The Luger looks awful with that silencer. The thing reminds me of a ratchet handle.

This is one of those stories you get to know if you are deep into a specific culture and I found out through some Facebook friends that are very into gaming. Apparently Anita Sarkeesian has been a visceral critic of the Video game culture and how they portray females in it. I did not delve into what makes her mad, but I would be very much surprised if she is not bitching about making the characters look sexy and assorted blah-blahs.

Ms. Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak at Utah State University when she got a threatening email (how coincidental) promising death destruction and free puppies or some crap like that. Here is a copy made available:

The writer makes reference to Marc Lépine and I admit I had to look him up. in Wikipedia.  He turns out to be a Canadian Mass Shooter who killed 14 women in 1989 who complained women were taking over non-traditional roles in society and what-not .  This is a very dark reference to make in the US; first Mass shooters rarely if ever give specific warnings as they know there are no points to be gained that way and secondly, if you are gonna use a reference for a college/school shooting, you go to the classics: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold or Seung-Hui Cho which are embedded in the American mind. After reading that email, I figured that it was written by a Canadian troll to screw with Sarkeesian or maybe somebody with a flair for the dramatic in need to boost Sarkeesian’s relevance outside the gaming community.

But erring on the side of caution, USU authorities decided to do a threat assessment:

USU police were contacted immediately, as were state and federal agencies, including the Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center, the FBI Cyber Terrorism Task Force, and the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit.

Prior to the threat, USU police were already making preparations for security as Ms. Sarkeesian had received threats in the past. After receiving the email, USU police added heightened security measures, including securing the Taggart Student Center auditorium far in advance, ensuring her safety to and from the event, and bringing in additional uniformed and plain-clothed police officers.

Throughout the day, Tuesday, Oct. 14, USU police and administrators worked with state and federal law enforcement agencies to assess the threat to our USU community and Ms. Sarkeesian. Together, we determined that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the speaker, and that this letter was intended to frighten the university into cancelling the event.

And here is where Anita Sarkeesian needed to step up. She just couldn’t play the victim when even the FBI told her the email was a load of BS. So what is a Social Justice Worker to do? Blame the usual suspects: Gun Owners.  Utah allows for Campus Carry and as far as I know, no blood has flown in the student centers nor massacres have occurred in class.  But it was the perfect excuse for Anita Sarkeesian to save face so she demanded that concealed carry be forbidden at her event. The school told her they could not do that as they would be breaking the law and Anita Sarkeesian finally had the excuse to call more attention on herself by loudly cancelling the event.

Now how the heck does Mom jump from a probably fake email and the law of the State of Utah to Gun People bullying Anita Sarkeesian is one those mental acrobatics I cannot fathom. Then again it is a Pavlovian response in their part since they saw the word “guns” and had to attack.  Pity the guns only exist in some video game console and are hard to make work in real life.

If you were under attack by a pregnant woman and had to choose between dying or using deadly force in self-defense, which would you choose? If you would choose self-defense, how do you reconcile harming the fetus to save your life with putting the fetus first when the life of the mother is on the line for medical or other reasons?

via A hypothetical situation for pro-life people | VolkStudio Blog.

Although Oleg circumscribes the question among the Pro-Life, I don’t think even the most staunchest Pro-Abortion defender would  favor an unwanted termination of a pregnancy, specially if it is an obviously advanced case.

In the calm rational moment of now, the answer would be a yes-I-will-shoot knowing that I would probably be needing a visit from JD and some counseling afterward.

I hope I never face the situation because I just don’t know how I will react. Harming an innocent child is top in my taboo list.

Your thoughts?

As usual, I am not a lawyer, jus somebody who reads law and might have an interpretation of it. Grain of Salt recommended.

From its earliest times, the law of self-defense has included an important exception. When one under attack knows he can escape from danger by retreating, without risking further danger to herself, he must retreat. Like the law against homicide, the rule of retreat attempts to avoid unnecessary death – even the death of an unlawful attacker – unless the circumstances present no alternative. The rule of retreat is itself subject to an exception: the rule has almways applied everywhere except in the home of the person under attack. This exception to the rule of retreat, known as the castle doctrine, makes sense: the home is the last and final place to which one could retreat. Thus a victim never had to retreat from an attacker in her own home; she could stand and fight back.

SYG laws change this ancient legal landscape in a fundamental way. SYG laws abolish the rule of retreat in any place the person defending herself has a right to be. Put another way, SYG laws take the rule of retreat from the home and extend it into public places. A person under unjustified attack in a public place need not retreat, even if she knows she can get away in complete safety; she can stand her ground, and even use deadly force if she faces deadly force

via JURIST – EXTRA: Stand Your Ground Laws and Implicit Bias.

These are the words of David A. Harris, Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law University of Pittsburgh during the United States Commission on Civil Rights on this past October 17. By now the readers of this blog are well aware that Stand Your Ground is not something that the NRA cooked up in last decade and poured over Florida but a well established principle with Supreme Court decisions over 100 years old ( Beard v. United States – 158 U.S. 550 (1895) and Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335 (1921) )

But there is more:

This “no retreat in public” idea is the central feature of Florida’s SYG law. The Florida law also gives criminal and civil immunity to one claiming an SYG defense. When the killer makes an SYG claim, police cannot immediately arrest, detain, charge or prosecute, as they usually would. Police and prosecutors may investigate, utilizing “standard procedures,” but they cannot arrest unless the agency “determines that there is probable cause that the force that was used was unlawful.”

He makes it sound like you can stand, knife in hand on top of a mound of dead babies, shout “Stand Your Ground!” and you cannot be touched. Nothing farther from the truth. Immunity from prosecution is not a legal olly olly oxen free that let’s you walk out of a crime scene without any worry in the world. In order to claim immunity from prosecution, the four tenets for Self-Defense still must be present: Innocence, Immediacy, Reasonableness and Proportionality. f these conditions are not present, you can claim SYG/Immunity till your face turn green and you will still be riding in the back of a cruiser wearing steel bracelets.

What many confuse with a Free Pass is actually Florida Statutes 776.032 (2) which states: A law enforcement agency may use standard procedures for investigating the use or threatened use of force as described in subsection (1), but the agency may not arrest the person for using or threatening to use force unless it determines that there is probable cause that the force that was used or threatened was unlawful.  What we have is that if you used deadly force/Homicide to defend yourself, you cannot automatically be arrested for the use of such force when the evidence says otherwise even if Use of Deadly Force/Homicide is against the law because there is enough information to initially support an extenuating circumstance: Justifiable Homicide. The law does not say that the police should stop investigating altogether and let the person investigated go home and collect $200 but that they continue to do so till they can find evidence contrary to the initial findings or they are satisfied that the initial assessment of self-defense is confirmed.

So why are we still having these silly arguments about SYG and Immunity from prosecution? In my opinion it is mostly a political narrative based on prosecutors disliking the fact that power has been taken away from them (mostly because a history or prosecutorial misconduct) and they resent that. Those interested in the elimination of SYG, added a few shakes of implied racism by claiming that SYG unfairly targets minorities, specially blacks (but they forget to add that the biggest recipient of SYG benefits have been blacks) and we have us a faux uproar based on nothing.

But that a supposed scholar like Professor Harris repeats the same old stupidity that we expect from our local news rags and political hacks, makes you think he is not a worthy recipient of the position at his school. That he does it by sheer ignorance or conscious choice is to be determined.

Via Concealed Nation.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier says taxi drivers should be banned from carrying concealed handguns.
Lanier  made the recommendation during a hearing on a bill that would allow District of Columbia residents and visitors to get concealed handgun permits for the first time in nearly 40 years.

via Cab Drivers Shouldn’t Carry Concealed Weapons, D.C. Police Chief Says | NBC4 Washington.

After 25 years or more of country-wide Concealed Carry, it is sad to see that D.C. still treats their Cab drivers like some sort of second-class citizens.

Those who follow Massad Ayoob have his best-selling book The Ayoob Files. In the book we find the Mark Yuhr Incident in which Mr. Yuhr, a can driver saved his life because of the still new Florida Concealed Weapons Permit law.

In this city, it was once impossible to get a concealed carry permit unless you were influential, and even then it was only good in the county of issue. Florida’s recent pistol permit reform has changed this. Yuhr is one of the many citizens who took advantage of their right to get a statewide concealed carry permit after paying
$145 for the application and taking a 4-hour firearms safety course.

….”I’ ve given you all the money I have!”
“Get out of the car!”
The man in the back seat gestures savagely with the muzzle of the 9mm, and Yuhr opens hi s door, slides out of the bucket seat, and steps into the roadway. He watches as the man climbs between the two front buckets from the back seat. As he starts to emerge from the driver ‘s door, the gunman’s head swivels both directions, as if scanning for witnesses. His finger is tight on the trigger of the Smith & Wesson automatic...

If you wanna read the rest, go buy the book. This is a one must-have book in your library.

But I can advance that we had a happy ending with Mr. Yuhr or at least not so bad. But it was because he was given the chance to defend himself with the proper tools and not be 100% victim.

In D.C.? Well, Police Chief Cathy Lanier wants you to have a good chance to become a crime statistic.