And the “occassional freak” who does something like Dunblane is ACTUALLY LESS of a PROBLEM WITH A GUN than without one !
Without a gun, the Dunblane thing could have been done ‘better and more effectively’ with 2 cans of petrol – one poured round the outside of the building first, to prevent people leaving, then one inside to burn them out – it would kill everyone. (As Bomber Command how to kill thousands of people and the answer is fire, not shrapnel)
But we don’t ban petrol – we cart millions of gallons of the stuff through our city streets every day.
We SHOULD make guns a lot more accessible to the general public – as in Switzerland where EVERY adult male has an automatic assault rifle, no less.
john_u December 12, 2010 WRONG – WE THE PEOPLE SHOULD BE ARMED ! [I find it encouraging this and a number of other pro-gun comments are showing up in a U.K media outlet. Gun rights is not completely dead over there.
I have sometimes considered analyzing crimes committed using firearms and showing there was a “better” way to have committed the crime without a firearm. The mass killings are the easiest to demonstrate this. And as john_u suggests fire is one of the better ways. Driving a vehicle through crowds of people and causing structures to fail are also “good” methods.
I have not done so for two reasons. 1) I’m hesitant to give people ideas on effective mass murder. And 2) There aren’t that many mass murders to analyze.—Joe]
We used 200 grams of Boomerite in each test. By volume this one cup, which was the same amount used the designers in their first tests. They later increased the amount to a soda can full with still no structural failures. We put 500 grams of chalk dust on top of the Boomerite.
In this first pictures you can see the chalk dust on top of the Boomerite. The zip lock bag of Boomerite is just visible in the front hole.
Ry will probably have video to share in a day or three but in the picture below you can see the dispenser was moved a couple feet by the blast. The dispenser appeared to be undamaged.
The second test was essentially the same as the first. The only intentional difference was that the Boomerite wasn’t poked partially through the front and rear holes. This time the dispenser was moved several feet and there was some obvious damage:
I set it up for a third test and expected it would probably “cut loose” this time. The movement was about the same and the fractures widened. Notice the bottom of the containment area is starting to bulge and the middle “rib” is bulging out the back too.
In terms of a long lasting target this has some problems. But it survived three uses which is as much as it really needs for the Boomershoot main event. We should consider cutting the Boomershoot charge in half because I think the ejection of the chalk will be sufficient with a much smaller charge.
On the drive back to my home in Moscow we pondered why the difference between their tests and ours. We had pretty much decided that it was because of the chalk dust on top of the explosives because we just couldn’t imagine Boomerite being that much different than Tannerite. But I replayed the video from the California tests and they used chalk too. So the only other variable that I can think of are the temperature and the Boomerite. Our temperature was about 24 F with the first test done while the metal was probably significantly above that because it had been in the warm vehicle. By the time of the second and third tests the metal was probably close to ambient temperature. Could that temperature change made the metal brittle and weaker?
Some of you … may have decided that, this year, you’re going to celebrate Christmas the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on “The Walton’s”. Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.
Dave Barry Christmas Shopping: A Survivor’s Guide [This comes pretty close to my view of Christmas.—Joe]
I presume she meant “zero” rather than “Oh” but I’ll give her a pass on that. I remember when some typewriters didn’t have the digits ‘1’ and ‘0’ because you were supposed to use a lower case ‘L’ and a capital ‘o’ for them. I will not give her a pass on the intent.
Zero is not possible as long as people and guns exist. No matter how lives are saved with guns, not matter how successful “gun violence prevention” programs are, no matter how many court rules there are that the right to keep in bear arms is a specific enumerated right, this Brady Campaign Board member will demand evermore restrictions on that right.
What she is saying is that guns are somehow different than other tools used to commit murders. If she were to advocate for a position like this in regard to sticks, stones, fists, or feet she would be hauled off to the loony bin. But somehow with a constitutionally protected right at issue there exists an organization that makes her a board member.
The whole lot of them are essentially politically extinct at the Federal level because more and more people are getting a clue as to just how disconnected from reality these people are. We just need to drive them into extinction at the state and local level.—Joe]
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Appellate Court defense of the county gun ban (Wilson, et. al. v. Cook County, et. al.) got off to a bad start when briefs filed by the county before the First District Appellate Court were found to contain factual errors. More specifically, these factual errors included the misquoting of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the DC v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago cases. (The ISRA was a Plaintiff in McDonald). When these errors were brought to light by the plaintiffs, the county hastily filed a motion to withdraw the erroneous briefs in favor of amended versions. Presently, the plaintiffs in the case have moved to strike the amended briefs as the amendments do not remedy the ramifications of the misquotes contained in the original set of briefs. In fact the County may have used their own “errors” to further violate the Court’s rules and to additional arguments and bolster existing arguments in their amended brief.
“We find it interesting that the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office would blame ‘electronic errors’ for the tainting of its briefs with misquotes,” commented ISRA spokesman, Richard Pearson. “This situation is made all the more curious given that the misquotes would fundamentally alter the intent of two landmark Supreme Court decisions – D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago. In the county’s briefs, the two high court decisions are erroneously quoted as addressing ‘common handguns’ whereas the decisions, as written, do not contain the phrase ‘common handguns.’ There is a clear difference when one addresses handguns versus ‘common’ handguns in that the latter would drastically reduce the types of firearms whose ownership is protected under the Second Amendment.”
“If I were a cynic,” continued Pearson, “I’d suggest that these ‘electronic errors’ were just poorly executed attempts by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office to re-write the Heller and McDonald decisions more to Mayor Daley’s liking.”
How can anyone not see the bigotry in these actions? How is this any different than the way the politicians of 50 to 70 years ago in the deep south kept the blacks repressed? They have been shown to be in violation of the highest law of the land and yet they continue to resist conforming to it “dragging their feet” and lying every step of the way.
At what point are we going to finally send in the U.S. Marshalls and National Guard to arrest these bigots and/or force them into compliance?
In a somewhat related post see Sebastian’s post where he asks, “How long before the gig is up, and even the die hards realize it?” I think the U.S. Marshalls arresting the politicians enforcing unconstitional laws would pretty much cause even the most dimwitted to get realize the exit light was glowing.
It should have started with “Fuck you!” and ended with “Fuck you!” In the middle it should have said, “Provide for the common defense.”
The 1st Amendment should read, “Congress will make no law” and we are done.
Jim G. December 14, 2010 [I had lunch with Jim. Instead of the usual gun control issues we were talking about the TSA and health care. This wasn’t even the portion of the conversation where the water I was drinking spurted out my nose.
The NRSC sent out a mass e-mail this week, linking to a web-site poll they have going. Seriously, guys; you haven’t been listening all year?
It may just be that poll-taking is a pet peeve of mine, but really; if you came into the field (any field) not knowing what you want do and why you want to do it, why are you there at all? You ran for office, in this case, and really, really wanted to win. You spent tons of money and long hours getting elected, and now you don’t know why you’re there? Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot?
As usual, the poll questions are multiple choice, and as usual the answers could be easily interpreted in opposite ways, depending on the observer. Unlike many polls however, there are places to enter comments.
They start with; “What do you think should be the first legislation addressed by the new Congress?”
There are four choices, plus “Other”.
I left them all blank and then entered this comment;
It’s really quite simple; if you understood the American Principles of Liberty, you wouldn’t need to take a poll. The fact that you’re asking tells me you’re fishing for a position, trying to figure out what it is you should PRETEND to believe. Crack a history book or two and figure it out, then run on those principles, actually stand for them in practice, and win big.
Then came; “Please rank in order of importance to you personally, the following issues” and there were nine choices, starting with abortion (really?) plus “other”. I left them all blank, and filled in the next comment box;
Regarding #4; See, there you go again. I don’t see liberty on the ballot. Never have. Hence the problem. This isn’t rocket science, people. Defeat the left. Go for the jugular and drive them and their programs into political extinction. Get Progressivism out of the Republican Party so we can win more elections, shrink the federal government (I mean real, meaningful contractions, and closure of departments) and “promote the general welfare” BY PROMOTING LIBERTY. It doesn’t work any other way.
Do we demand perfection immediately? Of course not. 1; There is no such thing as perfection, and 2; things take time. The point is; if you have the Ideals, you naturally trend toward them. If you don’t have the Ideals, stand aside and make room for someone who does.
But after you submit the poll, you’re taken directly to a donation form. Chances are, no one’s interested in the poll (it’s a piece of jr. high school crap anyway) so much as they’re interested in the raising of funds.
Here’s another (bonus) message for you Senate Republicans;
I’ll consider sending you money after I see some results. I’m tired of supporting mushy, confused Republicans who can’t decide what it is they should pretend to stand for. Been there, done that, and I’m never doing it again.
You know about all those eligible voters who sit out election after election? Yeah; maybe that’s a clue you’re still not getting, and maybe, just maybe, it’s a sign that there are millions of votes available to someone who will, for once, actually stand for American ideals rather than simply jabbering about them during campaign season and hoping we’re still dumb enough to fall for it. Time is running out.
Really? You guys didn’t see the spontaneity and scale of the tea party movement? You really didn’t understand a bit of it?
Unlike section 12031, the District of Columbia law did not contain, and the Supreme Court declined to infer, an exception for self-defense. Id. The Heller Court did not reach the question of whether the law would have been constitutional had there been an exception for self-defense. See id. As a consequence, the Court declines to assume that section 12031 places an unlawful burden on the right to carry a firearm for self-defense.
The Brady Campaign is quite pleased with this order because it says concealed carry is not a guaranteed right. But what they don’t mention is that the reason given by the judge that it doesn’t infringe is that an exemption exists for open carry. While the courts don’t always rule consistently this does imply that some sort of public carry is believed to constitutionally protected. Hence the Brady Campaign may be crowing about how sweet the grapes are because concealed carry restrictions are upheld while open carry becomes a guaranteed right beyond their reach.—Joe]
I know this is late. I updated my Righthaven Blacklist utility within a few hours of hearing the news a week ago but didn’t have time to create the blog post at the time and then forgot about it…
Via Clayton Cramer, No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money, and Sebastian (this last site is down for at least a few more hours) there has been additional online news sources that are suing people for using excerpts from their sites. The utility has been updated to include these new sites.
Son-in-law John and I went to the Paul Bunyan (Pullayup Washington) USPSA match yesterday. It rained all Saturday night and continued to rain throughout the match. This made for some deep water in places, difficult to tape targets (clear plastic bags are put over the targets to help keep them dry), and soggy score sheets and shooters. We call it “Liquid Sunshine” and have a good time anyway.
On Friday my officemate (Priyanka), my boss (Sajib) , and I were talking about weekend plans and I told them I was going to attend this match with John, my son-in-law, who is in the army. Priyanka, exclaimed, “Oh! I’ll bet he is really good!” I tried to explain that actually I was quite a bit better at this sport than John. I’m not sure either one of them really believed me. So this is for them: I came in second in Limited Class with 90.43% match percentage while John came in fourth with 47.70%.
What this basically means (it’s not quite this simple but it’s close enough) is that for a given level of accuracy, on the average, I can shoot the same course of fire in about one half the time as John. Or expressed another way, for a given speed, on the average, I can shoot about twice as accurate as John. Why is that? The answer is I have practiced a lot more than John and for pistol shooting I have had better training. I also have better equipment than John but that is not even close to the dominate factor.
This was the first time I had shot a match at this range and they had more high round count stages than what we usually do at the Lewiston Pistol Club in Idaho where I usually shoot. High round count stages are fun. You not only get more trigger time but you get to “run and gun” too. It’s not particularly realistic for defensive shooting (the last statistic I read was that the average gun fight was over in 2.4 seconds) but generally people think they are more fun. Having fun means you are likely to shoot more. And even if on the first two and a half seconds of your average USPSA match relates to reality you end up practicing a lot more than if you only shot matches that were composed of stages that lasted less than two and a half seconds.
The stage was 12 targets spread over a fairly large distance with barricades to go around to get to the last targets. It’s a little hard to see in the still picture and you have to watch for it in the video but there is a rope between the barrels as a fault line so you can’t get too close to the targets.
Stage 2 (In The Rain) had targets on opposite sides of the bay with barricades which made it difficult to avoid a lot of moving. Plus there were targets in moderately difficult to reach positions.
Shooting while on the move helped for some of the targets but others required full stops.
Stage 3 (Get Off Santa’s Back) was a little different. It is composed of three strings of fire. One is “freestyle”, one is “strong hand only”, and one is “weak hand only”. Although it is difficult to see in the video there are four paper targets. Two on each side of the hardcover (steel painted red) target. The paper targets are overlapping and it is difficult to see where the lower target ends and the upper target begins. The requirement was that for each string you put one bullet into each target. There were penalties for misses, extra shots, and extra hits on any given target. I got all my hits with no penalties in a total of 13.38 seconds. Nearly everyone else had a better time but my accuracy was much better. This earned me a stage percentage of 86.40%.
Some other people were not as fortunate and one person had so many penalties that they zeroed the stage.
Stage 4 (1 Tuesday #2) required moving backward! The shooter began with their hands on either side of the opening in the barricade. There are four (only two are standing in the still photo) steel targets to be shot through the opening then you had to back up to shoot two targets on either side around and through the barrels for a minimum of 12 shots. I thought I had hit the last steel and started to move on, noticed it didn’t fall, and had to return to finish it off. It took me 8.06 seconds and I got all ‘A’ hits on the paper. This earned me a 69.27% stage percentage and last place for limited.
Son-in-law John, for the first time ever, beat me on this stage. He did it with all ‘A’ hits in 8.05 seconds. Just 1/100th of a second better than me.
Stage 5 (I Wanna YoYo) was four banks of six steel plates. Two banks of plates could be shot from each of two shooting boxes. You were required to change boxes between shooting banks. Hence you had run back and forth between the boxes. Ability to shoot on the move is of nearly no advantage for this stage.
On my first run there was a range equipment failure about two thirds of the way through the stage when one of the plates fell without me shooting it. This required a reshoot and I did much worse the second time through but I still took second place in Limited with stage percentage of 71.91% after knocking down all 24 plates, and running back and forth, in 39.09 seconds.
Stage 6 (Six A’Clock) was the last stage. It was composed of three strings of fire with three sets of targets. The first set was a single target which you were required to put six rounds into. The second set was two targets and you were were required to put three rounds into each target. The third set was three targets and two no-shoot targets and you were required to put two rounds each into the “shoot” targets and you were penalized if you hit the no-shoot targets, had misses, or fired more than the specified number of rounds. I won this stage with a total time of 10.38 seconds for the 18 rounds. Nearly everyone else in my division had better times but I had much better hits. I scored 81 out of the possible 90 points with no penalties and the next best shooter only scored 75 points and had 20 points in penalties.
I have a problem with more than three rounds on a single target. I can shoot faster than I can count and have to slow my shooting to match my ability to count. When confronted with this situation, and it works out for the stage design, I will load only six (or ‘N’) rounds in the gun. Then I just shoot until the gun runs dry. That is what I did in this case. I didn’t get the individual times or the splits between shots while at the match but I went through the video frame by frame on the first target and found that from the muzzle flash of the first shot to the muzzle flash of the last shot it took 1.17 seconds. This is an average of 0.234 seconds between the five shots. This was at a distance of about 30 feet. IIRC I had five “A” hits and one “C” hit.
It turns out that I accidently used a bad magazine (it needs a new follower) and it didn’t hold the slide open on the last shot. This caused me to drop the hammer on an empty chamber and I was somewhat surprised that the gun was empty. No matter—Sometimes a little surprise is a good thing.
I keep thinking Brady Campaign supporters must require frequent trips to Sears for their special needs with these sort of videos being put on the web.
At what point does this right becomes infringed in Breyer opinion? What if there was only one city in the country that allowed the possession and use of a pistol in public. Suppose that one city was Barrow Alaska (300 miles NORTH of the artic circle) and that was only when there was a polar bear watch in effect (yes, they have polar bears roaming the streets sometimes). Is there still “no problem”?
As pointed out in comments to the above posts (note that Snowflakes in Hell is down and will be for at least a few more hours) this statement by Breyer can be shown to be irrational and inconsistent with the rest of the Bill of Rights by transforming the restricted object to be something other than a gun such as:
So if we in Texas decide to ban Islam, and you want to practice that particular religion, then you should just go somewhere else to do it? (StanInTexas)
Let’s make a law that all political speech by a Democrat is illegal in Texas. If a Democrat wants to make a political statement, they needs to go to New York or Oklahoma. (StanInTexas)
If blacks wish to be served at the lunch counter, they simply must take the blacks-Only Bus to New York where they allow such things. (Weer’d Beard)
Can’t get an abortion in Texas? Well just get on an airplane and fly to Maryland! No problem there right? (pete)
Here are some of my contributions to that meme:
Are you in an interracial marriage? Do you like to live together? Well then get on the bus and go to San Francisco. There is no problem!
Do you want a trial by jury? Then don’t commit a crime unless you live in Washington State. There is no problem!
Do you want due process? Then move to Idaho. There is no problem!
Do you want representation by a competent attorney? No problem—Just make sure his name isn’t Stephen Breyer.
Bulk Ammo is a sponsor here and sent me the following:
On the 12th Day of Christmas BulkAmmo.com gave to me… a 12ga- $15 Off Coupon. Use the coupon code 12gaXMAS for $15 off 250 rounds of 12ga Rio Royal Buckshot Ammo from BulkAmmo.com. Expires on 12/26/10- Pass the Christmas cheer along and repost!
Phillip Van Cleave From the Virginia Citizens Defense League December 12, 2010 Death of eight-year-old becomes a symbol of lost struggle by US gun control lobby [The struggle over gun ownership was a legal conflict between individual responsibility and group punishment. The individual is taking the lead for a while. Let us hope it continues and spreads to other areas as well.—Joe]
