I’m off to the Evil Loophole Gun Show

I fully expect to see literal armies of terrorists walking the halls, buying machine guns without background checks.

**snort**

Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight face. I’ll actually post a report here about it later.

Edit: So I’m back from the show. All in all, it was a lot of fun, I ended up with a new 9mm pistol for a steal, so I’ll call it a good day. It was a little rough, because they had one of the NEF .45/.410 survival rifles that I really want, in the end I went with the new carry gun.

Also, I didn’t see any Al-Qaeda fighters buying machine guns without background checks. Actually, I even saw a guy fail the NICS check; he got denied by the fed. Tough beans for him.

I do have one comment, though. This is directed to the one guy who has the booth that consists of “WWII” paraphernalia, and when I say “WWII”, I mean “Nazi”. Take your business somewhere else. Like the internet, for instance. Law-abiding gun owners have enough shit to worry about without being associated with the freakin’ Nazi party. I’m sure that you and your retarded cousin-fucking friends can get together in your basement and talk about how much the white man rocks; but we really don’t need your kind at our shows.

Other than that one guy, it was a great show. I got to handle a whole load of firearms, including an brand new MP5K, which was a blast and a half.

See you Monday!

Drinking and packing

I know that a lot of us carry firearms for personal protection, which had led me to wonder about the title of the thread. When you’re carrying, do you imbibe? Obviously, we all know that you shouldn’t drink and drive, but what about drinking and packing?

Please note, I am not a legal expert, and nothing I say should be construed as legal advice or counsel, please feel free to ignore me, and heed me only at your own risk.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, let us look at the particulars of drinking and packing.

First thing we all know is that alcohol and firearms don’t mix. I can personally say I’ve had that pounded into my head for years, and the 2 alcohol related firearms accidents I’ve been witness to have reinforced that feeling. So, we can eliminate getting drunk and carrying; I think everyone’s okay with that.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation. You and the missus go out for dinner and a movie. At dinner, you have two drinks. Being a man of decent size, two drinks does not raise your BAC above the legal limit, nor impair your judgment (you think). On your way to your vehicle, you are confronted and blah blah blah, you end up plugging a critter. When the police officer shows up, how do you think his reaction will be if he smells alcohol on you? Now imagine the same scenario, except you are sober as a Baptist preacher on Sunday.

My feeling is that if I’m planning on having a few drinks, I leave the pistol at home; better yet so that I don’t have to go around unarmed, I don’t drink when I’m out. Plus, it saves me a tonne of money; buying booze from a liquor store and drinking at home is a lot less expensive. A great way to kill two birds with one stone is to volunteer to be the designated driver. I do this a lot as it allows me to stay sober, stay armed, and I get to laugh at the antics of all my drunk friends. I call that a win-win situation.

There are some states that forbid CCW holders from imbibing while they are in public and armed, some states don’t permit CCW holders to bring their firearms into bars. Know your local laws regarding weapons and alcohol before you do anything.

And remember that alcohol and firearms don’t mix.

Best quote ever

With apologies to Kim.

This is lifted from the SF Gate, I won’t link the rest of the article because it’s bad; but this little portion is a true gem.

And finally: One thing you can say about outgoing Alameda County Sheriff Charlie Plummer — he always spoke his mind.

In an interview with MediaNews reporter Chris Metinko, Plummer said he had one regret about his 50-plus years in law enforcement, and that was about his conduct during the Berkeley riots of the 1960s.

“I wish I would have hit some people harder,” Plummer said.

That right there is a textbook example of What John Wayne Would do.

Gun control at home

Hooray, hooray! I now actually have a home-grown gun control issue to blog about! It seems that one of our state reps here in Indiana has decided that Indiana needs more gun control. Link to article here.

I just posted a while back about the “gun show loophole” that doesn’t exist, so I’m not going to revisit that issue. I also think that we all know why one handgun a month limits are silly. No, there are two major issues that I’d like to address.

The first is in Rep. Orentlicher’s third bill, which would overturn the “no-preemption” clause in state law. Indiana state law currently forbids localities from passing laws that are more restrictive or would come into conflict with state laws regarding the possession and carrying of firearms. This is a good thing, as it allows for consistent standards across the state; whether one lives in rural Pulaski county or in the Chicagoland (Indiana side) area.

The obvious goal behind the law is to allow Rep. Orentlicher to have his constituency in Marion county pass more restrictive gun control laws. Unfortunately, it would also open the door to have politicians in the Chicagoland area to follow the lead of their Illinois counterparts; for politicians in Fort Wayne to restrict gun ownership, etc. An inconsistent standard for gun laws makes it more difficult for law enforcement to do their job.

Moving along, the second major issue that I find disturbing is actually in the original article. If you read it, you’ll find quotes from Don Davis, the owner of Don’s Guns that appear to be in favor of more gun control. Before I continue, I have to give you a little bit of background on Don’s Guns. It’s located in Indianapolis, and guns from Don’s have actually been linked to crimes in the Indy Metro area. How he still has a license to sell firearms is beyond me. Furthermore, all the shooters I know in the Indy area dislike Don’s as much as I do. For lack of a better way to describe it, Don’s Guns is that gunshop that liberals love so much, because it’s a shady joint that engages in questionable business practices.

Don coming out in support of more gun control just completes the picture for me. The addition of hypocrisy to Don’s resume has only solidified my boycott of his establishment.

Hoplophobia

I was talking to a non-gunnie friend of mine a while back and I used the term “hoplophobia” in conversation. My friend had never heard my favorite made-up word before, so I explained the term and its common usage amongst the gun community.

Wikipedia has an excellent entry on hoplophobia, including the actual genesis of the term. I’ll trust that my four readers are capable of clicking the link so that I won’t have to copy and paste the text here.

One of the finest articles ever written on the fear of weapons and how it drives gun control can be found here as originally published in the Jewish World Review. In her piece, Ms. Glorin opines that the reason that many men support gun control is simply to compensate for their own feelings of inadequacy; that fear that comes from knowing that there exist men who are capable of shouldering the responsibility of defending their families and homes.

Well, now that I’ve satisfied my Blogger-Linking-Quotient™, I suppose that I should actually, you know, write something of my own original material about hoplophobia. Well, I can say that I’ve had some weird experience with people being afraid of my guns in the last few years. I’ll note out two of the more interesting ones, and add some commentary.

The first one that really stands out comes from back when I first started dating my wife. At the time, I was carrying a Glock 29 (the compact 10mm-I wish I hadn’t sold that) most of the time. Mrs. Ahab’s roommate at the time was from New York; little did I know that would be a deciding factor in the upcoming events. The short version of the story is that I was visiting and decided to remove my pistol and holster because the bugger was rather uncomfortable when sitting on the couch with a lady. I placed my holstered and cleared weapon on the coffee table and thought nothing of it. A bit later, her roommate returned. She took one look at the gun and proceeded to spend the rest of the evening sequestered in her room. I was later told by the future Mrs. Ahab that her roommate had said that the gun “made her uncomfortable sitting out there in the open”.

That made no sense to me at the time, nor did it make sense to the Mrs. We both know that an unloaded firearm sitting on the table is about as dangerous as a rather light, small club. Having been raised around guns and serving in the military, that was really the first time I had encountered that sort of illogical approach to guns “in the wild”.

About a year later, a friend found out that I carry a concealed weapon in all places that the law allows. The look of total surprise on his face was almost funny as he said “You carry a gun?” That conversation was the first in which I responded, “You don’t? I thought any responsible citizen would want to be armed.” That has pretty much been my default response ever since then.

So, why are people afraid of guns? In the case of my wife’s roommate, most likely it was because she had never been around firearms, and had been raised in the classic liberal fashion to fear those “evil guns”. My 2nd friend was less silly about the whole thing, although he couldn’t be brought to understand why I felt that carrying a firearm is just as much a part of my civic duty as voting.

We all know that firearms are dangerous; and when used irresponsibly or for criminal purposes can obviously end a life. To blame a gun for a shooting or death would be the same as blaming your hammer when you hit your thumb.

Totalitarianism, brought to you by Roman Catholics!

Now, I’m not a particularly big fan of the Catholic Church (or most organized religion, but that’s another post), so you can imagine how this little gem from CNN tickled my funny bone.

The short version of the article is that it has come to light that the current Archbishop of Poland collaborated with the communist secret police during the time that Poland was under the Iron Curtain. Because nothing says “Spread the love of Christ” better than informing on people so they can go to the gulag.

The downside of this is that it represents something of a scandal for the current pope, Benedict; which is too bad because I kind of like him. Of course, the Archbishop has resigned his post, while his supporters are claiming that there is a “vendetta” against him.

Vendetta? He spied for the communist secret police! That’s not a vendetta, it’s justice. One wonders if he ever violate the “sanctity” of confession. It’s rather awful, when a religious leader, in a position of trust and authority abuses his position with respect to his parishioners.

Bra stops bullet

Sort of. According to the story in the Miami Herald , a woman who was hit by what was presumably celebratory gunfire had the bullet’s progress slowed significantly by her bra-strap.

Well, bully for her. According to the story, the round had only penetrated half of its overall length into her skin, the rest sticking out the back of her bra. If the round had that little energy left, even if she hadn’t been wearing a bra the .45 bullet most likely wouldn’t have had the energy to do any more significant damage to her. It’s much more likely that although the bra slowed the bullet down, the elasticity of her skin is what dispersed most of the projectile’s energy.

Secondly, and pardon me if I shout but GUNS AND ALCOHOL DO NOT MIX. CELEBRATORY GUNFIRE IS BAD, BECAUSE FUCKING BULLETS COME DOWN AND HURT PEOPLE. The Mythbusters did an episode where they demonstrated that a round that is fired straight up won’t have the power to kill someone as it comes down, which is great and all; but celebratory gunfire is rarely fired straight into the air. It’s usually fired at an angle, which means the bullet comes down a lot faster than if it had been fired straight up.

The moral of the story is don’t shoot fucking guns into the air. Seriously, that’s the sort of behavior that makes law abiding gun owners look bad.

Gun control from the old homestead

I’m sort of from the Seattle-Metro area, and I have family that still lives up there. So when I saw this article from the Seattle Post Intelligencer I was rather disappointed. Mind you, I’m not particularly surprised by the mayor’s actions, but still disappointed.

For those of you that don’t feel like wading through the article, the gist of it is that the mayor of Seattle is calling for more gun legislation. One of his hot-buttons apparently is the “gun-show loophole”, which is something that doesn’t actually exist.

Gun-grabbers claim that the gun-show loophole allows convicted felons and other naughty mans to go to as “assault weapons bazaar” and purchase firearms without an NICS background check or paperwork filled out by a dealer. The problem with this theory is that any gun dealer that actually has a Federal Firearms License is required by federal law to perform a background check on anyone purchasing firearms. Over the years, I’ve bought about a dozen guns at gun shows, and I’ve had an NICS check run on me every single time.

The only people that aren’t required to run a background check on a buyer are private sellers, i.e. if I sell my Ruger rifle to my best friend from high school I don’t have to run a background check on him. This might seem like a loophole, however most gun shows prohibit private sellers from selling firearms. I know that the local show that I usually attend doesn’t allow unlicensed entities to sell firearms; their reason is based both of federal law and for liability reasons.

The “gun show loophole” doesn’t need to be closed. Calls to close the loophole are most assuredly a less than clever beard for the gun grabber’s desire to eliminate gun shows in their entirety. Why these folks are so afraid of licensed business conducting a legal trade is something that I will probably never understand.

The Wide World of Sports

I am a self-proclaimed sports nut, and one of the sports that I dearly enjoy is college football. For one reason or another, I have developed over the past couple of years a fondness for the Boise State Broncos. I don’t know if it’s the blue Astroturf that they play on, or the fact that they don’t get any love from the national media (probably because they play in Western Athletic Conference); but I just can’t get around the fact that I flat like them.

Well, the part about them not getting any love from the national media is about to change, after last night’s wild victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.

The highlights of the story are available on Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and pretty much every major media outlet that covers sports; but the gist of the story is that Boise State went 13-0 on the season, and beat the number 7 ranked team in the county last night.

The Broncos had a lot of critics, people who said that because the WAC is a weak conference that they couldn’t hang-and-bang with a big, bad team like Oklahoma. I guess they were wrong. If Boise State goes undefeated next year and doesn’t get a shot at the BCS title, that’ll be one more mark in the “Why the BCS System Sucks” column.