The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
SayUncle reports hunting licenses are up 3.6 percent during a one year period from 2008 to 2009. If I had to conjecture on why, I’d wager a lot of hunters that have been out of the field for a while are headed back to put meat on the table during lean times.
I’m betting this isn’t the kind of hope and change the Obama Administration was banking on.
The good thing was it got the basic shape of the Apple Logo correct:
The only problem is that this was supposed to be 7 centimeters tall. Pretty clearly we have some scaling issues to work out. Possibly the program outputted the wrong units. I’m a long way off from doing anything useful with this. I also think Blender‘s UI was designed by aliens. I did this with Google SketchUp, which unfortunately doesn’t output directly to STL format for printing.
Jacob notes that Nassau D.A. Kathleen Rice is going after assault weapons in her district. Not going after drug dealers with assault weapons, but rather going after dealers who sell firearms with folding stocks that are pinned not to fold, but where the pin can be easily removed. Does she really expect us to believe that she’s making New York a safer place by ridding it of the scourge of folding stocks? Is it a wise use of taxpayer dollars to put otherwise law abiding people like this in jail? Is it even just? If you think about this hard enough, you’ll start to understand why I think many people on the other side of this issue are actually horrible people.
UPDATE: SayUncle is reporting it looks like it’s politically motivated. The gun shop owner filed a civil rights suit against the city previously. I guess that’s sufficient reason for a DA to be looking for revenge.
Looks like Heeding God’s Call is now Neighborhood Partners to End Gun Violence. The MO of the group is the same, however: basically protest a gun shop to try to get them to sign some kind of code of conduct. Clearly they were emboldened when Colosimo’s gun shop folded. Every Philly gun shops is now, apparently, to blame for the violence in Philadelphia.
Joe Huffman got a chance to exchange e-mails with the last surviving scientist on the Manhattan Project. Very cool. This was the guy who developed the detonators. In order to create an implosion type device that uses a plutonium core (Fat Man), you need to create a very precisely orchestrated conventional explosion to compress the core. Conventional detonators weren’t up to the task, which is where Johnson came in.
Carolyn McCarthy is pretty clearly desperate for her bill to be seen as having legs. Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for us, all I think she’s accomplishing is to help boost magazine sales.
Joe Huffman notes that we can’t really go back to a pre-technological lifestyle easily. Personally, I’m pretty worried about what’s going on in the Middle East currently. What if our oil supplies get interrupted? What if the Suez Canal falls into hostile Islamist hands? That’s stuff you have to fight a war over. And what money are we going to fight a war with? The money we keep printing?
Maybe we need to draft retiring baby boomers. They can drive tanks, man ships, and fly planes right?
Tam and Borepatch both have some interesting posts on firearms made in Pakistan’s Khyber Pass. There seems to be a “guns aren’t hard to make” meme going around the blogs. Even believable ripoffs of existing commercially produced firearms aren’t hard to make.
I say that because I can’t think of too many who are still alive that are worth honoring. Due to the fact that, for some odd reason, the pharma industry traditionally gets this day off, it’s an extended weekend for me. So this is what it feels like to be a government employee eh? Holidays in February. At least I’m not wasting tax dollars, but certainly feel free to get upset next time you balk at the cost of renewing your Lipitor prescription.