It’s Wednesday, March 28th, 2018…but before we begin, submitted for your perusal, the latest iteration of “Hands up/Don’t shoot”:

Sacramento Kings, Boston Celtics players honor unarmed black man killed by police

For the REST of the story, we turn to Scott Morefield writing at Townhall.com, who details…

The Police Shooting of Stephon Clark – Beyond the Hysteria and Screaming Headlines

A black man with two small children was shot and killed by Sacramento, California police. His only crime? Holding a cellphone while standing in his own backyard.

That seems to be the Left’s narrative, anyway, regarding the death of 22-year-old Stephon Clark, who was indeed shot by police in his grandmother’s yard on Sunday night. And given today’s political climate along with mainstream media headlines and activist tweets on the topic, it’s no wonder so many people are outraged.

The tweet that perhaps went viral the fastest, with well over 100,000 likes and retweets, came from First Coast News journalist Lana Harris, who wrote, “Stephon Clark. Officers reportedly shot at him 20 times in his backyard because they thought he was holding a tool bar. It was his cellphone. Someone will have to explain this to the two little boys he leaves behind – one and three years old.”

Race baiter Shaun King called Clark’s death a “brutal police execution” of someone who “posed no risk whatsoever.”

BLM activist Qasim Rashid called it a “cold-blooded execution.”

“Clark was in his own backyard when officers shot at him 20 times,” read the Huffington Post byline. The site’s main headline on Wednesday night read, “Cops Kill Unarmed Man *In Own Yard* 20 Shots Fired.”

“Police shot at a man 20 times in his own yard, thinking he had a gun. It was an iPhone,” headlined the Washington Post.

CNN’s read, “Sacramento police shot man holding cell phone in his grandmother’s yard.”

To get to the actual facts, or at least some explanation that doesn’t involve Clark sitting in his backyard on a work conference call when two police officers strolled by and simultaneously thought “hey, let’s shoot a black guy today…” – one had to read beyond the screaming headlines, but not very far.

Turns out, the incident involved some serious property destruction, a multi-yard chase involving fences… and a helicopter. Yes, a helicopter and yes, I’m pretty sure they don’t bring those things out to look for jaywalkers. (No, but this might be overstating the importance of the presence of the helicopter.)

As it so happens, far from a night of shooting random black people just for the fun of it, these two officers were responding to a 911 call about a man breaking vehicle and home windows with what the helicopter pilot thought was a toolbar. When encountered, the man led them on what the Washington Post called “a frantic foot pursuit through darkened streets.”

Even the Huffington Post couldn’t help but cite the inconvenient details later in their coverage:

“Disturbing helicopter footage of the incident, released Wednesday, shows thermal images of Clark running through his neighborhood and hopping fences as two officers begin to close in on him. He stops at the home he shared with his grandparents and two sons. Seconds later, officers shoot him dead.”

While an investigation is being conducted and the truth will be ascertained about whether or not officers should have pulled the trigger when they did, one fact is incontrovertible – Clark could have surrendered at any point during his multi-yard pursuit, yet chose not to.

It should also be noted that Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, hardly a “law and order” conservative by any conceivable definition, chose not to “second guess the split-second decisions” of the officers.

Even so, Leftists have already turned it into a race thing. In their coverage of the incident, VOX wrote, “Police killings of unarmed black men helped fuel the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Now a new tragedy — the shooting death of an unarmed black man in his own backyard — is raising new questions about how much things have changed, if at all.”

VOX then goes on to cite the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database statistics that show that out of 230 people killed by police in 2018, 38 were identified as black.

That’s 17 percent, out of a population that makes up about 13 percent of America. Slightly more than their representation, but hardly the “significant racial disparities” VOX complained about later in the piece so they could attribute it to “high levels of housing segregation and economic inequality” and stuff.

The Washington Post also feels like there’s an “overrepresentation of African Americans” in the statistics, citing statistics last year showing that of unarmed people killed by police, “30 were white, 20 were black and 13 were Hispanic.”

Given the fact that black offenders actually commit 52 percent of homicides, or well over their 13 percent representation of the population, the fact that the number is significantly less than white suspects shot is a testament to police restraint, not racism.

Granted, pulling that trigger should be the absolute last thing police do when confronting any criminal suspect. On the other hand, bashing in windows and running away from police should also be the last thing anyone who doesn’t want to get even inadvertently shot should engage in.

Even though we see things differently, Left and Right should be able to agree on this: Stephon Clark’s death was a needless tragedy, and yes, it was entirely preventable.

Primarily through different behavior on Mr. Clark’s part.

Here’s the juice: (1). Under no circumstances should anyone run from the police.  Chris Rock nailed it:

(2). There’s an ongoing investigation, Sacramento is hardly a bastion of racism, and if the officers involved were acting either unreasonably or against departmental guidelines, it’s a safe bet they’ll be charged and/or indicted accordingly.

(3). Black lives matter, but Black lies matter even more, particularly when they’re serving a false narrative created for purely political purposes.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in response to one of the most demonstrably untrue arguments ever put forth against semi-automatic weapons, Bob Costas is schooled on his assertion…

The first 5:50 is the money clip, after which the rest of the video concerns the woefully inadequate firearms used by the FBI during the 1986 shootout in Miami.

Since we’re on the subject of firearms ignorance, if you’ve ever wondered why gun control zealots with no knowledge of firearms whatsoever presume to tell those possessing actual expertise what weapons, accessories and ammunition they “don’t need“, NRO‘s David French offers this…

“…semiautomatic firearms with a detachable magazine and a number of other features to conceal the weapon or control it during rapid firing“. Grenades and bayonets not included!

“It’s become popular on the left — thanks in part to a widely-shared Washington Post op-ed by Adam Weinstein — to scorn so-called “gunsplaining.” Weinstein defines the term as the habit of gun-rights advocates to “bully” gun-control supporters with technical jargon. Think the “AR” in AR-15 stands for “assault rifle”? Then you’re too dumb to talk about gun policy. Did you confuse a magazine and a clip? Then you’re too ignorant to talk about background checks.

There’s a kernel of truth in Weinstein’s critique. There are gun-rights supporters who revel in jargon and belittle those with inferior knowledge, but the problem of “gunsplaining” pales in comparison to the mass-scale ignorance of the gun-control movement and — critically — the mainstream media. It’s an ignorance that contributes to bad policy proposals and threatens constitutional rights. It’s an ignorance that has the potential to empower criminals while rendering law-abiding citizens more vulnerable to foreseeable threats.

This ignorance manifests itself in multiple ways. First, it’s common to see activists and marchers consistently say things that just aren’t true. You could see examples of this all over the March for Our Lives this weekend. Signs said ridiculous things like, “It was harder to buy this poster board than an AR-15” and “I want to live in a world where guns are harder to get than Hamilton tickets.” People routinely pretended that gun sales are virtually unregulated or that even “machine guns” are somehow easy to purchase.

Second, they’ll advocate “solutions” that won’t make a dime’s worth of difference to mass shootings or to gun violence more broadly. Our nation’s gun-violence problem is highly concentrated in a small percentage of the American population: people with prior criminal records who largely obtain and possess their guns unlawfully. Even if you focus on mass shootings — as a famous Washington Post fact-check noted — various “common sense” gun-control proposals would not have prevented a single modern massacre.

Third, the proposed solutions betray an extraordinary ignorance of the realities of gun ownership. Let’s take, for example, the common proposal to ban “high-capacity magazines.” That’s often defined to mean any magazine capable of holding more than ten rounds of ammunition. In reality, though, a ban on ten-round magazines is a ban on the standard-capacity magazine in tens of millions of guns that Americans use for self-defense. I often carry a Ruger SR9, and it came with a 17-round magazine. Dozens of other popular guns also come with magazines of similar sizes. Police carry guns with similar magazines, and — critically — criminals often do as well.

Activists can play funny games with language. The phrase “high-capacity magazine” implies something unusual, something you don’t normally see — like, say, a drum magazine on an AR-15. In reality, given the definition, they’re purporting to ban the norm. They’re telling law-abiding citizens that they should have less firepower than the very criminals who present the reasonably foreseeable threat.

And why should law-abiding Americans have less firepower than criminals? Because — and this is where the gun-control movement truly loses its authority — they say we don’t “need” anything more than ten rounds to defend ourselves. That’s right, the very people who time and again demonstrate their profound ignorance about firearms purport to tell law-abiding, gun-owning American citizens — who possess far superior knowledge — exactly what they “need” to keep their families safe. It’s extraordinary. I’d rather take my self-defense advice from actual experts than from politicians and activists who don’t know what they’re talking about…”

As our middle son Mike observed, why are the anti-gun advocates permitted to tell us what to do with our weapons, while we’re not permitted to advise women what to do with their bodies?!?

Consider this: since Sandy Hook, 138 people have been killed in school shootings.  Since Roe v. Wade, over 60,000,000 unborn infants have been willfully slaughtered.

In a related item, the WSJ reports how a man we thought dead has miraculously breathed life into The Left’s favorite whipping boy:

John Paul Stevens for the NRA

The former Justice wants to repeal the Second Amendment.

“Holy unintended consequences, Batman!”

“Critics often accuse the National Rifle Association of paranoia for arguing that gun controllers want to eliminate the Second Amendment. Well, being paranoid doesn’t mean the NRA is wrong.

Look no further than former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who is arguing this week that the Parkland, Florida, students and their allies shouldn’t settle for mere restrictions on guns. They should lobby Congress and the states to abolish the Second Amendment.

“Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment,” the 97-year-old former Justice wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times Tuesday, adding, “today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”

…But give credit to the former Justice for honesty about what most gun controllers believe deep in their progressive hearts: The right to own a weapon should be preserved for the state. Look for the NRA to use him as a spokesman more than it does Dana Loesch.“

Stevens has a long list of like-minded individuals from more contemporary times…

…squarely on his side!

Next up, in The Hits Just Keep on Coming segment…

Orlando nightclub shooter’s father, an FBI informant, brushed off son’s terror comments, agent says

As John Paul Stevens said…

Meanwhile, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins reveals why…

Why Trump Never Speaks Ill of Putin

And why Obama CIA chief John Brennan may have a few things to hide himself.

“…For the truth is, Mr. Trump’s version of the loudmouth demagogue is increasingly coming out on the better side of the emerging facts on Russia. The Kremlin wasn’t the most consequential meddler in the 2016 election: It was James Comey’s FBI, with Mr. Brennan standing obscurely at his elbow every step of the way.

If a planted Russian intercept was instrumental in the fiasco of Mr. Comey’s intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter, as numerous leaks indicate, then that intercept would have come from Mr. Brennan’s CIA. What’s more, it likely came not with a shrug, but with a clear expectation that Mr. Comey would act to protect a Clinton presidency from an alleged Russian plot…”

Again, as John Paul Stevens said…

Then there’s this incontrovertible conclusion, again from the WSJ: