I swear I’m not trying to turn this into a ‘blog about guns, I never have and never will be an NRA member, but… The local news has been all over Florida HB 503, aka the Preservation and Protection of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Motor Vehicles Act of 2008. It is… interesting.
The Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald both published unattributed opinion pieces calling it bad for business and an infringement of property rights. Their arguments strike me as being completely wrong. First and foremost, nothing in Florida law requires a gun owner to honor a property owner’s “No guns allowed” policy, so there is no “right” being taken away. The bill also provides that an “employer is not liable in a civil action based on actions or inactions taken in compliance with this section.” To me that sounds like a giant win for business!
That said, I don’t think HB 503 is good law. The rights of customers and other guests of a business are already adequately protected. Employees, however, most certainly are not. I happen to have worked with someone who was let go “without reason” after their employer suspected there was a gun in that person’s car, which was parked outside of the company’s parking area to avoid violating the company’s anti-gun and search policies. Had this bill been law back then, the only remedy would have been to file a civil rights lawsuit, which I would expect to be quite difficult to win.
Also, the protection for an employee in the House version of the bill only applies to those that have a concealed weapons permit. Florida law allows anyone in legal possession of a gun to keep it in their car without a permit so long as it is “securely encased” — basically in anything that has to be opened, such as a closed-but-unlocked glovebox or a holster with a snap-strap. I see no rationale for denying protection to law abiding, non-permit holding citizens.
And of course, the bill is completely silent about concealed carry. I’m not particularly in favor of guns in the workplace but it strikes me as silly that a permit holder can bring a gun into a bank or Walmart but they risk being fired for having a gun in their office.
I suppose that something is better than nothing, but HB 503 ain’t much.
Tags: Guns
Made it to the range after work last night. This is with the High Standard Compact Crusader at the 7-yard line:
Not bad at all, and not a single FTF, FTE, or FTRB in about 100 rounds on the HS. The RIA Tactical, on the other hand, had 1 FTF and 3 or 4 FTRBs, each time on the last round in the mag. On the FTRBs somehow the round ended up in front of the extractor, with the factory mag and a Chip McCormick. I tweaked the extractor after I got home, we’ll see how it does on the next outing…
Tags: Guns
Buying gas from a place that I regularly purchase gas from = Suspicious Transactions.
Buying gas from the gas station up the street as the first purchase on a new card = Suspicious Tranactions.
Spending ~$1,000 on two gun purchases, maybe 30 minutes apart, on a brand new credit card that was activated about 2 hours earlier = Not Suspicious.
There’s got to be a Priceless spoof in there somewhere…
Tags: Annoyances, Bank, Credit
The Fort Lauderdale gun show is this weekend, and for once I actually made it there. After much consideration I decided that I wanted to buy a High Standard Compact Crusader 1911 for car / carry duty and a Rock Island Armory Tactical full-sized model to replace the ultra-cheap 1911 that I purchased a couple of years back. Amazingly enough I quickly found both at prices I was willing to pay so I am now the proud owner of a new pair of .45 calibers.
Both are manufactured by Armscor in the Philippines and have all the features that you’d expect in a Kimber or Springfield that cost twice as much. Fit and finish appear to be excellent, way better than my previous 1911, with no rough edges on the outside. The checkered grips on the High Standard have much better feel than the smooth grips on the RIA, but I’ll probably replace both with aftermarket wrap-arounds that have finger grooves.
Unfortunately, I probably won’t have the chance to shoot them for a week or two…
Tags: Guns
First and foremost, none of the credit monitoring services give you a genuine FICO score. myFico.com is the only place to get the real deal and the regular price is a whopping $15 per report, per credit reporting agency.
The “FAKO” scores from the various monitoring services are wildly divergent. I’ve been using TrueCredit from TransUnion for a while but have recently sampled CreditSecure from AmEx (Experian) and Chase ID Protection (First Advantage). On credit reports pulled on the same day the average difference in my FAKO score for each CRA was around 70 points. TrueCredit and CreditSecure provide a “Your credit is better than XX% of US consumers” ranking, which are fairly close when averaged but the difference between each for a single CRA was as much as 7 points.
From my credit union I’ve learned that my actual FICO score from Experian is right around the middle of the fake scores — when I talked to a rep about getting better terms and a higher limit on my VISA, she inadvertently blabbed my score, and from the monitoring services I learned where they got it from.
The one thing that all the services I’ve tried seem to agree on is which CRA would provide the best score for me. Historically that has been TransUnion but in the past week they’ve fallen to the bottom and Equifax has risen to the top. TrueCredit puts the difference between best and worst at just 6 points while Chase has it at a whopping 114 points. One of the collections that I paid hasn’t reported to TU or EQU yet so they’re both still due a bump, but I’m hoping for EQU to stay on top since that’s where most of my credit inquiries go.
I’m probably going to use all three services for a few months — large quantities of “soft” pulls can cause “hard” inquiries to fall off of TU and EQU reports — but if I had to recommend one service it would still be TrueCredit, mostly on the basis of having the best presentation.
Tags: Credit
If your prank were actually funny you wouldn’t need to do it on April 1.
See also: Your April Fool’s Day Joke Continues to Suck.
Episode #983: Never give a Windows PC to someone who isn’t an expert.
Not so long ago I had a friend in need of a computer. What I should have done was snag an early x86 Mac Mini off a fleabay and scrounge the rest of the need parts from my collection of old crap. What I actually did was give away my old Dell Inspiron 8600. Which I now have to support. Constantly.
On the plus side, Remote Assistance actually works fairly well.
Tags: Annoyances
