Category Archives: Guns

Why Open Carry is a bad idea

Posted on February 20, 2014 | 18 comments

It’s not just because Abortion Barbie has come out in favor of it. She’s just matching AG Greg Abbott’s support for it in their campaigns for governor.

I think they’re both wrong, but especially Abbott, the only one of the two who has a prayer of being elected. Maybe he’ll wise up after he’s safely in the governor’s mansion. He’d have to convince the Legislature and they don’t meet again until 2015. They had an opportunity to do it in 2013 and didn’t take it.

The Texas Firearms Coalition favors it, but with a measure of concern:

“If open-carry does pass, it is incumbent upon those Texans exercising this option to be extraordinarily polite and courteous so as to allay the fears of those who, for the first time in their lives, will see people [other than police] openly carrying handguns.

“For sixteen years, our fellow Texans have been walking with, sitting next to, and eating among, hundreds of thousands of armed, law-abiding CHL’s [Concealed Handgun Licensees].  Those choosing to openly carry a handgun should view themselves as ambassadors for those Texans who chose to continue to conceal their self-defense handguns.”

The trouble is that not everyone displaying a pistol will be polite. Concealed carry doesn’t intimidate anyone. Open carry is automatically intimidating and that intimidation will cause trouble. Most likely a shootout on the street between two open-carry people who don’t like each other and seeing each other openly-armed will encourage them to get it all out in the open.

Late 19th century city marshals and police chiefs in Texas routinely required people (usually men) packing revolvers to leave them in their saddlebags or check them at the police office until they were ready to leave town. It saved a lot of problems, specifically deadly shootings.

I support concealed carry, which makes a lot of sense to me and apparently to many thousands of other Texans. Displaying handguns on the hip or in a shoulder holster on the street is a big difference and not a good one.

Hopefully, the Legislature will recognize that and refuse to allow it.

UPDATE:  Open carry draws a mixed response on the Texas CHL Forum, who say CHL is approaching 800,000 in Texas. They do seem to agree that carrying rifles into stores as some sort of 2nd Amendment demo is stupid.

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Posted in Guns, Texana

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Austin’s burgeoning Jewish choices

Posted on February 16, 2014 | 4 comments

The black hats—or penguins if you want to be rude—are the ultra-Orthodox of Judaism, mostly found these days in New York and Jerusalem. But a growing number can be seen daily in our hilly neighborhood on the eastern slope of Austin’s northwest plateau. They’re the surface indications of a growing Jewish population and, therefore, Jewish choices hereabouts.

There’s the proximity to the Dell Jewish Community Center half a mile or so up the road from the rancho. It mainly offers a variety of secular, reform, and conservative services. All of which many of the Haredim lump with pagans and gentiles. Although there is at least one orthodox congregation there and an orthodox  Chabad-Lubbavitch center a mile or so farther north, as well as the student one a few miles down to the southeast of the neighborhood at the University of Texas.

The kosher meat market tucked into a corner of our local H.E.B is a nicety. And, who knows, the diamond merchants amongst whom the Haredim are said to be proliferating might like to congregate. Confirmed for me by a gentile friend hereabouts who is also in the diamond trade. An unassuming fellow devoid of identifying costume except for his diamond pinky ring and the small, belt-holstered 9mm whose outlines are occasionally visible under his shirt. Hard to imagine the Haredim going armed—they’d need a concealed-carry permit from the state of course—but their permanent choice of black suit jackets would provide appropriate concealment.

Whatever the draw for Jews and their burgeoning choices hereabouts, I find the black hats comforting. I see them every Shabbat escorting their long-skirted, hair-covered wives and young children in their Saturday best, all walking in the general direction of the community center and back home again to the rental duplexes on a street a few blocks east of the rancho. But I have always been among the god obsessed, even in our seemingly secular age.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Israel, Obsessions, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana, The Culture

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When Old Ironsides shelled Da Nang

Posted on February 8, 2014 | 1 comment

usscon

It was in the spring of 1845, according to the USS Constitution Museum, at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Massachusetts, where Old Ironsides is docked nearby, still afloat after more than 200 years.

Captain John “Mad Jack” Percival was then in charge of the pride of the American Revolution’s world cruise and he ordered the shelling that redistributed some of the tile on the roofs of old Da Nang. Back then the French had dubbed it Tourane—or soup bowl—for the shape of its harbor on the South China Sea.

Percival was acting on behalf of what he thought were some unfairly detained French missionaries, though the Vietnamese emperor Thiệu Trị considered them disruptive. I alluded to the incident in my Vietnam war novel The Butterfly Rose, which focuses not only on our war there but the 19th century French invasion as well.

I didn’t give much space to the shelling, apparently done by the ship’s starboard Paixhans guns, the first naval guns designed to fire explosive shells, being preoccupied by my fictional French Foreign Legion assault on Hoi An a few miles south and almost 20 years in the future, during the American civil war.

So it’s good to see the museum website’s offering of the story and you should give it a read to appreciate just how long ago American involvement in that part of the world began—almost a hundred years older than the accepted 1950s version of most contemporary histories.

Our post WWII role as world policeman, it seems, is much older than we think.

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Posted in Civil War, Guns, Obsessions, Sailing, The Culture, War Without End

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Battleship Texas Centennial

Posted on February 6, 2014 | 2 comments

On March 12, the Battleship Texas will be a hundred years from her commissioning date in 1914. The state parks department is planning a musical tribute to her three days later from noon to 10 p.m. at her mooring off the Houston Ship Channel near the San Jacinto Battleground.

One month later, the Texas will begin at least $17.5 million in repairs, mainly to her corroded hull, which has sprung so many leaks that the last of the old Dreadnoughts can’t be moved to dry dock as she was back in 1988, the last time extensive hull repairs were made.

That was the last time I ventured through her cramped corridors, onto her bridge and down ladders to her old radar room amidships, the whole smelling of age and the brackish water that surrounds her. The foundation that runs the ancient weapon as a tourist attraction hopes to raise a lot more money for more extensive repairs, but the awful Democrat economy isn’t the best time for it.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Science/Engineering, Texana, The Economy

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One super bowl ad you won’t see tonight

Posted on February 2, 2014 | 1 comment

It’s a trifle provocative even for my tastes, but Daniel Defense deserves its own point-of-view and, if it wasn’t for an anti-gunner in the White House you’d probably be able to see this ad when (if) you watched the super bowl tonight.

But you won’t. Not sure whether Fox killed it or the NFL did. Could be the later.Might be they’d fear losing their tax status. That’s right. The $9.5 billion NFL is a 501 (c) 6 nonprofit, meaning they are exempt from federal taxes, if you can believe that.

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Posted in Guns, Obamalot, Obsessions, The Culture

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Passive resistence

Posted on January 30, 2014 | 2 comments

The flaw in all those new Democrat anti-gun and “high-capacity” magazine registration laws? Ninety percent of gun owners refuse to cooperate, and the state doesn’t have the manpower to do anything about it.

“I’ve seen estimates of 1,000,000 firearm magazines that should have been registered under the law, but the state reports registering only 40,000… just 4 percent.

“Against this backdrop of failure, the anti-gun government of Connecticut is contemplating an ‘amnesty’ to encourage those who haven’t registered to do so…”

Oh, yeah, that’ll work. You bet. Heh.

Never mind revolution, riots, etc. Passive resistance to government overreach is much more effective.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Guns, Obamalot, Obsessions, The Culture

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Rule 5: Lara Croft

Posted on January 10, 2014 | 2 comments

lara-croft-cosplay

Lara, Lara, Lara, proper gun etiquette is to keep your fingers off the triggers until you are ready to fire. Those index fingers should be slid along the outside of the trigger guard whilst in the ready. Just sayin’.

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Posted in Guns, Rule 5

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