Via email from Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance (I’m on the Board of Directors):
From: Michael C. Brown Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2011 1:44 PM Subject: Alert: Campus Carry Reform on the move!
Shooters:
The Idaho House State Affairs committee voted 16-3 to print H222 which will clarify that the colleges and universities can only regulate firearms in dorms. Currently the U of I and other state colleges and universities have policies that ban all firearms from campus, even ones stored in a private automobile. Some colleges even restrict off-duty and retired law enforcement officers from carrying on their campuses. This much needed legislation was drafted by Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance in conjunction with Idaho Students for Concealed Carry. This will probably come up for a full hearing next week– we’ll keep you informed!
Mike
Michael C. “Mike” Brown Executive Director/General Counsel Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance 208 835-3737 208 835-3744 Fax www.idahossa.org
This is particular important to me because I have a daughter (with a concealed weapons license) attending the University of Idaho and frequently walks to and from classes from our home a mile or so off campus.
I was going to go to the Steel Challenge match today but I have to drive 300 miles back to my hidden underground bunker today and this little issue came up:
Winter Storm Warning (Expires: Monday February 28 4:00PM PST)
the national weather service in spokane has issued a winter storm
warning for heavy snow and blowing snow which is in effect from 4
am this morning to 4 pm pst monday.
snow accumulations: total snow accumulations of 8 to 10 inches
are expected from this morning through monday afternoon.
elevation: all elevations.
timing: snow will begin this morning, increase through the
afternoon, taper off tonight, then ioncrease again monday.
locations include: moscow, plummer, potlatch, genesee
winds: winds will increase and become gusty late today through
monday, producing areas of blowing or drifting snow. gusts to
35 mph will be possible.
impacts: difficult driving conditions will be a certainty,
with visibilities dropping significantly in wind prone
locations due to blowing snow.
Similar warnings exist for nearly the entire route back to my bunker. It could be a long drive and I need to get started early and make as much of the trip as I can in daylight.
The featured phone is the same one I have and that I gave wife Barbara and daughters Kim and Xenia for Christmas. Barb explicitly told me not to get her one (after I had already bought it). But now she uses it all the time. She plays games on it, she listens to music with it, sends text messages, and she can even check the weather and make phone calls with it. She has thanked me repeatedly since Christmas for getting it for her even though she thought she wouldn’t like anything “too complicated”. It’s not complicated.
It is also the same one that son James and his fiancé Kelsey have. I evaluated all the Windows Phone 7 available just before Christmas and the Samsung Focus edged out all the others with it’s bright display, the camera, and the sound quality. Others apparently agree because from what I’m hearing it is a very, very popular phone.
Full disclosure—I work for Microsoft and I wrote some of the software that goes into this phone.
Where else can you find deuterium oxide (or would it be di deuterium monoxide?) uranium, thermite and jet engines for sale on one site? Too much to mention. Just look.
This recent post of Joe’s reminded me. I don’t remember whether I posted about this before, but a couple years ago during a state highway upgrade outside of Moscow, Idaho, a fiber optic line was cut. One little line. Typically, we think of having a cell phone, a computer with internet access, a land line, and a radio as being diversified with regard to our communications. Well, not necessarily.
When my cell phone was unable to reach anyone outside the Moscow area I tried the land line. No go. Then I tried to get on line and check e-mail. Nope. Then I turned on the radio. More than one station dead. It turned out that more than one cellular service, our local internet access, much of the land line traffic, and even some radio station feeds were using the same FO line. I don’t know if that’s changed.
I view large scale electrical generation plants in the same light. Your local food supply may depend on one or two highways and one rail line, and the stores have been relying on the “just in time” inventory method more and more. A similar situation may exist in your local hospital. I don’t know. It costs money to keep extra rooms, beds, personnel and supplies available, much beyond the normal demand.
Co-worker Chet stops by my office and chats every once in a while. We both grew up on a farm, we share similar views on the world, and have similar concerns about the current economic situation. One of the concerns is the potential for world wide economic collapse. This has lead us to ponder how we might deal with the collapse of technology. How would or could we survive in a world with greatly diminished supplies of various natural resources such as oil, metals, fuels, and even water (electricity is needed to move it for irrigations as well as direct human consumption). As a consequence of those reduced supplies the food supply would be dramatically reduced. Our total population as well as the distribution of that population would make “going back” even to the time of our childhood (the 50’s and 60’s for Chet and I) nearly impossible without dramatic and extremely painful consequences.
Some of the concerns are that food production today is heavily dependent on oil based fuels, fertilizers, and pesticides. The yields (bushels/pounds per acre) on the farm today about almost 50% greater than what they were when I was a small child yet our food surplus is smaller than what it was then. If we were to attempt to go back to horse powered farm production it would take something like 20 years to increase the horse population adequately and it requires about 1/3 of the farm capacity to feed them.
The food distribution problems are just as bad. The populations of major cities require food (and frequently water) be brought in from at least 100 miles away if not 300 miles away simply because the land within a smaller radius is not capable of supporting a population that size. How do you transport the food with greatly reduced oil supplies? We can’t produce enough fuel on our farms.
Shall we talk about heating? Coal, natural gas, and oil either directly or indirectly via electricity produce much of the heat for our buildings. How are those supplies going to hold up in an economic collapse? The metals to distribute electricity are already being stolen and sold for scrap (H/T to Roberta). Read Doctor Zhivago or watch the movie. It’s a novel but it was based on events from the Russian revolution and civil war of the early 20th century. People will burn their furniture and even their own houses to keep warm. In todays world I expect even pieces of streets and road (asphalt) will disappear in the night to be burned as heating fuel.
Apparently these concerns are far from new. Yesterday Chet sent me an email (bold added):
As we have discussed several times we cannot easily go back to our parents or grandparent’s way of life if we lose today’s technology.
It looks like this idea has been known for some time. I found this quote in ELEMENTS OF TECHNOLOGY published in 1831 (second edition).
“The augmented means of public comfort and of individual luxury, the expense abridged and the labor superseded, have been such, that we could not return to the state of knowledge which existed even fifty or sixty years ago, without suffering both intellectual and physical degradation.”
The civil unrest in the Mid-East is not just something that happens someplace far away. Wisconsin may be the first sign of stress in the U.S. but other states are very close behind and things are going to get far worse before they get better. The attitudes of the people protesting economic belt tightening and demanding revolution will guarantee it. A lot more people need to do a reality check to avoid disaster.
A brief family discussion about these concerns late last year resulted in daughter Kimberly taking it upon herself to read up on how to make your own simple medicines, grow various foods, and we made plans to plant fruit trees on some of our land. Kimberly now has avocados trees about two feet tall and pumpkins blooming in our living room:
We might not be able to go back without suffering intellectual and physical degradation but some people will survive. Will it be you? Or should anyone even be concerned? I am concerned. Far, far from everyone has sufficient land or a Kimberly in their family.
My Dad ran across some stuff about his parents recently.
I didn’t realize that my Grandfather and his brother were married on the same day in Juliette Idaho or that they went to Riverside California for their honeymoon.
A few years ago a friend of mine and I were talking about nuclear bombs and he said something about all the scientists involved with the development of “The Bomb” were now dead. I told him, “No. Johnston is still alive.” “Who is Johnston?” Johnston, I told him, was the guy that invented the detonators. After the war he was a physics professor at the University of Idaho and still lives in Moscow. I’m not sure my friend really believed me. Why would someone with a background like that end up in a backwater college like the U of I? I disputed this. The U of I has done quite well for itself and has nothing to be ashamed of—well, except for perhaps Larry “Wide Stance” Craig. Other famous graduates or professors include Sarah Palin in the class of 1987, Dan O’Brien (class of ’93), and Margrit Von Braun (daughter of Wernher von Braun).
Back to Johnston—I got my undergraduate degree at the U of I and took several physics classes there. But none of them were with Johnston even though he was there at the time (’67 –> ’88). But I would occasionally see mention of him in the news and I was proud to have him in my home town.
Last week wife and physical therapist Barbara called me up and excitedly asked me, “Do you know who I have as my patient?” “No. You don’t tell me that information unless you get permission from the patient and you haven’t done that for several weeks now.” My taking her literally somehow didn’t damping her spirits as it usually does and she went on to tell me that it was one of the scientist who worked on the first atomic bomb. “Johnston?”, I asked. “Yes. How did you know?”, her spirits finally dampened a tad. “Because he is the only one left and he lives in Moscow”, I explained.
She went on to tell me he gave her permission to talk to me about him, he was a really nice guy, is 92 years old, is the only person to have witnessed all three of the first atomic bomb explosions (he was in the observation planes over Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and he would be interested to exchange email with me. “Uhhh…. WOW!” was about all I could say.
A lawsuit has been filed in my home town of Moscow Idaho to allow guns on campus. This is particularily interesting to me because of the home town jurisdiction, I have a daughter attending the University, Barb and I lived in “Married Student Housing” owned by the University when we first got married, and I know the judge the case has been assigned to. Judge Stegner is the father of a couple girls my daughters used to be friends with. Our children would sometimes visit each others home for parties, etc.. Judge Stegner was also the judge on the trial when I did jury duty.
I certainly like the idea but it bothers me a great deal that the plaintiff, Aaron Tribble, is doing this PRO SE.
I sent an email to the lawyer that sent me the case asking what he thought the chances of screwing up things from doing this PRO SE were. I’ll try to keep everyone up to date on this action and might even have a chat with Mr. Tribble when I go back to Idaho next weekend.
Update: First error, it should have been filed in Federal Court, not locally. I wondered about that…
It also complicates a few other things that I won’t get into in a public venue.
I finally got access to the pictures Oleg took at Boomershoot 2010 (thanks Barron). Here are some of my family (minus son James who was in the Seattle area that weekend) that I was most interested in getting.
Keep in mind these are just the raw images without any special post processing that brings them up to the quality product standards you normally would expect from Oleg. The tweaks were by me, a non professional, which consisted only of resizing and in the case of the first picture some slight cropping.
As is usual, click on the picture for a higher resolution version.
This was me just prior to the shooters meeting and fireball demo on Sunday.
This is wife Barbara and I about halfway through the main event on Sunday. Notice how tolerant she is of me even though I have been grouchy for days? That is simply amazing someone would put up with that. It probably helped that she received the special edition Boomershoot jacket she is wearing from Boomershooters Fred and Bruce the night before.
Barbara Scott December 4, 2010 In response to Robert Fargo saying I was “devilishly handsome”. [I think the answer is probably no. But there are some guys out there that publically say the have “a man crush” on me. And Barb claims I have groupies of both genders.
Somewhat related is the story of the woman that offered me sex for a position at Boomershoot for her husband. What is interesting is that Barb sort of predicted it before it happened. Spoiler alert,, in part because I haven’t told Barb the story yet—she ended up acquiring the position just like everyone else and paying for the position with a credit card.—Joe]
Earlier, when she found out daughters Kim and Xenia were getting a Windows Phone 7 for Christmas, she told me, “You better have not gotten me one of those. I’ll be afraid to use it because I might lose it.”
Here is the video when she opens it and then finds out I got her a little something extra to go with it:
I miss Idaho dearly. I REALLY miss being in the middle of nowhere, as strange as that probably sounds to most people. I just feel so confined in the city–almost like I can’t breathe. I feel safe most of the time (I would feel safer if I could carry on campus… but that’s another story) but there’s always this lingering thought. I never had that growing up on the farm, or in Moscow for that matter.
Lisa December 14, 2010 1st Semester of Grad School — Finished! (Almost) [Lisa, is my niece and grew up on the same farm I did. I completely understand what she is saying. I work in a different city on a different campus but the same restrictions apply.
It’s been 35+ years since I lived on the farm and I still feel that way.—Joe]
I hope one day to tell “boogeyman” stories to my grandkids about how the Brady Campaign will come back and take their guns if they don’t adhere to the 3 (4) basic rules of gun safety.
IrishPirate December 20, 2010 Brady’s going broke, telling same old lies [Let’s make this a reality as soon as possible. It probably won’t be all that long before I have grandkids.—Joe]
Some of you … may have decided that, this year, you’re going to celebrate Christmas the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on “The Walton’s”. Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.
Dave Barry Christmas Shopping: A Survivor’s Guide [This comes pretty close to my view of Christmas.—Joe]
Son-in-law John and I went to the Paul Bunyan (Pullayup Washington) USPSA match yesterday. It rained all Saturday night and continued to rain throughout the match. This made for some deep water in places, difficult to tape targets (clear plastic bags are put over the targets to help keep them dry), and soggy score sheets and shooters. We call it “Liquid Sunshine” and have a good time anyway.
On Friday my officemate (Priyanka), my boss (Sajib) , and I were talking about weekend plans and I told them I was going to attend this match with John, my son-in-law, who is in the army. Priyanka, exclaimed, “Oh! I’ll bet he is really good!” I tried to explain that actually I was quite a bit better at this sport than John. I’m not sure either one of them really believed me. So this is for them: I came in second in Limited Class with 90.43% match percentage while John came in fourth with 47.70%.
What this basically means (it’s not quite this simple but it’s close enough) is that for a given level of accuracy, on the average, I can shoot the same course of fire in about one half the time as John. Or expressed another way, for a given speed, on the average, I can shoot about twice as accurate as John. Why is that? The answer is I have practiced a lot more than John and for pistol shooting I have had better training. I also have better equipment than John but that is not even close to the dominate factor.
This was the first time I had shot a match at this range and they had more high round count stages than what we usually do at the Lewiston Pistol Club in Idaho where I usually shoot. High round count stages are fun. You not only get more trigger time but you get to “run and gun” too. It’s not particularly realistic for defensive shooting (the last statistic I read was that the average gun fight was over in 2.4 seconds) but generally people think they are more fun. Having fun means you are likely to shoot more. And even if on the first two and a half seconds of your average USPSA match relates to reality you end up practicing a lot more than if you only shot matches that were composed of stages that lasted less than two and a half seconds.
The stage was 12 targets spread over a fairly large distance with barricades to go around to get to the last targets. It’s a little hard to see in the still picture and you have to watch for it in the video but there is a rope between the barrels as a fault line so you can’t get too close to the targets.
Stage 2 (In The Rain) had targets on opposite sides of the bay with barricades which made it difficult to avoid a lot of moving. Plus there were targets in moderately difficult to reach positions.
Shooting while on the move helped for some of the targets but others required full stops.
Stage 3 (Get Off Santa’s Back) was a little different. It is composed of three strings of fire. One is “freestyle”, one is “strong hand only”, and one is “weak hand only”. Although it is difficult to see in the video there are four paper targets. Two on each side of the hardcover (steel painted red) target. The paper targets are overlapping and it is difficult to see where the lower target ends and the upper target begins. The requirement was that for each string you put one bullet into each target. There were penalties for misses, extra shots, and extra hits on any given target. I got all my hits with no penalties in a total of 13.38 seconds. Nearly everyone else had a better time but my accuracy was much better. This earned me a stage percentage of 86.40%.
Some other people were not as fortunate and one person had so many penalties that they zeroed the stage.
Stage 4 (1 Tuesday #2) required moving backward! The shooter began with their hands on either side of the opening in the barricade. There are four (only two are standing in the still photo) steel targets to be shot through the opening then you had to back up to shoot two targets on either side around and through the barrels for a minimum of 12 shots. I thought I had hit the last steel and started to move on, noticed it didn’t fall, and had to return to finish it off. It took me 8.06 seconds and I got all ‘A’ hits on the paper. This earned me a 69.27% stage percentage and last place for limited.
Son-in-law John, for the first time ever, beat me on this stage. He did it with all ‘A’ hits in 8.05 seconds. Just 1/100th of a second better than me.
Stage 5 (I Wanna YoYo) was four banks of six steel plates. Two banks of plates could be shot from each of two shooting boxes. You were required to change boxes between shooting banks. Hence you had run back and forth between the boxes. Ability to shoot on the move is of nearly no advantage for this stage.
On my first run there was a range equipment failure about two thirds of the way through the stage when one of the plates fell without me shooting it. This required a reshoot and I did much worse the second time through but I still took second place in Limited with stage percentage of 71.91% after knocking down all 24 plates, and running back and forth, in 39.09 seconds.
Stage 6 (Six A’Clock) was the last stage. It was composed of three strings of fire with three sets of targets. The first set was a single target which you were required to put six rounds into. The second set was two targets and you were were required to put three rounds into each target. The third set was three targets and two no-shoot targets and you were required to put two rounds each into the “shoot” targets and you were penalized if you hit the no-shoot targets, had misses, or fired more than the specified number of rounds. I won this stage with a total time of 10.38 seconds for the 18 rounds. Nearly everyone else in my division had better times but I had much better hits. I scored 81 out of the possible 90 points with no penalties and the next best shooter only scored 75 points and had 20 points in penalties.
I have a problem with more than three rounds on a single target. I can shoot faster than I can count and have to slow my shooting to match my ability to count. When confronted with this situation, and it works out for the stage design, I will load only six (or ‘N’) rounds in the gun. Then I just shoot until the gun runs dry. That is what I did in this case. I didn’t get the individual times or the splits between shots while at the match but I went through the video frame by frame on the first target and found that from the muzzle flash of the first shot to the muzzle flash of the last shot it took 1.17 seconds. This is an average of 0.234 seconds between the five shots. This was at a distance of about 30 feet. IIRC I had five “A” hits and one “C” hit.
It turns out that I accidently used a bad magazine (it needs a new follower) and it didn’t hold the slide open on the last shot. This caused me to drop the hammer on an empty chamber and I was somewhat surprised that the gun was empty. No matter—Sometimes a little surprise is a good thing.
I keep thinking Brady Campaign supporters must require frequent trips to Sears for their special needs with these sort of videos being put on the web.
Kim took most of the pictures while Sarah, Matt, and Caleb built the snow castle wall and I prepped the chalk dispensing target:
The final snow castle wall just prior to destruction:
The road flares are to ignite the four gallons of gasoline located high on the left side of the wall, on top of (and behind) the 6 pounds of Boomerite.
The snow, gasoline, and dirt went flying when the Boomerite detonated:
I expected the ground to be bare beneath the explosion but that was not quite the case. Apparently the explosives were too high above the ground to clear it of snow:
Next time we should put the explosives much lower to give the snow more lift.
Roberta X recommended checking out the comic Abstruse Goose. It has a strong resemblance to XKCD and a quick scan of a few previous posts was more than sufficient to add it to my list of RSS feeds.
I then hit the Random button and got this on the first click:
This probably isn’t what Roberta (or wife Barbara) would call “good”. Of course the author does have something for the women too:
