US Airways is probably the crappiest airline on the planet.  Now there’s another reason that’s true. Bitter and I are driving to Louisville in May, because of how much flying sucks. Hopefully I won’t be flying again until Reno in October.
Shot of the Week
Silhouette tonight was so so. I still can’t shoot pistol silhouette for crap. But my number came up in shot of the week. That’s where we write our name or membership number on a dollar bill, put it in the pot, and take chances that our dollar bill will be drawn. If you hit shot of the week, you win. If you miss, the money goes to the next week. Last week someone missed. Mine had yet to come up, except for tonight. The pot was 19 dollars. The challenge is to shoot a 1/10th scale animal at 25 yards. It’s about this size, depending on your screen resolution:
Roughly the size of a quarter, cut out into a chicken shape. I hit it in the ass with open sights, much to my surprise, so I decided the 19 dollars would go toward beer money for the week. That made up for shooting horribly in pistol.
Colleges teach a lot of things these days …
… but apparently respect is not one of them. Just because someone has the constitutional right to do something, doesn’t mean it ought to be done, and doesn’t mean I won’t call you an asshole for doing it.
You have to wonder if Mr. Art Project had to watch his friends getting shot and blown up, had to kill other human beings, and endure psychological stress beyond what most people imagine, all because he thought the piece of cloth disrespectful college kids so casually walk all over was worth all that, whether he might be able to put himself in a shoes of a veteran who had. I’m not an advocate of legally mandated flag respect, but that doesn’t mean I think these kinds of people aren’t asshats.
Lessons to Learn
From this incident in California:
The officer was struck with the bat as he walked out of his office and fell backward in a daze, Dyer said.
As the officer tried to draw his firearm, the weapon’s magazine clattered to the floor, Dyer said.
The student with the bat approached the officer again, the chief said, prompting the officer to reach for a second firearm attached to his ankle.
Magazine disconnect safeties do not belong on guns which you carry to use in self-defense. If the magazine drops during a scuffle, you want a gun that will go boom when the trigger is pulled. Absent that, not much beats the old New York reload.
Hat Tip to Dave Hardy.
Interview With Kyle Cassidy
Author of the photo journal Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes, which is on Bitter’s coffee table, and is an excellent collection of photography.  Head over to GunPundit for the intervew.
UPDATE: Just noticed something:
That’s a good question too. When I was going to take that photograph I said “let me just move those pizza boxes out of the way” and my girlfriend, who was with me at the time, said “What? Are you crazy?” and she was right. They do really help make that photo. I did ask Dan what the deal was with all the pizza boxes and he said: “I miss recycling day a lot.” So that’s it. He orders out a lot and isn’t always around on recycling day.
Dan is someone familiar to many of us, because he’s president of a certain PA gun rights organization.
Injunction Granted
A judge has blocked the City of Philadelphia from enforcing its gun control ordinances:
Common Pleas Judge Jane Cutler Greenspan is granting the National Rifle Association’s request Thursday to keep the ordinances from taking effect right away. The NRA argues that Pennsylvania law prevents municipalities from regulating guns.
So, the question is, how far do you want to push this Mayor Nutter and Commissioner Ramsey? Do we want to risk contempt of court charges in addition to civil rights violations? Still want to enforce your laws?
Defeat for Gun Control in IL
The RKBA movement is becoming extremely effective at keeping Daley and Blagowhatshisname’s agenda at bay. Maybe they’ll soon be able to start reversing losses, and we can hit them with a combined strategy of litigation post-Heller, and grass roots action. Armed and Safe told us yesterday that Daley would make his move on the anniversary of Virginia Tech (this date is a refuge of scoundrels everywhere it seems). Well, it would appear Daley has gone down in flames.
Illinois is a good example of how effective we can be when NRA and its state affilate work together and are effective together. It’s a pity Pennsylvania’s state Rifle and Pistol Assocation are mostly useless politically.
More on Wal-Mart
Bitter points out a pretty interesting back story to the whole Wal-Mart Bloomberg affair. Seems that the firearms industry, and even some Wal-Mart executives were caught off guard by this. I’ve thought for a while that Wal-Mart would like to be out of the firearms business, now it seems they might want to be out of the fishing business too. All the more reason, I think, to go elsewhere for my outdoor needs.
Closing the Gun Show Loophole
This issue will be what the antis push the hardest in the future, because I think it’s the one goal they have that is probably most politically achievable. But that’s not to say it’s going to be easy:
“Gun control is not an issue that any of these candidates wants to bring up right now,” Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute told ABC News the other day. “For the candidates, it’s a lose-lose.”
No, it’s not. There is no serious grass roots movement in this country for gun control. They can bring money to the table, they can bring media, but they can’t bring the most important thing; votes. I did not point out this thread on the HuffPo about Obama’s endorsement by AHSA. I wanted a chance to see how many gun control advocates actually turned out. The answer was, not many. Plenty of Obama and Democrat ra-ras, many of which were eagar to assure that Obama wouldn’t take away anyone’s guns, but very few people actually advocating for restrictions. And this is a site full of the exact demographic who should be most in favor of restricting guns. Where’s the passion? If it wasn’t for the anti-gun groups hold on the media, no one would pay attention to them. No one. But back to the article:
“There are people who think engaging on this gun-show loophole is too much of a hot-button issue,” Clifford said. “I would suggest that the fact that the Baltimore Police Department seized almost 4,000 illegal guns last year shows it is a critical law-enforcement issue.”
And exactly how many of those guns traced back to gun shows? I’m going to suggest that Sterling Clifford has absolutely no idea. We can win on this one. We can deliver passion, and we can deliver votes. All they can deliver is lies and propaganda.
Did Rev. Evans Actually Say This?
I’m hoping this is a mistatement:
Thanks, Mr Horwitz, for your well-spoken(written) words. We have work to do to build a more wholesome and safe society. There was some debate about this “protest†on a day of “remembrance.†Yet it felt so appropriate. When the focus is on the anniversary of the tragic events, it seems pertinent to give attention to better ways forward.
Emphasis mine, but the quotes aren’t. This is in regards to the “lie-in” held at Virginia Tech. Is the Reverend doubting this is a day of remembrance for a lot of the families and victims? That seems hard to believe, for a man who was a pillar of the community in the aftermath of the tragedy.
Sorry Reverend, I can’t agree with you on this. The lie-in was a protest, meant to advance a political position. Thirty-two people laying down and playing dead is a macabre way to remember such a tragedy, don’t you think? Is it really “so appropriate?” I have little problem with people using the example of tragedy as a justification for advocating certain political positions, but this was a day of remembrance for a lot of people. Virginia Tech deserved to have a quiet and reflective day. We have 364 other days of the year to argue about the politics.