by Peter Boyles | May 27, 2014 | Blasting with Boyles
I can’t think of a time in my life that I didn’t want to have a gun. When I was a little boy I thought toy guns, real guns and guns in general were the coolest thing in the world.
The only benefit I ever had in life is that I could read. I started reading quite early and the other gift was a wonderful mom who knew we were dead broke, but always took me to the library. (Thank you Andrew Carnegie. You did a lot of rotten things to really decent people but you made it up by giving me a library card in 1950.) I read James Fenimore Cooper. Thanks to my Uncle Barnie I read Zane Grey. I read books about the American Civil War, the American Revolution, the Second World War, taming the Old West and gangsters.
Pretty simple trivia question, what do all of those books have in common? Simple answer, guns.
I have a theory the only reason the First Amendment stays where it is, is because of the Second. And of course both of those cornerstones of our liberty are under attack. And that same group of intellectual nincompoops wants to feminize and take away from little boys in this country their constitutional, God-given right to have a toy gun.
Hunting became part of my life when I was about 12-years-old. I always wanted to hunt, but my father was not a hunter. So by saving my money from paper routes, working in pool rooms and bowling alleys and a stint in a delicatessen, I raised enough money to buy a BB gun and eventually my first .22.
I bought a .22 single shot JC Higgins rifle. It had a little stinger on the back of the barrel that you had to cock to enable it to fire. Thanks to my friends and me there probably wasn’t a wren or a songbird that was safe from our hunting expeditions (Yes I know Atticus Finch — never shoot a mocking bird).
Guns and boys are an intrinsic part of life, but with the advent of what’s happening to young boys in America today, toy guns are becoming a thing of the past.
The picture we have used to illustrate this column relates to a 1961 Ideal Toy ad starring Roy Rogers. It’s a sneaky little ad that every guy I’ve ever shown it to loves. The Derringer is hidden in the hat so you can easily shoot another kid when he approaches you. Who among us didn’t play army or guns or cowboys and Indians (or the politically correct cow persons and Native Americans) and really love it?
I can’t imagine myself at 10 years of age learning to play cooperative games and how to play well with others. Toy guns, pretend swords and rubber knives are the arsenal of a childhood democracy.
Why do you suspect that the progressive educators throw first graders out of school for turning their hands into little pistols? I’m a great believer in Lenin’s saying, “the purpose of terror is terror.” When you throw that little boy out you’re setting fear in the hearts of other little boys. The word comes down. Don’t be that kid. These people believe that these boys are influenced, predisposed, if you would, to violent behavior simply by possessing a toy.
Kids can make almost anything into a gun. I watched my son make a banana a gun once. Oftentimes as a kid we didn’t have any money for real toy guns. But that didn’t matter. A stick made a good rifle. Two fingers extended from the fist made a perfectly fine pistol. And you know what? The good guys always won.
There were lots of guns in my neighborhood when I was a kid. It didn’t turn anyone aggressive and of course there were no school shootings. Banning toy guns — do you really think it’s the same as putting armed guards in a school to protect children against people with real guns? Do you think throwing a little boy out of school for drawing a gun will prevent a sick and deranged individual from committing those acts of violence?
And how about squirt guns? My God, when spring hit it was baseball and squirt gun season. Rather than avoid the subject and pretend there’s not guns all around us, let your kids play guns and when they become old enough, do as my dad did. Find one of his drunken buddies to take me hunting. One of the greatest days of my life.
Keeping guns from kids doesn’t mean they’re never going to shoot someone else. It’s the forbidden fruit. My mother’s warnings during summer vacation to all of us was “Don’t go near the river. “ When I was a boy the Allegheny River was a lure. I was in my period of reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and no power on earth was going to keep me from the river. My mother’s warning, “don’t go near the river” — first place we went.
Kids who play with toy guns use them to fight bad guys. How’s that a bad thing? I actually think it can help a kid feel safe and make sense of the world around them.
So if you’re teaching your children all of these nonviolent, politically correct new speak thoughts, remember this. In the words of Mike Tyson, “Everybody’s got a plan till they get punched in the nose.” And then maybe it would have been better to teach your son to fight back.
Happy trails.
— Peter
by Peter Boyles | Mar 13, 2014 | Blasting with Boyles
April Fools Question
What do Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, John Hickenlooper and Lamar Alexander all have in common?
There’s gotta be at least a million answers to that question and counting. Of course the immediate reaction is “they’re all idiots,” and one way or another have managed to screw up your life. And, although it’s hard to believe, they can possibly screw it up even further by using Common Core as their educational guide.
Let me put you in a very brief time machine. Former Florida Governor Jeb (known as the smartest of the Bush brothers) may be eyeing a run for president in 2016 on the GOP bandwagon. On Friday, March 22, 2014, the big doofus made a speech in Florida, that revealed some of his stances on issues like immigration and — remember these words cause you’re going to hear them a lot — Common Core. Jeb (who’s starting to look more and more like Cousin Eddie) said those who oppose Common Core are supporting the status quo. And he wants to know how American society is going to be the winner in the 21st century. My real question for the 21st century is how are you gonna stop Jeb, his brother’s political party and the Democrats from eating everyone’s lunch?
And as an aside, Jeb says people who come here illegally are “risk takers.” With this logic if you’re living in rural Guatemala and you come here, you’re a bigger risk taker than those who are already here.
That kind of logic obviously produces a formidable candidate for the 2016 elections, according to the brilliant thinking of the GOP. This is just a reminder but he is the brother of former President George W. Bush, and the son of the other former president George H.W Bush, and older brother of Neil. All you folks in Colorado remember Neil. If Neil lost four more IQ points you’d have to water him once a week.
The Jebster then went to Nashville to join Tennessee GOP Governor Bill Haslam and former Secretary of Education currently GOP Senator from Tennessee Lamar Alexander. He quipped, “Trust me, I know there’s not a whole lot of people who are standing up to the avalanche of criticism.” Tennessee, along with Colorado and the vast majority of states, has adopted the standards developed for the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers by so called education experts.
Currently U.S. Education Secretary Arne, the Carney, Duncan is promising to improve education by pushing for the implementation of Common Core standards. This year 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted those standards. Carney doesn’t seem to care much for people who criticize Common Core. He has insisted that it’s all a bunch of white suburban moms who all of a sudden realized their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought and their schools aren’t quite as good as they thought they were. As you can plainly see this is the attack on soccer moms taking that hackneyed phrase “angry white men” and now applying it to white suburban mothers — gawd these people are becoming ever so predictable.
Now remember I can’t seem to do math or marriage but on everything I hold sacred this is a question that’s on that part of the Common Core curriculum. I think this used to be called word problems and as a youngster I would automatically tune out of any question that began with “two trains go out of a station…which one…” and then I go blank.
Here’s the question.
“Juanita wants to give bags of stickers to her friends. She wants to give the same number of stickers to each friend. She’s not sure if she needs four bags or six bags of stickers . How many stickers could she buy so there’s not stickers left over.” I kid thee not. Apparently there are any number of answers to this question.
This question appears in the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt textbook on Common Core. On their website they promise to be “a partner who will share the responsibilities of Common Core.”
I find myself always returning to George Orwell and those of you who recall the ending of his novel 1984 when Winston Smith learns to love Big Brother. It’s done with math. When he leaves the Ministry of Love not only does he know that two and two are five, he believes it.
Also they are teaching fourth graders, i.e. nine year olds, how to put on condoms. And this one is my favorite. Teaching kids how to masturbate. Don’t you find that interesting? No one needed to teach me.
But in my vast reading so far I found nothing in Common Core to explain why the framers beat feet from mad King George, how the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence protect our God given rights. And Mark Twain doesn’t exist.
By the way, John Hickenlooper and The Denver Post roundly support Common Core.
I can hardly wait for the debate when Bob Beauprez has no idea what Common Core is and John Hickenlooper roughshods him.
The serious part of this is this process will bypass parents and state and local school boards.
Obama wants to fundamentally transform America by transforming education and what your kids and grandkids will learn or not learn. Of course the progressives will love this.
By the way, did anybody ever read Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer in a school library? Today it’s the equivalent of finding Barack Obama’s real birth certificate. See you on the radio.
— Peter
by Peter Boyles | Dec 5, 2013 | Blasting with Boyles
The Butcher, The Baker
And The Candlestick Maker
In New Mexico there’s a case of a wedding photographer by the name of Elaine Huguenin who has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by New Mexico’s
highest court that she was required by the state public accommodations law to take pictures of a female couple’s committed ceremony.
Three weeks ago a judge here in Colorado ruled against a baker who refused to supply a gay couple with a cake for their wedding reception. Religious thought is the issue in both cases. As is free speech. This is important.
The first amendment protects not only the right to express one’s own views but also the right not to be compelled to convey someone else’s. In the New Mexico case the photographer warns that the decision against her would threaten other artists and “expressive professions,” including marketers, advertisers, publicists and website designers.
In as much as I support and have verbally fought for same sex marriage and very much oppose discrimination, there is a distinction between businesses that provide the same products or services to all comers and those that collaborate in a personalized message.
In July 2012, Dave Mullins and his husband Charlie Craig walked into the Masterpiece Cakeshop. They were there for about 50 seconds when Jack Phillips told them he would not make the top of a gay wedding cake. At that point Mullins and Craig stood up and said “f-you and your homophobic cake shop,” and gave him the finger as they walked out the door. How nice.
What we now know is a month before that, a lesbian couple went into the bake shop and were told by one of the employees that they would not make the wedding cake for the women. True to form, Phillips also will not make Halloween cakes with werewolves, demons or satanic decorations. This also offends Phillips’ religious beliefs. And he has made that clear on numbers of occasions. Now one of his critics has said he was willing to make a wedding cake of two dogs. My response to that is, dude, that’s make believe.
There’s no consenting adult involved in dog weddings. How far the progressives will go to stretch a point.
I’ve been to Masterpiece Cakeshop. It’s very out of the way in the back of a shopping center off of South Wadsworth. Mullins and Craig were shopping there to cause Phillips a problem. They had the ACLU in their back pocket as well as the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and, frightening enough, I believe Colorado Attorney General John Suthers is in on this, too.
So when it comes down, the Administrative Law Judge Robert N. Spencer ruled that Masterpiece Cakeshop discriminated against the couple “because of their sexual
orientation by refusing to sell them a wedding cake for their same sex marriage.” Spencer also said Phillips must “cease and desist” discriminating against gay couples. Although his Honor didn’t have the stones to impose a fine, therefore kicking the can down the street for some other black robed fascist who will fine Phillips if he continues to turn away gay couples that want to buy cakes.
Here’s the kicker. Phillips says you can buy anything else, all your pies and muffins and cookies and cakes are yours. He won’t, as an artist, make the top of a gay cake. He told me the other day on 710 KNUS he can’t back down. He won’t make the cake. So now the ACLU, the state of Colorado and the cake police are going to put this man out of business. He’s been there for over 20 years. He truly is an artist and I believe that his career is coming to an end.
What is it about the left that’s screams tolerance? That would put this humble guy and his employees out of business, hurting everyone who sells him supplies, who he pays rent to.
For the store will close. Because an appointed judge is telling this man what he must believe. How soon after gay marriage (which I openly support as well as gay adoption) before someone walks into the Catholic cathedral, conservative Jewish temple and evangelical Protestant church and tells them that they’re either hate speakers for saying a marriage is between a man and a woman and telling they must cease or be fined. Or better yet, when the hate police walk in and say it’s hate speech for you preaching that marriage is between a man and a woman and you must serve everyone’s interest and marry two men and two women on demand or be fined and put out of business. If we had enough space in this paper I could list historically nations that have pulled that stunt in one form or another. All of them are now in the dustbin of history. So I leave you with the words of the original motion picture, “Watch the Skies” — This stuff is scary!
Happy New Year!
Peter
