Penny Dean and Your Rights

This should serve as your periodic reminder that the case that Jeffrey Toobin lays out here — that the Second Amendment was never intended to protect an individual right — is an outlandish conspiracy theory that contradicts the text; the history; all of the contemporary commentary; the views of the drafters of the 14th Amendment, who incorporated it; and the actions of the states, almost all of which protected the individual right to keep and bear arms both before and after the drafting of the Second Amendment.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California says facial recognition technology isn't ready to be used for law enforcement. This comes after a test of Amazon's Rekognition software wrongly flagged 26 California lawmakers as criminals, according to the ACLU.

An Alabama police officer staged a shooting last month to make it look like he was under attack, a police chief said Thursday.

Birmingham Police Chief Patrick Smith said that Officer Keith Buchanan made a distress call early July 21 while patrolling an isolated area. Shots could be heard in the background, and an abandoned police car was later found with a bullet hole. He was later found moaning on the ground.

The police chief said investigators determined the event was staged after they, "found nothing to support the officer's account of this incident."

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A 33-year-old felon accused of killing four people and wounding two others in a stabbing spree in two Southern California cities “savagely attacked” his victims seemingly at random and unprovoked, police said on Thursday.

The suspect, Zachary Castaneda, was taken into custody on Wednesday evening outside of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Santa Ana, California, moments after stabbing to death a security guard there, police said.

As Walmart faces pressure from gun control advocates to stop selling guns, images of a Walmart memo calling for "Immediate Action: Remove signing and displays referencing violence" are being shared on social media. Two recent in-store shootings have claimed more than 20 lives combined.

Walmart confirmed the legitimacy of the memo to USA Today on Thursday.

The meth seemed to appear out of thin air.

Benjamin Bowling couldn’t figure it out. He had been clean ever since his release from prison on a DUI conviction, but now a Jackson County, Fla., sheriff’s deputy was accusing him of possessing a minuscule amount of methamphetamine.

The 2014 indictment leveled against Defendant-Appellant Ben Wassell in the first ever SAFE Act case was dismissed with prejudice in Chautauqua County Court on Monday. This final action represents the culminating victory for Wassell and Second Amendment civil rights advocates across New York State who sought reversal of the state’s first ever conviction under the unconstitutional and ineffective SAFE Act imperial gun control edict. Additionally, dismissal with prejudice represents yet another positive and decisive step towards SAFE Act repeal.

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.

The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.

Cory Booker made that claim yesterday. As CNN notes, there’s a 2015 study backing him up.

Since the day it came out, that study has been driving me insane.