Snowflakes in Hell

January 6th, 2007 is when I penned my inaugural post:

This is the inaugural post of this blog, because I think that one of the greatest things we shooters can do for ourselves is to introduce new people to our community. My friend Loretta, who came to visit over the holidays, did not have any existing prejudice towards guns, but I have taken people shooting for the first time who have. There’s nothing that quite opens people’s minds like seeing firearms as the tools that they are, and shooters for the ordinary people that they are, than a trip to the range.

I still think that.  I started gun blogging when things were pretty good for us.  Now, things aren’t looking as good.  I’m expecting that year three is going to be a lot more interesting, and I mean that in the old Chinese sense, than the first two years.

In the past year, Heller is the big news, and probably our greatest card to play moving forward.  But while Heller was a great achievement, because it answered the big question, we now will be stuck arguing the scope of the Second Amendment in front of an increasingly unfavorable panel of federal judges appointed by Obama.  There will be many challenges, and I’m sure more than a few setbacks and losses, but I am an optimist by nature, and believe we’ll get through them, and start making progress again.

AP’s typo, not mine.  Note that Assemblyman Reed Gusciora believe that this is an assault rifle.

Peter has a pretty good review of Steve Halbrook’s book “Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II“  Just a reminder, the Second Amendment Book Bomb is still ongoing, and you can now get copies of Steve Halbrook’s current book, “The Founders’ Second Amendment,” from Amazon.

Nancy Pelosi is stacking the deck, and changing the House Rules to shut out the GOP.  This will make it much harder for Republicans to kill gun control bills.  Giving Pelosi such a solid majority was going to have consequences.  A lot of people gave me grief for fighting with the lesser of two evils last election, well, this is the evil I was fighting.  The Bush years are going to look positively rosy compared to what’s coming.

You know, it seems like once anti-gun Caroline Kennedy, you know, started talking to the people of, you know, New York, they stopped like liking her, you know.

PPP says Kennedy’s popularity “has taken a major hit as the result of her public campaign” to get the appointment of New York Gov. David Paterson. Although Kennedy is still regarded by a small plurality, 44 percent of voters say their opinion is less favorable than since she first stated publicly her desire for the seat, while 23 percent say they view her more favorably. Her favorable to unfavorable ratio is 44 percent to 40 percent, while that of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is 57 percent to 20 percent.

Other articles I’ve seen indicate that her biggest support is coming from Baby Boomer women who believe she deserves it because she’s a Kennedy and just has the DNA to do the job - despite having never held elected office before or having any useful experience.

Apparently there’s nothing about guns or the shooting sports that the DC City Government won’t hate on with a burning white passion.  Here you will find a letter rejecting the tag “TRIGGER” because they deem it offensive, followed by a letter from one of NRA’s attorneys warning them that it’s a First Amendment violation.  Looks like DC decided it wasn’t worth fighting a court case over, and issued the tags.

Another issue you’ll want to contact your Congress Critters about is this.  I’m skeptical that anyone knows for sure at this point which direction they will attack us from, but one thing I’m fairly certain of is that an attack on our gun rights is coming.  We need to be ready for anything, and writing your reps about opposing any gun control in the 111th Congress is as important as ever.

The last time we were in this situation I was eighteen years old, and there were no blogs, no forums, most people didn’t have e-mail, and the media wasn’t on the verge of going the way of the dodo.  If we’re going to come out on top here, we have to use our natural strengths as a movement.

UPDATE: Robb has more.  The ironic thing in all this is, if the Democrats were really interested in destroying the NRA, the smartest strategic thing to do would be nothing.  It only helps NRA to become the monster that they said you were.

UPDATE: Thirdpower wonders why we’re all surprised.  I wouldn’t say we’re surprised, but there has to be some hope we can mobilize against something, even if we expected it.  I also had hoped Obama’s move to the center post-election indicated he wasn’t willing to tackle divisive cultural issues, and would govern as a pragmatic centrist.  That’s still a key question: how much Obama will push gun control.  We know he’ll sign anything Pelosi and Reid send him, so we can’t count on anything.  Writing the Critter is important.

The blogosphere seems to be pretty effective at creating noise, and making people pay attention.  Today is the first day of the 111th Congress, which is the new Democratic Congress that we elected along with Obama.  Pretty shortly Congress will take up the issue of Obama’s nominations.  Among those people is Eric Holder for Attorney General, who is no friend to gun owners.  We’ve made a lot of noise over guys like Jim Zumbo, Dan Cooper, HS Precision, and the like.  Let’s make some noise to stop the nomination of Eric Holder.  You can contact your elected officials here.

Marko seems to have the worst luck with people plagarizing his writing.  I’d have mixed feelings about it, personally.   On the one hand, I’d be awfully pissy that someone is taking credit for my writing.  On the other hand, someone apparently thought my writing was good enough to pilfer.  Marko makes money off writing, though, so not at least offering attribution is pretty low.

I have ordered a new server to run the blog, and a few other things I also run on the side.  The new machine will also be rather small.  It’s a 1.6GHz Intel Atom based machine with 2GB RAM, a 7200RPM 500GB SATA hard disk and DVD-ROM.  The little provisional server I’m on right now isn’t quite quick enough to handle my traffic peaks, but hopefully we’ll get past that.  The cool thing about the new machine is it cost me about $250 bucks to put together, and consumes power like a laptop.

With luck, the new server will arrive tomorrow, and be ready for operation by Wednesday.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a puff piece on it today, with Bryan Miller’s big mug plastered all over it.  We’re also back to that “personal privilege” thing again:

“What we’re talking about here is some sort of balance . . . between the privilege of a tiny minority of handgun owners in the state and the common good of public safety,” Miller said. “We’re talking about a light burden, if any.”

Sorry Bryan.  Heller is over, and we won.  It’s not a privilege anymore.  That means the burden is now on you to justify restricting my constitutional right.  If you can provide any evidence at all that one-gun-a-month works, I’d be happy to listen, but the evience seems to suggest it has no effect on crime, just like every other gun control law.  Governor Corzine also asks the wrong question:

“How many guns does somebody need to purchase in a month?” Corzine asked.

I don’t have to justify anything to you, Governor.  Your job is not to treat all citizens as criminals because some people are irresponsible.  The solution is to put violent people in prison, rather than to turn the society at large into a prison.  This proposal does the latter.

Jacob links to some nasty predictions for New York Gun owners, including serious restrictions on the use of lead ammunition.  It would be one thing if there were reasonable alternatives, but there isn’t.   At least not yet.

JR reminds everyone of the importance of cleaning your rifle after firing corrosively primed ammunition.   I can personally attest to this.  I bought some corrosive 5.45×39 before I realized it was corrosive.   I found out the hard way.  Didn’t take long either.   Fortunatly, no lasting damage, but yeah — corrosive ammo is nasty stuff if you don’t clean.

Joe Huffman offers a lesson in exterior ballistics.

I take the Pennsylvania Turnpike to work and back every day.  Tomorrow, I will begin paying the Ed Rendell Approved higher rate for turnpike tolls so Philadelphia can continue to grossly mismanage its public transit system.  Previously, I paid $1.25 each way, which comes out to $2.50 a day, or 625 dollars a year.  Now I will be paying $1.56 each way, or $3.12 a day, which comes out to $780 dollars a year.  That doesn’t cover non-communiting use of the Turnpike system either.

Thanks Ed Rendell, I really appreciate the $155 dollar a year tax increase.  Meanwhile, people who don’t have to drive on the Turkpike, get to drive on roads my income and sales tax dollars pay for.

I’ve decided I should make at least one purchase during this panic gun buying season, so I decided to throw down some benjamins and buy TD’s FAL.  Blue Book of Gun Values says the gun is worth $700, but today everything has an Obama Panic Premium (we’ll call it OPP for short) attached to it, so that must be taken into consideration.  But there is one issue.

TD lives in Michigan, and I live in Pennsylvania, which means it’s time to play the “Reasonable Gun Laws” game.  Since TD and I live in different states, we can’t just handle this through a private sale, even though we can both legally posses the rifle in our respective states.  Asked a local FFL about doing the transfer, and got this answer:

We fax or mail our FFL directly to the seller’s dealer and he/she ships the firearm/s with a copy of his/her FFL. That is the only way we do out of state transfers. It costs $50.00 plus tax plus $10.00 for the instant check, totaling $63.00.

So that’s $63 bucks on my side, and another batch of money on TD’s side to pay for the FFL transfer at his end.  Legally speaking, TD can ship direct to my FFL, since non-licensees are permitted to ship through common carrier (though not U.S. Mail if it’s a handgun) to an FFL in any state.  But it’s hard to find an FFL that’s willing to deal with a non-licensee who’s out of state.  Obviously, I’m not paying anyone $63 bucks to receive a package and do 10 minutes of paperwork.  I know another FFL who does them for 32 bucks, so I might try him.

Imagine how hard it’s going to be to find a reasonable deal on transfers when selling a gun to a friend requires it?  Prices in Pennsylvania are already high for transfers, because in this state, there are no private sales of handguns.  If they ban all private sales for all guns, you can expect dealers to jack prices on handling transfers, since it eats into their business.  This is the world the Brady Campaign wants to bring us all, folks.

Looks like the National Association of Park Rangers is also going to file suit to keep the new rule from going into effect.  I have to admit, I’m little miffed at the Bush Administration for not getting this rule change done sooner.  I think the strategy of our opponents is to run the clock out, until they can deal with an administration who won’t fight that hard for the change.  If it can get thrown out on a legal technicality, then that’s it.  There will be no time or desire to rework a different rule.  If the rule change gets reversed, Bush will still have taken media heat for the rule, but we won’t have gotten it.  No one will be happy, except perhaps the Brady Campaign.

I’ve moved the blog to a new server.  If any of you were noticing an outage, that is why.  Unfortunately, it’s actually not as fast as our previous server, which sucks, but if I’m going to replace it, I’ll need to the blog running on something else so I’m not having to deal with a lot of downtime for the blog while I get the new digs up and running.  If you want to see what I’m running on, take a look here.  Makarov provided for scale:

It’s a pretty old box.  1.2GHz Celeron, 256MB PC100 RAM, old laptop hard drive, running Ubuntu 8.10 Server.  My eventual goal is to have a server that can handle a full on, no-holds, Instalanche.  This little guy isn’t up to the task, at least not without a gig or so more RAM.  In the past, links from Instapundit have melted my box, so I’m going to provision a new box that can handle Glenn’s traffic.  So enjoy running on this small box for a bit, folks.  Hopefully it won’t be too painfully slow.

SayUncle pointed out North Dakota had zero gun murders in 2008, despite being 44 out of 50 in the Brady Campaign rankings.  Bruce looks at New Hampshire, and finds a similar story.

Dave Hardy’s paper on the subject is now published.  You can read the thing in full by downloading it from here.

Looks like there’s some murmuring in Minnesota of a lead ammunition ban for hunters, along the same lines as California’s ban.

Local NRA members are apparently teaming up with the U.S. Forest Service to clean up sections of National Forests which have been used for illegal dumps, in order to make room to shoot.

… to make a difference in helping a local community clean out drug dealers.

Jim Geraghty has dug up some information on Roland Burris record on guns.  Roland Burris being Blagoevich’s pick to take Obama’s seat.  Fortunatly, Harry Ried says he won’t seat him, or even let him onto the Senate floor.

“Extend the circle of love to all creatures.” You know, except for duck hunters I guess.  You know who else eat ducks?  Foxes.  You don’t see the animal rights loons spray painting foxes, do you?