It seems that Sebastian is reconsidering his thoughts on the killing and consumption of our most dangerous enemy, the Bushy-Tailed Menace, also know as Arborus Rattus.
Having taken many of our furry enemy on the field of honor, I can say with the utmost conviction that he is best enjoyed in a stew, or chili. Personally, I prefer the chili method myself; a good spicy Squirrel Chili always hits the spot.
Apparently, the badguy weapon of choice (at least in NYC) is no longer the “assault weapon” as loudly proclaimed by the media. No, this week it’s the lowly Hi-Point 9mm. For a brief period, I owned a Hi Point C9, and you can see my review of it here. To say that I was underwhelmed would be putting it mildly, and I eventually sold the Hi-Point, saved up a little bit more cash, and purchased a Taurus PT92 – which incidentally does not suck the big one.
Back to the article regarding the apparent wide-spread use of the Hi-Point for criminals in New York, one section caught my eye.
Selling for as little as $250 on the street, the High Point 9-mm. dominated a list packed with cheap firepower.
$250 for a Hi-Point? Man, someone is making an absolute KILLING (ha-ha) of the resale of these things. I bought mine for $125 brand new, and you can get them from FFLs via Gunbroker for as low as 100 bucks.
This does illustrate a point about the high blackmarket demand for handguns, a demand which is not abated by any gun control laws. Frankly, the most interesting part of this article to me is the economic nature of the blackmarket. I must confess a fascination that a cheap, unreliable firearm commands an illegal price more than double what it would retail for to a lawful citizen.
While this may be slightly morbid, I’d be really interested to see what the markup for good quality firearms, which models are the most popular, etc. I suppose it’s what I get for being a Business major in college.
It must be nice to “do something about gun control” without actually having to do anything; and to top it off, make a tidy profit while you do nothing!
The spring 2008 collection of Brandon’s clothing line Melani Von Alexandria, which debuted at a SoHo art gallery Thursday as part of New York’s Fashion Week, featured items fashioned out of real guns that have been collected by Philadelphia sheriff’s deputies, melted down and sculpted into cuffed bracelets, dangling necklaces and pendants. Her tagline: With each piece made, another gun is taken off the street.
I honestly don’t even know where to begin with this article. And actually, that last sentence in the paragraph I quoted is an outright lie, because the guns had already been taken “off the street” by the Sheriff’s Office, so really she’s not actually doing anything.
Uncle has a saying that “Gun Control is what you do when you don’t want to do anything”, and I’ve never seen it more aptly applied than right here. While I applaud this woman’s desire to “stop violence”, I am also relatively certain that taking already confiscated firearms and turning them into jewelry isn’t going to help anyone.
But hey, now she can feel like she’s “making a difference”, without having to do any actual work beyond taking melted junk and slapping it on some designer clothes. It’s nothing but a empty show, designed to make people “feel good” about themselves. When you get down to it, that’s what gun control is all about – it’s most powerful force is blind appeals to emotion.
That the ATF hasn’t shown up, demanding to see the machine gun in question.
A preliminary report said the whale was shot with a .50-caliber machine gun, Oswell said.
The long and the short of the story is that the Makah Tribe has subsistence fishing rights for whales, provided they abide by the regulations put in place by Fisheries and Wildlife, which are enforced by the Coast Guard. Right now, the Guard is investigating to see if this whale was illegally hunted.
What I would honestly like to know is where the Makah tribe got a .50 caliber machine gun, if indeed that was what was used on the whale. I also sort of wonder if the “traditional subsistence fishing” license of the Makahs covers the use of automatic weapons.
Update/Edit: It seems that while I was watching football last night, Sebastian was scooping the hell out of me on this story. He has the full details, which include a lot of interesting information about the rifle (not a machine gun, way to go CNN) and why the tribe was using it.
Just an update on the match, I did a test shoot on the target this weekend, and at 50 feet the bullseye on that big rhino is suddenly a lot harder to hit. It would be a piece of cake from a bench rest, but since this is offhand it really required a lot of patience on my part.
Secondly, at 25 feet, the bullseye on those 5 rhino targets are damn near invisible. I had the most success with my .45s, because the big bullet cuts a huge hole in the paper.
Go shoot! I want some entries already! Email them to me at admiralahab (at) gmail (dot) com.
In light of the recent shenanigans from the JPFO and Kim; Sebastian would like to know what you (us) would do to improve the NRA, instead of just bitching about it. Here are my ideas.
Personally, I’d like to see the NRA spend some more money educating and teaching, not just lobbying. While I enjoy our political power in DC, I honestly feel that education programs that reach out to Suzy Soccermom and teach the literal truth about guns would be tremendously useful.
My biggest pet peeve about the NRA is the face that they show to the public. It’s not that the face is bad, but the face is old. Honestly, I don’t feel like the NRA does a great job of representing my demographic of people in their mid to late 20’s.
The real “improvement” I’d like to see would be for the NRA to plant “shooting education centers” in major cities around the country. It would be one part classroom, one part range; and could offer shooter education classes, new shooter orientation, etc. I would really like to see a concerted effort made by the NRA to educate people that aren’t on our side – that would be the biggest change of all.
Figure out a way to reach Suzy Soccermom in her Lexus SUV.
This stupid crap has got to stop. As much as I admire the JPFO for their adamant stance on the 2nd Amendment, we don’t actually gain anything by sub-dividing and fighting amongst ourselves. At Snowflakes, Sebastian does a pretty good job of summing up how I feel about this sort of thing.
Seriously, that’s not going to help anything. Going after Joaquin Jackson for what he said was fine, but undermining other pro-gun groups and promoting the fragmentation of the movement help no one.
Especially when Mr. Jackson has already explained what he was trying to say right here at the NRA-ILA.
You don’t like what Mr. Jackson said? That’s fine, you’re entitled to your own opinion. However, calling for a “Zumboing” or similar silliness is not only foolish, it’s downright idiotic. Do you even remember what happened in the media after the Zumbo thing? All the mainstream media took the holy fervor with which we eagerly consumed one of our own and used it to paint us as extremist, reactionary nutcases.
Just because Zumbo apologized and is now apparently a “true believer” doesn’t mean that we should ignore the consequences of our actions. In the haste to eradicate “Fuddism” or somesuch from our holy, pure ideals, we run the risk of alienating people that we actually need on our side to win this thing.
What’s funny about all of this is that I actually am a 2nd Amendment extremist. I believe that “shall not be infringed” means exactly that; I think that what Mr. Jackson said was foolish and not well thought out. But that doesn’t mean that I’m willing to pillory a valuable member of the single most effective pro-gun organization in the country just I can feel good about myself and how I’m “contributing to the cause”.
When it comes to gun rights, the JPFO, the GOA, and all the organizations other than the NRA do serve a valuable purpose – I think that we need those groups to contribute to the larger body as a whole. But when those groups instigate fights with the NRA, it doesn’t help. We need the NRA, and the NRA needs us; Hunters, Cowboy Action Shooters, Tacticool Teddy’s, and everyone else. This is exactly the kind of foolishness that we don’t need.
Even more so than the JPFO, I’m a little disappointed in Kim’s reaction to all this. He was one of the first bloggers I read, and part of the reasons I got into blogging. His reach is over 9,000 unique hits a day, and it pains me to think that he’s more than happy to continue to incite people to subdivide and fight amongst ourselves. Yelling at the NRA and eating another one of our own just isn’t going to help any one.
Update: This quote from Robb is too good to leave in the comments.
I want the group to use my money to fight the gun grabbers, not other pro-gun groups.
I wanted to clear up some confusion on the E-Postal Match for this month.
Targets
Shoot two of the targets that have one rhino. Each piece of paper (1 rhino per paper) gets 5 rounds from your .22 rifle, for a total of ten rounds from the rifle.
Shoot two of the targets with five rhinos. Each piece of paper (5 rhinos per paper) gets ten shots – shoot each rhino twice. Your total shots with the handgun should be 20 shots.
Guns
You need a .22 rimfire rifle for stage one, and pistol in any caliber for stage two. You can also shoot the same gun with different entries. For example, I can use my Ruger 10/22 as my rifle, and then pair it my Ruger GP100, my Walther P22, or my ’58 Remington. That would be three different entries. The caveat is that if you want to use the same rifle multiple times, you have to shoot new targets for every entry. So you can’t just shoot one set of targets and call that your “rifle entry”; for every entry you have to shoot a complete set of targets.
I think that covers all the questions I received.
Now go shoot!
The more they stay the same. Just because I’ve moved websites and changed the name of the blog doesn’t mean that I don’t get really, really, really excited when a new western comes out, especially when it’s a remake of one of the all time classic westerns, 3:10 To Yuma.
The new version, featuring two of my favorite actors in Christian Bale and Russel Crowe, has raised my hopes to a level not seen since Open Range. The fact that Rotten Tomatoes score the new 3:10 as 81% fresh (a good sign) and cnn.com gave it a positive review only fills me with even more hope. When given a choice between a good western, and well, pretty much anything else, I’ll pick the western 99 times out of a 100.
In other movie news, I will also probably go see Shoot ’em Up, for a couple of reasons. Anything that Entertainment Weekly describes with this sentence “But then its pulpy violent excess will tip over … into slightly more excessive excess. That’s its silly, scuzzball joy” has my attention. Additionally, I would pay money to watch Clive Owen read out of the phone book.
I’ll let you know what I think about 3:10 to Yuma, just as soon as I convince my wife that a western with Christian Bale and Russel Crowe is totally worth her time.
I often use Canada as a model for things I don’t want to see happen here in the States, especially when it comes to gun control/crime issues. Perhaps because Canada really is “close to home”, and it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination for me to see Canada-style gun control implemented here in the US.
With that in mind, I find the following article especially disturbing.
Courts, particularly in gun cases, have begun to retreat from the idea that tainted evidence should be excluded from trials, legal experts say, pointing to a ruling this week from the Ontario Court of Appeal.
I like it when criminals are convicted of crimes, especially if that crime involves violence, or the use of a firearm. However, I do not like it when the law is disregarded in making those convictions. My deep and abiding concern is that I have seen a decent portion of the rights of the accused shredded in the name of the War on (Some) Drugs; and I mean that in the most personal sense.
It went on to say that even if the trial judge was right and L.B. was questioned and searched in breach of the Charter, evidence of the gun should be admitted at a trial anyway because any rights violations were not serious.
“Because any rights violations were not serious” is an absolutely terrifying statement to me. Saying that means that the State values some of your “rights” more than other “rights”, which doesn’t really make them rights at all, now does it?
When I look at an utter disregard for the law like we’re starting to see in Canada, and then I couple it with the increasing trend here towards Nanny-Statism, I get concerned. It’s not helping that the majority of the viable presidential candidates never met an authoritarian position that they didn’t like.
A loss of liberty, any liberty, is never a good thing. Due process, at least in the US, is part of the Bill of Rights; and as I see due process eroding in Canada it really does make me afraid for us.