Articles by Herschel Smith

David Codrea:

The latest citizen disarmament plot currently being hatched will raise the minimum age for rifle purchases to 21. While some are specifically calling out semi-automatic rifles, others want it all. Such plans are  gaining traction at the state and federal level by no shortage of Democrat opportunists and “bipartisan” Republican panderers, including Sen. Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump.

An interesting article over at Firearms News notes Audie Murphy would have been deemed “too young” to be trusted with a rifle at the time his legendary heroics earned him recognition as the most decorated combat soldier of WWII.

But wait, the emperor-god Trump wants it, so it must be good, or he must be lying, or he must be playing 4-D chess while everyone else is playing checkers, or something else, it can’t really be that Trump didn’t keep his promises to be pro-gun, can it?

Yea, sign me up for opposition to said stupidity, but you knew that already.

On a different subject entirely, David has a great idea for a new gun law.  I support this one.  Don’t look for it in the bills on the House or Senate web site though.

The Blaze:

“Let me tell you why I’m a defender of the Second Amendment,” she began.

“I was a little girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late fifties, early sixties,” she explained. “There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham Police were going to protect you.”

“And so when White Knight Riders would come through our neighborhood,” she said, “my father and his friends would take their guns and they’d go to the head of the neighborhood, it’s a little cul-de-sac and they would fire in the air, if anybody came through.”

“I don’t think they actually ever hit anybody,” she continued. “But they protected the neighborhood. And I’m sure if Bull Connor had known where those guns were he would have rounded them up.”

“And so, I don’t favor some things like gun registration,” she said to a suddenly silent crowd.

“That said, it’s time to have a national conversation about how we can deal with the problems we have. It’s not going to be any single fix to the terrible events at Parkland,” she concluded.

It’s this last part that’s important, but more on that in a minute.  David Codrea links at Washington Times piece saying this.

Bam. That’s it in a nutshell — this is why founders saw fit to put in place a Second Amendment. It wasn’t a right to hunt they were defending; it was a God-given right to protect one’s self and one’s family from harm. And specifically: from harm from the government

And David points out the same thing I’m about to.

“I think it is time to have a conversation about what the right to bear arms means in the modern world,” Rice told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday. “I don’t understand why civilians need to have access to military weapons. We wouldn’t say you can go out and buy a tank.”

More specifically, Rice said weapons like the AR-15 rifle that authorities say shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz, 19, used to kill 17 students and teachers Feb. 14, shouldn’t be available to civilians, the Washington Times reported.

I would absolutely say that I should be able to go out and buy a tank with all of the ammunition I could afford to use with it.  So here’s  the bottom line, Ms. Rice.  We have the second amendment to protect us from fake second amendment supporters like you.  My conversation on the RTKBA with you can be neatly summarized as follows: Molon Labe.  That’s about all the conversation I’ll have with you.

You’re what’s called a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Hey, I recall a time when you supported race sensitive admissions.  I’m just saying that you’re not who you’re purported to be.  But you fit in well with Mr. Bush, who was exactly who he was purported to be, having first sought permission from Bob Bullock to run for governor of Texas.

Time:

Dick’s Sporting Goods announced on Wednesday that it would stop selling assault-style rifles in all of its stores, a direct reaction to the February 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead.

“When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset,” CEO Edward Stack said.

The move leaves just one major retailer standing alone in continuing to sell the semi-automatic assault-style rifles commonly used in mass shootings: Bass Pro Shops, which now includes Cabela’s, a competitor it purchased last year. Bass Pro Shops was named by Forbes as one of America’s largest privately-owned companies. There are a total of over 160 Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops retail stores in the U.S. and Canada. Both stores also sell high-capacity magazines, which allow shooters to fire a higher number of rounds without needing to reload.

Many large companies have changed their policies around guns lately, as protesters push for tougher regulations. Some have cut ties with the National Rifle Assocation, ending discount programs for NRA members. Dick’s announced that all of its stores would immediately stop selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, and that it would no longer sell any guns whatsoever to customers who are under the age of 21.

While stating that “we support and respect the Second Amendment,” Dick’s also urged Congress to take action and called for a national ban on assault-style firearms, a ban on high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, and a minimum age of 21 for all firearms sales. “Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough,” a Dick’s press release said.

[ … ]

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has also been scaling back gun sales at its stores. In 2006, Walmart stopped selling guns at roughly one-third of its stores, citing “diminished customer relevancy.” In 2015, all Walmart stores stopped selling semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, the weapon of choice in mass shootings such as those in Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, and most recently in Parkland, Florida.

Ridiculous.  So someone tell me the last time you were in a Dick’s or Walmart and saw anyone buy a gun?  Anyone?  I didn’t think so.

Gun buyers don’t go to Walmart or Dick’s.  You have to call someone over to the counter just to ask about that ammunition behind the counter that you can’t pick up.  Otherwise, the gun counter is the most unmanned part of the store.  No one is buying anything, save a little ammunition or cleaning supplies from time to time.

Walmart will still continue to struggle competing with Amazon, and Dick’s will continue to sell pansy-ass golf gear and clothes and wonder why they’re struggling compared to Bass Pro Shop and Cabela’s – where you can get literally anything you want.

And nothing else will change.  And time will continue to write breathless, hyperventilating fake news about big wins for the gun control lobby.

Foxnews:

The ever increasing costs of compliance has driven many gunsmiths out of New York and other states southward to more gun friendly states. Remington, in business here since the 19th century, recently relocated to Alabama. Beretta pulled out of Maryland for Tennessee. KAHR Arms moved to Pennsylvania. So far, Fargnoli is resisting.

“I have 11 grandchildren and one on the way. And I can tell you my wife’s not leaving them. So moving the business isn’t going to happen for me,” he said.

Then if you can’t move your entire clan, your business will suffer, possibly in the extreme.  Sorry, but that’s the way the market works.  Buyers reward loyalty, and they punish those who undermine their wellbeing, or even those who work with those who undermine their wellbeing.  Again I say, if you’re a firearms manufacturer, you need to think seriously about moving South like so many others.

The Hill:

“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.

“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

No, you didn’t go to sleep and imagine Trump being elected, only to wake and find out that you’re still in the Obama era.  Obama didn’t say that.  Trump did.

Wasn’t this the guy that was going to save the second amendment and root out the deep state, drain the swamp and make America great again?  Or was he just a temporary stop on the way to dystopia, a delay for getting ready for what we all know is coming?

See, the whole idea behind “due process” is that it happens first, not second.  It’s not due process if it happens out of sequence.  But he didn’t think very deeply about this before he said it.  It may be what he believes and feels, but it sounds so stupid that if he thought about it, he wouldn’t have actually said it.

And if he was more of a thinking man, he might have pondered the fact that no progressive is going to vote for him in the next election for being a gun controller, but he might just have alienated the very base that put him in office to begin with.  But remember his words during the debates: “Everything is negotiable.”  That apparently includes your  God-given rights.

You don’t have enough ammunition yet.  Neither do I.

WGNTV:

OSWEGO, Ill. — A man armed with an AR-15 rifle helped stop a knife attack during an argument in Oswego.

It happened on Monday at an apartment building on Harbor Drive.

Police say it all began when someone with a knife attacked another person during an argument.

Neighbor Dave Thomas, who witnessed the attack, went into his home, got his rifle and ordered the suspect to stop.

“I ran back into the home, into my house and grabbed my AR-15. Grabbed the AR-15 over my handgun. It’s just a bigger gun. I think a little bit more than an intimidation factor definitely played a part in him actually stopping.”

No shots were fired.

The suspect was able to get away briefly, before police captured him.

The stabbing victim was taken to a hospital, and is expected to recover.

Wait!  I thought AR-15s were evil and only did bad things of their own volition, or turned good guys into bad guys who perpetrate mass shootings by their bad vibes and mind-control?

Guess this story breaks that narrative (as if it hasn’t been broken a thousand times before), sort of like the one about Stephen Bayazes.

Matt Vespa reports:

UPDATE: Folks, I’ll just leave this here. It’s from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) linking to a Rolling Stone article, so you already know where this is going.

“A handgun wound is simply a stabbing with a bullet.”

What is this?

“A handgun [wound] is simply a stabbing with a bullet. It goes in like a nail.” With the high-velocity rounds of the AR-15, “it’s as if you shot somebody with a Coke can.” https://t.co/xkyw3pEtjn #BanAssaultWeapons

— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) February 26, 2018

MSNBC anchors are claiming that teachers armed with handguns would be unable to stop a school shooter because rifles shoot “three times faster.”

Anchor Lawrence O’Donnell said on his show Thursday night that “a bullet fired from an AR-15 travels 3x faster than one from a handgun…and yet the president and the NRA think giving teachers guns will stop a school shooter.”

Welcome to the stupidest argument ever crafted, dear friends.  A teacher doesn’t have a rifle, so let’s not allow them to carry handguns because they cannot produce the muzzle velocity of a rifle.  Quick.  Somebody go delete all of those ballistics gelatin tests at Lucky Gunner.

Forget all of the hundreds of thousands of instances of defensive use of handguns.  They’re not effective, so there.  It’s okay if cops have them, but you shouldn’t.  I’m reminded of a comment by reader millard fillmore:

At the end of WWII, a German prisoner who knew English quite well asked my father if he could just see a .45 acp cartridge. He asked why they exploded when they hit. My father explained that they didn’t. The guy then showed him a large exit wound on his leg from a .45 slug the German took during the retreat from Paris. Even pistol bullets can cause significant damage if they hit the ‘right’ way. Banning Ar-15’s won’t stop that,doc.

I also had an imaginary phone call with John Basilone, who says to tell these idiots the following: “Come back in time with me to the greatest and most storied gun fight in history, go through it with me, and then tell me I shouldn’t have my 1911.  Until then, just shut up.”

Michael Gerson at The Washington Post:

It is one of the dirty habits of our political discourse that so many people use thermonuclear rhetorical weapons as a first resort. It is not enough for defenders of gun rights to be wrong; they must be complicit in murder. It is not enough for gun-control advocates to be mistaken; they must be jackbooted thugs laying the groundwork for tyranny.

These competing apocalypses, paradoxically, make politics appear smaller — the realm of unbalanced partisans and professional hyperventilators. But more destructively, this type of argument makes incremental change — the kind that our system of government encourages — more difficult.

This is a particular shame on the issue of gun violence. The maximal solutions — broad restrictions on gun ownership or fixing the mental-health system — are so difficult or unlikely that they have become obstacles to action. They are something like, on the issue of global warming, recommending that the Earth be moved farther from the sun.

[ … ]

When it comes to mass killings, we know what the perpetrators generally look like: disappointed loners, motivated by grudges, seeking fame and planning their violence carefully. So here is an answerable public-policy question: What can we do to identify these dangerous malcontents and keep ­military-grade weaponry out of their hands? We should be considering: special police task forces that actively identify and track prospective killers instead of ­passively responding to warnings. ­Higher age restrictions on gun access. Broader application of gun­ violence protective orders that forbid gun ownership to people exhibiting warning signs. Better education on those warning signs among adults who deal with young men. Media norms against using the names of mass killers, which only encourages their deadly performance art.

[ … ]

When it comes to American gun culture, the issue of motivation matters a great deal. If you defend access to guns for sport and self-defense, there is no logical reason to reject reasonable ­restrictions on firepower and access. Some compromise — focused on keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous and unstable people — is within the realm of possibility. But if you view the ultimate purpose of gun ownership as resistance to a future (or present) tyrannical government, then restrictions on firepower and access are exactly the things a tyrannical government would want. Because the goal of an oppressive state is to have a monopoly on sophisticated weaponry, any incremental movement toward that goal is unacceptable.

This argument — summarized by David French as “the concept of an armed citizenry as a final, emergency bulwark against tyranny” — is perhaps understandable in a country born of revolutionary violence. But more than two centuries removed from the ­revolution, the concept seems, well, frightening.

When I look at many of the people holding the guns, I don’t really view them as legitimate protectors of my rights, or as qualified to make choices about the employment of violence in politics. I don’t view America as halfway to tyranny. And I am grateful that Americans such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — who suffered actual oppression by government — made a principled commitment to nonviolent political change.

It is one thing when Thomas Jefferson said “the tree of liberty must be ­refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” It is another thing entirely when your well-armed neighbor says the same.

I have no idea how much this attitude infects the right. But the fever can be measured in talk of a “deep state” coup against the president, in sympathy for Cliven Bundy in his armed standoff with federal agents, in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) when he ordered the State Guard to monitor the Navy SEAL/Green Beret joint training exercise Jade Helm 15. All destructive madness.

So let me assist you a bit, Michael.  First of all, I would do nothing to protect you against tyranny.  You’re the enemy, or at least you’re in bed with the enemy.  You love tyranny.  You love high taxes, government control, government-run health care, redistribution of wealth, and a police state.

You’ve traded liberty for a semblance of security, but that security is only as the state deems right and fitting.  You could wake up tonight to a SWAT team busting your door in and shooting your loved ones, all in the name of a war on drugs, with no apologies, no recompense, and no explanation.  Wrong home?  Who cares – certainly not the police.  You feed from the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.  And you’re happy with that.

There are a lot of us.  We’re the dirt people.  You get your power from us, and your lights come on only because we allow it.  We feed you.  We drive the trucks that deliver your supplies.  We make the lines of logistics.  We grow your crops and worry about heavy equipment breakage and droughts and the price of goods and paying our employees.

And we have guns.  We have pistols, shotguns, bolt action rifles, and AR-15s.  You’re not getting any of them.  One of my commenters observed something that may be enlightening to you.  Listen closely.

The gun-banners aren’t too well-educated and haven’t thought things through. They really haven’t. They have not studied the history of the Prohibition Era enough in depth to realize that the federal government can’t really outlaw anything – all the government can do is force buyers and sellers of goods/services out of the above-board, legal market and into the underground economy and black market. That’s it.

It’s basic economics. As long as a market for a particular good or service exists, and producers/sellers of that particular good or service exist, they will find a way to do business – whether the government likes it or not. Not only the prohibition of alcohol, either, but the so-called “war on drugs” proves this fact.

All the Eighteenth Amendment really did was to turn tens of millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into instant felons overnight by making illegal what had previously been legal – the production, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

At the stroke of a pen, millions of gainfully-employed people were rendered unemployed, and businesses large and small immediately felt the ripple effects of the new laws. Not only the tavern down the street, but the liquor distributor across town and the bottling plant the next state over and the largest firms involved in the business of slaking their customer’s thirst.

Alcohol prohibition also – nearly single-handedly – created and enabled the explosive growth of the mafia – the outfit, the mob, La Cosa Nostra, whatever you wish to term them. The biggest syndicates moved huge amounts of liquor, beer and spirits smuggled into the U.S. from outside; reaping giant profits in the process.

It took the FBI (back when that agency still had a shred or two of honor to its name) decades to finally beat back and take down the mob, so powerful had they gotten in the 1920s and 1930s.

Alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs will fade into insignificance in comparison to the massive underground economy sure to be created in the wake of any national ban on the ownership of firearms. Such a ban would surely create the largest and most-profitable black market in history.

And bear in mind that such a vast underworld enterprise will likely not restrict itself to the sales of deer rifles and five-shot revolvers; it will deal in the latest military-grade hardware – including fully-automatic weapons. After all, if the mere fact of owning a firearm is already a crime, there is no additional harm done going “all in” and getting the mil-spec hardware.

Very quickly, this country will move from resembling the U.S.A. we have known and loved to something like Mogadishu, Somalia, where even a poor man can afford to buy an AK47 and an RPG down at the local market and arms bazaar.

We don’t like government interference and government intervention.  You see, when the Scriptures teach us that “The good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,” we take that seriously.  That means government theft is immoral, and if the government has become an impediment to us providing for our children’s children, then the government has become a stumbling block and worker of evil.

We do not look to the state to provide, protect and give us cradle to grave security like you do Michael.  It might be “scary” to you that we’re armed the way we are.  That’s by intent, for our armaments are not only for our own personal protection, but amelioration of tyranny.  We aren’t “legitimate protectors of your rights,” we are legitimate protectors of our rights.  People like us believe that the Mr. David French you cite is too progressive and we pay little attention to him.  You mustn’t forget the history of gun control, with the Armenian genocide, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Hitler and The Third Reich, and Stalin, all of whose regimes were preceded by gun confiscations and gun control laws.  Deaths at the hands of tyrants in the last century approached 200 million souls.

So the best and quickest way to ensure the war you apparently fear is to keep pushing government control and disarmament.  Do it at your own peril, Michael.  Your secure home and lifestyle inside the beltway may not be as secure as you think if you can’t control that controller impulse in yourself.

Georgiaboy61:

Re: “A man can’t live forever. And it matters how you die.”

Precisely my point. Our civilization and our society used to contain men who understood that certain fates were worse than death. Traditional manhood was sacrificial, when necessary, to protect the aged, infirm, the weak and the children. Allowing the law of the jungle in society, where the strong preyed upon the weak, was seen as evil and would have been unthinkable.

Men also risked their lives in defiance of tyranny and to free the oppressed. The insignia of the U.S. Army Special Forces contains a Sykes-Fairburn dagger, pointed upward, superimposed upon crossed arrows, against a heraldic shield bearing the inscription, “De Oppresso Liber,” Latin for “To Free the Oppressed.” Once, those words meant something to Americans, not only to elite soldiers, but to common men as well.

Do we still live in a culture which honors those lofty values? I honestly do not know; you tell me. There are undoubtedly individual men who still honor those words, but as for the wider society, I am not nearly-so-optimistic.

This is not to say that men of that time threw their lives away cavalierly; they did not. Rather, it is to recall a time when honor and courage were virtues widely-celebrated in our culture – and men strove to live up to those lofty expectations. Cowardice was shameful, not something to be celebrated.

In those now-bygone days, little boys wanted to grow up to be just like John Wayne, James Arness, or one of the other great cowboy western stars. People still believed in heroes then; today, heroes are tough to find anywhere in pop culture – and when you do find them, they are apt to be post-modern caricatures of them – traditional males need not apply. Today, the role of the villain is reserved for those kinds of men! Today, many kids have the ambition of getting rich and famous. People who risk their lives for others are seen as fools, saps who didn’t know how to play the game.

Yes, I am cynical, I admit… but I have ample reason for being so, would you not agree?