Author Archives: Joe

The gun battle in California

Posted on by

California is suffering terrible attacks by the anti-gun politicians. One of the battles is that Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is running for governor in 2018 and has managed to put an initiative on the ballot for this fall which:

  1. Prohibits Possession of Large-Capacity Military-Style Magazines: The Safety for All initiative outlaws possession of large-capacity magazines of 11 rounds or more and provides for their legal disposal. If passed, California would join New York, New Jersey, Hawaii and The District of Columbia in banning possession of these military-style clips.
  2. Treats Ammunition Sales Like Gun Sales: The initiative requires licensing of ammunition vendors and point-of-sale background checks for ammunition purchases. Under the initiative, if a person is convicted of a felony, a violent misdemeanor, has a restraining order or has been declared dangerously mentally ill, they will no longer be able to buy ammunition in California. California would be the first state to require background checks at point of sale.
  3. Ensures People Prohibited from Owning Guns Do Not Possess Them: The initiative defines a clear firearms relinquishment process for those convicted of a felony or a violent misdemeanor.
  4. Requires Reporting Lost or Stolen Guns: The initiative requires firearm owners to notify law enforcement if their firearm has been lost or stolen. With the Safety for All initiative, California would join 11 other states and the City of Sacramento requiring lost and/or stolen firearm reporting.
  5. Shares Data with Federal System on Prohibited People: The initiative mandates that California share data with the FBI/NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System).

Bad stuff.

How do they imagine this cannot be infringing up on the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms? Short answer, they don’t. They intend it to infringe up on the rights of gun owners. That is the entire point.

In response the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA), which is the official state association of the NRA, put up a website asking for money and released this ad:

It’s a very emotional ad, but that is what it takes to reach a lot of people.

Gun owners are peaceful people

Posted on by

Another image from Stephanie:

I’ll probably put this on a t-shirt soon as well. Look for it here.

Quote of the day—Shaun King ‏@ShaunKing

Posted on by

Even more so, when white men hold big black guns and shoot power out of the tips of them, it gives them a racial-psychosexual high.

Shaun King ‏@ShaunKing
Tweeted on December 5, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

Via a Tweet from Michael Z Williamson ‏@mzmadmike.—Joe]

Barb’s birthday hike

Posted on by

Barb decided she wanted to go on a hike for her birthday. She spent a lot of time trying to find just the right hike. Not too short, not too long, not too long of a drive, not too much elevation gain, and absolutely required was “a nice view”.

She settled on Cedar Butte. It was only 30 minutes away from home, 900 feet of elevation gain, and 3.8 miles round trip. It seemed pretty reasonable. But what about the view? I’ll let you decide.

Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Flemming Rose

Posted on by

Human beings are morally self-governing individuals that are able to make up their mind about the speech of other people and decide how to respond. No politician or public opinion should have the power through criminalization and bans to hide opinions and speech from us, implying that we are not able to handle it in a reasonable and responsible way. It takes away our dignity because it is based on the assumption that we cannot be trusted to listen to certain kinds of speech. As Lincoln assumed in another context, free men should not be free to choose unfreedom for others.

Flemming Rose
May 25, 2016
Notable & Quotable: The Milton Friedman Prize
From remarks by Danish journalist Flemming Rose upon receiving the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, in New York City.
[Via email from Paul Koning who points out, “The same reasoning and the same principles apply to the right to arms.”—Joe]

Arrest them! #GunGate

Posted on by

Another one from Stephanie:

GunGateArrestThem

Preparing for another Clinton presidency

Posted on by

WP_20160604_10_07_49_Pro__highres

  • 5805 Blue Bullets
  • 7400 Black Bullets
  • 8800 Montana Gold Bullets

I also have almost all the powder and primers to go with those. I have several thousand shell casing which may or may not be enough depending on the percentage I recover from practice and matches.

This probably will be enough to get me through another election year scare and shortage of ammo and components if it looks like Hillary will win the election.

It’s time to start cranking on the Dillion 550B.

Quote of the day—Sean Davis

Posted on by

When Soechtig and her team plea to federal charges for violating the nation’s commonsense gun laws, we’ll know they’re serious about cutting down on gun crime. Until then, we’ll know they’re just a bunch of ignorant, gun-trafficking profiteers who want to take away our rights while they violate the very laws they demand with absolute impunity.

Sean Davis
June 3, 2016
Katie Couric’s Anti-Gun Producers Repeatedly Violated Federal Gun Laws

GunGateStephanieSoechtig
[The laws Soechtig and team committed should not stand up to scrutiny by the courts but other people are still going to jail for them. And as long as other people are going to jail over them it should doubly apply to Soechtig and her gang. Since she wants us to go to jail for violation of nonsensical laws then she needs to understand, first hand, the significance of what she demands.

Update: Image supplied, copyright free and no permission required, by Stephanie.—Joe]

Hillary’s war on women

Posted on by

HillarysWarOnWomen

See also The Clintons’ War on Women on Google Play and Amazon.

Normalize behavior

Posted on by

This is a reference to my frequent suggestion that gun owners “come out of the closet”.

NormalizeBehavior

Just one question

Posted on by

Image from an anonymous donor referencing my just one question post.

JustOneQuestion

Update: Bill suggested I put this on a shirt. So I did. Get your shirt here.

#OrangeYouGlad Susan Sarandon #WearOrange

Posted on by

OrangeSusanSarandon

#OrangeYouGlad Kim Kardashian #WearOrange

Posted on by

OrangeKimKardashian

#OrangeYouGlad Amy Schumer #WearOrange

Posted on by

OrangeAmySchumer

#OrangeYouGlad Boston Mayor Marty Walsh #WearOrange

Posted on by

I received some images from an anonymous source to share with the suggestion to start a “#OrangeYouGlad” campaign. Here is the first one. Share widely and freely.

OrangeMayorMartyWalsh2

Quote of the day—Michael Sainato

Posted on by

If Democratic voters and party leaders are serious about winning the general election, they need to abandon Ms. Clinton’s sinking ship. The fiercely negative publicity Ms. Clinton is likely to elicit will diminish all chances the Democrats have to recoup majorities in both houses of Congress. Allowing the Republican party to win the presidency would be disastrous for Democrats—a fate that will be sealed with Ms. Clinton as the nominee.

Michael Sainato
May 31, 2016
Fellow Democrats Turn on Clinton
[I’m nearly certain all of the above is true. And I’m thrilled that someone as evil as Clinton is almost for certain going to fail in her attempt to become the most powerful person in the world.

But what I find most interesting is that nearly all people think in terms of what is good/bad for the political parties involved. They do not express concern for our country, our economic situation, or human rights in terms other than what it means to their political party/tribe.

In those, more appropriate, terms there are no good outcomes.

I’m going to keep preparing for the worst and stocking up on popcorn. My “tribe” is composed of less than a couple dozen people. Democrats and Republicans are “The Others” to me.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Daniel Payne

Posted on by

“Gun control that works” continues, as always, to not actually work. Like Sasquatch, it’s always out there somewhere—but you never find it.

Daniel Payne
June 1, 2016
No, We Haven’t Discovered ‘Gun Control That Actually Works’
A national gun registry would be just as stupid and ineffective as Washington DC’s gun registry.
[Sasquatch. I like that. Unicorns, leprechauns, and the Great Pumpkin would also be appropriate.

The anti-gun people keep trying to ignore inalienable rights in favor of “security”, or “safety”. But, as I have been saying for years they can’t get traction in that direction either. So the motivation for gun control must be ignorance, irrational, or evil intent.—Joe]

Biometrical identity verification via your brake pedal

Posted on by

Via Bruce Schneier we find there is still another means of biometric identity verification:

“With very limited amounts of driving data we can enable very powerful and accurate inferences about the driver’s identity,” says Miro Enev, a former University of Washington researcher who worked on the study before taking a job as a machine-learning engineer at Belkin. And the researchers argue that ability to pinpoint could have unexpected privacy implications: Everything from letting insurance companies punish drivers who loan their cars to their teenage kids, to confirming the identity of a driver who violated traffic laws or caused a collision.

…

In the end, the researchers found that they didn’t even need the longest portion of the driving test to reliably identify each of the 15 drivers. Using the full collection of the car’s sensors—including how the driver braked, accelerated and angled the steering wheel—the researchers found that their algorithm could distinguish each of the drivers, with 100 percent accuracy, based on only 15 minutes of the driving data. Even with data from the brake pedal alone, they found that they could guess at the correct driver with 87 percent accuracy.

Keep in mind this is result on identify verification. They are not determining identity with this information. Still, this very interesting. Not all the implications are obvious at first glance. But it might be claimed that regular collection of this data violates my Jews In the Attic Test.

Quote of the day—Henry Hazlitt

Posted on by

One simple truth that could be endlessly reiterated, and effectively applied to nine-tenths of the statist proposals now being put forward or enacted in such profusion, is that the government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. In other words, all its relief and subsidy schemes are merely ways of robbing Peter to support Paul.

Henry Hazlitt
May 27, 2016
The Task Confronting Libertarians
[Originally published in the March 1968 issue of The Freeman. Excerpted from The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt]
[While I can see this has potential I can also see that many people feel completely justified in robbing Peter. Still it is worth trying and probably puts the advocate for the statist on weaker ground and will sway some to a more principled position.—Joe]

Rounds in the last month

Posted on by

I did a fair amount of shooting and reloading this last month. I have a big backlog of match reports to do. Not sure if I will get around to all of them but the reloading report is quick and easy.

Lifetime totals:

223.log: 2027 rounds.
3006.log: 467 rounds.
300WIN.log: 1351 rounds.
40SW.log: 48448 rounds.
45.log: 0 rounds.
9MM.log: 21695 rounds.
Total: 73988 rounds.

I only reloaded .40 S&W. Last month my total .40 reloads were 46549 rounds. So I reloaded 1899 rounds. There was one primer that got mangled otherwise it would have been an even 1900 rounds. 1099 of those rounds were with The Blue Bullets for steel matches. The other 800 rounds were with 180 grain Montana Gold JHPs for practice at indoor ranges. Montana Bullet has a, “Mix And Match Promo” on cases of bullets going on right now if you are interested.