I can’t get my head around the idea that it’s OK to keep a loaded weapon in the house.  There are many people that keep one for “self defense” or whatever but I just can’t do it.  Even the pistol I have locked in the pistol safe doesn’t have a round in the chamber…I can’t bring myself to keep a loaded gun in the house.  The risk/reward just isn’t there at all.

It’s these kinds of “accidents” that can easily be prevented.  These “accidents” are what keeps the ignorant public fearful of firearms and stories like this are used to back tighter legislation and further restrictions.  We need to enforce the laws on the books, this guy needs to be charged with what he can be charged with currently.

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FARGO – Police say no one was injured when a handgun accidentally discharged in a south Fargo condo early today.

Sgt. Bill Ahlfeldt said the gun’s owner had just had some repair work done on the gun and was testing it at about 1:45 a.m. to see if a round would cycle through. As he tried to extract the live round from the chamber, the pistol went off in the home in the 3000 block of 23rd Avenue South.

“It was either some type of mechanical malfunction with the weapon or operator error,” Ahlfeldt said.

The bullet traveled through an exterior wall and into an open courtyard-type area, he said.

Officers checked on residents of homes in the bullet’s likely trajectory but found no injuries and no signs that the bullet had entered another home, Ahlfeldt said.

Police plan to file a long-form complaint in municipal court against the owner for discharge of a firearm in city limits, he said.

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The Star Tribune reported that the victims included an 8-year-old boy who was shot in the head by a 13-year-old with a gun that shoots plastic bullets and a 4-year-old girl who was shot in the neck by a pellet gun as she sat outside her house with her father.

Reporting the pellet gun shooting is marginal at best.  I could see how something like that would get reported in a fargo (or smaller) news paper, but in the cities?  and to be reproduced in another town is pretty over the top…but the 8 year old shot with a plastic pellet gun?  In what world does that qualify as a “shooting”?  Are we going to start adding water guns to the list of shootings and the survival statistics?

Further down the article:

Police say three teenagers were also shot as they played football in the street.

Given that the first two “shootings” they reported on where a joke…when they come to one that sounds serious I can’t help but want more details…but naturally none are given.

That’s five of the shootings…the article reports seven…but there is no information about the other two people.  Maybe they were water gun related incidents.  Articles like this wreak of an agenda, and that’s unfortunate for the public.

full article:

MINNEAPOLIS — Seven people the age of 18 or younger were shot within seven hours in Minneapolis.

Inspector Mike Martin says none of five separate shootings Monday night appear related.

The Star Tribune reported that the victims included an 8-year-old boy who was shot in the head by a 13-year-old with a gun that shoots plastic bullets and a 4-year-old girl who was shot in the neck by a pellet gun as she sat outside her house with her father.

Police say three teenagers were also shot as they played football in the street.

The seven victims are either expected to survive or police didn’t release updates on their conditions

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Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the five justice majority saying “the right to keep and bear arms must be regarded as a substantive guarantee, not a prohibition that could be ignored so long as the States legislated in an evenhanded manner.”

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JAMESTOWN, N.D. — Jamestown police say a downtown business has reported the theft of about $4,500 worth of guns.

Capt. Gary Peterson says a window and a glass door were discovered broken at Gun and Reel Sports early Wednesday.

Eight handguns were missing. Store officials were doing an inventory to determine if anything else was gone.

Office manager Gary Docktor says the store has a security alarm but the window and door that were broken were not part of the system.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press

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A 2-year-old Milwaukee boy has died after playing with his mother’s handgun.

A Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s report says the toddler found the gun in a dresser drawer Sunday and accidentally shot himself in the face.

Authorities say Zaire Cameron was in a bedroom with two other children watching a movie. His parents were in another room when they heard the gunshot and found the toddler slumped over the end of the bed with the gun next to him.

WTMJ radio reports the boy’s mother caught him playing with the .38 caliber gun a day before, punished him and put the gun back in the same drawer.

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A BRITISH Army sniper has set a new sharpshooting distance record by killing two Taliban machinegunners in Afghanistan from more than a mile away.

Craig Harrison, a member of the Household Cavalry, killed the insurgents with consecutive shots — even though they were 3,000ft beyond the most effective range of his rifle.

“The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright,” said Harrison, a Corporal of Horse. “He went straight down and didn’t move.

“The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”

The shooting — which took place while Harrison’s colleagues came under attack — was at such extreme range that the 8.59mm bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target after leaving the barrel of the rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

The distance to Harrison’s two targets was measured by a GPS system at 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles. The previous record for a sniper kill is 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an Al-Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

In a remarkable tour of duty, Harrison cheated death a few weeks later when a Taliban bullet pierced his helmet but was deflected away from his skull. He later broke both arms when his army vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.

Harrison was sent back to the UK for treatment, but insisted on returning to the front line after making a full recovery.

“I was lucky that my physical fitness levels were very high before my arms were fractured and after six weeks in plaster I was still in pretty good shape,” he said. “It hasn’t affected my ability as a sniper.”

Harrison, from Gloucestershire, was reunited in Britain with his wife Tanya and daughter Dani, 16, last month. Recalling his shooting prowess in Helmand province, he said: “It was just unlucky for the Taliban that conditions were so good and we could see them so clearly.”

Harrison and his colleagues were in open-topped Jackal 4×4 vehicles providing cover for an Afghan national army patrol south of Musa Qala in November last year. When the Afghan soldiers and Harrison’s troop commander came under enemy fire, the sniper, whose vehicle was further back on a ridge, trained his sights on a Taliban compound in the distance. His L115A3 long-range rifle, the army’s most powerful sniper weapon, is designed to be effective at up to 4,921ft and supposedly capable of only “harassing fire” beyond that range.

“We saw two insurgents running through its courtyard, one in a black dishdasha, one in green,” he said. “They came forward carrying a PKM machinegun, set it up and opened fire on the commander’s wagon.

“Conditions were perfect, no wind, mild weather, clear visibility. I rested the bipod of my weapon on a compound wall and aimed for the gunner firing the machinegun.

“The driver of my Jackal, Trooper Cliff O’Farrell, spotted for me, providing all the information needed for the shot, which was at the extreme range of the weapon.”

Harrison killed one machinegunner with his first attempt and felled the other with his next shot. He then let off a final round to knock the enemy weapon out of action.

Harrison discovered that he had set a new record only on his return to UK barracks nine days ago. The previous record was held by Corporal Rob Furlong, of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, who was using a 12.7mm McMillan TAC-50 rifle.

Tom Irwin, a director of Accuracy International, the British manufacturer of the L115A3 rifle, said: “It is still fairly accurate beyond 4,921ft, but at that distance luck plays as much of a part as anything.”

News of Harrison’s success comes amid concern over a rival insurgent sharpshooter who in a five-month spree has killed up to seven British soldiers, including a sniper, in and around the Taliban stronghold of Sangin.

In a later incident during the tour, Harrison’s patrol vehicle was hit 36 times during a Taliban ambush. “One round hit my helmet behind the right ear and came out of the top,” he said. “Two more rounds went through the strap across my chest. We were all very, very lucky not to get hurt.”

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Department of Defense has reacted to the Ft. Hood shootings by imposing regulations on private arms possession. Muslim fanatic Nidal Hasan would certainly have stopped in his tracks if he knew he would have to violate regulations in order to carry out a mass murder. Now we only need to promulgate regulations forbidden unlicensed possession of explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then never get around to printing up the licenses, to bring Al-Queda to its knees.

link to fox news

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has signed off on a new policy regulating how privately owned guns can be carried or stored on U.S. military installations.

The policy was developed following the shooting at Fort Hood in November, which left 13 soldiers dead. The suspect, Major Nidal Hasan was able to bring weapons he bought onto the base.

The new standardized policy is part of list of recommendations accepted by Gates and adopted by the Department of Defense after a review of the November shooting.

The Defense Department announced Thursday some near-term actions to be taken to remedy the intelligence failures, including 26 of the 79 recommendations made by a panel charged with reviewing the shooting. The panel, headed by former Secretary of the Army Togo West and retired Admiral Verne Clark, former Chief of Naval Operations, announced the findings of their review in January.

One recommendation is to expand the use of the FBI’s “eGuardian” reporting system to handle all suspicious activities. The report also suggests complete deployment of the “Law Enforcement Defense Data Exchange” system to share this information between DOD agencies.

The report establishes the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs as the DoD lead for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force program, according to Fox News.

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OLATHE, Kan. — The City of Olathe has settled a lawsuit with the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri on behalf of a man filing a lawsuit for receiving a ticket for flipping an officer off and shouting “(expletive) you.”

The suit came after Scott Schaper was pulled over by Olathe police officer Craig Lundgren for failing to yield at a stop sign. The ACLU said since Schaper’s children started to cry during the stop, so as he pulled away from the stop, Schaper said “(expletive) you” and directed his middle finger at Lundgren “in an expressive way.”

Lundgren pulled Schaper over again and issued him a ticket for disorderly conduct.

On Oct. 7, ACLU Legal Director Doug Bonney sent the Olathe city prosecutor a letter pointing out that the ticket was unconstitutional. In November, the city dismissed the disorderly conduct ticket, the ACLU said.

On Thursday, the City of Olathe agreed to settle Schaper’s civil rights claims out of court in exchange for $4,000 to Schaper and $1,000 in attorney’s fees to the ACLU. As part of settlement the City of Olathe’s Police Department has agreed to provide department-wide refresher training on the proper use of the disorderly conduct ordinance, the ACLU said.

“Courts have interpreted Kansas disorderly conduct statutes and ordinances very narrowly to bar only speech and conduct that is truly obscene and thus outside of First Amendment protection,” Doug Bonney, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri, said. “Many courts — including the federal district court for Kansas — have held that saying ‘(expletive) you’ and using one’s middle finger to express discontent or frustration is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. The city has an obligation to train its officers to respect citizens’ free-speech rights.”

“The police practice of detaining and charging people for impolite behavior gives the police arbitrary power to harass citizens they do not like,” ACLU Executive Director Dan Winter said. “This practice must stop, and we are very pleased that the City of Olathe has responded to our efforts to make sure the free speech rights of its citizens are protected.”

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There is an article that I read this afternoon about a guy that seems to be on a crusade for 2nd amendment rights.  I’m not sure I’d put myself out there like that, but I’m all for anyone standing up for something they believe in.  In the article they outline an encounter he had with the police.  What happened is a little disturbing to me.  It’s not so disturbing that the police would stop him, but cuffing him and all that is pretty ridiculous.  To me that is just like cuffing someone and throwing them in the back of a police car as soon as they walk out of a bar…there’s no proof they’ve done anything wrong yet…so why stop them?  Beyond that, what they did afterward is pretty weird…I wonder how much responsibility they would have if someone else had picked up the bullets before he was able to get to them.  Again, should they cuff you…take your keys, throw them down the block and tell you not to move until the police have left the scene?  Pretty ridiculous.

Something I don’t get about the general public is why do you assume that someone who is carrying a gun openly is a threat?  The person carrying the gun in that manner is drawing attention to themselves…it’s pretty unlikely that someone up to no good is going to try and draw attention.  I could understand if a police saw someone “printing” (concealed weapon visible through clothing).  In that case I could understand checking their permit…I still don’t like it, but it makes far more sense.

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Just about everybody on the Metro Police force has heard of Tim Farrell, and he sometimes gets mistaken for a law enforcement officer.

Farrell is simply a 29-year-old wireless Internet engineer — and a gun rights crusader. He is one of what appears to be a growing number of people taking up the “open-carry” cause, advocating a constitutional right to openly carry firearms.

“The open-carry movement has gained momentum over the last four or five years because people are waking up to their rights,” Farrell says. “I don’t need a permit to exercise free speech. I don’t need a permit to be tried by a jury if I’m accused of a crime, so why do I need a permit to carry a gun if I have a constitutional right to carry a gun?”

Nevada is a better place than most for Farrell because it is “an open–carry state.” Nevada reiterates the right to bear arms in its constitution and does not have blanket restrictions on law-abiding citizens’ open carrying of firearms.

That’s why a dozen or so people who attended the March 27 Tea Party rally in Searchlight were able to openly carry firearms.

One was Dave Stilwell, a 44-year-old truck driver from Las Vegas who always carries a gun for self-defense.

He says he was jogging back from a garage sale near his house one morning last May with his .45-caliber pistol on his hip. Around Jones Boulevard and Cheyenne Avenue, a Metro patrol car rolled up slowly behind him.

A shopkeeper had called police after seeing the gun, said the officer, who took the pistol from Stilwell, removed the magazine and the bullet in the chamber, checked the ID number on the gun and then returned the weapon and ammunition to Stilwell before driving away.

“I just told the officer I was exercising my body and my rights,” he said. “In retrospect, I didn’t think that was such a big deal.

“I knew I would have contact with police at some point. Even though it’s my legal right to carry a gun, there’s a lot of propaganda out there, a lot of inaccurate information. When I started to open carry a couple years ago, I would have guessed that 90 out of 100 people didn’t think it was legal.”

So have open-carry advocates latched onto the Tea Party movement? Stilwell said that although he attended with gun in holster, his reason for going was to join others who care about their rights.

“Rights are becoming more prevalent because people feel like their backs are against the wall because of the government,” he says.

Farrell is not a Tea Partyer. He describes himself as libertarian and pro-choice on abortion. He and Stilwell are on the same page when it comes to guns, however.

Like Stilwell, Farrell says he carries his handgun wherever he goes, for self-defense. He says he has never been kicked out of a casino or other place of business but finds himself educating business owners who question why he is so brazenly armed.

Farrell says he has worn his gun many times into his neighborhood restaurant and bar near the U.S. 95-Summerlin Parkway interchange. But as he walks in one recent afternoon, a bartender who spots the gun is taken aback. She says the only pistol-packing customers she has served are undercover cops.

“So what I should have done is asked to see your concealed weapons permit because that is something that’s mandatory,” she tells Farrell.

“I don’t have a concealed gun on me,” he replies. “I do have a concealed-weapons permit but you do not need a concealed-weapons permit for a nonconcealed gun.”

“I mean, a regular permit just to carry the gun around,” she says.

“There is no permit in this state for that,” he tells her.

“It used to be years ago you would have to give your weapons to the bartender,” she says.

“This bar is private property, obviously,” Farrell says. “You can set whatever rules you want.”

“You can pull that out on me and shoot,” she tells him. “You see what I’m saying?”

“Well, of course. And that’s one of the reasons to carry openly, is for self-defense but it’s also to educate others as well that, one, it’s not against the law and, two, that not everyone with a gun is a bad guy. Certainly if there was a bad guy coming to rob you, he wouldn’t let you see the gun until it was too late.”

With that, the bartender goes about her business.

It undoubtedly helps that Farrell is not one of those guys who wears head-to-toe camouflage gear. He wears polo shirts and bluejeans.

He doesn’t have a gun collection. “I have a handgun and a shotgun, that’s all, just to keep me and my wife safe.”

When Farrell read Stilwell’s blog post about how he had been stopped by police, Farrell researched state and local laws, as well as police regulations and then conducted an experiment.

On the night of June 24, he holstered up his loaded 40-caliber Glock 23 pistol and proceeded to a sidewalk on Las Vegas Boulevard, just south of Charleston Boulevard, where he was certain he would be noticed by police. He was.

It wasn’t his first encounter with the law. While vacationing in Nashua, N.H., early last year, he was stopped on foot on the way to a bank by police who asked about his gun. Minutes later he was allowed to go about his business with gun in tow. Such is life in the “live free or die” state, apparently.

The Las Vegas Strip encounter was far more intense, with police arriving in squad cars and on motorcycles in a show of force, guns drawn. Farrell was handcuffed and his gun was confiscated, its bullets removed. Over the course of the next 23 minutes, Farrell invoked his right to talk to an attorney, told police not to touch his gun, and that he hadn’t consented to being searched and detained. He refused to answer questions about whether he possessed a registration card for the weapon, and invoked his right to remain silent.

Bottom line: He hadn’t committed any crime. After police ran a background check on Farrell, confirming his gun was properly registered, and finding that he also has a concealed-weapons permit and is not a dangerous criminal, he was uncuffed. He was handed back his gun but the bullets were dropped down one of his pants pockets and the empty magazine was placed on an irrigation box 100 feet away. He was ordered not to move until police drove away.

“I understand the need for officer safety,” Farrell said. “These guys have a tough job. But officer safety does not trump my rights. To stop me there has to be something other than the fact I have a gun. They shouldn’t have even taken my gun.”

Based on complaints from Farrell, Metro’s Citizen Review Board and internal affairs division each launched investigations into his case last summer. Although the officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing, Metro’s force had to take a refresher course on how to handle individuals who openly carry firearms.

Last month, a five-member panel of the Citizen Review Board found that police had complied with department policy related to the incident but that neither the policy nor police training at the time Farrell was stopped was specific enough on “open carry” stops. The board concluded that the police action was “the result of ambiguity among officers on how to handle an individual asserting his Second Amendment right to openly carry a gun in public.”

While cadets are trained in Metro’s police academy on how to handle constitutional rights, including those involving gun possession, the agency’s thick policy and procedure manual is silent on open-carry issues.

Andrea Beckman, the Citizen Review Board’s executive director, says Farrell’s case “brought to light the significance of how to train police officers on open carry.” Farrell’s case, in fact, was the first open-carry dispute heard by the board, and his name is now familiar throughout Metro.

A little more than a month after “the Farrell incident,” Metro’s 3,000 officers took their refresher course.

“When we don’t respond to something the way we should have, we’re quick to correct ourselves,” Metro Patrol Division Deputy Chief Kathleen O’Connor says.

The review board noted, however, that one police sergeant who confronted Farrell needed more training because it was clear from the sergeant’s testimony that if he had been given a test after the refresher, he would have failed.

The open-carry issue is tricky for police, O’Connor says, because officers are caught between preserving an individual’s open-carry rights and protecting the public from potential harm.

Of course, some police officers are not the only ones uncomfortable with the idea of lots of citizens walking around with guns on their hips. Opponents say the more guns that are being toted around, the greater the possibility that a bystander could be hit by a stray bullet, the more likely it is that a criminal will get a citizen’s gun and use it for no good. Even some Second Amendment advocates acknowledge that an individual who openly wears a gun in a crowded public area might result in the same reaction that a false warning of fire can in a crowded theater.

There are exceptions to Nevada’s open-carry rights. Among them is a state law that prohibits average citizens from carrying firearms on college campuses, at public or private schools and at day care centers without written permission from the heads of those facilities. An individual also cannot legally possess a firearm while intoxicated.

Local laws prohibit possession of guns in Clark County parks or in vehicles within North Las Vegas city limits.

Violation of the North Las Vegas “deadly weapons” ordinance, on the books since 1978, is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. The ordinance provides exceptions to the weapons ban as it pertains to “ordinary tools or equipment carried in good faith for uses of honest work, trade or business, or for the purpose of legitimate sport or recreation.” The ordinance has only been enforced in conjunction with traffic stops for other violations, such as speeding or suspicion of criminal activity, police say.

It also appears to violate the state law that gives the Legislature, not local governments, the power to regulate firearms, UNLV Boyd School of Law professor Thomas McAffee says.

“The state statute does permit some older local registration requirements, but the city ordinance here is a complete ban on possession in a motor vehicle, which seems to clearly fall within the scope of the state reservation of authority,” McAffee says.

Michael Davidson, North Las Vegas’ chief criminal attorney, said his interpretation is that the ordinance is legal because when the state law was last revised in 2007, the intent was to preserve pre-1989 local gun laws that had nothing to do with firearm registration. He said there have been dozens of cases in recent years where convictions that included violation of that ordinance have been upheld in North Las Vegas Municipal Court without a single appeal of the weapons ban made to District Court in Clark County.

“The intent was to go after gangbangers, not mom and pop in the RV,” Davidson says.

Farrell and other local open-carry advocates counter that North Las Vegas’ law is unconstitutional on its face, no matter the intent.

These advocates staged peaceful protests in North Las Vegas last year — picking up litter “to show we’re just regular guys” — and in January in front of Bally’s on the Strip, where numerous tourists had their pictures taken with Farrell and roughly 20 of his fellow gun-toters.

Farrell had given a Metro watch commander a courtesy heads-up before his armed group headed down to the Strip. The police commander thanked him for the warning, acknowledged the group’s right to assemble, but also pleaded with Farrell to cancel his plans.

The tourists who took pictures, however, encouraged Farrell and his posse to keep standing up for the Constitution, he says, and that’s what he intends to do.

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1. Always be calm and cool.

2. You have the right to remain silent.

3. You have the right to refuse searches.

4. Don’t get tricked into waiving your rights.

5. Determine if you’re free to go.

6. Don’t do anything illegal.

7. Don’t run.

8. Never touch a cop.

9. Report misconduct: Be a good witness.

10. You don’t have to let them in.

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