Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Gun Owners in Washington Planning Act of Mass Civil Disobedience

During the election i594 passed in Washington, which requires all gun transfers to be performed through a federally licensed dealer. As you can guess gun owners are pissed. After all, what parent wants to pay a middle man just so they can give their child his or her inheritance to them? Who wants to pay a middle man just to get permission to sell a firearm to a friend? It’s a stupid law, it’s unenforceable, and it appears that Washington’s gun owners are planning to give their rulers a rightfully deserved gigantic middle finger:

Tens of thousands of Connecticut gun owners chose to become overnight felons rather than comply with that state’s new gun registration law. The defiance spurred the Hartford Courant editorial board to impotently sputter about rounding up the scofflaws.

New York’s similar registration law suffers such low compliance that state officials won’t even reveal how many people have abide by the measure—a desperate secrecy ploy that the New York State Committee on Open Government says thumbs its nose at the law itself.

Now Washington state residents pissed of about i594, a ballot measure inflicting background check requirements on even private transactions, plan an exercise in mass disobedience next month.

According to the event’s Facebook page they plan to gather en masse at the Washington State Capital and exchange firearms without involving any middle men. Since only federally licensed dealers can access the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to perform a background check these transfers will be in violation of the law.

I’m a big fan of civil disobedience because it shows how impotent the state is. Assuming half of the 6,100 people (as of this writing) marked as going show up it will be impossible for law enforcement agents to arrest them all. Even if they did manage to round them all up they probably wouldn’t have enough cages to keep them in. The state’s power is predatory in nature. It attempts to isolate individuals and attack them. But when it faces masses of people it must either back down or use violence on all of them, which quickly erases its legitimacy in the eyes of many.

This even will, in all probability, also cause many gun control loons to reveal their true faces. I’m sure social media outlets will be jam packed with comments by anti-gunners who claim to want peace demanding the police execute these unruly gun owners. Nothing brings out an anti-gunner’s violence nature like disobedient gun owners. I look forward to reading their rants for the LULZ.

That Will Teach Him a Lesson

A woman wanted to teach her teenage son a lesson. Obviously you know where this is going. She talked to the dad and together they came up with a very clever plan that involved embarrassing their son slightly so he would learn to behave next time. Just kidding. What she actually did was plant a handgun into her son’s backpack and then reported him anonymously to the school:

A 28-year-old woman was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison for planting a pistol in a child’s backpack and anonymously reporting him to the school.

Heather Hodges, who pleaded guilty to unlawful carrying of a weapon on restricted premises in exchange for the dismissal of two lesser charges, was the live-in girlfriend of the boy’s father but they had struggled as a blended family.

Hodges wanted to teach 13-year-old James Bailey McKeegan a lesson for what she considered to be the mistreatment of her own children, ages seven and four.

So she took her boyfriend’s 9-millimeter Smith and Wesson handgun, replaced the child’s cologne and deodorant in his backpack, and then called Magnolia Junior High School from a nearby payphone to report him by name.

Yup, that sure taught him a lesson. Never trust a parental figure because they’re constantly plotting to get you into seriously trouble with the law. At least I’m assuming that was the lesson she was trying to teach the kid because I can’t see any other lesson that could have been taught from this exercise in stupidity.

Kudos go to the investigator for actually doing his job:

Retired MCSO investigator Mike Price said this was an important move, because of his experience as an interrogator, since it took multiple interviews to get Hodges to open up about what happened and her motives.

“It was very unusual,” Price said. “Initially, we wanted to know what was (McKeegan’s) intent with the pistol. Did he bring it to school to harm someone, or just to show to his friends? He kept insisting that he knew he brought a gun to school, but he didn’t realize it until the principal found the gun in his backpack. He was insistent.

“He was so consistent with his story and he came across so sincere, not just emotionally, but how he just stayed with his story and would not waver from it, that my position was that there’s something to this. I was the lone wolf at that point.”

Too many investigators would have crucified the kid regardless of his protests of innocence. Mike Price actually used his head and came to the conclusion that the kid was telling the truth. That kind of quality work is seldom witnessed this day and age and deserves to be acknowledge.

Sometimes the War Against the Homeless Becomes Literal

Usually when I talk about the state’s war against the homeless I’m speaking figuratively. But from time to time the state’s figurative war becomes a very real one:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has released a disturbing video of a police shooting. It shows eight officers of the Saginaw, Michigan Police Department lined up against Milton Hall, a mentally ill homeless man. There’s a brief stand-off in a vacant parking lot, in which Hall pulls out a pocketknife, then the law enforcement agents fire 45 bullets at Hall, hitting him 14 times, even as he drops to the pavement, but it doesn’t end there.

“One policeman, after [Hall] was on the ground, turned him over, handcuffed him, and put his foot on his back,” says Jewel Hall, the mother of the 45-year-old homeless man. “And his blood is running down the street like water.”

A knife is a deadly weapon, there’s no denying that. But us tax payers are forced to pay for a lot of less-likely-to-be-lethal weaponry for police officers so you would think they would humor us by attempting to use it from time to time on somebody other than small children. Especially when there are eight officers so if something like a Taser fails to be effective you still have seven sets of hands free to either bring in another Taser or a firearm.

As a side note we should also take a moment to look at the hit ratio. 14 out of 45 rounds is approximately a 31 percent hit ratio, which is pretty terrible. Criticizing their poor marksmanship isn’t just my attempt at taking a cheap shot at the officers. Having that poor of marksmanship in a town is dangerous since it means 31 rounds went who knows where. That’s a sizable risk to the people the police are supposedly there to protect.

Another Reason to Implement HTTPS Everywhere

There is no reason for a website to not at least have an HTTPS connection available to users. When websites like StartSSL provide free certificates the old excuse of costs is no longer even applicable. Computer hardware has increased to the point where offering secure connection isn’t really that big of a drain on a server. And HTTP is just plain dangerous. Not only can any traffic sent over HTTP be viewed by anybody between the two communicating points but it can be altered without either point knowing. That is what Verizon is now doing to its customer’s HTTP traffic:

Over the past couple of days, there’s been an outpouring of concern about Verizon’s advertising practices. Verizon Wireless is injecting a unique identifier into web requests, as data transits the network. On my phone, for example, here’s the extra HTTP header.1

X-UIDH: OTgxNTk2NDk0ADJVquRu5NS5+rSbBANlrp+13QL7CXLGsFHpMi4LsUHw

After poring over Verizon’s related patents and marketing materials, here’s my rough understanding of how the header works.

[…]

In short, Verizon is packaging and selling subscriber information, acting as a data broker on real-time advertising exchanges. Questionable. By default, the information appears to consist of demographic and geographic segments.2 If a user has opted into “Verizon Selects,” then Verizon also shares behavioral profiles built by deep packet inspection.

This is a dirty trick only made possible over unsecured connections. Secure connections, in addition to preventing anybody in between two communicating points from snooping on the communications, also provides mechanisms to verify that the data wasn’t altered when traversing between its start and end points. This is done with a wonderful algorithm called hashbased message authentication codes (HMAC). If the contents of the message are altered in any way the HMAC will not match and the receiver can verify that the message received doesn’t match the message that was sent. HTTP, unfortunately, has no way of providing this functionality so there is no way to know whether or not the data has been altered in transit.

The bottom line is HTTP needs to die and HTTPS needs to replace it for every website.

Suicide Assistance Hotline

There are few things, at least in my opinion, more tragic than somebody being pushed to the brink of suicide. It seems I am not alone in my thinking since resources have been set aside for things like suicide hotlines where people contemplating suicide can call and hopefully get talked out of it. Unfortunately a call to a suicide hotline can result in police officers being dispatched to your location. At that point the suicide hotline may very well become the suicide assistance hotline:

The 35 year old man, who neighbors describe the as a quiet, friendly man, was divorced and now lived in the home with his girlfriend and her children. According to Detective Matthew Gwynn of the Roy City Police Department, the man called a suicide hotline around 4 a.m. and threatened to kill himself. The Weber County Consolidated Dispatch Center sent officers to the resident.

“There were people in the home at the time the call was placed,” Det. Gwynn told ABC4 News. “They left the home shortly thereafter.”

Roy City Police and the Weber Metro SWAT Team tried to convince the man to surrender and get help but seven hours after the initial call, something dramatic occurred in the garage causing SWAT officers to open fire.

People whose training mostly focuses on using force are probably not the type of people you want to send to a person who just declared that they are suicidal. What is interesting about this case though is that the police are investigating it as a suicide by cop incident. In order for that to be a possible reason for the call it would require the caller to know that the suicide hotline would dispatch police officers. Furthermore it would be reliant on having officers dispatched that are more prone to shoot a suicidal man than attempt to dissuade him on committing suicide. It’s also interesting that the police, so far, haven’t released any information regarding the actions the caller took that instigate the police opening fire (or, for that matter, what a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team was dispatched instead of regular police officers).

Hopefully the media actually covers the details of this case because I believe they could be very interesting.

I’m Just Declaring Today Stupid Wednesday

That’s it, I’m declaring today Stupid Wednesday. There’s just so much idiocy in the news that I’m left wondering how many humans remember to breathe, let alone function at a high enough level to make the news. The City of St. Paul is looking to set a minimum price on tobacco products. But that’s not the dumbest part. As hard as it may be to believe the justification for this plan is even dumber than the plan itself:

“I’ve seen people come in — of age, because they’re purchasing in front of a police officer — but they simply throw down change on a countertop,” Gannon said. “And they have enough change in their pocket to buy a single cigarillo. And I just wonder where that cigarillo ends up at. Does it go out to somebody who may be younger who can’t afford more expensive cigarettes.”

Where does one even come up with such a conclusion? Just because somebody plunks down a bit of change to buy some cheap tobacco doesn’t mean, or even remotely imply, that they’re buying for underage individuals. And it gets dumber:

For law enforcement, limiting access to cigars can be important, because cigar wrappers also can be used to smoke marijuana.

Yup, cigar wrappers have to be controlled because they can be used to smoke weed. Because there’s no other possible way for somebody to smoke weed other than using an old cigar wrapper. No siree!

And just think, these are the people tasked with running your life. These are the people that make up the institution known as government. Your lives are in the hands of total fucking morons.

Five Years Old? Draw Something That Vaguely Resembles a Gun? Then You Must be Suicidal!

I honestly had a difficult time coming up with a title for this post because it contains more stupidity than a title rightly ought to describe. A five year-old kid in Mobile, Alabama drew something that vaguely looked like a gun. Since this is the nation of zero tolerance that picture required an immediate and overwhelmingly moronic response:

MOBILE, Alabama (WPMI) – An Alabama mother is furious that her 5-year-old daughter was forced to sign a school contract stating she wouldn’t kill herself or anyone else at school.

School officials told Rebecca, who did not want to give her last name, they had to send 5-year-old Elizabeth home after an incident in class.

“They told me she drew something that resembled a gun. According to them she pointed a crayon at another student and said ‘pew pew’,” Rebecca explained.

I’m not even sure what the line of thinking was here. The kid drew something that looked like a gun, which I understand requires immediate action from school administrators this day and age. I also understand that the response must be devoid of recognizable logic. But requiring the kid to sign a contract, which is unenforceable since she isn’t 18 and therefore irrelevant, stating that she won’t commit suicide? That’s just bizarre. The school administrators couldn’t believe the kid was either suicidal or a threat to fellow students otherwise they would have required more than a signature from a kid on a contract that wouldn’t accomplish anything on the best of days. Perhaps the school administrators are trying to get an incident of mental illness on the kid’s record in the hopes of making it more difficult for her to buy a gun in the future. Or, more likely, the school administrators are trying to embarrass the kid as much as possible in the hopes of linking anything involving guns with bad experiences.

Don’t Be Stupid and Other Observations By Captain Obvious

Opponents of open carry often claim that anybody who open carries a gun will have it taken from them by an attacker. After a lot of huffing and puffing they finally have an example to point to:

William Coleman III was robbed of his Walter- brand P22 just after 2:00 a.m. October 4 in Gresham by a young man who asked him for it — and flashed his own weapon as persuasion.

Coleman, 21, was talking to his cousin in the 17200 block of NE Glisan St., after purchasing the handgun earlier that day, when a young man asked him for a cigarette, police said.

The man then asked about the gun, pulled a gun from his own waistband and said “”I like your gun. Give it to me.”

Coleman handed over the gun and the man fled on foot.

Now opponents of open carry can feel justified for all of the time they spend bitching, moaning, and whining about how terrible openly carrying a firearm is. Caleb over at Gun Nuts Media covered most of the important points to take away from this story. I do, however, have one point to add.

I took to Google Maps to verify that the location mentioned in the story was a residential area. It is. Although that’s not super important to what I’m going to say it’s a worthwhile criteria point to mention. The big red flag, to me, is that the thief asked to bum a cigarette. Asking to bum a cigarette, begging for some change, or approaching somebody and asking for directions are common tricks thieves and other violent criminals use to close the gap between themselves and their intended prey without, they hope, raising any red flags. Because of this these things should all raise immediate red flags. If you’re standing at a house at 02:00 and somebody starts walking up to you asking for a cigarette you should immediately be on the defensive. It’s not common, in my experience at least, for random strangers to walk up to people in residential areas and ask them for a cigarette. That kind of behavior is more common at bars where people are grouped together and smoking.

When you’re suspicious of a person you should also be very watchful of their hands. According to the story the thief drew his gun from concealment. The moment a suspicious man’s hands being moving towards a potential weapon your hands should probably begin moving towards your weapon. Especially when you’re advertising that you are in possession of a valuable object such as a firearm. In most cases a person openly carrying a firearm should be able to draw their firearm quicker than a person carrying concealed. At least if they’re paying attention.

While there are times when I open carry I prefer to carry concealed for the same reason I prefer not to have my phone visible when walking around; I don’t like to advertise being in possession of highly sought after items. Guns, like iPhones, are highly sought after by thieves. If you’re open carrying you’re advertising not only an ability to defend yourself but also that you possess something worth stealing. Hence you need to also need to be aware of your surrounding. Not only must you be aware of your surroundings but you must project the fact that you are aware of your surroundings. Thieves usually rely on distraction. They tend to prey on individuals who are distracted and avoid individuals who are obviously aware of what’s going on around them. Although I can’t be sure I believe it’s fairly safe to assume that the victim in this story wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to what was going on around him.

Jeff Johnson is a Dick

I’ve been doing my best to avoid wasting your time with the current off season election. While politics really isn’t my thing these days I do feel the need to chime in from time to time. This post is dedicated to Jeff Johnson, the Republican nominee for the Minnesota governor’s race. As this is a gun blog I will point out that Johnson has been enjoying decent support for local gun owners because he pays lip service to the Second Amendment and he’s not Mark Dayton (probably more the latter than the former).

Here’s the problem with Jeff Johnson, he’s a dick. As evidence to support my accusation I present the following:

Johnson, who first proposed reinstating capital punishment for some violent crimes during his unsuccessful bid for attorney general in 2006, said he still supports it.

Admittedly I don’t have much support to give but the second a politician says he supports having the overt power of life and death over his subjects he loses all of my support. Consider the position Johnson is running for. A governor traditionally has the power to exempt people from the death penalty after being sentenced to it. Additionally the death penalty gives the courts an option to outright execute people. This is a major problem when you consider the number of death row inmates who were later acquitted or had the charges otherwise dismissed.

While locking people in a cage is pretty nasty, death is final. Improvement in forensic technology is responsible for many acquittals. As the technology continues to improve it’s likely more people will be found wrongfully convicted. If those people are in a cage they can at least be let out and allowed to live some kind of life. On the other hand if those people are executed there’s not a damn thing that can be done if they’re later found innocent.

Guilty verdicts don’t necessarily mean the convicted is guilty. Knowing this the fact that Johnson supports reinstating the death penalty in Minnesota makes him wholly unworthy of being in a position where he can potentially make it happen. It’s none of my business what master you pick but I discourage you from picking one that wants the organization he is trying to lead, the State of Minnesota, to have the power to overtly murder its subjects.

How Six Years Changes a Political Party

I’ve been riding Republicans pretty hard on this blog. That’s not because I hold any love for the Democrats but because my RSS reader consists primarily of gun blogs and gun blogs generally report more on Republicans and therefore I’m more exposed to that parties stupidity. But it’s time for me to give the Democrats some much needed criticism.

Let’s rewind to September 12th, 2001. The dust hadn’t fully settled from the previous day’s attacks but rumors were already circulating that American was going to bomb somebody in retaliation. Eventually that somebody became the countries of Afghanistan and Iraq. Shortly after the wars began the anti-war left in name only (LINO) began protesting. The protests were loud and the anti-war movement was relentless. Then 2008 rolled around. George W. Bush was swapped out with Barack Obama. Obama, and many of his fellow Democrats, ran on an anti-war platform. His campaign even netted him a Nobel Peace Prize. The anti-war LINO settled down and awaited their savior’s demonstration of his love of peace. That demonstration never came. In fact Obama declared new wars. But the anti-war LINO never reappeared in force.

Now it’s 2014 and the Democrats are no longer running on an anti-war platform. Instead they are beating the war drum just as hard as the neocons:

A host of Democratic Senate hopefuls who rode anti-war sentiment into office in the past decade are running for reelection now as hawks, staking out hard-line positions on the latest upheaval in the Middle East. The candidates are quick to note the differences between then and now — a years-long military mission with boots on the ground versus the airstrikes President Barack Obama has launched in Iraq and Syria in the past month.

In six short years many politicians in the Democratic Party have gone from protesting the war to cheering it. I guess their opposition wasn’t to the fact that bombs were being dropped but only to who was dropping the bombs. At least the Republican Party is consistent. It has a gigantic hard-on for war and never lets you forget it. Democrats, on the other hand, only become erect from war when they’re running it and complain loudly about their erectile dysfunction when they’re not running it.