I have a doctors appointment tomorrow. In addition to asking me on the forms what my preferred pronouns are and what my “gender assigned at birth” is, they also asked if I had guns in the house. Thats when the Woke exhausted my patience:
I’ll be curious to see if they choose to pursue it further.
You can imagine how it’ll go when they start asking me about my Kung Flu vaccination status.
Remember the coworker I mentioned a few posts back? She finally got power up at her place restored Sunday night. She’s having car problems and her and her husband are sharing one vehicle. I offered to give her a ride home and to reclaim my loaned gear.
As I was driving her outta town I saw, literally, a mile of stumps and matchsticks where the powerlines used to be. Apparently once one or two go, they yank down the others. The wires were laying by the side of the road like garden hoses on a summer day. Some power poles snapped a few feet above the ground but it looks like some were snapped at ground level. It was a mess.
I did see quite a few power trucks and crews driving around so, despite the ‘the power company gives all their money to shareholders and not into maintenance’ ranting from the left here in town, progress is being made. But…those boys have really got their work cut out for them. I hope the folks out there are treating them right.
My new water cans arrived yesterday. Even though I personally suffered zero problems at my house because of this event, that doesn’t mean the possibility isn’t there. I had a half dozen of the Scepter water cans on hand in the basement. I just upped that number with another ten. Why that many? Three reasons: First, why not? Second, it makes it easier for me to help people that I choose to help (enforced charity, rather than charity-by-choice, is not charity), and finally, at some point I’ll need to be stashing some of these at an off-site location…could be Commander Zero’s Post Apocalyptic Bunker O’ Love And Lingerie Proving Ground, or it could be at a friends outbuilding along with a Pelican case of gear and some fuel cans. Regardless, they seemed like a good idea.
I really need to get my little hideaway set up and online. I am rapidly losing my ability to let living around these useless people not get to me.
A comment over at Bayou Renaissance Man really summed up the sheeple attitude:
A few years back, I read a piece on crisis management and why people screw up so badly, over and over. The writer, who is some sort of expert on the subject, said the chain of denial reasoning goes like this:
- It won’t happen.
- OK, it’s going to happen, but not to me.
- OK, it’s going to happen to me, but it won’t be that bad.
- OK, it happened to me, and it was so bad, there was nothing I could have done about it anyway.
This commenter is absolutely correct. As a disaster progresses, the unprepared go though those stages and never imagine that their level of suffering is inversely proportional to the amount of personal responsibility they’ve undertaken. The larger overall problem, I suppose, is that no one wants to take responsibility. In my town, like many other places, we have a huge amount of homeless people causing all sorts of problems. The lefties in town demand that we provide all sorts of services and accommodations for these ‘neighbors’. But, if you ask what about the responsibilities of the homeless to actively take part in their redemption…well, you’re clearly lacking empathy. The notion of taking responsibility for your situation is just not on the radar for these people….its all about the feels. Empathy, compassion, solidarity, etc, etc.
When it’s 2am and there’s no electricty, your water pump is dead as a doornail, there’s a puddle forming under your fridge, and the kids are telling you theyre scared….which would you rather have…empathy or a generator, some stored gas, and a few flashlights?
I really don’t want to be a misanthrope. I think that people are not fundamentally bad, but they are dangerous, not just when when they’re scared. It’s just downright foolish to ignore that the other person’s self-interest will usually trump yours. Men In Black was a popcorn movie but it had this nugget that will be forever making the rounds on the internet:
And, worst of all, their vote counts as much as yours or mine.
I cannot get my heavily fortified little slice of Montana fast enough.
A while back I posted that ATFE had made it so that a person could, if so inclined, do some paperwork online rather than through the mail. I hate the ATFE with a passion and I see no reason to change that. But, I hate the idea of being in jail even more. So, I filled out the forms, paid the $200 tax each, and waited. I just got the approvals on both in email today:
Yep…..I took this guy:
And did the paperwork (and engraving) to add a Choate side-folder (sent to me by the fine like-minded guys at Choate). The results? Here you go:
The one on the left is surprisingly handy…I mean it is really handy. It’s a comfortable length, carries well, has enough barrel length to give the 9mm a little added oomph, and is just a remarkably handy size, weight, and length for any situation I can envision needing it. It just feels…perfect. The one on the right? Less utility but oodles of ‘cool factor’.
A very valid question to ask would be why not just go with the now-legal-again ‘wrist brace’ and save myself $200 and some headache? Well, a couple reasons…first, I’m already on ‘the list’ so..in for a penny, in for a pound. Second, the SBR status lets me throw a VFG on the front of the thing. And finally, I just figured that in this case I may as well skip the half-measures and just go full retard on this.
How long did the paperwork take? Let me check….49 days. I get Form 3’s back in less than a week but the Form 1’s take seven weeks, it seems. Unfortunately this isnt the end of my having to deal with the goons at ATFE. I still need to give my Uzis the same treatment. But, for now, I’m gonna enjoy taking these to the range and getting the envious looks.
My hatred of BATFE is something that is in my bones right down to the molecular level. BUT, I have to play by their rules because.
However, I have to admit that once in a while they can take an odious and unconstitutional process and make it a faster, simpler, unconstitutional process.
Apparently, most of BATFE’s Forms are online now. I can go to a website, fill out the Form 1 to ‘make’ a short barrelled rifle, pay the $200 extortion on line, and then just wait for the stamp and approval. It took me less than ten minutes to do.
I still think it’s absurd that if I want a 10″ barrel on my Uzi rather than a 16″ one I have to pay $200 and jump through a bunch of hoops, but, sadly, this is the world we’ve let develop.
I’ll have the engraving done over at Lone Sentinel Engraving, the engraving wing of Zombie Tools, since they’ve got experience at this sort of thing. After that, I’ll order up a 10″ barrel and have my Uzi looking like it was intended to.
Remember: if a law allows something that Democrats don’t like, its a ‘loophole’.
Should be interesting to pick this apart and see exactly what is and isn’t defined as being ‘engaged in the business’. The important takeaway here is that if you believe that a paperless gun transaction is important to your privacy and well-being, yo u may wish to make those purchases sooner rather than later.
Im simply going to state that I did my taxes this weekend. I’m not going to bother talking about how much I hate paying those taxes because I think we can all agree that paying taxes sucks.
The only nice thing is that there’s a refund on the way. As you know, if you could adjust your withholdings perfectly you would owe nothing and have no refund. Unfortunately, that is a virtual impossibility. So…Im getting a bit of a refund. And, please do not forget – tax refunds aren’t (usually) ‘free money’. It just means you handed over too much money to Uncle Sam and he’s returning it.
And what really annoys me is that there is someone, somewhere, who is thinking I’m not paying enough in taxes. You know, not paying my ‘fair share’. Keep in mind that I pay more in taxes, and use less government services, than the ‘victims of inequity’ who, literally, pay no taxes at all and use the most services. Their ‘fair share’ is zero? That doesn’t seem fair.
And then people like Fake Indian Woman want people to pay taxes on money that they haven’t actually gotten yet (unrealized gains), and even a percentage of your annual worth (wealth tax). But it’s okay because we all know that the government will manage that additional tax revenue wisely, frugally, and efficiently. Oh, and by the way the national debt is around $34 trillion dollars.
The more centrist-lefty minded will say something like “Don’t you like having a police and fire department? Don’t you like having roads to drive on? Don’t you like having infrastructure?” Why, yes…yes, I do. But Stuff like that makes up a tiny percentage of my taxes. The rest is stuff of questionable utility to me. It’s easy to jump on the government for the classic $900 toilet seats, but its more than that. I would say that .gov spend money like drunken sailors, but a) thats an unfair comparison to sailors everywhere and b) drunken sailors at least have the decency to spend their own money.
Whats the solution? Honestly, there isn’t one. Everyone is happy to tax someone as long as it isn’t them. “Free” health care, college education, housing, and that sort of ting isn’t ‘free’ by any stretch of the imagination. If you think it’s free then ask yourself how the teachers, doctors, and other people are getting paid. They don’t work for nothing, right?
“Oh, we’ll tax the rich!” Yeah, sure you will. Anyone remember when Clinton promised that he’d only raise taxes on ‘the rich’ and said that if you made less than $XXX,XXX per year your taxes wouldn’t change? And then what happened? Why, they lowered the dollar threshold lower and lower until all of a sudden almost everyone was considered ‘rich’…and then taxed ‘the rich’.
I’m trying not to be bitter, but I have enough business, accounting, and finance classes under my belt to know that there is a tremendously strong case for a) cash businesses and b) converting that cash to cash-like instruments (gold, silver, land, etc.)
And here’s a head scratcher….remember when the .gov was talking about a trillion dollar coin? If .gov can just mint a coin to give themselves a trillion dollars to beat a budget restriction, then why do they need to collect taxes at all? Why not just ‘print money’ like they already do? Don’t use the argument that doing so will cause inflation…no one seemed too worried about that when they were bandying the idea about.
I’ll leave you with what Will Rogers said about the difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.
Remember, kids…when the other side doesn’t like something that our side does that is perfectly legal..well..thats a “loophole”.
This is interesting because I’ve done a bunch of business with Gunbusters on GunBroker. Theyre an excellent source for getting spare parts for a gun ‘just in case’. The pearl-clutching in this article is priceless. If recycling gun parts is somehow a safety problem for the public, then by extension the purchase of spare parts through other channels should be just as much of a (non)problem. That is, of course, the direction this will eventually go to as more and more parts will be considered controlled or, more likely, prohibited from distribution through various means….social pressure on carriers, advertisers, etc.
The culture war never stopped, guys…sometimes it just quiets a bit as folks reposition themselves in their trenches.
It appears Feinstein became a good Democrat:
I’m just gonna leave it at that and go buy some Pmags out of spite.
ETA: I cannot post about a Democrat hitting the non-biological stage of existence without telling one of my favorite Democrat jokes: Did you hear the one about the Illinois Democrat who said that when he died he wanted to be buried in Chicago so he could remain active within the party.
Benjamin Franklin, my favorite Founding Father, famously said “Three May Keep a Secret if Two are Dead”. Sadly, its a brutal truth: if someone other than you knows your secret, it ain’t a secret.
And now, apparently, your gun safe isn’t a safe but rather a heavy storage locker when the manufacturer will roll over and hand the backdoor entry code over to someone with a badge.
I’ve had two emails so far about this:
Liberty Safe Gave FBI Access Code to January 6 Protester’s Safe
The first thing I want to say is that whether the evidence in the safe was regarding the January 6 incident, or if it was regarding the Lindbergh kidnapping, makes no difference. The key issue is that the manufacturer of the safe retained the ability to override your personal privacy. I have no doubt that this wasnt some plan on Liberty’s part for anything more sinister than helping people who locked themselves out of their safe….BUT….even the most benign feature, with the best of intentions, will be abused by .gov.
You could say the lesson here is that you should trust a mechanical combination over an electronic one that could be compromised by the manufacturer. And, there’s some merit to that although whether its the manufacturer giving up the secret pass or a local locksmith hired to bypass the combo, the fact remains that a safe screams “Cool stuff in here! Come get it!”
This is the real message from this event: If you’ve got a USB drive of who really killed JFK, or a stained dress from the Oval Office, don’t put it in a big metal box that is, literally, the first place people will look. Put it under the safe, or in the insulation in the attic, or in the oil pan of that dead car in your backyard, or anywhere else than a safe that will be Target Number One of any search warrant.
And I recognize that, if they were handed a court order, Liberty’s hands were tied but I’m not sure there should have been that backdoor there to begin with…thats the part I have a problem with. If there wasn’t a court order and they turned over the data…..well, Its A Bold Strategy Cotton, Lets See If It Pays Off For Em.
So, not that youre doing anything wrong, but if you absolutely, positively gotta keep something away from people with badges, putting it in your high-profile safe might not be the best method.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department announced on Friday a new rule targeting pistol attachments known as “stabilizing braces,” implementing a key move in the Biden administration’s efforts to beef up gun control regulations.
A stabilizing brace is an attachment to a pistol that functionally turns it into a short-barreled rifle, similar to a sawed-off shotgun. Such weapons are considered particularly deadly as they offer the power of a traditional rifle, but are much easier to conceal.
For decades, short-barreled rifles have been subject to strict regulations, including a law known as the National Rifle Act, which requires additional taxation and background checks for private transfers, among other provisions.
The new rule clarifies that pistols modified by a stabilizing brace are subject to those additional requirements, department officials said.
“This rule enhances public safety and prevents people from circumventing the laws Congress passed almost a century ago. In the days of Al Capone, Congress said back then that short-barreled rifles and sawed-off shotguns should be subjected to greater legal requirements than most other guns,” said Steven Dettelbach, the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Last year, President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced they were planning measures to tackle stabilizing braces as well as “ghost guns” – a type of firearm that is assembled by users and practically untraceable.
While Democrats in Congress have pushed aggressively for new regulations of stabilizing braces, most Republicans have opposed such measures, portraying them as an infringement on Americans’ constitutional gun rights.
The new rule gives owners, manufacturers and distributors 120 days to report their stabilizing braces to the ATF tax-free. They may also remove the stabilizing brace or turn in any pistol modified by a stabilizing brace to the ATF.
It goes into effect once it is published in the Federal Register, likely next week, department officials said.
The perfect scenario?
ATF lets you register your arm-braced guns to SBR’s for free
Arm brace ruling gets struck down
Enjoy your new tax-free SBR’d guns AND enjoy your arm braced stuff.
