March 16, 2014


Source: APNews.com

SEOUL, South Korea  — North Korea fired 18 short-range rockets into the sea off its east coast Sunday, South Korean officials said, in an apparent continuation of protests against ongoing U.S.-South Korean military drills.

Such short-range rocket tests are usually considered routine, as opposed to North Korean long-range rocket or nuclear tests, which are internationally condemned as provocations. North Korea has conducted a string of similar short-range launches in recent weeks that have coincided with the annual military drills by allies Washington and Seoul.

North Korea says the drills are preparation for an invasion. The allies say the exercises, which last year prompted North Korean threats of nuclear war against the South and the United States, are routine and defensive in nature.

Outside analysts say the North is taking a softer stance toward the U.S.-South Korean military drills this year because it wants better ties with the outside world to revive its struggling economy. North Korea's weeks-long tirade of war rhetoric against Washington and Seoul last spring followed international condemnation of its third nuclear test, in February 2013.

South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said the type of rockets North Korea launched Sunday wasn't yet clear.

Earlier this month, Seoul said a North Korean artillery launch happened minutes before a Chinese commercial plane reportedly carrying 202 people flew in the same area.

Pyongyang has said that its recent rocket drills are part of regular training and are mindful of international navigation.

The Korean Peninsula remains officially at war because the Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.


The most shocking display of out of control government I have since in a long time!





UPDATE: 
According to the Mainstream media: 

Central Connecticut State University locked down its campus for more than three hours Monday after reports that a person carrying a sword and gun had been spotted at the school. But by midafternoon, an “all clear” was given, three people were in custody, and police said they were investigating the possibility it was a Halloween hoax.

CCSU Police Chief Chris Cervoni said three "persons of interest," including at least one student, had been taken into custody. Surveillance video showed one entering a residence hall with what appeared to be something "looking like a sword" and a "possible handgun," Cervoni said. No charges have been filed and the investigation is ongoing.

The three were taken into custody on the fourth floor of James Hall without incident, he said. No weapons were recovered, and authorities were looking into the possibly it "could've been a Halloween costume."

"We determined there was no real threat to the students, faculty and staff here," Cervoni said.

"It wasn't a prank because there was concern and alarm," he said, adding that the men in custody were "being cooperative."

No one was injured.

"In this situation, our prayers were answered," CCSU president Jack Miller said. "Certainly there have been many situations that didn't conclude this way."

A tense afternoon for the school's 11,000 students began shortly after noon, when New Britain, Conn., police said they received 911 calls reporting that a suspicious man, believed to be a student, was carrying "a weapon or weapons" near campus.

"Campus emergency," CCSU wrote on its Twitter feed around 12:15 p.m. "Seek shelter. Lock doors, close windows. We will communicate when we have more info. This is not a drill. #ccsu"

CCSU officials also issued similar alerts over the campus loudspeakers.

Police and SWAT team members swarmed the 55-acre New Britain, Conn., campus, but quickly focused on James Hall, a dormitory on the campus' southwestern side. Police dogs could be seen entering the building.

About 400 students live in the residence hall.

According to the school, officials were treating it as an "active shooter" situation as police searched for "a suspicious person carrying a gun."

A spokesman for the school stressed that there were no shots fired, but at the time would not elaborate on the nature of the threat.

According to one student who was interviewed by WFSB, police told him they were looking for a black male wearing camouflage pants and possibly a mask. The person was said to be armed, the student said police told him.


Another CCSU student said he saw a person matching that description get off a city bus and head in the direction of the campus carrying what appeared to be a samurai sword on his back. "I figured he was wearing a Halloween costume," the student said. "I just went and parked my car and went to class."


After the latest ATF raid on a totally legal gun store for the purpose of getting their customer lists, I thought I would post some stories on how the state and federal government has attacked gun owners and separatists in the past.

The Story of Donald Scott

Five police agencies staged bogus drug raid on rich eccentric to acquire 200-acre spread

Early on the morning of Oct. 2, 1992, 31 officers from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, Drug Enforcement Administration, Border Patrol, National Guard and Park Service came roaring down the narrow dirt road to Scott's rustic 200-acre ranch. They planned to arrest Scott, the wealthy, eccentric, hard-drinking heir to a Europe-based chemicals fortune, for allegedly running a 4,000-plant marijuana plantation. When deputies broke down the door to Scott's house, Scott's wife would later tell reporters, she screamed, "Don't shoot me. Don't kill me." That brought Scott staggering out of the bedroom, hung-over and bleary-eyed -- he'd just had a cataract operation -- holding a .38 caliber Colt snub-nosed revolver over his head. When he pointed it in the direction of the deputies, they killed him.

Later, the lead agent in the case, sheriff's deputy Gary Spencer and his partner John Cater posed for photographs arm-in-am outside Scott's cabin, smiling and triumphant, says Larry Longo, a former Los Angeles deputy district attorney who now represents Scott's daughter, Susan.

"It was as if they were white hunters who had just shot the buffalo," he said.

Despite a subsequent search of Scott's ranch using helicopters, dogs, searchers on foot, and a high-tech Jet Propulsion Laboratory device for detecting trace amounts of sinsemilla, no marijuana --or any other illegal drug -- was ever found.

Scott's widow, the former Frances Plante, along with four of Scott's children from prior marriages, subsequently filed a $100 million wrongful death suit against the county and federal government. For eight years the case dragged on, requiring the services of 15 attorneys and some 30 volume binders to hold all the court documents. Last week, attorneys for Los Angeles County and the federal government agreed to settle with Scott's heirs and estate, even though the sheriff's department still maintained its deputies had done nothing wrong.

"I do not believe it was an illegal raid in any way, shape or form," Captain Larry Waldie, head of the Sheriff's Department's narcotics bureau, told the Los Angeles Times after the shooting. When Scott came out of the bedroom, the deputies identified themselves and shouted at him to put the gun down. As Scott began to lower his arm, one deputy later said, he "kinda" pointed his gun -- which he initially was holding by the cylinder, not the handle grip -- at deputy Spencer who, in fear for his life, killed him.

Although attorneys for Los Angeles County believed Scott's shooting was fully justified, they weren't eager to see the case go to trial. Recent widespread revelations of illegal shootings, planted evidence and perjured testimony at the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division were making the public mistrust the police.

"I've tried four cases (since the Rampart revelations)," said Dennis Gonzales, a deputy Los Angeles County counsel. And in each case, he said, jurors have told him that the possibility that police officers were lying was a factor in their vote.

"You have to be realistic as to public perceptions," he said.

Nick Gutsue, Scott's former attorney and currently special administrator for his estate, put it more bluntly: "(Gonzales) saw he had a loser and he took the easy way out."

Ironically enough, the county might have had a better chance of winning a court battle if it had allowed the case to go to trial when Scott's widow and four children first filed their lawsuit back in 1993. The county blew it, says Gutsue. It adopted a "divide and conquer strategy." It prolonged the lawsuit's resolution with a successful motion to throw legendarily aggressive anti-police attorney Stephen Yagman off the case. Then it filed a time-consuming motion to dismiss the estate from the lawsuit.

In the process, says Gutsue, new revelations of police misconduct began appearing so frequently that the public's attitude toward law enforcement began to change. "It was one scandal after another," says Gutsue. "(County attorneys) stalled so long that the (Rampart scandal) came along and their stalling tactics backfired."

Although county officials still maintain that Scott was a major marijuana grower who was just clever enough not to get caught, his friends and widow maintain that his drug of choice was alcohol, not marijuana. As a young man, Scott lived a privileged life, growing up in Switzerland and attending prep schools in New York. Later he lived the life of a dashing international jet setter who was married three times, once to a French movie star, and who had gone through two bitter and messy divorces by the time he moved to his Malibu ranch, called Trail's End, in 1966.

Although well-liked and generous to friends, Scott drank heavily, could be cantankerous and deeply mistrusted the government, which he suspected of having designs on this ranch, a remote and nearly inaccessible parcel with high rocky bluffs on three sides and a 75-foot spring-fed waterfall out back.

"You know what he used to say," his third wife, Frances Plante, told writer Michael Fessier Jr. in a 1993 article for the Los Angeles Times magazine, "He'd say, 'Frances, every day they pass a new law and the day after that they pass 40 more.'"

To Los Angeles County officials, the fact that Don Scott got killed in his own house during a futile raid to seize a non-existent 4,000-plant marijuana farm is just one of the unfortunate facts of life in the narcotics enforcement business. It doesn't mean that sheriff's deputies did anything wrong.

"Sometimes people get warned and we don't find anything," Gary Spencer, the lead deputy on the raid and the one who shot Scott, told an L.A. Times reporter in 1997, "so I don't consider it botched. I wouldn't call it botched because that would say that it was a mistake to have gone there in the first place, and I don't believe that."

Someone who did believe that was Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury. Although Scott's ranch was in Ventura County, none of the 31 people participating in the massive early morning raid, which included officers from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, the DEA, the National Park Service, the California National Guard and the Border Patrol bothered to invite any Ventura County officers to come along. Furthermore, once Scott was shot, Los Angeles County tried to claim jurisdiction over the investigation of Scott's death, even though the shooting occured in Ventura County.

To Bradbury, it was easy to see why. L.A. County wanted jurisdiction. In a 64-page report issued by Bradbury's office in March of 1993, Bradbury concluded that the search warrant contained numerous misstatements, evasions and omissions. The purpose of the raid, he wrote, was never to find some evanescent marijuana plantation. It was to seize Scott's ranch under asset forfeiture laws and then divide the proceeds with participating agencies, such as the National Park Service, which had put Scott's ranch on a list of property it would one day like to acquire, and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which heavily relied on assets seized in drug raids to supplement its otherwise inadequate budget.

For something written by a government agency, the Bradbury report was surprisingly blunt. It dismissed Spencer's supposed reasons for believing that the Scott ranch was a marijuana plantation and accused Spencer of having lost his "moral compass" in his eagerness to seize Scott's multi-million dollar ranch. As proof of its assertions, the report pointed to a parcel map in possession of the raiding party that contained the handwritten notation that an adjacent 80-acre property had recently sold for $800,000. In addition, the day of the raid, participants were told during the briefing that Scott's ranch could be seized if as few as 14 plants were found.

In order to verify that the marijuana really existed, at first Spencer simply hiked to a site overlooking Scott's ranch. Discovering nothing, he subsequently sent an Air National Guard jet over the area to take photographs of the ranch. When this also failed to reveal anything, he dispatched a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in a light plane to make a low level flight.

The DEA agent, whose name was Charles Stowell, said he saw flashes of green hidden in trees which he believed were 50 marijuana plants. At the same time, Stowell was uncertain enough about his observations -- which he had made with the naked eye from an altitude of 1,000 feet -- to warn Spencer not to use them as the basis for a search warrant without further corroboration.

In an effort to confirm the marijuana sighting -- Spencer by this time had decided that Scott was growing marijuana in pots suspended under the trees -- Spencer asked members of the Border Patrol's "C-Rat" team to make a night-time foray into the ranch. Despite two separate incursions, they failed to find anything except barking dogs. The following day a Fish and Game warden and Coastal Commission worker went to the ranch to investigate alleged stream pollution and do a "trout survey" on the dry stream bed. They too failed to see any marijuana. Two days after that, a sheriff's deputy and National Park ranger visited the ranch again, this time ostensibly to buy a rottweiler puppy from Scott. The Scotts were friendly and gave them a tour of the ranch. Once again no one saw any marijuana.

This lack of confirmation notwithstanding, four days later Spencer filed an affidavit for a search warrant saying that DEA Special Agent Charles Stowell, "while conducting cannabis eradication and suppression reconnaissance ... over the Santa Monica Mountains in a single engine fixed wing aircraft ... noticed that marijuana was being cultivated at the Trails End Ranch 35247 Mulholland Highway in Malibu. Specifically Agent Stowell saw approximately 50 plants that he recognized to be marijuana plants growing around some large trees that were in a grove near a house on the property."

To attorneys with a lot of experience with warrants, Spencer's affidavit didn't look like much. "On a scale of one to ten," says former district attorney Longo, "I would give it a one."

Despite the affidavit's deficiencies -- among other things, Spencer didn't mention that none of the people participating in any of the previous week's incursions had reported any marijuana -- Ventura Municipal Court Judge Herbert Curtis III issued a search warrant which, in the words of the Bradbury report, became Scott's "death warrant." After Scott's death, a helicopter hovered over the area in which the marijuana plants were believed to have been growing. There were no pots, no water supply, no marijuana. There was only ivy and even that wasn't in the location where the marijuana was supposed to be.

Larry Longo, a friend of Scott whose children used to play with Scott's children, says it's absurd to think that Scott had marijuana plants hanging from the trees.

"I went up there right after the shooting. The trees were 200- or 300-year-old oak trees. The leaves under them hadn't been raked in a hundred years." If Scott had been growing marijuana under the trees, the leaves would have been disturbed and the tree bark broken. "There wasn't a single mark on the trees. There was no water supply."

Besides, says Longo, "Donald might have been a lot of things, but he would never be so dumb as to cultivate marijuana on his property." If for no other reason, he didn't need the money. Any time he needed cash, all he had to do was call New York and they'd withdraw whatever was necessary out of his trust fund. At the time of Scott's death, there was $1.6 million in his primary trust account.

The Bradbury report caused a huge ruckus in Los Angeles County. Sherman Block, the sheriff at the time, denounced it and issued a report of his own which completely cleared everyone, and California Attorney General Dan Lungren criticized Bradbury for "inappropriate and gratuitous comments."

Cheered by his apparent exoneration by Sheriff Block and Attorney General Lungren, sheriff's deputy Spencer subsequently sued Bradbury for libel, slander and defamation. After a long and bitter fight, including allegations that Bradbury suppressed an earlier report which concluded that Spencer was innocent after all, a state appeals court declared that Bradbury was within his 1st Amendment rights of free speech when he criticized Spencer. The court also ordered Spencer to pay Bradbury's $50,000 legal fees, a development that caused Spencer to declare bankruptcy. According to press reports, the stress from all this caused Spencer to develop a "twitch."

Spencer wasn't the only one affected by Scott's killing. Scott's wife, Frances, was so strapped for cash, she subsequently told a judge, she considering eating a dead coyote she found on the side of the road. According to her attorney, Johnnie Cochran, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, she is currently living on the property while she holds off government claims to seize it for unpaid taxes. In 1996, the massive Malibu firestorm destroyed Scott's ranch house and the outlying buildings. As a result, Frances Scott currently lives in a teepee erected over the badminton court, albeit a teepee with expensive rugs and a color TV.

Scott's old friend and attorney Nick Gutsue recently said he had mixed feelings about the settlement. While he was glad that Scott's widow and children didn't have to go through the horror of reliving Scott's death in a jury trial, at the same time was disappointed that he never got a chance to clear Scott's name.

"I asked for an apology and exoneration of Scott," said Gutsue. "I never got one. I was told it was against their policy." That's one reason, said Gutsue, he always wanted a jury trial. In a settlement, no one has to admit any guilt.

"Of course," said Gutsue, "$5 million is a pretty good sized admission."


Kathyrn Johnston was 92-years-old when police carrying out a drug raid kicked in her door. She took a shot at the cops, and was gunned down by the return fire.

Now, the city of Atlanta has agreed to pay Johnston's family $4.9 million for her death in the botched 2006 raid.

Police had been acting on an informant's claim that he had bought narcotics at Johnston's home. But no drugs were found, and officers then planted drugs that had been recovered from a different raid.

An FBI investigation led five officers to plead guilty for their roles in the shooting, while six others were reprimanded for not following department policy.

Mayor Kasim Reed said Monday that the city will pay the elderly woman's family $2.9 million this fiscal year and the rest next year.

Thanks to CaliforniarighttoCarry.Org, we now know that Federal Judge Janis L. Sammartino reversed herself and allowed the ATF to conduct raids on Ares Armor locations.

f troopThe excuse for the raids was that Ares Armor sold EP Armory polymer lower receivers, which the ATF claims are made by making a firearm (completed lower receiver) and then filling it in. EP Armory claims that they make the cores, and then build the lower around the cores, which is completely legal. EP Armory was raided March 7. They maintain that they have done nothing wrong.

No charges are known to have been filed as the result of either raid.

YouTuber Xxbanshee13xx was at the National City Ares Armor location as the ATF raided the store with the help of a local locksmith and what appears to be the National City Police.



If you have purchased an 80% lower receiver from a storefront location or over the Internet from any vendor, I think it is safe to assume that the federal government either has your customer data, or is in the process of trying to obtain your customer data. If you want a truly anonymous 80% lower, pay cash via a private sale, the same as you would with a serialized firearm.

We have to wonder if this raid wasn’t as much an attempt to send a message to 80% lower customers as it was a raid for user data. Perhaps they’re attempting to scare people away from buying from these companies, so that they go out of business.

Frankly, I don’t care if the federal government knows if I am armed, and I refuse to be intimidated from celebrating my constitutional rights. I might buy an EP Armory polymer lower receiver via Ares Armor (once they are back in stock) in support of both companies.





Source: Bearingarms.com
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