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Russia is big mad that some Russkie channels have been removed from YouTube, so a Moscow arbitration court has fined the tech giant a jillion squillion hojillion dollars, which is roughly a bazillion times more than all the money in the world.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Google’s parent company Alphabet — one of the five most valuable companies in the world — is valued at about $2 trillion, about 10 billion trillion times smaller than the fine.

LOL.

ROFLMAO, even.

This certainly makes me take Russia seriously and not think of them like a cross between a comic opera kleptocracy and the fictional bad guy country from an Austin Powers movie.

(The post title is, of course, Google Translate's attempt at "You mad, bro?" in Russian. Is it accurate? I don't know, and I also don't care, much like Google doesn't care about bogus fines issued by some phony-baloney court.)

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Trump's Bump Stock Ban Struck Down

The press is in a real tizzy about the most pointless piece of firearm regulation in the last couple decades getting struck down by SCOTUS.

(And it was pointless no matter what angle you looked at it from. They're dumb and I wouldn't take one if it fell off the back of a truck and landed at my feet, but at the same time they do nothing to make guns more dangerous or "assault-y". They're range toys for turning money into noise. I can already do that with my thumb and a belt loop, neither of which I have a tax stamp for.)

Confusion

There's a lot of "How often does lying on a 4473 get prosecuted as a standalone crime?" floating around out there, and the answer is "Almost never because it's almost never discovered as a standalone crime."

Generally it's only after running the trace on a gun that's already been involved in a crime that it gets discovered. Sometimes it's thrown on as a pile-on charge in those cases and I guess sometimes they just don't bother using stretched-thin prosecutorial resources on someone who's already going down for whatever felonies got a trace run on the gun in the first place.

Hunter Biden's situation was unusual in that he was essentially dimed out by a concerned significant other, absent the gun being involved in any actual crimes.

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TSA Follies

The airport here in Indianapolis has the newer baggage scanners that don’t require you to remove your laptops or tablets from your carryon, which is handy. Things tend to move pretty ricky-tick at IND.

Last week was, like, maybe only the third or fourth time I’d ever flown without checking a bag, so I was looking forward to the experience of hopping out of my Uber at the curb and just breezing my way to the gate like most normies do.

I tossed my shoes, camera, and my gun burkha into a tray, my camera bag into another, and then slid both of those and my Maxpedition Fliegerduffel into the tunnel. Then I stepped through the porn-o-scan to await my gear so I could trot off to the gate.

They pulled the Fliegerduffel to the side for further inspection.

That was weird. I half expect them to pull the tray with my gun burkha, because it’s got my wallet and my wallet has a Sparrows Hall Pass and a lockpick card, both of which have drawn scrutiny in the past, but are devoid of sharp edges. My suitcase, though? Maybe they wanted to look at the trauma shears in the blowout kit attached to the MOLLE loops?

Nope, the dude opened the bag and pulled out my little toiletries kit. Nothing in there but some nail clippers and some tweezers, so…?

Friends, the dude pulled out my Secret solid antiperspirant and swabbed it with the bomb detector swab. Hand to God, I have never seen that before.

Holden is attached to the bag via MEOWLLE loops.

As far as the return flight goes? Well, the less said about the seething mob of aberrant humanity I was trapped in for better than thirty minutes at the MSY security checkpoint, the better.

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It's like a whole 'nother country over there.

Forgetting that you have a gun or ammo in your purse or briefcase at the local courthouse can be embarrassing.

Forgetting that you have a gun or ammo in your purse or briefcase at the TSA checkpoint at the airport can get you jammed up legally.

Forgetting that you have a gun or ammo in your purse or briefcase in Boston or NYC will almost certainly get you jammed up. You go through the checkpoint at Freedom Tower or the 9/11 Memorial or some other tourist attraction with your out-of-state toters permit, and it's gonna be a bad day.

And as for traveling overseas? That could be really bad.

"An Oklahoma man faces up to 12 years in prison on a Caribbean island after customs officials found ammunition in his luggage.

Ryan Watson traveled to Turks and Caicos with his wife, Valerie, to celebrate his 40th birthday on April 7. They went with two friends who had also turned 40.

The vacation came to an abrupt end when airport staff members found a zip-close bag containing bullets in the couple's carry-on luggage. Watson said it was hunting ammunition he had accidentally brought with him — but under a strict law in Turks and Caicos, a court may still impose a mandatory 12-year sentence.

"They were hunting ammunition rounds that I use for whitetail deer," Watson told NBC Boston in an interview conducted last week that aired after their first court appearance Tuesday."

There's a reason I keep the bags that I use for carry-ons at the airport "sterile". I don't take them to ranges if I can help it. If I have to while on the road, I keep them as far from the line as possible and painstakingly go through them in the hotel room that night.

People throw the phrase "responsible gun owner" around a lot. This is just part of that.

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Ignorance is no excuse, they say…

I just closed a column with the sentence “Know the law, so the law doesn’t get to know you” and I could have kept going for another thousand words.

For instance, there are a lot of very pro-2A states with very relaxed, liberal handgun carry laws that, at the same time, have strict prohibitions against loaded long guns in vehicles.

This isn’t an “anti-gun” thing, it’s the result of the state having a strong hunting culture and therefore having laws intended to thwart poaching and “road-hunting”.

This is the kind of thing folks need to be aware of on roadtrips. Don’t just glance at your handy CCW reciprocity map and think that it’s an indicator of the entire regulatory climate along your route.

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The digital sewers will overflow...

Internet jackholes are hopeful that the Supreme Court will rule that they have a constitutional right to say the N-word on Facebook.

Folks who moderate the comment sections on their blogs should brace for nuisance lawsuits if SCOTUS upholds this.

It'll be lulzy.

Remember, kids, it's either put up with jannies or be hip-deep in literal Nazis.

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Ohio Joins the Doobie Brothers

 

Ohio voters overwhelmingly chose to legalize recreational marijuana yesterday. In today's 50/50 fractured political hellscape, a 57-43 drubbing is as close to a landslide as you're likely to get in a statewide election.

That puts Indiana in a nearly unique position of having every bordering state have some form of legal weed (recreational in IL, MI, and now OH, and medicinal in KY) while outlawing it entirely ourselves. Only Texas is in a similar situation.

Of course, as long as it's illegal on the federal level and I work with firearms for a living, I can't spark up myself. Although at this point five of the ten most populous states have legal recreational weed and two more have medicinal marijuana, so who knows when we'll reach a tipping point federally?

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Wish in one hand, poop in the other...

One thing I've noted when visiting Marko in New Hampshire is the difference in the scale of politics between here and there.

The Granite State has just shy of 1.4 million people and a state legislature with 24 senators and 400 state representatives. The City-County Council here in Indianapolis/Marion County has 25 members for a population of over 977,000. 

So, by comparison, the municipal government here is really...streamlined. Things can happen fast when it's just the mayor, backed by an overwhelmingly Democratic-controlled council.

Due to the levels of violence in town (which are still pretty sporty, but down from 2020-'21) there's a lot of pressure on the mayor and city council to Do Something, and so the Something the mayor wants to do is gun control.

The mayor presented a package of proposed city ordinances to the Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee of the council, including the following:

• A ban on "semiautomatic assault weapons" in the city.
• Raising the age for all firearms purchases to 21.
• Ending permitless carry in Indianapolis/Marion County.

Which is entirely a theatrical gesture, since Indiana state law says that no political subdivision of the state can pass its own gun control laws. These ordinances would be toothless and unenforceable and Mayor Hogsett admitted as much:

“If state preemption is overturned by the legislature or by the courts, there will be no delay in implementing the most basic safety measures," Hogsett said. "That is why, today, I am announcing that we will submit to our City-County Council a package of gun safety measures that, if passed, will immediately become law, should state preemption be abolished for the city of Indianapolis.”

Considering the legislative makeup in the statehouse, with its Republican supermajority, and the judicial climate in post-Bruen America, Hogsett might as well have wished for a gold house and a rocket car while he was at it.

The proposed ordinances sailed through the Public Safety Committee and are probably a cinch to pass the whole council...in a purely meaningless symbolic gesture, since any attempt to enforce them would just be a jobs program for Guy Relford.

However there were a few items in the mayor's proposal that weren't entirely dumb.

For one, there was a proposal to increase the pay of IMPD officers. In an era where departments are hemorrhaging good cops, every little bit helps, I guess, but what would help even more is better training and convincing them they won't be hung out to dry after any use of force.

The other good proposal was freeing up city money to pay three federal prosecutors to go after local felons when they violate various federal firearms statutes. Maybe if there were an actual chance of catching hard time for some of this stuff, word might get around.

It's a long shot, but hey, it might help.

The Great Utah Spank-Out

It'll be interesting to see if this move leaves voters flaccid, causing pols to get spanked at the polls.

"The adult content website Pornhub blocked access in Utah on Monday due to new state laws requiring websites with adult content to verify users' ages before allowing them to access the platforms."

"Erections have consequences", to mangle the aphorism...

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It’s funny because it’s true…

Tell me it’s wrong…

Another dumb law passed.

Washington becomes the 10th state to restrict semiautomatic possession through as stupid feature list.

The House concurred with a floor amendment to House Bill 1240 that was added in the Senate, voting 56-42 to approve it on April 19. The amendment will allow gun manufacturers to sell inventory already in stock prior to Jan. 1, 2023, and only to out-of-state clientele for 90 days after the bill goes into effect. So vendors aren’t totally hosed, just mostly.

At a national level, I think a new Assault Weapons Ban is a non-starter because even if one could squeak past the House (highly unlikely in the current climate), I just can't see it securing enough votes to get past a filibuster in the Senate.

My worry is that, should an AWB case make it before the Supremes, they may decide that something like an "evil feature list" and/or 10-round magazine capacity limits are a reasonable place to slice the RKBA baby in half, and leave that manner of regulation to the states.

So if that happens, you'd have nation-wide Shall Issue (with varying degrees of onerousness) post-Bruen, but some states will be able to restrict your carry choices to revolvers and low-cap pistols.

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THANK YOU!

The general public (some of whom work for news organizations) have a stunningly poor grasp of exactly what "Stand Your Ground" laws entail and, by repeating the inaccuracies in the news or online, wind up making the problem worse.

If someone's entire knowledge of the legalities of self defense comes from watching the 6 o'clock news and old Law & Order reruns, is it any wonder that they think they're cleared hot to blast away any time they feel "in fear for their life"?

Fortunately there are people out there trying to get the word out in mainstream press outlets:

"These groups and even scholars studying gun violence refer to Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws as “shoot first” laws, short for “shoot first and ask questions later.” As a gun scholar, gun owner and opponent of gun violence, I fear that equating SYG with the legal right to “shoot first” could unintentionally mislead people into thinking that self-defense laws truly give them a blanket license to kill with impunity.

They do not.

Self-defense laws actually place significant limits on the ability of individuals to use lethal force in self-defense lawfully. Whether people fully understand those limitations is an empirical question, but critics should drop the language of “shoot first” in referring to these laws. Instead, in the interest of public safety, why not educate people on the limited range of behaviors they in fact allow?"

Do me a favor and go read the whole thing and share it around.

Professor Yamane in the classroom at Alliance Police Training

Not this again...

Somehow guns become more lethal the farther they get from their point of origin...

Nearly 20% of the guns used to commit crimes in Chicago come from Indiana. It doesn’t do much good for a city to have strict gun laws when everywhere around it has them readily available. pic.twitter.com/kFR7TNsab5

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) April 12, 2023

Dank

While recreational weed has been legalized in two adjoining states (Illinois and Michigan) and a third, Ohio, has medical marijuana and decriminalized possession, Indiana is still not down with the jazz cabbage.

While I've had very little in the way of buyer's remorse with our current term-limited governor, he has been foursquare against the legalization of wacky tobaccy, and it's unlike our state legislature would send him a bill anyway.

Nevertheless, just walking through the parking lot of the local big-box store has had me wondering if I'd be able to pass a whiz quiz by the time I get to the front door. I'm told this ain't the Oaxacan ditch weed of my youth. When the stuff is so dank you can smell it from multiple car lengths back at interstate speeds, this is a whole different strain of the chronic.

Alas, 5th Circuit decision or no, my line of work keeps me from finding out until we legalize the stuff federally.

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You really want your waterfowl in a line...

San Francisco, post Bruen, has loosened its CCW permit requirements...

In light of the Bruen case heard before the United States Supreme Court last year, the San Francisco’s Sheriff’s Department has issued its first CCW permit (pending the final training class for this applicant). The City And County of San Francisco have always had a strict reputation when it came to approving license-to-carry permits. According to San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, prior to the Bruen ruling, only individuals considered to be in at-risk positions such as diamond jewelers or judges would have even been considered for a CCW permit in San Francisco. “The significant change from the Bruen decision was that they took out the ‘good cause’ requirement for someone who is applying for a CCW license,” Miyamoto added. “Which basically means as long as you clear our vetting process, our background procedures, and as long as you take a safety course and demonstrate you’re responsible, you’re given an opportunity to have a license.”

Boy howdy, you want to talk about a jurisdiction where you really want to understand the legalities of the use of force before you whip out your blaster, there's the one. 

In San Francisco, I'd imagine you want to be solidly in "MUST" territory* on the "CAN > MAY > SHOULD > MUST" spectrum. (I mean, you should be doing that anywhere, Captain Mall Ninja, but some jurisdictions are going to be a lot more lenient about what is and isn't a questionable shoot.)

*And able to articulate why.

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Straw men... and women.

Kevin D. Williamson's latest at The Dispatch is, alas, paywalled. It's absolutely spot on, though.

"Prosecutors at all levels—from local yokels up to the feds—are notoriously loath to prosecute ordinary straw-buyer cases. If there’s a big, juicy, organized-crime case to be made against gun traffickers, that’s another story: For example, the feds were very happy to bust up an Illinois-based gun-trafficking ring involving U.S. military personnel who were acting as full-time straw buyers for Chicago’s infamous Gangster Disciplines, an old-school crime syndicate that has been operating in Illinois since the 1960s. And they should be busting those guys.

But most straw-buyer cases don’t look like that. Most straw buyers are girlfriends or family members of convicted criminals and other prohibited persons, and most straw purchases involve one firearm. (Or so seems to be the consensus; again, real data are difficult to find.) Straw buyers who get charged with the crime are, by definition, almost always first-time offenders, and many of them are sympathetic subjects: Did we really expect that 23-year-old mother of three to tell the felon who is the father of her children and upon whom she is financially dependent to go jump in Lake Michigan when he ordered her to go buy him a pistol? We do not instinctively want to put such offenders in prison—but that is who a great many straw buyers are.

(Similarly, try putting yourself in the place of a firearms retailer, a businessman who already has a target on his back, politically speaking—in the age of “woke” moral panic, how assertive are you going to be about somebody you suspect of being a straw buyer? Short of her preemptively confessing to the crime, are you going to tell a young black woman shopping for a 9mm semiautomatic with her boyfriend that you think she is not a prospective customer but a prospective criminal? This is your family’s livelihood, and the same people who want to put you out of business for selling guns at all will be happy to try to put you out of business on grounds of racial discrimination, however vaguely attested to. I have spoken to firearms dealers who have gone forward with sales they believed to be straw purchases precisely for that reason.)"

In all my years of working in the retail firearms biz, I'm only aware of the feds going after one straw buyer, and it was because guns he'd purchased here in the U.S. turned up in cartel hands after he'd traded them for dope. Come to think of it, he was the only big-time straw buyer I was ever aware of, and we just thought he was a guy with a good-paying job and a taste for oddball tacticool-looking guns like SPAS-12s and such.

I've turned down plenty of purchases that my spider sense told me were straw purchases, a lot of them really obvious ones and some that were more subtle. But I can see why some folks would be leery of doing so in this day and age, for exactly the reason Kevin highlighted.

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This Post is Banned in the UK...

A pending piece of internet safety legislation in Britain has an interesting provision:

"Under a further change to the bill, video footage that shows people crossing the Channel in small boats in a “positive light” will be added to a list of illegal content that all tech platforms must proactively prevent from reaching users."

Well, as a rebellious Yank...

Both Sides Now

If you're in a mixed group of both Progressives and Right-Wingers and want to get all of them mad at you, you can point out that the history of gun control laws in the U.S.A. is practically the exemplar of CRT...

Me: Explaining systemic racism to someone by pointing out that urban interstates got built right through the middle of Black neighborhoods.

Them: Replying that, no, they were built through poor neighborhoods because real estate was cheaper.

Me: pic.twitter.com/7wtF8bE0cm

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 5, 2023

Freeze Peach

https://t.co/CMmvmheF1E pic.twitter.com/YSWpZ0T9lQ

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 28, 2022

Here in the 'States you get people complaining about their freedom of speech being violated because Twitter won't let them use the n-word so they have to go to Parler or wherever to type their racial slurs.

Meanwhile in Fiji, a place where there are no First Amendment protections...

It was an error that could have happened to anyone, especially two years into a pandemic: In a court document, a judge in Fiji twice wrote “injection” when he meant “injunction.”

And so, in a gently mocking Facebook post back in February, Richard Naidu, one of the most senior lawyers in the Pacific nation, pointed out the mistake, concluding with a “thinking face” emoji. He now faces up to six months in prison.

The government throwing you in prison for calling out a judge's spelling errors in a Facebook post is pretty draconian. 

That's not a response to incitement or libel or a threat of violence, it's just a heavy-handed overreaction to the non-crime of lèse-majesté.

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