Hipsters: more conformist than a Victorian matron.

Kathy Shaidle had a post the other day about New York hipster types taking up hunting and target shooting because they think its "edgy". Here's Kathy's post, and here's the original story: "How Gun Culture Won Over Liberals: The new "gun nuts": media elites, locavores, and hipster hunters."

The story begins:

On a Sunday morning a couple years ago, Brooklyn journalist Foster Kamer and a few of his "particularly liberal" blogger friends decided to skip brunch and hit the shooting range instead.

"We said, hey, let's do something ridiculous," he recalled. "Let's go shoot guns."

They chose the nearest site they found, a range that operated out of a basement in midtown Manhattan. "The first thing that happened when we got there was we heard some guy hammering away at a target with what sounded like a cannon. It was just in such tight quarters. It kind of freaked us out."

It didn't keep them away, though.

One 30-minute gun safety lesson and a few bucks later, Kamer and his friends were blasting away at their own targets — the first of many. "Sometimes we go bowling, sometimes we eat together, and sometimes we go shooting," he said. "It's something to do."

Yes, they go shooting because its "something ridiculous". Forty seven layers of irony available to any hipster OWS/peacelovedove dweeb liberal punk who goes <gasp!> SHOOTING. Its so completely wrong, it has to be right. And of course they discovered what boys have known for a few hundred years now, shooting is -fun-. Its big fun. Huge fun. Its a hell of a fun time.

So they go shooting for several years, and then... Aurora!

As for Kamer, he said he hasn't picked up a gun since last July, when a masked shooter opened fire on a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

"After that, I think the thought just occurred to me, like, you know, there's something that feels a little bit weird about doing this right now," he said. "I just kept thinking, Jesus God, am I propagating this? Is there a way to justify this to myself?"

But Kamer, who spoke to BuzzFeed Wednesday afternoon, minutes after President Barack Obama went on TV and laid out the most aggressive gun control agenda in a generation, said there should be room on the left for both a cultural appreciation for guns, and support for the president's efforts.

"Do I plan to go back again [to the range]? Yeah, yeah, I probably will," he said. "Would I mind my ID being checked and having to sign off on a bunch of forms before I'm handed a rifle and a box of 20 shells? Hell no, I wouldn't mind."

Several things spring rather forcibly to mind.

First off, this retard immediately draws a connection between his harmless weekend target shooting in the basement, and the mentally deranged Aurora Colorado shooter. ""I just kept thinking...am I propagating this? Is there a way to justify this to myself?" Which is pure magical thinking at its finest. A Haitian witch doctor couldn't come up with better. Little Foster's weekend target practice causes Aurora. Genius.

Second, "Would I mind my ID being checked and having to sign off on a bunch of forms...? Hell no, I wouldn't mind." He knows he's waaaaay off the reservation here, and he's terrified. Suddenly the nested levels of hipster irony are conflicting with Holy Writ! Guns Are Bad, Guns Cause Crime, Gun Owners Are Eeevile Republicans! That's liberal catechism. Little Foster better show he's all about the government gun control and he's got a big ol' man-crush on Barry too, or he's going to get ex-communicated.

That would be bad for him. He's a lefty blogger/writer/journolister. If he gets declared persona non grata by the liberal universe for being a possible NRA supporter, all his hipster friends will stop calling him up. Everyone he knows will de-Friend him on Facebook. His Twitter followers will drop him like a hot rock. He won't get any more writing work. His blog hits will disappear. He'll have to get a McJob.

Little Foster is in danger of being shunned from Polite Society, in other words. Enough whiff of scandal about him that he might not get those invites to tea and parties anymore, like a fourth tier Victorian society woman caught out without a chaperone.

These little boys like to pretend they are Edgy, Transgressive, Ironic, and all that other do-your-own-thing BS that liberals champion. But they're just pretending. In reality they're all conforming to a pretty rigid set of regs, dress code and all, stressing like mad in case somebody denounces them as UnCool and they get tossed out of New York like a leper out of a nudist colony.

The Phantom

AR-15 might have been really handy here.

It began as a quiet night...

The ordeal at the Nordstrom Rack store near Los Angeles International Airport began at about 11 p.m. when a man called 911 and reported that his girlfriend had called and said there were gunmen in the store, Lt. Andy Neiman said.

Police officers and special weapons team members swarmed the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center, an outdoor shopping center that also contains restaurants and a theater.

The super-duper "heavily armed" Special Weapons And Tactics from the super-duper amazing highly trained Los Angeles Police Department squad rolled up and took over the whole area. They had body armor, full-auto assault weapons, flash-bang and sting-ball grenades, and probably an armored car with a cannon on it. They got to the mall, surrounded it and... nothing!

SWAT members surrounded the location but weren't able to talk to anyone inside during the four-hour standoff.

Wow. Four hours without a peep, then they go in? What did they find?

When they finally burst into the store, they found hostages locked in a storage room and others in a bathroom, Neiman said.

The 13 women and one man were all believed to be employees because the store was closed when the robbery began, Neiman said.

One hostage was treated at the scene for a non-life threatening stab wound, Neiman said.

Another employee had been sexually assaulted, Neiman said, although he declined to provide details.

Yeah. It took the Super Squad so long to get there that the robbers had time to stab somebody, rob the place, stick all the kids in a "storage room" AND have a little fun with one of them, then scarper away like little bunnies. Clean getaway.
Then the Super Squad stood around looking dangerous for FOUR HOURS while the kids stifled in the closet. Good thing that "non-life threatening stab wound" didn't bleed much, eh?

So remember my friends, police are not there to save you. They can't, and as in this case even if they can they probably won't. They are strictly there to put on a show and clean up afterward.

No one is coming to save you. You are on your own.

Next time you see Piers Morgan on TV, remember the LA SWAT team waited FOUR HOURS in front of an -empty- store with wounded kids trapped in it.

The Phantom

Blast from the past: David Hemenway comes out from under his rock

Back in the day when I looked into the medical research on gun control, one name kept coming up over and over again: Dr. David Hemenway.

Paid gun control boffin of the Joyce Foundation, Dr. Hemenway's greatest hits include:
I am the NRA: an analysis of a national random sample of gun owners.  Violence Vict. 1993 Winter;8(4):353-65. 
Loaded guns in the home. Analysis of a national random survey of gun owners.   Weil DS, Hemenway D.  JAMA. 1992 Jun 10;267(22):3033-7.
Firearm training and storage.    Hemenway D, Solnick SJ, Azrael DR.JAMA. 1995 Jan 4;273(1):46-50.

I've read these studies, and a lot more by Dr. Hemenway and his little friends at Haaaaahvaaahd. His basic modus operandi is to conflate two things together, like guns and cars, and argue that these things should be treated in the same fashion. Because cars are licensed and inspected, guns should be licensed and inspected. He also likes to make sweeping policy statements based on telephone surveys with really small sample sizes.

Well, he's back at it after Sandy Hook, and his new paper is called "Curbing Gun Violence: Lessons From Public Health Successes"

Predictably published in Journal of the American Medical Association, he tries to pretend guns are the same as cars, cigarettes AND poisoning. Which is just friggin' GENIUS. He's got the whole gamut of gun-ban love in here. He's got magazine restrictions, he's got the "SmartGun" electronic control, he's got Assault Weapon (boooo hissss!) bans, he's got TAXES on guns and ammunition, and new for this year he's got Hollywood taking guns out of the movies.

Here's the table from the article:

Which sounds really great and everything, except for this: guns are not cars, they aren't smokes, and they aren't toxic household products.  Guns are -weapons-. Weapons have a specific purpose fundamentally different from vehicles, smoking and etc.

Criminal acts of violence committed with guns, specifically assault, murder and suicide are not accidents. They are the deliberate and purposeful acts of willful individuals. Which take place in very small geographic locations, not spread evenly across the country.

So to pretend that the type of public health policies that have been applied to accidents and habit forming drugs are applicable to murder and suicide, if I were feeling charitable I'd characterize it as stupid. Silly. Ridiculous.

But it isn't stupid, silly or ridiculous in this case. Its a deliberate lie. One that this man, Dr. David Hemenway, has been making a tidy living spreading since the early 1990's.

If you want to watch the man lie out of his own mouth to Sandra Cupp on video, here's some MSNBC for you.

I hate liars.

Dear Dr. Hemenway, please do us all a favor. Crawl back under your rock and take all this bullshit with you.

The Phantom

Barry may order gun law by executive order!

Well true believers, we have word from the Mouth That Roared, Mr. Joe BiteMe himself, that The One my simply decree new gun laws.

Vice President Joe Biden revealed that President Barack Obama might use an executive order to deal with guns.
"The president is going to act," said Biden, giving some comments to the press before a meeting with victims of gun violence. "There are executives orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required."
Biden said that this is a moral issue and that "it's critically important that we act."
Biden talked also about taking responsible action. "As the president said, if you're actions result in only saving one life, they're worth taking. But I'm convinced we can affect the well-being of millions of americans and take thousands of people out of harm's way if we act responsibly."

There you have it. King Barry will simply wave his hand, say "make it so", and so it will be.  My surmise is that there will be mandatory registration for all gun owners, registration for all guns, no mags over five rounds, and all makes/models of semiauto rifles will be prohibited for sale. Canada, basically. On steroids.

I doubt there's much he can do that will survive a Supreme Court challenge today... but he's got FOUR MORE YEARS to finish packing the court, my friends.  That's a long time, and some of those Supreme Court dudes are old. Just a waiting game now.

In that spirit, I'd say to you Americans y'all better get out there and buy whatever you think you might need or want right now. Off the books, too. Or you'll be sorry later, when you can't get whatever it was.

And if they declare universal gun registration? Seven million Canadians decided "what they don't know can't hurt me" when the sonsabeeactches did it here. Historical fact, don't y'know.

The Phantom

Scientists: dumbest smart people on Earth.

Here's an example of a guy who should bloody well know better using a mathematical principle to try and prove something about gun control. And doing it -wrong-.

... Dr. Michael Shermer, who writes a regular column for Scientific American, is the force behind Skeptic magazine, author of many excellent books dealing especially with evolution and why people believe weird things, and – interestingly – is a self-described libertarian.

Ok, take it away Skeptic guy talking about the Aurora theater shooting:

We do know something for certain, however, and that is that this will happen again…and again and again. The reason is the law of large numbers that I will outline below and that is disturbing enough that it really is now time to rethink our gun-control laws to include the prohibition of semi-automatic assault rifles like those Holmes' allegedly used to murder 12 and wound another 58 in a matter of seconds. Had he not had such weapons—possessing, say, only a pistol purchased for self-defense—the tragedy would surely have been lessened. Thus, even though I am a life-long libertarian who champions freedom in all spheres of life and has previously opposed gun-control measures in principle (I do not personally enjoy hunting or recreational gun shooting), I now believe that the freedom of a few people to own WMM's (Weapons of Mass Murder) conflicts with the freedom of the rest of us to enter the public sphere without the chance of our ultimate freedom of life itself being cut short. Here are a few figures that should give even the most freedom-loving libertarian and conservative pause.

Oh, I am all ready for those figures, baby. Lay it on me Mikey!

• First, there's a good chance that James Holmes is schizophrenic, suffered from severe depression, or is a psychopath.
• The current U.S. population is approximately 314 million, about half of which are males, so if 2 percent of the 157 million American men suffer from one of these severe disorders, this results in a figure of 3,140,000.
• So let's conservatively estimate that if only 1 percent of these 3,140,000 men commit any kind of violent act, this results in 31,400 acts of violence per year, a nontrivial number.
• If only 1 percent of those violent acts involve murders, that leaves us with 314 unnecessary tragic deaths caused by psychopaths.
• And, finally, if only 1 percent of those murderous violent acts involves killing multiple people at once, this results in a rate of 3.14 Aurora-size mass murders per year in America, which is actually lower than the rate of around a dozen per year that we have been averaging the past half century, depending on what constitutes a mass murder (school-shootings alone that amount to more than one killed in one event happen on average once a year in the U.S.)
• History and population demographics for rates of mass murder show that Aurora-size events are going to happen again and again and again, and there is no way to predict who is going to do it, where, or when.

 In the article Mikey takes a lot longer to make his point. I stripped out a whole bunch of crap to get down to his bottom line, that there are an annual average of twelve incidents of murder where more than four people die in the USA, and they are completely unpredictable.
Which is true. Then he says this:

Thus, damage control is the only option we have, if we want to do something about this tragic social problem. And by damage control I mean gun control. Specifically, I mean outlawing all automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles for anyone who is not in law enforcement or the military. When the Second Amendment was written stating that citizens have a right to "keep and bear arms," rifles took over a minute to load one bullet at a time. The most crazed 18th century American could not possibly commit mass murder because no WMM's existed at the time.

Not really dude. They used bombs instead.

Now, this here is an example of the reason why scientists are the dumbest stumps on the planet. He goes from "tragic deaths caused by psychopaths" to "outlawing all automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles" with no intervening logic or connection between the two things. He spends the whole article proving crazy people walking around loose are a problem, and then says

"The freedom for you to own any gun you like is in conflict with my freedom to interact freely with my fellow citizens in public spaces when so many madmen mingle among us."

Yes friends, because we don't lock up dangerous crazy people any more, guns must be banned for everyone everywhere in case a crazy man might get his hands on one. Oh, but if a crazy man manages to get one anyway... you're frigged.

Dumbest. Scientist. Ever.

Why do you think they're poor?!!!

NY Post:

Welfare recipients took out cash at bars, liquor stores, X-rated video shops, hookah parlors and even strip clubs — where they presumably spent their taxpayer money on lap dances rather than diapers, a Post investigation found.

What, this is a surprise? Maybe to liberal bleeding heart types, but not to anyone who knows The Poor. They're poor because they're -stoopid-.

The Phantom

Beliefs have consequences.

You know how atheist Leftists looooove to mock Christians because they believe in stuff that can't be proven or isn't true?

Well now friends we can mock them back, because they have their own catechism of stuff that's completely wrong.

Case in point, the idea of gun control is that guns -cause- violence. The presence of a gun in an emotionally charged situation creates the situation that someone will get shot. If no gun was there, then no fatal incident could happen.  Because its much too difficult to simply beat somebody to death, whereas shooting somebody is easy. Just a trigger pull.  Therefore because its easier people are more likely to do it. In the literature this is known as the "Impulsivity Theory" of gun violence.

Now, without arguing the validity of the theory just yet, let us examine the logical consequence of it. If guns make it easier to kill somebody, how about other things? Wouldn't a knife make it easier to impulsively stab somebody? Well yes it would, and indeed there are plenty of British doctors signing on to a policy of banning certain kinds of knives.

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

Also, Japan has what's referred to as the Firearms & Swords Control Law.  Meaning anything the cops feel like calling a sword, pretty much you don't get to have. In Japan, on the whole only the cops and the Yakuza have guns, and only museums have swords. Except for the odd mass murderer, now and again.

How about a baseball bat, wouldn't that make it easier to beat somebody? Well yes it would! Shouldn't we ban them then? Well yes we should, and in Tokyo they do!

Four teen-age biker gang members were arrested Sunday as Tokyo police for the first time wielded a traffic restriction on cruising the streets with baseball bats.

A 17-year-old metal worker from Chiba and three other boys received the dubious honor after they allegedly carried metal baseball bats while riding around Tokyo.

Under a revised Tokyo traffic regulation introduced on Sept. 30, people sitting on the backseat of a motorbike are banned from holding a baseball bat, iron pipe or similar items.

Highway police said the boys, who were riding tandem on two bikes, were netted at a temporary checkpoint set up in a Toshima-ku part of the Metropolitan Expressway early Sunday. (Mainichi Shimbun, Oct. 28, 2001)

Hey, how about DANCING? Dance clubs attract all sorts of bad elements, can we ban dancing? Well yes we can, and in Tokyo they do.

Japan's club scene is dying. From Sapporo to Fukuoka, dance floors in some of Japan's most prominent venues are filled with motionless twenty or thirtysomethings, if at all.  Club staff make their rounds, interrupting unknowing or rebellious jubilants and pointing to the prominent "No Dancing" signs in major Roppongi clubs (your taste may vary), where they even give out paper warnings that read something like this:

              PLEASE NO DANCING

It's prohibited by the Japanese law to dance in any commercial place in Japan. We don't allow to dance in this establishment.

Thanks for the cooperation.

Poor translation aside, this is the state of Japan now. Some clubs even kick out dancers, although swaying like you're at a high school dance seems to be acceptable (perhaps out of pity).

 Clearly once you believe that things cause crime, there is no limit to what you need to ban.  Britain banned guns, now these idiots at NIH are on about knives. Japan banned guns AND knives, now they're on to baseball bats and dancing. In Saudi Arabia women wear the veil because a woman's uncovered features cause rape!

That this belief is both obviously and demonstrably insane does not matter! The believers believe it, and they will put thier hands over their ears and shout "La la la can't hear you!" if you try to question their belief. You can't talk to them, you can't mock them, you can't shame them. They have the One True Belief and -you- are just an infidel.

There's really only one way to manage people bent on banning your freedom to keep you from misbehaving. Three guesses what that is, first two don't count.

The Phantom