...unless the student has a MA FID card. Without one, mere posession of a spent cartridge is a felony in MA.
JayG says,
No one needs a high capacity magazine! But, wait, don't send David Gregory to jail over having one illegally. Kids shouldn't be able to buy ammunition! But, wait, don't prosecute this poor college kid for having ammunition.If you want a law to do what you mean for it to do--restrict gun ownership--then you must enforce the laws impartially. Okay--David Gregory knew that the magazine he wanted to brandish on Meet the Press was illegal in DC, and was relying as his status as Important Journalist to protect him. He should go to jail; regardless of whether or not the law is stupid (which it is) it's nonetheless the black letter law of D.C. and he broke it.
"It was just an empty ammo clip!" The law does not distinguish. It does not say "loaded magazines" but merely "magazines"; and further it makes no distinction for intent of the bearer, but criminalizes mere posession of high-capacity magazines.
The same thing goes for the kid with the bandolier. If that thing used real spent brass, he must be tried for a charge of felony posession of ammunition. Having looked at the web site JayG linked, I have to say that the bullets look like real spent brass--but it doesn't say what the bullets are made from, nor how.
* * *
Speaking of the NBC gunman, Doug Powers over at Michelle Malkin's blog posts about that. Nice pithy picture of the gunman in question, brandishing his illegal magazine.
Again, the magazine ban is a stupid law, but as long as it's on the books, violators of it must be prosecuted.
Legal Insurrection has another LOLGregory and further examines the situation.
And JayG discusses it, too:
...[D]id at any time you stop to think that this piece of plastic and metal could get you in a world of trouble?* * *
No, you didn't. If you had stopped to check, you would have found out that possessing that magazine in the District of Columbia was strictly forbidden. It certainly sounds like someone at NBC checked, but you went right ahead with the segment anyway, didn't you? See, you think those pesky laws don't apply to you, don't you? You're doing a greater good, using that illegal magazine to make a point and all that, right? It never occurred to you that the reason we protest bans on magazines might just have something to do with the fact that they are selectively enforced and utterly pointless.
Hitting JayG's site pretty heavily today: Colorado is taking 100 hours to do a background check. See, when you go to buy a gun from a dealer, he has to do an electronic check to make sure you're not a criminal or a or lunatic. Right now, in Colorado, that check is taking more than three days because of the sheer volume of gun sales taking place.
* * *
Britain has a ban on "dangerous knives" yet people insist on using them to kill other people. I mean, damn, it's as if it's not the tool's fault, or something, you know?
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Sailors working aboard a nuclear-powered ship are suing TEPCO for exposure to radiation in the wake of the Fukushima event.
Here's an interesting thing about working aboard a nuclear-powered ship in the US Navy: unless I miss my guess, all personnel are issued radiation dosimeters, and those dosimeters are routinely checked. The exposure these eight sailors received from the Fukushima event would therefore show up in their medical records, and said exposure would have been noted specifically in their medical records as coming from the Fukushima event and not the ship's reactor.
I could be wrong. Perhaps nuclear surface vessels don't require dosimetry the way submarines do. But I do know that regardless of whether or not personal dosimetery is maintained, there are radiation detectors all over the damned ship, and there is--somewhere--a record of exactly how much radioactivity the ship and its personnel were exposed to.
And that record will show that the additional exposure from Fukushima was essentially noise in the regular background exposure we all get just for being alive on planet Earth.
*rolleyes*
* * *
2012 is nearly over, already. Today's the 27th. Holy crap.
And I'm posting another home-brewed Garfield Without Garfield:
The annoying thing is, Photobucket appended hashes to my photo names when I did the last upload, so instead of being able to link to "g-g-103.gif" I have to link to "g-g-103_zps6c513982.gif"...which means instead of being able just to grab the link to the previous picture and increment the picture number, I must go through the laborious procedure Photobucket has instituted for getting links to pictures.
Used to be you could bring up the appropriate album, hover over a specific field under the thumbnail, and click--and you have your link. Now you must click this, click that, click the other thing, wait for it to load, click this, click that, and then you have the link.
They took a very nice user interface and improved it beyond usability. *sigh*