A Consuming Darkness

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Late one afternoon in January, Peter Hartzel stood in the basement firing range of the PSMG Gun Shop with a 9-millimeter Beretta in hand and a consuming darkness welling within.

Hartzel, a 29-year-old newspaper reporter with a history of mental illness, had nearly completed a three-day firearm safety course, required for a state license to carry or possess a gun. In his final hour of training, he was consistently hitting his target. Then he lifted the gun to his right temple and pulled the trigger, killing himself...

More fundamentally, the suicides highlight what some say is a flawed sequence in the process of obtaining a firearm license in Massachusetts.

Right. Create more hoops for We the People to jump through because an "authorized journalist" misused a gun. Yet somehow, in the entire Boston Globe article, they couldn't even give fleeting mention to one segment of the populace much more likely to commit suicide...

We're the Only Ones Medical Enough

A diabetic woman and her family called for better training for police after a Portland officer used a stun gun to subdue her during a medical emergency.

She should thank her lucky stars she's not an epileptic.

[More from "The Only Ones" files...]

The Iron River

“There’s an iron river of guns flowing to Mexico,” said special agent Thomas Mangan, spokesman for the Phoenix Field Division of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"Iron river." How pseudo-Churchillian.

Leave it to BATFU to give the "authorized journalists" a new propaganda term. Somebody thought that one up and decided it would be useful. Useful for what? should be the very next question.

Maybe if the fedgov would do its damn job, one of its branches wouldn't be able to complain about the consequences of a porous border.

This, of course, is simply a bureaucracy trying to justify its appropriations and expand its influence by throwing We the People under the bus, and the media is more than eager to help. It is also individuals within an agency promoting their advancement at the expense of their countrymen. The fact that the actions being described are already illegal seems not to be an issue here--we need to make them more illegal!

We're seeing more and more stories about U.S. guns smuggled into Mexico. We ignore at our peril this increasingly important front in the war on guns.

We're the Only Ones Berserk Enough

A Sikkim Police constable guarding the Dena Bank treasury at Daryaganj in central Delhi went berserk early Sunday morning, killing five of his mates after they allegedly tried to sodomise him while on night duty.

OK then.

[Via Cryptic Subterranean]

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This Day in History: March 12

On this day in 1776, in Baltimore, Maryland, a public notice appears in local papers recognizing the sacrifice of women to the cause of the revolution. The notice urged others to recognize women’s contributions and announced, "The necessity of taking all imaginable care of those who may happen to be wounded in the country's cause, urges us to address our humane ladies, to lend us their kind assistance in furnishing us with linen rags and old sheeting, for bandages…." On and off the battlefield, women were known to support the revolutionary cause by providing nursing assistance. But donating bandages and sometimes applying them was only one form of aid provided by the women of the new United States. From the earliest protests against British taxation, women’s assent and labor was critical to the success of the cause. The boycotts that united the colonies against British taxation required female participation far more than male—in fact, the men designing the non-importation agreements generally chose to boycott products used mostly by women.