Happy Anniversary!

On February 3, 2004 I made my first blog post.

No introduction. No outline of my intended topics. No mention of what my intended audience. No mention of my intended goals. Just the facts on another lie from the anti-gun crowd.

It is as it was, and was twenty years before that, and probably will be as long as there are evil people who want disarmed victims. They will always be lying to achieve their evil ends. There will never be an end to material to blog about on my primary topic.

Twenty years, 15,898 blog posts, and 78,408 comments later we are here. Along the way I had help from Defens, Lyle, Mike, Stephanie, and Rolf. I really appreciated the extra perspectives and posts.

But most important has to be all the visitors. There have been over 4.2 million visits to my blog. I could not have imagined there would ever be that many people visit that many times. That is amazing.

Thank you everyone. You make it worth my while.

Scheduled maintenance

I received the following email (in part) from my hosting provider:

We’re making important updates to your website and hosting services during the following time period:
Date: April 19, 2022
Start time: April 19, 2022 4:00 AM GMT
Finish time: April 21, 2022 4:00 PM GMT
Estimated completion: 60:00h

During this time these services may be affected:
Service: website / server
Status: unavailable

If joehuffman.org or blog.joehuffman.org is down during this time please try again later. The Boomershoot site is not affected.

Password protected blog post

Earlier today I received a message from Alan Gura requesting that I not post his protected tweets on other social media. The previous QOTD by him has been password protected until such time as his tweet are not protected.

Don’t ask for the password. I won’t give it out.

Sorry about that.


Update: Everything but Gura contribution to the post is:

Tweeted on November 30, 2021
[He is referring to:

Annastacia Palaszczuk on Twitter: “Check out the before ➡️ after Stage one of our quarantine facility at Wellcamp is on track for completion by the end of the year.

Regional quarantine is a common sense approach to keep Queensland safe – that’s why we’re building this dedicated facility at the airport.

“Common sense.” I’m surprised she didn’t also say, “For the children!”

Yes, Gura’s comment is sarcasm.—Joe]

16 years old

Today, as of 11:41 AM, this blog is 16 years old. That was when I made my first official blog post.

If you look in the archives you will see a few posts older than that one but they are from a web site or two I had prior to this blog. I moved them here for safe keeping.

A rare occurrence

Last Friday Barb and I flew into Victoria B.C. to attend daughter Jaime’s wedding. While waiting in baggage claim a guy walked up to us and ask, “Are you Joe Huffman?”

“Uh…. yes”, I replied.

I was a bit concerned. I was already uncomfortable that I had to leave my gun, knives, and even pepper spray behind. And now some strange guy has approaching me, correctly identified me, and is verifying my identity. It took a couple seconds to think it through and realize that he just got off the same plane I did and almost for certain doesn’t have any weapons either. Together, Barb and I should be able to handle the situation should it go sour.

It turns out, as you might have already guessed, he reads my blog and just wanted to say hi. He lives in Texas and had traveled to Victoria to be with his daughter while she attended a ballet class for a month.

We had a nice chat before going through customs.

In the over 15 years of this blog there has only been one other time a strange person came up to me in an public place (Cabela’s) to say they recognized me and to say hi.

Search rankings for #I1639

I checked to see where my blog posts rank when you do a search for #I1639. I found the results interesting:

  • DuckDuckGo puts one of my blog posts at 1.
  • Bing puts one of my blog posts at 1 (after an advertisement).
  • Google puts one of my blog posts at 11.
  • Twitter puts one of my tweets at 16.
  • Yahoo puts one my blogs posts at 87.
  • Facebook doesn’t list it or any of my Facebook posts (even from accounts other than mine).

Make of that whatever you want.

Free ammo for a year

Widener’s has a raffle for “free ammo for a year”. It’s not really all the ammo I would shoot in a year if it was free. It is a gift card for $1500 which might cover my .22 LR needs but wouldn’t come close to my total consumption. But, a $1500 gift card is nothing to be sneered at.

To enter the raffle visit this blog post and give them your email address in the edit box at the top of the blog post.

I’ve purchased stuff from them over the years (almost $2200 worth in the last 2.5 years) and I almost always check them for price and availability when I am purchasing reloading supplies. I sometimes find interesting things which I couldn’t find anywhere else. An example would be SS109 bullets for .223 in large quantities.

Full disclosure: I was contacted via email by Widener’s about this “free ammo for a year” raffle. If I linked to their blog post about the free ammo they offered to give me a $25.00 gift card and entry in a different raffle with other bloggers who also posted about their raffle.

Facebook changes

Today I was notified there are changes coming to how my blog posts are shared on Facebook:

We wanted to update you about an upcoming change Facebook is introducing to their platform, and which affects how you may share posts from your WordPress.com website to your Facebook account.

Starting August 1, 2018, third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles. This includes Publicize, the tool for WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites that connects your site to major social media platforms (like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).

I can still share them manually which means it won’t happen as much. I just don’t like Facebook for a variety of reasons and this change doesn’t endear them to me either.

Radio silence

I usually have QOTDs up for the time before and slightly after Boomershoot so I have time to concentrate on Boomershoot then just veg out and recover afterward. This time I did not get ahead on the QOTD stuff for this blog. I’m going “radio silent” for a few days.

Nothing to worry about. I’ll be back online when I feel like it.

Stephanie, our new guest blogger

Although Stephanie Sailor isn’t new to a lot of old-timers in the gun rights movement she hasn’t been all that active on gun blogs. Stephanie’s contribution to Boomershoot in the early 2000’s was a large part of why it became a success. And the things she did to counter the anti-gun people in Chicago just blew me away when I first heard her speak for the Second Amendment Sisters at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Washington D.C. in 2000.

And last summer she made a number of images I posted on this blog. For example:

And now she has requested permission to make some blog posts here. I immediately agreed and gave her an account. Expect to hear from her soon.

See her also at on Gab as S2.

Dumping Twitter

I have been on Twitter since May of 2008. In general I thought it was pretty cool. But recently with the banning and shadow banning of people who were guilty of nothing more serious that “bad think” of something other than progressive dogma while letting other people freely tweet about support for people shooting police it has become time to show my displeasure. It is very clear they are opposed to the freedom I value so much and I’m doing my small part to make them pay a price for that.

I only have 992 followers but in a small sense my content is the product that Twitter sells. I’m going to be tapering off my use of Twitter as I migrate to Gab.ai to reduce the amount of product available to Twitter.

You can view me at Gab.ai at https://gab.ai/JoeHuffman.

The Instalanche

My post about OSHA is going after ammo manufacturers got a link from Instapundit last week. While the number of hits weren’t as great as some people; with total of 6,975 page views in one day it is much better than the first time I got one. And it is the most page views I have gotten in a single day since I switched to Word Press in December of 2012 and perhaps ever.

Here is a more visual view:

Instalance

A big thank you to Glenn Reynolds and especially the anonymous caller from the ammo manufacturer.

DHS likes me too!

The Department of Homeland Security likes the same post as the CIA:

Visitor Analysis & System Spec
Referring URL:
Host Name: cbcp4.dhs.gov Browser: Firefox 38.0
IP Address: 216.81.81.84 Operating System: Win7
Location: Arlington, Virginia, United States Resolution: 1440×900
Returning Visits: 0 Javascript: Enabled
Visit Length: Not Applicable ISP: Department Of Homeland Security

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Date Time WebPage Tags
    author: Joe
28 Dec 08:03:08  

I wonder why they think this post is so interesting. And they both came here via a post at DirectorBlue.blogspot.com.

My fans visit from the most interesting places

Earlier this month I had a visitor from the FBI.

Today it was the CIA:

Visitor Analysis & System Spec
Referring URL:
Host Name: relay201.net.cia.gov Browser: IE 11.0
IP Address:
198.81.129.193
Operating System: Win7
Location: Fairfax, Virginia, United States Resolution: 1920×1200
Returning Visits: 0 Javascript: Enabled
Visit Length: Not Applicable ISP: Central Intelligence Agency

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Date Time WebPage Tags
    author: Joe
28 Dec 14:12:36  

I’m honored to get attention from such special people.