The View From North Central Idaho

Ry reports the KING 5 Evening Magazine video on Boomershoot 2005 was nominated for an emmy in 2006.

Guns got to go! Too many redneck, bible toting racist with them. There honestly is no need for anyone to have a gun, for any reason. Hunting included. Obama said he would get rid of guns and he will. Last season for hunters. Enjoy while you can.

Cedric T
THE AGENDA: GUN CONTROL
November 19, 2008 10:05 AM
Chicago, IL
[Μολὼν λάβε Cedric. Μολὼν λάβε!--Joe]

Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.

Herbert Marcuse
An Essay on Liberation, ch. 1 (1969)
[Some people don't want to be liberated. And a great many more don't want others to be liberated either.--Joe]

President-elect Obama, I wish you all good fortune as you embark on your Presidential career. I suspect that you will come to realize (if you haven't already) that Socialism and Communism don't work, that we can't tax our way into prosperity, and that punishing motivated people who succeed on their own by forcing them to support those with little or no ambition is a recipe for disaster. If you don't figure those things out, that's okay too. We might have to wait for the midterm elections of 2010, but one way or another, because of you, the nightmare of Socialism will finally be over for America.

John Ross
November 8, 2008
Hallelujah! The Nightmare Is Over!, or Thank You, Mr. Obama, for Putting So Many Bad Things Behind Us
[If it were only so easy. Maybe he's right. But Barb tells me I always optimistic and I'm not optimistic in our present situation. Is this the way it has ever been? People elect a socialist to the top spot, he or she takes the country down the toilet and everyone realizes it was a terrible mistake and becomes capitalistic overnight (two years)? Show me an example where that has been the case and maybe I can be optimistic again.--Joe]

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Edward Abbey
(1927 - 1989)
[Among other accomplishments, such as his books, Abbey inspired the formation and associated with the members of Earth First! I find it very interesting how the words of one set of extremists can match the words of their opposites.--Joe]

If you are in the Moscow area you might be interesting in going to the range with some (University of Idaho) Vandals:

This Sunday, the 16th is a range day sponsored by the Vandals for Firearms Education and Training (VFET). We are meeting in the Safeway parking lot here in Moscow at 1pm and caravaning out to the range out on Lenville Road.

Look for the silver Subaru Forester with the fishing bobber antenna topper and the yellow flag on the antenna on top.

So come on out and have some fun at the range.

Daughter Kim and I plan on attending.

Update: Kim can't make it due to a study session with a fellow classmate. I'm going to work on Caleb and Xenia and try and get them out there.

I won't apologize for concluding that anyone who supports the free and unfettered possession of deadly weapons is sick in their head. Why in God's name should the Democratic party, or any organization dedicated to improving the lives and future of Americans, give up on the idea of gun control? Has mental illness spread so far in our country that the concept of curbing violent death by gun is no longer viable?

Here's my take: all gun owners should immediately submit themselves for psychiatric examination, to determine the extent of their illness and begin treatment before they do harm to someone.

Rifled, single-shot hunting weapons aside, this country should immediately consider laws making the possession of any handgun or assault weapon evidence of serious and dangerous mental illness, and anyone having such a weapon on their possession should be subject to immediate immobilization, hospitalization and confinement for treatment. The sale of -- or display with intent to sell -- any handgun or assault weapon to a private citizen should result in that person's inventory being seized and immediately destroyed, and the seller hospitalized immediately for treatment. Any factory producing handguns or assault weapons caught selling their product to private citizens should be closed, their corporate officers hospitalized, and the inventory destroyed.

Sick in the U. P.
Oct 27, 2008 06:07 PM
In a comment to this article: Why we all need the Democrats to abandon gun control
[Sounds like some people are in full support of sending us for an extended stay in the reeducation camps. I wonder if he realizes what it would entail to get 80 million (or even a significant fraction) armed people to the camps. I would like to suggest it is they that need to seek psychiatric help.--Joe]

I sometimes do a back-and-fourth with a self described centrist, or moderate (which is another name for a leftist in denial, something like a "moderate drinker" who can't get through a day without alcohol) over at Say Uncle in the comments, but I thought it should be posted here too.  Today we're talking about the proposed (yet another) GM "bailout".  I explained how propping up failure is inviting more failure, while at the same time negatively influencing the way we make decisions, while at the same time freezing out some of the small, hungry, innovative businesses and potential businesses, to say nothing of unfairly punishing taxpayers for the bad decisions of others.  He offered some of the regular arguments against pure capitalism;

"…the party with leverage will take advantage of that leverage, often to the level of exploitation.."

To which I replied;

I know that is the age-old argument, but what you describe has a simpler name. It’s called crime [or corruption]. That's what government is for– to protect basic rights by punishing (retaliating against) crime.

And the reason why centrism is the superior stance;

"…pure capitalism and pure socialism are both bad…"

How so? Do you have any proof of that? Any evidence? Have we ever seen pure capitalism? If so, I’d like to know. Give me an example. I’ll bet you a case of beer that any example you attempt to give will in fact be an example of what happens when government get its nose into the market, creating some form of monopoly [either that or government has simply failed to do its job as protector of basic rights].

I've been all through this many times before. Please read the book, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal or I'll be forced to re-write the whole damned thing right here. Trouble is; that would take months and I'd go broke wasting my time writing. As I said, you haven't seen this stuff [these ideas] before, and so you're falling into all the old traps. You need some genuine de-programming. I know that sounds really insulting and condescending, but the same is true anytime you try to tell an alcoholic he's an alcoholic. This is damned tough stuff. I'm saying here that you're addicted to a belief in government-sponsored coercion. You're convinced that it has a proper place in a free society. I'm saying that that is a contradiction in terms.

The coercion pushers have gotten to you and got you hooked. You've grown up with pushers and you've known nothing else. The same happened to me and it was a tough, slow, painful withdrawal. Even still it's one day at a time. I have to go to regular meetings with other people struggling with the destructive effects of believing in socialist theories. Oh sure, I thought a little bit here and a little bit there would be fine. A lot of people do it just to get along in social situations. Lots of people think like that, but a little bit is never enough, is it? You always end up needing another fix, and there's always another pusher ready and willing to sell it to you…

"Hello. My name is Lyle and I'm a recovering socialist…"

You have to first admit you have a problem before you can take the steps to solve it. Your original post is a good start– you're asking questions. That's good, but you're fighting the answers because they go against everything you've ever known. If you really want the answers, it's going to take a lot of effort on your part. It will be time-consuming and it will be painful. Some of the people you thought were your friends are going to chastise you [even disown you]. Stay strong. Only you can help you, but we can help point you in the right direction. You will have friends.

What the centrist doesn't realize is that, though some people are bad and as a result sometimes people will get burned, when government shifts away from being the protector of rights and becomes the main perpetrator of coercion, we're all screwed.  This has been referred to as the equal distribution of misery.

When I was five, my first-grade teacher taught us to repeat a random string of syllables she called "the Pleh-juh, Vuh-Lee-junss".  We were to recite it every day at the beginning of class for the next several years, while holding our right hand to the left side of the chest (reportedly, this is where our hearts were to be found inside the chest cavity).

From admittedly "not the wisest person in the world":

One way to probably lower gun use would be to make the price of the bullet higher. I think one bullet should cost almost as much as a gun and I think bullets should be sold individually.

I feel that if people had to pay a lot more for bullets, they wouldn't buy them as freely.

I'm not the wisest person in the world, but I know if people had to pay $100 just for one bullet, people would think twice about how important it really is to kill themselves or other people with that bullet.

The black market starts appearing when the tax on something goes above 15%. $100 for a single round is on the order of 20,000%. Her suggestion would work about as well as the prohibition against recreational drugs and probably would use much of the same supply chain.

Jeff has other comments.

He says "these" firearms (Clinton included normal magazines like police use for protection), belong on "foreign battlefields." God help us if they're needed on domestic battlefields against a government confiscating rights. Mr. Obama -- I know these people. Disarm criminals, mobilize robust support, disarm the public, mobilize robust resistance. Please choose wisely.

Alan Korwin
November 13, 2008
Hope for Obama's Gun Bill
["Battlefields" appear to be a theme recently. I wonder why.--Joe]

The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind. When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.

Dr. Lyle Rossiter
The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. 2006
[H/T to Jeff.

While looking around for an Zune compatible format for my consumption I ran across this:

Rossiter's dream is to construct a grand, idealized libertarian, nightmarish, dystopia that creates hardships and inflicts wounds. This is dangerous, tragic, and sick.

So both sides accuse the other of being mentally ill.

Interesting.

So one then has to ask, "Which world view has resulted in the worst outcome for the affected populations?" I would presume the United States has best approximated (and poorly at that) the Libertarian viewpoint. But I'm not sure which of the following best represents the centrally planning government of the Liberal viewpoint: Communist China, USSR, Nazi Germany, or the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. But then I decided that it really didn't matter.--Joe]

Prolific writer, economist and historian, Thomas Sowell, gives us some frank talk about our self-appointed intellectuals.  I post it here for some who have felt it necessary to tell us that they are smart, or that those from whom they get their ideas are smart.  Seriously, if I haven't noticed it already, your telling me won't help either of us, one way or the other.  Here's a small sample of Sowell's piece on the subject;

What is more telling, form [rather than substance] was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed...

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

How right you are, Mr. Sowell (I mean, yeee haaww, Baby!)  He continues;

The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model— all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear— that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

Things never seem to change, do they?

As an aside, when I use the word "socialist" to describe people who express anti-capitalist ideas, I mean it.  I know what the word means and I know where the ideas came from even if socialists don't.  I'll use it when it fits, even if the socialists protest, scream, hold their breath, or try to brow-beat me into silence.  If you disagree, get a bloody dictionary, or better yet, a history book.  A very old one.  If you consider yourself a progressive intellectual, never mind.  It won't help (see above quotes).

But that's not the main subject of Sowell's piece.  I'll summarize it with a simple thought; logically, if you had some horrific defect in your ability to perceive reality, surely you'd be the last to know.  Wouldn't you?  Keeping that in mind, go ahead and read the whole piece.  It won't make you comfortable but it will certainly interest you, personally, one way or the other.

I have absolutely no use for protecting those trafficking in illegal guns. Even those who would do so on principle. Street guns, slithering from state to state, do too much harm.

Fred Lebrun
November 12, 2008
Lock, load and try taking aim at the illegal handguns
[This is from a guy that claims to support gun ownership. This was the first instance I had heard of guns slithering. I would have thought they sort of hopped when the slide release was disengaged. But maybe this "street gun" he talks about is some new type that I'm not familiar with.

Regardless of their mode of locomotion Lebrun has a very naive viewpoint of the world. He thinks the following would somehow be a good idea and wouldn't be a problem for gun owners:

...a national identification system for handguns. A computerized system that would be accessible to all law enforcement agencies, and that would standardize the requirements for handgun ownership coast to coast.

What he apparently doesn't understand is there is already a Federal standard requirement for handgun ownership coast to coast. It's called the Second Amendment. And even with that there are people who been chipping away at that with waiting periods (the original Brady Act), restrictions on who can purchase (age, prior felony convictions, prior domestic violence convictions and accusations), storage requirements, and types of handguns ("junk guns", "Saturday Night Specials", "armor piercing", too powerful, too concealable, too many rounds). This incremental approach is what the people of the UK bought into which ultimately resulted in their complete loss of handguns.

It appears he is suggesting universal registration of handguns. He is hopelessly naive if he believes this will fly. He need look no further than Canada to see their gun registration failure. Then he should try to answer Just One Question.--Joe]

Update: Jeff and Sebastian both have posts up about the same article.

I have some quotes from a fellow, Joe Argenzio, interviewed by the History Channel.  He fought in Europe with the 1st Infantry Division ("The Big Red One") 16th Infantry Regiment.  His unit was clearing socialists (SS in this case) out of the Falkenau death camp;

"I know some of them that I encountered committed suicide-- they jumped in front of my M1."

Suicide.  OK.  That's what the man said.

"As far as I know we got 'em all.. and they deserved what they got."

Over 21 thousand members of the U.S. First Infantry Division were killed or wounded fighting the socialists and the Imperial Japs in W.W. II.  Our only job is to remember them all.  We have it easy.  The socialists have it easy now too-- all they have to do is stay out from in front of our M1s, so to speak.  Today, there thousands more American and coalition GIs in the middle east and elsewhere fighting the latest socialist/statist menace-- the Jihaddists.  As in previous wars, their job is often thankless, but they know what they're doing.  Thanks, people.