News from Michigan:

Authorities who went to the wrong house in search of a wanted fugitive and shot a beloved family pet are refusing to take responsibility for their actions, according to a Michigan attorney who has filed a lawsuit against them.

“These officers came into the wrong house, shot this dog, told the owners they would take care of it and then never returned their calls,” Royal Oak attorney Chris Olson told The Huffington Post.

Olson is representing Erica Moreno and Katti Putnam. The couple’s 15-year-old mixed breed dog, Clohe, was shot in the face during the mistaken police raid, Olson said.

Clohe survived the shooting, but has had to endure three surgeries, and lost part of her tongue and a canine tooth.

“Clohe’s not been the same since,” Putnam told HuffPost. “It really angers me and makes me concerned for the system and how things work.”

On Oct. 3, Olson filed a federal lawsuit against Michigan Department of Corrections investigator Ron Hughes. The lawsuit alleges that in shooting Clohe, the defendant violated Moreno and Putnam’s Fourth Amendment rights.

According to Putnam, the events leading up to the shooting began on June 18 when Hughes, along with several Michigan State troopers, went to Moreno and Putnam’s home to recover a wanted fugitive.

“It was a hot day, the windows and back door were open, and I was sitting inside reading a book,” Putnam said.

The peaceful summer day was interrupted by a loud bang at the front door.

“The next thing I knew there was a tactical team surrounding our house,” Putnam said. “I went onto the front porch and they said they were looking for a fugitive. I was answering their questions when an officer looked at the address on our house and said, ‘We’re at the wrong house.'”

According to Olson, the tactical team had mistaken Moreno and Putnam’s house for that of a neighbor’s home — where the fugitive they wanted was allegedly staying.

“I went inside to get my identification and I heard a pop,” Putnam said. “I looked out the door to the back yard and there was an officer with his arm raised and a gun in his hand. I immediately realized Clohe had gone outside.”

Jimmy Armstrong, a neighbor who witnessed the shooting, wrote in a signed affidavit that he saw Clohe enter the backyard. He said she was not attacking or threatening any of the officers.

“[Hughes] shot Clohe for no reason at all,” Armstrong wrote in the affidavit, according to the lawsuit.

Hughes allegedly fired a second shot, which missed Clohe, prompting Putnam to place herself in harm’s way — between the officer and her now injured pet.

“I was yelling at him,” said Putnam. “I said, ‘Why are you shooting my dog? What are you doing? You’re at the wrong house.'”

During the exchange, Clohe made her way back inside the house, leaving a trail of blood in her wake.

“I followed the blood trail into the bedroom, where my partner was cradling Clohe and crying hysterically,” Putnam said.

According to the lawsuit, a Michigan state trooper told Moreno and Putnam, “We’ll take care of this” and urged them to get their wounded pet to a veterinary clinic.

[ … ]

“They should not have been in our backyard,” she said. “Clohe did not charge them or anything. She is old. She has a hard time getting on our couch as it is and she hobbles down the steps when she goes outside. She does not run or charge.”

I am always loath to disarm people (note my defense of the so-called “mentally ill”), even the police.  Law enforcement has as much right to self defense as I do, but this has become an epidemic.

As a side note, I’ve said before that if you are in law enforcement and cannot handle animals, you are unfit, unsuited and unqualified for the job.  Go spend some time at a farm or ranch doing the things you should have learned to do as a little boy.  If you are a pussy around animals, you surely shouldn’t be hunting for felons.

But to the main point, one by one, police force after police force, if you prove that you cannot handle yourselves with maturity, decency and respect for ordinary folks, you should not be armed.  You should forthwith turn in your weapons to your superiors, and if you don’t, you should be forcibly disarmed by the National Guard (or the unorganized militia).

View from Connecticut:

In 2013, Gov. Dannel Malloy pursued a closed-door legislative agenda to impose strict gun laws on Connecticut’s citizens and to cast an historic state industry, employing thousands here, as a villain. In campaign commercials, he continues the false narrative.

Gov. Malloy either doesn’t know much about an industry with a significant economic presence in his state or is so uneducated about federal and state law, as well as longstanding programs and practices, that it should be embarrassing.

First, the governor and his inner circle decided the people who know the most about firearms would be frozen out of any policy discussions. Then, on April 7, 2013, he decided to attack the industry on CNN.

“What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible — even if they are deranged, even if they are mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background,” Malloy said. “They don’t care.”

Not one bit of this is true. We sent the governor a letter well over a year ago in an attempt to set the record straight. We are still waiting for a reply.

The governor made the conscious decision to go well beyond arguments about firearms features to castigate an entire industry. He must see a political advantage in using the industry as a straw man. But, this is not leadership and it does not represent responsible and inclusive governance. It is the politics of divisiveness and a lot of Connecticut citizens know it’s wrong.

No one in the firearms industry wants to put guns in the hands of criminals or seriously mental ill individuals. The firearms industry works with local, state and federal law enforcement officials every day to help prevent that from happening. We back that commitment with proven, practical programs.

Police departments across the nation distribute Project ChildSafe gun safety education material and gun locks to help prevent unauthorized access to firearms. Launched more than a decade ago with the assistance of a federal grant, Project ChildSafe is now funded solely by the firearms industry and a small number of public donations. The Connecticut State Police recently passed out Project ChildSafe locks at the Big E.

To help ensure that the appropriate mental health records are in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the industry launched the FixNICS campaign that resulted in 12 states adopting laws so that all the relevant records are submitted to the national database all federally licensed firearms retailers use to stop prohibited persons from buying firearms. One of the governor’s campaign ads says “Tom Foley refuses to support mandatory background checks for people with mental illness.” The charge is insensible, given there is only one check system for both criminals and those with adjudicated mental health records.

Developed in 2000 with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Don’t Lie for the Other Guy program is the industry’s initiative to assist firearms retailers in the identification of would-be illegal straw purchasers. It uses outdoor and radio advertising to inform the public about the serious penalties involved with the crime. We brought the public awareness campaign to Connecticut in 2013. Maybe he missed the huge billboards.

We are the nation’s firearms safety experts. We equip the American military and law enforcement, working cooperatively with law enforcement at all levels. We also make it possible for law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights should they decide they want to both exercise that right and assume that responsibility.

We have not and will not quietly accept the role of villain in which Gov. Malloy has cast our industry whether in pursuit of mistaken and ineffective public policy or in search of a second term.

While Gov. Malloy seems to enjoy the sparring, we would prefer to be spending more time on the programs discussed above and on other cooperative ventures with members of our industry and the public. The governor can still call us if he wants our help, but we don’t expect that he will and we’re not holding our breath. Doing so would not seem to square with the style of slashing politics to which he is accustomed.

Joseph H. Bartozzi is senior vice president and general counsel, O.F. Mossberg & Sons Inc., North Haven.

Since you sent this open letter to Governor Malloy, I would like to send an open letter to Mossberg & Sons.  This letter disappoints me in numerous ways.  First of all, I couldn’t care less that you supply firearms to law enforcement.  I do care deeply about my rights as recognized by the second amendment.

You wrote to the Governor as if he would behaved differently if he had just had “experts” in his policy discussions.  You know better than that.  You know that his behavior is a function of his collectivist world view, and the Governor would just as soon see you completely out of business (or supplying only to law enforcement so that they could retain their monopoly of violence).

The Governor couldn’t possibly care less about gun locks, the NICS, or the jobs of the good men and women who work at Mossberg & Sons.  We recently saw an example of this kind of thing with the boy-Mayor of Jersey City who recently preened his feathers over spending more taxpayer money than he should have purchasing weapons for the police from a supplier who swore on their mother’s grave that they wouldn’t sell except to law enforcement.  It has to do with value judgments, not facts and figures.  The Governor and many others in Connecticut don’t value you or what you do.

You have ensconced yourselves deeper and deeper in a state that doesn’t respect anything about you, me, fellow firearms owners, or the second amendment.  The real story here, and what you should have said in your letter, is that Governor Malloy campaigns against firearms owners and other American patriots.  To be sure, there are good men in Connecticut, but they are in the minority given that collectivists continue to hold court.  If you really believe the things you said in your letter, you need to do what so many other gun manufacturers have done – move South.

David Codrea:

Understanding that much of the electorate reacts based on impressions gleaned from the media, a detailed fisking of the dry proposal seems unlikely to change many minds. That said, there are some “bullet points” that have the benefit of being true which could be persuasive, providing gun owners take it on themselves to be force multipliers and do what they can to pass them along to everyone within their spheres of influence.

The first point is, a background check bill is impossible without creating registration data. That was admitted by no less an authority than Greg Ridgeway, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Justice, who wrote a summary report on gun violence prevention strategies in which he concluded “Effectiveness depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration…”

[ … ]

You can further move open-minded people with another documented reality: Gun registration only applies to the law-abiding. Many people don’t realize that criminals don’t have to register their guns …

You can also tell them a way exists to ensure prohibited persons are excluded from lawful gun sales, and no information identifying either gun buyers or what they purchased needs be collected.

This is perhaps the most important piece David has ever penned.  His insight into the issue is outstanding, and his logical connections from one point to the next impeccable.  If you have ever involved yourself in political action, do it now.  This is the first step in a multi-state strategy with lots of dollars behind it.

We may not vote ourselves out of the problems that we face, as the saying goes, but it is a moral imperative that we do everything we can to avoid the violence and turmoil to surely follow if universal background checks leads to a national gun registry, like I think it will, and a national gun registry leads to confiscations, like I think it will.

Jerry Miculek helps you decide.

David Codrea:

“We have the avenue to attack both the machine gun ban and the NFA with the BATFE’s recent approval of a number of Form 1s,” Stamboulieh advised on his GoFundMe page. “I have a number of clients that I will be filing a lawsuit on behalf of to seek to overturn the ban and the NFA in different states.”

The Hughes Amendment is certainly an unconstitutional abomination, but in this case I have my doubts that any federal court will overturn it based on the weakness of D.C v. Heller.  That’s a shame for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the U.S. will fall behind the rest of the world in the development of automatic weapons technology.  Who makes the M249 SAW, and why is a foreign company the only one who can design an open bolt machine suitable for that purpose?

Kurt Hofmann:

As home manufacture of guns becomes more and more accessible to more and more people, “gun control” laws will become more and more irrelevant. A southern California radio station, KPCC, recently interviewed UCLA Constitutional law professor Adam Winkler, who has never been what anyone would call a staunch defender of private ownership of firearms. He doesn’t sound happy.

Kurt is all over the democratization of firearms ownership, this liberty being a positive sign.  For those of use who can afford it, fine precision-machined weapons made from the finest engineered alloys that we can hand down to our children’s children is the best bet.  But I look forward to future developments in home manufacturing.

Via Uncle, Joe Biden says we need another James Brady.  He just makes you shake your head, doesn’t he?

Mike Vanderboegh:

As the article notes, in the aftermath of the OKC bombing elements within the Clinton administration wanted to use the excuse to suppress the constitutional militia movement by measures that would have demanded — with all the force of the federal government backing it up — that we publish our memberships lists, required us to register as “paramilitary organizations” with the Feds and to get permission from them before doing any training.

On 6 Oct 1995, the Clinton political operative Dick Morris wrote in a memo to White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, as well as Deputy Chiefs of Staff Erskine Bowles and Harold Ickes:

“The public overwhelmingly supports a significant expansion in the FBI’s ability to investigate militia groups. If you and the Justice Department believe such an expansion would be in the public interest, I would recommend that we go ahead with it with a high profile announcement.”

Read the rest at Mike’s place.  There was significant disagreement over this strategy for reasons that Mike explains.  But what’s interesting to me is the actors (Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles, Dick Morris, all of whom are collectivists) and what they were prepared to perpetrate.  The heart of the totalitarian is violence as an exclusive-use procedure, exclusively used to deal with perceived problems and exclusively in the hands of those in power.

Via Eugene Volokh, here is Northrup v. City of Toledo Police Div., 2014 WL 4925052 (N.D. Ohio Sept. 30, 2014).  I’ll cite extensively, but not as extensively as Eugene.

On the evening of June 16, 2010, Northrup was walking down a street in his neighborhood, with his wife, daughter, grandson, and their Yorkshire terrier, and a handgun holstered on his right hip, when Alan Rose drove by on a motorcycle. Northrup and Rose did not know each other, but Rose stopped his motorcycle and began telling Northrup that he could not walk around in public while openly carrying a handgun. Northrup and his wife told Rose that open carry of a firearm is legal in Ohio, but the conversation quickly devolved into an argument. After a few minutes, Northrup and his family continued walking while Rose called 911. A dispatcher with the Toledo, Ohio Police Division sent Officers Comes and Bright, as well as Sergeant Ray, to investigate.

Officer Bright arrived first. He stopped and exited his car and approached Northrup and his family from behind, while on foot. The parties dispute the exact sequence of the events that took place next. Northrup testified his daughter informed him when she saw Officer Bright’s car driving down the street. Northrup’s cell phone was clipped to his belt, next to his holster. He took his cell phone off of his belt and accessed the camera feature in order to record the impending encounter with the officer. When Officer Bright approached, he said “excuse me” to get Northrup’s attention. Northrup then turned toward Officer Bright with his cell phone in one hand and the dog’s leash in the other.

Officer Bright testified he said excuse me and asked Northrup to hand the dog leash to his wife. At this point, Officer Bright states Northrup reached back to remove his cell phone. Officer Bright thought Northrup had made a “furtive movement” toward his handgun. Officer Bright then placed his hand on his holstered weapon and ordered Northrup to hand his cell phone and the dog leash to his wife. He ordered Northrup to turn around and place his hands above his head while he removed Northrup’s gun from the holster.

Officer Bright asked for and received Northrup’s driver’s license, before handcuffing Northrup and placing him in the back seat of his police cruiser. While Officer Bright entered Northrup’s personal information into the computer in his cruiser, Sergeant Ray arrived. Sergeant Ray and Officer Bright discussed the situation before Sergeant Ray contacted the Detective Bureau to determine if Northrup could be charged with committing an offense. Following this phone call, Officer Bright issued Northrup a citation for failure to disclose personal information; this charge ultimately was dismissed following the request of a City of Toledo prosecutor.

So Northrup sued the Toledo Police.  First of all, I observed that Northrup was acting within the boundaries of the law.  The Judge says the same thing.

While Ohio law forbids individuals from carrying a concealed weapon without a license, there is no prohibition against the open carry of handguns. Northrup was acting within the bounds of Ohio law at the time a then-anonymous person called 911.

My second reaction was to note that Ohio has a stop and identify statute, but it has to be a legitimate “Terry Stop.”  This wasn’t.  The Judge concludes by saying:

I concluded above that there is a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether the Defendants had reasonable suspicion to support a Terry stop or probable cause to support an arrest. If a jury concluded the Defendants lacked a reasonable suspicion or probable cause, they may draw the inference that the Defendants’ actions were motivated by malice. Therefore, statutory immunity does not apply to Northrup’s state law claims against Officer Bright and Sergeant Ray [including the punitive damages claims -EV].

And thus it is important that “statutory immunity” doesn’t apply.  Unfortunately, if Northrup wins the case it will redound to more monetary damages to the city, while the police will walk away unaffected by any of this – and they will have been the perpetrators of the crime.

Raw Story:

Minnesota Rep. Rick Nolan (D) on Wednesday defended his call for gun safety laws by joking that his Republican opponent might need a military-style assault rifle to shoot ducks, but he didn’t.

Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, Nolan had told CBS News that an assault weapons ban was just “common sense.”

Nolan’s opponent, Stewart Mills, and the Minnesota Republican Party have pointed to the statement as evidence that the congressman wanted to limit gun rights.

“Stewart, what I said on CBS Face the Nation was that I don’t need an assault rifle to shoot a duck,” he explained at a debate for Minnesota’s 8th District on Tuesday. “And I don’t. Perhaps you do. Maybe you should spend more time at your shooting range.”

“The fact is, right now, you can only have three shells in your gun when you’re shooting ducks,” Nolan continued.

On Face The Nation, Nolan said:

… an assault weapons ban is “common sense legislation.”  “I’m a hunter. Believe in second amendment rights. But you know what? I don’t need an assault weapon to shoot a duck,” Nolan said. “And I think they ought to be banned, and I think we need to put a ban on the amount of shells you can carry in a magazine, and I think we have to strengthen our background checks.”

So I’m doubting that Mr. Nolan is really an avid hunter like he says.  In fact, given the duck hunting with assault rifles, shells in magazines and so forth, I’m concluding that Nolan doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Someone named Carla Axtman is celebrating (perhaps prematurely) the potential passage of I-594 in the state of Washington.  With the gun control money pouring into the fight, this piece of legislation poses a real danger.

And the commentaries by the leftists are virtually breathless.  Consider what Alexander Zaitchik says at Salon.

Gottlieb’s controversial bill is a direct response to another initiative on the ballot, 594, which expands background checks to include sales at gun shows and over the Internet. It is polling high and expected to pass. If Washington votes “yes,” it will join the growing list of states that have taken gun policy into their own hands in the wake of Newtown. Both the NRA and Gottlieb’s organization oppose 594. But Gottlieb has done more than just denounce it. He has raised more than a million dollars to promote an alternative bill, 591, which would prohibit the state from ever ”requir[ing] background checks on the receipt of a firearm unless a uniform national standard is required.”

Can you spot the offending language? It’s this: “unless a uniform national standard is required.”

For Jeff Knox and much of the gun-rights movement, to even accept the future possibility of federal background check legislation constitutes apostasy. Some of the groups represented at the GRPC are the ones that, along with stalwarts like the NRA and Larry Pratt’s Gun Owners of America, mobilized in April 2013 to torpedo the Manchin-Toomey Senate bill, which would have closed background check loopholes across the country. After looking at the polling data, Gottlieb initially supported Manchin-Toomey as a way for the movement to get some “goodies” (such as relaxing laws on interstate gun sales) while supporting something that he thought was going to pass anyway. (Gottlieb later dropped his support when Chuck Schumer stripped the bill of Gottlieb’s prized “goodie.”)

Gottlieb’s early support for the Senate bill earned him names like “sellout” and “traitor.” But it’s now looking like he understood something his critics did not. Steadfast opposition to a federal background-check bill would give rise to a growing and well-funded movement for background-check referenda in the states. In Washington, the coalition behind 594 is supported by a group of wealthy donors, including Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, the head of the gun violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety. In his newsletter, Gottlieb describes their efforts as the “Billionaire’s Club war against freedom.”

So when Knox asked Gottlieb to defend the language of 591 at this year’s GRPC, attendees sat up in their seats. After a weekend filled with enough policy weeds to replant the Everglades, the confrontation amounted to high drama.

With his comb-over, pencil mustache, and brightly colored bowties, Alan Gottlieb has the presence of a harried, slightly eccentric accountant. But the Queens native is no dutiful CPA; he’s a convicted tax felon who does not flinch easily on questions of strategy, let alone challenges to his commitment to the Second Amendment. In the 1970s, while still in his twenties, Gottlieb began organizing the legal workshops that grew into the brain trust that won the landmark Supreme Court rulings of Heller and McDonald, which enshrined gun ownership in the home as an individual right guaranteed by the Second Amendment. At the podium in Chicago, Gottlieb welcomed the chance to deliver a blunt message to the background-check dead-enders who had been calling him a traitor since Manchin-Toomey.

“The bottom line is that” the background check issue “is different” from other gun gun policy debates, Gottlieb explained, pointing to public opinion. “What issues do you find that get 70 to 90 percent of the people to agree on anything?”

After Knox asserted that he doesn’t believe polls showing support for background checks, Gottlieb responded, “You may not believe the number, but I’ve seen well over 500 polls all across the country over the last six years on background checks. They all say the same damn thing. They’re not wrong, believe me.”

Knox countered with another reality: Many gun groups, especially those in the referendum states of the Southwest, are never going to sign off on background checks, ever, at any level. In Arizona, “I wouldn’t be able to get our members to proactively concede anything,” said Knox. His hardline solution is to “let them go ahead and deal with the consequences.”

By “them,” Knox means the feds. In the purist view, the best way to deal with any gun law is to dig in, take the hits, and ignore the law, forcing the government to “deal with the consequences.” Knox said he wished the NRA had taken that approach with the 1934 National Firearms Act, which regulated machine guns and banned short-barrel rifles.

To Gottlieb, that’s a doomed strategy. In any case, he stressed, “the Bloomberg people” know gun groups will never support background-check legislation, so they can “knock our teeth out and there’s nothing we can do about it.” He later added, “They’ve got us hogtied because they know we’re not going to change. I’m being honest with you. I’m not expecting you to change, but that’s why we’re going to lose.”

I’ve quoted extensively from the article (normally bad form, but it’s Salon so I don’t really care), so let’s deal with a few facts now.  First of all, good pollsters could get the vast majority of the American public to agree with the assertion that the man in the moon stayed alive by eating the green cheese the moon is made from.  Please stop citing polls to me.  Just stop.  Second, when posed this way, what percentage of the public would be in favor: “Would you favor background checks for all gun sales even if it involved bloodshed and possible civil war when warrants were served on otherwise peaceable Americans for selling guns person-to-person?”

As for Gottlieb, I always knew that the “stupid” act he played after support of Manchin-Toomey was a ruse.  He has a deep character flaw that enables him to support totalitarian measures.  We all have our flaws, but this one runs deep and dangerous.  In fact, read again his excuse for supporting universal background checks.  Basically it boils down to this: if you don’t voluntarily agree to it, they will do it anyway.  Or by way of analogy, if you don’t give a pick pocket you money, he’s just going to take it anyway.

Someone please try to convince me that isn’t what he is saying, because it looks to me like it is.  And that’s puerile and childish reasoning, and in this case I think he advances it not because he really believes that it is logically compelling, but because he is frightened, or a publicity hound, or something dark.  As I said, I don’t know exactly what, but the character flaw runs deep in Alan.

Queue it up, all of the polls, and money, and voters, and whatever else you want.  I will not submit to universal background checks and/or its corollary evil cousin a national gun registry.  We know why they want it.

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.

The writer at Salon has it all wrong, and Alan has it equally wrong.  Passing a bill is the easy part, and it isn’t the first in a string of compromises.  It will be the last straw.

David Codrea:

“That is nonsense,” he responded to the contention that arms are needed to defend freedom, revealing just where he stood (still stands?) on citizens resisting the tyranny he now warns against. “If the government wants to take your rights away or imprison you for whatever reason, your owning an assault rifle is not going to stop it.

Trying to take away my guns would be a very messy and ugly affair, and notice how Savage doesn’t say who exactly is going to do the taking.  Advocates of gun bans never consider that they advocate putting someone else in harm’s way.

Mike Vanderboegh has a long and interesting post on Ralph Peters’ book “Wars of Blood and Faith.”  Mike remarks:

Peters’ eye is focused on the world picture of 2007, not the American domestic reality as we experience it now after 7 years, most of them reflecting the neo-tyrannies of the Obama regime. Yet Peters’ description of the elites of both parties and of the permanent Mandarin bureaucracies that serve them is even more accurate today. And the disconnect between their collectivist ideologies /slash/ godless-religion and the deeply held beliefs of those of us who still revere the Founders, seek liberty, and worship the God of Abraham, Moses, David and the Christ could not be any more stark than that between us and the beheading savages of the Islamic State.

As I have observed before, we are a nation divided along the answer to the existential question, “Does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government?” This is a political question, yes. It is an intellectual question. It is a question of competing and mutually exclusive world views. It is thus also a moral question. It is a religious question. It is a question of blood and belief, to use Peters’ words.

I enjoyed Peters’ book and can always take away something from his interviews.  But I don’t always agree with him, and one specific black mark on his book is its tendency to lump all religious view into the same category.

But I too disagree with Peters and his diagnosis of the malady.  I must unfortunately wax philosophical for a moment and recommend that you read the first chapter of Gordon H. Clark’s “Religion, Reason and Revelation.”  Clark utterly demolishes all attempts to define religion by showing how those who would do so set out boundary conditions for the definition that reason in a circle (or assume the consequent).  It’s best to discuss these matters in terms of world view, or philosophical systems.  Christianity is a system, or world view, as much as Dewey’s instrumentalism, Mill’s utilitarianism, communism or any other ‘ism.  It just happens to be the truth, but that is beside the point.

The point is that communism is a faith as much as Christianity is a faith, and it is much of a world view as Christianity is a world view.  As far as Islam is concerned, it is a political faith more than anything else, and a totalitarian one at that.  There are many manifestations of evil, but the most prominent one in politics is totalitarianism.  Separating Islamists from communists isn’t a very useful or meaningful bifurcation, and I think Peters has missed the boat on this one.  Yesterday it was the communists, today it’s Islam, today and tomorrow it’s the contemporary manifestation of communism in America.  They are different faces of evil.  But “there is nothing new under the sun,” as the wise man said.

WSB-TV:

HABERSHAM COUNTY — A grand jury recommends no criminal charges in the Habersham County SWAT raid that critically injured a toddler.

Bounkham Phonesavah, affectionately known as “Baby Boo Boo,” spent weeks in a burn unit after a SWAT team’s flash grenade exploded near his face. The toddler was just 19-months-old and asleep in the early morning hours of May 28. SWAT officers threw the device into his home while executing a search warrant for a drug suspect.

In their 15-page presentment, the grand jury found no cause for criminal charges against the any deputies involved in the botched SWAT raid. but they had plenty to say about the investigation.

The jury called it “sloppy and hurried” and “not in accordance with best practices.” The grand jury said while they want law enforcement to pursue drug dealers “the zeal to hold them accountable must not override cautious and patient judgment.”

They went on to say “there should be no such thing as an emergency drug investigation.”

A sheriff’s task force said they had a witness to drug sales at the home and expected to find a known drug dealer inside. They obtained a no-knock warrant. Instead, they encountered the child and his parents sleeping just beyond this door.

To that point, the grand jury recommended “that every effort should be made in determining presence of children.”

“What stood out to me is how hard they worked and struggled,” said District Attorney Brian Rickman.

Channel 2’s Kerry Kavanaugh asked Rickman, “A lot of people have said throughout this that if a flash bang, a grenade, exploded inside a child’s crib, something went wrong. A lot of people were hoping that someone would be held accountable.”

They wanted someone to be held accountable, they just didn’t want to be the ones to do it.  So here is the summary.  In Georgia, and perhaps in many states around the nation, cops can go into a man’s castle on sloppy police work (rather than spend their time chasing MS13 and other gang activity), throw a grenade behind a door they hadn’t breached so without knowledge of who or what was on the other side, injure a toddler for life (sentencing him to multiple painful surgeries and recoveries), and get off without so much as a slap on the wrist.

And this, from a jury of people who could suffer the same fate tomorrow at the hands of the police.  Welcome to Amerika!

Related: Man Who Defends His Life In No-Knock Raid Now Faces Death Penalty