Thoughts (and prayers)

Two opposing (or at least offsetting) things can both be true:

Political violence is lethal to democratic republics. Regardless of the target or the cause. Assassinating or assaulting the worst idiotic would-be tinpot dictator (coughTrumpcough) is no better than murdering Abe Lincoln. 

The bottom line is that if the cost of political disagreement is lethal, the wages of disagreement will perforce become violent. No sensible person will continue to oppose lethal force with reasoned argument. Bullets will drive out ballots and campaigns will become "campaigns" in the military meaning of the word.

But.

There's a bright line of fault to this sordid little drama, and it runs direct as a bullet towards the faction so now loudly aggrieved and self-righteous about it.

For generations that "conservative" faction has done everything it can to bring its candidate to this place.

It has single-mindedly fought every sensible effort to prevent people like this shooter from getting to that rooftop (synagogue, grocery store, concert venue, nightclub...) with the tool (military-grade firearms) he needed. 

It pranced around the halls of  legislation sporting adorable little auto-rifle pins on its lapels. Which "well regulated militia" did our boy belong to? Remind me..?

It has doggedly fought to turn our politics into a zero-sum battleground by turning its political opponents into mortal enemies. It has fled from "my distinguished opponent" to "scum", "animals", "traitors", "un-American". It has embraced its country's enemies, foreign and domestic, to win allies against its domestic rivals.

It has made violence the language of its "debate".

Once you've done that, once you've created the climate of anger and hate, once you've mobilized the freikorps of Threepers and Proud Boys, once you've declared open season on your political foes, you've effectively removed the firewall between political speech and political violence.

You've lost your right to be pissy when that violence comes for your guy.

The GOP got us here.

If we allow it, they will take us even further. Look up "Project 2025" if you want to be horrified for the head-on collision of venality, autocracy, and theocracy that the "conservative" faction is jonesing for in this country, and the actual violence it will do to millions of people here.

So this ridiculous drama changes nothing.

Tubby, stitches in his ear or no, is still our Sulla and his faction is our enemy.

And if We the People don't want to be ruled by that faction our path is clear, and it leads to the polling place in November.

It's up to us. As Jim Wright likes to say; if we want a better nation, we need to be better citizens.

...but even tougher for the dead guy, eh?

Headline in today's online Oregonian:

The context here is, as it always seems to be, supplied by the Mercury newsweekly:

"(Note: When the cops were finally forced to accept body cameras, which departments across the country have been using for years, PPB spokesperson Lt. Nathan Sheppard had this to say: “This is huge and it’s long overdue.” That's funny... according to every report available, the PPB and union has been fighting against the idea of body cams since 2014, when the Department of Justice first ordered them to start using cams.)"

Couple of things here.

First, this is BTDT with cops. Portland cops, yes, but "cops", generally. Copaganda portrays these jokers as the "thin blue line" but, again, it's you and me who are the first and second and every other "line" against criminal anarchy. If we're not generally decent people, nothing but a full-on occupying army of coppers could hold that line.

The degree to which coppers shoot people is ridiculous given the not-Somalia-like state of American society. The cops are being trained to think and act like soldiers, and that's bad for them and everyone else.

That said...

The other part of this is that, as we've also discussed to death here, there's too many goddamn guns out there and too many dipsticks who have no business walking around strapped walking around with them.

So the eagerness of the coppers to bust a cap in people's ass can't really be separated from the likelihood that the sort of people they are forced to interact with are armed. That makes "shoot first" the sensible reaction to those interactions. The cops may be a problem, but the guns are the problem.

What's really frustrating about ALL of this is that there's absolutely zero probability that any of this - cops, guns - will change anytime in the foreseeable future. The political will isn't there. If Sandy Hook couldn't produce meaningful change in firearms law, well...

And the coppers?

The City of Portland has never really tried to do anything about the toxic mess that is Portland Police Bureau. As time after time we run into the reality that PPB is a sinkhole of incompetent and racist assholes that somehow never translates into actions that would make PPB more competent and less racist or asshole-y. We just throw a crap-ton of money at these jokers.

Like so much of our politics, there's simple and sensible alternatives that are utterly un-doable because of a hard knot of utterly impossible people who refuse to even consider doing them.

Today in Responsible Gun Ownership

The dude in the SUV has just killed the other dude lying there on the street, and he's going to shoot the third dude, the one who's taking the photo, through both legs, shattering one of his femurs.

The story turned up in my Xhitter feed the other day as a "OMFG CRIME IN PORTLAND!!!" headline (except without the actual headline, of course,  because Elmo don't roll that way anymore...).

It linked to this story in the digital version of our "local newspaper", which you can't read because it's behind a fucking paywall - local news, my ass - but trust me; it plays all the hits; it mentions "downtown violence", "unrest", "drug use" and "homeless".

In the Xhitter comments we filled in the last of the bingo card: "Democrat city" and "gun control" (as in "how's that gun control working out for you now, libs?!?")

Y'know what it DIDN'T mention?

"Financier". (or "Banker" or "Rich Prick" - y'know, coded words for "wealthy white dude"), or

"Legally owned handgun".

 Because that kinda kills the whole Portland Is Over - Downtown Hellscape Edition vibe, dunnit?

You can't gin up the whole Scary Doper (Probably Colored) Hoboes theme if the nutter shooting is being done by some rich white normie with a legally-obtained concealed carry permit who's just a fucking hair-trigger asshole with an anger problem and a round under the fucking hammer, amiright?

So it's critical to rope in all that other stuff, so the rubes and MAGAts and the other FAUX-addicted ClackaCrackers can continue seamlessly hating on Portland, liberals, and the smelly poor.

But I might as well ask a dog to stop licking it's balls as expect the so-called "news" media to stop throwing this red meat to the numbskulls. I've been ringing this bell a loog, looooong time. It does no good at all. The 2nd Amendment has become why people like this rich fuckstick get to drive around fully loaded and kill people.

And, short of solving the sort of people who keep voting for "2nd Amendment Rights" over everything else?

It's not going to be solved, either.

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...

The Politics of Stupid

So here's what's been bugging me.

This past November the voters of Oregon went marginally in favor - 50.6 to 49.4 - of a ballot measure, 114, that imposed some restrictions on firearms.

Those included:

• requiring permits issued by local law enforcement to buy a firearm;
• requiring photo ID, fingerprints, safety training, criminal background check, and fee payment to apply for a permit; and
• prohibiting manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, possessing, using, or transferring ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and make violations a class A misdemeanor.

 And y'know what?

That's just fine as far as I'm concerned. 

It doesn't infringe the "right to keep and bear arms". It infringes the non-right to keep and bear certain types of magazines, to keep and bear arms without being evaluated for things like criminal records or knowing how to use the fucking things, and being on record so that IF your bang-stick gets used for bad purposes it can be chased back to you.

If I'd have been the ballot measure writer I'd have added some of Jim Wright's "bang bang sanity" proscriptions like making "accidental" shootings crimes that would lose you your "right" to fuck up other people with the weapon you obviously don't know how to use and have no business having and requiring people to store the things like we did in the Army, locked up right.

So vox populi vox Dei, right? Gonna get right on that, sheriff. Right?

No.

Because if you're a wingnut ammosexual then the public spirit only bloweth where wingnut fap-memes listeth, and so, of course, a judge in West Buttfuckistan (or Harney County, which is effectively the same thing...) heard a suit brought by a bunch of these clucks and, of course, has been hammering down Measure 114 because...reasons.

Well.

I don't really need to go over - again - why fewer people with smaller, slower, less capable firearms is good.

It's the same reasons that a NASCAR-grade Camero isn't street legal. What soldiers need in war is the exact opposite of what Sparky needs behind the counter of the 7-Eleven.

But because the Right has spent more than sixty years grooming these chucklefucks to scree like wounded eagles anytime some sensible reduction in the mad carnival of firearms is proposed here in the Land of the Free trying to make that obvious fact a reality is damn near impossible.

Different day, same nitwit wingnut shit, though, right?

Here's the problem with just shrugging about that.

These dopes are making life harder for all of us, and not just about firearms.

Some of the things they want - more racism, more prejudice, more ignorance, more misogyny - are 1) irritating and vile as well as 2) predictable, but are baked into them and can only be ignored when trivial and mocked and slammed down when violent. 

Any sensible government - any sensible organization - can and will do that. Even corporations, sociopathic sonsofbitches that they are, realize that gays and immigrants and dusky people buy toasters, so being associated with redneck shitbirds is bad for business.

No. It's the other political obsessions that they're being talked into now that are so fucked up.

These ammosexual rule-free Days of Jubilee are one of them.

If you think we're bad here in Oregon look at Florida, where their Wingnut Jesus wants to enact "constitutional carry", meaning that any and everyone can walk around strapped. No rules, no license, no training, no nothing.

Imagine how your average rural Florida deputy sheriff - Nobel Prize winning philosopher and gentle soul that he will be - is going to act now that EVERYone he meets is packing heat?

You think we're way ahead of the mean on copper shooting of randos now?

Oh, and try pulling that shit if your skin color is marginally darker than a sheet of notebook paper.

Fuuuuuucccccckkkkkk.

But even beyond how fucked up that is, is the wingnut neediness to repeal the 20th Century.

When I was learning my trade, an older engineer told me that things like building codes and design requirements were enacted "one death at a time".

Because we would do our best to head off fucked up things like deadly building fires or earthquake collapses based on our best guess on how bad those fires or earthquakes could get.

Then a worse fire or earthquake would come along, kill a bunch of people, we'd learn from that and revise our codes and designs to head off those worse fires and earthquakes.

If you look at public health and safety rules - things like OHSA regs, vaccination requirements, medical practice - between 1900 and 2000 you see a fairly broad, if uneven, progression from "we don't understand and couldn't do anything even if we did" to "oh, okay, here's what's happening and here's how we can prevent or mitigate that."

No everyone was on board with that - look back at the "polio monkey serum" shit that the Birtchers ran with back in the 1940s and 50s - but the public in general agreed; safer is better in the general sense.

So it was less fun to drive with seatbelts and sober. But it was safer for everyone.

It wasn't much fun to get measles shots. But it was safer than getting measles, safer for everyone.

It was more irking to have guards on saws, and rules for ladders. Some things - like the tipping toddler on 5-gallon buckets, seemed even silly and excessive.

Taking the handle off the pump sucked. But shitting yourself to death from cholera sucked worse.

The general public consensus was that this stuff was a minor issue compared to, say, dying horribly of smallpox and cholera or being paralyzed by polio.

Now that consensus is in ruins, and it's for a simple, horrible, stupid reason;

Because the political right's policy goals are subjectively shit - plutocracy, oligarchy, theocracy - they need red cultural meat to feed their C.H.U.D. hordes, something like 40% of the U.S. public, and they've chosen things like democracy, equity, and, yes, public health to feed this ignorant beast.

As the linked article points out, it's killing those CHUDs.

And, as the article also points out, the CHUDs don't care. 

If those cultural "wins" kill those they hate and "own the libs"?

They'll die happy.

How the fuck do you fight that?

That's whackadoodle cult thinking.

That's hashishin thinking, the kind of thinking that made blissed-out drug-addled assassins that you had to kill to stop.

And, as I've also said here before, if that is the case...

...and I believe it is...

...the implication is that our choices are grim; give up all the social and political and economic and even medical gains of the 20th Century,

or,

Kill them.

I know which I think is the worse option.

But I also know that I'm rolling a massive rock uphill to even begin to clue the vast bulk of my supposedly-fellow citizens in that that's even a possibility, much less a necessity.

And so here we are.

They will kill us before they let us take the fucking handle off the fucking pump.

And that, my friend, is a Peak Fucking Stupid way to die.

Bang Bang Crazy: Supreme Court Conclusion

 

On Thursday, June 23, 2022, six of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States wrote the conclusion to my little thread about the butchery that took place inside an elementary school in Texas almost exactly a month earlier.

And that conclusion was: we're wingnuts and we love guns, so fuck you.

It's really just that simple.

The modern "conservative" movement loves them some guns. Big guns, little guns, old guns, new guns...guns are what gives them wood. There is no firearm that the current SCOTUS majority considers too risky, too dangerous, too lethal, for some mouth-breathing peckerhead to carry around the public square.

Why? Because there's a good reason for mouth-breathing peckerheads to stroll about armed like a Nung mercenary?

Fuck, no.

It's because ammosexuals - people who get their rocks off having badass weaponry - are a crucial voting element of the Republican criminal conspiracy.

Without the gun-humpers, the racists, the incels, the bible-bangers, no Republican would ever get elected. Ever. Again.

So this is them throwing brains to their zombie horde.

There is no other reason.

They give fuck-all about the people who are going to die, who are going to live miserable lives with the damage the bullet will do to their arms or legs or guts (have you ever seen a gunshot wound? Unless it's from a peashooter .22 it's not a nice neat little hole. High-velocity ammunition shreds human meat and splinters bone. It commonly leaves you crippled and in pain for the rest of your life) or the grief of loss and rage at the insult to minds, lives, and bodies those firearms and the mouth-breathing peckerheads who will soon be humping them everywhere will do.

And don't even get me started on how the already-twitchy trigger fingers of the cowardly cops will get an order of magnitude twitchier.

Adam Serwer has a terrific article up in The Atlantic that explains that this isn't some sort of "conservative" bug. It's a feature:

"The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along."

 Which, of course, leads us to the past week's Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

Wingnut assurances to the contrary, people have been purging their spawn since there were people. The difference that Roe made was that the person outside the spawn was likely to survive. 

But, like the Bruen decision was not intended to make civil society safer, saner, more reasonable and more attractive for everyone but to give the Republican gun-humping faction a chubby, Dobbs isn't actually intended to make things more sane and sensible for actual human beings but to make the fundamentalist freaks that are one of the other important parts of the GOP base cum their brains out.

That's it.

That's all.

That's the entire reason these black-robed fuckers are tearing out everything built since 1929 they can lay their grabby little dickbeaters on.

Look up "nondelegation" if you really want to get a shiver of existential terror.

That's where these fucksticks are going. 1929? Just a pit stop on the way to 1879.

As I said back in May; these people are coming for us.

Any of us who aren't like them.

They're coming with force and fear.

Serwer sums it up neatly:

"The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. (T)he right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing."

This is what they want for you:

It's from The Onion, but don't kid yourself.

It's only as funny as long as they haven't actually done it.

All these nice people? The church lady, the gruff-but-loveable old cuss down at the VFW, the nice missionary who handed you the tract the other day, the respectable attorney who's the chairman of the local Kiwanis?

They're your deadly fucking enemies and want you powerless and crushed.

So.

It's really simple:

Fight them.

Fight them or be destroyed.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 2)

 

Just look at 'em. 

The Uvalde, Texas Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics Team.

Pretty badass, aren't they? All dress-right-dress-and-covered-down, got their GI on, tac boots and blue fatigues, locked-n-loaded and ready to protect and serve, right?

Except they didn't.

When an angry but untrained young man with a similar weapon turned up to kill a bunch of the kiddies their P.R. claimed were the reason for their existence, these heroes stood around with their thumbs up their collective ass for an hour or so letting the dude wax those kids.

What you and I and every other American needs to get is that this was a feature, not a bug.

Think about who those coppers actually work for.

You? Me? Those kids or their parents?

C'mon. Pull the other one. That's enough to make a cat laugh.

The Uvalde cops work for "the City of Uvalde" just like the Portland Police Bureau works for the "City of Portland". 

When was the last time your city or town did something because you wanted or needed it?

That's not to say that the people who the cops do work for - the federal, state, county, or city governments and those who have outsized influence on them such as wealthy donors or corporations or political action groups - don't do things that help work for you.

But they don't do it for you.

And neither do the cops.

Instead, given the way most police in the United States have been infected with Soldier-Cop Disease, it's more likely that these rascals look at you and me as nuisances at best and enemies at worst. We're not why they do their job; we're a problem that has to be solved for them to do what they see as their job. We're the randos in Nisour Square that scare the shit out of them, that put them on edge and make them reach for their weapons.

Now.

I have a tiny amount of sympathy for the coppers, given the immense number of firearms wandering around the U.S. public. It's kinda hard to avoid being paranoid and trigger-happy when any rando could be a whackaloon with a hogleg and a hard-on for killing someone.

Not that they usually kill coppers, mind. That's hard and risky; it's a lot more fun and easy to kill kids or shoppers or folks in church or massage parlors.

But my sympathy is hammered pretty flat by the hard cold facts that those coppers will willingly shoot your or me but are unwilling to risk going in hard on some whackaloon with a black rifle.

Frankly, it's time and past time for We the People to get over the ridiculous tongue-bathing we give our coppers.

I get it; we've had years and years of copaganda, going all the way back to the old Dragnet- and The FBI-style TV shows, telling us that these jokers are the Thin Blue Line between us and anarchy.

But think about it.

Coppers don't "prevent" crimes.

Unless the copper is literally standing right there, the cop has no way to "prevent" crime. Or anything else, when you stop and think about it, from a riot to a hobo taking a dump on your lawn.

Portland has a whopping 0.0012 sworn officers - actual cops - per person. How the ever loving fuck is one-thousandth of a cop going to stop me from whipping up on your head. Like I said two years ago; what maintains our civil society isn't some thin fucking blue line. It's us, you and me, being good citizens and good neighbors.

Coppers don't "solve" crimes, either.

I'm old enough to remember Sergeant Friday locking up all the baddies every week. Crime didn't pay, at least not on TV.

In real life?

The cops barely clear half of all murder cases. Here in Portland? It's less than half.

And that's THE big crime, felony murder. Figure out for yourself how the Blue Line does with stuff like robbery, rape, or burglary.

Yeah, like that.

So what do these tax-fattened fucksticks do?

Largely exactly what their owners - the governments and wealthy government-influencers - want them to do; keep the canaille in line, show the flag so the plebs see who's in charge, do the minimum to intimidate the normies from misbehaving and to ensure that there's no visible opportunity to break loose and run wild.

I'm not against that, exactly. That's what We the People seem to be fine with, and, besides, someone has to roust the smelly crazy homeless people off the Safeway parking lot and it's sure as Hell not gonna be me.

But there's no reason to valorize or even defer to the people we pay to do that sort of stuff.

It's not like they're going to charge a looney murderer with a rifle for us, right?

No.

The coppers won't save us from these lunatic killers and their semiauto hard-ons.

Next time, let's discuss what, if anything, is possible.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 1)

 

I'll be back with some thoughts on the latest watering of the Tree of Liberty, but let's get this out of the way first - here's an observation from an old GI:

 

A school shooter - hell, almost any "shooter" in a civilian setting - is pretty much the exact equivalent of an "ambush" in a military setting.

You're doing the civilian equivalent of diddy-bopping down the trail - studying, serving macchiatos, shopping - when someone does the equivalent of blowing the claymore and opens up from the tules and you're caught in the dead center of the kill zone. 

 

You - unless you're insane-grade paranoid - are completely unprepared both physically and mentally to respond with quick, accurate, deadly force. So - like the GIs inside the ambush kill zone - what you pretty much almost always do is; die.

 

So the people who are running this "arm and train" level of bullshit aren't telling you that to "arm and train" anyone, be it teachers, bank tellers, grocery clerks, won't do more than provide another target. 

 

Because the third part that has to follow "arm" and "train" to make a difference - the part that they don't want you to hear - is that these armed and trained people would have to walk around like a grunt in a weapons-free ROE combat environment; on the immediate, hair-trigger edge of a violent response to the slightest hint of danger.

 

Now think of your fourth-grade teacher being there through the whole fucking school day.

 

And...seriously?

 

(Next: To Protect and to...what? Are you fucking nuts..?)

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.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition)

 

Over at Nancy Nall's place the inevitable discussion about who gets to get shot down in the streets (grocery stores, rub-and-tug-shops...) because freedum!!! 

One of the commentors made the following remark:

“…let’s give the olde white guys credit in 1787: they’re thinking about muzzleloading black powder rifles…”

To which I replied that I think it’s even simpler than that; these guys were thinking with their wallets. And, to a great extent, their “republican” ideology. It wasn't the weapons. It was the fiscals and the politics.

The thing the gunsuckers always elide is the first section of that amendment: “A well-regulated militia…” The rich guys who wrote the foundational documents 1) were appalled at the expense of a standing army (and navy, which is insane when you think of how important maritime commerce was to the infant U.S., but, Jefferson, FFS…) and 2) were deeply committed to the idea that a standing army was a “danger to liberty”. All those soldiers with no citizen cred, just waiting for the demagogue to come along and coup with them? 

No way, Citizen Jose’!

So their idea was that the Good People of the country would flock to the standards when danger threatened and form “the nation in arms” (and keeping in mind that their model were the colonial militias, which largely kept their weapons (and almost all their propellant – the black powder) in a local “magazine” where it would be issued when that alarm was sounded).

So it wasn’t even the notion of every swinging richard running around with a military-grade firearm that would have bugged them. It was the notion that that firearm was for using on their fellow citizens for random whackadoodle reasons and that wasn’t a good reason to keep those firearms locked up in the magazines.

And let’s not EVEN go into the notion that they wanted every Joe and Molly to have a bang-stick to prevent “tyranny” coming from the new U.S. government, because the moment that happens Shay’s and the whiskey rebels will need a moment to whip the fuck up on your head.

Nope. The current firearms priapism is a symptom of the prion disease that has eaten the brains of waaaaayyyyy too many Americans, including nearly all “conservatives”.

 You'd think that at this point...

 But, no. I mean, Sandy Hook! Rando homicidal looney guns down adorable kiddies. That doesn't shake you? You insist it was a fake, or "crisis actors", or whatever?

The crazy has gone too deep, and there's no digging it out now. 

(And the title of this post comes from Jim Wright's series on this whole nonsense. They're archived here and are all worth a read, as is his "Bang Bang Sanity" essay that discusses some commonsense ideas that will help put a lid on this nonsense. 

Not that We the People will.)

Another day, another ammosexual "WTF"

So the SCOTUS has refused to hear an appeal from a couple of Kansas gunlickers who were caught with illegal suppressors.

From what I can tell, these gimmicks are the new throbbing erection for the sort of people who get huge wood from fondling firearms; in this case (I can only imagine) as part of the Seal Team Six fantasies cherished by these people, the ones where they are sneaking into the Terrorists' Hideout and eliminating the sentries with their silenced pistol or submachinegun.

While it's good that even the GOP nutbags on the court weren't willing to go all in on these Rainbow Six: Siege wannabes' suppressor fapping, the most revolting part of this court case is that the fucking State of Kansas, along with seven other states' AGs, joined in the appeal because it's obviously in the states' interests to have a bunch of fucking lunatic gunbunnies running around with silenced firearms because what the fuck.

The "explanation" I've heard for why these nimrods want to put cans on their metal dicks is because something something hearing protection something.

Okay. So. Word up.

I've been there and done that and shot the real noisemakers, the REALLY big guns, and I got your fucking hearing protection right here, chief:

Works just fine to protect your delicate, shell-like ears from the bad bang-bang, AND it doesn't help you sneak up and kill random people without alerting the OTHER random people you want to kill that you're killing random people on your way to kill them.

Just sayin'.

Honestly.

These fucking people.

More fucking thoughts and prayers

I see it's time to drag this one out.

Again.

I know this has nothing to do with the results of the 2016 elections, yet I look around and what I see is just a part of the toxic stew of the very worst of my country that seems to be bubbling cheerfully on every stovetop; arrogant, corrupt, ignorant, splenetic...it makes me think of the piece of Robert Graves' I, Claudius where the cunningly-not-really-a-gimping-halfwit emperor turns his appalling heir loose on Rome, whispering "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

What hits me hardest about these nutter shootings is how they never change anything because of the magical incantation "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" as if the whole "well-regulated militia" thing was a fantasy and the U.S. Constitution is some sort of Holy Writ, handed down on gold tablets never to be altered or re-imagined.

Well, the Constitution once said that black people were 3/5ths of a registered voter, and that it was illegal to drink a beer.

Both of those ideas were fucked up. So We the People changed the Constitution.

So far, the score of the Second Amendment is "resisting tyrannical government", zero; "butchering other Americans", about a gajillion. I note that all these ammosexuals with their arsenals seem curiously mute about "tyranny" like the idea that the government can freely spy on our communications, or take our stuff if we get arrested - not convicted, mind you, just arrested - for smoking weed. So I conclude that the notion that the "right to keep and bear arms" has pretty much zero percent to do with the sort of people doing actual tyranny-resisting and 100% to do with the sort of fucking people who get a woody out of busting out more than thirty rounds a minute.

But who gives an actual fuck?

Nobody is going to do anything about this. Tomorrow another nutter will take another semiautomatic weapon into another school and another N > 0 number of kiddies and teachers and random poor sonsofbitches will die or be hideously wounded. And we'll hear that there's nothing we can do - in the only industrialized nation that this happens regularly - and we need to have more mental health care (but fuck-all funding for it), and we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the new set of grieving parents and lovers and brothers and sisters whose beloveds have been blown away so I can go to the range tomorrow and bust out 200 rounds of 5.56mm in fifteen minutes.

So, fuck it.

Here's a fucking cute picture of a cute fucking cat.

Wild, wild West

Just got back from a bunch of days in the field up the Columbia, on the deserty side of the Cascades. Pretty country there but...spare. Sparse. Not much out there other than the grass, the rock, the wind, and the sky.

Mind you, that's not what I'm thinking about. I had some idle thoughts about the latest bang-bang-crazy, as Jim Wright likes to call it.

And, because I'm a callous sonofabitch and nobody got killed in Vegas or Texas who I know or remotely care about, my main idle thought was this:

What the fuck is it about these ammosexual gun-licking nuts and the Black Stick?

If I had a choice I can't imagine a less-fun rifle to own than an AR-15 or one of its clones. I mean, seriously? I was assigned an M-16 for many years. I was decent with it - a workman should know his craft, after all - but I never liked the goddamn thing.

I'd say that for me it was just a tool, like an axe or a hammer, except it wasn't nearly as useful at its trade as a hammer or an axe at theirs.

The worst part about it was that it was chock-full of fucking irritatingly tiny little parts. Sure, it knocked down and went together easy, that comes with being a modern battle rifle. But when you had it knocked down the little fucking parts had an immensely irritating way of hiding or rolling away - don't get me started on the firing pin retaining pin! - unless you had a perfectly flat, well-lit, clean place to put them.

Then it was hard to clean. And you had to KEEP it clean; if it got fouled - and all those tiny little parts were easy to foul - it tended to malfunction, usually either in the form of a clogged gas tube and a short-recoiling bolt carrier, meaning either a failure to extract, a failure to eject, or a failure to feed. Double feeds, too, which were a stone bitch to clear, weren't uncommon in a dirty rifle.

My understanding is that the early 1960's issue models also suffered because the ammunition propellant burned dirty, gunking up the inside of the rifle with soot and crap and increasing the fouling problem. I can't imagine that cheap civilian 5.56mm ammo is all that much better.

Plus, frankly, what benefit is there to have a "hunting rifle" that can crank out a round every couple of seconds? Elk aren't going to shoot back. And a 5.56 round seems less optimal for knocking down something bigger-than-human-size. It's either going to tumble and tear up the meat, or its gonna break up and scatter nasty little lead bits into your venison.

I have a Short Magazine Lee-Enfield No. 1 Mk III* that has served me perfectly well for years as both hunting and target rifle. It's fun to shoot and relatively accurate given it's long life and relatively hard use. I've debated several times whether or not to hang a rifle scope on the thing. It would make my shot group tighter, but I love the history of it and wouldn't want to just slap a modern scope on the centenarian. Yet the original Periscopic Prism Company scope and mount is an awful abortion, only 2x magnification and, worse, offset to the left of center which is the kiss of death for me, a left-handed firer.

But I've let myself get off the damn subject.

The point is, what gives? What the hell makes so many of these people crave the AR-15 in all its flawed avatars?

The impulse to kill people? I get that. Just thinking about the dumb fuckers who gave us the Fraudulency Administration makes me want to go all St. Bartholomew on their asses.

But to do that with a shoddy tool? One that makes it harder to do a decent job of work?

Who the hell needs that?

I swear. People are just weird.

Now we know.

In re: Mister Trump's "Second Amendment Solutions" statement today, in 1972 Hunter Thompson wrote this:

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

And now we know.

(h/t to Charles Pierce, who mined this priceless quotation from the depths of prehistory...)

Cop-killer

So, in quick succession, a couple of different coppers killed some black people, and a black person killed some cops.

As is almost always the case, depending on their outlook, various other people mourned and defended the people killed by the coppers and excoriated the coppers, and various other-other people exalted and mourned the coppers and excoriated black people.

Well, you know my position on the whole business of being so fucking easy to kill people with guns in this country, so I'm not going there

But, if you want, here's Fred Clarke with a good point on the whole business of coppers, badges, and guns:

"This is why our constantly armed law enforcement can be police, but can no longer really be police officers. The office, like the badge, is overshadowed by the gun as an insufficient, subordinate source of authority, meaning and legitimacy."

Is it possible to "enfore the law" in this country without firearms?

Sadly, no. But it's a hell of a brilliant thought.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

First of all, and kind of beside my point, if the joker who sniped five coppers in Dallas wanted to discredit everybody who's pissed off because American coppers have killed about an infantry battalion's worth of people in 2016 already (and it's not even halfway through July...) he couldn't have done a better job. Every right-wing ding-dong who throws up a little in their mouth when they see the words "Black Lives Matter" will now have enough rocks to throw at their non-wingnut "BLM" fellow citizens from now until Christmas. Good job, sniper. You done fucked your own cause like a football bat. Asshole.

Second, the cop-shootings allowed every talking head from here to Fox and Friends to trot out the nauseating little trope of "hero coppers".

That nursery rhyme may be my second-most hated thing in the entire world after "hero soldiers". I practically grind my teeth down to nubs when I hear it.

I mean...I realize this may be a difficult concept to convey in the "news", or to people in general and the public-is-an-ass people in particular, but...just being a copper doesn't make you a hero...or, possibly anything...other than, possibly, a total asshole.

Yes. It's entirely possible to do a stressful, demanding, occasionally-dangerous-but-usually-just-boring-and-aggravating, difficult job and yet still be a complete scumbag.

Or not.

But - just putting on a damn badge doesn't make you a better human being, any more than putting on a tree-colored suit makes you a hero.

So I posted this to my FB feed and got an immediate reply from a very nice but fairly simple and politically conservative person:

"...seriously john... would you do that job? those guys are doing a job most of us would not want to do and they deserve our prayers and i know that you will shoot back and put me down for my thoughts. But that is how i feel. May God have mercy on us all."

To which I, in turn, replied and, in so doing, realized what irks the shit out of me about this stuff:

"I've DONE that job, (person's name). I've worked riot control. I've been a "cop" in foreign lands where the residents really DID want to kill us. And I still managed not to kill anybody.

I'm not "putting you down" for your thoughts. I'm putting you down because your thoughts are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And like I said; putting on a uniform - whether it's colored blue or colored green or colored like a tree - doesn't make you a good person. It makes you...a person in a uniform. Some good. Some bad. Mostly in between.

And that's just the truth. Some cops are terrific. Some are assholes who use their authority to make other people's lives miserable. Most of them just try and get through their day as best they can, not doing great, not doing evil, just bumbling through.

So using the actions of some murderous a-hole to try and turn cops into saints and martyrs (and "heroes") is stupid, counterproductive, and wrong. It doesn't help the good ones, and it lets the bad ones (and the "enh"-ones who let the bad ones slide, which a lot of them do because, people...) cover their bad deeds with the mantle of heroism.

So. Cops. Some are great. Some are total scumbags. Most are just regular jamokes.

Killing some of them doesn't make the scumbags any better.

And, more importantly, making heroes out of dead coppers doesn't solve our single big problem with coppers - that we've let our coppers, a hell of a LOT of our coppers, begin to think of themselves as soldiers in an occupying army, to think of their fellow citizens as "civilians" whom they are ordered to rule by force and fear, and whose task it is to suppress any hesitation to accept, or any attempt to question, their authority.

And that authority is to be ruthlessly applied with deadly force - often not as a last resort but as a first.

(And, as an aside, I note that the usual suspects who were all there about the Bundy clan and the Malheur Moron Mulisha's armed sedition and threats to fire on federal law officers are suddenly and curiously silent about the black man shooting down law officers. Hmmm...I wonder if race has...nah. Unpossible.)

But we cannot exist if our law officers become unquestioned figures of authority, and that authority comes, predominantly, from the barrel of a gun.

As Clarke says: "(The point) at which we must arrive if we are to be a free people under the rule of law in a community where badges and offices and law are to mean anything more than who has the biggest gun."

Shut up and sit down

Seems to be what the Republican voters in the state of Nevada told their lunatic gun-licking teabagger Michele Fiore. She lost the House District 03 to someone named Tarkanian who, since he is a Republican, is reliably spineless on the whole business of well-regulating the fucking militia but is less full-blown, bull-goose looney about armed sedition.

One can hope.

Mind you, she came in a strong third, garnering nearly 20% of the GOP primary voters. Which pretty much confirms what I've always suspected; that there's about somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of U.S. "citizens" who have no real idea what constitutes a polity, have no concept of (or interest in) a civil compact with their fellow-citizens.

As I've mentioned here before, Fiore represents the very, very worst of the greedy, stupidly chuckleheaded notion that there IS no social contract, that "I built that", that the entire idea of collective responsibility or community is not just impractical but iniquitous.

Needless to say I'm pleased that even the Republican primary voters in Nevada were unwilling to go so far into that fever-swamp as Ms. Fiore wanted them to. While it is reprehensible that some of these jokers let her get as far as she did, apparently sending her to join the poop-flinging Freedom Caucus in D.C. was too much even for Republicans, even in Nevada.

Enjoy spending more time with the family, Michele. Don't forget to keep the ammo out of reach of the toddlers, now, hear..?

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.

Straining at bullets, swallowing glaciers

A friend of mine linked to this video:

Fighting Back Against A School Shooter

Fighting back against a school shooter:

Posted by TheBlaze on Monday, March 7, 2016

It's apparently a clip from a much longer training film that argues for a more active, aggressive defense against school shooters.

And y'know what? In a perfect world I'd be all about this.

For one thing, the whole "duck and cover" response to danger kind of pisses me off. Run away? Fine. Fight? If you want to. But cowering in hopes of being overlooked? Seems like a pretty miserable way to die, if that's how you're gonna go.

But.

We don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where we have to make choices about how we spend our resources.

And I have two problems with this little video.

First of all, it's a school shooter video. It assumes from the jump that school shooters are a thing, a horrible, omnipresent, immediate, clear-and-present danger thing that must be aggressively confronted. I talked this to fucking death damn near ten years ago, but as horrible as the cable news people try and make it, the simple fact is that mass murder just isn't that big a threat in the US in 2016. IT's not like dying of dysentery was on the Oregon Trail back in the day.

You're more likely to get run over by a bus than you are to be killed by a madman with a gun in your school, kids. Seriously; Uncle Chief has done the math. Turns out that about 14 kids a year get squarshed by those ol' yella-dog buses. But about 297 people total - that's adults AND kids - got shot in school between 1980 and 2012 when Sandy Hook brought the whole "school shooter" thing back into fashion. That's about 9.3 people a year; the third of a person was either a really little kid or possibly a Donald Trump voter, but, whatever.

So throwing a lot of money at school shootings is like throwing money at ballistic missile defense or alien invasions; not a good return-on-investment thing.

Second of all, while it looks and feels nice, I think it completely mistakes the point of the "lockdown huddle".

The trainer of the video assumes that the point of the huddle is "protection" or something. He's right...assuming that the "main problem" is trying to cut down the casualty count and not actually control the kids' panic.

If I had a bunch of troops I had confidence in, and felt were both cool-headed and trusted each other I'd use his methods. My problem would be that...that's what I'd do with trained, confident troops. I'd trust them to stay still and silent until they had to take aggressive action. That's what good troops do in an ambush drill, which is basically what this is; a plan to ambush the shooter.

My problem would be that if I didn't trust my troops, or trust them to trust each other, spreading them out makes it much more difficult for 1) them to combat their own panic and 2) me to control them and prevent them from doing something panicky and dangerous.

So spreading them out makes it MUCH more likely that the most panicked one will bolt for the door and try to escape, or start screaming and crying, thus both alerting the nutter that we're there in the room and, possibly, unlocking the door for him.

It's a great idea, but it requires a HELL of a lot of training and a really high level of confidence and aggression in the kids.

Meaning that to do this successfully you'd have to...you knew it, right; spend a hell of a lot of time and money training kids and teachers to do this.

It seems to me that for some reason We the People are more and more inclined to do this stuff; worry and fret ridiculously about madman bullets, tiny, horrible problems that have a miniscule probability of harming us...while ignoring things like the melting glaciers that warn us of global climate change that have a real serious likelihood of fucking up our entire world.

I don't know why we do this. It kind of pisses me off, and I wish we'd stop. But it seems to be a people thing and no amount of pissing and moaning on my part will do anything about it.

A cigarette and a cookie

Well.

The Malheur Moron Mulisha is finally all either in the sneezer, run away, or in one case biding safe in a ditch, food for worms.

The last of these heroes chieu-hoi'ed after asking for a coffin-nail and a cookie. From snacks to smokes, at least these jokers were true to their Constitutional cravings for cheap thrills and snack foods to the last.

The bonus round, however, goes to the original armed seditionist and welfare moocher Cliven Bundy, who flew the Friendly Skies right into federal custody. Seems you ain't the sharpest barb on the wire, Cliven, ol' shoe. You may have thought you were done with the feds but they sure as hell ain't done with you.

And that's goddamn good.

Because the Stupid, it's still out there. It continues to live, free and wild, even as these sad bastards will hopefully begin meeting their new Aryan Brotherhood friends for their long occupation of a very different sort of federal facility.

It even continues to arrive here, in eastern Oregon, even now - the latest import of this nonsense coming in from Nevada in the form of one Michele Fiore, elected representative of Clark County and wanna-be U.S. Congresswoman. Michele's quite the piece of work, and here she is on the subject of our latest outbreak of armed sedition:

"Fiore promised that the cause for which they fought – defending citizen rights under the Constitution – would go on even if they were arrested."

Citizen rights, my sweet rosy-red ass.

If these damn traitors were "defending" anything other than their own goddamn greed and stupidity then I am the goddamn Dragon King of Bhutan.

This, this is the exact sort of thing that should be throttled in the throat of any seditious liar that utters it. This is the sort of thing the sows these Cadmus traitors, a sort of Cheeto-shaped mental eyetooth that awakens their hunger for power (and snacks, and maybe a Marlboro, but, hey..."defending citizen rights under the Constitution" can't be done on C-rations.

Wait. What?)

For all their irritating rhetoric and seditious treason these morons are just the cannon fodder. The meat waiting for a bullet so it can be finally put to a useful purpose to fill in the fosse. Only the (rather low-hanging) fruit of the poison tree.

Fiore. Fiore is the fucking tree.

It is her beliefs - the guns trump ballots, that traitors are "patriots", that the commons are for the taking of anyone armed enough and selfish enough and greedy enough to take it - and her spouting those beliefs, and the public post she has been given to spout those damn deadly treasonous beliefs that is the root and branch that bears this bitter (albeit perhaps smoky and Oreo-tasting) fruit of treason.

And government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the earth if We the People do not take the axe to her, to people like her, and cut them down at the ground, dynamite the fucking stumps, and salt the earth to ensure that no more like them will spring from it no matter how many American Spirits and Doritos and .45ACP rounds seditious bastards like Bundy and Finicum and, yes, like Fiore sow there.

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

It appears tonight that at least part of the armed seditionists and traitors in arms are dead or in federal custody.

Good.

Hopefully the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of the remainder will follow swiftly.

Because these people are not simply traitors. They are madmen and idiots who would invoke their insane concept of "common law" to destroy our republic for their own benefit. It is also worth noting that the shootout and arrests occurred as the traitors-in-arms were on the road to spread their treason to neighboring Grant County, Oregon, where the county sheriff is another whackadoodle seditionist and wanna-be sovereign-fucking-citizen.

My only regret is that they will not, as they should be, as their predecessor traitors typically were, speedily and publicly hung as a warning to those who are tempted to follow in their path; thus perish all traitors.

Because in order to not lose the Whiskey Rebellion, as Bill Sherman said; fear is the beginning of wisdom.