Category: ClueBat O’ The Day

DO IT THIS WAY ⇓

Woman shoots masked intruder dead in Frankford apartment break-in: police

PHILADELPHIA – A 29-year-old man is dead after investigators say he broke into a Frankford apartment and was shot dead by the woman who lives there.

What we know:
Police say the shooting happened at an apartment building on the 4600 block of Castor Avenue around 5 a.m.

Investigators believe a 29-year-old man wearing a ski mask shattered a second floor window and entered an apartment.

A woman who lives in the apartment encountered the intruder and fired at least two shots, one striking the man in the head.

Officers found the man lying on the bedroom floor and brought him to an area hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters that the woman and the intruder knew each other and had some sort of prior relationship.

Investigation continues
What’s next:
No arrests or charges have been reported as of Wednesday morning.

Police have not said if the gun used in the shooting was legally owned.

NOT THIS WAY ⇓

California Man Arrested After Firing Warning Shots at Burglars

Let’s start off by noting that yes, warning shots are stupid. I don’t feel like getting into why, generally speaking, in this piece, because it’s not about that. It’s about a California man facing charges for firing warning shots.

It started with the nightmare scenario for many people: the proverbial bump in the night. Someone was inside of the home in the dark of night who shouldn’t have been there.

So a man who works as a security guard decided he needed to do something, but he apparently didn’t want to hurt anyone.

A security guard was in custody Tuesday after firing warning shots to scare off burglars during a home invasion in Hacienda Heights.

Several suspects allegedly broke into a home to commit a burglary around 9:20 p.m. Monday in the 15400 block of Skyline Drive, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson said.

An armed security guard at the residence, which is located within the gated Skyline Estates community, fired warning shots in the air to scare off the burglars, the sheriff’s department said.

Several suspects fled the location in a dark-colored sedan while others remained inside following the shots, according to the sheriff’s department….

Deputies detained the security guard who informed them that he fired the warning shots in the air. It is illegal to discharge a firearm without threat of the loss of life, the sheriff’s department said.

Now, some items were stolen and were recovered nearby, so there is evidence of a burglary.

Further, because the guard was home at the time, it means it was a “hot” burglary. Those are considered fair game in most states, especially those without an explicit duty-to-retreat law. California does not actually have one of those. Believe it or not.

So while firing a warning shot into the air was colossally stupid, and the man should most likely be charged if that round hits anything or anyone, that’s not what he’s charged with, and that is the problem here. If he technically shot straight up into the air, terminal velocity limits what the round will do when it returns to the Earth, but the issue is that few people will hold a gun perfectly straight, and thus the problem.

A burglar in the home with you is a threat to your life. That’s established doctrine in most states, and the reason for that is the high number of “hot” burglaries that turn into violent encounters, including homicides.

Of course, this is Los Angeles, where they value the lives of criminals over ordinary citizens. Why, those burglars might have been illegal aliens who should be welcomed to take all of our crap because we live on stolen land or something!

Charges should fit the crime, but the only “crime” here is the stupidity of that warning shot, especially up into the air. Especially as that block seems to have everyone packed in like sardines.

Still, it’s Los Angeles. Is anyone really surprised that they’re going to be hell on someone defending themselves during a home invasion? Seriously? That doesn’t make it right, though. Not in the least.

Author, Self-Described Gun Control Proponent, Says Gun Bans Don’t Work

A British-Canadian journalist and self-described gun control advocate who has authored a new book being released today—The American Way of Killing—told Time magazine in a Sept. 22 interview that he doesn’t think bans on so-called “assault weapons” work, and he also acknowledged the elimination of handguns is not likely possible.

Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker for the past 30 years, has published eight books relating to the social sciences. He has finally gotten around to discussing gun-related violence in the U.S., but it is not clear that he understands the importance of the Second Amendment, and right-to-bear-arms tenets woven into more than 40 state constitutions.

Asked by Time editor-at-large Belinda Luscombe whether he thinks banning modern semiautomatic rifles—the so-called “assault weapons” now the subject of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court with oral arguments scheduled Dec. 2—his reply was blunt.

“No. Assault-rifle bans of the sort that have been passed and contemplated in the United States are completely pointless,” Gladwell stated. “They’re just a charade, and they are a distraction from the real issues. I think gun control can play an important role in violence prevention. But empty theatrical exercises in removing a class of rifles because they look a certain way do not move the needle.”

Coming from a gun control proponent, that amounts to blasphemy. And while Gladwell sticks to his guns (no pun intended), he admits the elimination of handguns in the U.S. is unlikely.

Aside from Supreme Court rulings that handguns are protected by the Second Amendment—which protects the right to keep and bear arms from government infringement—he just doesn’t believe removing them is possible.

“There’s the obvious political thing that people with guns are the most motivated to fight hardest politically,” he observed. “The Supreme Court currently has been captured by a majority of people who believe very strongly in gun rights. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of guns there are in America, but there’s a lot. Practically speaking, I don’t know how you get rid of them. No one’s ever answered that. I’m as big an advocate of gun control as anyone else, but I have no clue about how it would work if it was passed. I mean, are you going into people’s homes to remove their guns? Very few gun-control advocates have a good answer to that question.”

Gladwell doesn’t mention the high court rulings which say gun ownership, especially handgun ownership, is protected by the Constitution. But he does point a finger at liberals who are adverse to recognizing that irresponsible people use guns to kill people, and that the gun, itself, doesn’t make that call.

“One of the many annoying things about the gun debate in America is the extent to which liberals roll their eyes at ‘Guns don’t kill people; people do,’” he told Time. “I understand their aversion to it because it was dreamt up by people who wanted to escape any responsibility at all for the presence of guns in America…One of the irresponsible things about progressive views on gun violence is the extent to which they use their legitimate antipathy towards guns as an excuse not to address more fundamental issues about human behavior.”

He also maintains that the so-called “epidemic of gun violence” often claimed by anti-gunners, is “an epidemic we invented.”

He doesn’t think criminal activity in the U.S. is inherent, but a problem “that was brought about by a wide set of very specific choices, misapprehensions, and errors.”

In a proverbial nutshell, Gladwell may have unwittingly indicted the political left. They don’t like guns, but their solutions, such as banning the most popular rifle in America, are non-starters. In reality, they really have no solutions at all that will pass muster under the Second Amendment, which is enjoying something of a revival under the Roberts Supreme Court, and many observers expect that to be strengthened even more when the Court rules on the constitutionality of semi-auto bans sometime in mid-2027.

Noah Pollak

One of Trump’s greatest legacies will be how he blew up a half-century of western diffidence, restraint, and failure on terrorism. As the era of Islamic terrorism began in the 1970s, western countries (very much including Israel) spun up all kinds of pseudo-sophisticated theories and excuses to avoid carrying out the only successful policy, which is killing terrorists — as many as you can, whenever you can.

There are entire university departments, think tanks, media outlets, NGOs, foundations, and political parties devoted to promoting self-defeating, enervating fictions about terrorism designed to tie the hands of the West. We just have to live with it, deal with it, accommodate it, accept the barbarism. Terrorists have grievances. It’s partly our fault, after all, because reasons. There are no military solutions. If we’re nice to the terrorists they will actually help us stabilize the region. The tropes go on forever and they are invented by people who want the west to lose, and who would rather be wrong but appear sophisticated than be right and appear crude.

Trump wants our side to win. The winning approach to terrorism is very simple. Bomb them to smithereens. Kill them off. Decapitate the regimes. Sanction them until they have no more money for jihad. Trump gets it, because unlike so many people in politics, he doesn’t care whether Harvard likes him.

Winning is going to generate a real peace dividend for America. Finally dealing with Iran — the head of the snake — will enable the US to step away from the Middle East. It will send a message to our adversaries that the big dog is still in charge. And very enjoyably, it will sweep aside decades of dumb elite groupthink about how we have no alternative but to cut deals with terrorists. Thank you President Trump.

One Common Link for Mass Killings Should be Eliminated, and It’s Good for Gun Rights, Too

It’s darkly humorous to me how often anti-Second Amendment types see some kind of gun control law as the ultimate solution to everything. They pretend that this law will stop mass shootings, regular murders, suicides, domestic violence, type 2 diabetes, conflict in the Middle East, and Christmas’s encroachment into the rest of the year.

It’s funny how often they try that crap, and how often the media pretends they’re hearing BS and mistaking it for brilliance.

But there is one little change that could be made that would reduce a whole lot of problems. I’m honest enough to say it won’t make them all go away, but it’ll help reduce a lot, including mass shootings.

It’s pretty simple, really. End gun-free zones.

In their manifestos, many mass murderers have explicitly said they looked for targets that had disarmed victims in them. Nevertheless, mainstream-media outlets often leave this fact out.

The Annunciation Catholic School murderer wrote: “I recently heard a rumor that … the Aurora theater shooter, may have chosen venues that were ‘gun-free zones.’ I would probably aim the same way … .”

Yeah, this is pretty common. Mass killers have often picked gun-free zones for their rampages. That’s part of why schools are such popular targets. It’s why churches are popular targets. A lot of shopping malls are gun-free zones, and those are pretty popular with this bunch, too.

And look what happens when someone has a gun in one of these places that’s traditionally gun-free?

The Greenwood Park Mall shooting ended with an armed citizen becoming something of a legend in shooting circles. He put down the bad guy in impressive fashion.

Yet he wasn’t quite as impressive as Jack Wilson, who put down a would-be mass killer before the little bastard knew what hit him with a headshot that limited the horrific incident to just a few seconds at a church in White Settlement, Texas.

Guns save lives.

Gun-free zones are a primary target for would-be killers, and it’s not just mass killers, either. More pedestrian criminals have no respect for the signs on the door. Hell, if they’re going to prance around armed even though they can’t legally have a firearm at all, do you really think a sign will stop them? Of course not.

Look, making gun-free zones disappear won’t make all of society’s problems vanish in an instant. Unlike the other side of this debate, I’m not delusional.

But I can say that it’ll go a long way in reducing the threat to some of the places where people are the most vulnerable. What’s more, it means we’ll have more cases like White Settlement and Greenwood Park Mall, at the very least, and it might…encourage some people to look for another way to achieve fame or infamy, whichever they’re after.

Guns aren’t the problem. They’ve never been the problem. They’re tools; tools with no volition of their own. They serve their masters regardless of whether that master is a hero or a villain.

So let’s stop treating them like they are and start empowering the heroes instead of making it easier for the villains.

Judge Vacates Decision Requiring 2A Groups to Identify Members

A federal judge in Louisiana has rescinded his order for the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, and Louisiana Shooting Association to provide a list of its membership to the Department of Justice as part of his judgment in a case dealing with the federal ban on handgun sales to adults under the age of 21.

The new order by U.S. District Judge Robert R. Summerhays comes after both the plaintiffs and defendants asked him to reconsider that requirement. While the DOJ did originally ask Summerhays to limit relief only to the named plaintiffs in Reese v. ATF and those SAF, FPC, and LSA members who were members when the lawsuit was filed back in 220 and “have been identified and verified by respective Plaintiff organizations during the course of this litigation,” Summerhays went even further by demanding the groups turn over lists of every member as of 2020.

That move was reported by some Second Amendment groups as Summerhays simply granting DOJ’s request, when that was not the case. It’s true, though, that the Justice Department’s proposed relief was still far narrower than what was offered by the plaintiffs. In fact, the plaintiffs stated that the DOJ’s position was even though the Plaintiffs won, they “should be entitled only to illusory relief and the Government should be free to continue to enforce these unconstitutional restrictions against Plaintiffs’ affected members as though they never brought and won this suit.”

In a press release responding to the judge’s order vacating his previous judgment, SAF Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack said the group “had no intention of releasing any private membership data and were prepared to take all necessary steps to ensure our member list was not disclosed to the government,” but added that “Luckily, the court responded to our joint motion promptly and vacated its original order.

With that order vacated and a phone conference forthcoming as to the proper scope of relief, it appears we will have more updates on the Reese order in the near future.”

While the plaintiffs and defendants agreed that Summerhays demand the DOJ receive membership lists was the wrong step, the two sides still very much disagree on the scope of the relief that should be provided now that the Fifth Circuit has held the law banning retail gun sales to adults under the age of 21 is unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs would like to see the law enjoined for all 18-to-20-year-old members of the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, and Louisiana Shooting Association, regardless of when they signed up, while the DOJ, as mentioned above, wants to limit the injunction to only a handful of young adults residing in the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction.

FPC’s Brandon Combs told Bearing Arms last week that Summerhays’ order was likely going to be appealed to the Fifth Circuit, but now that the judge has vacated that order in its entirety we’ll have to see what his amended judgment looks like before we know what the plaintiffs’ next step will be. DOJ has already declined to appeal the underlying decision by the Fifth Circuit regarding the constitutionality of the law, which is good, but depending on how limited the scope of the injunctive relief is, this case (or at least the remedy provided to plaintiffs) could still end up before the Supreme Court before all is said and done.

MISSING AIRLINE SLUMP

Just like the M.I.A. stock market crash, the long-promised airline travel slump is nowhere to be found.

I checked the most recent TSA statistics available on airline passengers. More than 2.8 million people passed through TSA checkpoints on the latest day available, Thursday, May 15. That was some 40,000 more than the equivalent day in 2024 (May 16) and over 200,000 more passengers than the same day in 2023 (May 18). Not a holiday weekend, not spring break, not yet the summer rush, just packed airports and packed planes on a random Thursday.

Yet this headline featured in Forbes last week,

‘Trump Slump’ Hits Expedia: Shares Fall 8% Due To Weak U.S. Travel Demand

Ah, yes, the much-promised, but little-seen “Trump Slump.” I had occasion to venture out to the local airport this afternoon for a passenger drop-off. Despite the Trump Slump and the surrounding city in its final death throes, the airport on a Sunday mid-afternoon was a complete zoo both inside and out.

Unfortunately, I fear that all too few departing passengers were traveling on one-way tickets.

[Update: it turns out that I was correct about yesterday (Sunday). TSA data show passengers over 2.9 million, some 86,000 above the equivalent day in 2024. Yesterday marked the biggest travel day since December 1, 2024, the Wednesday after Thanksgiving.]

Right on time comes this headline from the Baltimore Sun,

Despite economic concerns, Americans are set on getting away for Memorial Day weekend

Bon Voyage!

FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado: Indiana University quietly removes profile of tenured professor and refuses to say why.

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles.