The power went out due to snow around 4:00 yesterday afternoon and at noon today it’s still out.

My house is currently 42F by my thermometer because the oil boiler needs electricity to run.

The reason it went out is that branches on trees laden with snow fall off the tree when they freeze and hit the powerlines.

I’m a Florida boy and in Florida we cut back the trees so they don’t touch the powerlines.  That is to minimize the damage to the powerlines during hurricanes.

No bullshit, 25-foot easements around powerlines.

In New Hampshire, they just let the trees grow over the powerlines even though every year this happens and people lose power.

I asked why they don’t trim back the trees from the powerlines and all of got was “people in New Hampshire like looking at the trees.”

People in New Hampshire are fucking retarded.

Florida prepares for hurricane season cutting down trees and when the power goes out it’s back in maybe a few hours.

New Hampshire does nothing to prepare for winter snow taking out powerlines, year after year, and takes a day to repair the lines.

Ive been less inconvenienced by a Cat 3 hurricane in Florida than a snowfall in New Hampshire.

When I complained, I was told that everyone in New Hampshire has a generator because the power goes out so much.

Gee, thanks…

“I got my generator, fuck you.”

I keep being told how New Hampshire is this great Libertarian state.

Live free or die.

Fuck New Hampshire Libertarianism.

Give me Florida governance all day long, where I can have both friendly gun laws and a grid that prepares for seasonal weather.

So Antifa got to do in Atlanta what usually does in the great Northwest thinking they would get the same results when the broke the law.

Oops!

ATLANTA – Two of the six suspects arrested during a riot in downtown Atlanta Saturday evening have been granted bond Monday morning.

A Fulton County Court judge granted both 23-year-old Ivan Ferguson of Nevada and 20-year-old Graham Evatt of Decatur, Georgia bond of over $355,000.

The other four suspects Nadja Geier, 24, of Nashville, Tenn.; Madeleine Feola, 22, of Spokane, Wash.; Francis Carrol, 22, of Kennebunkport, Maine; and Emily Murphy, 37, of Grosse Isle, Mich. were denied bond.

All six of the men and women are each charged with four felonies and four misdemeanors including rioting, pedestrian in a roadway, willful obstruction of a law enforcement officer, and unlawful assembly.

Atlanta Riots: 4 of 6 suspects arrested denied bond (fox5atlanta.com)

I am unsure about Georgia law and arson being a forcible felony like in Florida or Tennessee where gives civilians the ability to use deadly force to stop it. But just in case, I would recommend stop burning stuff for shits, giggles and protests.

Oh yes, waving a hammer at somebody will get you shot in a hurry.

This was posted with the proper derision by a buddy in Facebook.

Still after many years, I cannot imagine journalists being this stupid and/or immoral/and/or liar and again, they prove me wrong: It is part of the article Inside El Chapo’s Son’s House After a Deadly Gunfight (vice.com).

Dear Mr. Chaparro: That is an unfired cartridge. The bullet is the pointy thing up front. That cartridge did not make that hole, you dumb/lying ass.

And then they say we are mean when we celebrate mass personnel reductions at media corporations and outlets. They have to see it our way: The less of them, the less chance of lies being published.

Just the music:

H/T my wife

This is a follow-up to my post Attempted murder by cop whitewashed by press.

The Cherokee County Sheriff released a new statement to address the video that has gone viral of cops firing squading a guy in a doorway after just waking him up.

It’s some fucking bullshit.

“I didn’t know what happened because all my subordinate officers lied to me with a bullshit story and I believed them.  The original statement which pissed off everyone who saw the video was written by the County Attorney and is also not my fault.  Besides,  the shooting wasn’t really my fault either, it’s the fault of the local police.  Give me money for my own SWAT Team so we don’t have to use the city’s SWAT Team next time.”

Fuck this guy.

What a stunning lack of leadership a bullshit statement like that reveals.

Near murderous fuck-ups should not be rewarded with budget increases.

Mad Ogre spent last week on Twitter praising the new Marlin rifles produced by Ruger displayed at SHOT.

If you read the internet, the consensus is Marlin was a great company that made great guns, Remington bought them and destroyed them, Ruger bought Marlin from Remington after Remington went bankrupt, and the Ruger ones are great.

There is a lot more to that story.  I’ve been sitting on it for a while and it’s time it gets told.

Everyone loves their Connecticut-made Marlin rifles.

The Connecticut-made guns were some of the last, probably the last, gunsmith-built guns in volume production in the country.  Marlin rifles were assembled by men with gray beards, sitting at workbenches with files, fitting the guns together to make them work.

That may have worked well back in the day, but that’s not how modern guns are manufactured.  Go to a modern firearms manufacturing facility, it’s like any other manufacturing facility, parts come off machining and finishing and go to assembly, where they are put together.

None of the automotive manufacturers are having workers hand-fit components during assembly.  That’s not how it works.

It’s just not profitable to have skilled people hand-fitting parts at high wages.  The gun companies that do sell hand-fit guns do so at low volume and high prices.  They are custom or at least semi-custom guns.  Not production guns.

The way Marlin built guns was the way they built guns when they first started building these new models in the 1970s (the Model 1985, for instance, was named for the original 1895 but was designed in 1972).  Much of the equipment was dated to that same era.

That was one of the big problems.  The old men with gray beards who did that were retiring or dying.  They couldn’t train younger people to build guns like that at assembly wages.  An assembly tech is not a gunsmith.  Marlin, on its own, didn’t have much of a future under its business model.  They just couldn’t meet demand building guns the way they did.

The goal in the acquisition of Marlin by Remington was to turn Marlin into a modern production gun company so that it could be cost-competitive.

Henry rifles are not hand-fit.  They are assembled from parts made to spec on modern CNC equipment and designed with GD&T (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing) to work.  They will tell you that during their factory tour.

When Remington got hold of Marlin, nobody knew just how much work needed to go into a Marlin rifle to get it to run reliably.  Remington moved production out of Connecticut and it didn’t go smoothly.

The job of turning Marlin from old-school, making parts and fit at assembly, into a modern machine and assemble production fell onto Remington R&D.

When Remington R&D got the old prints from Marlin and plugged them into AUTOCAD, quite often, the CAD software spit them back out for being over-dimensionalized, under-dimensionalized, having no or bad datums, etc.

I’ve written about the NASA Artemis before.  Why NASA was asked why they were creating a new rocket instead of just building the Saturn V again.  Their response was that they couldn’t.  Each Saturn V was fit at assembly.  They didn’t know what was done by the engineers between what was off-print and what they did to make the engines work.  Most of the engineers who made Saturn V were dead and they took their tribal knowledge to the grave with them.  It was easier to start over with CAD than try to decipher the old prints and handwritten notes and put them together into a working engine.

Well, Marlin was exactly like that, except Remington couldn’t start over because people wanted the guns they knew.

There were other problems as well.  Many of the old Marlin vendors (companies that made small parts like screws and springs) had gone out of business.  The old companies often made parts that worked but were different from the prints, because years ago they tweaked something at the request of Marlin but never noted it.  Parts made by newer vendors using old prints didn’t function.

Remington R&D started with the premier gun, the Model 1895 in 45-70, and effectively re-invented the inside of that gun with all-new GD&T.  At some points old guns that were made to work were reverse-engineered to figure out what corners were broken, what surfaces filed down, what had been changed from print to get the guns to work.

After the Model 1895, the Model 336 was next, then the Model 1894, and so on, until every gun in the Marlin lineup had been fully modernized.

Herein lies the problem.

While R&D was doing this, a process that took years, Remington was still building Marlin rifles and trying to get them to run in production.  The decision was made, for better or worse, that production of Marlin was not going to be stopped during the refresh.  The idea was if Marlins were not on the shelf during that time, Henry would just come along and eat Marlin’s lunch, take its market share, and Marlin would never be able to get its ground back after disappearing from store shelves for a few years.  As a result, there were Marlin rifles of less than stellar functionality that went to consumers.

Later year Remington made Marlins, the ones produced from the new prints created by Remington R&D are great guns.  They work well, but that is eclipsed by the reputation Remington made Marlins developed in the early years of production.

Everyone knows what happened next, Remington went bankrupt and Ruger bought Marlin.

They didn’t just buy the name, however, they bought all the work done by Remington R&D.  The new prints, the new specs, the new G&D, the designs designed to be manufactured on modern CNC equipment and put together at assembly that work without hand-fitting.

There is a lot more detail and complication in the story of why Marlin had quality issues than just “Remington made shit.”

Much of it has to do with prints that were a half-century old, designed to be made on equipment that was half a century out of date, and a style of manufacturing that was obsolete by half a century, and the engineering challenges of trying to modernize a legacy product while simultaneously trying to produce it.

Ruger Marlins work and they work well, but that’s not all just Ruger.  It was years of work put in by Remington R&D engineers behind the scenes and it was a labor of love for all involved with it.

That’s the truth the internet has never told you.

No, not that one about the birds and the bees, the one about firearm safety.

In the best of all worlds, every child would be exposed to gun safety from a very early age with refresher courses throughout their years. If adults have to have mandatory yearly classes on how to handle classified materials, then it makes sense that children will need refresher courses as well.

In my opinion, the best way to deal with firearms training for children starts with Eddie Eagle style instructions.

• Stop!
• Don’t Touch!
• Run Away
• Tell A Grown-up

Besides instructions on what to do if your child finds a gun, I also teach the four safety rules.

1. Treat every firearm as loaded until you have personally verified that it is unloaded
2. Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy, even if you have personally verified that it is unloaded
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot
4. Always identify your target, and what is beyond it

This is what I taught my children.

There was one other rule, if they ever wanted to see or handle one of my firearms I would stop what I was doing and bring the firearm to them. And we would then safely examine that firearm.

This last is designed to remove the curiosity part of firearms. If a firearm is something that is hidden in your sock drawer, you can darn well be sure that your kids have already found it. If it is a “secret” and “dirty” then it is the case that they will want to play with it.

Remove the temptation by giving them good instructions and guidance and then be willing to make removing their curiosity a priority for yourself.

When I got my pistol safe I had 2 of my own children living with me and 3 step children. I gathered all five of them and showed them the box. I then put a $50 bill in the box and put the box on the coffee table. I told them that if they could get the box open without damaging the pistol safe in the next 48 hours that the $50 would be theirs. They failed and I got to keep the money.

It also meant that they had no interest in trying to open the pistol safe, if they wanted to see anything in it, all they had to do is ask. And all they would be was frustrated if they just tried to open the safe.

While my children were younger and while my grandchild visited, all of my firearms were keep under lock and key. Since my youngest children are “old enough” and my grandchild doesn’t visit very often, like once every couple of years, I no longer have that always locked requirement.

This means that I can have some firearms out of the safes and displayed.

And then something weird happened, my son brought his girlfriend over.

And this lead to The Talk

I’m not particularly concerned about my son over at her house. He is anti-alcohol and anti-drugs, and firearm safe. Her parents are watchful so I really don’t have a concern.

On the other hand, she is now coming over here and I just put up a display stand for an Mrs. Pink, the AR-15 in our bedroom. Son and GF are put in our bedroom as it is downstairs where we can keep an eye on them for those pesky teenage hormone issues.

But that means she is in the same room as a rifle that is displayed.

So I took the two of them to the table and gave her The Talk. We went over the four firearm safety rules. We went over them until she could repeat them correctly.

I demonstrated that you can drop the magazine from a firearm and it is still loaded.

That first rule is so very difficult for most people. “Treat every gun as if it is loaded…” is hard. They “know” that it is unloaded. They just observed you unload it. You just showed them the empty chamber. Of course it is unloaded.

I broke my son of that by making my pistol go bang three times after he told me it was unloaded.

Once when he assumed I had brought it to the range unloaded, when it was hot.

The second was when I dropped the magazine and showed him all the cartridges in the mag.

The third was after the first two and I had shown him how to verify that a semi-automatic pistol was unloaded. I dropped the slide, asked him if it was loaded, he said it was unloaded. I pointed it down range and pulled the trigger to a bang.

I had cheated, thank you Lazarus Long, I had palmed a round into the chamber after he had verified that it was empty.

From that day forward he has always treated a firearm as being loaded.

It’s an awkward conversation, but you have to talk to other parents about guns, experts say is an okay article from CNN.

The problem is that it has just enough “off” that it makes it a hard read, and it has that leftist “I know better than you” attitude in it.

The author got her story from talking to Johanna Thomas, a member of Moms Demand. So you can expect it to go sideways from the start.

The first thing that Johanna does is to assume that she has the right to demand to know if the house her kid is visiting is gun free. This is because she has not trained her child to be safe around firearms. If her kid was trustworthy, then there wouldn’t be any issues as her kid isn’t going to pick up a firearm that they find.

Of course they have to have the irresponsible gun owner “The girls mother told [Johanna] that the family didn’t have any [guns] in the home but did have one in the car that was kept under a seat”.

Now I have had to put a firearm under the seat a couple of times. When there was nobody else in the vehicle, the vehicle was going to be locked and I had to go into a government mandated legal gun free zone. I know people that commonly place their carry weapon under the seat when they have to go into places that are gun unfriendly.

I don’t know any responsible gun owner that just leaves their gun rattling around loose under their seat.

I won’t give Everytown the link but they have a program that they call “S.M.A.R.T.”

• Secure all guns in your home and vehicles
• Model responsible behavior around guns
• Ask about the presence of unsecured guns in other homes
• Recognize the role of guns in suicide
• Tell your peers to be S.M.A.R.T

As always, the leftist has decided it is YOUR responsibility to keep her children safe. My firearms are secured. I believe that Everytown would have a cow because I don’t have all of my firearms disabled with ammunition in a separate secure storage container.

I do model responsible behavior around firearms.

And the only times I ask about other people’s firearms is in the context of “what cool guns can we shoot?”

The S.M.A.R.T. program is all about intruding into the lives of others and subtle painting all gun owners as dangerous.

Of course there has to be scare numbers “In a five year period leading up to 2021, there were 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18”. Hmm, that’s 414 unintentional shootings per year, on average. According to the CDC there were 53,220 deaths caused by conditions originating in the perinatal period, 27,734 accidental deaths, 8,526 assault(homicides), 8,472 suicides, 7,714 by malignant neoplasms, 3,585 by heart disease, 2,024 by influenza and pneumonia, 1,395 by Septicemia, 1,393 by cerebrovascular diseases, 1,156 by chronic lower respiratory diseases, 824 by in situ neoplasms.

And finally we have 765 by unintentional gun shoot. Note that the “unintentional gun shoot” is reported out of Everytown, not from the CDC.

All of this means that there are many many more issues that lead to childhood deaths and injuries other than “unsecured firearms”.

The problem really is that every such unintentional death by gun of a child is horrific. As it is almost always preventable.

One of the common themes going through the gun rights infringement community is to treat firearm related violence as a health issue. We find many direct allegations of this. From people claiming we have an epidemic of “gun[related]-violence” to having the CDC study it as a health issue.

Language also plays a part in it.

Talking about gun safety when it comes to your kids and community doesn’t need to be a political issue, said Cassandra Crifasi, associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. It may feel uncomfortable, but the focus can stay on minimizing the risk of exposure.

Somehow there is a gun right infringement group at Johns Hopkins, a world renowned medical school, labeled “Bloomberg School of Public Health”. They talk about “minimizing the risk of exposure.” I’m very sorry, but I’ve never seen anybody die because they were “exposed” to a gun.

Then she goes and blows my mind by saying this:

“We can protect kids, we can reduce a lot of gun violence, just by normalizing the conversation around firearms,” Thomas said.

Then I realized that “normalizing the conversation around firearms” means her people getting to lecture us about how we should store our firearms. For them, guns should always be stored in a locked safe and unloaded. By that they mean with no loaded magazines as well.

As an aside, the State of Maryland considers a magazine with one round in it to be a “loaded firearm”.

Johanna then gives some manipulative language to use to get other parents to divulge if they have firearms. She makes it clear that the only way she thinks it is safe to store a firearm is in a locked safe, unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate safe.

Yeah, just what you want to do when you hear an animal in your house (or on your porch), go to the rifle safe, unlock the safe, pull out the rifle, close and lock the safe, go to the ammo safe, unlock it. Take out a box of ammo, put rounds in to the magazine, ready your firearm and proceed.

No, I think I’ll use different methods.

Listen to J.Kb. talk about actually securing firearms. He has written a number of very good articles. Upto and including anchoring a job box to the floor of the garage and then storing firearms in that.

Of course we get to the final line:

In order for my child to come to your house, do you have a way you can secure those firearms that would be unloaded and locked in a safe?

“Do it my way or I will destroy your child’s friendship with my child.”