Completely subjective, I know, but having to do the grocery shopping yesterday on the way back from the office, I decided to take notice of anyone wearing orange. I can report I did not notice a single person wearing orange all of yesterday. Of course, to really be scientific, you’d have to take a control sampling at the same place on a day when Bloomberg isn’t asking people to wear orange, and then calculate whether the variation is statistically significant. But my number was a big zero. Did anyone else notice anyone wearing orange? Miguel did.
As for me, I wore my ParaUSA polo that I got gratis when Para treated some of the gun blogosphere to a long weekend at Blackwater many years ago. Before Para became part of Remington, before Blackwater started changing their name. You know, back when Eric Prince was bilking the American government rather than the Chinese.
I definitely saw some extra orange, but I have a sneaking suspicion they were nearly all on our side.
I got an orange bag of burgers at Whataburger while wearing a Glock.
http://whataburger.com
I’m a little irritated. I heard nothing about this idiocy of wearing orange until today. Unfortunately, I wore an orange shirt yesterday without knowing about it. But, that’s the problem with these sorts of campaigns. People can be swept up in it without evening knowing the significance of wearing a particular color on a particular day.
I wore my “hey! look out!”-orange shirt while biking to work yesterday, THEN discovered the meaning imputed by people I don’t know and don’t agree with and don’t support and just because they declared “orange shirts” to have some stupid meaning for a day doesn’t mean I condone/support/promote anything they claim orange shirts do on the one random day I do wear an orange shirt for my own comfort & safety.
BTW: they do realize “hunter orange” is a thing, right? and it’s very much about facilitating guns, shooting, and killing stuff?
I saw only four people wearing orange. They were road workers.
I saw zero orange yesterday. And I am in California.
I did spend time hanging Women On Target training posters at various venues, like my office kitchens. The main lobby open area, a cork board at a indoor range and 2 gun shops.
I would consider their Orange day a huge flop, but what we expected, right?
Apparently they showed up in Indy. Given where Whatts lives…
“Hoosiers showed their support on Monument Circle Tuesday for the #WearingOrange campaign.”
http://fox59.com/2015/06/02/wearingorange-campaign-honors-those-lives-lost-to-gunfire-brings-awareness-to-gun-violence/
And the provided photo is a close in shot of… 10 people.
That includes the baby and 4 other children.
The pic iself is rather lousy as it’s cropped badly and removes heads and arms. Not to mention one of the kids has her face totally obscured.
It seems that all the media reports are going big on how this is the “First time ever!” that this has been done. Uh…
I live in Indy. I saw zero people wearing orange yesterday on the northeast side of the city where I work. Husband works downtown and reports the same. He didn’t even see these people on the circle so they may have just shown up for the photo op and then left.
And the funny thing about their desire to honor the lives lost to gunfire, is that they literally honor people who lost their lives, because the police shot them in self defense after hunting them down for successfully bombing major marathons.
These people would literally rather see a cop-and-innocent-bystander murderer be free to roam the streets with impunity, than to see him get shot in an attempt to bring him into custody!
Sorry for the digression, but your mention of Erik Prince caught my attention.
What has enabled his bilking of the American government is his strong involvement with the Christian Dominionist and Reconstructionist movements. I’m not sure how much was “bilking” and how much was a deliberate funds transfer.
I would look into his involvement with the Chinese in that context.
This is just one article, but I would suggest Googling “Erik Prince” AND “dominionist” OR “reconstructionist” if you want something that suits your tastes better.
Interesting. When we went down there, we were just using their ranges and lodge for the Para event, and didn’t interact much with the “Blackwater” side of things. The one Blackwater guy we spoke with indicated that they wanted to switch their focus to civilian firearms training, so I suspect by that time they were in “we need to rehabilitate our image, because Uncle Sam’s gravy train won’t be running much longer,” mode.
“… they wanted to switch their focus to civilian firearms training,…”
I would think that if you were looking to recruit talent for a private or mercenary army, that would be a great place to start. It is doubtful that many raw novices would show up, and the proper marketing would attract people with the proper motivation.
Here’s another Erik Prince story: Blackwater Founder Turns White Collar Boss, Helps China.
My reading is that his new activities will not be completely devoid of the use of force of arms; and in return he anticipates his Chinese partners will facilitate (or at least, not hinder) the infiltration of his own network into African politics. These people are never without a political agenda.