NO on I-1639 Grassroots Organizer

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Contribute to the fight against I-1639:

Please use the form and map below to report and locate firearms retailers, ranges, clubs, or other shops that have SOS | NO on I-1639 handouts, and also the NRA NO on I-1639 handouts and or campaign materials.

Also, please indicate if the store is out or refuses to post or make materials available.

A downloadable and printable copy of the SOS | NO on I-1639 information handout is available at this link.

You don’t know what I-1639 is about? Here is the text.

Of particular interest is this definition:

25) “Semiautomatic assault rifle” means any rifle which utilizes a portion of the energy of a firing cartridge to extract the fired cartridge case and chamber the next round, and which requires a separate pull of the trigger to fire each cartridge.

Hence, all semiautomatic rifles are “semiautomatic assault rifles”. Ruger Mini-30s, Ruger 10-22s, and even Remington Model 750 with four round magazines:

Remington750

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you no one is after your hunting rifles.

And the cute rifle you might get as your daughter’s first gun will be included:

If I-1639 passes your daughter won’t be allowed to possess it until she turns 21, and then she will have to take “a recognized firearm safety training program”. The gun must be register to her. And:

The chief of police or sheriff, or the designee of either, shall check with the national crime information center, including the national instant criminal background check system, provided for by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (18 U.S.C. Sec. 921 et seq.), the Washington state patrol electronic database, the health care authority electronic database, and with other agencies or resources as appropriate, to determine whether the applicant is ineligible under RCW 9.41.040 to possess a firearm.

Yes, law enforcement gets to look at your daughter’s medical records to see if she is unfit to possess an “semiautomatic assault rifle”, also known as a Ruger 10-22 or Remington Model 597.

Just say NO!

Progressives don’t want you to read this

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I haven’t read this yet. It sounds interesting:

An elementary mathematical theory based on “selectivity” is proposed to address a question raised
by Charles Darwin, namely, how one gender of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with
greater variability than the other gender. Briefly, the theory says that if one sex is relatively selective
then from one generation to the next, more variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to
prevail over those with lesser variability; and conversely, if a sex is relatively non-selective, then less
variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with greater variability. This
theory makes no assumptions about differences in means between the sexes, nor does it presume that
one sex is selective and the other non-selective. Two mathematical models are presented: a discrete-time
one-step statistical model using normally distributed fitness values; and a continuous-time deterministic
model using exponentially distributed fitness levels.

If I had seen this without much other context I probably would have read the abstract and moved on. Interesting, but not worth much more time. However…

The context in which I ran across this was Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole, an peer reviewed paper, approved and published, was removed from online archives:

Colleagues I spoke to were appalled. None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?

I save banned CAD files for 3D printing. I buy banned books. And I publish banned academic papers.

Quote of the day—Chip Bergh

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As a company, we have never been afraid to take an unpopular stand to support a greater good.

…

I’m convinced that while some will disagree with our stand to end gun violence, history will prove this position right too.

Our country has faced seemingly intractable issues like this before, but together we’ve overcome them. We can do it again. Together we can put an end to the gun violence epidemic in America.

Chip Bergh
September 4, 2018
Levi Strauss CEO: Why Business Leaders Need to Take a Stand on Gun Violence
[Not anywhere in the article does he even hint there is such a thing as justified violence. He says he is not suggesting we repeal Second Amendment but he doesn’t acknowledge that it protects the rights of individuals to own firearms.

He speaks of ending “gun violence” and “the greater good”. He apparently doesn’t realize that in almost all cases the greater good is achieved by respecting the rights of individuals. Because of this disrespect of our rights tens of millions of individuals will fail to respect his decision and spend their money elsewhere.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Eric Raymond

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The people who had the most extreme, negative, lying-bastards model of what “gun-control” activists had been doing turned out to be correct.

One of the people radicalized by this realization was me.

Eric Raymond
June 20, 2018
Comment to The critical fraction
[I didn’t really have any models presented to me. I had to make my own model from the available evidence. And, as you well know, the only model that fits is the “most extreme, negative, lying-bastards model”.—Joe]

Quote of the day—L.B. Zumpshon

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Until we can get comprehensive education and deal with toxic masculinity head-on, and/or the U.S. gets some sensible gun control laws in place, I believe the only solution is for a law to be passed that only lets women buy and own guns.

L.B. Zumpshon
September 4, 2018
We Need Man Control as Much as Gun Control to Stop Mass Shootings
[What she conveniently ignores:

  • The percentage of mass shooters who are leftists is close to that of those who are men. Using the same logic one could concluded that all leftists or leftist men should be banned from gun ownership.
  • Rights belong to individuals. Just because everyone else in a group abuses a right does not justify the infringement of that right for individuals who have not abused it.

But, as has been known for many decades, in every socialist/communist utopia there are always some animals which are more equal than others.—Joe]

This could never be abused

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Five-Eyes nations to force encryption backdoors

The governments of Australia, United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand have made the strongest statement yet that they intend to force technology providers to provide lawful access to users’ encrypted communications.

…

As part of that, the countries that share intelligence with each other under the Five-Eyes umbrella agreement, intend to “encourage information and communications technology service providers to voluntarily establish lawful access solutions to their products and services.”

…

While the statement says the five countries “are committed to an open, safe and secure internet”, it also calls for the tech industry to develop solutions that prevent illegal and illicit content from ever being uploaded.

Where there has been a failure to prevent uploads of undesirable material, tech vendors should develop capabilities to execute urgent and immediate takedowns of such content.

Human and automated systems should be developed to seek out and remove legacy content, the Five-Eyes nations said.

Capabilities to counter foreign interference and disinformation are also to be developed.

Great timing. Government repression of how to build legal products are a sensitive topic right now.

And about the “disinformation” topic. One can be fairly certain this is not aimed at, or be enforced against, those lying anti-gun people. Who does history tell us these tools will be used against? Minorities and those who are out of political power.

If they go down this path it will not end well for anyone. Regarding my encryption keys… molṑn labé.

Vote No on I-1639 poster

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Via Sebastian:

VoteNoI-1639

Quote of the day—Hannah Shearer

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Kavanaugh’s illogical claim was that public safety should play no role in determining the constitutionality of public safety laws.

Hannah Shearer
September 4, 2018
Brett Kavanaugh’s extreme beliefs on gun control ignore the concerns of most Americans
[Wow.

“Illogical”? I don’t think that word means what Shearer thinks it means. But then it’s clear, that to Shearer, words mean whatever she wants them to mean. Apparently she expects people to forget that if there needs to be some exception carved out of the Bill of Rights there is an amendment process for that. The constitution doesn’t give Federal judges the power to rewrite the constitution.

But, again, she doesn’t want to acknowledge the judges don’t have the power. She appears to thinks the constitution means whatever she wants it to mean.

Ms. Shearer, please get yourself a copy of the constitution, the Bill of Rights, and a dictionary. Words mean something and you, and especially judges, don’t get to redefine them to suit your whims.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Abbie Vetger

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Only one in five gun owners belong to the NRA, so we think there is something else going on than just the NRA when it comes to mobilisation.

Abbie Vetger
September 2, 2018
Gun owners are more politically active, study finds
[The naiveté and lack of rigor here is astounding. Were they paid money to do this “study”?

Vetger and her colleagues need to check their work. A very simple check would have revealed the following:

Most estimates of gun ownership are between 20 and 40 percent of people in the U.S.. And this assumes all gun owners admit they own guns when they are asked by a pollster. It may be much higher than this.

The population of the U.S. is currently about 330,000,000. This means there are between 66 and 132 million gun owners in the U.S.

The NRA claims a membership of about 6 million people. Hence only about one in 11 to one in 22 gun owners belong to the NRA. Unless, you hypothesize the NRA is telling the world they have far fewer members than they actually have. For them to have such a motive escapes me.

Simple arithmetic shows any influence gun owners have must be far beyond the members the NRA influences.Assuming all the NRA’s 6 million members vote and vote as a block for the NRA agenda in an eligible voting population of about 241 million people is only about 2.5%. Sure, some political races are as close or closer than that but that isn’t enough to make a big difference and the assumption they all vote as a block is almost for certain false.

So… if the hypothesis that the NRA is the source of power is of questionable validity how about the hypothesis that gun owners a group independent of NRA members being a source of election strength? 60 to 126 million out of 241 million is about 25% to 50%. Now you are talking about some real power!

Therefore the timid conclusions reached by Vetger can be arrived at, and stated with far more assuredness, with a few minutes of searching on the Internet without going through the grant process and publishing a peer reviewed paper.

I wonder if Vetger and company were among those making projections that Hillary Clinton had a 95% chance of winning the 2016 election. If not then I expect she at least rode the same short bus to school with them.—Joe]

Political violence in the U.S.

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I recently finished a book where I found eerie parallels to the current left-wing violence in America (Days of Rage):

Probably the most time in the book was spent on the Weather Underground (also known as Weathermen). But there was also the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and others. The author interviewed many of the leaders and participants of these violent “revolutionaries” in the writing of the book which was published in 2015. They set off thousands of bombs, robbed dozens of banks and armored cars, broke people out of prisons, and engaged in murder and kidnapping.

What I found most interesting was the white middle class students who formed the Weather Underground, for the most part, had never held jobs, and were incompetent at many basic tasks such as organizational structure, simple electrical wiring, and fixing cars. This held true when they started building bombs and blew up the house they were living in. The home was owned by the parents, away on vacation for a few weeks, of one of the members. They did know how to riot and have orgies, so, they weren’t total incompetents.

Their political philosophy and manifestos were non-sensical to most of America. In several cases people came together because they all “knew” a violent revolution was necessary because the the oppressive U.S. government had to be overthrown. They then sat around trying to figure out what cause they were taking up to rebel about. Most of the groups which where primarily white decided they were rebelling because of racism. They would have participated in the revolution because of the Vietnam war but when the U.S. pulled out they needed to find another cause. The Weather Underground political philosophy ultimate morphed a Marxist/Leninist view of utopia.

The primarily black groups thought unfair police treatment of blacks was a good cause but didn’t want much, if anything, to do with the white groups unless they had black leaders. They did allow a few white women into their groups which were useful. The women could go places and do things (for example, place bombs inside buildings) which would have drawn attention if a black had tried to do the same thing.

As is the case now, these young, naïve, idealists were financed by wealthy individuals who were sympathetic to their cause. The Weather Underground got most of their money from radical left-wing lawyers.

Also interesting was that the leaders of the Weather Underground, such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, lived in nice homes and ate well while “underground” but their followers lived lives of crushing poverty. One guy, at a meeting at Ayers home, opened the refrigerator and saw butter. He became enraged. He couldn’t afford biscuits to put butter on and this guy had butter. Ahh… yes. Under communism some animals are always more equal than others.

Interviewed decades after their revolutionary days they marveled at how naïve they had been. With hindsight they could see it was folly that they believed their revolution could succeed. But at the time, they just believed it.

I think there are lessons for many people of many political persuasions in this book. Political revolution requires a change in the culture of the society. If you can change the culture you don’t need the violence component. If you can’t change the culture the violence has a high chance of failure. The political left learned this in the 60s and 70s and it is long past time for others to learn this lesson too.

Quote of the day—Mr. T‏ @MrT_runner

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Do you sell plan for a plastic dick too? Because all you gun nutters are compensating for something. We all know.

Mr. T‏ @MrT_runner
Tweeted on August 28, 2018
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

Via a tweet from Jonathan @CorrelA_B.

It’s very clear what these anti-gun people use as criteria for knowledge is not related to that which the normal population uses. For other examples see here and here.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Via email from Rolf.

ArmedVsUnarmed

Humans are, by nature, tool creators and users. The best personal defense tool ever created was the firearm. Using the best tool for the job is just natural. You aren’t against people using all natural products are you?

Quote of the day—Ramishah Maruf

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It’s time to stop using video games as a deflection from conversations about responsible gun control. Video games shouldn’t even be in the conversation because it distracts us from the hard truth: easy access to guns is the main reason for mass shootings.

It takes a special train of thought to come to the conclusion that an animated video game is more to blame for shootings than the actual weapon used. Is America really that blinded by their love for the Second Amendment?

Ramishah Maruf
August 30, 2018
Video games have no relevance to mass shootings
[It’s interesting how she substitutes one class of objects, video games, which probably didn’t have much of an effect on the mental illness of the perpetrator, for another object, firearms, which certainly didn’t cause the mental illness.

That takes a very special kind of train of thought. At first you might think her train was functioning properly then you find it was going backward.—Joe]

Rounds in the last month

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I reloaded 2396 rounds of .40 S&W last month. It was all 180 grain Montana Gold JHP to be used for practice at indoor ranges. I just brought home another 7,500 of these type of bullets as I was getting really low.

This is the most number of rounds I have reloaded in a single month all year but it’s about 400 fewer than I reloaded in August of last year.

This brings the rounds for the year to date to 8,928. I hope to break 10,000 rounds for the year this month and maybe get to 16K by the end of the year..

This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:

223: 4,813 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1,591 rounds.
40 S&W: 87,093 rounds.
45 ACP: 2,007 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 117,901  rounds

Quote of the day—Winnipeg Free Press editorial board

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Of particular interest to gun-control advocates are handguns and military-style assault rifles, neither of which have any real practical application for civilians, hunters or rural residents who keep firearms at hand to protect their livestock from predation.

Winnipeg Free Press editorial board
August 30, 2018
Entrenched positions won’t resolve gun debate
[The board appears to believe they are essentially a neutral party in the debate. But their claim that handguns and “military-style assault rifles” don’t “have any real practical application for civilians” betrays their bias and lack of information on the topic.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Adam Lankford

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I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims.

Adam Lankford
Professor at the University of Alabama
August 2018
Shock study: U.S. had far fewer mass shootings than previously reported
[Of course not. Liars have no desire for the truth.

Lankford claimed the U.S. has more mass shooters per capita, by far, than any country. And has, what appears to be, a socialist explanation:

Mr. Lankford, who claimed to be the first to attempt a global survey, said his results suggested there was something to the American psyche that left people disaffected when they failed to achieve the American dream. He said they turn to violent outbursts with firearms.

“It may thus be the lofty aspirations and broken dreams of a tiny percentage of America’s students and workers — combined with their mental health problems, distorted perceptions of victimization, delusions of grandeur, and access to firearms — that makes them more likely to commit public mass shootings than people from other cultures,” he postulated in his 2015 paper.

He refuses to share his data and his exact methodology and John Lott, and others, easily find many more mass shootings in the rest of the world that what Lankford claims. This results in:

Mr. Lankford studied the period from 1966 to 2012 using data from the New York City Police Department’s active shooter report, a 2014 FBI active shooter report and some foreign accounts.

He identified 292 incidents worldwide in which at least four people were killed — the FBI’s definition of a mass murder. Of those, 90 were in the U.S. — 31 percent of the total among –Jooe171 countries.

…

Mr. Lott, meanwhile, turned to data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database and followed up with Nexis and web searches to try to catch cases that the database missed.

He said good data exist only for recent years, so he looked from 1998 to 2012 and found 1,491 mass public shootings worldwide. Of those, only 43 — or 2.88 percent — were in the U.S. Divide that by per capita rates, and the U.S. comes in 58th, behind Finland, Peru, Russia, Norway and Thailand — though still worse than France, Mexico, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Looked at from the number of victims in those shootings, the U.S. again ranks low, with just 2.1 percent of mass shooting deaths, Mr. Lott said.

Lott released his data and even sent it to Lankford. Who, of course, has an agenda to support and is “not interested in giving any serious thought” to it.

They have to lie to even attempt to win, and they know it.—Joe]

New shooter report

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We have a relatively new intern on my team at work, Nashwa. She grew up in Texas and speaks fondly of it so I figured she was at least comfortable around gun owners. I had taken everyone else on the team, except my boss Jodie, to the range but not Nashwa.

I have invited Jodie many times. While she expresses great interest she has not found a time slot that works. I give her a pass because she recently finished up training with the FBI where she learned to shoot everything from handguns to sniper rifles. I’ll get her to the range someday but today was Nashwa’s day.

I had the training bay reserved just for the two of us from 4:00 –> 6:00. It turns out she had never fired a gun before. I asked if she was right handed or left handed. “Right”. Which eye is dominant? “Right”. I was a little surprised she knew. My surprise must have shown because she then said she wasn’t sure. I did a quick test and found she was left eye dominant. I first taught her shooting left handed and then part way through switched to right handed for a while. She decided to stay with left handed shooting.

I started her out with dry firing of a Ruger 22/45 Light with a suppressor. She looked like she had it down. But her first half dozen real shots were all high. Nice group. But they were about three inches high at 10 feet. I went over sighting again. Still the same problem.

20180830_165000

I fired a few shots. It was maybe a quarter inch low at that range.

We went over the sighting again. “Oh, I wasn’t really looking at what was going on with the rear sight.” Hmm… I’ll have to work on how I explain sights.

I gave her a clean target and she was putting them just below the bulls-eye:

20180830_165250
Ahhh… Yes. The new shooter smile.

I moved her to shooting a simulated steel match with four targets on one piece of paper and removed the suppressor.

She was getting all five hits in under ten seconds.

Next I gave her Major Power Factor loads in my STI DVC Limited. With essentially the same results. But after a few strings the misses started increasing and getting more and more wild. It was time to go back to the .22.

20180830_171819

She still had some misses. Back to dry fire. We needed to end the day on a positive note.

The dry fire looked good. I pretended to put in a loaded magazine and she “fired” again. There was some serious movement of the gun when she pulled the trigger. More dry fire. And then, finally, live fire. She was back to consistent, solid, hits  I shouldn’t have let her fire so many rounds through the .40. She was starting to develop a flinch.

After we cleaned up and packed things up we talked a little bit. She had two questions:

  1. Q: How much do I owe you?
    A: Nothing. The first time is free for new shooters.
  2. Q: How often do you come here? I would like to go again.
    A: Two or three times a week. But you don’t need for me come with you. You can come here by yourself if you want or bring a friend anytime they are open.

We now have a new member in the gun community and a team member at work that fits right in.

Quote of the day—map.therealbitcoin.club

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If you need a gun to protect your property you simply have too much property and lost your life already aquiring [sic] that property.

map.therealbitcoin.club
August 27, 2018
Comment to EXCLUSIVE: 3D Gun Proponent Defiant Offers Firearm Blueprints For Sale.*
[Ahhh… yes. The true nature of an anti-gun person comes to light. They are opposed to private property as well as being anti-gun. Apparently they want us all to be part of the collective.—Joe]

* Bonus: There is a humorous typo in the URL to the post:

… exclusive-3d-fun-proponent-defiant-offers-firearm-blueprints-for-sale

Quote of the day—Angela McCarthy @ninjagrrrl7734

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Please die. Preferably by gunfire. Your policies are killing so many people every week.

Angela McCarthy @ninjagrrrl7734
Tweeted on August 26, 2018
[The account has been deleted or at least temporarily suspended. Here is the screen capture (via a tweet from BFD‏ @BigFatDave):

Ninjagrrrl7734

See also a similar wish for the death of Dana’s children.

They want you dead. Don’t ever give up your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—FedUp

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I don’t really have a need to download them.

I’m just downloading them because some black robed cocksucker in Seattle doesn’t think I have the right to do it.

FedUp
August 1, 2018
Comment to Gun Controllers, Politicians and Judges Think They Can Stop the Free Flow of Information. They’re Wrong.
[Further developments here and here.

You can also get everything you want here.—Joe]