Yep, it’s definite.
There’s now a gallery for these here, or the whole snapshot gallery here.
Category: Firearms
Preliminary Results are in
We appear to have had a good time.
The Heller Decision
I’m not going to go into this in any depth, but I wanted to post something acknowledging that the Supreme Court handed down the right decision on something (not that rare even for this court).
No reasonable interpretation of the Second Amendment, based on its history, its language, the debate surrounding its adoption, or the other related measures debated and sometimes adopted for state constitutions, can possibly justify understanding it as anything other than an individual right to “keep and bear arms” for self-defense and any other lawful purpose.
One can sanely think this is a mistake, and thus favor fixing it; but to fix it requires a new constitutional amendment. It’s been done before; slavery was thrown out, and prohibition was brought in and then thrown out, for example.
Justice Scalia’s decision goes into the historical and linguistic scholarship in some detail, and is also remarkably nasty to the dissenting opinions. I haven’t yet read them; the two of them are bigger than the main opinion, and I just haven’t had time.
The decision (in PDF format) can be downloaded here.
There’ll be years of litigation, of course, trying to expand from this beachhead into a real, solid, acceptance of the most basic human right, the right to defend yourself.
Rifles and Me
With a tiny number of exceptions (and no decent training, and in hindsight the people I shot with before were not competent), I didn’t start shooting until about 1978. Then I started with handguns, and the people who started me then were competent and gave me an excellent introduction to safety and shooting skills. (I probably wasn’t competent to have that opinion until last year; but now that I’m an NRA certified instructor in several areas including pistol, I think I have a decent idea of what a good introduction looks like.) Before this last year, I don’t think I’d fired more than 5 rounds from rifles — some .22, and I think one round from a .223.
Timing Is Everything
Went over to the TCF in Uptown this afternoon to make a deposit, as I do most weeks (sadly, the deposits are mostly small). I would have gotten there around 2:15pm I think. I’m in the habit of going to a teller window, and usually get some cash back.
On the way in past the ATM, I noticed a lot of people sitting around in the lobby. Then the door failed to open.
Finally, I noticed the sign on the inside of the glass door saying “Temporarily closed due to robbery”.