A slew of bars in New Jersey, including 13 franchised TGI Fridays, were busted for selling caramel-colored rubbing alcohol as top-rail scotch, among other things:

At one bar, a mixture that included rubbing alcohol and caramel coloring was sold as scotch. In another, premium liquor bottles were refilled with water – and apparently not even clean water at that.

State officials provided those new details Thursday on raids they conducted a day earlier as part of a yearlong investigation dubbed Operation Swill.

Twenty-nine New Jersey bars and restaurants, including 13 TGI Fridays, were accused of substituting cheap booze – or worse – for top-shelf brands while charging premium prices.

That would explain a lot of the “top shelf” scotch I’ve had, come to think of it…

I’ve opposed the death penalty for a long time.

I actually support it, for every reason but one – the inevitability of executing the wrong person (and it appears all but inevitable that there’s been at least one and possibly two erroneous executions in recent years).   Executing the wrong person is a double crime; society kills an innocent person, and a guilty party goes free, leaving a terrible crime unpaid-for.

So I oppose the death penalty for one reason, and one only.

But there are cases were, I gotta confess, I’m really just going through the motions.

(The suspect is innocent until proven guilty)

Kermit Gosnell is guilty of three counts of First Degree Murder.

Suck it, baby killers.

(On this issue, screw civility).

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Is it morally wrong for a company to take advantage of school boards by selling them Bulletproof Whiteboards that are impractical if not outright dangerous?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

He’s talking about this little number here:

…which, I have to admit, I thought was  hoax.  Between the cop who looked like he was doing a bit on Reno 911, to the notion of confronting violence with an hand-held shield – an idea the real world gave up during the Renaissance, I thought it was maybe a Daily Show spoof mocking people who think it’s possible to stand up to shooters, when I saw the video of it being rolled out at Rokori high school, west of the Twin Cities.

It’s apparently not:

You’ll notice that an 18″x20″ whiteboard will only cover part of the head and torso of even a relatively petite teacher like the one in the photo. An active shooter would have no trouble at all shooting over, under, or around the armor, easily killing the person holding the armor with any firearm.

From the manufacturer’s website.

In the bizarre and unlikely event that an active shooter didn’t just simply shoot around the whiteboard, there is an apparent assumption that a teacher or administrator holding the armor would be capable of retaining it as it is struck by the impact of a bullet or a shotgun blast. Do we really expect that an average teacher or administrator is going to be able to handle the concussive force of a bullet and to retain the whiteboard in a defensible position?

It is far more likely the board would simply be shot out of their hands or the teacher knocked down with the first or second shot, if the shooter doesn’t simply opt to shoot around the 18″x20″ panel. If a shooter armed with a shotgun loaded with slugs or buckshot were to fire at close range against the whiteboard, there is the distinct possibility that the whiteboard would be ripped from the defending teacher’s hands and turned into an injury-producing projectile itself.

Then, there is the problem of the armor not actually being bulletproof.

As noted on the Hardwire LLC website, the armor is rated NIJ 3A, which will in carefully controlled conditions stop a majority of pistol bullets and shotgun blasts. However, this armor class will not stop intermediate-caliber rifle rounds as small as .223 Remington, much less have the desired effect on more substantial rifle rounds.

The whiteboard concept, allegedly inspired by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, would not have stopped or even slowed down the shooter in that instance. He was armed with a rifle chambered in .223 Remington that would have sliced through the armor.

It’s a risible idea – another example of “security theatre”.

As John Edwards used to say, there are two Americas when it comes to dealing with mass shooters in schools; the not-serious America, which yaps about lockdowns and “ballistic blankets” and hand-held kevlar whiteboards and everything but the only thing we currently know that stops active shooters – a person resisting with lethal force – and serious America, which is confronting the ugly reality of mass shooters with the sobering reality that once the shooting starts, armed resistance is the only answer.

Charles Ramsey, the rescuer of the three kidnapped women in Cleveland, in what may be one of the greatest television interviews of all time:

Runner-up lines of the day:

“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway…She homeless or she got problems. Only reason she runnin’ to a black man.”

Winner line of the day?

When [Anderson] Cooper mentioned the FBI reward related to information for Amanda Berry whereabouts, he said, “I tell you what you do, give it to them… you know I got a job anyway,” and pulled out his paycheck that he just picked up.

Thank God – in more ways than one – for Charles Ramsey.

One of the more comical moments in this past winter’s debates at the capitol over the various gun grab bills was when Representative Heather Martens, introducing her bill copied and pasted from Andrew Cuomo’s magazine ban bill, informed a crowd full of experienced shooters that (I’m paraphrasing closely here):

Nobody needs more than seven rounds for self-defense.  Experts say the Colt .45 is the best gun for self-defense, and it holds seven rounds

Hopefully the Colt marque will survive Rep. Martens’ endorsement.  The Colt 1911 is indeed a fine self-defense gun.  It’s also a hard gun for casual self-defense shooters to master; it’s big, and heavy, and it’s a single action piece with three safeties, any one of which the owner may bobble in the heat of the moment.  And – this is more important – it was designed to be used by guys in an army; when the lieutenant fires his seventh shot, he’ll have other guys in the platoon to cover him while he reloads.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Joe Doakes sent me this one.   It’s an attempt to answer the question “who really needs more than seven rounds?”

The answer?  Anyone who values survival:

It’s a dramatization, of course – but it reflects reality:

From metropolitan Philadelphia, PA to tiny Wilmer, AL, to North Woodmere, Long Island, NY, to Suitland, MD, and Pine Township, IN, home invaders are nowcommonly showing up in teams of 2-4 violent, armed criminals, willing to murder you and your family to get what the want.

Because self-defense shooting isn’t like the movies.  One hit doesn’t throw the target across the room – in fact if they’re drunk or high or dissociative, it’s entirely possible they won’t know they’ve been hit at all.  There’ve been cases of people walking to ambulances after five, ten or more hits (although they may have bled out before too long).

At any rate – when anyone, whether Rep. Martens or Governor Cuomo, tells you “seven rounds is all you need!”, just remember; they got that the same place they’re going to get yesterday’s dinner after the press conference.

…I voted Romney, and didn’t refudiate Sarah Palin’s rhetoric, people inflamed with ideological vitriol would wander the streets inflicting violence.

And they were right.

…or for that matter anyone else associated, however spuriously, with the American Right, do you think this would have ever been written?

…that, for some reason, isn’t getting saturation media coverage.

An attempted mugging in a school parking lot in Detroit after hours was thwarted when one of the intended victims, a 70-year-old girls’ basketball coach, fought back with a handgun:

Police sources say the coach was walking the two girls to their cars when two men allegedly approached and one pulled out a gun and grabbed him by his chain necklace. The coach then pulled out his gun and shot both of them, according to sources.

One of the attackers was found dead in the median on Lafayette Boulevard, and the other was taken to a local hospital, according to police sources. We’ve learned that both of the men had attended the high school, and one had been recently expelled.

But remember; according to the left – experts on self-defense that they are – not only is arming teachers a bad idea, but concealed carry never helped thwart a crime.

The alleged killer of the two Texas prosecutors and a spouse has turned out to be…

…the a former judge and his wife.

Not the “Aryan Brotherhood”, ad so many on the left and in the media desperately hoped predicted.

Government employees. I tell ya.

Watch for this story to vanish without a trace.
.

It’s best to try to engage your opponents’ best arguments; that makes your own arguments stronger.

David Sirota’s Salon piece, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American“,  is not one of our opponents’ better arguments:

As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing — the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity — the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being.

According to Sirota, “white privilege” has prevented white males from coming under the sort of scrutiny that, say, Arabs have for ghastly crimes.

This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes. 

Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

Yeah, it could be the “white privilege”.

Or it could be the fact that nearly all of the Arab mass murderers – from Major Hassan up to the 9/11 hijackers – have actually been members of, or allegedly explicit sympathizers with, major extranational military/terror movements, while the white males have represented tiny fringes of tiny fringes of our society:

By contrast, even though America has seen a consistent barrage of attacks from domestic non-Islamic terrorists, the privilege and double standards baked into our national security ideologies means those attacks have resulted in no systemic action of the scope marshaled against foreign terrorists.

“Consistent barrage?”

The examples Sirota gives (drawn from the lefty idiotblog Crooks and Liars – the only blog in the world that can’t shake its head at what dolts the Daily Kos diary writers are) are largely lone crazies, many of them implicated in “white supremacy” by the thinnest of threads; some of them (John Patrick Bedell) are actually lefties; the article itself considered the Gabby Giffords shooting a “terror attack”.

And beyond that?

In fact, it has been quite the opposite — according to Darryl Johnson, the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, the conservative movement backlash to merely reporting the rising threat of such domestic terrorism resulted in DHS seriously curtailing its initiatives against that particular threat.

Sirota is apparently writing to an audience of the addled; DHS Secretary Napolitano’s “reporting” (along with her camp followers at the Southern Poverty Law Center) was less “reporting” than “releasing a list of groups that opposed the Democrats”.  The right was correct to mock both “efforts”.

Is there an element of “racism” in the way our society treats crime?  Sure – although the term might better be called “we-ism”.  Everyone in the world is a “we-ist”; they’re more tolerant of people who look, speak and act more like them, and less tolerant of those who don’t.  It’s true of everyone; middle-class black professionals are twitchy around urban Latinos; alpaca-clad Volvo-driving fashionably-gray NPR-listening upper-middle-class white liberals get nervous around leather-wearing Bud-drinking bikers.  Our society is still largely white, and the male half of that majority is, well, male; to the extent that the idea of a “white male majority” includes both David Sirota and, well, me, I guess you could say “we” are more forgiving of people like “us”, whoever they are.

So you could chalk this up to “white privilege”.

Or maybe to the fact that so many Arabs who’ve attacked us have expressed sympathy with the goals of the groups that attacked us in 9/11 (notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of American Arabs are no less American than anyone in Bemidji), while the vast majority of “white terror” suspects have indeed been lone wolves (I mean, if you’re going by evidence rather than Sirota’s fervent, nearly evidence-free wish that it were otherwise) might have something to do with it.

As this is written, news reports indicate two bomb blasts along the route of the Boston Marathon have put over 100 in the hospital.

A suspect – reportedly a 20-year-old Saudi national – has reportedly been detained. Reports say the FBI and DHS are checking him for ties to pro-life, Second Amendment or tax protest groups.

UPDATE: The “Saudi national” story came from CBS, and may have been wrong.  We’ll see.

LA Police say they’ll no longer immediately release addresses of people who’ve been “SWATted” – victimized by prank false alarms designed to bring out a maximum, intrusive police response:

The Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that they will no longer offer immediate information to the media on bogus 911 calls that target celebrity homes.

“We think that whoever is doing this is motivated by watching the police on TV and watching the helicopters come in, and we don’t want to allow that opportunity,” said Cmdr. Andrew Smith.

This is a good thing; it removes a motivation for these potentially dangerous pranks, and it might even potentially free up one of their overstretched supply of scarce reporters to cover the Gosnell trial!

Er, wait – no.  They’ll be busy filing paperwork to find out who’s been SWATted:

Smith said the department will also stop broadcasting the “swatting” calls so news organizations can’t hear the location of the star’s home. The media will now have to file a public records request, which can take 10 days.

They know what matters, after all.

(SCENE:  At the Cabinet room in the west wing of the Capitol building.  President OBAMA is talking with Attorney General HOLDER, Homeland Security czar NAPOLITANO, Secretary of Defense HAGEL, Secretary of State KERRY, administrative assistant Shaquanda ELLIS, and Vice President BIDEN)

OBAMA:  So we’ve got to figure out who’s killing prosecutors in Texas.  Any ideas?

NAPOLITANO:  Gotta be white supremacists.

HOLDER:  Oh, my God, I hope you’re right.

NAPOLITANO:  Or possibly tax protesters, Tea Partiers, anti-abortion protesters, Second Amendment activists, land activists, Tenth Amendment activists, Ron Paul supporters, talk radio listeners, FOX news viewers, seat-belt protesters…

HOLDER:  Yes, yes, absolutely.  Some of them.

OBAMA:  Wait – that’s a very, very broad net you’re casting.

NAPOLITANO:  We think it’s a huge conspiracy.

HOLDER: YES!

KERRY:  Just like it was in Oklahoma City!  I remember scouting the remains of the Murragh Building in my Swift Boat.  It’s seared, seared in my memory.

BIDEN:  They should have fired a couple of shots through the door with a double barrel shotgun at McVeigh!

ELLIS:  Beg your pardon, sirs and maam, but if I may interject?

OBAMA: Go ahead?

ELLIS:  OK.  On the one hand, we have a movement – white supremacists – who have committed a few crimes over the decades, but have never really developed a pattern of killing law-enforcement.  Isolated incidents, yes, but no clear pattern.  On the other hand, we have the Mexican narcotraficantes, who do in fact have a pattern of killing prosecutors throughout Mexico, and who have been operating and committing violent crimes in the US for years, and whose pattern these murders fits to a “T”, and whom the Administration inadvertently armed in operation Fast and Furious…

HOLDER: (Plugs ears, runs from room) Nanananananana, can’t hear you!”

NAPOLITANO:  Clearly you are racist.

(And SCENE)

Now, this is one of those stories where there are really a couple of levels.

At the surface, this is a story about liberal hypocrisy; a Pennsylvania NAACP leader blames a rape victim for tempting a couple of football players into perfidy:

In shocking comments, the president of the Steubenville chapter of the NAACP places the blame for the rape case that has shocked the nation on the 16-year-old victim.

Royal Mayo, a lifelong resident of the Ohio city that gained national infamy following the rape of the girl by two Steubenville High School football players, says that attention should be focused on the role of the young woman, whom he calls the “alleged victim,” saying she was drunk and wanted to go out with one of the football players. He also claims that other teens involved in the incident were let off easy, because they were “well-connected.”

Yes, yes, I know – official for a liberal organization violates PC kashrut with great gusto, exposing the left’s deep-seated hypocrisies, yadda yadda.  An example of the left’s war on women.  Same as it ever was.

But I’m here to issue a challenge to conservatism’s assembled linguists, the movement’s neologic engineers.

These stories are with us always.  They are constant blog fodder, and have been ever since most people still thought “blog” was a sound associated with gas-station burritos.  And these stories almost always need to plod laboriously through explaining something along the lines of “if a Republican or conservative would have said this, the media and the left’s chanting-point-bots (ptr) would be howling for blood, but since it’s one of their own, they’re silent”.

We need to come up with a snappy, dismissive word or short phrase to wrap up that meaning.  If I were a lefty and this were twitter, I’d make it a hash tag with an acronym: “#IAROCWHSTTMATLCPBPTRWBHFBBSI1OTOTS”, but that’s almost worse than having to type out the explanation.

So set to it, real men of linguistic genius!  We need a single word or short phrase that goes Alinsky on this pattern, and does it with style!

…that if we didn’t tighten up gun laws, there’d be shootings over parking quarrels.

And they were right; a Minneapolis man was shot in the head over a double-parking argument:

A 30-year-old man was shot in the head Sunday morning after a confrontation over a car that was double-parked, police said.

The shooting happened about 3:30 a.m. in the 7100 block of South Maplewood Avenue in the Marquette Park neighborhood, police said, one of three shootings overnight that left three people wounded.

Police said the 30-year-old man was shot in the head after an argument, ran west and fell in an alley where an ambulance picked him up and took him to Advocate Christ Medical Center. He was “walking, talking, breathing, living,” according to police.

Damn.  We gotta ban guns, I guess…

…wait.  I don’t recognize any of those landmarks.  Let me check…

…Oh, jeez.  I’m sorry.  It was Chicago, the crown jewel in Big Gun Control’s tiara.

Not sure how I bobbled that.

I apologize.

With the clocking ticking closer to midnight on his mayoral legacy, Michael Bloomberg is banning as fast as he can.

Fran Drescher

In the era of “Yes, We Can,” Michael Bloomberg has long staked his legacy on “No, You Can’t.”  In the soon-to-be 12 years since he became Gotham’s Technocrat-in-Chief, Bloomberg has managed to ban, or try to ban: (in no particular order):

• Trans fats
• Salt
• Food donations to homeless shelters
• Soft drinks
• Fatty foods (mandatory calorie counters in restaurants)
• Outdoor smoking

Bloomberg’s nanny-ish reach has been so broad that in his waning months he’s repeating himself.  Hizzoner’s latest ban plan?  Hide cigarettes from public view:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing for a new citywide law requiring stores to physically conceal cigarettes and other tobacco products behind counters, curtains or cabinets—anywhere out of public view—as part of a new anti-smoking initiative.

The legislation would also increase penalties on the smuggling and illegal sales of cigarettes as part of an effort that Bloomberg said would help curb the youth smoking rate and promote a healthier New York City.

Three out of every five cigarettes smoked in New York City were “smuggled” – purchased over state lines where the $4.35 per pack expense, not counting the additional $1.50 per pack levied in New York City, wasn’t an issue.  So while smoking in New York is at historic lows (14% according to polling in 2011), most of those gains occurred from 2002 to 2007 – before Bloomberg’s more recent tobacco initiatives to ban workplace and outdoor smoking were set in motion.

Bloomberg isn’t likely to receive much push-back to his latest move.  Hitting tobacco is often a political winner and as nanny-state legislation goes, moving tobacco products behind the counter isn’t much of a reach.  Bloomberg’s past comments on tobacco put this latest move to shame, with Bloomberg even suggesting that children have the right to sue their parents if they’re exposed to second-hand smoke.

But Bloomberg’s acknowledgment that his past legislation has made underground tobacco sales Gotham’s latest cottage industry stands in stark contrast with his attitudes on marijuana.  Last June, in concert with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s move to downgrade possession of pot from a misdemeanor to a violation, Bloomberg chimed in that he would “limit” enforcement of New York City laws against marijuana.

So pot’s okay.  But a Big Gulp demands immediate legislation.

But of course, marijuana isn’t tobacco when it comes to the effect on health.  Right?  A 2012 study at the University of Alabama garnered some press for the headline that marijuana wasn’t as bad for your lungs as tobacco.  As usual, the substance of the research was buried by the lede.  Smoking marijuana, the study concurred, leads to chronic coughing, wheezing and potentially chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).  The study even admitted that longer term research would be required to see what the rate of lung cancer was among long-term pot users.  Or as one quoted researcher simply put it, “casual or recreational marijuana use is not a safe alternative to tobacco smoking.”

By his actions, Bloomberg demonstrates a capricious sense of how to use the bully pulpit of the mayor’s office.  Marijuana restrictions need to be eased because enforcement has not only failed but is as likely to hurt the causal user as the hardcore dealer.  Tobacco restrictions need to be tightened even as Bloomberg acknowledges that his previous efforts have driven demand underground.  Tobacco users, who legally purchase a legal product over state lines need to be taught a lesson.  Marijuana users, who use a product that is currently illegal, are due leniency.

The macro issues of the Drug War aside, at a minimum, Michael Bloomberg has a high threshold for irony.

It took place in Thailand.

Yep, it was overseas. Do we have many gangs of people roaming cities in packs, looting and pillaging?

Well, not often, but stuff happens.

Just saying; if that bar owner had been limited to seven rounds or less, he and his innocent customers might well know what deli meat feels like.

Background:  It is a fact that the two places in the United States with the worst rates of firearm crime are…:

• The states of the deep, deep South, with their Scots-Irish tradition of casual, clannish violence, honor killings, and so on.
• Cities with tight gun controls.  Like Chicago, which is more dangerous per capita than Afghanistan these days, at least in terms of gun violence.  And if Rahm Emanuel theatrically bans IEDs, five’ll get you ten you start seeing those, too.

Now, when you mention this to gun-control advocates – who are usually urbanites, frequently with much schooling (as distinct from education), and some of whom at least try to go through the motions of an informed and civil debate – many will furrow their brows and intone one or both of two things:

1. “But wait!  There are cities with tight gun controls, like New York and San Francisco, with low gun crime rates!”
2. “Yes, cities like Chicago and Washington DC have tight gun controls and high crime rates.  But the guns that are used to carry out the crime come from places with lax gun laws!”

Zip Guns, Zip Codes:  Of course, just as it’s misleading to splotch crime rates across entire states – or states with significant populations, shaddap about Wyoming and the Dakotas – as it is to draw the same conclusions about politics or the economy, it’s equally as misleading to do the same with metro areas.  Just as Illinois as a whole is relatively safe (with a murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000, just a little above the national rate of 4.7/100,000), the city of Chicago as whole is modestly less-than-catastrophic, with a 15.9 per 100,000 murder rate; that’s only triple the national rate, double that of Minneapolis, and five times Saint Paul’s murder rate.

Murder in Chicago is heavily concentrated in its most blighted neighborhoods, and among its most disadvantaged populations.  You can walk the streets of Norwood Park or Lincoln Square in relative safety; Washington Heights or New City, less so; Chicago Lawn, still less.  That’s true in most cities.

And especially true in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis and New Orleans and Baltimore and Atlanta, where you have wide swathes of disparity in income and society.  And less so in cities like San Francisco and Manhattan, which have largely become gentrified and too-expensive-for-the-poor, and have managed to export their criminal element to Oakland or Newark.

Balance: To the second point?  If Chicago is more dangerous because its criminals are able to get guns from suburban Illinois or and from surrounding states, why aren’t those surrounding counties and cities anywhere nearly as dangerous? A fifth of guns used in crime in Chicago come from Indiana, a state with a crime rate a point lower than Illinois and about a quarter that of Chicago.   About 4% come from Wisconsin, a state with a crime rate half that of Illinois (and much of even that concentrated in Milwaukee, whose crime rate is not much better overall than Chicago, and for most of the same reasons) and less than a fifth that of Chicago.

If the guns – and the access to the guns – were the problem, then Montana, North Dakota and Mississippi should have sky-high crime rates too…

…oh, wait: while Montana (2.6/100,000) and North Dakota (1.5/100,000 in 2010) have very low murder rates, Mississippi is at 7/100,000 (with no urban areas making the top list).  Not much different than Minneapolis; triple Saint Paul; half of Chicago’s murder rate, even with its Deep South pathologies fully and stereotypically undisturbed.   

So here’s the question:  if access to guns is the problem, why aren’t the places from which Chicago criminals get their guns as overrun with crime as Chicago itself is?

A few days ago, I published a slightly-tongue-in-cheek Urban Renewal plan, based around selling houses in blighted neighborhoods to people with stakes in the community and the means – firearms – to defend them.

Not a few times in my life I’ve shaken my head at the onrush of events and thought “My fiction is the tortoise; fact is the hare”.

A non-profit in Houston is giving shotguns to law-abiding citizens in crime-ridden areas.

(more…)

…”there are no civilian uses for an AR-15″.

Detroit-area man repels two would-be armed robbers.

Fox 2 News Headlines

There is something to be said, when one is facing two people with handguns, for having the most intimidating-looking gun in the building.

There are libs who would say “well, maybe it’s just the receptionist, owner and security guard’s time”.

The first recorded Dorner tattoo:

I’ll bet dimes to dollars Tarantino is already scavenging the film rights.

Chicago-area National Guardsman survives Afghanistan; gets killed at home:

On February 2, Cook, was shot and killed while in a car near his grandmother’s East Chicago house where he was taking Antoine for a visit. The veteran was found on top of his little boy, shielding him from the 15 bullets that pierced the car.

” He saved his son he made sure that before he left the last thing he did make sure his son was okay,” said Norwood.

Antoine was hit, too, in the left leg. Another bullet skimmed his right and a third grazed the toddler’s head.

Police believe Cook’s murder was a case of mistaken identity, possible retaliation for another shooting just days before. The couple was planning their wedding, and a future.

And I’ll start a countdown before some lib on Twitter says “Hey!  Indiana’s not Illinois!  They’re a shall-issue state with relatively liberal (meaning conservative) gun laws!”

Yeah.  But East Chicago is not just part of the Chicago metroplex; it’s a run-down industrial suburb full of oil storage tanks and down-market housing; it is more or less to Chicago what Bayonne is to New York.

It’s a blip of Chicago-style violence, along with Gary and Hammond (and, downstate, Indianapolis) in a state that’s relatively placid by comparison.

It’s not the guns.  It’s the sociology.  Big, Democrat-controlled cities full of the social pathologies they bring are just plain more dangerous.

I wrote this piece five years ago yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of what had to have been the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.

Not much has change for me, or the story, since then.  So while I usually don’t re-run pieces, I’m going to basically just update the piece from 2008.

———-

I was a 20 year old college kid working a grindingly-boring Sunday afternoon shift at KQDJ Radio in Jamestown, ND on February 13, 1983.

I was doing what I usually did on those boring Sunday shifts; playing records, doing homework, taking transmitter readings.

Then, the police scanner in the “newsroom” next door, which normally burbled with the desultory reports of DWIs and bar fights and traffic stops that make up the lives of most small town cops, suddenly erupted.  There’d been a shootout; officers were down; cops and sheriff’s deputies were being dispatched to Medina, a town of about 400 people about 35 miles west of Jamestown on I94.

It took hours to untangle the story, which became perhaps the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.

Two US Marshals, dispatched from Fargo to try to arrest a group of tax-protesters affiliated with the neo-Nazi-sympathetic “Posse Comitatus”, had been killed in the shootout that ensued.  Their leader, Gordon Kahl, and several others fled the scene.  The scanner reported ambulances on their way to the hospital in Jamestown bringing the wounded, which included Yorie Kahl, criticially injured by a gunshot; in one of the many ironies that day, Kahl’s life was saved by the doctor on duty in the Emergency Room that day, Dr. Evan Kostick, father of my high school pal David (himself a doctor today), and one of Jamestown’s tiny Jewish community.

The scene of the shootout when the first TV station, from Bismarck, arrived on the scene.

Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the shootout.  The anniversary passed without much notice in the regional media.  Five years ago it was another matter; the Fargo Forum led the coverage; others from the Bismark Trib pitched in; former Forum staffer James Corcoran wrote “Bitter Harvest”, the definitive book on the event, relating not only the shootout and the apocalyptic trial of the survivors, but the social sturm und drang that the event caused on the Northern Plains.

———-

Times were brutally tough in the Dakotas in the early ’80s.  The rest of the US was slowly recovering from a recession; it’d be hard to call what happened on the Plains anything less than a depression.  What the foreclosure crisis is to the inner city today, the farm crisis of the ’80s was to the Great Plains.

The Medina water tower. The tower was there in 1983, although without the antennae.

Some farmers – and some of the workers whose livelihoods depended on agriculture, which in North Dakota back then accounted for pretty much every job in the place – did what human nature naturally bids some people to do; blame someone else.  And for some – like Kahl and a thin film of like-minded people – it wasn’t a big leap from “losing your farm to the bank” and “losing your farm to Jewish Bankers”.  The Times’ review of “Bitter Harvest” notes:

The book that turned his head at an early age was ”The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” and it was written by Henry Ford.

It is based on a 1918 treatise called ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to be the minutes of a cabal of Russian Jews plotting to destroy Christianity and the white race and take over the world. Ford wrote ”The International Jew” in 1920, and it was not until 1929 that he finally conceded that ”The Protocols” was a fabrication concocted by czarist Russian anti-Semites.

Even so, as a young man in the 1940′s, Mr. Kahl believed it totally. He had considerable encouragement. He came of age at a time when the velvet voice of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who reached into almost as many homes with his weekly radio show as Fred Allen, broadcast some of the nastiest anti-Semitic propaganda ever heard on the airwaves; when Gerald L. K. Smith established the Jew-baiting Christian Nationalist Crusade in Arkansas and gained a national following, and when Gerald Winrod, an apocalyptic fundamentalist preacher in central Kansas gained tens of thousands of adherents to a movement that came to be known as the Jayhawk Nazis.

Winrod’s son, George Gordon Winrod, kept the ministry alive.  I remember his followers leaving corrosively anti-semitic leaflets under the windshield wipers of cars in the church parking lot when I was in ninth grade.

Nobody in my circle bought into it, of course – but we all knew people for whom it rang true.  There was an audience, out there.

And they – like Kahl – weren’t necessarily easily identifiable:

When Mr. Kahl came home from World War II, he was 25 years old, and he was regarded as a hero. He had shot down 10 enemy planes as a turret gunner on B-25′s, and he had won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two air medals, a Presidential unit citation and two Purple Hearts. That was not all the metal he brought home. Surgeons never did get out all the shrapnel he took in the jaw, chest and hip.

Kahl in World War 2

So the combination of hard times and ready scapegoats found some adherents.

———-

Kahl escaped that day; with two federal agents dead, the federal law-enforcement machinery sprung into place.  Two blocks from the house where my father still lives in Jamestown, in Stutsman County’s then-brand-new courthouse, the FBI and an alphabet soup of other federal law-enforcement agencies set up their command post; local hotels were jammed with brusque men and women in sharp suits and/or, occasionally, battledress utilities.

Kahl

And they were not happy.  Rumors began to circulate; the Feds were tramping about the prairie with big, nasty boots; they were conducting no-knock raids, presuming the locals guilty until proven innocent, acting like a hostile occupying power – or so said the rumors.

The previous summer, I’d worked at KDAK, a little station in Carrington, a town of about 2,000 about 40 miles north of Jamestown.   The station had also just hired a new “News Director”, a pretty mid-20-something named Peggy Polreis who’d just come from Carrington’s newspaper.  One of my jobs had been to make her broadcast-worthy.  I did a good job.

One day, a few days after the shootout, Peggy got a tip from a source that the Feds were going to search a farmhouse near nearby Fessenden.  She arrived on the scene to find that the press were being cordoned away from a farmhouse located a solid half-mile up the road, behind a shelter belt.

Peggy slipped away from the group, and crawled – so the story went – a quarter of a mile along the shelter belt, keeping out of sight of the cops.  She was, apparently, the only non-cop to see what happened.

The police – and, as I recall, a North Dakota National Guard armored personnel carrier – had surrounded the farmhouse.  A dog darted from an outbuilding; a policeman shot the dog dead.  The gunshot sparked more gunfire, and before long the farmhouse was completely riddled with bullet holes.  Finally, the police moved in…

This is a photo, as I recall, from the search near Fessenden. That’s an M-114 Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle on the right, a ND National Guard vehicle that was pretty much the only armored vehicle in the state at the time that wasn’t intended to carry cash.

…to discover the farmhouse empty.

It was one of many incidents that angered, and occasionally alienated, the locals from the Feds.

———-

How you look at the events of that winter (and the ensuing spring and summer, when the manhunt for Kahl led to a final shootout in Arkansas that left Kahl and another Christian Identity supporter dead) depends on who, and where, you were back then.

If you were a local, you knew that North Dakotans tend to be good, law-abiding people; they’ve voted Republican in pretty much every Presidential election since statehood, making them marginally less conservative than Utah.  And yet the Posse, and Christian Identity, found recruits and adherents – and it was no mystery why.  Radical fringes were no stranger to the plains; the Non-Partisan League, the Grangers, the Bund and other fevered activists had gestated in the area in response to other crises since the 1890′s.

The seven Kahl case defendants

So we weren’t surprised that some of the locals were sympathetic.  It was a minority – a small one – but it drew attention.  One of them even wrote and recorded – on a home cassette player, I think – a song praising and rooting for Kahl, during the manhunt and before the final fatal shootout in Arkansas.  It got a little play – mostly from news organizations who were reporting on the acceptance Kahl, the Posse and other extremists got from the area.

If you weren’t from the area, and didn’t understand it, it must have seemed odd.  And maybe a little scary.

———-

Hollywood certainly knows nothing of the area, and understands less about it.  But that didn’t stop it from making a made-for-TV movie, based rather loosely on Bitter Harvest, in 1991.  Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas starred Rod Steiger as Kahl, andMichael “Family Ties” Gross as an FBI agent from New York who flew to the state to help solve the crime.

The show got the basic facts right; the names, the places (most of the show was putatively set in Jamestown), the timeline (sort of).

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.  Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (“Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.  The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance.

Rod Steiger as Kahl, during the shootout scene.

Worse?  While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”‘s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.

“Main Street in Jamestown”, from “Manhunt in the Dakotas”. Note the 1986 Honda Civic wagon inserted into a story set in 1982. Also note the movie theatre – and I’ll point out the relative lack of local significance to “The Alamo” in rural North Dakota. Perhaps that’s why all the “Locals” in the movie had Arklahoma accents.

It was crap, of course, factually (no station in the state played the song, except as news) as well as socially (Jamestown is a college town of 16,000 that hosts a state hospital, and a school for the profoundly disabled, where Kahl had little traction; Kahl’s base of support was out on the isolated drift prairie).  But it was interesting, seeing how inscrutable “flyover land” was to the people who actually produce these things, and the almost-superstitious fear the place engenders.

———-

That part of North Dakota is a huge place in terms of the land and the sky; the human geography is much smaller.  In the 27-odd years since I left the place, whenever I meet other expats, it’s hard to go more than thirty seconds without finding a common acquaintance.

It’s the same with events.  Besides Dr. Kostick, and Peggy Polreis, I knew Darrell Graf – Medina’s police chief at the time (and Graf has actually turned up on this blog) and people in his family.  Scott Kopp was another – a guy I remember as a Stutsman County deputy who lost a finger from a Kahl shot that could have done much worse.  Another guy – a Medina cop who was on the periphery of the action – was my friend’s sister’s boyfriend (and, the last I checked, husband of about twenty-five years).

The internet can make you acquainted with even more people.  Scott Faul – one of the Posse members who was arrested, tried and did prison time for his role in the shootout – had a blog, although it hasn’t been updated since the first time this piece ran.

Thirty years is a long time, even out there.  But memories are longer still.

Pleased to meet you, can you guess my name?

Plenty of sympathy (and a $1 million reward) for the devil in Southern California.

Former Marine and LAPD officer Chris Dorner promised to wage “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” against his former employer in his bizarre manifesto.  Five days into Dorner’s declaration of war against the LAPD, starting with murdering the 28 year-old daughter of a police officer and her fiancé, it appears Dorner has made good on that threat as there has been little “conventional” in the reaction to his crimes.

If Dorner believed that gunning down two innocent people, and two other police officers, would result in greater scrutiny of the LAPD, it was a bloody gamble that’s paid off.  In a matter of days, the LAPD has gone from dismissing Dorner’s account of the reasons behind his firing to re-opening the investigation.  LA Police Chief Charlie Beck denied the move was an attempt to “appease” Dorner.  It’s more likely an attempt to appease the public amid an ever-growing series of errors in the Dorner manhunt.

Who might have guessed that the LAPD would be Dorner’s biggest ally in his murderous attempt to move public opinion?  Thus far, the LAPD has managed to shoot one older woman in the back, terrify her daughter, and shoot at a thin white man in a supposed case of mistaken identity with a large black man.  Much was made in the media of Dorner’s military experience as a rationale for why authorities have been unable to find him in the resort community of Big Bear, where Dorner is said to be hiding.  But there’s little rationale for a trigger-happy police force that seems to be playing right into Dorner’s hands.

And Dorner most certainly seems to have some sense of the media impact of his actions.  Writing in his manifesto screed, Dorner claimed:

“The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse,” Dorner wrote. “I know I will be vilified by the LAPD and the media. Unfortunately, this is a necessary evil that I do not enjoy but must partake and complete for substantial change to occur within the LAPD and reclaim my name.”

Apparently part of the “necessary evil” was taunting Monica Quan’s father Randall with a phone call in which he said Quan “should have done a better job of protecting his daughter.”  Don’t worry, Dorner didn’t “enjoy” that.

What Dorner might have had a harder time anticipating was a vocal minority insistent on turning him into a folk hero:

Supporters of Christopher Dorner, the former LA policeman turned “cop killer,” have shown up online, with tweets and fan pages on Facebook. Some call Dorner a “hero” for writing a nine-page manifesto alleged on racism and corruption within the LAPD.

Numerous supporters on Twitter are calling the alleged murderer a “Dark Knight.”One Facebook page calls him “the hero LA deserves, but not the one it needs right now … He’s a silent guardian, watchful protector against corruption, he’s our Dark Knight.”

There’s even a “I support Christopher Jordan Dorner” Facebook page with over 7,000 “likes.”  The page’s creator is already promising “t-shirts, buttons, stickers + bumper stickers” because nothing says respectful, intellectual debate like mass marketing a psychopath.  Hey, it worked for Che Guevara.

If Dorner really was the “whistleblower” he wants to define himself as, there were a myriad of ways for him to get his message out other than with a gun.  But his entire narrative of the LAPD is at odds with perception of the department.  After the disgrace of the Rampart scandal in the late 90s, where 70 officers were implicated in misconduct with a gang strike force, the LAPD has seen a surge in popularity.  A 2009 poll put the LAPD at a nearly 80% approval rating.

Most of Dorner’s criticisms of the department aren’t exactly Serpico-level indictments, but rather tales of harassment and bureaucratic lethargy.  Hardly grounds for a killing spree.  Unless, of course, Dorner isn’t the “Dark Knight” wish fulfillment figure for some in Southern California but at heart just a deranged, vengeful man.