"GUN FREE ZONE" = "FISH IN A BARREL"

I was cruising around YouTube today watching some of Ted Nugent's videos on gun control and the 2nd Amendment when he mentioned the uselessness of "gun free zones." That kinda struck a chord with me, and since I haven't really addressed that issue in my blog, well, here we are!

So let me start off by asking the obvious question for those of you who many not have ever heard the term: What is a "gun free zone?" Well, the literal answer to the question is this: a "gun free zone" is an area which has been designated either by policy or ordinance in which the carrying of a firearm is either not allowed or illegal, including the carrying of a concealed weapon by CW (Concealed Weapon) permit holders. In short, with the obvious exception of law enforcement officials, NO ONE in a "gun free zone" is allowed to have a gun. Period.

The realistic answer to the question is far, far different, and it goes like this: a "gun free zone" is an area in which no one but the criminal will have a gun.

This means that there will be two kinds of people in a "gun free zone" - the criminal and his victims. And should the criminal decide to start shooting, it will be just like shooting fish in a barrel.

The concept of the "gun free zone" was thought up as a "feel good" measure by the anti-gun crowd, aka "The Brady Bunch," to make people feel safer in the wake of events such as the shootings last year at Virginia Tech. The idea is that if you go into an area that is posted as a "gun free zone," you're going to feel safer knowing that no one there will have a gun.

A nice concept, except for one small thing - it won't work.

Anyone with any amount of sanity and intelligence at all should realize that "gun free zones" won't work and are useless for the same reason that gun control laws won't work and are useless - criminals don't obey the law! That's why they're called "criminals!"

Virginia Tech is proof that "gun free zones" don't work. The school has a long-standing policy in place prohibiting firearms on campus, so in effect at the time of the shootings, the entire campus was a "gun free zone." But this sure didn't stop that asshole Cho from shooting more than 30 people, did it? Nope, sure didn't!

On the flip side of the coin is the shooting in the Midwest (the location escapes me) that took place a short time later at not one but TWO churches, in which a criminal shot and killed several people at one church and then moved on to the next one. Thing is, when he got to the second church one of the congregation was a CW permit holder who was armed in the church with the approval of the church leadership, and when the gunman started shooting the CW holder - a woman, by the way - opened fire and punched his ticket for him! The shooting rampage was stopped literally dead in its tracks, and no more lives were lost.

So you tell me: where are YOU gonna feel safer? At Virginia Tech or any other place that is designated as a "gun free zone," or sitting in the church with that CW holder in the Midwest?

I fail to understand how anyone with any amount of intelligence can NOT see how "gun free zones" don't work. It just plain escapes me.

As for me, I will never - NEVER - become one of the "fish in a barrel."

IHC

The Sorry State of the Union

I'm kinda short on time today - wanna see if I can do this in the ten minutes I have before I have to go get ready for work - so I'll be brief.

After reading the transcript of NObama's State of the Union address that he gave last night, I can best sum up my reaction by three simple words: I'm not impressed.

So, the results NObama had hoped to achieve in the first year didn't come as quickly as he would have hoped. (Damn, there's that word again...) Well, no shit. Now you know what the rest of us knew a year ago.

Jobs and the jobless rate continue to be a problem. Again, no shit. Tell us something we DIDN'T know, like what YOU plan to do about it.

Oh, ok...so you're gonna make 2010 "The Year of Jobs." Uh-huh. After squandering your first year in office on a useless and increasingly unpopular health care plan which you tried to shove down our throats, NOW you realize that it's time to do something about jobs for Americans. Welcome to reality, genius.

All in all, nothing more than another pretty speech, which is what NObama has proven he's best at - giving pretty speeches that mean absolutely nothing. He even used the "keep the dream alive" phrase in the hopes that using words from his hero, Martin Luther King Jr, would help him out. Of course, the Demoncrats in Congress couldn't stop from jumping up and standing for him at every word, just like a good little group of lemmings, led by the head lemming herself, Nancy Pelosi. All I can say is, enjoy it now while you can, Nancy, 'cuz November is just around the corner.

All in all, a pretty speech delivered by a charismatic speaker who danced around the main issues and used distorted facts to try and get others to see his point and forgive his shortcomings.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

As I said, I'm not impressed. Disgusted, yes. Fed up, yes. Nauseated, yes. Impressed?

HELL NO.

All I can say is, "ONE DOWN, THREE TO GO!"

IHC

One More Thing that Hasn't "Changed"

And that "one more thing that hasn't changed" would be The Great Pretender's stand on the 2nd Amendment.

Anyone who paid any attention at all during the elections of 2008 is fully aware that NObama and all of the other Demoncratic candidates avoided the topic of gun control and the 2nd Amendment like the plague. They did this because they knew that the nation's opinion of gun control had drastically changed over the previous eight years, spurred on by the continual yearly reports by the FBI that since the Clinton-era "Brady Bill" had been allowed to expire, violent crimes had dropped drastically in direct proportion to the drastic increase in private gun ownership and issuance of Concealed Carry permits nationwide. They knew that the majority of Americans were now in favor of private ownership and "must issue" CCW laws, and the backlash that NObama suffered at his "bitter gun owners" remark only proved the point. When asked point-blank about his stand, NObama made some vague remark about being in favor of gun ownership and hunting, something like that, but those of us who are more savvy than that took one look at his Congressional voting record on the topic of gun control and knew different. (He voted IN FAVOR of EVERY SINGLE GUN CONTROL MEASURE that crossed his desk, so you tell me what his stand is!)

But that was then, and this is now. Now that The Great Pretender is in office and his Secretary of State is the Wicked Bitch of the North, Billary Clinton, he must feel that the time is right to take the first tentative - and very quiet - steps towards implementing a more stringent version of the Brady Bill. And these first steps were taken in a very surprising place, a place that only the most aware and alert of us would have thought would be the place where NObama's gun control measures would learn to walk.

And that place was the floor of the United Nations.

The Obama administration has enthusiastically and completely shown its support of the United Nation's desire to implement a legally-binding program which they are calling a "treaty" that would control the international firearms trade. The United Nations has decided that gun control - INTERNATIONAL gun control - is the key to world peace, and they want all of the member nations to sign this "treaty" and start obeying laws that the United Nations would set in place. Billary Clinton supported this notion emphatically and said: "The United States is commmitted to actively pursuing a strong and robust treaty that contains the highest possible, legally binding standards for the international transfer of conventional weapons."

Uh, excuse me, Mrs. Clinton, you're a lawyer, right? I mean, you went to law school, graduated, and all that, right? So tell me, did they never teach you about a nation's sovereignty, or mention the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, specifically the 2nd Amendment? How in the world can you make a statement about "legally binding standards" as long as we have a 2nd Amendment?

OOPS! Did we just stumble across a hidden agenda, here? I think we did!

It doesn't take a law school graduate to know that you can't enter into ANY such "legally binding" agreement as long as we have the 2nd Amendment, so the only way to do this is to - you guessed it! - repeal the 2nd Amendment. And that's been the agenda for Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, Barack Obama, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Frank Lautenberg, and the late Ted Kennedy for the past 20 years or so, hasn't it?

With the support of the United Nation's idea of this inane "treaty," the gun grabbers in our nation's government now pose a very real and credible threat to our rights. The mere idea that a President would support ANY treaty which violates both the sovereignty of our nation and the US Constitution makes me wanna puke. And of course he supports the idea - if he didn't, do you think he would let his Secretary of State make such a statement to the United Nations and the world?

I think not.

I had a conversation over a beer - well, okay, over several beers - last spring at the Myrtle Beach Spring Bike Rally with one of my closest friends in the entire world, my "brutha from anutha mutha" who also happens to be a fellow biker, the author of a blog entitled "Motorcycles Have No Doors," and a registered Democrat. (No, I won't use my own spelling of the word "democrat" when referring to him, 'cuz he ain't one of those kinds of Democrats.) We were talking about the election and the inaguration of Obama, whom he voted for, and the pros and cons of McCain, whom I voted for. The conversation inevitably turned to gun control and the 2nd Amendment, and my brutha "Bulldog" told me that the first time Obama gave him cause to think he was going to do ANYTHING to infringe on his 2nd Amendment rights, he'd abandon both him and the Democratic party.

I don't know about you, but I think it's time.

IHC

One Year Later, and Nothing has "Changed"

So did you hear the latest dirty trick that the Demoncratic leaders in Congress have played on the American taxpayers?

Seems that in order to get support for their ill-conceived health care plan that they are currently ramming down the throats of the Republicans in Congress and the American people, the Demoncratic leaders - specifically, Xavier Becerra (D-Cal), Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) - have been conducting secret "backroom negotiations" with the various labor unions in the United States. The unions were vehemently opposed to the proposed tax on high-value insurance polices that would be used to help pay for the nation's new health care plan, fearing that this tax would drive members out of the union because they couldn't afford the tax. (Keep in mind, now, that it was the strong support of the unions that played a major role in getting The Great Pretender elected.) So in order to gain the support of the unions, these wise Demoncratic leaders have given the unions an exception to the 40% tax for five years, meaning that the union members won't have to pay the tax until 2018.

This will effectively leave a hole in the funding for the health care bill in the amount of a whopping 60 BILLION dollars. Yes, that's right - 60 BILLION. So that means the government is going to have to come up with that money from another source.

And I bet I know what that source is gonna be. It's gonna be a new tax on the common folk, meaning you and I. And that promise of "no more taxes" that was made during the elections? POOF! gone in a puff of smoke!

In a moment of what I'm sure Pelosi would call "brilliance," she and the others in her band of merry idiots in the Demoncratic party have just committed the same sin that they have been bashing the Republican party and former President Bush for over the past 8 years - they granted a concession to a "special interest group."

And in MY book, friends and neighbors, that makes them no better than the Republicans they've spent the past 8 years talking bad about. Actually, it makes them worse because they've now also become hypocrites in addition to being liars.

So here we are, just 4 days shy of the completion of The Great Pretender's first year in office, and what do we have to show for it? Record unemployment due to a failing economy, a "stimulus package" that didn't stimulate a goddamn thing, bailouts to companies that promptly turned around and awarded huge cash bonuses to their executives, more federal intervention and regulation into the private sector, escalation of an unwinnable war in Afghanistan after months of election year talk about being opposed to the Iraq war, a Homeland Security chief who couldn't secure a small child in his/her room let alone a nation, a Demoncratic-controlled Congress that is busy awarding pork in spending bills and concessions to special interest groups, and a looming health care plan that will be the ruination of the economy for decades, long after NObama is gone.

So one year later, just what has changed?

Nothing. Not a damned thing. Not for the better, anyway.

The only good thing about the whole thing is that it's one LESS year we have with this ignorant buffoon in office.

January 20, 2013 can't get here fast enough for me.

IHC

I Refuse to Dress My Age

Nope, I just can't do it. And the older I get, the more I refuse to acknowledge it. Part of this refusal to acknowledge increasing age is a refusal to dress my age - which is 53 in two days, to be precise.

I guess this line of thought has its origins from my time in the Air Force. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely and thoroughly enjoyed my 23 years in the service and would do it all again at the drop of a hat...but a side effect of spending 23 years in a military uniform, always having to be concerned about how you looked, is that when you don't have to do it anymore you find yourself dressing pretty much any damned way you want and not giving a damn how you looked or what others thought.

Within reason, of course...I've seen retired military folks who REALLY took it to extremes - hair past their shoulders, beards which hadn't seen a razor in years, ratty jeans, ripped t-shirts, things like that. On the flip side of the coin, I've seen plenty of retired military folks who dress and look like they're still in the military - flat top haircuts, epaulet shirts, pressed pants, friction-style belt buckles on webbed canvas belts, and so on.

I like to think that I've landed somewhere in the middle between "reasonable" and "unreasonable." The last time I put on a military uniform was in June of 1998 when I went to my former son in law's commissioning ceremony at Virginia Tech. Once that was over I packed my uniforms away in a trunk, stashed the trunk in my closet, and haven't opened it once since. Decades from now after I'm long gone, hopefully my son will one day open that trunk and take a stroll through his old man's military career, and will smile at the remembrance...but that's a long way off, I hope.

In the mean time, most of the time you can find me clad in my usual attire - boots (either my Ropers or Harley boots), jeans, a biker t-shirt of some sort (usually a Harley shirt), black leather belt with a Harley buckle or Iron Cross buckle on it, and my Robocap. (That's the hat I'm wearing in my profile pic at the top of the page.) If I'm on the bike, which is most of the time, I'll also be wearing my black vest with all the patches on it. In the summertime when I'm not at work or on the bike, I'm wearing sandals, shorts, a tank top (Harley, of course) and a straw cowboy hat. Sometimes in the winter, especially when I'm visiting my father in North Carolina, I'll wear a long-sleeve Western shirt and a black felt Tom Mahan cowboy hat to go with my jeans and cowboy boots. (Side note: no matter what I'm wearing, unless I'm on my way to or from work, I'm always armed. Always.)

As for what I wear to work, I'm pretty lucky in that my company allows me to wear jeans and a t-shirt to work, because as a part of my job as a Loss Prevention Specialist, I have to be able to blend in with the customer base. So my jeans and t-shirts fit right in. After 23 years of working in a uniform all day, this is a godsend, let me tell you! Sure, I have some polo style shirts that I wear every now and then, but not very often. More often than not you'll find me in a Harley garage shirt or a nylon print shirt or two, or one of my two Guyberra shirts which look good and are really comfortable as well.

But the one thing you'll NEVER find me wearing is ANYTHING in pastel. ANY pastel, ANY color - you absolutely WILL NOT find me wearing a pastel - EVER. You will also never see me wearing "Sans-a-Belt" trousers or Velcro-laced tennis shoes. And my wife is under standing orders that if she ever sees me appear out of our bedroom wearing shorts, sandals, and SOCKS, she is to relieve me of whatever pistol I'm carrying and shoot me until the slide locks back - and then reload.

I've always said that age is simply a fact of mind over matter - if you don't mind, it don't matter. That's pretty much the way I feel, and that's pretty much the way I'm living out my life.

And I'm enjoying every second of it!

IHC