Articles by Herschel Smith

News from the Northwest:

King County Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht has agreed to update her department’s use of force policies and pay a man $65,000 in damages after one of her department’s detectives drew his gun on an unsuspecting motorcyclist in a video that went viral last year.

The settlement, which was shared with me by the motorcyclist, states that the sheriff has agreed to implement an order classifying aiming a gun as a “use of force” and requiring that the department to track every single time an officer points their gun at a person. This is already standard practice for many law enforcement agencies across the country, including the Seattle Police Department.

Alex Randall was waiting on his motorcycle for a light to turn green in August of last year when King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) Detective Richard Rowe approached him from behind with his gun drawn. Randall had his helmet camera running at the time and captured the tense exchange.

In the widely-viewed video, Rowe can be seen quickly approaching the man from behind with his firearm drawn and without clearly identifying himself as an officer. Randall, surprised by suddenly seeing a gun pointed at him, responds by saying “Oh shit, what are you doing to me?” to which the detective responds “You’re fucking driving reckless. Give me your driver’s license or I’m going to knock you off this bike.”

Rowe has received three road rage or driving complaints against him in the last five years and was placed on administrative leave after Randall posted the video to the Internet, according to reporting by former Stranger writer Sydney Brownstone. In April of this year, Johanknecht suspended Rowe for five days without pay for a lack of courtesy in his conduct.

An internal investigation unit determined last December that the detective had violated some internal policies during the incident but he had not used excessive force because “no actual force was used.”

We had covered this earlier but I hadn’t followed it to conclusion.  This is it, I guess.  The cop is left in the workforce.  He should have been fired and then flogged in the public square, and then put in prison.

The $65,000 is an award paid by the citizens, with the culpable Sheriff and officer bearing no responsibility for what happened.  This isn’t the way to bring accountability.  This kind of settlement will keep encouraging illegal behavior by cops.

Note what the Internal Investigation Unit found: “No actual force was used.”  If you or I had done this, we would have been found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon.  He should also have been tried and found guilty of false arrest, violation of the fourth amendment, kidnapping and threats against a person.

NBC News:

A sheriff’s sergeant who died during a firefight during the Borderline Bar and Grill mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, last month was killed by friendly fire, officials said.

Sgt. Ron Helus was hit five times by gunman Ian David Long at the bar but was ultimately killed by a sixth shot from a California Highway Patrol officer’s AR-style rifle, Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub said at a press conference Friday.

“This news is extremely difficult for all of us to process and understand,” Ayub said.

Helus was wearing body armor during the shooting but the rifle shot penetrated the vest and struck his heart, according to the medical examiner.

“I can tell you that most body armor worn by municipal police in this country is not capable of stopping rifle ammunition,” Ayub told reporters. “It’s a matter of comfort as well as fatigue for officers to wear heavy armor, day in and day out.”

The highway patrol officer who fired the fatal shot was a 9-year veteran of the department and has voluntarily taken time off, according to a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.

“The mere thought of something like this happening is devastating to all of us and underscores the difficult and dangerous circumstances law enforcement faces, often with only mere seconds to react,” California Highway Patrol Commissioner Warren Stanley said in a statement.

I grok that is “devastating,” and that it’s “difficult to process and understand.”  Let me ask you a question, Bill.  Is this as “devastating” as news of LEOs under your command threatening to shoot dogs for no good reason, or worse, when LEOs under your command shoot unarmed people?

Or is this only devastating to you when a LEO shoots another LEO?

Views from Ohio:

“If I have a gun and I shoot somebody, I should have to describe why I did that,” Kasich said in an interview.

He also expressed frustration that Ohio’s GOP-controlled Legislature would not pass a “red flag” law to allow relatives or police to ask a court to remove temporarily any guns from a person they fear might be a threat to themselves or others.

“There’s no ‘red flag’ law,” Kasich said. “I pleaded with them to put the ‘red flag’ law in there. They didn’t do it.”

Let me say in the clearest language possible: No, Kasich, a person is not required to testify against himself.  That’s a protection we’re guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment to the constitution.

That may be uncomfortable to you, but I don’t care because it’s a right of all citizens.  One very important reason for it is that it’s based on Biblical law, which requires two or more witnesses, independent of the accused, to convict a man for a crime. Coercion is unbiblical and immoral.

As for your red flag law, that’s an equally unconstitutional and immoral infringement upon the rights guaranteed under the constitution.

Via WiscoDave, news from Colorado:

A Colorado police officer who shot an armed Vietnam war veteran in his home after he had just killed an intruder who attacked his 11-year-old grandson will not face charges, the District Attorney said Monday.

District attorney for Colorado’s 17th Judicial District Dave Young said his office has cleared Aurora police Officer Drew Limbaugh of wrongdoing in the July death of Richard ‘Gary’ Black Jr. Black, 73.

Police said that officers believed Black was the intruder and opened fire after he didn’t follow a command to drop his gun. It later became apparent that Black had been protecting his wife and young grandson.

On the night of July 30, police responded to multiple 911 calls from Black’s home reporting a naked intruder who was trying to drown his 11-year-old grandson, CNN reported.

Police heard gunshots as they arrived and entered the property to find Black had just shot and killed the intruder, 26-year-old Dajon Harper.

Officers found the young boy and his father in the bathroom next to Harper’s dead body.

When Black did not respond to multiple requests to drop his weapon, he himself was shot by Officer Limbaugh in his living room and died from his injuries at University of Colorado Hospital.

In a 26-page letter to Aurora Police Department, the DA wrote that there was no evidence that Officer Limbaugh ‘engaged in reckless or criminally negligent conduct’.

That last sentence tells you everything you need to know about LEOs and DAs.  The bolded sentence tells you everything you need to know about what not to do.

Calling the cops while an incident is in progress and you are trying to defend yourself or loved ones is the least safe action you can take.  Someone will die if the cops are called.  This poor man had survived Vietnam.  He couldn’t survive American LEOs.

Defend yourself, call your lawyer, return your firearm to its proper place, and then call 911 for the cops to write the report.

That’s the sequence.  And don’t talk to the police.  Let your lawyer do that for you.

Via WiscoDave, as you knew would happen:

Mother Jones reports that Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) met with gun control groups that included the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, the Center for American Progress, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Gabby Giffords’ group. He asked them what they wanted, and a bill to criminalize private gun sales was on their wish list.

So Thompson will sponsor legislation requiring a background check before someone may buy a gun from his neighbor, a co-worker to get a background check before buying a gun from a co-worker, and so forth. The bill will go so far as to require a son to get a background check before a father can give him a gun as a gift.

Expect it to pass the House, and I predict that enough GOP senators will go along for it to pass the senate.  I also predict that Trump will sign it into law, but we’ll have to see if it’s this specific bill or some other version of it that exempts gifts between family members (which he’ll call a win and trot out as his protection of gun owners, demanding gun owner votes in the next election cycle).

Reuters:

New Jersey may enforce a new law that lowered the number of bullets that guns can hold, a divided federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld a lower court’s refusal to temporarily enjoin the law, which was passed in June and reduced maximum magazine capacity to 10 rounds from a 15-round limit adopted in 1990.

What?  You didn’t expect the black-robed tyrants to ensure your rights, did you?  And make sure to notice that this limit never applies to LEOs who do virtually as they please and are the most dangerous people on earth (via David Codrea).

According to Michael Harriot at The Root, police killed more Americans in 2017 (1,129) than military combat, terrorism, airplane crashes, mass shootings, and Chicago gang violence combined. Furthermore, of those 1,129 slain, most (718) were suspects in nonviolent offenses, stopped for traffic violations, or were found innocent of any crime whatsoever. The recent case of Jemel Roberson in suburban Chicago is one more reason to remove law enforcement from Swalwell’s exempt list.

Because gun control isn’t about controlling guns.  It’s about controlling you.

Not unexpected news from Florida:

Florida has joined a coalition of major pension funds and investment companies that have adopted a set of principles aimed at encouraging gun manufacturers and retailers to act responsibly.

Ash Williams, executive director of the State Board of Administration, which oversees the state pension fund and other investments, said the agreement carries no mandates for gun-related companies. But he said it is designed to raise awareness of issues that could impact the value of investments in the firearms industry.

“We’re not telling anybody, any private company, exactly what they should be doing. Our concern is motivated very simply by one thing, as fiduciaries anything that poses a risk to the value of the assets that we own on behalf of our beneficiaries, we want to make sure we’re managing it properly,” Williams said in an interview with The News Service of Florida.

“By extension, if there is a risk or peril to the stock value of a company that we own in our portfolio, we want to make sure that company is, A, aware of it and, B, attentive to it. That’s all this is,” he said.

In signing the “Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” last month, Florida joined more than a dozen public pension funds and investment companies that have adopted the document.

“We believe that enterprises involved in the manufacturing, distribution, sale and enforcement of regulations of the firearms industry are well-positioned to support pragmatic transparency and safety measures that contribute to the responsible use of firearms,” the document said.

Safety measures.  Like stop selling semi-automatic firearms, invest in so-called “smart guns,” and do anything else the collectivists want, like go out of business entirely.

All by plan.  The answer is simple.  If you’re a firearm manufacturer, ensure that your employees own a majority of the stock and tell the hand-wringers to go pound sand.

Elizabeth MacBride is doing just that.  Take a look.

“The firearms made by our member companies are designed to perform in austere and less-than-ideal conditions when lives are literally at stake,” wrote the NSSF spokesman. “To date, authorized-user technology developments have only introduced points of failure that could put the lives of lawful and authorized users at risk when they need those firearms to preserve lives.”

I asked iGun founder Jonathan Mossberg about how reliable the iGun is. He says the gun already passes military specification testing, including “a 3,000 round torture test including freezing and dropping.”

“We have already built a personalized firearm that is more reliable than most commercial firearms available,” he wrote.

Based on conversations with companies and engineers developing military weapons with chip technology, reliability is a valid worry – but it’s an existing worry for every gun. Weapons without chips or ID technology fail now (we don’t know how often, but they do).

“The market should decide which technology and which product to buy based on its merits as the market does now,” Mossberg said.

It’s important to note that in the gun community, where the belief in the singular defensive power of guns is common, a higher risk of a gun failing means a higher risk of dying in a confrontation.

This would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.  Read it again if you must.

First of all, she said that the iGun founder “wrote.”  In other words, she sent him an email and he responded.  This is reporting, apparently.

Second, freezing and dropping has nothing at all to do with anything.  That she didn’t know how to press the issue with him is an indication that she shouldn’t have been writing this piece.

Third, she (or her sources) acknowledge that failure of the technology is a “valid worry,” but she dismisses that “worry” because a failure can happen anyway.  This shows absolutely no knowledge or understanding of anything mechanical or electronic.

The fact that a tire on an automobile can burst while driving and throw the automobile into a spin is no reason for sticking a nail in the tire.  The nail increases the probability of failure.

Let’s turn to the next bit of propaganda on smart guns, written within a few days by none other than Ms. Elizabeth MacBride.

There’s a revolution building in gun design, one with far-reaching implications in military and civilian weaponry, says one of Israel’s top tech investors.

“We believe that in less than 5 years every gun that will be produced will have a smart chip in it,” said Ron Zuckerman, a long-time executive, investor and angel whose list of successes includes co-founding Sapiens International Corp., which develops software for the insurance industry, serving as CEO of Brazilian telecom GVT and as co-founder of influential Israeli venture funds, including Magma. Now a California-based angel, he is an investor in many tech startups.

One of those is a small tech company, Secubit, that is focused on one of the hottest areas in the gun world: tech-enabled weapons. Zuckerman estimates there is a $50 billion market for high-tech guns, including military, law enforcement and civilian. The company’s first market is the military, where there is a growing interest in tech-enabled weapons as war becomes more distant and mechanized.

Yea, there’s “growing interest” in smart guns in the military, just as in law enforcement.  Right.  That she would publish shit like this is embarrassing.  To her.

So in case readers have forgotten it, my bet is still on the table.

I am a registered professional engineer, and I spend all day analyzing things and performing calculations.  Let’s not speak in broad generalities and murky platitudes (such as “good enough”).  That doesn’t work with me.  By education, training and experience, I reject such things out of hand.  Perform a fault tree analysis of smart guns.  Use highly respected guidance like the NRC fault tree handbook.

Assess the reliability of one of my semi-automatic handguns as the first state point, and then add smart gun technology to it, and assess it again.  Compare the state points.  Then do that again with a revolver.  Be honest.  Assign a failure probability of greater than zero (0) to the smart technology, because you know that each additional electronic and mechanical component has a failure probability of greater than zero.

Get a PE to seal the work to demonstrate thorough and independent review.  If you can prove that so-called “smart guns” are as reliable as my guns, I’ll pour ketchup on my hard hat, eat it, and post video for everyone to see.  If you lose, you buy me the gun of my choice.  No one will take the challenge because you will lose that challenge.  I’ll win.  Case closed.  End of discussion.

Ms. MacBride?  Questions?

News from Texas, but it could be virtually anywhere in the lower 48.

FRISCO – Frisco police are warning residents to beware of aggressive coyotes after a jogger was attacked in the third coyote-related incident in the city this month.

It’s only abnormal if you don’t know anything about Coyotes.  When you’re out and about in or near the bush (and yes, a park is near the bush or at least similar enough), you’re carrying a gun, right?  You’re watching your six, right?