Fun Turns to Tragedy!!!

The Skinny

I am a gun enthusiast trapped in the People's Republic of Maryland. My political affiliation is Independent, as the Ruling parties are both full of crap, and long ago stopped representing the common man. If the Libertarians weren't such freaks I would probably be one. I am a member of the Nation of Riflemen and damn proud of it. I once took an oath that I would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. As far as I know I never broke that oath, and will continue to follow it. I am not Politically Correct and will NEVER be Politically Correct. If you need to know more, feel free, Ask.

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Man I thought that the weekends were for relaxing... I got the speaker stands all finished. Just have to put sand in them and they will be ready to go. I ended up with 3 coats of poly on the stands and no sanding problems this time. We spent 4~5 hours yesterday putting the bag for the under water video housing together. It got a little bit bigger as I decided after packing the hard suit case with all our dive gear that I did not have room for the Light Cannon 100s. The bag is quite nice and it was fun working with my sweetie while designing and building the bag. Have the handles and a zipper left to sew onto the bag and it will be finished. Got our regs back on saturday and I think that it will be the last time I use Scuba Hut to service my gear. I was worried that they would no be finished with them and they have had them for over a month. The store is also not the neatest or best organized and they use the excuse of "Its a working dive shop" to justify not cleaning things up. They never seem to have the things I need in stock and just seem to run things on a wing and a prayer. The next nearest store that services Scuba Pro gear is in Annapolis which is 20 miles verses 6 miles... Oh well. 3 days till vacation. Well in general I hate the fact that with everything that you buy today the sales person pushes you to buy the extended warranty. Now on general principal I just can't see getting the extended warranty, most technology seem so disposable right now. Case in point For getting the warranty. My Ti book. Did not get the warranty and the screen just decided that I did not really need all of it to be functional. I could work on the left half of my screen but not the right... Bummer. Called Apple said it would be 1K minimum for the repair. Big bummer. Bought a new 17 inch Al book but could have used the Ti book for another year before really needing an upgrade. So the warranty would have saved me about a grand after the cost of the warranty. Liz and my Ford Lightning. Got the warranty after a friend suggested that it would be a very good thing to do on this particular truck since it is a High Performance vehicle. Well last week the truck decided that it would do bad things to itself. It bent a valve and ejected a piston. the dealership had to yank the engine, replace a piston, replace the entire right head. The dealer would have charged me $3,500 dollars to do the work and replace the parts. Well the extended warranty costed $1,800 dollars and in the case it paid for itself right out of the gate on just one trouble. So in the future if the Item is over 1,500 bucks it looks like I will get the extended warranty. BTW I did get the apple care on the new Al book... I also got the extended warranty on the new video camera. A no fault warranty at that which does cover water damage, which is a good thing since this camera is going to go in an underwater housing when we go on vacation in 5 DAYS... Well All that work on staining and finishing was for naught. When I sanded the first coat of polyurethane finish I blew right through to the stain and into the wood. I then re-sanded all of the cabinets and have put the stain back on all of them and will probably put the poly on tomorrow night. I really want to get these speaker stands done since I have been working on them for a while. Well the Cayman Dive Lodge is calling our names pretty loudly now, we can't wait till it is time to go. We have to pick up our regulators this week along with Liz's 2 mil dive skin. The Video housing is all complete and Liz and I have to sew a carrying case for it as we have the fabric and padding all we have to do is cut it up and put the pieces together. I will post some pictures of the housing, lights, and light control arms. later this week. 11 Days to Vacation... Well we got the Lightning to the dealership and they called me on Friday morning and told me it sounded like a valve may have broken or is stuck, yada, yada. They could not start working on it Friday since there was no place in the shop to put the motor that they are going to have to pull. Once again I am very glad that we have the Premo Warranty on the Lightning and everything will be covered. 12 Days till vacation... I sometimes fear that that is the way we are heading in this country. Look what good it has done for the UK and Australia, gun violence continues to rise despite the fact that they have taken all (or most) of the firearms from the law abiding citizens. When will the politicians face the fact the people that are using firearms in the act of committing a crime are in fact criminals who could care less that they are breaking the law. Rob has a good point that we have a lot of violence in this country, even a lot of gun violence. The solution is not taking firearms away from lawful citizens. The solution has been illustrated in many places in this country. When you enforce the laws crime goes down (funny how that works ehh). If we enforce the laws on the books and put criminals away for the maximum sentence when they commit a crime with a gun we make a point that most criminals will not fail to see. Virginia has done that with their Project Exile, firearm related crime is down in Virginia on average 30% per year since its inception. Now that is something the average politician should be shouting about (and they do in VA and the criminals are aware what will happen to them if they get caught with a gun) and trying to emulate in other states. But instead they keep trying to pass laws that ban firearms and do nothing to take them out of the hands of criminals. They should be ashamed at the lack of results and the expense they incur with laws that do nothing. But it seems the politician has no shame and is not representing the people who put him in office which is his sole reason for being in office but many politicians seem to have forgotten that. In Maryland the only people that can get concealed carry permits seem to be the politicians and their lackeys (who then get arrested for DWI and just happen to have a firearm on them at the time, and by the way the media does not make a big issue of this) who have some influence on the State Police. Maybe I should run for office… Nahh. I won’t even get into the reasons that would be a bad idea, me being an unwashed barbarian who thinks that the SWAT team sniper would be a great crime fighting tool (cheaper than running the punk through our court system and then our prison system to boot)… Our news media here is no help what so ever, you rarely if ever see a report on how an armed citizen fought off or for heavens sakes killed an intruder with a firearm. Now if someone uses a firearm in the commission of a crime it is headline worthy and they do put it on the front page because violence sells well to the public. If they would only protect the second amendment as staunchly as they protect the first amendment like when they are being pressured to give up an information source we would not be where we are now. I am reminded while writing this about the story of how to cook a frog. If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water he is immediately aware of the danger and hops right out of the pot. Now if you put him in a pot of cool water the frog is happier than a pig in slop. As you slowly turn up the heat the frog gets comfortable and decides that this would be a nice place for a nap. By the time the frog wakes up and realizes that he is in trouble it is too late because he is mostly cooked and too weak to get out of the pot. So when the water does come to a boil it is too late for the frog and he is good and cooked. I definitely do not want to be in the same pot as the UK, where they are busy outlawing children’s BB guns as we speak. Also in the UK if you do happen to resist being a victim and kill a criminal while protecting yourself and your family they do their best to throw you in jail. Now there is a system run amuck, Sorry Mr. Freemarket. Well Liz and I got rid of my last fun car for a truck. Well I would only accept only one truck, a Ford Lightning. Other wise know as the redneck Corvette, 0 to 60 in 5.5 seconds yea baby. Well today Liz was driving it home from work and it developed an engine problem, at idle it ticks and if you rev the engine any it starts popping quit loudly. As a bonus you can smell fuel when you start and run the engine, which I consider not good. 14 days till vacation. On a good note I got the extended warranty before the factory warranty ran out. I got the premo warranty and everything should be covered. I will update this tomorrow when I find out just what blew up on the motor. I hope it is the supercharger since it should be covered and it is due to expire sometime after the 100,000 mile marker (which would put it out of warranty) and the truck only has 64K on it now. On Jan. 1, 2003, Maryland banned the majority of handguns manufactured after 2003 in the state. Maryland’s new law requires all new handguns to have a built-in trigger lock. That means no 2003 models of Ruger, Glock, SIG, Beretta, Kimber, Colt and many others not be sold in Maryland until they have integral locks. Which has had a very real side effect of banning many popular firearms (which may have been what the anti-gun lobby wanted in the first place) I can spit out all of the facts and figures about this law and its effects if anyone wants to really know. These locks serve no real function since I have yet to meet a handgun owner that actually uses the integral lock as it interferes with the purpose of having a firearm for home defense. The average firearm owner who is a responsible adult and who has children in the house has an external trigger lock or has the handgun locked in a gun safe or better yet both. The really laughable thing about the trigger locks is that you can make a “key” with a paperclip or a small set of needle nose pliers. Effective NO? Maryland also went ahead with a highly ineffective “Ballistic Fingerprinting” program in 2001 which mandates that all guns sold in the state of Maryland will have a cartridge test fired and cataloged. The state has spend in excess of 5 million dollars since the programs inception and has yet to show a single arrest, let alone a conviction based on “Ballistic Fingerprinting”. Now that was 5 million well spent on crime prevention NO? Additionally in October of 2001 the state of California concluded that Ballistic Fingerprinting was an unfeasible technology, since the study did not go the way the politicians in California wanted it to go they commissioned an independent review of that study. The findings of that study stated that the system was unable to match a casing 38% of the time with a casing from the same manufacture as the original casing, and 60% of the time with a casing from a different manufacture, this with each firearm only fired three times between samplings. Now I fire my weapons on average 200 times per outing so I wonder what the effectiveness of fingerprinting would be for me. Once again Effective NO? Now some of you may be wondering where I am going with this (maybe even me) but I can’t help but wonder why politicians are busy passing laws that have no effect what so ever on crime (and wasting my tax dollars). Is it just so they can look like they are doing something? You want to deter crime make the penalty fit. We have hundreds of gun laws on the books today that don’t work, they don’t work because we don’t enforce them. If you want to reduce gun crime enforce the laws on the books. Put criminals away for a long time if they want to commit a crime with a firearm. Virginia has done just that with Project Exile and it is working very well by all accounts. Another very effective crime deterrent is the armed citizen. There is a reason that there is a second amendment in the constitution. Our nations founders thought that an armed citizen was essential to the freedom of the nation, Just as the freedom of speech is essential to having a free and open nation. Our fore fathers worked very hard to ensure that we would have the right to own firearms, as well as the right to speak our minds. Now Maryland is not a Right To Carry state and that is a shame. Here are some of the stats on crime in the RTC states where you are able to exercise your second amendment rights. RTC states have lower violent crime rates, on average: 24% lower total violent crime, 22% lower murder, 37% lower robbery, and 20% lower aggravated assault. The five states with the lowest violent crime rates are RTC states. (Data: FBI) Why is having the right to carry a firearm important you may ask? It is a well established fact of law that the police are not in the business of providing protection for the average taxpayer. Its up to you to ensure your personal safety and well being, it is no one else’s job to do that unless you have the money to hire an armed guard. If don’t want to defend yourself from those who wish you harm you deserve what you get. The thing that the average criminal fears most is an armed victim. Criminals are afraid of their victims being able to defend themselves a DOJ funded study cites that 30% of felons had been shot, scared off, wounded, or captured by an armed victim. Now that is a deterrent I can live with I am glad that there are still places in this country that understand that the average citizen is a responsible person who is able to own firearms in not abuse the trust that the founders of this country gave its citizens. I just wish I lived in one of them. It could be worse just ask Mr Freemarket Anyone else out there seeing a sudden increase of spammers? I am updating MT-Blacklist daily and still getting a spam or two each day, and seeing 20 a day blacklisted. Now if I just had that many people reading my blog a day I would be happy... I will try to post my rant tomorrow, I am just getting all of my facts straight and have had to run down some unbiased sources so I can say what I want to without looking like an unwashed barbarian. I would have gotten the rant out tonight but we had puppy intermediate class tonight. Max was a real snot but he somehow managed to win the little obedience contest at the end of class for the second week in a row. Err 16 days till vacation... Well I am trying very hard to have a strait week of posts and get in the habit of posting every night. Went tanning again tonight. Last time I got a wee bit burned and had to wait 4 days until the second session and it did not help that I got burned on Saturday while mowing the lawn. I went in for 8 minutes this time and I think my back may be a bit red but most of the other parts of me feel fine. I guess that Liz will tell me how the back looks tonight. Liz and I seemed to have acquired a coffee addiction. After not drinking coffee for 35 year I have finally found coffee that I like. It is a coffee snob brand from the northwest (imagine that) and it is definitely not starbucks. A company called Ravens Brew who only roasts small batches to order. We particularly like Kodiak and Resurrection blend from the five types of coffee from the first order. For our second order, we finally got our grinder and ordered 5 pounds of assorted blends in bean form, which we are still coming to conclusions about but there are no losers as of yet. 17 days till vacation... I feel a big rant brewing for tomorrow... Stay tuned Mr. Freemarket you will like this one. Well I am spending a nice slow day on my B-Day. We got a few things done around the house and played with Max and had a couple of friends over in the evening to christen our patio furniture that we have had for a couple of year but due to a broken glass top never used. In surfing around tonight for information on Under Water Video stuff I came across a gem of a site. It deals with a whole lot of information on Video editing and there are a lot of articles on FCP, iDVD and iMovie. There were also several very nice articles on the how too of Underwater Video by a gentle man from Canada. all and all I had a very nice evening browsing through Ken Stones site. If you are at all interested in Digital Video give it a look you will not be disappointed, I sure was not. Oh yea 18 days till vacation... Well We all went out last night and saw The Chronicles of Riddick. I liked it a lot but I am not much of a movie critic (in face I like most of the movies that the critics pan). It hooked in fairly well with the precursor Pitch Black, The special effects were well done, and the action scenes were also well done. I will not put down any spoilers here but seeing it on the big screen was nice. Got a lot done today. The Lawn is now back under control, Liz's outdoor dining table is put together, The gutters are fixed, the PA system is returned, and I posted an update to my blog. Now I am tired. Well my helicopters are charging so that I can go fly on my birthday tomorrow. 19 days till vacation... Well the Video housing is all ready and I will post some pics if anyone out there is interested in what one looks like, if not you all can just scrog off... Have a nice evening night all. Tacos... yummy.... Well the government being closed today to remember Ronald Reagan gave me some free time, as the office I go to for work is closed. I was able to get the speaker stands all sanded and stained. I will be posting some pictures once I am finished with the staining. I probably will get that done this weekend if all goes to plan. Then it will be time to get back on the basement projects. We are going to see the movie, "The Chronicles of Riddick" tonight. I am fairly excited to see this movie as I like the sci-fi themed movies will see if it lives up to the original movie and all the hype. 20 Days till vacation... Well as Vacation is coming up Liz and I have started Tanning. Two years ago when we went to the Caymans Liz tanned for a month before we left and I did not. Well I got sunburned the first day and was having to slather myself in green goo (kinda felt like Nickelodeon slime) for three days till it tanned out. Well not this time buddy I am tanning with my sweetie... She went yesterday for 6 minutes in a very strong bed. Well today she went 8 minutes and has a nice sunburn (ummm Burned Boobies ummm I like putting on the lotion ummm), I went in for 8 minutes but have a darker complexion than Liz to begin with so I got only a slight burn (though Liz may disagree with me on that one). I know that people may disagree with tanning because of skin cancer (Hell you have to die of something) and what not, but we do it only once a year, and not burning while you are on vacation is very nice... Well tonight was the first night of Max's intermediate obedience class. I was shocked that he did so well tonight. He still did not like his gentle leader but he was not able to slip it over his slightly longer snout and gave up for the most part on getting it off his nose. He was able to stand by my side during the Hallie's talks without pulling and fussing around, he still would not sit and lay down for long but I will accept standing still quite well, as beggars can't be choosers. He actually won the watch me contest. He did not win a single contest the whole time he was in puppy basic so this was great for Max and he got the special raw hide treat. Good Max...