Year: 2008

Machine Gun Killers

Bryan Miller was thankful yesterday for the federal restrictions on machine guns.  As one commenter pointed out:

Bryan Miller is right — the 1934 law strictly regulating machine guns has been effective, resulting in almost nonexistent cases of misuse by their legal owners. So gun control groups are satisfied about that, right?

WRONG — most gun control groups favor banning ownership of machine guns from those who now own them legally and without misuse.

And that is why we we’re obstinate in opposing them.  The federal machine gun regulations are actually very instructive.  For 50 years you had, by any gun control advocate’s standards, a successful program of licensing (in the form of a tax stamp) and registration, that resulted in very few crimes from legally possessed machine guns — and yet in 1986, they banned them anyway.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. The Question of Machine Guns
  2. SOPA and Gun Control
  3. Juries Must Decide on Machine Gun Possession

Photoshop Update

The H-S Precision Photoshop Contest is hopping along.  I will collect entries through to Sunday.  We’ll start the vote on Sunday.  On Monday, I will announce the results of the voting, and will declare a winner.  Since so many people have invested their time in this, I will send a 25 dollar MidwayUSA Gift Certificate to the winner.  Get your entries in!

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. The H-S Precision Photoshop Contest
  2. A Match for Cold Occasions (Winter Gun Blog Rifle Match)
  3. Last Weekend for This Month’s E-Postal

Happy Thankgiving

Have a Happy Thanksgiving Everyone.  What I’m thankful for:

  • Thankful that Bitter still has her b***h a** in the kitchen making me pie, even though she came down with a cold last night.
  • Liberty Safes, for making a prompt and easy delivery of all 850 lbs of my safe.
  • I’m thankful that Michelle Obama can spend her first Thanksgiving being thankful for her country.
  • My new RCBS media separator.  No more digging through tumbler media to find the cases, then having to dump the media out of them.  Just dump them into the separator, turn a few times, and bingo — clean media.
  • I am thankful for a reader for sending me “The Contraption.”  Pictures will be forthcoming, once it’s set up properly.

Enjoy your holiday.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Happy Thanksgiving!
  2. Have a Happy Thanksgiving
  3. What Anti-Gun People Play

Photoshop Contest

Anyone good with photoshop?  I think it’s time for a HS Precision photoshop contest.  I will post any entries that I think are pretty good.   Let Tam be your inspiration:

What’s next from HS Precision? A John Lee Malvo Signature Edition AR-15 stock?

I would let your imagination run from there.  Feel free to e-mail me the submission, or provide a link in the comments.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Final Hour of Voting
  2. Voting is Open
  3. And The Winner …

A Peek At the Playbook?

Ilya Somin might have given us a hint at what Obama’s Administration might be centrally planning:

Interest group pressure has already played a key role in the congressional vote on the finance industry bailout, and it is likely to be equally important in structuring the massive future bailouts to come. Once Obama takes office, we are likely to see some $500 billion to 1 trillion in additional bailout spending – and that may be just for starters. Interest groups will play a major role in allocating this money, and they are already ramping up their lobbying efforts.

On the surface this sounds pretty bad, and it is.  It’s well established that central planning of an economy is folly, and these fools are arrogant enough to think they can do it.  But I am actually somewhat relieved if this is the kind of crap that Obama will be driving through Congress.  It won’t engender a large amount of public support, and will be relatively easy for successive Administrations and Congresses to undo.  The real fear (well, other than new gun control, for our purposes) is that Obama will pass a massive new entitlement program, such as national health care.  Entitlements are nearly impossible to get rid of once they are in place, so if Obama and Emanuel wants to waste taxpayer money by sending tax dollars to inefficient industries, rather than passing new entitlement, all the power to him.  It will make rallying public opposition that much easier.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. “Betting” is a Good Term for Believing in GM
  2. Specter is a “No” for Card Check
  3. Altmire Vows to Stop Bailout

Is It Reality?

Linoge looks a pretty whaky example of an Obama supporter and concludes that the administration is certainly heading down the path for re-education of all us gun clinging cousin humpers.  I can’t say that I really find it persuasive in terms of indicating where The Administration is headed, when you have folks on our side threatening journalists and anti-gun supporters with consequence on the day of reckoning that is certainly fast approaching.

There are extremes on all sides.  Part of the reason our system works is that it tends to dull extremes.  The ship of state does not turn on a dime.  The captain can throw the rudder hard to port as much as he wants, but unless successive administrations do it, it’s hard to execute a sharp turn in either direction.  Because our system is slow to change, it takes a serious consensus among the people in order to keep it moving in any one direction.

Given that there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of actual change going on, I think it’s safe to say that the re-education camps, at best, will be a second term project.  I’m not saying we’re not going to get some really bad policies and legislation out of this Congress and this Administration, but we’ve seen all this before.  My problem with hyperbole, and I do think it’s hyperbole, is that while it might be emotionally satisfying, it’s not entirely useful for actually rebuilding the coalitions we’re going to need to defeat this.  Fear is a powerful motivator, but I think what this administration has actually been proposing is plenty scary enough to get people motivated.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Holiday Bustling in DC
  2. Anti-Gun Myth vs. Reality
  3. Another Walk Down Memory Lane

Add me to the List

Tam is overqualified for public office based on her results from this Civic Literacy Test, which apparently our elected officials did not so well on.  I scored 33 out of 33, so I’m clearly not destained for public office either.  I’ll have to try hard to reduce my competence if I want to have a future in politics.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. What Can I Say …
  2. Picking Over the Bones
  3. What We Need More Of