Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 809 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Asking the Important Legal Questions

Is it legal to eat your cat? In New York State, the answer is apparently no:

When police in Western New York pulled over Gary Korkuc for blowing off a stop sign on Sunday, theyÂ found a live cat in his trunk, covered in cooking oil, peppers, and salt. Korkuc told authorities that his pet feline was “possessive, greedy, and wasteful” and that he intended to cook and eat it. Korkuc has been charged with animal cruelty. Is there a legal way to cook and eat a cat?

Maybe in some places, but not New York.

I think in Pennsylvania this would likely also be illegal unless you slaughter it according to state law, which stipulates methods that animals can be slaughtered (firearms are among the methods permitted for taking animals). It certainly could be possible to legally eat your cat in Pennsylvania, but I’m pretty sure slathering your live kitty with cooking oil, pepper and salt isn’t the beginning of a legal slaughtering method, and itself might be considered cruelty.

Personally, I think salt and pepper is a really unimaginative seasoning mix for Felis Catus. I would think at the least, a marinade is called for.

UPDATE: It would seem it was chili peppers and red peppers, from the more detailed article. Better, at least.

The Right to Practice

I’m very pleased with this new SAF and ISRA lawsuit against Chicago. Though the earlier NRA-backed Benson v. Chicago lawsuit takes a kitchen sink approach, which would include this question, SAF seems to be taking a more narrow strategy. I think this is smart. Depending on what happens, on appeal the court it ends up before might not want a kitchen sink case, and I believe it’s beneficial for us to have a narrow case available as well.

Randy Graham, vice president of Action Target, said, â€œWe believe that citizens have a constitutional right to use and train with firearms in a safe and controlled environment. As a leader in the firearms training industry, Action Target is committed to standing up for these rights.â€

And we want the courts to say that the right to keep and bear is also the right to practice with arms. That opens the door to many possibilities in terms of expanding this right. The First Amendment angle on this is also interesting. It would appear that they are essentially arguing the ban on public ranges prevents education in firearms, which violates free speech. It almost sounds like a stretch, but when you think about it, would a ban on, say, chalk boards be constitutional if it interfered with teaching English Literature? What if there was no reasonable substitute? What if you could show the law was specifically intended to frustrate teaching of English Literature? In a different context it’s very plausible.

UPDATE: John Richardson notes that the Benson complaint has been amended, and is now less of a kitchen sink approach. He also notes which counts they dropped. This looks sensible. A lot of the dropped complaints still made sense, but probably not all for a single case.

Two Bills Need to Be Stopped in the California Senate

An open carry ban and long gun registration are up now. Phone calls need to be made. Even Canada is giving up on long gun registration. It won’t be long before California has worse gun laws than Canada.

Misplaced Grief

The family of a victim of the Craigslist Killer blames the gun shop that sold him the gun. The killer apparently sole the identity of someone who could legally purchase the pistol. There’s no sure way to defend against this, despite what John Rosenthal says:

â€œYou couldnâ€™t do this in Massachusetts,â€™â€™ said John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, a Newton-based group. â€œThatâ€™s why he went to New Hampshire.â€™â€™

It might be harder in Massachusetts, since you’d have to apply in the right jurisdiction, but does Rosenthal really want to suggest if someone was using a stolen identity that they wouldn’t issue? They’d be sure to catch it? Maybe it’s a little harder in Mass, but everyone can be fooled, and serial killers are notoriously intelligent and resourceful. I’ll bet one could be had on the streets of Dorchester with no ID required at all, if one were so inclined.

Mall Ninjary on Parade

Many thanks to Tam and PDB for entertaining me this evening with images of this fellow:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BRb9AlEGN4[/youtube]

This is really one of those things you hope you never see. There’s enough muzzling of other things there to seriously disturb. But it gets better. Thanks to an intrepid reader of Tam’s, it turns out this guy has a record over at Bullshido (warning, not safe for anyone). That lead me to find this guy’s YouTube channel, which is perhaps the finest collection of mall ninjary I’ve seen on the Internets. How can you argue with quality training like this?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5r4btM_OU[/youtube]

The neighbors must love it. I really hope the other guys in that video didn’t fork over good money to get muzzled in some dude’s back yard. This one had me practically blowing soda out of my nose:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCo6kOMExIQ[/youtube]

That kind of training might even be too over the top for teaching Hollywood actors how to look cool. I’m not even sure it does look that cool. Either way, based on the site over on Bullshido, what are this guy’s qualifications? It seems it comes down to this:

We discovered that a Ralph Severe of Texas was trained and employed as aÂ private security guard at one time, some of Severeâ€™s videos show himÂ conducting interviews in some sort of LE/Security uniform. We can reasonably assume that Severe may indeed have some legitimate LE training, but that his resume may be embellished to imply more expertise than he perhaps deserved.

Said another way, it could perhaps be this, “I am the Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of Americaâ€™s largest indoor retail shopping areas.”

Obama Administration Fighting Surplus Korean M1s

South Korea wants to surplus a bunch of M1 Garands and M1 Carbines that have been gathering dust in warehouses around the R.O.K. Â The Obama Administration obviously thinks we’ll shoot ourselves, or sell them to terrorists if we are allowed to get our hands on them:

â€œThe U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents. It was also worried the weapons could be smuggled to terrorists, gangs or other people with bad intentions,â€ the official told The Korea Times.

â€œWeâ€™re still looking into the reason why the U.S. administration is objecting to the sale of the rifles and seeking ways to resolve the problems raised,â€ he said.

The Obama Administration has no legal authority to prevent the importation of these rifles. Under a provision of the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, rifles and shotguns that are Curios and Relics are permitted to be imported, the “sporting purposes” language in the 1968 Gun Control Act be damned. That’s probably why they are resorting to back channel pressure to prevent the South Korean government from selling them as surplus.

This goes to show that the Obama Administration may be unwilling to take us on head on, but they are willing to screw us through the back channel.

History of the Sheriff

Looking around for more information about the new LTC standards, I found this very interesting page on the PA Sheriff Association’s web site on the history of the office:

Under Anglo-Saxon rule it was the duty of the citizens themselves to see that the law was not broken, and if it was, to catch the offenders. All the males in the community between the ages of 12 and 60 were responsible for this duty. They were organized in groups of about ten families, and each group was called a “tything”: At their head was a “tythingman.” Each member of the tything was held responsible for the good behavior of the others. Ten tythings were led by a “reeve.” If one member committed a crime, the others had to catch him and bring him before the court, or the “moot” as the Saxons called it. If they failed to do so they were all punished, usually by paying a fine. If anyone saw a crime he raised a “hue and cry” and all men had to join in the chase to catch the criminal and bring him before the court. Under Alfred the Great, (A.D. 871-901), reeves began to be combined, forming “shires” or counties. Each shire was led by a reeve. For minor offenses, people accused of crimes were brought before the local “folk moot.” More serious cases went to the “Shire Court,” which came under the “shire reeve” (meaning “keeper and chief of his county”), who came to be known as the Sheriff. After the Normans conquered England in A.D. 1066, they adopted many Anglo-Saxon law keeping methods, including the system of tythings, the use of the hue and cry, and the Sheriff’s courts. In A.D. 1085, King William ordered a compilation of all taxable property in a census, and decreed that the Sheriff was to be the official tax collector of the king.

Read the whole thing. I found it to be quite interesting.

UPDATE: If you think about it, this type of system is probably what made English liberty possible. If the King was dependent on the community to enforce the King’s law, then the laws had to largely reflect the values of those communities. You wouldn’t be much interested in catching law breakers over laws that went against the values held in that community, would you? You’d probably spend a lot of time looking the other way. So English law didn’t develop in the same manner as other countries, and when they came here, they brought the law with them. Obviously neither the English nor Americans use this type of system for law enforcement anymore, but the American distrust of centralized police forces is probably rooted in this tradition, and has probably helped keep locally controlled policing, despite the efficiencies that could be gained from centralized police forces. Though most states have State Police, at least in Pennsylvania, they have jurisdiction over our highways, and in any communities that don’t hire local police.

Top Ten Reasons for Not Supporting NRA Anymore

Thanks to Miguel for a good laugh over the weekend. Over this week I’m going to try to get in a series of posts about the NRA, how it works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be) so that folks can understand it better.

Blind Justice

A judge in New Jersey rules that blind people have Second Amendment rights too.

UPDATE: Clearing out my tabs, it seems I forgot how this story was put together. Now let me do it the right way:

A blind gun collector is in Court defending his Second Amendment rights. It looks like this guy has made the news before, when he won his appeal of his FID denial for being blind back in 1994, and once again in 2004 after they tried to revoke him because of a conviction unrelated to firearms possession (being unruly in a bar). Now they apparently want to revoke him because he was the victim of a burglary while he was in the hospital after shooting himself, and while in the hospital was the victim of a burglary.

You don’t have Second Amendment rights in the Garden State, despite McDonald. The time will soon come to put the smack down on this nonsense. Maybe it would be a wise things for Mr. Hopler to give up his hobby, but that should be his choice, not the states.

San Francisco Becoming Food Fascists

Apparently the Center for Science and the Public Interest, our nations leading Food Nazis, are going around the bay area trying to ban the Happy Meal. I’m relatively disappointed that our restaurant industry is, so far, taking a relatively passive approach to resisting these Food Fascists, these Meatball Mussolinis. If McDonald’s came out and said, “We’re going to stand up for the right of Americans to eat whatever they want, and CSPI can go to hell,” health problems be damned, I’ll hit McDonald’s for lunch every day for the next two weeks. I’ll even regret not having kids to take there for a Happy Meal.