At Pine and Divisadero on Wednesday afternoon, a man severely slashed a woman with a box cutter (some reports we saw said she might die, while others said the wounds were not life-threatening); the cops subsequently caught him.

A police officer in Oakland shot a man to death yesterday afternoon at 54th and MLK, where a number of shootings have occurred recently. The officer confronted the man for reasons that they declined to specify to the media, and a fight broke out. After the officer's attempts to taser the suspect didn't work, the suspect reached into his waistband, at which point the officer shot him. The suspect was later found to have a loaded handgun in his possession.

And hey! Remember all those women pretending to live at Stanford when they didn't really? Well, Azia Kim (the girl who pretended to be a freshman and got away with it for almost a whole school year, by sneaking into dorms through open windows and just pretending she always lost her ID card) still hasn't heard from the Santa Clara DA's office, despite Stanford's saying they were going to press charges for trespass. Santa Clara says they're still waiting on paperwork from the Stanford PD. Elizabeth Okasaki, on the other hand, the other squatter who had been living in a Stanford physics building for four years, moved to UCLA and their music library, pretending to be a grad student in the "philosophy of music." UCLA managed to evict her after only four months, in part due to a suspicious administrator who had heard about Okasaki's time at Stanford.

First up is this story from San Jose about a crazy guy, an ambulance, a carjacking, and a stolen police car. Apparently this one guy was picked up for psychiatric care (it's unknown at the time for what) when on the way to the hospital, he tried to take control of the ambulance. When the driver fought him off and stopped the ambulance to call the police, he escaped. While running he saw a couple trying to fix a flat tire in a parking lot and despite his being on the lam, actually stopped to help them fix it. Which he did, but when the cops showed up, he hopped into the car and drove off. A block later, he got out of the car, got into a fight with one of the pursuing cops, and managed to get into the cop's car and ride off on that, with the cop still hanging onto the door of the car. The guy drove around in circles, again with the cop still hanging on, before being apprehended. He is being charged with auto theft, attempted auto theft, attempting to take a police officer's handgun and carjacking a police car.

Next up is something that happened on HWY 4 by Pittsburg. Apparently, the CHP tried to pull over a driver for being DUI. The car, which turned out to be stolen, stopped but the driver wouldn't let the cops in. So the cops tried to break into the car, causing the driver to get out and run. The driver ran back-and-forth between the westbound lanes of traffic and the center median before he was struck and killed by another driver. That driver then sped off, turning the accident into a hit-and-run.

In 2002, nearly 10 in every 100,000 Californians died at the hands of a firearm, for a totaly of 3,410 deaths according to the Center for Disease Control and Injury Prevention. In 1999, using the same CDC data, Handgun Control noted that more Americans were killed by firearms between 1979 and 1997 than were killed in battle in every war waged by America. Finally, a study by the Journal of Trauma pointed out that guns at home were 22 times more likely to result in an unintentional death than to injure or kill an attacker in self-defense.

But we weren't surprised by the story of a lesbian couple in the Mission with matching nines and a Winchester rifle anxious that their guns might be taken away from them, even though the main subject of the story is from England, where the incidence of gun violence is negligible when compared to the United States. We totally understand the fear that can grip groups marginalized by discrimination. Hence our support of second amendment rights. It's one of the few things the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan can agree on.

The problem is, there's a big difference between a jittery person in a rough neighborhood and a well-regulated militia. What's good for the goose is not always good for the gander, and statistics have shown that a handgun in the home is much more likely to kill someone accidently, be stolen, used in a suicide or escalate an encounter from a property crime to a mortal crime than it will save you. Of course criminals will always have access to weapons, and of course you have a right to defend yourself. We bet you could trade that Glock in for a nice double-barrelled, pump-action 12 Gauge. Hey, they're banned in combat by the Geneva Convention, they can't be all bad.

Good ol' Chris Daly -- in an interview with the NY Times about Proposition H (reduces swelling), he said about the anti-H forces, "I'm crazy, but they're crazier." (Special bonus quote from the article: Daly is described as "a self-described far-left progressive." Yes he is!)

Well, Daly may or may not be proven right as the NRA rumbles into town, so upset about the 58% yes on H vote that they filed suit directly in the state appellate court. Why don't they have to go through the Superior Court like everyone else, huh? They shoot their way in or something?

Prop. H prohibits any SF resident from owning a handgun, and will require that everyone turn in their guns by April 1, 2006. Second Amendment advocates are claiming that the law makes us unsafer, would require cops to go gun-free, and would prohibit people from using guns in opera productions. Daly says police are exempt and operas and school plays can just use toy guns. Dennis Herrera, fresh from his 98% victory (almost as popular as Saddam Hussein!), says he's confident the city as a local municipality can regulate guns however it wants.