The View From North Central Idaho

I've long a been a critic of airport “security” measures.  But I think the Federal Air Marshal concept has a lot of validity.  I have reservations about the constitutionality of government supplied security for private enterprise, but the functionality of having highly trained, undercover, armed guards seems to be beyond rational criticism.  And of course if something should work you can probably count on the government finding a way to mess it up.  The FAM program is no exception to this general rule.  Michelle Malkin has been following the mess the program is in and reports the potential for Director Thomas Quinn to soon be fired or to resign under pressure.  My favorite option, allowing all passengers to carry defensive weapons on board any flight, isn't likely to happen anytime soon and having an effective FAM program is probably the most politically acceptable of the various potentially effective options for airplane security.  The sooner we can get the FAM program to be effective the better.  Besides, my 18 year old daughter says she wants to be FAM.  And although she can shoot a handgun she isn't anywhere near up to the level she needs to be; FAM handgun qualifications are the most demanding of any law enforcement agency in the country.  We are going to the range on Sunday to start her education.  I expect it will take a year to get her up to speed.  She is an incredibly strong willed person and if she really wants this I know she has the physical and mental strength to accomplish it.  We'll see what happens in the next few months as I chart her progress.

As I mentioned the other day I had dinner with a friend last week.  He commented on the insanity of Bush's State of the Union speech if you read between the lines.  I got a comment on that post defending Bush which I didn't bother to respond to in public.  I am in close agreement with Bush on the issue and it coming from this particular friend of mine it shouldn't really be considered as disagreement with the “Bush Doctrine“.  My friend is well aware that he cannot claim any high ground on the issue of sanity.  His solution for winning the war on terror is a case in point:

1. We tell the residents of Medina we are going to nuke the city in two weeks.  Anyone that believes Allah will save them or prevent it should stay.
2. Medina is converted to glass on schedule.
3. We tell the world that if so much as a US pizza restaurant is bombed we will nuke a city in response.  As soon as we find a piece of a turban or a scrap of their beard another city will be converted to glass ASAP and without warning.

We had enough nukes to deal with Russia so we sure as hell have enough to deal with the Arabs.

I suggested perhaps the Muslim extremist psychology might not respond in the same way that he expected.  His response was:

Their psychology has been adequate for them to survive for the last thousand years.  This is about their survival.  They will figure it out or they will cease to exist, either way we win.

His solution for dealing with the existence of Osama bin Laden is similar in that it is simple, ruthless, and nuclear.

I am always looking for better explosives for the Boomershoot and the other day someone suggested nitroglycerine.  I told him no, it's just too hazardous to work with.  While following up on idea for something else I ran across this story which I have to share:

In the 1920's and 1930's, liquid nitroglycerine was used for "shooting" oil wells to stimulate production. The productive formation might have a large porosity, so it held a lot of oil, but might be relatively impermeable, or "tight," so the oil would not flow into the small hole with sufficient speed. In limestone, hydrochloric acid was often used, but this was not useful in sandstones. By exploding from 2 to 200 quarts of nitroglycerine, the rock could be fractured for a considerable distance, greatly enlarging the surface through with the oil would flow, equivalent to making a much larger hole. The "shooter" drove alone in a Ford coupe, with the "soup" in the back where the rumble seat used to be, from his source of supply. Nitroglycerine could not be commercially shipped, of course. He poured the "soup" into tin "torpedoes" and lowered them one by one, each fitting into the top of the one below. On the top went a time fuze that ticked away and exploded the charge at a reasonable interval. Then everyone filtered back to the well from their places of refuge. Occasionally, all did not go well, but the "shooters" were well paid and their widows had insurance. There are few graves of "shooters."

Ultimately, people will have to be controlled directly. The only open question is whether it will be the "jackboot" model (1984) or the "soma" model (Brave New World). Soma's ahead by just a nose as they round the turn...

Scott Meredith
Upon hearing that there is a push to register air guns in the UK.
May 10, 2000 9:23 AM

Kim du Toit just pledged the following:

When these boys come home, and I pray they will all come home, I will be there at Ft. Lewis to welcome them. 

Any of you who want to join me on that happy day are welcome to do so. No, I don’t know when it is: maybe later this year, maybe early next year—but I will be there when it happens, regardless of personal inconvenience.

These boys have become our boys, and that’s all there is to it.

I'm pledging the same with the possible exception of pressing government business I need to attend to.  Please join us if you can.

This is the kind of adventure that is better when it is over.

Barbara Scott
September 24, 2000
About 3:00 AM while traversing a narrow, gravel, poorly mantained road in the middle of West Virgina (Dolly Sods) trying to find the way to a time-share condo.

For some reason my blog comes up on top for a number of search terms with the search engines.  Due to the referrals I was seeing I noticed that searching for Josh Sugarmann on either MSN search or google puts The View From North Central Idaho at the top of the list.  It was this post that did it.

Josh Sugarmann, for those that don't know, is the Executive Director at Violence Policy Center, is the author of this book, and was the brains behind the assault weapon ban.  Wow!  Someone looking for information on Mr. Sugarmann ends up looking at my propaganda on freedom, guns, and explosives.  I love the irony.

Here are some data points:

• More Than 2,000 Demonstrate at Iraqi Bombing Site
• bin Laden encouraged Zarqawi and his group to focus on attacks inside the United States
• Lebanese Cheer Collapse of Syrian-led Government
• Syria cooperating with Iraq authorities
• Democratic moves snowballing across Mideast

From this last article:

Under the combined impact of US pressure and rumblings on the home front, democratic moves have snowballed across the Middle East in recent weeks and brought in timid changes to Arab regimes fearful of reform.

Egypt has become the latest country to break with the autocratic order that has come to define regional politics and make a small concession to a cautious yet unprecedented democratic push.

President Hosni Mubarak took Egyptians and the rest of the world by surprise Saturday when he proposed multi-candidate direct presidential polls, replacing a 50-year-old system whereby a single candidate was vetted by the army before being submitted to a popular vote.

The fact that there are thousands of protesters against the terrorists in Iraq is a very good sign and I suspect this attitude is a good part of the reason why bin Laden is telling his top commander in Iraq to move his area of operations to the U.S.  They have lost the battle in Iraq and they know it.  Syria is trying to play friendly with the US and Iraq as their power wanes.  Egypt claims to be moving towards freedom.  Iran is a concern but overall it's almost all good news from the Middle East.

I, as well as most other people that watch these sort of things, are amazed we haven't had another attack on U.S. soil since 9-11.  That bit of good fortune may change as the extremists realize they aren't going to win in Iraq.  But we got nearly four years of preparation in before they decided to focus their sights on us again.  I just hope our intelligence network is working well enough to stop the vast majority of the attempts on our homeland.  That reminds me--I should go visit the guy upstairs to see if the stuff I have been giving him has been ignored or put to good use.

I will tell dispatch to hold the SWAT team.

John Willard
President, Clearwater Country Sheriff's Posse
Reserve Deputy for Clearwater County
April 14, 1999
This was in response to Joe Huffman asking him if he would let the Sheriff know about the Boomershoot before the neighbors did. John participated in the fun.

I did a lot of preparation for Boomershoot 2005 this weekend.  I finished up reducing the volume of the 8“ target bodies so the neighbors don't have so much stuff falling off the walls.  I didn't do all the 8“ target bodies, just more than enough for this event.  I changed my method to do this.  The egg cartons were just too time consuming.  I switched to using the expanding sealing foam used in home repair.  It was much, much faster even if it was more expensive.  Here is a picture of some of the target bodies:

Also note the colors of the lids at the base of the stack of target bodies. I'm painting them different colors to help the shooter/spotter teams identify which target they are talking about.  There will be a white as well as the yellow, red, and “cardboard brown” shown in the picture above.  I have painted all the yellow and red lids I need for the 8“ targets just the white lids remain.  I'll do the six inch lids and the rest of the 8“ lids sometime in March.

These are the new 4” targets we will be using for the main event on Sunday.  These are cardboard boxes with internal dimensions of 4x4x2 inches.  These targets will hold slightly more of the “reactive recipe“ than the old 4“ diameter targets did.  They come from the factory white so there will only be the three colors of them.  The clinic will use up the last of the 4” diameter targets with the plastic lids we used last year.

In other news I just sent in the comments from a number of proof readers (family and friends) on a article that is being written for a shooting magazine on the Boomershoot by someone that has attended the last two events.  It looks really good but we don't know for certain if the magazine will actually publish it or not.  I doubt that it will appear before this years event so it probably won't help attendance this year but it might for next year.

Next weekend, assuming the weather is favorable, we will be doing a bunch of experiments with new mixes to increase the sensitivity and reliability of detonation.  Then on the 27th of March we have a “private party“ to put on.  This is going to be a busy month for Boomershoot stuff.

I got an inquiry from someone in Wisconsin this weekend.  He will be a first from that state if he is able to make it.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Aristotle

Later in life, when mortar rounds were dropping around him, Brother said he didn't mind a bit.  "Just like fishing back on the farm," he always said.

Ragnar Benson
From: Ragnar's Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives
Page 5, Copyright 1988

As usual, lots of entries came in this last week of February but because I expanding the shooting line so much I still have 22 more shooting positions available.  I have 38 positions taken now.  I'm also officially in the black on paper.  That doesn't count the loan I made to Boomershoot for the new explosives magazine last year and all the chemicals I purchased last year or the new generator I bought a month ago.  But since I had purchased nearly enough materials for this years event last year my cash flow has been very good this year.  I have paid back $1650 (including interest) on the loan and paid for the generator with this years money so I'm feeling pretty good about the money situation.

Since we have all the bloggers showing up this year I had hoped to get wireless internet service onsite.  I talked to the provider yesterday and found out that there are political obstacles to that happening.  They have been working on providing service in that area for some time but aren't quite there yet.  There are permits they have to obtain and stuff like that.  The current schedule looks like “end of the summer“.  So, maybe Boomershoot 2006 will be the first to have live blogging.

There are just under nine weeks to Boomershoot 2005.  Next Saturday Ry and I will do a full day of experiments aimed at getting the mix more sensitive.  Then we will be ready until just a few days before the event when the work really begins.

I drove 400 miles round trip to have dinner with a friend on Wednesday evening.  I always enjoy my time with him immensely.  Very, very, funny, and thought provoking.  I'll share his solution to our war with Muslim extremists in some other post but a newspaper article I saw this evening reminded me of something else he said.  He made a comment about Bush's State of the Union speech being insane if you read between the lines. "Oh?", I asked. "How is that?" The answer I got was, "He wants to export freedom to everyone. That's not much different than Caesar saying he wanted to bring civilization to everyone and the Conquistadors bringing Catholicism to everyone."  Interesting viewpoint.  I hadn't thought of it that way before.  My friend doesn't exactly think everyone is ready or capable of handling freedom as we know it.  I'm not so sure but he has a number of data points from dealing with other cultures that I don't have direct experience with.  Anyway the news indicates, insane or not, foreign governments are taking Bush seriously.

From the LA Times:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called Saturday for a constitutional amendment to allow other candidates to run against him for the first time, a surprise move that could be a historic turning point in a country that has endured decades of repressive rule.

The announcement by Mubarak, a staunch U.S. ally, came days after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a trip to the Middle East this week amid mounting tension over the autocratic Egyptian leader's crackdown on political opponents.

Yeah, I know, so what else is new?

They report on the bill before the U.S. Senate to protect the gun industry from junk lawsuits.  They claim:

 In September, the families of victims in the sniper shootings in the Washington area won a $2.5 million settlement from the dealer who supplied the snipers' assault rifle.

Being generous to the reporter and editors, they are misleading when they say this.  The gun was stolen from the dealer by the two criminals.  Do they claim a bank that gets robbed provided money for the criminal to buy illegal drugs?

To give them credit where they deserve it, they did quote a spokesman for one of my Senators:

A spokesman for Senator Larry E. Craig, an Idaho Republican who sponsored the bill, said the lawsuits were inappropriate.

The suits "attempt to achieve gun control through judicial rather than the legislative means," said the spokesman, Sid Smith. "If a drunk driver hits someone," he said, "the car manufacturer is not held responsible so long as the car functioned correctly, so why should the gun industry be any different?"

Overall I give them a grade of 'C' on this article. In addition to the above blatant bias they only gave a few lines of coverage to the pro-freedom viewpoint and the vast majority to the anti-freedom viewpoint.

Man defends himself as much as he can against truth, as a child does against a medicine, as the man of the Platonic cave did against the light.  He does not willingly follow his path, but has to be dragged along backward.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Denise's comments here and the big story about CNN breaking Federal law to do an anti-freedom story on gun ownership reminds me of something I said a long time ago and remains true today:

Huffman's rule of firearms law: Firearms law are so complex, victimless, and nonsensical that almost every firearms owner breaks multiple laws without knowing it. A general rule to compute the earned prison time for crimes committed is to multiply the number of years of activity in the shooting sports by five.

Joe Huffman
(Who, if caught and convicted, would spend the rest of his life in prison)
12/16/97

As I reported before Adam was one of the Precision Rifle Clinic instructors at the last Boomershoot.  Rivrdog reports on his memorial service.

MSM reports:

Seattle Times
Seattle Times
The News Tribune
The News Tribune
KVAL News
Seattle PI
Seattle PI
KOMO TV
The Register Guard
KOIN News
The Oregonian
Bend.com
The Olympian
The Olympian
YubaNet

You can donate money to directly to the Lancer Memorial Fund which helps the families of those fallen in battle.  See near the bottom of this press release for more details.

Amazing.  The first time my blog is linked to by a really, really, high traffic blog and it's these people.

Someone has a tin foil hat on and quotes a news quote of mine rather than going directly to the source I gave.  <shrug> They are a few Fruit Loops short of a full bowl so what do you expect?

No, that wasn't a note.  That was an entire symphony.

Peter Zatloukal
When asked if that was a note of sarcasm in his voice.
3:00 PM, October 24, 2000