builder206

Wild guess here but maybe it's got to do with hunter education classes? Showing a kid how to safely cross a fence with a firearm? They'd need that exception in the law. Dunno, just guessing.

Skydiving! It's like floating on air, and with modern ram parachutes you land at a walking pace.

No. I give the greatest weight to the Park Service argument that it will lead to more poaching and other wasting of animals. Hunting is prohibited in National Parks, and there are much better ways to avoid bear problems than being macho man with a .44 on your hip.

Standards for justifiable use of lethal force differ from state to state and have a strong case law component. It is not possible to easily detail a full & proper answer to your question in this forum. In sum, though, in Washington lethal force is justified if a person reasonably is in fear of his or life, or reasonably in fear that he or she will suffer serious harm (like a person raising a brick to throw at you from close range), or to protect someone else from either of those outcomes. But as I said, it is much more complex than that and my statement here is an oversimplification. Imagine a person points a real gun at you but it is not loaded. You certainly would not be prosecuted if you killed that person. It’s a gun, it very possibly could be fired at you in mere seconds without warning. There is nothing reasonable in expecting you to ask or wait to see if it is loaded. What if it is a toy that looks convincingly like a real gun? Same thing. It is unreasonable to expect you to wait and deduce all possible facts at the risk of your life. A person ordered by cops to drop a weapon and who does not do so, yet does not point the weapon at anyone, eventually might be shot. Case law has developed that judges this a reasonable outcome under some conditions, and many mentally ill people use this to commit what is called “suicide by cop.” In fact, it is so common that one excuse taser makers first used to get tasers into police hands was that they are a “less-than-lethal” solution to this very problem. You *do* know, don’t you, that self-defense includes the right to kill or disable someone *before* they kill or attack you, right? Do you think that a victim must first be attacked before responding? A person who is waving around anything gunlike (or any other serious weapon, like an axe or a baseball bat) can be shot and killed without anyone having to be harmed first in order to evaluate the threat. Police operate all the time in a high threat environment. Many more people want to kill them than want to kill you or me. For this reason, slow movements and telling police what you are doing or reaching for are appreciated by cops and show that you are a sane and cooperative person. Doing anything with a realistic toy gun in your hand might work against this impression. Sorry to hear about your paintball incident. Sounds like it was bad.

I took a surf landing class. You are right Feck, it is special stuff. I'd rather try to land against sharp rocks in a bobbing tide than to try to come ashore on a hard sand beach in the surf. You can time yourself in a bobbing tide but your boat won't float in foam.

Carry permits are issued by the state. They would have no bearing one way or the other on carrying a firearm on federal lands. The constitutional relation between state and federal gov't being what it is, it is not legally possible for a federal agency to recognize a state-issued permit. The rules of the federal agency managing a given land unit trump a state-issued carry permit. Anyway, the proposed change would not "relax laws." The prohibition against firearms in national parks was a rule-making activity by the Interior Secretary, not legislation. The proposed change simply removes the prohibition on having firearms in national parks, returning conditions to those that existed before 1983. Before 1983, there were no rules about type of weapon (pistol or rifle) or method of carry (concealed or exposed). If you imagine you could stop a bear with a handgun, you wouldn't want it covered under a jacket. You'd carry it holstered out in the open, like cops do, to make it easy to get at. There's nothing in the federal code that say anything about concealed or open carry. One motivation behind the proposed change on National Park lands is that in 1982 only 6 states allowed private citizens to carry a pistol. Now 48 states allow handgun carry for citizen defense. Of them, 46 have some sort of process for issuing a carry permit and 2 states allow carry without a permit at all. The reasoning is that now citizens have an increased or heightened expectation that they can defend themselves than they did in 1982, so the prohibition in national parks is out of step with the national trend toward expanding the capacity of individuals to use firearms to defend themselves. For perspective on the national park thing, there have never been any prohibitions against firearms on lands managed by the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management.

Go look for your bony flat-chested girls on NW Hikers!

Keep your fat fetish to yourself, she is perfect I don't have a fat fetish. Real woman have curves. Guys who like girls with bony knees and the shape of a 12-year old boy are gay. You're gay!

Only if she wants a moist cockpit.

I believe Sherri and Rob. If Archie of all people tries to tell me about some climb called Pussy Party, I know something's wrong.

The girl in that picture needs some meat on her bones.

I am learning to lead, that’s why I put this in Newbies instead of Climbing Partners. Assuming it's dry enough, does anyone want to go to Index on Sunday? I want to do lead Great Northern Slabs and Ultrabrutal. I have followed both of these before. I can follow Index 5.8 with some thrashing, so I can belay you on something at that level as payback for tending the cord while I lead the bunny stuff. I have tried Index 5.9 and I'm not there yet.

FYI the latest CF Journal (#69) has a video article about CF Kids. I subscribe to the journal but I think you can see it on the CF website too.

I thought someone was invoking The Rooster.

Heinous technical backpack

Shoot, you can carry 80 lbs. of luxury gear and camp in super style. A well-designed sea kayak (by no means are all well-designed) won't ride or handle any differently with that much gear properly balanced fore and aft.

Sea kayaking = check out Northwest Outdoor Center on Lake Union. Have shop space? Get a Pygmy Kayaks kit. Want a cool road trip? Check out Pygmy's shop in Port Townsend and test paddle their boats. Go to the annual sea kayak extravaganze in September. Check out the Wooden Boat Festival in mid-summer. Always several cool sea kayaks on display, some for sale, and builders to talk with.

The guy whose hands bled into your food when your back was turned. Did you notice the coppery virus taste?

Apparently you arrived after I left. Probably for the best.

I have had some frustrations with Cilogear that eventually were resolved. Cilogear takes care of business but not very fast. So if you have an issue, take a breath going in and realize things aren't going to happen immediately. Just deal with it. Cilogear has some pull with the shipper they use but Graham has no control over the shipping company itself. (I realized a long time ago that UPS is the crummiest outfit in the world) It is easy to tell factually who screwed up shipping: you, or Graham, or UPS. If it isn't Cilogear's error, stop trying to bust Graham's balls. On those occasions I have spoken to Graham I got the sense that he was working on large-scale business issues like making or shipping dozens or hundreds of packs while also working on individual one-off problems. There are only 24 hours in a day and the two categories of business issues require the owner to take different paths to resolution. I prefer dealing with a business in which I can get the owner on the phone vs. dealing with a once-famous name that is now owned by Megacorp International, whose Luggage Division now "makes" packs.

Next time: tape.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Last weekend I could have used hand lotion with blood coagulant in it.

They'll turn the thermostat up to send it out of condition. After a couple weeks, they'll turn it down again. The Mounties will be all ooh and aah, our freezer is back in! and it will be like climbing it for the first time again.