July 2007 – Page 9 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Joyce Kilmer can Bite Me

I’m sure my tree surgeon has never seen a poem as lovely as a tree either, considering it’s going to cost me $1050.00 to have the fallen branch removed from my lovely red maple tree, have all the other limbs cut away from the wires (seven of my trees are impinging the utility wires), and one of my sweetgum trees is nearly dead, and has to be removed. I have another sweetgum tree right across the driveway, just in case I miss having monkey balls all over in the fall.

Last month I had three of the trees on my property trimmed for $800. They did a good job. Of those trees, I lost not a twig off them in the bad storm. I was debating on whether to have them take the sweetgum tree down now, or have them do it later. Doing it now will be cheaper. Tree surgeons seem to charge a base price just for coming out with all their gear and equipment, so I figure if I’m going to have them out, I might as well have him set me up so I don’t have to worry about my trees again for quite some time.

But damn, think of the rifle I could have bought with the $1850 bucks I’ve spend on tree surgery this year? I’m not buying another property with 12 trees on it. It’s either going to have only a few trees, or so many trees I don’t have to care!

Victory for 2nd Amendment Rights in IL?

It seems to me that this is more of a case of a victory for following the friggin law.Â It’s perfectly legal to carry an unloaded firearm in Illinois on your person, except in Chicago, where handguns are illegal.Â Unloaded, under Illinois law, meaning no round in the chamber, or no loaded magazine in the gun.Â I’ll call it a victory for the second amendment in Illinois if Chicago gets its oh so effective gun ban thrown out.

Ruger Needs to Make Guns for Shooters

I think I can declare myself pretty intimately familiar now with my new Mk.III Hunter 22/45. The Mk.III isn’t the only Ruger pistol I own. I also have a Mk.II 50th Anniversary Edition. The Mk.II was my first pistol purchase, and my first experience with “Hey, what’s this extra form?”

The Ruger Mk.II has the safety features I would expect, which means it has a hammer locking manual safety. Great! When it comes to a target shooter, that’s all I want. But the Mk.III has every safety under the sun. Mag release safety, chamber loaded idiotcator, manual safety, child safety lock, and airbags. Seriously, I don’t want any of these things on the gun. Here are my problems with the Mk.III:

Magazine doesn’t drop free. They switched to a manual thumb release, but you have to physically remove it. As long as I have to do that, I think the original magazine system was fine. If a gun has a thumb release, I expect the magazine to drop free.
Chamber loaded idiotcater. These don’t belong on any firearms. It implies a firearm without the indicator showing is “safe”. All firearms are always treated as loaded. It also make the Mk.IIIs a nightmare to clean. The indicator can get gritty and stick. Early versions rested directly on the rim, meaning a hard blow (like form a drop) would fire a round. Ruger fixed this problem, when what they should have done is remove the feature, and tell people in the manual how to properly handle a firearm.
Magazine drop safety. In a target gun, I don’t mind this so much, in a carry gun it’s totally unacceptable. But it is another safety feature that caters to fools, and needlessly complicates the mechanism on a gun that is already notoriously difficult to reassemble.
Front sight issues. The front sight on the Mk.III likes to come loose after shooting it for a while. They should ship with lock-tite applied so this doesn’t happen.
I prefer the grip angle of the 22/45, but the polymer frame doesn’t balance of the rest of the gun’s weight very well. On the 22/45, you can’t swap grip panels. It’s integrated into the frame. I use a Houge grip sleeve, which helps a lot.

I understand why Ruger is loading up their guns with safety features; they are popular among entry level shooters, because they work well and don’t cost a lot of money. Ruger doesn’t want to be sued because they could have made a gun with more safety features, which is a product liability tort in most states.

A firearm is an inherently dangerous object, and cannot be made safe in the hands of an ignorant user who hasn’t bothered to educate himself, or get training on safe gun handling. These new features, which are superfluous for experienced shooters, are going to drive experienced shooters away from the Ruger badge, and still will not protect an ignorant user from the device’s inherent hazards. Ruger needs to worry more about catering to new and experience shooters alike, rather than worrying about lawsuits.

X-Ray Guns

Not the Buck Rogers kind.Â Actual high speed x-ray photography of firearms, including a mini-gun firing.

Blogging Risks

Joe shares his story of how he lost his job at PNNL, that involved his blog and firewall logs. Â This is one reason I blog pseudo anonymously.Â Among the other things I do in my real life work, I run the company firewall.Â Â If anyone wants to know how to stick it to your corporate boneheads, there are many ways to get around them, and in ways where they can’t possibly tell exactly what you’re doing.Â Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Feeling the Heat?

Yesterday I posted that I agreed with David Codrea that calling for the ATF to investigate Steve Bailey was taking things a bit too far. I will stand by the assertion that he should not actually be brought up on federal charges, but I will most definitely relish in the sweet, sweet, poetic justice.

Hey, Mr. Bailey, the ATF doesn’t care that you’re not a criminal. They have no problem wasting our tax dollars and their time harassing ordinary law abiding people and businessmen. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you should go to jail, because I don’t think what you did ought to be against the law. But instead of insulting us, maybe you can wake up and smell the coffee, and admit that perhaps we have a point in our opposition to these laws?

UPDATE: I’m retracting my retractions about whether he took the gun with him or not. This guy is a liar, one way or another, so I feel no need to worry about whether I’m getting my story right. He didn’t, why should I bother?

LTC Holder Busted

The woman in this story is a dummy, but check out how the Inky opened this article:

It is no secret that Philadelphia’s out-of-control murder rate makes folks feel that a gun can go off any time, any place. But on Tuesday, even the courthouse wasn’t off limits to a dangerous weapon.

Do journalist even try to write intelligently anymore? Â I have some news for Simone Weichselbaum: guns do not just “go off, at any time, any place”.Â Someone has to pull the trigger.

“She put her bag in the X-ray machine and began to enter security,” said Central Detective’s Capt. Sharon Seaborough.

Banks also had an “attitude,” cops said. She gave the impression she didn’t think there was anything wrong with carrying the gun, and a knife, in her purse, police said. She was charged with weapons offenses.

Dummy.Â She had an LTC, but as anyone who has an LTC knows, you can’t carry into a court of law.Â She might have some room to mount a defense here, because of the definition of “court facility” in PA law:

The courtroom of a court of record; a courtroom of a community court; the courtroom of a district justice; a courtroom of the Philadelphia Municipal Court; a courtroom of the Pittsburgh Magistrates Court; a courtroom of the Traffic Court of Philadelphia; judge’s chambers; witness rooms; jury deliberation rooms; attorney conference rooms; prisoner holding cells; offices of court clerks, the district attorney, the sheriff and probation and parole officers; and any adjoining corridors.

There has been at least one court ruling in Pennsylvania that this cannot be applied to the entire building.Â But this was Commonwealth Court for Jefferson County.Â Some courts don’t set up the location of their metal detectors with this in mind.Â If I were her attorney, I would make the argument that the law doesn’t say court facilities, but that the prohibition is limited.Â Â Philadelphia courts are unlikely to rule that way, but it might be worth getting this cleared up in superior court, or the supreme court, so the entire commonwealth can have a single standard.

The state legislature is quite capable of making a law that would have prohibited an entire court house, but they didn’t choose to do that, they chose the prohibition to be limited, and I think there’s a good chance this woman can get off on the weapons charges.

Of course, you won’t read any of that in the Inquirer, since I doubt the reporter knows much about the law in any detail, and couldn’t be bothered to check.

They’re Getting Better at Least

Uncle updates on the NBC video:

And letâ€™s get this out of they way: theyâ€™re not known in the trade as black rifles. Theyâ€™re known as AR-15s. On some gun boards, they started referring to AR-15s as Evil Black Rifles to poke fun of the assault weapons ban, which seemed to target rifles that were black.

Man, if you had told me back in the early 90s that we’d be upset with the press because they are calling them “black rifles” rather than “killing machines” or “assault weapons”, I would have said you were nuts. Back then they said the only reason for a civilian to own one would be to mow down a kindergarten, which you could do, pretty easily, since 2 minutes with a nail file would convert it into a fully automatic machine gun, according to the news media.

I’m not sure I’d object to the term “military style” from anything other than a public relations point of view. The rifles are made from a military pattern. This you can’t really argue with. While they are not true military assault rifles, they are patterned after them. So I’m not sure “military style” isn’t fitting from a technical point of view.

To me the important message that seems to be getting out there is that these firearms do have a sporting use, and people do use them for legitimate other purposes, like home defense. This has always been the case, but I’m glad to see the media is moving beyond regurgitating whatever the Brady Campaign or Violence Policy Center tells them.

Note to Criminals

If you take your car to the shop to get fixed up, be sure to remove any bodies that you might have stashed in the trunk.

MSNBC on Black Rifles

I saw the video tonight of MSNBC’s feature on Black Rifles that SayUncle mentioned earlier.Â Overall, I think they did a pretty good job.Â It would be nice if the other side of the story weren’t a load of crap.

The woman they featured reminded me of Sgt. Callahan from police academy, only with a heavy midwestern accent.Â Still, it showed these rifles are mainstream among shooters, which can only help our cause.Â If any of you remember the crap the media was peddling from 1989 to 1994 or so, this is a huge improvement.