Helpful Hint of the Day

If you have a small, easily lost tool in a dark, hard to see color -- such as the tiny allen wrenches that come with lasers for adjusting the elevation and windage --before you put them in a tool box where they will gravitate towards a dark corner and be lost forever, take a moment to acquire some nail polish in a bright color such as mirror shine or shocking pink and paint the body of the tool. (If you are worried about precision fit, you may leave the working part of the tool unpainted.)  This will dramatically increase your chances of finding that dark, tiny tool in whatever crevices it manages to lodge itself. It also makes it easy to find on the floor should you accidentally drop it.

This thing that happened

Pretty much everything that needs be said about the theater shooting in Aurora, CO has already been said by others -- and in some cases, said better than I could. Still, I feel the need to say something. So:

As a gun owner, I find the mass shooting in Colorado to be monstrous, abominable and inexcusable. My thoughts, prayers, and sympathies are with the victims and their families.

However, I have less than zero empathy for the shooter, because I am actively hoping someone beats him to death in jail tonight. If that makes me callous, I'm okay with that. I'm not going to waste my sympathy on the damned; I'm going to save it for the deserving.

If someone you know was killed in Colorado, all I can do is tell you that I'm terribly sorry, give you a virtual hug, and hope that this eulogy poem will help make things a tiny bit better. 

For my thoughts on generalized human-on-human violence, see this post which I wrote in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.

As for me, I'm going to try not to dwell on the evils of the world and concentrate on the good. Today is my mom's birthday, and we took her to the pistol range where she used her Crimson Trace lasergrips for the first time. She had a blast and showed incredible improvement; the full writeup will be the subject of next week's Monday Gunday post.

After that, we stopped by the gun store and she bought the Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 380. We're both looking forward to another range trip to test it out.

This weekend, I'm going to do some product testing. I've received a number of small camping/survival stoves, and I'm going to set them up, start a bunch of fires, and see how well they all boil water and fry eggs. I may even do something silly like put a stove inside of a stove and see how well that works.

And when that's done, I'm going to go see The Dark Knight Rises. Because fuck you, death.

WNW: Fluttergun

Behold the AAC Honey Badger Personal Defense Weapon (PDW) in tactical Fluttershy camo.

This is just simply full of passive-aggressive carnage.

Sadly, it isn't a real gun, but it should be. The skin was designed by TheBadPanda2, the same artist who made the Rainbow Dash AA-12.

I've all but begged him to make a Pinke Pie version of the Kriss Vector. This is close but it's not quite the same.


However, this is a real thing and is incredibly awesome.

Military ‘bronies’ love their rifles and their My Little Pony

 

From one of the many awesome comments:

I’d MUCH rather have a brony watching my six than someone who was self-absorbed and thinking of little more than his image. Someone saying openly “I like this show” has conquered a fear of rejection and has faced down a few inner demons. Someone criticizing that person lacks courage, is pretty much guaranteed to have medical-grade skeletons in his closet, and is therefore a prime candidate for desertion under fire or is blackmail fodder.

No question about it, a brony in uniform is a far greater asset to this country and will do greater things than a poseur.

Also, this happened at BroNYCon 2012:





"Semper Filly." Have I mentioned how much I love this fandom?

Dirty Laundry

This is making the rounds on the intertubez, and due to family aggro I haven't been able to accomplish anything today. So watch and enjoy. 

More gunbrony humor

For the 90% of you who don't understand why this is gunnie humor, go here.  And before you go off on him for his "ruining cool things" statement, please note that Uncle's "hate" is a pose. He's actually a remarkably good sport, as proven by the fact that I emailed him this image over the weekend and he posted it here.

Monday Gunday: The Folly of Gun Restriction

Why I get upset by gun restriction, simplified edition:

Let's say a law is passed -- oh, let's call it the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, just for giggles -- preventing civilians (meaning: non-military personnel) from owning military-style weapons. I would expect most people to think that law only affects "army stuff":  assault rifles, machine guns, etc.

But here's the problem I have with that law, aside from its dubious constitutionality: poor definitions that lend themselves to slippery-slope enforcement.

You see, officers and members of the military police are regularly issued carry pistols. The regulation pistol of the US Armed Forces is the Beretta M9, a 9mm semi-auto magazine that uses a 15 round detachable magazine. It is also immensely popular in its civilian version, the Beretta 92 (probably because veterans, having returned their issued sidearm and wanting to own one for private use, decide to purchase a pistol identical to what they have trained with). 

So when legislation says that "military style weapons" are forbidden for civilian ownership, it suddenly becomes a non-trivial point of legislation if this pistol is restricted because it is, in fact, issued and used by the US Armed Forces.

Is this pistol restricted because it's military issue? If not, you need a better definition than "military-style weapon".* Perhaps something like above a certain caliber, or fully automatic as opposed to semi-automatic, or any number of other things --  at which point I refer you to the 1934 National Firearms Act. **

If it is restricted, why? Is it just because it's used by the military? If that is your argument then please say yes, that I may laugh at you as I point out the large variety of pistol types used by militaries around the world. You might as well just outlaw every pistol above 9mm and .40 caliber.

Or are you going to try to stretch your definition to mean "any magazine-fed semi-auto weapon", i.e. the evil features argument? Because if you go down that road you're basically saying that civilians should only ever own revolvers, pump shotguns, and bolt-action rifles -- in which case just come right out and say THAT. I would at least appreciate your honesty in the matter.  You'd still be wrong, of course, because my five-round, bolt-action Mosin-Nagant rifle was -- guess what? -- the primary infantry rifle of Russia/USSR from 1891 until 1936 or so, and still sees action to this day:

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mosin–Nagants are still commonly found on modern battlefields around the world. They are being used by insurgent forces in the Iraq War and the current war in Afghanistan. Separatists have also used the rifles alongside more modern Russian firearms in the Second war in Chechnya.  

How about shotguns? They're okay, right? You'd be wrong, because the pump-action 12-gauge Mossberg 590A1 is used by the US Army.


In conclusion: The term "military-style weapon" is an arbitrary definition that means absolutely nothing. The bolt-action hunting rifles of today were (in design, if not in actuality) the infantry rifles of a century ago; pistol calibers as small as .32 have been military issue; and even manual shotguns are military-issue.


So when people say that they want to "keep military-style weapons out of the hands of civilians," please note how that definition can be stretched to encompass basically everything that doesn't fall into the very narrow category between .17 HMR and .25 ACP for pistols and rifles, and possibly single-shot shotguns in the .410 to 20-gauge range. 

In other words, they want us effectively disarmed; they just don't have the courage to say so, and instead of doing it by force (which will backfire) they will attempt to do it through creeping legislation that outlaws firearms by slices as they constantly define what is "military".



* This phrase should be read in such tone of voice as to imply an unspoken "you idiot" after the main clause.
** See above.

Saturday Morning Ponies

Fresh from San Diego Comic Com come two videos from season 3 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

I've mentioned before that it seems like The Hub had my games of Unknown Ponies bugged, because it seemed like elements of them -- Derpy flying backwards, the Timber Wolves, etc -- kept cropping up throughout season 2. But this video has convinced me that a writer from the show really IS reading my blog, because it might as well be the theme song for Failure is Awesome.



Please note the mathpony cameo around the 0:50 mark. I believe The Jack has found his pony avatar...



I call upon the... wait. Crystal ponies? Man, this throws everything off!




The thing is, they don't look like they're crystalline -- of course, we're only going by book illustrations and not an actual picture of one from the show. But it seems more like they're earth ponies with crystal architecture/technology than anything else.



Dang it, I still want sea ponies!



That'll do, sea pony. That'll do.