Arms and the Law

A mental case run into a Target, pursued by some bystanders (reasons for pursuit unstated). Mental case begins stabbing a teenage girl. One of the pursuers, Michael Turner, makes a flying tackle and drags the mental case off her. Now Target is suing Turner.

According to story, the mental case had stabbed a friend of Turner outside the store, and Turner and others pursued him inside.

My guess from the above stories: the teenager has sued Target, and target made a third-party claim against Turner and the other pursuers, claiming that were partially to blame because their initial pursuit of the mental case led to the stabbing. Good luck with the jury -- if it gets that far.

Hat tip to Alice Beard and Sixgun Sally....

At George Public Radio. He speaks with Philip Smith of the National African-American Gun Association.

The news has been out (and I too busy to blog it) that the VA is moving to report the names of certain pension recipients to NICS, so as to ban them from purchasing firearms -- and in legal effect, from possessing them, as well. The rationale is that those veteran-pensioners who receive payments thru a fiduciary (appointed because the pensioner was found incompetent to handle his or her financial affairs) comes within the GCA 68 ban.

Now, it's reported, the Social Security system is going to do the same for its pensioners who receive payments through a fiduciary.

This would certain curtail the number of mass shootings and drive-by homicides caused by our WWII vets and SSI recipients, except for the fact that it's hard to reduce zero.

To add to the mess, the reasoning must be that these people come within the 18 U.S.C. §922(d) ban on a person who has been "adjudicated as a mental defective." That's a term from the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of progressivism ... and of eugenics. Its use appears to have faded out after the Nazis showed their method of dealing with the "mentally defective." Yet here it is in Federal law.

Sander's attitudes on gun control have the liberal/progressive commentators befuddled, or at least more befuddled than they generally are. The one explanation they can put up is that it's a posture to please his Vermont constituents. As the Christian Science Monitor puts it, "Why would a candidate who is staking his campaign on progressive reform be so soft on gun control? The simplest explanation, as my Middlebury colleague Bert Johnson argues, is that, like it or not, Bernie is representing the preferences of a good number of his Vermont constituents."

A New York City police officer is busted for stealing other LEO's guns and selling them to a drug ring.

Some background. He's New Mexico firearm collector and importer who had DHS pull a mega-raid on his house.

The Tenth Circuit just affirmed a District Court ruling suppressing the results of the search, on grounds of no probable cause. The claimed probable cause was that he bought some firearms in Canada, got the permit to import them, but only reported importing some of them. Yes... that and he'd occasionally gone to Canada, and on one occasion apparently drove back rather than flew. Yes...

Over 100,000 concealed carry permits issued in Illinois: 14% to women, many in minority neighborhoods. Rest in peace, Otis McDonald.

Eugene Volokh thinks FBI director was wrong, the shooter actually wasn't a prohibited buyer. If so, it is interesting that our gun laws are so vague that even the Director of the FBI can't get them right.

The Gun Control Act's prohibited person category does have an ambiguity. It bars gun receipt and possession by those who are illicit users of controlled substances. But, except in those cases where the defendant is caught with both drugs and a gun at the same moment, this gets murky. Does he have to be using the drugs at the moment he possessed the gun?

From ABC News. The story is somewhat off, tho, when it says the problem was that the check system did not note that he'd been caught with drugs:

Maine becomes latest State to allow concealed carry without a permit requirement. Note the law goes into effect 90 days after the legislature adjourns, which would mean an effective date sometimes in October.

How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse in North Dakota. A state full of guns, ammo, pickups and crude oil does have the advantage when there is a zombie outbreak.

Came across this by coincidence. The Sandy Hook massacre came on December 14, 2012. On January 14, 2013, Brady boasted that the incident had raised $5 million for it..

Story here. Sen. Leland Yee plead guilty to racketeering after being accused of conspiring to run guns to Islamic terrorists, not to mention taking $40,000 in bribes from undercover agents and money laundering.

For his previous service, Brady Campaign had named Yee to its Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll.

One of his codefendants is Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow, a onetime gangster whom Sen. Nancy Pelosi praised for his "tenacity and willingness to give back to the community and working 'in the trenches' as a change agent."

An 8-1 in Jonnson v. U.S.. The ACCA provides for increased prison terms for an offender with three priors for certain offenses. The offenses are listed, with a residual clause, a crime that "otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another." In construing that, the Court had held that you look at the legal definition of the offense, not at the facts of a particular offense, and so it covers flight from an officer and attempted burglary, but not DUI.

At issue here was a past conviction for possession of a short barreled shotgun. The majority rules, per Justice Scalia, that the whole thing is simply too vague to pass muster. The case law required courts to think of the "typical" offense of a given type, and guess how much danger that posed. That requirement was simply too vague to be constitutional.

His Swiss Guard has halberds and swords for show; for serious work they pack:

"SIG P220 pistols

Steyr Tactical Machine Pistol

SIG P220 (P75)

Glock 19

Steyr TMP

Heckler & Koch MP5A3

Heckler & Koch MP7A1

SIG SG 550

SIG SG 552"

Not a bad assortment: handguns, subguns, assault rifles. They've retired their Mauser 98s and Suomi KP-31s in favor of modern firearms.

Details here.

at New York Daily News, he goes into the claim that the US has such a high rate of mass slayings.

It's a good time to call upon Maryland to ditch its State song. In fact, that was my reaction when I first heard of the song, decades ago.

Over at Reason Online, Brian Doherty joins in the fun. I have an article, accepted and in edit, on how the grant-induced wave of medical studies (published in medical rather than criminology journals, so the editors and peer reviewers have no idea what they are dealing with) plays with the books. It's been a problem with medical articles in general, where the author sometimes has a vested interest in promoting some therapy or drug, and there the editors at least know what they are dealing with. One editor notes many different ways to cook the books, for example: run your study and use survival data from one, three, and five years out. If one and five years show no result, report only the results from three years, and never admit that you ran the other periods. Or ignore confounding variables (was this therapy only given to the less sick patients?). This "study" seems a clear example of those problems. It ends in 2005, for no convincing reason, and when extensions to 2010 or even 2014 would have found gun homicides rising. It compares CT, not to easily chosen controls (the region in which it is situated, or the entire nation) but to an artificial CT composed of parts of several States. With that sort of liberty, I'm...

About 44,000 have been registered, which is perhaps 4% of the total.