Articles by Herschel Smith

How awesome would it be for Paul Nehlen to unseat long-time gun controller Paul Ryan?  I guess we can wish, and hope and pray.

Time.com.

On the issue of gun control or reform, there should be some middle ground. Gun owners and 2nd Amendment supporters need to give some, as do anti-gun folks. Civilians should not be able to own military-style weapons. I do believe Americans should have the right to own weapons for home self-defense and for hunting, but there are too many weapons available to civilians that were originally designed for the battlefield. And as Las Vegas shows, once again, there are too many Americans willing to turn civilian life into a battlefield. I think what worries some gun owners is who decides what is military, and what is for sp ort. I am deciding for myself.

My action may not change anything, but the truth is, if my semi-automatic battle rifle were stolen, or fell into the wrong hands, it would be devastating. So to put my money where my mouth is, I am getting rid of mine and donating it to a law enforcement agency.

The gun I’m getting rid of is called an M1A Springfield Scout, or Civilian M14. It shoots a 308 or 7.62-51 NATO. It is a semi-automatic and can send bullets 1,000 yards (700, accurately) as fast as I can pull the trigger. It has a 10- and 20-round clip. You could probably get an even bigger one.

It was designed for the military in the mid-1950s and is still used by special forces. It is much more powerful and accurate than an AR-15 or an AK47. I purchased it because it is a great gun and the truth is I’m still a boy at heart (and mind, too). I convinced myself I needed it because — Hey, there a lot of crazy people with weapons out there that I may need to defend myself from. I also told myself I needed to kill wild hogs. I’ve only seen wild hogs once. I have used the rifle to hunt deer but I have a bolt-action rifle for the same purpose, which is all anyone needs for deer hunting.

After the shooting happened in Las Vegas and the details began to come out, I knew this man had to have a weapon like mine. I know I don’t need this rifle, and neither does anyone else. Selling it would be hypocritical because it would go back into gun circulation. I plan to give mine to the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks — the game wardens in my state. It is a very expensive gun — it cost me $1,300, not counting the scope — so this is not a particularly easy thing to do. But it will mean I’m not a part of the problem, at least in my mind. My plan is to put any tax write-off towards charitable giving.

I will keep my other guns for hunting and self-defense. Some people will say I’ve overreacted, others will say I have not gone far enough. Getting rid of and eventually banning assault rifles and other military-style guns will not end the violence, but it will help.

No it won’t.  All this means is that you’ve decided to rid yourself of the best means of defending your family.  In the event of multiple home invaders, you’ve made the decision to let your family perish because of emotional distress you sustain caused by watching the television.

Oh, and here’s a suggestion, Fudd.  Call it a magazine, not a clip.  At least you’ll sound like a pseudo-educated Fudd.

I haven’t weighed in with any detail on the Las Vegas Shooting since this post.  I’m not ignoring the published reports, nor am I ignoring the notes readers send to me.  But I’m waiting until I have clarity and enough information to make a substantial article.  In the mean time, there are a number of things that make you go … hmm …

Like this report telling us that a key witness in the Las Vegas shootings “committed suicide.”

And this report linked by WRSA (and also sent by readers).

Please keep me in the loop and continue to mail important revelations to me.

Reader David Dietz sends this from Recoil.

Amid ongoing reports of deteriorating sales in the black rifle market, firearms manufacturer Daniel Defense laid off an undisclosed number of employees. According to conversations with those affected and social media posts, on Friday, Sept. 29 and Monday, Oct. 2., the firearms manufacturer eliminated approximately 100 full-time positions.

A former employee of Daniel Defense affected by the layoffs said, “This was very unexpected. All of us were handed a blanket packet that explained everything. The paperwork didn’t even have my name on it. All they said about my job was that my position was being eliminated. There was no severance package, we were just fired.”

The scope of the layoff is unknown, but firsthand sources including current and recently laid off employees speaking under the condition of anonymity said anywhere from a third to a half of the company’s workforce was affected.

Speaking about the terms of employment at Daniel Defense and the layoff, one laid off employee said, “We all had to sign a non-compete. I think the non-compete I signed was for 2 years. The outgoing talk and paperwork didn’t specify the non-compete being lifted. It’s unfortunate for a lot of people who don’t have skills outside of the industry.”

According to former employees, Daniel Defense’s post-termination non-compete clause is contained in a standard employment agreement employees sign as they are brought aboard. It is used to protect the employer’s interests by preventing employees from working for a competing company for a certain amount of time, stipulated in the non-compete clause.

When asked about the existence of a post-termination non-compete agreement, the terms, and whether it will be enforced, officials from Daniel Defense refused the opportunity to comment.

Well, Daniel Defense has a right to force employees to sign non-compete agreements as a condition of employment.  But this is a shame for the former employees of Daniel Defense, who only know how to do one thing.  Hopefully they can keep their machinist skills up-to-date enough to return to the workforce when the agreement has been fulfilled.

On the other hand, one has to question the wisdom of Daniel Defense.  If they were prepared to throw good money after Super Bowl commercials (and apparently they were), and if their rifles are almost priced out of the market, and they are, then it seems wise to cut costs and MSRP, tighten the belt, and even cut employee salaries in an attempt to stay afloat.

This way (with the history of the non-compete agreement preventing employees from seeking other similar gainful employment), it would seem to me hard to hire good employees in the future.

This stupid article with disconnected thoughts and poor composition was the occasion of my reading today, and nothing stood out as important to me except this tweet from Marc Thiessen (former Bush speech writer and sometimes TV commentator).

My twitter feed is filled with NRA members saying they agree on bump stock ban. Time for Congressional Republicans to lead on this.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Tom Brokaw at NBC:

I am a gun owner and have been since I was 12, growing up in South Dakota. I still have an assortment of shotguns and rifles, all used for sporting purposes.

My son-in-law, a New Yorker, loves to come to our Montana ranch and with Doug (our expert marksman manager) target shoot a variety of legal weapons.

During the hunting season Doug provides a wide variety of game for the ranch menus.

But, in recent years, my favorite gun store in Big Timber, Montana, began stockpiling the ever-more-popular military-inspired weapons alongside those used to hunt game and defend livestock. They sell the AR-15, modeled on the military version — except that it is configured for semi-, not full, automatic fire.

But Google “convert AR-15 to automatic” and you’ll find all kinds of ways of altering a semi-automatic weapon to fire more rapidly — and it appears that’s exactly what Stephen Paddock did in Las Vegas by purchasing and using “bump-stock” devices.

And while Congress is now considering whether to make bump-stocks illegal, it’s not enough to make the conversion illegal. Who will catch the change artists?

The larger question we need to be asking ourselves is: Why do we have all-but-military-grade weaponry available to civilians in the first place?

Yeah, Yeah: The Second Amendment. But the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to bear any arms you please. Fully automatic weapons have long been illegal to buy, as have bazookas and artillery pieces our troops take to war.

All of our rights have conditions. That’s how we maintain a civil society.

I am a journalist, protected by the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law,” it says, except that all journalists know they cannot, among other acts, deliberately libel a person or falsely shout fire in a crowded theater without legal consequences.

It is time for civility to reign — and madness to be snuffed out.

It isn’t enough for these statists to go after bump stocks, which action I oppose, by the way (i.e., making them illegal).  They have to go after “military grade” weapons as well, meaning modern sporting rifles.

Did you catch the reference to “sporting,” and hunting, and supporting the second amendment with limitations?  The only thing he left out was being a life NRA member.

How disconnected can these guys get?  Doesn’t he know that the gun rights folks will lampoon his idiotic essay as written by a Fudd?  Instead of Googling “convert AR-15 to automatic,” why don’t you Google “Fudd,” Tom.

And you can come after our modern sporting rifles and all-but-military-grade weaponry whenever you feel froggy.  I’m waiting.  We’ll see how civil your society is when you try that.

Reading National Review Online has become drudgery, with their never-Trumpism and pseudo-progressivism just remarkably wearisome.  Most times I almost can’t stand it.  But occasionally something comes across my desk that needs to be addressed.

Beltway boob Robert Verbruggen waxes know-nothing on bump stocks.

There is no good reason to make fully automatic weapons or their equivalents generally available to the public. The Second Amendment doesn’t require it: The Supreme Court’s Heller ruling took care to explain why it didn’t apply to weapons that are “dangerous or unusual” or not in “common use,” including “M-16 rifles and the like.” This is strongly supported by previous Supreme Court precedent (the “common use” standard comes from 1939’s U.S. v. Miller). It is also consistent with history: The Heller Court explained that there is a strong tradition of prohibiting the carrying of especially dangerous weapons, and that “the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty.” There may be an argument that the Court got it wrong — that the people are to be allowed any kind of firearm that exists, all the better for resisting tyranny — but few constitutional rights are so broad in scope as to completely override any threat to public safety they pose. And, if nothing else, imposing such a broad interpretation is a good way to get the Second Amendment repealed.

Self-defense is not a compelling reason for bump stocks to be easily available, either. Outside of a war zone, one would not fire a fully automatic weapon at an intruder indoors or carry one in the streets late at night. Full autos are also not hunting weapons, or tools suited to pinpoint-accurate target shooting. About all that can be said for them is that they’re fun to shoot, at least for those who can afford the copious amounts of ammunition they burn at dramatically reduced accuracy. That would be enough if the case against them were weak, but it’s not. Weapons equipped with these devices let off far more rounds, far more quickly, than do the semiautomatic weapons commonly used for hunting and self-defense. Unleashed on a crowd, even from hundreds of yards away, they can produce unprecedented casualties.

The second amendment was written by men who risked their livelihoods, their wealth, their fortunes, their lives, and the lives of their families to overthrow the government under which they lived.  They used cannon when they had them, and would have been quite happy to have used semi- or fully-automatic weapons.  To argue differently is idiotic, with the founders who wrote the very amendment under debate having seen the bloodshed, lose of life, loss of limb, and pain they had witnessed during the war of independence.

Public safety wasn’t the apex of their concerns, and in addition to being a war against England, the war of independence was a civil war.  In fact, it was primarily a civil war, and would have been over in a month had all of the colonists been patriots.  As far as the “unprecedented casualties, if the shooter could have gotten fertilizer byproducts into the hotel – and one may conclude that he could have given the large cache of weapons and ammunition we carried to his rooms – he could have caused significant casualties, and even more than his shooting if he had been able to get explosives and shrapnel under the stage or in or near the concert that night.  Moreover, I have argued and will continue to argue that if he had used semi-automatic fire and aimed with good optics, the casualty count could have been much higher.  So others argue as well who know more than I do.

What if the Fedgov going to do, outlaw fertilizer?  Bump fire stocks can be mimicked with rubber bands, a fact that beltway boob apparently doesn’t know since he likely doesn’t even know anyone who owns a gun, much less make it to the flyover states to learn about the people anywhere besides the beltway.  Are we going to outlaw rubber bands too?  Dismissing rubber bands, since that is a silly alternative to either slide fire stocks or fully automatic, is he going to outlaw people like Jerry Miculek who can fire (accurately, mind you) virtually as fast as fully automatic with his finger?  Many professional 3-gun competitors can do that.

My own son Daniel has said to me many times that he never needed automatic capabilities in the Marines (he was a SAW gunner, but carried an M4 on occasion).  The Marines had shot so many rounds down range, and in close quarters battle training, that they could put three rounds into an enemy as fast as the three-round burst on the M4.  Beltway boob is just looking for someone or something to blame, and it doesn’t bother me one bit that the progressives are after my rights.  My rights come from God, not the second amendment, and I’ll defend them as such.

Now on to a more daffy commentary today at NR by Michael Brendan Dougherty.

Alert readers (and listeners) will know that on a philosophical level, I’m a squish on the gun stuff. I find it embarrassing that the United States is “exceptional” in the amount of violence its people inflict on one another, and themselves, with handguns. And I’m skeptical about the utility of an unqualified right to acquire weapons of such lethality. My colleague Kevin Williamson says that the right to bear arms makes us citizens and not subjects. And I agree, up to a point …

[ … ]

Sometimes people put Schermer’s argument more baldly. They ask something like this: “Do you really think Bubba in camo gear hiding in the forest is going to take on the U.S. military? The U.S. military has nuclear weapons!”

Who exactly do you think has stymied the U.S. in Afghanistan for 16 years? The Taliban is made up of Afghan Bubbas. The Taliban doesn’t need to defeat nuclear weapons, though they are humiliating a nuclear power for the second time in history. They use a mix of Kalashnikovs and WWII-era bolt-action rifles. Determined insurgencies are really difficult to fight, even if they are only armed with Enfield rifles and you can target them with a TOW missiles system that can spot a cat in the dark from two miles away. In Iraq, expensive tanks were destroyed with simple improvised explosives.

He goes on to discuss the moral costs of such warfare against its own citizens.  But this all misses the point, and while the U.S. military goes about its business preparing for fifth generation warfare, they do so because they haven’t learned how to win fourth generation warfare and are planning their next engagement being a near-peer.

Do you suppose this would look like great land armies getting into formation at the edges of great fields of battle and marching towards each other?  What do you think such a messy civil war in America would look like?  Bubba would be wearing a Ghillie suit, shooting a bolt action rifle, or a modern sporting rifle, and after the shot you will never hear from him again – until the next one.  And you’ll never catch him.  Police will have to decide what side to take, and if they take the wrong one, they will be dealt with in the middle of the night when they take their dogs out to pee in the backyard.

Insurgent will be mixed with progressive statist, and there will be no SEAL teams or nuclear weapons to which you can turn because you won’t know one from another.  There will be nowhere to target a nuclear weapon, and nowhere for a SEAL team to raid.  All of their close quarters battle preparations will be for naught when their own families are in peril due to civil warfare.  These aren’t Afghan tribesmen you’re dealing with.  These are engineers, mechanics, fabricators and welders, chemists, and the world’s best machinists.  If you think Afghanistan was rough, wait to see what civil war would look like in America.

If you have ever said something like, “You can’t win because the government has a land army and nuclear weapons,” here is the moral of the story for you.  You are an idiot.  You haven’t thought through this well enough, and you need to see the second amendment for what it really is.  It is the best guarantor of peace because tyranny is mutually assured destruction.  The statists know that, or else America will suffer the consequences.

However, given the insular life of the metro-riders inside the beltway, I wouldn’t expect anything else out of National Review.  Behind, out of touch, and out of commission.

TPM:

“You said earlier that you would be willing to allow a clean bill in Congress that bans or regulates bump stocks without requiring more, broader gun control to be attached to the bill,” Jake Tapper said. “Is universal background checks, closing the so-called gun show loophole, requiring background checks for private sales, is that the next step for people in your philosophical camp and Senate?”

“It should be the next step, in large part because it is the most popularly accepted change. And it has the biggest effect,” Murphy said. “So yes, that would be the clear next step. That should be our North Star as we try to figure out how to proceed.”

Never forget they want you in a registry.  It’s their “North Star,” their “touchstone,” the penultimate inflection of their control desires.  Just before illegality.

Chicago Tribune:

In the early 1930s, with gangsters like John Dillinger mowing down his enemies with machine guns on the streets, Congress held hearings on a sweeping proposal to severely restrict firearm sales.

The testimony of one man — now totally forgotten — stood out.

“I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” said Karl T. Frederick, according to a transcript of the hearings. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

Well then, thank goodness he’s dead and unable to effect his gun control schemes any more.  Remember this?

In the colonies, availability of hunting and need for defense led to armament statues comparable to those of the early Saxon times. In 1623, Virginia forbade its colonists to travel unless they were “well armed”; in 1631 it required colonists to engage in target practice on Sunday and to “bring their peeces to church.” In 1658 it required every householder to have a functioning firearm within his house and in 1673 its laws provided that a citizen who claimed he was too poor to purchase a firearm would have one purchased for him by the government, which would then require him to pay a reasonable price when able to do so. In Massachusetts, the first session of the legislature ordered that not only freemen, but also indentured servants own firearms and in 1644 it imposed a stern 6 shilling fine upon any citizen who was not armed.

The earlier NRA didn’t agree with the Christian heritage of our country, which was to carry all the time, everywhere.

The Alaskan remarks thusly.

Had he been a precision sniper, given the target rich environment and the ability to follow up shots in such an environment, his gruesome tally would’ve been much deadlier, I believe.

The manner in which he carried out his mission seems to have been weighed more heavily towards the political sphere and the “shock” of it all, than the actual “targeted” killing of individuals, as would have been the the case if optics and precision shooting had been the tactic.

Bump stocks just aided in his mission of “shock and awe,” which really seems to have been his motive to his madness.

I believe so too, and that’s just the point made by Mark Quimby (via Codrea).  I believe that this is the Mark Quimby here.