Articles by Herschel Smith

Fox News:

The Pentagon nearly gave over $1 million worth of rifles, pipe bombs and other military hardware to a fake police department — set up as part of a government watchdog’s sting operation, a new report reveals.

Using cloak-and-dagger tactics, auditors from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) created a nonexistent police department. They submitted requests to purchase from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) “controlled properties” like simulated pipe bombs, night-vision goggles, and explosive ordnance detonation robots.

“In less than a week after submitting the requests, our fictitious agency was approved for the transfer of over 100 controlled property items with a total estimated value of about $1.2 million,” the GAO said in a July 18 report.

The sting operation involved government auditors creating a website describing the fake agency and using publicly available resources to produce false police credentials.

“Personnel at two of the three sites did not request or check for valid identification of our investigator picking up the property,” the GAO said.

In its reponse to the findings, DOD concurred with four recommendations made by GAO and highlighted steps it was taking to improve internal controls and implement recommendations from past audits.

At no point during the application process did Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) staff speak with officials at the fake agency to verify the legitimacy of the application, according to the report. All authorizations were done via email.

I have a better idea.  Let’s not give any police any military weaponry or ordnance at all, ever.  For any reason under the sun.  Under any circumstances.

There.  Fixed it.

Randolph Scott concerning the CIA:

I would choose to get rid of the agency. As the pricks walk out the door arrest every single one of them, everyone including pissy secretaries, readers, do nothings, mail clerks, janitors, every single living human being even remotely associated with that agency. Hold them all in jail and question every single one of them and if anyone is implicated in a seditious, treasonous or criminal offense prosecute and complete the execution by public hanging. Next burn the buildings down and grind the rubble to dust.

That is how you drain the swamp. When this is done move on to the next 3 letter agency.

The Firearm Blog:

In addition to being a tasty beverage, Coca-Cola is indeed a good choice for cleaning rust if there are no purpose made cleaners available, thanks to its mild acidity and carbonation. “Every three days I and my gun – I call it “grinder” – every three days, I clean it. If I shot it, if I did not shoot it – does not matter. Gun is sacred,” Yuzkovich said in the video. “What is a gun? It’s not a wife, it’s a lover. The wife will bear with it, the lover – whew, and she is gone. The same is with the guns. We use everything: toothpicks, ear picks, toothbrushes. Reaching everywhere we can. Dirt, everything is cleaned off. Some people said we used sand or something, it’s nonsense.”

Hmm … sounds like a good way to cause acid-induced stress corrosion cracking to me.

PJM:

… the spooks are warning Pompeo not to get too uppity in draining the John Brennan swamp. The last pol who tried to grapple with the Agency was Porter Goss, and look what happened to him.

Hence, all the more reason that swamp must be drained.  Off hand, I’d say firing every last one of them and restaffing with new personnel would be a good start.

The CIA is filled with ne’er-do-wells, statists, self-aggrandizing control freaks and criminals.  Get rid of them, or get rid of the agency.  They are nothing more than an organ of state control anyway.

NYT:

President Trump announced on Wednesday that the United States will not “accept or allow” transgender people in the United States military, saying American forces “must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory” and could not afford to accommodate them.

Mr. Trump made the surprise declaration in a series of posts on Twitter, saying he had come to the decision after talking to generals and military experts, whom he did not name.

“After consultation with my generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

The sweeping policy decision reverses the gradual transformation of the military under President Barack Obama, whose administration announced last year that transgender people could serve openly in the military. Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, also opened all combat roles to women and appointed the first openly gay Army secretary.

Note how he has couched this – very smartly, in my opinion.  We cannot afford to accommodate them.

That’s how the Marine Corps sees everything.  If you come into the Marines left-eye dominate, they put a patch over your left eye (for a while) and reprogram you to be right-eye dominate.  I know this because my son did this to his “boots” who were left eye-dominate.

They don’t even accept left handed shooting.  They value sameness and likeness above everything.  Everything.  If you don’t like that, then go find your warfighting capabilities somewhere else.  There’s a right way to do this, and the Marine Corps has found it.

Capital View:

Most people find the shooting death of an unarmed yoga instructor by Minneapolis police to be incomprehensible. But some cops on patrol say the circumstances of the shooting, an officer poised to fire in the dark from a car seat, aren’t uncommon. And some experts say they aren’t surprised to hear that police officers are responding to seemingly routine calls with their guns drawn. (MPR News)

Before Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor shot Justine Ruszczyk through the open driver’s side window of his squad car, a woman had approached the back of the patrol car and “slapped” it, according to a court document filed Monday.  A search warrant was filed by Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators to look at the area where the shooting happened and gather evidence as part of the investigation. “Upon police arrival, a female ‘slaps’ the back of the patrol squad,” according to the search warrant. “After that, it is unknown to BCA agents what exactly happened, but the female became deceased in the alley.” (MPR News)

Well hell, that clears it all up for me.  She “slapped” the car.  I hate it when that happens to me.  I remember the last time I shot someone for slapping my car.

And it’s good to know that she simply “became deceased.”  I had thought she was murdered by a Muslim thug affirmative action hire.

Recoil:

The issue is multifaceted. First, there’s the ability and willingness of many production sources, mostly in China, to create knockoffs. This readiness to create counterfeits, though, is bolstered by unscrupulous people here in America willing to knowingly trade in them.

While United States Customs officials and other protection agencies catch millions of fakes destined for American markets, enough slip through to create genuine concern.

[ … ]

Counterfeiters make some convincing copies of Magpul’s popular slings and sights. At first glance, the fakes look just like the real thing. But differences you might not see include the use of inferior polymer materials that may fail unexpectedly …

Liptak explained there actually was a time when Magpul licensed some cheaper components for the airsoft market, intended to make Magpul-branded pieces available for use on airsoft guns at lower prices. These licensed Chinese clones weren’t supposed to create confusion about their lower quality compared to components made for actual combat or law enforcement. But they did.

“We shut that deal down a few years ago. It was potentially confusing in that something from overseas that was marked MAGPUL was actually legitimate,” Liptak said. Now, he added, people are counterfeiting the former PTS products. All real Magpul products are made domestically. This makes it easier for U.S. Customs to stop anything coming into the country.

“An even larger issue, and a safety issue, and something we’ve raised in litigation is that someone may be putting these counterfeit products on a firearm they’re trusting their life to — whether it’s a law enforcement or military firearm or a civilian firearm trusted to defend hearth and home. It’s not going to perform to the same standard as the Magpul product they thought they were getting. Not good,” he declared.

Liptak says most Magpul knockoffs are sold online. Ebay is a common venue. Even Amazon sometimes sells counterfeits. Liptak advises to always check where an item ships from and who’s selling it. Beware some of the purported consumer reviews on online retail sites. Many can be fake fluff.

[ … ]

John Enloe is Aimpoint’s manager of marketing and technical support. An 11-year veteran of the company, many fakes come across his desk, some sent in for warranty work.

“They’re sold all over the internet and at gun shows. It’s startling because there have been times when professionals, people who’ve been overseas in combat, send sights to repair after they’ve used them for a couple weeks, reporting the sight “crapped out.”

Aimpoint military equipment models are the most frequent knockoffs. He said most Aimpoint knockoffs are airsoft toys. The airsoft community likes to call them “military simulators,” Enloe said. Many fakes are products for which Aimpoint has substantial military contracts. These include the COMPM4 optic, the 3X magnifier, and the entire line of micro series optics, mainly because of the popularity with the Special Operations community.

“The companies manufacturing these things are in direct infringement. They’ve got our logos on the products. They’re mainly building them for airsoft toys, and less scrupulous people are importing them into the country, and then trying to pass them off as the real thing to defraud people.” Enloe sees rampant problems at gun shows.

Brad Romines, Trijicon’s export compliance manager, says his company has also seen a noticeable uptick in counterfeits with optics and riflescopes the past few years. They’re even finding counterfeiters selling directly at U.S. tradeshows, including SHOT Show and a major consumer show, the Great American Outdoor Show. Trijicon knockoffs are being sold throughout the European Union, the United States, and even the Middle East, he said. China is almost always the country of origin.

Read the entire article at Recoil.  And be careful what you buy and how you buy it.  I know Amazon has been caught selling fake products before, or more correctly, they put people in contact with companies selling fake products.

I have a problem with this not only because the products are inferior and may fail, but also because it’s intellectual property theft, and China is the master of it.

We all hate paying big prices for things, but if you don’t like it enough, then you’ll design something better for cheaper, and when you do, that intellectual property belongs to you, not China.

Here’s a tip for you – put this on a mental index card and file it away the next time you think about buying an important product from China.  China still doesn’t get the QA process.  They don’t have the culture to sustain such a thing.  The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) doesn’t allow U.S. nuclear power plants to procure structures, systems or components from China, and for good reason.  Nothing they build can be trusted.

What does that say to you?  Is your own safety any less important to you than the safety of your local nuclear power plant?

Firearms Policy Coalition:

In today’s Wrenn v. District of Columbia decision (a related case, Grace v. District of Columbia, was consolidated with Wrenn on appeal), a lawsuit helmed by civil rights attorney Alan Gura and backed by the Second Amendment Foundation, the Court held in relevant part that D.C.’s “good-reason” handgun carry ban laws were unconstitutional:

Of course, the good-reason law isn’t a “total ban” for the D.C. population as a whole of the right to bear common arms under common circumstances. After all, it allows some D.C. residents—those with a special need—to defend against threats both common to everyone and specific to themselves.

But the ban on ownership struck down in Heller I also made “minor exceptions” for certain sorts of owners, who could then defend their homes to the hilt. 554 U.S. at 570 n.1. That made no difference to constitutional review of the ban, see id., for a simple reason: the point of the Amendment isn’t to ensure that some guns would find their way into D.C., but that guns would be available to each responsible citizen as a rule (i.e., at least to those no more prone to misuse that access than anyone else).

So if Heller I dictates a certain treatment of “total bans” on Second Amendment rights, that treatment must apply to total bans on carrying (or possession) by ordinarily situated individuals covered by the Amendment. 

This point brings into focus the legally decisive fact: the good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on most D.C. residents’ right to carry a gun in the face of ordinary self-defense needs, where these residents are no more dangerous with a gun than the next law-abiding citizen.

We say “necessarily” because the law destroys the ordinarily situated citizen’s right to bear arms not as a side effect of applying other, reasonable regulations (like those upheld in Heller II and Heller III), but by design: it looks precisely for needs “distinguishable” from those of the community.

So we needn’t pause to apply tiers of scrutiny, as if strong enough showings of public benefits could save this destruction of so many commonly situated D.C. residents’ constitutional right to bear common arms for self-defense in any fashion at all.

Bans on the ability of most citizens to exercise an enumerated right would have to flunk any judicial test that was appropriately written and applied, so we strike down the District’s law here apart from any particular balancing test. 

***

So our approach, briefed by all the parties, is also urged by Heller I and coheres with Heller II. It’s narrower than any other basis for decision but not ad hoc.

And it would avoid suggesting what Heller I implicitly denies: that some public benefits could justify preventing people from exercising the law-abiding citizen’s right to bear arms for self-defense given the risk and needs typical of, well, law-abiding citizens. 

We pause to draw together all the pieces of our analysis: At the Second Amendment’s core lies the right of responsible citizens to carry firearms for personal self-defense beyond the home, subject to longstanding restrictions. These traditional limits include, for instance, licensing requirements, but not bans on carrying in urban areas like D.C. or bans on carrying absent a special need for self-defense.

In fact, the Amendment’s core at a minimum shields the typically situated citizen’s ability to carry common arms generally.

The District’s good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on exercises of that constitutional right for most D.C. residents. That’s enough to sink this law under Heller I. 

***

To watch the news for even a week in any major city is to give up any illusions about “the problem of handgun violence in this country.” Heller I, 554 U.S. at 570. The District has understandably sought to fight this scourge with every legal tool at its disposal.

For that long struggle against gun violence, you might see in today’s decision a defeat; you might see the opposite. To say whether it is one or the other is beyond our ken here.

We are bound to leave the District as much space to regulate as the Constitution allows—but no more. Just so, our opinion does little more than trace the boundaries laid in 1791 and flagged in Heller I. And the resulting decision rests on a rule so narrow that good-reason laws seem almost uniquely designed to defy it: that the law-abiding citizen’s right to bear common arms must enable the typical citizen to carry a gun. 

We vacate both orders below and remand with instructions to enter permanent injunctions against enforcement of the District’s good-reason law.

Circuit Judge Karen Henderson dissented, arguing in a footnote that:

Although I assume that the Second Amendment extends to some extent beyond the home, I am certain the core Second Amendment right does not. The application of strict scrutiny—let alone my colleagues’ application of a categorical ban—is, in my view, patently off-base.

I’ve always thought that Scalia left much undone in his Heller decision, and the appeals court is doing his work for him in this ruling.  Perhaps Heller is all he could get the Supremes to agree to.

Unfortunately, however, this won’t be the end of it.  D.C. will come up with something equally unconstitutional, and I’ve noted before that similar federal courts have ruled in favor of “may-carry” laws in states such as New York, Massachusetts and Hawaii.  There is much more to come, and all of this confusion could have been avoided by a more robust Heller decision.

In the mean time, how dark for a person like Henderson, whose world and life view distinguishes between “to some extent” and “core.”  How sad and abusive towards other women who are left defenseless in the face of assault by her vacillation.

Glenn Reynolds also provides some links.

Post links and talk amongst yourselves.  Be back tomorrow hopefully.

The Island Packet:

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, N.C. – Tammy Dunn was vacationing on the Grand Strand on June 18 when a mass shooting erupted on Ocean Boulevard. She didn’t know it then, but the shooting that rocked Myrtle Beach was about to shake her hometown, too.

He was shocked.  Shocked!  He had multiple interactions with law enforcement, but the police are shocked that he was a shooter.

Little has been in and out of jail since 16 when he was first arrested for stealing two pit bull puppies. But most of his charges have stemmed from property crimes. He was never accused of firing a weapon until June 18.

Police say Little worked “in concert” with 19-year-olds Tyron Elijah Daquan Steele and Raekwon Tariq Graham and 18-year-olds Jarvez Datwan Graham and Keshawn Datavis Steele to ambush a Stanly County, North Carolina, man.

Dunn reported that the feud between the groups started at least two years ago when a Mount Gilead man was killed in a 2015 shooting in Albemarle, the county seat of Stanly County.

The man convicted in that killing, 18-year-old Jimmy Jaquavis Parker, is incarcerated in the Foothills Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Morganton, North Carolina.

This just gets better and better.  Theft, and perhaps larceny.  A gang, killings, and a gang feud.  But the cops are shocked!

Parker was 16 at the time of the shooting. His projected release date is Dec. 13, 2019, according to the N.C. Department of Public Safety.

But aside from ongoing “unpleasantries” between people from both areas, Hensley said, he didn’t think Parker and the primary victim in the Myrtle Beach shooting were related.

“There’s a contingent of young gentlemen in Mount Gilead and there’s a contingent of young people in Albemarle and neither one of them get along with each other,” he said.

Police say there is a known chapter of the United Blood Nation (the East Coast Bloods gang) in Albemarle. Suspects in the Ocean Boulevard shooting are considered to be a part of the Money Chasin Gang.

“I can say that we have had problems in town with that crowd coming over, starting fights; our crowd going to Albemarle starting fights with them,” Hensley said. “There’s not like this ongoing, ‘we’re going to kill everybody’ feud. (But) there is a rivalry.”

Oh good.  It’s just unpleasantries.  For a moment it sounded more serious than that, like a gang war.  At least it’s just a rivalry, sort of like High School football.

Albemarle Police Department’s Assistant Chief Jesse Huneycutt said the shooting in 2015 erupted in a “turf battle.”

“I know there were some concerns with the school system after that about some of the ballgames and security at the ballgames and whether or not to play Stanly County in football and things like that,” Dunn said. “But, it’s sad that, you know, teenagers are involved in that.”

[ … ]

Keshawn is accused in warrants of delivering Xanax, a prescription drug used to treat anxiety, to two teen boys on Jan. 24. He was charged with two counts of selling/delivering Xanax and simple possession of a controlled substance after officers say they found three Xanax pills in his possession. He is still facing those charges in Montgomery County.

Tyron is accused of shooting a high-powered rifle into a Troy, N.C., home occupied by two men, a woman and a 7-year-old boy on April 7, according to an indictment. Later that night, the Steele family’s home also reportedly was riddled with seven bullet holes by a suspect named in a police report as Roshun Dumas, a family member of the victims listed in Tyron’s indictment.

Keshawn and Tyron were both charged with fighting, communicating threats and disorderly conduct after a street brawl on June 8, 2015, according to a police report. Then, in August of that year, Tyron was accused of possessing a cellphone stolen from a locker room at West Montgomery High School, where he was a student, according to a separate incident report. That charge later was dismissed.

Most recently, Tyron and Keshawn have each been charged with trafficking heroin, possession with intent to distribute Oxycodone and maintaining a dwelling for controlled substances in Montgomery County, according to court records.

The title of the article includes ‘guns,’ but of course, that has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this.  Lot’s of people have guns, but not lots of people commit crimes like this.  The problem begins long before something like this happens.  My own daughter was in college studying Nursing, and was later to become a Nurse Practitioner.  Her time in undergraduate studies was marked by incurring student debt and driving a “beater” Volvo 240 that required a quart of oil every time the tank was filled up with gas.  I had to work hard to keep that thing running during her tenure in college.

Her roommates were black girls, both of whom went to college for free (free for them, costing you a lot of money), smoked dope the entire time, both of whom drove Cadillac Escalades, and both of whom flunked out of college.  The apostle tells us that if a man doesn’t work, he shouldn’t eat (2 Thess 3:10).  This is righteous and morally upright teaching, but it has been violated in America for far too long, creating a class of entitled criminals who perpetrate acts like what you saw above.

It isn’t limited to blacks, and rich people commit crimes too, but the black community in America has a special cultural and moral problem.  These boys should never have been in that situation to begin with.  They have no parents to speak of, or if they do, their parents don’t care.  They don’t care because they don’t have to care.  The first time one of those boys committed the crime of theft, he should have become an indentured servant of the one he had offended until the debt was paid threefold.  As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in prisons or the concept of a “debt to society.”

If he didn’t do it, his parents should have shouldered the financial burden, and if they couldn’t, they should have become indentured servants until the debt was paid threefold.  Only such circumstances engenders responsibility and accountability, where the parents tired of being indentured servants because of crimes their child committed.  The first time attempted murder occurred, someone should have become enslaved to the one he offended, and if he refused, he should have been executed.

As for Myrtle Beach, as long as they have “senior week” where underage riff raff, ne’er-do-wells and criminals are invited in to terrorize a city, they deserve what they get.  If they want to hold someone accountable in Myrtle Beach, then hold the proprietor who gave them accommodations accountable.  Run them out of business, and then run them out of town.

As long as you have fights, shootings, naked girls running around the beach, hollering and partying all night and public drunkenness, it won’t be a place amenable for families.  So continue to cater to the criminals and gangsters rather than the families, and see what happens.  Who has the real money to spend?

Prior: South Carolina LEOs, Open Carry And Myrtle Beach Follies