In a surprisingly fair article the Chicago Tribune reports:

Fresh off its success at poking holes in a Wilmette handgun ban, the National Rifle Association has launched a new legislative drive to dismantle strong gun prohibitions in Chicago and test Gov. Rod Blagojevich's wavering commitment to broader gun control.

Taking direct aim at Mayor Richard Daley's hard-line stance against the proliferation of guns, the NRA package of state legislation would allow residents of Chicago and other communities that ban handgun ownership to legally keep the weapons in their homes for self-defense purposes. It also would hold Chicago and other places with bans liable for injuries that residents claimed could have been avoided had they been allowed to carry handguns.

And this editorial claims Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC will be “The last nail in gun control”:

The expected election of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee this month will strike a crippling blow to the gun-control movement, lobbyists and political observers say.

Like Dean, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is a strong supporter of gun rights. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports gun control but rarely mentioned the issue before the 2004 election.

I've been watching WA state flirting with an assault weapon and .50 BMG ban the last couple of weeks and I have concluded it probably won't go anywhere.  Yeah, they introduced it but hundreds of freedom supports showed up for the hearings and only a handful of bigots showed their support.  Something could pass, but I put the odds at about 30%.

The risk freedom advocates run now is that we relax.  NOW is the time to (politically) shoot anti-freedom bigots in the back as they run for cover.  We should root them out of their hidey holes like Saddam Hussein and humiliate them with our political victories and the data showing freedom is not to be feared.  Let Freedom Ring in our country as well as around the world.

Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, announced “licence to kill“ guidelines for householders.  Basically they are saying you can use deadly force to defend yourself and your family.  The guidelines appear to be pretty close to what you would expect in most of the U.S.  Here are some examples from the article: 

THE CLUEDO GUIDELINES

Colonel Mustard awakes to find a burglar standing by his bedside — he reaches for a length of lead piping, strikes out and knocks him unconscious or kills him.
Lawful

Miss Scarlett hears noises in the night. She creeps downstairs and sees a burglar in her dining room. He has not seen her. She seizes a candlestick, hides behind the door and strikes him unconscious.
Lawful

The Rev Green is woken by the noise of a burglar making his escape. He races after him and and with the butt of his revolver knocks him unconscious to the ground.
Lawful

Mrs White disturbs a burglar in the library. She seizes a knife in the kitchen and stabs him. He falls to the ground and is rapidly becoming unconscious. Just to teach him a lesson she stabs him again.
Unlawful

Professor Plum hears on the grapevine that a man he suspects of thefts from his house is planning forced entry through the kitchen. He lies in wait to trap the burglar and then shoots him or knocks him unconscious.
Unlawful

Mrs Peacock disturbs burglars in the billiard room. They flee empty-handed. She chases after them with a shotgun and shoots one of them dead.
Unlawful

THE NEW ADVICE

What is ‘reasonable force’?

You are not expected to make fine judgments over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of your acting lawfully and in self-defence. This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon. The more extreme the circumstances and the fear felt, the more force you can lawfully use in self-defence.

What if the intruder dies?

If you have acted in reasonable self-defence and the intruder dies,you will still have acted lawfully.

When would my actions not be lawful?

If having knocked someone unconscious you decided to hurt them further or kill them to punish them; or you knew of an intended intruder and set a trap to hurt or kill.

What if I chase them as they run off?

You are no longer acting in self-defence and the same degree of force may not be reasonable. You are still allowed to use reasonable force to recover your property and make a citizen’s arrest.

Do I have to wait to be attacked?

No, not if you are in your own home and in fear for yourself or others.

I'll believe it's a trend rather than just crumbs thrown to the subjects when they can carry handguns in public for self defense.

Shamil Basayev, the mastermind of the taking of the hostages in the Russian school, was interviewed and had this to say:

Mr Basayev states: “We are planning more Beslan-type operations in the future because we are forced to do so.”

Justifying his attacks on civilian targets, he states: “We are at war and we look at the reality, and not at whether the population has weapons in their hands. We look at the reality of their participation in this war.

“ People who approve of Putin’s policies, people who pay their taxes for this war, people who send their soldiers to this war, priests who sprinkle holy water on them . . . How can they be innocent? They are just without weapons. Russian citizens are accomplices of this war, it just may be that they have no weapons in their hands. Peaceful people for us are those that don’t pay taxes for this war, people who don’t participate, and who speak against this war.”

If you paid your taxes then you are a combatant.  I presume this is the rational used to justify 9-11 and the beheadings of female aid workers in Iraq too. 

Like I said before, if these guys decide to take out a school in the U.S. they should do it in a major city many, many miles from the nearest farm.

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Probably a pretty low chance of getting dooced over this.  I don't hold back my opinions at work about this anyway.  A bunch of senior managers at DHS are leaving in the next couple of months:

The resignation of Secretary Tom Ridge and Deputy Secretary James Loy was widely publicized. But other resignations include Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security; Frank Libutti, undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection; Robert Liscouski, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection; and C. Suzanne Mencer, executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness.

So why is government money being spent on trying to help transportation security, and infrastructure?  I can see efforts “spilling over” into to industry in a beneficial way, but not having an “undersecretary” for that job.  It's really tough for government to get industry to do something unless they give them incentative of some sort.  Typically that involves using force of some type or another.  Taxes for example, or the threat of breaking them up (as in the AT&T break up).  I'm involved in project right now that has a bunch of academics and “scientist types” (technically I'm one of them) that is supposed to be “helping” industry with something.  You can't just give them a gift and expect them to use it.  It has to make economic sense for them to use it.  So imagine the following situation.  We see some gaping hole in the telephone communicaton industry (no, that's not what I am working on, it's just an example, I don't know of any gaping holes in our communication industry security).  This hole is so big that someone with 300 baud modem could dial up almost telephone company central office in the country and set off a chain reaction that cause all but the rotary dial only offices to melt down into a heap of aluminium/epoxy/silicon slag.  We come up with a good way to fix it.  Suppose we give the solution to industry and it only costs $1.00 per phone to implement, will they fix their security hole?  Why should they?  It's going to cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to implement.  It's never happened before, so why should they worry about it now?  And if it does happen, what then?  Why of course!  The government will pay for them (or at least loan them the money like the airlines after 9-11) to build all new central offices in record speed!  The public utility commisions will agreed to any rate hike requested and the telecommunications company will be better off if they are attacked!

The problem is that our government will not allow some industries to fail and gives out government sanctioned monopolies.   If the free market were allowed to function the utilities would be much more motivated to maintain their investments.  Government scientists, like me, would be working for private industry or working on problems that are the proper domain of government like building better tools for intelligence gathering or defending our borders.

Yesterday Hewlett-Packard reported they may have the successor to the transistor working in their labs. 

... its researchers have proven that a technology they invented could eventually replace the transistor, a fundamental building block of computers.

In a paper published in Tuesday's Journal of Applied Physics, HP said three members of its Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.

Palo Alto, California-based HP said that the technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today.

...

The crossbar latch -- which Williams said was six to 10 years from widespread commercial use -- could help to extend Moore's Law, the 1965 observation by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore that computing power doubles roughly every 18 months as production costs fall by about half.

I remember back in the late 70's researchers were doing work with Josephon Junctions and were making all kinds of claims about how they were going to be the next big thing.  That work was largely abandoned (but interest has picked up again).  I've wondered about Moore's Law for a while.   There are physical limits to the size of our current technology and it was the constant reduction in size of the junctions that allowed us to build faster and faster computers.  The physics represented a “brick wall” that we were going to hit in the not too distant future.  My confidence in the free market and technology said we would find a way around it but the wall was looming larger and larger.  Maybe the “crossbar latch” is that path.

It looks like he meets all five of the conditions and he responds just as predicted.  He rants:

Iraq is a train wreck. The man who caused it is not in trouble. Tomorrow night he will give his State of the Union speech, and the Washington establishment will applaud him. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead. More than 1,400 Americans are dead. An Arab nation is humiliated. Islamic hatred of the West is ignited. The American military is emasculated. Lies define the foreign policy of the United States. On all sides of Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is wreckage. In the center, there are the dead, the maimed, the displaced -- those who will be the ghosts of this war for the rest of their days. All for what?

...

The chaos of a destroyed society leaves every new instrument of governance dependent on the American force, even as the American force shows itself incapable of defending against, much less defeating, the suicide legions. The irony is exquisite. The worse the violence gets, the longer the Americans will claim the right to stay. In that way, the ever more emboldened -- and brutal -- "insurgents" do Bush's work for him by making it extremely difficult for an authentic Iraqi source of order to emerge. Likewise the elections, which, as universally predicted, have now ratified the country's deadly factionalism.

<Heavy sigh> I suppose I should give him a pass on this--he writes for The Boston Globe.

Tony Blair, the new Prime Minister of England, has announced officially that his government's grotesque gun laws are not expected to have any effect upon crime, but rather to eliminate what he calls "the gun culture." If he succeeds in eliminating the gun culture in Britain, he will presumably feel good. Isn't that sweet? Well, we ought not to jeer too loudly at the Brits. Just look at what we have elected!

Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper's Commentaries
Vol. 5, No. 9
August 1997

Saturday Ry stopped by and left his cat with my daughter Xenia while he went on a road trip. I was worried about the dependability of his van and he jokingly thanked me for lending him mine.  HA!  I told him that if he broke down within 300 miles I would come and rescue him, but if it was a 1000 miles away to forget it.  He left Sunday and had his first breakdown at about 500 miles away on Monday.  He limped on into town on his own and $93 poorer continued on his way.  Tonight he made it almost exactly 1300 miles away before breaking down the second time. 

I'm afraid this road trip is going to be one of those “well thought out” plans hatched from his “incompletely myelinated” brain that “seemed like a good idea at the time”.  He's (technically) an adult and just as long as he doesn't do something that gets him a “felony dumbass” conviction that “insurance doesn't cover” and he makes it back in time for Boomershoot I guess I don't have anything to complain about.  But I'm almost certain that his spreadsheet for this adventure has a “need for more columns“.  OMG, it's getting close to “Superbowl Sunday” isn't it?

See Ry's dictionary to understand the significance of the quoted phrases in the previous paragraph.

Liberty News made a post mentioning Boomershoot today.  It seems I can barely keep up with all the postings.  Analog Kid again mentioned boomershoot today.  There were some others too.  I think they are all listed here now and the number of referrals should be close to up-to-date.  Claire Wolfe would be the exception, she just keeps racking up the hits on Boomershoot.org.  I expect she'll have a free entry to Boomershoot by tomorrow if she wants it.  It's also very, very interesting to see what sections of Boomershoot.org the various people look at.  The Claire Wolfe people are interested in different things than the Kim du Toit people, who are interested in different things than the IsntAPundit people.  I can see why the people at work have a full time counter intelligence guy looking at the lab web logs.

There is a lesson in the previous paragraph for people paying attention.  Darwin awards await the people that have more balls than brains.

Imagine my surprise when the first referral I see through my blurry eyes to Boomershoot.org this morning is from the blog of my greatest inspiration in our fight for freedom--Claire Wolfe.  Her post is rather brief but I'm thrilled just the same.  She also mentions my Jews in the Attic Test.  Very cool.

I updated the Boomershoot Blogging section 20 minutes ago but Claire's column already is out of date -- it should be 19 now.

Thanks Ms. Wolfe, you made my day.

If you're involved in any underground or anti-government activity, there is always one person you should distrust more than any other.  For years, members of groups from the Ku Klux Klan to the Weather Underground have had a saying: "You can always tell the FBI agent; he's the one who keeps trying to get you to bomb something."

Claire Wolfe
From 101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution

Say you got laid (no future pun on this intended) off.  You are receiving unemployment benefits.  You get a job offer from a different field that pays well, better than your previous job, but you decide to turn it down.  Would the state be justified in cutting off your benefits?  At first thought I would say, “Yes“, with the qualification that the state shouldn't be in the business of employment insurance to begin with.  Germans have a new wrinkle in this area of their law since they made prostitution legal two years ago.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit.

...

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."

Miss Garweg said that women who had worked in call centres had been offered jobs on telephone sex lines. At one job centre in the city of Gotha, a 23-year-old woman was told that she had to attend an interview as a "nude model", and should report back on the meeting. Employers in the sex industry can also advertise in job centres, a move that came into force this month. A job centre that refuses to accept the advertisement can be sued.

I'm so amused.  This is what you get for government to have a monopoly on employment insurance.

Thanks to Claire for posting the link on her blog.

Update: Be sure to read the comments to this post.

Update 2: See this link for more (or less) about the story.

As frequent readers know I watch the log file on boomershoot.org pretty close.  Today I saw this scroll by:

62.252.96.7 - - [31/Jan/2005:14:47:34 +0000] "GET /2003/Kim.avi HTTP/1.0" 200 1703936 "http://pwnstar.proboards44.com/index.cgi?board=wtf&action=display&num=1105866135" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

Following the referral URL I found some things I had to share:

these dudes are mad they mix explosives and shit up and shoot it with a rifle
http://www.boomershoot.org/2003/Kim.avi

HOLY SHIT! BOOOOOOOOM! hell yes!

girls should not be given a loaded weapon

omfg! i wanna do that!!! holy b'jesus that was cool!

Barb, hearing about girls and weapons, says, “You shouldn't say that about our girl!”

I would logon to the forum and invite them to attend but it looks like they are probably just kids and probably are in Europe.  Not likely for them to be able to attend.

 ... model legislation, "The Firearms Safety and Violence Prevention Act," designed to expand the powers of the Secretary of Treasury to include regulation of the manufacture, distribution and sale of firearms and ammunition and to expand the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department to include firearm products and non-powder firearms. In addition to granting the Treasury health and safety powers (such as standard-setting and recall capability), it also includes: a ban on assault weapons; a ban on weapons regulated under the National Firearms Act (NFA) such as silencers, hand grenades, and land mines; and a handgun phase-out--the future manufacture and sale of new handguns would be prohibited. Currently possessed handguns would be required to be surrendered upon the owner's death.

Violence Policy Center
From http://www.vpc.org/fact_sht/ceasefs.htm
(as of 11/10/98 and 01/31/05)

Stephanie Sailor has been sending me Boomershoot PR stuff all day to review, edit, and add to the website.  I think I am finally all caught up.  Check out the following stuff:

• Fact Sheet
• News Releases
• Media Specialists
• Gun Myths and Truths

Send me an email if you see something messed up, inaccurate, whatever.

I also updated the Boomershoot 2005 web page with the number of referrals from various bloggers.  I discovered I had forgotten to add Jeff Soyer (Alphecca) to the list of bloggers that have mentioned Boomershoot.  That is now corrected.

I'm done on the computer for a while.  Time to modify some more 8” targets.

We stand at the brink of a new age, an age made possible by the revolution that is embodied in the computer. Standing on the brink, we could totter either way to a golden age of liberty or a dark age of tyranny, either of which would surpass anything the world has ever known. Perhaps no individual's efforts will make any difference in the result, but we must never cease trying, for then the result is sure to be tyranny.

Gerald M. Weinberg
The Psychology of Computer Programming
1971

I've been reading and listening and without doing 2+2=4 type of calculations just getting a gut feel for what is happening and what will happen I have a prediction to make.  Prophecy is always tough to get right and it's easy to end up looking like an idiot.  But my guess is that 10 years from now the war we are fighting against the Muslim Jihad warriors will be over and election day, January 30, 2005, in Iraq will be the equivalent of the battle of Gettysburg in the U.S. civil war.  The turning point in the war.  Although there will still need to be a lot of fighting, deaths, and there will be lots of screaming and wailing by the losers (including the Democrats in our country), the end will known to anyone that studies the problem.  There could be something bad things happen, we could still get some nukes detonated in a few of our cities, but the days of the Muslim extremists will be numbered and we will be counting them down.

More Boomershoot 2005 completed preparation this week.

Today I picked up the 3500W (peak) generator I ordered a few days ago.  Ry and his son Alan helped me unpack it, I filled it with oil and gas (with some Stabil), and gave the rope a pull.  Nothing.  Oh, turn on the gas, you idiot, choke it, and try again.  It started on the first pull.  I can't tell you how happy that made me.  I've spent 20 minutes cranking on the old one before it would start sometimes.  I measured the voltage, put a load on it, everything works good.

I also ordered boxes (4“x4“x2“) to use as replacement 4“ targets.  I didn't have enough of the ones we used last year and decided to try something different.  They are cheaper, pack tighter, and should be less labor intensive.  They hold slightly more explosives but that shouldn't be a problem.

I sent email to the caterer telling them the dates and expected number of people.

I looked at the spreadsheet for chemicals and it looks like I already have all I need for this year with the possible except of something I can get locally at Wal-Mart.

Two more entries came in this week.  I'll update the Boomershoot status page later this evening.

'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.

George Bernard Shaw

There is not a group on this planet worthy of your respect.  Only individuals.  Respect or disrespect them case-by-case, based on what they do, not what categories they belong to.

It's possible that your greatest ally could be a DEA or BATF agent becoming disillusioned with the agency's practices.  It's possible your worst enemy could be a friend about to rat on you to save his or her own butt.  It's possible that the smartest person you'll ever meet will be a member of a racial group you always believed was stupid.  It's possible that the most venal person you'll ever meet belongs to a group otherwise known for its honor.

Claire Wolfe
From 101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution

So I got this email today...

It's just a couple of college kids making a movie and they need a car blown up.  There were some emails exchanged and then we ended up chatting online for hours (until just a few minutes ago).  Ry and I, being nerds, wanted to encourage reality based stuff.  Such as no fireballs unless there really is excess fuel in the explosion.  And the sound arrives significantly AFTER the explosion occurs (at 700 yards, boomershoot range, it's about 2 seconds).  Only if the camera is right in the middle of the explosion would it happen at the same time.  They probably aren't going to go for it.  They want Hollywood reality, not physical reality.  <shrug>  Okay.  We can do that.  The first couple of emails follow.  We'll be blogging about the project as we know more.  They should have a website and trailer up before long.

From: Gideon Oakes
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 10:17 AM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Subject: Filming at Boomershot 2005

Hi Joe,

 

My name is Gideon Oakes. My buddy and I are students down here at BYU-Idaho, and we're putting together a feature-length action movie called "The Moment." In the film, there is a scene in which a car is supposed to blow up. I've visited your website and looked at everything, especially Project Fireball, with my eyes wide open. That kind of a fireball is exactly what we want. We're not looking to demolish the car, but we want to have a spectacular fireball blow through the windows and up into the air.

 

I've been trying to figure out how we could do this on our own, but the prospect of experimenting on blowing a car up (with no prior pyrotechnical knowledge) is somewhat of a frightening thing to me. So that's why I started looking for people who already knew how to do this kind of thing. When I came upon your site, I was first thrilled to see someone doing what you do. You guys are definitely my kind of people. I'm from South Dakota, where we too take our 2nd Amendment rights very seriously. Then when I saw that you did this all in Idaho, I nearly fell out of my chair. Of all 50 states, you're in the same state as us.

 

So, I guess what I would like to know is, what would it take for you guys to put a titanium powder firebomb in a gutted out car and blast it at Boomershoot 05? We don't know how far our movie is going to go, but we know that having this kind of special effect would definitely help its prospects out. Not to mention, it would be a heck of a lot of fun to do.

 

Please let me know if you're interested, so we can begin working on coordinating this project.

 

Thanks,

Gideon Oakes

BRP Digital Media

http://www.rushmore.tv

 

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 10:40 AM
To: Gideon Oakes
Cc: Ry Jones
Subject: Re: Filming at Boomershot 2005

Rather than doing it at Boomershoot 2005 when my crew and I are very, very busy I would recommend some other time. Some weekend with a couple weeks notice would be probably work for us. Some of the issues I see are:

Do you have a car? If it wasn't scrap before, it will be afterwards.

Cleanup. Unless you film it where you can just leave it the car and any pieces that fall off will have to be cleaned up.

Cost. If you can travel to us we can be had very cheaply--perhaps free if you give us credit in your movie. If we have to travel there then we would expect some compensation.

If we travel there do you have a place where this sort of activity will not upset the neighbors? Houses may shake a couple miles away. You might be able to mitigate this by inviting them to watch...

We will detonate it with rifle fire. If we travel to you we will need a safe place to shoot a high powered rifle.

Equipment risk. Depending on how close your camera(s) must be there is some risk of them getting hit by something. We can discuss this in more detail to give you some idea but if you decide to put them inside of the radius we give you (probably about 200 yards) then you take the liability.

Looking forward to hearing more about your project.

Oh, one more thing... we don't do 'bombs' or 'firebombs'. We do "reactive targets"--some of which happen to create fireballs. Talking about 'bombs' will get you turned over to the ATF, the FBI, and/or various intelligence agencies.

-joe-
----
http://www.boomershoot.org
http://www.modernballistics.com

I thought the whole idea of "zero-tolerance" was to show that the problem was so serious that intelligence and common sense would not be allowed in the implementation of policy.  This serves to give a valuable lesson to students -- when something is really serious, you must make sure not to think.

 Fritz Sands
 4/15/99 2:36 PM
 Microsoft Gun Club Public Folder
 Regarding zero tolerance gun policies at schools resulting in suspending kids for tiny toy guns.