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It's rare that we see an honest-to-goodness saint these days.  It's even rarer to see one in the entertainment industry.  Dolly Parton was one.

Her father never learned to read, growing up in Depression era eastern Tennessee, but she always said that he was really intelligent and always wondered what he could have done if he had had access to books.  So she started her Imagination Library 31 years ago.

The charity has given away a third of a billion children's books.  I don't think that I've seen anyone in my lifetime (celebrity or not) that has had this big a positive influence world wide.

As I said, a saint.

Her enormous success as an entertainer allowed her to do this.  Here is a quick recap of just how enormous that success was.  Note that the numbers are low because I took them from a 16 year old post, so she was even bigger than this:

• She was called the "Iron Butterfly" for her tough business negotiation, having turned down Elvis' (Elvis!) request to cover I will Always Love You. He wanted too much money - half of all royalties in perpetuity. She said no. 
• She was Entertainer of the Year - one of only seven women who have ever been given this award. 
• 45 Grammy nominations, 7 awards (she wuz robbed). Two Academy Award nominations.
• Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. Country Music Hall of Fame, and Songwriter's Hall of Fame. 
• A 2003 tribute album to her featured covers of her songs by Melissa Etheridge, Allison Kraus, Shania Twain, Norah Jones, and Sinead O'Connor. Yowzer.
• American Idol had a "Dolly Parton" night where everyone had to perform one of her 6000 (!) songs. 

Yet she said that the greatest honor she's received is a bronze statue on the Courthouse lawn in her hometown. She was more properly called Dr. Dolly Parton - she received an honorary degree for her decades of work to increase literacy. Eastern Tennessee had a real problem with that when she was born in 1946.

Through it all, she's kept her sense of humor. Famous (or infamous) for her showy outfits and huge wigs (among - ahem - other things), she has been known to say "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap."  When Dolly was originally on the UK TV's Graham Norton Show, Graham was wearing quite a loud suit, for which he apologized. Without batting an eye, Dolly said Don't you worry yourself, my aunt had a sofa just like it. It was instant chemistry, and Norton and Parton became great friends, to the point where he recorded a duet of Islands In The Stream with her at her theme park, Dollywood.

Unusually for an entertainment celebrity, she was married to her husband, Carl Dean, for almost 60 years until his death.  When asked if she was going to remarry, she demurred, saying I don’t think I’ll ever be married but once. I think Carl’s waiting for me on the other side, and if I turned up at the pearly gates with somebody else, he wouldn’t like that! He’d be saying, ‘Who’s that little [bleep]? You leave him outside the gates and if the Lord wants him in here, you get on in here with me!

Needless to say, The Queen Of The World and I are huge Dolly Parton fans.  There's a real sense of loss in her passing, that we shall not see her like again.  But our loss is Heaven's gain.  Like I said, a saint.

So long, Dolly.  Thanks for making the World a better place.

The post Drone Chaos & an Epic Pool Party: Finnish Brutality 2026 Day 2 first appeared on Forgotten Weapons.

The shooting remains under investigation. Preliminary investigation indicates that the two men met up for the sale of a firearm. The 22-year-old then pulled a gun and attempted to rob the 20-year-old, and the two shot each other.

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Police said their investigation has been consistent with the shooter's account of what happened. Cuts on Conley's arm were consistent with cuts from reaching through the door glass.

The shooter heard Conley trying to enter and repeatedly told her to leave. He also warned her that he was armed, police said.

Leesburg police said Conley continued attempting to gain entry, at which point he fired a handgun through the door, breaking the window. That's when she reached through the broken window in an attempt to open the door from inside.

The homeowner fired a second time, striking Conley and killing her, police said.

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 We built this shop during the winter of 2017-18 and put down gravel during that winter.  That has been eight years.  Around here, crushed limestone is the preferred driveway material  The limestone dust packs well between the stones and makes a firm driveway that needs very little maintenance.

The post Sicario Hunting and Mölkky: Finnish Brutality 2026 Day 1 first appeared on Forgotten Weapons.

• Jim Grey has some beautiful color photos from downtown Columbus, Indiana and some neat B&W shots from a car show.


• Greg Ellifritz is thinking of starting a new series of articles on the historic gunfights that have shaped training over the years.


• Meta is hounding the author of Careless People. It might not go so well for them.

 The town is Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee.

 Widener's has an interesting discussion of how prices for guns and ammo have changed since 1986. Guns have roughly followed inflation. Ammunition has often not risen as fast:

The Biggest Surprise: 9mm Got Much Cheaper

In 1986, a box of 9mm cost $22.50, or about $0.45 per round.

In 2026, it averages $10.00 per box, or $0.20 per round.

Even without adjusting for inflation, that’s a dramatic decrease. When adjusted for inflation, 9mm is significantly cheaper today than it was in the 1980s.

On Saturday, August 15, 2026, at about 1:30 a.m. on the Virginia State University campus, shooting broke out. Five people were wounded, one of them a 20-year-old student at the university. Camron Rarris, 19, was found hours later and was charged with four counts of malicious wounding. The Virginia State student was treated and released with non-life threatening injuries. A 21-year-old man remains in critical condition, according to foxnews.com. Police are seeking others to determine if some people fired back in defense of self and others. A 23-year-old man, a 17-year-old teenager and a 19-year-old woman had non-life threatening injuries. The crimes appear to have had little to do with the school except for the location.

Virginia State University is located about 25 miles south of Richmond and has close to six thousand students. It is an historically black university. The cause of the shooting is not yet known.

Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit with a mandate to reduce school violence, referenced the Virginia State incident and posted this on X:

 
Gun violence is an ever-growing public health epidemic that demands our attention now.

"Gun violence" is a political term designed to associate guns with social problems. The term conflates suicides, murders, justified homicides, and firearm accidents as all part of the problem, and thus, defines the "problem" as "guns". Suicides and homicides have different causes and solutions. The number of guns in a community is not correlated with the number of suicides or homicides. Fatal accidents with guns have been dropping for over a hundred years and are at an all time low, in spite of firearms ownership being at an all time high.

In 2025, and it appears likely in 2026, the murder rate in the USA was and will be at an all time low.  

At the Sandy Hook Promise non-profit website, there are several policies the organization supports which work to help keep children safe in their schools. The have programs to reduce violence in schools. They have programs to aid in preventing suicide. Those programs appear to be helpful and probably are helpful.

Unfortunately, Sandy Hook Promise is actively working to:

 Sandy Hook Promise Action Fund is working to expand background checks on all firearm sales, pass temporary transfer orders, create secure storage laws, limit high-capacity magazines, and institute high-capacity magazine limits.

There is little reason to believe these policies would actually reduce active school shootings. There is no consideration of the costs of such policies or the reasons such policies are becoming more and more difficult to implement.  Instead the site promotes highly controversial statements such as:

Background checks rarely provide false-positive results. 

The FBI makes the claim, but John Lott presents plenty of evidence the claim is not correct, that a large number of false positives are created, and the false positive have large racial biases. There is little, if any evidence more background checks would reduce the murder rate or the number of active mass murders. A bill has passed the House, and is pending before the Senate, to force the FBI to share NICS demographic data with the Congress. Currently, the FBI refuses to do so.

Sandy Hook Promise promotes what they call "Temporary Transfer Orders", which appear to be "red flag" laws designed to allow courts to take people's guns without due process. As the statement at Sandy Hook Promise claims these orders respect due process, it is difficult to see exactly what they are promoting. All states currently have processes to place people under care if a court has evidence they pose a threat to themselves or others. Those processes do not focus on firearms. They focus on the individuals and the potential threat they may pose. It is unclear exactly what Sandy Hook Promise is promoting with this policy.

Sandy Hook Promise also opposes some weapons modifications. Auto sears are already heavily regulated and almost impossible to legally obtain. "Glock switches" are a type of auto sear. Bump Stocks are almost never used in crime. Forced-reset triggers are almost never used in crime. The premise used to oppose these modifications is that more shots fired mean more innocents hurt. The example given is Sandy Hook. None of these devices were used at Sandy Hook. These devices make some incidents less dangerous by making the firearms hard to control and aim, thus reducing casualties.

Analysis: Why does an organization such as Sandy Hook Promise promote such dubious policies?  The leaders may not even be aware there are arguments against such policies. They may not know there are strong legal, moral, and Constitutional reasons to oppose such policies. As the organization gets is name and its foundation from a mass murder at a school, it is very difficult for them to carefully consider such foundational questions.  If they question the premises in support of more gun control, they question the foundation of their reason for existence.

Fortunately, Sandy Hook Promise appears to be spending more energy on positive programs to help students, and less on dubious political issues involving firearms. May they continue to put more resources into productive policies and programs, and less into dubious gun control efforts.

©2026 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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