Quote of the day—Lee Williams

Dear Gabby, Shannon and Mike,

The instant the first Russian T-80 crossed the Ukrainian border, the whole world could see the uselessness of everything you’ve ever said and everything you’ve ever done. You’ve been overtaken by events – mooted and muted in one fell swoop, so scram. Leave the field. It is time for you and your gun-ban groups to go.

There’s a madman with nukes on the loose who’s just 50 miles off Alaska’s port bow. No one knows how far he’s willing to go, so you’re out. The adults are taking charge. Your services are no longer required. Please take the Demanding Moms and their creepy husbands with you, open a box of wine and have yourselves a good cry. Ukraine learned nearly too late that the right to keep and bear arms saves lives, while the civilian disarmament pipedream you’ve been peddling for decades costs lives.

Lee Williams
March 2022
An open letter to Gabby Giffords, Shannon Watts and Michael Bloomberg
[There’s more but I found this the best part.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Lauren Boebert @laurenboebert

Remember.

Ukraine gave up their nukes in exchange for promises of security.

We see how that turned out.

This is why we must NEVER give up our guns to any government.

Lauren Boebert @laurenboebert
Tweeted on March 7, 2022
[This makes perfect sense to me. The principles which apply at a national level make sense when scaled down to an individual level.

But yet some people seem to think it is total nonsense. And they don’t (or can’t) explain why it is nonsense in a way that makes sense to me:

Oh my God, how are you not getting this? Two totally separate things. It’s like comparing apples to a dragon.

Does that mean we’re all getting nukes? We can pile them on a bookshelf behind us in Zoom conferences. Pose with them in Christmas photos. Have shirts that say, “Over my radioactive body.”

Comparing rifles to nukes is an extreme comparison considering that fact individuals can’t just walk into their local Walmart or bass pro shop and purchase a nuclear weapon.

Excellent argument for a 5th grader.

One screen. Two movies. Each think the other is delusional.

Reality is tough. Really, really tough.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jason Ouimet

Having successfully removed the “violence” component from the federal “domestic-violence” prohibitor, gun controllers set to work on removing the “domestic” component. The current version of the federal Violence Against Women Act (H.R. 1620 or VAWA) would alter the types of relationships that give rise to a prohibiting “domestic violence” conviction to include “dating partners.” There is no temporal or cohabitation limit to the definition of “dating partners.” Ladies, next time you see that cad who ghosted you after two dates, don’t throw a drink in his face—it might cost you your gun rights under the federal government’s increasingly ridiculous definition of “domestic violence.”

Over the last half-century, gun-rights supporters’ enthusiasm to protect the ownership and availability of the types firearms necessary to exercise the Second Amendment right has altered the political landscape. Now, as gun-control supporters increasingly set their sights on gun owners, gun-rights supporters must marshal that same passion to combat the more complex anti-gun campaign to expand prohibited-persons categories. At stake is more than just what types of guns Americans may own, but whether the average American will qualify to own any firearm at all.

Jason Ouimet
Executive Director, NRA-ILA
March 6, 2022
From Prohibited Firearms To Prohibited Persons
[I found this to be an interesting observation. With the new ban on standard capacity magazines in Washington State the article could have had better timing but it is still a valid point.

The anti-gun people have opened up a new front in the war against the right to keep and bear arms and to a large extend gun rights advocates have been caught flat-footed. We do not have a good response to this new type of attack.

In part we have ourselves to blame. We have often said things to the effect of, “It is the criminal, not the gun.” And, we were unable or unwilling to prevent the enactment of laws against convicted felons owning firearms (even though they had “paid their debt to society”). So now when they push us down the slippery slope of any type of conviction it is tough to get traction and push back.

As it stands there is no connection between being a violent criminal threat and being banned from firearm ownership. An petite elderly woman with a felony conviction for $1,000 of tax fraud 50 years ago and has lead an angelical life since is banned from protecting herself with the most effective self-defense tools. But the Antifa thug with dozens of arrests for assault, battery, and arson but no convictions can purchase artillery pieces just like the rest of us normal people.

We need a good response to this threat and absurdity.

My thought is since NICS, and background checks in general, have not changed the violent crime rate we should push for the elimination of these costly infringements which do nothing for public safety. That’s the logical approach.

Am more emotionally based response might be, “If someone is safe enough to be allowed in public with gasoline and a book of matches they are safe enough to be in possession of a gun in public.”*

A better one might be, “Background checks don’t make us safer.** What is the real reason you are doing this?”

Short and clever sound bites are best. Any ideas?—Joe]


* I can’t take credit for this observation. I think it was someone named Jason who, probably in the late 1990’s, told me his father pointed this out to him.

** California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds

Quote of the day—Steven Kovac

The special counsel alleged that rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide in many of Wisconsin’s 6,875 nursing homes (housing 92,000 residents) during the 2020 election.

When visited by OSC investigators, many nursing home residents who are on record as having voted absentee in the election, were unaware of their surroundings, what year it was, or to whom they were speaking.

Steven Kovac
March 4, 2022
Wisconsin Special Counsel Alleges Massive Misconduct in 2020 Election
[A friend of a friend tells a similar story about what he saw on election day in Philadelphia with nursing home residents brought to the polling place via wheelchairs.

There is a reason Democrats are so strongly against voter ID and other reasonable qualifications for voters.—Joe]

Quote of the day—David S. Willis

Amid the technological chaos and Western culture wars of the 21st century, thinkpiece writers sporadically debate which of these novels more accurately foresaw our present predicament. Modern China most clearly embodies Orwell’s vision, and elements of both novels can be found in contemporary Western societies. However, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 offered perhaps a more accurate warning than either. Published in 1953, Bradbury’s novel is as gloomy and prescient as either Orwell’s or Huxley’s, but its explanation of how a dystopia is created comes closer to providing an understanding of our new reality.

David S. Willis
February 12, 2022
“A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or Huxley’s
[I think he is right. Orwell’s vision could be on the horizon though.—Joe]

I’m ahead of you Tom Gresham @Guntalk

Tom:

If I were a Washington State resident I’d be online this morning, ordering at least 100 magazines for a modern rifle (AR) as well as other standard capacity mags. The governor will sign the mag ban passed by the legislature.

Me (some time ago) with my grandson:

image

Quote of the day—sacrebleu14 / SA Hinchcliffe @sacrebleu141

Bullies.

Like those who demand women, BIPOC, Ethnic, & LGBTQ+ communities to be forcibly disarmed. Unable to protect themselves.

Oh wait…

that is @washdems to #wastate Women, BIPOC, Ethic, & LGBTQ+ communities

#waleg #wapolitics #wa2A #wcraimage

image

sacrebleu14 / SA Hinchcliffe @sacrebleu141
Tweeted on February 27, 2022
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Mugme Street news

Another shooting death one block away from the one on Sunday.

Police are investigating after a man in his “late teens or early 20s” died after being shot in downtown Seattle Wednesday night.

The shooting happened around 7:15 p.m. on the 1500 block of Third Avenue, which is near the intersection of Third Avenue and Pike Street. When officers arrived, they found the victim suffering from a gunshot wound to the abdomen.

The one on Sunday was at 3rd and Pine. Pine and Pike are one block apart.

Barb’s nickname of Mug Me Street is appropriate.

Here is a recent video of the street (via Chuck Petras @Chuck_Petras) :

See also this article.

So, what is your assessment of the “defund the police” policy?

Quote of the day—Oleg Volk

My elected home country definitely gets my support over the former place where my family was held in detention for at least 14 years of my life. I consider Communist party membership to be a death penalty offense, same as Nazi party membership.

Oleg Volk
February 28, 2022
Facebook comment.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Signs of the times

I saw these on the wall of a U-Haul store:

image

image

They are a little too close to the truth.

Quote of the day—KING 5 Staff

Seattle’s popular Piroshky Piroshky Bakery is closing its Third Avenue location in downtown “until further notice” over “countless safety concerns.”

Following a fatal shooting Sunday afternoon at Third Avenue and Pine Street, the bakery sent a series of tweets detailing problems with crime in the area. The shooting on Sunday was the third in the area in a month, according to the bakery.

KING 5 Staff
February 27, 2022
Piroshky Piroshky closing downtown Seattle location over ‘countless safety concerns’
[This is Mug Me Street in Seattle. If you look at the picture at the top of the article you will see the McDonald’s store which is ground zero of Mug Me Street. My boss, a former Seattle cop, recently told me a story of his undercover coworker shooting a drug dealer in that store several years ago when a drug deal went sour.

Defunding the police is working just as expected.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

The gun prohibition lobby would have America become vulnerable to such aggression as we are now seeing on television screens from coast to coast. This isn’t some action movie Americans are watching, this is real life, and it vividly illustrates why so many of us fight day and night to protect and defend our Second Amendment rights.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the good citizens of Ukraine. We can only hope that gun prohibitionists, or at least their supporters in the establishment media, learn something from this tragedy. To live in peace, one must always be prepared to defend it.

Alan Gottlieb
CCRKBA Chairman
February 24, 2022
CCRKBA: ‘UKRAINE CRISIS UNDERSCORES IMPORTANCE OF SECOND AMENDMENT’
[I do not expect, and I doubt Gottlieb does either, gun prohibitionists will “learn something from this tragedy” that will cause them to reduce their efforts to disarm private citizens. I expect many of them would celebrate the destruction of the USA and imagine they can, and should, accelerate that destruction by eliminating or neutering the 2nd Amendment.

We live in interesting times. Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Chris Cillizza

What looked like a major flub during the 2012 campaign — and was used as a political cudgel by Obama — now looks very, very different. It should serve as a reminder that history is not written in the moment — and that what something looks like in that moment is not a guarantee of what it will always look like.

Chris Cillizza
February 22, 2022
It’s time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia
[See also what David Rutz has to say about this.

How gracious to admit his political bedmates were wrong. Isn’t he a nice guy? I wonder how they got it wrong to begin with?

One might be tempted to claim, “Never attribute to malic what can be adequately explained by ignorance and/or stupidity.”

When the hypothesis of ignorance and/or stupidity is put to the test you have consider that the political left is so much more friendly, and almost reasonable, with their political opponents after those opponents are no longer a political threat  When they are a political threat they are called “Hitler”, “fascist”, “racist”, “sexist”, etc. It happened with McCain, it happened but both Bush’s, it’s a consistent pattern. It’s to the point that they come across as schizophrenic.

But, again, the hypothesis of mental illness of a wide swath of the general population needs to be tested. In my estimation the simpler, and therefore more likely, answer is the behavior is a calculated and deliberately deceptive action.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Isobel Asher Hamilton

The chip Neuralink is developing is about the size of a coin, and would be embedded in a person’s skull. From the chip, an array of tiny wires, each roughly 20 times thinner than a human hair, fan out into the patient’s brain.

The wires are equipped with 1,024 electrodes which are able to monitor brain activity  and, theoretically, electrically stimulate the brain. This data is transmitted wirelessly via the chip to computers, where it can be studied by researchers.

The second is a robot that could automatically implant the chip.

The robot would work by using a stiff needle to punch the flexible wires emanating from a Neuralink chip into a person’s brain, a bit like a sewing machine.

Isobel Asher Hamilton
February 17, 2022
Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to embed microchips in people’s skulls and get robots to perform brain surgery
[This sounds like such a great idea it should be mandatory… for politicians. The data should be posted on the Internet in real time.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader on the feedback to be applied when the dislikes exceed the likes by a factor of two to one.

On a more serious note, I expect there will be people eager to do this. It will depend upon what sort of “apps” are available. Being able to give yourself almost instant orgasm will probably be a best seller with some people. Direct Internet access will be sufficient for others. And the math coprocessor will be the “killer app” for many of the nerds. But I don’t expect the concept will get full market penetration until virtual reality is nearly indistinguishable from the real world.

Just as with recreational drugs Darwin will provide the negative feedback and limit the adoption of this technology.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Igor Volsky

The significant increase in gun violence over the last couple of years is simply too hard to ignore and, I do believe the President when he says and when he said that this issue is a priority for him,

Igor Volsky
Founder of Guns Down America
February 14, 2022
‘We’re not asking for magical things’: Anti-gun violence groups launch campaign to pressure Biden four years after Parkland
[Completely ignoring that over 92% of violent crime in the US does not involve a gun. Completely ignoring the “defund the police” component to the increase in violent crime. Completely ignoring the lack of prosecution of violent criminals which are caught. Completely ignoring the early release of violent criminals from prison using the excuse they were in danger of catching COVID-19 while in prison. Completely ignoring gun ownership is a specific enumerated right.

It is not about crime. It is about taking Guns away from ordinary people.

Just as interesting is that there is such a new anti-gun organization. This organization was founded in late 2016. Apparently the half dozen or so other organizations, many of which have been around for decades, weren’t effective enough for Volsky.

What he doesn’t seem to understand is that his message of “building a future with fewer guns” has already been tried by many of the existing organizations. And if they ever get any traction with the politicians gun sales skyrocket. It is an “adaptive response” as explained by Chet just the other day.

And don’t let anyone get away with telling you, “No one wants to take your guns.”—Joe]

Quote of the day—StumpSmasher @SmasherStump

It’s hard to beat a sales pitch of “we’ll reduce your sentences to nothing, defund the police so they don’t stop you, disarm your victims so they can’t resist, and throw in a pile of free stuff at the expense of workers”.

The DNC’s platform is tailor-made for the criminal vote.

StumpSmasher @SmasherStump
Tweeted on February 5, 2022
[Also, as was the case in the early days of the USSR, criminals are the natural allies of the communists and are treated as such by the politicians.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Victor Davis Hanson

This governmental freefall has been overseen by a tragically bewildered, petulant, and incompetent president. In his confusion, an increasingly unpopular Biden seems to believe that his divisive chaos is working, belittling his political opponents as racist Confederate rebels.

As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, who will stop our descent into collective poverty, division, and self-inflicted madness?

Victor Davis Hanson
January 19, 2022
Is America Heading for a Systems Collapse
[I’m nearly certain that is the wrong question to ask. It is my understanding that in chaotic times people give their support to “strong” (authoritarian) people who claim they can fix the broken system. Mussolini and Hitler come to mind…

Hence, I think the better questions are:

  • “How can we prevent the wrong person from coming to power?”
  • “How can we dramatically reduced government power and let the free market fix the mess we are in?”
  • “How can we survive the coming collapse?”
  • “Where is my underground bunker?”

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Forrest Cooper

In his book, Antifragile Nicholas Nassim Taleb describes his concept as something which gains from disorder or resistance. Having no word to accurately describe something that is the opposite of fragile, he argues that the term robust does not go far enough, and is neutral at best. Antifragility is a trait, whether it be in markets, military strategies, or bone mass, that grows off of the volatility of their environments.

The phenomenon that is American Gun Culture has responded to censorship in an antifragile way. This can be seen in the sudden spike in firearms purchasing whenever politicians push for banning certain firearms, as well as by continuing to grow despite political and cultural opposition. While social media platforms normalize censoring firearms-related content, the culture revolving around firearms shows that it doesn’t need their approval to continue thriving.

Forrest Cooper
February 7, 2022
Censorship and Antifragility: Aero Precision
[Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder is a good book. It is a novel, (but obvious in hindsight) way of looking at things. As an engineer it helped me think about the design of reliable systems. It can help the gun rights community think about better responses to attempts at infringements too.

Gab is a good example. They were deplatformed on multiple axis simultaneously and came back stronger than before.

One might also say Boomershoot was an antifragile response to a law introduced by Diane Feinstein. The word did not exist at the time, but it certainly fits the facts.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Emily McCormick

Consumer prices soared by the most in four decades in January, with inflation across the economy showing few signs of peaking even after months of increases.

The Consumer Price Index’s 7.5% annual surge at the start of 2022 was the biggest leap since 1982 and topped already elevated expectations for a 7.3% rise, based on Bloomberg consensus data. On a month-over-month basis, the CPI unexpectedly posted a 0.6% increase for a back-to-back month, whereas economists had been looking for a deceleration. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, also exceeded estimates, showing a 6.0% year-over-year jump in January.

The report served as one of the clearest affirmations that inflation — described as recently as November by the Federal Reserve as “transitory” — has become a persistent feature of the economic recovery.

Emily McCormick
February 10, 2022
What economists are saying about soaring inflation
[We live in interesting times.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Natasha Abel

Based on the percent of firearms licenses, about 1 to 5 percent of adult residents had a firearms license in Massachusetts counties. But Iwama found no consistent effect of the new legislation on reducing four types of violent crime (murder or nonnegligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery, rape). Her study did find that a one-percent increase in denied firearm licenses and denied firearm licenses following statutory disqualifications increased robberies 7.3 and 8.9 percent, respectively.

While the percentage of denied firearms licenses and firearms license applications had little to no effect on violent crimes, Iwama suggests state lawmakers revisit their legislation to ensure that it is being implemented as intended and address challenges identified. In particular, are these findings the result of a longer-than-expected lag in enforcement following passage of the legislation? Are they due to individuals obtaining firearms in nearby states with looser gun laws? Or is it possible that the 2014 law is being enforced differentially by county?

Natasha Abel
October 22, 2021
Study: Massachusetts Gun-Control Legislation Has Had No Effect on Violent Crime
[Or is it possible that what I and others have been saying, for almost 20 years, gun control has not and will not make the general public safer?

Study after study agrees with me but researcher Janice Iwama confirms the findings of dozens of other researchers using data from all over the country (for example: a 2018 study on background checks and my thoughts on background checks in 2013) and concludes it must be an implementation problem specific to Massachusetts. She doesn’t understand (or believe) that it was never the intention of the law to increase public safety.—Joe]