Before killing himself, the deranged 25-year-old son of an Algerian immigrant shot to death 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989 as a gesture of personal revenge upon Feminism, which he blamed for ruining his life.

Canadian authorities might have deported all anti-feminist Muslims likely to produce defective offspring, but instead they blamed guns, passing Bill C-68 in 1995, which created a Canadian Firearms Registry.

Registering every firearm in Canada was marketed as a measure that would prevent crime, but in reality criminals don’t register guns and the ownership and specific identity of the weapon used in crimes is very rarely a meaningful issue.

Legislation creating the Firearm Registry was passed on the basis of estimates that promised that licensing fees would take care of nearly all its costs.

In reality, the gun registry cost $2.7 billion, 1350x the original estimate.

Why Projects Fail:

It was originally expected that the project needed only $2 million of investments while registration fees would cover the rest. In 1995, the Department of Justice reported to Parliament that the system would cost $119 million to implement, and that the income generated from licensing fees would be $117 million. This gave a net cost of $2 million.

At the time of the 2002 audit, the revised estimates from the Department of Justice revealed that the cost of the program would be more than $1 billion by 2004/05 and that the income from license fees in the same period would be $140 million. The annual operating costs of the program are reported to be $15 – $80 million.

Last Wednesday, the Canadian Parliament voted to end the Registry of long arms. $2.7 billion later, it was concluded that the Registry had never resulted in the solution of a single murder.

Mike McDaniel:

On December 8, 2011, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder baldly asserted that he had no idea who authorized the deadly Fast and Furious debacle and added that he would be “surprised” if any evidence about it could ever be found.

Put aside, for the moment, Holder’s lack of transparency which has become standard operating procedure for the most transparent administration in history, and consider that Mr. Holder is correct for two primary and likely reasons: he knows who is responsible for every facet of Fast and Furious and has no intention of ever revealing that information, and he has the most important, powerful ace any corrupt bureaucrat or politician could possibly have up his sleeve, but more on this later.

According to Fox News, on January 19, Patrick J. Cunningham, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division for Arizona, through his attorneys, has notified Rep. Darrell Issa’s Committee that he will not testify before the committee as requested and that if subpoenaed, will take the Fifth and refuse to testify to avoid incriminating himself.

It’s a common journalistic meme: young and pretty urban female fashionista, for one reason or another, winds up visiting the real America, picks up a gun, tries firing at a target, discovers that shooting a gun is really fun, and then puzzles over the meaning and moral ramifications of it all.

Yet, these are nearly always interesting to read, especially since the gun-owning reader knows better than Amanda Fortini does that she has begun the process of conversion from deluded ignorance to realism.

My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was. I’m wearing earplugs, but you don’t just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you’ve never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin’s reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don’t. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.

My next thought is, I want to do that again! I have an immediate, exhilarated reaction. Partly it’s that what I’ve just done initially frightened me, so there’s a sense of a limit overcome. For many people I know, guns remain unreal—the accessories of fictional characters, or at least of the Other, not you and yours. Yet to fire a gun is to realize you can do it: You can operate one, understand how it works. Shooting gives me a rush that comes from a feeling of (admittedly incomplete) mastery.

Plus, the sensory experience of target shooting—readying your stance, controlling your breath, focusing on the target—is so absorbing that I can’t indulge my free-floating worries. I can’t have a self-conscious intellectual reaction when firing a gun. It’s almost meditative. At one point I glimpse a woman in her sixties dressed in a white polo, creased khakis, and pristine white sneakers—attire for a day of golf at the country club; she’s brandishing a Glock. I have to stop myself from laughing with delight.

As I shoot, I again experience the strange, paradoxical sense of an act that’s familiar and unfamiliar at once. I’ve seen Clint do this; I’ve seen Arnold do this; I’ve seen Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton do it. Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You’ve watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It’s impossible not to feel like a cliché.

Farhad Manjoo, Cornell ‘00, is Slate’s Technology Columnist, so his take on toy guns, one would expect, ought to be well-informed, sophisticated, appreciative, and realistic.

A technology columnist really ought to be the sort of person who knows all about real guns. Firearms are an extremely important and interesting, downright fundamental, form of technology, after all.

But Farhad Manjoo’s holiday article in Stale this year is rather different from what one might have expected.

Nerf guns (which propel sponge rubber tipped plastic darts) frighten Manjoo and send him into a tizzy of anxiety. He describes the Nerf Barricade as “one of the most powerful toy weapons ever built, capable of sending a 3-inch foam dart hurtling 30 feet through the air, and then doing it again and again every half second.”

How does that compare, Mr. Technology Columnist, to the old Daisy Model 25 pump action BB-gun, my generation’s idea of a toy gun, which fired a copper-plated .177” diameter BB at a velocity ranging from 375-450 fps (fast enough to break glass) from a tubular magazine as rapidly as you could pump the slide?

Shooting one’s friends in the face was regarded as verboten (you might put out an eye), but BB gun wars did regularly occur. The impact of a BB on human flesh stung smartly, even through clothing, and characteristically left a mark. It was a common form of deterrence to shoot oneself in the hand without flinching and then display the bruise. One’s interlocutor was thereby given to understand that you were not afraid of being shot with a BB gun, and was significantly less inclined to initiate hostilities.

Older generations of American boys additionally commonly played with home-made slingshots, a leather pad attached to two lengths of rubber strips cut from a discarded inner tube then affixed to a Y-forked branch. A good slingshot could propel much larger projectiles like marbles, ball bearings, or suitable rocks with good accuracy at very effectively damaging velocities.

We were bloodthirsty hunters in my boyhood, and we used to, I regret to say, kill the occasional incautious songbird with those BB guns. More becomingly, we also sometimes successfully nailed a rat found skulking in the open around the dump with our slingshots. (BBs just bounced off rats.) Try taking any variety of game with a Nerf gun.

But, it isn’t really the ballistic capabilities of the Nerf gun arsenal that sent Mr. Manjoo into a tailspin. It is, of course, the ethical considerations.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with some of the new Nerf guns, and I’ve tied myself in knots thinking about whether ultrarealistic weapons are just harmless fun or whether they reveal something terribly wrong with modern American boyhood.

One feels bound to question the expertise and judgment of the technology expert who would describe the above Nerf Barricade as “ultrarealistic.” So few real firearms are made of yellow plastic, and when Mr. Manjoo expresses awed respect for a toy gun’s ability to propel a harmless foam rubber dart 30’, he seems to have lost completely any sense of proportion and relative capability between the real weapon and the toy.

Someone who finds a harmless toy “scary” is, by my standards, an incredible wimp. And the kind of people who have all these hyper-sensitivities and moral issues over boys playing at war are prigs and decadents. Our blue state pseudo-intelligentsia resides in a haute bourgeois dreamworld, perfectly safe and far removed from the ugly realities of human conflict and criminal predation, protected by rough men they neither know nor respect, in homogeneous enclaves in which they have created their own Eloi-style culture in which gross moral self-indulgence parallels their conspicuous material well being.

Newt Gingrich ought to start promising to eliminate the TSA.

News4Jax.com

Iowahawk imagines the Strangelove-esque phone call from the current occupant of the White House to Mexico, to explain that a little something has gone wrong with a BATF gun control operation.

Juan? Hola, amigo! Como esta?

Fine, fine. And how are Lupe and the kids?

College already? Boy, how time flies. Has she picked a major?

Splendid. And how is Juan Jr.? He’s what now, 13, 14? The last time I saw him he was only…

Oh.

Oh.

My goodness. Boy, that’s… that’s just terrible. My deepest sympathies to you and Lupe on your loss. I’ll have my secretary arrange for a memorial bouquet. I know he was a fine boy, and…

Now, Juan, let’s not jump to conclusions here. We both know there are lots of machine gun murders in Mexico, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all…

Yes, Juan, I got your messages. As a matter of fact that’s why I’m calling this afternoon. I’ve had my people look into this thing and…

Mmhmm.

Mmmhmm.

Now… now Juan… let’s just calm down here a minute. Just, okay.. okay… let me please explain, okay? See, the funny thing is, it turns out, a couple years back there was, well, this stimulus program money, and then there were these brainstorming sessions, where, well, there were some ideas what to do with it. So, anyhoo, one of the ideas that happened was, ‘hey, what if there were, say, 2000 machine guns that got sent to Mexican drug lords?’ and so forth.

Well no, of course we couldn’t tell you. It would have ruined the surprise.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Knife Safety: MyFoxBOSTON.com

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

The recent breakdown of civil society in British cities has been widely associated with welfare state entitlements and an all-encompassing liberal egalitarianism which insists on treating criminality as victimhood. A version of society Kipling predicted: “[T]he brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.”

But it must also be noted that the left’s aversion to punishing crime has consistently featured a single notable exception, a passionate determination to make a conspicuous example of any law-abiding citizen competing against the state’s monopoly of force by daring to defend himself against crime and violence. In such cases, liberal authorities have consistently been out for blood.

Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor at George Mason University has made the study of the British experiment a personal specialty, and reports in the Wall Street Journal on some of the atrocities produced by the contemporary administration of justice British-style and their results in multiplying crime.

Great Britain’s leniency began in the 1950s, with a policy that only under extraordinary circumstances would anyone under 17 be sent to prison. This was meant to rehabilitate young offenders. But the alternative to incarceration has been simply to warn them to behave, maybe require community service, and return them to the streets. There has been justifiable concern about causes of crime such as poverty and unemployment, but little admission that some individuals prefer theft to work and that deterrence must be taken seriously.

Victims of aggression who defend themselves or attempt to protect their property have been shown no such leniency. Burglars who injured themselves breaking into houses have successfully sued homeowners for damages. In February, police in Surrey told gardeners not to put wire mesh on the windows of their garden sheds as burglars might hurt themselves when they break in.

If a homeowner protecting himself and his family injures an intruder beyond what the law considers “reasonable,” he will be prosecuted for assault. Tony Martin, an English farmer, was sentenced to life in prison for killing one burglar and wounding another with a shotgun during the seventh break-in at his rural home in 1999. While his sentence was later reduced to five years, he was refused parole in 2003 because he was judged a danger to burglars.

In 2008, a robber armed with a knife attacked shopkeeper Tony Singh in West Lancashire. During the struggle the intruder was fatally stabbed with his own knife. Although the robber had a long record of violent assault, prosecutors were preparing to charge Mr. Singh with murder until public outrage stopped them.

Meanwhile, the cost of criminal justice has convinced British governments to shorten the sentences of adult criminals, even those guilty of violent crimes, and to release them when they have served half of their sentence. Police have been instructed by the British Home Office to let burglars and first-time offenders who confess to any of some 60 crimes—ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl—off with a caution. That means no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance.

In 2009, 70% of apprehended burglars avoided prison, according to British Ministry of Justice figures. The same year, 20,000 young offenders were electronically tagged and sent home, a 40% increase in the number of people tagged over three years.

All sorts of weapons useful for self-defense have been severely restricted or banned. A 1953 law, the “Prevention of Crime Act,” made any item someone carried for possible protection an “offensive weapon” and therefore illegal. Today there is also a list of devices the mere possession of which carries a 10-year sentence. Along with rocket launchers and machine guns, the list includes chemical sprays and any knife with a blade more than three inches long.

Handguns? Parliament banned their possession in 1997. As an example of the preposterous lengths to which zealous British authorities would enforce this law, consider the fate of Paul Clark, a former soldier. He was arrested in 2009 by Surrey police when he brought them a shotgun he found in his garden. For doing this personally—instead of asking the police to retrieve it—he received a five-year prison sentence. It took a public outcry to reduce the normal five-year sentence to 12 months, and then suspend it.

The ban on handguns did not stop actual crimes committed with handguns. Those crimes rose nearly 40%, according to a 2001 study by King’s College London’s Center for Defence Studies, and doubled by a decade later, according to government statistics reported in the London Telegraph in October 2009.

Knives? It’s illegal for anyone under age 18 to buy one, and using a knife for self-defense is unlawful. In 1991, American tourist Dina Letarte of Tempe, Ariz., used a penknife to protect herself from a violent attack by three men in a London subway. She was convicted of carrying an offensive weapon, fined, and given a two-year suspended sentence.

The result of policies that punish the innocent but fail to deter crime has been stark, even before the latest urban violence. The last decade has seen a doubling of gun crime. According to the latest annual report of the Home Office (2009), there was a 25% increase in crimes involving contact, such as assault and battery, over the previous year.

Hat tip to Miguel.

If you were an American millionaire, a belted earl, or an Indian maharajah, you’d go to London and buy sidelock best guns from the likes of Olympian gunmakers like Purdy, Boss, Churchill, or Woodward. The ordinary American or English gentleman of limited means would buy excellently well-made, but far less expensive, boxlocks produced by the workshops of down-to-earth makers like Greener or W.C. Scott in Birmingham.

The Birmingham gun trade armed the British Army for the victory at Waterloo. It produced the Brown Bess and the Baker, Snider, and Enfield rifles that won the Empire, and the Martini-Henry that stopped the Zulu charges at Rorke’s Drift. It armed the Confederate Army in the War for Southern Independence. It produced the rifles, pistols, bayonets, machine guns, and artillery that determined the fate of Europe in two world wars.

The Gun Quarter of Birmingham; like Gardone, Italy; Oberndorf, Germany; Tula, Russia; or Springfield, Massachusetts; is one of the world’s great historic arms-making centers, boasting a leading role in gun manufacture for more than three centuries.

But a pusillanimous group of British politicians has recently announced that Birmingham’s historic Gun Quarter is going to be renamed, specifically in order to renounce its association with the arms trade.

The Birmingham Post reports:

It’s been a symbol of Birmingham’s manufacturing excellence for 250 years, but the city’s Gun Quarter has lost its biggest battle of all.

One of Britain’s oldest industrial areas has been renamed after council leaders claimed local people no longer wanted to be associated with the weapons of war.

The streets where highly skilled tradesmen produced two million muskets to fight Napoleon are to be known in future as St George and St Chad in recognition of a church and Birmingham’s Roman Catholic cathedral.

Opponents of the name change say the Gun Quarter has been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

St. George, a soldier saint renowned for killing a dragon, would probably have no personal aversion to the arms trade. St. Chad (who turns out to be completely personally unconnected to the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida) was an abbot and bishop of Mercia, the patron saint of medicinal springs, and must have had a personal interest in agriculture, as traditionally his feast day (March 2) is particularly propitious for the planting of broad beans. His views on weapons are unknown.

Of Birmingham today, a city willing to spurn the memory and achievements of Westley Richards, William Powell, Greener, Webley, and W. C. Scott, one can inclined to say with John Betjeman:

“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now”

From the equally outraged Steve Bodio.

Rand Simberg adds:

It took almost a day for some on the left to start blaming Sarah Palin for what happened in Norway. It probably took a while for them to get over their cynical shock that it actually was a white guy this time.

I will note, though, as an aside, that like school shootings in “gun-free zones,” this was another catastrophic failure of gun control. Just a few rifles in the hands of the older kids on that island, with training, would have ended this pretty quickly. Instead, they were fish in a barrel for him.

Officials at the Department of Justice are in “panic mode,” according to multiple sources, as word spreads that congressional testimony next week will paint a bleak and humiliating picture of Operation Fast and Furious, the botched undercover operation that left a trail of blood from Mexico to Washington, D.C.

The operation was supposed to stem the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico by allowing so-called straw buyers to purchase guns legally in the U.S. and later sell them in Mexico, usually to drug cartels.

Instead, ATF documents show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly and deliberately flooded Mexico with assault rifles. Their intent was to expose the entire smuggling organization, from top to bottom, but the operation spun out of control and supervisors refused pleas from field agents to stop it.

Only after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died did ATF Agent John Dodson blow the whistle and expose the scandal.

“What people don’t understand is how long we will be dealing with this,” Dodson told Fox News back in March. “Those guns are gone. You can’t just give the order and get them back. There is no telling how many crimes will be committed before we retrieve them.”

But now the casualties are coming in.

Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns. Police have recovered roughly 700 guns at crime scenes, 250 in the U.S. and the rest in Mexico, including five AK-47s found at a cartel warehouse in Juarez last month.

A high-powered sniper rifle was used to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter. Two other Romanian-made AK-47s were found in a shoot-out that left 11 dead in the state of Jalisco three weeks ago.

The guns were traced to the Lone Wolf Gun Store in Glendale, Ariz., and were sold only after the store employees were told to do so by the ATF.

It is illegal to buy a gun for anyone but yourself. However, ATF’s own documents show it allowed just 15 men to buy 1,725 guns, and 1,318 of those were after the purchasers officially became targets of investigation.

If I could have my personal choice of one federal agency to defund or entirely abolish, I know which one it would be. I subscribe to the viewpoint that “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” ought to be the contents of the sign in the window of my local convenience store, not the name of a federal agency.

While the terms have yet to be made public, if passed by the U.N. and ratified by our Senate, it will almost certainly force the U.S. to:

1. Enact tougher licensing requirements, creating additional bureaucratic red tape for legal firearms ownership.

2. Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms (exempting those owned by our government of course).

3. Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons (any that have magazines even though they still operate in the same one trigger pull – one single “bang” manner as revolvers, a simple fact the ant-gun media never seem to grasp).

4. Create an international gun registry, clearly setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.

5. In short, overriding our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.

There can be no doubt that international treaties of this sort represent the “nose under the tent” of efforts by the left to modify domestic laws and individual rights at the international level, in which Syria, Libya, and Cuba’s votes are added to those domestic democrats. Though there seems no real likelihood of any treaty of the kind Mr. Bell anticipates passing the US Senate at the present time, warning articles of this kind are prophylactic in preventing our ever getting to the point where US confirmation of such a treaty is a real prospect.

Oleg Volk identifies gun control as a classic case of the assignment of collective responsibility.

Via Vanderleun.

NBC Philadelphia:

A 7-year-old child allegedly shot a Nerf-style toy gun in his Hammonton, N.J., school Jan. 18. No one was hurt, but the pint-size softshooter now faces misdemeanor criminal charges.

Hammonton Police began an investigation into the “suspicious activity” at the Hammonton Early Childhood Education Center Jan. 18 after school officials alerted them to the incident.

The “gun” the child brought to school was a $5 toy gun, similar to a Nerf gun, that shoots soft ping pong type balls, according to the school’s superintendent.

Officials also say that there was no evidence of anyone being threatened. The child’s mother told school officials that she didn’t know her son brought the toy to school.

Dr. Dan Blachford, the Hammonton Board of Education superintendent, said the school has a zero tolerance policy.

“We are just very vigilant and we feel that if we draw a very strict line then we have much less worry about someone bringing in something dangerous,” said Blachford. ...

Police charged the 7-year-old with possessing an imitation firearm in or on an education institution – a misdemeanor and a minor juvenile offense in New Jersey.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Security forces at Gatwick Airport recently detected an assault rifle concealed in hand luggage and prevented it being smuggled aboard a departing aircraft.

Daily Mail:

The crouching, camouflaged figure is most certainly armed. But few would say he was dangerous.

Security officials disagreed however when he passed through a scanner at Gatwick Airport.

His three-inch, plastic toy gun was branded a ‘firearm’ and banned from a transatlantic flight.
model soldier

The plastic Royal Signaller was bought by tourist Julie Lloyd as a present to take home to her husband Ken, a recently retired policeman in Toronto, Canada.

Mrs Lloyd, 59, who regularly visits Britain to see her mother, said: ‘I took it to the airport still in its wrapping, but they discovered the little gun when it was scanned.

‘It is only about three inches long and there are no moving parts. There isn’t even a trigger.

‘But they wouldn’t let me take it with me. I had it in my hand luggage. I just didn’t think it would cause a problem. They said rules were rules. There was no flexibility or common sense.’

From Theo.

Most Americans reject that theory, with 53% agreeing that commentators who allege conservative rhetoric was responsible were mostly attempting to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad.

And efforts to drum up support for more control on the basis of the tragedy in Tuscon are really going nowhere.

Most Americans… do not believe tougher gun laws in Arizona would have prevented these shootings. One in five say stricter laws would have prevented the tragedy, while 72% disagree.

Alan Caruba points out once again that gun control laws are ineffective in disarming the insane.

In 1247, the Bethlehem Royal Hospital was established at Bishopsgate, just outside the London wall. It was better known as Bedlam and was the first asylum for the mentally ill in England. By 1403 it had some prominent guests. Bedlam had become the generic name for psychiatric hospitals and, more colloquially for a disturbance of the peace.

There was such a disturbance on Saturday when Jared Loughner shot U.S Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the brain at point blank range. He then shot others including a Federal judge and a nine-year-old child.

There is something like 25,000 laws on the books concerning the purchase and ownership of guns and not one single one of them could have prevented what happened.

This is not a defense of guns. The U.S. Revolution began at Concord and Lexington when a group of farmers picked up their guns and shot at British soldiers. No one is going to un-invent guns and everywhere they were banned, tyrannies of every description occurred.

This is about the Jared Loughner’s who, in my lifetime, assassinated men like John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Some nine U.S. presidents have either been killed or attacked by assassins. ...

Anyone who has been a reporter as I have been will tell you that every American city has a section that local residents fear to travel to or through. Murder occurs in every American city, large and small, every day. Usually it is a drug deal or robbery gone bad or a gambling dispute.

For reporters, the killing of someone prominent is a news bonanza. It overrides the usual buzz in a newsroom devoted to the more commonplace stories. There’s a reason the news channels are into full coverage mode and why, by the end of the week, when they have exhausted the few known facts of the Tucson shooting, they will return to a normal coverage of the news.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind. It’s not about gun laws. It’s not about Tucson. It’s not about Arizona. It’s not about political analysis and dialogue, so you can ignore the hypocritical ravings of MSNBC’s Keith Olberman and others eager to blame Rush Limbaugh or the Fox News Channel.

Loughner is Hinkley redux. Described by all who know him as “a loner” and rejected for military service, invited to leave the campus of a local college, more than a few people understood that Jared had a screw loose.

The closest you can get to understanding what happened is to rent Martin Scorsese’s brilliant film, “Taxi Driver.” There you will see Robert DeNiro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle, the archetype of every lone gunman. And yes, also in the film, you will find Jodie Foster.

The shooting was about mental illness. It was about paranoia. It was about schizophrenia. It was about all the other killings where innocent people were gunned down by someone hearing voices in his head.

Say a prayer for Rep. Giffords, but remember, they walk among us.

Via Theo.

WRAL story

It is time for the revolution.

America has somehow wound up being run by nincompoops who respond to unique and extraordinary crimes committed by a few individuals (Columbine, 9/11) by awarding themselves unprecedented grants of authority, completely alien to our constitutional and civic traditions, to tyrannize over the entire American population.

Americans are now harassed, electronically strip-searched, and groped at airports, treated like criminals upon entering courthouses and public offices, and children are arrested and thrown out of school for drawings, carrying toys, or for being found in possession of kitchen utensils.

Not so very long ago, high school boys used to participate in target shooting in urban high schools. Rural students would bring deer rifles to school, and keep them in the lockers during class, in order to go hunting at the end of the school day.

Only someone genuinely insane would suppose that Ashley Smithwick really represented a threat to anyone, but an ideological regime pathologically hostile to private possession of arms and fanatically devoted to the principle of a statist monopoly of force has descended upon schools across the United States. Zero tolerance policies are gestural expressions of ideological absolutism. Zero tolerance policies express the viewpoint of officialdom that our pacifistic, hoplophobic values are more important than facts, rationality, or your rights. Nothing whatsoever is as valuable as physical safety and the unchallenged rule of established authority.

Totalitarianism never came to America through foreign invasion, military conquest, or our defeat by foreign enemies. But totalitarianism has arrived here, in our schools, our airports, and our public spaces, entirely domestically. Totalitarianism is already occupying ever-expanding regions of our public lives via the petty tyranny, the habitual cowardice, the overwheening self-importance, the small mindedness,and the contemptible values of our ordinary administrators and minor officials.

This country needs a new litigation center dedicated to combating zero tolerance policies, safety fascism, and TSA-style security policies.

——————————-

Update from Bryan Preston via Glenn Reynolds.

The school administrators are issuing misleading press releases, obfuscating the student victim’s status and trying to depict a new-fangled lunch container as a purse. Sleazoids.

Providence, Rhode Island addresses violent crime by destroying children’s toy guns at Christmas time.

Boston Globe:

Dominic Johnson, a 10-year-old fourth-grader with a fledgling Mohawk, brandished his black, long-nosed toy gun and caressed the muzzle appreciatively.

“It’s like a shotgun mixed with a rifle,’’ he said, as his mother, April, told him to stop pointing it at nearby children.

Soon it would be junk.

Dominic joined dozens of children yesterday at the annual Toy Gun Bash in the gymnasium of Pleasant View Elementary School. There, they lined up to toss their toy guns, from dainty purple water guns to camouflage-painted pistols, inside the Bash-O-Matic, a large black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.

Prodded by Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, who wore a fuzzy Santa hat, the children stared curiously as the Bash-O-Matic mashed up their guns and digested them into a plastic bin near its tail. ...

For seven years, Providence municipal and law enforcement officials have organized the event around Christmastime as a way to raise awareness of the dangers of playing with guns, real or fake. ...

In exchange for their toy guns, all the children received wrapped presents that were indisputably not violent — dolls, stuffed animals, and board games like checkers.

Some children were not thrilled with the trade.

Malik Hall, a round-eyed second-grader, looked apprehensive as he stood in line with his favorite toy, a thick, blue gun with plastic sword underneath the muzzle. The 8-year-old was furious when his mother, Amanda, told him he would have to give it up. Yesterday morning, he tried to hide it under his pillow, she said.

“I’m worried,’’ she said. “He might cry.’’

But when it was his turn, Malik strode dry-eyed and with quiet dignity to the Bash-O-Matic and fed it the gun. When his mother approached, he said nothing.

“You don’t want to talk to me?’’ Hall asked. He looked at her stonily and left to retrieve his gift.

Hall said she had no regrets. The 26-year-old mother of six said she has been trying to wean her only son off toy guns for years. In kindergarten, he brought a pop gun to school and shot at a classmate when the child refused to return his toy truck.

The police and representatives of the state’s children services department rushed to the school, and the boy was expelled.

Hat tip to Adam Freedman.

The Korea Times reports that the Obama administration is blocking the sale to US importers of tens of thousands of surplus M1 Garands and M1 carbines, avidly desired by American target shooters and collectors on grounds that they might find their way into the hands of terrorists (!).

The U.S. government opposed South Korea’s bid to sell hundreds of thousands of aging U.S. combat rifles to American gun collectors, a senior government official said Thursday.

The ministry announced the plan last September as part of efforts to boost its defense budget, saying the export of the M1 Garand and carbine rifles would start by the end of 2009.

The U.S. administration put the brakes on the plan, citing “problems” that could be caused by the importation of the rifles.

The problems the U.S. government cited were somewhat ambiguous, said an official at the Ministry of National Defense on condition of anonymity.

“The U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents. It was also worried the weapons could be smuggled to terrorists, gangs or other people with bad intentions,” the official told The Korea Times. ...

The Seoul government sought to sell the outdated U.S guns back to the United States.

A total of 86,000 M1 rifles and another 22,000 carbines were to be sold, as the weapons have been mothballed for about five decades in military warehouses. The per-unit price of the M1 rifle is about $220 and the carbine is more than $140, according to the ministry.

M1s were made first in 1926 and used in World War II and the 1954-1975 Vietnam War. The carbines were first produced in 1941 and used during the 1950-1953 Korean War.

Hat tip to David Kopel.

ChinaSmack, a blogsite translating Chinese news and comments, publishes a Chinese comment thread on gun ownership in America. They are even sold in Walmart!

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Erin Miller, at SCOTUSblog, live blogged the announcement:

Erin:
Alito announces McDonald v. Chicago: reversed and remanded
Monday June 28, 2010 10:04 Erin
10:04

Tom:
Gun rights prevail
Monday June 28, 2010 10:04 Tom
10:05

Erin:

The opinion concludes that the 14th Amendment does incorporate the Second Amendment right recognized in Heller to keep and bear arms in self defense
Monday June 28, 2010 10:05 Erin
10:05

Tom:
5-4
Monday June 28, 2010 10:05 Tom
10:05

Erin:
Stevens dissents for himself. Breyer dissents, joined by Ginsburg and Sotomayor.
Monday June 28, 2010 10:05 Erin
10:05

Tom:
The majority seems divided, presumably on the precise standard
Monday June 28, 2010 10:05 Tom
10:06

Erin:
The majority Justices do not support all parts of the Alito opinion, but all five agree that the 2d Amendment applies to state and local government.
Monday June 28, 2010 10:06 Erin
10:06

Erin:
Alito, in the part of the opinion joined by three Justices, concludes that the 2d Amendment is incorporated through the Due Process Clause.
Monday June 28, 2010 10:06 Erin
10:07

Erin:
Thomas thinks the Amendment is incorporated, but not under Due Process. He appears to base incorporation on Privileges or Immunities.

Evidently, the Court actually did rule that the 14th Amendment’s Incorporation of the Bill of Rights makes applicable the Second Amendment to the states, limiting the right of states and municipalities to restrict the right of Americans to keep and bear arms.

A lot of the big urban areas of the Northeast have turned into war zones. Virtually, without exception, they place the blame on lax “gun control”... laws for their sky-high murder rates. I wonder if their voters have ever asked themselves why their mayors are so obsessed?

I think the answer is simple: It give the mayors external actors to blame so they don’t have to answer for their own incompetence.

Think about it. What is every one of those mayors really saying when they talk about disarming the citizenry? They’re really saying, “Hey, it’s not my fault our city has become a shooting gallery, it’s the fault of those rednecks three states over! You can’t blame me because I can’t control what those rednecks do! Oh, if only we could overturn two centuries of Constitutional law we would have safe streets! Until that happens, don’t even think of voting me out! It wouldn’t be fair!”

Apparently, the urbanites’ regional, racial and class bigotries make them more willing to blame people outside of their communities than to accept responsibility for the safety of those very same communities. The mayors and the rest of the failing big-city pols have figured out that the age-old practice of blaming outsiders is the sure path to political job security.

The problem in the big cities of the Northeast isn’t guns. If guns caused problems, it’s rural America and pro-gun states like Texas that would be murder horror shows, not the Northeast cities crammed with people too self-righteously moral to accept the responsibility of protecting their loved ones and their communities. When young black men are safer in small, gun-packed southern towns than they are in northeastern urban areas, you know something has gone seriously wrong in the big city.

No, the problem in the Northeast’s urban areas is an unusually large population of individuals who chose to kill and a political and criminal-justice system that cannot or will not contain them. It is ineffective law enforcement that drives high murder rates, not access to guns.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Mike Dumke, a reporter for the in-no-way-conservative Chicago Reader, brought up at the mayor’s recent press conference the obvious point that Chicago’s draconian gun laws have been ineffective in stopping the use of guns in crime, and hizonner (while brandishing a police-confiscated military rifle complete with bayonet) proposed a hypothetical including the reporter.

Guns are one of the mayor’s favorite soapbox topics—he regularly goes out of his way to point out that he despises gun manufacturers and “extremists” like the NRA. “It’s really amazing how powerful they are,” he said today, standing next to a table covered with handguns, rifles, and even a machine gun that police had seized. “They’re bigger than the oil industry, bigger than the gas industry, bigger than Google, bigger than President Obama and the rest of them.” ...

But even supporters of tough gun regulations—myself included—have to admit that it’s not clear how much they reduce violence. Despite having some of the most restrictive laws in the country, Chicago is a national leader in shootings and murders, and the mayor himself noted that “we’ve seen far too many instances in the last few weeks” of firearm violence, including the shooting that left a cop dead last night.

So I asked: since guns are readily available in Chicago even with a ban in place, do you really think it’s been effective? ...

“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”

He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.

“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”

For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)

“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”

The photographers snapped away. Suddenly everybody started cracking up.

Daley went on. “This gun saved many lives—it could save your life,” he said—meaning, I think, that getting that gun off the street might have saved many lives, including mine.

And he went on some more. “We save all these guns that the police department seizes, you know how many lives we’ve saved? You don’t realize it. First of all, they’re taking these guns out of someone’s hands. They save their own life and they save someone else’s. You cannot count how many times this gun can be used. Thirty, forty times in shooting people and discharging a weapon. I think it’s very important.

“Next will be hand grenades, right? We’ll say that hand grenades are OK. I mean, how far can you go in regards to mass weapons? To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America. I really believe that, I don’t care what people tell me. You have to thank the police officers for seizing all these weapons. We lead the country in seizing weapons. This is unbelievable.”

I had to agree.

0: 24 video

Mayor Daley’s understanding of firearms and America is pretty sad. The National Rifle Association has typically around 3-4 million members, its membership roll fluctuating and tending to rise significantly when major new gun control initiatives make the news. The NRA is an influential lobbying organization, but its strength is not really a matter of the size of its membership or annual budget, which is certainly small potatoes compared to the oil and gas industries or Google. The NRA is influential because it represents the views of many millions of American sportsmen and gun owners who have demonstrated their opinions by voting against liberal politicians who supported gun control. The gun control issue has cost the democrats a great any congressional seats and certainly the Presidential election of 2000, in which Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee. Mayor Daley’s adversary on the gun control issue is not the NRA. It is the American people.

Mayor Daley then holds up the military rifle with fixed bayonet. He is holding it sideways, so we can only see the bottom. It is short, a carbine, and seems to have an extended magazine. I think it was probably an SKS with a a folding bayonet.

Did confiscating that SKS really save anybody’s life? It seems doubtful to me.

There is plenty of crime and many shootings take place in Chicago, but gangbangers and muggers tend to use pistols which are considerably easier to carry and conceal than a carbine. Mayor Daley’s “To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America.” is obviously craziness.

Chances are overwhelming that that SKS was never used in any crime whatsoever. (Anybody hear of any bayonetings in Chicago recently?) And guns actually fired in the commission of a crime tend to be used once, by and large, and then discarded. There are many, perhaps hundreds of, millions of guns in private hands in the United States. Some collectors own hundreds. The percentage of firearms actually ever used in crime is infinitesimal.

People like Mayor Daley want to focus law enforcement efforts on confiscating objects instead of apprehending criminals simply because taking weapons away from people not committing any crimes with them is so much easier than catching the bad guys.

Reading the tea leaves is not very hard, since Justice Anthony Kennedy these days casts the deciding vote.

[D]uring Tuesday’s arguments, the justices who formed the majority in the D.C. case said they had already decided that gun rights deserved national protection.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the individual right to bear arms is a “fundamental” right, like the other protections in the Bill of Rights. “If it’s not fundamental, then Heller is wrong,” he said, referring to the D.C. ruling, which he joined. Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. echoed the same theme.

At one point, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed a narrow ruling in favor of gun rights. Two years ago, he dissented and said the 2nd Amendment was designed to protect a state’s power to have a “well regulated militia.”

Now, however, Stevens said the court could rule that residents had a right to a gun at home, but not a right “to parade around the street with a gun.”

A lawyer representing the National Rifle Assn. scoffed at the idea and opposed a “watered-down version” of the 2nd Amendment.

Scalia also questioned the idea. In his opinion two years ago, he described the right to bear arms as a right to “carry” a weapon in cases of “confrontation.” Such a right would not be easily limited to having a gun at home.

The justices will meet behind closed doors to vote this week on the case of McDonald vs. Chicago. It may be late June before they issue a written ruling.

Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It’s so inept, it doesn’t even rise to cover-up level.

“Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood” never mentions Islamist terror. Its 86 mind-numbing pages treat “the alleged perpetrator,” Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as just another workplace shooter (guess they’re still looking for the pickup truck with the gun rack).

The report is so politically correct that its authors don’t even realize the extent of their political correctness—they’re body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian.

Reading the report, you get the feeling that, jeepers, things actually went pretty darned well down at Fort Hood. Commanders, first responders and everybody but the latest “American Idol” contestants come in for high praise.

The teensy bit of specific criticism is reserved for the “military medical officer supervisors” in Maj. Hasan’s chain of command at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As if the problem started and ended there.

Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks why they didn’t stop Hasan’s career in its tracks.

The answer is straightforward: Hasan’s superiors feared—correctly—that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.

Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the PC tyranny of today’s armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.

This is a military that imposes rules of engagement that protect our enemies and kill our own troops and that court-martials heroic SEALs to appease a terrorist. Ain’t many colonels willing to hammer the Army’s sole Palestinian-American psychiatrist.

I thought myself that existing circumstances in which a fanatic can arm himself and simply proceed to gun down members of a crowd of completely unarmed uniformed military personal in the middle of an Army base in time of war speak volumes about contemporary American pacifism, hoplophobia, and identity problems in certain branches of the US Armed Forces. The US Army actually needed an armed female police officer to come to the rescue of soldiers being attacked by a single adversary.

They call them Armed Forces, don’t they? If US military personnel routinely carried sidearms, and knew how to use them, there wouldn’t be much chance of anyone succeeding in a massacre. An Islamic fanatic might draw a gun and shoot someone, but if everyone else had guns, his shooting spree would come to an abrupt halt very quickly.

British model and singer Myleene Klass called the police after she waved a knife and managed to scare off two intruders trying to break in at 12:45 A.M. British police warned her that she might very well be arrested if she did that again.

Telegraph:

Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear’Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was illegal.

Jonathan Shalit, Miss Klass’s agent, said that had been “shaken and utterly terrified” by the incident and was stepping up security at the house she shares with her fiancé, Graham Quinn, who was away on business at the time.

He said: “Myleene was aghast when she was told that the law did not allow her to defend herself in her own home. All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off.