Obama has not named an ATF director, and this is making the Brady folks incensed. You know, I can think of one organization that does have a director, if the Bradys are so concerned about this issue. Would they be willing to join us now in asking Obama to abolish this agency, and fold its functions into the FBI? This is one way I can think of to solve this problem.
Year: 2010
Third Party Shenanigans to Make Even a Cynic Roll Their Eyes
The ballot access laws in Pennsylvania are notoriously tough for anyone who doesn’t have the nomination of a major political party, so it makes for big news when people qualify. In two local Congressional races, it’s likely to give us some very severe headaches in seats that are otherwise rated extremely competitive or complete toss-ups.
The most frustrating is the birther who plans to try and pull votes away from the pro-gun Republican nominee in PA-7, Pat Meehan, by claiming to be a Tea Party candidate backed by far left Democrats. (In reality, there was a Tea Party candidate in the race earlier this year, but he ran as a Republican in the primary and was defeated.) He’s pretending that he had no idea his most helpful supporters just happen to be officials with the Democratic Party, some of whom have been publicly recognized by the anti-gun Democratic campaign for their grassroots support. The Democrats aren’t even trying to deny what they did here, and they are eating it up. They don’t think their guy can win on a race based on issues, so they are instead trying to add fringe candidates to the right side in order to split off any votes they can.
What’s worse is that these same “grassroots supporters” for the birther also filed petition challenges in the primary campaign to pressure all of the Democrats not personally chosen by party leaders off of the ballot. They really are afraid of any competition at all and will use any tactic other than a clean campaign to get their way.
Here in our neck of the woods, there’s a new independent candidate in PA-8. By new, I mean just got on the ballot. Because he’s the kind of guy who runs for every office every election cycle. Oh, and he told Tea Party supporters at a forum that voters are all stupid because a) they vote, and b) don’t vote for him and his brand of crazy.
Tom debuted a brand new campaign strategy at tonight’s forum: Tell voters how much they suck. They suck for being voters. They suck for possibly being Republicans. They suck because they don’t vote for Tom. They suck for even turning out to such an event.
When not telling voters how much they suck, Tom indicated he may not honor treaties, and it didn’t really sound like he would give much thought to helping out Israel should they get attacked.
He’s likely going to try and appeal to angry Republicans who can’t get over the fact that their favorite candidates didn’t survive the primary. That’s exactly what the Democrats would like to happen – at least by a cursory glance at the race. After all, this is a blue district that would really only go red with a Republican focused on economic issues – the message the party appears to try and focus on this year. In other words, this is the year the seat could go back, especially since the GOP nominee is a former Congressman who only lost by 1,500 votes last time he ran.
Except, oddly enough, it looks like the Democrats might be lining up to kick Angry Crazy Candidate Tom off the ballot. I suspect it’s because they would rather have disaffected Republicans vote Democrat to “send a message to the GOP” rather than voting third party. They may well need every vote they can get, even if it’s just a spiteful vote from some conservatives being pissy about things not going their way every single time.
Ultimately, this means we’re going to have to work even harder for pro-gun candidates to not only beat the competition from both sides – Democrat & Crazy – but also overcome the margin of error fraud. I have a feeling that I’ll be hoarse come September with all of the phone calls I’ll be making and doors I’ll be knocking on.
Do You Get An Alibi for This?
Apparently there’s a dead Canada Goose at Camp Perry, which happened when a gaggle of geese flew through the line of fire. Shot perfectly through the neck. You couldn’t make that shot at a flying goose with a rifle if you tried.
What I’ve Learned About Running Matches
Last year I was attending a lot of matches. All our Thursday night silhouette matches, all the air silhouette matches on the 3rd Sunday or 1st Monday (depending on season), CMP at my club, a few practical rifle over at Langhorne, IHMSA on the first Sunday, and I was thinking of trying out more. But this year I’m lucky if I can get out to the weekend air gun matches. Much of it can be blamed on my work schedule, but there probably is such a thing as burning yourself out on something.
- But it’s all been valuable. If I have to run a match or shooting program at some point in the future, I have learned a few things:
- Don’t start your match too early. If you do that, you’re guaranteed not to attract people with demanding jobs who have to catch up on sleep over the weekend. I’ve discovered 10:00AM is a great start time for a match, though I would consider as late as 11AM. You want people to be able to get home for dinner, so you can’t go too late. I think too many clubs want matches early to free up ranges by the afternoon for casual shooting, but that disadvantages the match in terms of attendance.
- Have fun. This is probably the most important rule. If you look like you’re having fun, others are going to have fun. If they are having fun, they’ll keep coming to your match. They’ll tell other people the match is a lot of fun too, and it’ll grow.
- Have lunch. Nothing convinces people to show up to shoot like a free or very low cost meal. Our 3rd Sunday silhouette matches always feature food, and a kitty to donate to the cause of lunch.
- Be welcoming and helpful to newbies. Help them get into your sport. Make sure they know that everyone started out struggling, and that you can become competitive with time and practice.  See previous point about emphasizing fun over the competitive nature.
- Offer time to socialize. What’s good for that? See previous point about lunch. But at the same time a match that’s mostly standing around rather than shooting is no fun either. There has to be a good balance, for people to get to know each other, but still spend most of their time doing what they came there for.
There are obviously more things, but these are what I’ve noticed have been the difference between successful matches and less successful ones.
A Subject Near and Dear to My Heart
Before I got involved in gun rights, my primary civil liberty concern was laws governing the free flow of information, including overly broad intellectual property regimes, and restrictions on encryption technology, among them. Joe Huffman has some interesting observations about encryption and mobile communications. There are countries which ban encryption technology, and historically in this country there have been attempts to restrict its use, such as by providing the government with backdoor keys. Back when I was into this issue, France banned encryption entirely, but they lifted that in 1999, as the technology became pervasive. These days most of the regimes who restrict encryption are repressive, and their reasons for doing so obvious.
Encryption is an important tool for the citizen militia. It’s something gun owners should definitely care about. Part of the reason I started caring more about the Second Amendment rather than information restriction is because there was a ready made base of supports of the former who understood politics well enough to be a force. The geeky nerdy types don’t really get the political process as well as gun owners. If you think organizing gun owners is like herding cats, you haven’t seen anything if you haven’t worked with technology people. I think part of the problem is technology people tend to get wrapped up in ideas too much to think about how to implement those ideas in a highly imperfect political system.
But still, there are groups out there like EFF, who just won a very important victory for jailbreakers. This is very important for me since I have both of Steve Job’s walled garden devices. Jailbreaking should not be a crime. If I want to take a bite of the Apple, and cast myself out from the Garden of Steven, I ought to be able to without having to worry about grief from the feds. By the same token, Apple ought to be free to try to technologically keep me within the garden walls, but the only legal action they ought to be permitted to take is invalidating my warranty.
Looks like Pennsylvania …
… isn’t the only state that leaves authorities with some degree of discretion when it comes to issuing licenses to carry firearms. Leonard Embody is certainly a bozo, but being a bozo ought not be grounds for being denied the right to carry a firearm.
The Face of Gun Ownership
The American Thinker notices that it’s changing:
Two examples of just how respectable gun ownership is today happened to me this last week.  First, I am on my Catholic parish’s finance committee. As we finished setting our budget for the current fiscal year and adjourned Thursday night’s meeting, the topic turned to guns.  Soon four of the seven members, including our pastor, were talking about getting together at the local shooting range. At least one additional member is also a gun owner but doesn’t target shoot as a hobby.   Although the parish is in small town North Carolina, none of us are native to this area. We are big city and suburban folk, active and retired accountants, investment advisors and a former lobbyist for a business association.
Read the whole thing. This big aspect of Heller that I hadn’t anticipated was that Supreme Court validation of the right would do more to legitimize gun ownership in the eyes of ordinary citizens, which I think it has to a very large degree. To be honest, I’m not sure why folks working at gun control groups aren’t looking for jobs in other left-of-center issues at this point. The past few years has minted a lot of new gun owners. It may only be anecdotal evidence, but how often now when you go to gun shows do you hear dealers explaining the process to people?  I’ve noticed quite a bit of it.
Appeal for Funds
Clayton is saying he’s going to fight the Righthaven lawsuit, and is looking for donations to help with legal costs. Please kick him some money if you have some to spare. I donated back when this started, and when I stop hemorrhaging money planning a Hawaii trip at the end of the summer, I’ll kick him some more. I think it’s very important for the blogging community as a whole that someone stands up to these people, in their abuse of process. It could be any of us, and shutting down these forms of nasty lawsuits will benefit everyone.
UPDATE: Righthaven is filing five more suits.
UPDATE: The defendants, including Clayton, speak out in the Las Vegas Sun.
Todd Tiahrt Loses his Primary
This is bad news. Very bad news. I keep saying the big problem we face this election is that no one gives a flying rats ass about gun rights because they haven’t been attacked along with everything else. This means we’re going to lose a lot of friends on the issue due to the anti-incumbent sentiment. Tiahrt was one of the good guys. Could the Tiahrt Amendment era be over? The Bradys and MAIG certainly will be hoping so.
See more discussion at PAFOA here.
UPDATE: Didn’t notice this was a Senate primary. He announced he was giving up his House seat a year ago. I can’t recall if I reported on that or not. Still bad news, either way.
iPad Tips
Some things I’ve learned about the iPad after using it for a while:
- Scaled up to a 10 inch display, iOS is far more useful on an iPad than an iPhone.
- I needed to cut my thumbnail down to a nub because of my tendency to hit the spacebar with it. Capacitive displays don’t work well with fingernails. This substantially increased my typing speed.
- Fingerprints are 1000x more annoying in the iPad than the iPhone.
- Google Earth was made for the iPad. Google just didn’t realize it.
- They’d probably sell a lot more of these if Apple was more OK with porn. It’s a great multimedia device.
- Ten hours of battery life my ass. Only under very conservative use. More like 6 hours the way I use it.
- My biggest pet peeve is not being able to easily upload pictures to with Safari. You can do that with the apps for Facebook and Twitter, but that sucks for the blog.
The iPad isn’t meant to be a general purpose computer. It’s hard to describe what it is, really. But I am certain others will copy it, and sell something that good enough for cheaper.