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Spin, Spin, Spin

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A couple of posts down is the story of Caroyln Lisle who shot an intruder in her Rancho Cordova home. Quoted in the story is one William Vizzard, described as “chair of the criminal justice department at California State University, Sacramento.” One commenter called him “a gun control flunky” and suggested Googling to prove it. So I did.

I found this interesting transcript from PBS’s Newshour from October 18, 2002 where Mr. Vizzard, described as an ex-employee of the BATF was one of the panel. The discussion was about “ballistic fingerprinting,” and was inspired by the fact that the DC snipers were active at that time.

This will be kinda long, but I’m going to fisk it.

RAY SUAREZ: The recent sniper attacks in the Washington, DC, area have revived a debate over a technology that helps authorities trace ammunition found at crime scenes. The technology is called ballistic fingerprinting, and it’s based on the idea that every gun leaves unique markings on its bullet casings.

Um, not quite so unique. Modern manufacturing methods and tooling mean that guns coming sequentially off a production line are very likely to have very similar tooling marks.

Gun makers would be required to register those fingerprints so a national database could be compiled. Until recently, crime labs relied solely on the human eye and a microscope to look at evidence from bullets, but now bullets, bullet fragments and shell casings are scanned into a computer and compared against thousands of other bullets or casings.

SPOKESMAN: When a barrel is produced or a firearm itself is produced, it’s made by other tools. The metal is formed and moved around, scraped away, and those imperfections of each of those tools in the manufacturing process have accidental characteristics it imparts on the gun. It’s still a needle in a haystack, but now we can get through the haystack faster. These comparisons from bullet to bullet are into tenths of seconds.

This assumes that there’s enough left of the bullet to allow identification. On top of that, the bullets being compared must also be of similar composition. For example, a .45 caliber 230 grain full metal jacket bullet made by Speer will have much different markings than a 185 grain hollowpoint bullet manufactured by Federal when fired from the same gun. Especially if the first was fired into a water barrel and the second recovered from a corpse after impacting a major bone. A computer probably wouldn’t be able to get a match. A human eyeball Mark I might. But the human eyeball takes a lot longer than tenths of a second.

RAY SUAREZ: Law enforcement officials back the idea of ballistic fingerprinting and so does the federal Bureau of Alcohol, tobacco and Firearms. Several lawmakers have called for legislation requiring gun makers to record the ballistic markings. The National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates oppose legislation, saying the fingerprinting is an unproven science.

The Bush administration was also skeptical, saying earlier this week the technology might not be reliable and could infringe on privacy. But on Wednesday, Spokesman Ari Fleischer said the President does want to look into creating a national registry.

ARI FLEISCHER: The president wants this issue explored. And to that end, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been meeting, and met yesterday afternoon with White House staff to start to discuss the various issues: The technical issues, there are feasibility issues, the pros and cons about how this could possibly… may be effective, whether it could work or whether it would not be able to work.

Gee, thanks Mr. President.

RAY SUAREZ: While the national debate continues, two states, New York and Maryland, have already enacted laws requiring a ballistic fingerprinting for handguns.

Neither of which has yet to have a match that didn’t identify a crime gun already in their possession, contemporary with the crimes, and firing ammunition that matched that found at the crime scene.

We pick up the debate with Joe Vince, the former chief of the crime guns analysis branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He now has a consulting company in the Washington area. And William Vizzard, a former ATF agent, now chair of the division of criminal justice at California State University at Sacramento.

Well, since the speculation, Joe Vince began with the Washington area sniper, let’s take a look at how ballistic fingerprinting may have been useful in a case like this, in investigating a case like this?

JOE VINCE: In a case like this, Ray, this right now, the ballistic evidence is your best evidence. It’s almost your only evidence. So it provides a lead for law enforcement. And any time you’re working an investigation, law enforcement officials are looking for leads that take them to the next step.

You build your case incrementally. And for this, knowing that it was a .223 what type of firearm it could come from, is very useful.

RAY SUAREZ: But would you, if you had this database, have been able necessarily to narrow down what firearm?

Note, now, how Mr. Vince artfully dodges answering the question:

JOE VINCE: With a database like this, the possibilities multiply. And we have to remember that law enforcement today needs to rely on 21st century technology. In 1890, if you wanted to get in law enforcement, you received a badge, a gun and a club, and said go out there, enforce the law.

Well, that was towns of hundreds. Now we have metropolitan areas of millions. Law enforcement has to leverage technology in order to help them solve crimes — as the gentleman said on your earlier piece, to take the haystack and eliminate as much hay as you can to find the needle.

Simple question, wasn’t it? Would the technology help narrow down what firearm? Answer? Evasion, obfuscation, and haystacks. Is he called on this? Don’t be silly.

RAY SUAREZ: William Vizzard, would this have been a useful tool in this investigation?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: Well, it conceivably could be although — given the circumstances — an individual who apparently has planned these shootings in advance, it’s most likely not in the sense that we have about 200 to 250 million guns in circulation in the United States today.

And it’s possible for an individual simply to acquire one of those and use it, knowing that it’s not in the database. I mean, if we were to begin a database, for instance, today, or at whatever point Congress would cease debating it, presumably, it would start recording bullets and cartridge cases from that day forward.

Now one could of course try to collect the 250 million existing samples out there. But I don’t hear anybody really advocating that because the mechanics of simply trying to track down those guns and get some sort of record on them is extremely difficult. So Joe is certainly right about the technology; it’s extremely useful technology.

It’s proven very useful in a number of crimes involving suspect firearms and bullets or cartridge cases recovered from crime scenes. And had we been doing this from the 1930’s on, and of course in those days we didn’t have in way of cataloging it, we might have some utility at this point.

Hey! An actual answer! No wonder he’s no longer in the ATF.

RAY SUAREZ: But given the plans that are under consideration now this gun would have had to have been either used in a crime before or purchased and profiled at the time of purchase in order to get a hit in a database, is that right?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: It would have to be placed in the data base through scanning in either at time of manufacture or when it was picked up by the police.

Of course unlike fingerprints when you fingerprint an individual and they’re subsequently released and you have their fingerprints, in the case of guns, normally when police get their hands on a gun, they don’t release it and so it’s usually useful only for checking against previous crimes as opposed to building a database for future crimes.

This, too is factually accurate. So far I’m impressed.

RAY SUAREZ: I’m sorry, Joe Vince, go ahead.

JOE VINCE: Well, a good comparison is over 100 years ago when we started fingerprinting. We had no database and we were doing everything in a card file. However, we said this is a good tool to use and it has been extremely useful. Now we have a computerized AFA system; that’s a national system that has fingerprints computerized.

And we don’t only put bad people into that system of fingerprinting. Every man and woman who enters our armed services is fingerprinted. Schoolteachers are fingerprinted.

My wife is a schoolteacher; she’s in there. The reason for that in the military is to obviously check their background, check the teacher’s background but also, God forbid, if they were injured or killed in the line of duty, we could identify them.

This is the same thing we have to do. We have to take incremental steps now and build our database up so we have the same capability that we have with fingerprints.

Yet no one suggests that we fingerprint and DNA scan every single individual so we can pick criminals out of the population from crime scene evidence.

RAY SUAREZ: William Vizzard notes that there are some 250 million guns already out there. How long would it take until you had a database that was actually useful, a body of profiles that was large enough to be useful compared to the number that’s already out there?

And, once again, Mr. Vince dodges the very simple question: “How long?”

JOE VINCE: Well, I agree with Bill, there are a lot of firearms out there. But we have to take the next step. (And there is ALWAYS a “next step.”) I was in Palm Beach, Florida, last week and I talked to the sheriff’s office there. Six months ago they received the IBIS equipment and that has already linked seven or eight different homicides and shootings together that they did not know it was related.

So you can see, in a short period of time you can have some success. We have to start somewhere. Congress wisely already allocated the money. We’ve put the equipment everywhere in the United States. Now we have to effectively use it as a law enforcement tool.

Uh, Mr. Vince, you matched crime scene evidence. You did not identify the firearm or its possessor. And YOU DIDN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION.

RAY SUAREZ: Mr. Vizzard, you’ve used the fingerprints analogy. To carry it one step further, it’s pretty hard to change your fingerprints. Is it hard to change the so-called fingerprint that a firearm puts on a shell casing?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: It’s difficult. It’s more difficult than the opponents have characterized. Firearms are made of extremely hard steel and it takes a long time to wear them enough to significantly alter them. But they are capable of being altered, unlike fingerprints and DNA.

Not exactly true, Mr. Vizzard. For example, take two identical Glock model 17 handguns manufactured three years apart, both of which had been ballistically fingerprinted at manufacture. Run 10,000 rounds through gun #1. Then replace the barrel with a new one you can buy – without a background check, via mailorder. You won’t get a ballistic match on the bullet any more. You might be able to get a shell casing match, but after 10,000 rounds I’d imagine the breechface, the extractor, and the firing pin would be quite worn and the last two items might have been replaced. Add to that the fact that the hardness of the brass and the primer cup has a significant effect on the markings put on the case and you just decreased the possibility even more. Finally, swap the slides and barrels between gun #1 and gun #2. It’s the frame of the pistol that’s considered the “gun.” But it’s the slide and barrel that leave the ballistic markings. Your trail just went cold.

WILLIAM VIZZARD: I think the real issue probably here is that the devil is in the details. It’s a question of cost/benefit analysis, not a question of whether it would be desirable to have this data. I think it would be. I’m not an apologist for the NRA. I’m not morally opposed to the idea.

I simply think that if you consider the cost and the benefits, for instance, we aren’t currently, I believe, scanning into AFIS, any of the prints– any of the non-criminal prints that Joe mentioned, either at the state or the federal level. Some local agencies do.

We are taking DNA only on a very small number of samples from serious offenders. It varies from state to state, depending on what the state law is. We would probably solve far more crimes collecting DNA from everybody in the United States than we would from collecting ballistics from every gun manufactured, so I think you just have to weigh what’s the cost going to be, how is it going to work. (I stand corrected. Someone has suggested it.)

Is there going to be a chain of custody issue, which I haven’t heard anybody discuss; you can get a lead without a chain of custody issue, but if you want to actually make the comparison and you don’t recover the firearm, that’s going to be a problem.

So I don’t think it’s a case of it being a bad program in the sense that it’s evil. I think it’s just simply a very difficult program. And before you rush into it, you sit down and you figure the cost and you figure the benefits. And you say what would we do with the money if we didn’t spend it on this. That’s my only point.

And a good one it is.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Joe Vince, how would it work? A lot of the firearms sold in the United States are made overseas. There are domestic makers and sellers as well. At what point in the life cycle of a gun would we check the markings that it puts in the firearm?

JOE VINCE: It would have to be when the firearm sold. Right now in Maryland and New York, they’re doing it with new handguns. And it really is not keeping a database of names. It refers back to a serial number of a gun and then back to the records of that dealer.

So the government really doesn’t have the information. But we do it in a way that’s very similar to the tracing of firearms that we do now for crime guns, which has also been very useful. But again I really think we have to look at integrating this, too with the various information systems we have in law enforcement.

Like, say a gun registration database? That would be the logical “next step” would it not?

JOE VINCE: The idea is that law enforcement collects enormous amounts of information. This is just one piece and DNA is another. But it’s getting knowledge from all that information. That’s what we have to look at. So it is integrating this so we can get those leads consistently and so that crimes like the sniper in Maryland can be swiftly apprehended.

RAY SUAREZ: How about that, Mr. Vizzard, the idea not being that it would provide absolute information, but when cross referenced, when overlaid with a lot of the other sources that police use, it might be useful?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: It would clearly be useful in some cases. My guess is that for sometime what you would get are rather poorly planned crimes, particularly among younger offenders who tend to acquire new guns more readily than older offenders.

I suspect– I really would question Joe’s characterization of collecting at the time of sale. Frankly collecting at the time of import or manufacture would make more sense. We’re talking about a lot of guns here and I envision ATF being back where they were when they used to put personnel at the distilleries — simply putting somebody at the factory and scanning the data in there, but without a national gun registration and licensing system, you’ve got real limits on the value. (Thank you for making my point, Mr. Vizzard.)

And of course that’s why the NRA gets so exercised by it. I’m as not offended by a licensing and registration system as they are. But without that information, private sales very often result in guns just simply being swallowed up and disappearing.

And we do oftentimes trace guns to individuals. We oftentimes lose the track, also. So I think you just have to again analyze the worth of the system as it relates to the specific kind of information you’re looking for. Nobody, I think at this point, can estimate the cost.

Every computer system ever built has turned out to be different than people expected and I realize we’re running the system on a small scale today. But if we start running on a much larger scale, we’ll probably gain some economy of scale and probably also run into problems we didn’t know we would have. All of those things have to be addressed.

Thus endeth the transcript.

All in all, I thought Mr. Vizzard was quite fair, and Mr. Vince was the typical official-line-spewing, job-justifying government flunky.

For further reading on the efficacy of a ballistic fingerprinting database for identifying firearms in the general population, I strongly recommend the initial ballistic fingerprinting study report to the California legislature, Feasibility of a California Ballistics Identification System , the follow-on AB1717 report – Technical Evaluation: Feasibility of a Ballistics Imaging Database for All New Handgun Sales, and the Maryland State Police Forensics Division IBIS report (a 2.5Mb scanned document in PDF format. Maryland never officially released this report as far as I can tell.)

When Vizzard said “Nobody, I think at this point, can estimate the cost” he wasn’t kidding. What he didn’t say was nobody can estimate the effectiveness, either. Without those two crucial bits of information, it’s damned hard to do a cost/benefit analysis, isn’t it?

UPDATE, 2/12: Reader Kevin P., who was the commenter that characterized William Vizzard as a “gun control flunky” has withdrawn that comment, and instead states: “I withdraw that term unreservedly and apologize to Mr. Vizzard should he ever read this.

“However, I will stand by the assertion that he is a gun control advocate. He is a rarity, an informed and knowledgeable gun control advocate, probably because of his career in the ATF. His performance in the PBS ballistic fingerprinting debate was fair and accurate – but it is something that should be expected and demanded of everyone.”

Yes, it should. Kevin P. also links to this quite interesting review of Mr. Vizzard’s book Shots in the Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control by Dave Kopel. Give it a read.

Thank you, Kevin. Stuff like this makes my day.

KevinLeave a comment

Dept. of Agenda? What Agenda?

AGAIN via Instapundit, more evidence of media bias and agenda. We all knew about it, but it’s refreshing to see journalists talking about it for a change. Bernie Goldberg bore the brunt of being the first to protest publicly, but now we’re seeing more.

Anyway, it seems that Dr. Bob Arnot, NBC foreign correspondent, hasn’t had his contract renewed, and he’s a might perturbed about the stories he’s pitched that the network has rejected. And he’s got something to say about it.

In a 1,300-word e-mail to NBC News president Neal Shapiro, written in December 2003 and obtained by NYTV, Dr. Arnot called NBC News’ coverage of Iraq biased. He argued that keeping him in Iraq and on NBC could go far in rectifying that. Dr. Arnot told Mr. Shapiro that NBC had alienated the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since it shot and then aired footage of correspondent Jim Miklaszewski at the scene of the November bombing of the Al Rashid Hotel, in which a C.P.A. staffer was shown injured. That incident, he wrote, “earned the undying enmity of the C.P.A.”

“We’ve been at a significant disadvantage given NBC’s reputation in Iraq,” Dr. Arnot wrote Mr. Shapiro. He argued that due to his excellent relationships with military and C.P.A. personnel, NBC News could repair its standing with government authorities by airing more of his material.

“I’m uniquely positioned to report the story,” he wrote. “NBC Nightly News routinely takes the stories that I shoot and uses the footage, even to lead the broadcast,” but “refuses to allow the story to be told by the reporter on the scene.”

In other words, he suggested, NBC News did not like putting him on the air.

Dr. Arnot included excerpts from an e-mail from Jim Keelor, president of Liberty Broadcasting, which owns eight NBC stations throughout the South. Mr. Keelor had written NBC, stating that “the networks are pretty much ignoring” the good-news stories in Iraq. “The definition of news would incorporate some of these stories,” he wrote. “Hence the Fox News surge.”

Much more. Read the whole thing.

I wonder if FOX is looking for a Geraldo replacement?

They Keep Missing the POINT

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The Baltimore Sun reports that Maryland’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee heard testimony yesterday on a proposed state “assault weapon” ban.

Leading the BAN ‘EM ALL! charge was testimony that “One in five law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty is killed with an assault weapon.” The piece reports:

There’s just one problem with the ratio, according to gun rights advocates: It isn’t true.

Dozens of them testified before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee yesterday, and a hundred more crammed an antechamber while committee members considered a bill that would give Maryland one of the nation’s strictest bans on semiautomatic firearms by banning 45 named weapons and any subsequent copycats. Though 70 state senators and delegates back the bill, gun shop owners, hunting groups, and assorted police organizations rejected the ban and the statistic.

Lt. Col. Steven. T. Moyer of the Maryland State Police — which opposes prohibiting the sale, transfer and ownership of semi-automatic weapons — told committee members that of the 50 rifle-related deaths in the state over the past decade, none of them were officers.

“The statistics are not here and [don’t] support this legislation,” he said.

That’s a surprising thing to hear from a high official of any law-enforcement department. Usually these people are politically savvy and anti-gun. In Maryland it’s especially refreshing. However:

Roots of the 20-percent figure lie in the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit group that works to curtail gun violence through research, advocacy, education and litigation. The group analyzed unpublished FBI data on fatal police shootings from Jan. 1, 1998, through Dec. 31, 2001. During the period, 211 officers nationwide were killed in the line of duty, 41 of them with weapons the group determined to be assault weapons, such as M1 Carbines, AK-47s, Tec 9s and AR-15s.

“They classified all rifles as assault weapons,” Republican state Sen. Nancy Jacobs, wearing a button with the words “MARYLAND GUNOWNERS VOTE,” complained during the marathon hearing.

Not so, said Kristen Rand, the Violence Policy Center’s legislative director, in a telephone interview.

“All we did was we called the FBI, we asked them if we could get a list of guns used to kill police officers,” Rand said. “We took those instances where we knew for sure that it was an assault weapon and put them together. I think the confusion comes in that this data is not routinely released.”

The data, summarized in the organization’s “Officer Down” report, includes the model number and bullet caliber used in police shootings from Alaska to New York. Among the fatalities is the Oct. 20, 2000, death of Baltimore County Police Officer John Stem, the last Maryland officer to die of wounds inflicted by an assault weapon. Stem suffered the wounds during a barricade shooting in 1977 that left him paralyzed and killed a fellow officer.

One quibble – “research, advocacy, education and litigation”? The VPC is unabashedly in favor of banning handguns. If they can get “assault weapons” banned first, they’re all for it. Here’s where I get to insert my favorite VPC quote:

Although handguns claim more than 20,000 lives a year, the issue of handgun restriction consistently remains a non-issue with the vast majority of legislators, the press, and public. The reasons for this vary: the power of the gun lobby; the tendency of both sides of the issue to resort to sloganeering and pre-packaged arguments when discussing the issue; the fact that until an individual is affected by handgun violence he or she is unlikely to work for handgun restrictions; the view that handgun violence is an “unsolvable” problem; the inability of the handgun restriction movement to organize itself into an effective electoral threat; and the fact that until someone famous is shot, or something truly horrible happens, handgun restriction is simply not viewed as a priority. Assault weapons – just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms – are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Yeah, they’re really dedicated to honesty and full disclosure. People are confused about the difference between semi-autos and machine guns? Great! Works for us! Plastic firearms? Don’t exist, but boy, what a fear-inspiring soundbite! Armor piercing ammo? Who cares if any rifle round will penetrate a police vest, we can use that to slip in a backdoor ban! Spin, twist, mislead, obfuscate, exaggerate, lie! It’s for a righteous cause!

Ok, what we’ve got here is both sides offering “sloganeering and pre-packaged arguments” for the purpose of influencing lawmakers. (Big surprise.)

I covered the VPC’s report back in May when the Atlanta Urinal Constipation Journal Constitution ran a story on it. What I found was that the report said that of the 211 officers killed with firearms, 41 were killed with “assault weapons.” The accuracy of this statement depends on the definition of “is” how you define “assault weapon.” Unsurprisingly, the VPC defines it as broadly as possible. Of the 41 deaths, four (4) were with M1 Carbines, eight (8) with SKS rifles, two (2) with Mini-14’s, three (3) M-11’s, and two (2) TEC-9’s. Problem is, the M1 Carbine, the SKS and the Mini-14 don’t qualify under the current Federal ban as “assault weapons,” and neither the M-11 nor the TEC-9 is a rifle. The table indicates that in 2000 a Maryland officer was killed with an M1 Carbine, so somebody is obviously in error.

But the point everybody misses is the one I made in that May piece: The underlying implication is that the “assault weapon ban” would result in officer’s lives saved, but the statistics show that’s a conclusion you can’t draw. According to this table provided by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, there is no evidence that the proliferation of “assault weapons” has caused any increase in officer deaths. In other words, you cannot honestly conclude that banning these guns would save anybody. If someone’s willing to shoot a cop, they’re willing to shoot a cop. Choice of weapon is apparently immaterial. And an “assault weapon ban” is a useless exercise, as Lt. Col. Moyer correctly stated.

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A Liberal I Could Live Next Door To

Though I think he’d be wary of ME. Barry of Inn of the Last Home has written an excellent piece (permalinks bloggered, scroll down to “What to Write, What to Write…”) (Link via Say Uncle) Teaser:

I’m just the average guy who wants to do the right thing and the dutiful thing when voting. Today’s Primary Day in Tennessee. I plan to go to the polls this afternoon after work, and make my choice for Democratic candidate for President.

Trouble is, I’m not sure I want a Democrat as President this time.

In the past, I’ve always considered myself a Democrat, and have mostly identified myself with liberal causes. The Republican mindset has mostly been alien and unfathomable to me.

But things have changed in this past year.

I wrote a couple of pieces about Barry’s position on guns a while back. I accused him, based on his writing, of being mentally unbalanced when it came to firearms, but this piece illustrates beyond a doubt that his logical faculties are quite functional. Read the whole thing.

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Agenda? What Agenda? III

Unsigned (naturally), the ABC News “The Note” newsblog had the following admission of liberal bias that I feel (and Instapundit felt) needs to be recorded for posterity, as it’s sure to disappear as soon as some higher-up discovers it, if not it will simply scroll off the page into oblivion:

NEWS SUMMARY

The first version published of yesterday’s Note included what was intended as a SATIRICAL report of a fictional ABC News/Washington Post poll. No such poll was conducted. The questions and results listed were not from a real poll.

But on this day when John Kerry has a chance for wins in Tennessee and/or Virginia that just might get the Southern monkey off of his back — and take an opponent out of the race — and after two full news cycles in which Kerry’s transient upper hand over President Bush doesn’t seem to have been removed by the “Meet” appearance — on this day, let us tell you again what we tried to say yesterday.

Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are “conservative positions.”

They include a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation’s problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don’t have a negative affect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories.

More systematically, the press believes that fluid narratives in coverage are better than static storylines; that new things are more interesting than old things; that close races are preferable to loose ones; and that incumbents are destined for dethroning, somehow.

The press, by and large, does not accept President Bush’s justifications for the Iraq war — in any of its WMD, imminent threat, or evil-doer formulations. It does not understand how educated, sensible people could possibly be wary of multilateral institutions or friendly, sophisticated European allies.

It does not accept the proposition that the Bush tax cuts helped the economy by stimulating summer spending.

It remains fixated on the unemployment rate.

It believes President Bush is “walking a fine line” with regards to the gay marriage issue, choosing between “tolerance” and his “right-wing base.”

It still has a hard time understanding how, despite the drumbeat of conservative grass-top complaints about overspending and deficits, President Bush’s base remains extremely and loyally devoted to him — and it looks for every opportunity to find cracks in that base.

But only FOX news is biased, right?

KevinLeave a comment

Read the Curmudgeon. The Curmudgeon is Wise

For a couple of weeks now I’ve had an urge to write an essay about just how crappy our government has become and what to do about it. Don’t get me wrong – I think that our system of government is still the best in the world. No other democratic form of government has lasted as long as ours in modern history, nor has any other nation achieved the wealth, the power, nor the standard of living the United States has. However, the defective components of the system – the people who want to manipulate it for their own ends, and those who fail to oppose them – have had a very long time to toss sand and monkey wrenches into the gleaming machinery our Founders constructed, and time has taken its toll. Repair is needed. The question, in my opinion, is whether we’re going to be able to make the necessary repairs while the system is running, or if we’re going to have to dismantle the thing for a complete overhaul. The second option holds the very real risk of not being able to put it back together again, or – possibly worse – put it back together in a form that is far worse than what we have now.

My urge to write that essay was largely inspired by a piece written by the Geek With A .45, because, like me, he sees the mechanisms of oppression being constructed by our ostensible public servants – subassemblies just waiting to be put together into a machine of tyranny. Mechanisms that I believe the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written to prevent.

Thankfully, Francis Porretto has begun a series of essays entitled Tyranny and its Fringes which is up to part four now. If you don’t read The Curmudgeon’s Corner please give these a read:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

UPDATE: 2/13 – Part V is up.

UPDATE: 2/20-Part VI is now up.

Francis lays out an excellent background lesson, and has begun to explain how we can repair the damage with the machinery still running. The Constitution has really excellent self-healing properties, but it requires us – the working parts – to do our jobs. We’ve not been living up to the task.

I may still write my piece(s), but I’m going to wait until Francis is finished with his series.

OK, THIS Cop CAN Shoot!

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I’ve written a couple of pieces on news stories on cops that can’t seem to shoot straight. It is my opinion that there is a misconception among the general public about the efficacy of the training regimens of police forces and the general level of marksmanship thereof. However, Officer Richard Silva of the Tucson Police Department can shoot. (Last story on the page)

Police wound man, say he fired twice at them

TUCSON – A man chasing his ex-wife with a handgun was injured this weekend when he shot at police and an officer returned fire, police said.

Tucson Police say the man, Bernie Duran, 55, was treated for a gunshot wound and booked into the Pima County Jail on one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, three counts of aggravated assault on police officers and one count of kidnapping.

At 12:40 p.m. Saturday, a man called police to report that his mother-in-law was being held against her will by her ex-husband.

When police called the home, the woman was evasive on the phone but was apparently in distress, said Sgt. Judy Altieri, a Tucson Police spokeswoman. As officers reached the home, the woman ran out with Duran chasing her, Altieri said.

Duran fired two shots at Officer Richard Silva, 36, and Silva fired three times from about 180 feet away, striking Duran once, she said.

That’s about sixty yards at a running target. That’s damned good shooting, especially when your target is shooting back!

And lest you think I pick on cops too much, you might want to revisit “THIS is Why You Train”.

Carolyn Lisle could use some pointers, I think.

KevinLeave a comment

Read this, and Rember Those Left Behind

From the Denver Post comes this touching story of the widow of one of the pilots murdered on 9/11. It opens:

A week after United Flight 93 crashed into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001, Sandy Dahl had a dream about her husband, one of the pilots aboard the four ill-fated planes that day.

In the dream, she and her husband, Jason Dahl, were each piloting F-16 fighter jets. The dream was a reminder for Sandy Dahl: Jason had hoped to fly “the Porsche of aircraft” during his life and counted his 25th birthday – the cutoff age for entering flight school for F-16s at the time – as one of saddest days of his life.

Sitting in a briefing room at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora on Sunday, minutes before living out her husband’s dream to see the world from the cockpit of an F-16, Sandy Dahl recalled “the most real dream I’ve ever had.”

Go read.

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“And That’s Just Our Womenfolk!”

This ought to have you laughing. And thinking. Clayton Cramer relates this Sacramento Bee story of a loser who broke into the wrong dad-gummed house in the wrong dad-gummed neighborhood!

Woman opens fire on intruder

A man is wounded as she defends her home with two handguns.

Firing nine rounds from two handguns, a 53-year-old Rancho Cordova woman fended off an intruder Thursday night after he crashed through her sliding glass door.

William Kriske, a 47-year-old parolee, was treated for a gunshot wound to the arm, then taken to jail and arrested on suspicion of burglary and resisting arrest, according to Sacramento County Sheriff’s Sgt. Lou Fatur.

“It was one of those nights. I have a few holes in my glass out front,” Carolyn Lisle said Friday.

“That’s OK, I don’t think he’ll be back,” said Lisle, who emptied one .357 revolver at the intruder before she retrieved a second one and he crashed through another window to flee.

“I was trying to miss my furniture. Priorities, right?” Lisle said.

Lisle, shaken but spirited, recounted her night that started as a quiet evening of TV with three friends and two dogs in her living room.

At about 9 p.m., a noise at the sliding door prompted a male visitor to get up to investigate, but Lisle dashed to a back room to get one of her guns.

“I knew it couldn’t be good,” Lisle said.

When the intruder shattered the glass, Lisle’s three guests fled from the house. Lisle stood her ground and opened fire.

“He was like a mosquito hitting the window. Every time he turned around, poweee,” she said.

Lisle wasn’t sure the intruder was alone so she nervously watched her back as she squeezed off rounds.

When she emptied one gun, she still hadn’t hit him. And he wasn’t gone.

“He was still in the garage, flitting around,” she said.

She went to get another gun — “I like to be prepared,” she said — and waited to see his next move. After tearing up the garage, he finally broke out through a garage window, but he veered toward Lisle’s front door. She fired again, hitting him at least once.

The bleeding intruder ran across the street and tried to hot-wire a motorcycle, but its owners, already armed to come to Lisle’s aid, chased off the would-be thief, she said.

She said one of the men yelled after the retreating burglar: “And that’s just our womenfolk.”

A California Highway Patrol officer stopped the suspect a short distance away and sheriff’s deputies arrested Kriske.

Lisle is still puzzled why someone would break into a well-lit living room with four people and two dogs.

“It was like he was out to hurt someone,” she said.

Fatur said a prowler had been reported moving through neighborhood back yards at about the time Lisle’s house was invaded.

Lisle, who said her guns are registered, will not face criminal charges, Fatur said. California law allows someone to use deadly force whenever a reasonable person believes an intruder poses a threat to kill.

Lisle is the second homeowner in the Sacramento area this year to use deadly force against an intruder.(And it’s only February!) In January, a Sacramento man shot and killed one of two armed intruders who broke into his home. He wasn’t charged.

Studies done to determine whether gun ownership deters crime have only stirred more controversy because of the way statistics are gathered and analyzed, and the way people recall their experiences, said William Vizzard, chair of the criminal justice department at California State University, Sacramento.

“We tend to see ourselves as heroic rather than idiotic,” said Vizzard, who is also a 30-year law enforcement veteran.

Vizzard, who has studied major research and written on gun issues, said two of the most prominent surveys differ dramatically in results, showing anywhere from 150,000 people a year to 2.5 million who claim success in thwarting crime with a gun.

“The answer is, no one can say for sure at the end of the day that the presence of a firearm doesn’t increase your risk of getting injured, nor does it reduce your risk,” he said.

Lisle is pretty sure where she stands: “You need protection in this day and age.”

A retired state worker who once worked as a correctional officer, she did admit that she hadn’t been to a shooting range lately: “After last night, I might go once in a while.”

I’d appreciate it if she went more than once in a while. Nine rounds and one peripheral hit? The odds of one of those misses hitting an innocent are low, but certainly not zero.

This is a surprisingly balanced piece given the source. The quote from Vizzard shows, I think, some bias though. To be really valid he should have said no one can say for sure that the presence of a firearm increases or decreases your risk of getting injured. Read it carefully for the spin he actually put on it: Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.

Consider, though, what might have happened if she had not been armed. A guy willing to break in to a house with three people and two dogs? That could have been very ugly.