Quote of the day–New York State Assembly

The 50-caliber weapon is one of the most dangerous weapons in the U.S. military’s arsenal.

New York State Assembly
BILL NO A02772A
[As they have defined 50-caliber weapons this wasn’t true even 200 years ago, long before AC-130s, B-52s, cruise missiles, ICBMs, and tactical nukes. I can’t imagine what alternate reality these people live in. I can only conclude they have mental problems. How did these mental cases get elected to office? Are the majority of people in New York State suffering from some sort of mass delusion?–Joe]

Too stupid for explosives

From my Bomb Help email folder:

From: Peter 
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 7:47 AM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Subject: let make thing happen

 

Hello…

My name is peter and i am really sad because the mothers in my hood simple told thier daughters to stay away from me because i am too bad a science and i may use their daughter for lab. experiment so i want you to help me do some thing really loud to disturb the peaceful sleep of the hood and blow up some cars that they never ride…..i like bombs from watchs and home appliances but let the procedure be simple so i will never get confused durung the process for safety

reasons…….http://www.boomershoot.org

Cheers

Peter…

  between 0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99

I wouldn’t even consider him for suicide bomber mission:

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 10:16 AM
To: ‘Peter’
Subject: RE: let make thing happen

 

If you are easily confused and bad at science then you sound like you are far too stupid to be let anywhere close to explosives.

The complete message header will be made available upon legitimate request from law enforcement.

Another example of futility of the TSA

The TSA should just give it up and let congress spend that money on something that would do some good.

Also note that in this video the morons interviewed think that somehow outlawing the “glass knuckles” will make society safer. Do they think banning sharp sticks will make society safer? These things are so easy to make anyone with a room temperature I.Q. could be taught how to make them. But then maybe the media morons and the people they interviewed should be given a pass because they don’t have a room temperature I.Q.

Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!

Via John, Xenia’s boyfriend in Iraq I received a link to this site. [Side note, it is John’s birthday tomorrow and he is in Iraq away from his family and girlfriend working to keep us safe.]

It was like stepping through the looking glass into a fact free zone. Here are some examples:

The National Rifle Association in the United States of America has very few female members, but those that are members claim that guns empower them, protect them and give them more freedom in a country marked by the highest crime rate in the world.

“Very few”? I’ll agree it’s a minority but won’t spend the effort on slapping them down other than to point out the NRA has had two women presidents, Sandra Froman and Marion Hammer and Tany Metaksa was the NRA’s top lobbyist for a while.

Highest crime rate in the world? Not even close. Even England and Wales have higher crime rates than the US.

Actually much of the effort has been to keep guns and weapons that are considered “too dangerous” off the streets. Things like rocket launchers, grenades and other items usable by terrorists. Besides, who carries a grenade or an automatic sub-machinegun like a Mac 10 around for self-defense?

Shall we talk about handgun bans in Chicago, Washington D.C. (about to be thrown out), and San Francisco (thrown out)?

I have NEVER heard of any laws trying to prohibit shotguns, which is primarily a weapon for hunting deer, elk, bears.

Apparently they have never heard of NFA ’34. And I’ve never heard of a shotgun being considered appropriate for elk.

Magazine clips that contain 10 bullets are more useful to people who carry automatic weapons (which are illegal in most states). You just hold down the trigger and the handgun keeps firing, a bit like a machine gun, which means the criminal in question has the ability to fire many rounds at a police officer quickly and easily, and is more likely to hit the target as a result. Thanks to the 10 bullet limit the person runs out of bullets a lot faster. Since that law has been in place officers in many American states have seen a dramatic drop in the death of police officers due to automatic weapons.

Ignoring the ignorance of saying “magazine clips”… The full auto versus semi-auto game has been played many times with the semi-auto shooter getting more bullets on target than the full-auto in nearly all circumstances. The last sentence is total fabrication. The DOJ study found no such benefits to the “Assault Weapon Ban”.

The following is in regard the 10 round restriction for guns designed for full capacity magazines:

Those changes were only less reliable for people using automatic weapons. The new magazines were designed specifically to jam up frequently when used in an automatic gun.

Wow! This person is in total la-la land. There is no need to continue further until they start taking their Thorazine again.

Thanks John. Thanks for everything.

Quote of the day–Anonymous

You have a right to your own opinions, but you don’t have a right to your own facts.

Anonymous
[I have found attributions to Churchill, read an instance where Bloomberg said that, and heard one radio personality attribute Daniel Moynihan. If someone has better results in finding the originator please let me know.

What I like about this quote is that it applies so well to many of the anti-gun bigots. Their sloppy thinking confuses opinions and facts in so many ways. A post demonstrating this is forthcoming.–Joe]

What were they thinking?

I thought everyone knew that self-defense was illegal in the U.K.

They should know they would get complaints if they came out with a product like this:

Gun control groups have condemned a new bullet-proof “hoody” which claims to protect against all bullets except those fired by high-velocity rifles.

Bladerunner, the London company which sells the £300 Defender hoodie, says it is responding to demand from undercover police officers and concerned parents.

Raymond Stevenson, a spokesman for Don’t Trigger, an international antigun campaign based in Brixton, London, said: “It’s not helping kids to provide them with bullet-proof armoury. and will encourage more aggressive behaviour.”

Quote of the day–William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

William James
[Look around. You will see it nearly everywhere.–Joe]

Send the teachers to the reeducation camps

Via an email from Kirby I get this link and story:

LARP fans at Bowling Green State University may have to contend with a crippled game of Zombies vs. Humans after the University banned Nerf guns on campus.

Nerf guns are banned???

I started poking around the University website to try and figure out what sort of place this is. I found this scary:

Established in 1910 to educate teachers, BGSU is the 14th largest producer of teachers in the country

They pride themselves on producing teachers and they think 18 year olds should not be allowed to have Nerf guns? I think some teachers of teachers need to be taught something. Perhaps some time at a reeducation camp would help. I suggest they start with the U.S. Consitution and the basics of a free society.

I blame global warming

Seattle and surrounding areas in the Puget Sound are now getting heavy snow. Visibility is only a few blocks as I look out the window of our building here in Redmond.

I’m fairly certain Al Gore would agree with me, and I know Phil does. It’s all because of man caused global warming climate change.

Update: The storm forecast for the Boomershoot site:

OROFINO/GRANGEVILLE REGION-LOWER HELLS CANYON/SALMON RIVER REGION-

132 PM PDT FRI MAR 28 2008

…SNOW ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 5 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 5 AM PDT SATURDAY…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MISSOULA HAS ISSUED A SNOW ADVISORY…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 5 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 5 AM PDT SATURDAY.

2 TO 5 INCHES OF SNOW ARE EXPECTED FROM LATE THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH SATURDAY MORNING AS A COLD FRONT PASSES THROUGH THE AREA TONIGHT. QUICK BURSTS OF MODERATE TO HEAVY SNOWFALL WILL BE ASSOCIATED WITH THE FRONTAL PASSAGE.

Quote of the day–Wendell Phillips

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.

Wendell Phillips
[I was reminded of this one by BillH’s Hillary Is Delusional post.–Joe]

Who is Fascist?

I’ve written about this several times over the years, but it takes a true scholar to do a superior job of it.  A while back, Jonah Goldberg did just that, and Thomas Sowell did a review on Goldgerg’s book:

Fascism, initially recognized as a kindred ideology of the left, has since come down to us defined as being on “the right” — indeed, as representing the farthest right, supposedly further extensions of conservatism.

The next time you hear Leftists throwing the word “Fascist” about like a general epithet, and then hanging it around the necks of capitalists or Jeffersonian liberals, you can correct their rather silly (and I have to think willfully ignorant) error.

You’re doing it wrong

Just go to Boomershoot. Don’t set off dynamite on the sundeck of the hotel you are staying in. Not only do we do it legally and cheaper (considering all the damage they did, let alone the cost of the lawyers), we will detonate about 1000 times more explosives.

[H/T to Sean, Ry, and Glenn Reynolds.]

Self-parody

I had seen the graphics below before but just shook my head and went on. Reader Rob sent them to me today and pointed out it’s self-parodying. They are from the main page of the Brady Campaign website.

In the first graphic they actually say guns murdered people. It seems to me if that is the case all those biologists trying to create and/or modify life in a “test tube” should be redirected to study common metals, charcoal forges, hammers, and drills. Apparently the secret to life was discovered with the invention of the first firearms four or five hundred years ago.

Okay, so maybe I was taking them a little too literally. But my point is they twist the meanings of words to achieve their goals. It is only by telling half-truths and sometimes outright lies that they can achieve political traction. We need to rub their noses in it in a very public manner.

In the second graphic they try to take advantage of a negative stereotype of the gun owner as a vandal who shoots up a sign. They also imply that disallowing guns makes a workplace safer. To test that hypothesis answer this question, “Which is a safer workplace, a maximum security prison or a police station?” Nearly no one has a gun in the prison (including the guards who are in contact with the prisoners) and almost everyone has a gun in the police station. Of course the police station is safer–because the people there are much more likely to be trustworthy people. It’s the people, not the guns, that make the difference.

In the world view of the Brady bunch the concept of there being more than one variable that contributes to personal safety is too difficult of a concept. Guns have no will of their own and are tools that can be used for good or evil but making the intellectual leap from the gun to the person pulling the trigger is just asking too much of their feeble brains.

Either that or they have mental problems.

Aren’t They Going to Hate it

What if DC citizens get to exercise their right to keep a functional, loaded firearm in the home for self defense, and the crime rate drops?  What if at some point DC gets legal concealed carry, and crime rates drop even more?

Won’t the antis just hate that?

Yes, I think it is reasonable to assume they would see that as a defeat and absolutely hate it (it’s exactly how they viewed all other defeats, where crime has dropped after a new concealed carry shall-issue law) which points to the utter depravity of these people, and the lie they’ve been telling us when they claim that what they’re doing is about “safety“.

Correlation is not causation

If I were a peer reviewing this piece of work I would ask the “researcher”, “Please repeat after me, ‘correlation is not causation’. Again, ‘correlation is not causation’. Good, keep doing that until you can remember it when you are writing your papers.”

It looks to me like this guy has staked his career on something and is looking for evidence to support his hypothesis. And of course if that is all you are looking for and you ignore contradictory evidence you can probably convince yourself your hypothesis is valid.

Here is a sample of his conclusions:

Straus analyzed the results of four studies and found that spanking and other corporal punishment by parents is associated with an increased probability of three sexual problems as a teen or adult:
• Verbally and physically coercing a dating partner to have sex.
• Risky sex such as premarital sex without a condom.
• Masochistic sex such as being aroused by being spanked when having sex.

“These results, together with the results of more than 100 other studies, suggest that spanking is one of the roots of relationship violence and mental health problems. Because there is 93 percent agreement between studies that investigated harmful side effects of spanking, and because over 90 percent of U.S. parents spank toddlers, the potential benefits for prevention of sexual and relationship violence is large,” Straus says.

I haven’t read all his papers so it’s possible he has considered an alternate hypothesis but I could find no evidence of that in the web pages I viewed this morning. The alternate hypothesis that is just “screaming at me” is that children with behavioral problems are more likely to behavioral problems as adults. And if they have more behavioral problems as children then they are more likely to get spanked.

Political actors?

I think there is a little bit of projection going on here:

Politics also factors heavily into D.C. v. Heller, according to Henigan.

He said some state attorneys general — who are elected in 43 states — likely sided with Heller as a way to show constituents they support an individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment, even as they seek to preserve their own state statutes regulating guns.

“These are political actors. They don’t want to appear to be endorsing a handgun ban,” Henigan said.

Living in a fantasy world

With so much real world data available you would think they wouldn’t even try to get away with publishing something like this. But these people have mental problems so I guess it’s not too surprising, just frustrating. This nut case is classified under projection:

Concealed carry safety is a fantasy

Some people say we need to let college students have the right to carry concealed weapons so that they can protect themselves and others. Here’s a possible scenario:

Dear Diary:

Well, here I am in my Physics 202 class at NTU, ready for another boring lecture by the professor’s assistant. I feel really good today, ’cause I’ve got my new Ruger 7-shot automatic in my backpack and a box of extra ammo too.

Makes the backpack a little bit heavy, so I think I’ll toss out a couple of boring textbooks when I get back to the dorm. I sure hope some intruder will burst into the lecture hall one of these days so that I can shoot him!

Meanwhile, several friends and I are thinking about taking our automatics to the game against State U tomorrow night. We’re only a half game behind in the standings and if any of those State guys start smarting off to our coach or players, we’ll know how to handle them at half time!

It’s so great now that even 18-year olds can pack heat. Is this a great country, or what! Well, diary, I’d better sign off now, ’cause that lecturer is writing some sort of formula on the board and I guess I’d better start paying attention.

Whoa! One of the kids on the other side of the room just stood up and has started shooting people! The teaching assistant just went down, and he’s bleeding!

I’ll just get my gun out of my backpack and get it loaded in a second and I’ll fix him! Oh no! He’s pointing that gun at me now! Oh…..

Kurt Thoss

Quote of the day–Robert Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

Lazarus Long
A character in Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein
[When I started my QOTD thing my intention was to never repeat a quote. I’m making an exception this time because of this. It’s called Verizon Bad Math, but it’s not even math. It’s 4th grade arithmetic. Background is here. I didn’t read it all. It’s way, way too painful for me.

What’s your call?

  • It is the public school system
  • Verizon hires only arithmetically challenged people
  • People in general are just mind boggling stupid
  • Some people should not be allowed to breed
  • Abortions should be available on a retroactive basis

Listen sometime when excess adrenaline won’t be a problem and you have your blood pressure meds handy.

Thanks (I think, I may not be able to sleep tonight) to Taqi for the pointer.–Joe]

Things you don’t do

You don’t pick a fight with George Foreman
You don’t get snarky with Tam
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Kim

Okay, it wasn’t as scathing as I would have expected but I like to laugh at my own jokes.

[Apologies to Jim Croce]

ATF job description

Kevin Cullen is from Boston so it’s no surprise he doesn’t have a clue about guns:

So, some cow chip-kickin’ senator from Louisiana doesn’t want Mike Sullivan, the US attorney in Boston, to become head of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms because Sullivan wants to make it harder for people to get guns.

Um, isn’t that what the head of the ATF is supposed to do?

Let me spell it out for you Mr. Cullen, you’re from Boston so I understand the concepts are difficult for you.

The head of the ATF, just like all other government officials are required to uphold the constitution. Until such time as the Bill of Rights is declared null and void it is the NOT the job of the head of the ATF to make it harder for people to get guns. In fact the “Head of the ATF” should be actually be the CEO of a convenience store by the same name (actually you should tack the ‘E’ on to the end of it but I’m not going to complain if that market is handled by a separate chain that specializes).