Articles by Herschel Smith

It was a beautiful day to mountain bike Big Rock at Dupont last Friday.

The Denver Post:

When a gunman opened fire inside a Walmart in Thornton Wednesday night, shoppers screamed and ran for cover — and others pulled out their own handguns.

But those who drew weapons during the shootings ultimately delayed the investigation as authorities pored over surveillance videotape trying to identify the assailant who killed three people, police said Thursday.

Although authorities said “a few” individuals drew handguns, they posed no physical hazard to officers. But their presence “absolutely” slowed the process of determining who, and how many, suspects were involved in the shootings, said Thornton police spokesman Victor Avila.

It took more than five hours to identify the suspect, 47-year-old Scott Ostrem, who is accused in the seemingly random shootings. The problem for investigators came when they reviewed the surveillance footage and had to follow each individual with a firearm until they could eliminate them as a suspect.

“Once the building was safe enough to get into it, we started reviewing that (surveillance video) as quickly as we could,” Avila said. “That’s when we started noticing” that a number of individuals had pulled weapons. “At that point, as soon as you see that, that’s the one you try to trace through the store, only to maybe find out that’s not him, and we’re back to ground zero again, starting to look again. That’s what led to the extended time.”

Well, just go cry me a river, why don’t you?  This “journalist” should be notified that he wins the aware for the stupidest article of the month.  Read this again and let it wash over you.  Armed citizens were prepared to protect themselves and perhaps others in a good Samaritan defense, and the police are bitching because it took them several hours to do what they’re paid to do, which is to conduct investigations.

And say, what the hell do you mean “once the building was safe to get into?”  You mean that it isn’t the job of the police to enter active shooter zones to protect citizens?  You mean that the only real function of the police is to conduct investigations, write reports and ensure continued state power and viability?

And after knowing the answer to all of that, you want me to sympathize with the cops over having to do the only job they have?  What happened?  Didn’t they make doughnut time with their buddies?

David Codrea:

Some of us would argue the edicts she demands makes things a lot more dangerous, and just ceding to Delatorre or Becker their own characterizations without at least addng qualifiers like “self-professed” gives credence to their side. Because what they’re claiming to be is debatable.

And more to the point, “Just because gun-grabbers call themselves “Second Amendment supporters” and “safety advocates” doesn’t mean the media should just take them at their word.”

I prefer to call them “The Controllers.”  It’s what they are in their heart of hearts.  Besides, they hate hearing the truth and they’ve tried to change the narrative by focusing on words other than controller.  Don’t let them.

Music Row:

Prominent Nashville attorney Orville Almon, Jr. has died.

He practiced entertainment and music law, IP law and business law for over 35 years, representing numerous prominent recording artists, music producers and songwriters, as well as record company executives, music publishers, record companies, television production companies, managers and other clients affiliated with the entertainment industry.

What they’re not saying in this article is more important than what they say.

Describing meetings with MGM, Las Vegas police, and the FBI as “incredibly strange and complex” to one of his friends on recently made private Facebook threads, the attorney was privy to inside information that the FBI, by announcing they are no longer holding press conferences and the investigation is closed, have chosen to withhold from the public.

Orville Almon, known as a straight shooting attorney to the many Nashville musicians he represented, has become the latest in a very long line of suspicious deaths and disappearances surrounding the Las Vegas shooting.

Almon’s death, described by local Nashville media as “seizure during sleep”, mirrors that of Kymberley Suchomel of Apple Valley, California, a shooting survivor who was found dead in her home, hours after her husband left for work.

I agree with him.  The case is incredibly strange and complex.  Or at least it is given that we’re not being told anything but lies about it by FedGov.

Science Daily:

“It’s been known for some time that gun violence, like many other forms of crime and other social problems, can be clustered within certain neighborhoods,” says Charles Loeffler, the Jerry Lee Assistant Professor of Criminology in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences. “So when we observe that a particular part of the city has an elevated risk, how do we understand what that phenomenon actually is?”

Loeffler and Oxford statistician Seth Flaxman, who published their findings in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, turned to data from Washington, D.C., firearm-related 9-1-1 calls and acoustical sensors around the city that listen for and record the latitude and longitude of every shot fired.

Starting from the baseline that gun violence doesn’t occur randomly, the researchers ran the numbers for two hypotheses. First, they asked whether such behavior could be an epidemic, something that spreads quickly and diffuses into the surrounding environment. One incident begets the next, such as a victim retaliating against a former perpetrator.

“The alternative hypothesis,” Loeffler says, “is that you have clustering of gun violence in certain neighborhoods at certain times, but it may not actually be spreading in any real sense.” The researchers call this an endemic pattern.

As an example, consider an encounter in a bar: Two individuals bump into each other. One takes offense at being accidentally shoved and pulls out or quickly gains access to a gun. The same scenario might happen during a drug deal, where one party feels slighted by another. In either case, the resulting action is not retaliation, but rather an aggressive response to a commonly reoccurring stimulus.

“It may not last more than a couple minutes and may not lead to further acts of violence,” Loeffler says. “It could be self-extinguishing.”

For Washington, D.C., the data were compelling.

“We found that a substantial fraction of the gun violence was better characterized as this endemic, non-random clustering rather than as an epidemic, contagious, diffusing process,” he says.

But then you knew that already, didn’t you.  That is, if you have a lick of common sense, which doesn’t seem to be so common these day.

There is L.A., Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington D.C. and Baltimore, and then there’s everywhere else.

Phillip Carter writing for Slate:

Before the bodies cooled Tuesday after a deadly terror attack in Manhattan, conservative commentators raced to proclaim that a good guy with a gun might have stopped the speeding truck that killed eight on a bike path along the Hudson River. This is absurd.

So Phillip has spoken in the superlative, stated absolutes, and committed formal logical fallacies in this awful commentary.  Let’s dissect it for a while, shall we?

First of all, everyone understands the difficulty of stopping a moving vehicle.  But at some point in the commentary one gets the feeling it must take superman to perform this feat – or Delta Force.  Or Ryan Nash or any other cop in New York (his expansion of the discussion to solutions involving beat cops and the actions by Ryan Nash shows that he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying, but we’ll get to that more in a moment).  My son did this in Iraq (dealt with moving vehicles).  True enough, he didn’t use a pistol to do it, but it doesn’t take superman.

Furthermore, shooting the tires out of moving vehicles does actually happen to bring an end to carnage.  But notice that after Carter paints the most impossible picture imaginable to bring and end to carnage – with physical barriers in place in Iraq, heavily armed Marines ensconced or on patrol, good intelligence as a foundation for their actions, but still all leading to and endless stream of busted and entangled cars and vehicles and bombs – his solution is more police.

Yes, more police.  It takes either Delta Force, or NYPD officer Ryan Nash, because why?  Well, because ordinary citizens cannot be entrusted with firearms.  Why, it would lead to a hail of bullets fired at the wrong thing and mass casualties, no doubt.  Let’s forget about the fact that the NYPD is famous for shooting wildly at targets and then missing.  NYPD fired 84 rounds at the Empire State Building shooter, missing with 70, and injuring numerous other people in the process.  Let’s also not forget that the Stockton Police engaged in an hour-long rolling gun battle involving 32 officers discharging more than 600 rounds, at speeds of at least 120 MPH over 63 miles, with the result that at least one innocent hostage was killed.

Our catalog of negligent discharges by cops, dogs shot by cops, and wrong home SWAT raids makes Phillip’s trust in the police appear juvenile.  But I’ll virtually guarantee that Phillip cannot point to a similar set of incidents where civilian carriers (concealed or open) were responsible for rolling gun battles or the legendary “hail of bullets” we all hear about from “moms against whatever.”  His objection is the chicken little “The sky is falling” warning.  The sky isn’t really falling, no matter what Phillip says.

But there is a larger problem here than this exaggeration by Phillip.  Regardless of what one might think of claims that a concealed carrier might have stopped the carnage (and an open carrier did do just that), Phillip expands his injunction against carriers by stating “Arming bystanders in Manhattan—and hoping they could stop the attack with a lucky shot—could have only killed more people in the crossfire.”

He doesn’t really know any such thing, he just made that up.  But notice how he puts this: “Arming bystanders.”  People don’t voluntarily purchase expensive guns, nor do they go to the range and spend lots of money on ammunition learning to shoot well.  No, by allowing people to carry, we’re “arming bystanders.”  Who’s doing the arming is left a mystery.  Notice the word gaming he’s doing?

Getting past his stilted prose, he argues against carrying firearms generally.  Since someone may not have been able to stop the carnage from a vehicle, no one should be allowed to carry except cops.  This is like saying that since a sharpshooter shovel (forestry spade) is required to trench water mains to the required 16″ freeze line without tearing up too much lawn, construction workers should just throw away all of their other tools regardless of the fact that not all jobs are trenching water mains for homes.  Let’s put this in more formal language.

His syllogism goes like this: (1) Pistols are ineffective against vehicular attacks, (2) Vehicular attacks is terrorism, therefore, (3) Pistols are ineffective against terrorism.  It is the fallacy of the undistributed middle, and either Phillip knows better, or he should.  This is the second commentary in two days from folks at CNAS (Center for a New American Security), Michele Flournoy’s organization and Obama’s favorite think tank, arguing for some form of gun control (the first being written by Adam Routh at CNAS).  So regardless of Phillip’s juvenile trust in the police or his logically fallacious thinking, there may be little more that I can do than recommend the same thing for Phillip that I did for Adam.  These folks are pathologically problematic to themselves and others because of their controller nature.  For Phillip I am recommending a good therapy and support group.  Same as for Adam, you must begin this way.

“I am a controller.  I think I’m smarter than everyone else.  I want to control everything people do.  I want to control what they think, how they behave, how they talk and what they say, what they have, what they do with it, how they spend their money, and what they believe.  I am admitting my problem to you in open honesty.  The only thing I don’t want to control is myself.  People hate me for it.  No one loves me.  I’ve been a controller for ___ years.  Please help me.”

HuffPo:

Kim, 42, lives in China and was traveling on a Cambodian passport. He planned to ship the goggles from Hawaii to China in a box labeled “toys.”

The sale turned out to be a sting operation, and Homeland Security agents arrested Kim a short time later. Federal prosecutors charged him with violating the Arms Export Control Act, which regulates the sale of military equipment, and a judge sentenced him to 40 months in prison after he pled guilty in 2016. A separate smuggling charge was dropped as part of a plea deal.

But Kim’s crime wasn’t buying military-grade technology — it was his attempt to export the equipment without a license. Prosecutors argued that the high-tech military equipment could have ended up in the hands of the North Korean government.

The kind of gear Kim was trying to export was once prohibitively expensive, but low-end night vision gear is now marketed to hunters and can be purchased from sporting goods retailers for under $100. Advanced models can cost over $20,000, but are also perfectly legal and available to buy online. There are a variety of models on the market — goggles, handhelds, devices integrated in rifle scopes. Some models allow users to see in the dark by electronically enhancing the amount of light available, while others use thermal imaging to create a picture from the heat radiating from bodies or objects.

If Kim had an export license, very little would have prevented him from sending the equipment to North Korea, which is a major concern for experts who warn that military-grade night vision gear could fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.

Low-quality night vision equipment is easily available overseas and used by the militaries of most countries. But the high-end equipment available in the U.S. isn’t ― and if exported, that gear could give adversaries similar night vision capabilities to those of the American military, said Adam Routh, a research associate with the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Okay, so let’s not pretend that only the military has the best equipment.  That’s ridiculous and certainly false.  I saw the crap the Marine Corps issued to my son in the Marines, and he usually got better equipment of all kinds at TAGs (Tactical Applications Group) right outside Camp Lejeune than he got in the military, whether boots, tactical vests, or whatever.

Furthermore, every Marine got issued a Colt M4 that had too many rounds through it to be reliable, and he demanded that the action in his SAW be replaced before he deployed to Iraq because of reliability issues related to SAW operation.  They did, and it changed everything for him by giving him a reliable machine gun.

The Marines used ACOGs, we can get ACOGs and any number of other good optics.  I have a Vortex Strike Eagle 6X scope with illuminated reticle and BDC holdover indices for much less than an ACOG costs, and just as good.  The Marines got used and beaten up M4s, and if we’re willing to spend the money, we can get Rock River Arms, Daniel Defense, Head Down, or any number of better and newer rifles.  As those who financially support the military rather than being members of the professional military, we can purchase the very best Night Force scopes if we can afford them.  Virtually every innovation comes from the market, e.g., PMags, lighter MLOK forends, etc.

We can choose to purchase a very good 1911 from Springfield Armory, Smith & Wesson Performance Center, or Dan Wesson (CZ).  For a little more, we can have a Wilson Combat if we can afford it.  We get to choose.  If we want a double stack gun, the sky is the limit and the field is wide open.  And as we’ve discussed so many times before, the way to have the very best equipment for your military is to vet it in the civilian marketplace before you deploy it.  If it fails, ten thousand negative posts and discussion threads will be written on it.  The market is the best gauge of success.

It’s no mistake that the author of the article, Sascha Brodsky, contacted CNAS for his moral support.  This is the group led by Michele Flournoy, and upon whom Obama relied so much during his failed tenure.  And it’s no mistake that they sent the author to supposed expert Adam Routh, who is former military.  He is not stupid, and he knows and understands everything I’m saying.

But note his “concern.”  It’s not for cost or equipment success in the market in order to deploy the best equipment.  It’s for imperial operations overseas.  We need to “own the night,” as they say.  In order to effect open borders and a sociological death wish by ensuring diversity, we need to tamp down on the sources of violence overseas, as if that’s ever going to be possible.  The problem Adam is worried about is a problem created by the globalist elites who want to fundamentally change America.  Otherwise, this isn’t really the problem it’s purported to be with a closed and sealed border and diversity not the ruling factor in American politics.  Adam knows this.  The author, I suspect, is just stupid.

Finally, in addition to the idea that we will always be able to afford better equipment than the military (and I haven’t even brought up for discussion the fact that we simply cannot continue to throw away money on defense as if costs don’t matter), Adam also knows that the ownership of firearms under the second amendment isn’t about hunting or self defense, it’s about the amelioration of tyranny.  Thus, whether weaponry can fall into foreign hands is a secondary concern to the notion that our own standing army has it, and they are potentially a greater danger to us than any foreign army.  At least, the founding fathers saw it that way.  Based on a survey of history and the nature of mankind, that idea isn’t antiquated.

As a postscript, note the misdirect thrown in by the author that feral hogs are considered pests in Texas and thus there are no limits on hunting them.  In fact, there are very few limits on hunting them anywhere, anytime, and the word pest doesn’t even begin to describe the ecological disaster wrought by these awful creatures.

To the author, Sascha, may the turds of a thousand swine lay in your own yard and you need a gun you don’t have to kill them.

To the controllers, you will not be successful trying to control night vision, since it is just cameras and optics.  I suggest instead that you try to find a support and therapy group for your problem.  You can begin like this.  “I am a controller.  I think I’m smarter than everyone else.  I want to control everything people do.  I want to control what they think, how they behave, how they talk and what they say, what they have, what they do with it, how they spend their money, and what they believe.  I am admitting my problem to you in open honesty.  The only thing I don’t want to control is myself.  People hate me for it.  No one loves me.  I’ve been a controller for ___ years.  Please help me.”

Adam, you’re very young to be such a control freak, and you need to consider a support group like this too.

Reddit/r/firearms:

My cat stole a part of my revolver, Ruger replaced it free of charge, paid for shipping both ways, improved the trigger and sent me a pretty nice oiled up cleaning rag free of charge.

Here’s the rundown, after going out shooting I came home and disassembled by revolver – besides the cats I was the only one home. After I disassembled it I went to the bathroom, came back and found my cat on the table – tossed her off and then did a thorough cleaning.

My hammer dog mysteriously disappeared. I searched for that thing for an hour. It even got the point where I tried to shake it out of my cat. GONE. VAPORIZED. F***.

Well, I had heard some great things about Ruger’s customer so I gave them a call. The lady I spoke to on the phone was polite as I embarrassingly explained the situation.

What I expected: 25$ shipping there, 25$ shipping back, 25$-50$ for labor/parts.

What I got: A free of charge shipping label from ruger to send the Revolver in, no charge for labor, no charge for parts and no charge for them to send it back and a sweet cleaning rag to boot.

F***ing wow. To make things better the trigger is better than it was before, and it was pretty nice to begin with for a GP100.

I want to reiterate what just happened, because I’m still pretty stunned by how great the company treated me.

I f***ed up and they fixed it for me free of charge.

Easily one of the best customer service experiences of my life.

Now, some folks would say that this is a good way for Ruger to go out of business.  Those people have probably never run a successful business either.  I had a similar experience with my GP100.  It’s a beautiful firearm, and it’s trigger is as good as any S&W Performance Center trigger I’ve ever shot, in both single and double action.

Well, I’m not going to tell you what I did because it’s embarrassing, but Ruger handled it free of charge and I will never, ever get rid of that GP100.  I’ll keep it the rest of my life, I’ll recommend that other people buy the GP100, and I’m more inclined to get another Ruger product because of the great customer experience from them with the GP100.

So here’s a note to Ruger.  You know how to run a successful business.  Don’t ever change.

Guns.com:

An omnibus sportsmen’s package of legislation in the House that has drawn fire for its plan to curb regulations on suppressors may be reworked.

According to E&E News, an outlet that covers energy and environmental issues, the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, or SHARE Act, is still a priority for Republicans but could see some modifications from the version that passed the House Committee on Natural Resources last month.

Sponsor of the bill, U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., said the most divisive of the 16 sections of the SHARE Act — removing suppressors from National Firearms Act control — may be dropped from the legislation while language addressing bump stocks may be added now that the bill is in a “sort of a cooling off period” after the Las Vegas shooting.

In the days immediately after the event that claimed the lives of 58 and sent hundreds to area hospitals, potential suppressor deregulation was a popular line in the sanddrawn by everyone from Democrats on Capitol Hill to frequent presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, even though the shooter did not use the devices.

In addition to the suppressor language, the bill in its current form would open the 11.7 million acres of land controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to concealed carry and protect travelers crossing state lines with firearms.

Other facets would cut the ATF’s authority to reclassify popular rifle ammunition as “armor piercing” and how regulators classify some shotguns, shells and rifles as “destructive devices” under the NFA. It also allows changes to the Pittman-Robertson Act to expand the allocation of already authorized funds for use in public shooting ranges while limiting restrictions on traditional ammunition and fishing tackle and scaling back protections for gray wolves. “There’s a lot of stuff in there for sportsmen,” Duncan said.

Good Lord.  They never miss a chance to ignore that “shall not be infringed” thing, do they?

No, representative, there isn’t a lot there.  Why is this so hard to understand.  NOT … ONE … MORE … GUN … LAW.  No.  We won’t accept further regulation of anything, and I won’t accept this for that, a trade for a trade.  Most of the rest of my community feels the same way.

Listen to me, Duncan, this is a chance for you to man up and dump your own bill if it becomes a catch-all for further regulation, spending add-ons, and earmarks.  We would respect you if you did that, knowing that you tried your best to give us what we wanted.  Instead, you may have to play hard ball with these demons, pit vipers and gargoyles.

If you want to see what my community has to say about this, see this Reddit/r/firearms discussion thread.  No, we’re not happy, and we’re not in the mood to compromise.

Shooting Illustrated:

High-pressure symptoms are probably the most commonly encountered stop signs our rifles provide. Inspecting spent cases whenever you try new ammo, changing a handload recipe or shooting in drastically different atmospheric conditions can help you spot potential issues. Primers warn us in the form of “blowing” completely out of the brass, cratering (a slightly raised lip around the firing pin indention), flattening out or being pierced by the firing pin. Minor flattening or cratering is not uncommon, especially when firing heavy bullets. Either condition needs to be watched, but neither is cause for alarm so long as it is minor and limited to one ammo type.

But, when multiple factory loads are showing these signs consistently, it is time to have the rifle looked at by a qualified gunsmith or the firearm’s manufacturer. The same goes for blown primers, damage to the case head with semi-automatic rifles or brass flow into a bolt’s ejector-pin hole on any gun: A minor amount is not abnormal for heavy loads, but excessive or consistent damage is cause for concern.

Consistently pierced primers warrant more immediate action. Checking your brass will reveal piercing, but sometimes you get an earlier warning from a blast of gas in your face and the contents of an external magazine littering the ground under your rifle. This is your cue that it is time to stop and find the source of the problem. Piercing can force small discs of primer material into a bolt’s firing-pin hole, eventually causing other problems. A jammed up firing-pin bore can stop pin movement and possibly fix the firing pin in the forward position. That may lead to a “runaway” machine gun, firing every time the bolt slams forward on a fresh round or worse, firing out of battery. A full-auto surprise is bad enough, but a gun that fires out of battery can be catastrophic for the shooter and anyone nearby.

At any sign of primer piercing, stop using the suspect ammunition and ensure the firing pin and bolt are closely inspected for proper function or damage. Just a few pierced primers can erode a firing-pin tip, leading to greater primer-piercing frequency, leading to more firing-pin damage, and so on.

Other harbingers of pressure trouble include bent firing-pin-retaining pins, broken extractor pins, bent or broken extractors, a sudden increase in recoil/muzzle blast/gas without a change in ammo, case-head separation or spent cases that are split or ruptured. In each case, it makes more sense to stop what you are doing and look for the source of the problem(s) than it does to just keep banging away.

Read the rest at Shooting Illustrated.  I would have thought most of this is common sense, but perhaps not.  There are the harder to find issues as well.  I once went shooting where the Range Officer was a gunsmith, and he took interest in the brass my pistol was ejecting.  Close inspection of it, along with me, showed that it was heavily charred on one side, while the rest was clean.  It turned out that my barrel was out of round and had to be replaced.  To this day I thank that man for his attention to detail (if he happens to be reading this).

The point of this is that we all have to be mechanics if we’re going to be good shooters and sportsmen.