Quote of the day—David Dunning

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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:

 Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 7h

@apple_butter NOBODY WANTS YOUR DAMN GUN! Understand now? @TANSTAAFL24 @KentAtwater4 @wallsofthecity @psherm07

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 5h

@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

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 4h

@JoeHuffman I don’t care to read your “opinion” piece. @apple_butter @TANSTAAFL24 @KentAtwater4 @wallsofthecity @psherm07

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 3h

@djmincey11 Factual examples are not opinions. Are you allergic to facts? @apple_butter @TANSTAAFL24 @KentAtwater4 @wallsofthecity @psherm07

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 3h

I know the difference between fact & speculation. Cognitive powers aren’t magic. I’ll give you a minute to Google the big words @JoeHuffman

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 3h

@djmincey11 For years I had the job title of Senior Research Scientist II. I know this topic well and I know you don’t. @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 3h

For years I held the title of Executive Director, Reigional Director, CEO and Vice President/Owner. Now what? @JoeHuffman

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 2h

@djmincey11 I suggest you learn some science and educate yourself on the topic at hand. @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 2h

I suggest you KNOW your opponent BEFORE you run into battle. @JoeHuffman @wallsofthecity

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 2h

@djmincey11 I find it odd that you don’t follow your own advice. Is hypocrisy one of your greatest strengths? @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 2h

Are we finished yet? I am bored with this sniping. @JoeHuffman @wallsofthecity

Joe Huffman ‏@JoeHuffman 2h

@djmincey11 Only if you stop tweeting nonsense about guns, gun owners, and the enumerated right to keep and bear arms. @wallsofthecity

Lady Farmer ‏@djmincey11 2h

And 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:

Linoge ‏@wallsofthecity 2h

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 Suit

Epic.

Interesting. Very interesting.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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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]

Gun cartoon of the day

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GunViolenceMeeting

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.

1000 yard shot with 9mm

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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!

Drop10To1000

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.

Drop990To1010

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.

TargetView

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.

TracerView

Jerry is at the peak of human shooting ability but he had some serious luck on that shot.

Quote of the day—kim launius ‏@kimmie8264

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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:

KimLauniusTwitterProfile

And here is definitive proof she has crap for brains:

KimLauniusCrapForBrains

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]

Quote of the day—Trysha (@MapleysMorsels)

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[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via Mark‏ (@tazcat2011).—Joe]

End of times?

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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.

Replacement for tracers

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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.

Quote of the day—Justin Anderson

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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]

This won’t end well

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Sometimes a few pictures are worth more than thousands of words.

20130905_nixon1

20130905_nixon2

debtchartfw2

Quote of the day—Medicine4theDead

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The only crazy people here are the paranoid gun nuts who are nothing but a bunch of thugs trying to intimidate everyone with threats of violence because they are cowards.

Medicine4theDead
Comment to Bullets to the head: Why James Brady’s shooting led to gun control, but Gabby Giffords’s did not
[All the “gun nuts” I know just want to be left alone. The thugs are those that want to take guns from peaceable people.

As for cowards, I don’t see Medicine4theDead using his real name or offering to take point to take the guns from all those paranoid gun nuts. I wonder why that is.—Joe]

Summer Trip

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I grew up in Alaska, and still have most of my family there. Summer is a great time to go places with the kids, and visiting home is always an item high on the list. But, because Alaska Airlines normally has a defacto monopoly on flying into Juneau, it’s usually around $500 a ticket from Seattle. When Delta decided to give them some competition this summer, priced promptly got cut in half. The daughter has been there once before, when she was two, and the son only in utero. So, we went. Continue reading →

Quote of the day—American Academy of Pediatrics

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The AAP supports firearm regulation, including a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazine sales.

American Academy of Pediatrics
April 2014
State Advocacy FOCUS
[H/T to Miguel.

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

Keeping records of your exercise of rights

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Imagine you were in the printing business and the government required you to put serial numbers on every book you printed. Imagine the Bureau of Books (BoB) seized a book at a private residence and tried to trace how it got into the hands of someone who was forbidden by Federal law to own a book. They then found out book was recorded as being scrapped instead of lost or stolen.

This is what then happens:

Deirdre M. Daly, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, announced that ROBERT BRINKERHOFF, 54, of Old Lyme, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill in Bridgeport to one year of probation for violating federal firearms laws.  BRINKERHOFF worked as the general manager of Tri-Town Plastics, a federally-licensed firearms manufacturer located in Deep River.

According to court documents and statements made in court, Tri-Town Plastics (“Tri-Town”), which has since been bought by Smith and Wesson, had a contract with Smith and Wesson to manufacturer firearm frames at its Deep River facility.  In February 2012, after the Plainfield Police Department seized a Smith and Wesson 9 millimeter handgun from a residence, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) learned that Smith and Wesson had no record of the handgun ever having been manufactured.  According to Tri-Town’s records, the handgun had been scrapped back in March 2011.  At that time, ATF was preparing to conduct a routine inspection of Tri-Town to determine whether to renew their federal license to manufacture firearms.  Tri-Town had also been inspected in 2009 and been directed by ATF to address some record-keeping issues discovered during that inspection.  When two Tri-Town employees discovered that there were approximately 23 firearms missing from their inventory, rather than report them as missing, the employees falsely listed them as “scrapped” in Tri-Town’s acquisition and disposition records, so that ATF would not learn that they were missing and would renew Tri-Town’s license.

Soon after ATF contacted Tri-Town in February 2012 to ask about the Smith and Wesson handgun seized in Plainfield, one of the Tri-Town employees responsible for the fraudulent scrapping advised BRINKERHOFF of what had been done in March 2011.  At that point, BRINKERHOFF, who had not known about the March 2011 conduct, failed to report these missing firearms as lost or stolen.  In June 2012, BRINKERHOFF caused a theft/loss report to be filed with ATF that listed all of these firearms, but the report failed to advise ATF that all of the firearms had been falsely listed as scrapped back in March 2011.

On March 10, 2014, BRINKERHOFF pleaded guilty to one count of failing to file a theft/loss report and one count of making false statements in a theft/loss report, which are both misdemeanor offenses.

As part of his sentence, Judge Underhill prohibited BRINKERHOFF from engaging in a firearms-related business for a period of 90 days.

This ongoing investigation is being conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.  The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert M. Spector and Vanessa Richards.

The Second Amendment is just as important as the First Amendment. That this happened to a someone in the gun industry doesn’t make it any less repugnant.

Alan Korwin on James Brady

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The post on James Brady that I wish I had the knowledge and skill to write:

Attacks on the Civil Right to Arms to Continue Unabated

Criminal acts still cleverly used as leverage to disarm the innocent

Sarah, not Jim, the real force behind the anti-rights movement

by Alan Korwin

“There’s no way to tell if you’re on the Brady rights-denied list, (the “NICS Index”) and attempting to buy a firearm if you’re on the government list is a felony. Attempting to find out if you’re on the list is a crime.”

James Brady, the White House Press Secretary under President Ronald Reagan has died. He was 73. He is being credited with “stunning successes” in the “gun-control” efforts in America.

Brady had been shot in the head with a .22 caliber revolver during an assassination attempt on president Reagan in 1981, and was severely incapacitated by the injury. Confined to a wheel chair for the balance of his life, in constant pain and speaking only with extreme difficulty, his ambitious and attractive young wife Sarah was understandably horrified and reportedly turned bitter by the life-changing tragedy. Their world had turned upside down.

Continuing a long tradition of spinning gun-related news to fit a set of beliefs instead of conformance with the facts, the “news” media is portraying James Brady as the moving force behind what is now the Brady Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence, formerly the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, formerly the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence Allied with The Million Moms March, formerly the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, formerly Handgun Control, Inc., formerly the National Council to Ban Handguns.

…

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the day—James Binder

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Call or e-mail your Congress member and demand that he or she support a child’s right to a secure environment and vote for legislation that eliminates firearm possession.

James Binder
August 3, 2014
James Binder: Children, families safer in homes without guns
[H/T Thirdpower.

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

Quote of the day—Dan Gross

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There are few Americans in history who are as directly responsible for saving as many lives as Jim.

Dan Gross
President of the Brady Campaign
From Gun control man’s legacy James Brady, former press secretary under Reagan, dies
[I am willing to concede there are almost certainly some lives saved by the Brady Act. But what Gross and others refuse to recognize is that those lives saved come at the cost of other lives lost.

The chilling effect of getting your name put on government list prevents some people in high risk situations from getting the self-defense tools they need. Why be afraid of being put on a government list? Most governments are hostile to gun owners and treat them with great suspicion and sometimes murder them without cause. If you were gay would you register as a gay with the government? Or would you willingly put you name on a list of Jews, Muslims, or couples in mixed race marriages? You might think it would be okay at a particular place and time but in the big picture things can change quite rapidly and lists which were “promised” to be held in strict confidence end up getting into the worst of hands.

There were people murdered during the waiting period, required during the first few years of the Brady Act, before they could possess the gun they so desperately needed. Did Gross include them in his calculations? Did Gross do any calculations at all? My guess is that his only metric was the number of sales blocked. This was regardless of how many of those sales blocked represented a death due to someone who was unable to get a gun to defend themselves with. He didn’t bother to research the question at all, let alone do the subtraction in the expression “Lives Saved” minus “Lives Lost”.

Even after a dozen years to collect and study data criminologist still can’t find conclusive evidence the Brady Act, on the whole, saved any lives.

No. Gross doesn’t really care about the truth. Gross is simply continuing the long history of a culture of deception within the Brady Campaign. They have to. It’s all they have.—Joe]

If it’s not true it should be

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Dan here at UltiMAK told me recently that the word “understand” comes from building, or dwelling construction, long ago. If you were going to add a floor atop an existing structure, you would need to “understand” the structure so as to prevent catastrophic failure (that is to say; support with additional stands underneath). If your building collapsed, you failed to “understand”.

That would make our current usage another of the many euphemisms that we no longer know to be euphemisms (at least I never knew – maybe you all heard it before, or maybe it’s not true). It would also add a layer of perception to the word. If you fail to “understand” you failed to acquire, or to take the time to construct, the requisite foundation and lower level structure to support what you just saw or heard, and so it collapses in on you.

Random thought of the day

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Peaceful gun owners should no more be punished for the acts of violent criminals than should present day progressives be punished for the acts of those that ran the gulags in the USSR. People who do not abuse theirs rights shall not have their rights infringed. That is the system of government we have.

Progressives advocate for collective rights and punishments. They should be careful what they ask for. Should they get their way they might not be happy paying the price for the tens of millions murdered in the pursuit of “progress” by their political brethren.

Quote of the day—Susan Danzig (@SusanDanzig219)

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I f’n hate guns. Unlike the Prez, I would take away everyone’s.

Susan Danzig (@SusanDanzig219)
Tweeted on August 4, 2014.
[H/T to @BigFatDave.

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