When you’re in a tank, things don’t happen to you. You happen to them.
Damn, it Sure is Dusty in Here
Go read this.
“When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril.”
That’s a quote from the 1996 New Jersey Superior Court decision State vs. Pelleteri, which I have discussed previously.
That’s obviously still the law of the land in the People’s Democratic Republic of New Jersey (PDRNJ) as evidenced by this latest story:
Family Says New Jersey Overreacted To Boy’s Gun Photo On Facebook
The ruddy-cheeked, camouflage-clad boy in the photo smiles out from behind a pair of glasses, proudly holding a gun his father gave him as a present for his upcoming 11th birthday.
The weapon in the photo, posted by his dad on Facebook, resembles a military-style assault rifle but, his father says, is actually just a .22-caliber copy. And that, the family believes, is why child welfare case workers and police officers visited the home in Carneys Point last Friday and asked to see his guns.
New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families declined to comment specifically on the case but says it often follows up on tips. The family and an attorney say father Shawn Moore’s Second Amendment rights to bear arms were threatened in a state that already has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws and is considering strengthening them after December’s schoolhouse massacre in Connecticut.
In this case, the family believes someone called New Jersey’s anonymous child abuse hotline.
—
Moore said he called his lawyer Evan Nappen, who specializes in Second Amendment cases, and had him on speakerphone as he arrived at his house in Carneys Point, just across the Delaware River from Wilmington, Del.
He’s got a good lawyer, anyway.
Here’s the really interesting part:
“They said they wanted to see into my safe and see if my guns were registered,” Moore said. “I said no; in New Jersey, your guns don’t have to be registered with the state; it’s voluntary. I knew once I opened that safe, there was no going back.”
With the lawyer listening in on the phone, Moore said he asked the investigators and police officers whether they had a warrant to search his home. When they said no, he asked them to leave. One of the child welfare officials would not identify herself when Moore asked for her name, he said.
The agents and the police officers left, and nothing has happened since, he said.
“I don’t like what happened,” he said. “You’re not even safe in your own house. If they can just show up at any time and make you open safes and go through your house, that’s not freedom; it’s like tyranny.”
State child welfare spokeswoman Kristine Brown said that when it receives a report of suspected abuse or neglect, it assigns a caseworker to follow up. She said law enforcement officers are asked to accompany caseworkers only if the caseworkers feel their safety could be compromised.
“No going back,” indeed.
Joseph Pelleteri was convicted of possession of an “assault weapon” when his safe was searched and a Marlin Model 60 that he had won in a target competition – manufacturer’s tags still dangling from the trigger guard – was found. Since that weapon could hold 17 rounds of .22 Long Rifle in its magazine tube, and that “highly dangerous offensive weapon” wasn’t licensed, Mr. Pelleteri was convicted of a felony and stripped of his right to arms. Shawn Moore was exactly right in refusing to allow his safe to be searched without a warrant.
But note also that in the PDRNJ, a picture of a “camoflage-clad boy” smiling while “proudly holding a gun his father gave him as a present” qualifies as potential “abuse or neglect” to “state child welfare” workers.
When dealing with the State, the citizen acts at his peril.
And that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
ANOTHER Book for the Pile
I have listened to a speech given by Evan Sayet, and watched a couple of things on YouTube by him, but I just last night found this interview of him conducted by Bill Whittle last year:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61BhYPdIlao?rel=0]
I’m going to have to buy his book.
Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition
This was also found in yesterday’s link to that Larry Correia post, but it’s from a June, 2012 column, Dissent is the Highest Form of … No, Wait:
I hate to bring up other “mid-century notions” but intellectual diversity on the left is increasingly indistinguishable from Tupperware night with the Stepford Wives.
Mark Steyn is another national treasure.
“Bomb-Thrower, McCarthyite, Naysayer, Nitpicker”
Another one I’ll need to watch tonight when I’ve got time, Uncommon Knowledge interviews freshman Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX):
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvBdZBl4u7I?rel=0]Watching him bitch-slap Feinstain was entertaining.
Quote of the Day – Tom Kratman Edition
Excerpted from this long but excellent blog post over at Larry Correia’s:
It’s not racist to wish that our first black president had been Thomas Sowell.
That’s item 10 in Kratman’s “Right’s Twenty Rules of Racism”.
Can I get an “amen!”?
So, Magpul has Pulled the Trigger
…and is leaving Colorado in the wake of that state’s new legislation. Good for them. Now if we could get the Northeast firearms manufacturers to do the same thing.
Demoralization
In the comments to a post at Say Uncle on massive failures from police crime labs in Massachusetts and Texas, Lyle said:
Part of the overthrow of the U.S. is demoralizing the population. Part of demoralizing the population is having incompetent buffoons in critical positions, such that we lose trust in the system. Eventually, so the idea goes, we’ll be so fed up and disgusted that we’ll cry out for a “strong man” who will “do something” by getting past all the politics and red tape, i.e. a dictator.
In the comments to a post at BoingBoing that Uncle linked wherein a Brit berated a man for “taking the law into his own hands” and taking a gun to check on the welfare of his daughter instead of calling the cops to do it, another commenter responded:
Call the police and they might just kill you
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-50…Police escalate car chase to deadly conclusion
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a…Even the mayor isn’t safe
http://www.seattlepi.com/natio…Police helping the mentally-challenged
“With his dying words, he… never understood why the defendant had beat him. He said ‘All I wanted was a Snickers bar.'”
http://digitaljournal.com/arti…Newly-Released Surveillance Video Shows Police Officers Brutally Beating, Suffocating, and Tasing Kelly Thomas to Death
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2…Sure, a lot of cops, maybe most, are there to help. I’ve met some of them. But in this country, it really is a crapshoot. You don’t want to call the cops unless you absolutely have to.
There are a lot more of those, too.
Where have I heard the term “demoralization” before?
UPDATE: The Kelly Thomas link goes to a different homicide-by-cop. The video of Kelly Thomas getting beaten (not tased) to death is here: Full, unedited video.
Don’t Pee On My Leg and Tell Me it’s Raining
So Diane Feinstein’s “Assault Weapon Ban” bill is out of committee. We’re told endlessly by the media that our betters in Washington want to pass new gun control legislation to make America safer. But if you’ve been paying attention, you know for a fact that this is complete bullshit.
Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish explains it so that I don’t have to. Pertinent excerpt:
67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those numbers are from six years ago. They have grown worse since.
Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. The places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. These are the places where the family is broken, money comes from the government and immigrants crowd in from some of the most violent parts of the world bringing with them their own organized crime. These are also the places that have run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.
Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory. He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.
These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.
Obama isn’t the cause, he’s merely the latest symptom. But here’s the point:
America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem. These social ills cannot be solved by banning something. The War on Guns is not going to fix the inner city just as the War on Drugs didn’t. Rigid law enforcement can keep the numbers down, but does not deal with the causes of the violence.
As Say Uncle puts it, “Gun Control – what you do instead of something.”
They’re not interested in making us safer, they’re intent on disarming us. Newtown just presented another opportunity to try.