I just might attend this. I have a life membership at the gun range and it’s only a few miles away:
As Seattle and the state weigh tighter gun control measures the King County Sheriff is locked and loaded. He’s ready to take the gun control debate to the firing range.
It’s an upcoming campaign event called, “Shootin’ With the Sheriff,” and some say the timing couldn’t be worse.
…
Strachan’s “Shootin With the Sheriff” campaign fundraiser happens July 27 from 6-8pm at Wade’s Gun Shop in Bellevue.
And that the anti-gun people are wringing their hands and whining makes it all the more attractive to me.
Lawmakers in Prince George’s County, Md. hate guns so much they want to brand anyone convicted of violating one of the state’s convoluted firearm statutes. Stab someone with a knife, and the county won’t care or take notice of you after you serve your time. Sell a handgun that’s not on the state’s list of approved firearms, and the Washington suburb will mark you as a criminal and hold you up to public ridicule.
Emily Miller July 18, 2012 MILLER: A scarlet letter for guns: Prince George’s public registry shows county’s priorities are misdirected [A scarlet letter is a mild way to describe a number of gun laws. The original “scarlet letter” was for adultery which is generally looked down upon and even considered a criminal act in some places. Unless of course you are the President and have a ‘D’ after your name. But gun ownership in our country is a specific enumerated right.
The Second Amendment, as ruled by the courts, should be treated like the First Amendment. Is there a state approved list of religious books? Does the state require a background check for each book purchased? Does the state require records on the purchaser be kept for 20 years for each book sold? Such laws have a chilling effect on gun ownership and they need to be treated as such by the courts and gun rights activists.
We are winning but we still have a long way to go. Maryland is as unenlightened in regards to gun ownership as societies that stone adulterers.—Joe]
New shooter Julie from last week and her mother invited me out to dinner on Sunday night. Julie said she wanted to go shooting again—soon!
We went to the range again last night and she shot 200+ rounds through my Ruger Mark II. I had her doing timed drills such as a modified Bill Drill. From the first timed exercise to the last she cut her time, while getting equivalent hits, by about 25%.
Iconic Casting has issued a call for shooters from all walks of life to cast a new shooting competition program which will be filmed for CMT – Anyone is welcome to apply. They are eager to begin interviewing prospective participants as early as this week. Check out their flyer today and follow the instructions in order to be considered for the next big shooting competition reality show! No need to be an ‘expert’ to appear on the show!
The agency warned on its website around Easter that the treats can’t be imported legally.
The agency says it seized more than 60,000 Kinder Eggs from travelers’ baggage and international mail shipments in fiscal 2011.
60,000 pieces of “illegal” candy were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection workers last year? That must mean they have stopped all the people entering our country illegally and now have nothing better to do but sit around all day and eat stolen candy.
Today, it’s nice to know that human beings are a lot more enlightened. We know that the dimensions of someone’s skull or nose don’t matter much in the way of intelligence or integrity.
And we can wonder with absolute incredulity how anyone could have passed off such nonsense as science.
Here’s the irony, though. In the future, they’ll wonder the same thing about us. The difference is that our faux-science is economics.
In the future, they’ll wonder with utter incredulity how these ridiculous assertions about conjuring money out of thin air and borrowing your way out of debt could possibly pass as science.
They’ll be mystified at how political leaders listen to these modern day soothsayers, directing national policy and robbing wealth from hundreds of millions of people based on this faux-science.
And they’ll be completely floored when they see that we actually award our most esteemed prizes to these men who tell us that we can spend our way out of recession and tax our way into prosperity.
To give you an example, I’ve just finished Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s new book The Price of Inequality in which he writes something that may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard from an economist:
“[T]he success of [Apple and Google], and indeed the viability of our entire economy, depends heavily on a well-performing public sector. There are creative entrepreneurs all over the world. What makes a difference. . . is the government.”
Simon Black July 17, 2012 Guest Post: Quite Possibly The Dumbest Thing I’ve Heard An Economist Say [I’ll grant that government makes a difference. A government that enforces contracts, protects the rights of individuals to own property, and to exchange in free trade is what makes for a thriving economy. Government involvement to a greater or lesser amount may reap short term benefits for some people but the long term result is a less successful economy and society.
Or as Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, it’s both startling and revealing (H/T to son James) that the President of the United States also adheres to that philosophy:
President Obama either demonstrated profound ignorance and/or ill-intent and deserves all the ridicule he gets. He does not deserve to be president of anything in our country.—Joe]
The United Nations is flea-infested, hygiene challenged hellhole of soulless despots, tyrants, anti-freedom, human-rights violating global gangbangers who wish to shore up their power by having the United Nations put forth a treaty that would restrict the access to guns by their people, thereby ensuring the tyrants can continue to kill, control, rape and plunder innocents with impunity.
Let’s get one thing straight: more access to guns leads to more freedom. Limiting access to guns leads to more innocent death, destruction and tyranny.
Once again, the United Nations is on the wrong side of freedom. This isn’t surprising since the United Nations has a statue of a handgun with a barrel tied in a knot in front of their rat-infested New York building. We should melt that statue and turn it into bullets for free Americans.
Ted Nugent July 17, 2012 More guns equal less goons [I suspect Nugent may be exaggerating. I’m not convinced the UN is flea-infested.—Joe]
They distinguished themselves by being the first group of ruffians to hold a sitting Attorney General in criminal contempt over the so-called Fast and Furious “scandal”. Let me translate: They pandered to the ageing-fat-white guy demographic that makes up their base and the Board of the National Rifle Association (NRA), by attacking the black Attorney General who happens to work for the black President.
Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which as not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.
James Q. Wilson [It is clear that our present government and that of governments world-wide have either abandoned this viewpoint or never even considered such a viewpoint.
Tonight it was Julie’s turn. Julie is the daughter of this new shooter I took to the range nearly three years ago:
As I pointed out to Julie her group was smaller than that of the shooter in the next lane over. And after a couple more targets almost all of her hits were in the black at the same range.
After a couple hundred rounds I gave her an USPSA target:
Those smiles will bring tears to the eyes of the Brady Campaign people. Keep those smiles coming folks!
A third new shooter, Kelsey, is currently scheduled for a trip to the range on July 28th.
Alan, your question presumes facts not in evidence. There is no evidence that Bloomberg responds to being told anything. This is true no matter how many times he has been told.
Has it ever struck you as odd that many companies will offer free samples as you are shopping at the grocery store or the mall but you don’t have banks handing out crisp $100 dollar bills for you to try?
This isn’t quite as odd as you might think in the first couple of seconds. In a truly free market this might actually happen. Banks could issue their own currency and would compete for market share.
Unfortunately there are many individuals in the state and in this country that look to the bill that I am carrying as really un-American. And I will tell you that I am probably as American as anyone else.
Leland Yee California State Senator July 12, 2012 Author of gun control bill SB 249. ‘Bullet Button’ Supporters Intensify Campaign Against State Sen. Yee [Do the see the way he did that? He changed topics between sentences. He may be technically, as in living here since the age of three and being a naturalized citizen, as American “as anyone else” but the bill is not “American”. And he did not defend the bill as being “American”. It is an obvious infringement of the Second Amendment and I think this quote demonstrates he knows it.—Joe]
Food is an interesting commodity is that it is very inelastic. If the price of gasoline goes down people will be more likely to increase their discretionary driving such as vacations. If the price of food goes down people, at least in the U.S., do not start eating more. The reverse is also true. If the price goes up people don’t cut down their eating. They will eat different foods and they will cut down on going to restaurants but they are still going to eat about the same amount of food. This means that if there were to be a small change in the supply you would expect a large change in the price.
As some people might have noticed there has been some very hot weather with an absence of rainfall in the mid-west this summer. The crops grown in the area are suffering as a result of the weather and the yields are forecast to be lower than usual. This means the price of crops over 1000 miles away in the Pacific Northwest should show dramatic increases as the crop damage in the Midwest becomes irreversible.
The prices above are for a bushel (60 pounds) of wheat. If loaf of bread weighs a pound and were composed entirely of soft white wheat flour (soft white wheat isn’t usually used for bread, but this makes the point less complicated) then the roughly $1.75 increase in price would translate into an increase in production cost of something on the order of about $0.03 per loaf. So this isn’t all that big of a deal to consumers.
It is big deal to wheat producers because the cost of production is essentially fixed by the costs of land, equipment, seed, fuel, pesticides, fertilizer, and labor. If the cost of production is $5.00/bushel then profit goes from $1.00/bushel to $2.75/bushel. This is an increase in profits of 275%.
My brother on the farm in Idaho might be able pay off the loan on that “new” (new to him but it is several years old) tractor a little bit earlier than expected.
Going back as least until the 1960’s it has been common knowledge that you could always tell who the FBI informants were because they were the ones in any group encouraging people to illegally blow something up.
Apparently this guy didn’t get the memo and is going to be spending many years in prison because he is stupid as well as want-to-be terrorist:
The man accused of plotting to use model airplanes loaded with explosives to attack the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol agreed Tuesday to a plea deal.
Rezwan Ferdaus, a 26-year-old from Ashland, Massachusetts, will plead guilty to two of the six charges against him and faces 17 years in prison followed by 10 years of supervised release, according to a statement from the Justice Department.
Ferdaus, a U.S. citizen, will plead guilty to attempting to damage and destroy a federal building by means of an explosive and attempting to provide material support and resources to al Qaeda for attacks on U.S. troops overseas, authorities said.
For six years, the NRA has closely monitored this effort for an Arms Trade Treaty.
We have watched with increasing concern and, one year ago, I delivered to the Preparatory Committee our objections to including civilian arms in the ATT. I said then … and I will repeat now … that the only way to address NRA’s objections is to simply and completely remove civilian firearms from the scope of the treaty.
That is the only solution. On that there will be no compromise. American gun owners will never surrender our Second Amendment freedom. Period.
