Shedding Light on Christian Trejbal

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.

"Au contraire." Figures he'd use French.

Readers are beating this odious punk up pretty good over in the article's comments section. Hopefully it'll result in some canceled subscriptions.

[Via KABA Newslinks]

De Facto Carry Ban in Santa Barbara County

By Larry R. Rankin, Santa Barbara, California

Life member NRA, Life member GOA, Life member JPFO, Life member California Rifle and Pistol Association, Life member Law Enforcement Alliance of America, Past President of the Grassroots, NRA members’ council, Chairman of the First Friends of NRA dinner in Santa Barbara, Current Chairman of the California American Pistol and Rifle Association for the County of Santa Barbara.

I am to this day licensed to carry a loaded weapon in all of the states below:

1) Alabama, 2) Alaska, 3) Arizona, 4) Arkansas, 5) Colorado, 6) Delaware, 7) Florida, 8) Georgia, 9) Idaho, 10) Indiana, 11) Kentucky, 12) Louisiana, 13) Michigan, 14) Minnesota, 15) Mississippi, 16) Missouri, 17) Montana, 18) Nevada, 19) New Hampshire, 20) New Mexico, 21) North Carolina, 22) North Dakota, 23) Ohio, 24) Oklahoma, 25) Pennsylvania, 26) South Dakota, 27) Tennessee, 28) Texas, 29) Utah, 30) Vermont, 31) Virginia, 32) Washington and 33) Wyoming

You might not like what Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara County has to say, but he is honest and direct about it. Which makes you wonder why the NRA gave a “A” rating to a man who makes it clear he's proud that he has given out only three concealed carry permits in his many years of service. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Sheriff Brown claims to be a life member of the NRA. Perhaps it is because Sheriff Brown is bright, well spoken and endowed with a certain measure of conceit that so often seems to be the inevitable attribute of a successful politician. It seems that there is something about a successful politician that the NRA finds hard to resist.

When I met with Sheriff Brown this March the 9th, to appeal my denial of my application of my active gun permit that I have had for over ten years (unsuccessfully) he was diplomatic enough to hear me out. He then very clearly and unambiguously laid out a policy of a de facto concealed carry ban in Santa Barbara County. A policy that does not recognize the right of self defense. A policy based on the model of a sovereign who knows what is best for his subjects, not a public servant elected to protect the rights of the citizens who elected him. A policy reminiscent of King George's government that was rejected by our founding fathers, not the constitutional model of government they bequeathed to us. A policy that supports the continued efforts to redefine the Second Amendment in sporting terms rather than in terms of a right of defense of self and property. And finally, if the NRA lawyers are listening, a policy that violates California law on concealed carry, which at least acknowledges that there might be someone qualified to receive a concealed carry permit other than persons associated with law enforcement. While California was careful enough not to craft an outright de jure ban on concealed carry, Sheriff Brown's policy is a ban as a matter of fact, if not of law.

Twenty years ago I might have understood how Sheriff Brown can state "I am a Life member of the NRA, a hunter, a gun collector and we have enough laws, without creating new ones" and yet prohibit concealed carry. But many years of data are available today from states that have allowed widespread concealed carry. Data that show a reduction of crime. Data that show that concealed carry holders are overwhelmingly safe and law abiding. These are facts especially important to the discharge of his duties as Sheriff. Facts that he should have made an effort to investigate before adopting a concealed carry policy. Facts that any NRA member knows. To continue a policy that he has followed for many years with no consideration of contemporary evidence is to demonstrate an arbitrary and capricious exercise of his power as Sheriff.

If enough sheriffs abuse California's concealed carry law in an arbitrary and capricious manner, the argument can be made that California's concealed carry law violates either the California of Federal constitutions. Is the NRA counting?

There is, additionally, another legal reform that the NRA should champion. One concern Sheriff Brown identified, and I have heard this from other sheriffs, is fear of personal legal liability if someone with a concealed carry permit commits a crime with the permitted weapon. Law enforcement is second only to the teachers' unions in political influence in the California legislature. Would not California law enforcement almost unanimously support the NRA were it to lobby for a law protecting sheriffs and police chiefs from liability for issuing concealed carry permits? Would you issue CCWs if it meant you might lose your job, your house, your kids' college money, and a lifetime of savings? If it meant declaring bankruptcy to avoid having a multi million dollar verdict haunting you for the rest of your life?

Sheriff Brown is no Patrick Henry ("Give me liberty or give me death"). But then how many of us are? We have to work with the men and women we have as law enforcement leaders. If the NRA were to lobby for the legal protection California police and sheriffs' needs, perhaps they might not be afraid to take an honest look at success other states have had with concealed carry.

Apportioning the Blame

Suljo Talovic doesn't know where his son got the guns or how he learned how to use them.

Suljo Talovic, Father of Shooter: "Somebody got (the guns)…and maybe (they were) training him and tell(ing) him (to), ‘go shoot somebody.'"

I don't suppose there's any way to console a man who has suffered such a loss. I think the agony and guilt a father would feel over a son doing this could drive the strongest among us over the edge.

But pointing to US gun laws and now at unknown manipulators goes to the crux of the "gun control" argument: freedom doesn't just mean doing what you want. It means being personally accountable for your actions.

It sounds hard, unsympathetic and cruel, but your son did this murderous act. If others influenced him, he chose to heed that influence.

This business of apportioning blame to guns, to the law, to others, has been bought into by a significant number of voters who hold a misguided faith that human evil will end by mandating social change. That they're enablers for further and more monstrous evil does not occur to them because the ones not in on the scam actually believe they're doing good.

[Via Larry Rankin]

This Day in History: March 13

On this day in 1733, Joseph Priestley, supporter of the American Revolution and leader of the Unitarian Church in Britain and America, is born in Birstall, Yorkshire, England.

Joseph Priestley shared the liberal religious and political philosophy of many of America’s revolutionary leaders, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, all of whom became his friends and correspondents.

So does that mean modern UNitarian leaders have hijacked the organization, bastardized its principles and deliberately led their flock away from that philosophy?

A Consuming Darkness

[Use BugMeNot to bypass site registration]

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]

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

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.

Wayne Fincher Fires Lawyer

A Black Oak man can fire his lawyer, but will have to take whatever defense attorney the court appoints, a federal judge ruled Friday.

Hollis Wayne Fincher, 60, was convicted in January of possessing illegal, unregistered weapons, including machine guns and a sawed-off shotgun. A sentencing date has not been set.

Fincher asked U.S. District Judge Jimm Larry Hendren to appoint David Dunagin of Fort Smith as his attorney. Fincher fired Oscar Stilley of Fort Smith, who defended Fincher during his trial, citing irreconcilable differences between the two.

At this point, the only information I have is from the paper. If I can get some inside information that I'm free to share, I'll pass it on.

[More about Wayne Fincher via WarOnGuns]

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Yeah, I know it's not gun rights-related, but this is really all about truth and freedom anyway. The parallels between the collectivists and the lies they use to embed themselves into the culture to promote an anti-human agenda are things we expose every day on the RKBA front, so this is useful if for no other reason than to show us the methods employed by our enemies--and there's really no other word for them--on another issue with significant impact on individual and economic freedom.

This video takes an hour and a quarter--if you can't watch it today, bookmark the link and get back to it when you can. It really is well done, and will help focus our understanding on how control agendas are started, politicized and infused into the public consciousness.

And make sure you show it to your kids.

[Via Stieger]

UPDATE: It didn't take the Marxist thugs long to start threatening people rather than tolerating dissent.

Battle of the Gun Ban

Here's the untold story behind the Hatch bill: It was concocted by the NRA to head off a pending lawsuit, Parker vs. District of Columbia, which challenges the D.C. gun ban on Second Amendment grounds.

Yep, between that and the Seegars lawsuit, there's no denying the record.

[Via Blogonomicon]

New WarOnGuns Poll: What Will Happen if the DC Gun Ban Case Goes to the Supreme Court?

See the left margin and pick the outcome you think most likely.

Here are the results of last week's poll (click on image to enlarge):

The Filipino "Only Ones" Loophole

And it's one you could drive a truck through:

The breakdown of approved applications is as follows:

PNP -- 9,953; Armed Forces of the Philippines ­- 4,539; government employees/Bureau of Jail Management and Penology ­- 4,773; high-risk persons -­ 2,172; security agency -­ 727; transport -­ 383; cashier/disbursing officers -­ 722; security escort/bodyguards -­ 2,031.

A few government officials are automatically exempted from the ban and without applying for an exemption certificate. Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos and Commissioners Resurreccion Borra, Florentino Tuason Jr., Romeo Brawner, Rene Sarmiento and Ferrer are in this category.

Naturally. If there's one thing we "Only Ones" take care of, it's our own.

Oh, and as for the rest of you...citizens:

Violators of the gun ban may be arrested by the chief of police if prosecutors are not around to conduct preliminary investigations and make apprehensions.

No Debate

Brian Williams: "Good evening. As long as there have been firearms and for as long as there's been a Constitution of the United States, there's been a debate in this country over the definition of the right to bear arms. [More]

That's simply not true, Brian.

From my March 2007 GUNS Magazine review of "In Search of the Second Amendment":

The historical evidence is conclusive. The Second Amendment was intended to express an individual right, and any alternate “collective rights” theories are modern fictions developed by those with an agenda to control guns. In the words of Sanford Levinson from the University of Texas, this “view was virtually unknown before the 1960s.”

Look, it's nice that NBC apparently gave this story more coverage than rivals ABC and CBS (which according to the title-linked article pulled an LA Times evasion), but it's important that that coverage be accurate.

[Via 45superman]

This Day in History: March 11

On this day in 1779, Congress establishes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help plan, design and prepare environmental and structural facilities for the U.S. Army. Made up of civilian workers, members of the Continental Army and French officers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers played an essential role in the critical Revolutionary War battles at Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Yorktown.

For Love or Money

A drug rehabilitation center has sued Courtney Love, claiming the singer has repeatedly refused to pay her $181,000 bill for her stay there 1 1/2 years ago.

This lack of character and personal accountability is hardly surprising. Love was another anti-defense media icon I profiled in "A Judgment Call," my March 2005 Rights Watch column for GUNS Magazine:

Where do we begin with grunge diva Courtney Love? Multiple arrests for drug abuse, reportedly shooting heroin while pregnant? Assault with a deadly weapon, attacking a woman at her ex-boyfriend's home? Hitting a man at a nightclub in the head with a microphone stand? Getting arrested for disrupting a transatlantic flight? Being assigned a guardian, losing custody of her daughter and being institutionalized?

How about if we just focus on her statement to the Million Moms that US gun laws are "nihilistic and barbaric"?

Who Bravely Breaks the Most

Yon roaring boys, who rave and fight
On t'other side the Atlantic,
I always held them in the right,
But most so when most frantic.

When lawless mobs insult the court,
That man shall be my toast,
If breaking windows be the sport,
Who bravely breaks the most.

But oh! for him my fancy culls
The choicest flowers she bears,
Who constitutionally pulls
Your house about your ears.

William Cowper's words reflected a sentiment at the time of the Rebellion that, while brutal, was inevitable, and even cruelly utilitarian. So much so that:

In 1776 General Putnam, meeting a procession of the Sons of Liberty who were parading a number of Tories on rails up and down the street's of New York, attempted to put a stop to the barbarous proceeding. Washington, on hearing of this, administered a reprimand to Putnam, declaring 'that to discourage such proceedings was to injure the cause of liberty in which they were engaged, and that nobody would attempt it but an enemy to his country.'

I really don't want to see this happen again. Like the man said, can't we all get along? Can't you collectivists, busybodies, do-gooders, Marxists, statists, fascists, democrats, RINOs and idiot celebrities just leave Americans who believe unyieldingly in their rights the hell alone? Won't you let us live unmolested, and in peace?

We're the Only Ones Expert Enough

Reaction was mixed in the legal community over allegations that Joseph Kopera, the state police firearms expert who committed suicide last week, may have falsified his academic qualifications.

For those who would use suicide prevention as a rationale for disarming you, show 'em the statistics for "The Only Ones."

Workers Protest "Job Control"...

...or would that be "citizen disemployment"?

Workers from some area gun manufacturers are taking a bus to Springfield next week to plead their case for jobs they may lose if Illinois Senate Bill 16 passes and is signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

I wonder how many of these workers voted for Blagojevich?

As for the manufacturers, they're going to need to strap 'em on and adopt the Ronnie Barrett approach. The heavy lifting can't all be done by activists, fellas...