Millions for charity but not one cent for gun-grabbing church bureaucrats!
John Snyder
Press release from St. Gabriel Possenti Society (Patron Saint of handgunners)
Titled: Stop Gun-Grabbing Church Bureaucrats with Pro-Gun Coupons in Church Collection Baskets
As I mentioned last week (and here) I interviewed for two different positions and both groups were interested in hiring me. Our son James interviewed with two other groups with the same company the Friday before (March 3rd). Then last Friday (March 10th) James got an email saying both the groups he interviewed with were also interested in him and he has to make a decision between them. And no, I didn’t have anything to do with him getting the interviews nor did he interview in the same groups as I did.
James will graduate from the University of Idaho with a B.S. in Computer Science this spring (currently he has a 4.0/4.0 GPA) and so it’s not surprising he would do well on the job interview front. We are very proud of him and assuming he accepts an offer from them we will be pleased he will be working close by.
Xenia is back together with her old boyfriend, John. Much to my surprise one of my favorite jokes, calling him “Xenia’s John”, has gotten old for some people in our family. I can’t imagine why this is but I’m willing to abide by daughter’s wishes. He does seem to be a pretty nice kid and I don’t have any objections to him dating my daughter. Being that I’m not all that good with social skills I need some hints on dealing with new social situations. I am therefore very pleased to see Xenia post in her Live Journal detailed information on how to make someone feel part of the family. I would have never have guessed. I can’t wait to follow Zanita’s lead in making John comfortable in our house.
You don’t hurt ’em if you don’t hit ’em.
Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller
USMC
1962
From Marine Corps Quotes
[Making a case for accurate rifles and ammo?–Joe]
Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion…in private self-defense.
James Madison
I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
George Bernard Shaw
1992 Daily Curmudgeon Calendar
[Sometimes life is a bummer.–Joe]
That’s kind of like the ACLU giving people who believe in freedom of speech a D in the First Amendment.
Linn Armstrong
A National Rifle Association handgun instructor
Grand Valley Colorado
March 10, 2006
After the Brady Bunch gave Colorado a ‘D’ grade on “gun safety”.
I got a call from a recruiter for one of the jobs I interviewed for this week. She said both groups want me. The company policy is that the two groups won’t compete for me. I have to choose which job I want and then that group will make me an offer. “Most people would kill to be in your position” she said.
One of my fellow contractor co-workers is all bubbly and just gushing over the situation vicariously. She can’t figure out why I’m not jumping up and down in excitement. I’m not entirely sure why I’m not. It’s not really my personality type. Although there have been events which got me pretty excited when my goals were realized (the audio of one is here the background is here). And other thing is that I have to make a choice and disappoint someone. Maybe it’s not that big of a deal in the big scheme of things but it’s important to me. I told both groups I wanted the job, which is true, but I have to tell one of them that I want another group more than them. I’m “rejecting someone”. That’s not pleasant for me even though I know “the company” is not the same as a person and holds zero compassion toward individuals in the cases where the situation is reversed. It’s not really rational but it’s the way it is. Barb and I have talked about similar things before. As we learned again with the bigots at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory we have too often given our employers more loyalty and more of ourselves than they deserve. I expect this will happen, at least to a certain extent again here. I’m hoping to stay here until I retire but I had similar plans at PNNL before I found out the depth of their bigotry extended to them being willing to commit felonies against me. I have friends at this company and it will be easy to settle in and be at ease but I’ll try not to give so much of myself that it will not be so incredibly painful if I have to move on for some reason.
Another issue is that I probably don’t have the doubts some people do about whether they are “good enough”. I was pretty sure I had what it took. I just needed a chance where people could overlook my age and my history with PNNL. I’m climbing back up the ladder and getting in a position to deal with the bigots. I have the drive, the smarts, and strength of will to deal with almost any obstacle put in my path. Reaching this goal isn’t a surprise to me.
So to sum up my late night ramblings I think the bottom line is that even though I’m not bubbling with happiness I’m content. I wouldn’t kill to be here because I knew wouldn’t be necessary for me.
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors–and miss.
Lazarus Long
A character in Robert Henlien’s book Time Enough for Love
Yesterday I arrived at 8:45 and left at 17:40. Nearly nine hours interviewing for a new job. I’m not sure how many people I talked to. In my mind they merged into a blur of coding tests on the white-board. “Write your own version of malloc() and free().” “Implement a function that converts a ASCII string into a floating point number.” “Reverse the order of the words in a string. Do it in place–without allocating more memory.” “Find the first unique character in a string.” “Write the test cases for your code.” “What is the big O of your solution? Can you do it better?” Those are just the ones I remember. My right arm went weak from writing on the white-board for so many hours. I remember the easiest question though. “What gets you up in the morning?” “My wife”, I answered.
Update: I’ve been getting calls and email asking how it went. It went well. Only the smallest of glitches. The 8.5 hours of interviews with eight different people today in a different group was generally easier except for one technical question that I severely crashed and burned on.
And the toughest question yesterday? “Show me a cure for spam email. You have 45 minutes.”
Reno tells us that the weapon is totally safe, the finger was off the trigger.
I now know I’ll never need a trigger lock if I just keep my finger off the trigger.
“Lee Enfield”
Regarding the raid the took Elian from his relatives and back in the hands of his Cuban father.
The Liberals are the flying saucers of politics. No one can make head nor tail of them and they never are seen twice in the same place.
John G. Diefenbaker
They are pulling the plug on the gun and gun owner registry in Canada and the nationwide long gun registry (handguns have all been confiscated–except those owned by the criminals) in the UK can’t get off the ground after ten years. Details are here:
Dunblane gun crackdown ‘a failure’
ALMOST a decade after the Dunblane massacre, ministers have been accused of an “abject failure” to crack down on the number of firearms in circulation. Tories have joined Labour MPs, gun-control campaigners and peers in condemning the government over the National Firearms Register, which was promised after Dunblane but will not be delivered for at least another year.
The need to establish a searchable, nationwide computer system to track those who hold firearms licences was established after Thomas Hamilton’s murderous attack on Dunblane Primary School on March 13, 1996.
Several investigations, including the inquiry led by Lord Cullen, found disparities in the records of legally held firearms maintained by police forces across the country. Hamilton had legal certificates allowing him to own the guns.
Legislation paving the way for the register of certificates was rushed through Parliament during Tony Blair’s first days in office in 1997, but the project has since become bogged down by a succession of technical problems.
The Home Office and police chiefs have since reversed the plan for a standalone firearms register, opting instead to link it to the Police National Computer. That will not happen until March 2007 at the earliest.
More details are here:
Pilots highlighted “data quality issues” which have yet to be ironed out, much to the anger of campaigners such as Dr Mick North, father of five-year-old victim Sophie.
Chief Constable Bernard Hogan-Howe told the Jonathan Dimbleby programme that there had been “great progress” in gun control but admitted that 10 years was “too long” for the register.
He said: “I understand that they’ve had two pilots and we’re told that there are IT problems to actually resolving it, but I’m with Dr North in the sense that 10 years on, this is too long.
“We want it, there’s certainly no resistance from the police service to have it and clearly what we do need is a register of all the people with a licence and we certainly need a register of those people who have applied for a licence and had it refused because the danger is they apply to one force, fail, and then re-apply to another.”
The establishment of a searchable database of everyone who holds a firearms certificate, or who has ever applied for one, was one of the central demands of the campaign for greater gun control that followed the Dunblane massacre in 1996.
It was promised by Prime Minister Tony Blair to members of the Snowdrop Campaign, set up by victims’ families to call for tighter gun controls.
About £5.5 million has so far been spent on setting up the register, which will be piloted once again in May.
“Great progress” in gun control? They make that claim when the number of crimes committed with guns has skyrocketed? Oh yeah, I forgot that’s not how they measure progress. They measure progress by how few people can legally own firearms, not how often guns are used criminally. These people have mental problems.
This delay is yet another example of Home Office inability to operate computer systems, and if they cannot get a relatively simple system for a firearms register like this to work so many years after such an awful disaster, what hope is there for the vast system needed to make identity cards work?
Alistair Carmichael
Orkney and Shetland MP
March 5, 2006
Dunblane gun crackdown ‘a failure’
News.Scotsman.com
[There is no hope of a system of national identity cards working. If you have doubts read this.–Joe]
I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Literature
Rumbles
We were recently treated to a bizarre exchange between a hapless Englishman and some BATchick in some front office in Washington. Our English friend was inquiring about bringing his arms into the United States, and was told that he could not import a Peacemaker (Colt Single-action Army) because it had no “legitimate sporting purpose!” Now, apart from the fact that “legitimate sporting purpose” is a blatantly unconstitutional interpretation of the Second Amendment, it is apparent that these poor souls who are confined to the District of Columbia cannot keep up with the times. Clearly the girl involved had not heard of the proliferation of “Cowboy Action Shooting.” I stuck my oar in to tell her that this sort of bureaucratic behavior gives ignorance a bad name. I guess I can expect the black helicopters any night now.
Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 5, No. 5
April 1997
I’m all for religious tolerance as long as they are also tolerant of others. I’m intolerant of intolerance. The Supreme Court of Canada just made an important ruling with an 8-0 victory for freedom and tolerance. I think it’s time for some Canadian gun owners to start a new religion to “push the envelope” just a little bit more for the cause of freedom. Here are the details on the ruling:
For nearly five years, Gurbaj Singh has argued that he has a legal right under religious freedom to wear a ceremonial dagger to school.
The Supreme Court of Canada now agrees with him.
In a unanimous 8-0 decision yesterday, the top court sided with Singh, now 17, that a Montreal school board went too far in banning his wearing of a Sikh kirpan, stating that it is an infringement on religious freedom that “cannot be justified” under the Charter of Rights.
The Illinois State Rifle Association walloped the Brady Bunch, etc. yesterday in a news release:
The very foundations of the gun control movement were rocked today by the results of a survey taken by the National Association of Chiefs of Police (NACOP). In a nutshell, the survey shows that the nation’s top law enforcement officers believe that average citizens can be trusted to responsibly own firearms; that criminals ignore gun control laws; and that concealed carry laws reduce crime.
These revelations come as a stark contrast to gun control movement propaganda that asserts that police officials feel that our streets would be safer if law-abiding citizens were disarmed.
Specifically, the survey revealed that 93 percent of chiefs and sheriffs felt that citizens should be able to purchase firearms for sport and self defense; 73 percent opposed so-called “one gun a month” laws; 96 percent believed that criminals ignore gun control laws and; 63 percent supported laws that allow citizens to carry defensive firearms as a means to control crime.
The complete survey can be found here.
Keep the pressure up. We need to politically exterminate these bigots.
For them, a gun is a symbol of power and potency… The gun has replaced the spear as a phallic symbol.
Peter Mwaura
Nairobi
The Nation
Owning a Gun Sign of Power And Success
February 25, 2006
[I get rather annoyed at people that believe they can read the minds of others and invariably fail. This guy is no exception. In all likelihood it is Mwaura that has the mental problems. Thanks to Jeff for the pointer.–Joe]
By the time of the nation’s tricentennial, there will be more government workers in the United States than there are workers.
Norman R. Augustine
From: “Defense Systems Management Review”