Nylarthotep has the skinny.

Greeley Tribune:

In a bizarre twist of events, what should have been a routine film shoot turned into a real-life thriller.

Members of a film crew got the shock of their lives Saturday when a Larimer County SWAT team surrounded the crew and ordered everyone on their knees, hands behind their heads.

The crew from Twelve Monkeys Dancing Films, a Denver-based independent film company, was shooting a scene from their current low-budget feature, “Different Kinds,” in the North Pines campground just west of Loveland.

In the scene, Chris Borden, the lead actor, plays the role of Jared, who is holding a girl hostage and pistol whips a good samaritan who tries to intervene.

Borden surmises that someone passing through the park thought there was a real hostage situation, and in a panic, called the police.

The crew had a park permit and had been shooting the movie for several hours when the SWAT team moved in.

“One of the actor’s faces goes completely white and we all turn around and we’re all surrounded by SWAT,” Borden said.

The entire crew was ordered to drop to their knees with M-16 rifles pointed at their backs and then were forced to lay on the ground for 15 to 20 minutes. Several crew members tried to explain that they were just filming a movie, but were ordered by the SWAT team to shut up.

They were issued a citation for disorderly conduct. On the one hand, it’s another incident of a SWAT team acting a bit overzealous. On the other hand, the film crew should have probably notified the authorities.

Update: Apparently, everyone says films require permits and those serve as notification. SWAT team’s fault.

Rape down, Authorities stumped

The LAT:

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has revoked the concealed weapons license of a retired sheriff’s captain who waged a fiery but unsuccessful campaign to unseat him in last week’s election, a move the candidate’s lawyer called “blatant retaliation.”

And this is why I don’t like may-issue CCW. It’s subject to abuse. In this case, it was abused by giving it to a privileged person and again abused when it was revoked for political purposes.

Slate has an interactive feature on torture. Don’t worry, it’s not that interactive. It’s really just a gussied-up web page, but there’s lots of good information there. They break down all the controversial interrogation techniques, tell you where they’re used, what the official comment is and what the international lawyers say. Better yet, they try to tell a story about how these policies arose and hilight some of the problems torture has caused.

The real legacy of American interrogation practices, post-9/11, is that practices and justifications that should have been reserved for the worst of the worst (assuming we could know who they are) began to be used indiscriminately. In the eyes of the government, they began to seem almost normal. The effect has been to turn America from the world’s leader on many issues of international human-rights law into the world’s tyrant.

Reader Chris:

While our spouses may hope for the passage of the 1 gun per month law, it is meaningless because it can be defeated by the use of straw persons.

Dr. appointments for the kids and errands. Light blogging. Let me know if anything happens.

According to the Knoxville News Sentinel Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale asked the Knox County law director’s office to file a motion in Weaver’s court asking for 180 days to amend the charter to address Weaver’s concerns.

Three months from now is September 19th. Almost six weeks after the August 3rd General Election in Knox County. Is this most hypocritical act of mendacity yet to be foiled upon the people of Knox County?

Is this enough to show the utter lack of leadership? The great issue at hand is not that we don’t have a Charter to govern Knox County but we do not have leaders to govern Knox County.

Yet ironically there is one lone voice on County Commission. Is he perhaps a prodigal son? One has to wonder about the atonement of John Schmid. One of the first to sue in court over term limits Schmid is now trying to fast track an appeal of Chancellor John Weaver’s ruling that invalidated the Knox County Charter. He is among the few that has standing to make such an appeal and he goes against the wishes of 18 other Knox County Commissioners. Schmid told the Knoxville News Sentinel, “The appeal’s been filed. We’re trying to get a quicker decision than the Charter Review Committee.”

According to the News Sentinel Schmid decided to move forward with the appeal after talking with Chief Deputy Law Director of Knox County John Owings. Schmid asked Owings if the committee would acknowledge that term limits apply to commissioners. Owings stated, “Everything is on the table, as far as term limits.”

The greatest mystery is why County Mayor Mike Ragsdale would take the chance of playing a game of who can take the moral high ground while holding back term limits for another four years. Ragsdale said term limits must stay in a revised charter yet it is clear there will be no term limits in this Knox County General Election. Is this a way of saying, “Let them eat cake”?

If ever Knox County needed a Jefferson Smith to come forward this is the time. Friday at 5:00 PM is the final time for write-in candidates to apply at the Knox County Election Commission for the August 3rd General Election. Of course Jefferson Smith was just a character in a movie. In real life heroes are much harder to find.

Pete Guthier, aka Drug War Rant, has put up a wiki voting guide so we can keep track of where candidates stand on the drug war. There’s no content on it yet, but with Pete’s involvement, you know it will soon be a valuable resource.

Seems the NYT is up in arms over limiting access to gun data. And they tell an outright lie:

These two bills would give crooked dealers more — not less — leeway in interstate trafficking. The Justice Department has warned that the worst provisions would have a “chilling effect” on gun control and law enforcement. If they had been in effect during the deadly spree of the Washington, D.C., snipers, the dealer who peddled the murder rifle and scores of other crime guns could never have been shut down under federal law.

No. Bullseye (the dealer) failed to keep records up to date and failed to report the gun missing. It was stolen. This law only affects gun data not related to criminal investigations.

The gun lobby will do almost anything to deny basic information about the gun mayhem that Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and 60 other mayors are properly pursuing through the courts.

And Bloomberg broke the law while conducting his investigation to pursue the lawsuit. And the lawsuit likely won’t advance due to the protection of lawful commerce in arms act.

The carnival of cordite is up for your gunblogging pleasure.

Gene Patterson, a local news anchor at WATE who blogs, wants to know. Well, I’ll tell you. By the time it’s on TV, it’s old news. I’ve known for a while already. That and scary commercials like Something in your house can kill you!!! We’ll tell you about it in three hours at 11:00.

I also don’t like hard hitting investigative pieces on subjects like bootie juice.

Or investigations that conclude that (gasp!) nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Or selling sexual innuendo.

Or using lame inaccurate buzzwords on a subject the reporter clearly knows nothing about.

Or when you guys are flatly inaccurate (or intentionally misleading) in a report. Then you’re called on it and you say your mistake was addressing my complaint and stick by your bogus story even though I’ve quoted the law chapter and verse to you to show you how you’re wrong/misleading. Despite my attempts to show you the law, you stick to the talking points that you Googled up from an anti-gun propaganda outfit.

All those items are, of course, my criticism of WATE’s news coverage. Is that a good start?

I’ve mentioned this push before but the NRA is now circling the wagons for the coming UN driven arms control hooey:

An American delegation will participate in a controversial United Nations small-arms conference criticized by Second Amendment advocates as a threat to U.S. gun ownership.

The U.N. Small Arms Review Conference will meet in New York City June 26 to July 7 to discuss illegal trafficking in arms, “ineffective national controls” and related issues.

The U.N.’s disarmament effort features a program in which it buys back weapons in nations torn by civil strife. But National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre insists the U.N. is concerned about more than illicit arms in African hot spots. He says the global body wants the firearms of American citizens – and much more.

It’s coming.

Via top, comes this:

My fellow liberals, arguing for gun control, say that the amendment only relates to citizens in an organized militia. The wording is unclear, but I can’t get past this: the bill of rights generally is about the rights that belong to individual citizens. I don’t know exactly what the founders where thinking, but it seems odd to think that they meant this particular amendment to only apply to organized groups. So I have to conclude, even if it challenges some of my poltical opinions, that it means that yes, American citizens have a constitution right to their guns.

But on the other side, I see anti-gun-control folks insisting that this means that any law that controls the ownership of guns is unconstitutional, and I think that’s patently ridiculous. The right to free speech is probably the most fundamental of all of our Constitutional rights, but that doesn’t mean speech can never be controlled in some ways. Your freedom of speech doesn’t include freedom to incite violence or panic with falsehoods, or freedom to libel someone. Your right of assembly doesn’t mean that the city can’t require a permit for some public gatherings. (It does mean that the way such permits are given out had better be fair, though.)

Given that, I don’t buy the argument that regulation of gun sales or registration of weapons is unconstitutional.

There’s more. Read it all.

Seems a lot of liberal types are abandoning the gun control bandwagon. Good.

Odd:

A man who had drugs and weapons inside his home is going to jail. Alvin Maxwell has been sentenced to 17 months in prison. He pleaded guilty to importing and manufacturing weapons at his home . In exchange, the drug charges were dropped.

Police would rather get a gun conviction?

Tam has a nice desktop background for the hoplophobe near you.

Ah, Congress and it’s Republican foolishness. Georgia Rep Lynn Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the 10 Commandments in the House and Senate. Steven Colbert challenged him to name all 10 and the guy barely managed to paraphrase three. Aren’t you glad these are the people running the country?

Via Milk and Cookies.

It is interesting to read the different viewpoints between optimists and skeptics concerning the Weavergate conundrum. Local optimists believe Knox County government is made up of good people doing their best and they can disagree and still be friends. Local skeptics believe Knox County government is controlled by a very few un-elected people and everything that happens, happens for a reason.

Before the Tennessee Supreme Court issued the Bailey ruling that term limits apply in Shelby County, term limits were ignored in Knox County because of a 1994 opinion from the State Attorney General that State Constitutional offices could not be term limited even though Knox County voters clearly voted in a 1994 referendum on term limits that clearly stated that all office holders in Knox County government would be held to a maximum of two terms.

One of the problems is that the English language can be imprecise. Another problem is that no matter how well a law, Charter, or referendum is worded there is always a lawyer somewhere that can challenge it using some literal absolute interpretation. Optimists may say that Chancellor John F. Weaver was doing his job and had no choice but to enforce the laws of the State of Tennessee. Skeptics may say that the fix was in from the day the Supreme Court ruled in the Bailey decision to enforce term limits.

The outcry from the public is matched by the outrage in the press. Editorials from the Knoxville News Sentinel and The Metropulse have chastised the Weaver ruling as unfortunate, outrageous, and egregious. The most telling opinion is from the Number One optimist Mayor Mike Ragsdale who said, “This would be the same as a federal judge ruling that the U.S. Constitution is invalid simply because Jefferson or Adams signed on the wrong line or that Benjamin Franklin didn’t deliver the right copy to President Washington.”

One of the most significant sources on this matter has been Richard Beeler the former Knox County Law Director who took office in 1990 and was Secretary on the Charter Commission of 1988. His appearance on the Lloyd Daughtery Show and on WBIR’s Inside Tennessee have provided more information than almost any other source. Mr. Beeler defends John F. Weaver as a good judge and astute legal scholar but disagrees with his ruling. Beeler does not seem to fit in either the optimist or skeptic camps. His point is that the Charter had no problem in the fact that the Constitutional offices were not defined. They were not defined in the Shelby Charter either. There are defined in the State Constitution.

Beeler’s other main point is that the Charter became effective upon being ratified by the people and that the return receipt from the Secretary of State is an overblown issue.

But here is where it gets interesting. Beeler notes that the term limits referendum was brought forth by a regular citizen and was not correctly written according to State law. Stop right here, this is the important part. The Charter was never the problem, the term limits referendum was the problem. The State Attorney agreed that the term limits referendum was incorrectly worded when he gave his opinion in 1994 that the Constitutional offices were not affected by referendum. Since 1994 Knox County Commissioners have used that opinion to disregard the will of the people on term limits.

The question people will ask is why did Weaver muse out loud in court that the Charter might not be valid? Betty Bean was far ahead of the curve on this when she wrote about the problem of obiter dicta.

Optimist may say that Weaver is just a very analytical judge who made this ruling in only a legal interpretation of the law. Skeptics may say there is an end game. If the skeptics are right, what is the end game?

The Geek notes that the city attorney that defended the handgun ban in San Fran position was:

We’re disappointed that the court has denied the right of voters to enact a reasonable, narrowly tailored restriction on handgun possession,

I don’t think an outright ban (Mr. and Mr. San Francisco, turn them in) is a reasonable, narrowly tailored restriction on handgun possession.

Update: What, no comment on the Mr. and Mr. San Francisco thing? Must be slipping with the gay jokes. I bet if I’d said Mrs. and Mrs., you’d have liked that. Everyone seems to like the lesbian stuff. Well, except Bob Corker.

Publicola says it’s bad ju-ju:

I’ll get to the point; it’s bullshit. All this will do is open up more records for inclusion in the NICS system. In other words they’re hoping that more folks will be disqualified because of Lautenberg, mental health records or possibly because they’re being investigated for “terrorism”.

The last part may leave you in the cold. Here’s where I get that from:

“…and (3) the Secretary of Homeland Security to make available to the Attorney General records relevant to a determination that a person is disqualified from possessing or receiving a firearm and information about a change in such person’s status for removal from NICS, where appropriate.”

I can only assume that this is an effort to grease the wheels of that “terrorism watch list’ being made at least a temporary disqualification. Why else would the department of Homeland Security be involved?

He has more. Not sure about his assessment but it is possibly a particularly slippery slope.

I step away from the blog for a bit and the supreme court pounds away some more.

Bloomberg.com:

Prosecutors can use evidence seized by police during a home search even though officers violated the Constitution by failing to knock or announce their presence before entering, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled.

The justices, voting 5-4 in a Michigan case, today put new limits on the so-called exclusionary rule, which in some circumstances bars prosecutors from using the product of an illegal search. The majority said the exclusionary rule doesn’t apply to violations of the “knock and announce” requirement for home searches.

Basically, evidence can be used against you if the police screw up by not knocking. This goes against the exclusionary rule which stated that evidence obtained unconstitutionally was invalid and could not be used. In other words, no-knock warrants will soon be standard operating procedure.

We have police who cannot legally be held to account for violating the provisions of the constitution. And we now will no longer exclude evidence obtained via violation of the constitution. So, in such a case, your recourse is non-existent.

Fuckers.

As to the details:

In the Michigan case, prosecutors opted not to argue that the entry into Hudson’s home was constitutional, instead contending that the exclusionary rule shouldn’t apply to knock- and-announce violations. The state, backed by the Bush administration, argued that those types of police errors don’t enable officers to seize additional evidence.

Scalia agreed, saying the connection between the manner in which police enter a home and the evidence they discover is too weak to warrant application of the exclusionary rule. He said the knock-and-announce rule doesn’t protect “one’s interest in preventing the government from seeing or taking evidence described in a warrant.”

That’s not an error. It is intentional.

In comments, Justin says:

I think you’re mistaken on that point, Mr. Uncle. A search at GunBroker just netted me 61 auctions selling armor piercing ammo in .223, .308, 30-06, 7.62×54R, and .50BMG.

AP ammo is only illegal for handgun ammunition.

I should have been more clear. Armor piercing ammo, as a legal construct, is different from what is actually armor piercing. Justin is correct that AP ammo for handguns is illegal but that means rounds designed to penetrate vests, whereas real AP ammo is designed to penetrate armor such as that on a vehicles. Most rifle rounds penetrate vests anyway since vests are designed to stop handgun ammo.

Sorry for the confusion.

On a page titled “Mass Destruction of Weapons “, images abound of Takarovs and Makrovs being destroyed. I wish I knew why.

I’ve noticed that Yahoo!’s search results often get me to what I’m looking for faster than Google’s. Moreover, while Google has forsaken Say Uncle, Yahoo!’s search engine has not.

Google’s days of search engine hegemony will soon be over.

The fifth panel of the first chapter of Shooting War has a good condemnation of Kelo v. New London. Good to see the issue raised, even if they cast it as a battle in the war against corporatism, rather than a fight over property rights.

The comic itself is a serialized graphic novel about a lefty video blogger covering the Iraq war in 2011 during the McCain administration. It’s well-drawn, cynical, and deft with the politics and culture. Worth a look.

Oh, and Uncle told me the way to keep you folks entertained is with explodey pictures, so don’t miss panel 7.

Update: While you’re looking at fictionalized accounts of the terror war, check this alternative history of the US/Afghan war. So scary it could be true!

Ayup. Also, ammo advertised as armor piercing is illegal.

Barbeque

How do you keep an idiot entertained for hours? Click here.

Yeah, taking my few days off before the new gig to help a friend move. Blogging still light.