Articles by Herschel Smith

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.

News from South Dakota:

That Wednesday morning began with a gruesome discovery: a bloodied goat lie dead on the ground behind Streff’s house, 10 miles south of Custer near Pringle. The owner of Black Hills Goat Dairy, single mother of six, and grandmother to nine, soon discovered it was one of the young bucks she keeps pastured behind her home.

For better than a decade, Streff has milked 38 others, as well as eight dairy cows, making deliveries to Custer on Tuesdays and Rapid City on Fridays. But this was the first animal she had lost to a hungry mountain lion.

“We can see the goats right off the back porch, and we saw one lying on the ground back there,” she said on Tuesday. “We went right out and looked, and it was dead. We also saw a trail of destruction from the chicken coop with a dead cat, a dead duck and a bunch of chicken feathers.”

Streff said she feared the mountain lion would return for more.

“It’s unnerving because I really have a smorgasbord of animals here,” she said. “It’s like Golden Corral. If you don’t stop it, you’ll be at the mercy of the lions. I also have grandchildren out back occasionally, and I was worried.”

Read the rest at Rapid City Journal.  I think’s its awesome that this young man is home-schooled.  I also think it’s awesome he got the dangerous critter.  A man can’t let a dangerous animal destroy his belongings and endanger his family any more than he can let a man do it.  Despite the title of the article, I don’t think this has a thing to do with revenge.

As for fancying himself a hunter, I don’t think so.  This young man has guts, and a lot of patience to boot.  He doesn’t fancy himself a hunter, he knows he’s a hunter.

David Codrea:

“We’re going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily — given the political realities — going to be very modest. . . . [W]e’ll have to start working again to strengthen that law, and then again to strengthen the next law, and maybe again and again. Right now, though, we’d be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal — total control of handguns in the United States — is going to take time. . . . The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition-except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors-totally illegal.  — Richard Harris, A Reporter at Large: Handguns, New Yorker, July 26, 1976, at 53, 58 (quoting Pete Shields, founder of Handgun Control, Inc.)…”

It’s what they want, it’s part of who they are.  This is from a write at Daily Kos, cited by me over four years ago.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

Which is why we opposed universal background checks.  It’s easy to say, “Come and get my guns when you’re feeling froggy.  I’m waiting.”

It’s another thing entirely to work hard to oppose the incremental changes the progressives want to make.  But incrementalism is their game, a game they’ve played successfully for a very long time.  We need to be better at our game, and adopting incrementalism ourselves would mean supporting removal of suppressors from the NFA items list, even if the NFA is left basically intact.  We would like to dismantle the NFA, but the absence of that doesn’t mean we can’t support incremental changes that make things better.

However, it doesn’t mean we have to support things like national reciprocity if that means we give the FedGov power over permitting, training requirements, or national lists of any kind.  We have to be smart about this.

Fox45:

Ohio (WKEF/WRGT) – The Buckeye Firearms Association has come out against a potential ban of bump stock devices that investigators in Las Vegas say Stephen Paddock used to modify the semi-automatic rifles to fire rapidly into the crowd.

The device fell under scrutiny after videos of the mass shooting started a debate about the rapid gunfire heard.

An association spokesperson said because they don’t change the actual functionality of the gun, they should not be banned.

“With a bump stock or a slide fire you hold your finger still and you move the rifle back and forth to fire it,” said Joe Eaton, region leader for the Buckeye Firearms Association. “So it really is the same thing each press of the trigger results in one bullet being fired, does not change any of the mechanics.”

The announced stance from Buckeye Firearms came one day after the National Rifle Association (NRA) said bump stocks should be “subject to additional regulations,” after lawmakers proposed a ban of the device.

“Since they don’t change the function of the firearm it is still a semi-automatic, one bullet with one press of the trigger, there would be no reason to have them outlawed,” Eaton said.

Semi-automatic weapons are legal to sell and buy.

Eaton said while the bump stock changes the action it takes to fire a bullet, it remains a semi-automatic weapon.

“I guess the only advantage I could see is by moving your finger a bunch of times it could get fatigued after a while, where the bump fire stock would eliminate that fatigue,” Eaton said.

Eaton also said he doesn’t think a bump stock ban wouldprevent a similar attack.

“The fact that this time he chose a semi-automatic rifle and he happened to choose another accessory for it again, unfortunately is just more noise in the talk about what needs to be the talk in why is there this much violence out there,” Eaton said.

Good for Buckeye Firearms Association.  I agree that this introduced more noise, and it’s not noise that we need to coddle by stipulating agreement with it.  The NRA chose poorly.

As I’ve also said, “I cannot be convinced that the shooter who landed all of this crap in our lap would have been less effective if he had aimed and fired in a controlled manner than with the bump fire stock, if in fact such a device was used.”

Reddit/r/firearms has a discussion thread on Hickok45 coming out in defense of the NRA in their apparent statement that bump fire stocks need further regulation.

I’ve seen a precipitous drop in prices for both Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms products since their apparent siding with the gun controllers in Illinois.  Gun owners never forget, and seldom forgive (S&W might be an exception, but even then not for some).

Hickok45 talks about potential haters who won’t like his defense of the NRA, and I’m no hater.  I will continue to check his videos every now and then.  But I’ll remark that it would have been just as easy for him to have stayed silent on the matter and let this blow over.  The redittors don’t like the fact that they came to his defense when Google tried to demonetize and even ban Hickok45 from YouTube, and they feel that he let them down on this one.

Or Slide Fire stock.  Hey, the dude can hardly hold onto that M203.  Hey, I suddenly want a slide fire stock if it comes with a free grenade launcher.

The internet is swirling with possible scenarios for things that could have happened.  I’ve seen a lot of them and won’t rehearse them here.  It isn’t necessary to rehearse what might have been, what could have been, what’s possible, and what is feasible, in order to understand that the government narrative is infeasible.

For me there are two pieces of evidence that point conclusively to the fact that this didn’t go down the way the FBI says it went down.  Everyone who has operated guns for a long while, like I have, had to ask themselves the following question: “If God forbid I decided to perpetrate something evil like this, what would that room have looked like when I was finished?”

The answer for most knowledgeable and sensible people is this: “Not like that.”  Not at all like that.  After firing so many rounds from rifles, the curtains, my face, my clothing, the carpet, the bedding, and just about everything else, would have been so covered with carbon and lead deposits that the dominant colors would have been black and grey in any photograph.  I know this from range time, and you do too.

Moreover, I probably would have been wearing eye protection, as I know what it’s like to shoot with brass, lead, carbon and other such things flying around.  That room looked like the maid had just been there and cleaned everything but the body lying on the floor.  No carbon, very little brass (there would have been a mountain of brass, along with spent casings everywhere), and no flesh from the head penetration to the shooter when he was killed.

The second piece of evidence for me is even more convincing.  Watch this video, and listen and watch extra carefully at about the 12:00 mark.

While I don’t agree that the video demonstrates that any of these firearms are belt-fed or crew serve weapons, or suppressed, there is no mistaking one fact.  He points out a moment in the video where two or more shooters must be shooting.  There is no other way to interpret that video.  Many of the suppositions in other posts, entries, discussion forums and threads have multiple explanations or plausible alternative possibilities.  This one doesn’t.  There are at least two shooters at that moment.

This all means one thing.  Fedgov is lying to you about what happened.  I don’t know what happened that night, and as I said I would need to be wrapped into the process to know (autopsy reports, crime scene access, time to study all of the videos, opportunity to interview the eyewitnesses, and so on).  But I don’t have to tell you what happened in order to tell you that the government account didn’t happen.

It didn’t go down the way they said it went down, with one lone shooter firing bump fire stock AR-15s from one vantage point for no reason under the sun except that he lost gambling money (or whatever).  Their story is a lie.  Hopefully the truth will come out, but I’m not holding my breath.

NYT:

The National Rifle Association on Thursday endorsed tighter restrictions on devices that allow a rifle to fire bullets as fast as a machine gun — a rare, if small, step for a group that for years has vehemently opposed any new gun controls.

Twelve of the rifles the Las Vegas gunman, Stephen Paddock, had in a high-rise hotel suite when he opened fire on a crowd on Sunday were outfitted with “bump stocks,” devices that allow a semiautomatic rifle to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, which may explain how he was able to shoot so quickly, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds of others. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has ruled that bump stocks do not violate laws that tightly limit ownership of machine guns, and some lawmakers have called for them to be banned.

The bureau should revisit the issue and “immediately review whether these devices comply with federal law,” the N.R.A. said in a statement released Thursday. “The N.R.A. believes that devices designed to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.”

Ignoring the small issues of “shall not be infringed,” the NRA caves on bump fire stocks, as surely as most of the senators and congresscritters will cave, many of whom will have high marks from the NRA.

The NRA is still conflicted as to whether it wants to be a hunter and sportsman organization of a second amendment and gun rights organization.  As I mentioned, I don’t have one, and consider them to be mostly a novelty and range toy.  I would never put one on a personal defense weapon, accuracy and control being too important for such things for me to consider a high rate of fire as more important, especially near or around other people.

That said, I cannot be convinced that the shooter who landed all of this crap in our lap would have been less effective if he had aimed and fired in a controlled manner than with the bump fire stock, if in fact such a device was used.

The point to be taken here is not that of the bump fire stocks (the senate and congress is always looking for ways to further regulate your rights, even if not constitutionally allowed).  Bump fire stocks are merely the latest incarnation of the boogeyman.  Tomorrow it will be something else.  The point is that there is a world of difference between knowing that you’ll lose a fight, and actually going on record stating that you agree with your enemy.

The NRA.  Always squishy, never completely fulfilling their stated purpose, and always disappointing.

Daily Gun Story:

An elderly Delaware man stopped a home invasion when he wrestled with four burglars and ultimately grabbed his rifle and fired a single shot.

Tyson B. Beckett, 26, Anthony Long, 18, Brandon D. Satchell, 25, and Joshua T. Walker, 29, have all been arrested after they were confronted by an elderly man as they attempted to enter his home, according to the Milford Beacon.

The elderly man fought off one of the home invaders, but eventually found his rifle and fired a round into the floor, which was just enough to scare off the four alleged burglars.

They were eventually caught.  I’m no fan of shooting warning shots, and it would have been tactically better for him had he discharged the firearm at them.

Either way, it’s always nice to see reports of guns being used for their intended purpose.