Rights shouldn’t have borders, and they shouldn’t have walls either. Washingtonians are tired of out-of-state interests buying our elections and chilling our civil rights—and they have made their voices heard loud and clear in the legislature.
Philip Watson
Firearm Policy Coalition Legislative Advocate
March 10, 2017
Gun Ban Fail: FPC Tearing Down “West Coast Wall of Gun Control”
[The last sentence is probably a little overstated by there is a lot of truth to it.—Joe]
This is news to me:
Officials from the Czech Republic have been among the most vocal critics of the European Union’s efforts to restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Most recently, the Czech government has contemplated taking the drastic step of amending the country’s constitution in order to better protect the rights of Czech citizens to possess guns for self-defense.
I didn’t know they had a strong RKBA attitude there. If the MSM and anti-gun people (redundancy alert) are to be believed Europe is almost gun free. I knew Switzerland was good about guns but I figured that the Czechs would have had their gun rights supporting people sent to the gulags during their time behind the iron curtain.
With Obama in office and Clinton poised to take office, Americans were concerned about their Second Amendment rights, and they were arming up. The guns they didn’t want Americans to have are now in the hands of the very citizens their gun control schemes targeted. The irony is almost overwhelming.
Dave Workman
March 7, 2017
Obama’s Unintended Legacy: A Better Armed America
[I think he left out a word. Between the last word and the period I think there should be the word “sweetness”.—Joe]
H/T to daughter Jaime who told me about this earlier this week when we had dinner.
What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?
A restaging of the presidential debates with an actress playing Trump and an actor playing Clinton yielded surprising results.
After watching the second televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in October 2016—a battle between the first female candidate nominated by a major party and an opponent who’d just been caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women—Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD, had an idea. Millions had tuned in to watch a man face off against a woman for the first set of co-ed presidential debates in American history. But how would their perceptions change, she wondered, if the genders of the candidates were switched? She pictured an actress playing Trump, replicating his words, gestures, body language, and tone verbatim, while an actor took on Clinton’s role in the same way. What would the experiment reveal about male and female communication styles, and the differing standards by which we unconsciously judge them?
Here is a sample of the result:
Read the whole thing. It’s very informative.
The Second Amendment does not preclude federal law relating to firearms, as long as you can own one or fewer guns, your right to bear a firearm is not being infringed upon.
Celebrity
August 19, 2016
Comment in the DebatePolitics thread My Gun Control Plan [W:1271]
[A few things Celebrity should spend some time reflecting upon:
Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
Finally, and most importantly, incorporating considerations of gun suicide into policy-making decisions is necessary because it would lead to different policy outcomes. One of the main focuses of the gun-control debate revolves around limiting the types of firearms that can be purchased, which could work to decrease the casualties of individual mass shootings, but would do little to prevent gun suicide, which requires only one bullet. Instead, focusing on mental health screenings, making it take longer to buy guns, making it harder to buy guns, and eliminating guns altogether would prove much more effective.
Maile McCann
March 8, 2017
Suicide: Gun Control Advocates’ More Pressing Problem
[McCann thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to “eliminate guns altogether” (Maile, are you taking point on that task?) because some people wants to exercise their own “right to chose”. Even if 100% of those decisions were easily and conclusively known to be wrong decisions (I know of suicides where one can make a decent case that it wasn’t an unreasonable decision) the decisions other people make for themselves cannot give some government entity the power to infringe upon the rights of the population as a whole.
And don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
someone stopped by searching for “key question about gun control.”
Inspector of Police Colin Greenwood of the West Yorkshire Constabulary, (Rtd) , in a report to Parliament tells of flying to Australia for an international conference of Criminologists. Everyone before his scheduled speaking time was high on the myriad virtues of gun control, so the Inspector scrapped his prepared notes and, stepping to the podium asked the hall full of criminologists if they knew of a single case in which gun controls had reduced crime rates, made anyone safer, or done anything else a sane person would consider “good.” No one did.
Inspector of Police Greenwood’s question is the key question about gun control.
Stranger
March 6, 2016
“The Most Important Fact About Gun Control?”
[Just one question.—Joe
Update: Sometimes what I think is blindly obvious and doesn’t need to be said, actually should be said…
This demonstrates those who support gun control do it for reasons other than the public good. So, one has to ask, what is the real reason they support gun control?]
After 20 years of active duty military experience and nearly 30 years involved with professional civilian handgun training I have observed that:
1) Handguns are at best of tertiary interest to the Army.
2) The criteria used to select a handgun for the military includes several factors of very limited value to the civilian self-defense practitioner and fails to address several other factors which are critical to that user.
3) Only a VERY small minority of all military members EVER fire a handgun.
4) The training provided to the majority of military members who do fire a handgun is extremely rudimentary. (InSights General Defensive Handgun course is far more in depth and the material in our Intermediate Defensive Handgun course is not found in the military training system other than a few special operations schools.)
Based on the above observations it is my opinion that:
What handgun the Army has chosen for standard issue should have exactly zero impact on what handgun a civilian should consider for self defense use.
John Hoschen
March 3, 2017
Via the InSights Training Center email list regarding the Sig P320
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
I do not for a moment believe that its main impetus is the desire to save lives however.
Notice the tricky little dance in the text, whereby they point to the high rate of gun ownership in Texas as a reason why a city needs a sonic surveillance network to locate gun shots. This kind of lie (we call it “fake news” now, but it’s just a form of lie – we could call it “the subtle art of the lie”) will always sway a few people and so it will continue to be used.
In reality of course, the city and state governments which commit the most significant infringements against the right to bear arms will tend to have the higher rates of violent crime in those areas as a result. They know this, and yet call for more of the cause, presenting it to us as the cure.
This will shake things up:
“We will be providing access to quantum systems for selected industry partners starting this year,” said Scott Crowder, who’s leading the handoff of the quantum computing work from IBM Research to the IBM Systems product team.
Certain problems that were computationally impossible to solve using current computers will be solved in a fraction of a second. The programming and the algorithms used will be mind bending but the results will be astounding.
This will be as big, or bigger, than the invention of the microprocessor in the 1970s. I was there for that (in college I built a simple system on an 8080 and programmed it by hand assemble of the instructions and keying the hex bytes into a PROM programmer) and I’m thrilled to be here for this.
Join the live conversation tomorrow, Tues. March 7, 11am EST: Joe Huffman of Boomershoot & Maj Toure of Black Guns Matter on Reddit AMA.
Joe Huffman, Founder of Boomershoot:
I’m white + from Idaho. I make reactive targets for people to shoot at, and detonate, thus causing fiery, fun explosions.
Maj Toure, Founder of Black Guns Matter:
I’m black + from Philly. I teach urban communities gun rights and responsibilities, to prevent inner cities from self-imploding.
We’re two peas in a pod, here to talk guns, gun safety, exploding targets, keeping cool, and peace.
We’re not here to nitpick about gun facts — that’s already been done.
We’re here to have fun. We’re individually atypical, so let’s dig deep into what makes us tick: why we do what we do, and how we do it! Ready. Aim. Fire. Kaboom!
#BlackGunsMatter
#Boomershoot
Boomershoot Precision Rifle Clinic instructor Gene Econ has sent me an update to share for the events he is running this year. Basically it is the schedule and some safety issues.
Apparently, if you tell the police you are going to be inappropriately touching people, before you actually do it, the police will then give you a pass:
the TSA decided to inform local police in case anyone calls to report an “abnormal” federal frisking, according to a memo from an airport trade association obtained by Bloomberg News.
Good to know.
[Update: Phelps helps in a flash. Thanks, Phelps. Much appreciated. — Stephanie]
………………………
Greetings, thousands of readers/potential tech-savvy volunteers!
Is there anyone out there who could please volunteer to convert this old Boomershoot .wmv video from King 5 Seattle’s award-winning feature into a more universal format, and then post to YouTube… for educational use? Deadline: ASAP.
Video’s on the Boomershoot website, here:
http://boomershoot.org/2005/KING5.wmv
If you’re able to help, please post your YouTube link in the comments below.
Thank you! — Stephanie
P.S. To keep within YouTube guidelines, it’s important to include this wording in your description on YouTube:
This video is posted for teaching, scholarship, and research purposes.
Credit: King 5 NBC Seattle, King5.com
Learn more at: Boomershoot.org
@seahawks575791 What purposes do guns have?
1 Kill
2 Target Practice
3 Penis Enlargement
4 Penis Replacement
5 ?
OMG How Could I? @DidITweetThat
Tweeted on June 1, 2016
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from Proud Hunter @Duck_Hunter7.
We have SCOTUS decisions. They have a startlingly limited view of reality.—Joe]
I have completed the CafePress Boomershoot 2017 section. The image used was the beginning of the fireball from Boomershoot 2015. The slogan is from a comment by JFT on one of my Boomershoot postings.
In addition to the usual t-shirts, cups, and thongs (yes, there has been more than one sale of a Boomershoot thong) there are now king-size blankets, coffee trays, cutting boards, pillows, and potholders. For some reason a potholder with an image of a fireball on it makes me laugh even more than the Boomershoot thong.
Take a look and see what you think.
I was doing some reorganizing and throwing away of old things on my library shelves and ran across a “men’s magazine”, Cheri (caution explicit photos), from October 1983. I don’t know why I still had it. I never subscribed to it. It was a favorite of a friend of my ex-wife and I. But we lost contact with him in about 1979 or 1980.
I was about to toss it in the recycling when I noticed something on the cover:
A sex and gun club in Hawaii? That’s odd. For one, I wasn’t into guns then. And two, were guns that less frowned upon that a magazine of that genre would, let along a club, risk combining the two subjects? And three, I never could, and still don’t, see a connection between sex and guns. They just don’t mix for me.
I scanned in the first two pages of the article (probably NSFW) and put them here and here.
In the second page of the article you will find they say that all calibers greater than .22 LR are banned in the state. Even though they still suffer under extremely repressive gun laws it seems as if Hawaii’s gun owners made progress in some areas over the last 33+ years.
I wondered if the magazine was still in existence and found the link to their website. I discovered their current content is all hard core. I remember our friend saying he liked the magazine because it was not as explicit as many other magazines and it featured women who looked more real than those in the better known magazines. Looking at my sample it appears to be a notch less explicit than Playboy magazine was at the time.
Times change in many ways.
I was looking through my collection of images for Boomershoot shirts and thought I would share:
Yes, the 2016 slogan is a duplicate of 2006. That was intentional.
The 2017 image will be coming soon.
U.S. Airport Pat-Downs Are About to Get More Invasive
The TSA reacts to a study that found weapons making it past security.
While few have noticed, U.S. airport security workers long had the option of using five different types of physical pat-downs at the screening line. Now those options have been eliminated and replaced with a single universal approach. This time, you will notice.
The new physical touching—for those selected to have a pat-down—will be be what the federal agency officially describes as a more “comprehensive” physical screening, according to a Transportation Security Administration spokesman.
Denver International Airport, for example, notified employees and flight crews on Thursday that the “more rigorous” searches “will be more thorough and may involve an officer making more intimate contact than before.”
“I would say people who in the past would have gotten a pat-down that wasn’t involved will notice that the [new] pat-down is more involved,” TSA spokesman Bruce Anderson said Friday.
It’s still going to be security theater.
When will the people say this is too much and demand the abolishment of the TSA?
[Update: Joe’s done at Reddit. Thanks to all who participated in the interview.]
