(A customer is open-carrying what is probably a Star pistol in a cheap nylon holster with a magazine carrier on the front. Paul is totally cool with folks carrying concealed or openly in the store as long as the pistol stays in the holster, but this cheap crappy holster eats at him.)

Paul: Hey man, I think we need to pass a hat around and buy you a real holster! *grin*
TT: Oh, I’ve got a real holster at home.
Paul: Yeah?
TT: Yeah, it’s nylon like this, but it goes on your leg. I figured that would be too intimidating.

We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

Never has the difference between malum in se (wrong because it’s wrong) and malum prohibitum (wrong because it’s illegal) been clearer than the ban on High Capacity Assault Soda, which begins tomorrow in New York City. If you are a business owner and you sell soft drinks larger than 16 ounces, men with guns will come and stop you.

Remember that government can only accomplish most things by violence or the threat of violence. This applies to everything, from fighting a World War, to giving a parking ticket, to paving a road, to funding a homeless shelter. So ask yourself the next time you entertain the thought of government solving a problem: Would it be OK for me to use a gun to make my neighbor do this? If not, why is it OK for me to have the government use a gun to do the same on my behalf?

Update: Ban stricken down as unconstitutional. Solid.

The interwebs are all upset about some targets being made for law enforcement types that depict pregnant women and children. I can’t agree with them.

Now, I’m a former Only One, but please hear me out, and don’t dismiss me because of my previous life. I think I can add some perspective.

These particular targets may be a new product, but training material of this type is not new. Back in my PD orientation days, our trainers brought out this very fancy (and probably federally-funded) interactive video training system that involved a projector and some sort of light gun. The gun had an air hose running to it and would recoil semi-realistically as you fired it. The scenario would play out in front of the officer, who was instructed to attempt to interact normally with the actors on the screen, using his weapon if necessary. The computer would tally hits, give you some percentages about the time from danger to the officer’s first good hit, etc. A trainer would sit to the side with a video-controlled turret which launched something like airsoft pellets. If the situation went bad and he saw that you were out of the provided cover, he’d aim the turret and the simulation would fire at you to match the bad guys on screen.

Handy, right? It’s force-on-force, but presumably with more consistency since you’re not relying on the proficiency of Team Bad Guy. The training was less about marksmanship and more about using the appropriate level of force at the appropriate time. As much as you did not want to get shot by the machine, you knew that it would not go well for you if you ventilated a blue-hair who was brandishing a Sears catalog. In some scenarios, nothing happened and your gun never left the holster.

(Well, we tucked the guns into our pants. Only half of us had remembered to bring our gun belts, and we decided that it would be better to all go down together than to make a few of us pay inordinately for poor instructions from our trainers. The bluff worked. No pushups.)

I’d like to recount one of the sessions we saw on this trainer. It’s been years, so I hope that any readers who were there will forgive minor details. One of my fellow rookies had a domestic dispute scenario. The camera entered the room to find a male and pregnant female. The male was agitated and the female was crying. If you’ve watched an episode of COPS, you know how the domestic calls tend to go. After a lot of denials and confusion (you’re supposed to have a conversation with a scripted video, so it doesn’t work so hot) the male admitted that he hit his wife and will go with you, if only to get away from that crazy bitch, who he’d been looking for an excuse to leave anyway.

I’ve set it up, so you know that the twist is coming. The wife screamed and threw a book at the husband. She then reached into a dresser drawer and withdrew a revolver, firing one round into the husband, and the rest into our brave Only One. She had killed hubby and got three rounds off at the rookie before he finally shot her… in the elbow.

The simulation ended. The lights came up.

The LT was clearly not happy, nearly choking on his dip. “What the hell happened, officer? Why didn’t you shoot her!”

The rookie, visions of scissor kick marathons dancing in his head, was apologetic and uncertain. “She was pregnant, sir! I can’t shoot at a momma with a baby!”

“The hell you can’t! She had a gun! She killed dood, then you!”

Then we all went for a good punitive motivational  run. The lesson was clearly received.

So we’ve found the answer to the fictional prosecuting attorney‘s question, ”Have you, or have you not, actually been conditioning, programming even, your officers to shoot small children?”

Yes. Small children pointing guns at other humans will be fired upon. And pregnant women pointing guns. And senile nuns pointing guns. As the anecdote above demonstrates, hesitation can be a problem that leads to tragedy. Just like you have to do a lot to convince a rookie in PIT training to bump the training junker into the rear quarterpanel of the other training car, you have to convince those who sometimes take lives for a living to overcome a lifetime of being told by society that shooting kids and pregnant ladies is never, ever OK.

It is distasteful. It is unpleasant. It is heartbreaking. It is, despite all that, a reality. Sometimes officers have to stop people who are about to do terrible things to other people. Unfortunately, the most practical way to stop someone who is intent on killing you sometimes results in the death of that person. I wish it weren’t so. But it is.

These targets aren’t new, but the current public opinion tread is distrust of the police. Frankly, it’s mostly their own fault. Whether it’s no-knock warrant service on the wrong house, or shooting the family pug, or surrounding a building and taking a page out of the Federal Bureau of Incineration’s Standoff Negotiation Playbook, police in the news lately haven’t exactly been showing themselves in the best light.

It doesn’t help that the cult of officer safety is used by higher-ups and elected officials as an excuse for all kinds of un-American behavior. I can at least assure you that that’s not universal. On one wall of the academy I attended is a reminder: “SAFETY THIRD.” If officer safety was the number one priority, they’d find a way to telecommute.

So I’m on board with the whole don’t-talk-to-the-police thing. By all means, tell the officer who wants to search your car on a traffic stop to pound sand. Want to come in? Get a warrant.

But if you tell me that you’re not OK with an officer killing a kid who’s about to hill him, then I’ll probably suspect that your good sense is being overshadowed by your distrust of the cops. I’m all for distrust of the cops, but what you’re asking for is even less effective training for them. Yeah. That’ll help.

(Alternate title: How Paul ensured that Kel-tec would never send him a product to review, ever.)

Erin Palette posted a review of the Kel-tec C-43 light.

Now, I was skeptical, just like I’m always skeptical of everything Kel-tec puts out until I’ve been convinced that it’s not either made out of potmetal or tremendously poorly designed. I’m not here to argue about this. Three of the four Kel-tec firearms I’ve owned have been more hazardous to the shooter than the shootee. The best design I ever saw from them was the P3AT, and I went through two of them before I got tired of carry guns falling apart and bought Ruger’s superior copy.

In the case of the light, I was willing to give it a chance, because I know from experience how tough the problem of tactical lighting is when you’re a police officer who isn’t allowed to put a light on his gun. (We eventually got the go-ahead to put lights on our guns, and there was much rejoicing, especially on midnights.)

However, my mild optimism came only from the fact that it’s not a terribad design as an off-hand light. Then I saw one of the uses that Kel-tec thinks is OK for this torch.

NO. No. Nope nope nope nope nope. Stop. Put the gun down. From now on, you are allowed to hold a pistol, or a flashlight, but never both at the same time, until you’ve got this figured out.

I have pointed pistols at people. It sucks. It’s not fun, and it’s not easy. It’s terrifying and stressful. Are you telling me that you’re somehow able to, under stress, grip two objects in one hand, squeezing with your middle finger but not your pointing finger? It’s not going to happen. You are going to point the combo at something, scared out of your wits, and then you are going to put both 420 lumens and a pistol round into that object. Hopefully it’s not one of your kids.

If Kel-tec doesn’t put a warning on the box NOT to attempt to do this, they’re providing a real disservice. Then again, they also tried to sell the KSG to people who might actually have to depend on it, so who knows.

Wired, via Bruce Schneier:

According to their theory, exposure to violence is conceptually similar to exposure to, say, cholera or tuberculosis. Acts of violence are the germs. Instead of wracking intestines or lungs, they lodge in the brain. When people, in particular children and young adults whose brains are extremely plastic, repeatedly experience or witness violence, their neurological function is altered.

It’s true that exposure to violence changes you. I’ve been exposed to LOTS of violence, and while my capacity for violence is certainly increased, my proclivity to it has probable decreased. I’ve seen people get hurt, and frankly, I’d rather not be involved with that again if I can help it.

Key to this approach, said Slutkin and Wilkinson, is understanding that quarantine — criminal incarceration — is a limited tool, something that needs to be applied in certain circumstances but won’t suffice to prevent violence any more than imprisoning everyone with tuberculosis would stop that disease.

“You do interruption and detection. You look for potential cases. You hire a new type of worker, a violence interrupter, trained to identify who is thinking a certain way. They have to be like health workers looking for the first cases of bird flu,” said Slutkin. “In a violence epidemic, behavior change is the treatment.”

Funny thing: When someone brings up thoughtcrime, I start having these violent thoughts.

*ring ring*
Paul: Nerd Store, this is Paul!
Guy: Hey, do y’all, uh refurbish controllers?
Paul: You mean clean them, or repair them?
Guy: Repair them. My 360 controller is busted.
Paul: No sir, but we do sell working ones for $27, so you could just replace it!
Guy: (very exasperated) Why does NOBODY fix these things?
Paul: Well, the parts that frequently break will cost between $5 and $20, plus our time to fix it, plus profit… it just doesn’t make sense to do that, when we can sell you a perfectly good one for a lot less.
Guy: Just seems like a waste, is all. You guys should fix them, it’s the right thing to do.
Paul: Well, you could order the part you need online for cheap and fix it yourself if you don’t want to throw it away.
Guy: No way, man. I get paid $16 an hour. That’s not worth my time to do.
Paul: Hope to see you soon, sir.
Guy: Thanks man. See ya. *click*

The battle over gun control, or rather a parody of the battle over gun control, frequently takes the place on the great interwebs, on Facebook and Reddit and 4Chan and the like. It’s a parody because both sides wade into battle not to convince others to change their ways, but usually for the arguer to feel good about himself and increase his standing among those who share his opinions. If the argument on Facebook were a civil war, the fighting technique of choice would look something like this:

Usually the ammunition chosen for these frequently-bloodless and always-silly battles are quotes from Venerated Heroes Who Agree With Me. You get big points across the board for using quotes from big names in history like Washington, Patton, or Reagan. Man, Reagan. I do miss that man. Let’s hear what he has to say about guns.

Are you a poor college student? Do you have a kid who wants a phone, but you don’t want to give them a cell phone? Do you need a disposable number for prank calls, extramarital affairs, or your startup small business?

While doing research on the process of installing a computerized phone system in my store, I came across an easy way to get telephone service for free using Google Voice and a small network appliance. There’s lots of guides out there on how to do this, but they’re too complicated. The total time invested is about 20 minutes. I’m going to give you the stripped-down step-by-step. In the interest of brevity I’m going to assume that you’re tech-savvy enough to do things like set up a new computer and connect to a wireless router.

Buy an Obi100 for $40, shipping included. I bought the Obi110 for $10 more because I wanted some of the capabilities it has for my business, but the cheaper version I’ve linked should work well for you.

(Optional) Buy a cheap cordless telephone. I actually did not own a non-cell phone telephone. I bought a $15 Uniden at Walmart, but this one should work fine for you, too. You could get a cheaper wired phone I suppose, but when you can get a $15 cordless phone, why would you?

While you wait for the Obi dingus to arrive in the mail, set up Google Voice. It’ll walk you through the process of choosing a number. You’ll need to enter your cell phone or use a friend’s phone to set up the account initially. Afterward, you can unlink that number. In the Google Voice settings, there’s a place where you can turn off Call Screening. I chose to turn it off, because I didn’t want my callers knowing that I’m using VOIP.

When the Obi dingus arrives, hook it up to your cordless telephone, your home network, and power. Give it a couple minutes to sort itself out, then go to obitalk.com and register your account. It’ll walk you through finding and registering the device.

Once registered, go to Device Configuration on the Obitalk website and find the Configure Voice Providers section. There’s a button there to Configure Google Voice. Enter your username and password for Google (if you have application-specific passwords set up, which you really should consider doing, you can generate a password just for Obi and use it instead of the password). Make sure the “Make this the primary line to call out” box is checked.

Click submit. Go get a drink or go to the bathroom or something. After about 90 seconds, you should be able to refresh the page and see “Connected” beside your Google Voice account on the Obitalk web page.

Pick up your phone. Call your mother. She worries about you.

There’s lots of other very cool things you can do with Google Voice, including handling texts via email, ringing multiple cell and VOIP phones at once when a call comes in, and placing calls from any web browser using a headset.

The standard disclaimer that you’re probably going to see everywhere is that THIS DOES NOT GIVE YOU EMERGENCY CALLING. You can sign up for a service through Obi that will do that, but for now be aware that dialing 911 may result in your call being routed to the wrong agency, and that the agency won’t be able to trace your call to a physical location to send help.

Someone claiming to speak for Anonymous is telling people on YouTube that the US Armed Forces should use military force to remove the President, Vice President, and Supreme Court Justices from Howard by military force.

I’m watching the video from a computer with no speakers, so it’s possible that YouTube’s automatic closed captioning software is mangling some of that.

Still, I’m not sure if I’m more shocked at the mistreatment of this poor Howard guy or that the President managed to start another invasion without getting any media attention.

*ring ring*
Paul: Nerd Store, this is Paul!
Lady: I have PS3 but I lost the cord that goes to the TV.
Paul: We can help with that!
Lady: Good! What do I need?
Paul: Do you have one of the newer flat-screen TVs, or an older tube TV?
Lady: It’s an older TV. The big kind.
Paul: OK, great. We’ve got several types of cables that will work for you, and they’re all under $10.
Lady: No, I’m at Fred’s. Do you think they have them?
Paul: I… I don’t know.
Lady: Well, if they had them, do you know where they’d be?
Paul: Ma’am, I can’t help you shop at Fred’s. We have the cable if you’d like to buy it here.
Lady: But I’m already at Fred’s, I should just get it here.
Paul: That’s fine, but you need to find a Fred’s employee.
Lady: Well, you’re not very helpful! *click*