Articles by Herschel Smith

From Instapundit:

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Why Are The Feds Loading Up On So Much Ammo? “According to one estimate, just since last spring DHS has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9mm. That’s sufficient firepower to shoot every American about five times. Including illegal immigrants. To provide some perspective, experts estimate that at the peak of the Iraq war American troops were firing around 5.5 million rounds per month. At that rate, DHS is armed now for a 24-year Iraq war.”

Wicked fascists.  If you’re in this line of work, you ought to go home tonight, fall on your knees, beg God for forgiveness and then turn in your resignation.  You will answer for your sin of totalitarianism one day.  God does not approve of your world view, and He manages the economy of His creation by spheres of influence and authority, the Church, State and Family, all accountable to Him and none with the authority to override the other’s domain.  You have usurped God’s natural order.

Shame on you, now or in eternity.  Beware.  God will not be mocked.

Prior: So Why Does DHS Need 1.6 Billion Rounds Of Handgun Ammunition?

NYT:

In Idaho’s graceful, striated-marble Capitol, home to one of the more ardent and adamant state legislatures in the nation in standing up for the Second Amendment, lawmakers from both parties say that a torrent of public passion, even panic, about new proposed federal gun rules is pushing in only one direction: toward more guns, not fewer.

If Idahoans, like Americans in many states, have rushed to buy guns out of fear for personal safety in the aftermath of recent mass shootings, or out of fear of tighter legal controls, then democracy has already spoken, many lawmakers said. People have voted with their pocketbooks.

[ … ]

The speaker of the House, Scott Bedke, a Republican, said that he would not guess what might come from the session, but that the will of the people was clear.

“Idaho will push back,” he said, referring to federal gun control proposals. “A question that is rolling around in most Idahoan’s heads right now is, What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ don’t they get?”

Yea, this voting with the pocketbook has been happening all over America.  I had placed my M1 Carbine on layaway several months before Christmas with Allen Arms in Greenville, S.C.  In September, Allen Arms had a copious stock of guns.  When I went to pay off my gun at Christmas there were no AR-15s, no M1 Carbines, no tactical shotguns, very few polymer frame pistols, and just a few revolvers left.  It looked like a tornado had come through the store.

I have also noted before that Hyatt Gun Shop in Charlotte was reported to have done more than one million dollars worth of business the Saturday before Christmas.  That’s one million dollars in a single day – on guns.  I went back to Hyatt just a few days ago to place another firearm on layaway with them (and buy some ammunition), and the store was as crowded as I have ever seen it.  There is no slowdown.  And this sort of thing is happening (and has happened) all over America.

Do you want another example, a little less anecdotal?

And it won’t do much good to go direct to the manufacturer for an AR type rifle. Top companies like Bushmaster, and Rock River Arms report wait times up to two years for the guns. Stag Arms, which bills itself as the “Worldwide Leader in AR Manufacturing” is so backlogged they’ve stopped answering the phone: “Please know that we are currently experiencing exceptionally high call volume due to increased demand. Current response time is anywhere from five to seven business days for all voicemail inquiries.”

Note again – a two year wait time for a Rock River Arms rifle.  These folks who have voted with their pocketbook will learn to cherish their gun collection, and they will want to bequeath it to their children and children’s children without the involvement of the federal government.

So listen, Eric and Paul.  It might be that you are listening to the “polls” in your support for universal background checks.  But I assure you, America is voting with it’s pocketbook.  The vote is overwhelming, and it is fixed.  We won’t change our minds.  You need to get with the popular crowd and drop the support for gun control as fast as you can.

Gun control is an artifact of self-serving, crusty, old rich white men, angry feminists and effeminate inner city dwellers who have never ridden a horse across a snowy mountain, sat up all night with a dog who has been bitten by a Copperhead, or plowed a row in a garden on a sunny day.  You’ll never reach the young people that way.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mike for the attention.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to David for the attention.

UPDATE #3: Thanks to Glenn for the attention.

UPDATE #4: More voting on gun control with money.

Specialized gun shops, super sporting goods stores and even big-box retailers are enduring a big-time demand for firearms ammunition as First Coast gun owners are buying up most of the bullets they can find.

“There’s a complete run on ammo and guns,” said Paul Rukab, who has owned St. Nicholas Gun & Sporting Goods on Jacksonville’s Blanding Boulevard for 22 years.

Bullets are leaving the store as soon as trucks arrive with new stock at local Walmarts and stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Academy Sports. Ammunition for long rifles and handguns is in highest demand.

It’s the same everywhere.

Sun Journal:

According to gun writer Chuck Hawks, the .270 made its debut in 1925 and was created to challenge the popular .30-06. (The .270 is a necked down 30-06). Famous Outdoor writer Jack O’Connor helped make the .270 popular when he recounted the .270’s lightning-quick kills at 300 yards! At that time the .270 was considered to be the flattest shooting big-game round in the world, according to Hawks. The .30-06 spits a 180 grain bullet at 2,700 feet per second. The .270 releases a 130-grain bullet at 3,140 feet per second. Equally impressive, according to the ballistics students, is the .270’s capacity to sustain its velocity down range: 130 grain bullet registers 2,320 feet per second at 300 yards!

[ … ]

I also like the .270’s relative civility when it comes to recoil. A fellow elk hunter, who hunts with a Winchester .300 Magnum, always leaves the shooting range with a bruised, tender shoulder after zeroing his cannon. He also rations his rounds due to the cost. Granted, I’ll stick with him during a grizzly-bear charge, but the rest of the time give me the .270.

I have to say that I like the “relative civility” when it comes to recoil as well (as I have written before).  The 0.270 is a sweet round.  I can shoot a 12 gauge shotgun for hours (here substitute a large game round), but then my shoulder and chest complain to me for days.

I don’t know if anyone else has problems with this, but I lift weights, and with a somewhat enlarged chest there is little real “shoulder” left in which to fit the butt of the rifle (or shotgun).  It simply sits across my chest / deltoids.  The last time I shot clays I had a bruise as straight as a board down my right pectoral (I am right handed but left eye dominant, which is yet another problem in that I still shoot with my right eye).

I like moderate recoil, which is one reason I like carbine rounds.  I consider the 0.270 to be a large game round without the kick.

Greenville News:

A New York firearms company should move to South Carolina because the Southern state is more sympathetic to gun rights, according to an Upstate congressman.

Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan of Laurens is urging the parent company of Remington Arms to move its Ilion, N.Y., plant to South Carolina to avoid “enemies” of the Second Amendment.

“In South Carolina, we believe in the right to keep and bear arms,” Duncan wrote to the chief executive officer of the Freedom Group, a North Carolina company with firearms divisions in 14 states and more than 3,000 employees.

[ … ]

He said he’s also encouraging South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to contact gun-manufacturing facilities in other states where gun control legislation is likely.

But dislodging Remington from New York may be an uphill battle. The company’s history there goes back nearly two centuries, according to its website.

And the Republican congressman who represents Ilion says he’ll fight to keep the Remington plant where it is. The plant employs more than 1,000 people.

“Generations of expertise is in the DNA of all those who work for Remington and live in upstate New York,” Rep. Richard Hanna, R-N.Y., said Tuesday. “The Ilion plant remains highly competitive and its workers and the community are committed to the success of Remington. I look forward to working with New York state leaders to see that Remington stays here for generations to come and thrives right where it began almost 200 years ago.”

This isn’t enough.  Governor Haley is going to have to get deeply involved if she wants this industry in S.C.  As for Remington, it doesn’t matter that they have been in New York for two centuries.  The South is better.  The employees may gripe and moan, but given a few months, they’ll see the benefit themselves.  Their griping won’t last long.

Prior: It’s Time For Gun Industry To Move South

From site meter, DNC visit on Eric Cantor and universal background checks.

The communists are a hard-working bunch, no?  The GOP?  Well, they’re just a cowardly, bleeding, pitiful bunch of ne’er-do-wells who want to be loved.  And the Dems smell their blood.  Call your Congressmen.  Call your Senators.  Tell them that gun owners have a long memory, and even longer reach.  Tell them what their sell-out will cost.

Prior:

Paul Ryan Caves On Universal Background Checks

Cantor Caves On Universal Background Checks

Bless her heart.  An elderly woman uses a gun for self defense.

An 86-year-old woman grabbed a gun in self-defense when police say an intruder broke into her home. News 5 sat down with this woman today and listened to her tell about the experience.

Louise Howard lives just off a busy highway in Bulls Gap.  

She told us she’s been the victim of theft many times before, and she’s had enough and it was time to take a stand.

“I told different people if I ever catch them, I mean to kill them,” said Louise Howard.

Louise Howard may be 86 years old, but she isn’t afraid to defend her home or her life.

On Friday afternoon she was forced to do that. Howard said a young woman broke the glass on her door and forced her way inside.

“I was in shock. I didn’t know what she was going to do to me!” Howard said.

Howard immediately grabbed her gun, but the two started to struggle down the hall.

“I already had my gun in my hand, and I wouldn’t turn it loose for anything,” she explained.

Howard’s hands are proof she wasn’t letting go.

“She stuck a fingernail in there,” said Howard. “She moved her hands sort of released me a bit. I moved over like that, and I was going to shoot her in the stomach, but she took her knee and hit my elbow.”

The bullet ended up inside the wall where it still hides.

Sheriff Ronnie Lawson told us Howard was in her rights to use her gun for protection.

“All indications [were] the intruder, the female, has a wrench. It was what she used to break the window of the door so she could’ve defended herself,” Sheriff Lawson explained.

Gun = 1, Assault Wrench = 0.  The folks who suffer abuse from hammers needs to get guns too.

Washington Post:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said this week that he is open to closing the loophole that allows weapon purchases at gun shows without a background check.

In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published Tuesday, Ryan said gun show loopholes are a “very reasonable” issue and that it’s “obvious” it should be addressed.

“I think we should look into someone who is not legally allowed to buy a gun going to (a show), buying one, and let’s figure that out,” he said. “I think we need to find out how to close these loopholes and do it in such a way that we don’t infringe on Second Amendment rights.”

You go ahead and “look into that.”  I think we should look into booting your cowardly ass out of Congress.  The phrase gun show loophole is an invention by the statists.  What they really want, and what you’re agreeing to, is universal background checks and a national gun registry.  These are evil things, and with everything I’ve got I will defend the right for grandfather to bequeath his rifle to his grandson under the Christmas tree without asking the communists in Washington about it.

I have the same counsel for you that I had for Eric Cantor.  Tread carefully, young man.  We’re watching.

I have been watching carefully as more Southern states engage in courtships with the various gun manufacturers over location.  There are too many articles to link and discuss.  But this report does a good job of summarizing what’s at stake.

Every year, New York state gives out millions in tax incentives, loans and economic development grants to the private sector. Every state does it, and New York has little choice if it wants to prevent companies from leaving, but additional attention is now being paid to the incentives going to the state’s gun industry.

In a letter sent Jan. 3 to Empire State Development President Kenneth Adams, State Senator Liz Krueger urged an end to incentives for the firearms industry. 

“I’m still awaiting a formal letter of response, but I have been assured that this was a grant made in a previous administration, not in Governor Cuomo’s administration, and the moneys that were committed have been spent,” says Krueger.

She is referring to $5.5 million that went to Remington Arms in the last five years. The incentives to Remington in New York are among $19.9 million given by nine states to makers of assault weapons in the last decade and were revealed in a list compiled by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting.

The $5.5 million that went to Remington and its parent company, Freedom Group, led to the consolidation of manufacturing plants in Massachusetts and Connecticut to Ilion, N.Y., where Remington has manufactured firearms for nearly 200 years.

“They were down to close to 600 jobs and now they’ve more than doubled that,” says Sen. Jim Seward, Ilion’s representative in the legislature. “These are good manufacturing jobs and obviously we want them to stay.”

Seward says as many as 40 of the guns manufactured in Ilion can no longer be sold to civilians in New York.

The state’s new gun control law, known as the SAFE Act, bans semiautomatic weapons with certain design features deemed military-style, like detachable magazines or folding stocks. 

The company can still manufacture the banned guns in New York for export, but Seward says cutting off Remington from future incentives would make it even harder to keep the operation in Ilion.

“I must point out that they are being constantly recruited by other states,” says Seward. “And at some point, we hope this day does not come, but at some point, the company could say, ‘hey, well why should we remain in a state that is perceived by many as being hostile to law-abiding gun ownership?’”

Politicians in Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina are reportedly all trying to convince Remington to relocate.

Another manufacturer called Kimber, which makes guns that are not classified as assault weapons, received $700,000 from Empire State Development in 2009.

The move South makes sense for the gun manufacturers.  First of all, living in the upstate South Carolina area means that you’re always within one hour of some of the most beautiful mountains East of the Mississippi, and within three hours of some of’ the best beachfront on the East coast.  Second, the gun manufacturers can always rely on workers who wouldn’t be caught dead paying money to a labor union.  Third, they would be located in a state that wanted them, had laws that were amenable to their needs, and rewarded them handsomely for their industry.  Continued time spent in the Northeast is time wasted.

I think this is true of Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms in Illinois too.  Their time is limited in the North, and the move is inevitable.  As for the states from which the manufacturers relocate, I think the figure of speech is called “chickens coming home to roost.”  If New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and other Northern states decide that the jobs are too important to lose, then we have the delicious irony that these states care enough about their own citizens to protect them from these “evil” guns, but not the citizens of other states.  Making money is more important than the lives of other people.

How rich is that?

From Joseph Farah:

How do you know the left is firmly in charge of the political and cultural establishment in America?

Because now they want to ban guns.

As a former leftist revolutionary during my misguided youth, I recall with crystal clarity when the radical left of the 1960s brazenly bore arms in public, boasted about firearms training, stockpiled arms and ammo and even engaged in armed violence against police.

The Black Panther Party, originally, by the way, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a case in point. The organization, led by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, were often referred to in the ’60s as “the vanguard of the revolution.”

They were known for ambushing police. Newton himself, after being freed from prison for the killing of Oakland police officer John Frey, boasted of murdering him. James Forman, Black Panther Party “minister of foreign affairs,” called for blowing up police stations, killing Southern governors and mayors and murdering 500 cops. They took full advantage of the Second Amendment and California laws that permitted the carrying of loaded rifles and shotguns in public, as long as they were not concealed or pointed at anyone. In May 1967, the Panthers literally invaded, fully armed, the State Assembly of the California Legislature. Later they organized an armed march on the state Capitol when lawmakers introduced legislation banning the carrying of loaded weapons in public.

All of this made them the heroes of the left. So-called “civil rights attorneys” like Charles Garry and William Kunstler and the American Civil Liberties Union defended them for their brazen calls for armed struggle, armed attacks and armed intimidation tactics.

But that was then, and this is now.

[ … ]

The only difference between now and then is who is running things.

[ … ]

The New Left, as it was known back then, worshipped firearms.

The new, new left does, too – as long as it maintains a monopoly on them and state power.

Yes, the left still loves guns.  There is no other reason for the fawning acceptance of the vulgar SWAT raid tactics in which innocent men like Mr. Eurie Stamps get shot and killed.  These tactics are repeated all across America every day.

The left just doesn’t love guns in the wrong hands, and anyone who isn’t an agent of the state is the wrong hands.  Listen to Representative Jim Himes (D – CT) tell you why high capacity magazines are still necessary in government hands.

There is absolutely no justification for weapons that were made for the explicit purpose of killing lots of people quickly to be in the hands of civilians.

Let that wash over you again.  “Killing lots of people quickly” and “civilian hands.”  The two don’t go together.

Leftists are by nature not liberals, no matter what label they have adopted.  Scratch a liberal, and find a Fascist.

From CNN:

The number two House Republican said Tuesday that he supports beefed up background checks for gun sales, an indication of where potential gun control legislation could be headed on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, told CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash that a system put in place in his home state of Virginia following the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech could be a model for a nationwide measure.

He said that model ensured mental health information was linked to databases used in background checks during gun sales.

“I think that we can take a lot of lessons from what Virginia did and put it in place at the federal level, because there are a lot of states that aren’t doing what Virginia is doing to try and beef up the database for the background checks to make sure that we actually can do something that does have a chance at reducing the likelihood and hopefully eliminating it from happening again,” Cantor said.

Mental health checks are the great red herring in this whole discussion, and won’t accomplish anything in the way of enhancing public safety.  Furthermore, mental health checks are a minor part of Obama’s overall plan.

The most significant part of Obama’s plans is the universal background check.  As I have pointed out, universal background checks are the way to develop a national gun registry, a national gun registry (and in fact, all gun control) is the action of a wicked government, and a national gun registry is only a pretext for and necessary prerequisite condition for gun confiscations.  Cantor is talking past you in order to hide his real intentions concerning Congressional plans to cave on gun control.

Mr. Cantor, listen very carefully.  We all know you want to be President.  You are about to do something that will (a) not gain you any leftist votes, and (b) lose you the GOP nomination.  If you grease the skids for Obama’s national gun registry plans, you will be a pariah.  Oh, you may keep your little post and stay snugly ensconced in the House, but your plans for national prominence will be finished.  We gun owners don’t forget.  Ever.

Tread carefully.