Articles by Herschel Smith

The Daily Caller:

You’d think the “caliber wars” would wind down, the firearms community would just accept that people like different things and be okay with it. It’s the adult thing to do and frankly makes more sense than pointlessly arguing over things that don’t matter.

For some reason, the .45 ACP and the .30-06 just can’t be left well enough alone. Every few weeks, there’s a new article in a gun magazine, on a website or something decrying one or the other. The 9mm is better, one might say, or the .308 or 6.5 Creedmoor doesn’t recoil as badly and is more accurate at 1,000 yards says another.

Folks, neither the .45 ACP nor the .30-06 are going anywhere and it is just time we all dropped it.

Look:

If there’s anything approaching truth regarding the efficacy of a bullet on a living target, be it a human assailant or a critter that you’re looking to eat/put on the wall, it’s that there are established “will always work” rounds. However, which one you use doesn’t matter all that much; accuracy and bullet design matter more than the rest of the ballistic data sheet.

Sure, 9x19mm produces less recoil. Follow-up is faster and it’s easier for more people to shoot. It’s also cheaper and subcompact pistols chambered in that round tend to work a bit better than those in .45. If it’s a 9mm, .40, or .45 ACP pistol you put in an appendix carry holster or other concealed carry holster, it really doesn’t matter; what matters is if you carry good rounds and can hit your mark.

Much the same is true of the trusty old .30-06. It’s a long-action round, ruling out compact, short-form rifles which some people can’t live without. While recoil is subjective, the .30-06 is a bit stouter than the trendy cartridges of today like .300 Blackout, 6.5 Creedmoor and .308/7.62 NATO.

And you know what?

It doesn’t matter at all.

The fact is that .45 ACP is a very effective self-defense round. With good hollowpoints and good placement, it will put down a bad guy just as well as a well-placed 9mm round will. Some people find they aren’t as accurate with a 9mm or a .40, so who cares? It works for them.

Well, some people may say that about the .45 ACP, but some others (me) might say that they don’t like the snappy muzzle with 9mm and the slow recovery time to a good sight picture compared to the “push” of the .45 ACP.

Shoot whatever you shoot well.  But I do have one nit.  I’ll rewrite the sentence for you: “With good hollowpoints and good placement, it will put down a bad guy just as well as better than a well-placed 9mm round will.”

There.  Fixed it for you.

CNN:

No one will bear the burden of those tragedies more heavily than our police. Under the CCRA, cops would have to patrol our streets surrounded by hidden, loaded guns. They would have no way to confirm whether an out-of-state permit is legitimate and no database to check on the status of those permits. And because many states don’t even require permits to carry, the NYPD would have to take armed individuals at their word.

So police officers are against this bill. Prosecutors, like me, are against this bill. Who would actually be for this bill? I can offer one answer: ISIS.

I’m glad he brought up ISIS.  It’s Vance who is aligned with ISIS, not gun owners.  Remember?  One of the first things ISIS did when they took any area was to outlaw firearm ownership and confiscate them.  ISIS is big on gun control, just like New York City officials.

As for turning New York into the Wild, Wild West, I don’t think anybody has anything to worry about from concealed handgun carriers.  It’s the NYPD we all have to worry about.  Given their < 20% hit rate, if they’re shooting at you, then you don’t have much to fear.  If they aren’t but are just shooting, then find a hole, crawl in it, and pray.  Or run.

On the other hand, you can just stay out of shitholes like NYC like I do.

No, I’m not kidding.

If you purchase a rifle with an embedded cant indicator level from a source other than McRee’s Precision … it is not authorized by McRee’s and your may be liable for infringing McRee’s patents.

Oh dear.  Will gun manufacturers never learn?  The quickest way to make the entire gun community hate you is to threaten them.  It’s even faster than supporting the gun controllers in your state to get special treatment, viz. RRA and Springfield.  They didn’t threaten the infringers, but the people who purchased the products themselves.  Good Lord.

Does anyone at firearms manufacturing companies know how to think one step ahead?  Perhaps they should play chess for a while to learn the science of cause and effect.

Via WRSA, Brent Bozell:

There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Put them together. They are the swamp.

Just as Republicans have the power to enact the agenda they’ve pledged in toto, so too do they now own the federal government, in toto. It’s no longer Obamacare. It’s GOPcare. It’s no longer crazy liberal Democratic spending. It’s crazy liberal Republican spending. It’s no longer socialist Democratic Party taxation, it’s socialist Republican Party taxation. All the legislation authorizing all these programs, all the graft, all the waste, all the obscenity, all the immorality, and where Planned Parenthood is concerned, all the killing — all of it is now formally authored by the Republican Party.

Ayup.  Nailed it.  And yet the GOP goes blithely along, thinking that all will be well.  Collapse is coming, a collapse in civility, a collapse of the economy, a collapse of order, and a collapse of liberty when the deep state begins to sense that it is losing control of things.

Be prepared.

Active Response Training:

You’ll notice that I didn’t provide any expansion data.  That’s because NONE of the .380 or .38 special rounds expanded at all!  All of the bullets except for the two 9mm rounds could have been reloaded and fired.  They had no expansion whatsoever.

They made that statement after testing .38 Spl, .380 ACP and 9mm in gelatin covered with several layers of denim.  But here’s the problem to me.  This data doesn’t comport with what Lucky Gunner found at all.  It’s not even close.

If you take a look at Lucky Gunner’s testing protocol and test results, which were performed under tight control and strict boundary conditions, it’s clear that there is indeed expansion of most PD rounds regardless of barrel length.  Mind you, some do better than others, and it’s also clear that the higher velocity imparted with longer barrels helps.  But I just don’t see anything in the testing done by Active Response Training that even comes close to what Lucky Gunner found.

But regarding Lucky Gunner’s test results, I will offer up a few comments.  First of all, the venerable .45 ACP, which I shoot, does well just about regardless of barrel length or ammunition type.  Second, there are some good performers and some weak performers for every caliber.  But on the average, the high performers seem to be Speer Gold Dot, Winchester PD rounds and Federal PD rounds (such as Hydra Shok).

Finally, I don’t really think anyone who ever gets shot with a .38 Spl round is prepared to call the gun that shoots it a “mouse gun,” even if it has a 2″ barrel.

American Hunter:

Comparing Hornady’s Precision Hunter ammunition, the .30-06 will deliver about 9 percent better performance than the 308. The trade off—there’s always a trade off—is this performance increase comes with a 16 percent increase in recoil. In other words, with what is arguably the best big game hunting ammo you can buy, the .30-06 gives you about half what you pay—suffer—for.

Some might point out the .30-06 will handle heavier bullets. True, but given our modern projectiles, 200 or 220 grain .30 caliber bullets offer no advantage. Back in Whelen’s and your grandpa’s day, this was not the case. At .30-06 velocities the weakly constructed 180-grain or lighter bullets of that time, shed lots of weight during penetration. 200 or 220-grain bullets didn’t because they impacted at slower velocities, thus penetrating deeper.

With bullets like the Partition, Triple Shock, AccuBond and ELD-X, those weighing less than 200 grains offer a better ballistic balance. This is why 200 grain or heavier .30-06 ammunition is almost as rare as flying frogs. Modern projectiles have even improved the performance of smaller cartridges. They can now hang with the ’06 and not whack you near as hard.

Consider the 6.5 Creedmoor. Comparing similar bullet weights, the Creedmoor will shoot flatter and just as hard as the ought-six. But, the .30-06 will kick 34 percent harder. Though some will argue you gotta get used to recoil if you’re going to hunt big game, it’s an established fact, the harder a rifle kicks, the more difficult it is to shoot with consistent precision.

Well, some of this is true, and the 6.5 Creedmoor is a very interesting cartridge, especially because it is a necked-down .308 and therefore a short action cartridge and capable of semiautomatic operation.  But I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about here.

He’s focused on recoil and the ability to shoot it well.  But according to this logic, there is no reason for the .300 Win Mag to exist in North America.  And he’s being savaged in the comments.

What do readers think?

Guns.com has the scoop.  I haven’t seen any reviews of the gun yet.  I’d like to see some serious, critical work to vet this gun and others made by Diamondback.

But the great thing is that their rifles – including this 6.5 Creedmoor AR – are less than $1300.  That’s right.  An AR 6.5 Creedmoor < $1300.  Competition is a wonderful thing.  Diamondback is selling their rifles for under $1300, and that includes their rifles that handle larger cartridges than the 5.56mm (e.g., 6.5 Creedmoor and .308, which are both still short-action rounds).

If you are a firearms manufacturer who fabricates ARs, you seriously need to recalibrate.  You need to ask yourselves if you really want to be in the business of manufacturing ARs if your MSRP is significantly more than $1300.  This is the sweet spot.  Because if a prospective buyer can buy yours for more, or a Diamondback for less, he must ask himself whether it’s wise to throw away his money like that in order to have yours.  The calculus is simple, and you absolutely must begin to match the cost of the least expensive manufacturer, or if you don’t, you’ll have to find a niche market because of some features or quality you have that others don’t.  Where do you think the real financial margin is in this calculus?

Diamondback Firearms can be found here.

David Codrea:

“The Alt-left does not even hide their violent threats against conservatives,” Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit noted Thursday. “Of course, you will never see this reported by the #FakeNews media.”

“The patriot prayer rally is a nazi white supremacist event,” so-called alt-left “leader” Jordan Towers threatened. “I’ll be their [sic] to crush some nazi [sic] skulls.”

Read the rest of it.  I disagree with one of the commenters who doesn’t believe there can be such a thing as civil war.  “I don’t believe we are headed toward civil war. The Leftists can’t be controlled by their leaders well enough to accomplish that,” he says.

This ignores the fact that America is already at civil war.  The controllers are people like George Soros, the Clintons, the two generals in the White House (Kelly, McMaster), and all of the three-letter agencies, or in other words, the deep state.  Senators, Congressmen, Antifa, BLM and the other participants (e.g., college professors and students everywhere) are doing exactly as they have been taught and told.

The control thus far is perfect, lacking nothing at all in intelligence, deep state operatives, logistics, money or any other resource.  It may not look like civil war to this commenter, but it is.  It’s 4th generation warfare, or some version of it, and it’s working so far.

Richmond-Times Dispatch:

In an interview, Crompton falsely said the Confederate states seceded because of heavy taxation and “tyranny” by the federal government, not slavery. “They were overtaxing the South and the South got fed up with it,” he said. “Slavery was not a factor.”

Let’s cover this one more time for good measure.  The thinking in the South was based on who did the thinking.  If you were among the more educated, such as preachers and pastors, you would have seen the war between the states as a theological conflict.  My former professor, Dr. C. Gregg Singer, stated that “The Southern Presbyterian Church saw the war as a humanistic revolt against Christianity and the world and life view of the Scriptures” (A Theological Interpretation of American History, 86-87).

R. J. Rushdoony, citing Benjamin Palmer, stated that “Indeed an important aspect of the Civil War was the Unitarian statist drive for an assault on its Calvinist enemy, the South…  The gathering conflict (South Carolina had moved as early as November 16, 1860) Palmer saw as forces of a false theology, of atheism and of the French Revolution, of the religion of humanity, in short, arrayed against a Christian people dedicated to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to Constitutional government.  These forces sought to frame “mischief by law” (The Nature of the American System, 58-59).

Men like they cite – Palmer, Plumer, Thornwell, Dabney – were in the pulpits or seminaries informing men how to think.  Being “churched” today may not be a thing like it was 150 years ago, but the place for philosophy was in the pulpit.  On the other hand, on a more pedestrian level, there was the burdensome taxation and tariffs set in place by the Congress.

In addition to generating revenue, a tariff hurts the ability of foreigners to sell in domestic markets. An affordable or high-quality foreign good is dangerous competition for an expensive or low-quality domestic one. But when a tariff bumps up the price of the foreign good, it gives the domestic one a price advantage. The rate of the tariff varies by industry.

If the tariff is high enough, even an inefficient domestic company can compete with a vastly superior foreign company. It is the industry’s consumers who ultimately pay this tax and the industry’s producers who benefit in profits.

As early as the Revolutionary War, the South primarily produced cotton, rice, sugar, indigo and tobacco. The North purchased these raw materials and turned them into manufactured goods. By 1828, foreign manufactured goods faced high import taxes. Foreign raw materials, however, were free of tariffs.

Thus the domestic manufacturing industries of the North benefited twice, once as the producers enjoying the protection of high manufacturing tariffs and once as consumers with a free raw materials market. The raw materials industries of the South were left to struggle against foreign competition.

Because manufactured goods were not produced in the South, they had to either be imported or shipped down from the North. Either way, a large expense, be it shipping fees or the federal tariff, was added to the price of manufactured goods only for Southerners. Because importation was often cheaper than shipping from the North, the South paid most of the federal tariffs.

Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. Between 1830 and 1850, 30,000 miles of track were laid. At their best, these tracks benefited the North. Many rail lines had no economic effect at all. Many of the schemes to lay track were simply a way to get government subsidies. Fraud and corruption were rampant.

These ideas don’t conflict.  In fact, they dovetail together as a real example of statism and its effects.  While the pastors were philosophically training the men who would ultimately decide on war, these same men were suffering under the yoke of financing an entire country due to protective tariffs.  You can believe they heard from their countrymen, their neighbors and their wives about the yoke of burden they felt.

War ensued.  If anyone tells you that the war was fought over slavery, he is lying to you.  That’s revisionist history, a version of events that has no basis in the primary source documents of the time (newspapers, sermons, etc.).  Idiot “journalists” today may not know history, but you need to be better than that.

UPDATE:  Frank Clarke sends the following note.

For those who say the Civil (sic) War was “all about slavery”, I like to point out that slaves in the South were “identified as free” by the Emancipation Proclamation — issued two years after a war that was “all about slavery” started — but weren’t actually free because there were no blue-clad troops to spring them.  Slaves in DC were freed by ordinance in 1864.  Slaves elsewhere had to wait until the 13th amendment in December 1865, 8 months after a war that was all about slavery ended.  It appears the DC politicians didn’t get the memo about the war being all about slavery, and Lincoln, himself, didn’t realize it for two whole years.

The Emancipation Proclamation, America’s first major PR effort, was (much more likely) a ploy to “make the war about slavery” which would operate to bring lots of Northern abolitionists down to the recruiting stations.  This, in turn, would beef up the ranks of the Union army which was then getting its clock cleaned.

Had Lincoln been keen to erase slavery, he could have done it far cheaper than ruining the South’s economy and threatening the North’s — at a cost of 620,000 dead — had he done it the way the Brits had 30 years prior; he certainly had to know about that.  The Brits outlawed slavery, then bought out all the slaveholders for cash.  It was a good deal for anyone who could see the onrushing Industrial Revolution, an event which would, in short order, make human chattel slavery an economic dead-end.

But Lincoln was not keen to empower the South with such a scheme.  Lincoln wanted to OWN the South.  The tariffs had done that.  If the South rendered itself immune to the tariffs, the Northern economy would crash.  This could not be allowed to happen.  It is related that one reporter asked Lincoln “Why not just let them depart?” and Lincoln’s answer was “Then who would pay for the government?”  That was Lincoln’s (and the North’s) motive.

Foreign newspapers of the day, Corriere della Sera, Le Monde, The Times of London, and others, universally saw the conflict as economic and not connected to slavery.  As disinterested spectators, their views are telling.

Fox8:

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL FOREST, N.C. — A Tennesee teen last seen more than 10 days ago was found Tuesday afternoon after walking out of the Great Smoky Mountains, WLOS reports.

Austin Bohanan was found around 2:30 p.m. after walking out of the remote backcountry area near Tabcat Creek in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, according to a National Parks Service statement.

He was taken to Blount Memorial Hospital in Maryville, Tennessee.

Bohanan was reportedly last seen hiking off-trail in the remote southwest corner of the park on the evening of Friday, Aug. 11, 2017. He was reported missing around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 13 to Blount County authorities.

On Tuesday, four search teams consisting of rangers from the parks Search and Rescue team, officers with Tennessee Wildlife Resource Authority and individuals with the Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue team (BUSAR) had a total of 19 people searching the area. The search continued with canine teams and other special search teams.

Bohanan “had light food and water and was not anticipating spending the night in the park,” according to park spokeswoman Jamie Sanders.

He spent eleven days in the Southern bush.  He was unprepared for what faced him and he’s blessed to be alive.  The rescue team made an official statement, to the effect that “From day one, we treated the search for Austin as an emergency and appreciate the resources from across the region that came to our aid to help us actively and aggressively search through extremely tough terrain,” said Park Chief Ranger Steve Kloster. “We faced multiple challenges, including a moving target in dense conditions, but our search teams never gave up hope.”

But it was Austin who self-rescued.

On Tuesday morning, rangers explained he woke up on a ridge and saw a boat and some kayaks on Abrams Creek below. He scrambled down to the water and waved to the boaters, who picked him up and gave him a ride to safety.

That’s not to diminish the efforts of the rescue team, but the higher probability rescue in this circumstance is self-rescue.  Even the rescue team had to have water and food assistance from the community to keep going.  The search area was 6700 acres, which is 10.469 square miles.  This may not seem like a lot, but in the back country in the South, it is an eternity of land.

This is what Austin and his rescuers faced.

Steep terrain, dense vegetation, deadfall, blowdown, and almost impenetrable bush.  But we’ve discussed in detail what you should carry with you even if you’re going for a day hike thinking that you’re not going to be far from the beaten path.

(1) heavy rubberized poncho, (2) 550 cord, (3) gun, (4) tactical light, (5) fire starter [redundant means], (6) knife [serrated edge], (7) water and fast food energy, and (8) parka.

I carry this in a day pack.  For eleven days, you can add to this list a container with which you can boil water.  With the rubberized poncho and cordage, you have shelter.  With the gun and tactical light you have protection.  With the knife you have virtually everything (never leave home without a knife).

In the South he could have encountered problems with Copperheads, Timber Rattlers, black bear, feral hogs and Coyotes.  Coyotes in the West may still travel as lone predators, but in the South they have learned to travel in packs.  Many hunters in these parts have gone out at dusk only to find five or six pairs of eyes staring at them and encircling them closer and closer.  Retreat is the best option at that point, but if Austin couldn’t have retreated, he would have needed a firearm, and possibly more ammunition.

If this seems like overkill, just remember when you go into the bush.  You’re not in control of everything – the bush gets a say.  Try to be wise about the things you do control.