Requiescat in Pace, Charlton Heston

October 4, 1923 - April 5, 2008

I am a recent newcomer to 2A issues. I got my first handgun in 1999, along with my concealed carry permit from the State of Florida. Because of the potential legal issues involved with concealed carry, I have since then made effort to find out about issues concerning gun rights.

In doing so, you can't help but come across the NRA and Charlton Heston. Oh, the way the left vilifies both! Even at his death, your more encephalitic lib (i.e. your typical Democratic Underground poster) can't help but spit on his grave.

Here are some jewels as quoted by The Jawa Report:

"1 less right wingnut to worry about"

"Quick, someone pry out his gun!"

"Is he soylent green yet??"

"If Heston lived another 20 years would the world be a better place? no. I think not. Its just that simple. So break out the good wine. Drink to vanquished enemies."

"Their brain-eroding diseases coincided with their rightwing turns." (referencing Heston and Reagan)

"I'll see you at Nancy Reagan's funeral. I will be the guy with the air horn and a big ol' grin."

"Rest in Hell is where I am coming from."

"I had no empathy for the aging Nazis, either."

"he was scum"

"He was a mediocre actor who believed he was Moses."

"If "liberal" means...feeling any sense of loss that some sorry piece of shithumanity such as C Heston has checked out?...Then sign me out."

In my experience, though, vitriol often follows a man of character. Heston most definitely had that. I recall a published speech given by him that put his character on open display, and I found it over here. It had to do with the Culture War that was very much noticeable in the late 1990s. Excerpt:

As I've stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are -- are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain accepted thoughts and speech are mandated.

For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 -- and long before Hollywood found it acceptable, I may say. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist.

I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life -- throughout my whole career. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.

I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out the innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.

Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution I'm talking about, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they're essentially saying, "Chuck, how dare you speak your mind like that. You are using language not authorized for public consumption."

But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys -- subjects bound to the British crown.

This is the part of the speech that I remembered, talking about the price of standing up for what you believe:

In that same spirit, I' m asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives, and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

But be careful. It hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated, to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water Cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. Now, I'm not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have left their mark on me. Let me tell you a story.

A few years ago, I heard about a -- a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called "Cop Killer," celebrating the ambushing and of murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the country -- in the world. Police across the country were outraged. And rightfully so. At least one of them had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the -- the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills, and I owned some shares of Time/Warner at the time, so I decided to attend the meeting.

What I did was against the advice of my family and my colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of "Cop Killer" -- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word:

I got my 12-Gauge sawed-off. I got my headlights turned off. I'm about to bust some shots off. I'm about to dust some cops off.

It got worse, a lot worse. Now, I won't read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyrics brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing the two 12-year-old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore:

She pushed her butt against my --

No. No, I won't do to you here what I did to them. Let's just say I left the room in stunned silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps outside, one of them said, "We can't print that, you know." "I know," I said, "but Time/Warner is still selling it."

Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T's contract. I'll never be offered another film by Warner Brothers, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you have to be willing to act, not just talk.

That is character, friends. That is proper use of 1A to address serious problems. But the left-leaning radical ideologues, for all the value they put on 1A, will only sing its praises for as long as it is used to distribute their views and agendas. All others are seen as a good reason for censorship.

Especially if the views come from a former member of their number. Another great conservative was the same way: Ronald Reagan.

This is the sort of opposition you and I have to be ready to face, and some of us do. We have a very good example in Charlton Heston.

As far as his acting is concerned, I'm no theatrical critic. I can't say if Charlton were among the best actors America ever produced. But I will say that The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur were both a regular part of my viewing diet at certain times of the year, even before I took my relationship with Christ seriously.

There was also The Planet of the Apes, which I do remember with fondness from my childhood. But the last bit of acting I ever saw him take a leading role was his son's production of A Man For All Seasons. Partially because of his acting, and his choice for a well-written drama with a worthwhile message, it became my favorite drama in English.

We'll see you on the other side, Charles.

U.S. News & World Report article from Last Month

It's not that I'm slow to read. It's just that I stopped subscribing to mainstream media rags the very day I got an issue of Newsweek (a magazine I grew up with) that featured Saddam's capture on the cover, but only gave a page-long story, and a very lukewarm one at that.

If ever there were an evident lack of media support for our military and our efforts to bring order to Iraq, that was it.

My folks in N.C. asked me if I wanted them to renew the subscription. I said flat-out, "No."

At any rate, someone apparently was done with the March 6 issue of USN & WR, covering the Heller case. On the cover, for those of you who remember, was a prominently-displayed Beretta 92 and something about the new battle over guns in bold block print.

Naturally, it aroused my curiosity. So, I flipped through the articles featured.

They were all written by an Emma Schwartz. And the articles appearing in that issue can be found here, here, here, and here. Since that issue, she has written another article concerning the Heller case, appearing March 18, here.

In the March 6 issue, she seems to be rather confounded that most people saw 2A as an individual right. The tone of her articles seem to take on the assumption that the collective right view is the normal way to look at 2A. She even tries to say that Circuit Courts have often ruled in favor of the collective.

But that is simply not the case. Let us refer again to Guy Smith's Gun Facts 4.2:

St. George Tucker, any early legal commentator and authority of the original meaning of the constitution wrote in Blackstone’s Commentaries "… nor will the constitution permit any prohibition of arms to the people”

The Second Amendment was listed in a Supreme Court ruling as an individual right.

The Supreme Court specifically reaffirmed that the right to keep and bear arms did not belong to the government.

In 22 of the 27 instances where the Supreme Court mentions the Second Amendment, they quote the rights clause and not the justification clause.

Now, you would figure that someone who graduated with honors in history would have been able to dig this stuff up. But, her degree was from California at Berkeley. She herself is from San Francisco. It adds up.

It would also explain the other assumptions she makes in her articles--the typical media angle of focusing on guns used in crime, while any meaningful discussion over the successful use of firearms in self-defense is very lacking. Painting the NRA in a negative light. Blaming the Bush administration for doing nothing about gun-control issues.

So, it's not all that hard to understand how someone who graduated from UCB in 2004 managed to land a job writing major articles for major news corporations almost straight out of school. The leftists take care of their own.

But getting back to her confusion over collective vs. individual right--the reality is, if it were indeed a collective right as opposed to an individual one, then I would not have been able to obtain the five firearms I have owned in my lifetime (3 bought during the Clinton years), nor my fathers before me. And there would have been no way 250 million firearms would be in private possession here in our country (this is her own quote of a Virginia gun-control group).

That explains the opinions on 2A that she came across, and the Supreme Court's leaning towards individual rights that she reports about in the March 18 article.

There is a world that functions outside your ideology, sweetie. It's a shame that someone who reports about this world can't see that.

Hand to Face Time: Gun Control has Helped D.C.!

Hoo boy. The budding journalists in academia are at it again.

A friend of mine asked me this afternoon if I had been keeping up with the gun rights issue in DC. Admittedly, I had not. So, I decided to look it up.

The first article I came across was from Georgetown's campus newspaper, The Hoya:

Gun Ban has Triggered Safety

The editorial board makes the comment that the gun ban worked in reducing crime:

"By 2005, the murder rate had dropped to 29 per 100,000, and the number of violent crimes had been reduced to 8,032."

Problem is, the gun ban was enacted in 1976. It took 29 years for it to show any marginally favorable results, during which, DC was crowned the murder capital of the nation (in 1991, according to the editors' own research).

Furthermore, the gun ban still doesn't seem to have eliminated crime involving firearms. In their own words, "in the past four years, at least two students have experienced the terror of being on the receiving end of a pistol’s bullet. Countless muggings and robberies have plagued the campus and surrounding community for several years, and the criminals who commit these crimes frequently carry firearms."

Happily, though, no criminals were injured by the law-abiding folk who respected the ban.

Read the comments on the article. Especially the police officer's take on the article:

Look at the crime rates just on the other side of the Potomac River from Georgetown. Almost zero! Yet Hoyas are robbed and shot constantly in DC. Why? Because the bad guys know you are not packing heat and that if they do get caught they will serve very little or no time due to the incompetent court system in DC.

On the Virginia side of the Potomac River any citizen can own a handguna nd even carry it with them, without any special permit being required. Are people walking around Arlington blowing each other away? No! The opposite is the case, Arlington's violent crime rate is very low, while DC is astronomical.

But what is even more telling is the perspective from the other side of the law--an ex-convict:

For 22 years I dealt drugs and preyed upon anyone weaker than me. With the exception of crimes against children & women I committed most every crime known to man. I did not care about the law or how much anyone suffered as long as I got my way. I have never owned a legal gun but you can rest assured I kept guns with me at all times. Not any of those guns were legally purchased. Why would I want a gun that could be traced back to me and connect me to a crime? Why would any criminal buy a legal gun ever? May as well as leave a business card at the crime scene. When I went to rob or assault anyone rest assured I looked for victims not opponents. I picked people and places that were unarmed and defenseless. If I wanted to work for a living I'd have gotten a job. I looked for and found easy prey. That is why 7/11s get robbed more than banks. Banks have a lot more money, they also have armed guards. While 7/11 does not allow employees to have guns. Some even ban customers from having guns. They call those Gun Free Zones, we call them easy pickings, Stop & Robs or Free Crimes zones. After all they made sure I was safe from being hurt.

I'll leave the rest for you guys to read.

Now's the time to get your reloading components

I was visiting one of our sister churches here in Delta, and after service, talked with one of the guys there who I shoot the bull with on guns and hunting.

He told me, "If you're planning on getting any ammo, do it now. The price of lead and copper is going to go up."

He mentioned that China is gearing up for war, and we are already involved in a couple of conflicts. So, military demand for lead and copper, naturally, is going to affect market prices for us civilians.

Matter of fact, Dave told me that if you look at a Cabela's catalog, flip over to the ammo section. Under .223 there is a disclaimer about the availability of that caliber due to military and law enforcement demand.

I looked up the matter, trying to see how much truth there was to the China deal. I mean, why would China be gearing up for war? Against whom?

I came across this article in The Statesman. Excerpts:

In a move that surprised the international strategic community, it was announced at the Fifth Session of the 10th National People’s Congress that China’s defence budget for 2007 would be 350.92 billion Yuan (US $45 billion), an increase of 17.8 per cent ($6.8 billion) over the previous year. Though Chinese analysts sought to pass off the rather steep hike as having been “caused by the sharp increase in the wages, living expenses and pensions of 2.3 million People’s Liberation Army officers, civilian personnel, soldiers and army retirees,” the world was skeptical.

Indeed. I don't think army retirees are really that much in need of the following:

...aircraft carrier under construction, the acquisition of SU-30 fighter-bombers and air-to-air refuelling capability, the drive towards acquiring re-entry vehicle technology to equip China’s ICBMs with MIRVs...

Along the way, I had discovered several articles mentioning alliances between China and Russia, and, of course, Putin's anti-Western rhetoric. It's the 1970s all over again (only this time, without all the polyester).

Confirming increasing copper prices can be seen here, and lead and ammunition prices in a very informative article right here.

Excerpt from the latter:

There are, however, other things that are going to affect the cost of enjoying the outdoors in the coming years. One of those is the cost of metal, which is on a steady climb upward for several reasons, one of the biggest of which is the export of scrap metals and raw materials to China and other emerging industrial nations. Much of the goods we buy today are manufactured in countries where it is cheaper to produce them because of cheaper labor and less stringent, (non-existent) pollution regulations. These countries, besides producing inferior goods (just look at all the recent recalls), are scarfing up metal at an alarming rate.

With the material cost of outdoor sports rising, it seems that the only outdoor enthusiasts who won't be affected by will be nudists. Not a terribly viable pastime here in Alaska, where it is cold 8 months out of the year, and mosquito-infested the remaining four.

Thankfully, I still have a sizeable stash of .45 and .44, plus reloading components for .44. I did some plinking yesterday, overseeing some boys with their .22 rifles while wowing them with the power of a .44 magnum. Probably the last time I'll do some full-out blasting for a good while.

Speaking of which, here is a shot showing some of the aftermath of yesterday's blastfest:

We were shooting cans off the drum I am sitting on. The boys were very good shots, able to hit that spent .410 casing from 25 yards out.

I managed to impress them with blasting the cans off the drum at the same distance. But, it seems that the sheer power of the .44 was more responsible for it than my own accuracy.

Please note the holes on the top of the drum. I put those there.

They're out there

Now, I remember during the early days of the war on terror, when there was a trend to rename everything "French" with "freedom," sort of thumbing our noses at the nation who helped get us into Vietnam.

BUT, there are those Frenchies who seem to be less prone to PSH-itis. Here is one of them:

http://www.thedissidentfrogman.com/blog

Make sure you check out his response to Agence France Presse's coverage about the woman who held up two unfired cartridges as evidence that our troops had shot her house a good while back.

http://www.thedissidentfrogman.com/blog/link/like-a-suppository-only-stronger/

Now, there are three things I generally tend to associate with liberalism: women, Europeans, and youth. The first I have little understanding of, being a male myself. The second I understand somewhat, having spent a good 20+ years associated with European culture (a result of my language studies).

The latter part I can understand; when I was in my teens, I had some pretty good liberal leanings myself, thus proving something I read somewhere: if you're not liberal when you are in your teens or 20s, it's because you have no heart. If you're not conservative by the time you're in your 30s, it's because you have no head.

At any rate, here is someone young, european, and female, who also happens to be conservative:

http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/

And with that goes the first two new links I've put on my good list in a long time.

More on Clothing and CCW

As a part-time caregiver for a paraplegic, I sometimes get to take my client to Fairbanks for his appointments. Oftentimes, on these trips, I have my urban hardware with me.

Now, those of us who have and do carry understand that concealed carry, while for the primary purpose of self-defense, nonetheless means keeping aforementioned hardware out of sight. Especially if the public at large is prone to PSH attacks, which, happily, generally isn't the situation here in interior Alaska. Still, you've got to keep your iron covered.

...which has the potential to make an everyday situation less-than-everyday. Yesterday, mine happened in the Men's bathroom at Fred Meyers'.

Usually, when I'm carrying, I'll get a stall, and take the USP out and rest it on the tank or TP dispenser or somewhere off the ground while I'm doing my business. Zip up, reholster, wash up, head out.

This time, though, no stall was available.

My carry gear involves a Bianchi Black Widow holster, which I've bought for both USPs I've owned. It's your typical strong-side high CC holster, meant to be worn with a 1" belt.

For it to work, said belt must be fastened, lest the holster droop down with the hardware. Not a desirable situation in a public rest room.

This is made more complicated by the fact that I was wearing button-fly jeans at the time. Which means the top button must be loosened. Which often means the above-mentioned belt had to be loosened.

So, here I am, trying to maintain tension on the belt with my right hand while managing bladder relief operations with the other...

In short, button-fly jeans are not the best choice for CC on a belt holster. Doable, but not the best.

New Leftist Organizations

Brought to you courtesy of the People's Cube.

TWITS
Trotskyite Workers Imagining Transcontinental Socialism

FRAUDS
Free-thinking Radicals for Awareness, Understanding, Diversity, and Sensitivity

SORROW
Socialist Operatives Rallying for Redistribution Of the Wealth

AIRHEADS
Academic Iconoclasts Representing Hedonism, Environmental Activism, Disarmament, and Sandal-wearing

EMPIRE
Empower Marginalized Peoples, Intern Rich Exploiters

VERMIN
Vegan Environmentalists Rejecting Masculinity, Imperialism, and Narrow-mindedness

LARD
League of Animal Rights' Defenders

GARGOYLE
Greens Advocating Recycling, Gardening Organically, Yoga, and Loving the Earth

WANKERS
West-coast Altruists, Naderites, & Kleptocrats for Enforcing Redistribution and Self-sacrifice

WINDBAGS
World Institute of Nihilists Deconstructing Bourgeois Assumptions and Glorifying Subjectivism

POTEMKIN
Pacifists Opposed To Escalation and the Military's Killing of Innocent Non-combatants

HERPES
Humanitarians Extending Relief to Poorly Endowed Sex-workers