Last week I received a reply letter from my State Senator, Debbie Regala, per the letter I dropped off at her office on the day of the SB-5197 hearing. Here is a copy of the letter that I gave to the committe which was hearing the bill. That letter closely resembles the one I gave to the Senator.
I’m going to put her reply letter to me and the letter I just finished sending off to her in blockquotes below the fold, because we both get a bit wordy.
Enjoy
Have a peek
Although it is tough to see, that would be my recently purchased Belgian Browning Hi Power.
Sorry for the lighting (though it works halfway decently for night firing exercises).
I picked up the Hi Power very recently and used this range time to decide which improvements will be made sooner rather than later. PowerCustom, here I come.
Here’s some more video
That would be my Ruger MKII 10in bbl. The first two shots were sighters before I remembered to hit the “go” button on the camera. There would be more video of the MKII except that the Volquartzen grips failed miserably for the last time (the molded-in washers for the grip screws ripped out and the grips stopped holding the parts in).
The videos were taken via me and my tripod at Champion Arms Indoor Range last week. Mucho thankee to the staff there (if you’re wanting to take some vids, bring your URL as they’ll want to scope out your site beforehand).
Last week we did the “Wouldn’t It Be Neat” post and had some very good suggestions in the comments. In this post, I would like to discuss something mentioned within those comments which I completely forgot to include in my list of wants from the gun manufacturing industry. I would also like to make a request of select members of the gun-owning community.
I picked up the Hi Power bug in my yoot. Even though I love the 1911 without end, I like the handling and the pointing prowess of the Hi Power with the strength of 100 men. I put off buying one until I could do so no longer.
My main reason for holding back is that I’m not a fan of 9mm (although with the right load, it does it’s job well enough) and I did not want to expand my caliber library any further. However, this gun will be a project and I can wait to buy 5000 rounds of 9mm until it is finished (although a quick 500 rounds are already on their way).
This one has the sweetest 2-3/4lb trigger you’ll every give squeeze to and keeping it will be a demand I put on the smith who installs the new hammer. It is a “shooter” and not a collector, with the usual light sweat pitting on the front and back of the grip and holster wear on the slide edges, so I won’t feel too bad in making it “carry ready” with the addition of a new slide stop, thumb safety and new sights.
Although getting it parkerized might be a bit much for me to ask of myself.
There is one downside that I discovered while at the range: These pistols are currently being made from the factory in .40S&W, and I knew that before I bought it. But some pitiable soul felt the need to tell me all about it that afternoon. I’ve already had to deal with the guys who worship at “The Altar of 40” when shooting my .45 for years, and now it seems that I’m going to have to suffer these fools with my 9mm.
I truly want to give these twerps a quick history lesson of their precious dot-four messiah, or maybe just tell them the true story about the local constable who couldn’t even shoot though the window of his own squad car at point blank range with his .40, until his seventh round, sending the first six ricochetting off the inside of the glass, down and into his dashboard, when a felon tried to run the officer down by backing his truck over the front of the officers car.
But that would accomplish little other than reminding me that .40 should have been left in the bin of fads where it belongs. If you can’t do it with a 9mm, .40 isn’t going to put you over the top. Period, end of story.
I’m not trying to break any hearts here, so if you don’t like my opinion, we’re here to talk about this stuff, so let’s do so.
Everyday folks who shoot .40 are great. I’m glad that they’ve found a cartridge that they like and hope that it gets them shooting more often. The people I’m talking about, and there seem to be quite a number of them locally and on this here interweb, are those who want to evangelize about .40. I don’t know if they’re hoping I’ll convert or if it is some sort of inadequacy problem, but they’re as annoying as the folks who wake me up in the middle of the day to hand me religious pamphlets.
If you know of someone like this, let them know to knock it off. If this gets regular, like it used to be at a different range I used to visit, I’m going to stop being gentle with them.
Which leads me to my request of the firearms industry:
10mm pistols were brought up in last week’s post. Unfortunately, the 10mm was left in the dustbin of fads, though it shouldn’t have been. And as much as I try to forget my like of the 10mm, I would have one additional request of the manufacturers:
If I can’t get an upsized Hi Power in .45ACP, could I at least get a standard sized one in 10mm (or at least barrel/recoil spring kit with 12rnd mags)?
I caught the 10mm bug at the same time as the Hi Power bug. I’ve seen it in real-world tests and it does damn well, though it still has problems with auto glass in the faster/lighter-weight projectiles.
I’d have bought myself a Colt Delta 10 by now, except that the curent owners seem to think that these pistols are made of some rare and expensive metals, and I don’t buy Kimbers any more after their extractor fiasco.
Folks made mention of the Bren-Ten, which was a fine pistol, except for it’s bad looks, weird trigger and horrible controls. Others listed the S&W pistols as their gun of choice in 10mm. For me though, every other pistol in 10mm, including the current Combat Tupperware with their “Staplegun Chic” triggers, would have to disappear off the planet before I put my life in the hands of a S&W auto (although this looks interesting).
Nope, a Hi Power in 10mm would be about the only reason I’d expand my caliber library any further, and if I have to promise to buy at least two at $1000 each before they’ll make them, I’ll buy three.
In a nutshell, Jim Zumbo, Outdoor Life columnist and perhaps the most visible outdoor writer in the United States, wrote a blogpost (linked below) calling for the banning of ARs, AKs and similar “terrorist” rifles from hunting. Nevermind that there are ARs that outshoot almost any bolt-action rifle out there. Zumbo wrote the post after a varmint shoot testing Remington’s new .17 centerfire Spitfire cartridge (which I believe is simply their version of the venerable .17 Mach IV), so he can’t claim ignorance of the perfection of a high-capacity autoloading rifle in the varmint fields. No, the man’s just a bigot.
After a blogswarm of comments by irate 2A supporters canceling their Outdoor Life subscriptions and calling for a boycott of Remington (Zumbo’s prime sponsor for his TV show Jim Zumbo Outdoors), Zumbo apologized, stating that he plans to learn all about ARs on a hunt with Ted Nugent (link below). Well, that’s nice. But Dumbo’s ill-thought comments are already being trumpeted by the Brady Bunch on their website (link is not to Brady but to Michael Bane’s blogpost about it).
The best part about all this was the hurried comment by Remington’s CEO on Zumbo’s original post:
ALL – Jim Zumbo in NO WAY speaks for Remington! His opinions are his own. We at Remington take our 2nd Ammendment Rights extremely seriously and ourselves market and manufacturer a AR based 308 rifle. Remington Arms supports the lawful use of all firearms by thier owners in whatever legal manner they choose. We at Remington feel that it is the diversity of our tastes and uses of fireaems that should also be the binding element that assists us all in defending the rights granted to us by our fore fathers.
Rest assured that remington not only does not support jim’s view, we totally disagree! I have no explaination for his perspective.
I proudly own AR’s and support everyones right to do so!
What makes me sick is how quickly people on the internet have called to boycott Remington. All Jim said was he was hunting with our people! This is normal course in our industry. How else do people think we field test? with writers.
Remington has spent tens of millions of dollars to defend your rights and how quickly the thanks is threat and boycott! Please feel Free to post that remington does not agree with Zumbo in any way shape or form and we will assess our relationship with him accordingly.
Tommy Millner
CEO and President
Good for them! Remington had better drop Zumbo like a hot potato.
Michael Bane’s excellent and passionate writeups on the controversy, with copies of Zumbo’s posts, are here and here. Zumbo’s original post is here and his apology is here. Beware, there are so many comments on his blogposts that they take forever to load and may crash a slower machine; you may want to read Bane’s writeups instead.
I don’t subscribe to Outdoor Life, but I did enjoy his TV show on the Outdoor Channel. No more. The Outdoor Channel’s feedback page is here. You can email Outdoor Life at [email protected].
I, for one, don’t believe the sincerity of his apology. I’ve got a lot of good company, too.
UPDATE: Hmm, that Brady “blogpost” may have been a hoax. I’m sure the real Bradys will have something to say eventually. In any event, Zumbo gave ’em plenty to work with. And as many commenters have noted, he still hasn’t actually apologized for the “terrorist” comment or said that it wasn’t what he meant. His “apology” is more along the lines of “please don’t boycott my sponsors.” Riiiight.
UPDATE 2: From Remington’s site, splashed on the front page:
NOTICE: Remington is in the process of severing our sponsorships with Mr. Zumbo. Remington in no way shares or advocates any of the comments made by Mr. Zumbo on his blog site. A formal announcement will be released by noon today.
UPDATE 3: Outdoor Life has discontinued Zumbo’s blog. Remington’s press release is here.
If you live in a state like mine, sending an email this guy’s way and letting him know you’ve got his back could put him over the top.
Nader says he may run in 2008, especially if Hillary gets the nomination
Former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader said he is considering a presidential run in 2008 and strongly suggested today he would enter the race if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the Democratic Party nomination.
“She’s just another bad version of (former President) Bill Clinton,” Nader told KGO radio host Ronn Owens in San Francisco.
And in that last sentence is exactly why the Nutroots hate Nader: He doesn’t worship at the altar of St. Billiam.
Run, Ralph! Run!
Besides the chicks with accents
Unemployed ‘must learn English’
Unemployed people who cannot speak English will have to show they are learning the language or face losing benefits, the government has announced.
Up to 40,000 jobless people say their poor English is a barrier to finding employment, ministers say – and £4.5m is spent on translators in job centres.
This money would be better spent on teaching them English, they say.
My plan is even better than that!
1. No teaching them English
2. No giving any benefits to those who cannot ask for it in English.
3. Making them get the fuck out of their ghettos to interact with the rest of the country every now and then so that they learn english.
Approximately one-third of the guys I work with are naturalized. My employer is liable for any mistakes they make while driving a 40,000lb vehicle, so they do one very thorough background check in order to protect themselves, including making the person prove who they are with some very restricitve reqirements on form of ID.
We employ no illegal immigrants, period, point blank.
All of our drivers can speak conversational english, however accented, and they can be understood over the radio comm channels.
One of my newest drivers is from the Ukraine, and when he came to America, he watched network TV until he had most of the common phrases down. He then took a mainline job outside the community of his fellow immigrants, taking a pay cut, until he could be understood by just about anyone with average hearing.
Why is this little bit of respect so hard to understand for some?
With the recent kerfuffle over the Padagon wenches, it was inevitable that someone would make a Pandagon-mockery site
Click on over and find out how Bush is trying to erase Abe Lincoln from history, stop progressives from eating meat and why there are more cockslapping incidents than ever befoer.
The Drink-spray vs. Monitor Alert is in Full Effect.
I hope more Dems try to use leftist bloggers on their team
Senator Reid, why not call for an up-or-down vote on Bush’s surge plan?
Poor John, he doesn’t understand that the reason why the Dems will only put forth non-binding resolutions is because they know that do vote against the soldiers in Iraq as thus would be electoral suicide.
So many kilobites, so little brains. Aravosis sounds like one of those freaks outside of the RNC in NYC in 2004 telling anyone who’ll listen that W should force Jenna and Barbara into the Army.
While waiting for my antibiotics last week at the pharmacy, I picked up this book and started reading, because any book blurbed by the Washington Post as “the Great American Zombie Novel” can’t be all bad. And I really enjoyed Stephen King’s old stuff — up through the late eighties, when I stopped reading his books after Tommyknockers disappointed me for reasons I can’t recall.
So this was the first Stephen King book I’ve read in more than a decade. It’s still got the same old familiar King touches — his prose flows so naturally that, like any master craftsman, he makes it look deceptively easy to do what he does.
Unfortunately, it’s also got some teeth-grating anti-gun attitudes on display. All of his firearm depictions (surprisingly few for a TEOTWAWKI zombie novel) are accurate except for one moment where he has a character “swing the barrel out” on a revolver to find that “only one of the six chambers was empty.” Grrr. That would be the cylinder he swung out. But that’s a relatively minor error.
Far more annoying is that King appears to have this thing against hollow-point rounds:
“Then he’d explained the highly illegal nature of the ammunition Arnie Nickerson had obtained for his wife’s .45 fraggers. What had once been called dumdum bullets.” (Cell, Page 231.)
And this:
“KA-POW! in jagged yellow capitals across the foreground of the splash, and this one really is a splash, because Arnie Nickerson has thoughtfully provided his wife with the kind of softnosed rounds they sell on the Internet at the American Paranoia sites, and the top of Ray’s head is a red geyser.” (Cell, page 404.)
AAARGH!!!!
Okay, just where, exactly, are hollow-point self-defense rounds illegal? Outside of New York City and a few other select leftist wacko burgs around the country, that is. (And in King’s story, they are self-defense rounds — America’s Defender brand, in a bright red box.) And pardon me, but I believe you can pick up defensive ammunition at almost any Wal-Mart, Big 5, or other sporting-goods store. No paranoid Internet sites necessary, thank you very much. Maybe King hasn’t been out of his Maine hidey-hole that often in the last few years? At least he recognizes that only Frederick Forsyth still calls hollow-points “dumdum” bullets. Sheesh.
And for what it’s worth, it’s clear all the way through the book that the only way to defend yourself when the SHTF is with a gun. Of course, once the zombies start practicing telekinesis, mere firearms stop being useful. It’s less jarring than it sounds — I suppose that’s just King’s style to push the envelope past your standard zombie fare.
…
On balance, it’s a pretty decent “zombie” story, although it’s not zombies per se but rather crazed homicidal humans made nuts by a “pulse” that infects them through their cell phones — thus the title of the novel. It goes off in King’s usual way-out-there vein pretty early on, though. So don’t read it if you’re expecting a tale focusing on survival in the face of the chaotic conditions resulting from SHTF — King moves past that pretty quickly to weightier matters.
…
In sum, the book’s definitely worth a look. I sure hated finding out that the ten bucks (!!) for the paperback went to support anti-gunner propaganda, though. For God’s sake, don’t pay seventeen bucks for the hardcover. Wait for it to hit the used bookstores or Goodwill — you’ll get it cheaper and King won’t get your money.
When you think about it, cigarettes cause both death and taxes.
Scott Adams figured he was saving about $20 per carton the past few years by ordering his cigarettes online and by phone from out-of-state tobacco dealers.
Those savings are proving mighty costly now.
The state claims Adams owes nearly $8,000 in unpaid cigarette taxes and penalties. After hounding him for more than a year, the state last week began garnisheeing 25 percent of Adams’ wages.
Adams says he blew off the numerous warnings and tax statements he received in the mail, figuring the state was just trying to intimidate him and didn’t really have the authority to force him to pay.
I lost a link to the story, but it seems that the state just figured out that by both putting a huge tax on tobacco products and then limiting the places where people can smoke, makes people quit smoking.
While this sounds all well and good, the tale I heard the other day is that the state is crying about the loss in tax revenue because of the quitters.
I know that a number of politicians are lawyers, but would think that a few economists would find their way into the government too.
Here is at least one leftist who, since she can’t get a judge to fine people for saying things people don’t like, is going to take her own path.
Plans for a meeting between Michael Richards and the four people he insulted in a racist onstage tirade have stalled
over a disagreement on how the session should proceed and whether it would be a legal mediation, it was reported Friday.Attorney Gloria Allred said in remarks reported by the Los Angeles Times that she is convening a three-member “jury” comprising a retired judge and two lawyers to hear a presentation Saturday afternoon of what happened at the
Laugh Factory on the Sunset Strip on Nov. 17. Richards allegedly used the “n-word” repeatedly during a mid-performance outburst that night.The session will be closed to the public but open to the media, she said.
“We will leave it to the three members of the ‘jury’ to tell us whether they think, under the facts and the law, he should be accountable and, if so, in what way,” Allred said, according to The Times.
Richards was invited, but he won’t be there. His lawyer, Douglas Mirell, said any meeting between Richards, who portrayed Kramer on “Seinfeld,” and the four patrons should be private as part of legal mediation.
If Richards can be sued for using derogatory language towards black folks, I wonder if this means that DefJam Records will be next on the list.
For some strange reason, I think not.
Found at Right Thinking
