It’s one thing to issue an executive order during peacetime saying private property “required” by the government can be taken if there is a national emergency. It’s quite another thing to enforce it during a national emergency.
One question on the Martin/Zimmerman case
There is only one question I want answered at this point. There might be more questions once I get the answer but I suspect I’ll know all I need to know with that one answer. I would like to think that answer would enough for everyone else as well but for the people chanting for Zimmerman’s arrest and those putting up “dead or alive” rewards for Zimmerman little things like facts probably won’t make much of a difference.
I strongly suspect Zimmerman is innocent of a crime. I need one more fact to convince me it was a lawful use of deadly force or that we cannot know the answer.
It is possible that Zimmerman instigated the confrontation in such a way that Martin attacked him. Taunting or “picking a fight” with Martin would have Zimmerman sharing a significant amount of responsibility in the death of Martin. But I have heard zero reports of a beginning to the confrontation in this manner. Hence I am of the opinion it did not happen this way or that as long as Zimmerman does not change his story we will never know about it.
I realize the police can’t always be trusted that concern is usually associated with the facts in regard to police conduct, the conduct of those with significant political power, or the conduct of groups being discriminated against. In the case of Zimmerman I don’t think there is any particular reason to believe the police are “fact challenged”. I realize witnesses can be mistaken and/or have a bias. If possible I would like to be able to reach a conclusion based entirely upon physical evidence that is difficult to convincingly fake in a timely manner without getting caught. Hence the particular facts that I think are most relevant are:
- The grass stain on the back of Zimmerman’s shirt
- Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, had a swollen lip and had bloody cuts to the back of his head—presumably with matching blood on the sidewalk
- There have been no reports (correct me if I am wrong on this) that Martin had physical injuries beyond a single gunshot wound to the chest
The one question I have that will probably settle the issue for me is when the authorities said, “Zimmerman then shot Martin once in the chest at very close range”; What was that range? I’ve probably spent more time and money than most on learning about such things and if the investigators know what they are doing, and I have no reason to believe they don’t, then they should be able to determine that range quite accurately. If the range was under 12 inches they can probably determine the range to within a fraction of an inch. And of course the angle can be determine quite closely as well.
If the range is determined to be within six inches and the bullet path matches Zimmerman’s story then I have to conclude the two were in a fight at contact distance and Zimmerman was losing badly. If I were on a jury I would insist that Zimmerman was in reasonable fear of imminent permanent physical injury or death and was justified in using deadly force to protect himself.
End of story for me.
Quote of the day—Christopher Pearson
Remember:
Birth control is not cleaning your guns…on the couch… in your underwear… every time she brings a boy over. It’s doing it on his couch.
Christopher Pearson
March 26, 2012
Via the gun email list at work.
[While this parenting technique has its merits it’s also probably a pretty good way to get your daughter pissed at you.
Not that I have any experience in that regard. But I will say that being about a foot taller than your daughter’s date, wearing all black, armed, wearing a Boomershoot coat and silently following about eight feet behind them for 50 yards as they leave the movie theater in the mall and out into the parking lot before they notice leaves an impression too.—Joe]
30 Cal Gal and Shelley Rae to attend Boomershoot 2012
We are going to have some other (I already mentioned the bloggers I knew about) high profile shooters at Boomershoot 2012.
I knew this was in the works and finally saw the entry come in this morning making it far more certain. But I didn’t want to say anything until I saw this from 30 Cal Gal:
Shelley Rae and I are a 2 woman team sponsored by ESS Eyepro. They are paying us to go shoot things that explode!
In somewhat related news I have three pair of the ESS glasses that I have been using for a few weeks. I really need to make a blog post about them (I like them!). And ESS will be donating several pair to the raffle to raise money for Project Valour-IT of Soldiers Angels at the Boomershoot Dinner Saturday night.
There are still lots of High Intensity openings left and 10 long range positions available for Boomershoot 2012. Sign up here.
It will be a blast!
High Praise for Windows 8
From John at work. We are both working on Windows 8. Occasionally we will complain about some problem or another we have run into with the prerelease bits we are dealing working with.
This morning he sent out some email:
I don’t know what all the Windows 8 bashing is about the new UI is clearly superior:
Obviously he is correct. As Greg (at work) pointed out, “This is a much more pleasing shade of blue.”
Quote of the day—Ash Can
what the fuck do you need to be carrying around a gun for?
You have to go to Starbucks with the dick you have, rather than the dick you wish you had.
Ash Can
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
What a ride
I suspect even with a civilization with our level of technology and capacity for building durable shelter that nearly everyone would be dead in a few days should something like this happened. But man, what a ride if you could manage it:
Planets in tight orbits around stars that get ejected from our galaxy may actually themselves be tossed out of the Milky Way at blisteringly fast speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour, or a fraction of the speed of light, a new study finds.
Climbing the Clock Tower stairs with my rifles
Today I brought a couple rifles back to the Seattle area for cleaning and preparation for Boomershoot. I call my place “The Clock Tower”.
As I was climbing the stairs with my cased rifles and openly carried pistol on my hip I wondered what the response would be if someone in this liberal enclave saw me as I was lugging the precision rifles up the stairs. Should I hurry inside to reduce the time they have to figure out the contents of the cases? Should I stop and chat with them and invite them to the range or maybe even Boomershoot?
In either case will the friendly neighborhood SWAT team pay me a visit early tomorrow morning?
Somehow I doubt people lugging books or political signs up the stairs worry about the quite the same things I do. As long as people carrying books or guns into their home worry about the police breaking down their doors in the early morning hours we have more work to do.
Quote of the day—Tom Diaz
Lethality is the nicotine of the gun industry. Even more than the tobacco companies, firearm manufacturers have been shielded from public scrutiny and exempt from health and safety laws that govern other products.
Tom Diaz
January 20, 1999
[“Shielded from public scrutiny and exempt from health and safety laws? Do the rights protected by the First Amendment have a Federal Agency devoted to the regulation of them? Do you need to pass a background check before you can purchase a book on religion?
Are you required take a class and get a license before you are allowed to vote? But what is more dangerous? A few million people carrying handguns in public or a Joseph Stalin implementing his progressive political views? Diaz is not only has his facts wrong he doesn’t even have a clue about the dangers facing humanity.—Joe]
Getting some schooling
Today Ry, Barron, and I finished our first day of NROI training at the Lewiston Pistol Club. Ry and I figured we had driven the furthest since we came from the Seattle area. But it turns out someone else had driven from Winnemucca, NV. Even without him we would have had to share the title with another guy from the Seattle area (Bellevue).
I have been operating on about five hours of sleep each night for the last several days so I came home and took a nap while others were doing their homework.
I’m awake again and now it’s time for me to do my homework.
Quote of the day—John Yemma
It is a shame that we are still a species that feels comfortable, even celebrates, an instrument built solely to maim or kill. We are, after all, the same species that believes in persuasion and reason and has seen the efficacy of nonviolent movements. Yet ending tyranny and oppression and defending life and liberty still seem to require firearms.
John Yemma
March 12, 2012
Guns and freedom: the American paradox
[For the Christian Science Monitor it’s actually a pretty favorable opinion. My impression is that Yemma in transition from an anti-gun position to something neutral or even positive. He sees the tragedy of firearms misuse but recognizes that at least in worst case situations they are necessary.
We need to keep coming out of the closet and showing the benefits of gun ownership. It’s fun, it decreases crime, and it is a deterrent to tyranny.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Jeff Jacoby
To be sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But the experience of Colorado State and DC should come as no surprise. By now there’s so much evidence that higher rates of gun ownership lead to lower rates of crime that it isn’t hard to fathom why fewer and fewer Americans want to ban handguns.
Jeff Jacoby
March 21, 2012
A safer society with guns
[Via David Hardy.
As David said, “It’s staggering that the Boston Globe ran this.”
We need to continue the mop up operations in many places but at this time it is just pockets of resistance that need to be cleaned up. They will scream, yell that the blood will run in the streets, and fight us as best they can but their current strategy and tactics is a losing game plan. Their only hope is to change their approach and I don’t see anything that has a reasonable chance of working. Only terrorist operations have any chance at all against us and I can’t see that working without other, extreme, complicating factors coincidently aligning in such a way as to be enable them.
On the other hand it is easy to imagine we eventually will have constitutional carry everywhere in this country.—Joe]
New gun blog
BrainBang.info is a blog about guns and psychology. It is brand new and already has some interesting and clever stuff. Here are some tidbits:
- You own your body. You own your brain. To own a gun is perfectly sane.
- This blog is a form of therapy. I’ve gotten back my brain. Next I’m getting back my guns.
- nervous system: The mental health system. Government is very involved in the running of this system. Makes me nervous.
- street drugs: Drugs sold on a street. If a drug comes from a pharmacy, then it is a street drug, because pharmacies are located on streets.
- Glock block When two guys talk about make/model of various firearms in front of a pro-gun woman, in an effort to impress her.
- Prazosin – sleep anxiety, other stuff – The Dream Eraser
If the content keeps coming this will be good.
Quote of the day—New York Daily News
New Yorkers surrender their weapons for the good of all or face jail time.
…
Jerome and Graves pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and were sent back to states where the right to own a gun can trump the right to live.
New York Daily News
March 31, 2012
District Attorney Cy Vance deserves praise for pursuing gun cases–New York City is the wrong place for unlicensed weapons
[If surrendering weapons was for the good of all then why don’t the police do it?
You don’t have a right to live. That would imply someone could be forced to provide you food, shelter, and medical care. As always when someone says something is a right the first thing you should ask is, “At whose expense?”
What the New York Daily News ignores or is oblivious of is that you do have a right to defend yourself and that all members of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed there is a right to keep and bear arms. I expect their ignorance will be forcibly ended by the courts within a few years. Whoever wrote that opinion piece will then be dragged, screaming and kicking, into the 21st Century just as the KKK supporters had to be forced into respecting the rights of black in the 20th Century.—Joe]
Getting Closer
It is repeated over and over in regard to hunting. “Get closer”.
It’s an often misunderstood term. I once was criticized for telling a guy to get closer. He hunts on beanfields, or cornfields, that are as flat as flat gets, for as far as the eye can see. He was quite sarcastic about it. “Get closer. Are you kidding? Ever try to sneak up on a deer?”
Well yes, and it can be done if you’re willing to move slow enough and you’re downwind, but that’s not the point.
No, Young Grasshopper. Find out where they’re going to be, and get yourself in there beforehand. See? You’re not “getting closer” in the real time, active stalking sense necessarily. You’re allowing your prey to get closer to you. You know them, you know their habits, their needs, their wants, and their hangouts and that allows you to predict their movements.
The longest shot I’ve taken at a living creature was about 85 yards, and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been in the middle of 100 square miles of open flat land or in the wooded hills bordering the Palouse. If you can observe their habits over time, you’re good to go. Most of my kill shots were in the 15 to 45 yard range, and the closest deer were oblivious right up the moment of impact. (In Joe’s world, “closer” is anything inside 1,000 yards)
If you want to take all this as metaphor, that’s your business. It applies in many fields anyway.
Quote of the day—Ken
Generally speaking, it isn’t “progressive” to want to repeal the Industrial Revolution.
Ken
March 18, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day–Helen Caldicott.
[But “progressives” aren’t progressive. They yearn to implement a proven failed political and economic system invented over 150 years ago. Perhaps it’s a mere coincidence but the rise of Marxism marked the end of the Industrial Revolution. “Progressivism” is the propagation of a lie that people desperately want to believe:
Therefore when a “progressive” wants to “repeal the Industrial Revolution” they are just being true to their nature.–Joe]
Quote of the day—Robert Verbruggen
[W]hen a government has the ability to forbid gun ownership, it has the ability to render groups it dislikes helpless to defend themselves. Regardless of whether modern gun control accomplishes its purpose of reducing crime — and for the record, there is no evidence it does — a free society should fear a government with such power.
Robert Verbruggen
July 7, 2010
Gun Rights Are Civil Rights
[Via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.
For those so ignorant, stupid, or evil to claim “that can’t happen here” remind them it has happened here. Verbruggen explicitly points out that the end of slavery but the continuing repression of blacks in the deep south continued for many years was enabled by gun control. And don’t forget about all the people of Japanese descent who were sent to concentration camps in this country.
It can happen anywhere and therefore most restrictions on firearms must be eliminated. Gun control fails my Jews in the Attic Test.—Joe]
Velocity
As kids, we liked to shoot, and one of the things we liked to shoot was cans. Bottles were cool too, but we mostly did that at the dump since it sprays broken glass all over the place. One of the first cans I shot was with .22 Shorts (very low power ammunition) from a handgun. One bullet entered a can at a tangent and spun several times around the inside (“PZzzzzit!”) making the can levitate off the ground a little and leaving raised ridges protruding around the outside of the steel. Fascinating. That was in the 1960s.
So of course when I recently got some good performing loads worked up for a 30-30 Winchester carbine model of 1894, I was going to shoot some cans. It’s the natural order of things.
The two milk cans below (both were filled with water) were shot using the same 170 grain bullet cast from #2 lead alloy, from the same carbine at the same distance. The only difference was the powder charge. The can in the first photo was hit at around 1600 feet per second, with the bullet coming in from the left and exiting to the right. Note that the entry side is blown out much more than the exit (a not uncommon phenomenon when you have a harder outer shell containing a softer, more fluid material). You can see that the neat little bullet entry hole is split in half.
The can below was hit at around 2000 fps, again with the bullet coming in from the left and exiting to the right. It’s more like a cherry bomb went off inside it. The top separated and flew waaaay up into the air. I never did find it.
Yes it’s a little bit childish, and yes it is a lot of fun. Though I’ve done this sort of thing hundreds of times and I’ve had this carbine since the mid ’90s, just the other day I found myself chuckling like a ten year old boy with a new toy. It’s hard to explain. Several previous outings were for the purpose of recording velocities, accuracy and sight adjustments for various loads. That may be some fun, but it resembles work too. This time out, just for shooting, was very different– more like a meditative state of near total concentration and peace. Would that we could spend most of our lives in that state.
In case you’re wondering; I doubt there was any significant bullet expansion. The hard cast round nose bullets were not recovered, but at those low velocities (for a rifle) I’d bet they held their shape fairly well. I plan to try recovering some later, using several water jugs as a trap. So we’ll see.
Blog problems
As I have posted before I have had some problems with my blog crashing and had to make some serious changes in an effort to get the problem fixed. It was down starting about 4:40 (PDT) this morning until about 2:00 this afternoon.
One of the changes was a change in the IP address. If you have a DNS cache with the old value you will still see unexpected results. So if works from one computer but not another flush the DNS cache (reboot works) and it probably will fix the problem.
Memory wipe
I’ve written programs to securely wipe your hard disk upon your command. I wrote a prototype ‘virus’ that wiped your newly installed hard disk on the first boot even if you had removed all previous disks, CDs, DVDs, and thumb drives. I have reduced permanent storage devices to their molecular components.
But to the best of my knowledge (if I wiped my own brain would I know?) I have never wiped a human brain clean of memories before:
While sex can be forgettable or mind-blowing, for some people, it can quite literally be both at the same time. The woman, whose case was reported in the September issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine, was experiencing transient global amnesia, a rare condition in which memory suddenly, temporarily, disappears.
I guess I’ll have to just keep trying.