The Paul Pelosi attack: I was wrong and it’s weird
When I saw the news that Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer at his home but no details were released, I assumed, as in typical fashion about mass shooters, that the attack was carried out by someone who was inconvenient to the Leftist narrative.
At the time I thought, probably an illegal immigrant or minority criminals who didn’t know that was the Pelosi house and was engaged in one of the many robberies that has caused half of San Francisco residents to be a victim of property crime in the last few years.
It made sense. The Left is downplaying crime as an issue and if the Speaker of the House was a victim of an armed robbery, that would hurt their narrative. Best to make that go away.
Had it been some white guy in a MAGA hat, I’m sure the FBI would have started door-to-door raids of known Trump supporters already.
Then the details started to come out.
I was wrong, it wasn’t some dumb crook who didn’t know whose house he robbed.
But it wasn’t a Right wing attack either.
It’s weird as hell is what it is.
Paul Pelosi told attacker he needed to use the bathroom, called 911 from there
Law enforcement officials are still investigating how the alleged assailant, identified by police as 42-year-old David DePape, was able to access the speaker’s home and have not yet assessed a motive.
Paul Pelosi was able to dial 911 himself after telling the intruder he had to go use the bathroom and then calling from there, where his phone had been charging, according to a person familiar with the situation. He was hospitalized after the attack at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where he successfully underwent surgery to repair a skull fracture and “serious injuries to right arm and hands,” Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill said in a statement Friday evening.
In a brief press conference Friday, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said that police officers were dispatched to the Pelosi residence at about 2:30 a.m. for a “priority well-being check,” and arrived on the scene to find Paul Pelosi and DePape holding a hammer.
“The suspect pulled the hammer away from Mr. Pelosi and violently assaulted him with it,” Scott said. “Our officers immediately tackled the suspect, disarmed him, took him into custody, requested emergency backup and rendered medical aid.”
DePape was running around the saying “where’s Nancy?”
A source briefed on the attack told CNN that the intruder shouted “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” at the speaker’s husband, Paul Pelosi, after breaking into the home just before 2:30 a.m. CNN reported that the attacker also tried to tie Pelosi up, saying he was waiting for the speaker.
Then things get weird.
This is from the Sacramento Bee:
Conspiracy theories, racist posts: What we know about the Nancy Pelosi home invasion suspect
A blog written under the name of DePape — with the domain ‘godisloving.wordpress.com’ and banner that reads “Welcome to Big Brothers Censorship Hell” — includes articles titled ‘pedophile normalization,’ ‘facts are racist,’ and ‘Hitler did nothing wrong.’
His posts contain right-wing conspiracy theories, QAnon beliefs and racists messages. He repeatedly railed against government officials, the media and tech companies for alleged censorship. The blog, created in 2007, was largely inactive until this summer, when he made dozens of posts in the span of just four days in August.
Another website with entries also written by a person who identifies as David DePape similarly contains antisemitic and bigoted blog posts, including denial of the Holocaust.
CNN reported that DePape’s Facebook account, which has been taken down by the social media company, contained memes and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines, the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack.
According to a 2008 Oakland Tribune article, DePape has three children with Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, a prominent Bay Area nude activist who pushed conspiracy theories, including that 9/11 was an “inside job” and attempted to stage a naked wedding on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. A 2013 article in The San Francisco Chronicle identified David DePape as a “hemp jewelry maker” who was living in a Berkeley Victorian flat with Taub, their three children and Taub’s partner at that time, Jaymz Smith.
This is from Heavy.com:
David Depape, Paul Pelosi Suspect: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
An older picture of Depape, a Canadian-born resident of Berkeley, showed him alongside a prominent Berkeley nudist activist with whom he helped raise children.
Some of his posts referred to former President Donald Trump. “Either Q is Trump himself or Q is the deepstate moles within Trumps inner circle. So Q/Trump sabotaged their child trafficking operations. #2 self inflicted wound. Trumps covert id or a Deep state mole? Was Q refering to this? Did Q do this? another video,” he wrote, referring to QAnon. Some videos on his website show Pelosi.
So is he far Right, far Left, just plain fucking nuts?
He wasn’t a Trump fan.
And, of course, how did this guy get in past security?
We clearly don’t know enough but what we do know is that this is some bat shit craziness that isn’t “a Right Wing Trump supporter tried to assassinate Speaker Pelosi.”
Any slower and it would walk to the target.
590 feet per second is BB gun speed or close to.
I have become a fan of the slow rimfire cartridges. You can shoot them in your backyard from a long gun without the need for ear protection. Within a reasonable distance they are pretty accurate, and the occasional backyard pest ends up going bye-bye without too much mess.
I still need to get around and get a .22LR revolver and a bolt action or pump rifle in the same caliber. I have a rifle loaner which I have been using and it is a joy to feed it sub sonics without having to endure the partial ejections & feeding issues of shooting from a semi-auto.
Also, it seems I am not the only one who likes this type of ammo, so if you see it, grab some and “hoard” it ’cause it disappears off the shelves rather quickly.
The Right of The People To Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed
This has been the law of the land since 1791. It was still the law but not formally acknowledged prior to then.
The language is very clear to anybody that is educated in English. Chances are that Miguel, who is not a native speaker of English can parse the 2nd amendment and understand exactly what it means per the rules of English.
So how did we end up in a place where there exists so many infringements? There is no other right in the Constitution that requires government permission to exercise it. You don’t need the government’s permission to post online. You don’t need the governments permission to move from state to state. You don’t need the governments permission to be secure in your papers and person.
These rights exist. The government needs permission in order to infringe on our rights. Where did they get it?
In the early history of the country we had small, individual locations pass infringements. These were allowed to stand because the people either did not care or their complaints were not heard by the courts or the government. There were so few of these laws that the Supreme court opinion in Bruen said that they were outliers and should be ignored.
In 1911 the most famous gun control act was passed. The one that lead to all the others. The Sullivan Act. This law required government permission to possess firearms.
The act was passed based on the idea of stopping people from having guns in violent areas. The reality was that it allowed for the Tammany Hall democrats to disarm all that opposed them while still putting muscle on the street as they wished. The law was always unfairly applied.
Prior to 1911, almost all gun control was based on disarming blacks. They were passed as “safety measures” and they did provide safety, for those attacking newly freed slaves. It wasn’t uncommon for the sheriff to show up and search a black home for “illegal guns”, confiscate the guns they found and for the Klan to arrive that evening to do violence to that household.
The level of corruption in gun control laws never goes away.
The first federal gun control law was the NFA in 1934. This was passed as a “safety measure”. The original goal was to ban all the things that “The Mob” were using. This was machine guns, pistols, sawed off shotguns, and silencers. But congress knew that this was unconstitutional.
Much as Obama Care was unconstitutional when it was a penalty for not having health insurance but it was constitutional when it was a tax, banning guns was known to be unconstitutional, but charging a tax to transfer or register one was constitutional. They took pistols out of the NFA but created a new class of firearm, short barrelled rifle, to keep people from calling a pistol a rifle to avoid the tax.
Because it was “just a tax” in the beginning, being caught with an unregistered NFA item merely required you register and pay your tax. It was only much later that having an NFA item without the tax stamp became an actual crime that you were prosecuted for.
This was challenged in 1936 when the supreme court issued its Miller opinion. The opinion was issued without anybody there to represent Miller. The question before the court was whether the NFA was “an attempt to usurp police power reserved to the States” and whether the NFA’s requirements to register and have taxed short barrelled shotguns was counter to the second amendment.
The court did not look at anything else.
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State of Tennessee, 2 Humph., Tenn., 154, 158.
With these words, the supreme court gutted the second amendment for the next 90 years.
The court focused on the right to bear arms meaning that the militia, all the people, needed to be able to have military arms. Since nobody told the court that shotguns were used in a military setting (“In the absence of any evidence…”) they found that short barrelled shotguns were not protected under the second amendment.
Implicit in their decision was the implication that if Miller had been caught with a Tommy Gun and that was what had been brought to the courts attention, then the NFA would have been found unconstitutional. It is unknown if the court would have struck down all of the NFA or only that part that was in question.
This opinion lad to the passage of many more gun control laws. The first challenges failed. In general these laws were passed where the government felt like they were “a good idea”. The district courts were often leaned the same way, and it wasn’t uncommon for the circuit court to also lean in the same directions.
This lead to many cases being dismissed for lack of standing. The lower courts ruled that because the second amendment referred to militia and since the person in question was not a member of the militia, then the 2nd amendment did not apply to the challenger. It went so far as to some states passing anti-militia laws.
The second method used was “level of scrutiny”. The gist is that yes, the law infringes on the second amendment but it is balanced by the needs of the government. In the eyes of the lower courts, an infringement was constitutional if the government said that it was needed for a good cause.
This lead to “you don’t need an AR-15 so it is constitutional to ban them.” and “You need to show good cause before you can have permission to have a gun at your premise” and “As long as we let you buy SOME guns it is ok to ban the rest of them.”
During this time, the different states worked hard to keep those few cases that did have standing in the courts eyes from making it to the Supreme Court. The state might fight tooth and nail through the appeals process claiming that people would die and the streets would run red with blood if their infringement wasn’t allowed to stand. And if they lost at the circuit court level they would look at what might happen if the case was heard by the Supreme Court and go, “you know what, good fight, you won.”
This lead to the interesting situation where it was sometimes better for the state to lose at the circuit court level because that gave them control of the appeal.
This started to change with Heller. In Heller the Supreme Court ruled that the second amendment was an individual right, not a right reserved for the militia which was now the national guard which was now the states police powers.
Heller was challenging D.C.’s law that banned the carrying of an unregistered firearm, even within the home. And that any resident of D.C. that did lawfully own a firearm had to keep it unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. Because D.C. would not allow him to register a firearm Heller could not legally carry it, even in his own home.
The district court dismissed the case. It was appealed and the Second Circuit court ruled that the DC ban was, indeed, unconstitutional. Amazingly DC appealed to the Supreme court which heard the case and ruled in favor of Heller.
1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
This was the end of courts dismissing 2A cases for lack of standing.
Shortly thereafter the Court heard McDonald. This case stopped “no issue”.
Still the courts continued to use means-end balancing which allowed anti-gun states to pass infringements and then justify those infringements because government knows best how to keep you safe. Remember, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
Bruen was the end of the two stage analysis.
(1) Since Heller and McDonald, the Courts of Appeals have developed a “two-step” framework for analyzing Second Amendment challenges that combines history with means-end scrutiny. The Court rejects that two-part approach as having one step too many. Step one is broadly consistent with Heller, which demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history. But Heller and McDonald do not support a second step that applies means-end scrutiny in the Second Amendment context. Heller’s methodology centered on constitutional text and history. It did not invoke any means-end test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny, and it expressly rejected any interest-balancing inquiry akin to intermediate scrutiny. Pp. 9–15
The states and the courts as well as many gun rights organizations have responded to this major change in precedent. GOA, FPC and other organizations have filed suits to overturn long standing laws. In some cases governmental entities have stepped up and made changes to laws, regulations and procedures to bring them in line with the Bruen decision.
The response from the infringers has been interesting, to say the least.
The responses fall into a number of categories:
- Opps, so sorry, we’ve fixed it.
- We are working to correct it, give us time
- We think there is room within the opinion for us to keep our infringements.
- FU SCOTUS, we’re going to infringe still harder!
Along with the states going in this direction, there have been a few court cases that have not gone as expected and these are things to keep an eye on.
In the Central District of California Judge George H Wu states that the plain text of the second amendment “plainly does not” cover the “self-manufacture of firearms”.
The goal here is to create a carve out from the second amendment. To do as much as possible to limit what is covered by the 2nd.
In addition the state of Maryland is arguing that there were historic bans on particularly dangerous weapons.
Others are arguing that the date to consider for “tradition” of firearm restrictions should be the late 1800’s with the passage of the 14th amendment rather than 1791 when the second amendment was ratified.
We need to stay vigilant to how the infringers are going to manipulate language and meaning to continue to infringe.
And we can expect the anti-gun courts to slow walk any decisions that are made.
Responses: Do It Yourself Emergency Care
Contributor : Do It Yourself Emergency Care
Bad Dancer says:
Thank you for the article and links Reltney McFee I’ve read it several times and will go through it again to make notes soon. I appreciate you sharing your experience and advice.
I’m building a few kits as Christmas presents this year. Are there any supplies you recommend added for a family that has a 1-2 year old?
Thank you for reading. Outstanding question! With regard to families that have toddlers (or infants), my first pass suggestions would sound very much like, “What did you want on your last camping trip, that you did not have?” along with, “what sort of comfort item does your child love?”
If I were to add to that, I would look to my own “Grand Kids Are Here: What Might I Need RFN?” (GKAHWMINRFN) supplies. Now, remember, I’ve been a paramedic, paramedic instructor, ED Registered Nurse, and mid level provider since Jimmeh Cahteh was the HMFIC (OK: President).
On the top of my “GKAHWMINRFN” bag is a pediatric BVM (Bag-Valve-Mask: commonly referred to as if they were all branded as Ambu Bags). You might be happy with a pediatric sized rescue breathing mask of some sort, or, easier to pack, mastery of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Near the top would be comfort items, so as to both distract the child, as well as help the child “buy in” to the procedures to be performed. Blankets, pacifiers, stuffed animals: whatever floats the child’s boat.
Remember that children, particularly infants and toddlers, are NOT simply pint sized adults. Due to differences in body surface area, kidney function, maturity of their livers and other factors, they may metabolize medications quite differently from adults. So, just slapping some QuikClot on Little Johnnie’s wound may be a problem. OTOH, here is what I did find in a reference that I use, myself, clinically every day:
“Compared with standard sponges, the use of the kaolin-impregnated sponges in 31 infants undergoing the Norwood procedure had a significantly lower intraoperative use of blood products and lower incidence of perioperative bleeding requiring return to operating room for hemostasis (0 versus 41 percent) [44].” (source: https://www.uptodate.com/
That means, better bleeding control. THAT suggests that a kaolin-impregnated sponge (QuikClot), at least, is not inappropriate for use on bleeding in children that is not otherwise controllable by dressing, direct pressure, and (in extremis) tourniquet-ting. So, small (2×2, 3×3) dressings impregnated with QuikClot appear to be reasonable.
Splinting materials for fingers, limbs, or whatever, are going to be a challenge, both because children do not, as a rule, comprehend the entire “lay still while I splint you” thing, nor the bit about “do not wiggle about, you will work you way out of this splint, and your injured (whatever) will hurt, and be injured further.” So, however much tape or gauze you THINK that you will need, you are wrong, and will require considerably more than you guessed. Unless, of course, you have made it a habit to secure IV armboards to infants and toddlers, several times a day, for the past several years. If you have done so, and done so successfully, please tell me when/where your classes will be, and save me a seat.
Another tangent from adult IFAK/Jump Bag/Holy Fertilizer kits, and child directed emergency care, is that children will both dehydrate, as well as become hypothermic way, way more rapidly than adults, and, once they have burned through their reserves, will crash and burn, often irretrievably. The axiom is that children generally do OK with their injuries, until they don’t. And, when they don’t, they crash biggly. Adults generally slowly decline, until they die. Therefore, measures to protect a child from heat loss are important. That means blankets and knit caps in appropriate sizes. The foil “emergency blankets” are a mixed bag: they are not going to get saturated in whatever bodily fluid is present (good thing), but they are not going to trap heat in a maze of air pockets formed by a Mark 1, Mod Ø fuzzy/fleece/wool blanket. (and you will notice the difference). Select thoughtfully.
Another feature of kid injuries, particularly infants and toddlers, is that they are top heavy. Their heads are a greater proportion of their body weight than adults, and that means that their initial point of impact may be more likely to be their heads, than their hands/wrists/forearms. Therefore, when you are in the hot seat, you need to be suspicious of the possibility of a head injury, when children fall. You have learned to spine board/cervical collar/secure for transport, head (and that is often spelled N-E-C-K) injured patients, right?
Right?
Another needful skill, that you pray is never needed.
That is it for my off the cuff, just got home from work and warmed up my laptop, answer to your question.
Thank you for the stimulating inquiry. Gonna be food for more rumination!
The lack of information speaks volumes
Spokesperson Drew Hammill said the assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation.
Nancy Pelosi was not in the residence at the time. pic.twitter.com/TltjUJfhyO
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 28, 2022
I guarantee you that the assailants are either Black or illegal immigrants and neither had any idea who Paul or Nancy Pelosi are.
If they were white men, especially if they had the faintest association with the Right the media would be exploding with how this was Right Wing extremist political violence.
That the media is not doing this speaks volumes about the assailants even though the police haven’t said anything.