Mr. C, the organizer behind the Gun Blogger Rendezvous and avid shooter was hospitalized with gall bladder problems the other night. He’s not going to make it to the Blogger dinner tonight, which is a real bummer (on top of gall bladder surgery) since I’ve been trying to run into him for a year or so now.

His wife, KeeWee has an update posted on his site.

I hope that he gets well soon.

Blogger Dinner tonight with Joe Huffman, Phil from RandomNuclearStrikes and more. Should be a good time, I haven’t had a chance to meet any of these guys yet.

I am really liking this gun! I have about 300rds through it now and it shoots like a champ. I’m now to the point where I’d trust my life to it and carry it every day — which means I’ll have to get another Undershirt holster made since it won’t fit in the one for the Kimber. I continue to have some problems anticipating recoil so I’m hitting low to the left as usual.

I went to the range with a couple of friends yesterday. It was pouring down rain, but thanks to the cover at the Kitsap Rifle and Revolver Club we were dry. Lots of fun was had with the Ruger Mark III. The only problem there is that the 10 round mags are just too small. The AR-15 worked like it was supposed to, with the exception of a couple of rounds of Radway green that didn’t fire the first time.

I hope all the followers are happy with the next 4 years. You bozos elected him, not me. Remember that.

And now I have to figure out how I’m going to survive this mess. I’ll be back later.

Vin Suprynowicz, who has been a huge influence on my political views over the years with his columns and books, has decided to vote for the GOP.

I have only one marginally effective way to tell those who have spent the past three months libeling and trashing Sarah Palin — and with her, every “regular American” who owns a gun or goes to church and lives outside their oh-so-correct urban enclaves of Washington, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles — where to shove it. And that’s to vote against the communist sympathizer who would make legally owned self-defense weapons as rare as whooping cranes, and for a true American hero — to vote a Republican presidential ticket for the first time in my life.

Via spankthatdonkey

In his own words

The full audio can be found here.

From stoptheaclu.com, hat tip to Dave Workman.

Sebastian at snowflakesinhell and Steven at Bucks Right have also posted about this.

This morning I re-discovered The Ayn Rand Institute. In an article from yesterday Amit Ghate makes some excellent points about the current financial ‘crisis’:

Overlooked here is that in a free market business failures are not just normal, they’re crucial for the best products and ideas to emerge. Most restaurants fail in their first three years because customers have other preferences. Many mom-and-pop grocers go out of business because Walmart offers better selection and lower prices. Even whole industries–think typewriters, 8-tracks and horses and buggies–vanish because new inventions and competitors arise.

None of these failures are a problem, nor do they threaten the system. On the contrary, they are an inherent part of the progress which only capitalism makes possible.

So why would failures in the financial industry be any different?

Well, I now have enough .45 and .223 loaded to do a test run. I’m a total newbie at this, and I think I’ve done everything right (I was extra careful and weighed every round). I hope to make it to the range tomorrow or Wednesday to see how well they work.

If all goes well I’ll crank out a few hundred rounds of .45 to use at the next fun steel shoot, and start working on figuring out a decent round for the WAHTF rifle I built.

I’ve turned the google ads back on, lets see if they can show anything relevant. I went through the links and removed all the old broken ones. I guess Its been quite a while since I visited some of those sites.

I ran across this post over at Pass the Ammo via GunBloggers.com. I made what I thought was a fairly reasonable reply to the posting.

Later in the day I wanted to check out the rest of the site, and noticed that my reply was missing. I was pretty sure I’d done it right, but anything is possible. I happened to have it open on the laptop so I re-posted it this morning. Its gone again. Now, this doesn’t really bug me that much, I don’t have any ‘right’ to have my comment posted, but I do think that silently deleting opposing viewpoints gives the false impression that everyone agrees with you.

update It ends up that my post was the victim of an overzealous Askimet spam filter! Spammers certainly have made it harder to manage comments on blogs these days, and Askimet usually does a reasonable job of things. Sorry to Pass the Ammo for thinking the posts were being dropped on purpose.

So, I give you my original comment:

Please don’t.

I felt the same way in 1992, and by voting for Ross Perot helped hand the country over to Bill Clinton.

All through the primaries I swore I would not vote for McCain this time around.

But I have to act like a grownup now. The economy is sliding into a recession, people wrongly blame the Republicans for that. We WILL have supreme court judges retire in the next 4 years. Congress will likely be under democrat control. Bush has already tipped us over into the nationalization of banks and the use of public funds for private benefit. Obama will only make this worse.

If you vote for anyone but McCain you will be helping to hand the country over to the socialists, and once they reinforce their hold there will be no turning back. This is a turning point in the history of the United States. Can we survive as a nation of Free Men?

He has setup a (very recent looking) backup of TheHighRoad on a new server under the domain thehighroad.us while he fights for control of thehighroad.org

My login worked fine, and it even remembered my last login date correctly.

HatTip to Snowflakes In Hell

Tomorrow is my last day. I suppose the bright side is that now I should have time to learn how to use my new reloading setup in-between surfing craigslist for jobs.

Anyone need a Linux geek/sysadmin/software developer who is fluent in C, Python, PHP and a bit rusty in Perl? I’m a reliable telecommuter as well, no need to pay for me to relocate.

Email me at editor here at libertynews.

Pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole lot of them.

H/T to Sith by SithWest

The High Road, one of the largest pro-gun websites has been hijacked by its hosting provider. The hosting provider, Derek Zeanah owner of WellBuiltNetworks.com, was asked to change the domain registration from its original owner, Rich Lucibella, to the forum’s actual owner and moderator Oleg Volk. He instead changed the ownership to himself and locked out many of the admins who disagreed with him.

Background by an original moderator

Mr. Lucibella says:

At no time was I aware that Derek was acting as anything but Oleg’s personal agent. Had I been aware that Derek was acting for his own benefit I would never have transferred the domain name to him. It is my position that Mr. Zeanah had fraudulently misrepresented himself to me. If he persists in publicly hiding behind my statements, taken out of context, I will have little choice but to join this legal fray, recover the domain name thru the courts and pursue Mr. Zeanah for my legal fees.

Here is Oleg’s request for support and an Update from Oleg where it appears that Derek Zeanah has also hijacked Oleg’s Armed Polite Society forum as well. At this time it is in maintenance mode and still pointing to the same server that hosts The High Road forum.

This Derek Zeanah guy gives IT people a black eye. His job is to host the site, not try and steal it from its rightful owner. He has a hosting company, wellbuiltnetworks.com, and if you are a customer of his or thinking about becoming a customer I’d look elsewhere. Unethical behavior like this is bound to carry over into the rest of his business dealings.

The WTC image and video archive is still open. It was created in the days after the attack as a way to preserve the images and the feeling that was present.

It’s election season and we need a reminder of just how serious the job of protecting American lives is. Are you going to vote for the team that wants to negotiate with those who would not hesitate to kill you and your family? Or for the ones who would spend sleepless nights protecting you from the barbarians at the gate? The war has not gone perfectly, mistakes have been made, but on balance we have been safer because of the choices made by our leaders. They are not the evil ones, they are not the ones that want to see your burning corpse falling through the sky. For all their faults they are doing the job of combating the shadows that creep in the night and so far have been successful.

That success is no accident. It takes hard work and planning. It takes accepting mistakes and learning from them. It means standing up for unpopular positions and drawing a line that shall not be crossed. America has seen no major terrorist attacks since 9/11 because of these steps. Imagine for a second where we would be at had AlGore won the election. Not just him, but his whole team of radical liberal ideologues running around scared of global warming while extremists slaughter our families in the name of their God.

Never Forget what we are fighting against. Or for.

I’d better start this off with a disclaimer - I’m glad the Republicans picked her to be the Vice President. She’s a breath of fresh air to the party. But we need to stop treating her like she’s the Conservative incarnation of Barack Obama.

Let us be realistic about this. She’s not running for President. And if elected won’t have much, if any, effect on our lives. John McCain is still the one who will be signing or vetoing the laws. He’s the one who will still be making deals with the Democrats. He’s the one we have to hold accountable for carving away at our rights. Out enthusiasm for Sarah Palin is understandable. Just look at who we had to choose between during the primaries this year. If we’d had someone like Palin running maybe we wouldn’t have to settle for John ‘Lets gut the 1st Amendment’ McCain.

I stand by the slogan of my newest political shirt from We’re Screwed ‘08. No matter who wins this election the US Constitution is still guaranteed to be be on the losing side. McCain has a history of compromise and disrespect for the Constitution. I don’t expect him to give that up just because his running mate is an NRA member and has held an AR-15.

The Palin nomination seems a bit like a magician’s trick of mis-direction. “Don’t mind the white haired man, just look at the pretty lady” as he signs away the rights that our forefathers fought so hard to protect. John McCain is still the one with the real power here. Palin might make a good Presidential candidate some day but that isn’t what this election is about.

What this election is really about is the choice between the lesser of two evils. Who will do less damage to the Constitution during their time in office? That’s who I have to vote for, no matter how unhappy it makes me to do so.

Mark Levin has a short interview with John Lott covering what he knows about Obama and his views on guns. Lott and Obama were both teachers at the University of Chicago Law School. Lott says Obama wasn’t around campus much, but on the occasions they did meet Obama referred to him as ‘that gun guy’ and refused to discuss the issue at all. You can listen to the interview on Lott’s site.

from 2003-2007 according to this article from the Kitsap Sun. IIRC WA is one of the best armed states (although I need to re-discover my source for that). They interviewed a number of people from the Kitsap Rifle and Revolver Club, of which I am a member. The article is pretty good, much better than I expected when I first heard that it was being written.

I’ve added some new blogs to GunBloggers.com, Blackfork, Cemetery and The Gun Shots

Somehow Cemetery’s feed triggered a bug in the feedparser module that I use to parse the RSS feeds, I added an exception for his site and got it all fixed up so that titles look ok.

Welcome guys!

The Gun Shots blog over at Outdoorlife is reporting this observation from Devline Rossell who was shopping in New Orleans for supplies in preparation for Gustav:

I just left a sporting goods store and you would think that the number-one selling item would be plywood or potable water or gasoline right now,” he said. “Apparently it is AR-15s and .223 ammo. I watched at least 20 people buy AR-15s and cases of .223

Looks like the people of New Orleans learned their lesson from Katrina.

Hat Tip to The Firing Line