The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Sebastian has always said that if we decide to have kids, they better learn to be smarter than he and his friends are with technology. Yeah, I’d say this girl has a long way to go on that front.
For those who really can’t sit and watch the whole thing, which I highly suggest doing, you can skip to 6:53 where it really gets going.
Forget helicopter parents mentioned in the post over teens who no longer desire the independence that comes with driving, this is a case of government gone mad with control over how you parent your children.
The Department of Labor has proposed new rules that would restrict children under the age of 16 from working on a farm or ranch. The list of tasks youth would not be allowed to do is astonishing to me. For example, milking cows would not be allowed, and neither would building a fence. One item that stood out to me was that no youth under the age of 16 would be allowed to use a tool that was powered by any source other than hand or foot power. That would eliminate youth using flashlights, garden hoses (because hoses are powered by water) battery operated screwdrivers, etc.
The mother who wrote this (a fifth-generation hog farmer in Missouri) notes that she cares about the safety of her children far more than any federal bureaucrat in DC, and she, as a mother, should be trusted to keep her children safe.
I spent my high school years in a small town where the biggest paper of the year had huge pictures of all the kids who won ribbons at the county fair with the animals they raised. Sometimes, that required work and tools that the Department of Labor would now ban. Those kids raised those animals, contributed to all of the work that goes into caring for them, and many times would get to enjoy the fruits of their labor with the reward of feeding their families. It seems like some bureaucrat in DC isn’t a fan of such a way of life. As much as the left complains about big corporations and not having family-run farms, they sure seem to be in a hurry to destroy what is left of that culture.
I’ve recently watched The Today Show, only to be reminded of that scene in the movie Fargo where Mrs. Lundegaard is watching some super cheesy daytime talk show, right before Grimsrud and Showalter come crashing through the sliding glass door. Today is pretty much that same vacuous dreck.
So it’s not surprising they are latching on to gun control. This reeks of Bloomberg. Here’s the press release regarding the promotion of the reporter doing this story. They are losing women fast. What they don’t realize is that fewer and fewer people are watching, particularly in the age groups they need to reach to hold on to women.
Tam highlights a post from someone who visited Europe, tried to rent a car, only to be told they didn’t have any “American transmissions.” It’s hard to find anyone born after 1980 that knows how to drive a manual. Kids these days. I suppose I don’t mind if they don’t know how to drive cars with manual gearboxes, as long as they stay the hell off my lawn.
I learned to drive on an old 1982 Datsun 720 pickup truck, because that’s what my dad drove. When I was rear ended in an accident right outside my high school, he replaced that car with a 1990 Nissan Sentra two door. It was literally four wheels and a steering wheel. I didn’t even have a tape deck. Both were manuals. I have actually never owned a car with an automatic transmission. I had to learn to drive these because that’s what my dad bought. Dad took the train to work, and didn’t have a need for a fancy car. That worked for me because I generally had use of it during the day. I don’t know at what point parents stopped teaching their kids to drive manuals, but it had to have been around 1980 or so.
If you want to be truly horrified at kids today, apparently one problem the auto industry is having is millennials just aren’t learning to drive. Now, if we had flying cars, I could accept this. We’d all be lamenting these damned kids, with their flying cars, zooming over the house all hours of the night. I could live with that. But no, they just aren’t interested. I couldn’t wait to get my license, so I could go places without having to beg mom, and more importantly, without having mom tagging along wherever I went. Cars represent independence from your parents, even if you’re driving around mom and dad’s old beater. It was this way for generations of Americans, except this one, apparently. Maybe this is the consequence of helicopter parenting.
UPDATE: I should note, just in case dad is reading, I smashed up the 1990 Sentra too. Not my fault. Hit and run driver on the onramp to the Schuylkill Expressway from 30th street in Philly. Car was un-drivable. I got the plates from the car that ran, and we had a cop we know run it… they were stolen tags. The risks of driving in Philly. But my dad would have been sure to remind me of this fact if I didn’t bring it up.
This looks like a quite interesting idea, to make a Bullpup .50BMG semi-auto, but I’m skeptical for a few reasons.
What do you think? The big advantage I can think of, offhand, is this might be a .50BMG that will actually fit in my safe. But my impression of this is that it mostly looks like a neat toy.
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is today, tomorrow and Saturday. All I have to say is that CPAC and the American Conservative Union that runs can go get bent as far as I’m concerned. Why? Because they have chosen to exclude gay conservative groups from their conference. I will not blog about CPAC, blog about ACU, except to say that they are short sighted and narrow minded, who are afraid to tell social conservatives to suck it up and deal with the fact that there are gay people in this world, and some of them are generally conservative.
I grant conservative groups their religious views on homosexuality. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. Is this really the year to be narrowing the coalition? Is this a good election to say we don’t need those votes? Sorry, but another four years of Obama is going to do a lot more to hurt “family values” than being near gay people for a few days.
Iowahawk’s take on the Clint Eastwood Super Bowl commercial, “A Fistful of Rebates” :
And, what’s true about Detroit is true about all of us. This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get back up, slip again, and send the video to our personal injury lawyer. And when we do – the world is going to hear the roar of our engines.
Well, maybe not ‘roar.’ What sound does a solar electric engine make? Zweep or something, I guess. Anyway, they’ll hear something like that.
Read the whole thing.
The Firearm Blog posts about a new type of module rail system that looks a lot better, to me, than Picatinny rails. All my AR-15s, save one, have standard ribbed hand guards. I find the Picatinny rail hand guards uncomfortable to shoot. On my one AR with Picatinny rails, I have ribbed hand guards attached to the bottom for comfort. This system looks immensely comfortable compared to current rail systems.
Joan Peterson mistakes a zombie for a “black man,” and then proceeds to be horrified that zombies are an largely just fun and games, and became an internet meme, just like lolcats. I can’t recall when the zombie internet meme actually started, but it started as a joke. The earliest stuff I can remember being this:
It doesn’t have to be your humor, but this stuff was all over the Internet several years ago, and started, if I recall, largely outside the shooting community. Then some clubs started doing zombie shoots. A club near me had one each halloween and it was very popular, and a lot of fun. You get that Joan? Fun! Some people think shooting is fun, and shooting at zombie targets on halloween? Double fun!
Why is this so hard to deal with and understand? If shooting wasn’t fun, many of us wouldn’t be so energized by this issue. Imagine how it feels for us. It would be like being a golfer, and having petulant busybodies constantly trying to limit access to golf courses, country clubs, and golf clubs, all the while talking about what scary, horrible people golfers were. This is exactly what you people are doing applied to another pastime. Is it so difficult to understand that in a free society, different people have different ideas of fun and humor? Shouldn’t those who value a free and tolerant society embrace such diversity of thought and pastimes? The only answer I can come up with is that Joan and her ilk value neither freedom, tolerance, or diversity, if it people happen to enjoy things they don’t understand or approve of. We have a word for people like that.
Personally, I think the whole zombie thing has jumped the shark. It’s gotten old, and at this point even I’ll agree the joke isn’t funny anymore. But I get how it started, and kept going. Even the Puritans had more of a sense of humor than the anti-gun folks, geez. It reminds me of an old saying about people who wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, terrified at the prospect that there might be people out there having fun. It would seem for many of the leaders of the anti-gun movement, this is an accurate description!
Hear the final tale of her story of Emily getting her gun. But this is not over for her:
Now, this series is far from over. As I’ve found, the hurdles placed before gun owners do not end here. I need to figure out the laws on getting ammunition and transporting the gun to a state that allows practice shooting.
Most of all, I intend to keep pushing the Council of the District of Columbia to rewrite the its laws to make them fair and constitutional for law-abiding Americans.
Excellent. One of the great advantages to getting more women involved in shooting is that when they feel something is wrong, they have more tendency to try to do something about it than men do. Some of the most passionate new advocates for the Second Amendment I’ve met are newly minted female gun owners. I also believe politicians tend to be more sympathetic to women standing up for their Second Amendment rights than men.