Ten Years After Columbine, It’s Easier to Bear Arms

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In the decade since, massacres perpetrated by deranged gunmen have continued – including the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre in which Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people and wounded many others. But something odd has occurred. Whatever momentum the Columbine killings gave to gun control has long since petered out.
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But efforts like Woods’ are up against powerful headwinds – and not just because of the powerful gun lobby that often strangles gun-control laws. Americans in general have cooled significantly to the idea of restricting gun rights. A poll released last week by CNN showed that support for stricter gun laws was at an all-time low, with just 39% of respondents in favor. Eight years ago that number was 54%.

The author blathers on about how this makes no sense at all, and that people who oppose gun control are obviously confused. However, while gun control advocates like this author continue along in their willful ignorance, a growing number of people are recognizing two important facts:

1. Crazed gunmen almost always strike where the lawful population has been disarmed (schools, etc), reducing their ability to fight back;
2. When a shooting starts, seconds count. A personally carried pistol is one second away, whereas police are hundreds and hundreds of seconds away. Further even if the police show up within 300 seconds, they might sit outside with their thumbs up their butts for another 3600 seconds before moving inside.

We can talk about getting help and treatment for those who carry out these attacks, and that’s all well and good. But we must also face reality: when the shooting starts, the single best thing to do is to fight back, and the best tool for the job is a personally-carried gun.

Those of us who oppose new gun control and advocate the private carry of arms see reality. It’s the gun-control crowd that is confused.

War bill helps Iraqis, may ignore Katrina victims

NEW ORLEANS – A long way from Iraq and the war debate in Washington, Herman Moore sat outside a tent in a downtown New Orleans homeless camp, trying to make sense of a proposal that helps Iraqi war refugees but will likely exclude Hurricane Katrina victims.

First of all, am I detecting just a hint of bias in this headline and first paragraph?

Second of all, this is a war spending bill. Why should a war spending bill contain spending unrelated to the war? Domestic spending in this bill can be described in one word: Pork.

First, he briefly explains how the Republicans have fucked up in the past few years, bringing us to the brink of electing the most liberal candidate since George McGovern. Then he articulates many of the fears many of us have of an Obama presidency. These are many of the same themes I’ve touched on here. The professional vs. non-professional comparison is left as an exercise for the reader.

Hanson also touches on the racial double-think going on among Obama supporters:

So now we are in this Orwellian paradox of seeing Obama’s base turn out in record numbers on the basis apparently of race, but on the other hand the implied warning that if anyone else were likewise to consider that fact, then he would be racialist.

Finally, he touches on the McCain “affair” non-story.

Good reading.

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Despite the expected anti-Bush spin, this pretty much destroys the “Bush Lied” meme, doesn’t it?

It’s pretty obvious that if Saddam had been left alone, the sanctions and controls imposed on him after the Gulf War would have come to an end. (They were already falling apart by 2003, thanks in no small part to certain European powers.) Once sanctions were gone, he would then have been free to restart his weapons programs — or sell his knowledge to interested third parties, such as Al-Qaida.

Umm… WTF is that?

But of course, the media isn’t biased…

(Click for full size.)

The caption reads: “A panoramic aerial view of the city three weeks after the U.S. air raid”

I’m not exactly an expert here, but this appears to be the result of a conventional daylight air raid: the landscape is littered with impact craters of the type left behind by conventional high-explosive bombs dropped by many planes. Also notice the buildings in the lower-left corner appear to be standing. An atomic bomb air burst would have flattened those structures (along with everything else), but not left multiple impact craters.

My conclusion: this area was hit by a force of conventional bombers — not the Enola Gay.

Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

The grizzled leader of our heroes, Sgt. ‘Scream’, complains that they are stuck there holding the cordon so some stupid general 75 miles away can look good on TV. And so the soldiers hunker down for a 36 hour siege while the brass in Baghdad cow-tow to the Mainstream Media and negotiate with the terrorists.

In the real war, the commanders on the ground would have returned fire and shot the building full of holes before anyone watching Al Jazeera on the satellite in Baghdad could figure out what was going on.

In the real war, as evidenced by Fallujah and other cities, the mosque would have been shot up and probably destroyed. The following day, the media would be grilling the generals about how they killed an Al Jazeera reporter and destroyed a mosque. The media would complain loudly, the Arab media would scream bloody murder and the anti-war left would demand that Sgt. ‘Scream’ and the fire team be investigated for war crimes because they killed terrorists who were offering to surrender.

That is what would happen in the real war.

But ‘Over There’ is a Hollywood production being filmed in the Mojave Desert and in drama, and the heroes have to be right and vindicated. But showing the reality war and how the media operates in war is not what Hollywood wants.

Why am I not surprised? Hollywood not only gets it wrong, they get it wrong intentionally. Weasels.