Articles by Herschel Smith

From a reader, news from Virginia.

Though one of the men in the group was ineligible to buy a gun — and had been previously convicted of making a false statement on a firearm consent form — he made the purchase without a hitch.

Police took the video footage from the gun store in the course of investigating a homicide, according to search warrants filed in Danville Circuit Court.

Days after seeing the video, police found the man riding in a Buick with a Glock 45 tucked under his seat — a round in the chamber — and a magazine on him. Court records show police arrested and charged him with possessing a gun as a non-violent felon, carrying a concealed weapon and felonious possession of ammunition.

Though federal and state laws prohibited him from possessing ammo, there were no background checks required to buy it, as there are when purchasing a gun at a store.

In fact there is no background-check infrastructure in the state to stop a felon from purchasing ammo, Virginia State Police public relations manager Corinne Geller said.

The state police handles background checks for firearms purchases, referring applications to the Virginia Firearms Transaction Center in Richmond. The center combs through four state databases and one national database maintained by the FBI to check a buyer’s criminal history, mental health history, protective orders and other disqualifying factors when they go to buy a gun.

But of course.  Instead of reversing the unconstitutional gun sales background checks, since they don’t stop crime, just expand it to ammunition as well.  When a process fails, double-down on it, the progressive way.

They are eventually going to implement a new AWB, and they will eventually come after ammunition too.  Without ammunition, a gun is a paperweight.  Get it now while you can.  Otherwise, red flag laws may sweep you into their net.

By the way, I fear that the good folks of Virginia are going to fall victim to the progressives in Northern Virginia, just as North Carolina has to Mecklenburg and Wake Counties.

Army Times:

The Army has selected the sub compact weapon it will arm its security soldiers with and it wasn’t one of the big companies that have grabbed other recent weapons contracts.

Brugger and Thomet, USA won the competition over Sig Sauer and four other companies that had been vying for the job. Their APC9K was the winner, according to an update on fbo.gov, a government business website.

The small submachine gun is chambered in 9mm and variants of the weapon are in use with police units such as Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT teams.

I don’t shoot 9mm, I shoot .45ACP.  But if I did shoot 9mm it isn’t clear to me why you wouldn’t choose the Sig MPX.  I’m sure they had their reasons, but those reasons may not translate to civilian ownership (e.g., cost).  Also, for civilian ownership of that weapon above you’d have to drop the forend grip and the stock, or register it as an SBR.

News on Pete Buttiegieg:

Buttigieg, an Afghanistan war veteran and lieutenant in the United States Navy Reserve, could become America’s first openly gay president. If it wasn’t apparent from how much money he’s raised so far, he’s gained an incredible amount of momentum since launching his presidential exploratory committee on January 23, 2019. When it comes to key issues like gun control, Buttigieg has made it clear over the years where he stands: He supports universal background checks, and knows that mental health contributes to America’s gun violence epidemic.

[ … ]

“Joined bipartisan Mayors Against Illegal Guns to do something about need for common sense gun safety. #NowIsTheTime.”

“I’m with the majority of Americans (& gun owners) who agree with @POTUS that we need universal background checks to help #StopGunViolence.”

[ … ]

Buttigieg is a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a bipartisan group within the Everytown network that’s comprised over 1,000 mayors advocating for gun safety. Think: Advancing policies and practices that reduce firearm suicides; and minimizing shootings by the police. After Parkland, he supported the young people within his community demanding that our country ends gun violence.

[ … ]

We had an assault weapons ban in this country in the 90s. I would like to see more research on the effect it had. I do think we need to draw a line. Look, compatible with the Second Amendment, there are some restrictions. Somewhere between a slingshot and a nuclear weapon, we’ve decided that the American people would draw a line. Whether, for example, an AR-15 is on this side or that side of the line, I’m skeptical that it belongs in our neighborhoods in peacetime, but let’s at least have a healthy national debate about what’s best for keeping our families, our homes, and our schools safe.

Yea, as if there isn’t a healthy national debate already on this very subject.  Any time a progressive wants to have a “healthy national debate,” she is lying.  One already exists, and they know it.  What they want is draconian gun controls.  They want to occupy the throne of God, who alone grants rights and issues duties.

This candidate is the progressive’s wet dream.  Don’t count him out by a long stretch.  It’s messy-hair Bernie, creepy-Joe, or confused Beto, versus a guy who is gay, a veteran who can trot out pictures of himself in uniform, and believes in gun control.  He hasn’t been in politics long enough to have heavy baggage, so money is pouring into his campaign.

I say again.  Don’t count him out.

Word:

Once again folks, I’d like to point out that ‘Donate’ button in my sidebar.

I’ve always said that this blog is a labor of love, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s also a colossal pain in the ass. I spend way more time online than I care to admit, and not just doing the posting and comment moderating.

Actually, that’s the easy part. It’s digging up material that really kicks my ass.

Yea.  I hear that.  I don’t post nearly as much as he does, but I do like to post on esoteric things, thematic issues here at TCJ (gun rights, philosophy, theology, politics, firearms mechanics, open carry, etc.), and don’t like to post what other people have done.  Why would I do that – there would be no reason to post at all.

It’s not really the posting itself, or the moderation of comments, that takes the massive amount of time.  It’s finding items of thematic interest so that the blog has a purpose, or crafting your own prose and essays.

That’s so hard, and really time consuming.  If you’re so inclined, hit his tip jar.

As for me, I’ve got some things to communicate in the coming days, and some prayer requests to make.

Thank you for your patronage.

Remember our little scuffle with Lucian K. Truscott IV?

Apparently he got his pink panties in a wad over others [I presume he isn’t referring to me in his followup] fisking his piece.  So he now comes with Youuuuu might be a gun nut if …. (I know, some editor at Salon should have told him to stop doing drugs and rewrite the title).

I don’t care what they say. That’s not a civilian weapon. That’s a weapon designed for use by the military to kill human beings. The thing costs $1,249.95. It is, of course, sold on the open market to any civilian who walks in with the scratch to buy one. The people who buy weapons like this are, strictly speaking, gun nuts.

[ … ]

But less than one percent of our population is in the military. The rest of us are civilians, and these things are being marketed and sold to civilians. They use of the term “tactical” to yank at the heartstrings of arm-chair warriors, to make them feel like they’re buying something big and powerful. “Tactical” is a purely macho word. It’s used to appeal to gun nuts. Sadly, it seems to be working.

I am a gun owner. My guns are locked away in a storage locker right now. I own a 12 gauge Remington pump-action shotgun, a .32 revolver, a .38 revolver, a .22 bolt action rifle I inherited from my grandmother, and a .177 bolt action rifle my brother gave me. I’ve never owned a semiautomatic weapon. Not even one. The last one I shot was an M-14 in the Army in 1965.

I come from a military family. You would think a family of Army officers would have owned a lot of guns. You’d be wrong. My father owned the 12 gauge pump-action shotgun I inherited from him and the .45 caliber Army-issue Colt pistol he inherited from his father. My grandfather, a four-star general, owned two guns: the .45 pistol he gave to my father in 1951 when he left for the war in Korea, and the German Luger taken from Field Marshal Albert Kesslering, commander of Nazi forces against whom grandpa had campaigned the Fifth Army in Italy.

That’s it.

The whole commentary is so emotional, disjointed and hysterical that it’s really difficult to boil it down to a few quotes, but I’ve tried.  Here you get the gist of this.

A man who has never seen combat is trying to tell you that if you want semi-automatic weapons, you’re nothing but an “arm-chair warrior,” a tacticool LARPer who wants to hurt people.

A man who received an other than honorable discharge from the U.S. military is trying to trot out his creds having shot an M-14.

A man who was caught making $600 worth of long distance telephone calls on a stolen credit card is posturing the military history of his honorable family to tell you you’re some kind of nut.

A man who never intended to deploy to Vietnam nonetheless parasitically sucked off of the good will of the American taxpayer for his education, and then got out because they threatened to send him to war.

Here at this web site we debate and discuss the theological and philosophical roots of the American system, the God-given duty of self defense, and the necessity of the amelioration of tyranny to preserve human life, among many other things.  We try to dive into the deeper issues of mankind, ethics, epistemology, truth, and justice.

So in summary, thanks Salon.  If this is the best you can do, we’ll continue our scholarship unabated.  You can keep your shrieking cowards.  But do please try to do a better job of editing poor Lucian next time.  He rambles so much it sounds sophomoric.

Philly.com:

If you Google the name Jabir Kennedy, you will read about a fugitive wanted for gunning down four men, one fatally, during Christmas week 2017 in the Elmwood section of Southwest Philadelphia. You will read that the “armed and dangerous” fugitive turned himself in a week later and was charged with first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder.

Well, that’s partly because Google sucks, and partly because this is all the information the DA’s office and cops  wanted you to know.

So when the case reached its conclusion this month, there were no headlines for what turned out to be a rarity in the criminal justice system: an admitted gunman in a quadruple shooting acquitted by a jury of all charges.

Let that wash over you again.  “Assistant District Attorney Sheida Ghadiri argued during the trial that the gun Kennedy fired belonged to him, that he knew how to use it given that he shot four of the five men he fought with, and the number of bullets he fired — eight to 10 — was too many to be self-defense.”

Yes, she wanted you to die.  Self defense isn’t a right recognized by the state, at least not any more.  And God help you if you ever put yourself on the line and defend someone you don’t know who is in distress.  You see, the only agents recognized by the state for dispensing violence are those commissioned by the state to do so.  To the communist, the state is the beginning, middle and end of all things.

I have absolutely no confidence in the so-called justice system, neither judges no juries.  Fortunately, they go this one right.  They tried to convince the jury it was more complicated than that (read the rest of the article if you wish), but in the end it’s simple.  Man is made in God’s image and thus has a solemn duty before the Almighty to defend his life.

Via WRSA and Instapundit, this commentary from Quillette:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

This has all been going on for a very long time.  Statism and self-hatred didn’t begin in the 1960s.  It was well-ensconced into the culture by the time I matriculated.

I recall sitting in history classes at Clemson University in 1977, and rather than survey the philosophical thought that led to the American war of independence, which would have kept my attention even if I disagreed with his view, he prided himself on using every class to choose the most irrelevant and meaningless event, spending massive amounts of time doing things that were useless to the class, except for trying to convince them of the evils of colonialism or how America would have been better off with just the noble savage.

So if you ask the typical college student today to catalog how gun control preceded and enabled Idi Amin’s genocide of Christians in Uganda, or to explain the Calvinian roots of the covenant theology that led to support for the American revolution among the clergy and their sermons, he would probably be too busy talking on his cell phone to pay attention.  And if Google couldn’t answer, he won’t know.  If Google can answer, it will be a lie.

This story comes from The Epoch Times.  The full article is at the link, but the video is embedded below.  I’ve watched it all.  It’s a no-nonsense, very clinical survey of exactly what the deep state accomplished in the run up to the election to protect HRC and take down Trump.  That deep state is still in existence today, even though the senior players are different at the CIA, FBI, State Department, and so on.  The invisible leadership – the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the bankers, the IMF, remains as it always was.

Attention to the Main Stream Media.  This is called “investigative journalism.”  Your Marxist professors didn’t teach you that in journalism school.  But you too can do it.  You just have to ignore what your professors taught you, be good, be honest, be forthright, be unbiased, search for the truth, work hard, and go where the facts lead you.

It will be hard, but it’s a road you can take.

Fox News:

David Smith had long been a competitive shooter, and he wasn’t going to allow a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease to end his hobby.

The 46-year-old, now considered by Guns.com a “powerhouse on the competitive circuit,” and who just scored a spot at the 2019 World Rifle Shoot in Sweden, was first diagnosed with the crippling nervous system disorder eight years ago.

But rather than shrinking away, Smith confronted Parkinson’s head-on and developed what he calls “gun therapy” as a means to control the tremors that come with the illness.

And when he lifts his firearm to the ready, those debilitating shakes disperse. In the gun world, he is the “Parkinson’s Shooter.”

“The disease had taken away everything from me in terms of my ability to eat and drink or do anything without help. Shooting was all I had left, it was all I could do,” Smith told Fox News Thursday. “It made me feel normal.”

At the time of the diagnosis, Smith considered himself to have a strong “body-builder type” physique and good health – but that twitch in his finger wasn’t going away. For some time, the feeling of doom was debilitating and he ended up in a wheelchair. Although those around him kept cautioning him to “take it easy” and enjoy not working, Smith wasn’t willing to stop pushing boundaries.

Before Parkinson’s surfaced, Smith – who worked in the scrap metal business – had been going to the range a few times a month for most of his life, but stepping it up changed his life.

“I now shoot 5000 to 6000 rounds a day, treating it as an eight-hour workday,” he explained.

Smith’s “gun therapy” is focused on neuroplasticity, where he can shoot repetitiously using intense focus, hand movement, control, and agility training, which entails running with his firearm and fast firing. His preference is shooting rifles rather than handguns, but he says both come with the benefits of steadying his hand.

According to New York-based psychologist Dr. Norman Fried, while the label “gun therapy” may leave some Americans uncomfortable, a movement called “competitive shooting” may be implicated in healing some side effects for patients with Parkinson’s disease.

“Through extreme dedication and long hours of practice, David Smith may have found a way to help his brain rebuild neural pathways – or reroute cortical connections – that were impacted by his disease. The dopamine rush that comes from this exercise may indeed be at the core of a movement to help some sufferers of brain injury to heal,” he said.

And folks, this man is good.  Make sure to watch the video at Guns.com.  I’m not embedding the video because it’s a Facebook video.  This is a heartwarming story.  God bless him, and I hope he keeps it up.  He is an inspiration.

News from New Mexico:

ALBUQUERQUE – A nonprofit that pushes for gun-control laws nationwide sent letters Wednesday to numerous New Mexico sheriffs, asking them to provide records related to their coordinated stance against gun-control laws that they do not plan to enforce.

The Brady Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization, said it requested emails from the sheriffs under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act, with demands for emailed communication among sheriffs and gun-lobby representatives.

Attorney Jonathan Lowy of the Brady Center said his group is seeking the emails to learn “what possible basis” the sheriffs have for declaring they won’t enforce the laws. Brady also wants to obtain any communication the law enforcement officials had with the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups.

I’d be nice to tell them to blow it out of their collective asses, but since it comes with a requirement by law, the Sheriffs are answering.

But I can answer for them.  Concerning “what possible basis,” it violates the constitution.  There, I’m glad I could be of assistance.  Now, go back to your worship of Baal, you pagans.