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 ...
The Framers intent was never to confine the Bill of Rights to a box, otherwise they would have specified which arms we were "allowed" (as you allude) to have. Nor were they concerned at the time with creating a standing army.
As far as "well-regulated" having dual meaning, well:
...A well-trained militia, being necessary to the security of a free state...
...A well-subservient militia, being necessary to the security of a free state ...
One sounds a bit more totalitarian than the other.
YIKES!!!! How do I get the "Text Magnifier Feature" into the off-position on my Internet Explorer!!??
Ah! Maybe that's why Webb denies knowledge -- it'll turn out to be unregistered.
"You should go through all the points. And you never answered the question. What laws or restricitons prevented OKC, prevented the anthrax letters, prevented presidential assassination, keeps thugs and criminals out of you house, prevent you being attacked on the street."
Ok, I did answer all the points you raised, at length, above. Now I will answer this last set of questions.
First I will answer it with a question of my own: what law ever prevented ANYTHING, completely, from happening? There have been laws against murder since the dawn of man. Murder still happens. And yet, when killing is made illegal, there is less of it than when the law is indifferent. Consider the case of duelling. Undoubtedly, there are still people who kill and are killed today, in 2007, in duels. But not nearly as many as were killed in duels in the 18th Century, certainly not in relative numbers, but also not in ABSOLUTE numbers. America has about 100 times the population that it did at the time of the Revolution, and yet it has perhaps only a hundredth of the total number of deaths through outright, intentional duelling as occurred then. When you outlaw something and punish people for it, it does not completely stop it, but it certainly discourages it.
The same is true of every other social disease and distemper. Do you imagine that ceasing to criminalize child pornography would leave the volume of it available untouched? No. The exploitation of children for evil purposes would explode. Were prostitution legalized, would there be the same amount of it? No. In Holland, where it is legal, statistics show that over ten percent of the post-pubescent males avail themselves of the services of a prostitute every month. Ten percent. There is prostitution in America too, but nothing like ten percent of the population uses prostitutes every month. However, in Las Vegas, where prostitution is legal, there is a tremendous flow of visitors for precisely that reason.
One can name any social distemper and find two truths:
(1) Outlawing it does not make it cease completely, and
(2) Legalizing it causes it to increase and the problems to expand.
Sometimes, as with Prohibition of widely-used substances, the effect of the law is to generate more criminality. Alcohol in the 1920s and Marijuana today come to mind.
But now let's turn back to your examples. Did the laws prevent the Oklahoma City bombings? No. But one need only follow the news carefully to realize how many bombing rings and terror plots we have broken up specifically because we now chemically tag fertilizer. Certainly if weapons of mass destruction were legal, they would be widely available: there is a market for these things. And just as certainly, Israel would have been destroyed by now. Similarly, 9/11 wouldn't have been four airplanes. It would have been 15 jihadis with their own personal atomic bombs. It is simply not true that there is widespread expertise in making WMD. But certainly if the stuff is LEGAL, it takes no great expertise to buy it and operate it.
Were the anthrax letters prevented completely? No. But the laws against biological weapons, and the tracking of the materials that could go into it certainly tamp down the ability of crazies to make the stuff.
Have Presidential assassination attempts been completely halted by laws against murder and heavy control of the President's area? No. And yet, for all of the attempts since 1963, none has succeeded. So yes, policing does make a difference.
I have actually never been attacked on the street anywhere in my life. This is certainly in part because of good policing.
Finally, there is a case directly on point. There are crazies in America who buy guns and go shoot up schools, Luby's, McDonald's, courthouses: it's true. There are drug gangs who shoot each other up. But you know what you DON'T see or hear? Machine gun massacres. Gangs going after each other with fully automatic weapons. The gun control of the most lethal mass-casualty guns HAS BEEN EFFECTIVE at keeping them off the streets. Machine guns exist, but they are damned hard to get. Criminals don't go to that length. They get pistols, and that is good enough for most of them. This limits the damage they can do.
So, on the one hand, it is true that there is not one law that stops completely the crime it is aimed at.
But it is also true that most laws, in a functional state, do DEPRESS the rate of violence and crime that would otherwise exist in the absence of the laws.
There is no gun registration in Virginia.
However the BATFE could trace the serial number and find out who the last person to buy it from a federally licensed gun dealer was. Of course if the last person to buy it from a dealer can't remember who he sold it to, the trail breaks right there, or if any subsequent buyer/seller has a memory lapse (I have several guns that I can't remember who I bought them from, but they are still perfectly legal, and aren't about to jump out of the cabinet and go rob a bank, or walk in the Capital building, on their own.)
Assuming the "giving" had taken place in Virgina, there would be no reason for the Senator to lie about it, he had done nothing illegal, even under any unconstitutional law.
Unless the Judges explicitly put a "Stay" on their ruling, which AFAIK they did not, the law is dead the moment they issued their ruling. However the ruling probably did not extend to keeping and bearing in the Halls of Congress... but then again, maybe it did. It seems to extend only to keeping, and bearing on one's own property, but that's not 100% clear just from reading the opinion, at least to me and on just a quick read through.
Well we know what happens when an armed person with malice walks into such an area where everyone but a few guards are disarmed. We don't know what happens when a significant portion of the "civilians" are also armed.
Might be an interesting thing to find out.
My understanding is the Senators don't go through the metal detectors and don't submit their bags to the X-ray machine. Even if they did, they are not subject to arrest while attending a session of Congress, which is most of the time they are in the District. It's in the Constitution.
"Baloney...."
Agree. I think maybe Webb is doing some of that Slick Willy stuff and is parsing words. No, "he did not give Tompson the gun", he gave him the bag that the gun happened to be in. Kinda like when the Slick One stated "it depends of what the definiion of is, is". It will be interesting to see how this one turns out for sure. Another inside the beltway soap opera....
Handgun registration has not been allowed in DC for several decades, at least until last week. It was required, but you couldn't do it. The only way you could legally own a handgun was for it to have been registered those decades ago.
Taking it into the Capital or Senate Office Building is another matter.
As a US Senator, yes he is. He's got a Constitutional protection from arrest during Congressional sessions, which would be most of the time he's in the District. Members of the House have that same immunity.
It's in Article I,
Section. 6. The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same;
It need not be registered to anyone. Virginia does not have registration, and DC *won't* register a handgun, haven't for decades, although they are required to be registered to be possessed in the District.
Or such was the state of the DC law until the US Circuit Court for DC through a giant monkey wrench into the law. I doubt anyone has sorted out just what the law actually is now in DC with regards to registration, possession and carrying of handguns, at least in one's own residence.
It was, but since last week, it probably isn't.
At the time it was written, it was not unusual for individuals to own cannon and/or cannon armed ships.
It's the ultimate Red Herring of the Gun Grabbers. Very few folks could afford a nuke, and those that could wouldn't be deterred by a stinking law, if they were wanting to commit mass murder anyway. Pretty much the same is true, but less so, of the M1A1 and 155.
Now a nice Ma deuce or a M-249 or M-240, that's another matter. According to the last Supreme Court ruling on the subject, keeping and bearing any part of the ordinary military equipment is protected by the second amendment, just not "gangster weapons" with no military utility. (Whatever sort of weapons those might be).
I wouldn't go that far. It doesn't mention muskets or muzzle cannon either. The power to raise and support armies certainly implies that those armies (we have several, depending on how you count) have the power to be armed. The same is true of the power to provide and maintain a Navy. Not to mention the powers of the President as the Commander in Chief.
The Second Amendment protects a preexisting right, it doesn't grant anything. The Constitution grants powers to the branches of the federal government, restricts the states from exercising certain powers they had prior to the Constitution. But it protects the rights of the people.
Could be a revolver with speed loaders, or even true "clips". Semi auto's and full autos have magazines, not clips. The M-1 Garand has a clip, and some magazines are loaded via "stripper" clips, particularly the SKS, which doesn't have a removable magazine.
Learn the proper terminology if you expect to be taken seriously on *this* forum.
Virginia doesn't register guns. In many states there is no record of purchase except from a federally licensed dealer, and that record remains with the dealer. I'm not sure about Virginia, which appears to have a required *state* background check, but I don't know if that applies to private transfers either. If you buy a gun from another individual, there is no record at all, in Texas, and many other states.
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