Guns, Cars, and Tech

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  • Says cheese!

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  • Knee jerk reactions

    With all this talk about folks wanting to re-institute a high capacity magazine ban, I reacted in my normal way. I’ve just order a couple 17 round mags for my Bersa Thunder 9. Last time this came up, I bought a Springfield XDm 9mm compact because it held more rounds than the other guns I was looking at.

    Some may call this childish.

    I say childish would be ordering a 22 round drum magazine for my Bersa Thunder 380.

    So far, I’ve avoided this temptation.

  • How to lose the high ground

    I’ve talked here a few times about how it’s sometimes frustrating that a business has different views on civil rights than I do. When the owner of several popular local restaurants spearheaded a campaign to derail restaurant carry, I mocked him and stopped going to his restaurants.

    When Costco employees freaked out about a guy with a CCW to the point they had him killed by police, I cancelled my membership.

    When Regions Bank banned carry permit holders from their branches, I closed my accounts after 14 years of doing business with them. When my new bank did the same thing a year later, I moved my money again.

    When looking for furniture, I don’t shop at American Signature Furniture.

    I don’t do business with businesses that don’t support my rights. I encourage others not to do business with them, by explaining my reasoning.

    You know what I don’t do?

    I don’t try to deny their right to do business via force of government.

    I don’t lobby the government to deny them the right to buy land.

    And I sure as hell don’t wish death upon their customers.

    Honestly that last one is the worst, and I’m afraid that’s where its going in this case. Instead of just not eating there and using a perhaps-effective boycott, they’re going to turn to demonizing the people who do eat there. It’s a new low, going after consumers of a product who’s producer hold views you don’t agree with.

    It’s days like this that remind me why I’m not on Facebook.

  • Picasa albums suddenly disappeared from Android Gallery

    So I’m rocking a Samsung Galaxy S III 4G now and have been for a couple of weeks.

    I also have an Eye-Fi Pro X2 8 GB hooked up to my Canon EOS Rebel T2i. All the kickass pictures I’ve been posting since January have been with that setup.

    Through the magic of computers and Al Gore’s Internet, this means that when I take a picture with my fancy pants camera, it shows up on my phone. The process is roughly this:

    1. Take Picture.
    2. When/If near my home wifi network, the picture is automagically copied to my media server.
    3. Once on my media server, they Eye-Fi software compresses the picture and uploads it to a Picasa web album, using the date the picture was taken to create a new album name.
    4. The album is then synced to my phone.

    This is all entirely automatic. I literally have to do nothing but take the picture and a couple of minutes later it’s on my phone. It’s very, very convenient.

    Well, yesterday I went to show someone a picture of Casey (our Belgian Malinois) and none of my Picasa Web Albums were on my phone! Poof! Gone! TRAGEDY!

    As it turns out, this was an easy fix that took me two days to find. There seems to be a rebranding of Picasa to Google Photos in the midst. When I updated the Google+ App the other day, it turned on “Sync Google Photos” under System Settings->Accounts and Sync->(your google account). That broke the Picasa sync, apparently.

    I unchecked that guy. Then I unchecked and re-checked “Sync Picasa Web albums” and voila! Now I have my pretty pretty pictures back.

    I’m putting this out there in the hopes that someone else who has this problem won’t have to go to the third page of a discussion board on the fifth page of google results in order to find this.

  • QotD: Obviousness edition

    Commenter “Brad” over at Bob Owens’ place gives an absolutely beautiful response to those people who think that the ill-conceived federal assault weapons ban would have done anything to stop what happened in Aurora:

    Let it also be said that even if the killer had used a weapon which complied with the Feinstein AW ban, the outcome would not have changed. The proof of this is the 1999 Columbine massacre, where the primary murder weapon was a Hi-Point 9mm carbine using a supply of loaded 10 round magazines.

    http://acolumbinesite.com/weapon.html

    Armed people vs unarmed people are what enables massacres. Not flash-suppressors or 20-round magazines. The Hi-Point 9mm carbine was designed to comply with the Federal AW ban. I don’t think a magazine greater than 10 rounds capacity even exists for the weapon. Yet it is perfectly suitable for slaughtering unarmed victims.

    That had never occurred to me.

  • It’d be funnier if it wasn’t so damned true

  • Gun Porn: NFA Edition

    I was going through some files on the recently undead server, and found some stuff you guys might enjoy.

    I’m a giver.

    That is a suppressed, short barrel, full auto M4…in .458 SOCOM. I want to have it’s babies.
    That one on the top? Custom .338 Lapua Magnum, “chambered in $5 bills” says the owner.

    So nice!

    Unfortunately, you’d have to feed it. If I recall correctly, it’s about $65 per 20 round box.

    Post-May dealer sample Uzi.

    It’s little brother. Also full auto.

    Thompson SMG, another M4 (in 5.56), and an MG42.
    And yes, it’s all full auto.

  • Well, now I have a problem

    Went to the gun show, and an AR lower came home with me along with a scheduled purchase I’ll talk about later.

    What should I make?

  • Why would you ever need a gun in a bar?

    Because you never know when some jackass wants to go on a shooting rampage in hopes that police will kill him.

    Note, however, that he didn’t actually wait around for the cops to show up and kill him. Nor did he try to go out in a blaze of glory when the police finally caught up with him came to pick him up after he confessed to a FedEx worker

    Also, this wasn’t what I’d call a “thug bar” where you’d expect drug-related violence to break out. We see that all the time. This was a sports bar filled with college kids. That kinda kills the “just don’t go to those kind of bars” argument that our opponents kept trotting out.

    No good info on what kind of weapon the shooter used. The press is reporting it was an “assault rifle” but I’d also seen reports that paramedics claimed it had created small-caliber wounds. My guess is a Ruger 10/22 with a 30rd mag. That would explain the high number hits, but zero fatalities.

    He also shot someone about an hour before this, and set two fires at his former place of employment.

    Oh, and just in case it comes up? He was a prohibited person. Shocking, I know.

  • I LOL’d

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    Seen on my walk this morning