The Gun Guy is back. Tell a friend.
You should really click on that link and see if that site reminds you of anything.
I’m pretty sure it will.
Remember, no using the ‘K’ word.
In fact, I’ve taken him out of the blogroll and substituted this one for it. If you have a blog, please do the same.
I have a blog, and I did that after a personal request sent to me privately, but the whole way this was conducted leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
I consider the man a friend, although I haven’t met him. That is a very special status to me, and one whom I’ve given to less than 5 people in my life. That’s why I complied with his request.
You have tens of thousands of people whose behavior is bordering on that of cult members.
Some of the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment there are read that blog on a daily basis, and one day, that’s blog’s writer(s) told us to impose censorship, AND WE DID IT!
I keep wondering when the effects of the Kool-Aid I drank are going to hit me…
Aren’t I supposed to be lying down in a ritual circle now?
Now, we haven’t even addressed the technical side. Technically, what he is trying to pull off is impossible. There is just no way that the traces of the old blog will be erased even enough so that a non-geek couldn’t find them. It just won’t work.
Now, we haven’t addressed the politics.
Now, we haven’t addressed the logic, of which there is very little. The man now has his tens of thousands of followers who have followed him to his new site, having just abandoned the old site en masse. One look at the stats total on the new site would tell anyone investigating the question of new vs old that the leader there is an even more dangerous man to the radical left, because he has just demonstrated his power and authority over those masses of followers, having led them from one blog to another in so short a time.
Were I a rich lefty, I would have previously put the man down as a voice of the opposition, but NOW I would put him down in a much more dangerous category, a person who could snap his fingers and have a rather large group of rightys doing his absolute bidding.
No, I don’t think the man accomplished his goals. On the contrary, I think that for the first time, he has lost sight of them. His best course now would be to turn over his site to someone else and just fade away.
Trying to partially fade away didn’t work, and his stunt has now made him stand out even more than he did before.
Rivrdog,
I don’t agree. You’re presuming the rich lefties (or even just lefties) are paying attention to the trials and tribulations of Mr. Raconteur. Trust me, they’re not. I live in the middle of a couple million of ’em, and they couldn’t care less about some gun guy and his blog. If they discuss it at all, it will be a whole bunch of schadenfreude about how yet another obnoxious righty blog vanished from the ether.
If lefties were truly paying attention, we wouldn’t have been able to get all of those states to pass CCW laws just in the last ten years, almost without any notice from the national media.
All hail K, the Supreme Ruler.
Sorry RD, but I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you here. I’m not going to defend anyone or their actions as I’m pretty sure that I’m quite far down on the list of folks who are qualified to do so.
To cover one subject right up front, it isn’t rich lefties that anyone has to worry about in this situation, it is the good old American capitalist corporation. If that institution has one flaw, this would be it.
Since there were only a handful of people who were involved in a conversation I was party to, I’ll relay the paraphrase of it.
At the last Boomershoot the gun guy and a number of other folks were talking about the subject of the gun guy’s site and it was pretty evident that a universal conversation was taking place across the country; when someone would mention the gun guy’s name, someone would undoubtedly answer “Oh, you mean the gun guy?�
It was then told that the topic of changing the name of the site had been a minor topic of discussion since the hit counter started looking more like the odometer on a taxi.
This is only my speculation and should not be taken as anything much more than that: It is my guess is that it took financial near desperation to get the change moving.
Google the man’s name and you’ll get dozens of google pages full of hits. He will never get his name off the internet until the earth just up and explodes. An entire IT department would have to work for a couple years to get the wipe done.
And the gun guy knows this.
I did what I did as an attempt to help this along.
Next, I got no email to delink. In fact, I’ve been trying to get ahold of the gun guy on a different matter altogether and haven’t gotten a single response from him. I’m thinking that if I was supposed to have gotten one, the gun guy is using my crapped out address. I saw the new link at a couple of other gunblogging sites and took a hint. I’m not eloquent enough to give hints so I was pretty blunt in my request.
I haven’t taken orders from anyone in over a decade. Hell, I don’t even take orders at my work; I take requests. If some guy orders me to do something, chances are that I’ll do the exact opposite, even if I like the guy. I take requests and they should have the word “Please� contained within if someone wants my attention.
I see no cult or even the beginning of one. I see a decent sized number of people who were liking the free ice cream and that when the truck drove off while they weren’t looking, they freaked out. If this had lasted another week or so, I would bet that this topic would fade away just like every other site closure.
If you look at the time table of what transpired, you’ll see a pattern that is rather common in the blogosphere: Old site goes bye-bye, people jump up and down. The only difference is what followed: five to seven days later, the new site is up and running.
5-7 days. Time enough for the purchase of a new domain, the moving of a large amount of data (years and years worth), propagation of the new domain on the server, some essential changes to the front page to include the editing of names on any and all posts, testing to make sure the place is stable enough for 24hour operation and then the release.
The secret had to be void of a connection, no forwarding page and no direct link from one site to the other and it had to be immediate.
If you remember the minor business announcement shortly before the old site went down, I would speculate again that some HR dweeble who did corporation vetting/backgrounding hadn’t been keeping up on their workload and that a few days after the offer was given, a phone call was made explaining some new conditions. The answer was probably something along the lines of “Name off the front page? Done.� End of conversation.
Luckily for the gun guy, the offer wasn’t just withdrawn.
All I saw was a server crash and a name removed off the front page of a website. It isn’t a 1st Amendment issue because the same words are there, a name was just removed. You takes your risks when you grab a domain with your entire name on it and then say things that people don’t like. The gun guy probably just bit off more than he thought he did when he registered that domain. It might have been a 1st Amendment issue if there was no new site, but again, it would have been the gun guy’s decision to make that happen.
If he were independently wealthy (which is a goal of his, as I understand), he would have never had to worry about this. If he succeeds in his goal, I’m sure we’ll see the old domain come right back with a redirect from the NoR site as sort of a symbolic finger in the air.
Again, it was his decision to do so, speculatively so that he could put food on the table. He could have refused and hoped for the best, but a bird (or a job) in the hand is better than two in the bush.
A name disappearing off the front page and a domain change is not an attempt to fade away by any stretch of the imagination. It would not surprise me to find his or the gun gal’s name on the domain registration.
Joe Huffman wrote a post about annony-gun-blogging a day or so after the disappearance of the original site. I found it a bit odd since with his (to my knowledge) particular specialty with computer technology being security, he would know that no one is anonymous on the internet, least of all anony-gun-bloggers such as myself.
Even a Democratic Underground moron would be able to find my name in under fifteen minutes and my other info in just a slightly longer amount of time. I’m not trying to be anonymous, I just want a time investment made by those with enough interest to find me.
99.9% of folks who don’t like what I write will just slough me off as some wingnut Bush-groupie, and that is how I want it. It was easier for me to be anonymous when Nukevet Neal owned the site because I had an extra layer of anonymity that I don’t have anymore, but I’ve been doing this for almost three years now and have decided that I could give a shit less who wants to know who I am, except for those that may wish me or mine harm. I’ll deal with them directly.
For over two of those three years, I have made the offer to anyone who wants to take me up on it to go BS’ing, to the range, to a movie or even to try and kick my ass with them having to do nothing more than send an email.
The gun guy has done the same more times than I can remember and I doubt that has changed. The Nation of Riflemen is still up and running which means that the Nation of Volunteers is still up and running. The gun guy is the first volunteer.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that this wasn’t such a big deal and the delinking is just a courtesy stemming from that non-big deal. Go ahead and google his name. You’ll see a number of folks who aren’t or can’t comply and I doubt he has ill will towards any of them. It is a decision he made that will have both positive and negative repercussions that he will have to deal with. I have always felt that I will be the judge of whom I please and that I will judge them how I please. I don’t feel that I could hold a decision such as the one the gun guy made against anyone.
Present company included.