Archive for January 17th, 2009
Obama and the Second Amendment
Despite a huge Democratic Senate majority, Eric Holder’s confirmation hearings are going to be difficult. He has a long record to defend. Whether it is his involvement and inconsistent statements about Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich’s or his pushing Clinton’s clemency of the FALN terrorists or his failure to disclose his work for troubled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich after Blagojevich’s legal problems surfaced, he faces tough questions.
But Holder’s nomination raises other questions about what President-elect Barack Obama claimed he believed during the campaign. Numerous times he promised that he supported an individual’s right to own guns and that he wouldn’t do anything to take away people’s guns.
Just last year in a brief to the Supreme Court, Holder argued that “the Second Amendment did not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms,” that it only protected government militias’ rights to guns. He claimed that the Second Amendment posed no obstacle to implementing gun bans.
I can’t find even one gun control law that Holder has opposed. On every gun control regulation he has discussed, he has been supportive, including: bans, raising the age that someone can possess a gun, registration and licensing, one-gun-a-month limit on purchases, and mandatory waiting periods.
Even more troubling, while Holder served in the Clinton Justice Department, he oversaw the background check system, but he has never been asked to explain why the system broke down so consistently while he ran it.
The constant breakdowns of “instant” background-check systems during the Clinton administration halted gun sales for hours or even days at a time, costing stores untold sales and additional costs. Even by the end of the Clinton administration, from September 1999 to December 2000, the system was down about one hour for every 16.7 hours of operation. The breakdowns often came in big blocks of time, the worst during a period covering 60 business hours during two weeks in the middle of May 2000. During his tenure, gun shows sometimes found that they couldn’t sell guns during the entire weekend that they were open.
Try running a business where you face random shutdowns and neither customers nor sellers are ever informed of how long outages are expected to last. In addition to the government-imposed fees on gun sellers and the regulatory harassment of gun sellers with no evidence that these policies have reduce crime, it is not surprising that the number of gun dealers has plummeted by over 80 percent since 1992.
The breakdown in background checks, which had been a problem for years under the Clinton administration, magically fixed itself within weeks of President Bush assuming office in 2001, and the problems have not recurred.
What few realize is the huge power that the attorney general has to make legitimate gun selling very difficult without any new laws or regulations having to be passed. This is even more important now than it was under the Clinton administration, as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has recently moved from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department.
I always questioned Obama’s claims and argued that up until the presidential campaign his whole career had supported gun bans, but there was no lack of politicians and advisers who attested to Obama’s sincerity on the issue. Obama and his campaign constantly tried to explain away his past support for gun control as being mistakes by subordinates who had incorrectly explained his positions.
Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, promised reporters last August about Obama: “He ain’t going to take your gun away. He ain’t ever going to take your gun away.” Joe Biden made similar statements while campaigning in places such as rural southwest Virginia. An Obama adviser, Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, said on Hugh Hewitt’s national radio show last fall that “I think that he has always been an individual rights person on the Second Amendment.” Another adviser, Professor Cass Sunstein at Harvard, told Time Magazine in June: “Obama has always expressed a belief that the Second Amendment guarantees a private right to bear arms.” The list goes on. It was a constant theme of the campaign.
Just before the November election, the Los Angeles Times questioned the honesty of those who questioned Obama’s stand on guns, because “Obama does not oppose gun rights. He has made a point of pounding this home to rural audiences, telling them he has no intention of taking their guns away: not their shotguns, not their handguns, not anything.”
There are few such issues that the Obama campaign promised over and over again during the campaign.
Holder’s nomination suggests this promise was not serious. And it also suggests that Obama won’t appoint judges who believe it either. With Appeals Courts around the country already facing Second Amendment cases and a very closely divided Supreme Court likely to rehear the issue, the judges Obama will appoint could easily reverse last year’s Supreme Court decision striking down the DC gun, a decision that he claims to support.
Violence taxes police resources
After a wave of violence this week, Salinas city officials are set to huddle in private today to discuss the rash of shootings and homicides, most of it believed to be gang-related.
Two people died Sunday after being shot last week, and three people were shot to death Monday. On Thursday, six people were shot, one fatally. In all, there have been 14 shootings since the beginning of the year.
On Friday, police arrested a Salinas man they say fatally shot James Lopez, 26, about 2p.m. Monday while he was driving on John Street near McGowan Drive.
Sgt. Don Cline declined to identify the suspect.
A witness spotted the suspect riding his bicycle on Del Monte Avenue and called police, Cmdr. Dino Bardoni said.
“People need to keep doing that,” Cline said, referring to cooperation from the community.
Police are still looking for the driver of a light green minivan from which the shots that killed Lopez were fired.
Salinas police and anti-gang officers collaborated with the California Highway Patrol on Friday to sweep the city’s streets of gang members under what Bardoni called a “zero-tolerance” policy. The effort tallied one arrest.
City Attorney Vanessa Vallarta said this morning’s special closed session is necessary to allow Salinas Police Chief Daniel Ortega and his top deputies a chance to provide “basically a confidential briefing” to city officials, including Mayor Dennis Donohue, the City Council, City Manager Artie Fields and herself.
Vallarta said the briefing would include a report about the threat from “street terrorism” and the threat to the city’s ability to provide police service.
“This spike in violence has led to an enormous drain on our police resources,” Vallarta said. “It has endangered our ability to provide public safety to our residents. It’s all hands on deck.”
Vallarta said the meeting is being conducted under the auspices of a section of the Brown Act that allows private consultation regarding a threat to the “security of public services,” in this case law enforcement.
She said the section was added after Sept. 11 to allow government entities to address terrorist threats.
Terry Francke, a Brown Act expert who serves as general counsel for open government advocate Californians Aware, said the provision wasn’t intended to discuss a “crime wave” in private.
“There’s no authority in the Brown Act that allows city officials to meet with police in closed session to hear about a crime wave,” Francke said.
Mayor Dennis Donohue said there will be a public briefing by Salinas police before the closed session commences at 11:30 a.m. in the city manager’s conference room at City Hall. It will offer information on the recent shootings, excluding sensitive investigative details that police “aren’t yet ready to share with the public.” The public briefing is not included on the meeting agenda.
Vallarta said there will be an opportunity for public comment before the closed session.
Donohue said the purpose for the closed session briefing is to ensure city officials are synchronized in their efforts to battle the outbreak of violence, and could allow the council to discuss details such as police overtime and staffing.
“We’re simply in the process of making sure we’re all on the same page,” Donohue said. “We represent the community and perhaps we can get additional information that’s not ready for the public.”
Donohue said he and Ortega will offer a statement after the meeting. City officials would be setting up community forums or district meetings to address the public’s concerns, he said.
Donohue said the city’s focus should be on the immediate threat, though he suggested that most city residents are relatively safe. Those who aren’t safe, he said, are those associated with gangs.
“There is a large group of people who have chosen to be involved in a self-destructive lifestyle,” Donohue said. “They’re not safe. No amount of police protection can protect those people. Parents do need to keep track of what their kids are doing and who they’re associating with. The impact of this lifestyle can extend beyond the gangs to their families and friends.”
Officials hope an increased police presence via Operation CalGRIP Salinas, which began earlier this week, will tamp down the violence.
Bardoni said the operation is named after a state grant from the California Gang Reduction, Intervention and Prevention Program that was secured by the CHP to help defray the cost of its officers working with Salinas police and anti-gang units. Bardoni said officers will arrest any known gang member who is breaking the law, “with no breaks.”
“We have to be able to break the cycle,” Bardoni said. “We have a cycle of violence and we have to get known gang members off the street. We have to stop the violence immediately.”
Sheriff Mike Kanalakis said such outbreaks of violence are common and are usually the result of gang rivalries between Norteños and Sureños, as well as power struggles within the gangs. Retaliation is common, Kanalakis said. He called the violence a “countywide problem” that is simply “expressing itself in the city.”
“These spikes happen all the time and we’re doing all we can,” he said. “There’s back and forth and retaliation all the time. My suspicion is that’s what’s going on here.”
Jim Johnson can be reached at jjohnson@montereyherald.com or 753-6753.
THE clubhouse of the Dirty Ryderz, a Brooklyn-based motorcycle club with 63 local members (plus 27 in Virginia), is in a featureless brick building in East Flatbush with a security gate out front and tall, colorful trophies lying flat along a wall in the basement. Winter weather is not motorcycle weather, so no cycles were to be seen outside last week. But on Wednesday evening, the clubhouse buzzed with activity.
It was nearing time for a meeting of the Concerned Citizens for Motorcycle Safety, an umbrella organization for several local clubs that has had its hands full lately fighting a proposed city law aimed at controlling cycles’ noise. In particular, members were preparing for a third City Council hearing on the bill, to be held in the next few weeks, and for the international motorcycle show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center this weekend.
The bill, which was the subject of two Council committee hearings late last year but was delayed for further study after motorcyclists and their supporters raised objections, is intended to curb common modifications to the exhaust pipes that make cycles noisier.
On new motorcycles, exhaust pipes bear a stamp from the manufacturer certifying that they meet state and federal laws limiting noise to 80 decibels, comparable to the level of a vacuum cleaner or an alarm clock. The law, as proposed, would give police the power to ticket the drivers of cycles that are missing the factory stamp — presumably cycles with excessively noisy or improperly modified pipes.
The bill’s main sponsor, Councilman Alan Gerson, who represents Lower Manhattan, said the police would not have to chase noisy motorcycles but could simply look for the stamp on a parked cycle.
“We’re not talking about street noise,” said Mr. Gerson, noting that motorcycle noise was a leading complaint from residents of his district. “We’re talking about noise that reaches into apartments, bedrooms, living rooms, places where people live. It’s so loud it’s like a physical assault. It’s jarring.”
Especially, he said, in warm weather.
“Elsewhere in the world, the birds come back and start chirping,” Mr. Gerson said. “And in these neighborhoods, the motorcycles come back and drive everyone crazy.”
In the East Flatbush clubhouse, though, bikers complained that they were being misunderstood. Among the benefits of a loud exhaust system, they said, is that it alerts drivers, many with their radios on in soundproof cars, to a motorcycle’s presence.
“Every person that rides a bike can give you several stories of how that loud pipe saved them from potentially being killed,” said Jermaul Holloman, the Dirty Ryderz’s round-faced, large-bellied president, who rides under the nickname Naughty. “They don’t respect the dangers that we go through. Anyone that says loud pipes don’t save lives has never rode a bike.”
(In response, Mr. Gerson said that the noise from a legal, unmodified exhaust system was enough to announce that a motorcycle is nearby.)
Ellen Patterson, a member of the concerned citizens’ group who was with Mr. Holloman this day, said the organization hopes to one day get federal decibel limits raised. In the meantime, she said, the bikers, who have a powerful ally in Councilman Leroy Comrie of Southeast Queens, plan to turn out in force to testify at the next Council hearing. Their worry, Ms. Patterson said, is that under the law, police would punish riders whose legal exhaust pipes have stamps that are hard to see.
If the stamp is hidden, as it often is, she said, “do you really think that they’re going to get on the ground to try to see it? No, he’s going to ticket you.”
For riders like Derick Coard, a city bus driver who attended the meeting, that is a scary prospect, especially because multiple citations could lead to a biker’s losing his cycle. A nice Japanese sport bike can cost $10,000, he said, and a Harley-Davidson several times that.
There is, of course, another reason some people have loud motorcycles: the adolescent joy in producing a deafening noise and bothering the neighbors. That, Mr. Coard emphasized, is not what he is defending.
“We sponsor a Little League team, for God’s sakes,” he said. “How rogue can you be? There’s corrections officers in my club; there’s police in my club; there’s nurses. Why should the few have to suffer for those that are living outside the law?”
Redflex Expands Red Light Cameras to Red China
Australian red light camera vendor cuts deal with broadband vendor to distribute automated ticketing cameras in China.
Redflex Traffic Systems and ChinaTel Group this week announced their hope of invading the potentially lucrative traffic surveillance market in the People’s Republic of China. Under a joint agreement, ChinaTel, a small provider of wireless broadband connectivity, would provide the communications infrastructure required for the red light camera and speed camera ticketing systems as well as provide local sales.
“ChinaTel and Redflex’s mutually beneficial partnership will fully leverage their respective strengths on global operation and local distribution, creating synergy, extending their customer base, and expanding potential sales revenue,” the companies explained in a press release. “Both parties recognize the importance of the market opportunity for camera enforcement systems in China.”
Marketing efforts would focus on convincing officials in the biggest cities to outsource existing traffic collections to Redflex, which is based in Australia. Prime targets include Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. If successful, a total of 71 million residents would find themselves under additional surveillance.
Cameras already blanket the world’s most populous country. According to Xinhua, China’s official government news service, total yearly traffic ticket revenue is estimated at over a trillion yuan (US $146 billion) and the cameras are frequently used for additional purposes. Last May, Shenzhen Public Security Bureau employees were caught using traffic cameras to peep into the bedrooms of local residents. The
The ChinaTel Group trades over-the-counter with a stock price that closed yesterday at 53 cents. Redflex trades on the Australian Securities Exchange for A$3.30 (US $2.23) per share.
goldiron