Watch out for the one with your name on it.
In the annals of proportionate response: a southern California criminal came up to a police station, swinging a baseball bat. Now, the cops inside could easily and legally have drilled him one, because there is no question that a baseball bat constitutes deadly force. How many times has a headline here read: “When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Baseball Bats” or some variation thereof? We checked: 13, almost three a year. Most of ’em fatal to somebody.
(Crims are even killing people with baseball bats in England, where nobody plays the American sport of baseball — and yet, no one seems to be killing people with bats in Japan, where baseball’s a popular pro sport. And in both countries, lots of guns are functionally outlawed).
But they didn’t do that. Instead, they took the citizens in their lobby to safety, and then got ready to swarm him, while a young and fit cop circled around, looking to make a blindside tackle.
Batter up! Nope, batter down. Dumbass brought a baseball bat to a football game, and got the tackle of his lifetime for his pains.
This description is from the YouTube page, and it hints that the would-be Babe Ruth may be experiencing mental difficulties (that word “evaluation” is not usually a reason for hospitalizing you, apart from the goings-on going on in your Brain Housing Group).
Monday, February 27, 2017, a man carrying a baseball bat walked up to the front lobby of the West Covina Police Department and began striking the large glass windows. Seated inside the lobby by the windows were three women who immediately ran and entered a secured area of the lobby.
As officers responded from within the police station, the suspect walked up to the entry way repeatedly swinging and striking the glass entry doors threatening to enter. A West Covina PD officer who had been outside saw what was happening and ran up to the suspect, tackling him to the ground. Other officers then assisted in taking him into custody. The suspect suffered minor injuries from the fall and was transported to a local hospital for treatment.
None of the women were injured. The outer glass of the police department did not break from the impact strikes made by the suspect. Arrested for Assault with a Deadly Weapon and Resisting Arrest was Christopher Rivas, 28 of West Covina. The suspect was cited and released to the custody of the LA County Medical Center for treatment and evaluation.
via Man Swinging A Bat At A Police Station Gets Spine Shattering Tackle By A Cop! – YouTube.
The cops handled this well. With the citizens from the lobby behind their cypher lock, would-be Bat Boy couldn’t harm anything but property. The approach they chose minimized the risk of danger to everyone: cops, bystanders, and suspects. At the end of the day, the suspect’s in the bag, the disruption’s over, and nobody’s seriously injured or inconvenienced.
Well played, West Covina PD. We assess a penalty on your opponents, the Crims. The ball’s in your possession, first and ten.
How Many Foreign-Born Terrorists?
President Trump spawned a series of news stories calling him a liar when he said at an address to Congress in Joint Session that “the vast majority” of terrorists convicted for planning or carrying out terrorist attacks in the USA were “from outside of our country.” Here’s what he said (from the official WH transcript), with the key sentence highlighted:
Our obligation is to serve, protect, and defend the citizens of the United States. We are also taking strong measures to protect our Nation from Radical Islamic Terrorism.
According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted for terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country. We have seen the attacks at home -– from Boston to San Bernardino to the Pentagon and yes, even the World Trade Center.
We have seen the attacks in France, in Belgium, in Germany and all over the world.
It is not compassionate, but reckless, to allow uncontrolled entry from places where proper vetting cannot occur. Those given the high honor of admission to the United States should support this country and love its people and its values.
We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America — we cannot allow our Nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.
Now, you might expect his political opponents to zero in on his prescriptions, but instead, they accused him of making up his facts.
I
n an “AP Fact Check,” AP reporters Calvin Woodward and Christopher Rugaber write:
THE FACTS: It’s unclear what Justice Department data he’s citing, but the most recent government information that has come out doesn’t back up his claim. Just over half the people Trump talks about were actually born in the United States, according to Homeland Security Department research revealed last week. That report said of 82 people the government determined were inspired by a foreign terrorist group to attempt or carry out an attack in the U.S., just over half were native-born citizens.
If they were making the claims about the same thing, they can’t both be telling the truth, right? And if they’re making the claims about different things, while the Associated (with terrorists) Press is asserting they’re addressing the same thing, then it’s the AP that’s lying, right?
But they’re not done calling Mr Trump a liar.
Even the attacks Trump singled out weren’t entirely the work of foreigners. Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his Pakistani wife killed 14 people in the deadly 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California, was born in Chicago.
It’s true that in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the FBI’s primary concern was with terrorists from overseas feared to be plotting attacks in the United States. But that’s no longer the case.
Now, we’re far afield from the supposed fact check, but today’s reporters just can’t get over themselves as opinion columnists, can they?
The FBI and the Justice Department have been preoccupied with violent extremists from inside the U.S. who are inspired by the calls to violence and mayhem of the Islamic State group.
Actually, that’s quite mistaken. For the eight years of the Obama Administration, the DOJ was preoccupied with the “right-wing terrorist extremists” from the list created as a fund-raising measure by the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose main objective is ensuring that Morris Dees and his heirs and assigns be towards the right side of the continuum on a line that begins with “Poverty” and ends with “Bill Gates.” So far, so good, as frightened donors have made Dees worth tens of millions.
Infidel! I keeeel you! I am native American terrorist — from Jeff’s workbench!
But you can’t keep the donors frightened unless the steel curtain of Fascism is ever descending on the United States. (And the whole racket would stop if said curtain ever actually arrived).
So, what else will they do to obfuscate the fact that their fact check has yet to produce contrary facts? Let’s try a little time travel, Associated (with terrorists) Press style.
The Justice Department has prosecuted scores of IS-related cases since 2014, and many of the defendants are U.S. citizens.
And note: they’re now comparing “since-2014” oranges to those “since-9/11” apples. Why would they do that?
Or they grow up to be reporters! And lie to their moms that they play piano in a whorehouse.
There are two possibilities. (1) They are so innumerate that they do not realize 2001 ≠ 2014. That sounds prima facie ridiculous, but we’ve known some reporters, and most of them couldn’t compute a 15% bar tip with the help of a staff of black ladies with slide rules. So, it’s possible. Or, (2), they do know 2001 ≠ 2014, and they’re trying to lie about whether the President lied.
The DHS document Woodward and Rugaber are going on about appears to be a draft leaked to the press by its author, a friend to the press, not the President. “Just over half of the people Trump talks about” were actually born in the United States, but what people did Mr Trump talk about? “individuals convicted for terrorism-related offenses since 9/11″. They are quoting a document addressing something different: “Individuals inspired by foreign terrorists,” and moreover, a document written, as we will see, by someone who didn’t even have a handle on the hundreds of terrorism prosecutions that have taken place in the last decade and a half.
Mr Trump did mention three incidents: Boston, San Berdardino and 9/11. Woodward and Rugaber seem to consider his claim invalidated by the fact that one of the 24 perpetrators identified in those crimes was native-born. In Associated (with terrorists) Press math, 23 out of 24 is not the vast majority. We don’t expect Woodhead and Rugburns or whatever to do the percents, so we will: in AP math, 95.8% is not “the vast majority”. (95.8333 repeating 3 for the pedants among you).
Oddly enough, though, the President was not working off the leaked phony-baloney memo written by some disloyal apparatchik trying to make him look bad, but from what he said he was: “data provided by the Department of Justice”.
Now, you probably think that it was unfair of the president to use DOJ data that was not available to the stalwarts of the press. Except, he didn’t. He used DOJ reports previously sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Senator Ted Cruz in their capacity (in Sessions’s case, his previous capacity) as heads of relevant Senate committees. Which were so secret that they were posted on Sessions’s (now shut down) Senate website. On 13 January 2016. Where a reporter could have found it… if only the Associated Press had one.
Having downloaded it, being an actual reporter, Patrick Poole posted it today on Scribd. And now, we’re posting it here for your convenience (we got the file direct from Patrick’s Scribd):
Justice-Department-terrorism-statistics-2001-2014.pdf
Now, there are 580 terrorists and supporters — convicted ones, on that list; and that’s just cases that are final and not sealed through the end of 2014. The list doesn’t include a breakdown of who was native born and who was not, but other analysts (including Poole) have done the math, and behold! At least 380 of these 580 were just doing the terrorism Americans won’t do.
Patrick also found that one Subcommittee had broken it all down:
When the staff of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest examined the open-source data for the 580 cases, this is what they found:
Using this list, the Subcommittee conducted open-source research and determined that at least 380 of the 580 were foreign-born (71 were confirmed natural-born, and the remaining 129 are not known). Of the 380 foreign-born, at least 24 were initially admitted to the United States as refugees, and at least 33 had overstayed their visas. Additionally, of those born abroad, at least 62 were from Pakistan, 28 were from Lebanon, 22 were Palestinian, 21 were from Somalia, 20 were from Yemen, 19 were from Iraq, 16 were from Jordan, 17 were from Egypt, and 10 were from Afghanistan.
So Trump is correct: 380 of 580 (65.5%, or just under 2/3) were in fact foreign born.
It is no mystery, contra the Associated Press, where this data came from. And as you can note, all of these cases involved Category I, II, and III terrorism offenses.
That notwithstanding, some in the media and terrorism industry began throwing out other terrorism numbers from a number of difference sources with no reference to the Justice Department data cited by President Trump…
Poole’s article deserves to have you Read The Whole Thing™. Some of the reporters’ fearless beating of strawman piñatas has to be seen to be believed, including an appearance by an even-wronger-than-his-usual-wrong Thpenther Ackerman, the “military and defense” reporter and Internet Tough Guy™ who totes would have signed up sometime during the last 15+ years of war, if only he hadn’t been 4F on account of moral and physical cowardice. If you’re ever wondering whether Thpenther is lying, there’s a reliable tell: his lips move.
And he’s what a reporter is, in this Year of Our Lord 2017. So are the AP’s two fact-free fact checkers, Wooddud and Rugbugger, the Marquises of Mathlessness, the Khans of Confusion, the Imperators of Innumeracy.
Lord love a duck.
Exit thought: these are just terrorism cases. Boy howdy, if you could see the espionage and counterintelligence case statistics, which for obvious reasons are never going to see the light of day in our lifetimes, you’d see another whole cohort of immigrants (and asylees, and refugees, etc.) who ought not have been.
Where Treason is A-OK, and Criticism of it is Forbidden
We’re referring (and this is unlikely to shock you) to the People’s Republic of California, and specifically to the Senate of that failing State.
Legislative éminence grise Tom Hayden, perhaps best known to the general public as the former Mrs. Jane Fonda, expired in October (or, as practitioners of one of the few faiths still alive in San Francisco put it, “Satan called him home.”) And naturally his peers — we use the term advisedly — in the Senate have spent from then till now engaged in hosannas to the pulchritude and luminosity of the former violent radical turned typical grifting, grasping, greedy politician.
State Senator Janet Nguyen, who on her election was (and as far as we know, still is) the first ethnic Vietnamese state senator in any American state, was not having any of that, and she prepared a powerful statement. Here are the highlights:
I and the children of the former South Vietnam soldiers will never forget the support of former Senator Tom Hayden for the Communist government of Vietnam and the oppression by the Communist Government of Vietnam for the people of Vietnam.
After 40 years, the efforts by people like him have hurt the people of Vietnam and have worked to stop the Vietnamese refugees from coming to the United States, a free country. We will always continue to fight for freedom and human rights for the people of Vietnam.
Members, I recognize today in memory of the million of Vietnamese and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died seeking freedom and democracy. … I would like to offer another historical perspective.
… I want to share what Senator Hayden meant to me and to the over 500,000 Vietnamese Americans who call California their home, as well as to the over 1 million Vietnamese Americans across the United States.
As you may be aware, Tom Hayden chose to work directly with the Communist North Vietnamese Government to oppose the efforts of United States forces in South Vietnam.
Mr. Hayden sided with a communist government that enslaved and/or killed millions of Vietnamese, including members of my own family. Mr. Hayden’s actions are viewed by many as harmful to democratic values and hateful towards those who sought the very freedoms on which this nation is founded.
…. In contrast to the great many people who fought to defend freedom and democracy, Mr. Hayden supported a Communist agenda ….
In sum: bad cess to him. Naturally, his friends and allies would not let Nguyen make that statement, but you can read it here (she got away with the introduction, in Vietnamese, before Kevin de Leon called the Senate Bouncers to give her the bum’s rush).
Hayden is especially beloved in institutional and academic Californistan — the environment that produced his modern cognate, Sulayman al-Faris, aka Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi, aka John Walker Lindh — for his “opposition to the Vietnam war.” This opposition included gathering information for the People’s Republic of Vietnam and harassing American families of prisoners of war. He first came to the public’s attention of one of the organizers of the Alinskyite attack by hippies armed with sticks, bricks and molotov cocktails on the police at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. Hayden himself, a physical coward, was far from the “cannon fodder” he sent in, for his objective was to provoke the police into “overreaction.”
The media, safe behind the cops, and in on Hayden’s plan, produced thousands of these images, making it look like the Chicago PD made an unprovoked attack on “protesters,” and that’s how they reported it. (It wasn’t a complete loss. A lot of deserving skulls got cracked, and a beginning news fabricator named Dan Rather got punched in his glass jaw. What’s the frequency, Kenneth?)
Hayden went on to win a mistrial as one of the Chicago Eight clown show defendants, and continued to serve the interests of Communism and foreign powers for the rest of his miserable life.
After trying to make a statement about the late Tom Hayden and his opposition to the Vietnam War, Sen. Janet Nguyen (R-Garden Grove) was removed from the floor of the state Senate on Thursday, a tense scene that ended in a slew of angry accusations…
Nguyen, who was brought to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee when she was a child, said she wanted to offer “a different historical perspective” on what Hayden and his opposition to the war had meant to her and other refugees.
Hayden, the former state legislator who died last October, was remembered in a Senate ceremony Tuesday. ….
“I’m very sad because the very people who elected me to represent them and be their voice on the Senate floor, I wasn’t allowed to speak on their behalf,” Nguyen said later in an interview with The Times. “I was told I cannot speak on the issue at all,” she said.
The LA Times, being the LA Times, can’t even describe the sanguinary efforts of Hayden honestly. (Apart from all he did directly in Chicago and Vietnam, he also was a founder of the SDS, the “overt” political branch of the murderous Weather Underground terrorist movement).
Hayden was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and made celebrated trips to North Vietnam and Cambodia, offering to help broker a peaceful end.
via A state senator is removed from the chamber for her comments about Tom Hayden and Vietnam – LA Times.
“Broker a peaceful end,” that is probably the most dishonest phrase ever written, and it took two LA Times hacks, John Myers and Melanie Mason, to generate a lie that big. (That’s like saying the Wannsee Conference met to “broker a peaceful end” to the “Jewish Question.” It’s always peaceful if you just get on the boxcars yourself, which was always Hayden’s goal for the free people of Vietnam).
Let’s reconsider what Hayden actually did during his period of Vietnam “protest.”
On visits to Vietnam, he not only performed propaganda for his Communist masters, but worked to help Communist organs recruit propaganda mouthpieces and spies among disaffected, tortured prisoners:
Tom Hayden’s anti-war efforts included recruitment efforts of military personnel, and propaganda from release of American POWs. Whether or not Hayden and Fonda were in bed together on this one (literally and figuratively) is not clear.
His efforts (among other traitors’) were an inspiration to Vo Nguyen Giap, the military leader of North Vietnam, and extended the war, leading to over 50,000 more Americans killed. (Same page as last quote).
General Giap and the NVA viewed the Tet 1968 offensive as a failure, they were on their knees and had prepared to negotiate a surrender.
At that time, there were fewer than 10,000 U.S. casualties, the Vietnam War was about to end, as the NVA was prepared to accept their defeat.
Then, they heard Walter Cronkite (former CBS News anchor and correspondent) on TV proclaiming the success of the Tet 1968 offensive by the communist NVA. They were completely and totally amazed at hearing that the US Embassy had been overrun. In reality, The NVA had not gained access to the Embassy-there were some VC who had been killed on the grassy lawn, but they hadn’t gained access. Further reports indicated the riots and protesting on the streets of America.
According to Giap, these distorted reports were inspirational to the NVA. They changed their plans from a negotiated surrender and decided instead, they only needed to persevere….
Today, there are 58,229 names on the Vietnam Wall Memorial.
We know where we stand on this. We stand with State Senator Nguyen. Her powerful statement is available on her State Senate web page, at least for now. Who knows how long that will stand, before the Cult of Hayden burns it down?
TSA: Turkeys Strike Again
The world’s most incompetent “security” agency did it again, and wait till you see what it did. The gist of it:
Eleven passengers strolled through a security lane without being screened at Kennedy Airport early Monday after Transportation Security Administration agents left the area unsupervised, law enforcement sources said.
There was no one present to operate the magnetometer and the X-ray machine, or to do pat-downs and secondary screening….
Instead of following protocol and notifying Port Authority cops, it took the TSA two hours to tell police about the frightening breach, the sources add.
Just how horrible was this security breach?
The unscreened passengers — three of whom set off a metal detector — didn’t even have to take off their shoes to get through security, according to a photo of two of the men obtained by the Daily News.
Oh, God. They didn’t even take off their shoes. What is the world coming to?
Of course, the TSA immediately fixed everything, right? Er, wrong. Remember, no one good, decent, honest, competent, moral, ethical or intelligent has ever been employed at TSA in any capacity whatsoever. We call that the Fundamental Law of TSA. Rather than fix anything, these bozos continued screwing up by the numbers.
Rather than notifying the police, who are specifically trained to handle those situations, the TSA used its own agents to search for the unscreened passengers.
Well, that will lead to the usual “security” crisis: bureaucratic turf battles! Did it? You betcha:
“The TSA tried to mitigate the situation by sending their screeners through the terminal in violation of all the protocols,” a source said. “The protocol says law enforcement is immediately notified.”
As you might imagine, TSA’s brain-dead trust was not successful in suddenly repurposing themselves as Emil and the Detectives. When they realized that they couldn’t find The Unclean the unscreened, they finally sent up a signal flare to the real cops.
Well, Port Authority cops.
But regardless of which cops they were, that received this belated notice from the screenergarten, it was too late.
When they were finally alerted, Port Authority cops flooded the terminal equipped with surveillance photos of the travelers, but none of them could be found, the sources said.
To us, the take-away from this is this: TSA’s passenger-harassment game broke down for a period… and nothing happened. That’s because targeting every single passenger as a terrorist threat, because the nation doesn’t have the stones to actually target the known wolves of actual terrorism, is not doing anything but pretending to provide security.
It’s security theater. But the joke is on us, as a nation, because after 15 years of uninterruped failure by TSA, the most brilliant North Star of incompetence in the entire Milky Way of incompetence that is fed.gov, the rubes demand their security theater:
“It’s scary that people could just walk in like that. It’s seems like something’s out of control here,” said Marie Ruiz-Martinez, 49, of Connecticut, who was at the airport to see her niece off to Puerto Rico.
No, it’s stupid that everybody can’t just walk in like that.
But somehow, even the ever-expanding purulent cyst of failure that is TSA has come to be comforting to our increasingly uneducated people. Prognosis: we’re getting more of it.
Social Justice 1, Olympic Shooting Sports 0
Matthew Emmons has been hogging the medals. He and the other guys need to share more with the girls. (His wife is also an Olympic medalist — for another country!)
If you follow shooting sports, you know that USA Shooting is powerfully competitive if not dominant in the international shooting sports, and brings home lots of medals. This is especially true at the Olympics. And you know that the gun-hating TV network — whichever one has overbid to bring viewers an increasingly politicized, commercialized, and dull quadrennial sports event — will do its level best to minimize or ignore these sports.
But now, the sports themselves are being reorganized from the top down — and not to enhance competition.
The official reason for reshuffling the sports is, and we are not making this up, because the International Olympic Committee’s “Agenda 2020” demands 100% equal participation of men and women. It’s basically Title IX for a slower, weaker, duller, more political, Feminist Olympics. If the US Olympic Committee didn’t buy off on this, the IOC would threaten the US’s bid for the Olympics in LA. (Fine. Hold it in Lagos then, or Manila. Let them pay to feed 10,000 useless IOC bureaucrats: the ones who only eat lobster, so long as it has to be flown in by Learjet).
For reasons that should need no elaboration, but in this day of you-go-grrl infantrywomen being carried through training by the male peers, and resenting them for it, will have to be elaborated on in a future post, women and men do not compete directly against one another in almost all sports. This means male sports must go to make room, as they have done at colleges.
The three sports on the chopping block are men’s 50 meter rifle prone, men’s
The IOC is irretrievably opposed to men competing directly against women — in most sports, women would be rare on the podium, although several of the shooting sports might be exceptions — so male events are being eliminated to create female events, and individual events are being deprecated to create “mixed double” team events, turning everything into the yawnfest that is Tennis Mixed Doubles.
A Tee-Ball, Participation Trophy Olympics.
The US Olympic Committee’s honcho, Scott Blackmun, has put his thumb on the scale — against his own athletes, as a nod towards Social Justice. Chris Dolnack of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reports:
Perhaps most alarming is that the USOC’s motivation seems to be securing the bid for Los Angeles as host of the 2024 games. USOC CEO Scott Blackmun has urged USA Shooting to not participate in the ISSF vote, citing that there are already enough votes to eliminate double trap and that USA Shooting’s participation in the vote could hurt the chances of Los Angeles being awarded the games.
Angelenos and Californians should be appealing to their gods — whatever santeria believes in, we suppose, because that’s about the only faith superstition left in Greater Aztlan — that they don’t get the Olympics. Every city that’s had one since Montreal is still paying for it, except for Sarajevo, which cleverly got out of the debt by destroying itself in civil war.
But it’s a great deal for Scott Blackmun, and all the other Olympicrats.
Anyway, for a critical take, read the above-linked story by Dolnack. (We’ll link it again). To read what the fully-SJW-converged International Shooting Sports Federation has to say about it, go here. We’ll just excerpt a bit of question-begging (emphasis theirs):
Gender equality is one of the key principles in Agenda 2020. Gender equality means all Olympic sports must have 50-50 men’s and women’s events and participation quotas for the Tokyo 2020 Games. There are concerns regarding the shooting events program because there were nine men’s events and only six women’s events in the 2016 Games.
And, of course, because Diversity is Our Vibrancy™, this will magically decant us all onto the bright sunlit uplands, as New Soviet Man Gender-Fluid Cog in Society!
The changes necessary to achieve gender equality in Olympic shooting have great potential to make shooting an even stronger Olympic sport. Deciding the ISSF recommendations to the IOC is a past versus future decision….
We march forward in the Vanguard of the Proletariat, the winds of history at our back!
Gender equality is right and the ISSF fully supports this aim.
Translation: no discussion is wanted or will be heard. Shut up and follow.
The changes necessary to achieve gender equality will probably include the loss of three beloved events that represent the past and no longer fulfil [sic] the highest standards for dynamic, growing Olympic events.
If we were one of those East German guys who got gelded to participate in female sports back in the nineties, and was DQ’d for it, we’d be pretty bitter.
The strange thing is for this to be happening in shooting sports, where women have always been much more competitive with the men than in any of the more physical, less cerebral sports.
The TSA Continues to Excel
Evil, or stupid? Embrace the power of “and”!
Excellence, TSA style, is in the news again, this time for its agents’ merry participation in a cocaine smuggling ring that has been running through Puerto Rico since prior to the misbegotten agency’s existence.
Not surprisingly, the smugglers found that TSA employees, far from threatening the criminal enterprise, were delighted to join in.
A dozen airport and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees have been arrested for their alleged involvement in a massive cocaine smuggling operation in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Monday.
The defendants are accused of helping smuggle approximately 20 tons of cocaine through Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport over the course of 18 years, from 1998 to 2016.
The operation allegedly involved employees smuggling suitcases through TSA checkpoints at the airport and onto flights, with as many as five mules on some flights and with each mule checking two suitcases in some cases.
Six current and former TSA screening officers have been indicted in the case for their alleged role in smuggling cocaine through X-ray machines and onto airplanes without detection.
Since named TSA employees have been indicted, you know that this wasn’t a TSA internal investigation. TSA never prosecutes its own, no matter how heinous the crime, under the flimsy excuse that to punish insiders would risk exposing “critical security procedures.” So when you see a TSA goon standing in the dock, it’s not just to check that the defendant’s place is level (which you can tell, because the TSAnik drools evenly from both sides of his mouth). It’s because some other agency caught him.
An Airport Aviation Services worker, who was a baggage handler and ramp employee, is charged with paying TSA employees to clear the suitcases stuffed with cocaine; taking the suitcases to their designated flights; and giving a drug trafficking organization member the “all clear” for mules to board the plane.
“These individuals were involved in a conspiracy to traffic massive quantities of illegal narcotics to the continental United States,” Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez, U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, said in a statement. “These arrests demonstrate the success of the AirTAT initiative, which has successfully allocated a dedicated group of state and federal law enforcement officers, whose mission is to ensure that our airports are not used in the drug traffickers’ illicit businesses.”
Now TSA is claiming that they uncovered this inside ring themselves, but we know from the charging of TSA criminals that such was not the case. So who was it, really?
The Drug Enforcement Agency is in charge of the investigation, in collaboration with the FBI, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement-Homeland Security Investigations, the U.S. Marshals and Puerto Rican police.
Three Federal agencies and the PR cops made it too big for TSA’s usual under-the-rug treatment.
The TSA has dealt with a number of high-profile security lapses at airports in recent years, including a gun-smuggling operation uncovered at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in 2015.
via TSA employees arrested for cocaine smuggling operation in Puerto Rico | TheHill.
So, at least in this case, we should be glad that they were just smuggling drugs, and not guns. Or were they? Puerto Rico still clings to pre-Heller gun control, and yet has a high level of armed crime. Where are the guns coming from?
If the answer is, “through a TSA smuggling ring,” we know that the one agency that will never expose the ring is the TSA itself.
Once again, we have evidence of the Fundamental Law of TSA: No one good, decent, honest, competent, moral, ethical or intelligent has ever been employed at TSA in any capacity whatsoever.
When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Knives, Bats and Meat Cleavers
Lifestyles of the violent and illegal aliens — in England, where guns actually are outlawed. Criminalien Bilal Miah would have had his ticket punched by knife-wielding, cleaver-chopping, and bat-swinging Dalya Saeed, if the UK didn’t have really good emergency services.
The punchline? Dalya was Bilal’s estranged wife, and she whipped out the knife after a meeting about child custody segued into four hours of intense sex. The Sun (UK):
Dalya Saeed, 35, is accused of stabbing Bilal Miah, 31, with a carving knife and trying to pull out his intestines after the pair had romped.
A court heard part of Mr Miah’s small bowel was cut from his body and thrown on to the bedroom carpet.
The taxi driver, who had remarried, told a jury he desperately tried to push his entrails back into his stomach after being attacked by his estranged wife at her home.
Saeed denied charges of attempted murder and wounding with intent when she went on trial at Birmingham Crown Court on Monday.
Mr Miah told the jury he was attacked by Saeed at around 10pm on October 19, 2015 after going to her flat in Moseley, Birmingham.
He said the pair had argued about custody of their daughter before they ended up back on the bed.
Giving evidence, Mr Miah added: “Suddenly in the blink of an eye, and I didn’t see the knife, she stabbed me twice in the belly.
“I can only assume the knife came from either under the bed or the pocket of her dressing gown.
“My intestines were out, everything was out and she was grabbing hold of them, trying to pull them.
“She broke one of them and threw it on to the floor but I managed to put the rest of them back in my belly.”
The court heard Mr Miah tried to flee the flat but Saeed pursued him into the street where she attacked him with a wooden bat and a meat cleaver.
“The female of the species is deadlier than the male.” Once, Britons learned that poem in school. But of course these aren’t exactly Britons, are they?
He was only discovered in a nearby doorway at 3am when neighbours heard his screams and called police.
The jury were told Mr Miah suffered 30 separate wounds and spent ten days in hospital, where he had two operations, but made a full recovery.
The generosity of the British taxpayer, which no doubt Mr Miah and Ms Saeed are not, knows no rational bounds.
Prosecutor Adam Western told the jury: “The cuts were so severe part of his small bowel ended up on the carpet.
“She caused his injuries. Her intention was nothing less than to kill him.”
Well, on the one hand, who knows what ideas were among the bats in her belfry? But on the other hand, homicidal intent does seem like a reasonable inference, under the circumstances.
ATF Cracks Down on Retro Builders using 80% Receivers
In an entirely unexpected turn of events, ATF has reclassified completed and even so-called “80% lowers” with a fake auto sear marking as machine guns, depending on who makes them. Here’s an image of one such receiver the Bureau has taken custody of and ordered destroyed.
The problem is that fake sear hole. Marking such a receiver with a small, engraved ring has been one detail adopted by detail-obsessed retro builders for years. The receiver above is a typical example of this detail obsession. It began as a so-called 80% blank, and has been completed to firearm stage. But it also has been engraved with Colt markings and extensively machined to change its profile from the current reinforced lower to the M16A1 vintage shape, especially in the vicinity of the pivot pin bosses and the buffer tower. Internally, the receiver remains AR-15 semi-auto profile only, and cannot accept M16 full-automatic parts.
High-pocket AR lower (l.) and M16 showing auto sear and more open receiver (r).
Under this novel, stretching interpretation, this 80% receiver blank, too, is probably a machine gun, even though it is not completed. No trigger group machining has been done, and it cannot accept machine gun (or any) trigger group parts.
There is no consistency to these rulings, and ATF lawyers insist that every ruling applies only to the single case at hand, which must be considered de novo, and that previous rulings are not precedent or even evidence. ATF lawyers will take you to court, and will fight to keep their own agency’s prior determinations out of that court.
The ATF has even given written approval to this engraving — when it’s done by large licensees who can afford lawyers to haggle over ATF rulings, like Colt and Troy:
(Troy has taken hits from the market before for hiring a disgraced ATF figure, and some infer an unusually cordial relationship with ATF management. The Troy receiver also has a couple of unique features, which are discussed below).
ATF has also approved the marking in the past, in letters to individuals and licensees, when it is out of position relative to the factory location of an auto sear. But the same engraving now, and done by or for a little guy who has no practical defense against an ATF attack? Strengstens verboten.
When the definition of an object depends not on what it is, but on who you are, is it really law we’re talking about, or just power? Are we operating under a system of laws that claims derivation from the US Constitution, or under Hammurabi’s Code, which provided “different spanks for different ranks”?
This whole affair began during a routine inspection of US Anodizing in Virginia. All licensees accept such inspections, during which ATF inspectors or occasionally agents examine paperwork, inventory, and overall regulation compliance. Generally these are cordial and professional, but given the weak firearms knowledge of many ATF personnel, and its politics-first pursuit of gun control enthusiast personnel, sometimes they lead to disagreements or disputes. (And some licensees screw up; nothing thrills the ATF more than the chance to hammer a licensee, the bigger the better). On this particular inspection, there was no tension and no suggestion that US Anodizing was doing anything wrong, but ATF initially set several lowers in-process aside for further review. The inspector made a tentative determination that lowers completed from so-called 80% lowers, and showing any indication of a mock auto-sear pin anywhere on the side of the trigger group, was a “machine gun” because it would be “readily convertible.” That’s even in the case of a firearm that would require considerable internal machining to accept MG parts.
There were relatively few receivers — more than three but not more than six — with such a marking on site, but others may have passed through in the past, given this feature’s popularity with retro-heads.
The ATF actually hasn’t seized the receivers in legal terms. Instead, it is holding the receivers and has demanded that the owners voluntarily surrender them to be destroyed, or face prosecution. They say that this is a generous offer that they don’t have to make but are willing to do because they have determined that there was no intent to violate the law.
But, and here’s the rub, they’re demanding that the owners not only allow the ATF destroy the receivers, but also, that they sign a sort of Chinese-show-trial-confession letter, admitting having produced an “unregistered machine gun.”
UPDATE: The following was received from the owner of the 1st receiver illustrated above:
The 1st pic is of my receiver. I am one of the 6 or so that have had my receiver seized. I must tell you that this part :
But, and here’s the rub, they’re demanding that the owners not only allow the ATF destroy the receivers, but also, that they sign a sort of Chinese-show-trial-confession letter, admitting having produced an “unregistered machine gun.”
…is not true. I, at least , have only been given an ATF Form 3400.1. I have NOT been asked to sign anything admitting to creating anything or breaking any laws.
We stand corrected and have lined out the paragraph in question. Form 3400.1, Property Taken into Bureau Custody, is used in nonjudicial takings. It describes the property, and the person or entity from which the property was taken, but does not require or expect any admission of anything. This OIG report of some of ATF’s problems (.pdf) managing seized property in the 2004-05 period shines some light on the regulation in question, ATF 3400.1B. ATF takes approximately 200,000-300,000 items a year, of which about 10,000 to 30,000 have historically been firearms.
The owner of the receiver in the first illustration above decided to sign the ATF letter and let his “machine gun” be destroyed; others, who are not in the crosshairs of the ATF like he is, have criticized him for “caving,” but his choices are (1) give the ATF the Cardinal Mindszenty confession uncontested, nonjudicial surrender-of-property that they want, or (2) fight, with the possible outcomes of: (2a) a pyrrhic “victory” that would leave him a financial ruin after years of stress; or, (2b) a decade of two in Club Fed.
Of course, given the legal constraints and historically demonstrated character of the ATF as an institution, you can choose (1) and get (2a or 2b) also, if they feel like making an example of you. Today. For something they approved for Harry yesterday and will approve for Tom tomorrow.
It is hard to fight this kind of creeping, arbitrary, whimsical regulation. Under most US regulatory law, the courts defer almost absolutely to the regulatory agency. As we understand it, and we’re not lawyers, court precedents rule that the expertise on any particular regulatory area is contained within the regulating agency.
There are social and organizational dynamics at work in the current regulatory environment. Once a field agent or inspector makes such a allegation, it’s the instinct of the Firearms Technology Branch to produce whatever it takes to support the ATF officer and keep him or her from losing face, even at the cost of the FTB’s and the Bureau’s reputation for consistency and even integrity.
ATF argues that Colt and Troy are doing something slightly different. For example, Troy’s receiver has a bridge between left and right sides, and is engraved REPLICA – SEMI ONLY for those law officers not steeped in firearms design and construction. But the real underlying problem is baked into regulatory law: there’s no reason that ATF can’t argue the law any of several different ways in different cases at the same time.
We see this ATF power grab casting a chill over the retro movement, which is a small and relatively inconsequential. But the bureau’s real target is the “80% lower” builder in general and the entire home gun building movement, which senior managers and the Chief Counsel’s Office would like to criminalize. This is one of the things that senior managers such as Thomas F. Brandon, who put the ATF behind the Hillary Clinton campaign in major newspapers, was hoping to get out of the Administration they wanted. (Wanted and expected. They had initiatives ready to go).
This is a legal minefield and anyone in this position needs a professional and experienced attorney (i.e. experienced with the ATF and with Federal gun laws).
You Can Always Trust the FBI
Fidelity… Bravery… and we forget what the “I” is, but it sure as hell isn’t “Inventory Control.”
An HK MP5 in 10mm has been lost by a southern California special agent. According to the agent, the submachine gun, the mag and ammo, and a protective vest were stolen from his or her car (the agent remains unidentified… when they screw up, FBI Special Agents are secret agents).
That was January 8th, in Lafayette. Or maybe it was January 9th, in Concord. Wait, it was the 8th or the 9th, in Concord, Lafayette or maybe Orinda. But, whatever, it’s missing now.
Have you seen this lost puppy? Dial 1-800-FBI-CLUE (OK, that’s a joke, call the number in the actual post).
The Bureau snuck the press release out at the witching hour of all Washington embarrassments, Friday night, so there have been only brief stories in the San Francisco Chronicle (warning, autoplay video) at about 11 PM Friday, and Fox News even later, on Saturday.
Meanwhile, if you’re a SoCal WeaponsMan reader, and happen to stumble across the missing MP5-10, the Bureau requests you to call them at (415) 553-7400 or online at http://tips.fbi.gov. They certainly don’t want you to, say, take a picture of it for the media, and call the media after calling it in to your local Law Enforcement, who can get the pleasure of making whichever SA or manager snubbed them last, beg for its return.
Heard at the range: “Ah, he probably got tired of not having 10mm ammo and tossed it in San Diego Bay so they’d give him one in a caliber they could give him ammo for.”
The news stories linked above both reference a California law meant to address the epidemic of police carelessness with firearms, but CA has no authority over Federal LE. And, after all, they are the Only Ones dependable enough to be trusted with the careless storage of such terrible firepower. Because the FBI agent has always been a model of integrity.
If the agent was a local cop, a soldier, or God help him a citizen, he’d be getting the third degree right now. But he won’t. Because the FBI agent has always been a model of integrity, his word stands without question.
Rodney King Day, 2017!
As long-time readers know, we like to celebrate Rodney King Day. As we said in the first ever WeaponsMan Rodney King Day story:
Sure, some people celebrate another Civil Rights King this day. But his maybe-relative Rodney’s story resonates with us more, in part, perhaps, because one of the cops that helped make Rodney King famous was an SF guy. (Which one, we’re not saying. It was not our finest hour).
But the main reason is that, in the middle of 1992’s violent, destructive riots (55 dead and 2,000 injured), caused by people supposedly supporting him, Mr King went on the radio with this sentiment, the one that underlies any workable approach to civil rights, and that bespeaks tolerance and respect for your fellow man.
“Can’t we all just get along?”
In 2012, the LA Riots that Rodney, peace be unto him, tried to tamp down were already 20 years old. This year, they’re 25, and it’s fair to say that “race relations” in America are worse than they were before the LAPD tuned him up for resisting arrest all those years ago. In fact, even the phrase, “race relations,” adds to the toxicity of the situation, implying that people have no individuality, nothing more important than the bands of skin-tone-marked ancestry into which they can be conveniently sorted.
Who benefits from this? Not the average soul in our fair land, whatever his or her ancestry might be.
Can’t we see each other as individuals? And, if we can do that, can’t we all just get along?
Here’s some of our past Rodney King Day columns:
- 2012: Happy Rodney King Day!
- 2013: Happy Rodney King Day, 2013!
- 2014: Celebrating Rodney King Day, 2014: our third.
- 2015: Happy Rodney King Day (reprint of 2012)
- 2016: We seem to have missed this holiday last year. Sorry, Rod.
- 2017: Rodney King Day, 2017!
And if all else fails, remember how we closed the column in 2014?
“Can’t we all just get along?”
Of course we can. Mostly. But for the times when we just can’t, well, there’s always weaponsman.com. See you on the range!
Indeed. See you on the range!
Kevin was a former Special Forces weapons man (MOS 18B, before the 18 series, 11B with Skill Qualification Indicator of S). His focus was on weapons: their history, effects and employment. He started WeaponsMan.com in 2011 and operated it until he passed away in 2017. His work is being preserved here at the request of his family.
