Month: February 2007

September?!? But I Want it NOW!

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The Civilian Marksmanship program has given us a little more info on the M1 Carbines it received:

We have started the inspection of the M1 Carbines that were recently transferred to the CMP. Because the carbines were received with the bolts removed and many are in heavy preservative, the process is taking longer than expected. The carbines will not be ready for sale on 1 March. We will begin accepting carbine orders for Inland carbines on 30 April, 2007. Carbine orders received prior to 30 April will be returned to the sender. Other manufacturers will not be available until later in the year. At this time no decisions have been made as to pricing. We are not accepting orders or establishing waiting lists at this time. Next CMP Sales update is planned for 23 March.

We do not expect to find any ‘collector’ or ‘correct’ grades.

We do not expect to have a “field” grade for these carbines.

After all the carbines are inspected and graded, any remaining receivers or barreled receivers will be put up for sale at that time. We do not expect this to happen for another 12-18 months.

We do not have magazines, slings or oilers. Carbines will not be sold with magazines, slings, or oilers. If we are able to acquire any of these items, we will list them for sale separately at a later date.

Now, here’s the bad news:

ITEM MANUFACTURER PRICE COMMENTS**
R017IN INLAND TBD Accepting
orders beginning 30 April 2007. Carbine orders received before 30
April will be returned to sender.
R017UD UNDERWOOD TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017Q QUALITY
HARDWARE		 TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017NP NATIONAL
POSTAL METER		 TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017IBM IBM TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017SA SAGINAW
SG		 TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017ST STANDARD
PRODUCTS		 TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017WIN WINCHESTER TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017RO ROCKOLA TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017SG SAGINAW
S’G’ (GRAND RAPIDS)		 TBD Not accepting orders before Sept 2007
R017IP IRWIN
PEDERSON		 Auction Auction Only
AUCTION
***
 Auction Auction Only

So, no IBM until after October at the earliest, and jeebus only knows what the price might be. Damn.

No, Violent but Protective

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So much to blog about, but there was a very interesting piece over at Say Uncle about ass-whuppin’. (Note to Uncle: Turn in your Southern Boy card. An ass-whippin’ is what your momma gave you for misbehavin’, followed by another when your daddy got home. An ass-whuppin’ is what you get in a fight if you come out the loser.) Read the whole thing and the comments, but the heart of the piece is this:

The man I worked with was a licensed social worker with a graduate degree and before that he was a drill sergeant. No, really. One day, I said to him: What’s wrong with kids these days? They’re too quick to shoot each other or stab each other or club each other from behind. He says, and I am not making this up, that: Kids today are afraid to take an ass-whippin’.
He went on to say that, in his day and mine, if two teenage boys had a conflict, they’d meet on the playground after school and settle it. He’s right, we did. But no one ever got killed. No one ever went to the ER. We had black-eyes and were sore but we got over it pretty quickly. Then, the next day, we were friends again. Now, he says, kids are afraid of that. They don’t want to fight, because they’re scared of a little ass-whippin’. They’d rather attempt to kill someone than get their ass handed to them.

In a conversation with a co-worker several years ago, he related that when he was growing up you fought with your fists – no kicking. (Kicking was girlish.) Then kicking was OK. Then kicking when the other guy was down. Then using sticks or clubs. Then knives. Then guns.

He stopped fighting when they went to knives.

Commenter Ken noted:

I think he’s not exactly wrong but not quite right either. I don’t think it’s being afraid of an ass-whippin’ as such (hell, I was afraid of that too) but it’s a result of the whole “violence is BAD BAD BAD ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS” mentality forced on kids today, often to the point that self defense is punished (can you say “zero tolerance”?)

In the old days, as noted, boys would often just pair off, fight, and be done. Also, if there was a bully, the victims could team up and take care of it, and be done.

But if no distinction whatsoever is made between degrees of violence, or the ends to which it is put, then there is no reason for an adolescent to draw a distinction between “fighting back” and murder. Both are equally condemned, so why take half measures? (My emphasis.)

I’ve written on this topic before, in “(I)t’s most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can.” What Ken is illustrating is the social philosophy that cannot distinguish between “violent and predatory” and “violent but protective,” and it’s a philosophy most emphatically in evidence on the campuses of our primary schools – where even Dodgeball is banned because it’s violent and somebody might get hurt. While I’ll agree that there’s a growing number of younger kids who are willing to use lethal violence, I think that this is only part of the problem. Another problem for is the number of our yoots who grow up in a protective bubble, essentially never suffering any significant injury – certainly not one at the hands of another. From that Arizona Republic piece:

Kids often get hurt playing tag, said Sharon Roland, the nurse at Jack L. Kuban School in southwest Phoenix and vice president of the School Nurses Organization of Arizona.

They split their chins, scrape their noses and graze their knees, the expected injuries of childhood. But they also knock out teeth and fracture bones.

E’Lisa Harrison’s son, Grant, was 8 when he was pushed and fell during a game of tag at Kyrene de la Estrella Elementary School in Phoenix. It was an accident, but Grant spent weeks with a cast on his arm, missing out on a season of baseball.

While growing up, my sister broke her wrist. My brother broke an ankle and a collar bone in separate incidents. I broke a toe. Hovever I cracked my head a number of times (requiring stitches – which may explain my current personality), and even did a serious face-plant on the sidewalk once. Most of the kids I grew up with got injured – from cuts requiring stitches to one that was hospitalized after being hit by a car. We were active – and we learned that stupid hurts, pain is temporary, and chicks dig scars. I don’t think a lot of our yoots learn much of that today.

Part of that learning leads to empathy – you know what it feels like to be significantly physically injured. It’s a short leap to transferring that to someone else – and staying your hand, or intervening in a violent situation. But if you have no personal experience with pain, inflicting it on others would seem to me to be easier.

I last fought when I was about 10 or 11 years old. Neither one of us was noticeably injured. We were best friends before the fight, and we were best friends again afterward. (Well, within a couple of weeks.) But prior to that, I knew what being hurt was. I didn’t try to gouge out his eyes or kick him in the crotch, and he returned the favor. No knives, no clubs, no guns – though both he and I had fathers who owned firearms, and we both knew where they and the ammo were: in bedroom closets, unlocked and accessible.

In Potential Victims I quoted Grim from Grim’s Hall:

Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.

The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective). This is to ask: what is the difference between a street gang and the Marine Corps, or a thug and a policeman? In every case, we see that the good youths are guided and disciplined by old men.

Absolutely. Case in point, my father-in-law and my wife’s nephew. He’s a very small boy for his age, and he gets bullied in school. My FIL advised him to fight back, and if set upon by someone much bigger, gather his friends and take on the bully as a group. My wife, who has worked in the public education sector explained to her father that his advice was no longer acceptable. A fight in school no longer involves the principal and a few days suspension – the police are called and even children are taken away in handcuffs these days.

It’s insane. And it’s the end product of this kind of thinking:

Barry Says:

I’m a follower of the “violence never solved anything” school of thought as a general rule. I don’t necessarily think two kids squaring off in the schoolyard is a productive way to end an argument, either in the short term of the long term. There must be more civilized ways to resolve conflict that let kids release steam but do it in ways that don’t involve anger and aggression toward each other.

And Ken responded:

But for Barry’s comment: I realize I didn’t express it very clearly, but I don’t (and I don’t think others did either) mean to imply that kids should ever have solved arguments that way. Violence is neither useful nor productive for solving disagreements, though one might make a case for minor fights being an outlet (I don’t, but it’s not implausible). But bullies are not typically deterred by nice talk alone, and certainly are not deterred by victims that don’t fight back.

No, bullies aren’t deterred by victims who don’t fight back.

Which negates the hypothesis that “violence never solved anything.” Violence does solve things, and it solves them pretty thorougly in many cases. Attempting to suppress violence in a population due to a philosophy that “violence never solved anything” and “violence is BAD BAD BAD ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS” has led the UK to be the most violent industrialized nation in Europe – because the bullies are not confronted. Violence in defense of self or others is a corollary of the fundamental human right, and it is RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS. It is “Violent but PROTECTIVE,” and as a culture we’ve lost sight of that to a large extent – and we’re brainwashing our children with it more and more with each successive generation, leaving them defenseless against those who would do them violence.

Update: I have an earlier post along these same lines, too, I just discovered. Read the comments.

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Apologies.

For the dearth of posts. Lots going on in my personal and professional life which are interfering with the time needed to blog – at least up to my personal standards, anyway. There’s lots out there to write about, but I just don’t have the time right now. I’m limited at the moment to commenting sporadically. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ll try to generate something interesting later in the week, but I’m not promising anything.

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Quote of the Day.

Via David Hardy, from a Harvard Crimson op-ed you really ought to read the whole of:

Academia is inherently ill-equipped to deal with the realities of conflict, since it is based on the premise that disputes can be resolved through rational exchange of ideas. Yet violence, whether it happens to squirrels or Harvard undergraduates, is a strange animal. It is sudden, profound, and oblivious to logic and theory.

Change “Academia” to “Intellectuals” or “Bureaucrats” or, as David put it, “Elites,” (or Thomas Sowell, “The Anointed,”) and it goes a long way to explaining the Iraq Study Group’s conclusion that we need to engage Syria and Iran in negotiations:

In order to foster such consensus, the United States should embark on a robust diplomatic effort to establish an international support structure intended to stabilize Iraq and ease tensions in other countries in the region. This support structure should include every country that has an interest in averting a chaotic Iraq, including all of Iraq’s neighbors—Iran and Syria among them. Despite the well-known differences between many of these countries, they all share an interest in avoiding the horrific consequences that would flow from a chaotic Iraq, particularly a humanitarian catastrophe and regional destabilization.

Doesn’t that just drip with the belief that “disputes can be resolved through rational exchange of ideas” while completely ignoring the fact that these states are violent, and thus not interested in the stability of Iraq? In fact, that they find the instabilty in Iraq to their advantage?

Doesn’t that one quote explain the urge to find out “why they hate us” – so we can exchange ideas rationally and resolve our dispute? Doesn’t this explain Neville Chamberlain perfectly? Our media? The Left?

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Named Estates.

“Monticello,” “Mount Vernon,” “Biltmore House,” “Pickfair,” “Tara.”

And now Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards’ new little bungalow:


“Other America”

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Global Bullshit.

Now that the UN has proclaimed the debate over Global Cooling Warming Climate Change to be ended, I got the urge to write one of my typically long and heavily link-filled pieces on the topic. Somebody beat me to it. Read J. R. Dunn’s A Necessary Apocalypse at The American Thinker if you have not already done so. A teaser:

That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)

Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse – and that’s what global warming is all about.

Once you’ve read that, sit back and enjoy Penn & Teller’s Showtime episode of Bullshit! on the topic of environmentalism.

Let me quote from one of the people interviewed for the piece: Patrick Moore, a founding member and former President of Greenpeace:

The environmental movement was basically hijacked by political and social activists who came in and very cleverly learned how to use green rhetoric, or green language, to cloak agendas that actually had more to do with anti-corporatism, anti-globalization, anti-business, and very little to do with science or ecology. And that’s when I left. (The Greenpeace organization.)

I realized that the movement I had started was being taken over by politicoes, basically, and that they were using it for fundrasing purposes.

Most of the environmental movement is composed of white, upper-middle class people who are, I think incorrectly, telling people in the rest of the world what to do, where people don’t live in nice houses and don’t have good drinking water and good health standards. I think the environmental movement is basically elitist.

Nobody’s going to listen to you if you say the world is not gonna come to an end, but if you say the world is coming to an end you get headlines. And so sensationalism, especially when it’s combined with misinformation, leads to a situation where people send gobs of money to these groups for campaigns that are actually totally misguided.

The campaign against forestry is a classic case of absolutely and totally misleading the general public. It’s true that we are losing forests in the tropics of this world, but it’s not because of logging companies, it’s because of poor people – millions of them, who are trying to make a living and grow some food for their families. The fact is, in North America, there is still as much forest as there was a hundred years ago. And the reason there’s so much forest is because we use so much wood. Because we cut trees down to make our houses, But the environmental groups have got people thinking that when you go into a lumberyard and buy wood, you’re causing the forest to be destroyed, when in fact what you’re doing is ordering new trees to be planted. It is something we have to do in order to feed and house the six billion people on this earth.

And it drives me even further crazy to have them say they’re against globalization when their main tools of trade are cell phones and the internet. It just makes no sense at all to be against science and technology, and then to use science and technology, whether its jet planes to get to international environmental meetings, or cell phones or laptop computers. You’re part of globalization. So how can you be against it?

I can’t add much to that, though in a future post I will attempt to.

KevinLeave a comment

Quote of the Day.

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. – Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom.

And for some reason, large parts of our population seem to want us to return there.

The Journey Down the Path of Compelled Helplessness

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The title of this post is from a comment left at On Being Down and Defenseless in Britain over on The Gates of Vienna. The latest outrage from Old Blighty?

Jump up and down and shout to beat street crime

 Witnesses to violent street crime should try to ‘distract’ attackers by honking their car horns or even ‘jumping up and down’. That’s according to Labour’s Police Minister.

 The extraordinary remarks by Tony McNulty prompted an immediate, angry response from law and order experts, who described him as ‘irresponsible’.

 The standard police advice to people who witness violent behaviour is that they should not get involved and immediately call 999.

 But in an interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, Mr McNulty said concerned citizens should ‘try some distractive activities’ instead.

Absolutely. Fucking. Amazing. This is the Monty-Pythonesque “You’re Not Qualified” mentality brought to its highest lowest form. Citizens shouldn’t get involved – even to the point of simply making noise. If this doesn’t define “compelled helplessness,” I don’t know what would. I’m reminded of an old post by Dave Kopel at The Corner where a University student told of her introduction to acceptable victim behavior while staying in England:

(The officer) instructed us on how to properly be a victim. If we were attacked, we were to assume a defensive posture, such as raising our hands to block an attack. The reason was (and she spelled it out in no uncertain terms) that if a witness saw the incident and we were to attempt to defend ourselves by fighting back, the witness would be unable to tell who the agressor was. However, if we rolled up in a ball, it would be quite clear who the victim was.

In other words, assume a fetal position. How appropriate.

The Minister, who is the deputy to Home Secretary John Reid, suggested that ‘simply shouting’ at would-be muggers or ‘blowing your horn’ at them could act as a deterrent. And he said that people who witness an attack in the street should ‘jump up and down’ while waiting for the police to arrive.

His comments come during a deepening crisis in the Home Office and follow new figures showing a sharp rise in violent crime.

Right. Would that be the report indicating that recorded violent crime is down, or the official crime survey report that indicates that violent crime is up? Because, you know, I’m confused. Of course, it’s fairly easy to reduce “recorded” violent crime. Just don’t record them, you see!

The interview with Mr McNulty is part of a Panorama special being screened tomorrow evening which examines the crisis of anti-social behaviour sweeping Britain’s streets.

Law and order campaigners warned that anyone following the Minister’s advice to ‘distract’ robbers could be putting themselves at serious risk.

Which is why “it’s most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can.” Instead, the UK emotionally and legally neuters its populace via an official but unwritten policy of compelled helplessness.

Street criminals routinely carry knives or even guns and there have been a growing number of incidents in which so-called onlookers who intervene have also themselves been attacked.

Because the criminals know they have little to nothing to fear from an unarmed populace unsure of what they can legally do to defend themselves or others, and the police are too overwhelmed to intervene. Besides, they’re too busy running the “Big Brother” video cameras.

The remarks add to the already confusing and sometimes contradictory messages sent out to concerned citizens.

In some cases police publicly praise so-called ‘have-a-go heroes’. But in other situations, people taking the law into their own hands have become police suspects while the original perpetrator has walked free.

Even honking a car horn, as Mr McNulty suggests, can backfire. A motorist who sounded his at a pedestrian who stepped out in front of his car was recently fined by police for ‘excessive’ use of the instrument.

Sweet bleeding jeebus. I rest my case.

Serving police officer Norman Brennan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust, called the Minister’s remarks ‘irresponsible’, adding: “Tony McNulty needs to get into the real world. Only then will he realise how ridiculous these remarks sound. The public are not going to jump up and down – they are going to be scared witless.”

Only because you and those like you made them that way. Once upon a time, England was populated by a people with pride and a sense of right and wrong. Apparently between the losses of WWI, WWII, and the increasing control of their everyday lives by a Socialist government, the population has been domesticated. It’s sad, really.

For the Tories, Shadow Police Reform Minister Nick Herbert said: “Jumping up and down and waving your hands in the air in a hopeless manner does seem to be the standard Home Office response to problems these days. The public need some consistent guidance about what they should do in these circumstances.”

Figures out this month showed a two per cent rise in crime over the past year to a total of 2.44 million incidents, with gun crime soaring by ten per cent. And there was a 46 per cent surge in householders suffering the terror of being robbed at gunpoint in their home.

Isn’t England the sterling example that the gun control organizations point to as the pinnacle of achievment? Weren’t handguns banned there, oh, about 1996? Banned not as in “you can’t have any more,” but as in “turn them all in”? Aren’t all other guns there supposedly strictly controlled? Licensing? Check. Registration? Check. “Safe Storage?” Check. No “gun show loopholes,” no “assault weapons,” no “Saturday Night Specials,” no “Pocket Rockets”? Check. Isn’t England an island – without the excuse that neighboring countries don’t share its strict gun control laws? Check.

So, instead they smuggle Uzis in via truck.

Economics 101. Supply will meet demand.

The statistics come against a backdrop of a growing crisis in the Home Office, with Mr Reid admitting he and his ministerial team had failed to make the Home Office ‘fit for purpose’. Mr McNulty was reshuffled from immigration to his current brief last May after the scandal over foreign criminals being allowed to walk free without even being considered for deportation.

Sounds like catch-and-release is popular on that side of the pond as well.

But, as the man in charge of law and order, the 48-year-old MP for Harrow East has continued to be dogged by controversy.

He was recently blamed by the Tories for another furore, this time involving Britons who committed sex crimes abroad being allowed to return home and work with children.

Of course. It’s not like he’s in danger of losing his job or anything. He’s from the government, and he’s there to help you. Good and hard.

Extract from the full Panorama interview

Jeremy Vine: “You see a young man looking aggressive, shouting at an old woman. What do you do? Do you retreat and ring the police?’

Tony McNulty: “I think you should in the first instance. It may well be simply shouting at them, blowing your horn or whatever else deters them and they go away.”

Jeremy Vine: “He’s now hitting her and the police haven’t come. What do you do then?’

Tony McNulty: “The same, the same, you must always…”

Jeremy Vine: “Still wait?’

Tony McNulty: “Get back to the police, try some distractive activities.”

Jeremy Vine: “What? Jump up and down?’

Tony McNulty: “Sometimes that may well work.”

At least he wasn’t advocating curling up into a fetal position. How about grabbing something heavy and beating the sonofabitch into unconsciousness? Would that be excessive?

Edited to add: If you want your blood pressure to spike even further, read up on some other recent outrages carried out by the UK government as chronicled by Irons in the Fire. Read down to the updates. Stow all breakables out of reach first.

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“Gee, I Never Knew 110VAC was a Caliber.”

Hat tip to Xavier. I haven’t finished watching this yet, but that line had me rolling. A 13 year-old girl explains Canada’s gun registration system. Watch “Katey’s Firearm Facts”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJggEvIlsJ4&w=425&h=350]

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What Happened to the Concept of a “Speedy Trial”?.

Back in 2003 when I wrote Pressing the “Reset” Button, I mentioned the case of Steven Bixby and his father Arthur of Abbeville, SC. The Bixbys admittedly shot and killed two SC peace officers over a dispute about a 20-foot section of property taken for a road-widening project. Steven Bixby is going to trial shortly. Bixby claims the first officer was shot in self-defense. Judging from the scant evidence provided by the newspapers, the second officer cannot be so justified.

Jury selection begins next week, according to an AP news report.

According to the latest report:

The Bixbys left New Hampshire about a decade ago after participating in a group angry with zoning laws and taxes.

And, of course, anybody who dissents over government exercise of power is painted with the same broad brush:

“When I think of the Bixbys, it’s like the arc that anti-government folks take,” said Heidi Beirich, spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alabama-based civil rights watchdog group. “You start not paying your taxes, you start hating the government, you get involved reading publications from patriot groups. So many of them end up committing acts of violence.”

“Patriot groups.” Really. No “scare quotes” either.

As I wrote in “Reset” Button:

Jefferson suggested a small armed rebellion every 20 years or so. We didn’t take his advice. Our last one ended in 1865, and it was so devastating, I think it put us off rebellion entirely too long.

Government isn’t “us” and hasn’t been for a long, long time. It represents the people who run the Democrat and Republican Parties, and those who pay them the most. Government-run education has ensured that the end product coming out of our schools is uniformly ignorant of how the system is supposed to work, and it’s done a damned good job of indoctrinating our children in the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” philosophy, and the “if it feels good, do it” philosophy. Fifty-plus years of this has produced a very large, very ignorant, very apathetic population.

I think that “pressing the reset button” is going to happen, but all it’s going to get some of us is a tighter collar and a heavier chain.

—

I don’t think you’re going to see a widespread armed uprising. What you’re going to see is individuals and small groups who’ve simply had enough arming and striking – and probably dying in the process. If you’ve read John Ross’s Unintended Consequences you’ll get the idea, but I don’t expect anything like the level of response he writes of. Not enough people are pissed off enough to do that.

Of course the media will spin it as “lone deranged gun-nuts” or “anti-government militias,” but if you pay attention you’ll note an increase in the numbers over time.

In the earlier piece, Steven Bixby reportedly stated: “If we can’t be any freer than that in this country, I’d rather die.” Chances are good he’ll get his wish.