Joe Huffman, over at The View From North Central Idaho was asked to show a couple of local reporters some gun basics. I’m glad they picked him — from reading his blog he is obviously thoughtful and patient pro-gun advocate who will make a good impression on them. Hopefully they absorb the knowledge that he presents to them.

This is the way to swing public favor to our side. Present the facts, familiarize them with with some basic weapons and training and help them overcome their fear of guns.

According to this NYT article the latest idea to come out of the Big Apple is to require a city permit and $1M insurance for people who want to take pictures or movies in the city!

The proposed rules would apply to:

• 2 or more people in a location for longer than 30 minutes
• 5 or more people using a tripod for longer than 10 minutes

City officials are claiming that it would not apply to tourists or families on vacation. But in typically totalitarian fashion the rules don’t actually say that they are exempt, leaving it open for interpretation and abuse.

Mr. Dunn [of the New York Civil Liberties Union ed.] suggested that the city deliberately kept the language vague, and that as a result police would have broad discretion in enforcing the rules. In a letter sent to the film office this week, Mr. Dunn said the proposed rules would potentially apply to tourists in places like Times Square, Rockefeller Center or ground zero, “where people routinely congregate for more than half an hour and photograph or film.”

I am reminded of this quote from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

You may have seen this email being passed around. It has been falsely attributed to people other than its original author – Marko. You can read his original posting here, and his take on the plagarism in this post.

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

When a neighbor screamed she’d been shot, Colin Bruley grabbed his shotgun, found the victim and began treating her bloodied right leg.

Tonnetta Lee survived Tuesday’s pre-dawn shooting at her Jacksonville apartment, and her sister and a neighbor praised Bruley’s actions. But his employers, the same people who own the Arlington complex where Bruley lives, reacted differently. They fired him.

Read the rest of the story here at the Florida Times-Union, hat tip to The Freehold

The Federal Government has taken it upon itself to insert itself into the employment process to such a degree that you can’t be fired if you’re an alcoholic in some cases. But this guy does a stand-up job and helps protect his neighbors and he gets fired for it? Typical. But should he get his job back? Should he sue? I don’t think so. Why would you want to work for someone who is going to treat you that way? I’m sure there are lots of Employers who would be happy to have an upstanding guy like Colin Bruley working for them. Working for someone is a temporary arrangement, it can be severed by either party for any reason at any time. I don’t believe an employer has the right to force you to continue to work and you don’t have the right to force an employer to continue to employ you. Its a two-way street. Or at least it ought to be.

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Is that the kind of man you want to elect as President of the United States? I certainly don’t want a man who thinks that ‘Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.’

The quote comes from a NYT article by way of Dave Markowitz.

This story from The Real Gun Guys has me kinda riled up this morning. Most of the article covers a brave teenager who saved him and his mom from a carjacking by grabbing the goblin’s gun and shooting him with it.

Its the police reaction that’s got me red in the face –

While acknowledging the gamble succeeded, authorities stressed that it’s safer to cooperate in such a case.

“Give them the money and give them the keys,” Sheriff Harry Lee said. “You make an insurance payment on your car, and nobody gets shot.”

Says who? I figure if some shithead it sticking a gun in my face he’s ready to take my life. In other words, I’m dead unless I take matters into my own hands and do something to save myself and my loved ones. If more people would react this way to criminals trying to terrorize innocent victims we would quite possibly have lower crime rates and more dead criminals.

It really pisses me off when the guys in blue say ‘nice job, but you should have just given in’. Are we giving in to the terrorists who want to annihilate our way of life? No. The same standard should be used for cowardly little punks sticking a gun in your face.

This article comes from President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus via the Financial Times -

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years? Every child is taught at school about temperature variations, about the ice ages, about the much warmer climate in the Middle Ages. All of us have noticed that even during our life-time temperature changes occur (in both directions).

18 years ago today the Communist Chinese crushed the pro-democracy movement’s demonstrations in Tienamen Square. Gateway Pundit has pictures and links.

On the surface we see China as a country that makes cheap goods for us to buy at WalMart. And while that isn’t a bad thing, we still need to remember that their government is is a repressive regime and no friend to Liberty.

Read this interview with Tao Jun, Student Leader of Tiananmen Square Democratic Movement

The fire for freedom and democracy is always burning within Tao’s heart. In 2000 he established Maihua Net during his spare time to make public his articles, poems, and commentaries. However, one of his articles entitled, “Who Will Supervise the General Secretary,” touched the sensitive nerve of the authorities. In April 2001, he was put in a criminal detention in Shekou. Not long after being placed in detention that the authorities sentenced him to three years imprisonment for “crimes of inciting subversion of the state power and of overthrowing the socialist system.” Consequently, he spent three miserable years in Futian Detention Center and Shaoguan Prison.

Hat Tip to Michelle Malkin