Author Archives: Joe

I have more work to do

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I spent a lot of time with Paul Barrett of Business Week at Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno a couple months ago.

He has another article on guns up on the web now. This time it is about guns “walking” to Mexico. It was interesting and had some information on the topic I was only dimly aware of (the extent to which the Bush administration was involved in a  similar program).

As I told him in email I still have some work to do with the words and phrases he uses. An example:

Detty, the proprietor of Mad Dawg Global Marketing in Tucson, Ariz., is a federally licensed firearm dealer who sells the high-capacity, military-style rifles at gun shows or from the living room of his Spanish colonial-style home on the outskirts of town.

“Military-style” is misleading in a derogatory manner. The original AR-15 was a civilian firearm before it modified and sold to the military as an M-16. And I’m nearly certain there have been just as many if not more AR-15 rifles sold to private citizens as the militarized version have been sold to the military. So “military-style” is inaccurate at best and at worst it is intentionally inflammatory. And what does “high-capacity” mean? Who is the arbitrator of gun accessory descriptions that gets to decide what is “high-capacity” versus “normal-capacity”? “High-capacity” is the inflammatory phrase used by the anti-gun people.

Another example:

Also working for him was the striking ineffectiveness of federal gun laws.

While technically true it again is inflammatory. What is equally true is that any law, be it federal, state, county, or city, is going to be ineffective when it tries to block the exchange the goods or services between willing parties. The country learned that lesson with Prohibition in the 1920’s, the War on Drugs for the last 30 years, and it cannot be a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that an attempted ban on firearms that were exceedingly difficult to legally define would soon be circumvented. And with a few more brain cells one would have little trouble predicting that the sales of such firearms would increase with legal restrictions against them (Forbidden fruit).

The implication of Barrett’s phrase is that if only the federal gun laws were written better or more broad they would have been more effective. Are the laws against recreational drugs effective enough for you?

If someone wants to avoid alienating a large group of people they should avoid using words and phrases that add little or nothing to the topic at hand and are offensive to those same people. I don’t think I’m just being a little thin skinned. Those words and phrases are the same words and phrases used by our political enemies who on a daily basis attempt to restrict and eliminate the exercise of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It would be like invoking images of male sexual predators of little boys while advocating prison sentences for consensual homosexuals. It’s misleading and inflammatory with the sole purpose of denying a specific enumerate right (freedom of association in the case of homosexuals).

Update: Forest/trees. Regardless of the inflammatory phrasing it is a very good thing that the bungling and illegal acts of the ATF are getting mainstream media attention.

The dark ages

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It’s sort of a meme with Tamara leading the way followed by Say Uncle and Sebastian.

Tamara is correct as far as she goes but doesn’t get into how dark things were on the political side. For a more complete story read my “From the archives” tagged posts (ignore the post with the picture of the beautiful woman). Here are some samples:

I think — you know, we can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles…

Bill Clinton
March 1, 1993

And we should — then every community in the country could then start doing major weapon sweeps and then destroying the weapons, not selling them.

Bill Clinton
October 1, 1993

Banning guns is an idea whose time has come.

U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden
November 18, 1993

Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein
November 18, 1993

We’re here to tell the NRA their nightmare is true!. We’re going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We’re going to beat guns into submission!

U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer
November 30, 1993

If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it.

Diane Feinstein
February 5, 1995

If this is a topic of serious interest then you must read The Gun Rights War for the view from the trenches during those days and before. It was very clear that the dark ages were upon us. The lies and broken agreements of our opponents were ignored by the general public. The forces of evil merely cackled and thought us fools to believe the truth and principles would be sufficient to slow let alone stop or reverse them.

Quote of the day—John/az

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When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it’s yellow…

John/az
From his signature line on a The Firing Line post May 4, 2000.
[Via a link from Tamara.—Joe]

Some things I don’t want to know

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I’m surprised the researchers were able to get answers they believed were correct:

Men who have sex with animals may have an increased risk of penile cancer, a study finds.

…

As for the kinds of animals the men had sex with, mares were the most common, followed by donkeys, mules, goats, chickens, calves, cows, dogs, sheep and pigs.

“Chickens”? I sort of wonder, “How?” But I don’t want anyone to tell me. There are some images which can’t be unseen even if they were only in your imagination.

Although it does remind me of the difference between “kinky” and “perverted”. “Kinky” is when you use a feather. “Perverted” is when you use the whole bird.

Posted in Sex

Quote of the day—BitterB

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I find it interesting that not a *single* member of the opposition to HR822 named the @bradybuzz position as a reason to oppose the bill.

Bloomberg was mentioned by many, but @bradybuzz seems to have become politically irrelevant.

BitterB
November 16, 2011 in two Tweets: here and here.
In regards to the debate over HR822, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act.
[And The Brady Campaign should be politically irrelevant. The KKK and similar anti-civil rights organizations are no longer relevant are they?

Their “membership” is non-existent, their donations are in the tank, and now important people don’t listen to them. They should just give it up, change their names, and rejoin civilized society.—Joe]

I thought they wanted national licensing

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John Lott makes a great point:

For decades, treating licenses for guns like those for cars was something that gun control advocates wanted.

And now that congress is debating making states honor other states concealed carry licenses, just like drivers and marriage licenses, gun control advocates are about to have aneurisms.

I say let them have their aneurisms. As crazy, irrational, and inconsistent as they already are the extra brain damage probably wouldn’t be noticed anyway.

Security theater must make people stupid

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David Perera must have gone through the scanner a few too many times and his brain turned into crap. He claims that just because someone has a security clearance that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to go through airport security without being subjected to TSA scrutiny:

First, if the ability to go through the expedited line is given to all secret holders regardless of the purpose of their travel, clearance holders would be the recipient of an unfair perk relative to the rest of society. Clearance holders receive access to classified documents – not a badge that permits them to cut in line at the gas station, take 20 items through the 15-item supermarket checkout line or buy 3.2 beer in an Arkansas convenience store on a Sunday.

Just what does he think TSA security is for? It’s not a line at a gas station.

I kept expecting him to explain that the only purpose TSA serves is to harass and desensitize people to illegal searches. If some people don’t go through the desensitization process then TSA effectiveness is drastically reduced. After all, TSA has been insisting that pilots and the rest of the flight crew be searched so what purpose could that serve other than desensitization? Do they think that unless they search the pilot for box cutters he would be able to hijack the plane he was already flying?

But that doesn’t appear to be the case. As near as I can tell he really believes what he says. I can only conclude he has crap for brains. I expect that soon he will insist Air Marshals also go though TSA screening. After all their badges don’t enable them to take 20 items through the 15-item supermarket checkout line either.

Quote of the day—Aesop

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Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Aesop
[It is also true that any excuse will serve those that enable tyrants. Here are some of the many I have come across:

  • It’s for the children.
  • No one needs one of those.
  • It’s an ASSAULT weapon!
  • It’s a collective, not an individual, right.
  • The Brady Act works. It has blocked XX million gun sales. (Never mind that no measurable increase in safety has occurred. The mere fact that sales have been blocked is proof of success.)
  • Road rage will become gun fights.
  • Assault clips can hold 30, 50, or even 100 rounds!
  • 32 rounds in just 16 seconds!
  • States and cities should be allowed to make their own laws.
  • The Federal government must do it because many states have lax laws.

It’s interesting how there are truths which appear to be universal yet people never learn.—Joe]

Selling your daughter

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Some people are real lowlifes:

A Salt Lake City woman is accused of trying to sell her 13-year-old daughter’s virginity for $10,000.

The woman’s boyfriend reported the alleged plot to police after finding text messages on the woman’s phone detailing negotiations with a man identified only as “Don,” said Salt Lake County prosecutor Sim Gill.

The woman, 32, had promised Don that her daughter would perform oral sex and other sex acts in exchange for $10,000 and later confessed the deal to police, Gill said.

Had I been the (soon to be ex-) boyfriend I would have been inclined to let the woman overhear the daughter and I “arranging” to sell one or maybe both of the mother’s kidneys as we waited for the police to show up.

Posted in Sex

Back to work

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Wife Barbara went back to work on Saturday after breaking her ankle in August.

At the end of the day her ankle was sore but she went off to work again yesterday. She has today and tomorrow off but starts her regular schedule of six days on, eight days off again on Wednesday.

It was tough leaving her behind in Idaho yesterday. It was really nice living together full time again but we have our duty to support all those other people who need the time to camp out in the parks and protest people having more money than them so it’s back to work for us.

In somewhat related news Ry drove his van to Idaho this weekend to deliver stuff for Boomershoot I had purchased in the Seattle area. Life is always an adventure when riding with Ry and this weekend was no different. This was the drive across the field to the new explosives production site:

The first voice you hear is mine. The laughter is Barron, who gave Ry QOTD status for that little adventure. The last voice is son-in-law Caleb.

I rode back to the Seattle area with Ry yesterday. We had the left front tire blow out on the van while on I-90. It was a very interesting hole in the tire. We had never seen anything like this before:

We got the limited service spare put on without getting hit by another vehicle and limped on in to Ellensburg, Since it was Sunday all the tire shops were closed. Ry paid the $100 to get someone to open up the Ellensburg Tire Center on Sunday and we arrived back in the Seattle area about 18:30 after leaving Idaho at 09:30. That was a nine hour journey that usually takes only five hours.

It could have been worse. On the way to Idaho Barb and I were a few minute ahead of Ry and had stop and go traffic over snow covered Snoqualmie pass on I-90. We weaved our way around the stopped, crosswise, and even backward facing cars, RVs, and trucks. Ry, probably less than 10 minutes behind us, found the pass closed. After it was opened up again he was an hour behind us.

Barb and I had bare and wet and even bare and dry conditions the rest of the way to Idaho. Ry had black ice:

Boomershoot 2012 prep

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Saturday son-in-law Caleb, Barron, Ry and I did some more prep for Boomershoot 2012.

Ry has pictures and an overview. Barron has a bit more.

I was tempted to make Ry’s comment just before we left Mecca my QOTD, “I’m doing you a favor.” Barron said he agreed with that sentiment then Ry threw my 8″ crescent wrench over the hill. Sunday morning Ry gave me three new crescent wrenches in various sizes and told me they had lifetime warranties and to take them back if I ever had problems with them.

There is still a lot of work to be done. I had hoped to get the solar panel operational but we didn’t quite get there. There is still more wiring to do but most importantly the pole it mounts on needs to be secured to the shipping container with something more than zip-ties.

Protestors—but just barely

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The headlines say, “Local gun show brings out protesters” and “Protesters fired up about Yakima gun show”. Technically they are correct–but just barely. As near as I could determine there were only three protestors who showed up. They were probably outnumbered 50:1 by the tables at the gun show.

Anti-gun people are members of a dying cult.

Quote of the day—Dr. Tim Ball

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There are several misconceptions about CO2, most created because proponents tried to prove the hypothesis rather than the normal scientific practice of disproof.

Dr. Tim Ball
November 9, 2011
Whether It Is Warming or Climate Change, It Cannot be the CO2.
[There is lots of other interesting data in this post. As Ry summarized when telling me about this, “North America and Europe are net absorbers of CO2. South America and Africa are net producers. And it’s all due to natural causes. Human CO2 production is in the noise of measurement error of the natural sources.”

Beyond the point the CO2/global-warming/climate-change fraud I wanted to point out that the “normal scientific practice of disproof” is what has been tripping up the anti-gun people. Their hypothesis that gun control will decrease crime is so easy to disprove that they expose themselves as a religious faith. Their deeply held beliefs persist in the absence of and in despite of evidence. I have no problem with them exercising their First Amendment rights to exercise the the religion of their choice but they do not have the right, nor should they have the power, to force others to worship the same god(s) they do.

If you only need a couple of talking point so to put them in their place point out that since the gun ban in Washington D.C. was thrown out the number of murders (the murder rate would be lower still) has dropped to the lowest in 46 years. Since the gun ban in Chicago was overthrown the number of murders is the lowest in at least 20 years. The gun bans reduce crime hypothesis cannot survive exposure to the normal scientific practice of disproof. This has been well known since at least the mid-1980s when Rossi and Wright published their book.

The Brady Campaign, The Violence Policy Center, and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are nothing more than fading religious cults whose beliefs have killed tens of thousands of people and put millions of lives at risk. They are no more credible and should be given no more political voice than a cult advocating castration to reach an alien spacecraft.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeffery D. Sachs

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The new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption.

…

Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.

Jeffery D. Sachs
Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
November 13, 2011
The New Progressive Movement
[As SebastianSH said, “This is a lot of crap.” First off, our current economic situation is not due to insufficient “progressive politics” (actually Marxism is very old and hence regressive, Libertarianism would better be called “progressive” and/or “liberal” but left-speak requires that words be redefined to suit their purposes). It is the result of progressive politics.

Second, “social media” and the Internet in general tends shine the light of truth and the progressive rats and sidewalk scum wither in that light.

Third, the corruption in Washington is because Washington has the power to pick winners and losers. As long as the power exists there will be people and companies who find it necessary to see that power is exercised in their favor or at least not used against them. It will only be by the elimination of that power, as the Constitution was intended and written, that the corruption will fade.

What Jeffery D. Sachs advocates will only make the problems worse. Just read New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America to get a clue. But even if given motivation with a clue-by-four Sachs will probably always remain clueless.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeff Knox

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The emperor truly has no clothes in the gun control debate and the more that is pointed out, the more people will see the truth.

Jeff Knox
July-August 2011, Volume 8, Issue 4 The Hard Corps Knox Report
[I think this was a critical item in turning the tide in the mid and late 1990’s. The Internet made getting the point out about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-gun movement easier and overcame the MSM bias. It’s like that famous Hunter S. Thompson quote, “With the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”—Joe]

Quote of the day—Andrew Rosenthal

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I want to be clear: the New York Times editorial board does not oppose gun ownership. We believe the Second Amendment confers a communal right on Americans to own guns – not an individual one. But that’s actually a smaller point than you might think. All we really want are sensible restrictions based on public safety and common sense. I wrote about our position in April, 2009 on our website. You can read it there, but I’ll summarize it here.

Go ahead, buy a gun. Use it to hunt, for target practice, in a collection, or in case you need to defend your home. Just register it and submit to a background check. If you live in a city, then your political leaders have the right to restrict ownership of handguns. In cities, they tend to be used to kill people.

Andrew Rosenthal
November 8, 2011
The Gun Lobby and Military Suicides
[This is so full fail that I could write thousands of words about it. But I don’t have the time and the people in the comments did a pretty fair job and raking him over the coals.

I’ll just give an overview.

Since all nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices disagree with the individual right issue what Rosenthal and the NYT editorial board thinks only has political implications and very few legal implications.

The very words he uses demonstrates he is essentially living in a different universe. We don’t have “political leaders”. We have public servants. Our servants do not have “rights” to regulate anything. They have delegated powers given to them by the people via the U.S., and state constitutions. When our servants start demanding we give up firearms and beg permission from them to own what is a specific enumerated right it is quite clear to me they have either forgotten they are servants or that they intend to change the relationship.

Yes. Handguns are sometimes used to kill people. Sometimes deadly force needs to be legally exercised and sometimes people get killed. Get over it.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Richard Feldman

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This book is dedicated to Harlon B. Carter, the man responsible for saving the Second Amendment freedoms for generations of Americans during a time in our country when gun ownership was on the road to extermination as a cherished and fundamental right. Equally important are the tens of thousands of local activists who make the “gun lobby” the true grassroots dynamo that it is. Money doesn’t vote, people vote, or as we said in the sixties, “Power to the people” and, I should add, “away from the elites, wherever they dwell.” I think Thomas Jefferson would have approved.

Richard Feldman
2008
Dedication to Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist
[This is a very nice start to the book.

Think about the “Power to the people” phrase. And remember what Chairman Mao said, “Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Private ownership of firearms is the ultimate power in the hands of the people. Yet nearly all communists and socialists who advocate “power to the people” in the U.S. today are opposed to private gun ownership. Why is that?

Could it be they don’t really want power in the hands of “the people”? I think what they really want is power in the hands of their people and want to remove power from those that oppose them.

Communism and socialism is not about “power to the people”. Those political systems are about government having a huge power advantage over the individual. “Power to the people”? No. Not at all. That isn’t what they really want. But no one has ever accused the political left of being consistent.

Thank you Richard for sending me an autographed copy. More later when I finish it. Not all of my review is going to be positive though. I’ve already got notes that are “not happy thoughts”.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Barbara Scott

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I want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. Entropy sucks.

Barbara Scott
November 9, 2011
[This was after she asked me, “Why do things always have to happen?” This was in regards to some potential changes in her job that were going to require extra work on her part to at least adapt and has the potential to put pressure on us to sell our house in Idaho.

I explained that one of the laws of physics is that things always go to a more lower energy, more random, state and that energy input is required to maintain things in a high energy ordered state. This law of physics applies to life in general and not just physics.

She did not dispute my answer but she wasn’t pleased with it either.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Phil Tagami

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They took a few steps forward and I racked the shotgun and they left. It’s sort of the universal ‘Don’t come any farther’ sign.

Phil Tagami
November 3, 2011
Oakland developer Phil Tagami keeps protesters at bay — with a shotgun
Background:

About eight men and women dressed in black, faces covered in bandannas and armed with hammers, sticks and poles had just barged down the doors of Oakland’s landmark Rotunda Building — with another dozen behind them — when they were turned back by a tenant with a shotgun and an attitude.

…

Tagami said he phoned the mayor’s office and began communicating with senior staff around 10:45 p.m. voicing his concerns. Yet police were nowhere in sight, he said.

At around 11 p.m., a group of protesters began forcing the glass front doors back and forth before they opened partially. Before they could move much further, Tagami lifted his shotgun. He insists he did not point the gun at anyone, just positioned it in front of him and cocked it.

After the group cleared out, Tagami continued checking in with the mayor’s office and at 12:14 a.m., the assistant city manager phoned to tell him the police were moving in.

[Via email from Rob.

Also worthy of note is that they did 100’s of thousands of dollars in damage to the exterior of the building.

Also applicable are the following observations:

I do have to give the police some benefit of the doubt. A single patrol car and officer could have easily been taken out by a mob of that size and nature. It probably calls for a large group of police or else sniper fire from a few blocks away. Approval for sniper fire isn’t going to be given by that mayor at this time and assembling and deploying the riot police is going to take some time. 90 minutes may not have been out of line.—Joe]

Forbidden fruit

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Sebastian has the info on the most recent incident where banning something made it more popular that ever.

I’ve posted about this type of thing before.

The people that enact rules and laws like this apparently don’t have children or weren’t paying attention when they were growing up. When I was helping the kids buy Christmas presents for their mom (~20 years ago) I would put the packages in the car and never mention the contents again. They never told their mom what she was getting for Christmas. On the other hand Barb will repeatedly remind them all the way home and again as they entered the house, “Don’t tell Daddy what he is getting for Christmas!” They would burst through the door and run the length of the house and tell me what I was getting before Barb could get the packages into the house.

Sebastian speculates, ‘Americans, I believe, also possess the same “character that reacts against the hectoring and bossiness of officialdom,” as their British cousins.’ While correct, that characteristic well extends beyond Brits and Americans.

I thought nearly everyone had heard of Eve, the Garden of Eden, and forbidden fruit.