Quote of the day—Justin Anderson

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Sales have definitely been brisk, especially of small, concealable handguns. We also saw a spike in sales of tactical rifles like AR-15s and AK-47s, for which I think we can confidently thank Beto O’Rourke.

Justin Anderson
Marketing director for Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, North Carolina
December 4, 2019
ATF: 423M guns in America, 1.2 per person, 8.1B rounds of ammunition a year
[If the anti-gun people want there to be fewer guns in circulation the best way for them to accomplish that is to stop trying to ban and/or restrict gun sales.

Using other information from the article, I’ll leave following as a exercises for the reader:

  • Calculate the percentage (worst case using reasonably valid assumptions) of the total number of guns used in a murder or violent crime each year.
  • Calculate the percentage (worst case using reasonably valid assumptions) of the total number of rounds of ammunition used in a murder or violent crime each year.

And more directly related to the Anderson quote, the anti-gun people should ask themselves, “Are all these people buying the guns that we plan to confiscate just really stupid? Or, are they planning to shoot the people advocating for confiscation?”—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ben Joseph Woods

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The legal precedent we would set by allowing the legislature to selectively ignore enumerated rights at will is the same mindset that 150 years ago lead this country into a civil war.

Ben Joseph Woods
December 5, 2019
Pubic comment to Fairfax County Virginia on debate regarding becoming a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary county.


[The part quoted above starts at 5:38 in the video. The previous minutes are definitely worth listening to.—Joe]

I was productive today

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This is just part of the ammunition I reloaded today:

20191208_174417

Major power factor loads using 180 grain bullets chambered in .40 S&W. These will be used both for practice and USPSA matches.

Quote of the day—James Howard Kunstler

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What is the Democratic Party today? Well, it’s the cheerleading squad for “seventeen” government agencies that add up to the craftily-labeled “intel community,” a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres, seditionists, and bad-faith artists working sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds with ever-fresh ones. They’re the party against free speech, the party against due process of law, the party determined to provoke war with Russia. They’re the party of sexual confusion, sexual hysteria, and sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries (including national borders), and of making up rules for all that as they go along — like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The ideas and policies they advocate are so comprehensively crazy that their old support of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in comparison.

James Howard Kunstler
December 6, 2019
A Fraught Moment
[Harsh! But fair.

Via email from Chet.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brad Smith

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The pressure to put data centers in more countries is giving rise to what is rapidly becoming one of the world’s most important human rights issues. With everyone’s personal information stored in the cloud, an authoritarian regime bent on broad surveillances can unleash draconian demands to monitor not only what people are communicating, but even what they are reading and watching online. And armed with this knowledge, governments can prosecute, persecute, or even execute those individuals they consider threats.

This is a fundamental fact of life that everyone in works in the tech sector needs to remember every day.

Brad Smith
President and chief legal officer of Microsoft
September 2019
Page 45 in Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age


[One of Barb’s brother-in-laws recommended this book to me a few days ago as we were having a discussion about privacy and security.

I’m only about 20% of the way through the book but I’m really enjoying it. What I’m hearing matches the general tone of the culture when I worked at Microsoft. They take customer privacy seriously.

They have a team of about 50 people that work full time to respond to government requests and push back if the request is out of line with the law. They have promised to go to court rather than comply with requests that don’t have the warrants and documentation all in order. And they have gone to court numerous times. Smith claims they win in court 90% of the time.

I don’t know the details of the level of cooperation my current employer and the government have but I know that on the security side of things we take things very seriously. I also know that, IIRC, we have about 100 full time people who deal with government requests for information. I’ve talked with some of them and they too seem to believe it’s critical to keep the government on the straight and narrow.

I only see the criminal side of things but if we know or suspect customer personal information has been compromised, by either insider or outsiders, we put a stop to it as quickly as possible. And in the past year or two I’ve been seeing names of the people we chased end up in the news as being arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. None of them have been government officials, but that’s probably a little too much to expect.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Glenda T. Goode

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When your opponent is self energizing as far as creating disrespect in a society there is no sense egging them on. By letting them continue the process they will eventually take it too far.

Know what the democrats do is self serving and destined to either a tyrannical socialist state or their extinction . Either way, this dispute will not go on forever.

Glenda T. Goode
December 5, 2019
Comment to Truth.
[When stated as “forever” she is absolutely correct. But the heat death of the universe is a long time from now. I suspect she really meant sometime before that. But similar disputes have persisted for hundreds of years. For example we have more than one religion in the world with some pretty nasty conflicts between some of them.

One could make the case the Democrats are engaged in one last epic struggle before they implode in the 2020 election and go the way of the Whig party. The Whig party was originally formed around the hate of President Andrew Jackson and it’s easy to make the case this is what the Democrats have done with a name replacement. But just six years ago people were making the case the Republican/Tea party would disappear for similar reasons. It, obviously, didn’t happen.

But yet there certainly have been high tension disputes between competing political parties which have been decisively settled. The most obvious one is the one between Republicans and Democrats which was settled in 1866 when the Democrats also attempted an insurrection.

I hope the current insurrection is settled soon, against the insurrectionist Democrats, and with less bloodshed than the previous insurrection.—Joe]

Boomershoot 2020 registration opens soon!

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I finally have the new credit card processing working. I had to move the websites to a different hosting provider. For various reasons, I am abandoning the boomershoot.org domain. Everything is now on boomershoot.com.

Entry opens to Boomershoot 2019 participants on Wednesday December 11th at 6:00 PM PST. When you sign up, the site checks your name in the list of 2019 participants. It will fail to find you in 2019 if you use a different name with this entry than you did last year. The classic is ‘Robert’ versus ‘Bob’. If you can’t figure out why you aren’t being recognized send me an email and I’ll look up your entry from last year.

Entry for everyone begins on the first day of winter, Saturday December 21 at 9:00 AM PST.

Sign up soon so you don’t lose your favorite position (or something close by) to someone else.

Federal Air Marshal Qualification

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I tried this years ago and failed. I should try it again.

Federal Air Marshal Qualification: Test Your CCW Skills

Commonly called the “old Air Marshal (FAM) course,” it was created for Federal Air Marshals in 1992. In cooperation with the Office of Civilian Airline Security, it was developed by a private instructor in the Fort Bragg, NC, area who routinely taught skills to certain units based at that facility. It eventually became the qualification course for all Federal Air Marshals. Those who passed it received their flying orders. Those who failed went back for more training. It was not an easy course. In fact, when senior officers from the Joint Special Operations Command attended and reviewed the course in 1998, their opinion was that those passing the TPC were among the top one-percent of pistol shooters in the world.

I expect I will fail again but I now have easy access to a place where I can practice on the stages I difficulty with.

Quote of the day—Robert A. Heinlein

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Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That’s a personal evaluation only. But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It’s a good thing.

Robert A Heinlein
1942
Beyond this Horizon
[This is the longer version of the famous quote. For my comments on this observation see my previous posting of the short version.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Joseph O’Sullivan

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Extending gun-free zones to include child care centers. Banning high-capacity magazines. Creating a licensing system for ammunition sellers.

With the Washington Legislature starting back up in January, gun-safety advocates, led by the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, are planning a fresh push to pass new firearms restrictions.

Joseph O’Sullivan
November 22, 2019
Gun-free zones, licenses for ammo dealers: Gun-safety advocates reveal agenda for Washington state
[“Gun-safety advocates”? The NRA is a gun safety advocate organization with thousands of gun safety instructors nationwide. It is unlikely these people have ever even taken a gun safety class let alone taught such a class or advocated for anything other than restrictions on the specific enumerated right of the people to keep and bear arms.

The deceptive language is intentional and very telling. They know they cannot succeed without deliberate deception and lies. It’s part of their culture.

Respond appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Josh Horwitz

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As I said this morning, the gun lobby has told us for years that guns will keep us free. That simply is not true. The reality is that gun violence confines where we go, how we worship, what we do, and how we live.

Guns do not make us free — they bring death, violence, and injustice.

Josh Horwitz
December 2, 2019
Email.
[Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hong Kong, North Korea, Poland, Venezuela, and probably dozens of other countries where tyrannical governments inflicted death, violence, and injustice upon their own citizens.

But Horwitz interest in the facts only extends to the point he can conceal and ignore them in an effort to further his agenda.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Miranda Yaver @mirandayaver

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If you’re a white dude who’s doubling down on the necessity of possessing AR-15s, I’m making some anatomical assumptions about you.

Miranda Yaver @mirandayaver
Tweeted on September 1, 2019
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

The “white dude” is an new racist twist on Markley’s Law I haven’t seen before.

Congratulations Ms. Yaver! You have found a new low in the race to the bottom for childish insults to denigrate those who exercise their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.—Joe]

Hanging target stand

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This looks like it should be a good product:

It’s definitely a good ad.

Quote of the day—Trump is a Sociopath @sharcat12

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Those 53% of Republicans probably don’t even know who Lincoln was and they would kiss Trump’s feet if he asked them to.

Trump is a Sociopath @sharcat12
November 30, 2019
[This is in response to a tweet which said:

Democrats sure better nominate someone we’re excited about.

53% of Republicans polled think Donald Trump is a better President than Abraham Lincoln.

We sure as fuck better be energized and unified.

I find it interesting so many people on the left think insults are an effective response to serious thought they disagree with. Simple things for simple minds I guess.

But of course one should never underestimate the power of simple, powerful, and absurdly stupid concepts to persuade the masses. Never forget that The Communist Manifesto was simplistic, filled with absurdities, claimed communists are intellectual superiors, and persuaded millions to murder hundreds of millions of innocent people.—Joe]

Quote of the day—dennis @pourteaux

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Hong Kong is making me rethink my position on gun rights. Perhaps it’s best for common people to have access to firearms to counterbalance an over-reaching government. Gun violence is terrible, but systemic state violence also must be deterred.

dennis @pourteaux
Tweeted on November 20, 2019
[Duh!—Joe]

Chicago isn’t that violent

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Via email from Don W.

TailGunner

I suspect this report is somewhat exaggerated.

Quote of the day—Alexandria Times

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No civilian in the United States should own a gun that fires 20, or even five, rounds a second. Those are military weapons, period. We are confident that George Washington, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin did not have private ownership of military assault rifles in mind when they signed the U.S. Constitution.

Alexandria Times
July 11, 2019
Our View: Guns aren’t the whole problem
[What a collection of fail packed into three sentences.

  • Their “confidence” is irrelevant to the truth. Determining truth from falsity is difficult. But even the most stupid know that confidence is not a good indicator. Hence, one must conclude they are deliberately lying.
  • Revolvers can five, or more, rounds per second. The first revolver was invented in about 1680. So, these lying bozos want to restrict firearm technology to that which existed about 100 years prior to the birth of our nation.
  • As SCOTUS pointed out in United States v. Miller 59 S.Ct. 816(1939), military weapons are expressly protected by the 2nd Amendment.
  • Washington, Madison, and Franklin did sign the U.S. Constitution. But it did not explicitly address the right to keep and bear arms. Madison was important in drafting and getting the Bill of Rights (and thereby the 2nd Amendment) ratified. It
    is claimed Washington did not contribute to the content or express a public
    opinion about it.     I’m unable to find any indication Franklin was a contributor and he died over a year and a half before it was ratified.
  • Regardless of the contribution by the three, they all knew private cannons and warships were used in the revolutionary war. Yet there are no exemptions for protection of them in the Bill of Rights.

The Alexandria Times is either displaying their ignorance and/or deliberately lying to the public. Respond appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—MJ‏ @morganisawizard

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libertarianism is respecting property rights and owning more guns than you say you do on paper

it’s also appearing to be extremely terrible at driving boats

MJ‏ @morganisawizard
Tweeted on November 23 and November 24 2019
[The grammar and punctuation is, at best, strained. But the concepts expressed have significant merit.—Joe]

Visit to an oasis

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Growing up in north central Idaho an oasis was something I only saw in cartoons and perhaps on some television show. I have driven across the deserts of central Washington, southeastern Oregon, and Nevada many times but never came across anything similar to an oasis I would recognize from the cartoons of my childhood. They remained somewhat of a mythical place.

That changed last January when Barb and I visited the Palm Springs California area. We visited several oases in the area but by far the most interesting and pleasant were the West Fork Falls and Palm Canyon trails.

Since it has essentially the same trail head as Palm Canyon Trail and is only 0.1 miles long if you go to the Palm Canyon Trail area you must check out the West Fork Falls Trail. Barb and I were wandering around and I noticed something odd. I then began taking a bunch of pictures of the trees. Barb thought I was acting a little more strange than usual with the sudden interest in taking so many pictures of the trees. I had to explain. Check out the pictures below:

20190115_141531


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