Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the House Oversight Committee again today. As with his previous appearances, we were treated to a litany of evasions and excuses. Long story short:  he doesn't know what's going on in his department, and he claims to have had no knowledge of any gunwalking operations prior to the death of Brian Terry.

It's been over a year since he promised an internal investigation, and he has yet to provide any explanation or any proof of action. Representative Labrador pointed out that Holder continues to show up for Congressional hearings unprepared, and that he seems oblivious to happenings at Justice. Representative Farenthold took it a step further, asking Holder, "knowing what you know, do you think you're qualified to lead the Department of Justice?"

Holder's response? "If you're going to ask me to resign (…) you've asked the wrong question."

I don't think we are.

Attorney General Holder gets another chance to testify to the House Oversight Committee Thursday morning.  Just in time, Representative Elijah Cummings has released a report [pdf] in which he claims to clear the White House and Department of Justice of any complicity in this matter.  Of course, if they were already clear, then why is this unsolicited "report" even necessary?

He doesn't go so far as to claim ignorance, only that,

[t]he Committee has obtained no evidence that Operation Fast and Furious was a politically-motivated operation conceived and directed by high-level Obama Administration political appointees at the Department of Justice.

Instead, Cummings settles for declaring that the administration did not conceive or direct Fast and Furious.  He seems to think that justification hinges on such semantic differences.
Entitled "Fatally Flawed: Five Years of Gun-walking in Arizona," the report tries to lump Fast and Furious in with prior such schemes as Wide Receiver ("see?  George Bush did it, too!"), and it attempts to portray the entire situation as something isolated to rogue elements in the Phoenix field division.
Of course, this flies in the face of facts.  US Attorney Dennis Burke has resigned after being caught providing false claims to his superiors, and newly available documentation [pdf] from NPR shows that Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson still approved of the operation's details as of February of 2011.

I'm uncertain how effective the Wikipedia blackout truly was. Most people who've mentioned it to me saw it as a massive inconvenience and little more. That's a shame, because a some lessons are being lost there.

SOPA is a bad bill, and one with potentially dire consequences for the entire internet.
At least one major pillar of the online community was willing to step up to protest it.
Most people don't care and would rather not be bothered. They had to endure 24 hours being deprived of a resource for which they pay nothing, and for which there are alternatives.

I hope just a …

H.R. 2055, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, has passed the Senate and is on its way to the President's desk. The NRA managed the inclusion of three pro-2nd Amendment provisions in the final draft.

The first is quite self-explanatory, and very encouraging.

None of the funds available to the Department of Defense may be used to demilitarize or dispose of M-1 Carbines, M-1 Garand rifles, M-14 rifles, .22 caliber rifles, .30 caliber rifles, or M-1911 pistols, or to demilitarize or destroy small arms ammunition or ammunition components that are not otherwise prohibited from commercial sale under Federal law, unless the small

…

Two years after the election, gun sales are still going through the roof.

Two years after the boom in sales, violent crime is still dropping.

As I've pointed out before, correlation does not equal causation. We can't attribute the drop in crime to an increase in gun sales. What we can show, however, is that a vast increase in civilian gun ownership does not lead to more crime.

In other news, Eric Holder's trotting out the race card:

This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with

…

The Supreme Court has refused [pdf] to hear United States v. Masciandaro. That leaves Woollard v. Sheridan, which still has decent odds of making it to the calendar.

There's been some scuttlebutt that the Court would rather hear a "pure" case in which the petitioner isn't someone appealing a criminal conviction. Both the Heller and McDonald cases fit this bill, as they were brought by law-abiding citizens appealing unjust laws. In such cases, the Court can address a constitutional issue directly, without having other …

Eric Holder testified before Congress today for the second time regarding the Fast & Furious disaster. Here's the condensed version:

He's not apologizing to the family of Bryan Terry
The best way to keep illegal guns from flowing southward into Mexico is to further restrict the guns the government bought to ship southward to Mexico.
It's all the fault of the Bush administration.
He didn't know anything about it. His staff kept him in the dark.

The allegations of impropriety began to circulate in April of 2010.  Terry died in December, and despite the widely distributed and …

Just when the media starts to accept that the gun culture is the mainstream, a knuckle-dragging troglodyte like Crockett Keller decides to crash the party. Keller runs a gun shop in Mason, Texas and teaches the state CHL course. In a recent radio advertisement, he set some fairly prejudicial ground rules in his student selection process.

If you are a socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner in chief, please do not take this class. You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as required under the law.  Also, if you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class. Once again, with no shame, I am Crockett Keller.

Guess which story is getting more attention?  Give yourself a cupcake if you guessed it was Keller.

You too can be Irony King (or other monarch) of the week by going here and giving your address.  They send you one of these bumper stickers free.  The site says it'll take 4-6 weeks to ship, but that's still plenty of time before the primaries.

In other news, there's a promising verdict from the North Carolina Superior Court (opinion linked at Volokh) upholding a felon's right to keep and bear arms.

Before you flinch at that, bear in mind that one can be punished as a felon for crimes that do little or no real harm to anyone.  Rehabilitation or decades of clean living don't matter:  a felony conviction of any sort is a lifetime ban from owning firearms.  However, if the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental liberty (as the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald), can felons be denied its exercise forever?  After all, they still have rights to freedom of speech and legal counsel, right?

H.R. 822 now has 245 cosponsors.  I have my reasons for thinking it's the wrong approach, and even if it does get through the Senate, it won't be signed.  That's alright.  I like this one for one very salient reason: it's got folks in certain corners going all kinds of asplodey.

Today's exhibit is from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV).  They were originally formed in 1975 as the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.  One of the founders was Edward Welles, who also started the Violence Policy Center.  At some point, they decided …

Things might not be what they seem. I have very little to substantiate this at the moment, but some folks with their ears closer to the ground than mine are wondering what Governor Brown might be playing at with the gun-control bills he signed into law this week.

We've got an interesting snippet from a statement he made today:

The governor tried to explain to an audience in Belmont why a bill that bans the open carrying of unloaded handguns and another that makes it easier to carry a concealed weapon were both signed.

“There is a phrase called the coincidence of opposites. I can even say it in Latin—coincidentia oppositorum. It means that apparently antagonistic measures can be melded together in a higher unity.”

This got me thinking.

Today, California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 144 into law, making open carry of any sort a misdemeanor.

Since 1967, there's been a loophole in § 12031 that allows an unlicensed citizen to carry a handgun, as long as it's visible and unloaded. It's a questionable mode of carry, but at least it's an option when others are not available. Now, Californians don't even have that. Who's to blame? Portantino? Brown? Nope. We are.

For over 40 years, the whole technicality was something of an open secret, but it was never front-page news. That is, until a bunch of pro-gun …