Gun Free Zone

The Trace is Michael Bloomberg’s other news site.  One dedicated entirely to spreading misinformation about guns and gun crime.

The Trace weighed in on Twitter on a shooting in New York, to attack the NRA for supporting women’s self defense.

A NY woman who fatally shot her boyfriend after years of alleged physical abuse—some of it documented—was convicted of murder, highlighting a problem with the NRA’s position that women should shoot their abusers in self-defense. https://t.co/duMku65iRg

— The Trace (@teamtrace) April 15, 2019

So what are the details of this case that would make a woman who defended herself from an abuser be guilty of murder?

Nicole Addimando found guilty of murder in boyfriend’s shooting death

Nicole Addimando said she was acting in self-defense when she shot and killed Christoper Grover, her longtime-boyfriend and the father of her children, in September 2017.

A woman a right to defend herself from violence, even if that violence comes from an intimate partner.

In New York, prosecutors must disprove a self-defense justification of homicide beyond a reasonable doubt.

That burden of proof was a challenge they welcomed, said Chana Krauss of the Putnam County District Attorney’s Office, during her closing statement.

“That wasn’t self-defense,” said Krauss, whose office handled the case as special prosecutor. “Chris Grover was sleeping on the couch. This was intentional murder.”  Chris Grover was killed by a gunshot wound to the head.

It is not self defense to shoot a man in the head while he is sleeping on the couch.

It doesn’t matter if he beat you 10 minutes before he decided to take a nap.

Justification for Defense is covered in New York Penal Law Article 35.

The general justification for defense is:

Such conduct is necessary as an emergency measure to avoid an
imminent public or private injury which is about to occur by reason of a
situation occasioned or developed through no fault of the actor, and
which is of such gravity that, according to ordinary standards of
intelligence and morality, the desirability and urgency of avoiding such
injury clearly outweigh the desirability of avoiding the injury sought
to be prevented by the statute defining the offense in issue.

So if the man beats the woman then lays down on the couch, the “imminent public or private injury” has ended.  The violence is done.

That may seem unfair, but it’s the law.  Trust me, there are parts of self defense law I want changed.

But, self defense is just that, defense against an imminent threat.  Shooting a sleeping person for revenge or even to preemptively stop a future beating is not self defense.

When the Left gets so wrapped up in identity politics they fail to understand that.  To them, the issue seems to be powerful vs. powerless and gender politics rather than the imminency of violence.

The NRA is not wrong to encourage women to defend themselves.

The Trace is wrong to imply that a woman shooting a sleeping man because he beat her before and probably will beat her again is self defense.

As a Catholic, apparently I am supposed to be in mourning and wearing all black while sporting a rosary in my hand because of the fire at Notre Dame. Sorry, I just can’t feel it. Notre Dame had long ceased being the house of God and it had become a tourist attraction. It was pure religious Disney than pious Christianity. I have never been to ND but I have been to other cathedrals, including Compostela which is older and I feel the same way for all.

I think what ticked me off the most about the TV coverage is the faux sorrow by the talking heads and the fear about the possibility that the objects d’arte perished in the fire. That is not what  church is about, that is a museum or the guitar collections in the Hard Rock casinos. The true measure of a church is the gathering of souls to praise the Lord and not how many statues of seraphims they have.
A Church or Cathedral or Meeting Place or whatever your particular Christian edifice is about is summed up in Matthew 18:20

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

The rest is just cheap decoration.

Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and for some reason he thinks he can use that as a spring board to the Presidency of the United States.

Like every other Democratic Presidential candidate, he has decided to jump onto the “the electoral college is bad” bandwagon.

They way he did it, however, is particularly stupid.

.@PeteButtigieg: "We can’t say it’s much of a democracy when twice in my lifetime, the Electoral College has overruled the American people … Let’s pick our President by counting up all the ballots and giving it to the woman or man who got the most votes" https://t.co/ak42dRUf5R pic.twitter.com/EpCC54432k

— CNN (@CNN) April 14, 2019

In his lifetime, the two elections in which the elected President lost the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

In both of those elections Indiana sided with the electoral college winners, Bush and Trump.

Buttigieg lives in South Bend, one of the few Blue dots in what is usually a mostly Red state.

His desire to undermine the electoral college is a desire to undermine the electoral desires of the majority of the people in his state.

It really is something to watch a person from a flyover state to work so hard to fully subjugate flyover America to New York and California.

Coming across this article shook me a bit. Helping doing this research makes me feel like I am in a mental time machine and get to see through a very narrow window the world back then. When you get to know about what was going on in a time period, you get a better comprehension of why people behaved one way or another.

And then you bump into one of the most investigated mysteries in history as it begins: Jack the Ripper. You know the outcome and details and compare it to what was being published at the time. What they knew, what they speculated and even stuff you may not know. Personally, I just found out Jack was originally called “Leather Apron” even though I had heard there was speculation he used one.

Here is a PDF of a front page of The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer and headline article of the killings, seventh column, top. Realize that journalists and editors not only did not know what was going on but had no inkling we would be still discussing the events an who could be the killer some131 years later.

My wife and I really love the TV show The Orville.

It is, in every way, the rightful heir to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

There was an episode in Season 1, titled “Majority Rules.”

The plot revolves around a society that has no major code of laws.  Peoples’ behavior is judged by social media.  Too many thumbs down and you get lobotomized.

At first this seems really dystopian.

Then I see Tweets like these defending Ilhan Omar’s statement on 9/11 and attacking the Republican response to it.

The I realize that maybe, society lobotomizing some people because of their social media might not be such a bad idea.

One interesting thing I am finding out is that at least at the sliver of time I am working on, lynchings are pretty much colorblind.