Deborah Frisch, the former instructor in Psychology at the University of Arizona, who resigned her position after posting a series of irrational and obscene comments on Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom blog-site (many including references to Goldstein’s children) was arrested, and arraigned on August 21, in Oregon on charges of stalking and telephone harassment.

WWB and Tim Dreier have the story, and lots of recent background.

Our own coverage of the original incidents may be found here, along with some subsequent blog humor here.

The American Rifleman, the NRA‘s traditional monthly magazine, has for many years run a featured called the Armed Citizen as a corrective to the MSM’s deliberate policy of avoiding coverage of the use of armed force by private citizens to stop crime.

It’s easy to see why.

Clayton Cramer catches USA Today inventing a non-existent tackle in a stabbing attack in Memphis halted by an armed citizen with handgun.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Florida Crime rates have fallen to the lowest level in three decades, reports the St Petersburg Times:

The state’s serious crime rate fell to the lowest level in three decades last year, a development Gov. Jeb Bush hailed Tuesday as validation for his policies on gun control and criminal justice.

Bush credited tougher penalties as one reason for the lower crime rate. He also said the figures show that controlling human behavior, not guns, is the way to reduce crime.

“I think law-abiding citizens who have guns for protection are actually part of the reason we have a lower crime rate,” Bush said at a press conference in the Capitol. “I don’t think that there’s a lot of data that suggests that gun control reduces crime.”

Florida licenses to carry concealed handguns are easy to obtain, and Florida recently passed legislation abolishing a legal requirement in liberal states that obliges the law-abiding citizen to make every possible effort to retreat before defending himself when confronted by an attacker.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, where even ownership of handguns is prohibited, the July Homicide total has risen to 14 (in 13 days), and the chief of police has declared a crime emergency.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey reacted yesterday to a recent surge in homicides by declaring a “crime emergency,” a move that gives him the freedom to quickly adjust officers’ schedules and restrict their days off.

The victims included a popular store owner slain at closing time, a community activist killed in a park and a British citizen whose throat was slit in Georgetown.

The most recent to die was 23-year-old Michael Dorsey, of Capitol Heights. He was found shot in the chest just after 2 a.m. this morning, in the hallway of an apartment building of Gallaudet St. NE. Three other people were also shot in the city overnight, but were expected to live, police said…

Eleven men, two women and a 16-year-old youth have been killed in the city since July 1. About 25 hours before Dorsey was killed, Laquanda Johnson, 24, was found fatally shot in the 3600 block of 22nd Street SE. A suspect was arrested yesterday afternoon in Suitland.

Despite the recent uptick in violence, the 95 homicides recorded in the city so far this year is only one more than the total committed by this date in 2005. But the number of robberies is up 14 percent, and Ramsey and other commanders are concerned that more holdups will turn deadly.

It’s a good policy to avoid some American cities run by corrupt democrat party machines with incompetent police departments full of officers hired on the basis of political considerations. WBAL reports the case of a Virginia couple who attended a baseball game in Baltimore, got lost, asked a police officer for directions, and were arrested.

Baltimore City police arrested a Virginia couple over the weekend after they asked an officer for directions.

WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Va., got lost leaving an Orioles game on Saturday. Collins reported a city officer arrested them for trespassing on a public street while they were asking for directions .

“In jail for eight hours — sleeping on a concrete floor next to a toilet,” Kelly said.

“It was a nightmare,” Brook said. “I was in there thinking I was just dreaming and waiting to wake up.”

This kind of thing is no joke. American city jails are unsanitary and dangerous places, where detainees are commonly housed in unsupervised conditions at the mercy of other prisoners.

The Australian Herald Sun reports that DNA testing of postage stamp saliva, from taunting letters addressed to Scotland Yard, suggests the person responsibe for the 1888 series of murders of prostitutes in London’s East End may have been a woman.

Ripperology:

Metropolitan Police —Casebook — Wikipedia— the letters— Whitechapel Society

Capital Online reports:

When a shabbily dressed man ran out of a Westfield Annapolis jewelry store followed by an employee screaming for help, Erik McInnis didn’t think twice.

“Anybody sprinting out of a store like that is guilty until proven innocent,” the 39-year-old Marine major said.

He immediately left his two children, ages 9 and 2, in the mall’s play area and chased Timothy A. Laboard, 40, of Baltimore, through the back corridors of the mall.

Jonathan Neff, another father in the play area, said Maj. McInnis “hurdled the row of seats and hit the ground at an all out sprint behind the thief … He was through the doors in hot pursuit before anyone else knew what was happening.”

Maj. McInnis followed Mr. Laboard back into the mall, grabbed his collar, and put him in a rear figure-four choke hold on the ground.

“It was kind of surreal. There I was laying on top of this guy and everyone just kept walking by like nothing had happened,” said the Naval Academy math instructor.

After a few moments, an off-duty FBI agent walked up and handcuffed Mr. Laboard.

Mr. Laboard was charged with theft over $500 after the incident on Monday. Police allege he snatched a $28,000 diamond ring out of a person’s hand inside the Helzberg Diamonds. After Mr. Laboard was arrested, police said he pulled the ring from his mouth and handed it over to an officer.

“I’m a drug addict and I need help,” Mr. Laboard said, according to a police report.

Officials at Helzberg Diamonds were not available for comment.

While Maj. McInnis might teach calculus during the day, he’s still a Marine. He said he also teaches martial arts at the academy and is the officer representative for the school’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club. That, he said, is where he learned the submission and grappling moves he used at the mall.

“I’ve been teaching the stuff to midshipmen for years. I had a better than average chance to catch him,” said Maj. McInnis…

“As hokey as this sounds, I consider apprehending scum bags to be an unwritten statement in my general job description of being a Marine,” he said.

California definitely features America’s most colorful crime. On Monday, a 68 year-old Sonoma former gaming executive grabbed his .357 Magnum revolver and dispatched an intruder who had pursued his 64 year-old wife into the house. The intruder was armed, and apparently dressed as a ninja.

Police investigators looking into the shooting death of a ninja-style assailant at a semirural home in Healdsburg say they have not yet been able to identify the masked intruder or establish a motive for his actions.

The intruder was shot dead Monday morning by Louis J. Phillips, a former tribal and Nevada gaming executive, shortly after the man attacked Phillips’ wife, Sandra, outside their home on Sunset Drive, police said. The man struggled with her and chased her inside, where Louis Phillips opened fire with his .357-caliber Magnum handgun.

“We don’t have a motive for the attack,” Police Chief Susan Jones said. “And we’d feel a whole lot better if we could identify the intruder.”

Jones described the dead assailant as a white man, about 35 to 40 years old. He was armed with a revolver and carried no identification. The man was dressed from head to toe in black, including a black mask and black leather gloves, Jones said.

The attacker’s motives, and identity, remain unknown, but Mr. Phillips’s former occupational associations might just possibly have had some connection with the attack. SF Chronicle

Allan Poster’s 1968 Corvette, stolen in New York in 1969, has been found and returned to him in California.

reports Reuters:

COLOGNE, Germany (Hollywood Reporter) – A German cannibal is taking legal action to stop the release of the horror film “Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story,” which he claims is based on his life.

Keri Russell (“Felicity”) stars as a graduate student researching imprisoned cannibal Simon Grobeck (Thomas Kretschmann). Russell is drawn into Grobeck’s world and becomes obsessed with the Internet cannibal community. “Butterfly” is scheduled for a March 9 release in Germany.

But not if Armin Meiwes, who was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for eating a man he met over the Internet, has his way. In a statement Monday, Meiwes’s lawyer, Harald Ermel, said the film is a “slavish re-enactment” of the real-life events and his client did not give permission to producer Atlantic Streamline to fictionalize his story.

“I feel used,” said Meiwes, who filmed the killing and confessed to the crime but denied it was murder since his victim volunteered to be eaten.

In Burlington, Vermont, the progress of leftist dementia is so extreme that one Judge Edward Cashman sentenced the confessed rapist of a seven year old girl to a punishment of 60 days in prison, stating that he no longer believes in punishment.

There was outrage Wednesday when a Vermont judge handed out a 60-day jail sentence to a man who raped a little girl many,many times over a four-year span starting when she was seven.

The judge said he no longer believes in punishment and is more concerned about rehabilitation.

Prosecutors argued that confessed child-rapist Mark Hulett, 34, of Williston deserved at least eight years behind bars for repeatedly raping a little girl countless times starting when she was seven.

But Judge Edward Cashman disagreed explaining that he no longer believes that punishment works.

“The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn’t solve anything. It just corrodes your soul,” said Judge Edward Cashman speaking to a packed Burlington courtroom. Most of the on-lookers were related to a young girl who was repeatedly raped by Mark Hulett who was in court to be sentenced.

The sex abuse started when the girl was seven and ended when she was ten. Prosecutors were seeking a sentence of eight to twenty years in prison, in part, as punishment.

The prosecutorial proposal was far too lenient as well. He should have been hanged, and left hanging for 60 days for the crows.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

An off-duty New York City police officer, Daniel Enchautegui, was killed, when he interrupted a burglary next door to his Bronx home, but the dying officer managed to shoot both burglars repeatedly. The second suspect was Lillo Brancato, Jr., a moderately successful actor, who played Robert De Niro’s son in the 1993 film A Bronx Tale. Brancato appeared in numerous other films and television programs, including The Sopranos .

ShrinkWrapped (who was on duty when John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, was brought in) remembers that night (hat tip to Baron Bodissey):

John Lennon was shot to death 25 years ago today. His killer was an undistinguished and indistinguishable man named Mark David Chapman. He was arrested, brought to Central booking, and arraigned the next day, at which point he was remanded to the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital Prison Ward for Psychiatric observation and evaluation. As it happened, I was on-call the night he was admitted… I had grown up with the Beatles and was saddened, though not surprised, when they broke up. They have left us some of the most memorable music from an era that produced an exceptional flowering of pop music in all its myriad forms. Their music will be with us for a long time.

I remember feeling sorrow for John Lennon myself, and thinking that his unfortunate death marked the end of a period of rock music history coinciding with my own generation’s youth. By that time, of course, John Lennon had developed the relationship with Yoko Ono, which seemed to bring him happiness, but which unhappily also led to the break-up of the Beatles, and which was leading Lennon into further and further depths of intellectual banality and embarassing displays of vanity.

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The Solid Surfer speculates that John might have straightened out, given time, and that had he lived, he’d be a Republican today. Could be. I personally think Taxman on Revolver may well represent a better picture of John Lennon’s natural politics than Imagine. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

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Bolshevik David Corn blames gun ownership by private citizens, and the National Rifle Association‘s defense of Individual Rights, for a madman’s act, and today, as then, believes more Gun Control is the answer to crime. I don’t recall Mark David Chapman having a New York pistol permit, which suggests that gun control laws don’t necessarily deter persons willing to break one law from breaking a second as well.

Mr. Corn will blame insufficiently strict laws in other US states (since Chapman purchased the gun in Hawaii), but no law would ever have prevented Chapman from buying an illegal gun, anymore than any law ever kept Chapman, Lennon, or millions of the rest of us back then from buying marijuana and other illegal substances. And the banning of firearms owned by tens of millions law-abiding Amerrican hunters, target shooters, and collectors, and ordinary people wanting a means of self defense would do nothing whatsoever to prevent crime. In fact, gun control increases crime by eliminating criminals’ fear of potentially armed victims. Not long after John Lennon’s murder, Bernard Goetz shot some assailants in the NYC subway, and in the period when the unknown subway gunman had not yet given himself up, street crime temporarily vanished.

Comrade Corn’s twaddle is worth a look, however, because the conniving Mr. Corn reveals how all he had to do was invent an imaginary organization, the so-called Citizens against Gun Violence, an “ad hoc citizens group” consisting of Mr. Corn, period; and a few photocopied fliers and some calls to the MSM later, he had a full-fledged moonbat rally of his own, and 15 seconds of fame.

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Since unfortunately they did not hang him:

On-line Petition Opposing Parole for Mark David Chapman