Eco-sailors rescued by oil tanker

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/8034027.stm









An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker.
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Montana Governor Signs New Gun Law

http://www.panamalaw.org/montana_governor_signs_new_gun_law.html

Executive Summary – The USA state of Montana has signed into power a revolutionary gun law. I mean REVOLUTIONARY. The State of Montana has defied the federal government and their gun laws. This will prompt a showdown between the federal government and the State of Montana. The federal government fears citizens owning guns. They try to curtail what types of guns they can own. The gun control laws all have one common goal – confiscation of privately owned firearms.

Montana has gone beyond drawing a line in the sand. They have challenged the Federal Government. The fed now either takes them on and risks them saying the federal agents have no right to violate their state gun laws and arrest the federal agents that try to enforce the federal firearms acts. This will be a world-class event to watch. Montana could go to voting for secession from the union, which is really throwing the gauntlet in Obamas face. If the federal government does nothing they lose face. Gotta love it.

Important Points – If guns and ammunition are manufactured inside the State of Montana for sale and use inside that state then the federal firearms laws have no applicability since the federal government only has the power to control commerce across state lines. Montana has the law on their side. Since when did the USA start following their own laws especially the constitution of the USA, the very document that empowers the USA.

Silencers made in Montana and sol in Montana would be fully legal and not registered. As a note silencers were first used before the 007 movies as a device to enable one to hunt without disturbing neighbors and scaring game. They were also useful as devices to control noise when practicing so as to not disturb the neighbors.

Silencers work best with a bolt-action rifle. There is a long barrel and the chamber is closed tight so as to direct all the gases though the silencer at the tip of the barrel. Semi-auto pistols and revolvers do not really muffle the sound very well except on the silver screen. The revolvers bleed gas out with the sound all over the place. The semi-auto pistols bleed the gases out when the slide recoils back.

Silencers are maybe nice for snipers picking off enemy soldiers even though they reduce velocity but not very practical for hit men shooting pistols in crowded places. Silencers were useful tools for gun enthusiasts and hunters.

There would be no firearm registration, serial numbers, criminal records check, waiting periods or paperwork required. So in a short period of time there would be millions and millions of unregistered untraceable guns in Montana. Way to go Montana.

"We want them registered."

http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Federal/Read.aspx?id=4753

...
on Tuesday, on ABC's "Good Morning America," Pelosi said, "we [members of Congress] have to find some level of compromise" on guns. She noted that the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller, ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to guns. But, she said, "We want them registered."

HR45 Gun Control

This is the Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sale Act of 2009.

We just learned yesterday about this on the Peter Boyles radio program

Even gun shop owners didn't know about this because it is flying under the radar.

To find out about this - go to any government website and type in HR 45 or Google HR 45 Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sales Act of 2009. You will get all the information.

Basically this would make it illegal to own a firearm - any rifle with a clip or ANY pistol unless:

It is registered.

You are fingerprinted.

You supply a current Driver's License.

You supply your Social Security #.

You will submit to a physical & mental evaluation at any time of their choosing.

Each update - change or ownership through private or public sale must be reported and costs $25 - Failure to do so you automatically lose the right to own a firearm and are subject up to a year in jail.

There is a child provision clause on page 16 section 305 stating a child-access provision. Gun must be locked and inaccessible to any child under 18.

They would have the right to come and inspect that you are storing your gun safely away from accessibility to children and fine is punishable for up to 5 yrs. in prison.

If you think this is a joke - go to the website and take your pick of many options to read this. It is long and lengthy. But, more and more people are becoming aware of this. Pass the word along. Any hunters in your family - pass this along.

This is just a "termite" approach to complete confiscation of guns and disarming of our society to the point we have no defense - chip away a little here and there until the goal is accomplished before anyone realizes it. (Did Obama promise transparency? It seems his motives are more and more transparent while his methods are hidden in back rooms.)

This is one to act on whether you own a gun or not.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.45:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h45/show

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-45

One in Three Children Fear Earth Apocalypse

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/kids-worry-about-environment.php

There's a new bogeyman lurking in the closet, and this one isn't imaginary. Us. One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won't exist when they grow up, while more than half—56 percent—worry that the planet will be a blasted heath (or at least a very unpleasant place to live), according to a new survey.

Commissioned by Habitat Heroes and conducted by Opinion Research, the telephone survey polled a national sample of 500 American preteens—250 males and 250 females.

On a sliding scale of anxieties, minority kids have it worst; 75 percent of black children and 65 percent of Hispanic children believe that the planet will be irrevocably damaged by the time they reach adulthood.

Interestingly enough, kids vex over the state of the planet, especially when it came to safe and clean air and water, regardless of any pro-environmental measures on the part of their parents. A staggering 95 percent of the children surveyed said their parents pitched in by recycling, using rechargeable batteries, and conserving water and electricity.

"We commissioned the survey as a result of my own childrens' experiences with the recent fires in Australia as they expressed much concern for both their safety and the planet’s,” said Sharon Lowe, founder of Habitat Heroes, in a press release. “While it is upsetting to hear how many children in the United States have expressed similar concerns, I am more committed than ever to help educate children around the globe in a way that is not scary to them.”

Other interesting findings

• 50 percent say that hurricanes and tornadoes are the natural disasters that scare them the most.
• 28 percent say that they fear animals, such as polar bears and penguins, will become extinct and disappear from the planet more than any other environmental concern.

Girls worry more

• 67 percent of girls ages 9-11 versus 60 percent of boys ages 9-11 worry that the earth won’t be as good a place to live when they're adults.
• 57% of girls ages 6-8 versus 43 percent of boys ages 6-8 worry that the earth won’t be as good a place to live when they're adults.

Urban kids are more anxious than suburban kids

• 59 percent of kids in metro areas are more concerned that the Earth won’t be as good a place to live when they grow up compared to non-metro kids (47 percent).

Study shows congressional delegation's most-used words

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=6214320

By Andrew Adams

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A new list shows the most common words spoken by Utah's senators and representatives. Capitolwords.org analyzes everything on the Congressional Record over the past year.

The top word for Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, is "country."

For Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, "blue" is his most-used word on the House floor. "Bipartisan" is his 28th most popular word.

The favorite word of Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, is "land."

Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, likes the word "percent."

All of the congressional delegation's favorite words, ranked in order, are available at the link on this page. The Web site is set up by the Sunlight Foundation.

E-mail: aadams@ksl.com

ABC’s Shameful ‘20/20′ Experiment

http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/04/15/lott__gun_control_experiment_rigged/

Gun control advocates look desperate. Last Friday night, on April 10, ABC aired a heavily promoted, hour long “20/20″ special called “If I Only Had a Gun.” It is ABC’s equivalent of NBC’s infamous exploding gas tanks in General Motors pickups where NBC rigged the truck to explode. With legislation in Texas and Missouri advancing to eliminate gun-free zones at universities, perhaps this response isn’t surprising.

The show started and ended by claiming that allowing potential victims to carry guns would not help keep them safe –- not even with hundreds of hours of practice firing guns.

No mention was made of the actual multiple victim public shootings stopped by people with concealed handguns nor did they describe who actually carried out such shootings. Instead, ABC presented a rigged experiment where one student in a classroom had a gun. But sometimes even the best editors can’t hide everything the camera sees.

The experiment was set up to make the student fail. It did not resemble a real-world shooting. The same scenario is shown three times, but in each case the student with the gun is seated in the same seat –- the center seat in the front row. The attacker is not only a top-notch shooter –- a firearms expert who teaches firearms tactics and strategy to police -– but also obviously knows precisely where the student with the gun is sitting.

Each time the experiment is run, the attacker first fires two shots at the teacher in the front of the class and then turns his gun directly on the very student with the gun. The attacker wastes no time trying to gun down any of the unarmed students. Thus, very unrealistically, between the very first shot setting the armed student on notice and the shots at the armed student, there is at most 2 seconds. The armed student is allowed virtually no time to react and, unsurprisingly, fails under the same circumstances that would have led even experienced police officers to fare poorly.

But in the real world, a typical shooter is not a top-notch firearms expert and has no clue about whether or not anyone might be armed and, if so, where they are seated. If you have 50 people –- a pretty typical college classroom –- and he is unknown to the attacker, the armed student is given a tremendous advantage. Actually, if the experiment run by “20/20″ seriously demonstrated anything, it highlighted the problem of relying on uniformed police or security guards for safety: the killer instantly knows whom to shoot first.

Yet, in the ABC experiment, the purposefully disadvantaged students are not just identified and facing (within less than 2 seconds) an attacker whose gun is already drawn. They are also forced to wear unfamiliar gloves, a helmet, and a holster. This only adds to the difficulties the students face in handling their guns.

Given this set-up the second student, Danielle, performed admirably well. She shot the firearms expert in his left leg near the groin. If real bullets had been used, that might well have disabled the attacker and cut short his shooting spree.

Nevertheless, even terrible shooters can often be quite effective. Despite all of ABC’s references to the Columbine attack, the network never mention the armed guard at the school. He had an unusually poor target shooting record –- indeed it is reported that he couldn’t even hit a target. Yet, his bravery still saved many lives because his poorly aimed shots forced the two killers to engage in gunfire with him. This slowed down their killing spree and gave many students a chance to escape the building. The guard was only forced to retreat and leave the school himself because of the homemade grenades that the Columbine murderers had.

The Columbine murderers strongly and actively opposed passage of Colorado’s right-to-carry law, particularly the part that would have allowed concealed handguns being legally carried on school campuses. What goes unnoticed is that the Columbine attack took place the very day that the state legislature scheduled final passage of the concealed handgun law.

Time after time the attackers in these multiple victim public shootings consciously avoid areas where people might be able to defend themselves. In the attack on the Jewish community center in Los Angeles in which five people were wounded, the attacker had apparently “scouted three of the West Coast’s most prominent Jewish institutions—the Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center and the University of Judaism—but found security too tight.”

In the real world, even having a gun and pointing it at an attacker has often convinced the attacker to stop shooting and surrender. Examples include high schools in Pearl, Mississippi and Edinboro, Pennsylvania, as well as the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. Street attacks in Memphis to Detroit ended this way, too, without any more shots fired.

Even if the cases don’t get much attention, gun permit holders stop these multiple victim attacks on a regular basis. Ironically, just this past Saturday, the day after ABC’s broadcast, a permit holder in Columbia, Texas stopped a mass robbery by fatally shooting the criminal. Some Web sites have started collecting these and other defensive gun use cases (e.g., see here, here, and here).

ABC’S “20/20″ exaggerates “the danger of accidentally hitting a friend” when confronting an attacker. The show cites as an example is a man who mistook his wife for an intruder. Obviously that case is a tragedy, but those cases are exceedingly rare. But why didn’t they present a single multiple victim attack as an example? Simple, because it has not happened.

ABC pushes the notion that gun show regulations, rather than arming potential victims, can stop these attacks. But very few criminals get their guns from gun shows: a U.S. Justice Department survey of 18,000 state prison inmates showed that less than one percent (0.7%) of prisoners had obtained their gun from a gun show. Even adding flea markets and gun shows together raises the number to just 1.7 percent. There is not a single academic study showing that regulating private individuals selling their own guns — the so-called “gun show loophole” — reduces any type of violent crime. What the regulations have accomplished is cutting the number of gun shows by 25 percent.

The show ends with this claim:

“If you are wondering where are all the studies about the effectiveness of guns used by ordinary Americans for self-defense, well keep searching, we could not find one reliable study and the ones we found were contradictory.”

Yet, “contradictory” is an overstatement. There have been 26 peer-reviewed studies published by criminologists and economists in academic journals and university presses. Most of these studies find large drops in crime. Some find no change, but not a single one shows an increase in crime.

You would think that if gun control worked as well as ABC implies, there wouldn’t be these multiple victim public shootings in those European countries with gun laws much stricter than those being publicly discussed in the United States or by ABC. Yet, multiple victim public shootings are quite common in Europe. In just the last few days, there have been a shooting at a college in Greece and in a crowded café in Rotterdam. Of course, the worst K-12 public school shootings are in Europe.

Given the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent annually in the United States for police officers on campus and other programs, one would hope that this relatively inexpensive alternative, where people are willing to bear the costs themselves to protect others, would be taken more seriously.

ABC never mentions a simple fact: all multiple victim public shootings with more than 3 people killed have occurred where permitted concealed handguns are prohibited. Rather than studying what actually happens during these shootings, ABC conjured up rigged experiments aimed at convincing Americans that guns are ineffective. Unfortunately, ABC’s advice, rather than making victims safe, makes things safer for attackers.

John Lott is a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, second edition, 2000) and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery, 2003). Much of the discussion here is based on both books. John Lott’s past pieces for FOX News can be found here and here.