Month: September 2003

That’s OK, the Supreme Court Would Overturn

Day By Day

Personal Responsibility

The Laughing Wolf has an excellent piece up on the topic, entitled And The Parents Are Responsible How?:

There was an ad I saw on TV this morning at the gym, which brought up a fundamental question, and flaw with much of what is socially conscious right now. The ad focused on teen drinking, and the problems therein. It called for tough actions on the people who sold or gave alcohol to minors. It demanded that corporations be made to pay for the damage done by alcohol and to be harshly and fully regulated. In all the individuals and entities it demanded be held accountable, it left out the most important of all: the parents.

Nowhere in this screed was there any hint that parents have any responsibility for their children. No suggestion that parents need to keep up with what the kids are doing, much less take the responsibility to raise them such that the kids could make intelligent choices about alcohol and behavior.

Go read the whole thing.

That piece has much in common with several other pieces I’ve seen recently that decry the belief (justified, IMHO) that our society does not want to hold people (and thus, ourselves) responsible for their behavior. It must be someone else’s fault. As The Laughing Wolf put it:

The commercial, and the group behind it, are a part of the societal responsibility group that feels that we need a nanny state to monitor and control all. To them, there is no such thing as individual responsibility, only a threat that demands immediate action to prevent harm “to the children.”

And you ought to know by now how I feel when someone makes an appeal “for the CHILDREN!” (Hide the silver!) Overlawyered.com has a page dedicated to personal responsibility cases. Take a look. Have some antacid nearby.

And just to tie this into the overall gun-centric theme of this blog, here’s a firearms training center that goes by the name of Personal Responsibility, Inc. in Nashville, Tennessee.

Good marketing.

I Don’t Know Exactly Where to File This One

Seems an ex-officer stole an assault weapon (you know, those guns that are only good for killing a large number of people without carefully aimed fire) out of a police cruiser, and then used it to rob a bank.

Ex-officer pleads guilty to robbery (Registration required)

Ex-police officer Gary Sahlin pleaded guilty in federal court yesterday to robbing a Fleet Bank branch of $23,960 with a semiautomatic assault weapon he stole from a Manchester police cruiser.

Under a plea agreement, the 26-year-old former Manchester patrolman will likely spend 25 years or less in federal prison for pulling the bizarre Aug. 6 heist using a stolen cruiser as a getaway car.

—

If Sahlin had gone to trial and been convicted on two indictments, he faced a mandatory sentence of 30 years for using a machine gun in the robbery — on top of a sentence for bank robbery. In exchange for his plea, the government dropped the machine gun charge and substituted the lesser charge of using a firearm during a crime of violence.

But here’s the fascinating part:

Sahlin’s lawyer, federal defender Bjorn Lange, said if the case had gone to trial, a jury would have had to decide whether the weapon could be converted into a machine gun and therefore fit the legal definition of a machine gun; Lange contended it wasn’t.

The prosecutor said the U.S. government’s position was that it was a machine gun and Sahlin knew it was a machine gun.

Government information describes the weapon as a Colt M16A1, 5.56-caliber semiautomatic assault weapon. Ollila said it had been a machine gun when owned by the military and had been converted into a semiautomatic for local police.

“Could have been converted”? Either the parts were in the gun during the crime, or they weren’t. IOW, either the gun was capable of full-auto fire at the time of the crime, or it was not. The government’s position seems more than a little bogus to me. But then most juries are pretty ignorant about firearms, so I have no doubt the prosecutor believed he could sell it.

Finally, there’s this:

Manchester Police Chief John Jaskolka, who attended the plea hearing with Deputy Chief Richard O’Leary, said he had no idea what drove the former officer to commit such a reckless and violent crime.

He said police had had no contact with Sahlin since his resignation last December. His departure followed his Nov. 2, 2002 arrest for an alleged domestic assault on his former wife.

Jaskolka said police knew immediately that the bank robber was a police officer or a former officer because no one else could overcome the security devices on a police cruiser. He said no one would know how to start one or be able to get to the semiautomatic locked in a metal box in the trunk.

“It’s the first time a car’s been stolen. It’s not going to happen again,” Jaskolka said.

I love blanket statements like that. They’re always wrong.

“Vanquishing Your Enemies, Crushing Their Skulls, and Drinking Their Blood” – Figuratively Speaking

Author John Ross details the recent concealed-carry victory in Missouri, which he was far more involved in than I realized. Excerpt:

I moved back to Missouri in 1980. As time passed, other states abolished their Civil War-era victim disarmament laws, but not Missouri. In late December of 1991, a friend of mine and I were sitting in my study, discussing the outrage of our state leading the nation in arresting people carrying guns for self-protection. The NRA had never made any effort in the past to bring up concealed carry in the Missouri legislature, and my friend told me he had just talked to them again, and they had no interest in bringing it up now, either.

Then my friend and I looked at each other and had the exact same realization: We were ashamed of ourselves. Here we were, two smart, prosperous men, whining about the fact that a national organization wasn’t fixing an injustice in our own back yard, instead of doing something about it ourselves.

And they did.

Read the whole thing.

Ask, and Ye Shall Receive

In the post below, “Gun-Polluted” America?, I quoted a lawyer by the name of Kimberly Croyle who stated that there were an average of “20 workplace murders per week” in America, and I wondered where she got her statistic.

Now I know, and unsurprisingly her data is way out of date.

An Associated Press piece recently released (and little commented upon) informs us that:

Working got safer last year, according to the government’s annual tally of workplace deaths, released Wednesday.

Nationally, 5,524 workers died on the job in 2002 — a significant decrease from the 5,915 who died in 2001, a number that did not include those killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“It’s the largest year-to-year decline we’ve ever seen,” said Scott Richardson, program manager of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. The bureau began publishing the data in 1992.

The decline extended a downward trend since 1997, when 6,238 workers died. Workplace homicides also declined, down to 609 last year from a 1994 peak of 1,080.

Note that. AT THE PEAK in 1994 (a bad year for homicide in total) the rate was just over “twenty per week.” It’s declined every year since to reported current rate of 11.7, a decline of almost half. But what statistic does Ms. Croyle use? The worst one she can find.

I have repeatedly said that the actual numbers are bad enough, why must gun control proponents inflate them?

Here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics graph of workplace homicides for 1992 through 2001.

Note that during this entire period, the number of guns in private hands has been increasing at a rate of well over three million per year (33,367,000 from 1994 through 2000 according to the Violence Policy Center, 11,094,000 of which were handguns – and that’s just domestic production, not including imports) and the number of states with “shall-issue” concealed-carry laws has increased with a corresponding increase in permitted persons.

No, I am not implying causality, I’m impugning it. More Guns do NOT EQUAL More Crime.

Note also that there have been no noticeable changes in national firearms law during this time period with the exception of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban that (according to which gun control group you listen to, and what day it is) either was circumvented by the manufacturers because of NRA engineered loopholes and was useless (thus needing to be “strengthened”) or was effective, but still needs to be “strengthened” because it didn’t do enough. I haven’t found any data indicating the relative percentages of workplace victims of “assault weapons” versus your average, say, Walther PP which was used in the recent Chicago auto parts warehouse murders.

Note: Blogger’s permalinks seem to be screwed up at the moment.

This Hits the Market the Day After The Assault Weapons Ban Sunsets

I Finally Get a Running Debate

in my comments, and the comments go down.

Anybody else having problems with Haloscan?

I’ve already changed comment services once.

(*Sigh* – whaddaya want for free?)

Now THIS is Interesting

Lopez, Affleck Seek Gun Permit in Ga.

HINESVILLE, Ga. – Just because Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez aren’t doing much of anything doesn’t mean they’re not making news.

Hollywood’s most overexposed couple set gossip pages aflame anew on Tuesday after they popped into a south Georgia courthouse near Affleck’s Hampton Island home.

But apparently it was a gun license, not a marriage license, that the on-again, off-again super couple was seeking Monday.

“Affleck wanted to know where he could apply for a gun permit,” said Liberty County Sheriff Don Martin, who mugged for a photo before sending the couple down the hall to the probate court.

The appearance has unleashed a horde of paparazzi and celebrity reporters onto the small town of Hinesville, where a court clerk verified Tuesday morning _ apparently not for the first time _ that the couple did not apply for a marriage license.

And normally I couldn’t care less about Bennifer.

Toys for Iraqi Tots

The Rev. Sensing at One Hand Clapping tells us about Chief Wiggles’ impromptu toy drive. Go read. And donate.