So, Magpul has Pulled the Trigger

...and is leaving Colorado in the wake of that state's new legislation.  Good for them.  Now if we could get the Northeast firearms manufacturers to do the same thing.

Demoralization

In the comments to a post at Say Uncle on massive failures from police crime labs in Massachusetts and Texas, Lyle said:

Part of the overthrow of the U.S. is demoralizing the population. Part of demoralizing the population is having incompetent buffoons in critical positions, such that we lose trust in the system. Eventually, so the idea goes, we'll be so fed up and disgusted that we'll cry out for a "strong man" who will "do something" by getting past all the politics and red tape, i.e. a dictator.

In the comments to a post at BoingBoing that Uncle linked wherein a Brit berated a man for "taking the law into his own hands" and taking a gun to check on the welfare of his daughter instead of calling the cops to do it, another commenter responded:

Call the police and they might just kill you
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-50...

Police escalate car chase to deadly conclusion
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

Even the mayor isn't safe
http://www.seattlepi.com/natio...

Police helping the mentally-challenged
"With his dying words, he... never understood why the defendant had beat him. He said 'All I wanted was a Snickers bar.'"
http://digitaljournal.com/arti...

Newly-Released Surveillance Video Shows Police Officers Brutally Beating, Suffocating, and Tasing Kelly Thomas to Death
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2...

Sure, a lot of cops, maybe most, are there to help. I've met some of them. But in this country, it really is a crapshoot. You don't want to call the cops unless you absolutely have to.

There are a lot more of those, too.

Where have I heard the term "demoralization" before?

UPDATE:  The Kelly Thomas link goes to a different homicide-by-cop.  The video of Kelly Thomas getting beaten (not tased) to death is here:  Full, unedited video. 

Don't Pee On My Leg and Tell Me it's Raining

So Diane Feinstein's "Assault Weapon Ban" bill is out of committee.  We're told endlessly by the media that our betters in Washington want to pass new gun control legislation to make America safer.  But if you've been paying attention, you know for a fact that this is complete bullshit.

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish explains it so that I don't have to.  Pertinent excerpt:

67% of firearm murders took place in the country's 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average. Those numbers are from six years ago. They have grown worse since.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. The places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. These are the places where the family is broken, money comes from the government and immigrants crowd in from some of the most violent parts of the world bringing with them their own organized crime. These are also the places that have run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory. He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.

These places aren't America. They're Obamerica.

Obama isn't the cause, he's merely the latest symptom. But here's the point:

America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem. These social ills cannot be solved by banning something. The War on Guns is not going to fix the inner city just as the War on Drugs didn't. Rigid law enforcement can keep the numbers down, but does not deal with the causes of the violence.

As Say Uncle puts it, "Gun Control - what you do instead of something."

They're not interested in making us safer, they're intent on disarming us.  Newtown just presented another opportunity to try.

#StandWithRand

Did you see this on ABCNNBCBS?  FOX?  NPR?  BBC?



No, you did not.

But you should have.

Motherf*%&ers!

Remember how the LAPD was going to replace the shot-up pickup of those two non-Dorner newspaper delivery ladies?

Not so much:

No New Truck for Women Shot During Dorner Manhunt

The two newspaper delivery women who were shot at during the manhunt for Christopher Dorner will not be getting a new replacement truck as promised by the LAPD, according to their attorney Glen Jonas.

It has been more than a month since LAPD Chief Charlie Beck promised the truck to Emma Hernandez, 71, and her daughter, Margie Carranza, who had been working in Torrance, Calif. before dawn on Feb. 7.

--

According to Jonas, LAPD and Galpin Ford wanted his clients to pose for a photo opportunity and pay income tax on the truck. The women no longer want the truck after they were told they needed to fill out a 1099 form for the donation, Jonas said Monday.

"You tried to murder the woman, now you're telling her she can't have a four-wheel drive, you're telling her she can't sell it and you've got to be taxed on it?" Jonas said. "How would anyone react to that?"

Jonas plans on filing a government claim, which is a precursor to any lawsuit filed against a government agency. He said he felt the truck was being touted as a "reward or prize" instead of a sincere gesture by the LAPD.

--

The women's Toyota Tacoma was pierced with 102 bullet holes from the Feb. 7 shooting, according to Jonas. Emma Hernandez is still recovering from two bullet wounds to her neck, which are giving her life-threatening complications

They want her to pay income tax on the truck.  I'm not a fan of our litigious society, but in this case, I want to see the city pay, and I want the officers involved to pay.

She should get a fucking Ferrari and a mansion to park it in.

Wherein I Disagree with an Appeals Court Judge on Matters of Law

In that video interview I posted recently where Matt Welch of Reason talks with 9^th Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, I have only one disagreement with the judge (OK, two).  Starting at 43:50 in the interview:

Welch:  Why don't you like jury nullification?

Kozinski:  It's lawlessness.  You know, at least with a legislature, you can vote the rascals out.  And it's the law that we are ultimately responsible.  But the idea that your fate, whether you will either be found guilty or innocent, or whether you're gonna be found liable or not liable, or the amount of damages that you're going to pay is up to the law made up by twelve people who have no constituency, who've gotten elected to nothing, who never get elected to anything again, who have no one to respond to - you can't kick out of office - and your fate, your future will depend on those twelve people making up the law on the spot?  It's just a horrendous idea.  It's really one of the truly evil ideas, because - think about it - we always think that what juries are going to do is take a law that they find unjust - that we all think is unjust - and they are not going to apply it. 

But what if they take a law that is just and say "we don't like this defendant"?  We don't like this defendant because its a corporation.  We don't like this defendant because he's rich, or white, or black, or we don't like him because he has an accent.  And we don't have to follow the law, and so we're going to make up the law right now and find him guilty, or find him liable, or ruin him financially?  Because we can make up the law?  We can do what the legislature, what the people assembled can do, we can do it in this room, we twelve. 

It's a really frightening idea.  If anyone has ever been in front of a jury, really had your fate in their hands, the last thing you want is for them to be able to make up the law as they wish.

I understand the point, but I have to disagree.  Getting twelve people to agree to anything is pretty damned hard.  Add to that the constraints placed on a jury, and the probability that they're going to decide "we hate that guy, so he's going to fry" are pretty slim unless the prosecutor has done his job.  From my perspective, the ability, the duty of any juror saying "NO!" in the belief that a law is unjust or being applied unjustly and making it stick is far more important, and more likely.  To tell me that I must enforce a law I find unjust or unjustly applied simply because it was approved by a legislature is repellent.  That is evil.  We are ultimately responsible, and shirking that responsibility is abhorrent to me.

The second disagreement comes at 38:06 (yes, I know that one comes before, but it's my post and I'll do it in the order I want to):

I think the Supreme Court got it right, but it was far from inevitable.  The words of the Second Amendment are clear in one way, but I think they could be rationally interpreted the other way as well.

I agree that the Supreme Court got it right, I agree that said decision was far from inevitable, but if one is intellectually honest I do NOT think it could be - in the face of the history and evidence - "rationally interpreted the other way".  And I think Judge Kozinski said it himself (PDF) better than I ever could:

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or...the press" also means the Internet...and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths....When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases - or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it's using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

Now THIS was a TEACHER!

Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) memorializes the teacher that influenced his life more than any other, Fred King. It's a 30-minute podcast. Worth your time.

Your Moment of Zen

By request, a new Moment of Zen:

So, TSM has had a Recent Infestation...

...and as a result, I thought I'd post this bit of humor sent to me by my favorite Merchant-O'Death.

A US Navy cruiser anchored in Mississippi for a week's shore leave. The first evening, the ship's Captain received the following note from the wife of a very wealthy and influential plantation owner:

"Dear Captain, Thursday will be my daughter Melinda's Debutante Ball. I would like you to send four well-mannered, handsome, unmarried officers in their formal dress uniforms to attend the dance.

They should arrive promptly at 8:00 PM prepared for an evening of polite Southern conversation. They should be excellent dancers, as they will be the escorts of lovely refined young ladies. One last point: No Jews please."

Sending a written message by his own yeoman, the captain replied:

Madam, thank you for your invitation. In order to present the widest possible knowledge base for polite conversation, I am sending four of my best and most prized officers.

One is a lieutenant commander and a graduate of Annapolis with an additional Masters degree from MIT in Fluid Dynamics and ship design.

The second is a Lieutenant, one of our helicopter pilots, and a graduate of Northwestern University in Chicago, with a BS in Aeronautical Engineering. His Masters Degree and PhD In Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering
are from Texas Tech University and he is also an astronaut candidate.

The third officer is also a lieutenant, with degrees in both computer systems and information technology from SMU and he is awaiting notification on his Doctoral Dissertation from Cal Tech.

Finally, the fourth officer, also a lieutenant commander, is our ship’s doctor, with an undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia and his medical degree is from the University of North Carolina. We are very proud
of him, as he is also a senior fellow in Trauma Surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Upon receiving this letter, Melinda’s mother was quite excited and looked forward to Thursday with pleasure. Her daughter would be escorted by four handsome naval officers without peer (and the other women in her social
circle would be insanely jealous).

At precisely 8:00 PM on Thursday, Melinda's mother heard a polite rap at the door which she opened to find, in full dress uniform, four very handsome, smiling Black officers.

Her mouth fell open, but pulling herself together, she stammered, "There must be some mistake!"

"No, Madam," said the first officer. "Captain GOLDBERG doesn’t make mistakes."

It's an oldie, but a goodie!

Quote of the Day - Sarah Hoyt Edition

From her post Malice or Incompetence?, on American public education:

So – how do you take most of the youth of a country, a country, moreover, rich enough that most kids have no major developmental disabilities, and make them functionally illiterate?

You WORK at it.

Yes. Exactly. And my point all along.

RTWT.

I mean it.

"Civilized" Warfare

I got a comment tonight on another post from one "Patrick Henry."  I'll excerpt the significant portion:

Well, if we weren't involved in the middle east and had our troops killing everything in sight....

To which I responded:

If our troops were "killing everything in sight," we'd have been out of there after eighteen months, tops.

This kind of "thinking" really pisses me off.

We're still in Afghanistan after more than 11 years of war, Iraq for not quite 10.  Why?  Because we decided to go to war as gently as possible, and then pick up the smashed pieces and try to build modern nations where there were none before.

Contrast that to sixty-eight years ago this day when we dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo, killing over 100,000 people - men, women and children - and burning sixteen square miles of the city to the ground.  THAT'S "killing everything in sight."  THAT is total war.

No Time Tonight...

...but I'll have to listen to this tomorrow.  Alex Kozinski, my favorite 9^th Circuit judge is interviewed for Reason TV (via Arms and the Law):

OK, Where the Hell is all the .22 Rimfire?

CCI supposedly makes 4 million rounds of .22 rimfire a day.  That's (assuming 5 days a week, and most holidays off) just under one billion rounds per year.

From one manufacturer.

And how many manufacturers are there?

Yet there's not a single round to be found on any retailer's shelf - anywhere.

This is unbelievable.

"...Or We Will Send Another Harshly-Worded Letter!"

Mike Ramirez comments on the latest news:

Happy Birthday to Me!

So last year, I was given a Colt Pocket Hammerless Vest Pocket .25.  It was the second-oldest gun in my safe. Now it's third-oldest.  This year, my father-in-law gave me his original 1917-vintage Colt 1911!





It's pretty pitted, and appears to have been reblued some time in the past, but I believe the double-diamond walnut grip panels are original, and I know for a fact that it feeds and shoots hardball just fine. Not bad for a 96 year-old handgun.

Remember that Sultan Knish Piece...

...The Closing of the Liberal Mind that I took a QotD from on Tuesday? Here's another:

As a scientist, you formulate a conclusion that will lead to a healthier society, and then you build a hypothesis around it, and then you declare it to be science. Your science, like your journalism, consists of the progressive narrative that proves whatever you want it to prove, whether it's that capitalism will melt the icebergs, homosexuality is genetically fixed or oil is about to run out. Scientific objectivity has no more meaning to you than it did to the Caliph who torched the Library of Alexandria. If science is worth anything, then it's progressive. And if it doesn't, then it's worthless.

And PowerLine has a recent example of exactly that.

Of course, the whole history of gun control is an example of exactly that, but....

"STOP DIGGING!"

Reader Phil B., the Brit expat now living in Middle Earth, sent me a link to a wall-o'-text essay,  Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell, by one Scott Alexander. Aside from being a tremendous source for Quotes of the Day, it's an absolutely outstanding piece of work I cannot recommend strongly enough.

But it is, absolutely, an überpost. Get a beverage and a snack before you sit down to savor it. Excerpt:

Reaction isn’t a conspiracy theory; it's not suggesting there's a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it's positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn't have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It’s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.

And so the main difference between modern liberal democracy and older repressive societies is that older societies repressed things you liked, but modern liberal democracies only repress things you don't like. Having only things you don't like repressed looks from the inside a lot like there being no repression at all.

The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn't feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone's around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell.

And that's just for openers. Go. Read.

It Worked for Caleb

Dunkin' Donuts worker stops robbery -- with hot coffee

When a man tried to rob a Dunkin’ Donuts in Connecticut on Saturday night, an employee acted quickly and stopped him with the closest weapon available -- hot coffee.

The attempted robbery happened shortly after 11 p.m. at a Dunkin' Donuts in West Haven, when a man pulled up to the drive-through and asked the clerk for change for a $100 bill, according to Sgt. David Tammaro, of the West Haven Police Department.

When the clerk refused to make the change, the man said this was a robbery and tried to climb through the drive-through window, police said.That is when the clerk threw hot coffee in man’s face, police said.

The man fled the area in a newer model white Ford Explorer without stealing anything, according to a news release from police.

When a man tried to mug Caleb a few years ago, he got a hot cup of Starbucks in his face, with the same result.

Which resulted in this coffee mug:

Quote of the Day - Sultan Knish Edition

Via email from Unix Jedi:

But now you are a liberal in 2013 and the society is already very liberal. You are the product of liberal professors who learned at the feet of other liberal professors for 3 or 4 generations. You grew up in a liberal community to parents whose grandparents were already singing red campfire songs. Like them, you came of age as a member of a natural elite.

The newspapers you read, the textbooks you studied, the movies you watch, the professors who taught you and every adult you grew up with all reflect your point of view. You have no sense of being marginalized or out of step. Nor do you have any sense that there is another point of view out there. Only ranks of ignorant teabaggers paid for by corporate money who are about to be swept away into the dustbin of history as soon as the multicultural youth of tomorrow put together another Hip-Hop Against AIDS protest.

You live in a bubble and you see no need for an open society or for maintaining the integrity of institutions such as journalism or the scientific community. The very idea of objectivity is at odds with your entire way of thinking because it presumes that there is some higher truth than the one propounded by the progressive reality-based community. And you know, with the casual faith of any born believer, that this is not possible.

Read the whole thing.

Violent and Predatory vs. Violent but Protective

A couple of months ago, while attending a play group with my four-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, another little two-year-old girl lashed out and hit another child. Her mother, ripe with indignation, swept the girl into her arms and scolded, "No! It is NEVER okay to hit people."

My skin crawled. The scenarios flowed through my head and I couldn't restrain myself.

"Would you tell her that if she was being abducted?" I asked.

The mother stopped and blinked a few times and then stuttered, "Well... that's different."

"Yes, it is," I said. "But you just told her that it was never okay to hit people. That's not entirely true. There are times it's okay to hit people and to hit them hard."

That's from Limatunes' Range Diary, Yes, My Son, It Is Okay To Hit People. Read the whole thing.  Good mom.