www.mi6.gov.uk

Yep, Britain's MI-6 has its own website.
And M's wife now has her own Facebook page. Link.

Yeah, and the Special Air Service is on Twitter. Give 'em a tweet!

Challenge: What color is the boathouse at Hereford?

Response: How the hell should I know?

"Forced To Fight"?

Perhaps the poorest choice of words in the first sentence of a newspaper article, ever:

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan, July 3 -- Taliban insurgents stepped up attacks Friday against U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan's Helmand River valley, forcing troops in some areas to spend the day fighting instead of carrying out plans to meet with residents and local leaders.

Marines? Forced to fight? I'm sure they're disappointed.

NOT!

"Awww, Sarge! Do we have to?"

From The Washington Post by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (no link 'cause I'm Blackberrying)

The Pregnant Fighter Pilot

She's Major Stephanie Kelsen and she flies F-16s. Her nickname is "Vapor".

Dozens Of Crime Guns Stolen From Police

Interesting story on crime guns in Memphis media. Excerpt:

According to incident reports obtained [by] WREG News Channel 3 Investigators, you could fill an entire firing range with the number of department-issued guns lost by Mid South law enforcement.

The cases include:
A trooper's assault rifle, stolen from his trunk.
A Memphis City officer who lost two guns in two separate break-ins at his house.
A Shelby County deputy whose Glock disappeared after he left it on the bumper of his truck.

In all, at least 40 guns have been taken since January 1, 2007.

Observation: if an FFL lost that many guns, it would be a definite legal liability, to put it mildly.

Secondly, the head of the local group, Stop The Killing, is himself an ex-con who says he used to carry a gun. Then his adult son was shot to death; the perp is serving 23 years.

"I think most of the guns that kill are stolen guns," he says.

Couple of points:
1) Even if we woke up tomorrow morning and found that all civilian-owned firearms (all 280 million of them) had disappeared, thugs would steal them from the police. And the bolder and more reckless the criminal, the more likely he would be to be armed.
2) The numero-uno risk factor for homicide is a criminal record, not gun ownership. That fact is staring us in the face here, in the person of this local activist. It's the elephant in the drawing room.

h/t Say Uncle.

Judge Kozinski Cleared

I blogged about this over a year ago here.

The Volokh Conspiracy covers it here, pointing out:

The LA Times, which helped fan the flames of this story in the first place, reports on the decision, but curiously omits the fact that the judicial council cleared Judge Kozinski of judicial misconduct. Nor, I would note, does the LA Times item mention the opinion explicitly criticized media reports for misrepresenting Kozinski's conduct.

Ah! The media. Kozinski is one of the most committed and articulate advocates of the Second Amendment on the federal bench. He makes Scalia look like Chuck Schumer.

Here is an excerpt from Kozinski's very moving dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer (2003):

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Way To Go, Tam!

View From The Porch is the Number 6 Gun Blog Overall, #5 in number of pages per visit and #4 in total Delicious bookmarks.

Congratulations!

Guns, Crime and Canada

Fascinating article in Macleans on international crime rates with respect to Canada, and also the United States. Excerpt:

What factors determine murder rates aren’t always clear or consistent, says criminologist Gary Mauser, a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and a member of the federal firearms advisory committee. Most countries take their crime control strategies to varying degrees from all points on the political spectrum. Imprisonment, rehabilitation, prevention, policing and education all play a role. “It’s a mixture of carrot and stick if you wish and the balance and mix is the devil in the machine,” says Mauser. “How do you get that right? That’s hard.” Then there are the intangibles, things like age, economics, and the social mix. “I think demographics and social changes are the most powerful factors here, but we don’t understand what they are or how to measure them, so that’s not a very helpful explanation,” says Mauser.

Among the factors determining murder rates, levels of gun ownership is among the most overstated and least reliable, in Mauser’s view. “There is no empirical support for the claim that gun ownership is related to violence rates,” he says. Certainly Canada is not the gun-free zone you might think. It has the 13th highest civilian gun ownership in the world, according to the Small Arms Survey by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Canadians have more firepower—31 guns for every 100 civilians—than South Africa (13 per 100) Jamaica (8 per 100) or Columbia (six per 100), where murder rates surpass Canada by as much as 20-times or more. Americans are among the best-armed civilians on earth with some 89 firearms per 100 people. Their availability makes them the weapon of choice in 68 per cent of American homicides, and yet even in the U.S. murder rates have been falling. The pro-gun lobby in the U.S. credits this decline with the sharp increase in states allowing defensive concealed weapons permits, although there are no studies to back that claim. In Canada, guns and knives each account for one-third of homicides. Others victims die of beatings, strangulation, suffocation, even rampaging vehicles. “If you really want to kill someone there are lots of alternatives at hand,” says Mauser.

h/t Say Uncle.

Millionaire Dumps Fiancée

Nothing newsworthy about that, except for two things.

First, the guy broke it off in an email to the 200 people on the wedding guest list.

Second, the woman is Rachel Hunter.


Daily Mail.

Stop The Presses!

Flash! New Jersey newspaper editorial not on board with new gun control law!

The Bergen County Daily Record published an editorial today on the "one-gun-a-month" law awaiting the governor's signature. Excerpt:

It is not easy to become a legal buyer of guns in New Jersey. Among other things, it requires fingerprinting, personal references and a background check by the local police department. The process from start to finish normally takes more than 30 days. When a resident successfully completes that process, he, or she, is eligible to buy a gun. (This is not a right to legally carry a gun, which is an additional application process.)

If a person is cleared to buy a gun in New Jersey, why seek to limit the number of guns that can be bought? Many of the people who legally buy multiple guns are collectors of one type or another, or recreational and competitive shooters. Their backgrounds already have been investigated. Let them buy their guns. We have referenced those who "legally" buy guns for a reason, knowing that lawbreakers are unlikely to adhere to gun-control laws in the first place.

Wow! I was so impressed I registered just to leave a comment:

A breath of fresh air from a New Jersey newspaper on the gun control issue! Very good point: if every gun buyer has to pass such a rigorous background check before buying a gun, why limit buyers to one a month? It's unreasonable. Not that that ever stopped a legislature hell-bent on eliminating private gun ownership by the method of "the death of a thousand cuts", i.e. more paperwork, fees, registration, references, fingerprinting, tests, inspections, etc. Excessive gun control legislation may also have unintended consequences: driving up the price of black-market guns and actually increasing the supply available to the criminal, while restricting the supply to the law-abiding. Was it Hippocrates who said, "First, do no harm."?

h/t Alphecca.

Last Train To Snarksville

Peter Tork has cancer. WaPo.

Blink Twice If You Like Me

Caption: In many fireflies, pairs stay coupled for hours while the male, lower, gives the female a protein package injected with sperm, called a nuptial gift.

Make up your own joke. I'll start: "Yeah, I've got your 'nuptial gift', right here!"

Shock Value

Poster seen during a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in London last week.

Amazing. Very powerful.

The Most Heartbreaking Cars Sold In America

If ever there were a threat to the reputation of ’60s British sports cars as the most heartbreaking form of transportation sold in America, it probably would have come from Fiat.

Like classic Austin-Healeys, MGs and Triumphs of the bell-bottom era, Fiats could be lovely to look at and delightful on the road. In particular, they were loads of fun when driven with urgency — ideally with the engine screaming at maximum revs and with minimal regard to the tires’ limits of adhesion.

But they also carried the stigma of being unable to return home from dinner and a movie without an alternator dying, a fuel pump expiring or a head gasket blowing.

NYT.

Hearsay!

"Hearsay" is a radio talk show on National Public Radio, based in the Norfolk-Hampton area of Virginia. On Monday, June 22 the subject of the show was guns in Virginia.

"The ads say that Virginia is for lovers, but increasingly, Virginia is for gun lovers!"

Yeah, that sort of thing.

They interview an agent for BATFE, Mike Campbell, who offers an interesting reason for the number of guns from Virginia recovered in New York, and it has nothing to do with straw purchases or trafficking. It's due to the large number of military personnel in Virginia. Many of these people buy guns in Virginia (often at gun shops located nearest to military bases) and a year later they may be transferred to Illinois or New York, the gun stolen and used in a crime, and traced back to Virginia. And opportunistic pols claim that these guns are being deliberately trafficked, when they have actually been stolen. That portion of the show is about 9 minutes in.

http://tinyurl.com/mtd9tg

Thanks to VCDL for providing the link.

Crime Reporting

The internet is a wonderful thing for checking two or three sources to get a better idea of a confusing or shallow piece of reporting.

That's what Second City Cop did recently.

On June 26th, WBBM 780 reported on a fatal car crash at 3:30AM that took the life of a boy who was one of five passengers in a Jeep which collided with a van. Two other boys in the Jeep, ages 13 and 14, were hospitalized. The other two passengers were hospitalized in critical condition.

Another news source reported the ages of the critically injured "passengers" as 15 and 15.

Then the hospital announced the age of the dead passenger: 13.

Second City Cop made a phone call and discovered that the Jeep was stolen.

IMO the real story is that five teenagers were joy-riding in a stolen car at 3:30 AM. But what's the follow-up story?

Family: 'Wonderful Boy' Made Bad Choice

A troubled Garfield Park teenager killed when the stolen Jeep he was riding in crashed and caught fire just yards from his home was a good kid who made a bad choice, family friends said Sunday.

He'd planned to spend the summer playing in a youth baseball league. Now his family is planning his funeral.

SCC comments, and I agree:

The ability to justify any behavior perpetrated by criminals regardless of age, is astounding of late. The death of personal responsibility continues.

Oh, and the van? It was fleeing an armed robbery. The two men in the van were badly burned. One is in custody.

Friday Fly-fishing

I biked over to a little spot I know, just to practice my fly casting. I haven't had the opportunity in years. This is in my home town and just a quarter-mile from the Beltway, although you'd never know it. It's surrounded by trees and not a car in sight. I had a couple of bites from the tiny fish who live here, but I wasn't really interested in catching anything, so back they went. I had an enjoyable two hours of casting and trying different flies. I love to see the loops of line curling through the air, and there was plenty of space for long casts.

As I was packing up, I saw this little brown snake giving me the eye.

Guns In Church II

The NYT blog has a story on the armed gathering at a church in Louisville; it isn't really a "service".

Excerpt:

“This country started by people gathering together in churches and complaining about taxation and about their current government, King George the third, taking armaments that they had,” said Chesley Kemp, 61, a family doctor with his Kimber .45 auto at his side.

Dr. Kemp drove two hours from Bowling Green to attend a gun celebration here inside the New Bethel Church, believed to be the first such event in modern times.

I left a comment and I doubt they'll allow it so here it is:

That Kimber .45 that Chesley Kemp was carrying was made in Yonkers.

Another example of New York supplying guns to Kentucky.

It's Moon Bounce Day!

The day when hams bounce signals off the moon!

Farrah Fawcett

Steve Martin used to tell a joke in his stand-up routine - in the white suit, remember?

"Boy, I am so mad at Farrah Fawcett-Majors! She has never even called me, once. Not even ONCE! And after the hours I spent holding up her poster with one hand!"

When Muslims Saved Jews

Tiny Albania is the only country in Europe to have a larger Jewish population after World War II than before it. This book is about the Albanian Muslims (and Orthodox Christians and Catholics, too) who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust. An inspiring story.

Review in WaPo.