Category Archives: Gun Rights

Quote of the day–Larry Whitmore

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This type of sensational journalism contributes nothing to an already emotion-filled debate and only serves to mislead and confuse the issue. The simple truth is: You cannot legislate against insanity. Unfortunately, Ackerman and others have a problem grasping that fact.

Larry Whitmore
Executive Director
Canadian Shooting Sports Association
Cannot legislate against insanity
October 30, 2006
Toronto Star
[It is my opinion they cannot grasp that fact because they too have mental problems. The writers of our constitution did in fact attempt to legislate against insanity. It’s called the Second Amendment. And as Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, et al. plainly demonstrate it wasn’t entirely successful.–Joe]

Another sign

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Amendment II Democrats:

Today, Amendment II Democrats pledges itself to helping take back America from the Republican Party and giving it back to the people. We will settle for nothing less than a Democratic House and Senate in 2006. And, at the same time, there is a golden opportunity for pro-RKBA Democrats to dramatically change firearms policy within the Democratic Party itself from the ground up. All we have to do is join together, stand up on our hind legs, and exercise our First Amendment rights if we want any hope of affecting real change within the party of Jefferson, Kennedy, and F.D. Roosevelt.

Can anyone name a U.S. political party that openly says, “We are opposed to the people having the right to keep and bear arms.”? Certainly there are individual politicians that work to subvert it and are openly for gun control. But they don’t dare make it a party platform.

We are making progress. We just need to drive the remaining bigots into political extinction. Once the gun issue is under control we can working on the next greatest threat to our freedom. My vote probably would be to set our sights on the war on some drugs or the income tax.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

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Barb and I visited the exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. Very interesting. It wasn’t overwhelming or awesome. It was more like somber reverence. To actually be looking at documents that were written over 2100 years ago put me in a very somber mood.

From what I could tell there weren’t any big revelations in the documents. A lot of them were copies of known works of the existing Bible. Others were rules for “purification” and other standards of behavior for a particular Jewish sect.

It was worth my time and money to see them since it was only a 30 minute drive and $20.00 to get in the door. Knowing what I know now I probably wouldn’t travel a 1000 miles and pay hundreds of dollars to see them. But then I’m an atheist and don’t consider the documents to be the word of god(s) either.

Update: I forgot to mention the indignity of attending. There was a big sign just before you went in the building but after you had paid for your ticket that said no firearms or knives. It even said mandatory search of bags. I had to find a locker across the way to put my knives and my handgun in. There was no search of my person and I’m pretty sure there were no metal detectors so I probably could have defied the sign and gotten away with it.

But what was the reason? Did they think someone was going to go off the deep end and shoot a 2100 year old scrap of parchment? Oh, I forgot, they don’t need a reason.

Choosing the right metric

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One of my “hot buttons” is when people choose the wrong measurement for optimization.

I did that with Boomershoot 2005 when I tweaked the explosive mixture such that I got good results with a rim-fire .22. It turned out that the typical center-fire bullets had great difficulty detonating them.

This metric problem was one of my points in this post.

I heard of one software company that gave raises out based on the number of lines of code produced by the software developers. This adversely affected the designs, implementations, and even style of the code produced.

Another well known anti-virus software company paid bonuses for quickly finding solutions to new computer viruses. One enterprising employee became well known for finding figuring them out. Of course he didn’t tell management that he had created these same viruses and released them into the wild.

Gun control advocates rejoice and claim they were right when deaths and injuries due to bullet wounds decrease after a restriction on firearms is passed into law. They do that even if violent crime, injuries, and deaths increase. They ignore that many of those deaths and injuries are justifiable or even praiseworthy shootings that stopped criminal attacks.

Another one is that windmill manufactures work toward greater efficiency. In most cases this is the wrong measurement. The only case that this is important is if land space or wind is in short supply. If you have lots of land that can host windmills then the correct metric is cost per kilowatt-hour over the lifetime of the windmill.

Some of the first mass produced solar cells were for use in spacecraft. Area and weight were at a premium and hence efficiency was one of the proper metrics to use in the design. That is not true for the side of the shed I used for mixing and storing explosives over a quarter mile from the nearest usable power line. I have lots of area and I don’t care if it takes ten times as much area as the more efficient but twice as expensive solar cells to generate the same power. This is now being realized by the manufactures.

Examine every metric carefully. Think about the unintended consequences. Think about what is really important to the target audience. It can make a huge difference.

The consequences of gay marriage

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Clayton claims that that the recent court rulings on allowing gay marriage, “… is likely to make the legal situation for homosexuals more difficult, not easier.” He also predicts that these court rulings will help get Republicans to the polls this election.

I agree with this latter point but disagree with the first. I think gay marriage as well as equal rights for gay is here to stay. It is an idea whose time has come. The worst anti-gay politicians can do is slow down the inevitable. The reason is because there have not been any dire consequences happen that are attributable to acceptance of gays in society. Just as gun owners right to carry weapons for self defense were gradually recognized in state after state without “blood running in the streets” so it is with gays and the recognization of their rights.

It will be scary for some, just as it was with people carrying firearms in public, but eventually the fear will subside and most people will accept it.

Running up the white flag

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According to Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University:

Democrats have run up the white flag. They have evidently concluded that curtailing the right of gun ownership is a nonstarter, especially if they intend to pursue victory in 50 states.

He speaks of “curtailing the right” as if it were a good thing. Would he speak so highly of curtailing the right of free speech? Or curtailing the right of due process? And he calls this running up the white flag? How about reluctantly acknowledging that the public will tolerate few further infringements of their right to gun ownership?

And this point total ignores the reality of those infringements being useless in terms of furthering public safety.

Get a grip on reality man. The Democrats needed a clue-by-four but at least most of them now avoid leading with their chin with their crazy ideas to restrict this particular inalienable right.

Beltway snipers

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The Beltway Snipers have been of more than casual interest to me for numerous reasons. Even before we knew who they were or their motives it was source of concern because of the damage it did to our right to keep and bear arms. I was also asked by a program manager when I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory if I had any ideas on how to catch them. The labs were getting asked by law enforcement for help. I didn’t really have anything other than what was already known. I don’t really think short of creating a surveillance society of both video and audio sensors that new technology can offer much help in catching criminals of this nature. But that’s getting off my main impetus for this post.

Michelle Malkin points out one of the criminals has confessed to another murder in Arizona.

It’s amazing to me how much these criminal got away with before being caught. And then they only got caught after they started leaving notes for the police!

It appears that because their motives are not obvious from the crimes it was extremely difficult to find suspects to examine for evidence. Scary stuff.

I tried but I couldn’t do it

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I started reading the Brady Center’s “report” titled The NRA: A Criminal’s Best Friend–How the National Rifle Association Has Handcuffed Federal Gun Law Enforcement but had to stop when I got to:

<blockquote”>

…rolled back this provision of the Gun Control Act, leading to the dangerous spread of gun shows and sales by licensed gun dealers to criminals outside their place of business at these largely unregulated arms bazaars.

“Dangerous spread of gun shows”? Exercising the constitutionally protected rights of freedom of association and the right to keep and bear arms is “dangerous”? And no one can legally sell to convicted felons in or outside their place of business. There’s no exemption in the law for gun shows.

I have Just One Question for these bigots–the KKK of the 21st Century.

I’m so tempted

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“Evil thoughts” from reading this:

Your generous donation and bids on our auction will support the Freedom States Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to “Changing the Way America Things About Guns.” 

All proceeds go directly to grassroots organizations working to reduce gun violence.

Our auction items range from exotic vacation getaways to donated items guaranteed to delight and surprise!

I wonder what the reaction would be if I donated a shooting position at Boomershoot 2007 for their auction. I guarantee my donation would “surprise”. And I would get a great deal of delight from it if I could see the expression on their face. But since they would get all the surprise and I can’t get any of the delight I’ll just continue to fantasize about it.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

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It’s rare that I copy some one else’s blog posting word for word without adding some significant content of my own. But in this case I don’t have much to add. Say Uncle has pretty much said all there is to say on the topic and about all I can say is, “Me too.” So here goes:

sensible gun laws

sensible gun laws

And, while we’re at it, let’s add:

ban all guns

ban gun ownership

After all, that is their goal. Don’t be fooled.

There are others that want to ban all guns too. And of course these guys don’t even try to hide the fact that they want to ban all guns.

Uncovered meat

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To my female readers, just so you know your place:

Muslim leaders, women’s rights advocates and political leaders in Australia today condemned one of the country’s top Islamic clerics for comparing women who don’t wear head scarves to “uncovered meat” who invite rape.

…

In a translation from Arabic by the newspaper, later verified by other media, Hilali was quoted as saying in the sermon: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside … and the cats come to eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s?”

“The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred,” he was quoted as saying, referring to the head scarf worn by some Muslim women.

Of course if some “cat” treats one of my daughters like “uncovered meat” there might be some question as to who is going to end up as “uncovered meat” for the cat. And example of daughter Kim in action is here.

Quote of the day–Greg Hamilton

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From the Greg Hamilton to English Dictionary by Meredith Robinson:

Mass Launcher also Behavior Modification Device and/or Reactive Defensive Tool

Translation: A gun.

Give them back

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Say Uncle pointed out this website by the NRA. I made the mistake of watching the videos just as I’m about to go to bed. That wasn’t wise. My adrenalin is running way to high to sleep now.

Remember New Orleans!

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?