Private Mars Rocket II

Comes news that Alex Pretti, the person most recently murdered by ICE in Minneapolis, got in an altercation with ICE a week prior to his death. Said altercation (at least the video portion of it) seems to have started when Pretti kicked an ICE rental car and broke a tail light. I've seen on the ICE-apologizer sites claims that this "ruins the narrative."

Here's the thing - Pretti doesn't have to be a saint for me to be mad at his murder. Nothing he did at either of the incidents with ICE justifies him being killed. The tail light incident was at most a misdemeanor property damage* and the second event started with him standing on the sidewalk when ICE pushed another woman down.

This "no sainthood required" concept goes back with me at least to George Floyd. I am under no illusion that Floyd was a nice guy and I probably wouldn't have invited him to dinner. There's a few thousand miles between "not a nice guy" and "deserved to die in the street."

I also don't particularly want to hear about people (who seem to all be suspiciously white, blond and female) who were killed by illegal immigrants. Their killers were caught and punished. More importantly, my tax dollars were not being used to pay their killer's salaries. We give police guns and uniforms for a reason - we expect more from them than of J. Random Dude.

This whole mess started because Trump decided to punish Minneapolis for the crime of not voting for him. That's "the narrative" of this story.

ETA: a report from somebody who knew Pretti.


*The fact that ICE was able to subdue Pretti at the first event actually proves that they *can* subdue armed men if they want to.

I've been reluctant to post about the recent shooting of Renee Good. I have decided to overcome my reluctance. Anybody who's looked at the videos of the shooting and sees anything other than a murder of somebody who was at most guilty of a misdemeanor traffic violation is willfully deceiving themselves. I intend to address the excuses offered up by the defenders of ICE.

1) "The officer was in danger" - No, he was not. He was not hit by the car and had he felt that he was in danger, taking a step to the side would have been a better choice. (Sorry, not going to argue further on this point.)

2) "But she was a lesbian / poet / bad mother (etc.)" - This is irrelevant. Nobody at the scene knew any of this, and using these as defenses is merely smearing the victim.

3) "She was obstructing" - Maybe, although if your operations are so poorly-planned that an unarmed woman in a minivan on a public street can hamper them, you should reconsider your plan. In any event, since she was leaving and thus un-obstructing the operation, shooting her was counterproductive.

3) "You should always comply with police" - It may be good practical advice, but failure to move your car from a public street is not grounds for execution. I feel that people saying this are mostly trying to reassure themselves that this won't happen to them. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but when poorly-trained cops issue conflicting orders, it could happen to you.

4) "We should respect the police" - I respect the police. I also know that police officers are human beings and thus fallible. Respect is a two-way street, and police need to earn that from us by admitting when one of them made a mistake.

I'm going to repost a quote from earlier thoughts on policing: When a profession commands our respect, we often feel tempted to “virtue-cloak” it, insisting against all opposition that members of that profession really are what we know they should be. This is how people end up defending clearly bad police shootings, or saying criticizing police has a "chilling effect" and leads to higher crime. It's also how the Catholic Church ignored pedophilia in its ranks for far too long.

The larger problem, which is that our immigration system is broken and has been for years, is something I shall address in a later post. Right now, all this street theater is getting people hurt and killed without solving much of anything.

In an effort to reverse the drought of postings here as of late, a few semi-random thoughts.

1) Personal Update: I am in Westville Il, where I was raised and my parents still reside for the rest of the week. On Monday, I attended the local American Legion's Memorial Day service, which was well-executed and surprisingly moving. I also won a shotgun at a fundraiser for the Westville Sportsman's Club.

2) I found a link to somebody who wonders how much of the disfunction we see from are Tech Business Overlords is a mid-life crisis. I have to admit it's an interesting idea.

3) I've said on many occasions that small towns are not Mayberry RFD. Here's a true story: The Story Of Ken McElroy, The Vicious Town Bully Who Was Eventually Killed By The People He Terrorized. I just started a science fictional novel in which a character like him may appear.

So, here we are again - another mass school shooting. I'm not sure why the 18-year-old shooter decided to kill first-graders and it's doubtful that we'll ever know. It's also noteworthy that three cops traded lead with the shooter but were unable to stop him. A "good man with a gun" was not helpful. Other thoughts:

A Brief Thought on the Shooter

I was a somewhat weird kid in a small town so this thread by Amanda Marcotte rings true. Fortunately, I had a stable home and the general wherewithal to get myself out of my small town.

Longer Thoughts on Guns

I've expressed it before, but I'll say it again - in a society with the technological resources to put a toaster oven in every kitchen, you'll never be able to successfully ban guns. I am, in fact, writing a book in which somebody on a space station makes a gun for what they see as good and sufficient reasons. Having said that, making a gun, even one designed specifically for ease of manufacture, is not "easy." The kind of loser or lunatic that shoots up a school won't be able to do so.

There are things which can be done to reduce the number of shootings, mass or otherwise. They require the Republican party to vote on changing laws and provide funding to law enforcement. Specifically:

1) Background checks for all gun purchases. Currently, private sales (like from me to you) do not require Federal checks.
2) Better information-sharing between law enforcement so background checks are more accurate.
3) Anybody buying guns at retail in high volume is selling them on the street illegally. Flag and investigate those people.
4) Federal law preventing straw purchases (people buying a gun specifically to sell it to somebody not otherwise eligible to own one.)
5) Private citizens do not need assault rifles. Definition of an assault rifle = a weapon of intermediate caliber with a high capacity magazine and a high rate of fire designed to kill a man at 300 meters. This is a military definition, not a civilian one. You might as well argue that you need a 105 MM howitzer as an assault rifle.

The most dangerous gun in the world is the one you're pretty sure is unloaded. That's one of the many gems from the video below. I highly recommend watching it. For those that don't, a few highlights:

A) The three basic rules of gun safety:
1) Always assume the gun is loaded
2) Keep it pointed in a safe direction and your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot
3) Always personally inspect the gun to determine if it is loaded or not

B) The response to the Alec Baldwin incident where he shot somebody on the set of a movie has been an example of a lack of leadership and responsibility from the gun community. This would have been an excellent opportunity to educate people and reduce the thousands of accidental shootings which happen every year. Instead we get "leaders" like Donald Trump Jr. making fun of Alec Baldwin. Again from the video, the current "leadership" of the Republican Party aren't leaders, they're Internet trolls.

I've been away from this blog for a while. Once you get out of the habit of posting, you're out of the habit. Herewith, various thoughts.

1) Writing: I have committed writing again, adding nearly 4,000 words to the mystery novel. Based on the comments at my critique session, they were generally good words. More (hopefully) to follow.

2) Marching Morons, Gun Division: Comes news that a Minneapolis cop shot a crime victim through the car door of his squad car. Moreover, the cop was in the passenger side and the victim was talking to his partner through the driver's side window. It seems like the cop had his gun out and finger on the trigger way too soon. Unfortunately, that's called "involuntary manslaughter."

3) Marching Morons, Politics Division: After months of assurances by Donald Trump that nobody from his campaign met with the Russians, we hear that his son, son-in-law and then campaign manager took a meeting with the Russians. Words fail me.

4) Marching Morons, health care division: the wealthy comedian Scott Adams has, in the wake of the failure of the Republican party to repeal Obamacare, been pedaling various solutions to American health care. Conspicuously they all seem to have been conceived in a vacuum, and are completely unaware of the fact that the rest of the world cracked this code a long time ago.

I've fallen off the wagon of daily posts here. This week the main reason was my getting sick on Wednesday, which put the whole week in a tailspin. In any event, I shall try to do better.

Since they've accumulated, have some links:

1) My radio interview is up for a re-run. Visit The Author's Show.

2) An interesting two-part history of one of the most popular cartridges in history, the .38 special. Part 1 and Part 2.

3) Cora Buhlert on false memories.

4) Some pretty pictures: Equihen Plage: The Village of Inverted Boat Houses.

I went home over the Thanksgiving weekend, where much food was eaten. Dad and I shot skeet on Friday, and on Saturday went to a gun show. I really didn't need to buy anything, but I talked myself into picking up a Ruger LCR. Thanks to the weirdness of Illinois gun law, I won't have it for a few days, but it's mine.


Simply put, I realized that in the unlikely event I need to carry a gun, it will be an improvised situation and I won't be able to "dress around my gun," so small is better.

My writer's workshop held their monthly meeting last night. As a result of a discussion of a plot point in my book, I asked the five attendees "if a gun fell in your lap, could you get bullets for it?" All five said yes, even though only two of them had FOID cards, which are legally required in Illinois to own firearms or ammunition.

Back to the drawing board on that plot point. And this, folks, is why you should have a writer's group.

Over the weekend, I took my concealed carry course via Roy and Company in a nearby suburb. I have no immediate intentions to carry a gun. However, concealed carry permits are much like parachutes - if you ever need one, you need it right away and don't have time to go shopping for it. Due to the wide variation in state licensing standards and reciprocity, I took a multi-state class, which included training for Utah and Florida non-resident permits. The three of them give the broadest coverage available.

The class itself was underwhelming. The two old fogies teaching it were knowledgeable, although I had to put up with more than a little political BS. (Did you know that the Oklahoma City bombing was an inside job?) Since I was there to get training, not argue politics, I kept my mouth shut. There were only six of us, so it was a quick class.

The Illinois statute is poorly-written, with several clear cut-and-paste errors, and can be contradictory. All the contradictions were pointed out as proof of Madigan's conspiracy against gun-owners as opposed to errors, but again, not there for the politics. Illinois, unique among concealed carry states, requires one to actually shoot a weapon. This does not have to be the weapon one plans on carrying.

This class provided all materials needed, from pens and paper to a gun and bullets. We shot a small-frame .22 semi-auto. It was the same size as and mechanically functioned like a typical concealed carry 9 MM, just chambered in .22. I (and the rest of the class) had no problem scoring enough hits to pass the test. Now my task is to assemble all the various applications, pictures and related paperwork and send it off to the correct locations.