Broadripple Art Fair

This afternoon we visited the annual Broadripple Art Fair, a very large outdoor gathering of artists in every media: painting, sculpture, wood carving, pottery and ceramics, photography, etc. Check out this amazing spherical pot: the color inside it is so pure that it doesn't seem three-dimensional, it just seems to float in space. Amazing.

Tam and Roberta peruse an exhibit.

For five dollars, a poet would write a poem just for you, and Roberta X threw down the gauntlet. Here is the poet, slaving over her work.

"What the heck?"

It's a toothbrush holder.

This is a spectacular spherical carving from burled wood, mounted on a turntable above a mirror.




And what art fair would be complete without a guy playing a didgery-do?

By the end of the show, our very own "Alpha Geekette" was laden with mucho art.

The Monon Trail

I have now tried my bicycle on Indy's Monon Trail and I hereby pronounce it in every way equal to Virginia's W&OD Trail.

Here we see a couple of cyclists, and, passing them and looking back, we see Roberta X, Tam and Shooting Buddy, flying down the Trail.




Just off the Trail we discovered this little spice shop. They offer free samples for sipping, and we were all absolutely floored by their Black Cherry Balsamic Vinegar. Ambrosia!

There, But For The Grace Of God, Go I

Gun confiscation in Kenya:

Samburu, Turkana and Marsabit residents oppose the operation and accuse the government of failing to protect them in the past after they surrendered guns.

"We'd rather commit suicide. To hand over our guns is like stripping naked. Our people were killed, our animals taken away; many families are poor now... We'll never repeat the mistake we made two years ago," said an elder from the village of Lerata.

But the police say things are different this time. "This operation is different. We have used a different approach; it will succeed [as it is] well planned and involves the largest number of security forces," said Assistant Police Commissioner Marcus Ochola.

"The government is not using force, nobody will be harassed. We have gathered adequate intelligence reports. Security measures to protect all communities are also being implemented," he said.

He added that the operation involved paramilitary and regular police; rapid response units and aerial surveillance.

"Those who have gone into hiding will be tracked," warned Internal Security Ministry Permanent Secretary Francis Kimemia in the town of Isiolo, where five people have been detained for resisting security forces.

The Grace of God, and the Grace of Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, Patrick Henry....

It could happen here, folks, if we let it.

h/t Maddened Fowl.

Location, Location, Location

Or maybe it's Repetition, Repetition, Repetition.

From Guns, Holsters and Gear.

Broken Guns

Some of the 200 firearms turned in at Uptown Baptist Church on Saturday as part of the city's annual gun buyback program. Virtually all of the guns were non-functional and not likely to be used to commit crimes.

Historian and author Michael A. Bellesiles got into a world of hurt when scholars began checking the sources of his book Arming America. Bellesiles had argued that early Americans were not nearly as well-armed as had been thought, and that gun-ownership in 18th and 19th-Century America was actually rather rare. Instead, he argued, the idea of an armed public was the creation of the 20th-Century NRA-rightwing-gunlobby, etc.

Bellesiles's sources for his book were probate records of the 1700's and 1800's. In poring over thousands of wills filed during the previous two centuries, Bellesiles said that he found very few firearms mentioned in wills, and those he did find were frequently described as "broken" or "damaged".

Arming America received glowing reviews in The Right Places (New York, Boston, The Bay Area) and also won Columbia University's Bancroft Prize for the best work of history by a new author.

Maybe Bellesiles's ambition got the better of him, because the unraveling began when other historians noticed that Arming America used wills from 19th-Century San Francisco as source material. These records had long been assumed irretrievably lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire, and no copies, facsimiles or summaries were known to exist. Anywhere.

When contacted for details on where he had discovered these long-missing files, Bellesiles mentioned the San Francisco Public Library; but they didn't have them. Then the California Historical Society in Sacramento; nope. Then the Mormon Research Library in Salt Lake City; nix.

Other researchers began looking deeper into the sources. They found many instances in which wills listed guns, and Bellesiles had appended "broken" or "damaged" where it did not exist in the original. An investigation was begun. The Bancroft Prize was rescinded and Bellesiles resigned his professorship.

In Chicago last Saturday, a gun "buy-back" program netted over 4,000 firearms, air-guns, replicas and what-have-you's.

At Uptown Baptist Church, one of two North Side collection points, area residents had dumped 200 rifles by 12:30 p.m. Saturday, including a machine gun that had been in a fire. Another man presented a box of replica handguns, each worth $10.

Virtually all of the guns turned in Saturday at Uptown aren’t the kind likely to be used to commit crimes.

“There’s not a functional gun in the lot,” said Sgt. Alex Silva, a 23^rd District CAPS officer.

I'd settle for a functional historian.

h/t Second City Cop.

Holder: Fourth Amendment May Have To Be "Modified" To Fight Terrorism

WaPo reports.

Silly me! I thought that Holder took an oath to protect the Constitution, not dismantle it.

Contrast Holder's ideas about the rights of men like Shahzad, who is an American citizen, with the way the Administration wants to protect the rights of illegal immigrants, who are not citizens. It seems as though non-citizens will soon have more rights than U.S. citizens, in their own country!

There's no reason to panic and defenestrate the Constitution because of a bomber.

Interrupt Us?

Great headline in today's WaPo:

Coitus: AARP Says Worries, Not Mores, Interrupt Us ​

UPDATE: Hey, they changed the title!

Never Again!

In 1943 the Bureau of the Census provided confidential Census data on Americans of Japanese descent to assist in placing them in internment camps for the duration of World War Two. You can read more about it in this article in Scientific American from 2007.

Something to think about as we all fill in our own ethnic information for the 2010 Census.

You can find a hi-rez copy of the memo by image-Googling "Census Japanese internment memo"

Shahzad's Gun

Via the NYT we learn that bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad, back in March, had purchased a Kel-Tec 9mm Sub Rifle 2000 from a dealer in Connecticut. The gun's serial number is E7L98. After the two-week waiting period (what the?!) he came back on March 15th and purchased the gun.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his testimony on Wednesday before the Senate committee, urged that suspects on terrorism watch lists be blocked from buying guns and explosives.

“When gun dealers run background checks, should F.B.I. agents have the authority to block sales of guns and explosives to those on the terror watch lists — and deemed too dangerous to fly?” the mayor asked. “I believe strongly that they should.”

Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office has released data showing that suspects on the terror watch lists were able to buy guns and explosives from licensed dealers in the United States more than 1,100 times from 2004 to 2010. Such a statistic seems irrelevant in Mr. Shahzad’s case, as he was on no such list in March.

It is unclear whether, in the 50 days Mr. Shahzad was a registered gun owner, he ever once pulled the trigger.

The suspect had a clean criminal and mental health history, he purchased a long gun (not a pistol, for which a permit is required in Conn.), waited the required two-week period, and may not have ever fired the thing. All fully in compliance with the Brady Center's recommendations.

He seems to have acted alone in his bomb-making, so there's no "conspiracy" charge. It looks to me like he didn't break any laws at all until he lit the fuse in Times Square. Except, of course, for the Sullivan Act! But you don't need a gun to violate the Sullivan Act: George "The Mad Bomber" Metesky was charged with violation of the Sullivan Act for carrying his little pipe bombs around NYC.

And as the Times so accurately (and uncharacteristically!) points out, Mayor Bloomberg's proposal wouldn't have stopped Shahzad from buying a gun, since he wasn't on any Federal list in March.

Any lawyers care to weigh in?

Long Haul

Yesterday was a glorious day. Just look at these flowers blooming outside the Embassy of Turonistan. So some bicycling was in order.

The W&OD Trail was in wonderful condition after the brutal winter we suffered. Just look at all of those beautiful buttercups!

I don't know what these wildflowers are called, but there were millions of them lining the trail.

Pretty far from home now, but not quite as far as I wanted to go.

That's it, Milepost 31. From my house to the trail is 4.5 miles, then thirty-one miles on the trail is just over 35 miles, making a round-trip of 70 miles.

Pedaled for over 7 hours. I was exhausted when I got home. Had a couple of cold beers and a quick bowl of spaghetti and fell into bed at 9 PM.

"Zombiesat" Threatens Other Satellites

A geosynchronous satellite has stopped responding to commands and is drifting toward other communications satellites. The nearest is only 2-degrees away at 36,000-km. My high school math makes that about 628 kilometers.

This is not the first time this has happened. There are more than 160 dead communications satellites parked at two "dead zones".

This time, though, the zombiesat is drifting toward the living.

Yahoo News.

First Russ Meyer, Now This

Joseph Sarno, the director of such cinematic epics as "Sin In The Suburbs" and "Moonlighting Wives" has died.

His obit, in the NYT.

The Mad Bomber

The discovery of an improvised bomb in New York City yesterday brings to mind a previous bomb, or rather, series of bombs in the 1940's and 1950's.

More than thirty small pipe bombs were placed in phone booths, subways and theater seats in NYC. No one was killed; more than a dozen people were injured. Some of the bombs did not explode and were discovered months after they had been planted. Several bombs rolled out onto the work benches of upholsterers who were attempting to repair theater seats that had apparently been vandalized.

In 1957, police arrested 53-year-old George Metesky and a grand jury handed down 47 charges, ranging from attempted murder to violation of the Sullivan Act (well, he did have to carry those bombs, didn't he?).

I thought it was interesting that the newspapers used the word "terrorism" in their headline, back in 1957:
The second headline could have been written by Monty Python (falsetto): "He was a quiet man, but handy with a fuse!"

A psychiatrist consulted by the NYPD in an early example of criminal profiling, predicted that when arrested, the bomber would be wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned.

Metesky held a grudge against Con Edison for a workplace accident in 1931 that had exposed him to harmful chemicals and disabled him. He was never tried, but sent to a mental institution; it was thought that, due to his advanced tuberculosis, he would only live a few weeks. Instead he responded to treatment and completely recovered from the disease.

Metesky spent nearly 18 years in mental institutions. In 1973 he received a new psychiatric evaluation and was declared "harmless". Since he had never been convicted of anything, he petitioned a court for his release. Because he had already served two-thirds of the 25-year maximum sentence he would have received had he been convicted, he was released. The judge told him, "not to do it again." A good thing he did, too, because Metesky later told a reporter that he was still angry with Con Edison.

George Metesky died on May 23, 1994.

NYT's Thomas Friedman

This morning NYT columnist Thomas Friedman had this to say about Mexico:

The Narcos are the drug cartels who are now brazenly attacking each other in turf wars and challenging the state for control of towns. The success of U.S. and Colombian efforts to interdict drug trafficking through the Caribbean and north from Colombia have pushed the cartels to relocate their main smuggling up through the spine of Mexico. President Felipe Calderón is bravely trying to take them on, but the Narcos have bigger guns than the Mexican Army - most smuggled in from U.S. gun stores.

He needs to hear from us that the kinds of heavy weapons being used in the narco-wars. - machine guns, grenades, RPGs, etc. - are not available in U.S. gun stores.

Splish-Splash

At Connecticut Ave. and L Street this morning, somebody dug where they shouldn'ta.

National ID Cards

The experts seem to agree that there is no real security in biometric ID cards. Storing the biometric data on a central computer (not on the card itself) would offer more security, but would still be possible to spoof. And would be a huge privacy nightmare.

And the more faith we put in these cards, the less suspicious we become of their authenticity. Some experts say that this is actually a liability. For example, a Social Security card printed on paper is trivially easy to forge, so it requires other forms of ID to confirm the user's identity. But a biometric card would be a "get out of jail free!" card, could not be questioned, paradoxically making it much more valuable for forgers.

And a card can always be stolen and used by a person who resembles the card-holder.

You may remember the case of the Mexican citizen who was recently executed in Texas. Mexico complained that he should have been informed that he was entitled to contact the Mexican Consulate at the time of his arrest. Fine.

But now some of the same people are saying that American police must'n't dare ask arrestees about their nationality or visa status.

Well, you can't have it both ways.

According to an op-ed in the NYT, there has been a federal law in place since 1940 that requires foreign visitors to the U.S. to keep their documents with them at all times and produce them when asked. If a police officer asks for ID, a pedestrian in America can answer, "Sorry, but I'm a citizen!" and that, presumably, ends the interview; without probable cause, the officer can't press the matter. But a driver does have a legal obligation to produce a driver's license. And traffic cops have lots of tricks for spotting fake ID's - did you know that your place of birth (the state, anyway) is encoded into your Social Security number? That's why traffic cops frequently ask motorists, "Where were you born?" - if the answer doesn't match the SSN, the ID may be a little hinky.

Mark my words, if something isn't done, ten years from now, in the next Census, the Census-takers will all be carrying fingerprint machines, to fingerprint all 300-plus million of us.

Debate At The 1872 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention

On a motion to amend the Pennsylvania state constitution by adding the word "openly" to the state's equivalent to the federal Second Amendment, so that it would read, “The right of the citizens openly to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State, shall not be questioned..." thus removing the protection of concealed carry:

I understand that among other things that cannot be taken from a man, is the privilege he has to defend his life and to protect himself. Of course he is answerable to the fullest extent for the use of it, and your law against carrying concealed weapons does not interfere with the habit among the dangerous classes. But there are periods in every community, periods of excitement, when it may be necessary for a man to say in his own behalf, “Say what your please and do what you please, but you must not beat or maltreat me,” and with all the inequalities of physical condition that exist, it is the very worst thing in the world to say that if a man of my condition offends a man like Judge Woodward, he is to take a severe beating whenever his enemy chooses to inflict it. I do not believe in it. I believe in the right of self-defence of the weak against the strong, and I do not propose to allow any man to maltreat me at his pleasure, as long as there are any weapons of defence to be had by which I can equalize any strength with his....

From the Volokh Conspiracy.

Federal Bills Introduced To Repeal DC Gun Laws

Washington Times.

The bills introduced Tuesday would eliminate gun-registration requirements in the city and prevent the mayor and the D.C. Council from adopting laws prohibiting gun ownership.

It would also bar city officials from enacting laws that would prohibit guns from being carried in public places (whether concealed or openly brandished), that would diminish the authority of the city's police chief to deny concealed-carry licenses, or that would prohibit city leaders from preventing guns from being taken into city buildings.

The legislation was introduced into the Senate by Sens. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and Jon Tester, Montana Democrat. In the House, the bill was sponsored by Reps. Travis Childers, Mississippi Democrat, and Mark Souder, Indiana Republican.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Onanistic Overlords

SEC regulators were surfing porn as the economy tanked.

Question: Are these the same people who will soon be monitoring our salt intake?

Why Is It...

...that requiring people to provide proof of health insurance is OK, but requiring people to provide proof of citizenship is "troubling"?

Good point! From Gateway Pundit.

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

WaPo On Appleseed

Yesterday the Washington Post published a big article on an Appleseed shoot held in rural Buckingham County last weekend.

Worth reading.

According to the article, Appleseed has been growing at an exponential rate over the last four years, tripling each year for four years in a row. In 2006 there were 17 Appleseeds and in 2009 there were 450.

I wanna play!

I'll post a link when I get back from work.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

UPDATE: Thanks to OldNFO, here's the link.

Breadboard

Snarkybytes links to this hilarious graphic of an electronic circuit diagram.

Second Amendment March, Part 7

Suzanna Gratia Huff is now describing the Luby's Cafeteria shooting.

Second Amendment March, Part 6

David Codrea is speaking now. Crowd still growing.

Second Amendment March, Part 5

Ken Blanchard is really firing up the crowd: "Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce myself - I am a black man with a gun, and I am an American!" Huge ovation.

Second Amendment March, Part 4

I pointed out Peter Hamm to a camera crew from NRA, and they're interviewing him now. Ha!

Second Amendment March, Part 3

There's a guy from the Brady Campaign mingling at the edge of the crowd. Peter Hamm, I think his name is.

Second Amendment March, Part 2

Dick Heller just finished speaking, now Larry Pratt of GOA is up.

Second Amendment March, Part 1

I got here about 10:15. Beautiful day. I guess there are about 1,000 people here now. Charged-up crowd. Lots of Gadsden flags. The NRA booth is doing a brisk business!

Adverse Selection Death Spiral

In New York State, insurance regulations require insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions and expensive healthcare needs at the same rates as healthy people who don't have such conditions. The result has been a very large increase in health insurance premiums for all.

It did not take long for healthy people to realize that they were subsidizing the others. Many healthy people dropped their insurance because, for them, the option of paying for all of their health care costs directly was much less expensive.

Individual health care insurance premiums for self-pay HMOs have gone from $250 monthly in 2001 to $700 in 2008. During the same time, the number of insured individuals dropped from 128,000 to 31,000.

The insurance pool shrank as more people with preexisting conditions signed on and more healthy people dropped their coverage. This has led to what health insurance specialists call an Adverse Selection Death Spiral.

An executive for Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield told the NYT that of the approximately 6 million New Yorkers in the 18-to-26 year old group, most of them healthy, only 88 had purchased individual plans from his company.

New York Times.

Preventing a national Adverse Selection Death Spiral is the reasoning behind the ObamaCare "insurance mandate": healthy people must be compelled to purchase insurance, even if it greatly exceeds their annual out-of-pocket costs for remaining uninsured.

The insurance mandate is likely to be challenged in court as soon as it becomes effective. And there is a good chance that it will be found to be unconstitutional. That will leave the rest of the ObamaCare law intact, but with no way to pay for all of it. Even legal gimmicks like "tax credits" are unlikely to close the gap.

A likely result is that many healthy people will opt to have no health insurance at all; only people with expensive pre-existing conditions will find that health insurance is a bargain. Fewer people will have health insurance, and those who do will tend to have expensive chronic conditions.

It Spins In Mysterious Ways

A very cool post on a bygone engine,
from The Retrotechnologist.

And Then There Were Three...

Arizona governor signs "constitutional carry" law. Once it goes into effect (ninety days after the legislature adjourns), law-abiding adults may carry concealed in Arizona without a permit.

Unless you have a permit; in that case you must have your license with you when you carry concealed.

Got it?

Yeah, me neither!

New App For iPad

Running a country.

Norway's Prime Minister is stranded in NYC by volcanic ash clouds that have turned large parts of Europe into a no-fly zone.

D.C. May Be Forced To Scrap All Gun Laws

Snowflakes In Hell has an excellent post on it here.

The New York Times editorialized today, calling it "...a cynical, sickening compromise."

That's good enough for me! When does it pass?

U.S. News Poll On Open Carry

Be sure to vote!

Turkish Garands

Military parade in Turkey. Anybody have any details on how many they have, and when we're going to get them back?

Fun With Numbers

Roberta X links to some astounding images created by taking the Mandelbrot Set into the third dimension. Such as:

Another 100 Kilometers

Couldn't sleep. Woke at 3:30, then again at 5:00 and had breakfast. The bicycle had developed nasty shifting problems so after the sun came up I disassembled the rear derailer assembly, piece by piece. I cleaned every piece with solvent (acetone) and a toothbrush. Then I gave each piece a light coating of Breakfree and re-assembled. That did it. Works like new.

So I packed a lunch and set off around 10:30. Pedaled for a total of six and a half hours and covered 62 miles, burning over 3500 calories. That's over a pound of weight. The headwind on the trip back was punishing and wore me out.

I am just waaaaay out of shape. I did this same trip back in October without all this stress.

Country Trip

I spent a couple of days at a house in the country owned by some old and dear friends. They have offered to let me stay there for several months while I attempt to sell my house.

I took a look around and it is really beautiful farm country.

Great to explore on bicycle. One thing that the pictures don't convey is the pervasive smell of manure. Although at one point I was cycling through a mile-long grove of cypress and juniper trees...mmmm....it's gin and tonic season.

Cellphone coverage is sporadic to non-existent.

This is just the most magnificent ruin I've ever seen. It's almost absurdly beautiful. Looks like it was built that way by Hollywood set designers. Look carefully at the mountains in the background. See the road-cut that appears just below the peaks? That's Skyline Drive, on the western slope of the mountains.

Talk about a property that is "underwater"!

How apropos! Hey, that gives me an idea!

Newark, NJ - Now With 8% Less Homicide!

March 2010 is the first month in 44 years in which there has been not one homicide in Newark, New Jersey.

Probably the Revell vs. Port Authority case had something to do with it.

Do Weed

Not-so-subliminal message from the Word Verification Team.

XHALO

Testing a 25,000-ft jump in preparation for an attempt at the vertical sound barrier later this year.

How'd they get the picture?

The UndieShoe

They say it's all the rage in China.

Shooting At Shoplifters

Last Friday a mall security guard in Roanoke, VA fired a shot into the air to apprehend a shoplifter.

Yesterday in Montgomery County, MD a uniformed officer fired into a car in which two shoplifters were attempting to flee, and the driver was trying to hit the officer.

Miss Your Flight, Spend Four Days In Jail

At the Volokh Conspiracy, the Strange Case of Revell vs. Port Authority.

Passenger books flight involving a change of planes in Newark, New Jersey. (That was his first mistake right there.)

He was transporting a properly declared handgun and, in a separate, locked container, ammunition for same.

His flight was late arriving in Newark and he missed his connection. He collected his luggage and spent the night in a hotel. Ye Gods! In Newark?

The next morning he returned to the airport and attempted to check in for the next flight to his ultimate destination, Allentown, PA. He declared the unloaded firearm and was immediately arrested.

Interesting case and discussion of the Firearm Owners Protection Act (FOPA).

NYPD Finds Huge Weapons, Drug Cache

Looks like a collection of old hunting rifles and shotguns, some of them older than I am. Neighbors told reporters that the guns were inherited from the old man's grandfather and uncle.

The drugs? Paxil, Xanax and so forth; the "suspects" had prescriptions for them.

Typical New York City hysteria. I wonder, what was the basis for the search warrant? Might be an interesting test case if all of the residents have clean criminal records.

Fast Food Makes Us Impatient, Study Suggests

Marvelous headline, which unwittingly illustrates, in just seven words, the dichotomy between cause and effect. This is an actual scientific study from the University of Toronto.

The researchers are implying that something in fast food makes us impatient: trans fat, sugar, red meat, hormones, genetically modified veggies, or some combination.

It seems never to have occurred to the researchers that people who are already impatient might prefer fast food because it is, well, fast. That explanation fits the data just as well, and is considerably more plausible.

The headline should read, "Impatient People Prefer Fast Food", but that's an even more obvious tautology, and won't get you published.

U.S. Healthcare Reform Is Boon For India Outsourcing Companies

Oh, isn't that special!

Christian Science Monitor:

The bulge in administrative work may look like a nightmare to American insurance firms and government employees. But to outsourcing executives here in India, it’s heaven-sent. A number of Indian companies are already anticipating an increase in workload thanks to Obama's healthcare law.

The addition of 32 million insured Americans is “very significant” for Indian outsourcers, says Ananda Mukerji, chief executive officer of Firstsource Solutions in Mumbai. Companies like his will see “increased opportunities” as US health insurers and hospitals scramble to reorganize to comply with the new law, he wrote in an email to the Monitor.

This extra work will include processing new enrollments, organizing bigger member databases, processing more claims, providing more support services, and managing more revenue, he says.

Calfornia Ballot Initiative To Legalize Marijuana

"We spend so much time, our police do, chasing around these nonviolent drug offenders, we don't have time anymore to protect our people from murders and child molesters," said Jack Cole, president of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group that plans to champion the California proposal between now and the election.

The initiative, also known as the "Tax Cannabis Act," received enough signatures this week to qualify for the November ballot. If it is approved, California would become the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use by adults. The measure would also give local governments the authority to regulate and tax pot sales.

I'll never touch the stuff, but this is a step in the right direction. And I don't know how they can tax something that you can grow in you own backyard, but still...

Interesting Gun Case

In the Second Circuit. In Connecticut, a man named Peter Kuck applied for renewal of his carry permit. The Dept. of Public Safety phoned him and told him that he would have to provide proof of citizenship, because permits are not available to non-citizens. Kuck objected, since he had already documented his citizenship back in 1987 when he first obtained his CCW. The DPS denied his renewal and Kuck filed an appeal with the Board of Firearm Permit Examiners. The Board scheduled Kuck's hearing for eighteen months hence. Kuck sued.

The Board told the Court that their extremely heavy workload required such lengthy delays.

Here's the kicker: Kuck was a member of the BFPE and had access to their records. He showed the Court that in a single year, the Board had held only 40 appeal hearings; that's fewer than four a month, hardly a "heavy workload". In the same period, the Board "mooted" 249 appeals; that is, they made the applicant wait for 14-20 months, then quietly approved the application on the eve of the hearing. The Court found that this was consistent with an effort to use bureaucratic delays to deny "due process".

Interesting metric for use against similar regimes (NYC, DC, Chicago, etc.) in the future!

The Volokh Conspiracy, via Of Arms And The Law.

[Update:] One commenter adds: "The Second Circuit covers New York State and its arbitrary, discriminatory, expensive and burdensome pistol licensing scheme. After McDonald comes through, NY’s pistol licensing is in trouble!"

[Update] I should also point out that this decision is limited to a procedural question: now the suit may move forward and be heard on its merits. And another commenter points out, if the state can require proof of citizenship each time you renew your CCW license, can they also require proof of citizenship each time you vote? Hmmmm!

Pew Poll Finds Increased Support For Gun Rights

The figures for Republicans and Democrats haven't changed much, but there has been a large change in Independents.

A year ago, Independents were equally divided 48% to 45% in favor of gun rights, but that 3% gap has grown to 12 percent (53-to-41) in just one year.

Also, note that the overall approval rate for gun ownership is the highest that the Pew Poll has recorded in 17 years of polling on this question.

h/t Snowflakes In Hell.

"Shall-Purchase"

If health care is now a "right", and the federal government can compel Americans to buy health insurance, can they also pass a law to compel us to buy guns?

Record Numbers Now Licensed To Pack Heat

Surprisingly even-handed article from MSNBC. Excerpt:

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the concealed-carry movement gained steam, Americans were killed by others with guns at the rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population. In this decade, the rate has fallen to just over 4.07 per 100,000, a 28 percent drop. The decline follows a fivefold increase in the number of “shall-issue” and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006.

Be sure to hit the poll! So far the results have nearly 80% saying they "felt very safe" knowing that people around them might be CCW-holders.

h/t Maddened Fowl.

The Bronze Age

Well, perhaps not exactly the Bronze Age.

I'm reading an archaeological book on Alexander The Great, and on page 103 is this unusual bronze plaque, now in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

OK, but one wonders, was this made from life? And what is that funny three-cornered hat?

The Surface Of Mars

NASA released this synthetic image made from a stereoscopic pair of terrain maps:


The perspective on the vertical axis has been "stretched" three-fold to show detail. Below is the "unstretched" version:

Still, way cool, no?