Snowflakes in Hell

It seems to me that this is more of a case of a victory for following the friggin law.  It’s perfectly legal to carry an unloaded firearm in Illinois on your person, except in Chicago, where handguns are illegal.  Unloaded, under Illinois law, meaning no round in the chamber, or no loaded magazine in the gun.  I’ll call it a victory for the second amendment in Illinois if Chicago gets its oh so effective gun ban thrown out.

I think I can declare myself pretty intimately familiar now with my new Mk.III Hunter 22/45. The Mk.III isn’t the only Ruger pistol I own. I also have a Mk.II 50th Anniversary Edition. The Mk.II was my first pistol purchase, and my first experience with “Hey, what’s this extra form?”

The Ruger Mk.II has the safety features I would expect, which means it has a hammer locking manual safety. Great! When it comes to a target shooter, that’s all I want. But the Mk.III has every safety under the sun. Mag release safety, chamber loaded idiotcator, manual safety, child safety lock, and airbags. Seriously, I don’t want any of these things on the gun. Here are my problems with the Mk.III:

• Magazine doesn’t drop free. They switched to a manual thumb release, but you have to physically remove it. As long as I have to do that, I think the original magazine system was fine. If a gun has a thumb release, I expect the magazine to drop free.
• Chamber loaded idiotcater. These don’t belong on any firearms. It implies a firearm without the indicator showing is “safe”. All firearms are always treated as loaded. It also make the Mk.IIIs a nightmare to clean. The indicator can get gritty and stick. Early versions rested directly on the rim, meaning a hard blow (like form a drop) would fire a round. Ruger fixed this problem, when what they should have done is remove the feature, and tell people in the manual how to properly handle a firearm.
• Magazine drop safety. In a target gun, I don’t mind this so much, in a carry gun it’s totally unacceptable. But it is another safety feature that caters to fools, and needlessly complicates the mechanism on a gun that is already notoriously difficult to reassemble.
• Front sight issues. The front sight on the Mk.III likes to come loose after shooting it for a while. They should ship with lock-tite applied so this doesn’t happen.
• I prefer the grip angle of the 22/45, but the polymer frame doesn’t balance of the rest of the gun’s weight very well. On the 22/45, you can’t swap grip panels. It’s integrated into the frame. I use a Houge grip sleeve, which helps a lot.

I understand why Ruger is loading up their guns with safety features; they are popular among entry level shooters, because they work well and don’t cost a lot of money. Ruger doesn’t want to be sued because they could have made a gun with more safety features, which is a product liability tort in most states.

A firearm is an inherently dangerous object, and cannot be made safe in the hands of an ignorant user who hasn’t bothered to educate himself, or get training on safe gun handling. These new features, which are superfluous for experienced shooters, are going to drive experienced shooters away from the Ruger badge, and still will not protect an ignorant user from the device’s inherent hazards. Ruger needs to worry more about catering to new and experience shooters alike, rather than worrying about lawsuits.

Not the Buck Rogers kind.  Actual high speed x-ray photography of firearms, including a mini-gun firing.

Joe shares his story of how he lost his job at PNNL, that involved his blog and firewall logs.   This is one reason I blog pseudo anonymously.  Among the other things I do in my real life work, I run the company firewall.   If anyone wants to know how to stick it to your corporate boneheads, there are many ways to get around them, and in ways where they can’t possibly tell exactly what you’re doing.  Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Yesterday I posted that I agreed with David Codrea that calling for the ATF to investigate Steve Bailey was taking things a bit too far. I will stand by the assertion that he should not actually be brought up on federal charges, but I will most definitely relish in the sweet, sweet, poetic justice.

Hey, Mr. Bailey, the ATF doesn’t care that you’re not a criminal. They have no problem wasting our tax dollars and their time harassing ordinary law abiding people and businessmen. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you should go to jail, because I don’t think what you did ought to be against the law. But instead of insulting us, maybe you can wake up and smell the coffee, and admit that perhaps we have a point in our opposition to these laws?

UPDATE: I’m retracting my retractions about whether he took the gun with him or not. This guy is a liar, one way or another, so I feel no need to worry about whether I’m getting my story right. He didn’t, why should I bother?

The woman in this story is a dummy, but check out how the Inky opened this article:

It is no secret that Philadelphia’s out-of-control murder rate makes folks feel that a gun can go off any time, any place. But on Tuesday, even the courthouse wasn’t off limits to a dangerous weapon.

Do journalist even try to write intelligently anymore?   I have some news for Simone Weichselbaum: guns do not just “go off, at any time, any place”.  Someone has to pull the trigger.

“She put her bag in the X-ray machine and began to enter security,” said Central Detective’s Capt. Sharon Seaborough.

Banks also had an “attitude,” cops said. She gave the impression she didn’t think there was anything wrong with carrying the gun, and a knife, in her purse, police said. She was charged with weapons offenses.

Dummy.  She had an LTC, but as anyone who has an LTC knows, you can’t carry into a court of law.  She might have some room to mount a defense here, because of the definition of “court facility” in PA law:

The courtroom of a court of record; a courtroom of a community court; the courtroom of a district justice; a courtroom of the Philadelphia Municipal Court; a courtroom of the Pittsburgh Magistrates Court; a courtroom of the Traffic Court of Philadelphia; judge’s chambers; witness rooms; jury deliberation rooms; attorney conference rooms; prisoner holding cells; offices of court clerks, the district attorney, the sheriff and probation and parole officers; and any adjoining corridors.

There has been at least one court ruling in Pennsylvania that this cannot be applied to the entire building.  But this was Commonwealth Court for Jefferson County.  Some courts don’t set up the location of their metal detectors with this in mind.  If I were her attorney, I would make the argument that the law doesn’t say court facilities, but that the prohibition is limited.   Philadelphia courts are unlikely to rule that way, but it might be worth getting this cleared up in superior court, or the supreme court, so the entire commonwealth can have a single standard.

The state legislature is quite capable of making a law that would have prohibited an entire court house, but they didn’t choose to do that, they chose the prohibition to be limited, and I think there’s a good chance this woman can get off on the weapons charges.

Of course, you won’t read any of that in the Inquirer, since I doubt the reporter knows much about the law in any detail, and couldn’t be bothered to check.

Uncle updates on the NBC video:

And let’s get this out of they way: they’re not known in the trade as black rifles. They’re known as AR-15s. On some gun boards, they started referring to AR-15s as Evil Black Rifles to poke fun of the assault weapons ban, which seemed to target rifles that were black.

Man, if you had told me back in the early 90s that we’d be upset with the press because they are calling them “black rifles” rather than “killing machines” or “assault weapons”, I would have said you were nuts. Back then they said the only reason for a civilian to own one would be to mow down a kindergarten, which you could do, pretty easily, since 2 minutes with a nail file would convert it into a fully automatic machine gun, according to the news media.

I’m not sure I’d object to the term “military style” from anything other than a public relations point of view. The rifles are made from a military pattern. This you can’t really argue with. While they are not true military assault rifles, they are patterned after them. So I’m not sure “military style” isn’t fitting from a technical point of view.

To me the important message that seems to be getting out there is that these firearms do have a sporting use, and people do use them for legitimate other purposes, like home defense. This has always been the case, but I’m glad to see the media is moving beyond regurgitating whatever the Brady Campaign or Violence Policy Center tells them.

If you take your car to the shop to get fixed up, be sure to remove any bodies that you might have stashed in the trunk.

I saw the video tonight of MSNBC’s feature on Black Rifles that SayUncle mentioned earlier.  Overall, I think they did a pretty good job.  It would be nice if the other side of the story weren’t a load of crap.

The woman they featured reminded me of Sgt. Callahan from police academy, only with a heavy midwestern accent.  Still, it showed these rifles are mainstream among shooters, which can only help our cause.  If any of you remember the crap the media was peddling from 1989 to 1994 or so, this is a huge improvement.

It seems the Hartford Courant is admitting that gun control hasn’t done anything to fight crime in New England.

In 2004, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence gave Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island a B or better for their efforts to inhibit gun violence (Connecticut and Massachusetts got an A-), while Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont all received a D-.

Statistics from 2005, however, tell a much different story. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the murder rates in Portland, Maine, and Manchester, N.H., were 4.7 and 3.6 respectively per 100,000 residents - low when compared to the murder rates in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Boston, Springfield and Providence, which were more than twice their northern neighbors’ and higher than the national average of 6.9 per 100,000 during the same time period.

Yep.  But it gets better:

What do these statistics tell us? Restrictive and needless legislation does nothing to prevent violence. Erecting unnecessary roadblocks (i.e. gun control) to legal gun ownership only hurts, and at times dissuades, the law-abiding citizen. More importantly such laws do nothing to impede the criminal, because criminals do not adhere to the law. This is why lawmakers would better serve and protect those of us in Connecticut if they sought to address and remedy the destructive culture in our cities and elsewhere. Destroy this mindset as opposed to devising harmful legislation that does nothing to solve the true ills that plague certain communities, which are the real reasons why violence is occurring in the first place.

I wish the Philadelphia press could be this honest.   Read the whole thing.

Dave Hardy gives a hearty fisking to some delusions from the Christian Science Monitor.

This time, from the other side.  Of course, he’s wrong that it was the NRA that filed suit.  The NRA was actually pretty opposed to the idea.  It was filed by attorneys who were unassociated with the NRA.

 he appeal of the DC gun ban, however, looks likely to renew the debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment. Gun control advocates had urged DC not to appeal their loss in the Appellate Court (which ruled that the Second Amendment did indeed protect the registered gun in your home – that the 1930 opinion was wrong or misconstrued) in order to avoid having the US Supreme Court ratify the appellate decision.

So they were pressured not to go for cert!  Or at least this person seems to think so.  But I don’t think the DC circuit said anything about registration being OK.  And I’m pretty sure that Miller never endorsed anything other than the individual rights argument.

I think I’ve done about as well as I’m going to do in this match. I went to shoot at my club tonight, with a mind to do some outdoor shooting at 100 yards with the 10/22. I arrived kind of late though, and only got about 15 rounds off before I decided it was getting a little too dark.

Switch to the indoor range. Tried out the E-Postal with the Glock a bit to see if could do any better. Had a really hard time hitting anything over the 8 with it. I probably could have worked my way up to hitting the 9, 10, and maybe 11, but I told myself I wouldn’t blow more than 50 rounds with the Glock. 9mm is just too expensive right now.

Switch to the Mk.III, and I seem to be doing better than I was last time. I managed to shoot a 65 two handed.

Hitting the 11 was a lucky shot! I figured if I can hit the 11, I can surely hit the 12. But no, I pulled that one way down, and to the right. I would have been better off going for the 1 circle, and getting an extra point. But these are the gambles you take with this target. Next I had to try one handed. Now, I’ve been practicing one handed, and I’m getting to the point where I don’t totally suck. I shot 55 one handed.

I discovered Ahab’s advice about taking your time to be quite useful. I instituted a rule of loading no more than one round at a time, which improved my shooting dramatically. I tend to practice more rapid shooting.  If I put 5 rounds in a magazine (club maximum), I rush my shooting, which was killing me in bullseye stance.

I think this is about as well as I’m going to shoot on this match. To be honest, I can’t see anything beyond the 10 circle well, and I can’t see the 12 and 13 circle at all. This was the hardest match so far, I think. Golf at least had color to aim at. This circles target was as much a test for eyesight and dealing with poor sight picture as it was for holding the gun steady and trigger technique. My advise for other shooters is to do the middle row first. Errant shots have a good chance of hitting the other circles! I had that happen at least twice.  Even hit the 13 by chance first time I tried the target, unfortunately the rest of the target sucked, and my single handed shooting was atrocious in that first session.

Good luck to everyone.  You have until Monday the 30st to get your entry in, if you want to participate.  But you should!  Go download the target from Conservative UAW Guy.