We used to say that anyone who knows a little bit of metal shop can build a gun in their garage. Well, it’s easier than that. Here is the lower of an evil “assault weapon” made out of a pine 2×8.
Or maybe it isn’t evil if it is made out of wood and has a natural color finish instead of being black plastic. I never could figure out the rules for good versus evil guns.
I have my vacation budget allocated up through Boomershoot this year or I would be on my way to Olympia Washington today to testify against the “universal background check” initiative. Gabrielle Giffords is coming in from Arizona to testify in favor of it. And almost for certain she will imply the initiative would have prevented the shooting in which she was a victim. This is rather odd because the guy that shot her passed a background check. She knows she can only make progress on her agenda if she is deceptive.
Barron Barnett and Anette Wachter say they are going.
Despite what KING5 says it is TODAY that we need your testimony. Here is where you go and what you do. It’s not hard. Even an introvert like me has successfully done it.
Be civil and succinct. Think “sound bite” instead of “essay”. Don’t repeat what others before you have said.
If you want some ideas on what to say read my Crazy Talk post. Or more succulently say something like this:
“Universal background checks” is crazy talk. They cannot be any more useful than bans on recreational drugs or underage drinking and smoking which are bypassed by any high school dropout in minutes.
The only thing the proposed legislation will be useful for is harassing people exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It will cast a chilling effect on this right and, if it were any other right being regulated in this manner, will be declared unconstitutional.
I am adamantly opposed to the proposal.
Until now, the gun lobby’s political contributions, advertising and lobbying have dwarfed spending from anti-gun violence groups. No longer. With Americans for Responsible Solutions engaging millions of people about ways to reduce gun violence and funding political activity nationwide, legislators will no longer have reason to fear the gun lobby.
Gabrielle Giffords
January 8, 2013
Giffords and Kelly: Fighting gun violence
H/T to Douglas Anthony Cooper for his post Now We Know Who’s Going to Take Down the NRA
[So… how did that “take down” work out for you guys?
I’ll bet after what happened in Colorado recently anti-gun legislators walk tall, proud, and confident, right?—Joe]
Now I feel dirty. Last week I was playing devil’s advocate with Joe, making the left’s arguments the best I could, seeing what he’d come up with in response. I think it’s important to have the ability to argue the points of the other side at least as well as those True Believers (useful idiots) that the power brokers rely on to maintain the rank and file. It is my thesis that once you can do a good job making the left’s case, you’ll have a better understanding of the fundamental differences in world views, and can then focus on those differences and bring them to light efficiently.
I wrote this last week, but hesitated to post it. Well here it is anyway;
Joe; Secondary or even tertiary point: Everyone can express an opinion. But until you express it in numbers which actually represent
the benefits and costs you haven’t proved anything beyond that you can string words together and form sentences.
Me; You want to limit the manner in which I may speak. People are not numbers, nor are they statistics. The starving people of the
world, the hopeless and the desperate, do not need statistics to know that they are hungry, and neither numbers nor your fake intellectual arguments for “freedom” will feed them.
Joe; Primary point: Government is force. At the most basic level it is the power to kill people that oppose it. Who granted and where
and when did government get this power to compel the whole of society to work for the “common good” instead of protecting the individual ability to make their own decisions and chart their own course in life?
Me; Yes; government is force, and you are as willing as anyone else to see that force used, so long as it is used to further your
ideals at the expense of other’s ideals.
Who granted, and where did you get the power to decide that people should NOT work for the common good, that they should instead be concerned only with themselves at the expense of everyone else, at the expense of the entire planet, and at the expense of everyone in the future? You are ignoring the grave and destructive consequences of that which you advocate.
Joe; It is immoral to force another to do their bidding for the good of another when their previous actions harmed no one. Your
“greater good” argument is nothing but a weak justification for slavery by another name. Advocates of such a society deserve all the scorn, revulsion, ostracizing, and political as well as physical resistance due any other slaver.
Me: You free-marketers use some form of this argument frequently, but is a false and blatantly hypocritical argument. First; who gave you and your cronies the exclusive power to define for everyone else what is and is not “moral”? It seems you are manipulating that definition to suit your own selfishness and convenience. You often use your “morality” as a weapon against people you wish to suppress, causing them harm.
You are perfectly willing to use force to protect your property and your comfortable way of life, even to the point of owning guns yourself and training to kill people, and yet you complain when government uses force, in a democratic republic which you claim to advocate and which is merely doing the will of the People? Could there BE a higher, more virulent form of hypocrisy? No, Sir; don’t tell me you’re against using force while you simultaneously brag about walking around with a loaded gun. “Disgraceful” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
An don’t speak to me about capitalism having “harmed no one”. The “free market system” (a disgusting term) of greed and opulence for the few is in fact, to put it in your own words, “forcing some to do the bidding of others” as people trapped in poverty are forced to work as wage-slaves for the people with the money and property. Further, when a more powerful corporation puts a smaller one out of business (because they never understand when enough is enough and they always want more more more) they have harmed that smaller business and everyone who depended on it for their sustenance. They’ve been put out onto the streets, and you claim “no harm”? The extent of your denial is fascinating, and very telling. Explain that to the family that’s in bankruptcy court because the parents lost their jobs due to “free market competition” from a Big Box store chain. Capitalism is constantly harming other people, and in many, many ways, and yet you blindly hold it up and cling to it as though it were the greatest thing ever.
Yet I can forgive you– You’ve been conditioned all your life to believe this gunk, and it’s extremely difficult to overcome one’s life-long programming without some kind of shock to initiate the process of waking up from one’s materialist fever. Well I have news for you. I’ll have the courage to say it if no one else will; you had better start waking up because your time is running out– You represent the past whereas We the Citizens of the World represent the future.
===========================================
I think that pretty well represents the mind of the useful idiot. I could go on and on of course, and adding more layers of complexity, more erroneous assertions and accusations, and appeals to envy, anger, victim mentality and other emotion is all part of the game, but that’s a good sample. Those at the top of the political power food chain benefit greatly from this kind of thinking and its proliferation, but they don’t believe any of it for a second. It’s a tool. A big part of the game lies in putting the freedom advocate off his game with endless accusations and insults, never allowing any issue to come to resolution. The crazier the assertions, sometimes, the better– Whatever it takes to hijack someone’s emotions thus throwing them off balance, while taking advantage of any self doubt or insecurity, with the oft used grand finale of putting the capitalist into a pathetic minority, opposed to a glorious and energetic majority. It works extremely well on young people of course, and so they have been a perennial target. We usually fall for it too. Republicans (the ones who may not actually be Progressives) fall for it practically 100% of the time.
Where we often fail is in forgetting that the ideal of freedom appeals to people’s strengths and potential, whereas the leftist tactics appeal to our weaknesses, our emotions of envy, insecurity, fear, anger and so on.
Therefore it’s an entirely different argument with an entirely different set of appeals, with virtually no overlap. What works for the Dark Side cannot, will not, work for human freedom.
What if some “news” organization or politician were to propose making lists of one or more of the following sets of people with home and work address, and making them publically available:
Suppose the people creating the list of Jews were neo-Nazi’s or Muslims.
Suppose the people creating the list of abortion doctors were abortion protestors.
Suppose the people creating the list of homosexuals were from Westboro Baptist Church.
Suppose the people creating the list of people in interracial marriages were members of the KKK.
Would you consider this covered under free speech? I probably would. I’d also consider them at least partially liable if the people on those lists were harmed by people utilizing the information on those lists. I think I could convince a majority of people that the intent of the list(s) was to intimidate and/or harm the people on the list(s).
Now imagine it was the government making such a list. Would you regard this a permissible use of the force of government?
So when a U.S. newspaper conglomerate considered making a public database of people with concealed carry licenses and says this about them:
We are launching two enterprise projects across our newsrooms this month. The first will deal with the creeping influence of heroin in our communities. The deadly drug has quietly taken over, reaching across all age groups and eclipsing meth as the recreational drug of choice,” Lawitz began.
“The second project examines the explosion of ‘conceal and carry’ gun permits across the U.S. Through public records act requests, we will attempt to build state-by-state databases that list those who have the right to carry a concealed weapon,”
What do you think their intent was?
What do you think the intent of a government is when it makes such lists?
I don’t know about you but my mind immediately goes to the story of the Belgium Corporal.
@youth4_america “A Hoot”?! You know, Comedy, along with everything else, has Progressed since the ’50’s. Big Gun=Small Manhood. #uniteblue
GEOFFREY(@jeffreynola)
Tweeted June 3, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via still another tweet from Linoge.—Joe]
Wood is easier to work with than metal. So why not make a homemade gun out of wood? Yes. It won’t last nearly as long and it will be susceptible to moisture if you don’t treat the wood correctly. But wood stocks have been used on guns for hundreds of years. People are making complete guns out of plastic. Why not make an AR-15 lower made out of wood?
I didn’t come up with idea and I haven’t tried it. But someone else is trying it:
Only a couple of aspects of the Australian Model would legitimately outrage a predictable group. The ban would be retroactive. Citizens would then have to specify why they wish to keep or purchase an unbanned gun. Sufficient reasons would include hunting, pest control, and target shooting. Insufficient reasons would include, notably, “self defense.” Anyone with a demented understanding of the Constitution would be outraged by this, and you ought to welcome their outrage. They are a menace.
Douglas Anthony Cooper
December 12, 2012
A Proven Way to End the Gun Slaughter: Will We Fight For it?
[It is critical for the anti-gun people to eliminate the concept of self-defense. It is our strongest point in this battle. Look what we did with the concealed handgun laws in the last 30 years. That was the “tip of the spear” and getting some of our gun rights back.
What is surprising to me is that self-defense, of almost any type, does not resonate with many people from other cultures. Our culture of individualism regards self-defense as self-evident. My communist brother-in-law has flat out told me “the needs of the society outweigh the needs of the individual” and denigrates self-defense and individual rights. Individual rights, to him, hinder “progress” because they inhibit the “advancement” of society as a whole.
My brother-in-law and Douglas Anthony Cooper regard anyone who has a respect for individual rights as a menace to society. Stalin, Pol Pot, Lenin, and Mao Zedong were in full agreement and demonstrated the “proper” way to deal with such people. It should be no surprise so many of these people want you disarmed. And it should be obvious what they would do if they could acquire the power to deal with you as they wished.—Joe]
Barb has been in Ecuador for the last ten days visiting her daughter. I picked Barb up at the airport today.
Joe: Were you ever concerned about your safety?
Barb: Things were fine except when the serial killer was there.
Things weren’t exactly “fine”. There were lots of times when she had her pepper spray and Spyderco knife at the ready. But she never had to actually deploy them. I’m glad she made it back with the worst wounds being the multitude of bug bites.
And the “serial killer” was a guy that gave her and her daughter “the creeps”. Things just didn’t add up right about him but to the best of their knowledge he didn’t actually do anyone harm.
The real engine which powers this hidden force is actually our world’s reality, so the force is almost useless to Leftists. Until reality can be replaced with fantasy in the real world, Leftists can do no more to stop our wielding of this weapon than they can do to stop gravity. They are helpless before us, and ply their political strategies only with our willing acquiescence to their evil and our passive acceptance of their fantasy.
The day major Conservative strategists grasp the force at work in the graph above, from the macro-level effects down to the effect on dopamine receptor gene transcription within neurons, is the day our battle ends, and our species begins a stratospheric ascent to levels of technological and societal advancement that we can only dream of.
Anonymous Conservative
January 16, 2014
The Forces Exerted By r and K-Selection Effects Mold the Ideological Inclinations of Societies – How Resource Availability Determines Destiny
[It’s a pleasant thought but I’m not convinced of this conclusion even though I’m mostly convinced of many of the less specific conclusions made in his other blog posts and his book. I have a lot more to read in his book but what I have read resonates well with me.—Joe]
Update: I asked a question in the comments to his post:
If resource depletion causes a strong shift to K-selected behavioral traits then why doesn’t this always happen in other countries? It appears to me that they frequently turn communist.
Two days after my question he came back with a 2200 word response.
I just watch the video Uncle put up on January 1:
It’s an hour long which is why I just now got around to watching it. I suspect that only about 10%, at best, of software developers will understand all of it. Non software security people will grasp only 10% of the material.
I had to look up several terms and I stopped it many, many times to more closely examine the classified documents. I am very impressed with the technology the NSA has implemented. That is amazing stuff.
They have tools that can, literally, fly over your home or city from up to eight miles and away infect computers with spyware. That’s just one of hundreds of tools they have.
There was some very serious bad-ass stuff in there that I knew was possible, and actually implemented prototypes of, years ago. They have it perfected and massively deployed. Seeing that they have it deployed explains some things that always bothered me about some of the projects I worked on or was sort of associated with. It all makes a whole lot more sense now.
The NSA people should congratulated on the awesome technology they have developed and deployed and then they should be sent to the gulags.
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
“No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” [Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816]
There have been volumes written about it, but that’s all that needs to said on the subject of liberty. Truth requires few words.
I’ve heard all of the “Yeah but…” arguments, so don’t bother. Those all come from people who see themselves as would-be social engineers (obstructionists).
There is no reason for the government to prevent, much less prosecute, a former member of law enforcement from buying a gun for his law-abiding uncle. The Supreme Court should overturn the appeals court, but more importantly, make clear that the government has no right to intervene in private gun transfers between honest American citizens.
The ultimate purpose of the Second Amendment, the prevention of tyranny, depends on the government not having a registry or knowing who is armed.
Emily Miller
January 22, 2014
MILLER: Supreme Court ruling on Abramski could limit Obama’s radical, gun-control aims
[The only thing I would change about the above quote is that it should have been, “the government has no power to intervene”.—Joe]
I think the law can be rewritten to allow residents to determine whether they want these businesses in their neighborhoods.
Will Burns
Member of the Chicago Board of Alderman
January 22, 2014
Chicago Officials Say New Gun Control Law Can Be Crafted
[And do they also think they can also write a law that allows residents to determine whether they want a Jewish/Muslim/Christian place of worship in their neighborhood? These officials need to be interviewed by the police instead of the media. Then they should be prosecuted.—Joe]
Colin Goddard, the Brady Campaign expert at getting shot, used to get a lot of media attention. But not anymore. I couldn’t find any connection between Goddard and the Brady Campaign since April 2013.
In fact it appears the Brady Campaign has had a complete regime change. These are all new faces to me since Dan Gross took the job as president.
They don’t have a very large staff and to replace that many people in that short of time means that, essentially, they flushed all their institutional memory. Which I suppose makes sense. It’s a good idea to change a losing strategy. But it’s a better idea to shut down an obsolete business rather than to continue dumping money into it.
When I read this I was really annoyed:
Smart Tech Foundation, a new San Francisco gun violence prevention organization backed by tech investor Ron Conway, will start taking applications on Jan. 28 for a $1 million contest to identify devices for preventing gun-related injuries and deaths.
In particular, Smart Tech is focused on access control technologies that can reliably prevent unauthorized use of guns and ammunition.
…
Smart Tech was founded in 2013 in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre of children and teachers the prior year in Newtown, Conn.
Why didn’t he offer $1 million for ideas to make our children safer? By limiting his acceptable solution set to only those things that place limits on firearms he is showing his prejudice. It rules out things like firearms instruction for teachers and building designs that inhibit mass shootings.
After reading a part of his website I’m slightly less annoyed. It’s not quite as bad as I thought it was, but it still has lots of room for improvement:
On the gun side of things the solutions being suggested will never be retrofitted on hundreds of millions of existing firearms even if they are found to be feasible in new production guns. And I have my doubts that any biometric solution will be practical, ever. The hurdles to a biometric solution are very high and numerous. And they are all bypassed with 3-D printers and/or someone with access to hand tools in their garage.
On the brain health side of things short of mandatory examinations of a large segment of the population it’s not going to work no matter how accurate your examination is. And that gets into some troubling civil rights territory.
It will be interesting to watch and see what comes out of this. My guess is nothing anywhere nearly worth $1,000,000.
Doing things in Real Life ™ is educational. Frustrating, tiring, confusing, and risky, but educational. Case in point: after writing a book comes the part you have much less control over, and a learning curve that you can’t postpone. (Or should have researched better, earlier). Continue reading
The louder Bloomberg shouts his nonsensical rhetoric, the fewer remain willing to listen.
Chris W. Cox
December 2013
Bloomberg’s Anti-Gun Bus Tour Travels a Road To Nowhere
[Bloomberg’s slogans are moderately effective but his objectives and his illegal mayors cannot stand up to examination. It’s time to prosecute them.—Joe]
Almost everyone knows that leaving the refrigerator door open in the summer doesn’t, on the whole, make your house cooler. But did you know that in the winter you could use your freezer to make ice, store it in the ice-house for summer use, and make more ice you would be using the refrigerator as a heat pump and warm the house? This would make more efficient use of the electricity for heating than if you used that same electricity to heat your home directly with an electric furnace or baseboard electric heat. Part of the heat comes from the electricity used to run the freezer and the rest of the heat comes from the water you put in the freezer. You remove heat from the water, causing it to freeze, put the heat into the air, which raises the temperature of the air.
Plus, when you use the ice you stored in the winter the next summer you save on your summer electric bill as well.
Yeah, I know. What a geek. That what you get when read the blog of someone who thought their thermodynamics class was fun.
In reference to Obamacare President Obama said:
A lot of Republicans seem to believe that if they can gum up the works and make this law fail, they’ll somehow be sticking it to me.
What advocates for Obamacare and statists in general don’t seem to understand is that you cannot expect anything but people attempting to “gum up the works” under these situations. Anytime there exists a desired product or service and willing buyers those products and services will naturally, without any coercion, be exchanged for money or barter from the buyers.
Government is coercion. It is applying force. The “force of law” is a common phrase for a reason. Laws and government in some circumstances can help. It’s difficult to argue that using the force of government to enforce contracts entered into by willing parties is anything other than “a good thing”.
But on the other end of the spectrum when the force of government is used to require people purchase a product they did not want, supply a product below cost, outlaw products desired by the market, or sell only products wanted by only a few then things are different. In these instances, all present with Obamacare, government itself created obstacles to the free exchange of product and money. No one should expect the majority of people to embrace it. If it was something people wanted then they would have willingly done it before being forced to by the government. If the force of government is required before something will happen then government is “gumming up the works” of what people naturally want to do. And one should not be surprised when people expend effort in attempting to avoid or eliminate the obstacles placed in their path by government.
For Obama to complain that people opposing Obamacare are “gumming up the works” should be a defining example of the classic meaning of chutzpah.