The Threadless Nut

As you may know, there are several firearms related bills going before the NY state legislature this week. You can see details about them, as well as get contact info from the NRA-ILA site. If you are concerned I urge you to contact your representatives ASAP. Here is my letter, feel free to plagiarize.

I’m writing today to share my opinions on several firearms related bills that are up for your consideration this week. I’ll be as brief as possible.

A01093/S01715: While this bill speaks to prevention of illegal sales, it has a provision requiring dealers to obtain liability insurance for the damage the firearms they sell could cause. This clause makes no mention of whether this insurance should cover illegal or legally sold firearms. Having a dealer carry insurance for what a customer who legally purchases a firearm may do is simply ridiculous. This will add an undue financial burden and put local dealers out of business driving more jobs out of NY state.

A00801A/S01598: This bill adds a 5 year expiration to all firearms licenses and adds a training requirement. While I certainly support the idea of firearms training, I am a certified NRA instructor, the criteria for this training is not specified. Who will decide what the training includes and what are the standards? What will the cost be? How often and where will this be offered? These details can turn a seemingly positive bill into a gun ban. The reasons cited for the 5 year renewal include the fact that firearms licenses are not automatically revoked when a person loses the right to own firearm. That is an administrative problem and does not require new legislation that will further restrict the right, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, of law abiding citizens to own firearms for self defense.

A01326: This bill would require that individual handguns be made “child-safe” through one of several means. Any of these means either compromise the handguns use for self defense, or introduces mechanical complexities that will reduce reliability.

A05844/S03098: This bill requires “safe storage” of firearms. The primary issue I have with this is that it requires ammunition to be separately stored from the firearms. This makes it nearly impossible to keep a firearm in a reasonable state of readiness for defense within my own home. Having to retrieve the firearm from a locked box or device and then having to retrieve the ammunition from yet another locked box and then load the firearm will make that firearm all but useless in a stressful and time sensitive situation.

A02881/S02379: This bill attempts to ban “frangible ammunition”. The primary purpose of frangible ammunition is safety as it disintegrates immediately upon hitting any hard surface. It is useful for training to prevent ricochet and in self defense to prevent over penetration. There is no reason why this should be banned.

A02882: This further expands the use of the COBIS system. This system has been shown to be completely ineffective and a waste of state funds.

A03211: This bill bans the possession of .50 caliber firearms. Overall this is poorly written as it is never specified what .50 caliber firearms are being regulated. .50 caliber is simply a statement of bore diameter. As written this would ban most muzzle loading hunting rifles, almost all shotguns, several handguns, several .50 caliber rifles, and the .50BMG rifle. The .50BMG rifle is used for long range target competition throughout the country. It is just another lawful firearm and should not be singled out.

A06157: This bill expands the existing “Assault Weapons Ban”. The federal government did not renew a similar ban on the information that the ban did not affect crime rates. The bill promotes several fallacies such as “spray fire” and generally prays on fear. This bill includes a provision for confiscation of current legally possessed firearms from NY citizens. This would simply be a disaster. Once again this is an attempt to control crime by managing law abiding citizens.

A06468/S04397: This bill requires handguns to “micro stamp” ammunition. This will simply cause manufacturers to not make NY compliant pistols, and put the manufactures in NY state at a severe disadvantage, encouraging them to relocate to another state. This technology is also completely ineffective as it is easily defeated within minutes.

In summary, I urge you to OPPOSE these bills:
A01093/S01715, A00801A/S01598, A01326, A05844/S03098, A02881/S02379, A02882, A03211, A06157 and A06468/S04397.

Thank you for your attention,

Verizon recently added a “Friends & Family” thing to their mobile plans where you can pick 10 numbers that won’t count against your minutes. The website provides details about your calls, but they don’t provide a good tool to find the 10 people you call the most. Hmm, what to do?

OpenOffice to the rescue! Since Verizon makes call details available as a CSV download, they can be easily sucked into a spreadsheet where you can do all sorts of unholy data manipulations.

Here’s the, somewhat ungraceful, procedure I worked out to find out who we call the most. I’m sure things could be automated more, but I’m also pretty sure it would take me a lot longer to do that than this took. All this stuff should work in Excel too, but no promises.

1. Login to your Verizon account, Go to My Bill then Bill Details.
2. Select the date you want and the number you want.
3. Hit the Download to Spreadsheet link to download your call data into OpenOffice, you’ll need to repeat this for each number on your account separately. The default import options should work fine.
4. Get all the data pasted into 1 spreadsheet page. I did a page per month, but you could mash it all together too.
5. Turn on Data->Filter->Autofilter.
6. Filter out the calls to other Verizon numbers that don’t count towards minutes.
   1. Click the pulldown that appeared at the top of the Usage Type column.
   2. Select each type of in network call. The are listed as M2MAllow, M2M Allow,CallWait, IN Allow, or IN Allow,CallWait. Depending on the date of your statement. You may also want to filter out nights and weekends (N&W), but I left that in since I really just wanted to know who we call the most regardless of time.
   3. Select all the filtered rows and delete them, repeat this for each type. Don’t delete the header.
   4. Select All in the filter to get back to the remaining data.
7. Now, here’s the good stuff, select the entire sheet and go to Data->Subtotals.
8. Select Number for group by, Minutes to calculate subtotals for, and Sum as the operation. Click Okee Dokee.
9. Violin! The little elves will group all the unique numbers and place a subtotal of the minutes under each group. If you click the little 2 on the far upper right, you can collapse it so you only see the subtotal lines.

Just go and pick out your top 10 from there, easy peasy, well, easier peasier.