On any given day there will be a dozen different articles or opinions posted to major news organizations about guns. Well, not guns, gun rights, well not gun rights, OUR right to self defense.

The arguments are so tired and well worn that in most cases you can discard them within moments.

Militia! What about the Militia!

These are the people that read “A well regulated Militia,” and stop. If the amendment mentions militia it must be about the militia.

These are the same people that say that until 2008 and the Heller decision there was no individual right to keep and bear arms. They might state it a little differently “the individual right to keep and bear arms was not recognized until 2008” They are ignorant or deceitful regarding the facts that until around 1968 it was always considered an individual right.

But what about all the gun violence!

These are the people that are not interested in the law as written. They are interested in the law as interpreted. They believe in a balancing act between the common good and the law. If they believe that the common good is more important than the law then the common good should prevail.

In the past when “for the common good” was applied, you ended up with strange fruit hanging from the lamp posts.

You can hear and read this point of view in the descent to Bruen.

You don’t need a (Fill in the blank)!

Unlike every other right there are people that believe the right to self defense should be limited by need. And need is defined by them, not you. If they don’t think you need an AR-15 then the second amendment doesn’t apply to an AR-15. If they don’t think you need a semi-automatic center fire rifle then the second amendment doesn’t apply to semi-automatic center fire rifles.

By defining and limiting what is covered by the second amendment they are able to reduce the second amendment to a meaningless trope.

That place is to sensitive to have firearms

For some reason they believe that people that carry firearms will lose control and start shooting random people. Now it does happen that evil people shoot others because they are evil. The justification seems to be that by creating a gun free zone that people will be safer within those zones.

The obvious problem with this is that gun free zones are only apply to the law abiding. They do not apply to criminals. In addition, because of the limits on the law abiding they become a place where it is easier for criminals to operate.

If a property owner wishes to only allow criminals with guns into and onto their property, so be it. We should then decide not to enter those places to do business. If a crime then takes place in one of these places the property owner should be liable as they did not provide adequate protection for those on their property.

Years ago we went to Six flags in Maryland. On the way in we had to pass through metal detectors. Bags had to be checked. They got very upset about my Swiss Army Knife. They didn’t notice the large folder that was in my camera bag. They would not have noticed if I had a full size 1911 in that bag.

Criminal Guns Only zones just don’t work without a great deal of effort.

They Only Meant Muskets!

Leaving out the rifles of the time and all the other amazing advancements in firearm technology going on.

They are unable to figure out that if there was a technology restriction on rights they would loose almost all of their other rights.

The Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper published by Ben Franklin, published once a week and had a subscriber base smaller than this blog. (It is hard to find circulation numbers, take that last statement with a grain of salt). Yet nobody really thinks that the first amendment doesn’t apply to the Internet, regardless of all the yapping about “hate speech isn’t free speech”.

It is to deadly

Almost everything we do today is faster and has larger impact on more people than what was happening in the 1700’s. Most people didn’t hurl across the earth in contraptions of steel and plastic weight thousands of pounds. Each one of which was capable of destroying most homes of the late 1700’s.

A food processor is significantly more capable than the knives of 1776.

Balance

nj.com has a history of unbalanced articles regarding firearm rights. Earlier this week they published a balanced article. It is almost as if they can see where things are going and are making editorial decisions that don’t make them out to be complete fools.

The U.S. high court’s ruling, known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, “opens up the possibility of scrutinizing all modern-era firearms laws, which seem to be preoccupied with banning hardware as opposed to punishing wrongdoers and intervening with people with mental health problems,” said Scott Bach, the head of the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs.

There are many more quotes from gun rights advocates in the article. There is one from gun rights inf ringers and none from the usual suspects.

A spokesman for acting state Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who is named as a defendant in the two major suits, declined to comment. But Platkin saw these legal challenges coming.

“The opinion in Bruen (the Supreme Court gun permit case) will encourage individuals to challenge other laws, ranging from our limits on who can buy guns, to our limits on the most dangerous kinds of guns New Jersey residents can buy,” he wrote in an op-ed last week.

It is refreshing to read a news article in such an anti gun outlet in such an anti gun state that is not twisted in the normal ways.

N.J. gun laws face new legal challenges after Supreme Court strikes down concealed carry law

Five hundred thousand calories.

I need five hundred thousand calories or I am going to die.

Maybe less, I’m doing back-of-the-envelope, easy numbers head math, but that’s a good estimate.

Scientists like precise numbers, NASA is full of scientists who love really precise numbers.  I’m an engineer.  I like easy numbers that I can crunch quickly in my head and if they are accurate enough to be within the tolerance that I need, good enough.

I’m sure at least one scientist back home has calculated down to the third fucking decimal point exactly how many calories I need but I don’t have a spare fuck to give for that level of precision at the moment.

Alright, let’s go over the situation.

I’m an astronaut aboard the Iris.  We were on the final leg of our mission to Mars.  Actually, we had been to Mars and were returning home when docking with the shuttle went badly.

Badly is a bit of an understatement.  We fucking collided.

The Iris is in constant transit between Earth and Mars.  It never stops, it doesn’t enter orbit around either body.  It just goes back and forth between the two planets.

This is the most energy-efficient way to conduct multiple Mars missions.  A shuttle takes a crew from Earth and docks with the Iris as the Iris approaches Earth.  The new crew boards the Iris and transfers all the supplies they need with them.  The old crew enters the shuttle with the samples they collected from Mars, undocks, and returns to Earth.  Once the Iris reaches Mars, the process repeats.  The crew that was just on Mars takes a shuttle up to Iris with their samples, and the crew that boarded from Earth nine months before takes the shuttle down to Mars with the rest of their supplies.

This whole process is about conserving energy in order to conserve fuel.  Because Iris never enters orbit, it is on a pseudo-free return trajectory from Earth to Mars and back again.

All rocket engines work the same way, all based on Newton’s third law of motion.  A rocket pushes something out the back in one direction.  That pushes the body of the rocket in the other direction.  The force the rocket engine pushes the body of the rocket with, we call thrust.  Most people are familiar with chemical rocket engines.  Fuel and oxygen are mixed in a chamber and ignited.  Hot gas shoots out the back of the rocket engine pushing the rocket.

That works very well for short durations.  Lots of fuel is consumed to generate lots of thrust very quickly.  That’s not so good for long-duration space travel.

For that, a ship like the Iris is powered by ion engines.  Ion engines use electricity to propel ionized gas at extremely high velocity.  Remember that force is mass times acceleration.  Chemical rockets use huge amounts of mass and accelerate it to supersonic speed.  The Saturn V main engines had an exhaust gas velocity of approximately 2,400 meters per second or Mach 7.

Ion engines use very little exhaust mass but propel it at 50 kilometers per second, or more than 20 times the exhaust velocity of a chemical rocket.

This allows a spaceship to generate thrust with very little fuel consumption.  We don’t count electricity because the Iris is powered by a nuclear reactor like a submarine.  We only concern ourselves with the amount of xenon gas we have to have.

The downside to ion engines is that the way they produce thrust means that they produce low amounts of thrust for long periods of time.  Chemical engines, conversely, produce high amounts of thrust for short periods of time.  It’s the difference between total impulse and specific impulse and gets into all sorts of rocket efficiency technical bullshit that gives aerospace and propulsion engineering a hard-on that really doesn’t matter right now.

Suffice it to say, when the Iris has a problem, we can’t just flip the ship around and fire up the engines and go home.

I am along for the ride.  At best, I can fire up the engines and accelerate towards Mars, slingshot around it as fast as possible without launching myself out toward Jupiter, then decelerate hard as I approach Earth and cut some of my travel time, but there is no way of making a U-turn and going straight home.

So…

The shuttle collided with us as we approached Earth.

Our replacement crew was killed.

The entire docking assembly was ripped open and the rest of my crew was killed.

I was busy in the engine compartment preparing to transfer ship’s maintenance to the next engineer, which is why I survived when the forward compartment decompressed.

The automated ship systems did what they were designed to do and put us back on course.

That was the problem.  trans

During the collision, our communication system was damaged.  NASA sent a signal to Iris to go into emergency park mode and enter orbit around Earth.  Iris never read the signal and so continued on her merry way back to Mars.

Why didn’t I do anything to try and fly the ship?

One, I’m not a pilot.

Two, we don’t actually fly the fucking ship from up here.

Remember everything I said about how ion engines work?  It’s not like we have a joystick and can pilot the ship like a jet.  Some big supercomputer back on Earth calucaltes the most fuel-efficient trajectory it can and transmits that to Iris so it can adjust its trajectory over days and weeks of trust at a Newton at a time.

That’s why the ship’s internal computer is programmed with “in case of emergency, resume pre-planned trajectory.”

So now I’m headed back to Mars.

Seven months out, Seven months back.  Give or take a little bit.

Hence my need for five hundred and forty thousand calories or I am going to die.

It should be a lot more than that.  NASA plans on us having between 2,100 and 2,800 calories per day, but I don’t have that.

As an adult human male, I can survive at about 1,200 calories per day.  It will suck.  It will suck a lot, but it’s doable.  Below 1,000 calories per day, I’ll die.

Fourteen months at 1,200 calories per day, that’s five hundred and four thousand calories.  Call it five hundred thousand because I don’t have any spare fucks for that last four thousand to carry over in my math.

NASA sends us up with prepared meals, each one containing 1,250 calories.  We were a crew of six.  One day’s worth of meals for the entire crew is 22,500 calories.

I’m set right?

Wrong.

The number one concern of any and every space flight is weight.  We’re always worried about weight.

Force is mass times acceleration.  Thrust is force.  Trust comes from fuel.  The more mass you have to accelerate to launch velocity the more fuel it takes.

Weight, weight, weight, weight, fucking weight.

These missions are highly planned.  Everyone has their food rationed out over the course of the mission.  Ideally, we don’t want to have any more weight than we need so we don’t carry more food than we need for the mission.  We have a little bit of wiggle room so in stores we have one week of extra rations.  There were two days left in the mission for our transfer window.  So I have nine days worth of food for a crew of six.

That is a total of 162 food packs or 202,500 calories.  God dammit, I’m going to have to get precise with my math.  Fuck!

Stretch that out on 1,200 calories per day, or just under one food pack per day, and let’s say that’s 170 days’ worth of food.

Great.

That brings me most of the way to Mars.

Why am I focused on food?  Why not air or water?  That’s the first thing you learn in survival training.  Three minutes without air, three days without water, or three weeks without food is what it takes to kill you.

I have air and water.  I have it in abundance.  I have enough air for a crew of six and it is on a closed-loop replenishment system.  Even after the forward compartment decompressed, refilling it with air from the reserves, I have plenty.  Water is also a closed-loop, and I have enough for a crew of six.

Food is the one resource that isn’t on a closed-loop.

I’m not even going to entertain the idea of trying to make it one.

I have under half as much food as I need.

What about the crew currently on Mars?

Fuck ’em.  I know that sounds mean but without the resupply, I don’t have food for their return trip either.  They aren’t bringing any food up from Mars with them.  And with the docking assembly gone, they can’t get aboard anyway.  NASA is going to have to figure out how to help them without the Iris.

I need to focus on myself.  What are my options?

Die. I can always die.  But I don’t really want to do that.

I need to make up a difference of 300,000 calories and I’m not growing fucking potatoes on a spaceship.

What do I have?

I have 162 prepared meal packets, a bunch of rocks and shit from Mars, a mostly intact spaceship, and… fuck…

Decompression in a spaceship is not like what you see in the movies.  The ship doesn’t explode and blow everything out into space.  The air vents but most of what is in the ship stays in the ship.

Lean pork is roughly 1,100 calories per pound.  Give or take, roughly 60% of a live harvested animal becomes food.

A 180 lbs pig is roughly 120,000 calories after processing.

Long pig is what some tribes in the Pacific Islands called it.

I have five crew members.

No, I have five long pig vacuum frozen in the forward compartment.

At 120 to 180 lbs each, I have almost half a million calories of unprocessed lean long pork aboard.

It wouldn’t be difficult to recover with an EVA one at a time as needed.  Out the EVA airlock, around to the docking assembly, manually open the docking door, …, and return.

I have a microwave oven.  I have tools.

I have fourteen months to fix the communications system and work out a plan with NASA on how to get me off this interplanetary meat locker.

I have enough calories.

I will survive.

Peter Kehoe of the New York State Sheriff’s Association gave an interview. He was not kind to the Governor of NY.

He slammed Hochul for unconstitutionally pushing through her gun rights infringement bill without following the states constitution. As we reported earlier nobody had a chance to see the bill before it was voted on. The minority party was reporting that they didn’t have a copy until the day of the vote.

The citizens of NY surely didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the bill before a vote was forced. Another S.A.F.E. act passed in the dead of night without citizen input.

Kehoe: I think pretty clearly the intent was to stymie lawful gun owners from getting their permits and that would be unconstitutional by the state.

Anne: Do you believe that that infringes on second amendment rights?

Kehoe: Sure. By creating a rule they can’t abide by.

NYS Sheriffs: New gun laws unconstitutional by creating rules impossible to follow

BREAKING: Woke Female Army Soldier Questions Loyalty to United States after Roe v Wade Decision pic.twitter.com/SXRO00UcFQ

— Jack Poso ?? (@JackPosobiec) July 9, 2022

She is an E5, a sergeant and the lowest rank of NCO.

NCOs are the backbone of the military.

Apparently when she swore her oath as an NCO she swore it to Roe v Wade and not the United States Constitution.

That states now have the ability to regulate abortion based on the will of the citizens of that state means that she can no longer be a loyal soldier of this nation’s military.

I’ve been saying this for some time, our military is being turned into an institution that doesn’t swear allegiance to the Constitution and defends this nation and her citizens, but an institution that swears allegiance to the Woke bureaucracy and defends the Democrat party.

"A spokesperson said Friday that the MSP online licensing system is restricted to 10,000 outgoing emails per rolling 24-hour period. As a result of the massive increase in applications, they’ve gone over the limit for two straight days…" https://t.co/UrYFdJtbwW

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) July 9, 2022

Maryland is dealing with an “exponential increase” in applications for wear and carry gun permits, according to State Police.

In fact, there’s been such a surge, Maryland’s online licensing portal is having trouble keeping up.

A spokesperson said Friday that the MSP online licensing system is restricted to 10,000 outgoing emails per rolling 24-hour period. As a result of the massive increase in applications, they’ve gone over the limit for two straight days, preventing automated email communication with applicants.

The demand is high.

The permitting process is as strict as Illinois’ with 16 hours of training required.

But it seems that at least 20,000 Marylanders are willing to go through it to get permits.

It’s going to be amazing how Bruen will affect states.

Currently there are over 21 million issued carry permit in the US.

We might see easily a 20% to 30% increase in that number as may issue states go shall issue.

I’ll laugh if California beats Florida for total number of permits issued.

If you legally qualify for a gun permit, you should get one

The Supreme Court was right — New York’s decision to place an additional restriction on concealed carry permits was ripe for abuse.

[O]n June 23, the court held that New York’s restrictive law violated the Second and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

What does that mean to those of us in Pennsylvania? Absolutely nothing. The law in this commonwealth, as in more than 40 other states, was already in line with what the court said the Constitution requires. That’s because Pennsylvania is what’s known as a “shall issue” state; New Jersey and Delaware, however, are “may issue” states.

A shall-issue state like Pennsylvania will issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who meets the legal requirements. That doesn’t mean just anyone can get a permit — the law carves out several groups including convicted felons, people “not of sound mind,” and “habitual drunkards.” But if you are legally qualified, you get the permit.

New York’s law — like New Jersey’s — was more subjective. In New York, as a “may issue” state, the government may issue you a license if you meet the criteria, but they can also choose not to if the state believes applicants haven’t demonstrated a “proper cause” for having a license and proven it to the satisfaction of a “licensing officer” — a judge in most counties, but the local police or county sheriff in others.

In no other circumstances do we require people to apply to the subjective judgment of a cop or judge before they can exercise a right. If this were any other civil right, New York’s law would have long ago set off alarm bells in the minds of liberals.

Between 1998 and 2020, the percentage of people with concealed carry permits nationwide has grown by more than sixfold, yet for most of those years (until 2020) the murder rate declined. The rate of violent crime overall declined even more sharply.

Our state does not break down crime data into permit holders vs. non-permit holders, but one state that does, Michigan, found that out of more than 750,000 permit holders in 2021, only four were convicted of homicide. That’s a rate of 0.53 per 100,000 — compared with 7.4 per 100,000 in the state as a whole. The rate for all crimes was 1,856 per 100,000; for permit holders, it was 177 per 100,000.

The changes that will follow in New York and New Jersey after Bruen will not make people there more safe or less safe. What they will do is bring order and equality to the administration of a constitutional right, guaranteeing that all applicants for permits will be treated equally under the law. Equal justice under the law should be uncontroversial in a democratic republic.

Everything said is both factually correct and reasonable.

Every time concealed carry rights are expanded the Left clutches its pearls and cries that every uncouth social interaction will become a shootout.

It never happens.

In a city like New York, the number of carry permits will not move the needle substantially on the crime rate.  But the argument for concealed carry isn’t a collective one (it will change the crime rate), it’s an individual one (it will protect the permitted person from being a victim).

And once again, we see how the Left treats guns separate from every other right.

Perhaps a man should have to obtain a permit that shows “just cause” to dress as a woman and dance outside of his home.  See how long it takes for the Left to drag that one to court.

I’m amazed to see this OpEd printed in a newspaper in a Blue city.

A young lady in NYC decided to write a diary. Being a young lady what she wrote in her diary she considered to be private. It was her thoughts, her fears, her wants. It was for her.

Unfortunately, her brother was an uncultured clod and when he discovered her diary in a public area, knowing it was private, decided to read it. We can guess about how the brother handled such private disclosures.

The young lady realized that she needed some what to secure her diary from prying eyes. The idea of wrapping it in chains probably didn’t appeal to her. Like wise, it is unlikely she was able to get a high level wizard to spell lock it.

She found a small portable safe at a second hand store and bought it for cheap. She then proceeded to lock her personal items in the lock box to keep her private stuff private.

Her parents being meddling AWFLs couldn’t handle that so her father showed the lock box to a friend. The friend identified it as a “gun safe!” Exclamation marks in the original article.

Once the parents heard the word “gun” they had a mental break. They demanded that she get rid of the gun safe. They can’t have anything associated with a gun in the house. They young lady refused.

The parents aren’t worried about the gun safe holding a gun because the young lady is anti-gun but “GUN SAFE!” in the house is unacceptable.

Being unable to deal with their daughter refusing to give in to their crazed demands, the mother wrote to New York Times Social Q page for help.

There Philip Galanes comes to their rescue.

…Acknowledge your daughter’s valid distress and ask her to help you solve your problem with the gun safe in light of your shared philosophy about guns. Let her stash the diary elsewhere while you remove the safe, then negotiate a security system for her that wasn’t built for weapons.

More important, use this opportunity that’s fallen into your lap to talk with your children about guns. …
— Philip Galanes, New York Times: How Do We Get Rid of Our Teenage Daughter’s Gun Safe?

Yep, this editor of the NYT agrees with the parents that a gun safe is to awful to have in the home. Instead, the daughter should give up the good security she currently has for her diary and instead trust her parents to provide a “security system … that wasn’t built for weapons.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Is there an outreach program for parents like this? Heck, is there outreach programs for people that aren’t this far off their rockers?