Author: Sebastian

New Media Assault

I have to admit, so far the Brady Campaign’s Newswatch is top quality stuff. Worthy of Jadegold, except without the ad-hominems.  I mean, arguing that Montanans are crazy for taking the constitution seriously, and that NRA members are afraid of cows.  Wow.  I look forward to the day when I can be part of this parody.

Just to let you all in on what the Brady’s are likely hoping for here, is that we all link to these outrages, and that it boosts their Google mojo.  That way when people search on certain things, their message gets out there, and maybe they get some followers.  I wonder where they got that idea from?

But seriously folks, the Brady’s are a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid.  They are clearly starting to understand new media, and we have to be ready.  Be so baited as you might be, the best thing is to ignore them.

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It’s Worse Than That

Today’s NRA-ILA Grassroots Alert outrage of the week.

This week’s outrage comes to us from Winchendon, Massachusetts where, in yet another case of “zero-tolerance” enforcement defying common sense, fourth-grader Bradley Geslak was suspended from Toy Town Elementary School for bringing a Memorial Day souvenir to school.

According to a May 29, Telegram.com article, a uniformed veteran gave the 10-year-old two empty rifle shell casings from blanks used during the town’s Memorial Day celebration Monday morning. Bradley gave one of the empty casings to his grandfather and kept the other as a souvenir. The trouble began when he took his souvenir to school the next day.

“He was just playing with it at lunch,” explained Crystal Geslak, Bradley’s mother. “He wasn’t showing it to anyone; he had it in his hand and was playing with it.”

A teacher saw him with the harmless piece of brass and confiscated it. Ms. Geslak was then called at work and told to come and pick up her son, who had been suspended for five days!

Well, the problem is, if you don’t have a license to have a firearm in Massachuetts, you can’t even possess ammunition or ammunition components.   The truth is, this kid and everyone involved in this situation is lucky that it’s only resulting in a five day suspension.  Under Massachusetts law, both the kid, the veteran who gave the kid the empty shell casing, and the teacher to took if from the kid could be looking at two years in prison for having ammunition components without a license.

These are the “reasonable restrictions” that the Brady Campaign wants to impose on the rest of the country.  And they call us “nuts” and “paranoid” for arguing that these regulations are anything but reasonable.   Yet in this case, the following people could be looking at two years in jail:

  1. A 10 year old kid.
  2. One of our nation’s veterans
  3. An elementary school teacher

Sound reasonable to you?  Me neither.

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It’s Not About Guns, It’s About Control

Did I say guns?  I meant dogs.  Eric has a follow up to the post we linked to yesterday.

“I think eliminating vicious dogs is as important to reclaiming our cities as controlling gun violence and making sure our young people are going to school,” says Yates.

Tyrone Yates is as big a proponent of gun control as he is rounding up people’s pets and exterminating them.  You know, if you change two letters in his first name, I think you can come up with something more appropriate.  Tyrant Yates — yeah, that’s better.  I continue to be amazed that people will vote to keep power hungry politicians like this in office.  And yet these are our big city politicians.  It’s almost like people in big cities like having government run their lives.

A government that goes around invading people’s homes to snatch away family pets and exterminate them has crossed the line and lost any claim to legitimacy it might have.  In sincerely hope that other politicians in Ohio aren’t interested in perpetrating a crime like Tyrant Yates proposes.

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E-Postal Revisions

Made a few revisions to the e-postal match below.  For one, I said there was a total of forty shots and forty points.  That was incorrect.  That might be true for an actual silhouette match, where there are two banks of animals, but I figured we’d stick to one target, which only has one bank, so twenty shots and twenty animals.  Done in four strings of five.

Secondly, at the suggestion of Mr. C, I added a masochist class, where you can shoot all 20 animals, and your score is however many shots it takes you to hit them all.  In this class, you can hit the animals twice, and it still counts.  Also, if there’s any interest in an air pistol class, I’d be happy to add that.  If I get one person interested in that, I’ll shoot that class with you.

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The Boy Scout Lawsuit

Good editorial in The Daily News talking about the lawsuit the Boy Scouts have filed against the City of Philadelphia, who are trying to evict them because they exclude gays.  The Inqurer has run other editorials denouncing the Boy Scouts position, and arguing the city is justified in what it’s doing.

I take a bit of a conflicted position on it, in that I believe the Boy Scouts of America is wrong for excluding homosexuals and atheists from scouting, but I also think the city is wrong for punishing this particular troop because of the backwards policies promulgated by the national organization.  The next thing you know, they’ll be punishing local shooting clubs because they don’t like what the NRA does… oh wait.

The kids in the Philadelphia Boy Scouts shouldn’t be made to suffer for the position of the national organization over which they have no control.  This is political grandstanding, pure and simple, and it’s shameful.  Scouting offers a lot of positive things to young boys, and in a city that’s in desperate need of giving young boys positive leadership, and keeping them out of trouble, it seems to me that this move is supremely short sighted on the part of the city politicians.

I understand their beef with the Boy Scouts of America.  I even share it.  But they are a private organization, and are free to exclude whoever they want.  The Boy Scouts are not a hate group.  They don’t preach discrimination, or notions that some people are better than others; they view homosexuality and atheism as immoral behavior and belief.  I disagree with them strongly on this matter, but that’s what the national organization has decided.  The city politicians should be free to denounce this all they want, but they shouldn’t go so far as punishing the boys of this local troop by canceling their lease.

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Gas Riots of the 70s

The Philly media seem to act surprised that people are taking high gas prices in stride:

Twenty-nine years ago, service-station owner Steven Lankin watched as a summer-night Levittown crowd seething over gas rationing, two-hour lines at the pumps, and a then-stunning hike to $1 a gallon turn violent.

What began as a truckers’ gas-crisis protest lasted two nights, June 23 and 24, 1979. It drew thousands of people and left 100 people injured, nearly 200 arrested, and one Shell station shattered in the first gasoline revolt in American history.

When inflation is considered, today’s drivers are paying more for gas; $4 in 2008 is equivalent to $1.35 in 1979 terms. Even so, the gas-buying crowd remains civil, though unhappy, at Levittown’s Five Points intersection, where the riots broke out in front of the Getty station Lankin has run since 1964.

I think you’d find people were more pissed off at the fact that there was no gas, and people had to wait in line, because government price controls created shortages which forced the government to ration gasoline.  The price may be higher today than it was then, but because the government has, for the most part, not gotten involved with manipulating the free market price of oil, there are no shortages or lines, and we don’t need rationing.

Of course, the funny thing about the gas riots of the 70s, was you had people vandalizing gas stations over the fact that there were lines for gas, and chronic shortages, only to realize later that meant there were fewer stations that were able to sell gas.   Sounds like the kind of collective stupidity South Park likes to parody, only this time it was real.

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That Didn’t Take Long

No sooner does Ahab debunk the Brady’s latest post on “God, not Guns” than it disppears down the memory hole.  Turns out a lot of gun people are really into this Jesus thing, and know their stuff.  I guess the Brady’s haven’t been listening much to Barack Obama tell them about people clinging to religion and guns.

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Headline of the Day

“British Columbia Severed Feet Mystery Deepens.” I tend to think when you have severed feet washing up on shore, complete with socks and shoes, that mystery is starting off on a level that’s already about as deep as you can get.  I’m also rather surprised that this article reveals that body parts washing up on shore isn’t all that unusual.  I don’t know about you, but if I’m out in the surf with a boogie board, and I notice an uninvited passenger that turns out to be an arm, leg, or severed head — that’s it man, my ocean going days are over.

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