To be more specific, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Gordon Jenkins, a New York, Democratic Mayor, was arrested on bribery charges. Not just ““bribe receiving” but also “endangering the public health” and “intimidating a witness in connection with an incident in Fallsburg.”
A fine, upstanding bunch of folks those gun controllers mayor Bloomberg hangs with are.
Whenever these gun-toting knuckleheads see the Target logo, they get all moist in the loins and have an uncontrollable desire to whip out their weaponry for all the world to see.
labman57
July 2, 2014
Comment to Big Win For Gun Control Groups: Target Bans Guns In Its Stores
[Emphasis in the original.
It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!–Joe]
I saw this on the bumper of the car my daughter drives:
We were horrified, and rightly so, at Adolf Hitler’s solution to the problem. But we haven’t got a solution to the problem either.
Doug Huffman
August 16, 2014
[No. No any sort of mythical “Jewish problem.” The problem Doug was talking about was what to do with those people that are “unfit” to support themselves because they are too stupid, crazy, or lazy. In our society we are on track for an Idiocracy type “solution”.
Doug and I talked late into the night on this and other somewhat related topics.
The problem as I see it is that our ethics are appropriate for a tribe but they don’t scale to a population of a million people let along a population of 300+ million. When we see someone, children in particular, hungry or in need of care we help them even if they will never be able (or choose) to support themselves.
In a tribe of a 100 to 200 people everyone know everyone else and the peer pressure significantly reduces the freeloader problem. As soon as there is anonymity freeloaders become an essentially unsolvable problem. And with large numbers of people combined with a society in possession of advanced technology in the essentials of life it now becomes possible to support those that cannot support themselves as well as those who chose not support themselves.
And with that support of those who cannot and choose not to support themselves we end up, literally, breeding more of them. We are scared, perhaps even justifiably horrified, of the risks of the government assuming the power to mandate some people not be allowed to reproduce or to raise their children the way they see fit.
I see horrific outcomes in either of the two “solutions”.
There is at least one other potential solution. It is, as I see it, the least unpleasant of the available alternatives and as you might expect, the least likely path for our society to take.
That potential solution is for our Federal government to stay within it Constitutional bounds. If the individual states or counties or cities wanted to experiment with government welfare or “free healthcare” then those experiments could have run their course over the last 200+ years.
What I expect would have happened is with enough of these type of experiments being run that people would realize there are some people that we just have to let “nature take its course” with. We would have a lot fewer freeloaders. We would have a constant, but small, set of tragic cases of people that could not support themselves and could not convince family and/or friends to support them.
There would be heart wrenching cases and people would organize charities (Shriners, Elks Club, Eagles Club, Salvation Army, etc.). to help those for whom help was appropriate. The decision to help or “let nature take its course” would be done in more of a “tribe environment” for which our ethics were “designed” for.
I don’t see how our society can get from where we are now to the “least bad of the available options” without a lot of pain, suffering, and death. It’s like trying to solve a global optimization problem when the slopes of the sides of current local optimum are steep and high.
Nature is “going to take it’s course” with us. All of us. I’m certain many, perhaps even a large percentage of, people will survive the big “challenges” ahead. But I cannot predict if those challenges will send our descendants to the stone ages or to a Star Trek universe. But one way or another this ethical problem will “resolve” itself if we don’t resolve it.
Nature is testing it’s own “solutions” right now. Ebola, economic instability, and even the immigration issue are in beta test now. They may not be released soon or even ever if people do the right thing. But if we don’t then full production of something awful is coming soon.—Joe]
News from Ferguson, shopkeepers exercising their 2nd amendment rights. Who knew such things were possible? Well aside from anyone that actually pays attention…
I like the shirt one guy is wearing.
The report begins with the fairly innocuous idea of to removing “loopholes” where they exist between states and the federal government regarding information on the mentally ill. But after that, the focus turns to confiscation…
Five ideas, four of which deal with gun confiscation or gun bans. Is this really the “rational middle ground”?
AWR Hawkins
August 16, 2014
Report: Giffords, Kelly’s Gun Control Group Now Pushing Temporary Gun Confiscation
[As usual, they keep trying to push us down a slippery slope.—Joe]
Don’t tell people who want to ban high capacity guns about knives. You never have to reload them!
Media Matters and their leftist allies view this trend towards gun ownership in demographics that they once “owned” as a “gateway drug” towards classical liberalism, libertarian beliefs, or conservatism. They are fearful that if young liberals start following their peers into social shooting events at the new “guntry clubs” popping up around the nation, then the political shift towards anti-gun Marxism and socialism will not only be arrested, but reversed.
They know that firearm ownership is a gateway towards thinking as an individual and thinking more about individual rights, and this terrifies the anti-gun, collectivist left.
For them, fighting against the “new NRA” is more than fighting against gun ownership. It’s a fight for the very survival of a belief system that is starting to collapse under its own ponderous weight.
Bob Owens
August 6, 2014
Why the “New NRA” Terrifies the Political Left
[H/T to Sebastian.
While I believe it is true that gun ownership is a “gateway drug” toward classical liberalism I’m not sure the collectivist left is able to articulate their hatred that succinctly. I think it is more like, “Must hate because GUNS!”—Joe]
I came across an interesting article at the Blaze about a conversation with a former gang member. It was from an excerpt from the book “The Future of the Gun.” It looked at guns as symbols, specifically symbols of power in inner cities neighborhoods, and how the youngsters saw people in light of the laws, guns, and power/strength, in a way that makes a lot of sense, but a perspective articulated in a way I’d never heard before.
Let me show you what’s going on here: Over there you see some stores that are open — there are shop owners there. They should be the pillars of this society. They should be the leaders…everyone should look up to them. But they don’t. They’ve been neutered, their guns have been taken away. They have to call 911, and hope [someone comes to rescue them] if something happens. So they’re victims waiting to happen.
Conversely:
Now look around more: There’s a cop. Unfortunately, too often the youth…they don’t look up to police officers, and there’s all sorts of deep reasons for that…Now look around more, what else do you see? What you see are…gang leaders.
The end result in this former gang member’s view is that for the young kid:
he looks around the neighborhood, and he looks for the power…He looks to the gang member who has a gun tucked away in his shorts. He’s the power in that neighborhood. Whereas the average person who has been disarmed, the average store owner who has been disarmed are neutered, they don’t.
He’s right. People, especially young men, want power, to feel empowered. Welfare laws what they are, there are few good fathers to be role models in a lot of inner city “families.” Boys and young men look for “strong” men to emulate, and they see gang-bangers above shop-keepers in the social hierarchy. The anti-gun laws have created the inner city gang problem, and here is the underlying mechanism. Gun laws are not only unconstitutional, they are anti-human, they are anti-black, anti-business, anti-woman, and anti-equality. As people are wont to say, “read the whole thing.” It’s not long.
H/T to Barron on Facebook.
Please note that this was as of February 14, 2013. That was nearly 18 months ago.
Missouri Democrats introduced an anti-gun bill which would turn law-abiding firearm owners into criminals. They will have 90 days to turn in their guns if the legislation is passed.
Dana Loesch Radio reported on the new legislation being pushed by Missouri Democrats:
Any person who, prior to the effective date of this law, was legally in possession of an assault weapon or large capacity magazine shall have ninety days from such effective date to do any of the following without being subject to prosecution.
Here’s part of the Democratic proposal in Missouri:
4. Any person who, prior to the effective date of this law, was legally in possession of an assault weapon or large capacity magazine shall have ninety days from such effective date to do any of the following without being subject to prosecution:
…
UPDATE: It’s not just Missouri…
Minnesota Democrats Introduce Law to Confiscate Guns… Using Same Language as Missouri Democrats
Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.
The picture below is from a computer backup I was doing over the network.
This was with the existing file on the target drive being overwritten. For new files the transfer rate is nearly constant and a little above the peak shown here.
I suspect the algorithm used by either the driver or the controller for the hard disk for update an existing file results in a large number of seeks of the head. The file copy program (Robocopy in this case) could work around the problem by deleting existing files before doing the copy. But the designers of the program may not have been aware of the problem with this particular hard drive.
In my situation I don’t care a lot because it can just run as a background task and it doesn’t much matter if it takes 10 minutes or 300 minutes (yes, the transfer rate is over 30x slower). But for some people it might.
As always, thoroughly testing your products, processes, and assumptions is important and either this one wasn’t fully tested or management marked the bug as “Won’t Fix” and shipped it anyway.
Having presided over numerous Boomerite failures I know how easy it is to say, “This change shouldn’t matter” or “This has to make it better, no need to test it.” There is a reason many companies have a test team that is independent of the development team and may even have a reporting chain independent of engineering.
This, almost, paranoia about testing can be generalized to a lot of things in your life. Have you ever changed a tire on your current vehicle? I bought a used vehicles a few years ago and discovered a day or so after I bought it that it didn’t have a jack in it.
You have a gun to defend your home and loved ones? Have you ever pied the corners of your home with that shotgun? Have you looked at possible choke points for stopping a home invasion? How about looked at what happens to misses or shoot-throughs from likely shooting positions? How do those speed reloads you practice for USPA matches work out for you when you are at the top of the stairs in your birthday suit?
Progressives want the government to have more power to implement “social justice”. Ask the tens of millions of people that went into the Gulags of the USSR how that worked out for them. Oh, that’s right, most of them that weren’t shot after their forced confessions were worked and starved to death. We don’t need to run that test again. 100+ million people have already been killed during the testing done by various progressives regimes in the 20th century.
Anti-gun people want to register guns. Ask Canada how that worked out for them.
Does your bug-out kit included canned goods but you forgot to include a can opener?
You’ll discover many such things when you test.
If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.
David Dunning
June 20, 2010
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)
[H/T to Linoge who got me started on the Wiki-wander that led here.
I found it fascinating that there have been similar astute observations on the same topic throughout history.
This is exactly what happens with many of the anti-gun people we encounter. They cannot even comprehend how disparate in competence they are when they engage us on the topic. They are frequently profoundly clueless, don’t know it, and cannot be told how clueless they are.
It find it interesting that another aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that those who are highly competent tend to underestimate their skill level. Perhaps the following Twitter exchange demonstrates that:
@apple_butter NOBODY WANTS YOUR DAMN GUN! Understand now?@TANSTAAFL24@KentAtwater4@wallsofthecity@psherm07
@djmincey11 You must have your head in the sand: https://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-to-take-your-guns/ …@apple_butter@TANSTAAFL24@KentAtwater4@wallsofthecity@psherm07
@JoeHuffman I don’t care to read your “opinion” piece.@apple_butter@TANSTAAFL24@KentAtwater4@wallsofthecity@psherm07
@djmincey11 Factual examples are not opinions. Are you allergic to facts?@apple_butter@TANSTAAFL24@KentAtwater4@wallsofthecity@psherm07I know the difference between fact & speculation. Cognitive powers aren’t magic. I’ll give you a minute to Google the big words
@JoeHuffman
@djmincey11 For years I had the job title of Senior Research Scientist II. I know this topic well and I know you don’t.@wallsofthecityFor years I held the title of Executive Director, Reigional Director, CEO and Vice President/Owner. Now what?
@JoeHuffman
@djmincey11 I suggest you learn some science and educate yourself on the topic at hand.@wallsofthecityI suggest you KNOW your opponent BEFORE you run into battle.
@JoeHuffman@wallsofthecity
@djmincey11 I find it odd that you don’t follow your own advice. Is hypocrisy one of your greatest strengths?@wallsofthecityAre we finished yet? I am bored with this sniping.
@JoeHuffman@wallsofthecity
@djmincey11 Only if you stop tweeting nonsense about guns, gun owners, and the enumerated right to keep and bear arms.@wallsofthecityAnd FYI… I will NEVER stop tweeting facts because it hurts your feewings. *here’s a hanky*
@JoeHuffman@wallsofthecity
I dropped it there because she was going off the deep end into irrationality at that point. At no point did my feelings come up in the conversation or was I even aware of having any particularly strong feelings on the matter. And she was particularly lacking in facts.
But the point I wanted to make was that I didn’t think I was being particularly effective. Perhaps just a little bit more than holding my own.
So imagine my surprise to the following tweets in response to the exchange:
Your afternoon’s entertainment:
#gunsense useful idiot@djmincey11 is trying to have a battle of wits with@JoeHuffman. She came unarmed.
towerclimber37
@towerclimber37 53m@wallsofthecity
@djmincey11@JoeHuffman hahahahah she got owned.
Blackstone
@bitterclingerpa 36m
@towerclimber37@wallsofthecity@djmincey11@JoeHuffman Owned? Broken, sold, used, traded & then sold again. Science vs a SuitEpic.
Interesting. Very interesting.—Joe]
It’s a jungle, the consciousness of an orthodox Communist. It’s impossible-to make sense of it.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956. Page 347.
[And so it is with the progressives of today. They try to use a different name but they have the same crap for brains.—Joe]
Mr. Biden, two sides can play that game.
We are all very aware of your position on how to deal with the criminal use of guns. Does that mean politicians friendly to us should be able to pass or repeal laws or regulations without input from you and your ilk?
And if the cartoon was drawn from our perspective we would have you dancing with glee on the bodies and blood of children because of the increased opportunity to infringe upon our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. And that would be more accurate than how the NRA is portrayed in this cartoon.
Update: From the comments I discovered Miculek used a 400 yard zero for his revolver, not the 200 yard zero I hypothesized. I have updated the post accordingly.
The other day Say Uncle posted this video of Jerry Miculek shooting at a balloon from 1000 yards away with a 9mm revolver:
First off, as Rivrdog noted, he didn’t hit the balloon. He hit the steel and the splatter from the bullet fragments popped the balloon.
Second, I decided to run the numbers on those shots. Using Modern Ballistics, the bullet Miculek said he used, with a muzzle velocity of 1000 fps (Hornady factory ammo with a four inch barrel is 975 fps but I added some extra velocity because Miculek probably has a longer barrel and a custom load), with a standard deviation of 10 fps, a bullet delivering a five shot group size of 1 MOA under ideal conditions, a wind estimation error of 0.2 MPH, sea level, at 59F, and a 400 yard zero. We end up with the following results.
The bullet took 5.11 seconds to travel the 1000 yards. It reached a height of 110 feet at 583 yards from the shooter. It arrived at a velocity of 377 fps.
This first graph shows the height in inches from the point of aim. At the target the bullet is hitting over 2900 inches low. That is over 240 feet below the point of aim!
In this graph the rate of descent at the 1000 yard mark is shown. That is nearly 11 inches of additional drop for each yard of travel.
Here we have the odds of getting a hit if the shooter knew the exact ballistics and compensates perfectly for every shot. The random variation of the muzzle velocity, wind variation (Gaussian distribution with a standard deviation of 0.2 MPH), and inherent variations in the bullet contribute enough error that only about a third of the bullets would hit a target 30 inches wide and 50 inches tall.
The image below is what the shooter would see with a red-dot sight shooting a tracer bullet with the same drag. I added some wind to make the perspective a little better. At 1.6 yards the bullet crosses the near zero and you can see the red-dot of the sight just before the track of the tracer starts. The tracer ignites at 2 yards. Everything is to scale so change the size of the image such that the base of the 9mm bullet looks the same in the image as a 9mm bullet would at 1.6 yards and you can see what the 30 x 50 inch target would look like at 1000 yards.
Jerry is at the peak of human shooting ability but he had some serious luck on that shot.
your all insane and don’t need to own a gun. #gunsense
kim launius @kimmie8264
Tweeted on August 10, 2014
[As Linoge Tweeted in response, “It’s spelled “you’re”, and you don’t get to decide that. #gunsense #fail“.
This woman is a real gem. Here is the picture she uses for her Twitter profile:
And here is definitive proof she has crap for brains:
I case you have forgotten LBJ was a Democrat.
Don’t let anyone ever get away with telling you no one wants to take your guns.
And what is it with progressives and political violence? It must be because it’s the best chance they have for success. In the choice between brain and brawn they certainly do come up short on the brain side.—Joe]
Joe Huffman 
Linoge
@tazcat2011 Obviously, I better buy a surrogate penis in the guise of a firearm and walk through Home Depot and Target.
— Trysha (@MapleysMorsels)
July 2, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via Mark (@tazcat2011).—Joe]
The situation with Ebola appears to be far short of the conditions such that retreating to your remote hidden bunker are warranted. Ebola is currently only transmitted by direct contact with infected body fluids. This makes it fairly easy to contain if you have good hygiene procedures when dealing with infected people. Currently what makes it so scary is its 60 to 90 percent fatality rate that runs it’s course in a few days.
The U.S. is probably more vigilant about the disease being brought into the country that you might think it is. A little over a month ago some friends of ours came back from East Africa where there hadn’t been any known cases. Their teenaged son got sick on the plane. Vomiting, fever, etc. The entire plane was quarantined for a couple hours. No one but the kid and mom were allowed off the plane until he went on an ambulance ride and was thoroughly checked out at a hospital. It didn’t turn out to be anything contagious and all is well but it should give you a clue as to how serious the potential for infectious diseases being brought into the country are being treated.
The big concern I have for Ebola is the potential for mutation into something airborne. The more people that currently have it the greater opportunity for such a mutation. If such a mutation does occur then it could be an end of times scenario. Does your deep woods bunker have the resources to keep you and yours alive for several months while 50% or more of the of the worlds population dies off? Probably not. I certainly don’t have anything like that available to me. And when you come out of hiding what is the world going to be like? It will be a much different place and as bad as I see our current situation I don’t see such a scenario being any better.
This potential, aside from the humanitarian aspect, is reason enough for people not directly affected to assist in containing the epidemic.
Update: I should know better than to trust “the most transparent administration in history”. The CDC says something completely different from the Public Health Agency of Canada:
In the laboratory, infection through small-particle aerosols has been demonstrated in primates, and airborne spread among humans is strongly suspected, although it has not yet been conclusively demonstrated.
H/T to Rolf in the comments who gave me a link that lead to the quote above. He has other links to the studies concluding air transmission does occur in primates.
Via Mitchel M. on the gun email list at work:
The interesting part starts at 1:46.
This may mean that the new “tracers” could be safely used when the fire risk from normal tracers is too great. I’m a skeptical they can match the brightness of the pyrotechnic based tracers. But they probably would work for many applications.
And of course there are application where incendiary rounds will be needed when tracers might have worked.
It’s strictly prohibited and we are not in the habit of making exceptions. But we certainly do everything we possibly can to make all our students feel safe. We feel that it is a top priority.
Justin Anderson
Spokesman for Dartmouth college
Gun Control Rule At Dartmouth College Denies Taylor Woolrich Protection From Stalker With ‘Rape Kit’
[I think I see the problem here. Dartmouth only cares about feelings. They care about the feelings of their students and they feel about making those feelings “a top priority”. They don’t have respect for the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. They ignore the reality that their feelings do nothing to protect her from the reality of a confirmed stalker intent on raping her. They ignore the reality that her carrying a defensive tool might help her as well as make her feel safer.
There was a time when people that disconnected from reality were put in mental institutions. That probably isn’t a legal option in this case but you would think they could be prosecuted for conspiracy to deny her rights.—Joe]