Blogshoot! (BUMPED with addendum)

The annual Central Arizona Blogshoot is scheduled for Sunday, January 10 - just two weeks away. As previously, it will be held at the Elsy Pearson Public Shooting Range just off Trekell Road and I-8, just West of I-10 near Casa Grande.  (Ignore the labeling on the map.  The one marked "Pinal County Public Shooting Range" is the one we're at.  The other is the Casa Grande Trap and Skeet club.)

Same as last year, the range opens at 7:00AM. There are no rangemasters. There are no chairs - bring something to sit on. The firing line is covered and there are concrete shooting benches, however.


And the city has porta-potties out there on a permanent basis, so we don't have to rent our own (but bring your own TP just in case.)

The rules are pretty simple:


No explosives, no .50BMG rifles, clean up after yourself, don't be a dick.

The rifle range is 300 yards deep with the first berm at 200.  The mountains that form the ultimate backstop are another 300 yards out and farther.  The ground there is reinforced concrete disguised as sun-baked clay. Forget about any target stand that needs to stick into the ground, it ain't happenin'. Steel and targets that don't need taping are best. And the benches are funky-shaped. Regular camping chairs are marginal, stools are better. I bring a folding chair, a target stand made of 2" PVC pipe, and my steel swingers. I also have some .22 rimfire rated rolling targets made of steel.

I recommend you bring:  water or other non-alcoholic beverages (no alcohol on the range), sunscreen, ear and eye protection.  Ladies, don't wear anything low-cut or open-necked.  Yes, I'm sure it looks lovely, but you don't want to catch hot brass down in there.  OPTIONAL:  Something to shoot with, and something to shoot AT.  If you're a reader or a non-gun blogger interested in coming to a off-the-cuff funshoot, please come on down!  I imagine most of us will be bringing multiple firearms and lots of ammo, but if you don't, well, I'm willing to let people shoot my stuff (with my ammo), and I'm willing to let them shoot at my targets.

Hope to see you there!

ADDENDUM:  It has been brought to my attention that exit 199 to I-8 off of  Westbound I-10 will be closed starting Monday, January 4.  So if you're coming from the direction of Tucson, the recommendation is to exit at Jimmy Kerr (Exit 198, I believe) get back on I-10 Eastbound, then take Exit 199 to get on I-8 West.  Exit I-8 at Trekell Road.

Pastafarians Rejoice!

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is now approved to perform marriages in New Zealand! 

Texas Pastafarians are allowed to wear the sacred colander on their heads when getting photographed for driver's licenses, will marriage here in the States be far behind?

Boomershoot 2016

OK, I'm officially signed up - Position 26.  Saturday Field Fire and Saturday High Intensity shoot, Saturday dinner, and Sunday Long Range event.  Room reservations at the Konkolville Motel are made for Friday through Sunday.

Still need a co-shooter/spotter.

And I really need to start working on my .300 WM loads!

As Tam Said: Same Scene, Different Angles

The first one, from the film Secondhand Lions:


The second, from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather:

Have a Glowier Christmas

Peace on Earth, Good Will to All:


(Click for full size)

Wow, That Was a Lot of Work

Looks like I just finished another epic comment exchange over at Quora.  I'll give Matthew Heminger credit, he held on longer than most, but then he's a self-confessed hypocritical gun owner in favor of controlling other people's guns.

Whew.  Glad that's over.

Boomershoot?

I'm seriously considering attending Boomershoot 2016, which is April 22-24 this year.  Unfortunately DC, my shooting buddy, can't make it this year.  I need somebody to share a slot with and to trade spotting duties.  I'd also like to trade off on driving and split the fuel costs.  It's a two-day drive from Tucson to Orofino, ID.  I could pick somebody up in or near Phoenix or Salt Lake.

Anybody interested?

Tam's Fun Show Song, as Sung by Bonnie

For your enjoyment!


Needs another stanza, I think!

Here are the lyrics:

Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyeful
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

Thank Kelly Grayson for the video and Bonnie Burgette for the vocals.

I Guess Harvey Weinstein's Anti-NRA Movie is on Hold...

Remember when Harvey said "They are going to wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them"?

Guess he's got bigger fish to fry at the moment:

The Weinstein Brothers Have Oscar Gold. Now They Need Cash.

While a decent filmmaker, it would appear that Harvey's not much of a businessman.

Imagine that.

And not a mention of the anti-NRA film in the NYT piece.

Monty Python Reference Aside, It's No Longer Funny

Chris Muir dismembers The Black Knight the Republican Party:


What are they going to do next?  Bleed on us?

If Donald Trump was Voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch...

Seen on Rachel Lucas' Facebook page.



He'd win by a landslide.

QotD: The 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries Edition

Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary comic fame is finally publishing the entire list of his 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries (my favorite of which is Maxim 11:  Everything is air-droppable at least once.)  If you bought a copy of his upcoming role-playing game, you get a copy of the book.  If not, you had to wait for his annual calendars for twelve new Maxims each year.  No calendar this year, though.  You have to wait for the book.  But he has given out two new ones, (along with the original 51) and Maxim 64 is today's Quote of the Day:

An ounce of sniper is worth a pound of suppressing fire.

Quora Asks...

Someone asked, "Why are the presidential candidates so lame this year?"

I answered:

Back in the dim and distant past of the year 2000 when George W. Bush was running against Al Gore, Jr., comedian Lewis Black had the following observation:

In my lifetime we've gone from Ike to G.W. Bush.

In my lifetime we've gone from JFK to Albert Gore.

If this is evolution, in a few years we're going to be voting for PLANTS!

Long, long before that, newspaper columnist Henry Louis Mencken said:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Ladies and gentlemen, this may be the election year for Phil O'Dendron.

Quote of the Day

Found on Facebook:

Blogshoot!

OK, let's schedule this thing for Sunday, January 10, 2016.  The venue will once again be the Elzy Pearson Public Shooting Range outside of Casa Grande, AZ, just South of I-8, just West of I-10.  Range opens about 7AM - roughly dawn.  Getting there early means getting a shooting bench.

The range has three areas with shooting benches and sun shades. There is a 100 yard range, a 300 yard range, and a 25 yard range. There's also a bigass rock outcropping on the side of the mountain about 600 yards downrange if you want something to bounce bullets off of. The city of Casa Grande has seen fit to equip the range with a Porta-pottie, but there still isn't any running water. Everyone needs to bring lots of fluids, if nothing else. Oh, and sunscreen. It may be cool, but the UV count is still high.

The range is unattended. We are expected to behave ourselves and clean up afterward. The site is posted "Absolutely No Explosives," so no Tannerite on site, and no exploding targets of any kind. Sorry. They don't like .50BMG at the range, but I've seen people shooting them there and so far as I know, no one has complained.

The same cannot be said for Tannerite.

Full auto, on the other hand, is A-OK. (Just have your paperwork. The police range is about 400 yards away, and they have come to inspect paperwork.)

There are concrete shooting benches, but no chairs. Bring your own. The shooting area is fenced, so no vehicles downrange. If your stuff is heavy, bring a cart that'll fit through a 3' man-gate. (I have one of those.)

The range HAS NO TARGET STANDS. Bring something to put your targets on. The ground is about as hard as concrete, so the cheap-ass wire frames you're supposed to stick in the ground? Uh-uh. My stand is made of 2" PVC pipe and 2x2 lumber. Other people just bring big cardboard boxes they set on the ground, or their own target stands that just sit on the surface. Whatever works for you.  I'll also be bringing some steel targets that can stand up to .300 Win Mag.


Oh, NO GLASS.

Bear in mind, this is a public range. Other people not associated with this shoot will be there, too, and recently a negligent discharge at that range resulted in a 14 year-old girl being shot through the chest. She'll survive, but just damn.

We've been doing this since about 2010, so c'mon out and have a good time.  Please leave a comment if you think you can attend.

Hoplophobia

Hoplophobia: n. a morbid fear of weapons (Col. Jeff Cooper)

Here's an example:

Growing up, my greatest fear was dying in a school shooting. I still remember: Two boys in black walking into my classroom, one of them holding a stapler at a right angle. I saw the matte black. My mind read: gun. I panicked. I grabbed the arm of the student next to me. “What?” he asked, startled. I started shaking and laughing and breathing and sweating. The boys were only stopping in to see if my math teacher had any extra staples. They were not there to kill us, me first in the front row.

As long as guns exist, I don’t have a chance of saving the world. I feel useless against daily tragedy, against assault rifles and bullets. Here is something humiliating: I am afraid to write all this. Some people love guns. I do not love guns. I wish fewer people owned guns. Often, I wish no one owned guns. I realize many people will disagree with me, and I do not want someone who loves guns to hurt me.

What pathetic hubris!  "As long as guns exist, I don’t have a chance of saving the world."  You sure your shoulders are strong enough for that load? 

And sweetheart? Let Mr. Spock soothe your fears:

I do not have answers. I do not know which kinds of guns should be allowed and what types of background checks are most effective.

(And on a very personal note: I deal with mental illness every day....

This is my shocked face.

I visited the author's Twitter feed. I found that she had re-tweeted one by Matt Taibbi:

Putting aside the gun control argument for a moment, I wish people could simply agree that in an ideal world, there would be no guns.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2015

That prompted me to write my fourth Tweet ever:

A world with no guns? It's run by large men with swords and is not "equal," "fair," "safe," or "democratic." https://t.co/W1v4pA1Zwe

— smallestminorty (@smallestminorty) December 14, 2015

This is what we're up against, folks.  Magical thinking and mental illness.

Got Another Live One at Quora

A guy who claims to be an NRA member, but...

(Bumped) Let's See Who Still Reads This Blog

So, who's up for another Southern/Central Arizona Blogshoot?  It's about that time of year again.  Elsy Pearson Public Shooting Range, Casa Grande, AZ.  Chime in in the comments.

UPDATE:  New post.  The date is January 10.  Please check in there if you think you're coming.

The Christmas Tree for My Office Just Arrived

I'll put it up on Monday:

Markley's Law

XKCD weighs in on Markley's Law as only XKCD can:


As someone on Facebook noted, I wonder if the 'gun as a phallic symbol' meme explains why they keep wanting to grab 'em?

Thomas Sowell: Wealth, Poverty and Politics

His latest Uncommon Knowledge interview.  Worth your 45 minutes.


My favorite living economist and philosopher.  Still looking good and thinking brilliantly at 85.

I'd Like to Make an Observation

Not one of my three AR-15's is a "weapon of war."

But my M1 Garand, M1 Carbine, 1917 Enfield, No. 5 Mk 1, No. 4 Mk I* and P14 all are.

And you can't have those either.

Why the Sudden Push for Gun Control?

Glenn Reynolds says:

Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”

Those are all things that the Obama Administration — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — don’t want to talk about.

I think he may have missed something.

Remember Solyndra? $535 million in loan guarantees up in smoke?

Heard about Solana? A solar power station built here in Gila Bend, AZ? The Dept. of Energy under Obama guaranteed $1.45 billion in loans for that project. And now the parent company, Spain's Abengoa, is on the brink of bankruptcy.

But wait! It gets better!

In addition to the $1.45 billion for Solana, the Dept. of Energy also guaranteed another $1.2 billion loan for the construction of the Mojave solar power station in California - also an Abengoa project.

So $2.65 billion in loan guarantees - almost five times more than the Solyndra debacle - and another solar power pipe-dream flushes down the toilet. In an election year.

Let's talk about gun control, instead.  Oh, and climate change.

The media - Democrat operatives with bylines.

Yes, Yes I Am

Found at Facebook:



Here I stand.  I can do no other.

Interesting Information from the Trenches

My favorite local Merchant O'Death reports:

So, three days after the shooting in San Bernardino and we still have ARs on the shelf. As a matter of fact, we have sold a whopping total of TWO ARs and have put one on layaway. No other type of "assault rifle" has left the shop. I have yet to sell a single hi-cap mag for any type of long gun. Still have plenty of .223/5.56, .308, 7.62X39, 9mm, .40, .45ACP, .380 auto, .38 Special.....hell, we have a lot of everything except .22LR and .22 Mag.

We have been really busy the last three days for sure. I would attribute that to the usual hustle and bustle of the coming holiday but I know better. I have yet to hear a customer say "I want to get my husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend a gun for Christmas...." Judging by some of the purchases I have no doubt that some of the firearms being bought are to be stashed under the tree. Most of them are obviously being purchased to be stashed in purse or pocket.

Compact, concealable handguns are making a mass exodus along with spare magazines/speed loaders and the attendant ammunition. The majority of the buyers are older folks, men and women, couples and singles The usual "tacti-cool" crowd are noticeable by their absence. A large proportion of the buyers are inquiring about CCW classes as well as basic firearms handling courses and public ranges.

While there is no sense of hysteria among our patrons, there is an increasing amount of concern being voiced. Not so much about the political climate but more about the fact that the shooters in California had links to terrorists organizations in the Middle East. I do sense a bit of shock in a lot of folks as if they have finally realized that the threat is very real and not just something that happens "over there".

I would imagine that the SAR show in Phoenix this weekend is doing a land office business. I'll be interested to see what Monday brings. I do believe that POTUS is going to address the nation tomorrow regarding the recent event. This should be stunning....

I wonder if Tam is seeing similar things in Indiana.

ETA, 12/10/15:  The Washington Post reports:

Read the whole thing.

How About "No." Does "No" Work for You?

So much for "nobody wants to take your guns."

Seems the New York Times, Paper of (making up the) Record, found it worthwhile to put an op-ed on its front page for the first time in forever.  The topic?  Banning "assault weapons" - oh, wait, I'm sorry - "End(ing) the Gun Epidemic in America."  Excerpt:

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection.

As was the Brown Bess musket, the 1903 Springfield, and now the AR-15. Your point?

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

Considering that our fellow citizens in Connecticut, New York and California won't even register them, I think your idea of banning them is a complete non-starter.

So, how does "NO" work for you?

LAYERS of Editorial Oversight

Another invocation of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

The Clock Boy

Bill Whittle's latest:

"...no political will in the country to address inner-city violence."

As I've said here and on other fora, if you really want to do something about homicide by firearm then you need to pay attention to who's doing the killing, who's doing the dying, and where it is taking place.  ProPublica has an article out, How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives, on this topic, and the title to this post is THE pullquote from it.

Some other choice selections:

In 2012, 90 people were killed in shootings like the ones in Newtown and Aurora, Colorado. That same year, nearly 6,000 black men were murdered with guns.

--

Mass shootings, unsurprisingly, drive the national debate on gun violence. But as horrific as these massacres are, by most counts they represent less than 1 percent of all gun homicides. America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.

Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men.

Avoiding that fact has consequences. Twenty years of government-funded research has shown there are several promising strategies to prevent murders of black men, including Ceasefire. They don’t require passing new gun laws, or an epic fight with the National Rifle Association. What they need — and often struggle to get — is political support and a bit of money.

--

Lost in the debate is that even in high-crime cities, the risk of gun violence is mostly concentrated among a small number of men. In Oakland, for instance, crime experts working with the police department a few years ago found that about 1,000 active members of a few dozen street groups drove most homicides. That’s .3 percent of Oakland’s population.

--

Two weeks after Obama unveiled his plan, (Pastor Michael) McBride and dozens of other clergy members, many of them from cities struggling with high rates of gun violence, met again with staffers from Vice President Biden’s task force.

The mood at the January 29 meeting was tense. Many of the attendees, including McBride, felt the president’s agenda had left out black Americans.

“The policy people working for Biden worked with the reality of Congress,” said Teny Gross, one of the original Boston Miracle outreach workers who now leads the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. “What they were proposing to us was very limited and was not going to help the inner city.”

Gross said he “blew a gasket.” The clergy members in the room were pleading for help. “We bury hundreds of kids every year in the inner city,” Gross recalled them telling the administration representative. “Some of the solutions need to apply to us.”

A staffer said that the political will of the country was not focused on urban violence, several ministers who attended the meeting recalled.

“What was said to us by the White House was, there’s really no support nationally to address the issue of urban violence,” said the Rev. Charles Harrison, a pastor from Indianapolis. “The support was to address the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas — schools where white kids were killed.”

The Rev. Jeff Brown, from Boston, was angered by the administration’s calculated approach. “When you say something like that and you represent the President of the United States, and the first African-American President of the United States, you know, that’s hugely disappointing,” he said.

It would seem that Obama's a huge disappointment to a lot of people.

RTWT.  And especially the comments.

For Your Thanksgiving Enjoyment

Found at Facebook:

This is Interesting

In 1998 the Massachusetts legislature enacted Chapter 180, a gun control law requiring residents to acquire a Firearms ID card before owning any weapon.  "Weapon" being defined as anything as or more potent than pepper spray.  The FID card application cost $25.  There was a pre-existing law requiring a "license to carry."

That cost for the FID was raised in 2003 to $100.  Some time after that, the permit fee for chemical sprays was reduced back to $25, but firearms permits remained at $100.

As a result:

If the intent of the Gun Control Act of 1998 was to discourage the sport of hunting and competitive target shooting and to disarm Massachusetts citizens, it must be considered a howling success. In 10 years since its passage, the number of licensed gun owners has decreased from 1,500,000 to 220,000, an 85 percent drop, according to figures provided by the by the House Post Audit and Oversight Committee.

Of course, supporters of the law made claims like:

"Fewer firearms on the street makes life safer for everyone," said Robert F. Crowley, Quincy's police chief. "The average citizen who has a gun 24-7 I don't believe has the experience, knowledge, and training to know when and if they should use a firearm."

And

“Today, Massachusetts leads the way in cracking down on gun violence,” said Republican Governor Paul Cellucci as he signed the bill into law. “It will save lives and help fight crime in our communities.” Scott Harshbarger, the state’s Democratic attorney general, agreed: “This vote is a victory for common sense and for the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” One of the state’s leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. “The new gun law,” he predicted, “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.”

And

The author of the law, state Senator Cheryl Jacques, was pleased that the Bay State’s stiff new restrictions had made it possible to “weed out the clutter.”

Nice to know that the majority of legal gun owners were considered "the clutter."

But the reality?

If the intent was to reduce crime, then that law must be considered a miserable failure. Based on incidents per 100,000, gun-related homicides are up 68 percent, assault related gun injuries up 72 percent, assault related hospital discharges up 160 percent, gun assault Emergency Dept visits up 222 percent and gun assault outpatient observations up 538 percent. Keep in mind that these increases occurred when there were 1,280,000 fewer licensed gun owners in the state.

And:

Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Globe reported this month — “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for gun-control activists to admit they were wrong.

We know better than that. The philosophy cannot be wrong!
 
But now there's better news:

The number of legal gun owners in Massachusetts is growing. The 22News I-Team obtained and analyzed state data showing how many people have a license to carry from 2009 to September 2015.

378,642 people or one in every 14 adults has a gun license in Massachusetts. Up from 227,612 in 2010. A 66% increase.

Still a far cry from 1.5 million, but things are finally moving in the right direction again.

As always, the stated intent of "gun control" laws is to increase public safety, but the result of these laws is to disarm the general public, and public safety suffers.  After all, the mantra of The Other Side™ is that "the number of guns" in circulation is "the problem."  Therefore "the solution" must be to reduce that number to a level indistinguishable from zero.

Never forget that.

Why We're Winning

Somebody once said:

I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.

I think this guy gets it (seen on the streets of Tucson):

Quote of the Day - Sudden Jihad Edition

From Sean Sorrentino on Facebook:

If we keep pretending to ourselves that this takes "Extensive pre-planning and training," then we fool ourselves into believing that it can't happen. The real limiting factor is finding about a dozen psychos who are so mentally whacked that they think that this is a good idea, but are still composed enough that they can work together effectively. The tools and the tactics are easy to pick up. It's the broken, yet not shattered brains that are in short supply.

RTWT.

Iowahawk Scores Again

The man is a national treasure who should have his own monument on the D.C. Mall.

Yes, This Is a Perfect Representation of Modern Edumacashun

This does explain the recent actions at Yale and the University of Missouri.

Tough history coming, indeed.

Maryland Scraps its IBIS System

Maryland scraps gun "fingerprint" database after 15 failed years.

A surprising admission of reality.

If you're interested in the "Why" behind the (extremely overdue) decision, read my 2005 post, Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn't (and Won't) Work.

Quote of the Day - War on Women Edition

Seen at Facebook in response to Glamour Magazine's announcement of Bru... Caitlyn Jenner as "Woman of the Year":

Not only do we make better money than women, we also apparently make better WOMEN than women.

But that's not QotD.  My wife's reaction to that comment is:

They DO! They work harder at it!

Your Moment of Zen

It's been awhile.  Saw this guy's work at an art show/sale this morning - Victor Beer Photography.  He does large-scale hi-res on canvas - looks like photorealistic oil paintings, but they're oilrealistic photographs.  This image does not do justice to the real thing, but it's the best I can do:


Had I wall space, I could see a couple of his pieces hanging in my house.  They really are spectacular in person.

Blocked at Quora.com

Well, I've been temporarily blocked at Quora.com for violating their "Be Nice, Be Polite" policy.  Can't post there until October 30.  In the mean time, I guess I can still post here!

If you're unfamiliar, Quora is a site where anybody can ask anything, and anybody who joins up can respond.

Ran across this jewel over there and thought I'd share it.  The question asked was, "What will it take to radically change America's gun culture?"  Like there's only one.

Seems this guy thinks he's struck upon something original.

Avoiding getting dragged into the gun control debate and attempting to answer your original question, I would say there are at least two options, both of which would be lengthy and difficult in application. First, like cigarettes, the government could embark on a long term effort of making gun ownership and gun use difficult and expensive, while propagandizing against equating guns with generally positive terms such as "liberty" and "freedom", instead instilling in future generations the association of guns with negatives such as "murder" and "anti-social". Realizing that a goodly number of people holding social and political power in the US are themselves gun nuts, you can imagine this is a remote possibility. Equally problematic is the idea of revolutionary change in the US which removes all notions of American exceptionalism, militarism and conservative ideology from popular thought.

Summing up, the two paths I see involve public "shaming" of gun people in the same manner as smokers are publically(sic) shamed today, or the active suppression of what I think are really defining characteristics of America: conservative ideology, religious ideology, fierce individualism, a tendency towards conspiracy theory, a preference for violence as a solution to social and individual problems, and mistrust of government. As you might guess, I'm not optimistic.

As Instapundit once said, "It’s pretty irritating, being shamed by people who have none themselves."

He apparently doesn't realize that his prescription is precisely how it was done in the UK.  I have to wonder, though, at what form his "active suppression" would take.  What's most interesting to me however, is what he himself describes as the "really defining characteristics of America,"

• Conservative ideology
• Religious ideology
• Fierce individualism
• Mistrust of government 

You begin to understand Barack Obama's appeal to people like him when Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States of America.

They're ashamed of it.  They hate it. 

So yeah, I do think they're un-American.  They admit it themselves.

Got Law?

Sorry for the hiatus.  Busy, and I've been engaging over at Quora.com.  Got a couple of essays rattling around in the back of my head, but in the meantime, here's Bill Whittle's latest:

The Steel

Bill Whittle's latest:

How to Create a Gun-Free America

I've been playing over at Quora.com recently.  Sorry I've not updated TSM much, but I do think this belongs here:


Yeah. Good luck with that.

You Should Probably Say it Now

Bill Whittle's latest Afterburner, "Very Old Men"

The Martian

I saw The Martian this morning with my dad, a former steely-eyed missile man himself.

Matt Damon or not, FREAKING OUTSTANDING film. Howard Tayler (of Schlock Mercenary fame) said of it, 

I'm now declaring that The Martian, (movie) is the best hard science fiction movie I have ever seen. It is not a perfect film, but it is an outstanding film that speaks the way only a film can, and uses the medium in ways that the very best films do.

I concur.

I will be seeing it on the big screen again.

Day 2 of the Gun Rights Policy Conference

CSPAN is here.  And it will be livestreamed here.

Quote of the Day - GRPC Edition

I asked "Why would you need to suppress a .22?" and the guy behind me said "So you can get ALL the squirrels." - Genie Jennings, Contributing Editor Guns & Women magazine

Gun Rights Policy Conference - Live Stream

You can watch here.

Quote of the Day - Legal Edition

By way of preface, in 2004 I wrote the post "Game Over, Man. Game Over" which I concluded thus:

Mike Spenis said "the future of our freedom ultimately rests with the court's willingness to periodically reexamine the law," but the evidence is plain that the courts will not do that. They will use obviously flawed precedent so long as it "comports especially well with our notions of good social policy." And even if it doesn't, the courts will often bow, as Kozinski does here, to precedent they abhor. We depend upon the honor and intellectual honesty of the judges who make up the Justice system, yet it seems that those who are truly honest and honorable are outnumbered by those who are "willing to bury language that is incontrovertibly there." The honest and honorable ones abide, under the rule of law, by precedent that is otherwise insupportable. The middling honest ones, the ones Justice Brandeis labled as "men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding" "build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases - or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text." And those decisions stand, without review, periodic or otherwise, to serve as the next step down the road to Hell.

Tonight during a short discussion I had with Alan Gura he said something that boiled that paragraph down to a couple of sentences (from memory, so I may be paraphrasing):

Stare decisis is like gun control. It only affects those who respect the law.

Excellent Observation

On Vacation

Not feeling the urge to post.

Free ice cream to resume at some future date.

Well, There is at Least This:

Presented Without Additional Comment

9/11

So here we are, fourteen years after the attack, and there are finally (still mostly empty) structures where there used to be only the "National Embarrassing Vacant Lot and Monument to Red Tape & Inefficiency."  Four years ago our embassy in Benghazi, Libya was attacked and four Americans lost their lives there under the watch of President Obama and Secretary of State (and Presidential hopeful) Hillary Clinton, who proceeded to lie to us about it.

I'm kinda concerned about what might happen on this day, both here in the States and across the globe.  The "JV team" of ISIS seems to have grown into the big leagues.  Pretty much the entire Middle East is in uproar if not chaos.  Hundreds of thousands of "refugees" - the majority, military-age males - are streaming away from the conflicts - plural - and into Europe.  That'll not end well.

And our President has overseen the negotiation of a not-Treaty that will result, later if not sooner, with Iran building nuclear weapons.

And THAT will not end well.

And here?  Well, as Glenn Reynolds keeps repeating: 

My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.

Fasten your seat belts.  The ride might get bumpy over the next few years.

Quote of the Day - "Right to Be Safe" Edition

Found on Facebook via the Cornered Cat:

Someone is going to read this and think, "I have a right to go anywhere I want. Just because something is dangerous doesn't take away my rights." Let's get this over with now. Defending yourself is not and never has been about rights—rights are those things that the civilized members of society agree everyone "deserves". When you hit the ground and taste blood in your mouth, when a steel-toed boot slams your head into a curb, when a knife slips under the waistband of your skirt and a hand is wrapped around your throat, the civilized agreement on how people should be treated is not an issue. – Rory Miller

But too few people grasp this fact.

Sewing on Yellow Stars

Over on Facebook someone I know and respect wrote this in response to a local newspaper op-ed on the failures of gun control to prevent high-profile shooting incidents:

We can't continue with the argument that because we can do little, we should do nothing. Sooner or later, another bigger, badder incident will happen and in a panic, folks will do the wrong thing. Heck, the 68 control act is an example. Do you think for a minute that a political assassination or two won't rob you of support in congress PDQ?

We simply can no longer allow mentally unstable folk to possess/purchase firearms. Unfortunately, we will be forced to change the status quo a bit and attempt to judge the competency of individuals before they purchase. For lack of a better term, I'll use a loaded one--a firearms ownership ID.

Could all of the recent list of scumbags have obtained their legally purchased firearms if they, say, were required to have two or three letters of reference to sound mind and good character? Is it really too much to require that a facility for locking up firearms in the home be required?

Obvious, wording and such for laws must be carefully crafted such that devious individuals do not use such laws to abridge rights. But I believe it's doable. Also, we seem to forget about just what Reagan did with the machine gun import/manufacture ban, i.e., he bargained for lifting of other restrictions in the bill. Distasteful as that is to "purists", he knew his politics.

We absolutely need recourse if firearm possession is restricted. True and meaningful relief from disability and a fair process developed for appeal of such matters.

That a citizen should lose possession rights during a divorce is an affront. That a non-violent felon is disbarred from possession forever, is an affront. That a fully automatic firearm costs tens of thousands of dollars is an affront. That I need to trade through a licensed dealer is an affront. That the government is using an axe to cleave off thousands of "prohibited" possessors is an affront.

But all these "affronts" are not the fault of government, they are the fault of the people--those few people who have lost their morale compass and abused their right to keep and bear arms.

I replied

If you truly believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

He responded:

Then what you insist on is a death match which we will inevitable lose. The society will continue to deteriorate and the people in their panic will vote for restrictions in search of safety. There is no Constitutional right to keep and bear arms--only what 5 clowns on the Supreme Court say. It is an accepted concept that many rights are subject to reasonable restrictions, but what's reasonable? Whatever 5 justices say. We are one justice and one court case away from catastrophe.

You know me, I don't need to present my bona fides to anyone.

We suggest no potential solutions to the mentally unbalanced obtaining firearms, in that manner we are the same as the opposition--intransigent and unwilling to discuss potential solutions to what we freely admit is a people problem. I know from my personal experience and others in the community that there are any number of folk we run into that we would never sell a gun to or trust them with such. Yet we support their unrestricted right to walk into a store and buy a firearm? Do we? Should we?

My suggestion is to attempt to approach the people problem directly without depending as much as possible on government whose methods of separating good from bad are crude and flawed at best and devious and disingenuous at worse. The best defense is said to be a good offense.

What I hear is that it won't work, but few alternative suggestions. What we are experiencing plays right into the hands of prohibitions who jump on every opportunity to carve out classes of prohibited possessors in order to reach their goal of complete prohibition. The most recent, returning vets and SS recipients. There will be more.

Prohibitions play the long game. We saw a similar strategy wrt smoking. When the number of smokers reached a manageable level, approximately 25%, we saw a full court push to prohibition. We smoke now simply because it produces obscene tax revenue.

I simply offer suggestions and present some themes for discussion, not a fully laid out plan. If you have other suggestions for vetting firearms owners, then make them.

I replied:

And if we submit to "firearms ownership IDs" we will still lose, only FASTER.

Here's an alternative for you: Instead of applying for a "firearms ownership ID," how about the State runs a full background check on you when issuing a State ID: driver's license, whatever. If you're a prohibited person, that ID gets a "No Guns" symbol - you know, the pistol in the international circle with a slash through it. That way, if you go buy a gun, the seller - FFL or private person - asks to see your ID and if it doesn't have that symbol, they're free to sell to you. If you're slapped with a restraining order, arrested for domestic violence, whatever, you're required to turn in your ID for new ID. If you don't, a warrant is issued for your arrest until you do, AND they can force you to divest yourself from whatever you own (as they can now, but never seem to bother to).

That way, the government knows only who's eligible and who's not. Not specifically who legally OWNS guns, and who does not.

Will this prevent nut jobs from buying guns? Well the "War On (Some) Drugs" has done such a marvelous job of stopping people from getting stoned, I suspect that your local nutjob can probably score a Glock from the guy he gets his Oxycodone from, but it is better, I think, than your option.

I'm not happy invoking Godwin here, but fucking volunteering to sew a yellow star on my clothes because I'm a law-abiding gun owner? No.  Gun ownership IS a right.  It should only be denied through adjudication of either criminal acts or mental disability.  I shouldn't have to prove that I'm qualified to buy a gun, the government should have to prove I'm NOT.  And if we volunteer to identify ourselves to the government, when (not if) the next or the next or the next heinous act occurs, well, I'll let Charles T. Morgan, at the time Director of the Washington office of the ACLU said in Senate testimony in 1975:

I have not one doubt, even if I am in agreement with the National Rifle Association, that that kind of a record-keeping procedure is the first step to eventual confiscation under one administration or another.

The only people the government can disarm are the ones they KNOW have guns. I have no doubt they know I do, but I also have no doubt they don't know exactly what or how many I do. And I won't be informing them. Certainly not voluntarily.

Cali-Legal AK-47

Took a trip to see my favorite Merchant O'Death this afternoon.  He showed me something I hadn't seen before.  I know that residents of the UK have emasculated AR-15 rifles (converted to straight-pull bolt-actions, gas systems removed) but until now, I had never seen a pump-action AK:


Oooookay.

Keep passing those gun laws.  We'll keep figuring ways around them.

GBRX Recap

So, the Tenth Annual Gun Blogger Rendezvous is complete.  I skipped the Sunday simulator session, and left for home just after 8AM.  Had to stop in Vegas about 4PM because I was flat exhausted.  Got home Monday afternoon.

There were 25 registered attendees at this year's event, and together we raised almost $3,000 for Honored American Veterans Afield.  Sponsors of the event were:

Lucky Gunner - primary sponsor, and supplier of ammunition to attendees.  My thanks to Anthony W. of Lucky Gunner for getting everything set up and organized, and for running things so well.  Lucky Gunner is set up to run next year's event also.  Anthony took a lot of photos and video.  As soon as those are up, I'll be linking.

The Silver Legacy Resort and Casino - Nice place to stay, and very accommodating!  When we asked about wheeling in the Gardner Gun, they were all for it.

Special Interest Arms - Richard Brengman is a local out of Gardnerville, NV, about an hour south of Reno.  This year, in addition to the Gardner Gun, he brought a variety of Class III items for us to shoot - most suppressed, a couple full-auto.  I'm kinda interested in his 9mm bolt-action rifle with integral suppressor.  One tax stamp.  Sucker is about as loud as a dropped paperback in a library.  Richard also donated a stripped AR-15 lower to the HAVA raffle.

Springfield Armory - Donated T-shirts, beer glasses and coffee mugs, a couple of banners and some other things.  Maybe we can wangle a pistol out of them next year.

Ruger - Provided a range bag, a backpack and some coffee mugs.  No repeat of the MkIII Hunter of last year, but....

Sig Sauer - Sponser of shooter and GBR attendee Jaci Janes provided caps, keychains and stickers.  Hmm...  I think I'm sensing a trend here.

Dillon Precision - donated one of their "border shift" ammo bags and some hats.

Brownell's - No ultimate range bag this year, but Brownell's did donate one of their new ESG  Backpacks, some AR10 magazines, and a slew of oil samples as they usually do.  We missed having Larry Weeks join us, but he's enjoying retirement by running around to various competitions.

Allchin Gun Parts - donated optics mounts and machined magazine base pads.  Nice stuff!

Burris Optics - Again this year Lori Yunker (former GBR attendee) kindly donated an AR-F³ red dot sight on a Picatinny mount.  That got snapped up.

MOA Targets - another local, Mitch Gerlinger makes AR plate targets for rifles and pistols.  I won one of their Freedom Wheel units rated for rifle.  Can't wait to see if I can hit it at 500+ yards with the .300 Mag.  Mitch also brought out his full-auto M14 to the Friday shoot, and let anyone who wanted to rip off a magazine.  Pretty cool.

Target Barn - Provided the IDPA target cardboards that we used during the Saturday "paper steel" shoot, and also some pretty cool shoot-'n-see zombie varmint targets.  I got a set of those.

Front Sight Training Academy - again donated a four-day training course valued at over $2k.

Self Defense Association - Sponsor of shooter Great Satan (Jaci Janes' other half), Self Defense Association is an insurance company for anybody who might need financial security after a shooting.  SDA provides insurance policies to cover both criminal and civil legal fees should you need to defend yourself against prosecution or a lawsuit after a self-defense shooting.  They donated a $250k policy.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation - the REAL "gun lobby," the NSSF provided us with way too much Godfather's Pizza for the Saturday night festivities as they have for the last several years. 

CigarsCity.com donated cigars and a small humidor.  Something different, and also something snapped up almost immediately.

Repeat attendee Bill Llewellen of Billlls Idle Mind brought some laser-cut aperture sights for Ruger pistols, and donated a couple to the cause.

And last, but FAR from least, Reno Guns and Range (formerly U.S. Firearms Academy).  They allowed us to ship our stuff to them for safekeeping prior to our arrival, even though they were in the middle of trying to get ready for a grand re-opening at their entirely new and extremely state-of-the-art facilities.  And, ladies and gentlemen, if you're in the Reno area I strongly urge you to check them out.  That place will make the Scottsdale Gun Club look pale by comparison when they get it complete.  On Saturday they gave us the run of their 10-lane bay to conduct our "paper steel" shoot on opening day.  On Sunday they ran their simulator training for us again as we had done the previous year, but in a newer, more spacious facility.  We got the full tour of the place, which has not only the 10-lane 25 yard range (rated for rifles), but also a private four-lane range with attached "meeting room" complete with conference table, pool table, and mini-galley.  They will eventually have a "shoot house" complete with garage for realistic training using simunitions.  This place is AWESOME.  I kinda wish I lived in Reno.

I think once Lucky Gunner gets their feet under it, next year's Rendezvous will be even more outstanding than this year's.

HEAR, HEAR!

Nikki fisks.  Read the whole thing.

Bleg: Anybody Use These?

My gun safe is full.

Well, not full, but I would have a hard time getting more long guns into it the way it's configured now.

Other people have had that problem, and this is one solution that has hit the market:  Rifle Rods.


Anybody actually tried them?  It looks interesting, I'll give it that.

Lotsa Miles

I pulled out of my driveway at 05:30 this morning, and into the parking lot here at the Silver Legacy at 19:30.  Two stops for fuel, one for lunch in Vegas.  Not bad.  Best part about the trip is A) diesel doesn't cost $4/gal this year, and B) diesel actually costs less than regular gas.  Looks like the truck got pretty good mileage for a 7,000lb crew-cab beast.

Tired, hungry, and my a$$ is a little sore.  Time for some dinner and then bed, I think.  Looking forward to the next few days here at GBR X!

Planned Obsolescence Update

Remember I was bitching about my iPod not taking music I tried to put on it from iTunes?  Well, I've got a 13+ hour drive coming up tomorrow, and I thought, "Let's just wipe the thing and start over from scratch and see if that helps."  So I made a backup of the iPod, and proceeded to reset it to factory default.

And apparently I've bricked it.

Every time I try to get iTunes to recognize it now, I get:  "We could not complete your iTunes Store request.  An unknown error occurred (0x80090326)"

Which translates, as far as I can tell, to "BUY NEW HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE YOU LUDDITE!"

So my (mumble-) year-old iPod that had about 35 hours of music stored on it is now magically wiped clean, and is completely useless for its intended purpose.

Yay me.

I hope Steve Jobs is suffering on the eighth level of Hell being sodomized by a barbed-wire-wrapped fencepost.

UPDATE:  I got it working.  Connected it to the iTunes running on my wife's Windows7 laptop.  Recognized it as an iPod immediately and let me configure it as new.  Took it back to my XP machine and iTunes saw it.  Copied my music over, looks like it all took, as I listened to 13.5 hours worth without a hitch on the way to Reno.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Idiocracy

Bill Whittle on education:


Billy Beck calls it the Endarkenment.  I'm convinced that 115 years of public education has accomplished The Great Unlearning, and it has been deliberate.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

So the EPA "accidentally" released 3 million gallons of toxic spill into the Animas river.  It was completely unintentional.  No one could have predicted it.

Except someone did.  Seven days before the spill.

Why did he predict this would happen?

The "grand experiment" in my opinion will fail.  And guess what (EPA representative) Mr. Hestmark will say then?

Gee, "Plan A" didn't work so I guess we will have to build a treatment plant at a cost to taxpayers of $100 million to $500 million (who knows).

Reading between the lines, I believe that has been the EPA's plan all along.  The proposed Red & Bonita plugging plan has been their way of getting a foot in the door to justify their hidden agenda for construction of a treatment plant.  After all, with a budget of $8.2 billion and 17,000 employees, the EPA needs new, big projects to feed the beast and justify their existence.

And it was in a dead-tree publication, no less!

ETA:

Fifty Rounds of .300 Win Mag Loaded...

...Achievement Unlocked!

Got another fifty to do, then a few hundred rounds of .45ACP, 100 rounds of .44 Mag, and maybe some .38 Special pin loads.

Two Weeks to the Rendezvous!

There's still time to get signed up and make room reservations for Gun Blogger Rendezvous X.  Check out the site.  There's some good stuff to take home with this year.

The schedule has been sent out to attendees, and here's what's on tap:

Thursday, August 20:

2:45-5PM - Trip to the massive Scheel's Sports in Sparks. If you need any last-minute range gear or just want to check it out (worth the trip) a group will be leaving from the Silver Legacy. Upon our return we're having a group dinner at the El Dorado buffet. (No sponsor, attendees responsible for buffet cost.)

Friday, August 21:

8-9AM - Breakfast at the Silver Legacy Resort &Casino (Free, sponsored by LuckyGunner.com)
10AM-2PM - Range time at the Washoe County Shooting Facility. Shoot what you brought, and shoot what everybody else brought. This is where the Gardner Gun and various other toys, some suppressed, some full auto, will be available to shoot. The range has target frames and known-distance positions for them out to 300 yards. Steel swingers at various ranges out to 900 yards. I'm bringing my .300 Win Mag for this. Range fee is $8/person. Bring something to drink, and sunscreen is advised. You also need eye and ear protection.
6-8PM - Dinner at the Silver Legacy - (Free, sponsored by LuckyGunner.com)
8-Whenever - Mix-n-Mingle in the hospitality room.  Adult beverages and snacks (byob!).  This is the main reason I go to the Rendezvous, and I don't drink.  The range trips are just an extra added bonus.

Saturday, August 22:

8-9AM - Breakfast at the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino (Free, sponsored by LuckyGunner.com)
10AM-2PM - "Paper steel" shooting at the new indoor range at Reno Guns & Range.  $15/person.  Rimfire and centerfire handguns only.  Irons & optics.  Five white paper plates mounted on IPSC style target stands. One plate will be designated as the “Stop Plate” and it must be shot last. The other four plates may be shot in any order. Each shooter will shoot the stage multiple times, and the slowest time will be discarded. The remaining fastest times will be totaled, and added to the shooter’s overall score. Once each shooter has completed the stage, the targets will be moved to different positions, and will be shot again as “Stage 2.” Additional stages will be shot as time permits.  Each string will be shot from the "low ready" position.
5-6PM - Special Interest Arms' Richard Brengman will talk about his Gardner Gun and other toys, which you should have gotten to shoot on Friday.
6-6:15PM - Brief introduction to the organization we're sponsoring, Honored American Veterans Afield (HAVA).
6:15-7:15PM Pizza dinner, provided by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Please don't drip pizza grease on the Gardner Gun!
7:15-7:45 - Raffle benefiting HAVA. There's some nice stuff this year.
7:45-Whenever - Mix-n-Mingle. Adult beverages, yadda yadda yadda....

Sunday, August 23

8-9AM - Breakfast at the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino (Free, sponsored by LuckyGunner.com)
9AM-1PM - Scenario simulation at Reno Guns and Range. This is a training simulator using CO2 powered simulated firearms against projected threat scenarios. We did this last year. If you carry a gun for self-protection, this is highly recommended. It will make you think. $15/person.

So get on the phone and make your reservations!

Instead of Self-flagellating Over the Atomic Bombings of Japan,

...watch Bill Whittle's righteous defense of the war-ending act.  One of his best Afterburners ever, and now no longer behind PJTV's paywall.  Worth your time, and send it to people who claim that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was a war crime.

Hate

I just banned another commenter.  This pretty much never happens unless the commenter is a spammer.  That's not the case this time.  This time the commenter was banned because he advocates killing police officers.

I find it interesting that this happened on the same day that I was pointed to this article:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Creating An Entire Generation Of Fascists. Excerpt:

Like the far-right that they claim to be so staunchly opposed to, the far-left is based entirely around hate. Humans are perpetual morons who always need a bad guy. To neo-Nazis, the bad guys are Jews, "degenerates", and non-whites. To SJWs, the bad guys are people like Communismkills: not only is she a white person who isn't self-flagellating, but she's also a woman who doesn't see herself as a victim of some evil patriarchal conspiracy. To an SJW, that's heresy: all white people are evil and all women are victims. If a woman doesn't think that she's a victim, then she has "internalized misogyny" and she just doesn't know any better, so she needs SJWs to speak on her behalf. Likewise, if a black person doesn't tow(sic) the SJW line exactly, then they will be immediately labeled an "Uncle Tom" or "house nigger" by the extremely patronizing SJWs who see minorities as nothing more than political props and tools and who view all races as monoliths with intrinsic characteristics (which, ironically, is the absolute definition of racism).

Read the whole thing.  It's sickening, but informative.  I'm reminded once again of philosopher Eric Hoffer's seminal work The True Believer, and his observation on hate:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: "No.... We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one." F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: "It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews."

Another example of this came today in another article, Salem on the Thames: What Connecticut College's Andrew Pessin Affair Teaches Us. Dr. Andrew Pessin's story is an illuminating example of one college campus fusing and coalescing into one flaming mass of hatred. He'll be lucky to get another teaching job anywhere. He's been made an unperson, much like Dr. Walter Palmer, the dentist who killed a lion in Zimbabwe.

This all goes back to the piece I linked in this morning's post, Balkanization Part II, and even more to a piece I wrote the better part of ten years ago, Reasonable People.

The fabric of civil society is has been fraying noticeably for a while.  How much longer before it begins to shred?  I'm not taking any bets.

Balkanization, Part II

Awhile back I wrote a post entitled Balkanization about how the Tucson Unified School District was running elementary and secondary education courses in "Race studies."  What it appeared to be was advanced indoctrination in "The White Man is Keeping Us DOWN!"

This kind of stuff dates back to the 60's radicals - many of whom occupy (or have occupied) teaching positions in the schools of education across the country - Howard Zinn, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn being only the most "famous."  First you teach the educators, then they teach the pupils.

And the end result?  Balkanization - defined as

to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units

Note with particular attention the word "hostile."

Perusing Gerard Van der Leun's site the other day, I came across this really excellent essay: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules. Excerpt:

(America is) becoming a nation where an elite that is certain of its power and its moral rightness is waging a cultural war on a despised minority. Except it's not actually a minority – it only seems that way because it is marginalized by the coastal elitist liberals who run the mainstream media.

Today in America, we have a liberal president (who) refuses to recognize the majority sent to Congress as a reaction to his progressive failures, and who uses extra-Constitutional means like executive orders to stifle the voice of his opponents. We have a liberal establishment on a secular jihad against people who dare place their conscience ahead of progressive dogma. And we have two different sets of laws, one for the little people and one for liberals like Lois Lerner, Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton, who can blatantly commit federal crimes and walk away scot free and smirking.

Today in America, a despised minority that is really no minority is the target of an establishment that considers this minority unworthy of respect, unworthy of rights, and unworthy of having a say in the direction of this country. It’s an establishment that has one law for itself, and another for its enemies. It’s an establishment that inflicts an ever-increasing series of petty humiliations on its opponents and considers this all hilarious.

That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot expect to change the status quo for yourself and then expect those you victimize not to play by the new rules you have created. You cannot expect to be able to discard the rule of law in favor of the rule of force and have those you target not respond in kind.

RTWT. It's a cautionary tale that I don't think the Left on the whole is capable of learning.  But a few can.

"Tough history coming," indeed.

Quote of the Day - Top Gear Edition

Unless you've been living under a stump, you're most likely aware that Clarkson, May and Hammond will be returning to the small screen via Amazon Video next year.  (And there was much rejoicing!  Yeaaaa!)

I stumbled across this QotD over at Quora.com under the question "What is so special about Top Gear that it has 385 million viewers worldwide?"

The secret is that Top Gear is not about cars. It's about joy. About unabashedly, unashamedly enjoying life.

It also presents a positive image of masculinity, which is something that is entirely missing from everything else on television.-- Rúnar Óli Bjarnason

Abso-fricken-lutely.

Brains, Hard Work & Guts - Bill Whittle and the "Right" Brothers

Quote of the Day - Democratic Operatives with Bylines Edition

Seen at Glenn's, courtesy of Ed Driscoll:

Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats. - Jim Treacher

Yup.

The internet has gone a long way towards beating down the walls the gatekeepers seek to control, but it hasn't succeeded yet in penetrating John and Jane Doe's living rooms.  Far too many people still get all their "news" from ABCNNBCBS and the major newspapers.

My Pusher Dealer Emailed Me Last Night...

(Merchant O'Death:) Are you still interested in a Marlin lever gun?

(Me:) Yeah, but I want this one:

Marlin 1895GBL

Found it online for $625 plus freight, but I've got some expenses to cover this month.  Probably won't be able to afford it for another couple of months.

(MO'D:)  We have a bead blasted stainless version of that gun (or one very similar to it) that came in used today. Gray laminated stock. Rear peep sight.

(Me:) What kind of price?  This one?

(MO'D:) Pretty much the same gun but the guy had it bead blasted resulting in a matte finish. I will have a look at the price tomorrow when I get to work.

(Me:) The big thing is the large-loop lever and the six-round magazine tube. With this one, I'd kinda like it black, but I can always get it cerakoted. But the stainless rifles are a lot pricier than the chromoly steel ones. Even used, I'd expect the stainless version to run close to $800. That's a bit more than I'm willing to spend.

But let me know.

(MO'D:) I'll text you with the details.

(Me:) You are an evil, evil man.

(MO'D:) Yes. Yes I am.

He texted me this morning. It wasn't $800.

I traded a pistol to get it.  I can pick it up August 13.  I'll be bringing it to the Rendezvous.

Planned Obsolescence

I have a 16GB iPod my wife gave me several years ago.  It runs iOS 4.2.1, and is no longer supported by Apple, though it works just fine.  It's so old there is no Kindle app for it.

My version of iTunes is 12.1.2.27, apparently the last that will operate on Windows XP, which my home desktop is still running.

Fifty percent of the music I have on iTunes refuses to copy onto my iPod.  It says the music is there, but it won't play.

Fuck you, Steve Jobs.

Quote of the Day - RACIST! Edition

Seen on Facebook:

White privilege = being held responsible for the acts of your ancestors by blacks who accept no responsibility for the acts of their children.  Mark L. Anderson

I Love Arizona

Rated #1 for the third year in a row:

1. Arizona
Still the reigning champion, Arizona combines strong laws with an unmatched shooting culture and strong industry presence. An effort to strengthen the state's preemption law failed to make it out of the legislature this year, but a clarifying bill did pass, specifying that the transfer of firearms was immune from administrative or municipal regulation. Arizona gets full points in every category with both permitless and permitted carry, strong self-defense laws, a "shall sign" NFA statue and a thriving competitive shooting scene. Whether you're into ISPC-style shooting, 3-Gun, long-range rifles, Cowboy matches, shotgunning or just shooting machine guns in the desert, Arizona has everyone covered.

30 Days Until the Rendezvous

The Tenth Annual Gun Blogger Rendezvous, that is.  Here's some videos from previous iterations of the event:

GBR IX:


GBR VI:







GBR V:

GBR IV:

Oddly, there's not a lot of footage of us eating, drinking and talking back at the hotel!

But here's some of the stuff that you could take home from the Rendezvous last year:


You've still got time to register and make your reservations! Get a move on!

REPOST: One Small Step for Man

I posted this a couple of years ago. Here it is updated.


On this day at 02:56 UTC 46 years ago, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to leave one of these on the surface of another astronomical body. Three years and five months later, Eugene Cernan became the last man to do so, so far.

The last Space Shuttle touched down for the last time on this day four year ago.

Elon Musk of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX fame has said that the impetus behind the development of SpaceX came when his son asked him, "is it really true that they used to fly to the moon when you were a boy?"

Now there are two-dozen or more private space ventures around the world. There is a plan to capture and retrieve an asteroid for commercial purposes. Two companies want to mine the moon.

If we can just hold it together for a couple more decades, humanity might get off this rock, and we might do it in my lifetime.

But it's not looking too good.

Not good at all.

A Reaction to Sudden Jihad Syndrome?

Interesting observation at the grocery store today. I do the majority of my shopping at Frys, near my home, or at the WalMart Supercenter a bit farther away. It is not remarkably unusual to see someone open-carrying in WalMart (usually in a nylon Uncle Mike's holster - make of that what you will), but I can't recall seeing anyone open carry at Frys.

Today there were three.

Quote of the Day - (Lack of) Education Edition

From an interview with David Gelernter via a link from Clayton Cramer's blog

GELERNTER: I’m a teacher of college students. I’m lucky to be at one of the best colleges in the world, at Yale. Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they’re likable. My generation is getting a chip on its shoulder, we always thought we knew everything about every topic, our professors were morons, and we were the ones who were building the world.

My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed.

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(H)ow did we get to this point today when my students know nothing?

They know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don’t rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they’ve never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible. They’ve never opened it. They’ve been taught it’s some sort of weird toxic thing, especially the Hebrew Bible, full of all sorts of terrible, murderous, prejudiced, bigoted. They’ve never read it. They have no concept.

It used to be, if I turned back to the 1960s to my childhood, that at least people have heard of Isaiah. People had heard of the Psalms. They had some notion of Hebrew poetry, having created the poetry of the Western world. They had some notion of the great prophets having created our notions of justice and honesty and fairness in society

But these children not only ignorant of everything in the intellectual realm, they have been raised ignorant in the spiritual world. They don’t go to church. They don’t go to synagogue. They have no contact – the Americans. Some of the Asians are different. Some of the Asians – and, of course, the Asians play a larger and larger role. But I think, from what I can tell, the Asians are moving in an American direction, and they’re pulling up their own religious roots.

But when I see a bright, young Yale student who has been reared not as Jew, not as a Christian, outside of any religious tradition, why should he tell the truth? Why should he not lie? Why should he be fair and straightforward in his dealings with his fellow students? He has sort of an idea that’s the way he should be, but why? If you challenge him, he doesn’t know. And he’ll say, “Well, it’s just my view.” And I mean, after all everybody has his own view.

KRISTOL: So we began in the 50s, and now we’re 60 years later. How did this, what were the big break points in your judgment from “Serious America” to America-Lite?

GELERNTER: It seems to me something happened. There was a historical event, which needs to be understood and recognized more clearly than it is. The cultural revolution in the United States, which people take for granted. If I tell people there was a cultural revolution, yeah sure, there were a lot of changes in the 60s. But it’s more than that. It’s a double change.

Colleges and universities. Let’s look at the generation after the Second World War. This is a cultural revolution, it seems to me to extend roughly from 1945 to 1970. So in 1970 everything is different. Things are radically different. And what happened during those 25 years? Colleges and universities became vastly, vastly more influential on American culture.

Remember the words of John Taylor Gatto:

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia.

Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: "The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided." National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an "effective use of capital" through which our "unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained." When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.

It’s important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.

and

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted. The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.

WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.

A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.
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Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:

After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn’t.

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

and

Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.

In related news:

The top student in a high school’s graduating class used to earn the honor of being the valedictorian, and traditionally that one student delivered a commencement speech that helped send his or her classmates out into the adult world.

But at Arlington's Washington-Lee High School this year, there were 117 valedictorians out of a class of 457. At Long Beach Polytechnic in California, there were 30. And at some schools — including North Hills High outside of Pittsburgh and high schools in Miami — there were none.

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"Education's not a game. It's not about 'I finished first and you finished second,'" said North Hills Superintendent Patrick J. Mannarino, who was the North Hills High principal when the school got rid of the valedictorian designation in 2009. "That high school diploma declares you all winners."

Apparently not.

RTWT.