No, no one needs an assault rifle, but...

I was using StumbleUpon the other night and came across the Hello Kitty assault rifle, which apparently made its internet debut a year and a half ago. A good many of the comments have been archived, but the one still at the top asks the usual assault rifle question:

I've always wondered, where does one actually need an assault rifle? It's military grade weapon and a such has no use with civilians.

I've seen a lot of (virtual) ink devoted to answering that question. And there's certainly nothing for me to add (I've said before that I own one gun, a nonfunctioning WWII-era long gun that I know zip about).

But I've been thinking about it since I saw the AR-15 in question, and you know what? I've decided the question isn't one we really need to be answering.

I'm serious here. Let's take it at face value. No one needs an assault rifle. Fine. So?

Seriously, that's the only response needed. So you don't need an assault rifle. So what? What does that have to do with owning one? There are grown men out there with Barbie collections. Why is a gun collection any less moral? I know, I know, there's an inherent moral question in the mere existence of a gun. But there shouldn't be. There's a store at North Star Mall, Schärfer, that sells collectible knives & swords. I remember going in there once and the clerk pointing at a display and saying it was Strider's sword, but they had all the Lord of the Rings swords. The worst judgment anyone would pass on a person with a sword collection is that he's a geek. But, as local events have shown only too well, you can commit heinous crimes with a sword as well.

I'm not even going with the guns as tool argument, though it's valid. A gun is fundamentally an object and so is amoral--that is, it is possessed of no inherent moral value. To pass moral judgment on a person because of the objects in their possession, rather than what they will ever do with those objects is sheer stupidity. JayG doesn't even shoot most of the weapons in his collection. I don't use most of my crochet hooks. They're morally equivalent to one another. In fact, when used, the moral equivalency doesn't really change. I use my hooks to make knots in fiber. He uses his guns to make holes in targets. In both cases, the action serves to relax the person utilizing the object, and therefore if any moral conclusion is to be drawn, it must be a favorable one. (And yes, I realize the potential exists for Jay to kill someone with one of his weapons. But it's unlikely as hell, and I don't consider self-defense morally equivalent to murder anyway. So I'm going with actual use here.)

Hey, just so you know

The one on the lower left is for Adam. I lit it for him yesterday, at Mission San Jose, when I realized it would've been his birthday.

(I was checking my Statcounter & realized someone hit my blog with a search of his name & birthday. We don't know each other, but know that he is thought of here in Texas too.)

I'm updating this now that I've thought to go back to Statcounter and check the Google search. It occurs to me that I know next to nothing about Adam, & only learned of him because of that e-mail. Somehow, though, when you search for him my blog is something like the fourth or fifth link. This is the first, and this is either the second or third. The internet works in strange ways. There are just some really, really amazing people out there in this world, and we'll never know most of them. Looks as if Adam was one of them.

May the Lord protect the rest of his family still in harm's way.

It doesn't mean what you apparently think it means.

Personal vent ahead...

If you're a guy and I'm a girl and we've been flirting/talking for the better part of a month and you've recently gotten to see {the rest of this sentence redacted 'cause my brother now reads this blog}, and in an e-mail I say

"I'm starting to really like you"...

...it does not mean "I want to marry you next week and have your baybehs."

...it does not mean "I love you."

...it does not mean "I want to spend the rest of my life with you."

...it doesn't even mean "I like you as much as I do steak."

It means...wait for it..."I like you." Read nothing more into it than that. If you must infer any hidden meaning, infer "I will gladly show you my {redacted} again, and I'm perfectly willing to {redacted} any time you want." And you can only infer that because I've actually also said the latter and done the former.

And they say women read too much into things!

(You really don't need to guess that the fellow this is aimed at doesn't read this blog, do you?)
(And oh yeah, that group of men who've seen my {redacted} and whom I have any interest in {redacted} is really elite. I get naughty, but not with just anyone.)

Men

I spent much of last week thinking about Adam Davis (see previous post) after the e-mail Fred sent, and since I did not know Adam but I do know Fred--albeit not terribly well--I thought about him too.

I do not know if Fred used the term "cousin" literally or figuratively. I do know that Fred has a son Adam's age. That he knew Adam. And I can guess that he most likely saw something of his son in the other young man.

Fred is in Iraq right now, and has been in Afghanistan in the past. He's doing the job he's been doing for the past two decades and then some. He has seen those he was with die, and he has risked his own life, and is doing so now, and if he's bitching to someone about it (which I doubt), it's not me.

That, boys and girls, is what it means to be a man. Not chaining yourself to a tree, not driving your SUV up onto the sidewalk so you don't have to carry your kiddie pool as far. He's far from the only guy who's done this. Some men have died. Other men have carried on. Some have left pieces of themselves behind, both visible pieces and ones impossible to see. And still, they have carried on. They have come home, and some have gone back, and others have had to relearn what it is to be a civilian. And still, they have carried on.

And I am fucking in awe of that, just so you know.

Thanks, guys.

In Memoriam

Got this in an e-mail from a friend, and I am sharing it here. Most everything is going to be Fred's words, not mine. Just...take a look at the dates. And take a moment out of your day tomorrow to think of him.

Adam Davis 27 Jul 1987- 23 Jul 2007

Adam,

You are missed and never forgotten. You are a hero and an inspiration and you would be proud that the family is still in the fight and the new family of "youngsters" have stepped into your place are bold, brave and not afraid. Please guide them to do the right things, guide them to be honorable and guide them to shoot straight and dispatch the enemy.

We will drink one for you tomorrow to honor your life and the sacrifice you have made...it is not in vain.

your cousin,

Fred

The warrior understands so well that, because of the unpredictability of life, not only may future hopes never materialize, but also that he may die at any time. We all like to believe that we are going to be alive next week, next year, or in five years, but not so the warrior. He or she knows that we have no guarantees upon life, and that death can therefore tap us on the shoulder at any moment.

Do me a favor, & spare a thought for Fred too if you can. He's in Baghdad at the moment.

Another day in paradise.

The way this trailer park is set up, there are some businesses out front by the street, then a few rows of trailers, then a big ass empty field which has been developed just a tiny bit. To begin with, the owner was going to put nicer trailers back there (there are three dilapidated doublewides off to one side). Then he was just going to put in the pads. But nothing's been done the three years I've lived here other than a tiny bit of utility work.

Went out back with the girls a couple of days ago so they could play and we could take some pictures, and came across this:



Ain't it purty? It's a giant pile o' trash. Mostly couches from the looks of it, & a few mattresses. I haven't--and won't--gotten close enough to assess exactly what all's back there, but if I have to live in front of a literal dump as well as in a figurative one, I'm gonna be pissed.

Sometimes I love this city.

OK, I always love this city. But sometimes I love it more than usual.

Earlier this week, Dave linked to a fellow San Antonian's adventures with a crispy-crittering minivan:

Over a dozen folks stopped in person while the van was in flames to make sure I had gotten out of it okay. Some had followed me off of Nacogdoches Road after seeing the flames under my van. I’m sure some of them were just stopping by and snapping photos with their cell phones, but I really didn’t care. One kind lady, in a small red SUV, even offered to give me a ride home after the tow truck came, but I declined gracefully by saying my wife would give me a ride home from the impound lot after the van was towed. I’m assuming she meant to give me a ride “back to my own home.” :)

Last night it was my turn, though thankfully the incident didn't involve a) my vehicle or b) fire.

My non-evil cousin, Becky is house sitting for her sister and came over last night to ask me for a ride up to the corner store. Seems she's been having problems with her Plymouth overheating and dying on her. She had a diagnostic run on it & they said that she needed new spark plugs. (I need to ask her who she took it to, but I'm guessing Pep Boys.) She stopped for gas yesterday & it died at the pump, so some men helped her push it up into a parking space where she left it with permission from Valero employees.

So I gave her a ride up the street and she got in her van and it started right up. She pulled up beside where I'd parked & said her headlights weren't working. MUCH less than optimal being that this was well after dark. "Well, follow me home." She said she'd honk if it died again. I waited til there was absolutely no traffic (room enough for the both of us to turn out) and turned. She didn't. She's an overly cautious driver, so it took me about half a block to realize she wasn't going to go anywhere. I turned around and came back, paused beside her. "It died on you already, didn't it?"

"Yep."

Parked my car, walked back. She's sitting in the drive in the minivan. It's on a little incline. We can't push it back (I'm confident I could have pushed it if it was on a flat surface; I've pushed bigger vehicles before). We weren't there a minute before we had five guys pushing the van back into a parking space.

They figured it was her battery giving her problems. She broke out the cables and one of the men pulled up his car and they jumped it. It started up. Men scattered. I stood by her a second and we talked about her driving it around the trailer park when she got back so the battery could charge up. I notice it's sounding kind of funny.

"Stand on the gas a little bit."

"I am."

Bad news. It died again as we sat there. I told her just to leave it for the night; it was too much trouble to deal with right then. I had to pull my car up and jump it for her just enough for her to get the windows rolled up (she has a bunch of stuff in her van). One of the men who'd helped earlier came back out, seeing that we were still having trouble. We told him what had happened with the van dying again and he went to take a look at it.

Well, the problem isn't the spark plugs. Or the battery. Or the alternator, as we'd also thought likely. The serpentine belt had come loose (thinking on it, since it wasn't snapped, I'm gonna bet the tensioner arm broke; we had that happen on Rob's Corsica & it killed the alternator).

So we had a group of strangers stop to help and they even did a better job of finding out what was wrong than whoever Becky and her husband paid to do a diagnostic test!

Good to live here, where people still stop to help, even in a bad part of town.

Wait, what?

When I was 19 years old, I married a submariner. I moved to Groton, CT, birthplace of the submarine fleet. As I acclimated to my new life, I learned things. Like how the Navy likes impenetrable acronyms to a level that the Army would feel vaguely embarrassed. (Rob's command at the time was NAVSUBSUPFACNLON.) How they frequently misspell things on purpose (Subase New London). How command insigniae have gotten woefully politically correct over the years. How many different pieces of merchandise one can put a dolphin on. How stupid it is to try driving up the street that goes by the galley during morning rush hour, when the Sub school boys are marching to breakfast.

But the biggest thing I learned was that you're not a submariner until you get your dolphins. Your submarine warfare pin, in other words. It's the first thing you do at your first boat, because until then you are a waste of oxygen. (Nub is the slightly-more-PC term, but I heard waste of oxygen a lot more.)

One of the things Rob tried telling me, but I found impossible to appreciate at the time, is that there's a real, substantial difference between sub fleet & surface fleet. I learned that the hard way when we moved to Norfolk.

I learned that the surface fleet doesn't get the sub fleet. At all. There's little recognition that it even exists, to be quite honest, and none whatsoever that Things Are Different There. Shortly after my first daughter was born, I was enjoying a mild freak-out over how in the hell I was going to get word to Rob that he had a child, a daughter. (Thanks for not coming through for me when I needed you, Red Cross!) My nurse said, "Well, his CO will just have him call you when they get the news, you can talk to him." Uh, yeah. Submarines don't have phones unless they're hooked up in port. Near as we could ever tell, Rob was underwater somewhere off the coast of Turkey when Bobbie was born.

The smallness of the command makes certain everybody is up in everybody else's business too. And one of the things you do when you get to a new command is requalify on that boat. But you'll get some help from your guys, whether you want it or not. One of the guys who was on the Boise for a while, James something-or-other (damned if I remember his last name), had come from surface fleet, and he found the transition very hard. I remember Rob telling me around this time that surface fleet has Damage Control teams, a relatively small group of sailors who are trained to, well, control damage. Fire, flooding, what have you. Submariners don't do this. Everyone is DC. You cannot be a submariner if you're not the sort of guy to run toward the disaster instead of away from it. Since I'm naturally this sort of person myself, having everyone aboard part of DC makes sense. It was one of those things poor James had the most trouble with, though. (Honestly, I don't remember if he ever got his dolphins. He switched over to force protection and last I heard was happy as an above-the-water-clam.)

Anyway, I'm getting long-winded as usual. This is a really long story to explain my surprise when I came across this story on Facebook (I'm a fan of the MCPON. I know, mucho geeky, even for me):

Senior Enlisted Sailor Aims to Make Warfare Programs Mandatory for All Ranks

Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (MCPON) (SS/SW) Rick D. West says if a program is available, it should be mandatory for every Sailor.

In both the surface and aviation forces, program regulations state any Sailor, E-5 or above, must be actively working toward attaining his or her primary warfare device. West sees value in expanding that to all ranks and has asked the force and fleet master chiefs to review the programs for expansion.

I swear to you, before this story I did not know that junior enlisted surface sailors aren't routinely working toward their warfare pins.

I also did not expect many surface sailors to flip the fuck out over this (all quotes here are taken from MCPON West's Facebook page, & any emphasis has been added by me):

"It's the First Class' job to hold the E-4 and below accountable. E-5's and above get the extra pressure because the Navy felt they were fit to handle more responsibilites. Encouraging junior Sailors to get their warfare qualifications is the right thing to do, but I don't believe making it mandatory is the answer. We saw aspects of the warfare qualification program go downhill back when CNO ADM Johnson put out that earning a pin would not give you extra points on an advancement exam. Earning a warfare qualification allows hard charging Sailors to break out against their peers. It also becomes a numbers game. If it's mandatory, then the goal for the Sailor is to just get it done vs. really learning how to save his/her ship."

"Making these quals mandatory will draw away from the uniqueness of what it is to be a sailor. One can also surmise that people will just "sign off" the books, and voila - now the deck plates are full of people that really don't know the ins and outs of their ship. Look at some of those E-4 and E-5s that get POOW certified, but constantly goof on the 1MC. Still annoys me."

"Where I agree that the goal should be to have everyone qualified and knowing the in-and-outs of their respective warfare groups I don't believe making it mandatory would be a good thing. It really will take away any uniqueness left about getting a pin. Sailors will not have the pride in accomplishing something that not everyone does."

"I completely agree with both Courtney Dock Abuhl and Christopher Johnson.
The surface community is different then the submarine community. We have rates on the ship that are trained to minimize the damage in the event of a casualty."

(On that note: What happens when your damage control men get taken out?)

Really, I don't know enough about the issue to really weigh in one way or the other. It's just kind of startling to me to learn that not only is the surface warfare pin not a routine part of any surface sailor's first command, but there are sailors out there who think that such a thing being made mandatory would lessen it. What I have seen from the small world of the sub fleet suggests this is not at all the case.

Of course, maybe holding the specter of "If you don't qualify we're kicking your sorry ass to surface fleet" over a man's head is a hell of a motivator. Surface fleet just doesn't have that sort of bogeyman.

Misplaced Priorities

Man Chains Himself to Tree at Brackenridge Park.

How does it feel to be chained to a tree like a dog in this hot weather?

Adam Moran with the group Dogs Deserve Better has a pretty good idea.
He chained himself to a tree in Brackenridge Park for 12 hours this past weekend to make a point.

"It was just an attempt to raise awareness across the city for all the dogs who spend their lives at the end of a chain 24-hours a day and it helps people realize what's going on when they see a person out there," Moran said on the Jack Riccardi show on 550 KTSA.

Moran says it was hot and he got bored, but he had it a lot better than most dogs tied to a chain.

"I don't have on a big heavy coat like most dogs do. I have the ability to sweat so I can cool off. I had people bringing me food and water and a lot of the dogs in the city who are in that situation don't have that luxury," Moran said.

Moran says when people see a dog chained up they probably don't think much of it, but they gain more empathy when it's a person.

Deep breath.

OK.

Let me put this in small words: humans are more important than dogs.

Most of our Texas prisons lack air conditioning. It's been at or near 100 degrees all this month and at least half of last month. This creates health hazards not just for the prisoners but for people working in the detention centers.

Should we be chaining dogs to trees and leaving them outside in this heat with no way to get out of the sun and little to no water? Of course not. Hell, I've called Animal Control about it before. Chances are all of us in South Texas have.

But honestly? I hear this and I think "Dude we have bigger problems in this city." (and state)

Let's see:

Young black men are still killing each other. If you live here, or you've ever lived here, you know that the East Side is a war zone. It's been that way as long as I remember. You've got young black men killing each other. Young black women having children with the expectation they'll raise those children with no help from fathers. Young black children of both sexes being raised with the concept of "ghetto fabulous" where this is all the hell they're supposed to aspire to in their lives. I know this 'cause I was raised on that side of town.

The issue of child porn is continuing to spiral out of control. This might be the only thing people want to face less than the problem of gang violence. And these stories are coming more & more rapidly. There are others who have spoken on this subject much more eloquently than I.

Mexico's drug violence is crossing the border more & more often. Not as popular as the swine flu, admittedly, but this is a Mexican import with much broader (and more dangerous) implications.

Violent crime, especially against women and children, continues to escalate.

But this dude isn't worried about rape and murder and DUI. Nah, that's all mild. What's really an issue? Dogs on chains.

You, sir, are a wuss.

Coming out of teh Wal-Mart this evening, we were confronted with a gigantic SUV parked on the sidewalk.

I had expected that someone would be sitting in it, dropping off or picking up a passenger, but no. It was just simply parked there. My mother said that there's just no excuse for parking on the sidewalk like that. (Y'all know Wal-Mart. You know every single store has a parking lot bigger than it is.)

Comes this voice from behind us. "Yes, there is. I'm buying a pool."

Erh? Turned around, and this dude--who, by the way, was in full possession of all his body parts--was grabbing one of these:

A plastic kiddie pool. Which he was apparently incapable of carrying to his vehicle should he park it in, you know a parking space. (Mind you, these pools are off to the side of the Wal-Mart where of course there's that little bit of the lot that almost no one parks in. It's not as if he'd even have had to trek across the driveway with it.) Granted, these things are bulky. But requiring of an able-bodied individual to park on the sidewalk so as to minimize the carrying time? Ah, no. Those things weigh less than the cat food bags my disabled mother managed to put single-handedly into the back of my station wagon a week or so ago. Hell, in all probability they weigh less than the driver's side door on his giganto SUV.

I don't think he much appreciated the immediate laughter and mocking. But at least it amused me all the way home.

(For the record, when I bought a slightly smaller version of this pool at HEB last year, I managed to carry it & my youngest daughter halfway down an aisle to my car.)