Quote of the day—Rich Burgess

Posted on by

The State’s Attorney’s Office has made it clear that they will put their collectivist politics over the need for them to perform their job as advocates of the law. Mentioning mass shootings and the fear-based political climates that their collectivist ilk have manufactured to describe how police should interact with law abiding members of the population is the height of propaganda.

Rich Burgess
Connecticut Carry President
February 8, 2016
Press Release
Manual of How to Harass Law Abiding Citizens
State’s Attorneys Release ‘How to Manual’ of Harassment
[Here is a direct link to the actual “manual”.

If you were to imagine making the appropriate substitutions of people peaceably exercising their First Amendment rights, or entering an abortion clinic, or “driving while black” instead of gun owners and treating them as suggested the uproar would make national news. And rightly so. This has to stop. These people should be candidates for prosecution instead of public officials. They are deliberately casting a chilling effect upon a specific enumerated right.—Joe]

This is how they respond to terrorist threats in other countries

Posted on by

This is old news (October 2015) but is good to see. It can be used as a counter to those people who are opposed to our school teachers and other private citizens being armed:

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan on Wednesday approved a number of measures to ease the requirements for firearm permits, as Israel copes with a wave of “lone wolf” terrorism.

“In recent weeks many citizens have helped the Israel Police subdue terrorists who carried out attacks,” he said.

“Citizens with firearms training are a multiplying force for the police in their fight against terrorism and therefore I will take measures to ease the restrictions at this time.”

…

The ministry on Wednesday used the example of allowing the Jerusalem Municipality to give permits to school teachers in the ultra-Orthodox sector, which it referred to as one of the most vulnerable communities.

Israel has been subject to a greater intensity and longer duration of “lone wolf” terrorist attacks than any other nation I know of. Rather than increasing firearms restrictions they are reducing them.

This is what they think of you

Posted on by

This is so you know the type of people who oppose private gun ownership.

Via a tweet from Linoge I found that at 12:40 PM PST, on November 30, 2015 Chris Tacy tweeted:

@monteiro perhaps they should have to shoot their kids to keep their guns

This is what they think of you and the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.

Quote of the day—Alan Korwin

Posted on by

Depriving us of gear as a way to stop murderers is misguided, puts you at risk, and is a thinly disguised effort to get to zero-round magazines — in the false and dangerous belief that disarming innocent people will finally disarm criminals. Police never want less ammo because they know that’s dangerous — neither should you.

Alan Korwin
January 25, 2016
Normal Capacity Magazines
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Code practice oscillator

Posted on by

Roberta just posted about telegraph keys and coincidently I ran across this as I was continuing to unpack boxes that hadn’t been touched in 20 or 30 years:

CodePracticeOscillator

The battery is new and that is all it took to make it functional. It’s a code practice oscillator that Brother Doug and/or I built back in the late 60’s or early 70’s. Once upon a time we put in a half-hearted effort to learn Morse Code but neither of us succeeded at learning the skill.

Boomershoot 2016 shirts, thongs, etc.

Posted on by

I just completed the Boomershoot 2016 section at Café Press. It has over 100 items all using this image:

CafePress2016

This is the ten year anniversary of that slogan. It is also the personal favorite (as he has told me several times) of Kevin Baker. Who, coincidently, will be attending Boomershoot 2016.

The products include various styles of shirts, cups, mugs, water bottles, tote bags, a baby blanket, a teddy bear, diaper bag, calendar, posters, framed print, hoodies, and, of course, the ever popular Boomershoot classic thong.

There is a President’s Day sale on until midnight tonight (PST). Use the code POTUS25. So get your order in today!

Quote of the day—God Hates Windbags (@GodH8sWindbags)

Posted on by

@wallsofthecity @robdoar Need phallic symbol to show your manhood? Buy a fucking Camaro

God Hates Windbags (@GodH8sWindbags)
Tweeted on October 30, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from Linoge.—Joe]

Steel challenge match results

Posted on by

I participated in a steel challenge match today. It was raining but there was no wind and it wasn’t very cold so with the right clothes it wasn’t bad even if looks really bad in the pictures.

WP_20160214_09_06_18_ProAdjusted
Stage 1: Smoke and Hope

WP_20160214_09_12_16_ProAdjusted
Stage 2: Four Corners

WP_20160214_09_07_26_ProAdjusted
Stage 3: V for Victory

WP_20160214_09_10_49_ProAdjusted
Stage 4: Force Awakens

When practicing recently I have been shooting my “new” .22 that I have had all the problems with for so long. As of yesterday I had shot about 500 rounds, without cleaning, with only one failure to feed near the end of the sequence. And most of that was with standard velocity ammo (the manufacturer recommends high velocity 40 grain ammo only). With that sort of success I figured I could shoot a match with CCI Mini-Mags (recommended by the manufacturer) and have complete success. The first two stages I shot (Stages 3 and 4 below) it functioned perfectly. On Stage 1 it had two failures. On the last stage I shot, Stage 2, it again worked fine. Of course it happens on the only stage used for classification purposes with SCSA.

I did reasonably well anyway. In the Rimfire Pistol Iron (RFPI) sight division I came in second only to Christian. Christian is like 14 years old, just the sweetest kid, and an awesome shooter. He claimed second place overall in this division at the Washington State Championship last year.

RFPI
Final Name SCSA Class Division Time Stage 1: Smoke & Hope Stage 2: 4 Corners Stage 3: V For Victory Stage 4: Force Awakens
1 Sailer, Christian A86982 U RFPI 37.92 8.76 8.33 11.40 9.43
2 Huffman, Joseph U RFPI 57.00 15.09 11.59 17.11 13.21
3 Komatsu, Jeff U RFPI 72.39 12.27 23.75 18.43 17.94
4 Mortell, Jeffery U RFPI 74.37 16.97 17.51 22.91 16.98
5 Morris, David U RFPI 82.49 10.91 21.22 30.18 20.18
6 Meboe, Joey U RFPI 87.72 12.73 21.80 25.98 27.21
7 Kim, Conner U RFPI 104.38 30.42 22.47 23.24 28.25
8 Meboe, Isabelle U RFPI 107.42 16.39 36.94 25.44 28.65
9 Nakashima, Daniel U RFPI 121.30 22.38 34.17 37.22 27.53
10 Kim, Nam U RFPI 215.31 42.65 53.80 71.12 47.74
11 Wood, Sabrina U RFPI 224.81 30.47 88.34 63.02 42.98
12 Meisner, Matthew U RFPI 244.96 49.68 33.42 91.43 70.43

I was the only participant in Limited division but for a Steel Challenge match Production division is very close so for comparison purpose I mentally inserted myself in the Production results which put me in second place. Again this was behind Christian.

Also of interest to me is that my centerfire gun malfunctioned with failures to eject on two rounds. One of those was, again, on Stage 1 just like with my other gun. Both guns were cleaned and lubricated the night before. Both guns had shot many hundreds of rounds without failures in the week prior. But as the RO asked when I whined about my malfunctions, “When you shot all those rounds without any failures were you shooting on the clock?” Yeah. I know. That has to be the reason. It was important to me so they malfunctioned.

LTD
Final Name SCSA Class Division Time Stage 1: Smoke & Hope Stage 2: 4 Corners Stage 3: V For Victory Stage 4: Force Awakens
1 Huffman, Joseph U LTD 74.17 15.75 17.57 21.78 19.07
PROD
Final Name SCSA Class Division Time Stage 1: Smoke & Hope Stage 2: 4 Corners Stage 3: V For Victory Stage 4: Force Awakens
1 Sailer, Christian A86982 U PROD 53.62 11.13 12.99 15.11 14.39
2 Meboe, Greg U PROD 83.31 16.73 19.86 26.03 20.69
3 Komatsu, Jeff U PROD 85.56 17.74 24.10 22.03 21.69
4 Soraparu, Heather U PROD 86.28 17.21 20.54 28.34 20.19
5 Roe, Shawn U PROD 86.55 17.60 22.42 25.39 21.14
6 Rabino, Tony U PROD 90.37 16.27 25.51 24.33 24.26
7 Harding, Matt U PROD 90.77 15.92 23.23 27.72 23.90
8 Mortell, Jeffery U PROD 91.85 20.76 24.49 26.51 20.09
9 Taeschner, Monica U PROD 93.01 16.94 19.52 31.99 24.56
10 Meisner, Mike U PROD 94.93 14.94 29.71 24.45 25.83
11 Morris, David U PROD 103.80 19.34 28.25 29.84 26.37
12 Yi, John U PROD 106.20 18.66 32.47 30.48 24.59
13 Hong, Robert U PROD 107.27 19.13 27.82 30.70 29.62
14 Kenny, Dan A23624 U PROD 108.68 20.19 35.50 28.16 24.83
15 Pacczosa, Dan A492542 U PROD 117.58 18.35 33.37 38.94 26.92
16 Heinz, Jeff U PROD 117.70 21.46 26.65 40.51 29.08
17 McKenzie, Don U PROD 120.72 24.18 37.54 30.62 28.38
18 East, Susan A77097 U PROD 132.06 24.16 31.57 40.62 35.71
19 Femino, Jason U PROD 152.14 21.88 63.26 37.43 29.57
20 Wood, Ken U PROD 164.85 26.71 41.04 55.06 42.04
21 Dickerson, Terry U PROD 202.81 28.82 42.06 79.89 52.04
22 Morris, Dave U PROD – – 56.79 – –

Quote of the day—Justice Antonin Scalia

Posted on by

I don’t see how there’s any, any, any contradiction between reading the second clause as a — as a personal guarantee and reading the first one as assuring the existence of a militia, not necessarily a State-managed militia because the militia that resisted the British was not State- managed. But why isn’t it perfectly plausible, indeed reasonable, to assume that since the framers knew that the way militias were destroyed by tyrants in the past was not by passing a law against militias, but by taking away the people’s weapons — that was the way militias were destroyed. The two clauses go together beautifully: Since we need a militia, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Justice Antonin Scalia
March 18, 2008
During oral arguments in the case of District of Columbia et. al. v. Heller.
[We lost our strongest ally on the Supreme court in the battle against anti-gun people yesterday. He will be greatly missed.

See also other quotes and references I have posted about him.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Professor Ruth Wisse

Posted on by

If history has taught anything. When someone says he is going to murder the Jews, believe him.

Professor Ruth Wisse
February 6, 2016
Professor Ruth Wisse Explains the Worst Case Scenario
[There was another gem in the same post:

Professor Wisse explained why she is a political conservative. “When I look at any policy, I ask myself: What is the worst outcome that can happen?” Liberals, she said, are fixated on the best outcome. The liberal outlook ignores history and reality.

I can’t recall where I read it, and it was very recent too, but someone explained progressive thinking in a very similar manner. Their observation was something to the effect that if a good outcome was possible from government involvement then that was sufficient justification for government action. Examples abound but the most obvious are Obamacare and the popularity of an admitted socialist running for U.S President.—Joe]

The Instalanche

Posted on by

My post about OSHA is going after ammo manufacturers got a link from Instapundit last week. While the number of hits weren’t as great as some people; with total of 6,975 page views in one day it is much better than the first time I got one. And it is the most page views I have gotten in a single day since I switched to Word Press in December of 2012 and perhaps ever.

Here is a more visual view:

Instalance

A big thank you to Glenn Reynolds and especially the anonymous caller from the ammo manufacturer.

Quote of the day—Louis Pasteur

Posted on by

The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.

Louis Pasteur
[I can’t disagree with the conclusion. But I fear that particular derangement of the mind is so common that one would be hard pressed to prove it was abnormal. Hence my placing it in such a wide variety of blog post categories.—Joe]

This will be interesting

Posted on by

Cosmic breakthrough: Physicists detect gravitational waves from violent black-hole merger:

Scientists announced Thursday that, after decades of effort, they have succeeded in detecting gravitational waves from the violent merging of two black holes in deep space. The detection was hailed as a triumph for a controversial, exquisitely crafted, billion-dollar physics experiment and as confirmation of a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

It will also inaugurate a new era of astronomy in which gravitational waves are tools for studying the most mysterious and exotic objects in the universe, scientists declared at a euphoric news briefing at the National Press Club in Washington.

…

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” declared David Reitze, the executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), drawing applause from an  audience that included many of the luminaries of the physics world. The briefing was watched around the world by physicists who have long waited for such a detection.

I’m hoping this will lead to the development of “warp drive”.

Quote of the day—Denning and Reynolds

Posted on by

Political scientists and law professors alike have written extensively on signaling and agenda-setting by the Supreme Court. Despite being dicta—the issues mentioned were not before the Court and were not necessary to resolve those that were before it—the Heller safe harbor seems to us to have been a clear signal, clearer perhaps than any sent in Lopez, that lower courts should not declare open season on any and all federal gun laws. It seems to us that the lower courts have certainly heeded this signal.

If the Heller safe harbor was indeed intended as a signal to lower courts (and litigants, perhaps), then it tends to confirm an earlier observation we made about Heller: that it is another example of the Court’s tendency to constitutionalize the national consensus on certain hot button issues and then enforce it against outliers.

Brannon P. Denning
Glenn H. Reynolds
August 1, 2009
Heller, High Water(mark)? Lower Courts and the New Right to Keep and Bear Arms
[Via Glenn Reynolds.

This conclusion would appear to be true and signals to gun rights activists the incredible importance of changing the culture prior to pushing our luck in the courts. We need to make restrictive laws appear to be nonsensical outliers then, if we cannot get legislative action to our satisfaction, press the issue in the courts.—Joe]

The science is settled

Posted on by

Report: Criminologists, Economists Find Benefits to Gun Ownership:

Economists and criminologists have very different approaches to research and different political views, but they both generally find benefits from gun ownership,” Lott told Townhall in an email. “Economists, on the whole, were much more likely than criminologists to believe that there are benefits from gun ownership.  By a factor of 12-to-1, economists believe that permitted concealed handguns reduce rather than increase murder rates.  Despite their differences, still criminologists also believe this by a factor of just 2-to-1.”

Perhaps surveys such as this will help Americans take a level-headed approach to gun control in the future.

No. It won’t help Americans take a level-headed approach to gun control. This is because anti-gun people have never been “level-headed”. If they had the capacity to be level-headed they wouldn’t have been anti-gun to begin with and they wouldn’t have to lie to gain traction.

We must continue to fight them culturally and politically until they become as irrelevant as the KKK which they so closely resemble.

Quote of the day—Stephen Miller

Posted on by

Sanders is a kookily proud outsider and self-declared Democratic Socialist who joined the House of Representatives in 1988 and the Senate in 2005. In the quarter-plus century he’s served in federal office, only 3 bills he’s sponsored have ever made it into law. Otherwise, he was that guy you would occasionally see yelling about rapine capital or the unnecessary proliferation of deodorant brands to an empty chamber of Congress on C-Span during midday break sessions. And this has been Bernie’s professional life for the past 35 years. Get up. Go to Congress. Fight with Lamp. Declare victory.

Stephen Miller
February 1, 2016
Culture Club: How Media Makes a Meme
[H/T to Ed Driscoll.

I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Alan Korwin

Posted on by

Nothing points out the bankruptcy of our nation’s gun-control debate better than the mythologies that surrounds it.

Prior “common sense” proposals are perpetually abandoned. The so-called “news” media adopts each new absurd gun-control scheme dutifully, promotes it uncritically, then drops it like a hot potato when it is proven worthless and runs to the next latest greatest bit of hoplophobic (morbid gun fear) ridiculousness.

In effect the nation endures a serial mythology, with new myths invented constantly, so we lose sight of each established myth as new ones spring into the public eye.

Alan Korwin
December 21, 2015
KORWIN: America’s Real Gun Problem – The Gun Myths
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

I-594 being ignored

Posted on by

I reported some on this last December but KING 5 News has more:

But analysis of federal data by the KING 5 Investigators raises questions about how effective that law has been.

Only 2% of background checks in Washington in 2015 stemmed from “private party” sales of guns, according to data in the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check – or NICS – system.

That number is surprising to researchers Philip Cook of Duke and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, who study gun violence.

They say that their own research – and studies by others – have shown that up to 40% of gun sales nationwide are between private citizens. They’re skeptical that the 2% reported to the FBI is an accurate picture of the private gun market in Washington state.

“I suspect…there are a lot of unreported private-market sales going on,” Ludwig said in an email to KING 5.

In other words, the data could indicate that many gun sellers and buyers are evading the law.

And that doesn’t even count the “transfers” covered by the law which don’t involve a sale. I’ll bet they would be unable find anyone who did a NICS check on someone they loaned a gun to for a short period of time. I-594 is probably, and justifiably so, going to be ignored as much as other stupid laws such those against recreational drugs, underage drinking, and oral sex.

Quote of the day—Ms. Ann Drist (@saltphoenix)

Posted on by

and the first thing to shit up my mentions with trollish-ness? A man with a gun. Always swinging their dicks when you call ’em out. Or guns.

Ms. Ann Drist (@saltphoenix)
Tweeted on November 2, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jasim Mohammed Atti’ya

Posted on by

What I did were terror acts. It was my duty. There are infidels and there is instruction in Koran to stop this and fight all infidels.

Jasim Mohammed Atti’ya
February 3, 2016
EXCLUSIVE: Jailed ISIS bomb maker says he would quit before donning one of his deadly vests
[The options they give to us are become Muslim and follow Sharia Law, pay a heavy tax, or die. I am of the opinion we should create alternate options not to their liking.—Joe]