Clayton Cramer is reporting that the DC Court of Appeals has struck down Washington DC’s ban on having a loaded handgun in your home, and has recognized that handguns are protected by the 2nd Amendment!

Its nice to see some sanity in a city overrun by criminals.

Say Uncle, Volokh, Kerr, Cato Institute and Instapundit also have coverage.

The blogs are aflame with opinions about Jim Zumbo’s betrayal of his fellow gun owners a few weeks back. Smoke on the Water has a couple of good posts here and here, Geek with a .45 weighs in here with a decent summary of Zumbo’s apologies. Michael Bane asks the question ‘where do we go from here?’, and Snowflakes in Hell says Zumbo’s sincerity doesn’t matter.

It looks like folks are ready to give Zumbo a chance to redeem himself. It looks like he is on the path to redemption, but I’d rather sit back and watch him for a bit before allowing him back into the fold. What he wrote was very wrong, I was among those that wrote to his advertisers and demanded his head, and I am willing to forgive but only after I see some action from him that earns it. So far it looks like he’s taking the right steps.

This comes in from The Tennessean, more women in TN are signing up for concealed weapon permits than ever.

“Why should we not have something to protect ourselves?” said Oonk, the Tennessee representative for the Second Amendment Sisters, a national organization promoting female gun ownership. “Why should we let someone else have their way, when you could protect yourself?

Real Estate Agent Kim Hoard says -

“I have strangers in my car every day, I meet strangers in empty houses all day long. For me, it seems like the logical step to protect myself.”

Its good to see that some people are understanding the utility of carrying a concealed pistol. It is especially important for women, who are often preyed upon by stalkers and criminals with no protection other than calling 911.

Hat Tips to Say Uncle and Of Arms and the Law

From Argghhh! comes a reminder that today is the anniversary of the end of the siege at the Alamo. You can read more about the history here at the Alamo website.

The final assault came before daybreak on the morning of March 6, 1836, as columns of Mexican soldiers emerged from the predawn darkness and headed for the Alamo’s walls. Cannon and small arms fire from inside the Alamo beat back several attacks. Regrouping, the Mexicans scaled the walls and rushed into the compound. Once inside, they turned a captured cannon on the Long Barrack and church, blasting open the barricaded doors. The desperate struggle continued until the defenders were overwhelmed. By sunrise, the battle had ended and Santa Anna entered the Alamo compound to survey the scene of his victory.

While the facts surrounding the siege of the Alamo continue to be debated, there is no doubt about what the battle has come to symbolize. People worldwide continue to remember the Alamo as a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds — a place where men made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. For this reason the Alamo remains hallowed ground and the Shrine of Texas Liberty

The State of California is considering ripping another $500 (per child born) from the pockets of its over-taxed citizens. According to the San Mateo Daily Journal -

Every child born in California would get a $500 savings account to start building a nest egg for college or down payment for a home, under a bipartisan bill introduced Wednesday in the state Senate.

I just love this part

Under the bill, every child born in California after Jan. 1, 2008, would receive the money, regardless of their parents’ income or immigration status. Recipients would repay the state’s initial $500 investment once they turn 18.

Oh Joy! Not only are they going to steal your money and give it to your neighbor’s kids, but they’re going to give it to the illegal’s kids as well. I wonder what that’s going to do for the illegal population count in California… Will it increase? You bet! Any time you start handing out freebies to those who don’t earn it you attract more freeloaders. California’s infrastructure is already overwhelmed by the illegal immigrant problem, this will just be one more nail in the coffin.

Not to mention the typical socialist stupidity of taking money from one group and giving it to another. But I won’t rehash that right now.

Hat Tip goes to Random Nuclear Strikes and Knowledge Is Power

Someone cracked the Wordpress servers and inserted malicious code into 2 of the source files for the popular open source blog software.

If you are running Wordpress v2.1.1 you need to upgrade now! Read their announcement here. This is more serious than your normal round of ’someone found another way to exploit sloppy PHP code’ — someone was able to gain access to their download server, insert code and recreate the distribution file.

They have never had any kind of file integrity checking (GPG signatures are commonly used in Open Source projects), but I think it is high time they implemented them.

They are a bit light on details of the inserted code. It exists in 2 files - feed.php and theme.php, someone inserted this line into feed.php:
if ($_GET["ix"]) { comment_text_phpfilter($_GET["ix"]); }

And in theme.php:
if ($_GET["iz"]) { get_theme_mcommand($_GET["iz"]); }

What this means is that someone passing the argument ix to feed.php or iz to theme.php could execute PHP code or shell commands on the server with permissions of the running web server. It is as if you opened up a guest account on your system for anyone to use. It could be used to launch spam relays, potentially exploit other security holes to gain root access, or trash your blog.

The Wordpress team needs to take a very serious look at their development process and security procedures. At the least they need to designate someone as the release manager and have them GPG sign the release files so that those of us downloading their software have some level of confidence that it hasn’t been compromised.

According to this TBO.com story Georgia lawmakers are considering changing their no-knock warrant rules. A Bill, SB 259 has been introduced to:

A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Article 2 of Chapter 5 of Title 17 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to searches with warrants, so as to change provisions relating to issuance of search warrants by judicial officers; to provide that no-knock warrants shall not be issued in this state except under limited circumstances; to provide for related matters; to provide for an effective date; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.

This change of direction has come about because of a recent tragedy where the homeowner, a 92 year old woman, shot at the invading officers and was killed by them. The warrent was issued on the word of an informant that there were drugs in the house. None were found.

Hat Tip to Say Uncle for this story.

Washington State’s latest anti-gun law, which I wrote about previously has been passed out of the committee. This comes as no surprise as the Democrats have a 5 to 3 advantage and one of the bill’s sponsors is the chair. According to Mr. Completely -

An interesting sidelight is that one of the Democratic Senators, Senator Prentice from South Seattle/Renton, originally was going to vote against the bill, thereby keeping it from coming out of committee. As of the end of the Executive session yesterday, that was her position. By this morning, she had changed her mind and voted for it. I wonder who talked to her last night to change her mind, and what they said? We’ll probably never know.

And Phil over at Random Nuclear Strikes has taken a look at the differences from the original bill -

It appears that they have changed the language a litle bit (old bill pdf / new bill pdf) by taking out Section D of the old bill making an auction held by a non-profit NOT a gun show (because it clearly is not one).

However, the rest of it is there.

So, the fight goes on. Warm up the vacation time guys, it looks like we’re going to be taking a couple more trips to Olympia this session.

UPDATE: According to Mr. Completely Senator Jim Clements says that the bill is as dead as “A goose twelve yards away in the middle of my decoys!”. Great News!

My new GunBloggers website is up and running. This is similar to the TTLB GunBlogs community, except that it works. It is still needing a bit of work — it could use someone with better CSS skills than me to dress it up but the functionality is there. I imported all the sites from the TTLB community, weeded out the few that were no longer active or have no feed available and added a couple of more. In the next week I am planning on adding Google ad rotation for sites that submit their google adwords code — members will be randomly selected for display, with top stores having 2 entries in the list (double the chance of their ad being displayed).