The Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the court with jurisdiction over the Western United States) released a decision today (PDF) in Peruta v. San Diego striking down a California requirement for showing "good cause" to obtain a firearm carry permit, affirming that to "bear arms" is as much of a protected right as keeping them.
This week the Sheriff's Auxiliary is scrambling to make last minute preparations for our Apple Butter Makin' Days deployment. Apple Butter Makin' Days is Lawrence County's largest annual festival, held in Mount Vernon with attendance of approximately 25,000 people. Although the festival is exciting and a big draw for the city, it places a huge burden on emergency planners which could not be met without the help of many volunteers. This year the LCSA is deploying under the Mount Vernon Police to assist in parade and night security patrols during the festival weekend, resulting in long hours on graveyard shifts.
The bulk order of radio handsets (or at least the first set of radios for the community purchasers) have arrived! Some of you may even have gotten yours by now and may be wondering what in the heck to do with them. This post will start to answer that question and we (the local emergency response community) will provide (free) classes in the near future to get you further down the road (keep reading).
The Sheriff's Auxilary will be providing a tutorial session at the upcoming USAPrepares expo in Lebannon, Missouri (6-7 April) on how to start a county Sheriff's auxiliary. This will be a nuts and bolts presentation on the type of paperwork needed, staffing requirements, how long you can expect it to take, how to write the mission statement and so forth, with access to additional resources.
The Lawrence County Sheriff, along with several other Missouri Sheriff's, has sent a letter to President Obama regarding current gun control iniatives. The original letter was drafted by Sheriff Charles Heiss of Johnson County, which each Sheriff has personalized.
This letter underscores the position of the Lawrence County Sheriff's Auxiliary regarding the Right To Keep and Bear Arms.
Susan Drollinger (a NCO in the LCS Auxiliary) sent me this link to an article about the San Bernadino, CA City Attorney telling residents to "lock their doors" and "load their guns" at a city council meeting in response to dramatic shortages of police officers. In character, the economic crisis in San Bernadino leading to the staff shortages are no different than what is going on in Springfield or for that matter, the budgetary stresses in all cities and counties across the US at this moment. The problem this official addresses is real.
We offer a better solution.
We have a number of training opportunities upcoming, including a CCW class, local CERT Training, the Portable Radio Fundamentals, CERT Train-the-Trainer, and Disaster POD training. Read on for details. Updated 6 Nov: filled in details on 2-way radio training. CCW
Over the next few days, the LCSA website will move to a new server in order to make maintenance easier. During this time, you may have difficulty connecting to the website as various nameservers throughout the Internet are updated. Service should resume as normal after this period. The Google Apps account and email used internally by the Auxiliary staff should not be affected.
Updated 17 October:
We received the brushed-metal name plates this afternoon. They are currently in the care of the Quartermaster. We ended up getting a good deal on the nametags at roughly $6 ea. with the custom logo. We (the Voughts) paid for them out of pocket and would not mind getting the money back, at the very least to put into future orders.
This month, the Lawrence County Sheriff's Auxiliary will have its first field deployment exercise, Operation Earwax, timed to coincide with the National Amateur Radio (Ham) Field Day. The purpose of the exercise will be group training and operational test of field equipment (communications, power, etc).
