Nathan Rubin:

Little boy Nathan wants to make the rules now, does he?

You see what he’s done there, yes?  He’s offered you a Hobson’s choice.  Take this option or nothing at all.  Certainly, no one wants to be an irresponsible criminal, do they?

Left unsaid is whether Nathan has followed his part of the covenant to live together in peace with each other – it’s called the constitution.  I wish for something better, but for now it’s what we have.

So let’s replace some of the words thusly.  “You can’t call yourself a law-abiding citizen if you respond with disobedience to the new law that requires you locate one child from each neighborhood every other Thursday and sacrifice him or her to Baal.”

You see Nathan, we get our rights from God, the Almighty maker of the universe and all of His creatures, not the state.  The covenant merely recognizes your agreement to live in peace with that.

If you break that covenant, you invite massive, irrevocable, irreversible trouble.

News from the North.

Twenty people arrested, 18 of them now charged — all connected to brutal robberies in downtown Minneapolis.

[ … ]

“These people in the community that are doing this, we have to have some consequences for this, but we also have to get to the heart of it. What’s wrong? What’s your problem? Is it education? Is it mental health? What is it and let’s treat it and let’s fix it,” he said.

Ah, there’s the pushbutton witch-doctoring again.  How about this: America has rejected the law-word of the sovereign God of the bible.

And no, this has nothing to do with throwing prayer out of public schools.  The state has no business educating children anyway, and the Department of Education shouldn’t exist.  Prayer offered to some god or other, no one knows whom, in no one’s particular name, by a non-believer, offering praise to nothing, is an abomination and sacrilege.

This is the absence of the fear of God taught in home schooling, church, the home, and the neighborhood – the replacement of the supreme governor of the universe with a golden calf.

Rep. Shiela Jackson Lee (D-Texas).

“I don’t know what else it takes but I don’t believe we can stop at the door of the United States House. I believe there will have to be an emergence of members of the House flooding the United States Senate for Senator McConnell to understand that these initiatives today, my gun storage bill, my bill that I’ve introduced dealing with the caliber weapon, I’ve held an AR-15 in my hand, I wish I had it. It is as heavy as 10 boxes that you might be moving and the bullet that is utilized, a .50-caliber, these kinds of bullets need to be licensed and do not need to be on the street.”

So let me see.  A “caliber weapon” short-action cartridge AR-15 that shoots long action .50 BMG.  I want one.  If we can just get the 10-box weight down a little we may have something.

This all reminds me of authentic frontier gibberish.

Shooting Illustrated.

By any reasonable standard, the .44 Magnum cartridge is a milestone in handgun history. The big round came along in the mid-1950s, when America was on top of the world and American industry could make anything a sportin’ handgunner might want. By consensus, the guru of handgunning in those times was a little Idaho rancher with a big hat and gun savvy for the ages—Elmer Keith. He had been around for many years, shooting, hunting, handloading, experimenting and writing for the major outdoor magazines. Keith was widely read in the mid-1930s when Smith & Wesson took the bold step of stretching the .38 Spl., loading it hot and creating the first magnum revolver—the .357 Mag. One of the first to write a review of this new concept, Keith was still hard at it when World War II ended and sport shooting was popular once again.

For many years, Keith had hot-loaded .44 Spls. with bullets of his own design and sold them via the U.S. Mail. He developed a great deal of information about the feasibility of such a gun on a commercial basis. Smith & Wesson was exceptionally open-minded in the early ’50s and cooperated with him on a .44-caliber cartridge, which paralleled the concept used in the .357 program. It stretched the .44 Spl. case enough to increase its capacity and came up with an ultra-strong N-Frame revolver to fire the new round. The resulting gun and ammo opened to roaring acclaim and brisk sales. The now-famous Model 29 .44 Magnum was a spectacular success as a product.

[ … ]

There is another event that had at least significant effect on .44 popularity and it just might be one of the most important. Elmer Keith had a wonderful outdoor life, but one of the things that actually helped him make a living was working as a hunting guide. Keith put many hunters onto game—deer and elk mainly—over a wide span of time. On one of these trips, he encountered a situation that people still argue over. Keith was guiding a hunter on a mule deer hunt, when they turned up a really choice buck.

The animal was about 200 yards off along a ridgeline. Keith’s client hit the deer with an early shot, but the hit was in the jaw and it was obvious the shooter wasn’t quite up to the marksmanship challenge. In the next few minutes, the animal first disappeared, then came out of the timber even farther away. With no other arm available, Keith drew his brand-new .44 Magnum and began working his shots into range. After several ranging shots he got a hit and then another. The buck was down for the count, an animal that would have been subject to a lingering death had it not been for Keith’s skill. He was too much a man of the outdoors to let something like that happen. The shot was debated for years to follow—it was 600 yards. It was among the first (if not the first) game animal taken with a .44 Magnum.

That’s quite a shot!  Jerry Miculek can do that too, at least with 10mm rounds.

But then again, 10mm isn’t .44 magnum.  Jerry needs to get a better game!  I want to see Jerry do this with .44 magnum.

It would have been an honor to have met Mr. Keith.  They made them stout back then.

Dave Hardy.

On SSRN: The Janus-faced Second Amendment: Looking Backward to the Renaissance, Forward to the Enlightenment. I’ve just started circulating it to law reviews. It has two themes:

1. The 2A has two clauses because it had two independent purposes, each with a different constituency. Classical Republicans wanted a guarantee against the militia, as a system, being neglected. Jeffersonians want a guarantee of an individual right to arms. For most of the Framing period, a person, group, or State chose one of the other. With the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788, someone finally realized they could do both and please both groups. To construe the right to arms as limited to militia service (as the Heller dissenters did) is to misconstrue the history. They were separate ideas, and to the extent we can assign importance, the right to arms was universally seen as more important.

Good.  This is the right answer.  I look forward to reading the whole article.

Denver Post.

A man killed last month by Rifle police stood on the edge of a bridge with a gun pointed toward his chest, threatened to jump and then jogged away from officers before he was shot in the back, newly released video footage of the shooting shows.

David Lane, a Denver civil rights lawyer who represents the family of Allan George, released video recorded by a passerby who stopped to watch police engage with the 57-year-old. Lane called the shooting “cold-blooded murder” and accused investigators of trying to cover for the cops who fired shots.

Police had pulled George over because he was wanted on a warrant for possession of child pornography …

So if he’s guilty of that he’s surely a Putz, but shooting a man in the back as he attempts to flee was handled by Tennessee v. Garner.  The Supreme Court spoke … or so I thought.

Breitbart.

The Hill reports that Cruz responded to the letter while attending a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor on Thursday. He said, “I don’t think it’s a positive thing to see big corporations shifting their focus from their customers and actually doing what they were created to do into trying to become political players on divisive social issues.”

Cruz observed that the corporate gun control push “is about social signaling at the country club.”

Without revealing the name of the financial institution, Cruz spoke about one bank that removed its name from a gun control push after learning more about what was really going on.

He said, “I will note with at least one of those banks that came out with one of those oh-so-brave corporate letters, when I sat down with their leadership and actually asked them about it, the people who wrote the letter didn’t know the first thing about the substance.”

Cruz said he asked the bank CEO to define/detail an “assault rifle,” and the CEO could not do it.

That’s because corporations are being run by HR, legal and finance today rather than people who actually know anything.  These people graduated yesterday with social studies degrees from liberal arts colleges, having been educated in Fascism and anti-American doctrine.

Trump is planning a rollout of his gun control proposals soon.  He says, “I’m talking about meaningful, write that word, meaningful, meaningful background checks.”

Question: does anyone in the republican party other than Ted Cruz and Thomas Massie actually understand the mammoth error they are getting ready to make by embracing gun control?  Does anyone in the party other than these two guys have even three brain cells?

By the way, readers can expect to see that phrase over, and over, and over, and over again here: “Corporate gun control is about social signaling at the country club.”

Mr. Jones (todd.jones@publix.com),

It is with great sadness that I write to you.  I have readers who have already done so, but I thought I should weigh in on your recent decision to ban open carry in your stores.

I had occasion to shop at Publix on Saturday and asked to talk to the manager.  He was a delightful man, very respectful, but just a bit ill-informed on what the law says about open carry and leaving me a bit confused on your policy.

I informed the gentleman that I chose to shop at Publix not only because I can openly carry, which is entirely legal in North Carolina, but also because I wanted to reward Publix for your stand.  I had previously been told by the store manager that Publix follows state law, whatever that happens to be.

In North Carolina, that has worked just fine.  No one gives me strange looks, women and children don’t run screaming for the doors, and sometimes store employees even discuss it with me, asking me what brand of firearm I have, asking about my recommendations for purchases, and so forth.

Your manager brought up the issue of the recent shootings in El Paso and elsewhere, saying that they would not allow something like an AR-15 to be brought into the store, and I explained to him that, as he knew, it was legal to openly carry a firearm in North Carolina.  If I touched my weapon, that’s called brandishing, and it’s illegal.  If I unholstered it, or pointed it towards anyone, that’s called assault with a deadly weapon, and it’s illegal.  He had not previously understood that.  The shooter in El Paso broke the law the second he exited his automobile holding a rifle.

When asked for clarification on the new Publix policy, he explained that Publix would “respectfully request” that people not openly carry in Publix stores, but that legally they could not do anything about it.  That’s not true, I explained.  I must respect the wishes of private property owners and refrain from openly carrying if I know the request has been made.

You see, there is no easy way around this.  You cannot have your cake and eat it too.  You cannot please the forces of gun control while at the same time leaving room for me to openly carry in Publix stores by merely “requesting” that I not openly carry, leaving it to my discretion because “there’s legally nothing you can do about it.”

I suspect that your HR department, your financial people, and your legal department, have made a choice to involve you in corporate gun control as social signaling at the country club.  You’ve been backed into a corner by your own people, and perhaps too stolid to understand that.  Otherwise, this decision is entirely on you, and you should be considered 100% responsible for the new policy.

Which is it, sir?  Were you backed into a corner by your own people, who convinced you that there was a happy medium on this issue?  Or was this your decision?  Who is it that wants to virtue signal at the country club?  Are you a member of a country club, sir?

In either case, I cannot say enough to express my disappointment with your company.  I explained to the manager that while I may have to make a pragmatic decision and shop at Publix in the future because only you happen to have a product and someone else doesn’t, I will not longer happily reward Publix with my hard earned money as a patron.  You are not entitled to my hard earned money.  You must earn it, and this decision is a huge blow against your account.

Don’t you see how much easier it would be had you simply told the controllers to go away, and that “You follow state law, whatever that may be?”  It works fine here in North Carolina.  How would you like it if we came to Florida and forced our own laws on you?

We covered this before, but there was some question as to the authenticity of the statement by Colt.  Listen to them in their own words.

Colt moving away from selling ARs to civilians isn’t a sign that the company wants to stop selling guns to civilians altogether, however. Instead, the company will ramp up sales of pistols and revolvers, including its 1911 models, Cobra, King Cobra, and Single Action Army collectible series.

Which, of course, is an absurd declaration, i.e., that “rifles aren’t heavily favored by the civilian market.”  It’s just that the civilian market doesn’t apparently favor Colt rifles.  Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Daniel Defense, BCM, FN, and a whole host of other companies are doing well enough.

So they intend to focus on … wait for it … producing rifles to fulfill outstanding military and law enforcement contracts.  I take this to mean replacement rifles and more particularly, replacement parts.

The revolver market was abdicated to  Smith & Wesson and Ruger, and I doubt that Colt will regain support in this sector.  This portends bad things for Colt’s future, in my estimation.

See this report, and then watch this video.

Horace Mann was very effective at educating a new generation of communists, yes?  The funny thing is that I agree that our children are not our own, but not in the way they do.

They believe in the dictum “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”  I’ll leave it to the reader to ascertain the origin of this quote.

No, neither my children nor my grandchildren belong to me.  Neither do they belong to the state.  I am not an anarchist/libertarian, and I am not a statist.

I am a Christian.  That means when I baptized my children, they were marked into the covenant.  They belong to God, and God will do with them as He wishes.  They are accountable to Him, as I am for teaching, raising and training them up in a world and life view that honors Him.  I am God’s custodian and servant, I am in responsible charge of His living creation.  That’s an awesome responsibility.  It cannot be turned over to the state.

For once, I agree with a collectivist, but I still find myself on opposite sides.  The state wants to be God.  I will always war against that notion.