I have gone back to using a Bloglines script to display the blogroll.  This is nothing against Blogrolling--it's just easier to handle this way, and more convenient to use it to reflect my actual reading habits.

I had realized that I was skipping through the list and always reading certain blogs every day, and then catching up with many others when I had the time.  So now I've rearranged my Bloglines subscriptions to show this.

Lady's Perspective On Defensive Shooting is a pretty good article about one woman's introductory experience to guns.

I was recently contacted by a lady friend in Arizona who felt the need to obtain a defensive handgun and the training that should go with it. She was open to suggestions and sought advice to help her get on the right track with a realistic personal-defense plan. Because I want to respect her privacy, I'll just call her Ann.

From our conversations I knew that Ann had some prior experience with guns, and she had a grown son who was a hunter and shooter. For these reasons, I didn't think it was necessary for her to start out with a .22 rimfire, learning the rudiments of marksmanship and gun safety. What I did think was that Ann needed a dependable, no frills handgun that she could understand and quickly learn how it functioned. I suggested a medium-frame, double-action revolver chambered in .38 Special.

She got a lot of good advice, ended up with a good dependable gun, and discovered that shooting is fun.

But this article, and many others I've seen like it, has one statement that I always have a problem with.  Here it is:

According to the Sheriff, a three-inch-barreled, medium-frame, double-action .38 Special makes a good defensive gun for a lady. And he says the most important part of a defensive plan is proper training.

Emphasis mine, of course.  This is a sexist statement.  It has a very condescending tone for a "lady."  What he should have said was, "a three-inch-barreled, medium-frame, double-action .38 Special makes a good defensive gun for someone who is beginning the learning process, regardless of gender."  Not as catchy, I know, but more accurate.

The women in my family are frighteningly good with guns.  Why frighteningly?  Because although they are all firm supporters of the Second Amendment, self-defense, and even hunting, they are not what you would call gun nuts.  But on the rare occasions that a gun is to be used, I have seen many female members of my family simply pick up a gun and put the bullet exactly where it is supposed to go.  They seem to be born shooters (which I am not).  I would never casually recommend to any of them to get any particular kind of gun because they are female, because they would probably humiliate me with it at the range.

Spoken by a co-worker today:

"I figure one out of ten people are complete idiots.  In a city of over a million people, that's at least 100,000 f****** idiots running around."

I think he was being generous.

I have correctly guessed the moron of the week at The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns.  It was way too obvious--that, and the fact that I was probably up so early in the morning that I was the first one to read the post.  Lots of other people got it right, too, I was just lucky(?) enough to be first.

Only two people in history have had a hairstyle like that, and since I haven't heard of Buckwheat doing anything especially stupid lately, I knew it had to be Cynthia McKinney.

So today I expect there may be a slight increase in traffic here from Sam's blog.

Welcome to Blogonomicon, the blasphemous blog of unspeakable wisdom.  If this is your first time here, I'll warn you right off that this blog is primarily about guns and the right of self defense.  If that turns you off, avert your eyes or roll d10 SAN loss.

I am slapping this post together before work, so I don't have a lot of time to look up links, but feel free to poke around and see what you can find.  There's even one post about McKinney herself!

The search box up in the corner works great, and in the sidebar is a list of what I think are some of my better attempts at bloggery.  By sheer coincidence, there are actually a few non-gun-related posts on the front page today.  So feel free to trash my bandwidth, relax and smoke a pipe, and sweep up your brass before you leave.