We’re the 12th fattest city in the country! Give yourself another donut, you fat sack of crap, and don’t you think about getting on that treadmill! We’ve got to catch Memphis!
Oh yeah – and while the BMI (the method used to determine obesity for the sake of this study) is not the most accurate tool in the world, it’s still decent enough to give rough percentages.
In a story surprisingly devoid of hysterics, the owner of an art gallery found an old Iver Johnson .32 S&W while renovating her building.
Apparently, her gallery is located in an area that in the early 1900’s was somewhat…questionable, and someone had stashed a hideout gun along with gambling ledgers in a hidden area. That’s actually a pretty cool find, when you think about it.
What’s even better is that it’s likely that she’ll be able to keep the gun, provided she takes the correct legal steps; which in Canada are somewhat onerous. The police said that the gun hasn’t been in any crimes (which would be difficult, seeing as it’s been hidden for 90 years); so there aren’t any unusual legal barriers to her owning the pistol.
I wish I could find old guns that someone had stashed somewhere. Maybe a .41 Colt revolver or something cool.
I had a friend once tell me that the Illinois FOID system would never be used to try and establish semi-legitimate reasons to deny law abiding citizens gun ownership. Now, I know he was trying to defend “reasonable restriction”, but in Illinois the anti-gun bureaucracy has run wild, and is trying to deny a retired cop a renewal on his FOID:
Because he still owns the guns, it came time last month for Fitzpatrick to renew his state firearm owner’s identification card, an ID that he has held ever since the law went into effect in 1968.
And that’s when Fitzpatrick, now 73 and living in Roselle, got a surprise.
Instead of a new FOID card, the Illinois State Police sent Fitzpatrick a letter informing him he had some explaining to do.
The required criminal background check had turned up the fact Fitzpatrick had been arrested on a charge of malicious conversion, a lawyerly term for theft.
Before he could get his card renewed, Fitzpatrick would need to provide court records showing the disposition of the case. A conviction could disqualify him.
This struck Fitzpatrick as odd, considering that the arrest was from May 1, 1956.
Here’s the wild part – as I mentioned, Fitzpatrick is a retired cop. He’s had his FOID since ’68. His prior arrest (when he was in the service) did not disqualify him from being a Chicago cop for 30 years, or from renewing his FOID every five years since 1968.
If I didn’t know better, I would think that the Illinois State Police was looking for reasons to deny firearms ownership to people. Oh wait.
I grew up at the ass-end of the Mojave Desert, and if memory serves me, it only snowed twice during the 15 years that I can remember. I hate winter, and I hate the snow.
Mostly, I hate people who drive in the snow. This applies especially to the driver of the gold Honda minivan who felt it was necessary to tailgate me for 3 miles on a two lane road that was covered in slush and ice. If you read this Mr. Gold Honda, you’re a jerkoff.
I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of snow…from inside my house with a hot cup of coffee.
Unfortunately, I have not yet mastered the mental skill that will allow me to coalesce my hatred of winter into a beam of pure hate which is capable of melting snow. When I do, I’ll quit my job and higher myself out to Hamilton County – that way they’ll have someone on staff who actually clears roads, instead of just running one snowplow down the main road once.
All the different places I’ve lived have had different reactions to winter.
Antelope Valley, CA: “What’s this stuff falling from the sky? Eh, who cares it’ll be gone in 20 minutes anyway.”
New London, CT: “Hey, it’s probably going to snow like 400 feet overnight. Classes are still on for tomorrow.”
Purdue University, IN: “Hey, the winter storm is going to cover the ground in ice and shit. Instead of salting, we’re going to run high speed brushes over the sidewalks to ‘brush off the snow’, but all that will actually do is polish the snow into ice and turn the whole damn campus into a skating rink. I hope you like broken ankles. Classes are still on.”
DC/Metro Area: “OH GOD AN INCH OF SNOW CLOSE ALL THE ROADS AND SCHOOLS WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD.”*
Indy/Metro Area: “It’s going to snow about 4 inches overnight. Don’t worry, we can assure you that we won’t even start to plow or salt until it’s too late to actually be effective, ensuring that your morning drive to work will be complicated by closed roads and cars sliding off the roads.”
So yeah. I hate winter.
*Note – this is how every piece of news in the DC/Metro area is reported.
How I love your terrifying PSAs.
That’s pretty funny, eh?*
*Only funny if you’re sick and wrong like me.
My google alerts pop up the most awesome things some times, like this letter to the editor of a local paper somewhere in “The South”. It’s so funny that I’m going to copy/paste/fisk the whole thing.
I moved here about four months ago from Long Island, N.Y. As my mom and I drove around Hendersonville, we quickly noticed that very near to East Henderson High School is a gun shop.
Uh…so what? Would you be opposed if a chainsaw store was near a highschool? Oh wait…you’re from New York. Say no more, as your cultural hoplophobia is well documented. I do enjoy how your second paragraph begins with the statement “I moved here from New York”, the unspoken part of that being “and that makes me better than you southern hilljacks”.
At first we were shocked, and then we realized it isn’t too big of a deal down here in the South. However, I feel that having a gun store so closely located to the high school sends out a bad message.
How does that send a bad message? That’s not even logical. What does having a gun shop next to a high school say that becomes a “bad message”?
Not only is it showing a typical stereotype of the South, but it sends out a message of violence to teenage kids. It makes it appear as though guns are easily accessible along with making it appear to the teenagers that violence can be the answer to their problems.
That is the stupidest thing I have ever read.* A gun shop doesn’t send a message of violence any more than having a cutlery shop sends a “message of stabbing”. A gun shop (which is a pretty ambiguous term, actually) only sends a message of violence if your personal bias causes you to believe that guns are inherently violent. Of course, if you believe that, you’re an idiot.
I understand that it’s unreasonable to have the gun store go out of business, but I feel it would be appropriate for them to relocate.
Why should they have to move because you can’t get over your prejudices about inanimate objects? That’s unreasonable.
The author is right when he says that guns are common in South. But where he loses his credibility is when he assumes that the commonality of guns is somehow a negative stereotype, or a bad thing. I guess it’s just New York hoplophobia.
This time in San Francisco, where the local police were trading $50 gift cards for “your guns”. You get $200 for semi-auto rifles, $150 for handguns, and $100 for “standard” rifles.
That means that you could go on Gunbroker and buy a bunch of cheap potmetal revolvers for $50-$80 bucks a piece, and then go and turn them in for $150 each. You could make anywhere from 100% to 200% profit.
Of course, this being a San Fran paper, the article wouldn’t be complete without a healthy dose of Pants-Shitting – all supplied by the San Francisco Police Department:
Each of the 106 weapons turned in could mean one less murder in a city that so far this year has seen 94 homicides, not to mention one less injury or death from a child finding the family gun and fiddling with it, said San Francisco police Sgt. Mikail Ali, acting director of the mayor’s office of criminal justice.
Just from reading the article, it sounds like most of the guns were the aforementioned pot-metal revolvers, which could only kill someone if you bashed them repeatedly over the head with it.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a California police department would rather have 7 officers sit around all day collecting granny’s sock-drawer .22, instead of actually being on the streets trying to apprehend criminals. Maybe if they didn’t wast so much manpower with gun buybacks, they’d be able to cut down the number of murders.
I kid, I know it actually is – but I get the sneaking suspicion that MADD would love to get it back.
Also, as of Saturday, people can lose their driver’s licenses for providing alcohol to anyone under 21. The penalty is important because many underage drinkers get alcohol from friends or family members, said Craig Lloyd, the executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
The law means that, theoretically, parents could be punished for giving a glass of wine to their 20-year-old son or daughter, even if the 20-year-old never gets behind the wheel.
Lloyd said that’s not excessive.
“It’s a zero-tolerance policy,” he said. “Breaking the law is breaking the law.”
I agree with Sebastian 100%, this is precisely none of the state’s business. Like him, I agree that the drinking age should be 18 – and like him I think that the state is meddling way to much into people’s business. It is already illegal to provide alcohol to minors, so instead of actually educating kids on responsible drinking, we’re just going to make it illegaller.*
*I know that “illegaller” isn’t a word.
Let’s get together and blame video games!
A six-month study released by Iowa State University found that video game violence influences players to be more aggressive with proven teaching techniques.
My regular readers probably know that I do not ever advocate blaming outside sources when some kid shoots up his school. Just as it is not the fault of the gun when someone kills someone, neither is it the fault of a video game. What concerns me a lot of the time is that in our haste to protect and defend the 2nd Amendment, I’ve seen plenty of gun owners develop tunnel vision and toss blame onto other issues.
A perfect example of this is the book I just finished reading, Written in Lead. I have the recently issued addition, which added three chapters: one for Waco, one for Columbine, and one for the DC/Beltway Snipers. The author of the book is unabashedly pro-gun, which comes across much more strongly in the later chapters. What concerned me is that in his chapter on Columbine, he descended into the easy trap of forcing the blame onto violent video games.
I will admit that they make an easy target for gun owners; the media gets almost as hysterical over Doom/Half-Life/Grand Theft Auto as they do over Evil Black Rifles. I understand the temptation to push the blame onto that, and then breathe a sigh of relief because our issue isn’t being attacked.
The problem is that it’s a stupid idea. It doesn’t address the problem, and it just delays the inevitable attack on firearms. The people that blame the symptoms aren’t going to stop just because they’ve blamed one, they want to get rid of everything that they think is scary and evil.
Blaming video games isn’t the answer, just as blaming guns isn’t the answer. I have played “violent video games” since I was 9 or 10, and I didn’t turn into a murderous sociopath, and neither did any of my brothers.