Monthly Archives: May 2014

Quote of the day—Eric Bates

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If we want to stop gun violence, the 2nd Amendment has to be reworked and we must pass bills that restrict access to all types of weapons. The rest of the civilized world has figured this out already – but Americans are always late to the party when it comes to doing smart and sensible things.

The big problem is that the 2nd amendment won’t be reworked.

Eric Bates
May 15, 2014
The “Guns Everywhere Law” Keeps Us Safe Nowhere
[Bate doesn’t realize that the US Supreme Court has ruled that the right to keep and bear arms is not granted by the 2nd Amendment nor “is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence”.

I think Bates should move to one of those “civilized world” places he think is “smart and sensible” where they infringe upon the right of people to defend themselves. He should choose wisely because I’m of the opinion we should push such countries to stop their human rights violations and respect the right to keep and bear arms.

Bates is one of those who Alan Dershowitz would call a foolish liberal.

If we want to stop slander and libel we need to rework the 1st Amendment. If we want to get more convictions for criminal activity we need to rework the 5th Amendment. And if we want to stop people with dark colored skin from committing a disproportionate amount of crime we need to rework the 13th Amendment.

We won’t be going there in my lifetime.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brian Anderson

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Besides the Constitutional issues with gun control, the thing that bothers me the most is that the anti-gunners just don’t know what the hell they are talking about. They say they want to have a “conversation” about gun control, but they aren’t even armed with the basic knowledge of how firearms work, let alone stats and facts to back up their attempts to disarm the American populace.

Brian Anderson
April 28, 2014
Anti-Gun NJ Politician Confused About Guns
[H/T to JPFO.

They don’t have basic knowledge about how firearms work, stats, and facts because they are irrelevant to them. Their “reasons” for wanting to disarm us are independent of such things or the facts that do matter to them must be carefully hidden from us in order for their plans to succeed.—Joe]

Mixed feelings

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I approve of the end result but I wish we had got there via the legislature rather than the courts:

A federal judge has issued an injunction Tuesday blocking enforcement of Idaho’s ban on same-sex marriage, saying it is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Magistrate Candy Dale issued the ruling in the case of four same-sex couples who challenged the constitutionality of Idaho’s marriage laws, which voters approved as an amendment to the state constitution in 2006.

In her decision, Dale wrote that Idaho’s laws barring same-sex marriage unconstitutionally deny gay and lesbian citizens their fundamental right to marry.

I see marriage law as being in the domain of the state legislatures. I haven’t read the court decisions but it would seem to be a stretch to find a fundamental right for same sex couples to marry in the U.S. Constitution, common law, or natural law and yet there be some question about the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms being protected.

Random thought of the day

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If you listen to and read their propaganda closely you will notice gun control groups don’t say they seek lower violent crime rates. They seek things like:

  • “Common sense” gun regulation
  • Keeping guns away from people that should not have them
  • Protecting peoples “right” to feel safe

It should be clear from the things they don’t say that they know increased gun regulation does not make the world a safer place. And because of this you must conclude that whatever their agenda is it depends on the public at large being less safe from violent crime.

Such people should be prosecuted.

Quote of the day—Ed Suspicious

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The only constant in gun deaths is the presence of guns. Remove the guns you remove the gun deaths. Sounds great to me.

Ed Suspicious
May 11, 2014
Comment to John Oliver nails it on gun control
[Ahhh yes, the great “gun death” argument. As if everyone that dies from a gunshot wound is a tragedy and there is no benefit to gun ownership.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that no one wants to take away your guns.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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If corporations were really legally treated like individuals then they wouldn’t be prosecuted for organizing like unions and engaging in collective bargaining with labor organizations.

Gun Lube

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Via Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man I came across this article on gun lubes and water protection. Basically a guy with the handle of “Rancid Crabtree” bought a bunch of stuff, documented his procedures, tested things, took pictures, and posted the results. I’m sure quibbles might be made about some detail or another of what he did, but it’s a lot wider that any other test I’ve seen, and makes at least as much sense as others I’ve come across. Food for thought in any case.

Quote of the day—Chris and Jeff Knox

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Reasonable people should recognize and admit that no gun control law has ever met the stated goal of reducing crime, and there is no evidence to suggest that any of the various proposals to further restrict an enumerated right, which “shall not be infringed,” would be any more effective.

Chris and Jeff Knox
On Being Reasonable.
Front Sight magazine, May/June 2014 Vol. 31, No. 3
[Another way of expressing Just One Question.

When someone says something about “reasonable gun laws” push back on them with this. Get them to admit that it’s not about reducing crime. It’s about creating new criminals out of you and me.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) page 13, footnote 5.
[I agree with this review on Amazon:

The writing style is captivating. To some extent, it has been a series of references about how certain people or groups of people were arrested and/or executed. All too easy how people disappeared without a trace and no one even missed them and couldn’t do anything if they wanted to. And the petty, heartless, political and bureaucratic reasons people were arrested makes one closely reconsider his day-to-day activities.

Chilling, as you can see the roots of this activity growing in our country daily.

It will take a while to finish all 3 volumes, but I plan on gradually finishing. It’s hard to read too much at once as your jaw gets tired of dropping constantly and your brain can only take so much astonishment at once.

I am only about a quarter of the way through the first volume (of three) so there may be other things that strike me more profoundly. But so far it is that nearly all believed “in the system”. That once “they” got things straightened out the arrestees would be set free and they would go home. This was even in cases where the NKVD was arresting 25% of an entire town. The NKVD had quotas to meet. And there was always multiple laws they had broken and would be charged with. Just as there are in our country today.

Because of this belief in the system they not only did not resist—they cooperated. At the request of the arresting NKVD they would even tiptoe out of their apartments so as to not wake their neighbors.

I would like to believe that if a similar situation came about in our country that my only attempts to be quiet would involve the use of a sound suppressor for my firearms.—Joe]

Privacy is tough

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Very interesting stuff:

The signals produced by smartphones turn out to be so identifiable that it may never be possible to use one anonymously. Even basic privacy may be difficult to achieve.

Despite all the standardization and quality control that go into accelerometers and other sensors built into smartphones, each sensor contains enough tiny, unique imperfections to identify, not only the physical component, but also the data it records, researchers from the University of Illinois, the University of South Carolina, and Zhejiang University report.

“Even if you erase the app in the phone, or even erase and reinstall all software the fingerprint still stays inherent,” Romit Roy Choudhury, the UI associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the team, said in a press release. “That’s a serious threat.”

By analyzing data from the accelerometers from more than 100 devices, the team was able to determine that tiny differences in the data recorded by the accelerometers were unique to the sensor itself, rather than reflecting flaws or differences in materials or environment from a particular plant of production line.

…

It’s not even necessary to get that specific or interact that much with one smartphone to identify it as unique. In June 2013, researchers at Technical University of Dresden published a paper that said variations in the performance of the power amplifiers, oscillators, signal mixers, and other components of a cellphone radio transmitter leave patterns in the analog radio signal that become a uniquely identifiable pattern of errors after the signal is converted from analog to digital.

That makes it possible to identify and track individual phones passively by their radio “fingerprints” without doing anything but listen to it, and to identify a specific phone even if the SIM card has been replaced or its unique identifying numbers have been altered, according to Jakob Hasse, lead researcher for the paper, which was presented at an ACM Workshop.

“Our method does not send anything to the mobile phones. It works completely passively and just listens to the ongoing transmissions of a mobile phone — it cannot be detected,” Hasse told New Scientist.

I forget who and when I was telling the following story to recently but it is my understanding that during the Vietnam war we had technology that could hear the radio emissions from the ignition systems from trucks many miles away. And because of variations in the ignition systems, such as worn spark plugs, dirty points, etc. the operators of that equipment learned to identify individual trucks.

I think the lesson to be learned is that if you leak electromagnetic radiation you can be tracked.

Quote of the day—Benny @Brios82

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I’m against the mentally ill obtaining guns. You know…like NRA members.

Benny @Brios82
Tweeted May 8, 2014
[This is what they think of you. If you are a NRA member that is proof that you are mentally ill.

Never let anyone tell you that no one wants to take your guns away. Or send you to a mental institution. The political left loves mental institutions and gulags.

I’ve been listening to The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn. Scary stuff because of the easy parallels to the political left in our country right now. It’s surprisingly easy to listen too even though it is a 75 hour audible book.—Joe]

Supressor observation

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For those of you that saw the .45 ACP carbine being fired briefly at Boomershoot and thought it was awesomely quiet, like a heavy-duty staple gun, please note the can was being fired dry. It’s a “wet” suppressor, and being fired with some water in it to evaporate and cool the expanding gasses it would be significantly quieter.

According to the website, on a 1911 the difference is 132.5 dB vs. 123 dB. Yo, doggies!

Always fun to see what sort of toys folks bring. Everyone should have at least one, I’m thinking.

 

Boomershoot private fireballs

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This year we had some people sign up for the private fireballs on Friday evening. Here is the result via Dave Barry:

Here is the video I took:

Update: David has a collection of videos and stills as well. Check out the great still picture of the smoke ring. Daughter Kim saw it from over 3/4 of a mile away over the top of the hill in front of us.

Update 2: Daughter Kim sent me this picture she took from 3/4 of a mile away on South Road:

V__1358

Quote of the day—Jerry Large

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We should repeal the Second Amendment.

Jerry Large
April 30, 2014
Common sense calls for repeal of Second Amendment: Guns will continue to be a problem until we remove their Constitutional shield.
[H/T to Sebastian.

Apparently he doesn’t realize the Second Amendment shields the Constitution.

He, as a person of color, should also read Negroes with Guns. I’ve commented on it before (and here). Ry loaned the book to me and told me he thought it should be required reading in our schools. I can’t say that I disagree with that. It has some very powerful stuff in it.

Isn’t it odd that some of the classes of people that would, and have, benefited the most from bearing arms are the same that are so opposed to the Second Amendment?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Hillary Clinton

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At the rate we’re going, we’re going to have so many people with guns everywhere, fully licensed, fully validated, in settings where [one] could be in a movie theater, and they don’t like someone chewing gum loudly or talking on their cell phone and decide they have the perfect right to defend themselves against the gum chewer or cell phone user by shooting.

Hillary Clinton
May 6, 2014
Hillary Clinton pushes gun control, Obamacare
[I find it very telling that her concern is about the number of people with guns. Does she also worry about the number of people exercising their First Amendment rights? And does she think it would be appropriate to license and “validate” people that exercise their First Amendment rights?

And since she used the example of a movie theater does she also worry that if people don’t have their mouths locked shut before they enter a theater that they might yell “FIRE!” when there is no fire?

With bigotry and prejudice this severe Ms. Clinton is unfit to serve in public office. She doesn’t want to be a public servant. She wants to be a tyrant.—Joe]

503

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Yes. My blog, and all my websites, have been delivering a lot of 503 error codes recently. When the error appears on my blog it also means that boomershoot.org, modernballistics.org, xeniajoy.com, scottfamilyplace.org and others are all doing the same.

When I last talked to tech support about this they said it was because I am getting more than 500 simultaneous connections. My logs from just the first four days of May show over 3000 “GET” requests for “wp-login.php” from nearly 1000 IP addresses. I read this as my blog is under attack.

I’m not convinced my logs are showing me everything.

I’ll investigate more this week.

Quote of the day—Ry Jones

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Is this far enough?

Ry Jones
Asking me about the distance of his fireball creation from the spectators.
May 4, 2014
[This what the setup looked like:

WP_20140504_002Cropped

WP_20140504_003Cropped

It was about 30 yards from the shooting berm where all the spectators were. I said it should be fine. I had never seen any of our fireballs large enough to make that distance be an issue. And this configuration was such that it should make a “wall” of fire rather than a column or ball of fire. Even though it was nearly twice as much fuel as I we had ever used I just couldn’t see it being a problem.

I didn’t think it through.

I was doing the evaluation in regards to the spectators. I didn’t take into account that Ry had parked his pickup, lengthwise, between the spectators and the fireball. They were on the berm and could easily see over it. Ry didn’t move it as he usually did. He had Monte shoot the target probably another 30 feet from the end of the pickup closest to the fireball. This was the approximate distance Ry had set up his video camera and was hovering over when the fireball went off. This was his viewpoint:

From the viewpoint of Art to his right we see this:

Did you see that big blast of fire jetting to the left? That was directly toward Ry and Monte.

I was on the other side and this is my video:

You can see the muzzle of the gun in the video above as the fireball goes up. It disappears as the fireball grows. As the camera pans you can see Ry face down on the ground and Monte still retreating.

I think what happened was that the fuel ignited at the most distant location from the spectators. The expanding gases and increased pressure pushed the unburned fuel toward Monte and Ry. The unburned fuel then ignited as the fuel/air ratio became such that it supported combustion. This burst into the lower pressure air toward Ry and Monte.

I was correct in that it was far enough away from the spectators. But once I made that determination I did not reevaluate for the consideration of the status of Ry and Monte who were MUCH closer.

No one was hurt but it certainly was a lot more intense for them than anyone anticipated.

Here is the email thread between Ry, Monte, and I yesterday morning:

From: Monte
Sent: ‎5/‎4/‎2014 8:12 PM
To: Bill W.; Joe
Subject: fireball

Any pics/video of the fireball / singed wookie event from this morning? 😉
Thanks,
Monte

On 05/05/2014 05:58 AM, Joe Huffman wrote:

From Ry’s Twitter feed:

@RyJones: Boomershoot 2014 fireball. from way too close. https://t.co/XnqbSpQTRu

@RyJones: Boomershoot 2014 fireball different angle: https://t.co/8y650tGLcD that big lobe going left got close

I’ll have more after I get home and have some time.

On May 5, 2014, at 6:35 AM, Monte wrote:

The first one looks kinda like my POV… but with less chunks of smoking debris inbound 😉
Good times.

From: Ry Jones
Sent: Monday, May 5, 2014 7:33 AM
To: Monte
Cc: Joe Huffman; Bill W.
Subject: Re: fireball

The guys down at RNS had some video that shows both of us deciding to get down out of the impending trip to the burn ward. Hopefully they post it.

After the fireball went up I went to check on Oleg who was about 50 yards the other side of the fireball from me. The first thing he told me was, “I seriously underestimated the size of that with my camera. I got an incredible video though.”

Everyone is okay. I don’t think there were even any actual singed hairs, peeled paint, or scorched canopies.—Joe]

Update: Barron put up a video also: