illegal

Photography Is Not A Crime – Cameras Are The New Guns

When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop.

The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested.

Check out the full Story – HERE

Absolutely insane that laws like this were able to pass. Police are public servants who are being paid to enforce the law. Pretty disgusting that some of them think they can break the law and suffer no consequences.

If you want to raise your blood pressure check out the Photography is Not A Crime blog – HERE

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The Chicago Handgun Ban Challenge – What Will Today’s Outcome Be?

James from HellInAHandBasket points out an awesome article in the Associated Press about today’s challenge to Chicago’s 28 year old handgun ban:

CHICAGO – A couple worries that burglars who tried to break in when the wife was home alone will return. A retiree fears the drug dealers and junkies just outside his window will attempt — again — to steal what he spent a lifetime earning. And a businessman wants to protect himself as he could when he was a police officer.

On Tuesday, the four will take their seats inside the U.S. Supreme Court as their attorneys argue a lawsuit that bears their names: David and Colleen Lawson, Otis McDonald and Adam Orlov.

The four plaintiffs are not stereotypical gun rights advocates. They don’t represent the agenda of any national group or organize rallies. Instead they represent average Chicagoans — the kind of people that opponents of the city’s ban say should be allowed to protect themselves from gun violence.

Full Story – HERE

CNN Showing both sides of the story here:

Full CNN article – HERE

I applaud the kindness of Diane Latiker with her “Kids off the Block” program, I think that is great that those kids have a place to go to escape gun violence. She supports the handgun ban because she “would rather something be in place then nothing be in place”. I’d be willing to bet that all those 200+ people that are represented in her memorial did not did at the hands of law abiding citizens. This is one of those criminals do not care about the law type things, where it’s easy to see that banning handguns in Chicago does not make them any harder for criminals to get. It is the regular person that needs to protect themselves from the criminals.

Although I don’t live in Chicago, I anxiously await the outcome of McDonald v. Chicago (08-1521).

A repeal of the ban would be a huge Second Amendment victory.

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Posted by: ENDO-Mike March 2, 2010
Categories: Guns
Tags: 08-1521 , 2nd , amendment , ban , chicago , court , criminal , handgun , illegal , lawson , lawsuit , legal , McDonald , orlov , posession , protection , rights , supreme

CoBIS and NY – Some questions

CoBIS

Combined Ballistic Identification System

A system where the shell casing of a bullet, (or brass) from a fired round is supplied by a gun manufacturer in an approved container shipped with a new handgun that is shipped to the NY State Police when the gun is sold or if the new handgun is shipped to the Federal Firearms License holder, the FFL takes the gun to the State Police Lab to be test fired and the lab keeps the shell casing and the fired bullet.

The shell casing is scanned into a computer data base to be compared against shell casing recovered from a crime location.
This program has has NO success in NY while costing $4,000,000 to start and an estimated $4,000,000 a year to maintain or an average cost of about $200 per legal gun.
CoBIS only collects information from legal guns that are new and have not been linked to a crime and the size of the data base in New York alone is in 10s of thousands of guns and will, within the first 3 years included almost 66,000 data files with almost 22,000 new handguns being added each year. (Source)

Questions:

This program is been around for 8 years and has had no success… so why is it still sucking up millions of tax payers money?
Does the shell casing always has to be matched to striations (marks from the guns rifling) on a bullet found lodged in something at the scene, and both of those tied back to the gun? Or is it considered enough evidence if just two out of three are available?
Why would someone that is legally buying a gun want to take the risk of being in a database such as CoBIS?
Should we all take collecting our own brass at the range a lot more seriously if systems like this are going to be used to assign guilt?
Doesn’t the firing pin, and barrel rifling slightly change over time with normal wear? How is this taken into account?
We know that criminals can pick up their casings at a scene, modify the rifling of the gun, modify the firing pin to produce a different imprint. So why have a costly system that is rendered useless if even one of those happens?
Since New York isn’t an impenetrable fortress, where nothing can get in or out. What use is this database if a criminal can just bring in a gun from another state to commit a crime?

Hat Tip: Say Uncle

4 COMMENTS