Snowflakes in Hell

In Berkeley.

I went to the club tonight to shoot this month’s e-postal match.  This month I’m shooting scoped rimfire.  I did OK on the bullseye targets, but then I went and counted up the flies, and set aside 20 cartridges.  Oops.  I was only supposed to do 10.  Either way, I got 10 flies with 20 shots.  Maybe when I go back to re-shoot the match following the proper rules, I’ll do better.

Speaking of scoped rimfires, I got a cheapy Chinese made holographic sight for the Mk.III Hunter, and I’m not happy with it.  I think I need to spring for an EOTech.  I’m looking at the Bushnell Holosight, though, which I understand is actually made by EOTech, but marketed by Bushnell for the lower end market.  Anyone know whether they are comparable?  I don’t see any reason to spend the cash for an EOTech when I could get essentially the same thing for less money.

Ace will tell you.  Once you get below the folks who are political appointees, cops tend to be pretty strong supporters of the right to keep a firearm for self-defense.  Police confront the worst humanity has to offer on a regular basis in the course of their jobs.  They know better than your average upper middle class voter exactly what these kinds of people are capable of, and know they have about as much respect for the law as they do the communities they terrorize.

They have shut down a web site under pressure from Islamists:

h4rm0ny notes the furor over an anti-Islamic movie due to be released on the Web in the next week. After Pakistan disrupted YouTube worldwide over an interview with right-wing Dutch MP and filmmaker Geert Wilders, Network Solutions, acting as host as well as registrar, has suspended Wilders’s site promoting the 15-minute film “Fitna” (a Koranic term translated as “strife”).

The site now says:

This site has been suspended while Network Solutions is investigating whether the site’s content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy. Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation.

I don’t use Network Solutions, and now I can guarantee that I never will. We have to be willing to stand up to people who refuse to live peaceably among free citizens.

Over at GunPundit.  A miniature black powder mortar that fires BBs.

From Rachel Lucas who is having difficulty with the love of her life heading off to active duty:

I hereby declare March 23 as Punch A Hippie In The Nuts Day. All you have to do to celebrate it is find a hippie, ask him how he feels about the military, and if he says anything other than “I love it because those guys make it possible for me to be a worthless hippie”, punch him right in the nuts.

I’ll get on board with that!

Jacob has some footage of her barking like a moonbat for CNN.  I’m going to guess that most of that ended up on the cutting room floor since she seemed to be more interested in giving a speech than an interview.  As much as I lament that folks on our side often botch media opportunities, the gun control movement has the same problem.  Really, The VPC and Brady Campaign have been the only groups that have played the media game very well.

This time in Tokyo.  Good thing Japan has strict gun laws, someone might have gotten hurt.

Hat Tip to Tam for noticing it

Thirdpower points out this bit of pant shitting hysterics from the Associated Press:

When she pointed her handgun at the two nearest deputies, officers switched to assault rifles, hitting Sarah Marie Stanfield of Boise eight times with bullets designed to break apart on impact to increase internal damage. She died last fall of multiple gunshot wounds.

Or it could be, they are designed to fragment so they don’t pass through things and hit whatever is behind them, but whatever scares people the most, you know.

Some jurisdictions across the U.S. have been arming rank-and-file officers with high-powered assault rifles for a decade or more

Of rather, they are arming police with the types of rifles that are appropriate for police work, like AR-15s, that are neither high powered nor assault rifles.

The rifles fire bullets with enough velocity to penetrate some types of body armor and have greater accuracy at longer range than handguns.

So does your dad’s deer rifle. This is true of any center-fire rifle.  The Brady Campaign seems to be understanding of this predicament.  Angry Peter says:

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said it understands the moves to assault weapons. “Police officers need to be able to defend themselves and the rest of us, and they need the weapons to do so,” said spokesman Peter Hamm.

I agree with Peter.  But if the Brady’s are conceding that these firearms are useful for self-defense, why do they suddenly become useless for that purpose when they are in my hands instead of police officer?

Except to see more of this type of thing in the coming months.  No doubt the gun control proponents will go full court with their press game in an attempt to influence the outcome in Heller.

Gun shop owners should really get out of the habit of talking to the media.  Especially in the Philadelphia area.  The media here are not our friends.  Apparently Mike Glessner, of Mike’s Sporting Goods, needs this bit of advice more than a lot of others:

Congratulations Mike, you just gave the anti-gunners in our area a lot more ammunition to call for more restrictions, because “See, even gun shop owners agree!”

UPDATE:  Guav says in the comments: “Is there some context in the article for that statement, or are you just judging by the caption? Because there is absolutely no way to know what he said that in regards to otherwise—it may have been absolutely nothing to do with thinking there should be more gun laws.” Guav is right.  It could have been taken out of context.  Nonetheless, the lesson stands.  Don’t talk to media.

This very biased piece is a smear of all gun owners.  The topic, as far as I can tell, is that underneath every law abiding gun owner, is a crack head just waiting to sell guns to criminals:

When Trenton crack dealer Sean Hagins spotted the Pennsylvania tags and NRA sticker on a customer’s pickup, he saw opportunity. Hagins had been dealing drugs for years, was an ex-felon with a history of psychiatric problems; he could not buy guns himself. The customer, David Downs, had a nasty crack habit and had been laid off from a Bensalem belt factory.

Yep, those shady NRA members and their criminal ways!  Not content to smear gun owners, they also smear honest dealers:

Guns & Things owner Mary Ann Dobdrenz winced when a reporter told her the DC-9 ended up in the hands of an accused killer.

In an interview at her shop, which she runs out of her home, Dobdrenz said it was often impossible to separate the straw buyers from the gun enthusiasts.

“You just can’t tell from looking at a person,” she said.

Downs, 47, has a solid middle-class background. He graduated from Delhaas High School in Bucks County and owned a three-bedroom house in nearby Levittown. He even had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Eventually, Dobdrenz said, she grew worried about Downs. She passed a list of his gun purchases to a local police officer, who promised to give it to the FBI. She never heard whether federal investigators saw her list.

Dobdrenz said she did ask Downs why he needed so many guns. She never got a good answer.

“He was a real talker,” Dobdrenz said. “There was always a different story.”

So here we have a gun shop that fully cooperated with authorities, went well above the legal requirement in trying to ascertain the nature of this guy’s interest in all the guns he was buying, and they still get their name published in the Inquirer in a piece that’s decidedly not painting them in a friendly light.  This hits close to home for me, since “Guns & Things” is within walking distance, about 1/2 a mile from my house.

But is this article really a case of the need for stricter gun laws?  Downs was caught, and confessed to authorities.  He’s going to jail where he belongs, along with all this other gun trafficking friends.  The law worked in this case, and you’ll get no argument from most gun owners that these men belong in prison.  But straw purchasing is a fundamental problem.  The only way to put any dent in it is to outlaw all gun sales, or close the majority of the state’s gun shops, which service the shooting community in the areas they are located.  This is not a solution that is acceptable to gun owners in Pennsylvania, which is why we will not agree to further restrictions on our right to bear arms.

What the article doesn’t tell you is, for the most part, there are no longer many legal avenues to purchase a firearms in New Jersey.  There are few gun shops left in existence, having been driven out of business by all the burdensome regulations on gun ownership there.  Guns in New Jersey may not be illegal, but it’s fast approaching the point where they might as well be.  Gun owners in Pennsylvania will not permit our rights to suffer the same fate.  We will not sacrifice the health of our sport and our ability to protect ourselves and our families on the false promises that gun control actually reduces violence.

Happy Easter everyone.  Bitter and I were noticing how bright out it was last night with the full moon, and then it occurred to her that Easter is always the first full moon after the start of spring.  It then occurred to me how pagan such a means of determining when Easter fell was.  That would essentially mean you’d need a way to determine the vernal equinox, and then you’d need some kind of calendar based on the moon.  After that, how far do you really have to go before you’re sacrificing virgins to your fire god?

Also interesting that the word Easter is derived from the month on the Germanic Calendar dedicated to the goddess Eostre, who early Europeans celebrated by feasting around this time of year.

Enjoy your holiday folks, but please, no sacrificing virgins.

UPDATE: Some people are offended by my attempt at humor.  Apologies to anyone offended.  I am not intending to make fun of anyone for celebrating Easter, just poking fun at how the date of the holiday was selected.

UPDATE: Apologies to atheist readers who are disappointed at my attempt at reconciliation with my Christian readers who were offended by the original post.  Perhaps someday the People’s Front of Judea, and the Judaean People’s Front will be able to live side by side in harmony.

UPDATE: I should note that I am the product of an orange Irish/German paternity, and a Catholic Irish/German maternity, so if I took this stuff too serious myself, I’d blow myself up with a car bomb.