Snowflakes in Hell

Thanks to Robb Allen for getting some video of me shooting at the shoot house, where Todd was training us on how to use a laser to make yourself a better shooter.  One of the major weaknesses in my shooting is breathing.  Locking my knees is a silhouette habit, where you’re more concerned with a stable shooting position than you are with recoil management.  But breathing is a problem.  It’s often I find myself missing a string of animals when I realize I’m laxing on my breathing discipline.  I’m totally amazed that Todd can see this just by looking at a laser.

I need to look into some Grecian Formula for Men or something, because I am pretty grey from the back.

These look like a pretty nice pair of specimens.

Well, the old bench of evil turned out to be too small, too unstable, and I hated the fact that the only way I could mount the press was on the side.  I decided to go to Sam’s Club and get myself a new bench of evil, where I could mount the press the right way.   Now every time I decap and resize a piece of brass, it’s like I’m playing a slot machine, only with this slot machine, I win every time!

Now I’m thinking about upping the ante toward a progressive press.

… wife, mother, governor, Viking?

Hat tip to Papa Delta Bravo

… will defend us from the Cylon menace?

… I’m a sucker for hot Alaska governors who shoot AR-15s.  I just donated 100 bucks to McCain/Palin ‘08.  Regardless of how I feel about McCain himself, he’s elevated some very good folks to the national stage, and put them in positions where they’ll be leaders in the Republican Party.  Even if his campaign is destained to crash and burn, this is a great legacy to leave us for the future.

If you’re thinking about donating, now is the time.  McCain took the public financing route, so this weekend is the last his campaign can take donations.  After this, you can only donate through the RNC.

I’ve been worried that the McCain camp doesn’t seem to have their ground game in too good order, especially here in Pennsylvania, but I have to say that their strategic outlook seems to be pretty good.  The media is already starting to attack Sarah Palin as inexperienced.  But every article that brings this issue up is also highlighting Obama’s lack of experience as well.  The difference is, she’s on the bottom of the GOP ticket, and Obama is on the top of the Dem’s.  It’s probably not too smart for the Obama camp to even bring this issue up, but they are doing it.  The selection of Palin to the McCain ticket has put him in a win-win situation.  They can’t not criticize the choice, but on the only issue they can hit her on, also indirectly hurts Obama.

But Robb went and put it on a bumper sticker.

It’s been something I’ve been wondering, but I think Palin’s addition to the ticket might change things.  I still lean toward the idea that McCain is not worthy of an endorsement, but then I think how much is on the line this election.  McCain is far from perfect, but I think it should be considered in the following light:

• Gerald Ford never met a “reasonable gun law” he didn’t support, and is responsible for Stevens being on The Court.
• Ronald Reagan favored the enactment of the Brady Act, but also nominated Kennedy and Scalia to The Court.
• George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s VP before becoming president, issued an executive order to ban so called assault weapons using his powers under the GCA of 1968.  While he put Souter on The Court, he also put Justice Thomas.
• Bob Dole did not receive an NRA endorsement in 1996 because of his stance on the Clinton gun ban, and lost to Bill Clinton.
• George W. Bush favored re-enacting the assault weapons ban.  Granted, his VP pick was pretty good, but Dick Cheney is a duck gun kind of guy.  Bush’s Solicitor General worked against us in Heller, but he put Roberts and Alito on The Court.
• McCain favors regulating private sales, but Palin is pretty solidly pro-gun, and is a hunter and NRA life member.  Unlike a lot of other politicians, he’s not afraid to oppose an assault weapons ban.  He’s picked up a lot of obscure pro-gun candidates and put them front and center on the public stage.

I’m not saying NRA should endorse McCain, but I’m not going to freak out if they do.  In terms of previous Republican presidents, McCain is really no worse, and may even be better.  I have no idea which way NRA is leaning in terms of an endorsement, but I’m willing to accept either course of action.  An endorsement has serious political consequences for how people on the ground may help his campaign.  While I wish McCain would repudiate his stance on private sales, gun owners have been able to make progress with a very imperfect endorsed presidential candidates from the 1980s to now.  I worry that ceding the White House to Barack Obama will cause us to lose everything we’ve worked on for the past decade.

Bruce found a picture of Sarah Palin shooting an evil black rifle.  That beats John Effin Kerry in a duck blind any day.  But will she be better at shooting lawyers than Dick Cheney?

UPDATE: Breda has the video.

From a commenter:

Are you retarded?

Palin’s first veto was used to block legislation that would have barred the state from granting benefits to the partners of gay state employees. In effect, her veto granted State of Alaska benefits to same-sex couples. The veto occurred after Palin consulted with Alaska’s attorney general on the constitutionality of the legislation.

Well, if the gay bashing wing of the GOP is pissed that Palin supports same sex couples, I’m even more tickled pink about McCain’s choice.  The gay issue is going to kill the Republican party in a generation if they don’t mellow in the issue.  There’s a significant generational gap, and younger Republicans tend to be supportive of gay’s being equal members of society.  I think gay marriage is probably a bit too far out there for most people, even though I personally have no problem with the idea, but the GOP needs to jettison the gay cooties wing of the party before they kill it.

Countertop on Sarah Palin:

Like Bobby Jindal, in her short period in office, she has rocked the boat and brought real concern to the entrenched powers that be. Whats most surprising about this though, is unlike Jindal who is going after Democrats - Palin went after Republicans. Heck, she even went after family members - and has drawn the scorn of the state party who were unable to stop her as she took down their most powerful member - Frank Murkowski who famously appointed his daughter to fill his Senate seat.

And in that respect, in an election where the Republican’s biggest liability isn’t Iraq but Ted Stevens and the Alaskan Bridge To Nowhere, McCain took his maverick mantle by the reigns and just signed up the Anti Stevens to help him root out the corruption endemic in DC.

Compare that to Barack “Corrupt Chicago Democratic Political Machine Champion” Obama.

I think McCain hit this one out of the park.  She will be a powerful addition to his ticket, whereas I think Obama is going to increasingly find that Joe Biden is an albatross who doesn’t know when to shut his pie hole.  If McCain is looking to reshape the Republican Party with the likes of Palin, Pawlenty, and Jindal, the GOP could have a bright future.

The GOP has suffered greatly under George W. Bush and his merry band.  I’ve watched the Philadelphia Suburbs go from leaning pretty Republican, to tilting Democrat, largely because Philadelphia area GOP types don’t like Bush’s brand of conservatism.  McCain is someone people around here can get behind, and if the future beyond McCain is made up by his VP short list, that might be a reversable trend.  Whether it will be enough to overcome the Lightworker’s momentum remains to be seen.  Obama’s success around here will depend on the extent to which he can lash McCain to the deck of the sinking USS George W. Bush.

Dustin has more on the law abiding gun owner and concealed carry permit holder that managed to defend his life at a Wal-Mart.  His includes video.

It’s Palin! She’s an excellent choice.  Excellent.  Her politics are exactly where McCain needs his VP choice to be, and the fact that she’s a woman will help with jilted Hillary supporters.  And she’s a hell of a lot better looking than Joe Biden.

UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long.

Apparently there is a movement of academics to de-emphasize teaching political science from an American perspective.  Now we can have even more highly educated people who have no understanding or respect for how our political system functions!

This time it’s John Tester, who should know better.  Blue dogs need to start growing a pair and, rather than cowtowing to their party’s anti-gun leadership, stand up for their constituents.  It’s one thing to be all rah rah Dems on other issues that are important to Montanans, where Barack Obama might be their man, but it’s another to try to downplay the gun issue when there’s just no doubting his record.

The last time pro-gun Democrats allowed party to trump principle, back during the vote on Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban, it helped usher in the 1994 Republican Revolution (which the Republicans promptly squandered, but that’s nother rant).  Blue dogs should want the gun issue to die, but the way to kill it isn’t to get the Lightworker elected to the White House.  Blue dogs should follow in the footsteps of Oklahoma Representative Dan Boren, who has refused to shill for Obama.

As I mentioned before we went to Blackwater, Bitter had to bail out at the last minute to attend the launch of Sportsmen for McCain, which was held at a club near Scranton.  She ended up shooting the breeze with Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty for quite a bit, and was impressed with his depth of knowledge of our issue.  As a possible VP pick for McCain, he would certainly be OK with me, but speculation is currently leaning toward Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.  Palin would also be an excellent choice.

Todd Jarrett has made me a better Silhouette shooter.  Tonight was our thursday airgun match.  I started out on chickens, doing about what I normally do, got into pigs, and then noticed I was moving the gun when I pulled the trigger.  I then remembered Todd saying “You have to increase your grip strength by 20%, at least.” so I tightened up on the grip until the gun started shaking.  I backed it off a bit until the excessive movement stopped, and holding a much firmer grip than I was used to, starting knocking down animal after animal.  I kept my game up until my hand got tired, and I started trailing off on the rams.  But damn, I shot a AAA score of 37.  That’s ten whole friggin animals better than I had shot at any previous Thursday airgun matches, and better than I shot at states.  It’s amazing such a simple thing can make such a difference.  Wow!

Both Another Gun Blog and No Looking Backwards have covered California’s “Hasta La Vista Tax” which taxes people over a certain income for leaving the state.  Rich flight has created a serious revenue problem for California.

There’s a good case to be made that this law is unconstitutional, because it interferes with the common law right to free movement and travel.  There is a pretty strong body of law which would speak against such a law’s constitutionality.  Anyone subject to this tax probably has a good case to take into the federal courts.  California has no respect for the second amendment, it’s hardly surprising they don’t respect unenumerated rights as well.  Anything’s fair when it comes to soaking the rich, I guess.

Bernard Bell is the associate dean at Rutgers Law School, and thinks that there should be strict liability for gun owners:

A move toward absolute liability would ideally be accompanied by private insurers’ willingness to insure gun owners against such liability. Such insurance should be separate from standard homeowners’ insurance, so that homeowners who do not own guns are not required to subsidize those who do.

The cost of insurance would reflect the expected cost of compensating gun injuries to innocent people. Individuals would then have the incentive to weigh the cost of injuries to others in deciding whether to purchase or keep firearms.

And insurance companies might well offer incentives, in the form of lower rates, to gun owners who engage in practices that decrease the likelihood of accidental injuries, such as trigger locks, safe storage and regular courses in maintenance and use of handguns.

Gun control people everywhere are thinking up ways to get around Heller, in order to discourage people from owning guns, and especially discouraging people from using them in self-defense.  Sadly, most of this stuff is probably not going to get the scrutiny they deserve from the courts, which is why the political fight is still paramount.

I wonder if Professor Bell is open to the idea that these liability issues should be applied equally to the police and military?

New Jersey Assemblywoman Joan Quigley asked the question:

I introduced that bill in the spring of 2006. If it had actually become law on the day it was introduced, Mr. Braico would have been able to accumulate 33 handguns between then and now. I fail to see how that’s an unreasonable restriction on his civil rights. And I do wonder what he might have done with all those deadly weapons.

An intrepid gun owner in The Garden State provides her with an answer:

When I first bought my XD-40 handgun, it was quite a large caliber, and so expensive to use for target practice. As my self-defense instructor told me, a large caliber is necessary for “stopping power” in self-defense situations. However, I immediately bought a smaller, inexpensive weapon - a .22-caliber Browning Buckmark - for target practice, just to save money. There, already, were two guns in one month.

However, both of those guns were too large for my wife to operate, so we bought a Lady Smith revolver, which is specially designed for the smaller hands of a woman. At that time, we discovered that the XD-40 jams quite a lot (a design flaw, I believe, but certainly a problem in a self-defense situation), so we bought a large Ruger six-shooter as a more reliable alternative to the XD-40.

The point is we bought more than one per month, for good reason.

I would say if the XD-40 jams a lot, it’s either a specific problem with the gun, or his wife is limp wristing it.  The XD line are generally pretty reliable from what I’ve heard.  But it’s a great way to point out why the one gun a month issue is a problem.  The burden should be on the people advocating it to prove it reduces crime, of which there is currently no evidence whatsoever.

Hat Tip to Cemetery’s Weblog

I’ve had a bit to say about why we don’t dominate the Olympics here, but Kim has some more, and I think he’s right about this:

The problem is that outside the Army Marksmanship Unit, there are no professional Olympic shooters in America—no sponsorships, no funding from any source—so therefore people cannot afford to train for 8-10 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, which is what’s required to win the Olympics, in any sport (ask Michael Phelps about the training required to win Olympic Gold).

So when we say that we “should” be winning Olympic gold medals in the shooting sports, because we are by golly the Land of the Second Amendment and the Nation of Riflemen, we forget that winning Olympic medals is not just raw talent, but dedication—and dedication not just from the participants, but from We The People.

If there is no public support for Olympic shooting, though, then we have no right to complain when our amateur shooters can’t compete against the professionals of other countries.

If we want to be winners, money has to flow into these sports, and right now, not enough is.

A concealed carry permit holder foils an armed robbery in Pennsylvania.

A Pennsylvania man gets busted for having a loaded gun in his car.  He has an LTCF in Pennsylvania, but not for New Jersey.  My bet is he forgot he had the gun in the car.  I do not normally keep loaded guns in my car, but I do often keep my range bag in the car.  You don’t know how often I’ve had to turn around because I suddenly realized I had hollow tip .22LR rounds in my vehicle, which is a serious crime in New Jersey.  Gun owners would be wise, before entering New Jersey, to do a complete vehicle search of their cars to ensure there is no hollow point ammunition floating around in it.  Definitely check to make sure you don’t have a firearm in the vehicle.

New Jersey laws are designed to do one thing: put firearms owners and shooters in jail.  Keep that in mind when traveling over the river where the second amendment does not apply.

More anti-gun folks who can’t control their rage.  And yet they think they are qualified to control us?