Wednesday Chopped lettuce

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun."

—Raymond Chandler
Farewell My Lovely

Yeah yeah, one of those days...at least teh weather seems to have briefly broken, and we might accidentally have one day of spring before the snow returns.

First, some thoughts from the great columnist Thomas Sowell and why the media is so obsessed with counting bullets. It sort of reminds me of when I was along for the ride on the Grenada invasion...occasionally I'd desert the Rangers and EOD guys I was hanging with to visit one of those military press briefings. These MSM guys would be howling for body count numbers...interestingly enough, and something pointed out by the military briefers, the same MSM guys who were frothing at the mouth for body count numbers had previously decried "body count journalism" as one of the most repulsive outcomes of the Vietnam War. Go figure. Anyhow, here's Sowell on bullet counts:

People who have never fired a gun in their lives say that they cannot understand why the police fired so many bullets. If it is something that they have never experienced, there is of course no reason why they should be expected to understand.

But, even after confessing their ignorance, such people often proceed to spout off, just as if they knew what they were talking about.

It is very easy for a pistol shot to miss, even in the safety and calm of a firing range, much less in a desperate situation where a decision must be made in a split second that can cost you your life or end someone else’s life.

In a life-and-death situation, nobody counts how many bullets he is firing, much less how many bullets others are firing. It is not like a western movie, where the hero whips out his six-shooter, fires one time, and the villain drops dead.

A factual study of more than 200 real-life incidents where the police fired their guns found that most of the shots missed.

Even at a distance as close as six feet, just over half the shots missed. This may be far less surprising to people who have actually fired pistols than to people who have not.

Sowell adds this note:

Nor does even a clear hit always render the wounded person harmless. When your life is on the line, you keep on firing until you are damn sure it is safe to stop.

Amen to that! Sort of a mantra for the gun culture.

I promised myself I wouldn't get into any long political rants for the rest of the week, but I would like to note Cybscryb's comment on my last post on "Obama the Closer:"

We might get by with one more election cycle holding our nose and voting for the lesser of two evils, but if you've read the latest critique of the party by GOP Representative Davis...26 pages of why the GOP is in trouble, and not one single word about protecting the Second Amendment.

When I was at the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation shoot last week, I was heartened that Steve Sanetti, the new President of the National Shooting Sports Foundation and former head of Ruger, cnstantly reminded the pols that it wasn't just about ducks and the Farm Bill, that the firearms industry and Second Amendment issues were critical.

Still, there's a huge disconnect between us and our political supporters...they literally don't understand — or care — what is important to us. Okay, enough said for today...

Planning for the new show continues apace. In the meantime, I think I need a new watch, like this Pimp model featured on Tokyo Flash.


Here's how you tell time with it...if you understand it, you're smarter than the average Japanese pimp! Definitely smarter than me today...