Articles by Herschel Smith

This picture comes to us via reddit/firearms.

It is said that “Marine Sgt. Rudy Soto Jr. was atop the chancery roof, armed only with a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver. The U.S. ambassador at the time did not believe the Marine Security Guard needed M-16 rifles. His shotgun jammed, and the small-caliber handgun was next to useless at that range.”

That isn’t necessarily related to this picture, although this picture appears to be of a Marine holding a revolver during the Tet offensive near the U.S. embassy.

As to the issue of a “small-caliber handgun” being next to useless at that range, whatever.  A 9mm pistol would have been equally useless.  That’s not what interests me.

Readers know that I’ve had a fascination with just how far (back and forward) in history revolver usage goes in war.

Paul Harrell is up first.

One thing we learn from this is that you need to hit your intended target to achieve slow-down and energy dump.  Walls can be very little protection, depending upon the choice of gun and round.  Next up, Shawn Ryan.

His presentation, along with Paul’s above, shows that an AR-15 is a bad choice for home defense if there is a possibility of hitting nearby (neighbor) homes.  Rifle rounds have a lot of penetrating ability.

Shawn’s presentation shows that personal defense rounds dump enough energy in the target, interior and exterior walls that persons who may be in other locations outside the home would be safe.

This all points to pistol caliber PDW (pistol carbines) being the safest gun to shoot in neighborhoods, since the lower muzzle velocity combined with the hollow nose and walls give enough energy to kill the intruder but not enough to cause penetration through exterior walls, while also providing the aiming of a rifle.

But the moral of the story is to hit your target.  That’s where the energy gets deposited.

T.L. Davis.

Social Security was America’s foray into socialism and it has done a great deal of good for people who are unable to work, but that was never its purpose. Social Security was a bribe to elder citizens so they would quit work and give those jobs to the younger generation, why? Because the United States, at the time, during the depression, was afraid that too many unemployed twenty and thirty-year-olds might do what they are afraid of in Middle Eastern countries now, foment rebellion and revolution.

[ … ]

Capitalism works, because it is not managed, directed or focused. It does not require a government directorate to decide for everyone what they will want or need. It is unwieldy, chaotic and funds flow to that which is needed, or captures the imagination. People want to be entertained, want to do things that interest them and the money flows to those things. But, what has happened to literature is that the big five publishers have decided to do exactly that, direct and decide for all of us what we want to read, thereby deciding what we will think, pushing their socialist ideas into our brains, or cause us to stop reading all together to escape it.

I’m not sure how many people, human beings, must be sacrificed on the alter of communism to prove that it doesn’t work, so far more than 100 million have not been enough. The nation of Venezuela’s utter fall from the wealthiest Lain American nation to the poorest hasn’t even caused a speed bump on the way to the Democratic nomination. It is no coincidence that it started in a democratic nation, communism focuses on nations they can vote themselves into, then slam the door on elections by making voting for anyone besides the ruler a crime of treason.

That’s an interesting take on social security, and I’d never heard that before.  Thanks to TL for the insight.

I do have something else to say about capitalism.  There is a difference between capitalism (as we see it in America today) and the free market.  The Biblical notion is the free market.

In today’s society, we see corporations who lay off older workers (with age discrimination made impossible to prove in court), share and rotate membership on boards of directors, with those members never having had a hand in building the company they now rule, use earnings to create PACs and lobbying to ensure that the laws and regulations are friendly to them and what they want to do while foisting the real long term cost onto someone else (I could supply a thousand examples here, not the least of which is the massive government-sponsored investments in solar power, which is a scam of mammoth proportions, producing massive amounts of toxic waste and which will cause massive problems for disposal).  Do you think fracking is pollution free?  Google the words “Fracking Tails Pennsylvania Roads” to see just what is being put into the earth and groundwater around you.  But there is money to be made, so the .gov is complicit as long as it’s what the corporations want.

There is nothing “free” about this market.  It isn’t free market.  It’s corporatism.  I don’t claim to know the solution to these problems, but a massive reduction in the size of the FedGov is in order, along with a set of laws and regulations that force corporations to pony-up for the costs of their technology so that others don’t have to bear the costs.

I’ll also say that the most Biblical model I can find has companies with public stock majority-owned by their workers, and we could add to this that it might be a good idea to have members of boards of directors made entirely of employees, not all of whom can be senior or management level.

One final thought is that the stock market is a gigantic gambling casino.  Investment is a Biblical notion, viz. The parable of the talents.  But short term speculation on stock prices is gambling.  Never say that the government doesn’t like gambling.  We are all controlled by professional gamblers.  Of course, gambling is immoral, and so is short term, minute-by-minute speculation in the stock market.

These and other reasons are why America is not blessed by God.

David Codrea.

The first thing that’s obvious is we’re not talking about one of those “white right-wing nationalists” we’re constantly being warned are the greatest threat we face. If the killer had been one, and if he had social media posts brimming with sentiments that allow “progressives” to dismiss anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as a Nazi, it would be headline news. It certainly would not have taken this long to release who he was, and odds are good some of his more egregious posts would have survived, at least in screenshot form. As it is, the victims are being blamed for racism, and that’s in spite of a corporate “code of conduct” policy that is now being alleged to work every bit as well as its “security safeguards.”

If I didn’t know any better, if I was an alien from another planet and could only look at the facts to inform me, I’d readily conclude that there was a concerted effort to flush the news that’s not fit for consumption because it tells the wrong story, and the news that is allowed to be printed because it comports with the form, fit and function of the intent of the people who make these decisions.

If I didn’t know any better.

Never let an emergency go to waste.

Careful reading of the coronavirus emergency funding bill that will pass Congress soon will likely also uncover a reauthorization provision for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Just don’t expect to see any of the reforms Republicans say must be enacted to prevent future recurrences of the FBI surveillance abuses against the Trump campaign in 2016.  Most important among those reforms is a ban on bulk metadata collection derived from telephone calls by individuals within and without the country.

Democrats and republicans sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.  There’s one thing we can all agree on all of the time.  The masses need to be controlled, and that can’t happen without omniscience.  We are gods without knowledge – so “all of your information and data are belong to us.”

It happens every day in America.  Hundreds of thousands of men are in prison for false confessions. Here’s a particularly bad example.

Two months ago, Robert Davis was getting ready to set up chairs for Bible study when he received some life-altering news: Within hours, he’d be walking out of Coffeewood Correctional Center, a free man for the first time in nearly 13 years.

Davis, 31, stepped out of prison December 21 to face television cameras, probably as surreal an experience as his last night of freedom in February 2003, when he was surrounded by police, slammed to the ground and handcuffed.

He was 18 years old then, a senior at Western Albemarle High and by his own admission, “naive.”

He didn’t know that he didn’t have to talk to police without a lawyer about a horrific double murder that had happened a few days earlier in his Crozet neighborhood. He didn’t know that police can lie to suspects to obtain a confession. And he didn’t know that after hours of a middle-of-the-night interrogation when he just wanted to sleep, if he told the officer what the cop wanted to hear, he wouldn’t be able to straighten things out in the morning.

Davis wasn’t familiar with the term “false confession” in 2003, and he didn’t realize he would become the face of the phenomenon to which juveniles and the exhausted are particularly susceptible. Nor could he have guessed that his story would be the subject of a national television show that aired on “Dateline NBC” February 14.

Robert Davis has learned a lot since 2003.

Snow was on the ground the morning of February 19, 2003, when the Crozet Volunteer Fire Department got the call of a blaze in Crozet Crossing, a subdivision of entry-level homes.

At 6047 Cling Ln., once the fire was out, responders discovered a sinister scene: The body of Nola Charles, 41, known as Ann to her family and friends, in a bunk bed upstairs, with her arms duct-taped behind her. It took Albemarle police forensics technician Larry Claytor a while to notice the charred handle of a knife in her back.

Another shock awaited in the smoldering house. In Charles’ bedroom, the body of her 3-year-old son, William Thomas Charles, was found under debris. He’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning from smoke inhalation.

Almost immediately, police focused on a couple of neighborhood teens: Rocky Fugett, 19, a senior at Western Albemarle, and his sister Jessica, 15, a freshman. During interrogation, the two started throwing out names of other students to deflect the blame, both later told a reporter. One of those names was Robert Davis.

In a 2011 interview at Sussex II State Prison, Rocky Fugett admitted that he’d picked on Davis, and said he never dreamed Davis would confess to being there the night Charles was killed.

In the world of television crime, wrongful convictions are a hot topic, as evidenced by the radio podcast “Serial” and Netflix’s “Making a Murderer.”

An expert in false confession who appeared in the “Dateline” episode as well as in “Making a Murderer,” Northwestern law school’s Laura Nirider, who is the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, has been aware of Davis’ case for years, and sent a 64-page report supporting his petition for clemency in 2012. She has called his interrogation “one of the most coercive confessions I’ve seen.”

It was after midnight when Davis was arrested at gunpoint, and almost 2am when the interrogation by Albemarle Police Detective Randy Snead began.

Snead had been the resource officer at Ivy Creek, the special ed school Davis had attended, and Davis says he trusted him.

Davis denied he had anything to do with the Charles murders dozens of times, according to the video of his six-hour interview. He offered to take a polygraph to prove he was telling the truth multiple times. And he told police if they were going to arrest him, to go ahead and do it so he could go to sleep.

Police widely use the Reid Technique of interviewing and interrogation, which says if a suspect asks to take a lie detector test, that should be taken as a sign of innocence, according to Nirider. That alone should have been a red flag to investigators, she says, but there were other details that made Davis’ interrogation a textbook case of false confession.

She points out how police fed him the details of the crime. Snead lied and told Davis police had evidence he was at the crime scene. He threatened Davis with the “ultimate punishment,” and said Davis’ mother could go to jail if he didn’t tell the truth. Finally, at nearly 7am, Davis said, “What can I say I did to get me out of this?”

“The young and those with mental limitations are most vulnerable to making false confessions,” says Nirider.

She notes a recent study that shows the sleep-deprived are way more likely to falsely confess to a crime. Exhaustion “absolutely plays a role,” she says. “There is a correlation.”

UVA law professor Brandon Garrett has examined many cases of false confession, and points out the interviews in those cases lasted over three hours. If someone is exhausted, he says, he thinks if he just goes along with the interrogation, he can clear it up later.

Today, Davis says the overriding emotion during that interview was fear. “I was scared shitless,” he says.

With Davis’ confession and the testimony of the Fugetts putting him at the crime scene, his attorney, Steve Rosenfield, says it was a “grave risk” to go to trial. He feared a jury would ask the question most people ask—why would you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?—and give Davis a life sentence.

When the commonwealth offered a deal, Rosenfield advised Davis to enter an Alford plea, in which he maintains his innocence but acknowledges the prosecution has enough evidence to convict him, and take a 23-year prison sentence.

Davis says it’s hard to recall a lot about entering that plea because he was on medication for anxiety and depression. Mainly, he thought, “At least I get to go home eventually.”

“I told Robert one day the Fugett kids might tell the truth,” says Rosenfield. “It took a long time—with Jessica especially.” She recanted her allegations about Davis in 2012.

Two years after Davis was convicted in 2004, Rosenfield received a letter from Rocky Fugett that said he had some information that would be helpful to Davis. Fugett signed an affidavit saying Davis had nothing to do with the slayings, and in 2012, Rosenfield sent a petition for clemency to then-governor Bob McDonnell.

There it lingered until McDonnell’s last day in office, when he denied the petition. According to Rosenfield, McDonnell’s administration conducted no investigation of the petition’s claims.

That was a particularly bleak time for Davis. “It was crushing having to wait so long and even more crushing when Bob McDonnell denied it without doing any investigation,” he says.

When Davis walked out of Coffeewood the day Governor Terry McAuliffe signed a conditional pardon, he pointed to Rosenfield and said, “If it weren’t for that man there fighting for me, I wouldn’t be out right now.”

He’s probably right. Rosenfield submitted six volumes of documents supporting the clemency petition. “There wouldn’t be a realistic mechanism if a prisoner tried to do that,” he says.

Rosenfield was Davis’ court-appointed lawyer in 2003, but since Davis took the Alford plea in 2004, he’s been Davis’ pro bono lawyer. He estimates he’s spent between 1,500 and 2,000 hours working on the case, legal expertise worth about $600,000. And that doesn’t include the couple of thousand dollars he’s spent out of pocket.

“I’m glad he’s out,” says the attorney. “It’s a lot less work.”

Years in prison, more than half a million dollars in legal time, the innocent get punished, the guilty go free, and the cops and attorneys couldn’t care less because they got their conviction.

By feeding him details, threatening his mother, lying about other things, all to a sleep deprived adolescent. This is why the Scriptures require the testimony of two or more witnesses to convict a man of a crime, and self incrimination isn’t allowed by the Bible.  Because our judicial system no longer recognizes the Scriptures as God’s Holy law, they make up their own system of “righteousness,” a false righteousness in God’s eyes.  A damning righteousness in God’s eyes.  For more, see Rousas J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law.

Torture could become the norm without Biblical law, and while they didn’t inflict physical pain on the boy, it was a form of torture.  Torture is simply not allowed by the Scriptures, and only wicked men do it, some in the name of local security, and some in the name of national security.

Teach your children, wife, and even relatives well.  Do not talk to the police.  Explain to them why.  The Scriptures do not allow self incrimination.  Do not be naive, and do not be trusting.  Do not cooperate with your own false imprisonment.

News from Colorado.

Domestic abusers are generally prohibited from possessing firearms, but in many states, ensuring these offenders turn over their guns is difficult. A new investigator in the Denver, Colorado, District Attorney’s office is trying to change that by removing guns case-by-case.

The investigator spends his days listening to 911 calls, scanning social media and talking to family members, looking for signs that someone who has been charged with a domestic violence-related offense and who has a restraining order against them, has a gun.

Prosecutors can use the evidence collected by the investigator to ask a judge for a warrant ordering the removal of the gun. Sometimes removal is worked out on the fly by the lawyers in court as a condition of bond release.

The Denver District Attorney’s Office says that in his first four months on the job, the investigator — whose name the office won’t release due to safety concerns — helped take 49 guns from 14 people.

The father of one of those people described his 47-year old son as troubled.

“Relationship breakdowns, bipolar, drug abuse, on his own, no job, despondent,” Tom said of his son. Guns & America agreed not to use the father’s last name or his son’s full name because a criminal case against his son is pending.

Those qualities made Tom think about descriptions of mass shooters he has heard on the news.

“He had a very extensive gun collection,” Tom said, explaining why he was so worried. “Which brings us to our conversation about guns.”

Last October, there was an incident. According to the police report, Tom’s son and his girlfriend had been fighting. He had left her dozens of voicemails, emails, texts and showed up at her apartment, which “alarmed the victim and terrified her,” according to the police report. Tom’s son was charged with harassment and stalking. A judge issued a restraining order against him, which meant he was no longer legally allowed to have guns.

At that point, Tom says the domestic violence investigator at the Denver District Attorney’s Office got involved, coordinating among the father, his son, and the police to get the guns shipped and legally transferred to Tom.

“It gave me some hope that there are ways of doing the right thing,” Tom said. “Those guns are now registered to me and my son cannot get a hold of them right now.”

What is rare about the investigator’s work is that it is active instead of passive, taking guns from people who are barred from having them before they use them to commit a crime.

“One of the key overarching firearm violence prevention strategies that we use in the U.S. is to prohibit the purchase and possession of guns among those deemed high-risk of committing violent acts,” said Hannah Laqueur, an assistant professor of emergency medicine with the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.

Minority report.  Knowing all about who is going to commit violent acts before they actually do them.  And it’s a “key overarching feature of violence prevention” in the U.S.

Where the author got this very wrong is parroting the statement that this is rare.  It has quickly become the most abused nanny-state program in the country.  It essentially replaces the AWB, the lack of UBC, and the lack of gun permitting by the CLEO.  One by one, it’s the most effective gun control effort by the controllers by far, and they know it.  Florida has confiscated thousands of weapons since implementation of their red flag law.

I say again: Be careful what you say over social media.  Have control over your family.  Have children that obey.  Be a good husband and spiritual leader in the home.  Show you wife love, mercy, tenderness and care.  Lay down your life for her as Christ loved the church.

And never call the police for anything.  You are always in more danger when the police are around.

Recall that I had made a FOIA request to the city of Alexandria, Virginia, concerning an incident where a man with a gun stood “outside Del. Mark Levine’s window.”  The city of Alexandria has responded.

02/26/2020

RE: W014261-021820

Dear Sir/Madam,

This is to acknowledge receipt of your request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) dated 2/18/2020 referenced above. Based upon the information contained in your request, we have conducted a thorough search of the records held by the City and find that no police report for this event exists.

This letter is for your records and to inform you that the FOIA request file is now closed.

Sincerely,

David Lanier

Assistant City Attorney

So what the hell was that all about?  He clearly stated that he engaged the police and that the police responded and interacted with the man.  He also later stated that he wanted to press charges of some sort.

He can’t press charges without a police report.  What’s going on here?

UPDATE: David Codrea notes that “speculation that it may have been Fairfax County Police, not according to the news account quoting Alexandria police Lt. Courtney Ballentine. Someone is not being truthful and/or compliant here.”

David Codrea.

So the actor who went from a TV cowboy, to earn international fame as the iconic Man with No Name in spaghetti Westerns, with perhaps his most famous role being the .44 Magnum-wielding Dirty Harry, supports a rabid gun-grabbing zealot?

That may not be his intent, but it may be, and regardless, that’s the effect this has. Irrespective of whatever other reasons Eastwood may have, he is supporting a billionaire who will add the weight of the U.S. government to disarm his countrymen, including Eastwood and his fans. He is, to put it bluntly, but accurately, giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

So what makes people think that Hollywood actors are such paragons of value judgment righteousness?  Maybe he is just getting senile in his old age, or thinks this sort of virtue signalling is necessary before he meets his maker.  That would betray a shallow intellect, but most Hollywood types have a shallow intellect.

Doubtless though, Bloomberg and the forces of darkness will use this to their advantage for the idiots among us.  The best way to mitigate the damage is to teach the masses.  That’s a long term project.