The Buckeye Firearms Assocation takes a look at AHSA’s reaction to Holder’s call for a new semi-auto ban and wonders why they seem surprised.
Author: Sebastian
Ignorance on Parade
Hope and Change Comes to Delaware Valley
Even the local stations are picking up on the Great Obama Gun Rush. Not only that, but you have all these sources in the media still talking about the issue even months later. But will it continue? Check out this bit from VSSA:
Maybe because while other industries are sliding down a slippery slope of lower demand, the output of U.S. small arms manufacturing is forecast to grow at an annual compounded rate of 2 percent between 2008 and 2013, as seen on the following chart …
It’s change you can believe in.
Let Me Rephrase
Robert Schlesinger doesn’t seem to understand how rights work. Let’s take a look at what he says:
Thanks to the Supreme Court, D.C. citizens can keep and bear arms. They simply have to register them, and cannot have any of the semi-automatic variety. Only radical gun rights advocate suggest these are unconstitutional limitations—and if they are unconstitutional, then under-armed D.C. citizens can gain redress through the courts.
What they can’t do is try to gain redress through Congress, where the 600,000 D.C. residents lack a real voice. Which wouldn’t stop Congress from dictating what kind of gun laws D.C.’s 600,000 residents should have.
Let me rephrase this slightly:
Thanks to the Supreme Court, D.C. citizens can subscribe to newspapers. They simply have to limit themselves to newspapers registered with the government, and may not read any radical papers like USA Today. Only radical first amendment advocates suggest these are unconstitutional limitations—and if they are unconstitutional, then under-educated D.C. citizens can gain redress through the courts.
What they can’t do is try to gain redress through Congress, where the 600,000 D.C. residents lack a real voice. Which wouldn’t stop Congress from dictating what kind of censorship laws D.C.’s 600,000 residents should have.
Still consider yourself a Bill of Rights supporter Mr. Schlesingler?
Good News for Us, Bad News for Bloomberg
The Supreme Court has denied cert on the appeal of New York City’s suit against gun manufacturers. This lets stand a ruling in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled the lawsuits could not proceed due to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
Nice Article from the Lancaster Papers
I like this article because it gets the message out to hunters that they are under threat from many of the proposals too. Whether Angel Cruz or Bobby Rush realize it or not, they are tremendously useful to the cause, because they introduce bills that go nowhere, but serve as examples that hunters and shooters will not find rescue if they throw high-power competitors and “self-defense whackos” off the lifeboat.
UFO Sightings on the Rise
According to the local news radio station:
Bucks County is the focus of world wide interest in unidentified flying object sightings. That’s according to local UFO enthusiasts who meet monthly in Philadelphia’s Fishtown section.
Bob Gardner is state section director of the Mutual UFO Network — or MUFON. He’s an expert on the Bucks County UFO sightings and a regular attendee of the UFO discussion group at the Germ bookshop on Frankford Avenue.
I think I know who they may be looking for.
Autos Autos Everywhere, and Not a Car to Drive
This is a pretty good pictoral reprentation of the economic downturn as far as auto manufacturers are concerned. Lots of cars piling up that no one wants to buy, and the automakers have been churning them out because of the expense involved in shutting down and restarting production lines.
The Danger of Modeling Complex Systems
This is an excellent article from a few weeks ago that describes one of the proximate causes of the current financial crisis.
For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.
Read the whole thing. I am by no means a mathematician, but I work for a company that does mathematical modeling of a complex system (ligands binding to proteins), so I have some experience with the benefits and deficiencies of such systems, as well as some experience with what happens when the uninitiated try to understand these models. Let’s just say there’s a strong tendency to celebrate the benefits and fail to appreciate the limitations.
I think there’s a lot of this when it comes to global warming, too, which is another complex system that people have attempted to model. It’s always a good idea that when anyone claims to have a mathematical model of a complex system that is simply revolutionary, without any significant limitation of caveat, drag him into the nearest bathroom and beat him senseless, before he destroys civilization as we know it. Entire industries have been ruined by such people, who are seldom the people who actually developed the models, and understand the limitations. Finance is not the only industry, just the latest.
Putting Obama in Perspective
Karl Rove has a very interesting graph posted over on his web site, which shows that in terms of approval rating, Obama isn’t actually doing that particularly well compared to other presidents.