Month: May 2007

We Must Kill Them!

Apparently at least that’s what one Chicago area reverend thinks about gun shop owners and legislators.

Nobody expected Saturday’s Operation PUSH protest at Chuck’s Gun Shop Range to be anything other than a circus of the bizarre. However, nobody anticipated that an address by a Chicago priest would include a call for the murder of a suburban gun shop owner and legislators who oppose gun control.
During an address at an anti-gun rally in front of Chuck’s, Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina’s Church, exhorted the crowd to “drag” shop owner, John Riggio, from his shop “like a rat” and “snuff” him.  Rev. Pfleger went on to tell the crowd that legislators that vote against gun control legislation should be “snuffed” as well. As many know, “snuff” is slang for especially violent murder.

In case you think the ISRA is exaggerating, you can listen to his comments here.  These are the kinds of folks we’re dealing with here.  We must pass gun control to save lives by first murdering people.

If John Riggio is anything like gun shop owners here, it would have been entertaining to see them actually try that.

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Missouri Carry: “really a nonissue”

This article suggests that there has been no impact either way from Missouri’s concealed carry law:

“When they were debating this, one side was saying it was going to reduce crime and another was saying it was going to cause gunfights in the streets,” Franklin County Sheriff Gary Toelke told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I really haven’t seen either. It’s really a nonissue right now. You’re not having fights in the streets, but it’s not saving the world either.”

Seems to be the story everywhere this has happened.  I’m happy to see they close out the article with a great statement on why regulating concealed weapons at all is just about completely pointless:

In St. Charles County, sheriff’s Lt. Craig McGuire said that while there have been no reports of such infractions there, by its nature a concealed weapon would not be obvious anyway.

Exactly.  Which is why criminals don’t really think much of ignoring these laws.

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What Gets Me Worried About Pennsylvania

This article explains the struggle for the GOP to maintain it’s traditional dominance of the Philadelphia suburbs.  No single political party has clearly wielded total power in the state over any length of time.  I think this has been healthy for our politics in general.

The consequences of this are enormous for the balance of power in state politics. For decades, support from these suburban Philadelphia counties has been crucial for GOP success statewide. To control the state, Republicans needed the suburbs. But beginning in the 1990s, the suburbs began to tilt toward the Democrats in some very important elections.

This erosion in GOP support can be traced across presidential, statewide, and congressional elections.

I worry very much about Pennsylvania turning into a single party run state like New Jersey, New York, or Massachusetts.  I am not pleased with the political climate in any of those states, and corruption is a more serious problem when a single party has total control over political institutions.

This, quite honestly, is the fault of the Republicans themselves.  Pennsylvania suburbanites voted Republican because of fiscal issues.  We’re not a markedly socially conservative area.   With the GOP having all but abandoned any sense of fiscal discipline or smaller government, it’s leaving GOP supporters in the area hard pressed to find reasons to keep affiliating.   I myself used to be a Republican until the national party pissed me off with their crap.  They have yet to do anything of substance to bring me back into the fold.  I have been willing to punish the party for by voting for some Democrats in certain races, and I will continue to do so.

But if the Philadelphia Suburbs start voting in lock step with the city, I’ll move to Texas or Arizona faster than you can blink.  I have no desire to leave Pennsylvania, but I won’t live in a state run by Democrats.  I’ve seen our neighbors go that route, and it doesn’t end with happy results.

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They didn’t ask us Pennsylvanians…

… if our ban on private sales actually works.  From Wisconsin:

With all of the violence on Milwaukee streets, three mothers who lost their sons in a triple shooting are working to keep guns out of the wrong hands.The three are rallying behind a gun-control bill to be introduced to the state Assembly Tuesday which also has support from Milwaukee’s most prolific gun dealer.

Hey folks, we already did this in Pennsylvania. Guess what? It doesn’t work. Now Philadelphia says one-gun-a-month will solve the problem. What happens when that doesn’t work? There’s no gun control measure that will fail spectacularly enough that the politicians and anti-gun groups won’t call for more of the same.

You’d think a gun dealer would know better than this. I have to wonder if he’s willing to sell out other gun owners so he can get more business by forcing people into using FFLs for background checks.

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Hate Mail

According to SayUncle, the kid that shot the monster pig is getting hate mail from PETA types.   I have to wonder how many of them would have been happier if the hog had killed the kid.   I wonder how many of them know that was a very real possibility with a wild pig this large.

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More Hydrogen Inventions

Instapundit seems to be a lot more skeptical than some reporters are. Follow the story to a guy who seems to have stumbled across a way to make hydrogen using a radio frequency generator. I’m not an expert in this area, but I do think this is possible. There’s already a patent on it, actually. The problem is that it’s not revolutionary. The radio frequency generator will consume more energy than is released by burning hydrogen. This article suggests that the efficiency is around 76% of ideal, which is less, I’m fairly certain, than conventional electrolysis methods, which are more like 80%.

Thermodynamics is a real bummer. It will always demand that you use more energy breaking the hydrogen/oxygen bond than you’ll get out of burning it.  I’m sure someday someone will make a fool of us all by figuring out to convert matter directly into energy, but when one sees inventions like this, the conventional laws of physics will apply.  There’s no such thing as free energy.

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He understands the issue…

… about well as he can act. Kevin Costner is following the pattern:

The Dances With Wolves star admits he loves to hunt and often heads out with his dogs and a shotgun passed down through generations of his family, but he’s the first to admit that America’s gun laws are too weak. And following the recent tragedy (Apr06) at Virginia Tech college, where English student Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people in what was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, Costner feels that legislators should get tough with firearms owners, who refuse to accept their practices could harm others.

Chalk up one more for the “I’m a gun owner but…” campaign.  I’ll make Kevin Costner a deal.   I’ll give up my guns when he learns how to friggin act.

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Memorial Day Shooting

Bitter and I went to Myrtle Grove WMA shooting range in Maryland.  It’s a nice facility, except we learned a few things.   For one, you need to bring string.  Targets are placed on pieces of string strung between posts.  Lots of string was cut, or not placed in the right places.

One guy had a neat contraption made of PVC pipe that hung off the baffling, and looked like it provided a much more stable target platform than string.  My preferred platform would have been a thick twine, with the target held up with black clips.

On Pennsylvania PGC ranges, the state provides target backing, but it’s at fixed 25, 50, and 100 yard intervals.  The nice thing about the string system is you can place targets at 10 yard increments all the way out to 100 yards.  It makes shooting pistol easier.  Maryland also allows up to ten rounds in a magazine, as opposed to Pennsylvania’s three, which means you spend more time shooting rather than reloading.

The other thing is to take bug spray.  It was a hot sticky day, and the flies wouldn’t live me alone.  Sunscreen probably would have been a good idea as well, though we managed a bench in the shade, not all of them were.  One guy brought a big patio umbrella.  I think he planned on staying a while.

The range was a little messy, and needed some cleaning, and maintenance.  To be fair to Maryland, Pennsylvania ranges can get pretty ugly if they are at the end of their maintenance cycles, but shooters tend to keep them from getting too ugly.  There was also brass everywhere that looked like it had been there a while.  I’ve been to ranges at home where guys are there picking up brass quite literally as soon as they cooled down enough after being ejected from my rifle.  Our grounds do tend to get littered with steel casings, but reloaders gobble up the brass.  Are there no reloaders in Maryland?

All in all I liked the facility.  It was run safely, and I was happy to see it busier on a holiday weekend than I see a lot of Pennsylvania ranges.  Worth the yearly $20 dollar shooting permit.  I will have to return sometime when the weather isn’t so hot and sticky.

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