Some people just never learn.

Exactly two weeks ago, we told Mayor Adrian Fenty and the D.C. Council that the overbearing emergency legislation regulating gun purchases, registration and ownership they passed would face a lawsuit. The week before, we told them how to possibly avoid litigation. City Hall did not listen. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, the District remains onerous.

A lawsuit was filed Monday by Dick Heller, the very gun-rights advocate who challenged the city’s strict handgun ban that led to the Supreme Court decision. The high court affirmed that citizens do indeed have the individual right to bear arms. In his latest suit, Mr. Heller is contending that the new D.C. regulations are “unreasonable and burdensome” for prospective gunowners. Mr. Heller argues, for example, that the city’s classification that a machine gun is any weapon that shoots more than 12 rounds without reloading makes most semi-automatic pistols off limits and does not conform to the public’s perception of what a machine gun is nor with the definition in any English language dictionary.

But there are other encroachments, including a provision that requires residents to keep their guns unloaded and disassembled in the home or equipped with a trigger lock.

They must be under the mistaken understanding that houses are only burglarized by appointment.

A Dallas man has been forced by criminals to use deadly force to defend himself and his livelihood on two separate occasions in three weeks.

Dallas business owner kills 2 intruders in 3 weeks

For the second time in three weeks, the owner of a machine shop fatally shot an intruder who had broken into his business, police said.

James Walton fired a shotgun Sunday at a man inside Able Walton Machine & Welding, police said. Walton, who lives upstairs from the shop, was alerted to the intruder’s presence by a motion sensor system.

“He’s got a right to defend his property,” Dallas police Sgt. Gene Reyes said. “What gives a stranger the right to go in and vandalize or burglarize his business? He’s within every legal right to do this.”

. . .Walton also shot and wounded a second man Sunday outside of the shop. Police said the man escaped, but was eventually detained for questioning.

. . .About three weeks ago, Walton shot and killed Raul Laureles when Laureles was climbing through a pried-open window of the business, police said. That incident also was referred to a grand jury.

Let’s hope the grand jury doesn’t do anything stupid. Anyway, since there’s nothing so repugnant to a liberal as seeing a private citizen engage in self defense (as that negates the need for the state to take power and act on your behalf), a moonbat reporter took it upon herself to ambush the 70-year old Walton, asking if he was “trigger happy” and wanted to “shoot to kill.” Being a normal human being who doesn’t want to have to harm people, but will if he must, Walton was reduced to tears. You can see the despicable video here (Edit: Video apparently had to be removed). The reporter gal has been suspended.

Mr. Walton had every right to take the action he did. John Locke explained in his Second Treatise of Government why a man has a right to defend himself with deadly force under these circumstances (emphasis mine):

[It is] lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than, by the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he please, from him; because using force, where he has no right, to get me into his power, let his pretence be what it will, I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else. And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. kill him if I can, for to that hazard does he justly expose himself, whoever introduces a state of war, and is aggressor in it.

Learning absolutely nothing from the April massacre of 32 Virginia Tech students, the school has offered a mild set of changes supposedly designed to beef up security.

. . . The report said there was adequate coordination between Virginia Tech and local emergency workers, but recommended that officials improve the university?s ability to handle emergencies by centralizing the campus police and fire departments into one building. The cellular and phone systems on campus should also be upgraded to avoid being overloaded in emergencies, the report said.

The report described the university?s mental health system as responsive, but said privacy laws had created confusion about gaining access to students? health information. It called for an increase in the number of case workers on campus who can identify students at risk of mental problems.

Some of the changes suggested by the report have already been made. The university has replaced many of the types of door handles that enabled Mr. Cho to chain the doors during his attack, preventing the police from entering when they first arrived. It has also instituted a system to alert students and staff members of emergencies by text messages to cellphones, e-mail accounts and online instant messages.

So, Virginia Tech students, do your new door handles and new phone systems make you feel any safer? At least you’ll have the comfort of knowing that administration officials can babble on the phone a little bit more efficiently when a madman bursts into your classroom and begins firing. And you’ll furthermore know that when police finally do arrive they won’t have to wait outside, sitting on their thumbs (though they still might). Will these liberal gestures comfort you as you lay dying on the floor because you weren’t allowed the freedom to arm yourself with defensive weapons? I certainly hope so.

The Guardian reports on Britain’s gang problem:

In a city where more than 3,000 firearm incidents have been logged in the past 15 months, the sound of shots is just background noise for too many people. But last week’s ambush, which left a 25-year-old man struggling to survive serious wounds to his leg and abdomen, has taken gang warfare in Manchester, mainly black on black, to a new level.

. . .UK gun crime is still rare, but the numbers injured by firearms in England and Wales has more than doubled since 1998, with London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands accounting for 54 per cent of recorded incidents. So concerned has the government become that last February Tony Blair held a gun crime summit at which plans were outlined for more funding for community groups and tougher punishments for offenders.

In 1997, Britain banned handguns. 57,000 hand guns were confiscated between July 1997 and February 1998.* Yet the article notes that “the numbers injured by firearms in England and Wales has more than doubled since 1998.” According to the anti-gun lobby, this shouldn’t be possible.

Britain never had a large population of hand gun owners, and such crimes had already been on the rise prior to the ban. SO I don’t want anyone to get the idea that the ban caused this crime explosion, but it’s quite clear that Britain’s gun confiscations did absolutely nothing to reverse it’s upward crime trends. Gun restrictions do not reduce crime.

* Colin Greenwood. The British Handgun Ban: Logic, Politics and Effect, International Firearms Safety Seminar. New Zealand, February 2006.

Dan Simpson (yea, I’d never heard of him either) the former ambassador to Somalia under the Clinton Administration, has an interesting solution to gun violence in our nation. And I mean interesting in a purely “what the heck color is that vomit?” sort of way.

LAST week’s tragedy at Virginia Tech in which a mentally disturbed person gunned down 32 of America’s finest - intelligent young people with futures ahead of them - once again puts the phenomenon of an armed society into focus for Americans.

The likely underestimate of how many guns are wandering around America runs at 240 million in a population of about 300 million. What was clear last week is that at least two of those guns were in the wrong hands.

When people talk about doing something about guns in America, it often comes down to this: “How could America disarm even if it wanted to? There are so many guns out there.”…

Now, how would one disarm the American population? First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm. The population would then be given three months to turn in their guns, without penalty.

Hunters would be able to deposit their hunting weapons in a centrally located arsenal, heavily guarded, from which they would be able to withdraw them each hunting season upon presentation of a valid hunting license. The weapons would be required to be redeposited at the end of the season on pain of arrest. When hunters submit a request for their weapons, federal, state, and local checks would be made to establish that they had not been convicted of a violent crime since the last time they withdrew their weapons. In the process, arsenal staff would take at least a quick look at each hunter to try to affirm that he was not obviously unhinged.

It would have to be the case that the term “hunting weapon” did not include anti-tank ordnance, assault weapons, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, or other weapons of war.

All antique or interesting non-hunting weapons would be required to be delivered to a local or regional museum, also to be under strict 24-hour-a-day guard. There they would be on display, if the owner desired, as part of an interesting exhibit of antique American weapons, as family heirlooms from proud wars past or as part of collections.

Gun dealers could continue their work, selling hunting and antique firearms. They would be required to maintain very tight inventories. Any gun sold would be delivered immediately by the dealer to the nearest arsenal or the museum, not to the buyer.

The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.

Clearly, since such sweeps could not take place all across the country at the same time. But fairly quickly there would begin to be gun-swept, gun-free areas where there should be no firearms. If there were, those carrying them would be subject to quick confiscation and prosecution. On the streets it would be a question of stop-and-search of anyone, even grandma with her walker, with the same penalties for “carrying.”

And this guy calls Bush crazy.

But we must never forget, it’s conservatives who are the fascists.

Fred Thompson hits another homerun.

Many on the left have seized the tragedy at Virginia Tech as an opportunity to take away our freedoms. The same people who pull out Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote at the drop of a dime when it comes to terrorists who have no rights are themselves ready to turn over freedom for a false sense of security. Tom Plate says we should “lay down our right to bear arms”. Isn’t that what the students at Virginia Tech did?

Let me pose a simple hypothetical. How many fewer people would have died if one or two students or teachers had a concealed carry license and were allowed to defend themselves? It’s impossible to guess, but that it would have been fewer should be obvious. Not to journalist and freedom hater Tom Plate, who thinks he knows better than the Founding Fathers:

The use of guns is often the American technique of choice for all kinds of conflict resolution. Our famous Constitution, about which many of us are generally so proud, enshrines — along with the right to freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly — the right to own guns. That’s an apples and oranges list if there ever was one.

Not all of us are so proud and triumphant about the gun-guarantee clause. The right to free speech, press, religion and assembly and so on seem to be working well, but the gun part, not so much.

Let me explain. Some misguided people will focus on the fact that the 23-year-old student who killed his classmates and others at Virginia Tech was ethnically Korean. This is one of those observations that’s 99.99 percent irrelevant. What are we to make of the fact that he is Korean? Ban Ki-moon is also Korean! Our brilliant new United Nations secretary general has not only never fired a gun, it looks like he may have just put together a peace formula for civil war-wracked Sudan — a formula that escaped his predecessor.

So let’s just disregard all the hoopla about the race of the student responsible for the slayings. These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.

That’s a nice slight of hand argument. First he sets up a false dichotomy. The killings either happened because he was Korean OR because he had a gun! That makes total sense. Who these mysterious people who supposedly focus on his ethnic background are, we’ll never know. We just have to trust that Mr. Plate isn’t making them up. Right. Then he destroys the strawman he disingenuously propped up and hopes you don’t realize the true difference between Ban Ki-moon and the killer is not that one had a gun, but that one was crazy. Ban Ki-moon holding a gun wouldn’t result in 32 people dead. So clearly that explanation is deficient. Logic is an amazing thing when you know how to apply it properly.

Let’s take another idiotic declaration he makes. “Far fewer guns in America would logically result in far fewer deaths from people pulling the trigger.” After the massive failure of his first attempt at logic, I worry that he may be attempting to operate at an intellectual level that is simply above him. Indeed, that appears to be the case here. Incidence of gun use does not significantly rise or fall on how many there are available - unless you could get rid of them all or even close to them all which is impossible - but by how many more criminals have than law-abiding citizens. If you outlaw guns there will be far fewer than there are now, certainly. But they will still be out there. And criminals will have the comfort of truly knowing that they are safe against running into any armed citizens willing to defend themselves, since there won’t be any such citizens left. All that will remain is a population of potential victims. This is the world Tom Plate and the anti-gun nuts on the left want you to live in, because then you’ll have yet another reason to depend on big government for protection.

Thomas Paine said it best:

The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside ? Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.

Horrid mischief must seem a vast understatement to those at Virginia Tech.

From Volokh Conspiracy: Congress outlaws gun confiscation during disasters or emergencies.

This weekend, Congress passed, and sent to the President for his signature, the Homeland Security appropriations bill, H.R. 5441. The Conference Report of the bill includes a variety of non-appropriations measures to enhance homeland security. The most notable of these is the construction 700 miles of fence along the portions of the Mexican border which are the main transit zones for illegal aliens. Also included in the legislation is a ban on gun confiscation during emergencies and natural disasters, to prevent a repeat of the post-Katrina abuses such as law enforcement officers breaking into homes and confiscating firearms from law-abiding citizens.

It’s good to see this important issue resolved. During a time of emergency is precisely when people need their gun rights the most. When people are most vulnerable is precisely when the thugs are most likely to see opportunity. The need to defend oneself should not be dismissed for a false sense of security, as gun confiscation won’t protect the people from the thugs.