Snowflakes in Hell

I have arrived back in the Philadelphia area to my nice warm 55 degree house.  It’ll be painful while I wait for the house to come back up to temperature.  When I plan to be away for a while, I drain the plumbing and turn down the heat so I’m not burning through cash while I’m away.  While I enjoy traveling away from home, I will be happy to rest my aching back in my own bed tonight for the first time in a week and a half.

Looks like some bozo with a rifle decided to take some pot shots at a water tower in North Carolina:

Catawba County Sheriff’s deputy Major Coy Reid said the tower appears to have been shot three times with a high-powered rifle. He said authorities believe the shooting took place early Monday morning.

I would have thought water towers would be pretty resistant to small arms fire.  In addition to the shape usually being rather roundish, I would have imagined the metal would need to be thick enough just to contain the water that it could deflect a hit from most projectiles.

Syd has an excellent take on the video circulating of the girl smacking herself int he face with a recoiling Desert Eagle.

With polls showing John McCain coming back strongly in New Hampshire, and me looking at a distinct possibility of Huckabee pulling a win out of Iowa, and with my preferred candidate Fred Thompson not looking good at all, I’m prepared to bury the hatchet with the whole idea of McCain and get behind him by the time Pennsylvania’s primary rolls around.   Compared to my other choices, McCain isn’t looking too bad.

That says a lot about my other choices, none of it good.

You can get a replica of Captain Reynolds’ pistol for 150 bucks.

Eric notices she’s not doing too well among the young.  Looks like she does best with the over 55 crowd.  She would also appear to not be a college educated person’s type of liberal.

My theory on this is that younger, better educated people aren’t enamored with the whole idea of a woman president.  To our generation, the idea that a woman could be president isn’t very revolutionary; we expect it will happen, and the idea isn’t novel. Aging women, who didn’t grow up with full societal acceptance of women in positions of power, really want to see a woman president in their lifetime, and Hillary is their gal.

This is a startling admission from the New York Times:

 There’s an attractive logic to this argument, except that, in practice, it runs into some nettlesome inconsistencies. For instance, the National Rifle Association is also a dues-paying group that aggregates the power of its members, as is the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and I doubt very much that Edwards or other Democrats would describe these as anything other than special interests. Just like the N.R.A., Big Labor tries to manipulate elections to gain access and favor for its members. That doesn’t make unions a corrupting influence; as Andrew Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, always says, unions have been the greatest antipoverty program in American history. But it does make labor a special interest, whether Democrats like it or not.

Is it just me, or is that the first time you’ve ever seem anyone at the New York Times state that the NRA represents its members interests, rather than being a toady of the firearms industry?

According to this AP article, Hillary Clinton doesn’t want the media talking to her kid:

But onstage, Chelsea never speaks; she stands next to her mother and applauds but utters not a single sentence and doesn’t even say hello. And reporters covering the campaign have been put on notice that Chelsea is not available to speak to them. An aide follows the former first daughter as she works the crowd, shushing reporters who approach her and try to ask any questions.

Seems kind of odd to me to have your child show up and campaign for you to just be a pretty face.

Both War on Guns and Armed and Safe have offered their takes on this BBC article.   I have one as well:

Police commander Michael Anzallo says the capital has seen an influx of handguns from neighbouring states where there are fewer controls.

“The police department recovers more than 1,000 guns a year,” he says.

“The problem is easy access to firearms. Most of the motives for homicides are arguments or robbery related and the quick pull of the trigger means somebody’s life.”

This seems to be a common tactic; blaming the neighboring states.  The way this is always presented suggests the gun law of the controlling jurisdictions are strict, and effective at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, but that criminals can just cross over into another state and buy a firearm because of the lax laws there.

Given that most people aren’t aware of what current gun control laws actually are, this is an effective tactic to deflect the criticism that gun control will never work.  Most people don’t know that it’s illegal to buy a handgun out of state, or that someone with a criminal history will fail a background check, and aren’t aware of the current laws about straw purchasing.

It’s effective to evoke images of a criminal heading to a Maryland gun store and picking up a gun because of the “lax” gun laws there, rather than explain the existing laws, or the black market networks through which criminals obtain firearms.

Ravenwood talks about Washington DC’s gun buyback program, and suggests a gun buyback program of his own that I could really get behind.