Halloween Is No Longer The Scariest Day Of The Year

Halloween, for generations, has traditionally been the scariest day of the year.  Ghosts and goblins, skeletons and demons, vampires and werewolves and all sorts of other things that creep, crawl and go bump in the night were said to roam the world, creating chaos, mischief and evil.

They have sadly been replaced by other, scarier and more real monstrosities.

One is the conservampire, led by their kind, Count Walkula, who gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "blood-sucking weasel."

Even a more immediate threat to one's sanity and one's very life is the threat of an unbalanced, hate-filled woman with a criminal history of drunken violence carrying a gun:

If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, you probably need some professional help as well.

More Peaceful Talk From Right Wing Squawker

Michael Savage - Why we need to get armed:



I don't think he was reading from the Communist Manifesto either.

Guns Protecting Us From Adultery

Is there anything guns can't do? Now they can help prevent adultery:

A former Appleton firefighter accused of shooting his estranged wife to death claims he was trying to stop her from committing the felony crime of adultery.

Scott Schmidt's attorney plans to argue that Schmidt thought force was necessary to prevent Kelly Wing Schmidt from meeting another man at a hotel and committing the felony because prosecutors don't take adultery seriously, according to a notice of intent filed in Outagamie County Court.Schmidt, 39, will go to trial in March on charges including first-degree intentional homicide and attempted homicide.

[...]

Because adultery cases are rarely prosecuted, Schmidt had the unreasonable belief that he had no other viable options "except for suffering in silence as the victim of a felony as perpetrated against him in the form of adultery," according to the court documents, filed Feb. 12 by attorney Greg Petit.

I think we can expect that a certain couple of squawkers will be changing their stances regarding gun control laws pretty soon.

Jessie Oakley

In her Waukesha Freeman column, our old friend Jessica McBride chimes in on the open carry controversy which was escalated by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, who gave an advisory opinion on this matter. (Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Van Hollen tastelessly made his announcement on the anniversary of the Columbine shootings.) McBride writes:

Some in the media and other anti-gun emotionalists are tearing apart Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen for his – somewhat belated, but very correct – advisory opinion on open carry.

What provoked the open carry hysteria? Van Hollen simply reminded people about a settled fact. He reiterated a point that Jim Doyle and the state Supreme Court once freely recognized. He repeated the state Constitution. That’s controversial?

One does have to wonder if Merton's little Annie Oakley would be so agreeable if the person who wanted a gun looked like this:



Crown tip: Spring City Chronicle

Changing Times

One year ago this weekend the right side of the Quesosphere had their dinkies in a twist about an advertisement for a show about a couple of guys with their dinkies in a twist. There was thoughtful discussion about respect and appropriateness.

What is the big story for our conservative friends this year on Good Friday?

here and here

I Should Have Guessed It

Over at Cog Dis, I pointed out a series of tragic multiple murders done by gunmen, including the shooting of several senior citizens in a nursing home. I challenged someone to say we should arm more people.

Guess who was dumb enough to do just that.

Dumbest. Question. Evah.

PaddyMac has a post up today which cites some stats about how assaults are supposedly higher in Britain than in the United States. He ends this piece with the dumbest question I've seen in a long, long, long time:

And ask yourself: Why might those inclined to assault someone feel that
much less risk in Britain than in a country where one's victim might be
armed?

He answered his question in the first paragraph of his post:

As everyone knows, you're far more likely to be murdered in the United States
than in Britain, which so nicely has banned guns, which as we know are the cause
of violence.

In other words, those that would feel inclined to assault someone are much more likely to just shoot you in the U.S. of A. And given the number of gang related shootings, in which everyone is seemingly carrying a gun, albeit illegally, it does not appear that knowing that the intended victim is probably, not just possibly, armed does one damn thing to slow down the shooter.

Even more to the point, I would definitely consider getting shot to be an assault on my person.

And if one checks out the link that he so kindly provides us, you can see that murders in the USA is almost equal to the amount of assaults in Britain. And while neither is a pleasant thing to experience, I would much rather deal with someone trying to hit me, than someone trying to shoot me.

Some days, he just makes this job too easy.

Frowny Face Time

Something tells me that the new Police Chief, Edward Flynn will be falling out of favor of the local right wing media tomorrow.

Welcome to Milwaukee, Chief Flynn.

Madman Buses 21 People To Death

Well, that apparently is a headline that McIlheran sees in his own special world.

McIlheran posted one of his parrot pieces, supporting our other good friend, McBride. In the comments thread of said post, a liberal, apparently from Delafield, confronts old Pat on his gun-crazed illogic thought patterns. Pat responds thus:

Guns are no more the problem than are, say, kitchen knives. Three people have in the past few weeks been beaten by youths on buses in Baltimore. Buses are not the problem, either -- the hands that did the beating are, just as are the hands that wield guns to shoot people. It is the criminal, not the tool, that must be controlled.

Statistics clearly show that a person carrying a gun for defense is more likely to thwart an attack than is an unarmed person. We have lots of examples of the latter -- unarmed people, unresisting, attacked, robbed and killed nonetheless. So, no, pacifism won't make us safe -- simply look, further, at the statistics on people injured or killed in home invasion robberies in Britain vs. the United States.

As for states' prerogatives on guns and abortion, there's a straightforward difference. The right to keep and bear arms is in the constitution. Second amendment, in fact, up above the part about search and seizure. The right to abortion is nowhere in the constitution, having been entirely ginned up out of "penubras"(sic) and such in what is now widely regarded as one of the most egregious examples of jurisprudential nonsense in a century.

Well, I don't know about McIlheran, but I wouldn't want to be beaten or shot, but if I had to choose between only those two options, I would go with the beating. However, McIlheran defeats his own argument with using this example. The people that were beaten are still alive. How many of the people shot in the latest string of mass murders can say that? And as I pointed out, I haven't seen a story lately of someone going on a mass murder spree with a knife, much less a bus. Unless he's watched the movie Speed so much he thinks it's real.

Then he starts with the statistics, but provides none. But even then, he fails to mention that there are less gun deaths per year in all of Europe than in one average American city.

McIlheran really shows why he is always linking to other people expressing their opinions instead of making his own arguments in the last paragraph. He can't keep a train of thought for more than two paragraphs and tries to compare the constitutionality of having the right to gun someone down versus abortion.

Some advise for Patrick. Just pick one topic per post and try to stay to that. It will confuse you and your reader a lot less.

You Know, A Good Journalist Would Get The Facts Straight

It has been mentioned before, repeatedly, that McBride does not always appear to have a full grasp of reality. An example would be her issue with concealed carry laws. She somehow thinks that a person with his arms full of pizza boxes will be able to drop the boxes, pull a handgun out of somewhere and shoot it out with multiple assailants. All without being instantly killed and adding another gun to the criminal world.

Now in the wake of that murder, she posts another inane item, this time calling for the courts to give Andres Vegas his gun back. As a reminder to the reader, Andres Vegas is another pizza delivery guy that was mugged twice, and had bought some guns to protect himself. After shooting someone, the police took his guns away.

McBride is demanding that Mr. Vegas get his gun back. Um, note to McBride, he already did, two weeks ago.

She's Still Missing The Point

We've already discussed how McBride completely struck out on the issues around the church shootings in Nebraska over the weekend. As with most stories like this, as time goes on, the media gets more information so that we have a clearer picture of what happened and what let up to it.

McBride doesn't like this. The Minneapolis Star Tribune points out that the hero security guard was a former Minney cop who was fired after lying during an internal investigation of an incident in which she cussed out a bus driver. This irks McBride and her readers to no end.

There are also other things of relevance to the story that McBride isn't covering. These are covered by, ironically, one of her archenemies (she has so many) Illusory Tenant. They include the fact that the guard indeed did not kill the gunman, but he shot himself in the head and the cult-like atmosphere of the megachurch itself. She is probably waiting to figure out how to pin the blame for the tragedy on illegal immigrants, islamofacists, Democrats, hate/abuse blogs and/or Eugene Kane.

Ironically, she is upset that the media is doing their job in this tragedy and getting out the news about the players in this incident, but she is, at the same time, griping that there is no news about the players in the Crandon shootings.

The Amazing McKreskin

McBride never fails to amaze. First, she mentions an article in MSJ about a pizza man being shot and killed, and quotes the article:

A 53-year-old pizza delivery man was fatally shot about 3 a.m. Saturday, and police have more than 10 people in custody, said Milwaukee police Capt. David Zibolski.

She laments about there being no concealed carry law in the state and points out a local case in which another pizza man did carry a gun and faced criminal charges after shooting someone with it. But then McBride does her own version of the Amazing Kreskin, and tells us what we are thinking:

Now a pizza delivery man is a murder victim. Presumably, he wasn't carrying concealed. Question for all of those who oppose concealed carry: Why wouldn't you want a man like the one above to be able to defend himself? And if you don't want him to carry a gun, concealed, what would you have recommended that he use to defend himself? Admit it, concealed carry opponents, guns=bad! crowd. You think the man above should have been able to defend himself. Thus, you do really support concealed carry. You just don't want to admit it because to your crowd, guns=bad. It's an emotional, not a logical, argument.

Only McBride could think that it would be logical to presume that a person carrying a pizza, when confronted with ten armed assailants, would be able to drop the pizza, pull a pistol, and shoot all ten assailants, before being gunned down himself. Methinks she has been watching too much Jack Bauer.

Yeah, good rational and logical thinking there, Jessica.

The logical presumption would be that even if he did manage to get the gun out, he'd still be dead, and there's be one more gun on the street in the hands of a criminal.

If this is failure, we could use a dose

How easy it is, if you're Jessica McBride, to throw away a one-liner like this:

Looks like that handgun ban in England did a lot of good

over a story about some recent gang killings in England. In McBride World, that qualifies as an in-depth investigation.

A few things she didn't mention:

There were a total of 50 homicides involving firearms in England and Wales in their reporting year 2005-06.

There were 8,478 homicides involving handguns and 2868 involving other firearms in the US in 2005, according to DOJ reports.

Milwaukee had 122 homicides in 2005 and 103 in 2006. More than 75% of the homicides in 2005-06 were committed with a firearm. Source: Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission.

Milwaukee has more gun homicides than all of England and Wales. If that's a failed gun policy in Britain, maybe we could stand a little of that kind of failure.

More guns, that's the ticket

Ah, if only the students and faculty at Virginia Tech had all packed weapons, says Jessica the gun nut.

Or maybe, if it wasn't so easy for someone with as history of mental health problems to buy those weapons through the mail ...

And if Lee Holloway only knew about the Virginia Tech shootings, McBrat says, he'd be all for handcuffing students. Huh?