This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • House on gun map robbed

    Of course, you remember the map that New York State’s Journal News provided criminals a few weeks ago. Well, one of those houses was robbed this weekend, according to Newsday. Luckily, while the 70-year-old home/gun owner wasn’t home, he had his gun locked in a safe and the burglars were unable to get their grubby paws on it. You know, like responsible gun owners – those folks who buy guns legally and register like the law tells them – tend to do.

    Of course, Journal News’ enemies are all saying that the burglars targeted the house because of the map, but police remain silent on that subject at this point.

    White Plains police Lt. Eric Fischer confirmed that a burglary occurred but would not release further information Sunday.

    The Journal News has been the target of sharp criticism from gun rights advocates and some media ethicists since running the story and interactive map Dec. 23. The story was published 10 days after the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting that claimed the lives of 20 young children and seven adults.

    A call for comment to The Journal News was not immediately returned.

    Although some good-government groups have come to the defense of the White Plains-based newspaper, some elected officials, including State Sen. Greg Ball (R-Patterson, have complained the permit map could aid criminals.

    “If the connection is proven, this is further proof that these maps are not only an invasion of privacy but that they present a clear and present danger to law-abiding, private citizens,” Ball said Sunday in a statement.

    Police groups have said that the interactive map also provides a valuable resource for criminals to find police officers and corrections officers in the area for retribution. Regardless of whether it’s proven in this case that the burglars targeted that particular residence because the of the map and knowing that a law abiding resident wouldn’t have his gun with him when he left the house, the Journal News must finally admit that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. I’m sure the commercial retribution the map has inspired against the Journal News is more than they anticipated.

    Thanks to the scores of you who sent us links to the story.

  • Dingus at Washington Post tweets

    This tweet is in reference to Joshua Boston’s letter to Senator Feinstein. This is what suffices for rational discussion at the Washington Post;

    Boston Tweet

    I checked his bio and I don’t see anything in there about Rajiv Chandrasekaran being a career counselor in the Marine Corps. Maybe the Washington Post and, more specifically, Rajiv Chandrasekaran should stick to writing news stories and end the commentary about things that aren’t in his lane.

  • New York Times: More guns = more killing

    The left is grasping at straws in this “national conversation” that we’re supposed to be having about guns. In the New York Times, Elizabeth Rosenthal thinks she has a teachable moment by comparing Central America to NRA’s vision of America;

    I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.

    Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

    “A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia.”

    First of all, we’re talking about a region of the world which has been at war with itself since before Columbus landed. Those countries are rife with communist guerrillas, drug cartels and corrupt government officials which are more of threat to their citizens than the guy next door who may or may not own a gun.

    Ms. Rosenthal writes like she’s never been to Washington, DC where nearly every building in the city has at least one armed security person at the door to greet visitors. In fact, it was an armed security guard, Leo Johnson, at the Family Research Council in DC that stopped a mass shooting by a gay activist, Floyd Lee Corkins II, a scant few months ago.

    I also noticed that Ms. Rosenthal doesn’t include Mexico in her little condemnation of guns. I guess that could be because it’s illegal to own a gun in Mexico, there’s only one place in the country where a Mexican can buy a gun – in the center of a massive military base. Still, 2011 still saw 11,000 gun deaths in Mexico. Mexico even tried destroying toy guns to bring down crime rates in one city.

    She does, however mention Guatemala, which just this week announced a falling homocide rate according to Reuters.

    The Central American nation of nearly 15 million people registered 5,174 murders in 2012, an 8.9 percent drop from 2011.

    “We have improved coordination between the state prosecutor’s office and the police … and we have a new school with more advanced training for officers,” Vice-Minister of Security Arkel Benitez told Reuters.

    Guatemala has been battling a wave of violent crime for over a decade, with homicides peaking at 6,498 in 2009, giving the country one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates, according to the United Nations.

    Funny how Ms. Rosenthal didn’t feel the need to mention that homocides had declined in one of her scary gun-ridden country’s and they did it without gun control.

  • Distracting discussion at the Washington Post

    As the Left begins to lose the debate on guns, as the debate turns to mental health as the real problem, the Washington Post just happens to run two pieces today begging that we don’t pick on crazy people like the Post and the Left have been picking on gun owners. The first, “Predicting violence is a work in progress“, David Brown writes;

    It’s now fairly clear, for example, that people with severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and some personality disorders, are more likely to commit violent acts than others. But the risk is small. The vast majority of mentally ill people won’t commit assault, rape, arson or homicide, although the risk rises sharply among those who abuse drugs and alcohol.

    Yeah, well, neither will your average gun owner, but that’s not stopping the government and the media from making it appear as if we will and punishing us all for the actions of a statistically miniscule few.

    In the other piece, Martin E.P. Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association writes a similar piece; “Evil vs. crazy: What’s in the minds of mass murderers?“;

    Crazy people and evil people can commit mass murder, and they always do it with guns. Our society’s only real leverage, at least in the near term, lies in reducing access to guns. Our national experience with another lethal menace, cigarettes, shows that government regulation massively saves lives. High taxation on cigarettes and restricting access to them has markedly cut smoking rates and improved health. High taxes on guns and strong restrictions on their availability are the only realistic hope for avoiding many more Sandy Hooks.

    Yep, it’s always the guns, not the people. The picture at the head of the first article shows Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza and James Holmes – all three were at least recognized as being unbalanced. In the case of Holmes and Loughner, the people who knew they weren’t “right” were silent which allowed the murderers to buy guns. Lanza’s mother was reportedly in the process of putting her son into a treatment facility. In Webster, NY, Spengler was forbidden by law to buy guns because he was a convicted murderer.

    All four should have been warehoused, but we can’t say that out loud. Can you imagine the Washington Post running two stories warning readers not to blame gun owners for the actions of a few? But here we have two articles on the front page of the Post warning us to not blame nuts for the actions of a few nuts.

    I guess it just makes the liberals at the Post feel better about themselves because they oppose guns and cleave to the mentally ill. Regardless of the fact that criminals and crazy people won’t divest themselves of their guns.

  • Your morning dose of irony

    You probably remember that the Journal News of Westchester and Rockland counties New York published an interactive map to local legal gun owners’ homes, supposedly to warn their readers about the presence of guns in their neighborhoods. Well, the backlash has been so severe that according to the Rockland County Times, the Journal News has had to hire security, security armed with guns!

    According to police reports on public record, Journal News Rockland Editor Caryn A. McBride was alarmed by the volume of “negative correspondence,” namely an avalanche of phone calls and emails to the Journal News office, following the newspaper’s publishing of a map of all pistol permit holders in Rockland and Westchester.

    Due to apparent safety concerns, the newspaper then decided to hire RGA Investigations to provide armed personnel to man the location.

    Private investigator Richard Ayoob is the administrator of RGA. He told the Clarkstown Police on Friday, December 28 that there had been no problems on site at the Journal News headquarters despite the massive influx of phone calls and emails.

    Gee, I wonder why someone who feels threatened would turn to guns for protection. It reminds me of the time that Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin called for Marines to protect her once when she was protesting the Marine Recruiting Center in Berkeley, CA.

  • OK, CNN, you’re disqualified from the gun discussion

    LA's RPG

    Someone sent us this video on our Facebook page in regards to the discussion we had yesterday about LA’s gun buy back. If you can’t see what’s wrong with the screen shot above, you’re not qualified to discuss firearms, either.

    The screen shot identifies the expended AT-4 tube as a “rocket propelled grenade”, they interview with a “security expert” who calls them “RPGs”. The term RPG comes from the Russian phrase “ruchnoy protivotankovy granatomyot” which means “hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher” and it’s the nomenclature of Soviet- and now Russian-made anti-armor weapons. The CNN idiots admit that the expended AT-4 tube is American made, so how could it be an RPG?

    If you don’t stick around to the end of the video where Candy Crowley talks about how someone got the expended AT-4 tube with the hot Asian chick, you won’t get the full dose of idiocy. Candy asks Kyung Lah where the “rocket propelled grenade launcher” came from and the only answer Lah gives is that “You can’t buy it on Ebay”, but she makes it sound like there are mysterious forces at work in the country handing out AT-4s to everyone.

    The dude who turned it in probably bought the inert piece of junk at a surplus store. The AT-4 is manufactured with a rocket inside them, so if there’s no rocket inside it, it’s harmless. The cops were suckers for buying it back. It’s as if they paid someone to turn in a cardboard box that a gun came in.

    But look who I’m telling. You guys know where it came from, but the CNN audience is probably out looking for the Koch Brothers who are passing them out on street corners so we old white guys can undermine the Obama Administration.

  • Was Liberal Idiocy Legal Insanity?

    One can only wonder if the fool at The Westchester Journal News who made the decision to publish the names and addresses of New York gun owners has ever heard the legal term, proximate cause? I’m sure the newspaper’s legal counsel has as well as the risk management people at their corporate headquarters, but the fool who actually pulled the plug? Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

    In the law, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the “but for” test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light, the collision would not have occurred. For an act to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.

    May I submit that if a criminal seeking to steal guns breaks into any one of those homes whose address was published by the Journal News, any legal gunsel worth his salt will do his very best to tie the crime to the publication by the newspaper of the victim’s address. So, no big deal you say? Well picture this scenario: highly-paid, business executive type husband at home with three daughters while much lower paid wife is away on job-related travel; gun-seeking burglar breaks in, kills husband and one daughter before shooting other two daughters in the face, leaving them alive but permanently brain-damaged.

    To a personal injury lawyer, that scenario is the sound of a big dollar slot machine that just keeps going and going. The damages to be demanded in a civil suit with such facts of the case are in the tens if not hundreds of millions. And guess who made it possible? BUT FOR those high-minded liberal folk at the Journal News who saw fit to put very private and personal information in their newspaper, nothing else could have led that murdering burglar directly to the targeted residence where he inflicted all that pain and suffering on folks who most likely would have lived out their lives peacefully, fruitfully and happily. Can the nosy newsies claim a defense that the information is all a matter of public record? Well, sure, they can and will try, but then you come back to that but for principle: would the lazy, murderous thug have been intelligent enough or resourceful enough to have uncovered that address, but for its publication in the newspaper?

    So, was there proximate cause? Oh yeah, and you can bet there are lawyers combing that article for potential clients just to get them on retainer so that if any such, any such, unfortunate incident occurs, the legal beagle’s nose knows exactly which trail to follow to the very deep pockets of the multi-billion dollar corporate parent, Gannett Company, to seek justice and new-found wealth for his clients and fame and fortune for himself. That idiot editor at the Journal News may have just painted himself and his corporate masters right into the hottest liability corner in the history of newspaper publishing.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Breathless LA Times reports rocket launchers in their midst

    rocket launcher cop soqui

    The LA Times is freaking out because during the city’s gun buyback program, the cops bought back an expended LAW and an expended AT-4. ” Holy hell why do people on our streets have military grade rocket launchers?” the reporter asks. Well, those rocket launchers aren’t even effective as clubs now. Anyone doing the least bit of research online would realize that those one-shot weapons. After they’ve been fired, those launchers become as dangerous as a cardboard box.

    The official told us this is not that unusual, that “we’ve had them in the past.”

    He says that police believe the “shoulder-fired” weapons are antiquated, decades-old, launchers from wars past often picked up by collectors or passed down to family members by veterans.

    The official described them as LAW weapons, for light-anti-tank weapons.

    They propel rocket grenades, but the official called them “non-working” because they did not have the “projectiles” with them. Thank God!?

    I’ll admit that only a moron would keep an expended tube, but it’s not like someone is going to refurbish the things and make them into weapons again. If the cops paid for the things, they’re dumbasses. The only time I’ve seen a LAW tube refired is when we used to bury them on end up to the muzzle, drop an artillery simulator down the tube followed by a smoke grenade for some indirect short range smoke launchers.