I do not suffer fools well. 

I was at the local grocery store trying to do my shopping with a cranky three year old in the cart.

The kid behind the deli counter was having a conversation with his buddy who came to visit him.  They were wasting my time.

The buddy was complaining that some mutual friend borrowed his phone charger and now his phone is dying and blah blah blah…

This went on for almost ten minutes.  I know because I walked away, got my veggies and milk and went back to the deli counter and they were still at it.

I wanted cold cuts and to be on my way.

So I inturrepted their conversation in my most helpful tone of voice and said:

“There is a life hack for that.  Take a plate or pan or something large enough to put your phone in, with about an inch of space around the sided.  Then put about half to one inch of water in the pan.  Then put your phone in the pan with four nine volt batteries.  The water will act like a universal charger and power your phone.”

“Thanks” the kid said.

I got my turkey breast and cheese and went on merry way.

Moms Demand Action is celebrating the overturning of the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act, also known as “Docs vs. Glocks.”

The New York Times calls the decision “A Win for Free Speech and Gun Safety.”  I’ll be honest, I didn’t think the law, as written, was going to survive a court challenge.  That said, I still believe there needs to be some protection for gun owners from doctors.

The media that has covered this has failed to address the real fear of gun owners.

According to Slate, the issue is gun owners feeling bad:

Stop for a moment and consider that the Second Amendment injury here lies not in the possibility that a physician can do anything to take away anyone’s gun, but in the outside chance that she will use her knowledge of actual medical evidence to suggest that guns can kill people and her patient might listen to her. This is literally an argument for a constitutional right not to learn stuff from people who know stuff because you might then feel bad about the stuff you own. 

First of all, with all do respect to the MD’s out there.  Is there anything a doctor who might now own a gun (considering that pediatricians are overwhelmingly liberal) can teach a law abiding gun owner about guns?  This is nothing more than the logical fallacy of appeal to authority.

However, if you read the articles in The Atlantic and The Trace, you get a better idea of why gun owners might actually fear being talked to about gun by their doctors.

From the Atlantic:

“Conversations about gun safety between providers and patients should be nonjudgmental, educational, and focused on improving the health and safety of the patient and those around him or her,” the lead study author, Marian Betz of the University of Colorado in Aurora, told Reuters. “Unfortunately, the larger political debate over gun control laws can spill over into health-care settings.”

Great idea!  Lets take today’s hyper polarized political climate, and encourage doctors to discuss an issue that is every bit a political as a matter of safety, and tempt fate that the doctor’s politics “spill over” into providing medical advice.

“At times, clinicians may feel uncomfortable or uninformed when discussing certain subjects, and may disagree with a patient’s choices or beliefs,” they write. “However, this discomfort or disagreement cannot justify either offensive condescension or silent inaction.”

Even better, let’s acknowledge that doctors might not be informed on the subject of guns, but lecture their patients anyway because they disagree with their patients political choices.  That haughty air of smug condescension really worked in Progressive’s favor in 2016 didn’t it.

From the The Trace (in a blinding act of unbiased truth telling):

Until recently, the research on doctors’ gun counseling had long shown that gun-owning parents were OK with this approach: A 1999 survey of physicians and parents found that “All parents who owned guns indicated they would acknowledge owning a gun if asked by their pediatricians,” and 98 percent of pediatricians “believed that [they] should discuss gun safety with all gun-owning families” — a discussion that did not simply label guns in the home as an inherent danger, but offered that unloaded or locked guns are safer. (It should be noted that pro-gun parents aren’t the only group whose feelings have hardened during the gun-rights renaissance of the past decade; the American Academy of Pediatrics has since called for parents to remove guns from their homes altogether.)

That part in bold (emphasis added) is the key.

This is straight from the Healthy Kids website of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Big bold letters advocating not to own a gun.

But these points alone are not really the deep seeded fear of gun owners.  So what that your pediatrician decides to lecture you on how you are a bad person because you own guns?

It made national news when a couple in Las Vegas couple was denied the right to become foster parents because they had concealed carry permits.

There is a terrible shortage of foster homes, but the State of Nevada decided that the risk to a foster child being placed in a home where there might be a loaded gun was too high and the application was denied.  Too bad they weren’t gun free child molesters, Nevada would have given them all the foster kids they want.

But this is foster care, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to become a foster or adoptive parent.

In the State of Florida (as well as everywhere else) doctors are mandatory reporters.  There are guidelines to reporting, but if the reporter feels that the child is in an unsafe circumstance, they are to report it to the state.

Florida’s Department of Child and Family services is terrible.  A grand jury said so.  It is so bad there is a Facebook page chronicling their failures.

The horror that concerns gun owning parents is when some hyper political, anti gun, nanny of a doctor decides that when mom or dad says “yes” to the question “do you own any guns,” mom and dad are getting a visit from DCF.  If the American Academy of Pediatrics says owning a gun is bad and dangerous, than a home with a gun in it is worthy of government intervention.

In 2017 America where wearing a MAGA hat means that you are a neo-Nazi deserving of being punched or bashed, do we trust progressive doctors not to torment gun owners with unnecessary investigations from state agencies over the political disagreements of gun ownership?

Maybe a few years ago this was paranoid fantasy.  Today I’m not so sure.

The First Amendment should be respected.  Let the doctors talk to patients about guns.  Let the doctor talk to me about how often I change my break pads too, I’ll add it to the list of things I know more about than my pediatrician.

What gun owners need is protection for doctors that think their politics mean that they can do more than talk.

I went shooting on Saturday.  I put a new set of sights on my R1 and wanted to check the zero before taking it out to competition.  Figured if I was going to be out at the range with a bunch of .45 ACP, I might as well bring along my carry gun to brush up with.

I hadn’t yet heard about the #NOMOREBLACKTARGETS thing on Saturday, but the range was out of the standard B-27 targets, so I got something else for practice.

Now I think I might be in trouble with the LGBT community.

I am brushing up on my Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

George Orwell’s 1984 is a must  read.  It is mandatory reading in mos high schools.  It is a scary book, of course, but because it is fiction, I think some people don’t take it seriously.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the Soviet Union’s George Orwell.  He actually spent eight years doing labor in a Gulag because of a private letter he wrote to a friend.  He lived what Orwell only saw from afar.  Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opera are One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.

Both are excellent, and should be mandatory reading by all Americans once per election cycle.  If I could ever get the funding I would make The Gulag Archipelago into a movie or maybe a mini series.

There is a passage from The Gulag Archipelago that should be branded onto the soul of every gun owner and patriot in America:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

That quote has always been my answer to the question “Do you believe that if the Jews in Germany had been armed, could the Holocaust been averted.”

Solzhenitsyn knew and in that passage explained that every tyrannical law handed down from above has to be carried out by boots on the ground.  If you can make the boots on the ground fear carrying out the law more than they fear punishment from higher ups (who are just another layer of boots) tyranny breaks down.  But you HAVE TO BE WILLING TO FIGHT.

The negative corollary of this is the Ferguson Effect.  Rather than violence, the boots on the ground feared public humiliation of lawsuits and so walked away, allowing chaos to reign.

But this was not the passage that prompted this post.

This is from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

The shorter version of this is:

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.  Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

In this sentiment, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on Antifa.  It is a movement built on lies and distortions to justify the desire for violence.

These people would fit right in with the NKDV, they just don’t have a Stalin to lead them.

I might be literally worse than Hitler.  At least that is the opinion of my buddy’s girlfriend.

A coworker of ours has been selling Girl Scout cookies on behalf of his daughter.

My buddy bought a few boxes.  They were delivered in a stack to his desk.

I surreptitiously opened his box of Peanut Butter Patties, removed the tray of cookies, and glued the flaps of the box closed again.  He then took the stack of cookies home.

I come to find out today that his girlfriend made a beeline for the Patties.

She suspected something was wrong when the box didn’t weight much, but it was still sealed. 

Her suspicion turned to worry when she shook the box and heard nothing. 

Suspicion became absolute soul crushing despair when she opened the box to find it empty.

Apparently she was near inconsolable for an hour that some inhuman monster had so cruelly hoodwinked her and robbed her of her chocolate covered peanut buttery joy.

I don’t know what tasted better: his cookies or her emotional devastation.

I read Miguel’s post Days of Rage – A “No S***” Must Read and was reminded of this video.

A handful of Antifa bullies are blocking a sidewalk, preventing “the bourgeois” from getting to work.  In typical identity politics, they let the woman through, but the man, they stop.  He pushes through and the situation turns to blow.

I have to say, that big dude can throw a hell of a punch.

It’s what happens next that is key.  One Antifa goes after the guy with a stick.  Simultaneously, another Antifa starts whining that the big guy hit a woman.

Antifa initiates the fight then calls the cops trying to be the victims.

Fortunately in this case (I don’t know where this took place) the cops realize it was Antifa that started the whole thing.

This MO of being the attacker and the victim at the same time is dangerous a hell.

After the Berkeley Milo riots, like minded bullies rushed to their campus newspapers to explain how hurt Snowflake feelings are violence and so beating up the people that hurt their feelings was justified.

Stomping on a Trump supporter is self defense.  A the University of Central Florida, an group called Knights for Socialism, styled as an Antifa group, advertised a “self defense” flight club called “BASH THE FASH.”  Generally, the term “bash” is not associated with defense but attack.  (Also, I am normally a supporter of both self defense and Reason Magazine, but in this case, it is obvious that KFS is not defending but attacking.)

This is going to get worse and worse.

The lesson they are teaching the Right is:  If you aren’t with us, you are against us.  Take your beatings because if you fight back you will get crucified by the media.  Defend yourself at your own peril.  They are trying to create a no win for the Right and a total victory for them, where they can hurt individuals on the Right with impunity.

Here is where I fear this is going to go.

The left is notorious for their misunderstanding of Stand Your Ground.  At some point, mark my words, some Antifa is going to shoot a Trump supporter (or just someone who isn’t crazy progressive SJW) and claim Stand Your Ground because said shooting victim said something that hurt said Antifa’s feelings.

The question is, will the media still attack Stand Your Ground as shoot first gun culture craziness or when an Antifa shoots a guy in a MAGA hat, will they discover Stand Your Ground is good?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof needs to stop beating his wife.

He wrote an OpEd on Sunday that is so ridiculous and enraging at the same time  my vision started to go fuzzy reading it.

The bottom line is that most years in the U.S., ladders kill far more Americans than Muslim terrorists do. Same with bathtubs. Ditto for stairs. And lightning.

Above all, fear spouses: Husbands are incomparably more deadly in America than jihadist terrorists.

And husbands are so deadly in part because in America they have ready access to firearms, even when they have a history of violence. In other countries, brutish husbands put wives in hospitals; in America, they put them in graves.

Yet Trump is raging about a risk from refugees that seems manageable, even as he talks about relaxing rules on another threat, guns, that is infinitely more lethal.

I’m not excusing domestic violence.  There is no excuse for domestic violence.  But the fear with terrorism is that it can happen anytime without warning.  You don’t see it coming.  There are behavioral predictors for spousal murder, like… prior abuse.

Should there be more resources to help abused spouses and children escape abusers before the abuse turns fatal?  Of course.

Is it a good idea to keep people convicted of domestic violence and those with restraining orders as prohibited persons?  Yes (California’s abuse of that, not withstanding).

But don’t paint husbands with a broad brush of potential killers worse than terrorists.  That just makes you an asshole.