Open Carry on Florida: Update.

There is no problem with OC, as we see in the 40+ states that have OC. Gas station robbers are not gunning down OCers at the counter, OCers are not having their guns yanked away by muggers, mass shooters aren't picking out OCers as their first target when they walk into the mall, or any of the other dozen or so largely FICTIONAL scenarios that so called "gun rights supporters" use to disparage the proliferation of OC. So let's set that aside. Whether anyone likes it or not, we are going to have OC in Florida at some point, and no amount of bitching by the Fudds or the liberals or the fair-weather gun people is going to stop it.

Anyway, thanks in part to my communications with certain Florida legislative offices, I may have found out what happened to Senator Steube's SB 140. Shortly after the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting, he seems to have pulled the bill from the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting schedule. The bill included a provision allowing concealed weapons licensees to carry inside the non-sterile areas of the airports. This may be the source of the worsening "political climate" I saw mentioned previously.

It appears that Senator Steube has rewritten SB 140, and the bill is now SB 644. All amendments to the locations where carrying is prohibited have been removed. Whereas SB 140 was an OC bill AND a bill that significantly limited prohibited areas, SB 644 appears to be a purely OC related bill.

Florida Senate Bill 644 would take effect on July 1, 2017 if it passes.

House Intel Committee Chairman says no evidence of Trump-Russia ties.

With all of the speculation coming from the lying mainstream media and the lying democrats, it's nice to hear from someone doing some actual work on the matter of Trump's alleged ties to Russia. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says he has seen no evidence that Trump has significant ties to Russia.

The mainstream media isn't going to like that.

Maybe the mainstream media could look into when Hillary sold the majority of US Uranium production to Russia...

No? Okay...

How they operate.

Local police:

1. Laws restricting private citizens from forming militias (protected by the Constitution?) and persuing violent criminals, and restricting law-abiding private citizens from owning equipment helpful in persuing violent criminals. Laws limiting the self defense measures a private citizen can take without being prosecuted themselves.

2. Claim that police are the only ones capable and equipped to persue violent criminals. Encourage "shelter in place".

3. Ask for money, more military equipment, more guns and more cops, without ever telling the private citizens how many you need, just that you need "more" and whatever you have at any given time is "not enough". Tell the people the most important thing is always "officer safety", which is even more important than anyone's "rights".

4. ???

5. Profit.

Federal and State police:

1. Find an impressionable person (white is best, but a black will help fuel racial tension) with some "extreme" views, but they are otherwise not inclined, are incapable and unequipped to take any action, ever.

2. Befriend them, and train them to be capable, equip them and encourage them to take action. Provide the opportunity and assist them, but then arrest them at the last minute (or one minute too late).

3. Claim that "domestic terrorism" is a major threat, and request additional tax dollars for more weapons and equipment and lobby for the legal ability to spy on anyone you want without oversight, except by a super secret court that the public has no access to.

4. ???

5. Profit.

From Thomas Sowell.

Is Florida Open Carry dead in the water, again?

The last action on Florida Senate Bill 140 (open carry) was from early January when the judiciary committee meeting on the bill was "cancelled. I've emailed my senator in Tallahassee (Doug Broxson) twice without reply. I'll keep you updated.

Have the spineless republicans in Tallahassee lets us down again? The have the perfect political climate to get these type of bills passed.

(d)C+(f)P=W

Why do distinct cultures exist? I believe it's because people naturally gravitate and stay with people who are similar to them. People who look, behave and speak similarly, people who have the same talents, goals, norms, customs and attitudes will form cultures and generally stay together in their own geographic areas, large and small.

What happens when different cultures come into proximity? If the proximity is voluntary, great things can come of it. New ideas and innovations are introduced and generally speaking, all of the cultures can come away better, slightly changed, but still maintaining the core of their cultural identity. These different groups can choose to live in proximity for as long as they want and continue to absorb the positive aspects of this voluntary proximity.

But what happens when these diverse cultures are forced into proximity for an indefinite period of time? Perhaps permanently? What happens when these diverse cultures are told that they must absorb and welcome ALL aspects of the alien cultures, or else risk being branded with some negative labeling? What happens when some of these cultures are given special preferences above other cultures? What happens when history is taught in a way that shows some cultures as permanent oppressors to others?

Conflict occurs when the cultures can't voluntarily separate. There is nothing wrong with cultures maintaining a voluntary separation/voluntary proximity pattern.

Diverse cultures, combined with forced, permanent proximity, results in conflict that escalates into wars.

(d)C+(f)P=W

The wife favors the Sig P320.

The wife went and took her class to get the certificate required by Florida to get her concealed weapons permit. She had some issues with the Ruger LC380 she had, and instead tried out the Sig Sauer P320. She liked it. Liked it enough that she wants one ASAP.

My personal issues with Sig pistols was that they had larger, somewhat bulky feeling grips and were overpriced. In fact, Sig was sort of known for these things in the gun community, to an extent. Well from what I can tell, those issues aren't really issues anymore.

You can commonly get out the door with a P320 for less than $600, and that's not bad. It's modular, which is great if that matters to you.

The Army just choose the Sig P320 as their new standard issue pistol. The Special Operations community has instead settled on the Glock 19.

We don't all live in the same reality.

It's been a few days since I last posted, mostly because I've worked a lot of overtime at the hospital to get over a slight money hill. I've built up a little lineup of things to talk about over the next week or so, but for now, just a random thought:

When people wonder aloud (and to themselves) about what makes people do the things they do, good or bad but mostly bad, or at least something we perceive as being bad, it's hard for them to wrap their head around it. It's always hard for us to understand why people do the things they do, like "protestors" throwing bricks at passers by, or middle eastern migrants burning the city of Paris, or a murderer killing an innocent hospital employee just to take her car, or even less violent things like why people vote the way they do in elections or why they choose to carry or NOT to carry a firearm, or why they choose to or NOT to prepare for unknown disasters, or any of the other things we observe people doing that we find to be confusing. My theory is that we have this difficulty because we are trying to make sense of it using only the way that we ourselves have learned to make our way through the world.

I recently had a little debate at work with a physician that I very much enjoy and appreciate working with. His views on immigration (legal and illegal) were mostly opposed to mine, but during this debate our backgrounds and upbringings were also discussed. It became clear to me that we had both taken VERY different paths to get to the same basic place in our lives and that those background have placed us living in the same physical world, but two vastly different perceptions of reality, right and wrong, law and order, rights vs privileges, even our view of historical fact was perceived differently. In this case, he and I simply don't live in the same reality. That's not to imply that there was anything inherently wrong with what either of us thought or said. It's simply an acknowledgment of the fact that we could be looking at the same picture and see two different images, and this is due to the events of our lives that shaped our perception of literally almost everything around us.

When you are able to unshackle your mind of the constraints that forced you to process the world through only your own filter, then you can at least understand why people think and do things so differently. You don't have to understand why they're doing it the way they are doing it. You just need to understand why they ARE NOT doing the way that YOU ARE.

I've heard it said that in decades like the 1970's or 1980's, you might hear one of the "elites", like a highly paid, tenured professor with multiple doctorates, make a disparaging remark about one of the lower class people doing a lower class job, like a garbage man. But today? Do you hear the same remark? Not as often. But why then and not so much today? Because in the past decades, that professor and that garbage man still had to do a lot of the same things in life to survive and get by. But today, that high level professor barely even knows the garbage man exists... They're unlikely to cross paths or have any similarities in background or futures.

It's simply because we don't all live in the same reality anymore. A white, male, 38 year old farmer in Central Texas doesn't live in the same world as the Asian, female, 22 year old art history major in Seattle, or the black, male 45 year old Army veteran in Southern Georgia, or the Hispanic, female, 57 year old nurse in New York City.

Once you wrap your brain around the fact that we no longer live in the same reality, it's much easier to understand why things happen the way they do.

Thanks for reading. Maybe some of that made enough sense to you.

Peaceful protestors and violent rioters have a symbiotic relationship.

In this HotAir article, the author makes a point I've been trying to make to people for a while.

When you see protests turn into riots, you always hear people (ideologues) talk about how it was just a few violent people in an otherwise peaceful protest. It's the "few bad apples" argument.

This argument no longer applies, and if you read the article in the link, you'll see why.

These days, and in days past, violent rioters ALWAYS preferred to embed themselves into otherwise "peaceful" demonstrations, and the so-called peaceful demonstrators KNEW this. They acted as figurative shields for the rioters to hind behind in the arena of debate.

If you have a hundred "peaceful" protestors chanting and holding signs, and you have five people among them throwing rocks, then is the protest peaceful? What if the peaceful ones KNEW what those rock throwers planned to do?

Climate change whores caught lying, again.

As per usual.

If your position is backed by "99%" of scientists, and you have the moral high ground, then why lie constantly?

If you fire every scientist that dissents, then eventually you will have 99% who all agree with each other. Just get rid of all of the scientists who don't fall into line. This is how it works right now, unfortunately. Any scientists who produce "studies" that prove the narrative on climate change stand to make money and get promoted. Any scientist who dissents stands to lose his or her job and get black-balled from he scientific community. Does this not raise some logical questions in your mind?

And why is the AGW crowd constantly and publicly caught lying, while the dissenters are only accused of lying, with no evidence needed?

There is no such thing as "settled science" to anyone who cares about real science. Every scientific discovery is perpetually open to to be explored by critical eyes and re-examined. Once something is settled, especially if it's a bunch of politicians claiming that's it's settled, then you should be wary.

What if we had never reexamined our belief that the Milky Way was the entire universe? We believed THAT until the mid 1900's! And that wasn't even politicized like climate change is today.

The climate change narrative today can be used to make money and control people, so of course our politicians will tell us that it's "settled".

Whores just whoring for money and power.