Gun Free Zone

The MAGA chant in 2016 onwards was: “Drain the swamp.”

Then, in 2020, Trump handed Fauci and the swamp the keys to the country.

Trump and MAGA ceaselessly accuse DeSantis of being a RINO in bed with the swamp.

At the sane time, DeSantis is draining Florida’s proverbial swamp.

DeSantis suspends another elected prosecutor in move derided as ‘politically motivated’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday once again suspended an elected Florida prosecutor from office, this time removing a central Florida Democrat that the Republican governor contended was too lenient with criminals and was endangering the public.

The move drew sharp criticism from the target of the suspension — State Attorney Monique Worrell — as well as Democrats, who called DeSantis a “dictator” and said his actions were designed to draw attention to his struggling presidential campaign.

DeSantis, during an early morning press conference from the state Capitol where he announced the suspension, cited several examples of where he contended Worrell had failed to pursue minimum mandatory sentences for criminals or did not fully prosecute both adults and juveniles who later went on to commit other crimes. One of those the governor highlighted was a 17-year-old who allegedly shot and killed his pregnant girlfriend just months after he had been initially charged with gun crimes.

“We had a duty to act to prevent this dereliction of duty,” DeSantis said. “Prosecutors do have a certain amount of discretion about which charges to bring. What this state attorney has done is abuse that discretion and has effectively nullified certain laws in the state of Florida.”

But why now?

What was the tipping point?

A name that should be all over the news but isn’t: Daton Viel.

Just a few days ago, Daton Viel shot two Orlando police officers and put them in the hospital in critical condition.

That’s bad.  The whole story is worse.

Why was gunman Daton Viel on the streets?

The man who Orlando Police said shot and critically wounded two of their officers Friday night could have potentially been taken off the streets months before the violent attack, court records reviewed by News 6 suggest.

Daton Viel, 28, was killed during a shootout with the Orlando Police SWAT team early Saturday morning.

Viel had an extensive criminal history, records show, with his most recent arrest occurring a little more than four months before the police shooting.

Authorities arrested Viel on March 27 after investigators said DNA evidence linked him to the December 2022 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Orange County.

Viel posted a $125,250 bond and was released from the Orange County jail on April 14 to await trial on charges of sexual battery and molestation, records show.

At the time of the alleged rape in December 2022, Viel was under the supervision of the Florida Department of Corrections while serving probation for crimes he committed in Georgia, including aggravated battery and arson, state records show.

At the time Viel was released from jail in April, court records show the Florida Department of Corrections placed him on electronic monitoring that included a GPS bracelet.

On June 13, six weeks after a Georgia judge issued an arrest warrant for Viel, Florida Department of Corrections officials learned Viel had cut off his electronic monitoring device and moved out of his aunt’s Apopka home without notifying his probation officer.

During a news conference discussing Viel’s criminal history, Worrell placed full responsibility for the shooting of the two Orlando police officers on Viel, and avoided blaming other public servants.

“All of our agencies are doing the very best they can to handle a lot of cases with very limited resources,” said Worrell. “Hindsight is 20-20. There are any number of things that can be done on any given day that could make an outcome different. In this case, those things weren’t done. And here we are today.”

Then there is this:

Man accused of shooting 2 Orlando officers had previous run-ins with law enforcement, records show

Records show the man accused of shooting and critically injuring two Orlando police officers has a history of run-ins with law enforcement.

Daton Viel, 28, led Orlando police on an overnight pursuit.

Leading up to his death, Viel had been running from law enforcement under several other charges.

According to court records, he had a run-in with police on campus at the University of Central Florida.

This man was a known violent offender, sex offender, on parole with a cut-off ankle monitor, and still was allowed on the streets where he shot two cops.

Then the prosecutor who let him out on bond had the fucking audacity to blame the cops for getting shot.

It’s telling that Orange County Sheriff John Mina and Osceola County Sheriff Marco Lopez both supported DeSantis’ actions.

Upon Worrell’s removal, Mina released this statement:

“Our focus at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office is to protect our community from violent criminals. We rely on our partnership with the State Attorney’s Office to ensure those offenders are held to account and kept off our streets. We look forward to working with Judge Andrew Bain in his new role as State Attorney,” Mina said in a statement.

And from Osceola County Sheriff Marco Lopez:

“The criminal justice system only works when law enforcement investigates and arrests those who commit crime and the State Attorney’s Office prosecutes those offenders. We welcome Judge Andrew Bain as the new State Attorney and look forward to our offices working together for justice. The victims of crime in Osceola County will always come first,” Lopez said in a statement.

The politics here are that Worrell was a Leftist who was soft on crime that allowed a known offender with a repeat history of violence to shoot two cops, who she then blamed for getting shot.

She deserved to get fired for making Florida more dangerous.

That’s draining the swamp.

Last night I was able to go to one of our local ranges that offers a Gun & Run match either in pistol or rifle depending on the week.

It was Long Gun Day so I took my Ruger PC 9 which I have shot, but not run under stress (for me and the gun) in order to see how truly bad and rusty I was (been over a decade since I did any “tactical” rifle) and also to see if the gun and gear are truly reliable. The results were both expected and perplexing.

First, sweet Jesus, I am not only old’er’ but with a brain that deluded itself to think I was a much younger and more trained person. On the first stage, my brain and my body were having a spat: while the Gray Matter was shouting “faster! faster!” my Knees and Back were “Would you shut the eff up? This is as good as it gets unless you want to facepalm.” And this is after losing all the weight and doing gym for almost 2 years.  It makes me shudder to think about how worse I would be otherwise.

Now, to the stupid part. One of the lessons of participating in a match is that you are forced to run a course of fire you did not design and therefore not an exercise you subconsciously choose because you are good at it. Enter hubris: The first stage I shot unsupported while I should had known better. I mean, not even a hasty-hasty with the sling as told in Appleseed Project,I just went Hollywood Stupid and the paper showed it. It was my worst and horrifyingly bad, bottom of the barrel score and so bad I ended the worse shooter overall because of it. Lesson learned and for the next two stages I did use the sling properly and was reflected on paper again: I went for the depths of scoring Hades to somewhere below the middle of the pack on each stage.

On the gun & gear side, I had two double feeds out of otherwise reliable and accurate gun. I was slow in recovering at first because it has been so long it took me a too long moment to recall the clearing procedure. Good news, the PC9 is just a joy to have to recover from a double feed. Half the back of my brain is pestering me about the issue being the fault of one of the Magpul Glock 27 rounders while the other pessimistic half is arguing that maybe 27 rounders are not simply too reliable for this gun. I did run the last stage with a Magpul 15 rounder and not a hiccup. I guess I will have to start burning ammo trying to duplicate the malfunction and find a cure, but I did segregate the possibly offending magazine just in case.

Speaking of magazines, by watching other shooters I found out that AR mags, no matter the maker, are not too happy about landing on hard surfaces. Some lost ammo and others had ammo halfway out and one particular magazine which caught one round on the rim by the mag lips and pointing at a 90ish-degree angle (See the re-enacting pic below).  Lesson learned: Be nice to your AR Mags.

And the best part of the match was that I got to shoot among fellow shooters and had fun at it. Even with the issues, I left the range with a smile on my face and even got home before sundown fully relaxed.

I call it Ballistic Therapy and it indeed works.

PS: Murfreesboro desperately need an outdoor range.

PS2: I did double up on ear pro. I don’t have a lot of hearing left, but I would like to keep what I got.

I finished moving a new client onto our servers yesterday. They had been cracked and abused. Thank you to Miguel for that client.

On different fronts, I’m fighting with PyQt6. For whatever reason, the QMediaPlayer will not reliably play an MP3 or WAV. Lord help me if I want to change the start position. This is very frustrating for me because I’m at the 80% mark in a transcription program with a GUI.

You tell it to fetch a recording of a hearing before a court. It figures out how many speakers are recorded, when they are speaking and the duration of their segment. It then uses external guidance to do a voice ID of the different speakers before finally generating a transcription of the audio.

The issue? There is a part of the interface where you connect different speakers to named people. It allows you to listen to a segment of the audio and make comparisons.

For example, I have two cases where there was only one judge in common. That means that there should only be one match between the two cases, and that match should be the judge. There were two matches.

It turns out that both cases had the same court manager. So my software picked out the fact that there were actually two people speaking in both cases, which is cool.

Regardless, I’ll make it work. It is what I do.

There are numerous things happening in different cases right now, but I’m looking at Dayonta McClinton v. UNITED STATES which was recently denied certiorari. Not because the case has anything to do with the Second Amendment, but because Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Barrett are in agreement.

The case is about a man who was charged with murder and robbery. The jury found him guilty of the robbery charge and not guilty of the murder charge. Under the sentencing guidelines, McClinton should have been looking at 5 to 6 years.

At the sentencing hearing, the state told the court that McClinton had been charged with murder. The court used the accusation, of which McClinton had been found not guilty, to increase the sentence to 20 years.

If you are interested, please let me know in the comments.

The comments are open, go for it.

I am very much enjoying the CB Strike series by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the books not the TV show.

It’s a series about a private detective in London.

Despite all the dangers they run into with murders and psychopaths, all Strike and his partner Robin can carry to protect themselves is rape alarms.

Those alarms are a useless as you can imagine they are.

Oakland,  California is suffering a huge crime wave due to Progressive policies and a lack of policing.

They are giving their citizens the same useless self defense advice as the British government.

Air horns and moving trucks: How Oakland, California, residents are facing a surge in crime

After 60-year-old retiree David Schneider was shot and killed here while trimming a tree in his yard, his neighbor, Toni Bird, said she retreated indoors.

“People aren’t feeling safe out of their house,” she said. “It makes sense that you would want to protect your house then, right? You would barricade it.”

Amid a surge in crime in Oakland, California, police have advised residents to use air horns to alert neighbors to intruders and add security bars to their doors and windows.

Bird, who moved to Oakland 2 1/2 years ago, said she took their advice to heart. She now has three air horns and five security cameras around her home.

“The types of crime that we’re seeing feel much more violent and the consequences feel much more severe,” she said. “And it feels like the people that are being targeted are people who are vulnerable.”

The cowboys said: “God created all men, Sam Colt made them equal.”

Not a stadium air horn but a 45 caliber revolver.  That made men equal.

If the most vulnerable are under attack, what they need is an equalizer, not a can of tinnitus.

What useless fucking bullshit.

This is an actual captioned photo from that article:

The other day I posted video of a woman in California who was attacked and her her bike stolen, and was crying for help as people stood around and ignored her.

What the fuck will an airhorn do?  What neighbors will run to her defense?

If you fight back with an airhorn, you’ll only die with ringing in your ears.

This is post Bruen.

Californians need guns and concealed carry.

They get airhorns.

Welcome to the Chi
Young men show off all the guns they brought to an indoor basketball court in #Chicago pic.twitter.com/I4GkR106nP

— RawNews1st (@Raw_News1st) August 9, 2023

A bunch of youth gang members with illegal full auto converted Glocks, showing their guns and flashing gang signs.

This kids are, or want to be, cold blooded killers.

The Left may believe that they are all just about to turn their lives around and go to church, but these kids will kill you just for the street cred.

Be prepared to defend yourself.

H/T Miguel

In a push to deter criminals, the state in 2021 passed a law strengthening the penalty for stealing a gun from a misdemeanor to a Class E felony with a mandatory minimum sentence of six months in jail.

The law was part of a legislative package that year that made Tennessee a permitless carry state, and it was added to appease concerns that allowing people to carry handguns without a permit could lead to more crime.

Gov. Bill Lee even included an extra $17 million in the state General Fund that fiscal year for an anticipated jump in incarceration rates.

But while the effort was meant to address crime and stiffen penalties, attorneys who spoke with The Tennessean said the new law actually makes the cases harder to prosecute.

To begin with, it’s a tough crime to prove.
…
Under the new penalty, defense attorneys have little bargaining room with the six month mandatory jail time and are less likely to settle a case.

As a result, most felony gun theft charges are dropped.

Tennessee stiffened the penalty for stealing a gun. Is the law working? (dnj.com)

But wait, this next quote is just beautiful:

But the dropped charges show how a law that was meant to bring change in reality does little once it hits the court system, said David Raybin, a longtime local criminal defense lawyer.

“The dynamic has changed because now the sanction is so severe on a mandatory minimum case that’s already very hard to prove,” he said. “It’s the same philosophy that if we make the penalties harder it’s going to end the crime, and that’s absurd.”

Got it? And now we go back to the usual suspects in the same article:

Earlier this year, Rep. Caleb Hemmer, D-Nashville, introduced a bill that would have made it a misdemeanor for gun owners to improperly store guns in a car or boat. As punishment, offenders would be required to enroll in a court-approved firearm safety course — a decidedly lighter penalty in a state that largely supports gun ownership.
…

“It’s disappointing and frustrating because there should be penalties,” he said. “But I’m resolute and ready to push forward with some common sense solutions for this epically bad problem in Tennessee.”

Laws do not work for the criminals, so they are useless, but laws penalizing gun owners need to be passed so we can solve the problem. You have to love the way they ignore the contradiction.

And one more time: Secure you effing guns.