Armed and Law Abiding

Police are praising the courage of a concealed-carry permit holder who helped subdue a gunman in a deadly bank robbery. Chris Chappell was making a withdrawal when a man opened fire, killing two tellers and wounding two others. Chappell ran out of the bank and drew his gun, taking cover behind his SUV. The gunman tried to flee the bank, but encountered Chappell and ran back inside. At that time two passing sheriff’s deputies noticed the disturbance and turned around to investigate. The gunman grabbed a hostage and made another attempt to escape, but he was met by Chappell and the deputies. When the gunman stumbled, one of the deputies subdued him with a gunshot. “It’s certainly commendable,” said Jefferson County, Alabama, Sheriff’s Sgt. Randy Christian. “It’s obvious he played a key role in keeping the guy there until we could get there. It’s a great testament to someone willing to take action.” (The Birmingham News, Birmingham, AL, 05/16/07)

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Five people on a crime spree with an unloaded pistol and a baseball bat had robbed a 16-year-old of his cell phone, silver chain and wallet, and had also attempted to carjack a couple in their driveway. Later, according to police, they attempted to carjack a man at a car wash. The would-be victim, however, had a concealed-carry permit and a 9 mm handgun, which he used to shoot one of his assailants. The injured suspect’s accomplices took him to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. The surviving suspects face armed robbery charges. (Detroit Free Press, Detroit, MI, 05/19/07)

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Brian Smith was walking toward his apartment when two men approached him. Police say the men pretended to be lost, but became violent as Smith gave directions. One of the men pulled a revolver from his waistband, but Smith, who has a concealed-carry permit, reacted swiftly, drawing his own revolver and firing two shots. One suspect was injured and arrested at the hospital, while the other remains at large. (Kalamazoo Gazette, Kalamazoo, MI, 05/18/07)

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Upon having her ex-boyfriend charged with domestic violence and stalking, a woman began carrying a firearm for protection. According to police, her next encounter with the violent ex-boyfriend occurred at a store, where the man “threatened great bodily harm.” The woman reported the threats to police, and they followed her home to be sure the man wasn’t there. Officers searched inside the home, and found nothing suspicious—but they didn’t check under the porch. When police left, the ex-boyfriend burst from under the home. The woman shot at him, but she missed and fled inside. Minutes later the ex-boyfriend broke down the back door and rushed at the woman, who shot her assailant twice. He was found hiding in a nearby garage by police. (The Town Talk, Alexandria, LA, 06/01/07)

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An elderly man discovered an intruder less than one-third his age burglarizing his boat. Police say the young criminal sprang at the man, stabbing him in the chest. Despite his injuries, the victim retrieved a shotgun and fired upon his assailant, causing him to flee. The victim was expected to recover from his injuries. The suspect was charged with attempted murder after he was found seeking treatment for gunshot wounds. (The Mendocino County Observer, Laytonville, CA, 04/19/07)

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According to police, a 36-year-old man awoke to popping noises resounding from the back of his residence. He took a .40-caliber handgun from his room and walked down the hallway to investigate. Detecting movement from the rear bathroom, the man opened the door and found a 16-year-old climbing through the window and another standing outside; both boys wore cotton gloves. The homeowner held both suspects at gunpoint until law enforcement arrived. Police arrested the boys on suspicion of burglary and possession of burglary tools. (The Tribune, San Luis Obispo, CA, 05/21/07)

quick cooked venison

1 lb. cubed venison, marinated in buttermilkwith tenderizer, then washed and cleaned
4 baby carrots
1 med. onion, chopped
2 ounces butter
1 carrot
1/8 tsp. thyme
Flour
1 diced celery stalk
1 cup burgundy wine

Brown venison in butter. Add seasonings, celery, carrots, onion, carrots, and enough water to cover meat. Cook until tender; thicken sauce with flour and add wine. Good with white or wild rice.

Primative Fishing

The type of gear used to create a fish dinner is totally determined by the type of fish, its habits, its size and the place you're catching it. Deepwater fishing is very different than shallow water. Size matters a lot. Spears function in at least three different ways -- stab 'em, grab 'em and pin 'em down. Harpoons stab into fish (or other creatures) and have barbs to keep them from pulling out. With a toggle harpoon, the end comes off and turns sideways inside the animal's body, and is attached to the fisherman by a strong cord. Harpoons are best suited for large animals, up to whales and fish, like salmon.

A specialized spear grabs medium size fish of the trout / steelhead size between a top point and two upwards angled points which slip past the fishes body on flexible wood pieces and then lock the fish in. This is called a Leister in England, but is found all over (a set of bone pieces for one came out of a bayside Indian village site in California). Once set up, this spear will only work on one size of fish.

The third type of spear works by pinning the fish to the bottom in shallow water. This is what Tom Hanks appears to be using in the movie "Cast Away", although he somehow makes it defy physics when he throws it 30 feet and impales a fish. Multi-pointed gigs are also popular for taking bullfrogs.

One of the big challenges with spears (and arrows) when fish are underwater is refraction - the bending of light. The fish isn't where it appears. To compensate, many spears and harpoons have two or more points, so if one misses, then another might hit. A second technique is to wait for a large fish to come to the surface before harpooning it. Many people use torches at night to attract large ones to the surface. A third approach is to keep the spear underwater and watch the "bent" looking end to guide the thrust.

Most fishing in the "good old days" was done during runs, or migrations when there were great numbers of fish to catch. During these events, weirs were often set up to direct the fish to the spear. A weir is a fence across a stream with one way through. Weirs were also used to direct fish into traps or nets.

Traps work on basic fish psychology. Fish migrating upstream will go upstream no matter what. Fish look for a way out of a trap by following the edge. A fish at the end of a trap will turn along the trap, be forced back around, but won't usually turn the sharp corner to get back out. Shoreline traps made by stacking stones in the shallows use this feature, and often use nested funnels to insure the fish stay put. A limitation for weirs and traps is the speed of the water, which can rip them apart. So learn your stream and think like a fish.

Fishing With Children

Often times as adults, we want to share our hobbies and pastimes with our children. However, it can be difficult to decide when that pastime is appropriate. Children have shorter attention spans that make it difficult to calculate when they are ready for certain things. fishing is a common hobby of many people around the world and many people are eager to introduce their children to fishing the minute they can hold a fishing rod. fishing is a lesson in patience for children and a structured way to teach them a sport that involves precision and safety.

When you take your child fishing, the most important thing to keep in mind is their safety. What kind of fishing are you trying to introduce? Are you thinking about a day of bottom fishing? Does pier fishing suit your needs? Are you going to go all out and take your child for a deep-sea fishing excursion?

Regardless of what you decide is best, you should have the basic safety essentials with you at all times. A first aid kit is mandatory because whenever a kid is involved accidents will happen. Children tend to get poked, scratched, and barbed, so you need to be prepared. If you are going out into the sea and away from the shore, make sure that you have life jackets and make sure that your child is wearing one even he or she has no intention of getting into the water. Keep in mind your childs abilities when it comes to swimming. If you do not think that they are a strong swimmer, you may want to keep your boat docked.

Make sure to buy and stock your childs tackle box. A youngsters first tackle box should be small and lightweight. There is nothing complex about the contents of a beginner’s tackle box. All a child needs are some pre-tied hooks, some bobbers, a couple of weights, swivels, and small scissors or fingernail clippers to cut their line. A tackle box is a fingerprint for many who view it as a personal expression. Let your child see the basics so that they can build their own to represent themselves one-day.

Make sure to lead by example when you take your child fishing. Teach them how to keep the line taut so that they will be able to respond properly if a fish bites their line. As soon as your child feels the bite, teach them how to set the hook. Tug back on the rod in order to firmly set the hook in the fishs lip. Take the time with your child to let them learn techniques like playing the fish. Part of the fun of fishing is the struggle between the man and the fish, so let your child have the entire experience and not just a partial one.

When you introduce fishing to your child, you have certain advantages to teaching them at a younger rather than older age. Younger child have a greater absorption rate with a desire to soak up as much information as they can. Take the time that you and your child are sharing to educate them about catch and release regulations and fishing for food as opposed to pleasure. If your child decides that they want to let the fish that you catch go, make sure that you know the right way to release. Cleaning the fish can either make a child vomit or ask when the next trip is going to be, so use discretion in regards to age when preparing your catch for dinner.

There will be good days and bad days when fishing with your kids. Kids have a tendency to not listen, become disinterested fast or fall asleep at inopportune times. Patience is the key to taking children out for a day of fishing. Repetition will also make your child more comfortable with the whole process. Regardless of whether a fish is caught or not, take the time to bond with your child while using fishing as an excuse.

Wood as a Weapon

Wood
You can make field-expedient edged weapons from wood. Use these only to puncture.
Bamboo is the only wood that will hold a suitable edge. To make a knife using wood, first
select a straight-grained piece of hardwood that is about 30 centimeters long and 2.5
centimeters in diameter. Fashion the blade about 15 centimeters long. Shave it down to a
point. Use only the straight-grained portions of the wood. Do not use the core or pith, as it
would make a weak point.
Harden the point by a process known as fire hardening. If a fire is possible, dry the blade
portion over the fire slowly until lightly charred. The drier the wood, the harder the point.
After lightly charring the blade portion, sharpen it on a coarse stone. If using bamboo and
after fashioning the blade, remove any other wood to make the blade thinner from the
inside portion of the bamboo. Removal is done this way because bamboo's hardest part is
its outer layer. Keep as much of this layer as possible to ensure the hardest blade possible.
When charring bamboo over a fire, char only the inside wood; do not char the outside.
Metal
Metal is the best material to make field-expedient edged weapons. Metal, when properly
designed, can fulfill a knife's three uses--puncture, slice or chop, and cut. First, select a
suitable piece of metal, one that most resembles the desired end product. Depending on
the size and original shape, you can obtain a point and cutting edge by rubbing the metal
on a rough-surfaced stone. If the metal is soft enough, you can hammer out one edge while
the metal is cold. Use a suitable flat, hard surface as an anvil and a smaller, harder object
of stone or metal as a hammer to hammer out the edge. Make a knife handle from wood,
bone, or other material that will protect your hand.
Other Materials
You can use other materials to produce edged weapons. Glass is a good alternative to an
edged weapon or tool, if no other material is available. Obtain a suitable piece in the same
manner as described for bone. Glass has a natural edge but is less durable for heavy work.
You can also sharpen plastic--if it is thick enough or hard enough--into a durable point for
puncturing.

The Shame of New Orleans

by Barbara Baird and Gordon Hutchinson

In April, after nearly two years of stonewalling by untruthful New Orleans officials, representatives of the National Rifle Association finally were allowed to begin the inventory of guns city officials long claimed didn’t exist. What those involved in the inventory found was hundreds of confiscated firearms neglected by city officials to the point that many, even if returned to their rightful owners, will never be able to be used again.


It’s a story of government run amok—illegal confiscation of lawfully-owned firearms, mistreatment and neglect of confiscated property, a litany of lies concerning the confiscation, and long-term stonewalling of NRA’s attempt to get firearms back to their rightful owners. And it’s a story we must never allow to happen again.
First, however, some background.
Guns Will Be Taken Days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, New Orleans was without power or water, and 80 percent of its area was flooded. On Sept. 8, 2005, the eleventh day after the storm, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Eddie Compass looked into the camera lens of an ABC News crew and made his famous “no guns” speech:


“No one will be able to be armed. Guns will be taken. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns.”
Compass made this outrageous statement in conjunction with Mayor Ray Nagin’s instructions to get tougher on the stay-behinds and to force them to leave the city by any means short of physical violence.
If police caught these citizens on the street or in their vehicles (Louisiana law allows the carrying of firearms in vehicles, considering them to be an extension of the home), the police shook them down. Police then took their guns, even if citizens had Right-to-Carry licenses.
In many cases, police forced their way into homes and removed guns, leaving no identification, no receipts, no way for the homeowners to find their confiscated property.
NRA Takes Action Because of illegal searches and seizures by law enforcement, the National Rifle Association began receiving dozens of calls. In light of the illegal confiscations, Dan Holliday, a Baton Rouge attorney representing the nra, asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana for a preliminary injunction against the city of New Orleans.
Federal Judge Jay Zainey ordered the city to stop seizing citizens’ firearms, and to begin restoring the guns to their rightful owners.
However, New Orleans ignored the injunction. In February 2006, Holliday and Stephen Halbrook, noted constitutional scholar and attorney for the NRA, filed a contempt motion with the U.S. District Court against Mayor Nagin and Warren Riley, the new superintendent.
On the day of filing, the city attorney, Joseph Vincent DiRosa, met with Halbrook and Holliday outside the courtroom and told them he had apparently been laboring under a misconception. The city apparently was holding some firearms. But according to DiRosa, these were guns that had been turned in to the NOPD by other law enforcement agencies and National Guard troops.
DiRosa escorted the attorneys to a property and evidence facility and allowed them to view a trailer and a large rental truck containing what appeared to be nearly 1,000 guns, stored since September 2005. The guns lay rusting in a pile in the back of a large, dank trailer. A few long guns stood in plastic garbage cans, muzzles down, and plastic crates contained some of the handguns.
The three attorneys then hammered out an agreement by which New Orleans would begin returning the guns to their rightful owners.
Stonewalling The Inventory The NOPD made a few fitful attempts to return firearms, but few people actually had their property returned. In most cases, law enforcement did not give citizens receipts for their guns upon confiscation, and many citizens were not allowed to copy down the serial numbers as the gun confiscation took place.
The NRA asked for relief from the courts, seeking access to firearms held in storage by the NOPD in order to inventory and return the firearms. In early December 2006, NRA counsel sought access to conduct the inventory.


NRA attorneys then assembled a group of volunteers to conduct the inventory and set the date for the Christmas holiday season in 2006. But the city attorney continued to ignore the scheduling and discovery orders, causing the inventory teams’ December trip to be canceled at the last minute. Consequently, Holliday filed a contempt motion against the city attorney.
At that hearing, Federal Judge Carl J. Barbier instructed the city of New Orleans to comply with discovery deadlines which included an inventory of the firearms set for March 14. But as that date approached, Holliday made continued and determined attempts to reach DiRosa, only to be frustrated and ignored each time.
Holliday mailed letters requesting a conversation to confirm the date was solid. He e-mailed DiRosa’s office. When he called DiRosa’s office, he was told that the city attorney was not in. A few days before March 14, DiRosa’s office again canceled the inventory, claiming police background checks had to be run on the NRA volunteers, whose names he had already possessed for several months.
The judge was not pleased. In a hearing on this latest stonewalling, the judge accepted the contempt motion from the NRA and asked DiRosa his reasons for ignoring repeated attempts by NRA attorneys to make contact with him. When DiRosa admitted he had “no good reasons” for ignoring continued contacts, the judge found him in contempt and declared his actions to be “wholly unprofessional, and not to be condoned.”
Judge Barbier then ordered DiRosa to pay partial legal fees to NRA’s attorneys for their time.
April 2007—A Gruesome Find Finally, the city agreed to a date, and on April 18 the NRA team, including the authors of this story, arrived at the storage facility where they found more than 800 firearms remaining, many rusted beyond repair—now tagged and stashed in barrels and crates.
When an officer unlocked the Ryder truck holding the cache of confiscated firearms, Holliday waved into the truck body and said, “That’s them. If anything, they look worse than before.”
Each gun had an evidence card that listed the name of the officer, his unit, his badge number and the location of the confiscation. A few of the cards held information identifying possible ownership. A line on each card said “Confiscated From:” In most cases, someone had scrawled, “scene.”
The NRA’s inventory team members—wearing black ball caps emblazoned with the NRA logo—set up quickly outside and worked in a fenced area, amid crates and barrels of rusty guns. On a nearby street, traffic often slowed, with passersby watching curiously.
Surrounded by computers, cameras and filthy guns, the team began listing information in a database and photographing the firearms for later study and an attempt to locate the people named on the evidence cards.



New Orleans residents described their guns being broken before their very eyes by officers stomping the guns into the pavement.

It appeared the NOPD had attempted to inventory some of the guns since Halbrook and Holliday had first seen them. Police representatives on hand for the inventory proffered an incomplete listing (in hard copy only) to the crew. Holliday surmised that when he had first seen the guns, only about 10 percent had been inventoried.
The crew quickly adapted its database to include the pertinent police information—the FBI, California Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) were also indicated on the cards as having confiscated some of the firearms.
Soon, the crew began to notice that some of the handguns had been irreparably damaged by factors other than the flooding and the subsequent lack of care taken by those who had stored them. One of the team members, a former law enforcement officer, commented on it first.
“Here’s another one,” he said, lifting a small revolver aloft, the cylinder open. “Anyone else found revolvers with the crane bent, so the cylinder won’t close?”
Several of the crew affirmed they had found similarly damaged guns. These guns proved the claims of several New Orleans residents who, in earlier depositions to NRA attorneys, described their guns being broken before their very eyes by officers stomping the guns into the pavement.
The crew also found several loaded guns amid the crates filled with handguns. Within a few minutes of informing the attorney and policeman onsite that loaded firearms were included in the mix, a police lieutenant showed up and assured the crew that the police did not place loaded guns into evidence.
One of the crew showed him an evidence tag marked “loaded gun!” The lieutenant then said they had an “opener” for such guns—a hammer. But he was warned against using such force on loaded firearms, no matter what the condition, and the lieutenant grudgingly agreed. During the inventory period, several loaded guns were found—all of which had been sitting in piles in crates, juggled while moved, and affected by heat and humidity during the last year and a half.
Over lunch, several police officers visited the inventory site and talked casually to the crew about the surreal atmosphere during Katrina and its aftermath. One officer told of how the police heard “looters and shooters” were coming to get them in the aftermath of Katrina. Fearful of attack, they turned the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans into their private fortress, forming a perimeter of protection around the building and even placing snipers on the roof.

Yet at that very same time other police continued to illegally take firearms from New Orleans’ law-abiding citizens. It seems inconceivable that officers would continue confiscating guns from citizens with no other means of protection, when even the police felt unable to protect themselves. Yet that is exactly what occurred.
During the April inventory period, the NRA team made two trips to the evidence collection facility, inventorying 218 rusted and severely damaged firearms. At press time, attorney Holliday was negotiating again with the city to set dates for further inventories.
Despite a near complete lack of cooperation from city officials from the very beginning, the NRA fully intends to examine every gun and make every possible effort to contact the owners who can be identified and return their firearms. In the meantime, through NRA-sponsored emergency protection laws passed in 19 states since the New Orleans confiscations, and currently being considered in several others, NRA is working to make sure the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens are never again trashed during a time of natural disaster.

Classic Venison Sausage

Classic Venison Sausage


2 pounds ground venison from tough cuts like shoulder, flank, or neck
1 pound pork loin and/or shoulder
1 1/2 cups bacon fat
3 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
2 tbsp. powdered garlic
1 tbsp. powdered onion
1 tbsp. ground ginger, thyme or other favorite seasonings
3 tbsp. ground sage
5 - 9 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. instant oatmeal
Add all ingredients and mix well. Add water if mix is too dry. Package and serve as needed