Change in Ohio law makes murder convictions tougher when self-defense claims used

DAYTON — A 2021 change to Ohio law is making it more difficult for prosecutors to secure murder convictions when a defendant claims self-defense.

As reported on News Center 7 at 6:00, the law shifted the burden of proof to the state, requiring prosecutors to prove a defendant did not act in self-defense rather than requiring the defense to prove they did.

The impact of the legal update was recently seen in two Montgomery County murder trials that ended in acquittals for William Pointer and Anthony Perkins.

These cases come as police and prosecutors continue to navigate a system where defendants are now presumed to have acted in self-defense once the claim is raised.

Under the current Ohio statute, a defendant can claim self-defense as long as they were not the initial aggressor.

While the core definition of self-defense remains, the 2021 update changed the legal requirements during a trial.

Previously, defense attorneys carried the burden of proving that their client acted in self-defense, but the law now presumes the defendant acted in self-defense unless the state can prove otherwise.

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Des Moines homeowner shoots alleged intruder during late-night break-in

A 46-year-old woman is facing a felony charge after police say she forced her way into a Union Park home late Saturday night and was shot by the homeowner.

Des Moines police officers were called just before 11 p.m. to a residence in the 1500 block of Guthrie Avenue after a 911 caller reported that an intruder was attacking the homeowner. While officers were en route, the caller told dispatchers that the intruder had been shot.

When officers arrived, they found Stannita Wilson inside the home with multiple gunshot wounds. Officers provided first aid until Des Moines Fire Department rescue personnel arrived and transported Wilson to MercyOne Des Moines Medical Center for treatment.

According to investigators, the homeowner reported hearing someone yelling in the backyard, followed by banging on the back door. When the homeowner unlocked the door, Wilson allegedly forced her way inside and began assaulting the resident.

Police said the homeowner, who was armed with a handgun, shot Wilson during the confrontation.

Wilson’s injuries were described as minor. After being treated and released from the hospital, she was charged with second-degree burglary, a Class C felony.

Police said Wilson was not known to the homeowner. As of Sunday, no charges had been filed against the homeowner.

The incident remains under investigation

Senate Republicans Shoot Down Iran War Powers Resolution

Senate Republicans successfully defeated a vote Wednesday on the Iran War Powers resolution, which would require President Donald Trump to make his case to Congress before taking additional military actions against Iran.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine forced the vote on the war powers resolution, which comes after the Senate voted down a similar effort when the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear sites last June.

The vote comes as the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran over the weekend, killing its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has retaliated by launching missiles at Israel and U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

The motion to advance the resolution out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee failed by a vote of 47-53, according to The Hill.

Arkansas dad on trial for killing daughter’s rapist wins GOP primary for county sheriff

A man who is currently awaiting trial on a murder charge in the death of his daughter’s alleged rapist has now won the Republican primary for county sheriff in Arkansas.

Aaron Spencer bested incumbent John Staley in the Tuesday primary for Lonoke County sheriff. Unofficial results show Spencer received more than 53 percent of the vote, according to the Associated Press.

Spencer is currently awaiting trial in the shooting death of 67-year-old Michael Foster, who had been charged with multiple sexual offenses involving Spencer’s teenage daughter and was out on bond at the time of the killing.

Spencer has pleaded not guilty and is free on bond while awaiting trial. His legal team has not denied that he shot Foster but has argued that Spencer acted within the confines of the law to protect his child. The trial was scheduled for January but was delayed after the presiding judge was removed from the case.

If convicted of the killing, Spencer would be unable to serve as sheriff.

During his campaign, Spencer focused on failures in law enforcement. In a post last month, he said that if elected, he would create a team dedicated to combating sex crimes against children.

In a statement following the primary, Staley said, “Congratulations to Mr. Spencer. Tonight the voters made their decision in the Republican Primary, and I respect the decision.” Staley’s department arrested Spencer in 2024 in connection with the shooting.

Spencer will now face Democratic candidate Brian Mitchell Sr. in the general election. Lonoke County is a heavily Republican county.

In October of 2024, Spencer found his daughter missing from his home and searched for her in his truck, where he found her in the passenger seat of a vehicle that Foster was driving. Spencer allegedly forced Foster off the highway and later called 911 to report he had fired shots.

Iran is a graphic example of why governments want you disarmed. 90 million people with nothing to resist with, ruled by Shia fanatics who kill women for having hair showing. We strike their leadership and now they are dancing in the streets. Never give up your guns.
– Louis vil LeGun

Kurds are a people not to be trifled with. They’re tough, and motivated. Salah ad-Din, known to us as Saladin, the conqueror of Jerusalem, was a Kurd.


Ground invasion launched against Iran as thousands of US-backed Kurdish fighters storm border

Thousands of Kurdish fighters have launched a ground invasion in Iran, according to a US official.

The Kurdish militias, based across the border in Iraq, began the offensive in northwestern Iran on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump on Sunday night spoke with the heads of Kurdish militant groups in Iraq to discuss the situation in Iran.

The CIA was exploring plans to arm the Kurdish forces with the aim of sparking a popular uprising, CNN reported Tuesday.

The Kurdish groups are widely seen as the most well-organized faction of the fragmented Iranian opposition and are believed to have thousands of battle-hardened fighters.

Their entry into the war could pose a significant challenge to the besieged authorities in Tehran and could also risk pulling Iraq further into the conflict.

Asked about Kurdish involvement, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: ‘None of our objectives are premised on the support or the arming of any particular force.

‘So, what other entities may be doing, we’re aware of, but our objectives aren’t centered on that.’

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Brandon is an utterly rabid pro-RKBA person who advised if he was made head of ATF, he would – among other antibureaucrap things – institute continuing amnesties for any and all NFA firearms


Gun Rights Activist Brandon Herrera Forces Rep. Gonzales Into Texas GOP Runoff

One of the most closely watched Republican primaries in the country has turned into a political earthquake in South Texas. Gun-rights activist and firearms manufacturer Brandon Herrera has forced incumbent Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) into a runoff election in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, signaling deep dissatisfaction among grassroots conservatives and Second Amendment voters.

With nearly all votes counted in the March 3 Republican primary, Gonzales and Herrera each captured enough of the vote, leaving neither candidate above the 50-percent threshold required to win outright under Texas election law.

The result sends the race to a May 26 runoff, where Republican voters will decide whether to renominate the incumbent or replace him with one of the most recognizable gun-rights voices in the country.

For many gun owners, the race has become a referendum on the direction of the Republican Party—and whether Congress will have members willing to unapologetically defend the Second Amendment.

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Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces. – Joseph T. Chew

But as Kentucky’s goobernor is a democrap, the legislature will need a veto-proof majority to override his expected idiocy.


Second State Seeks to Run Its Own Machine Gun Sales to Residents

Following a roadmap drawn by gun rights advocates to end-run around the Hughes Amendment, Kentucky could soon be a very select-fire-friendly state.

As previously reported by Guns.com, a bill in the West Virginia Senate would establish an Office of Public Defense tasked with selling machine guns to interested members of the public who can legally possess such a firearm. Unlike the massively inflated prices seen for “Pre-86” transferable and highly collectible machine guns that were grandfathered under the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act signed by President Reagan, these could be “Post-86” guns at much more affordable prices.

Taking the West Virginia bill – which was written by Gun Owners of America – as a template, Kentucky state Rep. TJ Roberts (R) last week introduced HB 749 to the legislature in the Bluegrass State.

As detailed by Roberts, who is a practicing attorney, a Kentucky Colonel, and a member of the Federalist Society:

Through our history, Americans have armed themselves in case of invasion, but the NFA has significantly overburdened this practice through an unconstitutional tax and registration regime that has not defended public safety but only harmed essential liberty.

But there is a way out!

Since 1986, Federal Law has allowed for state governments to transfer machine guns to their citizens who are otherwise allowed to possess a firearm. HB 749 would create a process to sell machine guns to legal gun owners.

Kentucky House Bill 749, co-sponsored by six fellow Republicans, has been referred to the House Committee on Committees.

“Could Be”? I don’t know what you’d call what happened in Austin anything else.


Be Armed and Ready – the Asymmetrical Battlefield Could Be Here at Home

Asymmetrical warfare means applying the strengths you have against an overwhelming enemy’s weaknesses. The goat sex pest mullahs have been utterly humiliated by America’s and Israel’s overwhelming military superiority in conventional forces, with our airplanes, drones, and other systems traversing their airspace at will after we established total air supremacy. Our ships sail the seas, unthreatened and unchallenged, while most of the Iranian Navy morphs into submarines. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the capacity to strike back, and that doesn’t mean that we don’t have potential weaknesses. Everybody has weaknesses. Ours is located in the United States itself, our homeland, where we’re at. It’s already happening on a small scale, with open immigration poster child Ngdiaga Diagne shooting up a bar in Texas for Allah. We’re vulnerable here, and you are potentially on the front line of this war.

Time to be ready. Time to be armed. Time to get some.

What’s our vulnerability? Civilians, normal Americans, who Iranian proxy terrorists could murder in heaps. Until Donald Trump came back, we had four years of wide-open borders where every Third World indigent with shoes and a dream was able to sashay into our country, unimpeded and often subsidized by President Eggplant and his Democrat administration.

We know the Iranians have agents in the United States – that’s open source, and everybody gets The FBI is on full alert, now that it protects American citizens again instead of oppressing them. This is not wolf-crying. The Iranian mullahs tried to murder Donald Trump and others and have caused lots of other mischief outside their borders. Now, the Iranian jihadis are not superstars, and they’re not super-geniuses. They are cunning and relatively competent at times in doing what they do, and what they do best is attack innocent civilians.

As we can see, when they come up against soldiers, they die a lot. Well, there are lots of innocent civilians here in the United States, and it is not unreasonable to assume that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps has infiltrated sleeper cells into the United States. Once activated, they have the potential to go on a murder spree unparalleled in American history, one that would make Saturday night in Chicago look like a picnic with the Muppets.

I wrote about this in my bestselling novel, published not long after October 7, because October 7 is the asymmetrical terrorist mass assault template, called The Attack. The Iranian thugs helped plan and approve the Hamas massacre of innocent Israelis (as well as some Americans), which is more of the reason that they’re getting nothing but what they deserve right now.

The idea behind an asymmetrical strike is simple. You send in minimally trained but maximally indoctrinated killers through the open border, and they wait. They wait in small groups, taking no action until activated. It’s not hard for them to get weapons into the United States, and part of the beauty is that you don’t need complex weapons.

The AK-47 family of assault rifles was designed so that Siberian peasants would have an effective weapon system they could operate, even if they came from a village still baffled by devices such as the wheel. You can buy ammunition in the United States, and magazines, and recently, it was not that hard to ship fully automatic weapons across the border. Until Trump closed it, there was no shortage of cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl. The cartels would eagerly assist, for a price paid out of the pallets of cash that Barack Obama and Ben Rhodes dropped on them.

The advantages of this are obvious. Under Biden, nobody was looking for them. We didn’t do any interior enforcement. Now we famously are, and we can only hope that getting Iranian-adjacent illegal aliens out of the country is one of ICE’s top priorities. Of course, neurotic wine women and femboy libs will have a conniption over us deporting these potential terrorists, but we need to do it, no matter how hard they blow their whistles.

Just remember that the killers don’t have to be Iranian. They can be from Chechnya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Turkistan, or some other random -stan. The Iranians aren’t picky about who they work with. Iranians are Shia and Hamas are Sunni, but that didn’t stop them from getting together to murder Christians and Jews. Anybody from the Middle East who’s over here illegally, and some who are here legally, absolutely have the potential of acting for Iran if activated.

We’ve already had jihad murders here, like the Pulse nightclub and San Bernardino shootings. We hear less about them lately because Muslim murderers have had the limelight stolen by trans deviants who’ve gone on killing sprees over their pronoun gripes, but that doesn’t mean they are gone, as totally as real Americans as you and me, Ndiaga Diagnes demonstrated.

The beauty of this scenario for our enemy is that it is a quintessential asymmetrical attack. It takes the weaknesses of the Iranians, like the inability to coordinate forces, lack of logistical and administrative support, the absence of command and control, and paucity of concurrent communications, and turns those into strengths. When those don’t exist, the cells are hard to locate. If you have small groups of fanatics, whose sole purpose is to go to a given location at a given time, and kill everybody they see until they themselves are killed, you don’t need any kind of support.

They are akin to drones – meat drones that their overlords can fire and forget. And since American forces tend to look at the enemy support systems to find weaknesses, which is one of our advantages because we do it so well, you end up neutralizing the American advantage. Americans want to beat the enemy long before there’s an actual gunfight. In this way, against an Iranian enemy, an asymmetrical attack would ensure lots of gunfights, giving Iranian proxies the ability to cause significant casualties where they wouldn’t have the ability to do that otherwise.

In The Attack, thousands of these little cells are activated and strike, murdering scores of Americans before the government is able to form a coordinated response. But, as in reality, in the book, we see what I suspect we would see if the Iranians attempt something like this in real life. What we would see is normal Americans fighting back.

You see, if the homeland becomes a battlefield, we all become soldiers. We have a great counterintelligence team, and the FBI is back to protecting the American people instead of the Democrat elite. Still, they, along with our great law enforcement first responders, can’t be everywhere all the time. We citizens, can. All of us could be face-to-face with the enemy, whether another Ndiaga Diagne at a bar or a bunch of like-minded psychos in a church, a school, a shopping mall, or at a militantly cis-gender hockey game; their goal would be to bring the war to us, and our obligation would be to fight it and win it. But how do normal citizens do that?

You buy guns and ammunition. You train with them. You carry them legally. You get into the mental mindset that bad things can happen, and you need to be ready. Except in the blue states, where they put up hurdles to stop you from defending yourself, your family, your community, and your Constitution. Gavin Hairstyle and his ilk would rather you die than upset the aforementioned neurotic wine women and femboy libs who fear guns and manhood.

This admonition that you must be a warrior too is not some hooah big talk. That’s reality. As everybody knows, except liars and fools, armed citizens have long been able to intervene to stop crimes with their lawfully carried weapons. What we’re talking about here is something even more sinister than some gender goblin with a grudge over his unwanted penis shooting up a preschool; it’s terrorists shooting up everything as part of a plan to commit mass murder as terrorist retaliation against the United States for taking out their pals in Tehran.

You’ve got to be ready. If you can legally carry a weapon on you, you should, and a long weapon in the truck provides you with critical combat options if this goes down. But you should also practice with your guns. And don’t forget the other component of this – medical training and gear to stop the bleeding should you find yourself in the middle of a terrorist attack.

You didn’t ask to be a hero, but you are an American citizen, and that makes you hero-capable. It is your duty as an American citizen to do your best to protect your fellow citizens. If you can fight, you’ve got to be ready within the guardrails of your abilities and the law.

Our great troops are fighting this battle overseas as we speak. There is a non-zero chance we will have to fight this battle in America. Some people will dismiss this warning as silly. Some people will dismiss this as paranoid. They will run when it happens. You need to decide in advance that you won’t.

If it doesn’t come to fruition, that’s more than fine with us. We don’t want a fight, but, dammit, if those b******s start a fight in our home, we need to be ready to finish it.

Gun Control Groups Mum After Hemani Oral Arguments

The Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Hemani is likely to have major implications for millions of Americans who own firearms, use marijuana, or both (in violation of current federal law). And it’s not like the gun control lobby has completely ignored the case. Both Brady and Everytown for Gun Safety submitted amicus briefs supporting the Trump administration’s position that Section 922(g)(3) can be used to prohibit any and all “unlawful” drug users, regardless of what drug it is, how much of it is taken, or whether that individual drug user has ever shown themselves to be a danger while under the influence.

Yet, at least as of mid-afternoon on Monday, none of the anti-gun groups have made a peep about today’s oral arguments, which doesn’t seem to have gone well for the government. The closest commentary that I’ve been able to find comes from Duke Center for Firearms Law, which is run by an attorney who has worked extensively with groups like Everytown in the past. At least Duke’s willing to acknowledge what happened.

Pepperdine University law professor Jake Charles, who helped author a brief in support of the government’s decision, was also following along to the oral arguments, and he too struggled to find a positive takeaway from the “MOAR GUN LAWZ” point of view.

I think the Chief & Alito are very skeptical of the challenger here; they seem to think Congress can of course disarm drug users. But…it’s hard for me to see many other justices clearly on that side. I’m sure the govt will get more than 2 votes, but not sure it’ll be a majority.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 7-2, though I could also see Justice Clarence Thomas joining Alito and Roberts in voting to uphold 922(g)(3) as it applies to Ali Danial Hemani.

I don’t think Charles fairly describes the challenger’s position, though. Hemani’s attorney Erin Murphy repeatedly stated that Congress could categorically deny firearm possession to some drug users, so long as it its rationale was grounded in the national tradition of firearm regulation and was based on a factual finding of a particular drug’s dangerousness. What it can’t do, however, is look at historical statutes that regulated the behavior of “habitual drunkards” and assume it has the power to treat all “unlawful users” of drugs in roughly the same fashion.

Murphy did an excellent job of pointing out that “drunkards” weren’t just people who regularly imbibed alcohol. If that was the definition, then most American adults could have been stripped of their Second Amendment rights. It was the fact that their alcohol use rendered them a danger to themselves or others that gave the state the authority to step in and impose sanctions on their individual liberties. That argument can and does certainly apply to some habitual drug users, but it’s hard to argue with a straight face that it applies to every one of them.

I was a little nervous about where a majority of the justices would come down before oral arguments began, but I feel much more confident after listening to two hours of questioning. It may be 7-2, 6-3, or even 5-4 if Kavanaugh or Barrett throws us a curveball, but I believe there’ll be a majority ruling in Hemani’s favor. How broad or narrow it is I’d say is still very much undecided, and we will likely see some of the justices in the majority use very different arguments and rationales before they end up in the same place.

Which brings us back to today’s silence of the gun control groups. Yes, Everytown and Brady submitted briefs in favor of the DOJ’s position, but no anti-2A group has really been talking heavily about Hemani, because they know that as much as most Democrats despite our right to keep and bear arms, they’re also not generally fans of putting people behind bars… even for serious, violent offenses. Moreover, most Democrats support legalizing marijuana, and aren’t really keen on using its federal status as a Schedule 1 drug as an excuse to go after people, gun owners or not.

If I’d been advising Everytown or Brady I would have told them to side with Murphy and her client. Even if they had argued that yes, the statute is confusing, vague, and unconstitutional as it applies to this individual, but it still has merit in other criminal cases, that would be a defensible position (at least depending on where they drew the line). By declaring that the law is valid in all applications, though, the anti-gun groups have positioned themselves on the wrong side of history and a large number of the Democrats they depend on as their base of support.