Snowflakes in Hell

*ring* *ring* *ring*

Bob: Hello, this is Bob Ricker of American Hunters and Shooters.

Obama: Hey man, you told me if you guys endorsed me, all those crackers outside of Philadelphia would cast their vote for me.  What the hell?

Bob: Look Barry, we’ll help you out in Indiana, for sure.  My buddy Paul tells me we’re sure to deliver Fort Wayne.  And there’s Gary Barry, don’t forget about Gary!

Obama: Indiana?  Are you crazy?  Those guys are even more bitter than Pennsylvanians.

Bob: We’re confident we can deliver the rich Perazzi shotgun vote.  Those guys love us.

Obama: How many of those guys are in Indiana?  Can you really deliver?

Bob: Can we deliver?  Can we deliver?  Is your name Barack Hussein Obama?

Obama: YOU SAID THE MIDDLE NAME!  NEVER SAY THE MIDDLE NAME!

Bob: Sorry Barry.  Look, it’s not our fault that Pennsylvania has so many whacko gun owners.  We think we can get you to within at least 5 points of Hillary in Indiana.  At least.  Trust us on this.

Obama: I’m starting to think you guys are full of crap Bob.

Bob: A group called Hunters and Shooters endorsing you?  What gave it away?

Obama: You just better help me out in Indiana!

*click*

From the local news station:

“First, is to raise awareness and dispel a lot of myths about concealed carry and to show people that concelead carry actually helps reduce crime. The second goal is to get states and school administrators to change their policies.”

Clark says about 10 other ‘Nova students took part in the ”Empty Holster Protest” but he doesn’t have much hope the university will change its no-concealed weapons policy any time soon.

Looks like some good work by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.  This is one of those fights those of us who are beyond that age can’t win alone, but now that students themselves have gotten involved, and are taking their rights back themselves, perhaps we can win on this.  I would note that it’s not unlawful to carry on a college campus in Pennsylvania if you have a License to Carry Firearms (or are carrying openly), but colleges and universities, including those in the state system, can and do prevent students from doing so.  It’s silly policy when applied to people who are licensed to carry everywhere else, but it’s the academic (and corporate for that matter) mentality.

Now it’s just a matter of how badly she beats Obama.  Right now she’s leading by 10% points, so this is a very very bad night for Barack Obama.  I think we’re looking at a convention battle.

So far what they are saying:

Three in 10 Pennsylvania Democratic voters were union members or had one in their household, and they favored Clinton over Obama. Four in 10 had a gun owner in the household, and gun-owning households also went mostly for Clinton.

Bitter enough not to vote for you Barry-O!  Two fold message here: rural Pennsylvanians hate being condescended to, and AHSA’s endorsement isn’t worth elk piss (I don’t know what Elk piss smells like, but I’m guessing pretty bad.)

This is the first time that I can remember people paying so much attention to my state’s primary.  Usually by the time we come around, we’re just reaffirming what the rest of the country has already chosen for us.  In terms of primary politics, Pennsylvania has never mattered.  I’m glad to hear that the gambling industry has Hilly up by 7-10.  I think Obama is pretty much a lock in at this point unless he seriously bombs all the remaining states, which is a possibility.  A Hillary win will drag the fight to the convention, and if Hillary does manage to pull it out, it’ll be because of something shady that’ll piss a lot of Democratic faithful off.  That makes it less likely I have to worry about either of those two being president.

I’m not angry, nor am I a renter.  I’m a homeowner with a mortgage, but these guys are spot on.  Here’s their YouTube video:

Hat tip to Clayton Cramer.

I continue to not believe we elected this guy Governor of Pennsylvania.  I blame suburban voters who think he was a great Mayor of Philadelphia, so he’d surely make a great governor!  He was a lucky mayor of Philadelphia.  The city, like most other cities, benefited from the .com boom and the nationwide drop in crime in the 90s.  But it benefitted to a lesser degree than most other cities, and when the boom turned to bust, Philadelphia’s problems, which Rendell didn’t really fix, came roaring right back, falling on the feet of a corrupt and ineffectual John Street.  Now it’s Mike Nutter’s mess, and while I think he’ll certainly be less corrupt than John Street, the jury’s still out on the ineffectual part.

Hat tip to David Bernstein

Ace, who’s been going around interviewing gun bloggers, interviews Bitter.

Sorry Dad, if you ever run for public office, I’m not campaigning for you in Philadelphia’s gay bars.

Over at The Daily Kos.  I think this is one thing we can all agree on:

I know liberal couples who give each other pocket size copies of the Constitution for Christmas.

Ask liberals to list their top five complaints about the Bush Administration, and they will invariably say the words “shredding” and “Constitution” in the same sentence.  They might also add “Fourth Amendment” and “due process.”  It’s possible they’ll talk about “free speech zones” and “habeus corpus.”

There’s a good chance they will mention, probably in combination with several FCC-prohibited adjectives, the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

So.

Liberals love the Constitution.  They especially love the Bill of Rights.  They love all the Amendments.

Except for one: the Second Amendment.

Read the whole thing.  Another mistake a lot of folks on the left make is assuming we gun owners don’t care about this administration’s abuse of other civil liberties, or that we love the former attorney general, rather than thinking he’s as much of a weasel as they do.  I have known few gun owners who are entirely happy with the Bush Administration.

Democrats need to understand that the gun vote is not lost to them, and the way to get it back is not through sham endorsements or transparent pandering.  They way to get it back is to cease supporting gun control.

So says a University of Sydney study.  No doubt this is going to ruin Rebecca Peters‘ day.

In what is perhaps my last act of political apathy, I will not vote in today’s primary.  I have long held that I would switch my registration from Independent to Democrat or Republican if either party could give me a choice worth switching over.  To date, that has yet to happen.  McCain has the Republican nomination locked by now, and the Democrat choices are both so bad I’d have to throw myself off a building if I voted for either of those two.  I guess you could say I’m bitter.

But my apathy in regards to political parties will be at an end after this.  I have come to realize I am part of the problem.  The reason there’s no one worth voting for is because I have not done enough to help get people on the ballot who are worth voting for.  I will have to pick sides, and help promote candidates I like.  To that end, I think the Republican party is still closer to my own views than those of the Democrats.  If small government libertarians are to affect change, we have to work within the political system we have, not the one we wish we had.  Next election I’m not going to sit back and let someone else present me with a choice.  I’m going to try to make choices, and be heard.  I will register Republican, and support the candidates who most believe in getting government off our collective backs.

Well, it was Countertop’s Monday gun porn, but now is my Tuesday gun porn.  Cool picture of a rifled barrel from the inside, along with what looks like some type of Thompson Center pistol, along with a a collection of M1 Garands.

Dan Pehrson, president of the PA Firearms Owners’ Association, has an editorial running in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Until our elected officials learn to abide by the law, we gun owners will have to set an example. In what is only the first of many steps, gun-owner groups have filed for a temporary restraining order to prevent enforcement of the Philadelphia gun-control ordinances. Those of us who live in the city will continue to lawfully keep and bear our arms, waiting on the city to follow our lead in respecting the laws and constitution of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Read the whole thing.  A certain pair of gun bloggers, who will hunt you down and beat you if you don’t, helped in the drafting and submission of this editorial.

A startling admission from the New Jersey Star-Ledger:

Today, after gun manufacturers, engineering firms and research universities have spent millions competing to perfect the weapon, the quest has wandered onto the slow track.

The federal government has all but ceased its funding, crippling research. Legal squabbles over patents shelved promising technologies. And gun manufacturers got out of the business entirely, wary of potential lawsuits and marketing guns that would cost far more.

You don’t say?  This kind of project is happens to be in the displine that I’m trained in professionally, and if I were working on this project, I would definitely take exception to this:

“We need to demonstrate that you can reliably turn a gun off in real time,” he said.

That is not good enough for Bryan Miller, executive director of Ceasefire New Jersey, which pushed for the law five years ago.

“They went about inventing the Ferrari of recognition technology when they could have used the money to build a Ford,” Miller said. “They’ve run out of money and they can’t marry it to a handgun and, frankly, I think it’s shameful.”

Miller said he believes the nationwide effort has been sabotaged.

“We know that gun manufactures have already developed these technologies, they just don’t want to put them in guns,” he said. “The National Rifle Association doesn’t want them to do it.”

Bryan Miller has little respect for how difficult an engineering project something like this is.  Not only must the circuitry withstand forces well beyond what typical consumer electronics will have to endure, they must get it right 100% of the time in a fraction of a second.  What I suspect Bryan is looking for is a ring type system, where the firearms user has to wear a ring in order to use that gun, which transmits a code to the firearm if it’s in proximity and that allows it to fire.  It’s really the only way to solve the problem technologically, but even that will be subject to reliability problems.  As a professional engineer, who also understands guns very well, smart gun technology is a folly.  It’ll be enormously expensive and won’t always work properly.  It’ll be prone to interference, bad gripping, all the problems you’d encounter shooting in a high stress situation.

But that’s doesn’t matter to Bryan Miller.  These dastardly conspiring engineers just don’t want to deliver the technology, and it’s screwing with his master plan to ban all guns in New Jersey, except for his junk smart guns.  Bryan Miller summarized: “It doesn’t have to work!  I just want to ban guns, so deliver something already!”