Quote of the day—Sebastian

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It’s probably a lot easier to sleep at night if you think you’re fighting evil corporations, rather than merely being a sour busybody inserting your nose into the personal business of millions and millions of fellow Americans.

Sebastian
October 15, 2011
An Interview with Josh Horwitz
[Horwitz is the Executive Director of Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. Yeah. You would have never heard of him or his organizations if you weren’t active in the gun owner rights movement.

As Sebastian hints at these people either cannot believe and/or want to make others believe that gun ownership is driven by “evil gun companies wanting to make a profit”. That people actual believe that they have a right to own firearms and would want do so without the influence of “corporate interests” is nearly unthinkable to them.—Joe]

Quote of the day—David Shuster

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I thought Obama was brilliant. He’s so informed. He’s circumspect. He’s articulate. He’s thoughtful. Well, I think in my lifetime, there’s never been anything like it.

David Shuster
June 2009
[And how brilliant and thoughtful do people think he is now?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Victor Davis Hanson

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The left needs a sacrificial lamb. So it has nonsensically turned with a fury on Obama as if he were culpable for getting through the left’s own agenda. If Democrats don’t blame the public’s anger on their once-beloved messenger, then they’re left only with their message itself. That’s something they simply can’t accept.

Victor Davis Hanson
September 14, 2011
Why liberals are giving prez the shiv
[And I’ll bet they thought the “Occupy Wall Street” protests would resonate more as well. As near as I can tell the left lacks a grasp on reality. That limits their ability to accomplish anything other than by using violence. They apparently realize that and are making what they think are the appropriate plans. But as son James said last night (paraphrasing), “Bring it on.”—Joe]

Glock the book

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Paul Barrett sent Ry and I an email telling us he has a website up for his new book Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun.

Ry and I both reviewed the book and recommend it.

Homemade Rocket to the Edge of Space

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This was pretty inspiring.  I didn’t catch whether it had any guidance or whether it was just a dumb rocket.  Note the epoxy camera cover melting as it approaches Mach Three.  Things get pretty quiet after MECO at that altitude.  Retrieving it a few miles from the launch site was pretty amazing.  It must have had a pretty quick descent after climbing nearly 20 miles.

My junior high school rocket club never did anything nearly so cool, but I did once built a small, very sleek wood, plastic and paper rocket, powered by two “D” engines grafted together by turning them on the lathe to produce a tight socket & tenon joint, like a clarinet body– two “D” fuel charges stacked under a delay and ‘chute charge in the same case.  It went out of sight and stayed there for quite a while- well over 1,000 feet– 1% of what those guys did.  With the longest delay I could get in a locally available engine, it was still going so fast upon ‘chute deployment that it ripped most of the shroud lines.  That was before I found out you could get “E” engines.

The price of sex

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I found this rather interesting:

“The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

By boiling dating down to an economic model, researchers have found that men are literally getting lots of bang for their buck. Women, meanwhile, are getting very little tat for their . . . well, you get the idea.

Sex is so cheap that researchers found a full 30% of young men’s sexual relationships involve no romance at all — no wooing, dating, goofy text messaging. Nothing. Just sex.

…

“Every sex act is part of a ‘pricing’ of sex for subsequent relationships,” Regnerus said. “If sex has been very easy to get for a particular young man for many years and over the course of multiple relationships, what would eventually prompt him to pay a lot for it in the future — that is, committing to marry?”

Did you answer, “Love”? You’re adorable.

With reliable birth control, lower social sigma, and less economic dependency the cost of sex to women has lowered and they are able to lower their “price”. The Internet makes “shopping” for availability, “quality” and “price” much easier for males. Hence the competition among “sellers” has increased and the price has dropped. There are some women that are even competing over sexual access to men. In essence some women are “paying” some men instead of the reverse.

One would then think that the price for two wives or at least a wife and a girlfriend should now be low enough that I might be able to afford it. But the last time I checked with Barb she assured me that was not the case. It is kind of hard to understand her when she is growling like that but I think she said she would have to sell all my organs to pay off the debt incurred.

Quote of the day—Kurt Hoffman

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If you oppose the people’s Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms in defense of their families, lives, homes and liberty, perhaps it is you who have some explaining to do.

Kurt Hoffman
October 12, 2011
Brady Campaign offended by truth about Second Amendment
[If someone opposes a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights I think they are past the explanation stage. Either they are ignorant and need to go back to their high school government class or they are opposed to the basis of our nation and should leave the country. They simply don’t belong here. You can’t get much more fundamental about our political underpinnings than the Bill of Rights.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Joan R. Neubauer

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All of this is the stuff of a conspiracy theory that most of us would dismiss as so much rumor. Disturbingly, we have documentation that proves otherwise. Fast and Furious may have been the name the administration chose for this operation as a means of further curtailing our Second Amendment rights in a fast and furious manner. We the People must remain vigilant. For without the Second Amendment, the other nine could never stand.

Joan R. Neubauer
Conspiracy Theory: Fast and Furious an Attempt at Further Gun Control
October 11, 2011
[Yes. It is more and more disturbing. If this were a movie plot it would be dismissed as “too far out there”. The big questions now are, as in the movies, how and will the good guys win?—Joe]

Boomershoot 2012 speaker

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We have a speaker lined up for Boomershoot 2012 dinner.

Author Paul M. Barrett who I met in Reno at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous last month has agreed to be our speaker.

More information about the dinner and his talk, “The Ironies of Gun Control” can be found here.

Quote of the day—Clark

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Due to forces of technology (CNC controlled machine tools, cheap computation, open source ethics, and social sharing of designs) gun control is utterly dead. It’s a corpse, staggering along, not yet aware that it’s been gut shot, it’s blood pressure has dropped to zero, and its brain (such as it is) is about to die the True Death.

Try to outlaw gun powder and we’ll move to railguns and big capacitors. Try to outlaw primers and we’ll see plans for electronic ignitions up on wikileaks by the end of the day.

Go back a step and outlaw the sparkplugs and the capacitors and …yeah, it’ll work as well as the restrictions on cold syrup have ENTIRELY shut down meth production.

Gun control will stagger on for a bit, but there’s no putting some genies back in their bottles, and home printed firearms are one of those genies.

One hundred years from now everyone from Chinese peasants to American bankers (or do I have that backwards?) will have all the firearms and ammo they want, in the same way that 15 year old have all the hot monkey sex pr0n they want today.

It’s called technology, and it’s the universal solvent.

Clark
October 6, 2011
The Third Wave, CNC, Stereolithography, and the end of gun control
[I have nothing to say except H/T to Mad Rocket Scientist.—Joe]

Interesting times ahead for Microsoft

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I’ve seen reports that there are now more smart phones sold than P.C.s. This is part of the reason Microsoft has been putting so much effort into Windows Phone Seven (and beyond). Now people are saying:

Realistically, Microsoft’s last chance to make a dent in Apple and Google’s mobile aspirations is with Windows Phone 7.5. While the operating system is generally well regarded, many still believe it lacks the killer feature that will help it overtake the considerable leads held by its rivals.

The Nokia deal is about to reach first fruition with the shipment of the first Nokia phones with Windows Phone 7.5. If that doesn’t flop I expect Microsoft will still push on to Windows Phone Eight. I know a little about this and because this information is proprietary can’t say what the main push will be with it. I will say that I wasn’t entirely convinced it was the proper strategy. Maybe it is. But they had some very tough decisions to make and none of the options available were anything close to a sure thing and doing everything in the timeframe required simply isn’t possible.

Without a strong position in the phone and tablet markets which are cutting into the desktop and laptop sales Microsoft is facing completely new territory. As much as I liked working for Microsoft I’m glad I’m not working there right now.

California outlaws open carry

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From the LA Times:

Gov. Jerry Brown announced early Monday that he had outlawed the open carrying of handguns in public in California, a controversial practice that top law enforcement officials had denounced as dangerous.

Combined with the near impossibility of getting a concealed carry license in most of California this will, almost for certain, go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Quote of the day—Henry Louis Mencken

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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

Henry Louis Mencken
Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks [78], 1956
[I’ve seen this in engineering as well as politics. Someone who doesn’t really understand the problem has great enthusiasm for a simple solution that on the surface is very appealing. This enthusiasm and confidence can sometimes be very difficult to combat because it can take a great deal of effort to educate the people advocating the solution on the error of their ways. And in fact it may be impossible to educate them because they are too stupid to understand. Gun control is one such example.

This brings us to another Mencken quote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

I have no idea how to deal with this in politics. I have enough trouble with it in engineering where most of the people are rational and reasonably smart. This is part of the reason that government powers should be severely constrained. Political decisions are frequently very complex issues with incomplete data sets. Even if you had rational people involved, which you frequently don’t, and they had the general populace’s best interests at heart, which they almost never do, getting a consensus on the solution that best fits the available data is nearly impossible. In politics data, if present, is cherry picked. Proper data analysis is completely absent.

It is far better to let the free market provide the “remedy for all the sorrows of the world” because the solutions attempted will be varied. The non-solutions will quickly end up in the dustbin. The partial solutions will be tweaked and retried. The true solutions will dominate and another “sorrow of the world” will be reduced or eliminated.—Joe]

Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun

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Author Paul Barrett attended the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno last month. I spent several hours talking to him then and have since corresponded some with him. He send me an “Uncorrected Proof” of his new book, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. I finished reading it yesterday.

I liked the book. As he told us in Reno this is the story of how Gaston Glock came to dominate the handgun market in the U.S. It is primarily a book about a business and how success came from not only a great product as the right time but also how anti-gun people were his best salesmen. Paul loves the irony (his next book, unrelated to firearms will have it’s share of irony as well), it shows, and it makes the book all the more pleasurable to read.

Barrett and I come from about as disparate backgrounds as two U.S. citizens could. I grew up on a farm in Idaho with German roots which perhaps go back prior to the the birth of our nation (we are still investigating but it may be one of my great+++ grandfather Huffman’s was on the first U.S. census). I don’t own a Glock and probably have fired less than 50 rounds in a couple different Glock pistols. Barrett lives and works in New York City and his mother is Jewish. She escaped Europe as a little girl. Many of her relatives died in the camps during WWII. This difference lead to more irony as our discussion dove deeper into the issues around guns and it will surface again in my review of the book.

Our different perspective on things was a stressor during our conversations. Things we both thought were obvious to the most casual observer were, “You can’t possibly be serious!” moments for the other. I struggled with this stress and I’m pretty sure he did too. We both wanted this “relationship” to work.

If you want a one sentence summation of my thoughts on his book it is, “Gun owners as well many others will find the story of Glock fascinating and the irony will make you smile.” As I dig into specifics keep this in mind. I am deeply embedded in the movement to expand of the civil rights of gun ownership. So when the book touches on subjects I am an expert on and I think it is even slightly off base it really gets my attention. My disagreement on these items should not be taken as an overall disparagement of the book. It is a very enjoyable read and I recommend it.

There a lot of things that surprised me in the book. Of course there was the behind the scenes story of the creation of the gun, it’s marketing, the legal issues, and the criminals who embezzled from and even tried to murder Gaston Glock. That was all fascinating. But what surprised me was how thoroughly Barrett researched the topic and got into “the gun culture”. He attended the NRA convention, went to a small arms trade show in Germany. He spent a weekend with Massad Ayob. He shot in an IPDA match. He tells us that most police are not particularly good shooters and practice less than many private citizen gun owners. He refers to “the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9”, Heinlein’s famous quote, “An armed society is a polite society”, John Moses Browning, and tells the Suzanna Gratia Hupp story. He explains how a gun can malfunction by “limp wristing” it. He points out anti-gun advocates and that the New York times in particular tried to get Glock handguns banned by making claims for which there was no evidence. He points out Josh Sugarmann’s deliberate deception about “assault weapons”. He briefly tells the story of the efforts to ban “Saturday Night Specials” giving the reader the anti-gun people view:

… Saturday Night Specials had no redeeming social value; they couldn’t plausibly be marketed for target shooting, hunting, or police work. By their very nature, according to this view, cheap handguns were meant only to kill people and therefore were “unreasonably hazardous.”

Then he shoots them down with:

The plaintiffs’ argument had visceral appeal to gun foes, but also significant weaknesses: As a matter of economics and fairness, it didn’t address the concerns of people living in violence-ridden neighborhoods who might seek to defend themselves with cut-rate handguns.

He writes of how Glock advertising their pistol was “significantly more powerful with greater firepower and is much easier to shoot fast and true” drew fire from people like Sugarmann who wrote, “The rise of handguns to dominance in the marketplace has corresponded with an increase in their efficiency as killing machines”. And then he shots them down with the well aimed, “This tough rhetoric appeals to many liberal citizens and scholars. But when drained of emotion and set against firearm realities and crime trends, it loses force.”

I saw this again and again in his book and in my discussions with him. He even started to buy his own handgun but the paperwork required by New York City had a rather chilling effect. I was amazed with the details he knew about culture and the battles we have fought against less than ethical opponents.

With all the points he gets right I was occasionally shocked with his conclusions after correctly laying out the facts. Chapter 1 is about the 1986 FBI shootout in Miami. One of the lessons learned there was that a determined bad guy can take many, many hits (Michael Platt absorbed 12 shots before being stopped) and still be a threat. He correctly reports that law enforcement all over the U.S. concluded from this and other events that a six shot revolver wasn’t adequate for officer safety. Yet Barrett says things like, “It’s not obvious why a civilian handgun owner requires seventeen rounds in a magazine of a Glock pistol.” When I read that I wanted to scream at him, “Because if it is going to take 12 rounds to stop him he is going to really pissed off if I only fired ten!” And that doesn’t even get into the situations where there are multiple assailants and not all of your shots are going to be hits on a moving target that is shooting at you.

He refers to “the loophole that remains for private gun transactions” and says, “An estimated 40 percent of handguns are acquired by private transaction, for which no background check—no paperwork at all—is necessary. That makes no sense.”. Again, this guy lost many relatives to the Nazis in WWII. He is smart guy. Even if he has not read the story of the Belgium Corporal surely after digging that deeply into our culture he could formulate an argument about the risks of firearms registration rather than saying, “That makes no sense.” Barrett likes irony and here I, the German (descendent), am making the case to a descendent of a Holocaust survivor that Jews need to protect themselves from tyrannical governments.

He advocates for “ballistic fingerprinting” apparently without doing the usual research. Had he even read the Wikipedia entry he would have realized this scheme had serious and probably fatal flaws which make the database useless for anything other than gun owner registration.

Again and again I saw this. It was as if he had all the facts, he understood the anti-gun people frequently deliberately lied, relied on emotional appeals, and had their hypothesizes discredited. But when it came time to express his own opinion he wasn’t quite ready to give up many of their conclusions.

There are hints of condescension in places but this may have been editors or marketers rather than the author. A flyer included with the book states, “The Glock is a favorite among concealed-carry buffs”. I found that very insulting. Are people who attend church “religious buffs”? Or are people who marry someone of a different skin color “interracial marriage buffs”?

The back of the “UNCORRECTED PROOF : NOT FOR SALE” book includes some small print that looks like the promotion plans:

  • National review and feature attention
  • 20-city radio satellite tour
  • Author events and interviews out of New York
  • Outreach to law-enforcement blogs
  • Paid search campaign
  • Advertising on sites such as TownHall.com
  • Coordinated outreach with academic marketing to colleges and universities with law-enforcement studies programs
  • Advance reader’s edition available for distribution to urban law-enforcement agencies and mayors in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Miami, Kansas City, and New Orleans
  • eBook edition promoted in all advertising, promotion, and social media outreach

Why the emphasis on law enforcement and not a single mention of gun owner outreach? There are about 80 million gun owners in the U.S. Far, far more than there are police officers. Don’t they think gun owners can read? In addition to the obvious, to my readers, gun blogs there are many gun magazines which reach millions of readers, and there are even online stores that specialize in gun books.

I also found a minor mistake where he implied the “assault weapon ban” was part of the Brady Act. I reported this to him and he thinks he might still be able to get the “glitch” corrected before the book is released in January 2012.

It is still a good book. That his full time job is as a writer shows. I envy his writing skill. I highly recommend this book.

See also other reviews by Ry, Robert Farago, Jim Shepherd (and here), and my previous comments here, here, and here.

Update: Aaron has a review too.

Update2: Review by BobG.

Windows Phone 7.5

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I just updated my phone to Windows Phone 7.5. I love the new I.E. I can finally read my blog on it without enlarging the page and then scrolling from side to side. http://field.modernballistics.com/ is now much more usable too.

Maps now, finally, has “Favorites” and voice directions (I used to hear the void directions being tested for hours from my office when I worked at Microsoft).

The upgraded took longer than I liked but it went smoothly enough. Time to upgrade Barb’s phone now.

Quote of the day—Janet Reno

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The most effective means of fighting crime in the United States is to outlaw the possession of any type of firearm by the civilian populace.

Janet Reno
U.S. Attorney General during the Clinton administration
1991
[Ms. Reno was mistaken. Had such a law been passed there would have been a great deal more “crime” than she would have imagined or been able to handle.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Paul M. Barrett

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Feldman is trying to organize a politically moderate gun owners’ association as an alternative to the NRA. So far, he has not had much luck with that project.

Paul M. Barrett
Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun page 267.
[Richard Feldman,Esq. doesn’t have anything on his web site about trying to do this but Barrett knows him personally and perhaps has inside knowledge that I am not privy to. That aside, this would appear to be the worst error I found in the book. I have a lot of good things to say about the book and will do so in another post. I really liked the book so don’t let my disagreement with Barrett about the quote above adversely color your thoughts about the book. That would be very unfair.

The error in the quote above is as follows: I know many people who have left the NRA and having nothing good to say about the organization. All of them left because the NRA was too “moderate”. They felt the NRA compromised when they shouldn’t have. The anti-gun groups try to paint the NRA as extremist but that is certainly not the viewpoint from the majority of gun owners that I know. That Feldman hasn’t “had much luck with that project” would indicate to me that there may be a problem with his vision. Admittedly the “market” for political gun organizations is a bit crowded and it is always difficult to break into a new market even if you do have a lot of money and/or an exceptional product. My impression is that Feldman has neither. The “product” Feldman is selling, if he is in fact trying to do this, is not going to find a very large market. The people that yearn for a more “moderate” NRA either advocate against guns and gun owners or don’t care about the issue. Neither of which would join such an organization.

Barrett has done a very good job with this book. He has done a lot of research and he accurately reports on many subtle points that I would not have expected him to have found. I’m a little surprised he didn’t realize the statement above does not match the reality as I know it. Perhaps he does recognize it as an error on Feldman’s part but he didn’t comment on it beyond the “not had much luck” quip.

I found similar things in the book on other topics. He has all the facts right and then fails to draw the obvious conclusion or sometimes a jarringly different conclusion from what seems obvious to me. But these are mostly little things. I really liked the book and will report about it at length very soon.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Legal Community Against Violence

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As outlined in Petitioners’ brief, the Second Amendment is a limit on the national government alone and does not constrain the District of Columbia’s legislative authority. See Br. of Petitioners at 35-40. For analogous reasons, the Second Amendment does not serve as a limit on the States and their political subdivisions. Although the Court need not address this issue in this case—which does not involve a challenge to a law passed by a State or one of its political subdivisions—it is well established that the Second Amendment does not apply to the States.

Legal Community Against Violence
January 11, 2008
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AND MAYOR ADRIAN M. FENTY,
Petitioners,
v.
DICK ANTHONY HELLER,
Respondent.
BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE MAJOR AMERICAN CITIES, THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, AND LEGAL COMMUNITY AGAINST VIOLENCE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS
[Sometimes you have to just shake your head in disbelief. D.C. is under the control of the Federal Government! Congress can override any law or act of the D.C. politicians. How did these guys get through high school let alone law school without discovering that the District of Columbia is not a state or one of its political subdivisions? Maybe they are living in the alternate reality where D.C. of those 57 states that Obama said he has visited.

What is for certain is that anti-gun people have very little concern for facts. As near as I can determine they are lying, live in an alternate reality and/or are suffering from Peterson Syndrome.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dennis Henigan

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For the NRA, it was not supposed to be this way. After the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment granted a limited right to have a gun in the home, the NRA bragged that it was just the “opening salvo” in a legal war to use the courts to dismantle the nation’s gun laws.

Yet three years, 400 legal challenges, and “millions of dollars in [NRA] legal bills” later, all the gun lobby has had to show for its efforts is a growing body of case law affirming the right of the people to have strong gun laws short of a total handgun ban. Just last week, the same Texas judge who was previously overruled for ruling that domestic abusers have a right to own guns threw out the NRA’s lawsuit claiming that teens have a right to buy semi-automatic handguns. Never before have so many courts so cogently affirmed the constitutionality of so many strong gun laws in such a short span of time.

Dennis Henigan
October 6, 2011
How Many Second Amendment Cases Will the NRA Lose?
[The NRA is mostly a strawman in this context. SAF is who the Brady Campaign should be (and probably is) worried about.

The total number of victories is a poor metric of how the battle is going. More important is how many Supreme Court victories each side has to their credit. In the last three years, how’s that been going for you Dennis?

Gloat while you can Dennis. I’ll be saving these words for your eating pleasure a few years from now.—Joe]

Style Thwarting Function

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It used to be that your car’s horn control was a 360 degree, or near 360 degree chrome-plated metal ring.  It didn’t take much time or effort to find it when you needed it.  My Ford pickup has two horn buttons– tiny rectangular surfaces in the wheel spokes that are stylistically flush-mounted, much like the controls on an iPod.  Just as the iPod looks cool but can’t be very well controlled by touch due to the carefully flush-mounted buttons, so too the horn buttons for my pickup are designed as if to challenge the driver’s muscle memory and pin-point precision in a desperate situation.

Driving home in the dark last night I noticed a car in front of me swerve into the on-coming lane.  “Idiot” I thought, “probably texting or something…WHOA!”  After driving this pickup for many years, I am now able to stab the horn button in about a tenth of a second.  I am proud of that fact.  It has taken all those years practicing with the same rig to learn to do it.  Of course I wore out one engine at around a quarter million miles, and am well into wearing out the second.  I figure that by the time most people learn to find the horn button in the dark in a panic, they’ve already trashed the vehicle and are on to the next one, having then to start all over with the process of learning to find the horn button in the dark in a panic.

There was a deer, hell bent on crossing the highway ten feet in front of me while I was doing 60 MPH.  Stupid animals.  I’ve found that the white-tailed deer responds very well to short horn blasts, at around 3 to 4 per second.  It mimics the universal alarm sound in the animal world.  A full sized pickup whooshing along at 60 MPH doesn’t give them pause, but that horn will send them into hysterics and they’ll stop whatever they’re doing.  You should have seen the look on that deer’s face.  It looked as though it had been lassoed and yanked backwards, eyeballs bugging out, which is much preferable to having it crawl through my radiator and into the front of my engine at 60 MPH.  Sometimes if the car in front of you swerves, there is a good reason.

My next thought was to look in the rear view mirror.  No traffic.  If I’d hit the deer, at least I could have had time to heave it into the pickup bed without encountering any traffic in my lane.  If you’re going to have your radiator destroyed, at least there could be some compensation in your freezer the following week.  And yes; I can drive without a radiator (or a water pump, or an accessory belt).  Can’t you?  You go until the engine temp red-lines, then you stop and wait for it to cool down.  Restart, repeat as necessary.  I’ve had to do that on two or three occasions, for different reasons.  Drag racers don’t have trivialities like a cooling system and they do just fine.

But enough with the flush-mounted controls, OK?  Engineers; can we agree it’s a dumb idea?