First post of 2024; Hatsugeiko

For several years I lived out on Portland’s west side – part of the Tualatin Valley, the suburban enclave over the Portland Hills from the Beehive of Terrorism itself. New Year’s night there was always interesting, because amid the fireworks was a surprisingly large amount of actual gunfire that would have delighted the guests at an Afghanistan wedding party.

One year that included an immense blast that rattled the windows just past midnight; probably pyro but it sounded like someone had upgraded from small arms to an actual cannon, and who doesn’t shoot in the new year with an artillery piece, amiright?

This year I enjoyed a new experience New Year’s Day; loaded the bogu bag and shinai and played two hours of kendo at the Portland Kendo Club’s hatsugeiko, the traditional “first practice” of the new year, followed by a potluck. 

Part of the fun was the venue itself, "Fulton Park Community Center".

The building is over a century old - 1914 - as a school:

"In 1914, the Fulton Park Elementary School was built. The school housed grades K-8 in its four classrooms all opening into a central gymnasium, complete with a stage. A later remodel of the building included a new kitchen and additional bathroom facilities. The building was designed by Floyd Archibald Naramore, who was the architect and superintendent of school properties for Portland Public Schools from 1912 to 1919."

The old school - and it's still run as a school, a tiny French immersion program (which is kind of ridiculous. French? Allez savoir.) - is utterly Ragtime Era awesome, with all the architectural gimmicks of the era. Not sure which I loved more; the massive wooden timber truss ceiling? The little anterooms at the back of the classrooms with the sliding doors to hide all the coats and hats and the utility sink?

The wood floor was perfect; it's hard to emphasize enough how different floor types are on my legs.

The metal joints are unsparing. They simply don't give and flex like human bones do. So playing kendo - which requires a lot of energetic suburi or footwork - means taking a pounding through the legs. A hard floor, like concrete? Fuuuuuck. I come away from a couple of hours of keiko aching in every knee joint.

But a springy wood floor like Fulton? That's pure energy-giving. I was sore this morning - it was a good hard practice - but my legs? As good as they ever are, and that's terrific.

So. Great kendo, good training, lots of fun with kendoka from all over Portland plus family, big kid energy, great food, just a terrific way to start off the year.

Hope all here have the same.

And, today as every day, this year as every year, as always, ceterum (autem) censeo the GOP esse delendam.

This is fine

 So now any and every knucklehead Florida Man can prance around strapped?

"Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed into law a bill that lets people carry guns without a permit and without any training."

 Keep in mind I was under the hat. I fucking TAUGHT these knuckleheads how to use these weapons in ways that ensured they wouldn't shoot me or each other. I have some practical experience with people who have no firearms skills.

There is no.

No.

Practical, legal, social, or political need for every chucklefuck wander around with live rounds.

Mostly because one of the dumb fucks is sure as hell gonna have one under the hammer and it's gonna go through some other poor dumb bastard's brain housing group when said dumbass drops the hogleg out of her pocket or his carry bag.

Jesus wept.

I know the contemporary GQP is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but this is nonsensical on it's face. What the hell good will this do? Even in Wild West Dodge City you had to check your Peacemaker at ol' Wyatt's office. Even Delta Force locks their bang-sticks up unless they're going to or from the range.

Every time I think we've seen Peak Stupid from these people...

Brewed Dudes, or, Excuse me, waiter, but my coffee has a pistol in it

 In order:
1) "SS" is "America's Coffee"? WTF? Hello? "Sounds better in the original German" much?
2) If you're calling the sound of a suppressed semiauto pistol "smooth" you either a) have never heard one, or
b) have no respect for the intelligence of your audience.
3) Ammosexuals are deeply weird people.

I’ve seen these guys around the Internet but I've never bothered with them because
1) we roast better coffee here and
2) I’ve never been comfortable around people with assault rifle fetishes because
a) if you’re gonna have a kink for God's sake have a sexual kink, because they’re more fun, and
b) I ran a battery of 105mm howitzers, fucknozzles, and I’ll see your pissy little 5.56 and raise you four goddam inches. 

 

Fire for effect, bitches!

Big Iron On His Hip

 Back in November I wrote a short piece discussing the latest firearm atrocity. I had exactly the same effect on firearms in this country as every other opinion piece, editorial, blog post, and survivor plea after another nutjob takes his bullet launcher and sends another bunch of poor sods to join the Choir Eternal.

Nothing.

But today I was thinking how utterly weird the current insane gunlicking going on at the American Right is, and, in particular, how sudden it has arrived.

This isn't some sort of trace-it-back-to-the-Revolution thing. It's basically been invented out of whole cloth over about the past forty years. Contemporary with the rise of the modern GQP (hmmm...what an odd co-inky-dink, Bug Bunny would say).

The whole hyperammosexualization of firearms is only about twenty or thirty years old and how freakishly weird is the notion of living in a modern industrial democracy and wanting, NEEDing, to be strapped at all times.

I was a medic in an infantry battalion in the early 1980s. 

 

 It was legal for a GI to own a personal weapon (mind you, not many did - certainly nobody in my platoon, and infantrymen, even infantry medics, ain't exactly your soy-boy peacenik hippies...).

 

Keep in mind that this was an airborne infantry battalion. Infantry. The kind of people who, y'know, made their living with firearms.

 

And the ironclad Armywide rule was that IF you had a personal weapon, whatever the make and model, that weapon lived in your company arms room at all times 1) unless and until you signed it out to go to the range and 2) was immediately returned to the arms cage when you returned to the company area.

 

The notion that you the individual Joe would keep your bang stick leaning up against your bunk? Or your hogleg in your desk drawer? Your First Sergeant would square your young ass away most quick smart.

 

So here's a bunch of people who are thoroughly trained and experienced using firearms - whose trade is using firearms - whose first, last, unbreakable rule is that unless you're going to shoot at targets you don't get to keep and bear the sonofabitch. 

 

Period. 

 

It stays locked up with the rest of the weaponry.

But here's some idiot Joe and Molly keeping their nine-mil in the bedside drawer where their whacked-out sprog can use it to work out his testosterone issues.

 

Nope. 

 

This whole business is completely whacko.

 

And as always on this subject, I refer you to Jim Wright for a bit of bang-bang-sanity.

 

Get Strapped or Get Stripped

I'm not going to go deep into the weeds on the Rittenhouse verdict. It was prima facie from the moment the trial opened. Between the trial judge's Trumpkin antics to the jury selection, the odds were tilted towards getting the little bastard off.

But when the result of this decision produces crap like this:

Let me phrase it this way. Do you believe liberals need to bring guns to their protests?

Carrying a firearm is a personal decision, and more people on both sides need better education about what it means to carry a firearm in the public sphere so that they can make those decisions for themselves. I’m not trying to get around that question. That is a big, complicated question. And my answer to that is everyone needs more training.

 ...my country has a serious goddamn gun problem. And politics problem.

Yeah, it's Slate. I get that. And I have no idea who "Lara Smith" is other than she's a gormless nitwit.

But one of the most misunderstood Bob Heinlein quotes is that damn "An armed society is a polite society" one from Beyond This Horizon. The context - that the speaker is essentially advocating a sort of eugenics through firearms "kill(ing) off the weak and the stupid" - is never mentioned any more than the "well-regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment is cited alongside the keep-and-bear-arms part.

Because an armed society isn't "polite". It's barely a society at all. When you have to back your political ideas with armed force, every debate will inevitably degenerate into a gunfight. Smith basically admits that; ""everyone needs more training"? Seriously? That's your recommendation when your political opponents come at you armed? Spartakists versus Freikorps in the streets of Portland?

The Rittenhouse verdict sends a clear message to the political opponents of the Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers - you have two choices; arm yourselves or be at the mercy of being shot down whenever the armed wingnuts show up.

I know what my choice would be.

I also know that if I brought the bullet launcher to a protest that the Portland coppers would be all over me and not to pal around comparing cool rifles. 

As the Homestead strikers or the Stonewall rioters or the Freedom Riders could tell you; the police are the natural allies of the Right. If you're out there raising hell against the Authority the cops are your natural enemies, anyway, and when the Rittenhouses turn up armed and looking for trouble they will get a tongue-bath from the Blue that you, the dirty antifa BLM radical commie hippie bastard, will never receive.

Just like the murderous little bugger did in Kenosha.

Regardless of the circumstances of the individual case, the Rittenhouse verdict presents the American Left with a stark choice.

Arm yourselves, or be destroyed whenever your Proud Boy enemies choose.

And that, my friends, is not a sane way to run a nation.

Bearing Arms, Badly

One of the things about the Second Amendment crowd that kind of irks the shit out of me is how bad they are at this "keep and bear arms" stuff. Today's case-in-point of an Armed But Stupid Fucking Citizenry is Ms. Jamie Gilt of Jacksonville, Florida:

"Jamie Gilt, 31, who posts about firearms on her social media accounts was driving through Putnam County, Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday in her truck when she was wounded after the toddler picked up the weapon and shot her in the back. Her four-year-old son picked up a loaded .45 semi-automatic handgun from the back seat, pointed it towards his mother and pulled the trigger. The powerful round went through the front seat and passed through Gilt's body. Gilt and her son had been traveling to pick up a horse from a relative when the accident happened."

The weapon used by young deadeye when he put one through mommy's eight-ring was a "Kimber" M1911 knock-off, and that in itself makes me really pretty pissed off.

Because the M1911 and its variants may be the most mechanically safe handguns ever constructed.

Unlike most semiauto pistols that have no more than a single pushbutton or trigger safety the M1911 has three: a thumb safety (which is the equivalent of most modern semiauto's pushbotton/trigger safety), a half-cock safety (a very old-school sort of mechanism that was really a 19th Century military firearm hangover) and a grip safety, which requires a firm stock-weld with the firing hand to allow the hammer to fall.

The M1911 is a damn safe weapon, is what I'm saying. Even moreso if you follow Rule 1 of Handgun Safety; Never Chamber a Round Until You Are Ready To Fire.

It's really that simple, and the fraction of a second it takes to work the slide is not going to make half a nickel's worth of difference in "defending yourself". If the person threatening you has the drop on you to the extent that you can't chamber a round? You're pretty much fucked, anyway. But no more fucked than you are walking around with a live round under the hammer, as Mommy Gilt found out when little Chuckles picked up her hogleg and ventilated her ass.

In order to enable her spawn to put a live joe through her Mommy Dumbass must have, at the very least, had a live round in the chamber. The rest of the sequence is hard to figure out. Assuming the the hammer was uncocked little Nemo must have cocked it, which seems unlikely, so strike two against the Stupid Mother of the Year; she must have cocked it.

The other thing that the kid had to do was somehow grip the stock hard enough to engage the grip safety, which seems hard to believe for a four-year-old. Had Mommy gimmicked the grip safety somehow? If so, strike three, Mommy, and you're out with a bullet through the back.

So it's not their guns I fear. It's them. These fucking people. They're like an avalanche of Stupid, and they're Armed.

Did you think of that, Mister Madison? I sure as hell wish you had.

Update 3/23: So even in Florida you can be too goddamn stupid to carry a firearm. Turns out that the Mother of the Year is going to be charged under some kind of child-endangerment statute (I think...). But the new explanation - that Mombo had her hogleg lying around on one of the front seats, it slid under the seat (or possibly through the seat between the back and the cushion) into the back footwell where little Bubbles had unbuckled his carseat belt - still begs the question. Dumbass still had to have had a round under the hammer. I can't imagine that the little bastard knew to thumb the hammer back so the hammer must have BEEN back and the thumb safety off. And how the heck the kid managed to engage the grip safety I still don't know. The whole thing stinks, frankly, and just reminds me that this woman has NO business within the same grid square as a firearm.

Three-Fifths Compromise

I'm sorry, but I'm done with arguing with ammosexuals about "Second Amendment Rights".

You can argue the semantics of the "well-regulated militia" clause all you want, but the bottom line is that too many goddamn people can get their hands on too many goddamn firearms and We the People aren't even trying to do a goddamn thing about that.

Hell, the Framers would have a goddamn kitten fit if they saw what We have done with the verbiage they doped up just to keep the slaves down and avoid paying for professional soldiers.

As a result we're killing more American people every day than in the wildest Islamic State jihadi's wet dreams and that's indescribably, ridiculously, grotesquely fucked up. The Constitution is not supposed to be a goddamn suicide pact.

And speaking of the Constitution, it used to classify folks who weren’t free white men as 3/5ths of a human being. That was fucked up, so we changed it.

The Second Amendment as currently interpreted has effectively classified folks who aren’t armed and insane as the targets for those who are.

It's time to fucking change that, too.

And speaking of mistakes...

...the latest round of stupidity from this season's GOP candidate field comes from surprisingly ignorant Ben Carson, the climate change/evolution-denying physician.

"I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, 'Hey, guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.'"

Okay, fine; you first, asshole. I'm going out the window.

This latest incident of what Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station likes to call Bang Bang Crazy has brought all the usual idiots out of the woodwork to recommend that the solution to moar gunz is...wait for it...moar gunz! Because...

Good guys with guns! Amirite, hunh? Hunh?!

Sheesh.

Look, I may have been just a simple grunt medic, but I was smart enough to figure out that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a fucking battery six with HE-quick in effect. Except you can't fucking do that in a shopping mall or a theatre.

And short of that, you're pretty much just tossing the dice.

Teaching a human being to take effective deadly action is a damn difficult thing. We spend weeks and months training Joe and Molly to do that and the statistics show that we only succeed in about 30-50% of the time. Most people - even most trained soldiers - react to danger by getting their heads down and trying to stay in defilade.

But let's assume that the training works and our hero heads towards the sound of shooting.

What does he or she encounter?

Fucking chaos, that's what. The nutter is the center of it, shooting left and right...but everyone else is amplifying the chaos; screaming, running, dying...it's total mayhem. Into this comes our hero, trained but not experienced - one hopes - in this sort of bloody mess. How's that likely gonna work out?

First of all, one of the hardest parts of learning to be lethal in combat is making sense of it. We humans are used to an orderly world, a world that moves in a linear sort of way at a relatively leisurely pace. Suddenly - and with our own reactions and judgements spazzing as adrenaline turns our brains into an arcing circuit board and our firing arm into a licorice whip - we step into a world gone mad.

Is this guy running screaming at us the shooter in a kamikaze rage or a target trying to escape? Is the dude over by the wall still and silent with terror or does he have his pistol down by his leg waiting to fire again?

Noise, random movement, incoming fire...it takes an assload of training to even begin to sort this stuff out, and without experience the likelihood of sorting it wrong is damned likely; that's why we try and make veterans into our combat NCOs. Because they've had to sort through this gibbering chaos and hopefully - seeing as they're still alive - have gotten it right.

But there's another, even more complicating and difficult factor here.

This isn't a straightforward military red-on-blue. There's at least four factions; the "bad guy" shooter(s), the prospective "good guy" shooter(s) - if more than one made more fraught by having no connection or experience working together, meaning just as likely to mistake each other for the "bad guy" - the people being shot at...and the police.

The coppers have NO idea who the "bad guy" is. To them anyone with a weapon out is just as likely to be the murderer, which has, in previous massacres, nearly led to blue-on-blue gunfire.

So. You have a nutter firing right and left. You have "good guys with guns" firing at the nutter...but also possibly each other, seeing as unless they were on-scene when the shooting started don't know which armed citizen is the nutter. You have the coppers, when they arrive, shooting at the nutter...and possibly at the "good guys", since they have no way of telling that they are good guys when they roll up.

I'm sorry. That's fucking nutzoid land. Makes the Battle of Ia Drang look like a sorority pillow-fight.

The idea that We the People are happy with one of these nutter shootings happening every month or so seems just as nutzoid. If you told me that without my knowing anything about this country I'd laugh in your face.

At the same time I have the utmost confidence in my fellow citizens to do absolutely nothing to change anything. And that's just really, really depressing.

Update 10/12: As you might expect, Jim Wright takes down the Mad Doctor more completely than I ever could.

Dead to rights

I'm sorry, but this little morality play doesn't seem (to me) to say anything nearly as much about "gun control" or "Second Amendment rights" as much as it does "You're never as fucking smart as you fucking think you are so you need to plan for that".

Because there's really only two ways I can see this playing out:

1. Li'l Jocko reaches into Mommy's "specially designed" pistol-carry purse, extracts her hogleg, jacks back the slide, releases it, takes up a solid, two-handed firing position and puts a round into Mommy's brain housing group (all without Mommy either seeing him do all this or hearing the sound of the automatic pistol action being worked - an unmistakeable noise for someone who was supposed to be all Miss Idaho NRA as the mommy-target is said to have been) or

2. Now-deceased rocket scientist was wandering around Wally Mart with a freaking round under the hammer in violation of every common-sense rule on firearms safety ever thought up and Rule Number Zero for any sort of firearm, thus allowing her sprog to simply slip the bullet-launcher out of her clutch and put one in her ten-ring, easy-peasy.

Believe #1 if you dare, but I gotta go with #2. Which pretty much goes to show you that you can be a valedictorian, scientist, wife, mother, and firearms aficianado, and if you fuck up Rule Number Zero for a tenth of a nanosecond chances are you'll wind up dead as mutton.

Which, in turn, reminds me again that waaaayyyyy too many people can get their little paddy-paws on firearms who shouldn't go out in public with anything more lethal than a fucking licorice whip.

That's my real problem with "Second Amendment Solutions"; because the First Amendment of Not Getting Fucking Shot is that you never forget that the most dangerous weapon is the one closest to you, i.e., the one in your own hands. You ignore that, or forget that, or pretend that it's not true and you become more dangerous to yourself and everyone around you than the maddest lunatic jihadi suicide commando who ever graduated magnum cum madrassi.

Sargassum

There is, apparently, a sort of seaweed called sargassum (Sargassum muticum, among other species) that is well known for drifting about endlessly in the west Atlantic gyre. The early European mariners that sailed that stretch of ocean found it so inescapable that they tagged the place the "Sargasso Sea", a term that has come to mean a mysterious nowhere that traps travelers in a sort of no-time and no-place. These unfortunates drift aimlessly in stasis, without purpose or hope, until, perhaps, they emerge somewhere confused and disoriented.

That's a bit where I am at the moment.

My little life goes on apace; I am busy in small ways with home and family, wife, children, work, my own foolish pleasures.

But all about me I am more and more adrift. I can see the sort of rank, appalling idiocy, meanness, and shortsightedness that seems to be bringing my country closer to a sort of Gilded Age dystopia. (And I really recommend you follow the link to the Bob Reich post I linked to right there; it does a terrific job of summarizing in the example of Detroit how we in the U.S. today really are becoming two societies, separate and unequal, how this is a feature, not a bug, and how this is not good for those of us not in the two-yacht family.)

It seems like every time I bother to read the national news I rediscover that the depressing reality that about a third of my "fellow Americans" are batshit crazy has not changed. It makes me not want to read the national news. Or see if the National Institute of Mental Health can classify "voting Republican" as a mental illness.

In my national legislature the "people's house" does not find it objectionable that a secret agency can use a secret program to secretly collect...something; every single phone call made anywhere? Somewhere? Somehow in pursuit of phantom enemies that may not even exist, since we can't know what or who these enemies are lest we frighten them from using the phones that we then secretly surveil to secretly learn...something secret.

And using this blog to point out, discuss, complain, or rant about this vast national desuetude just seems...well, louche.

So I've been adrift lately, not really wanting to turn this blog into some sort of bottomless well of personal minutiae and yet not really having any sort of real reason to tackle the big issues of the day, those issues being either utterly insoluble so far as I can see or the "solutions" as or more distasteful than the problem.

In fact, the only "issue" that raised my hackles even so far as to make me consider a blog post was the entire business of "self-defense" as defined by the laws of the State of Florida that, in effect, allows an asshole with a weapon to pursue you, force you into either fleeing or fighting and, if the latter, allows them to then legally kill you if the fight goes against them.

This, in a nation that is increasingly idiotic about firearms and who and where they should be carried about in public, is not a good idea. As I have mentioned before; the most fundamental tradeoff required for the "domestic tranquility" specified in the nation's foundation document is internal disarmament. For civil society to function I must be confident that I can disagree with you - even to the point of getting up in your face and using intemperate language - without you pulling a hogleg and blowing a hole in me.

Because if I cannot I really only have two options. I can walk wide of you, all of you, for fear that you can do that. Or I can arm myself and enter into any public dispute ready to draw and fire if I even think you're going to do the same.

There's a reason that those old Westerns where the hero sheriff "tames" the wild out-of-control cowtown always has a scene where the hero sheriff confronts the drunken cowpoke carrying his shootin' iron in violation of the big ol' sign the hero sheriff has nailed up reading "The Carrying of Firearms Is Strictly Prohibited".

Because if he doesn't, then little me the meek store clerk has to strap on my own .45, just in case the drunken cowpoke comes into my store demanding a bottle of whiskey and some hard candy and threatening to plug me if I don't give it up. Or stops me on the sidewalk to tell me I look like a sissy and that I need to lick his boots because that's what sissies do.

And I was all het up about this until I read our Oregon laws regarding "self-defense" and realized that we here rather sensibly draw a bright line at the place where the armed citizen starts the fight; "...a person is not justified in using physical force upon another person if...(t)he person is the initial aggressor..." (ORS 161.125 (2)) There's a little loophole where if I start the fight and then lose and the other party doesn't let me escape I can shoot 'em. But there's none of the sort of nonsense here that's in the Florida law about how if I'm fearful that the guy I followed and bullied may kill me that I can kill them.

So there's nothing here for me.

So...how about a nice picture of my son's swim lessons? The Boy is totally rocking both the front and back crawl.

Does anyone still call that the "Australian crawl" anymore?

Oh, and "my" EPL club Norwich City came to Portland last night and played a "friendly" with the Timbers.

Nothing at stake, just a fun evening watching some of the Timbers guys we don't see much play and checking out some of the new signings for Norwich that included the improbably named Ricky van Wolfswinkel who turned up wearing #9 for NCFC but was rather less than wolfish in front of goal, the local lads running off 1-nil winners.

One thing I should mention; this now-inescapable procession where the players of both teams are escorted onto the pitch by (or escort onto the pitch) twin files of local urchins.

I guess I'm not sure of the point of this parade. Is it to give the nippers a thrill? I guess I'd have been thrilled to have marched out alongside some idol of my youth; I certainly hope these kids are. But given my own son's interest in the game I wonder. He loves to play but for the playing itself. He doesn't know any of the professional players or care about them. He'd have a hard time picking any of this year's Timbers squad out of a police lineup.

So it makes me wonder if the little kid-parade isn't just a bit of cynical showmanship on the part of the club.

I just liked this image, the patient woman with her book waiting for the gates to open. Very Portland. Generally we don't race about and shout unless we have a good reason for racing about and shouting.

And you will not find me at a Timbers match sporting the opponent's colors...unless the opponent is a team I have followed and cared about for many years that has come 5,000 miles to play in Portland.

"Kick it, throw it, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now's your chance,
Hurrah! We've scored a goal.
City!, City!, City!"

Mind, I'm still drifting. I'll try and come up with something of interest this weekend, some stray seaweed tendril from the slow, sunny summer of my personal ocean.

Oregon Assholes Award II: Sellwood Dumbfuck Guntards

Because nothing says FREEDOM!!! like wandering around a residential neighborhood in a major city sportin' your AR-15 wood.

These guys qualify as certifiable Oregon Assholes for a number of reasons:

1. They picked Sellwood, a very quiet little Portland neighborhood, to walk around slinging their metal cocks. Neither one of these assholes is from Sellwood - in fact, Guntard Warren is all the way from Medford, waaaayyyy south in the more rednecky-part of Oregon. The other one is from Clackamas County, well known for having livestock smarter than many of the registered voters. Assholes.

2. Here's the public statement of one of the assholes:

"I am a full flesh libertarian and a gun right extremest. We the people should control our government and bring us back to when we had and own our Life, Liberty, and Property. I hate socialist, dictators, and corrupt Government. We are losing are rights every day while not knowing it and then it become to late."

You will please note that neither one of these assholes was protesting the immense number of people incarcerated for long periods for minor drug crimes. Neither one is protesting the immunized spying on Americans facilitated by the PATRIOT Act, or the warrentless searches, or the imprisonment without trial, or the torture. Losing rights? Losing rights, douchebag? You've lost more goddamn rights than a Jewish activist in Omsk and the only ones that have gotten your panties in a twist are the ones that have you prancing around with faux-military firearms like some sort of NRA-lobbyist's wet dream? Assholes.

3. The assholes cost me tax dollars. These assholes generated ten calls to the 9-1-1 center and at least one Portland Police Bureau stop. They also caused a lockdown at one of the daycares in Sellwood. At the very least the City ought to bill these assholes for the time lost checking out their little stroll and the daycare should hit them up for the classroom time lost to the entirely-reasonable fear that these idiots might pull another Newtown.

4. The assholes cost local businesses money; several locked up on the, again, not unreasonable suspicion that the jackholes might take it into their heads to rob them.

There's a good reason that one of the first rules of urban civil society is that we disarm. Our history of armed assholedom is way too long to kid ourselves about the good that some noble individual might do with a bullet-launcher. The sheer weight of assholery will bury him or her in a heartbeat.

An asshole with an attitude armed with feet and fists can be a problem. An asshole armed with a knife may be lethal.

And asshole with a firearm WILL be lethal at a much lower degree of difficulty than that required to kill you with an elbow, a cleaver, or an axe.

Frankly, I don't walk around with a firearm because I don't trust myself not to reach for it when some asshole gets up in my face. And I'm a smart guy who hates fighting and has outgrown the groinical-reflex phase of manhood; you bet your ass I don't trust YOU - who the hell knows what kind of person, or whacko, or nutter, you are.

And you want to walk around with rifles, assholes? My Army brothers are were doing just that at the very time you fuckers were; walking around with rifles in their hands. But they aren't walking around peaceful Sellwood. They were walking around some of the shittiest places on Earth, walking around them for no reason that will ever bring them joy, or peace, or wisdom, or riches. They were not being asked whether they want to walk those places. And some number of them will never come home alive or sound.

And yet, there you were, as greasy and stupid as a pork rind and as useless as an encyclopedia in a monkey-house, you arrogant pricks, shoving your blued-steel cocks in everyone's face in quiet Sellwood like the pathetic wannabe-soldier porn-fluffers you are.

Want to walk around with rifles, douchebags? I'll bet there's a street in Kabul where you'd find lots of people who'd love to see your sorry, lame, "gun rights extremist" ass walking down the street with rifles. And here's somebody to tell you what would happen to your sorry sad act;

Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, pride of Bow Bazaar,
Owner of a native press, "Barrishter-at-Lar,"
Waited on the Government with a claim to wear
Sabres by the bucketful, rifles by the pair.

Then the Indian Government winked a wicked wink,
Said to Chunder Mookerjee: "Stick to pen and ink.
They are safer implements, but, if you insist,
We will let you carry arms wheresoe'er you list."

Hurree Chunder Mookerjee sought the gunsmith and
Bought the tubes of Lancaster, Ballard, Dean, and Bland,
Bought a shiny bowie-knife, bought a town-made sword,
Jingled like a carriage-horse when he went abroad.

But the Indian Government, always keen to please,
Also gave permission to horrid men like these --
Yar Mahommed Yusufzai, down to kill or steal,
Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer, Tantia the Bhil;

Killar Khan the Marri chief, Jowar Singh the Sikh,
Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat, Abdul Huq Rafiq --
He was a Wahabi; last, little Boh Hla-oo
Took advantage of the Act -- took a Snider too.

They were unenlightened men, Ballard knew them not.
They procured their swords and guns chiefly on the spot;
And the lore of centuries, plus a hundred fights,
Made them slow to disregard one another's rights.

With a unanimity dear to patriot hearts
All those hairy gentlemen out of foreign parts
Said: "The good old days are back -- let us go to war!"
Swaggered down the Grand Trunk Road into Bow Bazaar,

Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat found a hide-bound flail;
Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail;
Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee
As he ground the butcher-knife of the Khyberee.

Jowar Singh the Sikh procured sabre, quoit, and mace,
Abdul Huq, Wahabi, jerked his dagger from its place,
While amid the jungle-grass danced and grinned and jabbered
Little Boh Hla-oo and cleared his dah-blade from the scabbard.

What became of Mookerjee? Soothly, who can say?
Yar Mahommed only grins in a nasty way,
Jowar Singh is reticent, Chimbu Singh is mute.
But the belts of all of them simply bulge with loot.

What became of Ballard's guns? Afghans black and grubby
Sell them for their silver weight to the men of Pubbi;
And the shiny bowie-knife and the town-made sword are
Hanging in a Marri camp just across the Border.

What became of Mookerjee? Ask Mahommed Yar
Prodding Siva's sacred bull down the Bow Bazaar.
Speak to placid Nubbee Baksh -- question land and sea --
Ask the Indian Congressmen -- only don't ask me!

Assholes.

American Skin

In case you're wondering what prompted the violent posts of the past several days, this is my daughter's classroom Friday, the very same day that a nutter took his Bushmaster .223 to a school very like it, and a classroom very like it, and killed children and teachers very like the ones you are seeing.

Now speaking generally I have never understood the "need" for anyone to own one of these military-style weapons. Frankly, an old-school Ruger 10/22 would seem perfectly capable of killing as many first-graders as you need to feed your sickness and has the added feature of being terrific for hunting squirrels when society collapses in the wake of the Zombie Apocalypse.

And I've never understood the idea that you can't legislate the type and number of arms that We the People can bear. How many fuckin' GI Joe look-alike Bushmaster .223's do you need? Christ, one is too many. The fuckin' deer and squirrels have yet to shoot back. And cricket bats and Winchesters work just fine on the zombies; you've seen Shaun of the Dead, right? What, a bolt-action Mauser isn't cool enough for ya?

But far beyond and above all the bloviating, this is what matters to me. She is half of my skin in the game.

If she, and millions like her, can be 0.001% less likely to capped by some nutter with a bad attitude and an autoloading rifle by the hard graft of separating the two then to me the benefit is worth the cost. Mental health? Don't make me laugh. I'm an old sergeant, and I do simple, easy, and certain. I know with dead solid surety that it's simpler, easier, and more certain to take the weapon out of the hands of the asshole nutter than take the nutter out of asshole nutter with Prozac and a couch.

I don't pretend to have an unbiased opinion on the subject. If you're coming here for that you are in the wrong place. On this subject I am in full-rant mode.

I am tired of the lies about tyranny prevented and the evasion of real death and maiming done to innocents. I am tired of people with vested interests in weapons lying about how regulation equals confiscation. I am tired of the endless blaming of the nutters and not the admission of how much more difficult it would be for them to indulge their murderous nuttery if they had to do it with a kitchen knife.

But to me what is the most important thing is that these children, that MY child, benefit from increasing the chance that the next nutter won't be able to lay his hands on a Bushmaster .223 before he walks through the door of this classroom.

If this be tyranny, I will make the most of it.

Requiem for Kindergartners

Away with us, he's going,
The solemn-eyed;
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hill-side.
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast;
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than
he can understand.

~ W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child

I really cannot speak further on this subject.

On the madness of mixing madness and autoloading weaponry I cannot convince anyone who cannot be convinced by dead children.

Mr. Yeats has said it already, and better than I ever will.

This Pretty Much Sums Up The "Gun Control Debate"

Wherein I am prescient.

Two days ago I wrote this:

"Then we really need to start accepting that so long as we're going to be okay with widespread private firearms that these occasional nutter-shootings are just going to happen. They are. And nothing short of a violent change in the way American society and public law works will change that. This is the thing about firearms; they're fucking easy. They're simple to work, especially modern military-style firearms which are designed to be used by deadhead draftees and Somali teenagers. They're quick to debug if they malfunction. And they're easy to use; just point at the nearest toddler and shoot.

It takes some strength, some determination, and some damn deadly difficult-to-learn homicide skills to kill someone with a nunchuck. Or a pickaxe. Or a bread knife.

But an AR-15?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, as the little ponies say."

And sure enough, like a deadly Fairie Queen in a pantomime, comes another.

I cannot really add to what I said at the end of the comments for the earlier nutter-shooting: "There will not be any change in the nutter-shooting situation until some advocacy group - "Mothers Against Autoloading Weapons" ("Maaw" or some damn thing) - begins doing what MADD did for drunk driving and jams the 2nd Amendment sideways up the NRA's ass.

Period."

But, honestly? I'm betting you that this will be off the heavy-rotation news cycle by NEXT Friday and forgotten by next week.

Sigh. Fuckin' people...

Clackamas Slayride

Another shopping day 'til Christmas, another whackadoodle takes his his buddy's rifle to the mall.

We could blog the hell out of this.

But why bother?

We pretty much know already what stories will come out of this. The shooter will turn out to be either the scary loner with the gun collection (He used to scare the kids! We almost never saw him but when we did he was a freakazoid!") or the sweet boy who seemed so normal ("He used to mow our lawn." "He was always so polite...").

The police will conclude that there was nothing that could have been done that wasn't.

The usual suspects will fulminate about how the loon managed to get his hands on an AR-15. The other usual suspects will bloviate about how a sturdy yeoman with a Glock could have put one into his brain housing group and stopped the rampage before it began.

The usual ghoulish fascination will erupt through the daily fire-and-murder-news cycle for a day or so and be off the heavy rotation by the week's end.

And the sad reality is that we know, we simply know, how to make these random nutter shootings more difficult. Firearms, especially autoloading firearms, make it ridiculously easy to kill random strangers. If this zombie had to indulge his bloodlust with an axe, or a scythe, or even a bolt-action rifle it would have been orders of magnitude more difficult for him.

It's really that simple. Really.

But autoloading firearms are also just plain fuckin' fun to shoot, and we love our shooting fun, and we, We the People, are perfectly content to let others die or live with their wounds so that we may have our fun.

We're just too canny to come out and say it that way.

But, hell, y'all know that.

In fact, we discussed the hell out of it back in the spring when another nutter went and shot up a theatre in Colorado.

So. Silent Night Deadly Night. Chopping Mall. Whatever.

What else is new?

Couple of quick observations:

First, we really live in an extraordinarily safe time and place. As little as three hundred, five hundred, a thousand years ago we'd be shocked if most of the people we knew weren't dead of the Plague, or raped, butchered, then raped again in the latest fill-in-the-blank invasion/civil war/pogrom. I think that's why these random mad minutes make the news; they shatter the illusion we live in that our lives and our homes are so perfectly safe. They're a little teensy one-nutter Mongol Horde thundering in over the horizon to rape and pillage.

Then we really need to start accepting that so long as we're going to be okay with widespread private firearms that these occasional nutter-shootings are just going to happen. They are. And nothing short of a violent change in the way American society and public law works will change that.

And the final, simple, reality is that humans kill each other, always have and probably always will. Homo homini lupus; Man is a wolf to Man. This little fracas is just another in the unbroken line that starts back with the first australopithecus that went doolally with a camel thighbone and brained some of the gang around the waterhole and will continue on until the first flare of the solar nova bakes all humanity to a delicate crunch.

Really...what else is there to say?

Only what we say here in Portland; forget it, Jake; it's Clackamas County.

Update 1, 12/12 p.m.: Here's some more detail on the idiot who did the shooting. He apparently lifted the Armalite from a pal, and for the record here's the part that gets me: "...the rifle jammed during the 22-year-old's attack, but he managed to get it working again."

So this numbnuts steals what we'll have to assume is a weapon he's completely unfamiliar with, manages to get it to double feed (or either fail to feed or fail to eject, all fairly typical AR-15-type malfunctions) while he's capping sweet white-haired grannies and grampies, and then manages to do some sort of immediate action and gets it working again.

This is the thing about firearms; they're fucking easy. They're simple to work, especially modern military-style firearms which are designed to be used by deadhead draftees and Somali teenagers. They're quick to debug if they malfunction. And they're easy to use; just point at the nearest toddler and shoot.

It takes some strength, some determination, and some damn deadly difficult-to-learn homicide skills to kill someone with a nunchuck. Or a pickaxe. Or a bread knife.

But an AR-15?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, as the little ponies say.

Update 2: Charlie Pierce, as usual, has more, and better, to say.