This is an actual conversation I had with my family.  The names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I want to chime in a little bit on the North Carolina HB2 ‘bathroom bill’ issue.  My take on this is a little different than the ones I’ve seen espoused on the media and  I wanted to get my feelings on this off my chest.

Here is my problem with the entire situation: THE. LAW.

See, both sides of the HB2 debate have made good and legitimate points.

Anti HB2:

1. There is no epidemic of transgenders using public bathrooms to harass women or molest children.
2. Right now, there are transgender people using public bathrooms that are for the gender they identify with (no born as) and nobody has noticed or had a problem with it.
3. Sending some transgenders into the public bathrooms for the gender they are by birth will be more awkward for them since they made their transition.

Pro HB2:

1. There are documented cases of men abusing gender identity bathroom laws or policies to be perverts and peep or take pictures/video.
2. These men may have dressed as women but there is no evidence that they ever really identified as trans.
3. There is an expectation of decorum in public bathrooms.  Privacy is not the right word.  It is the idea that you should not be ‘perved at’ when in a public facility.
4. Having a person who is obviously of the opposite gender (a man) in a gender specific public bathroom (ladies’ room) will make other patrons (women) uncomfortable.
5. Why should a large number of people be put in a position that may make them uncomfortable to appease the needs of 0.3% of the population.

So how do you address these very valid but contradictory points?  Well, a law like HB2 is probably the worst way to do it.  Why?  The law is not a scalpel.  It does not parse things finely.  The law is a sledgehammer.  It crushes everything indelicately.

Let’s be honest.  If you look like Laverne Cox, RuPaul, or even Chaz Bono and you use the bathroom of the gender you identify with, no one will care because no one will notice.  You are – and SJW’s hate this term – passing.  No harm, no foul.

If you look like a one of the GAP GIRLS, guess what, you are going to make some women in the bathroom feel uncomfortable and possibly even threatened.

So how do write a law that says “you can use the bathroom you identify with as long as you pass and/or don’t scare the other patrons.”  You can’t.  The law can’t be that fine.  It is an all or nothing proposition.  But it is that gray area in between the all or nothing that all the protests are about.  When you see the anti-trans/pro-HB2 supporters, what they fear isn’t a Laverne Cox – because they’d never notice her anyway – what they fear is the 250 pound man in a dress with stubble and lipstick.

The gray area is where social convention should rule, because the law does so poorly a job at that.

Want another example?

Gay weddings and bakeries.  Should religious bakeries deny gay couples wedding cakes?  No, probably not.  But let’s say that they do.  Some baker is so offended by the idea of a gay wedding he wants no part of it on religious principles.  What should the gay couple do?  Find another bakery.  This is the type of situation that SHOULD be solved by social convention and not law.  Social convention says that in a free market system, if you don’t want to take my money, the only person you are hurting is yourself.  I can always find somebody else to take my money.  Using the law and civil courts means that somebody’s toes are going to get stomped on by the government.  It’s just a matter of whose.

Think about the absurdity of that for just a moment.

“Take my money or I will have you arrested and fined.”  What!?!

“ But what about the gay couple discriminated against?”

I’ll answer with a question “if you know somebody disproves of your lifestyle, why would you want to give them your money?”

Here is another wide gray area of potentially hurt feelings that could be better solved by the free market and a couple of f*ck yous.  Instead, some legislators wrote a law that ignited a firestorm of controversy, and caused more harm than good, because the law is a blunt tool.

Update: Based upon one comment, I wanted to clarify a position.  Allowing the free market to solve these types of issues is something I do believe in, with one exception: jobs that require professional license – e.g. doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lawyers, etc.  Most other jobs, even some that require a license (like a hair dresser) are easily filled by the free market.  A job that requires professional licence to practice, which requires years of study, advanced degrees, and passing exams, is much harder for the free market to fix quickly, as a licence is a form of government sponsored monopoly.  Anybody with a camera can photograph a wedding.  Not anybody with a saw can be an orthopedic surgeon.  If the government gives you permission to practice to protect the safety of the public (if your hair dresser makes a mistake, you don’t die in the chair), you cannot discriminate.  If you cannot abide by that, find a different career path.

This is the problem with trying to legislate behavior and the minutia of life.  One size fits all doesn’t, just ask any fat guy who has ever won a free t-shirt at a public event.  The more one tries to fix social issues like these with laws, the more consternation they cause.  This is the ultimate lesson that people who fall back on demanding that state power intervene learn.  Liberals are usually the first to run off to big nanny government to “make things fair.”  In North Carolina it was the other side that legislated their desires into law first, and now the liberals are protesting.  And of course the NC law was written in response to liberal transgender bathroom laws passed in other states.

Don’t invite the government in to meddle in personal matters.  It never ends will.  Like George Washington said: “Government Is Like Fire, a Dangerous Servant and a Fearful Master.”  Now people are getting burned.

P.S.  A message to Target stores.  My gun in my waistband is like Laverne Cox’s d*ck in a dress; if you don’t know it’s there, than it shouldn’t bother you at all.  If she can deep conceal in the ladies room of a Target without upsetting people, than so can I in the grocery aisle.

The media has been in a bit of a tizzy over the outrage directed at Target due to the announcement that Target stores will allow transgender people to use bathrooms and changing facilities of the gender they identify with.  This has prompted a boycott of target, which as of the time that I was writing this post, has over 1 million online signatures.  The media has been quick to condemn the outrage and boycott as overblown and trans-phobic.

The CBS out of Minnesota (Target is based in Minnesota) defended Target by saying “But there’s no evidence of dangerous predators pretending to be transgender in American bathrooms, even though Minnesota supporters of a bathroom ban say it’s true.”

I guess nobody at CBS Minnesota bothered to watch Fox News in Pennsylvania about the man taking pictures of a 10-year old girl in a bathroom stall or CBS Southern California dressed as a woman recording hours of video in a Macy’s.  Or any of the other cases of policy abuse that Breitbart News recorded.

But the point of this post isn’t to attack Target for its policy.  The point of this post is to point out the media and pop-culture reaction to two Target policies.

As many readers of this blog and the wider gun community know, Target allowed itself to be bulled by Bloomberg’s minions into releasing a statement that Target does not want guns carried in its stores, even when state law allows it.

“This is a complicated issue, but it boils down to a simple belief: Bringing firearms to Target creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping and work experience we strive to create.”

*On a side note, I love the irony that allowing CCW in Target “creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping” but allowing a man in the woman’s room does not.

The best estimates on the subject put the number of Transgendered individuals in the US at about 700,000 or 0.3% of the population.  The state of Florida has over 1.4 Million active state issued CCW permits, meaning that Florida ALONE has twice as many permit holders as there are total Transgenders in the US.  The average national rate of CCW is 5.2% of adults have permits, which is more than 17 times the percent of Transgenders in this country.

Shortly after that, the gun rights community opted to boycott Target.  That is progressiveness for you, Target has no qualms about turning away 12.8 Million potential customers because they are gun owners, but they are loathed to be seen as non-inclusive for 700,000 trans-people.  And of course the media was silent about the Target anti-gun backlash, and cheered on Bloomberg’s minions when they turned their sights on Kroger.

Fortunately for CCW permit holders, some important people were paying attention.  When the CEO of the largest supermarket chain in America was put in the spotlight, he decided that Kroger was going to follow whatever the local law said and put the burden of store policy on state legislatures.  That is how you don’t alienate a customer base.

Walmart seems to be taking a play out of the Kroger books on the trans issue.  Walmart is the largest retailer in America, and Target’s primary competitor.  When asked what Walmart’s transgender bathroom policy is, Walmart cracked open a family size container of STFU and started chugging.  Much to the disapproval of the media.  You don’t become the largest company in the world by revenue by being stupid.

Openly tell gun owners you wan’t them them as customers and the left will cheer you on.  Gun owners respond by not spending money where they are not welcome and all you hear is crickets.  Risk the safety of women and girls in your store to appease a tiny minority of people and you are a hero.  Refuse to hand over your money to that store and you are a bigot.

These policies aren’t about money, they are about virtue signaling.  Personally, I’ll take my cash to the same place that allows me to take my gun.

That should go double for the ladies.  I believe the best response to an up skirt camera flash is muzzle flash.

I found myself over the weekend being subjected to the ignorance that was a defense of magazine capacity bans.  Not feeling like getting into a protracted argument, I made a point that I shall repeat here, the quite effectively shut up my opponent.

Trying to stop shootings with magazine capacity bans is like trying to stop internet child pornography by restricting everybody’s bandwidth.   At the very best, you have slightly inconvenienced the person engaged in the criminal act, and you had to significantly interfere in the lives of millions of innocent people to accomplish that.

I watched Jurassic World again, now that it is on HBO.  You always get something more out of a movie or book the second time around.

There is a scene towards the end of the movie where Owen and the mercenaries security forces take the raptors against the Indominus Rex.  The Indominus says something in Dinosaur to the raptors and the raptors turn on the humans.

A bunch of people get eaten, Owen is facing off against one of the raptors, and then some human shoots the raptor with a rocket launcher and kills it.  Owen gets suddenly sad, and you are supposed to feel bad for the raptor getting vaporized.

It suddenly hit me WTF!!!

OK, Vincent D’onofrio’s character Fatty McStupidnbelligerent  may be an asshole, but the rest of these guys are ex-military who have been hired by a theme park to provide security for the guests.  These guys are probably regular working Joes who thought they got a good job in the private sector after getting out of the Army and have wives and kids and such.  Why should I feel bad for the cloned raptor instead of all the human are going to end up as dino shit in a Coasta Rican jungle?

Why the moral dubiousness?

Not, 30 seconds later, one of the other raptors tires to eat Owen’s girlfriend’s nephews.  Am I at this point still supposed to be sympathetic to Owen’s pet “six foot turkey?”  How can I root for Owen to score one with Ms. Orange-Hair PrissyPants if his raptor buddies end her status as an aunt?

Sure, blue comes to Owen’s rescue at the end when fighting the Indominus, but just how many of Owen’s human coworkers did just take out 15 minutes previous?

I’m all confused.  Jurassic Park was much less gray area on this subject: humans good (except Nedry), dinos bad.  Why is that so hard?

Fine, maybe the dinosaurs (except for the Indominus) aren’t malicious.  So what, that doesn’t mean that they are less likely to eat you.  Didn’t Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend learn that the hard way when he went to commune with the bears in Alaska?  Does a bear shit environmentalists in the woods?  Even Roy of Siegfried and Roy got nommed on by his tiger, and they trained together for years.

Don’t try an complicate the morality of the movie for me.  I like animals, but if I have to choose between the last lion on earth and some tourist on photo safari; pass the H&H.   I would love to see dinosaurs in real life.

During the legislative battle to implement concealed carry in Illinois – the battle being between Conservatives who wanted easy and wide CCW vs. liberals who wanted restricted CCW – the City of Chicago managed to have CCW banned on public transportation.  A person with an Illinois CCW permit can carry in Chicago, but not on a bus or train.  As you can imagine, this has created some problems.

A woman was attacked, beaten, and robbed on Thursday on the Blue Line.

In January the Orange Line was shut down after a fight that resulted in a man having he ear bitten off.

In February three men attacked a women outside of a Green Line station.

Just as was predicted during the legislative debate, criminals would use the CTA as a “safe haven” where they could attack and rob people, knowing that if they were getting on or off the trains, they would be unarmed.

Good job, Chicago!

Fortunately, not all hope is lost.  State legislators are trying to update the law to allow carry on the Metra, and it is receiving bipartisan support.

“There are many individuals throughout the state of Illinois who rely on public transit as their primary mode of transportation,” [Democratic state Rep. Jerry Costello of Smithton] said. “I do not believe their Second Amendment rights should be infringed upon simply because they take a train or bus rather than driving their own vehicle.”

DAMN STRAIGHT, JERRY!!!  Well said.

Hopefully this law will get passed, and for readers in Illinois, I urge you to contact your state reps and encourage them to pass this bill.

If it does, I predict that the criminal element won’t know about it until some punk tries to rob a CCW permit holder on a Metra platform and takes one to the chest.  Then watch the muggings on the CTA promptly end.

Amy Schumer did a skit on Comedy Central about buying guns on a Home Shopping Network knockoff.  Before you watch it, try and imagine just how bad that skit might be.  Then double it.

What did I tell you?  First of all, it wasn’t funny.  More importantly, it was factually inaccurate.

“You can absolutely get a gun if you have several felonies, as long as you buy it on the Internet or at a gun show.”

Ummm… no.  That’s not what the law says.  Federal law is very clear that felons cannot own guns unless their rights have been restored by a judge.  It is also illegal for a private citizen to sell a gun to someone they know or suspect cannot own a gun.  The “I don’t know and I don’t want to know, just give me your money and here is a gun” approach is, at best, ethically dubious, and at worst, a crime.

A study from The University of Chicago Crime Lab confirmed what the FBI has said that criminals do not get guns at gun shows.   They overwhelmingly get them on the street from other criminals.  What was interesting to learn is that gangs maintain gun libraries and  criminals treat guns as disposable, buying and selling them frequently so that they reduce the risk of being caught with a gun that can be traced to a crime.

*Holding up a Glock pistol* “Just a reminder to all the parents at home, these make perfect stocking suffers for as young as… it doesn’t matter.”

While in most states, she is technically correct that is no minimum age necessary to be allowed to shoot a handgun, those laws – and common sense – have provisions that allow minors to shoot handguns only under proper adult supervision.  But of course that’s not what she was getting at.  The implication being that any kid of any age can just have whatever guy they want whenever they want it because… that is the same, worn out, straw man argument that the NRA wants to arm kids with Uzis.

“Even a blind person can see what a great deal this is, and can take advantage of this deal by buying a gun.  Totally legal.”

Yes it is.  Physical handicaps are not a justification for denying someone their  Constitutionality protected rights.  Amy Schumer is a SJW type, so perhaps I’ll throw an SJW word back at her, she’s an ableist, thinking that only able-bodied people have civil liberties.  Just to further rebuke her, here is a video of a guy with no arms shooting a pistol.

Caller: “I wanted to buy a lot of these but I’m a suspected terrorist on the no-fly list.”

Amy: “You’re fine, sweet potato fries.”

First of all, the No-Fly List is not a terrorist watch list.  It is a disaster than just about anybody can be put on for any reason.  In this country, your civil liberties cannot be taken away by a bureaucrat.  Just because some anonymous government stooge puts your name into a list, a list that they don’t have to tell you that your name is being put on and is impossibly difficult to get your name off of, does not mean that your Constitutionality protected civil liberties are forfeit.  There is a reason the Democrat campaign against “no-fly loophole” died fast.  Even liberals got uneasy about just how Orwellian the no-fly list has become.

Then the video ends with the male co-host shooting himself in the foot because of terrible trigger discipline, then with an ad for Everytown.

It was so bad, that even that notoriously left-wing slanted Politifact rated the video as “half true.”  If even Politifact can’t back up your anti-gun bull, you know your’re wrong.

The biggest tragedy of this video is that it is not funny.  If this turd was YouTube video for Everytown, that would be one thing.  But this was shown on Comedy Central, which is supposed to be funny.  South Park is funny.  Key & Peele was funny.  Amy Shumer has just become a nanny-state loving, Social Justice advocating, hypocritical scold who has turned her show into a weekly 30 min SJW PSA.

Update:

When I finished this post, I clicked back to the Comedy Central tab and the next Amy Schumer clip started playing.  It just went to prove my point that Amy Schumer is an SJW with a PSA fora TV show, so I decided to update my post to hammer that home with you.

The skit is called New Twitter Button, and is a mock tech news bit on a new Twitter shortcut that sends rape and death threats to women.  Do not for a second think that I am defending rape and death threats, or any other sort of threat of physical or sexual violence online.  But the reality of online harassment if very different than this SJW scolding on the issue.

As it turns out, men are more often the victims of harassment online.  Men receive more threats of death and physical harm.  Men get called names more than women online.  It is true however, that women do receive the brunt of sexually themed threats.  This last point makes sense, in a weird way, since most trolls are straight males that sexual threats would be directed at women.

We’ve known for a while that the internet turns some people into psychopaths.  They act out online because they are protected by anonymity and distance, causing hurt that they couldn’t do in person face-to-face.

The problem with the discussion about online trolling is that it is almost entirely couched as how to stop trolling against women because women take trolling harder  and women are not welcome on the internet.  If you want to deal with trolls, let’s deal with trolls.  There are difficulties in doing that.  In the US there are protections on freedom of speech and privacy that make it hard to define some forms of harassment criminal and to identify the real identity of trolls.  Trolls may live in a different state or even a different country which makes enforcing the law against them even harder. Technology also makes it difficult, every time someone comes up with a piece of anti-troll software, there comes along a better troll to get around it.

But if you are going to take the attitude of “send death threats to 10 men and nobody gives a shit, but threaten to rape one woman and now we have to end trolling.”  That seems a bit unfair.