Our next fight?

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I don’t like this:

Proponents of President Barack Obama’s executive orders in the area of gun control point to OSHA’s General Duty Clause as a possible basis for a national “no guns at work” policy.

The General Duty Clause requires employers to maintain a safe workplace, including the implementation of policies that may be necessary to further that goal. Proponents argue that this significant increase in workplace violence coupled with the expansion of concealed carry laws would be the basis for this regulatory change. Moreover, because a General Duty Clause already exists within the OSHA statute, there would not be a need for congressional approval.

This would be another chilling effect on our rights. I frequently go to the range at lunch time or after work. And I know a lot of other people go hunting before or after work. And OSHA creating a regulation such as this would have to make exceptions for a many of places of employment. Police stations, security firms, gun manufactures, gun ranges, gun stores, any place which hires armed guards, etc.

I can see it being a valid concern for guns to be prohibited in some places of business (I’m thinking of oil refineries and other places where “high energy events” could be triggered). But it should be up to the business to decide if they have an overriding set of circumstance where firearms are just too high of risk to allow.

This could be our next fight for our right to keep and bear arms.

Skirt Club

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This is interesting:

Attractive, open-minded women are secretly gathering to explore their sexual curiosities…with each other. It’s the epitome of the male fantasy but—sorry fellas—this club is strictly ladies only.

Billing itself as, “An underground community for girls who play with girls,” Skirt Club is quickly catching on. What began as one woman’s passion project to embrace sexual fluidity in the UK has expanded to Sydney, Australia, and Miami, Florida, in two short years.

Now, the club has come to New York City. 

I wonder if I could attend as a member of the media or a researcher…

Posted in Sex

Quote of the day—David E. Petzal

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The forces acting upon the gun industry are Armageddon, for which we are all tooling up, and our Peerless Leader, who has sold more firearms than even Bubba Clinton, and The Horror That Is Hillary, who is lurking in our future like the Wicked Witch of the West.

David E. Petzal
January 25, 2016
SHOT Show 2016, Part I
[Via Caleb who has a much different, but entirely valid, angle on Petzal’s post.

As others have observed, if Obama and his friends want to reduce the number of guns being sold in this country they should resign from politics.—Joe]

Earth Day 2016

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I just realized that Boomershoot 2016 will be at the same time as Earth Day 2016. Which, of course reminds me of something Michael Justice said while participating in Boomershoot 1999, “Celebrate Earth Day by blowing up a small part of it”. You too can participate, sign up here.

And while we are thinking about Earth Day here are some wonderful predictions made on Earth Day 1970:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

I have a prediction of my own about Earth Day 2016. The people who attend Boomershoot and blow up a small part of the earth in Idaho with us will have a great time.

Interesting times

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From here:

As the chart below shows – which is disturbing without any further context – the 40 million ounces of gold open interest and the record low 74 thousand ounces of registered gold imply that as of Monday’s close there was a whopping 542 ounces in potential paper claims to every ounces of physical gold. Call it a 0.2% dilution factor.

ComexGoldRatio

Quote of the day—Richard Feldman

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In 1994 [when President Clinton introduced a ban on assault weapons] I remember being asked ‘Why do you need these guns?’ My response was ‘Well, I never needed them before, but if the government thinks I shouldn’t be able to own them, I guess I want them now’, and I did go out and buy about 15 of them before the ban.

Richard Feldman
January 26, 2016
How has the US gun lobby been so successful?
[Just like I buy and read banned books I also buy and use banned guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Carl Bogus

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There had been only three US Supreme Court cases that dealt with the second amendment. They all held that the second amendment was related to militia service [and] granted a collective right, not an individual right. This was considered pretty settled until the 1960s.

…

They won the war in 2008 in a case called ‘The District of Columbia versus Heller’, when the Supreme Court held for the first time that the second amendment grants an individual right.

The nine justices of the US Supreme Court divided five to four along perfectly ideological lines. The conservatives said it grants an individual right, and the liberals all said, no, it grants a collective right.

Carl Bogus
Professor of Law at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island
January 26, 2016
How has the US gun lobby been so successful?
[Bogus is correct. As a name for this liar that is.

  1. The Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, does not grant rights. It protects preexisting rights. Read the words of the Second Amendment. Or read US v Cruikshank, “This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.”
  2. I can only think of two Supreme Court cases directly addressing the Second Amendment before Heller, one being Cruikshank, and the other is United States v. Miller 59 S.Ct. 816(1939). Neither say anything at all about a “collective right”. Miller is sometimes misunderstood to imply something like that but that interpretation is obviously wrong. Read my comments on that here.
  3. The Heller justices were not divided on the issue of an individual versus collective right in regards to the Second Amendment. The four dissenting justices said, The question presented by this case is not whether the Second Amendment protects a “collective right” or an “individual right.”  Surely it protects a right that can be enforced by individuals.

Anti-gun people lie. It’s in their culture. It’s what they have to do to have any hope of making progress in their battle to eliminate our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Greg

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I no longer call it registration, it is a gun confiscation data base.

Greg
January 23, 2016
Comment to Ballot Fight in Maine
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brian Garrett

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Whenever someone tells me to “check my privilege”, I like to respond with “root access confirmed”.

Brian Garrett
January 21, 2016
Comment to Indistinguishable from Reality
[To understand this, and find it absolutely hilarious, it helps to be a computer geek.—Joe]

Speed Steel match results

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Last Saturday, January 23rd, I went to Whidbey Island for the steel match. It was a rainy, dreary, day as I road the ferry to the island but I had rain gear and was dressed warm enough to be comfortable.

WP_20160123_08_37_55_ProAdjusted

The weather wasn’t any better at the range and we put up a canopy to keep things a little drier for our little group of die-hard shooters:

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I shot my Ruger 22/45 for the iron sighted rimfire division and did okay with it.

With my STI DVC Limited gun I had changed out the sear spring and adjusted it for about 4.75 pounds of trigger pull rather than the 3.5 pounds it came from the factory with which I have never really gotten used to. It worked fine in practice and I was looking forward to using it. It worked fine some times then on other shots it had a much harder trigger pull. The pull was probably something on the order of 10 or 15 pounds. It was sometimes hard enough that my hands shook from pulling the trigger so hard to get it to fire. My times for centerfire pistol sucked.

Name Division Time
Steve Mooney RF-RI-O 47.66
Steve Mooney RF-O 57.63
Joe Huffman RF-I 67.12
Bruce Barchenger CF-I 91.92
Rev Barchenger RF-O 92.36
Joe Huffman CF-I 111.91
Jim Dunlap RF-O 112.08
Scott Bertino CF-I 123.44

67.12 seconds for five stages works out to an average of 3.356 seconds per five shot string. I’m okay with that.

Here are four of the five stages we shot. They started tearing down the fifth stage before I got around to taking a picture:

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Steel challenge match results

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On January 10th I shot a steel challenge match. I took video and have been meaning to edit it and post it on YouTube but I just haven’t got to it. Virtually no one watches (40 to ~100 views each) them anyway. So I’m just going to link to the results and tell you want happened.

The overall, all divisions, results are here. There were 34 participants and I came in 11th in iron sighted rimfire pistol and 13th in iron sighted centerfire pistol. My times for the four stages were 67.80 in rimfire and 76.58 in centerfire.

In the rimfire, iron sighted, pistol category I was 5th out of 11. I was the only shooter in the Limited division but if I had been in the iron sighted pistol division I would have been first. They didn’t get my Senior category into the record, but I would have come in with either gun only behind Jeffery with his open division rifle.

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Go Fast

WP_20160110_09_35_40_Pro
Go Hawks

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Beast Mode

WP_20160110_09_36_49_Pro
Focus

I shot my new rimfire gun that I have had all the problems with. It worked fine in practice and on the first stage our squad shot (Go Hawks). Then on the second stage we shot (Focus) it started jamming again. I went back to the Ruger 22/45 for the remainder of the match.

Quote of the day—Frenchpug14‏ @frenchpug14

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@wallsofthecity @Jan202017 great! I don’t care about your need to shore up your masculinity with a prosthetic penis.

Frenchpug14‏ @frenchpug14
Tweeted on October 18, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]

Quote of the day—W. Kamau Bell

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We could use a President who was, like, “OK. Everybody turn in all your guns tomorrow by 5 p.m. After that, if I catch you with a gun then I’m sending SEAL Team Six to your house with a recent Facebook picture of you and those tanks that shoot fire that we haven’t used since Waco — Ummm — I mean since World War II.”

…

And let me be clear about something else, gun owners. I want President Obama to want to take your guns away. I don’t trust you with your guns. I don’t trust you to fire them safely. I don’t trust you to store them safely. I don’t trust your kids not to find them. I don’t trust you not to get them stolen.

W. Kamau Bell
January 12, 2016
I want Obama to take away your guns
[H/T to The Writer in Black.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Azathoth @ArkhamRealty

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The 20th C Left had to shoot people en masse to get them to obey.

The 21st C Left plans on using dick jokes.

Azathoth ‏@ArkhamRealty
Tweeted on January 13, 2016
[This is only true because it’s the best the Left has available at this time. If they had the power to murder people en masse they would.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mr. Fusion

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If physicians are unable to, by law, ascertain the mental stability of someone to own a gun in Florida, then the Federal Government should deny everyone in Florida the ability to purchase a gun.

Mr. Fusion
January 10, 2016
Comment to The Absurd Logic Behind Floridas Docs vs. Glocks Law
[What is it with anti-gun people and their obsession with assessing the mental health of gun owners? It is they who demonstrate mental health problems (see also here).—Joe]

Quote of the day—Craig DeLuz

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The right to keep and bear arms is not up for popular debate. It’s a constitutionally enumerated civil right.

Craig DeLuz
Firearms Policy Coalition spokesman
January 12, 2016
Gun debate: Californians support more gun control, poll finds
[Technically he is correct. But from a practical standpoint he is wrong. If a large majority wish to hurt us any way they can, as one person in the article said regarding buying ammunition, “Anything that slows the process down, I’m all for,” the local courts will ultimately find some weasel words to allow it. We have to change the culture or we need some very strong rulings from higher courts.

With dwindling percentages of gun owners in the most oppressed states and significant obstacles for bringing new people into our camp changing the culture is probably nearly a lost cause in these areas.

Therefore getting a pro-freedom president in the Whitehouse next January is our do or die battle for states like California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, etc. Otherwise the Supreme Court will, for all intents and purposes, eviscerate the Heller and McDonald decisions.—Joe]

Gun madness again

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As implied by my last post about the overloading of the NICS system I have been noticing how crowded the indoor ranges are around here. A couple weeks ago, about 2:00 PM, on a Saturday, I was stopped at the local range to practice before a match. The parking lot was full. And it’s not a small parking lot:

WCA

Every place you see parking lines, or cars, and on the street in front of the building had parked cars. I drove by the front door and looking into the lobby to see it was packed. I just drove on home.

Recently I’ve been visiting the range at lunch time and while I don’t have a problem finding a parking spot the range has been crowded. The only time it hasn’t been crowded recently was when I went to a different range (because I was in the area anyway) and it was during a Seahawks game. I was far from the only shooter in the place but it wasn’t packed.

Another item of interest is that I ordered a holster and magazine pouches from Kramer Leather yesterday. They quoted me a delivery time of seven to nine weeks.

My speculation is that it’s the threat of more gun control that has people hitting the range and the gun stores in mass again.

NICS denial overload implications

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I wanted to post something about this last night but it was dinner and video night with my daughter so I decided to do it tonight. Then Sebastian made nearly all the points I wanted to make.

The one issue I want to elaborate on further is:

The surge of criminal background checks required of new gun purchasers has been so unrelenting in recent months that the FBI had been forced to temporarily halt the processing of thousands of appeals from prospective buyers whose firearm purchase attempts have been denied.

Since October, the bureau’s entire cadre of appeal examiners— about 70 analysts — was redeployed here to help keep pace with waves of incoming background investigations that continued through December when a record 3.3 million firearm sales were processed.

This shows us there is a loophole in the system an (redundancy alert) unscrupulous, anti-gun administration could deny the majority of the people in this country their right to purchase new firearms. If they can ignore the appeals of denials then it would seem that instead of actually doing a proper background check and giving a pass or fail response they could just say, “Fail” to everyone. Then they just ignore their appeals.

It would seem to me this loophole needs to be fixed. Best case is to just eliminate NICS and if states want background check for firearm purchases they can put “Firearm exclusions” on drivers licenses and state ID cards. And if it is impractical to eliminate NCIS the law should require the FBI/DOJ/whoever respond appropriately to the appeals within 10 days or else the denial is automatically overturned.

Sharing the wealth

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Being a software engineer for the last 30+ years means I have had opportunity to make a fair amount of money. I certainly didn’t do as well as I could have. I still regret declining the request for a job interview with Microsoft in 1985 but I’ve managed to do okay and with a little bit of income from Boomershoot I manage to adequately feed my gun, ammo, training, and explosives appetites. Currently I have a job I really like, I feel secure in (the last place I worked at just laid everyone off and is closing the Seattle office any day now), and am paid a comfortable amount. So for Christmas this year I decided I would share some of the wealth.

So it came to pass that it was with great pleasure I gave my three children, Barb, Barb’s two children, and Ry each fifty trillion dollars. Powerball winners have nothing to brag about when I get in a giving mood!

It was with great anticipation that I saw Barb select my present to her to open first:

FiftyTrillionDollars

But the first thing she said after looking at it was, “What am I going to do with this?”

Uh-oh! I didn’t have a good answer. I thought about, “Don’t spend it all in one place.” But decided that might not be wise in that context and told her there were other presents from me, maybe she would like one of them better.

Her children on the other hand thought they were awesome gifts and said they were going to take them to college and put them on their dorm room walls.

I was a little worried about my kids. What would they think? But they studied their gifts thoughtfully, considered their new status as multi-trillionaires and drew the appropriate conclusions about the hazards of hyperinflation, paper money, etc. Ry, of course, got it immediately and we drifted into a conversation about the worldwide economy, Europe, etc.

I don’t want you to think I gave away all my money last Christmas. I saved some for myself:

OneHundredTrillionDollars

Yes. I kept 100 trillion back for myself and a “rainy day”.

Quote of the day—Rana Florida

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As citizens, we must all take a stand. March, protest, Facebook, Tweet, write your congressman, senators and legislators urging them to ban guns.

Rana Florida
December 15, 2012
Shame on Us, America: Take a Stand and #BanGuns Now
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]