In Massachusetts, a man was sentenced to a year in prison for shooting a coworker who was busy knifing him–for the second time–even though the Massachusetts Supreme Court admitted that “it is possible that the defendant is alive today only because he carried the gun that day for protection.”
From the book “Lost Rights”, page 221.
by James Bovard
MA SC quote from Commonwealth v. Lindsay,
396 Mas. 840, 489 N.E. 2d 666, 669 (1986)
FishOrMan has recently been recently pushing the bleeding edge on coming out of the closet. I’ve long advocated it in a round about way but I never had the courage to push it as far he has. Thank you Jason. Keep us posted.
I just stumbled across a web log for criminal justice in the U.K. It has so much interesting information in it that I might find myself obsessed. Sort of like watching the emergency crews at a accident scene. It’s a tradegy and there’s nothing you can really do but see the mess the victim is in. This site is filled with stuff like this:
And:
I’ve just barely begun to read the material and I’m all the more of the opinion that the U.K. is headed for disaster and the better option for crime control is to give enable the potential victims to give the universal hand signal for “GO AWAY!”. Of course Kim du Toit has a reasonable approach as well:
…shoot the fucking goblin in the heart, at least twice, with a .45 pistol.
That is what Greg Hamilton calls, “the universal hand signal for LIE DOWN!”.
As I noted the other day www.boomershoot.org gets lots of hits from people looking for bomb building help. For the most part I just ignore the hits although I do look at most of them. This morning however I saw one that was very interesting to me. I’ll be keeping the details non-public to avoid tipping off future bomb builders but ask me in person sometime and I’ll tell you the details. The bottom line is that even though I have seen thousands of these hits I have never bothered to contact law enforcement about them–until today. I went to https://tips.fbi.gov and gave them all the information.
Tonight when I have access to my log files again I’ll be doing a graph of the number of hits per day I have been getting over the past year. That might be interesting to the FBI as well. There might be some sort of other ‘interesting’ information I can mine out of the log files also. I’ll need to think about it some more. There are some pretty nifty tools here at work I have access to as well that might help in visualizing the data.
Update: I once did send an email to Israel police based only on the log files. Below is my graph of the hits per month of people doing a search for bomb building help for the year of 2004 so far. Note that December is only about half over and if it continues at this rate it will be about 800 hits.
Update 2: I had an error in my script for counting the number of hits. Also I’ve updated the graph to include hits through December 17th.
I’m now convinced that the U.S. government know the searches done by TSA are forbidden by the 4th Amendment. Check out this story. John Barlow was removed from a plane after TSA found a small stash of recreational drugs in the bottom of his bottle of Ibuprofen which was 3/4 full of the original contents. They arrested him and after receiving a $25K bond let him out. The clincher for me is that rather than actually give him his day in court they are stalling and trying to make it too expensive for him to continue the battle. For example:
Since I was arrested, I have had to go to California four times for hearings on the suppression of evidence in this matter, every one of which was “continued”, either at the government’s request, or because the government has refused or failed to produce the evidence we subpoenaed on grounds of “national security.”
It’s a lot like when the “assault weapons ban” was challenged in court. Janet Reno claimed that the challengers didn’t have standing in court because the Feds hadn’t charge anyone and didn’t plan to either. Hence, the law stood simply because no one was allowed to challenge it. In talking with people that dealt with the ATFE I was told that the policy in regards to Federal gun laws was that no one would be charged with a violation of a gun law unless there was a major felony involved as well as the simple gun law violation. My take on that was that they didn’t want a “poster child” for the gun rights people to take to the Supreme Court. And so it is, I suspect, with this case.
The TSA, a government agency, is searching a million or more people each day without search warrents. It was bad enough when the FAA required airlines to do this, but at least it wasn’t a government agency doing the searches. Now it is a government agency. Never mind that it’s a total failure in terms of detecting “bad stuff“. And I believe it is just as much a violation of our 4th Amendment rights as it would be if the FBI were to put up road blocks around all cities and searching everyone on those roads to improve “national security“. From the actions of the Feds in this case, I think they know it too. It’s time they face reality and consider other options. Legal and effective options. Not just billion dollar options that make some people feel good and implement a police state.