Razor Burn

            Okay so since I've started this law enforcement gig I've had to be clean shaven and shave pretty much every day, since I never know when someone going to call that requires me to run out the door with my vest and uniform in tow. I don’t know about you guys but I’m one of those unfortunate blokes who has an extremely fast growing and tough beard, and sensitive skin. That being said I will bleed for hours if I use the ol’cheapo Bic razors 20 to a bag for 5 bucks (man I wish I could use these). I've used the Mach whatever number and they are usually a little better but still give me pretty bad razor burn, and it’s usually not a very good shave.

Well about a month ago someone mentioned the old fashioned double bladed safety razors. I started doing a little research, and figured why the hell not? Well I went ahead and found one that was a reasonable price Merkur Model 180 Long Handle, after ordering that I did some more poking around about how to actually shave with it, that lead to finding razors. Let me tell you apparently you have to find the brand of razor that works for your face, so I found the largest verity pack amazon sold at a reasonable price. Oh and you can’t forget your shaving soap, from what I read this matters too, everybody said to avoid the ol' aerosol can of doom.  So about 100 bucks later I've got a shaving set.

                Last night I received all my goodies, so while dinner was simmering in the pan I broke out the shaving soap and began experimenting. I took me about 20 minutes but I had the lather pretty much figure out. Make brush damp, load brush with soap, wet brush, swirl in palm until its rich and creamy, and apply to face with brush. Fairly simple, smells great feels even better.  Menthol is defiantly nice feeling, and smells good. While I’m eating I figure out how to load the sample blade into the razor, examine the cutting edge and where it lays, and how I should be holding the razor to my face. After all why not try the blade that comes with the razor first?

                So, this morning I pop out of bed on time if not a bit early jump in the shower scrub myself clean, dry off, and stand in front of the mirror while working up my lather….my shaving soap lather…perv. So here I am standing in front of the mirror with this perfect rich lather on my face hot water running and my razor in my hand. Hardest thing I've done in a while is put this thing against my face and start dragging. I have to say though once I got the hang of small short strokes without putting pressure on the razor against my face things seemed to be great, until I got to my chin. Wow it is really hard to shave your chin; this is definitely going to take some work. I managed to get out of the chin problem area without bleeding but once I got to my neck the most sensitive place I shave things got a little hairy (forgive the pun). Of course by the time I get here I’m feeling pretty good and I seem to decide to take my long strokes again, and of course the razor fills with hair and starts pulling. This causes little nicks that bleed a bit but no worse than I was getting with my old razor.

                Surprisingly enough it only took me about 5 more minutes to shave, it’s much smoother and more comfortable than my previous shaves. I think a lot of this has to do with the shaving soap. I also think once I get the technique down my neck will stop bleeding, and I’ll pretty much be going just as fast as I was before. And in the long run it’ll be cheaper too, most expensive blades I've seen so far is like 30 bucks for a hundred verses the 30 bucks I was spending on 8 refills. So all in all I feel it was worth the 100 bucks to try it out.  Who knows maybe one day I’ll get around to trying a straight razor. Until next time…

Activism

I just dropped everything after I came across this on of one of the blogs I read on a fairly regular basis, and I think Rob Pincus puts this most eloquently.

It's extremely frustrating to sit and watch these "activists" harass LEO's and waste their time.  You want to carry to protect your self, good on ya. If you want to make a statement go put together a parade or something. LEO's have better things to worry about than your statement to the public. Like how to go home to their family alive every day, or how to stay out of court even though they are performing their duties inside the bounds of the law and their department policies.

Source -  Breach Bang Clear

Irresponsible Open Carry Activism Jeopardizes The RKBA

Guns should be carried for personal defense, not Activism.
The best way to do that 99% of the time is Concealed Carry. Even if people do choose to Open Carry, they shouldn’t do it to provoke confrontation nor be uncooperative with the police while doing it. It makes gun owners look bad, turns cops against us, wastes their valuable time and certainly isn’t going to make it more likely that people will think “oh, gun owners are normal people, not trouble makers.

Spread the Word. Most people have realized that the time for “solidarity” through tolerance of the guys carrying guns with video cameras has come and gone. Their bravado is jeopardizing our RKBA and should be seen as an embarrassment to responsible gun owners. When the OC Movement started, people carrying while going about their daily business to show responsibly armed people are part of everyday life, it made some sense… but, the extremists have spun out of control. Let’s make sure that the firearms community is condemning this behavior.

I am not calling for a change in laws or for us to ostracize people who carry openly in a responsible, civil manner. Perhaps responsible OCers should be most concerned and the most openly critical of those who are using their guns to get (inevitably negative) attention?
Obviously, I am a proponent of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and do not want to to see OC made illegal, but I fear that will happen more and more often, in more and more places (as it already has it one state), if the confrontational actions of a very few reckless people continue.

-Rob Pincus
-I.C.E. Training Company

Unreasonable

Alright so it’s that time of the month again, I’ve seen just about enough material in the news to give me a bit to talk about. Though I’m not sure how well my thoughts are going to flow onto the pages it was a bit of a long night last night. After working my normal 6:30 to 5:30 job I went in to the Precinct office for a little paper work to help my Corporal out. He is charged with gathering all the statistical hours for each reserve in my department which there are about 16. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t mind helping him out at all, in-fact I think I’m fairly well suited for the job of gathering this data. It’s extremely tedious. First you have to separate each Deputy out and view their reports month by month. This wouldn’t be a huge deal but you have to look at the total hours for each day then add up each month, transfer the data into a simple spread sheet. Nothing hard about any of it just tedious, it took me 3 hours to do 8 months last night.  Luckily for me that got all of 2012 done till next month and I can actually keep up with it month to month at this point. Any who, that’s my excuse for this month’s post, I’m sure I’ll have a new one for next month.

First topic, New York, New York the place so nice they named it twice. So we have two cops, chasing a murderer down a busy street. Then said murderer turns and points a hand gun at the two officers. First things first, I refuse to Monday morning quarter back these two officers.  Second these guys are going to get crucified in the media as it is. I mean it’s already started one gentleman journalist, and I use the term loosely, has called for more gun control. He has also made statements saying “the predictable response for many reads was that it was the cops’ fault, guns were not the problem.” No you’re incorrect; the person who marched into an office building and killed his ex-co-worker is the problem. I feel for those two officers whose lives were threatened and took what they saw to be the necessary steps in split seconds, and now have to deal with the repercussions of their actions. Officers, good luck, and I’m very sorry your hand was forced, and ended with such a horrific cost.

As far as comparing us to the United Kingdom, please wake up. You’re comparing apples to oranges. I can throw out a million reasons why getting rid of all guns in the U.S. won’t work, but it’s a waste of key strokes. But I will comment on the “cowboy” culture, and the “spread of heavy duty weapons like the AR-15 semi-automatic rifles make our society a dangerous place”.  First, I want to say this person has never been in a situation where his life or family is threatened. Sir, when you have someone breaks into your home in the middle of the night how long do you really think it’s going to take the police to get there? No sir, guns are not our problem. Our diseased society is a problem.  In fact in law enforcement we have something called the 21 foot rule, this rule tells us that someone with a knife can exert lethal force on you or someone else before you can draw your weapon and neutralize the threat. I don’t know about you but I don’t have many places in my home that I have more that are much more than 21 feet. I mean if I back up against a wall and someone stands against the adjacent wall maybe. Though I have to think of the fact that these people don’t know the darker side of people, they pluck a morsel of news from the week or month, and write their point of view, and honestly how can I argue with that? Well mostly I just say to you “Yes it would be a great world where there were no guns, used to kill people.” But I follow that up with, and please excuse the foul language “Good fucking luck.” Please grow up, and realize that the U.K. has gun violence also, and you will never be able to pluck firearms from American Citizens. It’s unrealistic to even expect that. I suggest you widen you view, and honestly look at the base causes. Do people with guns commit crimes? Yes. Do people without guns commit crimes? Yes.  Have people used guns to stop crimes? Yes. Have people without guns stopped crimes? Yes. What exactly do you see in all these previous questions? PEOPLE! But being the realist I am, I realize that you will never fix all people, and you will never pluck guns out of the US, and tighter gun control will one end the violence, only some people’s ability to defend themselves.

Second topic of discussion, how in the world can you ban a finger gun? Some school in Nebraska has taken its Weapons in school policy a bit far. In fact I think this is a large portion of the problem we have as a whole. We want to dictate what people do over educating. What I mean by this is they want to dictate that this young deaf child not sign his name, so that they don’t have to educate the rest of the school on the fact that the child is using sign language, not a finger gun. No more cowboys and Indians folx. We are entirely too lazy to teach people, instead we would rather reinforce the entitled attitude. There is no reason to cause these sorts of issues. This child isn’t going out of his way to be offensive.  In fact he’s learned a skill that few learn, he’s learned it out of necessity. This is like telling someone they can no longer pronounce the letter “H” the same way because someone may mistake it for being told they are going to be hit. What exactly is wrong with us when we will allow such behavior by the administration of a school? This doesn’t even sound anywhere close to reasonable adult behavior to me.

Topic 1: Link

Topic 2: Link

Back in the Saddle

Hey folks, I’m taking another shot at it again. That’s right I’m back for a bit to see if I can make enough content to keep me interested. So I’m going to just dive right in and see if I can come up with something entertaining to put on the page.

                In the past few years that I’ve been away a lot of things have changed in my life, I’ve married and divorced, I’ve put myself through a law enforcement academy, and I’ve managed to get hired on at a law enforcement agency as a reserve officer. First I’d like to start by saying it was not a bitter divorce, there were no violent clashes, it was merely a splitting of a household with a friend. We remain friends, we talk on a regular basis, and I still value very much as a friend. I say this to let everybody know that I’m not just some bitter divorcee who feels slighted by the world. I don’t, and I’m not, I’m still the cynical, pessimistic-optimist I’ve always been. Allow me to explain; a pessimistic-optimist in my humble opinion (which happens to be the only one that matters in this particular instance) is someone who expects things to go wrong, and is not surprised nor unprepared when this happens. Though when something goes right this someone is freakin’ ecstatic, but in the long run does not let this affect his outlook on all other independent situations. That said I hope you can get a general idea of how and why I react in the ways I do, and how I come to some of the conclusions that I do.

                Now that that part is out of the way I’d like to get down into some of the topics that have me itching to write again. First subject of the day you guessed it gun control. I know everybody is pretty tired of hearing about it, but I’m also pretty tired of hearing people blame an inanimate tool for the failings of one person. Instead of attempting to look at the source of issues people want to ban the tool. I don’t particularly blame this knee jerk reaction on the people or honestly the government either. We don’t teach people as a society to be objective and think objectively. We also don’t teach proper trouble shooting any more. With this said I do not have all the answers, and I do not claim to have all the answers. But I do claim to be realistic, and to think realistically. First stop and think about what you’re saying, banning things that are readily available within 1000 miles (12 hour drive +/-) will not keep them out of the hands of criminals. Laws affect the lives of law abiding citizens, not criminals. Criminals will do what it takes to get the things they need to commit crimes even if it means manufacturing dangerous unreliable tools, such as fire arms, bladed objects, blunt weapons, to name a few. I book into evidence on a fairly regular basis prohibited items and controlled substances. Funny there are laws against these, yet people still continue to get their hands on them and carry them. I’m pretty sure it’s Illegal to drive while intoxicated yet it happens every day and on many occasions it’s that person’s second or third offense. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is why would you try to remove a person’s ability to protect and keep safe his or her family and or property?

                So yeah this law enforcement gig, probably one of the most rewarding and enjoyable things I’ve ever done. Even though I’ve been doing it almost a year the fact that I have a full time job that I work during the week has kept me from finishing the FTO program as of yet. The agency I’m working for has been great even though I’m at a reserve status I’m allowed to do pretty much everything the other full time officers do. I’ve also learned that two man operations are much more enjoyable than solo. Having someone to talk to and bounce ideas off of even if you’re sick of hearing that person breath, it makes the job that much easier, enjoyable, and safe for that matter. The job has also helped me build confidence in myself, and my ability to handle most any situation that comes down the pipe so to speak.

And that’s all I ‘ve got to say about that….for the moment.