Tag: linkery

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“The big problem for the GOP leadership is that they’ve lost their credibility. “

And they still don’t understand it. This was clear a year ago when we talked to then-GOP chair Ken Mehlman, and it’s much, much truer now. As a reader emails: “No credibility to fall back on. No reserve of good will to fall back on. No record to fall back on. No successes to fall back on.”

And as Dan Riehl said earlier this week, Republicans were given a wakeup call with the 2006 elections, and they opted to hit snooze.

Via Instapundit.

With nothing to fall back on, perhaps they should consider falling forward.

As in, “on their swords.”

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Express a Politically Incorrect Opinion, Lose Your Right to Arms.

Phil at Random Nuclear Strikes has a very, very important piece posted that everyone concerned with their right to arms needs to read: What is going on inside your head. If you’ve not heard the story of Hamline University student Troy Scheffler, you need to get up to speed quick. And when you look at some of the legislation proposed in the wake of the VATech massacre, you need to do it NOW.

After all, if newspaper editors can consider concealed-carry permit holders the equivalent of sex-offenders, it’s not such a stretch to consider them dangerous paranoids, is it? After all, some people already do.

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OK, I Lied.

I added one more blogger that I’ve been meaning to, but forgot: Skywritings. Written by a female ex-professional pilot, she’s been blogging since December 2005, and posts two or three times a month – but they’re good posts! Samples:

I remember offering a ride in my airplane to two French tourists who had come up for their idea of adventure, paying probably $10,000 for the privilege of camping out alone for a week, then a carefully orchestrated raft or hunting trip they could go home and brag about. Their flight out to their camp area canceled. Since I was taking my plane up that way to check out an eagles nest I’d seen from the air, I told them I’d drop them off on the sandbar. I couldn’t accept any money for it, but since I was going there anyway, they were welcome to a lift. I’d like to say that they were gracious, joyous people and we had a wonderful experience, but they were the rudest, nastiest people I’d ever met in my life. It got to the point I gave up being polite and started to burp and pretend to nod off at the controls muttering the phrase “boy I wish I hadn’t drunk that bottle of cough syrup”. – Saturday, 5/20/06

—

As the door opened, the next candidate came in – 6′ 3″ and wearing a pink tuxedo. . the ruffly, kind that epitomized what was wrong with 80’s fashion. We could only look and stare. He held himself up straight, and sat down with pride. Then he opened his mouth, and out came a pronounced Oklahoma accent. He said

“Bet you’re wondering about the suit?’

We could only stare, and nod, silently.

“Well, it took me all day to get here, my flight from Tulsa canceled and I was re-booked, and when I finally got here late last evening, you’all had lost all my luggage, all I had was the jeans and t- shirt I was wearing. I raced over to the mall, just as the department store closed, The only thing open was the tux shop. . and this was all they had in my size”.

And he finished, head held up with pride, smiled, and just looked me in the eye.

All I could say was “that took one hell of a lot of balls to walk in here like this. . . . .
you’ve got yourself a job – welcome aboard. Now get out of here, put those jeans back on and have a cold one by the pool to celebrate”

That was the whole interview. He ended up being one of our best pilots. – 5/27/06

—

I’ve felt fear in an airplane, shooting an approach to minimums in the mountains, snowflakes the size of postage stamps slamming into the window, my right hand on the throttle and sweat trickling down my cheek. I had never felt more present, more myself, more in the moment than at that time. The fear was right on the edge of either paralyzing me or propelling me into this place of being utterly engaged, that magic moment when I know I am honing years of practice into precision flying, and I’m suddenly out of the fear, into the light. I could manage the fear because I have faith. Faith in my training, faith in my mechanic, my copilot, my airplane. And faith that with needles centered, the runway should soon be straight ahead. For as it says in Hebrews 11:1 faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – 7/7/2006.

Her name is Linda, yes, she’s a shooter, and she’s partial to Sigs.

Go spend some time over there. It’s worth it.

KevinLeave a comment

Blogroll Updated.

Finally.

As I’ve noted before, I’m coming up on the fourth anniversary of TSM, and I thought it was about time I updated my blogroll. First I went through and pulled any site that hadn’t updated in the last six months, or any site I had as a reciprocal blog where a link to me no longer existed. Any site that came back as something commercial or “404 Not Found” was pruned, so if your site disappeared due to a temporary server problem, let me know.

For a medium in which so many people start out, but then peter off, I was quite surprised how many of my links are still active and healthy.

Then I went back and added some bloggers that I’ve admired but just not taken the time to include: LawDog, Ambulance Driver, and The Munchkin Wrangler. I then checked my Technorati links to add blogs that had put me on their blogrolls in the interim – so long as they were at least six months old and still posting.

Finally, I added a category: “Bloggers I’ve Met.” There’s a lot of redundancy in that list, but I don’t care.

Believe it or not, this took about three hours. See why I’ve been putting it off?

This should be the only post for today. Überpost tomorrow (I hope.) Title: To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. It’s about the war in Iraq.

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None of Your F@&^ing Business!.

I wish I could do the Spock eyebrow thing when I say “Fascinating!”

I was checking the Violence Policy Center website to see if they had any reaction to today’s Parker decision, and came across their latest “analysis,” A Shrinking Minority: The Continuing Decline of Gun Ownership in America (a PDF file). The report tells us what the title does, apparently guns just aren’t popular in America any more. So says the General Social Survey, which the Violence Policy Center tells us:

…is conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Begun in 1972, the GSS completed its 26th round in 2006. According to NORC, “Except for the U.S. Census, the GSS is the most frequently analyzed source of information in the social sciences” and is “the only survey that has tracked the opinions of Americans over an extended period of time.”

So much for the GSS’s bona fides.

Y’all know how much I love the VPC’s graphics. Well, here’s the centerpiece of this report:

Yes, according to the GSS:

During the period 1972 to 2006, the percentage of American households that reported having any guns in the home has dropped nearly 20 percentage points: from a high of 54 percent in 1977 to 34.5 percent in 2006.

While at the same time:

In a June 2006 press release, National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) President Doug Painter states that “…gun sales and ownership in our country continue to rise.” The NSSF is the self-described “trade association for the shooting, hunting and outdoor industry.” In the release, the NSSF adds without attribution, “The number of American households with at least one firearm is now estimated at nearly 47.8 million.” According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, in 2005 there were an estimated 108,819,000 households in America. Using NSSF’s figures, 43.9 percent of American households have a gun — more than nine percentage points higher than the most recent NORC household gun ownership figure.

I don’t see what the VPC’s problem is, then. Obviously the NSSF is lying and it appears that since gun ownership is declining on its own, there’s no need to pass legislation banning handguns, “semi-automatic assault weapons” etc. The “gun culture” is going away!

Except, it doesn’t seem to be. I mean, President Clinton wouldn’t lie to us, would he? In a February 4, 2000 White House press release he announced:

Handguns Account for Nearly Half of All New Gun Sales – About 2 Million Per Year. Fifty years ago, handguns represented only one out of every 10 new gun sales. Now they account for more than four out of 10.

Um, if two million a year represents, say 45% of all annual gun sales, then that puts the total annual gun sales (carry the one…) at about 4.4 million per year. And that’s just new gun sales. As I’ve noted many times before, guns are durable goods. A gun made 100 years ago can certainly be perfectly functional today, and many are.

Now, I certainly believe that those of us who collect guns are building bigger collections, after all, I’ve got (mumble mumble…) guns myself and my wife insisted that I buy the bigger model gun safe because “You’ll fill it up eventually.” But do I believe that all of those guns each year are going into the collections of a shrinking number of aging geezers like me?

I do not.

According to the General Social Survey FAQ site, about 3,000 people are interviewed for their survey, and about 75% of them respond. It’s not a telephone survey, either. You’ll note, also, that after the 1998 survey the response rate dropped to about 70%, so right off the bat about 30% of the people they go to interview now tell the interviewers (in effect) “F$%# off!”

Gee, I wonder what the gun ownership rate in that demographic is?

Second, the VPC, Brady Center et al. have been striving for decades to convince people that “Guns are bad, mmmkay?” This, despite the fact that since 1986 the number of states with “shall issue” concealed-carry legislation has increased from 6 to 37 (and Alaska has gone from no carry to unrestricted.) People, somebody had to be buying those millions of “pocket rockets” and they weren’t all prior gun owners. Perhaps the best illustration of what I’m talking about here comes from NPR contributor and gun convert Emily Yoffe, the “Human Guinea Pig,” in her Slate piece Guinea Get Your Gun: How I Learned to Love Firearms:

So anathema are guns among my friends that when one learned I was doing this piece, he opened his wallet, silently pulled out an NRA membership card, then (after I recovered from the sight) asked me not to spread it around lest his son be kicked out of nursery school.

Ye gods. As fellow blogger and activist Joe Huffman has noted, in many areas – specifically the “blue states” and metropolitan centers – the gun bigots have made gun owners into “gun niggers.” Hell, newspapers seem to think that concealed-carry permit holders are the equivalent of sex offenders. It happened again just today.

So where are all those guns going? Well for one thing, I think the National Opinion Research Center has its head up its collective posterior when it says:

Some have speculated that the 9/11 terrorist attacks undermined support for the regulation of firearms, arguing that fear of terrorism increased the public desire for firearms for self-defense. However, this was not the case. (E)xcept for a small bulge in handgun applications in September-October, 2001 which had already started to subside by November, there was no increase in firearm purchases in response to the 9/11 attacks.

What about after Katrina? A LOT of people figured out fast that the government wasn’t responsible for their protection – was, in fact inimical to it in some cases. (Just ask Patricia Konie and her attorney Ashton O’Dwyer).

So, given this “decades-long slow motion hate crime” perpetrated against gun owners, is it any surprise that people either decline to answer, or (dare I say it) lie when asked whether their home contains a firearm? I mean, if you fear that your toddler might be evicted from nursery school because daddy owns a pistol…

So go ahead, VPC, Brady Center and all the other Joyce Foundation sponsored gun ban control safety organizations; convince yourselves that the number of gun owners in the U.S. is dropping precipitously. Pat yourselves on the back for the outstanding (*cough*) job you’re doing.

I really enjoy watching you splutter like Sylvester the Cat every time a new piece of gun-control legislation goes down in flames, or gun-rights legislation passes with a veto-proof margin, or, as also happened today, a gun-rights court decision stands.

UPDATE: I swear, I wrote this piece before I ever saw this.

UPDATE II: D’OH! Instapundit link fixed. I need a vacation….

UPDATE III: Woohoo! Instalanch!