DC Sniper Claims Conspirators In Shatner Interview

William Shatner (yes, that William Shatner) interviewed DC sniper Lee Boyd Malvo fro an A&E television special:

In a telephone call from a southwest Virginia prison, Malvo told Shatner two men planned to join in the attacks to make them more deadly but reneged. Malvo said his fellow shooter, John Allen Muhammad, killed one of the men in retaliation.

In the TV interview, Malvo initially denies his psychiatrist’s claims that he and Muhammad had co-conspirators. Once pressured, he says someone in Arizona helped them get weapons and explosives, and a man in New York was supposed to help them get out of the country “when it’s all said and done.”

He said both later backed out of plans to help with the shootings.

“There was supposed to be three to four snipers with silenced weapons,” said Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the shootings. “In this way we could do a lot more damage along the entire Eastern Seaboard.”

Via Uncle and Sailor Curt comes the story of some bartender in Richmond, VA, who seems unhappy with a recent law change which allows those carrying concealed weapons into establishments which serve alcohol. He wrote about it on his blog Jack Goes Forth.

He uses lots of profanity and over-the-top stereotypes to describe gun owners as uneducated idiots. Murdoc can’t quite figure out the logic to that one, but we see it a lot so it must be SOP. Anyway, he includes a couple of gems:

I’m honestly thinking about getting a concealed weapons permit with my spotless record and then going to these people’s places of work and seeing how they feel about someone that they have never met, walking into their front door with a handgun.

Well, we wouldn’t even know, would we? That’s the point. And if we did, I doubt we’d mind. I know I wouldn’t. Not exactly sure what the point is here.

Hide behind your 2nd amendment you uneducated [X]. When the Brits come back and try to re-colonize us, then you can tell me that I was wrong and that we need to bear arms. Until then…You’re a [X] idiot.

Ah, the old “hiding behind the Constitution” card. Just a bunch of dumb people who think that simply because something was important enough to include in the document that established our government, it actually matters. If the cops try to ticket a driver for going 20 in a 35, is the driver “hiding behind the posted speed limit” if he thinks it’s wrong?

In closing…. If you attempt to walk into my bar with a concealed weapon and for whatever reason you didn’t conceal it enough…. You won’t have enough time to draw your piece cowboy. Your face will already be on the pavement. I promise.

Hmmm. Threat of violence. In his Twitter feed he stated that he intended to “maim” if he attacked and that

I stand by my guns in bars comments. If you have a problem with it then bring your concealed gun with you. You’ll need it.

He stood by those comments so strongly that he then TOOK DOWN THE THREAT. Gone. No longer on the blog. No mention about it or why he did it. (Plus he doesn’t allow comments on his blog in the first place, probably because other people are so insecure.)

But here’s a screenshot from the Bing cache:

Jack Goes Forth

What a classy act.

A lethal gun battle

The Boston Globe:

Will it really kill legal gun owners if we restrict them to one gun purchase a month? It may kill children if we don’t.

In some neighborhoods, it’s as easy to get your hands on a pistol as on a bag of Cheetos. We’re battling an epidemic of gun violence in this state, with 14-year-olds dying. We have to do something about gangs. But we also have to do something about guns.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced 1,000 of the illegal guns recovered from criminals and crime scenes in Massachusetts last year and found that more than a third were originally bought — legally — right here.

How did they get into the bad guys’ hands? Some were stolen. And some were acquired through straw purchases: That’s where legitimate buyers purchase multiple weapons, then sell them illegally on the street.

Legislation being considered on Beacon Hill would limit gun buys to one every 30 days, making it impossible for traffickers to buy in bulk in Massachusetts.

So by their own admission, only one-third of the guns were bought legally. How many of those were bought more than one per month?

It seems that doing something about the other two-thirds of the crime guns would be more effective than limiting the rights of legal gun buyers. But that’s just Murdoc.

And they don’t quite get the “straw purchase” definition, either.

Testing Minnesota’s gun show loophole

I decided to try to buy a gun. To hear the Citizens for a Safer Minnesota tell it, this would be an easy task. I didn’t have a permit, but surely these gun merchants would insist I purchase their wares, federal red tape be damned.

As anyone who’s spent much time at gun shows knows, you can’t just buy guns without ID or background checks from dealers.

Critics of the story cry about the fact that the writer only tried to buy from dealers and not from individuals. But, whether he meant to or not, he made the point that it’s not a “gun show loophole” at all. If the antis want to ban individual person to person sales, let them try while calling it a “ban on individual person to person sales.”

A reader-written opinion piece in the Santa Barbary Independent:

One cool moist morning at Montecito Starbucks, about a year ago, I’d ordered my usual “grande”-size coffee of the day (“in a venti cup, please”) and, turning with my cup to get milk, I suddenly noticed three fit-looking youngish men in neat clothes, each displaying a conspicuously large handgun on his right hip. They seemed like police or FBI or military, but their dark blue/black apparel had no insignias of any sort that I could detect, and I looked hard at these guys.

I asked to see the manager — whose name I never learned just as I don’t recall the exact date when this happened last year — and she was incredulous at my complaints.

“These are government guys who train near here, you should be glad they’re here,” she said (or words to that effect). “We’ve had robberies lately in this shopping center. You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” I said (as nearly as I can recall at this point in time). “I live in a civilian society, and having these fellows — likely good guys, so what? — practicing ‘open carry’ of their guns in Santa Barbara County is wrong. Ask them to leave, or to go lock up their weapons in their car. Are these weapons loaded? Do you really know who they are?”

Irate now, this manager said, “Hey—you know what? You go ask them to get out!” and turned back to her work.

Our country needs more gun control enforced by the government. My minor incident at Montecito Starbucks last year connects to a national gun rights debate which has recently popped up at various Starbucks around the country.

I’m assuming that by “my minor incident” the writer is referring to his scary run-in with the guys legally carrying, though I don’t see any “incident” at all. Other than maybe a customer getting out of line with the manager. “Ask them to leave, or to go lock up their weapons in their car.”? Really?

Also funny is this bit:

And these weren’t little .22 caliber pistols sported by the out-of-uniform Montecito Starbucks warriors, but much larger and more menacing handguns in the Glock or Sig Sauer range – they appeared huge and menacing on the hip.

I didn’t know that “Glock” and “Sig Sauer” were “ranges” of guns. I thought they were brands. As usual, gun-fearing opinionators don’t seem to know a whole lot about the thing they’re so afraid of.

He closes with:

And readers should find out where their favorite coffee houses stand on openly carried weapons. Otherwise, we risk returning to the Wild West with each man armed for himself, a libertarian’s heaven but a civilized citizen’s anarchy.

Ah, yes. The old Wild West argument. Funny that Dan had been going to this very Starbucks for years without any shootouts at the OK Corral but suddenly he sees a gun and it’s the end of civilization as we know it. Never mind that the civilization that he knows permits the carrying of guns into Starbucks.

More of the usual irrational projection.

This gem from the comments section, though, is priceless:

When people use their “rights” in a way that makes most others intimidated, they are stepping on the “rights” of those people.

Someone doesn’t quite get it.

I thought all those guns meant crime would be through the roof. The way crime is covered in the news you’d sure think it was.

But according to the FBI:

Preliminary figures indicate that, as a whole, law enforcement agencies throughout the Nation reported a decrease of 5.5 percent in the number of violent crimes brought to their attention for 2009 when compared with figures reported for 2008. The violent crime category includes murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The number of property crimes in the United States in 2009 decreased 4.9 percent when compared with data from 2008. Property crimes include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson is also a property crime, but data for arson are not included in property crime totals. Figures for 2009 indicate that arson decreased 10.4 percent when compared to 2008 figures.

This is terrible, terrible news for the Bradys and other gun control groups.

It must be sad needing bad things to happen so that you can get what you want. Rather than being glad violent crime is down, you have to worry about spinning the news so that you’re still relevant.

Murdoc’s not much for all these competition shows on television, but here’s one that might be fun to follow:

Chicago Mayor Daley offers to shoot reporter to prove gun ban works

At a news conference to discuss Chicago’s gun ban and the Supreme Court’s pending ruling on the issue, a reporter from the Chicago Reader asked him if the ban was effective.

“Since guns are readily available in Chicago even with a ban in place, do you really think it’s been effective?” asked Mick Dumke.

“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”

He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.

“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”

“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”

Besides being basically a retarded thing to do, I don’t even understand what the idiot’s point was. How would shooting the reporter prove anything?

Iowa is about to become Shall Issue.

Of course, this brings predictions of blood running in the streets and the OK Corral.

Here’s a bit about how the current “may issue” law works in one Iowa county, presented as proof that it’s just fine:

In Henry County, Sheriff Allen Wittmer has created a criteria on who is able to get a concealed weapons permit and who’s not qualified.

Under that criteria, those whose jobs require a firearm can be qualified to carry a weapon. The self employed also can get a permit if they collect and transport large sums of money or other valuables. Retired police officers also are qualified.

Wittmer, too, is in strong opposition to the law change.

“I did not support it,” Wittmer said. “There’s nobody that knows their constituents better than the sheriff. It’s totally taking the discretion away from the sheriff.”

Wittmer noted out of the 18 applications he received last year, nine were denied, just by merely following the county’s criteria.

“We have it working well here,” he noted. “We have a procedure in place that works in Henry County.”

So it sounds like the only people who get one in Henry County are people who require a gun for their jobs, people who transport large sums of money for their jobs, and people who are retired cops. So, unless your job necessitates it, only retired cops get permits.

That is a great example of a working may issue system. And a great example of why shall issue is the way to go.

In the hotel here and just saw a news story about an incident in Boston where a couple of dogs attacked another resident’s poodle. Neighbors claim that the dogs, belonging to someone in the neighborhood, have been terrorizing folks for some time. The poodle’s owner had to pull the dogs off of the little dog and he was injured doing so. When police showed up, both dogs attacked them. So the cops ended up shooting and killing the dogs. Duh.

In the Fox 25 TV news report, the on-the-scene reporter made it clear (rightly, I believe, from what I know of the story) that he thought the cops were completely justified. But there is apparently a bit of a question about why they fired 11 shots. The reporter made the statement “I’m not sure why they even had that many bullets” which is crazy. Does he think that they run around with one round like Deputy Fife?

This sounds a lot like the thinking that seems to come up when gun owners carry a second magazine or speed loaders for their revolver: “If the gun is just for personal defense why would you have so many bullets?”