Atomic Nerds

I swear I sometimes post about things that aren’t reactions to Peter. He’s just good at getting reactions out of me that don’t fit in a blogger comment box character limit and/or arguably ought to be posts of their own anyway.

Today’s- or really, yesterday’s, I wanted to do this then but there was no time- is the problem of pedophilia, a discussion of both the issues in general and specifically of a group whose mission is to re-examine the DSMV with respect to pedophilia- with input from pedophiles themselves. I’ll quote from the group’s description of their immediate goals:

This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:

Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process

I’d recommend reading Peter’s whole post, as I usually do with these things as well as sampling at least some of the other linked articles and reactions, because most of mine are based in the context therein and I’d like to get through this without having to recap all of it. I’ll try to provide what I can, though.

Point one I wanted to address has already been made in the comments, which is that pedophiles and child molesters aren’t necessarily the same thing. Peter says:

My huge problem with the way B4U-ACT talks about this problem is that they appear to deliberately adopt a neutral, non-judgmental approach to those with pedophilic tendencies. For example, their second principle states:

2. INDIVIDUALITY. We realize that other than their sexual and emotional feelings toward minors, minor-attracted people do not have any particular characteristics in common. They vary as do all people, and it is inaccurate to claim that all or most minor-attracted people have certain beliefs or personalities, exhibit psychopathology or specific personality disorders, or engage in particular behaviors. We do not assume that they abuse children, that they are prone to deception or violence, or that their sexual feelings are more compulsive or uncontrollable than other people’s. We see clients as individuals, not as a category.

If someone has never committed an offense against children, that’s not an inappropriate attitude. If such individuals can be helped to control their wrong attractions, that’s a good and healthy thing for society. My problem is that I don’t see B4U-ACT actually coming out and saying, bluntly, that such attractions are wrong.

And while my visceral response is to entirely agree with him, I can’t really nod my head and agree that the state of being attracted to children is, without action, either inherently wrong or morally the same as acting on the attraction. Most of my principles- the ones that have been actively examined, anyway- are based around the idea that what makes your actions right or wrong is what you DO, not what you think. We may commit murder in our minds a thousand times in a day, but until you actually raise your hand to your fellow man, you haven’t done anything wrong- something maybe for you to be concerned about with regards to your mental health, or serve as a warning sign that problems are going unaddressed, maybe, but nothing that would even remotely give, say, the state the right to restrain you.

Part of the problem as I see it with this is we really have no clue at the moment how many people who are attracted to children actually molest children, if that number is “all of them”, “almost all”, “some”, or “a minority”. We know what the recidivism rates are for people who go to prison for child molestation, but if you presented me with any other psychological issue, or even a generic unnamed issue, and told me that our sole source of data on people with the issue was collected from prisoners, I’d say we had a massive sampling problem and truly understood very little on whatever the issue was.

Realistically speaking, we’re not going to get a lot of data or understanding either if we insist that part of the mandated protocol for a patient admitting attraction to children is to immediately get to work reinforcing that they are worthless evil people. Call me a liberal, but I think the “child molestors are the worst kind of monster there is” meme is well-established in our culture, to the point that the easiest way for a prosecutor to get just about every kind of judicial protection for suspects overlooked is for a child to be involved and the allegations to be sexual. I think it speaks to the degree of our cultural hatred for people who molest children that I’m seriously worried typing this paragraph that someone is going to derail the discussion by either accusing me of being a pedophile myself or that I think we’re too hard on actual child molestors.

One very troubling trend I’ve noticed in the people speaking out against this group is comparing them and their goals to earlier movements to destigmatize other things that used to be viewed as sexual deviancy disorders- like homosexuality. The argument seems to be that first the psychiatrists were willing to reconsider the idea that being gay wasn’t a horrible disease, and then the next thing you know we have gay marriage and now we’re going to have accepted pedophiles too!

For a given value of “correct”, they’re right; actual child molestors would very much like this outcome and have done a fair bit of comparing their own plight to that of homosexuals, which I would link you to if I wanted to open that particular portal to Hell. The process from electroshock therapy for having bad thoughts about the same sex to two old women getting married in New York did indeed begin with depathologizing first, and then to a process of greater acceptance through exposure. Pedophiles who want to be free to act on their desires and people who fear that very scenario can easily see the parallels.

The problem with basing any kind of argument on that is that it’s a self-weakening one; if you argue that it’s bad for us to not react with total hatred and revulsion and immediate criminalization to pedophilia because we stopped reacting with total hatred and revulsion and criminalization to homosexuality and then homosexuality became OK, that immediately begs the question of why that’s such a terrible thing if the only obstacle is our collective energy to maintain visceral disgust.

The difference between molesting children and homosexual sex isn’t “we only still disapprove of one of them”, it’s that one of them is sexual activity that one party is incapable of consenting to, and one is almost always completely consensual sexual activity between two adults. (And when it’s not, it’s rape, which amazingly enough is still illegal and disapproved of.) Sex with a child and sex with an adult of your own gender isn’t just two flavors of “deviant sex”, it’s one flavor of sex versus rape. This is not a distinction that should be left between the lines or taken as given. Actual child molestors would love it if we did that more often, because it leaves them all the more room to paint themselves as merely misunderstood people facing visceral and unfair societal revulsion.

I agree with Peter that some things are wrong-just-wrong and moral relativism is a hazard, but I think it’s extremely important to retain our moral compasses to be capable at all points of articulating WHY something is wrong. And if all you CAN articulate for why both homosexuality and pedophilia are wrong and we should never have stopped violently hating the former is “because God thinks so”- you are welcome to your opinion and may even be right, but this is a secular society when it comes to policy, as well as psychiatry, and the argument will quickly wither.

All that said, Peter is entirely right to see the danger in pedophiles who want to freely act out their desires using the same social structure to advance that goal, because they absolutely will and if you know where on the internet to look*, you’ll find them doing just that. He’s right to use the Catholic church as an example of an institution that lost sight of the scope of the wrong done by people who molest children, and who acted to shelter them and thus opened thousands more children to predation. Those are real threats; we as a society, and maybe as a species, have a huge problem separating understanding from empathy from sympathy, and psychologists are not immune.

I don’t know whether B4U-ACT is going to be a group that opens inroads into a corner of psychology where we have very little- I would say dangerously little- understanding or not. In order to do that successfully a group that wanted to try would have to have and maintain perfect credibility, and reading some of the linked articles I’m not at all sure that’s going to be them. If not the only thing they’ll achieve is making people more vigilant to the threat of being lulled by predatory pedophiles.

One more point I wanted to make, though it doesn’t flow all that cleanly with the rest: working to maintain the attitude that pedophiles are HORRIFIC MONSTERS may not actually protect children as much as we think it will. It may serve as a clumsy bulwark against moral relativism, but one of the most commonly cited reasons given by victims of abuse, perhaps especially sexual abuse, for why they didn’t report earlier (or at all) was because they didn’t recognize it as abuse, because their abuser was someone known to them and maybe loved and they couldn’t be an abuser because they weren’t a monster. This is also how real predators manage to get actual protection from their neighbors and friends even after their victim reports- good old so-and-so couldn’t have diddled that little girl, he’s our friend and neighbor and he’s not a monster, we’d know if he was a monster. She’s probably lying, maybe someone encouraged her to lie, someone bad. We don’t want to believe we could have harbored, related to, bonded with a monster, and the lengths of psychological protection we’ll go to in order to avoid facing that can sometimes only be shattered by staggering evidence.

I don’t think I can see a way where we will cleanly thread the needle going forward- there are too many hazards, both in ourselves and in the way our society works- but I don’t think the position we’re in now is a healthy or harmless one either.

*I have a very bad habit of turning over digital rocks.

There is no good goddamn reason for every single article/how-to/hey-look-at-this link on the internet these days to include an embedded video. 99 times out of 100, the information or joke would’ve been just as good, if not better, as text only, if only for the simple fact that the last time I had to wait for text to buffer, I was able to whistle the connection string to the modem on the far end of the line and leave it confused when I didn’t continue the conversation. If there’s an ad in front of the text, I can look below it and start reading without having to sit through 30 seconds of What’s Gonna Suck At The Theater Next, or some damn middle aged fuck’s idea of what is hip and edgy in graphics and styling assaulting my eyes to sell shoes or phones.

And speaking of phones, let me just throw this out into the wild: I don’t give two flying shits at a rolling donut how you got your message to my eyeballs. I think it really is nifty as all get-out that you can use your idroidberry to communicate with more power than they fucking had on Star Trek TNG in a smaller form factor. I get that the tech is cool. But again, I don’t fucking care that you posted using shovepress for your ipeen (omg there’s a new one that has VERY SLIGHT CHANGES coming out soon, and it’ll only be $500!). Great. That really added to what you were trying to communicate to me. Unfortunately it added the exclamation point that you’re either too dumb to turn off the default advertising, or you just HAVE to make sure everybody knows JUST HOW COOL your communicator is, or you just get down with giving free advertising to whoever makes the damn thing. Stoppit. Odds are if you’re reading this you’re a grown adult, now stop waving your little silicone chubby at me every time you want to communicate.

Paper based books are not dead. Kindle is not evil and without the soul of paper. If you’re reading, good. Full stop. If you just want to jihad on about how you just can’t stand ebooks because you don’t physically turn a page and can’t flip to just the right spot, stop it. Either go read something, or join in fighting with the people who argue that chili must/must never have beans in it. If you’re going on about how archaic paper is and it’s stupid to have 1000lbs of books when you can fit the same amount in one device, you get to go play with the glock vs. 1911 crowd. And yes, I’m sending you off to separate arguments for a reason. Think hard, you’ll get it.

Now go laugh at this video, check out this book for kindle or paper, and please note:
-Posted using a Zephyr Vibroplex Telegraph Key US Patent No. 767,303

(Update: Go watch this one too. Poor lady must not be very popular if she’s digging for links here. )

So today I stumble across this post about sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, which was… interesting. I advise you to read the whole thing, especially if you want to comment, because it’s long, fairly nuanced, and I really don’t entirely disagree with its author. (Me making big things out of posts that I mostly agree with seems to be a trend.)

Post author Benjamin Dueholm and I seem to have in common that we’ve both been Savage readers for years, and in an important sense grew up with him in reading his stuff during times when we were still forming ideas of what sexual ethics, as well as ethics in general, should be. We also have pretty much the same problems with him; while I still agree with Savage more often than I don’t, I also think he’s grown a hell of an ego over the years, and his points of failure tend to be pretty consistent- he seems to think that asshole things you do to people whose politics you find repugnant aren’t really asshole things, that people with low sex drives are defective, and he’s developed a REALLY obnoxious tendency to propose opening the relationship as the universal solvent of problems within monogamous relationships. Dueholm also mentions Dan’s devotion to the Sex at Dawn people and their theories, although perhaps ironically he goes easier on that than I did.

Where Dueholm and I depart- and it’s not that far a departure- is in our estimation of how much, or if, sexual satisfaction has been placed unreasonably above and apart from other satisfactions and forms of happiness. In this, I don’t think he’s being quite fair to Savage, for once*. I also have a slightly different outlook on both the culture that produced him and what its future looks like.

Silly Sex-At-Dawn stuff aside, Dan has never promised that hewing to his ethics- which rely on the twin pillars of honesty and autonomy- would produce complete happiness. What he’s essentially always asserted isn’t that “it gets better” will end up at best, but that it’s better than the alternative- the alternative being, from his view and mine, deceit, self-hatred, and frustration and depression. People in relationships that don’t adhere to traditional sexual and relationship norms are still people, and whether you call it sinner’s nature or human nature they’re still going to screw up and still going to hurt themselves and each other and still going to miss out on opportunities they’ll regret, because they’re still people. That’s one of the reasons, when chewing out his supplicants that are doing something harmful to themselves and others, Dan tends to put disclosure above chewing them out for the bad behavior itself; nobody generally needs to be told something they’re doing is bad for themselves and others to know it is. They make seek affirmation for it (which Savage almost always refuses to give), but they’re still doing it because it’s satisfying to them in some way. Better behavior aside, the next step in damage control for Dan is telling them to own it and give their partner the option to figure out if this is behavior they can live with or a reason to terminate the relationship.

Among those reasons Savage finds acceptable grounds for termination of the relationship is lack of sexual compatibility, or at least lack that can’t be negotiated around with an open clause. Dueholm finds this cold, and a waste of the other happiness potentials in a relationship. To a point, I agree- having sex with someone else won’t always bring happiness outside the short-term sexual satisfactions, and monogamy isn’t such an unreasonable expecation that dropping it should be near the top of the list of solutions for sexual-compatibility issues. Sex isn’t the be-all and end-all of a relationship, no.

However, and this is the point in which I think cultural outlook comes in, in a really monogamous relationship based on love it’s also important enough to be a very serious consideration in terms of how partners treat one another. People talk about sexual norms and marriage as though they’ve always been as we’ve understood in the last fifty or sixty years, but that simply isn’t. The love-marriage based on mutual romantic affection and undying love is a modern construct; for the bulk of history it was more of an economic and legal relationship than a romantic one. In a lot of times and places, romance and passion were understood at things that explicitly occurred outside of marriage**. Twentieth century Americans may have gotten exercised about adultery, but in many cultures for many periods of history, seeking sexual and emotional satisfaction outside the relationship was more or less taken as given if not savory, with the only real problems arising from bastard children.

This is Dan’s point coming from another direction: if you’re really going to have a relationship with someone you love, you need to deal with their needs and desires, and if you’re the only one in a place to fulfill them and you want this situation to continue, then you do in fact have a responsibility to them in that sense. We may have been able to societally cope with not having such frank conversations about it before- but we were also taking the idea of having relationships for the sake of love and mutual fulfillment less seriously than we were taking them for the sake of economic and social alliance and a clear path of inheritance.

Yes, sex is not the be-all and end-all in a relationship, but it’s also not unimportant. Sex is a powerful enough drive that people chase it no matter what kind of norms and mores are in place, and one of the benefits of a loving long-term relationship is that it’s a context in which you can show and be more of yourself than you can in society-at-large- in large part that’s the very definition of intimacy. If sexuality is effectively taken off that table, that leaves a gap in intimacy that’s a lot larger than merely the absence of mutually satisfying orgasms and stretches well into the emotional realm. Religious/philosophical compatibility isn’t the be-all and end-all of a relationship either, but that doesn’t make its potential in its absence to damage or even ultimately destroy a relationship any less real- and the compulsion to satisfy sexual needs is a lot stronger and more deeply rooted than the compulsion to understand one’s place in the universe at large.

Challenging norms isn’t inherently a bad thing, since norms aren’t inherently beneficial or even inherently harmless; we’ve collectively rejected a lot of harmful norms over the course of our history, like “people of high birth are just better than other people”, or “children are the property of their parents and may be dealt with as they choose even if it’s bad treatment”. Over the course of examining which taboos are malum in se and which are malum prohibitum, there comes the question of what it is we actually want out of a relationship- and when requiring a long-term apparently-monogamous relationship is no longer necessary for general societal acceptance, the answers may sometimes end up surprising.

What people think they want and what would actually work for them aren’t always the same, and Dan Savage isn’t that great an ethicist… but both beat sweeping large sectors of the human experience off the table for discussion, expectation, and negotiation. Intimate relationships are tough enough as it is.

*I tried to find a quote to hang this off of but really the whole thing is needs to be read in its entirety to be understood. Sign of good writing, really.

**Here using “marriage” as an interchangeable concept with indefinite monogamous relationships, which I don’t think should be too controversial.

Ok, so we’re late to the party announcing this, but for anybody who hasn’t seen it already, Dennis over at Dragon Leatherworks has gone and got his website all fancimafied. Links in old posts are hopefully all updated, now go and order a holster.

You’d be hard pressed to be on the internet for more than five minutes without running into a H.P. Lovecraft trope or meme. From Hello Cthulhu to the complete works of the man himself, you can’t throw a digital rock without it bouncing off an eldritch horror. Naturally, in the delightfully capitalistic world, this leads to merchandising.

Reminded recently here and more directly of the HPLHS here, I realized I was woefully light on H.P. Fanboi brand equipment and product, and went to remedy the situation. An apparently non-form-generated thank you email arrived when I placed my order, which struck me as a nice touch and then promptly was dismissed as I went about my business. Then the package showed up.

Every other shop on the internet is perfectly content to just set the printer to “default and cheap as possible” when printing invoices/receipts. Not so the good folks at the HPLHS. Check this bad boy out:

You can click to summon the full size.

I know this is geeking out over something damn trivial, but the fact that they went to the effort to even make their invoice a period-appropriate love note to Lovecraft and his fans is just flat awesome. I’m tempted to ask if any of the typewriter afficionados in our audience can tell me if the font is period-correct, but honestly who cares? It’s already several orders of magnitude cooler than it needed to be.

Well done, H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Damn well done indeed!

So the last two days have been filled with posts dealing with heavy and SRS BZNS. The comments have been about what you’d expect, more or less, and Mel Gibson’s Laser Nipples will be debuting their first album any day now. So now rather than hammer on with more gloom and llama, you get something light for Friday. Yes, I know it’s a chatlog, but Old NFO said it was funny enough to crosspost from where it originally went up at the Gunblogger Conspiracy page, and given all the letters following his name on his business card, I’m not about to argue with him lest I be vaporized. The scene: A massive netsplit on the slashnet servers. A list of fifty-some users suddenly dropped to about a dozen, leaving my buddy Sal and I as pretty much the only people not just idling. Below the fold is what happens when you get two people very dedicated to wasting time together with plenty of time to waste, with the odd minor edit for context/clarity/chaff removal.
(more…)

Friend Breda comments briefly and pungently on the adventures of a couple of open carry activists carrying in the library to make a point. One went in with a pistol, the other fellow with a shotgun strapped to his shoulder. Comment wars have predictably ensued. Stingray is of the opinion that the title of Breda’s post said all that needed to be said, and I predictably have to use more words than are necessary.

Just because you have the right, and are in the right as you do something don’t make that thing the right thing to do. In the case of the long-gun toter, I agree he was within the letter of the law and the library was in defiance of it, and it should indeed be his right to go anywhere he pleases armed for bear without anyone saying boo about it unless he uses that weapon to actually kill somebody that didn’t very clearly need killing. I would make no attempt to restrict that right legally.

This is because things that fall within the scope of rights but are not necessarily the right thing to do are best addressed with social disapproval, of the “thanks a lot, you fucking dumbass!” variety.

Whatever the massive and clanging degree of logical and ethical in-the-rightness any given person possesses, we still live in a society of humans, and a largely democratic one at that. Other people don’t always agree with in our logic or our ethics, and not only do they have every right themselves to do so, we live in a largely democratic republic in which their scope of disagreement has a great deal of power to alter the law of the land.

Gun owners in general and carry advocates in particular tend to see themselves as something of a persecuted minority. To a real extent this is, in fact, true. What we see as our natural human right both to do as we please without harming anyone and to be capable of convincing self-defense are routinely violated on scales large and small by local and federal authorities, and we are the targets of some really quite hair-raising bigotry, especially by people who consider bigotry in general to be an obviously terrible thing but don’t consider bashing on gun owners to be bigotry because obviously gun nuts are just crazy and dangerous and saying so is not bigoted.

What this tempts us to do is borrow the language of other persecuted minorities and civil rights movements of the past, and compare carry protests such as the young fellows in question to things like the lunch-counter protests and bus riders of the black civil rights movement. As to such comparisons, I have a number of points to raise.

1. Mayhap have you noticed that black people went around for hundreds of years being abused on every level, including actually being held captive and forced to labor, despite having every logical and ethical right to autonomy and equal treatment before the law? And yet, it took a war and a lot of slow social change before even the worst of these offenses began to be redressed and their status as lesser citizens even stopped being enshrined in the legal structure of the nation itself. People had to agree with their point of view of themselves as unjustly abused and discriminated against, and the largest reason Martin Luther King’s nonviolent civil disobedience model worked as well as it did was because it highlighted their opponents as more unreasonable and more violent and threatening than the protesters were. With the nature of the bigotry in place fully exposed, public sentiment changed, and the law along with it.

2. JESUS CHRIST ARE YOU PEOPLE FUCKIN’ HIGH? If even a substantial portion of gun owners and carriers cocks their head at this analogy as being kind of off-kilter, do you have ANY IDEA how it comes off to people who aren’t already very inclined to be sympathetic? I can and will point out right fucking now that there is a pretty fucking substantial difference between a discriminatory policy that prevents you from ever entering a place without very convincing theater makeup and one that forces you to unstrap and put your gun in your goddamn glove compartment, or even to just go concealed and hope you’re as good at it as you think you are. I AM very sympathetic- I believe this is in fact discrimination of law-abiding citizens that just want a goddamn hamburger without having to partially undress and render themselves more relatively helpless than they would be should someone less law-abiding come mincing along- and I still think these comparisons are outrageously entitled as well as incredibly tone-deaf. Make some faltering attempt to imagine how they sound to someone who doesn’t believe carrying a gun in public is a natural human right, doesn’t see the mere presence of a gun as emotionally neutral, regards all guns as having the whiff of violence, and greatly admires the non-violent nature of that civil rights movement.

Oh, but you’re in the right? Well, that will make a protest designed to sway public sympathy and point out a violation of the law that much more fucking effective, won’t it?

3. Speaking of the perception of threat, public fear of black men going around getting goofy on the reefer and laying waste to the good white folk of the world was indeed used to reinforce support for segregation- but the actual primary argument was “seperate but equal”, and the idea that preventing mixing prevented conflict. The non-violent civil rights movement worked as well as it did because it shifted perception of who was the threat to the people enforcing the policies with dogs and fire hoses- it was effective because it orchestrated predictable violence by others. The later, more muscular Black Panther style movements didn’t so much shift public perception as prove that public perception had shifted, in that there was relatively little backlash to a much more openly threatening group. (Which mostly specialized in threatening insufficiently ideological black people, but that’s another discussion.)

Perception of threat is what I keep coming back around to. It may not actually be a threat to be openly carrying a weapon, and public fear of it may be completely irrational, but however irrational fearing an individual just because they have a weapon is, it does not negate the existence of people who are carrying a weapon in public because they’re about to gain everlasting fame and glory for ventilating as much of the public in immediate range as can be.

Speaking of those of us sympathetic, for those what do go around carrying, whether away from the public’s eye or no, what would your immediate first thought be upon sighting in a densely populated public place that wasn’t a range or a hunting ground, a young man who looked like he was nerving himself up for something, with an uncased shotgun slung over his shoulder? “Solidarity, brother”, or the thought that you might actually have to use your own weapon? If you’re hesitating at all on “solidarity, of course!”… that should tell you something.

I do agree “you shouldn’t exercise a right because it might alarm somebody” is a shitty argument with all sorts of slippery slopes, but there’s a difference between going about one’s dailies quietly exercising your rights and a protest organized and designed to get your point across. Namely, the entire reason to do the latter is to make your cause known and hopefully sway public opinion more favorably in its direction, not to make yourself feel righteous.

The point of discretion between “exercising your rights, move along good citizen” and “doing an unnecessary dumbass stunt that needlessly scares a lot of people” is always going to vary a lot, and because of that “technically in the right” thing will also have a great deal of overlap. Many fair-minded and good folk will disagree with me about where that point is… but I still think Shotgun Lad was well over into “unnecessary dumbass” territory.

This’ll likely generate a lovely comment war, so Stingray pointed out a little added clarity over our usual policies- linked on the nuts and bolts tab, visible enough- may be hepful.

Rule one: Don’t be a dick.
Rule two: If your justification for why you’re not being a dick includes rules-lawyering invoking technicalities of dickitude, you’re being a dick.

We also invite you to ponder the applications of both these rules to the original incident in question.

Dennis, of Dragon Leatherworks, makes holsters. Dennis, of Dragon Leatherworks, makes damn fine holsters.

For reasons that may have involved grain alcohol, Dennis decided that I would make a good reviewer for his latest offering, the Talon Pancake. The Talon is, as the name implies, a pancake holster, and this one specifically is tailored and intended for the 1911 platform, though as you can see at the linked page, he has a few other options that will work. Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Target Audience are 1911 owners, not the hard-core gunnie types, but folks who are on a somewhat tight budget, who wear 1.5″ wide regular belts, or 1.5″ wide gun belts (the double-layered, 1/4″ thick belts…)

Well, that about covers me to a T, right down to an exact description of my belt. Now before I jump into this, let me put up front that I am by no stretch a holster expert. Like Weerd, I got lucky and found a holster that worked for me and was comfortable very early on, and I stuck with it, so I’m not as familiar with the finer points of distinction between “This sausage-sack is made of suck and fail” and “This holster is crafted from purest unicorn skin and the spirit of John Moses Browning and win.” Also, I’ve been using a Versa-Max II from Milt Sparks to haul around my CZ-75b for over four years. There is some adjustment going on simply from the “that isn’t what I’m used to” department.

Out of the box, I had dueling first impressions: 1) Pretty! and 2) Thin! The Talon is very well put together. As part of test driving it, I wore it to help some friends move. I figured lots of movement, awkward motions, contortions to get furniture through doors, etc, would be an excellent shakedown of retention and comfort. More on that in a moment, but to back me up on the attractiveness of the holster, at one point I peeled off my cover shirt to better fit in a corner to assemble a table. The three other people in the room (all gunnies, one moving into that town specifically for gunsmithing school, so there’s some Informed Opinion going on with this crowd) noticed and commented literally within seconds. All were impressed. There is no getting around it, this is an attractive holster, one that would not be out of place on a three-piece suit, carrying a BBQ gun, or any other “I want to look good” situation.

The second part of that impression is because of this:

(Look, if you want the glamor shots, check out the product page I linked earlier. I’m no Oleg, and can just about manage a point-and-shoot.)

That’s the Talon on the left, and my VMII on the right. The angle is a hair off to really stand it out on the body-side of the holster, but the top makes it fairly clear. The Talon is, roughly (what? I’m not breaking out the micrometer for this), half the thickness. Given what I’m used to, it was something of a surprise. Even though it’s only half as thick, the Talon does not suffer in the slightest on stiffness, and holds its shape perfectly well enough for one-handed re-holstering. It may be thin, but Dennis has worked some strong ju-ju on this stuff. This has the added advantage of being light. I may be biased after lugging around the CZ with 17 rounds for all this time, but even comparing the two holsters empty, the Talon is like wearing a paperclip next to the VMII’s desk drawer.

Ok, I mentioned I thought a good stress test would be helping friends move. It was a great stress test, and I took away two and a half things from it. First, this holster is extremely comfortable. With all the crap associated with moving furniture, it didn’t poke or prod me in any but the most convoluted of motions. The weight distribution was very nice, and at the end of the day, I couldn’t have told the difference between having worn that or having gone unarmed. Second, there were zero issues with positive retention, and the only thing that could go in the problem category was almost certainly user error rather than the holster- that’s the half thing. Specifically, there were a couple instances where I would check things, and find the safety on the 1911 I was carrying flipped off. I blame this entirely on the fact that I am not used to OWB carry, and was occasionally bumping things.

Having covered the good, I have a few nitpicks. The first is a problem specific to my setup. The test gun I’ve been using for this is LabRat’s wedding ring, a Les Baer Premier II 5″ in stainless steel. The front of the slide on this model is serrated at 30 lines per inch. Since the inside of the holster is left rough, the front of the gun is sanding itself a path on every insertion/removal, and I keep finding little leather shavings around. This is a self-correcting problem, however, and not one everybody will experience. Dennis agreed that’s in the “Yup, that’ll happen” category, and suggested a few drops of olive oil once the gun has worn its path to where it wants it. Not a deal breaker by any stretch, but if you’ve got fine front serrations, you might want the dust-buster handy for the break-in period.

Other than the leather-shaving, this is a rather tight holster, both in gun-grip and in belt loops. The grip on the pistol has loosened some by taking the holster into the bathroom with me when I shower a couple times, to let the leather soak up some steam and loosen a little bit, and that will continue to improve over time, but out of the box, attempting to draw gave me a lop-sided wedgie. Dennis said he modeled based off a Colt 1911 A1, which he says has one of the thinnest slides, and given the way leather boning works, even a few thousandths of an inch will make a difference. I fully expect this problem to ease up over time, and it has some already from the steam treatments, but be advised you may wind up ripping your pants off Chippendale-style if you’re unfortunate enough to find yourself in an oh-shit situation immediately after buying.

Also of great tightness are the belt loops. Like I said, I wear the exact type of belt Dennis described above. The first couple of days, it was basically impossible to slide the pistol forwards or back on my belt without unhooking everything and pushing the belt through a bit at a time to where I wanted it. After the first few days, it’s still very difficult to slide around, but not impossible. Again, Dennis assures me this will break in more over time, but the steam won’t help since the belt loops are sealed and water resistant. On the flip side of that coin, he also tells me he’s going to increase the amount of curve he puts in on initial molding, and cut the slots at a slight angle to loosen things up a bit going forward. That sounds like a solved problem to me, so don’t let my word be the final one on that point.

All that said, the final impression is that I am very pleased with this holster. My issues with it are all minor, and will self-correct given time, the aesthetics of the piece are wonderful, the construction sturdy, and the wear extremely comfortable. I’m still having a few “this isn’t what I’m used to” sensations with it, but those of you with a drawer full of different holsters will almost certainly adapt more quickly and not find things like the sensation that the ride-height is a hair higher troublesome.

Really, the biggest problem I have because of this thing is now I’m looking around for a 1911 without sentimental value to stuff in it. What a horrible, horrible problem to have. See how traumatized I am? This could take hours and hours of (range) therapy. I blame you for this, Dennis!

For those who have not heard, TJIC is a Massachusetts blogger. TJIC is something of a wookie-suiter, and is not fond of the po-po, authority in general, or much in the way of government. When Rep. Giffords was shot in Tuscon, TJIC opined “1 down, 534 to go.” After posting this, The Arlington, MA police declared him unsuitable to have 2nd Amendment rights, and ordered him to no longer own guns. No charges have been filed, this is simply “because we said so.”

I am of several minds about this.

First, for such an egregious violation of individual liberty, and such a phenomenal lack of understanding of the enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights, I feel that TJIC is wrong. It is not 534 to go, it is 534 + the entirety of the Arlington, MA police force. Such blatant petty tyranny is intolerable in a society where the right to say distasteful things is first protected among The Things With Which Government Shall Not Fuck. I would, without hyperbole, not shed a single tear if the tin-pot jumped up bully who issued the order for TJIC to turn ‘em in was sodomized to death with a toaster, while the toaster was running, and set to “dark.” I’d in fact consider sending a Thank-You card to the person who performed the act.

Of the shooting of congress-beings in general, I agree, for the most part, with Roberta. It’s rude. Beyond that, I am unruffled. I feel sympathy for Ms. Gifford’s family, and certainly for the family and friends of the other victims. I’d feel sorry for Ms. Gifford’s friends, but she is a congresswoman; I doubt she had any. The House and Senate have, for many years now, done virtually nothing that does not serve to reduce liberty, increase the tax burden on citizens, and at the bare minimum meddle pointlessly in places where no meddling was needed, and all of this for no appreciable benefit, and so I am not upset in the slightest that one was shot. I am upset that the shooter’s aim was bad, and that he did it because he’s bugfuck crazy, rather than a well-reasoned expression of principles, and because, as Ms. X said, it is rude for one individual to determine “This is gonna go my way” in such a manner.

Rather as the petulant lickspittle that ordered TJIC to divest of firearms did.

Beyond this, however, is where I begin to feel conflicted. There is a large dose of “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” in this situation. As the saying goes, “don’t start nuthin’, won’t be nuthin’.” On the one hand, Travis knew he lived in the Volksrepublic. Saying anti-statist shit in statist-central is a stupid idea. On the other hand, if nobody speaks up, such idiocy goes unchecked, and that is certainly the worse option. On the one hand, if things are that bad (in MA, they certainly and obviously are), GTFO. On the other hand, one should not have to flee, anywhere, in the United States in order to find the liberty guaranteed to us by the Constitution. It is simply necessary that someone must stand up and fight these tin-pot bureaucrats with delusions of mental adequacy. That said, what a fuckin’ dumbass way to pick a fight.

Authoritarian dickwads, such as the needle-peckered Arlington, MA police, very rarely respond well to heated and vitriolic expression, whether correct in premise or not. Running around with a giant “Fuck the Gov’t and Fuck the Po-Po” banner as TJIC essentially often did, does not engender the sort of attitude in one’s philosophical opponent other than “Somebody squish this fuck, please,” which appears to be essentially what happened. I fully support people who want to pick a fight on behalf of liberty where it is clearly being infringed, and I support Travis’ fight to maintain his first and second amendment rights in a part of the US that would probably feel perfectly comfortable issuing him an order that he must provide housing for military staff. Given his history of opinion, however, I hold relatively little hope of success. Much lower hope than the case of Heller or McDonald, which did not begin with the plaintiff screaming “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.” As it turns out, stating it calmly was more effective. You catch more flies with honey, etc.

So there we are. I am appalled at the horrible infraction of Travis’ rights. I am appalled at the horrible infraction of JayG’s, Weerd’s and every other gun owner in MA’s rights. And if anybody in the Massachusetts law enforcement community feels I should no longer be allowed to own weapons, they can lip-strangle my penis-neck.

I am TJIC.

But if you’re gonna throw rocks at a hornet’s nest, at least have the fucking common sense to wear a long-sleeve shirt.

In life, many people have conflicts, and many people are assholes. However, you have to achieve spectacular levels of asshole in order for your mundane douchebaggery to become worthy of time on the national news, but the Petkovs of Trenton, Michigan have achieved such heights of pointless personal unpleasantness.

How did they manage the feat of managing to legally behave like such epically elephantine pricks that Fox News became involved? Well, it seems they have something of an ongoing feud with the neighbors, whose origins are murky but apparently involved “things that were said” and escalated into police personal protection orders and domestic disturbance calls. This would not even rate as an episode of Cops, if it weren’t for the exact situation at hand and how they chose to provoke the offending neighbors.

The person whom they have the actual dispute with is apparently the mother of a woman who died at 24 from Huntington’s disease, and the grandmother of the seven-year-old child now living with this family, who is now also in the process of dying from Huntington’s disease, an inheritable and degenerative brain disease. There is no treatment and the disease itself involves slow brain death, which is unpleasant for the victim, to put it mildly. The Petkovs have chosen to advance their cause against the child’s grandmother by painting their truck with tombstones and putting a coffin in the back, as well as posting Facebook pictures of the dead woman in the arms of the grim reaper with her dying child’s faced superimposed over a crossbones. Jennifer Petkov then went on record saying she wasn’t sorry and did it “because it rubs her (grandmother of the dying child) ass raw”.

Many people asked if charges have been filed yet, as though it were a crime to merely be such a miserable cunt. This is America, and freedom of speech includes being a miserable pusbucket as long as you’re not actually harming anybody, with “traumatizing a dying child” still not falling under the definition of harm. While in times and places where civilization still operates inside the monkeysphere these people would most likely be quietly nudged off an iceberg, part of accepting a nation of laws includes accepting such antisociality so long as no laws are actually violated.

However, freedom of speech applies not solely to the Petkovs but also to every other person, which includes Anonymous. Anonymous isn’t a person or a group so much as it is the internet collective of misanthropic people with too much time on their hands, mainly concentrated in the /b/ section of 4chan. Sane people usually avoid /b/, but it’s such a force of gravity on the internet that anybody who has ever spent any time on said internet probably has over 9000 memes picked up from it, often without even being aware of the origin of the catchphrase or image. During the 5% of its time not spent exchanging porn and playing with MS Paint, Anonymous likes to find people or things to direct itself at. Occasionally this becomes awesome, sometimes just hilarious in a facepalm-inducing sort of way.

For whatever reason- most likely the lulz- the Petkovs are now in the crosshairs, with their address, full names, contact details, and a link to Jennifer’s place to employment happily disseminated to whatever inviduals would like to know them.

The Petkovs have issued a public apology and taken down the Facebook page. Their neighbors may forgive them, God may forgive them, and in a week almost all of the outraged will have forgotten them, but I suspect /b/ never will. There are more ways to ruin your own life than just legally.