Vin Suprynowicz

In the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty’s father fails to follow the common-sense course — sending soldiers to arrest the evil fairy, warning her that if any harm comes to his daughter through that malevolent curse concerning sewing needles, said fairy would have her wings plucked and find herself locked up in a dark place for a long time.

Instead, the king attempts to ban all sewing needles from his kingdom. Brilliant. We all know how that worked out.

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So now a unanimous citizen jury has agreed with Sanford, Fla. police chief Bill Lee (fired for resisting political lynch mobs and refusing to file baseless charges — http://tinyurl.com/l5bch6w) and the state prosecutor who first investigated neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman’s fatal 2012 shooting of black teen-ager Trayvon Martin.

The jury listened to the eye-witness, considered the corroborating physical evidence, compared that to a set of prosecution witnesses that left defense attorneys with little to do but raise their arms and shout Hallelujah, and ruled no crime was committed by the 28-year-old resident of the gated Twin Lakes community.

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I see where retired astronaut Mark Kelly and his wife, brain-damaged former Arizona Congresscritter Gabrielle Giffords, are criss-crossing the country, traveling with an extended staff “resembling that of a political campaign” in private planes and helicopters, trying to stir up state-by-state support for more laws designed to make it harder for law-abiding Americans to buy and keep guns — part of a planned $20 million fund-raising effort by their “Americans for Responsible Solutions.”

Yes, I know those crying for ever more rigorous “background checks” and other permits and fees say making things harder for law-abiding gun owners is not their goal.

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The statists may have failed on the federal level to enact new anti-gun measures this year, but their farm teams in the state legislatures are stepping into the breach.

In April, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy signed new legislation that adds more than 100 firearms to the state’s so-called “assault weapons” ban (none of the guns on the list are actually assault weapons, since none can be set to fire full-auto.) The law also creates what officials have called the nation’s “first dangerous weapon offender registry” as well as “eligibility rules” for buying any rifle, shotgun or ammunition.

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Every once in awhile Harry Reid realizes another six years have sped by. He then feels obliged, like a salmon seeking out the quiet stream of its birth, to fly to Nevada.

Here, he temporarily dons a new pair of blue jeans and gets himself photographed a) sitting on a hay bale, and/or b) holding a .22-caliber rifle with which he contends he once shot a rabbit.

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Attempts to contact Vin at his former work email address or phone number may appear to go unanswered. Ditto, possibly, with snail mail … we haven’t checked. But it does seem that emails sent to him are going into a black hole somewhere — and the answering machine will take a message though he’ll never get it. He’s not ignoring you.

Surely an oversight on the part of his former employer, but it does create an awkward situation.

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The daily paper as you’ve known it is going the way of the drive-in movie, the party line, and black-and-white TV.

The financial reasons are well known: The Internet and tax-subsidized direct mail have sucked up much of the advertising revenue — by providing better, more efficient targeting — and significantly altered the business models of many former large advertisers. (In fact, when customers use your store merely to check out merchandise that they then rush home and purchase for less, online, the advertisers themselves are doomed. See “Circuit City.”)

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The Mojave Desert Tortoise is listed by the federal government as a “threatened” species, which allows extreme environmentalists and their co-religionist government thugs to impose restrictions on land use by humans in Southern Nevada, supposedly to protect the tortoise’s delicate wild habitat.

Anyone not familiar with this particular exercise in lunacy might draw the conclusion that the tortoise prospers only in untouched arid desert, that upon sight of an approaching human or cow, let alone a human-generated dirt road or house or barn, the poor reptiles just roll over and shiver until they die of fright.

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The discredited Left can find little to say, save that she was “divisive.” How refreshing, then, to hear the enthusiasm in the equally widespread reports that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday at age 87, managed in her remarkable 11-year tenure at Downing Street to vanquish socialism and restore the free market to Britain.

She was indeed a remarkable leader who did what many considered impossible. Unfortunately, these good-hearted reports could seem to declare victory in a struggle yet ongoing.

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Nevada voters approved medical marijuana at the polls, placing it in the state constitution in the year 2000 and instructing “The Legislature shall provide by law for … appropriate methods for supply of the plant to patients authorized to use it.”

Now, sick Nevadans can pay a $150 fee and acquire a physician’s recommendation for the medicinal plant. Then — they can’t get any.

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