LawDog and Phlegmmy
Yearly Archives: 2012
Jew Without A Gun
Today I have found the blog of Robert J. Avrech, Hollywood screenwriter (Emmy award winning, no less): Seraphic Secret.
The current post — hot-linked — is titled Jew Without A Gun, and recounts his (and his family’s) experience on the evening of the 1992 Rodney King riots in LA.
A good read, very well written.
LawDog
In honour of the Holiday Season:
Something to remind us that there is always beauty in the world.
LawDog
A simple question
For the liberals/Leftists/what-the-hell-ever-label the gun banners are hiding under this week, I have a simple question:
How would taking my guns away from me have stopped what happened in Connecticut?
I’m not talking generalities here; I’m not speaking about large groups of Americans — I’m speaking about me, myself — in person and specifically.
If you were somehow able to go back in time to last week and seize all of my guns — how would that have stopped what happened?
All right, I’ll go you one better: suppose you could have seized all of my guns and all of Phlegmmy’s, too. How would taking every gun in my house have stopped what happened in Connecticut?
How would taking all of mine and Phlegmmy’s guns have prevented that tragedy?
Now. Do you honestly believe that my name will ever come up as a mass murderer at a school in the future?
So why do you want to take my guns?
I am not a unique case.
There are about fifty-two million — let me type that out for you: 52,000,000 — households in the United States that own a gun who did NOT murder anyone in Connecticut.
There are 52,000,000 households in which nothing bad at all has happened with their guns … ever.
Bear in mind that 52 million households is not 52 million people. Many households have more than one person living there-in, so let’s give a best-guesstimate of eighty million gun-owners.
80,000,000 people did nothing wrong in Connecticut.
80 million people haven’t done anything wrong this week, won’t do anything wrong next week and have done nothing wrong in the past.
When did it become normal to suggest that the United States of America punish 80,000,000 of its’ citizens for the actions of a number of evil people totaling less than 0.00001%?
And that’s what gun-banning is: When you take away someone’s rights, you are punishing them. You take away my right to my AR15 because of what some scaffy little bugnsipe did somewhere else, you are punishing me for someone’s elses actions.
Is it American to punish me for the actions of another; is it just to punish me for the things someone else did?
I wouldn’t think so, but maybe I’m old-fashioned.
For the past four years.
Might be a bit of a clue there, but what do I know?
LawDog
Well, that’s just splendiferous
Each of us has a monster down deep inside.
It’s made of fangs, talons and shadow, and it glories in blood, fire and pain.
It’s been part of us since before we climbed down out of the trees, wrapped around our hind brains; it is there today, and it will be there as long as humans are human.
It is, after all, one of those things that makes humans, human.
Some will argue that it is our intelligence that makes us human. Well, no doubt. Other will point out opposable thumbs, and they probably have a point.
However, Gentle Reader, I put it to you that the ability to take a bit of rock, a stick and some vine, and see what it may become in our minds is no more important than that monster lurking in our bones and blood.
Yes, to take those items and turn them into a spear is important — but what use is the spear without being able to walk up and stick it into the cave bear, or lion, or raiding Neandertal, or any of the thousands upon thousands of other bogeymen waiting to make early H. Sapiens into a brief diorama in some other species Museum of Natural History?
Opposable thumbs enable us — as a species — to write sonnets, turn gears, build wondrous structures, sow, weave, paint and everything else that makes us … Us.
Before that, though, the monsters that live inside of us used those thumbs to pick up stone axes, walk into caves and Put Out The Cat so that our mates and our progeny could not only live, but thrive without becoming Kitty Kibbles.
It’s there. That monster is in good people, bad people, smart people, stupid people, big people, little people, brave ones and cowards. If you are human, it’s there.
Part of walking the warrior path involves reaching inside, grabbing your monster and hauling it out to take a good, hard look at it; because denial doesn’t make your monster go away. Denial only ensures that if your monster ever does try to slip its chain, you’ll not know what to do about it, or even what it is.
That’s the thing: those people who swear they don’t have a monster — when theirs gets loose, they don’t have a clue. Their monster runs them — and that’s a recipe for an unpleasantness.
Man should always control his monster. It’s when the monster control man that things get nasty. And you can’t control your monster with denial or ignorance.
You can’t control your monster unless you know it. Unless you know what it looks like, what it feels like, what it feeds off of … and what it can do.
I once engaged in a debate with a young lass who swore that my assertions regarding the monster that lives in each of us were totally mistaken. Not everyone, said she, had a monster. Surely I didn’t think that she had a monster.
In response I asked if she had a child, or if there was a young child in her immediate family? There, indeed, was. A niece, of whom she was very fond. I then asked her to engage in a creative articulation with me. I asked her to imagine that she and her niece were in a room, and that the room was empty of everything except one other person.
She said that she could, and then I told her that the other person was Jeffrey Dahmer.
There was a long pause, and then she stated that she’d obviously call the police. I responded that Jeffrey Dahmer was bigger than she was, stronger, faster — and, of course, a serial killer.
I asked her how much she cared for the niece, then I mentioned that there was a hammer in the room, and asked her to think honestly about her response.
She looked at me for a long time, then I said: “Hey, look. Monster.”
When she told me to go to hell, I figured that I had gotten my point across.
Anyhoo.
Today, we had a young man come to jail for burglary. Not only is he a long-term substance abuser, but he has almost mechanically-perfect scars up the inside of both forearms from wrist to elbow.
I spoke to him gently — he was obviously still under the effect of whatever the current recreational pharmaceutical du jour is, but was coherent enough to assure me that he had thrown away any blade that he kept around for the purpose of cutting himself. He told me several times that he wasn’t stupid enough to keep a weapon about his person while committing a burglary, and seemed somewhat aggrieved that I would ask him such a thing.
When the razor blade used by a self-mutilating, substance-abusing critter to carve multiple dozens of lacerations into the flesh of both his forearms slid through my nitrile glove and several millimetres into my right index finger I knew exactly what that electric burn meant.
My monster roared up out of my hind brain, fueled by such things as “HIV”, “Hepatitis”, “LIAR”, and for a brief instant my monster filled my mind with visions of rage and blood, of crushing fury and punishing pain.
Only for that briefest of instants, though.
I ordered the critter not to move, informed the other officers that I’d been injured by a blade in his pocket, waited until they had secured the blade and walked to the nurse’s station, blood dripping off my finger every step of the way.
Later, the arresting officer sought me out to apologise for missing the razor blade in the critter’s pocket during his frisk, and stated, “Man, I don’t know how you did it. If that would have been me stuck by that nasty razor, I would have smashed him!”
Kid, I’m a man. I control my monster — always. My monster doesn’t control me — ever. Period. Full stop. End of story.
And that’s something you might just want to think long and hard about.
LawDog
Somebody alert Tallahassee from Zombieland.
Apparently there will not be any Twinkies after the Zombie Apocalypse.
Hostess Brands, makers of the ubiquitous — and world famous — Twinkies, has announced that they’re shutting down.
Why, do you ask? Why would the company that makes a product that is popularly thought of being able to survive anything, up to and including various apocalypses, holocausts, Biblical catastrophes and the occasional zombie, be shutting down?
Apparently the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union decided to get their noses out of joint and initiated a nation-wide strike that pretty much destroyed the iconic Hostess Brands.
18,000+ people (only about ~6,500 of them Union members, though) have been laid off, or will be laid off pretty damned soon — and just before the Holiday Season, too. And because the company is up to its eyeteeth in bankruptcy court the amount of help that Hostess is going to be able to offer its (former) employees pretty much equals jack divided by squat.
Severance benefits? Sorry, try asking the union for help.
Expense claims waiting for reimbursement? Whoops. Hey, maybe the BGTWGMI Union will help with that.
Pension? Medical benefits? Other stuff? B-A-N-K-R-U-P-T-C-Y. Go ask the Union that got your job killed for help.
We here at the LawDog Files would like to congratulate the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union for demonstrating that not only do folks not learn from history, but they are obviously completely unable to learn from SIMPLE BLOODY NURSERY TALES.
*sigh*
In a civilised country, the BCTWGMI Union Officers would be apologising on national TeeVee before retreating to a back room with a pen, a sheet of paper and one round; and leaving their successors to make things right.
Unfortunately, I foresee a whole bunch of sniveling done by people who should be angry, much posturing by people who should be legally destroying the BCTMGMI Union, and pompous denials by Union Officers.
Pfagh, on the lot of them.
LawDog
Wow!
I’ve been receiving some comments and more than a bit of e-mail stating that Bloggers new anti-spam reverse Turing test was hard to read.
So, a couple of days ago I finally figured out how to turn it off.
Holy gods!
The spam filter has bloody well exploded, and that’s not counting the spam that the filter doesn’t catch.
I had no idea the spam comments were that prevalent.
Yeesh.
LawDog
What the hell?
I have supported the Wounded Warrior Project with money when I could, time when I had some, and by word of mouth for a couple of years.
Today I learn that might not have been my best idea.
I am a gun person. The majority of my friends are gun people. While I may not agree with them a lot of the time, I support the NRA, GOA, LEAA and other gun-rights organisations.
Apparently this gets me cross-threaded with the Wounded Warrior Project.
The following link leads to an e-mail exchange between Tom Gresham of Gun Talk Radio and the PR Director over at WWP.
Just in case someone was playing a nasty joke on me, I popped over to the ‘Additional Opportunities‘ page at www.woundedwarriorproject.org and looked for the quote cited in the e-mail exchange linked above.
Yep. I do quote from that page:
“WWP does not co-brand, create cause marketing campaigns or receive a percentage or a portion of proceeds from companies in which the product or message is sexual, political or religious in nature, or from alcohol or firearms companies.“
Highlighting is mine.
I am a “firearms person” and I have done what I could for that charity. I know of several “firearms companies” who have gone above and beyond for wounded veterans and the charities that support them, up to and including the Wounded Warrior Project.
This is one hell of a spit in the eye of those in the “firearms business” who have gone out of their way to support this Nation’s wounded heroes. All righty then. Doom on the Wounded Warrior Project.
Other folks have recommended Soldiers’ Angels, and they haven’t shown any sign — so far — of biting the hands that feed them, so they’ll be getting my hard-earned dosh and time from here on out; and nothing but the back of my hand for the Wounded Warrior Project.
LawDog
Well, that’s different
Tonight, we here at The LawDog Files have learned that the White House has a section of its website upon which one may create a petition.
Then, if that petition gains 25,000 signatures within a certain period of time — I think about thirty days — the Administration will issue a response.
In response to the recent election, some enterprising soul has created a petition to allow Texas to withdraw from the United States and form its own government.
Anyone in the Administration who didn’t see something like this coming shouldn’t be allowed outside without a minder, but I digress.
The petition was created on 09 NOV 2012, and needs 25,000 signatures by 09 DEC 2012. As of 12 NOV 2012 there were double the needed amount of signatures, with more coming.
Heh.
You don’t have to be Carnac the Magnificent to foretell the official response from the Administration — something polite masking giggles, giant Bronx cheers, and probably a cocked snook or two — but I signed it anyway.
I noticed that several other (lesser) States had similar petitions up, but Texas was in the lead by a good bit, which either makes me extremely proud or slightly worried.
LawDog
Okay
As I mentioned earlier, we are currently graced with the presence of OldNFO and AEPilotJim; and just a little bit ago EvylRobot Michael and Jennifer dropped by.
We discussed the plight of loved friends, and Things Have Been Jolly Well Sorted Out.
OldNFO has decided to raffle one of his Colt Diamondbacks for the cause. It’s blued, 4-inch, 38 Special and is just back from Cylinder and Slide who have — no doubt — done their usual excellent work on the pistol.
It’s a shooter, not a safe queen.
Having heard this announcement, Michael has decided to help by donating a holster. If you’re the winner, tell him if you want an Inside-the-Waistband or an Outside-the-Waistband, and he’ll make it for you.
Not to be outdone, Good Friend Joe Speer over at Jackalope Rifle Company announced that he would provide a second place prize. For those who hanker for something a little … different … he will donate a replica 14th-century handgonne.
Or a knife, if your tastes run that way.
So, here’s the deal.
Go over to Tam’s blog and hit her PayPal. I am told that there will be a receipt of some kind that pops up and can be printed off. Enter the word “DIAMONDBACK” on there somewhere, and e-mail the receipt to OldNFO.
Each donation to Tam of $25 gets you one entry into the raffle. Want two chances to win this pistol and holster, or the handgonne? Donate $50 to Tam. Want four chances? Donate $100.
OldNFO would like to see $1500 go to Tamara. I’d like to see that number left gasping in the dust on the way to double or triple that.
I am told that my lady and Jennifer are collaborating upon another raffle for the same cause, I am sure that details will be forth-coming.
Make me proud, folks.
LawDog
UPDATE: Stingray and LabRat over at Atomic Nerds are throwing their hat into the ring for Tamara. Also in the raffle will be a $200 gift certificate to Brownell’s. Check with OldNFO for details.
Well done, my friends. Well done, indeed.
LawDog