More lightbulb blogging over at Uncle’s. I thought about what a movement might look like, to protest Congress’ policy. Why don’t we all send Congress a bill for having to replace our light bulbs with CFLs? There’s some fixtures I have that I’ll just have to replace, because they call for clear bulbs. Send them the bill. They mandated this crap, let them pay for it! Oh, and be sure to include an environmental clean up charge, for the mercury in the bulbs. I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether or not to turn your local congress critter over to a collection agency when they don’t pay up.
Month: January 2011
Animal Rights Whack Jobs on Parade
Protesters are getting more bold about protesting pigeon shoots at clubs that still do them, even in rural areas. While I have no interest personally in pigeon shooting, I am not at all sympathetic to the crackpots that are pushing for the ban. My main reason for opposing a ban is that it would also ban hunting dog training (which can involve releasing birds from cages, and shooting at them, as part of flushing and retriever training). Here’s what I’m talking about from the comments to this article:
Pigeons are gentle creatures who deserve far better than this. The real “pests” are the hunters; too bad they don’t shoot each other and wipe themselves from the face of the earth.
Pigeons are disease carrying vermin, and are pests in most places they infest. Let’s not get crazy here. Standard control practices in cities is to gather them all up and gas them. If you gave me the choice, I think I’d probably rather be shot at, where I at least had a chance to get away. Here’s another:
Hunting is a despicable “sport†but at least the animals in the wild have a chance of survival. The only chance a bird in a box has is if the “hunter†is a ridiculously poor shot! Animals that are not domesticated all face the possibility of starving, freezing, or to be eaten by a predator. However, a bird that is used as a live target for a thrill-seeking human does not die a humane death.
That pretty much shows where enabling these people with a political victory is going to lead, and also how little they understand about this. The pigeons have a pretty good chance of survival. Most people I’ve talked to who have done pigeon shooting say it’s much harder than hitting a clay bird, and you’re going to miss far more often.
The Canadian geese in NJ who poop on golf courses are gassed in 18 wheeler trucks paid for by the state, the deer of Valley Forge National Park that will be using sharp shooters to kill deer that come right up to you, and countless other wasteful kills, These are not solutions to control populations, sterilization or birth control for the deer is an easy solution. I love animals too much to see them starving in the wild, even though I am an animal rights advocate I will not let my beliefs or opinions be more important then animals suffering.
As someone else, with more common sense pointed out:
So building a trap (or more accurately many of them), setting bait, regularly checking them, transporting the animal to a clinic, sedating a wild animal, cutting the animal open, removing the necessary reproductive organs, sewing the animal back up, caging the animal so it can recover, providing after care to ensure the animal is healthy and then driving the animal back to where it was caught is an “easy solution.” Wow. I suppose if you want to financially pay for a such a stupid system as this, I am all for but please don’t force reasonable minded tax payers to fund something because you are opposed to nature because that is completely ridiculous.
It’ll probably be cheaper than that. They’ll do it in the field, inject the thing with antibiotics, and send it on its way and hope for the best. Sure, some percentage of them will die of a painful infection, but it’ll make these people feel better than no one is shooting them. And besides, it’s a well known fact that all the deer sterilized in Valley Forge National Park will respect the park’s boundaries, and not wander out into the surrounding countryside to get knocked up.
Pigeon shooting is going to be a very tricky issue for us in this state, because it’s going to be used to hold up other parts of our agenda. The votes, I’d say, are probably there to pass a ban if it ever came to the floor. Their hope of our opponents is going to be that we violate the “no one goes under the bus” rule and trade a pigeon shooting ban for something else we want. The temptation will be to do that. I’m not sure we’ll be able to avoid it. But if you give them the victory, you’ll be enabling the people appearing in the first comments, and giving up the ground to allow them to proceed to the next step.
Family Values
I’ve been a fan of defending the Duggars ever since Mark Morford attacked them for believing in family and, very bizarrely, tried to claim they had dysfunctional views on sex. I’m still not sure how having north of a dozen and a half happy and fairly healthy children reflects any sort of bedroom problems.
Now, they make me proud again. Apparently, they took an exchange student out target shooting over the holidays.
I’m not sure what Jim Bob Duggar’s NRA grade was when he was in office (their online archives don’t go back that far), but I can definitely applaud him for teaching his kids about keeping their fingers off the triggers.
He adds, “All of the older boys, including John David, are well-trained in gun safety and always supervised when handling guns.”
The only complaint I have is that Jim Bob is a man with 9 daughters. While I’m sure the boys are all quite protective of their sisters, it could never hurt to include the girls in the family firearms training.
They are a family who claim to live debt-free, don’t look to the government to support their large family, have a large family by choice rather than irresponsibility, and seem to have fairly normal children who certainly come off as quite happy in life. And they have guns. I’d say that’s much better tv than half the crap on today.
Business Models that Fail
Typically, a business model for success involves offering a product or service people want to buy, taking their money, and enjoying your profits. That’s not a terribly hard concept, but it is one that still seems to be over the heads of most entertainment companies.
I wrote a post on December 2 about why supposed copyright laws are getting in the way of my ability to give the music companies the price they seek for the products they are trying to sell. You’d think, in this modern era of digital music and hundreds of daily flights between the UK and US, that I would have the products by now. You would be wrong.
We have received the DVD, as well as one cd. I’m still missing two cds, and now one of those may not be shipped out at all. Amazon.co.uk sold out of their stock, though they still have an affiliate selling. Unfortunately, said affiliate doesn’t want to sell to the US, and Amazon’s UK store doesn’t know if they will get it back in stock. Dear music companies: If it’s selling out, it is popular to warrant offering as, at the very least, a digital download. And our damn yankee money should line your pockets just as easily as the pounds & Euros you’ll take from other countries. (The only redeeming element of this story is that Amazon’s UK store has offered us free shipping if they ever get the other disk back in stock. Oh yeah, and there’s one more disc from this artist that we’d like to buy, but again, none of the smaller retailers through Amazon want to deal with an international order.)
On the other side of the pond, we have Amazon.com willing to sell a cd single for a song from the concert encore directly to US consumers. Yay! Only it should have arrived by today. Instead, it has not shipped. The only thing I can deduce from their sudden re-listing of the status of the cd recently is that they are having trouble getting copies here in the US.
Seriously, music executives, I want to buy your product. You can even mark it up at ridiculous rates and it’s likely I will still buy it. Why won’t you take our money? And more importantly, why are music company investors not firing all of your executives for refusing to sell products that make a profit?
Homicides Up 15% in New Jersey
Washington D.C.’s violent crime rate might be going down, but New Jersey’s is going up. That’s because they are busy spending resources prosecuting otherwise law abiding people for violating their ridiculous gun laws rather than locking up criminals. Of course, we all know it’s Pennsylvania’s lax gun laws that are causing this, because it’s always someone else’s fault. It’s never that the laws in question simply don’t work.
Interestingly, New York’s murder rate has also been up, and as we’ve noted before, New Jersey’s murder rate seems to closely track that of New York City.
Unintended Consequences
Ian points out a good reason there’s a problems with people dealing without a license:
And, for further pain; a lot of the gun show table dealers who would get FFLs can’t since the purge of the ‘table dealers from the FFL rolls in the 90′s; because of the “fixed place of business†requirement.
It’s a catch-22, the gun-show dealers can’t get FFLs without a place of business, but they don’t have (and in most cases wouldn’t want) a fixed place of business. Government “regulation†forces otherwise legitimate dealers “undergroundâ€.
That’s a good point. I would actually hold a type 01 FFL (dealer) rather than a type 03 FFL (C&R) if they were easier to get, because I don’t like having to deal with markups from middle men. We’ve have, to some degree deliberately, kept the entire firearms business in the 1950s as far as technology and business models are concerned. The reason is that both sides are scared to death to modernize things, but for different reasons.
Open Carry in Florida
The media seems resigned to the fact that this is going to pass. It points out some history of Florida’s law I was not familiar with:
Florida was, at the time, struggling to counteract tourist-scaring national media coverage of crime in the state, earning a Gunshine State tag in TV shorthand. In the week after the effective date of the conceal-carry law and the supposed end of prohibitions against open-carry, a number of activists walked around with holstered pistols. Lawmakers felt the need to act quickly, and did so. Gov. Bob Martinez signed the open-carry prohibition as soon as he got it.
I remember the media hysteria when Florida passed this law, and I was 13 when it happened, just to give you an idea of how nuts it was. In other words, in the midst of everyone panicking about the idea of people legally carrying guns, the politicians panicked that a tourist might see a gun. I seem to recall during that time German tourists, in several high profile cases, got to spend the last few minutes of their lives looking down the barrels of guns by criminals who were carrying them despite the prohibition on the practice. I also had heard at the time that car jacking in Miami was becoming so commonplace that there were certain places you’d probably rather risk the ticket and run the lights than stop.
Well, an amazing thing happened after Florida became one of the first states to make the leap: nothing really changed, except for tourists not getting shot and car jacking going down. Open carry is probably always going to be uncommon, no matter what the law is, if that’s what they are really concerned with. But it should be among the available choices.
Congratulations Texas!
You now have a “Florida Loophole” too, though they haven’t called it that yet. Maybe Pennsylvanians are more apt to think Florida is a sketchy place than Texans are, or something. Either way, expect anti-gun forces in Texas to try to tack this on to the repeal of the ban on college campuses. Hopefully they’ll have about as much luck with that there as they did here.
Misunderstanding Federal Law (Again)
Of course, given who Colin Goddard is working for these days, that this is a misunderstanding is probably offering a lot more credit that is deserved. The reality is, they know exactly what they are doing:
The gun lobby claims there is no “gun show loopholeâ€. The law governing the sale of guns by licensed dealers and private sellers was crafted so that dealers are required to perform background checks and private sellers are not. Some gun rights advocates argue that if something is intentional, it can’t be called a loophole.
But the exemption for private sellers was intended to cover occasional sales from personal gun collections, a father selling a gun to his son-in-law, for example, not regular sales that supplement income. Virginia law uses the language, “occasional sales of curios and relics.†Many of the private sellers sold new, or very recently manufactured, guns — hardly curios or relics.
No, what we argue is that if something is legal, and you don’t like it, that doesn’t automatically make it a “loophole.” If someone is selling a guns to supplement their income, and they don’t hold an FFL, that person is already breaking federal law. Many of the people appearing in various videos selling guns at tables at gun shows would be relatively easy to prosecute, except that ATF has a nasty habit of botching this kind of operation, and US Attorney’s offices can’t be expected to exercise reasonable discretion about whether to prosecute a collector, who is legitimately liquidating a collection, or going after someone who really is making a living at selling guns without an FFL.
It’s worth noting that in Pennsylvania, there hasn’t been any private transfers for handguns since the 1930s, and yet we still have papers editorializing for more control because “gun crime” is too high, and criminals are straw purchasing and stealing their guns. So now, obviously, we need to ration purchases, and institute a lost and stolen reporting mandate that, to date, not a single person has been prosecuted under.
This nonsense might make you guys feel better, but it doesn’t work, and the world was a safer place when you could go to any local hardware store and buy a pistol or a stick of dynamite, cash and carry, no paperwork or background check.
Mention in Shotgun News
Clayton Cramer has updated his list of publications, and I noticed on there was an article from Shotgun News that appeared in this months issue, on the Death of the Thousand Cuts the gun control movement is dying from. We got a mention:
Another interesting aspect of this death by a thousand cuts is that the gun control movement seems to have lost heart. Â The news media are still reprinting gun control group press releases without too many questions, but the days when the gun control movement enjoyed a large body of financial backers seem to be past. Â Snowflakes in Hell is a gun rights blog that has spent a bit of time over the last few years keeping track of the falling level of support that gun control organizations enjoy.7
So now I’m cited on one of Clayton’s publications. Given that Clayton has been cited by the Supreme Court, I figure that this is probably the closest I’ll come. But we will still hold out hope!