Author Archives: Joe

A challenge

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Here’s a challenge for you. Explain inherent, inalienable, rights and extend the concept to the right to keep in bear arms.

Oh, and do it via a few Tweets to someone opposed to gun ownership.

Here is my attempt:

Quote of the day—Ted Nugent

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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]

Quote of the day—Cliff Schecter

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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.

Cliff Schecter
July 15, 2012
Fraudulent and fictitious
Congress’ latest vote is another example of political nihilism – this time with Democrat support.
[Let me translate: Argumentum ad hominem is the best he can do. And, no surprise, he has a history of this when it comes to the NRA.

But what do you expect from a bigot? 300+ dead Mexicans, as planned by this administration (H/T Kevin and Robb), just don’t matter to them or Schecter.—Joe]

Quote of the day—James Q. Wilson

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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.

I need a new frontier.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Is it really that funny?

Both of the new shooters this week asked me, “How many guns do you have?” They both laughed when I truthfully said, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know how many computers, shirts, or pencils I have either.

Quote of the day—Timothy A Campbell‏

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If shooting paper silhouettes of people is not murder, then looking at porn is not adultery.

Timothy A Campbell‏
July 13, 2012 Tweet
[This Internet thing exposes the crazies in the anti-gun crowd.

With the intellectual capacity of our opponents at this level it’s no wonder we are winning.—Joe]

New shooters report

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I had not fired a gun since March and then this week I had two new shooters to take to the range.

The first new shooter was Maggie who went last night:

IMG_0294_Web20120712IMG_0292_Web20120712

This was after shooting about 40 rounds. Nice group!

After about 80 rounds I gave her an USPSA target:

Tonight it was Julie’s turn. Julie is the daughter of this new shooter I took to the range nearly three years ago:

IMG_0340_Web20120713IMG_0356_Web20120713

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.

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

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How many times must Bloomberg be told to keep his own house in order before he runs around complaining about the rest of the country?

Alan Gottlieb
CCRKBA Chairman
July 13, 2012
BLOOMBERG NEEDS TO PLUG POLICE LOCKER ROOM LOOPHOLE, SAYS CCRKBA
[I understand Gottlieb was asking a rhetorical question but I’m going to treat it as if it were serious.

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.

The more appropriate questions are:

—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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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.

Quote of the day—Leland Yee

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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]

Economic lesson

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Today’s lesson is in supply and demand via inspiration from Tam.

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 result via Northwest Grain Growers:

SoftWhitePrice20120711

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.

Didn’t he get the memo?

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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.

Quote of the day—Wayne LaPierre

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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.

Wayne LaPierre
July 11, 2012
Wayne LaPierre Fights for the Second Amendment Before the United Nations
[He apparently didn’t explicitly tell the UN this so I’ll say it for him. The UN can have my guns when they reanimate their cold dead hands.—Joe]

Gun Blogger Rendezvous

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I’m in the process of registering and making my hotel reservations for GBR VII.

It is a great event with opportunities to meet great people outside of the blogosphere in addition to all the gun bloggers. I always have a good time and I’m looking forward to attending again.

Quote of the day—Motor-T

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I always thought it was odd to describe capitalism as a system. Nobody arranged capitalism, or put it into place. Capitalism is the name for what happens (economically) when people are left alone.

Motor-T
July 6, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—John Aziz
[It gets even weirder when people start whining about the government “forcing freedom” and the CIA “forcing free trade” on people. I have to conclude there is some sort of cognitive distortion going on. Either that or these people have more than few pages in their dictionaries filled in by two-year olds with crayons.—Joe]

Web anonymity

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It’s tough to be anonymous on the web but there are some things you can do to improve your situation. Here is a mini-review of Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers. An provider that doesn’t keep logs can help keep even the most determined stalker from getting a clue of which city you live in from your web presence.

Quote of the day—MarilynManson

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It seems like any comment about gun safety issues and you get NRA morons crying about gun control and throwing a hissing fit claiming someone is trying to take away their manhood.

MarilynManson
August 26, 2010
Comment to Md. GOP says gun shot broke campaign office window.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Thomas Sowell

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Fallacies abound in economic policies affecting everything from housing to international trade. Where the unintended consequences of these policies take years to unfold, the effects may not be traced back to their causes by many people. Even when the bad consequences follow closely after a given policy, many people may not connect the dots, and advocates of policies that backfire often attribute these bad consequences to something else. Sometimes they claim that the bad situation would have been even worse if it had not been for the wonderful policies they advocated.


There are many reasons why fallacies have staying power, even in the face of hard evidence against them. Elected officials, for example, cannot readily admit that some policy or program that they advocated, perhaps with great fanfare, has turned out badly, without risking their whole careers. Similarly for leaders of various causes and movements. Even intellectuals or academics with tenure stand to lose prestige and suffer embarrassment when their notions turn out to be counterproductive. Others who think of themselves as supporters of things that will help the less fortunate would find it painful to confront evidence that they have in fact made the less fortunate worse off than before. In other words, evidence is too dangerous— politically, financially and psychologically— for some people to allow it to become a threat to their interests or to their own sense of themselves.


Thomas Sowell
Economic Facts and Fallacies: Second Edition Economic Facts and Fallacies: Second Edition page 2.
[See also When Prophecy Fails or my website by the same name for a quick overview.


I expect that most of those that read my blog will see the applicability of the above to our current political situation.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Steven Den Beste

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Way back in the depths of time, Greek philosophers ended up with two basic and incompatible ways of looking at the universe. One way was materialism, which says that there is a material universe which behaves in a consistent way, and if you study it you can learn the way it works.

That’s the world view of engineers and scientists — and businessmen, for that matter. It’s the world view of people who understand and use mathematics, and statistics. It is a place where cause leads to effect. It’s the place that game theory studies. It isn’t necessarily inherently atheistic; a lot of religious people live in the materialist world.

But there are people who don’t. A different epistemological view is teleology, which says that the universe is an ideal place. More or less, it exists so that we humans can live in it. And human thought is a fundamental force in the universe. Teleology says that if a mental model is esthetically pleasing then it must be true. Teleology implies that if you truly believe in something, it’ll happen.

Steven Den Beste
December 6, 2009
Government by Wishful Thinking
[H/T to wfgodbold in the comment to A process failure.

As I have said before (and here, here, and here) our opponents have a “currency” which is emotionally based. I find the dealings in this currency perplexing and frequently repugnant. But what is scary to me is the number of people that advocate this currency, deal in this currency, and hold great political power.—Joe]

Armageddon never happened

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Via a pointer from David Hardy I found John Lott’s article in the Maryland Law Review.

Lott discusses strict and intermediate scrutiny and what it means to Right-To-Carry laws and concludes the same thing as I did last month. Those proposing more, or even retaining, restrictions on firearms are going to have a very tough time meeting the threshold to overcome a 2nd Amendment challenge:

Under “strict scrutiny,” a regulation will only be upheld if it “furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” While government might regulate how guns may be carried, it seems doubtful that it can completely ban the “bearing,” or carrying, of guns. Whether such regulations must meet the same strict scrutiny test as regulations of other “fundamental” rights or a lesser standard of intermediate scrutiny, a balancing test is necessary. In the case of concealed carry laws restricting the right to carry a concealed gun in public, however, gun control proponents face a heavy burden.

That is, the governmental goal must be something crucial and there cannot be other less restrictive means of accomplishing the same goal. Intermediate scrutiny is an easier to meet standard where, as Judge Legg writes: “the government’s interest must be ‘significant,’ ‘substantial,’ or ‘important,’ . . . and the ‘fit’ between the challenged regulation and the asserted objective must be reasonable, though not perfect.”

The problem for the anti-gun people is that:

As Carlisle Moody and his co-authors recently summarized the literature: That is ultimately an empirical question. The only difference between “compelling” and “important” is how large that drop has to be before the regulation is allowed. In addition, under either standard, gun control advocates must show that there are not other ways of accomplishing the reduction in crime.

There have been a total of 29 peer reviewed studies by economists and criminologists, 18 supporting the hypothesis that shall-issue laws reduce crime, 10 not finding any significant effect on crime, including the NRC report, and [Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang]’s paper, using a different model and different data, finding that right-to-carry laws temporarily in-crease one type of violent crime, aggravated assaults.

With only one study out of 29 supporting the thesis of the anti-gun position what are they going to do?

Well, of course they will do exactly what they have been doing since right-to-carry came up as a legislative agenda and they continued to do even in 2008 and 2010 with the Heller and McDonald decisions:

Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Washington, D.C., in 2008 and Chicago in 2010. These were the Heller and McDonald decisions that divided the Supreme Court in close five-to-four votes.

Politicians predicted disaster. “[M]ore handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the Court announced its decision.  In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley predicted that we would “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets.” Similarly, the New York Times editorialized about the Supreme Court’s “wrongheaded” Heller decision.

The results were no surprise to us:

But Armageddon never happened. Data released for Chicago and Washington shows that murder and gun crime rates didn’t soar, they didn’t even rise after the gun bans were eliminated—they plummeted. In fact, Chicago and Washington’s crime rates have fallen much more than the national crime rate.

I expect the anti-gun people stuck their fingers in their ears and are yelling “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” As tough as might be to imagine they have a reality distortion field that warps reality for them almost as much as a black hole warps space and time. Like black holes those inside the reality distortion fields cannot seem to escape the hold on them, there isn’t much we can do to help them, and they release toxic radiation as they evaporate.

The major difference is that even though they are distributed throughout the population we are getting to the point where we can essentially ignore them and you can’t ignore a nearby black hole.