Executive Orders

The president has mad his speech, and the use of children as human shields seems to have worked. I'd comment, but here's an executive summary that puts the whole thing in perspective. Entertaining and worth the read.

However:

1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

Tell the government to follow the law.

Widen the existing database on legal gun owners.

2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.

Tell the regulators to stop the stupid and useless regulations.

Abolish any thought of privacy you harbored regarding your medical records. Now the Norks will be able to steal them from the BATF in addition to the national health.

3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.

Pay the states back for the unfunded mandates that the Feds keeps making.

Or, far more likely, threaten to withhold money they would otherwise be entitled to.

Bold type is my comment. Government is evil, uncaring, greedy and incompetent. Expect the worst and you will seldom be disappointed.

Human Shields

Obama plans to announce his plans to disarm the law-abiding surrounded by children.

Crassest use of human shields I've heard of, even including the middle east.

The Red Line

Bill Whittle has a video, or part of one in which he sidles up to the question of when do you refuse to comply with the law?

He lives in Cali. and has an AR which has the "bullet button" and 10-round magazines and required him to get a background check and go through a waiting period. If you buy from a dealer there, you don't have4 a choice. He suggests that when the government calls for you to turn the guns in, that's where you should refuse to comply.

Bad idea Bill. When it gets to that stage it's way too late for non-compliance. The red line for non-compliance is when they ask you to register the gun. Without registration, and with face-to-face sales without checks, whether a person actually has the gun in question is questionable. It's difficult to get a search warrant on those kind of shaky grounds. Not impossible, mind you, but somewhat more difficult.

Update: Just found this:

"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." Winston Churchill

 

Health Care

The quickest way to reduce health care costs is to simply eliminate health care. Several countries operate on this principle and if you make it to age 20, your odds of making it to age 70 are actually pretty good.

Found this over at Theo Spark:

It has a Zazzle watermark, so you can probably get it there as a t-shirt or coffee mug. Make a great Christmas present for your doctor, no? It accompanies an article by Alan Caruba decrying the state of health care in the country.

Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban or severely restrict the painkillers which makes hiring the fellow with the gun look like a realistic alternative. But wait! He also wants to ban the fellows gun and take yours away from you. What's a person to do in such a state?

In England, the NHS routinely decides that if your odds aren't that good, it simply cuts off your food and water. In just a few days, you're no longer a burden to society. Here it looks like the magic number for the "Liverpool Care Pathway" as it's called in the old country will be 70.

Want to live longer? Get elected. Some senators have been preserved into their 90's.

How Evolution Works

The ladder goes both ways:

I wouldn't mind it at all if the folks in the zone didn't insist on taking me with them.

H/T Theo Spark

Shooting Accessories

This has got to be the living end for high-precision, long range shooters, the Tracking Point XS1.

The scope runs on Linux and adjusts the reticle to take into consideration range, tilt, wind, humidity, and altitude density. An iPad app mirrors the scope display so your spotter can see the same thing you do. It requires that you use their own ammo to guarantee repeatability and starts at around $17,000.

I'll wait for the price to come down. For that kind of money I can hire "Big Luigi" Salmonella to go out there and personally stab my intended target to death with his notoriously large stiletto.

H/T to John for the tip.

Redneck Nerf Gun

I submitted my pedal air gun to the instructables contest. If you like it, please vote for it. The contest regrettably ends soon, so if not this year, then maybe next year.

Proposed New Gun Law

Of all the dreck that's being proposed in the congress, here's the only one so far that might actually help.

H.R.133
Latest Title: To repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and amendments to that Act.
Sponsor: Rep Massie, Thomas [KY-4] (introduced 1/3/2013) Cosponsors (None)
Latest Major Action: 1/3/2013 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

Imagine the deterrent factor of a $10 sign on the school house door reading "Your valid CCW welcome here."

Drop your rep a line and suggest he co-sponsor this.

Update:
Sir;
  You are probably aware that Congressman Massie (KY) has introduced HR133, a bill to repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990.   The President has called for quick action to prevent another school shooting, and this is the most realistic answer to a problem that no "assault weapons" ban will cure.

It's unfortunate that we need to protect our children with firearms, but it has been proven over and over again to be the only effective method we have.

Signs proclaiming "NO GUNS" have proven to be magnets for unstable people, not a deterrent.  Far more effective would be a sign proclaiming "Your CCW Welcome here."

Had she been allowed to be armed, Principal Dawn Hochsprung and 25 others might still be alive.

  I urge you to support HR133 and to go further and take the lead to allow responsible people inside schools to be their own first line of defense.

Respectfully,

The nraila site has a setup that allows you to email your rep, all your reps, or your entire state delegation.

Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Baloney

Statistics means never having to say you're certain, reads the t-shirt, but sometimes it's useful to point out a lack of certainty. In complex systems, it is possible that some result and one variable correlate fairly well, but as we know, correlation is not causality. It's entirely possible that some combination of other variables is in fact the driving factor, and the first variable is just along for the ride.

What's Up With That has found a scholarly paper that looks at climate change and concludes that human activity really has little or nothing to do with it. I have been exposed to statistical analysis, and I recognize the words he's using, but the papers author is going somewhat deeper than I had to. Still, the conclusion:

Panels a and b both show that there is no relationship between temperature and the anthropogenic anomaly, once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration. “…our rejection of AGW is not absolute; it might be a false positive, and we cannot rule out the possibility that recent global warming has an anthropogenic footprint. However, this possibility is very small, and is not statistically significant at conventional levels.”

 Emphasis mine. Still, as long as "green" business can act as a money laundering machine for politicians, we'll have to listen to the moonbats.

Gun Law Opportunity

It seems the Swiss are annoyed at misuse of Swiss gun law stats, and have set out to straighten the record. Interesting article, and worth a read. The complaint goes on at some length, but look:

The Bradys and other anti gun folks are really fond of citing overall gun deaths in the U.S. and include suicides in their totals, which puffs up the stats considerably as some 60% of U.S. deaths by firearm are suicides.

In Switzerland, the number is only about 20%. What's the difference? The Swiss are not noticeably less depressed than Americans, but they do have physician assisted suicide (PAS) available to them. The implication here being that if we could get Obamacare to include PAS in addition to the death panels, we could reduce our overall firearm death rate by some 40%!

Write today and demand this be added. 20 dead school kids is a tragedy, but 20,000 PAS is a statistic. It's for the children!

Colorado Gun Law

If this is any indication, I have to say the legislature is taking the "Softly, softly, catchee monkee" approach to gun control here. Refreshing, I suppose, compared to the ham-fisted approach in Illinois.

Rep Claire Levy and Sen Rollie Heath have introduced what has to be called the Seung-Hui Chu Virginia-Tech memorial bill which while bowing to the Colorado Supreme courts ruling that a CCW is pretty much valid anywhere, chips away at the phrase "pretty much anywhere".

If you have a CCW here you are allowed to carry on college campuses, but not in K-12 schools or government buildings. This bill would continue campus carry, but not in any campus buildings. The newspaper article in Pravda-by-the-Platte does not mention a number assigned to the bill, nor does it mention any provision to provide secure lockers for CCW folks to leave their carry pieces in when they enter a building.

If enacted the bill would turn every college campus building in the state into a copy of the Lubys restaurant in Texas where Susanna Hupp watched her parents murdered before her eyes as she left her CCW gun locked in her car outside. Of course legislation that enables mass murders also enables further such legislation, which may be the point. To make an omelet, one must break a few eggs.

With a couple of minor tweaks, the above 2 paragraphs would make a nice letter to the legislators in question. Be interesting to see their responses.

Speaking of responses, I wrote our Senatorial delegation regarding gun control bills in the 113th congress. I got a non-committal response from Sen Bennett who is safe until 2016, and no response from Sen Udall who is up in 2014. Excerpt form Bennett:

We must have a real discussion in this country about finding ways to stop these types of senseless shootings.  While no one law is likely to prevent a deranged individual committed to taking life from doing so, we should have a comprehensive and civil conversation about finding the right and most effective solutions to protect our communities and particularly, our children. This includes exploring a number of areas, such as mental health services, violence in our culture, and a review of our gun laws.

The phrase "real discussion" is Demspeak for "I'll talk and you'll listen". Calling for a review of gun laws similarly suggests some kind of draconian ramp-up toward turning the whole country into Chicago. 

Free State Project

The Free State Project is an informal activity by libertarians to encourage the like-minded to move to a single state and by voting and running for office, turn the state into a bastion of free-market capitalism. The state selected somehow was New Hampshire.

They are making inroads there. As they say in the Air Force, If you're taking flak, you must be over the target.

A New Hampshire legislator wants her constituents to know that she feels conservatives are the “single biggest threat” her state faces today and she wants to use her powers to legislate to “pass measures that will restrict” the freedoms of Granite State conservatives.

Setting an example for the rest of us. And here I'd thought the Libertarians would never elect anyone to public office higher than Town Dog Catcher.

Gun Sales II

QOTD from Phelps:

There are 800,000 law enforcement officers in America.
The FBI did five million NICS checks for people buying firearms in America — in November and December 2012 alone.
That’s over six guns per cop in the last two months.
Confiscation?  You better start negotiation.

I knew we were buying a lot of guns, but this really puts it in perspective.

Next item to consider: The usual suspects are putting forth the usual bromide gun bills as quickly as possible so as to take advantage of the rather short spate of attention that a mass shooting generates. Already in Illinois a proposal that might charitably be described as Black Belt Ignorance has been withdrawn for lack of sufficient votes.

The Illinois law was the first to actually get any kind of consideration, at least partly because it's being pushed in a lame duck session in which some number of the members have nothing to lose. It also got a lot of mention in the gun blogs and internet forums and newsletters asking the readers to send e-mails to the Ill legislature.

Folks, when they feel the heat, they see the light. Don't let up. Several bit players in Washington have proposed lesser bills individually banning standard-capacity magazines and other such affronts to the stability of modern society. The thinking here is that if you only ask for the moon, and put off the request for the sun and the stars, you might get something and you can go for the rest later.

You don't need to be specific as to which anti-gun bill you oppose, just put something like "No on Gun Control" in the subject line and write something very general in the body.  The unpaid, overworked staffer whose job it is to keep the tote board up to date will credit your mail in the correct column, and move to the next one..

Letter writing this year needs to be the literary equivalent of the fire bombing of Dresden. Twice a week is about right, and it only takes about 15 minutes to cover both State and Federal officeholders. Bombs away!

If you want to get specific, there's a list of the offerings so far at the Federal level at No Lawyers.

Gun Sales

NICS is quick to point out, and I readily concur, that a NICS check is not an indicator of a gun sale. Sometimes it's multiple gun sales, and sometimes it's just a background check for some other reason. Still, the odds are good. So congratulations America, in addition to smashing the previous monthly record for checks of just over 2M, 2012 is another banner year:

19.59M for 2012.


While it it true that a NICS check does not necessarily mean a gun sale, it is interesting to note that civilian ammo supplies for the more popular calibers are down to 10% of normal, so someone is planning on doing some shooting.

Somewhat more ominously, it was observed that at a gun show in PA where activity was frenzied, sales of the "burial tubes" favored by survivalists were noticeably lagging.

Again, happy new year. Here's a musical interlude possibly appropriate to the occasion.

Yowza!

Got phase 1 of resolutions taken care of already. Wrote both Senators and my state rep and Senator, one of the four is actually on my side. The graphic in a post below showing school shootings before and after making schools gun-free zones will be on the projector screen during the debates.

Pravda-on-the-Platte publishes an article in which one of our state legislators is suggesting that the costt of the background check be transferred from the state, where it is now, to the gun purchaser. Here in CO, a BC goes to the CBI who routes it through the NICS system which presumably helps filter out certain misdemeanors and mental adjudication, assuming that the mental issues are referred to the state in the first place.

The cost savings would supposedly be routed to the state mental health agencies and the upshot is that the gunnies would be made to pay for it. This is thought to be fair since mass shootings involve both crazy people and guns.

This is unlikely to fly for several reasons.
First it's a tax, which the libs love, but it's a tax on an enumerated right, which is a setback legally.
Second, the gunnies didn't make all the crazy people that way, just a hand full of activists.
Third, we already pay the salaries and benefits of the entire legislature which in my mind is enough subsidy for the mentally deficient right there.