Articles by Herschel Smith

Robert Verbruggen:

My skepticism of banning assault weapons has always primarily relied on the questionable nature of the distinction. These are not fully automatic military weapons that spray bullets when you hold down the trigger (though “bump stocks” can now make them behave like that, and we should do something about that); they fire once per trigger pull, just like many hunting rifles, and in fact often use smaller-caliber ammunition. Capping magazine size might allow someone to tackle a shooter while he’s reloading, and would apply even if he’s using a handgun instead of a rifle, but it also restricts people’s ability to defend themselves against more typical acts of violence (police do not limit themselves to ten rounds), and extremely high-capacity magazines jam more often.

These data don’t eliminate that skepticism of mine, but they’re worth noting and considering.

Eh, tet-a-tet, tit for tat, this and that, blah blah blah, yammer, yammer, yammer.

This fellow is the Deputy Managing Editor of National Review, and has argued for a bump stock ban and is willing to listen to another “assault weapons” ban based on the fact that the military “sprays” bullets and we do not.

So in addition to being an ignoramus concerning the use of firearms and anything like suppression or directed fire, he cavorts with gun control.

Which is why given the control of the beltway and Northern elitists have over National Review and the apparent desire they have to analyze their way to any conclusion based on what they perceive to be the “data,” the National Review has become irrelevant and meaningless.

You do realize that’s why they hate Trump and the revolution to overthrow the establishment, don’t you?  It upends their own self-appointed role of arbiter of the data and creator of policy that comes from the GOP.  By bashing the establishment in the face you’ve gotten into their stuff, and they don’t like it one damn little bit.

It’s a dangerous thing to offer up initial, unconstructed thoughts since they may all prove to be nonsense because of lack of information.  And yet I do have initial reactions that can serve as an open thread for discussion.

The police were worthless once again.  I had to bring it to my wife’s attention one more time while we were watching SWAT teams outside in safety while children poured out of the building that by procedure, the police would protect themselves first and foremost.  The children come later.  That shocked my wife.

The shooter did his nefarious deeds inside unabated and unmolested.  He then apparently shot at least two more people outside after he was finished, and the police caught him outside, not inside.  The police apparently didn’t prevent a single death or injury.  No one will protect you and your family except you.

Next thought.  Expect yet another push for gun control laws that only affect peaceable men and women.

Final thought.  How sad for the poor children in the school, and how sad for their parents.  This picture is sad too.

This person did exactly what s/he was taught to do: run, hide (and fight, but this last part would have been irrelevant).  This picture is the picture of failure.  It is emblematic of the failure of American society to deal with the concept of self defense.  If this poor student had gotten to the point of fighting, according to DHS instructions, s/he could have only thrown potted plants and chairs.

Again, how sad.

CNN:

A West Virginia city has agreed to pay a former police officer $175,000 to settle a wrongful-termination lawsuit after he was fired following his decision not to shoot a distraught suspect who was holding a gun.

The lawsuit accused the Weirton Police Department of wrongfully terminating officer Stephen Mader after he chose not to shoot a 23-year-old man while responding to a domestic disturbance in 2016.

“At the end of the day, I’m happy to put this chapter of my life to bed,” Mader said in a news release by the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia.

“The events leading to my termination were unjustified and I’m pleased a joint resolution has been met. My hope is that no other person on either end of a police call has to go through this again.”

The incident occurred May 6, 2016, when Mader responded to a domestic-disturbance call and found Ronald “R.J.” Williams Jr. with an unloaded handgun.

Mader told CNN last year that Williams was “visibly choked up” and told Mader to shoot him. As a Marine veteran who served in Afghanistan, Mader told CNN that he concluded Williams wasn’t a threat and so he tried to de-escalate the situation.

As Mader was trying to get Williams to drop his gun, two other Weirton police officers arrived. Mader told CNN that Williams raised his gun and was immediately shot and killed by one of the other officers. A state investigation found the officer’s actions were justified.

On June 7, 2016, the Weirton Police Department fired Mader. The lawsuit, filed in May 2017, claims the department fired him because of “failure to meet probationary standards of an officer” and “apparent difficulties in critical incident reasoning.”

“Failure to meet probationary standards.”  Or in other words, he wasn’t pathological enough for law enforcement work in America.  You see, Marine, there is nothing more important than the costumed clowns going home safely at the end of their shift.  The ability to discern your surroundings and circumstances and make wise judgments isn’t valued in American LEO work.

Unfortunately, the citizens will pay for this settlement.  He should never have been fired.  Instead, the police officer who fired him should have been stripped naked, marched out the public square and publicly flogged.  Then the young Marine should have been put in charge of the department.

But that’s not the America we live in today, now is it?

Via WRSA, this post continues on a theme I’ve worked before here at this web site, to wit, that unfunded liabilities will affect the smallest governments first and worst because small government cannot print fiat money to keep itself afloat.

I’m not sure we learn anything new from the article except for the shear magnitude of the problem, but there is this link in the comments on such a thing happening to a small town in Alabama in 2010.  I’ve also pointed out before that unfunded pensions has led to the inability to keep the police departments in Memphis and Miami-Dade afloat without massive changes.

It’s happening not just with small municipalities and towns, but with medium size and larger cities as well.  That which cannot continue, won’t.

From reader Fred Tippens, WSOCTV.

ORANGE COUNTY, N.C. – A North Carolina man said he shot and killed a coyote after it came dangerously close to his 6-year-old daughter and dog.

Ian Vigus said that shortly after he came home from work in Orange County, he heard his dog barking near where his daughter was playing.

Vigus said his dog was spooked by a coyote, so he took both the dog and his daughter inside and grabbed his rifle.

“As he started to lope off, I shot him and killed him,” Vigus said. “I just wanted to protect my family and protect my livestock.”

Orange County officials said there have been several recent reports of coyotes in the area.

Earlier this week in Huntersville, a family came face-to-face with a coyote that officials said was rabid.

In a video that the Schroter family recorded of the encounter, the coyote can be seen snarling at them.

More … tests confirm that Coyote that attacked Huntersville family’s car was rabid.

As I mentioned before, I’ve had them come trotting down the road at me in my neighborhood.  I wonder whether this was a Coyote or a Coywolf.  Many of what people take for Coyotes are actually Coywolves.

Via Knuckledraggin’, this is a good video about the Coywolf, but I found that it was too focused on the Northeast and Canada, as if the Coywolf was a Canadian invention and remains in the Northeast.  They also make the mistake of assuming that the Coywolf is just Wolf and Coyote, but it’s clear that it’s more complicated than that.

Coyotes have lived in the East since the 1930s, and recent genetic tests have shown they are actually a mixture of coyote, wolf and dog …

The Eastern coyote is one of 19 subspecies of coyote, which are adaptable predators that live everywhere from the streets of Los Angeles to Florida swamps.

The Eastern subspecies, which ranges as far west as Ohio, is thought to have migrated to the Northeast some 80 years ago, taking over the range occupied by wolves and interbreeding with the larger animals.

They no longer overlap with wolves, which are long gone from the East save for the very rare red wolf, but they remain eight to 25 percent wolf genetically, said Roland Kays, a leading coyote biologist with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

They are also about eight to 11 percent dog due to past interbreeding with feral dogs, he said.

The point of all of this is that we have a new breed of very adaptable, very smart canine in the land, one that isn’t scared of humans, may be rabid, and knows how to survive virtually anywhere.

Do you carry guns with you?  I do.  If threatened, you can’t shoot them if you don’t carry guns.

In the spirit of this post on precision rifle chassis from the 2017 SHOT show, the Bergara B-14, and the Diamondback AR-10 in 6.5 Creedmoor (I’ve got other articles and posts but I can’t find them at the moment), I thought I would drop the following three newly released rifles out there for you to ponder.

The Juggernaut Tactical precision rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor.

Semi-automatic, some extremely nice features, and hold your breath … MSRP $3300.

Next up, the Battle Rifle Company BR10.

Semi-automatic .308, some very nice features, and hold your breath … MSRP $2998.

Finally, there is the Weatherby Vanguard Modular Chassis Rifle.

Bolt action rifle in .223, 6.5 Creedmoor or .308, some very nice features, and MSRP $1519.  It’s strange though, because I don’t see an optic rail on the picture, and optics are not even discussed in the article.

I don’t get the impression that anyone who builds guns for >= $3000 per item thinks that there is a big market for them.  They must be marketing to law enforcement, which necessitates a huge margin and markup since quantity will be much lower.

This doesn’t impress me as a winning strategy for a company in today’s climate.  But that’s just me.  Only one of these rifles is affordable my me or many of my readers.

David B. Kopel:

As the amicus brief explains, a key reason that a decade-long political dispute between Great Britain and American colonies turned into a war was the British government’s attempt to suppress arms commerce. Royal governors illegally seized merchants’ gunpowder and firearms. King George III embargoed the import of arms and ammunition into America. Americans vehemently objected, describing the prohibition of arms commerce as an effort to enslave the Americans, by leaving them no means of resistance to tyranny.

Americans did everything possible to defeat the British suppression of arms commerce. Benjamin Franklin masterminded arms and gunpowder imports from other countries. All forms of domestic production were strongly encouraged.

Then on April 18, 1775, King George renewed the embargo. On that same day, Royal governor Thomas Gage dispatched Redcoat soldiers to seize a large cache of gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott rode to raise the alarm. Forewarned, Americans were forearmed. At Concord Bridge, they fired the shot heard round the world. Swarms of armed Americans harried the Redcoats all the way back to Boston, nearly wiped them out, and besieged the city. The War of Independence had begun. Rather than let a government effectuate a prohibition on arms commerce, Americans started a war against the most powerful military in the world.

The above story is told concisely in the amicus brief, and in more detail in my article, How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution, 38 Charleston Law Review 283 (2012).

Go get ’em David.  Kick them in the ass.  Always remind everyone who will listen that gun control started the war against King George and his band of controllers in the states.

The only reason it hasn’t precipitated yet another war of independence is the longsuffering nature of the American people.  That will eventually wear thin and break.  When it does there will be hell to pay.

This video is interesting given my almost obsessive interest in ballistics.

In it he analyzes the performance of the bonded soft point in ballistics gelatin, and his claim for superiority of this round is that it expands (like a soft point does) but it is more “barrier blind” than other rounds that are not bonded soft point.  It stays together and intact through barriers.

But take a look at the wound track in the gelatin.  It’s pretty straight and doesn’t fragment, and one of the things we know about the 5.56mm round is that it yaws upon tissue entry and fragments.  This is one of the aspects that gives it its lethality in spite of the small bore.

Compare that now with what you see in this ballistics test using M193 (there are a thousand like it, and also of the M855).  Compare and contrast the wound channel and fragmentation.  Which ammunition would you prefer for personal defense in close quarters battle?

Marine Corps Times:

In a slight change to the grueling initial stage of the 13-week Infantry Officer Course, Marines will no longer be required to pass the Combat Endurance Test to move on.

The Corps has come under criticism for what some have claimed to be unnecessarily high standards to graduate from the course. To date, only one unnamed female Marine has successfully completed the entire course.

No, we wouldn’t water down requirements.  No, nothing of the sort.  Even though we were looking for a way to do just that.

Women’s hips are wider than her shoulders, and a man’s shoulders are wider than his hips.  It’s the way God designed humans.  If you don’t like God’s perfect design for mankind’s anatomy, that’s tough shit.  Take it up with Him.  The hips of women lead to all sorts of problems bearing heavy loads, like pelvic fractures (which is the root cause of most of the female failures in Marine Corps infantry officer course at Quantico) while they’re trying to keep legs over the CoG of the heavy loads infantry has to bear.

I recall during the forced 24-hour march and obstacle course my son went through in Boot Camp, all of it with full kit, one young Marine sitting in the bleachers with us wasn’t on the parade deck.  He had completed the course with a broken leg instead of recycling back through all over again.  I guess this toughness is just a thing of the past until we have our next conventional war.

Oh, unless fifth generation warfare, drones and battery-powered robotic suits for women and weak men fix the problems.  Yea, that’s it.  That’s what’ll happen.

The Marine Corps should be ashamed.  And so should SedDef Mattis.  And so should America.

NRA:

There is a general consensus that uniformed and ununiformed current and former law enforcement officers should be allowed to carry a firearm for the public benefit. That is why in 2004 Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the Law Enforcement Officer’s Safety Act (LEOSA). Under LEOSA, current and former law enforcement officers who meet certain basic criteria, such as carrying qualified identification, are permitted to carry a firearm throughout the country. 

Showing the strong bipartisan support for this measure, the original legislation, H.R. 218, had 297 co-sponsors in the House of Representative and passed the Senate unanimously. Subsequent changes that have been made to increase the number of officers able to take advantage of this protection have been similarly popular.

I’m not sure where this “general consensus” comes from, but I’ll bet it’s not among my readers.  In other news, a SAPD officer just about killed a colleague.

A San Antonio Police Department officer was suspended for three days without pay after he accidentally fired his personal AR-15 inside a police station and injured another officer, according to police records.

Officer Jordan Ramirez accidentally fired a round from his AR-15 on Nov. 1 inside the SAPD Street Crimes Unit office, according to suspension records obtained by mySA.com.

Other people were inside the office with him and a bullet fragment or flying debris hit an officer, causing minor injuries.

Gosh I do hate it when that happens to me.  But leave it to the NRA to miss the opportunity to make the point that this has nothing whatsoever to do with LEOs and everything to do with the policy itself.