1) Turnout will be higher than expected.

2) The Democrats will get their asses handed to them.

You heard it here first.

I just stopped by my local Dick's Sporting Goods and noticed an excellent deal. If you are a beginner looking for your first gun, this might be just what you are looking for.

It's called a Rossi Matched Pair - a break open, single shot, .22 rifle that comes with an auxiliary shotgun barrel in either .410 or 20 gauge. They have it on sale for 99 bucks.

Break-action guns like this are ideal for beginners; they are intrinsically safe, mechanically obvious, and easy to operate. This particular gun is especially short and light, perfect for smaller-statured people. The .22 barrel allows you to practice with inexpensive ammo that doesn't kick, and the shotgun barrel allows you to quickly convert it into a very capable home defense gun. This is exactly the gun I'd suggest for a novice, especially a female, who wanted something for self-defense that was safe and easy to use.

I have not fired it yet, but I've looked it over carefully and I'm quite pleased with it, especially considering the price. Features include:

1) Adjustable rifle sites (not bad at all) on the .22 barrel. Gold bead on the shotgun barrel. Perfectly nice trigger.

2) Barrels change without tools! Pretty slick.

3) Transfer bar hammer safety. Manual safety/hammer drop on side of receiver. External hammer.

4) Comes with a nice little carrying case and a good trigger lock.

5) Should work great with Colibri powderless .22 ammo. This special ammunition reduces the gun to about the power level of a good BB rifle, making it quiet enough to shoot safely without earmuffs and, with reasonable care, even allows you to practice indoors.

Finally, here's a very positive review of this product from Davidson's. My local store has about six left...

And please... if you are new to shooting, find yourself a knowledgable person to show you the ropes before you dive in. If none of your friends are experienced shooters, your local gunshop or the NRA can help you to find a qualifed instructor.

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My mom made this for me:

Now if I can only get my wife to stop refering to my web page as "ShitApe.com"...

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Details are still sketchy, but it looks like Russian Special Forces pulled off a miracle yesterday, storming the theater where over 600 people were held hostage and rescuing more than 500 of them unharmed. This really was a miracle, because they were facing an organized force of about 50 suicidal opponents who had fortified their positions and who had placed numerous explosives around the theater and amongst their hostages, in order to prevent exactly this sort of operation.

Reportedly, the Russians did it by first introducing some sort of anesthetic gas, intended to disable the several people who were to trigger the explosives. They then entered the area and 'liquidated' all of them as quickly as possible, probably by simply shooting them dead where they sat. (I base this assumption of the high death toll among the hostage-takers, and on the one photograph I've seen, showing several of the female enemy dead in their theater seats, looking as if they had died in their sleep).

Based on what I've heard, the Russian's actions were correct, heroic, necessary, and admirably done. And maybe I'm wrong about this, but there is not a police force in America who would have possibly done this.

We probably could have done it; we have some of the best-trained hostage-rescue people in the world available to us, people who are not lacking in either the skill or courage to do the job. Nonetheless, I am convinced we would not do it; we lack is the ruthlessness necessary to shoot dozens of helpless women to death in their seats, even if the women are wired with explosives and even if their deaths were both necessary and correct. What's worse, the bad guys know this, and they almost certainly consider it a weakness on our part and actively factor it in to their plans.

No one can argue the necessity for us, as a society, to adapt to change. Before 9/11, our strategy for dealing with an airplane hijacking was to not resist and to let the negotiators handle it. This was a damned good strategy, too, and it served us very well for 30 years. Nonetheless, when things changed on 9/11, we sure as shit adapted these policies in a hurry; now we expect hijackers like this to be killed instantly by security guards aboard the plane, and if worst comes to worst, for the plane and all of its passengers to be shot out of the sky.

Currently, our police are terrific at handing ordinary, pre-9/11 hostage crises, and have adapted splendidly to the challenge as it has evolved over the last many years. Their first effort is to contain the situation, stabilize it, and allow the inexorable forces of time and the inevitable futility of the attacker's situation to run the crisis down to a negotiated surrender. In those rare events when a hostage crisis evolves into the start of a mass murder, our police are also skilled at stopping the attacker with a minimum amount of force. This is exactly the right way to handle the sorts of ordinary criminals, domestic psychos, and media attention seekers who typically provoke such situations.

Unsurprisingly, we are not especially well prepared to handle an organized, suicidal army of fanatical terrorists taking hostages by the hundreds; we've never faced such a threat and have never prepared for it. We are not prepared to handle a tactical situation like the one the Russians solved so beautifully this week, and we are not prepared to order our men to shoot unconscious women in the head as they rush by.

But we'd better be.

Our situation has changed, and we need to adapt to it. We are facing a raft of new and exotic threats, which are no longer just pie-in-the-sky fantasies but which have a real likelihood of occurring in the near future. Before 9/11, nobody could imagine some general in a bunker ordering his jets to shoot down a 747 over Pennsylvania. Today, few people could imagine our police engaging in the aggressive sort of killing necessary to contain a hostage situation like the one above. I'm proud that we think of our police this way; it means they have done a good job. It means they were right for the world which we inhabited just one short year ago but now it's time, once again, to adapt.

We know how to do it. The Russians, obviously, can teach us a few things, and the Israelis are damned good at getting the job done, and much better at staying within the bounds of Western decency. It's time, right now, to get good at surviving in our new environment, and this means not only training the police, but supporting them. It's time for us, as everyday, ordinary people, to recognize the challenge that our officers face and to help them to do the right thing. Currently, we don't even allow our police to use the sort of anesthetic gas that the Russians just put to such good effect. We consider it too dangerous.

We need to be the sort of people who could watch the NYPD pull off an operation like that and cheer when it was over.

Think about it. What alternative to we have?

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Please pay attention. A short quiz will follow this rant.

There is a huge story breaking in Russia right now, and for some reason the local media seems to be almost ignoring it. They won't be ignoring it for very long.

As best I can tell, a group of perhaps 50 Chechen terrorists - (one source reports ten men, and forty women!) - has taken six or seven hundred people hostage in a popular theater in Moscow. They have presumably placed explosives inside the theater to prevent the police from forcing their way in.

The Chechens who have been battling the Russians for the last many years are hardcore Islamic fanatics, and dues-paying members of the Al Queada network. One report says they have released some of their hostages - children, and those who they assumed were fellow Muslims - and have announced their intention to die during this mission. They are presumably demanding that Russia withdraw her forces from Chechnya.

As usual, Free Republic has the latest details on this story from around the world. The various wire services barely mention it.

A suicide squad holding 600 people hostage... jesus christ.

Of all the various freakazoid Al Queda types gimping around this earth, the Chechans are the ones who concern me the most. They are pricks and they are seriously hard core, not like the Arabs who just talk a good game but fold at the first sign of pressure. They seem to have inherited some of that legandary Russian toughness, and that's not good.

OK, here's the quiz. Ready?

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There was an editorial today in the Washington Times that's worth repeating, in full:

Police and the sniper attacks

We don't have any armchair advice for the police. We don't care whether they hold press conferences once an hour or once a day. We don't think we know better than them how to do their job. We are disinclined to criticize any part of their job performance. We only have two words for the police, sheriffs, FBI, ATF, and other law-enforcement men and women in our communities: Thank you. Thank you for doing the best you can. Thank you for trying to find one clever killer out of a population of 4 million. Thank you for working overtime and missing your families and home. Thank you for dashing to the scene of the most recent outrage at all hours of the day and night. Thank you for standing in the middle of the Beltway stopping traffic - never knowing whether in the next car you will be looking down the nose of a grumbling commuter or down the barrel of the killer's gun. And thank you for doing all this at a pay substantially below that of most of us whom you are risking your lives to protect.

The situation in Bali is genuinely heartbreaking. Three huge car bombs tore through hundreds of happy, drunk, harmless people, killing more than 180 of them and leaving hundreds more torn by glass, burned, and lacking all but the most basic medical care. An entire city block was destroyed.

The target was the tourist trade, and the Western customers upon which the Balinese economy depends. I don't imagine that the economy of this little island, by all accounts a genuinely peaceful oasis in the troubled Indonesian archipelago, will survive. Poverty, dirt, isolation, and disease will follow in the blood and fire of last night.

The Muslims who did this must be very pleased.

Bali's neighbor, Indonesia, is a hugely populous country and home to the largest number of Muslims on earth. Their Islamic population has been generally modern and peaceful, despite the civil disruption of the recent past.

Now I am told that extremists wish to establish a Taliban-like government in the area, and they want to wipe out the corrupting influence of the West. Alcohol, tourists, money... what better target? They can simultaneously punish the Infidels and cast the whole island into the sort of poverty they thrive upon, and prefer to impose on others.

To be blunt about it, our Australian friends are being ethnically cleansed from the area.

This is not because Australia gives blackhawk helicopters to the Israelis so they can kill Palestinian children with them. It's not because Australia has attacked the Muslim world with its evil plans for oil and imperialism. It's not because the bombers are freedom fighters, regaining their lost homeland from the invaders who have snatched it away.

It's because these extremists are evil, and they hate us.

They hate us for being white, and being free to drink beer and dance with our young women in public. They butcher us because they are evil, and they see the butchery as a glorification of their god. They think the place is left much cleaner and better, after we have been killed.

This is not hyperbole or even exaggeration. This is the blunt truth of what has happened here.

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