Scroll down a bit, and you’ll find that a while back we commented on the Leslie Hindman auction in Chicago of what they’re calling “The Gun That Killed Dillinger.” Only trouble is, it belonged to an East Chicago lawman who was across the street from the Biograph Theater on the sweltering 1934 night when three Federal agents shot down Public Enemy Number One.  Captain Timothy O’Neal, by all official accounts, never fired his gun that night.

We got some interesting comments on it (see that entry, below), including a polite response from the auction house itself.

Well, proving that P.T. Barnum was right about a sucker being born every minute, O’Neal’s gun went under the auctioneer’s hammer for a whopping $36,400 yesterday.  This LINK from the Chicago Sun-Times indicated that reporters in the Windy City apparently don’t research their stories much, either.

The popular Johnny Depp movie has apparently stirred a huge interest in Dillinger 75 years after his death.  A few days ago, a gun that documentably actually WAS possessed by John Dillinger went for over 96 grand in an auction elsewhere.  It was a double-barrel .41 caliber Remington derringer, a frontier-style pocket pistol that was obsolete even then, but still popular in the Thirties for pocket carry because it spat large caliber bullets, if only two of them.  It was taken from Dillinger during one of his arrests.  He had been carrying it tucked in his sock as a backup gun.

In the auction of the O’Neal Colt, a letter written by Dillinger to his niece from jail went to a private collector for what the Sun-Times called “a shocking $60,400 winning bid.”

Well, heck, I just can’t be an old curmudgeon about this stuff anymore.  It’s time I got into the spirit of things.

So, tell ya what: I’ll auction off a Colt Army Special almost exactly like Captain O’Neal’s, out of my own collection. We can start the bidding at, oh, a mere $30,000.  His had a five-inch barrel, and mine is a four-inch and looks to be in better shape.  And they have at least three things in common.

They’re both original Colt Army Special revolvers correct to their period, right down to the gutta percha grips.

They’re both chambered for the .38 Special cartridge. (And mine’s still in perfect working order, and surprisingly accurate.)

And, to the best of my knowledge, neither one was ever fired at John Dillinger.

Yet another Colt Army Special that didn’t kill John Dillinger

The Ogden, Utah mansion of John Moses Browning, widely considered the greatest and most prolific gun design genius who ever lived, is now on the market. Thanks to friend Erich Martell for the heads-up.

Built in 1900, this striking old building is “complete with turrets, dormers, grand staircases, amazing hardwood floors, original windows and moulding, new commercial-grade kitchen with corian counters, potential new baths for bed and breakfast use.”

Now, the photo in the real estate listing shows that this is obviously not a “backwoods home.”  But anyone who turns this historic place into a bed and breakfast is pretty much guaranteed a steady stream of visiting gun buffs, many of whom would make it a destination trip…a pilgrimage even.

And turrets.  Turrets!  Quick word association test…work with me here…BINGO! Yes!  GUN turrets!

Of course, nothing less than a Browning M2 machine gun would do for the gun turrets in the Browning Mansion.  Commanding field of fire to protect the neighborhood? OH, yeah!  “Neighborhood watch”? Yes, to the power of ten.

OK, so I’m getting a little crazy here.  But for $375K?  With eight bedrooms, formal dining room, and a history that goes back to the year 1900?  Good Lord, for real estate values, that’s like going back in a time machine even before you start looking at the lore of the place.

Please, please let some person from the Gun Culture with a sense of history purchase this magnificent icon, before some developer gloms it and turns it into a Yuppie Hutch.

The County Prosecutor in Arizona has announced that he will not re-try Harold Fish, who spent years behind bars for shooting a younger, stronger man with a violent past who came at him on a hiker’s trailhead, swinging his fists and screaming threats.

The gunnies on here will remember that the prosecutor made a huge deal of Fish using a 10mm Kimber pistol and Federal hollow point ammunition to protect himself, convincing at least some on the jury that the large caliber gun and the somehow extra-deadly bullets were indications of malice. The appellate court didn’t argue with that, apparently feeling that such arguments are within an adversary’s purview. Lesson there: be able to articulate why you, like most cops, choose a powerful handgun and effective ammunition to defend yourselves and your loved ones.

The high court, in reversing the conviction and remanding it for a new trial, noted that the instructions given on self-defense to the trial jury were imperfect. Moreover, the appellate judges found fault with the trial court’s failure to allow the jury to know of the dead man’s frequent, violent attacks on others, in a pattern much like the one that Fish described.

Meanwhile, honest Arizona legislators, spurred by calls and letters and emails from outraged citizens, recently passed legislation to make the state’s new self-defense law retroactive to the time of this shooting. This would, in essence, have forced the prosecution to prove that Fish didn’t fire in self-defense. In a case where the original lead detective had outspokenly called the shooting self-defense (and suffered for it), the prosecutor apparently knew he couldn’t meet that burden.

As we celebrate Harold Fish’s freedom, let’s not forget that he and his family are half a million dollars in debt from the legal costs of the defense and the appeal. Fish is a retired schoolteacher. The defense fund can be found HERE.

And all of you who did contribute – and who wrote to the Arizona legislators – give yourselves a well-deserved pat on the back. You helped to do justice.

A cartoon on the editorial page of today’s Gainesville Sun newspaper compares Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to the Cheshire Cat.

With what her confirmation hearing is turning into, the comparison seems apt. One would think a wise Latina with lots of time on the bench, and hopefully lots of time assessing the credibility of witnesses, would realize how pathetic she looks when she re-frames questions into straw man arguments to escape uttering an honest answer to a question fairly posed.  That strategy would get her kicked off a high school debate team.  Unfortunately, knowledgeable pundits think it’s going to get her confirmed.

Heather MacDonald thinks Sotomayor has been blatantly disingenuous, and may be steeped more in the Kool-Aid than in the nourishing lifeblood that came out of the feminist movement.

My old friend and colleague Don Kates, a long time fighter for civil rights on issues of race, victims’ rights, and Second Amendment issues, flatly called her a bigot in his guest editorial in the San Francisco Examiner.

Earlier this week I expressed my very adverse reaction to Sotomayer. Today the San Francisco Examiner printed them in the form of the guest editorial which follows.

-Don

Suppose a nominee to sit on the Supreme Court had consistently and repeatedly expressed the considered opinion that the views of non-Caucasian and/or female judges will be inferior to those of male Caucasian judges. Would such statements not plainly show the nominee to be unfit to be a judge? After all, our nation’s jurists are supposed to render decisions based on neutral legal principles rather than on the sex, race or ethnicity of the litigants.

Sonia Sotomayor’s defenders will insist that her racist and sexist sentiments should be evaluated in context. And rightly so. The context here is not just a single off-hand unconsidered and inept statement which is susceptible of multiple interpretations. Her opinion that white male judges will make inferior decisions is something she has expressed over and over again in prepared speeches she has had ample opportunity to phrase exactly as she meant them.

Nor can there be any doubt about what she meant, nop matter how she now seeks to evade the meaning when it is politically disadvantageous. She did not simply make the self-evident point that diversity is important because judges opinions may be shaped by their differing backgrounds. Rather she says the reverse – that the background of Latin females makes them better decision-makers than white male judges.

Note that the necessary implication of her repeated statements is adopting racist and sexist qualifications for the judiciary. The implication of what she is saying is not that diversity is good, but that it is bad; if we want the best judges, all judges should be Latin women. Nor is this necessary inference refuted by the fact that it is nonsense. Racism and sexism are nonsense but many people believe fervently in racist and sexist ideas. And Sotomayor’s considered and repeated statements show that she is emphatically one of them, despite the fact that she is an unusual variety of racist.

This is, of course, consistent with her most famous ruling, the New Haven case in which she held that white firefighters who had passed a promotion test could be denied promotion because black firefighters had flunked the test. Understandably the Supreme Court reversed this racial ruling. What has been missed here is the margin by which the court repudiated this ruling. It is true that four of the nine justices dissented in the case. But that was because they endorsed a different theory Sotomayor had not used. As to the theory Sotomayor used, all nine justices agreed that it was wrong.

When her nomination is confirmed – as the almost worshipful statements of the senators hearing her testimony show she will be confirmed – Sotomayor will be the firsr openly racist and sexist Supreme Court justice in more than 65 years. The last one was Justice McReynolds who was appointed in 1914 and served into the 1940s. A man of limited intelligence, he was a more conventional bigot who despised women and especially blacks and refused to talk to his colleagues Justices Brandies and Cardozo because they were Jewish.

Sotomayor’s defenders will doubtless point out that one of the Supreme Court’s great liberal justices, Hugo Black, was an Alabaman who had been a Ku Klux Klan member in his youth. This may mean no more than that the Klan dominated Alabama politics when Black was a young man. Whatever the reason for Justice Black’s Klan membership, he had long since resigned and disavowed the Klan in 1934 when he was appointed to the Court. Surely Klan membership is not something we would want in a Supreme Court justice who is supposed to render justice equally to all.

Is diversity a good thing? Of course. But not “diversity” to the extreme of bigotry. There is no room in American politics for racism and sexism, especially not on the Supreme Court.

Finally, Robert Heinritz calls out the nominee for her weasel-like response to a simple question about the rights of American citizens to self-protection.

No Constitutional right-to-life, per Judge Sotomayor
Robert G. Heinritz, J.D.

It now appears Judge Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Obama administration out-maneuvered the supporters of life and ability to defend life.  No one in the major media will bother to mention the NRA’s scholarly objections.  (See below.)

When a Senator asked Judge Sotomayor whether the Second Amendment guaranteed a personal right – or as lawyers would say, “a fundamental right” -  she said in effect  “the Constitution doesn’t give me the right to go home, get a gun, and come back to shoot you.”  She actually said that!  Not a single Senator challenged her adroit change-of-subject.  She was permitted to get away with this.  Not one news-reporter called attention to the irrelevancy of Judge Sotomayor’s response, or the evasiveness of her answers.  Not even Rush Limbaugh got it.  Nothing in the Constitution would ever protect the scenari o Judge Sotomayor used to so deftly dismiss Second Amendment protections.  She totally avoided a direct answer to the “personal” or “fundamental” rights issue by changing the subject.

What did the Founders of America mean by “fundamental” or “personal” right-to-life?  Among other things:  When a gang of hoods corners you on the street, your right to defend your life is a very “fundamental,” very “personal,” right – which no state or municipality may take from you.  When armed-intruders break into your house and threaten your  wife and children, your  right – and for that matter, your entire family’s right -  to a weapon for defense is a very personal right.  When an armed robber corners you and demands “your money or your life” – reasonable people would consider that very personal.  When an elderly grandmother fears going outside and keeps all her doors and windows barricaded, her right to defend against younger, stronger, and sometimes armed intruders – in her home, and on her way to her grocery store -  is a very personal right.  When my granddaughter is mugged, robbed, raped, and nearly killed at a bank-ATM, her right to defend her life, property, and virtue is a very, very fundamental right.  When my wife and20I are traveling across America in our RV, we believe we should treat all strangers as friends.  But we also have the free choice, and we demand the ability, to protect ourselves from armed thugs and bullies no matter where we are in the United States.

Judge Sotomayor’s judicial record shows she disagrees that Americans have such rights.

I don’t much care for the bother and responsibility of securing a firearm nearby.  But I’ve lived long enough to know the world sometimes presents threats that justify it’s presence.  A free person’s right to defend his or her life is a very personal right, a “fundamental right” – pre-existing our U.S. Constitution -  which is more important than our property, our ability to speak-out on political issues, our right to vote, or our rights to a Miranda warning when approached by a police officer.

Thro ughout history this has always been true among free people.  During the years American Colonists were bickering with Great Britain over taxes, representation, and rights; the one thing that finally provoked a shooting-war with their mother-country was Britain’s use of armed soldiers to disarm free citizens.  The Founders were well-read on history and the classics, and well-acquainted with what England did to it’s “subjects” in Ireland; first disarming them, taking over all their lands and resources by force of British arms, and consigning the Irish to virtual serfdom or slavery.  The most loyal of America’s Founders knew that government’s disarming of its free-citizens was the first step to slavery.  “Slavery” was the word they used.  History has confirmed this basic truth countless times in countless countries over the succeeding 200 years.  Free, law-abiding citizens do not give up their right to arms.

Judge Sotomayor may turn out OK on the Second Amendment, but her record doesn’t so indicate.  I am frankly outraged at the Senators, the press, the NRA, and every other civil rights group for allowing her to get away with her deft sidestepping of the question of the Second Amendment’s confirmation of “personal” or “fundamental”&nbs p;rights.

During the Reagan years, Democrats and left-wingers were infuriated by how effectively Reagan communicated his message.  It now appears Republicans have worthy adversaries in President Obama and his strategists.  The Founders of America are turning over in their graves.  We’ve got to do better than this.

And the NRA’s take on the nominee is HERE
We knew that President Obama would attempt to replace outgoing Justice David Souter with someone of a liberal stripe. At least the 5-4 balance won’t tip…until the next opening becomes available. Still, with a vast pool of candidates with genuine judicial mindset to pick from, surely he could have come up with someone who would at least give straight answers to simple, straightforward questions.

A week ago, my friends on the ProArms Podcast group shot an IDPA match mirror image. That is, all being right handed, we strapped on left-hand holsters and shot as southpaws. IDPA is the International Defensive Pistol Association, which requires quick draw, reloading under time, shooting on the move, and other useful skills. We did it because we’re instructors, and we know that if we can’t teach our own non-dominant hand to shoot a gun, we sure can’t teach a whole separate human organism. In the 28 years I’ve been running Lethal Force Institute, I’ve always asked the staff instructors to shoot a match or teach a class mirror image at least once a year to keep their own skills sharp. I do the same. The first thing this experience reinforced for me was that proper technique is critical. Most guns aren’t truly ambidextrous, so the left-hand technique can’t exactly mimic what the right hand is used to doing. One friend who shot that way with us said he felt like a monkey having a meaningful relationship with a football when he had to reload his .45 left-handed for the first time. He had a lot of fun and learned a great deal, though. It reinforced for all of us the importance of being able to perform at the Conscious Competence level, where if you take an instant to think about what you’re doing, you know you can do it right. My own reinforcement was costly: an eleven-second revolver reload because I tried to do it the usual way at the Unconscious Competence level – auto pilot. I didn’t have enough repetitions deposited in the long-term muscle memory bank to float an auto pilot loan for this particular skill set, and by the time I started thinking about what I was doing and got the S&W Model 686 back up and running, too much time had elapsed. Doing the rest of it on Conscious Competence, though, I was able to salvage the Most Accurate Shooter award out of the 50- to 60-competitor match. My buddy Jon Strayer was way faster than me, and his southpaw skills with a Glock 17 won him third place overall. Chris Christian finished first in Expert class shooting a CZ 85 pistol as a lefty for the first time. Our general consensus: keeping the accuracy good is the easy part when your non-dominant hand runs the trigger – it’s maintaining speed that’s tough. Thanks to the First Coast IDPA group at the Gateway Rifle and Pistol Club in Jacksonville, Florida for putting up with us. They’re a wonderfully welcoming place for new shooters, and some new southpaw shooters can lately attest to that. We’ll be discussing it in greater depth in a month or so on the ProArms Podcast, at the site mentioned above. Give mirror image shooting a try yourself – with handgun as we did, or with rifle and/or shotgun. It’s enlightening…and humbling. And, if you’re a seasoned instructor, it will make you more understanding and patient with your next class of newbies. Gail Pepin shows good control in her first match as a southpaw. Spent 9mm casing is rocketing past her head, but Glock 17 with Advantage Tactical sights is already back on target. Watching what he’s doing (conscious competence) Bud Deese reloads his Kimber .45 as a newborn southpaw. Shooting a 9mm CZ 85 cocked and locked (from a left-handed Aker holster for the first time), Chris Christian places First Expert in the Enhanced Service Pistol division. Freshly-minted lefty Jon Strayer, a 5-Gun Master right handed, wins the BUG (Back-Up Gun) side event with S&W 442 Airweight and .38 Special +P ammo. With the Glock 17 in his left side Blade-Tech holster, he came in third overall in the main match. Shooting mirror image with S&W Model 625 .45 snubnose out of left hand Don Hume  concealment holster, Steve Denney wins the Enhanced Service Revolver division. Mas competed with this S&W Model 686, tuned by Bob Lloyd, loaded with 158 grain +P ammo, and drawn from left handed High Noon thumb-break concealment holster.

Finally got to see “Public Enemies,” Michael Mann’s Dillinger movie with Johnny Depp in the starring role.  I got out of my last movie theater a lot smoother than the real John Dillinger got out of his. I enjoyed the tremendous attention to period correct detail in everything from the clothes to, of course, the firearms. I just wish that Mann, one of our great action film directors who admittedly doesn’t work for The History Channel, had gone a bit more true to the actual, fascinating story.

If you track down this blog to a bit over a year ago, I wrote about my anticipation of seeing this film after being in Chicago where they filmed it on location. Good Lord, the Crown Point, Indiana jailbreak was filmed at the actual Crown Point Jail, and the notorious Little Bohemia Lodge shootout was filmed at the actual site!  They were period correct right down to the holsters, including the double shoulder holsters for Colt .45 autos that Dillinger was known to wear.

That said, the historical accuracies disappoint.  The film opens with Melvin Purvis chasing Pretty Boy Floyd through an apple orchard. Floyd shoots at him (one-handed at one point!) with a Thompson submachine gun, and Purvis then single-handedly kills him with one shot from a European bolt-action hunting rifle (admittedly correct for the period.) However, history shows that this happened many weeks after Dillinger was killed; Floyd was armed with a pair of Colt pistols, one of which was converted to full auto; it was a cornfield, not an orchard; and while Purvis did indeed empty his snub-nose .38 Colt Detective Special at the fleeing Pretty Boy, it is believed to have been a rifle in the hands of one of the many other lawmen firing at the fugitive that ended Floyd’s life.

The film shows Melvin Purvis killing Baby Face Nelson at the end of the Little Bohemia shootout. Totally wrong. While Purvis and Nelson shot at each other that night, neither scored a hit. Purvis’ Thompson failed to fire and he dropped it and opened up with his handgun. Nelson was killed several months after Dillinger’s death, in a gunfight with Agents Sam Cowley and Herman Hollis, who both died at his hands. The real story of that can be found HERE.

“Public Enemies” portrays Dillinger’s death outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago closer to the truth than any other movie I’m aware of, but it’s still a bit off from the historical record. The agent with drawn revolver who freezes in fear when Dillinger turns and sees him, presumably Herman Hollis, didn’t do that. Hollis fired at him.  So did Agent Clarence Hurt, a veteran gunfighter out of Oklahoma. And so did Agent Charles Winstead, who is correctly depicted as killing Dillinger with a .45 “Government Automatic” as Dillinger draws a Colt Pocket Model .380 from his right front trouser pocket, also correctly depicted by the meticulous Mann. Nor does it include the two innocent female bystanders who were wounded by errant bullets in the actual shooting. My take on Dillinger’s death can be found HERE.  However, the scene at the end of the movie (I won’t spoil it for you here) in which Winstead contacts the late Dillinger’s bereaved girlfriend Billie Frechette, appears to be total fiction.

There’s more. I’ve shot a lot of Thompson submachine guns, and they don’t spit great sheets of flame as they do in this and most other movies. Those great old guns fire the .45 ACP cartridge. ACP stands for Automatic Colt Pistol, and even back then the rounds were optimized to burn their powder in the 5” barrel of a 1911 Colt like the ones Dillinger favored.  The powder is already burnt up by the time the bullet exits the much longer barrel of a Tommy Gun. No muzzle flash. That part is Hollywood fiction.

At least the movie did show the armed citizen who wounded Dillinger and one of his colleagues, even if it had the shots placed wrong and fired from a 19th Century rifle instead of a 19th Century revolver. Could’ve been more there, though: see THIS link. Thanks for that, Mr. Mann…and thanks to Johnny Depp and the others for realistic gun handling.  Rumor has it that Depp is One Of Us, a “gun guy,” and now owns the Thompson he wielded in the movie.

It could have been so much more, from the “real history” side. But, you know what? It’s still a helluva flick, and I still enjoyed it.  If you watch it, let us know here what you thought of it.

Some more related links:
FBI info on Dillinger

The book on which the movie is based

Comments in the LA Times from the author of the book on the movie version

Outside the Crown Point Jail. (No sweat, open carry is legal in Indiana.)

The Crown Point jailbreak was filmed here, where it actually happened.

Melvin Purvis emptied an early model Colt Detective Special at Pretty Boy Floyd, not a Mauser sporting rifle with set trigger as depicted in the film.

The real John Dillinger, seen here on the cover of Dary Matera’s biography, did indeed prefer the 1911 .45 pistol.

Yesterday, the appellate court overturned the murder conviction of Harold Fish in Arizona, and remanded it for a new trial.  This is indeed welcome news.

Fish is the retired schoolteacher who was hiking when attacked by an emotionally disturbed person and his two dogs.  He wound up having to shoot the assailant, who died of three gunshot wounds. The lead investigator originally determined the shooting to be justifiable, but friends of the deceased apparently prevailed on the prosecutor to press charges. You can download a ProArms podcast in which a man close to the case discusses some of what went on, while guest-lecturing at one of my classes in Phoenix last year.

The jury was not allowed to know just how violent the dead man had been. Nor were the jurors given proper instructions on what constitutes self-defense.  Both of these errors are cited in the higher court’s decision to reverse, found in its entirety HERE .

The case is well known to gun people because the death weapon was Fish’s Kimber 10mm semiautomatic pistol, loaded with Federal hollow point ammunition, and the prosecution made a huge deal about the powerful weapon and its deadly dum-dum bullets. These arguments were not effectively countered by defense counsel at trial, and jurors later stated that these factors did indeed influence their decision to convict.  Significantly, none of that is addressed in the appellate court’s opinion, which tells us that it’s wise to be able to explain to lay people on a jury why we use the firearms and ammo we do to protect ourselves.

I personally thought the conviction of Harold Fish was a travesty of justice.  Here’s hope that there is light at the end of the tunnel of the long ordeal this good man has needlessly suffered.