what the fuck do you need to be carrying around a gun for?
You have to go to Starbucks with the dick you have, rather than the dick you wish you had.
Ash Can
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
I suspect even with a civilization with our level of technology and capacity for building durable shelter that nearly everyone would be dead in a few days should something like this happened. But man, what a ride if you could manage it:
Planets in tight orbits around stars that get ejected from our galaxy may actually themselves be tossed out of the Milky Way at blisteringly fast speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour, or a fraction of the speed of light, a new study finds.
Today I brought a couple rifles back to the Seattle area for cleaning and preparation for Boomershoot. I call my place “The Clock Tower”.
As I was climbing the stairs with my cased rifles and openly carried pistol on my hip I wondered what the response would be if someone in this liberal enclave saw me as I was lugging the precision rifles up the stairs. Should I hurry inside to reduce the time they have to figure out the contents of the cases? Should I stop and chat with them and invite them to the range or maybe even Boomershoot?
In either case will the friendly neighborhood SWAT team pay me a visit early tomorrow morning?
Somehow I doubt people lugging books or political signs up the stairs worry about the quite the same things I do. As long as people carrying books or guns into their home worry about the police breaking down their doors in the early morning hours we have more work to do.
Lethality is the nicotine of the gun industry. Even more than the tobacco companies, firearm manufacturers have been shielded from public scrutiny and exempt from health and safety laws that govern other products.
Tom Diaz
January 20, 1999
[“Shielded from public scrutiny and exempt from health and safety laws? Do the rights protected by the First Amendment have a Federal Agency devoted to the regulation of them? Do you need to pass a background check before you can purchase a book on religion?
Are you required take a class and get a license before you are allowed to vote? But what is more dangerous? A few million people carrying handguns in public or a Joseph Stalin implementing his progressive political views? Diaz is not only has his facts wrong he doesn’t even have a clue about the dangers facing humanity.—Joe]
Today Ry, Barron, and I finished our first day of NROI training at the Lewiston Pistol Club. Ry and I figured we had driven the furthest since we came from the Seattle area. But it turns out someone else had driven from Winnemucca, NV. Even without him we would have had to share the title with another guy from the Seattle area (Bellevue).
I have been operating on about five hours of sleep each night for the last several days so I came home and took a nap while others were doing their homework.
I’m awake again and now it’s time for me to do my homework.
It is a shame that we are still a species that feels comfortable, even celebrates, an instrument built solely to maim or kill. We are, after all, the same species that believes in persuasion and reason and has seen the efficacy of nonviolent movements. Yet ending tyranny and oppression and defending life and liberty still seem to require firearms.
John Yemma
March 12, 2012
Guns and freedom: the American paradox
[For the Christian Science Monitor it’s actually a pretty favorable opinion. My impression is that Yemma in transition from an anti-gun position to something neutral or even positive. He sees the tragedy of firearms misuse but recognizes that at least in worst case situations they are necessary.
We need to keep coming out of the closet and showing the benefits of gun ownership. It’s fun, it decreases crime, and it is a deterrent to tyranny.—Joe]
To be sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But the experience of Colorado State and DC should come as no surprise. By now there’s so much evidence that higher rates of gun ownership lead to lower rates of crime that it isn’t hard to fathom why fewer and fewer Americans want to ban handguns.
Jeff Jacoby
March 21, 2012
A safer society with guns
[Via David Hardy.
As David said, “It’s staggering that the Boston Globe ran this.”
We need to continue the mop up operations in many places but at this time it is just pockets of resistance that need to be cleaned up. They will scream, yell that the blood will run in the streets, and fight us as best they can but their current strategy and tactics is a losing game plan. Their only hope is to change their approach and I don’t see anything that has a reasonable chance of working. Only terrorist operations have any chance at all against us and I can’t see that working without other, extreme, complicating factors coincidently aligning in such a way as to be enable them.
On the other hand it is easy to imagine we eventually will have constitutional carry everywhere in this country.—Joe]
BrainBang.info is a blog about guns and psychology. It is brand new and already has some interesting and clever stuff. Here are some tidbits:
If the content keeps coming this will be good.
New Yorkers surrender their weapons for the good of all or face jail time.
…
Jerome and Graves pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and were sent back to states where the right to own a gun can trump the right to live.
New York Daily News
March 31, 2012
District Attorney Cy Vance deserves praise for pursuing gun cases–New York City is the wrong place for unlicensed weapons
[If surrendering weapons was for the good of all then why don’t the police do it?
You don’t have a right to live. That would imply someone could be forced to provide you food, shelter, and medical care. As always when someone says something is a right the first thing you should ask is, “At whose expense?”
What the New York Daily News ignores or is oblivious of is that you do have a right to defend yourself and that all members of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed there is a right to keep and bear arms. I expect their ignorance will be forcibly ended by the courts within a few years. Whoever wrote that opinion piece will then be dragged, screaming and kicking, into the 21st Century just as the KKK supporters had to be forced into respecting the rights of black in the 20th Century.—Joe]
Generally speaking, it isn’t “progressive” to want to repeal the Industrial Revolution.
Ken
March 18, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day–Helen Caldicott.
[But “progressives” aren’t progressive. They yearn to implement a proven failed political and economic system invented over 150 years ago. Perhaps it’s a mere coincidence but the rise of Marxism marked the end of the Industrial Revolution. “Progressivism” is the propagation of a lie that people desperately want to believe:
Therefore when a “progressive” wants to “repeal the Industrial Revolution” they are just being true to their nature.–Joe]
[W]hen a government has the ability to forbid gun ownership, it has the ability to render groups it dislikes helpless to defend themselves. Regardless of whether modern gun control accomplishes its purpose of reducing crime — and for the record, there is no evidence it does — a free society should fear a government with such power.
Robert Verbruggen
July 7, 2010
Gun Rights Are Civil Rights
[Via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.
For those so ignorant, stupid, or evil to claim “that can’t happen here” remind them it has happened here. Verbruggen explicitly points out that the end of slavery but the continuing repression of blacks in the deep south continued for many years was enabled by gun control. And don’t forget about all the people of Japanese descent who were sent to concentration camps in this country.
It can happen anywhere and therefore most restrictions on firearms must be eliminated. Gun control fails my Jews in the Attic Test.—Joe]
As I have posted before I have had some problems with my blog crashing and had to make some serious changes in an effort to get the problem fixed. It was down starting about 4:40 (PDT) this morning until about 2:00 this afternoon.
One of the changes was a change in the IP address. If you have a DNS cache with the old value you will still see unexpected results. So if works from one computer but not another flush the DNS cache (reboot works) and it probably will fix the problem.
I’ve written programs to securely wipe your hard disk upon your command. I wrote a prototype ‘virus’ that wiped your newly installed hard disk on the first boot even if you had removed all previous disks, CDs, DVDs, and thumb drives. I have reduced permanent storage devices to their molecular components.
But to the best of my knowledge (if I wiped my own brain would I know?) I have never wiped a human brain clean of memories before:
While sex can be forgettable or mind-blowing, for some people, it can quite literally be both at the same time. The woman, whose case was reported in the September issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine, was experiencing transient global amnesia, a rare condition in which memory suddenly, temporarily, disappears.
I guess I’ll have to just keep trying.
Life isn’t fair. I reached this conclusion when I realized women get 24×7 access to breasts and can have multiple/continuous orgasms. Now there is coregasms:
Women may not need a guy, a vibrator, or any other direct sexual stimulation to have an orgasm, finds a new study on exercise-induced orgasms and sexual pleasure.
The findings add qualitative and quantitative data to a field that has been largely unstudied, according to researcher Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. For instance, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues first reported the phenomenon in 1953, saying that about 5 percent of women they had interviewed mentioned orgasm linked to physical exercise. However, they couldn’t know the actual prevalence because most of these women volunteered the information without being directly asked.
Since then, reports of so-called “coregasms,” named because of their seeming link to exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, according to the researchers.
Sometimes I think the only reason they keep us around is to provide them with food, shelter, and something to taunt.
Via Sebastian and Glen Beck this morning:
“Every day, every school, every level… Every day of the week and really brainwash people.”
This is who we have as the Attorney General of the United States. He apparently interprets “The rule of law” as “When I am the law I rule regardless of the Bill of Rights”.
Is it any surprise he is running guns to Mexico so he blame it on gun dealers?
I dunno, thinking about standing around waiting for your coffee and having to witness what happens to the banana in the process of being turned into a frappuccino, I can understand why some guys might want a little symbolic reinforcement.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
Solomon Friedman explains to House of Commons (Canada) how gun control, registration in particular, is “crime control theater”:
I’ve not heard the phrase “crime control theater” before but I really like it.
I took a quiz on the 2nd Amendment and got 11 out of 12 answers correct. I missed one history related question that I guessed on. It shouldn’t be too surprising that I missed a history question. I much prefer shaping and even creating the future rather than documenting the past.
The quiz was very well done. They even got the wording on things like “The 2nd Amendment protects the right…” rather than “grants the right”.
I especially liked one option for the question, “What did the Supreme Court decide in the 2008 case?”:
Bank robbers, drug dealers, and mob enforcers must be given an opportunity to register their firearms with local authorities and then become eligible for a professional discount on licensing fees.
As long as I’m above ground and I’m not getting rained on I’m doing great. Everything else is just gravy.
Ry Jones
March 17, 2012
[Ry was explaining to me how he kept his spirits up when unemployed for eight months and his financial situation grew worse and worse.
As I posted a few weeks ago Ry is now working at the same place I am and he is now on his road to recovery.—Joe]
The Taliban position on peace is clear and unchanging; it would behead Americans wherever it found them.
Wesley Pruden
March 16, 2012
PRUDEN: A curious experiment in gun control in Afghanistan
[Yeah. That pretty much sums up my appraisal of the situation too.
With a little further inspection I realized this position isn’t all that much different than what anti-gun people have in mind for gun owners:
If a kid in a red state finds his daddy’s handgun and blows his head off, we’ll feel terrible (we’re like that), but we’ll try to look on the bright side: At least he won’t grow up to vote like his dad.
—Joe]