Now that sounds like a range I would like to avoid. I like the one I go to since they take a very strict approach to those things and it sounds like you did as well while you were at that one. That seems to be how a lot of those things are one person leaves and things get lax.
As much as I would like to avoid the bears, I have had close encounters with them while out in the woods, as well as the wolves and cougars. Then again that is the only place where I carry a hand gun because my chances of needing it are fairly high. I haven't had to kill any of those critters but have used it to scare off the one wolf in front of me who was trying to drive me back into the waiting pack. I have also discharged it while heading away from a mamma bear and cub up the trail, and was very glad when I came around a bend in the trail and was about 2 feet from the ass of a black bear that was crawling into a hollowed out log. This ignores the times that I have seen such critters off a ways. A lot of it is being aware of your surroundings but being stalked by wolves is not fun and cougars really to move silently through the woods but even then it seems I have a 50/50 chance of seeing one of the large predators up there. With critters there is no quick draw, if something seems a bit off or I can see one I get it out and ready.
Unless you are one of my uncle's co-workers why wouldn't you clean the barrel or the gun after you use it? It should be considered regular maintenance just like changing oil and belts on your car. Of course if you don't take car of your shit it won't work, just like one of my uncle's coworkers has the same shotgun I do and his doesn't fire over half the time, while mine works perfectly and has never had a problem even though I use mine a lot more.
This a thousand times. In the US we live in a society that has lots of firearms so the genie is out of the bottle on that one. What we need is compulsory education on them just like we do for vehicles. In my high school everyone had to take the drivers ed course where everyone learned the rules of the road and hopefully enough to get their learners permit. We need the same thing for firearms. Hopefully this would accomplish two thing, the first being fewer stupid people doing stupid things with firearms, and the other might be fewer people who are absolutely terrified by the mere existence of firearms.
As far as training goes the following models are all good with the first 3 being among the best:
The basic firearm safety
Hunter education course (same as above but also focuses on hunting)
The BSA shotgun or rifle merit badges.
A state carry permit course (not impressed with these compared to the other options)
Sounds about right. The NRA like to say they speak for all gun owners but they don't. I support some of the initiatives (trigger locks) but there is a lot of rhetoric coming from them that I don't support. Because of this I will never join their organization and they will probably be pulled more to the extreme since there are groups farther out that are pulling away members. I would much rather support groups like Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever who do good work advocating for hunters and restoring and preserving wild spaces.
Don't worry the Boy Scouts of America still offers rifle and shotgun merit badges and they still have the same requirements that they did ~30 years ago when I got them. When I got them the range instructor was an old salty marine so we all learned how shoot like the marines do. I managed to make it into the dime club and to demonstrate proficiency to the instructor for the badge you had to be able to get 5 shots in a group that was quarter sized. There was a lot of emphasis on safe handling, when to shoot and not, cleaning, maintenance, and shooting proficiency. Both the rifle and shotgun merit badges were more comprehensive than the standard firearm safety, or even the Minnesota carry permit trainings that I have also done. They are an excellent program.
I prefer to start with an air rifle instead of blanks. No I am not talking the $40 daisy BB gun but the higher end.22 or.25 cal breach loading $200+ air rifles. They are easier to handle than a.22lr and are very accurate and I can shoot it in the back yard while a.22lr I couldn't. I did expose my children to handling and cleaning my firearms before I started teaching the oldest to shoot (6 years old) but that was to remove their curiosity. They have seen me disassemble and clean the firearms and have seen me handle them properly. I have explained what to do and why you do it so that it isn't a mystery. This summer I showed the oldest one why you handle firearms safely and besides it is always fun to explode a watermelon. Good fun targets were always the store brand pop cans. Shake them up really good, toss them out a ways (still closed) and even with an air rifle they make a big mess when hit.
At least to me it doesn't sound like those cited cases where responsible gun owners and that should be the response of any reasonable person. There was so much neglance in each of those cases it shouldn't come as a surprise that such things happened. We need to proscute more people for neglance especially in cases like this and responsible gun owners need to come out in support of such things.
I am one of the responsible gun owners who has a nice fireproof gun safe that is bolted into the concrete floor in my basement and have the ammunition stored elsewhere. I also use the trigger locks when I remove the firearms from the safe to go hunting or to the range (I also have a couple of nice hard sided cases for them as well). The problem is that responsible gun owners never make the news since nothing happens, the only time I see a news story about a responsible gun owner is maybe once a year on the back page of the sports section if someone gets a really big buck during deer season.
You are correct in that if you have children and firearms you need to introduce them to them but it needs to be done in the correct fashion. Kids think such things are neat and are naturally curious so you need to remove that curiosity. My oldest for the first time got dad's introduction to what a firearm can do this summer (12 gauge slug vs a watermelon) but has been taught how safely handle a firearm for several years. I have also started to introduce him to shooting using an air rifle (not a BB gun).
I also don't like the current movement of people doing open carry, especially of rifle and shotguns. I understand their reasoning but it does not draw the kind of attention they want and only makes them look like loons. They state it is for their protection or to exercise their rights but a lot of people feel intimidated by such actions. Also it seems that they are trivializing the firearm by using it to make a political statement. And for the record I do have a carry permit, but I only carry in places where I am likely to need it which is up by where I hunt since there are large predators that I have had close encounters with.
As far as the fingerprint scanner to unlock the gun I am fine with it as an option but I do not want to make them mandatory. Having it as an option is fine but the last thing I want is to trust in something additional that might fail if a bear is charging me or if I am being stalked by wolves. Add in that most of the time when I am carrying a sidearm I am wearing thin gloves this would be a complete failure.
I would like to know what range that is so that I can stay clear. I have only once seen a problem at a range and that was from someone who probably shouldn't have owned a firearm. The were shooting a 20 gauge with slugs and even at 25 yards only managed to hit the paper about 75% of the time. The individual after emptying the shotgun didn't follow the rules and was not handling it correctly (unloaded but waving it around). The range officer gave the cease fire command and had everyone put down there firearms and this person still didn't have a clue what was going on. They got a good yelling at, told to leave, and banned for life.
If you are worried about running out of water by doing this on large scale industrial process then you have far too few concerns in your life. Seriously we have use about 1 trillion barrels of oil in all of human existence, or about 55 trillion gallons. Assuming that all 1 trillion barrels of oil were used in the last century and if we used water at the same rate it would take somewhere around 5000 years to completely drain Lake Superior and by volume there are bigger lakes and on top of that there is still the oceans which I gather are rising so it might solve that problem as well.
If they are that desperate I wonder if I could make them a counter offer and send them $50 US to go and kick their boss in the crotch as hard as they could while having the phone on speaker so I could hear it.
While I would like to believe that this is the case reality seems to differ. I have been a fairly active citizen when contacting my elected representatives and the various candidates. Problem is that far too many people don't care and spout the anything for safety or if you have nothing to hide bull shit so they don't really care.
While sitting in a similar boat to yours self I have wondered if one could file theft charges against the officer doing the seizure. I don't know if this has been tried or is even prevented by law but if I found my self in that situation that is what I would do.
Granted you would be filing it in the with the department that the officer works for but if you had a video and audio recording of the incident it would seem like good evidence and make some hay with the local media about it providing them the recording.
This just gives me some ideas of what condition I should keep the interior of my old junk jeep in. It is perfectly road worthy but beat up and rusty on the exterior and I don't bother to really clean the interior after hunting or camping. There are even blood stains on the roof from the deer I have shot over the years. I am the kind of person who would make a big stink about things and do my best to put the screws to the police department if they pulled that on me.
The lesson here is that Nebraska sucks. The entire state seems to be setup to extract money from people driving through it since nobody would want to stop. When they have construction zones that stretch for 10+ miles where all you see is the occasional road barrel off in a ditch or the occasional construction equipment that has been sitting so long the hydraulics are rusting but it is a construction zone with a lowered speed limit and double fines so you will see cops every 2 miles waiting for the speeder.
When nationalistic Americans brag about our Bill or Rights, I wonder which version they're excited about: the version one gets from a plain reading of its text, or the twisted monstrosity that the three branches of government have foisted upon us.
Depends on the ruling doled out by the court. If it is one that agrees with their political leanings then regardless if it comes from the plain text reading or twisted and tortured interpretation it is a good one.
Hey we aren't lawless. We have so many laws and regulations that it is probably physically impossible for a single individual to read all of them in a lifetime, and we are creating more every day. Even one segment of the law that almost everyone has to deal with each year is basically unintelligible as it is almost 4 million words long and that is just the US Federal tax code.
Now joking aside we are probably at a point where due to the number of laws we as a country are very similar to a lawless one. You know it is bad when the people who do research for congress can't provide a count of the criminal offenses that exist in the USC:
My best guess would be yes you could use it as a battery and it would almost certainly be weaponized. As for how much energy could be stored my guess would be it would be the Planck Energy * (1cm^3 / Planck Volume) and I don't really feel like doing that calculation but it looks like it would be a lot given that the Planck Energy is about equal to the energy in an average car's tank of fuel and the Planck Volume is really small ~4^-104 m^3.
From what I have read going back to the time of the ancient Greeks it seems if you made it out of childhood, weren't a solider, and lived in the city or surrounding stable area as a free person you would likely live into your 70s. So over the last ~3000 years we really haven't progressed that much if your made it to adulthood (let's say ~15%), but we have made great strides in preventing people form dying before the reached adulthood.
Sounds similar to some people I knew in high school. One was especially bad in that he though he was smarter than most because he was able to get into the National Honor Society. He took the easy classes every opportunity, eg the practical math class that covered how to do simple addition and subtraction for things like a check book, never taking something as hard as a normal class if it could be avoided and never taking an AP or advanced class. He like to brag about how great he was since he was the quarterback and was in NHS and in general was a dick, think stereotypical high school QB (I didn't get beaten up by him simply because I was bigger and strong but a lot of my geeky/nerdy friends did until one of them hit him with the handle from a bumper jack).
Even without that I wouldn't call some of them sedate. The S60 with the 2.0 Liter, 4-Cylinde, Supercharged & Turbocharged, Direct Injection engine that puts out 302hp and 295 lb-ft torque looks like it would be fun to beat on.
I propose that my idea for anon-linear clock be rolled out for 'smart' watch. Basically, just a watch/clock with the time prescaled so that during lunch hour time runs slower. The working hours compensate for this by running faster.
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Now that sounds like a range I would like to avoid. I like the one I go to since they take a very strict approach to those things and it sounds like you did as well while you were at that one. That seems to be how a lot of those things are one person leaves and things get lax.
As much as I would like to avoid the bears, I have had close encounters with them while out in the woods, as well as the wolves and cougars. Then again that is the only place where I carry a hand gun because my chances of needing it are fairly high. I haven't had to kill any of those critters but have used it to scare off the one wolf in front of me who was trying to drive me back into the waiting pack. I have also discharged it while heading away from a mamma bear and cub up the trail, and was very glad when I came around a bend in the trail and was about 2 feet from the ass of a black bear that was crawling into a hollowed out log. This ignores the times that I have seen such critters off a ways. A lot of it is being aware of your surroundings but being stalked by wolves is not fun and cougars really to move silently through the woods but even then it seems I have a 50/50 chance of seeing one of the large predators up there. With critters there is no quick draw, if something seems a bit off or I can see one I get it out and ready.
but this seems like a good middle ground between your "guns are something the feds allow you to have" and what the constitution says.
Then change the Constitution.
Unless you are one of my uncle's co-workers why wouldn't you clean the barrel or the gun after you use it? It should be considered regular maintenance just like changing oil and belts on your car. Of course if you don't take car of your shit it won't work, just like one of my uncle's coworkers has the same shotgun I do and his doesn't fire over half the time, while mine works perfectly and has never had a problem even though I use mine a lot more.
This a thousand times. In the US we live in a society that has lots of firearms so the genie is out of the bottle on that one. What we need is compulsory education on them just like we do for vehicles. In my high school everyone had to take the drivers ed course where everyone learned the rules of the road and hopefully enough to get their learners permit. We need the same thing for firearms. Hopefully this would accomplish two thing, the first being fewer stupid people doing stupid things with firearms, and the other might be fewer people who are absolutely terrified by the mere existence of firearms.
As far as training goes the following models are all good with the first 3 being among the best:
The basic firearm safety
Hunter education course (same as above but also focuses on hunting)
The BSA shotgun or rifle merit badges.
A state carry permit course (not impressed with these compared to the other options)
My friend came up with "Pro-gun, anti-NRA"
Sounds about right. The NRA like to say they speak for all gun owners but they don't. I support some of the initiatives (trigger locks) but there is a lot of rhetoric coming from them that I don't support. Because of this I will never join their organization and they will probably be pulled more to the extreme since there are groups farther out that are pulling away members. I would much rather support groups like Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever who do good work advocating for hunters and restoring and preserving wild spaces.
Don't worry the Boy Scouts of America still offers rifle and shotgun merit badges and they still have the same requirements that they did ~30 years ago when I got them. When I got them the range instructor was an old salty marine so we all learned how shoot like the marines do. I managed to make it into the dime club and to demonstrate proficiency to the instructor for the badge you had to be able to get 5 shots in a group that was quarter sized. There was a lot of emphasis on safe handling, when to shoot and not, cleaning, maintenance, and shooting proficiency. Both the rifle and shotgun merit badges were more comprehensive than the standard firearm safety, or even the Minnesota carry permit trainings that I have also done. They are an excellent program.
I prefer to start with an air rifle instead of blanks. No I am not talking the $40 daisy BB gun but the higher end .22 or .25 cal breach loading $200+ air rifles. They are easier to handle than a .22lr and are very accurate and I can shoot it in the back yard while a .22lr I couldn't. I did expose my children to handling and cleaning my firearms before I started teaching the oldest to shoot (6 years old) but that was to remove their curiosity. They have seen me disassemble and clean the firearms and have seen me handle them properly. I have explained what to do and why you do it so that it isn't a mystery. This summer I showed the oldest one why you handle firearms safely and besides it is always fun to explode a watermelon. Good fun targets were always the store brand pop cans. Shake them up really good, toss them out a ways (still closed) and even with an air rifle they make a big mess when hit.
At least to me it doesn't sound like those cited cases where responsible gun owners and that should be the response of any reasonable person. There was so much neglance in each of those cases it shouldn't come as a surprise that such things happened. We need to proscute more people for neglance especially in cases like this and responsible gun owners need to come out in support of such things.
I am one of the responsible gun owners who has a nice fireproof gun safe that is bolted into the concrete floor in my basement and have the ammunition stored elsewhere. I also use the trigger locks when I remove the firearms from the safe to go hunting or to the range (I also have a couple of nice hard sided cases for them as well). The problem is that responsible gun owners never make the news since nothing happens, the only time I see a news story about a responsible gun owner is maybe once a year on the back page of the sports section if someone gets a really big buck during deer season.
You are correct in that if you have children and firearms you need to introduce them to them but it needs to be done in the correct fashion. Kids think such things are neat and are naturally curious so you need to remove that curiosity. My oldest for the first time got dad's introduction to what a firearm can do this summer (12 gauge slug vs a watermelon) but has been taught how safely handle a firearm for several years. I have also started to introduce him to shooting using an air rifle (not a BB gun).
I also don't like the current movement of people doing open carry, especially of rifle and shotguns. I understand their reasoning but it does not draw the kind of attention they want and only makes them look like loons. They state it is for their protection or to exercise their rights but a lot of people feel intimidated by such actions. Also it seems that they are trivializing the firearm by using it to make a political statement. And for the record I do have a carry permit, but I only carry in places where I am likely to need it which is up by where I hunt since there are large predators that I have had close encounters with.
As far as the fingerprint scanner to unlock the gun I am fine with it as an option but I do not want to make them mandatory. Having it as an option is fine but the last thing I want is to trust in something additional that might fail if a bear is charging me or if I am being stalked by wolves. Add in that most of the time when I am carrying a sidearm I am wearing thin gloves this would be a complete failure.
I would like to know what range that is so that I can stay clear. I have only once seen a problem at a range and that was from someone who probably shouldn't have owned a firearm. The were shooting a 20 gauge with slugs and even at 25 yards only managed to hit the paper about 75% of the time. The individual after emptying the shotgun didn't follow the rules and was not handling it correctly (unloaded but waving it around). The range officer gave the cease fire command and had everyone put down there firearms and this person still didn't have a clue what was going on. They got a good yelling at, told to leave, and banned for life.
If you are worried about running out of water by doing this on large scale industrial process then you have far too few concerns in your life. Seriously we have use about 1 trillion barrels of oil in all of human existence, or about 55 trillion gallons. Assuming that all 1 trillion barrels of oil were used in the last century and if we used water at the same rate it would take somewhere around 5000 years to completely drain Lake Superior and by volume there are bigger lakes and on top of that there is still the oceans which I gather are rising so it might solve that problem as well.
If they are that desperate I wonder if I could make them a counter offer and send them $50 US to go and kick their boss in the crotch as hard as they could while having the phone on speaker so I could hear it.
[Citation Needed]
While I would like to believe that this is the case reality seems to differ. I have been a fairly active citizen when contacting my elected representatives and the various candidates. Problem is that far too many people don't care and spout the anything for safety or if you have nothing to hide bull shit so they don't really care.
The GP probably just expects his police states to have iron gauntlets instead of velvet gloves.
While sitting in a similar boat to yours self I have wondered if one could file theft charges against the officer doing the seizure. I don't know if this has been tried or is even prevented by law but if I found my self in that situation that is what I would do.
Granted you would be filing it in the with the department that the officer works for but if you had a video and audio recording of the incident it would seem like good evidence and make some hay with the local media about it providing them the recording.
This just gives me some ideas of what condition I should keep the interior of my old junk jeep in. It is perfectly road worthy but beat up and rusty on the exterior and I don't bother to really clean the interior after hunting or camping. There are even blood stains on the roof from the deer I have shot over the years. I am the kind of person who would make a big stink about things and do my best to put the screws to the police department if they pulled that on me.
Upstate NY is a sauna just with more snow compared to the American version of Siberia known as Minnesota and North Dakota.
The lesson here is that Nebraska sucks. The entire state seems to be setup to extract money from people driving through it since nobody would want to stop. When they have construction zones that stretch for 10+ miles where all you see is the occasional road barrel off in a ditch or the occasional construction equipment that has been sitting so long the hydraulics are rusting but it is a construction zone with a lowered speed limit and double fines so you will see cops every 2 miles waiting for the speeder.
When nationalistic Americans brag about our Bill or Rights, I wonder which version they're excited about: the version one gets from a plain reading of its text, or the twisted monstrosity that the three branches of government have foisted upon us.
Depends on the ruling doled out by the court. If it is one that agrees with their political leanings then regardless if it comes from the plain text reading or twisted and tortured interpretation it is a good one.
We have so many laws and regulations that it is probably physically impossible for a single individual to read all of them in a lifetime, and we are creating more every day. Even one segment of the law that almost everyone has to deal with each year is basically unintelligible as it is almost 4 million words long and that is just the US Federal tax code.
Now joking aside we are probably at a point where due to the number of laws we as a country are very similar to a lawless one. You know it is bad when the people who do research for congress can't provide a count of the criminal offenses that exist in the USC:
When staff for a task force of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to update its 2008 calculation of criminal offenses in the U.S.C. in 2013, the CRS responded that they lack the manpower and resources to accomplish the task.
My best guess would be yes you could use it as a battery and it would almost certainly be weaponized. As for how much energy could be stored my guess would be it would be the Planck Energy * (1cm^3 / Planck Volume) and I don't really feel like doing that calculation but it looks like it would be a lot given that the Planck Energy is about equal to the energy in an average car's tank of fuel and the Planck Volume is really small ~4^-104 m^3.
From what I have read going back to the time of the ancient Greeks it seems if you made it out of childhood, weren't a solider, and lived in the city or surrounding stable area as a free person you would likely live into your 70s. So over the last ~3000 years we really haven't progressed that much if your made it to adulthood (let's say ~15%), but we have made great strides in preventing people form dying before the reached adulthood.
Sounds similar to some people I knew in high school. One was especially bad in that he though he was smarter than most because he was able to get into the National Honor Society. He took the easy classes every opportunity, eg the practical math class that covered how to do simple addition and subtraction for things like a check book, never taking something as hard as a normal class if it could be avoided and never taking an AP or advanced class. He like to brag about how great he was since he was the quarterback and was in NHS and in general was a dick, think stereotypical high school QB (I didn't get beaten up by him simply because I was bigger and strong but a lot of my geeky/nerdy friends did until one of them hit him with the handle from a bumper jack).
Even without that I wouldn't call some of them sedate. The S60 with the 2.0 Liter, 4-Cylinde, Supercharged & Turbocharged, Direct Injection engine that puts out 302hp and 295 lb-ft torque looks like it would be fun to beat on.
I propose that my idea for anon-linear clock be rolled out for 'smart' watch. Basically, just a watch/clock with the time prescaled so that during lunch hour time runs slower. The working hours compensate for this by running faster.
Best idea ever.