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December 2013

Barring BIG BREAKING NEWS, this will be our last post of 2013. Sit back and enjoy A.F. Branco's collection of Legal Insurrection 2013 cartoons. ...

Fun times start at midnight in New York City, and I'm not talking just about the dropping of ball. Socialist at heart Mayor Bill DeBlasio's first act will be to ban the horse drawn carriages that are one of the symbols of the tourist experience at Central Park. https://twitter.com/JonahNRO/status/418140444824854528

Federal District Court Judge William M. Skretny has found that most provisions of NY's SAFE Act--passed only one month after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting--do not infringe the Second Amendment. He did, however, find that the provision that limits magazine capacity to only seven rounds was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. This seemingly small win for gun owners is actually very important. Almost no semi-automatic pistols have 7-round magazines available.  Because semi-automatic pistols are the overwhelming preference for civilian self-defense--as well as for police and military use--the 7-round limit would have effectively banned the large majority of semi-automatic pistols on the market.  (Technically, one could use a large capacity magazine and only load it to 7-rounds; if, that is, one were willing to risk a felony conviction based on a police officer's honest ability to accurately count to seven. Not me, thanks.) Ironically, one of the few semi-automatic pistols for which 7-round magazines are readily available is the model 1911, which most folks not familiar with guns will know as the Colt .45 pistol of WWII fame.  Thus, this relatively lethal handgun firing the potent .45 ACP cartridge would have been granted preference over many handguns of lesser lethality. Thus the tossing of the 7-round limit saves for law-abiding citizens the vast majority of contemporary handguns for their self-defense use. Unfortunately, the remainder of the SAFE Acts egregious restrictions on the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens were allowed to stand, including severe restrictions on so-called "assault weapons," mandatory registration which can only serve the purpose of future confiscation  of firearms possessed by law-abiding citizens (because criminals do not register their guns or otherwise obey gun laws), and so forth. The full-length judicial opinion from Judge Skretny is available below. Happy New Year! --Andrew, @LawSelfDefense

Like my esteemed colleague Leslie Eastman, I wanted to take an opportunity to highlight some favorite posts from the last year. 1. 15 Conservatives You Wish Had Spoken At Your College Graduation I wrote this around graduation season last spring when I noticed the lack of...

A new survey from Pew Research Center’s Internet Project shows that people are expanding their use of social media to more than just one platform, but Facebook still leads the way.
Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind.1 Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. These are among the key findings on social networking site usage and adoption from a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.
While some of the other key social media platforms seem to have developed more specific audiences – Pinterest, for example, is far more popular among women - Facebook appears to have a relatively broad audience in comparison.

Professor Jacobson has already offered a critique of the investigative story by  the New York Times regarding the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Other critiques have rolled in as well:
Fifteen months after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the narrative of the attack continues to be shaped, and reshaped, by politicians and the press. But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks. “It was a coordinated attack. It is completely false to say anything else. … It is completely a lie,” one witness to the attack told Fox News.
Since then, The Times has doubled down in support of its investigation and its conclusions with an editorial and an editor's note written by the paper's editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal. I'd like to add three more general observations:

As I was reviewing the economic news of 2013, I felt a few updates might be in order as we conclude the wild ride that this year has been. One of the most fascinating stories of the year, from my capitalism-loving point-of-view, centered on Cyprus.  In...

I'm not doing a blog selfie this year. No Top 10 lists for me. No reflections on what was and what might have been. No deep thoughts. Too busy doing what I think it is we do best: Creating community within our Nation, chaos in theirs Thanks for your support this...

Well, just about everything. A young child holding her baby brother's hand.  A mother holding her children. The mother happens to be Mitt Romney's daughter-in-law. To the race-obsessed minds at MSNBC, the fact that Mitt Romney's son and daughter-in-law adopted a black child is something to mock. The focus...

As we enter into the New Year, I wanted follow one of blogging's finest traditions: The Top 10 List. However, as I reflected upon the year in-depth with a good friend last night, there was one post that really deserves special  mention, as its features an...

An official from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who helped oversee the rollout of healthcare.gov is retiring, according to the NY Times.
The No. 2 official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who supervised the troubled rollout of President Obama’s health care law, is retiring, administration officials said Monday. The official, Michelle Snyder, is the agency’s chief operating officer, in charge of day-to-day activities and the allocation of resources, including budget and personnel. Technology experts who built the website for the federal insurance exchange, HealthCare.gov, reported to her. Ms. Snyder is the second administration official to depart since problems with the website frustrated millions of people trying to buy insurance and caused acute political embarrassment to Mr. Obama. The chief information officer at the Medicare agency, Tony Trenkle, stepped down in November to take a job in the private sector. Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the Medicare agency, said Ms. Snyder was retiring this week “after 41 years of outstanding public service.”
Snyder’s name came up in congressional hearings in October.

Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source.  To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco ...

https://twitter.com/realmyiq2xu/status/417410251936104448 (Featured image source: YouTube)...

When they say "Coexist," what they really mean is ...

We have noted here many times the war on little boys in elementary school through the absurd application of "zero tolerance" rules, When do we finally stop the harassment of little boys by school administrators? We also have noted Dr. Helen Smith's book Men on Strike regarding how similar policies through college and beyond have had a negative impact. So this recent interview with Camille Paglia in The Wall Street Journal is familiar territory, A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues:
'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation..... Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters." She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college....

On December 18 a pre-trial hearing was held in the shooting case of Renisha McBride in Detroit. The purpose of the hearing was to determine whether the second degree murder charge against the defendant, Theodore Wafer, ought to be dismissed or whether there existed sufficient grounds to bind Wafer over for trial. The judge ruled the matter was to go to trial. Legal Insurrection previously posted on the Wafer/McBride case here: Analysis: Self-Defense Claim May be Legally Weak in Michigan Porch Shooting. As the title of the piece suggests, the evidence as then available seemed inadequate to support much of a claim of self-defense. In the course of the pre-trial hearing, however, the defense team called to the stand a crime scene reconstruction and firearms expert witness, David Balash. In the course of his testimony under defense questioning facts began to emerge that seem likely to form the structure of the team’s legal defense. Some of the forensic evidence remains in dispute, but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make several likely presumptions. One of these is that Wafer was standing inside his home, looking through the closed (and perhaps locked) screen door, and McBride was on the other side of the door standing on the rather small front porch, so within two to three feet of the screen door. Finally, that the shotgun round that struck and killed McBride was fired through the screening of the door. When police arrived on the scene in response to Wafer’s 911 call, they found the screen, and its associated frame, had been knocked lose from the screen door proper, and noted the hole in the screen through which the fatal shot had likely been fired. Prior to taking crime scene photos, they replaced the screen in its proper position in the door, the position in which they assumed the screen was placed when pierced by the shot.

The NY Times published a lengthy account of the Benghazi attack that is being hyped as exonerating the Obama administration (and of course, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton), but in fact the report does nothing of the sort. The main thrust of the spin is that it was the video after all, a claim long since abandoned by almost everyone. There never was a doubt that the video inspired a generalize hostility, but that is a far cry from saying that the actual attackers who executed by contemporaneous internal administration accounts were motivated by the video. The reporting does not support that the video was what motivated the "several dozen" armed attackers, even if it created a general atmosphere of hostility. https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/417120838060490754 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/417116566065389568 The NYT also plays a linguistic slight of hand, distinguishing between international al-Qaeda (NYT says no connection) and local al-Qaeda wannabees to try to prove that this was not an "al-Qaeda" attack. But local, independently operation al-Qaeda groups have been the motus operandi for years. That there was no phone call from Pakistan to the local group in Benghazi does not mean that this was not a planned Islamic extremist attack and instead some spontaneous reaction to a video: