After a three-year hiatus...

I knew I had been leaving this alone, but I was surprised both by how long it lay fallow, and by how much stuff I had posted here.  Cranking up again with a few observations.

Obama Birth Certificate

The PDF file on the White House web site is obviously questionable even to an untrained eye.  I'd like to see someone replicate that file with a scanner.  Even if Barry Sotero were born in Kenya, he'd arguably be eligible, being the son of an American woman.  I won't even touch that issue.  But the file itself is obviously and crudely manipulated.  Nonetheless, no one can address that elephant in the room without being labeled a birther.  Such is the power of the media machine.

Climate Change

Climate change is an undeniable phenomenon.  And some portion of it -- maybe even a significant portion -- could be human-caused.  The problem is that to "do something" about it would require creating a huge and ominously powerful world-wide bureaucracy that would be tasked with stepping on economic activity that did not fit some arbitrarily-defined carbon footprint or some other open question.  Sign most of the industrial, transportation, food, extraction, and energy sectors of the economy over to the government.  What could possibly go wrong?  Surely there'd be no trace of corruption or political gamesmanship.  After all, we're talking about Public Servants.

Same-sex Marriage

I believe in God.  I have fairly old-fashioned views of marriage -- one man, one woman.  I have gay friends who would disagree with me.  That's fine.  In fact, I could even use my own bible to make a case for the church -- some church, anyway -- to recognize and bless a homosexual union.  If one of my kids showed up with a same-sex significant other, I'd have to take a deep breath and accept.  Given a choice between accepting and losing contact, accepting wins every time.  But on the topic of marriage, what bubbles up in my mind is why the state is involved at all.  A marriage contract is a living and financial arrangement.  What does gender have to do with it? 

Abortion

I've always hated this issue.  It -- that unborn baby or that inanimate tissue mass, depending on your favorite axe -- is either human or it isn't.  I had been pretty much in the pro-choice camp, but hoping not to have to make a choice.  Then I saw an ultrasound of my eldest.  That complicated matters.  Some five years later, I saw my youngest in an ultrasound and I could see that she looked like her sister.  The sealed it for me.
 
And yet.  A friend of mine is a doctor.  "My patient," he said, "is a 12 year old survivor of sexual abuse.  She has an alcoholic mother and an abusive step-father.  No grandparent is in the picture.  My patient needs an abortion."  But most abortions aren't like that.  Even so, no one I know of is suggesting an inquest after every D&C procedure.  That's what enforcement would take.  

My daughter had an acquaintance in high school who had cerebral palsy.  He got it because he survived an abortion.

Abortion is a hard moral choice.  It is rarely the best choice. 

Update at The Firearms Coalition

Mo. State Police: Not Profiling, It's An "Educational" Document

A document from the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a division of the state police, conflates privately organized militia groups with libertarians, Ron Paul supporters, Constitutionalists, race separatists, and even some collectivists who distrust the Federal Reserve. The document, which we obtained last week, is marked "Unclassified, Law Enforcement Sensitive," indicating that the Missouri state patrol guys don't want to talk about it. We can confirm that last bit as they failed to return phone calls or email. Before running the document I wanted to verify it. The Associated Press has since picked the story up, so we're running it now. You can see the document here.
The AP story quotes Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol who called the report "an educational thing."
"Troopers have been shot by members of groups, so it's our job to let law enforcement officers know what the trends are in the modern militia movement."
The most encouraging thing I see in this story is that it leaked.
We'll be following this one.

NYTimes warns of "Coming Swarm"

A New York Times Op-Ed piece by John Arquilla, a Naval Postgraduate School professer, titled "The Coming Swarm" warns of a possible terrorist threat in the form of a "swarm" attack, a series of simultaneous small-unit actions much like the Thanksgiving Mumbi attacks. The piece correctly points out that anti-terrorism respondents are geared toward a single mass-casualty event, where Mumbai was paralyzed by a half-dozen two-man teams.

I made a similar prediction shortly after the Mumbai event in a Knox Report column, "The Siege of Mumbai " and friend Derek Bernard followed up with a piece by Richard Munday that was printed in The TImes of London. Mr. Munday focused on an obvious point that seemingly went right over the head of Professor Arquilla, that being that some of the would-be victims might happen to be armed. That there could be an armed citizen to fight back would indeed be a tall-odds proposition in disarmed Mumbai, London, or in Monterey, California, home of the the Naval Postgraduate School. But in Phoenix, Dallas, or Orlando, where roughly two percent of the population have obtained concealed carry permits, the odds tilt.

In those cities, I suppose we can expect the attacks to occur in airports or other disarmed victim zones.

Also posted at The Firearms Coalition.

A Bumper Sticker

This is a bumper sticker for sig lines and such.


Here is the code:



Qwest upgrade

Qwest is upgrading their Internet service to fiber optic and also pushing us off the ChoiceTV we've had for the past several years. So Qwest calls me today. It's an announcer in a box with a "press 1 to speak with a representative." I've got a few minutes and I decide to talk with them. The call is only to schedule a service call to install the new gateway. My neighborhood is eligible for upgrading on January 26. But the scheduling tool that the poor girl on the phone is using only goes out to January 15. Being as how I count on my Internet connection (I work from home), I'm pretty leery of this change. I'm thinking I may be safer switching to Cox until they get this thing sorted out.

Meanwhile, they also want to push me to DirecTV. I'm told that DirecTV and Tivo don't play nicely together. I've written this entire post while that oh-so-friendly Qwest announcer assures me that they know my time is valuable. This is not off to a good start.

Get Ready to Party Like It's 1989

From my Firearms Coalition blog:

Remember the mass demonstrations of the late 1980's up to the time that Bill Clinton signed his (and Joe Biden's) infamous "assault weapon" ban? The largest demonstration was in Columbus, Ohio on May 30, 1989. Police estimated the crowd at 22,000. In Phoenix crowds were estimated at above 10,000, this on a mid-June day when the temperature would eventually rise to well above 105. It occurred to me that it would be a good idea to start gearing up for such demonstrations again. Hoping to provide some inspiration, I started digging around the Web for pictures. I am appalled to report that I could find no pictures of any pro-gun demonstration of the late 1980's. None. Zip. Nada. Google couldn't find an image, neither could Yahoo! It's as if Winston of 1984

It's time to get ready for a reprise.

I well remember how uncomfortable gun people seemed to be coming out and marching with signs. They were strangely quiet, for a demonstration. Certainly they were well-mannered. Parks where the demonstrations occurred tended to be cleaner after the demonstration than before. Frankly, demonstrating in the street is not something that gun people take to easily. So let's start preparing the ground.

If you have pictures from one of those demonstrations from the late 1980's and early 1990's, put them on the scanner. Don't have a scanner? Go to the nearest copy store or even to a drug store. Then post those photos to Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa, PhotoBucket, or wherever you store your pictures, and send me a link. Send a link to every gun blogger you know. Send a link to me. It's time to kick off the Great Virtual March for Gun Rights of 2008.

Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa

This is a copy of my latest blog entry on The Firearms Coalition

So brother Jeff has trod upon the toes of some would-be militia bloggers with his latest Knox Report posting. Good for him. He's right.

Some have gone so far as to insinuate that Jeff has betrayed his heritage. That's nonsense. Jeff's characterization of the militia — the armed populace — as being a deterrent, much like the nuclear deterrrent, comes straight from Dad. Chapter and verse, which also happens to be a book excerpt, follow.

There's no question, America is headed for a rough patch. The Republicans have for the past eight years presided over an expansion of government that would make LBJ blush, and now they're nationalizing the banks. This while accusing the Democrats of being socialists. Both sides like to "spread the wealth around."

But that doesn't mean that everything has gone down the tubes and the only thing left to do is to start killing people and breaking things.

Here's a piece that Neal Knox wrote in May of 1995. Historical context: NRA had lost on the Clinton gun ban, the 1994 so-called "assault weapons" ban. But they lost honorably. The ILA leadership, backed by a strong pro-Second Amendment Board, fought the ban tooth and nail, resisting tremendous pressure to "accept a compromise in order to head off worse." Consequently, the 103rd Congress and especially the Democrats paid dearly at the polls. A sitting Speaker of the House was turned out of office, something that had not happened since before the Civil War, and the House majority switched to the Republicans for the first time in forty years. The leading political analyst of the day, William Jefferson Clinton, declared that the NRA had made the difference (Cleveland Plain Dealer). Then, the unthinkable happened. On April 19, 1995, two years to the day after the Waco horror, a pair of psychopathic misfits blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. We are still dealing with the fallout of that bit of political theater a decade and a half later. Militia is now a dirty word in the media. So much for hastening the revolution.

A revolution is by definition a mass movement. Our militia blogging friends claim three percent of gun owners are with them. Well if you count loosely, maybe so. Can they get that three percent to the polls? Can they bring a fraction of that three percent, maybe a couple thousand of them of them, out on the streets on a hot day? It's been done. Can they do it? Show some mass action — peaceful mass action — and the militia movement will start gaining some credibility. In other words, let's see some real political action. Until then the three-percenters owe more to Walter Mitty than to Thomas Jefferson.

Mr. Jefferson On Militia

by Neal Knox

May 10, 1995

An armed people – sometimes called a militia – scares big government and the supporters of a big, powerful government.

Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and James Madison and the other architects of this great nation planned it that way.

They based their plan on the teachings of John Locke and Niccolò Machiavelli, implemented in the armed citizenry of Switzerland. (The Swiss experience is the topic of a forthcoming book by British friend Richard Munday, an Oxford man who for several years has been researching governments based on an armed citizenry. The book is aptly entitled Most Armed, Most Free.)

Thomas Jefferson wrote “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms, is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against government tyranny.”

The beauty of the Founding Fathers plan is that an armed people is an insurance policy against tyranny. So long as the right exists, it is never needed.

That is the same reason we build B-1 bombers which we pray will never bomb.

That’s why an armed people – for defense of self, family and the nation – is guaranteed by the Second Amendment and codified by the laws of most states. Also, Section 311 of Title 10, U.S. Code, the rewritten Militia Act of 1792, describes both the organized and unorganized militia, and – by 1903 amend­ment – a third type of militia, the National Guard.

A militia isn’t necessarily a bunch of overage and overweight folks wheezing through the woods in camouflage. It’s you and me with rifles, shotguns and handguns owned primarily for recreation or personal protection.

Under the laws of most states and Federal law, there is a right to organize a militia, but a citizen gains no additional rights by doing so. We already are the militia – even including some of our anti-gun fellow citizens who have never touched a gun.

As George Mason said, the militia is “the whole people, except for a few public officials.”

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, wrote an incisive article about the militia movement in the January 30 Chicago Tribune.

He wrote that although many militia groups are quite knowledgeable about the Second Amendment, and are correct that it was intended to preserve an individual right as a protection against tyranny, many don’t understand the Founding Fathers’ careful definition of tyranny – mainly laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

“A government that taxed its citizens without representation was thus no better than an outlaw,” Prof. Reynolds wrote, “But revolting against taxation with­out representation is not the same thing as revolting against taxation.”

People who have the means of changing government through the ballot box, as was admirably demonstrated last fall, but who engage in armed con­flict with government, would be considered mere rebels and insur­rectionists by Thomas Jefferson.

Mr. Jefferson would have been outraged by the bombing in Oklahoma City – particularly if it was intended as a cowardly political statement.

This evening a reporter told me he didn’t understand how Oklahoma City had swung around to have something to do with “gun control.” I do.

The disciples of big government are furious about the role of the NRA in last fall’s elections, and fearful about what will happen in 1996.

And that’s why NRA is so hated and reviled, because NRA is so feared.

It’s not because of our guns, and not because of the lawful ways we use our guns, or even because of the unlawful way that they claim NRA members – or militia members who are also gun owners – might misuse guns.

It’s because of the NRA’s determination that all of the Bill of Rights shall be upheld, and that citizens shall remain free – and not the feeders and subjects of an all-powerful government.

Front Sight Diary - Day One

Day One - Introductions
We stumbled out of bed early the next morning allowing plenty of time to make the twenty-minute drive from the hotel to Front Sight. A guard in a grey and black uniform signed us in at the gate. We would soon recognize the uniform as belonging to the instructors. We were to holster up in the parking lot with our slides open and magazines out and move to a check-in table. Shotgun and rifle courses were running as well, and had their own check-in tables. As we made our way into the check-in more cars streamed in behind us. By mid-morning I guessed there were upward of 150, maybe 200 cars in the long dirt lot, and two or three people per car.

At the check-in table the instructors checked our names against a registration list, asked us to write our first names on two pieces of duct tape which we stuck to our chests and back. The instructors inspected guns and ammunition (jacketed factory ammo only – no reloads, no lead or copper-washed bullets). They also inspected and repositioned holster rigs. Finally they wrote a number in black Sharpie marker on the back each student’s hand. It was the range number we would go to after the initial classroom session. A little degrading perhaps, along with the name tag, but certainly efficient. No one asked where they should be after the classroom lecture.

The process was at least as efficient as gear hand-out in Army Basic Training, and far friendlier. I braced myself for a really friendly and efficient sales pitch to come. I would be surprised.

Next we moved to a large classroom where a video of Front Sight appearances in the news ran as the class filled. An instructor called the class to order and made quick work some legal paper. Front Sight indemnified and held harmless to its lawyers’ satisfaction, the instructors lined up and each stepped forward in turn. At a perfect military Parade Rest, each gave his background and credentials (all mentioning that they were Front Sight “First Family Members). The credentials were impressive. Among there instructors were veterans of Army Special Forces, Marine Scout Sniper, “U.S. government operations,” metropolitan law enforcement, and even firefighters. Many of the instructors are part-time holding day jobs and teach on the weekends.

We found our assigned range and looked around at our classmates. Part of the class assignment task is to keep buddies/spouses together, and to segregate the classes by level of training. Our group mostly consisted of guys like Jeff, Danny and me — considerable experience with guns and shooting, but with less formal education.

Other classes contained people who had been through the course several times, and first-time shooters. The numbers are a real advantage. It allows Front Sight to put students at a similar level together into learning groups that can feed each other.

We had several instructors, but the lead, holding the title Rangemaster, was Craig Bishop. Craig is a retired Army Special Forces Master Sergeant. He is a fit sixtyish, barrel-chested and erect with a booming voice that caused my electronic ear muffs to cut out when he was twenty feet away from me. It wouldn't be hard to picture him as every Basic Training recruit's worst nightmare. But that's not the persona MSG Bishop wore today. Make no mistake, we were on his range and clearly things would run his way, but we were welcome guests. There were other instructors including former Marine Scout Sniper Ben Stairs, China Moon, Terry Meinzer, and others whose name I didn't record, including at least two women.

The class was divided into two relays with the non-shooting relay encouraged to coach the shooters. Shooting started from the five-yard line -- ridiculously close. Which is the distance of most gun fights. It's a social distance. Conversational distance. Naturally, with my extensive firearms background, long-time gun ownership, experience with competition in a dozen different shooting disciplines, I had to shoot well. In other words, I was a wreck. Naturally, I flinched. My first rounds landed way low. I took scant comfort that they would have unmanned the assailant. I knew better and concentrated on my front sight and trigger control. Rounds started printing where I intended.

At the ceasefire, the instructors came down the line. These were our first shots and they wanted to know a) whether our guns could hit anything, and b) whether we could hit anything.
"What's that?" Sergeant Bishop asked gesturing to the low hits. "That's a flinch," I replied. "Well, don't worry, we'll fix that."

For the rest of the day we worked on the process of drawing — excuse me presenting the gun from the holster, pointing in, firing, after action drill, and re-holstering. There's a lot to the process. Far more than most of us think about as we walk to the line at an IPSC match.

Front Sight Diary - Day Zero

Front Sight Diary

Okay, I confess. I’ve been skeptical of Front Sight and its dapper, square-jawed proprietor, Ignatius Piazza. The slick advertising always set my B.S. detectors off before I got too close. Last year when brother Jeff suggested participating in a scheme to pad their site’s search engine rankings by posting a set of links to a blog in return for a class(as previously noted on The Firearms Coalition web site), I posted the links, but I didn’t feel a hundred percent good about it. The promised certificate for a class arrived in due time and I set it aside. Jeff, who had also attended their free machine gun course several years ago, was more sold on the idea. He suggested we set a time in September to dovetail with his trip out for the Gun Rights Policy Conference to be held here in Phoenix and take our course either the week before or the week after the GRPC. Still less than enthusiastic, I made my part of the arrangements (which mostly consisted of registering for the Four Day Defensive Pistol Class, and storing three thousand rounds of .45 ACP hardball as the course requirements suggested). Having large quantities of ammunition on hand always makes me feel better. If I’d be shooting 800-plus rounds of .45 over four days, it couldn’t be all bad.

Day Zero – Travel and lodging
Late Thursday afternoon we made the two hour drive north to Bagdad, Arizona to pick up Jeff’s Army buddy Danny Tope, and then on another five hours to Pahrump, Nevada, some 40 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Arriving at the hotel, which gave us a discount through Front Sight, we took some pause when we were asked to sign a statement that we would “not possess” firearms in the hotel lobby or parking lot. “What’s that mean?” I asked, perhaps a little suspiciously. Basically they didn’t want to see our guns and they especially didn’t want other guests to see them. The hotel management knew why we were there, being as how they had given us the Front Sight discount and provided uw with some nice discount coupons with the Front Sight logo for breakfast. But the other guests didn’t know why we were there.

We also received a polite request to keep gun safety at the front of our minds when handling guns on the hotel property. The girl was so circumspect, I asked whether something bad had happened. Sure enough, there had been at least one serious incident – what Front Sight doctrine quite correctly terms a negligent discharge – in a Front Sight student’s room. The round penetrated a couple of interior hotel walls and a bed, and caused a minor wound to another guest. Undoubtedly a bad day for all involved.

In the room we considered the fact that since we were surrounded on three sides and below by potentially occupied rooms and with a walkway out front, there was no consistently safe direction. We took the warning to heart. We didn’t do a lot of dry practice in the hotel room. In fact, we barely handled the guns in the room except to strip and clean.

The spoils of link whoredom

I started this blog with the notion that I'd use it to talk about stuff other than guns - things like my day job (IT Architecture), politics outside of firearms, arts, literature, the meaning of life and everything. But then came an opportunity to trade links for training at Front Sight (http://www.frontsight.com/). I decided to place the links here rather than on our site (http://www.firearmscoalition.org/) because the idea was to give Front Sight maximum exposure on the Web. Brother Jeff had already posted his links at our site and I figured that if I was going to spam the links, I should at least preserve some sense of integrity and post it under a different URL than ours.

So my off-topic blog is still about guns. Probably fits. With me, everything eventually comes down to guns.

I didn't actually blog from Front Sight. The hotel, hoping to keep its guests in the casinos where they belong, had no Internet connection. But I took some scattered notes and will re-create something like a diary here. Stay tuned.

The 10. The 101. The 17. The 51. The 202. The 60.

I live in Phoenix. This city is now an outlying suburb of Los Angeles. Now people have been saying that for years, but we now have verifiable proof. Over the past year or so the TV and radio folks have taken to referring to highways by "the" followed by the number. I remember visiting my wife-to-be's family in Pomona 20 years ago and remarking how strange it sounded. To get to Disneyland: "Take the 10 west to the 57..." Now every traffic reporter in town talks about 10, the 17, and on and on. So how long before we take the Camelback to the Pima Road?

Advertsing

Ha! I'm really pimping now! Tossed some Adsense ads into the mix.

By the way, I got my certificates for shooting lessons (see first post). My brother and I will be making a trip to Vegas and later to Pahrump probably next year.

I have a strange love-hate relationship with advertising. I remember being in junior high and if I had some time to kill in the library I'd read Advertising Age. I subscribe to their daily newsletter to this day. What I notice these days is where they have their annual party. Cannes! When lots of money changes hands, there's always some that shakes off. Advertising and sales are naturally at the top of that heap. I sometimes wonder if I'm in the right business.

I remember griping about ads when I was a kid. My dad, a magazine writer, editor, and later publisher, pointed out that advertising paid for my groceries. He also mentioned Packard automobiles. According to him, Packard was the best manufacturer of the best cars. Everybody knew they made the best cars. So they took a decision to stop advertising. Not long after that, there were no more Packards. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and see no reference to the story. But there may be something to it. When I've fact-checked the old man on other topics, he usually does pretty well.

Mad Men

I've gotten hooked on the AMC TV show Mad Men. Now I've got my wife watching it.

The ironic thing about all this? I Tivo it and fast-forward through the ads. And when I read AdAge online, I filter the ads using a Firefox plugin called Adblock.

If you haven't watched Mad Men yet, I recommend it. If nothing else, it's a good TV date show. The lead character, Don Draper is a New York advertising executive who's in free-fall and hasn't noticed yet. It's 1958 or 1959. Reader's Digest has just published an article linking cigarettes and cancer. He has a wife and kids in the suburbs, a girlfriend in the city, and now appears to be chasing a department store owner's daughter who has taken operation of the store over from her father. He's a first-class jerk, and yet for some reason we care what happens to him. I foresee numerous dramatic meltdowns.

Why I Am A Fan Of Harry Potter

1. He is a member of a misunderstood and often feared minority.
2. He rarely goes anywhere unarmed (J.K. Rowling uses the term).
3. He puts his friends first.
4. 
   

First Post: Pimp My Blog!

I've been meaning to start this blog for a while anyway. But I've been pushed over the edge. I can't help myself. I'm a gun nut and now, a link whore. At the bottom of this post I take up Ignatius Piazza on this offer. If you don't know what Front Sight is, there are thirty-some links that will tell you everything you need to know about it. It's for real.

Front Sight is an interesting concept. It combines a high-end firearms training facility and shooting range with a real estate development. Weird? If you don't play golf, a house on a golf course is pretty weird too, except we're used to the idea. I'd love to see a similar development in Phoenix near or adjacent to Ben Avery Shooting Facility. That range was once so far out in the sticks coyotes had to hitch-hike to it. It now has houses all around it. The picture from Google Earth is at least a year old. The red tile roofs are now south of Carefree Highway.


*Sigh*

While I'm plugging Ignatius Piazza, I may as well pimp out my own site. My brother Jeff and I run (direct? coordinate?) The Firearms Coalition which is a resource for grassroots Second Amendment activists. My original intent with this blog was to talk about stuff that I don't ordinarily talk on the Net about — my profession as an IT architect, business, politics culture — all this stuff that's not appropritate for The Firearms Coalition. Hence the "Off-Topic" title. But Ignatius's deal was too sweet. Couldn't pass it up. I'd have put the links up on The Firearms Coalition but my brother beat me to it and I figured it'd be less than kosher for us both to put the same links up twice.

• Front Sight Firearms Training Institute
• Ignatius Piazza - founder of Front Sight
• Ignatius Piazza Blog
• Front Sight - in Guns & Ammo
• Ignatius Piazza - in Times Democrat
• Front Sight - in London Times
• Ignatius Piazza - in Fort Worth Star Telegram
• Ignatius Piazza - in Chicago Tribune
• Ignatius Piazza - in Las Vegas Life
• Front Sight - in New York Times
• Ignatius Piazza - in National Enquirer
• Ignatius Piazza - in Las Vegas Sun
• Ignatius Piazza - in Forbes Magazine
• Ignatius Piazza - in Small Arms Review
• Front Sight - in Financial Times
• Front Sight - in Santa Cruz Sentinel
• Front Sight - in Pajaronian Register
• Front Sight - in Gun Web
• Ignatius Piazza - in El Mercurio
• Ignatius Piazza - in Las Vegas Mercury
• Front Sight - on BBC News
• Front Sight - in US News & World Report
• Ignatius Piazza - in Washington Post
• Front Sight - in El Pais Seminal
• Front Sight - on USA Today
• Front Sight - in The Mail on Sunday Review
• My Experience at Front Sight
• Front Sight - on CNN
• Front Sight - in Cybercast News Service
• Ignatius Piazza - in Playboy
• Ignatius Piazza - in San Francisco Chronicle
• Front Sight - in Los Angeles Times
• Front Sight - in Black Belt Magazine
• Front Sight - in Icon Magazine
• Ignatius Piazza - on World Net Daily
• Front Sight - in Sierra Times
• Ignatius Piazza - on Reform America
• Ignatius Piazza - in Gun World
• Ignatius Piazza - in Handvapen Guiden