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More Bondi Beach Reflections
A story has come out about the OzCop who is supposed to have shot and killed one of the Muslim terrorist assholes, ending at least that one’s participation in the fun and games.
Some salient facts: the gun was a Glock (model unknown), and the guy took his shot from just under 50 yards and dropped the dirtbag.
That’s some good shooting, or else just very lucky. (That’s why we shooters concentrate on shooting 3- or 5-shot groups: do it once, fine; do it again, good; do it five times, now we’re talking. Consistency takes luck out of the equation.) Consider the pic:
Couple of comments: Note that Our Hero did two things that helped him: he took cover behind a hefty tree, and used the trunk as a rest. (If he’d made a 50-yard kill shot offhand, I’d have to go with a 60% luck factor unless he was a highly proficient handgunner with maybe some competition experience.)
As for the tree, it’s a well-known fact that a thick tree trunk will stop the vast majority of calibers, and as anyone will tell you, if you’re going up against a hostile shooter, cover is essential because the less of you he can see, the better chance you have of surviving.
Anyway, all’s well that ends well. It’s just too bad the other asshole wasn’t shot and killed as well.
No More
Being a history buff, I’m always attracted to those Eeewww Choob videos that talk about the events that shaped our world. But now I look askance at these videos, and in most cases I turn them off after only a few minutes.
The reason? A.I. narration.
WTF is going on? How difficult can it be to hire a speaker — an actual human — to read a frigging script, instead of turning the script over to some machine to create a sorta-human voice?
I am, as my Readers will know, something of a stickler for correct speech, be it grammar or spelling (in print, of course), and that sticklishness extends very much, oh very much indeed to the spoken word as well.
When I hear mispronounced words — sometimes with several different pronounciations of the same word during the course of the narration — it irks me as much as would a series of different misspellings of the same word in print in the course of a single article or essay.
So no, I’ve made a decision to ignore any video, no matter how interesting the topic, if it uses that stupid, wooden A.I. nonsense.
I’m irritated almost as much, by the way, by A.I.-generated “photos” or pictures, but when it comes to history, of course, there’s not always a photographic record of the event or of the people involved, so I can sort of deal with it. Historical re-enaction using actual human beings can be horribly expensive, for not much benefit, so I can get along with phony actors and scenery.
But when it comes to speech? Ugh, no. There’s just too much dissonance — I mean, my own dissonance — for me to have any respect for the material, no matter the initial interest.
There it is: no more A.I. narration for me. I’d rather just buy a book on the topic.
Outrageous Travesty
We’re all familiar with the “registration leads to confiscation” trope. But that’s not the only way that a gun registration regime can fuck with you.
It all started with a Righteous Shooting:
Foehner collided with our criminal justice system in May 2023 when he went out for a pack of cigarettes in the early hours of the morning. Crime in his Kew Gardens neighborhood became a problem after a now-shuttered seedy hotel had opened up in 2017, so Foehner took a revolver with him as protection.
In an eerie twist, Foehner had complained to this very paper about the disorder in 2020.
“This isn’t our nice little neighborhood anymore,” he told The Post at that time, noting the brazen drug deals taking place.
But on that fateful night, he returned from buying smokes and saw an unhinged man banging on the door of his building. It was Cody Gonzalez, who then menacingly approached Foehner, demanding a cigarette and his phone.
“He kept coming closer and clearly he was going to attack me.” Foehner said he pulled out a gun and pointed it at the ground. But Gonzalez didn’t stop. He motioned toward Foehner’s neck with an object and his instincts kicked in. Foehner shot the man dead. The ordeal was caught on security camera.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone. He left me no choice,” said Foehner.
He called 911 and cooperated with authorities.
Of course, the corpus delicti was a charming choirboy:
Gonzalez had at least 15 priors dating back to 2004 and a history of mental illness.
In any American state, Our Hero would have been given a pat on the back and sent home to his wife. But this happened in Noo Yawk fucken Siddy, so now it’s time for a Red Curtain Of Blood Warning:
He wasn’t charged in the death of Gonzalez, which was deemed justified, but the DA threw the book at him for criminal weapons possession.
And so Our Hero, age 67, is going to jail, for four years. For owning a couple of “unlicensed” guns.
Read the whole disgusting thing to get the full flavor of life in the Big City.
And this, children, is why you should resist any government which wants to register your guns.
Thursday Landscape
Astoria, OR 1992
From one of my many roadtrips with Trevor.
I was a fairly serious photographer back then: two Pentax ME Super SLRs, a silver (for print) and a black (slides):
Shared between the two, I used five different lenses, and mostly Kodak 25- or 50 ASA film for daylight, 200- or 400 ASA for night-time.
When I get to posting the game animal pics, you’ll see the results through various Pentax lenses — 500mm, 200mm, 40-80mm zoom (my favorite), the “standard” 50mm, and very occasionally wide-angle 28mm (although the latter I used mostly for landscape pics).
I don’t want to wander too far into the Camera Dork Forest… those days are far behind me.
Bondi Reflections
Right up front, I’m going to say that I hope I’m never in a situation like one of the several mass shootings we’ve just seen. I’m no hero, I’m too old for that kind of thing, and there are too many bad outcomes (for me) should I get involved with — i.e. by shooting back at — asshole gunmen on a spree.
That said, I also hope that if the situation is inescapable that I will have the gumption to perform my civic duty, i.e. by not running away and hoping that law enforcement will take care of everything, and doing my level best to end the threat.
I also hope I don’t get shot by the frigging cops, which is what seems to have happened in Sydney because to the untrained and panicked eye, the target becomes any guy holding a gun (or, in the case of the OzCops) and even standing next to the gun he just used, with his hands in the air.
What a shit show.
For those who think that I’m being silly to imagine such things happening, living as I do in north Texas: let me remind everyone that there was just such a mass shooting at an outdoor mall in Allen, just up the road from my house, only a couple years ago. (What makes it all the more chilling was that both New Wife and Mrs. Doc Russia had gone out shopping in Allen, and might well have ended up at the mall in so doing.)
So no: if we’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s that this shit can happen anywhere. And we would do well to be prepared to deal with it.
Once again, I’m absolutely not hoping that I get involved in some of this mayhem; but at the same time, I will admit to doing some mental role-playing in my head, dredging up all the old “Coinops” (counter-insurgency operations) drills I learned back in those far-off days when we all carried muskets and bayonets.
One thing is for sure, though: I will not be a helpless victim.