Snowflakes in Hell

Apparently I was supposed to note that I should get a pin on last week’s score, so this week I didn’t get my chicken pin.   No fear though, because this week I also shot 10 chickens in a row, and was careful to note it properly this time, so next week I will have my chicken pin.

Sorry for the slow posting, tonight was Silhouette obviously, and also… Lost is back!  Which means I watch after coming back from shooting metal animals.

Looks like HB89 has had some pro-gun amendments attached to it today that include:

• further allowing concealed carry permit holders to carry in recreational areas, wildlife management areas, and public transportation;
• allowing concealed carry permit holders to carry in restaurants; and
• creating a stricter time line for various stages of the concealed carry license application process.

This amendment was tacked on by Representative Tim Bearden, and would appear to contain several of the measures that were in HB 915.  This sounds like a positive development, but NRA is alerting that people need to contact their representatives in order to ensure passage.

Bruce lets us know about a Boston news program designed to make it look like gang bangers are going to gun shows and buying guns cash and carry.  There’s a video preview linked if you haven’t already eaten dinner.

Apparently the dad who beat his kid to death over an Xbox has some competition for the vile parent of the year award:

The father of an 18-month-old child is off to jail for four years after being found guilty of using a stun gun on the boy. His reason for using the 100,000-volt Dragonfire, which resulted in muscle damage to the kid’s heart, was because he wanted his son to be “the toughest cage fighter ever.” Yeah, the toughest heart-damaged, cage-fighting 18-month-old ever.

Crazy.

… holding my nose come November.  Read the whole thing. Even for those who are predicting this will be the end of the republic, I don’t see any reason to open up the vein and help it bleed out faster by handing the election to Hillary or Obama.  I think The Republic will survive John McCain, and will, at the end of eight years, be better off than it will be under Obillery.

In Central Pennsylvania, a “zero tolerance” policy is making it difficult for a junior rifle team to bring air guns into the school so they can hold matches.

To me this is the same type of issue as sex education in schools.  You can either have the kids learn responsible gun use from responsible adults, or they can learn from video games and movies.

Armed and Safe talks about a federal gun show bill. The Democrats aren’t going to touch this before the election, but it’s a good example of the types of bills that will await us if the Democrats manage to shore up their majority if Republicans decide to stay home in November.

Today’s quote is from Joe Huffman:

Come out of the closet. In the early days of the gay rights movement there was a phrase, “Silence equals death!”. Getting people to come out in the open about being a gun owner helps the anti-gun people realize we aren’t red-necked, knuckle dragging, Neanderthals, who beat their wives, complain about the “coloreds” lusting after our women folk, and whose idea of a good time is shooting our empties while chugging beer from the tailgate of our pickups. It worked for the gays and it can work for us.

I agree with this.  When I first started getting back into shooting in my mid 20s, after not having shot since I was a kid shooting cans, I was pretty quiet about it around coworkers.  These days virtually all my coworkers know I shoot Silhouette on Thursdays, am a member of the NRA, and am politically active in the gun rights movement.

It is a risk, because you never know when some corporate drone will decide you’re too dangerous for the company to keep around and fire you.  I think it’s a risk we need to take.  Others who have preceded us have taken far far greater risks in the name of preserving freedom, and if we can’t step up in this manner, we’re doomed.

Of course, the one caveat is that being out only helps if you’re actually normal.   If you’re building a bunker in your cubicle out of old QIC computer tape cartridges and reams of copier paper, in preparation for the day the UN sends in the blue helmeted ones to impose the New World Order on your workplace, you might want to think about staying in the closet.

Kevin doesn’t trust McCain to pick the right kind of justices. I don’t really either. But you know what? I didn’t trust Bush to make good selections either, and, Harriet Meyers debacle aside, we wouldn’t be thinking about winning Heller if Al Gore or John Kerry had won. Bush could have done better, but Roberts and Alito are far from the worst choices that could have been made.

I know exactly the kind of justices that Hillary and Obama will pack the court with. How does the thought of Obillery picking Scalia’s replacement sit with you? It doesn’t sit well with me either, but Scalia will be 81 by the time the next president leaves office. Think he’ll make it? If either of those two win, I certainly hope so.

For whatever reason, conservatives didn’t have their act together this primary, and so we’re stuck with the second string. Perhaps folks will say I’ve drank the kool-aid, but can you imagine the damage that up to six Obillery nominated justices will do as we try to refine the scope of the second amendment post Heller? Make no mistake about it, I think that McCain’s choices are likely to be less than stellar, but I see no reason to slit our wrists electorally and let Obillery seriously alter the ideological composition of The Court.

One thing to consider is that while we might not get exactly what we want as president, McCain can’t be guaranteed to get exactly who he wants as Supreme Court justice. Justice Kennedy and Souter are prime examples of that. Also note that our most conservative justice, with the greatest fealty toward the constitution, Justice Thomas, was nominated by the decidedly unconservative George H.W. Bush.  With McCain, we run a much better chance of getting a more favorable justice than we do with either of the Democrats.

He’s baaack!

One thing all this reloading is going to start producing eventually is a lot of scrap brass.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to sell your old, worn out brass, to be recycled?  Is there a place you can take it?

It’s a telling statement that when gun control folks actually come on to debate us seriously, it’s worth a link, since it happens so rarely, even across hundreds of gun blogs.  Robb has that going on over at Sharp as a Marble.

Several other bloggers have pointed this out, and I feel I should as well.  Academics for the Second Amendment are a group of second amendment scholars that have been working hard to secure your gun rights for years to come.  They will be filing an Amicus brief with the US Supreme Court.  Needless to say, filing a brief with the Supreme Court costs a significant amount of money, so they really need your support.   I just sent a little bit of cash their way, and I hope you all will as well.

There is truly no fight in our life times that will matter to gun rights more than this one, and we must stand by the people who are standing by us.

As demonstrated on the official Ohio “we don’t want gun owner’s money” signs.

Ahab points out how the difference in attitudes towards allowing arms in schools created a very different result when terrorists paid a visit to an Israeli school.

It looks like there are plans afoot to make both Lehigh and Northampton counties “shotgun only” for hunting:

Currently, the restriction on rifle hunting applies only in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. However, a proposal on the agenda for the commission’s Tuesday business meeting would prohibit deer hunting with a rifle throughout Wildlife Management Unit 5C, which also would be significantly expanded to include the Reading area and all of Lehigh and Northampton counties except a small sliver adjacent to the Blue Mountain.

If the measure is adopted, the only rifles that would remain legal for hunting use in the territory would be less powerful .22-caliber rimfires, which could be used for small game such as squirrels or furbearers such as foxes and coyotes.

I guess the PGC decided the study that showed shotgun hunting isn’t any safer was without merit.

Looking at his overall plan, there would seem to be some good:

Philadelphia’s new commissioner said he plans to disband the elite Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement team - the SITE unit, which was created in 2006 by former Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson to flood violent areas at night. Ramsey said that the SITE unit had drained resources from regular patrols to the detriment of the local districts.

My armchair quarterbacking here might be in error, but it would seem to me that anything that steps up regular patrols will help.  I don’t know much about SITE, or whether to accept Ramsey’s assessment of it, but if it was one of Johnson’s ideas, that makes me skeptical of it off the bat.

Ramsey instead plans to create a “mobile force” of officers who offer to work extra shifts during the high-crime summer weekends, when violent crime tends to spike.

A mobile force?  You mean one that drives around in patrol cars? :)  What does this mean?  Is all the overtime sustainable?  Are there enough officers who want the overtime?  Would it be cheaper to just hire more cops?

Ramsey said he would concentrate resources into nine of the city’s 23 police districts that were responsible for 65 percent of the city’s homicides: the 12th, 18th and 19th Districts in Southwest Division; the 14th, 35th and 39th Districts in the city’s Northwest Division; the 15th District in the lower Northeast; the 22d District in North Philadelphia and the 25th District in the Eastern Division.

That means little to me, so I can’t assess whether that’s the smart thing to do or not.   Wyatt Earp says it’s a whole lot of nothin’.  Since he’s in the department, and I’m not, I’ll defer to his judgment on this matter.

Uncle is asking for some help:

So, there’s a lot of pro-gun activists on the Internet. I mean, there’s a ton. We’re just not all in the same place what with message boards, live journal, face book, etc, etc. If everyone actually got together, we’d be pretty influential, I would venture.

Any ideas on how to do that?

First you have to decide what your goal is, because online organizing is good for certain things, and not entirely good for other things. If the goal is grassroots mobilization, forums and blogs are effective, but I question whether we have the numbers to turn elections, which is the root of all political power. Politics is all local. A large percentage of my readers live here with me in Pennsylvania, so in a state wide race, I may have some very small effect on election outcomes. Online gun rights organizations like PAFOA, with many thousands of readers, could have even more. But could I mobilize my readership to defeat my local state representative? Probably not. A congressman? Probably not. You need a different kind of organization to affect those types of political outcomes, and for gun owners, they are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, local clubs and associations, along with NRA’s considerable election mobilization machine that works through a network of EVCs on the ground locally. This is why I think it’s important to have a debate about what we want a blanket online gun-owner project to accomplish. I don’t think online gunnies can’t affect political outcomes at all, but we have to play to our strengths, and understand our weaknesses.

Uncle relays a story from one of his readers. I agree with Tam’s assessment in the comments:

You know, not everyone is going to be a shooter, for whatever reason.

I don’t hang out on any golf-specific web forums, but are guys there as worried about getting their wives to come golfing with them as male shooters are to get their S.O. to the range?

I’ve only known a couple of women who were shooters and who had beaux that weren’t at all interested, and neither one really wrung her hands about getting her fella to the range.

She’s right that not everyone is going to be a shooter, but I think I can explain the male mind here. Golf players don’t sweat their sport. No one repeatedly accuses golfers of wanting to murder children, or causing inner city crime. There’s no strong political movement dedicated to the eradication of their “barbaric sport”. I think for a lot of guys they are seeking a bit of affirmation that the significant other really is OK with what they are doing, and won’t someday join with the chorus of people who look down on him because he likes to play with baby killing bullet hoses.

News reports has it that John Edwards is leaving the race.  Rudy is expected to bow out as well, and endorse John McCain.  That leaves both parties narrowed down to two candidates.  McCain is definitely not the best that gun rights folks could have hoped for, but the worst guy will be out.  McCain most decidedly is the best on the issue of the moderate candidates, as I feel Romney will be more unreliable than Bush.  I’m still not ruling out a protest vote for Ron Paul if my choice is those two.

Apparently killing a woman isn’t enough to draw the ire of left wing feminist groups, but endorsing a black man is.

McCain edged out Mitt Romney in Florida. Rudy bet his campaign on Florida, so he’s pretty much toast now. On to Super Tuesday, where McCain now has the momentum.

UPDATE: Looks like Hillary won too, but gets no delegates. This doesn’t please me, but it’s occurred to me that Obama could be tougher to beat, so maybe I shouldn’t savor his victories over The Hildabeast so much.

We’ve been seeing a lot of this logic lately:

Hafter’s daughter, Lizzy Hafter, a Dean’s List graduate of the University of Virginia, was murdered in September 2006 on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Charlottesville, Virginia. The killer had stolen the gun weeks earlier. The gun had not been reported stolen. Lizzie’s mother is advocating for a law in South Carolina, Lizzy’s Law, to require gun owners to report to police a gun that has been lost or stolen.

How would this woman’s daughter have been saved if the gun had been reported stolen?  It’s a violation of federal regulations to have a firearm on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the first place, but does reporting the firearm magically remove it form the hands of the criminal?

Philadelphia man convicted of murder because he killed his 17 month old daughter over a broken Xbox.

Looks like some Democrats in Concord want to make the state house a gun free zone.