Snowflakes in Hell

I have been off for the day of July 7th.  I decided to take a four day weekend.  That is why blogging has been light.  On Tuesday, I will be returning as best I can to full swing.  Look for more information on the Gun Blog Rifle League.  It think there’s a fair amount of interest, for both small bore and large bore.  I will be suggeting rules, but I will not be dictating them, so feel free to make suggestions.  I want to make this open to as many people as possible.

The gun blogosphere needs to do what it can to keep promoting marksmanship through these hard times of high ammo prices and high gas prices.  It sucks when your sport depends the commodity market, let me tell you.  But I think we blog folk can overcome.  We can show the dirty hippies that we are doing out part to help make our sport more green.  Corporate America can promote telecommuting while we promote telecompeting!

Stay tuned for more information.  I think we can make this work.

Looks like the e-mails have gone out to the winners of the ParaUSA contest.  Since I have not gotten an e-mail, it would appear that I didn’t make it.  Congratulations to all the bloggers who have made the grade!  I hope everybody has a lot of fun, and learns a lot.

UPDATE: Yeah, looks that way folks.  I am not among the winners based on what I’ve seen around the blogosphere.   Win some, lose some.  Congraulations to, so far:

1. SayUncle
2. Sharp as a Marble
3. Call Me Ahab
4. A Keyboard & a .45
5. View from North Central Idaho
6. View from the Porch
7. Maddened Fowl
8. GunTruth
9. Kevin Baker

We’re still waiting for two one more bloggers to announce they are in possession of the golden ticket.

Obama endorses the idea of forcing students to volunteer for community service, which Bitter explains will make it a lot harder to people, like myself, who worked while going to school to help pay for it.  Yeah, there’s nothing like forced labor to create a sense of national community, let me tell you.

Looks like I forgot to include LouG of Mad Gun Blog in the June E-Postal results.  I have revised the results accordingly.  Lou scored an 8 in Rimfire w/ Optics.

The Reading Eagle is worried that The Supreme Court has limited local options for dealing with gun crime.  They also tout figures by the Brady Campaign:

But when an average of 90 people a day are killed by guns in the United States, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, it can be an overwhelming job to trace the ownership of individual weapons — assuming law-enforcement officials know which weapon was used.

The vast majority of those are suicides, which the Brady’s are hoping is lost on the public.  Of course, that’s not preventing them from arguing that guns cause suicide.  But local communities still have at their disposal a time proven method for reducing crime and violence: locking up criminals.  Unlike gun control, there are many studies that have demonstrated that removing criminals from society actually does reduce crime.  Imagine that.

Once again, my Glock will one day apparently call out to me to kill myself:

What the authors of the Second Amendment did not foresee, however, is that when people own a gun, they unwittingly raise their risk of getting hurt and killed — because the odds that they will one day use their gun to commit suicide are much larger than the odds they will use their gun to defend themselves against intruders, muggers and killers.

There’s a big problem with using statistics like this to determine risk.  My gun has a 0% chance of being used in a sucide, because I am not suicidal!  Once more, I have never been, and don’t ever see myself becoming suicidal.  I can think of few suggestions more condescending than suggesting I not possess something because “you might hurt yourself with that!”

That the media has been reduced to selling the idea that “Guns cause suicide” rather than the idea that gun cause crime seems to indicate we’ve won on the latter debate, and the former is so utterly ridiculous to thinking people that I don’t expect it’ll find much resonance in the public.

Recently my club has had to suspend its CMP matches for lack of participants.  I suspect the reason for this is that ammunition has gotten so expensive that a lot of folks simply can’t afford to shoot large bore rifle matches, much less practice.  This has made me consider that maybe, in the spirit of Mr. Completely’s e-postal matches, we might be able to do something for rifle shooters like the e-postal series has done for handgun shooters.

I’m wondering how much interest there might be in a gun blog rifle leauge.  Rules would be roughtly in line with CMP, except you could participate with any centerfire rifle capible of rapid fire.  I’d like to keep classes limited to open sights and optics.  I’d be willing to consider a small bore category if enough people were interested.  This is something that would be open to blogger as well as readers.

Obviously, the rifle league would require a 100 yard range to shoot.  Because ammo is so expensive these days, I think we’d all go broke doing a once a month match, so I’m thinking about doing one match per season, with fall, winter, spring, and summer matches.  If I were to organize and coordinate such a thing, how much interest would there be?  Rules would be spelled out, and you’d basically just scan or photograph a target and submit it, just like with the e-postal series.  The idea, basically, is to have a way to compete against each other, without having to burn $4 dollar a gallon gas to travel to matches, and without having to do monthly matches people might not be able to afford.   We’d be saving the planet, one bullet at a time.

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