You have to wonder

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President Obama’s executive orders to ban gun ownership of Social Security recipients who are “incapable of handling their own affairs” raises some interesting questions. How many violent crimes do these type of people commit? Without access to guns will old codgers with Alzheimer’s substitute the use of their canes and walkers to hold up banks and 24-hour convenience stores when they can’t use a gun like they did last week?

One might claim that the President and all his advisers just didn’t think this through. But if you were to claim that I would have to wonder about your gullibility.

Expectations

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From ABC’s Zoe Daniel:

The President is expected to expand background checks for people buying weapons from high-volume gun dealers — despite the fact guns used in mass shootings have often been legally obtained.

And I expect ABC and Daniel to continue saying nonsensical things and failing to elaborating on the nonsense they know the anti-gun politicians use to infringe upon our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.

Quote of the day—Ed Morrissey

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In the wake of the Newtown shooting, the mention of which caused Obama to tear up today, he demanded a renewal of the so-called “assault weapons” ban, provoking a furious reaction before retreating to a background-check proposal instead. The well had already been poisoned, however, and the effort failed. He’s made repeated references (Dan McLaughlin counts four times) to confiscatory policies elsewhere as a model for modern nations, and then expresses surprise and indignation when people dare to assume he means it.

If you like your Glock, you can … eh, you get the point.

Ed Morrissey
January 5, 2016
Obama: Hey, forget what I said about Australia (twice) — no one’s looking to take away your guns!
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

I’ll believe it when the cell door clangs shut behind her

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Via Glenn Reynolds, Don Surber says FBI headed for a showdown over Hillary :

“I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an attorney general. It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable,” DiGenova said.

Speculation? Sure. We shall see.

By the way, you can run for president from federal prison. Keith Russell Judd received 41 percent of the Democratic primary vote in West Virginia in 2012 while sitting in a federal prison in Texas.

You might find it odd that people are speculating about her running for president while in prison. But, as in the case mentioned above, prison is frequently a credential for certain groups of people. It appears to have strong correlation with people who vote for democrats. Marion Barry and Judd, above, are but two examples. Victimhood is a sought out by these people and just as Hillary sought that with her claim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in the 1990’s she will claim arrest and prosecution for her crimes as a valid reason to vote for her.

I am quite willing to believe Hillary has engaged in more than sufficient criminal activity to put someone away for years if it had been committed by any ordinary person. Her husband didn’t spend any time in prison after all the crimes he committed. Why should it be any different for Hillary? I’ll believe she spends time in prison only after the cell door clangs shut behind her.

Quote of the day—Alan Korwin

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Depriving the public of gear as a way to stop murderers is misguided, puts you at risk and at its core, 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.

Alan Korwin
December 18, 2015
KORWIN: Talking Points For The 30-Round-Magazine Debate
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Kurt Schlichter

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I’m not advocating violence – I am warning liberals that they are setting the conditions for violence.

And that better worry them, for the coastal elites are uniquely unsuited to a world where force rules instead of law. The Serbs were, at least, a warrior people. The soft boys and girls who brought us helicopter parenting, “trigger warnings” and coffee cups with diversity slogans are not.

I know the endgame of discarding the rule of law for short-term advantage because I stood in its ruins. Liberals think this free society just sort of happened, that they can poke and tear at its fabric and things will just go on as before. But they won’t. So at the end of the day, if you want a society governed by the rule of force, you better pray that you’re on the side with the guns and those who know how to use them.

Kurt Schlichter
April 5, 2015
Liberals May Regret Their New Rules
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bacon @Baconmints

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The paid nutters of the nra, aka the #tinycockclub are losing their shit. It’s hysterical. Search my mentions, point, laugh. #gunsense #bok

Bacon @Baconmints
Tweeted on December 23, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

Via a Tweet from BFD‏ @BigFatDave.—Joe]

Rounds in the last year

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This last year I reloaded more ammunition than I have in a long, long time. I posted some my updates on the topic January 6th, February 6th, March 1st, April 5th.

For the entire year it was:

9mm.log: 2993 rounds.
40S&W.log: 6538 rounds
Total: 9531 rounds

That’s a decent number but I suspect I will do more this year. I’m taking InSights Intensive Handgun Skills class February 20-22 and I need to make up about 2500 rounds for that class alone.

The total number of rounds since I began reloading my own ammunition:

223.log: 2027 rounds.
3006.log: 467 rounds.
300WIN.log: 1351 rounds.
40SW.log: 41654 rounds.
45.log: 0 rounds.
9MM.log: 21636 rounds.
Total: 67135 rounds.

This really makes a mockery of the stupid proposed law in New York which “would cap the amount of ammunition to no more than twice the amount of the capacity of the weapon every 90 days”. I would have to claim all my guns are belt fed with essentially infinite capacity to keep up my current consumption rate if I were to attempt remaining lawful under such a tyrannical restriction.

Quote of the day—Tyler Durden

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If Obama wants to truly curb gun ownership at the national level, the solution there is also simple, as the following chart from the NYT reveals:

GunSales

He should resign.

Tyler Durden
January 1, 2016
Obama To Unveil “Multiple Gun Control” Executive Actions Next Week
[I’m not sure it would reduce it but it stands a chance of slowing the growth.—Joe]

Hillary’s New Years Resolutions

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Via NRA-ILA:

Gun cartoon of the day

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I found this taped on the wall of someone that I had been repeated told was very anti-gun.

I’m confused now. I don’t know what to think about them.

But I do know the comic does a good job of expressing our doubts about the validity of surveys to determine the number of gun owners.

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Steel match results

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Yesterday I went to a steel match at the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club on Whidbey Island.

It was cold for the Seattle area, in the upper 20s, but it was a beautiful day for a ferry ride:

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I had been sick earlier in the week as well as busy with Christmas stuff on the previous weekend. I hadn’t practiced in several weeks. Things didn’t go well. My new gun crashed and burned with multiple failures to feed on the second stage and I switched back to the Ruger 22/45 for the rest of the match. Even the video glasses messed up on stage two—the audio and video got seriously out of sync. But mostly it was my fault for not practicing and I had lots and lots of misses.

Even had I been shooting as well as I usually do at this match I wouldn’t have come in higher than second place in centerfire. There was new guy, Tony, shooting in the iron sighted centerfire gun category. He is much better than me even on one of my good days:

Tony Ceci CF-I 63.12
Bruce Barchenger CF-I 81.45
Joe Huffman CF-I 87.14
Rick Huggins CF-I 91.17
Scott Bertin CF-RV-I 106.80
Chris Ceci CF-RV-O 91.45
Brian Lawson RF-I 60.86
Joe Huffman RF-I 61.98
Mitch Hardin RF-I 83.24
Steve Mooney RF-O 48.43
Rev Barchenger RF-O 75.71
Steve Mooney
 RF-RI-O 41.08
Brian Lawson RF-RI-O 42.28
Tony Ceci RF-RI-O 46.59
MAC RF-RV-I 84.94

RF-RI-O: Rimfire Rifle Optics
RF-O: Rimfire Pistol Optics
RF-I: Rimfire Iron sights
PCC-O: Pistol Caliber Carbine Optics
RF-RI-I: Rimfire Rifle Iron sights
CF-I: Centerfire Iron sights
PCC-I: Pistol Caliber Carbine Iron sights

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Quote of the day—Jennifer Baker

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The fact is, the President’s gun control agenda will only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to exercise their right to self-defense.

Jennifer Baker
NRA spokeswoman
January 1, 2016
Gun Control Is Obama’s New Year’s Resolution
[Baker is correct.

Because gun control advocates don’t recognize the existence of or the legitimacy of self-defense they can convince themselves that any restriction on gun ownership is a good thing because it will make it harder for the bad guys to get guns. Any negative consequences of making it harder for good people to obtain or use guns is ignored and/or dismissed.

What is lost to many people is that restrictions on firearms ownership always affect the normally law abiding people far more than those who habitually disobey the law. Think of the illegal use of recreational drugs. How hard is it for someone to obtain and use them if they are willing to break the law? It’s trivially easy. But it is very difficult for someone to stay within the law and use those same drugs (they have to obtain and use them in a location outside the law such as in a different country or out at sea).

Making it difficult for the normally law-abiding to defend themselves is an extremely immoral act, a violation of our rights, and is, rightly so, a crime. These criminals should be arrested and prosecuted.—Joe]

It’s not an open loop system

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In control systems and electronic amplifiers engineers design things to be self correcting. Think of the simple control system for the heating system in your home. You set the thermostat to a particular temperature and it will turn the heat on it if gets too cool and off when it reaches the desired temperature. This is a closed loop system. There is a sensor which provides information about the current status of the system and this information is used to control the heat source and keep the temperature within acceptable limits. The system has a feedback loop from the output (the room temperature) back to the input (the heat supply).

Without such a feedback loop it would be very difficult to maintain a system at a stable temperature. When the outside temperature changed the inside temperature would change too. If someone left a window open the interior temperature would change.

I have often thought our planet must have one or more feedback loops to maintain it’s temperature at something very close to the same (averaged the entire surface over the entire year) temperature. I knew one feedback loop, which the climate change people seldom, if ever, mention, was that plants are CO2 starved. At our current concentration of about 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere it’s not easy for the plants to absorb and then pull the carbon apart from the oxygen to build plant matter. In fact, at current atmospheric pressures, photosynthesis shuts down at between 150 ppm and 200 ppm. As atmospheric CO2 increases plants grow faster. Faster growing plants mean more energy is absorbed from the sun, reducing atmospheric heating, and more CO2 is absorbed from the air. Hence the green house effect, atmospheric warming, from increased CO2 is counteracted, at least in part, by the feedback mechanism of increased plant growth.

There are other feedback systems as well. One of which only very recently was discovered:

According to a study by the Institute of Catalysis and Environment in Lyon (IRCELYON, CNRS / University Lyon 1) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), the oceans are producing unexpectedly large quantities of isoprene – a volatile organic compound (VOC) – which is known to have a cooling effect on climate.

Our planet temperature is not an open loop system. If it were then the global warming/cooling climate change people would be right to be concerned. But it is, almost, obviously not. Closed loop systems are much more difficult to upset and are much more stable. We have a closed loop system with many feedback loops. These loops make the system extremely difficult to model but don’t tell me climate is changing until you can explain to me how the inputs to the system have the potential to break the feedback loops which stabilize the temperature.

Quote of the day—John Donohue

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The best evidence to date suggests that right-to-carry laws increase gun violence, so efforts to eliminate or tighten those laws and to oppose their adoption in the states that do have them would be prudent at this time. A recent study noted that since May 2007, 29 concealed carry permit holders have gone on shooting sprees that killed at least three individuals. In general, legislative tightening of those allowed to possess guns to the fullest extent that the Constitution allows is clearly worth exploring.

John Donohue
Stanford Law Professor
December 31, 2015
Improved gun buyer background checks would impede some mass shootings, Stanford expert says
[“Gun violence” is a totally false metric and is immediate disqualification for taking this “expert” seriously. “Gun violence” includes self-defense shootings, and ignores any increase in non-gun violence as a result of people being unable to defend themselves. This “expert” clearly has an prejudiced and bigoted agenda against the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. And he  does not even acknowledge the existence of such a right.

In eight years 29 of the millions of concealed carry permit holders have killed three people? How many people in that same time period with medical degrees, drivers licenses, and police badges kill? If Donohue’s claim is true then he just claimed we are extraordinarily safe people yet he presents it as if we are dangerous.

This is no different than someone discussing “black violence” and insisting government should enslave all people with black skin based on the number of crimes committed by such people and completely ignoring the 13th Amendment. Someone with Donohue’s attitude on fundamental human rights isn’t fit to clean the toilets at Stanford let alone represent them in public.—Joe]

Malware for good

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What if someone created a computer virus which illegally infected as many systems as it could via the Internet and made them more secure against attacks by unauthorized users?

Would you call that malware? How about vigilante malware?

The further we dug into Wifatch’s code the more we had the feeling that there was something unusual about this threat. For all intents and purposes, it appeared like the author was trying to secure infected devices instead of using them for malicious activities.

Wifatch’s code does not ship any payloads used for malicious activities, such as carrying out DDoS attacks, in fact all the hardcoded routines seem to have been implemented in order to harden compromised devices. We’ve been monitoring Wifatch’s peer-to-peer network for a number of months and have yet to observe any malicious actions being carried out through it.

In addition, there are some other things that seem to hint that the threat’s intentions may differ from traditional malware.

Interesting.

But what you have to wonder is, why didn’t the software writers for these devices (these are embedded systems for the “Internet of Things”) include the capability for automatic updates and eliminate the need for some “vigilante” to do it for them?

Quote of the day—Garry Reed

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Back in North Texas a young coed was visibly upset when interviewed on TV. The guy sitting next to her in class might whip out his concealed carry gun and start shooting, she feared. A libertarian would ask why she also didn’t fear that he might suddenly start bashing her with his MacBook or stabbing her with his BIC pen? Or maybe whipping out his concealed carry phallus and raping her? This is, after all, the same guy who has been sitting next to her all semester. Why the sudden irrational fear over a gun?

Why isn’t she reassured that another student sitting nearby with a gun will jump in and defend her? Why, in fact, doesn’t she just grow up, act like a responsible adult, get handgun certified and defend herself?

Maybe people just need to stop coddling and being coddled.

Garry Reed
December 29, 2015
Gun culture, anti-gun culture and Texas campus carry
[The anti-gun culture has nothing but childish insults so it seems entirely appropriate to speak to them as if they were children. Something like, “Go someplace else now, the adults are talking.” Or perhaps better yet tell them, “Grow up and act like adults instead of spoiled children.”—Joe]

Boomershoot 2015 versus 2016

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Final Boomershoot 2015 statistics:

  Total Average per position taken Average per total positions
Positions Taken 52 – 0.68
Participants 118 2.27 1.55
Friday Field Fire participants 13 0.25 0.17
Friday Clinic participants 17 0.33 0.22
Friday High Intensity participants 23 0.44 0.30
Private Fireball participants 3 0.06 0.04
Saturday Field Fire participants 45 0.87 0.59
Saturday Clinic participants 18 0.35 0.24
Saturday High Intensity participants 19 0.37 0.25
Dinner participants 59 1.13 0.78
Shooters 110 2.12 1.45
Spotters 1 0.02 0.01
Media/Bloggers 8 0.15 0.11
ATF Approved 13 0.25 0.17
Staff 26 0.50 0.34

With nearly four months to go and only about 10 days worth of entries we have the following statistics for Boomershoot 2016:

  Total Average per position taken Average per total positions
Positions Taken 44 – 0.58
Participants 89 2.02 1.17
Friday Field Fire participants 11 0.25 0.14
Friday Clinic participants 3 0.07 0.04
Friday High Intensity participants 15 0.34 0.20
Private Fireball participants 1 0.02 0.01
Saturday Field Fire participants 40 0.91 0.53
Saturday Clinic participants 3 0.07 0.04
Saturday High Intensity participants 16 0.36 0.21
Dinner participants 37 0.84 0.49
Shooters 85 1.93 1.12
Spotters 2 0.05 0.03
Media/Bloggers 8 0.18 0.11
ATF Approved 10 0.23 0.13
Staff 18 0.41 0.24

I find it interesting that for 2016, even though we have 29 fewer overall participants so far, we have almost as many Saturday High Intensity participants. And that the Precision Rifle Clinic participation is so low (three on each day) for both Friday and Saturday. Yet the field fire participation is nearly that of 2015.

Quote of the day—Bruce Rollier

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Denying a request to carry a gun in public is not disarming that person; he already owns the gun, and no one is proposing to take it away; just keep it at home. Reasonable gun controls designed to save lives have nothing to do with taking guns away. The writer says that “Examples abound of gun control leading to extermination of dissidents and minorities”, but of course he does not mention any actual examples where this occurred, and there are none.

Bruce Rollier
December 29, 2015
Gun control is not about disarming U.S. citizens
[I would find it difficult to come up with a more disingenuous and/or delusional statement even if I were deliberately trying. This is total crap for brains or alternate universe material.

If you can’t carry a gun in public then you are disarmed in public. Which is,  DISARMED.

No one is proposing to take away our guns? Is the New York Times, numerous politicians, and hundreds of ordinary citizens I have documented as saying they want to take our guns “no one”?

I have to wonder what color the sky is in his universe where Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, The People’s Republic of China, Cambodia, and numerous other countries did not murdered tens of millions of disarmed people.—Joe]

Year in review

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One of the plugins for this blog prepared a review of the year.

The most interesting things to me were: