Author: Sebastian

OC Spray Effective?

You all remember the case up in New Hampshire of the Marine who shot dead a perpetrator that had previously shot a police officer and run him over. My friend Jason dug up the video (he also dug up that Pat Brown video from the other day, but I forgot to credit him). The video serves as a reminder to us that pepper spray is not always effective. This perp takes a blast in a confined space of a car and still manages to come out shooting, hitting the officer 4 times in the torso, and then run him over:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p4FK6Eq-ZA[/youtube]

For those that can’t see the YouTube, here is a link to QuickTime video. Officer McCay was foolish to turn his back on the perpetrator. At best, pepper spray is useful for getting out of fist fight situations, but I wouldn’t rely on it to overcome deadly force. It has a place, but I’ve always thought of it as a double edged sword, both tactically and legally. Aside from the tactical issue of blowback at you, and different people’s ability to fight through it, I’d hate to be in a situation where a prosecutor asks “You had pepper spray. Why didn’t you just use that?”

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The Fairness Doctrine

Cam Edwards has some good thoughts on the potential revival of The Fairness Doctrine:

The bottom line is this:  those who want to regulate speech live in a very bad time to do so.  Gone are the days when you needed a printing press or a broadcasting license to share your opinions with the world.  The genie’s out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in.

Yup!  Read the whole thing.

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Poisoned Well

Clayton Cramer is talking about the “poisoned well” that the gun control movement has created that’s causing a lot of gun owners to see HR2640 as a gun control bill, when it’s really no such thing. He’s absolutely right that the gun control movement has created an environment where there’s substantial mistrust even on bills that ought not to be controversial. Trying to screw us every chance they get tends to do that. My main concern for the bill isn’t that it’s gun control, but that it can be spun as such by those who push for it, and build their political capital for future battles. On the flip side, they also couldn’t get anything done without having to offer significant concessions to NRA concerns.

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Blog Host Replacement

I’m thinking about changing my blog host setup.   Currently, I host the front end of the blog on my Linux workstation, and host the back end on my MythTV DVR system.   Since I’ve gotten the MacBook Pro, I’m finding I never use the Linux workstation anymore, so all it’s doing is consuming power hosting a blog front end.   I could get a single server to act both as my DVR and blog host, and anything else I might want it to do.  If I’m going to consolidate both machines, I’ll probably get a new case, and a few larger hard disks so I can make a RAID5 array, to guard against data loss in the event of drive failure.  I might as well make it a dual core box as well.  I’ve not noticed either machine having a hard time with blog traffic.  The only time I noticed it was in the middle of an Instalaunch.

The real question is whether I want to shell out 500 or so bucks when it’ll take a while to recover that in energy savings.

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E-Postal Results

Sailorcurt has the e-postal results up.  Looks like I managed to beat Ahab.  I forgot about tie breaking rules!   I am quite happy with my placement.   This is the kind of shooting I practice most often, so when we return to precision shooting, I’ll probably fall back down in the ranking again.

The cool thing about these e-postal matches is that they cover such a wide array of shooting disciplines.  You might suck up the page on one match, and dominate the field on another.   Try the next one out.  It doesn’t matter how good or bad you are, because you’ll get better.  I’m finding it’s getting me to the range a lot more, which is improving my shooting quite a bit over what it was four months ago.

Hopefully the next one will allow me to go back to .22LR, because I blew through a few hundred rounds of 9mm (not cheap these days) practicing up on double taps before heading to the range this Monday to shoot the submitted targets.

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Let’s Not Make a Federal Case Out of It

Jesse Jackson has a well deserved reputation as an attention whore.  Do we really need to go adding more federal crimes to the books because of that fact?

After denouncing the demagoguery of Rev. Jesse Jackson in his continued protests at a suburban Chicago-area gun shop, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today announced that it has drafted federal legislation that would prevent such protests from interfering with legal businesses.

“This is not an attack on the First Amendment rights of Jesse Jackson or anyone else,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “But it would put an end to the kind of publicity-seeking shenanigans that Jackson and his cohort, anti-gun Catholic priest Michael Pfleger, have been conducting at Chuck’s Gun Shop in suburban Riverdale for the past three weeks. We’re working on Capitol Hill right now to gather sponsors.

Jesse Jackson and Snuffy Pfleger were already arrested under state law for trespassing.   Why exactly do we need to make a federal issue out of this?

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