Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
And just for kicks, let’s see how many gun laws (designed to protect us from the evils of gun violence) failed:
Feeling safer now?
If you follow anti-gun politics in the US, this headline won’t surprise you.
Do gun violence prevention groups have a race problem?
Nurah Abdulhaqq was 12 when she lost a family friend to gun violence – an experience that inspired her to make a change. After the student-led protests against gun violence in 2018 following the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, she got involved as a violence prevention organizer. “I knew that I could lend a different perspective as someone who not only has lost someone close to me to gun violence, but who also lives in an area affected by the school-to-prison pipeline and poverty,” she said.
But instead she often found her viewpoint sidelined, especially in the large national-facing violence prevention groups she found herself interacting with, said the Atlanta-based activist, now 19.
“There was really not a discussion on Black and brown youth,” she said, or of the fact that gun violence has been the leading cause of death for Black male teenagers and young adults.
Abdulhaqq wasn’t alone. According to a new study from UCLA, young Black and Latino organizers commonly reported being marginalized in their work at large, national gun violence prevention groups over the past four years – including “being tokenized, silencing of racially conscious organizing and expectation to educate white peers on racism”.
Moms Demand Action, Everytown, these groups are filled with upper middle-class, Progressive, white women. There is no more patronizing group of shallow virtue signaling people than that.
These experiences were especially concerning, researchers found, since many young organizers started their work after the violent death of a loved one or peer. The findings echo the criticisms many large, national gun violence prevention groups – which are often run or were founded by white people in the aftermath of high-profile mass shootings – have faced in recent years for their lack of diversity.
Upper middle-class white women are a demographic most likely to become professional activists, because they’re bored and have the time and financial resources to be professional meddling busy bodies.
Some participants in the study said that these national organizations – which have millions of dollars in budgets and connections to legislators and news media – don’t meaningfully focus on the daily community gun violence that primarily affects low-income Black and Latino people, and instead focus their attention on high-profile mass shootings and school shootings. Others said that their insights into the root causes of community gun violence in Black and Latino neighborhoods weren’t included in their organizations’ national platforms.
These upper middle-class white women want to take your guns away because they are worried they will lose their child in a mass shooting.
Their kids don’t deal drugs on a street corner or go into the Barrio, so they don’t really care about poor minorities killing each other.
Even their prescribed solution to gun violence won’t work in those neighborhoods.
Trevon Bosley, a 24-year-old organizer based in Chicago, said that Black and Latino organizers being overlooked or outright ignored is indicative of broader inequalities in the levels of attention and compassion certain victims of gun violence receive. “We are just a tally mark in the newspaper,” he said. “When these mass shootings happen, you see the faces.”
Because Progressives don’t actually care about minorities. Show me one Leftist policy that actually benefits minorities. Every single one undermines the minority community and consolidates power to the Left. Gun control is no different.
Bosley has long been involved in local violence prevention. In 2005, when he was seven, his cousin was shot and killed; the next year, his older brother was gunned down. Bosley said that organizing became his outlet. “After having these losses I had a lot of anger, and to use that to do something positive was the right thing. That’s what my brother would want,” he said.
As his profile and experience as a local organizer grew, Bosley began working with the local chapter of larger groups that were focused on stopping mass shootings. He quickly found that many of his new suburban peers weren’t interested in sharing resources and mutual support with people in his neighborhood. “They wanted to use it for résumé building,” he said.
Case in point, David Hogg. He’s the zenith of anti-gun activists. He accomplished nothing that makes anyone safer, but got into Harvard, and made him self rich and famous with his activism. Why actually help poor black people when there is influencer fame and fortune to be made.
In every way, white Progressives are the most racist people you will ever meet.
How many memes and Tweets have you seen that say “if black people bought assault rifles, Republicans would ban them immediately.”
It should be no surprise that their anti-gun groups are just as racist as every other group and policy they come up with.
It’s going to be fun watching their anti-gun groups get canceled for being bigots.
High availability is a concept that says you will have zero downtime.
Consider an old world situation. You have a server that is serving exactly one website. On that server you are running an Operating System, a database engine, a web server (Apache/Nginx), an interpreter, and a bunch of code and HTML.
In your browser (client) you type “http://www.awa-example.com”. This causes your computer to send a request to a DNS server to translate “www.awa-example.com” into an IP address. Dozens of computers working in a distributed way work to get that answer. Your browser then opens a TCP/IP connection to the address it was told to use.
When that connection finishes traveling across multiple different servers (routers) it arrives at my server. My server examines the packet and determines that it is addressed to the web server. The web server looks at the request and sees that the request is for www.awa-example.com. It looks through its configuration files and decides on which interpreter to use. It transfers the request to that interpreter.
The interpreter loads configuration files and loads the code to execute/interpret. That code runs and opens a connection to the database engine. The code makes a query to the database, the database returns a result, the code formats it and sends back a message to your browser, which displays it.
If any part of that long set of computers/servers and software fails, your browser doesn’t get an answer to display.
We have a “demark” that marks the point of responsibility. Anything outside the demark is “their” problem. Anything inside the demark, including the demark, is our issue.
What that means is that in a high availability system, there has to be at least two of everything. On the outside, we must have two “theirs” and two demarks. Linode provides us those multiple “theirs” and demarks. If one link into their data center dies, the others take up the load and everything continues as if nothing was at issue.
If we are worried about the data center, they offer data centers all around the world. We are happy with just one data center.
At their demark they send traffic to one of two “node balancers” we have purchased. These are in different racks. Each is capable of handling all traffic into our cluster. If they need to update the node balancer, they can update one, wait until it is up and running, then update the other. This is either software or hardware. They can physically turn off one rack, and we won’t even notice.
We use a cluster to support our clients. There are 6 nodes (servers) in our cluster. 4 are ours, two are theirs. Their nodes are used for the “control-plane”. This is what controls our cluster. When we tell our cluster to do something, it is the control-plane which orchestrates the other nodes.
We run two ingress pods. The node balancers send traffic to these pods directly to our nodes in a round-robin. If we need to upgrade our ingress, the cluster will create a new ingress pod, make sure it is up and running, then terminate one of the old ingress pods. It then launches another ingress pod, when that is up and running, it terminates the last old one.
There is NO downtime as this happens.
The ingress sends handles external SSL and internal traffic to services. The cluster receives traffic at the service and forwards that traffic to which ever pod is providing the service. If we run at least two pods, we will not have downtime. We set things up so that pods run on different nodes, if possible, so a node failure doesn’t take down all the pods.
Which brings us to the tail end of all of this. Our pod.
Our pod, in this case, is running WordPress. If the pods can mount a file system in ReadWriteMany then multiple pods can access the same files at the same time. WordPress has a directory of content. These are files that we upload, images, PDFs, videos, themes, and a boatload of other things. We want to have that directory accessible by all our WordPress pods.
We don’t have to worry about the database, that runs in its cluster. If one of the database engines dies, the others take over with no loss of function. We run a hot spare style of replication. We could use a multi-master version, it isn’t worth it at this time.
And this brings us to The Issue. Linode provides us with persistent volumes. This works perfectly for many situations. Unfortunately, those persistent volumes are ReadWriteOnly. This means that only one pod can access the files at a time.
Since there is only one pod, there is no redundancy. If that pod fails, the site goes down. If the node that the pod is running on fails, the pod fails, the site goes down.
On good days, when a pod fails, it is restarted and the replacement is up and running shortly thereafter. Downtime is low, but not zero.
Linode isn’t going to offer a ReadWriteMany anytime soon.
Which brings me to Ceph!
Ceph is a distributed block storage system with the ability to run a distributed file system on top of that block storage.
All I should need to do is deploy it to my cluster. Sure, if I want to buy 3 more nodes/servers and a bunch of disk space for them. Think $1000s of dollars per month.
But there is a version for Kubernetes called “rook”. It can even use persistent volumes. After a few days of fighting this on my local Kubernetes cluster, I finally got it working. All that was required was to deploy it to Linode.
12 hours of fighting and I finally got it mostly functional. Until I went to allocate block storage for Ceph. Linode doesn’t allow block persistent volumes! ARGH! I’m stopped.
Then around 2300 Monday I got it. I used the same volumes that Linode’s persistent volumes used and attached them directly to my nodes as block storage. Amazing! It works.
Today I got it all configured and running. I will be upgrading GFZ to be a HA site in the upcoming weeks.
The world is better.
Last week I had seen in Twitter some bitching about binary triggers, but I filtered it out because there is always somebody doomsaying about anything guns and it is simply boring. Doing my morning reading of blogs, I bumped into the news that a man by the name of Mohamad Barakat was shot and killed in North Dakota and he was probably about to commint a terrorist attack on unsupecting people at a local fair.
FARGO, N.D. (AP) — The heavily armed man who ambushed Fargo police officers investigating a fender bender last week likely had a bigger and bloodier attack in mind, with at least two fairs taking place at the time in and around North Dakota’s largest city, authorities said Friday.
Mohamad Barakat killed one officer and wounded two others and a bystander before a fourth officer shot and killed him, ending the July 14 attack.
Over the past five years, Barakat, 37, searched the internet for terms including “kill fast,” “explosive ammo,” “incendiary rounds,” and “mass shooting events,” state Attorney General Drew Wrigley said Friday during a news conference in Fargo, a city of about 125,000 people. But perhaps the most chilling search was for “area events where there are crowds,” which on July 13 brought up a news article with the headline, ”Thousands enjoy first day of Downtown Fargo Street Fair.”
…
After driving by the fender bender, Barakat pulled into an adjacent parking lot to watch from his parked car, Wrigley said. He said Barakat’s car was loaded with guns, a homemade grenade, more than 1,800 rounds of ammunition, three “largish” containers full of gasoline, plus two propane tanks, one completely filled and the other half-filled not with propane, but with “explosive materials concocted at home, purchased lawfully.”
…
With police and firefighters busy helping, Barakat watched for several minutes until the officers walked by him, when he lifted a .223-caliber rifle out of his car window and began firing, Wrigley said.The rifle had a binary trigger that allowed it to fire so rapidly that it sounded like an automatic weapon, he said. A binary trigger is a modification that allows a weapon to fire one round when the trigger is pulled and another when it is released — in essence doubling a gun’s firing capacity. The three officers who were shot had no time to react and fell in rapid succession. He also shot and wounded a fleeing woman, Karlee Koswick, who had been involved in the fender bender, he said.
This combo of explosives, arson devices and guns reminds me of Columbine. The intention of assholes Harris and Klebold was to kill as many as possible with two propane-based firebombs and then shoot people as they evacuated the school. They had to go back inside and create their havoc we know associate with School Shootings because their devices failed to detonate.
But it is inconvenient that the almost Mass Shooter/Terrorist was of the wrong Pantone code of skin and protected national origin. So, about the only thing worth emphasizing is the binary trigger rather than the duplication of the original Columbine planning or the fact that he had explosives made at home and ready to use. I do not know if the device was viable, but we will eventually going to hear of that one asshole that got it right.
It did happen before
And it really does not take much, just about a couple of bucks of gasoline and a lighter.
Happy Land Social Club arson.
Among the most egregious travestues of civil justice in recent memory was the Sandy Hook lawsuit against Remington.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was passed, quite explicitly, to stop vexatious lawsuits against the gun industry when criminals used guns that manufacturers sold through legal channels to licensed distributors.
The Sandy Hook parents convinced a judge to buy the bullshit that the PLCAA didn’t protect Remington because Remington’s marketing of Bushmaster was illegal.
Not that there was any evidence that Adam Lanza ever saw one of those ads, or that if he did, that was his inspiration to murder his mother and steal her Bushmaster rifle.
But Connecticut is an anti-gun state, and you know Leftists: For my friends everything and my enemies, the wall. The law didn’t matter when they had the ability to punish a gun maker for being a gun maker.
When the ghost of Remington and their insurance companies chose to settle the lawsuit, I knew it would be bad for the firearms industry.
Now Colt is being targeted by the Mexican government for the same thing.
El Jefe, El Grito, and the Emiliano Zapata 1911.
All of those are Spanish-named Colt guns manufactured at one point in the past few decades. Translated, the first two names mean The Boss and The Shout (a tribute to Mexico’s Independence), while the third is a reference to Emiliano Zapata, a leader during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century who fought for the rural poor and is now regarded as a national hero.
Some of these models display Mexico’s national symbol along with the date of the nation’s independence day. Others have quotes and images engraved on the barrel attributed to Zapata. Some of them even have Aztec designs laid over the gun’s grip.
But all of them have the words “HARTFORD, CONN. U.S.A.” engraved on their barrels.
Gun designs like these, Mexico argued against Connecticut-based Colt in a 2021 lawsuit, don’t “even try to hide its pandering to the criminal market in Mexico.”
From this article, you would never know that these guys were distributor limited editions of no more than 500 models each.
The Zapada 1911 was released in 2019 for the centennial celebration of the Mexican Revolution. Only 500 were made.
The Aztec 1911 is a 500 piece Talo distributor exclusive edition.
The El Jefe model was a Lew Horton special edition of 350 pieces.
These are collector grade guns that sold for thousands of dollars brand new.
The idea that these were made to attract the attention of cartel thugs is ridiculous.
Not just are these guns not well advertised, but I doubt Mexican cartel trigger pullers are ordering Talo special editions.
While the allegation wasn’t a novel one in international politics, its transition into a legal complaint was a first of its kind. A country’s government was formally claiming economic losses and fatal injuries caused by gun trafficking facilitated by a distributor and seven U.S. gunmakers: Colt’s Manufacturing Company, Smith & Wesson Brands, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Beretta U.S.A. Corp., Glock, Inc., Sturm Ruger & Co. Inc., and Century International Arms, Inc.
And Mexico isn’t just seeking monetary relief, but also court mandates that would require the gunmakers to improve monitoring of their distribution systems, ensure their guns are safe to use and finance projects focused on deterring gun trafficking.
This isn’t the responsibility of gun companies who sell to reputable dealers.
This is the fault of the US government that trafficked guns you Mexico and has utterly failed at border security.
It’s also the fault of the corrupt Mexican government.
Colt’s place in U.S. history is regarded by some as one of innovation and success, evident by the 2008 National Historic Landmark designation of Coltsville Historic District, where the former Colt factory is located. But in Mexico, where more than 8,000 Colt guns have been recovered since 2010, according to Mexican military data, Colt is partly to blame for some of the gun violence by drug cartels, Mexico says in the lawsuit.
We’re any of them those special editions?
For example, according to the leaked data, a .38 caliber El Jefe Colt pistol was recovered in August 23, 2019. The trace points to an original purchase at AMCLO Home & Hardware gun shop in Roma, Texas.
And Mexico says that those guns being trafficked into the country are ending lives, providing various examples of deaths in Mexico where the murder weapon was a Colt gun. In one of them, a version of the Emiliano Zapata 1911 was used to murder a Mexican investigative journalist named Miroslava Breach Velducea.
The answer is two.
I’m curious how many of those 8,000 Colts were actual Colt M4 Mexican police contract rifles.
Of those Colt manufactured guns, more than 5,000 of them were pistols and about 2,100 were rifles, making up 65% and 25%, respectively.
The answer is, probably most of those 2,000, considering when was the last time you saw an actual Colt AR14 in stores.
To make the argument that they don’t play a major role in the cartel’s gun supply, Mexico points to their own gun laws that ban the civilian use of assault weapons, and to the fact that there is only one gun store in the entire country, which issues fewer than 50 permits a year and is managed by the Mexican military.
Mexican officials claim that most of the guns they’ve recovered have been traced back to the U.S., and it’s confirmed by federal data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
ATF data shows that for every year since 2016, about half of all firearms recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing were traced back to a U.S. manufacturer. Guns traced back to the U.S., regardless of where they were manufactured, push the share up to about 70% each year.
This is mathematical bullshit.
Half the guns Mexico recovered and submitted for tracing to the US were from the US. I’m shocked.
I’d assume that’s because the guns not submitted for tracing were out of Mexican police armories or the inventories of other Latin American narco states, and the Mexican government knows that.
I’ve seen a lot of videos of cartel shootouts and I’ve never seen that many full autos sold in US gun stores.
Mexico adds that even if PLCAA applies, the gunmakers’ violation of state or federal laws regarding the marketing or sale of guns provide an exception to PLCAA, eliminating the immunity granted to gunmakers and allowing the case to move forward. But Mexico doesn’t seek the exception through CUTPA, which is what happened in the Sandy Hook case. Instead, Mexico argues that the gunmakers violated numerous federal laws, such as the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act, which regulate fully automatic weapons and its sales.
If Mexico is arguing that Colt violated the NFA, that means they are recovering full autos that are not for civilian sale in the US. Those have to be law enforcement or military sales. Those guns went to governments, then to cartels through corruption.
And others agreed. After Mexico’s appeal, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and 14 other state attorneys general filed as friends of the court in the case, siding with Mexico saying that the district court made an “error” in not considering whether the alleged violation of federal statutes allow for an exception to PLCAA.
Mexico would rather sue American gun companies than fight corruption and crime in Mexico.
Of course anti-gun politicians would side with the corrupt Mexican government over American gun companies.
They are not interested in justice, only hurting gun makers.
I personally would rather nuke Mexico thsn let Mexico sue Colt into bankruptcy.
There are many tropes in story telling. One of them is “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.
People misjudge others all the time. I recently watched a video of a “prank” gone sideways. A “prankster” filled a gas can with water, went into a parking lot, found somebody sitting in their vehicle, poured the water on the vehicle and then pulled a lighter.
The “joke” is to see the fear in the people’s faces when they believe they and their vehicle are about to go up in flames.
The sideways was when the “prankster” went up to a pickup with an older man inside. As he started to pour the water, the driver got out with a pistol in his hand. The “prankster” then was recorded with fear on his face. Running for his life, screaming that it was just water.
The “prankster” had misjudged his target.
Another trope is the mentor telling the younger newbie, “Listen to that old fart, he’s old in a profession where you die young.” Old doesn’t mean stupid. Old doesn’t mean without means. Old, fat and slow can still be deadly fast.
I said I never had much use for one. Never said I didn’t know how to use it.
— Matthew Quigley, demonstrating his skill with Colonel Colt’s revolver”.
Brilliant!
Just Stop Oil gets a taste of their own medicine.
Counter activists tie rape alarms to balloons and let them go in a Just Stop Oil meeting. pic.twitter.com/GbyI8CPj09— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) July 24, 2023