These are the oral arguments (mp3), before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Alan Gura is attorney for the appellant. The judges kept a lighthearted and friendly demeanor the whole time, and I get the impression they are taking the arguments seriously. For this case, I’m going to be cautiously optimistic. I think the arguments went well. This happened a few weeks ago, but I just got a link to the audio recently.
Month: September 2012
Another Mass Shooting
This time in France. Looks like four dead. From the sounds of this, it looks to me like it could have been a hit, and an unlucky biker happening by the scene got it. Fifteen shots fired, and as best as I can tell, French police don’t have the killer.
Gun Sales: Up in Australia Too
More and more people seem to be buying guns in Australia too, particularly handguns. Of course, their pant wetters, who have a lot more political power than ours, think this is a crisis for which something must clearly be done:
“The public can expect the further weakening of gun laws and it looks like the increase in gun numbers within Australia will continue to rise.”
He says that like it’s a bad thing. That’s a feature, not a bug.
The concern, he said, was not just that legal handguns were being poorly locked up, stolen and put on to the black market, but the majority of gun massacres in Australia’s history were carried out by legal gun owners.
Yes, the old you can’t have something dangerous because you’ll probably go ape shit and commit mass murder. That argument got Britain a handgun ban, and of course there hasn’t been any mass killings since.
An Interview With CeaseFire PA’s Max Nacheman
In the Philadelphia Daily News:
He can relate to people who collect guns, he says, because he collects bikes. He has six in his living room: a mountain bike, a road bike, the cyclocross, his “commuting bike,” a tandem (“the only way to get my girlfriend to go with me”) and a bike “on display” that he doesn’t ride.
No, you can’t. You don’t collect bikes in the same way people collect guns. You have multiple bikes that each meet the needs of different applications. You’re the bike equivalent of a guy who own a bolt-action in .243 Winchester for deer, keeps a pistol for home defense, has a shotgun for bird hunting, and keeps a 10/22 for fun and plinking. Now, if Max had half a dozen Penny-Farthings in his living room, one of which he was particularly proud of because it once belonged to a nephew of Queen Victoria, he’d have some idea what collecting guns is all about.
Post Convention Bounce
I think Barry owes Bill a beer, because there’s one thing I will definitely say it’s that the President didn’t build that. Here’s something interesting Jim Geraghty noted this morning’s Morning Jolt:
Either way, one of the fascinating facets of the polling during Obama’s presidency has been the fact that the monthly unemployment report has little if any discernible effect on Obama’s approval rating or head-to-head numbers against Romney in the tracking polls. This may meant that nearly half of Americans don’t blame Obama at all for the high level of unemployment for the past four years.
Are the American People suddenly getting educated on matters of economics, and realizing the President can’t do a whole hell of a lot about the economy? That’s quite encouraging if that’s actually the case. Maybe they believed Bill? Probably the most effective part of Clinton’s speech was that historically, we don’t just bounce right back from financial crises, which is true. What Barry rightly deserves condemnation for was ramming through a major new entitlement at a time of declined government revenues, and major deficits. He deserves condemnation for wasting our tax dollars pushing through a failed stimulus package. He definitely deserves condemnation for letting the regulatory agencies all run roughshod over the American economy. But I think even if you removed all that, the economy would still be rather anemic. Whoever won in 2008 was going to get to oversee a weak economy, pretty much no matter what.
Quote of the Day: Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson could often be a bit of a contradiction, I think depending on whether he was speaking of high philosophy, or was engaging in politics. I think Jefferson tended to be more pragmatic in his political endeavors. We all know this famous quote from the 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith. Jefferson, writing from Paris:
God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
But that quote can be contrasted with Jefferson’s appeal to Edmund Pendleton, in 1799, regarding opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed under the Administration of John Adams:
 Even the German counties of York and Lancaster, hitherto the most devoted, have come about, and by petitions with four thousand signers remonstrate against the alien and sedition laws, standing armies, and discretionary powers in the President. New York and Jersey are also getting into great agitation. In this State, we fear that the ill-designing may produce insurrection. Nothing could be so fatal. Anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion and rally them round the government. This is not the kind of opposition the American people will permit. But keep away all show of force, and they will bear down the evil propensities of the government, by the constitutional means of election and petition.
Jefferson may have had sympathy for appeals to the sword, but generally was committed to changing things electorally if the means were in place to affect the desired change.
Recoil Magazine Summons the Drama Llama
I can’t quite agree with Miguel or Lawdog that this is Super Zumbo. The big problem with Zumbo, and why we were so enthusiastic in his Zumboing, was that he was a very widely known and respected outdoor writer, and suggested that those of us who liked to own and use black rifles were terrorists. His statement was an absolute gift to the other side, and coming only a few years after the assault weapons ban had expired, was directly relevant to an ongoing political struggle.
In this instance, Recoil Magazine certainly stepped in it, but until now I’ve never heard of them, and looking around the web not many other people had either. So I am less concerned with the fact a small potatoes gun rag suggests none of us should own an MP7, which none of us can own. It certainly doesn’t help, to have them say something like this, and I certainly would never subscribe to their magazine after reading about this, but Zumbo was a big fish, and these guys are bait fish. In looking for what Recoil’s circulation numbers were, the best I could find was 15,000, which isn’t too bad. Except then I realized that Recoil Magazine was a satire publication, and is not a gun rag. The gun based Recoil Magazine have 26,000 fans on Facebook. Best I could find, which means none of the outfits that track circulation numbers give a crap enough to report on them. Outdoor Life, the magazine Zumbo was hunting editor for before The Incident, has over 700,000 subscribers.
So I’ll help spread the word, but I just don’t think these guys are a big deal. I’m also not sure this article is going to have much of an effect on their counterstrike kiddie subscriber base. Maybe if they said you shouldn’t own an Airsoft MP7 either, it would be enough to get their subscriber based really worked up.
The New Civility: Gun Owners v. Gun Controllers
That the crowd who supports gun control can sometimes be a bit unhinged is certainly not news to those who frequent the gun corners of the blogosphere, but lately it’s been getting even worse. Just today, from Twitter:
I’m not sure where I was making a joke in that conversation, or where the bigotry and racism comes from, but whatever that hejjet guy is sniffing, smoking or snorting, he should really share with the rest of us, because that’s some grade A hallucination right there. Of course, that’s not all. Let’s not ignore the other shit gun control activists say. Blaming the gun for gun violence is nothing new, but the latest tactic is collective blame. If you own a gun, and especially if you advocate for your Second Amendment rights, you are responsible for every crime or accident with a gun that comes along.
This is what the gun control movement in this country is now reduced to. It greatly pleases me, because they aren’t far from political oblivion if this is the best they can proffer. The funny thing is, despite the accusation, it does indeed feel increasingly like we’re up against angry children, who offer child-like arguments to the problems of our society. We must keep pushing.
Generational Changes in Technology Use
There’s a lot of things I don’t like about the “millennial” generation, or whatever the hell it is we’re calling those kids these days, but I tend to track them on technology use. This is an interesting article speaking of the decline of voicemail, especially among younger people. (via Insty). As someone who’s never liked phones, I could not be more pleased. I do almost all of my communication via iChat and texting these days, except when I need to talk to old people who don’t text.
There are other generational differences in technology use too, which I’ve noticed, both in workplaces and in my personal life. One is printing. I actually own two printers, but I very rarely, if ever, print anything. Most of the baby boomers I’ve worked with, if they want to read a paper, will send it to the printer. I do almost all of my reading electronically.
Baby boomers fairly readily adopted e-mail as a communication medium, which I think that’s probably the next technology likely to be rejected by the young, if it hasn’t been already. I’ve gotten rather indifferent toward e-mail as a medium. I still use the work e-mail systems, but I’m absolutely horrible about reading and responding to e-mails. Part of the problem with e-mail is that spammers have largely ruined the medium. Spam filtering is getting better, but it’ll never be perfect, and there’s nothing more annoying than having someone ask you about an urgent e-mail, only to find it in your spam folder.
Of course, that’s not to say there’s not a difference between me (a Gen Xer) and the Millennials. I’m typing this on a desktop computer with two 23 inch monitors. Desktops, I think, are becoming something lame old people use. The kids these days seem to love their thin laptops with 13 inch displays. I don’t know how they can get any work done in 13 inches. I have a laptop too, but it has a 15 inch display, an ethernet port, and a DVD drive, and much of the time when I use it, it’s at a desk hooked up to a big 24″ monitor.
What other generational shifts do you all see in technology use?
LAPD Police Qualifier Test: How Gun Nuts Did
Joe Huffman decided to set up the LAPD Combat Course qualifier at a USPSA match:
What this means is that in a little over a week we will have data on how the shooting skills of “a bunch of beer guzzling, uneducated hillbillies” stack up to the qualification course for a major metropolitan police force.
You’ll also note that in order to comply with USPSA rules, Joe actually had to make the course more difficult. Well, the results are in.
“We put 22 people through the stages. 20 people passed with a 60% or greater. That is 90.9% passage. The best results were by Roger who scored 95.1%. Roger was shooting a revolver.”
Now, could we please dispense with this notion that gun nuts are just wild-eyed mad men who will just kill all manner of innocents if they are ever forced to recklessly defend themselves? Would a police academy class have a 90.9% passage rate on a combat qualifier?