The AP:

A state trial judge on Monday overturned a voter-approved city ordinance that banned handgun possession and firearm sales in San Francisco, siding with gun owners who said the city did not have the authority to prohibit the weapons.

Good. As to why:

In siding with the gun owners, San Francisco County Superior Court Judge James Warren said a local government cannot ban weapons because the California Legislature allows their sale and possession.

I told you so.

I’ve been watching this show on Discovery Channel called Revolution. It’s a thirteen part documentary on the American Revolution. While watching it, I’m amazed at all the action that occurs. And that it occurs in Massachusetts. At one time, people in Massachusetts were willing to take up arms against a governing force over pretty small tax increases. Now, the government there arrests people on charges of animal cruelty for killing a seagull in self-defense.

Live free or there.

Barry has on Knox County’s invalid charter and how your vote there never really mattered. Just go here and scroll.

The Brady Crew is pushing the idea that Florida’s castle doctrine law is killing people:

A leading Florida newspaper yesterday published an analysis of incidents of violence in Central Florida that have occurred since January 1 where the state’s new deadly force law was invoked.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that in five counties in Central Florida 13 people killed six men and wounded four others, and that all but one of those shot were unarmed. The dead include a man who shook his fist at another man in a neighborhood dispute, and the wounded include a 15-year old would be car thief shot in the back of the leg while running away.

The story can be found at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl- deadlyforce1106jun11,0,2402838.story .

“The net effect of the new ‘Shoot First’ law in Florida is, unfortunately, precisely what we feared,” said Sarah Brady, honorary chair of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “People are dying who did not deserve to die. Meanwhile the legitimate cases of self-defense would have been viewed as legitimate self-defense without this law.

“Florida’s legislature should repeal this law. And other states thinking of passing this law should stop and look at the results in Florida,” Brady said.

One of the interesting things about the press release is that the link (which appears as is, I copied and pasted) doesn’t go any where. Yet, if you go to the actual article, it says:

It is too early to tell whether the law makes Floridians safer or puts them at greater risk. There are no statistics on the number of self-defense claims statewide before or after the law took effect Oct. 1.

But an Orlando Sentinel review of five months of court records in Orange, Osceola, Lake, Polk, Seminole and Volusia counties shows widespread differences in the way claims are investigated and prosecuted.

So, according to the article, there are no real statistics prior to when the law took effect. What is reported is the manner in which self-defense claims are prosecuted. The Brady Bunch, however, states that this piece shows that people are dying and initimates an increase in deaths. From the article, I see nothing indicating that.

They have to lie to win.

Via Chuck.

If you’ve ever thought the government would protect you from its own abuses, the recent domestic spying revelations have surely made the point that the only protection you’ll get is what you provide for yourself.

When you send email, it hops from computer to computer across the net in a form that can be read by anybody who cares to do so. Imagine every email is a postcard. It gets delvered by people passing it from hand to hand until it reaches its destination. Anybody handing it off can copy it, read it, or change it. People write all kinds of sensitive things in these postcards. They probably shouldn’t.

If you want more privacy than a postcard can offer, get yourself an envelope. I suggest you choose one that is tamper-resistant and very hard to open. In the world of email, that envelope is encryption.

The strongest encryption we know of is available to anybody who wants it at zero cost. It’s called GPG and works with many different email clients on Linux, Macs or even Windows. It takes some effort to set it up, but once you do, you can communicate privately with anybody.

How secure is GPG? Very. The amount of computing power it would take to break this encryption in a reasonable timeframe is more than we know exists on the Earth. Nothing is perfect, and this is as good as it gets.

Start using encryption. Encourage your friends and family to adopt it, and use it for everything from mundane chitchat to protecting sensitive business. There have been numeous attempts to outlaw encryption (from both major parties), and if it’s not in widespread use fairly soon, the current terror scaremongering might make it illegal to communicate in a way the government cannot understand.

Nobody can protect your privacy but you.

Terry Frank notes some inconsistency in how the local NBC affiliate decides what you should have access to:

OK. Let’s get this straight. A show that depicts Christianity in a bad light is a viewer decision. An ad that questions a union boss is censored.

You can make your own decisions about a show but not an ad.

Seems that in England, folks don’t like traffic cameras. So much so, that they’re destroying them. Here’s some pics of the mangled cameras.

Looks like Utah:

Utah residents volunteer more often and give more of their time than people in any other state, according to a national report released Monday.

Ok, Tennessee, get cracking.

The AP:

Murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in the United States increased last year, spurring an overall rise in violent crime for the first time since 2001, according to
FBI data.

Murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years.

Murders jumped from 272 to 334 in Houston, a 23 percent spike; from 330 to 377 in Philadelphia, a 14 percent rise; and from 131 to 144 in Las Vegas, a 10 percent increase.

Despite the national numbers, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York were among several large cities that saw the number of murders drop.

The overall increase in violent crime was modest, 2.5 percent, which equates to more than 1.4 million crimes. Nevertheless, that was the largest percentage increase since 1991.

As to why, the experts seem to think it’s because cuts in free government money and the NRA:

Criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation’s complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the 1990s and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.

“We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength.”

Is this person really intimating that the NRA’s activity has increased gun crime? I’ve seen no evidence that the NRA has done anything pro-criminal nor has it done anything to loosen restrictions on the availability of guns. The Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Justice have found that gun laws have no effect on crime.

I’m sure this is the impetus to blame the expiration of the assault weapons ban.

Update: AC encourages you to contact Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox has a whole heaping list of anti-gun credentials.

Update 2: David Hardy:

Hmm… NRA was pretty strong in 2004, too, when homicide rates fell by 2.4%.

And, strangely, in 2005, the FBI report notes, homicide rates fell by 3.9% in nonmetropolitan areas where gun ownership is highest.

And the lowest 2005 homicide increase came in the West, where gun ownship is also highest… 3.2% there, compared to 5.2% in the Northeast.

Well, that seems a bit too much, particularly since there have been no reported arrests.

WND:

If the prospect of being asked to explain some embarrassing detail about their personal lives by a prospective employer or a future romantic interest isn’t enough to deter users of social-networking websites like MySpace.com from posting it online, perhaps this will – the National Security Agency is funding research into mass harvesting what people post about themselves on the Internet.

I’m already on the list.

Rich:

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that if term limits are invalid, then most of the legislative actions of the Knox County government over the last few years is also invalid, including the regulations passed in Knox County limiting the operations of adult businesses.

Looks to me like most laws would be invalidated. Insty says:

SO IF KNOX COUNTY’S CHARTER has been ruled invalid, I guess it’s too much to hope for that I won’t have to pay my property taxes.

I installed quick tags. Now, when you comment, there are html buttons to make formatting easier when you leave comments. Yeah, the buttons are ugly but they work.

Found this via Der Commissar.

Jeff reports that Mikhail Kalashnikov has expressed some regrets about designing the AK-47:

“Whenever I look at TV and I see the weapon I invented to defend my motherland in the hands of these bin Ladens I ask myself the same question: How did it get into their hands?” the 86-year-old Russian gun maker said.

“I didn’t put it in the hands of bandits and terrorists and it’s not my fault that it has mushroomed uncontrollably across the globe. Can I be blamed that they consider it the most reliable weapon?” he said.

It gets into their hands the way they always do. If you had not built an AK, they’d be using another weapon. More:

The question is especially acute as an 11-day U.N. conference on curbing the small-arms trade convenes June 26 in New York. Kalashnikov is thinking of sending the delegates a statement.

Not sure what that statement would be but, from the article referenced, comes:

Kalashnikov said Amnesty International and Oxfam, the British charity, have asked him to write a statement for their campaign against small-arms proliferation, and he is also thinking of sending a separate statement addressed to the U.N conference.

So, Kalashnikov is getting anti-gun in his old years?

Update: The Scotsman has a different take:

I designed AK-47s to defend USSR – it’s not my fault terrorists use them

Swiss Army Knife has a jump drive.

I can’t imagine having a gun for over six years and not shooting it.

Please stand by.

Update: My host says I’m out of space, which I am not.
Odd how I can’t upload files to my server but can still post. While clearing out some stuff on the server, I find I did get a nasty gram from Google saying we’re delisting you.