Practicing Second Amendment law is what all the cool kids are doing these days, and the Brady Campaign aren’t ones to be left out in the cold. Documenting the Brady organizations’ descent into madness is quite a pleasure. Miguel has been really good at finding the really off-kilter stuff.
Author: Sebastian
Lawsuit over Florida Preemption
Any such ordinances could be challenged in court. If a judge agrees that a violation has occurred, the offending commissioners could be punished as a group and individually by a fine as much as $5,000.
As expected, the media and local politicians who have been flaunting state preemption for years with no repercussions, have been foaming at the mouth ever since this bill was passed in Florida. I’ve probably seen at least an article every couple of days condemning it. That’s a good sign we need to bring this idea to other states, like Pennsylvania, who have plenty of local worms who pretend preemption is a mere suggestion, to be ignored at their whim.
Palm Beach County Commission Chairwoman Shelley Vana told The Palm Beach Post that local governments should be able to enact gun rules without the worry of being fined or ejected from office.
No, I don’t agree. There’s a constitutional right at stake here, and I believe its within the state’s power to enforce that right. If Chairwoman Vana were talking about keeping blacks away from lunch counters, I think most everyone would agree that the state was absolutely within its power. Equal treatment for constitutional rights is our demand.
The Palm Beach county lawsuit, which was filed last week in West Palm Beach Circuit Court, said the new law was flawed on several grounds, including its withdrawal of the long-established immunity of local officials from being sued as individuals for the legislative act of passing an ordinance. The suit also notes that, contrary to the new law, the state constitution only allows the governor to temporarily suspend elected local officials for wrongdoing. Removal can only be done by a vote of the state Senate.
They might be on decent ground with the removal provision, but only the state enjoys sovereign immunity. Counties, towns, and cities have never been considered in our legal system to be sovereigns. Unless that immunity is part of the Florida Constitution, I don’t understand legally why the state couldn’t waive that immunity legislatively.
The Ledger accuses us of attempting to intimidate and bully legislators into not “going into the area of firearm regulation.” That is exactly correct. But this was necessary because these local worms have been doing that to Floridians and their constitutional rights for years. The shoe is now on the other foot and they don’t like it. I will proudly wear the badge of bully when it comes to standing up to foul busybodies who don’t know how to mind their own business. I’ll gladly intimidate legislators who want to erase parts of the Constitution, or pretend they are not bound by law. To me, that is civic duty.
Great Use for Old Computer Equipment
A few weeks ago I shared with you the floppy drives that played the Emperor’s March from Star Wars. No I bring you old computers and an HP scanner covering “The House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals:
The singer’s pitch sounds off to me, but still pretty cool. Hooking up the scopes was a nice visual touch.
Fast and Furious Hearings
Dave Hardy has some good excerpts of the hearings going on in Washington currently. This scandal has started to become like an overly drawn out drama, where you get tired of the movie, and just want to get to the end, where the villain gets what’s coming to him. But the political process, unfortunately, does not work like that. Republicans will have no problem dragging this scandal out to election season. Their desire to get Holder removed I think is sincere, but they’d much prefer to do that through the elections by removing his boss. That’s why I don’t think they are pushing that hard.
On Being Fit and Shooting
Caleb thinks that being fit makes you a better shooter. While I generally would agree, I know some utterly fantastic shooters I would not classify as fit. Actually, far from it. That said, I think it does help. I’ve had instances shooting where I’ve felt my stability would be significantly improved if I were in better shape. Certainly you will shoot better if your pulse rate is lower. So I would say it helps, but in the overall scheme of things, I think there are a lot more important aspects to being a good shooter.
BTW, Gun Nuts Media is sporting a new look. It’s cleaner and more modern, and it looks like they’ve also embraced threaded comments (which maybe they had before, but when you blog you don’t comment on other people’s blogs. It’s a rule :) )
A Review of Dave Kopel’s New Paper
The new job doesn’t leave much time for reading papers, which I have to reserve for the weekend, but Joe Huffman has a pretty good review of Dave Kopel’s latest, “How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution“
Whipping Up a Non-Existent War
The Delco Times, my home town paper, I suppose you could call it, is busy making CeaseFire PA out to be more than it really is:
One of CeaseFirePA’s advertisements featured a letter to Meehan, a former U.S. attorney and Delaware County district attorney. The letter in the ad was written by Mike Carroll, former president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
There’s also a quote by someone rumored to be a reader around these parts:
“I recognize the decision for him is a tough one, but I support what he did,†said McMonigle, also a member of the Firearms Owners Against Crime. “Pat Meehan understands that the Second Amendment supports law abiding citizens having the right to arm themselves. Pat Meehan also understands that right doesn’t stop at state borders. I’m still a law abiding citizen in the United States of America.â€
Good representation there, Dan. As for Nacheman, he’s a paid stooge, and if there’s any evidence that CeaseFire PA is anything more than a couple of people, and a paid stooge, I haven’t seen it. Looks like Casey and Toomey don’t want to comment, which is the smart move. Why bother giving the Delco Times more ammunition to whip this into more of a controversy than it really is? It’s only a controversy because Max Nacheman pitched it to you, and the media is gullible and sympathetic.
X-Plane 10: What Else is Keeping Me Busy
X-Plane 10 was released over the Thanksgiving weekend, so as a fan I immediately put in an order. I’ve been working on a project that revolves around X-Plane, a bit more slowly than I would like over the past month, but I’m still convinced I should do it, as it could possibly make me money. I’ve gotten as far as a skeleton prototype plugin written in Python. We’ll have to see how well it works in version 10.
I also have some first impressions after playing with the demo for a couple of weeks. I think the product has great potential. It’s certainly pushing the boundaries for what flight simulation can be. But I also think it was rushed out the door before it was really ready. Framerates are pretty terrible and not entirely predictable. I’m running on a 3.2GHz dual-core i5 with an ATI Radeon 5870 running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2. This machine is not top of the line, but no slouch either, and the frame rates can get quite disappointing.
Part of the problem, I think, is that X-Plane 10 looks fantastic with all the settings turned way up, but since few machines can really handle that, you have to make sacrifices, and those sacrifices are disappointing. But no doubt they wanted a good base to build on, and I think they have that. Take a look at some of these demos:
My system isn’t quite good enough to look that good. Here’s one from a helicopter:
You can see the jumpiness as it deals with ground detail, which is what I noticed. Hopefully much of this will be fixed in short order. With Microsoft getting started with betas of Flight, indicating they have not abandoned the flight sim market, Laminar is going to have to move quickly if they want to capture some of Microsoft’s dominant market share in this arena. They certainly have the potential to.
Confusopoly
It’s a common theme on Scott Adams blog, the notion that many companies, in order to avoid competing on price, creating buying structures that are impossible to understand, thus hiding true cost.
I think what’s surprising to me is that I’ve only ever heard the term from Scott Adams, but anyone who buys things, particularly corporate purchasing, knows this is common, so why don’t you hear mainstream economists speaking of confusopolies?
A Consequence of Winning
Tam has another link to training fail, which seems to becoming more common. While I think gun bloggers have a role in pointing this stuff out, I think there’s no better evidence for the phenomena of lots of newly minted gun owners than the training fail phenomena. If it’s correct that guns and shooting are going completely mainstream as a hobby, you’re going to see a lot more unqualified people getting into the business in an attempt to cash in on the larger pool of newbs floating around out there that wouldn’t know good training from bad.
So I put this phenomena in the “good problem to have,” category, because of what it means. It would be interesting to see as well, whether NRA’s had an uptick in problem instructors, since NRA’s credential is not all that difficult to obtain, and widely recognized. While they probably would want to keep quiet about that if it were the case, it would be more evidence there are a lot of new shooters floating out there on the market looking for training.