The other day in Seattle some nut case (literally, he was considered mentally ill) randomly attacked an innocent person and had him down on the ground before the victim was able to draw his .357 and shoot the attacker. The attacker died. The Seattle Times now has an article about concealed carry permits. It's neutral. Very factual. Here are a couple facts I didn't know but have wondered about:

Statewide, there are about 239,000 active concealed-pistol licenses. King County has slightly more than 48,000, Forth said.

The only thing that could be considered negative in the article is that they say there isn't any requirement for training to get a CPL. But they mention an instructor and quote him extensively on what his class covers:

Although Washington's law on concealed weapons is fairly detailed, it doesn't cover the responsibilities and potential liabilities that could come with using a gun for self-defense, said Paul Nickle, an instructor at Wade's Eastside Guns and Indoor Range in Bellevue. He teaches a course called "Legal Aspects of Armed Self Defense."

Whether a shooting qualifies legally as self-defense depends on the ability of and opportunity for the attacker to do the potential victim harm and whether the person threatened is in jeopardy, Nickle said. "But it's not just the legal requirements [of shooting a person] that gun owners have to consider," he said. "It's the repercussions — legally, financially, emotionally.

"The first question I'm often asked in class is, 'When is it OK to shoot?' I tell them the question should be, 'How can I avoid having to shoot?' "

Nickle said his students — some new gun owners, some seasoned — often don't realize that just because they might be in the right legally if they shoot in self-defense, they could end up being liable in civil court. His class is designed to fill in some of the gaps in the state's law on self-defense.

"The law is still very gray when it comes to using deadly force," Nickle said. "You have to ask yourself if you can live with the consequences if you do shoot."

I know Paul. He attended Boomershoot 2001:

Paul Nickle and Joe Huffman at Boomershoot 2001

The article even has links to the CPL application and other links to useful information for gun owners. And most of all I love the title of the article: "State's concealed-weapons law among nation's most liberal." They use the word "liberal" in the classic sense.

If you know who Ms. Rand is (Legislative Director, Violence Policy Center) you know what she is going to say if she gets space for two or more words, "Ban guns". In a letter to USA Today today she does not disappoint:

The fact is that such mass shootings are preventable, but the United States lacks the will to do what needs to be done: Ban handguns and semiautomatic assault weapons, and regulate the gun industry to control the firepower available to civilians.

I responded with my own comment:

M. Kristen Rand advocates banning some firearms. She gives the U.K. as an example. Apparently she has not looked at the violent crime rate before and after their ban. I just have Just One Question (http://blog.joehuffman.org/2004/12/15/Just+One+Question.aspx) for Ms. Rand: 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?

It's a pleasant thought to believe you can pass a law against something and that something will no longer exist. But it didn't work with laws against recreational drug, laws against guns near schools, and laws against murder. The only thing a law banning firearms will do is disarm the victims. World history is full of such examples and the associated tragedies. The Amish school shooting is only one of the most recent examples.

No, I didn't get into the bigot and "gun nigger" aspects of my recent proposal. It would not have been appropriate for this venue. However, I did have the "state of mind" I proposed. Go on the offensive. Make them justify their bigotry even if you don't flat out call it bigotry. We'll get there. Just keep pushing the envelope.

I believe that guns don't kill people. Husbands that come home early do.

Larry the Cable Guy
Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again

I knew they shot my brother, and I thought they were gonna shoot me. I had a better chance with the police.

Nicholas Artry
(Attempted) robber of an Indianapolis jewelry store. His brother was killed by the owner (five shots from a .38) and an employee (one shot from a .44).
This came from the second posting on Wayne LaPierre's new blog.
[This quote matches well from the results of Rossi and Wright's survey described in their book Armed and Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms. In this book the researchers discovered that robbers are more afraid of being shot by a home owner than by being arrested and sent to prison by the police. Hence they avoid breaking into homes that might have guns.

I have the same complaints about Wayne's blog that Say Uncle does.--Joe]

It stands to reason that self-righteous, inflexible, single-minded, authoritarian true believers are politically organized. Open-minded, flexible, complex, ambiguous, anti-authoritarian people would just as soon be left to mind their own fucking business.

R.U. Sirius
In How To Mutate and Take Over The World
[From a conversation and followup email from Kevin at The Smallest Minority.--Joe]

From my after dinner talk at the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous:

---

You all know what happens if you were convicted of an act of domestic violence years or even decades ago. Ex post facto your right to keep and bear arms was infringed by the Lautenberg Amendment. And yes, I think the Gun Control Act of 1968 had ex post facto elements as well. But this is just a symptom of a much larger problem. You don't cure cancer by giving the patient an narcotic for the pain. We have a cancer infringing on our right to keep and bear arms and we need to find a cure.

There are lots of places you can't exercise your right to keep and bear arms. Depending on the particular jurisdiction you can't carry your defensive tools, even if you have permit for most public places:

• On buses
• In parks
• In post offices
• Near schools
• In hospitals
• In the restaurant
• On the job
• In churches

In New Jersey a judge said, "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril."

In Utah AOL employees were fired for transferring guns from one car to another in the parking lot before going to the range. They sued and lost their case.

In Oklahoma Weyerhaeuser brought "drug sniffing" dogs into the parking lot on the first day of hunting season. The dogs were also trained to alert on guns. Employees who refused to allow searches of their vehicles after a dog alerted on them were told they would be fired on the spot. The searches that resulted in guns also resulted in people getting fired. They sued and lost their case.

A friend of mine started having "weird things" happen to her at work. In essence she was demoted and previous work from home accommodations were terminated. Things were being made very difficult for her and she didn't understand why. Independently I noticed that I was getting hits on my web sites from Google searches for her name. The visits were from people at her company. They spent a lot of time on my websites looking at her gun owner rights activities and I told her about my discovery. Ahhh haaa!!! So that is what is going on. She left the company on terms of her own choosing.

After taking a group of people to the range, where a good time was had by all, another friend was accused by some gun fearing woman of intimidating her in the hallway. My friends contract was terminated early without ever being asked his side of the story. The women later bragged about getting rid of the gun nut and was fired for dishonesty.

Chris at Anarchangel, at the next table over, has another egregious example of being fired from a job for exercising his right to keep and bear arms.

As many of you know I was fired from my job at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I couldn't understand why until I looked at my log files for my websites. Someone had a problem with my being a civil rights advocate.

If I know that many people personally affected then how widespread is the problem?

A former New York prosecutor told me if you shoot someone you must prove, and rightly so, that it was self-defense. Not that the prosecutor had to prove it wasn't self defense. No part of the Bill of Rights applies if you are a gun owner.

What I want you to do now is replace "gun owner" in all those cases with 'black'. What do you have?

We are gun niggers.

They want us "in our place" and they want to exterminate us. Not our physical bodies but our culture--our "gun culture".

And what do we do? Almost all of the time when we fight we only fight to maintain our position. We fight to keep from getting another restriction, another whipping. Sometimes don't lose those fights and don't get whipped. And when we lose "The Master" tells us if we are good we won't have to get whipped again. We bow our heads and tell him how good we are going to be. The "The Master" won't ever have to worry about us again. We are going to be good from now on. We don't want to be whipped again.

We seldom win. We seldom make real progress. We occasionally defeat an anti-gun politician at the polls but his replacement isn't able or willing to undo the damage done by his or her predecessor. We only slow the cancer some. We aren't defeating it.

What we need to do is to turn the tables. But how do we do that? It's in the state of mind.

We have been downtrodden for so long we are almost unable to think straight. These people are bigots. They may think they are the elite, the wise, the educated, and the deserving of power, but they are simple, ignorant bigots. The facts don't matter to them. I've literally had people tell me, "Statistics don't mean anything to me. You can prove anything with statistics." And, "I don't believe your facts." They don't have facts of their own. They only have their bigoted beliefs. When my Just One Question got put on the Democratic Underground the best they could some up with for a response was, "What color is orange? True or false?"

We must put these people in their proper place. The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, and all their associated organizations are the 21st Century equivalents of the KKK. And the majority of the public needs to know that. There were members of the KKK that were tried and sent to jail decades after their crimes because of the change in public opinion in the intervening years. Keep that as our final goal as you suffer through the "whippings" we take near every day. I know you cringe as you remove your gun and leave it behind when you go to work, or as you walk defenseless through the nearly empty parking garage to the hospital to visit a friend. We may be able to hold these people that impose these degradations and "whippings" upon us accountable years from now just as the KKK crimes were punished years after the crimes occurred.

I'll bet the first question that comes to mind is, "Even if it were possible to make that much progress, wouldn't that be Ex Post Facto that you complained about being applied to us?" No. The laws already exists. It just isn't enforced because we are gun niggers. 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242 is what I want them doing time for violating. I want to see mayors Daley and Bloomberg, senators Schumer and Feinstein handcuffed and dragged off to jail. I want to see major newspapers and news networks detailing their crimes which resulted in the deaths of thousands and rapes of tens of thousands because of all the victims they disarmed. I want to see them pay restitution and spend the rest of their lives behinds bars for their crimes against humanity. I want to see company diversity training include a section on being sensitive to the rights of gun owners. I want to see making a disparaging remark about gun owners in the workplace be cause for disciplinary action.

You can help do this. It's going to be much easier than some of the other battles we have fought because we don't need new laws. We just need existing law enforced.

When you post on a gun rights issues, when you write your letter to the editor, your congressman, or your senator you have to have the proper state of mind. Never forget that the anti-gun bigots are the KKK of the 21st Century. Look for opportunities to make that point. Make belonging to the Brady Campaign the equivalent of a membership in the KKK because it's true.

I was up Friday night/Saturday morning until after 1:30 and the alarm went off at 7:15. Getting by on minimal amounts of sleep has been too much of a pattern for the last week but I needed to push through it. This sort of opportunity doesn't happen often.

Range time went well. Breakfast at Denny's--once Say Uncle and I found our way there. We found the range easily with Microsoft Streets and Trips using the GPS option. I reduced the mass of my ammo collection by about a factor of two so I suspect I may actually be within the guidelines of the airline for the return trip. I had a request from someone at work for lots of pictures and video but there just wasn't that much that I found particularly interesting to take pictures of. And a lot of gun bloggers are very picture shy. They blog under pseudonyms and to have their picture associated with gun blogging would blow their cover.

In addition to Say Uncle and Kevin I wanted to meet Neanderpundit. Og was the first person I didn't personally know to link to my blog. I wanted to thank him. We got a chance to chat some at the range but it was about Boomershoot and there was so much else going on I didn't manage to bring the topic around to thanking him. He might actually make it to Boomershoot 2007 so I may get another chance to thank him in person.

We went back to the hotel and after getting cleaned up and having trouble finding my rental car in the garage (they really need to put numbers on the parking stalls) to get some essential supplies I only had about 30 minutes to finish writing my "speech" that Mr. Completely offered to let me give at the dinner. I'll post an altered version of that here soon. Some things I could have said better and somethings were not to leave the room yet.

Dan McKowen was the guest of honor and was presented with a check for his continuing medical costs and he gave his speech. As usual there were lots of critical details left out of the story presented by the main stream media and Dan filled us in on those. Thank you Dan.

We returned to the hospitality room and talked until after midnight when people started leaving because they had planes to catch and hundreds of miles to drive the next day.

This morning Kevin and I had breakfast together, Say Uncle was supposed to join us but somehow we didn't manage to connect with him. I then went back to bed and slept until after 15:00. Wow. I feel so much better now. As ex-coworker Niki from a long time ago used to say, "Sleep is such an amazing drug. It makes you feel so good."

Other posting on the Rendezvous:

• Gunblogger Status Report (Anarchangel)
• Hours and hours of shooty goodness (Anarchangel)
• Reno 911 (Say Uncle)
• On the gunblogger meetup (Say Uncle)
• Range time (Say Uncle)
• I’m leaving on a jet plane (Og at Neanderpundit)
• Gunblogger Rendezvous - It’s Cordite Time! (with pictures by Traction Control)
• Gun Bloggers Rendezvous Update (Spank that Donkey)
• Getting Ready for the Rendezvous (Kevin at The Smallest Minority)

AK owned by Say Uncle, scope mount by UltiMAK, modeled by Melody of Anarchangel.

Taken during the Gun Blogger's Rendezvous October 7, 2006 at the Palomino Valley Gun Club.

A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders.  Once those in authority realized the existence and magnitude of the problem, it was only a matter of time until they solved it.

And thus, since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare -- psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's own troops.  Propaganda and various other crude forms of psychological enabling have always been present in warfare, but in the second half of this century psychology has had an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
From On Killing -- The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill In War and Society
Page 251

We accuse the leftist, feels-good types of reinforcing each other but now I understand why they do it. Wow! What a rush, what pleasure it is to be talking to all these articulate, smart, gun people who get pissed about the same sort of nonsense from the illogical, arrogant, elitists that want to take our guns away. Do recreational drugs make you feel this good? I wouldn't know. I've never used drugs recreationally.

I only got about four hours of sleep last night and I'm still wired from talking to these guys even though I said goodnight a couple hours ago.

When I finally made it to the hospitality room most everyone was gone to supper. There was just Mr. Completely and two other guys there. I'd met Mr. C. before but didn't recognize the other two. My Boomershoot t-shirt gave me away to them and Mr. C introduced me to Kevin Baker from the The Smallest Minority, and <he who shall remain nameless> from Say Uncle. The two bloggers I most wanted to meet. This is so cool!

A little while later Cam Edwards shows up and is introduced. Now, I know who Cam is. I even recognized him when he walked in. But... I've only glanced at his blog. I was so embarrassed when he said he reads my blog all the time.

I pried myself away from the rest of the group long enough to have dinner (I basically hadn't had breakfast or lunch, just snacking on trail mix since I got on the plane) with Chris and Melody Byrne (Archangel) and a friend (sorry forgot his name) they brought.  Melody and the friend were rather quiet but Chris and I had lots of fun talking about explosives (he played with them a lot while in the military) and about being fired by anti-gun bigots and by Muslims that didn't like his participation with Team Infidel (do a search for "Team Infidel" on this page).

I reluctantly said good night when everyone else started talking about how late it was and drifted off toward the elevators.

Tomorrow we go to the range. I wish I had looked up the range website before I left Idaho. I would have brought a different rifle. They have a 1000 yard range here!

So we were sitting at the table in the hospitality room here at Circus Circus talking about small backup guns and someone mentioned how a visitor to his blog got all bent out of shape because of disparaging remarks about the .25 auto. I went looking with my cell phone web browser for what Jeff Cooper had to say about the .25, which is how I would handle someone defending the .25 as a defensive tool. I found the quotes but the moment had passed. Here they are--better late than never I guess:

We hear of an unfortunate woman who, during an nighttime asthma attack, confused the small handgun she kept under her pillow with an asthma inhaler and proceeded to relieve her symptoms. It was not a fatal mistake, partly because she used a 25 ACP, which everyone knows is not sufficient to clear sinuses.

From John B. Hubbard of Bangor, Maine 
   
Jeff Cooper
Jeff Cooper's Commentaries
Vol. 2, No. 2
31 January 1994

Our old buddy Gene Harshbarger from Guatemala reports a recent episode with the 25 ACP pistol cartridge. It seems that Gene's cousin was set upon by a trio of car thieves who shot him once almost dead center with that dinky little pistol. The bullet entered at a very flat angle, however, proceeded laterally just inside the pectoral muscle, and exited after about 5 inches of traverse, continuing on into the target's left arm.

The cousin hit the deck and started shooting back, whereupon the assailants split. When he stood up the bullet slid out of his left sleeve and bounced on the pavement. It penetrated the jacket, but not the skin of his left arm.

As we used to teach in the spook business, carry a 25 if it makes you feel good, but do not ever load it. If you load it you may shoot it. If you shoot it you may hit somebody, and if you hit somebody - and he finds out about it - he may be very angry with you.

Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper's Commentaries
Vol. 4, No. 14
December 1996

In looking for Cooper's advice I also found Ayoobs:

A .25 is a nice thing to have when you're not carrying a gun.

 Massad F. Ayoob
 On the use of .25 caliber handgun.
 In the Gravest Extreme
 End of chapter 14
 ISBN 0-936297-001

NO! I did not bring my chemistry set to Reno with me. This happened before I arrived and I can prove it.

The large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in a simple way.

Donald O. Hebb
[And to extend this even further and more emphatically, government cannot do things that businesses and individuals can. Health care, the food supply, housing, and personal security being just a few obvious cases in point.--Joe]

I'm headed to the SeaTac airport. I'll be in Reno by evening. I'll be seeing some of you for the first time at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous.

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary

I've gradually been making improvements to the Boomershoot 2007 online entry form. It should now be sending email when you have all the required fields filled out and you select a position. I had a few problems getting that to work right for certain email addresses so I would appreciate you verfying that you can receive email via the entry form before I enable everything for actual entries. It will show that positions have been taken but ignore that. They will all be reset when it is enabled for actual entries.

I still have some more things to do such as making the confirmation email real, rather than "this is a test...", and setting up the payment options. I'm off to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous tomorrow so I don't know when I will get it completed and will actually be able to start accepting entries but it will be soon.

I have problems with hay fever. Yeah, that was a big issue when I lived on the farm. Especially when my family's religious beliefs (Christian Scientist) strongly discouraged the use of medicines. Some of my kids inherited the problem but Sudafed (years ago) and now Claritin give us the relief we need to be functional in most situations.

Now there is a new solution on the horizon:

Scientists claim six injections of a new vaccine offers years of relief to sufferers of the allergy  
 
A NEW DNA-based allergy vaccine can offer long-lasting relief to hay fever sufferers after just six injections, American scientists have claimed.

Patients receiving the experimental vaccine showed an average 60 per cent reduction in typical allergy symptoms, such as sneezing, runny nose, watering eyes and itching for at least two years, compared with those receiving a placebo.  
 
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore, Maryland, believe that a six-injection treatment with the new vaccine, known as AIC, could offer a significant improvement over traditional allergen immunotherapy, which can require several years of weekly or bi-weekly injections.

AIC contains a short piece of DNA known as an “immunostimulatory sequence” that can modify immune system reactions and reduce the typical symptoms of ragweed allergy, more commonly known as hay fever.

The experimental therapy also holds the promise of one day eliminating the need for traditional allergy medicines such as nasal steroids and antihistamines.

Malkin's video on Islamic extremists has been banned and they won't tell her specifically why. So she made another video asking them why. I love the sarcasm at the end:

The Liberal party has no direction. The real challenge for the next leader will obviously be to unite the party and give them some direction other than just to run with whatever the issue of the week is that they think they can make a cheap point out of.

Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
September 16, 2006
$1-billion didn't prevent tragedy
[As near as I can tell the same applies to the Democrats in our country.--Joe]

Phil at Random Nuclear Strikes asks Ken Schram, Seattle liberal talk show host, Just One Question.

He probably won't get an answer, but it might make a few gears grind for a minute or two.

Via David and the Idaho Statesman:

Helen Chenoweth-Hage, an outspoken conservative who served three terms as Idaho’s 1st Congressional District representative, died Monday after being thrown from a vehicle that overturned on an isolated central Nevada highway.

She was traveling toward Tonopah, Nev., at 11:40 a.m. PDT on State Route 376 when the Jeep drifted off the right side of the road, swerved to the left and flipped after the driver overcorrected in steering to the right, Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Rocky Gonzalez said.

State Route 376 is the main route between Tonopah and her ranch in Monitor Valley. The crash occurred about 40 miles from her ranch. Tonopah is halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.

The other occupants — daughter-in-law Yelena Hage, 24, and 5-month-old grandson, Bryan Hage — also were ejected but were not seriously injured. Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo said it’s still unclear who was driving.

Gonzalez said Chenoweth-Hage, 68, was holding the baby and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

...

A Republican, Chenoweth-Hage was elected to Congress from Idaho in 1994, serving three terms before stepping down.

She first ran for Congress against incumbent Democrat Larry LaRocco, gaining national attention during fundraisers when she held endangered-salmon bakes, serving canned salmon and ridiculing the listing of Idaho salmon as an endangered species.

During her congressional career, Chenoweth-Hage was a victim of a “salmon pie” attack while at a field hearing on forest health in Missoula, Mont. Randall Mark of Moscow hit her in the head with a “pie” made of rotten canned salmon, forcing the meeting to adjourn for an hour while she cleaned salmon flakes from her hair and jacket.

After the attack, the congresswoman joked, “I would like to say that I find it amusing that they used salmon. I guess salmon must not be endangered anymore.”

Chenoweth-Hage, a colorful lawmaker, said salmon aren’t endangered but that white males are. She also said the Endangered Species Act was unconstitutional, complained about black government helicopters harassing ranchers, said minorities didn’t like northern Idaho because it is too cold and called for disarming federal resource enforcement agents.

The outspoken advocate of smaller government self-imposed a three-term limit and chose not to run in 2000.

She lived in Orofino at the same time Barb and I were going to High School there. Barb's sister Nancy used to babysit for her and her ex-husband Nick Chenoweth. There are stories I could tell, but won't, about her private life.

She did a good job as our Representative in Congress. I'm sorry to hear she is gone.

I sometimes give my wife and her family a bad time about their "different" sense of humor. Here we have Barb's sister Nancy caught in the act, by both Xenia and I, of pushing over an old building in the park last Saturday:

Probably more characteristic of their "different" sense of humor is as it applies to outhouses. I'll explain some other time.

For some reason this quote came to mind when I read the article:

Man, n.: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.  His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary

It's politicians that infest the whole habitable earth, even Canada, but some of them 'get it'--even in Canada:

For the past decade, the previous Liberal government has put all of its eggs in one basket when it comes to preventing gun crime. It invested over $1 billion into a gun registry that never functioned properly and was never proven to have prevented a single crime.

While federal gun registry officials were out chasing down farmers for not registering their .22s, relatively little was being done to attack criminal gun use. The Montreal tragedy, sadly, was the ultimate proof of the gun registry's failure. The preliminary police investigation revealed Kimveer Gill appears to have properly registered all his guns and complied with every other firearm regulation.

The $1 billion wasted on the registry could have been put to much better use in putting more police on the streets, providing better equipment for forensics labs and helping schools and social workers to identify and deal with troubled youths before they become violent.

The Liberal opposition, blind as always to facts, continues to chant that we must keep the registry to prevent future crimes, even though it has failed so abysmally to prevent past ones. The new Conservative government will not repeat the Liberals' mistakes.

...

Shamefully, the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc continue to exploit the grief of families by trying to twist the Montreal tragedy to their own political advantage. The Conservative government is not interested in such rhetoric. We are interested only in doing the right things by taking practical steps to clamp down on gun crime and violent criminals.

Tom Lukiwski
Lukiwski is Conservative MP for Regina Lumsden Lake Centre.
Ottawa

They have a long way to go to undo all the harm done by the restrictions on firearms. An entire nation needs to be educated on self-defense and how to use handguns. Had that $1 Billion (some say $2 Billion) been spent on teaching people to use and carry a handgun the Montreal tragedy would have been stopped much sooner. Think of it this way; when some criminal starts shooting innocent people what is the current response? It's to call the police who, quite correctly, arrive as fast as is practical with their own guns to stop the shooter.

Got that? Good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns from hurting innocent people. Everyone knows that. When the good guys don't have guns they are easily slaughtered by the bad guys with guns.

Therefore the way to reduce the number of innocent people from getting hurt or killed is to make sure there are good guys with guns close by. Therefore we need more good guys to carry guns with them and reduce the time from when a bad guy does something bad until he is stopped by a good guy with a gun. In this country we, by constitutional design, have the ultimate solution--The Right to Keep and Bear Arms. This solution also protects us from when the police, and the government in general, becomes infested with bad guys.

Unfortunately because of the infestation of politicians we have suffered with for the past 70+ years (I'm thinking of NFA '34, but really it's been longer than that) we have a lot of work to do before we restore things to their proper order. At least we are headed in the proper direction on this important issue.

As I obliquely reported the other day my cell phone turned into a pumpkin at midnight on Saturday. It wasn't until lunch time yesterday that I was finally able to get it fixed. It's quite the Cinderella now. Very pretty and nice. I'd like to say more but there are those pesky NDAs...

They say $32K was too much for playing around on second base. But they don't say what they think a fair price would be.

I think they should just let the open market decide.

Both links are via Raymond.

Your claim that "they're only for killing people" is imprecise. A gas chamber or electric chair is designed for killing people, and these devices obviously serve different functions than guns. To be precise, a high-capacity, military-type rifle or handgun is designed for conflict. When I need to protect myself and my freedom, I want the most reliable, most durable, highest-capacity weapon possible. The only thing hunting and target shooting have to do with freedom is that they're good practice.

John Ross
http://www.john-ross.net/mistakes.htm
September 14, 2005

Just stay away. There's no one here but racist, sexist, red-necked, gun-toting, explosives-loving, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthals anyway so you wouldn't like it.

On Sunday Barb and I replaced a Geocache that turned up missing. Things went much better this time than the last time we tried to visit this location. We took some pictures while we were out:

This is what I want you to think of when you think of Idaho:

I think the law is silly, but I am inclined to agree that the State of Texas probably is within it's enumerated powers to pass and enforce such a silly law:

The Supreme Court refused Monday to consider whether a Texas law making it a crime to promote sex toys shaped like sexual organs is unconstitutional.

An adult bookstore employee in El Paso, Texas, sued the state after his arrest for showing two undercover officers a device shaped like a penis and telling the female officer the device would arouse and gratify her.

The employee, Ignacio Sergio Acosta, says a Texas law outlawing the manufacture, marketing or dissemination of an “obscene device” including those shaped like sex organs is unconstitutional because it prevents individuals from using such devices, violating their right to sexual privacy.

I would be inclined to ridicule every man involved in this from the legislators that voted for it, the police enforcing the law, to the prosecutors presenting the case. It would go something like this, "So, are you afraid your wife won't be interested in you anymore once she gets one of these? Perhaps you should get some lessons on how to be a better lover rather than trying to prevent her from getting a little satisfaction."

Pretty much what I expected. I thought that particular explosive needed some more processing after being mixed and perhaps it does but they just aren't telling us. Also, I would have used something other than a hypodermic needle but other than that there are no surprises here for me:

Scientists tested the ingredients linked to the London plot in the Rio Grande Valley south of Albuquerque, where the canyons and mountains form a perfect explosives testing range. Based on the materials found in Britain, investigators developed a specific theory of the bomb plot, two officials who have been briefed on the inquiry said.

With the seal on a sports drink called Lucozade intact, the plotters apparently intended to remove the drink with a hypodermic needle and replace it with highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a syrupy liquid once used as rocket fuel. Another bottle would be filled with a common household substance, which The New York Times agreed not to disclose at the request of Homeland Security officials. After the two were mixed, a detonator hidden in a hollowed-out AA battery would be used to set off the bomb, according to this theory.

What they don't come right out and say is that they can't protect us from bombs being brought or made on-board. As long as I am allowed to walk on-board without body cavity searches, remain conscious, unrestrained, and unobserved for at least a short time there will be a way for me to detonate an explosive on-board. Get used to it and stop spending so much money on useless "security".

I don't think some people believe me when I tell them the hoplophobes frequently appear to believe that guns have free will. Here is more evidence of the truth of my claim:

No one will rise up to defend a man who walks into an Amish school, lines young girls up against a blackboard, ties up their feet, and then kills them before killing himself. But a surprising number of people will inevitably rise up to defend his guns, to call the man guilty but his weapons innocent.

...

There are no simple solutions to this conflict. It is neither possible nor tolerable to secure every school or guard every child. Nor is it possible or politically tolerable to keep tabs on every gun. But in these killings we see an open society threatened by the ubiquity of its weapons, in which one kind of freedom is allowed to trump all others. Most gun owners are respectable, law-abiding citizens. But that is no reason to acquit the guns.

Call the weapons innocent? "Acquit the guns"? Someone should commit these lunatics. They have mental problems.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Justice Louis Brandeis
1928
Olmstead v. US 277 US 479

This is, word for word and in its entirety, the text on a poster that has been displayed in a public school in our area for years:

Violence is Any;
Word
Look
Sign
Act
 that inflicts or threatens to inflict physical or emotional injury or discomfort upon another person's body, feelings, or possessions.

Can anyone make sense of that statement?  Adopting it as policy would be quite another matter:  "Ms. Dimbulb, Johnny gave my pencil a dirty look..."

Send the kid in for anger management counseling.  That'll get him to respect you, I'm sure.

I would point out that approximately 100% of a public school's budget comes as a result of threatening tax payers with acts of violence, but saying that might inflict emotional discomfort and thereby constitute an act of violence.