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.

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.

Smoking guns and mushroom clouds

The generation of this post came from a headline on my Comcast website (where I go to check my e-mail): "Rare picture of split mushroom cloud found" Here's the pic:

I followed the original article and found a irkingly cryptic story about this picture.

Apparently the "split" cloud over Hiroshima had already been seen in 1945; photographed by observers aboard one of the aircraft accompanying Enola Gay (tagged, by the way, with a terrific name for an implement of mass destruction: Necessary Evil).

Here's that snapshot - note that the upper "cap" cloud has pretty much separated from the "stem":

The thing I couldn't get from either the initial story linked by Comcast or the History Blog post I linked to above was - what was so fucking terrific about this picture?

I mean, was this some sort of truly odd, unusual atomic phenomenon?

Did the split in the Hiroshima cloud indicate that some really peculiar atmospheric condition, or some bizarre anomaly in the detonation, had resulted in this strange cloud formation that was never seen again during the many atmospheric nuclear tests conducted during the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties?

Okay, no.

The photo above is from the "Charlie" shot in the "Buster-Jangle" test series conducted in October and November of 1951. Note the double separations, the upper between the "cap" and "stem" as well as a lower split in the stem.

That led me to further research into the whole "mushroom cloud" business. Seems that these things are not just a nuclear signature. Any sufficiently large explosion will create them. The fireball of the explosion creates the "cap" as it rises, and the low pressure beneath the cap causes entrainment of the surrounding air and the moisture in the rising air condenses.

Not surprisingly, all this rising and condensing is dependent on the ambient air temperatures and pressures, so that if the rising cloud encounters a warmer air layer at altitude there will be no cloud formation, or the water droplets will evaporate again...

So it turns out that the photo itself was the big deal, if big deal it was, not the "split cloud".

And even that was not really all that such of a muchness; the photo had been published years earlier. It was the actual photo print that had been lost for some time and recently rediscovered.

So. No frightful new nuclear revelations, just a tiny bit of historical documentation come back to light.

Well, okay then. Let's dance!

Now I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds.

Wolverines!

My friends Jim and Lisa have a good post up over at Ranger Against War discussing the recent Colorado shootings I was fulminating over in the preceding post.

And - though it's not really the subject of their post - something came up over there that reminded me of a point of American politics that has always driven me fairly batshit.

That's the whole mythology centered around "Second Amendment Rights".

Now I'm not going to kid myself that Americans will ever give up their private firearms. We've had a pash for them since before we WERE Americans and that's not going to stop now.

And as a guy with two shotguns and a rifle in the gun safe, well, that'd be pretty hypocritical, anyway.

But that's not what bugs me.

The thing is, we WILL pay a price for private firearms. A blood price, different in causation but no different in effect than the one we pay for being able to get from Portland to Seattle in three hours, or for being able to eat food that other people prepare.

Those activities carry not just the risk but the certainty that at some point the brakes on the truck behind us will fail and the e. coli will lurk inside the hamburger. A statistical percentage of us will die, or be maimed, or injured, because of those things we want, and we accept that without a murmur because we consider our lives richer because of those things.

So with private firearms.

But automobiles and supermarkets are a practical necessity for our modern lives. We don't have to invent justifications for them.

Firearms aren't.

We don't hunt for survival any more. And the chaos inherent in a vigilante society is why we armed and empowered policemen and soldiers.

So our private firearms are really just toys, and it's hard to find a reason to keep a deadly toy around the house. We certainly would let our kids play with an exploding Etch-a-Sketch, would we?

So the people who build bunkers around private firearms for a living - and, yes, I'm looking at you, National Rifle Association - have to fill their sandbags with pure-D, 100% straight-from-the-feedlot bullshit, and the stinkiest of the pile is the one about how Our Guns Will Defend Us From Tyranny!

WOLVERINES!

Right?

But here's the things that make this utterly ridiculous.

1. The vast majority of the people in the U.S. who keep and bear arms are politically anywhere from mildly conservative to foaming-mouthed-Michelle-Malkin-wanking wingnuts. There's a relative handful of armed liberals in this country, and we tend to be a rare and lonely breed; there is no Liberal Militia.

2. Let's be honest with ourselves - the New Deal breed of U.S. nanny-state authoritarian is as dead as the dodo. Any "tyranny" that will arise in the U.S. in some future scenario will be wrapped in the flag, quoting Ronald Reagan, and carrying a cross.

3. All those wingnuts will lay their customized-fully-auto-AR-15s at the feet of this dictator like the goddamn freikorps. Even the "moderate conservatives" will be unlikely to take to the hills to resist the New Corporate Overlords, because

4. Is anyone willing to argue that the U.S. circa 2012 isn't already about 80% of a functioning oligarchy? Hell, even the GOP is willing to openly fight for a return to the economic and social policies of the Gilded Fucking Age. Most of us that still have our jobs are wage slaves, too frightened of losing our homes, our medical care, and our jobs, to do more than peep helplessly as the elites regain everything they lost in the Thirties.

How have all those liberty-givin' guns done with that, anyway?

5. And with the red-meaters goin' all fascists those of us liberals, those who would fight, will be as helpless against their U.S. Army and the new freikorps as the old Rotfrontkämpferbund was against the old SA and their stahlhelm buddies. Not to mention that

6. To be a guerrilla fighter is to die. Silly movies aside, regular troops kill dozens of irregulars for every trooper they lose. Look at the WW2 statistics for the partisans in the occupied Soviet Union, for the maquis, for the Yugoslav and Greek partisan bands. The sorts of people who make good guerrillas are tough, brutal peasants whose "good life" sucks hard. Pampered Americans raised on television and McDonalds? We'd be lucky if one in a thousand of us managed to survive more than a week and bit more than wing one of the "oppressors" before buying it.

So...nope, the whole "guns keep us free" trope?

Utter horseshit.

I loves me my old Lee-Enfield rifle. I still enjoy going to the range even though I no longer hunt with it.

But it's a toy. A luxury.

A toy that can kill one of my fellow Americans at half a mile.

And if I want to keep it - and I do - I should be willing to act the adult and stop coming up with ridiculous bullshit Wolverines! fantasies to make my case.

ISTM that the problem here is that we want to have our guns and our nobility, too.

We let people like the NRA promote these ridiculous fantasies when we know full well that we're not going to use our firearms to fight a desperate guerrilla war against the Nicaraguan or Chinese occupiers, or to overthrow the fascist dictator we elected in a fit of Limbaughism.

They're our toys, our security blankets, and our hobby.

And so that we may enjoy ourselves people will have to die.

We should have the balls to say that straight out.

In fact, I just did.

See? Isn't that simple?

Now they have.

"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
(Hilaire Belloc)

Jason over at Armchair Generalist has a good little discussion about the icon of modern rebellion, the AK-47. Jason objects, sensibly, to the sensationalist journalism that labels the rifle a "weapon of mass destruction" but points out that

"What makes the AK-47 such a distinctive weapon system isn't its accuracy or the number of widgets that you can add onto the rifle. It's a cheap, long-lasting, low-maintenance system that has an overwhelming abundance of available ammunition (that is )not the best weapon to use against other militaries, but works fine against noncombatants and poorly-armed security forces."

For what it's worth, I would opine that the combination of the cheap, rugged, low-tech automatic weapon and the mine are what has made colonialism such a mug's game since the middle 1940's.Back when it was us having the Maxim gun and they had not it was pretty simple to run an empire on the cheap. But now every dimestore Westbumfuckian Liberation Front can lay their hands on a couple of shiploads of AKs and a bunch of PMD shoebox mines (or just some Semtex and a Palestinian- or Iraqi-for-hire to show them how to wire the things for sound) and all of a sudden the White Man's Burden becomes hard for low-population-growth, expensive Western volunteer armies to bear.As the Sri Lankans showed us, crushing these groups is possible, but you have to be able to use genocidal-level force, and for a Western occupier in the age of CNN/Al Jazeeera I'm not sure that's possible anymore.

So the Sunni rebellion in Iraq is controllable, either by buying out the rebels as "Sons of Iraq" or by arming their Shia and Kurdish rivals and letting them do the genocide. But absent a truly competent government, and given the strength of the rebel forces on the outside, this may not be possible in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan, and for the Western press and governments to pretend otherwise seems extremely irresponsible.

Obviously it's hard to predict the arc of competence here, but I would suggest that if the ANA/AP haven't managed to outperform their rivals after eight years of Western instruction the window for their doing a Sri Lanka on the Talibs is closing fast.

(Crossposted to MilPub)

Happy 4th...er, I mean 9th of July

Incredibly cool, if more than a little terrifying. I advise following the link to see the NPR video - we're talking megatons of man-made aurora borealis.

Christ, but the Cold War attitude towards radiation was fucked up. Let's not forget about all those glowing sheep in Nevada. You have to look back at the beginning of the Atomic Era and shudder; like giving a monkey a machine gun.

Happy Fourth! (h/t to Crooked Timber)

Blessed are the Snipers, for they shall Hit the Center of Mass

This is sweet;

"Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. The company's vision is described on its Web site: "Guided by our values, we endeavor to have our products used wherever precision aiming solutions are required to protect individual freedom."

"We believe that America is great when its people are good," says the Web site. "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals."

Because nothing - nothing - says "Blessed are the peacemakers" like a full metal jacketed round right through the fucking forehead.