Rules In A Gunfight

There's a list of "rules" that goes around periodically  that includes this:

_F -- The average response time of a 911 call is 23 minutes; the response time of a .357 magnum is 1400 feet per second._

I've seen this list before and it continues to bug me as an engineer geek. The average gunfight takes place at a range of 3 yards. thus response time for the .357 would be 9/1400 or .00643 seconds.

 The rest of the story is the "rule of 3's", which suggests the typical gunfight takes place at an average distance of 3 yards, involves firing 3 shots, and is over in 3 seconds one way or another. Thus it would be fair as well to say the response time of whatever gun you have to hand would be about 3 seconds.

That video of the home invasion in Detroit in which the homeowner happened to have a rusty Hi Point carbine showed 2 encounters with the thugs, each involving 1 to 3 shots in quick succession. 3 thugs are shown kicking open the door and entering the house. A couple of seconds later you hear 1 or 2 shots and all 3 come flying out the door their feet barely touching the ground. One of them drops his gun, comes back to pick it up, then goes back in to the house. 1 or 2 more shots and out the door he flies this time not stopping.

That woman needs to get some range time in with that gun as no one seems to have been hit. Eventually the cops showed up.

Education

Somewhere the model got broken, and no one in government seems to know how to fix it. I found a graphic years ago that suggested that student test scores go up with educational spending to about $7500/student/year then the test scores level off as the spending increases. I suspect that this is a result of the extra money being spent on administrators rather than on anything that would impart knowledge.

Well here we are, several years downstream, and Cato institute has spending v learning broken out by individual state. Imagine how surprised I am to see pretty much the same result pop up across the board. Here's Colorado for example:

Double your spending and buy nothing. Just think, if we had passed amendment 66 we could have seen the spending curve go even higher. Click the link and see how your state is doing.

I also suspect this is a result of a non-competitive educational system. If each child was a walking coupon good for $X,000 per school year to whatever school he or she went to, you'd see schools touting their results to parents in an effort to bring in the students and thus having to have actual results to tout. Given a choice between hiring a diversity administrator and buying tools for the science classes, I'm thinking we would soon see the last of the diversity wonks.

Libertarian Candidates

Gaylon Kent (Libertarian) has announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Mark Udal.

Welcome Mr. Kent, to the U.S. Senate race. The Libertarian party has a lot of good ideas, but has allowed them to be pushed out of the Republican party by the old-school squishes. Today the Libertarians are the Democrats last best hope for holding on to public office at every level. Without them, Senators Morse and Hudak would not have gotten elected, and there are others who owe their seats to the Libertarian candidate pulling 5-10% of the vote away from the Republican candidate. Today we have gun laws, election fraud laws, tax laws, and an all out assault on TABOR thanks to the unflagging efforts of the Libertarian party. If I were the head of the Colorado Dems, I'd be making sure that $10,000 of untraceable funding magically appeared in your campaign coffers overnight.

On the other side Dr. Shogan will no doubt be portrayed by the Post as an "Independent" candidate to cover up his support for single-payer insurance. If Udall simply keeps his mouth shut, we can look forward to six more years of unflagging support for Socialism in Washington from a state that leans about 7% to the right.

Don't get me wrong. The Libertarians have a lot of really good ideas and I personally have a libertarian streak several feet wide. It's just that this state is NOT set up to handle a multi-candidate election at any level at all. Until this is addressed, the Libertarians would serve us better by lobbying and supporting the Republicans to move their agenda forward and make the electoral process amenable to 3+ candidate races.

Good News From The Gun Show

Very slow business today at the Tanner gun Show, mostly listening to the other vendors complain about the poor business they did yesterday.

Part way through the morning, the fellow next to me who had been asking $65/box for his supply of Remington and Federal 500+ ct brick, threw in the towel, at least partially, and cut his price to $50/box.

First time I've seen .22 for under $.10/rd in a while. Saw several people noting this with favor, but still didn't see anyone buying. I wasn't looking, but I heard others mention that there was plenty of .22 available around the show, just not below nosebleed prices. Maybe next show.

Opportunity for Gardner

The race for Colorado Senator got more interesting with the announcement of a third candidates candidacy. Steve Shogan apparently has enough money to make a run at the office and has widely scattered views on some topics.

Shogan actually seems like he’s saying enough of the right things to have both camps a little nervous.  He’s critical of Obamacare and advocates for its repeal, which could siphon votes from Republican Cory Gardner.  However – and this is a big however – Shogan is advocating that Obamacare be replaced with a single payer system, which is going to have lefties swooning and moving away from Democrat Mark Udall.

The "repeal and replace" crowd will definitely like this fellow. After all, if you shoot a rabid dog, you must consider what you're going to replace it with and what better than a rabid wolf.

If Gardner is quick on his feet, he will welcome Shogan into the campaign noting that now the left has a real choice on their side of the ticket.

Of course if Udall is equally quick, his campaign will allocate a six-figure donation to a Libertarian and say the same to the republicans.

QOTD

This time from a National Review article on the decision in Schuette v BAMN:

Justice Sotomayor argued that the decision of the people of Michigan to end racial discrimination is itself an instance of racial discrimination and that the only way to mitigate such racial discrimination is through the mandatory maintenance of racial discrimination.

After all, if there were in fact less racial discrimination, a lot of race pimps would be out of work and we can't have that now can we?

Someday we'll have a "wise Latina" on the court. I'm sure of it.

She was on the minority and the people of Michigan will be allowed to keep their constitutional amendment forbidding racial discrimination.

Cooking The Books

In Chicago they do things to the books that would make an Iron Chef jealous.

The article goes on at some length but it's like a (pardon the expression) murder mystery you just can't put down.

More Bad News On The Ammo Front?

Here's the latest summary of NICS checksand it's showing an uncharacteristic jump for this time of year:

 

You don't normally see a big jump from Feb to March, but there we are, back to 2013 panic-level buying. And of course along with buying a gun, you need some ammo to go with. The industry is running 24/7 but is having trouble keeping up.

Journalism

I believe I mentioned before at some point that it has been observed that if you have a talent for observing and noting your observations, you might do well as a scientist. If you don't have the requisite doctorate, you might consider being a police detective. If you like the job description but have no talent for the observation and accurate recording, there's always journalism.

But why stop there. In the Anglosphere, it also helps if you have a good command of the English language, or failing that, an editor who does.

This from the Times, presumably of London. Found at Samizdata as a QOTD. This may well be an accurate description of a typical Member of Parliament, after all the editors didn't see fit to modify the statement, but as a flag-waving American I feel it my duty to defend our Congress and hold them up as nothing less than the equals of the Parliament any day of the week, and do page abuse on weekends.

We also have whole bureauocracies like that.

Bullying

An elementary school in Lincoln NE has sent its students home with a list of 9 things to do or not do when you are afflicted with a bully.

Bottom line, let them get away with it and don't rat them out.

Now imagine that you see the school administration as the biggest bully in the school. Or perhaps the government. Stay loyal, citizens.

Stopping Big Brother

There's a bill currently circulating through the legislature to impose a statewide ban on the use of red light and speed cameras. The bill has bipartisan support, and the usual suspects are bringing in widows and orphans to no avail.

I found 4 articles in no time at all, none of which noted the bills number although one featured a link to SB 14-181.  

The cameras produce large amounts of revenue to the municipalities that use them but actual improvements in road safety are problematic:

Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates testified that T-bone accidents caused by drivers running red lights are down 25 percent since the cameras were installed, but the Aurora Sentinel reported that accidents involving motorists who were rear-ended when suddenly braking for a yellow light skyrocketed from 2005-2006 by 175 percent.

Just remind yourself, while sitting at a camera-controlled intersection, that every flash of the light represents about $100 to the city. Adds up fast. The bill is currently in the Senate and hasn't been to the House yet. It's an election year, so it might be a good dime to drop your Senator a line.

It has also been observed that increasing the duration of the yellow light makes for a dramatic drop in intersection accidents as well. There's a handy calculator at Political Calculations that any one can use. The speed of local traffic is a major factor in the formula. What do you bet, the yellow light times are normally calculated using the posted speed limit rather than what the traffic is actually doing, effectively reducing the yellow light times.

Another poll

Yeah, I know, those online polls by local newspapers are as close to worthless as not to matter, but still, I like the way this one is shaping up:

Do you think we need more laws placing restrictions on guns?

Yes. We need much stronger laws.		5 %
Yes, but only a few common-sense changes.		2 %
No. The laws are OK the way they are.		6 %
No. We have too many laws, and most of them should be eliminated.		87 %

Total number of votes 802
Poll results aren't scientific. Percentages may not add up to 100 percent due to rounding off.

Your Tax Bucks At Work

The FBI is visiting gun shops and listening to the customers in an attempt to ferrit out the dangerous ones. They make it abundantly clear who they're looking for:

“If you see some Middle Eastern guy come in, you don’t have to be so worried about that. What we’re really looking for are people talking about being sovereign such as sovereign citizens or people talking about big government,” the agent reportedly stated.

So to avoid suspicion, the new and universal greeting at your friendly local gun shop is now;
"Hi Fred! Durka durka, Muhammed jihad!".


You're welcome.

Letting Bygones Be Bygones

Mayor DeBlasio is disbanding a NYPD unit whose charter was to watch the Muslim community in New York. Sounds fair to me, after all what did Muslims ever do to New York?

Happy Tax Day

Here's a tax day quote about the folks that drive you to drink:

The Beer Institute points out that “taxes are the single most expensive ingredient in beer, costing more than labor and raw materials combined.” They cite an economic analysis that found “if all the taxes levied on the production, distribution, and retailing of beer are added up, they amount to more than 40% of the retail price” …

And they have a plan to make that number higher.

The very least the government could do for us would be to make booze tax free on April 15th in hopes we'd forget the screwing we're getting by November 4th.

QOTD - Education

One of the most important lessons kids learn in public schools is that school administrators are usually autocratic imbeciles.

Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing's observation

I figured that out early on, before there was more than one administrator per school. In my defense I felt that it was incumbent upon me to make sure those folks actually earned their salaries instead of being overpaid playground monitors.

Poly Sci 101

Rule #1: Do not become convinced your own propaganda is true. It can lead you to try stuff you really shouldn't.

Original pic is part of a tweet at Madmanjournal.

Thanks to Robert for the tip.

What If Washington Gets Nuked?

It could happen. First you wait to see if anyplace else got nuked, which might suggest a major nuclear war. In this case you should probably take cover.

If no place else is reporting any damage, I, for one, would break out a shot of the good stuff.

Here's a piece on the prospects from someone unfortunate enough to actually live there.

Productivity

Got an "urgent" e-mail from a lefty source that expressed outrage (of course) at:

President Obama has declared the 113th Congress the least productive in history — and the numbers back him up.

Complaining that the congress had passed only 23 public laws in its second session. To my mind, that was probably 22 too many, but at this stage we'll take the little rays of sunshine where we can find them. Write your congressanimal today and congratulate him or her on limiting the damage done this year to our lives, liberties and property.

Spring Is In The Air

So it come down to which of these 3 tools

I'm likely to need/use in the next 5 days. As of right now, it looks like all of them. Right to left, today, tomorrow, Tuesday.

New Box II

I'm finding out a lot about my new box as I move along. First off is that any software installed on the old box (32bit) cannot be transferred to the new one (64bit). The fax and filing software that served my HP 5510 printer, for example, was never upgraded beyond Windows Vista. Thus while I can print, I can't scan and file anymore so my all-in-one is now a dumb printer. At least it prints.

Microsoft Photo Editor was also never produced in a 64-bit compatible version. I found references to sites that had such a thing, but none of them actually did. Yes, Picassa is vastly more powerful, but it's also more complicated. Oh well, I can (eventually) learn new tricks.

MozBackup works a treat if you're moving from one box to another and want to bring your Firefox and T-bird over with you. The drawback is that it loses your home page and sets back the last date of opening on some of the websites in your bookmarks. Resetting the home page is easy enough, and in my case I simply ast the comics to go to the last page and click back a couple days. I consider this a minor nuisance. WARNING: The download page will include some adware. When you set up to run the program, it will ask you if you want to try about 5 or 6 other items. hit the "SKIP ALL" button. The adware is not a virus, but acts like one and is about that difficult to remove if you let it get installed. MalwareBytes will remove it if you accidentally get stuck with it.

IRS Scandal

As scandals go this one seems to have better staying power, probably because it doesn't depent on the media to keep it alive. Rep Issa has a live one here and he just keeps reeling it in. Found this

over at Right Wing News. Eric Allie is the artist.

So what other kind did you expect me to be reading?

Lois Lerner would be on the ends of the strings, but whose hand is that? Hey! Rep Cummings! Those your cufflinks?

Neighborhood Mad Scientist?

Found this in my back yard:

I have no idea what happened to this can, but I wish I could have been there. It looks like it was fun.

March E-Postal match

Scoring and results for the March Postal match will be delayed as the sponsor, Mr. Completely, is in the hospital recovering from triple bypass surgery.

After a while you begin to feel an attachment to the car about which the mechanic observed " Nothing wrong here that jacking up the radiator cap and driving a new car underneath it wouldn't fix.".

Click on over and wish him a quick recovery.

North Korean Reality Shows

Newsmax is reporting, but not endorsing, a story that has the Son Of L'il Kim (Jong Il) executing someone by flamethrower. Certainly newsworthy if true, but with reports of political enemies being fed to starving wild dogs having about the same credibility as the Obamacare enrollment numbers, it's time to demand a higher standard.

From here on in, it's on You Tube or it didn't happen.

A Real Politician

The consummate Democrat pol is the sort of person who can take any constituent complaint and immediately recognize how it can be turned into a revenue source. Without fixing the problem of course.

Went to a meet-n-greet of the local precinct leads which was attended by some of the local pols as well, and buttonholed some of them over my pet peeves.
Spencer Swalm, the current Representative for House District 37, south of me, when I complained about an HOV lane that was going effectively unused, declared that the lane should be turned into a toll lane to help ease congestion. This would accomplish essentially nothing at a cost of putting in gantries every mile or so, taking readings and photos of all the care, figuring out who was in the lane because they were trying to turn left, and extracting the last dollar from everyone.

Hard to believe Spencer's got an R after his name.

This will be his last term, but the time to primary him is alas, passed. Need to watch those weasels more closely.

New Box

This post is coming to you from my brand new W-7 box, brought to you by Microsquash's reluctance to support a perfectly good OS (XP) any longer.

The good news is that the Mozilla apps can be transferred seamlessly using mozbackup. All my bookmarks, e-mails, folders and the like on Firefox and T-bird moved over with no problems.

The bad news is that XP has a program called Windows easy file transfer wizard that will move the contents of your old computer to your new one via a cable or network connection ot onto a solid state disk. W-7 has a similar program with a different name that works the same way, but labels files transferred to the HDD differently so it can't see the files transferred by the XP machine. So it's cables or nothing. What fun.

The description of the cables is nebulous enough to me that I'm not sure if a simple USB-USB would work or if I need something fancier with a nuclear booster box built into the middle. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Hickenlooper's Best Shot

The Republicans here are smelling blood in the water as witness the flood of candidates running for Governor. Some better than others, but so far no Crazy Uncle Festers. But wait! There's hope for the Dems. Their best friends, the Libertarians have a candidate who bids fair to suck off enough Republican votes to let Hick keep his job.

Mike Dunafon, mayor of Glendale, swingin' single central in the Denver metroplex is considering a shot at the governorship. A laissez faire pol with fairly broad appeal, he's likely to pull down 10-15% of the conservative vote and hand the election to hick.

If I were Rick Palacio, I'd be figuring out how to launder a generous donation to Mr. Dunafon's campaign.

Common Core Civics Test

Let's all play! In a Common Core civics exercise the question is to name two amendments from the Bill of Rights that you would repeal. The choices offered the little tykes were limited to the first 10, but why stop there? Here's my answer, why stop at two:

16
17
19

See? Easy.

Vote Fraud

It's like rattlesnakes around here. If you don't look for them, you'll seldom find one. If you look, however, you'll turn one up fairly shortly.

N.C. decided to do some simple searching. There are several ways to commit vote fraud. You can register at two different addresses using different names, you can pick up mail-in ballots at apartment buildings where the voter has moved, or you can register in two (or more) different states. N.C. decided to have a look at item #3. It's a state where northerners come to for the winter if they don't want to drive all the way to Fla, and it's a place where retirees leave for Fla in the winter.

They compared their voter rolls with those of other states, 3 different states from the sound of it, and voila!

** 765 voters with an exact match of first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in N.C. and the other state in the 2012 general election.** 35,750 voters with the same first and last name and DOB were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in both states in the 2012 general election.** 155,692 voters with the same first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state – and the latest date of registration or voter activity did not take place within N.C.

That's a lot of extra votes. No telling for whom, of course.

Colorado has its share of vacation homes and snowbirds. I wonder what a cross check between CO and NM, AZ, and CA might bring up.