Articles by Herschel Smith

News from Denver, Colorado:

Denver is about to pay up again after a confrontation between civilians and police. This time, it’s a wrongful prosecution case.

A jury awarded a family $1.8 million Friday evening for a mistaken raid on their home back in 2009. While 9NEWS awaits the officers’ account of what happened, the family involved is speaking out about the events of that night.

Jan. 27 is a date Daniel Martinez, Jr. and his family have been reliving for five years. Martinez’s son, Daniel Martinez III, says at around 11 p.m., four Denver Police officers came pounding on their front door.

“They pushed through the door and pushed my dad against the wall. Then I saw them grab my little brother and saw them slam his head through the window. I screamed, ‘you can’t do that. You can’t do that, he’s a minor,'” Martinez said. “Then, they put me in a chokehold, had taken me outside, body-slammed me onto the concrete, put a knee in my back and handcuffed me right there.”

The family’s attorney, Kathryn Stimson, says that night DPD was conducting what law enforcement refers to as a “Knock and Talk.”

She says they were following up on a tip they received that two felons were selling drugs and running a brothel inside of a home located in the 1200 block of Stuart Street. Stimson said those tenants had moved out over a month before. About two weeks later, the Martinez family moved in.

Martinez says when the officers broke into his house, he was confused and afraid for his kids.

“I felt helpless, helpless and confused, scared. I didn’t know what was happening,” Martinez said.

Martinez was later charged with resisting arrest. His sons were charged with assaulting an officer. In 2010, all of them had either been acquitted or had their charges dropped. Stimson says that is when the family filed the lawsuit.

After being awarded the $1.8 million, Martinez says he’s glad that justice has been served, but still worries for his family.

“I’m constantly looking out the window, I’m still in fear,” Martinez said. ” I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Stimson says the jury upheld the claims of wrongful prosecution against the officers but not the claim of excessive force.

So let me get this straight.  A “knock and talk” is where cops come and bust in your door and beat the hell out of the occupants of the home, and you have to fight it all in court, and you have the community ignore your bruises, and then the community has to turn around and pay for what the cops did while the cops go unmolested and without responsibility or accountability, as if it was all some sort of obscene, bizarre, reality-horror show that costs obscene amounts of money the community doesn’t really have?

Okay.  I think I’ve got it now.

Salon:

Black men are routinely shot down by police in the country, that’s the bottom line. And while it’s certainly admirable for open carry advocates to stick to their principles and defend John Crawford’s right to carry a toy gun around Wal-Mart, it’s failing to see the forest for the trees. John Crawford, Michael Brown, Kajieme Powell, Levar Jones were all unarmed black men killed shot by police in the last few months. It wouldn’t have helped them to actually be carrying guns, real or otherwise.

Surely these open carry people, however well intentioned, should realize that nice white men and women openly carrying firearms on the street aren’t being gunned down on sight by police officers. The worst thing that happens to them is they are forced to show their ID. It’s unarmed black men (and unarmed mentally ill people of all races) who are being gunned down on sight by police officers. Are they agitating for their right to shoot cops? I doubt it. Nor should they be.

The problem isn’t that people don’t have enough guns. The problem is that police are too often using the guns they have. That won’t be solved by a bunch of average suburban white people wandering around public spaces with their rifles slung over their backs. Those aren’t the people most likely to be shot by police –whether they’re armed or not. They’re missing the point entirely.

In addition to confusing the Ohio stop and identify statute, which is oriented towards a legitimate “Terry Stop” rather than just any happenstance desire for the police to know someone’s identity (meaning that the Ohio police didn’t really have a right to stop the open carriers), the author is the one that misses the point.

Read her logic again.  Because – in her estimation – blacks are “gunned down” by police more than whites, the silly practice of open carry by whites is a meaningless contribution to liberty.  It misses the problem of over-zealous cops.  And while we can agree with the author about the over-zealous cops, we simply cannot agree on the notion that carrying weapons is a meaningless exercise of liberty and self protection.

The author would deny it, but her conclusion and end result is as racist as the Jim Crow laws in so many counties where the Sheriff reserves the right to deny gun ownership regardless of liberties and rights recognized by State Constitutions.  They are all racist and need to go the way of the dinosaur.

Another example of racism came up today in Disqus comments that drove a little bit of traffic to this site.

I can’t decide whether these comments were left by a feminist Sophomore international studies student at Dartmouth or scrawny boy in his mommy’s basement who has no job.  I’ll assume for former for the sake of argument.

First of all, the only reason that someone would invoke the issue of race is because she is thinking about it.  The only reason someone would think that gun owners and gun rights advocates would care about race is that they assume we are as racist and bigoted as they are.

For the record, I know his skin color.  The man has as much right to defend his life as anyone else, and in Texas he has a right to defend life and property.  Moreover, I don’t even care if the man was guilty of the crime of which he was charged (drugs).  If he thinks that someone is breaking into his home in the middle of the night, he has a God-given right to defend his life and the lives of his loved ones.  In fact, he has the duty to do so.  What you will find if you peruse this and similar sites is a consistent objection to thuggish and overbearing police tactics.  You will also find consistent support for the right to self defense regardless of race.  Consider David Codrea.

I addressed that question in principle many years ago, on the pioneering (and long-discontinued) GunTuths.com website in an essay titled “What the Panther Taught the Eagle: A Modern Folk Tale.” It involved about 50 armed members of the New Black Panthers who were counter-demonstrating against the Ku Klux Klan in Jasper, Texas, after James Byrd, a black man, had been kidnapped by three racist whites, chained to the back of a truck, dragged for miles down a country road and decapitated upon hitting a culvert.

“The Panther’s historic affinity for Marxist dogma notwithstanding, their stand demonstrates the true meaning and power behind the Second Amendment’s guarantee that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” I wrote at the time. “The truth is, the Panthers applied the right to bear arms in exactly the way it was intended to be – in defense of their lives and their rights. Their presence deterred violence against them. They did not engage in unwarranted violence. Their stand should be applauded as an example by all who believe that this is a right of all free people.”

Consider also Kurt Hofmann:

What Sugarmann did not point out then, and is certainly not pointing out now, is that the vast majority of the murderers of African-Americans are also black (91.1% then, 89.4% now). In other words, Sugarmann makes an issue of the fact that almost 57% of black homicides are committed with handguns, while pretending to ignore the vastly stronger correlation of race. If the focus for reducing black homicide, then, “must” be on “reducing access to firearms,” then whose access must be reduced?

“No guns for negroes,” all over again, right in line with the shameful history of American “gun control.”

And shameful it is.  All Jim Crow laws should fall.  I am told that the opposition to open carry in South Carolina by powerful state senator Larry Martin was because those horrible Negros down around Charleston might open carry and thus affect the tourism industry in South Carolina.  Larry Martin is an enemy of liberty.

Now on a personal note.  As to being a “wingnut” blog and my readers being “zoo critters,” let me tell you something deary.  I chew through people like you like I chew through a tenderloin.  I enjoy it.  You feel free to step into my back yard and run with the big dogs any time you feel froggy.  Be warned, though.  We play rough.

And drop the racism.  It betrays an evil heart.  Oh, and by the way, thanks for the traffic today.

David Codrea:

After over three years of emotional torture and total economic destruction, the prosecution, representing the same Department of Justice that has stonewalled investigations into its own culpability for smuggling guns to Mexico, now demands extracting five more years out of the lives of Rick, Terri and Ryin Reese. What that prosecution has not done is explain where a government that gets its sole Constitutional instruction on arms under the proscription that “the right of the people to keep and bear [them] shall not be infringed” also finds its authority.

See the update on the Reece family and the lying under oath engaged by the Federal Government.  Sad and despicable.  When the very ones in authority will not obey the laws the Congress passes to govern them, why should we?  And this reminds me of a post Mike Vanderboegh made just recently on the role of the law in totalitarian governments.

Kurt Hoffman:

When millions of Americans, with neither the metalworking and gunsmithing skills to build firearms by hand, or the wealth to buy equipment sufficiently sophisticated (at the prices such equipment commanded until now) to do so through automation, can nevertheless produce effective fighting arms in the privacy of their homes, “universal background check” laws, “prohibited person” laws, “assault weapon” bans, etc. become meaningless. The gun ban zealots’ worst nightmare–uncontrollable, utterly anonymous access to so-called “assault weapons” is upon us, spelling the death of the “government monopoly on force” so beloved of the gun ban jihadis.

That’s a victory for humanity.

This will make it even easier to ameliorate any evil universal background check law passed by Congress.  Rock on.

Mike Vanderboegh passed on this piece on caliber debates again.  But this is a strange one.  Somebody apparently wants the FBI to begin using the .22LR cartridge.  As I said, strange.  I’ve always thought of the .22LR as underpowered, even for a varmint round.  Muzzle velocity and wound trek matter (I prefer the .22 WMR for varmint rounds), which is why the 5.56 mm (.223) is such an effective round and has served the U.S. military so well for years given its propensity to yaw, tumble and fragment into pieces leaving multiple would treks.  Related: here is a very interesting article at The Daily Caller on the history of the .357 magnum (a round which I like very much).  For the record, I shoot .45 ACP, .38 Special and .357 magnum in my handguns.

Mississippi Business Journal:

Winchester Ammunition, which has manufacturing facilities in Oxford, has won a five-year contract to produce ammunition for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Olin Corp. and its Winchester division have been awarded a contract worth up to $50 million to produce ammunition at its Winchester Centerfire Operations in Oxford for two DHS agencies.

“The Department of Homeland Security’s wide-ranging border security and law enforcement missions require a significant amount of firepower, particularly for training. I’m pleased that Mississippi will be able to fill that need,” said Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), who serves on the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Homeland Security Department.

The indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract calls for the procurement of 40 caliber Smith & Wesson training ammunition, with a maximum dollar value of $50 million.  The ammunition is intended for use by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) for field-level training.

Most of the DHS uses .40 ammunition right now.  At $50 million and around 50 cents per round (that’s high priced and I can find it for less), that’s at least a total of 100 million rounds for range days.  With 20,000 field agents in Border Patrol, this amounts to 5000 rounds per agent.  They don’t need that many rounds to stay qualified with their firearm.

I wouldn’t begrudge the expenditure except that the Border Patrol doesn’t usually discharge their weapons (Brian Terry fired bean bags), and the Border Patrol has been turned into a giant nanny for aiding and assisting illegal immigration.

And the more Winchester makes for the federal government, the more that drives prices up for me and busies Winchester employees working for the government.

Mint Press News:

On Friday, May 9, 2014, just after 5:30am in Killeen, Texas, Marvin Louis Guy was the target of a no knock raid.

The officers were looking for drugs, yet none were found in the home.  There was some questionable paraphernalia, but nothing indicative of drug dealing- or anything damning enough for a reasonable person to feel the need to take an officers life.

Unfortunately the danger of no-knock raids is real. just ask the parents of baby Bou or the family of Detective Dinwiddie.

Detective Dinwiddie was one of the SWAT officers who broke into Guy’s house on May 9th, based on a seemingly bogus informant tip off about drugs being dealt from the home.

Likely alarmed by the men climbing through his windows at 5:30 in the morning, Guy and his wife sought to protect themselves and their property and fired on the intruders- in self defense.

Dinwiddie, along with three other officers were shot while attempting to breach the windows to the home, according to the department’s press release.

“The TRU was beginning to breach the window when the 49 year old male inside, opened fire striking four officers.”

Since the shooting occurred during the break in, a reasonable person would assume they had not yet identified themselves as police officers.  How on earth is this not self defense?

Prosecutors are now seeking the death penalty against Guy. He is charged with capital murder in Dinwiddie’s death, as well as three counts of attempted capital murder for firing on the other officers during the shootout, injuring one other officer. Body armor protected others who were hit.

This announcement, given by the prosecutor in open court, comes one day after Governor Rick Perry presented  Dinwiddie’s family with the Star of Texas award.

Rick Perry apparently wants to chat-up the listening public over the Oklahoma beheadings, but he’s got a situation in his state where a man defended his castle and now has the prosecutors wanting to put him to death.  What does the governor have to say about that?

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep pressing on the issue.  My home is my castle, and I don’t care what judge has signed what piece of paper.  If you come at my home, especially in the middle of the night, you’re going to get shot, cop or not.  I won’t differentiate because I cannot trust uniforms and announcements.  Criminal gangs have now taken to wearing uniforms and making announcements.

My home is my castle.  It doesn’t belong to you, and it doesn’t belong to the state.  If you are law enforcement and want to come in my home, call and make an appointment.  Got it?  If that isn’t good enough for you, if you think there is evidence of something or other you want to see, then put good detectives on the job (like you did at one time in history), watch for me to leave, detain me, and then take me back to the home and let me use my key to the front door.  Or get a locksmith.  In other words, use your brains to gather evidence.  Otherwise, I don’t care if you lose that evidence.  I only care about my safety, and the safety of victims like Mr. Guy.

I hope the grand jury levels charges at the prosecutors for the evil they are about to perpetrate rather than Mr. Guy.  Holding police, evil prosecutors and evil judges accountable by whatever means necessary seems to be the only way to handle this overreach in authority and force.

News from communist controlled territory:

A Pennsauken-based weapons and ammunition supply company is set to win a $500,000 contract to provide firearms and ammo to Jersey City police under new rules that Mayor Steve Fulop has said will help “shape the dialogue” on gun control nationwide.

Lawmen Supply Company, one of two bidders for the contract, had to answer questions regarding how it handles firearms it purchases back from the city, whether it manufactures or sells assault weapons for civilian use and whether it agrees not to sell certain firearms for civilian use.

Jersey City is the first municipality to seek this kind of information about suppliers’ practices. Seattle and other cities are reportedly interested in replicating the city’s initiative.

The questions, which have raised the ire of gun rights advocates, are “socially responsible,” according to Jersey City. Fulop, who will travel to Los Angeles today to participate on a panel on gun violence, has said that in the absence of nationwide legislation to curb gun violence, big-city mayors must act.

Lawmen’s bid was about $10,000 higher than the only other bidder — Atlantic Tactical, of Pennsylvania — but the city said Lawman’s bid “best met the needs of the department.”

The questionnaires the city required the bidders to fill out show Lawmen said it does not sell weapons to civilians …

Shape the dialogue, huh?  There’s only one problem with all of this.  Neither Lawmen’s nor Atlantic Tactical has anything to do with manufacturing anything.  They are distributors and sellers.  They are a middle man.  There are ten thousand just like them, and it sounds like the boy-mayor of Jersey City is perhaps a little jealous over real manufacturing being driven South?  Or does he not know that we’re taking gun jobs away from the North?  I can get nice custom built firearms at Hyatt Gun Shop.  I can go down to talk to the dozen or so gunsmiths at Hyatt and get more real manufacturing done than any of the bidders for this silly contract.

It’s in the news, cops wearing cameras.  A recent Washington Post editorial presses the issue with D.C., and even the New York Times has jumped into the fray.

Color me skeptical.  If cops want cameras in order to protect themselves, I couldn’t care less.  If the video will be live-streamed to a third party and controlled separate from the police, I’m all for it.  This is especially true of SWAT raids, in which the cops may not wear the cameras because of some bogus claim to OPSEC or for the safety of the officers.  In other words, it needs to follow certain rules like wearing cameras all of the time, third party control, and mandatory release of the information.

This follows what reader Ned Weatherby calls Herschel’s Law.

David Codrea:

“[Kennedy] said there should be a law that lets authorities punish skeptics and deniers — those who engage in ‘selling out the public trust,’” The Washington Times reported Tuesday, citing an interview the “progressive” activist gave to Climate Depot at the people’s Climate March in New York City. “I wish there were a law you could punish them with. I don’t think there is a law that you can punish these politicians under…

And while Kennedy maintains a police officer was lying when, as a teenager, he was accused of spitting ice cream in the officer’s face precipitating his arrest, he did not take the judge up on pleading not guilty, despite having the Kennedy fortune to mount a legal defense that would have allowed him to challenge the testimony. Likewise, his 1982 arrest for heroin possession resulted in probation, community service and an expunged record. Curious, that the man who would control those without addictive personalities is still described as a man who can’t – or won’t – control himself.

David goes on.  Really, read the rest of the hypocrisy here.  Kennedy is sounding crazier and crazier not only because he is an ideologically driven communist who likes being special and above everyone else, but also because he knows that AGW is a perishing science.  It is dying because there is no evidence for it.  There is no evidence for it because it’s a myth, a fairly tale of rich elitists who have nothing else to worry about.

Kurt Hofmann:

The proposal was put on the ballot by the same Republican-controlled Legislature that believes, in the absence of any evidence, that President Barack Obama is coming for your guns” … “The current state of affairs seems to reinforce Mr. Dotson’s position that the amendment’s wording was misleading. It surely didn’t tell voters that they’d be handing guns to felons, but that’s precisely what is happening right now” …

Read the rest of Kurt’s setup with St. Louis Police chief Sam Dotson and his opposition to the gun rights amendment which recently passed by a large majority.  It wouldn’t matter if the language really was unclear.  It wouldn’t matter if they really were giving guns to felons (although they aren’t).  It wouldn’t matter who dislikes the amendment.  It passed, and it passed overwhelmingly.  That closes the issues.  As far as Dotson is concerned, he can be replaced.  He sounds like an outdated dinosaur.

In other news, the Sandy Hook Commission calls for a crackdown on home schooling.  For any readers I have in Connecticut, seriously, is there any reason at all to stay there?  Think hard.  Why would anyone live there?

And this is one reason I am reluctant to ship firearms through the TSA and airline when I am flying.

The Bang Switch has a must read on gun control in France, lengthy, but well worth reading.  Some of it is highly detailed in the legalities of firearms ownership in France.  There are many salient points for gun control in America, but this quote encapsulates the spirit of the article.

This French writer is telling you what the American left is saying concerning their ultimate aim.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

This lefty writer at Daily Kos couches a total gun ban in terms of safety, but even if he believes in this state sponsored utopia, most on the left know that it’s a lie.  In the end it’s all about control over people.

This is why universal background checks and a national gun registry gain no traction in the gun community.  We don’t believe the lie of public safety, and we know your ultimate aim.  We will never relent.  We will never register our guns.  We will never turn in our guns.  We will never be put on a list.  We will fight a gun registry with all of our might.

As the philosophers would say, these truths hold “positive epistemic status.”

The Montana Standard:

By my count this is at least the second life that has been saved from a bear attack after legalization of firearms in National Parks, the first instance being mid-2010 in Denali.

Of course, Mr. Murphy is now charged with a crime.  There are two problems that could be contributing, the first being that laws are now passed in broad sweeping language that apparently ignores guilty intent, or in other words, Congress is Eroding the Mens Rea Requirement in Federal Criminal Law.

The second problem that could be contributing is that the enforcement in question may be of a regulation rather than a law, which is made via federal register by armies of lawyers sitting inside the beltway who have been (unfortunately) empowered by Congress to do just that.

But the third problem is there  is obviously a prosecutor who wants to take this case to court, otherwise he wouldn’t have a scheduled court appearance and need a lawyer.

The law becomes absolute in contemporary America, regardless of the fact that a man’s life was saved because he discharged a firearm.  But it’s absurd that Congress would have passed a law allowing firearms in National Parks early in 2010, but then refused to allow people to use that firearm to defend their lives.  Since it is absurd, it clearly wasn’t the intent of Congress (or should not have been).  Therefore, the prosecutor is likely to blame for the fact that Mr. Murphy has to defend himself in court for saving his own life.