Monthly Archives: October 2006

We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight

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

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

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

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  I then asked him if he could name a single anti-gun law that, once passed, the NRA had managed to get repealed.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

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

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

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

Dead Silence.

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

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

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

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

Homework help from the ATF

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

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

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

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

Quote of the day–John F. Kennedy

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

John F. Kennedy

Rapid evolution

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

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

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

My first time

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

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

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

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

Self-defense shooting gets attention in Seattle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know Paul. He attended Boomershoot 2001:


Paul Nickle and Joe Huffman at Boomershoot 2001

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

Kristen Rand in USA Today

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

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

I responded with my own comment:

M. Kristen Rand advocates banning some firearms. She gives the U.K. as an example. Apparently she has not looked at the violent crime rate before and after their ban. I just have Just One Question (https://blog.joehuffman.org/2004/12/14/just-one-question/) for Ms. Rand: Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where restricting the access of handheld weapons to the average person made them safer?

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

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

Quote of the day–Nicholas Artry

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

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

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

Quote of the day–R.U. Sirius

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

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

State of mind

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From my after dinner talk at the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I want you to do now is replace “gun owner” in all those cases with ‘black’. What do you have?

We are gun n***ers.

They want us “in our place” and they want to exterminate us. Not our physical bodies but our culture–our “gun culture”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gun Blogger Rendezvous Wrap up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other posting on the Rendezvous:

Quote of the day–Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

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

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

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

Gun bloggers paradise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion on the .25 auto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the day–Donald O. Hebb

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

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