Since it isn’t my story, I won’t wax on about the story Marcus Luttrell wanted to tell about his brothers in Operation Red Wings.

But it is the most intense movie I have ever seen.  By the end of the movie I was left virtually breathless and teary eyed.  In an age of horrible movies from Hollywood, this one is well worth the money.

Two sidebar notes on the movie.  First, the cinematography is some of the best and most intense I have ever experienced.  You are quite literally there.  The initial five minutes or so of the close action scenes and rapid camera movement took some getting used to, but after that, it became obvious what the producers and directors were doing.

Second, the movie is very close to what Marcus intended and what he wrote in the book.  There is a bit of Hollywood drama introduced into the story, but not much, and not significant.

Review: I cannot tell the story – Marcus has to.  It is his to tell, and he does his brothers proud with this movie.  It will take its place alongside the best war movies, and perhaps it is the very best of all time.  Go see it.

There is movement on the issue of mental health and gun ownership, but we’ll get to that in a moment.  First in order to set the stage, Michael Hammond writing at The Washington Times has done a good job of explaining the stakes.

The 1968 Gun Control Act bans guns for anyone who is “adjudicated as a mental defective or … committed to a mental institution.” Unfortunately, under 2008 NICS Improvement Act, drafted by Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and its regulations, that “adjudication” can be made by any “other lawful authority.” This means a diagnosis by a single psychiatrist in connection with a government program.

In the case of nearly 175,000 law-abiding veterans, the “lawful authority” has been a Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, who, generally, will take away a veteran’s guns by unilaterally declaring him incompetent and appointing a guardian over his financial affairs. Certainly, the findings can be appealed, but most veterans don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars to hire lawyers and psychiatrists to do so.

Although the problem hasn’t yet been as apparent in other areas, police and firemen on Social Security disability for post-traumatic stress disorder, Medicare seniors with Alzheimer’s, and people who as children were diagnosed under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act program with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder will ultimately face the same fate. Even a subsidized Obamacare policy might now make Americans participants in a federal program.

In fact, that process of expanding gun bans has now begun:

One gun owner in a virulently anti-gun state was placed on the gun-ban blacklist because many years ago, police, without the approval of any court, put him in a mental facility overnight. The facility found nothing wrong with him, but that didn’t stop his state from recently turning him in to the FBI for a lifetime gun ban.

In another case, a gun owner in an anti-gun state lost his guns because of a prescription for a psychiatric drug.

Bob Unruh explains how this happens with veterans.

And just a few days ago Mike Vanderboegh provided strong evidence that this is happening on a wide scale.  Returning to Bob’s article, he asks the important questions.  “As with most things, the devil is in the details. What is mental illness? Who is mentally ill? How mentally ill must one be to warrant revocation of a fundamental human right? Who makes that determination? Who is ‘normal,’ and how ‘normal’ do they have to be to own guns?”

Now to what David Codrea reported just today about the movement afoot to make the problem even more sweeping in scope.

In a chat session this month with the liberal magazine Texas Monthly, Cornyn revealed he and Lindsay Graham will introduce a bill strengthening the NICS federal gun owner registration database and place more Americans on lifetime gun ban lists.

There are no doubt good people who believe that such a thing is good for public safety.  Cornyn and Graham aren’t among that crowd.  They know better and would sell the souls of their own mothers if it would be beneficial to their careers.  It isn’t to them that I speak.  Nothing can change them, and so the only remedy for us is to change their jobs.

We’ve dealt with this before, this notion that the mental health profession is like any other, that it can pull the right levers, punch the right buttons, and administer the right drugs to fix mankind.  But listen to them in their own words.

Dr. J. Michael Bostwick, Mayo Clinic: “We physicians generally do not know enough about firearms to have an informed conversation with our patients, let alone counsel them about gun safety.”  He continues by arguing:

• Even if every mentally ill person in the country were registered, the system isn’t prepared to handle them — and only about half of the states require registration.
• Only about 10 percent of mentally ill people are registered — and these are people who have been committed, they’ve come to attention in a way that requires court intervention.
• Literature says the vast majority of people who do these kinds of shootings are not mentally ill — or it is recognized after the fact.
• The majority of mentally ill people aren’t dangerous.

Dr. Richard Friedman: ” … there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.”

Dr. Barry Rosenfeld: “”We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York.”

Dr. Steven Hoge: “One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently.”

And National Journal notes the following.

Perhaps most important, although people with serious mental illness have committed a large percentage of high-profile crimes, the mentally ill represent a very small percentage of the perpetrators of violent crime overall. Researchers estimate that if mental illness could be eliminated as a factor in violent crime, the overall rate would be reduced by only 4 percent. That means 96 percent of violent crimes—defined by the FBI as murders, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults—are committed by people without any mental-health problems at all. Solutions that focus on reducing crimes by the mentally ill will make only a small dent in the nation’s rate of gun-related murders, ranging from mass killings to shootings that claim a single victim.  It’s not just that the mentally ill represent a minority of the country’s population; it’s also that the overlap between mental illness and violent behavior is poor.

I won’t continue since we’ve covered this in detail before.  To my readers who believe that this has anything to do with public safety, you need to be dissuaded from such foolishness.  This has nothing to do with the decreased rate of forcible admissions to mental health facilities, and nothing to do with an increase in mental health problems, and nothing to do with the availability of guns.  And it has nothing to do with turning out patients from the asylums, no matter what you’ve been told.

Crime is a moral choice.  I know this is uncomfortable for some of my readers, because it forces you to think about things like value judgments and the roots of morality.  It all has such a deontological ring to it, and it suggests that mankind may not just be the product of primordial slime – that there is someone to whom we must answer.

But I don’t care one iota about your discomfort.  The mental health profession simply cannot sustain the weight of burden you wish to place on it.  It cannot tell you who will do what, or give enough medications to fix what ails mankind.  It cannot control individuals who are moral agents making their own choices.

And those who would rule us know this too.  They know that the mental health profession cannot function in this role, and yet the sweep of the proposed rules keeps increasing, the dragnet keeps expanding, and the Senators keep going along to get along.  So what does this tell you about why they want to expand the mental health dragnet?  When will you be adjudicated mentally defective because you believe that being armed is the surest way to ameliorate tyranny in America?

David Codrea:

“Study shows over 60 percent of weapons in El Salvador come from U.S.,” a Tuesday report from inSerbia claims. “The United States government agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), along with the federal and municipal governments of El Salvador set out to see just where the weapons are coming from.”

Bah.  I don’t believe it.  David takes us down a litany of embarrassing admissions by the U.S. government, sequentially stated, where they backed down from their initial claims in the gun walking scandal (which still needs accountability from the criminals who perpetrated the crimes).

But here is an offer.  I deal with mathematics, physics, mechanics and measurements all day long as part of my day job.  And I know how to tell if the data and conclusions meet the central limit theorem (since as you know their statistical sample is a finite size which is claimed to be an adequate model of the entire system).  Send the data to me.  I’ll analyze it and report back, without charge and without bias.  If it’s true, I’ll tell you so.  If not, I’ll tell you that too.  Does the ATF want to take me up on that offer?

David Codrea:

What’s clear from the outrage and disappointment is, contrary to what the name of Bloomberg’s front group implies, it’s not just illegal guns that are being attacked. All guns, and the means to lawfully obtain them, are targets.

Of course.  It’s always a wonderful thing when the enemy self-identifies and admits to the truth.  It makes my job easier.

Kurt Hofmann:

To cover their embarrassment over the fact that every high profile shooting carried out by someone who passed the vaunted background check system drives another nail into the coffin of the credibility of the claim that “universal background checks” are the key to stopping “gun violence,” Horwitz and friends respond with the only argument left to them–not nearly enough background checks result in the violation of the checked person’s Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms.

Kurt … parting the smoke and driving to the root of the argument again.  He has a way of doing that.  And as for the enemy self-identifying, remember that this is exactly what they want.

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.

That’s the enemy giving his strategy away.  Did you listen carefully to him?  If not, read again.

Police tearing stuff up, at which they seem to be good.

“It’s not about money. It’s about the lack of notification,” said Elana Andrew.

She wasn’t on her property in Sheridan when the raid happened early Saturday morning. Officers in an Oregon State Police armored vehicle rammed a metal gate and plowed down a wooden fence  to gain access to a neighbor’s property.

Police were going after Michael Abo, 34, a Yamhill police reserve officer accused of abusing his girlfriend’s four year-old son.

It took Andrew filing a police report of her own with the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office to figure out the damage was from a McMinnville Police tactical operation. McMinnville Police were the lead agency, working with OSP, because the sheriff’s office couldn’t arrest one of its own. Andrew said the abuse case is tragic.

“I don’t really mind them trespassing to effect an arrest. I think that that’s important that they be able to do that,” said Andrew, “No one took any time whatsoever the next day to find out who owned the gate or who owned the fence.

“There’s a house there. This is the house I own. And to me, it would be reasonable to assume that whoever owns this fence would live in that house,” said Andrew.

She contacted McMinnville police about the damage. Captain Matt Scales responded to her on Tuesday afternoon with an email.

He wrote, “Elana, we assumed the fence was owned by Abo as this was the information we had. We had no idea who owned the gate, so notification to the property owner in regards to that specific piece of property would have been impossible in our opinion.”

Andrew wrote back, “Sure seems like you had a duty to find out. You could have started by knocking at the foot door of the house you come to after entering the gate.”

That’s what I was going to say.  Instead of tactical operators performing tactical maneuvers while they are operating tactically, why don’t they just knock on the door?

S.C. is making themselves very friendly to recent Northern transplants doing gun manufacturing.

From beat cops to cashiers to Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s newest gun manufacturer has received an “absolutely tremendous” amount of support since leaving Connecticut for The Palmetto State, according to the firm’s CEO.

Josh Fiorini, CEO of PTR Industries, formerly of Bristol., Conn., told FoxNews.com that the firm’s new facility in Aynor, S.C., remains a week away from production, but 11 local employees began sorting inventory on Monday along with a team of training personnel from Connecticut. The manufacturer of military-style rifles announced in April that it intended to leave Bristol following the passage of gun-control legislation after the shooting deaths of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown.

[ … ]

“The facility that we’re going to move into is fantastically better than the one we’re coming from,” he said. “It allows us to consolidate two facilities into one and it’s much more modern, allowing us to set up our line in a more efficient way and hopefully expand.”

So Smith & Wesson, Colt, Springfield Armory, Rock River Arms, Remington, Mossberg … are you listening?  What are you waiting for, hell to freeze over and your current environment to be as welcoming?

CBS:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie responded Wednesday afternoon to email exchanges made public earlier in the day linking a top aide to the George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal that has been under investigation.

“What I’ve seen today for the first time is unacceptable. I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was I misled by a member of my staff, but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge. One thing is clear: this type of behavior is unacceptable and I will not tolerate it because the people of New Jersey deserve better. This behavior is not representative of me or my Administration in any way, and people will be held responsible for their actions,” the governor said in a statement.

Uh oh.  Somebody better begin looking for a new job.  They’re getting thrown under the bus.  But why is America shocked over this?  We have known this for weeks, and some of us have known it longer (remember “Get the hell off the beach” said to people whom he didn’t have any legal right to force out?).

In 2010, John F. McKeon, a New Jersey assemblyman, made what he thought was a mild comment on a radio program: Some of the public employees that Gov. Chris Christie was then vilifying had been some of the governor’s biggest supporters.

He was surprised to receive a handwritten note from Mr. Christie, telling him that he had heard the comments, and that he didn’t like them.

“I thought it was a joke,” Mr. McKeon recalled. “What governor would take the time to write a personal note over a relatively innocuous comment?”

But the gesture would come to seem genteel compared with the fate suffered by others in disagreements with Mr. Christie: a former governor who was stripped of police security at public events; a Rutgers professor who lost state financing for cherished programs; a state senator whose candidate for a judgeship suddenly stalled; another senator who was disinvited from an event with the governor in his own district.

In almost every case, Mr. Christie waved off any suggestion that he had meted out retribution …

Just like he has done in this case.  And just to remind everyone, Chris Christie made his fame in New Jersey pushing gun control.  He is a gun grabber from way back.  And gun grabbers are bullies.  You know that, right?

David Codrea:

The comment period for the HHS proposal will end in 62 days, on March 10. Comments can be submitted via an online form at Regulations.gov.

David is covering the proposed mental health rollout by the Justice Department as part of the new executive orders on gun background checks.  Go to the Examiner article for links to online forms for submitting comments.  This is something I will be doing.

We’ve covered this before, and you know my position.  The mental health profession cannot sustain the weight and burden being placed on it by the presuppositions inherent in the new rules.  It behooves us all to make comments so as to protect our neighbors as well as veterans who are swept into this category from PTSD and related maladies.

Kurt Hofmann:

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reports that U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has written a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, asking how the BATFE will be defining “armor piercing” ammunition, which would thus be denied to the general public.

I’m glad that Kurt is following this.  I was unaware that this was still an issue, preferring to think instead, perhaps wishful thinking, that this was all just a bad idea floated by the tyrants to see how we would react.  This has become habit for them, i.e., law-making by federal register.  So would 5.56 mm “green tip” ammunition become illegal?

The secret courts have approved three more months of NSA phone snooping.  Of course they did.  And the number of times this has been done by the secret courts?  Thirty six.

I do love Jerry Miculek, but it appears that he has talked S&W into making a 9mm, eight shot revolver.  I’m not sure what Jerry was thinking, but I won’t be buying one.  Thanks, but I’ll stick with my .357 magnum (and maybe spring for a .44 magnum and .22 magnum).  I’m certain that Guns.com has it wrong when they say:

While there will always be people who want 9mm revolvers in service-sized and snub-nosed packages — 9mm offers a lot more power over standard .38 Special loads in a considerably shorter cartridge and doesn’t have the sting, flash and bang of full-house or even reduced-power .357 Magnums — in truth 9mm revolvers have never seen a lot of success in the U.S.

Sorry, this just has to be flat-out incorrect.  The 9mm cannot possibly offer more power out of a revolver than the .38 or .357 magnum.  The point of the 9mm in the striker-fired pistol is the high chamber pressure, which approaches 35,000 psi because of the confined space.  Put into a revolver without the enclosed chamber and the pressures won’t reach that high.

On a related note, there are two competing issues regarding chamber pressure in handguns.  First, the larger the round (and thereby the higher the charge), the higher the chamber pressure – up to a certain point.  For very large calibers such as the .45 ACP, the enlarged barrel opening through which pressure can relieve (almost half an inch diameter) causes a lower chamber pressure for the .45 (which approaches 25,000 psi).  The turnaround point for chamber pressure (i.e., the peak pressure where larger barrels reduces the pressure and smaller barrels reduces the load) is the S&W .40, which is why the .40 has such a “snappy” feel to it when you shoot it.

Mike Vanderboegh covers the issue the dishonestly named affordable health care act, veterans, PTSD and guns.  To all of my military and former military readers, please, please, please go read Mike’s piece.  And be very careful what you say to doctors, who you choose for doctors, and for what maladies you seek treatment.  Big brother is listening.

Finally, WRSA has a piece on urban centers and government center of gravity (CoG) operations within that context.  It’s an interesting article and I recommend it to you, along with the comments.  I have a piece coming at some point on David Kilcullen and his focus on what he sees as the future of state warfare being in littoral, urban centers.  I’m still developing my thoughts on the subject.

A North Carolina family is demanding answers.

North Carolina prosecutors promised Monday to get to the truth — “wherever the truth leads”—  in the death of a mentally ill teenager whose family claims police shot him in cold blood over the weekend.

Keith Vidal, 18, of Boiling Springs Lakes, was shot and killed Sunday afternoon, authorities said.

At least three law enforcement agencies responded after the family called for help just after noon, saying Vidal was in the midst of a schizophrenic episode.

Vidal was declared dead of a gunshot wound at a hospital.

Jerry Dove, chief of the Southport police, one of the responding agencies, said at a news conference that Detective Byron Vassey, a nine-year veteran of the department, had been placed on administrative leave. He wouldn’t say whether Vassey was believed to be the officer who fired the shot.

[ … ]

Mark Wilsey, the young man’s stepfather, told reporters that the family called police to help subdue Vidal because he was holding a small screwdriver and threatening to fight his mother during a schizophrenic episode.

But the situation appeared to be under control, with two officers restraining the 90-pound Vidal, when the third officer arrived and shot Vidal point-blank, Wilsey contended.

“Then all of a sudden, this Southport cop came, walked in the house [and said]: ‘I don’t have time for this. Tase him. Let’s get him out of here,'” Wilsey said.

An officer used a stun gun on Vidal, “he hit the ground [and] this guy shot him,” Wilsey said.

Wilsey said that when he demanded to know why his stepson had been shot, the officer replied, “‘Well, I’m protecting my officers.'”

According to a report at The Daily Caller, Vidal was pinned on the ground by two officers when the third said “we don’t have time for this,” and shot him.  There was never any report to dispatchers of a problem.

The first unit on scene reported a confrontation in the hallway, but told Brunswick County Dispatchers several times that everything was OK. Unit 104 from Southport arrived on the scene at 12:48:41, fourteen minutes after the first officer had already been on scene. Seventy seconds later, Unit 104 radioed out that he had to fire shots at the subject in order to defend himself.

The event report mirrors what family members told the media. Wilsey said his family called the police to help with his schizophrenic son Keith Vidal who had a small screwdriver in his hand. Officers used at Taser on Vidal and then shot him, according to Wilsey.

Wilsey said officers came into their home after they called for backup help when Vidal was having a schizophrenic incident.

Wilsey said officers had his son down on the ground after the teen was tased a few times and an officer said, “we don’t have time for this.” That’s when Wilsey says the officer shot in between the officers holding the teen down, killing his son.

This report is even more detailed.  Two officers had him down on the floor, and the third officer, despite his claiming to think of the safety of “his” officers, shot in between the two officers who were holding Vidal down.  And just as a reminder, Vidal was a mere 90 pounds, only ten more than my dog.  The only person I ever knew who was 90 pounds had anorexia.

This has all the marks of cold blooded murder (at least second degree murder).  Yet I expect the blue wall to close in behind the officer who fired the shot, the flow of information to dry up, and no charges ever filed even if the officers lose their jobs.

We’ll see and I will continue to track this.  But this is the sort of thing people are coming to expect from police.  We already know never to talk to the police.  People generally learn the hard way, but learn they will.  Do not call the police even when you need help.  You just might die or get some innocent person shot.

At least, that’s the message being sent by law enforcement all over America.

NJ.com:

Gov. Chris Christie continues to support New Jersey’s gun-control laws, a spokesman said today, even as his attorney general declines to defend one of the toughest laws of all in a major case before the state Supreme Court.

Twice last year, the Republican governor’s administration did not defend a state law on handgun permits that was being challenged in state appellate courts, attorneys in the cases and court officials told The Star-Ledger today.

Instead, Christie left it to county prosecutors to defend the state’s handgun law against constitutional challenges — a legal move that experts say is rare in New Jersey.

One of the cases, a lawsuit brought by Richard Pantano of Monmouth County, is now pending before the state Supreme Court. Christie’s attorney general — who usually defends all state laws in civil cases — is not participating in that case.

A spokesman for the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office today confirmed they will defend the law instead of the attorney general.

In a separate case decided Monday, an appeals court upheld two gun-control measures and noted the attorney general “regrettably” declined to defend the state’s laws despite being the state’s “chief law enforcement officer.” The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office defended them instead.

“The governor supports New Jersey’s already tough gun laws,” Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said today …

Pantano’s case is probably the most important gun rights case ever brought in New Jersey, and concerns the state of New Jersey being a may-issue state and whether a citizen must prove to the CLEO that there is documented peril before getting a concealed carry permit.

Absent.  That’s where Chris Christie’s attorney general is.  Absent without leave, or if you wish UA (unauthorized absence).  Oh, the attorney general has the approval from Christie to be absent, but not the electorate.

Remember, this is the man who would be running for President of the U.S.  He supports New Jersey’s strong gun laws, but he doesn’t want to show the rest of red state America that he does by giving the progressive media a chance to highlight his gun grabber credentials before the world.

He is a coward, and his cowardliness doesn’t change the fact that he is a gun grabber from way back.  He made is fame in New Jersey pushing tough gun laws.  America should remember his duplicity when it comes time to enter the voting booth.

Prior: Chris Christie On Guns Tag

We’ve already discussed a couple of horrible embarrassments uncovered in the ruling on the New York SAFE Act gun ban recently issued by Judge Skretny, but more on that in a moment.

My brother Keith is a graduate of Emory Law School and practicing attorney in Georgia, and clerked for a federal judge.  I know that he has fealty to scholarship and takes his commitment to study, hard work and defensible and logical prose very seriously.  That said, lawyers take it on the chin, and properly so, and my brother once told me the best lawyer joke I ever heard (“99.99% of all lawyers give the rest of us a bad name”).  We’ll come back to this later.

David Codrea is covering John Lott’s analysis of the ruling by Judge Skretny, and has some excerpts and observations that warrant our attention.

“The decision relied heavily on testimony by George Mason University criminology professor Chris Koper, who argued ‘that the criminal use of assault weapons declined after the federal assault-weapons ban was enacted in 1994, independently of trends in gun crime,’” Lott wrote. “But Koper’s two studies on the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban don’t support his claims.”

They state:

“[T]he evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect [of the weapons ban],” the initial study reported.

“[W]e cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the second study concluded. “And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

John Lott and I had an odd run-in several months ago, and he has with Mike Vanderboegh as well.  But not being trifling or holding grudges, let’s observe that Lott’s analysis is important.  So one important feature of the analysis is that the very studies cited by the Judge do not bear out the claims.  But then there is this gem.  The ruling also cites the online magazine Mother Jones.  Just so that you heard that, let’s repeat it.  Judge Skretny’s ruling uses information from … Mother … Jones!

Earlier we learned from Kurt Hofmann that there is logical contradiction in the ruling.  The very logical process the Judge uses to deem the magazine cartridge limit in the SAFE law “arbitrary” isn’t applied to the guns themselves, and should have been.  Furthermore, we’ve seen that the Judge Skretny’s ruling invokes the ridiculous and laughable notion of spray firing from the hip (for semiautomatic weapons, no less) to rule pistol grips on long guns to be legitimately within the sweep of the law, ignoring (or simply not learning) that no one, not military or civilian, spray fires from the hip, and such a practice would not only be the most ineffective thing a rogue shooter could do, it would get you permanently kicked out of every range in America, and for very good reason.

So the list of silly, ridiculous, sophomoric stunts in the ruling is growing.  First, there is the notion of pistol grips and spray firing from the hip; second, the failure to consistently apply the same logic to guns as he does magazines; third, misinterpretation of the very studies he cites to support his conclusions.  Finally, the use of anything from Mother Jones in a legal ruling certainly must be a tacit admission of bankruptcy of thought and ability to do analysis (and for the record, even with my admittedly incomplete assessment of mass shootings, I do take issue with the completeness of the Mother Jones assessment which leaves out the Hartford Beer Distributors shooting, the Geneva County massacre, the Texas Tower shooting [Charles Whitman, who used bolt action long guns] due to the dates of inclusion, and others).

The ruling is quickly becoming a laughingstock.  I am wondering if these Judges just turn over their hardest work to juvenile clerks who get their news from Jon Stewart, Daily Kos and Mother Jones?  So returning to the joke my brother told me, there is sometimes profound truth in humor, no?

Related:

Guns And The Mentally Ill: A Professional Assessment

New York, Pistol Grips And Spray Firing

Kurt Hofmann, In Upholding NY’s SAFE Act, Judge Makes Surprising Inadvertent Admission

David Codrea, Federal Judge Upholding SAFE Act Gun Ban Relied On Unsupported Assumptions

NBC:

The Obama administration is proposing two more executive actions that it says will help prevent individuals who are prohibited from having a gun for mental health reasons from obtaining a firearm.

The Department of Justice, arguing that current federal law contains terminology about mental health issues that is too vague,  proposed a regulation that would clarify who is ineligible to possess a firearm for specific situations related to mental health, like commitment to a mental institution. “In addition to providing general guidance on federal law, these clarifications will help states determine what information should be made accessible to the federal background check system, which will, in turn, strengthen the system’s reliability and effectiveness,” the administration said in a fact sheet distributed to reporters.

The second executive action, proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services, would allow some medical organizations more leeway to report “limited information necessary to help keep guns out of potentially dangerous hands” to the federal background check system. “The proposed rule will not change the fact that seeking help for mental health problems or getting treatment does not make someone legally prohibited from having a firearm,” the White House added.

Because, you know, mental health professionals can use their skills so well as a predictor of propensity to violence, oh, er, uh, because mass shootings are a function of mentally unstable people who just suddenly snap, oh, er, well, whatever.  Everybody just shut up.  At least they’re doing something about something.  And that’s what we all want our government to do, right?  Something?

Eugene Volokh:

Laws that ban so-called “assault weapons” often define them with reference to various features, such as a rifle’s having a bayonet mount or “a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon” (to quote the New York assault weapon ban upheld by N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Cuomo (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 31, 2013)). One reason given for focusing on rifles with such pistol grips is that, in the words of the court, this “feature[] aid shooters when ‘spray firing’ from the hip.” … I’m not an expert on firearms tactics, but I’m very skeptical of this.

Eugene isn’t merely asking the question in a vacuum.  It’s right there in the ruling:

But for the contested features, like a pistol grip and thumbhole stock, New York points to evidence that these features aid shooters when “spray firing” from the hip. (Bruen Decl., ¶ 19); see Heller II, 670 F.3d at 1262–63 (quoting Siebel Testimony, supra). As the Second Circuit has held, “This factor aims to identify those rifles whose pistol grips are designed to make such spray firing from the hip particularly easy.”

Eugene is skeptical because that’s one of the stupidest things I have ever read anywhere, not just in a legal ruling.  Spray firing from the hip.  And the ruling seems to rely on that explanation – and not just for real assault rifles (the formal definition of which we have discussed, including selective fire), but for semi-automatic weapons.  Semi-automatic weapons!  Spray firing from the hip.

This is not intended or taught in any tactical maneuver in any branch of the military that I’m aware of, including and most of all Marine Corps squad rushes.  It would be a stupid, juvenile waste of ammunition and would get people killed (friendly more than anyone else).  Furthermore, a rogue shooter in America wouldn’t hit anything (except by accident) with such a tactic.  It would be the least effective thing a rogue shooter could possibly do.

The Weapons Warrant Officer for Marine Corps 2/6 wouldn’t allow their deployment to Iraq in 2007 (where my son was a SAW gunner) without the SAWs being equipped with optics.  And this judge relied on the notion of “spray firing” to make his ruling, marking one of the dumbest things ever to go down in the annals of legal history.

Moron.  Next time just ask somebody who knows this stuff.