Gun Nuts Media

Romney claims NRA endorsement. The problem of course being that he never actually received the endorsement that he’s claiming. Oops is brought to you by erasers:

“[Romney]I just talked about, about guns. I told you what my position was, and what I, what I did as governor; the fact that I received the endorsement of the NRA.”

The problem?

He was never endorsed by the NRA, and didn’t have their official support during his 2002 gubernatorial campaign.

Mind you, this was the very same interview where Mitt said that he would likely support a ban on weapons of “extraordinary lethality”, whatever that means. Actually, I know exactly what “extraordinary lethality” means. It means “scary guns that are arbitrarily deemed too powerful”. So you know, basically anything. When you get to use made up terms that have arbitrary definitions, it’s easy to ban whatever you want.

Romney never had my vote. My concern is that I don’t want people falling for his bullshit. He never met an opinion he didn’t like if he thought it would get him somewhere, which is why he’s currently trying to talk about of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, he can’t afford to offend the NRA and gun owners if he wants the Republican nomination, but at the same time he doesn’t want to offend his more left wing base by suddenly acting like a conservative. The ultimate result is that he ends up looking spineless and weaselly.

Sebastian also has good coverage of a quote by Romney about the assault weapons ban, which quite aptly demonstrates everything I’ve been talking about here.

I went and saw “I am Legend” last night with the wife and Token Liberal Friend. I had heard a lot of things about this movie, from “it sucked” to “it was the best zombie/vampire movie EVAR”; plus I am a huge fan of the original book and Will Smith so I figured “what the hell”.

A little backstory first: this is the 3rd attempt to adapt the novel I am Legend into a movie. To be candid, the first two attempts sucked. “The Last Man on Earth” and “The Omega Man” were perfect examples of Hollywood past taking a good story and raping it to death and then defecating on the corpse.

The new adaption does depart from the book in some areas. That being said, I enjoyed the movie. I felt like it was well acted and well constructed, despite the departures from the original story. In that regard, it’s sort of like the Last of of the Mohicans movie. It departs from the book, but stands well as an individual narrative. I think too many people (myself included) sometimes get too hung up on movie adaptations of books, because we’re expecting them to be 100% faithful to the source material. I am Legend was no 100% faithful to the source material, but it was faithful (I felt) to the spirit of the original story; in that it focused on the isolation and hopelessness that the main character feels.

Now to the gunnie stuff – throughout the movie, Will Smith’s character uses three different firearms; a full auto M4 Carbine with all the cool tacticool gadgets, an H&K USP (for the fanboys I guess), and an M9 Beretta. The M4 and the Beretta make perfect sense, as his character is supposed to be a military officer, and these would be weapons platforms with which he’s familiar.

The movie was fun from a survivalist point of view. From the way Will Smith tried to preserve a sense of normal relations in his life, to how he talked to his dog, and the way his survival provisions were organized did a good job of showing the stress of being literally all alone for years. Of those, his relationship with the other main character of the film (his dog) is the most poignant. The character’s concern and love for the dog did an apt job of driving home the point that humans are tremendously social creatures, and in the absence of other humans with which to socialize, we’ll mentally “humanize” other living creatures to keep from going insane.

I enjoyed I am Legend; I think it stands well on it’s own legs, despite it’s departures from the novels. If you want to go see a good survivalist/zombie flick, it’s worth your dollar.  Just to give you an idea of how excited I was to see this movie – I skipped the 49ers game that was on TV last night to see it.  The NEVER show Niners games in the midwest.  And they won as well!

Researchers from the other, lesser major university in Indiana have found the wreckage of Captain Kidd’s ship.  Of course, my deep seated hatred of all things Cream and Crimson makes me wish that it had been any archaeological department but IU.  Oh well, at least they did something cool.

All kidding aside, the part of me that is fascinated with the Golden Age of Piracy thinks this is one of the coolest things ever.  The fact that literally hundreds of people have been searching for this wreck for years, and it was found in 10 feet of shallow water is absolutely amazing.

“I look forward to a meticulous study of the ship, its age, its armament, its construction,” Foster said. “Because there is extensive written documentation, this is an opportunity we rarely have to test historic information against the archaeological record.”

I guess it kind of makes me a nerd, but that’s awesome.  They are quite correct, there is extensive historical documentation of Captain Kidd’s exploits, and the ability to actually compare that to the vessel is pretty rare.

The St. Gabriel Possenti Society, Inc. this week awarded Jeanne Assam of New Life Church in Colorado Springs its Medal and Certificate of Honor, Society Founder/Chairman John M. Snyder announced here today.

If you’re not aware, the St. Gabriel society is a non-denominational group seeking to have St. Gabriel recognized by the Vatican as the Patron Saint of Handgunners.  I’m not Catholic, so I never really understood the whole “saint” thing, but it would be kind of cool to have a Patron Saint for handgunners.

By way of Sebastian, I see that Ryan from Red’s Trading Post is talking about how C&R FFLs could fall under the fire of the ATF.

So the obvious choice will be Curio & Relics Licensees, C&R dealers would be easy targets for the ATF, much like the individuals who held a FFL were in the mid 90’s.

You know, that wouldn’t surprise me even a little bit.  C&R’s would almost be low hanging fruit for the ATF to pick off.  There are a lot of crufflers out there, and I doubt that all of them keep meticulous records.  Of course, if the ATF is looking for reasons to pull your license, even the best kept, most accurate records aren’t going to save your bacon.

We can’t afford to look at what is happening at Red’s and assume that it couldn’t happen to us.  The ATF could quite literally show up at your house and demand to see your Bound Book and your C&R firearms.  God help you if it doesn’t match up.  One of my C&R rules of thumb is that any gun that I get that is C&R eligible I put on my A&D List; even if I didn’t use my C&R FFL to acquire said gun.  Say I buy an SKS at a gun show – that goes on the list.  In the event of an ATF audit, I don’t want there to be any C&R eligible guns in my house that don’t show up on my A&D list.

I’ve accepted that the ATF is completely out of control.  There are good field agents in the agency who actually want to go after real criminals, people who are trafficking illegal automatic weapons in from Mexico – but the bureaucracy  that truly runs the ATF has decided that they’d much rather go after people for paperwork errors than actually chase criminals.

I’m not so sure we can lay this particular story entirely at the feet of Islam.

Aqsa Parvez would leave home each morning wearing track pants and a Muslim head scarf. Once the 16-year-old got to school, she would remove the scarf and change into close-fitting jeans.

But, her friends said, her parents got wind of what she was doing. Parvez soon began showing up at school with bruises on her arms.

It was a struggle that may have led to Parvez’ death this week at the hands of her father, who was denied bail Wednesday after being charged with strangling her.

My problem with blaming Islam for this is complicated. I understand that there are cultural issues with Islam, and that when strictly practiced it is difficult to adapt to the Western World. That being said, I feel like this guy would have killed his daughter no matter what religion he was.

Bad parents are bad parents – it usually doesn’t matter to whom they direct their prayers. If some guy thinks his daughter is dressing like a slut and decided that the only way to deal with it is to abuse her, that’s what he’s going to do. “You won’t leave the house dressed like that” is followed by a slap in a lot more places than just Muslim homes.

Of course, I also can’t hold Islam completely blameless either; specifically because of the cultural influences that you see at work here. You cannot import an abusive, repressive culture to the West and expect us to sit idly by as you mutilate, degrade, and otherwise marginalize women. It is simply not acceptable.

Thanks to Tam for the story.