Category Archives: Gun Rights

Girls and guns

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When I got home Friday night Xenia had a couple of friends there for the night–Sara and Cortney. I don’t know exactly how it came up but Boomershoot was mentioned and Cortney blurted out, “I want to go to Boomershoot! Have you guys been there?”

My response was something like, “What?” Xenia and Sara have been working at Boomershoot since at least 2003. Here is a picture of them there then. Xenia explained that she and Sara help out at Boomershoot and that I am the person who runs Boomershoot. Her eyes got big and I’m not sure she really believed it until we showed her pictures and the KING5 Evening Magazine video. She wanted to know when the next event was and if she could go. It ended up, assuming she gets her parent’s permission, she will be working for me at Boomershoot 2007.

Sara has been saying she wanted to go shooting for quite some time. She said she had done just a little bit of pistol shooting before, a .44 Magnum, and it was fun. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. A .44 Magnum? Sara is not a large woman. She’s almost tiny.

Anyway I invited the girls to go to the Lewiston Pistol Club’s Steel Challenge match today and Sara was the only one that really wanted to go. I brought along a Ruger Mark II (.22 LR) for her while I shot my STI Eagle in .40 S&W. I was very impressed with Sara. She had very few misses. She just nailed those plates. And on one stage she had a string where she hit all five plates in 5.79 seconds. That’s an average of 1.158 seconds per plate. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. At the last Boomershoot she nailed a 700 yard boomer on her first shot. And the Fort Lewis sniper instructor coaching her said she had a lot of natural talent and should consider joining a rifle team.

I received the results via email a little bit ago and will put them up on the Lewiston Pistol Club’s website tomorrow. I’m proud to tell you that she didn’t come in last. She beat one guy on every single stage. Here are some pictures of Sara at the match:


Can you tell she is excited to be there?


Not a perfect stance but pretty good.


She also helped with score keeping.


I did some shooting too and came in number six out of 12 shooters.

And another thing… Half way through the match Sara told me was missing the contact lens from her right eye. It had “broke” the previous week. She shoots right handed and at that point I didn’t bother to determine which eye was dominate.

Update: Here are the results.

More gun control glamor

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I have posted before about gun control advocates being glamorized in the press. Here is another case:

Edward O. Welles, 85, a former CIA officer who later become the first executive director of the antihandgun organization now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, died Oct. 11 of brain cancer at his home in Washington.

…

After retiring from the CIA in 1972, Mr. Welles had a varied career as a volunteer, lobbyist, entrepreneur and gun-control advocate. In 1974, he became the first executive director of the National Council to Control Handguns, which consisted of four people at the time.

“The best investment I ever made was placing an ad for $1.36, looking for someone with organizational abilities,” said Mark Borinsky, who founded the group and hired Mr. Welles as its unpaid executive director.

Mr. Welles helped raise money and recruited members and executives for the organization, now the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. He was known for his ability to talk with victims of gun violence and to draw them into the group’s mission.

Where was the praise for Neal Knox or Jeff Cooper in the main stream press when they died? Knox and Cooper were major players in organizations larger and more influential than Welles. And Welles helped violate the rights of millions of people and bears some responsibility for the deaths of thousands of disarmed victims. Where is the mention of that?

A real shooter on T.V.

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I heard about this segment of Miami Vice years ago from Guy Neill who is a local (Clarkston, WA) USPSA shooter and for several years wrote a IPSC history column in Front Sight magazine. Other than watching Enterprise, Star Gate, and 24 (never again) on DVD with James I can’t remember the last time I watched T.V. So I assumed I would never get to see this video. I’m exceedingly pleased to have stumbled across this.

I have background material from Guy on this video. I hope I get this straight. I’ll be sending Guy an email and asking for corrections so don’t be surprised if there are some tweaks in the next day or so.

The shooter was an IPSC Grandmaster (see the classification system here) and was a consultant on the show. Here he got a bit part as an assassin. For the pistol shooting at the end the director told him, “Don’t worry about making it look fast. We’ll take care of that when we edit it.” Apparently the director had never seen a real shooter draw and shoot. Needless to say they didn’t need to do any editing to make it look faster. Another thing Guy said was that the script didn’t say what to do with the gun afterward and he didn’t realize it until the shooting was over. So what happens is the shooter double taps the other guy looks down, realizes he has a “stove pipe” failure, clears the gun and puts it on the chest of the victim as he walks away. The crew was so slack jawed over the display of speed they just kept filming even though that wasn’t part of the scene.

Update: Rather than edit, which would be minor, I’m just including Guy’s response verbatim:

Joe, it looks like your memory is working well.
 
The actor is Jim Zubienna.   He was a past member of the US Team to the IPSC World shoot, as I recall.  He shot the Bianchi Cup and Steel Challenge matches as well.  I don’t think we actually had a Grand Master rating at that time, but Jim likely would have qualified.
 
He told me later, after the airing of the program, that the director knew nothing of his shooting background, and that he was to go through the motions of the draw and shoot, and that the scene would be edited for speed.  After seeing Jim draw and shoot, the director asked him how he did that!
 
The smokestack jam was not in the script.  Jim cleared it on instinct and then placed the gun on the “body” as an adlib, but one that was left in.
 
If you note Jim’s hands up position upon his surrender in the film clip, it is very similar to the position he used in competition.  A theory among many of the shoooters then was that you would have one hand out in front, approximately where the front sight would be to allow the eyes to be focused at that distance.  Thus, when the gun came up, the eyes were ready.
 
I do not recall at this time if Jim used a cross draw holster in competition, but cross draws were popular with several of the California shooters, so I think it likely.  This means the draw from under his shirt was very close to his draw in competition from a cross draw as well, further allowing very good speed on the draw.
 
Jim’s wife at that time, Linda, was also a shooter.  I don’t believe either is active at this time.
 
I missed seeing Jim a few years ago at the Steel Challenge.  He came by the stage I was working while I was gone to lunch.
 
Being the “bad guy” in the program, Jim was killed by the “good guys” at the end.  Jim also had a small part in another Michael Mann production “Band of the Hand”.

Update 2: Check out this web page on the same scene! There are forum discussions about this scene:

I suspect Guy may have misspelled Jim’s last name. It probably is “Zubiena”. And there is a question as to whether there was a stovepipe malfunction.

This is probably my single most popular post ever. The bump on Tuesday, below, is all because of this.

The Vile Consequences of Gun Control

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There’s probably no new material here for most of my readers. I suspect I’m just “preaching to the choir” most of the time. But you might want to send the link to pacifists or people that have the naive belief that, “if guns were banned there would be no gun crime”.

The NRA is more respected/favored/trusted

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Interesting poll results:

Most Americans respect the NRA more than they do the Democratic party, the Republican party, or even the U.S. Congress.

And here’s something else they won’t tell you: It’s been that way for years. For more than a decade, poll after poll says that more Americans favor the NRA than almost any other organization in the country. More than political parties, more than labor unions, more than the U.S. government itself.

Americans don’t trust politicians and they don’t trust The New York Times. They trust the NRA.

I’d love to see the polling questions and these results independently verified. It could be those polls were sponsored by the NRA making the results suspect. However Wayne claims these results were not done by the NRA:

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken last July found that while most Americans have positive feelings about the NRA, only 30 percent have “positive feelings” about The New York Times.

It bothers me he changes the subject from paragraph to paragraph. What was being polled? “Respect”, “favor”, “trust”, or “positive feelings”?

The Brady Campaign and me

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Say Uncle noticed before I did but we are both getting Brady Campaign ads via Google on our blogs. Cool. Check out the “Sensible Gun Laws” in the third ad down:

If you were to see their ad on the sidebar and click on the link it would transfer another penny or two from them to my pocket for my campaign against the anti-gun bigots. That could be fraud if you didn’t really have an interest in them–but it would be ironic if it happened.

Bondage or freedom

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Recently I had a discussion with someone that was resigned to us losing our freedom. I only weakly protested because I don’t think well on my feet. I need time, sometimes lots of time, to formulate my thoughts and to make my case. My strength is in my attention to detail and in my ability to focus on problems for long periods of time. I play a good game of chess but not a first person shooter computer game. Boomershoot for example is a particularly subtle, long term, and yet I believe effective blow against the freedom haters (see also Why Boomershoot).

He claimed Jefferson was right to say, “God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.” He said that it was too late to save our freedom. Our chance for freedom today was lost without a successful revolution 150 years ago. And he invoked this as an argument:

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

Never mind that it might actually be an urban myth that Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee wrote this (see also this). It could be true or false regardless of who wrote it. And even if were true when it was claimed to be written in the late 1700’s things have changed a bit since then. In the last 200 plus years the most amazing changes in human history have occurred. What is the effect of those changes? How does it affect our fight for freedom?

These questions affect us all. Do we resign ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren to a life of bondage? Is the best we can do just keep our head down so the “tiger eats us last”?

I don’t have definitive answers to those questions but I have some pretty good hints. Please consider these changes from the time when the above was supposedly written:

  • Long range individual owned and deployed weapons
  • Incredibly cheap and rapid transportation
  • Incredibly cheap, rapid, and secure communications

In the long range weapons category I don’t just mean extending the range of a rifle from a couple hundred yards to a thousand or more. And I don’t mean mortars that can extend that range out to well over a mile. With cell phones and/or the Internet people can now give commands to a weapon from anywhere on the planet to any other place on the planet. We can even deploy “smarts” into weapon systems that can take out a tyrant and/or his minions weeks, months, or even years after being put in place and the weapon owner is long gone or even dead.

There are many who would claim these items help the tyrant as much or more than the freedom advocate but I disagree. China, Russia, or even Canada with its oppressive gun control and socialist health care isn’t any bastion of freedom but each of those governments heavily censored communication to protect the oppressors. And in each case communication recently succeeded despite efforts to suppress them and brought about reforms. As a friend said, Computers and the Internet are a far bigger problem for the government than they are for the individual. Just look at the vigorousness of the response by the Islamic extremists to our “corruption” of their society by our communication. Or the impact talk radio has had on U.S. politics. They, the freedom haters, hate it so because it is so powerful. Open communication is the ultimate enabler of freedom in a war against tyrants and communication has never been so cheap or secure as it is right now.

The rapid and cheap transportation allows the freedom advocate to attend a pro-freedom march on Pennsylvania Avenue, or take action against jack booted thugs near Waco or Ruby Ridge on a Saturday afternoon and never miss an hour of work from his or her job in Seattle or Miami. And the communication makes it possible for them to know about the event and coordinate with others in real time rather than days or weeks after it was over and far too late to participate in a meaningful manner.

My conclusion, for all it’s lack of decisiveness, is that should we have the ambition and the courage to utilize the tools available to us we have it within our power to prevent the loss of more of our freedom and even regain many of the freedoms we have lost. I think the real question is, do you have the ambition and the courage to make a difference? Or are you going to give up?

The utility of gun registration

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As you probably know Canada recently received another data point on the utility of gun registration. This well worded response sums it up well:

Well thought out goals and plans do not change with the intrusion of events by one deranged individual. He had two weapons and both, actually, were registered. I don’t know what you would put in place to prevent that from happening.

In slightly different circumstances and what is just barely below the surface in this example of failure is the response the anti-gun bigots are working toward. Gun registration actually does have some utility it’s just that in this particular instance the proponents were caught in a weak position and weren’t able to take advantage of it. What is needed to take advantage of the real goal of registration is a emergency or crisis, real or manufactured, at the national level. In that sort of situation the bigots make the claim there is only one solution–they have no option but to confiscate privately owned firearms. This, of course, has all too often enabled the Final Solution for other “problems” and must be vigorously resisted. It fails my Jews In the Attic Test.

Quote of the day–John F. Kennedy

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The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

John F. Kennedy
[I’m sure Kennedy had something else in mind but I’m thinking the freedom to own firearms. The inalienable right to keep and bear arms.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Oscar Arias Sanchez

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This collection is an enlightening and comprehensive look at one of our planet’s gravest problems. Until we regulate the trade in light weapons, arms dealers, just like drug traffickers and the slave traders, will continue to reap benefits at the cost of human lives in all countries of the world.

It is only through tackling war, militarism and weapons of all sizes, on all levels and from all sides, that we will be able to realize our vision of a world in which extreme poverty and senseless violence are nothing but sad memories of the past.

Oscar Arias Sanchez
Former President of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace Laureate
From a review of the book: LIGHT WEAPONS AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY.
[Many in international society wish to completely infringe the inalienable right to keep and bear arms on a worldwide basis and implement a Utopian socialistic society. This has been tried many times in the last century at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives. Be on your guard for the next attempts.–Joe]

Carl J. Truscott misconduct

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I knew from talking to the investigators that inspect the Boomershoot explosives magazine that things were rather “tight” but I had no idea how bad it was or why it was that way.

The full report includes such items as demands for remote controlled doors, and wood flooring in the directors office that alone cost over $62,000. The millwork alone for the other wood in the office would cost $243,000. That doesn’t include the executive bathroom which involved telephone, TV flat panel and radio speakers to listen/view news, quartzite tile floor to match the floor in the building atrium, a bench with a water resistant wood seat, tile wall “in horizontal straight stacked layout vs brick,” and sconces. The conference table cost $28,000. Don’t get me started on the bodyguards, motorcades, and the gym.

All this while agents in the field were using expired body armor and complaining of not having enough people, and other safety equipment.

Now, I’m all for the starving the ATF for money to spend on unconstitutional activities but the money should be left in the hands of the taxpayers rather than put into a quarter million dollar office for the chief villain.

See also: Homework help from the ATF.

We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight

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I spoke with an NRA spokesman the other day.  Among other things, he was bragging up the fact that the NRA had sued to get some of the guns seized in the Katrina aftermath returned to their owners.

OK, kudos, NRA.  Great.  Wonderful.  Good job.

“Lets say I had broken into your home” I said, “ruffed you up, handcuffed you, and robbed you.  I then get caught, taken in and put on trial.  Would you consider it justice if the only thing that happened to me was that I were forced to return some of your belongings?”  End of story?  Hurrah, Hurrah?  I think not.

I then asked him if he could name a single instance in which the NRA had attempted to get a violator of the Second Amendment punished for his crime.  A long silence ensued, after which I had to ask, “Are you still there?”  He could not think of a single instance, nor had he ever even considered such a question.  I then asked him if he could name a single anti-gun law that, once passed, the NRA had managed to get repealed.  Again, silence.

“If I stole all the fire extinguishers from your house, and later you started a minor kitchen fire while cooking dinner, and your house burnt down because you couldn’t find a fire extinguisher, would you not hold me at least partially responsible for the loss of your house?”  After all, stealing your fire extinguishers is a violation of your rights and of the law, which limited your options in a response to an emergency.

Maybe you’d consider justice as having been served if, after you lost your house due to my violation of your property rights, I were merely forced by order of a judge to return half of your fire extinguishers a year later, all the while having continued my attempts at burglarizing other people’s houses for their fire extinguishers.”

Anyone would be a damned fool to think so.  It would be a sick joke, wouldn’t it?  Yet this is exactly the situation we face with regard to our Second Amendment rights and I dare say no one is doing anything about it.  People are being disarmed and thereby exposed to an increased risk for injury and death, and we’re supposed to jump for joy, singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” at the news that a few of the weapons are returned a year after they were illegally confiscated?  What about the perpetrators (I say, criminals– enemies of the Republic) who confiscated the weapons in the first place?  What happens to them?

Dead Silence.

We have a certain body of law in this country.  It is defined as the Supreme Law of the Land.  It is the Constitution of the United States. All of our elected officials are sworn by Oath to uphold, defend and protect the Constitution, and many of them set out immediately to circumvent, compromise, dilute, and willfully violate that Constitution.

Yet when was the last time you can recall any individual ever being punished for that violation?  It does not happen.  These people are law breakers.  They have been entrusted with, and then broken, the most important law in our society- the one that protects the very fabric of our Republic, and it seems to me that the very worst that has happened to any of them as a result is that they stand a small chance of being forced into early retirement (losing an election) and taking a life-long pension at the tax payers’ expense.

Until those who violate our constitutionally guaranteed rights are held personally liable for their crimes, they have no real incentive to stop.

Having said that, I have a friendly message for all you legislators, cops and judges out there– those of you who feel so comfortable attacking the rights of your fellow countrymen:  Your words, and your actions, are a matter of public record.  They will follow you for the rest of your life and in a time when intercommunication is increasing exponentially.  How much are you willing to bet on the notion that We The People will never actually get serious about protecting our rights?

Homework help from the ATF

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I wonder if the ATF would have helped my nephew’s with his high school homework had I asked really nicely:

The man who recently departed as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ordered his staff to help with his nephew’s high-school homework, wasting the agency’s time and violating ethics rules, an inquiry found Wednesday.

The nephew’s project — a documentary about the ATF that took 10 months to complete — was one of a half-dozen examples of lapses in judgment Carl Truscott committed before he resigned in August, says the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine.

Probably not. But it would have been just as constitutionally justified as any other activity they are involved in.

My first time

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Reno was the first time for me. I’ve had lots and lots of encounters where it could have happened had they given me enough attention. There have been dozens of times I certainly was making the moves on them and wanted something to happen. But it seemed they just weren’t interested in me. Oh well. You try as best you can and it doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen.

At the SeaTac airport on my way to Reno I wore my Boomershoot 2004 t-shirt and my Boomershoot 2006 hat. On the way back I was a “good boy” and didn’t wear the provocative shirt. But when they ran the swab over the edge of my gun case and ran it through the explosive sniffer it came back with a positive indication for explosives. The guy didn’t quite know what to do and called a supervisor. They talked about it a bit and seemed to think the boxes and boxes of ammo (probably about 300 rounds of .223 and another 100 rounds of .40 S&W) could have influenced the test. I pulled out my ATF type 20 license (license to manufacture high explosives) and showed it to them and explained I have a lot of contact with explosives. They looked at it but didn’t seem to know what to do with that information either.

Finally they removed most of the ammo from the case and pushed on the foam in the case looking for “something” underneath the foam. They didn’t touch the gun. My guess is they are not authorized to do that. Finally they put all the ammo back in the case and said I could go.

Why this time I wonder? It could be because I’ve never had this case sniffed before and I do use this gun and case a lot to test my reactive targets. Some of those tests result in prills of ammonium nitrate flying back at me (and the gun case). That rifle has been handled a lot after I was mixing up explosives. Whatever. I don’t really think it was the ammo.

Self-defense shooting gets attention in Seattle

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The other day in Seattle some nut case (literally, he was considered mentally ill) randomly attacked an innocent person and had him down on the ground before the victim was able to draw his .357 and shoot the attacker. The attacker died. The Seattle Times now has an article about concealed carry permits. It’s neutral. Very factual. Here are a couple facts I didn’t know but have wondered about:

Statewide, there are about 239,000 active concealed-pistol licenses. King County has slightly more than 48,000, Forth said.

The only thing that could be considered negative in the article is that they say there isn’t any requirement for training to get a CPL. But they mention an instructor and quote him extensively on what his class covers:

Although Washington’s law on concealed weapons is fairly detailed, it doesn’t cover the responsibilities and potential liabilities that could come with using a gun for self-defense, said Paul Nickle, an instructor at Wade’s Eastside Guns and Indoor Range in Bellevue. He teaches a course called “Legal Aspects of Armed Self Defense.”

Whether a shooting qualifies legally as self-defense depends on the ability of and opportunity for the attacker to do the potential victim harm and whether the person threatened is in jeopardy, Nickle said. “But it’s not just the legal requirements [of shooting a person] that gun owners have to consider,” he said. “It’s the repercussions — legally, financially, emotionally.

“The first question I’m often asked in class is, ‘When is it OK to shoot?’ I tell them the question should be, ‘How can I avoid having to shoot?’ “

Nickle said his students — some new gun owners, some seasoned — often don’t realize that just because they might be in the right legally if they shoot in self-defense, they could end up being liable in civil court. His class is designed to fill in some of the gaps in the state’s law on self-defense.

“The law is still very gray when it comes to using deadly force,” Nickle said. “You have to ask yourself if you can live with the consequences if you do shoot.”

I know Paul. He attended Boomershoot 2001:


Paul Nickle and Joe Huffman at Boomershoot 2001

The article even has links to the CPL application and other links to useful information for gun owners. And most of all I love the title of the article: “State’s concealed-weapons law among nation’s most liberal.” They use the word “liberal” in the classic sense.

Kristen Rand in USA Today

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If you know who Ms. Rand is (Legislative Director, Violence Policy Center) you know what she is going to say if she gets space for two or more words, “Ban guns”. In a letter to USA Today today she does not disappoint:

The fact is that such mass shootings are preventable, but the United States lacks the will to do what needs to be done: Ban handguns and semiautomatic assault weapons, and regulate the gun industry to control the firepower available to civilians.

I responded with my own comment:

M. Kristen Rand advocates banning some firearms. She gives the U.K. as an example. Apparently she has not looked at the violent crime rate before and after their ban. I just have Just One Question (https://blog.joehuffman.org/2004/12/14/just-one-question/) for Ms. Rand: Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where restricting the access of handheld weapons to the average person made them safer?

It’s a pleasant thought to believe you can pass a law against something and that something will no longer exist. But it didn’t work with laws against recreational drug, laws against guns near schools, and laws against murder. The only thing a law banning firearms will do is disarm the victims. World history is full of such examples and the associated tragedies. The Amish school shooting is only one of the most recent examples.

No, I didn’t get into the bigot and “gun nigger” aspects of my recent proposal. It would not have been appropriate for this venue. However, I did have the “state of mind” I proposed. Go on the offensive. Make them justify their bigotry even if you don’t flat out call it bigotry. We’ll get there. Just keep pushing the envelope.

Quote of the day–Larry the Cable Guy

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I believe that guns don’t kill people. Husbands that come home early do.

Larry the Cable Guy
Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again

Quote of the day–Nicholas Artry

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I knew they shot my brother, and I thought they were gonna shoot me. I had a better chance with the police.

Nicholas Artry
(Attempted) robber of an Indianapolis jewelry store. His brother was killed by the owner (five shots from a .38) and an employee (one shot from a .44).
This came from the second posting on Wayne LaPierre’s new blog.
[This quote matches well from the results of Rossi and Wright’s survey described in their book Armed and Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms. In this book the researchers discovered that robbers are more afraid of being shot by a home owner than by being arrested and sent to prison by the police. Hence they avoid breaking into homes that might have guns.

I have the same complaints about Wayne’s blog that Say Uncle does.–Joe]

State of mind

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From my after dinner talk at the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous:

You all know what happens if you were convicted of an act of domestic violence years or even decades ago. Ex post facto your right to keep and bear arms was infringed by the Lautenberg Amendment. And yes, I think the Gun Control Act of 1968 had ex post facto elements as well. But this is just a symptom of a much larger problem. You don’t cure cancer by giving the patient an narcotic for the pain. We have a cancer infringing on our right to keep and bear arms and we need to find a cure.

There are lots of places you can’t exercise your right to keep and bear arms. Depending on the particular jurisdiction you can’t carry your defensive tools, even if you have permit for most public places:

  • On buses
  • In parks
  • In post offices
  • Near schools
  • In hospitals
  • In the restaurant
  • On the job
  • In churches

In New Jersey a judge said, “When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril.”

In Utah AOL employees were fired for transferring guns from one car to another in the parking lot before going to the range. They sued and lost their case.

In Oklahoma Weyerhaeuser brought “drug sniffing” dogs into the parking lot on the first day of hunting season. The dogs were also trained to alert on guns. Employees who refused to allow searches of their vehicles after a dog alerted on them were told they would be fired on the spot. The searches that resulted in guns also resulted in people getting fired. They sued and lost their case.

A friend of mine started having “weird things” happen to her at work. In essence she was demoted and previous work from home accommodations were terminated. Things were being made very difficult for her and she didn’t understand why. Independently I noticed that I was getting hits on my web sites from Google searches for her name. The visits were from people at her company. They spent a lot of time on my websites looking at her gun owner rights activities and I told her about my discovery. Ahhh haaa!!! So that is what is going on. She left the company on terms of her own choosing.

After taking a group of people to the range, where a good time was had by all, another friend was accused by some gun fearing woman of intimidating her in the hallway. My friends contract was terminated early without ever being asked his side of the story. The women later bragged about getting rid of the gun nut and was fired for dishonesty.

Chris at Anarchangel, at the next table over, has another egregious example of being fired from a job for exercising his right to keep and bear arms.

As many of you know I was fired from my job at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I couldn’t understand why until I looked at my log files for my websites. Someone had a problem with my being a civil rights advocate.

If I know that many people personally affected then how widespread is the problem?

A former New York prosecutor told me if you shoot someone you must prove, and rightly so, that it was self-defense. Not that the prosecutor had to prove it wasn’t self defense. No part of the Bill of Rights applies if you are a gun owner.

What I want you to do now is replace “gun owner” in all those cases with ‘black’. What do you have?

We are gun n***ers.

They want us “in our place” and they want to exterminate us. Not our physical bodies but our culture–our “gun culture”.

And what do we do? Almost all of the time when we fight we only fight to maintain our position. We fight to keep from getting another restriction, another whipping. Sometimes we don’t lose those fights and don’t get whipped. And when we lose “The Master” tells us if we are good, we won’t have to get whipped again. We bow our heads and tell him how good we are going to be. The “The Master” won’t ever have to worry about us again. We are going to be good from now on. We don’t want to be whipped again.

We seldom win. We seldom make real progress. We occasionally defeat an anti-gun politician at the polls but his replacement isn’t able or willing to undo the damage done by his or her predecessor. We only slow the cancer some. We aren’t defeating it.

What we need to do is to turn the tables. But how do we do that? It’s in the state of mind.

We have been downtrodden for so long we are almost unable to think straight. These people are bigots. They may think they are the elite, the wise, the educated, and the deserving of power, but they are simple, ignorant bigots. The facts don’t matter to them. I’ve literally had people tell me, “Statistics don’t mean anything to me. You can prove anything with statistics.” And, “I don’t believe your facts.” They don’t have facts of their own. They only have their bigoted beliefs. When my Just One Question got put on the Democratic Underground the best they could some up with for a response was, “What color is orange? True or false?”

We must put these people in their proper place. The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, and all their associated organizations are the 21st Century equivalents of the KKK. And the majority of the public needs to know that. There were members of the KKK that were tried and sent to jail decades after their crimes because of the change in public opinion in the intervening years. Keep that as our final goal as you suffer through the “whippings” we take near every day. I know you cringe as you remove your gun and leave it behind when you go to work, or as you walk defenseless through the nearly empty parking garage to the hospital to visit a friend. We may be able to hold these people that impose these degradations and “whippings” upon us accountable years from now just as the KKK crimes were punished years after the crimes occurred.

I’ll bet the first question that comes to mind is, “Even if it were possible to make that much progress, wouldn’t that be Ex Post Facto that you complained about being applied to us?” No. The laws already exists. It just isn’t enforced because we are gun n***ers. 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242 is what I want them doing time for violating. I want to see mayors Daley and Bloomberg, senators Schumer and Feinstein handcuffed and dragged off to jail. I want to see major newspapers and news networks detailing their crimes which resulted in the deaths of thousands and rapes of tens of thousands because of all the victims they disarmed. I want to see them pay restitution and spend the rest of their lives behinds bars for their crimes against humanity. I want to see company diversity training include a section on being sensitive to the rights of gun owners. I want to see making a disparaging remark about gun owners in the workplace be cause for disciplinary action.

You can help do this. It’s going to be much easier than some of the other battles we have fought because we don’t need new laws. We just need existing law enforced.

When you post on a gun rights issues, when you write your letter to the editor, your congressman, or your senator you have to have the proper state of mind. Never forget that the anti-gun bigots are the KKK of the 21st Century. Look for opportunities to make that point. Make belonging to the Brady Campaign the equivalent of a membership in the KKK because it’s true.

Gun Blogger Rendezvous Wrap up

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I was up Friday night/Saturday morning until after 1:30 and the alarm went off at 7:15. Getting by on minimal amounts of sleep has been too much of a pattern for the last week but I needed to push through it. This sort of opportunity doesn’t happen often.

Range time went well. Breakfast at Denny’s–once Say Uncle and I found our way there. We found the range easily with Microsoft Streets and Trips using the GPS option. I reduced the mass of my ammo collection by about a factor of two so I suspect I may actually be within the guidelines of the airline for the return trip. I had a request from someone at work for lots of pictures and video but there just wasn’t that much that I found particularly interesting to take pictures of. And a lot of gun bloggers are very picture shy. They blog under pseudonyms and to have their picture associated with gun blogging would blow their cover.

In addition to Say Uncle and Kevin I wanted to meet Neanderpundit. Og was the first person I didn’t personally know to link to my blog. I wanted to thank him. We got a chance to chat some at the range but it was about Boomershoot and there was so much else going on I didn’t manage to bring the topic around to thanking him. He might actually make it to Boomershoot 2007 so I may get another chance to thank him in person.

We went back to the hotel and after getting cleaned up and having trouble finding my rental car in the garage (they really need to put numbers on the parking stalls) to get some essential supplies I only had about 30 minutes to finish writing my “speech” that Mr. Completely offered to let me give at the dinner. I’ll post an altered version of that here soon. Some things I could have said better and somethings were not to leave the room yet.

Dan McKowen was the guest of honor and was presented with a check for his continuing medical costs and he gave his speech. As usual there were lots of critical details left out of the story presented by the main stream media and Dan filled us in on those. Thank you Dan.

We returned to the hospitality room and talked until after midnight when people started leaving because they had planes to catch and hundreds of miles to drive the next day.

This morning Kevin and I had breakfast together, Say Uncle was supposed to join us but somehow we didn’t manage to connect with him. I then went back to bed and slept until after 15:00. Wow. I feel so much better now. As ex-coworker Niki from a long time ago used to say, “Sleep is such an amazing drug. It makes you feel so good.”

Other posting on the Rendezvous: