Author: Kevin

OK, THIS is FUNNY!.

From AR15.com, I bring you Weekend at Zarqawi’s:

And it goes very well with Iowahawks’ last missive from the Zarqman, Paradise is Overrated, which is worthy of a spew warning: Drink no beverages while reading.

And yes, I’m taking pleasure in the ridicule of the death of a (notional) human being.

But, But, It’s Not a Religious War…

So, we whacked Al-Zarqawi. Good for us. Really. There’s not too many people out there who need to be dead more than he. But the opposition’s response?

The death of our leaders is life for us. It will only increase our persistence in continuing holy war so that the word of God will be supreme. – Abu Abdel- Rahman al-Iraqi deputy “emir” of al- Qaida in Iraq

Nope. If we just leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone, right? They only hate us because of our political interference in the Middle East!

I don’t think so. And I have yet to figure out why the Left refuses (not fails – refuses) to recognize this.

I Hope He was Playing “Amazing Grace”.

A lone bagpiper plays a lament overlooking
Juno Beach in Courseulles-sur-Mer (AP Photo)

I Am Not a Great Fan of Nuclear Power.

Someone once said, “Using nuclear fission to boil water is like cutting butter with a chainsaw.” In large part, I’m in agreement with that assessment.

If you’re going to use radioactive materials to produce power, however, it seems to me that it would be logical to standardize on a design. The French have done that, and produce 62,466 MW – about 78% of their total production – using 59 identical reactors. The U.S. generates 96,245 MW with 103 reactors – no more than three of which, to my knowledge, are identical to any other. The latest to be commissioned, Watts Bar Unit 1 in Tennessee, was licensed for construction in 1973, and finally came on line in 1996 – 23 years later at a cost of $6.8 billion. It has a maximum output 1,167MW of power. Its operating license expires in 2035. Construction on Unit 2 was stopped by the utility – no word on how much money that ate. The price of power varies with demand, but $60/MW-H is a reasonable working figure.

You calculate the payback.

But nuclear power appears to be, in all honesty, our only option for increasing demands for power generation. Even Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has not only written a strong defense of nuclear power plants, he has become co-chair of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, to support increased the use of nuclear energy.

It says something when even a staunch tree-hugger embraces the atom.

The only really bad accident the nuclear power industry has suffered is Chernobyl, twenty years ago last April. Three Mile Island was bad, but the containment structure did its job. Chernobyl, however, was a disaster of a plant in the first place – an inherently dangerous design, everyone agrees. However, I’ve seen lately some pieces saying that perhaps the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t all that bad. For example, the Kid of Speed site where a young woman from Kiev motorcycles through the area, and this BBC piece on the hardiness of the local fauna.

Pardon me if I’m a little bit more humanocentric, though. Before we enthusiastically embrace the atom ourselves again, I’d like it if members of Congress, the Executive branch, and the nuclear power industry would sit down for a few minutes and watch this slide show by photographer Paul Fusco concerning the human cost of a serious accident.

I believe nuclear power is necessary. We’ve got to get the cost and time required to build such plants down closer to the range of normal coal or gas plants. But they’ve got to be safe.

I can’t imagine anything better at emphasising that fact than Paul Fusco’s photographs.

Warning: Some of those photographs are disturbing. And they should be.

Sometimes I Wish I Could Draw…

I can see the perfect image for a political cartoon describing the coming media frenzy over the civilian deaths in Haditha, Iraq. It would be a trench-coated figure with a “PRESS” badge in his fedora and a scourge in his hand, a look of savage glee on his face. But instead of self-flagellation – an act of contrition and shame – a U.S. Marine would stand, ripped and bloody, between the jagged tips of the whip and the reporter’s back. And the pair would be standing on a brightly lit stage, surrounded by the world media, with jihadists in the background dancing in the blood of the slain.

The media isn’t ashamed of the possible criminal actions of a few Marines in Iraq. The media no longer sees itself as being part of America. Instead, it’s salivating over another chance to trumpet to the world how evil the United States is.

And I for one and sick to death of it.

UPDATE: It’s the foreign press, but here’s Exhibit A.

FURTHER UPDATE: I hereby retract the previous update.

Mea culpa.

Presser v. Illinois

Reader Addison emailed me with a link to this piece:

Militia proposal misfires

By Jeremiah Horrigan
Times Herald-Record
[email protected]

New Paltz – Mike Peters is finding he hasn’t got many friends in high places.

Peters is chairman of the SUNY New Paltz chapter of College Republicans. He and three other campus leaders have made a national stir lately by advocating an on-campus gun-toting militia.

But last week, he lost the support of the National Rifle Association, which canceled at the last minute a scheduled lecture sponsored by the College Republicans.

So much for the gun lobby.

And now, the 200,000-member national organization behind the New Paltz chapter of the College Republicans has bailed on Peters for supporting the militia idea.

The College Republican National Committee has issued a statement distancing itself from the local group, saying it “lacks sensible action.”

“It appears these allegations against the university police force “¦ are unsubstantiated,” a spokeswoman for the group said in a statement.

Peters said he was surprised by the national group’s statement.

“I can’t see why they’d be upset with a group defending Second- and Fourth- Amendment rights, except for the name,” he said.

The name – “militia” – is the root of the Peters’ problem, according to Ira Margolis, a part-time SUNY student and an NRA trainer who helped organize the aborted NRA lecture.

“It’s a bad term – but they’re college kids, what do they know? They’re still learning,” he said.

He also included this follow-on:

NRA cancels presentation at New Paltz

By Jeremiah Horrigan
Times Herald-Record
[email protected]

New Paltz – Something happened to the National Rifle Association on its way to presenting a lecture at SUNY New Paltz yesterday – it “wimped” out.

That was the phrase that came immediately to the lips of several people who learned upon their arrival at a campus lecture hall of the NRA’s cancellation of its presentation

Perhaps even more surprisingly, one of the organizers of the event was told the cancellation came as the result of the publicity surrounding a proposed gun-toting militia on campus.

A spokesman for the NRA could not be reached for comment at press time.

Mike Peters, chairman of the College Republican club that sponsored the event, said he was shocked by the cancellation.

Peters had expected to field questions about the proposed militia following the talk.

Instead, he answered questions from students who challenged the need for arms on campus, a challenge that Peters generally agreed with.

He said the news media had sensationalized the issue. “We got attention, much more than we ever expected, but it obscured many other aspects of our arguments,” he said.

His comment to me was,

Now, as it happens, this is an interesting stunt, but without high-caliber (hah!) Civil Rights attnys on the speeddial, going to be pretty useless, after all.

But, the NRA cancelled a speech there? Why, couldn’t they say “Well, we disagree with how they’re going about this, but it’s no reason we can’t still talk about items of importance to us?”

My reply to him was pretty simple:

As to the “student militia” thing, that’s a non-starter, and I sort of understand why the NRA would shy away. The Supreme Court’s nineteenth-century Presser v. Illinois decision essentially makes private militias verboten if the State says “No.” The students don’t have a (legal) leg to stand on. The NRA would rather avoid that topic, I think. The “militia movement” is not one that most people want to embrace, since it’s been wrapped by the media in the stink of white supremacy, wild-eyed anarchism, etc., etc.

Students carrying concealed on campus? OK.

Student militia drilling on the quad? Not OK.

My 2¢, YMMV

Presser v. Illinois was the Supreme Court’s 1886 follow-on to their infamous 1875 Cruikshank decision. In Cruikshank the Court declared that the Second Amendment only protected individuals against infringement of the right to arms by Congress – i.e., the federal government. If your STATE wanted to violate your right to arms, the federal government had no power to interfere, said the court, despite ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. The Presser decision was specifically on the topic of private militias. Illinois had a statute on the books prohibiting private militias. The court upheld that law, using Cruikshank as precedent, and leaving Mike Peters with no legal leg to stand on. Neither case has been overturned or even seriously questioned by a later decision.

And unless the NRA and its spokesmen want to come out in favor of private militias and all the baggage that comes with them, they’re going to avoid this topic like the plague. There is no “good soundbite” that can come from it.

“It Must Be Art.”

If I don’t have the time or inclination to post original content, I’ll just plagiarize link.

Quote of the Week, from Tam:

Good ol’ Bono. You can always count on just some amazing surrealism from a guy who was happy that the G8 summit was held on his home turf so he could get there via Bentley rather than Gulfstream to deliver his rants about the unfairness of capitalism. I don’t know what he’s doing; it must be art.

Work, Work, Work.

It’s 5:54AM. I’m back at work. Actually, I got here at 5:30, but it takes me about thirty minutes to read my webcomics and The Bleat, check my email, and look for new comments on the blog.

I’ll probably get out of here at about 18:00 tonight. Lather, rinse, repeat.

As you might imagine, this is not conducive to blogging. I really am working on that last piece on rights, I’m just doing it really slowly. Posting over the next few days will be, as they say, light.

Thanks for dropping by.

Blogging from Work.

It’s Saturday. I’m in the office. Yesterday was Hellday – on the road at 4:00AM, home at 6:00PM – and this included 350 miles of windshield time. I’m trying to get caught up on drawings and quotations, but I’m taking a little break, and what do I find, courtesy of Blognomicon?

Lil’ Annie: Go get your gun

When “Little Sure Shot” Annie Oakley became one of the first women superstars as a renown markswoman on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 1800’s, her fancy shooting opened the flood gates to the idea that women had a place behind the trigger of a gun.

Although much has changed since the days of Oakley, women and guns remain somewhat of a taboo subject, while in recent years, the popularity of firearms with women has reached an all time high.

According to a survey taken by the National Rifle Association in 2004, over 17 million American women own some type of firearm.

Slowly, guns have been finding their way into the female populace for reasons ranging from hunting to a sense of security to self-defense.

There is a certain image that is associated with female gun ownership, one of strength and power, (See this piece from 2003. Ed.) but there is also something provocative to it as well. The appeal of firearms among women may be the impression of toughness that exudes from them; something that that says, “keep back.”

Women are perceived as more delicate and helpless than their male counterparts, they are the targets of more violent crimes and therefore carry a greater fear of coming into harm’s way.

When Smith & Wesson introduced their LadySmith model in 1989, they used the slogan that the handgun would “manage to be elegant without sacrificing any of their practicality.”

Taking their message to women a step further, they tread upon a woman’s propensity to nurture as a mother figure by reminding women of their responsibility to not only protect the family, but also protect themselves as caretakers of their loved ones.

Anti-gun mom turned firearm-advocate

Fellow gun-toting female Marcia Grann O’Brien, editor for the Narragansett Times, who has raised three children and is now a proud grandmother, was a self-proclaimed “huge anti-gun mom” when her own kids were growing up.

“I wouldn’t even let my boys have posters with guns in them,” said O’Brien, a Rhode Island native who lived in New York and then moved back to the Ocean State in 1993.

Oddly enough, it was her passion for the anti-gun movement that spurred her eventually love affair with firearms.

In 1995, O’Brien was in an editor’s meeting and got wind of a potential story idea surrounding a group of women who frequently gathered at the Warwick Range to practice shoot. O’Brien decided to cover the story out of a sort of morbid curiosity.

“I wanted to see who those crazy women were,” she joked. “I said to myself, ‘if you are going to do a story on this, you at least need to shoot a gun.'”

She chose the .22-caliber revolver for her first shot.

“I was hooked the first bullet out,” said O’Brien. “I loved it. I can’t tell you how wonderful and exhilarating it was trying to hit that bulls eye.”

Within a week, O’Brien was a gun owner, with her first purchase being her first love, the .22-caliber. She then moved onto a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and finished her collection with a .45-caliber Eastern European semi-automatic. Shortly afterward she also obtained her Handgun Carry Permit.

“My kids get a huge kick out of it,” she said when thinking back to her days as an anti-gun mom, calling her transition “beyond bizarre.”

Although O’Brien sticks to target shooting and does not partake in hunting, she said she is not against the idea.

In terms of self-defense, O’Brien made clear that she would absolutely use her weapon to protect herself if she saw no other alternative.

“Running away is always the first choice, but if you can’t get away, then you shoot,” she clarified. “I feel much safer carrying.”

In O’Brien’s opinion, regardless of women’s slight presence in the gun world compared to that of men, she finds that a women’s touch makes for a superior shot.

“Women are better shooters because they don’t have a macho thing to prove. So when you instruct them, they listen.”

Local gun clubs

Eric Gould, president of the local Wincheck Gun Club in West Greenwich said he has noticed more female members frequenting the club in the last couple of years, although not as many as he would have expected due to its growing popularity.

According to Gould, most of the women he notices inside the club are members’ wives who are either there to keep their husbands company or maybe fire off a few rounds for fun.

Although the numbers aren’t staggering, Gould estimated that roughly a half a dozen single women have, in recent years, attended the club’s firearm training class that they hold once or twice a year.

When the club hosts training classes for West Greenwich police cadets, Gould said he has noticed “quite a few” young women in attendance.

He also said that he has even noticed a handful of “little girls” when the club puts on their firearm education classes for children, as parents want their kids to know gun safety at an early age.

Although, many of the women go to the club’s safety courses in order to obtain a permit to carry for protection purposes, according to Gould.

While statistically, women appear to get involved with guns for safety issues, Gould argued that those women who shoot for sport and those who shoot for safety are, in his experience, “all across the board.”

“I’ve seen nurses who want to know how to shoot a gun, especially those who work in the city,” said Gould, “but I also know a woman who loves to go deer hunting.”

“You see a lot more women buying motorcycles, too,” he said, noting that women have been moving out of their set gender roles for some time now. “They are becoming much more self sufficient.”

Hunting, sport, and the Constitution

Pat Thompson, regional coordinator for Women in the Outdoors, a program that promotes basic gun safety, preservation of the hunting tradition and educational outdoor opportunities, picked up her first firearm 15 years ago and has never looked back.

Thompson has shot sporting clays competitively in Texas and New York State shooting contests, and she now devotes much of her time to the Women in the Outdoors, coordinating events around Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Like many women, Thompson began shooting as a way to spend time with her husband, who would shoot skeet with his friends often. According to Thompson, her and husband “did everything together,” and therefore she would find him reluctant to join his friends at skeet shoots because he felt it was taking time away from her.

After seeing an advertisement in the newspaper for shotgun lessons, Thompson decided to give it a shot, literally.

“I really, really enjoyed it,” she said, “and it turns out that I was halfway decent.”

As Thompson got more involved with competitive shooting, she became concerned that her constitutional right to bear arms was coming under attack, so she took the road of caution.

Using her already extensive knowledge of firearms, Thompson became certified in shotgun instruction and took several hunting safety courses in order to prove she was a responsible, safety-concerned gun owner.

For her, hunting became the next step in her gun career, although she explained that she never thought of herself joining the hunting community. After deciding to keep her husband company on a hunt, Thompson brought her gun along, but didn’t anticipate using it… that was, of course, until she laid eyes on her soon-to-be first kill.

“I saw a deer coming through the woods and I picked up my gun and just fired,” she recalled. “It was the most natural thing in the world to harvest an animal.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Thompson is also an advocate of women carrying firearms to protect themselves.

“A lot of protection against predators is confidence,” stated Thompson, “predators lean toward women who appear to be weak or unsure of themselves, an easy target.”

She finds that women who are in possession of a handgun carry themselves differently, deterring potential threats before they happen as well as offering women a means to defend themselves if a dangerous situation arises.

See also my piece How do You Convert a Gun-Phobe? and its follow-on, along with this nearly identical piece from 2004 about the conversion of author Diane Wagman. Excerpt:

Guns are bad. All my life, it’s been that simple. At my son’s preschool, if a child pointed a banana and said “bang,” he was admonished to “use the banana in a happier way.” As far as I was concerned, the 2nd Amendment gave us the right to protect ourselves against invading armies, not the right to buy a gun and keep it under our beds.

So what would make someone like me change my mind? I met this gun enthusiast. As research for my new novel, I asked him many questions, all the while voicing my disgust. My character might use a gun, but I never would. “Come to the range,” the gun guy said. “I’ll teach you to shoot.”

—

First lesson, respect your firearm. I got a little talk about how powerful it was. I learned how to hold it. To load it. And finally to fire it. It was terrifying. The gun was so heavy, I couldn’t keep it steady. It took both index fingers to pull the trigger, and then there was a flash of flame, a loud crack, a substantial kick. It was much harder than it looked in the movies.

I occasionally hit the target, but I also managed to obliterate the metal hanger that held it.

I have to admit: I loved it. I had a fantastic time. The power of that gun for me, a 5-foot, 3-inch woman, was immediately, shockingly seductive. The thrill when I hit the bull’s-eye (once) was as great as making a perfect tennis shot.

I’ve said it before: If we want to preserve our right to arms, we must get more people to the range. The only way to convince them that a right to arms is important is to make them understand what it is the other side is trying to take away. And because women make up over 50% of the population, but are a tiny minority of gun owners, educating women should be our top priority.