Looks like Dragon Leatherworks is finally getting its due for all the hard work Dennis has been putting in:

A Goth lunchbox carried by actress Pauley Perrette — the Abby character in “NCIS” — may have screamed Hollywood, but it actually came from the workshop of an Oak Ridge leather worker.

Dennis Badurina, who runs Dragon Leatherworks, made the eye-catching bag in just 16 hours after getting the specs from the CBS prop master. He didn’t have much to go on — it had to be black, red, chrome, and cylindrical.

Dennis does excellent work, and I’m glad to see he’s getting some well earned publicity.  His products are pretty, rugged, and comfortable, and it’s nice to see good things happen to good people.

I recently received a Flatjack I ordered from Dragon Leatherworks, and it and the gun it’s dedicated to are going to go into carry rotation.  Expect a review of both when the time comes.

Someone asked me this one recently, and it got me thinking about what the wider communities response would be.  It is not related to any real world situation, but is one of those “what if” things that someone I know who is a new shooter and concealed carrier thought of.

Here’s the situation:

You leave $GroceryStore at about 9 PM after running to pick up a few things for the next day.  Your bag of groceries is in your left arm, and you are reaching for your keys with your right. As you approach your car, two men, one old, one young, come up and ask you for money.  You politely tell them that you have nothing for them.  Upon hearing your answer, the older man pulls out a weapon and demands money.  You reach to your holster and draw your carry gun.  Upon seeing the gun, both men run away.  There is no-one else in the parking lot, and no-one from the store has come out to see what is going on.

Do you:

A) Call the police immediately, since the first one to call the police has more credibility.

or

B) Get in your car, and drive straight home.  You don’t want to get the authorities involved since no-one was harmed and you don’t want the hassle.

Please leave your answer in the comments.  I’ll put my own response down in a day or two.

The mother of a man who was shot and killed on a dormitory on the grounds of Harvard University is suing the university.  Her claim is that the university did not take proper steps protect her son, and that lack of protection led to his death.

The facts appear to be this:  The son, Justin Cosby, went to the dormitory to sell marijuana in 2009.  He had no affiliation with Harvard. While he was there, he was robbed and shot by other people who were only there for the drugs and died.

Now, the guy who got shot wasn’t an angel.  He was a drug dealer who went to the grounds of a private institution to sell his wares.  My gut tells me “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes”.  But did he have a reasonable expectation that Harvard would provide for his physical security while on the grounds of the university?

Harvard University is a gun-free zone.  Their handbook for incoming freshmen states that firearms and dangerous weapons are not allowed on campus in accordance with Massachusetts law and school policy.  So people who go onto the campus, if they choose to follow the law, must remove from their persons those tools best suited for self-defense, including guns and knives.

If you force people who come to your campus to disarm, do you take on a legal responsibility to provide for their safety from those who choose to not follow the law and do not disarm?  That seems to be the legal question in this lawsuit.

Let’s look at this another way:  Let’s say I run a ferry company.  I believe that people who bring along their own inflatable rafts and life preservers clutter up the passenger spaces on my vessel and create a trip and fall hazard, so I prohibit my passengers from bringing their own safety equipment along for the trip.  If the vessel sinks, am I legally obligated to provide a life-preserver and enough space on lifeboats for every soul on board and trained crewmen whose responsibility it is to make sure everyone gets off the boat safely?  Or I could say that passengers can’t bring on food or water because it could be a health hazard.  Am I responsible for providing food and water to passengers if my ferry gets stuck out in the bay for a couple of days?

In my opinion, and I am far from a lawyer or legal scholar, if you take away the tools that someone can use to provide for their own safety while they are on your property, you become solely responsible for their safety, within reasonable limits.  Yes, in this case the person who was harmed was a criminal who had no connection to Harvard other than the place where his carcass hit the ground, but does that matter?  Would it matter if the person who was shot was a student, faculty, or an invited visitor?  Would Harvard be liable if the person who got shot was a jogger who was just running through the campus?

To me, when Harvard and the state of Massachusetts denied law-abiding citizens the tools of self-defense, they took on a legal responsibility to provide security at the level an armed citizen could provide for himself.  This one will be interesting to watch.

Robb asks a great question:  What is the most fun firearm you own and why?

For me, it has to be my 1936 Mosin Nagant 91/30. Yeah, the sights are rudimentary (fixing that), turning the safety on is an exercise in upper body strength (fixing that), and the trigger gives my entire right hand a work out (also fixing that), but it’s also the most comfortable rifle I’ve ever fired, has outstanding recoil, and I can shoot it all day long for the cost of about $5 worth of ammunition.  It was the first centerfire rifle I ever bought, and I fell in love with it the first time I shot it.  It has gone on every range trip, and it never fails to give me that recoil therapy I crave so much.

Next in line would have to be my Thompson Center Omega muzzleloader.  Yeah, it’s a modern inline muzzleloader, and I’ve been scoffed at for buying it when a base model Kentucky long rifle wasn’t that much more expensive.  But it goes bang every time I pull the trigger, it has a strong but not unpleasant kick, and is accurate at the distances I shoot.  My favorite part is the necessity to stop between shots, take a moment to think while I reload it, then putting it back up to my shoulder to make smoke and noise.  I like it enough that I’m considering buying another to give to Girlie Bear as her first hunting rifle.

So what are y’all’s favorite guns?

1. Click
2. Boom!
3. Awwww  Yeaaahhhhhh!

CNN is running a piece on “Stand Your Ground” laws, and gives four cases where they have been exercised to protect people from prosecution or to acquit them:

• A mentally handicapped young man was shot and killed at a restaurant drive-thru after a close call between him and a car became violent.  The shooter maintains that he thought the man had a weapon and meant to do him harm.  He has not been charged with a crime.
• A man shot and killed someone who rushed into his trailer after asking for a drink of water.  The shooter maintains that the man was threatening his wife when it happened.  The man who was shot had contact with the police earlier in the evening, and they believed he was intoxicated.  An autopsy showed that the man had a skull fracture, which might explain his behavior.
• A man shot and killed a teenager after a group of young men broke into his home looking for snack food.  The man maintains that after he had subdued the group of teenagers, one of them lunged at him and he shot him.  He was prosecuted, but acquitted by a jury.
• A man learned that someone was robbing his car, grabbed a knife, and gave chase.  When he confronted the robber, the robber swung a bag full of car radios at him, and the man stabbed the robber in the chest, killing him. He was charged with a crime, but a judge dismissed the charges.  That dismissal is under appeal.

CNN goes on to express editorial opinions, drawing on the opinions of a law professor at Loyola, several prosecutors, and police officers to assert that the laws being examined are bad.

Here is my opinion, and please keep in mind that I am far from being a lawyer:

Where I have a right to be, I have a right to defend myself.  To go with that right, I have a responsibility to stand before the law if my judgement is wrong.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  If only it was.

In two of the cases above, the cases of the man defending his wife and the man who stabbed the thief, the situations are very clear cut to me.  When confronted with someone acting aggressively and not giving you time to think, you react.  A man who rushes a woman in her home or turns around and swings a heavy object at its owner is presenting a clear threat, and in both cases, I have no doubt that the people who defended their lives did so with good reason. In the case of the man with the skull fracture, the homeowners had no way to know that he was hurt.  All they could know was that he appeared to be trying to harm them.

The other two, on the other hand, are much more murky.  The case in Texas basically comes down to who you believe, the man with the shotgun or the youths who broke into his home?  Did he execute a boy or even just have a negligent discharge while pointing his shotgun at a home intruder who had surrendered?  Or did he shoot a teenager who initiated an attack against him after initially surrendering?

The Arizona case is also difficult for me, because I’ve been on both sides of it.  I’ve almost run over people because one or both of us weren’t watching where we were going, and I’ve almost been run over.  It doesn’t help that the shooter maintains that the man he shot had a pipe or some other weapon, and none was ever found.  Did he take the time to load his pistol and then shoot the man out of malice or fear?

The calls to use a deadly weapon to cause non-deadly injuries are of course specious.  I carry a gun to stop a threat in the most effective way I know.  I am under no illusions about my skills, reflexes, and capabilities to do much more than center mass shots when I am under stress.  Center mass shots on humans tend to be fatal.  After the fact questions about why a person was killed instead of wounded are unrealistic.

Would CNN and the academics, police, and prosecutors who are complaining about these laws prefer that we second guess ourselves when confronted with danger?  Is it preferable that a woman be harmed in her own home while her husband try to figure out why she is being attacked?  Is it preferable for a man to be bludgeoned with a bag of electronics while he tries to decide if he is really in danger?  Should a man with his pregnant fiance in the car wait until they are actually being harmed before he reacts?

I guess where I’m getting at is that “Stand Your Ground” laws have a place in our society, but we have to remember that our rights come with responsibilities.  We have a responsibility to use deadly force only when absolutely necessary, and we can aid ourselves in that by not letting ourselves be rushed into the decision to use it.  Stay aware of what’s going on around you and you won’t fall into non-thinking reflexes.  But we also have the right to defend ourselves when we feel threatened, no matter where we may find ourselves. 

To me, there is only one answer:  I am going home to my family every night, and we are going to be safe in our home.  What that costs me and someone who threatens me is much less important to me than that simple goal.