Stand your airspace law

The first snowflake of a snowball effect in the making?

Deer Trail to vote on whether to legalize hunting drones

Deer Trail's town board will vote Aug. 6 on an ordinance that would create drone-hunting licenses and offer $100 bounties for unmanned aerial vehicles.

"We do not want drones in town," said Phillip Steel, the resident who drafted the ordinance. "They fly in town, they get shot down."

Read more at the link. (There's not really all that much more to read.)

Interlude whilst we await Zimmerman's Florida court verdict

(CBS News) JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -

A Florida woman who fired warning shots against her allegedly abusive husband has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville had said the state's "Stand Your Ground" law should apply to her because she was defending herself against her allegedly abusive husband when she fired warning shots inside her home in August 2010.

She told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom she had already taken out a protective order.

CBS Affiliate WETV reports that Circuit Court Judge James Daniel handed down the sentence Friday.

Alexander was convicted of attempted murder after she rejected a plea deal for a three-year prison sentence. She said she did not believe she did anything wrong.

She was recently denied a new trial after appealing to the judge to reconsider her case based on Florida's controversial "Stand Your Ground" law. The law states that the victim of a crime does not have to attempt to run for safety and can immediately retaliate in self-defense.

Oh, she is a black woman, by the way.

Fence 'em all in

Guambat was vaguely aware of a news item in the last week about some devoutly irate pastor somewhere with a Southern accent barracking to fence in all gays and lesbians, with the hoped for result that they would then all die out.

On the premise that guns don't kill, but people with guns do, and that Americans have a god-given if not constitutional-given right to arm themselves, Guambat would like to offer the suggestion that that fence idea may (or may not) be a good idea to deal with "senseless" gun violence. Arm 'em then fence 'em all in. If you can't take the guns away, take away the people with guns. Maybe they'd eventually all die out.

What's up with Guambat? Well, Guambat has a sweet little sister who lives in the vicinity of the following item and is known to visit coffee establishments, so he looked a little deeper into this story. All good on the little sister front, but not so good for many others.

Father of Seattle gunman: ‘I’m so sorry’

"The first thing I can say, and it doesn’t go very far at this point, is I’m so sorry," Walter Stawicki said, his voice quivering. "It sounds so trite, that I feel their grief ... I just hope they understand he wasn’t a monster out to kill people."

the gunman opened fire at an artsy Seattle cafe around 11 a.m. Wednesday, killing four patrons. As he fled, he gunned down a woman during a carjacking and took off with her SUV. Stawicki killed himself as police closed in.

The 21 homicides this year have the city’s leaders wondering what if anything can be done.

"Why have these acts, these random killings occurred? I’m not sure we have the resources to tell you why," Councilman Bruce Harrell said.

In just over a month, a young woman was killed in a seemingly random drive-by shooting in a popular nightlife district and a father who was driving with his family was killed by a stray bullet fired during a fight involving people on the street.

McGinn said the highest priority would be addressing the "epidemic of gun violence that’s plaguing the city." He said he’ll look at redeploying officers, as well as legislation. Police have told residents to expect more officers on patrol in high-crime areas.

Guambat wonders if the artsy cafe was in a high-crime area.

And if more legislation in support of the 6th Commandment and in derogation of the 2nd Amendment will do SFA.

Make her day -- shoot her

Then throw her in the pen for trespass.

Shot by Tim Justice and the Queen of the Road, also really nice looking folks.

All three will be a long time getting over this one.

Birdbrains of a feather Glock together

Glock Pistol Sales Surge in Aftermath of Arizona Shootings

Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols -- popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters -- flying out the doors

a deadly demonstration of the weapon’s effectiveness has also fired up sales of handguns in Arizona and other states

One-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent to 263 on Jan. 10

Handgun sales rose 65 percent to 395 in Ohio; 16 percent to 672 in California; 38 percent to 348 in Illinois; and 33 percent to 206 in New York, the FBI data show.

“Whenever there is a huge event, especially when it’s close to home, people do tend to run out and buy something to protect their family,” said Don Gallardo, a manager at Arizona Shooter’s World in Phoenix, who said that the number of people signing up for the store’s concealed weapons class doubled over the weekend.

Light and easy to use, a Glock 9 mm was also wielded by the Virginia Tech killer, Seung-Hui Cho, in a spree that left 32 people dead. The gun is among the most popular sidearms for U.S. police departments. A negative for law enforcement is that the rifling of the barrel makes it almost impossible to match a bullet to an individual weapon with ballistic tests

Arizona law allows anyone to carry a gun in public if it’s in full view, making it what’s known as an open-carry state. Until recently, gun store owners say, it was common to see people carrying weapons in grocery stores or coffee shops. That’s less true today, because last year that state passed a law allowing individuals to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.

With a gun to its head, Wash D.C. surrendurs its seat

Rosa Parks sparked a civil rights revolution in America when she refused to give up her seat.

The people in the District of Columbia, a territory of the US, fed up with the shootings that have turned D.C. into a murder capital, have had to again give up any hope of having a seat on the Federal floor of the House of Representatives because they refused to give up their gun control laws.

Ardent supporters of having the seat in the House backed out, saying "they pulled the bill because of an amendment that would have repealed most of the District's gun-control laws".

Congressional leaders shelve D.C. voting rights bill

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) abandoned the long-sought legislation with the blessing of Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who had pushed for the measure.

Norton said the "egregious changes" by Reps. Travis Childers (D-Miss.) and Mark Souder (R-Ind.) would "directly proliferate guns throughout the District," in addition to eroding support for the bill among liberal Democrats, particularly in the Senate. Norton said that legislation would have restricted the District from prohibiting concealed or openly carried firearms.

The decision by congressional leaders Tuesday to shelve a D.C. voting rights bill, just days after announcing plans to move ahead, scuttles what supporters say was the best opportunity in a generation to give the District a voting seat in the House of Representatives.

"The price was too high," Hoyer explained during a news briefing in which he said he was "profoundly disappointed" at "his inability to get this legislation passed."

As Hoyer was making his announcement Tuesday, D.C. Council members at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue were decrying the gun amendment during a breakfast meeting. They called it an infringement on the city's limited powers of self-government and spoke passionately about District residents who have died from gun violence, including the four teenagers killed in a drive-by shooting on South Capitol Street last month.

Guambat is acutely sensitive to the quest for representation in the US government by another US territory. Being a Guam resident, and along with a population soon to be in excess of 200,000 citizens, Guambat also has no direct representation on the House floor. He can't even vote for President.

You'd think, in such circumstances, especially in D.C. where most Congresspeople have to go to work, they'd want to keep guns out of the hands of angry and other dysfunctional people. Remember what the Boston Tea Party led to.