Best arguments to carry a gun

I've found these to be the best arguments to carry a gun
1. law-abiding citizens do just that, they abide by the law. Their carrying weapons is no threat to any other law-abiding citizen.
2. if your daughter or wife were being raped, or your child abducted, would you rather I shoot the bastard, or call the police and give them a good description of the "suspect" and then help your wife or daughter to the hospital?
3. If you think people shouldn't keep loaded guns in the house, because the threat of home invasion is so low, do you lock your doors before you go to bed?
4. When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.
5. The Supreme court of the united states has decided and upheld the decision that the police are NOT responsible for your personal security. If they were, they would be liable every time a crime was committed.
6. When I carry open, people stare at me because they aren't sure if I am a threat. When I carry concealed, they don't even know if a threat is there (why open carry should be the law of the land, or concealed carry made as common as open carry--better a criminal doesn't know you are carrying, make them wonder about the threat to them.)
7. Anyone willing to depend on the police, or the National Guard, or the Military, or any other government organization for their personal safety has already surrendered their personal freedom to the government, and is the antithesis of what our founders considered to be the most American of Ideals: A Truly Free person.
8. "I'm carrying a gun and can kill you any time I want. How long do you think it'll take the police, military, or other gummint agency to get her to stop me? Since I have a gun and you don't, you have the rest of your life to answer. "

*(regardless of individual state statutes, laws, or regulations, I retain my individual right to self defense, and will not allow neither myself nor my family to be deprived of life or liberty by a criminal, nor by a nanny state which deems my gun any more dangerous than the oil-filter wrench in my garage. Tried by twelve vs. carried by six, and I will not stand idly by and watch my family harmed.)

I've sacrificed life and limb for these rights, and I will not tolerate their erosion or infringement. For any government to do so is to blatantly proclaim that everything I have sacrificed was for naught.
--Chuck

Rope, Tree, SCOTUS. Some assembly required.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate dissent in which he said, "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas." [emphasis added]

Ahem:

"Ninth Amendment – Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights."

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Tenth Amendment – Powers of states and people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Does that sound fucking familiar, you half-bald fuckstick?

Rights, all rights, belong to me, they are neither granted nor given, they are mine, not yours, and the gummint has absolutely no right to think they can take away or even limit those rights.

Madison acknowledged a major reason for some of the discontent with the Constitution as written: "I believe that the great mass of the people who opposed [the Constitution], disliked it because it did not contain effectual provision against encroachments on particular rights, and those safeguards which they have been long accustomed to have interposed between them and the magistrate who exercised the sovereign power: nor ought we to consider them safe, while a great number of our fellow citizens think these securities necessary."

The idea of adding a bill of rights to the Constitution was originally controversial. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84, argued against a "Bill of Rights," asserting that ratification of the Constitution did not mean the American people were surrendering their rights, {so although certain rights are enumerated, and therefore guaranteed against encroachment by the government, lack of inclusion of other rights does not mean the government may encroach upon them.--Chuck} and therefore that protections were unnecessary: "Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations." Critics pointed out that earlier political documents had protected specific rights, but Hamilton argued that the Constitution was inherently different:

Bills of rights are in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgments of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. Such was "Magna Charta", obtained by the Barons, swords in hand, from King John.

Finally, Hamilton expressed the fear that protecting specific rights might imply that any unmentioned rights would not be protected:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?

The first 10 amendments list individual rights--they outline rights that the founders felt so important that the government had to be specifically directed not to fuck with these rights. These rights belong to every citizen, and Keeping and Bearing arms is a direct part of that. The verbiage may say "as part of a well-regulated militia" but does not say the average citizen has to be an active participant, but rather able to be mobilized for the common defense of the country, state, town, or home.

The supremes exist to interpret the constitution as the founders meant it, and to validate all laws passed by the congress to ensure they are within the limits and constraints of the constitution. Any member of the supreme court who cannot remember that the founding principle of our nation is that people have inalienable rights needs to be hauled out onto the mall, and strung by his genitals to the top of the Jefferson Rotunda until he be dead, dead, dead.

His carcass should them be moved to the top of the Washington monument, to be carried around by carrion birds until no traces remain.

There is simply no right guaranteed by the constitution. The constitution guarantees that the government, be it the President, Congress, or even the "Justices for Life" in the supreme court can encroach upon, infringe upon, or otherwise limit my rights. The second amendment guarantees that the government cannot limit or otherwise take away the one thing that gives me the means to limit tyranny--whatever form it takes.

It is my duty as a citizen, as an Army officer and defender of the constitution, and my right, a right that is mine by the simple nature of my existence, which the good "justice"thinks he has the ability and authority to limit.

If the government tries to disarm me, or passes any law saying that I am no allowed to own, possess, or otherwise operate a firearm, I will disobey. I guarantee that any person who attemps to enforce any such law will have a gun, which clearly demonstrates a tyranny of government giving itself rights it will not confer to its citizens. That is 180 degrees off true from what 10,623 of my countrymen sacrifices life or limb to protect during the revolution. If the gummint is unable or unwilling to police itself of these nitwits who think we, the people exist to support them and their Utopian ideals, and the cost of our liberties, then sadly it is time for the streets of our nations capital to once again flow with the blood of patriots, scoundrels, and tyrants.

--Chuck

Military Motivator

I'm not sure if Military Motivator is one of Chuck's daily reads, but it might be after this:


I think I might start surreptitiously dropping links in his blogroll. Think he'll notice? ;)

-The Code Monkey

Well, I'm not dead...

Three years ago last Saturday, I died.

Then, three years ago yesterday, I died again.

Since then, I haven't died (except, of course, for la petit mort, which is all The Mrs.' fault.) And to be honest, I've never complained about that.

Many of you, (is two equal to many?) have written to wonder if I had fallen off the face of the earth. Not quite, but I can see it from here. I planned to blog my cross-country trip to Washington, and other than a few restaurant reviews, that failed miserably.

I planned to keep everyone up to date on my current state, and that too, has failed miserably. My beloved code monkey has even wondered where I went.

Here's the 411:

Like last summer, I am out at the Leadership Development Assessment Course, living in the woods at Fort Lewis, Washington. Unlike last year, where I led patrols and had a direct impact on training individuals, this year I am the overall operations planner for the patrolling committee. I write the plans, others go on to lead the patrols. Granted, the job is more in line with my pay grade, but is far from personally rewarding. Most days I sit in a tent and work on PowerPoint slides and excel spreadsheets, get yelled at by our fairly belligerent committee chief who enjoys servicing targets with shotgun blasts instead of well-aimed and placed shots. I attribute it to poor leadership styles of those who've led him over the years.

Because I have been sequestered for so long in the woods, the internet access we were supposed to have out here (100Mbps) and backup wireless broadband, was in actuality no wireless broadband and twisted pair 9600 baud. Not exactly conducive to blogging. I managed to find and purchase a high-gain antenna for my Verizon air card, and now I have teh intarweb on my laptop, but folks seem to think that my personal laptop is open for anyone to use to chat with teen boys on yahoo and such.

Even changing my password to "eatshit" wasn't discouraging to them. I had to stop bringing my laptop to the woods, which greatly reduces my ability to use the voice software, and as such slows productivity in producing slides and such, which leads to more frequent ass-chewings. Of course, working in a noisy tactical operations center isn't exactly a prime location for the voice software either, so I suppose I'm screwed either way.

So, I've driven three thousand miles to sit in a tent for the summer. I will not get to see Bubba's first few football practices, Adelle's soccer games, or get the whole le petit mort for the next two months because I am an overpaid slide bitch. Unlike last year, hard as the training was, I actually got as much out of it as I put into it, and made an impact on training leaders. Not so much this summer, the physical discomfort is greatly reduced, but the mental stress and lack of job satisfaction has increased exponentially.

I hate this job; toc bitch, S-3, Operations Officer, whatever you want to call it. I've done it everywhere from Kuwait to Kosovo and all points in between. It's a job where the boss is never happy with you, and the people who actually need your products never get them in a timely manner because a font is wrong, or a slide isn't formatted properly. Worse still, the end users never provide good feedback to tell you when your products help, how to improve to better help them, or when you are 90 degrees off true.

Most TOC's (and especially this one) focus on form over functionality, and eye wash takes precedence over common sense. On my desk (a folding table) is a phone that isn't connected to anything, a printer with no ink, a painter's paper dropcloth as a table skirt (god forbid someone should see the stuff under my desk, and a power strip. We had to build a 1/2 height wall out of sand bags across the TOC, for no reason other than it looks cool. All charts are printed on a plotter, and hung on plastic backing boards, which means that after I figure out which slides to display above my desk (not to be confused with which slides I can actually use) I have to drive the electrons in a thumb drive 20 miles to the training aid support center to get printed on a plotter, mounted on the boards, and covered in clear plastic. Since it's a drop-off, not while you wait, that means I have to drive back (20 miles) to work, and then make a return trip (20 miles) to the training aid center later in the day (20 miles) to pick up the finished product (assuming they are complete (and I can't very well call, because there is seldom a signal in these woods) and IF the products are ready, drive them back to the TOC, hang them up, and forget about them.

80+miles in a pickup truck (a gummint vehicle, not my own) for pure unadulterated eyewash. And then someone will decide that they need a different chart, or that they don't like they way I track information because it isn't intuitive to them, or that it isn't the way they did it when they were the ops guy in another unit with a different mission.

So, work sucks, I'm tired (days start at 0500 and usually seem to end at 0400) I'm getting tired of a steady diet of beef jerky and funyuns, stale burned coffee, and cold soup. (Actually, those are supplements to my steady diet of anger, regret, and nicotine.) I'm really sick of getting my ass chewed because other people couldn't give clear guidance if they were giving someone directions down a one way street, and because things aren't progressing as fast as they want, in the manner they want. So far, I've been nodding my head and doing the "yes sir" dick dance, but my dance card is getting full and my stupid shit o-meter is pinging in the red. Sooner or later the "I'm medicated but still in pain, tired, frustrated, and really don't give a flying fuck if you don't like the way I did something, especially when the end product is only for my use... sir." argument is going to come out, and since I can only be fired and sent home early, I really don't see many drawbacks to doing that.

Just bitching.

--Chuck

Where's Waldo Chuck

An update from the Code Monkey:

I just wanted to let everyone know that Chuck has not run off with Hare Krishna's or sworn off all technology to begin a new life as a Luddite or anything crazy like that. He claims the Army has got him quite busy, but I think there may be more going on.

A few of my theories:

• He's building his own Death Star.
• He's forming an alliance of bloggers to deal with trolls.
• He's delivering pizza and words of encouragement for the folks at UMass Lowell working on the DARPA project to study limb regeneration.
• Working a second job so he can win the bidding on the Sea Harrier Jump Jet Aircraft on eBay.

Feel free to add your own theories in the comments...

Fiscal responsibility

Has escaped the RNC and the DNC, apparently.

Now that the wicked witch of the west wing has formally withdrawn from the race (and no, she won't be VP, either) (if you need to ask why, google "vince foster") that means that the two major parties have exactly one candidate each in the race for POTUS.

So, since both parties are SO trying to out-responsible the other when it comes to wisely spending money, why are they both continuing to hold national conventions? Why fly all the delegates in, pay for hotels, meeting halls, parties, wine, dine, and woo $upporter$, why spend the MILLIONS of dollars each party will collectively spend so they can either vote for the party's ONLY candidate or not vote?

An election with only one person on the ballot is just stupid. Holding a national convention to vote, hosting multi-night pep rallies and chanting and cheering buffoonery when there is only one candidate on the ballot reminds me more of Saddam's elections than what should be hosted in America.

I honestly think that if a party can't come up with at least three viable candidates to go through all of the primaries, and then hold a convention where all states' delegates, having seen each of them under the political microscope for a year, can then select which one they want to throw their vote behind, if they can't find three good men, then that party has reached the point where it no longer can claim a viable representation of the American people.

There are Three Hundred Million of us little people. The best we can do for choosing a leader is "Sweetness and Light" or the "Jug-eared Reconquistador from Arizona." These are the two people who can best represent to the world who we are and what we believe in? If that is the case then we are well and truly screwed. I think each candidate seeking a party nomination should have to put up a 25% stake of their personal assets when they seek the nomination, which, if they stay in the race through the convention and then don't receive the nomination, get their stake back. If they quit early, they forfeit the stake and it goes into the general fund, or the hooker and booze fund, or goes into the dirty tricks and mudslinging fund. Then maybe we could see all the candidates for a party's nomination last longer than the first few primaries.

As it stands, they stay in the race until they either lose successively or lose big in a primary, someone finds out about the dead hooker from that weekend in Vegas, or (in Fred's case) they realize this popularity contest isn't about character as much as it is platitudes. Sometimes, we get really lucky and a megalomaniac gets involved and refuses to step down, and every "we're still in this" rally just becomes more and more pathetic and sad, not unlike a solitary unsold pantsuit hanging on the rack at goodwill.

But I digress. My point, already made, is that a national convention for either party at this point seems at least frivolous, and definitely worthless. Could the delegates (much like the candidates) just phone it in? If this is how the party elite are going to use the money they've raised, can we really trust either party with using our money--the money they've taken--wisely?

--Chuck

Why is Maria 'Skeletor' Shriver...

Why is Maria 'Skeletor' Shriver...
Married to the guvernator?


Personally, I think it's a secret genetic experiment to try and produce a bullet-proof Kennedy.

Dan's big trip

http://danielsbigtrip.blogspot.com/?danny

He's a retired Army Captain wounded in Afghanistan (lost his arm from the elbow down).

He is driving across the country to meet the people that supported him while he was deployed (camping or sleeping in his truck when he has to). He's funding his trip w/donations through his blog. If you can, offer to host him when he comes near you.

He is in Reading, Pennsyltuckey now working his way to Maine. Thanks for any additional exposure or help you can offer. He definitely deserves our support.

--Chuck

As for me, I'm sitting in an Arby's somewhere between Home and Uncle Jimbo's.

Picture fun

PS Skillz

I need someone with mad photoshop skills, a wee bit of free time, and a biting sense of humor to contact me--I have an idea that is likely to piss more than a few people off, and what the hell, I think it's funny.

Just contact me at tcoverride(press shift+2)gmail(period)com

--Chuck

More Tank Pr0n

This is what real men do with their families when the kids ask what you do for a living. And yes, that was my Panzer, with "Cry Havoc" on the bore evacuator.

--Chuck