The Ranks of Gun Owners Grow, and So Does Their Resistance to Scrutiny
Researchers report that many gun owners, especially newer ones, falsely deny owning guns.

Believe it or not, people are reluctant to tell total strangers about their potentially controversial activities. In particular, Rutgers University researchers say, gun ownership is something many Americans decline to reveal when questioned by people they don’t know. That’s especially true of women and minorities newly among the ranks of gun owners amidst the chaos of recent years. Academics are unhappy that privacy-minded respondents impair their understanding of the world we live in, but such evasion is an inevitable consequence of decades of fiery debate and punitive gun policies.

Fibbing to Nosy Strangers

“Some individuals are falsely denying firearm ownership, resulting in research not accurately capturing the experiences of all firearm owners in the U.S.,” says Allison Bond, a doctoral student with Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and lead author of “Predicting Potential Underreporting of Firearm Ownership in a Nationally Representative Sample,” published last month in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. “More concerningly, these individuals are not being reached with secure firearm storage messaging and firearm safety resources, which may result in them storing their firearms in an unsecure manner, which in turn increases the risk for firearm injury and death.”

Bond frames the problem of dishonesty among survey respondents as posing a danger to those surveyed since they don’t receive proper firearm safety information. But her deeper concern is with the validity of research into firearms culture and policy in a country where experts don’t have anywhere near as good a handle on the prevalence of gun ownership as they had believed.

“The implications of false denials of firearms ownership are substantial,” claim the authors. “First, such practices would result in an underestimation of firearms ownership rates and diminish our capacity to test the association between firearm access and various firearm violence-related outcomes. Furthermore, such practices would skew our understanding of the demographics of firearm ownership, such that we would overemphasize the characteristics of those more apt to disclose. Third, the mere existence of a large group of individuals who falsely deny firearm ownership highlights that intervention aimed at promoting firearm safety (e.g., secure firearm storage) may fail to reach communities in need.”

It should be emphasized that the report authors didn’t conclusively identify anybody who denied gun ownership as a gun owner. Instead, the report dealt in probabilities, with the researchers building profiles of confirmed gun owners. They then applied the profiles across their sample of 3,500 respondents to estimate who was likely fibbing about not owning guns. The results depend on the probability threshold applied, but they came up with 1,206 confirmed owners, between 1,243 and 2,059 non-owners, and between 220 and 1,036 potential but secretive owners lying about their status.

“It may be that a percentage of firearm owners are concerned that their information will be leaked and the government will take their firearms or that researchers who are from universities that are typically seen as liberal and anti-firearm access will paint firearm owners in a bad light,” the authors allowed. They also speculated that many respondents falsely denying owning guns may come from communities that are traditionally unfriendly to gun ownership. That’s an interesting possibility considering that nearly half of all those designated as potential gun owners are unmarried urban women of color. In fact, as the study points out, many new gun owners are women and minorities.

Gun Owners Look Like Everybody

“An estimated 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million) became new gun owners from 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021. Most (5.4 million) had lived in homes without guns,” according to a separate study published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “Approximately half of all new gun owners were female (50% in 2019 and 47% in 2020 to 2021), 20% were Black (21% in 2019 and in 2020–2021), and 20% were Hispanic (20% in 2019 and 19% in 2020–2021).”

With gun ownership becoming increasingly common beyond the traditional ranks of white suburban-to-rural men, there are big implications for politics and policy. New gun owners will certainly resist proposals to strip them of self-defense tools they acquired out of necessity. They’re also likely to resent restrictive policies that urban, left-of-center politicians promote to torment gun owners once assumed to be safe targets, but which apply to anybody who owns firearms no matter where they live and vote. Basically, the gun-ownership landscape is growing and changing, but new owners are even more reticent than established ones about revealing their existence to researchers and government officials.

After decades of debatearbitrary crackdowns, and draconian enforcement actions, who can blame them?

Until recently, many gun opponents tried to paint firearm ownership as a fading fetish among a disappearing class of Americans.

Old Firearm Assumptions Look Shaky

Firearms “are owned by roughly one in five U.S. adults and can be found in approximately one of three U.S. households,” wrote the authors of a 2015 analysis of results from the National Firearms Survey, published in 2015 in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. “Between 2004 and today, we know that the proportion of adults who personally own firearms (and the proportion who live in households with guns) has continued to decline, modestly but steadily, largely because of a decline in personal gun ownership by men.” They estimated 265 million firearms in private American hands.

But in 2021, Pew Research reported: “Four-in-ten U.S. adults say they live in a household with a gun, including 30% who say they personally own one.” And Gallup reported in 2020 that “thirty-two percent of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun, while a larger percentage, 44%, report living in a gun household.” Switzerland’s well-respected Small Arms Survey put the number of guns in private American hands at over 393 million in 2018.

Recent years have seen a surge in gun sales, spurred by rioting, social disorder, and political turmoil. Given that many of these gun buyers are first-time owners, it’s apparent that firearm ownership is becoming more widespread and being enjoyed by Americans who might have resisted the idea in the past. These new owners are even more suspicious of scrutiny than their predecessors in the already privacy-minded gun-owning community.

“Our results highlight the potential that several groups, particularly women and individuals living in urban environments, may be prone to falsely denying firearm ownership,” adds the Rutgers report.

Academic researchers and policymakers who draw from their work clearly regret such opacity. But they should cast the blame not on gun owners, but on the activists and politicians who vilified the exercise of self-defense rights and who drove growing numbers of Americans to evade scrutiny.

The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.
— James Burgh

July 6

640 – The moslem Arab army under ‘Amr ibn al-‘As defeats the Byzantine forces near Heliopolis, Egypt, effectively completing control of both sides of the Nile river delta region and of the Red Sea down to the Sudan.

1415 – Jan Hus is condemned by the assembly of the council in the Konstanz Cathedral, in modern day Germany, as a heretic, sentenced and burned at the stake.

1535 – Sir Thomas More is executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.

1536 – The explorer Jacques Cartier lands at St. Malo in France at the end of his second expedition to North America.

1614 –  The southeast of Malta, around the town of Żejtun, are unsuccessfully raided by moslem Ottoman forces, ending their attempt to conquer the island.

1777 – After a 4 day long siege, a final bombardment by British artillery under General John Burgoyne forces American troops to retreat from Fort Ticonderoga, New York during the Revolutionary War.

1779 –  The French defeat British naval forces off the island of Grenada during the Revolutionary War.

1854 – The first convention of the U.S. Republican Party is held in Jackson, Michigan

1885 – Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies

1887 – David Kalākaua, monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, is forced to sign the ‘Bayonet Constitution’ (so called because of the force implied), which transfered much of the king’s authority to the Legislature of the Kingdom of Hawaii.

1892 – 3800 striking steelworkers engage in a day long battle with Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Pennsylvania Steelworks Strike, leaving 10 dead and 47 wounded.

1917 – Arabian troops led by T. E. Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayi capture Aqaba from the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

1919 – The British dirigible R34 lands in New York, completing the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by an airship.

1933 – The first Major League Baseball All-Star Game is played in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, The American League defeating the National League 4–2.

1942 – Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in the “Secret Annexe” above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse.

1944 – A fire of unknown origin at an afternoon performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Hartford, Connecticut kills 168 people and injures over 700 more.

1947 – The Автомат Калашникова образца 1947 – the AK-47 – goes into production in the Soviet Union.

1988 – Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha drilling platform in the North Sea is destroyed by explosions and fires. 167 workers are killed, the world’s worst offshore oil disaster in loss of life.

1996 – The pilots of Delta Air Lines Flight 1288, a McDonnell Douglas MD-88 abort takeoff due to engine failure at Pensacola International Airport, with the engine explosion killing 2 and injuring 5 of the 137 passengers on board.

2013 – Asiana Airlines Flight 214, a Boeing 777, crashes at San Francisco International Airport, killing 3 and injuring 181 of the 307 passengers on board. San Francisco television station KTVU news anchor Tori Campbell mistakenly reports faked out names of the flight crew; Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow.

2022 – The Georgia Guidestones, a monument in the United States, are heavily damaged in a bombing, and are dismantled later the same day.[12]

Vacationer in rental home shoots intruder

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. (SNN TV) July 2, 2023 – A shooting early Sunday morning in the Gulf Gate neighborhood of Sarasota seems to have been in self-defense during a break-in.

The shooting took place about 2:15 Sunday morning when a family on vacation was awakened in their rental home by what appeared to be someone in the enclosed lanai breaking into the house in the 6500 block of Colonial Drive in Sarasota County.

One of the victims felt threatened and shot the suspect.

The suspect is still alive at SMH but in critical condition.

The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office investigation is ongoing.

 

FPC Files Opening Brief in Lawsuits Challenging Delaware “Assault Weapon,” Magazine Bans

PHILADELPHIA, PA (July 5, 2023) – Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced the filing of an opening brief with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in its Gray v. Jennings and Graham v. Jennings lawsuits, which challenge Delaware’s “assault weapon” and standard capacity magazine bans, respectively. The brief can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.

“The district court wrongly held that Delaware’s bans, which affect some of the most popular firearms and magazines in the country, could be justified by reference to a pattern of historical regulation targeting a variety of arms, from ‘slung shots’ to machine guns,” argues the brief. “But the State has not put forward, and the district court did not cite, a single law that banned possession or carriage of an arm that was in common use at the time like the Delaware bans do.”

“No matter what the State of Delaware thinks, the guns and magazines it banned are protected by the Second Amendment and thus cannot be prohibited,” said FPC Vice President of Communications Richard Thomson. “We look forward to the Third Circuit getting right what the district court got wrong when it declined to preliminarily enjoin Delaware’s bans.”

FPC is joined in these lawsuits by the Second Amendment Foundation……

Forbes Claims More than 330 ‘Mass Shootings’ This Year Using Misleading Data

Forbes pointed to misleading data and claimed on Monday there had been over 330 “mass shootings” in the United States so far in 2023.

They labeled their report “breaking” news.

Writing at Forbes, Ana Faguy relied on the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a pro-gun-control database which abandoned the long-standing definition of a “mass shooting” as four or more deaths in a single incident by a single gunman and replaced it with  “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.” GVA’s new definition allows drive-by shootings, targeted gang attacks, and other non-mass shootings to be counted as “mass shootings,” thus inflating the number of reported incidents.

For example, on Monday Baltimore WBALTV reported that GVA was still counting the April 15, 2023, Dadeville, Georgia, birthday party attack as a “mass shooting.” GVA is doing this although at least six people have been arrested in connection with the attack.

Yet Faguy quoted GVA numbers, saying, “There have been more than 330 mass shootings so far this year, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.”

Breitbart News noted that The Hill relied on GVA numbers last year and ended up claiming over 600 mass shootings in the United States by Thanksgiving Day 2022.

On July 26, 2021, Breitbart News observed that the GVA is also able to report higher numbers of “mass shootings” because it lists defensive gun uses and officer-involved gun uses against criminals as “gun violence.”

Breitbart News pointed out on May 7, 2023, that GVA’s new definition allows drive-by shootings, targeted gang attacks, and other non-mass shootings to be counted as “mass shootings,” thus increasing the number of reported incidents. While President Joe Biden was claiming there had already been “roughly 200 mass shootings” in America for the year, a database maintained by the Associated Press/USA Today/Northeastern University showed there had actually been 19 such incidents in the United States from January 1, 2023, to May 2, 2023.

Watch These Clips and Tell Me You Really Think Biden Will Make It Through the 2024 Campaign

Joe Biden has faced questions about his physical and mental health for a long time now. He managed to avoid being too accessible to the public in 2020 because of the pandemic, but now he doesn’t have the pandemic as cover for avoiding playing the role of the president daily. The amount of pressure that Joe Biden is under to appear in control is just as high as (if not higher than) the exposure he has. There’s simply no easy way to hide him away, save for clearing his schedule and giving him time to recharge out of sight — and that’s a really bad look.

As president, Ol’ Joe has a lot of public obligations. On Independence Day, the birthday of our nation, he was front and center a lot and was as big a gaffe machine as you’d expect. During a National Education Association event in Washington, D.C., Biden became a garbled mess trying to read his script off the teleprompter.

The White House did what it could to cover for Joe, publishing a cleaned-up version of that mess. “You know, I’ve often say — and you’re tired of hearing me saying it, probably, but — children are the kite strings — they’re not somebody else’s chi- — they’re all our children — are the kite strings that lift our national ambitions aloft, and you hold those strings,” the official transcript reads. “You hold those strings. And our job is to make sure you have what you need to do what you do best.”

Is that how Biden sounded? Not to those who listened to him.

Oh, but there is more. Later on, Biden proudly highlighted the achievements of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, claiming that it has successfully helped teachers pay off student loan debt. In addition to getting the name of the program wrong, when he attempted to explain to the educators present how to find information about the program, he completely lost track of what he was trying to say.

“And, by the way, the program is still there,” he said. “Go to — anyway, you ought to contact us to make sure you know exactly how to qualify because you deserve that forgiveness.”

It should come as no surprise that Joe didn’t answer any questions, and Jill Biden was on hand to make sure Biden successfully exited the stage without embarrassing himself further.

The 2024 presidential campaign has technically already started, but Election Day is roughly a year and a half away. When you watch these videos, do you think that Joe Biden will make it until then? It’s not looking good.

1 This one will disappear quickly – wrong demographic
2 Another case of the legal system letting a dangerous criminal lose with a slap on the wrist. Just like it’s a plan, not a bug.


Gunman arrested for Philadelphia mass shooting which left 5 dead is BLM activist who wore women’s clothes.

The rifle-wielding suspect who donned a bulletproof vest before allegedly shooting dead five men and injuring two children in Philadelphia has been identified as a Black Lives Matter supporter who shared gun-toting memes on social media.

Kimbrady Carriker, 40, was nabbed shortly after the bloodshed in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood Monday night, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, citing sources.

Cops haven’t yet publicly disclosed the suspect’s identity.

On his Facebook page, Carriker posted two pictures of himself wearing a bra, a women’s top and earrings with his hair braided long in March, three months before the alleged shooting.

He also regularly posts about supporting Black Lives Matter, including supporting workers who protested in the Strike For Black Lives in July 2020.
Carriker allegedly shot five men dead and injured two children in Philadelphia

Continue reading “”

Defending Your Vehicle: From carjackings to aggressive drivers to violent demonstrations, it’s not all that safe on our streets right now.

A man’s home is his castle, or so the saying goes, but these days, we also tend to look at our cars, trucks or vans as a castle as well. They’re our refuge in the stormy maelstrom of traffic. They provide us with soothing music from the stereo and cool breezes from the air conditioning vents. However, just because our vehicles are comfortable, it doesn’t mean they’re invulnerable, and that’s why something like the Vehicle Defense Class from Go Noisy USA starts to make a lot of sense.

Neil Davis, Go Noisy’s chief instructor, is a veteran with years of service in British Intelligence in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and a number of other locations, working primarily undercover in some of the hottest of the world’s hotspots. These actions required him to work primarily from “civilian” vehicles like passenger cars and trucks, so unlike other vehicle skills classes tailored to law enforcement, Neil’s classes have “real world” application for the armed citizen, as the needs of a teacher driving to work vary from the needs of an Uber driver who regularly has strangers in the car or a law enforcement officer at a traffic stop. The class was four hours in the classroom and four hours on the range and covered three different scenarios:

  • Carjacking
  • Aggressive Motorists
  • Violent Demonstrations

Carjackings

Carjackings, according to Davis come in two different flavors: Opportunistic carjackings, where the crooks are looking for any old car in a storm, and planned or targeted attacks, where the goal is to relieve someone of their expensive car.

shooting from the car

Shooting through your door? Bad idea. Move your pistol up a little higher.

 

For the armed citizen, an opportunistic carjacking will most likely be a “wrong place, wrong time scenario,” something we can help avoid by not being in the wrong places at wrong times. Targeted carjackings, on the hand, are meticulously planned, with copious prior surveillance so the crooks know exactly when and where they are going to strike.

Which brings up an important point. Crooks choose victims based on how they look and act, so anything you can do to deselect yourself as a victim is probably a good thing. One way to do that is what Davis called the “soak.” Simply put, when you arrive at a new location, take a few seconds and “soak in” the environment. Where are the other cars parked? Is there anyone just standing around? If so, how many, and where are they standing? Who is coming and going from your destination, and what do they look like? Taking a few moments to observe your surroundings like this gives you a baseline of what “normal” looks like and allows you to quickly spot what’s changed when you come back out of your destination, helping you spot potential trouble before it becomes a real problem.

Aggressive Motorists

Angry attacks on the road, Davis says, generally aren’t caused by traffic jams by themselves. Rather, traffic is the spark that sets off an emotional reaction to pre-existing frustration, such as a bad day at the work or a previous incident on the road. Because these kinds of incidents are escalations of other events, being able de-escalate the event is critical, as is not escalating things even more.

Getting out of dodge and putting distance between you and your attacker is the fastest and easiest way to avoid becoming a victim of an incident that has the potential for violence, as is knowing your state’s use of force laws so you can respond in an appropriate way if violence cannot be avoided or de-escalated.

Violent Demonstrations

Here’s where things get really tricky. A mob blocking a road can turn ugly and violent in the blink of an eye, and that can change your response just as quickly. It’s one thing to be stuck in traffic surrounded by a crowd of angry, shouting people, and it’s another thing to have Molotov cocktails thrown at the car next to you and a brick come through your windshield.

Your options for what you should do if you’re alone are radically different than if you have people in your car. This is dependent on the situation, of course. If you can use your vehicle to exit the area, make great haste to do so. However, if you can’t get away (which is the optimal solution) because your vehicle has been disabled or blocked in by immovable objects and it’s clearly a situation where things have gotten out of control, staying in your car means staying in one place, making yourself an easy target. If you’re alone and have to use a firearm, Davis recommends exiting the car to engage an attacker as soon as things turn to lethal force because of the shorter draw time when standing and the wider range of options available to you.

However, if there are others in your vehicle and you can’t leave, he recommends having the unarmed passengers assume the “crash position” found on airliner safety cards into order to give themselves a smaller, more defensible position. Either way, the instability of a riot means you’ve got to have a flexible plan. A one-note response of going to lethal force as quickly as possible is probably going to get you and those in your car in a lot of trouble. We are not in control of the people outside our vehicle, and that’s where the problems can happen.

Staying safe when you’re away from home is a complex task that pushes all our self-defense skills to their limits. However, a calm, clear mind and having the tools and ability to respond quickly and appropriately can help us come out on top when everything has gone south.

Almost like it’s not a bug, but a plan.

Suspect in shooting, carjacking spree previously had felon-in-possession charges dropped by DOJ

A 22-year-old man on probation for a knifepoint robbery at a D.C. Metro station is now accused of a carjacking and shooting spree in Prince George’s County, Maryland and the District of Columbia, and the suspect’s previous criminal history raises some major questions about why the Department of Justice chose to dismiss a charge of felon-in-possession just last year.

According to Prince George’s police, 22-year-old Daeyon Ross first carjacked a small SUV in Capitol Heights, Maryland; pointing a gun at the driver before taking off behind wheel, only to crash the stolen vehicle a few blocks away.

Police say Ross then attempted to carjack an Acura ILX in the drive-thru lane of a McDonald’s on Ritchie Road. When the driver, [56-year-old Kurt] Modeste, tried to get away, Ross allegedly shot him multiple times. Modeste managed to drive a short distance before he was pronounced dead.

Ross then carjacked a Toyota Scion, also in the drive-thru, that had three dogs inside. Police said he killed two of the dogs, before driving away in the Scion heading westbound on Central Avenue.

Officers from several agencies followed Ross, as he crossed into D.C. At the intersection of 52nd Street and Sheriff Road NE, he got out of the Scion and carjacked a fourth victim, stealing a GMC Terrain, but got into another crash. When officers approached Ross at the crash scene, an officer with the Capitol Heights Police Department fired shots, but neither the officer nor Ross was injured.

“It’s extremely rare to come across an individual who has such a disregard for life,” said Acting Deputy Chief Zachary O’Lare of the Prince George’s County Police Department.

And yet, authorities have come across Ross on several occasions over the past few years. In 2017 Ross was convicted as a juvenile for an armed robbery and according to WUSA-TV served five years in juvenile custody before he was released last year. Shortly after, and while he was still on probation for that earlier crime, D.C. police caught Ross with a pistol, only to see the resulting charges dropped by the U.S. Attorney’s office.

D.C. Superior Court records show Ross was arrested on Aug. 11, 2022 on multiple charges for allegedly carrying a handgun despite his felony conviction. According to an affidavit, Ross allegedly had a “wide-eyed stare” when he saw officers while walking in the 1400 block of Congress Place SE and then took off running while grabbing his waist band. Officers chased him, during which Ross allegedly pulled out a black handgun and threw it on the ground. Ross was taken into custody shortly thereafter and the gun was determined to be a Taurus G3 9mm with 13 rounds of ammunition.

Ross was charged with being a felon in possession, carrying a pistol without a license, possession of an unregistered firearm, possession of unregistered ammunition, altering identification marks of a weapon and possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia dropped all of those charges two months later, however, after Ross’ public defender filed motions challenging the constitutionality of the search under the Fourth Amendment and of the charges under the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which established a new “historical tradition” test for evaluating firearm regulations.

The U.S. Attorney’s office didn’t drop the charges because of the Bruen decision, even if that’s one of the reasons Ross’s public defender gave for why the case against their client should be dismissed. Biden’s DOJ contends that only “law-abiding citizens” have any right to keep and bear arms and have continued prosecuting prohibited persons cases even after the Bruen decision was handed down, so I don’t see how Bruen would have had any impact on the charging decision here.

Instead, as writer Matthew Yglesias recently highlighted, D.C. courts are throwing out a surprising number of prosecutions for firearm-related offenses on Fourth Amendment grounds; an issue that Ross’s public defender also raised last year. Yglesias pointed out a case decided in April called T.W. v. United States that seems to bear a close resemblance to the circumstances of Ross’s arrest. From the decision:

T.W. raised his hands in the air upon seeing the two officers exit the front vehicle. Ewing asked T.W. whether he had a gun on him, and T.W. responded no. Ewing and Gendelman continued approaching T.W. from each side, and Ewing asked “You sure?” to which T.W. replied, “Yeah, I’m positive.” Gendelman then asked, “I can pat you down just to make sure?” T.W. said “Yeah,” and Gendelman responded, “My man,” as he began to pat T.W. down. Gendelman found a gun in T.W.’s waistband. The encounter lasted about ten seconds from when the first officers exited their vehicle to when the pat-down search began, and it took just about another five seconds for the officers to find the gun on T.W. He was charged with carrying a pistol without a license, possession of an unregistered firearm, unlawful possession of ammunition, and possession of a large-capacity ammunition- feeding device.

Before trial, T.W. moved to suppress the gun, its magazine, and its ammunition. He argued that he was unlawfully seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment when he consented to a pat-down search, and that his consent was the fruit of the illegal seizure. During a hearing on his motion to suppress, T.W. testified that he was “scared and nervous,” never having been arrested before, and did not think he could say “no” to Gendelman’s pat-down request. Asked why not, T.W. responded, “Because of how they came up on me. I felt like I couldn’t walk away.” T.W. further highlighted his youth (21 years old at the time), his “complete lack of experience” with police, “and the fact that he was confronted by multiple officers” who “essentially jumped out on [him] and immediately began asking accusatory questions.”

As Yglesias points out, a jury convicted T.W. at trial, but the D.C. Court of Appeals reversed that conviction on the grounds that the tactics used by police violated T.W.’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Did the USAO believe that was likely going to be the end result of prosecuting Daeyon Ross for being a violent felon in illegal possession of a firearm? If so, it would indicate that this problem has been going on for quite some time in the District, given that Ross’s charges were dropped last year, and T.W.’s case was only reversed a few months ago.

So far the DOJ isn’t talking about why the U.S. Attorney made the decision to drop all of the gun charges Ross was facing last year, but I’m not sure that there’s an answer that’s going to be acceptable. A violent felon was allegedly found in possession of a loaded gun just a short time after being released from custody, and DOJ ultimately took a pass on providing any consequences for that crime. Less than a year later Ross is now charged with first-degree murder, armed carjacking, and even cruelty to animals for shooting two dogs in the second vehicle that he stole at gunpoint.

While Joe Biden is demanding new gun laws aimed at peaceable gun owners his own DOJ is turning down the chance to prosecute repeat offenders; something to keep in mind the next time the president calls for a gun ban, a crackdown on firearms manufacturers, or other infringements on our right to protect ourselves from the violent offenders the Department of Justice are letting go.

Argument over yard work ends in Tulsa shooting death

A homeowner, who police believe was accosted by a neighbor Sunday over yard work, shot [and] killed the aggressor, the Tulsa Police Department said.

Officers were called to the 1200 block of N. Toledo Avenue around 10:30 a.m. about a shooting. Officers arrived to find Blake Williams dead in the back yard of the residence.

Through the investigation and numerous interviews with witnesses and neighbors, officers learned the incident began with the homeowner doing yard work in the front yard. Williams approached him and became aggressive.

According to police, the homeowner asked Williams to leave several times. Williams eventually cornered the homeowner in the garage, began attacking him and cutting him with lawn trimming shears, and a physical fight ensued, TPD said.

At one point, the homeowner managed to get away from Williams, retrieved his gun, and again tried to get Blake Williams to leave, police said. Williams started walking away, then turned and ran at the homeowner, who shot Williams.

Williams died on the scene. TPD detectives questioned the homeowner and he is not under arrest at this time. His identity was not released by police.