The AP reported last night

Off-duty and retired police officers would have the right to carry concealed weapons in any state under legislation the Senate approved by voice vote Wednesday and sent to the president.

The bill, passed by the House last month, would override some states’ prohibitions on carrying concealed firearms. Many states do not recognize other states’ concealed weapons permits.

The President is expected to sign it.  Although this isn’t everything I want to see (every free and sane person, every place, should be able to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves and other innocent people) it is a good first step.  The anti-gun people have a difficult time articulating effective opposition to it and as more and more people carry these type of defensive tools it becomes more and more difficult for the general population to understand why some people start foaming at the mouth at people being allowed to use the best tools for the job of self-defense.  One step at a time.  That’s how we got here and that is the best way to get back to where we belong.

Kim is moving out this weekend.  She’s not 18 yet but we co-signed her lease on an apartment in Moscow.  She will have two roommates and they will have a two bedroom apartment to share.  She is taking the old sofa we were going to throw away and one of them will sleep on the hide-a-bed.  It comes not a moment too soon for some of the others in the family.  Xenia wrote me a long email and attached eight pictures (with circles and arrows) explaining why it was no longer tolerable for Kim and her friends to be hanging out at our place.

Also related to Kim is that a couple weeks ago I checked the oil in the pickup and found it did not touch the dipstick.  I told her she should not start it until it was filled.  I checked it a couple days later after she had driven it and it still didn’t touch the dipstick.  I told her she was done driving the pickup for a while and disabled it so she couldn’t start it even if she wanted too.  I filled it up with oil and enable it last weekend.  But it had a knock in the engine.  Kim drove it a little bit the other day and it came home with a very bad knock.  It’s done.  That’s two vehicles she has totaled.

I read nearly all of the “gun violence“ postings on Join Together Online.  Most of the time they are condensed versions of news stories with an anti-freedom spin.  Occasionally they will have their own writers or a VPC or Brady Bunch press release or ‘report’.  Here is a story from someone who I believe to be one of the Join Together Online staffers:

http://www1.jointogether.org/gv/news/features/reader/0,2061,572284,00.html

With the recent passage of a “shall issue” handgun law in Ohio, the number of states that have eased restrictions on concealed gun carrying has risen to 35. But in the face of this onslaught, four heartland states are holding fast to their long-time laws that prohibit the carrying of concealed guns by people other than police officers.

[snip]

Activists in these states say that the task of keeping shall-issue laws from passage is a difficult one, but as Bonavia stated during the recent legislative fight in Wisconsin, “Proponents of (concealed carry) laws claim that concealed weapons will provide individuals with an unparalleled means of self-defense while offering society an effective method of decreasing crime. Experts, scientific evidence, experience, and common sense contradict these claims.”

If it isn’t painfully obvious to them then surely it is to all rational people–if people legally carrying personal protection tools are a threat to society then why isn’t there data to support that conclusion.  Is the best conclusion their “scientific evidence“ can come up with is this?

… Stanford University Law School economist John J. Donohue has conducted an exhaustive study of the effects of all shall-issue states and found that these laws don’t reduce crime and may actually increase it.

The vast majority of studies show violent crime is reduced when people are not prohibited from exercising their inalienable right to self-defense.  They found one researcher who was willing to say it “may actually increase it“?  If it did actually increase it then with all the states recognizing peoples right to self-defense should provide lots of data to support that claim.  The data doesn’t exist and all they can do is whine about it.  It’s about time they had to come face-to-face with their lies.  It makes me smile.  If I didn’t know that these people won’t give up until someone, figuratively, drives a wooden stake through their hearts I would open a bottle of champagne and toast to their demise.  Anyone have some wooden stakes?  I haven’t had a glass of champagne in a long time.

Barb and I went for a walk today and found four geocaches.  All within about 1/2 mile of each other and in town.  It’s amazing how many of there there are now.  I remember when I had placed the one closest to Moscow and it was several miles out.  Things change.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59948-2004Jun22.html

First off I need to say I was wrong about something. I implied that the worst our soldiers did in the Baghdad prison was to humiliate some prisoners. It turns out that wasn’t true. At least one actually died and there were some activities that bordered on torture. The people responsible are being punished. Compare that to the consequences to the scumbags killing innocent people. Are any of them being punished by their peers? Are any of them even being publically opposed by their peers?

It is my belief they will continue to kill innocents as long as there are mild or no consequences for their actions. I believe one solution would be to announce, and then follow through if necessary, that we will bomb a mosque every time they murder an innocent (non-military) person. As I said in a comment on the Kim duToit blog:

Leave no stone on top of another — hell don’t leave any stones — turn them all into dust and their fundamental molecular components and put that dust high into the wind. Don’t leave anything but a gaping crater behind. Let them know that as far as they are concerned we are their gods and that these gods have a fury and a fist they have never seen the equal of.

Do it 3:00 AM or some such time when the chances of mass casualties are reduced. But be sure we do it. They will fill their mosques with innocent women and children but we could chose the one with the minimum number of casualties and then the second and third time there will be far fewer willing to risk death to support the murders.

I got an email from someone who read my post about the arrest of the guy wanting to blow up a shopping mall:

—
This moron actually wrote that stuff to you????

Good grief.

On the other hand, flying schools (and the FBI) didn’t seem to think it strange that people wanted to learn how to fly, but not to land.
—

I get LOTS of email from morons asking how to build bombs.  I try my best to discourage it but, well, they are morons.

Read these pages for example morons:

http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp.htm
http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2003.htm
http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2002.htm
http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2001.htm
http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2000.htm

And those are just the ones that actually bother to write.  So far this month I have received 145 hits (that about 10 hits/day) from people looking for help making a bomb.  I have all their IP addresses and their search query phrases — stuff like:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=how+to+make+a+small+bomb
http://web.ask.com/web?q=Want+Some+Help+Building+a+Bomb&o=0&qsrc=0

As of June 1 of this year I have had this many hits year to date on my website http://www.boomershoot.org on bomb building:

  232: how to make a small bomb
   79: building a bomb
   43: how to make a bomb
   37: building a pipe bomb
   30: bomb building
   30: how to make a simple bomb
   26: how to build a bomb
   25: make a small bomb

Yesterday I received the prints the writer, Lisa Anne Auerbach, sent me.  Very nice pictures.  Not sure the “still life” of the fireball target was the most beautiful picture, but she did take some nice pictures.  Today I got some email saying she sent the article in last week and that usually the magazine policy is to not allow others to see the article until the magazine comes out.  Also, unfortunately, the article was limited to just 500 words.

Interesting.  Very interesting.  It’s possible I had something to do with catching that guy.

—–
http://www.cincypost.com/2004/06/15/terr061504.html

Many in Columbus, Ohio, knew Nuradin M. Abdi as the owner of a cellular
telephone sales business.

But a federal indictment announced Monday accused Abdi, a native of
Somalia, of being an operative for the terror network al-Qaida whose
plans to blow up an unspecified Columbus-area shopping mall were
thwarted by his November arrest.
—–

And from about 1.5 years ago:

—-
http://www.boomershoot.org/general/BombHelp2002.htm#TerrorismClass

Hey Joe,

Do you know anything about explosives that are detonated via
cell-phones?

.
.
.

I think I’ve decided to (hypothetically) attack a mall since there’s
practically no security, they’re crowded, and they seem like the type of
target my chosen group would go after. I’d like to set off bombs in
several different key pubic areas, as well as some car-bombs in the
parking garage. The main goal of my terrorist group will be death and
destruction, but actually bringing down the building would be considered
a big plus. However, I know about as much about main building supports
as I do about explosives, so I still have a lot of research to do.

.
.
.

From: FBI Internet Tips
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 8:25 AM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Subject: FBI Response

Thank you for your tip to the FBI Internet Tip Line. It is being
evaluated for it’s strategic value, and will be disseminated, if
appropriate, for further action. It is the policy of the FBI to not
provide results of that evaluation or action to the providers of
information.

Sincerely,

David N. Rushing/jbv
Supervisory Special Agent
FBI Headquarters
Washington, DC
—-

Sami was found not guilty on most charges.

Sami almost for certain was/is not a “good guy“.  I think he was in fact working on the side of evil.  But one can do that without breaking any law and the court/jury has concluded there was insufficient evidence that he had broken any law.  So… he gets a pass (after spending over a year in jail, terminating his schooling, and having his family kicked out of the country).  I think he probably has paid a sufficient price for his “sins”.  And of course our intelligence agencies will be watching him and everyone he has contact with.  He will be essentially useless to our enemies for the forseeable future.  I say, send him back to Saudi Arabia and he is unlikely to bother us again.

For example Brigitte Bardot (sex symbol of 45 years ago) has been fined for exercising her inalienable right to free speech:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5181642/

The Paris court sentenced Bardot, 69, for remarks in her book “A Scream in the Silence,” an outspoken attack on gays, immigrants and the jobless that shocked France last year.

In the book, she laments the “Islamization of France” and the “underground and dangerous infiltration of Islam.”

And it’s not just free speech they don’t like, it’s economic freedom as well:

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18005/article_detail.asp

Back in May 1944, Hubert Beuve-Méry, the future founder and editor of Le Monde, the most influential journal in France today, was able to write that “The Americans constitute a real danger for France…. They cling to a veritable cult of the idea of liberty [and] don’t feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitudes that their capitalism entails.” The fact that an important Frenchman was able to argue this even while France was occupied by the Nazis, with the possibility of American liberation being their only hope for a different future, indicates the depth of both the hatred for economic liberty and the anti-American obsession in France.

For me this puts a new light on the French opposition to U.S. activities.

It rained, it hailed, the wind blew and I got a sunburn.  Other than the generator needing to be taken apart and fixed to make the targets, getting the van stuck, and me forgetting the cleaning rod for my AR-15 — things went well.  I sent the following email to the editor with a Cc: to the writer last night:

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 8:50 PM
To: ‘Amy Linn’
Cc: ‘Lisa Auerbach’; Ry Jones; Stephanie Sailor
Subject: Lisa’s Boomershoot Adventure

Despite the typical Boomershoot weather (rain, hail, high winds, and enough sun to give you a sunburn all in the span of a few hours), the electric generator overhauled in the middle of the target building, and me getting the van stuck, Lisa told me at the end of the day, “That was fun.” It must been my mom’s rhubarb cobbler and the detailed explanations of farm equipment supplied by my brother that balanced out the negatives. Although she did express some pleasure with the reactive targets. I have a few pictures up on my web site for you guys to look at. Lisa took many more and claimed that one which she took of our fireball target was the most beautiful she had ever taken in her life. I’m not sure why she told me that but I did buy her dinner later.

The pictures can be found here: [snip]

There are two albums of possible interest here. One is of Lisa’s adventure and the other is of Boomershoot 2004, the public event from last month. Click on the small pictures to get a medium size picture, click on the medium size pictures to get the large version.

Amy, thanks for sending Lisa out. She was a pleasure to entertain for the day and I hope you enjoy her pictures and what she has to say about her Boomershoot Adventure.

-joe-
—-
http://www.modernballistics.com
http://www.boomershoot.org
mailto:JoeH@boomershoot.org

A writer for Outside magazine will be showing up in Moscow tonight.  Tomorrow Ry and I take her on a Boomershoot adventure.  What the editor wanted her to do was attend Boomershoot 2004 but they just missed that.  The weather sounds like it will be on the good side of typical for a Boomershoot. 

Day Mostly cloudy and breezy with a shower or thunderstorm in the area
High	67° F
Maximum RealFeel®	65° F
RealFeel Shade®	63° F
Winds	N at 9 mph
Wind Gusts	19 mph
Maximum UV	4
Thunderstorm Probability	25%
Amount of Precipitation	0.24 in
Amount of Rain	0.24 in
Amount of Snow	0 in
Hours of Precipitation	2
Hours of Rain	2

Most Boomershoots have more rain (and/or snow and hail).  Wind is about normal — well into the obnoxious range but not into the impossible range.  Temperature is a bit above normal.  But the writer is from Los Angles so a bit above normal temperatures will be a good thing.

This week I spent a couple days in Seattle at the University of Washington Hospital Medical Center having some tests done on my stomach and esophagus. I have been having esophageal spasm every once in a while for the past five to seven years. They have been happening more and more frequent and more intense and I finally let Barb convince me to have a specialist look at me. What follows are the “highlights”. Lots of verbal information gathering was done at various steps along the way. And a fair amount of waiting too.

First they ran a tube up my nose and then down into my stomach and measured the pressure of the muscles in my esophagus as I swallowed. They would squirt some stuff (either salt water or this gooey junk) into my mouth and I would swallow. They did this 10 times for each substance.

Next came the endoscophy — visually looking at my esophagus and stomach. They put in an IV, positioned me on my left side facing the doctor and gave me an injection of some sort of sedative. I remember the room looking just a little bit “wavy” and Barb and one of the workers came rushing in to ask a couple quick questions. I answered, they left, and I turned to face the doctor again. I opened my eyes and I was in the same exact body position but in a different room and Barb asked me “How do you feel.” I said, “I feel like I just woke up.” I wasn’t groggy or anything. My eyes were working well, it seemed to me that I had just blinked but things weren’t quite right because I was in a different room. Very strange. The assisting nurse had said I would remain conscious and be able to follow directions but I may not remember anything. I remember absolutely nothing of the procedure. I now have picture of the inside of my stomach — a place where the sun doesn’t shine. Everything looked normal.

Next came the upper GI — X-rays of the stomach and esophagus as I swallowed a barium compound (which tastes a lot like caulk). The doctor found a small hiatal hernia. That probably contributes to the problem but isn’t a big deal.

Next came the PH probe which stayed in until 8:00 AM the next morning. A wire went in my nose and down my throat to my stomach. A ground wire was fastened to my shoulder. A monitoring device about the size of my hand was on a carrying strap that went over my shoulder. I couldn’t take a shower or get anything wet. The wire made my nose tickle and irritated the back of my throat. I had terrible urges to cough and sometimes to sneeze. I need to record all “events” such as coughs, sneezes, eating, lying down, going upright, incidences of heartburn, burps, etc.

The next morning at 8:00 AM sharp they removed the PH probe. About 8:30 a medical student took a bunch of medical history and did a physical exam. Blood pressure, pulse, listened to my heart and lungs, looked in my ears, nose, throat, felt a number of lymph nodes and pressed and thumped my abdomen and chest. She left for a while then the doctor and student came in and announced “you should go on antacids”. Surgery wasn’t something he recommended. I have a fair amount of acid reflux and it was surprising I didn’t feel it more (I seldom feel any heartburn) and that is causing the spasms. I asked about the effect of not having acid in my stomach — doesn’t it play a role in the digestive process? He said that it may have a subtle role that we don’t understand yet and that may be why some people get diarrhea when they go on antacids (I don’t). But that nutritionally it doesn’t seem to affect people. Okay. I can do that. I took Prevacid for several weeks on two occasions and it worked well for me without noticeable side effects. I don’t like to take drugs and I particularly don’t want to take a drug for the rest of my life. But as near as I can tell this is a pretty benign drug in terms of side effects and not having any more of those exceedingly painful spasms would be most welcome.

Lots and lots of stuff in the news about this.  The constitutional challenges to it are the most interesting aspects to me.

I especially liked this article: http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/05/18/grossman.mass.marriage/

[New York Attorney General] … Spitzer concluded that same-sex marriages should be given full force and effect in New York so long as they were valid in the state where they were performed. (Late yesterday, Rhode Island’s Attorney General issued a very similar opinion, while Connecticut’s declined to answer the recognition question.)

So can New York same-sex couples marry in Massachusetts, and have their marriages recognized back in New York? It’s a conundrum. Assuming Spitzer’s view of what New York courts will say is correct, then the law in New York is that such marriages will be recognized if valid in Massachusetts. Yet Massachusetts’ Marriage Evasion laws say they will only be recognized if they are permitted in New York.

Fascinating stuff.  And as I have said before I love the implications of the people that typically are the enemies of gun rights are breaking legal ground on getting other states to recognize licenses issued in another.  This will make it very difficult for them to deny recognition of our concealed carry licenses issued in one state in other states.

I’ve been getting email from people that participated and people that read Kim duToit’s blog entry.  Mostly good stuff, but some noticed the same flaws that we did and wanted to report them. 

I made a comment on Kim’s blog about being able to delete the pictures I took of him and Stephanie now that he had said such nice things about the event and me (I’m a “National Treasure”).  He immediately wanted a copy of the pictures and when I complied he posted them on his blog.  Honestly, I wasn’t going to show those pictures to anyone but Barb.  I knew they would be amusing when I took them, but I wouldn’t have deliberately embarrassed him.  But never-the-less, I’m now a “Papparazzi Bastard“ as well as a “National Treasure“.  All in good humor — I think.

I got an email and a call from an editor for a magazine that wants to do an article on the Boomershoot.  Very cool.  We (Ry and I) said we would put on a special event just for their writer.  She said that it would be arranged.

Some U.S. soldiers humiliate some military prisoners of war and in retaliation the terrorists video tape the beheading of a civilian? I see… That makes our course of action so much more clear. These are not people that are worthy of negotiation with. These are people that are only worthy of imprisonment and extermination. They can practice their religion all they want, they can believe in their “one true god” or twenty. But they will live by a set of rules that include allowing innocent people to have beliefs and practices different from theirs or they will be hunted down, captured and/or killed. They cannot seem to tolerate our existence so it appears that we cannot tolerate theirs. As I said, with sadness, before… there is a certain amount of symmetry their willingness to die for their beliefs because we are willing to kill for ours.

I slept 12 hours on Monday night.  10 hours last night.  Physically I’m feeling pretty good now.  The weather was (relatively) great!  A big plus there.  But I’m disappointed that a lot of the boomers didn’t detonate and that a lot of the fireballs failed to ignite.  We changed the target bodies, the mixing/grinding equipment, and added a very small amount of marking chemical to aid in determining if things were well mixed.  Other than that things were the same (we think).  So why the change in detonation?  More research is required…

Jason got some great video that I will need to “borrow” soon.  I have film in the camera bag that needs to be developed and Xenia has a bunch of digital pics to sort through.  Maybe I can get to it this weekend.

I’ve been awake since 2:00.  Probably won’t be able to get back to sleep until very late tonight.  I would pack up the pickup and leave now but Kim still hasn’t come home with the pickup. I asked that she bring it home by 6:00 and I suspect she will stay out until 5:50.

The weather is looking great.  Absolutely the best forecasts ever (except for July ’99 when we had the fire the next day).

Ry, Paul, and I went out on site today.  Found out the new cardboard ends for the targets are so tough they slow down the .22 LR bullets enough that it won’t detonate with them.  It’s not a problem with our mix.  This is very good news.  The bullets used by shooters are much heavier than the .22 LR bullets and shouldn’t loose near as much velocity when going through the target bodies.  The fireballs still didn’t work for some reason, but we can cheat with cans of sterno for the few fireballs we need to do.  We used a blender to grind the ammonium nitrate and it does it faster than the coffee grinders.

Lots and lots of targets to build tomorrow.  But with three blenders I think we can crank the product out fairly fast.

We got a little bit of a late start when Kim didn’t come home last night and I had to go find the van to move stuff from it to the pickup.  During the night someone had sideswiped the van which was parked on the street in front of a friend’s house.  Then Tidyman’s didn’t have any sandwiches made up and I had to wait for them to be built.

It took a while to set things up and move things out of the shed so we could have room to work.  We didn’t really get building targets until about 11:00.  Then one of the grinders died.  I called Barb who was coming out with Tim and Lisa (to deliver their camping trailer) later in the afternoon and asked her to buy two new ones.  I got the truck with the rest of the ammonium nitrate on it and we off loaded what we could from that.  But because we were running behind schedule on the consumption of AN we didn’t have enough room for it.  Barb showed up with the grinders about 15:30.  We used the new grinders with great success for about 45 minutes until one of them died too.  We built targets until 19:00 or so, off loaded all the AN we could squeeze into any decent sized container we could find.  The AN had absorbed some moisture and made a mess of the truck bed in places so we had to put the rest of the probably 200 or 300 pounds of AN in sacks and use a pressure washer to clean up the truck.  Back to the field with the pickup to load up the stuff that needed to be cleaned and had to come home.  Made it home about 23:45.  Cleaned up the mixing stuff and was in bed by 23:58.  This morning another grinder was dead.  Three out of four died.  The cheapest and most difficult to use one survived.

Also had problems with fireballs not working and the mix not detonating with a .22LR.  We’re going back out on Wednesday to do more tests and try and get our production line going.  Then get caught up with the production we didn’t get done yesterday.