Gun Dealer Averts Sequel to Fort Hood Tragedy. Mainstream Media Underwhelmed.

1. “Abdo is a Muslim-American. A radical Muslim-American.”

   You left out “a crazier than a shithouse rat Muslim-American.”

   • +1

     • Shithouse rats everywhere will of course be offended by that remark.

2. You would’ve seen it front page if Abdo had been a Tea Partier.

   No surprise that mainstream media ignores a truthful story in favor of stories that advance their own sick bias.

   • Well, that’s because Tea Partiers are crazy. What else can you say about people who want responsible government, lower taxes, less interference and a balanced budget. They must be mad!

   • No offense, but I have not heard a single news outlet that hasn’t indicated he was a militant muslim.

     I don’t disagree that there is sometimes bias…the muslim issue in this case though just isn’t an example

     • I think his point wasn’t that they don’t mention it at all, it’s that they usually mention it in passing or deep within the story. Contrast that with the way they loudly blamed the political right for Loughner even though he was a completely apolitical nut, or the way they’ve delighted in pointing out that Breivik was a Christian even though he’s only nominally so.

3. Yep, he was proclaiming status as a conscientious objector, then they found his kiddie porn. He must have changed his beliefs as he worked on the bombs…

4. We constantly have CNN on at work and this got approximately 5 minutes worth of coverage on the early early morning news stuff. I will give them credit they did mention and interview the gun store owner who IIRC is a former LEO.

5. “Just a few months back the [Killeen, Texas] FFL worked with ATF on a straw purchasing bust that netted 21 arrests.”

   Would that perhaps be an offshoot of the Fast and Furious operation? If so, does it indicate that the ATF gunwalking was national in scope and not limited to Phoenix?

   • If it “netted 21 arrests” it doesn’t sound like Fast & Furious.

   • Couldn’t have been F&F – why arrest anybody, when your goal is to let the guns walk into Mexico?

6. “For the liberals in the audience…”

   Yeah… Thanks for that. FYI, most liberals just assume people know basic things like that, without trying to use it as an excuse to insult people.
   It’s a freaking cognate and the verb “to be”, for heaven’s sake.

   This liberal is thinking he can get better gun blogging elsewhere.

   • Hmm. I wasn’t aware there were liberal gun blogs out there. Interesting concept though.

7. Global warming is settled science. When the only scienstists publishing (fundamentally flawed) papers refuting it are funded by ExonnMobile, it’s pretty logical to take their conclusions with a massive does of NaCL. Would you buy the validity of a gun control study funded by The Brady Campaign? Of course you wouldn’t.

   Where the legitimate scientific discourse exists are on the accuracy of various models, what said models predict, ect. Not the underlying fact that the Earth is warming and that humans are at least partially to blame.

   Obviously you cannot spend you way out of debt. That would be ridiculous, I don’t really see anyone in the media advocating that. The US can also not cut itself out of debt, at least not without dismantling massive sections of the society. It also cannot grow itself out of debt. The economy simply won’t grow fast enough. The only real solution is massive spending cuts and tax increases. No one, at least other than people that actually know what they’re talking about, will say this. Regan spent and cut taxes. Bush spent and kept taxes level. Clinton spent and cut taxes. Bush spent and cut taxes. Obama spent and kept taxes level (thus far). Those are generalizations (Bush I actually raised some taxes slightly, I think Clinton did too), but mostly true You cannot do that forever. Despite what DIck Cheney used to say, deficits do matter. Unfortunately they only seem to matter when the other party is in power.

   • Settled science? NASA Science News says:
     Unlike the surface-based temperatures, global temperature measurements of the Earth’s lower atmosphere obtained from satellites reveal no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. The slight trend that is in the data actually appears to be downward. The largest fluctuations in the satellite temperature data are not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño. So the programs which model global warming in a computer say the temperature of the Earth’s lower atmosphere should be going up markedly, but actual measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere reveal no such pronounced activity.

     Don’t we just hate it when actual measurements don’t fit the model? Or how about the polar-bear-like-a-miner’s-canary global warming indicator?

     “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations ‘may now be near historic highs.'”

     J. Scott Armstrong of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Kesten C. Green of Business and Economic Forecasting, Monash University, and Willie Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, published their findings in 2008 which argued that the claims of declining population of polar bears are not based on scientific forecasting principles.

   • Nate:

     “Global Warming” is anything BUT settled science. To add insult to injury, I recently read a report on solar activity, where three respected climatologists said that we are in for “global cooling” over the next decade or so. I think any time you have people standing up and saying ANYthing is “settled” in science, you need to start asking what their angle is, and who stands to benefit from their statements.

     “Obviously you cannot spend your way out of debt.” Well, we agree on that one. Somebody wanna tell Obama? (Not that Bush was much better.) This recent Theatre of the Absurd in D.C. was all smoke and mirrors. They didn’t reduce the deficit. They made a few, insignificant cuts to future increases in spending. Lovely.

     We’re in a fix. We can’t raise taxes – it will kill any hope for a recovery. We can’t borrow more (even with the debt ceiling increase). The ONLY solution is to make dramatic, drastic cuts in spending. 20% across the board might be a good start. But there are entire departments that need to cease to exist. I’d start with the Departments of Energy, Commerce and Education, and throw in the ATF as a bonus. Painful? Sure. But it’s the only real solution.

     • +1 on that cut the DoE et al. Some have compared the debt situation to gangrene, a condition that requires amputation not just more treatment.

       Nate says: You can’t drill yourself out of peak production.

       This assumes a controversial premise: “peak oil.” Of course we can still send US money to Brazil to develop their new fields. Too bad we aren’t allowed to exploit things like our own natural gas in the Gulf.

       Nate says: The DoE is probably the only Federal agency equipped to develop the technologies that can mitigate it.

       Wasn’t that the rationale for creating the DoE back in the 70’s? I’d ask rhetorically how that’s been going this past 30+ years e.g. immunizing us to the vagaries of Mid East oil.

8. Global Warming IS settled. Absolutely. Carbon dioxide and other green house gasses raise temperatures. Scienfic fact, we’ve known that for 200 years. Humans are releasing green house gasses in large amounts and it’s raising global temperatures. Scientifc fact, we’ve known that for decades. You will not find a climate scientist of any stripe that disputes this. The problem is that this country is so hopelessly, completely, scienfifically ignorant from top to bottom that things like this never seem to stick.

   What scientific debate there is, and it’s very little, revolves around climate sensitivity. The release of CO2 alone is not enough to raise global temperatures much beyond 1*C. That’s bad, but it’s nothing that couldn’t be handled through spending a lot of money on the problem. But if the climate pertubartion caused by CO2 causes positive feedback, then we’re in for massive and devesating warming. Positive feedback being something like CO2-induced warming causing the northern permafrost to melt and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is an order of magnitude more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. If they methane gets dumped, the warming would likely fly off the chart.

   There are a handful of climate scientists that legitimately believe that the climate is not as sensitive as commonly thought and that this is unlikely to happen. Most climate scientists think that it is very likely to happen. In any case, the threat is so large that to take no action because a small minority of climate scientists don’t agree is the height of stupidity. The costs of taking action and then the majority being wrong are rather small. The costs of taking no action and the majority being correct are grave.

   As for the global cooling paper. The Earth SHOULD be getting cooler. The Sun’s output follows a rather predictable pattern and we’re currently in a very deep lull. The Earth continues to warm. Why? CO2 is why. If I remember correctly the global cooling paper, which was torn apart in peer review because of faulty assumptions, was predicated on a long term continuation of this cycle. Something like that seen during the Maunder Minimum observed between 1645-1715. You can always find some scientist making wacky claimes. the AGW deniers picked this one up and ran with it. What they forgot to mention was how the paper was destroyed in peer review. It was crap.

   As for taxes, they have to go up. It’s that simple. A 35% top tax bracket is patently ridiculous. 35% is perfectly reasonable for someone making $300,000 a year. For someone making $30,000,000 is ludicrous. Of course, it’s not just for the rich. They have to go up across the baord. Middle class tax cuts just get shipped right to China anyway. A 16% hike for the top bracket and an 8% jump below that will not kill anyone. It would go a long way to relieving the country’s long term debt problems. Of course, it’s bad for reelection.

   Cut the DoE? Are you insane? We need the DoE now more than ever. Global crude production is at or near peak. Few people understand how profound and effect that will have down the line. You can’t drill yourself out of peak production. The DoE is probably the only Federal agency equipped to develop the technologies that can mitigate it. They’re technologies that are not generally financially profitable in the near term. Big business only cares about the next quarter, they’re not going to help develop inertial confinement. Nevermind that cutting science in generally always turns out to be massively short sighted.

   If you actually want to make an impact with cuts, there are few options. Social Security, Medicaid, and the military. Those are the pigs. You raise the age limit for collecting Social Security over a period of a decade by at least three years. You make substantial (20%) cuts to Medicaid and the defense budget. That gets it done. Making little or no cuts to those three and expecting a balanced budget is an act of faith and nothing more.

   • Nate, I’d dismantle each of your arguments, but I’ve learned (the hard way) that there’s really just no point in arguing with people like you. I can show you hard evidence that demolishes the arguments you make for “global warming” and the vast benefits that the Department of Energy has brought to us. But you wouldn’t listen. I’ll sit back and watch other members of the TTAG Armed Intelligentsia take it from here. I just don’t have the energy to keep trying to open your eyes to the truth.

9. Hey, if Nate says that global warming is settled science, he must be right. Right? So the next time your buddy tells you that manmade global warming is a big steaming load of horse puckey, you just tell him, “Oh, yeah? Well Nate says you’re wrong.” That’ll shut him up.

10. I wouldn’t expect anyone to think so because I say so. Just look into the science, not the politics. The only legitimate scientific debate on the subject revolves around sensitivity and feedback loops. Not the concept of CO2 causing global temperatures to rise. Not the concept that other greenhouse gases would case the temperature to rise (eg methane). The debate is as to if the CO2-induced warming will be significant enough to cause the release of natural methane stores. There is also considerable scientific debate surrounding methods to control or reverse warming trends, but that is another subject.

    American Association for the Advancement of Science

    United States National Academy of Sciences PDF

    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I PDF

11. Guns Galore is a great little gun store. I’ve bought from them before and plan to again as soon as I get back from Iraq. Great support for military buyers.

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