Author Archives: Joe

Quote of the day—NRA-ILA

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Concurrently, the nation’s total violent crime rate has dropped 18 of the last 20 years, to about a 41-year low. The nation’s murder rate has dropped to about a 48-year low. Polls show that support for gun control has fallen, support for the Second Amendment has risen, and gun ownership is higher now than any time since 1993. The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010).

The Brady Campaign’s response? Go even further off the deep end.

…

We’ve all heard the popular 19th century axiom, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It’s good advice in some circumstances, but the Brady Campaign would have been better off with the advice of W. C. Fields:  “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”

NRA-ILA
June 29, 2012
Learning Pains at the Brady Campaign? Pain, Yes. Learning, No
[This ties in with something Sebastian and I have commented on before. The anti-gun people are being “damn fools”. If the anti-gun people weren’t out there pushing their agenda we would spend more time on safety training instead of politics. If they wanted to reduce accidental injuries and deaths due to poor gun handling then they should become NRA certified firearms instructors and make classes available at affordable prices. If they wanted to reduce violent crime they should teach personal protection classes.

The world would be a better much place if they joined us instead of fighting us.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sebastian

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You have to wonder how far the anti-gun movement could have gotten if they had been honest, instead tricking the American people into gun control through deception and subterfuge. What’s even more amazing to me, faced with the utter failure of their movement, like a one-trick pony, they keep doing the same thing.

Sebastian
June 29, 2012
Concealed Carry Killers
[As I have said before the anti-gun movement has a culture of deceit to the point deception has become institutionalized within their organizations. They sometimes don’t even bother to hide it.

But to address Sebastian’s wonderment, their bag of tricks only contained deceit so all they can do is keep performing the same trick again and again or else give up. And giving up you life’s work is not something that you can easily do. But with the information age their kind will, just like the KKK, gradually fade away into the dustbin of history as they fail to recruit enough replacements for those that leave the movement through retirement.—Joe]

That didn’t work for G. Gordon Liddy

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Perhaps there is something subtle going on here that I don’t understand but this seems to be a settled issue:

Obviously Holder’s been under pressure for more than a year, but I think there will be an argument by the Justice Department that anytime a president authorizes something, that whomever follows the president’s orders cannot be prosecuted.

If I recall correctly G. Gordon Liddy claimed the same thing at his trial and he got a 40 year sentence for supervising a burglary.

People at the Department of Justice and/or the ATF deliberately sent guns to Mexican drug cartels in the hopes they could recover them later at “crime scenes”. Of course in this instance “crime scenes” is an euphemism for locations where innocent people were murdered. In other words people, perhaps acting under the orders of the POTUS, deliberately engaged in activities they believed would be directly related to the deaths of innocent people. They were successful and at least 300 people died as per their plan.

Liddy was sentenced to 40 years for supervising one burglary. What does that sentence extrapolate into for supervising 300 murders?

Quote of the day—Ry Jones

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The pro-tyranny side just doesn’t get enough positive coverage.

Ry Jones
June 27, 2012
[This was while walking by Westlake Park in Seattle. The park attracts most of the demonstrators for such things as the Occupy Whatever crowd. As usual there were some people there with signs I didn’t bother to read.

For a while I thought the root premise in the statement, tyranny doesn’t get positive coverage, was correct. But I had a nagging doubt that something was wrong. If anti-tyranny gets all the positive coverage then how does tyranny succeed?

The SCOTUS ruling on Obama Care this morning crystallized the answer. A retweet from Ry put it in video:

The quote above is wrong. The tyrant and their policies receives nearly all the positive coverage and is welcomed with thunderous applause.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

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Social bigotry is bad enough when practiced by the media and the gun prohibition lobby but when it becomes the official policy of an elected government panel, it then becomes necessary, if not imperative, for the courts to intervene.

Alan Gottlieb
Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President
SAF LEGAL ALERT: SAF SUES ALAMEDA COUNTY FOR CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATION
June 26, 2012
[Social bigots must not be allowed to violate the inalienable rights of people. This case is no different than if the county Board of Supervisors’ had refused to allow a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish bookstore to open and must be dealt with just as severely.—Joe]

Winning

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This (and this) is what winning looks like:

girls-gunsgroup2

Lots of smiles with lots of guns with an attitude that will appeal to everyone except the anti-gun people. What can the anti-gun people do in response except engage in heavy drinking?

More Zimmerman evidence

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From my viewpoint it appears Zimmerman’s case is getting stronger with every new bit of evidence released:

Prosecutors released more evidence in the George Zimmerman case Tuesday afternoon including an unredacted police report and the results of a voice stress test given the day after he shot Trayvon Martin.

The supplemental discovery was released at 1 p.m. and includes video and audio recordings of police interviews with Zimmerman, a 29-page Sanford Police report without statements redacted and an exemption list that notes redactions to the evidence.

…

The video released by prosecutors shows the same reenactment with additional footage of detectives asking Zimmerman about his injuries.

In the short clip, Zimmerman points out cuts and bruises on his head but says he wasn’t injured elsewhere.

“He was just focused on my head,” Zimmerman says.

In the stress test, Zimmerman answered “No” when asked “Did you confront the guy you shot?” He answered “yes” when asked “Were you in fear for your life, when you shot the guy?”

The examiner concluded Zimmerman was telling the truth.

The way I read the “tea leaves” is that the prosecution and perhaps even the media is slowly preparing the public for an acquittal or perhaps even dropping the charges.

Random thought of the day

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Over the weekend someone told me, “Drop the logic; embrace the real.” The short version of my response was, “I have no idea what this means.”

Yesterday as I was walking to the bus stop I was listening to The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Yet, I was still trying to get my mind around the implications of “Drop the logic; embrace the real” without concluding such a statement was an invitation to delusionville.

The author was talking (literally, he was reading his own book) about simulations of “universes” and how we might detect if we are in a simulated universe such as those explored in Hollywood with movies like “The Matrix“. Compared to some of the first alternate computer games I was aware of such as the text based game Zork computer games do an amazing job of creating simulated universes. Combined with the predictions of Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology we can imagine we are getting close (perhaps less than 40 years) from creating virtual universes which will be extremely difficult to distinguish from reality.

One of the suggestions the author made was that if we know of existence of millions or billions of virtual universes, such as those instantiated by all the people playing video games, and we question the reality of the universe we live in then the following logical conclusion might be entirely valid. Since we know that there are X million virtual universes in existence and only one universe that we have questions about the most likely answer is that the universe in question is also a virtual universe.

I’m pretty sure my friend hadn’t encouraged me to “Drop the logic” with anything this profound in mind but I decided they weren’t necessarily a strong candidate for occupying a padded cell either.

Quote of the day—Brennan Bailey

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How heartless do you have to be to laugh about the tragedy of this country’s deepening epidemic of spoon crime?

Brennan Bailey
June 25, 2012
From an email thread at work. This was in response to someone who said, “ROF, LMAO” in response to this picture (the origin may have been this comment):
389661_10150885762823887_866039906_n
[Yes. We gun owners are heartless and have no sympathy for those made fat by the spoon manufactures and their evil lobbyists who block commonsense spoon control.—Joe]

Think of the children!

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From Mike at work:

I brought my then youngest (who is now the middle) daughter to the range at 8-years old and she absolutely loved it.  Safe gun handling was taught at least a week before we went.  By the time we were at the range she knew what to do and had respect for the rifle.  To this day she still asks me “when are we going to that range?”  Check out her “straight and off the trigger” finger.

DSCF2959

Here are pictures of Mike:

m14_long_barrelCMMG_223

More pictures of Lily:

DSCF2946DSCF2950DSCF2952

From looking at these pictures the thought occurs to me that if our opponents were smart enough they may actually have had a rational reason for banning rifles with “collapsible” (length adjustable) stocks. This makes it more difficult for the young to shoot. Even if they didn’t think it through it is a good argument against such restrictions. Hence our side could and should demand, “Think of the children!”

Quote of the day—cherokeeprogressive

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Some people see phalluses and penises everywhere they look. It’s either penis envy or hatred of penises, I’ve yet to figure out which.
 
In the end, it’s a homophobic play to shame supporters of gun rights out of their beliefs. “Guns mean you’re gay” isn’t going to work, but some people will never figure that out. Never.

cherokeeprogressive
June 23, 2012
The Washington Monument is a phallic symbol. Skyscrapers are phallic symbols. Guns are NOT.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

There is from what is actually a pretty decent conversation going on in the Democratic Underground.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Thomas Sowell

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Undefined words have a special power in politics, particularly when they invoke some principle that engages people’s emotions. “Fair” is one of those undefined words which have attracted political support for policies ranging from Fair Trade laws to the Fair Labor Standards Act. While the fact that the word is undefined is an intellectual handicap, it is a huge political advantage.People with very different views on substantive issues can be unified and mobilized behind a word that papers over their differing, and sometimes even mutually contradictory, ideas. Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? Similarly with “social justice,” “equality,” and other undefined terms that can mean wholly different things to different individuals and groups— all of whom can be mobilized in support of policies that use such appealing words.

Thomas Sowell
Economic Facts and Fallacies: Second Edition Economic Facts and Fallacies: Second Edition pages 1 and 2.
[The phrase “special power” brings to mind “super heroes” and “super villains”. I am of the opinion that while there is ample evidence of “super villains” “super heroes” only exist in the minds of small children, some Ron Paul fans, and Democrats.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ayn Rand

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To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

Ayn Rand
“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” Philosophy: Who Needs It (The Ayn Rand Library)
Via Atlas Shrugged Movie
[Those that initiate force against you are not properly identified as human and force may be required. Only in extremely rare circumstances is persuasion a good option with these animals.

Government is force. Government is an extremely inefficient, and hence impractical, means of dealing with a set of rational people. It is only when your set of people are not rational and are approximating a herd of animals that government/force is appropriate. The case can be made that our government is creating, perhaps with malice aforethought, a class of people that are best dealt with as if they were an animal herd. This makes more and larger government seem like the appropriate solution to societal issues.

Perhaps growing up on a farm makes me more aware of this but the owner of the herd does not have the best interest of the herd in mind as they care for it. Yes, the herd gets food, water, shelter, and free health care as needed. But it also gets sheared, neutered, dehorned, selectively bred, and those which will be expensive or impossible to be made productive are killed.

I highly recommend Rand’s book. Rand makes the case that whether we think about it or not we each have a philosophy that guides our life. The only question is what type of philosophy. Will it be rational, conscious, and therefore practical; or contradictory, unidentified, and ultimately lethal? One can make the case that failure to teach philosophy at an early age is extremely harmful to both the individual and society.

The inconsistencies of those supporting the current administration are a case in point.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Appellate Judge D. Michael Swiney

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There is no economic sliding scale for the right to engage in constitutionally protected activities. The richest and poorest among us, as well as those individuals in-between, all have the same rights under the constitution. We hold that, as the ordinance could apply to virtually any pair or group of people engaged in a common activity, the ordinance is overly broad.

Appellate Judge D. Michael Swiney
Tennessee Court of Appeal
Street preacher wins battle against Maryville permit ordinance
June 19, 2012
[This was in regards to $50 permit being required by the city of Maryville Tennessee in order to exercise your First Amendment rights in public.

Via Say Uncle who asks, “So, we should get rid of the fees associated with getting a permit to carry a firearm?”—Joe]

5.56 versus .223

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This is probably more information than you are really want to know—unless you are a gun geek. 5.56 vs .223 – What You Know May Be Wrong

The differences between .223 Remington and 5.56mm NATO have been hashed out many times on the internet. Unfortunately, many of the “facts” that are often thrown around are simply what someone has heard from someone else, leading to a lot of misinformation being accepted as gospel.

…

My findings, and the opinions of many experts in the industry who deal with the topic every day, were not exactly what some might expect. In fact, many of them had already discovered what I am reporting, although my research was conducted independently.

I liked it.

Boomershoot 2013 entry schedule

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Boomershoot 2013 will soon be open for entry. The schedule for entry is as follows. All times are Pacific Daylight time.

Staff: 6/22/2012 6:00:00 PM.
2012 participants: 6/24/2012 12:00:00 PM.
Everyone: 7/7/2012 12:00:00 PM.

The link for entry is http://entry.boomershoot.org/

If something drastically wrong shows up in the software these times could change but I probably can manually recover without starting over or disrupting the schedule above.

There are some changes I would like to bring to your attention.

1) Clinic and Field Fire Registration is done on the web site as opposed to directly with Gene Econ as has been the case in the past.

2) There is a new Boomershoot event on Friday evening: Private fireballs. For $500 you may shoot a fireball of your own at (up to) “entertainingly close” range. We will supply the rifle, ammo, and a shooting table. This is an experience suitable for even novice shooters. There will be a 7″ square target at relatively close range with a red-dot optic on a .223 caliber rifle. This will be a low recoil, easy sighting, highly exothermic experience.

If you have any questions or experience bugs using the updated entry software please let me know (joeh@boomershoot.org).

Boomershoot 2012 stats

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I’m about to update the software on the Boomershoot entry web site and reset all the data so I captured the data from the statistics page before all the information is deleted.

  Total Average per position taken Average per total positions
Positions Taken

71

–

0.93

Participants

152

2.14

2.00

Shooters

140

1.97

1.84

Spotters

12

0.17

0.16

Friday High Intensity participants

23

0.32

0.30

Saturday High Intensity participants

27

0.38

0.36

Dinner participants

112

1.58

1.47

Media/Bloggers

11

0.15

0.14

ATF Approved

15

0.21

0.20

Staff

26

0.37

0.34

The final numbers were probably a little different because of some last minute changes that didn’t get reflected on the web site but they are very close.

Quote of the day—Jeff Knox

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To date, no gun-control scheme of any sort has ever been proven to deliver even minor reductions in crime, accidents or suicides in any nation. Even if restrictions were to reduce some aspect of crime, they could not be justified because they undermine both the individual right to self-defense and the collective right to political self-determination.

Jeff Knox
June 14, 2012
Chinese plot to strip Americans of firearms–Jeff Knox explains how communist ideals converge in both Asia and U.S.
[And yet those that would ban guns keep trying. One could claim they are ignorant or have evil intent. But I think both are somewhat rare. As near as I can tell the vast majority of anti-gun people are mentally defective.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Samuel Der-Yeghiayan, United States District Court Judge

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[T]his court finds that the strict scrutiny balancing test would be the most appropriate test to apply in the instant case, since “the right to possess guns is a core enumerated constitutional right” and Section (b)(3)(iii) of the Chicago Firearm Ordinance completely restricts that right.

Samuel Der-Yeghiayan
United States District Court Judge
Gowder v. City of Chicago (N.D. Ill. June 19, 2012), Page 24.
[Strict scrutiny!

The Brady Campaign, VPC, CSGV, and others are on the wrong side of history. They are no different that those advocating for ignoring or repealing the 13th Amendment years after it was passed.—Joe]

Extraordinary offer

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Today Attorney General Eric Holder had a 20 minute meeting with Rep. Darrell Issa about the failure of Holder to comply with subpoenas for documents in Fast and Furious.


Apparently the meeting went something like this:



Issa: Turn them over or tomorrow we will hold you in contempt of congress.


Holder: I’ll let you peek at them if you will agree before you ever see them to stop the investigation after you have seen them.


Issa: I think we are done here. We’re voting on the contempt charge tomorrow.


Holder (direct quote to the media): “The ball’s in their court. We made what we thought was an extraordinary offer.”


Imagine for a moment that you or some gun shop owner had sold and/or given thousands (not the hundreds like the article erroneously says) of guns to criminal organizations who used them to murder hundreds of people include at least one if not two government agents. After finding out about it the prosecutor lets you stay out of jail and asks you a few questions and turn over documents and emails to find out who your accomplices were. You sort of comply but just enough to avoid claims that you are completely uncooperative.


Had you told the prosecutor you would turn over some more documents on the condition they stop the investigation before they ever saw the documents, what do you think the reaction would have been?


What is extraordinary here is that Issa didn’t have Federal Marshalls rip his jacket and shirt off, tie him face down on the table, stuff a copy of the subpoena in his mouth, give him 30 lashes with a bull whip, then tell him there would be a whipping every day at 9:00 AM until he fully complied or his flesh had been stripped off and his bones were polished clean.


I understand why Issa didn’t do that but had it been me I would have being showing extraordinary restraint had I only done that in the face of that level of contempt for the law and Congress. Prohibitions against “Cruel and unusual” punishments would just seem inadequate had they been able to even just read my thoughts. “Crimes against nature, humanity, and being an inspiration to Satan” would probably come up in my trial just for a glimpse of what I would have been thinking.