This site has apparently been around for a year now, but I don’t know that I’ve come across it. Worth a look.

I added it to the blogroll.

Here’s a bit from an article on ‘tweens,’ kids that used to referred to as ‘pre-teens.’:

Last year, Skenazy received national attention—and not the good kind—for allowing her nine-year-old to take the subway home alone from Bloomingdale’s. She says, “The assumptions are that you should be there constantly, and that your child is in constant danger.”

Skenazy believes that parental fear is driven by the constant newsfeed we’ve all come to expect: “You turn on the TV and the worst possible thing is happening, somewhere, 24 hours a day.” Television dramas are also to blame. Skenazy cites a Mayo Clinic study that compared two seasons of CSI with the actual crimes committed during the same time period: Television crimes are generally committed by strangers, whereas real-life crimes are not. “So you get the feeling that all crime is random, as if lightning bolts were constantly raining down from the sky,” Skenazy says.

In a recent essay for The New York Review of Books, author Michael Chabon wrote, “At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children’s lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.”

As the parent of a 14-year-old and an 11-year-old, this is something that’s been on my mind for years. I think we fall somewhere in the middle of the scale, but if at 14 I had suddenly been watched over and restrained like I watch over and restrain my kids, I would have thought I was in prison.

Of course, things aren’t like they were when we were kids. Or do we just think that they aren’t?

Opinions?

Gun Owners Wear Weapons, Politics In Plain View

Story on OC in KTVU in California. The news report is, predictably, not quite balanced.

Advocates of “open carry” meet in public places such as this Cupertino Starbucks. When KTVU was there with a group, no one seemed to notice or care.

Even a police officer driving by failed to see the group drinking coffee outside with their weapons in plain sight.

They don’t seem to grasp that because the cops didn’t do anything doesn’t mean that they didn’t notice.

In California, police can check an OC gun to see if it’s loaded. OC must be unloaded in the state.

Here’s another bit from the story:

At an appearance by President Obama in Phoenix this past summer, open carry advocates showed up with automatic weapons.

Whoops! As far as I know, it was one weapon. And it wasn’t automatic.

What’s a little bit of a lie in a news story if it helps, though?

Human Events has a new section called Guns & Patriots. I haven’t had a chance to completely check it out, but it looks like it’s going to be worth keeping an eye on.

Section editor Mike Piccione writes about The Rifle You Have Always Wanted starting with

Everybody wants a gun they absolutely don’t need for any sound reason. So you start creating reasons

“Everybody”? I though it was just me.

Fretting about the FN 5.7 reportedly used by the Ft. Hood killer, because gun control advocates call it a ‘cop killer’.

Despite the hand wringing over the ability of armor piercing ammo, to, um, pierce armor, it doesn’t seem likely that any of the victims were wearing armor at the time of the incident. So that hand wringing, like so much of it in the press, is pointless.

For what it’s worth, this gun seems like a curious selection for someone who was planning to do this. Did things go differently than he planned? Had he originally planned to do something different?

Anyway, while some worry about the dangerous model of gun he used, the rest of us will know it’s the man who is the problem, not the tool. After all, it wasn’t the ‘cop killer’ gun that made him shoot the wounded again.

UPDATE: Confederate Yankee notes that Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who was wounded while fighting Hasan, might be the first law enforcement agent ever hit by this ‘cop killer’ gun.

UPDATE 2: Wow. This ‘cop killer’ thing is getting more attention than I would have thought, given that it has no basis in reality. Should have known better.

Anyway, the ‘cop killer’ aspect, even as portrayed by the antis, only comes into play if armor piercing ammo is used. I don’t know for sure, but I haven’t seen any reports indicating that Hasan actually used AP ammo, which isn’t available through normal civilian outlets. Hasan is, of course, military, but that doesn’t mean he had access to the military and LE only armor piercing ammo. Remember that his gun was a civilian purchase.

For what it’s worth, not only is the Five-seveN an odd choice for this sort of thing, but it would probably would be LESS lethal with AP ammo against unarmored targets.

I went over to MediaMatters to see what they had to say about Obama’s press conference shout-outs yesterday (surprise, surprise, surprise…they got bupkis) and saw this post on one of their blogs:

“Gun control” banned from Ft. Hood news coverage

According to a check on TVeyes.com, the phrase “gun control” has not been mentioned once* in the context of the Ft. Hood shooting by any reporter, anchor or pundit appearing on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, or MSNBC.

In the dozens and dozens of cumulative hours of Ft. Hood coverage amassed by those television outlets, as they focus on the latest mass, workplace shooting, the phrase “gun control” has not been uttered once. Once again, in the wake of epic gun violence, the topic of guns and non-stop gun violence in America is not on the media table and is not open for debate.

When the Columbine killers unleashed their fury inside a suburban Denver high school in April 1999, killing 15 and wounding more than 20, the horror show set off all kinds of media-driven debates about gun control. i.e. Were current laws too lenient, etc.

Today, the press couldn’t care less about the issue or the related policy debate. It seems gun advocates have cowed the press corps, even as we watch wave after wave of mass shootings.

The blogger, Eric Boehlert, updates his post to note that the phrase “gun control” was finally used one time in new coverage by a guest.

He seems disappointed that the media isn’t driving more debates about gun control. He’ll get over it. Or not. Who really cares?

We’ve had a lot of those debates and the momentum is clearly on the side of those who think we already have enough or too many controls in place that aren’t doing any good. Or actually doing harm.

It could be that the media isn’t using this incident to drive gun control debates because it’s been less than 24 hours since it happened and they just haven’t started up yet. It could be that they are waiting so as to not appear too overeager to capitalize on a tragedy. It could be that they’re being careful due to the momentum that the Supreme Court decision on the DC gun ban has given the civil rights side.

Regardless, I’ve got no doubt that we’ll be hearing more noise in that direction soon.

U.S. Army Spc. Peter Hurlock qualifying with the M16 in Korea. April 14, 2009. (U.S. photo by Staff Sgt. Christophe D. Paul/Released)

A couple of posts by C.J. Chivers:

How Reliable Is the M-16 Rifle?

and

The M-16 Argument Heats Up, Again

Good overall views of the issue, though the increasing use of 77-grain Mk 262 ammunition with the Special Forces and the poor showing in US Army dust chamber tests against a trio of piston guns were not mentioned.

Also, he writes about the M855 not “fragmenting” as well as the M193. Didn’t he probably mean “tumbling”? Though they do sometimes fragment, I thought that was not the design intent.

Anyway, it’s nice to see decent coverage of this issue where it might get a little more visibility.

Last July I mentioned that a new digital magazine about AR Guns and Hunting called, um, AR Guns & Hunting, was on the way from Grand View Media Group and that it would be edited by Predator Xtreme’s Ralph Lermayer. Well, it’s here:

AR Guns & Hunting
Volume 1, Issue 1

Read the premier issue, which is packed with a lot of great stuff. I’ll have to spend a little more time looking, but two articles that jump right out at Murdoc are Calibers that Hunt by Peter B. Mathiesen and AR Snafus by Kevin Murmatsu.

Overall, it looks like a major winner, and not only for hunters. I encourage you to check it out.

A note on the format: I was talking to Ralph at an event earlier this month and made the mistake of asking when his new web site would going live.  He immediately corrected me with a “it’s not a ‘web site’…it’s an online magazine.” And that is exactly what it is, laid out like a traditional print magazine but incorporating multimedia such as video into its pages. The interface works well and the pages are absolutely beautiful, but those used to surfing standard web page publishing may be a little put off. An upside is that you can download the entire 140-page issue via Google Gears for reading while offline.

Links Between Brady & MAIG Established

This is brilliant.

One thing I wonder about, though, is the amount of exposure with the general population this will get. Sure, it’s showing up on lots of gun blogs and lots of Conservative blogs, but that’s mostly preaching to the choir.

Legacy Media has lost its monopoly but it still retains a lot of its power. While we laugh about this and rightly congratulate those who put it together and spread the word, we need to remember that the biggies are still biggies. Things are changing (mostly for the better) but they’ve got a long ways to go.

I still maintain that gun owners should proceed with caution when it comes to open carrying to political events like this, but it sure is nice to see some liars de-fanged so effectively.

Via Sebastian.

UPDATE: Americans for Limited Government is calling for heads.