Articles by Herschel Smith

TFB:

In a move that is both shocking and unsurprising at the same time, the video hosting powerhouse YouTube has terminated Brownells’ channel citing violations of their “community guidelines”. In the professional business of gunsmithing, tools, parts supply, accessories and more recently firearms sales, Brownells has been a pillar of the shooting community for nearly 100 years. While countless old-fashion catalog sales companies died off with the ecommerce revolution, Brownells adapted, embracing online sales and customers with an easy to navigate website and strong social media presence.

It is unclear at this point what part of the community guidelines YouTube alleges that Brownells violated to get terminated or if there is a possibility of being reinstated. However, as channels with a heavy following continue to receive strikes, warnings and terminations, the fate of user and corporate generated firearmscontent on YouTube are becoming bleaker by the week.

TFB closes with a wish that the channel would get reinstated.

I understand that YouTube is the 900 pound gorilla in the room, but I don’t wish that at all.  I wish that YouTube would get some good competition and gun owners wouldn’t have to go there for anything, begging for crumbs that fall from the master’s table.

Google is in bed with the CIA, and Google owns YouTube.  Thus, YouTube is essentially a FedGov entity.  As if you needed anything else, this is what FedGov thinks of your firearms.  Beg, peasant.  Beg.

Long but worth it.

Delaware Online:

Sen. Greg Lavelle, a northern Delaware Republican and key swing vote on a bill that would prohibit the sale of an array of semi-automatic rifles, said on Wednesday that he will not allow the legislation out of committee.

[ … ]

At Wednesday’s hearing, Francis Pileggi, a Wilmington attorney speaking on behalf of the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, said the appeals court ruling shouldn’t be considered for this debate because the Fourth Circuit does not oversee Delaware.

[ … ]

In a visible show of political might, participants spoke of a primacy of the U.S. Constitution and a need to campaign against lawmakers who vote for gun-control bills.

Their motto, according to organizer, Mitchell Denham, is “Not one inch.”

So far, so good.  I would argue that the Fourth Circuit’s opinion doesn’t apply to Delaware or any other state or city because it is unconstitutional, not because of the limits of the fourth circuit’s jurisdiction.  And I certainly concur with not one more inch of retreat.

Denham said Delaware Gun Rights has 24,000 members in the state.

Asked where a line should be drawn for allowable weapons, Denham said, “There’s a reason why there’s a National Firearms Act. There’s a law prohibiting certain explosives, fully automatic firearms, silencers, short-barrel shotguns, short-barrel rifles.”

Well, here we have a problem.  I always want to be cautious when addressing the fights that others are in, especially when they are allies.

But to accept prior infringements because we want to keep what we currently have is a losing proposition.  It’s been a short time since the giddy days post-election when we were actually discussing repeal of the NFA, SBRs and suppressors being removed, and national reciprocity.

Imagine.  A gun rights advocate is willing to give up on suppressors and acquiesce to the need for a permission slip from the tyrants in order to own a muffler which is nothing more than a tube with baffles threaded at the end.

Sad.  Where we are as a country is just sad.  That’s all I can think to say at the moment.

From a reader, NY Post:

Teachers and school administrators would have the power to petition a judge to remove guns from the homes of troubled students under a measure pushed Tuesday by Gov. Cuomo.

Flanked at his Midtown office by teachers-union leaders Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew and other anti-gun advocates, Cuomo said his “red flag” measure would make New York the first state in the nation to offer such empowerment to teachers.

Christian school parents have heard and used the phrase en loco parentis.

This isn’t it.  Under this framework, teachers are vessels of the state and have all the police powers thereto.  John Dewey and Horace Mann would be happy about this if they weren’t in hell.

MEF:

An ominous indication of what lay in store for the religious minorities was afforded as early as December 1998 when Erdoğan, then mayor of Istanbul and an opposition politician, announced that the “mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers,” quoting a line from a poem by the nineteenth-century nationalist poet Ziya Gökalp underscoring the Islamist foundation of Turkish identity.

[ … ]

On December 28, 2016, for example, in the western province of Aydin, the ultra-nationalist Islamist group Alperen Hearths staged a forced conversion of Santa Claus to Islam, putting a gun to the head of an actor dressed as Santa Claus. A representative of the group explained the staging of the conversion this way:

Our purpose is for people to go back to their roots. We are the Muslim Turkish people who have been leading Islam for thousands of years. We will not celebrate Christian traditions and disregard our own traditions like Hidrellez, Nevruz, and other religious national holidays.

Well, be warned boys, I don’t believe in Santa Claus.  But what I do believe in is shooting people who threaten me, my family or my way of life.

Consider yourselves warned.  No, seriously.  Remember this, boys.  I hope you’re reading this.

Oh, and by the way, you’re holding the gun like a girl.  No, wait, that’s misogynistic.  My daughter holds her gun way better than you.  She would kick your ass.

Fox News:

A Texas man is recovering after he claims the head of a rattlesnake bit him — moments after he had just cut it off.

Jennifer Sutcliffe’s husband was reportedly bitten by the beheaded snake on May 27 at his home near Lake Corpus Christi.

Sutcliffe told KIII-TV the two were doing yard work when she came across the four-foot rattlesnake. She said her husband used a shovel to behead the snake, but when he went to dispose of it, it bit him.

Corpus Christi man bitten by severed rattlesnake head https://t.co/Pstjhg4Yvy pic.twitter.com/XYMa2TFM1P

— KIII 3 News (@kiii3news) June 6, 2018

The snake, Sutcliffe said, “released all its venom into him at that point” because it no longer had a body, and her husband reportedly began immediately experiencing seizures and internal bleeding, and lost his vision.

The man was transported via helicopter to a hospital, where doctors said there was a chance he wouldn’t make it.

“A normal person who is going to get bit is going to get two to four doses of antivenom,” Sutcliffe told the news station. “He had to have 26 doses.”

Her husband is now in stable condition but is suffering from weak kidney functions, Sutcliffe said.

I’ll tell you what, snakes can lay a wallop on you.  I don’t expect this is something that many folk from the far north can understand, but down South and in the Southwest, you’ve got to be very careful where you step and where you reach.  I’ve been bitten by a Copperhead, and so has my dog.

They usually aren’t deadly if treated, but you can lose fingers, hands, toes, feet or whatever if not treated.  A Cottonmouth (Water Moccasin) is worse, but the king of the pit vipers in America is the rattlesnake.  The worst of them (most venomous pit viper in America) is the Eastern Diamondback, and not far behind is the Eastern Timber.

Be careful out there this summer.

Providence Journal:

A civilian observer was accidentally shot during police firearms training Wednesday, according to the Northwestern district attorney’s office.

The district attorney’s office said the observer was accidentally wounded during a scheduled Athol Police Department firearms training session. The victim suffered a non-life-threatening gunshot wound to his upper rear leg area and was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, according to the district attorney’s office.

State police detectives assigned to the district attorney’s office are investigating, with what the district attorney’s office described as full cooperation of the local Police Department. The town will conduct its own internal review, the office said.

In a press release issued Wednesday, the district attorney’s office did not identify the victim or the person who fired the shot.

I don’t like the term “civilian” when distinguishing from cops (I just parroted the article title).  It assumes too much, but aside from that, I hate it when this happens to me.

I remember the last time I shot a LEO who was a range officer that day at the range.  They did an internal review at the range.  No harm, no foul.

Commenting on the bill introduced by Bill Nelson and Patrick Leahy, Emma Gonzalez says this.

This bill is Super (sic) important, with it we will Actually (sic) be able to find the original owner of weapons like we see in Criminal Minds.

“Criminal Minds.”  A TV show, so I’m told.  I don’t watch TV.  This is the level of thought for this generation.  Life is a TV show.

Related: Twitter is so appropriately tailored for this one sentence generation.  I am left wondering how she would do sitting in a hard back chair with a cup of coffee trying to read Francis Turretin’s “Institutes of Elenctic Theology“?

News & Observer:

A trio of Democrats want North Carolina to follow California’s footsteps in governing gun safety.

Uh huh.  “Misfires.”  Say, that can’t have anything to do with keeping your booger hook of the bang switch, can it?  Yea, I thought so.

The problem is that such lies and misdirects and misrepresentations are useful for rubes, idiots, soccer moms, and progs.  North Carolina is full of them.

The point is that there is a low level civil war going on against liberty, and if we want to see this escalate into a moderate to high level civil war, this is how you do it.

Here’s a warning to North Carolina legislators.  Don’t do it.  I have no doubt that within the current framework this will die.  But if the legislature is handed to the statists, I have no doubt that they will make hay.

Roy Cooper is a statist extraordinaire, and he’s never seen an infringement, destruction of liberty, tax or new law he doesn’t love.  Elections have consequences.

Ammoland:

The Virginia State Police are way, way behind on entering CHP holder information into the Virginia Criminal Information Network (VCIN).

What that means is that if you are stopped by law enforcement, who for some reason doesn’t trust the validity of your CHP, and the officer queries VCIN, he might be told incorrectly that your permit doesn’t exist (if new) or has expired!

Supposedly the VCIN system puts up a message warning officer’s that it’s data is not to be blindly trusted, but I’m hearing some officers are doing so anyway and there have been arrests. If the VCIN information isn’t 100% accurate, why are the State Police even providing it? That’s a recipe for disaster.

What an awesome way to lose the mandate of heaven (to recapitulate a phrase MV used so often)!  Impose an unconstitutional system of people to have to get state permission to exercise a God-given right, fail to catalog that permission, and then arrest them anyway.

I don’t want to hear one word about sympathy or support for LEOs.  LEOs in Virginia have either [a] done this themselves, or [b] allow their colleagues to do this with impunity.  Thus either way they are responsible for this evil act, each and every one of them, individually.