It’s time to get a big safe. I’m just buying too much I guess. Any advice on safe buying?  It seems that most places I can get them don’t deliver them, but I don’t have the equipment to move a 750lb hunk of steel around. Any of you have experience with safe movers? Or buying safes? Any advice would be appreciated.
Month: June 2007
More BS From Philadelphia Media
Eric has a good post about the Philadelphia media trying to paint the rest of Pennsylvania as having a growing problem with “gun violence”, so they can help the city pass stricter gun laws at the state level. As I’ve said before, the rest of the state, without Philadelphia, has a lower crime rate than most of Western Europe.
He also calls out the Philadelphia media for ignoring this little fact:
As it turns out, the police made an arrest in the recent spate of Lancaster shootings. Despite yesterday’s front page story, the story appeared on page B-5. Little wonder, because you don’t have to be a gun-toting NRA maniac with a handlebar mustache to read between the lines and see that what’s being called small town gun violence isn’t necessarily as small townish as it appears. The arrested man was a career criminal from Philadelphia.
Philadelphia not being able to control it’s criminal problem is clearly starting to affect the rest of the state. Before I agree to gun controls, I want to see Philadelphia institute criminal control.  Then we’ll see how the state’s crime is affected.
Newflash: Journalist Mike Fox a Prick
Mayor Daley on Guns
Mayor Daley is out, once again, to bring Chicago style Gun Laws to a state near you, presumably because they haven’t done anything to reduce violence in Chicago.
“When you look at other countries, only 20 here 15 killed here,” Mayor Richard M. Daley observed. “30,000 people here. Unbelievable.”
What he’s not telling you is that the vast majority of those 30,000 people were suicides.
The mayor said he’ll soon appoint a commission to target gun laws and gun makers.
Gun makers that reside in the lower portion of his state, and live in towns that depend on that industry. Â I notice the Mayor nor this article make any mention of the death threats against gun shop owner John Riggio by a catholic priest speaking at Jackson’s rally.
Note To Media
I don’t generally post on crime news, but in this case I’d like to correct the media on something I see all the friggin time:
Weapons used in the bank robberies included a .380 handgun, an SKS assault rifle and an MDL assault rifle, according to the U.S. Attorney.
I guess I need to correct the US Attorney too, but, aside from the fact that I’ve never heard of an “MDL assault rifle”, the SKS is not and has never been considered by anyone to be an assault rifle. The correct term would be semi-automatic carbine, or self-loading carbine. There is no version of the SKS that’s natively capable of fully automatic fire, so it’s missing a key part of the definition.
Big Cities See More Crime
This article suggests crime is on the rise in the big cities:
Year-end totals for murders rose in eight of the nation’s 10 largest cities: Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio and San Diego. That contributed to a 6.7 percent murder rate increase in cities with populations over 1 million people.
The murder rate dropped in two other big cities, Dallas and Los Angeles. And it plummeted by an overall 11.9 percent in smaller cities, towns and rural areas, the data show.
What does this say about guns being the source of the problem? Small towns, cities, and rural areas tend to have a much higher percentage of households with firearms, and yet have plummeting crime rates.  Of the cities they list that have had an increasing murder rate, Chicago and New York have a ban or a defacto ban on guns. Las Vegas has registration of all firearms.  San Diego operates under California’s strict laws, which includes registration, waiting periods, gun safety rules, and one-gun-a-month. Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio and Houston are in states with liberal guns laws and preemption.
I’ll leave drawing conclusions as an exercise for the reader.
Gun Safety Experts
SayUncle does a good fisking of gun safety “experts” and tell us:
Sorry but to any gun owner out there, don’t listen to safety experts. Listen to gun experts if you want real advice that will save your life and the lives of others. Safety experts will typically tell you not to have a gun (see?), which is not conducive to safety but more political posturing. So, take it with a grain of salt. Anti-gun hacks like Matthew Miller are not safety experts. They are hacks. Take your gun advice from someone like Col. Cooper or Massad Ayoob. Or your local firearms instructor.
I keep my firearm in the safest location possible; on my hip. When it’s not there, and I’m not home, it gets locked up, along with all the other firearms I’m not actively using at the time.  At night, it goes next to me on the bed stand. Being that I live on my own, I’m not exactly worried about children. My main concern is not giving a burglar a convenient weapon to use on me if I come home and surprise him.
Progressive Secularist
It’s really good that we have folks like Bill O’Reilly to sort everything out for us people who don’t think right. After all these years of reading Dave Kopel’s scholarship on the gun issue, I had no idea he was a “secular progressive”, until I heard O’Reilly unmask Dave on national TV. For those of you who didn’t hear the debate, here’s a paraphrased summary:
DK: You’re taking stuff out of contex,t Mr. O’Reilly
BO: We are not! Let’s roll this tape, that my producers have pulled out of context, that clearly shows I’m not taking anything out of context.
DK: Go read the entire transcript on the independence institute web site
BO: I don’t need to read the context, when we have these tapes, that take what they are saying out of context! Roll it!
TAPE: blah blah blah… some psychologists use ecstasy … blah blah blah.
BO: Are you defending that? Any good parent would see this panel was out to turn their kids into communists who love drugs and gay sex. You’re not a bad parent, are you Dave?
DK: I prefer to talk to my children about things they hear.
BO: You’re out of touch with America.
DK: But…
BO: Secular progressive! You’re s secular progressive!
DK: You don’t know anything about me.
BO: Shut up you secular progressive!
I don’t know what scares me more, that fact that Bill O’Reilly actually has a prime time show, or the fact that people actually seem to take this guy seriously. To me, his show is just more proof that the main-stream media is a cesspool of ideas.
The O’Reilly Factor is the only show on TV that when someone tells me to watch it because someone is going to be on it that I might want to see, makes me feel like drawing my pistol, and putting a bullet in my television. Â I can’t stand 10 minutes of that guy!
Evil Black Legs
Clearly we need to renew the federal ban on assault legs.
Dumb Protest Ideas
It seems to me these people need to be loaned a few brain cells:
“What we want is to bring just some basic common sense to gun laws. It’s crazy you don’t need any registration, you don’t need any permits. If you have a hand gun, you can get a permit to carry it concealed. That makes no sense.â€
Yeah, because common sense says that the drug dealers killing each other on the streets of Philadelphia bother to get gun permits from the police and would bother with registration and licensing.  Do you people listen to the crap you’re saying?  I’m pretty sure it’s not our gun laws that don’t make any sense.