Quote of the day—Tam

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Of course it will sell like gangbusters. This is, after all, a round marketed to people whose knowledge of terminal ballistics is so shaky that they’ve already bought a Taurus Judge for personal protection.

Tam
November 19, 2011
While, yes, it is technically a shotgun…
[I lifted my moratorium (no one else would have a chance if I didn’t put her in a special class) on Tam being my QOTD for this one.

When I first started getting into guns I would spend a lot of time reading magazine articles on terminal ballistics, the latest modern/high-performance/next-generation/whatever ammo. I fired various bullet styles in various weights into milk jugs filled with water. I bought and read various books. The various authors called each other names and said they were sloppy researchers, ignorant, and then got nasty with each other.

My conclusion from all of this was that the bullet MUST penetrate. Expansion is good but not required. The time spent reading and researching was better spent learning and practicing to put another bullet beside the first one in the minimum time possible.

Tam, in her post, nails it. This round only needs to be given a couple of seconds of consideration before totally rejecting it in favor of almost any other round unless you are defending yourself from anemic rabbits three feet away nibbling on your strawberries.—Joe]

5.56 x 45 Wound

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Very nasty.  You’ve been warned.  Lots of discussion from both medical and ballistics points of view, so I thought you’d be interested.  It’s here on the Philippine Defense Forum.  I found it as a link off of GunRightsMedia.  Femur was not hit but was broken by shock wave, they say.  M193 Ball at close range.

For comparison; a fifty caliber (.495″) soft lead ball at ~1000 to ~1500 fps on impact will not do anywhere near that much damage, and I can say that with some authority having necropsied four deer shot with same from various angles.  The slower round pretty much digs a straight, caliber-sized hole through anything it touches (though I haven’t seen a 50 ball hit a femur.  I have seen a 7 mm 168 gr match HP hit a femur, on the way out of a deer, having struck initially at ~2.5Kfps and passing through much of the animal, and that broke the heavy bone into several pieces).  You learn a few things about terminal ballistics when hunting, so you don’t have to listen to much of the talk.  The phrase; “Your pistol is the weapon you use to get back to your rifle” comes to mind, only the rifle should be putting lead on target at over 2Kfps according to these chaps.

Now clean up your lunch.

Quote of the day—Solomon Friedman

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Responsible citizens do not cease to act responsibly merely due to the presence of tools.

Solomon Friedman
November 15, 2011
Testimony at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (Canada).

[You would think this statement is blindly obvious but beliefs to the contrary have been around for centuries and persist to this today in the form of “gun control”.—Joe]

Lead contaminated tin foil hat?

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This article (also found here) via email from Jon at work claims:

Later Friday evening, this FSB report continues, the vehicle from which the shots were fired from was located by US Secret Service, FBI and local police authorities with the AK-47 laying across the back seat with a warning note saying “Aquí está uno de los nuestros, no la suya necesitan,” roughly translated from its original Spanish meaning… “Here’s one of ours, we don’t need yours.”

The FSB states that the warning note found on the AK-47 was in direct reference to the Obama regimes gun-running efforts (known as Operation Fast and Furious) to arm the dangerous Sinaloa Cartel as it battles to gain supremacy in a Mexican Drug War that has so far cost nearly 40,000 lives.

The article goes on to invoke the CIA and claims the American people are “not being allowed to know”.

Interesting.

I have to wonder if there isn’t some lead in a tin-foil hat that is getting into the bloodstream of the author.

I have more work to do

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I spent a lot of time with Paul Barrett of Business Week at Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno a couple months ago.

He has another article on guns up on the web now. This time it is about guns “walking” to Mexico. It was interesting and had some information on the topic I was only dimly aware of (the extent to which the Bush administration was involved in a  similar program).

As I told him in email I still have some work to do with the words and phrases he uses. An example:

Detty, the proprietor of Mad Dawg Global Marketing in Tucson, Ariz., is a federally licensed firearm dealer who sells the high-capacity, military-style rifles at gun shows or from the living room of his Spanish colonial-style home on the outskirts of town.

“Military-style” is misleading in a derogatory manner. The original AR-15 was a civilian firearm before it modified and sold to the military as an M-16. And I’m nearly certain there have been just as many if not more AR-15 rifles sold to private citizens as the militarized version have been sold to the military. So “military-style” is inaccurate at best and at worst it is intentionally inflammatory. And what does “high-capacity” mean? Who is the arbitrator of gun accessory descriptions that gets to decide what is “high-capacity” versus “normal-capacity”? “High-capacity” is the inflammatory phrase used by the anti-gun people.

Another example:

Also working for him was the striking ineffectiveness of federal gun laws.

While technically true it again is inflammatory. What is equally true is that any law, be it federal, state, county, or city, is going to be ineffective when it tries to block the exchange the goods or services between willing parties. The country learned that lesson with Prohibition in the 1920’s, the War on Drugs for the last 30 years, and it cannot be a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that an attempted ban on firearms that were exceedingly difficult to legally define would soon be circumvented. And with a few more brain cells one would have little trouble predicting that the sales of such firearms would increase with legal restrictions against them (Forbidden fruit).

The implication of Barrett’s phrase is that if only the federal gun laws were written better or more broad they would have been more effective. Are the laws against recreational drugs effective enough for you?

If someone wants to avoid alienating a large group of people they should avoid using words and phrases that add little or nothing to the topic at hand and are offensive to those same people. I don’t think I’m just being a little thin skinned. Those words and phrases are the same words and phrases used by our political enemies who on a daily basis attempt to restrict and eliminate the exercise of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It would be like invoking images of male sexual predators of little boys while advocating prison sentences for consensual homosexuals. It’s misleading and inflammatory with the sole purpose of denying a specific enumerate right (freedom of association in the case of homosexuals).

Update: Forest/trees. Regardless of the inflammatory phrasing it is a very good thing that the bungling and illegal acts of the ATF are getting mainstream media attention.

The dark ages

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It’s sort of a meme with Tamara leading the way followed by Say Uncle and Sebastian.

Tamara is correct as far as she goes but doesn’t get into how dark things were on the political side. For a more complete story read my “From the archives” tagged posts (ignore the post with the picture of the beautiful woman). Here are some samples:

I think — you know, we can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles…

Bill Clinton
March 1, 1993

And we should — then every community in the country could then start doing major weapon sweeps and then destroying the weapons, not selling them.

Bill Clinton
October 1, 1993

Banning guns is an idea whose time has come.

U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden
November 18, 1993

Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein
November 18, 1993

We’re here to tell the NRA their nightmare is true!. We’re going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We’re going to beat guns into submission!

U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer
November 30, 1993

If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it.

Diane Feinstein
February 5, 1995

If this is a topic of serious interest then you must read The Gun Rights War for the view from the trenches during those days and before. It was very clear that the dark ages were upon us. The lies and broken agreements of our opponents were ignored by the general public. The forces of evil merely cackled and thought us fools to believe the truth and principles would be sufficient to slow let alone stop or reverse them.

Quote of the day—John/az

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When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it’s yellow…

John/az
From his signature line on a The Firing Line post May 4, 2000.
[Via a link from Tamara.—Joe]

Some things I don’t want to know

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I’m surprised the researchers were able to get answers they believed were correct:

Men who have sex with animals may have an increased risk of penile cancer, a study finds.

…

As for the kinds of animals the men had sex with, mares were the most common, followed by donkeys, mules, goats, chickens, calves, cows, dogs, sheep and pigs.

“Chickens”? I sort of wonder, “How?” But I don’t want anyone to tell me. There are some images which can’t be unseen even if they were only in your imagination.

Although it does remind me of the difference between “kinky” and “perverted”. “Kinky” is when you use a feather. “Perverted” is when you use the whole bird.

Posted in Sex

Quote of the day—BitterB

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I find it interesting that not a *single* member of the opposition to HR822 named the @bradybuzz position as a reason to oppose the bill.

Bloomberg was mentioned by many, but @bradybuzz seems to have become politically irrelevant.

BitterB
November 16, 2011 in two Tweets: here and here.
In regards to the debate over HR822, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act.
[And The Brady Campaign should be politically irrelevant. The KKK and similar anti-civil rights organizations are no longer relevant are they?

Their “membership” is non-existent, their donations are in the tank, and now important people don’t listen to them. They should just give it up, change their names, and rejoin civilized society.—Joe]

I thought they wanted national licensing

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John Lott makes a great point:

For decades, treating licenses for guns like those for cars was something that gun control advocates wanted.

And now that congress is debating making states honor other states concealed carry licenses, just like drivers and marriage licenses, gun control advocates are about to have aneurisms.

I say let them have their aneurisms. As crazy, irrational, and inconsistent as they already are the extra brain damage probably wouldn’t be noticed anyway.

Security theater must make people stupid

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David Perera must have gone through the scanner a few too many times and his brain turned into crap. He claims that just because someone has a security clearance that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to go through airport security without being subjected to TSA scrutiny:

First, if the ability to go through the expedited line is given to all secret holders regardless of the purpose of their travel, clearance holders would be the recipient of an unfair perk relative to the rest of society. Clearance holders receive access to classified documents – not a badge that permits them to cut in line at the gas station, take 20 items through the 15-item supermarket checkout line or buy 3.2 beer in an Arkansas convenience store on a Sunday.

Just what does he think TSA security is for? It’s not a line at a gas station.

I kept expecting him to explain that the only purpose TSA serves is to harass and desensitize people to illegal searches. If some people don’t go through the desensitization process then TSA effectiveness is drastically reduced. After all, TSA has been insisting that pilots and the rest of the flight crew be searched so what purpose could that serve other than desensitization? Do they think that unless they search the pilot for box cutters he would be able to hijack the plane he was already flying?

But that doesn’t appear to be the case. As near as I can tell he really believes what he says. I can only conclude he has crap for brains. I expect that soon he will insist Air Marshals also go though TSA screening. After all their badges don’t enable them to take 20 items through the 15-item supermarket checkout line either.

Quote of the day—Aesop

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Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Aesop
[It is also true that any excuse will serve those that enable tyrants. Here are some of the many I have come across:

  • It’s for the children.
  • No one needs one of those.
  • It’s an ASSAULT weapon!
  • It’s a collective, not an individual, right.
  • The Brady Act works. It has blocked XX million gun sales. (Never mind that no measurable increase in safety has occurred. The mere fact that sales have been blocked is proof of success.)
  • Road rage will become gun fights.
  • Assault clips can hold 30, 50, or even 100 rounds!
  • 32 rounds in just 16 seconds!
  • States and cities should be allowed to make their own laws.
  • The Federal government must do it because many states have lax laws.

It’s interesting how there are truths which appear to be universal yet people never learn.—Joe]

Selling your daughter

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Some people are real lowlifes:

A Salt Lake City woman is accused of trying to sell her 13-year-old daughter’s virginity for $10,000.

The woman’s boyfriend reported the alleged plot to police after finding text messages on the woman’s phone detailing negotiations with a man identified only as “Don,” said Salt Lake County prosecutor Sim Gill.

The woman, 32, had promised Don that her daughter would perform oral sex and other sex acts in exchange for $10,000 and later confessed the deal to police, Gill said.

Had I been the (soon to be ex-) boyfriend I would have been inclined to let the woman overhear the daughter and I “arranging” to sell one or maybe both of the mother’s kidneys as we waited for the police to show up.

Posted in Sex

Y’all Better Read This

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I promise you; you will want to read this excerpt from The Life of Colonel David Crockett if you haven’t already.

There’s a powerful lot of meaning in few words.  I intend to print it off and hand it to my daughter, to be brought into her high school history class for discussion.

Special Thanks to LukeM, who brought it to my attention in comments here.  I don’t know how I missed it for so long.

Back to work

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Wife Barbara went back to work on Saturday after breaking her ankle in August.

At the end of the day her ankle was sore but she went off to work again yesterday. She has today and tomorrow off but starts her regular schedule of six days on, eight days off again on Wednesday.

It was tough leaving her behind in Idaho yesterday. It was really nice living together full time again but we have our duty to support all those other people who need the time to camp out in the parks and protest people having more money than them so it’s back to work for us.

In somewhat related news Ry drove his van to Idaho this weekend to deliver stuff for Boomershoot I had purchased in the Seattle area. Life is always an adventure when riding with Ry and this weekend was no different. This was the drive across the field to the new explosives production site:

The first voice you hear is mine. The laughter is Barron, who gave Ry QOTD status for that little adventure. The last voice is son-in-law Caleb.

I rode back to the Seattle area with Ry yesterday. We had the left front tire blow out on the van while on I-90. It was a very interesting hole in the tire. We had never seen anything like this before:

We got the limited service spare put on without getting hit by another vehicle and limped on in to Ellensburg, Since it was Sunday all the tire shops were closed. Ry paid the $100 to get someone to open up the Ellensburg Tire Center on Sunday and we arrived back in the Seattle area about 18:30 after leaving Idaho at 09:30. That was a nine hour journey that usually takes only five hours.

It could have been worse. On the way to Idaho Barb and I were a few minute ahead of Ry and had stop and go traffic over snow covered Snoqualmie pass on I-90. We weaved our way around the stopped, crosswise, and even backward facing cars, RVs, and trucks. Ry, probably less than 10 minutes behind us, found the pass closed. After it was opened up again he was an hour behind us.

Barb and I had bare and wet and even bare and dry conditions the rest of the way to Idaho. Ry had black ice:

Boomershoot 2012 prep

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Saturday son-in-law Caleb, Barron, Ry and I did some more prep for Boomershoot 2012.

Ry has pictures and an overview. Barron has a bit more.

I was tempted to make Ry’s comment just before we left Mecca my QOTD, “I’m doing you a favor.” Barron said he agreed with that sentiment then Ry threw my 8″ crescent wrench over the hill. Sunday morning Ry gave me three new crescent wrenches in various sizes and told me they had lifetime warranties and to take them back if I ever had problems with them.

There is still a lot of work to be done. I had hoped to get the solar panel operational but we didn’t quite get there. There is still more wiring to do but most importantly the pole it mounts on needs to be secured to the shipping container with something more than zip-ties.

Protestors—but just barely

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The headlines say, “Local gun show brings out protesters” and “Protesters fired up about Yakima gun show”. Technically they are correct–but just barely. As near as I could determine there were only three protestors who showed up. They were probably outnumbered 50:1 by the tables at the gun show.

Anti-gun people are members of a dying cult.

Quote of the day—Dr. Tim Ball

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There are several misconceptions about CO2, most created because proponents tried to prove the hypothesis rather than the normal scientific practice of disproof.

Dr. Tim Ball
November 9, 2011
Whether It Is Warming or Climate Change, It Cannot be the CO2.
[There is lots of other interesting data in this post. As Ry summarized when telling me about this, “North America and Europe are net absorbers of CO2. South America and Africa are net producers. And it’s all due to natural causes. Human CO2 production is in the noise of measurement error of the natural sources.”

Beyond the point the CO2/global-warming/climate-change fraud I wanted to point out that the “normal scientific practice of disproof” is what has been tripping up the anti-gun people. Their hypothesis that gun control will decrease crime is so easy to disprove that they expose themselves as a religious faith. Their deeply held beliefs persist in the absence of and in despite of evidence. I have no problem with them exercising their First Amendment rights to exercise the the religion of their choice but they do not have the right, nor should they have the power, to force others to worship the same god(s) they do.

If you only need a couple of talking point so to put them in their place point out that since the gun ban in Washington D.C. was thrown out the number of murders (the murder rate would be lower still) has dropped to the lowest in 46 years. Since the gun ban in Chicago was overthrown the number of murders is the lowest in at least 20 years. The gun bans reduce crime hypothesis cannot survive exposure to the normal scientific practice of disproof. This has been well known since at least the mid-1980s when Rossi and Wright published their book.

The Brady Campaign, The Violence Policy Center, and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are nothing more than fading religious cults whose beliefs have killed tens of thousands of people and put millions of lives at risk. They are no more credible and should be given no more political voice than a cult advocating castration to reach an alien spacecraft.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeffery D. Sachs

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The new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption.

…

Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.

Jeffery D. Sachs
Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
November 13, 2011
The New Progressive Movement
[As SebastianSH said, “This is a lot of crap.” First off, our current economic situation is not due to insufficient “progressive politics” (actually Marxism is very old and hence regressive, Libertarianism would better be called “progressive” and/or “liberal” but left-speak requires that words be redefined to suit their purposes). It is the result of progressive politics.

Second, “social media” and the Internet in general tends shine the light of truth and the progressive rats and sidewalk scum wither in that light.

Third, the corruption in Washington is because Washington has the power to pick winners and losers. As long as the power exists there will be people and companies who find it necessary to see that power is exercised in their favor or at least not used against them. It will only be by the elimination of that power, as the Constitution was intended and written, that the corruption will fade.

What Jeffery D. Sachs advocates will only make the problems worse. Just read New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America to get a clue. But even if given motivation with a clue-by-four Sachs will probably always remain clueless.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeff Knox

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The emperor truly has no clothes in the gun control debate and the more that is pointed out, the more people will see the truth.

Jeff Knox
July-August 2011, Volume 8, Issue 4 The Hard Corps Knox Report
[I think this was a critical item in turning the tide in the mid and late 1990’s. The Internet made getting the point out about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-gun movement easier and overcame the MSM bias. It’s like that famous Hunter S. Thompson quote, “With the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”—Joe]