Truthfully, I thought they already had.

"Dick's Sporting Goods, the nation's largest sporting goods retailer, is halting sales of selling assault-style weapons like the one used in the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting.

Dick's also no longer will sell firearms to anyone under the age of 21 and is stopping the sale of high capacity magazines, the company said on Wednesday."

Truthfully, I thought they already had done this. I hadn't been in a Dick's but maybe once or twice since they proudly announced that they "supported the Second Amendment but" they were going to stop selling handguns and handgun ammo after some previous media feeding frenzy.

Dick's ownership seems to feel the need to go find some media before whom they can ritually abase themselves after these incidents, and it makes me feel a little dirty stepping into one of their stores. One gets the feeling that they'd really rather not be in the gun biz at all, but don't want to give up the hunter bux.

Rabbit People.

Matt Lauer is on my television screen, warbling and emoting about the terror attack at Brussels airport. "The bomb went off in the departure area of the airport, which would have been packed with thousands of people, everyone carrying packages and bags and briefcases, and of course this is before anybody's gone through security."

One gets the feeling that this herbivore would prefer that the government station a TSA probulator just inside the front door of every residence in the nation to make sure nobody's out in public with a suspicious package that hasn't been checked to make him feel safe.
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The Part Where I Lost My $#!+.

So, I'm driving to the range yesterday while listening to NPR, as one does, and The Diane Rehm Show is discussing the Garland, Texas incident. There's a guest or two fighting a valiant rear-guard action for the First Amendment, trying to explain to the hostess that it even protects people's right to be icky and Republican.

Then they opened the lines for callers and I very nearly drove into the ditch, yelling at the radio and gnawing on the steering wheel in impotent frustration:

"Welcome back, I'm Indira Lakshmanan, sitting in for Diane Rehm. We're talking about the Texas attack, ISIS, and the limits of free speech. I'm gonna read a post that we got here, an email from Jean, who says that if someone published cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups, wouldn't they be prosecuted as hate speech? And why does offense of anti-Islamic speech get a pass in the name of free speech?"

Jean you ignorant slut, do you know what they call it when people publish "cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups"? They call it the internet.

This is America: You can go to the bookstore and buy yourself copies of everything from The Basketball Diaries to The Motorcycle Diaries to The Turner Diaries. The frickin' Ku Klux Klan has a website, honey; I'm not going to give them a link, but it's three letters followed by a ".com", you should be able to figure it out. Or maybe not; you don't seem very bright.

If you rabbit people would stop looking for someone to expose your bellies to in submission for five seconds and listen... Look, you like Donna Shalala, right? Y'all are sympatico, right? On the same team? Try this one from her:

"You can't have a university without having free speech, even though at times it makes us terribly uncomfortable. If students are not going to hear controversial ideas on college campuses, they're not going to hear them in America."

How about bell hooks?

"The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech."

Salman Rushdie?

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."

I'll give the Quote of the Day to Ken at Popehat:

"Much of the rest of the column is devoted to talking about how bad Pamela Geller is, and how the American Freedom Defense Initiative is a hate group. But this is irrelevant. You can talk to me all day about how Geller is a nasty, scary nutjob, and I'm unlikely to disagree much. But that has no bearing on whether her speech is, or should be, protected. We don't need a First Amendment to protect the soothing and the sensible."

Seriously, yesterday's Diane Rehm Show was the scariest thing I've heard on the radio since I listened to Mystery Theater on a battery operated boom box sleeping out in a friend's treehouse when I was twelve. It used to be that if there was one thing you could at least count on liberals for, it was a vigorous defense of free speech; it's a cause that has found the ACLU in bed with the NRA on at least one occasion I can think of. This new turn is... chilling.

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He may have had to steal the valor...

...but he already had the mendacity.

Seriously, remember the time you accidentally misspoke and told those people about the time you won a medal in the Olympics? Or were a starter for the Lakers? Or swam the Channel?

No? Neither do I.

There are some things that'll just torpedo the credibility of a person in a leadership capacity, and that's one of them, right there.
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What you mean "we", Leftie?

This article, which you'll notice was typed several days before the festivities kicked off in Ferguson and its environs, is just a gold mine of projection, self-loathing, and false equivalence.

No, honey, I don't think that property destruction is cool, even when it's those hideous redneck crackers in flyover country who are doing it because their sportsball team won the Kentucky Derby. I also am able to draw a chain of seriousness that starts with drunken frat kids burning their own sofa at one end, moves through some minor property damage in the middle, and winds up with South Central in flames at the other.

There are varying grades of wrong: Some wrong things result in somebody getting sent to their room without supper and some result in somebody getting sat in an electric chair and having the dial turned to Extra Crispy, and it's not because we're "ageist" and there are a whole raft of degrees of wrongness in between. I thought Progressives prided themselves on their grasp of nuance, ferchrissake.

Lastly, I'm sorry you hate yourself so much for being white or upper middle class or whatever reason, but don't assume I share your self loathing. I'm not interested in crawling into your hair shirt with you; work out your angst on your own and don't try and smear it all over me.
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Once upon a time...

...a long long long long long time ago, some people were sitting around outside of a cave one evening. Probably H. erectus or H. ergaster, they likely weren't composing any sonnets, but they were chilling out however it was they did back then of a Saturday night, when all of a sudden...

BLAM!

...lightning hit a nearby tree. And all of the early people gathered around and marveled at the fire, and began thinking of all the cool things they could do with it, like cook steak and invent cigarettes, except for one pair of hominids who ran hooting into the cave in terror of the fire.

They had babies, too, and Bobbi found a TIME article written by one of their great^1000 grandchildren.

It deserves a proper fisking, and I mean to give it one, but feel free to go marvel in its puling, craven rabbit-souled ignorance while I finish getting a mad on over here.
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The lowest form of single-celled digital life...

"An investigation from the Police Cyber Terror Response Center verified that all texts in question [from passengers still within the ship] are fake," South Korea police posted on its official Twitter account.

"Please stop such actions that are causing pain to the families of missing passengers. The malicious distributors of these texts will be strictly dealt with."

I think the families of those still missing should be allowed to troll the perpetrators right back. With tire tools. It would be extremely lulzy to watch the Cheeto dust fly while they whimpered "It was ju-u-st a j-joke! P-p-please! Not the face!"

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Why is politics like living near a paper mill?

Because after a while, you don't notice the smell of home.

So, some writer of "literary mysteries" wrote a whining screed about how J.K. Rowling was taking up all the shelf space that was rightfully owed to little people like herself and should stop writing and let other kids have all the fun. It was several paragraphs laced with the politics of envy and zero-sum economic theory that could have been titled #OCCUPYBARNESANDNOBLE.

Larry Correia delivered a classic Larry Correia fisking of her little text-based hissy fit, which was widely linked, and the comments section filled up fast. Among the commenters was some guy signing himself "orangemike" who described himself as a writer and reviewer and was saddened that Larry's castigation of the woman's admittedly noxious screed couldn't be done without dragging ideology into it.

It was pointed out to him that, uh, she'd kinda started it with the ideology, actually, to which he replied "That's not ideology!"

I snapped.

“That’s not water,” said the fish…

That is too ideology. That lady's whining column-ette is the entire foundation of leftist ideology in Cliff's Notes form. That is the Reader's Digest condensed version of Das Kapital and the French Revolution and Cap and Trade and every UAW contract ever written and the Democratic Party's national platform: You've got too much stuff and you need to give some of it to me.
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A fine domestic whine.

Dick Metcalf is still running to anybody who'll drape a crying towel over their shoulder for him.

Jesus, Dick, have some frickin’ dignity. This is beyond unbecoming.

Take your medicine like a ****ing grownup. People have stood in front of firing squads with more aplomb than you've shown getting a column taken away from you.

You don't ever take sides against the family, Dick.

Since Dick went crying to the New York Times with a tale of how those extremist whackos in the gun industry had given him a wedgie for not being extremist enough, it's only fair to link to Claire Wolfe's rebuttal in the February issue of S.W.A.T. which, despite being penned weeks ago, is suddenly quite timely again thanks to Dick's latest bout of confabulatin'.

Farewell to Kings, Hello to Midgets

Say what you will about monarchs, there's always the chance they didn't want the job. Same with businessmen or bureaucrats: They may be there because they've been gently bumped along through an ever rising series of canal locks, buoyed on a tide of dull competency.

Not so with elected officials: They all had to actively want the job, and from dog catcher to senator they are driven by a lust for position and power, and filled with an overweening sense that they deserve it. Monsters of narcissism, they are the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, no more conscious of the wants or needs (or even the existence, really) of others than an infant with an empty stomach and a full diaper.

Exhibit A:

Such perfect self-centeredness at the ultimate "popular kids' lunchroom table"! Unglaublich!

Friend staghounds related a tale in comments:

When King Edward VII died in 1910. former President Roosevelt happened to be in England and was invited to attend the funeral. It was a huge pageant and procession, which was governed by ancient medieval rules.

The various presidents of republics, having no titles of nobility, were assigned to march behind the Emperors, Kings, Dukes, and Barons.

The President of France found it unreasonable that he had to follow a bunch of titled nobodies, and told Roosevelt so.

T. R. said,

"For God's sake, keep quiet. This is a funeral."

Indeed.

We'd be better off with names picked from the phone book than being cajoled by these dwarfs.
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Shameless...

So there was consummate Manhattanite Matt Lauer, hectoring teary Paula Deen on stage. You could see the mixture of contempt and glee on his face: Contempt for this Southern hick who had actually admitted to saying *gasp!* the "n-word" in the past and glee that here was someone he was so obviously Better Than.

Matt, you go through an orgy of pearl-clutching there in the studio over Deen's admission, implying that your sophisticated lips are unsullied by its passage, and yet you were in high school when Blazing Saddles came out? N-word, please!

QotD: That's Gotta Sting Edition...

"You foot hurt? Your left foot?" 

"Uh, yes, ma'am." 

"It hurts, yeah. My feet hurt, too." 

The difference, of course, being that Mr. Castillo hurt his foot playing JROTC prep school football while Rep. Duckworth left both of her feet in a pile of flaming UH-60 wreckage in Iraq.

In a just world, she'd have slapped a Tokarev with one round in the mag on the table in front of Mr. Castillo and then everyone would have left the room, leaving him alone in there to Do The Right Thing. Seeing as he appears to be devoid of anything you'd call a "conscience", nothing like that will ever happen.

Still, that was a smackdown for the ages.

You can't pretty up getting punked.

So the story is that a US Attorney has withdrawn from a case, citing "security concerns".

Friend Staghounds is... how to put this delicately? ...not at all impressed. Neither am I.

You knew the job when you volunteered for it, Mr. Government Man; at the foot of the trench ladder is a hell of a place to decide to take the white feather.

"Soft, docile, toothless creatures..."

The ongoing hooraw over the decision to allow passengers to carry their bitty little pen knives onto airplanes is positively appalling.

The Flight Attendants' union is still pitching a conniption over allowing more "deadly weapons" on planes. An NBC reporter was interviewing people at the airport yesterday morning, and the bedwettery of the "Man (for lack of a more apropos term) On The Street" was actually painful to watch. I found myself yelling "Oh, harden the **** up!" at the screen.

The only knives I currently own that fall under these criteria are attached to keychain-size multitools and are less useful as weapons than, say, my belt. Assuming arguendo that the vital ingredient of a person with hostile intent is present, you're in more danger from the plastic shank they give you with your food in first class or an improvised shiv made from the complementary beverage can than you are from the 2" non-locking blade on a Victorinox key fob.

I can't get over the amount of hand-wringing accompanying this. When I first heard the news, my ears perked up, thinking that my Spyderco Dodo or CRKT Urban Shark would be accompanying me aloft, but no. Imagine my chagrin. At least I'll be able to keep my keychain in my carry-on rather than having to check it throu... no, wait, I guess they'll probably still lose continence over the monkey fist.

While I'm amazed at the puling and cringing that goes on at the sight of a penknife, I guess I shouldn't be; as far back as twenty years ago, I've had a roomful of Americanus cubiculanus suburbia shrink back, eyes all askance, as I pulled out a tiny, money-clip-sized CRKT K.I.S.S. to open a box. (The irony there is that I started carrying the K.I.S.S. because the Spyderco Snap-It I had previously carried clipped to a belt loop had a propensity to spook the straights in an office environment.)

At this rate I expect solid evidence of h. sapiens' eyes migrating towards the sides of the cranium over the next few generations.


EDIT: Jesus, they've got a Flight Attendents' union rep on the Today show right now, and she and Matt Lauer are emoting and quivering in two-part harmony over the sight of the kind of thing I keep on my keychain.  Matt asks... well, he doesn't ask so much as he Oprahs; I half expected him to reach out and rest a comforting hand on her knee... "The TSA says they want to let the screeners focus on finding explosives, things that could actually bring down an airliner. Does that make any sense to you?"

As Shiva is my witness, she responded with "No. I'm a flight attendant; I'm out in the cabin. I'm a first responder and the last line of defense..."

...and she said something else, too, but I couldn't hear it over me yelling "No, honey, you're a waitress in a bad restaurant at 28,000 feet!" at the screen.

The Nineties called. They want their "Look! A Girl! With A Gun!™" back.

"Hey, Tam!"

"What?"

"I said 'Hey, Tam!'"

"Yeah?"

"Did you hear that Piers Morgan had Paxton Quigley on last night?"

"Hang on, I can't hear you. Let me turn down my Wayne's World soundtrack here... Now, that pompous Limey sphincter had who on last night, again?"

"Paxton Quigley."

"Wow, that takes a girl back..."

It has been brought to my attention that some people may not be aware who Paxton Quigley is, but I've heard a rumor on a firearms forum that she went on CNN and "agreed that nobody needs an AR 15 asssault rifle and that Biden was right when he said a shotgun was a better choice for defending yourself."

The response from most anyone under thirty was "Paxton who?" Some folks googled her and found her website and yes, she's carrying on the good work still, but they were calling out photos of her with a revolver in the half Sabrina, booger hook firmly on bang switch... Why was this Rule Three violatin' chick being lauded as some kind of "self-defense expert"?

Their bafflement was a little understandable, especially in a mostly-dude crowd: Other than a brief trip around the talk show circuit promoting a new book in '05, she's largely been out of the mainstream media eye since the early '90s, when her book Armed & Female came out, well-timed for the ramp-up of the Shall Issue movement.

She cleaned up well, was an effective speaker and self-promoter, a fierce advocate of a woman's right to stick a .38 in her purse and shoot attempted rapists, and those talk show appearances probably sold a lot of Ladysmiths (there was even a "Paxton Quigley" edition of the Smith 640,) but she never really struck me as a serious shooter or a gun nut, just an empowerment and security moto speaker who was okay with guns. But back then, if a talk show needed a woman panelist who was ardent about women carrying firearms, it was pretty much Paxton or nobody.

In the years since, of course, there are a lot more women in the field with a lot better credentials when it comes to guns, shooting, and self-defense (*cough* buymyfriendKathy'sbook *cough*) but Paxton's still out there too, apparently, spreading the good word, if not as high-profile as before.

So Piers needed a woman for a "Women & Guns" spot, got her on his show and, in the middle of making a bunch of good points about a woman's right to carry a handgun, we get this:

QUIGLEY: Well, I agree with him that I think an AR-15 is not something that the normal, average citizen should have. And indeed, he is right that if you had a shotgun and you pull the trigger, it's going to -- it's going to scare somebody. There's no doubt about that.

Jesus, Paxton, et tu?

It only takes one awshit to erase a dozen attagirls. I'm washing my hands of her. Let the Zumboing commence.

Meanwhile, all this sudden mentioning of her name again after all these years makes me want to hop into a Supra Turbo and crank up "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and drive down to the store to buy a big-ass sweater and some stirrup pants...
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Wait, wait, wait...

A computer used by Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with CIA Director David Petraeus led to his resignation, contained substantial classified information that should have been stored under more secure conditions, law enforcement and national security officials said on Wednesday.

This guy was our Chief Spy?

Oh, my gawd how the mighty have fallen.

I can just see him ordering a pizza for him and his girlfriend and, having no folding money for a tip, telling the delivery driver "Uh, hey, I don't have any extra cash on me, so here's your tip: Go short on KBR. And cancel your vacation to Cairo." This guy isn't fit to carry Allen Dulles' secret decoder ring. Yuri Andropov is laughing his ass off from a slowly-turning spit in hell.

...and a Wing Commander in the Royal Manticoran Space Marines.

These guys would be a lot harder to spot if they didn't always slather on the awards like Latin American train conductors. That guy's got a rack of fruit salad that makes Omar Bradley look like a Marine Corps PFC. Seriously, I've seen less impressive displays spread across the chests of entire Chilean juntas.

Maybe if he was trying to pass himself off as Air Force; I hear they're pretty free with the ribbons... I kid! I kid!

The Special Forces Ranger Flight Medic is a new twist, though. Usually they're Navy SEAL Delta Scout Snipers. (Believe me, working in gun stores, you get to know the breed pretty well.)

(H/T to Life in 3D.)
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Quisling.

In a weaselly attempt to get business back from online ammunition dealers like Brownells or LuckyGunner, Texas gun store owner Jeremy Alcede goes on the radio supporting a ban on online ammunition sales.

Dear Jeremy Alcede of Tactical Firearms, Katy, TX: I hope you freeze in the dark, you gutless quisling punk.

When your children are crying "Daddy, why are we on food stamps?" you can tell them "It's because your Daddy was a selfish, pusillanimous sellout who put his personal bottom line ahead of the Bill of Rights, kids, and so nobody would buy anything from his store ever again."

Be sure and spread the word.

Dear Bill Maher,

Delta is ready when you are.