Les Jones

Guns > Thursday Gun Links #26

NeanderPundit is sponsoring a Postal Match: shoot an NRA target with your favorite .22 rifle and mail him your target. See his site for the rules.

SixGunner.com reports on a .44 Magnum Kaboom caused by a reloading mistake. Via Smallest Minority. (Sixgunner.com doesn't have permalinks, so if you're reading this in the future after it's scrolled off the front page, try the Smallest Minority link.)

New rules will require air marshalls to dress and groom like cops so they'll stick out like sore thumbs.

WASHINGTON, July 16 - Beards are out. So are jeans and athletic shoes. Suit coats are in, even on the steamiest summer days.

That dress code, imposed by the Department of Homeland Security, makes federal air marshals uneasy - and not just because casual clothes are more comfortable in cramped airline seats. The marshals fear that their appearance makes it easier for terrorists to identify them, according to a professional group representing more than 1,300 air marshals.

The Transportation Safety Administration continues to try to give terrorists the edge. The TSA is still dragging its feet in allowing pilots to carry guns. The airline industry is still teaching flight attendants to cooperate with hijackers, as if 9/11 never happened. This is, needless to say, happening on Bush's watch and he needs to fix it. This comes at the same time as further reports of Middle Eastern men probing airline security.

Jeff Cooper's Commentaries for June are up. Anyone with an interest in the Middle East should read his excerpts of a speech by Haim Harari.

Right to Keep and Bear Arms

San Francisco is attempting to regulate gun show sales. The bill would only affect one venue in San Francisco, but it sets the stage for regulating all private transfers and inter-generational family transfers.

Publicola is asking his readers "If the "Assault Weapons" Ban is renewed will you vote Republican generally &Bush specifically this November?"

Jeff Soyer's weekly check on the bias explores the controversy in Virginia over open carry.

Quotes on the Gun-Grabbing British

Mark Steyn is featuring British Crime Week. In support, here are some quotes from British colonists and others on Britain's tendency to disarm its subjects.

We should not forget that the spark which ignited the American Revolution was caused by the British attempt to confiscate the firearms of the colonists.
- Patrick Henry

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
- Mohandas Ghandi

Compared with London, New York is downright safe in one category: burglary. In London, where many homes have been burglarized half a dozen times, and where psychologists specialize in treating children traumatized by such thefts, the rate is nearly twice as high as in the Big Apple. And burglars here increasingly prefer striking when occupants are home, since alarms and locks tend to be disengaged and intruders have little to fear from unarmed residents.
- British survey quoted by Dave Kopel in Lawyers Guns and Burglars

Now I’m Canadian, so, as you might expect, the Second Amendment doesn't mean much to me. I think it’s more basic than that. Privately owned firearms symbolize the essential difference between your great republic and the countries you left behind. In the US, power resides with "we, the people" and is leased ever more sparingly up through town, county, state, and federal government. In Britain and Canada, power resides with the Crown and is graciously devolved down in limited doses. To a North Country Yankee it's self-evident that, when a burglar breaks into your home, you should have the right to shoot him - indeed, not just the right, but the responsibility, as a free-born citizen, to uphold the integrity of your property. But in Britain and most other parts of the Western world, the state reserves that right to itself, even though at the time the ne’er-do-well shows up in your bedroom you're on the scene and Constable Plod isn’t: He’s some miles distant, asleep in his bed, and with his answering machine on referring you to central dispatch God knows where.
- Mark Steyn

Gun Pic of the Week: Oleg Volk's Girl With a Mac-10

Oleg Volk is a talented Nashville photographer and gun enthusiast. The picture below is from his gun games page, and is one of many taken from the 2002 Machine Gun Shoot in Knob Creek, Kentucky. The next shoot is October 8-10th, with another planned for April 8-10th.