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This is just plain tragic. Long story short: Rather tasteless Myspace prank gets out of hand. Group of guys get together and form a lynch mob to go after the kid they think posted it. This group shows up at the kid’s house, shouting racial epithets and threatening to kill him. The kid’s father shoots one of them in the face amidst the confusion while trying to defend his son.

And now the father has been convicted of manslaughter and possession of an unlicensed handgun.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Oh, and wait, it gets even more insane. Al Sharpton is up in arms about it too:

Angered by the ruling, the Rev. Al Sharpton vowed to take a stand against the “dangerous signal” sent bythe White verdict.

“Are we sending a signal that if you’re black in this country and you defend your home, that’s different than if you’re white?” he asked.

Sharpton contrasted White with Bernhard Goetz, who was celebrated as a “subway vigilante” after shooting four black youths who he thought were trying to rob him in 1984.

“Here’s someone who came to someone’s house to do harm and he defended himself,” Sharpton said of White. “Why is Goetz a society hero and John White is a demon?”

Umm, Al, you sanctimonious asshat, this exactly what you wanted! This is the end result of the very same anti-self-defense laws you’ve been trying to push on everybody– black or white –for years! You’ve been supporting racist gun laws for this long, and you’re only upset about it now?! Shouldn’t this verdict please you?

Grrr. I think my brain just exploded..

Our Attorney General, Bob McDonnell, announced yesterday that Virginia will be joining the multi-state amicus against DC in the upcoming SCOTUS showdown over the Second Amendment.

Speaking about his decision to join an amicus brief supporting the individual right to bear arms, Attorney General McDonnell noted, “The right to bear arms secured in the Bill of Rights is a right “of the people.” We believe that our founders declared, in the Second Amendment, that American citizens have the personal right to bear arms as individuals.”

McDonnell continued noting, “Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas will file the lead brief with the Supreme Court in defense of this position. I have informed him that Virginia will join the multi-state amicus brief in support. The Heller case will likely be the most important Second Amendment case in American history. The result will have significant implications on individual liberty and the power of government. For this reason it is imperative that Virginia’s position on the fundamental individual right to bear arms is clearly articulated.”

For those playing along at home, notice that he states this is about personal liberty and a fundamental individual right, but doesn’t mention a damn thing about hunting, “sporting purposes,” or some such. Brady Bunch folks should pay special attention to this, as we will be coming for 922(o) and 922(r) next.

And on that note, Bob McDonnell totally just won my vote in the 2009 Gubernatorial election.

After decades of spreading the myth that the Second Amendment only applies to the state, it looks like the media (and the left in general) increasingly wants to apply that same “logic” to the First Amendment too. I.E., there’s a growing chorus who seem to think freedom of speech and freedom of the press should only belong to “authorized journalists” of some sort. Here’s a roundup of a few posts on the subject from today:

Over at Armed and Safe, 45superman tears into an article he found about online “extremism.” The general theme of which is that the government should regulate websites because the gun-control crowd doesn’t like people being able to counter their propaganda with facts and stuff.

David Codrea at The War on Guns posts about an editorial which takes it one step further, and calls for licensing the press to silence those pesky “citizen journalists.” The editorial in question tries to justify this tyranny with the apocryphal threat of hoaxes, and cries about how CNN and others must then debunk them. Does he mean the same CNN who quite regularly fabricates “news” on its own?

Speaking of hoaxes, GamePolitics is reporting that NY Governor Eliot Spitzer is using one (and inventing a few of his own) to support his effort to censor video games. Even if the government had the power to regulate speech on the internets, how would that help when they can’t even recognize obvious satire when it slaps them in the face? Let alone when said government makes up “facts.”

So, yea, between these, and the push from the left to bring back the so-called “fairness doctrine,” other attempts to censor video games (including at least one bill to regulate action games with religious themes), or newsman Tom Brokaw saying video games and blogs are “cancerous,” it seems to me that the anti-gun left and their media darlings really do hate the First Amendment as much as the Second. And at the same time, they expect us to believe Bush is the fascist.

Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot…

This is priceless. Mitt Romney wants to ban “weapons of unusual lethality” if elected, yet is bragging about an NRA endorsement he never got.

Methinks he’s just out flip-flopped John Kerry..

Oooh, look, more PSH from the Brady Blog. And once again, it looks like they’re resurrecting ye olde “cop-killer bullet” myth. Looks like they’re getting desperate now:

Yet today assault weapons remain perfectly legal to buy in gun stores and gun shows across the country, in unlimited quantities. Perhaps even more shocking, the type of bullet many assault weapons fire (7.62mm full metal jacket) can penetrate four categories of police body armor. There is no legitimate reason the public should have this kind of access to military-style assault weapons.

Umm, Paul (or whoever writes this tripe), pretty much every flavor of centerfire rifle ammunition will penetrate soft, police body armor. This is why the armor is only rated for handgun rounds. And for that matter, 7.62×39mm ammunition isn’t especially powerful when it comes to rifles.

There’s your 7.62×39mm, with the even less powerful 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge used by the AR-15 to its right. In fact, the 5.56mm (and its non-NATO-branded twin, the .223 Remington) is pretty much the least powerful centerfire rifle round on the market. On the left are two of the most common rounds used by hunters. Both are much more powerful than the ones on the right. All of the above can pierce soft body armor.

So, yea, do you seriously believe the words that are spewing from your keyboard when you say they have no “legitimate” use? Are you seriously suggesting we ban all centerfire rifle ammunition? And most importantly, do you seriously expect us to believe you when you say you don’t want to ban all guns?

Anyhow, good luck trying to get that ban pushed through Congress. No, really, good luck. It would be quite entertaining to watch you try. It would be even more entertaining to watch your Constitution-hating co-conspirators in Congress get voted out en masse like they did in ‘94..

I’m a bit slow posting this because it’s just hard to keep up with the Brady Blood Dance Congo Line. But, yea as usual, the Brady Bunch is capitalizing on fresh corpses in order to push their agenda like a pack of vultures. And, like usual, they’re twisting and omitting facts like crazy. From their front page:

We are saddened by the recent shootings that left four people murdered and four more wounded at a missionary training center and a church in Arvada and Colorado Springs, Colorado. This follows on the heels of the shooting in the Omaha, Nebraska mall where eight people were murdered and five wounded. Our sympathy and prayers go out to all of the family and friends who are grieving.

Having a military-style assault rifle with high-capacity ammunition clips, enabled two troubled young men to kill and injure innocent people quickly and efficiently. Allowing the easy acquisition and possession of military-style weapons like this is foolhardy and the results are tragic.

So high-cap “clips” enabled both of them, eh? But, umm, the Colorado shootings left eight people injured or dead, in two separate incidents. That’s one single ban-compliant magazine worth of ammo, or a revolver reloaded between locations. How would the “assault weapon” ban prevent that? Oh, right. It wouldn’t.

Now, is it just me, or does their second paragraph sound like an advertising campaign for “assault weapons” begging lunatics to use them? I was just thinking the other day how their propaganda reads almost like a manual for would-be mass shooters. And seeing as they’re self-proclaimed experts on “gun violence,” would it really be surprising if someone used their hype as a shopping list? Especially with their friends in the media giving them so much free air time.

Naturally, they blame the availability, but can anyone think of a single massacre involving an “assault weapon” before they started campaigning against them? Before 1934, when real machine guns could be bought with no questions, the only known school massacre involved a bomb. Back before the 1968 import ban on semi-auto rifles and the ban of mail order, the largest mass shooting was at the University of Texas, and that involved a bolt-action rifle. If it’s really about availability, shouldn’t that be backwards?

And isn’t it quite convenient that they make no mention of the fact a woman with a CCW stopped the attacker? But then, seeing as they’ve always been against concealed carry, I’m sure they’d have preferred her unarmed and dead. Perhaps they should just change their name to The Brady Campaign to Promote Gun Violence.

Next up, Paul’s Blog (or whoever writes it for him) has a list of shootings involving “high-powered” “assault weapons,” which, presumably, he’s implying would have been stopped by the now expired ban. That would probably be a really scary list if 90% of the things on it weren’t things that aren’t “assault weapons.” Seriously, there’s even several incidents where revolvers were used. Revolvers!

Just looking at the first two on the list which involved something that resembles an “assault weapon” shows they’re lying or ignorant. The Omaha shooter supposedly used a WASR-10, which was not covered by the ban. And the link to the article about the Idaho shooting just under it says a real, fully-automatic AK-47 was used. The sale of which was banned in 1986, and the importation banned in 1968. How is another ban going to stop something which is already banned?

And, gee, I wonder why Paul (or whoever) left out this shooting…

GamePolitics is reporting that Minnesota Congresswoman, and Nanny Statist extraordinaire, Betty McCollum wants the video game industry to do just what the censors at NIMF want. If not, she’s threatening to sponsor some bill by some other statist moonbat from California which would ask the FTC to study game ratings.

It seems her main gripe is that the industry should “adopt a clearer, more universal ratings system.” Umm, Congresswoman, how can the ratings get any clearer than this?

On the left is the ratings label from GTA San Andreas. On the right is a Shaun of the Dead DVD. Not only is the game label like ten times bigger and in colors that are actually legible, there’s another big label on the front which movies do not have. As such, any FTC report would probably consist of about seven words:

“The ratings are already clear, you idiots!”

And being that I just did all the hard work, can I have Federal funding now?

Via GamePolitics, we learn that the National Institute on Media and the Family have just released their 12th Annual Video Game Report Card. Much like every other anti-freedom lobby out there, they have invented a new so-called loophole out something that isn’t forbidden.

Rather than admit that its current procedures fail to prohibit children and youth from accessing adult content, the ESRB suggested that people who hack into games like Manhunt 2 are committing a crime. According to the ESRB, it is illegal to use Manhunt 2 for anything but its intended use. Besides, the ratings board has to rate more than 1,000 games a year; the ESRB simply doesn’t have time to look at a game’s code.

This argument is nonsense. M-rated games, officially anctioned for 17-year-olds and widely available to much younger children, should not contain easily unblurable or unlockable AO-rated adult content, “blurred” or not. The ratings procedures should take into account not only all the official content of regular gameplay, but all of the code on the discs. Under the current system, the ESRB fails to discourage hackers and makes adult
content all the more enticing to children in its right-under-their-noses secrecy.

It seems that the software manufacturers behind the ESRB are trying to get around their own rules. In the past, we have commended the software makers for creating an entity, the ESRB, to hold themselves accountable. It’s time to close loopholes in the ratings procedures to ensure that game makers are living up to the responsibility they have claimed to accept.

And just like every other anti-freedom lobby, they either have no idea what they’re talking about, or are intentionally misrepresenting the facts to promote their agenda.

First off, there is no “Adults Only” content in Manhunt 2. To get the M rating, Rockstar removed the plier castration, and a couple of other executions. Everything else was seen by the ESRB, and rated accordingly.

Second, given the dynamic nature of games, one cannot simply remove the “blurred” content. It isn’t like a movie or painting where the scene is permanently altered upon production. All content in a game is rendered on the fly. If you removed all the violent content from Manhunt 2, there wouldn’t be a game there anymore.

Third, it doesn’t really matter what’s removed or how well anything is “locked.” Anyone with the ability to mod any “blurred” material can hack in pretty much whatever they like. If one were inclined to do so, one could tweak innocent, existing assets in Barbie Horse Adventures, and make it into a bestiality sim. Again, games are rendered on the fly, and by prodding the code, you can make it do lots of things the developers never intended.

Likewise, I can spot at least a dozen obscene words which could be “unlocked” by highlighting letters in the portion of the NIMF report quoted above. Why aren’t they trying to close the “letter cloud” and “consonant and vowels” loophole?

Fourth, umm, how is it “nonsense” that the ESRB doesn’t have time to look at every game’s code? It takes a team of game developers years to write the code for one game. It takes modders on the outside years to understand the code in one game. Even with a community of thousands of people at GTAforums who have been modding the GTA3D series for like seven years, we still don’t know everything about San Andreas.

Were the ESRB to review every line of code and every asset in a game, it would probably take about 100,000 years for them to rate six months worth of game releases. Even then, as I’ve said above, modders can easily rearrange content however they like, or simply add their own.

A few days ago, famous liberal writer, Naomi Wolf, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where she said the Second Amendment keeps people’s homes safe from government intrusion. Lots of people assumed it was just a typo, and that she really meant the Fourth Amendment. But after she received a bunch of e-mails about it, she wrote a follow-up clarifying she was in fact referring to the right to keep and bear arms. Sorta..

Many writers have asked whether I intended to refer to the Second Amendment when I mentioned that we have been free of intimidation by the government that other citizens experience around the world. I did indeed intend to refer to the Second Amendment, though not in the sense that most of the email about this assumed. I was referring to militias — “a well regulated Militia” –not to private gun ownsership.

Often today, the Second Amendment is associated in our minds with the private right to bear arms, which is the subject of a case–District of Columbia v. Heller–at the US Supreme Court this year. Rather, I was referring to the historical origin of the Second Amendment, as the protector of local militias that would be more closely accountable to the people than a federal army.

Aww, you’re sooooo close Ms. Wolf. The militia isn’t just closely accountable to the people; it is the people. This much should be readily apparent by looking at US Code, or by looking at the laws in most of the several States. Or, we could look at the words of the people who were around when the Bill of Rights was ratified to see what the militia is..

I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.

– George Mason, 1788.

Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American … The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.

– Tench Coxe, 1788.

It is no doubt quite impressive for an extreme left wing writer (who previously advised Bill Clinton, no less) to come to the realization that the militia is intended to protect us from the Federal government. However, and maybe it’s just me, but it really kinda seems like she’s still clinging desperately to that last inch of the statist lifeline of modern liberalism. It’s as if she expect State and local government– or pretty much anyone but herself –to defend her from tyranny.

That’s all well and good in theory, but what happens when the more local forms of government go along with a move to tyranny? Will the State Defense Force really protect you if Governors are bought off by a promise from a would-be dictator that they can rule their fiefdom as a virtual warlord? And how many city governments will rise up when they are nearly dependent on Federal funding to operate already?

No, if her Ten Steps to Fascism should ever become a reality, it will only be after government of the several States and their cities acquiesce to the power of a would-be dictator; be it through fear or greed. Should this ever happen, it will be the people who must defend their own liberty.

And should this time ever come, those waiting for the state or anyone else to come to their rescue like some mythical knight in shining armor will be sorely disappointed. Freedom is not free, and if you’re not ready to pay for it yourself, don’t expect anyone else to hand it to you on a silver platter.

But, yea, Ms. Wolf, if you ever read this, my advice would be to take one more sip of coffee as you awake from the deep sleep of state dependence. Take the red pill. Then join us in the fight for true, personal independence. Judging by the evolution of your writing recently, you might just make a good libertarian yet.

Oh, and while you’re at it, add the 11th Step to your list mentioned by Mr. Smith over at the JPFO.