Crime and Punishment: Oklahoma (& Texas) style!

[GIThruster]

I agree with everything Paper just posted, and would note that the only issue where a shotgun does not shine for home defense is in "weapon retention" meaning, because it is not always short, it can at very close range be grasped and either directed away from the target or removed from the homeowner entirely. The best answer to this is the bullpup. While it is still long enough to be easy to point, it is short enough that it is very difficult to get hold of from the wrong end. There are a handful of really excellent bullpups and bullpup conversions currently on offer but some are so hot retailers can't keep them in stock.

As a big game hunter who has slogged a .300 Win Mag through many miles of thick brush in the mountains I can tell you, it is the length of a gun that makes it a chore to carry much more than its weight, and weight is a good thing indoors defending your home as it makes the weapon slide more controllably from point to target.

The Judge is an interesting weapon but .410's don't have much potency and you certainly don't want to ever fire it in one hand. Given this, why settle for a handgun when two hands on the weapon is really required at any range? No serious shooters plan to fire even small handguns with one hand, so unless you're carrying it, the handgun is never the best choice.

[GIThruster]

Another win: http://www.ijreview.com/2015/02/244066- ... d-shotgun/

and another: http://www.ksl.com/?sid=33233102&nid

[GIThruster]

Couldn't happen in NJ:

http://bearingarms.com/concealed-carrie ... r-houston/

[GIThruster]

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... itutional/

[williatw]

Defensive Gun Use Is Not a Myth
Why my critics still have it wrong.
By GARY KLECK
February 17, 2015

It’s deja vu all over again. In a recent Politico Magazine article, Evan DeFillipis and Devin Hughes resuscitate criticisms of a survey on defensive gun use that I conducted with my colleague Marc Gertz way back in 1993—the National Self-Defense Survey (NSDS). The authors repeat, item for item, speculative criticisms floated by a man named David Hemenway in 1997 and repeated endlessly since. The conclusion these critics drew is that our survey grossly overestimated the frequency of defensive gun use (DGU), a situation in which a crime victim uses a gun to threaten or attack the offender in self-defense. But what DeFillipis and Hughes carefully withheld from readers is the fact that I and my colleague have refuted every one of Hemenway’s dubious claims, and those by other critics of the NSDS, first in 1997, and again, even more extensively, in 1998 and 2001. Skeptical readers can check for themselves if we failed to refute them—the 1998 version is publicly available here. More seriously motivated readers could acquire a copy of Armed, a 2001 book by Don Kates and me, and read chapter six.


If DeFillipis and Hughes could refute any of our rebuttals, that would be news worth attending to. They do not, however, identify any problems with our refutations, such as errors in our logic, or superior evidence that contradicts any of our rebuttals. Instead, they just pretend they are not aware of the rebuttals, even though our first systematic dismantling of Hemenway’s speculations was published in the exact same issue of the journal that published Hemenway's 1997 critique, on the pages immediately following the Hemenway article.

The authors, a couple of Oklahoma investment counselors with no graduate degrees, do not claim to have had any training in survey research methods. Like Hemenway (who is also untrained in survey methods), they believe that it’s perfectly plausible that surveys generate enormous over-estimates of crime-related experiences, as if this were the most commonplace thing in the world. The reality that survey experts are familiar with, however, is that surveys of the general public simply do not overestimate crime-related experiences.



In order for a survey respondent to report a typical DGU, she or he must be willing to report all three of the following elements of the event: (1) a crime victimization experience, (2) his or her possession of a gun, and (3) his or her own commission of a crime. The last element is relevant because most DGUs occur away from the user’s home, and only about 1 percent of the population in 1993, when we conducted our survey, had a permit that allowed them to legally carry a gun through public spaces. Thus, although survey-reported defensive gun uses themselves rarely involve criminal behavior (that is, the defender did not use the gun to commit a criminal assault or other offense), most (at least back in 1993) involved unlawful possession of a gun in a public place by the defender.

So what does research on the flaws in surveys of crime-related behaviors tell us? It consistently indicates that survey respondents underreport (1) crime victimization experiences, (2) gun ownership and (3) their own illegal behavior. While it is true that a few respondents overstate their crime-related experiences, they are greatly outnumbered by those who understate them, i.e. those who falsely deny having the experience when in fact they did. In sum, research tells us that surveys underestimate the frequency of crime victimizations, gun possession and self-reported illegal behavior. Yet DeFillipis and Hughes somehow manage to conclude that defensive gun uses—incidents that always involve the first two of those elements, and usually the third as well—are overestimated in surveys.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... OZFbpQo7cu

[GIThruster]

We all know it's for the zombies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9iYvyffAh4

[williatw]

Woman Shoots And Kills Suspected Burglar

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A man was shot while reportedly breaking into homes in a west Columbus neighborhood.

It happened Thursday around 5 a.m. on North Guilford Avenue.

Columbus Police at the scene tell 10TV a widow heard someone breaking in, grabbed her gun and shot the intruder.

“She was armed and apparently fired multiple shots at him,” said Sgt. Dave Sicilia.

The woman’s son says he bought the gun for her a week ago to keep her safe now that she is living alone, but he never thought she would actually have to use it.

Police believe the suspect also broke into neighboring homes.

Nearby residents heard the shot.

"I got up and looked into my kids’ room and made sure they were all right,” said one person.

The burglary suspect was rushed to the hospital with serious injuries. He was pronounced dead shortly before 7:00 a.m.

Columbus Police have identified that burglary suspect as 28-year-old Chirstopher Lee Willis.

Homicide is now investigating the incident.

Stay with 10TV and refresh 10TV.com for updates.

http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/201 ... oting.html

[williatw]

Kanawha County pharmacist won’t face charges in shooting



Terry Gillenwater's gun took a .45 round to the muzzle which disabled it in the robbery

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A pharmacist who fatally shot an armed robber in his drug store won’t face criminal charges, Kanawha County prosecutor Chuck Miller said Friday.

“The Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department has interviewed witnesses and reviewed the video tapes of surveillance and provided those to the prosecuting attorney’s office,” Miller said during a news conference. “We have considered them and do not believe there are any criminal charges necessary to be filed against Mr. Don Radcliff.”

The suspect, Terry Gillenwater, entered the Good Family Pharmacy in Pinch on Wednesday morning wearing a mask. He pulled a gun and pointed it at the employees behind the counter. Radcliff was one of those employees, but was armed with a pistol and a conceal carry permit. He drew his .45 caliber pistol and shot Gillenwater three times.

After one shot struck Gillenwater’s shoulder, the assailant continued to point his gun. A second shot hit Gillenwater’s gun in the muzzle and disabled it. Gillenwater continued to point and try to shoot, but a third shot put him down. Radcliff and others immediately rendered first aid, before Gillenwater died at a Charleston hospital.

“Mr. Gillenwater had done some preliminary efforts to case the pharmacy,” said Miller. “He had done some search on his iPhone with respect to drugs in the pharmacy.”

Gillenwater had entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to distribute OxyContin in December. The plea was deferred to allow him to enter a drug rehab program. The deferred status is designed to allow the charges to be dropped if the defendant successfully completes the course.

Miller said although every case is different, Radcliff’s action was reasonable. Under state law, Miller said everyone has the right to defend themselves against deadly force and the pointing of a loaded pistol a Radcliff and other unarmed, innocent customers and employees of the store met the threshold.

“We believe Mr. Radcliff was completely justified in his actions,” said Miller. “It’s unfortunate this young man died as a result of his own action, but that happens.

“I must say it took a great deal of courage for Mr. Radcliff to pull his weapon and fire in the face of a weapon being pointed at him that was fully loaded with a round in the chamber,” Miller said. “That takes a lot of nerve, but he was completely justified in doing so.”

http://wvmetronews.com/2015/02/20/kanaw ... -shooting/

2nd link showing the surveillance video:

Pinch Pharmacist's Daily Devotional Offers Comfort After Deadly Shooting

http://www.wchstv.com/news/features/eye ... OqqyjY5A5u

[williatw]

Guns and the New York Times: Why shouldn't Americans be able to defend themselves?

By Dr. John R. Lott Jr



FILE -- New York Times building (AP/Richard Drew)

Police are the single most important factor for reducing crime, but even police commit crimes on very rare occasions. Even more law-abiding than police, however, are permit holders.

With Somali terrorists threatening this past weekend to attack the Mall of America, the nation’s largest mall, the debate over allowing citizens to defend themselves has heated up again.

Gun control advocates just can’t accept the fact that concealed handgun permit holders are incredibly law-abiding. The New York Times’ recent attack on permit holders is typical. It is filled with triple-counting of legitimate self-defense cases. Murders or suicides by permit holders are blamed on guns, even when no gun was involved. In point of fact, permit holders are incredibly law-abiding. Some new evidence puts things in perspective.

Police are the single most important factor for reducing crime, but even police commit crimes on very rare occasions. Even more law-abiding than police, however, are permit holders.

Police are the single most important factor for reducing crime, but even police commit crimes on very rare occasions. Even more law-abiding than police, however, are permit holders.

According to a study in Police Quarterly, the period from January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2007 saw an average of 703 crimes by police per year. 113 of these involved firearms violations. This is likely to be an underestimate since not all police crimes receive media coverage. The authors of the study may also have missed some media reports.

So how law-abiding are police? With about 570,000 full-time police officers in the US at that time, that translates into about 124 crimes by police per hundred thousand officers. For the US population as a whole over those years, the crime rate was 31 times higher -- 3,813 per hundred thousand people.

Perhaps police crimes are underreported due to leniency from fellow officers, but the gap between police and the general citizenry is so vast that this couldn’t account for more than a small fraction of the difference.

Concealed carry permit holders are even more law-abiding. Between October 1, 1987 and January 31, 2015, Florida revoked 9,366 concealed handgun permits for misdemeanors or felonies. This is an annual rate of 12.5 per 100,000 permit holders -- a mere tenth of the rate at which officers commit misdemeanors and felonies. In Texas in 2012, the last year the data is available, 120 permit holders were convicted of misdemeanors or felonies – a rate of 20.5 per 100,000, still just a sixth of the rate for police.

Firearms violations among police occur at a rate of 6.9 per 100,000 officers. For permit holders in Florida, it is only 0.31 per 100,000. Most of these violations were for trivial offenses, such as forgetting to carry one’s permit. The data are similar in other states.

Clearly, people who are going to commit crimes don’t bother going through the process of getting a concealed handgun permit.

At some point, maybe the New York Times and other gun control advocates will realize that making false claims about permit holders actually endangers public safety.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/02/ ... hemselves/

[GIThruster]

Heroes at it again. . .

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/03/278438- ... aign=Crime

[GIThruster]

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... -neighbor/

[williatw]

Uber driver, licensed to carry gun, shoots gunman in Logan Square



Gun-wielding Uber driver takes down man firing at crowd, prosecutors say. (WGN-TV)

Authorities say no charges will be filed against an Uber driver who shot and wounded a gunman who opened fire on a crowd of people in Logan Square over the weekend..



The driver had a concealed-carry permit and acted in the defense of himself and others, Assistant State's Attorney Barry Quinn said in court Sunday.

A group of people had been walking in front of the driver around 11:50 p.m. Friday in the 2900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue when Everardo Custodio, 22, began firing into the crowd, Quinn said.


The driver pulled out a handgun and fired six shots at Custodio, hitting him several times, according to court records. Responding officers found Custodio lying on the ground, bleeding, Quinn said. No other injuries were reported.

Custodio was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic hospital, where he was treated for gunshot wounds to the shin, thigh and lower back, authorities said.

Custodio, of the 2900 block of North Ridgeway Avenue, was charged with aggravated assault and unlawful use of a weapon charges. He was denied bond during the Sunday court hearing.

The Uber driver, a 47-year-old resident of Little Italy, provided police with a valid concealed-carry permit and a firearm owner's identification card, Quinn said.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... story.html

[williatw]

Armed grandma stops would-be robber: ‘Back off or I’ll blow your head off’



Jewell Turner, 74, told a would-be robber on April 20, 2015 that she would shoot the man in the face if he didn’t walk away. (Image: NBC 5 Dallas Fort Worth screenshot

By Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Wednesday, April 22, 2015


An attempted robbery in Fort Worth, Texas, was thwarted when a gun-toting grandmother told her would-be assailant to “back off or I’ll blow your head off.”

Jewell Turner, a 74-year-old widow, was accosted while sitting in her minivan Monday by a man who initially asked for directions, but then stuck a knife to her throat and demanded the contents of her purse, a local NBC affiliate reported.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to hurt you, but I want your money. And I will hurt you if I have to,’” Ms. Turner told the station. She only had $1.62 in change on her at the time.


PHOTOS: Best concealed carry handguns


Ms. Turner considered defending herself with an old knife that belonged to her husband, but opted for her pistol instead.

“I just reached down, got the gun and turned around and pointed it to his face. And I told him, I said, ‘You back off, or I’ll blow your head off.’ And his eyes got big and he just backed up and he took off walking down the street like nothing happened,” she told the station.

Ms. Turner said the experience has left her a changed woman.

“This let me know there is a dark side. I noticed there was a dark side in me, too because when I first pulled that gun on him I actually wanted to shoot him. But I stopped and thought about it,” she told the station. “I just hope they find him before he hurts somebody — or somebody hurts him.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -back-or-/

[MSimon]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... -homicides

Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government

Maybe it is time we got away from Police protection and got more into self protection. It might also be good to reduce the intrinsic level of violence by ending Black Markets.

It took us from 1920 to 1933 to learn that lesson. Which was soon forgotten. Because we have been unwilling to relearn that same lesson from 1937 to the present. And the main cause of the new Black Market was an enforcer of the recently ended Black Market. Harry. J. Anslinger. Them police types know where the profits are.

Maybe it is time to cut back on the regulatory/police State altogether. The police call themselves enforcers.

Every tax, every regulation comes with it an army of bureaucrats and behind that an army (with guns) of enforcers.

[williatw]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... -homicides

Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government

Maybe it is time we got away from Police protection and got more into self protection. It might also be good to reduce the intrinsic level of violence by ending Black Markets.

Right on both counts the 2nd amendment never intended for us to surrender our right to protect ourselves and our possessions to the police who have no specific legal obligation to protect us as individuals from anything.


From your link:

Academics and specialists have long been aware of flaws in the FBI numbers, which are based on voluntary submissions by local law enforcement agencies of paperwork known as supplementary homicide reports. No law requires local agencies to fill out the reports, and some agencies do not, especially not for officer-involved homicides, according to experts who have studied the issue.


But no accredited source had publicly ventured to claim that the numbers published by the FBI were more than 100% wrong. That’s notwithstanding an unusually public airing of doubts about the numbers by the FBI director, James Comey, in a speech at Georgetown University last month. “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people were shot by the police in this country – last week, last year, the last decade – it’s ridiculous,” Comey said.

In other words local law enforcement agencies only have to report their shootings/killings of us serf/citizens to the feds if they see fit...they have no legal obligation to do so. Gee...what could possibly go wrong with that. Unfortunately...too many of those with a conservative bent look at it like this: The crime rate is way down, and if it takes police misconduct/brutality/biased enforcement of especially the WOD to accomplish that it is a price worth paying. After all your average upper-middle class white male over 55 doesn't worry too much about being a victim of police misconduct; (with the possible growing exception of asset forfeiture) he knows law enforcements eyes are directed elsewhere.