February 27, 2014


COLUMBIA, S.C. — A police officer in South Carolina shot a 70-year-old motorist who was reaching for a cane during a traffic stop because he thought the man was grabbing a rifle from the bed of his pickup truck, investigators said. The man was expected to survive.

The York County deputy, Terrence Knox, pulled over Bobby Canipe (kah-NYP’) of Lincolnton, N.C., for an expired license tag about 7:30 p.m. Tuesday north of Clover, S.C., York County sheriff’s spokesman Trent Faris said.


After stopping, Canipe got out of his pickup truck and reached into the bed, pulling out what Knox thought was a long-barreled rifle, Faris said. It was Canipe’s walking cane. The officer fired several times, hitting Canipe once, Faris said.

Faris refused to say where on his body Canipe was hit, but said he was expected to survive. Canipe was taken to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C., where spokesman Kevin McCarthy said he was listed in fair condition.




“The situation is very unfortunate,” Faris said, reading from a statement at a news conference. “It does appear, at this time, that Deputy Knox’s actions were an appropriate response to what he reasonably believed to be an imminent threat to his life.”

The State Law Enforcement Division will investigate the shooting and turn its findings over to prosecutors, who will decide whether to press charges, Faris said. He said Knox, 24, has been a deputy for almost three years.

(Written in 1999)

Source: www.lexrex.com/

Synopsis of an interview conducted by Ginny Simone with Keith Tidswell of Australia's Sporting Shooters Association.

One year after gun-owners were forced to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed, including semi-automatic .22 rifles and shotguns, a program costing the government over 500 million dollars, the results are in...

A dramatic increase in criminal activity has been experienced. Gun control advocates respond "Just wait... we'll be safer...you'll see...".

OBSERVABLE FACT, AFTER 12 MONTHS OF DATA:
* Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2%
* Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6%
* Australia-wide, armed-robberies are up 44% (yes, FORTY-FOUR PERCENT)
* In the state of Victoria, homicides-with-firearms are up 300%
* Figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in homicides-with-firearms (changed dramatically in the past 12 months)
* Figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in armed-robbery-with-firearms (changed dramatically in the past 12 months)

* There has been a dramatic increase in breakins-and-assaults-of-the-elderly

* At the time of the ban, the Prime Minister said "self-defense is not a reason for owning a firearm"

* From 1910 to present, homicides in Australia had averaged about 1.8-per-100,000 or lower, a safe society by any standard.

* The ban has destroyed Australia's standings in some international sport shooting competitions

* The membership of the Australian Sports Shooting Association has risen to 112,000, a 200% increase, in response to the ban and as an attempt to organize against further controls, which are expected.

* Australian politicians are on the spot and at a loss to explain how no improvement in "safety" has been observed after such monumental effort and expense was successfully expended in 

"ridding society of guns". Their response has been to "wait longer".

"...The best organization you've got there, the biggest organization you've got there is the NRA. We didn't have an organization that size, and as a consequence, we suffered. And we hope that you don't suffer..."
Keith Tidswell Sporti


Source: examiner.com
Much has been written of late about what appears to be massive non-compliance with Connecticut's "assault weapon" registration requirement (the guns are banned, but "grandfathered," if the owner registers them). Well, much has been written, that is, in gun rights advocacy circles--the mass media would apparently have us believe that it's not worth covering the fact that scores of thousands--maybe hundreds of thousands--of people are committing a felony "crime" punishable by five years in prison.

That was interesting enough before the Hartford Courant editorial board decided to enter the fray, urging the state to use background check data to identify likely "assault weapon" owners, compare that list to the list of "assault weapon" registrants, and investigate the people on the first list, but not the second, in order to enforce the law:

Authorities should use the background check database as a way to find assault weapon purchasers who might not have registered those guns in compliance with the new law.

A Class D felony calls for a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Even much lesser penalties or probation would mar a heretofore clean record and could adversely affect, say, the ability to have a pistol permit.

If you want to disobey the law, you should be prepared to face the consequences.
As National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea notes, this puts the state in a very unenviable position. They could acquiesce to the Courant's demands, and take on the utterly impossible--not to mention lethally dangerous, both to private citizens and Connecticut law enforcement--task of confiscating the now "illegal" guns, and arresting and imprisoning the scores of thousands of newly-minted felons. Mr. Codrea points out a few of the reasons this is impossible:

Simply as a matter of resources and logistics, the state will be hard-pressed to allocate the manpower, budget, jail facilities and court case load capabilities to do more than scratch the surface to try to frighten everyone by making examples of a few. If The Courant is going to demand they apply those resources to all, perhaps the editors would flesh out what compliance with their call to action consists of, starting with realistic costs to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate every non-compliant gun owner, the number of total hours and dedicated personnel needed to execute that plan, how many decades it will take to accomplish, how many businesses will be disrupted by losing valuable employees, how much tax revenue the state will lose by taking productive taxpayers out of circulation and turning them into dependents . . . .




Codrea notes also that the Courant has also done gun owners the favor of confirming all gun owners' concerns that background checks are backdoor registration, and registration is tantamount to confiscation--concerns contemptuously dismissed as "paranoid" by the forcible citizen disarmament zealots. That, indeed, is the first lesson: background check data can be used as a de facto registry, and the registry can serve to find guns and owners. It's a lesson that should have been learned long ago, but better late than never.

The state's other option is to not attempt this bordering-on-apocalyptic task--which the state's top "justice" system official, Mike Lawlor, has already indicated is the plan, according to another Courant article:

"A lot of it is just a question to ask, and I think the firearms unit would be looking at it," said Mike Lawlor, the state's top official in criminal justice. "They could send them a letter."

An aggressive hunt isn't going to happen, Lawlor said, but even the idea of letters is a scary thought considering thousands of people are now in an uncomfortable position.

The Courant might be grossly overestimating just how "scary" these letters would be, especially given the fact that it's already clear that any kind of investigation and roundup is not in the cards. And that is the other, and most important, lesson. Scores of thousands of "assault weapon"-owning Connecticut residents have called the government's bluff. Now, what is the state going to do about it? What can it do?

In fact, as J.D. Tuccile points out in Reason, the only people likely to be forced to surrender their "assault weapons" are the ones who did try to register, but were too late:

Some people actually tried to comply with the registration law, but missed the deadline. The state's official position is that it will accept applications notarized on or before January 1, 2014 and postmarked by January 4. But, says Dora Schriro, Commissioner of the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, in a letter to lawmakers, anybody sufficiently law-abiding but foolish enough to miss that slightly extended grace period will have to surrender or otherwise get rid of their guns.
It is only through defiance of evil, unjust, illegitimate laws that one can avoid becoming a victim of them. This is a lesson for the entire country. If tens of thousands of citizens of one state can face the government down over a state gun ban and registration scheme, tens of millions of Americans can do the same in a face-off with the federal government, over an analogous law at that level. It is we the people who hold the only legitimate power in this country, and if enough of us stand together to exercise it, we can do so without firing a shot.
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