Category: news

07:55 – Believe it or not, we’re still getting kit orders as of this morning, presumably from people who want the kits in time for Christmas. We’ll ship those today and even tomorrow, and just keep our fingers crossed that they arrive in time. We also had several emails overnight from people wanting to know if they could buy gift certificates and have them delivered by email, which we’re not set up to do.

Today, other than processing orders and shipping kits, I’ll be working on the manual for the LK01 Life Science Kit. Tomorrow we get started on Barbara’s Deep Clean, beginning with the basement and working our way up.

13:38 – I see that the NRA has finally spoken on the Connecticut school massacre. The NRA proposes putting an armed police officer in every school. That’s better than nothing, but certainly inferior to the proposals to allow teachers, administrators, and other adults to carry firearms on school property.

The main problem, especially if the cops are in uniform, is that a would-be shooter could easily identify the cop and simply kill him or her first. That’s not an issue with teachers carrying concealed. The other problem for cost and other issues is that we’d be lucky to have one cop on site at each school. That means the school would have a single-point defense. If/when that cop goes down, as is likely to happen, the school is again defenseless. Finally, what kind of cops would be assigned to school duty? I suspect school duty would be treated as a good place to put cops near retirement, those with physical disabilities, those who can’t hack being street cops any more, and so on.

Also, the sad truth is that most cops are really rotten shots, both in absolute terms and relative to the average civilian who carries concealed. I know. I’ve shot with enough cops that I soon ceased being surprised at what terrible shots they were. It’s only to be expected. Unless they also shoot as a hobby, the only time most cops fire a pistol is during once- or twice-a-year qualifying. And, believe me, the standard required to qualify is ridiculously low in most departments: usually one box of ammunition (if that) at short, known range on well-lit, high-contrast targets, using only the dominant hand. And even at that many departments don’t even require the qualifier to keep all shots on the paper. Not a tenth of the cops I’ve shot with could come close to meeting what Jeff Cooper described as minimum competence.

07:32 – In the wake of large-scale disasters like the Connecticut school shooting, it’s easy to forget that smaller-scale disasters claim our children every day. The paper this morning reports that an 11-year-old local boy was struck and killed by an SUV at a school bus stop. His parents are surely as devastated as the parents in Connecticut.

In other local news, a former high school band director has been convicted on 65 counts of having sex with a student. He was 25 years old when these incidents occurred, from August 2008 through the end of that school year. She was a high school senior. Nothing in the article leads me to believe that the relationship was anything other than fully consensual. The age of consent in North Carolina is 16, so the relationship would have been completely legal had it not been for the fact that he was a school employee and she a student. Again, I think a “no fucking the students” rule is perfectly appropriate for school teachers, but this should be a matter of contract law, not criminal law. Fire the guy, fine. Make sure he can never work in a school again, fine. But don’t imprison the guy and brand him a sex offender.

On the good news side of the ledger, Herbalife has committed to taking over the old Dell plant in Forsyth County and creating 500 highly-paid manufacturing and technical jobs. Winston-Salem was in competition with other cities, all of which are in right-to-work states.

We’re back in stock on all of our science kits.

07:55 – The newspapers are still running articles and editorials about the Connecticut school shooting, most of them demanding that the government Do Something. That’s understandable, and it’s not politically motivated. All they want, all anyone wants, is to do what’s necessary to make sure this never happens again. It’s not a liberal vs. conservative issue or a Democrat versus Republican issue or an anti-gun versus pro-gun issue. It’s a human issue. No one, no matter what his politics, wants ever again to see headlines about US school children being slaughtered.

The problem is, there’s nothing that can be done to stop lunatics from trying to slaughter schoolchildren. Nothing. More gun control laws won’t help, even slightly. More mental health programs won’t help, even slightly. Of course, the last thing anyone wants to hear is that there’s nothing that can be done. They desperately want to believe that new laws can stop the slaughter. They can’t.

Current laws establish schools as predator-friendly zones, places where a would-be shooter is guaranteed to face no armed opposition. Ordinary people are compelled by law to be unarmed and defenseless in schools. Of course, a would-be mass shooter is also breaking the law when he carries his weapons into a school, but somehow I don’t think that enters into his calculations.

So, if we can’t stop would-be mass murderers from making the attempt, what can we do to at least minimize the damage? The most we can hope for is that such lunatics can be stopped in their tracks. The police can’t do that. As the old saying goes, when seconds count the cops are only minutes away. The only people who are in a position to stop such outrages in their tracks are ordinary people who are willing and able to take extraordinary action: the school teachers and administrators who are already on site. But in order to do that, they must have the tools they need. We’ve already seen what happens when unarmed teachers and administrators go up against an armed intruder. They die valiantly, trying to save the children, and the shooter continues shooting those children.

The obvious answer is to get rid of the laws that prohibit firearms on school campuses. Allow any adult to be armed on school grounds. Offer training programs to school teachers and administrators and encourage them to carry their personal weapons while they’re on school grounds. Some percentage of them will choose to do so, and as a result of that the school will be a much safer place. Is it an ideal solution? No. There is no ideal solution, but it’s the best available solution. And I see that Texas is taking steps to make this happen. Good for Texas. Now the other 49 states need to follow Texas’s lead.

08:54 – Well, that’s it. We’re officially out of both biology kits and chemistry kits. I’ve left the web pages for the kits showing that they’re both still in stock because I’m building a dozen more of each today.

10:47 – Okay, we’re back in stock on the CK01A chemistry kits. Now to assemble some BK01 biology kits.

07:43 – Well, that’s interesting. I put up the main page for the CK01B chemistry kits on Saturday, but haven’t done any other promotion or announcement and we’re already getting orders for it. I hope those back-ordered test tube racks arrive today so we can build another couple dozen quickly.

10:56 – Wow. Talk about hazardous materials. This article reports that a Louisiana company is facing criminal charges for illegally storing three kilotons of nitrocellulose. The headline characterizes the nitrocellulose as “explosive”, which may or may not be true in the sense that that implies “high explosive”. Whether or not nitrocellulose can detonate depends on the degree of nitration and other factors. But one thing is certain: at a minimum, nitrocellulose burns very, very fast, so this is “explosive” at least to the same extent that black powder is explosive. I can’t believe anyone would store 6 million pounds of the stuff anywhere near a town, but this company apparently did.

12:41 – If you ever doubted that François Hollande is a moron, here’s proof: French president’s plan to write off homework draws criticism. With Hollande and others like him “managing” the euro crisis, it’s no wonder that things have gone from worse to horrible, with no good end in sight. For that matter, this pretty much sums up what’s wrong with France in general: a gigantic, hideously expensive, intrusive government that attempts to dictate all aspects of people’s lives. Stalin would have been proud.