February 23

303 – Roman emperor Diocletian orders the destruction of the Christian church in Nicomedia, beginning 8 years of persecution until emperor Constantine becomes sole ruler and converts to Christianity.

532 – Byzantine emperor Justinian I orders the building of a new Orthodox Christian basilica in Constantinople – the Hagia Sophia.

1455 – Johan Gutenberg publishes a Bible, printed for the first time with movable type, in his printing shop in downtown metropolitan Mainz, Germany. (which, btw, I have laid eyes on one of the original copies, inside the vault inside the museum in Mainz, just across the river from Wiesbaden where I was stationed for a few years.)

1778 – Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben arrives at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania to help to train the Continental Army.

1836 – The Siege of the Alamo begins in San Antonio, Texas.

1870 – Mississippi is readmitted to the Union under Reconstruction.

1883 – Alabama becomes the first state to enact an anti-trust law.

1886 – Charles Martin Hall produces the first samples of aluminum from the electrolysis of aluminum oxide.

1903 – Cuba leases Guantánamo Bay to the United States “in perpetuity”.

1905 – Chicago attorney Paul Harris and three other businessmen meet for lunch to form the Rotary Club, the world’s first service club.

1927 – President Calvin Coolidge signs into law a bill establishing the Federal Radio Commission, later called the Federal Communications Commission.
German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg writes a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he describes his Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics.

1941 – The radioactive element Plutonium is first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley.

1942 – The Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-17 under the command of Commander Kozo Nishino, bombards the Ellwood oilfield, near Santa Barbara, California inflicting minimal real damage and no casualties, but causing mass panic among the population.

1945 – On the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, First Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, executive officer of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division, leads a combat patrol up Mount Suribachi, which, on reaching the summit, raises a U.S. flag, which is later replaced by a much larger flag, that raising being both photographed and filmed for posterity.
On the Philippine island of Luzon, troops of the U.S. 11th Airborne Division, along with Filipino guerrillas, free all 2,147 allied civilian and military  captives of the Los Baños internment camp.

1946 – At Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines, Imperial Japanese Army General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of all Japanese forces on Luzon, is executed by hanging for war crimes committed by his troops, which he did not attempt to discover and stop from occurring – which is known as the Yamashita standard.

1954 – The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine begins in Pittsburgh.

1974 – The Symbionese Liberation Army demands $4 million to release kidnap victim Patty Hearst.

1983 – The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency announces the buy out and evacuation of the dioxin contaminated community of Times Beach, Missouri.

1998 – Near Kissimmee, Florida an outbreak of 15 tornados destroy or damage 2,600 structures and kill 42 people.

2008 – The U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit bomber Spirit of Kansas crashes on takeoff from Anderson Air Force Base, on Guam, MI, with both pilots safely ejecting, the first operational loss of a B-2.

2019 – Atlas Air Flight 3591, a Boeing 767 freighter, crashes into Trinity Bay near Anahuac, Texas, killing all 3 crew on board.

RESPONSE BRIEF FILED IN MILLER v. BONTA CALIF. ‘ASSAULT WEAPON’ BAN CASE

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation and its partners in the case of Miller v. Bonta, challenging California’s ban on so-called “assault weapons,” have filed a responding brief in the case, countering defense arguments and strategies already rejected by federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Our reply takes the state to task for going directly against the instructions of the federal court,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “The state spent its entire 25-page brief trying to re-litigate the case, essentially arguing for ‘interest balancing’ by the court, which the Supreme Court nixed last year in its landmark Bruen ruling. The only logical conclusion is that the State of California is stalling, trying to delay the inevitable ruling that the ban on semiautomatic rifles is unconstitutional.”

SAF is joined by the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee, California Gun Rights Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition and four private citizens, including James Miller, for whom the case is named. They are represented by attorneys George M. Lee at Seiler Epstein, LLP and John W. Dillon at the Dillon Law Group, APC. The case is now before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

Plaintiffs note in their response brief, “The State’s attempt to ignore this Court’s instructions and introduce last-minute further “expert testimony” offered in other cases on the ‘dangerous and unusual weapons’ question—which has already been settled by this Court—is also a naked appeal to interest balancing and is irrelevant to the question of historical analogues requested by this Court (and required under Bruen). At this point, Defendants are simply padding the record with old (and misplaced) arguments and extraneous declarations.”

“It seems clear to us the state is trying to revive arguments they cannot use because they have no historical evidence to support their gun ban,” Gottlieb observed. “The court shouldn’t tolerate such legal shenanigans, which ultimately attempt to reframe this case into a policy matter, which boils down to whether average citizens ‘need’ a semiautomatic firearm.

“The Supreme Court already settled this,” he continued. “It’s not up to the government to make that choice, it’s up to the American people, and their rights are not subject to public opinion polls or the whims of anti-gun politicians in Sacramento.”

Canada Illustrates The Reality Of The Gun-Control Agenda

Learning from one’s own misfortunes is smart, but it’s wiser to learn from—and avoid—the misfortunes of others. For American Second Amendment supporters, the Canadian experience provides a chilling and instructive lesson in what gun controllers really want: the end of civilian firearm ownership.

For many Americans, Canada is as familiar and relatable as neighboring states of the Union. Canada and the U.S. share a border, a common language, cultural touchstones and various commercial and sporting pursuits.

That last category includes a shared love of the outdoors, and especially of hunting and trapping. As with America, much of Canada’s expansive wilderness was settled by hardy hunters and trappers who braved the country’s wild frontiers in search of fortune and adventure. The gun is an inseparable part of both national stories.

But America and Canada also share a similar cultural divide when it comes to guns. Guns are a common and uncontroversial facet of life in both countries’ rural communities, where they are used not just to harvest wildlife but also to provide a safeguard against predators when police protection is scarce. The politics and culture of firearms in both countries’ cities are very different, however. Canadian and American urban elites—who get their meat from grocery stores and restaurants and who take routine police patrols for granted—consider firearms dangerous, unnecessary and counterproductive.

Nor are the elites on either side of the border willing to tolerate these differences. Rather, they blame firearms themselves, and not human agency or the social dynamics they themselves promote, for the criminal misuse of guns. They associate firearms with cultures they do not understand and—let’s be honest—consider to be inferior. Firearms are also linked in their minds with infamous crimes. And, having no other reference point for the gun’s place in society, they reflexively call for firearm bans in response to these events.

That’s the generous explanation. There are also politicians in both countries who use gun control as a tool to subjugate their political opponents, much as King George III did in the American colonies.

Despite the similarities, we can see very different outcomes in the two countries. Canadians have essentially lost the right of armed self-defense, and are frighteningly close to losing the freedom to possess firearms at all. America, meanwhile, has the highest per-capita gun-ownership rate in the world, with the right to keep and bear arms shielded—at least theoretically—from urban elites.

An article published last December in The Washington Post opined that Canada’s progressive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a “gun-free Canada within his reach.” It noted how Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “was the first to begin the process of systematically banning entire categories of firearms,” with 1969 legislation that allowed the executive branch to declare certain firearms “prohibited.” A mass shooting in 1989 was then exploited to further clamp down on legal firearm ownership, prompting a needs-based licensing system that presumptively banned firearm acquisition for self-defense. Justin Trudeau capitalized on another mass killing in 2020 to accelerate the banning of “military-grade assault-style” long guns in Canada under existing law. He then promoted legislation in 2022 that would expand this bogus and misnamed category, coerce surrender of non-conforming guns and institute a “freeze” on handgun ownership. Trudeau later went even further, introducing amendments that would essentially grant the government control to ban what few hunting guns had remained legal.

Unlike Canada and the other commonwealth realms, however, the U.S. liberated itself from Britain’s monarchy in the Revolutionary War. This experience led the founding generation to enshrine the right to keep and bear arms in the nation’s organizing charter. Like Canada, the U.S. Congress passed major gun control in the 1960s. But this sparked renewed efforts by pro-gun Americans—led by the NRA—to promote responsible firearm ownership and to ensure the original understanding of the Second Amendment was expounded in scholarship and eventually preserved in judicial rulings.

Now, U.S. Supreme Court precedents protect the individual right to keep and bear firearms, in and outside of the home, for the core purpose of defense, and allow only such regulation as is consistent with the founding era’s legal history and traditions.

Yet, there are American politicians, like President Joe Biden himself, who see our neighbor to the North’s policies not as a warning, but as a roadmap. Only the dedicated and vigilant activism of informed gun owners, channeled through organizations like the NRA, stands in their way.

Private Gun Carriers’ Self-Defense Against Public Shooters
The El Paso incident from a few days ago, the FBI 2021 statistics, and more.

I had written about this in past years, but I thought I’d update it to reflect the El Paso incident from last week. According to the El Paso Police Department (see also CNN [Andy Rose]), a confrontation between two groups of teenagers at a mall “escalated into a physical fight” and then into a 16-year-old fatally shooting a member of the other group and seriously wounding another member, as well as injuring a member of his own group. Then,

As soon as the shooting ended, the 16-year-old suspect began to run and was pointing the gun towards the direction of bystanders, including 32-year-old Emanuel Duran, a Licensed to Carry Holder. As the suspect ran towards Duran and bystanders, Duran drew his handgun and shot the suspect.

At that time, one off-duty El Paso Police Officer arrived at the area of the shooting and together with Duran rendered aid to the 16-year old suspect and the others that were injured. Investigators found that there were at least two other legally armed citizens in the area of where the shooting took place, but were not involved.

Now in this case, the suspect didn’t seem to have planned a mass shooting; he seems to have had a beef with the other teenagers. On the other hand, he appears to have been pointing his gun towards the bystanders, so it’s hard to know what would have happened. And something similar could easily have happened with an intended mass shooting as well; for an incident like that from last year, see this WCHS-TV story:

Police said a woman who was lawfully carrying a pistol shot and killed a man who began shooting at a crowd of people Wednesday night in Charleston.

Dennis Butler was killed after allegedly shooting at dozens of people attending a graduation party Wednesday …. No injuries were reported from those at the party.

Investigators said Butler was warned about speeding in the area with children present before he left. He later returned with an AR-15-style firearm and began firing into the crowd before he was shot and killed.

“Instead of running from the threat, she engaged with the threat and saved several lives last night,” Charleston Police Department Chief of Detectives Tony Hazelett said.

According to WCHS-TV (Bob Aaron), Butler was a convicted felon, and was thus not legally allowed to own guns. In principle, perhaps he might still have been stopped by (say) a law requiring background checks, which would likely have stopped law-abiding sellers from selling him the gun; but it’s not clear whether someone with his criminal record would have much been stymied by that, as opposed to just buying a gun on the black market. Likewise, in El Paso, CNN reports that the gun used by the 16-year-old shooter was reported stolen.

I gathered some more examples from over the years here, and then followed up with data based on FBI reports of mass shootings in 2016 and 2017: legal civilian gun carriers tried to intervene in 6 out of 50 incidents, and apparently succeeded in 3 or 4 of them.

Continue reading “”

February 22

1512 – Amerigo Vespucci, Italian cartographer, sailor and namesake of the continents of the New World, dies, age 60 in Seville, Spain.

1732 –  George Washington in born in the family home at Popes Creek, Westmoreland County, Virginia. The date is celebrated from 1879 until 1971 as a federal holiday.

1819 – Under terms of the Adams–Onís Treaty, Spain sells Florida to the United States for 5 million dollars.

1847 – In the Mexican–American War’s Battle of Buena Vista, 5000 American troops under the command of General Zachary Taylor, defeat 15,000 Mexican troops under the command of General Antonio López de Santa Anna (yes of Alamo and San Jacinto notoriety)

1856 – The Republican Party opens its first national convention in Pittsburgh.

1862 – Jefferson Davis is officially inaugurated for a 6 year term as the President of the Confederate States of America in Richmond, Virginia. He was previously inaugurated as a provisional president on February 18, 1861.

1872 – The Prohibition Party holds its first national convention in Columbus, Ohio, nominating James Black as its presidential nominee.

1878 – In Utica, New York, Frank Woolworth opens the first of many of five-and-dime Woolworth stores.

1881 – Cleopatra’s Needle, a 3,500-year-old Ancient Egyptian obelisk, relocated from the ruins of the Caesareum temple of Alexandria is erected in Central Park, New York.

1889 – President Grover Cleveland signs into law a bill admitting North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Washington as U.S. states.

1901 – The Pacific Mail Company’s steamer City of Rio de Janeiro strikes a rock hidden by dense fog in Golden Gate harbor and quickly sinks, with the loss of 122 of the 201 passengers and crew aboard.

1909 – The 16 battleships of the Great White Fleet, led by USS Connecticut, return to the United States after a voyage around the world.

1942 – As Japanese victory becomes inevitable in the Philippines, President Roosevelt orders General Douglas MacArthur to evacuate to Australia.

1959 – Lee Petty wins the first Daytona 500 stock car race.

1974 –Reportedly inspired by the news reports of the buzzing of the White House by U.S. Army soldier Robert K. Preston in a stolen helicopter on February 17; Samuel Byck attempts to hijack a Delta Air Lines DC-9 jet at Baltimore/Washington International Airport with the intention of crashing it into the White House to assassinate President Nixon, but commits suicide aboard the aircraft after being shot and wounded by police.

1980 – In Lake Placid, New York, the United States Olympic hockey team defeats the Soviet Union hockey team 4–3.

1994 – CIA officer Aldrich Ames and his wife are charged with spying for the Soviet Union.

1997 – In Roslin, Midlothian, British scientists announce that an adult sheep named Dolly has been successfully cloned.

2006 – An unknown party at the time detonates 2 bombs at the Shite al-Askari Shrine in Samara, Iraq causing extensive damage, but no casualties, which incites a full on civil war between the U.S. backed Iraqi government and forces of Al Qaida and the Mahdi Army lasting over 2 years.

2018 – A Serbian man throws a grenade at the U.S embassy in Podgorica, Montenegro then detonates a suicide vest, managing to kill only himself and not even wound anyone else.

Lincoln Park man, 73, opens fire on catalytic converter thieves

Chicago — A Lincoln Park man fired shots at a catalytic converter theft crew that pointed a gun at him overnight, according to a Chicago police report. No injuries were reported.

The 73-year-old man saw two thieves trying to steal his catalytic converter in the 2000 block of North Larrabee around 3:40 a.m. He confronted the thieves, and one of them brandished a firearm, prompting the victim to open fire, a police spokesperson said.

Both thieves escaped in a dark SUV, which struck a parked car as they fled the scene, according to police.

The incident occurred near the corner of Armitage and Larrabee. | Google

Neighbors who called 911 said they heard yelling, followed by two or three gunshots. Police said the victim is licensed to own firearms.

Another round of catalytic converter thefts was reported in the area just after 5 a.m. One incident was reported in the 2200 block of North Cleveland, just a couple of blocks from where the shots were fired earlier. Witnesses said the thieves on Cleveland fled in a white Dodge Durango.

Homeowner shoots suspect in Ogle County home invasion

CHANA, Ill. (WTVO) — A suspect in a home invasion was shot by a resident in Chana early Sunday morning, according to police.

The Ogle County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were called to a home in the 9000 block of E. Fowler Road around 1:11 a.m.

When police arrived, they found the offender had been shot in the lower abdomen by someone living at the residence, authorities said.

The man was taken to the Rochelle airport and flown to Saint Anthony’s in Rockford via Life Flight helicopter.

Police said the suspect is in critical but stable condition. The incident is under investigation, police said, adding that charges are possible.

 

How Hard is Real Armed Defense?

Everyone has an opinion. If you ask them, most people will give you their impression of armed defense. Is it trivially easy or is it impossibly hard? I’ve looked at armed defense for a decade and I think we often ask the wrong question about defending ourselves and our families with a firearm. One view is that armed defenders have to make split-second decisions after evaluating a number of complex legal and tactical factors. In contrast, many new gun owners want to concentrate on firearms handling skills so they can manipulate their gun with “fast hands”. I don’t think that is what most defenders really do.

I think almost anyone can learn armed defense if they are willing to take instruction and then practice what they were taught. This is what I’ve learned from firearms students and instructors.

Continue reading “”

Teen breaking into Lexington home shot by homeowner, killed

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – Lexington police say one person is dead after an overnight burglary.

Officers were called to Jouett Creek Drive off Hays Boulevard around 1:10 a.m. Monday for a burglary.

They say they found 19-year-old Oscar Daniel Wilds dead from a gunshot wound inside a home where the homeowner and his children slept. Police say Wilds was forced his way inside, before being shot by a resident.

The Fayette County Coroner says the homeowner and Wilds did not know each other.

Police found a man suffering from gunshot wounds inside a home. He died from his injuries.

Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn has identified him as 19-year-old Oscar Daniel Wilds of Lexington. Police say Wilds was shot by the homeowner while he was breaking into the home.

Ginn says the homeowner and his children were inside at the time of the break-in. Neighbors say they feel even more vulnerable and feel that it could have been any of their homes instead.

Jim Groves and his neighbor Subir Ghosh were discussing the early morning events just a block away from where it all happened.

“We’ve lived here ten years, and nothing like this has ever happened,” said Groves. “It brings it home that all of us are vulnerable,” said Ghosh. “Sometimes the mind looks for excuses to say, that can’t happen to us, but something like this, would bring it home that it’s random and could happen to anyone.”

Police say all parties involved have been identified, and the investigation is ongoing. Police have not said if charges will be filed.

February 21

1828 – The initial issue of the ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi  -Cherokee Phoenix – still in publication today, is published; the first periodical to use the Cherokee syllabary invented by Chief George Guess Sequoyah.

1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.

1878 – The first telephone directory is issued in New Haven, Connecticut.

1885 – The newly completed Washington Monument is dedicated.

1918 – The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.

1945 – During the Battle of Iwo Jima, Japanese kamikaze planes sink the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea with the loss of 318 sailors of the 923 crew aboard, the last carrier lost in the war, and damage the fleet carrier USS Saratoga, killing 123 crew members and wounding another 192.

1947 – In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera”, the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.

1948 – NASCAR, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, is incorporated.

1965 – Malcolm X Little is assassinated while giving a talk at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

1971 – Under terms of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, the observance of Washington’s Birthday (often called President’s Day) is moved to the third Monday in February, which can occur from February 15 to the 21st.

1972 – President Nixon visits the People’s Republic of China to normalize Sino-American relations.

1975 –Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison for their parts in the Watergate burglary scandal.

1994 – CIA counter intelligence officer Aldrich Ames is arrested for selling national secrets to the Soviet Union.

1995 – Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.

2022 – Russian President Vladimir Putin declares the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic as independent from Ukraine, and moves orders troops into the region starting a general war in Ukraine.

What AP calls ‘turmoil,’ we call ‘about time’

The Associated Press, or AP, is supposed to be unbiased, though we’ve all seen countless examples of them being anything but.

That’s especially true regarding matters pertaining to the Second Amendment.

These days, the right to keep and bear arms may have a firmer foundation on which to rest following the Bruen decision. It’s rather clear that there can be no total gun ban and that any restriction has to conform to a particular framework that won’t be easy for any law.

It seems this has led to what the AP calls “turmoil” in the courts.

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment is upending gun laws across the country, dividing judges and sowing confusion over what firearm restrictions can remain on the books.

The high court’s ruling that set new standards for evaluating gun laws left open many questions, experts say, resulting in an increasing number of conflicting decisions as lower court judges struggle to figure out how to apply it.

The Supreme Court’s so-called Bruen decision changed the test that lower courts had long used for evaluating challenges to firearm restrictions. Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the justices said.

Under the Supreme Court’s new test, the government that wants to uphold a gun restriction must look back into history to show it is consistent with the country’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Courts in recent months have declared unconstitutional federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers,felony defendants and people who use marijuana. Judges have shot down a federal ban on possessing guns with serial numbers removed and gun restrictions for young adults in Texas and have blocked the enforcement of Delaware’s ban on the possession of homemade “ghost guns.”

In several instances, judges looking at the same laws have come down on opposite sides on whether they are constitutional in the wake of the conservative Supreme Court majority’s ruling. The legal turmoil caused by the first major gun ruling in a decade will likely force the Supreme Court to step in again soon to provide more guidance for judges.

“There’s confusion and disarray in the lower courts because not only are they not reaching the same conclusions, they’re just applying different methods or applying Bruen’s method differently,” said Jacob Charles, a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school who focuses on firearms law.

Sure, there’s a bit of confusion. The Bruen decision has set a stage most courts have never seen before. They now have to consider whether the Founders would have approved of such a law by looking at whether or not they approved of something similar during their own time.

But is it really a bad thing?

The only downside is that it’s taken us this long to get to this point. While the AP is apparently concerned that the status quo has been upturned, I’m more upset that the status quo was allowed to become the status quo in the first place.

It’s just insane that it came to this.

Yet here we are. We now have an opportunity to right the ship and put the onus on things back where they were. No longer can courts just claim it’s in the government’s interest to restrict our rights – something they’d never say about the First or Fourth Amendments, it should be remembered – but must instead look at the matter objectively and compare it to historical precedent.

The AP may lament this “turmoil,” but I only lament that we didn’t have this upheaval a long time ago.