The View From North Central Idaho

Amendment II Democrats:

Today, Amendment II Democrats pledges itself to helping take back America from the Republican Party and giving it back to the people. We will settle for nothing less than a Democratic House and Senate in 2006. And, at the same time, there is a golden opportunity for pro-RKBA Democrats to dramatically change firearms policy within the Democratic Party itself from the ground up. All we have to do is join together, stand up on our hind legs, and exercise our First Amendment rights if we want any hope of affecting real change within the party of Jefferson, Kennedy, and F.D. Roosevelt.

Can anyone name a U.S. political party that openly says, "We are opposed to the people having the right to keep and bear arms."? Certainly there are individual politicians that work to subvert it and are openly for gun control. But they don't dare make it a party platform.

We are making progress. We just need to drive the remaining bigots into political extinction. Once the gun issue is under control we can working on the next greatest threat to our freedom. My vote probably would be to set our sights on the war on some drugs or the income tax.

The powers that be took a good run at deep-sixing this report. There's such a strongly held consensus among industry and DHS that RFID is the way to go that getting people off of that and getting them to examine the technology is very hard to do.

Jim Harper
Cato Institute fellow
October 30, 2006
From Feds Leapfrog RFID Privacy Study

Thanks to The Smallest Minority for the pointer.

Boots on the ground

Mandatory viewing for daughter Xenia (her fiancé is in the army and probably will be going to Iraq next spring).

Proof of concept installation.  Yes, its an AK (AK-74 semiauto, but it could be any AK-- The principles are all the same).  Video - Less than 1MB.

OK, cite me for the gratuitous grin.

I used a statement from security researcher Christopher Soghoian for the quote of the day a couple days ago. He said airport security was really "security theater". Even before I had made that post the FBI had raided his home:

Soghoian ... came home Saturday morning to find his door forced open, “a rather ransacked home, a search warrant taped to my kitchen table, a total absence of computers — and various other important things.”

It’s not that he’s trying to compromise airport security. It’s that he’s pointing out that airport security already is compromised, or, as his site used to read, “The TSA Emperor Has No Clothes.”

They should have arrested whoever came up with the stupid "security" procedures at the airports for wasting taxpayer money. But that's not the way it works. I'm reminded of something Joe Waldron told me a long time ago about dealing with the police:

Once they have decided they want to talk to you the worst offense you can commit is "contempt of cop".

I remember when "The Pill", as it is called, came out in the 60's. It changed a lot of things. I doubt the male version will have as big of effect but it's still interesting:

Men concerned about contraception may soon be able to use the male equivalent of the Pill, without the potential side-effects of a drug based on altering the balance of sex hormones.

Scientists have developed a chemical contraceptive that temporarily blocks the development of sperm but does not interfere with testosterone levels.

Trials on laboratory animals have shown that the contraceptive effect is reversible and that there are no apparent long-term side-effects. Human trials of the new male contraceptive could begin within the next few years.

The biggest change I predict will be the child support issues that arise when the man thinks his female sex partner is using some sort of birth control when in fact she was careless or even deliberately not using something. The man now has a means to protect himself from unwanted pregnancies of that sort while still preserving his options for a child at a later date.

I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

William F. Buckley, Jr.
Up From Liberalism
[I was reminded of this by Kevin's posts here and here. Read the comments too.--Joe]

Barb and I visited the exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. Very interesting. It wasn't overwhelming or awesome. It was more like somber reverence. To actually be looking at documents that were written over 2100 years ago put me in a very somber mood.

From what I could tell there weren't any big revelations in the documents. A lot of them were copies of known works of the existing Bible. Others were rules for "purification" and other standards of behavior for a particular Jewish sect.

It was worth my time and money to see them since it was only a 30 minute drive and $20.00 to get in the door. Knowing what I know now I probably wouldn't travel a 1000 miles and pay hundreds of dollars to see them. But then I'm an atheist and don't consider the documents to be the word of god(s) either.

Update: I forgot to mention the indignity of attending. There was a big sign just before you went in the building but after you had paid for your ticket that said no firearms or knives. It even said mandatory search of bags. I had to find a locker across the way to put my knives and my handgun in. There was no search of my person and I'm pretty sure there were no metal detectors so I probably could have defied the sign and gotten away with it.

But what was the reason? Did they think someone was going to go off the deep end and shoot a 2100 year old scrap of parchment? Oh, I forgot, they don't need a reason.

One of my "hot buttons" is when people choose the wrong measurement for optimization.

I did that with Boomershoot 2005 when I tweaked the explosive mixture such that I got good results with a rim-fire .22. It turned out that the typical center-fire bullets had great difficulty detonating them.

This metric problem was one of my points in this post.

I heard of one software company that gave raises out based on the number of lines of code produced by the software developers. This adversely affected the designs, implementations, and even style of the code produced.

Another well known anti-virus software company paid bonuses for quickly finding solutions to new computer viruses. One enterprising employee became well known for finding figuring them out. Of course he didn't tell management that he had created these same viruses and released them into the wild.

Gun control advocates rejoice and claim they were right when deaths and injuries due to bullet wounds decrease after a restriction on firearms is passed into law. They do that even if violent crime, injuries, and deaths increase. They ignore that many of those deaths and injuries are justifiable or even praiseworthy shootings that stopped criminal attacks.

Another one is that windmill manufactures work toward greater efficiency. In most cases this is the wrong measurement. The only case that this is important is if land space or wind is in short supply. If you have lots of land that can host windmills then the correct metric is cost per kilowatt-hour over the lifetime of the windmill.

Some of the first mass produced solar cells were for use in spacecraft. Area and weight were at a premium and hence efficiency was one of the proper metrics to use in the design. That is not true for the side of the shed I used for mixing and storing explosives over a quarter mile from the nearest usable power line. I have lots of area and I don't care if it takes ten times as much area as the more efficient but twice as expensive solar cells to generate the same power. This is now being realized by the manufactures.

Examine every metric carefully. Think about the unintended consequences. Think about what is really important to the target audience. It can make a huge difference.

Clayton claims that that the recent court rulings on allowing gay marriage, "... is likely to make the legal situation for homosexuals more difficult, not easier." He also predicts that these court rulings will help get Republicans to the polls this election.

I agree with this latter point but disagree with the first. I think gay marriage as well as equal rights for gay is here to stay. It is an idea whose time has come. The worst anti-gay politicians can do is slow down the inevitable. The reason is because there have not been any dire consequences happen that are attributable to acceptance of gays in society. Just as gun owners right to carry weapons for self defense were gradually recognized in state after state without "blood running in the streets" so it is with gays and the recognization of their rights.

It will be scary for some, just as it was with people carrying firearms in public, but eventually the fear will subside and most people will accept it.

The Beltway Snipers have been of more than casual interest to me for numerous reasons. Even before we knew who they were or their motives it was source of concern because of the damage it did to our right to keep and bear arms. I was also asked by a program manager when I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory if I had any ideas on how to catch them. The labs were getting asked by law enforcement for help. I didn't really have anything other than what was already known. I don't really think short of creating a surveillance society of both video and audio sensors that new technology can offer much help in catching criminals of this nature. But that's getting off my main impetus for this post.

Michelle Malkin points out one of the criminals has confessed to another murder in Arizona.

It's amazing to me how much these criminal got away with before being caught. And then they only got caught after they started leaving notes for the police!

It appears that because their motives are not obvious from the crimes it was extremely difficult to find suspects to examine for evidence. Scary stuff.

According to Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University:

Democrats have run up the white flag. They have evidently concluded that curtailing the right of gun ownership is a nonstarter, especially if they intend to pursue victory in 50 states.

He speaks of "curtailing the right" as if it were a good thing. Would he speak so highly of curtailing the right of free speech? Or curtailing the right of due process? And he calls this running up the white flag? How about reluctantly acknowledging that the public will tolerate few further infringements of their right to gun ownership?

And this point total ignores the reality of those infringements being useless in terms of furthering public safety.

Get a grip on reality man. The Democrats needed a clue-by-four but at least most of them now avoid leading with their chin with their crazy ideas to restrict this particular inalienable right.

Kevin has at long last delivered The Überpost!

I can't really disagree with the essence of what he says but I'm going to play devils advocate for a bit. And I'm certain he already recognizes the problem I am about to point out. He says:

But the ideas of Western civilization in general, and the American philosophy in specific have proven themselves superior.

"Superior" on what scale? How is it that you measure that superiority? By the scale used by Muslims we are arrogant, decadent, and sinful. We drink alcohol. Our women, who are the tools of Satan, are allowed to tempt men with exposed skin in public are allowed to attend schools. We charge interest on the loaning of money. We do not pray to Allah. We tempt the youth of the faithful to desert that which is holy and become sinful. We have succumbed to Satan. Our power is not proof of our superiority. It is proof of the bargain we have made with the Prince of Darkness.

The Germans in the late 30's had a "noble goal" as well--"purification" of the human race. A similar argument could be made of the Japanese in the same time frame.

Who are you to say Western civilization is superior? By what measure and how have you determined that measure is superior?

[End devils advocate mode.]

Other things that come to mind from his post:

In the Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order Huntington said that frequently after one civilization convincingly wins a conflict with another civilization the loser imitates many of the characteristics of the winner. If the loser has a framework for dealing with the loss then there can be peace for a while. In particular the Chinese and the Japanese civilizations have the concept of a hierarchy of power and when the West unequivocally demonstrated greater military and economic power they had a cultural construct for at least a short term (in civilizational time scales) peaceful co-existence with the West being the superior civilization.

Islam does not have as much resiliency in this regard. After their defeats in the first part of the last century they realized they had to learn from the West and adapt what they could to their civilization. But they have no cultural construct of accepting non-Islamic people or institutions as being superior to Islam. If such a thing appears to be true then it is proof that those Muslims were not Islamic enough. It was proof that Allah was punishing them by allowing Satan to rule over them. Hence the demonstrations of the West being of superior power only means they must be even greater adherents to Islam.

They also have no concept of pacifism as a virtue (I am not a pacifist but consider input from those that are a useful balance of ideas in how to deal with conflict). Their greatest religious leader was a warrior and is praised for his warrior acts. The killing of infidels is regarded as not only acceptable or praiseworthy but as necessary acts of profound devotion to their faith.

Paraphrasing Greg Hamilton here: In the eyes of Muslims what Osama Bin Laden has to say about the West is as inherently obvious, once articulated, to them as the superiority of Western civilization is to us.

As to the central question brought up by Kevin I think he misses a concept that can help explain, or at least rationalize, our killing the civilians of cases such as the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In our minds we were not the aggressor--Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was unprovoked. The Japanese, of course, have a different view on this. We believed Germany's aggression would not end with the conquest of Europe and ultimately would be a threat to us if it was not stopped in Europe. The aggressor, in our minds, is the criminal in a conflict. Criminals do not have the same rights as innocents. That combined with the view in both Germany, at that time, and Japan that the concept of individualism was almost if not in fact repugnant. The State (in Germany) and the Emperor (in Japan) were what the individual existed to serve. Hence, we were "playing by their own rules" by killing civilians in our efforts to defeat the Germany state and the Emperor of Japan. And even then it is clear that many had serious qualms about the actions taken. We weren't blind to the hypocrisy of suspending our principles. It was a reluctant pragmatic concession to reality not mapping perfectly to our theory of individual rights. It was an ugly thing, as is all war, but it was the least ugly of the available alternatives.

This last point could be just another way of saying what Kevin offers when he offers this quote from Second Hand Lions on how we justify our violations of others "inalienable" right to life:

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love, true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

Lots of things to think about. Thank you Kevin.

...according to their linguistic constructs they are not gay, according to ours, they are. Same behavior, different categorization based on the framework you start with. The Greek language did not support concepts like straight and gay. Their categories deal with what type of sex you liked to have. In easy terminology an actor vs. receiver of oral, anal or vaginal intercourse. Nothing in their construct included which sex either party was.

So by creating a different framework you can have two people engaging in the same behavior but identifying it completely differently.

Osama Bin Laden has constructed a perfectly logical argument given the start point of the Koran. His arguments have been challenged and found correct by religious law. He has constructed a perfect sales pitch for the market he is trying to capture. It makes sense, and resonates no less in their hearts and minds, than Thomas Paine's and Thomas Jefferson's words resonated in ours. (Not in any way trying to confer moral equivalency)

We started with a framework that made what the founding father have to say as being very powerful. They start in a place that makes what Bin Laden is selling as powerful if not more.

Greg Hamilton
August 8, 2006 7:20 PM
From the email list: insightstraining @ yahoogroups.com

I started reading the Brady Center's "report" titled The NRA: A Criminal’s Best Friend--How the National Rifle Association Has Handcuffed Federal Gun Law Enforcement but had to stop when I got to:

The conversation Friday morning went like this:

She: How is work going?
Me: Pretty good. I'm having to come up to speed on something new again and that is stressful but I'm doing okay.
She: Are silencers legal?
Me: Suppressors are legal to own in Washington State but they are not legal to use in the state. What made you ask that?
She: They sure were random, jumping from topic to topic, last night.
Me [with mouth ajar for a few seconds before answering]: I don't know anyone else like that.

I just received word that Neaderpundit plans to attend Boomershoot 2007. We also have bloggers David from Random Nuclear Strikes and Kirk from Fun Turns to Tragedy each attending for the second time. Lyle who is a part-time blogger here and a principle of UltiMAK will be attending too. Ry of Mindless Bit Spew, of course, and "Leroy Brown" from Periodic Journal of my wanderings will be helping make things happen behind the scenes as well as doing a fair amount of "copper engraving" on Sunday.

Lee Ann Frailey ("Everything's better with a boom") and her husband will be there.  Steve Joachim will be back with his flying anvil (watch the video or the one here).

In the category of "people with celebrity names but aren't really" we have Dave Barry and Kevin Klein attending. There are also an amazing number of people from a gun club at a company that must not be named in western Washington including some moderately high placed manager types.

Boomershoot 2007 is going to have some great people attending. This being the 11th Boomershoot I have put on I should be able to deliver on my end of the deal. About the only thing that can prevent us from having great time is Mother Nature.

I don't want to help terrorists or help bad guys do bad things on airplanes, but what we have now is what we in the industry call 'security theater.' It's made to make you think you're secure without actually making you secure. As a member of the academic research community, I consider this to be a public service.

Christopher Soghoian
October 27, 2006
ABC News
Web Site Lets Anyone Create Fake Boarding Passes
[Yup. Airplane "security" is a joke. We spend the billions because it makes some people feel better. It doesn't make us any safer.--Joe]

"Evil thoughts" from reading this:

Your generous donation and bids on our auction will support the Freedom States Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to "Changing the Way America Things About Guns." 

All proceeds go directly to grassroots organizations working to reduce gun violence.

Our auction items range from exotic vacation getaways to donated items guaranteed to delight and surprise!

I wonder what the reaction would be if I donated a shooting position at Boomershoot 2007 for their auction. I guarantee my donation would "surprise". And I would get a great deal of delight from it if I could see the expression on their face. But since they would get all the surprise and I can't get any of the delight I'll just continue to fantasize about it.

Boomershoot 2007 is now almost three fourths full with 52 of the 70 positions are taken and I have received email from people that say, paraphrased, "A bunch of my buddies and I are going to be there. We just don't know how many yet."

I continue to be amazed. It was the middle of March before Boomershoot 2006 was this full.

Sign up soon or you'll have to wait until Boomershoot 2008.

The sheik that said women without covering are like uncovered meat that the cat eats now says there is other business that needs to be taken care of before he resigns:

After emerging from Friday prayers at Lakemba Mosque, Sheik Alhilali was asked by a media pack whether he would quit over a speech in which he said scantily-dressed women invited rape.

"After we clean the world of the White House first," the sheik said.

Supporters of the sheik cheered and applauded loudly at the comments, which were directed firmly at US President George W Bush.

The sheik has previously described Mr Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister John Howard as the axis of evil.

Don't ever forget that the reason they are opposed to us is not just because of our foreign policy, it's because we are so arrogant that we have "invented our own laws" instead of abiding by the laws of Allah.

Cleaning the world of the White House is just part of their plan for world domination.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

Mark Twain
[Reading this post from Phil at Random Nuclear Strikes reminded me of this quote.--Joe]

It's rare that I copy some one else's blog posting word for word without adding some significant content of my own. But in this case I don't have much to add. Say Uncle has pretty much said all there is to say on the topic and about all I can say is, "Me too." So here goes:

sensible gun laws

sensible gun laws

And, while we’re at it, let’s add:

ban all guns

ban gun ownership

After all, that is their goal. Don’t be fooled.

There are others that want to ban all guns too. And of course these guys don't even try to hide the fact that they want to ban all guns.

To my female readers, just so you know your place:

Muslim leaders, women’s rights advocates and political leaders in Australia today condemned one of the country’s top Islamic clerics for comparing women who don’t wear head scarves to “uncovered meat” who invite rape.

...

In a translation from Arabic by the newspaper, later verified by other media, Hilali was quoted as saying in the sermon: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside ... and the cats come to eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s?”

“The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred,” he was quoted as saying, referring to the head scarf worn by some Muslim women.

Of course if some "cat" treats one of my daughters like "uncovered meat" there might be some question as to who is going to end up as "uncovered meat" for the cat. And example of daughter Kim in action is here.

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.

William O. Douglas
Associate Justice U.S. Supreme Court
April 17, 1939 to November 12, 1975

From the Greg Hamilton to English Dictionary by Meredith Robinson:

Mass Launcher also Behavior Modification Device and/or Reactive Defensive Tool

Translation: A gun.

Say Uncle pointed out this website by the NRA. I made the mistake of watching the videos just as I'm about to go to bed. That wasn't wise. My adrenalin is running way to high to sleep now.

Remember New Orleans!

While we’re making plans for the holidays, and while we’re listening to political ads about which party will fight the most politically-correct war against the Jihad (no, wait, no one is saying anything about Jihad in Washington.  Its “terror”-- they’re fighting a war against an emotion) the missiles are landing regularly in Israel, and the Israelis are bracing for more violent attacks.

Decades of “peace talks” and “summits” and trading “land for peace” have led us to this point.  They’ve led to an enemy that has increased confidence and increased capabilities.  For this I place the blame squarely on the Left.  I also blame the “Conservatives”, for being too much like the Left.

What we need are warriors, not politicians.  When are we going to learn that our enemies must be defeated before we can “negotiate” peace with them?  They must be thoroughly convinced, beyond all hope, of their total defeat.  Only then will we have any hope of peace.

This is from my friend (I call him a friend, though we’ve never met) a marksmanship instructor in Israel:

Friends:

 

Basically this entire week is considered the Id al-Fitr Moslem Holiday.  Wonderful for those of us living in northern Jerusalem because it would appear that through this morning, there is virtually no rush hour traffic.  Hard for me to believe, but if the horrendous rush-hour traffic jams renew once the holiday is over, then one can conclude the congestion is caused by an unreal number of vehicles coming from the villages and towns north of Jerusalem.

 

The signs of impending conflict are growing.  Everyone is waiting the holiday's end as if it signals the start of the terrorism season - a new, improved terrorist violence with the terrorists possessing new, advanced weapons, huge stockpiles of ammunition and munitions and a year's preparation time well spent.

 

Hamas and the other terror groups want to "Lebanonize" the Gaza Strip.  They are well on their way.  During the last few days Israel has certainly "upgraded" its operations against the terrorists in the Gaza Strip.  There have been some successes, either the terrorists were preoccupied and got sloppy or the IDF got lucky.  Or there is simply so much terrorist preparation and activity going on that it was inevitable an IDF patrol would bump into a terrorist force.

 

It may all be brinkmanship.  There is a lot of talk of a Hamas "preemptive" strike across a wide front, employing everything from West Bank based cells, to barrages of missiles and commando style raids with terrorists emerging "behind the lines" from underground tunnels.  Who knows.

 

Avigdor is now a government minister and deputy prime minister.  The government is going from left to right faster than the Labor party can make excuses for why it remains in the government.   The Chief-of-Staff made a surprise visit at 07:00 yesterday morning to a base on the Golan Heights to "check alertness."  Syrian positions all along the Golan Heights are preparing for an Israeli attack.

 

I probably should start figuring out where I would like to be (and cover as a reporter) if violence renews.  Interesting thought. One which I shall ponder.

 

Have a good day and stay safe,

 

Howard

http://www.miguelcarrasco.net/miguelcarrasco/2006/10/dove_evolution.html

Highly recommended for men.

I can't seem to find which blog pointed me to this video. Sorry. When I figure it out I'll give them credit.

Government: Organized crime with an attitude.

D'Arcy Cain
[Cain is a Canadian but there are very few, if any, present day government for which this quip does not apply.--Joe]

[W]hen a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.

Robert Bork
Speech
Congress 1987

When I got home Friday night Xenia had a couple of friends there for the night--Sara and Cortney. I don't know exactly how it came up but Boomershoot was mentioned and Cortney blurted out, "I want to go to Boomershoot! Have you guys been there?"

My response was something like, "What?" Xenia and Sara have been working at Boomershoot since at least 2003. Here is a picture of them there then. Xenia explained that she and Sara help out at Boomershoot and that I am the person who runs Boomershoot. Her eyes got big and I'm not sure she really believed it until we showed her pictures and the KING5 Evening Magazine video. She wanted to know when the next event was and if she could go. It ended up, assuming she gets her parent's permission, she will be working for me at Boomershoot 2007.

Sara has been saying she wanted to go shooting for quite some time. She said she had done just a little bit of pistol shooting before, a .44 Magnum, and it was fun. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. A .44 Magnum? Sara is not a large woman. She's almost tiny.

Anyway I invited the girls to go to the Lewiston Pistol Club's Steel Challenge match today and Sara was the only one that really wanted to go. I brought along a Ruger Mark II (.22 LR) for her while I shot my STI Eagle in .40 S&W. I was very impressed with Sara. She had very few misses. She just nailed those plates. And on one stage she had a string where she hit all five plates in 5.79 seconds. That's an average of 1.158 seconds per plate. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. At the last Boomershoot she nailed a 700 yard boomer on her first shot. And the Fort Lewis sniper instructor coaching her said she had a lot of natural talent and should consider joining a rifle team.

I received the results via email a little bit ago and will put them up on the Lewiston Pistol Club's website tomorrow. I'm proud to tell you that she didn't come in last. She beat one guy on every single stage. Here are some pictures of Sara at the match:

Can you tell she is excited to be there?

Not a perfect stance but pretty good.

She also helped with score keeping.

I did some shooting too and came in number six out of 12 shooters.

And another thing... Half way through the match Sara told me was missing the contact lens from her right eye. It had "broke" the previous week. She shoots right handed and at that point I didn't bother to determine which eye was dominate.

Update: Here are the results.

One-tenth of the people involved in a given endeavor produce at least one-third of the output, and increasing the number of participants merely serves to reduce the average performance.

Norman R. Augustine
From: "Defense Systems Management Review"
[I listened to Atlas Shrugged on my drive this weekend and it reminded me of this quote.--Joe]

Remember there are no rules in war. The side which imposes the most rules on itself loses.  We lost in Vietnam because of self-imposed rules.

Curt Rich
[From a Jeff Cooper Commentary in December 1997--which makes it ominously prophetic.--Joe]

I have posted before about gun control advocates being glamorized in the press. Here is another case:

Edward O. Welles, 85, a former CIA officer who later become the first executive director of the antihandgun organization now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, died Oct. 11 of brain cancer at his home in Washington.

...

After retiring from the CIA in 1972, Mr. Welles had a varied career as a volunteer, lobbyist, entrepreneur and gun-control advocate. In 1974, he became the first executive director of the National Council to Control Handguns, which consisted of four people at the time.

"The best investment I ever made was placing an ad for $1.36, looking for someone with organizational abilities," said Mark Borinsky, who founded the group and hired Mr. Welles as its unpaid executive director.

Mr. Welles helped raise money and recruited members and executives for the organization, now the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. He was known for his ability to talk with victims of gun violence and to draw them into the group's mission.

Where was the praise for Neal Knox or Jeff Cooper in the main stream press when they died? Knox and Cooper were major players in organizations larger and more influential than Welles. And Welles helped violate the rights of millions of people and bears some responsibile for the deaths of thousands of disarmed victims. Where is the mention of that?

I heard about this segment of Miami Vice years ago from Guy Neill who is a local (Clarkston, WA) USPSA shooter and for several years wrote a IPSC history column in Front Sight magazine. Other than watching Enterprise, Star Gate, and 24 (never again) on DVD with James I can't remember the last time I watched T.V. So I assumed I would never get to see this video. I'm exceedingly pleased to have stumbled across this.

I have background material from Guy on this video. I hope I get this straight. I'll be sending Guy an email and asking for corrections so don't be surprised if there are some tweaks in the next day or so.

The shooter was an IPSC Grandmaster (see the classification system here) and was a consultant on the show. Here he got a bit part as an assassin. For the pistol shooting at the end the director told him, "Don't worry about making it look fast. We'll take care of that when we edit it." Apparently the director had never seen a real shooter draw and shoot. Needless to say they didn't need to do any editing to make it look faster. Another thing Guy said was that the script didn't say what to do with the gun afterward and he didn't realize it until the shooting was over. So what happens is the shooter double taps the other guy looks down, realizes he has a "stove pipe" failure, clears the gun and puts it on the chest of the victim as he walks away. The crew was so slack jawed over the display of speed they just kept filming even though that wasn't part of the scene.

Update: Rather than edit, which would be minor, I'm just including Guy's response verbatim:

Joe, it looks like your memory is working well.
 
The actor is Jim Zubienna.   He was a past member of the US Team to the IPSC World shoot, as I recall.  He shot the Bianchi Cup and Steel Challenge matches as well.  I don't think we actually had a Grand Master rating at that time, but Jim likely would have qualified.
 
He told me later, after the airing of the program, that the director knew nothing of his shooting background, and that he was to go through the motions of the draw and shoot, and that the scene would be edited for speed.  After seeing Jim draw and shoot, the director asked him how he did that!
 
The smokestack jam was not in the script.  Jim cleared it on instinct and then placed the gun on the "body" as an adlib, but one that was left in.
 
If you note Jim's hands up position upon his surrender in the film clip, it is very similar to the position he used in competition.  A theory among many of the shoooters then was that you would have one hand out in front, approximately where the front sight would be to allow the eyes to be focused at that distance.  Thus, when the gun came up, the eyes were ready.
 
I do not recall at this time if Jim used a cross draw holster in competition, but cross draws were popular with several of the California shooters, so I think it likely.  This means the draw from under his shirt was very close to his draw in competition from a cross draw as well, further allowing very good speed on the draw.
 
Jim's wife at that time, Linda, was also a shooter.  I don't believe either is active at this time.
 
I missed seeing Jim a few years ago at the Steel Challenge.  He came by the stage I was working while I was gone to lunch.
 
Being the "bad guy" in the program, Jim was killed by the "good guys" at the end.  Jim also had a small part in another Michael Mann production "Band of the Hand".

Update 2: Check out this web page on the same scene! There are forum discussions about this scene:

• The Gun Zone
• The High Road
• Something Awful
• Shack News

I suspect Guy may have misspelled Jim's last name. It probably is "Zubiena". And there is a question as to whether there was a stovepipe malfunction.

This is probably my single most popular post ever. The bump on Tuesday, below, is all because of this.

For at least the last 30 years Dr. Joe has been push his cure for everything--More sex. And now a survey from the U.K. reveals 70% of people 65 years old and older regret not following his advice:

The generational study questioned 1500 Britons over 65 and the same number aged between 20-29 and asked them their top 10 wishes if they could turn back the clock.

70 per cent of the pensioners said they wished they'd had more sex, with 57 percent regretting they had not travelled more.

Don't be ready to retire and let me have the chance to say, "I told you so!"

And although I don't talk about it much here Barb will back me up saying that our second most favorite activity together is to travel. We're going to keep those regrets off the top of our lists.

And speaking of regrets, here's a quote for you:

The follies which a man regret most in his life are those that he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

Helen Rowland

This article from the U.K. sounds absolutely glowing about implants to give you a unique I.D. so you can "Speed through the checkout with just a wave of your arm". But when you actually look at the number of people actually willing do submit to such a thing things look a little different:

The idea is already catching on with today’s iPod generation. According to research released today by the Institute for Grocery Distribution (IGD), a retail think-tank, almost one in ten teenagers and one in twenty adults are willing to have a microchip implanted to pay shop bills and help to prevent card or identity fraud and muggings.

In other words, only 10% of teenagers and only 5% of adults would be willing to have a microchip implanted in their bodies. That's too many but it's low enough that it's not likely to be mandated by the government any time soon.

I wonder how many milliseconds of thought were put into the claim that such a thing would help prevent muggings. Plan on having a hunk of your arm cut out when you get mugged for your money. And they will have access to your entire bank account instead of just the cash in your wallet. If your credit card is stolen there are relatively small limits on the amount you are liable for so that isn't a very big deal.

And these concerns completely ignore the little issue of the ID being remotely read and tied to things like your religion, race, national origin, or sexual preference (I see you are a Jew and it looks like there is a homosexual hiding behind the bookcase). ID implants fail my Jews In The Attic Test.

As I have said before, I'll accept an ID implant when the people giving the implants accept my implants for themselves. My implants are a little larger than theirs. Mine weigh about 200 grains and will be moving at least Mach 2.0 (assuming I'm within 500 yards which isn't really a requirement) when they contact the skin.

Millions of sensible people are too high-minded to concede that politics is almost always the choice of the lesser evil.  "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," they say, "I will not vote."  Having abstained, they are presented with a President who appoints the people who are going to rummage around in their lives for the next four years.  Consider all the people who sat home in a stew in 1968 rather than vote for Hubert Humphrey.  They showed Humphrey.  Those people who taught Hubert Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the black.

Russel Baker
Ford without Flummery

Using a laser range finder and very carefully taking note of how much space I had for shooting positions I opened Boomershoot 2007 up for 70 shooters instead of the 60 we had for Boomershoot 2006. As of this minute Boomershoot 2007 has 42 positions taken which means it is 60% sold out. It wasn't until the middle of February that Boomershoot 2006 was at a comparable level.

I know some people who are trying to get their schedules figured out and others are waiting for their next paycheck before signing up. I just hope the people I told "no hurry, it won't sell out before January" won't be calling me a liar.

There's probably no new material here for most of my readers. I suspect I'm just "preaching to the choir" most of the time. But you might want to send the link to pacifists or people that have the naive belief that, "if guns were banned there would be no gun crime".

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

Lord Acton
1881
Letter to Mary Gladston
[Lord Acton is probably better known for this quote, also known as Lord Acton's dictum, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."--Joe]

Interesting poll results:

Most Americans respect the NRA more than they do the Democratic party, the Republican party, or even the U.S. Congress.

And here's something else they won't tell you: It's been that way for years. For more than a decade, poll after poll says that more Americans favor the NRA than almost any other organization in the country. More than political parties, more than labor unions, more than the U.S. government itself.

Americans don't trust politicians and they don't trust The New York Times. They trust the NRA.

I'd love to see the polling questions and these results independently verified. It could be those polls were sponsored by the NRA making the results suspect. However Wayne claims these results were not done by the NRA:

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken last July found that while most Americans have positive feelings about the NRA, only 30 percent have "positive feelings" about The New York Times.

It bothers me he changes the subject from paragraph to paragraph. What was being polled? "Respect", "favor", "trust", or "positive feelings"?

Say Uncle noticed before I did but we are both getting Brady Campaign ads via Google on our blogs. Cool. Check out the "Sensible Gun Laws" in the third ad down:

If you were to see their ad on the sidebar and click on the link it would transfer another penny or two from them to my pocket for my campaign against the anti-gun bigots. That could be fraud if you didn't really have an interest in them--but it would be ironic if it happened.

Recently I had a discussion with someone that was resigned to us losing our freedom. I only weakly protested because I don't think well on my feet. I need time, sometimes lots of time, to formulate my thoughts and to make my case. My strength is in my attention to detail and in my ability to focus on problems for long periods of time. I play a good game of chess but not a first person shooter computer game. Boomershoot for example is a particularly subtle, long term, and yet I believe effective blow against the freedom haters (see also Why Boomershoot).

He claimed Jefferson was right to say, "God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion." He said that it was too late to save our freedom. Our chance for freedom today was lost without a successful revolution 150 years ago. And he invoked this as an argument:

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

Never mind that it might actually be an urban myth that Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee wrote this (see also this). It could be true or false regardless of who wrote it. And even if were true when it was claimed to be written in the late 1700's things have changed a bit since then. In the last 200 plus years the most amazing changes in human history have occurred. What is the effect of those changes? How does it affect our fight for freedom?

These questions affect us all. Do we resign ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren to a life of bondage? Is the best we can do just keep our head down so the "tiger eats us last"?

I don't have definitive answers to those questions but I have some pretty good hints. Please consider these changes from the time when the above was supposedly written:

• Long range individual owned and deployed weapons
• Incredibly cheap and rapid transportation
• Incredibly cheap, rapid, and secure communications

In the long range weapons category I don't just mean extending the range of a rifle from a couple hundred yards to a thousand or more. And I don't mean mortars that can extend that range out to well over a mile. With cell phones and/or the Internet people can now give commands to a weapon from anywhere on the planet to any other place on the planet. We can even deploy "smarts" into weapon systems that can take out a tyrant and/or his minions weeks, months, or even years after being put in place and the weapon owner is long gone or even dead.

There are many who would claim these items help the tyrant as much or more than the freedom advocate but I disagree. China, Russia, or even Canada with its oppressive gun control and socialist health care isn't any bastion of freedom but each of those governments heavily censored communication to protect the oppressors. And in each case communication recently succeeded despite efforts to suppress them and brought about reforms. As a friend said, Computers and the Internet are a far bigger problem for the government than they are for the individual. Just look at the vigorousness of the response by the Islamic extremists to our "corruption" of their society by our communication. Or the impact talk radio has had on U.S. politics. They, the freedom haters, hate it so because it is so powerful. Open communication is the ultimate enabler of freedom in a war against tyrants and communication has never been so cheap or secure as it is right now.

The rapid and cheap transportation allows the freedom advocate to attend a pro-freedom march on Pennsylvania Avenue, or take action against jack booted thugs near Waco or Ruby Ridge on a Saturday afternoon and never miss an hour of work from his or her job in Seattle or Miami. And the communication makes it possible for them to know about the event and coordinate with others in real time rather than days or weeks after it was over and far too late to participate in a meaningful manner.

My conclusion, for all it's lack of decisiveness, is that should we have the ambition and the courage to utilize the tools available to us we have it within our power to prevent the loss of more of our freedom and even regain many of the freedoms we have lost. I think the real question is, do you have the ambition and the courage to make a difference? Or are you going to give up?

If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.

Whitfield Diffie
[Words of wisdom for freedom advocates from a self admitted lefist who perhaps gave us one of the strongest keys (pun intended) to protecting and advancing freedom in all it's forms.--Joe] 

As you probably know Canada recently received another data point on the utility of gun registration. This well worded response sums it up well:

Well thought out goals and plans do not change with the intrusion of events by one deranged individual. He had two weapons and both, actually, were registered. I don’t know what you would put in place to prevent that from happening.

In slightly different circumstances and what is just barely below the surface in this example of failure is the response the anti-gun bigots are working toward. Gun registration actually does have some utility it's just that in this particular instance the proponents were caught in a weak position and weren't able to take advantage of it. What is needed to take advantage of the real goal of registration is a emergency or crisis, real or manufactured, at the national level. In that sort of situation the bigots make the claim there is only one solution--they have no option but to confiscate privately owned firearms. This, of course, has all too often enabled the Final Solution for other "problems" and must be vigorously resisted. It fails my Jews In the Attic Test.

Dooce is my favorite blog and it's not because her blog became the namesake of what happened to me (fired because of blogging). Most of what I read is gun and freedom related stuff and is often sort of draining. I don't read much of the lighter stuff and Heather gives me a real boost. I really, really like Heather's humor. Today she shared what is probably my favorite post yet. She and her family were interviewed for the Salt Lake Tribune about her blog and her family life:

The story ran this past Saturday, and although Matt had said it was going to be a big story, I wasn’t prepared to walk out to the driveway that morning and find my face staring back up at me from the pavement. The story was huge, the biggest thing on the front page, and inside it covered over a page and a half. I ran back inside, threw open the paper on the bed, and Jon and I stared down at these words in the second paragraph:

He runs the washcloth between her shoulder blades and then quickly circles around to rub her breasts.

OH.

MY.

GOD.

Hello, Mormons! How about some breasts with your morning prayers?

Matt was paraphrasing this entry I had written during the few days we had talked to him, and you might notice that not once did I ever use the term breasts in reference to my own. And this is the only complaint I have about the article which as a whole is the fairest, most level-headed piece of journalism ever written about me — he didn’t try to push an opinion about whether I was a self-absorbed egotist or an insignificant mommyblogger or an incredibly juvenile nitwit, although you only have to read one sentence of this website and you’d be convinced of all three.

My complaint is that when you take some of the things I write out of context they make me sound as if I am perpetually running up and down the street in the nude waving my tattooed middle finger at innocent old ladies who are cross-stitching passages of scripture as they sit in their wheelchairs on the porch. And that is so not true. I only do that on the weekends.

Her use of exaggeration sometimes makes me want to know a little more of the real side of her family. The article and this blog posting (Xenia, please read if you haven't already) by the photographer helped satisfy that urge.

Heather, thank you for sharing.

Another book is about to come out telling you what Dr. Joe has been telling you. And that is Dr. Joe's cure for everything (more sex) helps you live a long life. It also helps you stay lean.

'Sex Diet' Claims Lust Can Make You Lean

According to an upcoming book — and celebrities like Angelina Jolie and George Clooney's former model-girlfriend Lisa Snowdon — the key to controlling weight is simple: Have more sex!

"A steamy sex life could be the best diet you've ever tried," said author Kerry McCloskey, whose book, "The Ultimate Sex Diet: The Secret Formula for a Slimmer, Healthier, More Passionate Life," will be in bookstores early next year.

...

But a strenuous sex life doesn't only help you lose weight. Other health benefits include a longer life span, reduced depression, an improved immune system and a stronger heart.

Spending quality time in the sack can also make you look better — a 1999 study by Dr. David Weeks at Scotland's Royal Edinburgh Hospital found that an active sex life can make you look up to seven years younger.

...

"Life is short, so enjoy the ride," McCloskey says in her book, "especially the free one that your partner gives you!"

Have you ever had your child threaten to kill you? Yesterday was a first for me. And I thought things were going so well too...

Background: James bought himself a new computer and Xenia asked that he give his old one to her. James thought she was being spoiled but relented and wiped the hard disk before turning it over to her. Then he couldn't find the install disk for Windows XP. I told Xenia to send me an email to remind me and I would get her a new O/S. Our story picks up from this point:

From: Xenia Joy
Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 3:30 PM
To: xenia@joehuffman.org
Subject: Operating System

Get me an operating system.

 

-Xenia Joy

Interesting. It's not like she even said please. It's just a command from the little princess. But she left an opening for me to have some fun:

From: Joe Huffman 
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 1:38 PM
To: Xenia Joy
Subject: RE: Operating System

I got one. It's in the trunk of the car. Windows '95 should do, right?

-dad-

From: Xenia Joy
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 2:54 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: RE: Operating System

If you give me Windows ’95, you die.

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 3:04 PM
To: Xenia Joy
Subject: RE: Operating System

<gulp> What happens if I get you Windows 3.0?

-dad-

 

From: Xenia Joy
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 4:45 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: RE: Operating System

You die slower.

From: Joe Huffman [mailto:Joe@joehuffman.org]
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 5:32 PM
To: 'xenia@xeniajoy.com'
Subject: RE: Operating System

Hmmmm... I think maybe I like that. I like dying at the slowest rate possible. I guess this means I need to get you DOS 1.0. Will that get me a death in say 2100?

 

-dad-

From: Xenia Joy
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 6:56 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: RE: Operating System

No, you die over a 24 hour period.

I'm amazed. 29 positions have been reserved by 43 people. That is 41% of the positions taken already. In 2001 it took until March until I sold 30 positions--which filled it up.

At this rate (not likely to continue!) it will be filled by Wednesday.

Update (10/17/2006, 22:20): The event is now 50% sold out. 35 positions taken by 53 people.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

John F. Kennedy
[I'm sure Kennedy had something else in mind but I'm thinking the freedom to own firearms. The inalienable right to keep and bear arms.--Joe]

Fox News did a report a few days ago about Jay Leno having Kah-Lee-Foe-un-yuh Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appear on his show.  It was all about the "equal time clause" and whether Leno should be forced to have Arnold's opponents on for some "equal time".

Maybe Hollywood should be forced to cast Arnold’s political opponents as the stars in several hit movies, too.  It makes every bit as much sense, what with all the pre-election exposure all those movies are giving to Arnold.  Alternatively, We could force Blockbuster to quietly pull all of Arnold movies until after the election.  Its sickening to think about it, but I'm sure there are more than a few U.S. Congresswhores in both parties who would be willing to consider doing just that.

Update:  I though I was making a joke, but alas, no.  This has already been done by some broadcast stations.

Television stations also stopped airing Schwarzenegger's movies after he declared his candidacy to avoid violating the equal time provision.

I found it striking that at no point in the fox broadcast, or in several others I found, did anyone ever mention any possibility that Leno might have a right to invite anyone on his show anytime he feels like it.  Freedom, I guess, isn't worth discussing anymore.  Instead, we're to argue in detail only about how and when we are going to exercise coercion and how thoroughly justified we are in doing so.  Apparently, fairness demands more Stalinism.

Boomershoot 2007 is April 29th.

I have confirmation that Steve Joachim will be back with his anvils and again attempt to put one of them into orbit.

Gene Econ will be putting on his, as always, sold out Precision Rifle Clinic.

And of course there will be hundreds of highly reactive targets made up of over 1000 pounds of high explosives.

Learn more about Boomershoot here. Sign up for it here.

And so I don't have to hear it from everyone else...

It will be a blast!

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them that obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.

Samuel P. Huntington
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
[Most people probably would find this book a bit dry but I find it, for the most part, fascinating. I've been listening to it (as an Audio Book) on my iPod as I travel back and forth to the Seattle area.--Joe]

Proof by example:

From: Joe S
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2006 12:05 PM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Subject: little big boom

hey

i was wondering how to make a small bomb small enough to blow up in my back yard

but big enough to put a small hole in the ground(hehe).

also not to loud because i dont wont some old lady to call the cops.

I really dont wont to go buy thing that need an id.

can you help?

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2006 12:41 PM
To: 'Joe S'
Subject: RE: little big boom

I'm sure I can help. Would you please tell me the number of your local police department? If I wasn't so lazy I'd just look up the Akron, Ohio police department myself. I'm sure the police will be able to get Ameritech.net, your DSL provider, to give them your exact address. From there I'm certain you will get all the help you could possible want.

 

You might also want to check out these web pages to see if you can find help there:

 

http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2005.htm

http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2004.htm

http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2003.htm

-joe-

You would think this would be a sufficient whack with the old clue bat to get through. But this guy responded back!

From: Joe S
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2006 6:24 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: RE: little big boom

thanks it was just what i was looking for. it will take some time to make but ill tell you the results whin im done.

Data point number 2. One would think that he wouldn't be smart enough to send an email if he is this stupid. Apparently stupidity has no limits.

My position is that if someone is so stupid that they don't know how to build a bomb and yet want to build one then one should not help them. An exception might be made under carefully controlled conditions such that they only eliminate themselves, and perhaps their immediate friends, from the gene pool.

The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.

Will Rogers

This collection is an enlightening and comprehensive look at one of our planet's gravest problems. Until we regulate the trade in light weapons, arms dealers, just like drug traffickers and the slave traders, will continue to reap benefits at the cost of human lives in all countries of the world.

It is only through tackling war, militarism and weapons of all sizes, on all levels and from all sides, that we will be able to realize our vision of a world in which extreme poverty and senseless violence are nothing but sad memories of the past.

Oscar Arias Sanchez
Former President of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace Laureate
From a review of the book: LIGHT WEAPONS AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY.
[Many in international society wish to completely infringe the inalienable right to keep and bear arms on a worldwide basis and implement a Utopian socialistic society. This has been tried many times in the last century at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. Be on your guard for the next attempts.--Joe]

If you see a snake, just kill it - don't appoint a committee on snakes.

Ross Perot

I knew from talking to the investigators that inspect the Boomershoot explosives magazine that things were rather "tight" but I had no idea how bad it was or why it was that way.

The full report includes such items as demands for remote controlled doors, and wood flooring in the directors office that alone cost over $62,000. The millwork alone for the other wood in the office would cost $243,000. That doesn't include the executive bathroom which involved telephone, TV flat panel and radio speakers to listen/view news, quartzite tile floor to match the floor in the building atrium, a bench with a water resistant wood seat, tile wall "in horizontal straight stacked layout vs brick,” and sconces. The conference table cost $28,000. Don't get me started on the bodyguards, motorcades, and the gym.

All this while agents in the field were using expired body armor and complaining of not having enough people, and other safety equipment.

Now, I'm all for the starving the ATF for money to spend on unconstitutional activities but the money should be left in the hands of the taxpayers rather than put into a quarter million dollar office for the chief villain.

See also: Homework help from the ATF.

I spoke with an NRA spokesman the other day.  Among other things, he was bragging up the fact that the NRA had sued to get some of the guns seized in the Katrina aftermath returned to their owners.

OK, kudos, NRA.  Great.  Wonderful.  Good job.

"Lets say I had broken into your home" I said, "ruffed you up, handcuffed you, and robbed you.  I then get caught, taken in and put on trial.  Would you consider it justice if the only thing that happened to me was that I were forced to return some of your belongings?"  End of story?  Hurrah, Hurrah?  I think not.

I then asked him if he could name a single instance in which the NRA had attempted to get a violator of the Second Amendment punished for his crime.  A long silence ensued, after which I had to ask, "Are you still there?"  He could not think of a single instance, nor had he ever even considered such a question.  I then asked him if he could name a single anti-gun law that, once passed, the NRA had managed to get repealed.  Again, silence.

"If I stole all the fire extinguishers from your house, and later you started a minor kitchen fire while cooking dinner, and your house burnt down because you couldn't find a fire extinguisher, would you not hold me at least partially responsible for the loss of your house?"  After all, stealing your fire extinguishers is a violation of your rights and of the law, which limited your options in a response to an emergency.

Maybe you'd consider justice as having been served if, after you lost your house due to my violation of your property rights, I were merely forced by order of a judge to return half of your fire extinguishers a year later, all the while having continued my attempts at burglarizing other people's houses for their fire extinguishers."

Anyone would be a damned fool to think so.  It would be a sick joke, wouldn't it?  Yet this is exactly the situation we face with regard to our Second Amendment rights and I dare say no one is doing anything about it.  People are being disarmed and thereby exposed to an increased risk for injury and death, and we're supposed to jump for joy, singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" at the news that a few of the weapons are returned a year after they were illegally confiscated?  What about the perpetrators (I say, criminals-- enemies of the Republic) who confiscated the weapons in the first place?  What happens to them?

Dead Silence.

We have a certain body of law in this country.  It is defined as the Supreme Law of the Land.  It is the Constitution of the United States. All of our elected officials are sworn by Oath to uphold, defend and protect the Constitution, and many of them set out immediately to circumvent, compromise, dilute, and willfully violate that Constitution.

Yet when was the last time you can recall any individual ever being punished for that violation?  It does not happen.  These people are law breakers.  They have been entrusted with, and then broken, the most important law in our society- the one that protects the very fabric of our Republic, and it seems to me that the very worst that has happened to any of them as a result is that they stand a small chance of being forced into early retirement (losing an election) and taking a life-long pension at the tax payers' expense.

Until those who violate our constitutionally guaranteed rights are held personally liable for their crimes, they have no real incentive to stop.

Having said that, I have a friendly message for all you legislators, cops and judges out there-- those of you who feel so comfortable attacking the rights of your fellow countrymen:  Your words, and your actions, are a matter of public record.  They will follow you for the rest of your life and in a time when intercommunication is increasing exponentially.  How much are you willing to bet on the notion that We The People will never actually get serious about protecting our rights?

I wonder if the ATF would have helped my nephew's with his high school homework had I asked really nicely:

The man who recently departed as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ordered his staff to help with his nephew's high-school homework, wasting the agency's time and violating ethics rules, an inquiry found Wednesday.

The nephew's project — a documentary about the ATF that took 10 months to complete — was one of a half-dozen examples of lapses in judgment Carl Truscott committed before he resigned in August, says the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine.

Probably not. But it would have been just as constitutionally justified as any other activity they are involved in.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F. Kennedy

I heard the story a few days ago but now Xenia has posted the details on her Live Journal so I can talk about it here too.

It's kind of a nice story actually. Except for the barfing part. But that will make the story telling so much better for the grandkids.

My blog evolved from a Crawly Amphibian to a Flappy Bird in just two days and in the process pegged out the inbound link-o-meter:

Actually most of this rapid evolution was due to some sort of bug in the TLB ecosystem. I've had 50 some odd inbound links for quite some time but they weren't showing up right. After the Gun Blogger Rendezvous everyone started linking to everyone else and the dam sort of burst on my inbound links.

The rise in the number of viewers late last month is probably due to all the links Say Uncle has been sending my way recently.

Reno was the first time for me. I've had lots and lots of encounters where it could have happened had they given me enough attention. There have been dozens of times I certainly was making the moves on them and wanted something to happen. But it seemed they just weren't interested in me. Oh well. You try as best you can and it doesn't happen it doesn't happen.

At the SeaTac airport on my way to Reno I wore my Boomershoot 2004 t-shirt and my Boomershoot 2006 hat. On the way back I was a "good boy" and didn't wear the provocative shirt. But when they ran the swab over the edge of my gun case and ran it through the explosive sniffer it came back with a positive indication for explosives. The guy didn't quite know what to do and called a supervisor. They talked about it a bit and seemed to think the boxes and boxes of ammo (probably about 300 rounds of .223 and another 100 rounds of .40 S&W) could have influenced the test. I pulled out my ATF type 20 license (license to manufacture high explosives) and showed it to them and explained I have a lot of contact with explosives. They looked at it but didn't seem to know what to do with that information either.

Finally they removed most of the ammo from the case and pushed on the foam in the case looking for "something" underneath the foam. They didn't touch the gun. My guess is they are not authorized to do that. Finally they put all the ammo back in the case and said I could go.

Why this time I wonder? It could be because I've never had this case sniffed before and I do use this gun and case a lot to test my reactive targets. Some of those tests result in prills of ammonium nitrate flying back at me (and the gun case). That rifle has been handled a lot after I was mixing up explosives. Whatever. I don't really think it was the ammo.

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.

From my after dinner talk at the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous:

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.

Someone gets up one day and says, 'I'm gonna kill all the girls.' How do you legislate against that?

Katie True
Pennsylvania House Representative from Lancaster County
October 2, 2006
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Analysis: Gun control forces will be emboldened, face tall task
[The "tall task" is to train and arm the adults in the schools. The only solution which could improve the odds.--Joe]

DOS probably got your dog pregnant and left the milk out a couple times in college. Perhaps Windows 3.11 never paid you back for that $100 it was totally going to spend to get his car fixed but you later found out he spent on whiskey and hookers. Exchange server - I heard what it did, it was in all the papers.

Ry Jones