Ben and you Morons and Moronettes had good fun with this earlier:

But I want to make a bit of a serious point about it.

With about a 10:1 ratio of guns to people in my house when I was growing up, I learned proper gun safety early on. There are a couple of versions of the standard rules ... the NRA has 3 and Jeff Cooper had 4:

1. All guns are always loaded.

2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.

3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.

4. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.

My dad was always fond of pointing out that a "safety", like you'll find on most guns other than revolvers, is a mechanical device that can fail and is no substitute for these rules, which work in all cases.

Also, these rules are designed to provide layers of safety through redundancy. A gun you didn't think was loaded is less likely to unintentionally discharge and hurt anything other than your pride if it's pointed in a safe direction and less likely still if you keep your finger off the trigger.

And then today, along comes super-genius David Frum, who knows less about guns than the other things he knows nothing about but nevertheless sees fit to lecture on, and advocates for something that is less safe than current best practice engaged in by people who know what they're doing.

Note to Frum: My H&K USP carry gun has a loaded chamber indicator. It's meaningless to me because I always treat the thing like it's loaded anyway.

Frum's charge in the piece he did for CNN that I won't link is, basically, that gun manufacturers are being negligent and this results in needless accidental deaths. So, just at random I went and grabbed a box from a fairly recent gun purchase (a Glock 23 in 2007):

The outside of the box, inside of the box and manual are littered with warnings about the risk of death or injury from unsafe handling practices. Also, the gun store where I bought it has safety instructions printed on the receipt and you're required to sign a statement that you've read and understand them in order to take possession of the firearm.

Once someone has waded through all this, is one more form of warning really going to do any good?

The part of Frum's CNN piece spawning this ignorant tweet that deals with gun manufacturers can best be described by analogy: He's asking for a pen that doesn't misspell words.

Of course, this is classic Frum trolling of the right and I wouldn't pay much attention to it but for the fact that there are people who may actually mistake him for a serious commentator on the issue. As Jeff Jacoby points out, there is real danger in letting emotion and ignorance override fact and reason when it comes to gun laws.

In 1998, Massachusetts passed what was hailed as the toughest gun-control legislation in the country. Among other stringencies, it banned semiautomatic "assault" weapons, imposed strict new licensing rules, prohibited anyone convicted of a violent crime or drug trafficking from ever carrying or owning a gun, and enacted severe penalties for storing guns unlocked.

"Today, Massachusetts leads the way in cracking down on gun violence," said Republican Governor Paul Cellucci as he signed the bill into law. "It will save lives and help fight crime in our communities." Scott Harshbarger, the state's Democratic attorney general, agreed: "This vote is a victory for common sense and for the protection of our children and our neighborhoods." One of the state's leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. "The new gun law," he predicted, "will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief."

It didn't.

The 1998 legislation did cut down, quite sharply, on the legal use of guns in Massachusetts. Within four years, the number of active gun licenses in the state had plummeted. "There were nearly 1.5 million active gun licenses in Massachusetts in 1998," the AP reported. "In June [2002], that number was down to just 200,000." The author of the law, state Senator Cheryl Jacques, was pleased that the Bay State's stiff new restrictions had made it possible to "weed out the clutter."

But the law that was so tough on law-abiding gun owners had quite a different impact on criminals.

Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. Instead of "lead[ing] the way in cracking down on gun violence," the state has seen gun violence shoot up. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Boston Globe reported this month – "a striking increase from the 65 in 1998." Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

Read the whole thing.

I can personally attest to how hard Massachusetts makes lawful purchase and possession of firearms. As a matter of fact, they do virtually all of the things Frum suggested in his column, from requiring locked storage at home to promulgation of "approved firearms rosters" defining what guns can and can't be sold here under the guise of consumer safety.

These laws were made by people who know as little about guns as Frum and ignored all the advice of people who know vastly more. That this has failed to produce the intended results should come as no surprise.

Now people with this same mentality are charging forth to "prevent the next Sandy Hook". How do you think that's going to turn out?

Posted by: andy at 04:00 PM | Comments (267)
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I can't believe it, but there's a lot of things I don't believe that are true.

Party animals could soon be able to sober up in an instant just by popping a pill.

Researchers have developed a cocktail of alcohol metabolizing enzymes that speedily reduces blood alcohol levels in drunk mice.

The treatment, which has been compared to having 'millions of liver cells inside your stomach,' could have far-reaching implications for drinkers.

I always thought it was stupid that the "synthol" served in the Ten-Forward ended its inebriatory effects the moment the drinker willed those effects to end.

And yet, here again is some Star Trek "science" I thought was jackass-stupid which seems to be at least possibly achievable.

I still don't like the show, though. They killed Tasha Yar.*

* This is a joke. I also didn't like Tasha Yar. I just pretty much dislike everyone on ST:TNG, or any ST show.

Except TOS, of course. They had Whimsical Endings there, when they would freeze-frame on Kirk and McCoy laughing at Spock.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (196)
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But he votes the right way so it doesn't matter.

Posted by: Ace at 01:07 PM | Comments (252)
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Plain white box. Black printing on the side says "NEW POST"

Oh wait, the Aussies caught up to some Nigerian fraudster who was on the FBI's most wanted list. I guess we got that...and higher gas prices, that's always welcome too. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:00 AM | Comments (419)
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Stacy McCain has a great piece about the underpinnings of the environmental movement.

What too many Americans today fail to understand is the extent to which popular ideas about many issues — ranging from contraception to environmentalism — are not organic, but were manufactured by this cabal of wealthy population-control fanatics led by David Rockefeller.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

These skillful indoctrinators are still at it and, after many decades of propaganda from the population control movement, their ideas have been sufficiently diffused throughout our culture that the indoctrinators themselves donÂ’t even know the etiology of their ideas, so that their students are entirely clueless.

Keep that in mind when you read this account of the greenie protest about the weather that was held in DC yesterday. The video below the fold perfectly captures the results of this indoctrination. more...

Posted by: andy at 08:33 AM | Comments (466)
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Discuss.

Why doesnt every gun automatically indicate whether there's a bullet in the chamber?

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) February 18, 2013

I pointed out on Twitter that David Frum isn't repected by either Democrats or Republicans. He was involved in the Bush administration, but he'll never get another job with a Republican administration. The Dems won't take him because people like him are a dime a dozen.

All he has left is trolling.

BTW, my response.

@davidfrum Why doesnt every David Frum column automatically indicate that it doesn't contain any new content or ideas?

— Ben(@BenK84) February 18, 2013

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:50 AM | Comments (285)
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• Freezing Kooks Rally Against Climate Change In DC
  
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• Gun Dealers Are Reporting Ammunition Shortages, But You Already Knew That
  
• America, Where The Green Graft Grows
  
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• Media Out To Destroy Ted Cruz
  
• Remember That Report That Said The Tobacco Industry Paid For The Tea Party? Well, We Paid For The Study
  
• Key Democrats Turn On Obamacare
  
• Bill Maher Agrees With The Iranians and Stormfront
  
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• Dr.Ben Carson On This Week
  
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM | Comments (358)
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His Majesty the King can generate all kinds of euphemisms about how and why we're running up our nation's debt: "investing in the future", "borrowing from ourselves", "betting on the American worker". What we're really doing is stealing from our children and generations yet unborn. It might be different if we were actually building a better world for them to live in, but we're not: we're squandering the money like a drunken sailor on a three-day liberty. We've pissed all our own money away, and now we're pissing theirs away too, and on trifles. Vacations, new cars, fancy dinners, retirement living that we didn't save enough money for. It's child abuse of the rankest and worst sort. We're selling our own children and grand-children into debtor's prison. They're going to hate us for it, and they have a right to.

We're spending our children's money without giving them any say or vote in the process. We are promising their future labor, their future wealth, their future lives, to back up our own foolish debts. We are making their future lives meaner and smaller and more constrained because we could not govern ourselves properly. It makes me angry. It makes me furious. It makes me want to apologize to everyone under the age of twenty or so for what we are doing to them. We would do well to think about this: the young people will not simply obligingly labor forever as beasts of burden, content to pay the debts run up by their foolish elders. Sooner or later they'll grow wise, and tell the greybeards to go pound sand. There'll be a reckoning, and the geezers aren't going to like it one bit.

"Fiscal trouble ahead for most future retirees", frets the Washington Post. "Fiscal trouble ahead", indeed. That's like referring to pneumonic plague as a little tickle in the throat. Here's some grim numbers for you:

The consequence is that the nation is facing a huge retirement savings deficit — as much as $6.6 trillion, or about $57,000 per household, according to a U.S. Senate report.

Using data on household finances collected by the Federal Reserve, the Center for Retirement Research estimates that 53 percent of American workers 30 and older are on a path that will leave them unprepared for retirement. That marks a sharp deterioration since 2001, when 38 percent of Americans were at risk of declining living standards in old age. In 1989, 30 percent faced that risk.

My own feeling is that the whole concept of "retirement" is simply untenable and will either fade away or collapse abruptly (depending on what happens in the larger economy). It's a nice idea to take twenty or thirty years off at the tail-end of your life to travel and enjoy yourself, but it turns out that this really isn't sustainable when you have more retirees than workers. If you can save enough money during your working life to take it easy, then go ahead. Otherwise you'll have to keep doing what every other human being has had to do throughout human history. You'll have to get up every morning and go to work.

I wish I could budget the same way the government does. Step 1: I'll declare that I plan to spend a million dollars on a new summer home next year. Step 2: I'll check my bank account and realize that my large debt and two hundred dollar checking account won't support that kind of expenditure. Step 3: I'll declare the million-dollar-house project defunct. Step 4: I just saved a million dollars off of next year's budget! I'm an economics genius!

There's an old saying: success has a thousand fathers, but failure is always an orphan. (There's another one, more particular to this situation: Rats always desert a sinking ship.)

Democrats love to raise taxes...until the higher taxes apply to them, and then all of a sudden it's an outrage or something. (Remember: no one bothered to define who was "rich" and who wasn't, and that was deliberate. If you want higher taxes on "the rich", you can just keep defining down what "rich" means.)

European GDP takes a swan-dive into the potty. As someone or other said, the Eurozone situation is beginning to look like they sacrificed the patient to save the tumor.

The "red state vs blue state" metaphor never sat well with me. I've always thought it was really more "rural America versus urban America", and this piece provides some evidence for that claim. The liberalization of America has corresponded more or less exactly with the urbanization of America.

His Majesty the King is peddling a dangerous fantasy about the debt crisis. And yet...many of His Majesty's loyal subjects prefer sweet lies to harsh truth, which is why His Majesty is still sitting on the throne. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:12 AM | Comments (215)
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Since I'm currently traveling to Florida tonight's ONT will be a movie night. This evening's feature presentation is Zulu (1964) starring Michael Caine in his first major movie role.

It recounts the Battle of Rorke's Drift which took place on Jan. 22 1879 in what is now South Africa. A Zulu army had just destroyed a British column of several thousand men and now the only force left defending British territory was a small garrison at Rorke's Drift led by two lieutenants. Consisting of just 150 men, some of them wounded, they made hasty defenses and over the course of 12 hours managed to fight off repeated attacks by over 4,000 Zulu warriors.

By dawn nearly every British soldier was wounded and they were down to their last rounds of ammunition - but the Zulus had retreated back into Zululand leaving hundreds of their dead. 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders of Rorke's Drift, the most ever given out to a regiment in a single battle.

I had seen bits of this movie over the years but only saw the full thing a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I can see why it made Michael Caine a star. Some of the attacks and deaths seem quick and gore-less by today's standards but overall the movie is well done and slowly builds up the tension until the final battle. And yes it has some boobehs in it. It took a few liberties with historical details (often portraying men as worse than they were) but still remained true to the actual history of the battle and gave the Zulu impi their due.

The Zulu warriors of the time were fierce, disciplined, able to march up to 50 miles at a time, and had good leaders; They were probably the most formidable native army the British ever faced. The battle of Rorke's Drift was cited by Victor Davis Hanson in his book, Carnage and Culture, as a landmark battle demonstrating the superiority of Western military tactics - in particular disciplined group defenses and volleys of aimed fire - over all other existing military traditions of the time.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:06 PM | Comments (502)
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!!!! Crank it up to 11 more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:05 PM | Comments (150)
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