But on the ground, we still have a serious guys-with-guns problem and, in Baltimore, 150 people shot this year by the first day of April. Homicides are up by 11 percent over the same period last year, and last year was horrible. Even with the police effort — nearly 1,200 arrests for illegal gun possession in 2015, and at least 250 more so far this year — our city still crackles with gunfire.

In the aftermath of the killing by Baltimore police officers of the father and his teenage son as they stepped into East Lanvale Street on Thursday, consider this: Both of them had been arrested for firearms offenses, the father for a second time, within the last year. And the father, in particular, benefited from a state justice system that still treats gun crimes as secondary.

Source: What was this armed felon doing on the street? – Baltimore Sun

I was surprised: The Baltimore Sun aiming for the proper enforcement of the gun laws already in the books?

The father, 43-year-old Matthew V. Wood Jr. of Exeter Hall Avenue, had been arrested in October after police with a warrant searched his home and found a 9mm handgun. It was his second gun conviction. Wood, a convicted felon, pleaded guilty. He should have received a mandatory sentence of five years in prison without parole.

Instead, Baltimore Circuit Judge Alfred Nance sentenced Wood to time served awaiting trial, about three months. Nance apparently defered to prosecutors, who had agreed to “step off” the mandatory sentence. And isn’t that just great?

So Wood walked out of court.

There you go. Gift-wrapped with a bow and all and they just let the guy walk out of court.

But Wood got off easy. He appears to have benefited from the state’s willingness to toss aside a gun charge and a judge’s deference.

Imagine if Wood had been able to fire that rifle the other day. What would Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Judge Nance have said about the decision to let Wood walk with time served?

Good question, and the solution is obvious, right?

Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis has been calling for stiffer penalties for illegal gun possession. He does so in the midst of the great national awakening about, among other things, the collateral damage from mandatory minimum sentencing. Davis ran into resistance in Annapolis in his effort to increase the mandatory minimums for first and second convictions of illegal gun possession. He wanted a minimum of one year for the first offense, five for the second.

Dear God in Heaven! Is sending a guy to serve the time on a charge he pleaded guilty a difficult concept to grasp?

Not enforcing the laws we have in the book, Nay! WE NEED MOAR LAWS, Aye! Is that the way some politicians believe keeps the bad guys from doing harm? Or are we seeing the need to keep a city under siege as a political maneuver to ensure the perpetuation in power of a selected few?

Wait, it gets better:

Daniel Webster, a Johns Hopkins researcher and one of the nation’s leading experts on gun violence, notes the recent shift in police focus from arresting people who use and sell drugs to arresting people who are armed and dangerous and cause most of the violence.

“That practice has a pretty good track record and has wide support from community residents, so long as the policing is done fairly and legally,” Webster says. “But it’s demoralizing when police make arrests that are successfully prosecuted, and perpetrators get probation and are back on the streets, a risk to police and residents alike.”

This guy and the rest of “leading experts” should be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Obvious Shit. I can imagine a collective of the best and the brightest from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research (This is where Webster really works) sift through the data:

-Dude.
-What?
-I just finished percolating and filtering the data.
-And?
-You are not gonna believe this. If you put away bad guys with guns, crime goes down.
-You are shitting me!
-Nope. I checked and double checked. Apparently if you arrest them, convict them and put them in prison, they don’t do crime outside.
-Dude! This is revolutionary! 
-I know! Let’s publish a paper next week on that. Now it is time for strippers and pitchers of beer.
-Right behind you.

Then again, this is Baltimore, the city where the Mayor tells police to let rioters have a a space to destroy private property.

Hat Tip to John R.

I’ve seen this exact scene before, many times.

I figure one day, I will find a strip mall and open up gun store and a knitting/craft supply store right next to each other.

I’ll make a killing.

H/T: Wirecutter

I’m half watching Law & Order: SVU while doing the dishes, because there is nothing else on.  The episode is called Raw, and is about a school shooting.  Blah, blah, blah… whatever, whatever, whatever…

So the cops find the gun on top of a building across the street from the school.  It is described this way:

“Folding stock, bolt action, internal magazine.  High-powered scope and a flash suppressor. This is a precision sniper rifle.  Kind you use with a specific target in mind.”

WOW… a bolt action with an internal magazine and a high power scope.  That sounds like most of the deer rifles sold in America.  There is nothing that the folding stock and flash suppressor (which looks a lot more like a muzzle brake) does to make the gun any more dangerous.  Got to love Hollywood gun hyperbole.  No way this is just another bolt gun.  This is a “precision sniper rifle” used to kill people only.  I can’t believe that this thing is legal./sarc/

This is the rifle that the police tech holds up (captured from Hulu for this post).

I didn’t recognize it (which is saying something) and had to look it up.  Turns out it is a Grendel SRT, which turns out to be a .308 Sako 85 modified by the precursor to Kel-Tec, Grendel Arms, and was made in the late 80’s.  Yep, a hunting rifle with a folding stock and muzzle brake.

It’s a rare rifle.  I only found one online auction for one (either active or expired) and it was on Armslist for $1,600.  Seems like kind of an odd gun to be found at a crime scene and an expensive gun to use as drop piece.

So I tune out…

Then I hear “South Dakota.”  So as a former resident of the Rushmore State, I rewound the episode a little bit (hooray for DVR) and found out that Detective Munch traced where the gun was made:

“It was lovingly manufactured in Sturgis, South Dakota.  Made its way to a wholesale distributor in Brainerd, Minnesota.”

Well this was the image on the screen.

That red dot is nowhere near Sturgis.  Sturgis is right by Rapid City – which you can clearly see on the map.  In fact, if you look carefully, you can see Sturgis on the map just above and to the left of Rapid City.

OK.  I know what you are thinking.  This is a show written and shot in NYC.  What do they know or care about South Dakota.  That is flyover country, why be accurate.  Fine.  I’m used to it by now.

But then L&O: SVU goes full retard.

This is the dialog between Detective Munch (M) and Captain Cragen (C):

M: It was lovingly manufactured in Sturgis, South Dakota.  Made its way to a wholesale distributor in Brainerd, Minnesota.Who then shipped it to a whimsically named little shop – called “Gun ho!” On Staten island.
C: When?
M: Less that a month ago. Gun ho! sold it last Thursday.
C: We have a legal purchase?
M: Complete with loophole.  It’s a long gun, so no background checks are required.
C: Cash sale.
M: Of course.
C: Buyer’s signature on the affidavit?
M: Yeah, but it’s illegible.  And I guarantee you, it is bogus.
C: Okay, well, looks like, uh, “S. Brockwull” or, uh, “Rockwell.” First initial could be “G”? Who made the sale?
M: The owner of Gun ho! His name is Brian Ackerman.
C: Well, he did a pretty half-assed job.  He didn’t get a clear signature or a full first name.

And what, pray tell, is the image that goes along with this?  A mother-lovin’ ATF Form 4473.  It says so right at the bottom of the damn page.

So there are the things the writers of L&O: SVU want me to believe.

1. Neither the Federal Government nor the State of New York mandates background checks on long guns sold at gun stores?
2. A Federal Firearms Licensed gun store will make no record of serialized inventory if the item is paid for with cash?
3. Nobody checked ID when having the buyer fill out a Form 4473?
4. A buyer can get away with not properly filling out a Form 4473 and not printing a full name, birth date, address, city of birth, SSN (optional but very heavily encouraged)?
5. A Form 4473 is NOT part of the NICS background check system?
6. And all of the above is legal?

That is some serious bullshit right there.  No wonder most people and politicians have no idea about the background check system in this country.

Now that I am about one-third of the way done with this turd sandwich, I sit down to finish it.  As the late, great Billy Mays used to say: “But wait, there’s more.”

Detectives Munch and Stabler go to the Gun Ho! (the gun store) and lie their way past the owner’s 16 year old son to take a look around WITHOUT a warrant.  How does the prop department dress up the inside of the store?

In 30 seconds of TV I spotted three SBR’s (two SIG 556 and one UZI) hanging from the walls of a store in a state that explicitly prohibits the ownership of NFA items.  Not including the NFA items, there were a bunch AR-15’s, AK-47’s and other guns with high capacity magazines, in violation of New York City’s longstanding Assault Weapon Ban.

Maybe, this is a gun store that does deal in illegal “backdoor” and straw-man sales.  But would they really be so stupid as to have pretty much everything that is illegal in NYC put on display as soon as two cops walk in the door?  Or did the prop department really have no idea what is and is not illegal in NYC and just put the scariest looking stuff they have in the warehouse on the walls?

So the show progresses a little more, Munch and Stabler hear a noise and go down into the basement where BOOM!!!

A whole orgy of evidence that the gun store owners are racist, white supremacists.  Because of course, why not.  White people, guns store, assault rifles, talking about *gasp* the Second Amendment… they have to be white supremacists.  You just can’t have normal, law abiding, small business owners, who just happen to sell guns in NYC.  Not if you are Hollywood leftists.

I guess not seeing this coming was my fault.  I should have remembered that having an AR is practically screaming “Sieg Heil!” right? I figured the way that NYC oppresses scrutinized guns stores  – to the point where some don’t even sell to civilians – a gun store would have to be above board.  Nope.

Now we find out that the owner of the gun store has an entire Neo-Nazi website.  And somehow neither the government of NYC nor the anti-gun nuts in NYC never uncover this.

As it turns out, the sale was illegal for use in a murder conspiracy.  Somehow the the store owners goes free.  No mention of being arrested and charged with any of the federal laws that were broken relating to an FFL performing an illegal transfer as part of a criminal conspiracy.

In the course of this episode I watched the people over at SVU go hyperbolic misdescribing a 80’s Finnish hunting rifle, show total ignorance of state and federal gun laws and the background check system, then go into complete character assassination of gun stores and gun owners.

This is why so many people are so stupid about guns, gun laws, and gun culture.

F*** you Hollywood.  F*** you.

The fact that “gun” appears nowhere in the Bible means that literal evidence of a divine right to bear them is not available.

Source: Does the Bible Enshrine a ‘God-Given Right’ to Shoot in Self Defense? – The Trace

One kinda hopes that the smartest people against violence would not be rehashing this stupid concept again. But the principal reason of repeating misinformation is to make sure it becomes part of The Narrative and surpass both logic and the truth. I have covered in this blog that Self Defense is indeed not only approved but mandated by the Catholic Church. There are also no restrictions in the Jewish faith, Buddhism and probably no religion at all.

However, what these morons from Everytown/The Trace will tell you is that you do have the right to Self Defense, but not the best tools for it. Maybe pepper spray, maybe a cane but it is best if you use fists because everybody in the US is a 25-year-old MMA fighter and there is no need for guns. OK, Maybe cops need guns and the bodyguards for Bloomberg and Shannon Watts, but you little people? Nope.

So, what other things you do not have divine right to?

• Cars.
• HVAC
• TV
• Supermarkets
• Bacon
• The Internet
• Salary
• Modern clothing
• BBQ ribs
• Feminine hygienic products
• Modern footwear
• Medicine
• Publish stupid articles like the above
• Basically anything invented/created after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

So, what can you have?

• Famine
• Sandals
• Long walks to get where you wanna go.
• Being gang raped.
• Plagues
• Locking your woman away every 28 days.
• Being invaded every time an Emperor had his nuts twisted by the wife.
• hourglass.
• Papyrus.
• Grow your own veggies and fertilize them with your poop

The Stupid perpetuates itself.

Via Operator Operating Operationally.

and

For a woman that keeps claiming to be intimidated, she surely is aggressive. Is it really the best policy to accuse possible mass killers (according to her) of being crazy and other assorted name callings?

But who is the woman in the video? Her name is Nancy Bowman and she is a self-described “survivor” of the Tucson shooting where Gabrielle Giffords was injured and, of course, stooge for Bloomberg’s Band Of Lying Activists.

Why do I say “survivor”? Because he was not at the scene of the shooting but was inside of the Safeway shopping when it happened and only came out after it was over to render assistance. She says so herself in the video. 

Apparently, you just need to be in the neighborhood of a gun going off to proudly wear the badge of “Survivor.” But it is not surprisingly that Moms Demand change the definition of words to fit whatever snake oil they are trying to push. They have gone as far as call school shootings at incidents occurring outside school properties, at night among gang members so this fashion of calling themselves “survivors” is pretty much par for the course.

Good to see their true attitudes revealed without the careful PR craft of their handlers.

No kidding.