Well, it’s Independence Day 2017. Usually as it’s just the halfway point of the calendar year, I like to take stock of what’s taken place in the 2A community, and in our world as a whole. The Big thing of course is a President who is supposedly has committed himself to fixing this country’s ills. Next was that this President appointed a former Marine General as Secretary of Defense, and a former Navy Seal as Secretary of the Interior who rode to his first day of work on a horse, then repealed that stupid lead ammo ban!

But make no mistake folks, the Anti-rights crowd still wants to keep you from enjoying your firearms, keep you from Hunting if you so desire, keep you from carrying a handgun for personal protection, and keep you from having a firearms for protection in your home, and in your car.

So it’s up to you to be vigilant. It’s up to you to support candidates who will protect our rights, because it doesn’t happen without you.

You need to call your Senators and Congressmen because they are elected to enact laws that WE want enacted, not to “vote their feelings” on laws. Not to live in fancy houses and claim that $174,000 a year is not enough money to live on when were about to hit 20 Trillon in debt.

After Congressman Scalise was shot, another Congressman introduced a bill that would allow any Member of either house if they so desired, to carry a handgun for protection, even in DC. So I Say, “WHAT ABOUT ME” why can’t the “Average American” who has a CCW permit in his home state, have the ability to carry anywhere in the United States? Well that Bill, H.R. 38 sits not in Committee, but in Sub-Committee!!

To say that I’m outraged is putting it mildly. Did we not elect a Pro-Firearm majority House and Senate? I thought we did it so we could fix the country as the President promised. Not for the Liberal whiners to screw it up. Chuck Schumer and his stupid actress/comedy hack cousin Amy can prattle on all they want, but we have control of the country at least until 2020 and we better get off our rear ends or we will give control of our country back to the Socialists!

This is how I get when I don’t get to shoot! I’m recovering from a concussion back at the end of April, where I also broke a bone in my wrist of my shooting hand, so with my 57^th Birthday approaching, I’m looking forward to getting down to my indoor range to shoot (Shameless plug approaching) since we’re entering our 21^st day of +100 degree temps, and the only climate controlled, six 25 yard pistol lane, 4 100 yard rifle lane Shooting Range (also 50 yard Archery range!) is Copper Star Indoor Shooting range in Camp Verde Arizona. Sometimes I like Indoor ranges like this one because you can almost duplicate a situation like what you might encounter at your house during a home invasion.

Family run, Veteran owned businesses like this are important to our

Industry, so during the warmer months I like to get there every 10-14 days. The shop reminds me of the shop my Uncle was a part owner of in the 1960’s and 70’s. I hope you get to shoot this summer. Please observe the 4 safety rules. A few weeks ago I got to be a guest panelist on the Polite Society Podcast, with Paul & Susan Lathrop, Rob Morse, Rachel Malone, and others. I also host my own Podcast, Firearms Chat. Both can be found on iTunes, Facebook, and both, along with several other shows, can be found on Self Defense Radio Network at Selfdefenseradio.net and my show is Firearmschat.com and our show is approaching our 4^th anniversary. We look forward to you checking us out! Thanks.

About Dr. Bill Chachkes- A Retired Educator, Patriot, former Competition Shooter who still competes with his 22’s,  Ex-Rotary and Propeller winged Pilot, Sportswriter, Musician, and former US Army Warrant Officer. His Second Book, titled “I’m No Hero” is in Development, and hopefully will be out in late 2017/Early 2018

For as long as I’ve been scouring Twitter’s entertaining #GunSense tag, any time I’ve come across a phony “mom” demanding “action” (or worse, a real mom so resigned to being helpless that she’s actually emdangering the only things on earth she ought to risk it all to save), I’d typically just seagull the thread long enough to poop out the following image. It pretty much sums up Bloomberg’s city-dwelling, terrified, out-of-touch, vaguely female clientele and its uniformly uninformed opinion about safety and defense:

I dont know who came up with that, but it’s a classic. And like most classics, there’s now a remake with better special effects and a bigger budget, plus some corporate product placement for good measure. And unlike the sewage pouring steadily out of Hollywood, this one’s actually better than the original (or at least as good). Save it to your online ammo box and hit ’em where it hurts:

Delicious.

Hat tip D. Mike.

Oh, Apple.

A while back, the company dipped its toe into the #GunSense* arena by banning images of firearms from game previews inside its App Store, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue for developers of popular first-person shooters, side-scrollers, military-themed strategy games and, ultimately, Apple itself. Since money trumps phony morals, that particular policy was deep-sixed faster than a disarmed serf** on a French promenade.

Now, following news of Tim Cook’s $50,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for the most rabidly antigun Presidential candidate this side of ever, Apple’s taking its anti-rights acitivism one step further: The company is getting rid of the kinda-sorta-realistic revolver emoji and replacing it with a neon green water gun.

A freaking water gun!

From Popular Science:

On its website, Apple says it wants to “ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere.” And with millions of people using emoji in their daily communications, even the smallest changes will have significant impacts on our conversations. Apple’s stances on emoji can’t help but have political ramifications, in other words.

In this case, the change to the squirt gun emoji comes two years after a social media campaign called #DisarmTheiPhone was launched by advocacy group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, with the goal of pressuring Apple to drop support for the revolver emoji.

Previously, Apple was reported to have pressured the emoji masters of the universe —the Unicode consortium, an international standards body — to drop plans to add a rifle emoji to the set.

Derp.

OK, two things:

One, Popular Science is attributing this decision to the wrong entities, essentially declaring victory for the so-called #DisarmTheiPhone “movement” and its partner group NYAGV. In reality, #DisarmTheiPhone was and remains a trivial Twitter hashtag campaign that was abandoned about a week after it launched.

Similarly, the association alleged to be behind it likely had zero influence on Apple’s decision (potential Bloomberg puppet strings notwithstanding), as this is a change that’s been a long time coming for the California company. As noted, Apple is and has been consistently antigun, terrified of individual responsibility and self reliance in the interconnected world its future profits depend so dramatically upon. There is globalism, and there is tech globalism. It’s a tossup as to which version is more patently stupid.

Two, while this move will have no impact whatsoever on its PC purpose to “reduce gun violence,” it does have the rather insidious potential to make light of a serious matter in the minds of hundreds of millions of children and young adults the world over. See, water guns are toys. Kids point them at their friends and pull the trigger. But real guns — for which this naive nonsense will be substituted in the Pictionary-style communication that is emoji — are not toys. Far from it, firearms are potentially dangerous tools, deadly to the innocent when used improperly. And that improper usage, on a very basic level, is all Apple is encouraging with this move. When Johnny 10-Year-Old, raised on emoji and iDevice, finds a bright green gun or some zombie-themed Hornady hollow-points, he might not take those things too seriously. Indeed, like all such efforts to censor firearms from public consumption, the sole upshot (hopefully not into some poor kid’s developing brain) is the creation and curation of ignorance. Abstinence — and that’s all this really amounts to — doesn’t make children safer. It makes the taboo more mysterious, more enticing, and less familiar. If you want your kid to get the clap, never teach them about sex. If you want your kid to get banged, never teach them about guns.

Of course, Apple will never truly put its money where its progressive advocacy is. The company won’t ban games or apps where guns feature prominently, and you’ll still be able to buy John Wick and Deadpool from iTunes. Better, you’ll continue to have access to great firearms resources, retail stores, and auction sites through iOS’ Safari browser. Sure, you could protest this decision and boycott Apple (knowing, of course, that Google and Microsoft and Amazon et al. are no better on gun rights), but there is no more poignant mockery of such half-hearted #GunSense than to use the very tools built by these various anti-rights companies against them. Hell, I’m writing this post on an iPad, and I just used my iPhone to order 4000 rounds of remanufactured 124-grain 9mm JHP from Freedom Munitions.

Anyways, now that Apple has banned the scary, deadly, mass-murder-promoting cartoon handgun from its emoji lineup, I think it’s only fitting — and morally consistent — that the company also honor the hundreds of thousands of yearly victims whose deaths are likewise “represented” in the standard emoji alphabet. That is to say, as far as I can tell, Apple at the very least must now get rid of the following:

⚡️ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ✈️ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ⛪️ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Lightning, explosions, junk food, booze, vehicles, greed, hammers, bombs, knives, tobacco, pills, drugs, drownings, hospitals, doctors, houses of worship, various deadly critters, and hands and feet take countless lives annually, together (and many even separately) dwarfing the roughly 2000 innocents killed each year with firearms.

Worse, if one utilizes emoji combinations, one can get mighty specific about some mighty terrible events. Consider ✈️?? or ?? or ??‍?‍?‍??. How delightfully subversive! We all probably know someone who’s been killed by ??, too. And just recently, ??? made the news.

Looking at that last icon above, a thought occurs: nothing has been more responsible for killing more innocent people over the last (insert huge number here) years than government. Thus, I expect Apple to firmly and boldly address the number-one killer of man in their next update and ban these odious symbols:

?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??

I just have one more thing to say:

?***

Footnotes:

*A blending of the term “gun control” and the word “nonsense.”

**I am aware that “disarmed serf” is a redundancy. I just happen to like the way it sounds.

***I dont know if Apple added this emoji for its users or for itself. Both seem appropriate. Up mine? Up yours, Cook and Co.

(Excerpt from The Legend of Homie Coyote: America’s Guy Fawkes)

Oy!

And a couple more for good measure:

Go forth and enrage the phony “patriot” in your life!

In the aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack, there has been — predictably — renewed mainstream attention on the completely nonexistent “gun problem” in America. Fortunately, the narrative doesn’t stick so well when the perpetrator was a known radical Islamist on record as giving his acquaintances hell (or whatever it’s called in Muslim doctrine) over their pulled pork platters touching his burger at a barbecue. It’s even less compelling when the guy was allegedly on one (or more) of the federal government’s completely unlawful “watch lists,” demonstrating once and for all again the abject folly of these affronts to due process. The death knell for #GunSense* in this attack, however, is the fact that it was targeted at a group already marginalized for centuries — one that has made tremendous (if mostly superficial) gains in the last several decades.

And for all that time, Democrats have taken the LGBT vote for granted, making assumption after assumption that “alternative” denotes “liberal,” that one’s sexual orientation or gender identity should and would net the party a “D” in every column come every election day. Unfortunately, due most recently to court rulings on gay marriage and the whole bizarre bathroom distraction, it seems to be working. But under the surface, these initiatives are unimaginably insulting: The LGBT community is being exploited like a circus sideshow of freaks by the government it believes serves their best interests. Gay marriage a big win? No, folks, this is mere capitulation to government’s assertion that it is the sole licensor of love between individuals, that it has any conceivable say in who and how you love yourself and others. And as much of a sham** as all marriage licenses are***, the bathroom brouhaha is even more of a joke. The state thinks that where you piss in public matters more to you than the basic civil rights it regularly withholds from you and everyone else. The bathroom stink is a literal shit show, as if baking brownies (or baking cakes) is what the silly, childish LGBT community is really all about.

Because, LGBTers, that’s what #GunSense — and the politicians who promote it — think you are: children. In Orlando, there are no kids’ graves to dance on, so you’re filling in. Just like it’s unthinkable to arm youngsters in the face of violence, so too is it unthinkable to arm LGBTs. After all, you cannot be trusted to make mature, responsible, traditionally “moral” decisions, can you? Just like kids, you need a parent or guardian to take care of you, to salve your skinned knee and hurt feelings, to tell you you’re great. You aren’t a real adult. You aren’t a real individual. You are a ward. You are property.

It is dehumanizing, it is marginalizing, and it is — in so many awful ways — the epitome of pandering.

Which gets me to my main point:

Pandering is an important concept post-Orlando, and the LGBT community would do well to pay close attention to where it’s coming from and how it’s framed.

The government, naturally, will continue to use the Orlando victims’ lifestyle associations to foment a false “minority issue,” making the push to further limit firearms rights based on the terroristic threats that “gun nuts” present to the so-called “othered” others. It is in the controlling agency’s interest to tell you that you are a target and must kowtow to authority in order to maintain your ever-more-tenuous, hard-fought freedoms. This is textbook pandering, and it is textbook unacceptable. Even to straight guys like me.

But it is “straight guys like me” who represent the other side of the pandering problem. And that needs to be addressed.

See, to those in the LGBT community, it may feel that, all of a sudden, the erstwhile anti-gay good old boys aren’t so bad. It may feel as if a bunch of formerly homophobic hillbillies are coming out of the woodwork from every end of the Internet to tell you to arm up and fight back, that they’ve got your back 100 percent when all they ever did before was look at your butt and laugh theirs off. It may feel like an uncomfortable case of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It may feel less than genuine. It may feel like pandering.

It isn’t.

At least, it mostly isn’t. The majority of pro-gunners I personally (or passingly) know do not now and have never given a single moment’s thought or concern to the non-aggressing lifestyle choices of others. Yes, there are some Second Amendment activists out there who only “support” LGBT rights as a simple means to the otherwise noble end of expanding pro-gun influence. That sort of manipulation cannot be avoided, but it also cannot be allowed to push the many new (and understandably tentative) pro-gun fence-sitters back over to the Straight Ticket For #GunSense side. Defense rights are too important an issue — too natural a necessity — to scare anyone off through such misgivings.

The reality is this: The “intolerant Right” really isn’t as intolerant as the Left and its media outlets have been telling you. Of course, as in all collectives, pockets of ugliness do exist. And those who claim to support Liberty while simultaneously denying the humanity of the LGBT (or any other) community are struggling with a cognitive dissonance not unlike that faced by targeted minorities who trust the very masters who openly seek to disarm them.

Of course, if you are at all unsettled by the potential pandering coming from the the Second Amendment side, it is important to realize that even if you’re just receiving lip service in the advancement of gun rights for all, the operative concept is “for all.” At the very least, you are getting valuable information that can help you develop the necessary attitude to see to your own safety and the active defense of those you hold most dear.

There is also this happy fact to consider: Many pro-gun, anti-LGBT bigots have also had their eyes opened and minds broadened by the events in Orlando. What once seemed like a sociopolitical impasse has been climbed over and conquered. For many “traditional conservatives,” it no longer matters who you love or what you do behind closed doors, because they’ve been awakened — like so many in the LGBT community — to the fact that the freedom to be is more important than the freedom to be gay or straight or otherwise. The latter freedoms are redundant, shielded under the umbrella of defense of the former. It should never take a tragedy to make intelligent people see the fragile nature of their freedom, nor should it take death and destruction to make folks put aside unimportant differences in deference to the only thing that truly matters. But the tragedy’s happened, and tragedies always will. We of all colors and creeds and genders and beliefs that comprise Gun Culture 2.0 merely hope everyone can learn from it.

You dont need permission (especially not mine!) to be who you are. Love wins. You just might need to defend it one day.

So go to the range, rent some guns, and become familiar with the tool that defines Liberty’s state of the art. If you dont have a rental facility in your area or can’t currently afford the expense (firearms training isn’t exactly the cheapest best thing ever), check out Operation Blazing Sword. There, you can get in touch with many good people around the country who are stepping up to offer free (or nearly free) shooting lessons for LGBT folks new to the scene.****

If you happen to be in the Florida panhandle, I hope to see you and yours at the range.

Remember, the best relationships are the ones that survive.

Footnotes:

*Linguistically speaking, #GunSense is a blending of the term “gun control” and the word “nonsense.” Logically speaking, it’s a redundant, pathetic portmanteau, more French in spirit than even the word that describes it.

**You do get tax breaks on taxes that shouldn’t exist in the first place, so I guess that’s something.

***An interesting parallel between marriage licenses and gun control is that both concepts were constructed around governmental limitation of black integration. Freedmen were not allowed arms to fend off the rampant abuses they faced once unshackled, just as intermarriage between blacks and whites was to be stymied via the issuance of relationship permission slips. The gun license, like the marriage license, has its deepest roots in blatant legislated bigotry.

****Note to volunteer instructors: Dont screw up. The rest of us expect you to do a good job, to be patient, and to be familiar with the requisite dos and donts. So dont offer your range, time, money, or advice if you’re not going to follow the Four Rules and make the experience a welcoming one for all involved.

An XDS-9 came in the mail today for a customer. I turned the case to the side and there it was: the “NOT LEGAL IN CALIFORNIA” warning.

Always so special, Kali. They take really good care of their citizens there. From special lawnmowers to special (that is, limited) firearms–I’m sure safety has arrived and everyone enjoys an idyllic and bucolic lifestyle.  And with the recent batch of laws, folks on the internet have again turned to debating what can be done, if at all, to stop or reverse firearm legislation there. Some are sure it’s too late now and there is nothing to do; it will continue to get worse. Others say there is perhaps a glimmer of hope, given some recent court rulings, and things would get better.

One of the side effects of prohibitions is that over time you don’t just ban the object or action (or severely limit or control their use) but also eradicate the culture around it. And by culture we don’t mean the core “gun culture” as we identify it, but also all of the peripheral things that go along with it: merely a general awareness by the population at large that guns exist, that people use them, that there are businesses around them, marketers for those businesses and so on. Once that is gone, then it becomes even more difficult for the core gun culture to achieve not just legislative wins but also cultural acceptance. It becomes a bit of a vicious circle: there is no gun freedom because there is no gun freedom to be wanted and demanded. After a few generations nobody will be left to remember what it was like to have it. Granted, in today’s modern world of instant communications and cheap travel, people can see how things are elsewhere, so perhaps a possibility of change for the better. Of course, the upcoming election is likely to determine many things. But that’s another matter altogether…