strapped

Several months ago I began carrying a Taurus Millennium Pro 9mm as my primary concealed handgun. Until then I’d carried either a H&K P7 PSP or a Kel-Tek P3AT, neither of which held more than 8 rounds total. The Taurus packed 13 9mm rounds into a small, yet managable pistol, and was only about $325 from Academy, so I took a chance.

The Millennium was nice. I never had a failure in it, the gun felt sturdy, and it concealed well. It even had the manual safety I prefer in my handguns. I’ve stopped carrying it, though, because I’ve lost faith in the Taurus pistols. The 24/7 I owned in 9mm was nothing but trouble. When I shot for my CHL renewal in November I had two failures within 50 rounds, both of them due to the weak striker. Even though the Taurus handguns offer a unique DA/SA trigger, I just can’t accept a pistol with a poor striker or hammer. Both of the Taurus pistols I used to own are now gone, and I’ve moved on…

Directly to a Glock 19. I picked it up yesterday, along with a set of Trijicon 3-dot sights and a Don Hume OWB holster. I’m going to see if I can pack this thing daily on my hip under an unucked shirt and get away with it. I’m afraid the length of the Glock will show when I sit, so I’m likely to switch to another IWB holster eventually. If I can get away with it outside, though, I’m going to stick with it for comfort.

Walking out the door right now I’m carrying 16 rounds without the need for a spare magazine. A year ago I only carried 14 with the extra magazine.

I can’t tell you any one reason why I want to carry more rounds on my person. Something about the world just concerns me – like we’re right on the edge of something breaking. We live within a system permanently stretched to its limits. Nothing is ever humming along on an even keel. We’ve learned to accept panic and overcrowding as a way of life, but its unnatural. We all know something is wrong. Everyone is at that same precipice, waiting for something to break, inside them or outside.

You just can’t carry enough bullets. People break when they’re stretched, and we’re still a long way from the bottom of where this broken, irresponsible, and irrational federal government construct is going to take us. People are going to break because we’re all-in, as a society, as an economy, and as a nation. We’ve put our collective futures into the hands of the few, and they’ve been failing us egregiously for a hundred consecutive years. Sooner or later they’re going to break someone near you and I, and whether or not we’re ready to deal with it is a matter we all have to decide for ourselves.

I’ve never felt so prepared. The Glock 19 is clearly an unapologetic tool for the discriminating carrier. It’s not going to fail at critical moments, is not going to slow you down with extra buttons or levers, and is going to destroy whatever is in front of it when the trigger is pulled, whether you like it or not. It’s a dangerous gun in the wrong hands, and according to statistics is also a dangerous gun in trained hands. Without a good holster the threat of self-inflicted gunshot wounds from a Glock is significant, so it is certainly not a firearm to be treated with anything other than absolute reverence. When the time is right it’s a gun that can be counted on.

Being prepared feels good today.

Technorati Tags: 9mm, concealed carry, Glock 19, holster, millennium, pt111, self defense, taurus

Filed under : Living the Life

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Last December my wife received a notice from the City of Fort Worth, Texas that she was the target of a red light camera civil violation. The notice was printed 91 days after the alleged violation (the City municipal law only allows for notices to be sent within 30 days), and only allowed a few days for a response.

Her options were simple: she could either pay the fine or request something called  an “adjudicative hearing.” Since the civil penalty had been imposed in a manner contrary to the City’s own laws, she could not possibly choose to pay the fine. That the money would be spent on further red light camera programs, which have been repeatedly proven to endanger the public, gave her little choice but to contest the violation.

An adjudicative hearing is not the same as court. There are no judges or lawyers, but rather City employees making determinations of guilt or innocence based on a lacking and biased sense of the law as explained by individuals committed more to revenue generation than civil rights. Rather than subject herself to such a kangaroo court, my wife demanded that her Texas Constitution Article I, Section 15 right to a trial by jury be recognized.

Article I, Section 15. The right of trial by jury shall remain inviolate. The Legislature shall pass such laws as may be needed to regulate the same, and to maintain its purity and efficiency.

We had to pay extra shipping to ensure that her letter was delivered by the “due date” on the ticket, so late was the City in sending it to her.

Instead of impaneling the jury, the only legitimate course of action available to the City of Fort Worth, they awarded themselves a default win in her case. Her penalty rose from $75.00 to $100.00, and the City is now considering turning her account over to a collections agency.

My wife and I have both spent countless hours on the telephone with City attorneys and employees, explaining to them that municipal code cannot possibly hold precedence over the Texas Constitution’s Bill of Rights. As of today the City has chosen to ignore its lawful mandate and to end its communication with us on the matter. Fort Worth Deputy City Attorney Gerald Pruitt made this clear just before hanging up on me earlier this afternoon.

What concerns us even more is that the Fort Worth Star Telegram seems to be taking its cues from the City in this case. I originally wrote a long and detailed account of this matter to be published as a letter to the editor, which editor Paul K. Harral then requested that I shorten for publication. After limiting my statement to fewer than 300 words, Mr. Harral contacted me again to inform me that he was going to “try for the focus letter position” with my editorial. Three hours later I received another note from Mr. Harral, this time rescinding his promise to publish the letter and instead prompting my wife to simply accept the adjudicative hearing as offered by the City and repeat her request for her constitutionally inviolate right to a jury trial from the City during that hearing. What happened between 7:30 and 10:30 this morning that would convince Mr. Harrel to decide not to publish an editorial critical of the City of Fort Worth? Only he knows. Whatever responsibility he might have had to promoting dissenting opinins, a fundamental charge of a free press, went out the window in those three hours.

Mr. Harrel did point out that “there are all sorts of examples in law – medical malpractice for example – that require a hearing before proceeding to trial,” as well as trotting out a lot of the same arguments, largely verbatim, that the City has been using to give us the runaround. Of course he’s right about the medical malpractice suits, but what he fails to recognize is that in these cases the individuals signed contracts requiring them to submit to arbitration or hearings prior to trial as conditions of their employment. My wife is a not a contract employe, but a citizen, and as such is not bound to follow any municipal code which violates her civil rights. Were we to begin allowing municipalities to determine by decree which cases may be heard in front of a judge and jury, our future as Texans and as Americans would indeed be bleak. By accepting the City’s hearing my wife would in fact be waiving her right to a real trial, placing the decision into the hands of a system which is clearly operating outside of its mandate. That Mr. Harrel, a journalist, would so blindly follow the lead of a City in this matter gives us grave concerns about the legitimacy of his newspaper and his capacity as a journalist.

At this point the City of Fort Worth is unlawfully exercising compelling force against my wife by refusing to register her vehicle, and will soon be committing outright criminal acts by attempting to force a collection through punitive measures. She has repeatedly and lawfully demanded a legitimate trial, and has been denied at every turn by the City.

This is why we carry. This is why we protect ourselves. It is not always going to be a home invasion, carjacking, robbery, or any other sort of violent crime. It may instead be a City attempting to ensure a revenue stream that is clearly unconstitutional and dangerous to the public health. When we stand up for our rights we often place ourselves in the unenviable position of being whipping posts for unelected and unaccountable lawyers such as Gerald Pruitt who are more committed to the rule of revenue than the rule of law.

And sometimes these people can be dangerous. Sometimes the protection of a City revenue stream is such that the unlawful use of compelling force becomes the dangerous use of police force. I don’t truly believe that this is one of those circumstances, and I have no reason whatsoever to suspect that Mr. Pruitt or any of his colleagues would ever do something so sinister as asking any individual or force to take unlawful action against us. But the possibility exists, and it’s the same sort of possibility which exists each and every time we walk out our doors. To stand for liberty is to stand against tyranny. Mr. Pruitt and his colleagues are, whether they know and accept it or not, agents of tyranny, and as such are not to be trusted in any capacity.

Always remember, enemies foreign and domestic.

Technorati Tags: civil rights, red light enforcement, revenue, unamerican

Filed under : Living the Life, Ruminations

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I am the most prepared person on my block. I am easily among the most prepared in my zip code. At my current pace, I am likely to join the ranks of the most prepared in my state very soon. I have food, water, gasoline, maps, medicine, bullets, batteries, blankets, alcohol, bartering items, and the means to move it all rapidly. I also have a plan. Several of them, actually.

The question I’m most often asked is “why?” Why do I take preparation so seriously? Why am I so concerned about being able to survive any situation? Why do I carry a gun everywhere I go? Why can I quote the Bills of Rights of both Texas and the United States? There are a lot of answers to those questions, but one single idea lies at the root of all of them. I am prepared to defend myself and everyone around me from any wrongdoing, foreign or domestic, because the vast majority of you are not willing to defend yourself. In fact, as far as I can see society has gotten too stupid to defend itself from much at all anymore.

Seriously, when was the last time you looked around and took a rational accounting of what you’re living in? Right now we’re being told to believe that the two most capable people to lead the country are Barack Obama and John McCain. In an even more bizarre twist of stupidity, most of us believe that those two people are our only choices!

The current government has failed at literally everything it has ever done in our lives. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, and every other program currently administered by the federal government are complete disasters. There is no competition, and the one invariable fact of business is that an organization which exists with no competition will not only fail its customers, but will do so in the most spectacular fashion possible. There is not an American alive who believes that his or her tax money is being spent wisely. Everyone in the country knows that we continue to elect people who rob us, cheat us, and are even willing to see us die for profit, or even worse, vanity.

So many of us stand around and talk about how messed up it all is every day. We complain that Obama wants to spend too much of our money or that McCain wants to send all of our kids off to die. We whine about our taxes, warrantless snooping, and even torture. Seriously, here we all are, Americans, and somehow we haven’t gotten it across that it is not okay to torture our fellow human beings under any circumstances.

We must seriously be the single stupidest collection of people on the planet. Somehow, despite knowing for a fact that the people that we’re electing are criminals who would quite literally be working in telemarketing call centers if we hadn’t somehow allowed their families to get into politics, we still allow them to represent us. For some unknown reason we’ve all decided to look the other way when logic and reason call, preferring to ignore the very reality of the truth that if we continue electing these people to our highest offices they will eventually kill every last one of us through sheer incompetence.

So why do I prepare for anything? Because I look around and I see the real world. I see a bunch of people who don’t value human life at all, and they’re the ones with the keys to the bombs. I see a federal government that has long since stopped caring that its sole function is to protect the very rights that it has taken from us. Most importantly, I see a bunch of people who are not only too stupid not to notice that it’s their own damn fault that things are so bad, but are so dense as to fail to realize that they’re all doing the most terrible things that they could possibly be doing for the future of our nation and for their very survival by continuing to believe a single word from the federal government and by continuing to elect from the pools of criminals we call the Republican and Democratic parties.

What’s that? Oh, you see that too? Yeah, what are you doing about it? Voting for McCain? Obama?

Let me offer you another solution. Go buy some tuna and canned peaches. Get bullets, at least one good assault rifle, and flashlights. Make sure you know where you’ll go if martial law is declared. Make sure you know where you go if there is no longer any gasoline in America. Because if you can look around the country and see the shape we’re in and not see clearly that the absolute root of every single problem that we currently have, have ever had, or will ever have in this country is because of our ever-growing and overwhelmingly incompetent federal government, then you are the reason I am preparing. You are the one running us into the ground by believing that men like Barack Obama or John McCain could really bring about fiscal responsibility – the real kind, not the delusional, self-serving criminal kind that you’re probably thinking of. You are the one who buys into the absolute nonsense of global terrorist conspiracies and the need for a multi-trillion dollar war against enemies that might someday pose a threat if the people you continue electing insist on repeatedly poking them with their enormous egos.

Look around and ask yourself: are we really this stupid?

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, federal government, incompetence, John McCain

Filed under : Ruminations

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I’ve been slow in writing this, but it’s something important to me.

Until recently I was working at a major telecommunications company as a systems engineer responsible for building servers and processes for large and complex projects. I took the job knowing that telecom companies had been in the hot seat regarding snooping, and that there was a possibility that I might be around some of the technology, projects, or people responsible. I rationalized my concerns by promising myself that if I ever found myself breaking the law or violating the Constitution at the request of the company I’d blow the whistle.

The job was fantastic, the people were all great, and with the lone exception of the building being short on space to house the many employees and contractors, everything was perfect. I was working with state-of-the-art technology, and was managed by a  fellow who seemed content to let me be the best technical guy I could be.

One of the many projects to which I was assigned involved moving some old server hardware to a different location. As a first step I attempted to locate the original hardware, which was operational and responding to pings, but which I couldn’t physically locate in the data center. I asked a couple of colleagues for help and one of them began running on about the “other room.” We had to borrow a badge and go through several levels of coded door to get to it, but on the other end of the facility we found the alternate server room. It was smaller and had less gear, but was obviously separated from the primary applications. We couldn’t find the server I was looking for there either, so I began to ask if there were even more server rooms.

And there were. Several more, in fact. Each successive room could only be entered by navigating and passing the security of the previous room, and the rooms eventually became just a few huge machines and massive routers locked behind a chain-link fence in the corner of another room. I never actually made it into the the chain-linked area, and could only access the immediate rooms before it by having my manager accompany me to see an old, grisly-looking dude, who then had to stay with both of us beyond a certain point.

I started talking to my colleagues in hushed tones, asking them about these rooms and what purpose the served. The details were sketchy, and I never received a good answer because no one had a good answer to give. For a few weeks I struggled with the knowledge that secret rooms were buried in the building, wondering endlessly why the core engineering team did not even know their purpose.

Then, on July 10th, Bush signed FISA, complete with retroactive immunity for telecoms.

I can’t remember exactly how long I waited to submit my resignation, but it wasn’t more than a few days. I had not been asked to do anything illegal or unconstitutional, and still hadn’t even determined what the back rooms contained. I just knew that something was wrong, and that I could not be a part of whatever it was. I still gave a proper 2-week notice, and I still worked diligently on my project load, but for a while I secretly wondered if I was doing the right thing. Maybe those rooms just held core routers or time servers or something else critical. It was possible, even probable, that I was leaving a fantastic job over nothing.

With a few days to go I sat down with my manager, who had been pretty quiet during the run-up to my departure. He knew my reasons for leaving, and hadn’t commented to that point. We sat down in a little room and began to talk. I opened by quoting the 4th Amendment, and explained that with the passage of FISA and the concern over what telecom companies were being asked to do – and being retroactively immunized after having allegedly done – I was not a good fit for the position. Had I been asked to do something illegal or unconstitutonal, I explained, I wouldn’t have even been able to give them the two-week notice.

Then he said something that I’ll remember for the rest of my life, and which marked a turning point in my understanding of liberty and freedom.

“When the men in black suits come and ask you to do something, you know, there’s just not much you can do.”

Leaving that place was the single best decision of my professional life.

Technorati Tags: black suits, Constitution, fisa, telecom, warrant, wiretap

Filed under : Ruminations

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For the last couple of months I’ve been considering a new daily-carry pocket pistol chambered in 9mm, both to complete my conversion to 9mm for all of my handguns and to replace my dinky Kel-Tec with something more reliable. I went through the motions, researching Rohrbaughs and Seecamps, and even some Kahrs and Glocks. To finance the new pocket pistol I sold the last of my H&K handguns, my beloved P7 PSP. I hated to let it go, but after witnessing H&K’s customer support firsthand and realizing the eventual likelihood of something eventually failing and requiring H&K repair on my incredibly complex P7, I made the decision to commit it to another owner.

Flush with cash, I set my sights on a $1000 Rohrbaugh R9s, a sharkskin holster, and maybe couple of spare mags. I drove over to meet my FFL guy, and while we boxed up the P7 to ship off I told him of my new concealed-carry plans. While we were on the topic, he showed me his daily carry routine, which I immediately liked so much that I’ve since decided to scrap my original idea and try a completely new carry routine instead based on his.

I am now the proud owner of a Taurus Millennium Pro PT111. It’s a pretty solid gun, doesn’t break the bank, and carries a respectable 12+1 in a compact frame that will ride well on my hip. All I need now is leather. My wait time is still a month out, but I’ve started leaving my shirt untucked more and more often at the office for when it finally comes in.

I’ll likely keep the pocket pistol, and I might even carry it now and again. I’m excited about upgrading to a 9mm from the .380 though, and with the addition of night sights and maybe a more corrosion-resistant finish think that the Millennium could be a great sidekick.

Technorati Tags: 9mm, concealed carry, holster, millennium, pt111, taurus

Filed under : Living the Life

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