Articles by Herschel Smith

I think this will take some practice.

I just can’t find a good tactical shotgun course offered anywhere near me.

It seems to have a chance.

As you all are aware by now, Texas passed a “Texas Made Suppressor Law” last session. It is a highly specific law that says that a suppressor that is made ENTIRELY of Texas made parts and stays in Texas is legal. Representative Tom Oliverson (R-District 130) led the fight for passage on this bill and it was well crafted.

It requires anyone who wants to build these to first seek a Declaratory Judgement from the courts–thus giving Attorney General Ken Paxton legal standing to defend the law.

Good news for us! The feds tried to kill the case and Judge Pittman said their arguments were not good enough to pull the plug on the case and denied their motion.

We will have our day in court! Post-Bruen, I have high hopes that this will prevail. Further, I spoke with Representative Oliverson this morning and he said ““HB957 passed its first legal challenge yesterday.  I am glad to see the lawsuit move forward and I look forward to Judge Pittman’s evaluation of the arguments.  I believe the case against federal regulation of these Texas-made, Texan-owned firearm safety devices is solid!”

It’s going to be a long haul but the trial date has been included in the four-week docket beginning November 12, 2023 and I have high hopes for it!

Here’s the problem.  Unless this bill includes the directive for local LEOs to arrest agents of the FedGov who attempt to arrest folks who have suppressors without registering them as NFA items, the law is meaningless.

It’s a setup and trap, even if unintentional.

Do the right thing with the bill.  Connect it to protection from the FedGov by the state and then it’s good to go.  Even if the FedGov cannot be watched 24 hours per day, after arrest of innocent victims of this new law the state can decide to enter FedGov facilities to regain control of the victims and arrest said agents.

It’s all about who is willing to flex their muscle enough.  And by the way, this sort of thing is exactly why the FedGov fears the new Missouri law prohibiting the ATF from interfering with the 2A in that state.  It has teeth because it’s backed by state and local law enforcement under threat of firing and never again being able to work as a LEO in Missouri.

Guy appendix carries without a holster and shoots himself in the groin.  Link -> reddit/Firearms.

Yea I know.  Use a holster – that’ll make everything safe.

Or not.  I don’t appendix carry.  I don’t point weapons at myself regardless of how much confidence I have in trigger discipline.

It’s called redundancy, or defense in depth, which is an engineering design philosophy.

You don’t point guns at other people and then claim it’s safe because you have trigger discipline, do you?

No, I don’t either, and I don’t point weapons at myself.

But that’s just my opinion.  Carry however you wish.

With a good manufacturer you shouldn’t have to worry about this.  It could be the BCG if there’s a head space problem.  Otherwise, send the gun back and demand your money back.

Reuters.

WASHINGTON, Oct 3 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court, which expanded gun rights in a major decision in June, on Monday declined to hear a challenge to a federal ban on devices called “bump stocks” that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire like a machine gun – a firearms control measure prompted by a 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.

The justices turned away appeals by a Utah gun lobbyist named Clark Aposhian and firearms rights groups of lower court rulings upholding the ban as a reasonable interpretation of a federal law prohibiting machine gun possession.

It doesn’t meet the legal definition and they know it.  Here is the decision.

The case of McCutchen versus the United States is still alive.  It’s based on a “takings” argument.  To me this is a weaker case since technically, the government could do it with so-called just compensation.  The whole point of this is that the ATF cannot make law, but they do make law because of the overblown bureaucratic state and cowardice of the Congress to do anything about it by withholding funding and handing them pink slips.

Remember that Trump did this.  He didn’t have to.  No one held a gun to his head.  He voluntarily chose to do this.  It’s on his head – not only this ban but the precedent it sets (which is ongoing and growing as we speak with the new SBR / arm brace rules).

In connection with this, David Codrea links his piece at Ammoland where he asks what NFA items Paddock owned.  That’s right.  Paddock had prohibited weapons and you never heard anything about that.

Anyway, recall that floor camera in Paddock’s room showing all of the spent casings?  Me neither.

Las Vegas was a running gun battle with multiple shooters for several miles down main street.  Anyone who claims anything different is a liar.

The SCOTUS should have declared the ban unconstitutional because the executive branch made law.  As it stands, the best anyone could hope for now is a $150 credit on income taxes.

Weak tea and cowardice.  Just like Trump.

BLUF: Probably so.  It removes the offending piece.

We’ve covered this in previous posts.  I still believe this is all a gigantic trap.  It’s a way for the ATF to come to your door, demand your firearms, measure them, take data on them, log your serial numbers, and then make up their minds depending on the capricious “decision of the day.”  The entire point is to expand the gun registry.

Also see Tim’s discussion.

Also make sure to drop by David’s piece on this.

Outdoor Life.

It’s been a tough year for Chris Landers. The 30-year-old hunter from Strathmore, Alberta underwent four ocular surgeries at the beginning of 2022 to fix a detached retina, the result of a work accident during which some metal shavings flew into his eye. He hunted in 2021 before realizing the retina was an issue and successfully harvested an elk and a black bear. He was hoping to have similar success with his 2022 elk season, but things wouldn’t go as planned.

Landers and his buddies were hunting in the Spirit River valley north of Grand Prairie in the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 15 when disaster struck. As they followed after a bugling elk, some thick brush knocked an arrow out of Landers’ quiver. Somehow, the arrow stuck into the ground with the broadhead pointing up. Landers didn’t see it in time and stepped right into the razor-sharp blades. The broadhead gouged into his shin, soared up behind his knee, and plunged into the back of his lower thigh.

The blades severed his peroneal nerve and nicked an artery. This not only turned his left leg into a fountain of blood, but also rendered it practically immobile and without any sensory function. Extreme damage to the tissue and cartilage around his knee joint only got worse as he fell to the ground.

“[The arrow] went right beside the bone, almost halfway up my leg,” Landers tells Outdoor Life from a hospital in Calgary. “It went past my knee and snapped off somewhere. We found the bottom half of the arrow and another small chunk where it broke, so about 10 inches of arrow were in my leg.”

His hunting partners Devon Spencer and Jared Manuel immediately sprung (sic) into action. They were miraculously in the only spot of cell phone service they’d seen in the two days they’d been hunting, so they called in emergency services.

“We stopped the bleeding so that it wasn’t crazy bad, and I just tried to calm myself down a little bit,” Landers says. “We had STARS Air Ambulance flying overhead about an hour and a half later. They nosed down and one of the nurses came down and put a tourniquet on. She couldn’t get an I.V. in because I was in shock, so she had to do an [intraosseous infusion] and had to drill a hole in my leg to put meds in through my shinbone.”

Pictures at the link.  They were initially using a belt as a tourniquet.  Even if the IFAK contains nothing more than a tourniquet and Quik Clot, carry one in the bush with you.  Virtually anything can happen.

Here is a fully account of the follow-on antics.

Late Friday, the walleye fishing world was sent reeling after a cheating scandal was exposed in front of God, country, and a mob of justifiably furious walleye fishermen. Two guys – we can no longer call them fishermen without smearing the 99 percent who play by the rules – were exposed for what appears to be the most nefarious, blatant, and outrageous case of cheating that tournament walleye fishing has ever experienced.

Since we live in this drunkenly litigious climate, I will have to use every qualifier necessary – allegedly, reportedly, apparently – to relay this story, but when you have video captured from dozens of cell phones, it will be hard to build a case that their reputations have been unfairly tarnished.

I won’t use the terms apparently, allegedly or reportedly.  The video is right there.

When tournament director Jason Fischer sliced open the gullet on one of the fish that Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky had turned in, lead weights were exposed. Next fish – same thing. Next fish – lead weights and pieces of walleye fillets.

The duo had apparently, allegedly, and obviously, dropped these objects down the throats of their “catch” to enhance the weight and thus, improve their standing in the tournament. Fischer, a police officer in the Cleveland suburbs and a guy with an unassailable reputation in the Lake Erie walleye tournament ranks, was furious and threw them out of the tournament with a gesture reminiscent of the home plate umpire ejecting former New York Yankees manager Billy Martin.

Only the arrival of on-duty police officers likely saved Runyon and Cominsky from the assembled mob of “real” fishermen, many of whom had, behind the scenes, voiced their suspicions the duo had cheated in the past.

This story gets much messier. Since Runyon, of Cleveland, and Cominsky of Hermitage Pa., have already claimed the first-place prizes and considerable amounts of money in several LEWT events, including the 2021 season-ending championship, what happens now?

Legal eagles tell me that this apparent cheating in this weekend’s tournament constitutes fraud and is a felony. But the pair also took the top money in this past spring’s Rossford Walleye Roundup, and the huge payout in the 2021 Walleye Slam.

The duo weighed in the apparent top catch in last year’s Lake Erie Fall Brawl and made claim for the more than $100K attached to that finish, but then were disqualified. When the tournament director at the time offered no explanation or clarity other than to say one of them had failed the polygraph, the tournament lacked the transparency it so desperately needed.

Runyon went to great lengths to proclaim, repeatedly, that they were innocent and had caught their fish by following all of the rules. He secured legal counsel and has been trying to sue the Brawl to claim their so-called winnings.

Imagine that even after being caught red-handed, you were so eaten up with pride and greed that you hired legal counsel and argued that you “caught [their] fish by following all of the rules,” when that’s not even the point in question.

There is a lot of winnings and sponsorship money at stake.  Thieves and dishonorable men will go after that money.  But God doesn’t change His mind on the eighth commandment because of a lawyer.

Really?

WAILUKU — With the defense citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision confirming that the right to carry handguns for self-defense extends outside the home, a judge dismissed firearms charges Wednesday against a Paia man who said he had a gun for self-protection when he was arrested on a trespassing charge.

“The way the Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment has caused all of us — criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges — to rethink our gun laws,” said Deputy Public Defender Ben Lowenthal, who represents Christopher L. Wilson. “I hope that prosecutors, when charging these cases, are mindful of this interpretation of the Second Amendment.”

If he was trespassing, he should be charged as such.  But the judge made the right call.  In this source we learn that the prosecutor initially argued that the defendant lacked standing to argue that Bruen protected him.  I think they’ve got it backwards.

The defendant isn’t involved in a lawsuit against the state.  He was charged by the state.  His lack of attempt to obtain a permit is precisely the point in question.  In other words, saying that he lacks standing to argue Bruen begs the question because it presupposes the consequent.

I wish lawyers took classes in logic.

Every once in a while, reddit/Firearms has a good question come up.  It isn’t often, but sometimes one will catch my eye.

Can they be cleaned or are they disposable?  Just asking so I don’t wind up buying mops every time my 22 or shotgun turns those fibers black.

To which he gets this reply.

I reuse mine. I just hose it down with canned gun cleaner or non-chlorinated brake clean.

I like bore mops and use them heavily when cleaning.  They’re far more efficient than running a patch through the bore 1800 times.

However, I would suspect that repeated application of a solvent to clean the mop would begin to disintegrate the mop fibers.