I don’t care for horror flicks. I don’t find it fun to be scared. In most cases the victims do some really stupid things and avoid doing things that would obviously improve their odds of surviving until the end of the movie. However, here is a horror video that is “more like it”. Via Clayton and Arms and the Law.
Monthly Archives: July 2006
Toy guns called automatic weapons by media
Occasionaly I have some sympathy for the media. They can’t be experts on everything they write about. But this instance is just too rich. And Alan Korwin does such a good job of skewering them:
The lamestream media told you:
An armored car heist in Phoenix was committed using automatic weapons. An unknown amount of cash was stolen, and police are looking for the suspects. No shots were fired during the robbery.…
Several days later, the followup story claimed that automatic OR semiautomatic weapons MAY have been used, and suspects were in custody, increasing skepticism in those parts of the community that are awake.
Today (July 28), the headline says “Toy rifles aided three in heist,” and Bosnia-Herzegovina natives were the apparent culprits. “Fake AK-47 assault rifles” were used in combination with pepper spray. I am not making this up.
According to the report, toy fakes can be scary sounding “assault rifles.” The money has been recovered. No correction has been issued. The reporter is still at large.
Such drivel
I can’t comment authoritatively on everything this guy says but I do know at least some of it is without basis in fact. And yet he claims to be a professor. Well, I suppose really it all makes sense then:
The National Rifle Association (NRA), which makes millions of dollars through the manufacture and sales of weapons, has always opposed vigorously any law that would restrict citizens from easy access to the purchase of weapons. As a result, the United Sates has turned into a very violent society. Statistics show us that more people are killed by the gun in the United States every year than in all of the countries combined!
…
The United States is the only nation on earth that views the constitutional “right” for every citizen to bear weapons on a 24 hour basis.
News flash: The NRA doesn’t manufacture weapons, doesn’t sell weapons, and doesn’t get membership dues from firearms manufactures. They do sell advertising space to the manufactures.
News flash: England has a higher violent crime rate than the U.S. As I have said many times before here measuring violence only in terms of crimes committed with firearms is irrelevant. There is Just One Question.
News flash: He should check out the gun laws in some other countries such as Switzerland and Bolivia. They may not a have constitutionally guaranteed right to firearms but they don’t have many restrictions either. Perhaps he has and that is why he worded the statement so narrowly.
However, many people in the United States and the world at large have witnessed other types of Americans whose ultimate goal was to exploit them and to inflict in them endless pain and suffering. These are the capitalistic American industrialists who want to control the economy of every single nation on earth. Anyone that resists their domination is viewed as the enemy and they will soon ask the US government officials, whose campaign for election they financed, to punish such heads of states through boycotts and sanctions. This has been the case of Fidel Castro of Cuba who said from the very beginning, “the economy of Cuba belongs to the Cubans and not to American industrialists.”
Okay. We are done. No need to read any further. Castro’s Cuba is a workers paradise which is why so many of them risk death to flee to the U.S. The guy is clueless.
Interesting times in Cuba too
Castro is getting old and feeble. Some are even saying he is already dead. There could be fighting break out there too. A Cuba without Castro could be very interesting. It would be hard to imagine it being any worse than it is under the thumb of Castro.
Don’t be timid
One of the things we teach in self-defense classes is to not be timid. If you take an aggressive stance, preferably with a loaded large caliber firearm, your attacker is far more likely to rearrange their to-do list such that causing you harm is placed at a much lower priority than previously. On the other hand if your voice quivers and you look like you are about to break and run that increases the odds of violence being committed against you. Apparently Israel understands this:
The Israeli cabinet has agreed to widen the country’s ground offensive against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
The decision, made at a closed door session, received unanimous approval, a senior political source said.
Earlier Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ruled out an immediate truce, saying Israel would continue its offensive as long as its security was threatened.
Good for them. I hope we are giving them satellite images and/or whatever else help we can without being too overt about it. Some good deals on bombs for their warplanes wouldn’t hurt my feelings either.
America’s OTHER Department of Homeland Security
I would like to think that with last Friday’s tragic event we can wake the Jews up in this country to the benefits of sensible gun control (trigger prep, sight alignment, squeeze). Israpundit gives them a good shake here:
Now we remember why we have such little use for the Anti-Defense League: this is the same batch of Kumbaya-singers that supports gun laws like those enacted to disarm Jews in Nazi Germany and thus facilitates exactly the same kind of terroristic violence that took place last Friday.
I rather like this cartoon too:
Computer quotes
Via Samantha, a collection of computer related quotes. My favorite is this one:
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Time to go back to bed. Barb is waiting for me.
Muslim Community Reaches Out After Seattle Shooting
I realize the Israel/Lebanon situation is very stressful, to put it mildly, for Muslims. But this sort of response to the shooting at the Seattle Jewish center is a very good thing.
Thank you Shahed Amanullah.
Quote of the day–Bruce N. Mills
The sad fact is that the anti-gun lobby’s “vision” of gun control just doesn’t work. It can’t because it targets exactly the wrong group of people: law-abiding gun owners. Gun control isn’t crime control — it is only about divesting law-abiding citizens of their rights.
Bruce N. Mills
July 31, 2006
Guns and rights
Globe and Mail, Toronto Ontario
Something to work towards
My magazine changes are pretty good, but not anywhere near this good.
And the anti-gun bigots wonder why we think restricting a magazine capacity is just plain stupid as a means of reducing crime.
Dealing with James
Some time ago our son James took the Myers-Briggs temperment test and came out as an INTJ. This describes how to deal with him quite well:
- Be willing to back up your statements with facts – or at least some pretty sound reasoning.
- Don’t expect them to respect you or your viewpoints just because you say so. INTJ respect must be earned.
- Be willing to concede when you are wrong. The average INTJ respects the truth over being “right”. Withdraw your erroneous comment and admit your mistake and they will see you as a very reasonable person. Stick to erroneous comments and they will think you are an irrational idiot and treat everything you say as being questionable.
- Try not to be repetitive. It annoys them.
- Do not feed them a line of bull.
- Expect debate. INTJs like to tear ideas apart and prove their worthiness. They will even argue a point they don’t actually support for the sake of argument.
- Do not mistake the strength of your conviction with the strength of your argument. INTJs do not need to believe in a position to argue it or argue it well. Therefore, it will take more than fervor to sway them.
- Do not be surprised at sarcasm.
- Remember that INTJs believe in workable solutions. They are extremely open-minded to possibilities, but they will quickly discard any idea that is unfeasible. INTJ open-mindedness means that they are willing to have a go at an idea by trying to pull it apart. This horrifies people who expect oohs and ahhs and reverence. The ultimate INTJ insult to an idea is to ignore it, because that means it’s not even interesting enough to deconstruct.
This also means that they will not just accept any viewpoint that is presented to them. The bottom line is “Does it work?” – end discussion.- Do not expect INTJs to actually care about how you view them. They already know that they are arrogant bastards with a morbid sense of humor. Telling them the obvious accomplishes nothing.
Ahh…. that is my boy!
Friends in the news
Barb and I bumped into a friend today and we innocently asked “What have you been up to?”. Our innocence was taken away when he said he and his girlfriend just got back from Las Vegas where they attended the Lifestyle conference. There were 3000 people there. That’s a very big sex party.
He reported they both had a really good time.
Closing the gap
I participated in a steel match at the Lewiston Pistol Club last weekend. I just posted the results on the Lewiston Pistol Club web site. Although the same people are ahead of me that were ahead of me last month I’ve closed the gap some. I really need to start shooting while I’m in the Seattle area during the week.
Keeping your numbers straight
Continuing my watch on the enemy I found Washington Ceasefire does a very interesting dance with numbers. From their Gun Facts page:
- Last year in the United States, approximately 214 children died from accidental shootings and more than 1,000 suffered from non-fatal firearm injuries.
- In 2001, there were 14,571 kids injured by a firearm.
- Every 7.5 hours a child or teen was killed in a firearm-related accident or suicide in 2000.
At first glance you think they aren’t consistent. After all if a child was killed every 7.5 hours you would have almost 1200 dead in a year instead of the 214 on the first line. But the first line just references accidental shootings. The last line includes suicides, justifiable and praiseworthy homicides, and is for a different year as well. And doesn’t injury in the second line include those killed? Well… probably the 1,000 in the first line refers only to accidental shooting that were not fatal and again it’s for a different year. And “injured by a firearm” would include injuries on the “non-business” end of the gun such as “scope eye” from shooting a rifle with your face too close the to scope and recoil from firing cause it to hit your face (typically just above your eye).
And it’s interesting to me they spend most of their time on “kids and guns”. Apparently they are shooting for maximum emotional appeal.
The numbers they should be looking for are the ones that answer Just One Question.
Watching the enemy
I just browsed over to the Brady Bunch website and found them claiming in a recent press release that lax gun laws increase the violent crime:
Weak gun laws have not made Florida a leader in fighting crime: Arguably, they have helped to make it one of the two most violent states in the Nation.
They, of course, cherry-picked their states. They should have looked at my post on the Brady “Report Card” versus crime rates. But maybe they did and that is why they chose to cherry-pick their states.
Virtual babe
Friday night I met Barb in the Tri-Cities and the next day we visited her aunt and uncle before driving back to the Seattle area to visit our Jewish friends (Randy and his new wife Kim). On the three plus hour drive alone I figured it would be appropriate to listen to some of Randy’s music. So I listened to the album Slop. I found myself very pleased with the combination of technology and sex in the song Virtual Babe (WMA, 1.34 MB).
Anti-gun bigotry
I have never been able to get an answer from these type of people. They say things like this:
As for Australia, a study from Oxford University Press states: “Despite reports of a crime wave in Australia following recent restrictions on the private ownership of firearms, evidence actually shows sweeping reductions in gun-related death, injury, and crime.” (Small Arms Survey 2004 Yearbook, June 2004)
The results in Australia are important because more than 700,000 guns were removed from the community (the equivalent figure in the USA would be 40 million guns). No other nation had ever attempted anything on this scale. In the country’s leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, the question was asked, “So, ten years later, can we see a difference?” The answer was resoundingly, yes. The results are in: Australia’s tightened gun controls have been followed by remarkable reductions in gun deaths.
It is true that in an area that arouses such passions as gun control, statistics are a minefield because of the difficulty in comparing like with like. But in all the stuff that came my way as a result of what I wrote, one point stood out: “Stick to apples and apples: real gun violence versus real gun violence.
It just doesn’t seem to matter to them that the violent crime rate can go up as long as the crime rate where guns were used goes down. A million people a month could be killed with machetes because their guns were taken away from them (Rwanda) and that’s better than if a few people were killed with guns.
These people have mental problems.
This is going to make their heads spin
Scientists have created artificial sperm from stem cells. Similar techniques can probably be used to create artificial eggs. Hence:
..it may even prove possible to produce sperm from female stem cells, and eggs from male ones, allowing homosexual couples to have children that bear the genes of both parents.
This would also enable a single man or woman to provide both the sperm and eggs needed to create an embryo, so that a person could essentially mate with himself or herself.
This means the arguments based on “marriage is about raising children” currently used against homosexual marriage may soon fall by the wayside. I always found those arguments weak anyway. Do supporters of that argument think that a woman past child bearing age should not be allowed to marry either? Or what of a man that is sterile? My view is that if two (or more) people want to get married to each other and spend their lives together then what’s the problem? Where’s the victim?
Quote of the day–Jeff Cooper
Remember when Kennesaw, Georgia, made it mandatory for all households to be armed, and the media viewed this with dismay? Well note further that in Kennesaw, Georgia, where there used to be very little armed violence, there now seems to be none.
What was it that Heinlein said about an armed society?
Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 3, No. 1
13 January 1995
[Barb, James, and I spent the evening last night with some Jewish friends that are loosely associated with the Jewish center that was shot up on Friday. More Jews need to be armed in this country when (not if) they are attacked again the response needs to be immediate and decisive. This will reduce future attacks. Taking a 13 year old girl hostage and shooting a pregnant women is a cowardly thing to do. It wouldn’t take much display of force to convince cowards such as these to reconsider their actions. I also give my endorsement of some Muslims condemning the attack and expressing sympathy for the victims.–Joe]
New contributor
The View From North Central Idaho has a new contributor. Lyle from UltiMAK. Lyle’s UltiMAK facility is almost reachable with a good slingshot from my house. I have known Lyle for many years now. He’s been to numerous Boomershoots. I can’t tell you the number of times we have spent hours talking about all the problems of the world and how to solve them. He is has also left the most comments on this blog. And most importantly I can’t recall every disagreeing with any of his views. Hence his contributions to this blog are almost for certain going to be very compatible with mine.
Ry and I both have been very impressed with some of Lyle’s ideas and the way he has expressed them. There are some excellent essays he as written but they usually only get distributed in email to a few of his friends. With this new outlet that should change.
Lyle, thanks for coming on-board.