The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the… Decade?
I hate the dentist. My teeth are like little vaginas.
SayUncle (attributed with his permission, even.)
First runner up, Rob Allen from Sharp as a Marble:
Rob: Do they have anti-gun conventions?
Me: No. They can’t get enough people to show up.
Rob: What would they do? “Here’s the anti-gunrange…”
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I guess you had to be there.
A Few Shots (So to Speak) From the NRA Convention
I was there for the gate opening at 10:00AM. What a crowd! I’ve never seen so much high-speed, low-drag hardware in one place in my life.
And there were a lot of very political statements. Here’s one I particularly liked, on the back of a young man’s T-shirt:
(click each for full size)
Here was the display at the Kentucky State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. booth:
I’ll try to post much more shooty goodness tomorrow, but now I have to get ready for tonight’s blogger get-together.
One other thing, though: I watched most of the speakers at this afternoon’s “Leadership Conference” (starting with Ollie North – since they had a hard time getting us a video feed in the Press room). The general gist of pretty much every speech (as I heard it) was “Please don’t stay home this November. McCain may suck, but he’s better than the Democrat alternative, no matter which one it is!”
What a resounding endorsement of Senator Cylon.
Made it to the hotel, & unpacked. The weatherweenies were right – it’s wet here. And the jacket I brought with me that I thought was water-resistant surrendered immediately. It’s now hanging in the bathroom in shame, trying to dry.
It’s 8:40 local time (and still light out), 5:40 Tucson time, and I have had a Snickers bar and a Pepsi today. (Breakfast of champions!) I need to find something resembling food. And maybe some Scotchguard.
If there’s anybody else staying at the Executive Inn, drop me a email – gunrights-at-comcast-dot-net. Maybe we can get together later. For right now, it’s back out into the rain and something to EAT.
Word of Advice
I’m at the airport, waiting for my plane to arrive. It’s probably NOT a good idea to fire up the laptop in the waiting area when you’ve replaced Window’s “Startup” chime with a soundclip from the movie Serenity. Especially when the speaker volume is set to “High”.
And most especially when the soundclip says this:
This is the Captain. We’re having a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence, and then… explode.
And I wonder why I’m on a TSA list.
I just tried to check in online with Frontier Airlines for my flight out to Louisville tomorrow. Despite the nice letter I received from the TSA back in March, I’m apparently still on their list of suspicious people, even though the FBI recently gave me a clean bill of health:
So now if I want to fight it, I have to go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and appeal under 49 U.S.C. ยง46110.
In other words: “Go away. You’re bothering me.”
I don’t have the time or (especially) the money to pursue that option, so here’s the deal from now on – no matter what gas prices are, if my destination is 15 hours or less away, I’m driving. If it’s vacation, I’ll take TWO days to get there.
Mr. Jim Kennedy of the “Traveler Redress Inquiry Program” is kindly invited to lave my nether regions, neglecting not the ‘taint, and that goes for the entire employment roster of the “A Security Theater” department of “Homeland Security.”
I wonder if I should wear my Proud Member of the Triangle of Death t-shirt tomorrow, or my Achmed the Dead Terrorist one?
The fact is that the Democrats will control Congress. If they also control the White House, we will have a series of legislative packages that will make the Great Society look like a libertarian government. In opposition the Republicans rediscover their principles; it’s power they haven’t been able to handle since Newt Gingrich was Speaker.
The country is in trouble. We have forgotten our founding principles, and we move inexorably toward a European style socialist state, with the only winners being an enormous bureaucracy. This will accelerate the economic decline.
The argument is to give the Democrats their head, and pick up the pieces after the inevitable crash. I think that overlooks the resilience of tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect regimes. We haven’t seen much in the way of reforms in Europe. The Democrats will create new bureaucracies that can never be dismantled: an example is the Department of Education. Reagan came into office determined to abolish it. Now it owns US education, and No Child Left Behind is entrenched. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy is inexorable.
Jerry Pournell via Instapundit
RTWT.
The Smallest Minority turns 5 today. Five years ago, Wednesday May 14, 2003, I put up three posts; one of which was “What is a Right?”
Interestingly, we’re still discussing that topic.
This will be my 2,936th post, an average of about 1.6 posts per day. Two years ago I was at post 2,117. (Obviously I’ve either slowed down, or I’ve made up for a decrease in quantity for an increase in quality length.) Sitemeter says the current visit count is 1,089,044 as I write this. Two years ago it was 557,464. Haloscan tells me that I have 14, 374 comments, up from “over 10,000” as I recorded it a couple of years back. (Apparently y’all have gotten much quieter!)
On the first anniversary of this blog, I posted 40 Things About Me and This Blog. I just re-read it.
Nothing much has changed except I’m older, I’m no longer Pistol Director at the Tucson Rifle Club and I don’t run the IHMSA matches there anymore, my grandkids are four years older (and STILL living with me), and I’ve read a lot more books.
I’m still arguing with people, and trying to educate both myself and others. Over the last five years I’ve watched as the defenders of the right to arms have grown stronger and more active, and I’ve watched as those who want the State to provide cradle-to-grave “care” have, too. They don’t see it like that, but it’s what it boils down to in the end. Over the last five years I’ve watched our military fight enemies armed with small-arms, crew-served weapons and IEDs (some of which are made in Iran), and enemies who control the checkbooks that pay, feed, and supply them. I’ve watched our political masters on both sides of the aisle behave like angry children. (It was Heinlein who said that “civil servant” is the semantic equivalent of “civil MASTER”.) I’ve watched the Supreme Court make decisions that, as Antonin Scalia has noted, create a Constitution for a country I don’t recognize. I’ve watched as the Chief Executive has spent money like water, and asked the people to just keep shopping! while doing dick-all about our porous borders. Yeah. That’s sustainable.
And now we’re at a point, politically, where there are three candidates running who have a realistic shot at the Presidency, and I wouldn’t urinate on any of them if their hair was on fire.
Where the hell is the space colony they promised me when I was a child, watching men leave bootprints and tire tracks in the lunar dust? Where is my new frontier, my place to go to so that I may live free? (I mean, I appreciate Scaled Composites and its competitors, but we should be living up there now, not floating around in low-Earth orbit in a tin can.)
Oh. Yeah. NASA. Right.
We’re headed for the nanny-state. We’re voting for it. I’ve been watching the petri-dish of Western Civilization that is the UK, and that’s the direction we’re headed, once they figure out here how to disarm the few of us who really mean it when we say we don’t want to live like that. (You can almost hear the gnashing of teeth over the Founders putting the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights.)
Five years. That’s a lot of words. And mostly it’s been an exercise in trying to teach the horse to sing.
But I’m not quite ready to give up. After all, SCOTUS hasn’t handed down it’s decision in D.C. v Heller yet!
Here’s to one more year.
According to a post at AR15.com, that’s the sentence David Olofson just received.
Do you own a semi-automatic rifle, pistol or shotgun?
You’d better keep ’em clean and in perfect working order, or you too can be a felon!
An appeal has been filed. It should have been filed as soon as the verdict was read, but I’m not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV.
You cannot imagine how pissed off I am right now.
I’m going to the NRA national convention in Louisville this weekend. I imagine this case will be a MAJOR topic of discussion.
It had BETTER be.
The Secret Service Doesn’t Trust Us
There’s a shocker. I guess they heard the reaction to McCain’s Plan on Global Climate Change.
By email from Ashley Varner of the NRA, apparently the Secret Service will not allow anyone carrying anything more lethal than a shrimp fork (if that) in His Presence:
I know there’s very, very little time, but i just received confirmation about guns in the forum.
This came down from the Secret Service–it was not our call, nor Sen. McCain’s.
NOTICE: By mandate of the U. S. Secret Service, no firearms will be allowed in Hall A of the Kentucky Exposition Center, the location of the Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum, on Friday, May 16. Please be prepared to go through security screening to enter the venue.
Honestly, I’m not at all surprised. I was in fact shocked that they were going to let him appear at a venue where a significant portion of the audience would be A) not government employees who were B) armed.
My Boss Has a Sense of Humor
You’ve got to read this post.
Heh. Indeed. (Always wanted to say that.)