Guns at achool

When I was about 15 I took Vocational Agriculture in high school. We lived in town so I had to rent a stall at the school farm to raise my project for the year (pigs). It wasn't really a farm, just a large lot, fenced, with a barn and a couple dozen hog pens. We had a grain grinder in the barn so that we could buy whole grains (cheaper than buying the feed grains grounds).

But there's a problem with grinding grain. The grain dust that gets all over everything attracts mice. And mice attracts snakes. This was in Sinton, Texas and snakes meant rattlesnakes.

It shouldn't have come to any surprise to any of us that one day one of the kids finially got bit by a rattlesnake. Our ag teacher told us that we should start bring guns to the school farm when we made our daily trips to muck the stalls and feed the pigs -- just for rattlesnake protection.

I think he meant something like a .410 shotgun, but I didn't have a gun. I told my daddy I needed a gun for school.

He was in the Army Reserve so he went out to the armory and got a .45 military pistol out of the small arms locker. He took me down to a creek and had me shoot at beer cans in the creek until I could sink one at about 20 feet. He figured that was good enough to shoot a rattlesnake so that's when he gave me the pistol to keep in the trunk of my car.

Things sure have changed since then (about 1964, maybe 1965).

I wanted to be a police officer my whole life to help people

That's a quote from a Noble OK cop who was testifying on his own behalf at a hearing about his manslaughter charge after he and another cop shot at a snake last year and killed a 5 year old boy instead of the snake.

The snake was not poisonous and was contained in a bird house. More than one shot was fired, and police did not originally release the information about the snake being non-poisonous (actually that information eventually came from an animal control officer in another town).

When I lived in Cleveland, Texas, near a heavily wooded area in East Texas, a dry creek bed ran across the back side of my lot. Whenever it rained the creek bed would fill up snakes would find their way to high ground (my yard or my neighbor's yards). Rattlesnakes in the yard where not uncommon after a big rain.

There was no shortage of guns on that street. People who live in rural East Texas have guns. But the weapon of choice for killing rattlesnakes was a shovel. I kept a shovel in the yard and all my neighbors did (actually I had a big lot and kept two shovels, one next to the house and one next to a tree away from the house).

The two Oklahoma cops are pleading guilty in exchange of two years probation. And give up their police certifications.

THe guy quoted in the title is so full of shit. That's not why he became a cop. He was 34 years old when he became a cop. That makes it pretty clear that police work was not his first occupational choice. He was drawn to police work after trying other jobs. But policing offered a combination of good pay and a fun way to spend the day. Getting paid to wave a gun around and shoot at stuff is every little boys dream.

You can be sure that if some neighbor had shot at the snake and killed the boy that this cop would be standing in line to arrest the offender and would have a ready-made self-rightous explanation of why the bad person with a gun should go to prison.

Maybe one of these we'll actually start holding police to a higher standard. But it won't be anytime soon.

Obama and the 2nd Amendment

Obama thinks that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to own guns. Charlton Heston should be proud.

Rounding up the usual talking heads after a school shooting

I was watching MSNBC this morning and of course the topic was the campus shooting at Northern Illinois yesterday. They have some retired FBI agent who wrote a book as their usual expert. They say he's a criminal profiler, but that's a really bogus occupation, kind of like cold-reading done by psychic performers.

The guy is just an idiot. He went off on some political rant saying how all the gun rights people would be coming out of the woodwork to argue that we need to allow private citizens with concealed weapons permits to carry guns on unversity campuses. But, according to Mr. Guy-Who-Wrote-A-Book we shouldn't listen to those people becuase it's just insanity to allow anyone who doesn't have a job in law enforcement to have a gun.

Sure, buddy.

We don't need more cops and cops don't need more weapons. We need fewer cops and we need more restraints on the cops we do have. We also need fewer restraints on citizens ability and right to protect themselves and others.

Paul Phillips has a good explanation why this is true, so I won't repeat it here.

Dick Cheney gets one right

The supreme courts is hearing a gun rights case about a law in Washington DC banning ownership of handguns. The case seems to hinge on whether or not the Second Amendment is personal rights or state rights. Whether it's about the right for you to own a gun or whether it's the right of a state to field a State Guard.

Rationally, the idea that there's any question about that is complete nonsense. The whole point of the constitution was to limit the power of the federal government over the states. That part pretty much got changed with the civil war but the first Ten amendments was called the Bill of Rights becuase it was a list of 10 specific individual rights that the original writers to make sure didn't get overlooked within the main documents emphasis on limitation of federal rights over the states. It's about personal rights. All of it. The whole list. And the Second Amendment was number two on that list.

The US Justice Department filed a brief arguing that the DC law is bad and should be overturned, but that the personal rights of the second amendment is limited. But Dick Cheney, Dick "kill that bird in the cage" Cheney, signed a brief from various conservative senators (55 of them) arguing that personal rights are personal rights and that the Bill of Rights is about personal rights.

Good for him.

Dangerous people

The NRA thinks Marsha Stewart is way to dangerous to our physical safety to be allowed to have a gun in her house.

Guns are for honest people to shoot caged birds with, not for convicted felons to protect themselves in their own homes.

More discoverys about John Lott

Until recently I just didn't know much about John Lott, I'd not really paid much attention. I knew he wrote a book arguing that guns prevent more violence than they cause, although I'd never read the book. I knew he's sued Steven Levitt, although I didn't realize how weak the lawsuit was.

I didn't know he was delusional though. I think you pretty much have to be delusional to invent a sock puppet and use if for three years to prop up your ego. In my view anybody who behaves that way is at best intellectually unreliable.

His lawsuit against Levitt is a joke. There were two parts to it, one part was something Levitt said about Lott in the book Freakonomics. The other part was something Levitt said about Lott in a private email to a colleague.

The book part is really funny. Lott is using a take off on the Freakonomics title, calling his book Freedonomics, in a obvious attempt to boost sales. That's funny.

I've since read a couple of his research articles and I'm not impressed. I'll post about them later. For the most part his work seems driven more by politics than by theory, and his models are full of implicit assumptions about independence that I don't think stand up to close scrutiny. I'll get more specific over the next week or two.

I stand by my previous statement that they guy is scary. He seems just both intellectually and emotionally empty, yet he's held positions at places like University of Chicago, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and the US Sentencing Commission. That's what makes him scary. He's unstable but has all this apparent influence.

What's sad to me is that I actually agree with his politics about gun control. Usually I think that anybody that agrees with me about something must be a smart guy. But not this time.

Mental Illness and guns

If you've ever had a mental disorder that caused an irrational fear of spiders the Maryland State Police want to know about it so they can make sure you don't get access to a gun.

There's just too much risk if we let those kind of people have guns.

Past episodes of mental illness do not predict future violence. It just has no predictive value at all.

Past violent behavior does have some predictive value. But, it's not very strong. If the Maryland State Police actually thinks past violent behavior can predict future irrational violence then maybe they should be automatically disarming any cop who is invovled in an incidence of violence?

I think the head of the Maryland State Police is insane.

Bonnie Parker

Grits for Breakfast, a mostly Texas Criminal Justice blog, has a post up about Bonnie Parker and her poetry. (Bonnie Parker is part of the Bonnie and Clyde duo).

He got some comments that were critical of his post "glorifing" her. That's just silly. Bonnie and Clyde are an important part of the history of criminal justice in Texas. Not just a crime spree but complete with jail breaks and drama of all kinds.

In 1933 and 1934 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow ran amuck across North Texas and points North. My daddy was just starting the first grade in Alpine, Texas.

He told me once that he developed a lifetime interest in reading when he was in the first grade -- he had to learn to read quickly so he could get up every morning and follow Bonnie and Clyde's exploits reported in the paper every day.

When only police have guns

I saw a comment recently about how well trained police are in the handling and the use of guns. What a joke. Come on. The news is full of stories about cops how miss handle and misuse guns.

Here's one story. A SWAT team from North Carolina was driving through Memphis. I don't know where they were coming from or going to, I guess one of those national SWAT team competitions that police agencies have from time to time. They stopped in Memphis for some barbeque, and some one stole some machine guns, pistols and shotguns. SWAT teams are supposed to be the elite when it comes to how to handle and store weapons. I don't know why we let out of state cops run around crossing state lines for recreation with machine guns there's not much point in gun control when it's that easy to steal guns from cops.

Memphis police were looking Monday night for the thieves who stole seven weapons from a North Carolina SWAT team van parked in South Memphis.

Members of the SWAT team based in Raleigh, N.C., were eating at Interstate Bar-B-Que, 2265 S. Third, about 3:30 p.m. Monday when they realized their van had been broken into, said Lt. Jerry Gwyn of Memphis felony response.

Taken were three machine guns, two semi-automatic handguns, and two 12-gauge shot guns, Gwyn said.

The Memphis police put a couple hundred cops on the case to recover the guns, and with the help of a parking lot video and a woman who called in, they managed to recover the guns. But it did take a couple hundred cops to get the guns back. I wonder if Memphis is going to send the Raleigh PD a bill (can you say Barney Fife?)

Memphis police got some lucky breaks in running down a gang of thieves and the small arsenal they stole from a SWAT van.

Tuesday afternoon, while hundreds of Memphis police scoured the streets, officer Ken Hailey got a call from a woman in his precinct who told him where to find one of the assault rifles.

It's not the first time it's happened in Memphis.

Upon hearing of the theft, Police Director Larry Godwin put together a team that had worked on a similar theft in 1997, when an FBI SWAT van was stolen with sophisticated weapons, including grenade launchers. Those weapons were recovered and the suspects charged inside of three days.

Is there something about Memphis? Or is it just that SWAT teams tend to be especially careless with guns?

Gun Control, Texas style

From the Houston Chronicle

Forty-eight firearms are missing from the Nueces County Sheriff's Department

He said the serial numbers of the missing guns, which include shotguns, rifles and handguns, have been reported to a national law enforcement database and classified as stolen.

More on guns and schools

From a comment in the thread at deadmonywalking

The summer before my senior year we had a kid blow up the auditorium. Nobody was hurt. He went to prison. Because of the Apollo program a lot of kids got interested in rockets and rocket related explosives.

When I was 15 (10th grade) I took vocational ag and one kid got rattlesnake bit at the ag barn (school property but off campus). Our ag teacher told us to carry a weapon when we went to the ag barn. My dad got me a .45 out of the Army Reserve arms locker (it had to be returned for an Inspector General inventory once a year) and I kept it in the trunk of my '56 chevy.

The main difference between then and now is that now my dad and that teacher would go to prison.

The '56 chevy and the pistol were in the school parking lot everyday. There were a lot of guns in the school parking lot, deer rifles in gun racks mostly. It was a different world. People took care of themselves pretty much.

That's also when Whitman drug his footlocker full of rifles up the stairs of the University of Texas clock tower. That was the same year I was taking a gun to school everyday.

So, yes, we had stuff happen every once in a while. But nobody thought Whitman went nuts because he'd been in the marines and had guns. We just figured he went nuts because that's what happens sometimes.

We didn't have 24 hour cable news though. We had 30 minutes a day of TV news.

The police don't control things any better now than people did on their own back then. In most ways the police do a worse job of it.

Guns at school

A high school student has 3 pistols with him at school, he's caught trying to sell them.

The guns had been stolen hours earlier from a state trooper's home outside of Puyallup, said Detective Ed Troyer, a Pierce County sheriff's spokesman. Four other guns taken from the home were recovered Thursday in a Federal Way apartment, and a second suspect was detained, police said.

Let's crack down on gun ownership. Then the only way to get a gun is steal them from a cop.

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