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.