A Boy Scout without a pocket knife is just wrong. I started carrying a pocket knife (even to school) when I was about six or seven years old. Every Cub Scout I knew had a pocket knife. When we were full fledged boy scouts we graduated to fixed blade knives, hatchets, and machetes.

So much of the great tradition of Scouting has been pansyfied to the point that it is no wonder that kids would rather play video games than go to the woods. If all of the scouting adventure is going to be nerf, they might as well just stay home.

The reason they are useful for the police is because they are an effective low level of force. If you make the case that they are too dangerous for regular people to use then doesn’t that make them a higher level of force? I can see the defense attorney already:

“…the police then used a weapon on my client that is so dangerous, private citizens aren’t even allowed to possess it…”

When asked if he was advocating violence against the President, Broughton said he wouldn’t answer the question directly.

“I don’t care how God does it, I’m not going into further detail than that,” said Broughton. “It would be better now than later.”

So for all of the rhetoric about normalization, not hiding, etc. It turns out that this might not be the best spokesman for the gun rights movement after all. While I am not a fan of our current president, I think praying for his assassination is clearly over the top.

… It scared me to no end. It also pissed me off. If you all four hadn’t had guns, we would’ve had a completely different situation. Instead, you got all six of us tied up while you stole what you deemed worth jacking. What also pisses me off is that you were all black. Why the fuck would you feed the stereotype? I couldn’t see more than your eyes and a little bit around them, so I found myself racial-profiling out of fear. I stopped doing that, because I’m stronger and better than that…
…I work hard as an attractive woman to be intelligent and interesting, because I don’t like perpetuating negative stereotypes. I wish you would work just as hard to rid the world of the stereotype that black men should be feared because they’ll put a gun to your head and steal…

I cannot read this article without wondering if the author would have been happier if her home invaders were more racially diverse. Now for the gun rights portion of the post. When we talk about “normalization” or similar sentiments regarding gun rights, this is part of the audience we are trying to convince. These are people who worry about ethnically stereotyping the home invaders that victimized them. I don’t think they get reached by shock therapy (or even lobotomy.)

The idea that people would have some kind of practical (or tactical) answer to a home-invasion robbery (regardless of race) is totally alien to those of the authors ilk.

I think it is a waste of time and resources for the police to run a ballistics test on any firearm that happens to come into their possession, especially from situations that are not crime scenes.

From the article it seems to me that the police have a “policy” that is at odds with the law.

The article doesn’t explain how the police chief is going to go about accomplishing this, and I am sure the devil is in the details:

“It’s going to take a whole lot of people to help us do that,” said Demings, who pledged to work closely with the public, prosecutors and legislators for stricter gun control.

“It’s not about keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens who have every right to possess them,” she said. “Our initiative will focus on the people who are not supposed to have them.”

The most interesting bit of the article is here:

Data released Wednesday show the male murder victims and suspects share a common background of repeated arrests without imprisonment.

At least 95 percent of the victims and suspects had criminal histories. One-third of the suspects had been arrested at least 20 times. One quarter of the victims had been arrested at least 10 times. And about 40 percent of the suspects and victims had been busted for dealing drugs.

If 95% of the people getting murdered are actually criminals then taking guns away from them has a very good chance of increasing other types of crime. The sample size is pretty small here, but it would be interesting to know how many people killed by firearms (other than suicides) are in fact criminals.

Crime rates in the national parks are down significantly. Yet the international trade in animal organs may be pushing poaching to new heights. The National Parks Conservation Association reports poaching is partly responsible for the decline of at least 29 species of wildlife in national parks. Nineteen species — including grizzly bear, lynx and the desert tortoise — are in danger of being eradicated.

I think that people attempting to poach grizzly bears with handguns are going to be a self-correcting problem. I should ceased to be amazed by journalists who have opinions but no facts on which to base them.