the way I think is let people keep their hunting rifles….there is a need for them (I don’t think there is personally) but make it illegal to own hand guns whose only purpose is to kill people. the military can keep what they want….I hate guns of any kind
lzatlanta73
July 25, 2015
Comment to Ted Nugent, Allen West call gun control questions ‘inappropriate’ in Lafayette
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
Gun control wouldn’t even work in a utopia… and I don’t know of any utopias that exist.
Primal Zen
June 30, 2015
Comment to Survey: Majority of Americans Not Interested in Gun Control for 2016
[Well… if your utopia is a place where there are no animals capable of making tools I suppose you could say it works. But only because all the tool making animals are extinct rather than you banned firearms.
Strangely enough there are people who think this is a good idea.—Joe]
I was reloaded some ammo for the match tomorrow and found this round was a little tight in the case gauge:
I think it is time to retire that piece of brass. That’s some really “bad luck” about to happen.
In essence, liberal thinking is immature thinking believing that what sounds good is good regardless of results. This is what becomes their “Law of Unexpected Consequences,” which is only unexpected to them and not to those who think things through. It is the foundation of their argument that the results of their policies are not what is to be judged, but only their good intentions. Unfortunately, the Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions.
Dustin Koellhoffer
2015
Liberals Backwards Think
[It goes further than this. It’s not just that good intentions are good enough to them. Many of them are incapable of rational thought.—Joe]
My anti-gun-rights friends — you don’t seem to understand that crimes and atrocities committed by madmen are not valid grounds for infringing on the public’s right to arms — a fundamental freedom. This is why you meet the constant resistance that befuddles and frustrates you.
…
This is why you meet all the indignant furor and nothing gets done. This is why, from the man currently in the White House to the woman who wants that seat and those who support their anti-rights position, you’re looked down upon. This is why, when you’re literally dancing in the blood of helpless innocent victims, cut down in their prime, you are scorned.
From that insensitive immoral place you come after me and my fellow decent upstanding Americans, with a self-righteous, but more importantly dangerous intention of disarming everyone who didn’t do anything. You don’t need gun control, you need help.
Alan Korwin
July 15, 2015
Church Psychopaths As Law Givers
[Of course Tam said it more succinctly and without trying to be nice to people that aren’t nice to us..—Joe]
I’ve had a couple threesomes in my life. And I was like, Okay, let’s try more. One time I did have four girls and just myself, and that was absolutely too much. I was totally out of my league. It was just not that fun. It was a nightmare, actually. It was too much going on. You’re doing, like, a puppet show. You’re trying to take care of too many girls at once and there’s one of you.
Brody Jenner
July 20, 2015
Brody Jenner Explains Why Fivesomes Are ‘a Nightmare’
[As if you needed to try it to figure that out. Guys tend to greatly overestimate their sexual capacity.
This is one area where women overshadow men by an order of magnitude or more (see the last quote in that post). I sometimes wonder if this is part of the reason why many cultures repress female sexuality. Could it be men are envious of women and would rather repress women than suffer the envy?—Joe]
Frequently the media throws around words in a hushed tone about the things they are reporting as thought they were impressive. “Arsenal” is one of those words that normally draws an eye-roll from any sort of serious gunny, along with a derisive comment about it being less than they took to the range last week.
In LA police are reporting that a home they investigated after they found the owners decomposing body had 1200 guns and a couple of tons of ammo.
OK, I’ll allow that that’s a modestly impressive collection that could reasonably be called an arsenal.
I participated in a USPSA match on Sunday. It was the largest local match I have ever participated in. Originally they told us 97 people were attending but the results only show 92 so maybe some people left without shooting. That would be entirely understandable. It was a hot day for the Seattle area. It was 97 F when I left. The sweat was dripping off of me most of the time and I consumed two liters of water without once using the bathroom. Including my travel and registration time I spent 10 hours participating. It’s a good thing it was fun.
Marysville Rifle Club has stages that are more complex and challenging than those I have found at any other club. Don’t fool yourself into even thinking for even a millisecond these are anything like real life scenarios. They are problems to be solved using gun skills and your ability to move. It’s a game and this match demonstrated it better than any other match I have attended.
Here is an example:
Where, in real life, might you find something that looks like this?
Other stages were difficult because there were targets which were hard to find even when you weren’t on the clock. I, as well as many others, overlooked one target because of this and got a lot of penalties for it.
One stage required us to run about 60 feet then shoot a bunch of targets. I ran, shot targets, started to move to the next set of targets and reached for one of my four spare magazines on my belt. Three of them were gone. My stopping at the first set of targets caused the magazines to fall out of their holsters. This was a 30 round stage and I had just dropped one of my two remaining magazines that still had ammo in it. I had planned to do another reload when I moved between target arrays again. The magazine that remained was my one special magazine. It has a special follower that allows it to hold 19 rounds of .40 S&W. Along with the “super powers” the follower has a flaw. It doesn’t lock back the slide when the gun is empty. For this reason I don’t normally use it but it gave me 20 rounds in the gun and I decided to continue on without going back to look for the missing magazines or pick up the one I just dropped from the gun. I finished the stage with one round to spare.
An unusual thing did happened on a couple stages which can be blamed on the polymer coated lead bullets. They produce a lot of smoke. When shooting targets in deep shadows while the gun is in the bright sunlight the targets would sometimes nearly disappear in the smoke after a couple shots. The smoke reflected the sunlight creating a bright cloud between me and the targets.
As interesting as the previous stages were they weren’t the “best” one. Check this one out:
See the Texas Star on the right? Here is someone shooting one the conventional way:
In our case we had two Texas Stars. One on each side of the barricade. We also started the stage over 100 feet away and had to shoot 11 other targets on the way to the barricade.
It turns out that barricade has a special name. It’s called a Rhodesian Wall. The 1996 January/February issue of Front Sight, the USPSA magazine, had this to say about Rhodesian Walls:
With a Rhodesian Wall, which is not commonly used any more, the shooting position is a raised box behind a wall with a stout rope hanging down the middle. The problem is that the wall is so wide that you can’t shoot around it except by holding onto the rope with one hand, leaning around the edge and shooting one-handed while keeping the feet on the box.
Here is one of the participants in Sunday’s match practicing on the wall:
Yes. You had to shoot small moving targets one handed, around both sides of a barricade, while dangling from a rope, after running over 100 feet.
I have never seen such a difficult stage before. Many people in our squad ran out of ammo before hitting all the plates on the Texas Stars. One guy left three plates on one star and hadn’t even shot at the other one. With misses like that you end up getting a zero on the stage. There were stage times approaching 200 seconds. And I saw one guy get disqualified for breaking the 180 on this stage.
Fortunately last Thursday I went to the range and practiced my one handed shooting. I did well on this stage completing it in 42.12 seconds (an average of 1.316 seconds per shot) with no misses. I had good hits on the paper and got 154 points. The Grandmaster shooters in Limited came in with times of 32.80, 36.83, and 39.48 seconds with points in the range of 150 to 152. This put me at 7th out of 33 in Limited Division and 13th out of 92 overall.
That was my high point of the match. I also did decent on the classifier for a change. I might actually get my classification back up into the B range with that stage.
The worst stage was where I overlooked the target and had a miss on another target racking up 40 points in penalties.
I had misses on other stages as well. It was very common with even Master and Grandmaster shooters having misses.
Overall I was pleased with the results. My gun ran perfectly. But the fiber optic front sight insert did disappear sometime along the way, I think it might have been on the Rhodesian Wall stage. It is very fragile and I had to shoot through a port there (as well as several other stages) and it is easy to bump it on the edges of the port. But the irons were still fine and I didn’t really miss it.
Overall, across all divisions, I came in at 40th out of 92. In Limited I came in at 13th out of 33. In B class, I came in 2nd.
Here the blog post of Loke Tan who was at the match and came in 3rd overall. He also made a video of him shooting each of the stages:
The Brady bill will make the streets of America so safe that our nation’s police will not even need to carry guns anymore.
William Jefferson Clinton
On TV, while signing the Brady bill in 1993.
Quoted in Sheriff Richard Mack’s book, The Magic of Gun Control.
[Of course everyone knows now that President Clinton is a pathological liar and surely many people, including some of the supporters of the law, knew this was a lie at the time. What many probably didn’t know was that he even the chief advocates for the law who made far more modest claims about the law have a cultural and long history of lies.
But still there are people that believe the near equivalent of this even though just a little bit of rational thought will yield the conclusion that background checks cannot possible do any net good. People have a strong propensity to believe what they want to believe. And don’t get me started on the prior restraint of a specific enumerated right.
See also Robb Allen’s post on the Clinton quote from a couple of years ago.—Joe
Update: This quote may be one of those too good to be true things. Here is the signing speech.]
Small penis huh? My goodness, an action-movie badass wannabe like yourself looks SO intimidating with that big gun…
Michele Washam
July 14, 2015
Comment to Judge Orders Anti-Obama Filmmaker D’Souza Receive Psychological Counseling
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
These changes are a test of reason. If you can reason, you fail. If you can Doublethink, you pass.
Daniel Greenfield
June 30, 2015
No Truce With The Left
[Reason. I think of it as a test of someone trustworthiness. If they are unwilling or unable to reason I am uncomfortable being around them. I literally don’t have any idea what they might do or say next. Will they claim I attacked them when all I did was smile and say hello? Will they hit me in the head with a rock? I would rather be in the presence of a sociopath because I can model their behavior as looking out for their best interests and make it clear to them it would be irrational for them to cause me harm and in fact it would be in their best interests to have me as their ally.
But the irrational, non-reasoning, person is extremely dangerous. There is no loyalty. There is no mutual benefits. There is only unpredictability. There is only the prospect of chaos, suffering, and death.
Marxism, communism, socialism, whatever variety of leftism and you want to call it, has such a long proven history of poverty and death that only irrational people can support it. Venezuela is only of the most recent examples that went from an “economy was the strongest in South America” in the 1950s to the early 1980s to the massive shortages, unemployment, thriving black market, and the highest misery index score in 2013.
The USSR, mainland China, and many other countries learned their lesson the hard way with massive shortages, mind boggling corruption, and 10s of millions murdered by their own governments. Numerous experiments in the 20th century, on national scales, prove beyond any doubt the benefits of freedom and the hazards of adapting the ways of the leftists. How can anyone ignore the lessons of East versus West Germany? Or North Korea versus South Korea? China versus Hong Kong?
Freedom and capitalism has brought prosperity, and unbelievable technological advancement which benefits the entire world. Yet the political left continue to insist their way is “progress”. These are not rational people. They cannot be trusted. These people are incapable of rational thought and/or are evil. The correct diagnosis does not matter. Greenfield is right. There can be no truce with the left.—Joe]
It is very hot this weekend and Barb went looking for a hike that wasn’t too long and with very little elevation gain. Franklin Falls met our criteria.
It was crowded and it is easy to see why. The trail was mostly wide and smooth. The trail was shaded and while it was 90 F at home it was 72 F at the trail head. Only at the very end was it a little bit sketchy with a steep drop off on one side:
The actual falls were nice too:
The bridge you see in the upper left of the picture above is the west bound lanes of I-90 just west of Snoqualmie Pass. As Barb said, “I had no idea this was here.”
I tested out some different .40 S&W ammo the other day. Although I usually use my reloads I like to know which factory ammo can also be used. I seldom have reliability problems with centerfire ammo but accuracy is frequently a problem.
I was very pleased to discover that Federal RTP40180 (RTP => Range Target Practice) did well in my STI DVC Limited. The two groups below are offhand at 10 yards and 25 yards:
The groups are small enough I believe about half of the group size is due to user error. Compare this ammo to other ammo I have tested in the same gun here.
What I find odd is that I can’t find the ammo on Federal’s website although several websites have the ammo for sale at a good price.
If you have the right to slander the Messenger of Allah, we have the right to defend him. If it is part of your freedom of speech to defame Muhammad it is part of our religion to fight you.
…
Assassinations, bombings, and acts of arson are all legitimate forms of revenge against a system that relishes the sacrilege of Islam in the name of freedom.
Anwar al-Awlaki
From May Our Souls be Sacrificed for You in the July 11, 2010 issue of Inspire via Fanning the Flames of Jihad
[Someone doesn’t understand the concept of rights or freedom. Trying to explain them with ordinary words doesn’t seem to work very well. If someone attempts to exercise their “rights” in the manner suggested above I suggest you have bullets for back up of your words.—Joe]
Guns kill. The fork ate the cake. Same thinking.
Suzyqpie
July 16, 2015
Comment to Gun control activists call for probe of NRA’s political spending
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
I found the gun debate presented here close to fair. I wish they would have done some fact checking on the claims of the people/organizations they quote. But overall it is pretty good. It has a collection of facts that could be useful. For example:
The most-recently available total annual spending budgets for gun control groups were $13.7 million collectively (4.7% of the NRA’s 2013 budget): including Everytown for Gun Safety ($4.7 million in 2012); the Brady Campaign ($2.7 million in 2012); the Brady Center ($3.1 million in 2010); Coalition to Stop Gun Violence ($308,761 in 2011); Sandy Hook Promise ($2.2 million in 2013); and the Violence Policy Center ($750,311 in 2012).
It includes a decent history of gun laws and gun organizations.
It’s worth a read.
That’s why they’re afraid of it.
A fire extinguisher is made as a tool to be used by someone who can cope, to protect his property and protect those who cannot cope.
The university educated, the entertainers, and media personalities, leftists in general, tend to wear their inability to cope as a badge of honor.
We’ve all see it; the guy well into adulthood who cannot drive a car, for example, and is clearly proud of the fact. Driving is what servants do, for me– It is not something I do. He has his nose in the air when he informs you he doesn’t drive.
If you gave him the gift of jumper cables and a nice floor jack, he’d be offended and maybe even a little scared. If you required him to demonstrate a fire extinguisher on a network TV show? Same thing.
Only icky people can build things, fix things, cope with unexpected dangers, and use guns or fire extinguishers. Eeew!
The Special Little Snowflake, or as I call him, “Fragile Little Flower” gains his identity through his weaknesses. He has learned that his weakness is his power over other people.
Those of us who can cope are to blame for this situation, through our failure to correct and through our capitulation. The FLFs are in charge of much of society and culture as a result.
Someone recently brought up The Lord of the Flies to describe the world, and it fits quite nicely. When the adults fail in their responsibilities to encourage and guide the “children” into becoming capable and responsible adults themselves, then all hell will break loose. That describes world politics for the last 100 years quite well.
Anti-gun people attempt to fake rational thought. Here is another example:
In the wake of the July 1 attack in which illegal alien Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez allegedly used a stolen gun to shoot and kill Kathryn Steinle, San Francisco supervisor Mark Farrell is pushing a new gun control law that will require every gun and ammunition sale to be videotaped.
This law will increase the focus on law-abiding citizens who buy guns and ammo–as those are the kinds of transactions that will be videotaped–while completely ignoring the problem of illegal aliens in sanctuary cities using guns, acquired via theft or otherwise, to harm citizens.
To top it off the gun was one in the possession of a Federal agent.
This is crazy talk. But as crazy as this is the sad/disturbing/scary thing is that many people accept and approve of this sort of thing.
It’s as if when confronted with lemons, water, and sugar some politician attempts to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then a significant number of people want the government to force everyone to eat the sandwiches.
now we know exactly why Republicans hate gun control laws: it’s just tooooo haaaaaaaaaard!!!!!
bajacalla
July 15, 2015
Comment to Missing From New York’s Gun Control Law
[This is what they think of you.
In addition to reading comprehension apparently punctuation is too hard for this brainiac.—Joe]
The idea that guns provide protection appears to be quickly gaining currency among American blacks. In December, 54 percent of blacks polled by Pew said they believed guns were more likely to protect people than to put their safety at risk. That figure was up from 29 percent two years earlier. For whites, 62 percent said guns protect people, up from 54 percent in 2012.
Those are huge changes in a relatively short time.
It may seem odd to my readers that only about 60% of people think “guns protect people” (poor wording, but everyone should be able to extract the correct meaning from that). But if your only exposure to electricity was lighting bolts and electric chairs you might have a tough time believing someone extoling the virtues of electric lights, heat, and motors. That is essentially the case with people who have been living in “gun-free zones” for decades. The Heller and McDonald decisions, Shall Issue, and Constitutional Carry are having their effect in exposing the true nature of gun ownership. Or should I say exposing the true nature of the anti-gun people?