Free Republic

USC senior cornerback Josh Shaw has been sidelined indefinitely after suffering two high ankle sprains while saving his 7-year-old nephew from drowning. According to USC’s RipsIt Blog, Shaw was attending a function at his cousin’s apartment when he looked down from the second-floor balcony and saw his 7-year-old nephew, who cannot swim, had fallen in the pool and was struggling to stay afloat. With total disregard for personal safety, Shaw jumped off the balcony and landed on the concrete below. He then crawled into the pool, grabbed his nephew and got him to safety. Then, even though both of his...

In JEFF SILVESTER v. KAMALA HARRIS, the United States District Court for the eastern District of California found that the 10 day waiting period to receive a firearm after a background check, was a violation of the second amendment for people who already owned a firearm (and could be shown to do so in the California database), who had a valid CCW license in California, or who owned a firearm and had a Certificate of Exemption (COE).  This is a significant win for restoration of second amendment rights in California.   The court gave the government of California 180 days...

California: Democratic State Representative and candidate for U.S. representative Pat Murphy said Tuesday that if the underage migrants who have come to the U.S. from Central America aren’t given a “pathway for citizenship” they could become terrorists. [snip]

A jewelry store in Little Saigon, Orange County California, has become a magnet  for robbers.   In 2012, there was an attempted robbery in which one of the robbers was shot.  In 2013, several shots were fired at a thief who fought with the store owner, and escaped with a $9,000 watch.   Yesterday, 21 August, 2014, another robbery attempt ended in gunfire as a store employee drove off two robbers who had smashed a display case.  From ocregister.com: Two men wearing ski-type masks and hooded sweatshirts entered the store, used a hammer to break glass on a display case and...

A career criminal has an out of wedlock child with a woman.  He shows up for the child's first birthday, only to find another man present, who also has a criminal record, but no felonies.   The first criminal, enraged to find another man with the mother of his child, threatens to kidnap the one year old.   The man without felonies fires a warning shot from a .38 to stop the threat.   The  career criminal goes to his car, pulls out a handgun, and points it at the man with the .38, who promptly shoots him in the chest, killing...

he proposal to enter L.A. voters into a cash prize lottery, for the sake of increasing turnout, is easy to attack on numerous fronts. My first reaction to last week's recommendation by the L.A. City Ethics Commission? Horror. Or maybe it wasn't horror so much as anger that anyone would come up with such a sad little gimmick. Throughout history, people have sacrificed their lives for the right to vote, and now we have to offer jackpots to shake people out of their laziness and apathy? "How DUMB!!!" one reader posted on the story by my colleague David Zahniser. "Really???!!!"...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie joined California Republican gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari.... (snip) in town to raise money as chairman of the Republican Governors Association ,," "Kashkari riled the GOP when he admitted he had voted for Obama in 2008, ..(snip)

The following comes from a July 28 posting by Randy Thomasson on Save California.com.This is not a family you see. These are two very confused men who were likely sexually abused as children. And now they have a boy that one or both have adopted. And this boy is now being indoctrinated with big lies about family and sex….When Associated Press was preparing a widely-published July 27 article saluting another homosexual-agenda bill redefining family, the reporter pitted three liberal voices against me. But despite misspelling my name, and putting a qualifier before me and a subtle put-down after me, I...

Rep. Ed Royce, California Republican and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States should try to have productive relations with a Vladimir Putin-led Russia — with qualifications. “At the same time, we should be pointing out that Putin is using social media right now to recruit every skinhead and malcontent around Russia and get them into eastern Ukraine,” Mr. Royce told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We know these separatists were taken into Russia to be trained in how to use these SA-11s and they’re poorly trained, so they now shot down a jetliner.” .... “We should have...

(LONG BEACH, CA.) -- They came to the wrong house to do a B & E (break and enter) that night and they most certainly frightened and roughed up the wrong 80-year old man. For one of the invader-robbers that night, a woman, it was indeed a fatal error in the victim selection process. Tom Greer, an 80-year-old retiree arrived at his home in Long Beach Tuesday night to find a man and a woman in the middle of a late night break in, ransacking the place. Greer told L.A.'s KNBC-TV as soon as he got inside both robbers tackled...

California is going beyond being one of the 19 states currently allowing same-sex "marriage" by revolutionizing the sacred institution even further with Gov. Jerry Brown's (D) signing of Senate Bill 1306, which eradicates from state laws references to "husband and wife." Progressive media outlets are heralding this change as necessary and overdo. "California's same-sex couples may now be pronounced spouse and spouse after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a bill [last] Monday eliminating outdated 'husband and wife' references from state laws," Huffington Post reported. "Senate Bill 1306 was introduced by state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) to eliminate confusion and...

In this strange incident, little is said about why the intruder tried to force his way into the shooters home.   All that we know is that the homeowner drove into his garage, and the intruder drove a car behind the homeowner to prevent the garage door from closing.  A verbal altercation followed, then warning shots were fired, then the  intruder was shot. The authorities are investigating the incident, which they say stems from the rather ambiguous term "road rage". From the marinscope.com: The homeowner, a 71-year-old man, drove into his garage, and the other man tried to drive in behind...

San Francisco politicians love to opine on major national and international issues - even if their stance will have no bearing on anything other than bolstering their own egos. Impeach George W. Bush! End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! But this time, City Hall officials have seized on a significant issue - the swell of undocumented children from Central America crossing the U.S. border - that they just might be able to influence in a real way. The Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously to fund relief efforts for children arriving in the city, according to immigration advocates, at...

Muslims advocates gathered at the California state capitol. Photo courtesy of the Council on American-Islamic Relations CA. Sacramento, Calif., Jul 10, 2014 / 04:07 am (CNA).- Proposed California food safety rules for butchering animals have raised concerns among the state’s Muslims, who say the rules would prevent them from practicing their religious beliefs. “Religious freedom is an important issue for all Americans. It is at the core of the freedoms our country was founded on and a value we pride ourselves on,” Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council of Islamic Relations’ San Francisco Bay Area Office, told CNA July...

We felt it here in the high desert, north of BBL.

Bl. Junípero Serra and the Holy Family Sean FitzpatrickOn September 25th, 1988, Pope St. John Paul II beatified a swarthy, Spanish, asthmatic priest of small stature who was a dazzling scholar, a tireless apostle, and the founder of many missionaries from San Diego to San Francisco—Junípero Serra, who walked the western desert to irrigate souls with the water that becomes a spring welling up to eternal life.Born Miguel Jose Serra Ferrer on November 14, 1730, in Petra, Majorca, Spain, this servant of God and God’s people became a Franciscan after a brilliant career as a scholar of philosophy, taking...

bill that has just passed the California State Senate could effectively make criminals out of many people- just for having sex. The bill, SB 967, would require “affirmative consent” before college-age couples can have sex. This would essentially outlaw sex that is had “while in the heat of passion”. From Breitbart News: SB 967, amended last week by state Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), would mandate that college students obtain “an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity.” ……….. “Obviously, there is a problem,” he said in the report. “SB 967...

While examples of the old media using their power to push for ever more restrictive gun laws are so common as to be the norm, this segment by CBS is a particularly clear example: Newtown families have high hopes for N.J. gun ammo bill Exactly one family was said to be present lobbying for the bill; the father cites a theory with little to no evidence to support its premise.  An emotional father who lost a son is pushing for more gun restrictions that are virtually irrelevant to mass shootings;  the mass shootings are a tiny segment of homicides...

After the shooting at University of California, Santa Barbara on Friday, a rampage that left six students dead from gun or knife wounds, many parents and politicians found the federal government's past responses to similar tragedies to be one of the culprits. “Have we learned nothing?”

Firefighters have known for years that burning small arms ammunition produces a very low level of danger  to firemen.   This is from the SAAMI paper, "Facts About Sporting Ammunition Fires":  Ammunition fired in the open, not enclosed in a gun's chamber, discharges with such inefficiency that the projectile will not even penetrate an ordinary fiberboard shipping container panel at very close range. When not strongly and tightly confined, smokeless propellant powders burn relatively slowly and do not explode as we know they do when fired in a gun. Pressure within a cartridge case must build up to several...