Month: May 2010

The Brady Bunch Prove to Be Even Bigger Pricks

Wow the Brady Campaign are dicks. Days of our Trailers points out those pricks are jockeying for more gun related deaths by opposing the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program while offering nothing as a replacement. Why are they doing this? Simply because they don’t like the NRA. Seriously I’m not even exaggerating this:

When I look at the full record of NRA activities, it’s difficult for me to believe that the NRA leadership is serious about gun safety for children or anybody else.

But let’s look at their arguments:

Yet there is absolutely no evidence directly linking the use of the Eddie Eagle program to a decline in children’s deaths by guns.

That’s probably true, I haven’t heard of any such study. Of course the number of children killed by accidents involving firearms has been on a steady decline so the Eddie Eagle program certainly isn’t hurting anything.

In fact, a study published in 2004 by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that children could memorize Eddie’s simple advice about avoiding guns, but that advice went unheeded when children were put in real-life scenarios and asked to role-play a response. Indeed, not a single child out of 11 in the Eddie Eagle program study “used the skills in a real-life situation.” The authors noted, “Studies have found that when children find guns, they often play with them,” and concluded: “Existing programs are insufficient for teaching gun-safety skills to children.”

Of course the linked study is only an abstract and you need to pay to read the entire thing. So I have no idea how the study was conducted and Helmke doesn’t seem willing to provide those details so let’s move on:

Another study published in the late 1990s by the Violence Policy Center (VPC)

That’s all I need to say there. The Brady Bunch referencing the Violence Policy Center is the same as the NRA referencing Gun Owners of America. It’s a bias study where a goal exists and anything will be done to ensure the conclusion reflects that goal. Oh and I love this one:

Children in the United States die from gunfire at a higher rate than in any other industrialized nation, underscoring the need for gun safety education. But the responsibility for protecting children from these lethal weapons should not be dumped on already overburdened teachers and fiscally-strapped school districts that have limited instruction time. The responsibility belongs to parents, gun owners, and gun manufacturers.

This has to be the only time we’ll see Helmke state parents need to take responsibility for something. Because every time a child dies in a gun related accident he goes blames the gun. I just wanted to preserve this moment in history since it’s more rare than people who fully understand quantum mechanics. This is also golden:

When you consider the heart-ripping tragedies that mount every day in the form of accidental gun deaths, gun suicides, and the alleged gun homicide of a three-year-old by his sibling, one has to ask why. Why does the NRA continue to stand in the way of adult education and child safety laws that could stem the carnage?

So the NRA should stop the Eddie Eagle program to education children on gun safety but should not stand in the way of adult education (here’s a hint they don’t stand in the way, they actively try to educate adults as well as children). Likewise the NRA doesn’t stand in the way of child safety laws, they stand in the way of gun control laws which do not make children safer in any way.

You know I think the only play Helmke gets anymore comes from gun bloggers linking to his dribble and pointing out the lies and lack of logic.

Evolving Iron Sights

The Firearm Blog has a post about a new iron sight idea. The new system used a lens and “zone plates” and allows the user to focus on both the front sight and target at the same time.

It looks like an interested idea with certain applications for target shooting. I don’t think I’d put such a device on my defensive firearms simply because if you break the lens I imagine the sighting system would be useless. But this thing looks cool regardless.

Here I Thought They Were Already Doing This

This shows how paranoid I’ve become. MSNBC has a story about Amazon uploading notes and highlights taken on the Kindle is aggregating the data in such a way other people can view it.

Since the Kindle is able to sync things like notes and highlights I already knew they were being uploaded to Amazon’s servers. Likewise since the file storing said notes and highlights is a plain text file I assumed it wasn’t be encrypted. Finally I assumed the data was being sifted through and aggregated at some point. In other words I’m paranoid and trust nobody.

Well apparently Amazon wasn’t really doing anything with the data but will be soon. They’re trying to turn the Kindle into a social network reading device (yeah I just made that up and it’s officially my buzzword, wait this is under Creative Commons… crap). What Amazon is planning on doing is making popular highlights and such available for Kindle books.

If you don’t like this feature there is only one way I know of to disable it, never turn on the wireless card and do a sync operation. Either way you should know about this feature before they implement it and I’m sure Amazon will do everything in their power to not alert anybody of it.

The Dangers of Legislating Behavior

Jay over at MArooned sums up why it’s dangerous to allow our politicians to legislate any behavior:

That’s the whole thing. It never ends. Once we let them dictate one behavior, there’s no stopping those who would use the power of the state, the men with guns, to force the people to bend to their whims and wants. Today cell phones, tomorrow iPods, next week it’s passengers and heating choices.

It’s a slippery slope. Once you’re sliding down the slope it’s practically impossible to stop until you hit the bottom. In this case Jay was talking about calls to ban all cellular phone use while driving because it’s said to distract drivers. As he pointed out the logical conclusion is to ban passengers since they provide distractions as well.

This logic can be applied to anything. For instance when our government regulated the ownership of machines gun and other such “scary” guns via the National Firearms Act is started us down a slippery slop. Now thanks for the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act the transfer of machine guns produced after an arbitrary date to civilian hands is completely illegal.

This should be kept in mind whenever legislation regulating what can be posted on the Internet comes up. Sure first they will say they need to protect the children but it will not stop until everything that isn’t government approved is banned (think China).

Once you allow the state to be your nanny there is no escaping the nanny state.

Kids and Guns

The anti-gunners keep claiming that hundreds and hundreds of children die every year from firearm related accidents. Well Kevin over at the Smallest Minority has issues with bold face lies and delivers the real data provided by the Center for Disease Control:

Here’s the available CDC data (you trust the .gov, right?) tabulated from 1990 up through 2006:

2006: 102
2005: 127
2004: 105
2003: 102
2002: 115
2001: 125
2000: 150
1999: 158
1998: 207
1997: 247
1996: 272
1995: 330
1994: 403
1993: 392
1992: 378
1991: 419
1990: 417

Go read his entire post it’s very good and further exemplifies why the anti-gun crowd is becoming more irrelevant every day. Also it’s good to see that gun related accidents involving children have been steadily decreasing over the last decade and a half.

Bloomberg’s So-Called Terror Gap

You’ve all seen the massive amount of propaganda Super Douche Bloomberg and his posse have been vomiting up. They want to deny anybody who’s name appears on the “no-fly list” the right to buy firearms. Well let’s look at some of the people on the no-fly list whom Bloomberg wants to strip the rights of for life.

First let’s meet Sam Adams. No not that Sam Adams but a 5 year-old child who is a suspected terrorist:

Saw the article you posted on Boing Boing about the five year old on the no-fly list. My son, also five, is on that same list and it’s a nightmare. Every time we fly with him, we can’t use the computer terminals to check in and the attendant has to call some never named government agency to make sure he’s not a terrorist. Some attendants joke it off but some are insanely serious about it. His seat always goes unassigned (even if it was assigned when the reservation is made) which always causes problems.

I’ve tried everything that anyone has suggested. There’s a TSA form that you can fill out for this situation, which I did, but they won’t tell you if they’ve removed your name. We got him a passport — that didn’t work. We’ve tried booking the tickets with his full name (including middle name), that didn’t work. We tried booking the ticket under Master Samuel Adams, with still no luck.

How about Mickey Hicks? He’s an 8 year-old boy on the no-fly list:

On its website, the TSA specifically denies that there is an 8-year-old on any of its watch lists. But try telling that to Mikey Hicks, who has had problems getting on airplanes his entire life. As a baby, Hicks was denied a seat on a plane because, officials told his mother, his name “was on the list.” He started getting full pat-downs when he was 2, his mom tells the New York Times.

Although arguably deserving Senator Ted Kennedy was also on the list:

U.S. Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government’s secret “no-fly” list.

Federal air security officials said the initial error that led to scrutiny of the Massachusetts Democrat should not have happened even though they recognize that the no-fly list is imperfect. But privately they acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed.

Unlike you and me he was probably able to get his name off of the list. Let’s meet Michael Martin a 7 year-old “terrorist” who would be barred from owning firearms for life:

The name of a seven-year-old Coral Springs boy is on the no-fly list.

For the third time in his young life, Michael Martin recently had to check in with an airline agent before flying. His name appears to share a moniker with a suspected or known terrorist.

His mother had to ask an airline agent for help earlier this month when she couldn’t print Michael’s boarding pass from an AirTran kiosk at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

An Write named Chris Kelly notes his 12 year-old daughter is a “terrorist” as well:

My middle daughter’s name seems to be on the No Fly List. Since she’s only twelve years old, and neither practices nor endorses acts of political violence, I can only assume there’s been some kind of mistake.

No one at the airport will tell us how she made the list. They won’t even confirm that she’s on it. Every time we go to the airport, the electronic kiosk simply refuses to issue her a boarding pass, and we’re sent to the ticket counter, where five people look at the whole family’s I.D., and then specifically hers, and then someone calls someone, and they call someone, and that person tells the person on the phone, “No, she’s a little girl.” And eventually we’re allowed to run for our flight.

BoingBoing notes another 5 year-old is getting started in the field of “terrorism” early as well:

A five-year-old boy was taken into custody and thoroughly searched at Sea-Tac because his name is similar to a possible terrorist alias. As the Consumerist reports, “When his mother went to pick him up and hug him and comfort him during the proceedings, she was told not to touch him because he was a national security risk. They also had to frisk her again to make sure the little Dillinger hadn’t passed anything dangerous weapons or materials to his mother when she hugged him.”

This is just a small sample of people Super Douche Bloomberg wants to prohibit from buying firearms for life.

Math Hard

Apparently the education system in Chicago is a far more dire state than I realized. Basic math operations such as addition and multiplication apparently escape their government officials as Days of our Trailers points out:

Of the 4,050 firearms traded in for gift cards, there were 55 assault weapons and 3,335 handguns, along with 660 replicas, according to the Office of Police News Affairs.

Police gave a prepaid credit card for each weapon turned in: $100 for each assault weapon, $75 for guns and $10 for BB guns, air guns and replica guns.

About $46,000 had been raised so far this year for the program

55*$100 + 3335*$75 + 660*$10 = $262,225.00

In case you’re a victim of Chicago’s apparently abhorrent education system $262,225.00 is larger than $46,000 meaning the program cost more money than was raised.

Minnesota Representative Paymar At it Yet Again

I just received an e-mail from the NRA-ILA stating everybody’s most hated state representative Michael Paymar is threatening to amend a unspecified bill with his anti-private property amendment:

With Minnesota’s 2010 legislative session coming to an end, anti-gun State Representative Michael Paymar (DFL-64B) intends to offer an amendment to a yet unknown bill, which would severely regulate the sale of firearms at gun shows in Minnesota. Representative Paymar has until the last minute on Monday, May 17 to attach this amendment, so it is important that you once again urge your Representative to block his continued anti-gun agenda.

His proposed amendment would force all private sales conducted at gun shows across Minnesota to go through a background check. Gun prohibitionists, such as Representative Paymar, falsely claim that many criminals get their guns from gun shows, but the most recent federal study puts the figure at only 0.7 percent. This effort is a stepping stone for anti-gun advocates seeking to ban all private sales, even among family and friends.

Please contact your State Representative immediately and urge them to oppose Representative Paymar’s “Gun Show” amendment should it come up. To find contact information for your State Representative, please click here.

I will keep my eyes open and let you know the second he makes his move. Either way it would be a good idea to let your representatives know you won’t stand for any bill that threatens your property rights.