Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Civil Rights, Constitution, Daily Kos, Failure, Government, Guns, Politics, RKBA, Society
No, not from blogging. And it is only tangentially related to yesterday’s post. Rather, from visiting some of my usual gun forums – the upcoming inauguration has caused a resurgence of hatin’ on “LIEBRALS and DEMONCRATS”, and I just don’t have the stomach for it right now. As I said in a diary I posted on dKos a month ago:
I have given up participation in some gun forums for being told that I cannot be a gun owner and still be a liberal. Seriously, sometimes it is impossible to get other gun owners to understand that this issue does not need to be one which breaks down according to party alignment (and isn’t good for gun rights if it does). Even my family and some of my gun-owning friends have a hard time wrapping their head around it. The most common refrain is that no “true” gun owner can possibly be a liberal, or vote for a Democrat.
It happened again to me last night in one forum I particularly like. But I’ve seen much too much such sentiment the last week or so, on a variety of such discussion forums.
It’s maddening. Maddening because it is so damned short-sighted. A lot of people would rather be “pure” than win – they don’t care if they lose an argument, or their rights, so long as they get to trumpet their moral superiority. And a whole lot of “gun-rights activists”, who have tied their activism to the tail of an elephant, and now are so aligned with that party that they can’t see that there is a better path to preserving their Second Amendment rights. A path where the RKBA, and all the rest of the Bill of Rights, is respected and preserved by *both* major political parties. No, they would much rather pay homage to the GOP, and so alienate most moderate gun owners that they seem to be extremists – and therein delegitimize their cause, perhaps even hastening new pointless gun control legislation.
Gah. Makes me crazy.
So, I’m going to take a break. Being off to the wilds of northern California next week will help. Maybe the worst of this outbreak will pass by the time I get back.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to Ballistics by the inch Blog and UTI.)
So, Saturday I stopped in at my local gun shop, needed to pick up some components for a reloading project yesterday. They were busy, which is good to see, so it took a bit before I had a chance to chat with Dave.
“Had a chance to check out the Ballistics by the inch site yet?”
“No, not yet – busy with the holidays and stuff. You know.”
“No worries.”
“Going well?”
“Yeah, we’ve had over 350,000 hits in the month since it went up.”
“Wow.” Pause. “Um, is that a lot?” (They’re not real big on computers, these guys, which is why there’s just a link to a Yellow Pages listing for them off of our website.)
“Heh. Yeah, that’s a hell of a lot. It’s gotten quite a lot of attention. More and more, I see it cited as a reference when people are talking about this or that caliber performance.”
“Huh. Well, I guess. But everyone knows that it’s just basically 25 fps for each inch of barrel. Simple.”
“Well, no, actually the data we got shows a much greater range . . .”
“Oh, yeah, might be a bit more with some calibers, some weights of bullets and powder charges, but that’s a pretty good rule of thumb.”
Another guy had a question about a lever gun behind the counter, and Dave turned to help him. I took my powder and primers up to the front counter and had the new kid ring me up.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the Bbti blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Art, Ballistics, Guns, NPR, Promotion, Science
I’ve written previously about the ballistics research project I’ve been involved with, and how the launch of the site was going really well. We had some 100,000 hits the first week it was up (11/29 – 12/5), and then this past weekend that pace was keeping up, with the usual variation you expect day to day. As I noted on the 3rd, this was really exciting to see, and more hits than my Communion of Dreams site had gotten all year. The associated blog hadn’t been getting much attention, but those things sometimes take time to ramp up.
Well, late yesterday, I knew something was up with the Bbti site, because suddenly the blog traffic had picked up significantly. As I told my cohorts last night:
Surprisingly, had another jump in hits to the blog today. Be interesting to see in the morning whether this is connected to another growth in overall hits to the Bbti site, or whether it is more just a reflection of the blog getting more coverage through search engines.
But either way, there were also more people going from the blog to the Bbti site.
So this morning I came downstairs, got some coffee, fired up the computer, checked mail, and then pulled up yesterday’s stats for the Bbti site.
Huh.
60,000 hits. Actually, 61,970. In one day.
Now, this isn’t a large number by today’s standards, for sites which are well established or get “slashdotted“. But that’s not what happened. We did get a link posted off of Dark Roasted Blend, but that was literally in the middle of a bunch of links, and only accounted for about 2,000 hits (that I can tell – the actual number is probably larger than that, but still . . . ) Rather, the traffic seems to be coming from a wide variety of sources, not all of them gun-related.
And that pace seems to be continuing, based on traffic on the blog today.
To put this in a little perspective, my great ‘claim to fame’ was my Paint the Moon project some 7 years ago. The internet was a smaller place back then, but even taking that into account, the entire project generated something like one million hits to my website – over the course of about 5 months. It took about a month to cross the 10,000 hits mark. I don’t think it ever got 60,000 hits in one single day, not even after being on the Howard Stern show and then the next day on Weekend Edition.
So, we’ll see where this leads. And I suppose I should update my Wikipedia entry.
Wild.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Civil Rights, Constitution, Daily Kos, Politics, RKBA
. . . you’re curious, I posted a thing to Daily Kos this morning about what some people find to be confusing: my liberal/libertarian politics and my support for gun rights.
More later.
No, really.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, BoingBoing, Emergency, Failure, Feedback, Government, Guns, Kindle, Marketing, NYT, Politics, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Society
An update to this post… In the four days since the site went public, we’ve had almost 75,000 hits. That’s more hits than I’ve had to the Communion of Dreams site this entire year. I’d say it’s off to a good start. Interesting that it has already started to propagate beyond the usual gun forums and whatnot – we got a lot of hits from a link on SomethingAwful, and we’re seeing some links from people’s Facebook and Myspace pages.
* * *
Did you see this post in the NYT about the future of publishing? I was going to write about it, but have been occupied with other matters. Then I saw this piece by Clay Shirky in response, and figured I’d just tell people to read what he said. An excerpt:
There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick’s logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we’ve read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It’s the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words!
* * *
Got a note from a friend in response to yesterday’s doom & gloom report. He asked what my advice would be for anyone wondering about how to handle some modest investments (and acknowledged that I am not a financial advisor in any professional way). My reply:
Warm clothes and sturdy shoes.
* * *
Well, I have other matters to attend to. Have a longer post working in the back of my mind, perhaps for later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Guns, Predictions, Promotion, RKBA
Just a quick note: So far, the response to the ballistics project mentioned in my last post has been very positive. It is already propagating beyond the first couple of contact points, as people cross-post the information. We had almost 500 unique visitors to the site yesterday, some 3,000 page views. So that’s exciting!
More (not firearms related) later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Art, Ballistics, Guns, Predictions, Press, Privacy, Promotion, RKBA, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I’ve mentioned several times recently the ballistics project I’ve been involved with over the last year or so. Well, last night we migrated the temporary site over to its own domain, and except for a few tweaks it is pretty much done. Sometime probably this weekend I will post a comment promoting the site to a couple of the forums devoted to discussing firearms, and then all bets are off as to what happens next. (I’d ask anyone reading this to not spread the word to such forums just yet – please let me do that when we’re ready.)
For those who are not interested or knowledgeable about firearms, this whole thing may seem a bit silly. Actually, it is a huge project which will significantly add to the information base available to shooting enthusiasts, and as such will likely gain a great deal of attention both online and in the print media devoted to firearms. I’ve cautioned my two cohorts in the project to be prepared for a bit of a whirlwind of interest. I doubt that it will penetrate into the general media the way that my Paint the Moon art project did, but in the gun world it could very well be just as well known.
And the anticipation of that is kinda fun. As private a person as I am by nature, I enjoy doing things which are interesting or innovative enough to gain some level of attention, to povoke people to think about something in a different way or to expand their awareness of what is possible. I think that is a big part of the reason why I blog, and why I wrote Communion of Dreams – to help shape the world. This new project will do that in a very tangible way.
So, we’ll see what happens. Wish us luck with it.
Jim Downey
I have mentioned a number of times the big ballistics project that I have been working on with a couple of friends over the past year. And it is finally all coming to fruition. There’s still the actual results database to sort out (we have the data, we just need to decide exactly how we want to have it displayed and searchable on the website). But the basic website is now put together, and because you’re a faithful reader of this blog you get a sneak preview:
Do me a favor and take a look, poke around the site a bit. Not everything is finished – as I said, the results are not yet posted, we still need to put in some links to other resources and whatnot, I still need to build a flickr set of photos from the testing, set up a blog related to the project, et cetera – and just offer some feedback. With a little luck we’re only a week or so away from having the site go ‘live’ under its own domain (already reserved), and I’d like to have this as a shakedown period. Consider this the “alpha test” of the site, to see how it works on a variety of browsers and whatnot. Send comments to me – the contact email on that site is not yet active – and I’ll pass it on to my good lady wife who has done all the drudge work of putting the site together.
Thanks! It’s really exciting to have this project almost complete – it has been a lot of work for all of us, and I want it to launch successfully. Your help at this stage is very appreciated.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Humor, Preparedness, RKBA, Society, Terrorism
Couple of weeks ago I got my notice from the state that it was time to renew my CCW permit. The whole process was fairly straight forward: go to the sheriff’s office, hand over my driver’s license and other ID, have them renew the paperwork on their end (checking to make sure I hadn’t done anything which would warrant losing my permit); then over to the Driver’s License center for a new ID.
I use a non-driver’s ID for my CCW permit. It costs me an extra couple of bucks to have a separate ID, but that way if I have to hand over my DL to someone, they don’t know that I have a permit to carry. It’s not an issue for the police, should I get pulled over or something, since the CCW info is tied into the driver’s license database. And this way, I always have a second photo ID.
So, I got to the Driver’s License center. Light crowd, and it only took me a minute to get to a clerk. Who took my paperwork, pulled up the info on her computer, and said that since none of my information had changed, the simple thing to do was just to issue a renewal with the updated CCW expiration date. Cool.
Then she asked if I had a birth certificate or passport.
Yeah, the Real ID Act.
Now, think about this for a moment. I was getting a renewal of my CCW permit. Said permit requires initially a fairly thorough background check by the State Highway Patrol, along with plenty of ID and documentation about competency. The renewal paperwork had to be processed by the local sheriff’s office, and then an additional form issued requiring me to get the new ID endorsement within a week. Nothing had changed in my file since the original ID was issued three years ago – all they were going to do was just change the date of the CCW expiration. And yet they did not trust their own system to confirm that I was who I was.
Yeah, I had my passport with me. I knew not to underestimate the stupidity of the bureaucracy. I handed it over, and the clerk scanned it for just a moment before pushing the final key on her computer that spat out my new ID. But boy, I’m sure I’d have been in trouble had I not brought it.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Civil Rights, Daily Kos, Government, Guns, Politics, Preparedness, RKBA, Society, Violence
Hmm. As noted in comments in the previous post, I seem to never have cross-posted this essay here from Daily Kos. So, I thought I would.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Do you own a fire extinguisher? Why?
Do you own a fire extinguisher? Why? Are you expecting a fire? Or do you have some sort of left-over juvenile desire to play fireman, a private macho image of rushing into a burning building to save a child? Don’t you know that improperly used, a fire extinguisher can be dangerous to yourself and others? And there have been “studies” done that show people who own fire extinguishers are actually more careless with fire risks, thinking that they’ll always be able to resort to their fire extinguisher to solve the problem. Besides, firefighters are always right there when you need them, and can put out any fire for you, so there’s no point in having your own fire extinguisher.
How about an emergency first-aid kit? Do you have one of those? Why? Are you expecting to injure yourself? Or do you have some sort of left-over juvenile desire to play doctor, a private macho image of saving someone from bleeding to death with an improvised tourniquet? Don’t you know that improperly used, medical supplies and equipment can be dangerous to yourself and others? And there have been “studies” done that show people who own first-aid kits are actually more careless in general, thinking that they’ll always be able to resort to their medical supplies to repair any injury they sustain. Besides, Emergency Medical Technicians or doctors are always right there when you need them, and can instantly patch you up if you get injured, so there’s no point in having your own first-aid kit.
Are these responses to being prepared absurd? Yeah. But they are exactly the sorts of responses I get when people find out I have a permit for carrying a concealed weapon, and generally carry a pistol whenever and wherever I can legally do so. And my experience is not at all unusual – most gun owners encounter the same sort of reaction from non-gun owners. We’re asked if we’re expecting to have a shoot-out in the supermarket. We’re asked if we have some childish fantasy about playing cops & robbers. We’re told that if we want to play with guns and shoot people that we should join the military. We’re confronted with facts that guns are inherently dangerous to ourselves and others, and that “studies” have shown that owning a gun makes it more likely that we will behave in such a fashion as to need to resort to using one to get us out of a dangerous situation. And besides, there’s always a cop around when you need one, just to protect you, so there’s no need to have a weapon for self defense.
Are there gun owners who think that carrying a weapon makes them invincible, and they therefore go around with a chip on their shoulder, putting themselves in dangerous situations thinking that they can always whip out their pistol and escape? Yeah, probably. But that is no more the typical mindset of a gun owner than is the notion that someone who owns a fire extinguisher is going to be careless with fire risks. Are guns inherently dangerous, and if used improperly present a threat to the owner and anyone else in the vicinity? Definitely. Which is why anyone who carries a weapon has a responsibility (usually mandated by law in the state which issued their concealed carry permit) to know how to safely handle and use a firearm, how to safely store it, and when it can be legally used in defense of self or another. And are there gun owners who think that they’re some kind of auxiliary police force, ready to jump in and right any criminal wrong they see being committed? Yup. In fact, a lot of people who legally carry a firearm do so precisely because there are situations where intervening could save the life of a loved one, a friend or even a stranger. But that doesn’t mean that they are wanna-be cops. Rather, they’re just trying to help contribute to their own safety and the safety of others. The police, firefighters and EMTs can’t be everywhere. We do have a responsibility to protect ourselves, to make prudent preparations in the event of an unexpected turn of events. That means having a fire extinguisher handy in case of a fire. It means having a first aid kit, and knowing some basic medical skills for dealing with an emergency. And for me it means having a gun available as a tool for self protection. Your level of comfort with how you are prepared for what situations may well be different, but that does not mean that my decision, and the decision of millions of other Americans, to legally and safely carry a concealed weapon is wrong or paranoid.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 