Month: November 2006

The Top 100 Things to do as an Evil Overlord.

Via the webcomic A Miracle of Science (which I quite enjoy), I bring you The Evil Overlord List, a hilarious take on what to do if you ever become an Evil Overlord. First up, The Top 100 Things I’d do if I Ever Became an Evil Overlord. A sample:

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

6. I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.

7. When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”

8. After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks’ time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

9. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

10. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum — a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

11. I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to show they pose no threat.

12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

13. All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

14. The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last cigarette, or any other form of last request.

Also included are an additional 51 really good ideas, such as:

109. I will see to it that plucky young lads/lasses in strange clothes and with the accent of an outlander shall REGULARLY climb some monument in the main square of my capital and denounce me, claim to know the secret of my power, rally the masses to rebellion, etc. That way, the citizens will be jaded in case the real thing ever comes along.

And he’s taking suggestions, too. Pretty evil, eh?

The Militarization of the Police.

Instapundit links to a Wall Street Journal column by a retired officer on the recent shooting of three black men in an automobile. Some fifty shots were fired by three officers. According to a link provided by Zendo Deb, one officer fired thirty-one rounds – 15 +1 in the chamber, and another full magazine. According to the WSJ piece, the police opened fire after the driver of the vehicle struck a plainclothes police officer who had identified himself.

A week ago Tuesday, three Atlanta police officers performed a raid of a 92 year-old woman’s home on a drug warrant. She opened fire, hitting the three officers in their extremities. They killed her. At most, minor amounts of marijuana were found on her property. There are serious questions about the way the warrant was obtained and the “confidential informant” who gave the evidence for it. This is hardly an unusual occurrence. Radly Balko is probably the best source for in-depth coverage of stories like this one, and others such as Cheryl Ann Stillwell’s, or Cheryl Lynn Noel’s; or just look at his map of botched raids.

A commenter to Instapundit’s piece said:

Police officers carry “high-caliber” semi-automatics nowadays because they should have access to the best tools possible when they are really needed. Trust me on this: even the most routine call is an “extraordinary circumstance” to a cop in trouble.

I have no problem with this. If my life was on the line and I carried a gun as part of my professional duties, I’d want it to be semi-automatic and in a caliber starting with .4 myself. I certainly agree that the .38 Special is not really up to the task, nor is the standard-issue “riot gun” the best long arm an officer might use.

My problem is with the tactics and the attitude.

A lot of cop-bashing goes on over at AR15.com, where more than a few members are uniformed and plainclothes police officers. A lot of comments about “going home safe at the end of the shift” get bandied about, like a scene from “Hill Street Blues.” Cops go dressed in body armor and face-masks. They crash through doors with battering rams in “dynamic entries” ostensibly for their own protection. I realize that this can be a necessity. It should not be standard procedure.

Glenn Reynolds also has a piece up at Popular Mechanics which largely makes the point I want to here:

Dress like a soldier and you think you’re at war. And, in wartime, civil liberties—or possible innocence—of the people on “the other side” don’t come up much. But the police aren’t at war with the citizens they serve, or at least they’re not supposed to be.

I’m fond of quoting Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing:

1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.

3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.

5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.

7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.

9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

It would seem that we’ve abandoned at least a couple of those principles. Specifically, we’ve abandoned #7, and #6 seems to be on the wane. The public are now “civilians,” and the police apparently no longer see themselves as also civilians. But they are. The police are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they’re under the same civil law as the rest of us – except they get away with a lot more than we do, because they’re “professionals,” I guess. To a lot of cops, the rest of us don’t even seem to qualify as amateurs.

Most of the militarization of the police, I think, can be placed at the feet of the War on (some) Drugs™. Dealing with heavily-armed drug dealers meant that cops had to up-arm and “go tactical” too, but it’s greatly increased the police perception of the citizenry as “them” instead of “us.” I don’t want to disarm the police. I don’t think it would be a good idea to strip them of their AR15 rifles, MP-5 submachineguns, 15-round Glock pistols, body armor, etc. But I would prefer it if their attitude was less “as long as I go home safe at the end of the shift” and more like the Coast Guard’s “We have to go out. We don’t have to come back.” After all, their job is supposed to be “To Protect and Serve,” not “Kill People and Break Things.”

UPDATE: Say Uncle prefers the term “Ninjafication” to “Militarization,” and makes a good argument for the difference.

OK, So What Happened to Linda Riss?.

The site has been getting hits all day from Google searches for “Burt Pugach AND Linda Riss” or just “Linda Riss” or some variation. Did he finally kill her? Google News doesn’t say.

I’m a fan of author and professor Orson Scott Card. I admit that he’s hit-and-miss with me as a novelist. I greatly enjoyed most of his “Enderverse” novels (excepting Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead), and some of his other works are quite good, but some leave me unmoved. I generally like what he writes in his “Ornery American” columns. I strongly recommend this one, for example: Who Was On Watch As the Dark Age Approached? I’ve linked to or quoted something he’s written a half-dozen times, most recently here, and there’s this quote I liked very much from his novel Shadow of the Giant:

Islam has never learned how to be a religion. It’s a tyranny by its very nature. Until it learns to let the door swing both ways, and permit Muslims to decide not to be Muslims without penalty, then the world has no choice but to fight against it in order to be free.

Mr. Card has a new novel out today, Empire, on the subject of a new American civil war. (The first quarter of the book is available online. Read Chapter Two, I beg you.) Such a war has been an ongoing topic here at TSM, most recently revisited in Reasonable People, so this is a book I will most definitely be buying in the not-too-distant future. Mr. Card is now doing his rounds of interviews in support of the book release. He was on local radio Monday morning, and today he was interviewed by Mr. and Mrs. Instapundit in a 40+ minute podcast that ranged over a wide array of topics, mostly not the book. That interview is linked here, and I strongly recommend you listen to it as the pieces I have transcribed from it are taken just a bit out of context. It doesn’t sound as bad when you hear the entire discussion. Plus, it’s a damned interesting discussion.

Here’s the pertinent portion, starting about 2/3rds of the way through the interview:

The real problem here is that both parties are pushing towards ideological purity. We have the movement within the Republican party of getting rid of the RINOs – the Republicans in Name Only. We have Democrats who actually spurned Joseph Lieberman because he supported the war. Which means what, they’dve gotten rid of Scoop Jackson, Patrick Moynihan, the greatest Democrats, the reason I became a Democrat? The answer is “Yes, of course they would.”

But when people insist on ideological purity, with incoherent ideologies – and that’s what really both parties offer us right now – incoherent ideologies, there’s no reason why the fact that I oppose the death penalty should mean that I must therefore support freely available abortions. Simply no reason why those should be related. There’s no reason in the world why the fact that I support a fairly strong program of gun control should in any way imply that I support a complete ban on, on, uh, personally owned weapons. No reason why the fact that I support gun control should say anything about how I feel about free-market capitalism. Um, et cetera, et cetera. What do they have to do with each other? And above all, what does being liberal have to do with opposing, or, uh, supporting the war against terror? Our enemies in the war against terror are so anti-liberal that you would think it would be liberals leaping to protect the world from these monstrous ideologies.

—

A lot of it has to do with where the money is coming from in politics today. We have hard-core ideologues, ideologically-driven groups, that contribute money according to their issue. And that’s where these (political) packages were assembled. The NRA knows that Republicans are on their side. If they ever find a Republican who isn’t, of course, they’ll jettison him and he won’t get their money. They’ll support his opponent, if his opponent is willing to say that he’s against any kind of gun control. So we have a group that is a one-issue ideological group, pumping money into campaigns. And, so, the Republican party has become essentially owned by one team of unrelated ideologues who drive them in one direction and the Democratic party is supported by their team of one-issue ideologues who don’t have anything to do with each other, but they’ve picked their party. And so the parties then reflect where the money’s coming from.

—

When you begin to feel that there is no political recourse, where do you turn? What do you do?

—

The people in Yugoslavia, when Yugoslavia started breaking apart into the different republics, nobody expected there to be a war. After all, the different groups that ended up fighting were intermarrying at an astonishingly high rate. It was if the differences were irrelevant. The populations were scattered among each other, it’s why they needed to have ethnic cleansing. It was because you had Muslims and Christians living side by side, Serbs and Croats throughout the country. It looked like a civil war-proof society. But when one team decided to start shooting, they had to sort themselves out, divide themselves into their various territories. It became ugly very quickly and you ended up with genocidal acts. Why? Because the people who were the angriest and the most murderous felt completely justified. They were being lied to. They were being told that the other guys were monsters who were doing hideous, terrible things, and they also wanted to believe those lies, because it made them feel so justified in their rage. So satisfied at the thought that they could do something about it. Well, what they did about it was they pulled out all those wonderful unregistered guns and started shooting.

Well, by Mr. Card’s definition I would have to say that I’m an ideologue. If you want to go so far: a fanatic – defined as “won’t change his mind, won’t change the topic, and won’t shut up.”

It would appear that ideologues are a bad thing in Mr. Card’s estimation, and perhaps they are. I can certainly see his point. But the difference between myself and many, perhaps most ideologues is that I do have a coherent ideology, based on what I’ve studied. No one’s told me to think this way, nor do I blindly follow. I haven’t been lied to to make me believe what I believe. (Well, I have been lied to – by both sides – but I can discern the difference and I know which side lies most often and most egregiously, and why.) I’ll be the first to agree with him that his stance on gun control in no way means that he must hold a specific opinion on free-market capitalism, or that his opposition to capital punishment must mean a support for abortion. I understand what he’s arguing.

Given what he said in the interview though, I gather that the major portion of Mr. Card’s “fairly strong program of gun control” must include registration, and most likely licensing. It probably includes restrictions (bans) on particular types of (but not all) firearms. Mr. Card is a reasonable person. As such I believe we could discuss his support for gun control, and I believe that with some time and effort I could, if not convert, certainly alter his position. But Mr. Card is representative of a plurality of the population that holds an incoherent ideology with respect to gun control. It’s these people I want to reach. It’s these people I write most of these essays for.

I received an email the other day from a gentleman across the pond who wrote:

I’ve been reading through various pages of your blog for most of the day and I just read the “Invitation to my Readers” July 2003 entry and decided to write a quick email.

For most of my life I was pro-gun-control. I’m English, so this view was completely uncontroversial and I don’t think I ever conversed with anybody who disagreed with it. ‘Bowling for Columbine’ was regularly discussed in a “Sheesh, those crazy Americans, eh?” kind of way. Then a couple of years back I starting reading some dissenting opinions. I can’t be sure, but I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who started me down this road. There’s nothing like somebody you respect espousing ideas you don’t to make you look at them anew.

Anyway, every once in a while I’ll come back to the subject (living here it’s not exactly directly relevant to my life) and each time I do I move closer to the libertarian position. Your blog is a very well-written and balanced description. I find myself agreeing with much of it and, where I don’t – I see universal free health care as a great idea, for instance – your writing makes me examine things again.

So thanks for writing it. I get the feeling I’m going to be coming back.

I sincerely hope he does. That’s why I write. That’s why I debate people here on this blog and anywhere they’ll have me.

And I would love a chance to debate Orson Scott Card on the topic of gun control. Registering the Serbian, Croat, Bosniak, Albanian and Macedonian weapons wouldn’t have prevented Yugoslavia’s meltdown, nor could it prevent civil war here. It could have just made the atrocities even more one-sided. Ask Rudolph J. Rummel.

Can’t We Just Ban Liberals from Owning Guns?.

Remember Barry?

I just…I just blink my eyes in amazement everytime this crops up – actually watching people feel the need to carry a concealed weapon in public…

If I were to take a live, armed weapon and carry it on my person, in public, it would eat away at my sanity just as if it were emitting lethal radiation. To know that I carried an instrument of sure and certain death on my person, available and ready to be pulled out and used at a moment’s notice to possibly kill…a child. A homeless person. An innocent.

Obviously that is not your intent. You want to protect yourself – maybe that is how you feel in California. But being brought up in Eastern Tennessee I’ve never once felt the need to protect myself from imminent bodily harm in public. And if I were aware of a location that might be unduly hazardous – a dark alley, a badly lighted parking area – I would avoid it. I’ve never been mugged, nor can I readily pull up a name of any person I’ve ever met that’s been mugged or even bodily threatened in my whole life.

What scares me most is the arbitrary nature of self-defense. What line must be crossed to signal to you that there is imminent danger or threat? Is it a criminal pulling a gun on you? In which case, unless you’re a gunslinger, you’re not going to outdraw him. Is it someone pulling a knife? Threatening words? Bad language or rude gestures? Where is that one point where you decide, “Yes, my life or the life of my loved ones is in danger and I must now take it upon myself to take the life of another person.” What if the guy is reaching into his jacket, and you are sure, absolutely certain that it is a weapon. You pull your gun and shoot–and see he’s reaching for his wallet. Or worse, you miss and hit a child running in the street. Where is that line?

The radiation would rot my brain and I would never be able to live with myself.

Maybe it’s different in California. Maybe it’s different in Tennessee. Maybe I don’t love my family enough…maybe I love them too much. But I know myself, and know that if I surrendered to the paranoia – and I mean that in the most basic sense – there would be no turning back.

At the time I responded:

Barry, I applaud your decision to remain unarmed. I hope, however, that you will get some psychiatric or psychological treatment for your crippling fear of your own lack of control.

In attempting to defend his position, Barry made it worse:

Say I’m eating in a restaurant with my family. The guy in the next table over is carrying a concealed weapon. Someone bumps a waiter who spills hot coffee on his son. Enraged, the guy jumps up and notices either the waiter or the guy who bumped him is black – in his mind, the combination of circumstances: injury to his son, deep-rooted prejudices, you name it, combine to create in his mind a lethal situation. An argument ensues, names are called, nationality and circumstances of birth are questioned. He pulls the weapon and confronts the waiter. From that point on who knows what might happen?

And:

I understand completely that you have the best of intentions, the best training, the best gun money can buy, and the best reasons in the world to want to defend yourself. But I’m sorry, I don’t have insight into your character from my vantage point and I can’t assume you can be trusted with a gun any more than I can assume you’re not going to attack me anyway without a gun.

This is known, in psychological circles, as “projection,” defined at this site thusly:

Psychological projection is the phenomenon whereby one projects one’s own thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings, and so on onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals, parents, children, neighbors, other drivers, political figures, racial groups, states and countries, also occurs).

According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, psychological projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings, and so on onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals and inanimate objects also occurs).

Well, here’s another flippant example (h/t: Outdoor Logic):

Thankful For Restrictive Handgun Laws

I am in the foulest of foul moods. Everyone else is posting about all they are thankful for, but all I am thankful for right now is that I don’t own a gun. I’m not mad at anyone in particular, it’s just that nothing seems to be going the way I want it to go and I have PMS and have to clean the house before noon tomorrow when 14 people will be here to eat turkey.

Normally I’d rank this up to typical hyperbole but for two things: The title to the post, and the author’s self description:

A wife, a mother, and a proud liberal with a temper.

Can’t we just ban liberals from owning guns? They seem to be the ones with severe projection and self-control problems. (And I wonder if this post will piss her off?)

ETA: And also hippies?

A Close Second:.

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics – and you’ll get ten different answers. But there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us, it’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, Maruputo, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes – all of this. All of this was for nothing, unless we go to the stars. — Babylon5

Quote of the Month:.

And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939. – Spider Robinson

Via Eclipse Ramblings

Thanksgiving Dinner Was a Success.

A much smaller success than I had envisioned, but a success nonetheless. Normally we have Thanksgiving dinner, actually a late lunch, at my parent’s house, then drive to my wife’s parent’s house to do a repeat. This year a friend of my sister invited everyone from my side of the family over. Well, this time last year we were completing the Great Remodel™, and the kitchen countertops here were 3/4″ plywood while we waited for the real thing to be delivered and installed as the last major component of the overhaul of Casa del Baker. I decided that I wanted to do dinner here, and I thought it would be nice to have my wife’s family over for it.

So, about 2-1/2 weeks ago I bought a 22 lb. turkey – plenty for everybody, and enough left over for sandwiches and such.

Then I found out that the grandkids would be spending Thanksgiving with their father.

Their mother would be spending it in California.

My wife’s parents would be spending it with #1 Son & family, and #2 son would be going with them.

So it was going to be me, my wife, and a 22 lb. turkey.

What the hell. On with the show!

I got up a about 6:00AM this morning, straightened up the kitchen & fired up the dishwasher, made a batch of cornbread for breakfast, listened to some podcasts, read a few posts and some news stories, and then started the Thanksgiving Feast. First, I made a Lemon Chiffon pie and got it into the freezer, sat down & read a couple more things, and wrote a post. Then I started on the bread. I made a batch of dough, set it off to rise, and cleaned the kitchen up from the mess I made doing the cornbread, the pie and the bread dough. (Damn, but I do love the extra-large, extra-deep sink we put in.) Then I took a shower. By the time I was all cleaned up the dough had risen, so I punched it down, divided it in two, and put half in the refrigerator. The other half I rolled out and made into a loaf, put it into a loaf pan, and set it off to rise again.

I then took the turkey, all 22 pounds of it, out of the refrigerator where it had been thawing since Sunday and put it in the sink. A little more screen time, a few more podcasts, and it was time to put the bread in the oven. Once the bread went in it was time to start the turkey preparation. I did the Safeway 2-hour turkey recipe on my mother’s recommendation. Prep time was just about the 25 minutes it took to bake the bread, so right about 12:30 the turkey went into the 475º oven. I set the timer for 1 hour and went back to surfing the web. After an hour the bird was starting to turn a very nice dark brown, but the meat thermometer only indicated about 135º so I put some foil over the breast, rotated the pan and set the timer for 30 more minutes. Then I started on the Baker Family Tradition: Dressing Balls. We don’t do the stuffing thing (can’t anyway when you do the 2-hour turkey), but what we do is prepare bread stuffing formed into spheres about the size of billiard balls using Pepperidge Farms herb-seasoned and cornbread stuffing, onion, celery, rubbed sage and salt, all moistened by the water used to cook the vegetables and about 20 ounces of chicken stock. These get baked in buttered baking dishes for about 20-25 minutes at 375º.

The turkey came out of the oven just after 2:00PM – an hour and a half after it went in. The meat thermometer showed 165º – five degrees warmer than it really needed to be. I covered it with foil and left it to sit, and put in the first batch of dressing balls. (I eat these things almost like popcorn for a couple of days after Thanksgiving and Christmas, so it pays to make a LOT.) Kaoru came home from work right at 2:30 as the first batch of dressing balls came out, so I started prep on the mashed potatoes. Once they were on the stove and boiling, I checked the turkey – 170º, just like they advertised. Then I got the second half of the bread dough out of the refrigerator, divided it up into dinner rolls, and set them off to rise. I was a little later than I’d planned on those. The potatoes came off the stove, I drained, mashed, seasoned & whipped ’em, then covered them and set them off to the side. By this time the rolls had raised some, so I melted a little butter, brushed it over the tops, and into a 400º oven they went. (Like I said, a little late.) Then I opened the only can of the day – green beans – poured ’em into a bowl, seasoned with a little salt & pepper, and popped them into the microwave for a few minutes at a 20% power setting.

I set the table, carved the turkey, (thoroughly cooked, moist juicy and tender) got the food all arranged, and the rolls were STILL not done, but we sat down to eat about 3:30.

Everything was terrific! And it was nice, I must admit, to having Thanksgiving dinner in private with only my wife there to share it. And boy, do we have leftovers!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I hope the coming year lives up to your dreams, and not down to my expectations.

Not a Thanksgiving Topic.
(But I’ve got to comment on this one.)

The Washington Post reports on a perfectly typical anti-gun knee-jerk illogical reaction to an episode of gun violence:

More Limits Sought On Civilians’ Guns

By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 21, 2006; Page B05

Stung by the shooting deaths of two officers outside a western Fairfax County police station in May, county officials want to push the Virginia General Assembly to ban the carrying of guns into law enforcement buildings by anyone other than authorized personnel.

OK, let me see if I understand the “logic” here: Two officers are shot to death outside a police station, so in order to prevent another occurrence of this type the Virginia General Assembly wants to make it illegal for anyone other than “authorized personnel” to carry a gun INTO a police station?

Anybody besides me see the logical disconnect here?

State law bans weapons in courthouses. But the absence of any prohibition on weapons inside police stations or jails places officers at risk, county officials say. At the request of Fairfax County Police Chief David M. Rohrer, the Board of Supervisors has included a ban in a draft of its legislative program for the 2007 Virginia General Assembly.

Yes, this works SO well with “Gun-free School Zones,” doesn’t it? Note the difference, though: Police stations are full of armed people. No 20-minute wait for a 9-1-1 response.

The county has made numerous attempts to keep firearms out of government buildings, only to see the initiatives languish in a state legislature loath to restrict the rights of gun owners. But the issue has gained new urgency since the May 8 shootings at the Sully District station in Chantilly.

And here is another example of how our legislators don’t trust the law-abiding. After all, the only people who will obey such a law are the law-abiding. If you’ve decided that you’re going to mow down some police officers at their station-house, why would the fact that the General Assembly made taking your gun there illegal even slow you down? What, they’re going to tack on an extra five years to your death-penalty sentence?

No, it’s just the knee-jerk legislative reaction. “We must DO SOMETHING!” And when the only tool you have is a hammer…

Michael W. Kennedy, a mentally ill 18-year-old, drove to the rear parking lot of the station and fired more than 70 shots with an assault rifle and other weapons. Detective Vicky O. Armel, 40, died that day, along with Kennedy. Officer Michael E. Garbarino, 53, died of his wounds nine days later.

Yep. A new law would have prevented THIS shooting! How does a mentally ill 18-year old acquire an “assault rifle” and other weapons? Didn’t he break some laws to do that? Not to mention ripping off 70+ rounds at the police station parking lot and its occupants.

Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax police spokeswoman, said Rohrer would not comment on the proposal, the subject of a public hearing before the board yesterday, because it is still in draft form and has not been formally approved by supervisors.

Rohrer further would not comment because he probably thinks the proposal is as idiotic as I do. At least I hope so.

The Sully shooting touched off an intense discussion among county officials about security at public-safety facilities. The measure has stirred opposition by gun rights groups. Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said such a ban would not have prevented Kennedy’s assault on the Sully station, which occurred outside the building. He added that police stations have secure areas where only authorized personnel are allowed.

“This whole thing is a non-issue,” Van Cleave said. “They’re just trying to poke gun owners in the eye.”

No, they don’t see it that way, Mr. Van Cleave. These are people who think that anyone who likes guns is a psycopath-in-waiting, but a psychopath that can be deterred by another stupid fucking law.

A psychopath unless they collect a government paycheck.

Doubly Evil, Just in Time for Thanksgiving!.

Tonight at precisely 9:17:28PM The Smallest Minority received its 666,666^th visitor:

Far out! (Do they still say “Far out!”? Oh, and NO PRIZES! – Sorry.)

Next time HANG AROUND A LITTLE LONGER!

P.S.: Yes, I did sit and stare at Sitemeter until hit number 666,666 was recorded. Actually, I spent the time reading “Sluggy Freelance.” I’m up to January 2000 now.

I need a life, in addition to a break.