The Devil in the Details

New details are emerging about what led to the shooting of two ATF agents at an apartment complex in DeKalb County on Friday morning...

Reed says she told the ATF a different story than what they used to issue the warrant.

BATFU playing fast and loose with the details? Why doesn't that surprise me?

I also like this quote from another account:

“I just don’t get it,” the father said. “You come, kick in somebody’s door at 4 o’clock in the morning and what do you expect? This area has had a lot of burglaries and home invasions.”

Besides, haven't we established that if you shoot someone through a door, no charges will be filed? Or does that door not swing both ways?

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

The grand jury should be respected. The grand jury decision should be respected. In routine criminal cases against citizens throughout the state, grand jury decisions are not second guessed; rather they are respected.

Respect is earned.

Herbivores More Intelligent than Carnivores

Frequently dismissed as cranks, their fussy eating habits tend to make them unpopular with dinner party hosts and guests alike.

But now it seems they may have the last laugh, with research showing vegetarians are more intelligent than their meat-eating friends.

Allow me to illustrate:

Smart

Stupid

Stupid Carnivores With Smart Herbivore: "Try the brains--they're delicious!"

So I think I'll do the smart thing and gain an advantage over predators by getting rid of my guns and becoming prey.

British researchers--is there anything they can't prove?

For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyz lawmakers on Thursday approved a law allowing them to possess firearms. Most of the deputies believe that they need arms for self-defense.

We once suffer very bad Gypsy attack...

What You Should Know Before Buying a BB Gun for Your Child

For young boys a BB gun is like a right of passage. It is the first step to gun ownership. [More]

That would be "rite of passage," but that's not why this caught my interest:

The most important thing to remember if you get your child a BB gun is to supervise them while they use it.

See, that's the thing--when I was young, my Dad got us our BB guns and taught us how to use them. We learned safety and marksmanship from a man who spent his early twenties with the Marines on Guam in WWII, so we couldn't have had a more qualified instructor. And we learned rules and consequences, what you can shoot, what you can't, and then we were left free to exercise our judgment independently--critical skills if we were to become adults who understood and appreciated the responsibilities of freedom.

If we abused that freedom, we knew there would be trouble and we would be the ones to pay dearly for it. And we got something immeasurable in return: we learned how to earn trust from adults, who understood that at some point, we'd need to learn to work without a net, and that we'd never learn to be free men and women through incessant nannying.

I took my Daisy with me just about every time I was out playing, strapped to my shoulder as I rode my bike--no eyebrows were ever raised, no cops ever hassled me. And I did this not only here, but also in Iran (click the "Fourth Grade" link over in my blogroll), where we lived for several years, and that brings me to my real point:

If my sons today went casually about their public business bearing a BB rifle, indistinguishable to many from a firearm (both in reality and law), is there any doubt that 9-1-1 calls would flood the police station, that a response team replete with SWAT would be dispatched, that they would have their lives gravely at risk while arrested at gunpoint, and that the aftermath would include legal woes, expenses, potential criminal records and hysterical negative publicity?

This is the state of public respect for the rights of free Americans to keep and bear arms, and how much it has devolved in my lifetime. In this respect, I had more freedom as a boy in the Shah's Iran than my sons do in today's United States of America.

And we've allowed it to be done to us.

This Day in History: December 16

On this day in 1773, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships moored in Boston Harbor and dump 342 chests of tea into the water.