Yeah, what HE said!

Great Rant posted on Never Yet Melted.

It's one of those moments when you fall back in awe, saying to yourself:

"Gee ... I wish I had said that!"

I won't provide the link or the URL to the original youtube video.
The full credit (and hits-count) goes to the source:

https://neveryetmelted.com/2018/10/14/rejoinder-to-the-remoaners/

Even a blind pig can find an acorn, once in a while

On Religion, War, Politics and other things which don't keep your belly full and your mind peaceful.

(In other words, stuff that isn't all that important!)

While I am far from being an admirer of ANY member of the Clinton family, I have to admit that I agree with The Hillary-beast today, for the first time.  Ever.

 A young girl declined to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag.   Some folks got their panties in a bind over that.  Hillary said (in essence):   "That's okay, you go girl!". 

I say, "that works for me".

(SCROLL to the bottom of the page for the quote.)


IN MY OPINION ... the Pledge of Allegiance is an entirely personal OATH which has been turned into an obligatory rote action by nothing more persuasive than habit and social pressure.  That I choose to recite it means that I believe it. 
Folks that don't believe it may be Americans of Conscience.. their reticence doesn't necessarily mean that they are anti-American; just that there are a lot of commitments included in the text of the Pledge which they may not honestly support.

It has been a long time since I recited the Pledge of Allegiance, but to the best of my recall this is what I use to say (while facing the flag with my hand over my heart, to demonstrate my earnest intent):

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the country for which it stands; One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I've pledged allegiance to the flag thousands of times, and I have also sworn to defend the flag 'and the country for which it stands' when I was drafted.     I paid my debt to my country many times over, and I respect my flag.

(I'm not quite sure about God.  I've prayed and asked for guidance from above; still waiting for HIM to return my call.   But I'm patient ... God must have a huge backload of celestial-phone messages. Maybe He's still returning calls from falling sparrows?)

But anyone who has chosen to NOT offer their allegiance gets a pass from me.
 If, for example, you're an Atheist you might refuse the pledge because it includes the phrase "... under God ...".  (IIRC, it was President Eisenhower who added the sub-phrase some 50+ years ago.)

That makes you no less a patriot; it only establishes that you refuse to take an oath which you cannot support theologically.   In a very real way, it makes you more sincere and more aware of the nuances of the oath.    Some folks will disagree; it's one reason why Americans might wish to reconsider the exact wording (eg: excise the Eisenhower Update).

The Pledge of Allegiance is too important to be automatically assumed. 
If you are not fully and personally invested in the responsibilities of citizenship, you should not be hounded or ridiculed  because you either stand by your conscience, or decline to lie under oath.   The Pledge is entirely voluntary,  and those who think it should be obligatory forget the concept under which America was founded: 

"This is a FREE country".

Personally, I may not respect anyone who declines to accept the same dedication to my country as I do.  Also personally, I fought a war (sort of a war; except that men died and I was unhappy, it wasn't much of a war), and all American wars are purportedly waged to re-establish the American Way Of Life.

The American Way Of Life not only allows dissent, but encourages it.
If everybody agrees with me, we don't have a Free Society; we have an ant colony of mindless workers.

I never wanted to live in a homogeneous society.   I like folks who think differently.  They teach me lessons I would never have learned, values I never would have considered, if I lived in a Vacuum.

Your Opinions May Vary. 

If you don't agree with me ... your either an idiot or a villain.

(This is MY blog; I can say anything I want; so can you.)

Where Was She During the 'War on Drugs?': Hillary Called Out for Supporting Girl Who Knelt for Pledge | Fox News Insider: As seen on Tucker Carlson Tonight Hillary Clinton is taking criticism for offering encouragement to an 11-year-old student who made headlines for kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance. Clinton tweeted in response to a NowThis report on Mariana Taylor, a Maryland sixth-grader who refused to stand for her classroom’s recitation of the pledge, instead adopting the form of protest used by some NFL players to demonstrate against police brutality and racial injustice. “It takes courage to exercise your right to protest injustice, especially when you’re 11!  Keep up the good work Mariana,” Clinton tweeted.

WAPO is always good for a laugh

The NRA is laughing all the way to the bank - Opinion pages of The Washington Post:

Even though the Capital Gazette shooter had threatened the newspaper, he was still able to legally purchase a gun — the common denominator of all the modern mass killings in the United States.

I'm not sure how the NRA is conflated with a mass shooting, but under Federal Law citizens with no felony convictions or history of mental illness are free to exercise their Constitutional Rights.

But I guess that the good folks who write Letters to the Editor of the Washington Post rely less  on reason and facts, than hyperbole and Liberal Hypnosis.   They would rather attack the National Rifle Association for its defense of the Second Amendment rights of ALL Americans,  than to address the mania of today's American Psyche.

Is there A Good Reason why writers to the editor of WAPO should hypothesize that their fellow citizens who legally own guns should be tarred with the same brush as a mass murderer?

Example:

Once the concrete of Trump's fascist republic fully cures, the NRA crowd will be sorely disappointed when the democracyless (?) right wing state of their dreams knocks on the front door demanding to collect their guns. 

Wow.  Like, that's really, really DEEP man, y'know.  What's that stuff you're smoking?
It has  verisimilitude, analogy, and all that stuff that make you sound, like ... smart?

(I'd love to see the WAPO OPINION author of this article knock on the door of any legal gun owner and demand  to confiscate the constitutionally protected firearms there.   That's the epitome of "democracyless " ... which I think is a "made up" word.)

I doubt there's a reasoning person in this country who doesn't think that the mass murder of innocents is unconscionable..

If the people behind that knocked door were ALL armed, and the killer knew it ... that massacre would never have happened. 

Because wolves only hunt sheep.

And the writer of this opinion article is definitely a "sheeple".

This is me.  Laughing.

NRA Membership Controversy

Anyone who reads my blog knows that I'm no great friend of the NRA ... they're too reluctant for my taste to take on the anti-gunners, so as far as I'm concerned the NRA is a bunch of woosies.

Which is another way of saying that the NRA is insufficiently aggressive for my taste.

I'm currently a dues-paying member  of the NRA, but that varies from year to year;  some days I am reluctant to pay my dues, some days not.   

I suspect that I'm not the only "NRA MEMBER" who doesn't consider the NRA to be a sufficiently conservative representative of his pro-gun views.    That doesn't mean we don't agree with the NRA   it might mean that the NRA is more politically correct, and less liberally cognizant, than I am

The mainstream-press (read:  "LIBERALS")  may choose to interpret a choice to declline a conservative statement with a choice to disavow agreement with with the NRA's political position.


 I may be an NRA member this year, and a cranky old poop  the next;  but I'm completely comfortable with my NRA affiliation, even though I question their politics on a daily basis.

I'm guessing that I'm not the only "cranky old poop" who (from year to year) declines to renew his membership because the NRA is too 'gentle' to represent my pro-gun opinions.   So ... some years I don't renew my NRA membership, and that skews the "representation" numbers of the NRA.


That doesn't mean that the NRA isn't the best representative of my politics from year to year.

So when the extreme liberal website "Mother Jones" questions the exact-at-this-moment membership numbers of of the NRA, I have to mention that the membership is probably much more conservative than the organization, and the pure numbers which are reported might not be as  significant a 'data point' as the casual observer chooses to report.

Speaking as  not-so-casual observer, the membership of the NRA is so controversial that even its own members are so politicially (and socially) involved that they question the goals and involvement of their political support on a daily basis?

The NRA Says It Has 5 Million Members. Its Magazines Tell Another Story. – Mother Jones:

The National Rifle Association likes to boast that it represents 5 million gun owners. Or maybe it’s “nearly” 5 million—or perhaps “more than” 5 million. The NRA has never provided solid numbers on how many members it has, yet a look at what data is out there suggests that its claims may be wide of the mark—and the real figure could have dropped by more than 10 percent in the year after Donald Trump was elected president.

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It's Not Guns ... It's Men!

It's not guns, it's men. 

(Do not say "WHEW!" yet)


The Greenfield (MA) Recorder has an opinion article by Rob Okun which announces that the problem with violence in America might not be guns; he posits that the problem is Men.

My Turn: Men, we can, and should, do better:

... there’s a common denominator among all of the shooters that we in the pro-feminist men’s movement are blue in the face from shouting from the rooftops for decades: They’re all men.

Well, he may have a point there.  I don't know anything about the "Pro-feminist men's movement", and I haven't seen a whole lot of blue-faced guys at pistol matches for the past .. oh, I don't know ... THIRTY YEARS! 

But he may still have a point.
After all, how many mass shootings are committed by women?

Zero?  (Ignoring that the person who provided guns for the Colorado school shootings was a woman.   Women as enablers?  Who knew?)

(Almost everyone!)

I suppose it's legitimate to posit that women are more likely to be "enablers" than killers in the Pro-feminist Men's Murder Class (Dylan, et al).  Which may not be the author's point, but it's what I get from his writing.  Still,  I'm a bit concerned about this one tiny point he makes:

 It’s time for Congress to fund the Centers for Disease Control to conduct a study of how boys are socialized, starting with preschoolers. I’ve proposed this to an aide to Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal. Please, senator, introduce the legislation. 

Ouch!

Given that the CDC has been partially defunded because of their biased political stance against firearms,  this is like throwing baby chicks to the alligators;  gobble gobble gobble.   Let us ignore that the CDC lost a TON of funding from the federal coffers a decade or two ago because of their obvious anti-2nd Amendment bias.  The Namby Boys still haven't forgiven the NRA for that.

 What else? The NRA considers most men tacit supporters, and unless they hear otherwise, they have us right where they want us — silent,

Tacit?   Us?

I'm not sure what men are "tacit supporters" of.   I had to look it up.  Most men I know aren't "tacit" supporters of anything;   They are either indifferent, against, or balls-to-the-wall for it.   Life's too short to be "tacit".   And as for the NRA, they either hate it or they pay their annual dues.

There's no crying in baseball, and there's no "tacit" in guns.

Tacit this, Robie.

I've got to post this quickly, before it disappears!

Federal judge blocks California gun magazine confiscation scheme | Fox News:
Federal judge blocks California gun magazine confiscation scheme
By Stephen Gutowski Published July 03, 2017 Washington Free Beacon

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction on Thursday that blocks California from enforcing their gun magazine confiscation law. U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez said in his ruling that the law, which would make it illegal to possess any gun magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition, likely violates the Second Amendment rights of the plaintiffs in the case. He ordered that California immediately stop enforcing the law pending further legal action.
 "The Court does not lightly enjoin a state statute, even on a preliminary basis," Judge Benitez said in the ruling. "However, just as the Court is mindful that a majority of California voters approved Proposition 63 and that the government has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from gun violence, it is equally mindful that the Constitution is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. Plaintiffs' entitlements to enjoy Second Amendment rights and just compensation are not eliminated simply because they possess ‘unpopular' magazines holding more than 10 rounds."

[I tried to post this without comment, but BLOGGER dot com locked up.  It took me a while to recover the original text, so I'm posting it without much comment just to get it online before some other ...  bizarre circumstances  .. locked me up again, and this time loses my content.]

LATER:

Glad the post was published.

This is a significant judicial decision, not only because it challenges the "10 round magazine" limitation (which is common in most gun-unfriendly states}, but also because it established an "At Least" standard for magazine capacity which most states are bound to follow.

There are other significant ramifications of this judicial ruling:

First, it acknowledges the protection from the tyranny of the majority  ... which is always an issue when discussing Second Amendment Freedoms.  That the opinion was issued by a sitting judge is significant; it's not the errant rambling of a gun-guy, but the judicial opinion of a respected member of the court.

Second, there is a controversy between pro-gun and anti-gun forces which are generally considered to be nothing more than a matter of opinion; the judicial ruling cited here resolves the controversy, at least in terms of whether a 10-round magazine ought to be established as a minimum "load limit" (for want of a better expression).

One of the more obnoxious issues in gun-control controversy has been "what is a legitimate legal limit for magazine capacity".  I've always opined that there is no legitimate limit, if only because pro-gun and anti-gun forces have been unable disinclined to reach an agreement.  By this, we have established a minimum legitimate magazine capacity.  It's not much, but it's a start!

Third, (and I'm admittedly expanding on an issue raised in the preceding paragraph), there is another issue: when the "Other Side" of the issue enters into a discussion as to how many rounds in a magazine should be accepted as "optimal", they have already tacitly accepted that individual firearms ownership is a legitimate situation, and not subject to further discussion.  But some of those kind folk are adamant about the number of rounds should be permitted in a magazine, to all acceptable performance in the limited applications of firearms force they are willing to accept.

There is an old joke about prostitution, which ends with the punchline:

"We have already established 'what kind of girl you are';  Now we are only bickering about the price".

Not to belie the (perhaps inappropriate) discussion: nobody knows, or can make a definitive argument for, exactly "how many rounds" are appropriate for a magazine to define the difference between "not enough for defense" and "too many for sport".

My personal opinion is "you can never have too much ammunition, nor too many magazines!". 

But I'm guilty of using competitive criteria (USPSA competition allows an unlimited number of rounds and magazines in a variety of competitive classes) and some critics of the sport complain that the usage of 25+ round capacity magazines is, at best, "unrealistic".

My invariable response is: "It's a GAME, Sport!  If you can't pay, you shouldn't play."

Who says that gun ownership is only about self defense?  Shooting is fun because ... it's fun!

Let the Non-Debate Begin!

The Milwaukee (Wisc.)  Journal Sentinel's position has been well known for years; they're against current "gun control" laws, and think there should be more of them.

Their "Editorial Page Editor", David D. Haynes, has some scathing comments in his screed regarding the blame due to the National Rifle Association

What gun debate? There is no gun debate in Washington, D.C.:

There is zero chance that the shooting of U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise earlier this week will change anything about the gun debate in Washington, D.C. That’s because there is no gun debate in Washington, D.C. The NRA has won. Not the debate — the gun lobby remains very wrong on the facts. But the group had won the politics — big time.

So apparently Dave's outrage is based on on laws which were enacted due to the urging of the NRA, which has as one of its primary goals to protect our Constitutional rights to "Keep and Bear Arms".

I'm not sure if he is equally adamant in his condemnation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which shares some of these goals.   Haynes didn't say.

But Haynes is certain that the NRA has goals which he cannot support.  And he purports to speak as an "insider" in the firearms owners' community:

I have been a gun owner all my life. I’ve shot long guns of every kind and a variety of handguns. I have no problem with people owning them for legitimate purposes. I own a half dozen of my own firearms, several of which have been handed down for generations within our family.
But as a gun owner and outdoorsman, I also have no concerns with expanded background checks or limits on the kinds of firearms an individual can own. Civilians don’t need military-style assault rifles, which are nothing but tools for killing people. Civilians don’t need easier access to silencers or armor-piercing bullets, either, which a bill that was to be debated Wednesday in a House committee would allow. After the shooting, the debate was canceled — for now.

[emphasis added]

Let's ask Dave.

Nope! No AR15's in Pennsylvania Deer Season!

Pennsylvania has decided that semi-automatic rifles (aka: AR15) are NOT legal for big game hunting.

Deer Hunters Relieved Over Semi-Automatic Weapons Law Change | WNEP.com:

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Game Commission made a last-minute change and decided not to legalize semi-automatic rifles for hunting big game like deer, black bear, elk, and turkey.

I agree with the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

The .556/223 is an underpowered caliber, deliberately designed for "war", where a wounded foe is better for the aggressor than a dead enemy ...  a wounded warrior hopes he has two buddies to get  him to medical help.

I've never been a fan of the .223 and its kin, because it is a wimpy  cartridge and over-touted; it is best suited for small game like woodchucks and prairie dogs

(ASIDE:  I own a .22-250 which is MUCH more effective even on small game, but much more powerful than the .223 cartridge.) 

MEAT:
I've hunted deer and antelope, and I'm a firm believer that a cartridge of at least .25 caliber is most likely to bring a quick and humane end to their life as fauna, and immediate transformation of their body into a locker.  Yummy!  (No .. Antelope does NOT "taste like goat"!)

I've served in Viet Nam, where wounded prisoners were brought in, and those were almost invariably 'wounded', not killed, by the 5.56mm/AR16 .. unless it was a "Head Shot".

Conclusion:
I agree with the Pennsylvania Game Commission that the 5.56mm/.223 caliber is not an appropriate (or at least a "controversial"  cartridge) for medium-size game such as deer.

Certainly, the .22* cartridge is not optimal for Elk, which are closer in size and vitality to a horse, than to a deer.

POSTSCRIPT:
Now, if the AR15 frame is presented with a more powerful cartridge than the .223/5,56 cartridge, I think that an overly broad definition of the term "AR15" is premature; that frame is capable of accepting more powerful cartridges (if only barely' the AR15 is not a "robust" frame, after all) and for the folks in charge in Pennsylvania to (apparently) have made such a broad statement is to accept that .
That's all I have to say about that.

On the other hand, I'm dumb as a stump and if you read down this far ... you already knew that.