Articles by Herschel Smith

Fox News.

A Canadian man fighting for his life begged his assailant to let him go, but his pleas went unheeded — which is probably because black bears don’t understand English.

Brandon Lattie, 27, was on a walking trail in British Columbia at the Ferguson Lake Nature Reserve on Wednesday night when he says he spotted the bear, which began to chase him.

Lattie told CBC News he ran and jumped into a small lake, not expecting the bear to follow him.

“It happened so fast I couldn’t even think, so that seemed like the right thing to do,” he said.

Brandon Lattie says he was attacked by a black bear at Ferguson Lake Nature Reserve in British Columbia, Canada.

Brandon Lattie says he was attacked by a black bear at Ferguson Lake Nature Reserve in British Columbia, Canada. (Brandon Lattie)

But the swampy water slowed him and the bear swiped at Lattie, leaving him with scratch marks on his back and arm. The 27-year-old said the dogged bear even tried to hold him underwater.

“I think it was trying to hold me underwater. I was already physically tired and kind of out of breath from when I ran away and then the next thing I know I’m…going to try to get drowned by a frickin’ bear,” he told the news outlet.

Lattie said he noticed “there was at least a foot or two of water above me” and pushed himself “back up to fight back.”

It was then, Lattie said, he resorted to begging.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said he told the bear. “You don’t want to do it.”

A family said they were nearby and saw Lattie running away from the bear in the lake. Lucky for Lattie, the family’s dog began to bark, distracting the bear and giving the 27-year-old a chance to break free and swim to a dock.

“It could have been a whole lot worse,” Lattie said. “As soon as I got hit, I just thought, ‘OK, this is where I die. This is where my head gets chewed apart.'”

I don’t think bears have feelings of sympathy or a conscience.  I think a large bore handgun would have been a better choice.

News from the Northwest.

MTN News reports that the morning attack involved two bowhunters who, after getting medical care, “came into Shedhorn Sports in Ennis dressed in hospital gowns looking for new clothing. Shedhorn staff told MTN the men said they were able to deploy bear spray which ultimately drove the bear off.”

I don’t consider this successful use of bear spray.  If it had been successful, the men wouldn’t have been in hospital gowns.  I think a large bore handgun would have been a better choice.

Foreign Policy.

This cocktail of criminality, extremism, and insurrection is sowing havoc in parts of Central and South America, sub-Saharan and North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Not surprisingly, these conflicts are defying conventional international responses, such as formal cease-fire negotiations, peace agreements, and peacekeeping operations. And diplomats, military planners, and relief workers are unsure how best to respond. The problem, it seems, is that while the insecurity generated by these new wars is real, there is still no common lexicon or legal framework for dealing with them.   Situated at the intersection of organized crime and outright war, they raise tricky legal, operational, and ethical questions about how to intervene, who should be involved, and the requisite safeguards to protect civilians.

Mexico is on the front lines of today’s metastasizing crime wars. Public authorities there estimate that 40 percent of the country is subject to chronic insecurity, with homicidal violence, disappearances, and population displacement at all-time highs. States such as Guerrero, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz are paralyzed by extreme organized violence, as routine discoveries of mass graves attest. Since former President Felipe Calderón ratcheted up the country’s war on drugs in 2006, violent competition among the Mexican military, police, cartels, and criminal factions has left at least 200,000 dead. There were more than 29,000 murders in 2017, but 2018 is set to see even more—perhaps the most ever. In Guerrero alone, more than 2,500 people were killed last year, many of them victims of clashes between 20 autodefensas (self-defense militias) and 18 criminal outfits. Owing to endemic violence and the government’s slow retreat from crime-ridden areas, some towns are now run by parallel governments made up of criminalized political and administrative structures. In what are increasingly labeled “narco-cities,” the entire political and economic apparatus exists to perpetuate a drug economy.

In Brazil, meanwhile large portions of some of the country’s biggest cities are under the control of competing drug trafficking factions and militias. 

Some 1,000 low-income communities, roughly 20 percent of Rio de Janeiro, for example, are controlled by the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends), or Terceiro Comando Puro (Third Pure Command). São Paulo, meanwhile, is purportedly entirely under the authority of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, or PCC). And in smaller cities across north and northeastern Brazil, gangs and militias are starting to battle for dominion in the favelas. Already, they effectively administer state prisons. Some vigilantes have started to try their hands at politics and are running for office, while others seek to influence elections through buying and selling votes. Organized and interpersonal violence killed almost 64,000 Brazilians in 2017, much of it concentrated among poorer black youth. The mayhem has also triggered repeated federal military interventions.

Where is all of this headed?  The authors recommend Rio de Janeiro as an example of a “pilot program” that can be examined.  Very well.  Let’s examine it.

So the problems introduced by globalism – international crime gangs, crime warlords, payoffs, corruption, open borders – are all to be dealt with by an overarching police state.

America is travelling along in parallel with the rest of the world.  Plan accordingly.

The Washington Times.

But the biggest question remained: Where does the president stand?

“That’s an important piece — if the president doesn’t support it, there’s no point. It’s not going to become law,” Mr. Hawley said.

It was not clear what Mr. Trump thought of the proposal, with lawmakers pointing out that he hasn’t signed off on it and Mr. Barr was taking a temperature check.

I told you so.

NYT:

When Mr. Manchin volunteered to take his name off the background checks bill, Mr. Murphy said, the three senators were huddled around a speakerphone, talking to Mr. Trump from Mr. Toomey’s Capitol hideaway office.

“The president is a guy who thinks about branding,” Mr. Toomey said. “I think we just want to make it clear to the president that if he was going to do this, that he should get credit for it.”

Oh, no one has to worry about that.  Whatever new gun control makes its way into law, Trump will own it.  Completely.

Of the things that turn gun owners against gun manufacturers, these three things are highest on the list.

1. Aligning with gun control
2. Exclusive focus on military contracts
3. Reliance on name branding in lieu of true appreciation for the customer (e.g., H&K).  Look up the H&K memes like “Hi, we’re H&K and we hate you.”

It’s difficult to understand what’s so hard about this.

David Hunt on the Trench Gun.

The enemy didn’t like the trench broom one bit. In September 1918, the German government issued a diplomatic protest, complaining that the Model 97 Trench Gun was illegal because “it is especially forbidden to employ arms, projections, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering” as defined in the 1907 Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land. When the Americans rejected this, the German high command then threatened to execute any soldier caught with a Trench Gun or even just Trench Gun shells. General Pershing replied that, henceforth, any Germans caught with flamethrowers or saw-bladed bayonets would be lined up and shot. As far as is known, no American or German POWs were executed under such circumstances.

For a lesson in history, visit his article.

But not so fast.  The shotgun is still a weapon of war.  As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. Marine Corps used shotguns for close quarters battle in Now Zad, Afghanistan.  I snagged this shot of a YouTube video of fighting there when I was covering Marine Corps work in that theater.

So the next time some loud mouth tells you that “civilians” should not have “weapons of war designed only to kill others,” inform them that every soldier or Marine is first and foremost a civilian (in that he came from our ranks and will return to our ranks), and that every weapon that has ever been designed, or improvised, by an insurgency or uniformed army, is a weapon of war.  There are no exceptions, from sticks to rocks, from shotguns to rifles, from revolvers to pistols, from bolt action long guns to machine guns.

That’s a Red Herring anyway.  They don’t care about the details.  They just want you disarmed of all weaponry.  You’re easier to control that way.

Via David Codrea, FPC has a brief analysis here.

The invocation of “chain of title” is also problematic, as it suggests a legitimate government interest in maintaining searchable records of all firearm transactions. In other words: a universal registry masquerading as a background check system.

It’s a bad idea for a whole host of reasons.  But I wanted to point out one thing on this that you may have overlooked.

There are so many articles out there where it’s claimed that the White House said “Trump hasn’t bought any of this yet” that I cannot cite them all.

Here’s what I think happened.  These are ideas collectively promulgated by both Trump (a gun controller from way back) and Barr (a gun controller from way back).  Don’t believe it when the articles hint that this is all Barr and Trump is waiting on the Congress to lead by interacting first with Barr.

Barr is his boy on this.  Trump wants plausible deniability, and this effort is him sticking his finger in the wind.  Whether he gets all of this or not, at least now you see where Trump’s hearts is: “chain of title.”  Or in other words, a national gun registry.

Via Wirecutter, this disturbing report.

In a Reddit post entitled ‘Question regarding abortion and breeding fetish’, one user reveals how she has “a female friend who has a really powerful fetish for breeding” and never used birth control.

“She is with a male partner currently who is just like her, into breeding and they have been practising their fetish for quite a few abortions,” the post reads.

“I know this fetish. My girlfriend and me have the same fetish. My girlfriend enjoys her pregnancies and she enjoys the abortion. Her preferred date to abort is between 20 and 24 weeks of gestation. I enjoy making her pregnant. And I enjoy the time of her pregnancy. She has no menstrual period and she is sexually very active,” he writes.

“In the last ten years in our relationship we have done seven abortions and my girlfriend is pregnant again with a little girl,” he adds.

Good Lord.

And then there is this report of Union Theological Seminary students praying to plants.

Students at Union Theological Seminary prayed to a display of plants set up in the chapel of the school, prompting the institution to issue a statement explaining the practice as many on social media mocked them.

“Today in chapel, we confessed to plants,” the nation’s oldest independent seminary declared Tuesday on Twitter. “Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

The same article notes what Dietrich Bonhoeffer had to say about this place after his short tenure (before returning to Nazi Germany and being executed).

Bonhoeffer wrote they “are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.”

Bonhoeffer remembered that students “openly [laughed]” at a lecture on sin and forgiveness, and accused the seminary of having “forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for.” Disillusioned, he decided to return to Germany to resist the Nazi regime, where he was executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945 for his role in the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

So read these reports and tell me we aren’t at the end of the American age.  Read these reports and tell me we aren’t at Romans 1:22-25.

Field & Stream.  I will note for the record that the average price is high because this is a left-skewed distribution.  There are some reasonably priced rifles (like the Browning X-Bolt, Mauser M18, Savage M10 Stealth, and Bergara B-14), with the highest price being $3,999 (for the Proof Switch).

So maybe the mean should have been a geometric mean rather than arithmetic mean.  In any case, you get the point.  Accuracy doesn’t necessarily have to come with a big price tag these days.