December 26
1723 – Johann Sebastian Bach leads the first performances of his first Christmas Cantata; Darzu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes, – For this the Son of God appeared – in the 2 main churches in Leipzig; Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche
1776 – Successfully crossing the Delaware river under cover of darkness during Christmas night, troops of the Continental Army under General Washington attack and defeat a garrison of Hessian forces at Trenton, New Jersey.
1799 – Representative Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee III’s Eulogy to George Washington in Congress Assembled, declares him as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen”
1811 – A theater fire in Richmond, Virginia kills 72 people among them, the Governor of Virginia George William Smith and former Senator, Abraham B. Venable.
1862 – Four nuns serving as volunteer nurses on board USS Red Rover are the first female nurses on a U.S. Navy hospital ship.
1898 – Marie and Pierre Curie announce the isolation of radium.
1941 – President Roosevelt signs a bill establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day in the United States.
1944 – The U.S. 3rd Army’s 4th Armored Division, under General George Patton breaks the encirclement of surrounded U.S. forces at Bastogne, Belgium.
1972 – During Operation Linebacker II, 120 American B-52 Stratofortress bombers attack Hanoi, including 78 launched from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, the largest single combat launch in Strategic Air Command history.
1989 – United Express Flight 2415, a BAe Jetstream 31, crashes on approach to the Tri-Cities Airport in Pasco, Washington, killing all 6 passengers and crew on board.
1991 – The Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union meets and formally dissolves the Soviet Union
1994 – Four armed moslem hijackers seize control of Air France Flight 8969. When the plane lands at Marseille, a French Gendarmerie assault team boards the aircraft and kills them.
1996 – JonBenét Ramsey is found murdered in the basement of her home in Boulder Colorado.
2004 – A 9.3 Mw earthquake in the Indian Ocean hits northern Sumatra and causes one of the largest observed tsunamis, affecting coastal Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, killing over 227,000 people.
2015 – A tornado outbreak strikes the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, with multiple tornadoes from EF2 to EF4 power, killing 12 people and causing heavy damage to the suburb of Rowlett.
~4BC – Forced to stay in the equivalent of a modern stable due to all the inns in the city of Bethlehem being full up because of a census and taxing ordered by the Romans, Mariam, the wife of Yosef ben Yakov gives birth to a son they name Yeshua.
336 – Christmas is celebrated in Rome for the first time.
508 – Clovis I, King of the Franks, is baptized at Reims, France by Bishop Remigius.
597 – Augustine of Canterbury baptizes more than 10,000 Anglo Saxons at Kent, England.
800 – Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor at the ‘Old’ St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome
1000 – Hungary is established as a Christian kingdom by King Stephen I
1025 – Mieszko II Lambert is crowned king of Poland at the Gniezno Cathedral
1046 – Henry III is crowned Holy Roman Emperor at ‘Old’ St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome
1066 – William the Conqueror is crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey
1100 – Baldwin of Boulogne is crowned the first King of Jerusalem in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem.
1130 – Count Roger II is crowned the first King of Sicily at Palermo.
1758 – Halley’s Comet is sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch, confirming Edmund Halley’s prediction of its passage, the first passage of a comet predicted ahead of time.
1776 – George Washington leads 2400 members of the Continental Army across the Delaware River, Christmas night to attack Hessian mercenary forces serving Great Britain at Trenton, New Jersey, the next day.
1814 – Rev. Samuel Marsden holds the first Christian service on land in New Zealand at Rangihoua Bay.
1868 – President Andrew Johnson grants an unconditional pardon to all Confederate veterans.
1941 – Admiral Chester W. Nimitz arrives at Pearl Harbor to assume command as Commander in Chief U.S. Pacific Fleet.
1968 – Apollo 8 performs the first successful Trans Earth Injection (TEI) maneuver, sending the crew and spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth from Lunar orbit.
1989 – Deposed Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, are arrested, condemned to death after a summary trial, and executed by firing squad.
1991 – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as President of the Soviet Union.
2020 – Anthony Quinn Warner blows himself and his RV to bits in downtown Nashville, Tennessee injuring 8 more people.
2021 – NASA launches thehe James Webb Space Telescope
19-year-old shot and killed, possibly while trying to rob concealed carry holder in West Town
Chicago police are investigating after a 19-year-old man was shot and killed in West Town on Saturday afternoon. A concealed carry holder told police he shot the man because the man and three other people targeted him in an armed robbery.
The shooting occurred in an alley behind the 1700 block of West Cortez around 4:51 p.m.
In a media statement, the Chicago Police Department claimed “a 19-year-old male victim was in the alley when he sustained a gunshot wound to the chest by an unknown offender. The victim was transported to Stroger Hospital where he was pronounced. Area Three Detectives are investigating.”
However, officers at the scene said the shooter was a 68-year-old concealed carry holder who remained on the scene. He reportedly told them that he shot the man, who celebrated his 19th birthday last week, in self-defense during an armed robbery. Three other people who participated in the robbery ran from the scene, according to initial information.
The shooting occurred in CPD’s Near West (12th) District, where robbery reports are up 57% compared to last year and up 118% compared to 2019.
Incompetent ‘Contagious Disease’ Diagnosis for Guns a Prescription for Tyranny
“New Mexico Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham held a recent press conference to praise herself for implementing dubious gun control measures,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported. “‘I won’t rest until we don’t have to talk about (gun violence) as an epidemic and a public health emergency,’ the governor said.”
If a prominent politician declares an epidemic and imposes edicts and orders to enforce them, it’s fair to ask, “Where’s the science?”
“Lujan Grisham was born in Los Alamos and graduated from St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe before earning undergraduate and law degrees from the University of New Mexico,” the governor’s official biography states. Neither her education nor her claimed career highlights show her qualified to make such a proclamation on her own, which makes it fair to ask, “Who’s advising her?”
That would be Patrick M. Allen, her New Mexico Health Department Secretary.
“In simple terms, violence, especially gun violence, behaves like a contagious disease,” Allen pontificates in his op-ed, “Tackling Gun Violence: A Public Health Challenge — DOH secretary says rapidly-spreading violence behaves like a contagious disease.”
“Imagine treating violence as if it were an infectious disease. Just as we study diseases’ origins to combat them effectively, we can apply the same approach to violence,” Allen proclaims. “How do we address gun violence as the contagious disease it is? Gun violence is a public health emergency.”
He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t he? The thing is, like the governor, the secretary in charge of the Land of Enchantment’s public health doesn’t have a qualified medical background, either.
An Apollo 8 Christmas Dinner Surprise: Turkey and Gravy Make Space History
On Christmas Day in 1968, the three-man Apollo 8 crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders found a surprise in their food locker: a specially packed Christmas dinner wrapped in foil and decorated with red and green ribbons. Something as simple as a “home-cooked meal,” or as close as NASA could get for a spaceflight at the time, greatly improved the crew’s morale and appetite. More importantly, the meal marked a turning point in space food history.
The prime crew of the Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission pose for a portrait next to the Apollo Mission Simulator at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Left to right, they are James A. Lovell Jr., command module pilot; William A. Anders, lunar module pilot; and Frank Borman, commander.
NASA
On their way to the Moon, the Apollo 8 crew was not very hungry. Food scientist Malcolm Smith later documented just how little the crew ate. Borman ate the least of the three, eating only 881 calories on day two, which concerned flight surgeon Chuck Berry. Most of the food, Borman later explained, was “unappetizing.” The crew ate few of the compressed, bite-sized items, and when they rehydrated their meals, the food took on the flavor of their wrappings instead of the actual food in the container. “If that doesn’t sound like a rousing endorsement, it isn’t,” he told viewers watching the Apollo 8 crew in space ahead of their surprise meal. As Anders demonstrated to the television audience how the astronauts prepared a meal and ate in space, Borman announced his wish, that folks back on Earth would “have better Christmas dinners” than the one the flight crew would be consuming that day.1
If that doesn’t sound like a rousing endorsement, it isn’t.
FRANK BORMAN
Apollo 8 Astronaut
Over the 1960s, there were many complaints about the food from astronauts and others working at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now NASA’s Johnson Space Center). After evaluating the food that the Apollo 8 crew would be consuming onboard their upcoming flight, Apollo 9 astronaut Jim McDivitt penciled a note to the food lab about his in-flight preferences. Using the back of the Apollo 8 crew menu, he directed them to decrease the number of compressed bite-sized items “to a bare minimum” and to include more meat and potato items. “I get awfully hungry,” he wrote, “and I’m afraid I’m going to starve to death on that menu.”2
In 1969, Rita Rapp, a physiologist who led the Apollo Food System team, asked Donald Arabian, head of the Mission Evaluation Room, to evaluate a four-day food supply used for the Apollo missions. Arabian identified himself as someone who “would eat almost anything. … you might say [I am] somewhat of a human garbage can.” But even he found the food lacked the flavor, aroma, appearance, texture, and taste he was accustomed to. At the end of his four-day assessment he concluded that “the pleasures of eating were lost to the point where interest in eating was essentially curtailed.”3
Food used on the Gemini-Titan IV flight. Packages include beef sandwich cubes, strawberry cereal cubes, dehydrated peaches, and dehydrated beef and gravy. A water gun on the Gemini spacecraft is used to reconstitute the dehydrated food and scissors are used to open the packaging.
NASA
Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman concurred with Arabian’s assessment of the Apollo food. The one item Borman enjoyed? It was the contents of the Christmas meal wrapped in ribbons: turkey and gravy. The Christmas dinner was so delicious that the crew contacted Houston to inform them of their good fortune. “It appears that we did a great injustice to the food people,” Lovell told capsule communicator (CAPCOM) Mike Collins. “Just after our TV show, Santa Claus brought us a TV dinner each; it was delicious. Turkey and gravy, cranberry sauce, grape punch; [it was] outstanding.” In response, Collins expressed delight in hearing the good news but shared that the flight control team was not as lucky. Instead, they were “eating cold coffee and baloney sandwiches.”4
The Apollo 8 Christmas menu included dehydrated grape drink, cranberry-applesauce, and coffee, as well as a wetpack containing turkey and gravy.
U.S. Natick Soldier Systems Center Photographic Collection
The Apollo 8 meal was a “breakthrough.” Until that mission, the food choices for Apollo crews were limited to freeze dried foods that required water to be added before they could be consumed, and ready-to-eat compressed foods formed into cubes. Most space food was highly processed. On this mission NASA introduced the “wetpack”: a thermostabilized package of turkey and gravy that retained its normal water content and could be eaten with a spoon. Astronauts had consumed thermostabilized pureed food on the Project Mercury missions in the early 1960s, but never chunks of meat like turkey. For the Project Gemini and Apollo 7 spaceflights, astronauts used their fingers to pop bite-sized cubes of food into their mouths and zero-G feeder tubes to consume rehydrated food. The inclusion of the wetpack for the Apollo 8 crew was years in the making. The U.S. Army Natick Labs in Massachusetts developed the packaging, and the U.S. Air Force conducted numerous parabolic flights to test eating from the package with a spoon.5
Smith called the meal a real “morale booster.” He noted several reasons for its appeal: the new packaging allowed the astronauts to see and smell the turkey and gravy; the meat’s texture and flavor were not altered by adding water from the spacecraft or the rehydration process; and finally, the crew did not have to go through the process of adding water, kneading the package, and then waiting to consume their meal. Smith concluded that the Christmas dinner demonstrated “the importance of the methods of presentation and serving of food.” Eating from a spoon instead of the zero-G feeder improved the inflight feeding experience, mimicking the way people eat on Earth: using utensils, not squirting pureed food out of a pouch into their mouths. Using a spoon also simplified eating and meal preparation. NASA added more wetpacks onboard Apollo 9, and the crew experimented eating other foods, including a rehydrated meal item, with the spoon.6
Malcolm Smith demonstrates eating space food.
NASA
Food was one of the few creature comforts the crew had on the Apollo 8 flight, and this meal demonstrated the psychological importance of being able to smell, taste, and see the turkey prior to consuming their meal, something that was lacking in the first four days of the flight. Seeing appetizing food triggers hunger and encourages eating. In other words, if food looks and smells good, then it must taste good. Little things like this improvement to the Apollo Food System made a huge difference to the crews who simply wanted some of the same eating experiences in orbit and on the Moon that they enjoyed on Earth.
IDF Eliminated Over 8,000 Gaza Terrorists Since October 7.
Amid reports that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has eliminated more than 8,000 terrorists after eleven weeks of campaign in Gaza, the military is closing in on Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s defense minister said.
“One thing is clear – Yahya Sinwar now hears the IDF tractors above him, the Air Force bombs and the IDF’s actions. He will soon meet the barrels of our guns,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared Friday. Sinwar, who is regarded as the key architect of the October 7 massacre, is believed to be hiding in southern Gaza as Israeli ground troops bring most of the Hamas stronghold in the north under their control.
The Israeli news website Arutz Sheva reported defense minister’s remarks:
Speaking at the conclusion of a daily assessment of the situation with senior members of the defense establishment, Gallant said, “The activity of the IDF and the defense establishment continues. In the north of the Gaza Strip – the operation is gradually completing the goals we set: Disbanding the Hamas battalions and denying their underground capabilities. We also operate in the Khan Yunis area and the south of the Gaza Strip, and we will operate in other places in the future.”
“One thing is clear – Yahya Sinwar now hears the IDF tractors above him, the Air Force bombs and the IDF’s actions. He will soon meet the barrels of our guns,” the Defense Minister vowed.
“We will go and deepen our activity and complete all our goals – first of all, the elimination of the Hamas terrorist organization, the denial of its military and governmental capabilities, and the return of the hostages to Israel,” Gallant added. “The operation will be a drawn-out operation, requiring patience, but we will reach an achievement.”
Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant tells Yahya Sinwar that soon he will meet the barrels of Israeli guns. pic.twitter.com/GckjsOnObL
— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) December 22, 2023
‘Earthrise’ Christmas Eve 1968
On Christmas Eve, 1968 while in orbit around the Moon, the crew of Apollo 8; Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and Bill Anders, on live TV, recited the opening verses of the King James Version of the book of Genesis.
It was, and is still the most watched TV broadcast in history.
- Bill Anders
- We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
- Jim Lovell
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
- Frank Borman
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
- And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.
This was not done on the spur of the moment, as it was decided long before launch that a Christmas message would be sent to Earth from Lunar orbit. The message was actually included in the Mission Flight Plan and is now on display at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
December 24
1144 – The capital of the crusader County of Edessa, in modern southeastern Turkey, falls to Imad ad-Din Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo.
1777 – Christmas Island in the Gilbert archipelago – Kiritimati, as pronounced by the native populace – is named such by James Cook during his 3rd voyage
1814 – Representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.
1818 – The first performance of “Silent Night” composed by Franz Xaver Gruber takes place in the church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria.
1877 – Thomas Edison files for a patent for the cylinder phonograph.
1914 – During the first winter of World War I, the “Christmas Truce” begins.
1942 – The first V-1 ‘buzz bomb’, is launched at Peenemunde, Germany
1943 – U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower is named Supreme Allied Commander for the Invasion of Normandy.
1968 – Firing the Apollo 8 Service Module main engine, the crew becomes the first humans to reach the moon and enter into Lunar orbit.
1973 – The District of Columbia Home Rule Act is passed, allowing residents of Washington, D.C. to elect their own local government.
1996 – A Learjet 35 crashes into Smarts Mountain near Dorchester, New Hampshire, killing both pilots on board and resulting in the longest missing aircraft search in the state’s history, lasting almost three years.
In the course of writing Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon encountered Mohammed, who pursued the Jews with “implacable hatred” to the end of his life. The historian also called out Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth king who invaded Italy in 488 AD and “condescended to disarm the unwarlike natives of Italy, interdicting all weapons of offence, and excepting only a small knife for domestic use.” Call it an early display of the totalitarian mindset.
Wherever they hold sway, modern totalitarians disarm the people of firearms and ammunition. For details, see Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming Jews and “Enemies of the State,” by Stephen Halbrook. Hitler’s National Socialists used the registration records of the Weimar Republic to identify and disarm gun owners.
As Halbrook shows in Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, the Nazis confiscated all firearms, even antique hunting rifles. That left the people vulnerable to wholesale slaughter. On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, troops of the 4th SS Panzer Regiment surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France. The attackers killed 245 women and 207 children, including six below the age of six months.
The 196 men killed included seven Jewish refugees from other parts of France. Of the 648 people murdered in the village, only 50 could be identified. The Nazis locked the women and children in the village church, shot indiscriminately, and set the victims on fire. The rest of the village was then looted and set ablaze.
As the late P.J. O’Rourke explained, this is what happens when those with all the power have all the guns. And to paraphrase inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) in The Day of the Jackal, be in no doubt that this is what the Biden Junta wants.
At every mass shooting, the default government response is to blame guns and make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. This does not apply, however, to Muslim jihadists like “Soldier of Allah” Maj. Nidal Hasan. At Ford Hood in 2009 Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. Hasan wounded more than 30 others, including Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who took seven bullets from the jihadist.
According to the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, this was “workplace violence,” not terrorism or even “gun violence,” and the mass murderer Hasan got better medical treatment than his victims. In 2014, Lunsford sought to explain his plight to the president, who declined to meet with him. The composite character did not proclaim Islamic terrorist attacks in 2015 at San Bernardino (14 dead) and Orlando in 2016, (49 dead) as cases of “gun violence.”
Of all the various forms of government in the world, wrote Gibbon, “an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.” The buffoonish Biden channels Obama, but the Delaware Democrat shapes up worse. On September 1, 2022, backdropped in red light with Marines at the ready, Biden targeted those who want the nation to be great as the primary threat to America. Biden’s FBI openly follows suit and in August the FBI killed Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old woodworker, for threats he had allegedly posted online.
Recall the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992, when the FBI deployed massive military force against a single family, and FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot dead Vicki Weaver as she held her infant daughter. That case prompted Senate hearings, but so far nothing on Robertson. Biden’s FBI shoots first and avoids questions later, so an escalation of deadly violence is not out of the question. Christmas 2023 may well be joyous, but 2024 shapes up as the year of living dangerously.
The Great Legal War Over Your Freedom
Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022, the lower courts have been either trying to apply, or to resist, its directive to decide the validity of restrictions on the basis of the text of the Second Amendment and historical analogues from the time of the Founding. According to the ruling, an activity is presumed to be protected if it involves keeping and bearing arms by the people. The burden is then on the government to find historical precedents to show that a restriction is part of the nation’s history and tradition.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals applied Bruen to the federal ban on gun possession by a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order (DVRO) and found it to violate the Second Amendment. State DVROs are often issued with little pretense of an adversary hearing or are mutually agreed upon in divorces without knowledge that it evokes a federal gun ban.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, U.S. v. Rahimi, and a barrage of amicus briefs have been filed on both sides. Mr. Rahimi faces several state charges involving actual violence, dwarfing the federal possession charge. The amicus brief of the National Rifle Association put it this way: “Rahimi should not only lose his Second Amendment liberties, but he should also lose all of his liberties—if the allegations against him are ultimately proven true with sufficient due process. But constitutional safeguards cannot be set aside to obtain those ends.”
Consider the supposed historical analogues cited by Biden’s Justice Department and its amici—discriminatory laws disarming Catholics, slaves and “tramps”; confiscation of arms by oppressive British monarchs and by our own patriots in the American Revolution (there was a war going on, after all); and wholly irrelevant laws against gun sales to children and intoxicated persons. The Court heard oral arguments in the case on Nov. 7, 2023.
The Third Circuit, in Range v. Merrick Garland, held the federal ban on gun possession by felons to be unconstitutional as applied to a person convicted of a minor, non-violent offense. Again, no laws in the Founding era disarmed persons who were not dangerous. The government is asking the Supreme Court to hear that case after it decides Rahimi.
When it decided Bruen, the Supreme Court directed the Fourth Circuit to reconsider its upholding of Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban in Bianchi v. Frosh. That court had held that ordinary AR-15 semi-automatic rifles are not really different from machineguns and are “weapons of war most useful in military service,” even though no military force in the world issues them as service rifles.
The Fourth Circuit got right on it, holding its oral argument on Dec. 6, 2022. A year later, crickets. Still no decision. Is it really so hard to apply Bruen’s simple tests, or would the court not like the result?
Massachusetts Assault Weapon Ban Ruled Constitutional by Judge
Massachusetts’ law prohibiting the possession and sale of some semiautomatic weapons commonly used in mass shootings is acceptable under a recent change to Second Amendment precedent from the US Supreme Court, a federal judge said Thursday.
The National Association for Gun Rights asked the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts to prevent the state from being able to enforce its law, claiming the weapons are protected under the Second Amendment because they were in common use at the time the Second Amendment was adopted.
The banned weapons “are unreasonably dangerous for ordinary purposes of self-defense due to their extreme lethality and high potential for collateral harm,” Chief Judge Dennis Saylor wrote in an order denying the gun rights group’s request to halt enforcement of the law.
This IS NOT the Bruen Standard.
The US Supreme Court held last year in New York State Rifles & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen that state governments must prove a regulation would have been consistent with the nation’s historical regulation of firearms.
Saylor’s decision helps build the jurisprudence for the types of state regulations that remain acceptable under the Second Amendment post-Bruen as many states grapple with challenges to their weapon laws. States like Illinois, California, and Connecticut have also been allowed to move forward enforcing their assault weapon bans.
“The relevant history affirms the principle that in 1791, as now, there was a tradition of regulating ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapons—specifically, those that are not reasonably necessary for self-defense,” the order said, and the current restrictions “pose a minimal burden on the right to self-defense and are comparably justified to historical regulation.”
THIS, is not the Bruen Standard either!
Saylor was not convinced that assault weapons are commonly used for self-defense, finding them “generally unsuitable” for that purpose because of their weight, size, and firepower.
“The features of modern assault weapons—particularly the AR-15’s radical increases in muzzle velocity, range, accuracy, and functionality—along with the types of injuries they can inflict are so different from colonial firearms that the two are not reasonably comparable,” the order said.
The case is Capen v. Campbell, D. Mass., No. 1:22-cv-11431, order 12/21/23.
The Sheriffs “thinks” this will be referred to a Grand Jury. What crap-for-brains and from a Texas LEO. All homicides – by Texas State Law – are automatically referred to a Grand Jury.
Dollar General robbery suspect shot by manager, crashes into bus, dies:
A man accused of robbing a Houston, Texas Dollar General and crashing his car into a METRO bus has died, according to authorities.
A Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputy was heading to work around 1:16 p.m. Wednesday when someone flagged him down about an incident at the store, sheriff Ed Gonzalez said at a news conference.
Gonzalez said a man was driving a vehicle and parked it in front of the store. He then entered the store with a pistol and began making demands at gunpoint, trying to get the store’s safe open.
A store manager had a gun and shot at the suspect, hitting him once or twice, the sheriff said. The man then fled the location, got back into his vehicle and drove about a block away to an intersection.
“It appears he had been bleeding out based on some of the evidence we’re seeing inside the vehicle and collided with a METRO bus that was here and eventually came to a stop,” Gonzalez said.
The man was pulled from his vehicle and taken to the hospital, where he died from his injuries.
His identity has not been released by authorities yet.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County said there were six people on the bus, including the driver. There were no life-threatening injuries to passengers on the bus but the driver was taken to the hospital to be checked out.
No passengers asked to be taken to the hospital, METRO said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Man entered store with Airsoft pistol, sheriff says
The weapon turned out to be an Airsoft pistol, Gonzalez said, similar to a BB gun or pellet gun.
“But again, they look very realistic and at the time when somebody’s facing that at gunpoint … they don’t know what kind of pistol it is,” he said.
The sheriff also said the man’s vehicle may have been involved in another incident two days earlier in the same area. Investigators are still looking into it, he said.
When local media asked if the Dollar General employee having a gun on-hand speaks to the area and its safety, Gonzalez said it’s “not a great area” or a place where people let their guards down.
It’s the busiest area in the sheriff’s office’s district and authorities have tried to combat crime over the past few years with more patrols, authorities said.
Regarding the Dollar General incident, the sheriff said he can’t speak for the store manager but it is well-known that it is a high-crime area.
“But there’s a lot of great businesses, a lot of wonderful residents, so it’s not indicative of everybody that’s out here,” he said.
When asked if the manager who shot the man would face charges, he said he can’t speak for investigators or prosecutors but thinks it will be referred to the grand jury.
“If somebody was trying to obviously protect themselves, this went down as an armed robbery from everything that they viewed and how things went down, then most likely it’s referred to … the grand jury.”
Civilizational Jenga
Bit by bit, our ruling class is eliminating our societal safety margins
Politics makes me sad sometimes.
Oh, not just because politicians are doing dumb things. Not even because politicians are corrupt. Politicians have always been dumb and corrupt, as any study of history will demonstrate.
And it doesn’t matter if they hold office by election, inheritance, or swords distributed by strange women lying in ponds. Stupidity and corruption are human characteristics, and politicians are very, very human. (Though recent history is such that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords look better as the basis for a system of government . . . .)
Sometimes their stupidity and corruption make me angry, and sometimes they make me laugh. But, given my low expectations, it takes a special kind of stupidity and corruption to actually make me sad.
What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing. One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse. They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.
What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved – let’s call them “the morons” for convenience’s sake – are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it’s doing, and is fine with it.
Roger Kimball gets at it in a recent piece:
“This is the same old trick,” Trump said when he got the news that the Colorado Supreme Court voted 4-3 to keep him off the primary ballot for the 2024 presidential election.
Oops. Sorry. I got my papers mixed up. That was actually Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when he got the news that some Southern states had voted to keep him off the ballot. Eventually 10 states did so.
So here we are again. It’s a bit like that Army Major in the Vietnam war who explained that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Just so, the virtuous people of Colorado have decided that in order to save democracy they need to destroy it.
In fact, what they have just voted to preserve is not democracy but “Our Democracy™.” Here’s the difference. In a democracy, people get to vote for the candidate they prefer. In “Our Democracy™,” only approved candidates get to compete.
Donald Trump is the opposite of an approved candidate. The untrammeled hermeneutical ingenuity of the American legal profession had be let loose against Trump. As I write, he faces huge legal battle in four states. . . .
Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is. He is an enemy, not of the state, exactly, but of the state of mind that constitutes “Our Democracy™.” When he unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, the beautiful people, beginning with his opponent Hillary Clinton, couldn’t believe it. They denounced the election as fraudulent. “Our Democracy™,” you see, means “rule by Democrats.”
Now they are warning that, should Trump be reelected, he would be a “dictator,” a new Hitler, etc. He would weaponise the Department of Justice against his enemies, they claim, and use the FBI to harass his opponents. Stay tuned for the seminar on what the Freudians call “projection”: it meets this afternoon in a democratic redoubt near you.
In a more civilized version of America – one that existed just a few decades ago – the notion of waging this sort of unrestricted lawfare against a leading presidential candidate, much less a former president – would have been considered ridiculous, and had it been taken seriously, would have been seen as enormously risky.
A federal judge in Illinois has declined to temporarily delay a portion of the state law banning some high-power semiautomatic weapons from going into effect.
U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn on Friday declined a request from several gun rights groups that would have delayed the Jan. 1 deadline for residents of Illinois to register their guns that are under the ban, according to the Chicago Tribune.
According to the report, those who have guns or accessories that are included in the ban are required to file “endorsement affidavits” with the Illinois State Police on their website.
Individuals who fail to register could be charged with a misdemeanor for the first offense and a felony for any offenses after.
McGlynn wrote in his opinion that a temporary injunction would “create further delays in this litigation when the constitutional rights of the citizens demand an expeditious resolution on the merits.”
President of Federal Firearms Licensees of Illinois, Dan Eldridge, told the outlet that the issue could end up in the Supreme Court.
“There’s a lot of stuff in motion in here,” Eldridge said.
The ban, signed by Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker in January, includes penalties for individuals who, “carries or possesses… manufactures, sells, delivers, imports, or purchases any assault weapon or .50 caliber rifle.”
The law also includes statutory penalties for anyone who, “sells, manufactures, delivers, imports, possesses, or purchases any assault weapon attachment or .50 caliber cartridge.”
Any kit or tools used to increase the fire rate of a semiautomatic weapon are also included in the ban, and the law includes a limit for purchases of certain magazines.
On Dec. 14, the Supreme Court allowed the law to remain in place after the National Association for Gun rights asked for a preliminary injunction.
In November, a 7th District U.S. Court of Appeals panel also refused a request to block the law. In August, the law was upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court in a 4-3 decision.