Advertisements for guns for sale in South African shop windows and a newspaper have Gun Free South Africa all atwitter, and having already complained to the local police, they are considering taking their complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. GFSA spokeswoman Pam Crowsley called the advert “highly irresponsible” and said the overall message was that “guns are fun.” That message probably sits just fine with the placer of the ads, the Gun Fun Indoor Shooting Range. For their part, the ASA is staying out of it, saying they would only investigate adverts that breached the code, “for example, condoning illegal or violent behaviour, or (if) the prices were wrong” . . .
Have you walked your bug-out/get-home bag? If not, GeorgiaBoy over at The Survivalist Blog suggests you do so. Assembling a bug-out bag (or get-home bag) is a great idea, as is having a plan to use it, but if you haven’t tested them you may be doomed to failure. A bug-out bag is only as good as the distance you can carry it, and if it’s not something you’re used to, you may be dramatically overestimating your abilities. A test run (walk) is a great way to figure out your weaknesses, as well as those of your gear. Plus, a healthy walk is good for you, and probably will help combat the most likely danger the majority of us will face: being too out of shape for all that cool gear to do you any good.
Top-level shooter Randi Rogers, formerly of Team GLOCK, currently shooting for Team Comp-Tac and the marketing and sales manager for Comp-Tac Victory Gear, has signed on with Team Smith & Wesson. A supremely talented shooter in Cowboy Action, IDPA, IPSC, she’s now turned her sights toward 3-Gun. At S&W Randi will be competing side-by-side with her friend and podcast co-host Julie Golob, and their collusion can only help the both of them reach even greater heights of performance. Paul Erhardt at The Shooting Wire has all the details, but suffice it to say Ms. Rogers will (continue to) be one to watch in the upcoming year.
Parents of several students at Emmaus High School in Pennsylvania are up in arms, wanting to know why the school’s championship rifle team was left out of the school’s new yearbook. The EHS rifle team went undefeated against 10 other high school teams in the 2012-13 season, winning the district championship in February. Parents don’t know if the team was left out of the 2013 yearbook because of an oversight or if someone was afraid to include anything about its victory because of the national debate over gun control.
A professional photographer, Don Herb, hired to take pictures for the yearbook took the photo, which shows 21 team members, many holding their rifles, posing with their advisors. What happened after that, nobody knows. The yearbook advisor says that perhaps Mr. Herb didn’t turn the photo in on time, an allegation that he vehemently denies, saying that the rifle team photo was one of the best he took for the yearbook. He’s offered to send it to all rifle team members for free.
Meanwhile one of the parents, Chris Donatelli (who also happens to be a candidate for school board in November) suggested to the school board that everyone who gets a yearbook should receive a supplemental page showcasing the accomplishment of the rifle team, saying, “I’m not going to let it lie.”
Urge California Governor Jerry Brown to VETO gun control bills here:
https://www.firearmspolicy.org/the-issues/california/2013-2014/askbrown/
The PPLs Utopia of Social Justice is one of the most violent and unjust countries on the planet, if your white, just below N. Korea. The whites stay because, like Hitler’s Germany, it is almost impossible to leave. Everyone who can find a firearm is armed as PPL are routinely murdered for their cell phones in broad daylight, sorta like Chicago
This: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/17/south-african-police-shot-miners
This is really annoying. I live in South Africa. I don’t know if you guys saw the live footage of the massacre at Marikana(the mine) but the miners were completely harmless. Instead of the crowd control tactics meant to be used (water cannon, rubber bullets, beanbag shotguns), that were used Apartheid, they went with APC’s and full auto R4’s(renamed IMI Galil’s). They said they were the semi only R5’s but that’s crap. If you saw it, you would know.
As for US Police militarization, our government in its infinite wisdom, took actual Army and Special Forces units and mixed them in with our standard morons(cops). And they claim to have had ‘just cause’.
And if you think you’ve got it hard with gun control, I’m 20 with no criminal record, never comitted a crime, not even jaywalking, have to wait until I am 21 to apply for a ‘Firearms Competency Certificate’. Which basically means you need to be able to load the gun and rack the slide. At which point I have to apply for a license, prove that I don’t really need the gun, get the run around for just long enough to let that damn FCC expire, then be told I have to re-apply, be re-certified and be told that they lost the paperwork(again). Only to die from an armed home invasion at the ripe old age of 25, by a police officer ‘supplementing his income’.
And that’s for a handgun.
I can get a hunting license for an Accuracy International in .338 or an AR50, with which I could smite people I don’t like past 1000 meters. But no, that Beretta for self-defense is far more dangerous.
I hear gunshots at least twice a week. My mom and I play the game, What’s That Caliber And Are They Dead? The answer is usually 9mm or .45. Now and then .38 special.
And you think you have it hard?
In most areas, Americans clearly don’t have it hard when it comes to legally getting a handgun for personal defense and we want to keep it that way. The fight never ends though.
The comments in the linked story show white South Africans are aware of what’s going on in their country…. Unlike their world famous model who say Mandela is a hero even though he bombed white South Africans.
No wonder so many of them take the flight to Australia.
I can’t believe they would try to make guns seem fun at the Gun Fun Indoor Shooting Range. That seems so inconsistent.
My father and I just got back from a week-long trip to South Africa a short time ago; we stayed with a safari (photo, not hunting darn it) outfit just outside Kruger National Park. We had a wonderful time, but speaking of firearms…
While one of the guides was driving us back to the airport in Johannesburg, he told us that his wife had experienced a home invasion only a few days beforehand. She was home with their baby (he was hours away at the safari camp at the time) when two men broke into their home and robbed her at gunpoint. Luckily, they didn’t harm her, and he only lost some possessions. He had applied for a permit for a firearm 9 months ago, but the paperwork still hadn’t gone through. He hoped it would be approved by the end of the year, but was very pessimistic.
We discussed South African gun laws he asked me how strict the laws where I live (Colorado) are. I mentioned that we had recently had some gun restrictions imposed on us, but it was still a stark contrast with the draconian laws he had to live with…my heart went out to him.
“highly irresponsible” and said the overall message was that “guns are fun.”
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute… you’re telling me that guns are not fun?! D@mn it, this just throws a whole box of wrenches into my Universe.
Guns are fun, WTF is their problem? These are the people that essentially supported slavery until 15 or so years ago, right?
The situation in SA is bad, but not nearly as bad as Africa can get.
Before the Belgians colonized the Congo it was as violent and backward a place as could be imagined. Tribal factions warred endlessly; there was no infrastructure, no medicine and no educational institutions. The Belgians came and built roads, hospitals, schools and a power grid. Eventually though they had to retreat from their colony in the face of massed opposition because they refused to side with one tribe over another. Their Paradise lost is now called Rwanda, a place where so many have died in tribal warfare that a visiting catholic priest once said that there were no more devils in hell, they were all busy in Rwanda.
The Italians once had a colony called Italian Somaliland that is now known as Somalia. It’s such a violent and terrible place that even US troops withdrew from their mission supporting UN food deliveries there and it remains a completely lawless place where many people die violently or from hunger every day.
Ethiopia, once a ‘proud kingdom’ in Africa was only ever civilized when it was used by the Egyptians as a slave labor pool, and even they left off when it proved too problematic more than a 1000 years ago.
Sub-Saharan Africa has never produced the wheel, animal domestication, or anything even approaching civilization in its whole existence. Anywhere outside concerns have attempted to replicate anything like civilization they have been driven out by Africans. The most notable contribution to civilization that Africa can boast is the provisioning by some Africans of others as slave labor to European concerns.
These are people who lived amongst horses (zebra) for 100,000 years and never managed to domesticate them. It isn’t surprising that they have issues with other aspects of civilization.
One should read Let Africa Sink by Kim du Toit, a native African, available at: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/924795/posts
So, post European rule SA is a crazy place, where the laws don’t make sense and crime and corruption are rampant? This is a surprise to whom? Try finding a Sub-Saharan nation where crime and corruption aren’t the norm. No really, go try, I’ll wait. When you get back, please save all the accusations of racism and such that usually accompany a serious discussion of what is wrong in Africa and instead tell me how you would fix it.
Frankly this is going to take so long, just email me [email protected] when you have an answer. Or, more productively, you could contact the UN when you hit on an epiphany about how to fix what’s wrong with Africa.
Interestingly, you’ll have done what the greatest minds of the 18th 19th and 20th century were powerless to do.
Hmm, thats an interesting tidbit…
Have you ever been to Rwanda? Not too bad a place, felt safer there than Baltimore or New York.
I should also mention the infrastructure is well-maintained in the cities (some of the best roads I’ve seen!). The rural areas are quite poor but the small outlying villages are still clean and orderly.
Theres some hard feelings about the french involvement in the 60’s which contributed to the Iterahamwe movement (and subsequent genocide), but other than that, a peaceful region.
Biggest crime problem is poachers in the rural regions going after the gorillas – the guides carry old AK’s to ward them off.
I lived there for a couple of months in the capital Kigali, sister lived there for 4 years, she even married one of these “devils”. Nice guy, speaks multiple languages, is an accountant by trade.
“Sub-Saharan Africa has never produced the wheel, animal domestication, or anything even approaching civilization in its whole existence.”
There is a reason for that. Sub-Saharan Africa has no domesticable grains or animals. A zebra is not just a funny colored horse. There are no animals that can be domesticated for plowing, and there was no grain to plant anyway.
Read “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond. It’s a very interesting look at the objective reasons why civilization developed in some parts of the world and not others.
I’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond is a complete fraud. Not only have zebras been domesticated (by Europeans) but the elephant has been domesticated in India and SE Asian since before written history.
As to the lack of domesticable grain, also a complete falsehood. Not only is a grain source unnecessary to further civilization, there are abundant potential resources available in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Guns, Germs and Steel is nothing more than an impassioned apology by a man who is a fraud intellectually and who is wracked with European guilt. The book is littered with misleading concepts and many out right, demonstrable and well proven lies.
I don’t know why Africa never moved beyond tribalism to the next stage of civilized development, but I do know that it had nothing to do with lack of domesticable animals and grains.
Guns, Germs and Steel isn’t a reliable source for information about anything at all due to it’s preponderance of blatant and self serving lies. However, even if it were, given the several hundred years of European example, countless missions, donations of farm equipment, instruction in animal husbandry, crop rotation, civil governance and other benefits of European advance Africa remains largely lawless, impoverished and backwards in every way. Not even the false statements made in Guns, Germs and Steel can account for that.
Is anyone able to enlarge that photo more and compare prices on their firearms?
HA! I did the same thing – clicked on to see what they were going for over there.
In Brazil your average Glock goes for about 2000 reais, about a thousand dollars. If their import tariffs and deterrent taxes are as high in South Africa, then it’ll probably be something close to that.
Prices around here for ‘cheap’ guns like CZ’s and the Taurus clones hover around R8000-R9800. A Beretta 92, R11000 – R12000. R13500 for the a1 models. R15000 – R25000 for things like Sig’s and HK’s. Take any price and divide it by 10 on average for USD. That’s right. For a Taurus PT92 or CZ-75 you could buy a drivable used car in the States. Or 2-3 months rent in a nice apartment. Or an engagement ring for the wife who’ll leave you when she finds out you paid more for that shiny Wilson 1911 than her engagement ring.
It’s past prohibitive, it’s retarded. Not like we South Africans can get our handgun licenses anyway.
But hey, at least you know that Bill Wilson won’t abandon you. Right? . . .
But guns are fun! Anyone who says otherwise has not ever shot a gun before!
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