Articles by Herschel Smith

Shooting Illustrated:

What’s mechanical offset and how do you deal with it? If you have an optic on a firearm, particularly a rifle, the line-of-sight through the scope is higher than the center of the bore, and that difference is what we call offset. In other words, when you take a shot the bullet is going to exit the barrel as much as several inches lower than the line of sight.

[ … ]

To check this out, you’re going to need about 50 rounds of ammunition and a target. I suggest you fire three-shot groups, holding center, from 3, 7, 10, 15 and 25 yards. I think you’ll discover that your rounds are striking somewhere around 2 to 3 inches low at 3, 7 and 10 yards. At 15 yards, the group will still be low, but a little closer to point-of-aim. At 25 yards, point-of-aim and your three-shot group should be pretty close to coinciding.

Next, try shooting those same three-shot groups at 3, 7, 10 and 15 yards again, but this time hold high to account for the offset you observed the first time around (remember, the 25-yard group should be close enough to the center to not warrant significant correction). If you hold correctly, you should end up with centered hits at each of the distances. One quick example might be holding 3 inches high at 3 yards. Continue to practice getting used to the various mechanical offsets by shooting snaps—one shot standing from ready—at each of the various ranges until you thoroughly understand your offset holds.

Travis Haley refers to this as “height over bore” in the Magpul Dynamics “Art of the Tactical Carbine,” which is a very good video series.  I highly recommend it.

If this matters to you in CQB, you should check out your correction on a short range.

You might be interested in this.

New York Times:

During his four years as a war correspondent, Pyle was embraced by enlisted men, officers and a huge civilian public as a voice who spoke for the common infantryman. With his trauma in France, he had become one of them. After sharing so much of their experience, he understood how gravely war can alter the people who have to see it and fight it and live it. He knew that the survivors can come home with damage that is profound, painful and long-lasting. It was a truth that he found hard or even impossible to communicate to the readers back home — and it is a truth that is still difficult and troubling now, 75 years after D-Day.

For a writer to be famous in the states is one thing.  For him to be famous and loved by the troops is quite another – loved by the troops because he told their story.

If you haven’t read his reports, you have missed out on an adventure, sometimes dark, sometimes raucous.  But always an adventure.

No, seriously.  He does.

He asked the president if he would now consider banning silencers on guns after the Virginia Beach outrage in which high-capacity magazine were also used.

Trump replied that he ‘didn’t like the idea of them’ and was would ‘serious look at’ banning the noise suppressors.

He added: ‘I don’t like them [silencers]. No body’s talked about the silencers very much, they did talk about the bump stocks and we had it banned and we’re looking at that, I’m going to seriously look at it [a ban].

‘I don’t like the idea of what’s happening, what’s going on is crazy, with schools.’

[ … ]

On the subject of semi-automatic assault rifles, Trump responded to the use of AR-15 high-powered rifles that they were used for ‘sport’.

He replied: ‘Well a lot of them use it for entertainment. They do. It’s really. For some people it’s entertainment, they go out and they shoot and they go to ranges and they have a tremendous amount of fun.

My God.  Can the man construct a coherent thought for even a moment?  What on earth does schools have to do with suppressors?

At any rate, we already discussed his apparent kingly choice to go around the legislative system and single-handedly declare bump stocks illegal.  He’s apparently looking at doing that with suppressors too as we learned.

But what we didn’t know is how little he can actually craft a coherent argument for the ownership of semiautomatic firearms.  He thinks you only have an AR-15 to “have a tremendous amount of fun at the range.”

Tell that to Stephen Bayezes.  Oh and by the way, take a gander at the comments on these discussion threads on reddit/firearms.  Look here and here.

Trump is being increasingly seen as an enemy of firearms ownership.  I don’t believe the polls that show Trump as far ahead as they do.  Those polls ignore the fact that the same level of excitement for Trump won’t be there in 2020 as it was in 2016.  Gun owners may simply stay home.

Trump has no real political sensibilities except Northeastern progressive, and as I’ve mentioned doesn’t even speak the same language we do we.  But his advisors are idiots as well.

Via Uncle, this report.

Uncle asks, “Does he also drive a model T?”

Just one bit of correction.  The words “Model T” should be replaced with “muscle car.”

Washington Examiner:

Four are dead and one is injured in Australia’s second deadliest mass shooting since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania.

A 45-year-old gunman began opening fire with a pump-action shot gun at a motel in the northern city of Darwin before opening fire at other nearby locations in the city’s central business district around 6 p.m. Monday. Pump-action shotguns are largely prohibited in the country under sweeping legislation passed in the aftermath of the Port Arthur shooting, where 35 people were killed.

“He shot up all the rooms, and he went to every room looking for somebody, and he shot them all up,” John Rose, a witness, told Australia’s public broadcaster. “Then we saw him rush out, jump into his Toyota pickup and rush off.”

But with all of those gun control laws, this isn’t supposed to happen.

It looks like at present there are actually five deceased.  Let’s see.  An illegal firearm, out on parole, with an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Where there’s a will there’s a way.  Gun control laws don’t work to stop this sort of thing and everyone knows it.

Avoid crowds, carry guns, and watch your six.

From a reader, The Firearms Patent Attorney:

Poor Wayne.  No one complained that he earns over a million dollars a year leading the NRA ($5M according to Wikipedia).  No one paid attention to whether or not he flies in private jets to NRA events – I don’t know but I assume so.  Questionable but tolerable.  I try to fly first class to industry events and amortizing a $1000 ticket over a hundred meetings at the SHOT Show or NRA Annual Meeting makes it a good investment in reduced stress when every bit of positive energy helps.  If Dallas-area attendees ever want to link up to share a private jet I’m happy to make arrangements.

Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.  Leaked documents show that Wayne received hundreds of thousands of dollars in private overseas jet travel, including the Bahamas and Italy (where I understand there was a brief appearance in an NRA video).  A $4000/month apartment for a stunningly blonde “summer intern.”  But what got me was the clothing.  The Wall Street Journal reported:

“Wayne LaPierre billed the group’s ad agency $39,000 for one day of shopping at a Beverly Hills clothing boutique, $18,300 for a car and driver in Europe, and had the agency cover $13,800 in rent for a summer intern, according to newly revealed NRA internal documents.”

I got curious about the clothing and learned both to my pride and my horror that Wayne and I wear the same brand of suits, the unpronounceable Ermenegildo Zegna (“ZAY-nyah”).  The only difference is that I paid for mine (actually, it was an extravagant Christmas gift from Karmen) for about the cost of a fine custom 1911 from a top maker.  You’ll see me in it essentially every day of SHOT, NRA, and NASGW for the next ten years (and probably for ten more years with patched elbows!)  I can afford to change my shirt and tie every day, but not the suit.

So, I was irritated to think that all the regular “end users” that populate the aisles of the NRA show, and who buy the products that keep our industry alive, are paying for the million-dollar exec’s luxury clothing.  Buy your own clothes, dude!  I don’t care if you have to look good on TV – Buy your own damn clothes from your own salary!

As an aside, I did rather well in my taxation classes in law school and recall vividly that under no circumstances is clothing considered a deductible business expense (safety gear and otherwise unusable uniforms aside).  Which makes me idly wonder if Wayne’s accountants are scurrying to file amended returns including the value of as taxable income as I presume one must – my “Zegna” was paid for with after-tax savings just like all your own clothes.

But it gets worse, much worse.

[ … ]

It turns out that blood is thicker than water.  Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors was founded by William A. Brewer III in 1984 and has just 15 attorneys listed on their website.  Doing the math, a $1.5 million monthly bill averages out to $100,000 per attorney, but of course we know that’s not how things work.

Then I learned from a cranky NRA member on Facebook why this small firm might have had an inside track to land the NRA’s plum case: Brewer’s father-in-law is CEO of Ack-Mack, the NRA’s high-dollar PR agency!  Again, I don’t fault the law firm for taking advantage of family ties, and they might well be the best choice for the case whose issues I haven’t even looked into and don’t yet have an opinion on.

But, I’m more worried if the NRA is making BIG decisions in the right way for the right reasons.  Did Wayne himself make the call to steer the eight-figure plum case to the kin of the company that jets him around the world and fills his closet with the finest suits?  Or did the Board make this call, fully informed of all the relationships and possible personal interests?  I hope the latter – maybe one of the 76 Directors can let me know.  Were other firms considered or was it just a remarkable coincidence that the best law firm in the nation to handle the matter was so closely related to the PR firm that received $40,000,000 from the NRA in 2017?  It may be that the law firm is handling more than the legal dispute – they tout PR capabilities so maybe are handling some of Ack-Mack’s duties – I’m only speculating and have no idea.

Sidebar: When the NRA gets its act together again can we please have it stop with the embarrassing and exploitative marketing tactics?  I have to assume that Carry Guard is a terrible insurance choice that exploits the fears of ignorant consumers, and that no sensible business person would opt for.  Same for the cozy relationship between the gold -hawkers on the NRA Magazine cover and taking up precious display space at the NRA Annual meeting exhibition hall – no investment advisor would dream of suggesting investing in rare gold coins.  Precious metals may have a place in a portfolio, but those guys in gold jackets make my skin crawl when I think of how naïve customers think they are making a good “investment.”

And it goes on, and on, and on, including donations to Hillary, and “last year to Beto O’Rourke in his race against stalwart Second Amendment supporter Ted Cruz (my Senator).   And maximum donations (over $10k) to Hillary in 2008 and before, and even to Al Franken.”

We all knew that it was bad with the NRA becoming so festering that the pimple simply needed to burst its puss before it could ever heal.  This analysis takes a deep dive into the puss.

But I do have one comment.  I’d rather have a good 1911 than a stitch of clothing any day.

National Post:

The games children play in schoolyards are famously horrible, if you stop and think about them.

Tag, for example, singles out one poor participant, often the slowest child, as the dehumanized “It,” who runs vainly in pursuit of the quicker ones. Capture the Flag is nakedly militaristic. British Bulldog has obvious jingoistic colonial themes. Red Ass, known in America as Butts Up, involves deliberate imposition of corporal punishment on losers.

But none rouse the passions of reform-minded educational progressives quite like dodgeball, the team sport in which players throw balls at each other, trying to hit their competitors and banish them to the sidelines of shame.

When the Canadian Society for the Study of Education meets in Vancouver at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a trio of education theorists will argue that dodgeball is not only problematic, in the modern sense of displaying hierarchies of privilege based on athletic skill, but that it is outright “miseducative.”

I never played dodgeball in gym class.  We played only in boy’s gym class, and the coach made the sides get so close to each other that when we threw the ball at each other, it left whelps when it hit.  We played inside a gym, not outside where it could legitimately be called dodgeball.  We were danger-close.  He called it “murderball,” and we obliged him.

I guess these Canadian theorists wouldn’t like that, huh?  Hey, I was wondering, for men who are headed off to the US Marine Corps to learn to defend the country and who are learning to be men when they are boys, and who must survive in the brutality of combat, will those Canadian “theorists” be there to help the sides hold hands and sing Kumbaya?

As soon as the blood was spilled the controllers came out of the woodwork to shill their ideas.  First up is The Washington Post, or in other words, Jeff Bezos’ and the CIA’s blog.

But details of the rampage include one fact unique to the growing list of active-shooter cases: the assailant used a .45-caliber handgun with extended magazines and a barrel suppressor. This small detail — that the loaded gun was fitted with simple, and lawful, “silencing” equipment — threatens to upend how we understand and train for active-shooter cases in the future.

Let’s stop right there.  I’ve never “trained” for an active shooter situation by learning to “run, hide and fight.”  Only the DHS is stupid enough to purvey such nonsense.

But details of the rampage include one fact unique to the growing list of active-shooter cases: the assailant used a .45-caliber handgun with extended magazines and a barrel suppressor. This small detail — that the loaded gun was fitted with simple, and lawful, “silencing” equipment — threatens to upend how we understand and train for active-shooter cases in the future.

But the Virginia Beach killer seemed to want the anonymity of silence, a tool of the coward, not one seeking fame or a blaze of glory. None of the videos or manifestos we’ve seen from New Zealand to Las Vegas appear to be part of the Virginia Beach story. The killer wanted silence.

Silence is the enemy of time. An entire “run, hide, fight” policy that governs every school, workforce and the first-responder community in active-shooter cases is conditioned on an important premise: that there is situational awareness that shots have been fired, bullets are flying and it’s always best to run the other way. Once you know where the bullets are coming from, you can — as I tell my own kids — “sprint if you can; duck if you can’t; and fight only if you must. I only have one of each of you.”

If she would rather teach her children that than arm defenders around them, she hates her children.  But you see where this is going.  Now the controllers are targeting suppressors.  Next up, USA Today.

It’s not immediately clear how long Friday’s attack lasted, or how much time passed before the first police officers arrived on scene. But some gun control advocates say the suppressor may have caught the victims off guard. One survivor described hearing something that sounded like a nail gun.

“Especially on a handgun, a suppressor will distort the sound in such a way that it would not immediately be recognizable as gunfire to people who sort of know what that sound is,” said David Chipman, a retired agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and now the senior policy adviser with Giffords, a gun-control lobbying group.

Oh, I see.  An “expert.”  It’s always better for your story when you can get an “expert” to weigh in, yes?

But finally, the beloved Donald Trump himself.  Someone baited him with a question about suppressors, and he had this to say.

Q    The suspect in the Virginia Beach shooting used a silencer on his weapon.  Do you believe that silencers should be restricted?

THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t like them at all.

First we had the bump stock ban courtesy of a single, solitary, action by the federal executive remaking federal law on a whim.  Nice precedent, Mr. Trump.  We’ll see that used for very nefarious purposes in the future, no doubt.  Then we had support for red flag laws (or so-called extreme risk protection orders).  Then we had the selection of a gun controller to head the ATF, and finally today we get loathing of suppressors.

In fact it wouldn’t surprise me to see a bill pass the House and Senate headed for Trump’s desk to outlaw them completely, something that is no more than a muffler intended to save the hearing of target shooters and sportsmen.

You see, Trump can honestly claim that he is a defender of the second amendment when his definition of the second amendment is that you get to keep a pistol in your home if the Police say so, and only under certain very strict conditions you may be able to carry it like he does.

It’s a matter of language and world and life view.  His isn’t yours, and yours isn’t his.  When he says he is a defender of the second amendment, he doesn’t mean what you want him to mean.

The perspective from a controller.

At this year’s National Rifle Association annual meeting, President Donald Trump invited some special guests on stage. The first was a young mother from Virginia, April Evans.

“One night in 2015 she was alone with her two-year-old daughter when an intruder broke into her home violently,” said Trump.

“April took care of it.”

The crowd swooned.

[ … ]

“But kind of underlying all of this is a presumption about crime that whatever happens to you it’s probably going to be strangers who perpetrate it,” said Carlson. “It’s going to be sudden, it’s going to be fast and it’s going to be violent. And really the only thing you have to do is figure out how to basically train your muscle memory to respond as fast as possible.”

What gets left out of that narrative, according to Carlson, is that most sexual assaults don’t look like that. Neither does domestic violence.

“You’re experiencing crime and victimization, not as a one-off, acute moment of violence, but it’s generally in the form of mental abuse, psychological abuse, financial abuse,” said Carlson.

According to the FBI, attacks from strangers make up less than a third of violent crimes against women. The vast majority of violence women face comes from people they know.

This is an amazing commentary.  It can’t be described any other way than open loathing of women who have defended themselves.  Do you sense the commentary dripping with sarcasm and hatred for women who won’t go silently into the night and perish for the sake of the social planners?

First of all I won’t stipulate to their alleged statistics on anything until I’ve had a chance to review the data and perform the calculations myself.  But let’s grant for the sake of the discussion that they’re right and only a moderate fraction of women defend themselves from strangers intent on raping them or invading their homes to do them harm.

The author’s argument is that she doesn’t care.  She is willing to grant that this fraction gets raped or killed for the sake of gun control.  Her argument is that because she isn’t convinced that this fraction, whatever it is, is worth it, she wants to control means of self defense for everyone.

Only the most crass, blinded and wicked person could develop and perpetrate such an argument.  It’s the same kind of person who seems to dominate the political scene today, with environmentalists who would rather men get eaten by animals than carry weapons in the bush, and women who believe in sacrificing their children to Baal for the sake of convenience or some other reason.

This category of person is dangerous.  They do not believe that mankind is made in God’s image.  They believe they have the right and knowledge to dictate the terms of survival to everyone else, and to them, you are just a statistic.

Never listen to these people except to refute them, teach your family and friends better, and know where the FUSA is headed long term.