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.
Year: 2007
MSNBC on Black Rifles
I saw the video tonight of MSNBC’s feature on Black Rifles that SayUncle mentioned earlier. Overall, I think they did a pretty good job. 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. Still, it showed these rifles are mainstream among shooters, which can only help our cause. If any of you remember the crap the media was peddling from 1989 to 1994 or so, this is a huge improvement.
Honesty in the Press
It seems the Hartford Courant is admitting that gun control hasn’t done anything to fight crime in New England.
In 2004, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence gave Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island a B or better for their efforts to inhibit gun violence (Connecticut and Massachusetts got an A-), while Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont all received a D-.
Statistics from 2005, however, tell a much different story. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the murder rates in Portland, Maine, and Manchester, N.H., were 4.7 and 3.6 respectively per 100,000 residents – low when compared to the murder rates in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Boston, Springfield and Providence, which were more than twice their northern neighbors’ and higher than the national average of 6.9 per 100,000 during the same time period.
Yep. But it gets better:
What do these statistics tell us? Restrictive and needless legislation does nothing to prevent violence. Erecting unnecessary roadblocks (i.e. gun control) to legal gun ownership only hurts, and at times dissuades, the law-abiding citizen. More importantly such laws do nothing to impede the criminal, because criminals do not adhere to the law. This is why lawmakers would better serve and protect those of us in Connecticut if they sought to address and remedy the destructive culture in our cities and elsewhere. Destroy this mindset as opposed to devising harmful legislation that does nothing to solve the true ills that plague certain communities, which are the real reasons why violence is occurring in the first place.
I wish the Philadelphia press could be this honest. Â Read the whole thing.
Christian Science Monitor Fisking
Dave Hardy gives a hearty fisking to some delusions from the Christian Science Monitor.
Bitching about Parker Appeal
This time, from the other side. Of course, he’s wrong that it was the NRA that filed suit. The NRA was actually pretty opposed to the idea. It was filed by attorneys who were unassociated with the NRA.
 he appeal of the DC gun ban, however, looks likely to renew the debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment. Gun control advocates had urged DC not to appeal their loss in the Appellate Court (which ruled that the Second Amendment did indeed protect the registered gun in your home – that the 1930 opinion was wrong or misconstrued) in order to avoid having the US Supreme Court ratify the appellate decision.
So they were pressured not to go for cert! Or at least this person seems to think so. But I don’t think the DC circuit said anything about registration being OK. And I’m pretty sure that Miller never endorsed anything other than the individual rights argument.
E-Postaled Out
I think I’ve done about as well as I’m going to do in this match. I went to shoot at my club tonight, with a mind to do some outdoor shooting at 100 yards with the 10/22. I arrived kind of late though, and only got about 15 rounds off before I decided it was getting a little too dark.
Switch to the indoor range. Tried out the E-Postal with the Glock a bit to see if could do any better. Had a really hard time hitting anything over the 8 with it. I probably could have worked my way up to hitting the 9, 10, and maybe 11, but I told myself I wouldn’t blow more than 50 rounds with the Glock. 9mm is just too expensive right now.
Switch to the Mk.III, and I seem to be doing better than I was last time. I managed to shoot a 65 two handed.
Hitting the 11 was a lucky shot! I figured if I can hit the 11, I can surely hit the 12. But no, I pulled that one way down, and to the right. I would have been better off going for the 1 circle, and getting an extra point. But these are the gambles you take with this target. Next I had to try one handed. Now, I’ve been practicing one handed, and I’m getting to the point where I don’t totally suck. I shot 55 one handed.
I discovered Ahab’s advice about taking your time to be quite useful. I instituted a rule of loading no more than one round at a time, which improved my shooting dramatically. I tend to practice more rapid shooting. If I put 5 rounds in a magazine (club maximum), I rush my shooting, which was killing me in bullseye stance.
I think this is about as well as I’m going to shoot on this match. To be honest, I can’t see anything beyond the 10 circle well, and I can’t see the 12 and 13 circle at all. This was the hardest match so far, I think. Golf at least had color to aim at. This circles target was as much a test for eyesight and dealing with poor sight picture as it was for holding the gun steady and trigger technique. My advise for other shooters is to do the middle row first. Errant shots have a good chance of hitting the other circles! I had that happen at least twice. Even hit the 13 by chance first time I tried the target, unfortunately the rest of the target sucked, and my single handed shooting was atrocious in that first session.
Good luck to everyone. You have until Monday the 30st to get your entry in, if you want to participate. But you should! Go download the target from Conservative UAW Guy.
Wolves in Idaho
I agree with Clayton’s sentiment here about wolves. He quotes from a reader:
Currently Federal Rule 10-J allows commercially licensed OUTFITTERS only to shoot wolves that attacking their horses, we non-outfitter licensed horsemen must simply sit and watch the wolves eat our horses.
On Thursday, July 19th at 6pm at the Boise Center on the Grove the US Fish & Wildlife Service will hold an open house on a proposed rule change to allow us peasants to defend our horses if they are attacked. The open house will be 6pm to 7pm and a public hearing from 7pm to 9pm will follow.
Then states:
I am generally prepared to let wolves be wolves, but if the choice is shooting a wolf, or letting it destroy a domesticated animal in the presence of a human being–I’m hard pressed to see why the wolf should have a higher priority than a horse or a dog.
This seems sensible to me. Horses and other pets are like family members to those that own them. I can tell you that were I out in the wilderness, and a pack of wolves threatened my pet, the feds can shove rule 10-J where the sun don’t shine; we will be practicing the three S’s (normally Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-up, but in this case Shoot, Scoot, and Shut-up).
I’m generally in favor of the reintroduction of wolves into wilderness areas, but when they have encounters with people, the people ought to be allowed to win. There’s a difference between actively going out and hunting down wolves and killing them, and defending yourself, your family, property and livelihood.
Unbelievable
The evil twin has a story from Virginia about an open carry arrest in Norfolk (open carry is legal in Virginia). My advice to folks who choose the route of challenging local authorities on state preemption matters such as this is to retain an attorney, and make sure your spouse understands exactly what she needs to do if you get pinched, and is prepared to do it. After being arrested isn’t the time to go find a lawyer.
VCDL is going a good job here though, and I wish them well in their lawsuit against the City of Norfolk on this matter.
Gotta Disagree Here
I have to disagree with Scalawag over this one (which was linked earlier by David Codrea, talking about the dumbass gun shop owner) I have absolutely no fear of an AK-47 as a rifle, but if I see someone walking down my neighborhood toting a loaded rifle, then yes, I’m going to call the police. Context matters, and that’s something that’s way way out of place in a suburban setting.
Rifles are something you carry to deal with an expected threat, in other words, if the shit has already hit the fan. We carry pistols to deal with unexpected threats. While I would agree that disorderly charges against someone with a holstered, visible side arm would be unjust and unwarranted, and there are many contexts where I would accept the carrying of a loaded rifle, the streets of suburbia aren’t one of them.
I might think a stern talking to would be better than charges here, but we don’t live in a world where you can expect the kind of encounters on foot where a rifle can be effectively employed. Keep one in your home, keep one in your vehicle, but being out on the streets, you’re better off carrying a pistol for close encounters of the criminal variety, and not just so you don’t scare the sheeple.
Sure, I do wish we lived in a world where you could sling a rifle and carry it over to a friend’s house to work on that trigger job, but that’s not the world we inhabit. No one gets educated or relieved of their ignorance by seeing an AK-47 being carrying down the streets of their neighborhood. If anything, it will only feed it.
Feel free to disagree.
Taser Demo
Instapundit points us to a demo of the Taser C2 over at popular mechanics. I have always been a big proponent of pepper spray as the best option for less than lethal force, and I still believe that.
Electrical weapons are replete with problems.  For one, you only get once chance to hit. There’s the issue of the probes being able to get through clothing to the attacker. What do you do once you run out of the 30 second charge? Remember, that was a demo. A real attacker will be hopped up on adrenaline, drugs, or both.
If my friend Jym is reading this, he can tell you the story of the time he volunteered to get nailed by his friend’s stun gun and felt he would have been completely able to fight through it if he had to. The big problem with less than lethals is that any force that’s powerful enough to incapacitate someone to the extent that they are no longer a threat to you is quite likely to kill that person. The root problem is not that technology hasn’t advanced enough, it’s that the human body is surprisingly resilient. Perhaps someday electrical weapons will advance far enough to be able to reliably disable someone for a sufficient period of time to make a safe exit from a deadly encounter possible, but that weapon will probably also be liable enough to kill, that it’ll be treated legally as a deadly weapon.
So I’ll stick to my assertion that Tasers and stun guns are poor substitutes for an effective pepper spray, which are poor substitutes for firearms, when talking about deadly encounters with criminals. Less than lethals have their place, certainly. Definitely in police work. But I wouldn’t rely on them to get myself out of a deadly encounter.