Articles by Herschel Smith

Guns.com:

Attorneys for an undocumented immigrant facing charges in the high-profile death of a woman on San Francisco’s Pier 14 contend it may be the gun’s fault.

Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, 45, a Mexican national with at least five deportations under his belt, contends he shot Kathryn Steinle by accident with a found gun now tied to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. California Superior Court Judge Brendan P. Conroy on Friday found there is enough evidence for Lopez-Sanchez to stand trial on charges of second-degree murder for his alleged involvement in the woman’s death.

However, his legal team contends that the man never pulled the trigger and claimed the type of handgun involved is documented for having accidental discharges.

“This gun has no safety,” said public defender Matt Gonzalez as reported by the Associated Press.  “There is no evidence that he put his finger in the trigger.”

The gun was discharged by the perpetrator, therefore he put his finger on the trigger and pulled it.  Quod erat demonstrandum.

Actually though, you can’t blame the lawyer for this – he’s doing what lawyers do.  He is only following the road LEOs pave for him concerning guns that just discharge, as if guns have some sort of will and volition all their own and can decide to “go off” without human action.  If police departments all over America buy into that line of crap for the sake of saving careers, then so should the courts.

It’s dirty and scurrilous top to bottom, side to side, front to back, not the least of which is allowing a border that invites people like this across anyway.  What’s one more pile of mud?

Why, turn against peaceable citizens, of course.

With non-fatal shootings on the rise in Boston this year, public safety officials are reaching out to the city’s legal firearm owners in the hopes of cutting down on the number of guns that end up with criminals.

“Police serve an important role in reducing gun crime, but more can be done with your help,” a letter from the Boston Police Department and addressed to firearm owners states.

Police are offering free gun locks and are reminding firearm owners of information on how to report a gun sale, loss or theft; information on how to turn in a firearm, if so desired; and advice on proper weapon storage.

“Without better enforcement and education, we’re letting things slip through the cracks and legally purchased firearms are falling into the hands of criminals,” Commissioner William Evans said in a statement.

The statement cited a recent study that found that 32 percent of traceable handguns that Boston police recovered from 2007 to 2013 were originally purchased from a licensed Massachusetts dealer. And of the Massachusetts-sourced firearms, “almost 85 percent of them were recovered from someone other than the original, legal purchaser.” Sixty-three percent “had not been reported as transferred or sold to the Massachusetts Firearms Records Bureau, even though such [transfer reports] are required by law,” the city statement said. And just 11 percent of the Massachusetts-sourced guns were reported lost or stolen.

I wouldn’t report a sale either.  It’s none of your damn business.  This is pathetic.  This is literally all the collectivists have left in their tool bag against violence: going after peaceable citizens.

Actually, it may indeed be about the last refuge for the totalitarians.  When you create an entitled, criminal class who thinks you owe them a living, color TV, place to live, iPhone, food and medical care, there is nothing police can do to ameliorate the damage wrought by those social programs.

Entitlement creates monsters.  Monsters cannot be domesticated.

Very bad news for Mike Vanderboegh.  Keep him in your prayers please.  I know I am.

It’s possible to kill the Iran nuclear deal, but John Boehner stands in the way.  He’s a drunken sot, a scandalous pig, a lazy bum without scruples, morality, decency or character.

David Codrea:

This appears to be yet another in a never-ending list of examples demonstrating that for “progressives,” every day is Opposite Day. The whole object of child protective services is to protect children, and of family services to serve families. In this case, the tax-feeding bureaucrats would clearly rather see children killed than protected by foster parents with a gun, and they’d rather see children institutionalized in state facilities than have the opportunity to live in a nurturing home environment.

New Jersey Supreme Court to deal with gun control.  Personally I couldn’t care less whether a former LEO gets to continue to carry unless you roll everyone else into the calculus.  But it’s interesting to note that Chris Christie appointed the majority of the justices.  Let’s see which way they go.

Popular Mechanics on why don’t we have smart guns?  We do – nobody wants them.

To all of you who have contacted me offline, I appreciate the well wishes and prayers for my oldest son Joshua.  He is doing incrementally better each day but still needs prayer.

Dependent care issues.  Return to regular posting soon.  Thank you.

In the mean time, read this (and this, and this and this).  Contemplate the list of survival equipment I have recommended you take even on a day hike.

Fox News:

Second Amendment groups are accusing the gun control lobby of putting law-abiding owners of firearms in danger by urging people to call the police on anyone carrying a gun in public.

As more states relax rules about open-carrying of guns, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has taken to social media to urge the public to assume gun-toters are trouble, and to call the cops on anyone they feel may be a threat.

“If you see someone carrying a firearm in public—openly or concealed—and have ANY doubts about their intent, call 911 immediately and ask police to come to the scene,” the group wrote on its widely followed Facebook page. “Never put your safety, or the safety of your loved ones, at the mercy of weak gun laws that arm individuals in public with little or no criminal and/or mental health screening.”

That approach, according to a blog post by Ohio-based Buckeye Firearms Association, could give rise to needless, tense confrontations between police and gun owners. The association and other similar groups liken the tactic to “swatting,” or the act of tricking an emergency service into dispatching responders based on a false report. Many online harassment campaigns have been known to participate in the practice.

“This practice is exactly what they [Coalition to Stop Gun Violence] are doing,” said Erich Pratt, spokesman for Virginia-based Gun Owners of America. “It’s one thing if someone is using a gun in an illegal or unlawful manner. No one is questioning that. But this clearly sounds like swatting.”

The gun control groups are certainly clearly to blame for putting lives at risk, but the primary responsibility for this lies in the fact that there is such a thing as a SWAT team at all for deployment in situations like this.

If the 911 operators and police would simply educate the public like they should, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.  911 – what’s your emergency?  “I see a man carrying a gun down the street.”  Ma’am, that’s not illegal.  What’s your emergency, is he brandishing it or threatening anyone?  “Well, no.  But I can’t be sure of anything.” Ma’am, you are using the valuable 911 time that might be needed in real emergencies, so if you don’t hang up we intend to press charges for misuse and abuse of 911.  Click.

That’s all this takes.  It’s a lie to assert that every call must be investigated.  They don’t investigate your “widdle tummy hurting,” any more than they investigate why your cable TV stopped working.  In states where it isn’t illegal to open carry, 911 should be one stop shopping for explaining that police are only deployed when crimes are committed.  And claiming that the cops have a need to know who you are runs directly contrary to the notion of legitimate “Terry stops.”  No … they … don’t.  Not even in “stop and identify” states, for which the stipulation is suspicion of a crime.

WRSA: If you have a door on your home, you believe in borders.

Especially if you lock it.

The New Yorker:

Away from the world for August, in a house without Internet or television and only spotty, the-satellite-must-be-passing-over phone reception, I was, until Wednesday, thinking more or less benign thoughts about gun owners, if not guns. As I chronicled last year, I have only just learned how to drive, and, license in hand, or in glove compartment, I’ve been driving for the first time on the little winding roads of the beach town where we’ve spent vacations for the past thirty years. Despite having been anti-car and ostentatiously pro-bike for all those years, I have to admit that I love being in the driver’s seat. The overwhelming rush of freedom and possibility, the sense of autonomy—no need to request a lift, no UBER app to press—is overwhelming. You get in, and you go.

This in turn made me realize, a little more empathetically, what I had only intuited before—that guns, for many Americans, are a sort of secondary, symbolic car: another powerful symbol of autonomy and independence. The attachment to them that so many Americans show—unique among the civilized peoples of the world, and at a cost so grave that the rest of that world often turns away, appalled—is nonetheless understandable to anyone who comes late to driving: to have potentially lethal power within your grasp is an immensely empowering drug. Cars are obviously in a different category, because their benign use is so much greater than their lethal one. But they are tools of the same country, of which I am now a citizen.

[ … ]

For the deeper truth is that cars are not, or not only, symbols of autonomy. They are, in every sense, vehicles of it. Guns, however, have an almost entirely symbolic function. No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled; the dense and hysterical mythology of gun love has been refuted again and again.

The few useful social functions that guns do have—in hunting or in killing varmints, as a rural man such as my father has to do—can be preserved even with tight regulations, as in Canada.

Good heavens.  What a child.  Take note: killing varmints is the only legitimate function for guns.  Here’s a fact for Adam – modern game management practices increases herd size and health.  Period.  But in order to comport with his world view, he would rather see herds suffering and starving and the herd unhealthy.  Hunting anything but varmints is anathema to him.

But that’s not the most significant illogical leap he makes.  If you took note before, take careful note now.  “No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled.”  Adam knows.  Forget that lives are saved every day and intruders repelled on a regular basis because men and women have guns.  And forget that whether something has utility isn’t a stipulation for rights and liberties.  Adam knows better than you and (in yet another flaw in his thinking) wants the bad men in government with guns to enforce his idea of “better.”  At heart, collectivists are control freaks.

Their utility is denied because he starts there as a pre-theoretical commitment.  He presupposes that to be the case, and in logical or rhetorical parlance, it’s called presupposing the consequent.  He reasons in a circle, and most collectivists make the equivalent or some related error.  But of course, Adam is cocooned inside a world of his own making, sure to suffer himself if society breaks or even falters.  That car and newfound freedom he adores won’t save him.  My guns won’t save me either if God calls and it’s my time.  But at least I will have attempted to effect my moral duty of self defense.

Bob Unruh at WND:

I don’t go where Bob Owens does on this.  This isn’t about the second amendment to me.  I took a strong stand against illegal aliens and bearing arms before (I cannot recall where, perhaps in a comment at reddit/guns, or at Say Uncle), and was savaged, as if I was anti-gun.

There is a libertarian case against the ownership of weapons by illegal aliens.  It’s simple.  You cannot do things to take actions that adversely affect others, and the mere presence of illegal aliens on my home soil adversely affects me.

Libertarians notwithstanding, you do not have a right to do anything you want any time you want.  Your rights are circumscribed by God.  God gives me the right to own weapons.  God does not give illegal aliens the right to be in my country.  The discussion about weapons for illegal aliens shouldn’t even come up.  Let central and South America figure it out.

I don’t have to turn to the founding fathers to figure this out.  But what’s so rich about this – and Bob Unruh points this out – is that judges who would otherwise vomit at the notion of God-given rights and bearing arms, suddenly find it necessary to expand this right to people who have no right to be on this soil.  It must suck to be a progressive and face logical problems like this.  Being impaled on the horns of a dilemma is the sort of thing that sticks to your innards.

AlterNet:

A Florida family seeks justice after their son Jason Westcott, was killed by members of a SWAT team, during a “drug raid” on his house which yielded only $2.00 worth of marijuana.

An ‘internal investigation’ absolved officers of any wrongdoing though police only found .02 grams of marijuana in Westcott’s home.

“They have IA, they have internal investigations but when you police yourself, you have that veil of concern by the outsider,” said attorney T.J. Grimaldi.

On Tuesday, attorney T.J. Grimaldi, representing the family of Westcott, informed the city that family would be filing a lawsuit, after finding numerous “glaring inconsistencies” in police statements in the aftermath of the killing.

“We have developed and seen what we view to be significant inconsistencies with the way that the police department portrayed this case from the get-go all the way to its conclusion,” he said. “We have put the city and the police department on notice that we are going to be filing a lawsuit,” Grimaldi said.

Westcott became the target of an intense drug trafficking investigation after a confidential informant led investigators to believe that Westcott was a dealer, as opposed to the casual cannabis smoker he was in reality. The informant has since gone public and admitted that he was lying to police in the case.

[ … ]

The fact that a young man with his whole life to live was killed by police, over a $2 dollars worth of a plant, is a direct statement on the absurdity of the “War on Drugs.” The practice of trusting the word of individuals who have a vested interest in alleviating their own criminal charges is a practice that is contrary to the highest ideals of justice.

Read the rest.  A young man is dead because he thought his home was being invaded by criminals (it was) – all over two dollars worth of pot.  A police cover-up ensues – all over two dollars worth of pot.  A huge award is forthcoming all on the taxpayer’s purse – all over two dollars worth of pot.  A CI is now the target of criminals – all over two dollars worth of pot.

There is your war on drugs.  Do you feel safer now?

Please remember my oldest son Joshua in your prayers.  He’s having a rough go of it from back surgery.

Via David Codrea:

A college student was sexually molested at LaGuardia Airport by a uniformed TSA agent who demanded she go into a bathroom with him after she got off a flight so she could be searched for a weapon, sources told The Post.

As I’ve said before, “the TSA is filled with goobers, hicks, pedophiles, perverts and criminals.”

David Codrea:

In other words, “gun control” doesn’t stop the bad guys and only serves to give them a killer advantage over the “law-abiding”?  Who knew?

In this case, surviving train passengers are lucky there were some men on board who would not go down without a fight. And the defenders are lucky their bravery, instincts, training and skills were enough to overcome all of their assailant’s advantages.

It would have been better and much easier if someone had been armed other than the criminal.  This could have ended far differently.

Via Mike Vanderboegh, black activists call for lynching white people and cops.

“Find a mother f**ker that is alone. Snap his ass, and then f***in hang him from a damn tree. Take a picture of it and then send it to the mother f**kers.”

Maybe everyone should start carrying guns, huh?

Defense News:

The Pentagon’s top weapons tester confirmed to a small group of reporters on Thursday that his team will pit the full-up F-35 joint strike fighter against the A-10 Warthog and potentially other aircraft during comparative tests slated to take place in 2018.

Because the A-10 is awesome and the F-35 sucks.

The National Interest:

For decades, naval architects have concentrated on building ships that, by the standards of the World Wars, are remarkably brittle. These ships can deal punishment at much greater ranges than their early 20th century counterparts, but they can’t take a hit. Is it time to reconsider this strategy, and once again build protected ships?

That fifth generation warfare thing not working out so well for you, boys?