Articles by Herschel Smith

David Codrea:

Because that’s true, and it is, you know, looking at quick fix kneejerk ‘solutions’ such as changing state and federal information loop protocols on recorded mental health incidents may not produce any appreciable public safety improvements, and may in fact, endanger not only rights, but people disabled by ‘law’ who have been denied full due process.

Um, yes.  Of course a system like this is highly vulnerable to abuse and negligence.  It’s the government.  My God.  When is the last time you witnessed a government program work the way it should?  Besides, mental health professionals will tell you that their science isn’t as accurate as you think it is and isn’t amenable to such neat categories, that they cannot really predict with any confidence who will become violent, that their science won’t sustain such a burden, that such reporting will intefere with the doctor-patient relationship, and that they don’t want that kind of legal and regulatory pressure on their profession.  They have already told you so.  It’s like asking your Volkswagen Beetle to hit the curves at Daytona International Speedway and race with the big boys.  Man is too complex, and “doctors” don’t know as much about his psyche as this system would demand.  Because, you know, it’s his psyche … his soul … his spirit.  It’s not his big toe.

Finish reading Codrea’s piece at Examiner.  Mental health checks are not the answer to gun violence.  Move on to the real solutions, like abolishing gun free zones as an intrusion on our God-given right of self defense.

Just purchased.

.357 magnum, jacketed soft point, 3 boxes of 50 rounds for $29 per box.  You have to work.  Seriously.  What used to be simple and quick has become a scavenger hunt.

My buddy John Bernard went off on a tear concerning guns, accoutrements and the idiots who currently rule us.  I would like to think that the following articles set him off:

Duck Hunting With Bullets

High Magazine Clips And The Shoulder Thing That Goes Up

Automatic Bullets In Rapid-Fire Magazine Clips

But I don’t know.  Here is a taste of his prose.

I have had just about enough of the queue of lambasting idiots whose sole desire is to control every aspect of American’s lives. Their bloated exhortations about things they obviously know nothing about has risen to the level of epidemic. What is more troublesome is that there seems to be an unending assortment and number of mixed nuts fully prepared to accept any edict these windbags hand down from their lofty “thrones” in the City of the Dead (DC) while the combined knowledge of both exhorter and audience, if melted down and strained couldn’t fill a thimble!

I am sick to the point of retching of listening to the absolute nonsensical sputtering about firearms by those who can’t differentiate between a butt stock and a flash suppressor so here is a short lesson in nomenclature to make you sound less stupid.

Go to his place and read the rest.  Let a senior Marine Corps NCO explain the facts for you.

Kurt Hofmann has a great piece up at Examiner on foreigners respecting the Second Amendment more than some Americans.

It’s well worth the time.  As you read it, remember that your company can define who you are, characterize you, and change you.  “Bad company corrupts good morals,” 1 Corinthians 15:33.  And remember that many of those who currently rule us were trained by Marxists.

Also remember this.  I have called their designs for gun control evil, a function and product of wicked governments.  Take note that communist China has criticized our Second Amendment and encouraged gun control, as well the United Nations.  Finally, their ideas come mainly from Nazi Germany, where Hitler had designs for gun control long before our current administration.  That’s who this administration can call company.

What does all of this have to do with Kurt’s article?  Just that those who have seen the final manifestations of evil in a society are the very ones who warn us about it and encourage the nurturing of freedom in America.

Sometimes I feel inadequate to be a gun blogger.  For instance, there is a new category of weapon with which I lack familiarity.

For years I have ruminated on what it is about (some) Americans that make gun ownership such a “third rail” issue. I have never heard any person say we should remove weapons from hunters or and sports shooters. One of my grandsons shot his first with a bow and arrow.

I have never heard anyone state that people should not be allowed to own a weapon for home defense.

The following question is never answered by the NRA: “What would justify a regular American citizen having super-assault weapons and massive ammo magazines?” I ask again: Why is this question never answered?

I don’t know what a “super-assault weapon” is, but if you can tell me, I’ll tell you if I need it.  I do know this.  I want one.

On to other things though.

Rep. Mike Thompson, the California Democrat charged with crafting gun safety policies in the House of Representatives, keeps talking about ducks.

More specifically, duck hunting.

“Federal law prohibits me from having more than three shells in my shotgun when I’m duck hunting. So federal law provides more protection for the ducks than it does for citizens,” Thompson said earlier this month during a panel discussion on gun violence at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, also on the panel, was delighted by the line. “That’s a very powerful point,” Emanuel said. “My instinct is we’re gonna hear more of this line going forward.”

[ … ]

“My point is, when people say, ‘How dare you talk about putting limits on how many shells I can have in my gun?’ — that somehow this is unconstitutional, it’s an affront to, you know, God, country and apple pie — I think it’s important to point out that this isn’t something that’s new,” Thompson told TPM last week. “This is something that we already do and it’s something that we’ve done in the past.”

Brad Bortner, chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s’ Migratory Bird Program, told TPM hunters have generally been “supportive of the regulations” because they preserve waterfowl populations that they care about.

You don’t say?  You mean to tell me that states restrict the kinds and capacities of firearms in order to protect the population of game animals and thus their revenue?  Pretty good idea, huh?  Nothing to do with the second amendment, but a good idea nonetheless.  But now on to the learning experience.

And the duck-hunting line does appear to be catching on among Democrats. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) used it at the same news conference where Durbin spoke.

“These are good law-abiding citizens,” McCarthy said. “They want to hunt. They want to go duck hunting. And the guns they use, duck hunting, you’re only allowed three bullets.”

There you have it.  Duck hunting with bullets.

UPDATE: Thanks David.

Prior:

High Magazine Clips And The Shoulder Thing That Goes Up

Automatic Bullets In Rapid-Fire Magazine Clips

We discussed this pitiful character in New York who just couldn’t bring himself to keep his guns in self defense.  He would rather puke and throw his guns away.  Read the story again if you need to.

David Codrea said he was a “panic-stricken, vomiting incompetent.”  Say Uncle called him a “Nancy.”  I called him an “effeminate weasel.”  But at Say Uncle, Breda comments:

I would like SayUncle to use less of the language that makes him look like a misogynist Neanderthal.

This *is* one of the stereotypes you cousin’-humpin’ redneck bible-thumpin’ bitter clingers are constantly fighting against, no?

I try so hard, and I certainly have the credentials.  So what do I have to do to get called a misogynist Neanderthal?

Women in combat, and in fact, in special operations.

The commander of U.S. special operations said Tuesday he expects to see women in the elite commando forces now that the Pentagon is allowing them to serve in combat.

Adm. William McRaven, head of the US special operations command, said he was “fully supportive” of the decision to lift the ban on women in combat.

I’ll tell you what.  Obama has himself some lackeys doesn’t he?  Adm. McRaven is remarkable.  But no more so than the current Commandant of the Marine Corps.

In his first interview since the Pentagon opened ground combat jobs to women, the commandant of the Marine Corps said some occupations may ultimately remain closed if only a small number qualify.

The Marines will not lower physical standards for certain specialties, Gen. James Amos told USA TODAY. “We can’t afford to lower standards,” he said. “We can’t make adjustments on what’s required on the battlefield.

“That’s not why America has a Marine Corps,” he said.

Sounds like he isn’t so much of a lackey, huh?  But wait.

The Pentagon last week ordered that the services provide the opportunity for women to enter all fields, including infantry, tanks, artillery and other combat arms.

The entire process could take years as the services develop and validate “gender neutral” standards. The secretary of Defense would have to approve any fields that remain closed to women.

“If the numbers are so small with regards to qualification, then there very may well be (job fields) that remain closed,” Amos said. “Those will be few and far between.”

Deploying only one or two female servicemembers in a unit, for example, would make it difficult for the women to succeed. “You want to have assimilation … so our females can mentor one another,” Amos said.

“Difficult for women to succeed.”  We wouldn’t want that.  After all, that’s what the military is there for – to allow women to succeed.

I’ve already discussed my own (and my son’s) view of women in combat.  I can’t add that much to it except to say that it’s the most stupid social project the American progressives have ever conceived.  But let someone else tell you that as well.

America has been creeping closer and closer to allowing women in combat, so Wednesday’s news that the decision has now been made is not a surprise. It appears that female soldiers will be allowed on the battlefield but not in the infantry. Yet it is a distinction without much difference: Infantry units serve side-by-side in combat with artillery, engineers, drivers, medics and others who will likely now include women. The Pentagon would do well to consider realities of life in combat as it pushes to mix men and women on the battlefield.

Many articles have been written regarding the relative strength of women and the possible effects on morale of introducing women into all-male units. Less attention has been paid to another aspect: the absolutely dreadful conditions under which grunts live during war.

Most people seem to believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have merely involved driving out of a forward operating base, patrolling the streets, maybe getting in a quick firefight, and then returning to the forward operating base and its separate shower facilities and chow hall. The reality of modern infantry combat, at least the portion I saw, bore little resemblance to this sanitized view.I served in the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a Marine infantry squad leader. We rode into war crammed in the back of amphibious assault vehicles. They are designed to hold roughly 15 Marines snugly; due to maintenance issues, by the end of the invasion we had as many as 25 men stuffed into the back. Marines were forced to sit, in full gear, on each other’s laps and in contorted positions for hours on end. That was the least of our problems.

The invasion was a blitzkrieg. The goal was to move as fast to Baghdad as possible. The column would not stop for a lance corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, or even a company commander to go to the restroom. Sometimes we spent over 48 hours on the move without exiting the vehicles. We were forced to urinate in empty water bottles inches from our comrades.

Many Marines developed dysentery from the complete lack of sanitary conditions. When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face.

During the invasion, we wore chemical protective suits because of the fear of chemical or biological weapon attack. These are equivalent to a ski jumpsuit and hold in the heat. We also had to wear black rubber boots over our desert boots. On the occasions the column did stop, we would quickly peel off our rubber boots, desert boots and socks to let our feet air out.

Due to the heat and sweat, layers of our skin would peel off our feet. However, we rarely had time to remove our suits or perform even the most basic hygiene. We quickly developed sores on our bodies.

When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

And what sensible women wouldn’t want something like that?  So that women can experience the ultimate thrill of being shot at, going a month without a bath, getting their limbs blown off, and defecating near the faces of their colleagues, the evisceration of the U.S. military continues unabated so that the social engineers can have a legacy.

It’s a great country.

Standard-Examiner:

In the fictional world of television police dramas, a few quick clicks on a computer lead investigators to the owner of a gun recovered at a bloody crime scene. Before the first commercial, the TV detectives are on the trail of the suspect.

Reality is a world away. There is no national database of guns. Not of who owns them, how many are sold annually or even how many exist.

[ … ]

When police want to trace a gun, it’s a decidedly low-tech process.

“It’s not CSI and it’s not a sophisticated computer system,” said Charles J. Houser, who runs the ATF’s National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W. Va.

When police trace a gun, the search starts by sending all the information they have about the gun – including the manufacturer and model – to an office worker in a low-slung brick building just off the Appalachian Trial in rural West Virginia, about 90 miles northwest of Washington.

ATF officials first call the manufacturer, who reveals which wholesaler the company used. That may lead to a call to a second distributor before investigators can pinpoint the retail gun dealer who first sold the weapon. Gun dealers are required to keep a copy of federal forms that detail who buys what gun and a log for guns sold. They are required to share that information with the ATF if a gun turns up at a crime scene and authorities want it traced. Often, gun shops fax the paperwork to the ATF.

That’s where the paper trail ends.

In about 30 percent of cases, one or all of those folks have gone out of business and ATF tracers are left to sort through potentially thousands of out-of-business records forwarded to the ATF and stored at the office building that more closely resembles a remote call center than a law enforcement operation.

The records are stored as digital pictures that can only be searched one image at a time. Two shifts of contractors spend their days taking staples out of papers, sorting through thousands of pages and scanning or taking pictures of the records.

“Those records come in all different shapes and forms. We have to digitally image them, we literally take a picture of it,” Houser said. “We have had rolls of toilet paper or paper towels … because they (dealers) did not like the requirement to keep records.”

The tracing center receives about a million out-of-business records every month and Houser runs the center’s sorting and imaging operations from 6 a.m. to midnight, five days a week. The images are stored on old-school microfilm reels or as digital images. But there’s no way to search the records, other than to scroll through one picture of a page at a time.

“We are … prohibited from amassing the records of active dealers,” Houser said. “It means that if a dealer is in business he maintains his records.”

Good.  This is the way I want it kept.  Any further collating, storing, amassing, categorizing or any other kind of analysis means that the federal government would have a national gun registry.  And that would be unconstitutional … and immoral.

The Bible does contain a few direct references to weapons control. There were many times throughout Israel’s history that it rebelled against God (in fact, it happened all the time). To mock His people back into submission to His Law, the Lord would often use wicked neighbors to punish Israel’s rebellion. Most notable were the Philistines and the Babylonians. 1 Samuel 13:19-22 relates the story: “Not a blacksmith could be found in the whole land of Israel, because the Philistines had said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears!” So all Israel went down to the Philistines to have their plowshares, mattocks, axes, and sickles sharpened…So on the day of battle not a soldier with Saul and Jonathan had a sword or spear in this hand; only Saul and his son Jonathan had them.” Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon also removed all of the craftsmen from Israel during the Babylonian captivity (2 Kings 24:14). Both of these administrations were considered exceedingly wicked including their acts of weapons control.

As I said.  Gun control is the action of wicked governments.  A national gun registry grants the government too much power, too much information, and too much control.

NY Daily News, via David Codrea:

Late one night in the spring of 2008, I was jolted awake by the sound of yet another a burglar trying to break into my Atlanta home. We’d already had a series of scary close calls, but this time I was ready: I had staged my shotgun and a box of shells in a broom closet right by the back door, next to the umbrellas.

While my girlfriend called the police, I ran into the kitchen and looked out the window just in time to see a human form rush to hide in the shadows behind my car. I grabbed the gun and fumbled for the ammunition in the half-light, spilling most on the ground, but finally found one cartridge I was able to slide into the chamber.

I worked the action furiously, once, twice, and again, realizing dimly as I did that in doing so I was actually ejecting the shell, unspent, and basically unloading the weapon. But the unmistakable sound of the pump carried to the backyard, and, in a flash, the prowler was gone — a blur of raggedy jeans and tattered flannel sliding across the hood of my car and vaulting over the picket fence into the night.

I couldn’t make out his face or tell if he was armed. The next moment I was in the bathroom, vomiting hot puke all over the floor and toilet, water from the bowl splashing my face and eyes. Later, my girlfriend told me I had made her feel safe, protected. I just felt ill.

Codrea calls him an effeminate weasel, or something like that.  It does cohere with what Amanda Ripley says happens when your brain gets around guns.

But the research on actual gunfights, the kind that happen not in a politician’s head but in fluorescent-lit stairwells and strip-mall restaurants around America, reveals something surprising. Winning a gunfight without shooting innocent people typically requires realistic, expensive training and a special kind of person, a fact that has been strangely absent in all the back-and-forth about assault-weapon bans and the Second Amendment.

[ … ]

Under sudden attack, the brain does not work the way we think it will. Millbern has seen grown men freeze under threat, like statues dropped onto the set of a horror movie. He has struggled to perform simple functions at shooting scenes, like unlocking a switch on a submachine gun while directing people to safety. “I have heard arguments that an armed teacher could and would respond to an active shooter in the same way a cop would. That they would hear gunshots, run toward the sound and then engage the shooter,” Millbern writes in an e-mail from Baghdad, where he now works as a bomb-detection K-9 handler. “I think this is very unrealistic.”

Unrealistic.  But maybe not so much for this wheelchair-bound veteran (h/t Marooned):

A U.S. army veteran who uses a wheelchair confronted a burglar with a pistol, scaring the intruder away from his home.

Mark Sikes of Bogart, Georgia, tells MyFoxAtlanta.com that he was watching TV when he heard a noise at his door and saw a man appear in his hallway.

Or this mother:

Investigators are looking for three burglary suspects who forced themselves into a Magnolia home where there was a mother and her 6 year-old child inside.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office says around 9:30 last night, they were called out to a home on the 18700 block of Mink Lake Drive in Magnolia. Investigators say three male suspects went into the home where they found a 33-year-old female with a pistol in her hand and her 6-year-old child alone inside.

Investigators say the mother fired the pistol at the burglars and thought she hit one of them, but they all escaped.

Rock on, folks.  Don’t listen to Amanda, or the weasel either.

Paragould, Arkansas, that is:

In response to a recent increase in crime, Paragould Mayor Mike Gaskill and Police Chief Todd Stovall offered residents at a town hall meeting Thursday night at West View Baptist Church what could be considered an extreme solution — armed officers patrolling the streets on foot.

Stovall told the group of almost 40 residents that beginning in 2013, the department would deploy a new street crimes unit to high crime areas on foot to take back the streets.

“[Police are] going to be in SWAT gear and have AR-15s around their neck,” Stovall said. “If you’re out walking, we’re going to stop you, ask why you’re out walking, check for your ID.”

Stovall said while some people may be offended by the actions of his department, they should not be.

“We’re going to do it to everybody,” he said. “Criminals don’t like being talked to.”

Gaskill backed Stovall’s proposed actions during Thursday’s town hall.

“They may not be doing anything but walking their dog,” he said. “But they’re going to have to prove it.”

[ … ]

“To ask you for your ID, I have to have a reason,” he said. “Well, I’ve got statistical reasons that say I’ve got a lot of crime right now, which gives me probable cause to ask what you’re doing out. Then when I add that people are scared…then that gives us even more [reason] to ask why are you here and what are you doing in this area.”

Stovall said he did not consult an attorney before announcing his plans to combat crime. He even remained undaunted when comparing his proposed tactics with martial law, explaining that “I don’t know that there’s ever been a difference” between his proposals and martial law.

Statistics isn’t a good enough reason to stop citizens on the streets.  As best as I know, Arkansas is a so-called stop and identify state, but only for loitering.  Additionally, even in stop and identify states, the stop has to be a valid “Terry stop.”  It cannot be because you just want to, or because crime is high in a given area.

But beyond the unconstitutionality of this approach, it is one more step in the militarization of police tactics in the United States.  And don’t expect the courts to stop this kind of thing – they agree with the police and almost always side with them.  They are, after all, both part of the “criminal justice system.”

I asked my former Marine son to survey this picture and tell me what he thought.

His response:

Fat ass Johnny-Soldier-Boy wannbe, who has no business walking around the streets like that.  He should consider himself to be a peace officer, and if he wants to do CQB or room clearing, he should sign up, get the training, fly across the pond and do it for real.  Pitiful.  Just pitiful.

Pitiful indeed.  If the crime is so high that patrols are needed, then the Governor of the state should call out the National Guard.  Otherwise, the police should simply do their jobs.