2011 – Page 56 – Shall Not Be Questioned

We’re Not Indifferent …

… to gun violence. Only to hysterical individuals like our opponents who lately seem to be following the old adage of “When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

As quoted by the Associated Press he said the way the bullets come out of those AK47s is scary.

I don’t know about you, but if it’s aimed in my direction, the way bullets come out of any gun is scary.

That contention is that with everyone loaded for bear, we would stop a lot of these unwarranted attacks on civilization. Right! What the man who might have been a hero did is follow an instinct that nine out of ten other persons in his shoes would. When under assault by superior firepower, the best solution is to duck and run for the nearest cover and stay there.

He was not under assault. He was in his BBQ joint across the street. None of the people who were under assault were armed.

When he was through, he came outside and further demonstrated his prowess by spraying bullets through shopping center windows before killing himself as the police arrived. That brought the gun’s total for the day to four including the shooter. Not terribly impressive considering what those things can do.

That’s because all guns do is fire small bits of lead at extreme velocities. It’s the killer’s tactics that make the big difference, and if the killer has good tactics, he can easily accomplish his feat with matches and gasoline if that’s all that’s available. What keeps body counts down in this situation is a fast response by other armed individuals, such as the police, and the incompetence of the shooter at target selection.

How’s that for action Wayne La Pierre? For the un-anointed in the gun religion, he is the chief heat packer for the National Rifle Association and its followers. You know those who oppose any reasonable restraint on the dissemination of firearms here and across borders like Mexico unless they can find a way to use the issue to beat up on law enforcement.

The dismissal of the Fast and Furious scandal tells me that Dan K. Thomasson doesn’t give a whit about gun violence either. None of them do, and you’re a fool if you believe the facade. Guns are icky, and we have to get them out of society. That’s what they stand for. Nothing else.

NRA Backed 2A Litigation

They have made a list, which is good, because I can never remember who’s funding what these days. I believe this is just ILA supported litigation, and does not include litigation being funded by the Civil Rights Defense Fund.

Third Gun Linked to F&F

Fox has the details.

Brady Exploiting 9/11 Anniversary for Political Gain

You’d think the anniversary of 9/11 would be above political posturing, and should be about remembering the victims, rather than pushing a political agenda,Â but pretty clearly the Brady Campaign does not think so. Have they no shame? Pushing bills after a high profile tragedy is standard operating procedure for the Brady folks, but it’s hard fathom anyone could think attempting to usurp the tenth anniversary of 9/11 for political gain is anything other than disgusting.

And they wonder why they no longer have the pull with the main stream media they used to. I don’t think even the left-leaning media would want to touch a story that would appear to try to divert attention away from the tenth anniversary of a huge national tragedy to focus attention on a group’s public policy agenda that is not even remotely related to that tragedy. This is really shameful.

Republican Debate

I did not watch the debate, but Clayton took a look and analyzed the transcript. I’m not even really going to read the transcript, because paying attention this far out of being able to vote is just too depressing. If I had to put money on the primary, this will end up a race between Perry and Romney. I’m not sure how much of a dog I have in that fight. Truth is, I’ll get behind anyone who’s name isn’t Barack Obama in the general election, but neither Perry nor Romney get me excited. I’d generally give an edge to Perry, since Romney is a serial panderer who can’t be counted on. All politicians paint a bit with that brush, but some make a high art of it. Romney is that type of politician.

Reprise

Before Pennsylvania even had time to dry out from Irene, it looks like we just got creamed again with the remnants of Lee. This time, however, Central Pennsylvania got the worst of it, rather than us. But folks along the Delaware River are still in trouble, since the rains were quite fierce upstream. This picture was taken a few hours ago, and the river will not crest until tomorrow morning. The problem is, it’s rained so much here that the ground won’t take any more water, so it’s all going to end up in the rivers and streams.

We did OK here. The heavy thunderstorms moving through around 4AM woke me up, and we had rain heavy enough for a while to keep my sump pump pretty much constantly on, but no power loss, and the rains didn’t keep up long enough to pose a serious threat. It wasn’t like Irene, which was several hours of continuous torrential downpour.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the folks in Central Pennsylvania. You can see footage of some of the flooding here. Checked in with my dad, who’s out near Lebanon, and they came through OK, but since he’s active with the local fire department, spent all night pumping out basements and helping rescue stranded drivers.Â Capitol Ideas has video of the current state of the Susquehanna River, as well as continuing Twitter coverage of the situation in Central Pennsylvania.

Plea Deal in Grizzly Killing

I did not cover the original incident, where a man shot a grizzly bear that was on his property. Looks like federal prosecutors have agreed to let him pay a 1000 dollar civil penalty in exchange for dropping the more serious criminal charges. I’m sure, after the publicity this case has brought, the U.S. Attorney could be pretty confident it would be tough to find a jury that would convict. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

IHOP Killer’s AK Chinese Made

The supply of Norinco’s on the open market hasn’t been plentiful for almost 20 years, so it’s surprising MSNBC is reporting on the tracing efforts, suggesting that the gun is a Norinco AK. Since it’s traced to a dealer that’s out of business, it obviously wasn’t smuggled in. Dealers are required to send their 4473 records and their A&D records to ATF when they go out of business, so the gun should be traceable, ultimately. But if it’s a Norinco, I’d say a strong possibility it’s a black market gun just based on how long ago it would have been sold. I doubt a Norinco in the hands of a collector is going to be let go of easily, since they are rare these days. They can still be had for 500-600 bucks on the legal market, but it’s been a while since I saw one at a gun show, or in a gun shop.

Picking on MSNBC a bit, it’s not true the federal assault weapons ban ever affected Norinco AKs. They were all imported before the ban went into effect, and were therefore grandfathered under the federal assault weapons ban. Norinco AKs were actually banned in 1993, rather than 1994. It is a mistake to suggest the federal AWB had anything to do with these rifles.

McCain Calling for Hearings in F&F

I was wondering what was prompting McCain to go all “maverick”Â on us again, but perhaps it’s because he planned to call for hearings in Fast and Furious, and wanted to show he wasn’t anyone’s bitch.

When I Get Skeptical of Science

Found this interesting article from Instapundit, which followed through to this, more detailed description of research that shows evidence of inbreeding between modern humans and other proto-human species:

“Our work is different from the research that led to the breakthroughs in Neanderthal genetics,” he explained. “We couldn’t look directly for ancient DNA that is 40,000 years old and make a direct comparison.”

To get past this hindrance, Hammer’s team followed a computational and statistical approach.

“Instead, we looked at DNA from modern humans belonging to African populations and searched for unusual regions in the genome.”

Because nobody knows the DNA sequences of those now extinct archaic forms, Hammer’s team first had to figure out what features of modern DNA might represent fragments that were brought in from archaic forms.

“What we do know is that the sequences of those forms, even the Neanderthals, are not that different from modern humans,” he said. “They have certain characteristics that make them different from modern DNA.”

The researchers used simulations to predict what ancient DNA sequences would look like had they survived within the DNA of our own cells.

“You could say we simulated interbreeding and exchange of genetic material in silico,” Hammer said. “We can simulate a model of hybridization between anatomically modern humans and some archaic form. In that sense, we simulate history so that we can see what we would expect the pattern to look like if it did occur.”

It’s an interesting theory, but any time someone tries to tell me they can successfully model complex systems with a computer program, I get very very skeptical. From my previous job, I know the difficulties in doing this with protein-ligand interactions, which we have a lot of experience modeling in-silico, and even that’s daunting. We’re also, still, not that remarkably good at it.

I would imagine to model something like this, you’d have to make a rather large number of assumptions. Since we also do not have African proto-human DNA, in contrast to what’s available for Neanderthals, I don’t see any way you could invalidate this model. One way I can think of is to see if it can successfully tag DNA sequences from known inter-species hybrids, where we do have the DNA for both parent species available. If it can do that, I might have some faith in it. I’d want to see it work on more than just Neanderthal cross-breeding with modern humans.

I should note, that the theory sounds plausible, and the evidence that it happened with Neanderthals is pretty strong, but my bullshit alarm goes off when computer models are employed to model complex systems with a lot of unknowns.