Citizens Against Senseless Violence tries to get members of the media (and Eric Holder) to proudly proclaim that their homes are gun-free zones. Guess how it went.
[youtube wt1Zy_ASNyA]
Jan 162013
Jan 152013
New York Gun Legislation
Page 22:
6 § 265.01-b Criminal possession of a firearm.
7 A person is guilty of criminal possession of a firearm when he or she:
8 (1) possesses any firearm or; (2) lawfully possesses a firearm prior to
9 the effective date of the chapter of the laws of two thousand thirteen
10 which added this section subject to the registration requirements of
11 subdivision sixteen-a of section 400.00 of this chapter and knowingly
12 fails to register such firearm pursuant to such subdivision.
Let me post that text again:
A person is guilty of criminal possession of a firearm when he or she possesses any firearm
Ummm… Am I reading this right????
Jan 152013
NY seals 1st state gun laws since Newtown massacre
Some lowlights from New Yorks new law:
- An “assault rifle” is now any rifle with a pistol grip
- Magazines are now restricted to *seven* rounds
- If you have an 8-round magazine, you have one year to sell it out of state
- You will be arrested if you have an 8-or-more round magazine
- Background checks for buying ammo
- “It is well-balanced, it protects the Second Amendment,” said Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos of Long Island.
Jan 132013
… on the forthcoming gun-grab attempts.
Anonymous mentioned the legal steps that would need to be taken to overturn any weapon confiscation legislation. “Upon failure of all the aforementioned bodies to perform such duty, it will be the authority and duty of any and all members of the United States Armed Forces to remove the president, vice president, cabinet members and members of Congress — and the US Supreme Court justices — from power by military force. Failure by all military members to perform such duties will constitute as an act of civil war against the American people by said authorities.”
Huh.
I hadn’t previously given much thought to how Anonymous would react to a gun-grab, but I guess it makes sense that a group of anarchists would see an attempt by the government to consolidate power as a bad thing. Cheesing off a few hundred thousand hackers just might not be the best thing the US government could do. There are increasing calls for secession or civil war coming from the more unhinged on the right; and claims from the more unhinged on the left that the US FedGuv would simply use drones to smoke any civilians who dared stand up for themselves, giving said “gun nuts” no chance to defend themselves with AR-15’s. But if the hackers wade in, the drones might just find themselves being hijacked by someone with *way* too much Call Of Duty or flight simulator stick time.
Jan 132013
ATTEMPTED GUN BURGLARY TIED TO JOURNAL NEWS GUN MAPS
Brewster, N.Y. – 1/13/2013 – Today Senator Greg Ball (Patterson – R, C, I) announced that a burglary has been reported on Davis Ave. in White Plains, New York that evidently ties into The Journal News gun maps. It is reported that the burglar used The Journal News’ interactive gun map to target a home included on the map.
D’oh.
If the claim here pans out, I think the Journal News is going to be in for some financially exciting times.
Jan 132013
Demagogues like Piers Morgan tend to follow patterns. As an interviewer who wants to drive public opinion on the topic of disarming the law-abiding, he has generally performed his stategy well: bring on soft-spoken guests like Larry Prat, and shout them down; and bring on raving loonies like Alex Jones and let them go on in order to make gun owners look bad.
But last week Morgan made an error and brought on Ben Shapiro. Shapiro was polite and well-spoken… but would not let Morgan bully him. And that clearly threw Morgan for a loop; instead of a coherent interview, Morgan kept bouncing from one question to another, like a drowning man desperately grabbing for something, anything, to get a hold of.
Heh.
[youtube ObNC4bXTDf0]
Another Morgan interview mistake was to former Marine Joshua Boston, who calmly and politely owned Morgan:
[youtube 4TEBy6KPjVw]
Jan 112013
Rare Photo of the Mushroom Cloud Over Hiroshima Discovered in a Former Japanese Elementary School
Some interesting stuff at the link, along with the usual hand-wringing.
The person who took this photo would have been among the first to look out there and realize that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill bomb. It wasn’t the air raid that the citizens of Hiroshima had been anticipating for months. This was the beginning of a new world, one with a bomb unlike anything anyone had ever experienced before, something so new and fearsome that at first no one could understand what it was.
Jan 102013
Jan 092013
So Piers Morgan had a whole show about guns Monday night. He brought on a bunch of people to agree with him that “Guns ur bad, m’kay,” and a very few to argue the other side. One that he interviewed was world-class conspiracy whackjob Alex Jones, who thinks that the Bush administration was behind 911. I saw part of that… it was painful. Jones went full-bore bugnuts, ranting and raving. You can probably find the video on Youtube (it’s late and I’m tired).
I wouldn’t have brought it up except that someone on Fark *nailed* the situation:
Alex Jones is a nut and a kook, and I can only think of a few reasons for Piers Morgan to give him airtime, none of which reflect well on Morgan:
1) Morgan believes that Jones is representative of the political right, in which case Morgan is an ignorant fool.
2) Morgan wants to falsely portray Jones as representative of the political right, in which case Morgan is a disingenuous partisan hack.
3) This was a ratings stunt, in which case Morgan is sleazeball who will put anything on the air if it grabs a few extra eyeballs.
I personally expect that #2 is the real story here. Morgan is hardly an idiot; you don’t sleaze your way to wealth and fame as he’s done while being an ignorant fool. But he has shown himself to be of low character and desperately opposed to the right to keep and bear arms. What better way to tar the opposition than to find and promote the most unhinged kook who just happens to share *one* belief with the opposition?
Jan 082013
All of the “blueprints” I showed previously were based on the same basic color palette. But the actual vintage blueprints I’ve seen vary wildly Most are blueline or brownline… i.e. the lines are blue or brown on a white background. These have of course been replaced with black lines on white paper in the digital age. These, though, while they seem to form the bulk of such diagrams, are visually BLAAAAHHHhhhhh.
I’ve seen a number of German WWII-era blueprints, and the vast majority of the ones I can recall have all been brownline, not blue line, and not (sadly) whitelines on blue backgrounds. Still, age has turned the white paper slightly “tan,” which is more appealing than plain white. So, I went ahead and created a “vintage brownline” of the V-2 (A-4) rocket cutaway:
Printed full size, it would be 16.5 inches wide by 56 inches long; it would be priced something like $45. A reduced-size version 12 inches wide by 41 inches long would be something like $25. Anyone interested?