Articles by Herschel Smith

Since it is obvious that the decision has been made and all comments will be submitted to no avail, these will be my last comments concerning the rulemaking.

First of all, unless and until you have dealt honestly and in detail to my first set of comments, your response is incomplete and lack of forthrightness cowardly.

Second, I realize I am demanding that you do something beyond your capabilities, but until and unless you honestly address every one of the comments made by James Wesley Rawles, it will be apparent to readers that you have no way to respond in a manner that is logically coherent, legal, and rhetorically compelling.  In other words, the vacuous nature of your position will be manifest before the public.

Finally, I offer two additional comments beyond what I proffered earlier.

1. Note for the record any and all registered professional engineers employed and/or contracted and remunerated by the ATF or DOJ, whose job it was to provide input, calculations, analysis or opinions on the technical issues pertaining to this rulemaking.  Provide those analyses for our review, and list the PEs by name, license number and state.  State laws for all fifty states require that such analyses be traceable and sealed or stamped by the PE.  If no PEs have reviewed the technical issues pertaining to this rulemaking, say so with specificity and clarity.
2. Note for the record any and all licensed professional gunsmiths employed and/or contracted and remunerated by the ATF or DOJ, whose job it was to provide input, analysis or opinions on the technical issues pertaining to this rulemaking.  Provide those analyses for our review, and list the gunsmiths by name, license number and state.  If no gunsmiths have reviewed the technical issues pertaining to this rulemaking, say so with specificity and clarity.

The goal of said discovery will be to hold licensed PEs accountable before their respective state licensure boards.  If no PEs have reviewed the rulemaking, the goal will be, among other things, to trumpet loud and long the illegitimacy of the rulemaking due to lack of technical rigor or qualified oversight.  Illegitimacy of the rulemaking will redound to the illegitimacy of the ATF itself.

David Codrea:

From their position as stated on July 27, 2017:

“Bump firing is the process of using the recoil of a semiautomatic firearm to fire in rapid succession, simulating the effect of an automatic firearm when performed with a high level of skill and precision by the shooter… The rapid fire sequence in bump firing is contingent on shooter input, rather than mechanical input, and thus cannot shoot automatically”

From their position as stated on Sept. 13, 2017 (scroll to page 8):

“[B]ecause of the manual, skill based methods required to operate a bump fire device they are not machineguns.”

What has changed? Besides a political position ordered by superiors who would not be qualified to intern at the Firearms Technology Branch…?

Of course, nothing has changed, including the lack of integrity of the FedGov who cares not about officially approved lies and inconsistency.

From the comments there is this gem from someone named Dave Brown.

OK, when the pistol arm brace first came out we all said, better get one before they change their mind. WE all said the same thing when they said The Bump was OK. Get one before they change their mind. Me, I don’t need one as I have a few firearms I can bump without adding a stock, but even Bumping is considered a no no. As for Bump Stocks, they should never have been allowed, and you all know it. So quit being a Complainer, ask them to make a special Stamp for The Bump, and pay the price.

Of course, that’s true if you don’t believe in the second amendment.

That’s what it looks like in France today.  You can develop your own timeline for America.

I stumbled across this today and, while a little dated, I thought it might be worthwhile watching.  The bubble-headed beach blond is Evy Poumpouras, and she tells us that with semi-automatic weapons “you can switch it to a point where it fires “pop pop pop pop …”

But that’s not the only valuable thing we learn from Evy.  We learn that in an active shooter situation, we need to find a fire hydrant and make ourselves “teeny tiny.”

See, I guess we need to add to that DHS advice to run, hide and fight by throwing potted plants.  Find a fire hydrant.

NBC News:

Three parents whose children were killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting have filed defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones, the controversial conspiracy theorist and Infowars host who has falsely claimed the 2012 massacre was faked.

The two lawsuits were filed on Monday afternoon by Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of 6-year-old Noah Pozner, and by Neil Heslin, the father of 6-year-old Jesse Heslin.

“The statements were a continuation and elaboration of a years-long campaign to falsely attack the honesty of the Sandy Hook parents, casting them as participants in a ghastly conspiracy and cover-up,” the plaintiffs said in their suits.

Jones has repeatedly questioned whether 20 children and six adults were gunned down in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012, deriding the shooting as a “hoax” concocted to chip away at Second Amendment rights. The gunman, Adam Lanza, killed himself as police arrived at the school, but a clear motive for the rampage has never been identified.

In a broadcast last year called “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed,” Jones suggested a CNN interview with De La Rosa was faked — a claim that her lawsuit blasts as a “sick lie.”

Hey, why does Alex Jones get all the credit and attention?  So let me say this one more time, as if a dozen isn’t enough.

Sandy Hook was a hoax, fraud and fake perpetrated on the American people concocted to chip away at gun rights and liberties in America.

If you dispute what I’m saying, show me the autopsy reports by a licensed medical examiner.  Show them to me now, please.  Not later, now.

I would link the YouTube video on the Sandy Hook hoax again, but as you might have expected, Google has taken it down for “violating the terms of service.”  In other words, they didn’t like what the authors had to say.

Because Google.

Military.com:

A senior Marine Corps official confirmed today that the service is lockstep with the Army’s effort to search for a rifle round more potent than the current 5.56mm round.

For months, senior Army officials have been telling Congress that the current 5.56mm Enhanced Performance Round is not potent enough to penetrate enemy body armor plates similar to U.S. military-issue rifle plates such as the Enhanced Small Arms Protective Insert, or ESAPI.

As a solution, the Army is experimenting with a plan to replace its M249 squad automatic weapon and M4 carbine with futuristic weapons that fire a 6.5mm case-telescoped round or something that falls between a 5.56mm and a 7.62mm round.

The Marine Corps, which recently decided to buy more M27 5.56mm Infantry Automatic Rifles, has not publically echoed the Army’s concern with 5.56mm until now.

“We are working the Army; we have looked at the 6.5mm Creedmoor with the Army and [Special Operations Command],” Brig. Gen. Joseph Shrader, commander of Marine Corps Systems Command, told Military.com at the annual Sea-Air-Space exposition Wednesday.

“We are lockstep with them looking at a new round.”

Shrader, however, said he did not know if the effort would mean a new infantry weapon for the Marine Corps.

I doubt it will happen given that the U.S. is bankrupt and is having to spend your children’s children’s children’s future inheritance just to pay for entitlements today.

I also wonder if they’ve sufficiently taught them all to aim for heads and hips.  Heads and hips, boys.  Furthermore, this isn’t a new issue and what we have seems to suffice well enough today (although I understand that most of the combat hasn’t been against a so-called near peer actor).

Still, it makes sense to listen to what’s going on.  You do have plans to procure an AR-10 or at least have a bolt action rifle sitting in the gun safe capable of shooting something bigger than a 5.56mm, right?  That’s what I thought.

But remember the first rule of gun club.  Never talk about gun club, and when in doubt, refer back to the first rule.

Breitbart:

The huge number of crimes committed with the deadly, sword-like weapons means there is an average of 15 a day in the UK, or one every 90 minutes.

Figures uncovered using freedom of information requests by the Daily Mail show that police dealt with 928 crimes involving machetes in the last two months of 2017.

London saw the bulk, with 425 of the attacks. There were 99 in Greater Manchester, 77 in the West Midlands, and 29 each in Merseyside and West Yorkshire.

Just three years earlier, the deadly blades were used in 100 crimes a month over the same period.

As violent crime surges across the country, and even faster in London, the long blades, designed for chopping undergrowth, appear to be a weapon of choice for criminals in the UK, which is governed by strict gun-control laws.

It’s happened with Hispanic gangs in Chicago too.  It isn’t a fair fight no matter how you slice this up (pardon the very bad pun).  That’s why we carry guns.  I want the edge.  If I don’t carry, I give him the edge.

David Codrea:

The way things are going in favor of the antis while “Republicans” are nominally in control does not look good. If Democrats sweep the midterms and then manage to impeach Donald Trump, expect them to go full bore, from “universal background checks” to “assault weapon” bans and more. Don’t think for a moment because fault has been found here with Republican disappointments that the other side of the aisle represents anything other than utter disaster for legal recognition of the right to keep and bear arms.

Oh, I don’t even think it’ll be necessary for them to impeach Trump.  I think he is in fact a lame duck president as I write this.  He doesn’t have the backing of Congress to do anything of significance, and even if he did, given his predilection to gun control, I’m afraid of what might happen.  A democratic Congress would seal the deal, and given the inactivity from the White House in the event of a democratic Congress and the unreliability of North Carolina and Florida, I suspect as I’ve said before, we have a little less than two years to get where we want to be.

Where we want to be doesn’t include the legality of bump stocks, repealing the Hughes amendment, removing suppressors and SBRs from the NFA items list, or national reciprocity.  I’m talking individually.  You understand that.

So I went to a local gun show today, mostly looking for magazines and the availability and price of certain ammunition, but I was also surveying prices for all manner of guns.  I offer up a number of observations in no particular order.

For pistols, sellers still focus their stock in the cheap, plastic, striker-fired guns with crunchy, crappy triggers.  Good, high quality 1911s are just not carried by the folks looking to push large quantities of inventory (and rely on quantity rather than quality and larger markups for their profits).  And yes, I consider most if not all polymer handguns cheap plastic guns (with the exception of FN because their .45 tactical is a hammer gun and the FN 5.7 is an internal hammer gun).

The prices of rack (budget) ARs have not changed in months, or even years.  The prices aren’t going to get lower.  The prices of higher end ARs have not changed in months, or even years.  I suspect the prices aren’t going to get lower.  If anything, I expect the prices of the higher end ARs (Daniel Defense, Rock River Arms, FN, etc.) to creep slightly higher over the next few months, and then take off within a year or a little longer.

Good chassis bolt action guns are expensive, many as expensive as ARs.

There was plenty of ammunition for sale if you were looking for 55 gr. 5.56 mm / .223, .308, .45, 9 mm or the standard soft point hunting rounds.  Everything else is an esoteric round to them and few dealers had much else.  For more out-of-the-ordinary rounds like 77-gr. 5.56 mm, 5.7X28, .45 SMC (which I was looking for, finding none at all), and even some run-of-the-mill PD pistol rounds for 9 mm and .45 that you can get at Gander Outdoors, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shop, you may have to rely on mail order if you don’t want to pay a visit to aforementioned large stores.  Shipping ammunition is expensive because of the weight.  When you drive near the aforementioned large stores, always consider buying ammunition because you don’t know when you’ll be back if you don’t live near one.

Overall, there were about a third less tables than usual, and the crowd was thinner than usual.  It all felt rather bleak and depressing.  My assessment: the gun owning public is asleep at the wheel.  Give this until after the mid-term elections and it will all turn around, and it will peak at a frenzy as we near the presidential election.  The GOP shouldn’t expect to carry Florida and North Carolina again.

Get what you need while you can.

News from Vancouver:

A Chilliwack couple is taking the law into their own hands by shooting paintballs at the thieves who repeatedly rob them.

It’s a desperate tactic that police say could be illegal in most circumstances — but Rob and Nicole Iezzi say they’ve already tried everything else.

“This is a constant problem. It’s an escalating problem in our town,” said Nicole.

The couple say they are not taking this step lightly, saying they have been robbed of iPods, hand tools, Leathermans, and attachments for their truck, at a cost of thousands. One friend’s purse was also stolen from their truck in their driveway, resulting in identity theft.

The thieves have hurt them too, pepper-spraying Nicole in her doorway in a bid to steal her cellphone, and clubbing their Rottweiler to death in the yard when it challenged them.

They tried calling the police, putting up security cameras, improving their fences, and put in better locks but the thieves keep coming back.

So that’s when they decided to fight back — with a paintball gun.

Videos the couple has posted online show them rushing out to challenge thieves, firing paint at them as the thieves scurry away on their bicycles. Even Nicole has fired at one, shooting as he left on the street.

“He came this way and I just pop, pop, pop,” she said.

The couple said they take no pleasure in firing at thieves — just hoping to send the message that their property is not to be trifled with. It was only after some deliberation that Rob, who has a firearms license, decided on paintballs.

“I didn’t want to shoot him with a pellet gun, because you’re going to make him bleed. With a paintball, it’s like getting punched. I didn’t want to punch him, so a paintball seemed like the logical thing,” he said.

It also doesn’t go through walls and won’t hurt a neighbour, he said.

But Chilliwack RCMP are warning that vigilante justice could be dangerous and illegal.

“We understand that people are frustrated,” said Const. Tracey Wolbeck.

Shooting paintballs could escalate a nonviolent property offense into a violent crime, Wplbeck said, and the thief could react, putting the property owner in danger.

On top of that, attacking someone with a paintball could be considered an assault, potentially resulting in charges.

“In extreme cases we could see assault with a weapon,” Wolbeck said.

The cops are doing what cops always do.  I just think it’s too bad they didn’t use real guns and kill the perpetrators.

If weapons control is inherently wicked, and I believe it is, it is wicked in the superlative to require peaceable men and women to sit defenseless and allow themselves to be abused by savages while the state prefers criminals over productive, law-abiding citizens.

The government who would do this is a worker of evil and should be overthrown and the government workers hanged for cosmic treason against God’s Holy law.