Oleg Volk observes that psychopathic bullies prefer to kick kittens rather than wolverines (and draws a lesson from this). And on a perhaps related note … We noted in a recent links section that a third state (Oregon; home of BHM) had started legal cannabis sales “and nobody cared.” Well, somebody did. Oregon’s first week of sales beat Colorado and Washington combined. We live in a world where “experts” say that executing a 12-year-old playing alone in a park with a toy gun is “reasonable.” The eight best war cries of all time. In somebody or another’s opinion. Hm. I…
Author: Claire
The Big Scary Project drags on. I’ve been Handyman Mike’s Official Minion the last two days and will probably be so until the end of the project. Exhausting! Mike worked all weekend and tells me he’s been working weekends for a month or so. It shows. He’s never been exactly a fast-moving kinda guy, but between that and his Perpetual Life Crisis, hours have been short, productivity hasn’t been good and “mistakes have been made.” A day off would be a blessing for him, but the only realistic way to achieve it is to hustle harder for the next three…
First time commentor Larry L wrote the other day:
I’m not sure what to think about this stuff every time somebody does a multiple murder with a gun.
Everybody trots out their well developed positions with their talking points and talk past each other. The people who are scared of big fierce looking black rifles want all the guns confiscated etc. The people who have their fierce black rifles will only give them up from their cold dead hands etc. Okay, everybody has made their point(s).
There are still x number of people in a theatre/classroom/church/someplace that aren’t coming home today and what are we as a society or civilization going to do about it? I don’t have the answer but shouldn’t we at least ask the question.
Not to single you out, Larry L, but I suspect that a lot of people who don’t believe they have a dog in the gun-rights hunt ask themselves questions like this when these horrible mass shootings hit the news. So I’d like to try to answer your question, which I’ve bolded up there.
Still working on that blogosaurus. So close to done. But I’m helping to put up siding today and I’m not sure how long or steadily I’ll be required as a construction minion. So here are some links for ya. Oregon legalizes pot and nobody cares. Good one from Kevin Wilmeth. “Outsourcing Empathy: What Could Go Wrong?” (Was saving this to link from my blogosaurus, but what the heck.) Courtroom DNA evidence: it goes the way of so much other prosecutorial “science.” (H/T S.) “Why we should just nationalize Facebook.” Um … no, “we” shouldn’t. Even if “we” had the authority…
I’m working on a blogosaurus related to a comment on “Come and Take Them. Start Here.” (And what a comment section it’s been!) The giganto-blog is about 2/3 done and I’d hoped to post it this afternoon. But I got dragooned into minion work on the Big Scary Project. So at least now there’s this: That old addition was a stupid idea to begin with. By the time I bought this place it was held together by rot and insects. So down it comes! (And no, that’s not me swinging the sledgehammer. All I’m doing is bagging old blown-in insulation…
Stirring myself to the right words after One of Those Tragedies always takes a while. First, there’s the dragged-down feeling of “here we go again.” The antis rush gleefully on stage to perform their blood dances and once again, decent people need to respond to them, if for no other reason than to keep the record straight.
We can’t even stop to speak with decency and sympathy for the horrible losses because to speak at all is to become political. And that’s obscene.
Mass murders, whether by bomb or knife or vehicle or poison, are horrific individual tragedies. But mass murders by firearm result in a dreary sameness.
Except this time.
It’s started. The Big Scary project. And I’m as nervous as the proverbial long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. With spikes on their rockers. Poisoned spikes. With blasting caps in them. And alien plague germs. Flesh-eating alien plague germs. One good thing: worst comes first. The initial step (which I’m staying out of the way of) is to tear up part of the floor to gauge just how much rot, beetle damage, carpenter ant infestation, and other baddies might be under there. Once we see that, we know the baddest of the bad things that can happen…
Give ’em hell, Nicki! Alas, here is a gun owner who very, very much seems to get it. Then doesn’t. Australia’s notorious gun confiscation didn’t work as well as hoplophobes claim — and wouldn’t work here. (You already knew that, didn’t you?) Father of wounded Oregon student refuses to participate in Obama’s political display. Local VIPs aren’t planning to welcome Our Glorious Leader either. J.D. Tuccille: With 3D printers, all things are possible. And so are all panics. Media more deadly than “gun nuts.” (Stolen from Joel) John McAfee brings his famously wild brain (and unfortunately a lack of solid…
Even a gun controller calls Obama’s response to the UCC campus killings a tantrum and correctly states that nothing Our Glorious Leader wants will end violence. Here’s a pretty good fisk of Hillary Clinton’s latest opportunistic anti-gun knee-jerking, too. Again, it’s by somebody who’s hardly a pro-gun purist. Here’s another good one. I’d expect this sort of thing in over-regulated, over-zoned cities, but when rural Colorado tries to keep people from living off-grid on their own land, we’re truly in a pickle. (Via jed in comments) Have you ever complained about how some arbitrary credit score governs too much of…