Author Archives: Joe

Quote of the day—Bruce Schneier

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Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.

An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They’re afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism — or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity — they will be branded as “soft on terror.” And they’re afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they’re right, but what has happened to leaders who aren’t afraid? What has happened to “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?

An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers’ inability to take that kind of stand — and their inability to truly lead.

Bruce Schneier
December 2, 2010
Close the Washington Monument
[Alan also has a QOTD from Schneier. 

A few years ago Barb and I visited the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. I was appalled at what we had to go through in order to get in. It was airplane security theater. What??? Do they think someone is going to hijack it and fly it into skyscraper?—Joe]

Quote of the day—American Mercenary

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So the gun control advocates, 2/3rds evil, 1/3 stupid. I would say full evil except that there are some gun control advocates who are able to learn, so not all of the ignorance is willful. Still, evil must be opposed.

American Mercenary
December 1, 2010
Evil or Stupid?
[I’m not sure I agree with this. If you read the analysis you will find that, according to him it boils it down to willful ignorance being evil.

I think before resolving this question one has to define evil. If it is defined as intentionally doing harm we will arrive at a different conclusion than if we were to agree that evil means the results are harmful and/or injurious regardless of intent.

But the end result is the same. Even if they have the best of intentions gun control advocates are harmful and must be opposed.

How we oppose the gun control advocate must be tailored to the advocate. Someone who obviously lies and misrepresents facts can be safely exposed as evil. But labeling the willful ignorance of someone with the best of intentions and perhaps the loss of an innocent loved one in their background as evil is probably going to do more damage than good.—Joe]

Decades of legal silence

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From Portland Oregon:

The mayor said the new laws break nearly two decades of what he termed “legal silence” and “legislative silence” on gun control laws to help reduce homicides and assaults in the city.

Adams noted that 4 out of 10 homicides in the city are committed with guns.

He says “legal and legislative silence” as if it were a bad thing. What if he were talking about blacks/Jews/homosexuals instead of gun ownership? The mayor should be politically skewered for this infringement just as severely as if he had pushed through laws aimed specifically at people with different colored skin who happened to commit some high percentage of the homicides.

Good intentions are not sufficient reason to infringe upon a specific enumerated right.

Disconnect from reality

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I’m not sure if this is a disconnect from reality or just yet another example of a process failure:

What I think we should do is regulate the price of bullets.  I can see some CEO of a munitions company calculating his performance bonus right now.  Let’s try $75 dollars per bullet for a .22 caliber bullet.  $15 dollars more for each caliber higher.  You want a .38?  No problem!  Only $315 dollar each.  Want a .357 magnum?  Only $5100 dollars each.  Want six?  Cool!   A mere $30,600 will get you six.  Want a 50 round clip of 9mm bullets.  All you have to do is pony up a cool $15,700.  This, of course, does not include the cost of the clip.  How about a recyclable clip for $250 plus a $50 recycling deposit?  At last, an eco-friendly way to kill each other.   I can see Michael F. Golden (Smith and Wesson’s CEO) having multiple orgasms dreaming of his bonus based on the potential profits his company could make.

How disconnected is this? Let me count a few of the ways:

  1. The instant creation of a black market.
  2. The infringement of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.
  3. What is or would be a recyclable “clip”?
  4. S&W does not sell ammunition.
  5. With such a high price on something more cheaply available on the black market ammunition manufacturing companies would have near zero sales.
  6. Reading literally “$15 dollars” is “15 dollars dollars”. The same goes for “$75 dollars”, “$315 dollar” (well almost, it is “315 dollars dollar”), and “$5100 dollars”. It isn’t even consistent because many instances of “$” are correct.
  7. .357 magnum is $5100/round but .38 (Special, I presume) and 9mm are only $315 each? How can one derive that from “15 dollars more for each caliber higher”?

Even though I have decades worth of examples of stupid stuff the anti-gunners say I am sometimes still amazed at the depths of stupid they are capable of reaching.

Olympic Arms sale

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I just received an email from Olympic Arms. They are having a sale on upper receiver units:

Upper Sale

Greetings!

Just a gentle reminder about the Sale that Olympic is having on their upper receiver units.

All retail customers can take 15% OFF retail pricing on any or all of our complete upper receiver units. Any size, shape or caliber! Choose from an existing model or design your own.

The sale has been very successful so for, so all we wanted to do is remind everyone that the Sale is good through December 31, 2010.

Take advantage like thousands already have before time runs out!

Sincerely,
Customer Service Team
Olympic Arms, Inc.

I have been very pleased with my object embedding tool from Olympic Arms.

Number one on the shortest book list

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Number one on the list of the 10 shortest books ever written is Gun Control for The New Millennium: NRA Handbook.

There are a set of people that believe the NRA is the countries most effective lobby group for firearms restrictions. They have some good points. Provided that we can politically exterminate the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center I would be okay with that. One or two problems at a time… The NRA warts can be better addressed once the BC and VPC cancer has been in complete remission (submission/whatever) for a few years.

Probably not what she had in mind

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Roberta X recommended checking out the comic Abstruse Goose. It has a strong resemblance to XKCD and a quick scan of a few previous posts was more than sufficient to add it to my list of RSS feeds.

I then hit the Random button and got this on the first click:

lathe_of_god

This probably isn’t what Roberta (or wife Barbara) would call “good”. Of course the author does have something for the women too:

jersey_shore

Quote of the day—Christopher Burg

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I guess when your cause has no roots in reality it makes it easier to change your mind ever thirty seconds.

Christopher Burg
November 30, 2010
Guns on Trains
[He is referring to Brady Campaign spokesmen changing their story to fit whatever they hope might get some traction with the public. The problem for them is none of their predictions of the streets running red with blood have come true. Virtually anything they say will be either immediately demonstrated to be false or suspect. How many members do they have? They said they had “about half a million”. The true numbers are about 50,000 if you count everyone who has ever donated to them. They say gun control laws increase public safety yet they also say, “I am not arguing here that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime, violent crime, or homicide. Such causation is difficult to show because so many other factors bear on the incidence of crime.”

If they were to say the sky was blue people know it probably is completely overcast or when pressed on the issue the Brady Campaign will claim they meant that it was blue someplace else.—Joe]

Maybe now they will let people defend themselves

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California is likely going to be forced to release 40,000 inmates from prisons due to over crowding.

With the economic in shambles few of these people will be able to find work and will resort to crime for the basic necessities. With the huge deficit and debt California has don’t expect an expansion of parole officers and/or police to protect the public from people that are still dangerous. And besides, what would they do with them if they caught them committing a crime? Put them back in the prison that was already overflowing?

California politicians who oppose people being able to defend themselves may face a sudden change of attitude in their voters in regards to gun control.

One might also expect a rise in the black market. The excessive regulation and high taxes stifle the utilization of cheap labor these newly released inmates represent. If the incentives to go straight are strong enough (getting shot for committing a minor crime could be sufficiently motivating) the price of the labor will become very low. If the labor is cheap enough entrepreneurs will consider getting into a grey market which bypasses the regulations and taxes. I would not be surprised that a dollar earned “below the radar” of the state is worth two dollars earned in full compliance with the state. If this does happened the underground economy will further erode the financial position of the state.

And what will be the end result? Will it be a Mad Max world, a libertarian utopia, or an invitation for the Feds to create a police state?

Brady’s are begging

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Nice:

I got another begging letter from the BC, and in this one Paul Helmke says they have a $250,000 deficit:

Dear (friendly_iconoclast),

I am writing to you today as one of the Brady Campaign’s most loyal friends because we really need your help…

…But the truth is, because we’ve been fighting so hard on so many fronts, we’re facing a serious financial shortfall.

I need to make up a $250,000 budget shortfall before the end of the year….

Maybe they should ask the NRA for a loan. After all, the Brady Campaign has done wonders for their fundraising…

If they were a publically traded company I would consider attempting a hostile takeover (I could get a NRA range grant to build a Brady Campaign Memorial Boomershoot East, couldn’t I?). I would hire Tamara to write all their media releases for month or two as we liquidated every asset and did Boomerite experiments in the ashes.

Order to buy

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Microsoft’s Kinect is doing quite well and may soon be a sex toy as well. People that don’t quite “get it” when it is described to them end up spending hours playing with it when they try it. People at work are complaining of sore muscles and some are even seeing the doctor for before coming back to work after a long weekend of dancing and jumping around in front of their televisions .

Windows Phone 7, particularly when running on a Samsung Focus, is getting a lot of praise and sales are going well for it too.

We have a little bit of money left over from some recent financial shuffling and I put in an order to buy a little more Microsoft stock.

*I’m a Microsoft employee but any “insider” information I have isn’t worth what ten minutes of searching the web would gain you.

Random thought of the day

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When having a discussion about Federal taxes being too high I’ve had people tell me, “You have nothing to complain about. Your state receives more Federal money than it pays in Federal taxes.”

I think the proper response to this is, “It doesn’t come back in the form of gold. It arrives in the form of whips, chains, and taskmasters.”

Before I visit New Jersey again

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Before I visit New Jersey again (it’s been over 30 years since my last visit) they have to fix the gun laws or start issuing tags (varmint licenses would work too) for politicians and police officers.


Why? Because a New Jersey is man serving 7 years for guns he owned legally.


More comments on the topic here and here.

Is David Pruss in trouble again?

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A few years ago my brother helped capture David Pruss and wrote up his story of the event which I posted.

This morning I got a Google hit from a court in Ohio:

Domain Name uscourts.gov ? (U.S. Government)
IP Address 208.27.111.# (US COURTS)
ISP Sprint
Location
Continent  : North America
Country  : United States  (Facts)
State  : Ohio
City  : South Solon
Lat/Long  : 39.7462, -83.5451 (Map)
Distance  : 1,736 miles
Language English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System Microsoft WinXP
Browser Internet Explorer 8.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)
Javascript version 1.3
Monitor
Resolution  :  768 x 576
Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit   Nov 30 2010 7:48:18 am
Last Page View Nov 30 2010 7:49:05 am
Visit Length 47 seconds
Page Views   2
Referring URL http://www.google.co…wYa3DMKwV6xGJxCorScA
Search Engine google.com
Search Words david pruss
Visit Entry Page http://blog.joehuffm…AboutDavidPruss.aspx
Visit Exit Page http://blog.joehuffm…They Caught Him.aspx
Out Click  
Time Zone UTC-5:00
Visitor’s Time Nov 30 2010 10:48:18 am
Visit Number 949,960

It could be an entirely different David Pruss but I do know that some time after he was released the Sheriff was looking for him again.

Steel match results

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As I previously mentioned I attended a Steel Challenge match on Sunday. Here are the results:

Name Stage 1 Jethro’s Pyramid Paradox Pendulum Smoke & Hope Total
Adam 10.19 14.56 15.48 18.22 11.24 69.69
Don 10.16 16.1 16.59 19.46 13.52 75.83
Joe 12.55 17.27 16.33 21.35 17.1 84.6
Roger Auto 11.06 19.66 18.38 22.65 16.62 88.37
Roger Revolve 12.98 19.2 19.76 26.41 15.56 93.91
Bob 14.91 22 25.73 27.32 21.31 111.27
Janet 20.71 21.23 23.14 34.61 20.56 120.25
Roxanna 18.91 28.98 27.29 36.05 22.67 133.9
Yellow Cell denotes stage winner.

I’m not sure why Smoke & Hope gave me so much trouble. I was missing those big plates at close range. I was nearly six seconds behind the winner.

The shooting conditions were a little adverse. The footing was poor. With the snow on the ground it was very slick and the white targets had a tendency to disappear into the white background. But we do shoot all year around. In the Seattle area some of the ranges wimp out during the winter and don’t even have outdoor matches.

IMG_4331Web2010
Click to get a higher resolution version and see that Don had three pieces of brass in the air at once.

IMG_4346Web2010
Adam is air gunning in preparation for his run on Stage 1.

IMG_4348Web2010
Adam shows excellent presentation on his way to the first target.

Quote of the day–John Peterson

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Wisconsin will soon become the 49th state to endanger unarmed citizens with a gun crazy concealed carry law. While normal Wisconsinites prefer having no guns around as a way of ensuring a safe secure society, immature thugs and their guns will soon get their way via the party of bullying, the GOP.


…


While these paranoid wing nuts insist there’s nothing safer than a load [sic] gun in the hands of an angry anti-government whiner, the public has no choice but to fight back. Raise your voice, contact the police or business owner and tell them you feel threatened for you and your family.


John Peterson
November 28, 2010
Concealed Carry Killers. And these are only the ones we know about.
[Interesting. With those “great” Wisconsin gun laws how did this happen? It seems that a law against concealing firearms in a backpack and a law against firearms in a school didn’t stop a student from doing just that.


Don’t let the anti-gun people tell you that things would be worse if it weren’t for the restrictions on firearms. Remind them that in the years 1776 through 1990 there were seven school shooting incidents. But after the creation of “Gun-Free” zones in our schools in 1990 there were 78 incidents from 1990 through 2007. References here.


And where are all those people “endangered” by the concealed carry laws in the other 48 states? What is the violence crime rate in those states compared to the violent crime rate in the states that allow people to protect themselves with the best tools available?


Peterson is just another bigot on the wrong side of history.—Joe]

“Miss TSA” Calendar 2011

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If you can imagine it there is someone out there that will make it into a fetish.

Via email:

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Of course this is fake. The real TSA scanner don’t show your bones. They show your skin.

The law in Idaho

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Via Laurel we have this story from just a few miles south of my bunker in Moscow:

A northern Idaho sheriff says he is not advocating the illegal shooting of federally protected wolves by offering a hunting rifle and a shovel as the prize in a raffle called “.308 SSS Wolf Pack Raffle” in a region where SSS commonly stands for “shoot, shovel and shut up.”

Idaho County Sheriff Doug Giddings tells the Lewiston Tribune that the SSS in the raffle stands for “safety, security and survival.”

The newspaper reports that the SSS in the wolf-shooting context often appears in the area on bumper stickers.

Raffle tickets went on sale Friday for $1 each or 11 for $10. The prize is a Winchester .308-caliber Model 70 Featherweight rifle and a shovel. The drawing is planned for March 8.

Laurel called them and she has details on how you can purchase raffle tickets.

Most of the scary wolf stories I have heard have been from Idaho county. That the sheriff is participating in this is no surprise to me.

Μολὼν λαβέ

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The story from South Africa:

Quote of the day—Jack E. Dunning

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There are only two other states requiring the sale of confiscated weapons, Kentucky and Tennessee, both of which must have state governments almost as brainsick as Arizona’s. The NRA says why not sell these weapons to an authorized agent, and therein lies the problem. Gun show participants are authorized agents, and carry a loophole that would allow individual to individual weapons sales without background checks.

Jack E. Dunning
November 29, 2010
Arizona continues to lead the nation in putting more guns in the public’s hands
[This appears to be another case of someone lacking a thinking process. Not only does he have an error in his facts about gun shows but if you read the rest of his post you will discover he apparently believes there is a fixed supply of guns in the universe—he wants the police to destroy all confiscated firearms.

The only people that gain from destroying confiscated firearms are the people employed to do that and the gun manufactures. Yes, this anti-gun advocate is proposing a policy that benefits the gun manufactures by decreasing the supply of firearms in the marketplace. A decreased supply means more sales at a higher price for suppliers.

Sometimes I suspect they really are stupid. But if they were as stupid as they appear they couldn’t manage to string together the words into complete sentences. Nope, I think it has to be a mental defect.—Joe]