A Geek With Guns

I write this post with a heavy heart because the metal community has lost a truly great man. Yesterday it was announced that Jeff Hanneman, one of the founding members and the guitarists of Slayer, died of liver failure. Traditionally such news is met with a moment of silence but that’s not how we do things in the metal community. We like noise! So please bow your heads for a moment of metal:

If you turned on the news after Obama’s reelection you probably got the impression that everybody in the world was celebrating Obama’s victory. Obviously this wasn’t the case for much of the gun rights community or the Republican Party. Another group of people who didn’t celebrate Obama’s reelection were the families of his victims:

The roars celebrating the re-election of U.S. President Barack Obama on television give Mohammad Rehman Khan a searing headache, as years of grief and anger come rushing back.

The 28-year-old Pakistani accuses the president of robbing him of his father, three brothers and a nephew, all killed in a U.S. drone aircraft attack a month after Obama first took office.

“The same person who attacked my home has gotten re-elected,” he told Reuters in the capital, Islamabad, where he fled after the attack on his village in South Waziristan, one of several ethnic Pashtun tribal areas on the Afghan border.

“Since yesterday, the pressure on my brain has increased. I remember all of the pain again.”

Many people have lost family members to Obama’s murderous rampage through the Middle East. Every drone strike her orders seems to end in multiple casualties, each of which have family and friends. Imagine how barbaric the United States must seem to those who have lost family members to its wars.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t terribly familiar with Russell Means until after his death was announced but it turns out it was much more bad ass than I realized. During his life Means participated in several high profile American Indian actions against the United States federal government:

He rose to national attention as a leader of the American Indian Movement in 1970 by directing a band of Indian protesters who seized the Mayflower II ship replica at Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day. The boisterous confrontation between Indians and costumed “Pilgrims” attracted network television coverage and made Mr. Means an overnight hero to dissident Indians and sympathetic whites.

Later, he orchestrated an Indian prayer vigil atop the federal monument of sculptured presidential heads at Mount Rushmore, S.D., to dramatize Lakota claims to Black Hills land. In 1972, he organized cross-country caravans converging on Washington to protest a century of broken treaties, and led an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He also attacked the “Chief Wahoo” mascot of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, a toothy Indian caricature that he called racist and demeaning. It is still used.

And in a 1973 protest covered by the national news media for months, he led hundreds of Indians and white sympathizers in an occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., site of the 1890 massacre of some 350 Lakota men, women and children in the last major conflict of the American Indian wars. The protesters demanded strict federal adherence to old Indian treaties, and an end to what they called corrupt tribal governments.

What made Russell unique in regards to the American Indian’s fight against the federal government is that he held libertarian beliefs, even going so far as to run for the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate (he lost to Ron Paul). The more I read about the man the more I find to like about him. He was willing to make major stands against the government that all but wiped his people out and believed in individual freedom. That’s often a very rare combination of traits.

It’s unfortunate that evil people are able to strike anywhere in the world. This is the reason gun-free zones don’t work, because there are no zones you can guarantee to be free of guns unless the location is guaranteed free of people. When discussing gun-free zones many advocates of gun control demand that places of worship be including on the list of places where a gun can’t be carried legally, unfortunately bad people do enter places of worship:

At least seven people, including a gunman, have died in a shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in the US.

The attacker “ambushed” a policeman at the scene, shooting him multiple times, before a second officer returned fire, killing the gunman, said authorities.

The shot officer was among three men critically injured in the attack in Oak Creek, suburban Milwaukee.

My condolences go out to the families of the victims. At this time information is scarce since the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) are declaring it an act of domestic terrorism:

At a press conference, Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards said they were treating the attack as a “domestic terrorist-type incident”, and that the FBI would take over the criminal investigation.

He said he could not release any information about the shooter, who local media reports said was a white male.

I wonder if this was merely another random act of violence or if the shooter had a grude against practitioners of the Sikh faith.

It is my duty to regretfully inform readers of this blog that the Burnsville Rifle and Pistol Range in Burnsville, Minnesota caught fire two nights ago:

At least six fire departments were called to the scene of a fire at a shooting range in Burnsville Tuesday night. Crews are still working at the scene around 1 a.m.

Burnsville firefighters were called to the Burnsville Rifle and Pistol Range at 14300 Ewing Ave. S. around 8 p.m.

[...]

Burnsville Fire Marshal Lee LaTourelle told Twin Cities Fire Wire that customers were inside the range shooting when they saw smoke coming from the padded walls at the rear of the building. He said they escaped without injury.

I wonder what caused the fire and I hope the range isn’t a total loss.

I’m sure, by now, everybody has heard that Ray Bradbury has died. The man was a great writer but an unfortunate luddite. With that said, even though he forsake many great technologies, I must say he was quite the visionary:

You’re known as being anti-politics. Are you still that way?
I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

So long Ray Bradbury, your memory will live on through your writings (unless we make reading books illegal and change firemen from fight fighters to book burners).

I regret to inform you that Eduard “Trololo Guy” Khil has died. Last week it was reported that he suffered from a stroke that left parts of his brain heavily damaged.

This is a sad day as his song I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home is basically the Internet troll national anthem.

Today is a dark day indeed, or at least it is unless we’re being trolled:

Russian singer Eduard Khil who became an internet sensation two years ago is in a coma after a stroke. The 77-year-old stage star is in intensive care as he has suffered irreversible brain damage.

The Soviet stage legend who rose to international fame in 2010 when his I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home scooped the attention of millions around the world, is in St. Petersburg Polenov Scientific Research Institute of Neurosurgery. Medics fighting for Khil’s life say several important functions of the singer’s brain are irreversibly damaged.

Doctors suggest Trololo man’s life could be saved, but he would need urgent surgery, Gazeta.ru reports. Even if the singer survives the operation, there are no guarantees of recovery.

As a man who prides himself on practicing the ancient art of trolling this news saddens me. My only hope is that Trololo Guy is merely trolling us and is actually sitting on a beach in the Bahamas sipping vodka.