The View From North Central Idaho

Ry and I went to range today. We had some problems with some CCI Mini-Mag ammo. Ry has pictures.

He also told me of going to a party last night. The most memorable things he said were, "Drunk artists have poor muzzle control" and that he had to sign a waiver before being allowed in the door. Pictures from last night are here.

Alan Korwin was smart enough and fast enough to turn the tables on "an authorized journalist" during a recent encounter with a group of them:

The AP writer told of an assignment she got from the New York office, formerly the core of AP, and now restructured as one of four regional hubs. It seems the nation was bursting with hope and optimism right after Mr. Obama's inauguration, and now, one year later, everyone was disappointed and dejected.

"But wait," pointed out The Uninvited Ombudsman, the emcee for the evening event, "for half the nation's people, there was hopeless disappointment and dejection right after the election, and now, a year later, there is finally a ray of hope and light at the end of the tunnel. Doesn't your story neglect that half of the picture?"

All four AP staffers, who had nodded approvingly during the anecdote, stared like deer caught in headlights.

Nice.

Guns in bars. No background checks at gun shows. No permits to carry required. No restrictions on how many guns a person may buy (in some cases now it’s one per month).

What Americans don’t seem to understand is how crazy they look to most of the rest of the world. The reason they don’t understand is because of their one-thought tyranny.

Americans are tyrannized by 1776, The Second Amendment, The Bill of Rights, The Constitution and other colonial-era artifacts. They have been brainwashed into believing that those are the only thoughts there are. This is not freedom. Freedom means having a choice. If they could accept that there are other ways of thinking then they would have a choice! That’s what freedom is about and what many, if not most, Americans don’t understand.

Daniel Johnson
February 24, 2010
The Tyranny of the American Mind
[Tyrannized by The Bill of Rights? At first glance I thought it had to be satire. But no. I don't think it is. I think it more closely represents something from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

It appears "Reasoned Discourse" has broken out in the comments.

(graphic stolen from Robb Allen)

Numerous comments have been deleted. Ah, yes. Canadian "freedom" where they have official and unofficial censors.

Oh, and if you are interested in that sort of thing there is a picture of a tricked out SKS being held by a women in a bikini in Johnson's article.

H/T to jonjayray.--Joe]

This was a nice couple in their 50’s, fairly conservative, into classic cars, and in the market for a .38 for home protection. They were not loony-tune lefties by any means. They also mentioned a good friend who owns many guns and reloads. The conversation rolled along smoothly until the topic of “Uzi’s and machineguns” came up. As you can imagine, it wasn’t me talking about “Uzi’s and machineguns.”

I explained that there is little difference between an Uzi and any 9mm handgun or carbine and that legal machineguns are virtually never used in crime. That so called “assault weapons” are also rarely used In crime and that millions and millions of them are owned and used every day without hurting anyone. That the Second Amendment isn’t about duck or deer hunting, it is about being able to defend yourself, your family, your community, your state, and your country.

That is when the woman said something really chilling. She said that those crazy people who want all of those military weapons and think they have a right to that kind of capability just infuriate her and scare her to death and even though she doesn’t think people should have machineguns, those crazy people make her wish she had a machinegun to just shoot them all.

What on earth do you do with something like that?

Jeff Knox
February 18, 2010
A Lot of Work to Do
[We sometimes don't realize just how disconnected we are from the mindset of a lot of other people.

I'm probably not the best person to answer Jeff's question. I think they way I would handle it would be to ask if she felt the same way about blacks, Jews, or homosexuals.

Long term what we have to do is "come out of the closet". We have to get people to see us as normal or even better, as human with sheepdog tendencies. Take people to the range, get your shooting events mentioned in the mainstream media, and make it possible for people to think of you as little different than someone who goes to a different church than most of the people in the neighborhood.--Joe]

It's nice to see stuff like this:

An unnamed accused serial rapist demanded tougher gun control laws from his hospital bed in suburban Philadelphia earlier today, just hours after being admitted by police for a gun shot wound incurred while attempting to assault a local woman. Lawyers for the alleged rapist charged their client was “the real victim of this assault,” and warned that easy access to legal firearms was “[Making] committing a rape or other violent crime nearly impossible in many suburban areas.”

“She shot me in the privates,” bemoaned the wounded accused. “I was just trying to hold her down so I could have my way with her without her consent, and she just shoots me in the privates! How and I ever going to commit a rape again?”

In addition to a complete ban on private gun ownership, the accused lawyers demanded an investigation into hate crimes allegations against the shooter who, allegedly, uttered disparaging comments toward her attacker of a racially insensitive nature, and unfairly questioned his sexual orientation during the attempted assault. “Some guy’s trying to rape her, and she attacks his sexual orientation? What more proof do you need that she’s dangerous and insane,” asked the lawyer.

There is quite a bit more. The writer pokes fun at the police and anti-gun activists too.

I just got back from work after 17 hours.

Crystal is finishing up a new test and things were dying in inconsistent and strange ways in the middle of the test. It looked like it might be my problem.

I certainly held a good share of the responsibility. There were a couple of big memory leaks which I was responsible for. I fixed those and the test now sometimes runs to completion. Hiep will be surprised in the morning to find several new bugs on his plate. He had more, but smaller, memory leaks than I did.

It's a good thing we are investing so much in automated tests. These bugs only showed up with a cross country trip. Crystal started us out in Redmond and we died somewhere in the Great Plains a few minutes later. We now sometimes make it to New York City.

I did get some laughter relief during the middle of the day. We were trying to recreate the problem and she asked me, "Do you ever use Depends?"

Ahh.... No.

From the context I knew she was talking about a software tool that probably checked for dependencies but I didn't know of the tool she was referring to and decided to tease her about the inadvertent insult she just made. I frowned at her and told her, "I'm not that old!"

We both started laughing and my officemate then wanted to know what she had missed. Being an India native Depend had to be explained to her. More laughter then ensued.

The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.

Alexander Haig
December 2, 1924 – February 20, 2010
[I should have posted this a few days ago but I forgot that I had it in my collection.--Joe]

You don't have to think about this very long before you get a chill up your spine:

Three Google executives were convicted of violating Italian privacy laws on Wednesday, the first case to hold the company’s executives criminally responsible for the content posted on its system.

The content was a YouTube video posted by some random person. Google took the video down within two hours of being notified that it was in violation of Italian law. Still, some Google executives are now convicted criminals in Italy.

I keep waiting for the day that someone gets convicted in some restrictive country for daring to post a picture of a woman with her face and/or ankles exposed on their website. Or perhaps for providing firearms training videos on the Internet in China.

And don't forget similar things have happened in this country even before the Internet.

Somewhere there is one or more governments which would send you to prison for something you do as a normal everyday activity--freedom is a never ending battle.

I find this very odd. The subtitle is, "The Brady Campaign is doing all it can to ensure the safety of restaurant patrons." But the text of the article says things I could have written:

If Peet’s Coffee & Tea and California Pizza Kitchen can deny us service for expressing our Second Amendment rights, where does it end? Will they deny us service based on our nationality or sexual preference?

I got a call from Oleg yesterday. He plans to attend Boomershoot this year.

Of course he wants some pretty girls to take pictures of. It just so happens I know of two who will be there. So we talked about daughters Kim and Xenia.

He will be shooting with Lyle @ UltiMAK in position #74.

I'm sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple's industrial design, while the iPhone's UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.

Jesus Diaz
February 15, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple
[And to make sure those coffin nails for Apple stay tight I've been at work for nearly 15 hours straight now.

I'm running tests after fixing bugs that would only show up as somewhat excessive battery drain if multiple failures in the entire system (including network connectivity and/or servers temporarily being missing some data) occurred.--Joe]

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

Sydney J. Harris
[And there is a whole lot of asking going on around here now.--Joe]

One could get snarky with this one and revive the joke about the anti-gun people thinking guns are living things that kill on their own. Apparently some people think guns have their own DNA:

As a countermeasure, Magnus has proposed a plan to trace every weapon recovered on the street using DNA technology available through state and federal agencies. The county's crime lab does not possess the technology needed for such testing, he said.

Or snark about science hasn't yet sequenced even one Fe based lifeform yet so it will be a great many more years before the crime lab possesses the technology.

But probably it was just a lazy and/or stupid reporter than didn't bother to get the story straight. The ones that could have figured it out were probably fired long ago for "holding on to the notion there is an objective reality".

Sometimes you just have to wonder about their brain functionality. Sure, they are Canadian, but this is really over the top:

While rates of spousal violence and spousal homicide against women have dropped by 15 per cent over the past decade, the report slams the government's determination to scrap the long gun registry, which it credits as "one of the most significant factors" in reducing violence against women.

Registration of long guns reduced the rate of violence against women? Do they actually believe someone that is going to seriously injury or kill their spouse is going to obey the law about registering their rifle?

From my Windows Series Seven phone Windows Phone 7 Series.

Update: Yeah, yeah. I was in a meeting and didn't want to spend the time looking for the proper name. I got the words correct. Just not in the right order.

As a software developer deeply involved in providing location information to applications running on cell phones I have some advice if this concerns you:

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.

...

Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

...

The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone's location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)

...

Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting "thousands of these requests per month," and the amount has grown "exponentially" over the past few years.

Of course this is a two edged sword. If they can use your cell phone as evidence you were at a given location then you can use it to show you were not at some location. Leave your phone at work/home or in a friends car if you need to take supplies to your Jewish friends in the attic.

My advice is that no matter how careful you are with the applications you install or "disabling" the GPS or location services that isn't good enough. The cell phone company will still know where your phone is within a few hundred yards anytime it is turned on. And with some phones it's possible for you to think it is turned off when it actually is still functional at a level sufficient for your cell phone service provider to get location information.

As a friend of mine in the cell phone manufacturing business once told me, "I don't know exactly what's in the phone software. But I do know the phone only has one battery."

Daughter Kim already has her Concealed Weapons License for Idaho. Yesterday she called me to verify how to get her State of Washington License to Carry Concealed Pistol.

She called back after applying and told me of their new electronic fingerprint scanner.

She should be legal to carry in Washington within 30 days.

In tough economic times you frequently see mergers of the less healthy organizations with the more healthy. There are other reasons for mergers but when times are tough it's a pretty good bet that one or both of the organizations is about to collapse.

It is with this observation as background I'm pleased see the misnamed Freedom State Alliance (one of the most anti-freedom organizations short of the Democratic party I know of) is merging with States United To Prevent Gun Violence.

In real terms what this means is that Scott Vogel is saving some money by not renewing the domain name for FSA.

Corruption, extortion, child molestation, assault on officers, embezzling from the poor. That's just the job description. After hours, it gets nasty.

Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors
From http://www.stopillegalmayors.com/ as of February 23, 2010.
[Via Dave Hardy. Say Uncle also has a post about them. Linoge does some math comparing them to concealed carry permit holders.--Joe]

In South Africa you must apply for a license to own a gun:

...one must pass a written “competency test.” The South African constitution recognizes 11 official languages, but the test is only given in two of them, Afrikaans and English. Imagine if your gun ownership rights depended on passing a written test in a language you could not read!

And people wonder why we resist such things in this country.

It gets worse:

Applicants are not issued licenses if they are deemed to be at risk of becoming violent. As enforced in South Africa, this could simply mean that a person was divorced, separated or fired within the past two years.

Processing of applications is very slow. For example, of the applications submitted in 2006, only about a quarter have been fully processed.

Licenses are valid for two, five or 10 years, depending on the legal category of the license, so keeping a gun can mean staying on a near-constant treadmill of paperwork, fees and uncertainty. The majority of the 2005 applicants, who are supposed to renew in 2010, are still waiting for a decision on their 2005 applications.

Women are particularly hard hit (pun intended):

Married women who want guns for protection are told that their husbands will protect them—as if South African woman should behave like Taliban wives, and never leave the home except with their husbands. People who live in high crime areas are told that the police will protect them—except that the police obviously don’t, as South Africa is one of the most crime-ridden countries in the world.

Of course such high restrictions has created a black market with the attendant crime and corruption. It's no different than the prohibitions in this country against recreational drugs and alcohol in the last century.

Once we have our rights well secured in this country we should start putting pressure on other countries to recognize the natural right to keep and bear arms.

If you do a search of blogs for "Brady Campaign" you get progun posts. Nice!

One of my posts is number one with Bing. Say Uncle has a post with the top honors via Google.

No wonder the Bradys think they are fighting the NRA when it's really reduced to fighting a bunch of guys in their pajamas. Actually, I don't have any pajamas. I'm wearing a robe at the moment.

Very few persons qualify for the permit issued by a police chief. The only ones who qualify are persons who carry valuables. We refuse all we can.

William B. Hershner
Lancaster Pennsylvania Police Chief
Feb. 23, 1960
Flashback Lancaster
[A woman that carries cash from her shop to the bank may qualify because of the cash. But the woman with a stalking ex-boyfriend doesn't qualify. I guess human life doesn't qualify as "valuable".

Sort of like 50 years ago when there were literacy tests for voting and blacks were ask to read a newspaper aloud then given newspapers written in Chinese. Things are different now. The literacy tests were abolished but the "May Issue" concealed carry laws with nearly impossible to meet requirements to exercise the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms still exist and are abused by small minded law enforcement officers. We've made progress but there is still a lot more to be done. And we have people in D.C. working on securing the right to carry being recognized as inalienable (H/T to Jeff). We will get there. It is just taking us a little longer than it did for "people of color".--Joe]

Open Carry, which last year invited its members to holster up outside President Obama’s speaking sites, said it would not be deterred. Unfortunately, more than two dozen states also have allowed themselves to be bullied by the gun lobby into adopting similarly dangerous law.

New York Times
February 19, 2010
Who Can Relax This Way?
[The ignorance of these bigots is showing. Or else they consider the Founding Fathers of the nation and the individual states to be "the gun lobby" who bullied the states. Open carry has been legal in most states since before there was a United States. And there is good reason to believe the U.S. Supreme court will someday soon find that the right to carry a gun in public is a specific enumerated right protected by the Second Amendment.

Today is Starbucks Appreciation Day. Have a cup of joe with Joe.

If you are like me and don't like coffee have a cup of hot chocolate and a pastry or buy a gift card for someone else who does like their products.--Joe]

Opponents of gun control spend an inordinate amount of time and energy in pursuit of the "smoking gun" evidence that advocates of gun restrictions really want to ban all guns, or at least all handguns. With respect to handguns, some gun control organizations are quite open about their goal of ending the sale of handguns to the civilian market entirely.

For the gun control advocate seeking to overcome the slippery slope argument, these groups present a problem. They can be effectively cited as evidence that the ultimate goal of gun restrictions is to ban all guns. But the size and influence of these groups pales in comparison to the largest organization advocating stricter guns laws--the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and, before that, as the National Council to Control Handguns. The Brady Campaign does not support banning all guns, or even all handguns, and says so publicly every time it is asked and often when not asked. I know because I have worked in the Brady organization for most of my professional career. Our position on gun banning was explained to me on my first day on the job, and it has remained the same ever since.

Dennis A. Henigan
Lethal Logic, pages 79 and 80.
[We spend too much time search for the "smoking gun"? And they do not support banning handguns? And their position on gun banning has not changed since his first day on the job (in 1989)?

Okay. We can put an end to that right now. Either Henigan forgot about the brief he signed in support of the D.C. ban in D.C. v. Heller or he doesn't think the brief is public. And he forgot about this document still on the Brady website where it says on page 57:

The Brady Center is supporting the District of Columbia in defending its longstanding handgun ban...

Or as a final alternative, I suppose it's possible, Henigan is lying.--Joe]

This and this is very good to see.

Not only from the standpoint of being proud to have contributed to the project but this sort of press might positively affect my bonus and salary.

Update: Second link fixed. See also this collection.

Via daughter Xenia.

TSA is really A Security Theater so its just common sense that a four year old on his way to Disney World would get treated like this:

SECURITY officers at a US airport have come under fire for forcing a disabled boy to remove his leg braces and walk through a checkpoint.

Four-year-old Ryan Thomas was flying from Philadelphia to Disney World in Orlando with his parents Bob and Leona when the incident occurred.

At the time Ryan, born 16 weeks prematurely with malformed ankles and low muscle tone in his legs, had only just begun to walk.

His parents wheeled his stroller to the security checkpoint then broke it down and put it on the conveyor belt.

They then walked Ryan through the metal detector. The alarm went off and the screener told them to take off the boy’s braces.

“I told them he can't walk without them on his own,” Bob Thomas told the Philadelphia News.

“I said this is overkill. He's 4 years old. I don't think he's a terrorist.”

Security also demanded Ryan walk through on his own.

I guess this shows the terrorists how determined we are... or something.

Chet sent me an email to this article about swabbing peoples hands for explosives. They decline to say what sort of explosives they are looking for but I'd be willing to bet they don't pick up on wheat flour or powdered sugar (which could make great dust explosions on an airplane) so the benefit from this is asymptotically close to zero.

Chet also notes that even the ID requirement is false security since you don't really need ID to get on the plane.

The Second Amendment right to bear arms applies to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Richard B. Sanders
Supreme Court of the State of Washington
State of Washington v. Christopher William Sieyes
February 18, 2010
[This probably should be the quote of the year. But I'll I expect similar words will be used in the Chicago gun case.

Still nothing from the Brady Campaign. They must be off in a corner someplace sobbing, drinking Tequila or contemplating that bottle of whiskey and sleeping pills. I'll give them another slap by adding another chapter to my review of Lethal Logic tomorrow.--Joe]

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women.

Original version here.

I don't get it. Are these people completely intoxicated by Communism or something? They are suggesting that Microsoft should give away the Windows Phone 7 Series O/S I've been working on for over a year.

They say we should do it to gain market share. Yeah, that makes sense. We would lose money on every item but we would make it up in volume I guess.

I'm open to alternate business models but I'm not seeing a good alternate at this point and they don't have any plausible suggestions either.

I view this sort of like the Berlin Wall coming down. A friend that visited Berlin a few months after it came down said that 24 x 7 if you were within a 1/4 mile of the wall you could here the "dink, dink, dink" of hammers pounding away at the wall. As you approached you saw hundreds of people of people either with hammers or waiting to pick up one after the person ahead of him or her finished. Everyone was getting a piece of the wall.

In this case Dave Hardy put it as follows:

Defendant was charged with possession of a handgun by a minor. The court, in an extremely thoughtful ruling (citing Joyce Malcolm, Eugene Volokh, William van Alstyne and others) rules that the 14th Amendment due process clause incorporates the right to arms and makes it binding on the States, then remands for a determination as to whether the law passes muster (which was barely briefed). The dissent argues there is no need for remand, because strict scrutiny applies and the law fails that test. The dissent has interesting references to teenager possessing arms, and serving in the military, throughout American history.

The D.C. laws against firearms ownership were struck down and with that crack in the wall more and more of the wall is falling. When McDonald v. Chicago is decided the ground is going to start shaking as that wall of 20,000 oppressive gun laws collapses into a pile of rubble.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

Joseph Stack
February 18, 2010
Man Angry at IRS Crashes Plane into Office
[I also consider it a bit insane to deliberately kill yourself in the process of getting a different outcome. I can empathize with the desire to take out an IRS building (or 10) but I don't think this was that great a plan.--Joe]

I'm skeptical there could be this much difference in just one year. I suspect a sample error of some sort unless someone can suggest a good plausible reason for the increase:

Women are having wilder sex than a year ago with 76 percent admitting to using porn and four in five indulging in role play between the sheets, it emerged Wednesday in a new survey.

The English Netmums website survey found that despite three quarters of women having less sex — due to the demands of longer working hours — they are much more adventurous, The Sun reported.

The findings that 76 percent of women use porn is a 10 percent rise on the two-thirds of females who admitted to watching porn with their partners in a survey last year.

The most popular format is online porn, which is watched by 61 percent of couples.

My data set is very limited but I'm sure there has been an increase in the last 15 years.

I think I need to do some more research

I got an email from Dave Hardy:

I just got my ballot issue of the Amer. Rifleman. I’d greatly appreciate if you could mention the candidacy of Carol Bambery, of Michigan, and her webpage at http://www.carolbamberynra.com/. I know you like to quote from her brief in Heller (she filed another in Chicago). There is much to be said for a director who carries twice the committee assignments of the average director, hunts whenever she can, and loves to shoot NFA weapons!

I knew that I had quoted her a few times. I didn't realize how many until I went looking (10 times).

This, at its simplest, is political hate speech towards the community to which Detective Tuason is duty-bound to protect. It is an abhorrent and vile insight into the mindset of one East Palo Alto's own detectives regarding on-duty activities. It is chilling to contemplate what could happen if Detective Tuason encountered citizens exercising their fundamental civil rights to openly carry in a lawful manner within the City of East Palo Alto, as one Redwood City man did on January 28th. Like the allegations of comrption that left the East Palo Alto Police Department with a tarnished reputation just a few months ago, this vivid and graphic imagery of police misconduct will be hard to dispel.

Jason Davis
The Law Offices of DAVIS & ASSOCIATES
February 12, 2010
Letter to Ronald L. Davis Chief of Police City of East Palo Alto on behalf of The Calguns Foundation, Inc. This was in response to a detective saying "Sounds like you had someone practicing their 2nd amendment rights last night! Should've pulled the AR out and prone them all out! And if one of them made a furtive movement...2 weeks off!!"
[Ahhhh ... yes. Reminds me of the kind of stuff we used to hear about happening to blacks in the deep south 50 to 100 years ago.

Gun owners are the ni**ers of the 21^st Century.

H/T to Rob for the email pointer. I had seen the original quote but not the response of CGF.--Joe]

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Marshall McLuhan
[Although we can see road behind us with reasonable clarity our ability to discern the cliffs, turns, and rockslides ahead is severely limited. It's a shame Dr. Ronald L. Mallett's time machine isn't up and running.--Joe]

Just a FYI.

My hidden, hardened, underground bunker lost it's Internet connection yesterday afternoon and I haven't bother to use alternate methods of checking my email. I did check the comments and add one here on the blog but generally don't expect anything from me until I restablish normal communcations. This is expected to be sometime this evening after I get off work.

If something urgent comes up give me a call on my cell phone: 208-301-4254.

Update: After wasting about two hours of my life I have an Internet connection at my bunker again. I wish I could bill Comcast for my time.

Kelsey says, "Comcast is a Dick!" James had a longer explaination which is not worth repeating here.

And a word of advice to $@#!%^& people at Comcast from security professional...

Do not insist I turn off my firewall and connect my computer directly to the cable modem!

My inclination after doing this is to wipe the hard disk and reinstall the O/S.

That's fire and brimstone.  This is pure gun geekery, and even for gun geeks its nerdy because it's about percussion guns of the 1800s.  You've been warned.

Saturday, Nephew and I tried some heavy loads for the repro 1858 Remington revolver.  I'd been using a 28 grain powder charge and a round ball with decent results, but wanted to try something with more pep.  Civil War era military loads ranged from very light, to as much powder and lead as could be stuffed in the cylinder.  To start, we tried round ball (~140 grains) over a charge of 39 grains of 3F Goex with a greased felt wad in between.  That load filled the chambers completely and delivered an average of 925 fps at 10 feet with an extreme spread of 46.  Not too bad.  The 29 grain charge was yielding a velocity of about 850 fps.

It's like pulling teeth to find acceptable "conical" bullets ("bullet shaped" as opposed to a round ball) for these ".44" percussion revolvers unless you cast your own, which I don't.  I did find some Buffalo Bullets 180 grain jobs that fit the chambers nicely, and ordered 100 of them to try.  Since the bullet takes up more room in the chamber, the most powder I could get in and still seat the bullet below the cylinder face was 30 grains.  But, wow.  Average velocity was 1047 fps.  That's a tad better than a .40 S&W, and matches the V of a .45 Auto load in the Speer manual for their 185 gr GDHP.  Extreme spread was 67, with a standard deviation of 21.

That was with two different people doing the loading.  I'm going to guess that with the same person loading all the rounds, the charge weight and ramming pressure would be a little more consistent, and so too the velocity.  Groups with this load opened up slightly from last week's all-ball venture, but not enough to be sure.  This time was in direct sunlight, which makes aiming a little more difficult.

The extra pressure it takes to move the heavier bullet, which also has more friction surface against the bore, I will assume ramps up the powder's burn rate.  More velocity with less powder and a heavier bullet.  Neat.  We've found a performance, or efficiency, zone.  More pressure equals more heat, equals a faster, more complete burn inside the bore, equals yet more pressure.

This is how guns (and sometimes chemical factories, engines, etc.) blow up-- things look great as you increase the pressure and temp a little.  The reaction speeds up, a little bit more, things are doing fine, a little bit more and, Boom!.  A threshold is reached and a runaway reaction takes place.  You shear some bolt lugs, or burst a cylinder, etc. and maybe you go home with slightly fewer or slightly misshapen body parts.  That can be embarrassing.

I wasn't worried about this load in a modern repro made with modern steel.  When these revolvers were designed and built originally, metallurgy wasn't anything like it is today, and even back then they were known to stuff the chambers full on a regular basis.  Further, it makes no sense to build a cylinder that will take more powder than it can handle with the commonly used "44-100" bullets of up to 250 grains.  That would take more material and make the gun bigger and heavier, for no other reason than to encourage over-pressure loads.  I'm also running on some faith that they wouldn't have done that (though the much longer 1847 .44 Colt "Walker" cylinder was known to occasionally let go).  Remember that back then there was only black powder, not the wide spectrum of nitro powders we have now.  All they had to control the powder's burn rate were different granulations of the same mixture (though brand and lot inconsistency would likely have thrown in some degree of uncertainty).  With smokeless propellants you can get into a LOT MORE TROUBLE making your own loads.

Here's Nephew torching off one of the heavy loads.  The bullet has been on its way for about a millisecond, as the gun is still in firing position and the hot gas (I mean hot-- this is in direct sunlight) has traveled a foot or so out from the muzzle;

Below is the same shot in full recoil a fraction of a second later.  Forget about quick follow-up shots.  You can't see the target until the smoke clears. By then you're re-cocked and ready to go.  A side wind would be a big help in this case;

Today's rapid fire guns wouldn't be worth as much if they had to run on black powder.  For one thing you wouldn't be able to see squat.  It is "interesting" to take a shot, and find that your target has simply disappeared after the smoke has cleared.  There's that moment of uncertainty.

I like the slow, frame-by-frame animations as below.  You can see the mechanics of the recoil (though a high speed camera would be nice).  You can watch the force wave travel from his wrist, into the arm, the shoulder, and whole torso.  Nephew's grip is fairly relaxed, which isn't a problem with a medium weight 44 revolver.  Some people hate animated gifs on a web page.  I'm one of them, but this is for science;

You shouldn't haul off and max out your charcoal burner just because I did.  I'm not saying it's the thing to do.  What I can say is; I still, for the moment, have all my body parts (and gun parts) and all are operating satisfactorily, thank you.  I have a load that's within the range of those used in the 1860s for the Remington New Model Army revolver and 1860 Colt Army, and it matches some of the .45 ACP loads for a ~180 grain bullet.

Now here's a puzzler.  I've had barrel leading in modern revolvers and autos firing bare lead, hard-cast or swaged bullets.  Using pure, soft lead bullets in the '58 Remington and '51 Colts, no leading has been observed, even with these loads that achieve modern handgun KE levels.  I don't know why.  Is it the grease?  But we're told in no uncertain terms never to lubricate a modern gun bore, while black powder guns are greased all to hell.  Is it the propellant temp?  But the KE is the same.

This is what I'm working on.

Deep down in the O/S you will find a location application programming interface. Below that you will find code that converts the existence of Wi-Fi and cell tower radio signals into a latitude and longitude. That (and a few other things) has been my job for the last several months.

This is just one small piece of a very large and impressive picture.

As Sean just said a minute ago in an IM, "Wow. You showed me some neat stuff Friday, but I was still impressed by today's reveal. With this piece of the puzzle, I get a tingling feeling up and down my leg. Like we really might be entering a new golden age for Microsoft."

[I]t's always interesting to see provably secure cryptosystems broken.

Bruce Schneier
December 30, 2009
Quantum Cryptography Cracked
[Security can be a very, very difficult problem. It is like a chain in that it is no stronger than the weakest link. This is the reason TSA is A Security Theater. The same can be said about gun control--only several orders of magnitude greater in strength.

Quantum Cryptography is "provably secure" given a set of assumptions. Those assumptions include both known explicit assumptions and implicit assumptions which the prover may or may not be fully aware of. By making those assumptions invalid the proof falls apart.

No one seriously attempts to formally prove gun control provides benefits to society. The well informed anti-gun people frequently don't even make claims. They just point out all the adverse effects of gun ownership then announce their conclusions that there should be more gun control. This is not science. This is more like a witch doctor chanting around the fire and making pronouncements about the evil spirits.

If someone were attempt make a formal proof about benefits of gun control they would quickly find out that the anti-gun people make many assumptions which are provably false. Typically among these are that guns are "designed to kill" or "all gunshot deaths are illegal/evil/bad", or a prohibition on guns will work better with firearms than it did with alcohol and recreational drugs. With such assumptions so blatantly false the claims of there being benefits to gun control are laughable.--Joe]

Even though I'm not using the external antenna on the Taj Mahal Wi-Fi access point I still have good service at the far west end of the shooting line. I'm currently showing four out of five bars on my laptop.

As BillH posted a few days ago the Boomershoot site has zero snow. I drove all the way out to the Taj in my car without problems. Last year at this time it was snowshow conditions.

As I forwarded from Mike yesterday we need to have a Starbucks Appreciation day. In some back channel communication with other gun bloggers and friends in the gun rights community (Ashley V. suggested some wording for me to use) no one had any objection to Mike's suggestion. Therefore I would like to announce that one week from today on Sunday February 21 gun owners should have a Starbucks Appreciation Day.

I would like to suggest we do this without an overt display of firearms. Our message of Starbucks Appreciation will be overshadowed by the known presence of firearms if we make having a firearm on our person the point of the message. Let's keep it simple and let the barista and manager know why we're making a purchase that day.

You can get the message across just as well by saying something like:

Please know I'm here because firearm owners across the country want to show Starbucks our appreciation for your decision not to ostracize customers who own and carry guns.

I'm going to be consuming Starbucks products on a regular basis now and would like for other gun rights supporters to do the same. But next Sunday we should make a point of telling them why and explicitly telling them thank you.

Update: One supporter (Lorena) says, "Have a cup of joe with Joe!"

That’s sheer insanity.

If you remove the background check requirement, you’re literally writing a death sentence for law enforcement officers, family members, just people in the street.

M. Kristen Rand
Legislative director for the Violence Policy Center.
January 30, 2010
Seeing Loose Gun Laws as Still Too Tight (NY Times and the AP)
Ms. Rand is referring to a proposed law to remove the requirement for a license in order to carry a concealed weapon.
[Ms. Rand also said almost the same thing in regards to relaxing Washington D.C.'s oppressive gun laws. Complete with the "lunacy" and "writing a death sentence" phrasing. Of course she ignores places like Vermont and Alaska which have low crime rates and no requirement to obtain a license to carry. And, of course, D.C. didn't have an increase in the blood running down the street after the gun ban was overturned. But apparently in Ms. Rand's mind that really doesn't matter so she repeats her previously faulty prediction with just as much conviction as the previous time.

With such blatant disregard for the facts I have to conclude the only insanity involved is that of Ms. Rand. One could disregard the raving of such a lunatic if it were only her talking to parking meters on the street or other inmates in an asylum. But the New York Times and the AP apparently think there is value in sharing some of her delusions.--Joe]

See Notes on Lethal Logic for links to all my posts on Dennis Henigan's book Lethal Logic.

Chapter 2 of Lethal Logic is titled: "When Guns Are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns."

In response to this "bumper-sticker" Henigan, page 38, claims this:

... seems unresponsive to most proposals for strengthening our guns laws that have dominated the gun debate for at least the last two decades. Instead, the argument often functions as a classic "red herring".

The basis for this claim is there is virtually no support in public polls or the legislatures of the states or the Federal government for a ban on handguns. But notice, pages 37 and 38, how he words this in terms of handguns. Then he goes on to day (page 38), "This is not to say that the proposal to ban handguns, or even all guns, is not worthy of public debate."

What about "assault weapons" Mr. Henigan? Or ".50 caliber sniper rifles?" Or "Saturday Night Specials"? Or the support for banning the future sale of guns which don't met their criteria for safety? Or depriving people of their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms without due process (they call it the "Terror Gap")? And don't forget their support the the "safe handgun lists" of California and Massachusetts. And furthermore he doesn't mention the Brady Campaign supported the D.C. ban on handguns. With all the bans which he and his organization do support it can hardly be considered a "red herring". How many guns types would have to be remaining before it would stop being a "red herring"?

It stops being a red herring the instant he proposes the banning of just one gun. And we are way past that threshold. Yet he words things very carefully to try and make it sound as if his claim is still valid. He says the following in discussing the Heller decision (page 40):

If a handgun ban is "off the table," this may make it more difficult for the pro-gun advocate to change the subject when the issue is reasonable gun laws, like background checks at gun shows, that fall far short of a handgun ban. How can the gun lobby argue as if the issue is whether to allow guns for self-defense, if the issue now cannot be whether to allow guns for self-defense? If the argument is, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," now a new response is possible: "Not only are we not talking about outlawing guns, but guns cannot be outlawed. So let's talk about ways of strengthening our laws to keep guns out of the wrong hands, while abiding by the new Constitutional right created in Heller."

When all the anti-gun organizations give up bans of all types of guns, and making law abiding people jump through oppressive registration, licensing, and training requirements then we can talk about dropping the "When Guns Are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns" slogan.

And what is this about "the new Constitutional right created in Heller"? We have quotes, papers, and even state constitutions that go back to the founding of this republic all saying it was the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. It was just in the last few decades that some people started claiming it was a "collective right". We have been telling them all this time it was an individual right. Now that all nine justices on the Supreme Court agreed with us they act as if it's a surprise to them.

Even ignoring outright bans Henigan acknowledges the slogan has wider application (page 41):

The core of the argument is that because gun control laws, by their very nature, are obeyed only by the law abiding, they cannot possibly be effective in curbing violent behavior by criminals. "Criminals will always break the law and obtain firearms illegally," says NRA President Sandra Froman.

...

The success of gun control laws in curbing access to guns by dangerous people is not at all dependent on the willingness of hardened criminals to obey them.

...

Were it not for gun control laws barring gun possession by certain categories of high-risk people, the police would not have this enforcement tool at their disposal.

What it boils down to is that Henigan is a proponent of creating numerous victim-less crimes that can be used by the police to arrest and prosecute people. Usefulness to the police is not a criteria that should be entertained when we are speaking of a specific enumerated right. Do we want to create categories of "high-risk people" that should be denied access to religious materials? Or certain categories of "high-risk people" who do not enjoy a right to trial by jury, or the right not to incriminate themselves? Wouldn't those too be useful law enforcement tools?

I don't have the time to go through all the half-truths and mistaken conclusions and proposed violations of an inalienable right in this chapter but here is a slightly expanded version of my notes on the chapter

Page 45. Figure 2.1 baseline is not 0.

Time to crime is greater than zero.

By using a baseline very close to the average value changes that small effects appear to be amplified. The effect he exaggerates is the drop in crime rates after passage of the Brady Act. The same Brady Act that the CDC says insufficient evidence exists to credit it with a drop in crime. Furthermore the "time to crime" for a gun is greater than zero but his graph shows a drop nearly exactly coincident with the Brady Act. And even that is misleading because the crime rate actually started dropping in 1992 before the Brady Act was passed. If there was a correlation between the crime rate and the Brady Act any causation must be that the crime rate caused the Brady Act rather than the other way around.

Page 46. Iron Pipeline.
Strong gun law states will probably have their laws thrown out. Strong law argument can be used against cell phones and cars.

The laws against gun ownership/recreational-drugs/alcohol/pornography/whatever create black markets. The just because a black market exists does not mean it is in the best interest of society to expand those bans. There would exist a black market in cars and cell phones if some states made it expensive and/or difficult to acquire those tools. Cars and cell phones are used in crimes all the time too but that doesn't mean they should be banned or heavily restricted.

One gun a month requires some sort of registration.

Page 52. Registration fails The Jews in the Attic Test. People will not register. 100s of millions unregistered in Europe and Canada.

Page 58. Machine guns legal.

Henigan claims the low use of machine guns in violent crime shows that strict registration and licensing work. No. His base assumption that machine guns give "an enormous advantage in a gunfight with police" is wrong. I've fired machine guns, I've seen other people fire machine guns. When it comes to putting rounds on a few targets quickly a semi-auto is a far better tool. Even Jeff Cooper said, "As I have often stated, if someone wants to shoot at me, I sure hope he does it on full-auto." (Jeff Cooper's Commentaries Vol. 1, No. 9 October 1993). If criminals have any gun experience at all they will arrive at the same conclusion and realize that there are no advantages for the types of uses they have for firearms and don't bother to acquire one. Even the police who have legal access to full auto firearms do not carry them on a regular basis and do not have much, if any, training with them. The absence of full auto firearms in crime does not mean the highly restrictive laws reduced violent crime or had any other benefit to society.

Page 63. Suicide reduced by waiting periods.
A right delayed is a right denied. How many lives lost because of waiting periods and storage laws?

Page 65. Accidental shooting data is old.

He does not use data past 2000. The accidental shooting rate continued to drop despite vastly more guns being in circulation.

Page 68. Ten states. Six states.

By "cherry picking" his data (ten states the highest rates of death by gunshot versus the six with the lowest rate of death gunshot) he skews things to support his conclusions. Furthermore this measure "death by gunshot" is of little interest to people like me who care more about "violent crime". By choosing the metric he did he can ignore things like the high violent crime rates in jurisdictions where people do not have ready access to guns to defend themselves. It also lumps justified and praiseworthy homicide where the good guy used a gun in with criminal homicide with a gun. He may be giving accurate numbers but he is very selective in how he present them such that he can conclude "gun restrictions are good".

Regardless of which point Henigan attempts to make he completely fails to "explode the myth". The best that can be said about Henigan in this chapter is that figures don't lie but this liar does know how to figure.

Xenia and her husband John bought a new car today. Since John is several thousand miles away at the moment I gave her a ride to the dealership and provided "moral support". It is the first car she has ever owned.

Since the salesman who sold them the car was at his grandmother's funeral it was the dealership owner that did the paperwork and gave us a mug (for Xenia) and two hats (one for John, one for me). He was very nice and gave Xenia his card which had his home phone number on it in case she had trouble with the car that wasn't resolved with the normal staff. He asked Xenia to thank John for his service (U.S. Army). So far, I highly recommend Jess Ford in Pullman.

On the way back she called me (using the integrated Bluetooth cellphone connection) and talked about how cool it was that she could call people with her car. It even has voice recognition, she pushed a number, said, "Dial", spoke the number and said, "Dial" again. Very cool and the car is definitely shiny.

I have been negligent and I've been reminded of this in email from Mike:

Are you aware of any efforts to counter the Brady Starbucks petition? They claim to have 25k signatures. Money talks and bullshit walks, though. I think it would be a lot more effective than an online petition to designate a "Thank Starbucks Day", where people would be encouraged to go into their local Starbucks, buy a coffee, and hand the manager a card thanking the company for their enlightened policies. Or send the CEO a photo of oneself holding a latte. Or ??? This might not be a bad idea to put into practice regularly with other companies. Why complain about bad policies? Let's reward companies with good ones (and make a lot of noise doing it). What do you think?

"I'd like to thank Starbucks for standing up for the safety of its customers and allowing lawfully carried firearms in your retail establishments. Thank you for your wise decision and for helping us keep our families safe. I will be recommending your products to all my coffee drinking friends."

Yes. This must be done.

Sebastian has more on the topic here and here. Send your email by following this link.

It is really, really important for the Brady Campaign to win something. They aren't winning in the legislatures. They aren't winning elections. They aren't winning in the courts. They aren't winning in the polls. They aren't winning in donations. They aren't winning in members. They have sunk to the level of doing battle with a few guys in their pajamas which they can't win either.

Such a major losing streak can become a fatal downward spiral. It demoralizes them and their supporters. As Chris Cox, NRA-ILA Executive Director, said in regards to politicians, "They don't fear me. They fear you." If the Brady Campaign can only bring a small fraction of the people to the party that gun activists can they will be less influential. The less influence they have the less notice people will give them. The less notice the less influence.

It's sort of like something barely floating on the surface of the ocean. As long as they are less dense than the water they float and are visible. The visibility changes day to day with the density. As long as they are visible they have influence and have hope of becoming more visible and influential the next day. But this is only true while their density is less than water. There is a threshold which cannot be crossed. Very shortly after their density increases just a very small amount above water they start their journey to the very bottom of the ocean. Their visibility while on the surface is a linear function of their density. But as soon as the density of water threshold is crossed it's like a switch was turned off.

We know how dense they are. It won't take much to get them started on their journey to oblivion. Send Starbucks your email and your business. Tell them when you buy your coffee (or pastries, tea, and hot chocolate for people like me) that you are a gun owner and you appreciate them not discriminating against people exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.

The difference between gun control activists and gun rights activists is simple: gun rights advocates know what they are talking about, because they have depth of knowledge and expertise about firearms and pay attention to the issue. Gun control advocates, for the most part, don't know anything about guns, aren't interested in guns, and only pay attention to gun issues when the latest blood-dancing press release arrives. There's no sustainability.

Matthew
[It's more than just sustainability. It's depth of knowledge, training, and preparation for the conflict.

I thought this for a QOTD was particularly relevant because in a meat space discussion yesterday Sean told me that he sometimes gets into discussions with an anti-gun person who thinks they know what they are talking about. It turns out they have only given the topic a few minutes of thought whereas Sean has spent 20 years thinking about the subject. As expected a battle of wits with an unarmed person is very one sided.--Joe]

Via Instapundit (via Sean):

FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU, then they laugh at you, then they smear you, then you win. An updated version for the 21st Century . . . .

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “And if they had simply stuck with the ignore you part they would have come out so much better. But then stupidity and evil have always been a noxious brew especially when it is topped off by arrogance.” Yeah, imagine how much less powerful Sarah Palin would be if they’d just given her the usual amount of attention received by losing VP candidates. But they just can’t help themselves.

In my scaled down version "they" becomes the Brady Campaign. See further elaboration on this line of thought by Greg.

Brady Campaign week continues here tomorrow with another chapter in Lethal Logic.

Via The Second Amendment Foundation press release:

A King County Superior Court judge has ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association, striking down a ban on guns in city parks because it violates Washington State’s long-standing preemption statute.

Judge Catherine Shaffer ruled from the bench that the gun ban, adopted under former Mayor Greg Nickels, violates Washington’s law, which placed sole authority for regulating firearms in the hands of the State Legislature. That law was adopted in 1983 and amended in 1985, and has served as a model for similar laws across the country.

SAF and NRA were joined in the lawsuit by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Washington Arms Collectors and five individual plaintiffs.

“This is a great victory for the rule of law and Washington citizens,” said SAF Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “Greg Nickels was so blinded by his personal hatred for firearms owners and his own arrogance that he imagined the city under his control could simply ignore state law. That arrogance cost Nickels his job last year. We repeatedly warned him not to push a gun ban, but he refused to listen.

“It is also a victory for the Legislature,” he observed, “because this case affirms the intent of lawmakers in 1983 to prevent cities like Seattle from creating a nightmare patchwork of conflicting and confusing firearms regulations. The ruling solidifies the legislature’s authority and sends a message to city and county governments to stop meddling with the rights of Washington citizens.”

Gottlieb suggested a review of local ordinances may now be in order, so that city and county governments can be compelled to remove old gun regulations or face legal consequences.

“This ruling puts anti-gun local officials on notice that legally-armed citizens have rights, too,” Gottlieb stated.

See also:

• Judge's ruling ends Seattle parks gun ban
• Judge: Seattle gun ban is illegal
• Judge in Seattle case: ‘Plaintiffs have right to carry under federal, state constitutions’ (the most and best details are in this article)
• UPDATE: Seattle Parks Gun ban vacated
• West Seattle Blog (includes link to the judges order here)

Gun carrying residents of Washington State are protected from discrimination by the counties and cities yet the Brady Campaign wants businesses to discriminate again them. That is going to be a losing battle too. It's time for them face the music. They should quietly be sending out their resumes and preparing for the end. If they can't find honest work there are probably a few more years left in the global warming hoax.

I just received an email from Michael Bane saying he will be the dinner speaker at Boomershoot this year.

Just an FYI, you don't have to participate in Boomershoot to attend the dinner. Boomershoot spectators, gun enthusiasts, and even Brady Campaign Staff (we don't discriminate) are welcome too. Both concealed and open carry are acceptable (which means we probably won't have Dennis Henigan or Paul Helmke visiting us).

Dinner details are here and if you want to sign up for dinner follow this link.

Update: The Brady Campaign (aka Handgun Control Inc.) received their invitation a few minutes ago:

Domain Name		sct.com ? (Commercial)
IP Address		65.242.56.# (HANDGUN CONTROL)
ISP		Verizon Business
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  District of Columbia City  :  Washington Lat/Long  :  38.9042, -77.032 (Map) Distance  :  2,071 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Feb 12 2010 12:44:16 pm
Last Page View		Feb 12 2010 12:46:20 pm
Visit Length		2 minutes 4 seconds
Page Views		4
Referring URL		http://blogsearch.go...Henigan%22&scoring=d
Search Engine		blogsearch.google.com
Search Words		"dennis henigan"
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...10DinnerSpeaker.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...elBaneOnBigotry.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Feb 12 2010 3:44:16 pm
Visit Number		708,302

Say Uncle linked to a small, light suppressor for a 300 WM.

People often say my 300 WM is extremely loud and I frequently wear both plugs and muffs when shooting it. I have sometimes thought of getting a suppressor for it but the extra weight at the end of the barrel didn't seem like a good idea. The threads holding the barrel to the receiver have enough stress on them with the heavy barrel I have. But this suppressor weighs just 13.9 ounces and is only nine inches long!

My first thought was "I have to have one!"

Then I looked at the price: MSRP $1800.

I'd have to save up my birthday money for something like the next 30 years to be able to afford that.

The Brady Campaign set up a straw man to knock down again yesterday:

While trying really hard to pose as a “victim of bigotry” with his best Rosa Parks impression (someone who faced genuine discrimination), Mr. Pierce forgot to blur the distinction between gun owners and gun carriers.  Whoops.

They are still pushing on the "immutable characteristics" defense against their bigotry. What I find interesting is that they consider religious affiliation "immutable". And of course they don't even mention interracial couples.

They make a big deal about "guns are things" and claim people with those things cannot be discriminated against.

They are just so incredible smart to have thought of that. They sure got me on that one. I never would have thought of a defense like that.[/sarcasm]

Let see how well that assertion plays out in general:

• “You can come in, but you have to leave your burqa and ḥijāb, outside.”
• “You can come in, but you have to leave your turban outside.”
• “You can come in, but you have to leave your sari outside.”
• “You can come in, but you have to leave your Star of David outside.”
• “You can come in, but you have to leave your cross necklace outside.”
• “You can come in, but you have to leave your NRA/SAF/CCRKBA/JPFO/Brady-Campaign shirt outside.”
• “You can come in, but you have to leave your Bible/Torah/Koran outside.”

Is that still not discrimination?

I can only think of two possible explanations for the Brady Campaign to make the claims they do:

1. They think the general population is so stupid as to believe that gun owners magically materialized a holstered gun on their belt or in their purse just before they walked into the store. And therefore they could just as easily not materialized it just prior to entering the store. That's not the way it works. Many of us put on a gun just like we put on our shoes, pants, and shirt.
2. They are so stupid or blinded by their own bigotry that they were unable to think it through.

[Mostly off topic--Does the Brady Campaign even have apparel for sale? I didn't find anything on their website and none of the Brady Campaign items I found on Cafepress would be endorsed by them. I suppose that makes sense. After all, who would willingly put a "I'm defenseless" sign on themselves while in public? And if I did that I would likely get charged with "hunting over bait" or some such thing.]

Update: Sebastian put up a very well written post on the topic an hour before I started mine.

I've been in situations in other countries working where I'm glad I didn't have a gun. I've not sure I would've controlled myself.

Rep. Pete Jorgensen
D-Jackson
February 12, 2010
Gun bill gains backing
[The real reason comes out. They don't trust themselves so they don't trust other people.

The question I have is if they don't think they can be trusted to have the power of a gun in their hands why should we trust them with the power of government in their hands?--Joe]

I'm a little bit at a loss for words on this. But I received the following email from someone tonight:

So, I'm looking at my upcoming birthday... My hope is to be done by as many men as I can handle. For me, this is probably between four and ten. And a lot of lube. I, of course, am clueless how to set this up.

I'm thinking it might be helpful to talk with another single female... Can you think of someone I could talk with?

Before you claim it's joke or prank by some teenage boy, let me assure you it is not. I know her (barely) but she did hint at something like this the last time I talked to her. I'm a little surprised but it does so happen I know someone that might be able to give her some advice. After her birthday party I'll send her another email and see how it went.

Last night (this morning actually) I left work sometime after 3:00 AM. I woke up at 7:00 and couldn't get back to sleep so I was back at work by 9:30 AM. I got back back to my hardened underground bunker about 8:20 tonight and nursing a troublesome build from work on a remote desktop screen. But I am down to nine bugs now. Down from 23 this time last week. And I have two more that I think are fixed if I could just get the tests to run so I could verify that.

I'm running on empty and unable to do another chapter in Henigan Lethal Logic book like I had planned to the last several days. Maybe this weekend I'll be able to spend some time on it.

I have one more post I just have to make tonight then it will be lights out.

Finally, it is important to understand that the Court's decision will not jeopardize other gun laws. The sheriffs' challenge to the Brady Law was based on the Tenth Amendment, not the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court's Second Amendment precedents remain clear and unequivocal: there is no personal right to be armed for private purposes unrelated to service in a well-organized state militia. The Brady Law was subject to Tenth Amendment challenge -- not the Second Amendment -- because it involved a federal mandate to state officials; such mandates are not found in other federal gun control laws. In no sense did the Court impose general limits on the power of Congress to enact strong gun laws.

Sarah Brady
Jun 27, 1997
SARAH BRADY STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO U.S. SUPREME COURT DECISION ON THE BRADY LAW
[Times have changed. We have a successful Second Amendment challenge under our belt with another one due this spring. And we have another Tenth Amendment Challenge working it's way through the courts.

Mrs. Brady is going to see a lot more changes in the next couple of years as the effects of Heller and McDonald make ripple across the country. None of them will make her happy.

Although 1994 was probably the high-water mark for the Brady Campaign they did have a few minor victories after that with things like President Clinton's executive order mandating the provision of written warnings with each handgun sale. Since then they have been been essentially stopped on every major front and have been pushed back on numerous others. They things they now count as victories are merely a successful defense against our attempts to liberate those they have oppressed.

And a great deal of that push back has happened because of the Brady Organization. I bought my first guns, a SKS rifle and a Ruger P-89 (with 15 round magazines), and started becoming active in the gun rights movement in early 1994 because of the anticipated infringement being advocated by them. I know several other people with similar stories. In 1994 it was Sarah Brady who took the title of the best gun salesman ever. That record stood until Obama claimed the record last year.

It's ironic that the anti-gun people frequently claim the NRA is only interested in the profits of the gun manufactures and dealers but it's the success of the anti-gun people who do the most for those businesses.

And notice how it only works in one direction? If the NRA, SAF, CCRKBA, GOA, JPFO, etc. start pushing legislation and winning people don't start selling their guns or turning them in to be recycled. This effect has to be really discouraging for them.

Given the present data the logical thing for them to do is blindingly obvious. If they really want "fewer guns on the streets" they should completely disband their organizations and take vows of silence. But data and logic isn't their most distinguishing attribute and you should not expect such action from them anytime soon.--Joe]

This sort of thing appears with some regularity on the forums, product reviews, etc., so I can only assume there is a significant number of people who don't quite understand how a shot group on a target is measured.  What I recently read on an ammo review is that, since the bullet is x diameter, your group size cannot be less than x.

That's not how it works. (Boomershooters bear with me, I'm pretty sure you all know this)  For the size of your group on the target, you're measuring the center-to-center distance between hits.  If your holes were clean enough to allow such precise measurements, it is in theory possible to have half-inch diameter bullets and a group size of a hundredth of an inch or less.  You could just as well, theoretically, have an eighteen inch Navy ship's gun that shoots a group of 1" (all rounds through the same hole, to within one inch of center).  Actually getting a gun and several projectiles to do that is of course another matter, but it wouldn't violate the simple theory of taking a distance measurement on your target.

This isn't rocket science.  Well, maybe some aspects of shooting are in fact rocket science, but measuring the distance between centers of a few holes isn't complicated, and has nothing to do with the diameter of the holes.  Any carpenter, machinist or cabinet maker, etc. knows this, and it is often learned by farm mechanics in early childhood.

The "defense walks" that Ohio's gun supporters have staged the past few weekends offer the best proof yet that Ohio's current law banning the carrying of concealed guns works ("Protesters openly carry guns in bid to carry concealed ones,'' Dispatch article, Oct. 13).

Gun proponents are finding that when they strap on their handguns and parade around town, no one bothers them. Isn't that the point of carrying a loaded handgun openly? To prevent others from bothering you? The gun lobby's hope is that these public handgun displays will persuade the General Assembly to pass the stalled bill allowing the concealed carry of handguns.

Supporters of a concealed-carry law claim that their rights to self-protection are compromised by the ban on carrying a hidden gun. But what could be more of a deterrent to violent crime than the sight of a person carrying a gun openly? In case of attack by a violent criminal, an openly carried gun is far more accessible than one that is stuffed in a pocket or purse.

Statements by the gun lobby that carrying openly is uncomfortable or socially unacceptable won't wash. If those in the pro-gun camp genuinely are concerned for their safety, they should be willing to deal with a little disapproval from their fellow citizens.

Any prudent person carrying a loaded handgun should be a little uncomfortable. It represents a risk of instant injury or death. Carrying it concealed doesn't remove that risk; it just hides it from everyone else, which isn't fair to law-abiding citizens who may not want to expose themselves or their children to the potential deadliness of loaded guns. When a gun is carried openly, those around the carrier at least have the choice to remove themselves from the vicinity of the gun. Concealed guns take away that choice.

I hope the gun walks will make concealed-carry proponents more comfortable with their guns, calm their fears of their fellow citizens and finally convince them that they already have a legal way to protect themselves.

Lori A. O'Neill
October 22, 2003
President
Greater Cleveland chapter
Million Mom March
Chagrin Falls
WALKS SHOW CONCEALED CARRY IS UNNEEDED
From the comments here.
[Remember that the MMM is part of the Brady Campaign (http://millionmommarch.com/ takes you to the Brady site) who is vehemently opposed to open carry.

As Jeff in the comments said, "What short memories....here in Ohio first they were for it, now they are against it..."

But O'Neill is not the current contact person for Ohio Chapter of the MMM/Brady Campaign so I suppose it is possible she has been fired or replaced for heresy or some such thing.--Joe]

In case anyone has forgotten;

That in response to this story.

I'm listening to Down Range Radio where Michael Bane talks about anti-gun bigotry. He gives me a fair amount of credit for bringing the topic up and agrees with me. This blog is listed as a reference link.

He also talks a little bit about Boomershoot.

Thank you Michael.

The open display of firearms in public places is inherently threatening and intimidating, and poses risks to those nearby, to law enforcement and to the community. For example, when open carry has occurred in retail stores, other customers quickly become alarmed and the police often are called to the scene, creating a volatile and potentially dangerous situation. 

Brady Campaign
February 2010
Gun Lobby Backed Efforts Open Carry Guns
Emphasis in the original.
[It is true there are risk with open carry. But it is also true there are benefits. The Brady Campaign, like the bigots they are, refuse to acknowledge the benefits.

It is not true the open display of firearms in public places is inherently threatening and intimidating. Is a police officer at Starbucks and having a cup of coffee and chatting with the store manager inherently threatening and intimidating? Of course not. What the Brady Campaign finds inherently threatening and intimidating is private citizens possessing firearms. They are vehemently opposed to people exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. They have not been able to get the legislatures to enact laws infringing the 2^nd Amendment so now they are attempting to get businesses to prohibit the exercise of these rights. This is no different than having interracial marriage ban laws struck down or fail to pass such laws in the legislature then starting a campaign advocating restaurants refuse to serve such couples.

As I have pointed out before the response to gun ownership and the carrying of firearms in public is a cultural issue. One 911 dispatcher I know in the Seattle area says they frequently get "man with a gun" calls. But unless the caller can articulate a reasonable cause for alarm they caller is politely told to take a chill pill. The Brady Campaign wishes to inflame public opinion and propagate a culture of distrust and alarm over the exercise of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. Yes, that culture exists in parts of the U.S. today but just as with interracial marriage laws of the past that doesn't mean the culture is appropriate or it should be encouraged.

It is time for all Americans to start judging people by the content of the character rather than the color of their skin or the carrying of a self defense tool.

Yeah, I think it's going to be Brady Campaign Week here all week.--Joe]

As others have noted Michael Bane has announced he and his film crew will be attending Boomershoot 2010. I've known about it since mid-October when he sent me an email that said, in part:

I want to give you a heads up...I would like to film Boomershoot 2010, if it works for you. It would either be for my flagship, SHOOTING GALLERY, or for a new show I have in the works under the working title of AMERICA SHOOTS! You'd rather have it be AMERICA SHOOTS! because it will be hosted by the hysterically funny an spectacularly beautiful Katie Rowe, a professional stuntwoman and obsessive shooter.

Again, if it works for you, I'd like to put together some live coverage on DOWN RANGE (www.downrange.tv).

I held back on announcing it because I wanted to the plans to be a little more firm.

I don't know his exact schedule yet but I'm hoping he will cover the target making on Saturday too.

I've had an 1858 Remington New Model Army revolver for a while, but was never able to get decent accuracy from it.  Maybe it was the wrong grip fit for my hands.  Maybe it was the extra weight and maybe it was the very long creep in the trigger.  Don't know, but it had been sitting for a long time, such that the grease was getting stiff, so I took it out alone for some exercise yesterday.

I'd been experimenting with bird shot loads in handguns because I'm interested in handgun trap shooting.  Turns out the rifling pretty well renders that a losing proposition (I could get a spare barrel for the 1851 Colt repro, and ream out the rifling. we'll see).  Anyway, I ended up with a selection of fiber wads and cards for the .44 Remington, and since my current charge of 28 grains 3F Goex takes up little room in the chambers, and since everyone says the projectile should be close to the forcing cone for best accuracy, I added a quarter inch fiber wad on top of the powder, with a felt wad on top of that.

Now the revolver shoots OK.  Don't know if it was the extra spacing, or that I'd been handling the gun a lot more, but I was able to match my long standing 25 yard grouping (previously held by the 1851 Colt) several times that day, with this gun.  It may not be anything to brag about, but it's better than I've done with any automatic so far.  That's 25 yards, standing, two hands, unsupported.  I'm sure there are people who can do a whole lot better, but as the saying goes, "This is my group. There are many like it, but this one is mine."

That's the way it went several times-- four shots in a decent group, with one flier.  It didn't matter whether the group was fired from one cylinder, the other cylinder, or a combination of the two.  I shot a smaller group that day, but this one gives me hope that those four in the middle better represent the gun's potential.

There was zero wind that day, such that when I was all done, there was a layer of white smoke that covered the whole 5 to 7 acre range.  Cool.  It also means that you have to learn to aim through a cloud of smoke.

Several shooter have written about this other phenomenon; I found myself contentedly driving under the speed limit on the way home, which is something I practically never do.  I'm usually irritated by people who drive under the limit, the lot of serene bastards.  It seems that shooting can have a pronounced relaxing effect that can last for several hours after the fact.

Still trying to persuade Starbucks into banning people exercising the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign made a blog post on the topic today (the same post is here as well). As is usual he choses his words carefully when he says things like:

Studies show that the more guns there are, the more gun violence there is in that location. In addition, 80 percent of those who don’t own guns say they would feel less safe if more people in their community acquired guns; only eight percent would feel safer. Even among gun owners, roughly equal proportions would feel less safe if more people had guns versus those who would feel more safe.

There are three things to make note of here.

1. He says "the more gun violence there is".
2. The study he cites was published in 2001.
3. The emphasis on feelings.

As is usual Brady supporters seem to only concern themselves with criminal violence rates if a gun was involved. Total criminal violence rates are used by gun rights supporters because we care about people that are injured by criminals no matter the method. When using total crime rates even Brady Campaign staff acknowledge, at best, it is difficult to show more guns means more crime.

In regards to the second item that study is old. When the CDC did their study of dozens of papers in 2002, one year after the study cited by Helmke was published, they concluded, "The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes." Essentially the same conclusion as Helmke's co-worker acknowledges.

By choosing his words carefully Helmke misleads his readers in an attempt to further his agenda to justify his abnormal fear of gun owners lawfully exercising their rights.

If feelings were adequate reasons to exclude people exercising their rights from coffee shops and restaurants we would still have a multitude of Jim Crow laws on the books.

It is clear he doesn't acknowledge or respect those rights. From that same post notice that he says:

Welcome to the “open carry” movement, an effort by “gun rights” extremists to foist their interpretation of the Second Amendment on the rest of us by openly carrying handguns in public places.  While virtually all states have at least some minimal restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons, few states do anything to regulate the “open carry” of firearms.

Did you notice that he puts "gun rights" are in quotes? Apparently in their minds they are still fighting the battle they lost with the Heller decision.

He acknowledges these people are not breaking any laws but that's not good enough for him. I suspect he knows the open carry of firearms was clearly recognized as a fundamental right at the time of the writing of our Bill of Rights. Concealed carry was considered suspect and over time became banned in many locales. But the open carry of weapons, as demonstrated by the near universal lack of laws against it, has always been recognized as a fundamental right. I believe the Brady's are desperate to slow down and/or kill the open carry movement because they know they will loose that battle in the courts. And ultimately open carry will normalize the right to keep and bear arms.

As I said earlier today, respect isn't really in their vocabulary when discussing the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. And the Brady's will use half truths and any other deception needed in their futile attempt to remain relevant in a world where their tactics no longer work. It's time for Helmke and friends to acknowledge the facts and get some counseling for their inappropriate feelings. The world has changed and in todays world they are just as backward as George Wallace in 1970 and just as despicable in their tactics as when Wallace ran ads that showing a white girl surrounded by seven black boys, with the slogan "Wake Up Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama".

There have been some questions as to the origins of the anti-gun people as bigots meme. There have been occasions when I have been given credit for starting it. While I may be the most outspoken blogger of this I cannot claim credit for being the first to make this observation.

The Brady Campaign people seem to think it was the NRA:

In fact, the notion of “bigotry” is perhaps the pillar upon which the National Rifle Association itself has built its whole bogus empire.

This is particularily amusing since they link to the Ammoland website while saying "National Rifle Association". Say Uncle pokes fun at them for this better than I can.

In the comments MikeB302000 also suspects the NRA is behind it.

A Bing search of the NRA and NRA-ILA websites only shows one instance of the term bigot being used (a Google search resulting in zero hits). This was on January 18, 2008.

My somewhat limited research shows that it goes back as far as 1994 with the following speech by Don Kates in Sacramento:

From: MWUEST@alhrg.wpafb.af.mil (System Manager Wuest)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Speech by Don Kates
Date: 3 Aug 1994 10:10:00 -0500

(Text of a speech by Don B. Kates, renouned criminoligist at the Sacramento rally, 2 JUL 1994 MEW).

In this speech I am going to set out unfamiliar concepts and facts. I shall explain and defend the concepts and I entreat anyone who wants citations for the facts to ask for them.

BIGOTRY

The first of my unfamiliar concepts is that the gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry and the effort of an influence group to force its morality on everyone by having it adopted as state and federal law. To see this it is necessary only to review some unfamiliar facts: the average gun owner is better educated and has a better job than non-owners; attitude surveys find gun owners neither racist nor sexist; liberals are only somewhat less likely than others to own firearms; liberals who do are no less willing to use them to defend their families; the only violence gun owners endorse is willingness to come to the aid of crime victims. Gun owners do not approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters, etc. Also, good Samaritans who actually come to the aid of crime victims are twice as likely to be gun owners as the general populace.

Though these facts have been uniformly established by numerous sociological studies, they will doubtless surprise you almost as much as they would the anti-gun movement and the media. After all the former (which is actually a gun BAN movement), with the enthusiastic aid of the media, have succeeded in stereotyping gun owners as violence-oriented yahoos -- educationally, intellectually and morally retarded.

There is a word for people who inaccurately, unjustly ascribe negative characteristics to a whole group of others they dislike: that word is BIGOT.

Let me approach the matter from another direction. A couple of years ago right here in Sacramento some nuts who happened to be of some kind of Asian extraction -- I don't recall which and, of course it doesn't matter -- took a bunch of hostages in the course of a robbery and ended up shooting them. Now if I were to attribute that conduct to Asians as a group I would rightly be thought a bigot. But denouncing "gun owners" as a group and attributing such crimes to that group is commonly thought entirely appropriate.

Suppose I were to call gay leaders who oppose banning gay bath houses callous, selfish collaborators in the spreading of AIDS. The same public health leaders who support banning bath houses would nevertheless denounce such bigoted language. Yet such vituperation is commonly aimed at gun owners and gun leaders for opposing gun bans without anyone (except perhaps the targets) seeing anything wrong or even exceptional about it.

ORDINARY GUN OWNER AS MURDERER

Of course the difference is that, as we all know, owning a gun the ordinary average person puts family and friends at risk; as the Coalition Against Gun Violence puts it, most murders "are committed by law-abiding citizens who might have stayed law-abiding if they had not possessed firearms." Except that, as a criminologist I know no such thing. Criminological studies uniformly find that murderers are NOT ordinary citizens, but extreme aberrants with life records of serious crime. The typical murderer has a prior adult criminal history of six years involving at least four documented major felonies -- plus uncounted juvenile felonies. He is also a substance abuser with a history of car and/or gun accidents. Indeed, the life histories of those who cause fatal car and gun accidents resemble the life histories of murderers: in each case they tend to be young MALES with records of felony, violence against those around them, substance abuse and dangerous accidents.

In short, quoting a recent review in the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY: "fewer than 1% of all guns, and fewer than 2% even of handguns will ever be used in a violent crime" and "more people are killed in swimming pool accidents than firearms accidents." In short, blaming all gun owners for the crimes and irresponsibility of a tiny, highly aberrant minority is bigotry. In addition to being criminologically false, it is a false issue, a diversion from the true basis of anti-gun sentiment.

At this point I have to draw a fundamental distinction which is, once again, unfamiliar. That is the distinction between anti-gun and pro-control. CONTROL implies what the great majority of Americans, including most gun owners, believe: that law abiding, responsible people have a right to possess arms to defend their families, but that society has a right to reasonably control arms -- and the issue is working out an accommodation between these two things.

But the so-called gun CONTROL movement is really a gun BAN movement dominated totally by people I call anti-gun. Anti-gunners see no objective need for accommodation because they do not see self-defense as a legitimate desire. Their ultimate objective is first the banning and confiscation of all handguns and then of all guns. Given the state of public opinion there is a subjective, or current, need to soft-pedal this for the present. Thus when they say that the Brady Bill and banning so-called assault rifles (i.e. rifles and shotguns designed primarily for self-defense) are "just the first steps", they go on to say, as Sarah Brady now does, "the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes", and to advocate, as Handgun Control, Inc. now does, a nationwide permit requirement to own a gun under which only those desiring guns for sport qualify -- those desiring a gun for self-defense need not apply.

To understand the anti-gun view we must review the origin of the earliest anti-gun group. Founded as NCBH, it now calls itself the Coalition Against Gun Violence. It was and remains an outgrowth of the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church seeking to impose on American society the Board's moral position which is that armed self-defense is immoral. The Board actually teaches that it is a woman's Christian duty to submit to rape rather than do anything to imperil her rapists' lives. Let me give you the citation for that: It is an article entitled "Is the Robber My Brother" (and, no, robbery may not be resisted either) by the editor of the Board's magazine ENGAGE/SOCIAL ACTION an article which appeared first there and then in a pamphlet available from the Board under the title HANDGUNS IN THE UNITED STATES.

Another member organization of the Coalition Against Gun Violence, the Presbyterian Church, USA advocates, federal banning and confiscation of handguns on the express ground that they are designed for self-defense. The Church's representatives emphasize that its General Assembly "has resolved, in the context of gun control, that it is against the killing of anyone, anywhere FOR ANY REASON." Among other places you will find that testimony is v. I at p. 127 of the Hearings of the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime 1986.

This epitomizes the views and goals of the anti-gun movement, including its non-religious supporters. The distinguished cultural historian Garry Wills reviles "gun fetishists", "gun nuts" as "anti-citizens", "traitors, enemies of their own patriae", who are arming "against their own neighbors." "The need that some homeowners and shopkeepers believe they have for weapons to defend themselves" represents "the worst instincts in the human character" according to the WASHINGTON POST. According to Ramsey Clark, defensive firearms ownership is barbarism, "anarchy, not order under law."

I have already quoted Sarah Brady's view that "the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes" and Handgun Control's proposal for a national licensing requirement to exclude anyone who wants a gun for self-defense. An additional "step" is to have Congress pass the law HCI and the Coalition got D.C. to enact: no one may buy any kind of handgun and, while long guns are allowed, they too must be kept unloaded and disassembled so that they may never be used for self-defense. The ultimate goal, once again, is that expressed by Harvard public health professor Deborah Prothrow-Stith: she frankly avows that she "hates guns and sees no reason why anyone should ever own one."

In the few minutes which remain to me I want to discuss what is to be about done all this. One reason gun owners are in such a terrible fix is that they are politically unsophisticated. That is implicit in the fact that they are the targets of a vast campaign of bigotry. Gun owners are not politicians. They are just ordinary people wanting to go about their business. They have been ambushed and are being subjected to a systematic campaign of hatred and lies by an elite cadre of bigots who largely control the media and have disproportionate influence throughout our society. Naturally all too many gun owners react in mindless outrage. They leap to the conclusion that disarmament of the American public is being promoted by "liberals" -- it used to be "communists" -- for some sinister, ulterior reason involving making people helpless against tyranny. NONSENSE. Insofar as liberals support that -- and I must note so do many conservatives -- it is just out of hypocritical bigotry. They cannot see this because they view themselves as fighters against bigotry and so imagine that they are themselves incapable of it and of attempting to impose their morality on others through law.

And I want to briefly list other gun owner errors: First are the people who play into the media's hands by wearing camos when they make presentations against anti-gun proposals. Similar are the gun owners who take pleasure in extreme and intemperate statements -- at terrible cost to the cause in general. And then there are liars and buffoons like Linda Thompson and her "armed march on Washington." Demented is the best one can one say about an "armed march on Washington."

A particular pathology of gun owners is the idea that the bigotry will all go away if some particular lawsuit is brought or a strident manifesto screamed out. The simple fact is that the bigots are not going to go away. Gun owners are going to have to settle in to politics for the foreseeable future, smarten up, learn how to make politically sensible statements.

Most important, gun owners must learn the necessity and art of horse trading. By that I do NOT mean giving important things away in the absurd hope that it will satisfy the bigots and they will go away and leave us alone. I repeat, they will not go away regardless of what we do! I am not talking about compromises of principle. I am talking about things about which reasonable people can agree or disagree. For instance, raise the fee for a concealed carry license to $150.00 and the duration of the license to five years. Require that anyone who wants such a license show that they have the same legal knowledge and competence about shooting as a police officer -- but issue licenses as in Oregon and Florida to every responsible law abiding applicant.

The fact is that there are rational, non-bigoted people in the middle who can be compromised with. They cannot be convinced by the yahoo approach of "just say no to gun control." But, even as they are open to new control approaches and initiatives, they are also willing to recognize that old approaches may be unsound, or have unsound aspects, which need to be abandoned. We are in the pickle we are now in because the "just say no" attitude has allowed the bigots to paint us as mindless obstructionists who are blind to compassion and common sense. These people in the middle are open to arguments that many control proposals don't make sense in terms of crime control and to arguments based on the right and need to defend of self and property. The future of gun ownership will depend on whether we are willing and able to reach out to these middle people and convince them that the misnamed gun control movement is under the control of moralistic bigots.

-end-

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What in the world is the reasoning behind this?

Authorities lifted curfew and alcohol restrictions in King on Sunday, but said a state of emergency declaration remained in effect until Monday.

Authorities said the state of emergency declaration would continue until Monday 9 a.m., barring any unforeseen circumstances or severe changes.

Effective Sunday afternoon, alcohol restrictions and a curfew were lifted. All other remaining restrictions would continue until Monday, said Paula May, King police chief.

Other restrictions included a ban on the sale or purchase of any type of firearm, ammunition, explosive or any possession of such items off a person's own premises.

...

The state of emergency was declared Friday due to severe weather.

Emphasis is mine.

Via email from Rob.

We had another cancellation for Boomershoot 2010 yesterday.

I sent email to all the existing entries informing them they could swap their current position for the one opening up.

On Tuesday at 6:00 PM PST I will make the empty position available for the first person to sign up at http://entry.boomershoot.org/.

I don't know for certain which position will be open. The canceled position was #32 but if someone wants to swap that could change.

Some hints on signing up:

• Sometime several minutes before 6:00 PM on Tuesday go to the web page and put in your name, phone number and other entry details.
• Click on the button labeled "Update Price"-this sets the cookies in your browser so you don't have to reenter that information when you come back to the page or refresh it.
• A 6:00 PM go to the page and find the available position (I'll send out another email when I know for certain).
• Refresh the page repeatedly until the position button labeled "Position 32" or some such thing is not grayed out.
• Hit that button as soon as you can.

Last time I did this the first position to open up was snatched in 32 seconds. I don't expect it will take much, if any, longer this time.

I hope it doesn't reduce the attraction of Boomershoot but it was the lesbian couple that canceled due to one of them starting a new job and being unable to take time off so soon.

Update: Yes, I was trying to make a joke about the lesiban couple.

Also, position 32 has been take but position 74 is now available for swap.

L.A. Police Chief designate Charlie Beck presented the James S. Brady Law Enforcement Award to the Police Department's Gun Unit.  The Gun Unit's achievements are outstanding.  Through careful monitoring, it has kept the number of legal firearms dealers in L.A. at 17 for a population of 4,000,000 and has restricted the number of CCW permits to 23!

Ellen Boneparth
President, California Brady Chapters
November 10, 2009
California Chapters Celebrate
[If this is how the Brady people go about "respecting the Supreme Court’s reading of the Second Amendment" I would like to translate that into First Amendment language and see how it reads:

... The Jew Unit's achievements are outstanding. Through careful monitoring, it has kept the number of legal synagogues in L.A. at 17 for a population of 4,000,000 and has restricted the number of Rabbi permits to 23!

Yeah, it is just as I thought. Respect isn't really in their vocabulary when discussing the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.--Joe]

The Brady Campaign has now directly engaged us on the bigotry meme I started pushing several years ago.

Sebastian has addressed most of their points but I would like to pile on as well.

They say:

The truth, of course, is that guns and gun carrying are obviously not immutable characteristics of people, and that the whole cultural framework around the issue of gun violence prevention is a sham. (Brady Center Vice-President Dennis Henigan has exposed this most recently here and here.)

"Immutable characteristics" is a straw man argument I addressed in an update to the post that got their attention as follows:

By that logic banning interracial couples, Catholics or Muslims from Starbucks or Woolworths wouldn't be bigotry either. I've got news for the Brady Campaign Staff--they're wrong and I think they know it.

As long as they held on to the falsehood that the 2nd Amendment did not protect an individual right they might have made a thin case for that. But as soon as the right to keep and bear arms was on the same level as the freedom of association and freedom of religion they lost that crutch. Via D.C. v. Heller we have, and the Brady Campaign acknowledges, a specific, constitutionally protected, right to keep and bear arms. With that decision they became a gentler version of the KKK. No white sheets or burning crosses in our yards but they still attempt to segregate us and ban us from parks, buildings, and businesses. The only difference between them and the KKK is the KKK was sometimes willing to take the law into their own hands. The Brady Campaign attempts to get the government, Amtrack, and Starbucks to do the yucky work of infringing on the rights of others for them. They are now on a slippery slope into obscurity and revulsion and they are grasping at straws with their denial of bigotry.

And their advocacy for public bans of us exercising that right is more than just bigotry. It is just a hairs breadth away from a felony:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or

If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured—

They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

I addressed the claim that the cultural framework is a sham here using a paper published in the Journal of Criminal Justice. In that same post I pointed out that Dennis Henigan of the Brady Campaign admits in his book that causation between higher rates of gun ownership and crime are, at best, "difficult to show". I also pointed out they no longer insist the 2^nd Amendment is not an individual right. 

So if it isn't bigotry just what does the Brady Campaign claim as a basis for their continued insistence that the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms be infringed? From their post they claim, "It has everything to do with public safety, public health and common sense."

Ahh... I see.

But they already admitted that public safety and health correlating negatively with gun ownership rates are at best "difficult to show". So all we have left is "common sense".

So tell me--Is that the same "common sense" used by whites that didn't want their children in the same swimming pool with black children unless it was cleaned afterward? Or maybe the same "common sense" used by some to insist their white daughters not be near black men or enter into interracial marriages. No. I'm sure that's not it--that would be bigotry. How about the "common sense" and documentary films that claim Jews are the vermin of the human race? Oh, that would be bigotry too? Then just what is this "common sense" justification for infringing upon this right and how does it differ from these obvious examples of bigotry?

Perhaps they haven't seen the definition of "bigot" recently. Here is the Merriam-Webster definition: "a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices".

I have a challenge for Brady Campaign supporters--What evidence would it take for you to change your mind in regards to gun ownership and the public carry of firearms? Tell me and I'll give serious consideration to dropping the bigotry meme.

Wow! The things daughter Xenia does and posts about.

As I have reported before some people think other people's children are nice but we have interesting children.

For as long as I have been involved in the gun rights movement (over 15 years now) I have wondered "Why do people support gun control?" I figured there were most likely two things working in combination for most people. 1) A disregard for the Bill of Rights and 2) A belief that gun control would decrease violent crime.

That was understandable to me. One can make case for lack of due process and torture of suspects if you believe they have knowledge of a nuclear bomb about to detonate in a major population center. Bill of Rights be damned! Do whatever is necessary to save millions of lives!

It may not work and some people might even say it's not the right thing to do but I see a strong argument being possible. The Constitution is not a suicide pact argument is obviously defensible but it depends on the premise that the adherence to the constitution is tantamount to suicide in the given situation. I concluded that the anti-gun people either had data or believed data existed which demonstrated gun control made for a safer society and hence they were willing to ignore the constitutional issues. Gun control in the U.K. was frequently brought up as an example of the success of those policy decisions. As data from other countries brought in and then crime in the U.K. increased faster as guns were even more tightly restricted it became blindingly clear no reasonable person could believe gun control made society safer.

But the I more argued with anti-gun people and in particular listened to and read the writings of their leaders I realized most of them knew gun control didn't make society safer. This perplexed me a great deal and I asked Alan Gottlieb (founder of the Second Amendment Foundation) "What is the real reason they advocate more gun control?" Aside from the jokes it did seem to come down to a cultural issue as Gottlieb suggested. Although this raised other questions such as "Why don't these people respect the cultural of other people and just leave us alone?" it was the best answer I could find.

As I had more and more interaction with the anti-gun people over the years it became more and more clear people stuck with their anti-gun beliefs no matter how much data they had. Some even flat out told me it just boiled down to them not wanting to be around people with guns so they supported using the force of government to rid them of their discomfort. Mike Arst has more insight into this having been on the anti-gun side of the political aisle for many years before seeing the error of his ways.

Yet we have people like Dennis A. Henigan from the Brady Center saying it's not a culture issue (also here). For a while I wondered it was important to them. I think I understand now. As Mike Arst so eloquently explained in a different set of emails liberals are the enlightened, tolerant and know best what is for society. Cultural differences, in liberal circles, are to celebrated and embraced. Hence, if it is about a cultural difference then, as a liberal, they feel bound to respect different cultures. Since they are opposed to gun rights it cannot be a culture difference. But yet they do little more than try to prove their case via vigorous assertion. They don't answer Just One Question and in fact publicly acknowledge that any causation between gun availability and crime is difficult to prove. And in their recent brief in McDonald v. City of Chicago they have stopped insisting the 2^nd Amendment does not apply to individuals. They acknowledge the individual right to keep and bear arms yet they insist on restricting this right without giving justification beyond, "It has everything to do with public safety, public health and common sense." Ignoring the contradictions between their claims of public safety and health with Henigan own admission that any public safety benefits are so small that they are difficult to prove we are left with "common sense" as their reason for insisting on restrictions on firearms and their owners. "Common sense?" To me "common sense" means having a reason for spending vast amounts of time and money fighting for the elimination of a specific, enumerated, constitutionally protected right.

It was with this background that I was thrilled to see a paper in the Journal of Criminal Justice with the title "Why do people support gun control?: Alternative explanations of support for handgun bans". Wow! This is something I have to read.

Guess what they said? After all the review of previous studies, proposed hypothesizes, study methodology, and the multivariate statistics they arrive at this conclusion (page 503):

Support for gun control derives partly from a belief that gun control is an effective method for reducing violence, but this explanation has only limited power to account for positions on the issue. Many people favor control measures even though they think they will not reduce crime, while others oppose controls despite their beliefs that they will reduce crime. Further, support for gun control does not generally derive from personal experience with crime—robbery and burglary victims are no more likely than non-victims to favor banning handguns, and the experience of being an assault victim reduces support for this policy. The generally null results for victimization variables comport with past research that indicates that fear of crime and exposure to higher crime rates do not, on net, motivate support for gun control (Kleck, 1996). Thus, there is no sound foundation for expecting increased support for bans if gun crime goes up, nor for expecting declines in support if crime goes down. Consistent with this view, levels of support for gun control have remained generally stable in recent decades despite huge fluctuations in gun crime rates (Kleck, 1997, pp. 334-336; Smith, 2000).

Long-term stability in the phenomenon to be explained favors explanations that stress relatively stable causes. While crime rates fluctuate sharply over short periods of time, culture changes only gradually. Cultural cleavages among Americans remain fairly stable over periods of a decade or two; however, much the perceived need for crime-reducing strategies may change. Consequently, positions on gun control continue to be driven by the same cultural conflicts and antipathies that have divided the nation for decades. Those who have faith that police can protect them from criminals support gun control; conversely, those who believe that they cannot rely on the police put their faith in the gun, and oppose the stronger forms of gun control that might disarm them. Further, those who despise the “gun culture” as violent, racist, and backward support handgun bans, while those who reject such stereotypes oppose them. The stability of gun control views may also be due to the fact that most Americans already support moderate controls, so shifting opinion in a pro-control direction requires changing the views of a relatively small group.

These findings have a number of possible implications for the political struggle over gun control policy. First, they suggest that it is difficult to alter levels of support for gun control because support or opposition is partly grounded in relatively inflexible cultural traits. Changes in the level of popular support are more likely to result from relatively glacial, perhaps even intergenerational, cultural shifts. Second, even if solid evidence of the violence-reducing effectiveness of gun control were to be developed, and (perhaps less plausibly) large numbers of Americans were persuaded by the evidence, it is likely to have at best only modest effects on the level of support for these policies. Third, increases in crime are not likely to boost support for strict gun control, because the main effect of such increases is that they raise the number of crime victims who believe they must rely on their own resources for protection against criminals, a view that encourages gun ownership, and thereby reduces support for stricter forms of gun control.

I know I have said, "I guess we don't need to understand them. We just need to defeat them." but knowing the above does make a difference. People do support gun control because of cultural issues. They do support gun control even though they don't believe it will reduce crime. There are people who despise the gun culture and view them as violent racist, and backward. And Henigan is wrong. This study proves it.

What this means to me is that coming out of the closet, taking non-shooting friends to the range, and showing that gun culture is for normal people and not their stereotype of red-necked, knuckle dragging Neanderthals is essential for the long term survival of the right to keep and bear arms. And in the short term we must make it legal for people to come out of the closet and take their rightful place in society. The terrible oppression of gun owners in places like Chicago and New Jersey has to stop and that is where the courts will have to play a role. Just like the forced desegregation of public facilities in the south we must invest the time, money, and effort to give these people the opportunity to take part in the freedom and respect as normal human beings. It is taken for granted by many gun owners but that respect is denied to millions in this country by the cultural elites who, in the words of Mike Arst who once belonged in their ranks, "... tended to think of 'gun nuts' as drooling, knuckle-dragging morons. Cavemen. Uneducated. Beer-drinking slobs who could barely read and who probably beat up their wives a lot. Maybe they were even all closet Nazis, eh?"

This looks interesting:

Many scholars have suggested that Americans' positions on gun control are the product of culture conflicts. This assertion has been largely based on associations of gun control opinion with membership in social groups believed to be hostile, or favorable, towards gun ownership, rather than with direct measures of the cultural traits thought to mediate the effects of group membership on gun control opinion. Data from a 2005 national telephone survey were analyzed to test competing theories of why people support handgun bans. Instrumental explanations, which stress belief in a policy's likely effectiveness, accounted for less than 25 percent of the variation in support. The results supported the culture conflict perspective. Those who endorsed negative stereotypes about gun owners, and who did not believe in the need to defend their own homes against crime (versus relying on the police) were more likely to support handgun bans.

It's in the Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 37, Issue 5, September-October 2009, Pages 496-504.

I find it particularily intriguing that "Those who endorsed negative stereotypes about gun owners" are more likely to support handgun bans. That sounds like bigotry to me.

I could get it online for $20.00 or I could go to the library. I'm not sure which I should do. I have other things to do this morning. I'll decide this afternoon sometime.

Update: I have two copies sent via email now. Thank you! You can stop emailing them to me now. I've read the article and will make a post on it later today. Busy with something at work right now...

SB 6396, the so-called "assault weapon" ban bill, died in the Senate Judiciary Committee at the policy committee cut-off. Knowing he didn't have the votes to pass it out of committee, he didn't even bring it up for a vote. While in Olympia earlier this week, one Senator showed me two 4" thick binders full of e-mails opposing SB 6396. Several others mentioned similar responses. Along with the overwhelming turn-out for the public hearing last week, it's input like this that demonstrates the strength of the gun lobby in influencing the legislative process. To paraphrase the bumper sticker, we're ALL the gun lobby!

Joe Waldron
February 6, 2010
From GOAL (Washington State Gun Owners Action League) Post 2010-5
[This is great news. And this also backs up what Chrix Cox says.--Joe]

In the past I have had the impression that Sebastian has not wholly bought into my advocacy of portraying anti-gun people as bigots. But this post by him has him landing on the topic with both feet and getting into a word fight with the Brady Campaign.

I can understand people being of the opinion that pushing the bigotry meme is not productive. But I don't think any rational person can defend the claim that the following post by Mark Morford is anything other than the words of a bigot:

Hello and welcome to our store! Please, feel free to look around, make yourself comfortable, enjoy our fine offerings and, oh yes, by the way? Please, no murdering.

Also, no raping, gang-banging, popping off, stabbing, mauling, stealing stuff, or walking around in a confrontational macho huff, ready at a moment's notice to harass any of our normal patrons with a snarl and a vague threat of violence because you feel it is your God-given right, given how you are a card-carrying member of a pro-gun "Open Carry" sect that likes to strap unloaded handguns to your Wranglers, walk around in public places and freak people out. Thank you so much!

I'm sorry, I see you are still wearing your little weapon and strutting about like you are the rather doughy, bad-skinned king of the sand castle. Perhaps we were not clear? Shall we try it again?

Clearly, you are not a police officer. Therefore, the management, our employees and pretty much everyone within a 100-mile radius would very much appreciate it if you would put away that ego-fluffing man-toy that is designed solely to kill other living creatures and induce fear and ignorance as it regresses every hesitant advancement in the human soul back to caveman grunting lunkishness. Thank you again!

Oh, please do not misunderstand! We are all terribly impressed. It is so very patriotic of you to show off your little popper! Are you in a gang? Are you a drug dealer? Are you going to shoot some scary terrorists, Mr. pallid paranoid Constitution-misquoting videogame-addicted guy? Protect all of us here in the casual neighborhood coffee shop from those crazy liberals and their health care reform and organic pretzels? Thank you so much! But really, I think we'll be OK without your little display. Enjoy your frappucino, won't you?

What, no drink? You now wish to order nothing at all and instead plop yourself down in the corner, plug in your laptop and angrily scour Facebook all day for evidence that your ex-girlfriend, the one who left you two years ago at a full, what-the-hell-was-I-thinking sprint, is now dating a liberal or a pacifist or an atheist and is far, far happier than she ever was with you? We understand. We appreciate your desire to partake of our free Wi-Fi, buy nothing and not give a damn that we can't really stay in business that way.

Why, look at you! Refusing to step away from the counter and instead choosing to read aloud from your little card that says how it's completely legal to carry an unconcealed, unloaded firearm in a public space! Way to stand up for your rights! God bless America!

Turns out you are right. It is legal, sort of. Then again, so is eating gravel, wearing a giant hat made of cow manure and squirrel tails, and slapping yourself in the face repeatedly while ranting semicoherently about Jesus, masturbation and Shania Twain. And you don't see anyone doing that, do you? Except Carl over there?

We realize it might seem unfair. Far be it from us here at the neighborhood cafe, where families and small children and book readers come to chat and feel slightly better about their day, to ask you to leave because your energy is so low and repellant and also downright silly.

But nevertheless, I'm afraid that's exactly what we're going to do. We would appreciate it if you would take your business elsewhere. Right now. No? Very well.

We had hoped it wouldn't come to this. We had hoped to find a better resolution. However, in response to your insistence on carrying a firearm into our premises, we have no choice but to change our official policy, right here and now, on the spot.

Again, we mean no offense, you jingoistic lump of mancrazy. You are indeed well within your rights to be a thoroughly paranoid coward who has no real inner strength, confidence or social skills, to a degree that you feel you must carry a deadly weapon around to feel like you even exist. We understand your thinking completely. It's basic psychology. Very, very basic. Childish, even.

So then. Like any business, we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. But we realize there are some people for whom this is not specific or clear enough. We realize some people have to have it, you know, spelled out and publicly displayed.

Therefore, we have revised our list. Please note the new sign we have just posted on the front door. We have expanded and clarified a few things. We hope it helps.

Effective immediately on these premises, there will be:

• No murdering
• No raping
• No pillaging
• No gun slinging, pistol-whipping, sucker-punching
• No mauling, jabbing, stabbing, hating or undermining
• No screaming bloody murder
• No morons
• No panicking
• No testing on animals
• No jumping for Joy. While she appreciates your enthusiasm, our cashier is happily married. Thank you
• No live birthing
• No dumping
• No livestock
• No smoking
• No smoking the livestock
• No exit
• No way out
• No diving
• No spitting
• No way!
• No Crusades
• No "Star Trek" re-enactments
• No skinny-dipping in the half-n-half
• No doubt

Thank you so much for understanding. Free sample biscotti on your way out?

And what does Paul Hemke the Brady Staff (correction by the Brady Staff in this post) in a post on the Brady Campaign blog say of this bigotry? "Best. Answer. Ever."

Had this been about interracial or homosexual couples holding hands and kissing the outrage over a such a post would result in demands that the San Francisco Chronicle fire him. Hemke defends Morford and his support of Morford with:

The key reply is that clothing which some find offensive is different from firearms that others — justifiably — find frightening.  That is: pants aren’t guns, and being gay doesn’t kill people.  Not sure if CDC counts how many Americans die by strange-looking pants each year, but if they do, chances are the number will be a lot less than 30,000 (the number shot to death every year in this country).

In the paragraph above let's substitute "ni**er" for "gun" and "firearm", correct the numbers to match, and see how that plays:

The key reply is that clothing which some find offensive is different from ni**ers that others — justifiably — find frightening.  That is: pants aren’t ni**ers, and being gay doesn’t kill people.  Not sure if CDC counts how many Americans die by strange-looking pants each year, but if they do, chances are the number will be a lot less than 6,000 (the number murdered by "ni**ers" every year in this country).

That sounds a lot like an argument I would imagine someone from the KKK or some other white supremist would make in supporting restrictions against non-whites. Yet they appear to be blind to the parallel.

That some people are frightened by others exercising a specific enumerated right is not justification for infringing that right. As one judge said in regards to the First Amendment, "... free speech cannot be limited on the basis of 'undifferentiated fear". It is a severe and unjustified infringement on liberty to engage in prior restraint based on the imagination and paranoid fears people like Helmke and Morford have about gun owners.

It's not just Morford and Helmke that want to put up the equivalent of "No Coloreds Allowed" signs on businesses they frequent. Here is another bigot having his say on the topic:

Many intelligent educated and reasonable people feel that the presence of openly-displayed guns in a coffee shop like Starbucks is disturbing. Some of them may feel the gun owners are not to be trusted. Others may feel that guns in a crowded public place are too easily within reach of kids and criminals. Some may feel a tacit threat from those carrying weapons, which gets back to the trust issue. But, whatever they're thinking, aren't they free to think it? Don't they have a right to feel any way they want? Aren't they entitled to request Starbucks to institute a no-gun policy?

How many "intelligent educated and reasonable people" need to feel the presence of ni**ers in a coffee shop like Starbucks is disturbing before it stops being bigotry? How many people have to feel ni**ers are not to be trusted before it is acceptable to enact regulations and push businesses to ban them?

Certainly they are free to think and feel whatever they want. And they can petition Starbucks to institute a no-gun policy with legal intervention to back them up. No one is advocating otherwise. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't feel the outrage from the public for their bigotry. But should they take that bigotry to the next level where they injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate people for exercising their right to keep and bear arms then they should be prosecuted.

I've taken Paul Helmke to task on this before but he just doesn't seem to get it. But I shouldn't be surprised. Bigots have a tough time learning.

Update: The Brady Campaign has directly responded to this post. They claim that if it is not an immutable characteristic such as skin color then it isn't bigotry or a civil rights issue:

In order to think this way, the key assumption such gun advocates have to make is that their guns and gun use are functionally identical to race, or sexual orientation — such that one’s status as a gun advocate is essentially an immutable characteristic.

By that logic banning interracial couples, Catholics or Muslims from Starbucks or Woolworths wouldn't be bigotry either. I've got news for the Brady Campaign Staff--they're wrong and I think they know it.

As long as they held on to the falsehood that the 2^nd Amendment did not protect an individual right they might have made a thin case for that. But as soon as the right to keep and bear arms was on the same level as the freedom of association and freedom of religion they lost that crutch. Via D.C. v. Heller we have, and the Brady Campaign acknowledges, a specific, constitutionally protected, right to keep and bear arms. With that decision they became a gentler version of the KKK. No white sheets or burning crosses in our yards but they still attempt to segregate us and ban us from parks, buildings, and businesses. The only difference between them and the KKK is the KKK was sometimes willing to take the law into their own hands. The Brady Campaign attempts to get the government, Amtrack, and Starbucks to do the yucky work of infringing on the rights of others for them. They are now on a slippery slope into obscurity and revulsion and they are grasping at straws with their denial of bigotry.

And their advocacy for public bans of us exercising that right is more than just bigotry. It is just a hairs breadth away from a felony:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or

If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured—

They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

See Notes on Lethal Logic for links to all my posts on Dennis Henigan's book Lethal Logic.

Chapter 1 of Lethal Logic is titled: "Guns Don't Kill People. People Kill People."

Henigan claims cars are a valid analogy to guns:

Automobiles do not often exceed the speed limit without a driver behind the wheel. Sitting in a driveway, a car seems pretty innocuous indeed. Does this mean that the sum total of our public policy response to reckless driving should be severe punishment of drivers who violate the law? Few would think so.

For example, most of us are quite comfortable with the idea that before anyone is permitted to operate an automobile he must be licensed by the government to do so.

...

It makes sense to have a system in place to prevent potentially high-risk people from driving in the first place.

The first thing wrong with this is that Henigan ignores driving on public roads is considered a privilege and that in D.C. v. Heller all nine supreme court justices agreed that the right to keep and bear arms is a specific enumerated right. Rights may not be licensed. You don't have to get a license or even notify the government if you decide to worship zero, one, or a dozen gods. You don't have to get a learners permit from the government to learn speaking in public. You don't have to fill out justification papers in triplicate, pay $100, submit your fingerprints, and wait 90 days before being allowed (or denied on the whim of some bureaucrat) to exercise your right to read Das Kapital, or Mein Kampf although those books and many other books have directly contributed to far, far more deaths, violence, and misery than the private ownership of firearms has. Even abortion, where it can be argued that an innocent life is being taken, no one has to take a class, apply for a permit, give a reason to a government bureaucrat, and have government records on file for exercising that right. Creating expensive, time consuming barriers for those choosing to defend innocent life using the best available tool for the job just somehow "makes sense" and infringment on a specific enumerated right is unworthy of notice.

The second point is that our drivers license system does not "prevent potentially high-risk people from driving in the first place." It only allows for an easier means to identify those that may be lower risk drivers. There are lots of people that drive without a license and data indicates unlicensed drivers are involved in 17% of fatal car crashes. It is misleading for Henigan to use licensing of drivers as a successful model for gun ownership, use, and "prevention of gun violence". And more directly to the point one only needs to check out Chicago and Washington D.C. with their firearms licensing schemes and see how effective they were in "preventing gun violence" compared to the surrounding communities.

Henigan and his organization expects us to believe that it is possible and desirable to prevent bad things from happening. Preventing crime has long been a hot button of mine. And it's not just me. The legal system has ruled on this in specific reference to firearms before and even has a name for it in relation to the First Amendment: Prior Restraint.

The next point Henigan tried to make is that guns are unregulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission or in some similar manner to what the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration does for automobiles. I don't need to give this point much attention in this chapter because Henigan doesn't do anything with it. The Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations have attempted to get magazine disconnectors, loaded chamber indicators, microstamping, and "personalized" firearms (also called "smart" guns) mandated. They have been successful in Maryland, New Jersey, and California but I find it telling they have yet to supply any data showing this has improved public safety. I expect these restrictions will be found by the courts to be unconstitutional within the next few years.

I know of no gun rights activists who believe regulations such as those proposed will satisfy the anti-gun people. I am of the opinion that "everyone" knows the only thing it will do is increase the price of guns with no measurable public safety benefits. Increasing the price in of itself is seen as a good thing by anti-gun people as shown by their frequent mention of "cheap" handguns in a pejorative manner (see page 164 in Lethal Logic, the Brady Campaign website, and the VPC website).

The remainder of the chapter is devoted to explaining that guns are weapons which makes it possible for a single person to take on multiple people from a distance and with reduced risk to the individual with the gun compared to a knife, or baseball bat. This is true. And as Henigan points out this is a bad thing when a violent criminal uses a gun to do evil. But what Half-Truth Henigan doesn't say is those same characteristics make it a useful tool for self-defense. It allows the elderly, the disabled, and the outnumbered to successfully defend themselves.

Regardless of which point Henigan attempts to make he completely fails to "explode the myth". The most that can be said of this chapter is as a lawyer he knows how to distract people from the fact that guns don't kill people--people kill people.

Dennis Henigan from the Brady Campaign wrote the book Lethal Logic--Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy. I would like to point out he claims, "Although this book has its roots in my work with the Brady Center, it is not a book produced by the Brady Center nor does it necessarily reflect the views of the Brady Center." Hence his flaws should not necessarily be attributed directly to the Brady Campaign.

The reason why he wrote the book and what he claims to have accomplished are described inside the front cover:

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

“When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

“An armed society is a polite society.”

Who hasn’t heard these engaging assertions, time and time again? Burned into the national consciousness by years of targeted, disciplined messaging by the National Rifle Association and others, they are just a few of the bumper-sticker slogans that have defined the gun control debate in America. Long ridiculed by gun control advocates, they are the first words that come to mind for most Americans when the gun issue is discussed.

This is the first book both to acknowledge the profound and deadly impact of the gun lobby’s bumper-sticker logic on the gun control debate and to systematically expose the misguided thinking at the core of the pro-gun slogans. Indeed, the author contends that the gun lobby’s remarkable success in blocking passage of lifesaving gun laws is the result, in large part, of its relentless and effective use of these simple and resonant messages. Their persuasive power has been a largely ignored influence on the current politics of gun control, in which the gun lobby wields unprecedented power in the Republican Party, while many Democratic Party leaders see the policy benefits of stronger gun laws as not worth the political risk of standing up to the NRA. Lethal Logic contends that the current political stalemate over guns will never be broken until the pro-gun slogans are exposed as the cleverly disguised fallacies that they are.

I read the book and took lots of notes. I'm finally getting around to sharing them.

I planned to just make one post but it would simply be too large and take too long. I have other things to do beside refute the rants of bigots. So I am going to break it up into smaller posts.

Henigan has a chapter for each "fallacy"/"bumper-sticker". I will address them one by one and update this post with links as I finish the post. The chapters are:

1. "Guns Don't Kill People. People Kill People."
2. "When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns."
3. "But What You Really Want..."
4. "An Armed Society Is a Polite Society."
5. "We Don't Need New Gun Laws. We Need to Enforce the Laws We Have."
6. "Is Budweiser Responsible for Drunk Drivers?"
7. "From My Cold Dead Hands..."

But first I want to address something I find irritating every time I look at it. That is the cover:

The bullet holes look fake to me. Here are close ups:

The holes aren't round enough. And every paper bullet hole I have seen is more uniform than these. Perhaps a different type of paper causes the difference but I think it is more likely they were faked.

The central policy issue is whether the enactment of specific restrictions on firearms will prevent violence. Whether violence necessarily increases with the number of guns available in a society provides little guidance on that central issue.

Dennis A. Henigan
Vice president for law and policy at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Lethal Logic, page 108.
[Even after reading the entire book I still have to shake my head at these two sentences. They almost directly contradict each other. If violence doesn't increase with the availability of guns in a society then that does tell us that guns are an independent variable in the search for ways to prevent violence. "Independent variable" means it doesn't make any difference in the outcome. Hence they cannot legitimately claim violent crime as justification for "specific restrictions on firearms".

He does attempt to explain what he means in the following pages. But it boils down him claiming that restricting access and public carrying of firearms does prevent violence and it does not decrease "the number guns available in a society". This is a disingenuous at best and actually is factually false. Even the CDC says there is no evidence that any gun control laws have made people safer. Just One Question has been around for over five years now and still there hasn't been an answer come up that Henigan would be happy with. And anytime you increase the cost (money, time, and risk of innocently breaking a law are including in the definition of "cost" in this context.) the market will respond by lowering consumption. Hence, ANY restriction put on firearms will necessarily decrease the number of guns available.

Throughout the entire book Half-Truth Henigan very carefully words things such they are just barely true or only delve into outright falsehoods long enough to arrive at misleading conclusions. I think I have the time today, so today is going to be the day that I go through my notes on his book and make them into a blog post.--Joe]

Can the United States government actually get too large? Can “We, the People” ever retake control of our elected government officials?

Young marksman Oren Fletcher learned to hunt in the hills near his family’s farm and spent hundreds of hours at the range target practicing with his custom-built, high-powered rifle. Upon the untimely murder of his father at the hands of the newly and illegally created United States Federal Office of Gun Enforcement, Oren takes matters into his own hands.

With a strong and dedicated will to eliminate and sidetrack those who would destroy our country's Second Amendment and the Constitution, Oren sets out to restore solid American values based on his own interpretation of our nation’s “Supreme Law of the Land.”

Several subplots interweave the novel, finally intersecting with a definite finality for the “bad guys.” Meet “Louie the Pig,” a murderous repeat offender and his druggie partner Raymond Porter, along with street scum Bobbie Jones, who murdered Oren’s mother.

The United States Enforcers are worse than these lowly felons. Hiding behind newly created American laws created to remove all guns from private ownership, the Enforcers raid and pillage gun owners with sanctioned impunity. Under the leadership of Enforcer General Bob Woods, the Enforcers forever change the meaning of the words “gun collector.”

While Oren makes the biggest impact on both criminals and Enforcers alike, it is a host of American heroes, the Militia, if you will, that shows its indomitable American spirit throughout this novel.

Oren's War
From the back cover and the website.
[I've just barely started it but this may be the book for gun owners in this decade that Unintended Consequences was for them the 1990s.--Joe]

Via Glenn Reynolds (via Say Uncle), I found out that TSA let a guy with a gun and a convincing demeaner put his "prisoner" on an airplane.

How can people put up with the security theater at the airport without a look of disgust and anger at the people pawing through their stuff and putting their hands all over them? It's all to make some people feel better.

If someone had the help a dozen people or so who knew what they were doing (here is a hint) the TSA could be thrown out on the street. It's wouldn't be pretty for a week or two, it wouldn't be legal, but I think it could be done.

TSA, A Security Theater.

Via email from veteran Boomershooter (he was at the FIRST Boomershoot in 1998) Steve M. and the author of the article, Jack Lewis, I found out the March 2010 issue of Motorcyclist magazine has an article about a trip to Boomershoot 2009 from the Seattle area on a motorcycle with a sidecar--a 2WD Ural Safari.

It includes a lot of photos (by Shasta Wilson) and is a great story. It includes typical Boomershoot experiences like:

Bundling Pretty Wife into fuzzy blankets, I tossed two cased rifles across her chest and we were off.

"Don't worry, " I bellowed, "It won't rain in the mountains!"

It didn't rain. It snowed.

I bought out the entire supply of the issue at the newsstand in the lobby of the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, WA and they said they are unlikely to get any more in. The Barnes and Noble next door only had a couple of February issues when I checked on Sunday evening but if you check there now they might have one.

The article starts on page 70.

Via email from co-worker Chet.

Although I haven't heard any trainers directly address this it has been hinted at by some:

Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform "planned actions".

In an experimental "duel", published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they studied the speed of these two types of movement.

...

Pairs of participants were put in a button-pressing competition with each other. Each was secretly given instructions of how long to wait before pushing a row of buttons.

"There was no 'go' signal," said Dr Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham, who led the research.

"All they had to go by was either their own intention to move or a reaction to their opponent - just like in the gunslingers legend."

Those who reacted to their opponent were on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement.

During one or more of the classes I took from Insights Greg Hamilton told the students to "use your startle reflex" when the buzzer goes off to decrease your draw time. It works.

You can actually see it other shooters. New shooters take a lot longer to start moving their hand toward the gun and it moves slower when it does move. Tell them to use their "startle reflex" and after a few repetitions you will see their hands jerk into motion and reduce the amount of time required to get their gun deployed.

Apparently we have different pathways in the brain and we can consciously reroute the signals to decrease the time.

This strengthens the wisdom taught in NRA Personal Protection courses about "drawing a line". The students are told they must have a mental threshold past which they will take some sort of action. It might be something like "the door opens" when someone is trying to break into your safe room. Or "they come around the corner of the counter" when the bad guy is advancing at you with a knife. You are reacting to something the bad guy did. In addition to increasing the speed of your response to a threat you are less likely to suffer from a "boiled frog" situation where the situation escalates and you keep postponing your response because "it's not that bad" yet.

Update: See also the Scientific American podcast via Say Uncle.

Oakland California is trying to more heavily restrict firearms dealers. Never mind that there aren't even any gun shops in the city that sell to the public. When this was pointed out they responded with:

I think he wants to be sure that nobody gets any ideas of opening something. And if they did, they could regulate it under this law.

The very idea of someone contributing to people being able to exercise their rights needs to be repressed. At least they aren't (publicly) advocating killing gun owners as some people advocate.

There's a legal and very practical way to deal with open carry gun advocates that will get rid of some bad genes in CA. Tell the open carry gun advocates you dare them to come to your house with their guns. If they are stupid enough to come into your house with their guns get your loaded gun out and blow them away. Not a court in CA will convict you of any crime. This falls under the use of force (lethal) laws in CA. Whether the gun carrier guns are loaded or not you cannot tell and you have the lethal legal right to protect yourself here. This would be a good way to get rid of these mentally challenged people and will contribute to making the gene pool better in CA. Most of these gun carry advocates are already pretty close to getting a 1st place Darwin award. Help make sure that they do get it.

rectifier
February 3, 2010
Comment to Peet's and CPK tell Open Carry customers: No guns allowed
[Remember, these bigots don't just want you in the closet. They want you dead.--Joe]

Don’t expect the NRA to abandon its reliance on the fear of gun bans – it is not clear that the gun lobby knows any other way of arguing its case. And, admittedly, it may take years before the impact of the Heller decision on the gun debate is fully felt.

Dennis Henigan
February 3, 2010
Frank Luntz: “Culture War” Over Guns Is a Myth
[Half Truth Henigan is at it again. It will take years before we finish clearing the books of all the unconstitutional gun laws. But the "gun lobby" makes lots of arguments without "the fear of gun bans". If Henigan believes what he just said then I guess he didn't notice the some of the things the gun lobby has accomplished recently. Examples include Federal legislation allowing people to check guns with luggage on Amtrak, allowing concealed carry in National Parks, and blocking progress on restrictive gun show legislation. This doesn't include the progress made in the previous 20 years on enabling concealed carry.

Even ignoring those items the entire premise of his post is obviously false. There is a huge cultural war going on. How else can you explain observations like those made in the second half this post?

But what makes this particular half-truth so interesting is that all of those items, which have nothing to do with "gun bans", are in the 2009 Brady Gun Violence Prevention Report Card. I can only think of the following possible explanations:

1. Henigan didn't read the report card and press release his organization published 15 days ago.
2. Henigan forgot the contents of the report card and press release his organization published 15 days ago.
3. Henigan didn't believe the report card and press release his organization published 15 days ago.
4. Henigan thinks no one else remembers the report card and press release his organization published 15 days ago.
5. Henigan does not limit himself to rational thought.

I'm inclined to go with #5.--Joe]

The very fact that there are anti gun rights weasels in Congress is in itself a crime. When will the time come that it isn't considered "balance" to include the bigoted comments of the anti gun rights activists in public discourse, and it is seen for what it is-- a lying, bigoted, anti American movement? The Enemy Within. Would we tolerate the KKK being invited to speak in public forums? Would we tolerate an anti women's suffrage coalition of Mayors?

One thing we should always keep in mind is what victory would look like. One feature of victory would be that any politician who, even under his breath, even caught in a private conversation, suggests an infringement on a constitutional right risks swift impeachment. What could be worse, after all, than someone charged with protecting our rights actually fighting against them? Would you tolerate your nanny abusing your kids? Would you tolerate your security guard stealing from you or attacking you? Would you tolerate your grounds-keeper tearing up your lawn and garden, demanding that you have no right to a nice lawn? Would you tolerate your accountant embezzling from you? Why in the hell should we as a society tolerate any politician who hates the very fact that we have rights? If the term, "enemy of the state" has or ever had any meaning, surely an anti-rights politician is a prime example.

Lyle @ UltiMAK
February 1, 2010
In the comments.
[Wow! I think we should start including the essence of that in our emails to our congress critters.--Joe]

From Fan Security Will Be Tight At Super Bowl:

Bomb sniffing dogs and bomb experts will be fanned out around the stadium trained to spot the smallest explosive anywhere. "These K-9's, they have been trained in over 19,000 explosive components," said Hugo Barrera of the ATF. "They can detect almost anything."

If they actually did that the dogs would be worthless for the task at hand. So many ordinary things can be made to explode (matches, powdered sugar, flour, anti-freeze, fertilizer) that dog alerting on "the smallest explosives anywhere" would have so many false positives that probably a quarter of the people coming into the stadium would be searched.

All the bad guys already know the following so I'll tell you what many people don't want to know--the truth.

You can't make a stadium (or airplane) full of people safe from harm in this manner. What security experts call "The Threat Surface" is just too large. And it's trivial to overload the system with false positives which gives the security guys two options. 1) Shut down operations by investigating each "alarm" by doing a thorough investigation of each "alarm" (do you have a latex allergy sir?) or 2) After the backlog of impatient and irritated customers gets too grumpy they let them bypass the security protocol.

If you want to get something past security in these types of environments you can intentionally create false positives. False positives can bring down almost any security system where there is a modest amount of anonymity and backlog of "angry customers".

For example: The main ingredients for a common suicide bomb in the mid-east are acetone and hydrogen peroxide (both available at your local drug store in the "beauty" section). Covertly spray one or both of these chemicals in "the smallest" amounts on the ground/floor where people will walk on it prior to being screened. Everyone who walks on it instantly becomes suspected shoe bombers when they are screened. What happens then? Sometime before the 100^th false positive in a row the security people ignore that particular "alarm" and let people on through. The 110^th person actually does have a bomb in his shoe and walks through security without incident.

Another example: A car alarm that goes off every couple of hours every night without apparent cause will probably have the alarm turned off by the third night.

Super Bowl Security is just Security Theater.

Via Jeff I found out about National Association for Gun Rights India. I immediately forwarded the link to Shobana and Priyanka (and here).

I then read the article and found out, as expected with something highly regulated, there is corruption involved:

Shahid Ahmad, who runs a Web site called the Gun Geek , said the process of getting a gun license in India is so burdensome that it encourages corruption. To hasten the process, he said, many applicants ask politicians to put in a word in their favor, or attempt to bribe officials and police officers.

To illustrate the point, gun advocates refer to a 2008 incident in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The clamor for gun licenses was so high, according to news media, that officials tried to induce men with large families to participate in a vasectomy program by promising a license in return.

If the men have to get a vasectomy to get a gun license I wonder what the women have to do. I wonder if they think this through... if the woman pays too high a price to be able to get the proper tool to defend herself and family there might be an increased potential for some payback when she gets her gun.

Gun Control supporters are in the grips of a long term voter backlash that shows no sign of abating anytime soon, the gun control gains made in the early 1990's planted the seeds, and those seeds, having grown into trees, are bearing fruit now. Every time a politician even mentions any kind of gun control, email servers melt, mail bags multiply, phone lines get red hot, and politicians get the message very quickly.

As long as gun owners perceive a threat, their activism will continue, after all, it is much better to be on the offensive, than the defensive. They are reminded of the threat, regularly, like the push to ban assault rifles in Washington state...Eric Holders comments.."talk" of closing the gun show loophole. Even Brady giving Obama an "F" reminds us, that their are people out there, who are plotting and scheming against the US Bill of Rights.

The talking heads on the news, that talk about "meaningful gun control" and complain about "lack of movement" on it, don't realize that all they are doing is reminding, millions of TV viewers in "rest of the nation", that "they are still trying to ban guns"...They elites just don't get it, so they keep talking, and the people, keep listening, and seeing the threat..

The Brady Campaign's and VPC's successes, almost 20 years ago, has come back to bite them, they kept "poking" the sleeping giant that is several million, peaceful, law abiding, reliably voting, solid block of gun owners... The politicians where quick to learn that gun control did not bring near the votes, Sara and her ilk promised, instead it costed them dearly, when their first votes on Gun Control, became among their very last votes.

Now those gun owners have reached the political strength, to not only stop, most gun control proposals before they even get to the floor for a vote, they have the ability to form their own legislation, and get it passed into law, and that is what we are seeing now...

15 years, of constant, steady political gains, has made it so..

Brady and the VPC should have quit, when they where ahead in 1993....The Hated AW ban of 1994, was the legislation that enraged millions, and most of them are still pissed about it.

If they would have stopped then, gun rights would not have moved so far today, but when they started banning guns, because of cosmetic features, gun owners woke up and said this is pure political BS, and "not one step more".

In a way, Brady, MMM, and the VPC, are their own worst enamy...We are a creation of them, now they can feel our wrath, its not our fault that we outnumber them by 10 to 1 at every meeting, lobby day, or public event..

The sad truth is, if they really want the gun right movement to go away, all they need to do is SHUT THE HELL UP about gun control, and in a few years, many strong gun rights supporters would stop pushing the legislators....BUT, Sara Brady, Paul Helmke, Micheal Blomberg, all republicans, cannot shut their traps that long to let the issue die down...

They keep the wound raw, so we, the great mass that is the Gun Rights movement, will march on...to victory...

Virginia Mountainman
January 31, 2009
Death of the Gun Control movement, birth of the Gun Rights movement
[I think this is a little overstated but the essence is true.--Joe]