Yesterday I Agreed with the NRA

Usually I don't have much use for the NRA. They are much too interested in scaring me. They want to scare me about crime, which is why they think I should have a gun. They want to scare me about my government, which they say wants to take all guns away. The NRA scares me. There is something scary about a group of scared people with firearms.

But I was curious, yesterday, to see what the NRA had to say about the Vice-President Shoots Lawyer While Hunting story. Of the commentary I had heard and read so far, very little reflected any knowledge of how and why people go hunting. People were making fun of hunters, quoting Katherine Armstrong's comment that "these things happen from time to time," and her comment that the nature of the sport "ensures" that there will be accidents.

Yesterday the NRA was having none of that. Their home page highlighted a story in the Houston Chronicle about how rare hunting accidents are:

Hunting-Related Accidents Rare, State Data Show

Media feathers flew
after the South Texas quail-hunting accident that involved Vice President Dick
Cheney, but such incidents are rare, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department records
show.

Read About It: Houston Chronicle

POSTED: 2/13/2006

Today that link was gone, but the NRA was linking to an article that decried the media coverage of the incident and dragged in ted Kennedy and Chappaquidick for good measure.

I keep coming back to the work "procedures". Guns are dangerous, that's why there are rules about gun safety and procedures for hunting. The gun safety rules are handed down as lore: "Treat every gun like it was loaded." The plan for a day's hunt is more flexible, but there is a plan and you share it with others; where you're going, when you'll be back, where to look if you don't come home on time. When you hunt with a group, everyone needs to agree on the plan before the hunt begins, and then follow the plan once the hunt is underway. If you're hunting buddies can't follow a plan, you need new hunting buddies. If you can't follow the plan, you need to quit because you're a hazard to yourself and others.

We didn't need a hunting accident to know that Dick Cheney's crowd considers themselves to be above procedures. There are procedures for going to war. There are procedures for competative bidding of government contracts. There are procedures for approving government wiretaps. There are procedures for vetting a persons credentials before appointing them to a job. The procedure manual for our nation -- the Constitution-- that's beneath them, too. They don't need no stinkin procedures!

These guys think that rules and procedures are for the common folk. We common folk know, sometimes from bitter experience, that the procedures are there for everyone's safety. Field and Stream magazine put it bluntly:"The onus is on everyone who carries a gun not to shoot at anyone else."

Cut corners and someone's going to get hurt. Hopefully, the greatest damage will be to your pride, as you will have to admit your bonehead moment to your wife, your brother, and everyone at the bar. In the worst case you will have to admit it to a police officer, or a judge, or your buddy's widow. Knowing we are responsible for what we do is what keeps us on the straight and narrow.

My husband doesn't hunt anymore. The last time I ate game birds, it was a couple of partridge that flew out in front of his truck when he was headed home from work. He carefully scraped them from his grill, brought them home, cleaned them, plucked them, and served them on a bed of wild rice. It was a nice meal, carefully prepared and well appreciated. I wonder what happened to Cheney's birds.

Riverbend Raid

Baghdad Burning blogs from Iraq when there is electricity. Today she posted a terrifying account of a raid in her aunt's neighborhood by the new Iraqi security forces.

Broke Oven Baking

We cook a lot in the winter.

Yesterday I baked a batch of oatmeal cookies to take to chess club and then started a batch of bread, using more white flour than usual. I divided the bread dough in half and made three pizzas with one half. We ate those for dinner, and I made the rest into two loaves of bread.

When the bread had risen, I turned on the oven, set the timer and went to read Anna a bedtime story. I came back downstairs expecting a hot oven and baked bread. What I found was a stone-cold oven and mile-high loaves in danger of imminent collapse.

Ours is a gas oven, with the ceramic igniter instead of a pilot light. While this design makes it impossible to fill up the house with gas and blow up the house, you just can't light it if the igniter won't cooperate. I tried this, that, and the other thing, but I could not light that oven.

Fortunately, I had spent an ovenless winter in my youth. That is when I learned to bake English muffins.

	First, I scrounged the recycling bin for a large soup can to use as a muffin cutter. Then, I turned the dough out of the pans and rolled it out again to ½ inch thick. I cut muffin rounds out with the soup can and left them to rise on the board, which I had sprinkled with cornmeal. More cornmeal sprinkled on top of the rounds would help keep the dough from sticking.
	I baked the muffins on top of the stove, on a griddle over low heat. We have a long griddle that stretches over two burners, but I have baked English muffins four at a time on a 10 in cast iron frypan. I let them rise again about 30 minutes, but the griddle was heating slowly for the last 10 minutes. The muffins cooked about 10 minutes on each side.
I set a few pan lids over them as they baked, to help keep the heat in. Even the castiron griddle had a few hot spots, so I moved them around a little as I checked to see if the bottom sides had browned yet.
	They need to be turned with a pancake turner once, and only once, so the first side needs to brown before they are turned. Some of them rose and looked a little round, so I gave them one quick mash with the pancake turner to straighten the sides out to a right angle.

It may seem hard to believe that bread could bake on top of the stove. It works well for English muffins because we typically split and toast them, giving the inside a chance to cook a little more. It is a handy way to save the day when the oven fails you.

Good Story in the Enterprise.

This article in the Leelanau Enterprise answered a lot of questions I had about Dean's hostage taking attempt. This account sounds very much like the people who live in my community.

The Record-Eagle reporter chose to report the story using the "teen-gone-wild" formula that has been used over and over again since the Columbine school shootings. He played up the fear angle and told of how folks in this previously peaceful community were now locking doors. (We weren't.) He failed to even do a basic Google search on Dean, which would have turned up his step-dad's recent obituary; instead he quoted the sheriff as saying that everything had been going great for Dean. He twisted the interview with Ellen until she sounded like a helpless bystander. (Ellen is far from helpless, and she would never use the phrase "dark side" unless the toaster was broken.)

Chris Olsen's Enterprise report was through and well written. He interviewed the mother and daughter victims. They were scared, of course, but not helpless. Mom is retired military, with training in hostage negotiation, training that she put to use. The daughter recognized Dean's voice immediately, convinced him to take off the ski mask, and then spent the next half hour trying to convince him to put down the gun. When they finally convinced him to leave, they each took pencil and paper and went into separate rooms to write down what had happened while it was still fresh.

One of Mom's comments spoke directly to the fear-mongering that took place in the other paper:

“I don’t want everyone to go out and make the gun manufacturers rich,” the woman said. “Another gun would probably have only made matters worse. I think it will be years before anything like his happens again. We live in a safe community. This was an isolated incident.”

Skillet Granola

Anna has been taking my homemade granola to school for snack. Here, by popular demand, is the recipe:

• 2 cups raw rolled oats
• 2/3 cup chopped nuts
• 2/3 cup shredded coconut
• 2/3 cup sunflower seeds
• 2/3 cup sesame seeds
• 2/3 cups wheat germ

• ½ cup packed brown sugar
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 cup raisins, barely covered with hot water.

1. Have all ingredients measured and chopped before you start cooking, as the cooking goes fast and requires constant stirring. Leave the raisins covered with water (to slightly hydrate them) until you are ready to add them.
2. Use a large, heavy skillet. Put the oats and the nuts in the pan over medium heat, and stir until they just start to brown.
3. Add the coconut and sunflower seeds.Keepp the heat and stirring constant.
4. When the coconut has started to brown, add the sesame seeds and wheat germ, still stirring.
5. Sprinkle the brown sugar and salt over the granola, then stir it all in. The brown sugar will start to melt and bind the grains together.
6. Drain the raisins, but don't dry them. Add the wet raisins to the granola, stirring to let the moisture steam through the granola. Stir until you see no wet spots, then turn off the heat and let the granola cool thoroughly before storage.

This makes about six cups. You can cut the recipe in half if you don't have a large skillet.

Raccoon Day

If today is Groundhog Day, yesterday was Raccoon Day. Rose was barking outside for much longer than usual, and when Richard went to investigate he found a raccoon on the other side of the fence, nose through the fence, looking longingly at our dog.

In the summer a raccoon can climb that fence in no time, but yesterday's raccoon was kind of groggy. Was it sick? Still half hibernating? Had it been tapped by a car?

Richard chased it away from the fence by throwing snowballs. (He'll use any excuse to throw snowballs.) This morning he saw the tracks, where it had come down the hill from the neighbors and then had gone back.