News and Views about Happenings in the Firearms Industry from Classic Arms Company, Inc.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Walgreens Pharmacist Fired for Shooting His Own Gun During Robbery
Everyone in Michigan thinks Walgreens pharmacist Jeremy Hoven is a hero for using his own gun to scare off two armed men during a late night robbery at the store. Well, everyone that is except for his employer, who has subsequently fired Hoven from his pharmacy job for violating the company's non-escalation policy. I can't even begin to imagine what the Walgreens' bosses could be thinking with such an idiotic decision. It's not every day that someone loses their job for saving his own life and the lives of his co-workers.
As if the story of an employee shooting a gun purely out of self-defense wasn't infuriating enough, here are some more details to rile you up: Hoven says the reason he even had the gun (and a concealed weapons permit) in the first place is because after the store was robbed back in 2006, Walgreens failed to improve security, and he felt unsafe.
In addition to inadequate security, there's this ridiculous business of Walgreens' "non-escalation" policy. If you watch the frightening video below, you can see exactly what occurred during the robbery. Two masked men enter the store and hold up an employee at gunpoint. That's when Hoven draws his own gun and fires several downward shots in their direction. He justified his decision to shoot this way: "I was reacting out of fear, and the adrenaline was taking over ... You could have probably taken my pulse from my breath because my heart was beating that much." I'd say that's a pretty convincing justification.
As you can see, the thieves are clearly shaken by the shots and run out of the store. No one was harmed; the robbery attempt failed. Far from "escalating" the situation, Hoven stopped it.
If you ask me, Walgreens should be giving this man a raise -- not the sack. Still, the company is maintaining that Hoven had no right to carry or discharge a weapon in their store at any time. Hopefully, Hoven will get what should be coming to him -- a promotion and/or reward! -- when his lawsuit is decided.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Trying to track the IHOP gun's path from China
By Pete Williams, NBC News chief justice correspondent
The assault rifle used in the deadly shooting at a Nevada IHOP restaurant came from a Chinese company whose weapons imports have been banned since 1994, authorities say, but it’s unclear how the gunman acquired the AK-47 rifle.
Law enforcement officials say the man who fired the shots Tuesday in Carson City, Eduardo Sencion, had three weapons: two AK-47-style rifles and a handgun.
The officials say the actual shooting was committed with a Norinco Arms AK-47. Norinco, the Chinese company, is a global supplier of firearms and military weapons.
Since 1994, the United States has banned all imports of Norinco weapons into the United States (other than shotguns), but dealers were allowed to sell any stock they acquired before the import ban went into effect.
An attempt to trace where and how Sencion acquired the weapon has not come up with an answer. The dealer who originally sold the weapon has since gone out of business, which complicates the tracing effort.
Nevada IHOP shooter was 'gentle, kind man'
The gun could have been legally purchased. It could have been imported before the Norinco ban. The Clinton-era assault weapons ban applied to weapons like it, but the law expired in 2004. When Barack Obama first came into office, the administration suggested it would ask Congress to reimpose the ban, but that idea was quickly abandoned.
Officials say Sencion had two other weapons with him, apparently in the van he drove to the restaurant — a handgun and a second AK-47. The other AK-47 was a Romarm Cugir, made by a Romanian weapons company. The handgun was a Colt .38 revolver. http://www.bobproctor-training.net/decision-by-bob-proctor/#
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Republicans refuse to confirm leader for ATF despite its troubles
Former officials say the agency, which ran a botched sting operation, needs a permanent director to guide it. But nominees to the post have met opposition from gun-rights groups.
By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau
8:27 PM PDT, September 6, 2011
Reporting from Washington
Congressional Republicans have been upset at the management at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which authorized a botched sting operation near the Mexican border that put guns in the hands of drug criminals.
But Republican leaders, responding to complaints from gun-rights lobbyists, have refused to confirm a director for the bureau since it was split from the Treasury Department eight years ago.
"They have had nothing but acting directors. Do you wonder why some things would go wrong there?" said John Killorin, a retired special agent from Atlanta and president of the ATF Assn. "This is a major law enforcement agency, and they need a confirmed director with the full responsibility and authority to run it."
President Obama's nominee, an ATF special agent from Chicago, has yet to have a Senate hearing.
President George W. Bush faced the same problem. His nominee, Michael J. Sullivan, was a well-regarded U.S. attorney in Boston and an ally of then-Atty. Gen John Ashcroft. But Idaho Sens. Larry Craig and Michael D. Crapo, both Republicans, blocked his confirmation in the Senate in response to complaints from an Idaho gun dealer.
"People said to me at the time that if Mike Sullivan can't be confirmed, then no one was going to be confirmed," recalled Sullivan, who served as acting ATF director while remaining as the top federal prosecutor in Boston. "The agency needs a full-time leader. People there say morale is very low. They have felt abandoned because they didn't have a leader who had the confidence of the people at the Justice Department and the White House."
Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the failure to confirm the president's nominee to head the bureau did not explain the management failures at the bureau.
"While a Senate-approved director would be nice for the ATF, it wouldn't have stopped the disastrous mistakes made in the Fast and Furious strategy," he said, referring to the sting operation. "The acting director reported to the deputy attorney general who reports to the attorney general, so there should have been accountability."
The bureau has a long and colorful history. The first Congress imposed taxes on whiskey, and its agents were part of the Treasury Department. In the Prohibition era, its agents fought the illegal trade in booze, and they included Eliot Ness in Chicago. But more recently, its main duty has been enforcing federal gun laws.
Eight years ago, Congress removed the bureau from the Treasury Department and made it a separate law enforcement agency under the Justice Department. For the first time, lawmakers put its director under political control by requiring Senate confirmation of the president's nominee.
Since then, no one has been confirmed. Both nominees have drawn opposition from gun-rights groups, including the powerful National Rifle Assn. Obama nominated Andrew Traver, the ATF's special agent in Chicago, to lead the bureau, but his nomination has gone nowhere in the Senate.
"This president has consistently nominated hardened gun control advocates into positions that restrict the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans," Erich Pratt, communications director for Gun Owners of America, said in explaining the group's opposition.
Gun control advocates say these critics are opposed to the ATF itself.
"The bottom line is the gun lobby will oppose any nominee who promises to be a strong and effective director of the ATF," said Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "Fast and Furious is what happens when you don't have a strong director," he said.
Two years ago, Kenneth E. Melson, an expert on forensic science, was named the acting director of the ATF. He stepped down last month in the aftermath of the failed sting operation. In his place, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. named B. Todd Jones, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, as acting director. Officials said he would commute from Minneapolis, where he continues to hold his prosecutor's post.
The Gun Dean decried the Aug. 30 personnel changes in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s office in the wake of the Fast and Furious scandal.
"The Obama administration has been reduced to playing musical chairs at the Justice Department," said John M. Snyder, who as the senior gun rights expert and advocate in Washington earned the moniker: The Gun Dean. Snyder is a former journalist for National Rifle Association publication and is a founding member of the Citizen’s Committee to Protect the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
He is also the author of The Gun Saint, the story of how St. Gabriel Possenti, in an incident not related to his cause for sainthood, used a pistol to protect peasants from robbers. Snyder is working to convince the Vatican to name the saint the official patron saint of handguns.
"This musical chairs charade is the Obama administration's response to the government's gun scandal, and it isn't going to wash," he said.
"In that scandal, conducted by the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. government allowed and even participated in the illegal transfer of thousands of firearms from the United States to Mexico," Snyder said. "Many of the guns were used in the commission of crimes in both countries, including in the murder of American law enforcement agents.
"The government called this Operation Fast and Furious under Project Gunrunner. Now Attorney General Eric Holder is shifting people around the department and even around the country in order to stamp out the bad publicity and the congressional investigation coming as a result of the scandal. However, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, apparently is not going to bite on this bone. He says he's going ahead with the investigation and will continue to hold public hearings on the government's gun mess."
Snyder said the keys players in the game of musical chairs is the reassigning of Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson to the position of senior adviser on forensic science in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Programs.
Despite pressure not to cooperate with Issa, Melson testified in a closed-door hearing before Issa on July 4—significant not only because it was a Sunday and the nation’s birthday, but also because Melson brought his own lawyers, not DOJ lawyers.
Snyder said he is pleased that Issa has announced that he will hold more Fast and Furious hearings in September. "It's good news indeed.”
"It would be a good idea to scrap ATF and perhaps launch a full scale investigation of the Justice Department. It also would be a good idea to deep-six some of the nonsensical federal firearm laws now on the books, and reassert the individual Second Amendment civil right of law-abiding American citizens to keep and bear arms without undue interference from nosy federal bureaucrats,” he said.
"In November of 2012, just a little over a year from now, American voters will have a chance to deep-six gun grabbing politicians in the White House and in Congress. It's not too early to get ready for a sea-change in American politics."\\ http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=45930
Monday, September 5, 2011
Sellers prepare for gun silencers
Federal authorization required to purchase noise suppressor
It will be several months before a Battle Creek gun shop owner said he will sell silencers, approved last week by Michigan's Attorney General.
"I don't have any suppressors in yet," said Joel Fulton, president of Southside Sportsman Club at 539 Capital Ave. S.W. "I placed an order last week and I have had several phone calls from customers."
Late last week Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, in a formal opinion, said Michigan law permits gun owners to obtain and use noise suppressors or silencers as long as they go through a federal permit process.
Statelaw generally forbids sale or possession of the silencers but contains a specific exemption for those obtained with federal authorization, similar to permits required for automatic weapons.
Michigan becomes the 38th state to allow possession of gun silencers.
Fulton called the decision significant and delightful.
"It is no different than putting a muffler on a lawn mower," he said. "Once you shoot with the sound suppressed you won't go back. It is just so much better."
Fulton said the suppressors:
• Make shooting with friends more enjoyable because ear muffs won't be needed and with silencers people can talk to each other as they shoot which increases safety because of better communications among shooters.
• Allows shooting without disturbing neighbors. Hunters can sight their guns on land where they hunt without disturbing game.
• Will prevent ear damage if the gun owner is forced to fire in a room or other confined area.
Fulton said he believes criminals using silencers in movies and on television have tainted the public against the devices.
"We panic in the United States because in Hollywood only the assassins have silencers.
"The image is that every bad guy has a silencer,"he said.
Battle Creek Deputy Police Chief James Saylor said Sunday he has not fully analyzed the new opinion or possible implications but said he doesn't expect widespread problems.
"If it's legal to own and is obtained with the proper permits and the owner passes the screening qualifications and they can afford to own them, then with ability comes responsible ownership," Saylor said.
Applicants must undergo background checks including criminal and mental histories and obtain certification from local law enforcement.
Fulton said the silencers will cost $600 to $1,000 depending on the weapon used and buyers should expect to wait several months.
He said he ordered just over a dozen and hopes to have some in stock in a month.
Glocks and such: Phony outrage is well-worn shoe in US
Posted: Monday, September 5, 2011 12:00 am
A gun, by any other name, is just a gun. Unless it's a Glock semi-automatic pistol raffled off by Republicans in Pima County, which just happens to be the same county where Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people were shot, six of them killed.
Then it's an outrage.
Or so we're supposed to believe.
The 24-hour news cycle, the blogosphere and the Twitterverse erupted last week when Huffington Post pointed out that the Pima County Republican Party was raffling off a Glock 23 pistol, saying it's the same pistol that Jared Lee Loughner used Jan. 8 to shoot Giffords in the head.
It's not the same. Loughner used a Glock 19.
Liberals immediately decided it was an affront to Giffords and the others shot that day and dubbed it an insensitive outrage, yet it's legal to purchase and own a gun in the United States and it's legal to raffle a gun in Arizona.
The politics of outrage is a well-worn shoe in America. One pol or another is always trying to fan the flames of outrage to gin up votes. It works so well that we're constantly barraged with outrages to the point that we're permanently outraged.
In a country where everyone is outraged, no one is. Yet there are some things happening in this country we should be angry about and one of them is our inability to come to terms with the Second Amendment.
Consider the fake fury by conservatives over the ATF Fast and Furious scandal, an attempted sting operation by federal agents who allowed "straw buyers" to legally purchase thousands of assault rifles from Arizona gun dealers so that the guns could be tracked to Mexican drug cartels. The ATF lost track of many of the guns and one of those guns ended up at the shooting scene where smugglers killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
Conservatives say they are outraged about it and are desperately trying to pin the scandal on President Obama.
But in the three years prior to Operation Fast and Furious, several newspapers had written investigative stories about Mexican drug cartels smuggling tens of thousands of legally purchased American guns into Mexico.
Rather than be outraged by that fact, conservatives saw the stories as an insidious attack on the Second Amendment by attempting to conflate Mexico's drug war with America's gun laws. And that was outrageous, they said.
Thousands of Mexicans getting slaughtered with those American guns was not an outrage. Until a Democratic administration tried to do something about it and blew it. Then it was.
Since the Loughner shooting, people using guns of various makes, types and calibers have killed about two dozen people in Pima County.
Are Democrats outraged by that? Or are they only outraged when Republicans try to raise money raffling off a gun made by the same manufacturer of a gun used to shoot a Democrat?
