An opinion piece in the San Antonio Lightning has so many quotable quotes that I can only recommend reading the whole thing, but it boils down to this one quote:

There is a simple lesson here. Unarmed security officers can't protect themselves let alone others from armed killers.

I spent a very brief time as a security guard at the Texas Department of Child Welfare Services in San Antonio. There were usually 3 or 4 guards on duty, as well as one armed police officer. As you can imagine, a place that looks out for child welfare often involves protecting that child from his/her biological parents. I saw a lot of scumbags coming through that door. But get this: the guards were at the front entrance, supervising the entry of every single person (employees and "clients") into that building. The armed officer was about 100 feet down the main hallway, closer to the center of the ground floor. Due to the "security" design of the entrance, there was basically no way to escape if a violent person had come in through that front door. On the other hand, the officer on duty would have been easily able to hear the gunshots that would be dispatching us and be able to react in some way. It wouldn't have done us, or the receptionists, one bit of good. We would all be deadmeat.

Fortunately during my time there, we had no such people come through the door. I couldn't even get away with carrying concealed, because the security guards had to be scanned in as well. I couldn't even keep my Swiss Army Knife on me while on the job. My personal defensive weapon was safely (and distantly) stowed in my vehicle, which may have given me a chance if I happened to be the one patrolling the parking lot when something went down. I fully understand where this commentor is coming from.

category:advocacy

Not much exciting this week, work-wise. Spent all week delivering notices, no meter reading. Thursday and Friday were deliveries out in the "country," very low volume (50 one day and 29 the next), very high mileage driving all over the eastern part of Bexar County. Dogs were no problem. As a general rule, country dogs are a lot less crazy than city dogs, probably because they get to roam on a lot more range, and are more free to socialize with each other. A dog kept apart from all other dogs for it's entire life gets somewhat whacko after a while. I did encounter a trio of Dobermans today, but one was scared and the other two were friendly as all get-out. I have encountered very few vicious Dobermans.

I wanted to mention that I realize very few people read this blog regularly, occasionally someone comes through and leaves a comment, but probably doesn't ever come back. If I ever saw my number of subscriptions go up to "2" on Bloglines I think I would probably faint. Yeah, I have subscribed to my own blog (you don't see it on the blogroll because it's marked as "private"), but it's not because of some big ego or anything. I do it so that I can see how my articles look when they come out on Bloglines, in case I need to tweak the formatting. I also do it to see how long it takes an article to show up after I've posted it (usually a matter of minutes). And there's that number of subscribers. A lot of the blogs I read have very few Bloglines subscribers, but I know that lots of other people read them "straight," without using any kind of news aggregator.

Something that I don't want anyone to do is to put me on their blogroll merely because their blog is on my blogroll. This "courtesy blogrolling" is not for me unless you feel that I actually am worth checking into occasionally.

By the way, the free web statistic tracker that I use shows that the one blog that sends most people over here is Lest Darkness Fall. A lot of other folks have come through here due to my occasional posts regarding the Minuteman Project. Also by the way LDF, you have 2 subscribers who use Bloglines (one besides myself). Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has also been sending a few hits my way.

I occasionally see that someone has been here by Googling certain search terms that I have mentioned. If you come through here only to find that I have just mentioned something in passing, please feel free to leave a comment asking for more information. If I can add anything to it, I will. For example, yesterday someone came here after Googling "sp 101 ruger concealed carry." This was something I just mentioned briefly, but now I feel that I should add more detail to it.

This week I had a couple of article titles that might be too obscure to make sense to anyone. The time-traveler post made a reference to John Titor. I'm not going to try and explain it, but if you're curious, just go to johntitor.com. The other one I will explain ("Okay, Rockford, throw out the BB gun...). It was an old episode of The Rockford Files, in which Jim Rockford was holed up in a house with a woman while a gunman waited outside to kill him, occasionally firing shots into the house. Rockford asked the woman if she had a gun, and she replied, "I have an old pellet gun that I shoot gophers with." Rockford says, "Well, you better get it out." He eases the barrel through a crack in the window and takes a potshot at the bad guy. The pellet richochets off the hood of the BG's car and stings his cheek. After recoiling slightly, he realizes what happened, and yells, "Okay, Rockford, throw out the BB gun." Among people who know me, I am semi-famous for having a wealth of useless, trivial data in my memory. This is just one of those bits of trivia.

The book by Bob Dole has been very gripping, and hard to put down. Books by people who were actually there seem to be better than books by scholars who have only studied something. I'll probably comment more on the book when I finish it, which will probably be tomorrow.

A swift, deft dissection of a popular factoid at Insane Troll Logic:

The Pelopenesian War? Economic motives
The Trojan War? A woman
The Napoleanic Wars? Land
The Revolutionary War? Land/freedom
The Crimean War? Who the Hell knows
The American Civil War? Federalism/economics/slavery
World War I? Strange alliances, land
World War II? Land, alliances
Korean War? Civil War, ideology
Vietnam War? Civil War, ideology
The Persian Gulf War? Alliances, land, oil

Very cool picutres of Kim du Toit lighting up a S&W .500 Magnum. Now that's a hand-held howitzer.

A student at MIT is hosting a time-traveller convention. More power to you, Amal.

AP has this article about how tough it is to be a journalist in the Philippines.

Sixty-seven journalists in the Philippines have been killed since 1986--23 of them in the past three years alone, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, or NUJP, said. The mostly unresolved deaths prompted the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists to describe the Philippines as the world's "most murderous" country for reporters.

So...

Bataoil said the police will issue permits to journalists who are licensed gun owners to carry firearms outside their residence only if they prove there is a "verified threat" on their lives.

However...

Gun owners have to undergo neuro-psychological and drug tests plus a gun safety seminar before they are issued licenses.

I have no objection to a gun safety seminar, but I would be interested to see what kind of neuro-psychological test they are subjected to. It reminds me of Superintendant Fowler's attitude on the Britcom The Thin Blue Line: "Anyone who thinks they need a gun is obviously too unbalanced to own one." That's a paraphrase, I don't remember the exact words, but then, it's only a TV show.

Bobo the ratdog chihuahua that I mentioned last month, has now apparently been outcast by his owner(s). So I assume that unless someone jumps forward to save him, it's only a matter of time for poor Bobo. This must be one bad-a#$ chihuahua. Maybe they should have tried some chihuahua sauce.