The last broadcast of HamNation. Mary Katharine is moving on to bigger and better things. It’s good to go out with a bang:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BtJG0BonMQ[/youtube]
Month: June 2008
Seven People Dead in Japan Mass Killing
In a mass killing involving a guy with, what I’m guessing must have been a rather large knife.
“The suspect told police that he came to Akihabara to kill people,” said Jiro Akaogi, a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. “He said he was tired of life. He said he was sick of everything.”
News reports said the man crashed a rented, two-ton truck into pedestrians, then jumped out of the truck and began stabbing the people he’d knocked down before turning on horrified onlookers.
Maybe we need some restrictions on two ton trucks and sharp pointy things.
Two Things to Read
There’s two things I missed this week that I would like to have linked to, but because I was frantically cleaning in anticipation of Bitter’s imepnding arrival, I had to cut back on my regular blog reading.
First, Tam has an excellent response to Uncle’s post on serial numbered parts.
Second, Kevin Baker has written a thought provoking piece on education, and how it’s creating more and more kids each generation that look to government to solve our problems. I agree, but think education is only one prong of the problem. The drift toward ever bigger government is also largely driven by the people opposing it having better things to do than get involved in government and fix it. I think there’s also a problem with the cultural notion that everyone has a civic duty to vote. I think that’s hogwash. We have no vested interest in people who have only a peripheral understanding of government and politics casting a ballot. Someone who doesn’t care enough to vote without being guilted into it by MTV, or some other activist group, probably ought not to be voting.
BPCRs
Tam has an excellent essay on Black Powder Cartridge Rifles up over at The Arms Room.
Contributing to Global Warming
I normally get the air conditioning ready to go until late June or July, but since it’s supposed to hit 100 on Monday, I decided to flip the switch early this year. Last night there was no way I was getting to sleep without it, and with Bitter unpacking lots of boxes and with moving furniture around, I figured now was a good time.
So coal will be burned, and atoms will be split to further my appetite for cool comfort. Thanks be to thermodynamics.
Beretta CX4 Storm
Changes in the Shooting Community
Michael Bane has a great post up about how the shooting community is changing, with hunters and shooters ending up on a more equal footing with each other in terms of numbers, and the effect shooters are having on the industry:
We could not continue, much less go into another election cycle, with everyone, including Congress, acting like “hunting” and “shooting” were synonymous, so all anybody needed to do to suck up to us was conserve some wetlands and talk about ducks!
I guess someone forgot to tell Bob Ricker and Ray Schoenke.
Positive Article in LA Times on Open Carry
Sometimes the media can be fair to us. They are very right about this statement:
Most of the time people don’t notice Jensen’s gun. That’s not uncommon, said John Pierce, a law student and computer consultant in Virginia who is a co-founder of OpenCarry.org.
“People are carrying pagers, BlackBerrys, cellphones,” Pierce said. “They see a black lump on your belt and their eyes slide off.”
I’ve often had people ask me why I carry, like it’s some kind of great burden. In most cases, people just have a gut reaction to the idea. It’s not that they are afraid, though some are, it’s more that they tend to assume “Well, normal people don’t do that. Why would anyone want to carry a gun around with them?”
Reality is I find a gun to be far less of a burden to carry than a cell phone or a Blackberry.  For one, the gun doesn’t bug me regularly to pay attention to it. It’s a passive device. For two, I can’t count the number of cell phone clips I’ve broken by clipping it in doorways or againts walls. I’ve had my Glock do the same, and I think the doorway is getting damaged before the Glock. It’s made to last. Thirdly, I don’t have to worry about whether my Glock is charged sufficiently to make it through the rest of the day, and I’ve never had to scramble around looking for an outlet because it went dead unexpectedly. Of course, if the Brady Campaign gets its way, we’ll all be carrying around smart guns that barely work and has all the same burdens as a cell phone.
The electronics we carry around are quite a burden if you think about it. A gun, comparitively, doesn’t see much day to day use, but if you do need one, you really need one, and I’ve always been one to err on the side of caution.
Blaming Pennsylvania Again
In the Trentonian yesterday: “Jersey gun problem PA’s fault”:
New Jersey’s biggest obstacle to controlling gun-related crimes could be the state of Pennsylvania, according to federal data analyzed by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The vast majority of gun crimes committed in Jersey involve guns that were sold from another state, and most of those recovered firearms came from the Keystone State in 2007.
This data, compiled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, show that only 27.9 percent of crime guns recovered last year in New Jersey came from Garden State dealers. Of the 1,467 out-of-state crime guns seized by law-enforcement agencies in Jersey last year, most of them (285) originated from Pennsy gun dealers.
Of course, what they don’t mention is that most gun shops in New Jersey have closed down due to the opporessive gun regulations in that state. The shooting and hunting culture in that state has all but been completely extinguished by regulations that can land you seven years in prison by stopping at a Dunkin Donuts drivethrough on the way back from the range for a cup of coffee.
They don’t have to make guns illegal if they just make owning them so legally risky that no one bothers, except the criminals.  Now they want to do the same thing to Pennsylvania; to destroy its hunting and shooting culture, and close down thousands of gun shops in the state.  No thanks.  The end result will still be criminals getting guns, they will just smuggle them from somewhere else.
People like Bryan Miller won’t stop until they destroy the second amendment. They might not destroy it outright, but they can destroy it through attrition. It happened in New Jersey, and we can’t let it happen here.
Civics Test
Through Ricketyclick, I found this interesting civics literacy quiz.  Go see how you compare to most of the college freshman and seniors today. I missed 4 questions, for an A. I missed 19, 27, 36, and 58.  It’s a sixty question test. I sometimes wish you had a pass a basic civics test to vote, but there’s probably no way to do that without it getting abused.