awa

Tuesday Tunes

There are entire movies based on tropes. The trope of the tired old man that just wants to be left alone who is bothered to the point where he is forced to react, forced to take action.

People forget that there are old soldiers and there are bold soldiers, there are very few old and bold soldiers.

Those grizzled old men are sometimes more than they seem at first glance.

One of the favorite stories my family tells is of the day when a friend of ours, a former mercenary, yes, verified, was trying to teach my daughter some self-defense. I was only paying half an eye on them when I heard him tell her, “Just kick him in the balls”.

I stood up and told them both, “no”. Yes, if you get a guy in the balls he might stop attacking, but that is not for sure. In addition, most guys have a lifetime of experience guarding the family jewels. I told them that a leg sweep was much better.

Our friend is in his early to mid 20s. I’m old, slow, and fat in my late 50s at the time. I went over to give a short demo. He and I put hands on each other and I asked if he was ready.

On his “yes” I swept the leg, he went horizontal, I pulled up just before he hit the ground.

He was very, very surprised. He didn’t expect an old man to be able to do that.

Old men have to be tricky. Don’t assume that just because they don’t run like the wind they can’t do.

Remember that quote from Quigley Down Under I said I didn’t like them. I never said I couldn’t use one.

And another from Dean Brody

Why it is hard to unconditionally support the thin blue line, maybe?

Updated: When I was eating breakfast, Hagar watched the video.  When she came to the place where the cops opened fire, the cop yell’s “hands up”, not “Drop the Gun”.  I got it wrong. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.


Honest, I wrote this before J.Kb. posted his version.

At the end of May in 2020 I watched camera footage of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, slowly chocking him to death while the man repeated over and over again “I can’t breathe”.

I was so angry. I was glad I had not observed that in person. I did not know if I would have had the courage to intervene to save that man’s life. An out of control cop murdered a black man while people were screaming at him to stop.

When we discussed that horrific video at the table that night, we were all convinced that we had witnessed a cop killing an unarmed, handcuffed black man. Why? Why would he do that?

Over the next few weeks, we started to find out more. As always, it is best to wait to find out the facts, not what we think we saw. It turns out that the black man was a career criminal who was in the process of overdosing. He had just tried to pass off counterfeit money, was attempting to evade the police and had been just been removed from the squad because he was “having problems breathing”.

It seems likely that he had swallowed his stash, which is the cause of the overdose. Once he was out of the squad and before the famous video began, he was struggling with a police officer. The police officer was not “kneeling on his neck” but actually had his knee on the man’s shoulders holding him down, waiting until it was safe to transfer him to the EMTs for transport.

This incident led to a summer of violence in multiple cities and is still with us today. That one video with the massive narrative behind it has done more to damage our society in the last 5 years than any single event I can think of outside of 9/11 and 12/7.

And it was all based on a lie.

When I received an email describing the outrageous behavior of a bunch of cops that murdered a man, I started to write a highly emotional response, ready to slam the cops for their actions.

Here is how that article began:

On April 5th, 2023 an elite team of officers were responding to a domestic violence report. The cops showed up at the house and did the cop knock. Of course, the left plenty of time for people to respond.
AWA, rough draft

I finished that short paragraph and realized that I wanted to verify the type of knock, the length of time that was allowed for the residents to respond. I watched the video. What I saw was stupidity that ended a man’s life and will or should end another’s career.

The facts of the incident:

Three cops respond to a domestic violence call. They approach on foot. The arrive at a suburbia home, nicely maintained, outside lights on, inside lights out. No noises from inside the house.

The lead officer opens the screen door and politely knocks. It wasn’t the demanding cop knock of fame. It was a polite knock on the door. He waited about 40 seconds and knocked again. He waited another 40 seconds and knocked a third time.

At that point, the cops start talking with dispatch to have dispatch call the 911 caller back to get them to come to the door. To quote a television cop, Something seemed hinkey. While waiting on dispatch, the three cops start talking and realize they are at the wrong address. The lead cop chuckles and starts to back away.

As this happens, he sees the male resident coming to the door. Lights come on inside the house for the first time. Lead cop exclaims something like “oh shit”.

As the door opens and the male resident starts to open the screen door, the lead cop’s gun starts to come up. In the video, I see what looks like a pistol coming up and the man going into a two-handed stance with the gun pointed straight at the cop.

When the door started to open, all three cops turned on their lights and pointed them at the door. The resident was not seeing anything but shapes behind those bright lights. There were no flashing red and blues. There was nothing except three very bright lights pointed at him.

Lead cop yells, Drop the gun! About the time you hear the n of gun, he opens fire and the man drops. The other cops start firing as well.

The cops move back, a female resident comes to the door screaming about her husband. As she comes out the door, there is a very, very short flash from her hands. My first thought on seeing that flash was that it looked like a gun shot. There was no sound to go with it, but all three cops respond by opening fire once again.

You can go watch it yourself, sorry, but it is on the book of acquaintances.

So what happened?

The cops showed up at the wrong fucking house. They were at the wrong house number. Some reports say it was even the wrong street. They woke up the residents at 2330. The residents responded poorly by, to quote Miguel, Breaking the perimeter.

These cops are going to get away with murder. They are going to be covered under qualified immunity. They fucked up so badly that at least one person is dead and another was wounded. They should be fired. They should have their cop licenses revoked. They should have to do pen entice for the next 40 years, daily.

Maybe somebody who is a law enforcement officer can tell me why they didn’t park in front of the house with lights on? That might have saved lives.

For us, it teaches us, once again, don’t break the perimeter. Don’t expose yourself. Know your target and what is beyond it.

I hurt for that family. I’m angry. I hope we all learn something from this.

Example Lawfare

B.L.U.F. When a family is hurting, they want somebody to pay. It is easier to put that anger against a company than a dead body. Especially when there are blood vultures at work.


History

On April 15, 2021, some asshole entered the FedEx facility in Indianapolis, Indiana, and proceeded to start shooting. Eight people were killed, and more were wounded. The asshole then killed himself.

He had two rifles with him, both AR-15-style semi-automatics.

Shortly after, the blood vultures started to congregate. President Biden had flags flown at half-mast. The usual suspects jumped up and down screaming that guns were the problem.

To this day I’ve never had a single firearm give me a motive for anything it has done. That’s because all of them are inanimate objects. Any evil attributed to a firearm is a figment of a human’s mental derangement.

Bains v. American Tactical, Inc

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Just What Do All These Legal Cases Mean?

B.L.U.F. — What’s with all these court cases and what does it all mean in the grand scheme of things?


How Come We Have To Work So Hard At This?

If everything was as it should be, when the Bruen Court issued their opinion all of the states would have looked at the laws they currently had in place, looked at what would not pass muster, and then would have created new legislation to bring the state into line with the Bruen decision. The infringing states could not bring themselves to do the right thing.

In fact some (all?) of the infringing states jumped on the “Bruen Response” bandwagon to see who could do the most harm to gun owners the fastest.

This starts the long, slow march back to the Supreme Court to get more of these infringements knocked down.

There is a game that is played to accomplish this because the infringing states want to continue to infringe.

In the best of their imaginary worlds only the people they control who are loyal to them would have guns. And those firearms would not be allowed out of the control of dear leader. In their warped world view a cop would travel to work on public transport, they would be issued their duty weapon(s) and would then do a tour. At the end, they would turn in all their duty weapons and ride public transport home.

There would be nobody to stand up to their will.

To get this they need to disarm The People. This means passing regulations that disarm the people.

The Fight, Standing

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Another One Bites the Dust — USA v. Connelly


B.L.U.F. Another case where a Judge used Bruen to come to the correct decision. This This one is §922(g)3 and §922(d)2. This is a criminal case in front of a US Federal Judge for the Western District of Texas. It highlights how case law works.


History

On December 28, 2021 the El Paso Police Department responded to a 911 call. Transcripts are not available nor needed. When the police arrived they heard several gunshots and observed Paola’s husband with a shotgun at the neighbors house. The police then arrested Paola’s husband.

From this they managed to get permission to conduct[ed] a protective sweep of Connelly’s house &mcite; Order on Motion for Reconsideration P. 1. The cops found evidence of firearms and marijuana. From this they called in the ATF.

The ATF searched the house and found 1.2 grams of marijuana, 0.21 grams of marijuana extract, 27.74 grams of “THC Edible” and 37.74 grams of suspected psilocybinId. as well as multiple firearms and ammunition.

I have no idea if that is “a lot” or almost nothing. According to my sources this is a little low for medical use. In Texas up to two oz. is a class B misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of 180 days in jail and a $2000 fine. Paola is facing two felony counts with upto 12 years on each count.

Paola through her husband under the bus, accusing him of smoking crack. She was then asked about her own drug use and told the cops …she uses marijuana on a regular basis “to sleep at night and to help her with anxiety.”Id. at 2.

If this was the locals then it would have likely meant nothing more than the loss of her pot. Because the feds were involved, it now became a felony charge:

Based on these facts, Connelly was indicted with one count of possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of a controlled substance, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3). Superseding Indictment 1–2. Connelly was also indicted with one count of transferring a firearm and ammunition to her husband, an unlawful user of a controlled substance, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(d)(3). Id. at 2–3.
Id. at 2

The second count, transfer or sale to a prohibited person is charged because the lived together. Since he had access and could have gotten the firearms the state argues that she had transferred the firearms to her husband. It is unclear who owned the shotgun he used.

October 18, 2022 Paola filed to have the charges dismissed. Her argument was that post Bruen §922(g)(3) and §922(d)(3) were unconstitutional under the second amendment because the denied her rights to keep and bear arms while the state was unable to find an similar regulation from the founding era. She also argued that the law was unconstitutional under the fifth amendment because it was vague. What does addicted mean? What does “user” mean?

She points out that under the dictionary definition, user could mean anybody that ever took a toke.

Her motion to have her indictment dismissed was denied on December 21, 2022.

The Second Try

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Leading Cause of Death in Children?

So this has popped up over and over again. There is another study from KFF saying that 1 in 5 (19%) of people say that a family member was killed by a gun. These number are scary scary numbers. Has something happened?

Well I started digging through the CDC and NEJM letter and numbers and it is just to much work for me right now. I’ve got paying clients that need that time. Instead I’ll give you a YouTube video that covers much of what I was planning on saying:

The current population of the United States is around 331,900,000. If 19% of those people have had a family member killed by a gun that means 63,061,000 people have had somebody in their family killed by a gun. Given that there are around 45,000 gun related deaths per year, this number seems a little high.

The average family size in the US is currently around 3.1. That doesn’t really help. Looking at household size by city shows that doesn’t make a real difference either. It looks like race doesn’t really make that much difference either.

So let’s extend that from immediate family to extended family. We move to two generates, that gives us 4 + 3 + 3 or 10. If we go to three generations that takes use to 10 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 22. So we will use 22 as our base number for extended family.

That gives us 15,086,363 extended families in the US. If 19% of those families had a gun related death that would mean that
2,866,408 families had a gun related death in that family.

Again 45,000 deaths per year. It would take 63+ years to reach that number of deaths.

Given what they asked and how they asked it, my guess is that they are polling urban black neighborhoods at a rate that is over represented. In urban black centers there are often 100% rates of families having had somebody in their family shot.

The poll looks to be legit but the numbers they give just do not pass the sniff test.