A state senator in Arizona is taking HEAT rounds because she took her pistol out of her purse and was showing off her laser sight when it apparently got pointed at a reporter.  Some say she pointed it at the reporter, she says he sat down in its beam.

Either way, she says it was no big deal because her finger wasn’t on the trigger.

Sigh.

If you’re in Arizona, especially if you are represented by Lori Klein, please remind her about the Four Rules:

1.  All guns are always loaded
2.  Never point your gun at anything you don’t want to destroy
3.  Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot
4.  Know your target and what is beyond it.

At the very best, Senator Klein was breaking at least rules 2 or 4.  Worse, if she hadn’t cleared her pistol before activating and demonstrating her laser, she was doing it with a definitely loaded firearm.  It doesn’t matter of the reporter intentionally got into the way or not.  You don’t take your gun out in a place like the Senate lounge in the state capitol, activate the laser sighting device and point it around in order to show how neat it is.  You do something like that on a range or in your basement after you have cleared it.

Someone please take the good Senator aside and gently remind her of basic gun safety, please.

Officials in New York say that ammunition that has been found at the bottom of New York Harbor may be from a barge that broke up and dumped its cargo in the 1950’s.  They say that the ammunition probably isn’t dangerous because of water getting into the cartridges.

However, I’d like to be on the record as saying that if any of this ammunition is viable and sealed in spam cans, I’d be interested in taking it off of their hands.

I’ve got CMP .30-06 that was manufactured in 1953, and ComBloc 7.62x54r that was manufactured in the 1960’s.  The cans the 54r came in look like they were buried under a tool shed behind an apartment building before they were dug up, dusted off, and sold to the importer.  The M-2 ball is in great shape, although it must have been stored in a cow barn somewhere in England until the CMP got hold of it.

It amazes me when people won’t shoot bullets that are more than a couple of years old.  As long as they’re intact and don’t show corrosion, I’ll use them.

If Secretary Panetta is interested in letting me dispose of any viable ammunition his crew may find, I can be contacted through the comments.  I’ll be waiting.

A jewelry store owner in Wisconsin has decided to not allow his customers to carry concealed firearms in his store.  He reasons that he already has security procedures in place for a robbery, and he says he doesn’t feel comfortable having armed people around while haggling over price.

While I don’t agree with him, I fully support his right as a property owner to decide under what conditions he wants to do business. If someone I do business with decided to not allow concealed carry in their establishment, I would politely tell them that I will no longer be in their business and why.  This storeowner has apparently been getting a lot of angry mail and telephone calls.

Remember people, be polite.  If he recognizes that gun owners tend to be civil, honest, and polite people, he may in the future decide to change his mind.  Threatening, haranguing, and scaring business owners like this do nothing but solidify their position and rob us of converts.

In Texas, two children were injured when a 13 year old found a gun in a storage shed and caused the gun to go off while trying to see if it was loaded.  Luckily, no-one was killed.   I’d say he had to break at least three of the Four Rules:

I’m teaching my kids about gun safety and how they should act if they find a gun.  This is different from teaching a child how to handle a gun safely.  What I’ve taught Girlie Bear, Little Bear, and Junior Bear, and will teach BooBoo when he’s old enough to understand, is what to do if they find one of my guns, find a random gun while playing outside, or if they find a gun while they’re over at a friend’s house.  I’ve taken advantage of the NRA Eddie Eagle program as a tool in this.  This program has another four rules:

You know, I’m getting tired of writing these:

A police report said when the youths refused to leave Dunikowski’s stoop he took a 5.56 mm Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle to a second-floor window and started shooting.

Dear Walgreens:

This:

The man was armed with a handgun, stole prescription drugs and killed everyone in the shop before fleeing with a black backpack.

In New York City, where legal guns are almost non-existant, one person was killed and eight more were wounded when hit by bullets sprayed at a party.

Since no-one in the area had the necessary licenses to own and/or carry a pistol, someone must have come up with some kind of magical lead throwing device.

I can see it now:

A young person is disrespected somehow at a party, goes out to his car or apartment, and returns with his magic wand.  Taking several large lumps of metal out of his belt pouch, he conjures the necessary forces to form them into bullets and fling them into the house, wreaking havoc.  

Or maybe he or she just had a gun in defiance of all the gun laws on the books in NYC.  Occam’s Razor and all that.

Someone who wants to have a gun probably doesn’t need to break a sweat trying to find one, even in a gun free zone like New York.  No matter how many gallons of ink you waste on making something illegal, it does nothing to prevent someone who really wants to do it from doing it.*

*edited due to a really bad sentence structure.

After yesterday’s rant about some idiot shooting at a bunch of little girls because they were on their lawn, we get this:

… a group of children were playing pranks by ringing the doorbells of neighbors and running away. The neighbors say one man became upset at the prank and fired at the kids. 

One boy was hit by buckshot and was taken to the local children’s hospital.  I’m ashamed to say that this happened in Louisville, and I don’t even like Louisville!

OK, I tried being nice yesterday, but I realize I was just preaching to the choir.  I’m pretty sure that y’all don’t need to be reminded that firearms are a tool for self-defense, fun, and food gathering, not for the discouragement of nuisance pre-teens.   So, please spread this message to our brother and sister gun owners who have, shall we say, issues with anger and self control:

Quit acting like a moron with your bloody firearm!  It is not an instrument of intimidation, revenge, or negotiation!  Quit using them as your first resort in neighborhood and domestic disputes!

Look, I have a temper, a pretty bad one at that.  And I’m as territorial as the next guy when it comes to my property.  But kids are kids. They’re going to pull pranks, play where they’re not supposed to, and every so often they get on someone’s nerves.  Heck, my own kids irritate me, and I have an emotional bond with them.  So I understand getting a little irate when the little darlings from down the lane make a stranger angry.  But for heaven’s sake, leave the gun in the gun safe.  A verbal correction, followed by a discussion of the situation with their parents, followed by a call to the police is usually all it takes to make the offending behavior stop.  Worst that happens is that you get to be the grumpy guy in your neighborhood.  Come on over, we have jackets.

I hope the young man who was shot last night comes away from this with nothing but an interesting set of scars to tell his friends about, but I hope the jerk who gave them to him spends a very long time in Eddyville because he let his temper overcome his judgement and grabbed a firearm instead of a telephone.

Like I said yesterday folks, it only takes one dickhead among us to tar us all as dickheads.  If we don’t police ourselves, someone else will do that for us, and probably in a way that we won’t like.  Please, for the sake of us all, reach out to your fellow gun owners and make sure they know they have a pressure valve through you that doesn’t involve shooting up middle schoolers for being obnoxious kids.

A Cleveland Ohio man is under arrest because he took the “Get off of my lawn” jokes too seriously.  When a group of children got on his grass and bumped into his car, he opened fire, hitting one.  Thankfully, the little girl is going to be OK, and the moron who allegedly opened fire into a group of LITTLE GIRLS is in police custody.  Hopefully he’s convicted quickly and has a long timeout to think about what he’s done.

I’m absolutely furious with this jerk. First of all, he allegedly shot at a group of pre-teen girls over their presence on his lawn.  Now, I don’t like it when the neighbor kids use our yard as a playground without permission, but I’ve never considered opening a can of whoop-ass on them.  If he didn’t want the kids to be on his lawn or near his car, he should have gone tell them to leave and if they didn’t, go talk to their parents.

Second, it’s incidents like this that feed the anti-gun crowds.  The quickest way for a right to be eroded is for it to be abused and lose support in the general populace.  The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was possible because of all of the inner-city violence that occurred in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.  People stopped seeing AR-15’s and AK-47’s as tools that responsible people used and saw them as the implements of Mookie and his street corner pharmaceutical enterprise.   Same thing goes for the Gun Control Act of 1968.  People saw guns as the tools of political assassins, and supported gun control legislation because they were afraid that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were just the tip of the iceberg.  In 1934, violent crime was up due to the economic depression, and anti-gun forces were able to get the National Firearms Act of 1934 through at least partly because of John Dillinger and BabyFace Nelson.

My point is that we are all, as gun owners and users, the public face of our sport, hobby, and civil rights movement.  It only takes one slip or one dim bulb for us to lose a lot of ground, or possibly to push us off the cliff.  I heard someone say recently that all it takes for all of the progress that the SAF has made recently is for one Supreme Court justice to have a heart attack.  We need to stop giving the anti-gun people an excuse to attack our rights, and we need to police ourselves.

Those of you who monitor the anti-gun blogs, websites, and Twitter feeds will probably be hearing a lot about this.

Jennifer is asking for our stories of how we got into guns, so here we go:

I grew up around guns as a young child, although my mother was a committed East Coast hoplophobe.  Guns weren’t anything special, they were just there.  My father’s family hunted every season, and it wasn’t uncommon for me and my cousins to burn up a brick of .22 short in one afternoon of plinking.   There weren’t any gun nuts that I remember, just men and women who used them as tools.

I can honestly say I don’t remember the first time I fired a gun.  I was just so young that it’s gotten jumbled up with all of the other memories.  My first gun was a .22 single shot that I inherited from a cousin, and it was probably ancient before he got it.  I later passed it on to another cousin when my mother forbid me to give it to my brothers.

When my mom and dad divorced, my stepfather came into the picture, and guns changed from an everyday tool into a fetish item.  He was a true gun nut, and every gun was of some significance to him.  He had several rather expensive hunting rifles that he never took out of the box, and his 1970’s vintage Colt AR-15 probably had less than 100 rounds through it.  He shot his pistols every so often, but for the most part they were something he took down, played around with, and put up.  He was convinced that a nuclear war was imminent, and he was ready to be the ruler of our neighborhood though sheer firepower.  Something tells me step-dad probably couldn’t have hit the broad side of the barn.

As for me, now that my father and his family were out of the picture, guns were taboo.  My .22 and BB gun disappeared, and I was not allowed to do anything with the step-dad’s mini-arsenal except lug it around when we moved.  I distinctly remember my mother going off on my Scoutmaster when I came home from summer camp with a merit badge for marksmanship.

When I joined the military, I was around weapons of course.  I made the mistake of thinking that because I knew what an AR-15 looked like and some of how it functioned I knew how to shoot an M-16.  After having that little preconception corrected, I progressed up to being a fair to middling shot by the time I got out of training.  Over time, I became a firearms instructor for my unit, and became a pretty good shot with the M-16.  Other shooty goodness came along, including the Bushmaster cannon on a Bradley and the M-2 .50 caliber machine gun on my M113.  Ahhh, memories.

One side note on military firearms training:  I encountered a large number of soldiers in the intelligence field who didn’t like guns.  I was shocked.  Here was someone who was being given a gun, free ammo, and being allowed to shoot it at reactive targets for free, and they were either ambivalent or afraid.   I loved going to the range, and tried to go as often as I could, but I was the exception in a lot of my units.  A surprising number of otherwise squared away soldiers, both male and female, hated the range, and barely zeroed their rifle once a year when they went out to qualify.  More than once, I coached someone through getting their minimal 23 hits out of 40 just so we could pack up and go home.

Anyway, once I put my uniform in the closet for good, I didn’t shoot again for about 5 years.  I didn’t have any personal guns while I was in the military because I had always lived on post where having a personal weapon in your quarters was forbidden.  I didn’t get any guns after I got out because of money and not thinking of it.  I have to admit that at the time I was a bit of a Fudd, and since I wasn’t hunting, I didn’t think I needed a gun.  Having one for self defense or just for fun didn’t even enter my mind.  I was a true believer in the “Only Ones” approach to anything other than hunting pieces.

Three things changed my mind and sent me down the track towards where I am today:

First, during the summer of 2002, Louisville got smacked with a storm that knocked out our power for about a week.  It was widespread enough that our entire quarter of the city went dark.  I had the kids that week, and Irish Woman was on the road.  Some of the houses in the subdivisions around us started getting broken into, and there I was, alone with three small children and no way to protect them.  So once the money was available in the budget, I went out and got a shotgun for the house.  I put a box of shells through it, put it in the closet with another box of shells, and didn’t touch it for a couple of years.  But at least I had a gun.

Next, I thought I might get a cheap rifle for deer hunting.  I couldn’t afford a Remington or Winchester like my father had owned, but I figured I could pick up a cheap surplus rifle and get good with it while saving up for a ‘real’ rifle.  Co-incidentally, the movie “Enemy at the Gates” came out at about that same time, and I thought the Russian bolt actions looked pretty sweet. A friend took me to a gun show, and there I found table after table of Mosin-Nagant’s.  I picked a 91/30 out pretty much at random, gave it a cursory lookover, and bought it.  I got lucky and got one in pretty good condition, and it’s still my favorite plinking gun. 

Researching that old gun led me to various gun forums, which introduced me to the modern gun culture.  It also led me to start reading Tam’s blog, who led me to Breda, who led me to the Atomic Nerds, who led me to #GBC.  The rest is history.

And last but not least, I was involved in a robbery.  One of my buddies and I were going out to his woodlot to get some firewood and scope out whitetail activity one Saturday, and I stopped at the local stop-n-rob for a coke and some ice that morning.  As I was standing in line, one of the other customers pulled his stocking cap down over his face, walked up to the cashier, and demanded all of the money.  So there I stood with nothing but my wallet in my hand, while an armed creep robbed the store.  After he ran off with all of the money in the till, my friend showed up about a minute behind the police.  The first thing out of his mouth was “You have got to get a pistol and carry.”  So over the course of the next few months, I got a pistol, learned to shoot it and got my CCW license.

So now I own a few guns, know how to shoot all of them, and am bringing my kids and anyone else who asks into the gun world.  I went from Fudd, to home defense, to surplus rifles, to carrying a pistol as often as I can.  I’m trying to learn from my mistakes and the things I saw and did along the way, and I’m hoping that in some way I’m making a positive effect on our tight little group.