Check out the Gun Nuts Radio Blog for details on tonight’s show, featuring an interview with the president of the newest international shooting sport, Action Airgun.
Tonight at 11pm Eastern time, www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts.
Only Ones rescue little girl
In my home state of California, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s (wooo LASD!) SWAT team rescued a 2 year old girl after her father shot and wounded her mother and held her hostage for two hours.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Byron Ward said that deputies responding to a call found the wounded woman outside the house.
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“He refused to surrender or release his daughter, while making threats to kill himself,” Deputy Ed Ward said.
Deputies believed the child was in imminent danger and fired a single shot that killed Arvallo when he was not near the child, authorities said.
According to the linked story, the mother was hospitalized with an abdominal wound, but is in stable condition. The father who threatened his daughter and shot the mother of his child in the stomach died from a single shot from LASD SWAT at the scene, which is in my estimation about what he had coming.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is one of the largest law enforcement organizations in the country, spanning an area over three times the size of Rhode Island, and performs a large array of law enforcement services in that area, as well as assisting with brush fire control, and rural search and rescue.
Tomorrow we’ll have more in the week long “Only Ones” series, highlighting the valuable and often quite thankless job done by America’s law enforcement officers.
Here we go again
The LA Times is repeating the “guns from America are fueling Mexico’s drug wars” meme. Again. I swear, this comes up every two or three months in the border states, every time some hack gets bored and decided to write a fluff piece so that his anti-gun friends will think he’s cool, I get to hear about how illegal aliens are rolling in to gun shops in New Mexico and buying automatic weapons, which is well, bullcrap. In fact, I’ve already debunked this meme once before, all the way back in 2007.
I don’t understand why it’s so persistent – Mexico is the Brady Campaign’s wet dream for gun laws, guns are effectively illegal for private citizens to own, but that doesn’t seem to stop any of the drug runners down there. The problem is course is that no one can actually explain how people are getting fully automatic Kalashnikov rifles down there “from the US”, since full auto rifles are effectively illegal here as well.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that a major US paper is essentially repeating the PR lines from the Brady Campaign.
Family gun safety
This past weekend, my brother’s wife was in town with my nephew for a wedding (or some boring activity), and while they were at the rehearsal dinner, I took the time to go shoot the Friday Night Steel Match at Marion County Fish & Game. Well, when I got home from the match, I needed to clean the Glock 24, and I figured that it was never to early to start teaching my nephew responsible gun ownership habits. After a brief conversation on the topic of never playing with guns, I took the Glock apart and then had him help me clean it. He actually got pretty good at helping clean the barrel.
You know, a little photoshop here and there to clean up the crazy lighting, and that’s practically the cover photo for American Rifleman – or a commercial for Hoppe’s, since I’m using a bore-snake, their cleaning kit, their patches, and their gun rug.
For the record, the little guy was perfectly well behaved, he obeyed all commands of “don’t touch that”, and even responded with the most adorably serious sounding “yeah” when I asked him if he wanted to help me clean.
Tomorrow on Gun Nuts
Tomorrow night on Gun Nuts: The Next Generation, we’ll be talk about Action Airgun! Click the link above to head over to the official Gun Nuts blog for all the information on the show. The show starts at 11pm Eastern time, and is available for download usually about an hour after we go off the air.
Only Ones risking their lives
Two Chicago PD officers risk their lives to help evacuate residents of an apartment building which caught fire.
Two alert Chicago police officers prevented a tragedy early Monday morning when they spied smoke and flames in the Pilsen neighborhood and helped dozens of residents vacate three buildings that eventually were consumed by fire, officials said.
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“They risk[ed] their own lives to save them,” said Monroe District Lt. Deborah Izzo, referring to officers Laura Agin and Michael Daliege who saw the fire in the 1500 block of West 18th Street shortly before 1:40 a.m. and immediately ran into one of the buildings and began rousing residents.
Congratulations to Laura Agin and Michael Daliege – it takes an extremely brave (and possibly crazy) person to run into a burning building, but these two officers are a credit to their uniform and police across the nation. I guess it’s a good thing that those “Only Ones” were on hand – because it looks like cops were the only ones risking their lives to help evacuate residents in that fire.
Friday Night Steel
It’s tonight! Looking forward to the match tonight, the first one I shot last month was a lot of fun. As usual, I’ll be running the Glock 24 in the Open category. Come out and shoot, I promise you won’t be disappointed. Hopefully tonight I’ll be able to get some pretty good video of the shoot for the blog, then I can entice more of my Indianapolis area readers out to a match.
Big Ass Knives
I like knives, although to me knives have never held the fascination that firearms hold. John Snow of the Gunshots has a bigass collection of equally bigass knives. You can see the entire photo shoot of John’s knife collection at Outdoor Life. Even I’m pretty impressed, especially with the WWII paratrooper knife. Check out the aptly titled Big Ass Knives.
Compare and contrast
You want to know the real reason why the pro-gun side is winning the battle for hearts and minds in the US – why over 70% of Americans believe that the 2nd Amendment confers and individual right to keep and bear arms, and why the Supreme Court upheld that?
A big part of it is that pro-gun people are willing to have open debate, right out there in the air. You can compare and contrast the fact that the Students for Concealed Carry’s first annual convention featured Paul Helmke. That’s righ, SCCC invited Helmke to be on one of their panels; admittedly he spent most of the time getting his ass handed to him by John Lott, but that’s okay. The fact that pro-gun people aren’t afraid of our positions and are more than willing to invite anti-gun activists to argue the issue on its merits speaks a lot about our movement.
Meanwhile, anti-gun people ban pro-gun activists from commenting, delete comments from their blogs, and generally avoid open debate like cockroaches avoid the light. I will give Paul Helmke props in that he was willing to attend that function, that was pretty out of character for an anti-gunner to do that.
That’s the big difference though – anti-gun people will constantly and consistently attempt to turn the argument about guns into America into an emotional issue, citing X,000 people killed with guns every year, or talking about blood in the streets, etc. Meanwhile, we argue with facts, statistics; our debate thrives in the open because it’s based on logic and reason, and not on appeals to emotion.
Update: Hello, Instapundit readers! If you’re interested, tonight at 11pm Eastern time, check out Gun Nuts Radio!