thank you, mr. heller.

Some of you may remember my prognosis for Heller a few months back: that the SCOTUS would affirm the Second Amendment as an individual right, but in a half-assed way, by adding something about how it still permits “reasonable” regulation by state and local governments.

Am I good, or what?

That leaves us pretty much back at the status quo ante, except for the folks in localities like Chicago and D.C., who all owe Mr. Heller a beer or two.

hooray for craigslist.

I’ve been staking out Craigslist for a decent used desk, since I didn’t want to spend $500 for a non-particle-board one at Staples.  Yesterday, someone posted a nice desk for sale in my little village, so I called and arranged for a time to come and look at it.

Seventy-five dollars and some elbow grease later, I have a new office desk.  It’s rather solid, with lots of drawers, and it looks nice as well.  All the hardware is brass, and it’s old-school solid (which made it a bit tricky to get into the house by myself.)  It’s not quite the six-foot behemoth I originally wanted, but that one wouldn’t have fit around the corners to the office anyway, and this one is certainly Big Enough.  I went from having no drawers to having nine, including two filing drawers, which means I’ll be able to stow all my clutter for a change.

Hooray for Craigslist, I say.  For the price of a rickety sawdust desk at Staples, I got a solid and nice-looking office desk made from what appears to be real wood. 

Now excuse me while I start putting it to use…

fee-lings…nothing more than fee-hee-lings…

Every once in a while, I feel the need to reply to a comment with a separate post, to give the issue maximum exposure.  This is one of those occasions: reader “Matt” has taken me to task about my position on gun control.

Gun control does not control the wrong sort of people. Currently the availablitly of guns if anything serves to contribute to crime. The fact that guns are available in our society leads to gun deaths.

The availability of personally owned vehicles leads to car deaths–30,000 traffic fatalities per year, on average.  Of the few thousand gun deaths every year, half are suicides, most of the other half are intentional homicides, and only very few are outright accidents, whereas the vast majority of traffic fatalities are.  How come you’re not asking for a ban on vehicles?  People can take public transportation, and it would save tens of thousands of lives per year.

Semi-automatic and automatic weapons serve no purpose in our current society, Constitution or not. So at least these should be banned.

You can pray that little mantra all you want, but those weapons do serve legitimate purposes all over the country every day: defense of self and home, target shooting, plinking, hunting, or just being looked at in the safe.  Between the people on my blogroll alone, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of legally owned weapons serving a purpose to their owners every day without any crime involved, so your statement is flat out wrong.  What you mean to say is that you don’t agree with the purpose, which is a different statement altogether, and a totally subjective one at that.  Who the hell are you to claim the right to determine what’s a “legitimate” use, and what isn’t?  Unless I use them to infringe on your rights, what I do with my weapons is none of your business, and I’ll be the one determning legitimacy.

 Maybe have a military buy-back system. These guns could also be placed locally in secure buildings where they would be available in the event that our country was invaded or our government strong-armed by people with whom the vast majority disagree with and used to overthrow them.

First of all, you can’t “buy back” what you’ve never owned to begin with.  The government cannot buy back guns, because it never owned them., and the term itself implies that the government is the “rightful” owner of all arms.  Then there’s the breathtaking logic splice in your argument: we should keep the weapons in (presumably) public (i.e. government-regulated) buildings, so we can check them out if we need them to defend from government tyranny?

Irregardless of what is done with them, there should be a ban on these weapons. As to non-automatic handguns, my feeling is that they also should be banned, or put in public armories for use in a situation where militias are needed.

“Irregardless” is not a word.  Also, your “feeling” is not only irrelevant here, it’s also a bad basis for a law.  Emotions are not good foundations for public policy.  My feeling is that you’re alarmingly naive, and that you shouldn’t get a vote at all when it comes to gun control, but you’d never find me campaigning for a law to make it so.  You, on the other hand, support taking my gun away from me on the basis of your feelings, which is pretty damn discourteous, seeing how you know nothing of me and my situation.

You pointed out a good argument in that many criminals don’t need guns to commit crimes, but guns do make it much easier to commit a crime, and also to commit larger scale crimes.

They also make it easier for people to defend themselves.  Hell, they’re the only thing that makes it possible for some people to defend themselves.  How’s someone with a prosthetic leg or someone in a wheelchair supposed to run or fight back against even an unarmed attacker?  Banning guns makes it a little harder for criminals to do their job (but just a little, because anyone who wants a gun will get one illegally), but it also makes it a lot harder–or downright impossible–for many non-criminals to defend themselves.

You could say criminals could use knives, but ask most people, and I am pretty sure they will say it would be much easier from a mental standpoint to shoot someone than stab someone, I think it’s a matter of stabbing being a liitle too violently intimate for most people.

You may want to check the links to the news articles from gun-free Japan I linked earlier, and then get back to me about stabbing being “too violently intimate” for most people.  Are you honestly telling me that anyone who would shoot a person will just abstain from killing if they only have access to a knife instead?  What kind of fantasy world do you inhabit?

You point to violent criminals body-building and being able to commit further violent crimes without the need of a gun. The answer to this is stiffer jail sentences and better rehabilitaion services.

Ah, yes, that’s always the touchy-feely magic answer for violent crime reduction: rehabilitation.  How the hell do you “rehabilitate” someone who rapes and tortures someone just for the hell of it for 20+ hours, to the point where his victim begs him to kill her?  How do you rehabilitate someone who, upon learning of his guilty verdict, turns around and goes back to sleep in his cell?

OK, rehabilitation services will not rehabilitate all offenders, but stiffer sentences would serve to deter crime, or at least to keep criminals off the street for longer periods of time. I know, guns don’t kill people, people kill people; but guns make it a hell of a lot easier.

The point is that guns also make it one hell of a lot easier for the good people to protect themselves against the bad ones, and that the presence of guns in the hands of the good people is a much better deterrent to offenders than any amount of harebrained scheme you can think up.

Our Constitution has been amended over time to fix those issues which served to hold our socity back, and in my opinion this is another one of those issues.

Well, you propose disarming me and all my friends and family, and leaving us helpless against the poor little misunderstood criminals who just aren’t afforded enough quality rehabiliation services.  I’ll give your opinion the consideration it deserves.

works in progress.

I’m currently working on two novels (one general fiction, one science fiction), one non-fiction book, and an assorted stack of articles.  There are two completed novels on my hard drive–one is on its second revision, the other is in Submission Hell right now, meaning that many copies of the manuscript are waiting their turn in assorted slush piles of Gotham’s literary agencies and publishing houses.

(I also have some bits and snippets strewn about with story ideas for two or three more novels, but those are on the back burner, or I’ll not get another novel completed this decade.)

Here’s a quick preview of the non-fiction book.  Try to guess the subject from the following sample chapter headers:

–Supermarket, Pharmacy, and Liquor Store: Your New Retail Universe

–Poop and You

–Books Good, Anything With A Speaker Bad: A Guide to Toys

–Sleeping Schedules, Or: It’s Just A Nap, Not A Death Sentence

That’s what I do with my free time whenever I am not actively wrangling munchkins–from 6 to 8am in the mornings, an hour at lunch (if I’m lucky), and from 9-11pm at night, every day except for Saturdays and Sundays.  Exciting, huh?

current reading.

Currently on the nightstand:

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson.

Verdict so far: very interesting stuff.  It doesn’t really read like high fantasy, more like a cross between it and Steampunk.  The system of magic is very original, and I just love stories featuring groups of rogues and thieves that would be completely at home in the Firefly universe.

Anyway, I recommend it to anyone looking for well-written fantasy that’s not the usual formulaic fare.  Brandon Sanderson has been picked to finish the last of Robert Jordans’ Wheel of Time novels, and from what I can see of his writing in Mistborn, he may just be up to that monumental task.

same sad song, different verse.

Let’s put up signs saying “GUNS NOT ALLOWED”, and make it company policy to fire anyone who carries a gun to work, and nobody will be able to just walk into their workplace and shoot a bunch of people.  ‘Cause, you know, anyone with rage in their heart and murder on their mind will stop at the front door when they see that sign, and say, “Aw, shucks…no mass murder for me today.”

Better yet, if we only got rid of guns, like they did in Japan, then nobody would be able to wipe out their entire family anymore, or quickly kill a bunch of people in a public place, or massacre a whole bunch of school-aged kids.

Gun-free zones–whether they’re the size of a factory building, or the size of a country–are really Victim Disarmament Zones.  They make life easier for the people who don’t give a wet fart about the law, and harder for those who are most in need of equalizers.

Of course, a 200lb. ex-convict doesn’t need a gun or a hammer to rape and torture a 130lb. female grad student at will.  But it’s a good thing there wasn’t a gun in play, or someone could have gotten hurt, right? 

Carry your guns, people.  The touchy-feely folks who think that people don’t need to be able to defend themselves against such animals aren’t the ones who will shoulder your pain, your fear, and your suffering if they’re proven wrong.  They won’t die in your place, and they won’t be there to comfort your family and friends when you’re dead.  They’ll just shrug and use your death as a statistic to prove we need even more of their hare-brained policies.  That’s because they look at “gun crime”, and they focus on the word “gun” and not the word “crime”, as if eradicating the former will also get rid of the latter.  They focus on the object, not the behavior, and that’s why their approach can never work, even if you could magically make all guns disappear overnight. 

There will still be those who have spent a few years at the State Penitentiary and Crime Academy, lifting weights, getting in shape, and receiving training from others like them, all in order to make them a better predator.  They don’t need guns to do their jobs against women half their size, people in wheelchairs, or soft accountants stopping at the ATM after dark.  That’s why gun control is never crime control, but criminal empowerment, and any politician who tries to take the gun out of grandma’s purse should be considered on the same moral level as the mugger who would steal that purse.

Gun control is people control, and the trouble is that it controls the wrong kind of people.

and you listened to the government?

Oh, noes!  Teh Feds told us we didn’t need flood insurance, so we didn’t buy any, and now our houses are part of the Mississippi River!

I hate to sound callous here, folks, but if you live in a  town that has the word “Gulf-” in its name, and you live within sight of the second-biggest river in the United States, you buy some fucking flood insurance, regardless of what the Feds have to say on the matter.

(And don’t get me started on the morons who owned un-flood-insured houses located on terrain below sea level…a giant geographic soup bowl that is bordered by Lake Pontchartrain on one side, and the Gulf of Mexico on the other side.)

But hey, now they get to scream for the Feds to bail them out with our money.  In a good and just world, the bill would have to be picked up by the same Feds who told those people not to buy flood insurance, not by Joe and Jane Taxpayer.

when "high speed internet" isn’t.

We got a call from the Comcast folks, who let us know that their high-speed Internets are now available on our dirt road at the outskirts of sleepy little Enfield.  They have a package deal that includes phone service, TV, and Intarweebz, all for $115 a month, with unlimited long-distance calling, and 6-megabit low-latency data pipe.

The only thing that’s tempering the joyful popping of champagne corks here at Casa Munchkin Wrangler is that we have 18 months left on our contract with Hughesnet, Purveyors of Suck, and that canceling the service at this point would cost us early termination and equipment fees of $640.  Right now, we’re paying $60 a month for unreliable 256kbps service that cuts out every time a sparrow farts in front of the satellite dish, and an extra $20 a month for the equipment, because we rolled the $300 installation fee into the 24-month contract.

We’ve been struggling with World of Warcraft even when the connection is up, but at 1000ms latency on a good night, you can forget about playing a caster class.  Also, I haven’t even attempted to join a Team Fortress or Battlefield 2 match online since we moved out here, since 1000ms+ latency means your bullets will hit where your opponent was located…a few moments ago.  To top it all off, Hughesnet’s “Fair Access Policy” stipulates you can only download 200MB in any 24-hour period, otherwise they throttle you back to a speed that makes dial-up look like broadband.  (There’s a “generous” 3-6AM window where downloads don’t count towards your quota, but the paltry speed of the connection means that you need to use that entire block of time if you want to download more than a few dozen megabytes.  Hughesnet sucks, seriously.  When we’re free from their shackles, I’ll use their fucking dish as a target holder for my rimfire guns.)

Still, the prospect of drinking from the digital firehose again has me all kinds of indecently excited over here.  Calloo!  Callay!

morning tea reflections.

So I’m reading up on Zimbabwe’s malaise (and I am shocked to find out that Mugabe stole the election–shocked, I tell you!), and there are some ads in the sidebar to the right of the article.  One of those ads asks the question “How Much In Love Are You?”, and it shows two hearts with empty text fields on them. You’re supposed to put in your name and the name of your schmoopie, and it will then “calculate your love”.

That gives me an idea for a similar test called “Are You A Gullible Moron?”

Now I have to go and serve breakfast to my two employers.  Harsh taskmasters, they are.  More later.

i can’t help it…i have a disorder.

Is there a disorder for every facet of human behavior these days, or what?

“Empathy Deficit Disorder”? 

Where I come from, that’s called “being an asshole.”

Great, now there’s a bogus medical excuse for that, too.  I’m sure there’ll be some psychotropic drug available for EDD soon, because there are still a few people in the country who aren’t psycho-medicated to the eyeballs yet.