Articles by Herschel Smith

Funny.  I’d never even considered adjusting my point of aim for flinching.

Shooting Illustrated:

Lubricating is where many shooters make mistakes. The old adage, “more is better,” does not apply. Yep, Grandpa used a half-can of 3-in-1 Oil on his rusted fence pliers or his shotgun, and your father probably believed in the liberal application of WD-40 on any moving metal part. With firearms, however, too much is not good. In fact, according to Moore, you should “lightly lubricate.” The technical terminology he frequently uses is, “one drop.” He also warns to not lubricate the firing-pin channel, chamber, bore or magazines, because lubricants often allow debris to stick, and you don’t want stuck debris in these areas.

Some of his advice on cleaning frequency disagrees with what we studied earlier from Shooting Illustrated.

I’m neither concurring nor disagreeing with the bulk of the article – just sharing.  I did find it interesting that this bears on a comment thread we recently had here on whether it’s possible to over-lube a gun.

I have to disagree with one aspect of this advice.  I always oil my chambers, and always will.  If it gets dirty because of that, I’ll clean it again.

It’s been light posting lately and will likely continue to be into the following days.

It’s been a long haul to prepare for the hurricane.  The power company estimates that between two and three million people will go without power for some unspecified period of time.

The generator has oil and gas, I’ve had to think about a tarp for the machine (they don’t like to run in the rain), we’ve got batteries and flashlights, battery powered fans, protein drinks and bars, extra gas, the truck is topped off with fuel, I’ve bought isobutane canisters for my camping stove for morning coffee without power, and on and on the preparations go.

In addition to that, my company expects me to come into work for a twelve hour shift for “emergency operations” over the weekend, so my wonderful neighbors will handle running the generator for my wife.

I might make a few short posts, but I’ll try to return to normal posting on Monday if we don’t lose power.  If we do, then talk amongst yourselves.

On September 10th I brought up the Leland, North Carolina, prohibition of weapon transport or carry during hurricane Florence.  On September 11th, the Firearms Policy Coalition and Firearms Policy Foundation sent a demand letter that ended with the following statement.

Leland’s State of Emergency Notice should immediately be amended to strike the offending language creating this unlawful and unconstitutional weapons prohibition. Should the Town fail to do so, and/or attempt to enforce the same against any resident, it stands exposed to civil actions for declaratory and injunctive relief as well as monetary damages.

But while Leland issued a modified edict via Facebook (how laughable is that?), the damage had been done.  It essentially said that the prohibition applied only to those who were already prohibited.  In other words, that which was already illegal was “more illegaler and bader.”

Nothing explains the initial choice to violate state code by the initial edict, and nothing can undo the fact that the edict was criminal on its face.

I will continue to follow this.  This isn’t a resolution.

In a filthy firearm.

As a young Marine captain, I was the new officer on a rifle team and remember asking the grizzled old salts who had shot in many an inter-service championship or Camp Perry what the proper cleaning interval was for those incredible Quantico-built National Match M16s. The answers varied from daily on one end to at the end of the season on the other. There didn’t seem to be any real testing to support any given answer, and I accepted that you punched the bore whenever it seemed right.

I recently thought back on that experience as I finished up an endurance test on a Bravo Company Manufacturing (BCM) upper receiver. Over the course of a little more than three years, I had logged the lubrication intervals using FireClean to see how far the AR would run as it got dirtier and dirtier. At the end of the test, I was in possession of a barrel through which I had logged 10,000 rounds and had never cleaned in any manner. In shooting the last thousand rounds or so, I had noticed that the rifle seemed to be still shooting quite well and thought it would be interesting to do a formal accuracy workup. I borrowed a Bushnell Elite 4.5-18×44 LRTS riflescope to give the barrel every chance to succeed, and grabbed some quality ammo.

All firing was done from the prone position with the rifle supported by a Harris bipod in the front and some bags under the toe of the stock. The rifle had a Geissele Super V trigger, which is an excellent duty and snap-shooting unit, but not normally associated with group shooting. The BCM wore a free-floated KeyMod aluminum KMR-A rail and the barrel was a basic government profile 16” with a mid-length gas system and a 1:7” twist.

I fired a couple of sighters to get the LRTS on paper and then the very first five-round group of Hornady Steel Match clustered five .224-cal. holes into a tight .84” group that could be covered by a nickel. That was pretty close to prophetic, as the average of all five groups with the Steel Match ran .89 from the filthy barrel, with the series tallying .84, .85, .86, .72, and one lonely group over one minute of angle at 1.17.

That performance wasn’t an outlier. After 10,000 rounds, the BCM barrel grouped Federal Varmint hollow points into just barely over 3/4 m.o.a. on the low end and averaged just over an inch due to one “large” 1.5” group that pulled the average over one MOA.

Black Hills 69-gr. Sierra Match Kings clustered together consistently, poking holes in a tight knot while maintaining polite separation for each hole at just under a minute on average with .79, .82, .90, .92, and 1.25” groups.

[ … ]

I was somewhere between pleasantly surprised and mildly shocked for the barrel to do this after 10,000 rounds and never had as much as a boresnake, brush, or patch run through it.

I’m not surprised.  Eugene Stoner engineered a fine system.  Of course, I wouldn’t recommend doing that – this was a stress test of sorts.  Increased fouling and friction will only increase wear and metal fatigue.  But it’s nice to know that the delivered wisdom may not be so wise after all.

It’s funny how old myths die hard.  My son never had any complaints with the weapon system so I never came into it with predisposed prejudice.

NRO:

Renowned Second Amendment lawyer Stephen Halbrook detailed this history in a 2012 article for the Fordham Urban Law Journal. And now, in his book Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, he explains how French gun policy evolved over the centuries — and the consequences it had under the Nazi-puppet Vichy regime during World War II. A sequel of sorts to Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich, the book drives home the important lessons that gun control is a key element of the oppressor’s toolkit, that guns are incredibly useful for those resisting oppression, and that even the most draconian gun-control measures are far from perfectly effective.

It cannot prove, of course — and doesn’t purport to — that a stronger French tradition of gun rights could have radically altered history, or that America’s more libertarian gun policies strike the right balance among all the relevant priorities. What it does do is force readers to entertain a simple question: When a hostile and brutal power takes over, do you want your countrymen to have guns at hand, or not? Certainly this question weighed heavily upon the minds of the American Founders, and certainly its answer counts for something.

Going into World War II, the French citizenry was not particularly well-armed. An 1834 law had banned “war” weapons, essentially restricting civilians to shotguns, hunting-caliber rifles, and some handguns. In 1935, amid violent political upheaval, the government required the registration of non-hunting guns. Meanwhile, a French hunting organization estimated that there were about 3 million hunting guns in the country in 1939, when its population was something like 40 million.

Germany occupied the northern half and Atlantic coast of France in 1940, making short work of the French armed forces and taking 2 million soldiers prisoner in the resulting armistice. In France as elsewhere, the Nazis made it a priority to disarm the population when they arrived, hanging signs threatening harsh punishment — up to and including the death penalty — for those who refused to turn in their guns.

Of course they did.  Just like ISIS did when they captured new territory.  All gun controllers are like Nazis and ISIS.

WWAY.com:

Effective at 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, the transportation or possession, or the sale or purchase of any dangerous weapon or substance, while off one’s own premises, is prohibited, the town says.

H/T reddit.  According to the NC DOJ, “Pursuant to North Carolina’s Emergency Management Act (Chapter 166A of the General Statutes) local governments may impose restrictions on dangerous weapons such as explosives, incendiary devices, and radioactive materials and devices when a state of emergency is declared, but may not impose restrictions on lawfully possessed firearms.”

Furthermore, “Upon the possession, transportation, sale, purchase, storage, and use of gasoline, and dangerous weapons and substances, except that this subdivision does not authorize prohibitions or restrictions on lawfully possessed firearms or ammunition.”

The mayor of the city is a criminal, and so is the CLEO if he enforces this edict.  This isn’t over – this is just beginning, and this hurricane will be over at some point.  We’ll push on this until we get satisfactory answers or resolution.  It’s simply not acceptable to have Katrina style gun prohibitions.  Never again.

Matt Bracken on diversity being out strength, multi-culturalism, political correctness and social media.

Jeremy D. Lawhorn writing at SWJ.

The Pew Research Center suggests that political polarization in the United States has reached a dangerous extreme. Divisions on fundamental political and social issues reached record levels during President Obama’s term in office. And the gaps have increased even further during President Trump’s first year. This polarization is caused by political and social entrenchment combined with a general reluctance to compromise creating extreme fractionalization. Fissures have opened up along every major demographic line including race, ethnicity, religion, place of origin, gender, and along every major political and social issue including immigration, national security, gay marriage, religious freedom, structural inequalities and many others.

The extreme fracturing along these fault lines has wide ranging social, political, and security implications for the United States. Today, the single greatest challenge to the United States national security is the growing threat posed by people that are being forced to join factions that align, if only loosely, with their beliefs, creating deep fractures and eroding the internal cohesion of the country.

[ … ]

Understanding the U.S. center of gravity’s current strengths and weaknesses is crucial for accurately assessing the U.S. national security. The Pew Research data on political polarization suggests that the U.S. center of gravity is critically weak. Analyzing these critical vulnerabilities, exposes the dangers posed by expanding fractures that are ripe for exploitation. As the population continues to become more polarized and deeper fractures emerge, the nation loses its cohesion which is one of the critical requirements. As each of the critical requirements disappear, America’s center of gravity becomes weaker. If not properly addressed, these fractures will continue to present significant challenges and have potentially devastating consequences for national security.

[ … ]

These historic lessons of entrenchment are instructive for leaders today. The difference is, that the speed at which information travels today exacerbates political polarization. As a consequence, the United States is once again at the precipice of self-destruction. While the United States is currently addressing threats to national security all over the world like those posed by violent extremist groups, a greater threat is looming at home. The homeland is primed to implode; at present, the political polarization and fractionalization driven by growing resentment over unresolved internal problems is becoming a significant vulnerability as more people are becoming radicalized along major fault lines. As people become more radicalized in their views, they become reluctant to engage in debate and prefer to take action.

The author goes on to explore race, social and economic strata.  This is an interesting essay in that it is the first I can remember from the professional military in which these admissions are made.  They all know it, but no one talks about it.

The problem with the essay is that it doesn’t even begin to address or identify the root causes of these “polarizations.”  Barack Obama didn’t polarize America.  Donald Trump isn’t polarizing America.  They are symptoms, not the disease, branches, not the roots, effects, not the causes.

These divisions have been deep in America for quite some time.  In the old South, men like James Henley Thornwell, Robert L. Dabney and Benjamin Morgan Palmer were the philosopher-theologians, and their pulpits and classrooms were the center of culture and philosophy.  They didn’t just exegete the Scriptures, they conveyed a holistic world and life view throughout not only their congregations but to the entire South.  The notion that proper governance, economics or plowing the fields for crops could be divorced from the edicts and laws of the Almighty would have been preposterous.

In the Nineteenth century social Darwinism saw it’s ascent to throne of American culture, leading to the temperance movement and in no small part the war between the states.  Forgotten was the old hymns of the church, so even though theology was undercut and infected, it took a while (decades) for the church members to begin relinquishing their beliefs.

Eventually though, it happened.  It was in no small part aided by the pagan philosophy of the American educational system promulgated by William James and Horace Mann.  If students at American universities relinquished their theology, they replaced it with something else.

In the mid-twentieth century the hippies were reading Marx, Sartre and Camus.  Several decades ago they were studying Jacques Derrida (does anything good ever come out of France?).  Today they wear Che Guevara tee shirts and take to the streets to advocate fourth wave feminism.  The self loathing is nearly complete.

The election of Barack Obama was a catalyst at the very most, and possibly just an opportunity for these divisions to manifest in the public life to an extent that would cause the writer to pen an essay discussing the fracturing of America.  It’s a quaint notion, this idea suggested by the author that we do something about this.  But the destruction of a society has taken more than a century to effect, and it will take longer to undo.

It might be tempting to simply observe that we’re adjusting and preparing for a separation.  But a separation from what, and to what?  There are two problems.  The first is geographical.  From the town council in Jackson, Wyoming, to lower state South Carolina where their ideas still hold sway locking the state into union with California, Hawaii and New York as prohibiting open carry, from the so-called “Northwestern Redoubt” to Appalachia where many still vote for the party that will give them the largest welfare check, America is in trouble.  There is an admixture of ideas, political beliefs, self interests and no beliefs at all, making a division based on geography impossible.

Deeper still is the problem with world and life view.  Even if a division based on geography was possible, with beliefs so scattered, fractured, disjointed and disconnected, with the concept of social covenant and contract outdated, and moral scruples so out-of-favor, it’s unlikely that there can be a national agreement on much of anything, much less something so significant as a covenant under which we must all live and work.  Even if there could be agreement, that doesn’t ensure fidelity to the promise.

Unlike the author, I have hope, but it is not in addressing grievances or coming together as a nation.  My only hope is in an American reformation not unlike the European reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  But take careful note – the first one was rather hard, required centuries to effect, required the leadership of fearless men, and wasn’t bloodless.

Via David Codrea, we learn that Mexican cops have found 166 bodies in a cartel killing field.  Perhaps some of those cartel killers are in this video.  Perhaps with out globalist masters in charge, you’ll get the chance to meet some of them face to face.