Category Archives: Gun Rights

Gun Blogger Rendezvous Saturday update

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I can’t get WiFi on my computer so I’m using a cell-phone shared Internet connection. I don’t have much time either, otherwise I’d post a bunch of pictures. So I’ll defer to others you are faster and better than me on this:

The trip to the range was great. I brought my Spud Gun this time. So I put a couple rounds in a target at 200 yards just to make sure nothing had changed in the last two years since I had shot it. Pictures of that target will posted later. The “group” (two shots don’t mean a lot) was 3/8″ of an inch just under an inch left of the bull. I then went to 300, then 600, then spotted for Chris as he started hitting at what the range master said was 953. He spotted for me and I was able to connect on nearly every shoot too. I left it zeroed for that range and numerous other people who had never shot at those distances reached out and touched the metal at nearly 1000 yards.

Later (more about this when I get the pictures ready for posting) I shoot the Ko-tonics 6.8 SPC. Uncle has a red-dot sight on it zeroed for 400 yards and from the bench it was easy to hit the 400 (12 inch?) yard plate nearly every time so I shot a few rounds offhand at the 400 yard target. Much more challenging but I think I hit about 1/3 of the time.

It was a great day at the range!

Time for Barb and I to head to the banquet…

Live blogging GBR meeting with the NRA

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Glen Caroline and Ashley Varner are here and we having a great dialog even if the wheelbarrows of cash didn’t show up.

So far the best message coming our direction is they vigorously welcome our input. Pick up the phone, send an email, etc. They don’t have enough ears to pick up and filter all the useful information “out there”.

There is a lot of talk about internal bickering in the gun community. We need to improve things and there are some good ideas on how to deal with it better.

Update @ 15:35: We are now discussing the NRA support/non-support in the Parker/Heller case.

Update @ 15:41: NRA says, “How do we address the perception problem?” This is regarding the NRA being perceived as pro hunter and abandoning the black rifle crowd. Not to mention the NFA people. In other words the “NRA is Zumbo organization.”

Update @ 16:10: Ashley says she likes my blog and loved the pictures from Montana. She agrees the “Gun Porn” with Kim wasn’t a problem. The woman that was disturbed by it was disturbed before she saw it. Uncle suggested the NRA get the CMP program funded again and stop destroying the military surplus ammo.

Update @ 16:25: Glen talked about translating talk into action. We need to put links on our sites to congress critter contact information and NRA-ILA newsletters/action alerts.

Quote of the day–Charles Darwin

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False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the path to truth is often at the same time opened.

Charles Darwin
[Think of how much mileage the bigots get with the erronous studies about a firearm being 43 times more likely to blah, blah, blah… versus some opinion piece in a newpaper.–Joe]

All my bags are packed

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I’m ready to go. Barb and I are leaving on a jet plane for Reno and the Gun Blogger Rendezvous this evening. That’s assuming the TSA will allow me, my guns, and ammo on the plane. Alaska Airlines will only allow me to take 50 pounds of ammo [heavy sigh]. That would have been enough for what I want to do except that with all the other stuff I’m taking (Boomershoot give aways, knives, spotting scope, tripod, range bag, magazines, holsters, guns, shot timer, eye and ear protection, laser range finder, binoculars, spare batteries, gun cleaning gear, walkie-talkie, altimeter, wind gauge, thermometer, exterior ballistics calculator, targets, and a clean pair of socks) I started running up against a different weight limit without bringing all the ammo I wanted.

I have enough match rifle ammo and if I decide I want some more pistol ammo I’ll buy it in Reno sometime tomorrow.

Update: We made it through security without incident. We are now sitting at our gate waiting to board. Pretty amazing considering all the electronics and cables I had in my computer bag. The holster in the computer bag apparently didn’t raise an eyebrow either. And the empty water bottle… I thought for sure they would want to open my backpack to make sure it was actually empty. They were cool with me wearing a shirt with the picture of a gun on it and the Boomershoot coat too. All nice to know. Maybe they are happy with just infringing on one constitutionally guaranteed right at a time.

So far the flight is on time. You can track it in near real time here.

No new ghettos

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Over the years I’ve had numerous queries about bringing a rifle to Boomershoot that shoots the .50 BMG cartridge. I’ve always told them it wasn’t a problem but they had to set up some distance from “normal people” so they wouldn’t hurt their neighbors with the muzzle blast. I put these shooters off to one end and it quickly got named “The Ghetto”. After I started running out of shooting spaces I explicitly set aside positions with extra wide spacing for the .50 caliber shooters and I called the area by the name given to it by shooters years before, the “.50 Cal Ghetto”:

Shooting areas.

Now via Tam I find there are “affordable” guns that shoot the manly 20mm cartridge. See the bottom of this page for a picture of the 20mm compared to the wimpy .50 BMG cartridge.

I haven’t had any requests to bring 20mm rifles to Boomershoot but they are welcome to come. They will be thrown into the same ghetto as the .50 cal guys who will have to just suck it up when they get embarrassed by the size of their tools compared to the newcomers.

Gun Blogger Rendezvous itinerary update

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I had planned to leave the Seattle area at about 9:00 AM on Thursday and mistakenly made our airplane reservations for 9:00 PM. Hence Barb and I won’t be arriving at GBR until nearly midnight. Oh well, I’m sure people will manage to get by without us for a few extra hours.

Kevin will be on his way to GBR in just a few hours.

Virtue of selfishness

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Most anti-gun bigots have a strong tendency toward socialism and the concept of selfishness as a virtue is beyond the mental grasp of socialists. Hence it should not come as a surprise that the “Gun Guys” should think that if you wish to defend yourself that you are being selfish in a negative fashion. What I am surprised at is that he admits it:

Katz’s demands represent the height of selfishness.

Katz is the Oregon teacher with a concealed carry permit that wants to be able to defend herself against her ex-spouse.

Societal engineering

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This started out to be a comment in response to Lyle then it got a little out of scope. The short background story is that Lyle says gun control advocates are vacuous loons and that if we had our act together would have politically crushed them decades ago.

Lyle, It’s a little more complicated than what we would like. Read what Dar Korra’ti has to say to get a feel for just one of the issues involved. Another is, as I like to say, it is irrational to expect people to be rational. For example, people have a very strong tendency to believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts.

Also, many would like to believe that it’s possible to create a perfect world–if only someone was given sufficient power/control/money to do it. They don’t understand that trade-offs are a part of any engineering task whether it is an automobile, a plane, a computer, or a society you are trying to engineer. Most people accept a certain number of automobile, plane, and computer crashes while realizing, at some level, that with the money, time, and other constraints things are working pretty good and certainly they wouldn’t be able to do any better themselves.

But when attempting to engineer a society nearly everyone believes themselves to be an expert and that anything short of perfection is reason to throw some baling wire and duct tape at the perceived deficiency. Then with nothing more than opinion they forge ahead. The rare few that bother to try to put numbers on things and pretend to do an actual engineering analysis almost always only look at one side of the equation. They only look at the potential good that might occur from their changes. They fail to look at the actual and/or potential damage their proposed changes will cause.

Are they “vacuous loons”? Well, yes. But I’m of the opinion that is the present state of the average person and there isn’t much we can do about that. And that a form of society/government in which the loons are unable to participate is likely to have serious deficiencies of its own.

Quote of the day–Jayne Lyn Stahl

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Deadly face is no substitute for due process.

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Another Poster Child for the NRA
October 7, 2007 at 22:34:36
[Yeah, it was a typo. But even correcting that it’s still a pathetic attempt at rational thought. She gets her facts wrong, she has no idea what the rules and laws are for the use of deadly force, and she reaches irrational conclusions. As Uncle said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much stupid in one place.”–Joe]

Someone thinks they are a mind reader

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Someone apparently believes they can read my mind from reading part of my blog. And she thinks I have problems:

By Sheryl, 10-07-07
I checked that guys site out, very disturbing. I found the home life thread especially very disturbing. Any grown man that likes to brag about intimate relations with his wife on a public blog has some real personal problems. Using sexual terms to generate more search engine hits in conjunction with posts about his children saddens me. What an awful environment they must have grown up in. It frankly disturbs me even more that such a person has access to assault weapons and explosives.

Such a dark world we live in.

I left the following comment but was told “Akismet thinks your comment is spam, so it will be moderated first.”

Sheryl, I regret to inform you that you are unable to read my mind or my motives. The only thing truthful about your comment is that which you shared about yourself–you are disturbed.

Update: Interesting… someone else’s comment, again very negative, showed up but my comment and that of Miss C don’t. Does the moderator have an agenda?

Another mass shooting

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There is something very different about this one. It was a police office that went nuts:

A sheriff’s deputy shot and killed six young people in the northern Wisconsin town of Crandon before being killed himself after a manhunt, according to media reports on Sunday, quoting police and witnesses.

The Forest County Sheriff’s Department said seven people were dead, including the shooter, Tyler Peterson, 20, according to media reports.

Five of the victims ranged in age from 14 to 20, and the age was not available on a sixth, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on its Web site.

Another victim was in critical condition, the newspaper reported.

Peterson, who was accused of storming into his ex-girlfriend’s house, was shot by the Crandon SWAT team, the newspaper said. Peterson’s former long-time girlfriend was among the dead, it said.

If we are not allowed to have guns then how are we to protect ourselves from the cops with guns that go nuts?

That’s mostly snark on my part.

It’s a terrible tragedy and it makes me sad to hear of it. It’s a small town of about 2000 people. Everyone in that town will know at least one of the victims. Barb and I went to high school in a town of about 3000 (Orofino Idaho). The degree of separation between any two people in a town that small is at most one or two. That whole town will morn.

Quote of the day–Mohandas Gandhi

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You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Mohandas Gandhi
[I thought of this after reading of the tragic shooting of all the people in Wisconsin yesterday. Just because one cop goes nuts and starts shooting innocent people doesn’t mean all cops should have their guns taken away from them.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Jack L. Patterson

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De inimico non loquaris sed cogites

Do not wish ill for your enemy … plan it.

Jack L. Patterson
Baltimore, MD
June 20, 2007
[There are others that have used this as their .sig line but Patterson has used it more than any other that I can find. I have been unable to find the originator. 

I’m thinking of the anti-gun bigots at the moment…–Joe]

They started squirming

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I said it would make them squirm. And both the Gun Guys and Josh Sugarman are doing just that.

My daughters and I now belong to the tribe

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Kim’s last name isn’t Huffman but I’ll send an email to get that fixed. Check out our pictures with the other People of the Gun.

Quote of the day–John Gilmore

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But it’s no wonder we are concerned about privacy, because we are all “lawbreakers”, We all break the law, but few of us are criminals.  The problem is that simply attracting the attention of the police is enough to put the best of us at risk, because we break the law all the time and it’s set up to make that happen!

John Gilmore
March 28,1991
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
[Remember what Ayn Rand said and Huffman’s rule of firearms law.–Joe]

Making them squirm

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Goody Guns by JPFO.

[Heavy sigh] My youngest is in college now so this just wouldn’t have the impact it would have 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe it would be a nice gift for some nephews and nieces.

Gun Blogger Rendezvous 2006 story

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This is the story I heard at Gun Blogger Rendezvous 2006 I most wanted to tell. I’m glad Uncle shared this in public so I could comment on it.

Basically, some people need to be shot. People that claim everyone is just like everyone else and predators just need to be “understood” or some such thing are ignorant. There are evil people that will never change and will be a threat to others as long as they are alive. Read the epiphany a former psychologist (Uncle) had when attempting to counsel one of these animals.

I don’t advocate individuals hunting these animals unless you have a license and tag. The premeditate taking of even sub-human life should be carefully considered with the appropriate checks and balances. Defending against an imminent or in progress attack from one of them is another matter. Remember the following four rules and repeatedly apply them until the threat is eliminated or you can no longer acquire a sight picture:

  1. Trigger prep
  2. Sight alignment
  3. Squeeze
  4. Follow through

Alternative to Google for search

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In case you haven’t tested it out recently (as in the last day) Microsoft’s search engine was just updated and for the first time has search results on par with Google. I know the test methodology for this claim but I’m not sure I’m at liberty to reveal it but I am of the opinion they did a good job measuring this and that the claim is accurate. “On par” is not good enough to win and I expect MS will pull ahead of Google in the near future.

Having an alternative to the anti-gun owner bigots at Google is important and now you don’t have to compromise on search results. Now if I can just get the message to the right person to get MS to give us an alternative to AdSense so I can drop the Google ads in the right margin of this blog.

Quote of the day–John Longenecker

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In winning our Independence, and to make certain that it could never happen again, the Founders wrote that the Citizen was to be SUPREME AUTHORITY, and that our authority was to be backed by force, forever. In their living this reality which they knew could occur in any age, any era, any administration, the reality of life today was that liberty must always be backed by citizen force.

John Longenecker
Original Intent–Citizen As Supreme Authority–Liberty — How American Gun Control Is Adverse To The Public Interest In An Abuse Of Due Process
[There are lots of great quotes in this whitepaper.–Joe]