The Razor

Because it’s difficult to imagine living life as another person, his needs or her situation. Our instinct is to assume our situation is the norm, so we think that if we don’t need an a gun (or an abortion, gender reassignment surgery, or whatever other hot-button topic you can imagine) then nobody does.

Society is incredibly diverse and there is a naive assumption that everyone is the same. We’re not, but different doesn’t mean bad contrary to another base assumption that humans hold.

We are talking about rights, and these were viewed as so important by the founders of the USA that they recognized their origin as coming from the Divine, not a government. So when you are talking about limiting those rights you’re going to anger someone, whether that’s the right to marry whomever you want, say whatever you want, or protect yourself and your family.

Americans have become so polarized that we’ve forgotten how to empathize with those who think differently. It’s a problem that goes far beyond the 2nd Amendment and touches the very fabric of our national identity.

 

Just a reminder that the full-auto AK-47 rifle used by ISIS terrorists to kill a cop in France are completely illegal in that country, just as they were in a terror attack in Turkey last year. Yet for some reason the terrorists have no trouble getting these weapons into the EU and using them, and worse, our liberal neighbors in the US dream of instituting European-style gun confiscation here. How can that be? Don’t the terrorists know that full-auto AK-47s are illegal to possess, and if not, how did they get them?

Yes that’s sarcasm, caused by my disgust at watching one of the world’s great countries brought to a standstill by terrorism. Worse, it’s seeing Parisian police leveling their guns at civilians with their hands raised as in this photo. The only time I was ever held at gunpoint in my life was while I was being robbed at my job. I understand that the photo was likely taken minutes after a cop was shot and tension was high, but still, leveling a semi-automatic handgun at a grey haired guy carrying a cell phone? Is that really necessary?

Just remember the rules of reporting: Anything happening abroad is a terrorist attack. Anything occurring within the United States: Gun violence.

After I got over my aversion for guns and started shooting and owning them, it took me several years before I would touch an AK-47 or one of its many variants. To me the AK-47 was the weapon of America’s enemies. It is a favorite of terrorists the world over. It is on the flag of Hezballah, the Iranian backed Shiite militia responsible for the deaths of 242 US marines in Beirut Lebanon in 1983. It was standard issue for the North Vietnamese Army. In my mind that weapon engraved thousands of the names on this wall in Washington DC.

Then one day I realized that my old gun-fearing emotions were at the root of this attitude. As the old saying (now cliche) goes guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The AK-47 itself didn’t cause the deaths of those men in Vietnam. The Viet Cong did.

Once I realized that the AK-47 was a tool just like any other, I familiarized myself with the platform, read up on the thousands of AK-47 vs M-16 blog posts, and eventually started shooting it. It is now one of my favorite weapons. Just a joy to carry and shoot. It will eat anything you give it, including cheap Russian steel-cased ammo, without a misfire. It is rugged, so you don’t have to worry about it when you are in the woods or mud. A good AR-15 can beat it when it comes to accuracy, distance and weight, but the AK-47 is like a carpenter’s favorite chisel or a mechanic’s go-to socket wrench: For most jobs it’s the one he reaches for first.

I’ve met others who feel the same way I did about the weapon and I respect that. There are way too many names on that wall, too many good young people killed. But the AK-47 shouldn’t be blamed for their deaths and should be seen for what it is: a simple yet effective tool and one that every American rifle owner should consider.
 

Hillary Clinton has tried to assure her 2nd Amendment supporters (who could likely all fit in one of those new Target gender neutral bathrooms) that she is not going to take away their right to self-defense.

Technically this is true, and this graphic explains why.

Cross-posted at Vladimir Putin’s favorite hangout, Wow! Magazine.

I grew up fearing guns. When I was a kid my mother refused to buy a toy gun for me that shot plastic pellets 5 yards or so, fearing that the gun would turn me into a sadistic killer. I picked up on her fear of weapons at an early age and carried it through most of adulthood. Guns were tools of evil, and as such had no place in the hands of anyone except for those charged by Society to protect us: police and military.

In 1991 I lived in Hillcrest, a predominantly gay San Diego neighborhood. About a block away a 17 year old boy was stabbed to death in a wilding attack on the sidewalk where I regularly walked to my favorite coffee shop. I attended the protest march days later. Like me the kid wasn’t gay, but it didn’t matter to his attackers, and suddenly I realized that I was vulnerable. It was the first time in my life that I questioned my innate fear of guns, but instead of buying a gun I left the country and began a journey that would take me around the world and bring me back with a wife, kid and 3 Japanese cats.

I’ve never killed anything with a gun. I’ve never hunted but have no problem with people who hunt responsibly. This means people who eat what they shoot and respect wildlife. This does not include weekend drunks with guns who come to my county at midnight, spotlight deer then blast them, leaving garbage on my property and their rotting carcass for my dogs to find them and come home with body parts in their mouths. But I have trained to kill with a gun. Not only physically, but legally. As a responsible gun owner I recognize that knowing the laws in my county and state are just as important as knowing the action of my rifle.

I have been robbed at gunpoint. In an event detailed here I was once robbed at the video store I worked at it college. I’ve never forgotten what it was like to have a career criminal decide whether I lived or died. Would gun control have stopped the “Goody-Two-Shoes bandit”? Nope. He’d have gotten VHS copies of Playboy Sexy Lingerie and Career Opportunities, along with $500 in cash, with a knife, baseball bat, or even a well-timed punch. And given the success of prohibitions on heroin, crystal meth, and prostitution gun control wouldn’t have stopped him – a felon who couldn’t legally own a gun to begin with.

I rescue things. Animals mostly, dogs and cats even chickens and fish, but I have rescued a human being and guns played a role in keeping him and my family safe while we waited for authorities to arrive. Even with animals guns play a role since my chihuahua is a meal to a pack of coyotes, and although I would hope the loud noise of a “boomstick” would scare any predator away, I am prepared to shoot any animal attacking one of my dogs. Most of the time a volley of birdshot into the trees in the woods is enough to scare away the coyotes. The chickens are another case. Everything loves chicken so I will never injure an animal taking one of those. Ask the red tail hawks in the area. My coop was their diner for a while.

I support the LGTBQ+ community and am a member of Pink Pistols. As a writer, photographer and free-thinker I ended up spending a lot of time around people whose sexual preferences were different than my own. While hanging out with gays didn’t make me gay, it did make me a much better dresser (just kidding: I’m more Bill Belichick than Bill Blass). By associating with the LGTBQ+ community I have been exposed to and learned to appreciate fine food, abstract art (never thought that would happen), classic literature, all different types of music, and film and theater. Seeing the world through their eyes has been a joyous experience, and it is one that I would have completely missed had I not let go of my innate homophobia and opened myself up to them. This community is now under threat, and guns have a role to play in protecting it – if the community itself realizes it. Too bad that even after a terror attack in one of their own clubs Gays refuse to protect themselves.

I believe the AK-47 is a better rifle than the AR-15. Now I did it: Let flow the hate-mail! I’m sorry. For years I resisted owning the gun that had put so many Americans into early graves in places like Vietnam. But when that event that I hinted at in the “rescue” section above, I realized that I needed a gun that could put up a curtain of lead between the baddies in the darkness and my family in the light. And that gun turned out to be a semi-automatic Saiga 12 – the shotgun version of the AK-47. Once I made that baby-step it was only a matter of time in seeing the guns for what they were: tools without any metaphysical attachments. They were hunks of stamped metal (in the case of the AK), nothing more or less. And while I respect both platforms, I have found the AK-47 to be the best go-to gun. It’s not fussy with ammo the way the AR-15 is. It will eat anything including crap surplus ammo from the former Warsaw Pact. It’s tough and although I don’t torture it the way Rob Ski does at the Ak Operators Union Local 47-74, I don’t have to worry about its hygiene.

I believe self-defense is a human right.  I have learned through experience that the purpose of police is not the motto we’ve seen on cop shows, “to serve and protect,” at least at the individual level. A cop’s priority doesn’t include taking a bullet for me. His first priority is to survive himself, and his next priority is to reestablish order. These two priorities leave my family and me on our own, making me ultimately responsible for our defense. I find it interesting that the famous people who call for me to be disarmed are surrounded by men carrying guns. It’s not only politicians like President Obama and Hillary Clinton but even Salman Rushdie has called for the disarming of the American public while he is protected by armed bodyguards. They are blind to their hypocrisy and the anti-gun media refuses to call them on it.

If I can’t defend myself, I have no freedom, no rights. Anything can be taken from me by anyone. All my natural rights flow from my ability to protect myself and my loved ones from harm. And if that makes me a gun nut in the eyes of people like Hillary Clinton or Anderson Cooper, than so be it.

Bored with catching Pokemon with your phone? Don’t know much about handguns especially concealed carry and want to learn more? Then for the price of a latte you can come up to speed on how to live with a handgun by reading Living With Concealed Carry.

Although dedicated to the details of how to conceal carry a handgun this ebook is filled with solid information about possessing and using a handgun that every gun owner should know, from basic gun handling to interacting with law enforcement while carrying. Even trivialities like where to put your holstered firearm while using a public toilet (don’t remove your gun from the holster and place it in the crotch of your pants) are covered. Throughout the book Amberg emphasizes safety first and foremost starting with 4 basic, cumulative rules:

• “All guns are always loaded. Even if they are not, treat them as they are.” Whenever you see a gun assume it is loaded and clear the action immediately after picking it up. It doesn’t matter if your buddy or the salesman cleared it. Always check it yourself.
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• “Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.” Never point a gun at anything you don’t want to kill, even if you followed rule #1. If you want to play with a gun, buy a plastic toy or airsoft gun. Don’t ever point a gun at another human being unless you are prepared to kill them.
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• “Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.” This is tough, especially for those practicing drawing from a holster, and accidental discharges have happened to experienced shooters including soldiers and cops.
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• “Identify the target, and what is behind it.” This comes in handy as I once learned while siting in my .22 rifle. I thought a pine tree stump would stop the .22 round, so I was surprised to hear “PING”, and realized that a round had penetrated the tree stump and hit the steel rim of my car’s tire.
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Chad is my “gun-father”. He used to be my boss and once after work we hit the gun range. After some initial trepidation Chad showed me how to safely handle a firearm, and after a few hours I was hooked. When the Kid got older I got my first membership at that very same range, and soon purchased my first firearm, a Marlin .22 rifle. Since then I’ve read everything I can about handling guns safely, and Chad’s book is a concise summary.

For anyone interested in CCW or in guns in general, Chad’s book is well worth the $3.

A truck plowed into a crowd of Bastille Day revellers, running over hundreds before coming to a halt. The driver and an accomplice emerged, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and opened fire. 77 are reported dead and hundreds injured. Police shot the driver dead but the accomplice escaped. The truck was filled with grenades and automatic weapons – all of which are illegal to possess in France (and by civilians in the USA too).

This is the second large-scale terror attack in France in less than a year. France has some of the strictest gun control laws on the planet, yet terrorists seem to have no difficulty in finding guns and grenades to use in their attacks.

Should we be surprised?

Right now there’s a heroin epidemic in my community, replacing the painkiller epidemic when pill-mills and shady prescribers and pharmacies were raided and closed. People in rural America are still dying using a completely illegal drug from a plant that is grown, whose resin is then processed, packaged, shipped and distributed from central and south Asia to rural North Carolina on the other side of the planet.

Prohibition never works. It didn’t work with alcohol in the US, it doesn’t work for drugs and it doesn’t work for guns in Europe. Yet that doesn’t stop otherwise intelligent people from wanting to ban guns in the US.

No one is complaining about the gun laws in France tonight. There are no terror euphemisms like “gun violence” being using to describe tonight’s events in Nice. But it’s important to keep this in mind for the next terror attack in the US, when the “T” word is avoided and the “gun violence” term is bandied about, along with the assumption that San Bernardino and the Pulse Nightclub attacks would have been prevented with European style gun controls.

Gun control in Europe hasn’t worked to stop terror attacks, and it won’t work here either.

Just a reminder that both full-auto and semi-auto weapons such as this AKM (AK-47 variant) dropped by ISIS attackers at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul are illegal to possess or own in Turkey, as are the two 30 round mags. Full story here.

FWIW, the full-auto version of this weapon is also illegal to own in the USA. I showed  this pic to the in-house weapons expert (the Kid). He confirmed it was an AKM with a sawed-off flash-hider and noticed it was set to full-auto. “Idiot,” he smirked. “Everyone knows semi-auto kills more.”

I find it interesting that the only difference between whether an attack is called a “terrorist attack” or “gun violence” is where it occurs. Anything happening abroad is a terrorist attack. Anything occurring within the United States: Gun violence.

I belong to Pink Pistols, a group of 2nd amendment supporting LGTBQ and their allies, and would like to see local chapters to volunteer to post armed members at gay nightspots around the country. All it would have taken to save lives in Orlando would have been a single club goer carrying a handgun. Terrorists plan their attacks thoroughly. Orlando’s shooter had been to the club over a dozen times so he knew exactly what to expect and could carefully plan to maximize the carnage. Just the possibility of an armed defender changes the dynamic of terror, introducing an element of uncertainty that either forces the attacker to choose another target or causes him to stop and seek cover during the attack, giving victims precious seconds to escape.

Unfortunately liberals are taking the exact opposite approach, trying to convince the LGTBQ community to disarm itself further and take on the cause of gun control. As Ed Krayewski notes at Reason, this completely ignores the reality of attacks outside of the US where gun control is rife yet terrorists in France and Kenya have no difficulty obtaining full auto weapons banned in the United States.

But countries with stricter gun control laws than in the U.S. are struggling to find something to do to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists too. In Europe, while it may be far harder for law-abiding residents to acquire legal firearms, terrorists are able to acquire actual “weapons of war,” automatic weapons, that have are largely banned in the U.S. despite the misleading rhetoric used by the anti-gun left. Neither were tough gun laws able to stop the 2013 radical Islamist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya or the 2015 attack on Garissa University in Kenya or numerous other terrorist attacks around the world.

As I wrote in a previous post, I find this tactic of using terror attacks to advance gun control by the Left not only misguided but downright evil. Disarming law abiding citizens does not make us safer when terrorists have shown no difficulty in obtaining weapons in nations where they are banned. But the Left likes victims, so I suppose it makes sense to push policies that increases their numbers. Still, that’s pretty sick.

I found out about the shooting in Orlando while I was out of town. I watched on my smartphone as the body count doubled, and the major news outlets avoided using the term “Islam”. The “Religion-That-Must-Not-Be-Named” continued so when President Obama spoke and pushed banning guns as the solution, choosing to ignore the so-called Religion of Peace’s role in the slaughter.

How many people have to die before liberals admit they are wrong about Islam?

I avoided social media until today, but as I expected my mostly liberal friends followed the President’s lead, focusing on the type of rifle used instead of the terror ties, the shooter’s father’s belief that g-d will punish the gays, or that he attended a mosque where a visiting Imam preached gays should be executed.

As an ex-liberal myself I recognize the change is tough. 9-11 was the moment that I understood I had a choice: I could continue believing the fantasy that Islam wasn’t the problem, or I could accept the evidence to the contrary. 3000 people in 3 locations within 2 hours was enough evidence for me, and for weeks afterward I struggled with changing a lifetime of beliefs to fit the post-911 reality.

I saw the posts by ex-lovers and friends-for-life, and struggled with how to respond. Europe has some of the strictest gun control laws on the planet yet they didn’t stop full auto AK-47s from being used by Islamists to kill non-believers there last year. The recent attack in Brussels airport used bombs, which I would point out are also illegal in Europe. I didn’t point out that if banning works, why are people dying of heroin overdoses in my county? Liberals seem fixated on the AR-15 as being an “assault rifle” yet used a picture shared from Huffington Post showing an AR-15 that had been photoshopped into having an impossibly short (and illegal) barrel. And no mention of Islam anywhere.

I shut the site down. What’s the point in opening up myself to harassment from people who honestly don’t know what they are talking about? Few have ever fired a gun and I doubt that only a handful know the difference between semi-auto and full-auto. If I’m going to be beaten up online I’d prefer it to be done by someone who at least knows what they are talking about. I’m too scarred from previous attempts to try to educate these people and help them change their minds. If 50 dead gays won’t do it, I’m not sure what will.

Accepting that the threat isn’t from an inanimate object but a twisted idea in the form of world religion is pretty daunting. Blaming a scary looking gun is so much easier than blaming a world religion yet refusing to do so is like a drunk looking for his car keys under a street light because that’s where he can see them. It’s magical thinking that has no bearing on reality. So you ban AR-15s, how would that have stopped the Charlie Hebdo or the Bataclan Theater attacks in Paris? There’s a whole airplane missing in the Mediterranean and another that was blown out of the sky over the Sinai, how would the ban stop that? And what about the two men kissing that set him off. Should we ban that? How far down the slippery slope do we go before we realize we’ve realized we’ve traded freedom for security and gotten neither, to paraphrase Ben Franklin?

“Enough with the obfuscation. The killer of Orlando was a homophobic Muslim extremist, inspired by an ideological take on my own religion.” The “islamophobe” behind those remarks? Liberal Daily Beast writer Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim who recognizes “(j)ust as we encourage others to actively denounce racism wherever they see it, so too must we actively denounce Islamic theocratic views wherever we find them. Enough with the special pleading. Enough with the denial.”

It’s been said that conservatives think that liberals are idiots while liberals think conservatives are evil. The silence after these terror attacks, the refusal to see them for what they are and to accept the clear motives of the attackers at face value, and the usage of the carnage to further their own political agendas instead of preventing attacks (how can you stop it if you can’t even name it?) not to mention the promotion of gun-free buildings and the disarmament of the public isn’t stupid, it’s evil.

How many people have to die before liberals admit they are wrong about Islam?

It’s evil that liberals support flooding the country with people who follow the religion of a 7th century warlord then blame guns when they decide to kill in the name of their religion. It’s evil that liberals call anyone who questions the tenets of that religion an “islamophobe”, equating the questioning with a form of racism. It’s evil that liberals seek to turn gays into martyrs for their cause by disarming them and forcing them to rely upon the police, often the same homophobic force that arrested them for indecency and sodomy and raided their hangouts just a few years ago.

And that’s why liberals are evil.

Wonder if her dad would be open to an arranged marriage with my son? He’d get her a better rifle than the Dragunov – like this Barrett.

Take this article and substitute the words “gun owner” or “gun owning” for Muslim and Islam.

WASHINGTON — Cities across the USA are preparing for the next phase that inevitably follows a gun attack: anti-gun backlash.

Across social media, in public forums on college campuses, and even in mainstream political rhetoric from presidential candidates, anger over the deadly gun attacks in Brussels has spawned discontent and suspicion directed at gun owner groups.

The aftermath of an attack “is always a difficult time for gun owners in the United States,” said Nabil Shaikh, a leader of the Gun Owner Students Association at Princeton University.

“On Princeton’s campus, students took to anonymous forums like Yik Yak to comment that there are gun owners at Princeton who are radical and would therefore condone yesterday’s attacks,” Shaikh said. “These comments not only are appalling and inaccurate but also threaten the well-being of gun owning students.”

Unlike in Belgium and Paris following the November gun attacks, the backlash in the U.S. is not as confrontational.

Europe has seen occasional anti-gun rallies in Flemish cities such as Antwerp and Ghent. Some gun owner leaders have accused police in Europe of overtly targeting gun owning communities in lockdowns and raids of homes.

“The average gun owner still feels intimidated, still feels scared, still feels insecure.”

Khusro Elley, Chappaqua, N.Y.

Gun owner communities in the U.S. face opposition more in the form of rhetoric — but in an election year, such rhetoric can lead to sweeping change.

 

One of the reasons why some people are afraid of rifles like the AK-47 and the AR-15 is they look scary. Here’s an idea to make them less frightening to the non-gun owning public.

AR-15 owners may ask, “Where’s the ejection port?” The obvious answer, “Where do you think?”

One of the posts at The American Interest suggests the tactic of gun grabbers should switch from gun confiscation, which the writer says is unlikely to ever happen, to taxing ammunition. He even tries to make it more palatable by saying ammo could be tax free at shooting ranges and for police but in the free market a 10,000 percent tax – making a $.19 9mm round $19 – would curb gun usage and ultimately, gun ownership. Chris Rock raised the same argument, saying gang-bangers would shoot more carefully if each round cost $5,000.

Legally it would be much easier to raise the taxes on ammunition than ban its sale completely. A similar tactic could be used by pro-Lifers to discourage abortion.

For the sake of argument I’m going to make the following assumptions: The wealth spent on raising a child would be spent on other goods and services, making the economic activity from a social perspective the same whether a child is born or not. The expenses in retirement are covered by social taxes paid earlier in life – a big assumption on my part I know.

From Society’s point of view a child consumes resources until adulthood, at which time s/he generates income by working and paying taxes until s/he retires. For argument’s sake let’s assume the aborted child would have held a job. started earning at the age of 25 and stopped at the age of 65, a total of 40 years of productivity. S/he would then die 15 years later, assuming the current life-expectancy of around 80.

So 40 years of productivity. The average income in the United States is roughly $50,000. Multiplying the two together we get $2 million in lost earnings. Earning $50,000 means contributing about $10,000 a year in taxes, making a total tax bill during the productive years of $400,000 in lost tax revenue.

So each abortion costs the government roughly $400,000. In 2014 there were roughly a million abortions, meaning the potential lost revenue of $400 billion. Since abortion was legalized in the US over 25 years ago, this means that the US government today is missing out on the taxes that would have been paid by the “lost taxpayers” who were aborted in 1991 – about 1.4 million. Just this cohort could have contributed $14 billion in taxes this year. There were nearly 23 million abortions in the US from its legalization in 1973 until 1991. Applying our numbers to these lost taxpayers and we find that abortion has cost the state, local and federal governments in the US $230 billion in 2016.

Shouldn’t the government recoup that cost somehow? Perhaps if a woman had to pay a $40,000 tax she’d be more careful about getting pregnant just as gun grabbers claim extreme taxes on ammunition would discourage people from shooting others.

As a pro-Life, gun owning libertarian who supports legal abortion I believe such taxes whether on abortion or ammunition prohibit liberty instead of enhancing it. But the above little “thought exercise” shows how easy it is to take a tactic used to curb one freedom and use it to justify curtailing another. Gun-grabbing Pro-Choicers take note.

 

 

Ken White, writing at Popehat, explains the difficulty gun owners have talking to gun phobes. It’s something I’ve run into myself having gone from being irrationally afraid of guns to having several in my home, and having to explain to my gun phobic friends and family why.

He writes:

It’s hard to grasp the reaction of someone who understands gun terminology to someone who doesn’t. So imagine we’re going through one of our periodic moral panics over dogs and I’m trying to persuade you that there should be restrictions on, say, Rottweilers.

Me: I don’t want to take away dog owners’ rights. But we need to do something about Rottweilers.
You: So what do you propose?
Me: I just think that there should be some sort of training or restrictions on owning an attack dog.
You: Wait. What’s an “attack dog?”
Me: You know what I mean. Like military dogs.
You: Huh? Rottweilers aren’t military dogs. In fact “military dogs” isn’t a thing. You mean like German Shepherds?
Me: Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody’s trying to take away your German Shepherds. But civilians shouldn’t own fighting dogs.
You: I have no idea what dogs you’re talking about now.
Me: You’re being both picky and obtuse. You know I mean hounds.
You: What the fuck.
Me: OK, maybe not actually ::air quotes:: hounds ::air quotes::. Maybe I have the terminology wrong. I’m not obsessed with vicious dogs like you. But we can identify kinds of dogs that civilians just don’t need to own.
You: Can we?

Guns and dogs are an excellent analogy. Both can be your best friend but disrespect them and they can become the stuff of nightmares. I know both, and the more I am around them the more I appreciate what they can do and what they cannot. I try to never make assumptions about either one of them since doing so leads to trouble. I have learned that both make my life richer in ways that I cannot explain to people who don’t own guns or dogs. You’ve got to do it to understand it.

Anyway, White’s piece is worth the full read. I’m going to take the dogs out for “last call” before bedtime.