Your employer doesn’t know the answer. If he knew the answer he wouldn’t need you.
Glen Utzman
Professor at the University of Idaho Accounting Department
[This is an excellent observation for almost any professional job.
Utzman is daughter Kimberly’s professor this semester and she provided me with this quote.—Joe]
The basic requirement to register a handgun is longstanding in American law, accepted for a century in diverse states and cities and now applicable to more than one fourth of the Nation by population. Therefore, we presume the District’s basic registration requirement, D.C. Code § 7-2502.01(a), including the submission of certain information, § 7-2502.03(b), does not impinge upon the right protected by the Second Amendment.
Douglas Howard Ginsburg
United States Court of Appeals
Dick Anthouny Heller, Et. Al. v. District of Columbia, Et. Al. October 4, 2011
[Slavery, segregated restaurants, laws against interracial marriage, and the death penalty for homosexuals was accepted for more than a century in this country. That didn’t make them constitutional. Rights do not become privileges subject to denial because they are repressed in some portion of the nation for some set period of time.
Three fourths of the nation by population do not have their firearms registered and those areas had as low or lower crime rates than the areas that did have their firearms registered. Therefore one must conclude that firearm registration serves little or no benefit to the people. No question would be given to legitimacy of registration for First Amendment rights hence registration to exercise Second Amendment rights must be constitutionally suspect. Thus registration of firearms fails to pass any level of scrutiny.—Joe]
I’m getting bored with gun control advocates these days.
Sebastian
November 2, 2011
The Straw Men Builders
[I understand and empathize some. But this isn’t a game to get tired of and move on to something else more interesting when you get bored. This is a fight for the preservation of a specific enumerated right. We get bored with them because we keep refuting the same tired positions they put forward. That doesn’t mean we should stop.
I propose that we can slack off when at least half of the top 10 search engine results for their names are web pages mocking or explaining how these people are ignorant, evil, or liars we are not done with them. They need to be, figuratively speaking, pounded into the ground.
Here are some stats on our current situation on my proposed goal:
We are getting close on Sugarmann but have a lot of work to do on the others.—Joe]
It’s pretty common to get a response similar to; “I didn’t want to spend that much on an optic setup, since I only paid X for the rifle.”
A customer today said he has a WASR AK he keeps for defense, but can’t justify the price of a good optic. That’s a contradiction in terms, see– you’re going to count on this weapon, possibly, to save your life but anything more than 60 or 75 dollars for a sight that you can rely on is just too much? “I have another rifle that can put five rounds into a half minute or arc, so…[I don’t need a good optic on this one]” He said. So your 3 or 4 MOA Kalash doesn’t warrant an optic that will withstand a few knocks and hold zero, and has a battery life better measured in years than in hours? Why not? What is your life worth?
I don’t know if many people are aware of the number of thousand plus dollar scopes that are currently sitting on five hundred dollar rifles.
It’s not about matching the price of the sight to the price of the rifle. It’s about the setup you want, and you should want something on which you can rely. Reliable rifles with decent accuracy aren’t expensive, but good optics are. If your optic costs multiples of the price of the rifle, so be it. You have a good setup that didn’t have to include a super expensive rifle. Be happy.
I recently saw an article about some AR or other and the writer had one of the new Leupold Mk 8 variables on it. It seemed like just the thing I’ve wanted on my (700 dollar) Colt HBAR, so I looked it up. Four Thousand Dollars! Will I have to spend an additional 3,000+ dollars on a rifle only so I can justify a good optic? That sort of “reasoning” doesn’t make any sense to this shooter. It’s only a matter of coughing up the cash if you can (I do very much like the Trijicons too, and they’re not near 4K, but they don’t do all the same tricks). Choices choices, but the price I paid for my rifle won’t even be thought of during the process. I’ll only be thinking of what I can do with it once I have this rig setup nicely.
Disclaimer; …No– On second thought I don’t have to disclaim squat to anyone. I’m sick and damned tired of the notion that we have to qualify ourselves, or document any aspect of our lives or explain our behavior. If you can’t take my words at face value, or reject them purely on merits, that’s your own problem. Live with it. I’m not demanding anything of you, so stay out of my face and leave me the hell alone. Or else. This is the last discussion I will ever have with anyone on the matter of disclosure.
I’d commented just this morning that I’d seen more than enough of Newt. Then this was sent to me by a relative of a relative;
Not too shabby for a Republican. The problem for Newt though is that we know Newt. He has a history. I can only assume that this was a trial balloon for him– to see how this sort of thing sells in the marketplace (in the minds of people like him) in which the industry of political rhetoric sells its wares. He’s a craftsman in the art. I still think the world is better off with Newt as a history teacher.
“Isolate and crush the secular socialist left” he says. The only reference to liberty he makes is to religious liberty. OK, what about the religious socialist left? Why bring in the “secular” bit when you could just say “crush the socialists”? He still talks about “running” the country too. That bugs me– Raise your hand if you want to be run by someone in Washington. See? Didn’t think so.
If Alexa can be believed The Brady Campaign web site has a traffic rank of about 1.1 million. This compares to Say Uncle with a traffic rank of about 283,000.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence comes in almost dead even with the Violence Policy Center web site with ranks of almost 2.9 million.
Even my obscure blog nearly has the traffic of the Brady Campaign with a traffic rank of 1.24 million.
When I, blogging a few hours a week while working a full time job, can generate almost as much traffic as a the Brady Campaign with a full time staff and millions of dollars of income you have to know the general public just isn’t interested in their messages.
Give it up guys. You lost, we won. It’s time to change your names and rejoin civilized society.
Brady Campaign acting President Dennis Henigan says (YouTube video with only 311 views and the comments disabled) the Brady Campaign has a vision of American safe and secure with firearms prohibited from most public places.
It’s nice to have dreams Dennis but it’s just a dream. You long for something that never was and can never be. You might also have visions of American with unicorns, pixie dust, and manna falling from the sky but rational people do not share your delusions.
When self defense is prohibited safety and security are beyond reach.
I’ve long been opposed to the Muslim religion but perhaps I should give it further consideration. As reported here it has some interesting points I had not thought of:
The 115-page pocket-sized guide to Islamic sex was released a week ago by the OWC, which was launched in June.
In its foreword, the book says studies showed women only gave their husbands “10 per cent” of what men desired of their wives’ bodies.
It contains explicit sex details, devotes a chapter to “how sex becomes worship” and even reportedly urges Muslim men in polygamous marriages to have group sex with their wives.
I wonder if the women have to be Muslim too. I suspect getting number one wife Barbara to convert would be “challenging”.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is concerned about states’ rights:
“National concealed carry reciprocity legislation is a terrible idea for public safety and a huge affront to states’ rights,” said CSGV Executive Director Josh Horwitz.
I guess that means we can count on their support for The Firearms Freedom Act, states that wish to ban abortion, and even the reinstituting of slavery should some state desire it.
What these people don’t understand (or more likely just don’t want to acknowledge) is that states’ rights/powers only extend as far as the people rights. There are certain individual rights that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution that no state, county, or city may infringe upon. The right to keep and bear arms is one of those rights.
A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger
Courts: The Chief Justice Speaks Out
U.S. News & World Report (vol. 69, No. 8, Aug. 24, 1970) 68, 71
Address to ABA meeting, Aug. 10, 1970.
[I am of the opinion that the first two conditions have already been met.—Joe]
There are some things that are just completely incomprehensible to me. Maybe someone else can put it this into words I can understand:
The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) unequivocally opposes and condemns all invocations of the Holocaust in political discourse.
Does this sort of prohibition also apply to invocations of the Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian genocides as well? Or is there something special about the Nazi regime that means it is special? If so, then why? And how does one determine this “specialness” in advance rather than just memorizing some rules someone made up?
Further along that same line I have had numerous people tell me my “Jews in the Attic Test” is “brilliant”, “genius”, “one of the best things you have ever written” and it got me a “Thinking Blogger Award”. But one Jew I pointed it out to told me, “I agree with everything you say here but you must change the name. You don’t realize how offensive that is to Jews.”
What?
I. Just. Don’t. Get. It.
This is the Twenty-First Century, where you can track your gorramed pizza from dough to delivery, and you are telling me that the Great and Almighty Federal Government cannot dig its head out of its own ass long enough to develop something similar for a “product” that costs at least ten times as much as your average pizza order?
Linoge
November 1, 2011
good to know my tax dollars are being wasted
[Linoge is correct as far as he goes. A lot more could be said as well. Linoge hints at it but doesn’t quite come out and say what really should be said. Here are some of the things that come to mind:
—Joe]
I don’t know. I like watching The Universe series on The History Channel (once I get past the stupid graphics and the talking-down-to they give us) but this guy, a frequent contributor to The Universe, seems a little too full of himself for someone who apparently doesn’t understand the words he’s using.
Just as there are many solar systems in our galaxy, and many other galaxies in the universe, there may be, we find, other somethings (he uses “soap bubbles”) in the universe. “Universe” has it right there in the word– Uni. There can be only one. What all it may include is a subject for further study and discovery, but there is only one. Please.
Maybe this bugs me more than it should, but I don’t think so. When it comes to cross-culture or cross-generational communication it is critically important. Simple things like the meaning of “the People” and of “…shall not be infringed” have been under assault for example. If we’re not constantly on our guard we lose our history. When we lose our history we lose our culture and our freedom.
For the Sesame Street audience, “soap bubble” works OK, but surely there’s a better choice. I’ll take it over “multiple universes” any day though, as the latter is a direct contradiction of terms, hanging right out there in your face.
Encarta offers this definition of the universe; “the totality of all matter and energy that exists in the vastness of space, whether known to human beings or not.” Well there you have it, see? You might want to alert the theoretical physicists and the astronomers you know. That last clause is even better than I’d hoped. I’d figured on something more like “everything that exists everywhere, period. No, really– everything. Seriously. Dude” but that definition has a bit of a problem built into it. Ten points if you can describe it.
I felt a great disturbance in the Anti-Gun force, as if 10, maybe 15 voices suddenly cried out in terror and were basically ignored.
Suddenly I have a desire to visit cheesehead central.
Sean D Sorrentino
November 1, 2011
What a difference a day makes
[H/T to Robb.
I was tempted to say that now Wisconsin recognizes the “bear” part of “keep and bear arms” the streets will be run full with tears instead of blood but Sean is correct. 10 or maybe 15 people just don’t provide that many tears and don’t matter.—Joe]