“First they came for the blacks, and I spoke up because it was wrong, even though I’m not black.
Then they came for the gays, and I spoke up, even though I’m not gay.
Then they came for the Muslims, and I spoke up, because it was wrong, even though I’m an atheist.
When they came for illegal aliens, I spoke up, even though I’m a legal immigrant.
Then they came for the pornographers, rebels and dissenters and their speech and flag burning, and I spoke up, because rights are not only for the establishment.
Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I’d done nothing wrong. So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.” - Michael Z Williamson
After the 1996 school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, the British Parliament rushed through legislation banning handguns above .22 rimfire caliber, and it wasn’t a ban saying “You can’t have any more,” it was a “Mr. & Mrs. Law-abiding British Subject, we know who you are and we know what you own - turn them all in.” From this 1998 British Home Office report, Firearm Certificate Statistics, England and Wales, 1997 (PDF):
Following the shooting incident in Dunblane, Scotland, in March 1996, changes to the existing firearms legislation were introduced to increase public safety. The resulting Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 banned all handguns over .22 calibre with effect from 1 October 1997. A hand-in exercise took place between 1 July and 30 September 1997 which resulted in 110,382 of these larger calibre handguns being surrendered in England and Wales, while 24,620 smaller calibre handguns were handed in voluntarily in anticipation of further legislation. The remaining large calibre handguns held on certificate include muzzle-loading guns, signalling apparatus, firearms used for the humane killing of animals, war trophies etc. (All handguns were subsequently prohibited from 1 February 1998).
In the UK, they surrendered guns that were not banned. Here in America when we think something is about to be banned, we buy every one we can get our hands on, and everything we think might get banned along with it.
“Let’s see – Native Americans were wards of the state for a century, and, until the recent casino boom, were the most impoverished, addiction ridden, unemployed group in society; the family farmer has been the object of endless state programs to save him for most of the 20th century, and his numbers have shrunk from over half the population to under 2%; black people were “adopted” by the modern welfare state about 50 years ago, with the result that the black family has shattered, perhaps irreparably, and the male part is massively either in prison or unemployed, while the female half now has a 75% or so rate of births out of wedlock, and single parent families struggling with poverty lead to homicide from gang activity being the primary cause of death for young black males.
The wars on poverty and drugs continues to decimate the very populations they were supposed to help, the federal education programs have overseen a massive decline in the competency and educational achievements of our youth across the board, and catastrophically poor literacy rates among the minority communities.
The Fed decided to massively aid the housing market, to assist people in buying homes, and within a few decades, the housing and financial markets collapsed into a recession which we are still struggling to climb out of, and return to a semblence of our former economic levels.
And so now, the progressive state under the current progressive regime is going to come to the aid of the struggling middle class?
They had guns stolen from them, their “undercover” store was burglarized, then they stiffed the landlord for $15000 in damages and back rent/utilities. And they were paying such high prices for guns that people were going to Gander Mountain and buying new guns then going to them to sell them at a profit! They paid over $1000 for a S&W .40 pistol, which is maybe $700 new!
People of New York! I’ve started a new service for y’all (or youse). We rehabilitate evil assault weapons and “high” capacity magazines. Send them down to us, the Gandalf23 Home for Wayward Assault Weaponss (and their Accessories) where they can be rehabilitated away from evil and learn to live their lives in peace in an environment of acceptance and tolerance, instead of hidden away in closets and attics in shame and criminality.
As of last night magazines with a capacity of greater than 10 rounds must either leave the state or be destroyed. So send them down to us! We’ll see they are used for lawful purposes and treated with respect and dignity. Don’t let them rust away in your attics, in your basements, buried underground or hidden in the backs of your closets! Why risk criminal sanctions? Send them to us!
The law broadens the assault weapons ban to include any semi-automatic with a detachable magazine and one military-style feature, like a flash suppressor or a pistol grip. So send us your newly created, evil, assault weapons! We’ll take care of them, and rehabilitate them for good! All “NY Assault Weapons” will be, upon arrival in Texas, magically turned into “just firearms” and thus rendered un-evil. All such surrendered firearms will be put to lawful use in a loving, caring environment full of acceptance.
email for shipping address:
falfiles at gandalf 23 dot com
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” — Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” - Mohandas Gandhi, an Autobiography, page 446.
$1 worth of gasoline can kill up to 87 people! And in the US gasoline sales are not regulated or registered at all! Even children as young as 10 can buy gasoline! Some people even keep dangerous gasoline in quantities of up to 5 gallons in their homes! In their homes! Whole neighborhoods could be destroyed by these reckless people!
The Happy Land fire was started by a drunk dude with about a dollar’s worth of gasoline and two matches. He killed 87 people in that fire in 1990. 9/11 killed more people, and so did the Oklahoma City bombing but then it’s this guy (I think).
Crazypeople do crazythings. Crazy people killing people is not a new thing. School attacks by crazy people are not new, either. Nor are attacks where the attacker suicides at the end. Nor is this just an American thing. It’s world wide and all throughout history.
update:
Looks like the Connecticut elementary school shooter’s mom worked at the school and he killed her there, and maybe another member of the family at their house first. so this is basically a domestic dispute with lots of extra bonus killings. I would assume he thought something like “well, I’m already going to hell/jail for the first killing, might as well kill as many as possible” or maybe he was mad that the kids at the school got more attention from mommy than he did. Who knows? And unless a note is found we’ll never know for sure. All we do know for sure is that he was a sad pathetic cowardly fuck who should’ve eaten the bullet first instead of last and not put anyone through all this.
I think we need to start a campaign. Call it “First, not Last” and encourage homicidal fucks like this to off themselves first, not last after killing so many people. In order to assure they still get all the post mortem celebritizing they desire, we’ll encourage them to write out their sick little death fantasies, and then make sure to praise their “bravery” and “spirit” publicly for offing themselves before their inner monster was unleashed and they killed others.
We can even have scoreboards so that some guy that wants to walk into a hardware store with an axe and kill people will rank lower than someone who trows grenades in a shopping mall. It’ll kinda of be like Fantasy Football, except not. I figure if it encourages one of them to not kill others, it’ll be worth it. Plus it’ll give the media all kinds of gory details to obsess over and they can make neat charts and graphs and whatnots. win win.
“We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” — James Nicoll
“But urgent requests for help were rejected — even when Woods and two others radioed that they had a laser fixed on the terrorists who were firing mortars and called in their coordinates.
Woods and another former SEAL, Glen Doherty, were killed by a mortar shell about six hours after the initial assault began.
“My son . . . responded to the cries for help and voluntarily sacrificed his life to protect the lives of other Americans,” says his father, Charles Woods.
“This has nothing to do with politics,” he added. “This has to do with integrity and honor. My son showed moral courage.”
True enough, surprise attacks happen.
But the failure to respond — leaving an American diplomat and his security team to their fate — defies comprehension.
This, even as e-mails show the State Department and White House Situation Room knew within the first couple of hours that an al Qaeda affiliate was publicly claiming responsibility.
But how could that be?
Hadn’t al Qaeda been defanged by SEAL Team 6 when it took out Osama bin Laden — and didn’t the president have the victory laps to prove it?
Well, apparently not.
So Obama & Co. stuck with the untenable claim that the Benghazi strike wasn’t a terrorist attack at all, but a “spontaneous” mob assault prompted by that anti-Muslim video.
Indeed, says Woods, Clinton vowed to him at a White House meeting that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”
And don’t you just know, the “person . . . that did the video” is in jail, on a very dubious probation-violation charge. (So it seems the administration can follow through on some things when it chooses.)
Equally offensive was the bizarre remark at the same event by a “loud and boisterous” Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly asked Woods, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”
This man is a heartbeat away?
Compare that crudity with Charles Woods’ outraged dignity: “I wish that the leadership in the White House had the same level of moral courage and heroism that my son displayed.”
He wants “the person or persons who made the decision to sacrifice my son’s life to stand up” — and accept responsibility.
Not going to happen.
Not in this administration.
Acknowledging what really happened in Benghazi would mean confessing to hubris, incompetence, amateurism and deceit.
These are, sadly, Obama hallmarks.
So, what does the president have to say for himself?
“Well, we are finding out exactly what happened,” Obama told a reporter Friday.
Forty-seven days late and four lives short, sad to say.
So add cluelessness to the bill of Obama particulars — which goes a long way toward explaining the clouds of acrid smoke hanging over the entire Middle East.
As does nature, statecraft abhors a vacuum. When one develops, adventurers and advantage-takers appear in short order.
Iran continues to build its bomb; Syria burns; Turkey awaits its fate, and Egypt is looking at a Muslim Brotherhood-enforced Sharia state.
“Without a doubt, there are more consequences than are listed here, and we certainly should understand why certain decisions were made to do nothing, to reduce security, and, for weeks, to blame the whole enchillada on a radical youtube video…
First of all, we lost four very good men during the attack. Men that are irreplacable.
Second, we know now that the President, the VP and the SecDef knew what was happening within a relatively immediate timeframe. The way it should have worked was that the SecDef should have given the President options. Of course, one option is to do nothing. Apparently, even after knowing what was happening and having drone footage ~2 hours into the fight, the President decided on nothing. This is problematic if you work for State in the ME. You know now that the President won’t help you in times of dire need. You will either stop taking any risks or you will decide to use more force than might be necessary. Either way, it’s not good for our State people over there.
The President made the decision to not use F18s (even in a flyover to shake the resolve of the terrorists). The President made the decision to go to Vegas to a campaign dinner.
So what is worse than our State people now knowing that the President will do nothing if they are attacked?
“Neither the president nor anyone in the White House denied any requests for assistance in Benghazi,” -National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor
“Mr. President, when you say that you didn’t deny aid to those brave men in Benghazi, but that members of the US Military decided not to send aid to your personal representative under attack all on their own and you had no influence over that decision, then you are either derelict, incompetent, or a liar.
Either way, that means to me (and hopefuly soon, a whole mess of registered voters) you don’t deserve to be Commander in Chief.” - Deebow
nothing really to update. Still waiting on ATF approval.
However, I did find a used Practical Solutions .22 conversion on teh interwebs and bought it. Should be here next week. It’s for UZI grip converted M10s, but it will work with mine with a different adapter. Sadly, Practical Solutions is (hopefully temporarily) closed, so I’m not sure where to get one.
Taking precalculus and Basic Machine Shop, so I’m in class from 1900 to 2100ish M-Th. Takes 1.5 hours, on average, to get to class from work, so if I leave the office by 1730 I get there just in time for class. blech.
First test in precal is this weekend, it’s take home. We’ll see how I do. It’s been 21 years since I last took a math class.
Turned a cylinder of aluminium into a smaller diameter cylinder of aluminium last night in machine shop. That was fun. Had to indicate it onto a four jaw chuck, then turn it, and measure it and as far as I can measure it’s within tolerances, so it’s good so far. Should be able to finish it up on Monday, then hopefully start on the milling project.
Once I learn how to use my stuff, (and once I get electricity out to the shop and get the shop built) I hope to build all kinds of stuff. Especially want to do a 1911 pistol on my Barker horizontal mill and Atlas shaper (once I get a motor for it), since they are the type of machines that they used back in 1911 to build them originally.
