100-yard Indoor Range

Has closed-circuit video at 100 yards.

Magpul's Magic Bus

Tam Snaps a Tiny 1911

Roberta X Tries the Simulator

1952 Super-38 1911 NIB

Never unwrapped! At the Super-38 Collectors' booth.

Big Time!

WaPo: "Justice Stevens - The Five Extra Words That Can Fix The Second Amendment"

This annoying piece of uninformed nonsense is poor even by the lamentable standards of the Washington Post. And I must come out of my comfortable retirement to object!

Quoting Justice Burger's article in Parade Magazine (although it is more impressive to quote his later appearance on MacNeil-Lehrer where he repeated his charge about "fraud")! Talk about grasping at straws.

Not only is this "stare decisis" after Heller and McDonald, but the Founders rejected the idea, too. I don't usually respond to these editorials, but after all of the meticulous scholarship of the last thirty years, have people forgotten? Here is what I said:

Justice Stevens' idea has already been tried and it has failed. On September 9, 1789 the U.S. Senate debated the Second Amendment, then known as Article Five of the Bill of Rights. A motion was made to add the phrase "for the common defence" after the words "bear arms". This motion was defeated on a voice vote. (Source: Senate Journal #1, page 77) The Second Amendment was then sent to a conference committee to resolve differences with the House version, and the Second Amendment was sent to the states for ratification in the form we know it today. If the Founders of this nation wanted the Second Amendment to be limited to the context of a militia, they had an excellent chance to do it then and it was rejected.

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe summed up the ambiguity  nicely when he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the Founders wanted to guarantee that the Federal gov't would never try to disband the state militias, but they did so NOT by protecting the militias, but by protecting the rights of individual Americans to keep and bear arms.

Book 'em, Dan-o!

Strumpetry in the first degree.

Reflecting Pool

Segways and Street Hockey...

...in front of the White House.

License Plate

Montreal

A brilliant late summer day.

Restaurant Bocata, Montreal

St. Paul O. and Rue Saint Pierre.
Try the Osso Buco.

Christmas In August

Rue Saint-Sulpice, Montreal.

I Hate It When This Happens

The excitement and glamour of TV.
Screw it. When's the next episode of "Orange Is The New Black"?

The Scrapheap Of History

We've gone tapeless and these things are headed for the dustbin.

Is It A Cockroach?

Or a producer?

Outside Edit 14 at ABC Washington.

Bicycling In The Rain

I stopped under a bridge to get this video of the trail. About eight more miles at this point.

Badass of the Week: Odette Hallowes

She was born in France in 1912. When World War 2 began she was married to an Englishman and living in Somerset, England with her husband and three young daughters.

She volunteered for war duty, put her three daughters into a convent school, and was infiltrated into France as part of the "Spindle" network on October 31, 1942.

On April 16, 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo. Classified records released in 2003 indicate that her toenails were pulled out and she was branded with hot irons.

She refused to talk.

The Gestapo sometimes took pictures of their victims before execution. This unfortunate soul, whose name is lost to history, is probably a Resistance agent.

Odette was sent to Ravensbruck, the women's concentration camp, for execution. She somehow survived the war and was awarded the George Cross.

She is not the only woman to have received the George Cross, but she is the only woman not to have received it posthumously.

She is on the right. The George Cross is the blue medal.

After her liberation by the American Fifth Army, she later said, "The first night of my release was unforgettable. It was a glorious night, full of stars and very cold.

"The Americans wanted to find me a bed for the night, but I preferred to sit in the car.

"It was so long since I had seen the night sky."

Odette Hallowes died in 1995.

There is more in William Stevenson's book "A Man Called Intrepid".

Release of classified records, in The Telegraph.

Her obituary, in The Independent.

"Come in. I'll put on a pot of Bourbon."

This movie didn't get very good reviews but it's one of my favorites.

Shirley MacLaine steals every scene.

Directed by Rob Reiner.