Tucson – Bowling Pin Shoot, Mother’s Day, 5/9

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Yeah, I know, what planning.

Anyway, it’s at the Tucson Rifle Club Sunday morning starting at about 8:00 AM.

Handguns only, .38 Special or larger/more powerful caliber. (No .22 class yet, sorry.)

Course of fire is five (5) standard bowling pins placed on a table approximately 42″ tall, spaced 16″ apart. For “major” calibers (.45 ACP, .357 Magnum, etc.) the pins are placed 12″ from the front edge of a 48″ deep table. For “minor” calibers (.38, 9mm) they are placed 16″ from the BACK edge of the table. Shooter starts from the low-ready position, 25′ from the front edge of the table. At the sound of the buzzer, clear all of the pins OFF the table.

The competition begins with each shooter running five tables, timed. Worst time is thrown out, the remaining four are averaged. That’s your dial-in.

After all the competitors have their dial-ins, it’s bracket-racing time. Two shooters, two tables. The differential between the dial-ins of the two shooters is programmed into the timer. Slower shooter starts on the first beep, faster shooter on the second beep. Whoever clears their table first wins. Best two-out-of three runs decides that matchup. The next pair then steps up.

If you lose two matchups, you’re done for the day. Minimum course of fire, 45 rounds. Whoever is left standing at the end is the winner (of the admiration of the other competitors.)

This means if you’re slow and steady with an iron-sighted wheelgun, you might be able to beat the guy with the 20-shot compensated racegun with reflex optics who can’t miss fast enough to win. He HAS to wait for that second beep.

Entry fee is $10 for the first gun, $5 for each additional gun. One dollar out of each entry goes into a pot. At the end of the match there will be a drawing and one lucky shooter (still in attendance) wins the pot.

I’m going to try to run this match monthly, second Sunday of the month. This one just so happened to fall on Mother’s Day. Dammit. Hope to see you there.

This is Your Mind On Drugs

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This is Part II. Part I was last year.

Pimp my shooter: The amazing bling guns that belong to Mexico’s drug lords

Mexican soldiers have seized an arsenal of gold-plated and diamond-encrusted weapons believed to belong to the Valencia gang, allies of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel and, it seems, fans of hip-hip excess.

Showing just how flamboyant gang members spend much of their ill-gotten wealth, pictures show how most of the 31 ‘pimped’ pistols found in a raid on a home in western Mexico had gold or silver-plated grips or were glittered with diamonds.

Three of the assault rifles are almost entirely gold-plated and there was even a silencer plated with gold. One particularly image-conscious gangster has made his pistol unique by adding rows of gaudy red and green jewels and a Ferrari logo.

I won’t fry your retinas with pictures this time. It’s more of the same, though possibly some are even worse.

Hat-tip to Phil B., our intrepid reader from New Zealand. Thanks, Phil. I think.

And Then There Were Forty-Nine

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Shortly after I started TSM I wrote about the American Civil Liberties Union and its position on the Second Amendment in The ACLU Hasn’t Changed Its Tune. President Nadine Strossen was clear on it back in 2003:

The plain language of the Second Amendment in no way, shape, or form, can be construed, I think, as giving an absolute right to unregulated gun ownership. It says, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.” Certainly, when you have the notion of “well-regulated” right in the constitutional language itself, it seems to defy any argument that regulation is inconsistent with the amendment.

Putting all that aside, I don’t want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty.

Something mentioned in the Constitution? It’s the second item in the BILL OF RIGHTS, Nadine!

And she’s still President.

But now there’s been a break. Via Dave Hardy we learn:

Nevada ACLU supports an individual’s right to bear arms

And, one would hope, to keep them.

Everyone loves guns in Nevada. Ducks Unlimited, the National Rifle Association, Republicans, the American Civil Liberties Union, the …

Wait. The ACLU?

The Nevada ACLU has declared its support for an individual’s right to bear arms, apparently making it the first state affiliate in the nation to buck the national organization’s position on the Second Amendment.

The state board of directors reached the decision this month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals to own handguns.

Said Supreme Court ruling coming in June of 2008. You don’t want to move too fast, ladies and gentlemen. You might suffer whiplash! I take it back. Justin Buist in comments notes that the Nevada ACLU did indeed change their position almost immediately after the Heller decision, and the piece linked is dated July, 2008, not 2010. In other words, this is old news.

New to me (and apparently Dave), but old nonetheless.

Kudos, ladies and gentlemen, for your swift action. Too bad your move apparently wasn’t followed by any of your sister organizations.

“The Nevada ACLU respects the individual’s right to bear arms subject to constitutionally permissible regulations,” a statement on the organization’s Web site said. “The ACLU of Nevada will defend this right as it defends other constitutional rights.”

Will it also defend the right to keep? And does this mean the ACLU will be filing suit against North Las Vegas soon? (Apparently not.)

“This was the consensus,” said Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for ACLU of Nevada. “There really wasn’t a lot of dissent.”

One more reason for Sarah and Kristin and Josh and Paul to be Sad Pandas. (Can we rub their noses in it?)

But the state affiliate’s position puts it at odds with the national organization.

I’ll say.

There’s more to the story, but it’s interesting to see a split in that organization over this topic at this time.

We’re (still!) winning.

WTF? Seriously, WTFF?!?!?

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Via email, from a reader who says – “I am a gamer, but I was also a boy scout. I had some kind of gut reaction to this story, but no way to describe it. I am desperate to know what you think of it though.”

Video Games

Requirements

Tiger Cubs, Cub Scouts, and Webelos Scouts may complete requirements in a family, den, pack, school, or community environment. Tiger Cubs must work with their parents or adult partners. Parents and partners do not earn loops or pins.

Belt Loop

Complete these three requirements:

1. Explain why it is important to have a rating system for video games. Check your video games to be sure they are right for your age.
2. With an adult, create a schedule for you to do things that includes your chores, homework, and video gaming. Do your best to follow this schedule.
3. Learn to play a new video game that is approved by your parent, guardian, or teacher.

Academics Pin

Earn the Video Games belt loop and complete five of the following requirements:

1. With your parents, create a plan to buy a video game that is right for your age group.
2. Compare two game systems (for example, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and so on). Explain some of the differences between the two. List good reasons to purchase or use a game system.
3. Play a video game with family members in a family tournament.
4. Teach an adult or a friend how to play a video game.
5. List at least five tips that would help someone who was learning how to play your favorite video game.
6. Play an appropriate video game with a friend for one hour.
7. Play a video game that will help you practice your math, spelling, or another skill that helps you in your schoolwork.
8. Choose a game you might like to purchase. Compare the price for this game at three different stores. Decide which store has the best deal. In your decision, be sure to consider things like the store return policy and manufacturer’s warranty.
9. With an adult’s supervision, install a gaming system.

The link my reader sent went to a PC Magazine article that’s apparently not available at the time of this writing, but here’s more coverage of the (not fake!) story.

“Install a gaming system”??? Most kids today can do that in their sleep. I thought Scouting was about getting outside. You know, the resolution and the refresh rate in the real world is, like, totally AWESOME!

(*sigh*)

And I just wrote that nice bit about Tyler Rico, too.

Hope for the Future

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Last night I attended the 2010 annual meeting and banquet for the Arizona State Rifle and Pistol Association, which I joined last year at the annual NRA convention. The keynote speaker was Alan Gottlieb, who gave an interesting speech on the history of the Second Amendment Foundation and their history of fighting for the restoration of the Second Amendment through the courts. The SAF is the group behind the D.C. v Heller victory, and the McDonald v Chicago suit that was filed 15 minutes after the Heller decision was handed down, and was heard in the Supreme Court in March.

At a guess, I’d say about 120 people attended the meeting and dinner, among which were several state and federal politicians. The governor backed out, but among the attendees was J.D. Hayworth who is running for John McCain’s senate seat. I wish him a lot of luck. It’s past time for McCain to go. John McCain, needless to say, wasn’t present.

I sat at the table purchased by the Tucson Rifle Club, where I was introduced to someone special: Tyler Rico. Tyler is, I believe, just sixteen years old. He shot his first High-Power match at the age of eleven. He has won three Junior National High-Power titles, and in February at the Boulder Rifle and Pistol Club in Boulder CO, he beat the entire field with a 791-26X to take the Open class. He shoots for Team Remington and Lapua.

The kid’s been shooting since he was five. He wants to get a degree in aeronautical engineering, and shoot for the Army Marksmanship Unit. After all, he’s already competed against all of them, and beaten them.

It was a very interesting evening, all around.

May Victims of Communism Day

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Today is the second annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is the beautiful dream lie. R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people. For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million. And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” to make their utopian omlette.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them. “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated. But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes. Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea: That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns? For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? — Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago

—

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.