Snowflakes in Hell

Looks like they’ve updated their Board of Directors page, and what do you know, the good Professor isn’t on it.  One has to wonder whether he was quietly uninvited.  Perhaps Alex T. Riley has been abducted by aliens.

Hat tip to Armed and Safe and War on Guns for noticing the update.

So here I am on a Saturday night, and Bitter is no where in sight.  You all know what this means.  It’s time to buy a gun!  I have my eye on one.  This one is from the Civilian Marksmanship Program.

What do you think? Click on the picture for more detail.  I think that would be a great rifle for doing open sight silhouette. What do you all think? If I decide this is the gun, I’ll drop the order form in the mail on Monday.

UPDATE: It’s a Kimber Model 82.  You can read about them here.

Mr. Completely refinished his own grips.  Looks pretty good!

The latest bit of Pants Shitting Hysterics comes to us from The National Parks Conservation Assocation:

Originally written in the 1930s to prevent wildlife poaching, the parks’ firearms regulation was carefully revised during the Reagan Administration to be as narrowly restrictive as possible, while also assisting park personnel to prevent unlawful killing of wildlife. NPCA believes the current regulations strike an appropriate balance between the rights of individuals to possess firearms under state and federal laws and hunt in areas of the National Park System where it is permitted, and the safety of national park visitors and wildlife. NPCA will express its views in the public comment period, but highlighted a few of them today.

Park safety and enjoyment: We believe that enabling individuals to carry loaded guns in national parks will alarm families visiting the parks, and heighten the possibility for deadly visitor conflicts.

It doesn’t seem alarm families anywhere else that have laws allowing licensed individuals to carry firearms.  Why are the National Parks any different?  Why should they be different?

Hat tip to Of Arms and the Law

Roberta X has a pretty good post up that makes the case against John McCain.  She says:

The choice between Democrats and Republicans is the choice between the noose and slow poison and the “hold your nose and pick McCain”[3] school of thought takes comfort in at least having time to dash off a few more Letters To The Editor before the end. Buncombe!

I don’t think she’s necessarily wrong here.  This may be exactly what’s happening.  Our constitutional republic may very well be death spiraling into an inevitable sea of Social Democracy, and there might not be enough people left who would rather be free than be taken care of.  I do not think it’s inevitable, however.  If we do want to reverse it, there are some thing small l libertarians are going to need to accept.

1. We’re a minority.  When you get down to it, we’re all a minority.  Very few people’s political views can have a nice neat label placed over them.  When you’re a minority, you can only exert political power in coalition with other interests, which means, necessarily, you’ll never get a candidate that’s perfect in every way, and most of the time you probably won’t get a candidate that’s even perfect in most ways.
2. The system of government set up under our constitution makes two party domination all but inevitable.  We are not a parliamentary system with proportional representation, so coalition building in our Republic happens outside of the government, in the political parties.  Groups have been known to enter and leave the coalition, often to start third parties, but these have always been short lived, and have often meant the political death for the components that followed.   Paleoconservatism walked out of the Republican coalition with Pat Buchannan, and haven’t been heard from since.  Third party politics is the political wilderness in our system of government.  Some people like it there.  I can’t say I blame them, because it can be more fulfilling than always having to compromise with other interests in a coalition, but has the Libertarian Party been able to make either of the two parties reconsider the War on Drugs, or get anyone elected who could possibly have any effect on it?  You can’t keep blaming other people because they won’t get on board.  At some point you have to look inward and start to ask if maybe you’re doing something wrong.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m still, according to my state, registered as a Libertarian.  I have been for the past 10 years, just about.  My flirtation with the LP didn’t last long, after I realized that Libertarians weren’t about creating a political movement, but instead were mostly interested in making sure people who weren’t sufficiently pure remained outside of their “movement”.  They couldn’t see how people who were 70% with Libertarians might be able to work with them to help advance the 70% of their agenda they might be able to agree on.   It was 100%, or nothing, and if you couldn’t accept that, well, you’re not a real libertarian are you?

Sometime around 2002, I started to realize that I don’t have much room to complain about the state of things, because I’ve basically not been participating in the process that ends up giving us the candidates we all end up having to vote, or not vote for.  I didn’t vote in primaries, I didn’t donate money to candidates I liked, and I didn’t do anything to try to help candidates I liked get nominated or elected.  I just bitched about the choices I had to make in the end.  In my adult life, starting with voting for George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton, I have never felt good about anyone I’ve ever pulled the lever for.  I didn’t feel good about voting for Harry Browne in 2000, because even by that time I had come to realize the Libertarian Party was mostly full of shit.   I didn’t feel good about voting for Dole, George W. Bush, and I won’t feel good about voting for John McCain.  I’ve never not pulled the lever for Arlen Specter, because although I’ve despised him, I’ve despised every person that’s ever run against him even more.

I decided this election year that I’d do things differently.  Despite very early misgivings, I donated to Fred Thompson’s campaign.  Those hopes were quickly dashed as the campaign season started.  Fred was too late getting in, and was early getting out.  Living in Pennsylvania, there’s not too much else I can do.  Our race doesn’t come around until April, so we’re irrelevant.

I’m starting to understand the wisdom of former House Speaker Tip O’Neil, who famously qipped “All politics is local.”  If liberty minded people want candidates who more closely represent them, they have to work to front those kinds of people at the local level first, and get them elected.  National political leaders most often start small, and this is certainly an area I’ve been deficient, and am looking for ways to remedy, without having to become a party hack that supports the party no matter what.

Libertarians have to understand that politics is not primarily a process of principles and ideas.  It is more closely likened to a strategy game, than to a debating society.  In a game, you will not always win.  There will sometimes be periods when you lose. There will sometimes be periods when you might appear to be losing, but suddently see an opportunity to execute a strategy your opponent won’t see coming.  Sometimes winning will require you making risky moves,  Sometimes your opponent yesterday will be a friend tomorrow.  The real risk for libertarians is that a lot of people who start playing this game forget the reason they started, and they find themselves playing for the sake of playing.  That describes a lot of politicians in power today.

Every libertarian knows what their overall goal is; a lot more “leave me the hell alone” and a lot less of the typical shit we’ve seen from government since the progressives took over most of the institutions.  To that end, we need to pick a handful of issues that we can push in the mainstream today, that advance the cause of a more limited government.  It will require slaughtering an awful lot of sacred cows, and I know enough about how libertarians think to know they won’t want to do that.  So the mainstream will keep ignoring us, and will keep nominating socialists, and people like John McCain.  We’ll choose to see all of our issues and concerns addressed or none of them.  We may quite likely end up spiraling into the sea of Social Democracy, but I’ve never met a libertarian who is serious about doing something to stop it.  They insist on pushing a button to get the plane flying perfectly off onto the right heading and at the right altitude, rather than applying a little left rudder here, and right aleron there, in order to methodically get the plane out of the spiral, and onto a truer heading.  I do think we have to start fixing this soon, because the sea is starting to get pretty big in the cockpit window.  Some suggest just letting the plane crash, because what doesn’t kill us will just make us stronger.  I tend to think it’ll just make us dead, and I’m not ready to accept that the idea of limited, constitutional government has no traction left in main stream politics.

Pennsylvania’s concealed carry laws are among the best in the nation, but I can’t imagine our legislators having a debate like this.

SayUncle pointed to another anti-gun blog.  I went over and commented, and it would appear the site is moderated, and comments are not being approved.  Now it could be that the proprietor hasn’t gotten around to it yet, but feel free to go engage in some reasoned discourse of your own.

If Countertop keeps showing off pictures of his new EBR, Bitter is going to make me get her one.  I’m more of an EBC person myself.

Many of you have probably seen Joe Huffman’s Just One Question.  He managed to get a response back from a reporter this time.

Fresh from stabbing gun owners in the back with the Heller Brief, the Bush administration seems to have decided to be nice to us again:

At the request of the Bush Administration and 51 members of the United States Senate led by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prohibition of firearms on agency land will be revised in the following weeks.

Victory at last.

Caleb speaks of Cal State going ape shit over someone walking around with an assault rifle.  When I was in college, one of the ROTC kids got himself a reprimand for toting an M16 openly down the streets of Philadelphia on his way to our school’s rifle range.  Oddly enough, perfectly legal for anyone to do; open carriage of pistols is illegal in the City of Brotherly love without a License to Carry, but openly carrying a long gun is not, and Pennsylvania law makes no distinction between legal machine guns and other types of long guns.

I’m not sure this is evidence of hoplophobia.  If I saw someone openly carrying what looked like an M16 around campus, I’d probably be a little alarmed too.   It’s not so much the gun as it is that it’s something out of context.  I’m not sure my level of alarm would be lower if the person was in uniform.

This turd passed unanimously out of committee.  Folks in Nebraska need to get off their butts and join Joe in stopping this.  You only get one chance.  Repealing laws once they pass is next to impossible.

Good thing about the snow: No work!!

Bad thing about the snow: Too hazardous to go see Bitter :(

I have a new polling plugin, so I’m going to try this sucker out.

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Your feedback is appreciated.

… and I’m already tired of this election year.  Tired because I find myself defending John McCain, and I don’t even really like the guy.  McCain is pretty far from being a classical liberal I could really get behind, and tends to fall more into the category of “National Greatness” conservative, who are open to a lot more state meddling in things the state ought not meddle in than I’m comfortable with.

But there are more crazy claims about McCain circulating out there than I can shake a stick at.  The first is that he’s anti-gun, and no better than Hilly or Obama.  Brady gives McCain a career rating of 17%.  Obama and Hillary both have 100% ratings, as did John Kerry.  The other is that McCain is a socialist. Other than Ron Paul, McCain’s federal budget is the lowest of any remaining Republican candidate.  McCain is not in favor of socializing 7% of the US economy in the same manner Obama would.  I think McCain on fiscal matters will be a significant improvement over Bush, let alone Obama or Hillary.

To my mind, campaign finance reform is his biggest sin, and there were a lot of other folks, including Fred Thompson and President Bush, and five members of the Supreme Court, who all took their turn to drop their dookie into the constitutional swimming pool.

But given that I’m the only person in the gun blogosphere who is thinking, “McCain!  Why did it have to be McCain!?!?” but still planning to vote for him regardless, and encouraging others to do so as well, I find myself wondering if the more apt analogy is Han Solo telling Chewbacca, “Get in there, you big furry oaf! I don’t care what you smell!”

It’s probably hard for a cadre of paid activists to believe that folks like myself and W. Scott Lewis do what we do because we value our rights, and not because we’re paid shills for the “gun lobby”

Or perhaps it’s not so hard for them to believe, but in order to paint the big bad NRA, and its 4 million members, in a negative light, it has to claim we’re all paid shills of some nefarious “gun lobby”

From Peter Hamm, of the Brady Campaign:

But Peter Hamm, communication director for the Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence, is concerned that the group is the latest tool of the powerful gun lobby.

“We know very clearly that they were organised and they are funded by the gun industry, by the companies that are selling the guns,” he said.

“This is not some spontaneous, grassroots organisation.

“There are more members than there were before Virginia Tech because the gun industry is spending more money to enlist more young people to help them spread the word, that if only we had more guns in America, we’d have less of a gun violence problem.”

So the tens of thousands of people on SFCC’s Facebook group are all paid shills of the “gun lobby” and not real grass roots?  If Peter Hamm wants to know what astroturf looks like, he doesn’t need to look very far.

Peter Hamm offers no facts to back up this assertion, but are we really surprised?

Shot a 21 with Bitter’s new CZ-452 Lux rifle, open sights.  Not good, but I meant to take it to the range last night to make sure the sights were zeroed, but didn’t get the chance because I felt like dog pooh. It was shooting a bit high at to the left, but it’s hard to tell exactly how much just looking at the splatter on the animal.  I ended up missing the first couple of animals until I figured out where to aim for that particular animal.  After that it was down to my general skill, which only gets me about 30 or so with my scoped 10/22.

I think it’ll be a great shooter once I get the sighs zeroed and get a scope on it.

CNN has a pretty balanced piece of campus concealed carry.  They get some of the legal subtleties wrong though.  For instance, you can carry on a college campus in Pennsylvania legally, it’s just that Colleges and Universities, including those in the state system, exclude firearms through policy (rather than law).  This is the case in Virginia as well.  The laws being proposed in different states are meant to have various effects.

Many states, including Texas and Tennessee, ban concealed carry on college campuses through law.  There are proposals to repeal this, but that would still allow college to ban them through policy.  You could be expelled from the school, but you won’t be facing charges for violating a gun free zone.  Virginia’s proposal would have prevented the state run school system from imposing restrictions on individuals who possessed a Concealed Handgun License.

While I have some issues with how CNN has chosen to cover this, the fact that this is becoming a serious debate at all is a sign on how far we’ve come here.  Even five years ago, it wouldn’t even be up for serious debate.

Obama says that he wants to implement California style gun controls, as an example of how much he loves the second amendment.  Sportsmen for Obama talks about what exactly that would mean for the whole country.

… be very afraid:

“He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” George Clooney told talk show host Charlie Rose.

“I’ll do whatever he says to do,” actress Halle Berry said to the Philadelphia Daily News. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”

If it was just vapid Hollywood stars who liked this guy, I wouldn’t be that worried, but it’s enough people that I’m beginning to fear the prospect of an Obama presidency more than a Hillary presidency. Is this fervent and religious devotion to Obama among the young a product of schools long ago hijacked by the left?

I don’t like Hillary Clinton, and I despise her politics.  I was initially rather irrationally happy to see Americans thumb their noses at her.  But no one really likes Hillary Clinton all that much, even the people who vote for her.  Lacking any real mandate, she’d be limited to what she can accomplish as President.

If Obama sweeps into office on a wave of near religious devotion, at the risk of invoking Godwin, I can’t help but thinking about the other times this has happened.  I’m not at all making the comparison of Obama to Hitler, or suggesting he’s going to burn down Capitol Hill to create a pretext, but just the kind of blind devotion I’m seeing in Obama supporters leads to that kind of thing, and if this is the road our young people want to go down, they need to spent more time learning history, with a skeptical eye toward human nature.

Hat tip to War on Guns for the link.

From John Derbyshire of National Review:

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

All to effectively explains the difference between people who want liberty, and people who want to be relieved of its burden.

According to Michael Bane:

BTW, Ruger is reporting unprecedented advance sales of the LCP .380…shows what you can do with the right product and the power of the Internet!

I’m definitely interested in trying out an LCP as soon as I can.  I’m glad to hear Ruger is doing well with it.  Now, if Ruger can just make the Mk.IV a gun I would actually want to buy, we’ll really be getting somewhere.

War on Guns doesn’t seem too happy about PVF donating to the campaign of Tim Johnson.  Quite possibly, in consideration of the fact that he signed onto the Congressional amicus brief on the side of Heller, this donation could be seen as an encouragement for Johnson to be more pro-gun.  Given that it’s exceedingly difficult to oust an incumbent, I can’t say I have any problem with doing stuff like this.  Influence can be bought, as we saw yesterday.  Politics is not a clean or honorable game, and if $2500 bucks is enough to convince Johnson to go from a C+ record to a B record, I consider that money well spent.  Don’t be surprised if PVF also donates to his opponents campaign.  That’s common practice among PACs as well.

Kevin Baker catches CNN in another stupid gun mistake.  Not a shocker, they seem to know about as much about guns as the mice I’ve been trapping in my attic.

Robb Allen has a bit of Montana’s brief in Heller:

A collective rights decision by the court would violate the contract by which Montana entered into statehood, called the Compact With the United States and archived at Article I of the Montana Constitution. When Montana and the United States entered into this bilateral contract in 1889, the U.S. approved the right to bear arms in the Montana Constitution, guaranteeing the right of “any person” to bear arms, clearly an individual right.

There was no assertion in 1889 that the Second Amendment was susceptible to a collective rights interpretation, and the parties to the contract understood the Second Amendment to be consistent with the declared Montana constitutional right of “any person” to bear arms.

As a bedrock principle of law, a contract must be honored so as to give effect to the intent of the contracting parties. A collective rights decision by the court in Heller would invoke an era of unilaterally revisable contracts by violating the statehood contract between the United States and Montana, and many other states.

That sounds like secessh talk to me.  This will mean that quite possibly Montana will be the haven of shooters when The Messiah sends his jackbooted angels to give us the knock on the door.

SayUncle details other instances when Montana has told the feds to go to hell.  If Montana secedes from the union to preserve gun rights, I’ll move there.