Here Comes the 'Splain Again...

The Left: If you can't tell a fallopian tube from a trimester, you need to slow your roll in the abortion debate.
Also the Left: OMG #gunsplaining! https://t.co/EGDXPigFMD

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 8, 2018

This comes up every year...

Most of my 'net friends are fairly bright, and so I'm sure they've all figured this out by now, but just in case: http://bfy.tw/4dsM

Magical Thinking

All the usual propositions are being trotted out in the latest well-organized and well-funded push for anti Second Amendment legislation, and apparently the people pushing them are immune to cognitive dissonance. None of these proposals would have stopped a monster intent on shooting his way to the forefront of the 24-hour news cycle.

Let's break it down, shall we?

• "Universal Background Checks": The Columbine shooters acquired their guns via straw purchasers who passed the background checks. The Sandy Hook shooter got his by killing his background-check-passing mom and stealing hers. The guy who tried to shoot up the Townville elementary school killed his dad and took his Glock.


• "Raise the purchasing age for firearms to 21!" Leaving aside all the mass shooters who were over 21, this ignores all the dudes referenced in the previous section.


• "Ban the AR-15!": Townville dude used a Glock. There were no AR-15s at Columbine, nor at the summer camp in Norway. The Virginia Tech shooter used pistols. The Winnenden school shooter in Germany used a Beretta 92 9mm pistol.


• "Ban 'assault-looking weapons'." Perhaps not coincidentally, none of the weapons I just mentioned would be affected by such a ban.


• "Well, then ban semiautomatics!": The Washington Navy Yard shooter used a pump action shotgun, as did the perpetrator of the Erfurt school massacre in Germany (although his jammed). Two of the Dunblane shooter's four handguns were revolvers, and the Monkseaton and Cumbria shooters in the UK used double-barrel shotguns. The Cumbria shooter also had a bolt-action .22 squirrel rifle.


• "Three-day (or five- or ten-day) waiting periods!" These nutbars scheme for months or years before they act out their crimes. This proposal borders on farcical straw-grasping.


• "Smart gun technology"? Even if this worked, this only affects the one or two who killed someone to steal their guns. The rest were all 'authorized' users of lawfully-purchased guns.


• "Microstamping"? Great, we know all these shell casings came from the gun in the hand of that dead guy over there. That sure helps. Wow.

So none of these proposals help anything. All this does is make things annoying for normal, law-abiding people who want to be able to defend themselves from robbers, muggers, rapists, and the occasional King of England (or creeping fascist tyranny, which the same people who are trying to take our guns away paradoxically assure us is descending on our fair land.)

So, what if you were successful in your wildest dreams of returning us to 1870s firearm technology (a pipe dream at the federal level and unlikely outside of the most anti-gun states)? Surely that would end the plague of death-spraying bullet hoses, right?



Dream on.
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Hey, look!

I wrote a thing.
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Work day today...

Shooting the @sarusaofficial SAR9 for groups at 25yds for the @shooting_illustrated review at @indyarmscompany #turkishpistol #gunwriting #pewprofessional #indyarmsco

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Mar 6, 2018 at 5:51pm PST

Sorry...

Fun little overnight jaunt down to Louisville. Stayed at an adorable 1880's-vintage Airbnb with friends and enjoyed a nice dinner out on Saturday and brunch on Sunday morning before heading back up to Indianapolis.

 14-ounce ribeye steak au poivre at Le Moo...

Sunday morning at Toast: "Bloody Mary, full of vodka, blessed are you among cocktails. Pray for me now and at the hour of my death...which I hope is soon. Amen."

Steak and eggs, because it's diet food if they hold the toast and you only eat a couple grapes.
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Themed restaurant idea!

Since faux-Aussie-themed Outback Steakhouse has been such a success, Bobbi and I came up with a ripoff idea: A Soviet-themed Siberian Borscht House! The ad campaign slogan could be "No rights, just rules!"

No?

I'll see myself out.
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Already memeified...

“Playing Hooky For Gun Control”? Jesus, that’s brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that when I was in high school? What kind of heartless monster would punish you for cutting class if you claimed you were doing it for a noble cause?

I can only imagine how well “Sorry, I’m not doing any more Trigonometry homework until someone does something about the starving children in Africa!” would have flown. I could have been invited to sing "We Are the World" at LiveAid instead of having to take the stupid useless SAT.
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Pod People

So, here at Roseholme Cottage the resupply of groceries and household goods is most often handled on my daily rounds. I do this to try to allow Bobbi to come straight home from work without needing to stop at the store on the way.

Consequently, on the wall in the kitchen is a dry erase message board on which needs are communicated: "coffee creamer", "eggs", "breakfast meat", "39 gal bags".

In the morning before setting out for the range or wherever, I'll snap a photo of the board with my phone and use the picture as a checklist at the store. It's a kludgy system, but it works.

There are, however, certain consumables that are harder to keep track of: TP and paper towels live in a cabinet and it's all too easy to reach in there and find that there's only one or two rolls left and it's late of a Saturday and nobody feels like driving anywhere.

Similarly, dishwasher soap gets disproportionately used by me, since I do the dishes on weekday evenings at cat-feeding time. If I leave town with only one or two pods left in the tub, it can be a rude surprise for Bobbi. Conversely Bobbi is far more fastidious about sorting colors and fabrics in her laundry and goes through Tide pods at a brisker clip than me, who has two weekly (or biweekly) loads: Black fabric, and Laundry Thunderdome.

Enter this post from Joel about Amazon Dash buttons:

Do you buy these for $5 each, one for every regularly expended commodity, and then when you want more you just push this button and AMAZON AUTOMATICALLY SENDS YOU MORE???

Well, kinda yes, Joel.

They charge five bucks for the button, but then knock five bucks off your first order, so they're essentially free. I got one for each of these four high-use household commodities: TP, paper towels, dish pods, and laundry pods. The operating theory was that whoever notices it's down to a two- or three-day supply can just poke the button and...thanks to the magic of Amazon Prime...in two days, more will show up on the front porch like magic.

Et Voila! We were free of the stocking vagaries of the local Meijer or Kroger, which were too often perversely out of my preferred brand of bumwipe or plain white Bounty (select-a-size in the jumbo packs, please) right when I needed more, forcing me to go looking at Target *shudder* or more widely afield.

Does anybody really do that? Are you supposed to stick them on your fridge or something? What if your 5-year-old gets bored and pushes the button a hundred times to see what will happen? Will all your utility payment checks bounce as a trailor-load of Red Bull shows up in your driveway?

Well, you have to press and hold for a sec for the little light to blink white then go solid green to show that it has successfully done its WiFi thing, and the button is then inoperable until Amazon receives word that the order has been delivered.

We don't have any five-year-olds in the house, so that's not a big worry, but I do have a story along that line...

When the four buttons arrived, I put them on the corner of my desk preparatory to rolling them out as needed. The paper towels went first and everything functioned smoothly. This was heartening. Charmin Gentle was next and again, all went well.

I was in the kitchen one evening a couple months ago, right before the cats' feeding time, when Bobbi called out from the office. "I think Huck just ordered some Cascade pods!"

See, one of Huck's attention-seeking behaviors in the ramp-up to dinner time (especially during these four months of the year when dinner is an hour late) is to knock shit off desks near the humans.

"Relax! He can't have ordered anything just by knocking it off," I hollered back down the hall, "You have to hold it down for a bit to get it to connect. He would have had to have stood on the button until the light turned green."

"The light is green."

Oh, well. We were going to need to use that button in a week or so anyway.

Still, when that box hit the porch I brought it inside and informed the cat that his Cascade Platinum Pods were here.
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Ignorance is No Excuse for a Law.

What do the #AR15 and duck #sex have in common? We're glad you asked!https://t.co/XNaoSmO7FV

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 1, 2018

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.

Derailed.

Blogging has been overtaken by events. More later.

Bobbi could use your kind thoughts right now.
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Let me get this straight...

• Media: "Oh my God, Literally Cheetoh Hitler is in the White House and there's a rising tide of fascism in the land."


• Also Media: "The police are out of control and militarized and corrupt and shoot people for no reason."


• Also Also Media: "The government at every level...federal, state, county, and city...screwed up, sometimes multiple times, with multiple early warnings of this Florida school shooting."


• Also Also Also Media: "Turn in your guns and trust the government to keep you safe. Call the police."

I know that you big corporations have Chief Executive Officers and Chief Financial Officers and now Chief Information Officers, but have you considered hiring a Chief Message Consistency Officer?
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By that logic...

This tweet should only be protected by the 1st Amendment if it is written on parchment with a sharpened bird feather and delivered to you via horseback messenger. https://t.co/uBXTJMRsGB

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 26, 2018

Random Thoughts on the Current Issues...

• I have never used my NRA membership to get a discount on anything. While I was vaguely aware that some companies offered member discounts, I couldn't have told you what those discounts were or which companies offered them if you put an AR-15 to my head.


• Nobody's trying to conscript teachers into the gun debate. All we're asking is that teachers who are already trusted/permitted/licensed/trained...whatever...to carry a gun for sixteen hours a day be trusted to carry it the other eight, too. They currently carry at McDonald's, on the playground, in Toys 'R' Us, so what makes everyone think the wheels are going to suddenly come off if they carry in the classroom, too? Seven states already permit it, so people should take a chill pill on the issue.


• Told ya he'd fold.

Slow Sunday...

I did not get a single thing I meant to accomplish finished today.

On the other hand, Melody Lauer was passing through town and we met for dinner and caught up on post-SHOT/pre-TacCon news, so that was cool.

More bloggery will be committed in the AM.

PS: A side effect of my switch to Mac is discovering that Safari on the desktop has a hyperaggressive spellchecker/autocorrect.

Hamming it Up.

Hanging out with Bobbi at a hamfest this morning, going to gawk at tables of stuff that is a total mystery to me.

But you never know what you'll find at these things, because the ham radio nerd circle tends to overlap a lot of other nerd circles I belong to.
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A big chunk of the problem...

From @TamSlick
1)Put in the training to win an Olympic gold medal.
2)Study and research to find the cure for a disease.
3)Kill a bunch of classmates.
Which is the fastest way to get your name in the headlines and your own Wikipedia page?

— Robb Allen (Не русский бот) (@ItsRobbAllen) February 23, 2018

From an away game...

From a FB discussion stemming from some of that goofy overheated "Kill the NRA" rhetoric... Specifically, a person stating someone should shoot "the kids of the NRA", like it was some faceless entity someplace and not an organization composed of other people participating in that very conversation.

I commented:

It's turned into a self-licking lollipop. If you're a J-school grad writing for a major metropolitan or national news outlet, you almost certainly don't know any (non-closeted) NRA members. So the NRA is a faceless bureaucratic lobbying organization.

This allows such nonsensical soundbites as "the American people are growing fed up with the NRA" without even the faintest twinge of awareness that, dude, the NRA is a subset...and not an insubstantial one...of The American People.

I'm sitting here watching Savannah Guthrie run her suck on the TV and I'm thinking "Actually, honey, I'm not at all fed up with myself. Feeling pretty good about me today, actually."

As far as the "kill, kill, kill" rhetoric, primates heterodyne off each other's moods. Anybody who's ever shot fast for practice at the range and noticed other range patrons start speeding up and doing mag dumps has seen this behavior in action.

Right now, everybody's trying to out-emote each other. You want the chimp on either side of you to see you carrying your share of the troop's weight in the throwing-leaves-and-beating-branches display.
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Granny Guns & Kilts in the Streetz

A gun that allows you to yell down a dark hallway "You'd better leave! I've called the cops and I have a gun!" and not be lying will put you ahead of the game in probably eight out of ten private citizen defensive gun usages. If the gun will make a loud noise, there's a better than even chance it will solve the ninth.

It's only on that unlucky tenth incident that things like capacity, caliber, reliability, bullet selection and other angels we gun nerds like to set to dancing on the heads of pins come into play.

As Claude Werner is fond of pointing out, we do a disservice when we make people think that unless they're rocking a G19 in AIWB kydex and can shoot an Advanced score on the FAST cold and on demand, they might as well not even bother carrying a gun at all. Better the LCP in a pocket now than the Glock someday.

The great objective is that every man (and woman) be armed.
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