Tag: self defense

People Outraged After California Democrat Introduces Bill that Criminalizes Self-Defense – AB 1333 Limits Homeowner’s Right to Defend Self, Family and Home From Intruder

California is currently a ‘stand your ground’ state, however, a Democrat Assemblyman just introduced a bill that would criminalize self-defense.

California Assemblyman and Democrat Caucus Chair Rich Chavez Zbur introduced AB 1333 which seeks to limit a homeowner’s right to defend their family and home from an intruder.

This Democrat lunatic wants to limit a homeowner’s right to defend themselves from a dangerous intruder.

More than anything else, this is an attack on the Second Amendment.

“This bill would eliminate certain circumstances under which homicide is justifiable, including, among others, in defense of a habitation or property. The bill would additionally clarify circumstances in which homicide is not justifiable, including, among others, when a person uses more force than necessary to defend against a danger,” according to California Legislative Information.

“By expanding the scope of the crime of homicide, this bill would create a state-mandated local program,” the state said.

Rick Zbur tried to defend himself after people were outraged by his proposal.

Zbur defamed Kyle Rittenhouse as he tried to bat down critics.

“AB 1333 was never intended to limit a crime victim’s right to defend yourself, your family, or home. The goal is to prevent wannabe vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse from provoking violence & claiming self defense after the fact. We will amend the bill to make this crystal clear,” Zbur said.

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The Prosecution Of Daniel Penny Is A Soviet-Style Attack On The Right Of Self-Defense

American justice has become politicized — a weapon against enemies with hall passes for favored groups. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and dozens of big city, George Soros-funded leftist district attorneys routinely prosecute innocent citizens while letting criminals walk free.

The actions of these powerful officers of the law fit a pattern that the great Soviet-era Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn not only would have recognized, but he also detailed.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecutions of both Donald Trump and Daniel Penny — closing arguments for Penny’s trial are scheduled for after Thanksgiving — combined with his leniency for deadly criminals are a case in point.

In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn wrote of the “Voroshilov Amnesty,” granted three weeks after Stalin’s death in 1953, which “flooded the whole country with a wave of murderers, bandits, and thieves, who had with great difficulty been rounded up after the war.” Communist authorities thought a general amnesty would endear them to the people — of course, many non-violent political prisoners weren’t eligible.

This amnesty was compounded by Article 139 of the Criminal Code of 1926 which defined the “limits of necessary self-defense.” As Solzhenitsyn described the law, “you had the right to unsheathe your knife only after the criminal’s knife was hovering over you. And you could stab him only after he had stabbed you. And otherwise, you would be the one put on trial.” Solzhenitsyn then observed that “This fear of exceeding the measure of necessary self-defense led to total spinelessness as a national characteristic.”

Returning to Bragg’s prosecution of Penny, by now, much of the nation knows that Penny, a former Marine, intervened when Jordan Neely became aggressive and threatening on a subway train. Neely, who tragically died, either during the confrontation or shortly after, was not simply a man in need of help; he had a long history of violence and assault. By stepping in, Penny averted harm to fellow passengers. Yet instead of being hailed as a protector, Penny was prosecuted. It appears Bragg is a fan of the Soviet Union’s Article 139.

As Solzhenitsyn explained, the Soviet state reserved for itself the monopoly on force, punishing self-defense as a form of insubordination. Such policies deliberately cultivated fear and compliance, demoralizing citizens and teaching them to rely solely on the state for protection — a state that often failed to provide it. Solzhenitsyn recounted the case of soldier Aleksandr Zakharov, who, when sentenced to 10 years for murder for defending himself from a hoodlum’s attack, asked, “And what was I supposed to do?” To which the prosecutor responded, “You should have fled!”

The chilling effect of cases like Penny’s is already visible. People who might otherwise intervene in dangerous situations now think twice, fearful of becoming the next defendant in the crosshairs of prosecutors like Bragg.

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Armed Resistance is enshrined in international law

Decades ago, it was agreed that Resistance and armed rebellion against a settler colonial occupation and apartheid power is not just recognised under international law. It is enshrined specifically as a right for the oppressed, never to be denied.

In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.

This runs counter to what London, Washington and Tel Aviv would have you believe. Proscribing the Resistance factions as “terrorist” groups immediately distracts people from their real role in liberating Palestinian territory from the Zionist occupier and its Western backers.

Prof. Tim Anderson:

The colonial powers almost all abstained on the 1960 Declaration on Decolonisation, the lead principle of which (the right of a people to self-determination) entered the twin covenants of the International Bill of Rights. After that the hegemonic powers tried to deny (but could not block) UN declarations and conventions on the right to resist colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. The result is that today most anti-colonial resistance groups are banned as “terrorist”, but only in the hegemonic regimes.

International law clearly supports the right to resist (further, Palestine and Lebanon as recognised nations enjoy the UN chartered right to national self-defence) while the Anglo-Americans and their collaborators live in denial. This hegemonic denial of the right to resist (including the legitimacy of Palestinian insurrection) creates a culture which confuses and must itself be resisted. Proponents of resistance education should inform, encourage and build confidence in support of legitimate popular resistance.

Anderson advocates unequivocal support for the Resistance despite the threats that confront those who do:

Self-determination is not a posthumous medal for helpless victims, it is a great right that must be fought for and taken from the imperial and colonial forces which try to deny and block self-determination. This is not well recognised in colonial cultures, which embed paternal myths.

Yet it is well recognised by anti-colonial leaders, like the great 19th century Cuban patriot Jose Marti who said in 1880, “You take your rights, you do not beg for them. You do not buy them with tears but with blood.”

While the Palestinian cause is popular in Western countries, this support begins as sympathy for the victims and is often simply an abstract call for an end to the violence. To take a further step and support the Palestinian and regional Resistance implies confronting Western regimes which have tried to ban and criminalise all Resistance groups.

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Gun Control Hypocrite Kamala Harris Admits on Live TV That She and Walz Are Gun Owners and She Would Shoot Intruders, Then Regrets Saying It

In a town hall interview with Oprah Winfrey, Kamala Harris’ long-standing hypocrisy on gun control was exposed for all to see.

Kamala, known for her anti-gun rhetoric, let slip that not only is she a gun owner, but she would use it to shoot intruders if they dared to break into her home.

For someone who has championed stricter gun laws and even floated the idea of mandatory buybacks, this unscripted moment laid bare her duplicity.

When pressed during her interview with Oprah, she dropped the bombshell that she and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz both own guns.

“I’m a gun owner. Tim Walz is a gun owner,” said Kamala, much to Oprah’s surprise.

“I did not know that,” Oprah said.

But the real jaw-dropper came next. Harris, seemingly emboldened by the moment, continued: “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”

Harris, apparently realizing the gravity of her words, laughed nervously and backpedaled, adding, “I should have not said that. My staff will deal with that later.”

The hypocrisy is glaring. Here is a woman who has championed gun control measures for years, pushing for an assault weapons ban, mandatory gun buyback programs, and tighter restrictions on law-abiding gun owners—yet she is quick to admit she would use her firearm for self-defense.

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A Federal Judge Says Carry-Permit Holders Have a Right to Armed Self-Defense on Public Transit

Two years ago in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutional right to carry guns in public for self-defense. But in Illinois, people with concealed-carry permits are committing a misdemeanor if they bring their handguns with them when they use public transportation. Among other locations, that ban covers all Metra commuter trains in the Chicago area, all of the buses and trains operated by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), and all facilities, including parking lots, associated with them. Last Friday, a federal judge deemed those restrictions unconstitutional as applied to four permit holders.

Under Bruen, the government has the burden of showing that a law is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” when it restricts conduct covered by the “plain text” of the Second Amendment. “The Court finds that Defendants have failed to meet their burden,” U.S. District Judge Iain D. Johnston writes in Schoenthal v. Raoul. “That failure is dispositive.”

Maintaining that the challenged provision of the 2013 Illinois Firearm Concealed Carry Act passes the Bruen test, Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx cited several historical precedents, none of which Johnston considered adequate. She argued, for example, that the 14th century Statute of Northampton, which forbade “force in affray of the peace” and going or riding “armed” in “fairs” or “markets,” established a tradition of regulating arms in public that was continued in early American gun laws.

In Bruen, Johnston notes, the Supreme Court “found that the Statute of Northampton wasn’t a general ban on bearing weapons; instead, the offense was arming oneself to terrify others.” That motivation, he says, “is also reflected in the corresponding state statutes.” A 1786 Virginia law, for example, made it a crime to “ride armed by night nor by day, in fairs or markets, or in other places, in terror of the county.”

The Illinois plaintiffs, by contrast, “wish to carry concealed arms in self-defense, so the Firearm Concealed Carry Act’s ban burdens Plaintiffs’ Second Amendment right for a wholly different reason than the Statute of Northampton and similar state statutes did,” Johnston writes. “A concealed arm doesn’t terrorize; it’s concealed. Consequently, these historical laws do not serve as an appropriate historical analogue.”

Foxx also cited an 1821 Tennessee law, an 1837 Arkansas law, and an 1871 Texas law, all of which restricted public possession of weapons. The Texas law required that someone who carries a pistol have “reasonable grounds for fearing an unlawful attack on his person.” In Bruen, Johnston notes, the Supreme Court viewed that law and two state court decisions upholding it as “outliers” that “provide little insight into how postbellum courts viewed the right to carry protected arms in public.” Foxx, Johnston says, offers “nothing to the contrary.”

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Does Any Other Country Besides Israel Have the Right to Defend Itself?

Despite the countless atrocities, assassinations and violations of humanitarian and international law, American politicians and the corporate media recite ad infinitum the accepted talking point that Israel has a “right to defend itself.” From their distorted perspective, only the aggressor deserves that prerogative.

Israel’s claim to self-defense is never questioned.  Although it has one of the strongest modern militaries (581 aircraft, including F-15, F-16 and advanced stealth F-35 fighter jets), possesses the latest air defense systems, stockpiles 400 nuclear weapons with delivery systems, and has the United States, the world’s largest military power, standing ready to protect it, we are to believe that Israel is in physical danger.

On the other hand, the Palestinians, most in need of defense, are denied that right.  They are told to accept colonized lives in the Gaza concentration camp, to accept marginalization, injustice and humiliation forever; that they have no right to resist the Israeli apartheid regime.  And the United States and its Western proxies threaten the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and others in the Palestinian Resistance for daring to challenge Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Even though the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Palestinian Islamic Jihad and smaller groups have no organized modern military, no air force, navy, air defense systems, nuclear weapons and no Western allies to defend them from Israeli terrorism, we are to believe that they are a threat.

In addition, the U.S.-Israeli narrative concerning Palestinians and their regional allies is rife with contradictions.  The United States and Israel can choose their allies, while Iranians and Palestinians cannot without controversy.

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Government to introduce ban on machete and zombie-style knives – as Brits urged to surrender their weapons

Machete and zombie-style knife owners are being urged to surrender their weapons ahead of a government ban on owning them next month.

A nationwide scheme will be run at police stations across England and Wales for four weeks from August 26 to September 23.

People who hand over the potentially dangerous knives before it becomes illegal to own them on September 24 will not face repercussions.

After then, the weapons will be added to the list of dangerous prohibited items already banned – including butterfly knives, Samurai swords and push daggers.

Anyone caught with a zombie-style knife or a machete after this time faces time behind bars.

People can also dispose of the weapons using surrender bins by contacting their local police, council or an anti-knife crime charity.

Individuals are being encouraged to contact their designated police station first to get advice on how to package up any weapons and bring them into the station.

Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson urged the public to ‘do the right thing’ to make streets safer.

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Turn in Illegal Knives for a Free Year of Netflix, German Police Suggest

People who voluntarily hand in banned and dangerous knives should be rewarded with a year-long Netflix subscription, the head of one of the largest German police unions has said.

The most popular pocket knife costs €17 while an annual Netflix subscription amounts to €170, making the exchange worthwhile for anyone willing to dispose of their knives. “For this measure to be effective, the federal government must create serious incentives for sellers,” Jochen Kopelke, head of the Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP), added.

Knife crime has been soaring in Germany: according to police statistics, close to 13,844 knife-related attacks were committed last year, a significant increase compared to the 10,131 cases recorded a year earlier. The Charité hospital in Berlin said this week that the number of patients treated for stab wounds this year has already reached 50 to 55—a number they usually tend to in a whole year. “This is a threatening development for society,” Ulrich Stöckle, managing director of the hospital’s Centre for Musculoskeletal Surgery, said.

Most of the perpetrators of violence in Berlin “are young, male and have a non-German background. This also applies to knife violence,” Barbara Slowik, the police commissioner of Berlin recently said in an interview.

Knife crime has been especially rife among the migrant communities in Germany, with Syrian and Afghan perpetrators making the headlines in recent months. One of the most shocking attacks was committed by an Afghan failed asylum seeker in May in Mannheim: the 25-year-old man, who had been living in the country illegally for nine years, murdered a policeman.

Most recently, a Syrian migrant seriously injured a four-year-old girl in a supermarket in the southern German city of Wangen im Allgäu, and a 17-year-old Syrian was arrested for stabbing a family of five in Stuttgart. The latter case is particularly disturbing, as the attacker had reportedly committed 34 criminal acts in 31 months—but the police kept letting him go.

Support for resuming deportations to both Syria and Afghanistan has increased, but the government is unwilling to deport dangerous criminals because Germany has declared both countries unsafe.

Readers of the German daily Bild, the country’s highest-circulation newspaper, vented their anger at the government for doing nothing. “Deport everyone who is dangerous. Enough is enough,” wrote one of them. “These types of criminals are ridiculing our country,” wrote another. A third reader compared the situation to recent violent protests in Britain, saying: “Politicians are horrified, but no one is taking action. We can already see in England where this type of behaviour leads to.”

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Minnesota Supreme Court Rules That Threatened Person Must Retreat Before Brandishing a Weapon

The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a split decision that a person who is being attacked or threatened must retreat if “reasonably possible” instead of brandishing a weapon.

The court upheld two second-degree convictions of assault with a deadly weapon against a man who was armed with a machete who alleged that he was threated by another man with a knife at a light rail station in Minneapolis in 2021.

A 4–2 decision, issued Wednesday by the state’s high court, said that Minnesota law stipulates that there is a “duty to retreat” when reasonably possible before using deadly force. That applies when the person faces bodily harm, the judges ruled.

In its decision Wednesday, the state court wrote that the “duty to retreat when reasonably possible—a judicially created element of self-defense—applies to persons who claim they were acting in self-defense when they committed the felony offense of second-degree assault-fear with a device designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or great bodily harm.”

The plaintiff in the case, Earley Romero Blevins, brandished a machete after a man with a knife allegedly threated him at a rail station in Minnesota. The man approached Blevins as he was arguing with a woman, according to Blevins, who said that the man armed with the knife told him to come to a shelter at the station so he “could slice” his throat.

Blevins had argued that he feared for his life and was acting in self-defense when he produced the machete, according to the ruling. The justices, however, said that after they reviewed video footage of the incident, they found that he had ample opportunity to leave the situation.

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This Elderly Man Was Arrested After Shooting a Burglar in Self-Defense—Because His Gun Was Unlicensed

Dennis Powanda and Vincent Yakaitis are bound together by a common experience: They were both criminally charged in connection with an attempted burglary. Powanda was the burglar, and Yakaitis was the property owner.

Ah, justice.

Indeed, that’s not a misprint, parody, or a bad joke (although I wish it were the latter). Powanda was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and burglary, along with other related offenses, for executing the botched raid a little before 2:00 a.m. in February 2023 at Yakaitis’ property in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. The government charged Yakaitis, who is in his mid-70s, with using a firearm without a license after he shot Powanda, despite that it appears prosecutors agree Yakaitis justifiably used that same firearm in self-defense.

Whatever your vantage point—whether you care about criminal justice reform and a fair legal system, or gun rights, or all of the above—it is difficult to make sense of arresting and potentially imprisoning someone over what essentially amounts to a paperwork violation. That injustice is even more glaring when considering that Powanda, 40, allegedly charged at Yakaitis, who happens to be about three and a half decades older than Powanda.

Pennsylvania’s permitting regime does carve out a couple of exceptions, one of which would seem to highly favor Yakaitis. Someone does not need a license to carry, according to the law, “in his place of abode or fixed place of business.” Yakaitis owned the home Powanda attempted to burglarize. The catch: He didn’t live there—it reportedly had no tenants at the time of the crime—opening a window for law enforcement to charge him essentially on a technicality.

If convicted, Yakaitis faces up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Quite the price to pay for protecting your life on your own property. The misdemeanor charge also implies that Yakaitis has no history of using his weapon inappropriately, or any criminal record at all, as Pennsylvania law classifies his particular crime—carrying a firearm without a license—as a felony if the defendant has prior criminal convictions and would be disqualified from obtaining such a license. In other words, we can deduce that Yakaitis was a law-abiding citizen and eligible for a permit, which means he is staring down five years in a cell for not turning in a form and paying a fee to local law enforcement. OK.

Yakaitis is not the first such case. In June, law enforcement in New York charged Charles Foehner with so many gun possession crimes that if convicted on all of them he would face life in prison. Police came to be aware of his unlicensed firearms when Foehner defended himself against an attempted mugger—the surveillance footage is here—after which they searched Foehner’s home and found that only some of his weapons were licensed with the state.

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