized it was not her boyfriend.

She said she pulled the sheets up and saw it was Beard.

That case was bound to the Grand Jury earlier.

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Run Obama, Run!

Run away from your record on gun rights!

Barack Obama who maintained a lengthy relationship with a racist “minister,”cosponsored a bill to limit handgun purchases to one a month. He voted against allowing people to violate local weapons bans in cases of self-defense .Source: The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson, p.148 Oct 30, 2007.

“I am consistently on record and will continue to be on record as opposing concealed carry.”
Source: From Promise to Power, by David Mendell, p.250-251 Aug 14, 2007

Obama also has maintained close ties and received extensive financial support from Tony Rezko.

Principles that Obama supports on gun issues:
Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.
Increase state restrictions on the purchase and possession of firearms.
Require manufacturers to provide child-safety locks with firearms.
Source: 1998 IL State Legislative National Political Awareness Test July 2, 1998

“The second area which may be fought by the NRA, but I think has to be looked at is the availability of 19-round clips. I’m a strong believer in the rights of hunters and sportsmen to have firearms. I’m a believe in homeowners having a firearms to protect their home and their family. It’s hard for me to find a rationale for a 19-clip semi-automatic. “

Obama said this about small town gun owners:

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

(shamelessly stolen from The Oregon Firearms Federation)

In 2007 Obama’s campaign said:

“Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.”

Today he had this to say:

“I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures. The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view, and while it ruled that the D.C. gun ban went too far, Justice Scalia himself acknowledged that this right is not absolute and subject to reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.  Today’s ruling, the first clear statement on this issue in 127 years, will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.

As President, I will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun-owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne. We can work together to enact common-sense laws, like closing the gun show loophole and improving our background check system, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Today’s decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe.”

So the 2nd amendment doesn’t apply to all American’s equally? Are some of us more equal than others? Enquiring minds want to know.

Perhaps he’d also like use to forget his ties to the anti-rights Joyce Foundation?

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t want to take away their guns.

But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions.

The foundation funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the Second Amendment does not protect individual gun owners’ rights, as well as two groups that advocated handgun bans. And it paid to support a book called “Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.”

Obama’s eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to Politico this week.

LaBolt stressed that the foundation, which has assets of about $935 million, doesn’t take “detailed policy positions,” but rather uses its grants to “fuel a dialogue about how to address public policy issues like reducing gun violence.”

Run Obama, run from your record…but we won’t forget, even though you most certainly would like us to!

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