Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but down-right force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.

Patrick Henry, Governor and Patriot Leader

That has got to rank as one of the all-time greatest quotations on liberty … well … ever.

… but if I tried pulling off the perfect heist, this would be it:

DUBLIN, Ireland - Irish police were hunting for a beer bandit who stole 450 full kegs from the Guinness brewery , the largest heist ever at Ireland’s largest brewer.

National police said a lone man drove into the brewery , a Dublin landmark and top tourist attraction , on Wednesday and hitched his truck to a fully loaded trailer awaiting delivery to city pubs.

Mmmm. Guinness.

Fighting For Liberty is very proud to announce the adoption of our new baby! She’s from Russia (Izhevsk, to be particular), and she came cheap and covered in cosmoline!

Measuring up to a full 5′6″ (with her bonnet bayonet on), and weighing in at a substantial 10lbs, even unloaded she’s quite a handful!

Oh, I can’t stall any longer, everyone loves new baby pictures:

Quite a few birthmarks on her, too. Concentric 0 accuracy proof, point of aim proof, black powder proof and final proof, and matching serial numbers on her bolt, stock, receiver, and her cute little baby buttplate. Yep, she’s a 1932 original! She even has a hex receiver and inner ring (At least, that’s what the Doctor told us. I didn’t look).

Here’s a picture of some of those markings:

Cigars all the way around!

I saw this exchange during the debate last night:

Cooper then turned to Kerr and asked whether he felt he got an answer to his question.

Kerr responded: “With all due respect, I did not get an answer from the candidates. American men and women in the military are professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians. … Today, don’t ask, don’t tell is destructive to our military policy.”

Translation: “I got an answer that I didn’t like and I hope you don’t mind if I preach a bit more.”

Then his microphone cut out, and Hillary staffers waiting in the wings frantically replaced it so he could continue berating the candidates about the perceived non-answer answer that he received.

Honestly none of this was at all surprising. It’s the way the Clintons - and CNN - operate.

Heh.

A few weeks back, I wrote that CNN had the journalistic credibility of chewed gum.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize, publicly and profusely, to every discarded wad of chewed gum which may have been offended by that callous remark. I have nothing but the utmost respect for all gum and candy products, both chewed and unchewed.

The debate itself was purely ridiculous. It was like Republicans at the Democratic convention. Why do they bother? I could stomach 10 minutes - thankfully the last 10 minutes.

My take:

Thompson looked good. He was smart and answered the questions.
Tancredo was awesome hammering Ron Paul.
Huckabee looked sharp for the most part.
Hunter didn’t help himself.
Giuliani is more entertaining talking about the Yankees than anything else.

Ron Paul’s “they wouldn’t do this if we weren’t occupying their country” pisses me off to no end.
Romney is a total tool.
McCain is almost as big a tool as Romney.

Okay, not really a video game firearm safety course.

A few times in the past couple of weeks I’ve had discussions with people that revolved around new shooters, and bad influences. One of the huge problems you’ll find in urban areas is “thug culture.” It’s bred from lots of different things - disdain for police, rap role-models, and of course, video games.

It seems like just one of those factors feeds the flames of the others and so on and so forth to the point where … well … ridiculousness ensues. Now what we have is firearms being portrayed to young kids in a completely unrealistic light with no basis in reality.

For people who do respect guns and gun ownership, that’s a tough hill to climb - teaching new shooters with impressionable young minds while battling this kind of thug romanticism.

As if rap videos aren’t enough, there are video games out there that glorify disrespect and the thug culture. Now it’s cool to be an uneducated, drug-dealing, gang-banging murderer. Meanwhile the rap stars who promote that lifestyle with so much bling on screen are living their high life in security while their fans who many times are really living in bad neighborhoods where the sound of shots going off is a nightly occurrence are trying to emulate them without the multi-million dollar contracts.

Have a look at this - a screenshot from a game called “Saint’s Row”:

It’s almost comical, really. How hard is it to train a kid to respect firearms if he’s playing games like this every night with his friends?

And let me state unequivocally here - I’m a gamer. I’ve played Grand Theft Auto, GTA III, Vice City. I grew up with an Atari 2600, cutting my teeth on Pitfall and Combat. I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with various incarnations of that pudgy little Italian plumber in the overalls, and likewise hundreds running around the land of Zelda.

But these games out now … they’re a little different. Have another look - this one is GTA San Andreas:

Shootouts in the streets, guns being held sideways, drive-by shootings. I’m not going to eviscerate the video game companies for putting these games out (I wish they spent as much time on quality as they did on making a fast buck through shocking screenshots and programming for thugs), and certainly censorship isn’t the answer.

All games come with a rating system, and many like this are rated “M for Mature”. Thing is, you’ve got ignorant parents getting out and buying games like this for their kids without knowing a thing about video games, the content, or anything their child is interested in.

Do these games contribute to a violent society? No, I don’t think so. If you had a game called, “Virtual Church Pastor” where you had to run through a bad neighborhood and get people to stop killing each other, the game wouldn’t make any money. If you played a corrupt Pastor who operated a secret stripper club in the back of his Church who’s objective it was to con as many religious sheep as possible out of all of their money so you could buy more expensive hookers and cars, well you’d have a hit on your hands.

All this comes back full circle to teaching new shooters. How do you do it when this is their only influence and only interaction with firearms. There are kids out there who aren’t teenagers who can identify on sight any one of a dozen different handguns … but they’ve never touched one.

One last screenshot just to drive the point home:

Mercifully, it looks like this collaborative game featuring Snoop Dogg is not going to be made. But look at the screenshot. Two thugs gunning it out at close range in the front yard of a neighborhood, holding guns sideways, with a child’s toy in the yard. I don’t want to sound like a stuffy old guy, but seriously … this is a bad influence. Not because it turns gaming kids into killers - I don’t think there’s enough evidence to that effect - but because it indoctrinates them with a romantic sense of gang-banging and makes it nearly impossible to de-program them.

Take a kid growing up with games like these to the range, and he’ll hold the pistol sideways thinking he could actually hit something by looking cool. It’s sad, because it makes proper education so damn hard.

Who the hell is Attorney Andrew Cohen anyway? I mean really, you can give any monkey on the planet a pen and a piece of paper and he can write an editorial for CBS. And primates would probably make good lawyers to boot.

Look at this tripe:

“If the justices do honest work in this area, they will inevitably come to two candid conclusions. The first is that our hallowed forefathers were no more willing or capable of making tough decisions about contentious issues (like gun rights) than are their modern-day counterparts.”

That is what we call ignorant wishful thinking from a lawyering liberal retard. Our Founding Fathers were individually flawed in their own ways - they were all human, after all - but they were passionate about this country and it’s founding because if they weren’t, they’d die. They were committed to getting it right, and they did until we started screwing it up with collectivist theory. They were brave individuals who simply KNEW that years later some dumbass is going to wonder what they were thinking. That’s why you see them saying things such as:

“The first and fundamental rule in the interpretation of all documents is to construe them according to the sense of the terms and the intention of the parties.”

Justice Joseph Story (appointed by President James Madison)

… or …

“On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

President Thomas Jefferson

That means quit farking whining about an extra comma, you horse’s ass.

Here’s another …

“The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statue is to discover the meaning of those who made it.”

Justice James Wilson

Our Founding Father’s were extremely clear in the Bill of Rights.

Here’s a basic primer:

1. Everything in the Bill of Rights refers to the individual. States do not have “individual rights”Look at the other Amendments, jackass.

2. The Bill of Rights was written a long time ago. Just because you disagree with it’s grammatical sense by today’s standards, doesn’t make the Founders wishy-washy.

The big argument you hear out of the anti-gun camp is always, “militia means the army”!

Wrong yet again.

“The militia shall always include, according to the past and general usage of the States, all men capable of bearing arms.”

and …

“A militia … are in fact the people themselves and are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns.”

Richard Henry Lee, Signer of the Declaration, Framer of the 2nd Amendment

He didn’t say, “Are only part of an army created by the State with weapons issued to them from the Government!”

And another …

“The militia … are … the people at large.”

Tench Coxe, Attorney General of Pennsylvania

AND another …

“Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.”

George Mason, “Father of the Bill of Rights”

It takes a real special kind of smug, brainless schmuck to think that our Founding Fathers were being unclear or were somehow afraid to tackle the subject of firearms. Congratulations, Andrew, you’re a shining example of your profession.

What an excellent opening statement this piece in the Bahama Journal has:

It is virtually impossible for Bahamians to legally come into possession of a firearm, according to Desmond Bannister, Minister of State For Legal Affairs, who says firearms legislation in this country is among the toughest in the region.

Well then that must be one of the safest places in the UNIVERSE according to the Brady Bunch and their ilk, right?

He said the problem with The Bahamas is that its archipelagic nature, which law enforcement officials acknowledge makes it is easy for persons visiting to bring in firearms.

Hmmm … no mention of crime, yet we have an excuse. Nice technique.

What is violent crime like in the Bahamas, anyway?

Between 1991 and 2003, the murder rate in The Bahamas was higher than the United States and about three times as much as Canada’s on a per capita basis.

Crap.

“We do not have a difficulty with the legal regime. We have a difficulty with the nature of our country. If someone in possession of a firearm brings in a yacht into one of the Out Islands, that illegal firearm might get into the wrong hands and it is virtually impossible for the police to police that kind of thing,” said Mr. Bannister.

“That illegal firearm might get into the wrong hands?” Is it just me, or is this guy tying himself up in illogical argument knots?

We can not allow people in our homes to have illegal firearms and not report it to the authorities,” said Mr. Bannister.

Okay, so it’s not me.

Mr. Bannister said there have been reports of persons in many communities firing off bullets into the air and when the police arrived to question people they were met by a wall of silence.

He said a wall of silence should not be tolerated in the Bahamas. He said there must be obedience and respect for the law.

And that’s it right there, isn’t it? You must be disarmed. You must turn in anyone who is armed. You must obey. Beginning to sound like Philadelphia. I wonder if they can stop-and-frisk? Or maybe like Boston where you can “allow” the police to ransack your kids room looking for a weapon regardless of whether or not they have a warrant. I have a great respect for most police officers because most police officers aren’t insufferable jackass elitists. That being said, disarming the public and demanding they “obey” gives far too much power to your average every-day cop.

“When we decide to not tolerate illegal activities we will see the work the police, the courts and judges are doing. We as a people can work together to ensure the kind of society we want,” said Mr. Bannister.

Work together, greater good, blah blah blah. This is beginning to sound like a Democratic debate.

Chief Superintendent Raymond Gibson, Officer in Charge of Crime, said most of the illegal weapons entering the country are coming from the US.

Prove it you lousy sack of fecal expulsions.

Superintendent Gibson said the methods being used to import these illegal firearms are commercial airline flights, shipping vessels, cruises and pleasure vessels.

Commercial airline flights? Again, prove it you lying weasel. “Illegal” guns coming to the Bahamas on commercial airline flights, that’s your excuse? “Kucinich is bringing them over in his flying saucer,” would’ve been only marginally less reasonable an explanation.

This is what happens to America, unfortunately. It’s all our fault. No matter what it is - your people killing each other on your little hole of an island in the middle of your “archipelagic” cesspit of poverty and crime and it’s our fault.

Go fark yourself sideways with a push-broom.

“We want to make an appeal to the public, to continue providing police with information without delay so that most criminal activities can cease.”

So even though it’s “virtually impossible for Bahamians to legally come into possession of a firearm” (his words, not mine), you have a massive gang and drug related problem causing all sorts of murders with illegal guns.

And it’s the fault of the U.S.

Right.