Quote Of The Day

From Walter Williams:

“Knowing who owns what weapons is the first step to confiscation.”

I don’t think I have to caution any of my Readers about this, but anyway:  if ever some government apparatchik wants to register guns — any  kind of guns — resist, refuse to comply, make a noise about it.

I should point out that back in the police state known as Apartheid South Africa, all guns had to be registered to owners, who were themselves registered as such.

I had five  guns that the Gummint knew nothing about.  In fact, now that I think back, I had more un-registered guns than registered ones.  If it was possible under that government, it should be easy-peasy Over Here.

Do ye the same, O My Readers.

Enter Stage Somewhere

I see that the NRA has promised to “work with gun owners to swamp the first hearing of the Virginia Senate committee considering new gun bans”.

NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen told the Washington Free Beacon that the gun-rights group is mobilizing its members to appear at the first meeting of the Virginia Senate’s Courts of Justice on Jan. 13. The organization hopes that pressure from constituents will make newly elected Democrats, who helped the party capture control of the state legislature, think twice about supporting gun bans pursued by the state’s Democratic governor.

Uh huh.  Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but over the past three decades or so, whenever some state government has decided to crap all over the Second Amendment, the NRA has been more conspicuous in its absence than in its action.

I remember down here in north Texas, a long-established and much-loved gun range was being targeted by a housing development, whose new residents were aghast that there was a working gun range a whole mile away from their backyards.  So said developers put pressure on the TX legislators to declare the range a public nuisance / danger and force it to close.  As it happened, there was already a weak law on the books which prevented this kind of thing, but as it was a weak law (it’s since been toughened up) it required legal representation which the gun range couldn’t afford, and the Texas State Rifle Association couldn’t afford to cover, either.  So the TSRA appealed for help from the NRA but was told that the NRA had more important things to do with its money at the national level, and as such it was up to us locals to come up with the funds (from memory, the shortfall was just over half a million dollars, or fifty of Wayne LaPierre’s shiny suits).

The range closed six months later, bankrupted out of existence by lawyer’s fees;  despite raising a goodly amount (I donated nearly a grand, as I recall), it wasn’t nearly enough and so they just said “fuck it”, moved over fifty miles away into the boonies, and we all lost a fine range and an excellent little gun shop located on the premises.  Every time I drive past the place (now a nondescript strip mall standing between the road and the McMansions of the development), I want to toss bricks through the windows of every single one of the buildings.

If I were a cynical man, therefore, I would suggest that the only reason that the NRA is suddenly so interested in what’s happening in Virginia is because that’s where NRA HQ is located, and most of the guns in their basement museum would become illegal overnight and have to be either moved or handed in.

Not so fucking funny when it happens to you, eh, Wayne?

LOL Arsenal

From Fogs Noose  comes this breathless tale (emphasis added):

A Wisconsin man was founding living in an undetected underground bunk in the Milwaukee woods for years with a dog and a stockpile of weapons and ammunition.
Deputies discovered hermit Geoffrey Graff’s odd, hidden abode on Wednesday after responding to a call of shots fired.
After entering the 8-foot-by-8-foot bunker – which was also 20-feet-long – the deputies found an arsenal of weapons including two shotguns, a rifle, a handgun, three knives, ammo and a bow with arrows fashioned from “snowplow stakes,” Milwaukee County Sheriff Earnell Lucas said at a news conference Friday.
Lucas said Graff’s bunker also had a grill, propane tanks, a generator, various power tools, boxes of food and canned goods.

I haven’t checked recently, but I think I could lay my hands on all that stuff (apart from the bow) within a few paces from my living room chair, a couple more are at arm’s length, and let’s not even talk about the contents of my nightstand.

I am curious, however, as to how one fashions arrows from snowplough stakes… I mean, how does one affix the flights to the shaft?  Are the stakes made of wood, or metal?

I think we need to know all that, but of course media.  They won’t even tell us the caliber of the firearms, which tells you all you need to know about journalistic standards.

Hidden Agenda

Talking about legislatures passing laws which seem to be quite insane, not to mention un-Constitutional and unenforceable, Joe Bob Briggs nails the mindset perfectly:

“We don’t like things as they are, and so we’ll make it really, really expensive for certain people to enforce their rights. We’ll make them fight every day for what should be rightly theirs for free. We’ll take away their birthright. We’ll screw with their businesses and screw with their wombs and screw with their assumptions about what the courts have guaranteed them, and some of them will give up, and some of them will make mistakes, and we’ll just make sure they have many bad days, and eventually they’ll get tired of fighting with us and we’ll get a team of brutal lawyers to take them down and put them in their place.”

And then having said that, Joe Bob concludes with the killer line:

Well, okay, I guess it worked with the Indians.

To us normal people, this is known as the “beating a dog till it snaps at you, then killing it because it’s dangerous”-style of government.

The only problem with this approach is that we’re not Indians.  And we have some serious fucking teeth.

Couple Bugs There

Let’s hear it for the Surveillance Society:

Privacy advocates used Amazon’s facial recognition to scan thousands of random faces around Capitol Hill in Washington DC to highlight the dangers of this technology’s surveillance capabilities.
While walking around, the team found the facial recognition successfully identified a congressman, but also claimed to spot Roy Orbison – an American singer who died in 1988.
The demonstration was a message to Congress to ban the technology, as there’s no law preventing people from scanning your face without your consent anytime you step out in public.

Hey, I’m pretty sure that ol’ Roy did a few regrettable things in his lifetime (bonked underage groupies, etc.) so now that the gummint has found evidence of his “existence”, they can do a little retroactive post-mortem prosecution.  I’ve seen worse.

What I wanted to see was that the software identified someone who was provably somewhere else at the time — so that in times to come when this bullshit is used by the cops to break an alibi, the evidence can get tossed out of court.

Strangely Satisfying

You know, if an Alpine mountain community lived in constant fear of avalanches, one could feel a certain sympathy if said avalanches caused severe damage to the place each year and some loss of life among its inhabitants.

I suspect, however, that one would feel somewhat less sympathetic if the community refused to deploy snowplows and rescue helicopters purely because of the emissions from those vehicles.  Indeed, one might even get unworthy feelings of smug satisfaction and even Schadenfreude  from the annual, tearful news reports of death and destruction.

How then, are we expected to feel when California gets plunged into darkness and suffers loss of property and life through the regular occurrence of wildfires?

Fire conditions statewide made California “a tinderbox,” said Jonathan Cox, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Of the state’s 58 counties, 43 were under red flag warnings for high fire danger Sunday.

And just so we know exactly why these conditions have reached the point to where they have:  despite the fact that hot Santa Ana winds create an annual risk of deadly wildfires, California continues to ban the clear-cutting and controlled burning of deadwood and -brush in wilderness areas as well as in areas close to suburban development because of supposed-ecological concerns.  That’s the “tinderbox” referred to above.

Moreover, it’s hard for the rest of us to feel pity for Californians when it’s clearly the fault of their own elected officials and legislature who continue to force their wrongheaded Gaia-worship on the Golden Shower State, with consequences that have become not only annual, but predictably horrible.  (And which some, equally-predictably, somehow manage to escape.)

I should feel guilty about my Schadenfreude, but I really don’t — just as I don’t feel sorry for Californians who complain about high taxes, iniquitous government interference in their lives, high real-estate prices and the whole dreadful litany of self-inflicted ills, all without exception imposed on them by, once again, their stupid, venal and self-serving elected politicians.

Let ’em burn.  Maybe at some point they may even be forced to try and get some change enacted through the ballot box, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.


Update:  unusually, I seem to have understated California’s problems.