NY STATE NEWS

NY's failed CoBIS or "Gun DNA" program expected to record it's 100,000 shell case this month.

NY DEC announces Chronic Wasting Disease found in NY

Seneca White Deer inc. is seeking support

NATIONAL NEWS

The Morning Sentinel from Centralia, IL calls for renewal of Federal AWB?

A challenge from Banana Oil! blog

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice supports 2nd Amendment on CNN's "Larry King Live"

Florida passes Castle Doctrine law

Two men nabbed outside gun show; cops say vendors tried to dodge law
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ARTICLE

Times Herald-Record, May 18, 2005, By Christian M. Wade

     Town of Wallkill – At least three times a year, rifle and handgun vendors from across the country converge on the Orange County Fairgrounds to sell their wares.
     But state police say the event – the Middletown Great Gun and Knife Show – has become an open market for unscrupulous sellers who hawk weapons in the parking lot without conducting background checks on the buyers, a violation of federal law.
     Over the weekend, two men were arrested by state police in separate incidents after they attempted to sell weapons to patrons of the gun show, police said. The deals were made inside the gun show, but the sales were made across the street in the parking lot.
     The men weren't registered vendors in the gun show, state police said. Daniel Solomon, 40, of Glen Cove, was arrested and charged with the sale of a firearm at a gun show, a misdemeanor. He was given an appearance ticket for Town of Wallkill Court. State police said a security guard at the fairgrounds overheard Solomon talking with a man about selling a .45-caliber semiautomatic rifle for $400 in the parking lot.
     When a state trooper rolled up on the two men making the deal, the vendor allegedly shoved the gun under a tarp on the back of his pickup truck and then crumpled up a handwritten receipt for the sale of the gun, tossing it away.
The following day, a 39-year-old Port Jervis man was arrested by state police after security guards caught him selling a 12-gauge shotgun to a patron in the parking lot, police said.
Frank Crover was charged with the sale of a firearm at a gun show and issued an appearance ticket for Town of Wallkill Court, state police said.
     The charges stem from a federal law requiring vendors at gun shows to conduct background checks. The possession of the weapons was legal, but the sale was not.
     "These were private gun owners who were making what would normally be a legitimate transaction, the sale of a legal firearm between two people," said Sgt. David Scott, of the state police barracks in the Town of Wallkill. "But when you enter into a gun show and make the deal there, unfortunately you're bound by a different law."
State police have been increasing their presence at the gun show in recent years, adding uniformed troopers and undercover cops to patrol the fairgrounds, Scott said.
     The management of the gun show is doing a good job spotting sales that violate the background check law, he said. In both instances when the arrests were made, security guards employed by the gun show alerted police to the sales.

Rudy Vallet Memorial Youth Fishing Derby a great success

     The annual Rudy Vallet Memorial Youth Fishing Derby was a great success with over 400 kids from 5 to 16 years old registered at this year's free event. The Youth Fishing Derby was held on May 15th at the Thomas Bull Memorial Park in Montgomery, NY. Members of the Orange County Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, Inc and the County Seat Conservation Club, who sponsored the event, had to work hard to hand out all of the prizes, free hotdogs, sodas and other items to all of the kids who attended this free event. Everyone had a great time and the weather was wonderful.
     The even is held every year and is coordinated by the Orange County Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs. It is free to all kids from 5 to 16 years old. The ponds are stocked before the event and so everyone has a great chance at catching a fish. Prizes are awarded so many of the kids also go home a winner.

SCOPE and OCFSC at Middletown Gun Show

SCOPE'S TABLE

     If you did not go you missed a good gun show. I even broke down and got a few things. I was at both the SCOPE table and the Orange County Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, Inc. table.
     SCOPE was handing out flyers with lots of information and their new newsletter. SCOPE membership is only $20 and you can join the Orange County Chapter. We really need your help and money. They were also selling raffle tickets for a Jurassic Pork Hunt hunt at Ted Nugent & Sunrise Acres. The drawing is in September so CLICK HERE for more info if you want one.
     The Orange County Federation was also selling their GUN A DAY FOR THE MONTH OF JUNE tickets that really has some great prizes. Time is almost up so hurry up and get one. Click here for more info.
     If you have never been to a Middletown Gun Show you should really try to go. They are as good as any other in NY State and you get to see thousands of guns of every type plus all of the other stuff. The next one will be Sept. 10th & 11th. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO AND A $1 OFF COUPON

OCFSC'S TABLE

NY's failed CoBIS or "Gun DNA" program expected to record it's
100,000 shell case this month.

      NY is one of only two states that have the CoBIS OR "gun DNA" program and NY's program along with Maryland's system have both been total failures. It is impossible to tell how much money has been spent on the NY program but the NY budget includes $4,000,000 each year but DCJS has said that after the initial setup they are only spending $1,200,000 a year. The program has yet to yield one hit between a recorded shell casing and a crime. (Please understand that even a hit does not help most of the time because the gun might have been stolen and you would have to show the chain of evidence.)
     It is interesting to note that not even New Yorkers Against Gun Violence is pushing expanding of the program to all long guns like they have done in past years. NYAGV 2005 State Agenda is against eliminating "the state’s Combined Ballistic Identification System (A.5093 – Errigo)." NYAGV's Executive Director, Andy Pelosi, had no comment on the 100,000 mark and stated that NYAGV still supports expanding the program but they are not pushing it this year. He believes that the failure of the program is because not all police departments send in their shell casings and that the average "time-to-crime" in NY is 6 years.
PLEASE NOTE:

•      The Executive Director position with NYAGV is a "hired" position.
•      Time-to-crime is the time between the initial retail sale of a firearm by an FFL and its recovery as a crime gun, or the submission of a trace request. This number is taken from the ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative (YCGII) program "Crime Gun Trace Analysis Report". The data in this report is limited in many factors including the fact that reports are only collected from 55 jurisdictions and all of them are in large population centers and/or high crime areas. Many guns used in a crime are never traced or can not be traced for many reasons such as missing serial number, ("Overall, nearly 14 percent of handguns recovered in New York City had obliterated serial numbers."), the gun was sold before records were required or the records are missing or destroyed. In fact the 2000 report for NY stated that of all the Crime Gun Trace Requests, a purchaser was identified only 48.0% of the time and only 59.3% of the time was a gun even traced to an FFL. Even if you subtract the number of guns with a missing serial number and missing records, that still leaves a rather large % of guns that were sold before we started keeping records and that number, because of the age of gun, would have a large impact on the Time-to-crime numbers. The 2000 report even states that of the Crime Gun Trace Requests almost 10% were not initiated because the age of the firearm. (That means that the oldest guns, over 36 years old, were excluded from the "time-to-crime" calculations. If you have 10 guns and 9 of them have a "time-to-crime" of 1 day and one gun has a "time-to-crime" of 36 years the average "time-to-crime" for all of the guns is 3.60 years.) ATF's own YCGII 2000 report for NY contains the following, in part:

•     " ... This is the fourth report published by ATF that uses information from trace requests submitted from YCGII jurisdictions to describe crime guns recovered by law enforcement agencies in those jurisdictions. This information improves the knowledge base for the enforcement of Federal and State firearm laws and regulations. It is, however, subject to several limitations. ...
•      ... While the 50 participating jurisdictions represent a wide spectrum of American life, they do not represent a national sample of law enforcement agencies or crime guns recovered by law enforcement agencies.  Participation in this program is voluntary, and jurisdictions included were not selected to be representative of the nation as a whole, rather they were included primarily because of a focus on youth gun crime. In 2000, however, 44 of the 50 jurisdictions had a population over 250,000. The population of these 44 jurisdictions represents more than four-fifths of the population of all U.S. cities combined with Crime Gun Trace Reports (2000) .July 2002 B-4 Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative . Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms populations of 250,000 or more. This made it appropriate to generate summary data for these large cities as a group. ..."

CLICK HERE TO SEE OCSHOOTERS.COM'S CoBIS REPORT

NY DEC announces Chronic Wasting Disease found in NY
CLICK HERE FOR DEC's CWD WEB PAGE

     New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has received two positive results for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) out of 292 wild deer sampled in central New York.
      The first positive result in a wild deer was announced on April 27, 2005 and came from a yearling white-tailed deer sampled from the Town of Verona, Oneida County. The second positive result is from a three year old doe, located within a mile of the location where the initial positive result was detected. These are the first known occurrences of CWD in wild deer in New York State.

Seneca White Deer inc. is seeking support
CLICK HERE FOR SENECA WHITE DEER WEB SITE

    The  Seneca White Deer inc. (SWD), (a 501c(3) not for profit corporation,) is seeking support to protect and conserve the natural resources of the Conservation Area (CA) of the Seneca Army Depot as well as to promote the history of the former munitions depot and its role in the cold war.
     What's so special about the Senneca Army Depot? That is home of the Seneca White Deer. In 1941, 24 miles of security fencing enclosed the area now known as the Conservation Area (CA) of the former Seneca Army Depot. Captured within the fence line of the CA were several whitetail deer of the normal brown coloration. Within a few years, however, something unique happened. White pigmented deer began populating the brown deer herd within the CA. The U. S. Army gave the white deer protection while they managed the brown deer through hunting. This was necessary to keep the population within the carrying capacity of the habitat of the CA.
How did the white deer coloration manifest itself within the CA?
   It appears one or more of the brown whitetails originally confined with the CA, carried the recessive gene for white coloration. Over time and with protection from the military, this normally recessive gene continued to manifest itself. Today, the CA is home to the world’s largest and only herd of white deer, nearly 200 individuals strong. Such a density of white deer can be found no where else in the world!
      White deer have brown eyes unlike albino deer that are pink eyed. It is also not uncommon to see brown does with white fawns or white does with brown fawns. The color combinations of white and brown deer range from gray to brown as well as white spotting along with pure white.

'NRA’s eye is fixed on the president '
The Morning Sentinel from Centralia, IL calls for renewal of Federal AWB?
(But I thought that the ban expired in September of 2004?)
CLICK HERE FOR THE EDITORIAL

     The LA Times had an editorial on May 16th, 2004 calling for the renewal of the Federal "assault gun ban". Well it took a year for the Morning Sentinel to get around to publishing it on May 17, 2005. I guess that the ending of the ban did not have that much of an impact if the Sentinel has not figured out that the AWB ended in September of 04. Who said that editorial writers don't know anything about gun issues and that they are just anti-gun and are willing to take an anti-gun stand for any reason on any topic without knowing anything about it. At least they did not call on voters to vote for Kerry in the November Presidential elections because even though Kerry is pro-gun, he would not yield to the NRA and would pass a new ban.

A challenge from Banana Oil! blog
Click here for Banana Oil!

If you favor gun control of any stripe, please read and attempt the following:
      A well regulated Intelligentsia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.
      Convince me, using only the text above,

• that this sentence does not guarantee an individual right, only a “collective” right; or
• that this sentence means that the only legitimate intelligentsia is the one controlled by government; or
• that this sentence allows the government to decide which books are safe and which are dangerous, and permits it to ban those it does not approve, and to dictate how all books under private ownership must be stored; or
• that this sentence permits the government to require the registration of all books and book owners.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice supports 2nd Amendment
on CNN's "Larry King Live"
Thanks to Joe Zwers via The Countertop Chronicles

[NOTE: The CNN transcript did not contain the following section. To see the whole transcript you have to go to the State Department's web page.]

MR. KING: By the way, what do you think about gun control?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, Larry, I come out of a -- my own personal experiences in which in Birmingham, Alabama, my father and his friends defended our community in 1962 and 1963 against white nightriders by going to the head of the community, the head of the cul-de-sac, and sitting there armed. And so I'm very concerned about any abridgement of the Second Amendment. I'll tell you that I know that if Bull Connor had had lists of registered weapons, I don't think my father and his friends would have been sitting at the head of the community defending the community.

MR. KING: So you would not change the Second Amendment? You would not --

SECRETARY RICE: I also don't think we get to pick and choose in the Constitution. The Second Amendment is as important as the First Amendment of the --

MR. KING: But doesn't having the guns, while it's protection, also leads to people killing people?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, obviously, the sources of violence are many and we need to get at the sources of violence. Obviously, I'm very much in favor of things like background checks and, you know, and controlling at gun shows. And there are lots of things we can do. But we have to be very careful when we start abridging rights that our Founding Fathers thought very important. And on this one, I think that they understood that there might be circumstances that people like my father experienced in Birmingham, Alabama, when, in fact, the police weren't going to protect you.

MR. KING: Did you see him take the guns?

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, absolutely. Every night, he and his friends kind of organized a little brigade.

MR. KING: How old were you?

SECRETARY RICE: I was eight -- eight years old.

MR. KING: You remember that?

SECRETARY RICE: I remember it very, very well.

MR. KING: Did you understand it, as an eight-year-old why --

SECRETARY RICE: I understood that something was deeply wrong in Birmingham, Alabama, when I didn't have a white classmate until we moved to Denver, Colorado. I knew that these were separate societies. Our parents -- I grew up in a very nice, sheltered little middle-class community in Birmingham. My mother was a schoolteacher. My father was a minister and a high school guidance counselor. And I'm still friends with a lot of the kids from that community. And we recognize that we had very special circumstances.

Our parents told us, "All right, it may be that you can't have a hamburger a the Woolworth's lunch counter, and it may be that you can't go to this amusement park, Kiddieland, but don't worry, you can do anything you want. Your horizons should be limitless in America."

MR. KING: Did you believe that?

SECRETARY RICE: And we believed it.

Florida passes Castle Doctrine law
At last, balance shifts away from criminals

By MARION P. HAMMER
Published on: 05/02/05
     Florida's new Castle Doctrine law reverses the pendulum that for far too long has swung in the direction of protecting the rights of criminals over the rights of their victims.
      The new law simply says if a criminal breaks into your home or your occupied vehicle, you may presume he is there to do bodily harm and you may use any force, including deadly force, against him.
      Marion P. Hammer, past president of the National Rifle Association, is executive director of Unified Sportsmen of Florida.
      The Castle Doctrine law also removes the "duty to retreat" when you're outside your home and in a place you have a legal right to be. Consider the following scenario: a woman is walking down the street and is attacked by a rapist who tries to drag her into an alley. Under prior Florida law, the woman had a legal "duty to retreat." The victim of the attack was required to try to run away.
     Not anymore. Today, that woman has no obligation to retreat. If she chooses, she may stand her ground and fight. She may meet force with force, including deadly force, if she reasonably believes it is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm.
     No one knows what is in the twisted mind of a violent criminal. You can't expect a victim to wait before taking action to protect herself and say, "Excuse me, Mr. Criminal, did you drag me into this alley to rape and kill me or do you just want to beat me up and steal my purse?"
     Calling 911 won't save her life. The victim has a split second to take action to defend her life. That decision must be hers, not a prosecutor who isn't anywhere near the scene. Law-abiding citizens shouldn't have to worry about being prosecuted for doing what the Constitution and common sense give us all the right to do.
     Law-abiding citizens only want to be able to protect themselves. Proof of that statement can be found by examining the public record of Florida's lawful firearms owners.
     Of more than 1 million Florida gun owners who were issued licenses to carry concealed firearms for self-defense over the past 18 years, roughly 0.0001 of 1 percent misused their guns and had their licenses revoked. What other group has a better record of responsible citizenship?
     Survey research shows that at least half of Florida's homes have firearms in them, and there are approximately 6 million individual law-abiding gun owners. The overwhelming majority say the primary reason they own guns is for personal protection.
     That's what this law is all about: restoring your right under the Castle Doctrine and the Constitution to protect yourself, your family and others. Your home is your castle, and you have a right — as ancient as time itself — to absolute safety in it.
     Florida law is now on the side of law-abiding victims rather than criminals. And that is the way it is supposed to be.