Gun Nuts Media

I’m certain that most of you heard about the citizen that plugged some pismire in New Hampshire after the little scumbag had murdered a cop? Kim du Toit featured it in his “righteous shootings”.

Well, in my surprise of the day, because the scumbag was related to someone famous (who is also a douchebag) the media and some of the townspeople are trying to portray the murdered cop as some sort of abuser of power.

Here’s my problem with that theory – assume for the moment that the cop had maybe whacked him once, which the family of the deceased alleges. That doesn’t justify shooting the officer four times and then running him the fuck over with your car.

Here’s the part that really seals the deal for me; at least in regards to the “abusive cop vs. poor oppressed citizen”. It’s a little long, but pertinent.

In January 2003, an aunt, Larisa Kenney, sought a restraining order against her nephew, then 19. In a handwritten letter, she told the court Liko had frightened her by chain-sawing trees near her cabin, sending one crashing onto her roof as she slept. When she confronted him, she said Liko exploded — shouting, grabbing her and then following her on his ATV as she ran to safety at a relative’s home.

Just weeks later, Liko Kenney had a violent run-in with McKay, who had followed tire tracks into an isolated parking area. Court documents say it took three officers to subdue Kenney, who tried to escape three times, once while cuffed and shackled.

One officer said Kenney grabbed McKay in the groin and that McKay reacted by punching Kenney in the face. Kenney’s family and many in town say McKay broke Kenney’s jaw that night, but Grafton County Attorney Rick St. Hilaire said Kenney’s jaw was not broken.

Kenney could have gone to prison after pleading guilty to resisting arrest and assaulting McKay. But he got 15 days in jail, time served, when McKay asked for leniency, according to St. Hilaire.

The cop who was murdered asked for leniency at the sentencing hearing of the little scumbag. That really doesn’t say “abusive authority” to me, but then again I’m not crazy.

Of course, there are also some folks who are upset at the good citizen that plugged the asshole in question. It seems that the good citizen was an ex-Marine, which does help explain the rather decisive outcome, but there’s always someone to piss in the Cheerios.

Jean McLean…called the killings “vigilante justice”.

Well, let’s revisit the killing, for the moment. Citizen sees scumbag shoot, then run over cop. Somehow, citizen acquires downed officer’s firearm, instructs scumbag to drop his weapon. Scumbag does not drop his weapon, citizen who has just witnessed scumbag commit one heinous murder sends scumbag to his eternal rest. Sounds really vigilante to me. Doesn’t sound at all like justified self-defense (which the police department and the city attorney said it was).

The short version of the story is that Liko Kenney (the dead scumbag) was took his final moments on earth to commit a brutal murder; Bruce McKay (the cop) has left a child and a bride-to-be behind him, and that an ex-Marine did the right thing in a tough situation.

Update: In further unsurprising events, the Boston Globe is attempting to paint the ex-Marine as some sort of loner/crazy. Now, while it appears that his past civilian activities had some blemishes, I’m still unconvinced that this was some sort of vigilante killing.

There’s a saying that everyone has heard, “It’s not whether you win or loose, it’s how you play the game.” I don’t necessarily buy into that theory, because I really, really like winning. However, I also enjoy doing things that challenge me, whether or not I necessarily succeed at them.

That brings us to the topic of today’s post, the value of losing. I absolutely despise losing, and I hate failure. I mentioned once before that the only way to truly fail at something is if when you don’t succeed, you fail to learn anything from your lack of success. I stand by that statement.

If losing is so bad, and something that I will go to great lengths of effort and expend blood, sweat, and tears to avoid; what value can be found in it? You’d be surprised, and I know that I have been.

To me, losing has always been that bogeyman of failure, and I’ve been guilty on many occasions of losing a game/sport/contest and being a poor sport of the whole thing; which of course impedes my ability to learn from my loss, and thusly win next time. Every now and then (and more often as I get older) I actually do keep my head out of my ass and manage to maintain my dignity if I do lose. When I do that, often the first thing I learn from losing is I get a refresher course in one of my most challenging topics: Humility.

I am not a very humble person, my father tried to teach me humility, and it just didn’t take. I don’t feel too bad about it, because it didn’t take very well with him either. One of the greatest lessons I learned in humility was when I was a very young warthog, home on leave from the Coast Guard Academy. Momma Ahab had introduced me to a nice young lady named Mandy that she knew from the gym where she taught. Mandy offered to play racquetball and I offered to take her shooting. Now, being 19, in excellent shape, I figured that my athleticism would more than make up for my lack of experience at racquetball.

What I didn’t know was that Mandy played on her college team, and was quite good. When she finished kicking my sorry ass all over the court, I could hear the words of my father ringing in my ears. “Son, don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash” or something to that extent. I suspect to this day that Momma Ahab was setting me up in the hopes of taking me down a couple of pegs. It worked.

Of course, just learning humility would be enough, but there is a lot more value that can be extracted from not succeeding. The 2nd most valuable thing that I’ve ever picked up from not winning is perseverance. I don’t believe in quitting, especially if I want to do something. I quit at something that mattered once, and I don’t want to ever do that again.

When I first started shooting Collegiate pistol for the Coast Guard, I was lousy at Free Pistol. I hated the weird gun, the teeny targets, everything about it. Then I started practicing more. I sucked, and I lost, then I sucked a little less, my scores started to rise, you know how it goes. the point is that it would have been easy to just say “screw it” to Free Pistol and focus on an event I had more natural talent for – but the ability to persevere through my failure and bring my game up was a much more valuable lesson.

The final value of losing that I’ll talk about today is the joy that it adds to victory. This may not apply to everyone, but I don’t particularly like “coasting to victory”; I much prefer scrapping tooth-and-nail for my wins. I love to win, and even more than that I love to win at things that I’ve previously lost at. For instance, when I passed Chemistry at the Academy, the fact that I had struggled, failed assignments, and just had a general bad time with the subject most of my life; finally getting it and stepping up and beating it was delicious.

I don’t want you guys to think I’m going soft, and that I’m saying it’s okay to lose. I hate losing. I absolutely despise it, and I compete to win at everything. Ask my wife; I hate losing at anything from Rock, Paper, Scissors to a game of 9-ball. I can’t even stand to lose at board games. I’m not saying that you should go out and lose a bunch so you can learn lessons, either. But when you lose, you only fail if you don’t learn something from it. There are a lot more lessons than the three basics I mentioned here.

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but it’s now time to vomit some hate share my knowledge with you. In the travel tips and hotel wisdom section of today’s event, we’re going to look at two aspects of the hotel industry that are often a huge cause of headaches for both the traveler and the hotel employee.

Hotel Reservations
I’m sure a lot of you have stayed at a hotel before, so you’re familiar with the reservation process. You can either call in and reserve a room, book one through various means on the web, or just show up and ask if they have rooms available (called a “walk-in”).

Of the three, the third is the least preferable for the hotel if they’re busy, but great if they’re trying to fill rooms.

I’m sure that the following situation has happened to a few readers, and I know that I’ve been a part of it (from the desk side) on many, many occasions. You show up to check into your nice hotel, expecting to get the King Sized bed (or two doubles) that you requested, only to be informed by the front desk that “I’m sorry ma’am, I don’t have any of that room type available”.

That’s usually followed by one of two things, either they don’t have any available because they oversold that room type (happens a lot with busy hotels) or they don’t have any available because housekeeping hasn’t finished cleaning them yet. In the case of the latter, you’ll end up waiting for your room – and we’ll address waiting in a moment.

Hotels routinely oversell room types, whether it’s King sized beds, or smoking rooms hotels count on a certain percentage of their reservations to not arrive. That means that there are times when I could have 25 reservations for King sized beds on the books, and only 20 rooms with King sized beds available. Assuming that there’s no wash, that means that five people who want a king sized bed aren’t going to get one; that’s not even counting the people that booked as “No specific room type – request king”.

This puts the hotel in the situation where we have to decide to whom we should give the king sized beds. The hotels I’ve worked for have used variations of the following methods to prioritize their overbooked room types.

1. VIPs
This should need no explanation. If a VIP needs a room type, they get it.

2. Points Members
If you’re a member of HHonors, or Priority Club, or Gold Passport, etc that generally means that your reservation is “more important” than a non-member. Hotels try to keep their regulars happy, because it costs roughly five times as much money to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing customer. Plus, repeat customers spend more money than “non-brand loyal” customers, which makes them even more valuable. Additionally, in certain organizations, some points members (Hyatt Gold Passport Diamond Level for instance) can ascend high enough on the food chain to qualify for VIP status.

3. Call-in confirmations
Two days before you’re scheduled to arrive, call in and confirm your room type, and asked to blocked to a specific room. The hotel (if it’s good) should note your reservation and set aside a specific room to match your request for you. Bear in mind that calling in and getting blocked to a specific room could increase your wait time – and you’re lower on the totem pole than a points club member.

4. First come, first serve
For people that don’t get special treatment like those above, it’s generally based on a first come first serve basis. If I’ve got the rooms and you’re here first, congratulations.

The key thing to remember is that your reservation doesn’t necessarily guarantee a specific room type (unless it says so in the Terms), it guarantees that you’ll have a bed in the hotel.* The best way to make sure that you get what you’d like is to be someone that gets special treatment, and show up early.

Waiting
Let’s say you’re in a situation where you have to wait for your hotel room. Most hotels advertise that their check-in time is at 3pm (or sometime around there). If you show up before 3pm and they have rooms available, great. Sometimes (when the hotel is busy) rooms are coming available only as fast as housekeeping can turn them around, and it’s after 3pm. This means that you may have to wait to get your room.

Hotel employees don’t like making our guests wait for the room that they’re paying for, because people get all pissed off about it. That poor kid behind the front desk is actually more frustrated than you, because he’s completely powerless. He’s probably refreshing his screen every 10 seconds while praying to Jesus, Allah, and Buddha that housekeeping will hurry the hell up and clean some fucking rooms. Additionally, since the 3rd Church of Christ Holy Congregational Meeting of Revival Holiness Convention buses arrived three hours ahead of schedule, he hasn’t any clean rooms since noon. He also hasn’t had a cigarette in five hours, and might kill your for some nicotine right about now.

The point I’m trying to make about waiting is that sometimes, even at the best of hotels you have to wait. It usually means that someone screwed up somewhere, which happens. The thing is that the guy that screwed up 99% of the time isn’t the guy that you’re yelling at behind the desk. Take it easy on him and be cool, his day is probably sucking a lot worse than yours.

My friend Amanda has updated her comic at Way Too Random, including a cameo of yours truly!

The plot is that Amanda is visiting my (fictional) gun shop called “The Powder Keg”.

Also, I do not have a beard.

“Everyone is biased, it’s just a matter of picking the best bias to be biased by.”

I did mention yesterday exactly how much I love alliteration, which probably has something to do with why that’s still one of my favorite quotes. Well, that and the fact that it’s completely true. Everyone is biased, the key is whether or not a person is aware of their biases on certain issues, and how those can affect your critical thinking process.

For example: I am generally biased in favor of a more conservative viewpoint, but I’m also aware of that. Because of my conservative bias, I avoid Fox News like the plague, not because I think it’s bad; it’s because since their organizational bias often parallels mine, I’m less likely to be able to separate biased opinion from objective fact.

That’s actually why I prefer to watch CNN for my news – because their bias runs opposite of mine, I’m more likely to notice it and separate bias from fact.

I actually consider a bias that I agree with to be more dangerous than a bias that I don’t agree with. From my personal point of view, if I agree with what your opinion, I’m less likely to apply the necessary critical thought process to examine your opinion (and inherent biases) for their own value.

The flip side of that is that sometimes I’ll dismiss the opinions of other people entirely because they don’t agree with my predetermined bias. So it is very easy to fall into the trap of just rolling along with your preconceived opinions.

Bias in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, Webster’s defines bias as: “an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment”. Noting the “sometimes” qualifier to unreasoned judgment, it appears that a bias is really nothing other than an indicator of how you’ll react to an opinion.

Having a good knowledge of your own personal biases can really make you more effective at expressing your opinions, debating opponents, it can even regrow balding hair! Well, I might have lied about that last one, but the first two are true.

So, the question then is what are your biases? Feel free to share them in the comments – I’ll share one here.

I am generally biased in favor of the police. In the past, I have excused videotaped negative behavior by police officers because of my bias in that area. I accept that at times my bias in that area prevents me from applying all the critical thinking to certain issues that deserve it.

Oh man, I love alliteration, even if it’s only phonetic alliteration like that title. The actual subject of this entry is an interest I picked up in the Coast Guard, that of knots.

It is my firm belief that any man worth his salt should be able to tie the following knots, as they have practical use in day to day life.

1. The Overhand Knot, essentially the basic knot that everyone knows how to tie.
2. The Bowline (pronounced “bo-line”), this is one the most useful knots.
3. The Clove Hitch, which is useful for securing a line to an object.
4. The Figure Eight Knot, which is the most common knot for preventing lines from slipping from retention devices.
5. The Slip Knot, which is useful for all kinds of tasks.
6. The Fisherman’s Knot, which is good for binding two pieces of line together. You might not use this one as much, but you’ll be glad to know it when you need it.

Knowing how to tie a good knot definitely falls into my list of “John Wayne Approved” skills. Plus, a good knowledge of knots can come in handy the next time your kids get out of line are studying for their scout badges.

Lately, I’ve become dissatisfied with the sights on my Walther P22. If you’re not aware, the rear sight is windage adjustable (which I’m fine with), and the the front sight is “adjustable” for elevation by using one of the three interchangeable front sight posts.

My problem with this set up is that the front sight posts tend to work loose during rigorous rapid fire. Additionally, I have a decent little Kydex Fobus holster for the thing, which would make it PERFECT for knocking around the woods, but when you draw from the Fobus holster you stand a 75% chance of knocking the front sight off (and in my case, loosing it forever). In the past I tried this option from Walther, although they say that it doesn’t fit the P22; in fact it fits right into the hole in the slide for the sights. The problem was that I couldn’t secure it with the provided nut; it was just pushed into the slide like the standard sights. I tried that, and on my first shot the nice little fiberoptic departed company from the slide to destinations unknown.

After reading around on RimfireCentral a bit, it seems that some folks were able to use the screw to secure the P99 sight to the P22’s slide, so I’m going to try that again to get a studier front sight package. I’ll let you know what the end results are.

My next firearms purchase is probably going to be the 5 inch version of the P22; I know I could just buy the barrel kit and swap it back and forth, but I want two complete pistols – one of which I’ll be submitting to the Ultimate P22 Tacticool Transformation (details later).