Articles by Herschel Smith

Charlotte Observer, news from Atlanta.

A Georgia woman screamed in fright as a bear climbed through an open window and into her minivan, tore up a child seat and ate her lunch.

“A bear beat me to my lunch today and is now hanging out in my van for over an hour and I have set the alarm off multiple times!” Carrie Watts posted on Facebook with her video of the bear.

Watts was working as a caretaker in a home Tuesday on Lake Burton, in the northeastern corner of the state, when she looked outside as the large black bear munched away., Atlanta Fox affiliate WAGA-TV reported.

The bear ate her sandwich, chips and cookie, Watts told WSB-TV, the ABC affiliate in Atlanta.

“I panicked. I started screaming,” she told WSB-TV.

She set her minivan’s alarm off multiple times to no avail, Watts posted on Facebook. The bear stayed in the vehicle for an hour before leaving, she posted.

I don’t think a car alarm is going to do the trick dear.  In other news of Coywolves, they are where you might least expect them.

A coyote has been terrorizing two East Bay neighborhoods, killing at least four dogs and injuring several others in people’s backyards in the past month.

One of the attacks happened last week in Danville when a coyote leaped a six-foot high fence of a home and went after two dogs who lived there. Though the dogs survived, other pets were not so fortunate.

Nine-year-old Lucy is recovering from surgery after a coyote attacked her in her own Alamo backyard on July 6. Kent Molinaro says he was in shock when he looked out the window and saw his Jack Russell Terrier.

“I see a coyote with Lucy in his mouth,” Molinaro said.

[ … ]

“All of a sudden he made a funny bark and I saw one of the two dogs being carried to the back fence of the yard,” said Danville resident Dave Bruce.

As the dog was being attacked, another pet nipped at the coyote until he dropped him.

And much farther to the East.

Police in Burlington, Massachusetts, are reminding residents to be vigilant after a coyote possibly attacked a dog on Thursday night.

Authorities said a Winn Street resident reported that a wild animal, potentially a coyote, came into her backyard at about 8 p.m. and grabbed her 9 pound Maltese, pulling it into the woods.

Responding officers searched the perimeter of the woods but were unable to locate the dog.

“This was a very unfortunate situation where a resident lost her beloved pet,” Burlington Police Chief Michael Kent said.

[ … ]

To prevent those attacks, police recommend the following tips:

• Keep pets on leashes at all times if outdoors
• Do not approach, feed, pet, or try to interact with wildlife
• Don’t hesitate to scare or threaten wild animals with loud noises or bright lights

Hey, does a .45 ACP count as a loud noise?

I guess the moral of the story is that a bear just doesn’t give a shit about anything.  A Coywolf, only a little bit.

David Codrea:

Before judging him for that, consider the environment that is New Jersey. Then consider the overwhelming force the state can bring to bear, and its predisposition to using it, especially if it’s to enforce citizen disarmament. It’s easy to anonymously declare “Molon Labe” on the internet. In meatspace, resistance is more effective when the aggressor doesn’t get to dictate the time and place, especially if that place is your home and you have family inside.

Oh sure, I’ve got that.  I’m not sure if and when he’ll ever get them back, though, or how this ends.

Throwing down with a SWAT team in your front doorstep isn’t a good option.  When it comes to it, 4GW will be necessary to end this infringement.

In the mean time, I’m not sure why any thinking man would choose to live in New Jersey.  As for the cops, they are swine.  Every one of them who participated in this, and all of their colleagues back at the station since they allow this sort of thing to happen.

I guess that includes all of them since I folded in both the participants and the non-participants.

Chronicle:

At least four children have accidentally shot themselves in the Houston-area this year. All of those children were 6 years old or younger, and three of them died from their wounds. The most recent incident on Tuesday at a Hockley-area home left a 4-year-old boy in critical condition.

Young children generally don’t associate guns with death, and therefore, can’t be trusted anywhere near the weapon, Houston child psychologist Michelle Forrester said.

Forrester, who has been a licensed psychologist practicing in Texas since 1995, works with children under the age of 8. On the heels of two incidents in which Houston-area children accidentally shot themselves, Forrester opined that young children, including those who grew up with firearm education, shouldn’t even be in the same home as a gun.

[ … ]

But Forrester said young children are curious and apt to explore a home. In some instances, they might inadvertently break the combination to a lock box, she said.

They’ll apparently just hand a psychology degree to anybody these days I guess.  Perhaps she ought to take a course in probability and statistics.  She’d find another reason to hate guns, but at least she’d have to retool her argument and wouldn’t sound so ignorant and uneducated.

Via correspondent Fred Tippens.

Uh oh.  Queue up The Alaskan on this .357 Magnum focus.  I’m sure he’ll consider that too small.  I’m neither advocating nor denying what the author says.  I’m dropping it out there for your take.  In the mean time, that’s one mean, bad looking critter, yes?

Ammoland:

His views could be critical if and when SCOTUS hears a case challenging state bans on what they pejoratively term “assault weapons.” It still doesn’t get us to a birthright “to keep and bear … ordinary military equipment … that … could contribute to the common defense,” but it’s a better starting place than a court with many of the previous “Republican” picks on the bench (case in point: John Paul Stevens).

David is relatively pleased, or at least, satisfied under the circumstances.  We could do a lot worse than Kavanaugh.  I grok the sentiment, even though I am troubled at his views on the Fourth Amendment.  Very troubled.

As commenter Michael observed, “[As] Far as I’m concerned, a “loss” on a fourth-amendment case is a loss for the second amendment as well.”

He is a mixed bag.  But at least it’s not William Pryor, or at least inasmuch as we can judge at the moment.  I may have more to say about William Pryor later.  His views could be summarized as “If someone knocks on the door, leave your guns in the drawer, lay down on the floor and beg for mercy from intruders because it could be a cop and they’re special and you’re not.  Their safety is paramount.”

William Pryor is a swine.  Let’s pray that Kavanaugh doesn’t turn out to be that as well.

Military.com:

“The NGSAR will address operational needs identified in various capability-based assessments and numerous after action reports,” according to the PON solicitation document.

“It will combine the firepower and range of a machine gun with the precision and ergonomics of a rifle, yielding capability improvements in accuracy, range, and lethality,” the document continues. “The weapon will be lightweight and fire lightweight ammunition, improving soldier mobility, survivability, and firing accuracy.”

It will also be able to go to the latrine for you, take you to the dance, find your car keys, and most important, can sprinkle magic pixie dust from unicorn farts as they fly over the moon.

Then there’s this.

“They have some pretty aggressive goals with respect to lethality and weight and size and some other performance characteristics,” he said. “All of those things individually may be relatively easy but, when you start stacking them all together, that is really where it becomes complex and you need a new design.”

“There is not an easy button here …”

Well, you’d better try, because it’s what necessary for the brass to tell the demons, gargoyles and pit vipers in the Senate that women can actually do what God didn’t design their bodies to do, i.e., go to war and engage in combat.

My former Marine strongly believes that we’re going to have to lose another war in order to be recalibrated.  This next one will be bloody, and girls will come home in caskets while their parents were told this would be easy and clinical because of all the unicorn pixie dust rainbow farts.

We’ve discussed nullification many times before, and this article shows the popularity of this concept, except without the teeth.

Last month, Effingham County, Illinois became a Second Amendment Sanctuary County. The proposal passed the County Board after eight members voted in favor of it. Only one was against, according to a USA Today report.

Last year, a similar proposal in Spokane Valley, WA was floated in the City Council. This comes as a response to the gun control proposals that many members of the U.S. Congress have made in recent years. Moreover, several states also passed firearm restrictions. Illinois and Washington are two of the most prominent ones.

Under said proposals, local law enforcement would ignore the new gun control policies. They would not arrest residents who don’t comply with the new state/federal firearm policies.

“It was a way of standing up for 2nd Amendment rights,” former Spokane Valley City Councilman Ed Pace told UnCut Report (UCR) in a recent interview. When Pace was in the City Council, he proposed making Spokane Valley, WA a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary City.

“If state and federal governments restrict constitutional rights, cities need to stand up for their residents and protect their rights,” Pace elaborated.

Oh bullshit.  What are you going to do with this symbolic action, and how are you going to “stand up for residents and protect their rights?”

What are you going to do, throw ATF agents in the state penitentiary when they come to arrest firearms owners?  Do the CLEOs side with you on this?  Does the governor side with you, and will the state police back you up?  Will you hang judges who hear cases on firearms owners who have broken federal laws?

Unless you answer those questions for me, this is a lot of hot air.

Joel clearly prefers the Leupold, so for instance when someone else pays the bill (e.g., military) the choice is clear.

For me, not so much.  The Leupold Mark 5 costs $2500, while the Athlon Argos costs $400.  They’ll both shoot well out to 600 – 800 yards.  Yes, the picture must be clearer to Joel, but for an additional $2100, it had better be.

The question is what do you want to do with a scope?  Do you want to be a competition precision rifle shooter, or a hunter and shooter who can do it well to 600 yards and moderately beyond?  At some point a man must begin to think about cost unless he is wealthy.

But contrary to what Joel said, who was addressing those folks who think you can put a $400 scope on a $5000 precision rifle, I don’t know anyone who thinks that.  If you can afford a $5000 rifle, you can afford a $2500 scope.  I can afford neither.

As seen on reddit, a layman’s explanation.

In 1934, rich people decided that they didn’t like poor people sneaking onto their land to hunt game, which was happening a lot because there was this economic thing called the “Great Depression” and poor people were “starving”.

So they called up a bunch of their pet congresscritters, and ordered a custom made law called the National Firearms Act of 1934.

This placed a $200 dollar tax on rifles with a barrel shorter than 16″ or an overall length less than 26″, shotguns with a barrel shorter than 18″ or an overall length less than 26″, and firearm sound suppressors of any kind. This ensured that those nasty poor people couldn’t afford guns which they might smuggle onto rich people’s land to hunt rich people’s deer, or suppressors that might prevent them from getting caught in the act.

Nowdays, $200 isn’t a whole lot of money, but the law is being exploited in a new way to restrict access. You see, this tax gets you a “tax stamp”, without which possession of the firearm is a felony. But the law doesn’t put any upper limit on the wait before the paperwork gets approved. So these papers are processed by one elderly guy named Frank, whose eyesight isn’t so good any more, and a typical application takes six months to two years to come back.

Naturally, modern folks who own guns aren’t too keen on this, but modern folks who hate guns have their pet congresscritters who are dead set against repealing any law that makes firearms ownership inconvenient, even if it makes no sense at all. Also, there is a whole three-letter agency devoted to enforcing this thing, and they don’t want to lose their jobs, so they have plenty of interesting and highly inventive arguments about how this is critical to the future of the nation, and how everyone died multiple times every week before 1934 because we didn’t have this.

So people looked into ways to do normal things while in compliance with the letter of the law.

So, the thing that looks like a stock on that thing that looks like a rifle is technically an arm brace, which makes that thing technically a pistol, which makes the National Firearms Act technically not apply to it. Now, you could say that this is a loophole which complies with the letter of the law while totally ignoring its spirit, but you could also say that the law has no spirit, and is nothing but a big technicality designed to f*** with people from the very beginning.

But however we got here, the fact remains that the thing in the photo is perfectly legal as it is, but with a slightly different stock it’ll get you a decade in the federal penitentiary.

This is why gun owners get kind of shirty about this kind of thing.

This is the same reason why some of the gun community – including the NRA – will never support repeal of the NFA, GCA and the Hughes Amendment.

Too many people have too much money invested in Class 3 weapons.  Suppose you spend $25,000 on a Class 3 weapon, or several of them, and someone comes along and tells you that your investment will tank in the near future and your guns will be worth no more than a used gun of that make and model within a single day.

Would you support it, looking at it only from the perspective of money?  The better question is what, other than a true commitment to the RKBA under God, would make you support it?