The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
It’s hard to quit cold turkey, plus, there is a new Bitch Girl to help feed the addiction :)
UPDATE: The new Bitch Girl will be called Legal Bitch. Â She’s pretty young, and just starting out law school, so maybe it should be “Barely Legal Bitch” (that’s sure to attract the google traffic!)Â Thanks you, thank you. Â I’m here all week.
The post sneers at Governor Corzine and Mayor Booker’s attempt to distract the attention away from the real problem with talks of stricter gun control. I like what Dave Hardy had to say about this best:
This is one of those cases where you hope it’s all due to horrendous corruption. That’s the best case. Worst case is there was no corruption, this is how the NJ courts function in the ordinary case.
Hoping for horrendous corruption, because it’s the best case scenario. Â That’s Garden State politics for ya, folks.
Sorry for any of you who read through RSS. WordPress probably just republished a bunch of crap from months past because of some long overdue house keeping. I cleaned up some categories, and eliminated others that I didn’t think served much of a useful purpose because they only had a few entries, and I didn’t really see myself ever using them again.
David has pointed out some outrageous claims from the media. The Orlando Sentinel presents us with a picture, and some hysterics to go along with it:
Orlando emptied its bureau drawers and closets Friday of more than 300 unwanted guns — and one surface-to-air missile launcher.
You sure it’s a surface to air missile launcher?
After hefting the weapon designed to blow jets out of the sky, police spokeswoman Sgt. Barbara Jones commented, “I tell you, you never know what you’re going to get.
You sure it’s designed to blow jets out of the sky? Well, lets see. We can see the letters 1A-3 on the side. This could possibly be BGM or BTM 71A-3 TOW, anti-tank missile. My guess is they have a BTM 71A-3 tube, which would be a practice round, and is completly inert, and worthless without the mucho expensive guideance equipment that’s part of the TOW system. That’s assuming it’s not just an empty tube. The BGM is a the HEAT round that’s actually used for busting up tanks.
So what we have here is a surface-to-surface missile tube, basically. Here’s a picture of a more recent variant. Tell me what you think?
And here’s the one the Orlande Sentinal pimping as an anti-aircraft missile:
Looks the same to me. Again, all this took was a few minutes of googling that “authorized journalists” can’t be bothered doing. But why bother? A guy living near an airport turning an anti-aircraft weapon over to the police is such a great story! Too bad it’s a load of bullcrap.
Earlier in the week, I was reading about some videos over at Tiny Cat Pants, which reminded me of some of the vile anti-immigrant crap you hear about on the right. No matter what one may think about illegal immigrants, I think we can all agree anyone who does something like this to border crossers belongs in jail before they end up killing someone.
But then you have nuts on the left who claim that folks who argue that the government ought to do something about illegal immigration are responsible for spawning morons like the one featured in the video. I particularly like how he claims Clayton threatened him with his guns at the end of this screed. How exactly did that happen? Clayton is on my blogroll, and I’m pretty certain I’ve never seem him threaten anyone.
Either way, I think there are solutions to the immigration issue, but they won’t make anyone, on the left or the right, particularly happy. I do think we have a national security concern with illegal immigration and the ease at which someone can cross the border.
To some degree this is a fundamental problem, and not one that will be solved. You can’t build a wall; it’s too difficult an engineering problem, and it would cost a fortune. The Berlin example, which was a much much smaller wall, suggests they will figure out a way around it anyway. We have an interest in knowing who is coming and going from our country, however, and we need to think about how we can facilitate that.
Guest worker visas and various other things aren’t going to work as long as you have to pay those workers minimum wage and have them pay taxes. People will still hire workers who cross illegally because they can pay them less and don’t have to process any paperwork for them.
Here’s the part that will make the right unhappy. I think anyone who wants to come to this country to look for work ought to be able to do so. You can sign up for a temporary work ID, that just says who you are, where you’re from, and indicates to an employer that the state department knows about this person. The person would have to report in periodically and let the government know where they are.
Here’s the part that will make the left unhappy. Beyond that, the government will agree to look the other way as to whether that person is being employed in the informal economy, or employed formally. If the person is picking lettuce for 2.50 an hour, we’ll pretend we don’t see that. If the temporary worker is picked up on a criminal charge, they either go to jail or get deported. No questions asked. Temporary workers can’t bring their families with them. If temporary workers aren’t paying taxes, we won’t pay too much attention to that either. Employers who employ temporary workers, even informally, won’t get more wrath from the government than they currently do for employing illegals, which is to say, not much at all. Employers who employ undocumented workers will have a world of hurt come down on them from the government if they get caught doing so.
Here’s more that will make the left unhappy. Since we now make it easy to come into the country to work, we’ve presumably removed a lot of incentive to cross illegally. Since that’s the case, we can probably conclude people crossing with no documentation are up to no good, and are either smuggling contraband, criminals or terrorists into the country. We need to step up border patrols and make sure people who try to cross without documentation have a good chance of being caught and deported or jailed. The government doesn’t have the resources to do this, so yes, I do think they should deputize citizens to help the border patrol patrol. And yes, because this is a dangerous job, I have no problem with those folks being armed. But it has to be done within the structure of the government in order that folks like the man seen in this video are weeded out. We need more eyes on the border, both to catch the illegal immigrants, and people who would do them harm.
So there’s my politically infeasible suggestion for the illegal immigration problem. It wouldn’t make anyone happy, which is why it’s infeasible. But most of the other solutions are infeasible too, or wouldn’t do anything to solve the problem. Our country has a demand for illegal labor, and there’s a lot of people chomping at the bit to supply it. You can have all the government regulation in the world, but you won’t prevent that market need from being met. We need a solution to immigration which understands and accepts the reality of the market, and works with it.
It’s about frigging time! There’s rumors that Tom Corbett will make a run for the Governor’s office in 2010. This will certainly help his standing with gun owners.
This is a momentous occasion folks. It marks the first reciprocity agreement that allows Pennsylvania LTC holders to travel out of the state by land and not have to take the gun off to remain legal. Pennsylvania has no reciproicity agreements with any of its neighbors.  I’ve been able to carry in Ohio and Delaware for a while now, but only on a Florida CWL.
This article talks about how to survive a mass shooting. My suggestion involves seeking cover, then returning fire. Of course, you can’t talk about that. It’s crazy talk! We live in a society that’s frightened of bold and decisive action. Not all of the advice here is bad, but some of it is awful. The best way to deal with an armed gunman is to have a gun yourself, period.
UPDATE: Obviously the folks who wrote this never sought any advice from this guy.
I’ve never had the opportunity to shoot at a military base before, so I wasn’t about the pass up the opportunity when Bitter’s work invited me along for their range trip. I didn’t know much about what was going on other than to bring lots of guns and ammo, so I did. They had some instructors there for us which brought along a lot of their own guns, so it didn’t turn out we needed mine a whole lot. They even brought an AK-74, which was good, because for some reason mine was jamming (bad magazine I think).
Bitter was grateful I was willing to come out. I mean, it’s just so difficult to go out to a range on a beautiful summer day to teach a bunch of abundantly cute young chicks, many of whom have never shot a gun before, how to shoot. Sacrifices we must all make in order to grow the shooting sports, I know. I had a few people, even a few of the women, shoot the PSL.  I think they were a bit beyond 100 meters though, because the round was dropping a bit with the scope dialed into 100 meters, but the little reactive steel silhouette targets got hit just fine if you put the caret on the scope on top of the target’s “head” as a little hat. Bent it right over when it hit.
It was mostly plinking, but I was enjoying shooting the steel targets with rifle and pistol. I might have to get into silhouette shooting on a more regular basis!
Anyway, the Marines have some really nice facilities that are open to civilians. You have to be invited by the Quantico Shooting Club, however. But if you ever have a chance to go, I would highly recommend it. Sadly, they don’t turn on the pop up targets for civilians so you can see how you would qualify as a military rifleman, but it’s a nice place to shoot, nonetheless.
… seems to be leveling off. It’s been a hot month so far. Maybe it’s just too hot to be hanging out on the streets and getting into gunfights.
Man, I don’t know this not blogging thing is going to work out for Bitter.  When I got here, she had her Ethernet cable tied around her arm looking for a vein. It’s hard to quit!