Author: hsoi

Guns thwart crime, save lives — and we have data

/ hsoi

In fact… the data we have, refutes many commonly held misconceptions (that never had any data behind them anyways) about guns and their use.

In a new Cato Institute paper, Clayton Cramer and David Burnett review the controversy over how often Americans use guns in self-defense each year.

[…]

The most common situation, accounting for 1,227 of 4,669 incidents, was a “home invasion,” where intruders try to force their way into a home they know to be occupied. Burglaries were also common, accounting for 488 incidents. In 285 cases, the defender had a concealed carry permit, and most of those incidents occurred in public. There were very few cases where a permit holder became involved in an avoidable dispute that turned deadly because he had a gun—a scenario that figures prominently in arguments against nondiscretionary permit laws. Also contrary to the warnings of gun controllers, victims in this sample were rarely disarmed by their attackers; the reverse happened more than 20 times as often. Criminals took away defenders’ guns in 11 out of 4,669 incidents, and the defender ended up dead despite being armed in 36 incidents, less than 1 percent of the time. Cramer and Burnett describe many specific cases (mapped by Cato here) in which a gun prevented robbery, rape, serious injury, or death, illustrating their general point that policy makers need to take these benefits into account instead of focusing exclusively on criminal uses.

Full article at Reason

The Cato paper. Yes, you can download it for free.

And a nifty interactive map at Cato mapping out defensive gun use.

Remember, I wasn’t always a gun owner. I didn’t see the point of “assault rifles” because it wasn’t like Bambi wore a bullet-proof vest. I thought the police were there to “protect and serve” and they’d always be there to prevent my wife from being sexually assaulted….

But when you finally decide to look at facts, evidence, data, listen to reasoned arguments, well… it’s hard to refute Truth. You can keep your fingers in your ears and your hands over your eyes if you wish, but that only serves to keep you from realizing Truth. Your choice, I suppose.

Technology failures

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Too much computer fail right now.

Time-Warner Cable’s RoadRunner Internet has been horrible for me lately. It’ll be up for a while, then go down for a few minutes, then back up, then back down, and just repeat this for too long. That’s been going on for some weeks but I tried to do my best to ignore it. But then yesterday she gave up the ghost. I’m guessing the modem has failed, or something bigger. It’s not an outage, it’s local. Tech won’t come until Wednesday.

This doesn’t bode well for someone who works from home and relies upon Internet connectivity.

It’s good that my day job has me writing connection manager software, so I have lots of 3G/4G USB dongles around. I set up an old iMac with one of the 4G dongles and turned on Internet Sharing to share the 4G connection through the Ethernet port. Then hooked my router up to that iMac. And viola… the household is back online, every device. It’s a lot slower, but at least we can limp along for now.

And then on my server… one of the hard drives is making a funny noise. It’s failing. The bad part is, as I powered everything off to remove the failing drive, when I tried to power it back up it wouldn’t power up. So is the drive failing or the power supply? And a couple other drives in similar enclosures also made the same noise upon turning them back on, but they aren’t repeatedly making the noise. This doesn’t bode well. I’ll be calling Other World Computing this morning to talk about it and figure out a solution.

What with the flooding in Asia and how it’s affected the hard drive market, I was so hoping to avoid buying a hard drive for the next couple years until things recovered. Alas…

Oh what fun.

 

2012-02-06 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 6, squat 1

/ hsoi

Had to cut today short. Too many things on the agenda.

“Week 1”

  • 5 reps – Squat (working max: 260#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x105
    • 1x5x135
    • 1x3x160
    • 1x5x170 (work)
    • 1x5x195
    • 1x7x225
  • Asst. #1 – Leg Press
    • 3 x 10 x 315
  • Asst. #2 – Leg Curls
    • 3 x 10 x 85

I’m tight on time today. Thought about doing a “jack shit” but couldn’t bring myself to it. So I just did 3 (instead of 5) sets of assistance work and supersetted them. Good enough.

In out done.

Squats felt good tho. I found myself doing something with unracking the bar that seemed to help. Get fully prepped under the bar, normal breathing, no tensing. As soon as I know everything is in place, deep breath and hold, fully tense up, unrack the bar. As soon as I unrack, maintain tension but exhale and inhale… allow myself to breathe. Back up into position, settle, then squat. The key? To keep tension AND to keep breathing. I just can’t hold my breath so much else it doesn’t bode well for me. That really helped. Every set felt really good, tho I started thinking about things too much on the last set and only got 7 reps… would have been happier with 8, but good enough.

I’m 3 years old

/ hsoi / 8 Comments

So I’ve been blogging for 3 years now.

All this drivel and I still haven’t reproduced all the works of Shakespeare. 😉

I am pleased that even after 3 years I’ve been able to keep to my rule of writing (or at least ensuring a post) every day.

Stats? Whatever. I’m happy they’re growing. I’m not sure why you all like to read what I have to write, but thank you for caring. 🙂

What helps manage risk?

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

What helps manage risk?

Donʼt go to stupid places; donʼt associate with stupid people; donʼt do stupid things. We will add to that, be in bed by 10 oʼclock.

[…]

Have a “normal” appearance. Just look normal. If you have a flashy personality, you are going to attract attention.

[…]

Nothing good happens out after midnight. If you made no other lifestyle change other than being in bed by 10 oʼclock, you would avoid 99% of the bad things that would ever happen to you. Nothing good is going to happen to people who stay out late at night, particularly when you are carrying a gun.

– John Farnam, from the Feb. 2012 newsletter of the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network

Best Fight Scenes

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Want to see some of Asian cinema’s best fight scenes?

Some awesome stuff. Anything with Jackie Chan is always awesome because not just his performance, but he always stages some awesome elements into the scenes to make them more than just punching and kicking.

I’ll also say that #15, the knife fight from “The Man From Nowhere” (2010) is brutal. I mean, not for the weak stomached. But it does make you realize that if you have to fight, you must be swift and brutal and do whatever it takes to win (or at least, not die).

2012-02-03 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 6, bench press 1

/ hsoi

Started strong, ended… meh

“Week 1”

  • 5 reps – Bench Press (working max: 220#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x95
    • 1x5x110
    • 1x3x135
    • 1x5x145 (work)
    • 1x5x165
    • 1x9x190
  • Asst. #1 – Bench Press
    • 5 x 10 x 135
  • Asst. #2 – 1-Arm Dumbbell Rows
    • 5 x 10 x 60
  • GPP – Elliptical
    • 6 minutes steady at 120 spm, 10 incline, 14 resistance

As in other exercises, I’m modifying the weights on the warmups just slightly. The weights will be just under some plate threshold and gee, it’s just a warmup weight so who cares. If it makes it easier to (un)load the bar, fine. Thus why 95 instead of 90 on the warmups set. But… whatever.

Worked my way up to 190×9. I felt good, especially in my form. Getting the whole body tight and into the press, improving form over past workouts. So, good thing. I didn’t feel on the work set like suddenly everything went shaky — it was just another set. Doing the numbers it didn’t feel like a strength increase, but that’s ok. I think the improved form and over the course of this cycle I’ll still perform just fine.

On assistance bench pressing, I should have gone to 130, but again it was a plate thing. Going to 135 keeps it simple. And 5# does make a difference. It worked me well, the last couple reps of the last set were a bit of a struggle but not much. So it was good to have bumped things up a bit. You know what else? There was a nice ego stroke here. I remember when I couldn’t bench 135 at all. I remember when I broke the 135 barrier. Now it’s just light assistance work for me. I am pleased.

Speaking of light, going to 60 on rows felt really light today for some reason. But here’s a place I’m not going to crank it up. I think I could get away with 65, but let’s just be slow and steady.

Then came time for the GPP work, and I just did NOT feel it today. I just did a few minutes of steady pace stuff. Lame, I know.

I need to buy a foam roller to have at the house. Makes my back feel so good.

Dear lady driving the Kia Soul

/ hsoi / 15 Comments

To the lady driving the Kia Soul.

I know you didn’t see what I saw. Your car is small, my truck is large and blocked your view of what was ahead. You may have seen the large tractors mowing the expansive median area on the South Mo-Pac Expressway around the 290/360 interchange, but I know you didn’t see the one that I saw. That as I came around that corner at the bottom of the hill, that one of the mowers was in the left lane of traffic. That I had to hit my brakes to ensure I didn’t hit it. But you couldn’t have seen it because 1. my truck was in your face, 2. the mower was off the road within seconds of me seeing it.

Of course, the only reason my truck was in your face was because you were tailgating me.

Perhaps if you weren’t tailgating me, you might have seen the mower. Certainly if you weren’t tailgating me, you wouldn’t have almost ended up going up my tailpipe.

I look back at the situation and I guess all that reckless “revenge” driving was trying to make a point to me. You must have thought my sudden application of the brakes was to tell you to back off; no, it wasn’t but I can see how you would have taken it that way. All that honking. All the reckless zooming in and out of other cars in an effort to “teach me a lesson”. Then your final “fuck you asshole” move of aggressively cutting me off, of course flipping me the bird as you did so. It’s evident you weren’t thinking straight, because just before you cut me off it was evident you were going to do that, so I applied my brakes to slow down. Had I not, your rear bumper would have clipped my car — your judgment was off in many ways — and you would have been pushed sideways and likely you and the little doggie in your lap would have been t-boned and probably end up in the hospital, at best. That’s not a threat; that’s physics.

Yes my initial reaction was one of anger, because you put me and my son’s life in danger for no good reason. I let the anger go, because I realized there was no point in holding it. I did however get your license plate and reported you to 911 as a reckless driver. I don’t know if anything came of it, but it was the best I could do.

Actually I can do better. There are lessons to be learned from your mistakes.

Don’t be an asshole.

Don’t tailgate.

Don’t put yourself in dangerous situations. If you do, don’t blame someone else if things go pear shaped.

Before blaming someone else for all your problems, look first at yourself to see what you may have done wrong and could have done better.

Be slow to anger — not just on the road, but anywhere in life. The immediate situation may not be something you appreciate, but perhaps it was keeping you from a greater danger.

And I need to buy a hitch ball and mount. Bought one. 🙂

The Best Improvised Weapons

/ hsoi / 7 Comments

Low Tech Combat has an article about the 5 best improvised weapons.

What I like about the article is Adam first defines criteria of what makes a good improvised weapon — and what doesn’t. This includes dispelling some things commonly put forth as good improvised weapons (like car keys).

Then of course, they discuss the weapons and WHY they are good. I’d like to add a few comments:

#5 – loose change
#4 – backpack
#3 – a drink

Indeed these are good. They may not be damaging, but the key advantage (as a weapon) is it forces your attacker to reset their OODA loop. It doesn’t have to be loose change either. Consider Caleb Giddings’ coffee incident as an example of #3 (a drink) . Throwing things at your attacker makes them have to react to what you did —  their OODA resets, your OODA progresses.

#2 – a MagLite

I can’t deny a MagLite makes one hell of a club. But it’s a pretty crappy flashlight. 🙂 You could consider a model like the SureFire “Defender” (they have a few models in this flavor), which comes with a crenellated bezel made for striking things. Of course, that starts to make the flashlight look more like a weapon. I carry a SureFire E2L which has a mildly crenellated bezel, doesn’t look aggressive or weapon-like at all, but I wouldn’t want to get struck by it. And it makes a great EDC flashlight.

I tried using a MagLite in the past as a dan bong (Korean martial arts weapon, a short stick), but it’s just too heavy. Maybe a “C” cell version might work better. But the thing is, a MagLite is heavy. That’s an advantage, but it’s also a disadvantage (momentum).

#1 – umbrella

Even a small, compact umbrella could be usable (again, see dan bong). But yes, this makes a good weapon. There’s a lot these days about using canes and walking sticks for self-defense. You could use an umbrella, you could use a cane… maybe even have both, one for sunny days one for rainy (so you don’t look too out of place). Sometimes if I must enter a NPE, I’ll bring my cane.

That’s something else to consider: why carry an improvised weapon? If you’re a gun person, why would you want this? Well again, consider Caleb’s situation. Flinging the coffee into his attacker’s face bought him time — the OODA loop reset. As well, one point Adam stresses is sometimes situations dictate it and an improvised weapon is a fair choice due to situation or camouflage. A friend of mine likes to say “You don’t play golf with only one club in the bag.” That one gun may not be right for all situations.

Good stuff. Read the article for full details.