Dennis Praeger asks a few questions which have often occurred to me upon reading press reports of these kinds of incidents.

Question 1: Why are murderers always counted in the victims tally?

The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was: “6 Dead in NIU Shooting.”

“6 dead” included the murderer. Why wasn’t the headline “5 killed at NIU”?

It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.

This is something entirely new. Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims. To give a military analogy, can one imagine a headline like this in an American newspaper after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “2,464 Dead in Pearl Harbor Attack”? After all, 55 Japanese airmen and nine Japanese crewmen also died in the attack. ...

Question 3: Why are “shooter” and “gunman” used instead of “killer” or “murderer”?

If a murderer used a knife to murder five students, no news headlines would read, “Knifeman Kills Five.” So why always “shooter” and “gunman”?

The most obvious explanation is that by focusing on the weapon used by the murderer, the media can further their anti-gun agenda.

“Gus McCauley of Americans Against Guns” interviewed on a Fox 1/2 Hour News video

Hat tip to Xavier.

“First they came for the fully-automatic machine guns, and I’d didn’t protest because I didn’t own a machine gun…”

As the BBC reports, even joke guns and toys swords must be registered and stored locked up in today’s Britain.

A Cornish village drama group has had to register a toy gun with the police to comply with health and safety rules.

Carnon Downs drama group in Cornwall have also had to keep their plastic cutlasses and wooden swords locked up for the pantomime, Robinson Crusoe.

Producers of the show called the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) rules “farcical”.

A spokesman for the HSE said the rules were designed to make risks “sensibly managed”.

The climax of the show is a fight in which actors use replica 4ft-foot long plastic cutlasses.

There is also a toy gun which produces a flag saying “Bang”.

The directors contacted police after receiving advice from the HSE and the National Operatic and Dramatic Association.

The HSE have a page on their website called Entertainment Information Sheet 20 which lays down strict rules for the handling of guns, swords and other weapons on set.

Drama group co-director Linda Barker said: “The cutlasses count as weapons even though they are replicas and made of plastic and apparently they could be mistaken for real ones.

“Our only gun was a panto pistol which produces a flag with the word bang on it.

“Our local police at Truro were fantastic and they have registered the gun, the two plastic cutlasses and our six wooden swords.”

She added: “It gets a bit farcical when you are dealing with plastic swords. It is not as if anyone is likely to be scared by them.”

Neighbourhood beat officer Pc Nigel Hyde said: “We have been informed and made a note.

“It seems a bit unusual but other forms of replica weapons have been used to carry out crimes and the consequences have been serious.”

A spokesman for the HSE said: “We do not want to stop people putting on pantos or having fun as long as the risks are sensible managed.”

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

LA Times:

A D.C. ban on home handguns may not be constitutional, the solicitor general tells the Supreme Court, but rights are limited and federal firearm restrictions should be upheld.

In their legal battle over gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment, gun- control advocates never expected to get a boost from the Bush administration.

But that’s just what happened when U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement urged the Supreme Court in a brief Friday to say that gun rights are limited and subject to “reasonable regulation” by the government and that all federal restrictions on firearms should be upheld.

Reasonable regulations include the federal ban on machine guns and other “particularly dangerous types of firearms,” he said in the brief. Moreover, the government forbids gun possession by felons, drug users, “mental defectives” and people subject to restraining orders, he said.

“Given the unquestionable threat to public safety that unrestricted private firearm possession would entail, various categories of firearm-related regulation are permitted by the 2nd Amendment,” Clement said. He filed the brief in a closely watched case involving Washington, D.C.’s ban on keeping handguns at home for self-defense.

The head of a gun-control group said he was pleasantly surprised by the solicitor general’s stand.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence, said he saluted the administration for recognizing a need for limits on gun rights.

Disgusting.

wftv.com reports another incident of insane hoplophobia at an elementary school in Ocala, Florida.

School officials say the 5th grader was brown-bagging it. She brought a piece of steak for her lunch, but she also brought a steak knife. That’s when deputies were called.

It happened in the cafeteria at Sunrise Elementary School. The 10-year-old used the knife to cut the meat.

“She did not use it inappropriately. She did not threaten anyone with it. She didn’t pull it out and brandish it. Nothing of that nature,” explained Marion County School Spokesman Kevin Christian.

But a couple of teachers took the utensil and called the sheriff. When deputies arrived, they were unable to get the child’s parents on the phone, so they arrested her and took her to the county’s juvenile assessment center.

“And we didn’t handcuff her or treat her like a criminal. But, we took her to the assessment center to be assessed,” said Capt. James Pogue, Marion County Sheriff’s Office.

School officials said it doesn’t matter what the knife was being used for. They said they had no choice.

“Anytime there’s a weapon on campus, yes, we have to report it and we aggressively report it because we don’t want to take any chances, regardless,” Christian said.

But the sheriff’s office said the extreme measures in what some may say was a harmless incident had to do with school policy, not theirs.

“But once we’re notified, we have to take some type of action,” Pogue explained.

The student now faces a felony charge for the possession of a weapon on school property and the principal suspended her for ten days. The parents of the girl could not be reached for comment.

The sheriff’s office has turned the case over to the State Attorney’s Office.

Adam Freedman, in the Sunday New York Times, demonstrates the characteristic talent of members of the contemporary intelligentsia in his facile ability to reduce the discussion of the meaning of the Bill of Rights to an exercise resembling an archaeologist or historian poring over philological treatises on ancient punctuation and orthographic convention in order to guess at the meaning of some cryptic expression found upon a potsherd from a vanished civilization.

Of course, it is only possible to reject the concept of a right of citizens to be armed and able to defend themselves in the first place by achieving a level of estrangement from the philosophical perspectives, values, and ideals of the framers so extreme as to look upon their thought-world as unfamiliar, alien, and irrelevant to oneself, contemporary political life, and current jurisprudence as the outlook and perspective of some Greek hoplite or Egyptian charioteer.

It isn’t difficult in the least to find the meaning of a right to arms in English history, or extensive discussions of a right to arms (for purposes of self defense in both the private and the public sense) in writings of the framers themselves as well as in those of the writers on political philosophy and government who inspired them. One can easily consult the leading earlier treatises (Blackstone) on the laws of England and (Joseph Story) on the US Constitution to determine the nature of the previous status of such a right.

The avoidance of reliance on far more relevant evidence and the resort to the parsing of grammar and punctuation is simply another variation of the old lawyer’s maxim: If justice is on your side, argue justice. If the law is on your side, argue the law. If neither is on your side, pound upon the table.

Glenn Reynolds offers, in the New York Post, his view of the Supreme Court’s options in the DC Gun Ban case.

It can find that the Second Amendment doesn’t really do anything – that it’s merely a relic of an older era. But that’s a rather dangerous approach: What other parts of the Constitution might be considered relics? And can a judicial approach that leaves a tenth of the Bill of Rights meaningless possibly be sound?

It can find that the Second Amendment doesn’t grant individual rights, but only protects the right of states to arm their militias (or “state armies,” as some gun-control advocates put it). This would make the DC case go away, but at some cost: If states have a constitutional right, as against the federal government, to arm their militias as they see fit, then states that don’t like federal gun-control laws could just enroll every law-abiding citizen in the state militia and authorize those citizens to possess machine guns, tanks and other military gear.

Other consequences of “state armies” seem even more drastic. As Tom Lehrer put it:

We’ll try to stay serene and calm /

When Alabama gets the bomb.

Finally, the court can find – in accordance with the views of law professors as diverse as Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and, well, me – that the Second Amendment supports an individual right on the part of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms of the sort that are in ordinary use. As with other rights, such as freedom of speech, this is subject to reasonable regulation that stops well short of a ban.

This last would be the least radical approach, as it’s consistent with public opinion (most Americans think the Second Amendment gives them a right to own a gun) and with the 40-plus states whose own constitutions already provide for a right to arms. It would probably be the easiest to implement, too, as federal courts could (to a degree at least) look to state law for some guidance on how to implement it.

Finding otherwise would be ticklish for the court in another way. In recent decades, the Supreme Court has found many rights that aren’t specifically spelled out in the Constitution – rights to things like abortion, contraception or sodomy. If the court now follows up by denying a right that does seem to be spelled out, it would put its own legitimacy in the public eye at grave risk.

Houston Chronicle:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court will discuss gun control today in a private conference that soon could explode publicly.

Behind closed doors, the nine justices will consider taking a case that challenges the District of Columbia’s stringent handgun ban. Their ultimate decision will shape how far other cities and states can go with their own gun restrictions.

“If the court decides to take this up, it’s very likely it will end up being the most important Second Amendment case in history,” said Dennis Henigan, the legal director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Henigan predicted “it’s more likely than not” that the necessary four justices will vote to consider the case. The court will announce its decision Tuesday, and oral arguments could be heard next year.

Lawyers are swarming.

Texas, Florida and 11 other states weighed in on behalf of gun owners who are challenging D.C.’s strict gun laws. New York and three other states want the gun restrictions upheld. Pediatricians filed a brief supporting the ban. A Northern California gun dealer, Russell Nordyke, filed a brief opposing it. ..

The Second Amendment says, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Gun-control advocates say this means that the government can limit firearms ownership as part of its power to regulate the militia. Gun ownership is cast as a collective right, with the government organizing armed citizens to protect homeland security.

“The Second Amendment permits reasonable regulation of firearms to protect public safety and does not guarantee individuals the absolute right to own the weapons of their choice,” New York and the three other states declared in an amicus brief.

Gun-control critics contend that the well-regulated militia is beside the point, and say the Constitution protects an individual’s right to possess guns.

Last March, a divided appellate court panel sided with the individual-rights interpretation and threw out the D.C. ban.

The ruling clashed with other appellate courts, creating the kind of appellate-circuit split that the Supreme Court likes to resolve. The ruling obviously stung D.C. officials, but it perplexed gun-control advocates.

If D.C. officials tried to salvage their gun-control law by appealing to the Supreme Court — as they then did — they could give the court’s conservative majority a chance to undermine gun-control laws nationwide.

On the one hand, the movement of legal scholarship in recent decades towards acknowledgment of the real meaning of the Second Amendment based on the historical content of the political theory of the period and numerous statements by the framers argues that Supreme Court consideration would necessarily recall the Second Amendment fully from exile, and produce nationwide enforcement of an individual right to keep and bear arms.

But, on the other hand, realism notes that the consequence of overturning every form of state and local gun prohibition, and very possibly the National Firearms Act of 1934 which effectively prohibited private possession of fully-automatic weapons are bound to seem highly unpalatable to most justices. Moreover, these days, intensely combative, ideologically charged decisions have a strong tendency to result in 5-4 decisions, turning upon the (commonly European-informed) private moral intuitions of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

On the whole, given the opportunity of having the fate of an important but widely disputed, Constitutional right decided, potentially for many decades, effectively by Justice Kennedy alone, I’d rather wait for a different Court.

Nick Rivera debunks Hizzoner’s campaign narrative.

It’s among the most well-known and often-implemented strategies in the universe of presidential politics: appeal to the party’s base during the primaries and tack back towards the center during the run-up to the general election. This process doesn’t necessarily dictate that the presidential candidate “flip-flop” on any of his or her positions. He or she merely emphasizes one set of policies for the partisans who will be voting in the presidential primaries and then, several months later, emphasizes a different set of policies for the American electorate at large.

However, in recent years, a somewhat different tactic has emerged as a favorite among presidential candidates: the art of flip-flopping by presidential candidates who staked out positions that were popular when running for statewide office but became politically inconvenient when faced with appealing to the party base in the run up to presidential primaries. ...

In yet another example of a politician advocating one position while running for state or local office and a completely different one upon running for president, Rudy Giuliani has decided that he now supports a very strict interpretation of the Second Amendment. While Giuliani’s critics have been quick to point out Giuliani’s sudden change of heart with regards to gun control, Giuliani’s defenders have argued that Giuliani’s positions are consistent with the principle of federalism—arguing that while he may have supported strict gun control laws for New York City, he believes that individual states have the right to reject such gun control laws.

Unfortunately for Giuliani and his supporters, Giuliani’s current “federalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment directly contradicts his gun control record as mayor of New York…

Read the whole thing.

Minding the Campus:

Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school.

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus. Neither is the lack of protest among faculty and students for the kind of treatment Scheffler got. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending the student, reports that it has failed to find a single Hamline student or faculty member who has spoken out in favor of Scheffler’s right to free speech. So far, no protest from has been reported in the student newspaper or in outside internet outlets such as Myspace.

FIRE’s collected links on the case.

The Dennis Township ُPrimary School in Cape May, New Jersey suspended a 7-year-old second grader for drawing a stick figure holding a gun. He gave the drawing to a schoolmate whose parents saw it and complained.

The 7-year-old’s mother thought the official reaction was excessive, particularly since the drawing was depicting a person using a water pistol.

Press of Atlantic City

AP

California’s formerly-Republican Governor has signed two anti-gun bills embodying controversial theories.

Assembly Bill 821 bans the use of lead bullets in a number of California hunting zones inhabited by the California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) on the basis of the belief that the few surviving California Condors could ingest bullets from wounded-and-lost game animals or from hunter’s gut piles, then fail to regurgitate or quickly pass such foreign objects, consequently succumbing to lead poisoning.

Journalists report studies supporting such deaths, but those familiar with the digestive processes of raptors generally may well find it difficult to believe that indigestible lumps of metal are likely to remain inside the birds long enough to produce poisoning. Vulturine birds like other raptors eject indigestible portions of prey or carrion, such as bone or fur or feathers, in the form of pellets.

Arnold Schwarzenneger also signed the patently absurd Assembly Bill 1471 which mandates the application of imaginary non-existent technology in semiautomatic pistols. After January 1st, 2010, semiauto pistols in California must be

designed and equipped with a microscopic array of characters that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol, etched or otherwise imprinted onto in two or more places on the interior surface or internal working parts of the pistol, and that are transferred by imprinting on each cartridge case when the firearm is fired.

California’s democrat-majority assembly pretends to believe that an ability to trace ejected cartridge casings to specific individual firearms would be of great value in crime solving. That theory, of course, overlooks the possibility of smart criminals simply picking up their spent cases at shooting scenes, the truly diabolical taking a file to the microscopic array, and the just-plain-practical throwing the murder weapon into the Pacific.

In reality, of course, the impact (and concealed intention) is really simply to ban semi-automatic pistols in the state of California.

Governor Schwarzenegger ran originally as a Republican and a reformer. When he found himself taking large hits in the polls as the result of massive political advertising by state employee’s unions and hostile coverage by the liberal establishment media, he sold out and made peace with the democrat legislature, the unions, and the liberal activist lobby groups. Now he gets flattering press coverage for precisely this kind of betrayal.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation observed:

Governor Schwarzenegger has now effectively banned more firearms than Senators Kennedy, Feinstein and Schumer combined,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel. “The governor has proven to gun owners and sportsmen that he is just another liberal anti-gun Hollywood actor—he just plays a moderate Republican on TV. Mr. Schwarzenegger has now exposed himself for what he really is, the most anti-gun and anti-sportsmen governor in America.

James Bowman, in the New Atlantis:

Writing in the Washington Post about the dedication of the new Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., Philip Kennicott suggested that there is encoded in it the subtextual and “contentious” claim that “the left failed to adequately oppose communism.” As the memorial consists of a statue based on the replica of the Statue of Liberty carried by the students of Tiananmen Square in 1989, while the inscription on the plinth doesn’t mention “the left” at all but only says “to the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty,” you might almost think that somebody on the left had a sore conscience. It is hard to see, moreover, what would have been “contentious” about the claim—if it had been made—that, so far from opposing communism “adequately,” many on the American left hardly opposed it at all. Many others were unashamed apologists for the regimes that murdered the (estimated) 100 million people now being memorialized. Much of the left was —and remains— “anti-anti-communist.” This is what accounts for what Ferdinand Mount calls the “asymmetry of indulgence” afforded communistic and fascistic state-sponsored murders.

Robert Service, writing in The New Statesman, recently complained that merely because his book Comrades: A World History of Communism had noticed the toll taken on the lives and liberties of those unfortunate enough to have lived under Communist dictatorships, a reviewer in the British press had assigned to him the most despised epithet in the vocabulary of the contemporary British intellectual: “neocon.” Service noted ruefully that, though discredited wherever it has been instituted, “Communism, like nuclear fuel, has a long afterlife.” Indeed it does. But it didn’t occur to him to ask why. I think it is because Communism was a powerful example of the recurring strain of utopianism in the intellectual life of the West. Communism itself may have failed, but the utopian habit of thought on which it was based lingers on even among those who find Communism repugnant and hateful—even, perhaps, among the dreaded neocons themselves. And this survival, in turn, is a result of our culture’s having nowhere else to go in its long flight away from a heroic past it is determined to reject.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

David Kopel explains that it also violated the 1987 Constitution of the state of “New Columbia,” adopted by the District’s Council to serve in a desired condition of future statehood, which included in its Bill of Rights, a Sec.102 whose text was identical to the federal Second Amendment.

Accordingly, when DC lawyers argue to lower federal courts, and to the U.S. Supreme Court, that the language of the U.S. Second Amendment is not an ordinary individual right, they are making an argument which is decisively contradicted by the very constitution adopted by the government whom the lawyers are representing.

Second, DC’s cert. petition makes the novel argument that the District of Columbia (an entity over which the U.S. Constitution grants Congress plenary power) is somehow already a sovereign state for purposes of the Second Amendment; they claim that the 1886 Supreme Court decision in Presser v. Illinois, which held that under the 14th Amendment Privileges and Immunities clause, none of the Bill of Rights are enforceable against states, immunizes D.C. today from the enforcement of the Second Amendment. Yet the New Columbia Constitution shows that D.C. wants to be a state and wants the exact language of the Second Amendment to be enforceable against D.C.

The democrat crazies in the California legislature strike again.

San Diego Union Tribune:

The Assembly sent the governor a bill yesterday requiring that the next generation of semiautomatic handguns stamp identifying serial numbers on spent shell casings.

The legislation that would establish the first law of its kind in the nation could have a lasting impact on the war on crime, according to backers. But the limited application of the bill does not figure to be felt for several years.

The bill covers only new models or brands of semiautomatic handguns approved for sale in the state after Jan. 1, 2010. That excludes nearly 1,300 different semiautomatics already sold in the state. Revolvers, which do not discharge shell casings, also are not covered.

Nonetheless, supporters said tagging microscopic codes on ammunition fired from the guns of choice for gang members and violent criminals could prove invaluable to law enforcement.

“Chiefs of police from Stockton to San Diego, from Fresno to National City, 65 of them standing together in support of this bill because they see the potential to solve gun crime,” said Assemblyman Mike Feuer, a Los Angeles Democrat who carried the measure, AB 1471. ...

But in a passionate debate between gun-control Democrats and gun-rights Republicans, critics dismissed the technology as unreliable, expensive and easily thwarted. They warned that it would drive up the price of guns and drive manufacturers out of the state.

“There is nothing like this is any other state, and no other state is seriously considering this because they know it doesn’t work,” said Lawrence Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Council, an industry trade association.

The Assembly approved the bill on a 43-29 vote that fell largely along party lines. The Senate narrowly passed the bill last week. All involved are now closely watching for a signal from Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has taken no position on the bill.

Oh yes, California’s gang violence over drug distribution turf invariably takes the form of an Agatha Christie-style country house murder, in which Sherlock Holmes needs an assist from Rube Goldberg in determining if it was Colonel Mustard who shot Professor Plum in the library by identifying the true owner of the still-smoking Webley found smack in the middle of the oriental rug.

And no one less wily than Professor Moriarity himself would ever think of taking a file to their proposed-stamping mechanism in order to thwart those cunning legislators. Right!

Richard Munday, in the London Times, notes the impact of bien pensant gun control policies on British crime.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs.

Gun Owners of America reports that Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) have introduced a “Veterans Disarmament Bill,” which would expand the tactics used by the 1993 Brady Bill to disqualify Americans from gun ownership.

As many as a quarter to a third of returning Iraq veterans could be prohibited from owning firearms—based solely on a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder; Your ailing grandfather could have his entire gun collection seized, based only on a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s (and there goes the family inheritance); Your kid could be permanently banned from owning a gun, based on a diagnosis under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a story demonstrating just how far contemporary urban bourgeois phobia toward firearms can proceed.

In Roseville, doubtless a fashionable neighborhood of Sydney, residents are in a panic over the prospective opening of a sporting goods store.

Up in arms would accurately describe the incensed reaction of Roseville residents to news that a gunshop is to open in their midst.

Last night hundreds were expected to pack a community hall to protest against the approval granted by Ku-ring-gai Council, apparently without notification to those who may have an opinion about such an enterprise.

Andrew Peter, a gun enthusiast and coffee shop owner from Bondi Junction, made an application last month to turn an old printing shop into a sporting goods and firearms store. One of the main reasons for his decision was the estimated 1300 firearm owners who live in the area.

The shop is opposite a community hall that runs a preschool centre. It is also near a bus interchange used by schoolchildren, and some neighbouring businesses say the approval, although legal, is inappropriate.

Lisa Warrand is one of dozens of parents who fear the worst: the potential for an armed hold-up and shootout, or merely having to explain to children who walk past every day why a shop sells guns.

“Roseville has five churches and no pubs. People buy in this area because they want a more family-focused area,” she said yesterday. “We teach children about how bad guns are and yet we are being put into a position where we have to explain why there is a man in the car park carrying a gun bought across the road.”

Sally Cochrane runs the Zest hairdressing salon a few doors away. She concedes that the chances of a hold-up are slim but says it is a risk that should rule out the shop from the neighbourhood. “Children and guns don’t mix. It’s as simple as that, and if there is a robbery then it could be disastrous. I accept that this man has a right to open his shop and to sell guns, but not here.”

Do you feel threatened by this?

Even Western states with strong hunting cultures, no gun control laws, and residents who overwhelmingly vote Republican contain suburban enclaves of liberal insanity.

Chandler, Arizona, a major suburb of Phoenix, is obviously just such a locality. One glance at the junior high school’s web-site indicates immediately that it sees its goal as producing Berkeley Breathed’s Lola Granola rather than Wyatt Earp.

And, in a fashion typical these days nation-wide, the liberal regime in Chandler intends to enforce its politically correct perspective with absolute ruthlessness via “Zero Tolerance” policies. Zero Tolerance, as enforced by American school systems, seems commonly to include “zero connection to reality.” Even a kid’s doodled drawing of a ray gun may be treated as a “threat,” resulting in serious disciplinary action.

East Valley Tribune:

An East Valley eighth-grader was suspended this week after he turned in homework with a sketch that school officials said resembled a gun and posed a threat to his classmates.

But parents of the 13-year-old, who attends Payne Junior High School in the Chandler Unified School District, said the drawing was a harmless doodle of a fake laser, and school officials overreacted.

“I just can’t believe that there wasn’t another way to resolve this,” said Paula Mosteller, the boy’s mother. “He’s so upset. The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good.”

Payne Junior High officials did not allow the Tribune to view the drawing. The Mostellers said the drawing did not depict blood, injuries, bullets or any human targets. They said it was just a drawing that resembled a gun.

But Payne Junior High administrators determined that was enough to constitute a gun threat and gave the boy a five-day suspension that was later reduced to three days.

The Tribune isn’t publishing the boy’s first name at the request of his parents. ...

In the letter, school officials… indicated there would be a zero-tolerance policy toward gun threats.

Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the school is not allowed to discuss students’ discipline records. However, he said the sketch was “absolutely considered a threat,” and threatening words or pictures are punished.

The school did not contact police about the threat and did not provide counseling or an evaluation to the boy to determine if he intended the drawing as a threat.

The Mostellers said their son has no discipline record at the school because they just moved from Colorado this year.

The sketch was one of several drawings scratched in the margins of a science assignment that was turned in on Friday. The boy said he never meant for the picture to be seen as a threat. He said he was just drawing because he finished an assignment early.

School officials issued the suspension on Monday afternoon and notified the student’s father, Ben. He met with school officials and persuaded them to shorten the suspension from five days to three.

That kids’ parents should sue the pants off that school district, and the school board should obviously discharge all school officials incapable of, or merely disinclined toward, distinguishing between drawings and actual physical objects.

Reuters:

It resembles a hand-held electric razor and is available in metallic pink, electric blue, titanium silver and black pearl.

But it gives out a 50,000-volt jolt that short-circuits brain signals and momentarily incapacitates.

Meet the sleek new C2 stun gun from Taser International in Scottsdale, a controversial device aimed mainly at women consumers that has sparked widespread concern among U.S. law enforcement and human rights groups.

Police forces in the United States have been issued with Tasers since 1999 to subdue violent criminals. A pistol-like civilian version aimed at the self-defense market has been available since 1994.

But the new, lighter, brighter designer version, which was launched in late July with a price tag of around $350, is small enough to tuck into a purse and packs the same paralyzing punch.

“We wanted to make sure that it was something that people were comfortable carrying and didn’t make it look like they were ‘Dirty Harry,’” said Tom Smith, the company’s co-founder and board chairman, referring to the Clint Eastwood movie.

“And it does the job.”

But some of the nation’s top police authorities are concerned that the gadgets could easily wind up in the wrong hands. Amnesty International also is opposed, saying it can pose “serious harm” for women.

The C2 Taser, which fires two electrical probes and is equipped with a laser sight, can legally be sold to consumers in all but seven U.S. states. It is largely banned for civilian use throughout the rest of the world.

“If a police officer or a civilian is stunned with a Taser there are a whole array of things that can happen and most of them are very bad,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police in Washington, D.C.

Pasco, whose group represents 325,000 police officials nationwide, said the immobilizing devices should be limited to well-trained law enforcement professionals.

“There’s a tremendous amount of respect and accountability that goes along with a police officer using a Taser,” he said. “This Taser is no more regulated than a hair drier.”

Even the least dangerous weapon, one designed only momentarily to stun, can be supposed to be capable of being used to resist the authority of the state, and is therefore unacceptable to extreme statists philosophically committed to the Leviathan state’s total monopoly of force.

And civilian self defense, any level of physical resistance to victimization by violent criminals. is unacceptable to Pacifist extremists.

A record of hundreds of millions of deaths by government in the last century ought to be sufficient to discredit completely ideologies of extremist Statism, and extreme Pacifism has always been a minority position. So why does the mainstream media insist on treating both of these absurd ideologies as the appropriate standards for evaluating public policy?

A feud between East Bay and West Bay gangs is believed to have been behind some shootings in San Francisco on Monday.

And the city Solons promptly responded.

San Francisco’s already tough laws on firearms will get even stronger—becoming some of the most restrictive in the country—after a vote at City Hall Tuesday. But even new restrictions won’t do much to stop the gun violence escalating on city streets, one sponsor of the new laws said after the vote. ...

The laws—which gained final approval from the Board of Supervisors—would restrict both the sale and possession of firearms.

Specifically, they would prohibit the possession or sale of firearms on city property, require firearms in residences to be in a locked container or have trigger locks and require firearm dealers to submit an inventory to the chief of police every six months.

The last provision is intended to allow city officials to know how many guns are sold, though there is only one gun shop in the city.

“We’re pleased that, as soon as the mayor signs this, San Francisco has the strongest anti-gun laws in the nation,” said Nathan Ballard, spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom. The mayor sponsored the legislation, along with Supervisors Sophie Maxwell and Ross Mirkarimi.

Despite the laws, however, Mirkarimi said he doubts they will quell the kind of violence that erupted on Monday afternoon, which police suspect may be tied to a feud between a San Francisco gang and an East Bay gang.

Gun Control regulations will have zero impact on actual gun crimes even the politicians who propose and pass them admit, but isn’t it wonderful that San Francisco has the strongest anti-gun laws in the country?
—————————————————————-

The comedian Jackie Mason has some very sensible things to say about Gun Control (in his characteristic ethnic accent, of course).

6:43 video

Hat tip to Bird Dog.
—————————————————————-

And this horrifying news item from Connecticut demonstrates exactly why you need to have a loaded gun somewhere conveniently within reach in your home.

Mark Steyn observes:

If you live in one of those jurisdictions like New York City or Washington, DC where your Second Amendment rights are dramatically constrained, here’s a useful tip. If you’re looking for a good place to buy cheap firearms, try the local gun control group:

The founder of an antiviolence group called No Guns pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal weapons charges.

Hector “Big Weasel” Marroquin is accused of selling an assault rifle, a machine gun, two pistols and two silencers to undercover federal agents last fall.

I love America! Even the anti-gun groups are full of gun nuts packing totally awesome heat.

LA Times story
———————————-

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

The Daily Breeze, last Friday, reported a truly mind-boggling case of institutional insanity, of the sort that nearly always comes out of California.

A fifth-grade promotion ceremony in Rancho Palos Verdes turned into a free-speech battleground Thursday, when students were asked to remove weapons from toys that had been placed on mortarboard caps because of the school’s zero-tolerance policy for weapons on campus.

Each year, students decorate wide caps with princesses, football goal posts, zebras, guitars and other items to express their personalities and career goals. Cornerstone at Pedregal School is the only Palos Verdes Peninsula public school to practice the tradition.

On Thursday, before the ceremony, one boy was told he couldn’t participate unless he agreed to clip off the tips of the plastic guns carried by the minuscule GIs on his cap. Ten others complied with the order before the event.

Parents reacted angrily, calling Principal Denise Leonard’s decision censorship, but the Palos Verdes Peninsula School District defended her.

Cole McNamara and Austin Nakata, 11-year-old buddies who share an interest in all things military, said they put the toys on their hats to support American troops in Iraq.

“I was kind of mad because they just went over and clipped them off and didn’t say anything about it,” Austin said.

His father, Glen Nakata, said he was disappointed that parents were not approached or consulted on elimination of the “firearms.”

“I felt they were keeping the boys from expressing their patriotism, their strong beliefs toward the military,” he said.

Glen Nakata’s father served in the U.S. Air Force. And Austin wants to attend a military academy when he’s older. Cole wants to join the Marine Corps, said his father, Paul McNamara.

To treat the “injuries” caused by the order to remove the offending weaponry, Austin wrapped the plastic stumps in white gauze and painted on faux blood.

The principal pulled Cole aside Thursday morning, handed him a pair of scissors and said the guns had to go. ...

In enforcing the decision, the district cited its Safe Schools policy and the federal Gun Free Schools Act of 1994, a federal law designed to remove firearms from schools.

Susan Liberati, an assistant superintendent, said she believes “the principal has interpreted district policy accurately, and we support her in that.”

A copy of the district’s Safe Schools policy obtained by the Daily Breeze includes no mention of toy army men. Students found to be “possessing, selling or otherwise furnishing a firearm” are expelled for one year, the policy states.

Weapons are also mentioned in the board’s “weapons and dangerous instruments” policy that allows only authorized law enforcement or security personnel to possess “weapons, imitation firearms or dangerous instruments of any kind” on school grounds.

Board President Barbara Lucky declined comment on the incident or the policy.

“Sounds like a good question for legal counsel,” Lucky said.

It’s wrong for public institutions to adopt policies embodying extremist and Utopian forms of Pacifism or other doctrines wildly at odds with the religious views and moral philosophies of normal and rational Americans. But it is considerably worse to adopt policies which, whatever their philosophic content, represent pure insanity.

It’s bad enough that we have lots of people in this society so lacking in common sense that they hope to prevent criminal violence by trying per impossible to eliminate the material cause (the weapon), while opposing taking effective action to stop the operation of the efficient cause (the criminal). We’ve reached the point where persons in charge of educational institutions are incapable of distinguishing between real objects and their images. They shouldn’t let people that stupid go out by themselves, let alone trusting them to run any kind of school. The 5th graders have more sense.

Hat tip to Wordsmith from Nantucket.

Los Angeles Times:

Former 18th Street gang member Hector “Weasel” Marroquin for years was celebrated and rewarded for having turned his life around.

He founded the anti-gang organization NO GUNS and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the city for his efforts to help steer Latino youths away from a life of crime. His champions included former state Sen. Tom Hayden.

But his arrest this week on charges of selling firearms to federal undercover officers underscored concerns long held by people familiar with Marroquin’s background that he had not left his criminal life behind.

“I never for a moment believed that he ever left the life,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney and former member of the Los Angeles Police Commission who noted that she saw Marroquin at meetings of anti-gang agencies. “I always thought he was using the system.”

Marroquin, 51, was arrested Thursday at his Downey home on charges of selling several guns, including a machine gun, two silencers and two rifles, to undercover officers. He bailed out of Los Angeles County jail Thursday night and could not be reached for comment.

His lawyer, Patrick Smith, did not return phone calls Friday. ...

Marroquin’s arrest marks the latest chapter in a life filled with controversy.

In the mid-1990s, claiming to have left the gang life, Marroquin formed NO GUNS — Networks Organized for Gang Unity and Neighborhood Safety — headquartered in Lennox. Over the next decade, NO GUNS emerged as one of the area’s few anti-gang groups run by Latinos.

In 2000, the Sheriff’s Department called in NO GUNS to help quell riots between Latinos and blacks at its Pitchess Detention Center.

But some law enforcement officials believed that Marroquin was a front man for the Mexican Mafia prison gang and that NO GUNS was a facade for illegal activity and a channel for public funds.

Classic.

AP:

Bubba Ludwig can’t walk, talk or open the refrigerator door — but he does have his very own Illinois gun permit.

The 10-month-old, whose given name is Howard David Ludwig, was issued a firearm owner’s identification card after his father, Howard Ludwig, paid the $5 fee and filled out the application, not expecting to actually get one.

The card lists the baby’s height (2 feet, 3 inches), weight (20 pounds) and has a scribble where the signature should be.

With some exceptions, the cards are required of any Illinois residents purchasing or possessing firearms or ammunition within the state. There are no age restrictions on the cards, an official said.

Illinois State Police oversee the application process. Their purpose, said Lt. Scott Compton, is to keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons, those under an order of protection and those convicted of domestic violence.

“Does a 10-month-old need a FOID card? No, but there are no restrictions under the act regarding age of applicants,” he said.

Ludwig, 30, of Chicago, applied for the card after his own father bought Bubba a 12-gauge Beretta shotgun as a gift. The weapon will probably be kept at Ludwig’s father’s house until the boy is at least 14.

The Left has been accusing the Bush Administration of trampling Americans’ Constitutional rights with little basis for some time. So, what do you know? Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General currently considerably under fire from the Left, really is trying an Constitutional endrun.

The Second Amendment Foundation yesterday issued this press release:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ troubling support of legislation that would allow him and future attorneys general the arbitrary power to block firearms purchases without due process is cause for him to step down as the nation’s highest ranking law enforcement officer, the Second Amendment Foundation said today.

The bill, S. 1237, was introduced last week at the Justice Department’s request by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), one of the most extreme anti-gunners in Congress. Called the “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2007,” this legislation would give the Attorney General discretionary authority to deny the purchase of a firearm or the issuance of a firearm license or permit because of some vague suspicion that an American citizen may be up to no good.

“This bill,” said SAF founder Alan Gottlieb, “raises serious concerns about how someone becomes a ‘suspected terrorist.’ Nobody has explained how one gets their name on such a list, and worse, nobody knows how to get one’s name off such a list.

“The process by which someone may appeal the Attorney General’s arbitrary denial seems weak at best,” Gottlieb suggested, “and there is a greater concern. When did we decide as a nation that it is a good idea to give a cabinet member the power to deny someone’s constitutional right simply on suspicion, without a trial or anything approaching due process?

“We’re not surprised that General Gonzales has found an agreeable sponsor in Frank Lautenberg,” Gottlieb observed. “The senator from New Jersey has never seen a restrictive gun control scheme he did not immediately embrace, and S. 1237 is loaded with red flags. It would allow an appointed bureaucrat the authority to suspend or cancel someone’s Second Amendment right without even being charged with a crime.

“Attorney General Gonzales has no business asking for that kind of power over any tenet in the Bill of Rights,” Gottlieb said. “He took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not trample it. Perhaps it is time for him to go.”

When you are being actively attacked by the Left, and you proceed to stab-in-the-back your own base on the Right which is defending you, I would call that “implicitly resigning.” Mr. Gonzalez might as well make the implicit explicit.

AP reports:

Authorities dropped charges Friday against an aide to Virginia Sen. Jim Webb who carried a loaded gun into the U.S. Capitol complex.

“After reviewing and analyzing all of the evidence in the case, we do not believe the essential elements of the crime of carrying a pistol without a license can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” U.S. Attorney Jeff Taylor, top prosecutor in the District of Columbia, said in a short statement.

Well and good, readers probably think.

But Mr. Taylor and the Associated Press are overlooking the fact the Second Circuit struck down the District’s gun law in Parker v. District of Columbia on March 9th. Mr. Thompson was arrested on March 26th.

Charges have been dropped, but you can rest assured that thousands of dollars in defense legal fees were accrued. (Let’s hope Jim Webb is paying them.)

And a record of Mr. Thompson’s arrest and his fingerprints have been retained by the FBI.

Original report

Follow up

Dan Simpson’s editorial is an unfortunately typical expression of the excessive and exaggeratedly phobic attitudes of members of our over-domesticated, metrosexual intelligentsia toward firearms.

Guns are regarded as detestable and intrinsically dangerous objects which need to be kept under official control at all times, ideally in bank vaults. Their complete removal from American society is so unquestionably desirable that even house-to-house searches, and the shredding of the Bill of Rights, would be a perfectly acceptable price.

Obviously, this kind of policy proposal represents not a practical response to a real problem, but rather an irrational and emotional outburst, indifferent to benefits and costs, oblivious to process and law, expressive of an overwhelming combination of fear and aversion so profound as to dispense completely with practicality, proportionality, and cause and effect.

This kind of hostility toward firearms, this hoplophobia, needs to be recognized as the kind of irrationalism that it is.

In a sane society, familiarity and skill with arms, possession of the ability to defend oneself and others would be looked upon as essential components of every man’s education.

In dojos offering training in kendo and aikido, the following phrase written in the grass script on a scroll is commonly hung for purposes of admonition and inspiration.

These Japanese radicals are pronounced Katsujin-ken Satsujin-to (sometimes, Katsujinken satsujinken) meaning “The sword which kills is the sword which gives life.”

They are often rendered more explicitly in English as “The sword which cuts down evil is the sword which preserves life.”

This adage is attributed to the masters of Yagyū school, the Tokugawa shoguns’ personal instructors in swordsmanship.

And those Yagyū school sword sensei-s were right. The rightful use of weapons is essential in an imperfect world to defend innocent lives against unjust violence.

A wider commitment to skill at arms and a more common readiness to defend the innocent would be infinitely more effective at saving the lives of victims of attacks by madmen and criminals than a totalitarian program attempting to enforce universal disarmament.

Katsu-tempo satsu-tempo.

At Virginia Tech, a gun in the hands of the right bystander could have been the gun which destroyed evil and the gun which preserved life.

A liberal indulges in a pretty repulsive bit of fantasy in the Toledo Blade.

Now, how would one disarm the American population? First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm. The population would then be given three months to turn in their guns, without penalty.

Hunters would be able to deposit their hunting weapons in a centrally located arsenal, heavily guarded, from which they would be able to withdraw them each hunting season upon presentation of a valid hunting license. The weapons would be required to be redeposited at the end of the season on pain of arrest. When hunters submit a request for their weapons, federal, state, and local checks would be made to establish that they had not been convicted of a violent crime since the last time they withdrew their weapons. In the process, arsenal staff would take at least a quick look at each hunter to try to affirm that he was not obviously unhinged.

It would have to be the case that the term “hunting weapon” did not include anti-tank ordnance, assault weapons, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, or other weapons of war.

All antique or interesting non-hunting weapons would be required to be delivered to a local or regional museum, also to be under strict 24-hour-a-day guard. There they would be on display, if the owner desired, as part of an interesting exhibit of antique American weapons, as family heirlooms from proud wars past or as part of collections.

Gun dealers could continue their work, selling hunting and antique firearms. They would be required to maintain very tight inventories. Any gun sold would be delivered immediately by the dealer to the nearest arsenal or the museum, not to the buyer.

The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.

Clearly, since such sweeps could not take place all across the country at the same time. But fairly quickly there would begin to be gun-swept, gun-free areas where there should be no firearms. If there were, those carrying them would be subject to quick confiscation and prosecution. On the streets it would be a question of stop-and-search of anyone, even grandma with her walker, with the same penalties for “carrying.”

A fine fantasy, if the idea of living like a herd animal under the complete control of the state appeals to you.

I also find it remarkable how eager liberals are to trample the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans in order to attempt to prevent the crimes committed by an infinitesimally small number of deranged people. And I find the limitless faith in these kinds of ameliorist schemes even more remarkable. If you are a liberal, the calculative power of human reason expressed via governmental force is omnipotent. Just pass yourself a law, and “so let it be written, so let it be done.”

Liberals don’t believe that a lot of people would bury or otherwise conceal their guns. Liberals don’t realize that new guns can be built in American basements with hand tools the same way the are built in Afghan villages. Liberals don’t understand that black markets invariably spring up to provide any banned commodity. Existing laws would not have stopped the Virginia Tech shooter from obtaining heroin and cocaine if he wanted them.

German Maschinengewehr 08

The Boston Globe reports that the discovery in its attic of a German machine-gun captured in the course of one of the most famous American battlefield feats of valor in WWI has delivered the smalltown library of Nahant, Massachusetts into the clutches of the BATF.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 required fully-automatic weapons (even war trophies) to be federally licensed.

Sergeant Alvin York’s against-all-odds capture of a heavily fortified German machine gun nest in the Argonne Forest of France 89 years ago made York an American legend.

With seven other American infantrymen, he took 132 German prisoners and silenced German machine guns that had slaughtered Allied troops. His actions earned the humble Tennessee farmer an iconic status alongside Daniel Boone and a title declaring him the greatest American hero of World War I. He was held up as the very embodiment of humility and courage.

Which is why officials at Nahant’s public library were thrilled four years ago to discover what they say is one of the captured German machine guns in the library attic.

“I tripped over the gun one day, not knowing what it was,” said Daniel deStefano, the library’s director. “I picked up what I thought was a pipe. It was the barrel of the gun.”

Library officials say they researched markings on the gun and searched local newspaper archives and town documents for answers about the weapon’s origin, determining that the gun had been given to the town in 1918 by an Army clerk, Nahant native Mayland Lewis.

According to the research, Lewis had plucked the weapon from a pile given up by surrendering Germans and shipped it home. Briefly prized as a souvenir of the war, it was paraded through the town on Armistice Day in 1919 by Boy Scouts who towed it in a red wagon. But over the years it faded from public view.

Its rediscovery stoked dreams of a big windfall for the library, where officials had been pondering ways to finance an expansion of the cramped facility and an upgrade of an antiquated cataloging system. Library officials said they contacted several auctioneers in New England who estimated the weapon’s value at $100,000 and perhaps several times more than that.

But the dreams didn’t last long. Library officials soon learned that the gun is illegal and that they can do very little with it.

Federal gun laws prohibit possession or sale of automatic guns unless they are registered with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. In the library attic for years, the German machine gun was never registered. The library isn’t allowed to register the gun now because federal law prohibits new registrations on automatic weapons, except in rare circumstances.

Since it is illegal for the library even to have the gun, Nahant police took it and stored it under lock and key in an evidence locker, forestalling seizure by the ATF.

“We cannot hold onto this weapon,” deStefano said. “If we kept it on the premises, they were going to come and get it, and they were going to destroy it. This is a piece of history. We’re kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.”

The town has appealed to the ATF for permission to sell the gun, but so far, bureau officials have rejected the pleas.

A spokesman for the ATF said yesterday that it would be possible for the Nahant police to register the gun and take responsibility for it, which would prevent it from being destroyed. They could also possibly transfer it to another public agency, but it’s unlikely that it can be sold on the market , according to Jim McNally, a spokesman in Boston for the ATF .

He said the agency—at the request of US Representative John F. Tierney, a Salem Democrat—is researching options that Nahant might be allowed under the law, such as transferring the gun to a private museum.

“There are pretty clear-cut laws when it comes to automatic weapons,” McNally said yesterday. “This is a unique weapon, and it would be sad to see it destroyed. Whether it can raise money for what they’re looking for is another matter.”

In an effort last fall to get special permission to register the gun, town officials approached Tierney and Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry for legislation that would grant the town an exception to the restrictions. Neither Kerry nor Kennedy responded.

Tierney issued a statement yesterday calling the machine gun a “remarkable object” and said his office is engaged in discussions with the ATF.

The library’s machine gun discovery was first reported Monday by The Daily Item in Lynn.

Richard Hallion, a military historian who has studied Hiram Maxim, a Maine native who built the first effective machine gun, said he knew of no other gun from the York battle. He believes that numerous museums might be interested in preserving this one.

But Chris Berg, who owns a company that specializes in historic military weapons, said that the library’s gun is worth little because it is not registered.

“In all honesty,” he said, “it’s only worth $500.” He said if it were registered and legal to sell, he would pay at least $50,000.

Abashed by nationwide ridicule resulting from Dean Betty Trachtenberg’s ban on stage weapons in university theatrical productions, the Yale administration has announced its cancellation of the ban on free speech grounds. Yale should also reverse its ban on possession of firearms on campus, on second Amendment grounds, but that’s hardly likely, is it?

The Yale Daily News:

Stage weapons will again be allowed in University theatrical productions, in a reversal of last week’s ban, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Tuesday morning.

Administrators decided Monday afternoon to require that audiences instead be informed of the use of stage weapons before the start of every performance, she said. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, which left 33 students dead last Monday, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg had told students that they would be required to substitute obviously fake props for realistic stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Klasky said the University reversed the policy because of concerns about free speech.

“As an institution that has always valued free speech, we wanted to uphold the principles that we have always adhered to,” she said.

Klasky said the policy of announcing the use of stage weapons in advance will hold for all future campus productions.

The ban affected at least two shows that went up over the weekend: the play “Red Noses” and the opera “Orpheus in the Underworld,” and attracted national media attention as well as causing a stir among students involved in theater on campus. Several students complained that the requirement infringed on their free speech, while others pointed out that the policy was unlikely to assuage anxiety about Virginia Tech.

But over the weekend, Trachtenberg, who is retiring at the end of the academic year, said student criticism of the stage weapons ban had been exaggerated.

“I think people should start thinking about other people rather than trying to feel sorry for themselves and thinking that the administration is trying to thwart their creativity,” Trachtenberg said. “They’re not using their own intelligence. … We have to think of the people who might be affected by seeing real-life weapons.”

Klasky declined to name the people involved in making Monday’s decision.

Mark Steyn comments pretty acerbically on the academic intelligentsia’s aversion to weapons and self-defense… and to reality.

...at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to “permit the use of obviously fake weapons” such as plastic swords. ...

I think we have a problem in our culture not with “realistic weapons” but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already “fear guns,” at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a “gun-free zone,” formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a “gun-free zone” except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

But you can’t do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has created a “Gun-Free School Zone.” Or, to be more accurate, they’ve created a sign that says “Gun-Free School Zone.” And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The “gun-free zone” turned out to be a fraud—not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.

I live in northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in part because it has a high rate of gun ownership. We do have the occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told ‘em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased ‘em away. Eventually they figured they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots worked it out: Where’s the nearest place around here where you’re most likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area. To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you’re not in the real world.

The “gun-free zone” fraud isn’t just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia’s distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with “the erosion of intellectual self-defense,” and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and “safe spaces” that’s the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we “fear guns,” and “verbal violence,” and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ‘’The Three Musketeers.’’ What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?

Whole thing.

The ever-astute New York Times has discovered that, in theory, existing federal law should have prevented the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shootings from purchasing a gun.

When you buy a gun, you are required to fill out and sign a form which asks if you have ever been adjudicated legally incompetent, mentally incapacitated, or been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.

Firearms Purchase Eligibility

This sort of thing is exactly like the Post Office asking you to sign a form promising that the package you are mailing does not contain prohibited items or a bomb.

Asking ordinary people to fill out these kinds of forms is a complete waste of time, and the persons the form is intended to block will always simply lie.

And there is no point in singling out Virginia. Local adaptations of the same federal form 4473 are used in every state.

Example: Minnesota version

WASHINGTON, April 20 — Under federal law, the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from purchasing a gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment, a government official and several legal experts said Friday.

Federal law prohibits anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” as well as those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, from purchasing a gun.

A special justice’s order in late 2005 that directed Mr. Cho to seek outpatient treatment and declared him to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself fits the federal criteria and should have immediately disqualified him, said Richard J. Bonnie, chairman of the Supreme Court of Virginia’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also said if that if found mentally defective by a court, Mr. Cho should have been denied a gun.

The federal law defines adjudication as a mental defective to include “determination by a court, board, commission or other lawful authority” that as a result of mental illness, the person is a “danger to himself or others.”

Mr. Cho’s ability to purchase two guns despite his history of mental illness has cast new attention on Virginia’s relatively lax gun laws. And since states are supposed to enforce federal gun laws, the sales raise questions about whether Virgina — and other states — fully comply with the federal restrictions.

We’ve known that since early in our own Freshman year, of course. But Dean of Undergraduate Affairs Betty Trachtenburg (PC-enforcer for the University) really outdid herself in the liberal stupidity department with this response to the Virginia Tech Shootings.

Oldest College Daily:

In the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Students involved in this weekend’s production of “Red Noses” said they first learned of the new rules on Thursday morning, the same day the show was slated to open. They were subsequently forced to alter many of the scenes by swapping more realistic-looking stage swords for wooden ones, a change that many students said was neither a necessary nor a useful response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

According to students involved in the production, Trachtenberg has banned the use of some stage weapons in all of the University’s theatrical productions. While shows will be permitted to use obviously fake plastic weapons, students said, those that hoped to stage more realistic scenes of stage violence have had to make changes to their props.

Trachtenberg could not be reached for comment Thursday night.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

The Jawa Report catches newspapers from Savannah, Bradenton, San Jose, Trenton, and Canada referring to the shootings at Virginia Tech as the worst mass murder in U.S. history, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer doing only slightly better referring to the second worst mass murder in U.S. history.

Truth is, the Virginia Tech shooting rampage, while tragic, was not “the worst mass murder in U.S. history.” It wasn’t the “second worst mass murder in U.S. history,” or even the third, or the fourth.

The 9/11 attacks (2,998 deaths), the Oklahoma City bombing (168 deaths), the HappyLand arson (87 deaths) and the Bath, Michigan bombing (45 deaths) all claimed more victims than the Virginia Tech shootings (32 deaths).

But, as Vinnie noted yesterday, those events don’t fit neatly into the anti-gun political agenda, so they need to go down the memory hole, thereby leaving the Virginia Tech shootings as “the worst mass murder in U.S. history,” with Charles Whitman’s shooting rampage taking a close second.

Gary Koppel quotes Beccarria, the father of Criminology, on Gun Control.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

Glenn Reynolds editorialized in the New York Daily News today on the subject of campus firearm bans, which did not deter the killer, but which could very possibly have prevented his being stopped a lot earlier.

On Monday, as the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was unfolding, I went into my advanced constitutional law seminar to find one of my students upset. My student, Tara Wyllie, has a permit to carry a gun in Tennessee, but she isn’t allowed to have a weapon on campus. That left her feeling unsafe. “Why couldn’t we meet off campus today?” she asked.

Virginia Tech graduate student Bradford Wiles also has a permit to carry a gun, in Virginia. But on the day of the shootings, he would have been unarmed for the same reason: Like the University of Tennessee, where I teach, Virginia Tech bans guns on campus.

In The Roanoke Times last year – after another campus incident, when a dangerous escaped inmate was roaming the campus – Wiles wrote that, when his class was evacuated, “Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness. That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.”

Wiles reported that when he told a professor how he felt, the professor responded that she would have felt safer if he had had a gun, too.

What’s more, she would have been safer. That’s how I feel about my student (one of a few I know who have gun carry permits), as well. She’s a responsible adult; I trust her not to use her gun improperly, and if something bad happened, I’d want her to be armed because I trust her to respond appropriately, making the rest of us safer.

Virginia Tech doesn’t have that kind of trust in its students (or its faculty, for that matter). Neither does the University of Tennessee. Both think that by making their campuses “gun-free,” they’ll make people safer, when in fact they’re only disarming the people who follow rules, law-abiding people who are no danger at all.

This merely ensures that the murderers have a free hand. If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be harder.

In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school’s vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene. In February’s Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.

Police can’t be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it’s usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they’re armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.

Murderous attacks like the recent homicides at Virginia Tech always produce demands for some sacrifice of liberty as part of a program of preventive measures intended to prevent their recurrence.

A PersonfromPolock, at the Volokh Conspiracy, observes (not entirely tongue-in-cheek) that slightly reducing the immunities supplied by the First Amendment would do a lot more to help than eviscerating the Second Amendment.

To the Editor:

A practical, commonsense way of reducing gun violence—especially in the schools—would be a federal law prohibiting, or at least seriously limiting, the interstate reporting of sensational gun crimes like Virginia Tech for five working days.

Such a law would not affect local coverage, where there is a need for the immediate dissemination of information, but would make the event ‘old news’ when it was finally reported nationally and therefore unlikely to get the massive publicity that invites further, copycat violence. Even a small reduction in today’s intense coverage of such events might, by not stimulating some potential gunman to action, save lives.

While ‘gun’ laws are hard to enforce because of the easy concealment of firearms, the public nature of ‘news’ would make enforcement of this law virtually automatic.

Because the delay would be short and serve a compelling government interest, it should pass constitutional muster; the Brady law serves admirably as a precedent here. While First Amendment absolutists will cavil, the simple fact is that it is as wrong to hold that the Press Clause protects a media ‘right’ to lethally endanger the public as it would be to hold that the Religion Clause protects human sacrifice.

Sincerely,

For some reason, even though the suggested law would clearly be ‘worth trying’ (a standard rationale of the Left), no ‘anti gun violence’ paper has ever published it.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Predictably, the European press is blaming the lack of a state monopoly of force for the killings at Virginia Tech. With characteristic incompetence, too, many of these European editorialists blame the expiration of the (so-called) Assault Weapon Ban, which, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with events at Blacksburg.

The killer evidently used an ordinary 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol and some kind of .22 pistol. There was no authentic, or even mislabeled, assault weapon involved.

In the strongest editorialized image of the day, German cable news broadcaster NTV flashed an image of the former head of the National Rifle Association, the US gun lobby: In other words, blame rifle-wielding Charlton Heston for the 33 dead.

The German Bild offers a typical example of the journalist’s failure to acquaint himself with the actual facts.

Now we will probably begin discussing the overly lax gun laws in the United States. There, buying a machine gun is often easier than getting a driver’s license.

He must be thinking of Iraq, not the United States. Americans have needed a costly federal license, involving lots of paperwork, since passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, to own a fully automatic weapon, and a number of states do not allow private ownership of full-auto weapons, period.

The comedy magician duo apply their customary skepticism to the myths of Gun Control.

28:00 video

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Urban prosecutors and police departments ignoring state law in Texas has led to the unlikely alliance of the NRA and ACLU, reports the New York Times.

Like many other states, Texas bans the carrying of concealed handguns without a license. Obtaining a license requires a background check and a gun-safety course. By long-established law, however, Texans can cite “traveling” as a defense to possession of an unlicensed handgun. But while traveling was widely understood to denote a journey of some distance, it was never defined. (Travel on planes and other interstate conveyances banning weapons falls under federal jurisdiction.)

In 1997, the State Legislature tried to clarify the law by removing unlicensed carrying of a weapon as an offense while traveling. But it left unresolved whether traveling required making an overnight stop, crossing county lines or other conditions.

In 2005, lawmakers sought to remove the ambiguity by declaring that anyone in a private vehicle who was not engaged in criminal activity or otherwise barred from possessing a firearm was “presumed to be traveling,” and thus exempt from restrictions on concealed handguns.

Terry Keel, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives who sponsored the bill, explained its intent in a statement entered into the record: “In plain terms, a law-abiding person should not fear arrest if they are transporting a concealed pistol in a motor vehicle.”

But the measure hardly ended the controversy.

Almost as soon as it became law in September 2005, the Texas District and County Attorneys Association signaled its displeasure by advising members that the act did not rule out arrests of otherwise law-abiding drivers carrying weapons. The association said it was up to the courts to determine whether a person was, in fact, traveling. “Therefore,” it declared, “officers are still acting within their lawful discretion if they arrest a person who might qualify for the traveling defense or the new traveling presumption.”

Or, as Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, which includes Houston, argued, “The presumption of innocence does not make the person innocent.”

Dana Milbank skewers a well-deserving Senator James Webb for preeningly displaying his gun-owning credentials at a news conference (for the benefit of Old Dominion constituents), while carefully dissociating himself from any responsibility for his aide Phillip Thompson’s arrest for entering the Capitol with a briefcase containing Webb’s loaded 9mm pistol.

I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment,” (Webb) announced, wearing the sort of baggy suit that made it hard to tell for sure if he was packing heat. “I have had a permit to carry a weapon in Virginia for a long time, and I believe that it’s important for me personally and for a lot of people in the situation that I am in—to be able to defend myself and my family.”

If Webb seemed to be enjoying the moment a bit too much, that’s probably because a Virginia politician has never lost an election for loving guns too much. But Phillip Thompson, who carried the weapon, derived rather less pleasure from the incident.

Thompson—a.k.a. “Lockup No. 1”—spent 28 hours in the slammer after walking into the Russell building Monday morning with a gun and two loaded magazines in his briefcase. Two hours after Webb’s performance in front of the cameras, Thompson—sandwiched between drug cases and domestic disputes—made his appearance in the foul-smelling arraignment room at D.C. Superior Court. He had a 5 o’clock shadow and a new pair of leg irons to accessorize his rumpled business suit. Ordered to stand in a box marked off with frayed duct tape, he must have been too stunned to answer when the judge asked if he understood the charges.

“You have to answer, sir,” the judge told the silent defendant. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

Could it have been any worse? Well, consider that Monday was Thompson’s 45th birthday.

A court employee handed out copies of the complaint as reporters rushed from the arraignment room to chase Thompson. His fancy Virginia lawyer, unfamiliar with the bowels of the courthouse, led the defendant out the wrong exit—forcing him to walk several blocks to a parking garage, surrounded all the way by TV cameras and reporters.

“Who gave you the gun?”

“Was it a big mistake?”

“What are you going to do now?”...

The lawyer, Richard Gardiner, answered for his client. “No comment. . . . He’s not gonna have any comment. . . . He’s not making any comment, on the advice of his attorney.” Thompson, Gardiner and an unidentified third man gave the cameras yet another shot when they emerged from the garage in a BMW with Virginia plates.

The complaint laid out Thompson’s version of events: “The defendant stated that he was in possession of a pistol and two magazines belonging to Senator Jim Webb. The defendant further stated that he inadvertently left the gun that he was safekeeping from the previous days.” Webb may be pleased to know that, according to the complaint, “the weapon was test fired and is operable.”

And how does Webb feel about the whole thing? Hard to say. Gardiner wouldn’t say who had retained him to represent Thompson. Webb himself, after calling the news conference to discuss the matter, then said he couldn’t talk about it. ...

Webb, an expert marksman, was happy to discuss why he carries a concealed weapon. “Since 9/11, for people who are in government, I think in general there has been an agreement that it’s more—a more dangerous time,” he said. “If you look at people in the executive branch . . . there is not that kind of protection available to people in the legislative branch. We are required to defend ourselves, and I choose to do so.”

Webb even hinted that he ignores the District law requiring handguns to be registered. Asked if he considered himself above D.C. law, he said: “I’m not going to comment in any level in terms of how I provide for my own security,” he said.

The senator was less forthcoming in his defense of Thompson. “He is going to be arraigned today,” Webb said. “I do not in any way want to prejudice his case and the situation that he’s involved in.”

Prejudice the case? But wasn’t it Webb’s gun that his aide was carrying for him?

Webb wouldn’t even acknowledge it was his gun. “I have never carried a gun in the Capitol complex, and I did not give the weapon to Phillip Thompson,” he stipulated.

Webb had kind words for his aide—“a longtime friend” and “a fine individual”—but he seemed to be trying to cut Thompson loose as he spoke of the incident. “I find that what has happened with Phillip Thompson is enormously unfortunate,” Webb reported. “I was in New Orleans from last Friday until yesterday evening. I was not in town. I learned about this when I was in New Orleans.”

Upon reflection, Webb must have decided that he had been stinting in his defense of Thompson. An hour later, his office sent out an amended statement. “I can say with great confidence that this was an inadvertent mistake on his part,” the statement said. It was a little late for Lockup No. 1.

What a man!

My dad used to say there is a certain recognizable type of marine, who translates Semper Fidelis as “Pull the ladder up, Captain, I’m on board!”

Daily Mail:

Worried parents are buying their children body armour to protect them from knife attacks.

A firm that supplies stab and bullet-proof vests to government agencies around the world said it had been flooded with orders following a series of brutal knife murders on Britain’s streets.

VestGuard UK said it had received more than 100 calls from parents in London alone. It normally receives only one or two inquiries nationwide each year.

Some 60 jackets, costing between £300 and £425, have been sold – with parents saving up to buy the armour.

The American approach is cheaper, and more permanently effective.

Listen to this exchange on Sean Hannity.

That’s not just a slip of the tongue. You don’t get the First and Second Amendments confused, if you are significantly personally interested in the issues associated with either one. You can just tell that Rudolph Giuliani and the Bill of Rights have not had a meaningful relationship since high school civics class about 50 years ago.

Hat tip to Brian Hughes.

John Lott review Giuliani’s dismal record on the Second Amendment here.

One person’s “reasonable and sensible” gun laws aren’t always another’s. So when Rudy Giuliani recognizes that the Second Amendment guarantees people the right to bear arms subject to “reasonable and sensible” laws, it really doesn’t tell us much. Yet one thing is for sure though: Giuliani is hardly a “strict constructionist” on constitutional matters, at least when it comes to the Second Amendment. It is a long ways from “shall not be infringed” to “shall infringe whenever Congress has a ‘reasonable and sensible’ justification.”

For those who support the Second Amendment, the main problem is that Giuliani has rarely met a gun regulation he didn’t see as “reasonable and sensible.” In 2000, he pointed out how he was “a very strong supporter of gun-control legislation” and called for everything from federal gun-licensing and registration to banning guns based upon their price.

Only in the last couple of months has he finally gone on the record as opposing a gun law: he came out against re-imposing the assault-weapons ban. Yet he originally supported this law when it was first adopted, and he wanted it renewed as recently as 2004, when it expired.

His support for all these gun laws isn’t too surprising given his belief that “the single biggest connection between violent crime and an increase in violent crime is the presence of guns in your society . . . . the more guns you take out of society, the more you are going to reduce murder. The less guns you take out of society, the more it is going to go up.”

Read the whole thing.

Gun laws are often written in such a way as to criminalize “possession” when possession consists of merely holding somebody else’s legally owned gun in one’s hand briefly. In this case, the possession was a senator’s pistol in a briefcase being carried by an aide.

FoxNews

U.S. Capitol Police arrested a top aide to Sen. Jim Webb on Monday after he tried to enter a Senate office building carrying a loaded pistol and two fully loaded magazines that belonged to the senator.

Phillip Thompson sent a bag through the X-ray machine at Russell Senate Office Building, where Webb’s office is located. It detected the weapon and Capitol Police say they determined that Thompson didn’t have a license to carry the gun in Washington, D.C. Thompson was arrested and charged with carrying a pistol without a license and possession of an unregistered firearm and unregistered ammunition.

A senior Democratic aide said Webb gave the bag that contained the gun to Thompson when the aide drove the senator to the airport. Thompson said he forgot it was in the bag when he took it into the office building.

David Kahane, at National Review, observes signs of a double-standard flourishing in the ultra-affluent communities of the Hollywood elite.

I was driving through Beverly Hills yesterday, on my way out to Malibu, and the signs in the yards caught my eye.

Not the “For Sale” signs. ...

No, the other signs. You know, the ones that say “ARMED RESPONSE.” (They’re usually just to the left of the “Kerry/Edwards” signs.) Not only in Beverly Hills, of course, but in Santa Monica, Hancock Park, Brentwood, Bel Air, and all the best neighborhoods in town. The signs that advertise our private-security services.

You see, although we in Hollywood are personally opposed to firearms, and passionately support gun control, we have to be realistic about Bush’s America and protect our families and, more important, our possessions from burglars, stalkers, muggers, street people, the homeless, immigrants, the Christian Right, and tourists from Kansas City.

That’s why we were all so taken aback by the recent D.C. circuit-court ruling, which found that the residents of Washington are constitutionally entitled, as individuals, to possess firearms. It’s bad enough that every criminal in L.A. County has unlimited access to guns — now they want to give them to ordinary people, too?

Everyone knows perfectly well that the Bill of Rights was meant to protect the federal government against the depredations of the citizens — if you don‘t believe me, just ask senators McCain and Feingold …

Read the whole thing.

Donate to help keep America safe from Assault Weapon Violence.

Assault Weapon Watch web site

This approach to gun violence makes sense to me. I’m planning to pitch in, and volunteer to help stop best-grade London shotgun violence, custom rifle violence, and custom revolver violence. If anyone has any of these gorgeous, expensive, and deadly arms lying around ready to run amok, just forward them to me and I promise to place them under my personal Expensive Firearms Watch Program.

Michelle Malkin has some fresh horror stories of outrageous hoplophobic activity by a Virginia newspaper and the current mayor of New York.

Two weeks ago, the Roanoke (Va.) Times published an online database of registered concealed handgun permit holders in the paper’s community under the sanctimonious guise of “Sunshine Week.” The database included both the names and street addresses of some 135,000 Virginians with permits to carry concealed weapons. Columnist Christian Trejbal patted himself on the back for making it easy to snoop on the neighbors: “I can hear the shocked indignation of gun-toters already: It’s nobody’s business but mine if I want to pack heat. Au contraire. Because the government handles the permitting, it is everyone’s business.”

Trejbal denied that compiling the concealed carry permit holders list was “about being for or against guns.” But he exposed his true agenda when he compared law-abiding gun owners to . . . sex offenders: “A state that eagerly puts sex offender data online complete with an interactive map could easily do the same with gun permits, but it does not.”

The Roanoke Times showed reckless disregard for the safety of the license holders and reckless disregard for accuracy. In his column, Trejbal admitted that he knew some of the information he had obtained was inaccurate — but published it anyway: “As a Sunshine Week gift, The Roanoke Times has placed the entire database, mistakes and all [emphasis added], online at www.roanoke.com/gunpermits. You can search to find out if neighbors, carpool partners, elected officials or anyone else has permission to carry a gun.”

After an uproar among gun-owners, including domestic violence victims licensed to carry, the Times finally decided to yank the database. Trejbal seems not to feel much remorse: “Did we make it easier [to obtain the information]? Yes. But it’s still a public record.” Let’s review: He published a list he knew contained inaccuracies. His paper admits the decision endangered gun owners. He compiled a convenient shopping list for criminals — and smacked law-abiding gun owners in the face with his comparison of their choice to exercise their rights with sex offenders.

Public disclosure of concealed carry licenses varies from state to state. Eighteen states protect permit holders’ privacy from public view. Virginia is one of 17 states that make licensee records public. If information is public, does it make it right for a newspaper to publish it? The media exercise discretion all the time in withholding the names of minors or rape victims. Why should the privacy of law-abiding concealed handgun permit holders be treated with any less concern?

While the Roanoake Times has retreated, the witch hunt against gun owners continues. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a “sting” operation targeting gun shops in five states for allegedly selling guns illegally. Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman of the Second Amendment Foundation report that Bloomberg sent unauthorized private investigators to conduct the operation — without notifying the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF):

“The odor ripened when Bloomberg filed civil lawsuits against these gun shops, rather than turn over evidence to the proper authorities for criminal prosecution. Bloomberg’s office refused to turn over that evidence, and instead the billionaire mayor launched a high-profile media campaign demonizing the targeted gun shop operators.”

Bloomberg has, of course, earned the praise of the anti-Second Amendment media for his security-undermining stunt. The unholy alliance between Big Nanny politicians and journalists threatens us all.

Judge Laurence H. Silberman wrote the opinion striking down the District of Columbia’s ban on possession of operable handguns in private homes. The District law required privately owned pistols to be kept unloaded and disassembled or rendered inoperable by a trigger lock.

How Appealing reports and has links.

John Derbyshire has some words of wisdom for would-be Republican nominees. But they obviously come much too late for Giuliani.

As the Zumbo case illustrates, the point of maximum friction is between hunters and the rest. There is a lurking suspicion among non-hunting gun sportsmen that the hunters will sell them down the river, if some clever politician can clinch the deal:

A problem with the duck hunter crowd is that politicians try to take away our handguns or my black rifles, but insist they’ll never go after your over-under. The duck hunters nod and let the confiscation proceed, and before long all that’s left are the duck hunters, who have no support as their shotguns are confiscated…

What the Zumbo case shows is that these minor differences will be brushed aside when gun enthusiasts sense a threat to their rights. Hunting-outdoor sportsmen piled on with the rest — though in general, like Steve Bodio, with a bit more regard for civility. As I started out by saying, for all the magnificent achievements of the NRA in keeping gun rights secure, gun hobbyists and sportsmen live in a state of mild, if permanent, insecurity, and our natural posture is defensive.

The political lesson to be taken by any contender for the Republican nomination who is seriously short of creds on gun rights issues — no names, no pack drill — is that Second Amendment enthusiasts stand head and shoulders above other conservative groups in their passion and solidarity on behalf of their constitutional rights. You will need to work very hard and tread v–e–r–y carefully if you want the support of this large and well-organized constituency. Set a foot wrong and you could find yourself being zumboed!

• in Glenn Reynolds’ felicitous phrase.

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