Source.  I’m sure it’s nothing.  Pay it no mind.

ABC13:

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) –The Houston Police Department released new information Tuesday about the investigation into the shooting death of a kidnap victim during an FBI raid.

During a news conference Tuesday, Chief Art Acevedo discussed the homicide investigation being led by his department.

The chief detailed how the FBI SWAT team was at the home on Elbert Street in order to make a rescue to attempt to recover Ulises Valladares.

Valladares had reportedly been kidnapped from his Conroe home.

FBI agents attempted to breach a room in the back of the house where they believed the victim was being held.

Chief Acevedo said the agents were using a tool to break one of the rear windows to gain entry to the house. During that attempt, the agent dropped the tool inside.

The second agent made the decision to use his rifle to gain entry into the room.

According to the HPD, Valladares grabbed the weapon and began pulling on it.

Police say the agent, not knowing who was pulling on his weapon, feared he was going to lose control of his rifle. That agent reportedly made the decision to fire his weapon.

One of the shots hit Valladares. A second shot went into the roof.

The HPD says Valladares was bound in the room. When agents entered the home they immediately requested medical assistance. The victim died at the hospital.

Chief Acevedo says the agents repeatedly yelled “FBI” while attempting to enter the home.

Conditions in the room were described as dark since the FBI made the decision not to use lights during the rescue attempt.

The fail is so thick here that it shouldn’t be necessary to outline it, but I will anyway.

(1) The one breaking the window should have been wearing a lanyard to secure the tool if it was possible to lose the tool, and it was indeed possible since they conducted the raid in the dark (he could also have lost it in the yard approaching the house).

(2) They conducted the raid in the dark, and apparently weren’t wearing any sort of night vision or using tactical lights.

(3) The other SWAT team member shouldn’t have used his rifle as a tool to break the window.  That’s not the function of a rifle.

(4) The shooter shouldn’t have discharged his weapon without having positive ID.

(5) Discharging the weapon was stupid anyway because the shooter didn’t have proper identification of backstop.

(6) The person breaking the window shouldn’t have been part of the house clearing team and should have focused on his one job of breaking the window.  He had one job.  One job.  He couldn’t even do that without screwing up.  The shooter couldn’t do the job either without screwing up.

(7) The FBI is a fuckup.  They always have been.  They shouldn’t have been doing any raid.  Art Acevedo (who believes in forcible blood draws at random car stops and was driven out of the progressive city of Austin) deserves the FBI, and the FBI deserves Art.  Why the FBI was involved isn’t explained, but they are both disgusting.  I detest them both.

Don’t do any of these things.  Ever.  Stay away from law enforcement, as they are the most dangerous people on the road or in neighborhoods.  If you ever have to do anything at all like this, think before you do it, and use your head.

David Codrea:

“On December 13, 2006 … ATF … reclassified bump-fire systems like the Akins Accelerator as a machinegun, because it was equipped with a ‘coiled spring’ and initiated automatic fire with a single trigger pull,” the report states. “In an unpublished decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld ATF’s decision.”

Conversely, “Other manufacturers submitted modified ‘bump-fire’ or ‘slide-fire’ stocks that did not include a ‘coiled spring’ or similar mechanisms to the ATF for classification,” the report notes. “From the ATF rulings discussed above, it appears that bump-fire stocks with ‘coiled springs’ and that initiate automatic fire with a single trigger pull are regulated as firearms under the NFA; however, modified stocks without any ‘automatically functioning mechanical parts or springs’ are not similarly regulated.”

David is citing from a FAS report to which we were not privy.  Nice.  So let’s get this straight.  Because there are other precedents that infringe on our God-given rights, agreed to in the second amendment, and because a judge said it was okay, then the ATF can do it again?

Okay, got it.  I’ll remember this.  Folks, any time you even see an ATF agent you should spit on them, or at least tell them what you think of them.  They’re trash.  That’s the way I see it.  If you disagree, elaborate and show your work.

David Codrea:

Yet another citizen is facing criminal charges for not realizing that gun laws vary from state to state.  Hayley Leach, a Colorado woman, was arrested when she attempted to check her gun in at Albany Airport for her return flight home, News 10 ABC reported.

[ … ]

It’s reminiscent of earlier similar cases, including that of Donna Marie Gracey, the Florida woman with a concealed carry permit who was arrested last month for having it in New Jersey, or the ordeals of Shaneen Allen and others. None of them had criminal intent.

I don’t fly to states where I can’t carry a gun.  I don’t visit them in any way, including driving to or through them.  I try not to send my money there either (Kimber, S&W, Mossberg, etc., are you listening carefully to what I’m saying?).  In fact, I will not even get on board a flight where it’s possible that I’ll have a layover or exigent landing for weather or some other reason in a state where I can’t carry a firearm.

You shouldn’t either.

By the way, you are aware, aren’t you, that the great land of gun control, New Jersey, has a sordid and wretched  history with hitmen, and a not so great history of allowing people to defend themselves from such people?

Guess that gun control stuff hasn’t worked out so well after all.

Lizzy’s Law.  It would require certain things of S.C. gun owners.

“In the autumn of 2006, Elizabeth “Lizzy” Hafter, a 22-year-old graduate student, was shot twice in the head while she studied on a mountain overlook in Virginia. The man behind the trigger had stolen the murder weapon and the car he was driving from his roommate in Georgia, the first act of a multistate crime spree that left several people dead across the South. The roommate did not report the thefts to police for nearly a week, precious time lost to investigators.

“He could have been stopped if the gun owner had only reported the gun and car stolen,” Hafter’s mother, Joanne, wrote in a letter to a lawmaker in the years after her daughter’s death.

The letter was part of Joanne Hafter’s shoe-leather crusade to hold gun owners accountable for failing to promptly inform police about the theft of their weapons.”

She is imagining that.  She just made it up.  She doesn’t know if anyone doing any particular thing that day could have been stopped.  But the controllers want you to know they’re watching you.

On the other hand, there are hearings on constitutional carry in S.C.

On Tuesday, January 30^th, the South Carolina state Senate Judiciary Committee will be hearing Senate Bill 449 to enact constitutional carry.  Please contact committee members today and urge them to SUPPORT this legislation.  Click the “Take Action” button below to contact committee members.

Sponsored by Senator Shane Martin (R-13), S. 449 would allow law-abiding adults to legally carry a firearm without first needing to obtain a Concealed Weapons Permit (CWP).  Self-defense situations are difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate.  Accordingly, a law-abiding adult’s right to defend themselves in such situations should not be conditioned by government-mandated time delays and taxes.  The CWP will still be available for those who wish to take advantage of reciprocity agreements when traveling to other states.

Okay, this is all well and good enough.  But where is open carry in all of this.  WHERE IS OPEN CARRY IN ALL OF THIS?

Has it fallen off the radar, and if so, why?  Are citizens in South Carolina letting their senators forget about open carry?  Because it will piss me off if this goes yet another session without approval by the senate and house.

The Washington Times:

TV host Mike Rowe likes to illustrate how attitudes have changed over the years by recalling the time he and a classmate brought a gun to his high school in Baltimore — not just any gun, but a sniper rifle.

“We walked in the school, had the gun over my shoulder, walking down a crowded hall and the principal saw me and said, ‘Hey, what do you have there?’ And I handed it to him and said, ‘It’s a Mauser. Check it out. It’s an old German sniper rifle,’” Mr. Rowe said.

The principal was impressed with the firearm and their plans to tinker with it in metal shop, he said.

“He said, ‘Bring it by the office when you’re done. I’d love to look at it when you’re finished,’” Mr. Rowe recalled. “That’s 1979 or 1980. Where I grew up, we saw the guns in the back of the truck. They were there in the gun racks in the high school parking lot.”

“I think most things are down to mental health. I think a lot of giant issues get missed because we confuse the cause with the symptom,” he said, adding that the basic issue behind shootings is “terrible judgment.”

After properly and correctly observing that the culture and morals of the country have changed for the worse, Mike then proceeds to unravel his whole argument.  I’ve often said that if you want to truly understand what you think the root cause of something is, pose your remedy to ameliorate the condition.  Then you’ll be able to backtrack to your real problem.

Mike’s problem is that he feels that there are mental health issues, and I guess he wants a gigantic psychiatric program run nation-wide to figure out who is the one who will make “terrible judgments.”

Not one word about evil, sin, moral choices or a country that has rejected God.  Because apparently he doesn’t believe in such things.

You can keep your gun-control psychiatrists, Mike.  I don’t want them or need them.

Via WRSA, Matt Bracken.

On a related note, have y’all studied much on the JTTF and Fusion Centers?  If you haven’t, you need to.

Sarah Bregel:

My 3-year-son Tener is sitting at the dining room table, coloring next to his big sister. “What are you drawing, Ten?” I ask, while staring into my screen. “A gun,” he replies, not looking up. “Oh, that’s nice,” I say, relatively unfazed by his creative choice.

His sister smirks at me. She remembers how not long ago, I would’ve maybe tried to redirect either one of them if they’d been talking, playing, or even drawing guns.

But in truth, the question of whether or not to allow my kids to play “guns” is not something I had to think much about until the past couple of years. When kids on the playground would play guns, my daughter would find something else to do. It just wasn’t of interest. But almost as soon as my son could speak, “gun” was on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to play with the other kids who were playing guns. He’d lose his mind if someone had a toy gun to play with because he wanted it for himself.

He has a few weapons at home — a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival, a lightsaber he got for Christmas, and tons of superhero costumes — the same as his big sister. But intentionally, I had never bought any toy guns or allowed them in our home when he asked. To me, it felt wrong and dangerous to turn gun violence — a very real and serious issue, especially in America — into a game. I fiercely believe that we need common-sense gun control laws in our country. Nearly every time we flip on the news, there’s another mass shooting. How could I, in good conscience, allow that kind of play?

Regardless of the fact that we kept guns out of our home, and my son didn’t play violent video games or watch frightening stuff on TV, his interest still budded on its own. If he went to a friend’s house, he’d go straight for their Nerf guns and hold on tight until I picked him up. He’d shoot me dead with his pointer finger while I sat on the couch and then laugh at a job well done. For the record, he’d also shoot “fire” at me, burning me to the ground, or defeat me in just about any way he enjoyed. But shooting remained of high interest, too.

started to look into the issue with a more open mind. I picked up Gerard Jones’s book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. In it, he talks specifically about this kind of play and even suggests that it actually benefits kids.

According to the book, studies showed that in British preschools when kids were allowed to play with toy guns, their games became more aggressive in the short-term, but that they were actually more relaxed later in the day. So playing fantastical games didn’t impact kids negatively or make them more aggressive. You could even say that they got their aggression out by having the freedom to play how they chose.

Some studies have suggested that watching violent shows or playing violent video games encourages violent behavior (not just play), but high amounts of screen time no matter the content, has been shown to have the same result. And it’s no surprise that context matters, too. If kids have a violent home life, their violent tendencies go up. But if they have safe surroundings and are simply playing these kinds of games, they remain just that — games.

Sarah is a feminist and that probably has a lot to do with how she’s interpreting the response of her son and what she chooses to do about it.  Her world and life view affects her actions and perspectives, as it does with us all.

But try as she might, she cannot construct a value system that can make any sense of this.  The term aggression is there, but what causes it remains unexplained.  Why poor parenting can have a negative effect on children is just taken as an axiom.  She just decides to let it happen, and it appears to me that she has found justification for all of this as opposed to being unable to stop it and also unable to find justification.  If it’s going to happen regardless of what I do, then I may as well justify it, she apparently thinks.

So let me help a little, Sarah.  Getting aggression “out of his system” isn’t why he needs to behave like a boy instead of a girl.  Evil exists in the world.  We aren’t a tabula rasa, or a blank tablet, and we do have predilections and propensities, regardless of what the nineteenth and twentieth century idiot philosophers told you.

You want to teach your children well.  We don’t learn to drive in driver’s education.  Boys learn to drive by watching their fathers, and girls by watching their mothers.  Our children generally take on our own value system, at least initially, but there are still God-given tendencies in boys and girls that will always be different.

You will want to turn your boy’s predilections towards good.  He wants to learn to protect and provide because that’s the way he is wired, no matter what your feminist friends and professors have taught you.  He can use his predilections for evil, but you want him to learn the good.

Protecting his family is good.  Defending his community is good.  Opposing tyranny is good.  All of these things are necessary by someone, because many people will not turn their children to the good, and regardless, some children will not accept their teaching because we all have volition.

You don’t want your little boy to grow up to be a man who cowers in a corner when hard times hit and a loved one or neighbor is under threat.  If he does this, he will hate himself later in life and feel worthless, and even worse, an impediment to the good.  You don’t want your little boy to grow up to hate himself, do you?

You want better than that for your little boy.  You want him to grow up to be a man, not a unisex, genderless robot.  A man is what God designed him to be, and it’s your job to assist in that calling.  So your husband, if you have one, has a job to do with him.  Tell your husband to get busy hunting, fishing, shooting, camping, hiking, biking, and doing all of the things a man should do with his boy.  It’s what God wants.

If you have no husband, then you’re going to have to pull double-duty.  But your son is worth it, yes?

Fox News:

Authorities plan an investigation after a video posted on Facebook on Thursday showed a Kentucky police officer’s rifle leaning up against a car unattended as a student walks past.

“It is unfortunate that this accident happened, but we as police officers are human and do make mistakes,” Dayton, Ky., police Chief David Halfhill said in a statement Thursday, Cincinnati.com reported. “We hold our police officers to a higher standard and be assured that this mistake will be fully investigated.”

Multiple officers can be seen in the video engaging with a suspect on the opposite side of the street, while what appears to be a rifle rests against a parked car. At one point, a student walks by the weapon but doesn’t seem to notice.

One police officer then walks a person down the street, while two other officers walk the opposite way with a person of their own – the weapon still left alone.

It’s not until a voice can be heard in the video yelling, “there’s an assault rifle left unattended,” that an officer saunters over to reclaim the gun and take it back to his patrol car.

Ha.  I hate it when that happens to me.  I remember the last time I laid one of my guns out on the sidewalk in my little town, and later when I went to pick it up the cops talked to me about the Youth Handgun Safety Act.  We all laughed and laughed and laughed.

I told them I just did it for fun and they understood, but said they expect better of me and will “fully investigate” if it ever happens again.

Kirkland Reporter:

A proposed bill would add harassment to a list of domestic violence crimes for which someone can have their firearm rights revoked.

SB 6298, sponsored by Senator Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond, adds harassment crimes in a domestic violence setting to existing law. The bill was heard on Tuesday.

Under both existing law and the Dhingra’s bill, a person must be convicted of a domestic violence felony or gross misdemeanor to have their firearm rights revoked.

Harassment, which is a gross misdemeanor, not a felony, would be included under the bill. Harassment includes physical threats or threats that instill reasonable fear and are likely to be carried out.

“We can’t ignore that these threats are promises to a victim,” Chris Anderson, director of the Domestic Violence Unit for the Seattle City Attorney’s Office, said.

Protective order cases, he said, often show patterns of domestic abuse, threats, and harassment that can be more serious than individual incidents reported in 911 calls.

“The most statistically significant thing we can do is remove firearms from the situation,” he said.

Anderson also said that because felony level domestic violence cases are sometimes hard to prove, the court might settle for a plea-bargained misdemeanor. Including misdemeanors, the bill would more accurately represent a perpetrator’s past history of violence.

Washington state already has a law prohibiting those convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun. That includes felonies like assault, stalking, death threats, or violating a protection order. When someone is convicted of a crime, he or she must surrender any firearms to the court. In 2014, the legislature enacted a law that someone must surrender their firearms to the court when there is a protection order issued against them. He or she can, however, petition the court to restore those rights.

Here is what she wants you to think is going to happen.  A man and woman separate, and the man calls his wife up and says something like this.  “I’m going to find myself a sniper’s hide and take you out when you walk out the door.”

In reality, it will be applied like this.  The word of the woman is all that will be needed.  No evidence beyond this will be required.  Furthermore, it might be something like this.  “I’m going to pick up my things because I need them.”

But Manka Dhingra is a social justice warrior.  It will pass in Washington because it’s just California North.  So goes the great Western American redoubt.