Articles by Herschel Smith

From a reader, via American Thinker, this from Charlotte, N.C.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) — It’s been a difficult week for parents Temia Hairston and Michael Grace Sr. Their son, Michael Grace Jr., was shot and killed during an attempted robbery early Sunday morning.

Police said Grace Jr. and two other people tried to rob a Pizza Hut in the 3200 block of Freedom Drive. During the incident, an employee fired his own handgun and killed Grace Jr.

Hairston said she learned of her son’s death on social media, and only got confirmation from police after contacting them first. The grieving mother said she has been left with dozens of questions about the situation that have thus far gone unanswered.

“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston.

Hairston and Grace Sr. acknowledged that their son was breaking the law by robbing the business, and said they definitely don’t condone what he did.

“It was an act of desperation, but I do not believe that Michael would have hurt anyone,” said Hairston.

They said Grace Jr. had fallen on hard times and resorted to crime to provide for his own child. They also said their son used to work at the same Pizza Hut restaurant where the robbery happened. They maintain he never would have physically hurt anyone during the robbery.

WBTV contacted the local restaurant and the Pizza Hut corporation public relations line. Neither have confirmed that Grace Jr. worked as an employee at the Freedom Drive Pizza Hut. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officials have not confirmed the information either.

The parents are angry that their son was shot and killed by an employee. They don’t believe the full story has been released to the public.

“Why in the hell did this guy have a gun?” questioned Hairston about the employee who shot her son.

Well, that’s right.  Criminals do indeed have rights, guaranteed under the constitution.  And Tennessee versus Garner says that police cannot discharge their weapons in order to stop a non-violent offense or to stop a fleeing suspect (as that would be an end-around of the right of due process), and only in the defense of their persons or other persons.

The problem, Ms. Hairston, is that we can only assume that your son had a gun and brandished it and used it to threaten others.  In this case, the employee was entirely within his rights of self defense in shooting the armed assailant.  Brandishing a weapon and making threats is called assault with a deadly weapon, whether the weapon is discharged or not.

You see, if there was to be a death that night, it could have been prevented by you son deciding on a wiser course of action, to wit, not assaulting someone with a deadly weapon.  It isn’t the job of the police to perform or conduct executions.  They’ve gotten too good at that already.  Let’s not feed the monster, okay?

I want to cover this ground one more time for good measure.  The lawmakers in South Carolina are toying with constitutional carry, and this is a small step forward for liberty, but the largest step has yet to be taken and is still opposed by the power brokers in South Carolina.  Open carry.

Please realize that as gun owners, you’ve been conditioned to be embarrassed and ashamed of the fact that you own and carry weapons.  What was once considered poor taste, ill-bred and even criminal, hiding your weapons, is now required of you in order to keep them out of sight of all of the offended parties.

You’ve been taught that all of your gun owning life.  You have holsters for concealed carry.  Instructors and trainers are there to teach you to draw and present from concealment.  You know all of the applicable laws on concealed carry for your state.  There are entire posts and videos on carrying in non-permissive environments.  It’s even in vogue for the gun community to criticize open carry and viciously attack open carriers, with largely irrelevant and ridiculous notions of tactical advantages on concealment.  Those advantages, as you know, cannot be demonstrated to be advantages with any statistical significance that meets the Central Limit Theorem.  Finally, the tactical advantages of open carry, which is quicker draw and presentation, is largely ignored in these conversations.

Comfort is largely irrelevant to the conversation, as is the fact that you’re sweating and dirtying your weapon with IWB carry.  All of these things are signs and symptoms of the fact that gun owners have been taught by society to respond like dogs or other pets by “operant conditioning.”  The first time you ever openly carried caused you some degree of self consciousness, didn’t it?  Just go ahead and admit it.  It’s useful to demonstrate my point.

Gun owners, and in particular open carriers, are treated like second class citizens, inferior men, uncouth savages, like those who have no etiquette, when exactly the opposite would have been true two hundred years ago.  That’s one reason I openly carry when I can.  In some small way I want to change all of this.  I open carry “For the peace, good and dignity of the country and the welfare of its people.”  So should you.

Via Insty, this:

(WRCB) – A Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officer was asked to leave the Outback Steakhouse in Cleveland Friday night because he had his service weapon on him.

In a public post on Facebook, Andrew Ward shared the experience. He said he was asked by a manager to remove his weapon and put it in his vehicle. He explained that he had to have it on his person because he was in uniform.

According to the post, the manager made a phone call, and then asked the officer to leave citing company policy that makes Outback a gun free zone.

In a follow-up Facebook post, Ward shared why the manager confronted him. He says a patron at another table reported being scared for her life.

“She said police are shooting people, and she could have gotten shot in the parking lot, and the manager had to walked her and her husband to their vehicle,” Ward wrote in one of three posts he published about the incident. “We were told it was a policy they don’t allow guns – if we would have known there was a complaint we would not have went anywhere! Seriously, she was scared for her life? We were joking and laughing with our server as we ordered, then prayed. What was scary about that?”

Ward said he and his family have accepted Outback’s apology. He said they understand that a mistake was made.

“There was a mistake made and that’s it… We all make mistakes and must move forward with our lives,” Ward wrote.

Good.  I don’t give a shit about his uniform.  Bad, that they apologized.  Bad, that they want to be a gun-free zone.  Good, that cops and the rest of us are treated the exact, same way.  We should be.  Cops open carry, I open carry too.  That’s the way it works when it works correctly.

Got it?  Make Outback a gun free zone and enforce it, or ignore firearms altogether.  But don’t treat people differently.  That’s prejudice and bigotry.

Military.com:

“Leadership are exploring disciplinary actions and are checking to see if this is a broader issue on the base,” Sukach told Military.com in an email.

Using “Facebook Live” as a platform to vent about her work environment, Lovely recently made profane slurs against black female subordinates.

Executives for the page said Lovely works at the base’s fitness center as an administrator.

The NCO questions her subordinates’ attitudes in the profane-laced video rant.

These “f—ing issues with my airmen and my NCOs, that are lower ranking than me, but they’re black females. And it pisses me the f— off that they have no f—ing respect and constantly having an attitude, and what the f— is up with that?” Lovely says in the video.

“Like I’m trying my best to hold my professionalism with them, but good God, that they don’t have f—ing respect whatsoever. Everytime I talk to them, [imitating the airmen] ‘No, ma’am,’ ” she says.

She continues, “It’s just like, they’re talking down to me. And I’m trying to tread lightly as a higher-ranking NCO not to f—ing blow the f— up and start a fight club.”

Hmm … no respect, talking down, Facebook responses … Hmm.  It looks like we’re ready for that next full scale conventional war against a near peer state.

For some oddball reason, it occurs to me again to embed the Gunny.

This will only be a brief analysis, but I wanted to lay the groundwork for what I believe we learn from the recent Nunes memorandum.

Largely nothing.  We knew most if not all of that already.  Those who have been following the machinations of the deep state have know all of this for a very long time now.  We know that certain high ranking officials inside the government – the government that is mostly not appointed, but rather, in for life, and a few who are appointed – have colluded and conspired to design a police state, couple federal, state and local law enforcement agencies into one by use of the JTTF and Fusion centers, weaken American foreign policy, empower the Muslim lobby, encroach upon and even destroy liberties in America, and started and prosecuted foreign wars in order to enrich themselves and their co-conspirators.

The wars in Northern Africa are an example of one such campaign, where nations were toppled in order to create “rat lines” of weapons, money, gems, oil and children, these “rat lines” only being the initial stages of more formal lines of logistics on a more industrial scale.  Haiti was another such example, and the full story of TCF and CGI corruption in Haiti has yet to be told.  Many of the people who have tried to tell the story have ended up dead.  At the head of this conspiratorial network of taitors sits not just men like Comey and McCabe, but men and women at the State Department, DoJ, inside the U.S. military and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Again, we’ve known this for a very long time.  For example, the YouTuber George (Webb) Sweigart called the involvement of the Awan brothers a full half year before anyone else did, and also provided excruciating and even painful detail on all of the military and political actions affecting the campaign to topple Northern Africa.  We also knew that John McCain was involved in the campaign in Northern Africa.  Thus, he said of the memorandum, “The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s.”  Quite obviously, this is a misdirect and he doesn’t really believe this all has anything at all to do with Russia.

We also learned more about the involvement of DoJ personnel with the Nunes committee.  Rod Rosenstein outed himself because he was apparently less disciplined than he needed to be.  According to Greg Jarrett, he threatened the committee.

Much more troubling, however, is the degree to which the balance of Washington is in the pocket of the deep state.  Is there any other reason for this?

Calling on Trump not to interfere in Mueller’s investigation, four Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee dismissed on Sunday the idea that the memo’s criticism of how the FBI handled certain surveillance applications undermines the special counsel’s work. Reps. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Will Hurd (Tex.) and Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) represented the committee on the morning political talk shows.

Gowdy, who helped draft the memo, said Trump should not fire Rosenstein, and he rejected the idea that the document has a bearing on the investigation.

It appears that the deep state controls quite literally all of Washington, D.C., and all appurtenant departments, agencies, and personnel.  It runs deep, far and wide, and its powers are immense.  And that’s what we learn from the memorandum.  We get no farther down the road to knowing what has happened.  This is all the tip of the iceberg.  But what we do learn if that when a little light is shined, the gargoyles, demons, monsters and pit vipers come out fighting.  I think it’s a good thing for them to self-identify.

Army Times:

Early evaluations of the Army’s new handgun, the M17, last year showed test failures when the pistol was fired with the standard ball ammunition, stoppages, and double ejections.

Ridiculous.  Everyone should have a “high pistol grip.”  They are also having to do this because of the tall slide and high bore axis, and thus the muzzle flip this firearm produces because of the couple, something I pointed out when the Army selected this pistol.

As for not being able to shoot FMJ lead ball, that seems like a real problem.  Double ejections are also a big problem, and firing when dropped makes this firearm completely unacceptable.  Funny, this.  I never have any problems with any of these things or any other failures with my 1911s, or with my new CMMG .45 ACP AR pistol.  I just won’t accept failures.  It’s a machine, and it can be designed and fabricated properly (although I’ll have to say that it’s hard to beat what John Moses Browning did and I don’t think anybody has even come close yet).

Here is the right way to roll out new software.[1] Set functional requirements, [2] programmers go to work, [3] put high end users in a room with it and tell them to break it, [4] repeat parts [2] and [3] until no more breakages.  Only after this do you roll it out to the user community.

The Army should have taken this approach prior to selecting a new pistol.  This must be embarrassing for them.  It should be.

WBNG.com:

While the deadline for gun owners to renew their permits was Wednesday at midnight, New York State Police officials said they will continue to collect admissions.

The New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, otherwise known as the SAFE Act, makes people recertify their pistol permits every five years to keep track of them throughout the state.

Not only will state police allow recertifcations to be submitted past the deadline, the Public Information Director, Beau Duffy, said there also won’t be penalties on those who fail to do so.

David Codrea:

But wasn’t that one of Tancredo’s strengths? Hasn’t he been a champion of “America first” and “conservative” values?

Yes and no.

He’s been pretty good on “immigration,” to the point where domestic Marxist media tars him as a “xenophobe.”

But he’s got some unreconciled past sins on guns to atone for that he never genuinely has.

Gun owners have a very long memory.  We never forget, and we seldom forgive.  Here’s a note to politicians.  Be careful what you do and say about guns, how you vote, and what you preach about.  It would actually be easiest for you if you believed in a God-given right to the ownership and bearing of arms, and didn’t have to lie about it (Rep. Thomas Massie is a good example for you to follow).

I sort of want one, but not enough to pony up the $$$.

Fox News:

The biennial report of the U.N. Secretary General on Small Arms and Light Weapons, issued in December, leaves little doubt about activists’ priority for 2018: to have ammunition included in the PoA, even though ammunition already has its own instrument, the harmless International Ammunition Technical Guidelines.

The impracticality of focusing on a consumable commodity like ammunition, of which tens of billions of rounds are produced annually, will not deter the activists.

The PoA is also likely to return to an obsession with marking and tracing modular firearms — such as the AR type of firearm popular in the U.S. — and with polymer (i.e. plastic) and 3-D printed firearms. These are, at best, niche issues, if they are issues at all.

What the PoA is guaranteed not to do is to eliminate the exemption that allows China to leave its firearms unmarked in any meaningful way, thereby making them nearly impossible to trace.

Getting rid of the Chinese exemption would be a genuinely useful step, but the PoA is not about doing useful things. The best the U.S. can do, therefore, is to try and ensure that the PoA does nothing at all. The U.S. certainly cannot agree to any obligation to do the impossible by tracing every bullet it produces.

The ATT conference in August, fortunately, should be less fraught. The treaty is now, on its own terms, an obvious failure — nations are not paying their dues or filing required reports. The only thing left for the U.S. to do is for President Trump to ‘unsign’ it, and leave those nations that wish to keep on pretending to take it seriously to pay for their meetings on their own.

But just because the ATT is accomplishing nothing useful doesn’t mean the U.N.’s efforts are having no impact on the U.S. The most disturbing thing I learned at the SHOT Show was that U.S. importers were having increasing difficulties — which they linked directly to the United Nations.

One firm which relies on imports of parts from India found that New Delhi — acting under the guidance of the International Small Arms Control Standards, yet another mischievous U.N. initiative — had impounded an entire shipment worth millions of dollars, on the grounds that these parts had to be controlled under a technical definition that India did not understand and which those who did found close to meaningless.

Other nations will no longer ship arms to the U.S. — even to the U.S. government.

Another firm that imports firearms from southeastern Europe now has only one reliable route off the continent — from Slovenia to Austria to the German port of Hamburg. Many shipping firms departing from European ports will no longer take cargoes of arms — even when all export and transit licenses are in order — and even proper licenses do not always prevent cargoes from being seized en route. These problems began to appear after the ATT, which requires controls on the transit of arms, entered into force.

Activists will no doubt celebrate these developments as victories. They should think again. As shipping by sea becomes harder, legitimate firms will be forced to turn to air freight — which offers an easier route for the unscrupulous.

If southeastern Europe does not sell its firearms to the U.S., those arms will find their way to conflicts in Africa or the Middle East.

And as it becomes harder to import parts and components, U.S. manufacturers will source domestically — as, indeed, they are already starting to do.

I’m not entirely sure I understand this commentary by Ted, whom I’ve found to be a good researcher.  If I’m not mistaken he is suggesting that the UN agreement, which apparently we’ve signed, is making it hard to import parts into America for the building of firearms.  If this happens to ammunition too, it will throttle the flow to users.

Okay, if this is the point, I’ve got it, and competition is always a good thing.  But I’ve got to believe that in the total absence of imports for parts – whether guns or ammunition – American manufacturers would step up their game.  That might in fact lead to an increase in prices too.

Bottom line: you don’t have enough ammunition, right now or in the future.  Neither do I.