Say, that’s a good question…

here:

District Attorney Daniel F. Conley confesses to taking a bong hit in his college days. DA Gerry Leone admits he “tried it once” as a collegian. DA Michael O’keefe won’t out himself beyond a typical lawyer-like circumlocution that he “did a lot of things that were unwise, unhealthy and illegal” as a youth.
So where do these pot puffing prosecutors stand on decriminalization?
Here’s a hint: all quotes in this report come from a Boston Globe article titled “DAs fight bid to ease penalty for marijuana.”
So how does this work? If marijuana is so bad why didn’t these former potheads end up as heroin hacks and crack slackers today, punching out grandma for her bingo money so they can shoot up and zone out? Marijuana, back in their college days, was known by hardcore drug warriors as a “gateway drug.” One whiff of Mary Jane and you were trapped in the ever escalating spiral of addiction, running from drug to ever harder drug in the all consuming pursuit of staying high.
But these former drug abusers (there is no “user” in the Drug War Dictionary, only “abuser”) actually graduated college. Went to law school. Passed their bar exams. Worked their way up to district attorneys.
So why is pot okay for them but not for you?

Good question. I’d love to see some enterprising journalist in Boston ask them that question, and why lowering the penalty for possession of marijuana is such a bad thing. I am the furthest thing from a stoner, but there are a hell of a lot worse things than certain currently illegal drugs being legalized, as Milton Friedman so astutely pointed out to Bush drug czar William Bennett. Speaking of Mr. Bennett, it should be noted that he also championed the semiautomatic rifle ban later signed into law by President Clinton — no doubt, he argued for the ban as a necessary measure to quell the violence in the inner city fueled by the illegal drug trade. Which brings me to another argument.
I know I am far from the first one to point this out, but it can’t be said enough — As long as you have a War On Drugs, you will have a War On Guns to go with it. (Interestingly enough, even the socialists on the NYT editorial board have this simple truth figured out, as you’ll see if you click on a certain link brought up by the above Google search.) Because as long as these drugs are illegal, there will be a black market for them, with ionospheric prices and stratospheric profits. And what comes with black markets? Turf wars. And what are these turf wars fought with? Guns. In fact, as long as you have a War On Drugs, it is going to be used as cover for, or folded into, the War On Guns. (Incidentally, heroin from Marseilles was a problem? Marseilles, as in the city in southern France, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea? Wow, outlawing heroin in the United States — you know, the country clear across the damn Atlantic Ocean — worked quite well, didn’t it?) It really is that simple. No one will get any argument from me that drugs are bad. Hell, just look at the effects of alcohol and tobacco on Americans — drugs that, I might add, are completely legal. One would think we learned our lesson with Prohibition, but apparently not.
But sooner or later, if there’s any hope for liberty, we’re going to have to re-think the whole War On Some Drugs thing. No doubt there would be those who would take said drugs and pay with their lives, just as many do with alcohol and tobacco, but at some point one must ask, as Patrick Henry did once upon a time, ” Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”
(h/t David Codrea, who observes, “Funny, how they get a power fix, and yesterday’s liberal-minded become today’s blue-nosed puritan fascists.” Indeed…)

"Blood will run in the streets…"

…if Barack Grand Funk Railroad Obama loses next week, according to author and 9/11 Truther Erica Jong…

Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an “obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night.” She also says that her friends Jane Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to pass, the result will be a second American Civil War.

Sweet bleedin’ Barnabus, these people are pathetic. But it’s funny in a way, too. Civil war. Which side does she think has all the guns, or at least the vast majority of them?

A Tale of a Lost Sale

So I was waiting at the counter at the gun store to pay for my PTR-91 this morning, and as I was waiting an older guy came to the counter. He had come to pick up a pistol but due to extenuating circumstances, i.e. Coast Guard offshore duty, he had to fill out another Form 4473. The lady at the counter went and ran him through the system, and it came back that he was delayed. He got frustrated, said “the hell with it,” got his money back and walked out. I think it’d be interesting to find out how many gun sales have been lost because of someone getting frustrated with those background checks because of getting delayed for whatever reason. And I’d love to know the reasons for the NICS check coming back telling the FFL to delay the transfer. No doubt 99 percent of the time it’s bureaucratic error. Yeah, I know, it’s for teh childrenses, if it saves just one life, blah, blah, blah…but what if he’d been a she, perhaps a battered wife whose psychotic husband was coming back to kill her? Something to think about, I think…

I’m going shopping…

for an Evil Black Rifle…watch this space.
UPDATE: SCORE! I hit CDNN this morning in search of the PTR-91. They had a few in stock, so one thing led to another and it was off to my friendly local gun store, and she’s on her way to me now. They told me it’d be about a week. I bought three extra 20-rd. magazines for her too. .308, 18″ barrel..yes, sir. 😉

On the electoral college…

Somebody obviously missed the clue train…

…the vast majority of voting-age Americans can’t cast a meaningful vote for their candidate of choice. Yes, we can vote absentee, early, or at the polls. Yes, we can vote a straight party ticket or for an individual politician. But, what we can’t do is make that vote count. We might as well write in “none of the above” or leave a hanging chad. Why? Look no further than the Electoral College.
Unfortunately, because we now use the Electoral College to elect our country’s and arguably the world’s most powerful leader, we have abdicated our right to have our vote count. And what is voting without the right to have that vote impact an election?
In 48 states, including Texas, the Electoral College rules result in all of that state’s electoral votes going to the winner. If, for example, Obama gets 45 percent of the Texas votes he still gets 0 percent of the Texas electoral votes. If Obama wins by 1 vote in Ohio he still gets all of Ohio’s electoral votes. In fact, it is mathematically possible for a candidate to get 49 percent of the popular vote and 100 percent of the electoral votes.

All of this would seem to me to be a rather blatant appeal to emotion, or ignorance, even. The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. They knew that with safeguards like the Senate and the Electoral College, whoever had the most votes wouldn’t be able (or perhaps, be less able) to screw over the other side. If you wonder what pure democracy can lead to, I’d say Illinois and its gun laws make for a pretty good example of that because as it turns out most of the downstate Illinois residents are outvoted by Chicago and its environs. (According to Wikipedia, some 66 percent of Illinois residents live in metro Chicago.) Morton Grove and Wilmette, to name two suburbs of Chicago, had handgun bans just like Chicago does. If the Electoral College was abolished we’d see this sort of thing writ large across the fruited plain — not necessarly these types of draconian gun laws (although I’d bet they’d be one of the first things to roll down the pike), but the smaller, more rural states would be vastly outvoted by the more urbanized ones — in fact, one could say the folks in the large cities would hold complete power over the rest of us — and no doubt they’d suffer as a result of that. Or, as it’s been defined in this space, what the author is essentially proposing is a “tyranny of the majority” whose doctrine says that if 51 percent of the people vote to strip the other 49 percent of their God-given rights then that’s just too bad for them. As one commenter said, if the author of this drivel has this level of understanding of the Constitution he should just go back to his day job.
But hey, here’s some hope! From the letters to the editor in today’s Chron…

Once again the fabric of the country is under fire from someone who should know better. Mr. Pozmantier either doesn’t understand the basis of this country’s Constitution or prefers to try to disguise it as something it is not.
The filtering of the people’s choice through the Electoral College is a belief in the American republic. Doing away with it would be totally against the spirit of the Constitution.
If we were to eliminate the Electoral College we would see elections dominated by the most populous regions of the country and those of us in “fly-over” country would not have a voice.
…
Without the Electoral College, 46 or so states would never again receive a single instant of any presidential candidate’s attention. Let’s hope those less-populated states understand the damage they’d do to themselves by ratifying an amendment to render irrelevant their voices in national elections.
…
Using the popular vote instead of the Electoral College also gives more power to heavily populated cities in each state. It effectively disenfranchises Texans living in the less-populated counties, municipalities and rural areas.
Thankfully, our forefathers and framers of our U.S. Constitution had the good sense to establish the electoral college as the law of the land, so that every vote actually was worth something without giving undue influence to places having the greater number of people or voters.

I must admit, I was actually heartened by the response to that op-ed piece. With some of the idiocy that appears in the op-eds and letters to the editor I was half-expecting a chorus of “oh yeah, let’s do it!” I only hope that was not just an aberration, that more people actually do see the reasons for such safeguards.
More on the Electoral College here.

Pull my leg a little harder…

Not that it ever would have been remotely easy to give even a Texas Democrat my vote, although I might have an easier time of that than voting for, say, certain Illinois Republicans…but I still thought they would have been smarter — or that they would have given Texans more credit — than to say things like this…

Turn In Your Deer Rifle And Your 12-gauge Shotgun To The Texas Department Of Gun Control…That is an order that will never be given by a Democratic government. Democrats will protect Americans’ Second Amendment right to own firearms, and will keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists by fighting gun crime, reauthorizing the assault weapons ban, and closing the gun show loophole, as President Bush proposed and failed to do. Democrats passed the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban.

Hm. I believe in Texas we would call this sort of rhetorical chicanery “pissing down our backs and telling us it’s raining.” They’re going to protect our right to keep and bear arms by making it that much harder to get said arms? One could also call it “Orwellian doublespeak.” And perhaps our ancestors were hunters and needed their guns to defend themselves as well…but when it comes to nut-cuttin’ time I’d much rather have an AK or AR than a bolt-action rifle. (Although a scoped boltie would be the bee’s knees for long-range work…) And damn you, Barbara Hudson, it’s my right as a human being and an American to have that rifle. The Founding Fathers said as much in the Constitution and they told us all why it was our right to have those fearsome arms in everything they wrote before the Constitution. You might want to check into that. I see you mentioned the Brady background check…so I take it you have no problem with violent criminals walking the streets of Blanco County as long as they allegedly can’t procure a firearm. And you want to make it harder for the citizens of Blanco County (and the rest of us) to defend themselves against said criminals. Wow, you really are a piece of work. And of course you and your fellow jackasses aren’t going to tell us to turn in our deer rifles and 12-gauge shotguns…you’re going to tell us to turn in our long-range high-powered sniper rifles and big-bore street-sweeper riot guns. We know how this works, Barbara. Just because some of us might talk slow doesn’t mean we all think slow. So fucking stop insulting our intelligence by trying to hide behind the “camaraderie of the deer camp” horseshit. We saw that for what it was a long time ago.
(h/t JR & Kurt)

Great minds think alike, apparently…

Frank J. over at IMAO:

…perhaps my friend has the right idea: invest in metals.

Only, I don’t think I’m going to invest in gold.

I’m thinking steel, brass, and lead.

I’ve been thinking more about that myself…haven’t been able to locate a Springfield M1A anywhere, though. So I’ve been exploring alternatives. Anyone have any input on the newer Century Arms FALs?

I figured it wouldn’t matter either way…

Via Wizbang, Barack Obama thinks everyone should have election day off. I would think that since Obama has the welfare vote locked up, that just leaves the productive people, so it either would not help Obama one little bit, or it would actually help John McCain…

Just an observation…

If you click on the story of the neo-Nazi skinheads accused of plotting to kill Obama and who knows how many other black people, you’ll see some lipstick-bedecked loser holding some sort of scoped semi-auto rifle. One could only assume that said loser was going to be shooting from a fairly decent range…not unlike many deer hunters do. I have to wonder how many of the Fudds will concentrate on the semi-auto part and downplay the scope…

These people are just deranged…

Something called the Potowmack Institute…

Ayers can only be faulted for acting out the NRA’s childish political fantasy.

Once again, excuse the fuck me? I very highly doubt the NRA as an organization ever entertained the thought of killing 25 million people in an attempt to establish some “socialist utopia” like Bill Ayers and his Commie thug friends did. To put that in perspective, it’s the equivalent of over four Holocausts. Yeah, trying to link Bill Ayers and the National Rifle Association, yeah, I’d say that was seriously deranged…but then again, so is their main belief, which seems to be that all governments are deserving of the monopoly on force, no matter the carnage they inflict. One wonders just what they would support to help get that monopoly back…