Cdn-Firearms Digest Sunday, July 13 2008 Volume 11 : Number 708 In this issue: Re: "Your Safety is your Responsibility" says Translink Judges not imposing fine meant to support victim services- Canwest Argentine cops get life- (Reuters)The Windsor Star A City Street Decays, but One Holdout Fights On-The New York Times Re: Judges not imposing fine meant to support victim services- Bus stop shooting- The Gazette (Montreal) CALGARY: Body armour blocks Taser- (Canwest)The Windsor Star ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:19:32 -0300 From: "M.J. Ackermann, MD" Subject: Re: "Your Safety is your Responsibility" says Translink To: "Sandra@F.A.C.T." CC: Nina Rivet Sandra, et al., Believe it or not, personal safety IS an individual responsibility and right, although for the last five decades it is not recognized as such by Canadian governments. The simple fact is that it is the assailant that chooses the victim and the time, place, and manner of assault. Whatever else they may be, most violent criminals are neither stupid nor suicidal, and so they choose scenarios that strongly favor their chances of success in their attack and evasion of capture. Another irrefutable fact is the police, no matter how well motivated, staffed, trained, equipped, and deployed, simply cannot be on scene until several minutes after they are called. This leave ample opportunity for violent criminals to have their way with victims rendered defenseless both physically and psychologically by 50 years of soft-on-crime but hard-on-self-defense policies of governments from both ends of the political spectrum. Only once the absolute right of every trustworthy lawful citizen to train and equip for, and then practice effective self defense is once again recognized will we see significant reductions in to rates of victimization. The only tool proven to be effective in nearly 100% of cases for this purpose is the concealed-carry sidearm. Since there is no one else there to stop the attack than the victim, stopping it is indeed her right and duty. It is her right for all the reasons we have an individual right to Life. It is her duty because failing to stop the criminal inevitably leads to further attacks against other victims, many of whom may not be so luck as to escape unharmed. When an attack is in progress, our court system can't stop it. The cops can't stop it. The schools can't. Only you as an individual can. - -- M.J. Ackermann, MD (Mike) Rural Family Physician, Box 13, 120 Cameron Rd. Sherbrooke, NS Canada B0J 3C0 902-522-2172 mikeack@ns.sympatico.ca "Hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst". Sandra@F.A.C.T. wrote: > > Translink asking you to take responsibility for your own safety http://www.news1130.com/news/topstory/article.jsp?content=20080713_011222_16260 > > > News1130 photo > > Saturday, July 12 - 10:12:22 PM Erin Loxam > > VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) - Translink is warning people about personal > safety after an assault last night near Nanaimo Skytrain station. The > station has several signs warning passengers to turn their music off, > and remove their headphones before walking home. > > Drew Snider with Translink hopes people to take safety into their own > hands. > > "It's not a question of blaming the woman who was attacked. It is a > question of looking at what we can learn from this and one of things > you want to do, if you're walking through anything, whether it's a > shopping mall, a movie theatre, a crowd at General Motors Place, > whatever, is to make sure you've got all five senses operating. There > are creeps out there." > > He adds people in the community should rally together and approach > Translink with solutions to whatever crime plagues their neighborhood. > Vancouver police are still trying to find the attacker. > > >CKNW News 1130 > > Sandra Martins-Toner Executive Director F.A.C.T. www.familiesagainstcrime.org www.matthewmartinstribute.com sandra@familiesagainstcrime.org >604)-338-1411 > > " THOU SHALT NOT BE A VICTIM, THOU SHALT NOT BE A PERPETRATOR, ABOVE > ALL THOU SHALT NOT BE A BYSTANDER" -Holocaust Survivor > > Nina Rivet President of F.A.C.T. nina@familiesagainstcrime.org > (778)-241-9915 > ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:15:48 -0600 From: "David R.G. Jordan" Subject: Judges not imposing fine meant to support victim services- Canwest Judges not imposing fine meant to support victim services http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=1831aed2-5955-416a-8899-e055960f928f Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service Published: Sunday, July 13, 2008 OTTAWA -- Judges are routinely turning their backs on a special federal fine they are supposed to levy against lawbreakers to help support crime victims, says a report that finds the "federal victim surcharge" has turned out to be more of a bust than a cash cow. The Criminal Code dictates that the fine is to be imposed unless an offender can prove undue hardship, but the study, conducted in New Brunswick, found the fee was waived in two-thirds of 62,000 cases over five years, costing the province millions of dollars in lost revenue for victims. "Funds collected from the surcharge continue to be well below expectations," said the report, posted recently on the federal Justice Department website. The study was conducted to determine why victim funds have stagnated since the early 1990s, despite a 1999 Criminal Code change that made surcharge collection all but mandatory. The lead author was Moira Law, a professor at the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies at the University of New Brunswick. "It appears that mere assertions of an inability to pay by offenders or perceptions by judges that the offender cannot pay are sufficient to prove undue hardship," said the report. The purpose of the surcharge, which has been on the books since 1989, is to make an offender think about restitution toward victims as well as pitch in money to help fund programs. The fee goes into a victim services fund in the province in which it is collected and the money is used for such things as counselling and individual compensation. The fee is 15 per cent of the fine imposed on an offender for breaking the law, which typically ranges from about $8 for petty crimes to $100 or more for drinking and driving. If the crime merits jail time instead of a fine, offenders must pay a set amount of $50 or $100, depending on the offence. Almost 20,000 surcharges were imposed in New Brunswick from 2000-2005, raising $1.3 million for victim services, which fell about $3 million short of the money that could have been raised if judges had not waived the fee, the study said. In Ontario, in 2001-2002 alone, the province could have collected a potential $5.4 million, but instead took in $1.2 million, according to a table that showed revenue shortfalls in almost every province. "It's a huge disappointment," said Steve Sullivan, the federal ombudsman for crime victims. "It has had a significant impact on victim services across the country." Victim compensation, for instance, has been scaled back in several provinces, he said. Darren Eke, a spokesman for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, said that judges should have to explain themselves when they decide against imposing the fee. "The reasons for a finding of undue hardship need to be clearly stated in the record of proceedings," Eke said in an e-mail. "The government expects that the letter of the law be followed in all cases." While judges are supposed to justify their decisions for waiving charges, the information was not included in 99 per cent of 861 court files that were reviewed for the study. The authors interviewed almost two dozen "informants" in the justice system, including several judges, to gauge their attitudes toward the surcharge. While the majority were positive, it was denounced by some as a "tax grab" and stakeholders unanimously agreed that offenders make no connection between the surcharge and victim restitution. Some judges also felt that the surcharge was yet another burden on impoverished offenders who simply do not have the means to pay and are "victims themselves of wretched circumstances," said the report. The study found that there is a "blanket" waiver on fines for offenders who are sentenced to incarceration, when they are the ones who have probably caused the most harm to victims. The highest rate of surcharge imposition was for driving while impaired. "The people who are creating the most harm aren't contributing to victim services and all," said Sullivan, who suggested that offenders should be put on payment plans for the surcharge, including those who earn wages while incarcerated. The study also looked at imposition of the surcharge in the Northwest Territories from 2000-2005 and found it was waived 70 per cent of the time. © Canwest News Service 2008 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:37:13 -0600 From: "David R.G. Jordan" Subject: Argentine cops get life- (Reuters)The Windsor Star Argentine cops get life http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=c7329f61-3ffc-4c7a-8d57-c236cbf18de7 Reuters Published: Saturday, July 12, 2008 BUENOS AIRES - An Argentine court sentenced two former police officers on Friday to life in prison for participating in the 1976 "dirty war" massacre of 30 people whose bodies were thrown into a pile and dynamited. Former police captains Juan Carlos Lapuyole and Carlos Gallone were found guilty of kidnapping and murder charges, the first convictions in the case. A third former officer was acquitted. The massacre took place at the start of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, during which human rights groups say up to 30,000 suspected leftists were abducted and killed. An independent commission confirmed about 11,000 deaths. The 30 victims of the "Fatima massacre" were loaded on trucks and driven to a town north of Buenos Aires, where they were blindfolded and shot in the head at close range. Court documents said their corpses were then dynamited. During the previous administration of President Nestor Kirchner, Argentina's Congress and Supreme Court scrapped amnesty laws shielding hundreds of military and police officials from prosecution in connection with dirty war-era crimes. © The Windsor Star 2008 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:42:52 -0600 From: "David R.G. Jordan" Subject: A City Street Decays, but One Holdout Fights On-The New York Times Jersey http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/13colnj.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y&oref=slogin A City Street Decays, but One Holdout Fights On Image & Caption SURVIVOR Dion Clark at home on Walnut Avenue in Trenton. - -David Hunsinger for The New York Times By KEVIN COYNE Published: July 13, 2008 Trenton THE view from the freshly whitewashed porch of the brick row house where the Clark family has lived for the last 49 years is of precisely the kind of broken city street the United States Supreme Court had in mind when it was weighing arguments recently about the right of Americans to own guns. “Those three there are empty,” said Dion Clark, 44, pointing out the decrepit abandoned houses on Walnut Avenue that surround his own, their shattered windows gaping wide-eyed or shuttered by plywood. “That’s empty, 337, the one sitting back here is empty, 347 is empty, 352, 358. We’ve got 20 empty just on the 300 block. There’s another one over there.” The porch is shaded by a black awning and crossed by restful breezes, but Mr. Clark and his parents — Charles, 80, and Virginia, 75, Trenton natives who bought the house in 1959 — sit mostly among the flowers they tend in the small backyard, where they don’t have to watch the steady parade of young men whose drugs and gangs and guns have hollowed out their neighborhood. “We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country,” another Trenton native, Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote recently in his landmark majority opinion for the Supreme Court, overturning a ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and, more sweepingly, ruling that the Second Amendment means you can keep a gun in your home. “But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.” The decision has ignited much impassioned debate, starting within the court itself, which was split in a 5-to-4 vote. (Joining Justice Scalia in the majority was another Trenton native, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., whose family moved to neighboring Hamilton Township soon after he was born; Justice Scalia’s family left Trenton when he was young, too, for Queens.) But on the sultry summer streets of the jurists’ hometown, far from the hushed chambers where the meaning of the Constitution is parsed, the ruling has occasioned barely more than a whisper — because those who live here understand that it takes more than a law alone to change the way the world works. “It hurts to see what it’s come to,” Dion Clark said about the Wilbur neighborhood in the East Ward, from which the banks, the bakeries, the grocers, the movie theaters and most of the proud homeowners like his parents have long since vanished. Two months ago, and one block away, a 10-year-old girl, Qua-Daishia Hopkins, died in a late-night fire that may have been set in retaliation for her parents’ testimony in a case against a gang leader. “There’s no accountability. Everybody’s doing just what they want to be doing.” Mr. Clark has been preaching accountability for years now, and as he rides along the streets of Wilbur, he finds on almost every block more consequences of its absence — tattooed young men clustered on stoops and corners in the middle of the day; the spots where people were stabbed or shot; vacant stores, vacant houses, vacant lots; grand old brick houses broken up into apartments. “People like them because you can gut them out, and you still have that strong foundation structure,” he said. But the neighborhood itself has been so gutted he worries about its foundation. “We need order,” he said. “The laws are already there. We need to enforce them.” Mr. Clark spends three mornings each week hooked up to a dialysis machine for his failing kidneys, and he walks with a limp, from a knee injury at his old job in the supply warehouse for the city’s schools. He started attending City Council meetings, wielding photos he took with a cheap camera, when he wearied of finding piles of construction debris dumped in vacant lots by contractors, and in 2002, he ran unsuccessfully for a seat himself. Guns, though, are a tougher foe than trash, as he has learned in his own family. His only child, a son from a brief early marriage, ran with gangs and was caught with a handgun as a teenager several years ago. A year later, his son was shot several times; he lost his spleen, but recovered. “He’s my child and I love him, but when you do wrong and you live wrong, that’s what happens. I tell him all the time, I quote from Scripture: ‘The wages of sin is death,’ ” he said. “I’ve always tried personally to do the right thing, but when it came to being a parent, I totally didn’t do the right thing.” Mr. Clark has no argument with his fellow Trentonians’ interpretation of the Second Amendment; his father is a longtime member of the National Rifle Association, a former hunter and trap shooter. “I learned to respect guns,” he said. “The problem is that the wrong people got possession of the guns.” He has been advocating another remedy, though, in concert with some of the City Council members: patrols by the State Police of the most violent neighborhoods, including his own, which he routinely refers to as “the worst street in Trenton, bar none.” Mayor Douglas H. Palmer admires Mr. Clark’s commitment to his neighborhood, but — along with the city’s police director, Joseph J. Santiago, the former superintendent of the State Police — has resisted his suggestion. “I hate to use this word, but there’s no magic bullet,” said Mayor Palmer — no Supreme Court decision, no outside police force. The solution, he says, is as complex as the problem: local policing, gang intervention, jobs, schools, redeveloped neighborhoods. “It’s a lot of hard work consistently, and putting these bad guys in jails that commit crimes with guns.” Standing in front of his porch, Mr. Clark winced as a bass-booming car sped past. The house next door, abandoned for three decades, was finally demolished last summer, and his mother planned to do some planting in the lot where it stood. “We paint whatever we can reach every year,” he said, running his hand over the fresh coat of white paint on the bricks, and then pointing higher. “We have to get somebody to help us with the rest.” E-mail: jersey@nytimes.com Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:30:04 -0400 From: "mred" Subject: Re: Judges not imposing fine meant to support victim services- - ----- Original Message ----- From: "David R.G. Jordan" To: Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 1:15 PM Subject: Judges not imposing fine meant to support victim services- Canwest > > Judges not imposing fine meant to support victim services > http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=1831aed2-5955-416a-8899-e055960f928f > > Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service > Published: Sunday, July 13, 2008 > > OTTAWA -- Judges are routinely turning their backs on a special federal > fine > they are supposed to levy against lawbreakers to help support crime > victims, > says a report that finds the "federal victim surcharge" has turned out to > be > more of a bust than a cash cow. > Here in Ontario , speeding tickets get the same treatment , a fine that goes to "victims" but in reality it is a cash cow for the provincial government and it is levied automatically on speeding tickets if you plead guilty. (been there done that) I have NO idea how much of this money goes to "victims of crime " which it is supposed to be dedicated for. I would rather think it goes into the general tax fund as do all tax impositions in Ontario Its just a cash grab, it has nothing to do with benefitting "victims of crime",that's just an excuse. Other wise they wouldn't be so concerned ? about losing the money ed/on ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:17:51 -0600 From: "David R.G. Jordan" Subject: Bus stop shooting- The Gazette (Montreal) Bus stop shooting http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=32c38d66-5eec-4d2d-80aa-0f744b79db93 The Gazette Published: 10 hours ago Police are investigating a shooting at a bus stop in Lasalle late Friday night. About 11:40 p.m., a 17-year-old man was shot at while waiting at a bus shelter at Dollard Ave. and Jean Brillon St. He was not injured although the bus shelter was damaged. The suspect fled the scene, possibly by car, said Constable Olivier Lapointe. The motive behind the shooting is unknown, he added. The 17-year-old is not known to police and the shooting was not gang-related, Lapointe said. © The Gazette (Montreal) 2008 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:42:23 -0600 From: "David R.G. Jordan" Subject: CALGARY: Body armour blocks Taser- (Canwest)The Windsor Star Body armour blocks Taser http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=7a7a451e-4af5-4a29-9aff-c34ce1d2d5ca Canwest News Service Published: Saturday, July 12, 2008 CALGARY - Police who Tasered a suspected drug dealer clad in body armour would have been justified in shooting him dead, Calgary police said Friday. The man had tried to grab an officer's gun during an attempted arrest that eventually led to a car filled with guns, drugs and cash. "A gun-grab is considered a lethal force option," said acting Insp. Terry Larsen Friday. Larsen said the drama unfolded on Calgary's Macleod Trail South, where security guards at the Chinook Centre mall saw what they initially thought was a carjacking Thursday. The guards said a driver got out of a car, while another man slid into the driver's seat from the other side. It then drove away. Const. Dave Bailey responded and found the vehicle stopped in a car wash parking lot. The driver -- carrying a black bag -- got out and went into a nearby restaurant. Bailey followed him inside, but when he tried to question him, the man dumped the bag and fled, after pushing the officer and hitting him in the face. Bailey pursued him on foot and Tasered him -- without any effect. "The accused had made an attempt to grab the officer's gun from his holster," Larsen said. After a second foot chase and fight, Bailey Tasered him again and, although its effect was minimal, the weapon brought the man down and he was taken into custody. Meanwhile, mall security tracked down the man they'd initially seen get out of the car. A loaded handgun, thousands of dollars in cash and the black bag were found inside the abandoned car. Inside the bag, police found another loaded gun, thousands more in cash and a brick of cocaine. © The Windsor Star 2008 ------------------------------ End of Cdn-Firearms Digest V11 #708 *********************************** Submissions: mailto:cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Mailing List Commands: mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca Moderator's e-mail address: mailto:drg.jordan@sasktel.net List owner: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca FAQ list: http://www.canfirearms/Skeeter/Faq/cfd-faq1.html Web Site: http://www.canfirearms.ca CFDigest Archives: http://www.canfirearms.ca/archives To unsubscribe from _all_ the lists, put the next four lines in a message and mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca unsubscribe cdn-firearms-digest unsubscribe cdn-firearms-chat unsubscribe cdn-firearms end (To subscribe, use "subscribe" instead of "unsubscribe".)