Author Archives: TMM

“You carry a gun every day?” they ask incredulously? “You wear your
seatbelt every day?” I reply. It’s safety equipment – you don’t turn off
your smoke detectors because you don’t think you’ll have a fire today,
right? I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me; admitting that there is evil
in this world that can and often does strike at the vulnerable makes
folks uncomfortable, so they try to forget it exists and mock those few
that prepare for it.

JayG – Why Do You Carry A Gun?

April 23, 2012

[This fits my philosophy on the subject quite well.  I carry my gun for the unexpected.  A pistol is for the fight you don’t know is coming.  If I knew a fight was coming, I’d be grabbing my rifle.  It’s amazing how many people don’t seem to be able to connect the dot on the correlation with the above examples.  They’ll use their seat belt, they’ll make sure their smoke detectors are functional, but when it comes to carrying a defensive arm, that would never be needed.

I often will reply with, “do you have a fire extinguisher?”  Or “of course I do, have you tried carrying a cop around all day?”

The thing is, many of the bad things in life are statistically unlikely, it doesn’t mean that we should be ready in case we’re the poor bastard that pulled the wrong lotto ticket that morning. -B]

Via Alan comes this video that is worth watching.  I’ll wait.

Every last one of those things is blatantly visible.  Some of the very young may not get the ice age problem discussed at the beginning so I am going to explain it because I remember it quite well.

When I was in about fifth grade during one of my classes they started pushing a lot of this environmental conservation crap.  The scare at the time was we were all going to freeze to death.  Seriously, I’m not joking, I’m not kidding.  17 years ago I was being instructed in how the horrors of civilization is going to create an ice age that freezes humanity.

When I came home from school and started telling this to my parents, they being the inquisitive type who were interested in what drivel the public school system was teaching their little child, my dad promptly explained that there was more going on.  Not only did he explain it, he found a book that addressed every single one of the “facts” I was being taught in my classes.  It was an eye opener to say the least as I read it.  Then when not even 10 years later I started hearing how we were all going to boil to death I realized what was going on.

Environmentalism is nothing more than modern day religion.  They use fear and guilt to control people, carbon credits are nothing more than a modern day penance.  Tell me, who produces a carbon credit and how?  Think about that long and hard.  It’s a way to funnel money and nothing more.

The lesson of all of this is the following, when someone is claiming the world is going to end if we don’t do “X”, inspect long and hard to figure out how they benefit from “X”.

So I drove home last night instead of today like I originally planned.  Currently the 30 gigs of pictures and video are being copied over to the file server so I can start writing up more detailed posts on this stuff.

First another quick note, the post I had previously on the 354 crash has just been updated.  I found video from their GoPro camera showing the wreck in the first person.  So go look at the end again if you want to check it out.

I got a nice video of a run on my safety boat from just below the time zone bridge back up to where we were stationed above the 9-11 rapid.

You can see there was a few times I stopped paying attention to the video camera and focused on taking the hits.  My whole body was a shock absorber.  I was standing and holding onto a rail within the cabin.  Here’s the view from up on the bridge.

So as for the trip home, here a few snippets in video form.  All that work and I didn’t get video of the end.  At the same time, trying to get video of the end could have easily given me up.

Now I’m going to go cook dinner.  I plan on resuming the count tomorrow night.  We’ll see what happens though because I need to clean up and pack up for Boomershoot.

So some of the drivers who’s main rigs were incapacitated modified some sport jet boats with roll cages to race today.  On the first leg we went from three to one boat.

It sank.  Thankfully it didn’t obstruct the course, though they did successfully pull it out tonight.  Here’s some of the pictures.

There were some other things comm related to today’s activities, but I am too pissed too talk about.  Praise in public, chastise in private.  The associated party will probably be hearing about it.  I was doubly pissed when I was informed that there wasn’t going to be a debrief about today’s communications.  I left my beefs and comments with three of the hams at the potluck with instructions to deliver the memo.

To give you an idea of how pissed off I am about it, I was damn near ready to pack it in and drive home tonight.  My job is safety, it is actually the job of everyone on my boat.  As stated in the safety meeting, ultimately flags are left to the discretion of the boat captain.  Someone on the shore thought he knew better what was going on, never mind the person not visible in the boat.  Never mind this is around the corner from the start and from the experience of the crew there are not flags at the start line to inform a boat it is starting under caution.  This individual who was not aware of what was going on felt it right for him to alter the flags and communicate while there was emergency traffic.  He then felt it necessary to also yell at the boat and crew with a bull horn while they were trying to do their job.

I and people like me are not here to risk life and limb, we am here to protect life and property.  If that means delaying the start until we get what we discover to be a stalled boat and safety boat off the course so be it.  As a note the navigator wasn’t visible to the safety boat as it approached.  Safety is first, and if the people I am working with can’t understand that I will not be participating again.  Most seem to understand that, but there are a few who don’t.  There was no reason to endanger that race boat or safety boat as no other boats had started and the accident was at the start line. If it had been at boat two the caution would have been more understandable.

If anyone associated with the World’s Jet Boat Races would like to talk to me about what happened, feel free to contact me.  I listened to it unfold on the radio and was a little annoyed, after I got filled in by the EMT and boat captain I became all out pissed.  So I’m going to hit the bar for a beer with the EMTs.  Today was a crap day, and the above wasn’t the only screw up, boat dispatch for the sinking boat was handled less than optimally as well. 

So here I am in BFE Idaho, in a small town that is a blink of an eye as you drive through.  I have been open carrying for the most part unless I am wearing my coat or am wearing my staff shirt.

As I’m standing there talking with a couple hams an officer comes up looking for another officer, who actually happens to be a ham.  We start getting the info for who he’s looking for and I notice he looks at my right hip a couple times.  Immediately my brain locks on the cue.  Currently I’m not worried at all, I’m surrounded by people I know, many of whom are also currently carrying concealed weapons. It just so happens that I’m just the one who doesn’t give a crap about someone being upset by seeing me with a gun.

After a brief attempt to pull his partner up on the ham frequencies since his PD repeater failed the conversation goes something like this. (Officer’s words, my words)

Can I get you to untuck your shirt and cover up your sidearm?

Any particular reason? Open carry is still legal in Idaho right?

Yes, it is legal, but a lot of people have noticed (him) and it is making some of them uncomfortable.  I like that you’re carrying and I appreciate that you’re carrying, I just want to put people at ease.

(At this point I untuck again choose your battles wisely.)

Thanks.

A couple different observations.  First, out of all the time I have been carrying, no one has really said anything to me about it.  I know some people it does make them uncomfortable but how is this for a comparison?

Officer, that man over there is carrying a gun. I don’t like that and can you do anything about it?

Versus:

Officer, that man over there is black.  I don’t like him being here and can you do anything about it?

What I was doing is perfectly legal and overall if people were noticing, he was just getting tired of having to calm the sheep.  In that case I sympathize.  I did discover though that the Sherriff for Idaho County is more of a FUD in that he doesn’t want people open carrying in cities when you drill down into it.  So couple that with what happened while I was carrying in town we are starting to see a possible narrative.

I will give the officer the benefit of the doubt for two reasons.  First he was civil and respectful.  He wasn’t in a “respect my authoritah” mode.  Secondly covering up created a new problem.  Technically without a permit wouldn’t be able to conceal carry.  He never asked to see my permit, even after switching to concealed carry.

Everyone I talked to that wasn’t there got a total laugh out of it though.  It’s freaking rural Idaho, everyone around here is carrying a gun!  I got the officers name but didn’t record it immediately there after.

Overall it was an interesting experience, doubly so for rural Idaho.  I have heard stories of Moscow PD abusing open carriers, but Riggins isn’t exactly huge.

So after getting through all that, here’s a race picture.

Sadly I clipped the nose off the boat otherwise that would have been one bad ass picture.  This boat is currently the only remaining turbine and the worlds leader.

So I caravanned to Riggins last night with a bunch of EMTs while pulling the trailer. This created one small problem, the trailer where I had been staying wasn’t coming down till today.

Never fear though because the “Risk Manager”, read that as the EMT coordinator, made sure me and my other friends were taken care of. She put us up in the EMT shack which has it’s serious benefits. The biggest of which is a shower and wi-fi. So I had nothing much to do today other than help the EMTs set up a tent in the future.

So when I got back this afternoon and after a much needed nap I finally broke out my computer. I got my SDCard problem straightened out.

Here’s a short quick update from Tuesday on the Snake River. Boat 354 wrecked and wrecked hard. He wrecked as I called him out passing the check point. Thankfully someone else got pictures. We spent the next bit working on clearing the scene while warning other drivers. Boat 11 did a great job and got the boat off the course and out of the rapids. This was the same exact location where TMW acquired her story on Monday.  That’s that boat above.  He was the time leader and he was smokin’ fast… was being the operative word.  So what happened?  This:

Note I didn’t take that picture, if it was a bit wider you would see me on a boat behind him down stream on the left of the frame.  He looks like he just got some air, which he did.  But that which goes up must come down, and well landing was a bit hard.  Here’s something mid sequence that shows how bad he hit.

In the following pictures you can see he completely goes under water.  The wife got pictures close up of the damage after he returned to Hell’s Gate.  The boat was no longer structurally sound.  The big bummer is he came all the way from New Zealand, however the racers are working on making sure he will be able to run something even though it’s not his own boat here at Riggins.  When I get my hands on the damage pictures I’ll post them.  Suffice it to say, they both got very lucky.  Yeah I admit it’s neat to see it from the impressive forces of nature stand point, but I don’t want to see anyone hurt.  That’s why I’m here.

I’m off to another safety meeting and getting my boat assignment for the next two days.  I’ll try and get another post up tonight.

A big BZ to Mark Sharley on those photos.