Bookworm Room

This is a portmanteau post, filled with interesting things I read today, some of which come in neatly matched sets.
Opening today’s San Francisco Moronicle, the first thing I saw was that an illegal teen’s arrest is causing a stir in San Francisco’s halls of power.  You see, San Francisco is a sanctuary city, and its [...]

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One of the most basic principles of Anglo-Saxon common law is a homeowner’s right to defend himself against intruders.  Oh, wait!  That’s not quite true anymore.  In England, which practically gave its name to the notion that “a man’s home is his castle,” homeowner self-defense is against the law (emphasis mine):
Myleene Klass, the broadcaster and [...]

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Perhaps because they often tend to live in tightly packed urban environments, when it comes to the gun debate, liberals always forget that the cops cannot be relied upon to be there at the moment a crime is happening.  In a city it’s entirely possible that there are lots of police patrolling a small geographic [...]

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Twenty years ago, if you had offered me the opportunity to fire a gun, I would have recoiled in absolute horror and read you the riot act.  I can still recite my standard factoids from memory, although I’m too lazy now to string them together into a coherent narrative:
Guns are dangerous.  They kill people.  America [...]

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One of the things that baffled me as a child was the way in which the Jews passively walked into the gas chambers.  My parents explained to me that Jews were not warriors.  Outside of Israel, Jews still aren’t warriors.  Jeffrey Goldberg thinks that’s stupid:
You can’t fight a rifle or a shotgun with a stick, [...]

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Here’s one for the embittered crowd:  While we’ve all heard about the Annenberg Challenge, I think few, if any, of us have heard about Obama’s eight years as director of the Joyce Foundation.  You’d think he would have been playing up a directorship, considering that it would prove executive experience.  Of course, perhaps it’s because [...]

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This is not a picture in America, but the top two pictures in this story illustrate perfectly why it matters that a nation’s citizens — the vast majority of whom are law abiding — can bear arms.
It is also interesting to note that, while the Beeb instantly tried to paint the Israelis as killers, this [...]

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Just in time for July 4th, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says.
I personally am not now, nor have I ever been, a gun owner.  I keep meaning to go the local firing range and take lessons (operating on the principle that, since I’m surprisingly [...]

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That the North Bay region (SF, Marin, etc.) will send a Democrat to the California Senate in November goes without saying. What’s interesting is that North Bay Democrats selected the most extremely Progressive (read: far Left) of the three people vying for that seat (Carole Migden, Joe Nation and Mark Leno). I [...]

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I don’t drink.  I don’t like the stuff, and have never forced myself to learn to enjoy it.  However, I often find myself in a situation that requires me to buy wine, whether for a potluck or because it’s the perfect hostess gift.  Over the years, I’ve developed a surprisingly effective technique, since I’m often [...]

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Here is a message from the NRA:
Anti-gun hysteria has reached a fever pitch in the Golden State. The California Assembly is considering a bill (Assembly Bill 2062) this session that, if passed, will have dire consequences for California’s law-abiding gun owners.
AB2062 is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday, May 7 in [...]

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If a store routinely cheats its customers, its customers begin to go elsewhere. If the district attorney gets wind of the cheating, a criminal prosecution can result. It’s only in the wonderful world of TV news, however, that lying and cheating seem to have very limited repercussions. People like you and me [...]

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The State Supreme Court got this one right, and neatly sidestepped any discussion of the 2nd Amendment in doing so:
The state Supreme Court dealt a final blow Wednesday to San Francisco’s voter-approved ban on handguns, rejecting the city’s appeal of a lower-court ruling that sharply limited the ability of localities to regulate firearms.
The court’s unanimous [...]

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It shouldn’t be news, but it is: a Court of Appeal in California held that San Francisco cannot unilaterally make itself a little gun free oasis by the Bay:
San Francisco’s ban on handguns, blocked by a legal challenge since voters approved it in November 2005, suffered a possibly fatal blow Wednesday when a state [...]

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San Francisco tried to do away with guns entirely, but was forced to back off of that one because of a little thing called the Second Amendment.  It’s now trying a new tactic, which is to say that you can have guns, you just can’t have them in a way that would render them useful [...]

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This is what the Second Amendment says:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
This is what the District of Columbia did:
It passed a law in 1976 holding that all guns in the home must be “unloaded, [...]

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Everybody enjoys a good laugh when they read some version of what Robert Godwin calls “the perennially clueless New York Times, which often publishes variations on the theme of “Crime Down Despite Increase in Prison Population.” That is, we enjoy the fact that the NYTs, and other liberal publications, seem blind to the fact [...]

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I have a deadline that’s going to keep me hopping for a couple of hours, but I’ll share with you two things I learned this weekend. First, I learned that, in my very blue neighborhood, there are surprisingly large numbers of gun owners, wannabee gun owners, and hunters. Who knew?
Second, I learned from [...]

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Here’s the story:
A knife-wielding grocery store employee attacked eight co-workers Friday, seriously injuring five before a witness pulled a gun and stopped him, police said.
The 21-year-old suspect, whose name was withheld pending charges, was arrested and then taken to a hospital after complaining of chest pains, Memphis Police Sgt. Vince Higgins said. The attack apparently [...]

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