Standard Mischief

Recently, those who would disarm everyone, (Million Mom March, and protesteasyguns.com) held a protest in Richmond, VA. The purpose of which was to request that the mythical “Gunshow Loophole” be closed. The anti-RKBA people had a “lying-in” where they pretend to be dead folk lying on the ground for a few minutes to protest how quick it took Cho to get the firearms he used in the Virgina Tech massacre. This, of course is a lie because it took him well over thirty days to get both firearms, and that wait did absolutely nothing to deter him from murder. It’s also a lie because he didn’t buy either firearm at a gun show (where the laws are exactly the same as everywhere else.)

But that’s not want I wanted to talk about today. I want you to take a look at these two videos on YouTube. Usually I embed videos in a pop-up window but today I want you to go to the actual site.

The first is from some user called stopgunviolence. The video is here. Pop it open in another tab or something. Note the following:

• The video whines about how the counter-protesters – who counter-protest peacefully – didn’t get a permit before coming to witness.
• The video whines about all the people who were lawfully armed, yet fails to note that not one of those people acted on any uncontrollably urges to do some kind of wild west shoot’em up.
• The video is heavily edited with a number of stills.
• The poster deliberately disabled the ability of visitors to rate his video
• The poster deliberately disabled the ability of visitors to comment on his video.

Contrast this with a video from knotageek.

• Comments are on.
• Rating is enabled.
• The video is pretty much one unedited slice of how the protest went, with a bit of commentary at the very end.

Another example of Reasoned Discourse^tm?

(Video links via Sebastian, thanks.)(edit: wrong Sebastian, link fixed)

If you have been having connection issues to the blog, well it’s me — not you.

It seems that despite moving domain registrars, DNS is still set by my ex-domain hosting company for some reason. Those A records are pointing to IP addresses owned by my current domain register, but at their old data center. Forwarding those to the current bank of IP addresses is what the intermittent problem is.

The emal address that I leave in the comment form over at your blog is also in those old DNS records, so that email address may die. I’ve not figured out a solution for that yet (or at least I haven’t settled on a new provider yet)

Update: Should be fixed. Two emails and two non-form letter email responses in about 24 hours took care of it. Love my hosting company.

Here in the free state, for normal mortals that are not politically well connected, carry permits are rarer than hens teeth. I’ve actually never even heard of one being issued, ever.

Pro Gun Progressive got one, and it only took seven months of waiting, some non-standard photos, a big wad of cash (fully non-refundable) a few times being grilled by our public servants, several affidavits from neighborhood police, more than one documented examples of threats and witness intimidation, a fingerprint card, the serial number for the Glock he plans to carry, and a few spent shell casings from the same Glock for our useless and expensive ballistics “fingerprinting” scheme,

The permit is good for a whopping year and fifteen days.  The permit was modified from his earlier permit he already had, which allowed him to carry only while transporting cash to an after-hours bank deposit slot. Evidently, it’s much easier to get a permit in Maryland to protect some cash than it takes to get a permit to protect yourself.

Let’s hope that his Glock keeps running like a top, because I believe he will be forced to carry an empty holster if he ever needed to send that handgun in for service.

Self-defense is a civil right.

By now, if you read any of the gun bloggers, you’ve heard the news that the Bush Administration has filed an amicus curiae with the supremes over the upcoming landmark Second Amendment case D.C. v. Heller, and that brief is essentially supports the District’s side. Everyone seems to be linking to this Arms and the Law post, so I will too. While the brief from Bush’s lawyers does not go as far as the fantasy arguments that the District has been trying to make (essentially, the Second Amendment forbids Congress from disarming the state militia which is armed by the State which most certainly isn’t “The People” and since DC isn’t a state, while all the other amendment apply to the people living in the district, this particular amendment wouldn’t, but even if it did, the fact that you need a permit that you are not allowed to get to move your disassembled shotgun from one room to another while keeping said shotgun wholly inside your own private residence is not an “unreasonable restriction”.)

Instead, the Bush Administration says (paraphrased by Uncle): “…it’s an individual right but, you know, not really.”

In a surprising and altogether refreshing development, the NRA immediately put out a limp press statement, rather than waiting a week or so to see if a chorus of their paying members was going to die down or not. This is a good sign, seeing as it seem to take them forever to spring into action in the Katrina aftermath. They also, as far as I know, never even mentioned all the “open carry” marches that happened in Ohio because local RKBA supporters weren’t at the time allowed to receive carry permit chits from the state. Nor did they ever comment on the firearm confiscations that appeared in Maryland during the “Beltway Sniper Incident”. Maybe “limp” is the wrong word, they’re displeased, but they really don’t badmouth the Solicitor General (who serves at the pleasure of the President.)

Snowflakes in Hell is hoping that someone in the Administration put forward this brief without the President’s knowledge. He’s hoping that heads will roll, and this isn’t further ample proof that Bush is only with us only as far as it takes to get RKBA people to vote for him. But Sebastian doesn’t go far enough in his suggested penance. Here’s a laundry list:

• I want the President to ask for and get the appropriate resignations from the appropriate people.
• Withdraw his nomination of Mike Sullivan for chief of the ATF
• Use an Executive Order to forbid the ATF from making further law via issuing regulations, instead, have all proposed rules vetted through Congress.
• Sign immediate and full pardons for Wayne Fincher and Cory Maye.

Probably both a good start and a complete pipe dream, though.

Update: links fixed

So, about six months ago, I move the blog to a new subdirectory, and everything breaks.

So I start a voyage of self-discovery on how .htaccess files work in order to fix everything. I figure things out but for some reason beyond my knowledge, I don’t actually implement any of those fixes. Search engines that regularly scrape my pages for content can no longer find my blog, and my traffic drops to almost nothing.

Today I finally fixed things.

The first issue was my root website directory, as many spiders try to scrape my homepage. I created a kludgy html redirect page, but many spiders don’t really like to follow links like that. What I really needed was a 301 redirect, but my attempts to make one using .htaccess were filled with recursive fail.

The solution was a simple php file, placed in my root web directory, called index.php

<?php
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: /blog/");
?>


The second problem was all the links out there on other blogs pointing to my old posts. I tried to use mod.rewrite again, but that only seemed to work when my posts called for an existing but renamed picture or something. When someone followed an external link to say my most popular post ever, my “Zumbo timeline“, they got a 404. To fix those, I had to add the following lines to my htaccess:


Redirect 301 /2005 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2005
Redirect 301 /2006 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2006
Redirect 301 /2007 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2007

I think that fixes everything.