Bob Barr does deserve hazardous duty pay!

Instapundit noticed some interesting backpedaling from the anti-gun crowd...

But here's the most revealing quote:

Matt Nosanchuk, litigation director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy group, said there is no evidence that greater access to guns reduces crime.

Remember how anti-gun folks used to say that reducing gun controls would lead to "blood in the streets?" Now the best they can claim is that it probably won't reduce crime.

I guess that Sarah's minions realize that the "blood in the streets" thing needs actual blood in an actual street at least once to be effective.

The Clinton "legacy": Road Ban in Forests Is Leveled

Clinton's land grab attempt out here in the West was overturned. This was a sleazy attempt to use the Wilderness Act to seal off millions upon millions of arces of public land. The harm it did to logging is obvious. Loggers need to cut roads to get to their timber leases. But other suffered as well. There are pockets of private land surrounded by these wilderness areas. Owners were unable to build or, as I understand it, maintain roads to their property. Also, hunters and others use the roads to get into the back country. Letting the roads go to pot prevents people from getting at land that they pay taxes to maintain. What good is Public land if the Public isn't allowed in?!?

A good question: PETA--Legitimate Organization or Cloaked 'Onion' Contributor?

Circular reference

More on my Linux box...

I've been trying to figure out the intricacies of Samba. We have two machines: This dual boot box and a Win2k only box. I could see that other box from Linux, but not the other way around. After a good deal of searching, I found
this page on a FreeBSD site. The suggestions here did the trick as did another page's suggestion that the Win2k box be set (in local security policies: to allow sending unecrypted passwords to a 3rd party SMB server. (We're behind a firewall, so security is less of a concern.)

...Oh yeah. I also added the Win2k box to my /etc/hosts file.

So why blog this? Blogger is owned by Google now. The more places this info is, the easier it is to search it out.

Gun law's author hit right on target

A great profile of Minnesota's Joe Olson. He was one of the driving forces behind that State's recent "Shall Issue" law for concealed weapons.

So where did the out-of-state gun story end up? The A section, of course.

So where will this story end up in tomorrow's L.A. Times? It's the story of a guy going postal, with a gun, at a factory in Missouri. I wonder because this local story about a guy going postal with a sword didn't make the A section, let alone the front page.

One would think that a local story warrants greater coverage than an out-of-state story; however, one lunatic used a gun while the other used a sword. Will the Times hype the gun story? Or will they give it less coverage than the local story they relegated to the B section? We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see.

How does one blog a radio program? I almost drove off the road yesterday laughing myself silly. I was listening to the John and Ken Show. Their guest was Democratic strategist Bob Mulholland. During his entire appearance, Bob managed to avoid answering a single question. John Kobylt, at one point, realized that it was necessary to remind listeners that this was a real guest, not a joke. A caller would ask about the budget and Bob would ramble about abortion and gun control. When asked about taxes, he blurted out something about George Bush. John ased him if he had Tourette's and described the conversation as being like talking to a mental patient. It was great radio, however unenlightening Bob might have been.

Ostensibly, Mulholland was there to tell why Wile E. "Gray" Davis shouldn't be recalled. With friends like Bob...

Will the Skeet-Geeks finally get it? James Swan writes about the UN's small arms conference coming up next week in NYC. He points out what many gun rights activists have been saying for years: The UN would like nothing more than to disarm average citizens. The skeet-geeks are the hardest to get involved in protecting our gun rights. They convince themselves that no one's interested in taking their guns. In fact, groups like the UN view their pretty shotguns as identical to RPGs and machine guns. To them, a gun is a gun is a gun. Let's hope that articles like this one wake them up to that fact.

Has the CA State GOP sprouted some cojones? The State budget is about to slam into a wall and the Republicans in the senate refuse to budge on taxes. Looks like they've found their collective mojo since Mojo left.

Ugliness at Oxford...

A professor at Oxford sent this missive off to a PhD candidate:

From: "Andrew Wilkie" awilkie@worf.molbiol.ox.ac.uk
To: "Amit Duvshani"
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: PhD application

Dear Amit Duvshani,

Thank
you for contacting me, but I don't think this would work. I have a huge
problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from
their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross
human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they (the Palestinians)
wish to live in their own country.

I am sure that you are
perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody
who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the
only UK scientist with these views but I'm sure you will find another
suitable lab if you look around.

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Wilkie

It took chutzpah to write this and then complete stupidity to hit the send button!

Over at The Corner on National Review Online: "CHIEF JUSTICE FUNNYMAN"

I don't know how many times I've self-censored myself on FreeRepublic today. I hit the reply button and then realize that nothing I have to say would fail to be offensive. What have I been censoring? Well... Let's put it this way: There's a nexus between the Texas Sodomy case, California's run-away taxes, and the acronym BOHICA.

Cow...

Here's a cool tool for blogging on the fly. Go to this page on Blogger.com. There's a link called "BlogThis" near the bottom of the page. Drag that to your personal tool bar. It's a little javascript that opens a blogging window. This one's obviously for Blogger.com users. Other services may have their own. Mozilla users should check out MozBlog.

Firearms Industry Wins Another Court Victory

In another significant legal victory for the firearms industry, a New York appellate court on June 24 upheld a trial court's August, 2001 order dismissing a lawsuit brought by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer against gun makers. The appellate court said manufacturers of lawful and non-defective products cannot be sued for allegedly creating a 'public nuisance' when criminals misuse firearms.

From The NRA-ILA News Center

Another nuisance suit quietly bites the dust.