February 2012 – Page 10 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Gun Range Politicking

Remember when I gave Rick Perry a little campaign advice about hitting up a gun range while on the campaign trail? Well, someone in Rick Santorum’s campaign definitely has it together. Looking ahead to the March 6 sorta-Super Tuesday, he was looking to hold a campaign rally at a gun shop in Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, it had to be moved when ticket requests went through the roof after his non-binding caucus & primary wins this week. However, he still stopped in to do a little campaigning at the gun range.

During his pre-rally visit at H&H, Santorum said, â€œI wish we could have had it here, this would have been perfect.â€

He added, â€œI am very impressed. It is easy to see why gun ownership is so strong here, and I stand tall with the Second Amendment.â€

Said Miles Hall, founder and president of H&H, â€œIt was a great honor to show a small but important part of the shooting industry to one of our presidential hopefuls.â€

Defensive Gun Use

Clayton Cramer has an article in the Washington Times outlining the fact that use of a gun in self-defense is more common than many people think. Way more common than our opponents will admit, even to themselves.

Our study examines a variety of incident types: concealed-weapon permit holders (285 accounts); home invasions (1,227 incidents); residential burglaries (488). There are categories that we would never have thought were all that common: 172 incidents where people defended themselves from animal attacks (some wild, some dogs gone wild); 34 were incidents where pizza delivery drivers defended themselves from robbery.

As Clayton mentions in the article, the low end, from the National Crime Victimization Survey, is 108,000 DGUs per year. That’s already higher than the much vaunted “gun death” rate suggested by our opponents. Self-defenses incidents are going to overwhelmingly end without the need for bloodshed with a defensive gun use. You have criminals who don’t want to get shot, combined with defenders who don’t want to shoot, and that’s a recipe for resolving confrontations without having to shoot someone.

The Inquirer: Thinking It’s Readers are Fools Since 1829

The Inquirer editorial board is incensed that the legislature is even thinking about enforcing state law. Do they even bother to look at the facts? Of course not. Facts are optional in today’s journalism:

Pennsylvania legislators, forever beholden to the gun lobby it seems, want to kill lost-or-stolen ordinances enacted by a number of Pennsylvania towns to help fight illegal gun trafficking.

The ordinances, passed by 30 communities, require lawful gun owners to report it to police when their firearms have been lost or stolen.

Can the Inquirer name a single case where any of these towns or cities have used to ordinance to go after straw buyers? Can they even name a case of anyone being fined? No, they can’t. They can’t because to the best of my knowledge, this critical, badly needed law has never been used. That’s rather shocking when anti-gun activists and anti-gun politicians acted like the sky was going to fall if they didn’t pass these ordinances.

I am also amazed that the Inquirer has the temerity to suggest Pennsylvania does not have adequate “straw buyer” laws, when it imposes felony sentences on the behavior, and the state outlaws all private transfers of handguns, and has since 1934. Very few other states have such a restriction. If the Inquirer wants to editorialize like these laws don’t exist, pardon us if we get busy working to make that a reality.

The Best Defense

Is a good offense. We all know the term, but so does Rahm Emmanuel. Illinois has gotten dangerously (in Rahm’s view) close to shoving concealed carry down Chicago’s throat, and if they succeed in doing that, they can succeed in preempting a log of Chicago’s post-McDonald ridiculousness. I think he wants to get an anti-gun bill moving in Springfield as a defense to that. If we all have to rally to stop a bad bill, that runs us out to push a good bill. It’s smart, but it assumes Rahm can get it moving.

Parenting in the Age of Facebook

Sebastian has always said that if we decide to have kids, they better learn to be smarter than he and his friends are with technology. Yeah, I’d say this girl has a long way to go on that front.

For those who really can’t sit and watch the whole thing, which I highly suggest doing, you can skip to 6:53 where it really gets going.

Helicopter Government

Forget helicopter parents mentioned in the post over teens who no longer desire the independence that comes with driving, this is a case of government gone mad with control over how you parent your children.

The Department of Labor has proposed new rules that would restrict children under the age of 16 from working on a farm or ranch. The list of tasks youth would not be allowed to do is astonishing to me. For example, milking cows would not be allowed, and neither would building a fence. One item that stood out to me was that no youth under the age of 16 would be allowed to use a tool that was powered by any source other than hand or foot power. That would eliminate youth using flashlights, garden hoses (because hoses are powered by water) battery operated screwdrivers, etc.

The mother who wrote this (a fifth-generation hog farmer in Missouri) notes that she cares about the safety of her children far more than any federal bureaucrat in DC, and she, as a mother, should be trusted to keep her children safe.

I spent my high school years in a small town where the biggest paper of the year had huge pictures of all the kids who won ribbons at the county fair with the animals they raised. Sometimes, that required work and tools that the Department of Labor would now ban. Those kids raised those animals, contributed to all of the work that goes into caring for them, and many times would get to enjoy the fruits of their labor with the reward of feeding their families. It seems like some bureaucrat in DC isn’t a fan of such a way of life. As much as the left complains about big corporations and not having family-run farms, they sure seem to be in a hurry to destroy what is left of that culture.

The Vacuous Media

I’ve recently watched The Today Show, only to be reminded of that scene in the movie Fargo where Mrs. Lundegaard is watching some super cheesy daytime talk show, right before Grimsrud and Showalter come crashing through the sliding glass door. Today is pretty much that same vacuous dreck.

So it’s not surprising they are latching on to gun control. This reeks of Bloomberg. Here’s the press release regarding the promotion of the reporter doing this story. They are losing women fast. What they don’t realize is that fewer and fewer people are watching, particularly in the age groups they need to reach to hold on to women.

Kids These Days

Tam highlights a post from someone who visited Europe, tried to rent a car, only to be told they didn’t have any “American transmissions.” It’s hard to find anyone born after 1980 that knows how to drive a manual. Kids these days. I suppose I don’t mind if they don’t know how to drive cars with manual gearboxes, as long as they stay the hell off my lawn.

I learned to drive on an old 1982 Datsun 720 pickup truck, because that’s what my dad drove. When I was rear ended in an accident right outside my high school, he replaced that car with a 1990 Nissan Sentra two door. It was literally four wheels and a steering wheel. I didn’t even have a tape deck. Both were manuals. I have actually never owned a car with an automatic transmission. I had to learn to drive these because that’s what my dad bought. Dad took the train to work, and didn’t have a need for a fancy car. That worked for me because I generally had use of it during the day. I don’t know at what point parents stopped teaching their kids to drive manuals, but it had to have been around 1980 or so.

If you want to be truly horrified at kids today, apparently one problem the auto industry is having is millennials just aren’t learning to drive. Now, if we had flying cars, I could accept this. We’d all be lamenting these damned kids, with their flying cars, zooming over the house all hours of the night. I could live with that. But no, they just aren’t interested. I couldn’t wait to get my license, so I could go places without having to beg mom, and more importantly, without having mom tagging along wherever I went. Cars represent independence from your parents, even if you’re driving around mom and dad’s old beater. It was this way for generations of Americans, except this one, apparently. Maybe this is the consequence of helicopter parenting.

UPDATE: I should note, just in case dad is reading, I smashed up the 1990 Sentra too. Not my fault. Hit and run driver on the onramp to the SchuylkillÂ Expressway from 30th street in Philly. Car was un-drivable. I got the plates from the car that ran, and we had a cop we know run it… they were stolen tags. The risks of driving in Philly. But my dad would have been sure to remind me of this fact if I didn’t bring it up.

A Bullpup .50BMG?

This looks like a quite interesting idea, to make a Bullpup .50BMG semi-auto, but I’m skeptical for a few reasons.

Weight is a counter to recoil. 50s are generally heavy, but that also significantly reduces perceived recoil. These are lighter. How hard do they thump shooting offhand?
Do I really want to weld my cheek centimeters away from that much explosive power? All guns models made have kabooms every once in a while. I’d hate to be the unlucky shooter who experiences that.
I’m not sure what situation I’d need to employ that kind of firepower offhand or kneeling, and it’s certainly not something I’d want to shoot competitively with. If I wanted to do long range marksmanship in the .50BMG class, I think there are probably alternatives I’d prefer.

What do you think? The big advantage I can think of, offhand, is this might be a .50BMG that will actually fit in my safe. But my impression of this is that it mostly looks like a neat toy.

You Can Take Your CPAC and Shove It!

Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is today, tomorrow and Saturday. All I have to say is that CPAC and the American Conservative Union that runs can go get bent as far as I’m concerned. Why? Because they have chosen to exclude gay conservative groups from their conference. I will not blog about CPAC, blog about ACU, except to say that they are short sighted and narrow minded, who are afraid to tell social conservatives to suck it up and deal with the fact that there are gay people in this world, and some of them are generally conservative.

I grant conservative groups their religious views on homosexuality. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. Is this really the year to be narrowing the coalition? Is this a good election to say we don’t need those votes? Sorry, but another four years of Obama is going to do a lot more to hurt “family values”Â than being near gay people for a few days.