Nuts, I Can’t Go to the GRPC

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Alaska

I was all excited as I registered for the Gun Rights Policy Conference starting this Friday and running through the weekend — it’s the 25th anniversary and the first time in the history of the conference that we’re truly on OFFENSE as a movement — but then I saw this and realized I ain’t gonna make it:

Dear GRPC Registrant,

The 25th Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport will start off with registration and a reception from 7:00-9:00 p.m. on Friday, September 24, 2010.

The agenda will start at 8:15 a.m. on Saturday, September 25th and conclude at 6:00 p.m. A boxed lunch will be included at no charge. There will be a reception from 6:00-8:00 p.m. that evening.

For Sunday, September 26th, the panels will start at 8:30 a.m. and will conclude at 12:30 p.m.

Any questions, please contact me at [email protected].

Regards,

Julianne Versnel
Second Amendment Foundation
Director of Operations

I was all set to take Friday off work during the day, but Friday evening and Saturday-Sunday are out — my wife’s birthday is Saturday, and we’ve got birthday events planned from Friday evening onward. She’s enjoyed Boomershoot and the Gunbloggers’ Rendezvous this year, but she already told me that she was NOT interested in celebrating her birthday at the GRPC.

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel | 4 Comments

Asking the questions

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Oscar Gordon

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Personally, I value freedom a great deal more than safety, so yeah, I’d be willing to accept some loss.

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

First Day of School

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Phil Kadath

Gotta go. This will sucketh.

Posted in Phil Goes to College | 1 Comment

I guess he liked his award

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Phil Kadath

In 2009, President Obama won the Salesman of the Year award from the firearms community.

I can only figure that he wants to win it two years in a row with moves like this

The appointment of anti-gun rights former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels as an alternate representative to the United Nations has removed any doubt about the Obama administration’s intentions regarding global gun control initiatives, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

Nickels, a founding member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the author of Seattle‘s failed attempt to override Washington‘s state firearms preemption statute, was sworn in Wednesday to “help represent the United States in the UN assembly,” according to the Seattle Times.

“Putting an extremist gun banner in any position to represent this country at the United Nations amounts to renting a billboard for advertising against the Second Amendment,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “While he was Seattle‘s mayor, Greg Nickels supported every anti-gun scheme put forth by Washington CeaseFire, the Northwest’s most active gun prohibition lobby.

“Nickels is a gun ban proponent,” he continued, “so his appointment as an alternate to the UN is a clear signal of Barack Obama‘s intention to rubber stamp the UN’s global gun ban agenda. We had to sue Nickels while he was still Seattle‘s mayor to overturn his illegal city parks gun ban. Now he gets to push his anti-gun philosophy on a world scale. It hardly seems a coincidence that Nickels has been appointed by the Obama administration at a time when the UN is considering treaties and initiatives that pose a serious threat to the Second Amendment.”

Maybe Nickels will go for “No guns to the UN”. It’s not like they use them anyway.

Via Rolf

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel | 2 Comments

They can haz Electric Chair?

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Phil Kadath

Probably not in the Obamanation.

A scientist and his wife who both worked at the leading US nuclear research facility were arrested Friday and charged with trying to pass nuclear arms secrets to Venezuela, the US Department of Justice said.

The pair, both Americans, “have been indicted on charges of communicating classified nuclear weapons data to a person they believed to be a Venezuelan government official and conspiring to participate in the development of an atomic weapon for Venezuela,” the department said in a statement.

The defendants, Pedro Mascheroni, 75, and Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 67, could face life in prison if convicted on all charges.

I guess that I can only hope that their age is not considered during their sentencing.

Posted in Useful Idiots | 1 Comment

Daniels 2012

Posted on September 19, 2010 by Alaska

Lookin’ good.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Video Games & Crime Rates

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Oscar Gordon

Interesting Thesis: (RTWT)

Second – what about video games? This thought just struck me today – but looking at these charts, crime has been steadily decreasing since 1990 – about the time when video games were going mainstream and video game consoles were becoming affordable for most Americans. Video game sales have increased steadily during this time period as well. You could draw a line in the very opposite direction as the lines in these charts, for instance, charting video game sales between 1990 and 2008:

…

If anything, the fact that crime has been dropping for the past twenty years (along with things like teen pregnancy, etc. as I noted above) while more and more young people consume more and more video games should put a lie to the notion that video games actually increase crime and violence.

People in this country really do like to ascribe evil to things (guns, video games, etc.) instead of people.  It’s wierd.  Anyway, the part that is truth:

One of the functions of stories and games is to help children rehearse for what they’ll be in later life. Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions as well—one of which is to enable children to pretend to be just what they know they’ll never be. Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden to them is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.

Yep.  I think the same can be said for training, part of it is play, a chance to experiment with situations, and reality.  Something to keep in mind the next time someone looks at you funny while you train yourself to clear a holster, or whatnot.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Three from Chuck

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Alaska

GBR-V wasn’t the same as GBR-IV without Ziegenfuss there. Genius? Wisdom? You make the call:

I don’t want these three back. A cool half-million isn’t a ransom, it’s a huge tax on their families–a tax on them for raising, and then unleashing on the world, three people who are so colossally stupid that they deserve to languish in an Iranian prison. …

It’s farcical for Iran to claim they are spies …Our spies are all people who pose as journalists for the New York Times, Newsweek, and CNN. You’d think the Iranians would know that. That’s why these “Journalists” have such an anti-America slant on their stories, so they can buddy up to these governments to spy on them. …

We should tell the Iranians that if they don’t release the prisoners by Thursday, then we will launch a shuttle mission with a payload of 50,000 pounds of a single, solid piece of Iron, with steering fins, and we’ll drop it right on Tehran. No muss, no fuss, nuclear-megaton sized damage, no radioactivity (maybe). Best part is, now that NASA has “retired” the shuttle missions, we can use all of them as our new fleet of B-3 Bombers. Just a few of these–bombs that cannot be stopped, that cause no environmental or long lasting harm, bombers that cannot be shot down, and soon we’d see the world tremble when the State Department rattled its saber.

Posted in Heroes, Comrades and Brothers | 3 Comments

The Master and Margarita

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Alaska

Via the new-to-me blog A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Butter, I learned in this post about fresh trout of the novel The Master and Margarita:

a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.

After reading that, I immediately hit up Amazon and it’s in the mail. Review coming up.

I love finding new things to love — especially books. This may well be one of them. And it’s all Breda’s fault!

Posted in Kewel! | 1 Comment

Interesting Papers

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Oscar Gordon

Some deal with guns

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments