A great trip. I met a lot of interesting people, including some bloggers that I hadn’t heard of before. I got to see some nice products, bought a few, and hopefully will get to review a couple more in the near future.
It’s going to take me a day or so to get caught up, but then look for some new posts. Maybe even one or two with EMS in them.

Oh, if you were watching any media conference of the NRA Annual Meetings and heard reference to more than six protestors, they were lies. Six was the maximum and that was on Friday. By Sunday it was down to four. One attractive young woman spinning a Hula Hoop around her hips and carrying a sign. Another was a guy dress like Cookie Monster. The other two were dressed normally, but held up the typical signs. There were more people watching them than there were protestors. There was even more media watching them than there were protestors.

No gave an official estimate of attendance, but I heard that over the three days that the exhibit hall was open about 80,000 people walked through. It sure seemed like it on Saturday as the hall was packed and it was a chore just to move from exhibit to exhibit.

More later, as I said.

So, here I am sitting in the press room at the NRA Annual Meetings. I’ll say from the outset that the NRA is very friendly to the “new media”. After all, they’re giving me press credentials. Maybe I should say that they have a sense of humor because they gave me press credentials. To my right is OldNFO, to his right is Ambulance Driver. Two bloggers I read every day. Wandering through are Nancy from “Excels at Nothing”, JayG, We’erd Beard, Jennifer from In Jennifer’s Head, and a bunch of others who write much better than I do.

I’m kind of in Fan Boi territory here, but I’ll try not to show it. I think AD is writing a post about dinner last night, so I’ll just tell you to head over there and read it, but I’ll tell you this much about that. I sat across from Law Dog and Phlegmfatale and next to a bunch of people we I’d never met in person. As we were eating we were talking about this and that and we started talking about Phlegmfatale’s surgery. One of the other folks at the table made fake gacking sounds and I apologized for being so graphic. My EMS readers know how that goes. No apology necessary, because he’s a EMS helicopter pilot and has heard these conversations before. Once again the small world of EMS strikes.

Which brought us to the ever popular EMS topic of smells and what to do about them.

Do we have great dinner conversations or what?

Back to the NRA Meetings. The place is packed. The media says that “up to” 10,000 people are expected and that seems maybe a tad conservative to me. For the record I didn’t fly into George Bush Intercontinental Airport, so I missed that excitement. While it’s in the media here in Houston, it’s not dominating the coverage as it would in other cities. Just one more misguided individual getting his 15 seconds of fame.

There are supposed to be some “protesters” outside somewhere, but we didn’t see them.

Now, it’s off to the exhibit hall to look, ask silly questions, and try not to drool on the shiny toys.

Feel free to comment if there is anything in particular you want me to investigate. Seriously.

Holmes’ doctor warned police before Colo. theater attack

A University of Colorado psychiatrist told campus police a month before the Aurora movie theater attack that James Holmes had homicidal thoughts and was a public danger, according to records unsealed Thursday.

Lynne Fenton, a psychiatrist at the Denver campus, told police that Holmes had also “threatened and harassed her via email/text messages” in June 2012. He is standing trial for the July 20 shooting rampage that killed 12 and injured 70 during a midnight premiere of the latest Batman movie.

What I’d like to know is why the campus police didn’t follow up on this. Obviously the doctor was concerned enough that Holmes might actually be planning an attack to notify them. At the very least, they should have interviewed him and notified the municipal police.

This is exactly the sort of thing that any new laws should be intended to fix. Once again fixating on banning inanimate objects will do nothing to stop crime of any sort.

The implement is not the weapon, it’s the mind of the criminal.

Mens rea.

Literally. Maybe.

Gun-rights expert call local challenge to SAFE Act ‘significant’

WASHINGTON – In the marble-columned courthouse where five Supreme Court justices ruled that American citizens have the right to keep and bear arms, the gun-control law that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo calls the SAFE Act could one day find itself in grave danger.

The federal lawsuit filed in Buffalo earlier this month raises serious constitutional questions about several of the new law’s provisions, according to legal scholars who specialize in studying the Second Amendment – which guarantees gun rights – and who are familiar with the New York measure.

Most notably, legal scholars said, the Buffalo case might be the one in which the court determines whether the Second Amendment gives people the right to own the kind of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips that the SAFE Act seeks to ban.

This case has a long way to go and a lot can happen between now and the time it might be heard by the Supreme Court. Among other things, the composition of the Court could change, which shouldn’t effect the legal decision, but we know that it does. Even at that, this could be a decision that settles a number of questions left by the previous Heller and McDonald decisions.

None of which would be at all what the Governor and possible 2016 Presidential candidate had in mind when he and the legislature in New York rushed to get any law passed.

We’ll know in about five years or so, I guess.

Prosecutors, judges ignore federal ruling against state concealed carry ban

Let me put in the obligatory “I am not a lawyer” disclaimer. Neither have I ever played one on TV (I did one play an EMT on TV), nor have I recently slept at a Holiday Inn Express.

That being said, this sort of boggles my mind. A Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a state law in Illinois violates the Constitution of the United States of America. Said State of Illinois is located within the United States of America. Yet state judges and other officials say that they are free to ignore the ruling of said Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

Although the several states are not mere political subdivisions of the federal government, nor should they be, there are cases where the states must per force of law defer to various federal laws, rules, and regulations. Most of which have not been adjudicated by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The article is a must read. I’ll only quote one more part of it for your consideration,

Ronald Allen, a professor of constitutional law at Northwestern University, said federal courts clearly have the authority to declare laws unconstitutional within their jurisdictions.

If the General Assembly doesn’t act by June 8, anyone convicted under relevant circumstances could likely get his or her conviction overturned in federal court, he said, though it might take years.

“If the Supreme Court doesn’t take the case,” Allen said, “those (prosecutions) won’t go anywhere.”

Other aspects of the law, Allen noted, such as prohibitions against felons having weapons, would remain in effect.

Aziz Huq, assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago, said the confusion arises from having two parallel court systems that in this case did not give each other their usual deference. While the federal ruling doesn’t bind state courts, he said, it does affect police and prosecutors who could be held in contempt for violating the ruling.

It would seem to me that if police and prosecutors ignore the court ruling and continue to arrest and prosecute people under this state law, then they are not only violating a federal court order, but are engaging in a conspiracy to do so. The criminal and civil ramifications could be quite severe for them. Not to mention the financial ones.

Again, I’m not a lawyer, let alone a professor of law, but it would seem to me that a state judge who ignores a federal court order could end up explaining his reasoning to a federal judge.

At the very least, some lawyers are going to make handsome sums of money.