NRA goes on offensive over high-capacity magazine ban

By Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 21 hrs ago

The NRA, the nation's largest gun rights lobby, released an ad on Thursday that suggested banning high-capacity magazines will turn the country into a crime-ridden nightmare where only the wealthy are protected from murderers and thieves.

The ad points out that Secret Service and other law enforcement officers will not be barred from using the high-capacity magazines, while criminals would still be able to purchase them on the black market. "It's just the rest of us, the law-abiding people, who will have to defend our families with limited-capacity magazines," a narrator intones. "Welcome to Barack Obama's middle class."

High-capacity magazines and some semi-automatic weapons were banned for 10 years under a law signed by President Bill Clinton. It expired in 2004.

Meanwhile, the NRA's vice president, Wayne LaPierre, wrote an op-ed in the Daily Caller on Thursday warning that gun owners must "stand and fight" against any attempts at gun control. “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It's not paranoia to buy a gun. It's survival. It's responsible behavior, and it's time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that," he wrote.

Polls show a majority of Americans support banning high-capacity magazines, as well as closing loopholes that allow some gun buyers to evade federal background checks before purchasing a weapon. (The background checks screen out felons and people who have been declared mentally ill by a judge from purchasing weapons.)

The NRA has also taken a stand against the background checks.

"When it comes to the issue of background checks, let’s be honest—background checks will never be 'universal'—because criminals will never submit to them," LaPierre said at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting last month.

A ban on certain semi-automatic weapons pushed by Obama and some Democrats in Congress enjoys less popular support than either the magazine ban or background checks.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to a magazine as a clip.

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For some odd reason I wasn't seeing the article till I hit the quote to reply button. Sorry for that.

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As Droukdel rose through the ranks, he came into direct contact with bin Laden, Guidere said.

In the document found in Timbuktu, he cites a letter he received from bin Laden about the al-Hudaybiyah deal, a treaty signed circa 628 by the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraish tribe of Mecca, an agreement with non-Muslims that paved the way for Muslims to return to Mecca.

"The smart Muslim leader would do these kinds of concessions in order to achieve the word of God eventually and to support the religion," he says.

Perhaps the biggest concession Droukdel urges is for his fighters to slow down in implementing Shariah.

When the Islamic extremists took over northern Mali 10 months ago, they restored order in a time of chaos, much as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and even created a hotline number for people to report crimes. But whatever goodwill they had built up evaporated when they started to destroy the city's historic monuments, whip women for not covering up and amputate the limbs of suspected thieves.

http://news.yahoo.com/timbuktu-al-qaida-left-behind-manifesto-173454257.html

Fugitive LA ex-cop may have died from self-inflicted gunshot

SAN BERNARDINO, California (Reuters) - A fugitive former policeman whose charred remains were found in a burned-out cabin in the mountains above Los Angeles following a shootout with sheriff's deputies died from a possibly self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said on Friday.

An autopsy on Christopher Dorner, 33, found he was killed by a single shot to the head, San Bernardino County Sheriff's Captain Kevin Lacy told a news conference. Authorities have not yet determined who fired that fatal round.

"The information we have seems to indicate that the wound that took Christopher Dorner's life was self inflicted," Lacy said.

Dorner was accused of killing four people since February 3, including a deputy shot during the gun battle on Tuesday in Southern California's San Bernardino Mountains, where he had holed up.

A manifesto posted on his Facebook page last week claimed that he had been wrongly terminated from the Los Angeles Police Department and would seek revenge by unleashing "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" on police officers and their families.

During the news conference, San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon stood by his insistence that deputies did not intentionally torch the cabin where Dorner had taken cover.

McMahon has faced questions over his department's tactics since voices were heard shouting "Burn it down!" on an audio recording of the gun battle played on local KCAL-TV and on CNN.

"There is some recordings that I have heard on the news that would suggest that somebody, we have no idea at this point who, made those comments," he said. "We are looking into those and we will deal with those appropriately. I would suggest to you that those comments were made by somebody away from the tactical team."

SYSTEMATIC SEARCH

The sheriff also defended the apparent failure of his deputies to discover Dorner in one of the hundreds of cabins in the Big Bear area, despite assurances that they were making a systematic search.

McMahon said a cabin in which Dorner had hidden had been checked on Thursday evening, hours after Dorner's burned-out truck was found on a fire road in the area, but that deputies had found the door locked with no signs of forced entry.

"We did scour that area thoroughly. Our deputy sheriffs did a great job checking that neighborhood," he said. "My instructions were that we were not going to kick the doors open to unoccupied residences or ones where nobody answered."

Authorities displayed several of the weapons Dorner carried as he fled police, including an imposing Remington Model 700 rifle about the length of a human leg with the word "vengeance" inscribed above the rifle's butt.

Dorner had numerous assault weapons and semi-automatic handguns, as well as 10 silencers, a military-style Kevlar helmet and a tactical vest with high-capacity rifle magazines and teargas canisters attached to it, said San Bernardino Sheriff's Sergeant Trevis Newport.

Police are investigating how he had obtained the weapons.

Dorner had been on the run since at least last Wednesday, when he was named as the prime suspect in the February 3 slayings of a couple, including the daughter of a retired Los Angeles police captain, in Irvine, south of Los Angeles.

The ensuing manhunt involved more than 1,000 officers from over a dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and stretched from the Mexican border to the California desert north of the San Bernardinos.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck called it the largest in the region's history.

(Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis and Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Bob Burgdorfer and Lisa Shumaker)

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