KS: Charge dropped in mall gun case: "The city of Topeka has dropped its criminal case against Matthew C. Roberts, who openly carried a handgun in a holster inside West Ridge Mall, then was convicted in Municipal Court of transporting a firearm in a vehicle. Roberts later appealed his conviction in Shawnee County District Court. Assistant city attorney Craig Spomer filed a district court document Thursday dismissing the charge against Roberts with prejudice, meaning the city can't refile the case. "Because of the appeal and the city's dismissal, the Municipal Court conviction and sentence are hereby void," Spomer wrote. Carl Folsom III, an attorney representing Roberts, said the city dismissed the transporting charge in exchange for Roberts' agreeing to release the city from civil liability. Folsom had contended the city violated Roberts' Fourth Amendment rights by detaining him without reason to think he had committed a crime."


Gun control doesn’t work: "If firearms were indeed as inherently dangerous as gun control advocates suggest, there should be millions of crimes, murders, suicides, and accidents involving firearms each year, and those numbers should be escalating since the total number of firearms and firearms owners have risen substantially over the past few years. In reality, numbers of firearms related crime and accidents have steadily dropped while gun sales have gone through the roof and more states have liberalized laws dealing with the carry of arms in public. Independent, peer reviewed studies show that firearms are used 5 times more often to stop crime than to commit crime.”


Tight budgets and fewer cops; time for citizens to “arm up”‘: "Plunging government revenues may have the unintended consequence — so far as tax-and-spend (and spend some more) public officials are concerned — of reminding people that we are ultimately responsible for our own safety. The pie plate is empty and inevitable cutbacks in important public services, including law enforcement, are on the horizon. It is already happening in Oakland, CA where the police chief has announced that officers will no longer respond to a broad list of crimes, if department layoffs go as planned.”


If armed, the good guys can win: "Thomasson claims that the Supreme Court, while deliberating this decision, ignored the fact that "258 school children were injured by guns in Chicago, 32 of them fatally, in a short period." Injecting sanity into the gun debate, the correct way to say this would be "258 children were wounded by evil people who used guns illegally." Further, these shootings occurred before the court had ruled that the gun laws were unconstitutional. How, then, if guns were illegal, did these children come to be wounded by people with guns? Necessarily, people so evil as to be indifferent to injuries, including fatal injuries, to children, would also be indifferent to laws forbidding guns. What value, then, are such laws? It seems, then, that before the decision, the bad guys in Chicago were armed. The issue, in the McDonald case, was whether good guys could be armed to defend themselves against the bad guys whom we know, from the casualty statistics cited by Thomasson, to be already armed".