Gun licenses on the rise in Mass.; 7.8 percent increase seen
By Matt Rocheleau Globe Staff January 27, 2016

Tens of thousands of new gun licenses were issued to Massachusetts residents in 2015, continuing a recent surge, according to state data.

There were 342,622 active Class A firearms licenses statewide, according to figures provided by the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services earlier this month. That was up about 24,700, or 7.8 percent, from the same time a year ago.

A Class A license, the broadest license available under state law and by far the most popular, allows the holder to carry rifles, shotguns, or handguns. It also allows the holder to carry a concealed handgun.

The number of Class A licenses has increased by 104,150, or 44 percent, from five years ago....

“More guns, more fear — more fear, more gun violence — more gun sales.”

Massachusetts Violent Crime Rates: 2010 (before the recent surge in
gun ownership) compared to 2014 (the latest available full-year statistics)

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports/ Crime in the United States

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s

2014 is the latest full year available

Massachusetts violent crime rate

2010: 466.6 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants
2014: 391.4/100K

Murder/nonnegligent manslaughter:

2010: 3.2/100K
2014: 2.0/100K

Aggravated assault:

2010: 331.8/100K
2014: 267.6/100K

Robbery:

2010: 105.0/100K
2014: 89.5/100K

I didn't include rape as the reporting criteria changed. Nonetheless, the disinterested reader
can find at the FBI site that the rate under the old definition is also lower

More guns, more dead women. Period.

"More guns, more dead women. Period." Wrong- the number of women murder victims decreased...

...both in rate *and* absolute number over the last 15 years, all while the number of guns in
the US nearly doubled:

There were 3,076 women murdered in the US in 2000- source:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2000/table2-4_vicrace00.xls

143.4 women in the US in 2000-source:

https://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-9.pdf

Rate: 1 in 46,619

There were 2,715 women murdered in the US (that number includes victims of unknown sex)
in 2014- source:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_1_murder_victims_by_race_ethnicity_and_sex_2014.xls


161,979,384 women in the US in 2014- source:

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

Rate: 1 in 59,661

A decision to obtain (or not) a gun should be made for real reasons, not ficticious ones.

Chicago police must finally produce stingray records, judge orders

by Cyrus Farivar - Jan 11, 2016 6:10pm EST

Court knocks police for relying on generic FBI affidavit as argument for withholding.

A local activist has won an important intermediary step in his legal quest to force the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to produce documents that fully explain the department's use of cell-site simulators, also known as IMSI catchers.

In a Monday opinion in Martinez v. Chicago Police Department, Cook County Circuit Judge Kathleen Kennedy denied the city’s motion to dismiss. This decision paves the way later this month for a closed-door hearing (in camera review) where the judge gets to privately review the documents in question.

Back in September 2014, activist Freddy Martinez filed a request under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Among other items, Martinez initially asked for:

All court orders for any instances in which Chicago Police deployed IMSI Catchers

All formal or informal policies, procedures, orders, directives, or other such records that pertain to when, why, where, how, and by whom IMSI Catchers may be deployed

All records discussing the constitutionality of deploying IMSI Catchers

That request was originally denied by the CPD. By the end of that month, Martinez sued—his second records-related lawsuit against the CPD of 2014. As of nearly a year ago, the city owed over $120,000 to defend the cases. Martinez and his legal team still don’t know exactly how many documents will now be released.

Layered perovskite-on-silicon could boost PV efficiencies to 30 percent
by John Timmer - Jan 7, 2016 2:52pm EST

Given how fantastically cheap silicon-based photovoltaic cells have gotten, it might be hard to muster much excitement for developing any other material. But the cost of silicon-based PV has created a potential niche—it's so cheap that installation costs now dominate the price of solar power. If we could squeeze more energy out of a single installation, it could drop the costs even further.

That's one of the reasons researchers have been trying to develop perovskites. Not only are these made from chemicals that are cheap and easy to manufacture, there are indications that they can be tuned to absorb some wavelengths while allowing others to pass through to an underlying silicon photovoltaic. The big problem: they tend to decompose when exposed to intense light.

Now, an Oxford-Berlin collaboration is reporting they may have solved the decomposition problem and, in the process, accidentally made a material where they could tune the absorbance across a wide range of wavelengths. With some additional improvements, they suggest a combined silicon-perovskite cell could reach 30 percent efficiencies—up from the neighborhood of 22 for silicon alone.

Perovskites aren't actually a single material; instead, they're a variety of chemicals that all form a similar crystal structure. For photovoltaics, they're often a mix of lead, bromine or iodine, and a small nitrogen-containing organic molecule. None of these is very expensive, and it's relatively easy to form a layer of perovskite materials using bulk techniques. The best of these materials has photovoltaic efficiencies in the teens. That's lower than silicon, but expectations are that it can be brought up even higher...

NYC Settles Lawsuits Over Muslim Surveillance by Police

By Tom Hays, Associated Press

NEW YORK — Jan 7, 2016, 2:58 PM ET

The New York Police Department will strengthen safeguards against illegal surveillance of Muslims in investigations of terror threats and install a civilian representative on an advisory committee that reviews the probes under the terms of a settlement of two high-profile civil rights lawsuits, lawyers said Thursday.

The announcement of a deal following months of negotiations formally ended litigation over accusations that the nation's largest police department cast a shadow over Muslim communities with a covert campaign of religious profiling and illegal spying.

"We are committed to strengthening the relationship between our administration and communities of faith so that residents of every background feel respected and protected," Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.

The suits were among legal actions that followed reports by The Associated Press that revealed how city police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques and otherwise spied on Muslims as part of a broad effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

Slacktivism (sometimes slactivism or slackervism) is a portmanteau of the words slacker and activism. The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little physical or practical effect, other than to make the person doing it feel satisfied that they have contributed. Slacktivism can be defined as the act of showing support for a cause but only truly being beneficial to the egos of people participating in this so-called activism. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist. The underlying assumption being promoted by the term is that these low-cost efforts substitute for more substantive actions rather than supplementing them

Rep Pete Hoekstra [R-MI] calls spying "a matter of fact," he attacked a bill that would impose oversight on the NSA, and he "laughs at foreign governments who are shocked they’ve been spied on because they, too, gather information" -- except when the targets of the NSA's surveillance are Congress and Israel's leaders.

Then Hoekstra is "outraged" and wants "NSA and Obama officials... investigated and prosecuted."

This happens literally every time a Congressional spying apologist gets spied on: they freak out about privacy and the Fourth Amendment, and forget all about spying as a "fact of life" and "nothing to hide, nothing to fear."

What happened to all the dismissive lectures about how if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide? Is that still applicable? Or is it that these members of the U.S. Congress who conspired with Netanyahu and AIPAC over how to sabotage the U.S. government’s Iran Deal feel they did do something wrong and are angry about having been monitored for that reason?