Articles by Herschel Smith

Parody, but still amusing.

@waynecountylyfe

Stop Texting Me Pictures of Your Deer!

♬ original sound – waynecountylyfe

Animals just seem to know when to stop in order to preserve life.

As you probably know, our friend Stephen Stamboulieh on behalf of the GOA, along with a number of others, have challenged the NFA in court based on the lack of fee associated with suppressors and SBRs. Of note, the real failure here was by John Cornyn and John Thune for allowing the senate parliamentarian to dictate the terms of legislation (partly because Cornyn is a gun controller, as is Thune).

Here is Stephen’s brief. Here is the DOJ response.

Twice the DOJ argues that the NFA is in place primarily to regulate “weapons of war.” To which we may respond, “But the second amendment is in place specifically to protect weapons of war, and it came first.”

As always, Mark Smith is rather Pollyanna about the whole thing and believes that the DOJ is arguing for the NFA because they want this to go to the SCOTUS at which point they will argue with the plaintiffs that the NFA is now unconstitutional as it pertains to suppressors and SBRs because of the change in the tax code.

I think Mark is dead wrong about this, but you should make up your own mind about his claims.

Outdoor Life.

Why was the Kentucky rifle such a success? Probably because here, for the first time, was a firearm that evolved in direct response to America’s needs. Rifles brought over from Europe were of little value in the American wilderness. Loading was a slow, difficult job. The noise of hammering a tight-fitting ball down the length of the barrel often scared off game or attracted attention at the wrong time. Construction was ugly and ungainly; trigger guards were bulky yet frail; sights were useless in dark forests or in any spot where accuracy was vital; calibers were large; and the rifles as a whole were heavy and unreliable. Little wonder that for many years the smoothbores reigned supreme.

[ … ]

No frontiersman wanted to carry a heavy weapon on his long treks in the wilderness. The weight was steadily reduced until the average Kentucky hunting rifle weighed between 9 and 10 pounds. (Those made for match shooting averaged about 19 pounds.) Similarly, using a large-caliber rifle meant that the lone pioneer had to carry a heavy load of bullets. So the caliber was reduced from the .65 and .70 common in Europe to about .45. The pound of lead that once yielded sixteen .70 bullets now gave forty-eight .45 balls — three times as many shots.

[ … ]

George Washington had learned the value of Kentucky riflemen in the French and Indian War. When the Revolution began, he urged the Continental Congress to put in a call for them. So it happens that the first troops raised by a central government on this continent were companies of straight-shooting backwoodsmen — and this might be called the beginning of the U. S. Army!

From the far fringes of the frontier the colorful, independent hunters flocked to their meeting places. One group of ninety-six men, recruited in Virginia by Daniel Morgan, marched 600 miles in 21 days to join the army facing the British at Cambridge, Mass. And some of these tough customers had walked 200 miles through the wilderness in order to enlist!

The bulk of the fighting in the Revolution was done with smoothbore muskets, so inaccurate that nineteen shots out of twenty would miss an 18-foot-square target at 350 yards. This performance was so poor that Benjamin Franklin urged the authorities to equip the Continental Army with bows and arrows.

Like every other improvement in arms, from the longbow to the atom bomb, the rifle was denounced as barbarous and uncivilized — by the side that didn’t have it. After Bunker Hill, the British tried to alibi their heavy losses by charging that the Americans used rifles with slit bullets that broke in four parts when fired. As a matter of fact, the frontier riflemen hadn’t arrived at the time of Bunker Hill; according to a writer of the time, the New England farmers who fought there were armed with muskets, mostly without bayonets. But he adds: “They are almost all marksmen, being accustomed to sporting of one kind or another from their youth.”

Soon, however, the men with the Kentuckys were pouring northward, amazing townspeople with their marksmanship as well as with their outlandish garb and swaggering manners. Newspapers were filled with stories of their feats — many of which obviously gained in the telling. From Lancaster, Pa., a townsman wrote of seeing a man take a 5 x 7-inch piece of board and hold it between his knees while his brother put eight bullets through it in succession from a distance of 60 yards. Another chap offered to shoot an apple off a man’s head at the same range, but the timid spectators declined to watch any such fool stunt.

After they joined the army at Cambridge, the backwoodsmen made life miserable for the British. Their specialty was picking off officers and sentries. Soon a Philadelphia printer was writing to a friend in London: “This province has raised 1,000 riflemen, the worst of whom will put a ball into a man’s head at the distance of 150 or 200 yards. Therefore advise your officers who shall hereafter come out to America to settle their affairs in England before their departure.”

British General Howe is said to have offered a large reward for the capture of a Kentucky rifleman. When one finally was taken, Howe sent him to London to show what the redcoats were up against. A few demonstrations of his skill brought British enlistments practically to zero!

It sounds like the assault weapon of the revolutionary war. The British didn’t want the colonists to have rifled bores any more than your government wants you to have the weapons they have.

Oh sure they can. They ignored the Snope case (Maryland AWB) until it just went away. They can continue that as long as they are cowardly, which is to say, indefinitely. Will they? I don’t know.

But isn’t it interesting how we’ve been conditioned concerning the SCOTUS? They only want to hear cases where there is a circuit split, so we’re told. There must be a circuit split.

Bhah! There are plenty of SCOTUS decisions on cases where there weren’t circuit splits. Besides, is it not reasonable for the supreme court to take cases where all of the inferior courts are trampling the God-give rights of American, recognized in the constitution?

Source.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is warning Fairfield-based gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger & Co., that it could face litigation related to concerns that one of its pistols can be transformed into a machine gun.

Tong outlined his misgivings with Ruger’s RXM nine-millimeter pistol in a letter Monday to the company that alleged that the firearm can easily be converted into a fully automatic machine gun with the use of illegal “machine gun conversion devices” or what he called MCDs. His letter followed a similarly focused missive sent to the company last week by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, which called on the company to remove the RXM from the market unless it changed the pistol’s design.

“If the RXM can be easily converted to a machine gun by the attachment of an MCD, and videos my office has seen indicate that it can, Ruger’s pursuit of profits over safety may be in violation of (Connecticut’s Firearms Industry Responsibility Act and Unfair Trade Practices Act), by failing to enact reasonable controls to prevent the sale of legal firearms that can be easily converted to illegal firearms,” Tong said in the letter.

In a written statement provided by a spokesperson, Ruger officials said, “We have a long history of corporate responsibility and manufacturing safe, quality products for law-abiding citizens here in Connecticut and across the United States. We are disappointed that no one from Attorney General Tong’s office made an effort to talk with us in advance of the letter you reference and the related press release. That said, we offered to travel to Hartford to meet with Attorney General Tong.”

[ … ]

Meanwhile, the growing scrutiny of MCDs could be leading to changes at other gun manufacturers such as Glock.

“In recent days, reports have indicated that Glock will soon be pulling its easily modifiable pistols from the market,” Everytown officials stated in their letter to Ruger.

Thanks for the precedent-setting capitulation, Glock. I guess it’s left up to Ruger to tell them to go pound sand.

Actually, if the firearms industry was pro-2A instead of pro-dollars, every manufacturer would agree to stop selling guns and parts to Connecticut law enforcement.

Source.

Pete Hegseth is said to have lost the respect of his senior officers after an “embarrassing” speech in which he railed against “fat troops” and the state of the US armed forces.

[ … ]

Now, a report quoting senior military officers who attended the speech said they thought it was “embarrassing” and a “waste of time”.

“If he ever had us, he lost us,” one currently serving Army general told The Washington Times.

Oh my.

Oh dear.

Whatever shall we do? The perfumed princes don’t like Pete.

After all, our ruling class is so stelar.

Hells Angels Gun Fight with Cartel Members Crossing the Arizona Border

It was a bloody fight and the biker gang planned and fought with military efficiency. Yeah, I’ll bet they did. The Cartel lost > 300 shooters that day on an Arizona road.

So here’s a question for you. Why were > 300 cartel shooters in a convoy in Arizona? Why did we retire the A-10 when it could have taken these cartel members out in an instant?

Here’s another question for you. Why haven’t we declared China and Mexico to be enemies of America?

Outdoor Life.

Going over the timeline in his head, Harakal figured it had only been a few hours between the time the pheasant hunter found the deer and when he walked up on it. Unsure of what to do, he called back one of his friends, who encouraged him to report it to the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Harakal tried calling but didn’t get an answer as he walked back to his truck.

“I was just going home at that point. And I decided my season’s done. I’m not hunting for the rest of the year.”

Back at home, Harakal was about to hop in the shower when he got a call back from a PGC game warden. He shared the full story with the warden and agreed to meet him at the deer, and then he drove back to Shenango Lake for a fourth time.

Harakal still had the bone fragments in his pocket, and when they got to where the deer was still laying, he showed the game warden the missing puzzle piece. He said he still couldn’t believe someone had robbed him of the biggest buck he’d ever killed.

“The game warden tells me, ‘This is like one-in-a-million chances, but that is definitely your deer. And I don’t even know how to tell you this. But it’s our policy that when something like this happens, we cut the rack off.’”

The game warden then led Harakal back to his own truck, where he pulled the two antlers off his backseat and handed them over. He explained how the pheasant hunter had called the agency after finding the 8-point buck, and that he was just following standard procedure when he confiscated the antlers. Then he helped Harakal drag the buck out of the field.

Why is it your standard procedure to confiscate the antlers? Why do you believe they belong to you? How do you know “fair chase” is over at the point you ruin the game with a saw?