Snowflakes in Hell

Tonight my silhouette shooting was pretty good.  Shot a 37 in the first round, open sights, and got my remaining two pins, Pig and Turkey.  I shot 29 animals in a row before I dropped one.  Now I’m getting used to the Kimber Model 82 Government that I got from the CMP, I’m shooting pretty well with it.  Dropped to 34 on the second round, but it’s a heavy rifle, and I got tired.  Got some good advice from some of the guys who were watching me shoot, so I’ll have to work on some technique, and maybe I can start hitting high 30s consistently.

Bruce documents the cases that hit the press of licensed gun owners there (to own a gun in Massachusetts, you have to be licensed, and licenses are may issue to be able to own handguns), and finds that licensees seem to get a lot more negative coverage than non-licensees when they commit crimes.

This is an important reason to oppose licensing in my view.  It’ll never be spun in the media as an unusual case, but precisely because it is unusual, it will be guaranteed to attract media attention.  That will only strengthen the case for total prohibition, as our opponents will be able to point to many stories of violence at the hands of licensed gun owners.

John Lott points to some evidence that Obama’s “bitter” comments did him no favors among gun owning Democrats.  Obama learned a hard lesson about Pennsylvania voters: It’s not like Illinois, where he could safely thumb his nose at downstate people from his posh 1.6 million dollar home on the South Side of Chicago, knowing full well they can’t outvote his urban constitutents.  Pennsylvanians can and do outvote Philadelphia.  Politics here is hazardous for the inexperienced, and Obama didn’t have what it takes to navigate the minefield.

Rachel is absolutely right on this one:

Wanna know what I think, as a bona fide military girlfriend? I think they should have porn in the PX, especially if all we’re talking about is Playboy and Penthouse. Men need to see naked women, and these men happen to be spending months at a time in forced celibacy, and if they want to look at a pretty girl’s boobies and release some of that, uhhh, energy, more power to ‘em. I have absolutely no problem with it and like I said, I’d send those mags to my own boyfriend if I could, once he gets to Iraq.

It’s not a good idea to deny these kinds of things to young men who are forced to spend all their waking hours in the company of other men.  Bad things happen when you do that, especially in a high stress environment, like a combat zone.  It would seem to be this is just moralistic grandstanding on the part of a certain politician.

They don’t seem surprised at the idea of the state funding gun control groups.

VPC tries to argue that we can’t hunt with black powder cannons.  Pretty clearly, this is a bald faced lie.  They also work for cutting down the feral cat population.

I’m with Uncle on this one, but for me it’s no biggie.  Pizza Hut pizza just plain sucks.  It’s easy to boycott that which I wouldn’t eat anyway.

They have them for cars, so why not?  Peter Hamm and Josh Sugarmann aren”t happy about it though:

“He’s arming the criminals and then telling the rest of us to buy guns so we can protect ourselves from the criminals he’s armed,” said Peter Hamm, communications director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

While gun control advocates acknowledge that Thompson has a right to make this offer, they say this is yet another example of the gun industry trying to profit from gun violence.

“What this shows is that to the gun industry, gun violence is at best an abstract concept and at worst a business opportunity,” said Josh Sugarmann, the Executive Director of the Violence Policy Center.

“No matter how these products are used against citizens, the answer is always more guns when in fact these problems stem from the fact that there are too many guns out there already,” Sugarmann told ABCNews.com.

When the standard playbook no longer works, keep repeating it, only louder!  If Mr. Thompson is selling guns to criminals, shouldn’t Josh and Peter be complaining to the ATF instead of a newspaper?  Or are they merely hoping the public doesn’t realize that Eric Thompson can’t ship any firearms directly to the public, but must ship through a licensed dealer who will run the federally mandated criminal background check?

Also, college students are adults.  They can vote, get married, get drafted, sign contracts, and what have you.  You have to be 21 to get a license to carry one in all but one state (Indiana, I think).  So what’s the problem?   A lot of these guys were toting automatic weapons around Iraq before they became students.  If you’re old enough to bear arms for your country, and possibly die for your country, you’re old enough to buy a gun.

We’ve been experiencing too many outages lately, largely due to one of the drives in the server acting up.  This is something I need to remedy, but I’m thinking maybe it’s time to remedy it with a new server for the blog.  I’m looking at getting the parts in to do it.

Over at Dustin’s Gun Blog, which includes some video.

Gunpundit notes that there are a lot of options for those intent to cause harm on a large scale, many of which are far more deadly than guns.  Joe Huffman has had issues recently with this, and one from today is right around the corner from me here.

Maybe I’m wrong on this one, but I have no plans to contact authorities, because I don’t trust them to deal with the matter with any discretion.  Could be, and likely is, a curious kid.  I could see myself googling similarly with no ill intent when I was in high school.  But in our zero tolerance world, I don’t trust the authorities and school officials to rationally investigate the matter.  I do not wish to be responsible for some family’s broken door, and ransacked house, and, quite likely an expulsion from school.

They really must be pretty bad, because I can’t believe they don’t know this looks really bad.

Bitter reminds us that NRA ballots have to go out now for board elections, and she squeezes in a last minute message to vote for Bob Viden of New Jersey.

Countertop serves up a little gun porn in honor of Obama’s bitter defeat.

Via Glenn, I noticed this article talking about the entire Texas polygamy fiasco, and asking where the ACLU is in all of this.  The answer to me, is pretty clear.  It’s not George W. Bush perpetrating this outrage against people’s civil rights, so who’s to care?  If it can’t used it to beat those warmongering Republicans over the head, why does it matter?

The progressives’ defense of civil rights has become an utter joke, and it’s not just their willingness to throw the second amendment under the bus.  I’m not happy with Bush’s record on civil liberties at all, and for letting a weasel like Gonzalez run around for as long as he did.  But civil liberties violations don’t start and end with the Bush administration.

Go check out Confederate Yankee.  We really need to start educating reporters that there is basically no way that people are buying machine guns on the US market and shipping them south of the border.  As Confederate Yankee says:

The focus of the story, according to ABC News, is that U.S. dealers of civilian firearms are to blame for Mexico’s drug cartels and their violence problems… so why do they highlight an M60 general purpose machine gun, a weapons still in use in Mexico’s military, but impossible to find in the open U.S. civilian market?

Could it be, and maybe I’m crazy here, that the Mexican government finds it more convenient to blame the US, rather than admit there’s massive corruption within its own military that allowing smugglers to pilfer weapons out of government armories?  Of course, there are people on our side of the border willing to play along with this charade for their own purposes, including, apparently, ABC.

UPDATE: SayUncle has more.

Peter offers a good guide on how to get involved to get more pro-liberty candidates in the political mix:

We need to get more active, and at all levels of government. We look at the state and local races as closely as we look at the national races. We need to start reform at the ground level. The person that is running for dog catcher may become the Mayor. The Mayor’s office to the Governor’s office isn’t too far. And a lot of Governors have run for and become president. We need to take a long view, and work on our local officials, letting them know how we feel, and helping the good ones to make the leap to the next level. While not many of them will make this type of leap, we will benefit from elected officials that better represent us at all levels. Also consider how much easier it is to deal with someone at a lower level in the political process, and how much harder it gets as they rise through the ranks. Who would be in this race was largely determined years ago.

Read the whole thing.  The big problem most of us pro-liberty types have is that we’re too busy enjoying it.  We have wives, kids, jobs, baseball games, and beer, which leaves little time for activism.  But there are many things that those who are short on time can do.  Put out a sign, donate money, beat up a hippy, conqueror Berkeley, or whatever you can find the resources to accomplish.

Another thing to consider, if you have maybe a little extra time, is look at whether your local congressional district has an EVC.  Some areas are seriously deficient of volunteers, and many are deficient of EVCs, including my district, and I’ve been thinking about stepping up.

Congratulations to Tam for getting a cool writing gig!  She’s writing for Low End Mac.  My first Mac was a IIsi in 1992.  I soon realized “This is a lot better than Windows 3.1″ and used it pretty exclusively, even though I wonder how I ever lived with a 12″ display.  Later upgraded to a IIci with a larger 14″ display.  Briefly used a NeXT cube, until the novelty wore off and I realized it was nice to have software.  I actually skipped the whole PowerPC generation, using Linux pretty exlusively during that time, until I bought my MacBook a year and a half ago and thought “This is a lot better than Linux.”  Granted, I still use Linux for serving the blog and for a DVR, but not for desktop work.  There will be no going back to the world of Windows for me.

It’s important to remember that Barack Obama was closing the gap on Hillary rather aggressively when he stepped on a land mind in the culture war and blew up his campaign.  While “Bittergate” may have cost Obama the Pennsylvania primary, I think the cost to the Democrats in general is probably greater.  The Democrats can’t be the party of large urban centers and still win national elections, and their attitudes toward, not just rural, but ordinary people and their lifestyles have been a big part of what’s holding them back.

Bittergate wasn’t broken by conservative digging.  It wasn’t some intrepid reporter who uncovered it.  It was a lefty blogger, who had little idea of the significance of what she was revealing.  But how could she have?  She was part of the same intelligentsia that Obama was trying to appeal to in the first place.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the urban left, it’s that many are very insulated from lifestyles and opinions of those outside their parochial social circles.  This is a trait most commonly attached to rural people, but mass media and the internet have largely ended that.  Rural people are learning what life long urban dwellers like Barack Obama think of them, and they don’t like it.

I believe Wretchard of The Belmont Club summed up the issue best:

Americans in contrast, opted to leave that responsibility with individuals. The phrase “In God We Trust” is often attached by wags to the words, “all others must pay cash”. It’s a restatement of the belief that there are no special people, no natural overlords, no entitled class upon the earth. Bureaucrats are just people doing a job in uniform clothes. At the end of the day the world consisted of you and your Maker.

God and guns are a talismanic connection to the idea that the individual is supreme.

And that is what Democrats have been failing to understand for quite some time now.  Democrats of the past often had lofty goals in terms of progressive reform, but respect for the people they thought they were helping was generally there.  The more the Democrats look like they are a bunch of wealthy, educated, city dwellers trying to feel better about themselves by helping those poor ignorant indigents run their sad, pathetic lives, the more they are going to lose.  Barack Obama just learned that lesson the hard way.

*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.