…According to this guy Mark Carpenter from The Satellite Show group blog. He says here that

….not content merely showing off their guns at Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and our national parks, a group of gun-hot-mouth-breathers open-carry advocates converged on Alexandria, VA to wave their guns at the US Capitol on the fifteenth anniversary of militia supporter and gun-control critic Tim McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

Meh.

(Note that his Wal-Mart link goes to pix of me. I found his blog from the pingback.)

I do like that he says:

Okay, I’ll say it: these people scare the holy heavenly living fuck out of me. They seem so misguided and sincere and expect major gun battles in retail outlets and coffee shops. And ummm… just in case they’re right, I’ll be at Peet’s, okay?

Meanwhile, here in Casper, the liberal “more taxes and less freedom!” daily newspaper the Casper Turbine Tribune finally gets around to writing about the tea party that happened a week ago, talks about the “extremism” at the tea party in an article called
Tea partiers try to temper messages, but some turn ugly

Some tea partiers brought signs that were ugly, such as using Obama’s name as an acronym standing for “One Big Ass Mistake America.” Others didn’t carry signs, but they wore firearms on their hips.

Speakers talked about the evils of Obama’s health care reform, critics who call tea partiers dumb or racist, wasting taxpayer money, the justice system and government as corporations, health care reform, gun rights, the Constitution, disinvited University of Wyoming speaker Bill Ayers, political incumbents needing a kick out of office, the John Birch Society, and health care reform.

Some talked about America the way they thought it was and should be. “We will rebuild America the way it was back in 1776,” Allen Crowder said. “We are a Christian nation, regardless of what the president says,” Carl Collea said. “I don’t believe Obama is a Christian.”

The council often has no one to speak during the public comment sessions at the end of every meeting, which makes council members wonder if the public cares, Holloway said…Holding his Obama-as-The Joker sign, Matt Kull… feels frustrated that people speak and vote, but politicians do what they want. “Our perception is we show up and no one listens,” he said.

If you read the 60+ negative reader comments on that article from the “more taxes and less freedom!” crowd (four guys in Casper on SSI and one guy in California who used to live here but still wants to make Wyoming more like California), you get the impression that people think it’s silly that us tea party folk don’t like it that our government ain’t listening. I don’t get that.

The unattributed quote from me in that article’s sidebar about “It hurts to watch our country be in a hostile takeover” (video below) seems to sum it up well. (I was actually quoting myself, it’s a paraphrase of a line in my Right Arm of Wyoming song “Tar and Feather a Tax Collector.”)

Anyway, yeah, people were complaining about the do’h!-bama regime, and five of the 150 people did have guns on our hips (I was one of them), but I wouldn’t call the mood that day “extreme.” I’d call it quaint. And considering what the left is doing to America, I’d say the Right have been very polite up to this point.

–Michael W. Dean

==

(altered gun pic of me from mriguy4. Thanks guy!)

Damn, the NRA sure is square sometimes…

I dig them and dig what they do. My wife and I are members, and will continue to be, probably our whole lives. (We haven’t ponied up for the lifetime membership yet, but keep renewing our membership and also send ‘em a check for a little more than that once in a while.) The NRA is, if not the reason guns are still legal in America, they’re at least largely the reason there is shall-issue concealed carry permits and Castle Doctrine in a lot of states (including Wyoming).

But while they’re very in favor of concealed carry with a permit, they don’t seem to want to admit that open carry without a permit, is legal in many states (including Wyoming).

The new (April 2010) issue of the NRA magazine “America’s 1st Freedom” has an article on page 13 called “Should the Brady Campaign Try Decaf”? It’s about how the cranky nanny-statist anti-gun group The Brady Campaign are trying to get Starbucks to ban legal carry of guns in all their coffee shops nationwide. (Which would only turn all Starbucks into “gun free zones” i.e. “victim disarmament zones” where any criminal with a gun could more easily tyrannize and harm law-abiding citizens.) It’s a good article and makes some cogent points: Starbucks is righteous for not giving in, and the Brady Campaign used to be a powerhouse but no one really pays attention to them anymore.

The really square thing about the article is that it does not mention open carry, even though it was open carry events at Starbucks that caught national news attention and got the Brady Bunch gun grabboids involved i the first place! The article simply mentions the Brady Campaign “attacking Starbucks for allowing people to carry firearms in its coffee shops as provided for by state law.”

That’s kind of making the story a little more square than it is.

See, some folks from a really cool web site , OpenCarry.org (I’ve been a member of their forum for almost a year) recently had some peaceful, mellow events at some Starbucks and open carried their guns in holsters on their hips. It got some national news. It got some vitriol from the leftie blogs. And Stephen Colbert even joked about it.

After it hit the news, the Brady Campaign wet their fussy panties about it and tried to get Starbucks to forbid ALL legal gun carry (open and concealed) at all Starbucks. Starbucks refused, and then the NRA wrote the article. But, again, NO MENTION OF OPEN CARRY in the article.

I’m a member of some smaller gun-rights organizations that ain’t so square. They also ain’t got as much juice, or as many numbers. Maybe being square and compromising is how the NRA stays big and have the juice they do. (They’ve been called “The most powerful lobbyist group in America”, and they are.) But maybe a lot of NRA members are such straight-arrow boyscouts that they are scared of open carry, even though Open Carry is TRULY THE MEANING OF “KEEPING AND BEARING ARMS.”

So I’ll keep up my NRA membership. But I’m also keeping up my membership of the GOA, the JPFO, and the WGOA.

Anyway, I haven’t even BEEN in a Starbucks in a long time, but I open carried and went into one yesterday (East Side, Casper Wyoming), just in the spirit of all this news, and to help support them for being supportive of us. No one seemed to care that I was open carrying, except one lady who’s eyes bugged out at my big-ass revolver. Her husband (or brother) asked me “is that a .44 Magnum”? I resisted the urge to give the Dirty Harry speech verbatim (just kiddin’) and simply replied “No, it’s a .357 Magnum.” Then he nervously chatted with me a bit about his gun-shooting experiences.

But as one person said on OpenCarry.org “Your need to feel safe doesn’t trump my need to be safe.”

– Michael W. Dean

East Palo Alto Police Det. Rod Tuason apparently posted the remarks on his Facebook page in response to a friend’s status update, which suggested that gun advocates who carry unloaded weapons openly — which is legal in California — should do so in places like “Oakland, Richmond and East Palo Alto” and not just in “hoity toity” cities.

“Haha we had one guy last week try to do it!” Tuason replied. “He got proned out [laid face-down on the ground] and reminded where he was at and that turds will jack him for his gun in a heartbeat!”

Several comments later, the detective suggested shooting the gun rights advocates, some of whom have carried firearms openly in recent weeks in California’s Bay Area, particularly at Starbucks locations.

“Sounds like you had someone practicing their 2nd amendment rights last night!” Tuason wrote. “Should’ve pulled the AR out and prone them all out! And if one of them makes a furtive movement … 2 weeks off!!!” — referring to the modified duty, commonly known as desk duty, that typically follows any instance in which an officer is investigated for firing his weapon…..

Man. I am SO glad in EVERY way that we moved out of that state. I really feel like it’s almost a different country.

MWD

Here’s a screengrab of the exahange, before they deleted it to destroy evidence:

My Taurus  jammed while shooting .38 special plus P ammo. I got the spent shells out, but the gun won’t close easily now, and you can barely pull the trigger.
Fortunately, Taurus guns covered by a lifetime guarantee, not just lifetime of the owner, but the life of the GUN, so even if you buy one second-hand, it’s still covered.

UPDATE, ONE MONTH LATER: Got it back from Taurus, 4 weeks to the day after sending it in, it’s now working better than ever.

I’ll carry my S&W 908 semi-auto until I get it back (could take Taurus a few months, I’ve heard) but I am going to ALWAYS carry at least the mouse gun (Ruger .380 LCP) as a backup. What if I’d needed the Taurus in a life-and-death situation and it failed, and I had no backup?

I got the gun new, and have fired maybe 1000 rd through it over a few months. Mostly .357, some .38.

FWIW, the brand of ammo I was firing when it jammed was Blazer, but I don’t think it’s an ammo issue. Those rounds have a lot less power than the .357s I usually use.

WHY REVOLVERS?

Someone asked me “why do people still buy revolvers”?

People buy revolvers for the reason people still buy hammers. Because it may be an old design, but they work (despite my exception, which is so rare it proves the rule).

They fail less than most semi-autos, they’re cheaper.

They’re actually great guns for people with no experience with guns. If you ever buy a gun for someone, like a girlfriend or wife, who’s willing to carry a gun, but not willing to really become a “gun person”, a revolver is great. No safety to forget to turn off, not mag disconnect to accidentally hit, just point, and pull trigger. The trigger is so hard it acts as a safety, but you can also cock the trigger with your thumb to get a shorter trigger pull. (Which also has the psychological effect on whoever you’re pointing it at,….think Dirty Harry).

And why snubbies? A .357 revolver is the most power you can pack in the smallest form. Someone described a .357 snubbie as being like the “Noisy Cricket” gun from Men in Black.

And Snubbies can be fired from inside the pocket if need be. A semi-auto, not so much, because the slide has to move. Also, revolvers do not engage a spring until you pull the trigger. You could probably leave a loaded revolver in a drawer for half a century, and it would still work when you pulled the trigger. A loaded semi-auto with a bullet in the chamber would probably seize up or the spring would break in that amount of time.

Plus all revolvers look and feel cool and retro, and have a lot of history. They were the first usable multi-shot handguns. “God mad man, but Sam Colt made them equal.”

Revolvers have very few moving parts

compared to semi-autos

more on revolvers:

http://www.snubnose.info/

http://www.snubnose.info/history.htm

http://www.sixguns.com/range/Mademag.htm

http://www.handloads.com/articles/default.asp?id=30

http://www.notpurfect.com/main/concealed.html

Revolvers are much less affected by dust and dirt, require less cleaning and oiling, and are much easier to clean. (for what it’s worth, I cleaned mine often, and carried in a holster, which prevents pocket lint from getting in, but many people carry snubbies in a coat pocket. I don’t recommend that, for dirt, but also because in a holster, you KNOW what position it’s going to be in when you need to grab for it in an adrenaline situation.)

I’m psyched today. My concealed carry permit is waiting for me to pick up at the sheriff”s office . Yay! I’ve wanted one for two years and more or less moved to Wyoming so I could get one!

MWD