Quote of the day—Brennan Bailey

Posted on by

Hollow points are evil because they’re made to inflict maximum damage upon soft flesh. Jacketed rounds are evil because they’re designed for military use, and penetrate armor. Lead rounds are evil because they poison our beloved vultures. Non-lead rounds are evil because they start fires and/or penetrate armor.

In response to concerns over the innate evilness of so much of their product line, in January of this year ammunition manufacturer ATK/Teksystems began investigating the possibility of crafting bullets exclusively from puppy love and rainbows, to be dubbed their new PLRB line of politically sensitive ammunition.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg has already moved proactively against this effort, expending a portion of his personal fortune to found a new PAC “Mayors Against Illegal Puppy Love And Rainbows”, however Mr. Bloomberg’s initiative has seen a rocky start, drawing harsh criticism from PETA after 5 of his PAC’s 11 founding members were convicted on charges ranging from cruelty to animals to felony sexual assault on a puppy, while the remainder of the fledgling lobbying group continues to be haunted by rumors of colluding with senior DOJ officials to operate a puppy porn ring.

The White House Press Secretary ended speculation on the President’s long silence on the controversy when he told reporters on Friday that “the President believes puppies and rainbows belong in the hands of soldiers”, and also asserted that although allegations of DOJ involvement in organized puppy abuse were absolutely untrue and unfounded, the alleged policy of puppy abuse was actually formulated under the Bush administration.

Brennan Bailey
August 28, 2012 11:13 AM
[Via the gun email list at work.

I have nothing to add.—Joe]

On that whole Rachel Corrie thing

Posted on by

A couple of possibilities come to mind.

Maybe she stood in front of the bulldozer believing that when
the driver saw her, he’s stop. That would imply that she believed the Israelis
are moral and reasonable, and directly gives lie to much of what’s been said
about them in defending her actions.

Maybe she thought the driver would not stop, meaning she deliberately
let herself get killed, to be used as a propaganda tool. This would sort of imply some serious psych issues.

Maybe she was so stupid / ignorant of heavy equipment that
she didn’t realize that the driver might not see her, and not stop because he
was in a military zone that civilians had been excluded from and had no reason
to believe that some idiot might be standing in front of him.

In no case do I see any reason to support her actions,
change my beliefs, or care about her and “her cause” in any way, because it’s
nothing more than a personal tragedy for her family (who failed to educate her
properly), and a propaganda tool for people who want to re-create the holocaust
and tear down the best parts of Western civilization.

There will always be useful idiots. That doesn’t mean we have
to give them a platform.

Quote of the day—Ruth Bass

Posted on by

All we have to do is stop selling guns to people who are potentially violent or totally whacky. Then our gun troubles would be over — only the sane and sensible would be armed to the teeth, ready to shoot only when it was sane and sensible to do so, whenever that might be.

People get training for all sorts of things, from muscles to job skills, so training must be the key to success. Gun show salesmen, gun shop owners and anyone else who sells weapons that shoot would be trained to recognize the dangerous and the demented and be authorized to “just say no” when such folks ask for guns or ammunition.

If we’d instituted these bans years ago, we would have avoided James Brady, Simon’s Rock, Columbine High, Aurora. And we would have saved any number of wives, husbands and state troopers. The no-gun people could be registered, just like sex offenders.

Ruth Bass
August 27, 2012
Gun control must mesh with the times
[At first I thought it was sarcasm or someone mocking the anti-gun position. But by the second paragraph I realized it wasn’t that at all. I felt I.Q. points being sucked into the vacuum by the third paragraph and last night after reading the entire article I barely stumbled into bed before falling into a coma.

There should be barricades in place a light-millisecond in all directions around that vortex of stupidity to prevent people with poor constitutions from having their brains sucked dry beyond any hope of recovery.—Joe]

‘Shark Bump’

Posted on by

American veterans under attack by our government?  That DHS statement from a few years ago does come to mind.


People are being arrested and “committed” against their will as mental cases for saying things that, by the standards of this blog, are fairly innocuous.  They did this sort of thing in the Soviet Union, but it seems to be happening in the U.S. now.  Watch both videos, taking note of the things that were said openly by the left on national TV.


I’ve said for years that The Enemy will do things that are so crazy we’re afraid to even mention them for fear of sounding crazy ourselves, or things so crazy no one wants to believe it.  It’s happened before, so one can only assume that it will be done over and over.  Has it come to this?


What happens next is we start blaming the victims.  “They wouldn’t have been arrested if they weren’t doing something stupid or wrong…”  Neighbors start informing on neighbors, and “you wouldn’t mind being searched if you had nothing to hide” becomes the word of the day.  “We wouldn’t have all this trouble if it weren’t for those people saying things against the government.  It’s all their fault.  Get ’em!”


Look for it.  It’s all happened before, and the sharks are always on the hunt.

Parts and percentages

Posted on by

When I got into bullet casting, I noticed right off that there was confusion over parts and percentages.  People tell you that 20 parts lead to one part tin equals 95% and 5%, but when you start adding your “parts” you put in 20 parts this and one part that, and you realize that you now have 21 parts, which isn’t 95:5.  It’s actually 1/21, which is more like 95.3% and 4.7%.  Not a big difference, and not enough to really matter in this case, but when mixing several ingredients, you can end up farther off.  If you use this oft repeated “method” of calculating for things that really do matter, you’re in trouble.

Anyway, I wanted Lyman #2, and Lyman states the actual percentages.  I use other alloys too, and several sources of metal, so I made up this alloy calculator.

I think my assumptions are right…

Alloy Calculator.xls (26.5 KB)

You can fiddle with the composition of your various metal sources, plug in the number of parts in each, and it gives you the makeup of your final alloy in percentages.  So I can make #2 alloy from wheelweights, pure tin and 70:30 antimonial lead, or from pure lead, tin, and 70:30, etc. and in theory get a pretty consistent product without having to do much calculating.

Fakers

Posted on by

Sebastian gives us a report on Twitter fake followers so I used the tool to check out the followers of my Twitter feed.

The result were decent: 3% fake, 12% inactive, and 85% good.

Thanks guys!

Quote of the day—Boris Yellnikoff

Posted on by

If it wasn’t for sexual inadequacy the National Rifle Association would go broke!

Boris Yellnikoff
A character in the Woody Allen movie Whatever Works (2009).
Via a tweet from Linoge in response to a tweet from David Ali.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

You would think that if the “intellectuals” of this country wanted to have a discussion about the role of guns in society they could do better than this.—Joe]

How not to do it

Posted on by

We don’t know the details of the discussion but we can say one or both parties didn’t know what they were doing:

Police said Fleming was in a dispute with her 55-year-old boyfriend after discovering that he had brought his loaded 12 gauge shotgun into their shared home. They were discussing gun safety, including the proper handling of a loaded firearm.

It’s unclear the other details of the argument, but police said Fleming at one point intentionally opened fire from a close range from an upstairs room and blew out a hole about the size of a softball.

Instead of arguing they should have just taken an NRA gun safety class together.

Gun cartoon of the day

Posted on by

Sometimes a picture is worth a 1000 words.

gun-control

The inequity of compassion

Posted on by

Brady Campaign president Dan Gross wrote:

From the moment I started to get involved in the gun violence issue, I found the disproportionate attention given to our story also made me feel uncomfortable.
 
People seemed to care more because my brother was a white, upper-middle-class, young musician, shot at a famous landmark. A common theme began to emerge: “that kind of tragedy isn’t supposed to happen in places like that, to people like your brother.”
 
Over the years now, I have seen this same theme repeated. We seem to care more about certain tragedies, like suburban school shootings or psychotic shooting sprees in office buildings or malls or famous victims. Certain deaths seem to matter more.

“Certain deaths seem to matter more.”? Absolutely true. For example, self defense deaths are far more acceptable (sometimes even praiseworthy) than murders. Doesn’t Gross understand that?

The irony is that the Gross and his ilk are one of the worst in regards to “certain deaths seem to matter more”. I have long been critical of the Brady Campaign and anti-gun activists in general when they complain about “gun deaths” as if they were somehow more important that “fists and feet deaths” or “knife deaths”. And he complains “certain deaths seem to matter more” to the population at large? Wipe some of the soot off your face pal.

Gross goes on to say:

As a result, there is far too little focus on a shockingly common problem, that poses a far greater threat to all of us than most realize, and we fail to examine surprisingly simple and accessible opportunities to prevent it.

Absolutely true. And that is why we are working to get rid of all those gun laws that create victim disarmament zones. People have a right to defend themselves whether it is in their home, at work, or on the streets. Disarming potential victims is just wrong and just allowing people to use the best tools available for self defense will improve the odds for everyone. We agree there are “surprising simple and accessible opportunities” to prevent and stop criminal violence. Why does the Brady Campaign fight us on this? We are better than this.

Random thought of the day

Posted on by

If immediately after police officers accidently shoot nine innocent people while shooting just one bad guy is it “dancing in the blood of the victims” if private citizen gun owners point out the following?

A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The “error rate” for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.

The study cited above isn’t exactly fair to the cops in the Empire State Building shooting. They correctly identified the bad guy. They had a bad situation with a lot of innocent people in the background. From the latest reports I have read at most ten shots out of 16 hit the bad guy. That is actually an above average hit rate for a self-defense shooting.

I think I could do better in those same circumstances but until you are actually staring down the barrel of someone else’s gun you don’t really know how well all your faculties are going to work when the rest of your life might be measured in milliseconds.

Quote of the day—Tyler Durden

Posted on by

The Mayor was likely distracted by his profound confusion how a deranged assassin with intent to kill was so blatantly unaware of New York City Administrative Code § 10-131 on the use of Firearms, which effectively makes any use or carrying of guns in the city of New York illegal.

Oh well, time to cut the maximum legal size of a New York soda drink by edict one more time.

Tyler Durden
August 25, 2012
Was The NYPD Responsible For 10 Of The 11 People Shot Yesterday?
[This makes as much sense as anything else Bloomberg has proposed in regards to guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—New York Politicians

Posted on by

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims of today’s tragic shootings and their families. For those of us in government, and in law enforcement, the news of yet another mass shooting so close on the heels of the massacres at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and in Aurora, Colorado, should make it crystal clear that our current laws have failed to protect the public from gun violence. We must redouble our efforts to protect public safety so that New Yorkers don’t have to live in fear of the next deadly attack.”
 
Rep. Charlie Rangel: “I am shaken by the news that a man randomly shot at innocent people at the Empire State Building, especially at an hour when many New Yorkers are starting their workday and hundreds of tourists are visiting.  My thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and the families and friends who lost their loved ones. I hope that those who are wounded will heal quickly and recover from the psychological harm that they endured. This year, our nation has been plagued by frequent and senseless gun violence that has taken the lives of so many people across the country.  These arbitrary shootings are acts of terrorism that are paralyzing our communities.  We must unite to focus our policies on enacting stricter gun control laws that will prevent potentially harmful individuals from accessing such deadly weapons. It is the only way to make certain that our communities safer.”
 
Rep. Bob Turner: “My heart goes out to the victims’ families of today’s shooting outside the Empire State Building. I want to commend the quick thinking and resolve of New Yorkers and the first responders who acted quickly, saving countless lives.”
 
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver: “I am deeply saddened by the tragic events that unfolded this morning near the Empire State Building.  On behalf of the Assembly, I offer our condolences and our prayers for the victims of this tragedy and for their families.  There have been far too many victims of gun violence across the country, and today’s incident points to the need for sensible gun laws that ensure the safety and security of all.”
 
State Sen. Michael Gianaris: “My prayers go out for the victims of this morning’s horrific incident caused by yet another act of senseless gun violence. It is long past time to fix our gun laws to prevent future tragedies from occurring. To the victims’ families, stay strong and know our hearts are with you.”
 
State Sen. Jose Peralta: “I extend my condolences to the victim’s family and friends.  For the wounded, I hope for a prompt and full recovery from their injuries. The tragedy is yet another horrific reminder of the urgent need to act to curb gun violence and end the bloodshed on our streets.”
 
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer: “I share in the grief of families whose loved ones were shot this morning near the Empire State Building. When this kind of violence erupts on the sidewalks of our city, it affects all New Yorkers. It tears at the heart of our City. I wish a speedy recovery for all those who were injured and mourn the loss of life that took place today. We must redouble our efforts to pass tougher gun laws, and protect the public from future tragedies.”

New York Politicians
August 24, 2012
Pols Send Condolences, Urge Stronger Gun Control, In Wake of ESB-Area Shooting Spree
[If you follow the link you will notice I left out Gov. Cuomo. He also made a statement but did not exhibit such an effusion of crap for brains as these others did.

The bad guy shot one innocent person. He shot him in the head then then put four more rounds in the guys chest. This could have been accomplished with a five round revolver. And almost for certain a single shot pistol would have resulted in the same body count. What sort of “sensible gun laws that ensure the safety and security of all” do these idiots have in mind?

Of course the VPC and Brady Campaign exhibited even a greater capacity of crap for brains.

The VPC said, “Today’s shooter reportedly used a 45 caliber handgun to end the life of a former co-worker, offering yet another example of how the ready availability of semiautomatic handguns that can be equipped with high-capacity ammunition magazines destroy lives and make everyone less safe.” The facts are irrelevant to these people.

The Brady Campaign said, “On behalf of the Brady Campaign, I extend our deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and survivors of the mass shooting outside the Empire State Building.” Mass shooting? The only “mass shooting” was by the police. 16 shots were fired by two officers (seven and nine respectively). Seven (at least) hit the bad guy and nine innocent people were hit.

These politicians have crap for brains but in addition the anti-gun people have maggots eating the manure.—Joe]

My next stage design

Posted on by

This is the video of the NYC cops shooting the Empire State Building murderer and unintentionally, perhaps via ricochets, shooting nine innocent people.



One of my stage designs for next weekend will include this scene. I’ll post it when I get it finished. This will probably be sometime Sunday night.


Update (Saturday 8/25/2012): I finished it earlier than I expected. It is available for your viewing pleasure here. Please leave a comment if you see changes that should be made.

Good timing

Posted on by

As reported by others, “It’s now becoming clear that just about all of the injured in today’s mass shooting outside the Empire State Building were injured by the police response rather than by the shooter himself.

It turns out that months ago I signed up to provide the USPSA stages for the Lewiston Pistol Club match next weekend. Guess what I had planned?

Here are the two stages adapted (preliminary, there may be slight changes after the stages are reviewed) from the LAPD Combat Course.

LAPD Phase 1 and 4.
LAPD Phase 2 and 3.

If you compare the actual courses of fire to what I adapted to USPSA rules you will find I actually created a more difficult test. USPSA rules do not allow the shooter to touch a gun between the “Standby” command and the buzzer going off. The LAPD course of fire requires the shooters to, in some cases, have the gun pointed at the target with their finger on the trigger when the timer starts. In other cases the gun is held at the low ready position. Because the times were so long that I expect many shooters to have excess time I did not lengthen the time to accommodate the differences in start positions.

What this means is that in a little over a week we will have data on how the shooting skills of “a bunch of beer guzzling, uneducated hillbillies” stack up to the qualification course for a major metropolitan police force.

Barron and I will be there with video cameras running and will provide YouTube video of the results within a day or two.

My expectations is that nearly all the shooters will pass and most will pass with a very high score.

If things turn out as expected Mayor Bloomberg should be called upon to send NYC police officers to Idaho for training by us “uneducated hillbillies.”

ESS Boomershoot video

Posted on by

Via Barron:



I highly recommend ESS products.

Quote of the day—Daniel D. Polsby

Posted on by

Dominating a transaction simply means getting what one wants without being hurt. Where people differ is in how likely it is that they will be involved in a situation in which a gun will be valuable. Someone who intends to engage in a transaction involving a gun—a criminal, for example—is obviously in the best possible position to predict that likelihood. Criminals should therefore be willing to pay more for a weapon than most other people would. Professors, politicians, and newspaper editors are, as a group, at very low risk of being involved in such transactions, and they thus systematically underrate the value of defensive handguns. (Correlative, perhaps, is their uncritical readiness to accept studies that debunk the utility of firearms for self-defense.) The class of people we wish to deprive of guns, then, is the very class with the most inelastic demand for them—criminals—whereas the people most likely to comply with gun control laws don’t value guns in the first place.

Daniel D. Polsby
March 1994
The False Promise of Gun Control
[It’s somewhat remarkable that this extremely well done article, critical of gun control, appeared in The Atlantic in 1994.

This was a time when gun control advocates were on a roll. The evening news would give crime reports with an icon of a gun on the screen even when the crimes being reported did not involve a firearm. The message being screamed by the media and politicians was that gun control was the ultimate crime control. Yet a voice of reason made it through.—Joe]

‘Stunning interview’

Posted on by

We see that term, “stunning” too often.  This interview with Dinesh D’Souza however was actually stunning.  Please watch the whole thing.  Wow!  In any other circumstance this stuff would dominate the headlines for months and then linger for generations.


Actually, this is dominating the headlines, but not in the Old Media.  You have to look elsewhere.  Forget about the Old Liars (ABC NBC CBS MSNBC NYT et al).  They are done.  How did they get away with it for so long?  That, I hope, will be one of the big topical questions in history classes for the next hundred years.


It’s been done, but I second the notion that we stop worrying about about the Old Media.  Some people still bitch about them, wringing their hands over the latest dumb thing they did, always reacting and rarely acting.  No, Young Grasshopper; move past them, like the wind.  They are nothing.


We have our own media and our own culture.

DOJ could learn something from Ronald C. Dozier

Posted on by

On Tuesday (Illinois) McLean County State’s Attorney Ronald C. Dozier announced he would not prosecute many victimless crimes associated with firearms. The U.S. Department of Justice could learn something from Dozier instead of pursuing prosecutions such as this one:

Tracey Eberhart, 41, Augusta, Kan., and her husband, Jeffrey Eberhart, 50, Augusta, were charged in a criminal complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Wichita. Jeffrey Eberhart was charged with one count of unlawful possession of a firearm after a felony conviction and one count of dealing in firearms without a license. Tracey Eberhart was charged with one count of aiding a felon in possessing firearms and ammunition and one count of providing firearms and ammunition to a convicted felon.

According to an agent’s affidavit, Tracey Eberhart obtained a federal license as a dealer of firearms when she opened Traceys Dream Weavers Salon And Sporting Goods at 431 State Street in Augusta, Kan. She told an investigator her intention was to cater the firearms business to women. During the application process, she made no mention of her husband, Jeffrey Eberhart. Because of prior felony convictions, he was prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.

On Jan. 20, 2012, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives attended a gun show in Topeka, Kan., where they saw Jeffrey Eberhart selling firearms at the Dream Weavers booth. He was wearing a Dream Weavers T-shirt and was heard talking to buyers about guns and laser scopes. Eberhart explained to an undercover agent that his wife and female employees sold guns during the week while he and another man sold firearms at gun shows on weekends. Later, ATF agents purchased ammunition and guns from Jeffrey Eberhart, both at the storefront in Augusta and at gun shows.

Jeffrey Eberhart was pictured with his wife at gun show in a photo on their web site, www.beautyandbullets.com.

If I could go back in time and make a suggestion or two to the founding fathers one of the suggestions I would make is that it should be unconstitional to criminalize victimless behavior.

More on this allegories kick

Posted on by

If the gun is primarily a symbol, then it is a symbol of what?


To some it is a symbol of Man’s cruelty, or generally of evil.  To others it is a symbol of the love and protection of life and liberty – a defense against evil.


Why would one person take one view as opposed to the other?  It seems to me that the more good person is often trying to point out the differences between good and evil, whereas the more evil person wants to maintain some confusion over the matter.


“Get those guns out of the community” then, might be a reaction to a desire to maintain some of that confusion, to avoid addressing something they want kept hidden in the fog.  The “bitter clinger” charge lashes out against guns and religion, both of which tend to draw attention to the differences between good and evil.  The “bitter clinger” charge, as I see it, reinforces this guns-as-a-symbol concept to explain the rift between the antis and the pro 2As.


See; isn’t this fun?