Articles by Herschel Smith

I know someone who has the Bergara rifle and he likes it a lot.

Texas Plinking has spent a lot of money on rifles and optics.

This must be a joke!  But it’s not.

Is this yet another instance of length-of-pull NOT being measured parallel to the bore axis?

Do ATF employees still not understand the Pythagorean theorem?  Do I need to travel to their offices and give them a basic class in geometry?  Would it make any difference?  Would they be able to understand it?

Control.  It’s what controllers do.

Change. It’s what menstruating people do. Maybe it’s their time of the month.

News from Missouri.

The couple was indicted on felony charges of unlawful use of a weapon and evidence tampering. The indictments were filed under seal Tuesday. St. Louis Circuit Clerk Thomas Kloeppinger said a judge ordered the indictments suppressed but Kloeppinger didn’t know the reason.

And there you have it.  Done in secret, without defense, and evidence only presented by prosecutors.

After seeing the pictures of what happened, anyone with half a brain cell would have been able to entirely dismiss this whole issue.

But no.  They found enough ignorant rubes to go along with their scheming.

We had this conversation before about grand juries.  Grand juries have their defenders.  Great and glorious thing, they are, with good, street smart, common sense folks on the juries, it was said.  And I said this.

Most of America cannot do basic arithmetic, or basic physics, much less solve algebraic expressions, or … God forbid … do calculus. Most of America cannot construct coherent sentences and have no more than 2 to 3 minute attention spans.

Most Americans cannot name the first three presidents or explain the roles of the three branches of government. More than half of America voted for a corrupt communist named Hillary Clinton in the last election.

There may be some juries who happen to get it right, but in the main, I distrust juries (criminal and civil) as much as I distrust the Grand Jury. And no, your umpteen experiences with a jury don’t matter one little whit to me.

One example should suffice (I could give many more). A former colleague (and fellow professional engineer) was interviewed by lawyers to sit on a jury for a case involving elevators (who knows, maybe someone was suing Otis Elevator for whiplash or something).

The lawyer asked him, “Do you believe elevators can fall for no reason at all? To which he responded, “No, there will be a reason – mechanical failure of a component, failure of a circuit, or failure of something to cause the event. A formal root cause analysis could identify why, and give us a root cause or multiple root causes, but no, nothing happens for no reason.”

He was dismissed, and the lawyers went on until they found an entire jury who believed that elevators can fall for no apparent reason.

Grand juries … pfft.

And to their defenders because of the trustworthy, ordinary, common sense street smart folks on grand juries.

Pfft.

Ignorant rubes.  Suckers.  Tools.

We all knew it anyway.

Newly declassified documents show former CIA Director John Brennan took notes after briefing President Barack Obama on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plans to frame then presidential candidate Donald Trump as a Russian asset. The briefing took place during the 2016 presidential election.

Fox News has the exclusive:

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified documents that revealed former CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s purported “plan” to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server” ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Fox News has learned.

Ratcliffe declassified Brennan’s handwritten notes – which were taken after he briefed Obama on the intelligence the CIA received – and a CIA memo, which revealed that officials referred the matter to the FBI for potential investigative action.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence transmitted the declassified documents to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Tuesday afternoon.

“CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service,” Brennan’s notes read.

The declassified documents come after other documents, released last week, show Clinton’s initial plan.

“In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

Just like we know that Obama knew all about the Eric Holder’s Fast and Furious scheme to traffic weapons into Mexico.  Maybe he ran the whole operation.

Via WRSA, Gateway Pundit also has a report up on Trump’s declassification of all documents related to the Russia hoax, Spygate and Hillary Clinton’s email scandal – no redactions.

Also see The Federalist.

It’s a favorite tactic of the Luciferians to do what they blame others of doing.  Their father is the father of lies, and everything they do is a subterfuge and meant only to confuse, sew problems and bitterness and create chaos and hatred.

That characterizes the entire previous administration.

I’d prefer not to be that close.

Lately, however, the 53-year-old has been nervous to step outside, because on Sept. 21, she was attacked by a bear.

That’s for sure.  Dogs will go after bears, and usually dogs are too agile for the bears, but you’re not.  But I’d rather have the dogs with me to alert me to bear presence.

Because of this, the bears tend to travel along wooded ridge tops, like the area near Rum Springs Road.

“That is a natural funnel that the bears tend to come down,” Spiker said, adding Maryland’s healthy forested areas and plentiful food sources have likely led to an increase in the bear population since the mid-20th century.

DNR officials have set a trap in an attempt to catch the bear or others. Spiker said it’s unlikely the bear would be put down if trapped because it would be difficult to know if it was the one that attacked Levow.

Both Steve and Renee urged people who bike or hike in the area to be alert for bears, and not to approach them if they see one. Steve thanked DNR for bringing up some cans of bear mace for protection.

Yea okay.  You keep your bear spray.  If I’m out and about in the bush, I’ll carry a large bore handgun, thank you.

I know.  The post title is a bit snarky, but I think Kurt has been a long time getting to this point.

The real goal is control of the institutions that have combat power – the police, federal law enforcement, and the military. That’s where they can find people willing to kill, and maybe die, to impose the elites will. The cops, agents, and soldiers they dream of coopting to be their caste’s personal Gestapo and Wehrmacht provide the bodies who would actually do the dirty work – as Dick made clear when he said out loud what he is too smug and dumb to know he should have kept quiet, that he and the other tourist revolutionaries intend to be eager spectators to the gory unpleasantness that always accompanies a leftist revolution (“I’ll happily provide video commentary.”). Hijacking the government, and using loyalty to the country and co-opting the ingrained sense of duty in our cops and warriors as a means to manipulate them into being the enforcement mechanism for the tyranny the elite left dreams of imposing is the goal.

Remember, when someone says he wants you dead, he wants you dead. And the people who want you dead here in the USA intend to use the people you currently rely upon to keep you safe and secure as the means to do it. It’s actually quite cunning – if they can keep the cops, agents and soldiers in line. We’ve already seen lots of cops putting pensions over honor as they hassle citizens for mask crimes. The high-ranking Obama officer corps has already sold its collective soul for a handful of stars, and lots of colonels and generals would gleefully set their forces on uppity citizens – not rioters, but people like you – to please their Democrat masters. When the Biden administration orders the cops and agents, and maybe soldiers, to imprison or kill gun owners, the uniformed flinkies will be expected to spill blood if necessary, because when you send government officials with weapons to enforce a law, whether to bust a guy peddling loose Marlboros or to confiscate AR15s, you have to assume that a certain number of those encounters will end with dead citizens. And to folks like Dick, that casualty count is a feature and not a bug.

[ … ]

Remember those cops busting moms in parks because they don’t want to miss out on their pensions?

Yet, the notion that Americans will wake up one morning, see that they are no longer free, shrug, obediently line up to turn in their Remingtons and Mossbergs and reconcile themselves to serfdom is not in the cards.

Salary, benefits and pensions.  These are the things which are important to LEOs.  But there is no honor in the America-first philosophy or patriotic jingoism when tyranny is afoot (like arresting good men and women who bring out guns for self defense when rioters threaten their lives, livelihoods and businesses).  No, I will never forget that they have done these things, and neither should you, nor that these good men and women have to hide themselves to keep from being arrested when the police let the rioters run amok.  Some breaks are irreparable and final.  The fact that the prosecutors sent them out to do these things means precisely nothing to me.  Death doesn’t mean your body cooling to ambient temperature and then the end.  There is more after that – much, much more.  And one to whom we will all answer.

If anyone recalls when Kurt has been so clear as he is here, let me know.  But he seems to have embraced that the good folks wearing uniforms may not be so good after all if and when they violate your basic God-given rights.

It’s good to see Kurt calling out the awful class of flag officers in the military, and those who have recently retired, like Generals Petraeus (an adulterer and gun controller) and McChrystal (a gun controller and murderer for his role in ROE and the deaths of the men at Ganjgal).

Via WiscoDave.

David Bernstein, University Professor and Executive Director, Liberty & Law Center, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, has a paper on this very subject.

In it, he begins well enough.

The individual right to keep and bear arms has two primary rationales. The first is to provide citizens with a means to oppose tyrannical government. The second is to provide citizens with a means to defend themselves, their loved ones, and their property from criminal aggression.

I would argue that criminal aggression envelopes both of the above two rationales, personal self defense and defense against tyranny.  Family, home and hearth need protection against both, and that was the cultural milieu within which men had and carried arms in colonial America, and in which the second amendment was crafted.  But a careful reading of Heller doesn’t exactly bring that point out.  In fact, while he uses the Heller ruling in the paper, the right to overthrow a tyrannical government really isn’t the core of Scalia’s arguments.  If it was, Scalia would have argued differently, and argued for more weaponry in the hands of the citizenry, and finally, argued against one of his core principles in the ruling.  One of his core principles is that the ruling doesn’t negate or find unconstitutional all gun control.  In fact, many traditional gun laws are left alone, untouched, and simply go without discussion other than to note that the ruling leave them alone.

Bernstein notes what the minority thought about the ruling.

The majority and dissent clashed over whether the right to self-defense with firearms is anachronistic in modern times, when police forces are expected to enforce law and order. The majority observed that although some “[u]ndoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society … where well-trained police forces provide personal security,” it was “not the role of th[e] Court to pronounce the … Amendment extinct.” The dissenting Justices, by contrast, asserted that the midnineteenth-century “development of modern urban police departments, by diminishing the need to keep loaded guns nearby in case of intruders, … ha[s] moved any … right” to armed home defense “even further away from the heart of the Amendment’s more basic protective ends.”

Readers know that we’ve addressed this issue many times before.  The minority report is a lie, and they know it.  Police do not have the responsibility to supply protection of anyone or anything, from life to property.  This is so commonly known now that it’s amazing that we have to repeat it.  See, for example, the following decisions.

Castle Rock v. Gonzalez

Warren v. District of Columbia

DeShaney v. Winnebago County

Bernstein continues with his study demonstrating that stand downs of police across the nation in the face of Antifa/BLM riots has cast new light on the necessity of armed self defense.  If the police aren’t there to do it, it’s necessary to do it ourselves.

But given the fact that the police aren’t responsible to do it, we were always responsible to do it ourselves, and the minority in Heller knew that.  Everyone who knows the law knows that.

But this still misses the primary point.  Bernstein later quotes a LEO writing at Daily Kos.

Another Daily Kos op-ed, this one by a former police officer, likewise argued that the “right to Bear Arms … became outdated and irrelevant once the country actually had a well-regulated militia,” which today is the National Guard; “Not only does the United States have a ‘well organized militia’ but every inch of the United States is protected by a police or sheriffs department.”

And now we’re to the primary point.  When the police think this way, they have become the agents of tyranny that Bernstein suggests necessitates the need for the second amendment to begin with.

They aren’t there to supply protection – the courts have repeatedly told us that.  But what they can do is extinguish your right of armed self defense, something we have seen many times in the past few months where police arrested people who engaged in that very thing rather than target the rioters.  We argue that this itself is tyranny.

For this reason, and more, I have always held that Heller was a very weak decision.  Arguing that armed self defense is protected under the second amendment games itself with silly arguments about the role of the police.  The discussion itself becomes a subterfuge and misdirect.  Heller was an odd opinion for the simple reason that it buries the real intent of the second amendment.

Despite the Court’s confident pronouncement, it is not at all clear that the Second Amendment was meant to protect a personal right of self-defense. It is, however, crystal clear that the Amendment was meant to protect the right to keep and bear arms to resist tyranny-as the Heller Court itself concedes. Yet strangely, by the time the sixty-four-page opinion has wound to an end, the Court has purged the Amendment of its revolutionary quality. Justice Scalia’s opinion never hints that the right to resist tyranny might still be alive and well and relevant to the Amendment’s interpretation, and it lays down rules that will make the right a functional nullity.

As a result, the opinion has an odd quality. Justice Scalia insists that he is being true to the language and history of the Constitution. Yet by the close of the opinion, the purpose that clearly and plainly appears in the language and history-the right of resistance-has disappeared, but the right of self defense-which is much less clearly present, if present at all, in the language and history-has taken center stage.

[ … ]

Heller offers a Second Amendment cleaned up so that it can safely be brought into the homes of affluent Washington suburbanites who would never dream of resistance-they have too much sunk into the system–but who might own a gun to protect themselves from the private dangers that, they believe, stalk around their doors at night. Scalia commonly touts his own judicial courage, his willingness to read the Constitution as it stands and let the chips fall where they may. But Heller is noteworthy for its cowardice.

Only when the second amendment is seen as protection against and amelioration of tyranny does it take on the life it should.

Armed self defense, against aggressors both individual and collective, is a God given right, and even duty.  It is merely recognized in the constitution, a covenant document and contract with the people.  Honoring that covenant brings blessings, breakage of the covenant brings curses of all kinds.

King George found out well what kind of curses it might bring.  The American war of independence was known in royal circles as being a “Presbyterian rebellion.”  He found out that he wasn’t the author of rights.  That domain belongs to the Almighty.

Shooting Illustrated.

My first fighting lever action happened to be a Marlin. Back in the early 1970s, I got a Marlin 1894 in .44 Magnum, and cut it down to Trapper size. Even with the 16-inch barrel, it held 9 rounds of 240-grain hollowpoints and was just a handy little carbine. But, I’m clearly not the only one who likes lever actions because checking the 2021 Gun Digest Annual, I find that some 10 to 12 companies are building the guns. And I think that there are a number of reasons to consider the lever-action carbine for personal defense.

The first would be the fact that many models are chambered for standard handgun cartridges. The shooter who carries a revolver may very well find that a carbine chambered in the same caliber is mighty handy if for no other reason than the fact that only one kind of ammo needs to be carried and stocked. Carbines in pistol calibers will certainly take care of business out to 100 yards, and possibly beyond. And folks who live where dangerous four-legged game are known to roam can just select a gun chambered for .308 Win., .444 Marlin, .45-70 Govt. and others. Lever guns come in calibers that will take care of all of the ornery critters that one might have to deal with.

[ … ]

… there are those who simply have grown up shooting the lever-action carbines. The guns feel natural and the shooter understands them. There is no reason to switch to something else. A .30-30, which has essentially the same performance as the 7.62×39 mm, will do as good a job of protecting home and family as it does bringing in the venison.

The lever-action carbine, in one form or another, has been around since the 1860s, and it is still around because it gets the job done.

Mirroring some of the same comments seen here at TCJ.

One thing you’ll notice as you look around at the availability of firearms and ammunition is that, while ammo is virtually unavailable at reasonable prices, there are two types of long guns that are the same (they cannot be found): AR-15s and lever guns.

Ruger, in its purchase of Marlin assets, knows what Americans want.  Revolvers will be around forever.  Lever guns will be around forever.  AR-15s will be around forever.  1911s will be around forever, whether called 1911s or 2011s and given boutique names and calibers.  Good designs are like that.