What happened to Friday?

Yeah, I know...the weekly regular feature got missed. Sorry about that, everyone. Our internet connection still isn't quite what it used to be.

But at any rate, following David Codrea's advice over at War on Guns, I'll be moving it to Wednesday. Or maybe Wednesday AND Friday, depending on content.

How does that sound?

Taking Pornspamming to a New...er...Height?

I do have a Myspace account (look for "Jeremiad")--yeah, my brother got me started on it. Through it, however, I have come across quite a few decent gun owners.

Unfortunately, it also leaves you open to more pornspamming. Usually, it has all the hallmarks of a mass-marketing operation. Spam thousands of users with the same sort of impersonal message. Usually a link is involved, or in the case of Myspace, an invitation to be someone's friend.

I don't accept invitations outright. I check up on the profile. Always. And usually, you can tell the pornspammer. It poses to be some girl, very scant on details, but always has some sort of webcam link.

Except for this enterprising one.

I get this message, supposedly from the innocent-looking babe on the left:

hey Jeremiad
I liked your profile and would love to talk some more and maybe exchange some pics...or even meet up if you'd like? I would defenitely be into it. I check my e-mail more often then MySpace, so get me at kylynn9965@hotmail.com Anyway, have a good evening and maybe we'll meet sometime this week? Hope to talk to you soon!
love kacey:)

Okay, first of all, I don't know of many 23 -year-old PYTs with a horny streak soliciting possible encounters with a 36-year-old balding conservative Christian intellectual gun owner. Certainly not this conservative Christian intellectual gun owner.

And if, in the infinitesimal chance, it was the real deal? Nope. I prefer long-term commitments.

Needless to say, I am suspicious. So, I do a little research. Where to start? First of all, you check out their profile.

Now, unlike most pornspammers, this one paints a slightly more believable picture, thanks to the use of more verbage.

But I'm still not convinced this is the real deal. So, I google the given email address.

This is what I come up with--an account of a guy who was contacted by this same person. This pornspammer does follow-up emails, but eventually, they all end up in the same place...some adult website.

Read the account, if you're interested. It's almost hilarious. Especially when you see this person posing as so many similar, yet different, people all over the country.

Anyway, I responded by saying it was probably the most creative attempt at pornspamming I had ever seen, but no thanks.

Noticed Something Interesting on Idiots With Guns

78 photos featured.

22 of them feature Glocks.

Discuss.

Interview with a gun babe

Yesterday, I found myself in quite the enviable position.

A friend of mine and his family are moving off the farm, so I spent part of last week helping him pack and getting his stuff across river. Over 2 tons of stuff (no kidding), which we lifted by hand about five times before getting them in their crates to be shipped off to Georgia.

That wasn't the enviable part. Talking to the babe in the office was.

I should have brought my camera that day to treat you guys with a look of her. Incredible blue eyes, physically fit and evenly proportioned...straightforward personality, easy to talk to...everything about her held the promise of making any red-blooded American male very happy.

Including her stance on gun ownership. She was an ex-cop (yeah, yeah, I hear you guys, "frisk me, please!"), and had some pretty interesting views about the police force she used to work on (in short, if she ever went back to working in law enforcement, it wouldn't be in Alaska).

So I got to thinking, I've got to ask her what her views on concealed carry were. I've heard mixed opinions from cops on the subject--it was a chief of police who strongly recommended to me to get my CCW license, but you get guys like Sherriff Lee Baca who have got this "We're the Only Ones" mentality.

But anyway, getting back to the babe--If her opinions were negative, I'd try arguing with her about trusting your safety to a police organization you know is corrupt. But, there was no need for argument. She had no established opinion. Or, at best, an ambivalent one. As a citizen, she advocated RKBA and concealed carry, but as a former policewoman, she said it could possibly make her job a little more stressful, knowing that anyone could be armed.

Plus, since here in AK, anyone can carry concealed, not everyone takes time to educate themselves on what is legal--or prudent. So you get the occasional idiot who brings his gun into a bar.

But, as I said, she saw the point in lawful concealed carry, and carries herself on occasion.

Now the downside--she has a boyfriend. But happily, he is a gun geek, and they spend all sorts of time talking about different pistols and whatnot (the knife turns in my gut--all of the good ones are taken!). She said he is impressed with the Springfield XD, but she would stick to her Glocks.

Me, being the HK adherent I am, told her that if ever they were interested in looking into a new handgun, I strongly recommend the USP. I told her I'd show her my piece right then and there, but didn't know how my friend would react to being in the company of a brother who goes around armed.

I Take Gun Safety Very Seriously

Even if the guns are fake. I got onto the case of some of our kids who have discovered the joys of airsoft. One got a Beretta 92F, another a Walther P99 (which seemed to me to be a little larger than the real thing, from what I remembered owning a SW99 several years ago).

At any rate, I was moving some furniture when a bunch of them were shooting each other near our bike rack.

I stopped the van and called the boys near, saying, "I know it's all fun, but I don't want to see you guys shooting each other with these without some sort of eye protection."

Since I've built something of a reputation of being the farm's pistol expert, I think they took it to heart. Hope so. They wouldn't like it too much if they had to go through life with only one eye.

Campus RKBA Roundup #4

This week's edition of the Campus RKBA roundup showed a pretty good balance, with some surprising favor towards the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Had some technical difficulties whack out the farm's internet connection this week, so I wasn't able to scour the Web for as many student op-ed pieces as I could have found. But what I have, I'll share.

Most of the articles are pretty out-of-date by several months. Seems that everyone has calmed down about school shootings or concealed-carry issues...

...or they're just waiting for the mid-term elections to get underway so they can really spring their rhetorical ammunition on everyone and try to rake in the votes for their favorite ideologue.

At any rate, my first find comes from Georgetown. Now, having had a left-leaning prof from G-town (check this out--female, just got her Ph.D, first professorship, divorcee--translating as big ego, "I am woman, hear me roar," man-hating (well, condescending)--it made life rather interesting for this conservative male grad student), you kind of figure that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Well, whether you consider this fella a good apple or a bad one, I'll leave to you. But it seems that his experiences with the D.C. area (want a taste of the madness? Read this) really give him some good insight into the practicality of arms for self-defense. So much so, he says that "Happiness is a Legal Gun," and backs up his opinion with a lot of research.

Contrast this, however, to this leftie from Norwalk who decided to take his opinions to the gun range, and still came back an unbeliever. You can't fault the guy for trying. At least he admitted he had fun shooting.

You see, this is the sort of thing I would like to try with just about every fearful gun virgin I come across: "Ever shot a gun? No? Let's go to the range! Don't like guns? How do you know if you've never shot one? I tell you what, let's go, fire one a couple of times, and if you still don't like it, at least you're coming from a position of experience."

Unfortunately, uprooting someone from their anti-2A dispositions tends to be harder, especially if they live in a cushy ivory tower.

The problem with living in academia's ivory tower is that immersing yourself too much in the theoretical can keep you out of touch with reality, as seems to be the case with this sophomore from Arizona State. Reacting to Frank Lasee's proposal in Wisconsin, this attempt at persuasive writing features the liberals’ favorite weapons: fearmongering and fantasizing. She starts off with a bit of creative writing featuring Dirty Harry as a teacher. She fantasizes about students ripping guns off of teachers. She speculates about the economic impact of bullets and licensing.

What she doesn’t do: look into the hard facts surrounding the successes in Thailand and Israel. Investigate the particulars about Lasee’s proposal. Check out the facts involved in concealed carry. Instead, she fills in the blanks with her imagination, and we know how well imagination imitates the real world.

Oh, did I mention she was a journalism major?

Now, check out what this graphics design major from Auburn University Montgomery has to say about gun control. But before you click on the link, ask yourself, what can you usually expect from an art major, and a woman to boot?

Her stance might surprise you:

“I believe the answer is yes, but not in the way you are probably thinking. I have a family where every man and most of the women hunt. Even my grandmother owns a handgun. So I am not against people owning guns. I am against people using guns to solve problems that could be handled differently. When teenagers use guns at school, it’s time to make a change.”

She sees education and family involvement as effective means to both reduce gun-related violence and encourage gun safety. She also recognizes that gun bans are ineffective—the violent will find some other means.

Heading over to my native state (but not my alma mater), this Vanderbilt student's article is an interesting study in statistics: to use them, or not to use them? He seems rather confused. On the one hand, he says you can't really rely on them, but then says you need them, and tries to use them to disprove guns' role in reducing crime.

Mr. Vandy student, you earn this week's MHDD award for two reasons: One, your choice of an institution (double-entendre, as always, is intended), and two, for shooting yourself in the foot with your own logic concerning stats.

I have virtually berated many a liberal for spouting their opinions without substantiating them. Heading on over to my brother's hometown, Wilmington, one student over at UNC-W makes up for the lack of hard demographics concerning this coastal NC city's relationship with guns and crime by instead applying stats gleaned from the Harvard School of Public Health.

I can understand the similarities, being that Boston and Wilmington are both coastal towns, and have a university with at least 2 r's in the name.

And what does this regional-specific research yield? What secrets does it unlock?

...students who own handguns are more likely to engage in high-risk behavior such as binge drinking, vandalism, drunk driving and unprotected sex.

I read the above with great sorrow. Because...I'm a gun owner...and I haven't gotten deliberately hammered since I was a junior in college. I have never gotten a DUI, never vandalized someone else's property (unless you count rolling a friend's yard when I was a freshman in college), and haven't engaged in unprotected sex since I was an undergrad.

And I feel I'm missing out on all the fun.

But I did all four long before I ever owned my first handgun.

Heading towards the Left Coast, a philosopher from Southern Cal blames neither the NRA nor Hollywood for the recent rash of school shootings, but rather, individualism borne out of materialism. It almost sounds like he's starting off on a Chavez-esque tirade against capitalism (not knowing that Marxism is a very materialistic philosophy in itself), but laments the fact that families are more interested in giving their kids stuff rather than personal investments of time.

Not bad. Certainly addresses the problem better than throwing more money into school counseling programs.

Now, just in case you've started getting bored with these findings, let me tell you that I have saved the best for the very last.

Remember the Political Science Student from Butler University who inspired me to start the Campus RKBA roundups?

It pleases me to say that Ms. Danielle Rather got quite the royal reaming following her op-ed in late September. It elicited eleven whopping huge responses, warranting its own “Letters to the Editor” page the following week. Here are highlights of some of the responses:

“I agree with Maire Gurevitz and urge Indiana to ban all citizen owned firearms, especially those evil concealed handguns.

”Some .004 percent (4/1000 of a percent) of Hoosier concealed handgun owners are involved in crime each year. This is way too high.

”Guns are unnecessary. In 98 percent of the times a citizen uses a gun to defend himself, no shot is fired by the crime victim. If the badguy is that easily scared off just by seeing the gun then you clearly didn’t need the gun in the first place. Banning CCW will prevent these unnecessary defenses.”

And:

“'Why do we love our guns so much in this country? Why do we want to be able to carry them around with us everywhere we go?' Answer: I don't know that we do love guns. What we love is freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures, which muggers frequently violate -- especially where ordinary private citizens are not allowed to bear arms.”

And someone gave my favorite quote from Alan Dershowitz:

"Foolish liberals who want to read the 2nd Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."

And the hits just keep on rolling:

“I read with interest and dismay your editorial 'A picnic and a gun' yesterday, and I'm somewhat alarmed at the views you put in print. You expressed that that you're alarmed by the fact that our DNR director recognizes what our Founding Fathers intended with the Second Amendment. As a Political Science and History major, I'm sure you know the origin of 'gun control' laws as well as what Madison, Henry, Jefferson, and Franklin, indeed all of our Founders, considered the 'militia' to mean. It was not the National Guard, but private citizens, protecting themselves and their families first, then their state and country. 'Gun control' legislation came about much later, and is something of a misnomer, since it was not to control the gun, which is merely a tool akin to a shovel, a hammer, or a car, but rather to control Blacks and prevent them from being able to arm themselves. Enslaving and controlling them was so much easier when only the 'masters' had effective weapons.”

This guy has also noticed the liberal tendency to emphasize one part of a certain amendment, while ignoring the rest:

“The saddest part of your opinion is your woeful misunderstanding of the second amendment, and American history. Other than the fact that you totally misintepret the first part of the amendment, (militias meaning 'all' or 'individual' not collective, which is what state militias were), you conveniently leave out the second part about 'the RIGHT of the people to KEEP and BEAR arms shall not be infringed'.”

And commenting on the state of academia, as exemplified by our clueless coed:

“I am amazed that a student of your college would be comfortable displaying such an obvious lack of experience and wisdom in a public forum. It raises grave concerns about the state of higher learning in this country in general and definitely at Butler University if one of your students can be so ignorant in her third year of college.”

My reaction?


And not just because my two cents were featured! Read the rest of them, and enjoy the barbecue!

Idiot of the Day

Found this on Xavier Thoughts' Idiots with Guns




When I saw him rack the slide, I knew something bad was going to happen...