It took no time at all for the gun grabbers to start dancing in blood though. My personal favorite was the woman on twitter who informed me since no one shot back, we obviously didn’t need to have the right to arms. Let me start at the beginning, pardon while I synopsize I’ll get to why in a minute. She posted a tweet yesterday stating how she had physically fought off a rapist and she didn’t need a gun to do so and was glad her attacker didn’t have one. She then used that statement as a justification for a total ban on firearms. This is how I replied: <
Here’s the rest of the conversation, remember from the bottom up, I know it’s annoying I can’t figure out a way to change it. So after the tweets last night I thought the conversation was over. Well it was until she had some new blood to go dance in as you can see by her comments this morning.
Notice how she called me the ass and implied I was making assumptions but provided absolutely no answers to the questions I asked. Her solution when I presented arguments she couldn’t handle or respond to was to block me. All I wanted was for her to justify her position with facts and logic. Obviously the force is weak with this one. Especially with this awesome tweet after she blocked me. So even with my previous examples of people defending themselves and others, the fact that there wasn’t a CCW holder in the theater means that the right is pointless. Tell me, why wasn’t there a cop in the theater? It is not the job of the CCW permited populace to protect everyone else. Our duty is to ourselves and our families. If we end up protecting you in the process, that’s a bonus. If we choose to intervene on your behalf, we could end up being hung out to dry by the legal system so why would we?
Most entertaining though is she says that we’re eating our words this morning. Except we never claimed that guns were some sort of magic talisman, it’s just that it serves no purpose to disarm the law-abiding but to ensure their victimhood. She cannot argue against this point and she knows it. That’s why she hasn’t even attempted to answer any of my questions.
She may have blocked me, but she can’t exactly stop the signal. Feel free to go tweet at her if you like. (Do NOT harass her, just try and get her to justify her position.)
I am at a loss for words. I help regularly at a horse rescue in the area and seeing what some people do to animals is down right disturbing. Most disturbing though is what some of these people will attempt to do to the horse rescue that tries to save the horses. Suffice it to say they try to manipulate the system and say you’re abusing them just the same because they don’t regain the weight overnight… I’m getting side tracked and that’s a story for another time.
So Jay G posted this video and I’m sure there are a few of you who won’t find this funny. Watch the video and then let me explain, my sympathy meter is as low as possible.
You watched it all the way through right? Up till the end where you could tell she was walking around. What we all just saw was the epitome of a lazy person. There is no lazier person in the world, too lazy to walk, too lazy to read, so lazy and in a rush that she didn’t want to take the elevator. Instead she goes and tries to balance her scooter on the escalator and fails.
I am at a loss for words since sadly Jay G is right that this woman probably will get a settlement for her negligence, but it’s a stark reminder that there is stupid in this world. Not only is there stupid, but there is always going to be a bigger idiot.
Who know’s, maybe she’s done it many times before and this time she pushed her luck. This woman is lucky she walked away from her moment of stupidity and all that she will have is a blow to her pride and probably a larger bank account.
Either way, I got a good laugh out of it because I’m sure it hurt as it rolled over. Why am I laughing, because frankly, stupid should hurt.
*As an FYI for those who would dare to tell me I don’t know what it’s like to be confined to a wheelchair, listen carefully. Shut the hell up, you don’t know me or my history. I spent 2 months confined to a wheel chair non-weight bearing in both legs. So yeah, been there, done that, got the freaking t-shirt.
Update: Email from “The Short Lady With The Grey Hair” (otherwise known as my mom).
I saw a quick take on the news but was sidetracked and missed the entire episode. BOSTON—should have known. She better not get compensation; if anything she should be fined. Anyone who is so stupid as to try to take a motorized wheelchair—or non-motorized wheelchair—up an escalator does not have sufficient operating brain cells to be using the wheelchairs unaccompanied. Brain dead stupid!
I was laughing as I read that, mainly because she’s right.
Nobody builds a business alone, that’s true. But Bob didn’t make all those people work for free, and he didn’t make use of public resources without writing hefty tax checks for the privilege. Bob paid everyone, including his local, state, and federal government, before he even got to make his first dollar of profits.And Bob carries all the risk here. If his business tanks, his contractors aren’t going to return the money he gave them for their work, his employees aren’t going to give back their wages, and the government isn’t going to return the taxes and fees he paid. So why is it OK that when he’s successful enough to make a profit, some populist asshole politicians can stand up and say that “he hasn’t paid his fair share to society yet”?
[I do love the comments about what it took to build a business coming from a man who’s never built or run a business in his life. Businesses take work, period. There is risk and there is one person who takes that risk and the reward for the risk is the potential for profit. But profit is the result of greed and corruption right? That person who has poured blood sweat and tears working their ass off so they don’t fail shouldn’t get any reward.
Why should they get no reward, you see someone else actually built their business. The business owner didn’t spend late nights with no bonus pay keeping the ship afloat. They haven’t spent hours working on a website with zero income coming from it at the beginning. Who cares that the business operator has paid anyone who works for them a fair wage in exchange for their goods and services?
That’s the crux, people who are paid by the business owner didn’t build the business. People who build a business invest considerable time and effort without the guarantee of a reward. That in and of itself is the very nature of business and is known as your Return on Investment.
Building a business means you invest a lot of time and your own money that in the future you may end up with more than you had. Evidently our fearless leader has some other shining example of what building a business looks like.
*Most annoyingly is some places charge you a fee merely for permission to conduct business. You see you need a business license to sell things to people who would like your goods and services. You pay for the privilege but if for one reason or another you take a year off, you get to pay the tax man for the privilege again. See how that works? The government has to get theirs or you can’t get yours. -B]
Remember this is New York City where only the anointed are worthy of carrying firearms and even then ownership is difficult. Given these facts and he was obviously supplying arms to criminals to prey upon those disarmed by the state, it counts.
State Sponsored Criminal #370: Nicholas Mina
Because when you have a drug habit and are a cop, that just means you have a ready supply of stuff to sell on the black market.
I will state this up front. TMW and I received a free pair of ESS frames and lenses with no attachment to them. They were ours to keep and use. I have worn them constantly since I got them at Boomershoot this year. So while I did get free stuff, there was no request for a review, and I was not compensated for this. In other words, the following is entirely my opinion and no one paid for any of this so the FCC can go suck an egg.
My previous eyewear was no slouch however they left something to be desired, doubly so since I was spending considerably more time with ear muffs on. For those who haven’t spent all day wearing hearing protection while wearing sunglasses, let me enlighten you. There is the frame which runs back behind the ear. Your ear muffs sit around your ear attempting to create a tight seal.
Two things happen because of that frame. Extra pressure is applied from the muffs pinching your head between your frames and a decrease in noise reduction from the hearing protection. Enter ESS’s Cross Series.
I have two of the three frames, the Cross Bow and Suppressor.
The Cross Bow frames are your everyday frames and I have worn them every day since Boomershoot and they have been amazingly comfortable. The rubber pads maintain the comfort while also helping to keep them from sliding off your head. I also use these when working in the shop doing things that don’t require hearing protection. That includes cleaning the toys, I just swap out for the clear lenses.
Every part of the series in individually replaceable. Scratch or destroy the lenses order new ones. Break a frame, order a new frame. Break a nose piece, order a replacement.
Now the Suppressor frames are why I fell in love with ESS, plus a little story I’ll get to here in a minute.
Notice how thin the ear pieces are on the frame? They are unbelievably flexible and well are wide and thin to help distribute pressure. Not only do they solve the pressure problem but the fact they are thin helps hearing protection form a good seal around your head. In other words they solve the two main problems you find with most safety glasses. The visibility while shooting with the copper lenses I might add is amazing. The rear strap effectively keeps the glasses in place while you’re not wearing hearing protection.
The comfort and visibility are quite nice. With most glasses if there is a gap anywhere I can see out, I will most often find myself using that to look, completely defeating the purpose of the safety glasses. These however I just look as I normally would, my peripheral vision remains while I cannot effectively look through gaps to try to skirt around the glasses.
These have become my go to glasses for yard and shop work where I need hearing protection. Even my father-in-law, who is a machinist, is going to be ordering a prescription set that he can use at work. My mother-in-law is getting a pair as well. I’m going to get a complete kit to toss in my range bag so I know I’ll always have a set with me when going to the range.
As a FYI for how much use these things see for those who haven’t met me, I am actually unbelievably anal when it comes to eye and hearing protection around tools and equipment. I know growing up with many 4th of July’s I’m sure I’ve done a decent amount of hearing loss. To top that off I enjoy my weekends by spending time shooting guns and blowing up explosives. I regularly wear plugs on top of wearing muffs specifically because I’m around such loud impulses.
It has become such a habit I wear hearing protection if I’m going to be around loud noises, it’s just easier to wear eye and ear protection than to buy hearing aids and hope the doc can repair my eyes… which brings us around to the story.
The Story
You see, your humble host has spent so much of his time around explosives, entertainingly close is entertaining for me. For many it’s terrifying but I’ve been around explosives enough that as long as you remember the cardinal rule I’m not that afraid. In other words a box on the ground with nothing between me and it doesn’t cause me discomfort being close.
Sometimes you just end up turning your clothes a nice shade of brown. So now you’re asking yourself, where is all this going? Well Tango got my earlier entertainingly close excursion on video.
Now, towards the end, the video doesn’t show it too well but I was easily with 10-15 feet of a bunch of those boomers. If you don’t understand how close that was, let me say, I should have been wearing my Carhartt jacket. What do you mean I hear you ask, well let me show you.
That wasn’t from the mud, that was from the ammonium nitrate prills. There were more injuries on the other side of my arm too. That peppering occurred during one of the last couple shots. So at this point I found my limit of how close I was willing to go.
But you see, your humble scribe often acts before the page fault has allowed all the necessary data to be returned to memory for the correct decision. Even more than that, often the page fault doesn’t occur until after the fact where the event itself causes the page fault.
Can you guess what happened? I’m sure you can, especially since this is a post about eyewear. Well let me set the stage for you.
It is the last day of Boomershoot. Everyone but staff has left and we are rounding up piles upon piles upon piles of explosives. There were so many explosives I said, and I quote,
You know something is horribly wrong with you when you’re finding it tedious and exhausting to set off hundreds of explosives.
If you’ve never been there for staff cleanup and haven’t worked the days preceding the event you just can’t really fully understand it. I seriously don’t know how Joe does it but I’m grateful that he does.
So I’m tired and exhausted and we’re tailing down the end of a very long week.
Continuing on though, we have to look for boxes of Boomerite that may have skipped over the berm, while walking behind the berm I discover an ant hill that is by no means small. Well to demolish said ant hill we place a couple of targets of Boomerite on it. I place them in such a manner as to give me the maximum distance without placing anything between me and it.
We start shooting explosives. We shoot more explosives. We shoot three waves of explosives most of us extremely tired and exhausted by the end. We call the range safe after the “last” boomers go off and we start cleaning up. Then as someone walks behind the berm, “TMM, we forgot the ant hill.”
Frick, Joe is already up on the hill in the direction I was originally going to shoot, well I only have one other option. I move about 120 degrees to give myself maximum distance from the target. Without realizing it though I have now inadvertently broken the cardinal rule. Parts of the anthill are between me and some of the explosive.
I squeeze off that round and immediately I’m encased in a cloud and my left hand, arm, and face feel like they’re on fire. It freaking hurts. I start falling off the top of the berm and immediately drop the muzzle and flip the safety on. Tango is behind me and I take off the rifle and hand it to him asking him to clear to make life easier. I probably could have cleared it, but at the time I was wanting to do it one-handed. One handed hand off is easier. I didn’t need to compound this with shooting myself or someone else.
Again for those who don’t know, my pain scale is screwed up compared to most people. There is a reason for that and I have done serious damage and then showed up to the doctor 2 day’s later with him saying “WTF!?”. I would take my pocket knife and dig out glass from my arm and hand when I would find it. In this case my arm felt like I had just take it to a belt sander with 120 grit on it.
I had a high number of pain exceptions and overloaded the system. It took a visual inspection to clear the faults. My brain registered a high number of impacts, thankfully only a few broke the skin, the two most notably.
You can’t really see it but the spot I’m bleeding out of on my knuckle is a ripped open scar, (it’s bigger now), and my lower arm and hand are both bright red from being peppered with smaller spots bleeding. The hit below my left eye was a solid hit, I washed some crap out of it when we got back to the hotel. Inspection of the ant hill after the fact indicated that I was also blowing up a stump. Also not visible in the picture was dirt and marks from larger debris that had obviously impacted the glasses.
I am extremely grateful I wasn’t any closer, given the few major cuts I had along with the peppering of bleeding I was on the hairy edge.
At the time I wasn’t so sure I was going to document my stupidity. I realized though now it actually is one of those things that speaks well for ESS. The glasses didn’t really end up with any pitting and they did their job. I will say I wish I had been at least wearing my flight gloves to save my hand.
So in closing a big thank you to the guys at ESS, especially Steve Dondero and Ari Drougas from ESS.
*Also I forgot to mention, there were a couple of folks shooting next to Shelly and Anette, and thus next to the ESS guys, who were shooting without eye protection. Yeah the ESS guys tried to give them free suppressors to wear but they turned them down. I’m of the mind that an extra 50 bucks in my pocket won’t make a lick if difference if the time comes my glasses have to do their job. In fact, I’ll probably wish I had sprung for the more expensive set.
It also takes all of about three seconds to determine it’s airsoft and further he could have asked permission prior to touching. If it had been a real firearm cop or not I would yell at him to put it down. You NEVER touch someone else’s firearm without permission.
Once he was told to leave, he needed to immediately. If he has “the right by law”, I want the cite.
He’s on the count because not a damn thing will happen to him. There were much more civil ways to deal with that call than the way he did which was the Cartman method.
State Sponsored Criminal #368: Officer Tom Tiphayachan
Because a garage sale means that you can do as much digging as you want and you can’t be trespassed if you’re a cop right!?
<
So after the tweets last night I thought the conversation was over. Well it was until she had some new blood to go dance in as you can see by her comments this morning.
So even with my previous examples of people defending themselves and others, the fact that there wasn’t a CCW holder in the theater means that the right is pointless. Tell me, why wasn’t there a cop in the theater? It is not the job of the CCW permited populace to protect everyone else. Our duty is to ourselves and our families. If we end up protecting you in the process, that’s a bonus. If we choose to intervene on your behalf, we could end up being hung out to dry by the legal system so why would we?
So take this as yet another reminder. Be careful out there and carry your damn gun, you probably wont know when the wolf comes knocking.
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