Articles by Herschel Smith

Business Insider:

The U.S. Army’s chief of staff revealed Thursday the M4 Carbine’s 5.56mm round can’t penetrate modern enemy body armor plates and plans to arm infantry units with rifles chambered for a more potent 7.62mm cartridge.

Responding to questions from Senate Armed Services Committee members, Gen. Mark Milley conceded that the service’s current M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round will not defeat enemy body armor plates similar to the U.S. military-issue rifle plates such as the Enhanced Small Arms Protective Insert, or ESAPI.

“The 5.56mm round, we recognize that there is a type of body armor out there, that it doesn’t penetrate. We also have that body armor ourselves,” he testified.

Milley told lawmakers Army officials at the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Georgia, have developed a new 7.62mm round to solve the problem.

“We have developed a pretty effective round down at Fort Benning,” he said. “We know we have a bullet that can penetrate these new plates.”

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, asked if the new bullet will require a new rifle. Milley said, “It might but probably not,” adding that weapons can be chambered for various calibers.

However, the M4 would require a new barrel, bolt carrier group, buffer system in addition to a new lower receiver to shoot 7.62mm ammo, experts maintain.

He later told Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, there are systems on the shelf today that, with some very minor modifications, could be adapted to meet the Army’s needs.

“I think there are weapons out there that we can get in the right caliber that can enhance the capability of the infantry soldier,” Milley said.

He also told lawmakers that not every soldier will need a 7.62mm rifle.

“This idea that the entire Army needs the same thing all the time, it’s not necessarily true,” Milley said. “There are some infantry units that are much more highly likely to rapidly deploy than others and conduct close-quarters combat that we would probably want to field them with a better-grade weapon that can penetrate this body armor that we are talking about.”

The subject of the 5.56mm round being underpowered came up at a May 17 hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Airland Subcommittee. Retired Lt. Gen. John Bednarek and retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales Jr. testified at the hearing about the U.S. military’s future small-arms requirements.

Ernst said that Scales testified about “a weapon that could fill the role of the light machine gun and the rifle.”

“Is the need for a machine gun a higher priority than just a basic rifle?” she asked.

Milley said that infantry units need both to be effective. “I think what [Scales] is talking about is the Marines are adopting … the M27” infantry automatic rifle, a version of the 416 made by Heckler & Koch.

“We are taking a hard look at that and are probably going to go in that direction as well, but we haven’t made a final decision on it,” Milley said. “The infantry squads and infantry platoons — they’ve got to have an automatic weapon for suppression; they’ve got to have the individual weapon as well, so you need both … to be effective in ground combat.”

Wait.  So the Army infantry needs a new 7.62 mm rifle to be “combat effective.”  But not really, because then he mentions automatic weapons and suppression fire.  And then he points out that not all infantry needs this new rifle … er, crew served area suppression weapon … just some of them.  How many, he doesn’t say.  So for instance Army snipers need it.

But Army snipers already have the 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm, .338, .300 Win Mag, and .50.  So they don’t really need it.  You know, for this “new” body armor.  You know, the armor that a 7.62 mm NATO round can penetrate, i.e., the ESAPI plate.

But the ESAPI plate can’t withstand a 7.62 mm NATO round right now, and this is nothing new.  So let’s change the subject and talk about Gen. Scales and his paid advocacy of H&K.  And just think of all of those dead soldiers and the “new” body armor worn by the enemy (which isn’t the ESAPI plate, so it makes no sense to invoke that if he’s talking about the enemy).  So give us more money.  Just because.  And shut up.  And if you don’t, you’re not patriotic.

Ignore Scales on the 5.56 mm rifle, and the fact that we want to buy it too even though we’re in front of you talking about the 7.62 mm rifle.  He hasn’t been briefed on what we’re going to say, because neither have we.  We have absolutely no idea what to say to you except give us more money.  Because shut up.  We’ll figure out what to do with it.  And ignore the fact that the Army no longer teaches soldiers how to shoot.

It’s very challenging to try to stay up with someone whose thighs and heart makes it seem like they’ve got rockets attached to their bike.

So says Alex Yablon at The Trace.

When José Luis Hernández was a boy, his hometown of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, had its share of gangs, neighborhood toughs who used knives to claim turf and settle scores. As he came of age, a new generation of criminals took over. These crews worked with international organized crime rings, and they carried guns.

“I started seeing guys around town that weren’t just local gangs,” Hernández says. “They were sicarios” — professional killers working for the drug cartels — “armed better than the police. They’d have AK-47s.”

As Honduran gangs grew ever more well-armed and difficult to police, they gave young men like Hernández an impossible decision: join up, or be marked for death. In a single month, one gang in San Pedro Sula tortured and murdered as many as eight minors who refused to enlist. Across the small country, according to official counts, nearly 50,000 people were murdered between 2008 and 2015. In several of those years, civilian homicides reached a rate of 80 per 100,000 residents — a higher rate than recorded at the height of the Iraqi insurgency. Eighty percent of Honduran homicide victims were shot.

“With all the violence” Hernández says, “I didn’t have a choice” but to flee north to the United States. “I call it a forced migration.”

He made one unsuccessful attempt to get to the United States in 2005, then journeyed north a second time the next year, hopping a Mexican freight train line known to migrants as La Bestia (The Beast) for the tendency of riders to be maimed or killed while riding it. Clinging to the train in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, Hernández fainted and fell. The train severed a leg, an arm, and half of one of his hands as it rolled on without him. He was hospitalized for more than a year in Mexico before being deported back to his home country.

Hernández again braved the trip to the United States in 2015, as part of a larger group of disabled Hondurans calling themselves themselves the Caravan of the Mutilated. This time, they reached the border crossing at Eagle Pass, Texas, where they sought and received asylum.

“We had nothing to lose,” Hernandez says of his reason for undertaking the arduous passage, “and a lot of hope to achieve something” by escaping Honduras.

Federal immigration statistics show that Hernández and his caravan are part of a tidal wave of Central Americans driven north by violence in their home countries. The flow became a humanitarian and political crisis in 2014, when the Department of Homeland Security apprehended nearly 480,000 people at the southern border, including tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors. In 2016, another 400,000 people were captured by the Border Patrol in southwestern states.

Dramatically reducing immigration to the United States is a pillar of President Donald Trump’s agenda. He announced his candidacy with warnings about undocumented Latino migrants bringing drugs, violence, and rape. He has secured $341 million in federal spending for the first phase of a promised 20-foot-high wall to keep them out, and requested $1.6 billion more to extend the barrier. Arrests of undocumented immigrants, the majority of whom lack records of other criminal offenses, are up 38 percent during the first three months of the Trump administration, a crackdown designed to deter would-be migrants from entering the country. Recent reports say the Border Patrol is refusing to admit asylum seekers like Hernández, in violation of international law.

But experts say Trump’s tactics could amount to a finger plugged into the dike, halting people at the border without addressing the reasons why they flee to America.

Ah yes, and now we’re down to the root of the issue according to Alex.  There isn’t enough American gun control, for if there were, we wouldn’t be the recipient of such overwhelming immigration.

No mention is made of the fact that our borders are virtually open.  No mention is made of the fact that progressives want the immigrants for votes, and republican elites want them as workers for Monsanto and Archer-Daniels-Midland on our middle class tax dollars when they go to the local ER for routine medical care.

And no mention is made of the fact that we in America have more guns per capita than anywhere else on earth, and yet we aren’t attempting to migrate South, are we?  No question is posed, “If guns fuel immigration, then why aren’t Americans trying to leave?”  No mention is made of the cultural and moral problems that underlie the entire machine sending migrants North, or of the fact that Mexico and the Central American countries want to ship their criminals and impoverished here for us to take care of.

Because.  Just because.  Shut up.  Alex doesn’t want to deal or traffic in facts or even Sunday School level logic.  No, if we just had more gun control, the entire problem would dissipate overnight.

What a dumb ass.  Or liar.

I’ll leave it to readers to fisk this event.  This man is blessed to be alive, as far I can tell.

David Codrea:

One might if one had zero knowledge of guns, of gun design and of defensive gun uses. Left unacknowledged are inconvenient realities like the fact that the harder the trigger pull, the more inaccurate the gun, a problem the New York Police Department (and those they shoot and/or miss) has experienced since the bureaucrats imposed a 12-lb. trigger pull requirement (resulting in a 15% hit ratio). Serrano has not offered how making a gun less accurate makes it safer.

Have you ever tried to use a gun with a 12 pound pull?  I haven’t, but close.  I believe it had around an 8-9 pound pull.  It belonged to someone else, and I believe I managed to saw the left arm off the target silhouette.

I don’t think the NYPD needs any more help in learning how to shoot badly.  Leave it to progs to design dumb laws intended to super-manage lives rather than punish criminals.  By the way, David also links an NRA piece on the S&W sellout that I have never seen.

NY Daily News:

He just had to show off his gun.

Police arrested an off-duty city correction officer who brandished his gun in a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant to impress two women – then accidentally shot himself in the finger and one of his companions in her right foot, officials said Wednesday.

Correction Officer Mario Carrillo was charged with assault and reckless endangerment for the boneheaded move inside the Mamasita Bar & Grill on 10th Ave. near W. 54th St. on Tuesday night.
The 56-year-old guard, a five-year employee of the Department of Correction, had joined two women at the restaurant at about 8 p.m. and was talking about his job when he pulled out his off-duty Glock to show them how it worked, officials said.

A moment later, the pistol went off.

“It appears he may have been displaying it,” a police source said.

Well gosh.  I just hate it when that happens to me.  We always laugh, and laugh, and laugh if the wounded ones are willing to laugh about it and shrug it off.

Notice the third person the author applies in the article, as if the gun has a personality of its own and does things volitionally.  “A moment later, the pistol went off.”

Remember boys and girls.  Only authorized journalists can be considered professional writers.  And only LEOs are tactically well trained enough to handle guns.

Robert Farago at TTAG writes about Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook’s invective against open carry.  Two days after I did.  One commenter writes:

“Open-carry law or not, when citizens see someone with a gun, they will call the police. When responding to “person with a gun” calls…”

When someone calls 911 to report a ‘man with a gun’ ask what he was doing. Unless the answer establishes reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, tell the person that open carrying is lawful and end the call.

Hey look, I solved the problem.

Um, except that I solved it two days earlier when I said this.

It would be a good opportunity for 911 services to educate people on the new state law.  “Ma’am, what was he doing with the gun?  Was he brandishing it or pointing it at someone?”  No.  “Well then, he wasn’t breaking any laws.  Open carry is legal in South Carolina.”

Well, he was acting erratically.  “Hmmm … what do you mean by that?”  Well, I don’t know, he just seemed shifty.  “Ma’am, seeming shifty isn’t illegal.  Please hang up and call us when there is a law or regulation being broken.  Otherwise, you are wasting our time.”

This conversation is entirely plausible.  Don’t discount it as an example to follow for 911 operators, or classroom material.

Or more than a year ago when I dealt with Texas open carry and LEOs objected the same thing.  Or even longer ago than that whenever open carry comes up in whatever state it does.

But Robert’s readers wouldn’t know anything about what other gun rights bloggers say because Robert doesn’t link other gun rights bloggers.  Or if they do know anything about what other people are saying, they’re not getting it from Robert.

The State:

Columbia, SC – Although law enforcement has always been a challenging, difficult and dangerous job, the past few years have been some of the most challenging ever.

Guns.com:

A federal judged ruled against Remington Arms in a personal injury case despite arguments that the gun maker is protected under Louisiana law.

Judge Ivan Lemelle ruled that the case has merit under the Louisiana Products Liability Act, saying the law protects gun makers from lawsuits except in cases involving a defective firearm. He awarded $500,000 to the plaintiff, Precious Seguin, for her claim holding Remington liable for producing a defective product.

According to court documents, Seguin was injured during a hunting excursion in October 2013. As she tracked the blood trail of a wounded deer with her father, brother and a family friend, her father’s Remington 710 bolt-action rifle discharged as they made their way through the brush. The bullet struck her right buttock, traveled through her hip and exited through her right elbow.

The lawsuit argues the rifle’s trigger design, the infamous Walker Fire Control, a mechanism that has been linked to almost a dozen deaths and numerous injuries, allowed the gun to discharge without the pull of a trigger. In Seguin’s case, her father had the rifle strapped over his shoulder and pointed upward until a branch knocked it up and backward, at which time the safety moved to the fire position and unintentionally discharged. Before Seguin was injured, they had not experienced an unintentional discharge with the rifle.

So this is more on the Walker Fire Control System.  Good grief, people.  I was among the most vocal critics of Remington on the gun blogs, using my engineering credentials to advocate that Remington had misled their constituency and gun buyers, and in fact they’re still lying.  The Remington 700 has indeed been tested to fire when the trigger isn’t being pulled.  Their own test data shows it.  Good Lord!  Their own test data shows it.

But how far do we take this?  Now that Remington has settled the issue in court, it’s finished.  Let it go.  Everyone who knows anything about guns – and you shouldn’t be a hunter if you don’t know anything about guns – knows what Remington has been charged with, and knows that Remington settled.

Legal settlements mean something or they don’t.  Besides, I don’t know what really happened on that day Seguin was injured since I wasn’t there, and neither do any of my readers, and neither does the idiot judge who ordered this payout.

It’s time to put this to bed.  It’s finished.  Buy Remington, or don’t.  It matters not to me.  But this issue is closed as far as I’m concerned.  I hope Remington’s lawyers end this swiftly and surely.  If they don’t, let me make it clear.  At this point I have no compassion left for people who want to sue Remington for damages from a trigger system that has been recalled.  Do your homework, people.

David Codrea:

“So please, Congressman Culberson, make the right choice and delete the Schumer amendment from this year’s Commerce-Justice-Science ‘chairman’s mark,’” GOA asks in a representative message intended for members to amplify.

I’d go a step further. I’d let Culberson know that with an “A”-rating from GOA and with an “A+” and endorsement from NRA, I shouldn’t have to be sending polite form mailers asking him to “please” do his job. He’s happy to accept gun owners support and to represent himself as a Second Amendment leader and champion.  It’s not too much to expect him to act like one and to vocally lead the charge on this, especially since it’s taking place in his wheelhouse.

Yea.  I’m damn sick and tired of good ratings for senate gargoyles and congresscritters who undercut their constituency.  Things like this are easily fixed if we just have the guts to hold our representatives accountable.

It’s also a crying shame, I might add, that a single man has this kind of power.  What an awful place, this den of pit vipers.