Monthly Archives: February 2012

This one isn’t a state sponsored criminal but it’s another example how A Security Theater aids criminals and theifs, even if they’re not employed by the state.

Florida police arrested a man Friday for allegedly stealing a Rolex watch from a TSA bin at an airport security checkpoint.

I do love how they refer to the thief as “brazen”.  The thing is this falls under my “King Shit” rule.  If you act like a king shit, like that is your property or are allowed to be there, no one is going to question it.  There is nothing tying TSA bin A to passenger A.  If the bin gets ahead of the passenger, more specifically if the TSA stalls the passenger, it makes his belongings available for picking.

It’s this falsehood of security that allows thieves like this as well as the TSA to get away with these types of crimes.

For more on the “king shit” rule*, watch this.

*I first coined the term in 1999 while following my dad into the ER to check on the status of a friend who fell and broke her hip.  We didn’t walk in through the main door and no one stopped us even though I was only 15 at the time.  My dad just said to follow him and don’t look lost.

Tip: To mask the noise of racking the slide as you load up at the airport do it while the toilet is flushing.

Joe Huffman – Tweet

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[I started laughing uncontrollably as I read that.  Then I started laughing even harder when I remembered a conversation from Saturday. It is easier and more fun too.-B]

Update: Sebasitan added this which is funny as hell:

@barronbarnett If you slam fired into the toilet, you could also easily exclaim “Damn, that was one hell of a burrito!”

Please see the update at the bottom or this post!

So the Brady Campaign released their updated scorecard for 2011 this year.  I saw it earlier last week and kept meaning to update my spreadsheets.  I know it’s pointless but it’s still good to numerically show how pointless it is.

If you actually believed the doom and gloom provided by the Brady Campaign you would think that the streets were rivers of blood.   I uncovered something that you might want to stick around for.  Read to the end for the icing on the cake that I found after comparing 2010 to 2011.

Before getting into that, lets get the quick run down of charts out of the way.  For reference, here is the 2010 card with the 2010 UCR.  Here is the similar data from a year ago with the 2010 score card with the 2009 UCR.  It must be noted that this data does not reflect the UCR data from 2011 as it has not been released by the FBI yet.  Expect an update later this year when it becomes available.

Here is the straight comparison of the score versus the violent crimes per 100k.

(Old Graph, incorrect, old comments remain below)

(corrected graph details)

R2 dropped again to a value of 0.0016 and the correlation was calculated out to be 0.040117, while it did increase by 0.01, it is still completely insignificant and indicates there is no correlation between the Brady Score and violent crime.  Moving forward though lets just limit this to the top 10 Brady Scores.

(Old Graph, incorrect, old comments remain below)

(corrected graph details)

Again the correlation is non-existent with it coming in at –0.047.  Anything that could be indicated by the trend line is irrelevant due to the very low correlation.

(Old Graph, incorrect, old comments remain below)

(corrected graph details)

All scores above 50 had a correlation of 0.78 while the sample size renders it truthfully statistically irrelevant, it is trending in the direction opposite to which the Brady Campaign would claim.  Next up though is all those with low murder rates.

(Old Graph, incorrect, old comments remain below)

(corrected graph details)

There are 20 states who’s violent crime rate is below 300 per 100k.  The average Brady Score is 11.85.  Only three states have a score above 20, and those with crime rates below 200, the lowest in the country, all have scores below 10.

As I said above I’m now working on collecting historical data for the Brady Scores as well as UCR data.  The latter is much easier.  One item that is critical and worth noting is that the Brady Data is suspect.

Not only is it suspect, but some states will have a decrease in their score not because they passed pro or anti rights legislation, but another state has.  When the new legislation is passed the Brady’s to make their system look better will modify their categories to reflect it.  Most importantly though, as noted above, they may falsely grade states inflating their scores.  The biggest problem with that is the effect it can have by skewing the data to one side.  Currently as Florida ranks #4 in the UCR for violent crime rates it would benefit them better to not inflate the score, however what’s to stop them from inflating the scores of the states with lower crime rates.

In closing on the straight comparison, as the last two times I did this exercise, there is no correlation between higher violent crime rates and a lower Brady Score.  This can be taken as an indicator that the laws and “common sense legislation” does not have the effects they claim.

Bonus Discovery!

Now I said to read through to the icing on the cake at the end.  It has become obvious as of late our opponents have been in denial and anger.  They have been lashing out, some have been very angry, well here’s a wonderful graphical indicator as to why!

(Old Graph, incorrect, old comments remain below)

(corrected graph)

Every one of those blue lines represents a state who’s score had lowered.  The reasons for the drop in score were tied to laws passed respecting the rights of gun owners.  That sole red line is California who’s score increased by 1.  The net score shift over the past year was –34 points.  There were 14 states who helped with increasing the downward fall of the anti-rights organizations.

We won in 14 states, significantly based on their scores, while they barely got a point.  That is why we are now seeing them go through the stages of grief.  We must continue the fight less the cancer stop being in remission.  I want the cancer attempting to destroy our rights to be dealing with the 5 stages of grief, not the law abiding citizen who’s rights they want to trample.

It’s so nice of them to keep score for us on how badly they’re loosing.

*You are free to repost these graphs, however I must request that you provide a direct link back to these posts. Some individuals seem to think that providing credit to those who put forth the effort to create these doesn’t really matter.  Please, don’t be that dick.  It takes a lot of time to organize the data and graph it. If you don’t feel it takes that much time, do it yourself. So if you want to use these graphs, feel free, please just provide proper credit.

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Update (2/27/2012 1000 Pacific):I screwed up.  Thank you to the observant individual who spotted it.  I used the wrong spreadsheet for the UCS data and that is actually the 2006 census data.  I will be updating everything to be correct tonight.  I should have noticed that California shifted upward in the axis that should have stayed static.  Attention to detail fail.  I will write a post tonight along with a link to the spreadsheet for people to look at.  These graphs will be updated to be correct as well, I will rewrite the current images for those who linked them.

So without further ado:

1. I screwed up, and I used the wrong data set for these graphs.
2. To many this could be considered misleading and attempting to hide the truth which impacts our credibility.
3. Tonight I will fix all the graphs affected within this post overwriting the current images to be correct with the 2010 UCS.  I will create a new post with this information as well and include a link to the spreadsheet used.

Those are the three parts of an apology being used in execution for those who aren’t familiar.

Update 2/27/2012 1930:  See this post for more info (charts are being updated).

2011 Brady Scores with 2010 UCR XLSX document.

Steel match was early this month which worked out well for Joe.  We shot the match this morning, I did decently well and came in middle of the pack.  Got some tips from one of the shooters which helped and I’m going to incorporate it into my practice.  I had been fairly lucky thus far but I had a failure to go boom today.  Did an immediate action drill.  I thought the round extracted but it didn’t or I had a double feed because the slide didn’t go home.  I promptly locked the slide, dropped/ripped the mag out,  dropped the slide and racked it again, inserted a new mag, racked and reengaged.  That obviously was my throwaway string for that stage.  Compared to the other runs though that only added 10 seconds, it felt like an eternity, I know with practice I can get that time down but for the failure I had I can’t complain with how I handled it.

After the steel match we headed out to the Boomershoot site.  We had some storage experiments to conduct.  We get out to the road for Mecca and there’s still a lot of snow on the ground.  We start to walk on it and we both arrive at the same conclusion, we would probably make it driving out there but we probably wouldn’t make the return trip successfully.  We decide to head over to the entrance for the berm since that’s closer to the Taj, our final destination.  The snow felt like it wasn’t going to be too bad so we began our hike sans snowshoes that we forgot at Joe’s house anyway.

We start climbing up the first hill to descend the backside to go through the valley and back up to the Taj.  As I said last time, sitting behind a desk all day everyday is probably eventually going to kill me.  Doubly so since about every other step I went about ankle deep until we went over the backside of the hill.

Joe was ahead of me and all the sudden he stopped, stood there for a second and then started walking back to me and the conversation goes like this.

“TMM, I need help.”

“What’s up?”

“My arms just started tingling and felt it throughout my body.”

“That’s neither good, nor normal.”

“I know, it started when I was under the power line.”

I walk over towards the power line and the hair starts to stand up on my neck and my chest becomes heavy.  The next part of the conversation goes like this.

“That’s not good, my hair just stood up.  Lets try someplace else.”

Eventually we decide to cross under the line at the tower itself.  The effects were still present though not as pronounced.  I have no idea what was causing that behavior.

We then proceeded down the hill toward the stream.  Every step I’m going up to the edge of my boot.  As I get towards the bottom I’m now up to my knees.  I tell Joe to go on, I’m headed back because if it gets any deeper I’m in trouble.  He say’s “fine, go ahead and wuss out.”  I start my extraction at this point.  I get about half way back and Joe tells me to stop and we’ll test the targets at the 380 berm.

So all three went Boom with a side note that we used V-Max bullets for testing, and the storage temperatures were probably around 32F instead of 60F.  It is interesting that the color was yellow where it is normally white.  However the ground was very wet and it could have been mud, but I’m not sure, it is a possibility.

It does appear that there is nothing left of the plastic wrap.  Joe also had other good news for Boomershoot 2012.  It’s getting closer and it’s just moving faster and faster.

So yesterday Ry emailed me another incident from Seattle PD.  I didn’t get around to blogging it and forgot about it until today.

There was at least a reprimand from this incident, though there are some serious questions this brings up.

Now we’ve found a chilling case that started as a simple traffic stop that could happen to any one of us. Only this time the dash cam video of the incident was shown to a man’s boss, jeopardizing his very livelihood.

Now why is that so significant, they showed the video to his boss and then did the following.

KOMO 4 News is suing the Seattle Police Department after the department denied our requests for other videos similar to Miller’s stop. Citing privacy laws, the department has denied us copies of any videos less than three years old. Yet the officer who stopped Miller didn’t hesitate to show damaging video to Miller’s boss at school, jeopardizing his job.

Think about that for a second, they’re more than willing to attempt to use that evidence in their favor to ruin your life, but the second they might be held accountable they will refuse citing privacy.

Go read the story, my only real comment is this:

Never, get you of your car during a traffic stop unless you are instructed to do so.  That said, the reaction by the officers was a bit over the top, especially given the number of them on scene.  Overall this was just a bad incident, though this statement right here is telling about the attitude from Seattle PD.

Seattle Police Department Spokesman Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said officers respond to over 1,000 calls a day and get 99.99 percent of them right.

And the law exists Mr. Whitcomb to protect the innocent and when you screw up it’s a big freaking deal because you have violated the rights of someone.  As such you should have a boot put up your ass.  If you can’t take the time or be bothered to strive for 100% accuracy you’re in the wrong damn line of work.