Articles by Herschel Smith

I learned something simply from watching this video.  I look forward to the next installments.

News from New York.

What price for violating all of the rules of gun safety in one encounter?  If you’re someone normal like you or me, we go to prison for a very long time.  If you’re with the NYPD, there is no price.  It’s a payment of $2.75.

LA Times.

Ten special agents from the California Department of Justice were watching as a man walked out of the Big Reno Show and placed his purchases in his car.

The black Isuzu with California plates headed west on Interstate 80 into the Sierra Nevada, eventually crossing the Nevada state line. That’s when the California Highway Patrol pulled Vincent Huey over. Inside the vehicle, state Justice Department agents found 18 high-capacity magazines, some capable of holding 30 rounds, according to court records.

Ten agents.  Not shutting down Latino gangs, not stopping the Marijuana farmers from raping the land and polluting the water with illicit use of chemicals.  Ten agents, working on high capacity magazines.

JWR says this.

California has the largest tax base of any state in the nation–with quite high income taxes, sales taxes, and fuel taxes. But despite these criminally high tax rates, California is now famous for its crumbling freeways, decrepit bridges (despite $3 to $7 bridge tolls), 20+ cents per kilowatt hour power bills, high tap water bills, and taxes that have boosted gasoline prices to $4+ per gallon. There are restrictions on wood home heating stoves, hundreds of gun control laws, and bi-annual smog inspections for cars. Many older cars can be re-registered only after paying hundreds of dollars in “attempted” smog control remediation. And then there are the leaky water mains, the leaky natural gas pipes, and leaky dams.

The state is becoming over-run with illegal aliens. The state legislature granted them driver’s licenses. And now there is talk of illegals being appointed to state boards and commissions–all for the sake of “fair representation.” In California’s larger cities, the streets are strewn with human feces and hypodermic syringes. Rats now breed in piles of uncollected trash. Homeless mental patients wander through neighborhoods shouting obscenities, there is public nudity, burgeoning homeless encampments, legalized recreational marijuana… The list goes on and on. Despite all of these problems, the legislature seems intent on providing free health care to illegal aliens, and taxpayer funding of huge Green Energy boondoggles. Not just millions but billions of California taxpayer dollars have been wasted. Talk radio show host Michael Savage refers to San Francisco as “Sodom By The Sea.” Unfortunately, his jab is not just hyperbole.

All in all, California is now just a dim reflection of the paradise that it once was, in its golden years as The Golden State. Even the once ultra-conservative Orange County has a majority of Democrats. I’m sad to say it, but California is now a lost cause. I mourn for the loss of the California of my youth.

My advice is to get out while you can, just don’t bring progressive politics with you.  Leave that and your high taxation behind for the communists to sort out.

Ammoland.

If we can identify the mentally ill people that are suicidal, I think that is another conversation that is worth having.

I said, “We shouldn’t take some guns from all people; we should take all guns from some people,” but I think an important part of that is that it is the people we all agree shouldn’t have guns. I am not looking to be prescriptive there as much as I am looking to find where that common ground is.

We’re going to have a hard time finding that common ground, Dan.  The problem is that ” … efforts to limit firearm access only for persons with a mental health condition (including substance use disorders) or those who previously attempted suicide would prevent few suicide deaths by firearm.”

It just doesn’t work the way you’re saying it works.  And besides that, if we agree to agree on just a tiny little bit, like say, on a category of prohibited persons, who’s to say you won’t expand that list of prohibited persons to include someone who believes in Jesus, or believes in the RKBA?

No, I think forty years ago that speech would have worked.  It’ll probably work today with Wayne and the other folks in Fairfax.  But history has taught us that the words and meaning of the 2A are unalterable and not up for negotiation.

Tamara K.

ZCQOTD: “A carry gun without a reasonable amount of wear on it should be a source of shame, not pride.”

I’ve blogged before about how I feel that a gun with a bellicose name like the “Wilson Combat CQB” or “Springfield Armory Professional” that looks like it never gets used deserves the epithet “Minnie Pearl gun”.

An inanimate object isn’t deserving of anything.  It just is.

I’ve put thousands upon thousands of rounds through pistols, and I try to take good care of them, inside and out.  I don’t always pull that off, and there are scratches, normal wear and usage marks, dulling of the finish, etc., but generally I try.

I’ve explained before why I try.  When a smartass salesman at a gun store once told me that he shouldn’t have to spray any gun with aluminum parts down with Rem oil or any other kind of protectant because aluminum doesn’t rust, I replied, “Aluminum doesn’t rust, but it does corrode in the presence of salt, and your body has numerous salts.  Corrosion and rust are different chemical processes in that rust only oxidizes iron and its alloys, whereas corrosion occurs with other metals.  Rust is a subset of corrosion.”  High pressures (such as would be experienced in the chamber / barrel) can also lead to IGSSC (intergranular stress corrosion cracking) due to the stretching of grain boundaries and crystalline structures.

So rather than be a fashion Nazi and assume that the appearance of your firearms says something about your soul, I prefer to let you decide how clean, scratch-free and pristine you keep your firearms.  If you do better than I do, then more power to you.  The better you take care of your machines, the better they take care of you.  I hate machines that don’t work, almost as much as I hate it when people abuse machines.  We are in a continual fight against the second law of thermodynamics, whether with your automobile, your HVAC or your firearms.  I don’t consider it an article of shame to take care of yours.  Entropy always increases.  Why help it along?  Why not slow it down when we can?

From reddit/firearms.

Court jury questionnaire. Part 26. “Do you own firearms or have you owned firearms? Do you feel strongly one way or the other about them?”

This questionnaire makes it clear on the top page that ANYTHING you write down on the sheets are publicly searchable by individuals and media.

Talk about having people admit to the state they own firearms.

The best response seems to be this one from a redditor.

Ask the clerk quietly and politely to speak to the judge. Explain your reservation to the questionnaire and that it infringes upon your 4th amendment right to be summoned by the court to then be questioned about the free exercise of your constitutional rights and your personal property and since it’s under threat of perjury if you lie, it’s also a 5th Amendment issue.

Judge will tell you to have a nice day and excuse you quietly because one potential juror in a pool isn’t worth the work and they don’t want people who are competent anyway.

Do not divulge anything to the state.  They don’t have a right to know what you have or why you have it.  If readers have a better answer, feel free to weigh in.  Perhaps a lawyer could help us out.

Dean Weingarten.

Thirty-three percent is very far from that 98 percent efficacy rate so widely cited. And it’s an especially problematic number if we accept that firearms can be demonstrated to have a success rate of between a 76 percent (in a worst-case scenario, as presented in “Efficacy of Firearms”) and 96 percent (as is the case in Alaska’s DLP data or that compiled by firearms writer Dean Weingarten).

The Government of Svalbard, Norway,  has strict requirements for protection against bears. People are not allowed to leave the town without adequate protection, because of the large number of polar bears in the vicinity, and the constant potential for attack. The governor of Svalbard does not recommend bear spray. The governor of Svalbard prohibits the use of bear spray as a protection against polar bears. The Governor requires people to have appropriate firearms in their group.

And as Dean points out, this is different from the advice and counsel of the government of Montana.  Wonder why?

You make your decision, I’ll make mine.  When in the bush, I’ll carry a large bore handgun at a minimum.

News from Colorado.

Projectiles were still lodged in the walls. Glass and wooden paneling crumbled on the ground below the gaping holes, and inside, the family’s belongings and furniture appeared thrashed in a heap of insulation and drywall. Leo Lech, who rented the home to his son, thought it looked like al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s compound after the raid that killed him.

But now it was just a neighborhood crime scene, the suburban home where an armed Walmart shoplifting suspect randomly barricaded himself after fleeing the store on a June afternoon in 2015. For 19 hours, the suspect holed up in a bathroom as a SWAT team fired gas munition and 40-millimeter rounds through the windows, drove an armored vehicle through the doors, tossed flash-bang grenades inside and used explosives to blow out the walls.

The suspect was captured alive, but the home was utterly destroyed, eventually condemned by the City of Greenwood Village.

That left Leo Lech’s son, John Lech — who lived there with his girlfriend and her 9-year-old son — without a home. The city refused to compensate the Lech family for their losses but offered $5,000 in temporary rental assistance and for the insurance deductible.

Now, after the Leches sued, a federal appeals court has decided what else the city owes the Lech family for destroying their house more than four years ago: nothing.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit unanimously ruled that the city is not required to compensate the Lech family for their lost home because it was destroyed by police while they were trying to enforce the law, rather than taken by eminent domain.

The Lechs had sued under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which guarantees citizens compensation if their property is seized by the government for public use. But the court said that Greenwood Village was acting within its “police power” when it damaged the house, which the court said doesn’t qualify as a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment. The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whomever is damaged by their actions along the way.

“It just goes to show that they can blow up your house, throw you out on the streets and say, ‘See you later. Deal with it,’ ” Leo Lech said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday. “What happened to us should never happen in this country, ever.”

Leo Lech said he is considering appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court. Police must be forced to draw the line at some point, he said — preferably before a house is gutted — and be held accountable if innocent bystanders lose everything as a result of the actions of law enforcement.

In a statement to The Post, a spokeswoman for Greenwood Village said the city never refused to help the Lechs, saying the family was “very well insured” and refused the $5,000 assistance for out-of-pocket expenses before insurance kicked in. The spokeswoman, Melissa Gallegos, applauded the 10th Circuit’s ruling.

“The house was being used as a barricade, and the damage done to it was to remove the barricade and get the gunman out without any loss of life,” Gallegos said. “That is not a use of another’s property under eminent domain, but a use of another’s property during a police emergency.”

In June 2015, the standoff at Lech’s suburban Denver home captivated and alarmed the public, as their house at the end of the street, one located by a baseball field complex and a park, suddenly turned into a quasi-war zone.

The suspect, Robert Jonathan Seacat, had stolen a shirt and a couple of belts from a Walmart in neighboring Aurora, Colo., and then fled in a Lexus, according to a police affidavit. A police officer pursued him in a high-speed chase until Seacat parked his car near a light rail station, hopped a nearby fence leading to the interstate, and then crossed five lanes of traffic on foot. He climbed the fence on the other side — and then, shortly thereafter, came upon the Lech residence.

A 9-year-old boy, John Lech’s girlfriend’s son, was home alone at the time, waiting for his mom to return from the grocery store, Lech said. He told police he was watching YouTube videos in his room when he heard the alarm trip, according to the affidavit. He emerged to find a man walking up the stairs, holding a gun. “He said, ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to get away,’ ” Lech said. Minutes later, the boy walked out of the house unharmed.

Seacat then began searching the house for car keys. But by the time he got in the car parked in Lech’s garage, police had pulled into the driveway. Seacat fired a shot at them through the garage, the affidavit says.

Thus began the 19-hour standoff.

“They proceed to destroy the house — room by room, by room, by room,” Lech said. “This is one guy with a handgun. This guy was sleeping. This guy was eating. This guy was just hanging out in this house. I mean, they proceeded to blow up the entire house.”

SWAT officers attempted to enter the home on one occasion but retreated after believing they heard Seacat fire several rounds. After other tactics, including tear gas, robots and police negotiations, repeatedly failed, SWAT officers tried again to enter the home at 8:21 the next morning. They found him holed up in a bathroom with a stash of drugs, where he was disarmed and arrested.

When the Lech family was allowed back on the property to retrieve their belongings, they were aghast at what they found.

John Lech, his girlfriend and her son moved in with Leo Lech and his wife, who lived 30 miles away, requiring John to change jobs. The $5,000 offered by the city “was insulting,” Leo Lech said.

His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.

“This has ruined our lives,” he said.

Gallegos stressed that any large expenses Lech incurred are because he chose to do more than necessary, and chose to “repour the foundation that wasn’t damaged, and [build] a bigger better house where the old one stood.” Lech insisted starting from scratch was necessary.

Previously, police have defended their actions during the standoff.

“My mission is to get that individual out unharmed and make sure my team and everyone else around including the community goes home unharmed,” Greenwood Village Police Commander Dustin Varney said in 2015, KUSA reported. “Sometimes that means property gets damaged, and I am sorry for that.”

I think you’re a liar.  I don’t think you’re really sorry.

But take note, dear readers.  You’re never in more danger than when the cops are around.  And remember, they aren’t out to protect your safety.  They only care about making their arrest and going home safely at the end of their shift, regardless of what happens to you.

I consider John Moses Browning and Eugene Stoner to be the two premier weapons designers in American history, and certainly, Browning much more prolific.

It’s been a season of loss for me.  First, my job at the end of 2018.  Then my beloved dog of ten years, on New Year’s eve.

Today I lost my precious father, who passed away at 5:15 pm.  But the great thing is that he knew the Lord, so I will see him in heaven.  I will be posting, but it will be light.  I must focus on other things.  As always, talk to each other in the comments.