Articles by Herschel Smith

Source.

A federal judge based in Mississippi has released a scorching order expressing frustration with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment opinion issued last summer and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

The opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations. Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Carlton Reeves – who is considering a case concerning a federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms – said he is not sure how to proceed.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote in an order released last week.

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

The Bruen decision, he said, requires him to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

Well if you haven’t been looking to the historical context, what have you been doing with your decisions?  And don’t conflate your own ignorance with that of the Justices.

So here are some suggestions for you.  Read the primary source literature – such as the writings of the founders themselves, and also the newspapers of the era.  I think you’ll find that free men were allowed to possess firearms, that rapists, murderers and kidnappers were punished with death (as they should have been), and that there wasn’t generally a belief in the rehabilitative power of imprisonment.  So a man who is convicted today of assault and battery with intent to kill, for example, is likely to have been put to death in Colonial times even if he would be released today.  Much of this is a problem of our own creation.

Then after studying the primary literature, study the secondary source literature.  You can learn all about American history, like you should have done in your “education.”

Then maybe you won’t be a dummy.

David Kopel debunks a stupid set of claims with a made-up set of indices that proves nothing, all promulgated by the idiots at Duke University (among others).  We’ve run into these dummies before.

The authors, one at Duke, and one at Wesleyan University (who has probably never shot a firearm in her life), should read Kopel’s analysis and be ashamed for the poor “research” and bad analysis and writing they did.

Anyway, if you want to read all about this stupid notion of the lethality index, read Kopel’s analysis of what these writer claim.  I found the most interesting part of Kopel’s article to be these few paragraphs.

Miller and Tucker write:

The Founders lived in a period when they could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because the basic flintlock hadn’t really become significantly more lethal in the previous 150 or so years. If the Constitution had been written in the middle of the nineteenth century, instead of the 1780s, the Founders would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. (p. 2511).

This is incorrect. The American colonists from Europe who arrived in the early 17th century came mainly with matchlocks. In a matchlock, pressing the trigger lowers a smoldering hemp cord to touch the gunpowder in the firing pan. Over the course of the century, Americans shifted to the more expensive flintlock. In a flintlock, pressing the trigger causes a sharpened flint (held in the gun’s “jaws”) to fall forward. The flint strikes a piece of metal, and the shower of sparks ignites the gunpowder in the firing pan.

Unlike matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept always-ready. There is no smoldering cord to give away the location of the user. Flintlocks are much more reliable than matchlocks, and all the more so in adverse weather.

Americans made the shift from matchlocks to flintlocks sooner than did European armies or European civilians, because the flintlock was so vastly superior for use in the dense woods of the eastern seaboard, and for Indian fighting, which was very different from the rigidly organized, linear tactics of European warfare. For the same reasons, American Indians greatly preferred flintlocks to matchlocks. The TLI of a 17th century musket is 19 and the TLI of an 18th century flintlock is 43. So the transition of firearm type in the American colonies more than doubled the TLI. There is no reason to believe that the American Founders were ignorant of how much better their own firearms were compared to those of the early colonists.

Besides, the men who penned and approved the 2A had spent their lives and fortunes on overthrowing tyranny, which is the singular point of the 2A.  It would be idiotic to believe they would have written the 2A any other way based on a “lethality index” created by ne’er-do-wells in the twenty first century.

I like his choices, and especially his paint job.

I’m not trying to be a gun snob, but one thing the Italians know how to do is make shotguns.  Beretta for gas operated guns, Benelli for inertial shotguns.  Additionally, anyone who claims that pump action is the only reliable action in a shotgun has never shot a Beretta A400 or 1301.  I’ve shot both, and I’ll say the same thing about semiautomatic shotguns to the malcontents that I say about ARs and 1911s.  I’ve never had a single FTF or FTE, or a malfunction of any kind.  And I run them hard.

You get what you pay for with any product, and guns are no different.  This think looks cheap.  You couldn’t give it to me.

My experience with a .44 Magnum wheel gun is that shooting it is a bone rattling event, at least with a short barrel.  I don’t think I ever want to shoot this thing.

I suspect that by characterizing this thing as controllable, there’s more than a little irony.

Readers may have noticed I was absent the last several days.  It was a good time away.  A very good buddy and neighbor of mine, Robert, and I went hunting courtesy of the fine folks with Williams Hunting in South Carolina.

I was shooting a 6mm ARC rifle with a Grendel Hunter upper, Aero Precision lower, Amend2 magazines, Brownells scope mount, Radian Raptor charging handle, Nikon Black scope, and a Viking Tactics sling.  I have no complaints about the gun.  It’s at least a 1 MOA gun all day long, and it can shoot better than I can.

I managed to tag him right behind the ear, with followup shot to the head.  Meat saved.

We then went quail hunting with Jackson Walling Quail Hunt.  I took half my bag limit in a morning hunt.  I do love quail hunting and shooting 12 gauge shotguns.  It was also a pleasure to meet Jackson and his son.  Jackson is very friendly, an outstanding guide and quail hunter, and makes the experience wonderful.  I did enjoy watching his dog work.  What a pleasure to see such a well-trained dog work so hard!  I hope he was fed well that night.

A special thanks to our fine guides at Williams Hunting, John and Richard.  You couldn’t ask to meet two better guides, nicer men or harder workers.

I’ll go back to do a two or three day deer hunt with these guys and also for a quail hunt with Jackson.  Next time it’ll be an all day quail hunt, or maybe two days.

Oh, and the low country boil was great.

The much anticipated 7mm PRC design by Hornady is in the news.  As if pre-planned, the articles piled up this week.

The Hornady 7 PRC is a new long-range hunting and competition cartridge that slides neatly into the gap that exists between the 6.5 PRC and 300 PRC. The best way to think about this round is as an updated version of the venerable 7mm Rem. Mag. I’ve been hunting and shooting with the 7mm PRC for a couple months now and I think it is going to do extremely well, particularly with Western and open-country big game hunters.

First of all, it fits in between the 6.5 PRC and the 300 PRC, which Hornady wants to be replacements for the 6.5mm Creedmoor and the 300 Win Mag, which they believe leave too much free bore and don’t fit well into the lands, leaving open the potential for bullet deformation when the bullet enters the lands.  So this 7mm PRC design not only fits in between the 6.5 PRC and the 300 PRC, it would fit in between the 6.5 Creedmoor and the 300 Win Mag, which aren’t even mentioned in the article.  He goes into some of the details on what Hornady intends to be available bullet designs, and then let’s pick it up later.  This next bit is interesting and correct if you have wondered about why new cartridge designs are being investigated.

The hallmarks of modern cartridge design include:

• Faster twist rates to stabilize heavy-for-caliber, long ogive, high BC bullets
• Adequate neck length on the case for consistent neck tension
• Headspacing off a steep-angled shoulder
• Minimal case taper
• Fine-tuned throat dimensions and taper (usually 1.5 deg.) in chamber
• Moderate muzzle velocities that deliver consistent shot-to-shot MVs and take advantage of the aeroballistically-efficient bullets the cartridge is designed for. This leads to better precision and longer barrel life

The 7mm PRC incorporates all these elements.

This is why he said this cartridge is an “updated version” of the venerable 7mm Mag.

The author says he got Miles Neville, an engineer with Hornady, to help him with accuracy testing.  I can say with utter confidence, Miles has the greatest engineering job on earth.

Unfortunately, there are two needs for a cartridge to be successful.  Rifles, and ammunition.  The manufacturers are making them now (and some already have), but the ammo may be a bit hard to find, at least initially, and then never if this turns out to be a “flash in a pan.”

Next up, Alloutdoor.com has three articles on current guns in production to shoot the 7mm PRC.

Mossberg Patriot Predator.  At an MSRP $616, this is an entry level rifle.

Savage.  They go the spectrum from their 10 Apex Hunter XP with an MSRP of $709, to their Impulse Mountain Hunter at $2,437.00.  It’s quite a good looking rifle, and certainly not entry level.

Then finally, as one would expect, Gunwerks breaks the bank with the ridiculous price of $9000.  You could have a gunsmith do a custom build for less than that.

It will be interesting to see where the 7mm PRC goes from here.

Source.

Dear Lord.

Somebody named “Coyote Bill” is doing Coyote psychology, and has women blowing horns and waving sticks around.

I have a better idea before her pet gets attacked and eaten.

Buy a pistol or wheel gun, preferably a large bore gun, go to the range and learn to shoot it, always carry it, even to the grocery store, and kill the Coyotes if she sees them.

I’m not a prophet, but I’m 100% certain that killing it will keep it from coming back.

Well, regardless of what he concludes, I don’t think I want to shoot a 45-70 with a muzzle device.  Muzzle brakes throw gas back in your direction, and sound too.  So for a bit of reduced recoil, you pick up sound and gas jets.  If your plan is always to wear electronic hearing protection, then maybe a muzzle brake is for you.

Speaking of electronic hearing protection, for folks who are a bit hard of hearing, like me, not only can it save the rest of your hearing, turning the volume up can introduce you to a world of sound to which you had been unaware.  In fact, amplifying that sound can be to your advantage in the bush if you can rapidly distinguish one sound from another.

I like the idea.  Keep the wood grain, but beef it up in areas where it needs it, making a new concept for chassis rifles.

The same concept, by the way, is used in engineered floor joists, i.e., press wood using glues, and there is no way the historic Southern White Pine floor joists can compete with engineered joists in strength.

Looking on their web site, it doesn’t appear to me that they sell this with the barrel or action – it only comes as a stock.