Posted on 03/27/2007 10:31:38 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Webb Denies He Gave Aide Gun That Led to Arrest
Tuesday , March 27, 2007
WASHINGTON — Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said Tuesday he did not give aide Phillip Thompson the gun that led to his arrest in a Senate office building. Webb did not say whether it was his gun.
Thompson is awaiting arraignment in D.C. Superior Court after being arrested Monday for trying to enter the Russell Senate Office Building, where Webb's office is located, carrying a loaded pistol and two fully loaded magazines.
The judge will determine whether Thompson, 45, will have to pay bail to get out of jail, and will set a date for a preliminary hearing. Thompson spent the night in a D.C. jail after U.S. Capitol Police determined Monday that he did not have a permit to carry a gun in Washington, D.C., where only law enforcement officials are allowed to carry handguns.
He is charged with carrying a pistol without a license and possession of an unregistered firearm and unregistered ammunition. According to the court docket, Monday was Thompson's birthday.
A senior Democratic aide said Monday evening that Thompson forgot that he had the weapon when he sent the senator's bag through the X-ray machine at the office building. The aide said Webb gave the bag that contained the gun to Thompson when the aide drove the senator to the airport.
Webb said he has been in New Orleans since Friday and returned Monday night. He denied that he gave the weapon to Thompson.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
"Just how do you imagine that everyone would have a nuke? Why not a M1A1, or a 155 howitzer. The nuke argument is a bit Gorelike."
Free speech is not unlimited.
Can you sell child porn? No. Think you should be able to?
Can you sell porn to children? No. Why not?
Can you show fornication on the airwaves at 6 PM? No. Why not?
Can you broadcast military secrets? No. National security trumps free speech, always has. And unless we want the Constitution to be a suicide pact, it had better.
Can you falsely advertise your product? That's free speech alright, but it's also fraud. And free speech does not trump the right to not be defrauded.
Can you slander someone else in the press? That's free speech and the free press, and it's illegal. Free speech does not go so far as to printing deliberate untruths to damage somebody else. And it never has.
Free religion? Sure, people can be Islamists and believe in jihad, but those are just words. Can neo-pagans practice human sacrifice? No. There are limits on freedom of religion. Can Amerindians take peyote buds in their traditional ceremonies? No. The drug laws trump. There are limits on freedom of religion. Can neo-pagans recreate the temple prostitute cults of the East? No. There are limits on freedom of religion.
Speech is limited of necessity.
Religion is limited of necessity.
The right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures does not mean that the police cannot search private property to get dangerous and incriminating things there. It means that they have to follow process.
The right to not testify against yourself applies only at a CRIMINAL trial. OJ couldn't be forced to testify when he was on trial for his life, but his failure to testify COULD be held against him when he was on trial for his MONEY in the civil trial afterwards. The right against self-incrimination is not absolute. It's a matter of defining what "incrimination" means. We have defined it narrowly, rather than broadly.
The weapons of mass destruction issue is not "Gorelike". If nuclear weapons possession were a universal right, they would be a lot cheaper. But forget the nukes, let's just talk about anthrax, or gigantic fertilizer bombs. There are plenty of deadly WMD which can be put together without the budget of a small state. The Oklahoma City bombers managed to do it with very low tech and caused tremendous damage and death.
There are of necessity limits on individual possession of weapons to, and those limits cannot sanely be whatever any individual decides he wants, for whatever purpose. Firearms for personal defense? That makes sense. WMD are not firearms for personal defense. They are mass-casualty weapons. There is no individual right to inflict mass casualties on the neighborhood even in one's own defense, and therefore there cannot be any personal right to possess weapons with the capacity to do that. There are plenty of insane, sucidial people out there who cook off every year and take out 5 or ten people before killing themselves. Happens every year in just about every major metropolis. Have no laws to stop people from building simple, huge fertilizer bombs, and the death tolls will be in the hundreds from every such incident. The Unabomber certainly could have build dirty bombs if he could have easily gotten the materials, and if everybody has an unlimited right to any sort of weapons at all, those materials are going to be easy and relatively cheap to get. Germs are even easier and cheaper to get.
Let people walk up to the President with guns, and you are going to go through a lot of Presidents.
It's just the way the world is, and we all know it.
That is why the right to keep and bear arms, too, must be reasonably limited. It's a right to individual self-defense, and to collective defense against tyranny. It is NOT an individual right to insurrection against the government or the neighborhood. It means guns, with reasonable restrictions concomitant with national security needs (as in: no, you CANNOT take a gun anywhere near the President, and no, you CANNOT take a gun into Congress or the Courts. There are armed officers there to protect YOU, and it's a small enough space that the police CAN effectively protect people (unlike the big old world), so if you're taking a gun in there, you have the possibility of doing dramatically nefarious things that destabilize the whole country. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms is not infringed by refusing people the right to have WMD or make bombs, or to pack heat in the Capitol Building.
All rights have to have reasonable limitations on them.
And they all do, of necessity.
The most worrying thing on the right is when people don't have any sense of this and press for an absolutist position on weapons which would, in fact, result in chaos.
The 2nd Amendment means a personal right to FIREARMS, subject to necessary regulations. It means law abiding citizens can carry. The right does not extend to convicted felons. It does not extend to WMD or heavy military weapons. It can't. The carnage would be too great, swiftly.
Check your guns at the door is a good answer.
The 2nd Amendment means guns.
Not bombs. Not missiles. Not tanks and mines or grenades.
Personal firearms.
It's a personal right of self-defense, within the limits of the law. Felons can be restricted. Machine guns can be restricted. The personal right to self-defense has reasonable limits. If you can't do the job without a good semi-automatic weapon and a reasonable number of rounds, you can't take out a whole city block...things like that.
Check your weapons at the door is an infringement of individuals' rights to carry a gun, but a NECESSARY infringement, within the range of reasonable regulation. Within THIS building, where the President is (for example), the security is continuous and heavy, and the government guarantees your safety, so the regulation of milita requires, for national security reasons, that you relinquish your personal right to keep and bear arms HERE, when you enter, until you leave, much as individuals who enter the military check their right to unlimited free speech at the door as a necessary part of military duties.
This is all a reasonable basis for personal firearms ownership. The notion that everybody can have a fertilizer bomb in the back of his pickup "just in case" turns the Constitution into a suicide pact. It cannot mean that.
The 2nd Amendment is a real right, but like the 1st, it cannot be an UNLIMITED right.
Good point. If Webb IS bringing in a gun, how is it secured once he's in the Senate building? Does he walk around with a holster? Is it in his desk drawer? Perfect set-up for an assassination plot, where the Senator's gun is "stolen" beforehand.
Don't you find it kind of ironic that members of Congress are allowed to carry? There actually was a gunfight on the House floor once between two members...........
Dingdingdingding!!!
We have a winner!!!
To answer your question, the Virginia "Permit to Carry a Concealed Handgun" is not specific to a specific handgun. It confers the right to carry any otherwise legal handgun.
Thanks for the info NorthFlaRebel. I am beginning to see what's going on here. Someone yesterday also mentioned that the background checks done on CCW's and DC registration isn't all that tough on Congressmen anyway...must be that they are "special"!! Gag!!
Reject the word Aid and insert the phrase body guard.
Thompson is the Senator's body guard and always carries a weapon. Regarding the word Gave, the Senator checked out the gun to the body guard. That is like one checks out a tool from the tool room, the BG checked out the weapon from the U. S Marshal's weapon closet. Webb is the marshall
The Senator is either paranoid or in deep caca. We know Cynthia McKinney had body guards. Wonder how many others? Do they also carry guns?
What a brave, stand-up guy. Thanks, Virginia!
Bingo!! I have another question for you all...do the Capitol Hill Police have any idea whatsoever who possesses a gun on their "watch" and in their halls and what security measures have to be taken for just such a thing happening.
I be almost willing to bet that this "gun" took the CHP completely by surprise. Does "registered" in DC mean that the guns have to be registered with CHP or DC Police or both? Tell me that the CHP does not have any idea whose packing within the halls of Congress. Scary. Tell me that the CHP has no idea how many weapons there are, the type of weapons, how they are secured, or anything about the daily disposition of such weapons. What is it...the wild, wild west up there? It is scary to imagine Webb or any other Congressman parading up and down the halls of Congress with a gun that no one knows they have. Am I wrong?
Yikes!!
I'm glad I live in the wild wild wild west where guns are never registered.
Don't tell me you are the only guy in the country who doesn't understand full well that James Webb is first and foremost a fascist, and professional antisemite.
That brand of politician has a long track record in the assassination and murder of opponents.
This was my first thought. Here in Illinois there's a big fine for not securing weapons properly.
Now I'm wondering just what kind of horror might have been averted.
"Don't you find it kind of ironic that members of Congress are allowed to carry?"
Not a bit, no.
Congress makes the rules that governs Congress. It's right there in the Constitution. Clearly there cannot be any executive branch personnel with guns "guarding" Congress. There's too much history of that sort of thing all over the Western World to make it advisable for Congress to have anything other than direct control over the police who police Congress, and even for Congress to have control over the police power in the city where Congress sits (hence the District of Columbia, answerable not to the police but to Congress).
Think about the White House. Can the President be commanded by the Secret Service not to have his own weapons? No. And if the President SHOOTS a Secret Service Agent, can he be either SHOT by the Secret Service OR arrested by them? Legally, no. In reality, he probably WOULD be subdued by them, on the premise that he had gone insane and needed to protected against himself, but even then, he couldn't be PROSECUTED for murdering the Secret Servicemen unless he were impeached and removed from office. Then, and only then, would he be answerable for his crime.
Once one gets to the top of the government: the White House and Congress, there CANNOT BE a police force with amorphous, abstract authority to restrain the top political leaders by force. Congress sets the rules for Congress, and there cannot be any source of Congressional police rules that can interfere with Congress. If Congress decides that Congressmen can carry, and that the Congressional police are not to know that, well, the Capitol Police serve at the pleasure of Congress. In no sense whatever are they there to POLICE Congress any more than the Secret Service has any right to police the President. The armed guards are there to protect the Congressmen and the President, respectively, against the rest of the world. They do NOT have a law enforcement function over the actual officials themselves. They SERVE the officials, not police them, except and only within the limits that the officials themselves decide to set rules to police themselves. And the officials can change the rules whenever they want to. Congress has full and unlimited constitutional power to set the rules for Congress. It has to. Without that, the Executive branch could effectively control Congress the same way that English rulers and Roman leaders controlled their Parliaments and Senates: by controlling the police who police the Legislature.
Query: should the Secret Service take its orders from the PRESIDENT, or from CONGRESS? It's a vital question. The men with guns around the President, who have the physical power to restrain the President if need be, to whom must they answer? If they answer to the President, then they guard him but they cannot restrain him. If they answer to Congress, then they CAN restrain the President.
So too with the Capital Police. If they answer to Congress, then to the extent that Congress sets the rules, Congressmen do NOT answer to them. If they answer to the President, then Congressmen, as individuals, can be made to answer to the President. Note that the FBI, answerable to the President, CANNOT simply walk onto Capitol Hill and search Congressmen's office. The Executive police power DOES NOT EXTEND to Congress itself, and MUST NOT.
That's why Congressmen can carry: it's THEIR house, they are the masters, there is absolutely nobody in America above them, in their house, and there is no check on their power, in their house. The police answer to them, but they do NOT answer to the police. If they have decided that they can carry weapons and the police who serve them have no business knowing about it, then that is the rule they have set, in their house, with their absolutely sovereign constitutional prerogative to do so. No police authority extends over Congressmen in Congress, except insofar as Congress itself grants that power, and Congress can change the rules however it wants. It's a very important principle to prevent an angry President from doing to Congress what Lincoln did to the Maryland State Legislature to prevent a vote on secession (he arrested them in session). Can't do that using the guards in Congress. THEY answer only to Congress. Not to the President, and not to the Supreme Court. Congressmen want to carry guns. The capital police have nothing to say about that, and there's no reason to think they should have any veto over it. It's none of their business. They SERVE Congress. They do not police it.
Two things pretty obvious about this state of affairs: (1) The Founders didn't exactly envision the nuclear age, and (2) Build your own!
It's probably long overdue to get around to fixing the Constitution.
Well, if Congress wants those to be the rules for Congress, then they're the rules. I suspect it has a lot to do with Congressmen's sense of their own prerogatives. Also, the floor of Congress was once attacked by terrorists. Congressmen may want to have their own weapons in case somebody gets in and goes nuts in the Capitol.
Anyway, it's their sovereign right to set the rules in Congress, and no law trumps them there, so that's that.
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