The Pinellas County State Attorney Bernie McCabe should remember that the last prosecutor that pulled a political move in a self-defense case, lost her bid for re-election badly. But probably the idea is to make noise against Stand Your Ground (which does not apply here)  and bankrupt the defendant.

From our  local fecal aviary catcher:

And there you have it folks: Florida is suffering red timed because politicians are failing to protect the environment according to the article. We need more attention to Global Warming and More Money to be spent and more politicians who side with the environmental druids.

Bu there is a rub. You see, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation:

Red tide is a naturally-occurring microscopic alga that has been documented along Florida’s Gulf Coast since the 1840’s and occurs nearly every year. Blooms, or higher-than-normal concentrations, of the Florida red tide alga, Karenia brevis, frequently occur in the Gulf of Mexico. Red tide begins in the Gulf of Mexico 10 to 40 miles offshore and can be transported inshore by winds and currents.

Let’s digest that a bit. Red Tides have been documented happening in South Florida for 178 years. Florida became a state of the Union till 1845, same as Texas. The Oregon trail started in 1843 two years after the first covered wagons started to make it to California. The first telegraph message was sent by Samuel Morse in 1844 and in 1847 the Mormons start leaving Illinois for Utah.

It is in that timeframe above that the first red tides are documented, but the Miami Herald tries really hard to say that it is all because of Climate change/global warming/bad politicians/not enough money/some people hate the environment.

Dear Miami Herald, don’t be pissed when you are called Fake News… because you are.

PS: Yes, don’t blog without enough caffeine. I got it.  And spell check the title.

The great conservative pundit Iowahawk is has a great quote about the state of modern media.

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 9, 2013

This is one of those.  It is a study on guns that the Washington Post covered and I’ve seen nowhere else.

New evidence confirms what gun rights advocates have said for a long time about crime

Yes, that is the actual title.  I’m surprised nobody’s been fired for it and the article memory holed.

Lawful gun owners commit less than a fifth of all gun crimes, according to a novel analysis released this weekby the University of Pittsburgh.

In the study, led by epidemiologist Anthony Fabio of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, researchers partnered with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police to trace the origins of all 893 firearms that police recovered from crime scenes in the year 2008.

I like how they put that: Perpetrator was carrying a firearm owned by someone else.

That shows you just how pervasive media spin is.  That category is stolen or straw purchased guns.

They found that in approximately 8 out of 10 cases, the perpetrator was not a lawful gun owner but rather in illegal possession of a weapon that belonged to someone else. The researchers were primarily interested in how these guns made their way from a legal purchase — at a firearm dealer or via a private sale — to the scene of the crime.

“All guns start out as legal guns,” Fabio said in an interview. But a “huge number of them” move into illegal hands. “As a public-health person, I’d like to be able to figure out that path,” he added.

That’s good news for us.  The take away is proof that all the gun control ideas that the Left can come up with that restrict the rights of law abiding citizens will barely make a dent in the homicide rate.  Of course we all knew that but it’s nice to finally have evidence in an academic study.

Still, anything positive for us has to be minimized.

More than 30 percent of the guns that ended up at crime scenes had been stolen, according to Fabio’s research. But more than 40 percent of those stolen guns weren’t reported by the owners as stolen until after police contacted them when the gun was used in a crime.

I suspect that these are a lot of “I bought one gun for personal protection and hid it in my closet and forgot about it for years” gun owners.  Don’t be one of those people.

One of the more concerning findings in the study was that for the majority of guns recovered (62 percent), “the place where the owner lost possession of the firearm was unknown.”

That seems oddly suspicious.  I’m thinking the percentage of straw purchasers is higher than anybody suspects.

“We have a lot of people with a lot of guns,” Fabio said, referencing statistics on the large number of guns in circulation. “And some of them aren’t keeping track of them for different reasons — maybe because they have a lot of them and they don’t use them that often.”

Lock your guns up when you are not using them.  A cheap safe isn’t a safe.  Write down your serial numbers and store that information somewhere else.

A number of factors could lead to legal firearms entering the black market. Owners could misplace them, or they could be stolen — either through carelessness on the owner’s part (leaving a gun in an unlocked car, for instance) or determination on the part of thieves.

It’s also likely that many guns on the black market got there via straw purchases — where a person purchases a gun from a dealer without disclosing that they’re buying it for someone else. This is illegal under federal law. One potential sign that straw purchasing is a factor in the Pittsburgh data: Forty-four percent of the gun owners who were identified in 2008 did not respond to police attempts to contact them.

I’m thinking a lot of those “I lost my gun and I don’t know where I lost it” people might be straw purchasers.

The top-line finding of the study — that the overwhelming majority of gun crimes aren’t committed by lawful gun owners — reinforces a common refrain among gun rights advocacy groups. They argue that since criminals don’t follow laws, new regulations on gun ownership would only serve to burden lawful owners while doing little to combat crime.

There is always a “but” to counter the positive.

But Fabio’s research suggests that this strict dichotomy between “good guys” and “bad guys” isn’t necessarily helpful for figuring out how to keep “good” guns — those purchased legally — from getting into “bad” hands. And there may be modest, non-burdensome ways to help keep guns in the hands of the good guys.

“The good guys don’t commit the murders but we don’t know who the good guys are so we’re going to assume everyone is a bad guy so we still need more gun control.”

For instance, 10 states plus the District of Columbia have laws in place requiring gun owners to report the theft or loss of firearms to law enforcement, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that advocates for stronger firearm regulations. But in the majority of states, no such law is in place.

If my guns were stolen, I’d report it right away.  The problem is that these laws in a place like DC usually get turned into a way for the city to prosecute the gun owner rather than catch the criminal.

DC resident: “I’d like to report my guns got stolen”
DC Cop: “Guns, but your permit is for one gun.”
DC resident: “I meant gun.”
DC Cop: “You have the right to remain silent…”

Additionally, past research has demonstrated that a small fraction of gun dealers are responsible for the majority of guns used in crimes in the United States. A 2000 report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found that in 1998, more than 85 percent of gun dealers had no guns used in crimes trace back to them. By contrast, 1 percent of dealers accounted for nearly 6 in 10 crime gun traces that year.

Sounds like the ATF isn’t doing their job well.  This is my shocked face.

The firearms bureau knows exactly who these gun dealers are — but they’re not allowed to share that information with policymakers or researchers due to a law passed by Congress in 2003. As a result, solutions for stanching the flow of guns from these dealers to crime scenes remain frustratingly out of reach for public-health researchers.

“There’s not much federal funding out there to do research on firearm and firearm safety,” Fabio said. As a result, “there’s not a lot of good research out there. The process of getting it done has been hindered by a lot of limits on academics and how they can do firearms research.”

You mean the goverment won’t let “public heath advocated” do a run-around of the Second Amendment, imposing gun control as bureaucrat fiats the way they do in health care.

In the meantime, researchers have to be creative — like partnering with local law enforcement agencies to find answers to their questions.

We’re so sorry that you have to work to get results.

You can tell that the people who did this study and the WaPo writer who reported on it didn’t like the outcome.

It proves what the NRA has been saying all along is right.  The vast majority of gun owners are responsible law abiding people who are no harm to anyone.  The majority of murderers are already criminals, and there is a small percentage of people – straw purchasers or bad dealers – that enable them.

Go after the bad dealers and straw purchasers.  That would go a long way in reducing gun crime.  That isn’t a justification for blanket gun bans or gun control.

No wonder this study got no coverage.

Woman killed by neighborhood dogs

Montgomery County [NC] Sheriff Chris Watkins released this statement Friday, August 10.

On Thursday, August 9, 2018, a resident of a Lake Tillery development on the western side of Montgomery County went missing while taking her daily walk. After several hours the 66 year old female did not return home. Her husband called neighbors and friends who searched the area. They were unable to locate her and call 911. Sheriff’s deputies and search and rescue were sent to the scene. Within hours she was discovered deceased on the side of an unused road within the development. An investigation was conducted with the assistance of the Medical Examiner’s Office, NC Wildlife Resources Commission and Animal Control. The investigation revealed she had been attacked by dogs. Law enforcement searched the neighborhood and located two pit bull dogs with physical evidence reflecting the dog’s involvement. The animals were taken into custody by Animal Control and are being quarantined. The owner of the dogs is cooperating with officials and the matter is still under investigation and review by the District Attorney’s Office. The name of the victim is being withheld until family members can be notified. The victim is being sent to the NC Medical Examiner’s Office in Raleigh for an autopsy. “This is a very tragic event, which has deeply affected the family, friends, deputies and first responders, our thoughts and prayers are being extended to all.”

The owner is cooperating.  My guess is he didn’t think is dogs could do that and didn’t know they had gotten out.

If you are out and about and choose to carry, remember, in your mind you maybe watching out for just the two-legged predators out to get you.  You never know what else is lurking outside your home.

Two kids among 12 injured by SHOTGUN in Manchester shooting rampage at street party

Children as young as 12 were among the dozen people injured in the incident at around 2.30am on Sunday morning, as a crowd of several hundred people enjoyed a street party following the Caribbean Carnival in Moss Side.

A “large number” of armed and unarmed officers raced to the street where they found several people suffering from gunshot wounds.

This has to be fake news.  Gun control advocates have assured me that mass shootings do not happen in the UK because they banned the guns.

There is on thing that does make me suspect that this story is real.

2 killed in J’Ouvert festival shootings in Brooklyn

Two people were shot to death and four others wounded early Monday at the bustling J’Ouvert carnival celebrating Caribbean culture in Brooklyn – sparking pandemonium hours before the city’s annual West Indian Day Parade.

At least four people were shot and two people were stabbed despite a heavy police presence to ensure safety during the raucous event, which has been routinely marred by violence.

You just can’t have a Caribbean street festival without a shooting.  Most people think of places like Jamaica in terms of cruise line tourism, but once you get away from the places your Caribbean Cruise Line guide takes you, you will find out that Jamaica has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

Still, a mass shooting in Britain.  Unpossible I tell you, unpossible.

Eye twitching something fierce.

“My mom and I were shopping and heard people yell, ‘Active shooter.’ We sprinted out through a back door. I’ve never been so terrified in my life,” Sara Perlman said on Twitter.
A photo posted on Twitter shows people hiding in the back room of the H&M store.
South Florida malls have been the site of several shooting scares in recent months. In December, a thief set off fireworks to distract employees of a jewelry store at Sawgrass Mills. People mistook the noise for gunshots and fled the mall. No one was hurt.

Are you ready for the headline?

Shoplifter with knife causes Sawgrass Mills mall evacuation, police say

And no kidding, they did hide:

Correct me is I am wrong but, when an Active shooter is doing his thing, there is noise as in shooting, right? That is a pretty damn big clue to know if somebody is shooting or not. So what did this guy do? Slash in the air and go “Bang-bang-bang-bang.”?

Effing Broward County.