Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power.

In one of the most fact free editorials I have seen in a long time the bigot known as William Crane said this at the Spectator, the school newspaper for Seattle University:

Those who are ineligible to buy firearms at a local store will simply go to a gun show and purchase a firearm there.

...

Concealed weapon permits are also available to any eligible gun owner with no further background check or training needed.

...

Overall, firearms killed 11,829 people in the United States in 2002, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. This number far outweighs any potential benefit firearm possession has in Washington State or the United States.

...

The corroboration between firearm regulations and a reduction in firearm violence is clear.

I was not particularily gentle in my online response. It has to go through a moderator and hasn't shown up yet on their site. I repeat it here in case the moderator decides my opinion is not worthy of being published:

Please have Mr. Crane do some research before expressing his bigoted opinions.

There is no gun show loophole. The laws are the same at a gun show as they are at any gun shop. And even if there were such a loophole according to several government studies only a very small portion of guns used in crime are purchased at gun shows. And most Washington state gun shows already voluntarily require a background check before attendees can purchase a firearm.

Concealed Pistol License do require a background check.

Firearms are used to defend innocent life from grave injury and/or death between two and three million times each year in the U.S. This far outweighs the number of murders committed with firearms. Guns in the hands of private citizens save more innocent lives from harm than are injured by guns in the hands of criminals.

Crane states:

The corroboration between firearm regulations and a reduction in firearm violence is clear.

I presume he means correlation, not corroboration, but regardless Crane is wrong. Please see the CDC report on this very topic for more details.

As for the other misleading, bigoted, and inaccurate statements made by Mr. Crane, I have Just One Question for Crane:

Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where restricting the access of handheld weapons to the average person made them safer?

"Smart guns" are not only a dumb idea but may be impossible with todays biometric technology.  Biometrics is something I studied and successfully researched for a different application.  I'm not a stranger to biometric technology.  New Jersey thinks they can find a solution for their "smart guns" but I think they are living in a make believe world.  Here's what they have to say about their smart gun research:

The prototype, developed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, has pressure sensors embedded in the gun handle that recognize a person's unique grip.

The team says a commercial model is up to five years away, but if it works, it will trigger a singular - and controversial - state law. Within three years, all handguns sold in New Jersey would have to be personalized, with this or some other recognition technology.

Michael Recce, who dreamed up the grip-recognition concept in 1999, said the only obstacles are time and money. "It's an engineering problem, not a scientific problem," he said.

...

Inside the grip, 16 ceramic discs generate a charge when pressed. They are called piezoelectric sensors, from the Greek piezo, for "pressure." Barbecue lighters use a similar feature.

Once the shooter squeezes the trigger, the grip sensors spring into action, recording the pressure for one-tenth of a second. In that moment, the pressure applied by each finger varies enough that engineers can distinguish between shooters with a high degree of reliability. A grip's signature does not vary significantly from firing to firing, even in stressful situations, researchers have found.

A year and a half ago, a prototype recognized authorized users nine out of 10 times. Now, the rate lies between 95 and 99 percent, said Michael Cody, a computer science engineer on the team.

The goal: at least 99.95 percent - or good enough that the recognition process fails less often than a regular gun would jam or fail. A higher success rate will require better placement of the 16 sensors; currently, four or five do most of the work.

Recognition of the authorized users isn't enough.  It must also reject unauthorized users.  It could be they are quoting the cross-over point where both the successful rejects and the successful accepts are the same.  It's common to distill the performance down to a single number when in fact you will seldom run your biometric device at that point on the operating curve. 

Typically you will allow a much higher rate of failure for correct rejections that you will allow failure to accept correctly.  For example you might be perfectly happy the gun rejects 90% of the unauthorized users as long as it accepts correct users greater than 99.9% of the time.  I don't know if it is the failure of the reporter to understand the subtleties of biometrics or if it is the failure of the engineers to understand the problem.  For the time being I'll give the benefit of doubt to the engineers on that point.

What I seriously doubt is that Reece and his team have done is evaluate real stress and adverse shooting conditions.  What is the grip like when your hands are numb and swollen from the cold?  Or slippery with blood?  Or with gloves on?  Or after you have been stabbed and/or shot by your attacker(s)?  Add in shooting strong hand only, weak hand only, and with both hands and you have a very large set of variables that you can't program into baseline template for the authorized user without allowing a very high percentage of random people to be able to shoot the gun as well.

I believe, short of nearly instant DNA analysis, biometrics cannot solve this problem.  And even if we had DNA sensors that could respond in milliseconds it wouldn't solve the glove and other problems.  The "magic decoder ring" type of solution is the only thing I see as viable.

Recce estimated that his revolving team of graduate students and postdocs could develop a market-ready product in five years, and that a private company could do so in three.

Estimated cost: an additional $5 million. To date, the school has received $4.4 million in state and federal funds, said Donald H. Sebastian, a university senior vice president who oversees the research.

A 2005 study by a committee of the National Academy of Engineering was less optimistic, predicting that any of the various smart guns would need five to 10 years and $30 million.

The committee recognizes the problem is much, much bigger than Reece realizes or cares to admit. 

Keep spending NJ money.  That's fine with me.  That's less money they have to spend on enforcing their stupid and tyrannical gun laws.

He didn't answer Just One Question when I ask the other day.  He didn't even look at it (I checked my logs).  He knows what he wants to believe and that's all that is important.  And he calls Chris Cox evil?  What can be more evil than insisting we ignore the facts and do things his way?  The way that has enabled the murder of at least 60 million people by their own governments in the 20th century?  His name is Michael Daly and he says:

Staring down barrel of NRA's evil lobbyist

The devil does not wear Prada.

The Devil wears an off-the-rack suit and tie and speaks with a honeyed Southern accent.

That much remained clear yesterday as you gazed at the congealed blood on W. 22nd St., where four more New Yorkers had been shot with an illegal gun. The figure who immediately leapt to mind was the guy in the suit you had seen over the weekend at the National Rifle Association's annual gathering in Milwaukee.

His name is Chris Cox, and he is the NRA's chief lobbyist. He leads the charge to block Bloomberg's effort in Washington to get the federal legislation that is the only way to stem the flow of illegal guns into New York.

Considering the 2nd Amendment says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and the 14th amendment says the Bill of Rights apply to the states and cities as well as the Feds, just what is an illegal gun?  Michael Daly has mental problems.

We pray that it will not come to shooting in South Africa, but if it does - God forbid - consider who is likely to win between a group armed primarily with AK47s and no skill in their use and another group armed with sporting rifles and considerable skill in their use. Numbers would not matter particularly in such a confrontation. Formal armies can defeat other formal armies, and they can put down mobs of agitators, as in China. They cannot defeat a population completely armed with simple old-fashioned rifles. What the disarmers never recognize is that episodes like Tiananmen Square can never occur if every citizen maintains his own rifle in his house, as in Switzerland.
   
Jeff Cooper
Jeff Cooper's Commentaries
Vol. 1, No. 10
15 November 1993

They have done all they could (and failed) with guns and crimes committed with guns and now they are working on knives.  A "knife amnesty" program is now underway in the UK.  Can you believe it?

A NATIONWIDE knife amnesty aimed at reducing knife crime comes into force today.

For the next five weeks people will be able to hand in offensive weapons such as flick knives, butterfly knives and swords without fear of reprisal.

Secure bins will be left in police stations and other public places such as supermarkets, schools and youth clubs, to encourage people to hand in their weapons.

It is hoped the amnesty, which ends on June 30, will lead to fewer people carrying knives.

...

Kent Police's Assistant Chief Constable Dave Ainsworth said: "We obviously want to reduce the number of knives and lethal weapons on our streets that are designed to kill or maim, such as combat knives, flick knives and swords.

"Knives can damage and destroy lives, leaving families and communities devastated."

...

Wrong.  People with knives damage and destroy lives.  And they don't need knives to do it.  These people have severe mental problems.

"In a survey, 46 per cent of youngsters in Newcastle said they carried around a knife with them. That's a horrifying statistic.

"We have got to get the message through: this is illegal, it is very, very dangerous. You could end up yourself being injured or, worse still, on impulse inflicting some mortal injury on a friend."

I remember getting a Christmas present from my teacher when I was in the first grade and six years old.  It was a knife and all the boys in the classroom got them.  One guy cut his finger a few weeks later but that was the only problem that occurred and that was minor.  The people in the U.K. are totally bonkers.

From the May 23, 2006 edition of the Washington Post--Federal Law Negates D.C. Suit Against Gunmakers, Judge Rules:

A lawsuit in the District against gunmakers was dismissed yesterday by a D.C. Superior Court judge who ruled that the suit was precisely the sort of claim that a new federal law was intended to block.

In a 37-page opinion, Judge Brook Hedge wrote that the city and the federal government had two competing policies, and only one could prevail.

...

"The Court is faced with a classic tension between two elected branches of different governments, two equally clear legislative judgments, but each enforcing opposite policies," Hedge wrote.

"At bottom," she said, the federal law was enacted "to prohibit the very types of lawsuits the Strict Liability Act allows."

And unless she was persuaded that the federal law was unconstitutional -- which she was not -- the federal law would prevail, she wrote.

And from the National Shooting Sports Foundation news release:

This is the third case against the gun industry to be dismissed based on the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act signed into law by President Bush last October.

In March, Los Angeles-based federal district court judge Audrey B. Collins became the first judge in the nation to dismiss a case based on the new legislation. Collins dismissed a public-nuisance lawsuit filed against Glock and gun distributor RSR by victims and family members of the now infamous "Jewish Daycare Center" shooting in Los Angeles in 1999 by Buford Furrow, a crazed homicidal maniac.

Last Friday, Los Angeles County superior court judge Charles W. Stoll dismissed a case filed on October 18, 2005, against three firearm manufacturers and a distributor following a gang shooting of a Los Angeles police officer during a traffic stop.

Links are via a post at Alphecca.

Just because we have made progress doesn't mean we can back off.  We need to keep pushing and drive the bigots into political extinction.

Yet another example of how our right to not be searched without a court order are being violated without any benefit:

CBS4) DENVER Nearly 5 years after Sept. 11, 2001, how difficult would it be for terrorists to get explosives aboard a plane? With billions being spent on airport security, one would hope it would be nearly impossible. But what CBS4 found may have you questioning whether we are really safer.

CBS4 demonstrated 3 years ago how explosive chemicals placed on luggage, a computer and a person could pass through security. The CBS4 Investigates wanted to see what, if anything, has changed. CBS4 began the test by purchasing those same explosive chemicals.

...

After this, the CBS4 team placed even more of the chemicals on the bag. Investigators also packed a lead-lined sack designed to protect film from X-rays. Then an electronic object was placed beneath it. This was to see if security would open the luggage to see what the lead bag was hiding.

The team then went to Denver International Airport.

A CBS4 employee who carried the bag with her purchased a one way ticket in hopes of being placed in the security line for extra screening. She was not.

The bag was placed on the conveyor and passed through the X-ray machine. The Transportation Security Administration screener spotted the lead-lined bag and wanted a second look. They let it through. They did not open it to see what was beneath the lead lined bag. And no one seemed to notice all that powder.

From watching the video I'm pretty sure I know what powdered chemical they used for the tests.  If I am correct there is no way the explosive detectors can flag it as dangerous without generating false positives on a very high percentage of the passengers.  It's an unsolvable problem with the current paradigm.  If people wish to increase security, rather than just make some people feel good, they need to switch paradigms.  Here are my suggestions for increasing airplane security.

There is some concern that the bird flu has just made the evolutionary jump to transmit between human easily.  It's too early to say for certain but it looks like that concern is unfounded:

"This is not the first time, and we cannot conclusively discard or prove this to be human-to-human transmission," Mehta said, echoing a statement made by the WHO.

On Tuesday, the WHO said limited human-to-human transmission of bird flu might have occurred in the family, but there was no scientific evidence that the virus had mutated to allow it to spread easily among people.

"What is reassuring is two of the human samples from Kubu Sembilang have shown no evidence of reassortment or significant mutations. The lineage of these viruses are very similar to H5N1 viruses from avian specimens from north Sumatra," Mehta said.

It's things like the bird flu that cause me to have near zero concerns about global over-population.  The glass is half-full, right?  I'm just naturally an optimist.

For the sheer terror of it - the worst thing you can do to people is aim at their children.

Lee Boyd Malvo
May 23, 2006
Rockville, MD trial of John Allen Muhammad
In response to being asked why Muhammad devised a two-phase plan to shoot as many as six random people each day for 30 days in the Washington area and then target children and police officers with explosives.  They planned to place explosives on school buses in Baltimore, kill a Baltimore police officer and then set off explosives packed with ball bearings at the officer's funeral.  Malvo also testified Muhammad hated America, introduced him to the teaching of the Nation of Islam, and thought white people were "the devil".
[Islamic extremist.  Racist.  Murderer.  Conspiring to murder children.  The death penalty is clearly appropriate for Muhammad.--Joe]

Update: Far more details are in the Washington Post article.

It's a pleasant thought.  Start prosecuting the bigots that are infringing upon our inalienable rights.  From the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms comes this news release:

BELLEVUE, Wash., May 23 /U.S. Newswire/ -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg should be investigated for obstruction of justice, and possibly prosecuted under the federal RICO statutes, for his headline-hunting "sting" operation of alleged law- breaking gun dealers, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) said today.

"According to the New York Daily News, 'Quick-Draw' Bloomberg's decision to hire private investigators for this gun control stunt has apparently jeopardized several genuine criminal cases,' said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. "In his foolish zeal to drum up support for an anti-gun campaign, Bloomberg quite possibly has put real investigations at risk. This appears to be as clear cut a case of obstruction of justice as I've ever witnessed and Bloomberg should be investigated, and prosecuted if necessary."

There is also the felony offense of 18 U.S.C. 242 "acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States."  The offense is punishable by a range of imprisonment up to a life term, or the death penalty, depending upon the circumstances of the crime, and the resulting injury, if any.

Of course the fantasy of Bloomberg spending the rest of his life in some Federal prison playing the role of "girlfriend" to some thug won't play out anytime soon.  He is above the law for now and knows it.  But it doesn't hurt to keep reminding the bigots that what they are doing is illegal.  Perhaps someday, before the statute of limitations runs out, he and others will get what they legally have coming.

It would appear that, despite the screeching of the anti-gun bigots here, the U.S. doesn't have the most lax or ignored gun laws.  Yemen seems to enjoy a bit more freedom in that regard.

"I have cannons, missiles, Kalashnikovs, anti-aircraft guns and hand grenades," said community leader Mohammed Naji, sitting cross-legged in his house in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a. "This is a part of our culture, and a tribesman can give up everything except his gun."

...

The report said it was relatively easy to obtain surface-to-air missiles in Yemen.

Too bad their culture is so messed up in other ways.  Revenge killings are just a bit too crude for my tastes.

No, it is not the cleanup the Boomershoot participants helped with.  Sunday, while Barb was at work, I drove the hour east to Boomershoot country to tidy up a bit in preparation for the next ATF inspection. 

After using over a 1000 pounds of my chemical supply (we consumed 864 reactive targets at Boomershoot 2006) I had some room to rearrange things.  I also removed a couple garbage bags full of old milk and soy cartons.  We used to use the cartons for target containers and I had saved them for testing new mixtures.  We discovered the type of container made a difference in how easy the targets detonated.  Future tests will be made with the actual containers used.  This gave me room for the table we set up outside during production on the north side of the Taj Mahal.  This lets us open the door to the magazine without the table being knocked over and gives us better access to the chemical on the south side of the shed.

This same table has been broken for a couple years.  This year during the building of the targets it collapsed with some targets on it.  There wasn't any danger of the targets exploding from the slide to the ground but it was not pleasant and someone could have gotten hurt anyway.  It needed to be fixed and I have been meaning to do that every year.  I still need to do some sanding, buy the screws, and put them in but I have made a significant amount of progress on this long overdue task.

I was pleased to note that the batteries were fully charged by the solar cells.

I swept the floor which had a couple dustpans full of dirt on it from all the travel in and out with muddy feet.

I ran the generator for a few minutes to warm it up so I could change the oil--which I did at lunch time in my parents shop.

I took the floor mats to my parents place and hosed them off.

I cleaned the air cleaner and put in a new filter.  I burned the old filter which was filled with potassium chlorate dust.

I removed all the miscellaneous mixing utensils we don't use which have gathered over the years.

I brought home two blenders that "froze up".  The chemical contact apparently had corroded the bearings (ammonium nitrate is particularly hard on metal).  I'll see if I can repair them easily, if not I'll buy at least one more for backup to the two remaining ones.

I did an inventory of chemicals we use (there are some chemical types we have used for testing that I didn't inventory), and the target containers.  I still need to inventory the remaining stakes.

The following pictures are after clean up and putting all the remaining stuff, including some empty garbage cans, back in.  I'm pleased and I hope Crystal, Sue, or whoever the ATF sends to visit this year is as pleased as I am.

Last Wednesday my girlfriend for the last 30+ years, Barbara, flew into SeaTac (I work in the Seattle area) from Idaho.  Even with the extra few days together it seemed we didn't have enough time together or to do the things we wanted to do.  We had lunch with HsuanHua on Thursday.  I introduced Barb to my work associates on noon Friday.  Friday night we went to dinner and a movie (The Da Vinci Code--good, but not as good as the book) with my roommates.  Saturday morning we went hiking on Mt. Si then had lunch with Michelle before we drove back home to Moscow together.

And every night we tested out the new sheets I bought for my bed.  At 600 threads per inch they are almost like satin sheets without the problems (a small amount of sweat cause satin sheets to stick to your skin).  Even at $100 for the set (King size) they are worth it.

Soon, we hope, the visits and the testing of the sheets will be much more frequent.

It takes a particular kind of nerve to be filmed taking $100,000 in alleged bribe money out of an FBI informant's car, have the FBI later find the same cold, hard cash wrapped in aluminum foil in your freezer -- and then adamantly claim that you have done nothing wrong.

...displaying the cool of a man who keeps his cash in the freezer.

Dana Milbank
May 23, 2006
So $90,000 Was in the Freezer. What's Wrong With That?
Washington Post
[While this scumbag, Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, needs to be prosecuted this incidents of these sorts of crimes could be greatly reduced by restoring the limits to power to those mandated by the U.S. Constitution.  An excess of power, as is now the case, attracts the type of people who will abuse it.--Joe]

Daly was my Quote of the day today.  Alphecca also commented on him.  This is the email I sent him:

I just read your May 21, 2006 article in the Daily News and the first paragraph or two of a few of your other anti-gun owner articles.  You appear to be mistaken and or ignorant about certain facts.  Firearms in the U.S. are used to defend innocent life between two and three million times each year.  In the vast majority of these cases no shots are fired.  Most of these firearms are handguns.  Defending the innocent from grievous bodily harm or death is a entirely legitimate use of a tool--which is why the police and millions of private citizens in the U.S. carry handguns on a daily basis.

Before you advocate restrictions on such useful tools you have to ask yourself Just One Question:

Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where restricting the access of handheld weapons to the average person made them safer?

-joe-
http://blog.joehuffman.org

Looking through my log files I could not find any indication he clicked on the link to my "Just One Question".  This is as I would expect.  Bigots don't need to think about an issue since they already know what they want to believe.

Lyle's comment deserves some more attention.  He says:

In a free society, "legitimate demand" is determined by the manufacturers and their customers, not by socialist political activists masquerading as journalists.

Very true, but beyond that only someone that hasn't made it past elementary school would believe that manufactures would be able to known what "legitimate demand" is.  The manufacturers sell to distributors who sell to retailers.  They manufacture as many as the distributors wish to purchase.  They have no "crystal ball" which can give them any sort of clue as to how many of those firearms will be lost, stolen, or sold to straw purchasers and end up in the hands of a person prohibited from firearms ownership.  And with there being about 200 million firearms in the country and just a little over 300,000 crimes involving a firearm each year in this country it means only about one out about 700 guns is used in a crime.  And that is making the worst case assumption that each crime is committed with a different gun!  The real number is probably something on the order of one gun out of 2000 to 10,000 is used in a crime.  Hence forecasting of firearms sales would have to be accurate to the level of about +/- 0.01% in order to know what the "legitimate demand" is.

Bigot Daly and his kind have mental problems.

...to enter the cavernous Midwest Airlines Center was to behold thousands of weapons, many of them handguns that have no real purpose other than to kill people and are produced in far greater numbers than the legitimate demand.

Just inside and to the left was the booth for Smith & Wesson, which manufactures two of the three most-prevalent guns among the 5,551 recovered by the NYPD last year. The list was topped by the Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver, a number of which were on display for anyone to heft.

Michael Daly
Aw shoot, they're cute
May 21, 2006
Daily News
[I don't believe I have ever read a more bigoted article by someone who was not on the payroll of an anti-gun owner organization.  I sent him a short email asking Just One Question--Joe]

The inquisitions, however, are predicated upon the wholly implausible notion that there are people out there willing to bomb the bejeezus out of 300 fellow passengers, yet unable to bring themselves to tell a fib. Either that or the increasing torment is just a canny plot by rabid environmentalists, hellbent on dissuading us from flying at all.

Personally, I find the second more likely. I also think they're winning.

Carol Sarler
May 21, 2006
Airport security is a farce... I rest my case
The Observer (UK)

From the Edmonton Sun, Gun control advocates lining up their ammo:

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe and Wendy Cukier of the Coalition for Gun Control accused the Conservatives of pandering to the gun lobby.

And the liberals are pandering to the gun control lobby.

We believe the evidence is absolutely clear on this.

This system is expensive and not effective. It's not the right way to spend dollars on both gun control and crime control.

Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
May 19, 2006
Harper tells Ontario, Quebec to butt out on gun registry complaints
[It's going to be a rough road getting rid of this dangerous encroachment on civil rights but Harper appears to be determined.  Good for him!--Joe]

Ms. Porter should walk in the shoes of those who couldn't fend off the strength of another, where using a gun would be the only means to stay alive. If it isn't a gun, then it would be a baseball bat, tire iron, piece of glass or just muscle.

As a woman, I deserve the right to defend myself the best way I can. Gun-control advocates don't seem to realize that gun control will adversely affect the rights of the easily-victimized, i.e., the elderly and young and, especially, females who can't throw a punch like men.

Celeste A. Morello
Letter to the editor.
Philadelphia
Apparently in response to this editorial.
[Ms. Morello should ask Just One Question.--Joe]