Monday 08-15-11

Despite the title of the article with the obvious left leaning title the article is worth the read.


Guns in bars have little impact on crime

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - The number of gun crimes at Virginia bars and restaurants declined slightly during the first year of a new state law that allows people with permits to carry concealed firearms into establishments that serve alcohol, a newspaper reported Sunday.

According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch ( http://bit.ly/qq6Keh), 145 such incidents were reported in fiscal 2010-11, compared to 153 the previous year _ a 5.2 percent decrease.

Virginia State Police compiled the statistics at the newspaper's request.

The newspaper's analysis found that most of the incidents were relatively minor, and few appeared to involve people with concealed-carry permits.

Phillip Van Cleave, president of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League, said the results aren't surprising.

"The numbers basically just confirm what we've said would happen if the General Assembly changed the law," said Van Cleave, whose group strongly lobbied for the law's change that made Virginia one of 43 states to allow concealed guns in restaurants that serve alcohol.

"Keep in mind what the other side was saying _ that this was going to be a blood bath, that restaurants will be dangerous and people will stop going. But there was nothing to base the fear-mongering on," Van Cleave said.

State Sen. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, who strongly opposed the law, said it's not clear what conclusions can be drawn from just a year's worth of data.

"Most folks obey the law, and that's a good thing," said McEachin. "But I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that just like drinking and driving doesn't mix, guns and drinking don't mix."

David Rittgers, an attorney and decorated former Army special forces officer who is now a legal policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the growing number of states that are adopting concealed-carry measures like Virginia's have seen no appreciable rise _ and in some cases a decline _ in violent crime.

"The worst that you can say about these laws is that they are statistically value neutral" in terms of impacting the crime rate, Rittgers said.

State police pulled from their computerized database all major crimes at bars and restaurants reported by local law-enforcement agencies across Virginia for two successive fiscal years. The Times-Dispatch then contacted more than a dozen police departments in Virginia for more detailed information on all aggravated assaults, homicides and sexual assaults involving firearms at those businesses.

Reported robberies were not analyzed because they tend to involve premeditated crimes by perpetrators openly displaying guns, and many of the affected businesses are chain restaurants that don't serve alcohol.

Only two fatal shootings occurred during the last fiscal year _ one outside a Petersburg nightclub and the other at a Radford restaurant _ but neither involved concealed-gun permit holders. And only two of the 18 aggravated assaults reported could be linked definitively to concealed-carry holders.

Several other cases appear to have involved hidden guns, but the suspects either didn't have a concealed permit, or they fled the scene before they could be identified and arrested.

Aside from the two homicides, the only assault that resulted in a person being shot occurred in February outside a Virginia Beach restaurant and bar. The shooting followed an altercation inside the restaurant. Several unknown men were asked to leave, and the victim was shot and wounded as he walked toward a male in an adjacent parking lot, police said.

But because the suspect was never identified and arrested, police don't know whether the shooter was carrying a concealed gun or whether he had a permit to carry it.

Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, http://www.timesdispatch.com

http://wtop.com/?nid=120&sid=2496416

SF cell shutdown: Safety issue, or hint of Orwell?

An illegal, Orwellian violation of free-speech rights? Or just a smart tactic to protect train passengers from rowdy would-be demonstrators during a busy evening commute?
The question resonated Saturday in San Francisco and beyond as details emerged of Bay Area Rapid Transit officials' decision to cut off underground cellphone service for a few hours at several stations Thursday. Commuters at stations from downtown to near the city's main airport were affected as BART officials sought to tactically thwart a planned protest over the recent fatal shooting of a 45-year-old man by transit police.

Two days later, the move had civil rights and legal experts questioning the agency's move, and drew backlash from one transit board member who was taken aback by the decision.

"I'm just shocked that they didn't think about the implications of this. We really don't have the right to be this type of censor," said Lynette Sweet, who serves on BART's board of directors. "In my opinion, we've let the actions of a few people affect everybody. And that's not fair."

Similar questions of censorship have arisen in recent days as Britain's government put the idea of curbing social media services on the table in response to several nights of widespread looting and violence in London and other English cities. Police claim that young criminals used Twitter and Blackberry instant messages to coordinate looting sprees in riots.

Prime Minister David Cameron said that the government, spy agencies and the communications industry are looking at whether there should be limits on the use of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook or services like BlackBerry Messenger to spread disorder. The suggestions have met with outrage—with some critics comparing Cameron to the despots ousted during the Arab Spring.

In the San Francisco instance, Sweet said BART board members were told by the agency of its decision during the closed portion of its meeting Thursday afternoon, less than three hours before the protest was scheduled to start.

"It was almost like an afterthought," Sweet told The Associated Press. "This is a land of free speech and for us to think we can do that shows we've grown well beyond the business of what we're supposed to be doing and that's providing transportation. Not censorship."

But there are nuances to consider, including under what conditions, if any, an agency like BART can act to deny the public access to a form of communication—and essentially decide that a perceived threat to public safety trumps free speech.

These situations are largely new ones, of course. A couple of decades ago, during the fax-machine and pay-phone era, the notion of people organizing mass gatherings in real time on wireless devices would have been fantasy.

BART Deputy Police Chief Benson Fairow said the issue boiled down to the public's well-being.

"It wasn't a decision made lightly. This wasn't about free speech. It was about safety," Fairow told KTVU-TV on Friday.

BART spokesman Jim Allison maintained that the cellphone disruptions were legal as the agency owns the property and infrastructure. He added while they didn't need the permission of cellphone carriers to temporarily cut service, they notified them as a courtesy.

The decision was made after agency officials saw details about the protest on an organizer's website. He said the agency had extra staff and officers aboard trains during that time for anybody who wanted to report an emergency, as well as courtesy phones on station platforms.

"I think the entire argument is that some people think it created an unsafe situation is faulty logic," Allison said. "BART had operated for 35 years without cellphone service and no one ever suggested back then that a lack of it made it difficult to report emergencies and we had the same infrastructure in place."

But as in London, BART's tactic drew immediate comparisons to authoritarianism, including acts by the former president of Egypt to squelch protests demanding an end to his rule. Authorities there cut Internet and cellphone services in the country for days earlier this year. He left office shortly thereafter

"BART officials are showing themselves to be of a mind with the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak," the Electronic Frontier Foundation said on its website. Echoing that comparison, vigorous weekend discussion on Twitter was labeled with the hashtag "muBARTek."

Aaron Caplan, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in free-speech issues, was equally critical, saying BART clearly violated the rights of demonstrators and other passengers.

"We can arrest and prosecute people for the crimes they commit," he said. "You are not allowed to shut down people's cellphones and prevent them from speaking because you think they might commit a crime in the future."

Michael Risher, the American Civil Liberty Union's Northern California staff attorney, echoed the sentiment in a blog: "The government shouldn't be in the business of cutting off the free flow of information. Shutting down access to mobile phones is the wrong response to political protests, whether it's halfway around the world or right here in San Francisco."

The ACLU already has a scheduled meeting with BART's police chief on Monday about other issues and Thursday's incident will added to the agenda, spokeswoman Rebecca Farmer said.

But others said that while the phone shutdown was worth examining, it may not have impinged on First Amendment rights. Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center, a nonprofit educational organization, said freedom of expression can be limited in very narrow circumstances if there is an immediate threat to public safety.

"An agency like BART has to be held to a very high standard," he said. "First of all, it has to be an immediate threat, not just the mere supposition that there might be one. And I think the response has to be what a court would consider reasonable, so it has to be the minimum amount of restraint on free expression."

He said if BART's actions are challenged, a court may look more favorably on what it did if expression was limited on a narrow basis for a specific area and time frame, instead of "just indiscriminately closing down cellphone service throughout the system or for a broad area."

University of Michigan law professor Len Niehoff, who specializes in First Amendment and media law issues, found the BART actions troublesome for a few reasons.

He said the First Amendment generally doesn't allow the government to restrict free speech because somebody might do something illegal or to prohibit conversations based on their subject matter. He said the BART actions have been portrayed as an effort to prevent a protest that would have violated the law, but there was no guarantee that would have happened.

"What it really did is it prevented people from talking, discussing ... and mobilizing in any form, peaceful or unpeaceful, lawful or unlawful," he said. "That is, constitutionally, very problematic."

The government does have the right to break up a demonstration if it forms in an area where protests are prohibited and poses a risk to public safety, Niehoff said. But it should not prohibit free speech to prevent the possibility of a protest happening.

"The idea that we're going to keep people from talking about what they might or might not do, based on the idea that they might all agree to violate the law, is positively Orwellian," he said.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9P3FGQG0&show_article=1