Articles by Herschel Smith

I want to be just like Jerry when I grow up.

From Ammoland.

Every one of these bills is as affront to good men in Virginia, but this one stands out to me.

SB 64 – makes a group of two or more individuals brandishing with the intent and purpose of intimidating others a felony.

Of course, it’s up to the LEOs whether you’re intimidating others, or maybe it’s left up to the one making the call to the LEOs.  After all, calls to the police render and report a perfect state of mind, just like when a person makes a red flag call, there is never a mistake.  Because women.  Or children.  Or something.

So the Virginia legislature is telling Virginians that Richmond rally day was a once in a lifetime event for them.  The elitists won’t allow that any more.

And note the word “brandishing.”  This is problematic, because there is no distinction between open carry and brandishing.  They want it that way.  It’s legal to openly carry in Virginia, but if you do it along with someone else, it’s “brandishing.”  And you know they’ll prosecute it that way.

Ammoland has the details.

Coming in at 6.8 pounds, I really like the lightweight handguard.  The price point seems right too (MSRP: $1100), and I think it’s a good addition to their stable given the usual unavailability (and high cost) of 458 SOCOM and the much higher availability (and lower cost) of 450 Bushmaster.

Just remember these words: “Biden’s blonde leg hair.”

The most amazing thing about this, though, is the reaction from David Frum.  This is no joke.  I initially thought this was some sort of parody, but it’s not.

“Kind of amazing that anybody thinks this video makes Biden look anything other than terrific. He shushes the aide who wants to lead him away – and then engages a hostile critic face to face, fact to fact. Impressive.”

Hey David, when did you sell your soul to the devil?

Jeff Minick.

As I write these words, a reproduction of the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, published in 1968 by Chelsea House, sits at my elbow.

The fat catalog is a casual reader’s delight and a historian’s treasure trove. Here are medicines like laudanum, herb tea, and castor oil. Here are tools, bobsleds, gasoline stoves, windmills, bicycles, clothing and footwear, valises, books, clocks and watches, fountain pens, banjos and snare drums, furniture and cutlery, buggies and wagons. (The price of most surreys is under $100, a belt is fifty cents, a child’s high chair a dollar, a ball room guide for gentlemen twenty-five cents.)

And in the Sporting Goods Department we find 28 pages of guns, ammunition, and accessories.

Here we have weapons ranging from the Daisy Air Rifle to “Our $1.55 Revolver,” from shotguns for $7.95 to Marlin Repeating Rifles. Sears, Roebuck & Company also sold ammunition, pistol holders, reloading tools, and cleaners for these weapons.

No one was monitoring these sales. The government had no part in regulation. No one conducted background checks on the buyers. Indeed, Sears brags that it is “the headquarter for everything in guns,” that their prices are below all others, and that “we will send any revolver to any address.”

Yikes, right? Even a common laborer, for three or four days wages, could order a Saturday night special from Sears. With guns and ammo so easily available, we might guess that the streets of every American city and town were running red with blood every day of the week. Mass murder surely occurred on a weekly basis. Assassination and terrorist attacks must have happened so regularly that no one blinked an eye.

We might guess so, but we would be wrong.

In 1900, the number of murders and “non-negligent homicides” in the United States was approximately 1 in every 100,000 inhabitants (This figure and the others in this paragraph include all murders, not just those by firearms.) In 1980, that figure was close to 11 murders per 100,000 people. Since then, that figure has declined to between 4 and 5 murders per 100,000. (For a deeper analysis, see here.) Bear in mind too that unlike today, a gunshot wound in 1900 frequently resulted in death.

These statistics contrasted with the easy availability of guns should raise some questions. Why in 1900, when firearms were so readily accessible, were murders so infrequent? Why are murders today quadruple what they were in 1900? Based on what gun-control activists tell us, shouldn’t we expect the exact opposite?

He has his answers, but in my opinion they are all connected and symptomatic of the higher order issue, which we all know as a rejection of God and His law.  It’s a cultural issue, not one of hardware.

I’ve never had any of these things happen to my guns, but then again, I’ve never had to put 500 rounds downrange in ten minutes.  So there’s that.

I could go on for hours on this, but you don’t have hours, so …

Ammoland.

A few years back while living in New Mexico I attended a Homeland Security Combating Terrorism Conference. The days were spent watching videos of bombings, explosions, and all manner of terrorist attacks on both American and foreign soil.

However, the briefing that got my attention the most, was a short forty-five minute, New Mexico, state, public health presentation about potential large-scale medical emergencies on the US – Mexican border. The majority of the people attending the conference were from New Mexico and Texas. The big topic on everyone’s mind was weapons of mass destruction.

We continued each day of the conference learning how to train, equip, and prepare to deploy, first responder assets. What if, there was a large bombing incident in downtown Dallas that kills a thousand-plus people? Or, what if there is a radiological disaster in Albuquerque (more nukes in that town than anywhere else in the US) that contaminates a large part of the city? The major problem I discovered was no one was prepared or politically able to discuss the “Border Situation.”

Lots of discussion about how to meet a projected crisis, but for the most part it was all done as if the US-Mexico border did not exist on the south end of four of our states. The most powerful “first world” country on this planet is sitting right next door to one of the neediest “third world” countries, with only a partial fence between them.

Another what-if question, what if a new strain of swine flu or smallpox or today (March 2020) the CONVID 19 coronavirus, either naturally or, worse yet, man-manufactured, breaks out in Juarez City, Mexico?

The perception that there is anything that resembles a public health system in the Mexican State of Chihuahua that could deal with the above medical crisis is incorrect.

Oh, I think that’s the wrong question.  I don’t really think they want to be prepared, if being prepared means closing the border.

You are aware, aren’t you, that while the country is at a point of crisis over health concerns, the Senate is pushing hard for a bipartisan green social engineering bill?

There is certainly a serious threat, but you are aware that while the country reels from Covid-19, Trump met with Lindsey Graham to talk about immigration issues?  From the NumbersUSA newsletter.

A number of Republican Senators, including Gang of 8 alum Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and immigration-expansionist Thom Tillis of North Carolina met with Pres. Trump on Thursday to discuss an election year push to pass an amnesty for illegal aliens.

Sens. Graham and Tillis have been in the news as of late trying to convince their colleagues to get behind an agricultural amnesty bill that was passed by the House in December.

According to reports, the meeting was more of a session to discuss strategy should the Supreme Court strike down former Pres. Obama’s executive DACA amnesty. The Senate attempted to pass a permanent DACA amnesty in February of 2018, but three competing proposals failed to reach the 60-vote threshold needed for the proposals to come to the Senate floor for debate.

Ahead of the Thursday meeting, Sen. Graham told Fox News, “Just to see, you know, where we are in terms of the DACA Supreme Court case, [there’s a] pretty good chance that the president will win, being able to set aside the Obama-era DACA regulations and what’s the play after that.”

We know that Sen. Graham would like nothing more than to pass an amnesty for DACA recipients, and he likely doesn’t want to stop there. He’s the lead sponsor of the Dream Act, S. 874, that would add to DACA’s 800,000 recipients by granting amnesty to an estimated 3 million illegal aliens. The farm amnesty that he’s currently pushing would add another 1 million-plus to that number.

It’s almost as if during the fixation on Covid-19 in the news, the men behind the curtain are busy redistributing wealth, terraforming America, and moving colossal sums of money around, with corporations and big Pharma getting rich. Like this was all planned or something.

If I didn’t know any better.  Perhaps it’s just not letting a crisis go to waste on the vicissitudes of the idiot American public who cannot be trusted with their own rule and need the elitists to govern them.

This awful report came to my attention, and it pertains not just to social media, but to father Google too.

The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in January, startling Zachary McCoy as he prepared to leave for his job at a restaurant in Gainesville, Florida.

It was from Google’s legal investigations support team, writing to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The company said it would release the data unless he went to court and tried to block it. He had just seven days.

“I was hit with a really deep fear,” McCoy, 30, recalled, even though he couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. He had an Android phone, which was linked to his Google account, and, like millions of other Americans, he used an assortment of Google products, including Gmail and YouTube. Now police seemingly wanted access to all of it.

“I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew the police wanted to get something from me,” McCoy said in a recent interview. “I was afraid I was going to get charged with something, I don’t know what.”

There was one clue.

In the notice from Google was a case number. McCoy searched for it on the Gainesville Police Department’s website, and found a one-page investigation report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home 10 months earlier. The crime had occurred less than a mile from the home that McCoy, who had recently earned an associate degree in computer programming, shared with two others.

Now McCoy was even more panicked and confused. He knew he had nothing to do with the break-in ─ he’d never even been to the victim’s house ─ and didn’t know anyone who might have. And he didn’t have much time to prove it.

McCoy worried that going straight to police would lead to his arrest. So he went to his parents’ home in St. Augustine, where, over dinner, he told them what was happening. They agreed to dip into their savings to pay for a lawyer.

The lawyer, Caleb Kenyon, dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a “geofence warrant,” a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby.

The warrants, which have increased dramatically in the past two years, can help police find potential suspects when they have no leads. They also scoop up data from people who have nothing to do with the crime, often without their knowing ─ which Google itself has described as “a significant incursion on privacy.”

Still confused ─ and very worried ─ McCoy examined his phone. An avid biker, he used an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides. The app relied on his phone’s location services, which fed his movements to Google. He looked up his route on the day of the March 29, 2019, burglary and saw that he had passed the victim’s house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood, he said.

“It was a nightmare scenario,” McCoy recalled. “I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect.”

There is more at the link.  It actually ended up working out okay for him, but not without some trouble and expense.

Let this be a lesson.  I have used biking apps on my phone for mountain biking trail maps, as well as Waze for navigation in my truck.

I’ve rethought that after reading this article.  Google = Fedgov.  Never forget that.

Two different readers have now confirmed to me that they know of connecting flights in America where foreign nationals were allowed to connect in America with final destinations outside of America.

Let that sink in.  That means the protocols in place for foreign nationals entering the U.S., or outright prohibitions thereto, aren’t in place for connecting flights.

Foreign nationals could be traipsing through airports on their way from one flight to another, and there is absolutely no control or protocol to monitor that or ensure the health and safety of the public.

It’s almost as if the American controllers aren’t taking this seriously.  It’s almost as if the combination of the FedGov and media has caused a panic to overcrowd medical care facilities and over-stress the staff, with little to no planning or foresight, with inadequate hospital beds, medical staff, training, equipment or protocols.

It’s almost as if the only real winners in all of this when it’s all said and done will be big Pharma and some corporations.

If I didn’t know better.

Readers feel free to drop URLs to news reports, studies and analyses of Covid-19 in comments.  This is a rare time I ask for this.