BATFE Harassing Gun Owners in Border Towns

Scary news being reported by the NRA-ILA…

http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Read.aspx?ID=4990

Several NRA members in border cities are saying they’ve had BATFE (I’m still wondering when the Hell the B and the E were tacked onto ATF) agents coming to their door and asking to be let inside so they can get the serial numbers off of their guns.

Remember everybody unless an agent has a warrant do not let them into your home. No matter what threats they make or what they say without a warrant they can not legally enter your residence. Law enforcement agents are allowed to lie to you so they can say things like they will report you or bring you down to the precinct but without legal grounds they can’t do anything.

If this is actually happening I encourage everybody to stand up for their rights and tell the BATFE no they can not enter and it’s none of their business how many guns you own.

Just Because the Bad Guy is Armed Doesn’t Mean They’ll Win

At least if you’re also armed. From Robb Allen’s blog we have this story…

http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/news/local/hillsborough/concealed_weapons_permits_rise_061709

The anti-gunners always spout the fact that if you are attacked you’ll be at a disadvantage. This is true but they claim this disadvantage is so great due to your foe being armed and already having their weapon at the ready that you’ll have no chance in Hell of getting to yours. This story flat out destroys that argument…

TAMPA – About a month ago, Audry Sauceda was carjacked and fought back.

He stuck a gun in my side and told me to get out of the car,” Sauceda said while sharing her story with FOX 13 on May 15. “And I pulled out my gun and stuck it in his face, and told him, he needed to get out. He screamed and jumped out of the car.”

Even though the attacker had a gun at the ready the owner of the car was able to get her gun out and into the would be high jacker’s face.

The bottom line is most criminals prey on what they perceive to be easy targets. They want easy money and objects that’s why they are stealing instead of working. To them it’s easier to rob an unarmed person than it is to go to work everyday like the rest of us. But once in a while they find a person who is armed and it turns their life to shit. Not wanting to die most criminals will run at the sight of a gun in the hands of the law abiding.

Of course there will be somebody who says if the woman would have just surrendered her car then she wouldn’t have had a chance of ill happening to her. The problem is you can’t make a deal with a person who is robbing you because you can’t trust them. Just because a criminal says they won’t kill you if you give them your stuff doesn’t mean they won’t kill you.

Source: http://blog.robballen.com/2009/06/19/p3516-getting-the-jump-on-things.post

Having the Government Control Our Lives Costs a Lot

I found an eye opening post over on Bob Barr’s blog…

http://blogs.ajc.com/bob-barr-blog/2009/06/19/federal-regulatory-burden-hits-117-trillion/?cxntfid=blogs_bob_barr_blog

He brings up the cost of Federal regulation which is right around $1.17 trillion. From the blog…

The cost of federal regulations to American citizens, businesses and state and local governments has reached $1.17 trillion, according to a report just published by the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). This equates to some $3,849 for each man, woman and child in the country.

That’s a lot of my tax money going to regulate my life. Personally I think I can regulate my life for much cheaper by doing it myself. Furthermore regulatory code is expansive…

The same report found that the “Federal Register,” the government publication that is the compendium for federal rules, now stands at a staggering 79,435 pages!

No human being is going to be able to read through 79,435 pages of regulatory code. Hell you’d need a lot of people knowing small parts just to have a group of people who know it. This means that there are regulations that are probably not usually enforced until they need something to nail somebody to the wall with.

Personally I’m of the idea where if your laws are so numerous and expansive that no person can possibly know them all you need to cut down the number of laws. I should be able to read all the laws in a specific area, understand them easily, and know exactly what I can and cannot do. With our current setup I can guarantee everybody in the United States will break multiple laws this year without even knowing it.

But the best quote is this one…

But not to worry. President Barack Obama admits he “loses sleep worrying about the deficit.” Sort of like an alcoholic worrying that he drinks too much, as he reaches for another drink to drown his worries.

Simply hilarious. I’m rather glad I voted for this guy during the election.

Don’t Place Your Cameraman Downrange

Although I’m more late to posting this than any other gun blogger at least I’m posting it (yeah this was a failure to bring breaking news). The people at Tactical Response shot a video that showed a cameraman down range while students were shooting.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqboR6gjOi8&e]

This is such a bad idea I don’t know where to begin. Let’s face it you don’t put a man down range when people are shooting. This is just asking for trouble. All it would take is a slight miss and you’d have on injured or dead cameraman. And anybody could make such a slip up no matter who good they are.

Source: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/06/17/highly-controversial-training-video/

But James Yeager posted a video response on YouTube as well. Here is the video…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R3t0wuLDWQ&e]

Personally all he makes are excuses trying to justify a bad idea. The statement that really irks me is where he says nobody can be completely safe. I’ll give him the truth in that but there are easy and common sense things you can do to make something safe. For instance not placing somebody down range while people are actively shooting. This isn’t hard to do and it greatly increases safety. It’s akin to ensuring your gun is unloaded before you start cleaning it.

Seriously this guy is an idiot. When you fuck up don’t try to justify it just admit you’re only human and you made a mistake.

Source: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/06/19/james-yeager-responds-to-the-controversial-training-video/

Germany will Sensor the Internet

But of course it’s “for the children.” Germany passed an Internet censorship bill under the guise of stopping child pornography…

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4406608,00.html

This is always the first set in full government censorship. Find something almost everybody decries, make a law banning it, and further use that law to censor all free information exchange where that now illegal item can be obtained.

The bill as it stands right now doesn’t prevent a person from viewing a site deemed to contain child pornography it just makes them click through a displayed stop sign (and I’m sure record their IP address for government agents can come arrest them).

The problem I have with a bill involving any kind of censorship is this. If you give a government an inch they’ll take a mile. This is true of every government. Right now they will only censor child pornography but next it will be anything deeming sexually abnormal and eventually it will involve anything that speaks badly about the German government.

I Guess We Now Tax Based on the Value of Money’s Material

Found on Say Uncle the Feds are trying to tax a man’s independent contractors via the value of what the money was made from not the government’s set value of the money…

http://www.lvrj.com/news/46074037.html

This may sound odd but alas the employer paid his employees in $50.00 gold coins…

Kahre contends his workers had agreed to be independent contractors, so he did not have to withhold taxes for them. His six businesses are in the trades of painting, drywall, tiling, plumbing, heating-cooling and electrical work.

Further, the $50 gold coins and the silver dollars Kahre used for payroll are designated by Congress as legal tender, so people are entitled to value them at their stamped denominations, he also contends. Taken at face value, each defendant’s annual coin income placed him below the threshold for filing a federal tax return.

So the coins are legal tender according the Congress whom I hear has some say in the value of money. But alas being the greedy people they are the IRS wants to tax based on the value of the precious metals the coins are made from not the legal value Congress set for them.

“It’s not whether what Mr. Kahre did was legal under the law,” defense attorney Michael Kennedy told the jury in his opening statement. “It’s whether he believed what he did was legal,”

So now the law is based off of what you believe is right or wrong? In that case I don’t believe anything I do is wrong and therefore should be innocent of any crimes committed. Fuck the taxation system in this country is off the wall. If Congress sets the value of those coins at $50.00 they should be valued for tax purposes as $50.00

It’s not like the employees can legally melt down the coins for the material. Destruction of money is a federal crime.

Source: http://www.saysuncle.com/2009/06/19/capital-idea-2/

Another Company Using Technology B.S. to Push a Product

A post on Bruce Schneier’s blog has lead me to this product release statement by Guidance Software Inc. Apparently they have made a revolutionary new super awesome USB stick that can snoop the hard drive of a computer and my sensitive data…

http://investors.guidancesoftware.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=384544

From the article…

Unlike existing computer forensics solutions, EnCase Portable runs on a USB drive, rather than a laptop, and enables the user to easily and rapidly boot a target computer to the USB drive, and run a pre-configured data search and collection job. The ease-of-use and ultra-portability of EnCase Portable creates exciting new possibilities in data acquisition. Even personnel untrained in computer forensics can forensically acquire documents, Internet history and artifacts, images, and other digital evidence, including entire hard drives, with a few simple keyboard clicks.

Well I have some sad news for them. This super awesome data mining drive won’t work on my machines. Why? Because I encrypt all of my drives.

The beauty is almost all modern operating systems have drive encryption technology now. Mac OS X has a feature called FileVault that encrypts your entire home directory. Windows from Vista up have a technology called BitLocker that encrypts your Windows partition. I don’t have much knowledge of BitLocker but FileVault works like a charm. All of your files get encrypted into an AES disk image which can only be decrypted via your password. Good luck with my information Guidance Software.

Source: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/new_computer_sn.html

North Korea Makes Threat it Can’t Keep

More shenanigans from North Korea…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8104709.stm

A hilarious quote from North Koreas state run news agency…

If the US and its followers infringe upon our republic’s sovereignty even a bit, our military and people will launch a one hundred- or one thousand-fold retaliation with merciless military strike

OK North Korea can’t even hit us with one fold how do they expect to strike us with one hundred or one thousand (they’re not even sure which) fold attack? Personally I’m not too scared.

North Korea is like a young dog. It’s going to bite and rip things apart but in the end all you have to do is give it a good smack with a news paper and it’ll settle down.

IANSA Want More Woman Assaulted

Via Snowflakes in Hell we get this story full of hypocrisy…

http://www.snowflakesinhell.com/2009/06/17/global-week-of-gun-violence-prevention/

The International Action Network on Small Arms is promoting International Women’s Day of Peace by promoting the disarming of everybody. Snowflakes in Hell has a great comparison between the likely hood of a unarmed woman being assaulted and an armed women. Personally if I were wanting to cause ill will to anybody, including women, I’d certainly want them unarmed.

This kind of hypocrisy is the Achilles’ heel of the anti-gun movement. They want all the good people disarmed so they push for stronger gun legislation. But by definition a criminal breaks the law and if they are planning on harming another person they aren’t going to avoid breaking any other law to accomplish their goal. The only true form of defense is what you as a person are willing to do.

Source: http://www.snowflakesinhell.com/2009/06/17/global-week-of-gun-violence-prevention/

Some Anti-Gunners Crying over Open Carry

A rather whiny article I found thanks to Mark Vanderberg on Facebook. I only post this because I’m in the mood to shoot down some more illogical statements…

http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/opinion-starbucks-full-of-guns-the-insanity-of-open-carry

The usual thing will be happening here, I’m going to pull out choice quotations and then destroy them. Let the carnage begin…

The real world implications of the open carry crusade is chilling. Consider:

Ooooh a bullet point list, I love these. Heck I love these so much each point is getting it’s own block quote. Let us consider the implications of…

Sipping hot chocolate with your toddler at Starbucks while a fellow patron openly displays a gun at the table next to you;

What is the implication of this? Well I’d probably go over to the guy and strike up a conversation. Who knows what terrible manner of conversation could arise between two pro-gun nut cases. Why there could be talk about the type of gun he’s carrying, the type of gun I’m carrying, politics, coffee, Hell almost anything. I’m sure the baby would have fun getting complements from another person proclaiming how cute he/she is. The only crime that could happen here is paying more for the coffee then you do for some ammunition.

Attending a church service with your entire family knowing that the fellow parishioner sitting next to you has a handgun tucked in his belt; or

What implication could we have here? Conversation with a fellow pro-gunner after the service is certainly likely. If some crazy asshole broke in with intent to kill people at the service I’m sure he wouldn’t get very far since there would be at least two law abiding citizens with guns there. You know this also sounds like a good implication.

Boarding a crowded bus with your newborn child with upwards of 5 other passengers openly carrying weapons.

Once again conversations could be abound. Also I know my newborn child would be safe from any crazy drug addict who might board the bus and try to rob or kill us. Hell this sounds like the only bus I’d want to ride on.

So what other quotes can be pulled from here? How about this one…

Unless this is the kind of world you want for you and your children, Americans’ need to pick up the phone to call state and federal lawmakers to voice outrage over the gun lobby’s extremist agenda.

Actually since this is exactly the type of world I’d want to live in I have contacted my congress critters, and told them to fight for my second amendment rights.

Oh and I love this one…

It’s ironic that today’s parents are hyper-vigilant about what their children eat, whom they hang out with and whether they have sunscreen on. Yet, in sharp contrast, there is remarkably little awareness or concern about the 280 million guns in civilian hands in our country—many of which are carried into countless public places each day where families frequent.

Maybe it’s because people aren’t concerned what law abiding citizens with guns will do. They are more concerned what criminals with guns will do. Furthermore they probably feel a bit safer knowing that there are people willing to defend themselves and others from criminals with guns. I know I do.

And finally…

After all, allowing a small group of armed gun owners — versus trained law enforcement officers — to make potentially life and death decisions about public safety in restaurants, churches, theaters and parks is a frightening prospect.

Sure I’ll bite, we can let the trained law enforcement officers make life and death decisions. After the many minutes it will take for them to arrive and many people have already been killed. Great idea, let’s let innocent people die because some people are afraid of something they’ve never used, guns.

Seriously I love these anti-gun arguments because they are so full of emotional B.S. but lack any real facts.