Kevin sets me straight:

Turn in your Southern Boy card. An ass-whippin’ is what your momma gave you for misbehavin’, followed by another when your daddy got home. An ass-whuppin’ is what you get in a fight if you come out the loser.

Candyland shark.

Spelling.

Ahab discusses rimfires as survival tools.

Cool. Can I get one in AR?

Commenter rb responding to my question about why atheists try to convert:

I stopped associating with atheist groups years ago because the vast majority were liberal. I also stopped trying to convert people years ago because:

1) It’s a waste of time, and

2) There’s a danger that a newly converted atheist will become a liberal.

heh.

Rich gay philanthropists secretly coordinating donations to tip statehouse races away from bigots. Man, the rightwing loonies are going to love this.

Gill and Trimpa decided to eschew national races in favor of state and local ones, which could be influenced in large batches and for much less money. Most antigay measures, they discovered, originate in state legislatures. Operating at that level gave them a chance to “punish the wicked,” as Gill puts it–to snuff out rising politicians who were building their careers on antigay policies, before they could achieve national influence. Their chief cautionary example of such a villain is Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who once compared homosexuality to “man on dog” sex (and was finally defeated last year, at a cost of more than $20 million). Santorum got his start working in the state legislature. As Gill and Trimpa looked at their evolving plan, it seemed realistic. “The strategic piece of the puzzle we’d been missing–consistent across almost every legislature we examined–is that it’s often just a handful of people, two or three, who introduce the most outrageous legislation and force the rest of their colleagues to vote on it,” Gill explained. “If you could reach these few people or neutralize them by flipping the chamber to leaders who would block bad legislation, you’d have a dramatic effect.”

…

With that in mind, he assembled a bipartisan team of political operatives and tested his theory in 2004, quietly targeting three antigay Colorado incumbents; two of them went down. Through the combined efforts of a host of progressive interest groups, including many supported by Gill, Democrats captured both chambers of the legislature for the first time in forty years.

Les alerts us to the introduction of a ban on weapons that look like assault weapons. It is H.R. 1022. It says it’s a re-authorization so I assume it mimics the old one. You can read all about how useless the old one is here.

As Les says: This is exactly why I’m only buying semi-autos between now and the end of 2008. Well, and a suppressor.

The other nasty bill (H.R. 297) should be called the We Don’t Need No Due Process of Law bill. This bill is particularly nasty:

One of the major criticisms of H.R. 297 is that, if it became law, the records of individuals who were never convicted of an offense preventing them from obtaining a firearm but had been arrested for such an offense would be included in NICS. This would make them legally unable to purchase a firearm, even if they were never convicted of the crime for which they were arrested.

In other words, H.R. 297 would make the so-called attempt to improve NICS a legal instrument of injustice. McCarthy, Dingell and their supporters may try to persuade some alleged gun rights advocates that if they accept H.R. 297, they will have nothing further to worry about regarding gun control legislation during the 110th Congress. It would be interesting to see what fools get suckered in by this line of argument. True blue Second Amendment supporters will not. They will stand on principle and hold their ground.

You got that? Your rights will be eliminated without a conviction.

Update: In comments, Xrlqy Wrlqy says:

Maybe I’m missing something, but after reading HR 297 from top to bottom, I’m frankly at a loss as to why anyone thinks it would prohibit anyone from purchasing a gun who isn’t prohibited from doing so now. NICS already contains some arrest information, but per the FBI, “Currently, under federal law, the NICS cannot preclude the transfer of a firearm based on arrest information alone unless independent state law otherwise specifies[.]” What specific section of HR 297 does Mr. Snyder believe would change that result?

I read the text and I too do not see which provision provides for that. However, Mr. Snyder has forgotten more gun laws than I’ve ever known. Will do some digging.

Since we’re talking about it, I have a question about the more practical things that come from death. I have a will and a living will and insurance and all that. But it occurs to me: What happens to my blog when I die? Or, for that matter, my various email accounts? I also need to make a list of my various accounts and passwords so that in the event I croak, my wife can access things like Google ads and whatnot.

How do you guys do that?

Maybe I need to do an If You’re Reading This, I’m Dead post and set it to post at a future date. So long as I’m alive, I can keep delaying its publication. But if I keel over, it will publish. That way, at least you’ll know. And, you know, that will surely result in a spike in traffic and a subsequent increase in ad revenue. And my wife will need to have a way to collect that. So, we get back to getting her access to stuff.

Carnaby. Whoops. You’d think I’d know better since I have multiple bloggers here. Stickwick Stapers:

I don’t understand how atheists face death, either that of loved ones or their own. Do they put off thinking about it until the inevitableness and finalness of death is around the corner?

I’m not an atheist. But I’m rather unsure about this whole eternal life business. Heaven or Valhalla or even Hell seem quite unlikely to me, as described. I’m sure a particularly religious person would tell me that said descriptions are likely metaphorical for something we cannot comprehend.

I said here:

About once every few years, I go through this phase wherein I ponder the nature of the universe. As opposed to the rest of the time, when I could apparently give a fuck less because I got shit to do.

And that’s how it is. I don’t sit around and ponder death because it’s depressing and, of course, the result is uncertain. And I’m certain atheists don’t ponder it because it would be quite depressing.

That said, if there’s an afterlife, that’s cool. If there’s not one, no big deal. I didn’t exist 100 years ago and it didn’t bother me then. If I don’t exist 100 years from now, it won’t bother me then either.

Oh, and to atheists everywhere: What’s the deal with the atheists who try to convert? Not all of you do but there are some of you who do. Why do you do it? It makes little sense to me. I understand why religious people try to convert atheists. They don’t want you to go to Hell and they want you to have eternal life instead of oblivion. But I see no motivation for converting a believer to non-belief. When you try to convert the religious, are you just trying to prove something or are you just being a dick?

Well, my wife would be mad because the bottle had water in it.

In this post, I mentioned that the nut job Sulejmen Talovic went on a shooting rampage was a Muslim. Then, I noted that the right wing blogs were wondering why this fact wasn’t mentioned much in the press.

Persimmon’s PC radar went up and, first, I was accused of not knowing that Muslim was not an ethnicity but a religion. I’m fully aware, which is why I also stated he was a Bosnian immigrant. Then, persimmon made a good point in that I don’t know if this guy was religious or not. It is a valid point. And I am willing to buy that Sulejmen Talovic may not have been actively religious. The source that I found regarding his religion was Wikipedia, which links to other articles. This article mentions his ethnicity and religion and the source is his aunt. He may or may not be actively religious, of course. I should note that in the course of the 5 minutes it took me to type this, that the word Muslim was deleted and added back to the Wikipedia entry. A bit of a Wiki controversy.

So, simple question: Is it really that far out of the realm of possibility that this could have been a pathetic little Jihadi getting his Fatwah on? Why does it offend someone’s delicate sensibilities when a particular nutjob’s religion is mentioned to the point that we are not to mention it at all?

Now, I’m more inclined to believe the lone-gunman, nutjob theory in this case. That said, how much info do we need before we can label something terrorism? According to Rich:

We don’t know why Sulejmen Talovic decided to start shooting up the local mall, so it would be inappropriate to mention domestic terrorism, primarily because Talovic is a Muslim and you can’t call Muslims terrorists, especially if they are because you might offend other Muslims who aren’t terrorist, and who might express their injured feelings by kinapping and beheading a random bystander, and that kind of thing just gets in the way of diplomacy, doesn’t it? Nick Lay, on the other hand, isn’t a Muslim, so it’s OK to throw the label of terrorist around in his case.

The more accurate (and politically incorrect) question is: At what point do we label something Islamic Terrorism? After all, there are religious terrorists of the Christian right variety, the Irish Catholic variety, and a whole host of other varieties. I don’t know when one can make that distinction and be politically correct, but in this case I am not willing to rule it out. Period. Because, as Tam noted:

If you’re a young Islamic male and you go and kill people in Israel or Iraq, you’re a terrorist.

If you do it in America, you’re just a crazy loner.

Heh.

I was wrong. I thought the whole man made Global Warming issue had been thoroughly fisked and dissected. I thought the hockey stick had been reduced to splinters.

How was I to know that things would get goofy on an unimagined scale? How goofy you ask? There is now a call to try Global Warming Skeptics for War Crimes. Or should that be “thought crimes”? Welcome to the far left extremist world of 1984. Leo Rosten once wrote, “Extremists think ”communication” means agreeing with them. ” And what if you don’t?

Far left extremists say you should be arrested and tried. Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts wrote, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.” Roberts has called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry”.

Okay, Roberts is a full blown nutcase. No way anyone respectable could believe in arresting people for thought crimes. Right?

Er. Not exactly.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Ellen Goodman writes, “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

Dennis Prager writes, “the Ellen Goodman quote is only the beginning of what is already becoming one of the largest campaigns of vilification of decent people in history — the global condemnation of a) anyone who questions global warming; or b) anyone who agrees that there is global warming but who argues that human behavior is not its primary cause; or c) anyone who agrees that there is global warming, and even agrees that human behavior is its primary cause, but does not believe that the consequences will be nearly as catastrophic as Al Gore does. If you don’t believe all three propositions, you will be lumped with Holocaust deniers, and it would not be surprising that soon, in Europe, global warming deniers will be treated as Holocaust deniers and prosecuted.”

I wonder if the ACLU will step in to defend the First Amendment? Or will they step in to prosecute “the bastards”?

Another is in the works. This one targets carjackers:

Spurred by violent crime in Memphis and elsewhere, Tennessee legislators have filed several bills to expand the legal rights of people to use deadly force when threatened by would-be attackers.

One would specifically allow people in motor vehicles to kill or “cause serious bodily injury” to attackers — both inside or outside the vehicle — who they believe are threatening to murder, rape, kidnap, rob or carjack the car’s occupants.

That bill was filed Rep. Ulysses Jones and Sen. Reginald Tate, both Memphis Democrats. “I’ve heard a lot of support for this. It’s time to give citizens the opportunity to protect themselves. Right now, we’re at the mercy of what I call ‘scum’,” Jones, a Memphis Fire Department paramedic, said Tuesday.

There are a total of 11 bills in the works in Tennessee to expand use of force provisions.

Grey’s Anatomy star Kate Walsh has a video shilling the anti-gun propaganda. It’s full of the standard misrepresentations and willful ignorance.

I guess, as a gun blogger, I should say something about it. A crazy guy walked into a mall with a shotgun (despite the mall’s signs saying that guns were not allowed – go figure) and started shooting people. He also had a handgun, which is illegal for him to own since he is under the age of 21. He killed five and injured four. He was prevented from shooting more people by an off-duty police officer, who also thankfully ignored the No Guns Allowed sign.

The shooter was named Sulejmen Talovic, a Bosnian immigrant and Muslim. There are allegations from the right that the media is intentionally not covering the fact that this guy was a Muslim and that he may have been living out some Jihadist fantasy.

Despite the laws the guy broke, the Brady Campaign is pushing for more laws.

The pro-gun side says concealed carry kept it from being far worse.

Tam puts on her tin foil hat.

Nagin in contempt. The judge forces the city of New Orleans to pay the NRA’s legal bills.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership responds to the Justice Department telling Bloomberg to knock it off:

“The response by the Bush Administration’s Justice Department to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to combat illegal gun trafficking come across as an effort to silence the messenger rather than respond to the problem of a rise in violent crime,” according to Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

No, the response comes across as telling a mayor he has no authority in other states to break the law by having agents of his city engage in illegal firearm transactions known as straw purchases. More:

Mayor Bloomberg, along with Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston, helped start a Coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which now represents over 150 mayors. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence launched its own Campaign Against Illegal Guns in March 2006 and has been working to support the efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and the other mayors to stop illegal gun trafficking.

That would be the anti-gun group that Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam is a member of.

The AMA wants movies that feature smoking to be rated R. Bob Krumm says we shouldn’t stop there, let’s restrict any movie that shows unsafe behavior.

Sure, the FBI lost 354 firearms but their record with computer security is a bit better:

The FBI said that 160 laptop computers were lost or stolen in less than four years, including at least 10 that contained sensitive or classified information — one of which held “personal identifying information on FBI personnel,” according to a report released yesterday.

Why Big-Dollar Guns Are Worth The Money

New S&W Revolvers

Tam’s 6.8SPC AR-15. I dig that forearm as it’s not just acres of rails.

NK sends the following image:

This is Hiram Maxim’s bump-firing, semi-automatic lever action. Looks like the recoil of the weapon cocks it. NK says:

This particular design was actually produced in England in 1885 and was adopted by the Turkish army who were already very happy with their standard lever-action Winchesters.

My sources tell me that if you’re in the process of initiating a National Firearms Act transfer and tax payment, do not use the forms on the ATF website. Apparently, the PDF files contain a few errors and ATF will not process them. That’s government for you: inconveniencing you for their mistakes.

Pink eye is running rampant at day care. Groan.

Via Dr. Helen, comes an interview with, err, Dr. Helen. On the cause of kiddie violence, she says:

Youth violence is a very complex construct and experts and others tend to want to blame one thing, a video game, the Internet, or TV as the “cause” of why kids kill. This simplistic “one solution fits all” approach is easy, just get rid of X and kids will stop being violent. But it is simply not true.

Back when I was in prison*, there was a man that had worked with delinquents for two decades. Back then, we called them delinquents – I think they call them happy, fluffy bunnies now so as not to offend them or their parents. Particularly the parents, who get outright ornery when you tell them that their son (who is a three time, violent felon and sexual predator) may have some issues. The man I worked with was a licensed social worker with a graduate degree and before that he was a drill sergeant. No, really. One day, I said to him: What’s wrong with kids these days? They’re too quick to shoot each other or stab each other or club each other from behind. He says, and I am not making this up, that: Kids today are afraid to take an ass-whippin’.

He went on to say that, in his day and mine, if two teenage boys had a conflict, they’d meet on the playground after school and settle it. He’s right, we did. But no one ever got killed. No one ever went to the ER. We had black-eyes and were sore but we got over it pretty quickly. Then, the next day, we were friends again. Now, he says, kids are afraid of that. They don’t want to fight, because they’re scared of a little ass-whippin’. They’d rather attempt to kill someone than get their ass handed to them.

Could be. I had my ass kicked a few times and I seem OK.

* I worked there but I may as well have been doing time. Not a pleasant experience.

Update: In comments, Ken opines:

But if no distinction whatsoever is made between degrees of violence, or the ends to which it is put, then there is no reason for an adolescent to draw a distinction between “fighting back” and murder. Both are equally condemned, so why take half measures?

I suppose teaching the notion that all violence is equally bad, though understandable, could have some unintended consequences. But I don’t know that anyone intentionally teaches that but policies like zero tolerance make it somewhat believable.

Challenge The Man^tm and get demoted:

Two senior officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who opposed many questionable management and spending decisions by the agency’s former director are being moved to lower-ranking positions effective Thursday, officials said.

Deputy Director Edgar A. Domenech, who also served as acting director last year, is being moved out of ATF headquarters to lead the agency’s Washington field office. The assistant director for field operations, Michael Bouchard, will become an assistant to Michael J. Sullivan, a U.S. attorney who is temporarily running ATF.

The transfers are widely seen within ATF as demotions. They come seven months after the sudden departure of Carl J. Truscott, the former director, who clashed with Domenech and other senior executives over spending and management practices.

It’s been a rough couple of years for ATF. Here’s some past coverage of some of the agency’s problems:

Insiders criticizing the agency.

A circuit court smacks them down for their ruling on model rockets;

An agent testified under oath that the NFRTR (the NFA weapons database) was corrupt;

Having budget issues due to mismanagement;

Being investigated for breaking he law at Virginia gun shows.

And they’ve had funds cut for some of their rather, err, dubious programs.

The ATF Director has resigned over excessive and lavish spending.

The now former head of the ATF ordered staff to do his nephew’s homework.

And there may be somewhat of an internal revolt at the agency. David Hardy posts an email from a group called ATFers United against Mismanagement and Misconduct. I received the same email. I hoped it was true but had my doubts. The group has no webpage, their email address was from Yahoo or something, and the letter was in all caps. But, if true, some guys inside the ATF are unhappy with management.

Someone really needs to clean this agency up. My preference, of course, would be to shut it down but that’s not going to happen. It seems lately, though, that the rot is coming from the inside.

Triggerfinger has some more analysis of the case in DC that is challenging their gun ban.

Looks like there’s a bill to expand the defense for deadly force in the works:

Representative Todd wants to build on an existing law passed back in 1999. In Tennessee you can already use deadly force if there is reasonable belief your life is in danger. But Todd wants to broaden that law and close what he calls loopholes. Giving the citizen every bit of legal protection when, if threatened, they can shoot to kill.

“I want to make sure its spelled out so there is no other interpretation but that, and I think that’s key,” said Todd.

It might be going too far since a firearms instructor isn’t too keen on the idea:

“Tennessee state law is already pretty much in favor of the individual,” said Chief Instructor at Range Master Tom Givens.

Givens says Tennessee gun laws are solid enough.

“I wouldn’t want to see it broadened to the point its ambiguous. Tennessee state law is pretty simple right now. It’s easy to teach, easy for the laymen to understand.”

Yeah, I feel that too. I started feeling them earlier than most.