Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

The Nation:

But Chipman says that the reality is that, even though they undergo extensive training designed to inoculate them against natural human stress reactions, it’s not uncommon for soldiers to freeze up the first time they experience combat. It’s not a sign of cowardice. In most cases, those same troops perform well—or even heroically—after that first exposure to real-life combat. We can’t expect police officers to behave any differently.

[ … ]

So I think that unless you are trained—and you’re trained over and over again, and you practice like you play, which means you’re training in simulated life or death environments—the likelihood of you even firing your gun is small. And then the likelihood that you would actually hit a moving target surrounded by other moving targets—any trained operator knows the fallacy in that. It’s highly unlikely that it would turn out well.

Wow.  You’d think this guy did room clearing in Fallujah with my son in 2007.  But on to his points, these sound like the same ones made by “military expert” Ralph Peters.

When the shooting starts, even the best-trained, most disciplined soldiers and cops — US Army Rangers or NYPD SWAT members — don’t put every round on target. The notion that a guard or teacher who goes to the range once a quarter would keep kids safe is profoundly divorced from reality. “Friendly fire” would simply add to the danger.

Well, this is depressing.  For some oddball reason, I’m recalling some happier times here at The Captain’s Journal.

Like the mother who chased away a home invader using a handgun, protecting her children.  Or the sixty year old Texas woman who shot and killed one of two home invaders using a handgun.  Or the Indiana woman who used a gun to scare off home invaders.  Or better yet, the 23 year old woman who used a handgun in self defense with someone pointing a gun at her own head.  She had the presence of mind to draw from her own holster, present and discharge her weapon.

Maybe I need to ask these women to talk to the SWAT cop or Ralphie so they can be told, “Since you don’t have all of that super secret Ninja warrior stress management training, you can’t do that.  So don’t do it again.”

Finally, would you want to be the one trying to defend the cop who hid while children were being executed?

Minnesota gun owners explain.

Anthony Bieker.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Yes. Always.

Jay Daley.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Yes, locked full size safe.

Mike Potter.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Yes.

Richard Troxel.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

No, a locked closet.

Peter Boelter.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

No, but they are not readily available for use.

Nick Booth.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Always. We have a daycare in our home.

Isaac Lees.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

No. I live in a small town where we don’t even need to lock our doors because there is no crime. There are also no children in my house. If I lived in a high-crime area like the Twin Cities or had underage children in the house, I would absolutely use a safe if I kept guns in the house, but safes are extremely expensive both to purchase and to have installed, and since it is not necessary in my situation and I can’t really afford one I don’t use one.

Julie Mills.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Yes.

Ron Smith.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Most of them. I keep two pistols handy for self-defense/home protection. I keep a rifle handy for varmints.

Brad Leeser.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Of course.

Daniel Becker.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

No, my rifles are kept in cases and stored. My handguns are out of sight and kept unloaded but are accessible for self-defense purposes. If there were children in the house all firearms except my handgun used for my concealed carry [would be in a safe], but my girlfriend and I don’t have children. I’m former infantry and she grew up with a firearms instructor father.

Melissa Timm.

Do you keep them in a gun safe?

Yes.

First of all, I realize that these gun owners aren’t exactly apologizing for anything, but there’s an undertone here I don’t like.  It’s a man’s own business what he does with his guns and how he keeps them (I’m not giving legal advice or recommending that you keep firearms unsecured with children around).

Furthermore, while I get the idea that you want to keep firearms secured with children around, there are many ways to do this, including putting them out of reach, not allowing children unsupervised time where there could be firearms, and perhaps the most effective, putting your home defense gun in a biometric safe where you can open it immediately with a thumbprint.

But let’s be clear about one thing.  When one respondent says “my rifles are kept in cases and stored. My handguns are out of sight and kept unloaded but are accessible for self-defense purposes,” he’s just kidding himself.  An unloaded gun is not for self defense or defense of home and hearth.  It’s an expensive paperweight.  An unloaded gun may as well not be considered accessible at all.

Having them “accessible” means the home invader has a loaded weapon and you do not, and thus when he sees you attempting to load a weapon he has two choices: (1) risk the outcome, be that death, injury, and/or prison, or (2) shoot you.

Don’t give him that choice.

Those who follow firearms, shooting, and tactical channels on YouTube know about the travails of Hickok45 on YouTube.  Venerable and old school, Hickok45 tests and comments on firearms manufacturers send him.  Sometimes he shoots his own firearms, but always, he shoots, comments and often provides history and mechanical commentary on the machines he is using.  Sometimes it is with admiration, sometimes slight disdain, but always honest and interesting.

Hickok45 met with disapproval from some redditors when he supported the NRA in light of the compromises the NRA recommended (e.g., bump stocks, enhanced background checks), but being a former LEO and old school like he is, I wouldn’t have expected anything else from him.  Just as interesting to me is Jeff Quinn of Gunblast, especially when shooting and commenting on revolvers, but always interesting.

Hickok45 met with several bans on YouTube for promoting products, but he never really did that and always appealed the decision, mostly meeting with reinstatement by those who run YouTube.  But all of these folks may need to find new homes.

Full30: I received an email from my Google/YouTube rep at 9:30pm tonight. He requested an emergency meeting tomorrow to discuss YouTube’s new policies regarding firearms content.

This is really bad. Please read this carefully and a couple of times, and let it sink in. 1/3rd of my videos or more will need to be removed. If you don’t have them removed in 30 days, your channel will be deleted for policy violations.

I wish this were a joke. It’s not. I feel horrible for reloading channels or NFA channels. Showing how to make ammo or even showing the installation of a silencer is prohibited. Hell, showing the use of a magazine larger than 30 rounds is prohibited! Belt feds are a no go.

I’ll try to find out as much as I can from my rep tomorrow. I mean, are legal machine guns and silencers being demonstrated really going to get us account strikes now?

Please read this guys… I’m in shock, but then I knew this day wold come. It looks like it’s here in 30 days. I’m at a total loss for words. ~Tim

Redditors are up in arms, because the Google guidance says the following.

“YouTube prohibits certain kinds of content featuring firearms. Specifically, we don’t allow content that:

Intends to sell firearms or certain firearms accessories through direct sales (e.g., private sales by individuals) or links to sites that sell these items.

These accessories include but may not be limited to accessories that enable a firearm to simulate automatic fire or convert a firearm to automatic fire (e.g., bump stocks, gatling triggers, drop-in auto sears, conversion kits), and high capacity magazines (i.e., magazines or belts carrying more than 30 rounds).

Provides instructions on manufacturing a firearm, ammunition, high capacity magazine, homemade silencers/suppressors, or certain firearms accessories such as those listed above. This also includes instructions on how to convert a firearm to automatic or simulated automatic firing capabilities.Shows users how to install the above-mentioned accessories or modifications.”

“Manufacturing a firearm.”  Reddit understands that this means if you teach someone to field strip an AR-15 or replace a bolt carrier group and check head space (Brownells), you fall into this category.  If you comment positively about a particular firearm, part, accessory, or manufacturer, you fall into these categories.

Their temporary answer is to start downloading targeted videos.  But make no mistake about it, they’re pissed off.  There is also no mistaking the fact that at the moment, there is no replacement for the information and firearms channels on YouTube.

This could possibly effect other related videos such as tactical instruction where firearms are discussed, such as with Kyle Lamb, Travis Haley, Chris Costa, and John Lovell.

I’ve long thought that an alternative needed to be developed to YouTube other than Live Leak, but to date there is nothing.  Suffice it to say that the progressives at Google are winning this battle.  What happens in the longer term war will be up to someone other than Google.

You might have noticed that I rarely embed or even link YouTube videos any more.  I’ve made my choice – has the rest of America?

This transcript (which was bot-generated, so it’s not fit for human consumption unless you’re patient and forgiving), is interesting and informative.

So a little research battle kings mountain which you may be familiar with just west of here over in Cleveland county. Was one of the turning ports in the American revolution. And in researching that battle … One of the things I found Is that for people who were in the battle where they knew their ages. Over eighty of the participants were under the age of eighteen.

So don’t bother me with debates about why 18-year olds cannot be trusted with rifles unless you want to live under British rule.

Via Codrea, this from Daily Signal.

1. Harris County, Texas (2013)

A 15-year-old boy saved both his life and the life of his 12-year-old sister by fending off a pair of home invaders with his father’s AR-15.

2. Rochester, New York (2013)

Two armed burglars retreated from a college student’s apartment after coming face-to-face with an unloaded AR-15. The rifle itself instilled enough fear to cause them to flee.

3. Ferguson, Missouri (2014)

During the Ferguson, Missouri, riots, nearly all businesses within a particular 2-square-mile area of the city were looted or destroyed—except for one. African-American men guarded the gas station and convenience store of a white friend from looters and rioters. They did so armed with an AR-15, a MAC-10 “machine pistol,” and a variety of handguns.

4. Houston, Texas (2017)

A target of a drive-by shooting successfully fended off the attack by using his legally owned AR-15 against his three armed attackers. He was able to hit all three men in the moving vehicle.

5. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma (2017)

A homeowner’s 19-year-old son used an AR-15 to defend himself against three would-be burglars who broke into the home in broad daylight. The 19-year-old was later determined to have acted in justifiable self-defense.

6. Sutherland Springs, Texas (2017)

After a gunman opened fire on congregants inside First Baptist Church, a man living near the place of worship grabbed his AR-15 and engaged the shooter. The shooter subsequently dropped his own firearm and fled the scene as the courageous neighbor pursued him.

7. Oswego, Illinois (2018)

A man with an AR-15 intervened to stop a neighbor’s knife attack on a pregnant woman. The rifle’s “intimidation factor” was credited as a reason why the attacker dropped his knife.

8. Catawba County, Illinois (2018)

After his 17-year-old relative successfully used his own firearm to fend off three would-be robbers who attacked him in the driveway of his home, a man used his AR-15 to stop a threat from one of the would-be robber’s upset family members.

Nice list, and thanks to author Amy Swearer for compiling it (most of which I’ve covered, just not compiled).  However, she missed the case of Mr. Stephen Bayezes who defended himself and his wife from home invaders.  There is also the case of Patrick Hale who apprehended two criminals who might have taken life again.

Dear Marty,

I see that you weighed in with support for the “fix-NICS” bill.  I was sad to see this, so I wrote you a note that went something like this (in abbreviated form).

Sir,

I feel that this will be a huge mistake and I wish there was a way to undo this.  Unfortunately, there isn’t.  My readers have already sent me this information, and I was wondering if there was anything I could say to them about this?

I haven’t received a reply from you Marty, but I assume you’ve been busy, sir.  I also assume you’ve heard an earful about this, because you’ve withdrawn your support.

Very well.  I’m a forgiving sort of person and it’s the same position I took on Rock River Arms when they flirted with gun control in their own state, intentionally or not.  I’ve made many mistakes in my life, and my aim is to learn from them all and become a better person.

But this episode requires a little bit of unpacking.  You clearly demonstrated bad judgment in the initial endorsement of this bill.  I know that you are a Christian and a defender of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  This means a lot to me, and more than anything else will earn my trust and patronage.  This is also why I recently purchased a CMMG gun – they are a Christian company too.

As a Christian, you must be wiser and more circumspect than those around you.  You cannot be thrown about by the shifting tides and the changing winds.  You must understand that the results of the fall in Adam and his federal headship over all mankind causes sin, and sin causes the very things that the progressives use to foist their schemes of control over others.

You must understand that firearms were ubiquitous in early schools, so much so that gun clubs were a thing.  The changes wrought by society are entirely due to rejection of the very gospel that you claim to support.  And no rejection of the gospel can be repaired or ameliorated by a law or new scheme of control.

Gun control is evil in all of its forms.  It was Dr. Greg Bahnsen who pointed out the utter wickedness of gun control schemes.

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.

Furthermore, you must understand that the progressives are incrementalists and have been at this a very long time.  They are patient in achieving their goals.  Here is a perfect example.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

This is why a registry is the Holy Grail for the progressive.  They won’t stop with their initial victories.  Oh no.  In fact, they’ve told you so.  As for this so called “fix-NICS” bill, you must understand what while you might intend something like that for good, the state will never work it that way.

Any increase in the registry of people who cannot own guns will sweep into its chasm veterans who were diagnosed with PTSD, didn’t know they were on a prohibited list (because Obama’s VA reported them as prohibited), try to buy a gun, and then find out they have committed a felony and end up being arrested under this new bill.

Any increase in the registry will sweep into its chasm men and women who someone wanted to be on the list and [falsely] reported them as mentally defective, with the village witch doctors – or psychiatrists – employed by the state now an integral part of the process.

All of that bypasses the right of due process.  One of my readers observed this about court appointed mental health professionals.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

And just today, another astute reader made this observation.

Just as a gun registry is a precursor to gun confiscation, a mental illness registry is a precursor to the “confiscation” of the mentally ill.

The denial of second amendment rights for a certain category of people is a precedent for the denial of any and all other rights held by people in that category.

All men have certain inalienable rights. U.S. citizens have those rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

Denial or abridgement of those rights for any portion of the population, absent act or crime by each individual, is premised on a determination of one or the other of two things: 1) No human or citizen has any rights that may not be abridged or denied by government at will; or, 2) A certain segment of the population may be deemed to be neither citizens, nor fully human.

Our founders correctly believed that it’s never a good idea to give the state more power, or to centralize what power does exist in the state.  If America is suffering from a lapse in moral constitution, it has nothing to do with the laws or lack thereof.  As a Christian, you know the corrective for that problem.

Again, you must be wiser than your opponents, if indeed the controllers are your opponents.  Even the so-called National Association of Evangelicals, which is anything but national or evangelical, has flirted with gun control because they want to be cool, hip, modern and progressive.  You need to be better and smarter than that.

When the teachers of religion go their own way, you need to remember the Bible.  When the state sings its siren song of more peace for more power, you need to remember that, as Dr. Bahnsen pointed out, all gun control is based in wickedness, and the state is always lying to you.

Please, please, please do not ever let this happen again.  It will take time and hard work to rebuild trust with the gun community.  Please invest the time and work to do just that.

In the interest of following up George’s question on rifle scopes, I currently use a Vortex Strike Eagle (although I don’t currently shoot 3-Gun).  It’s a second focal plane scope, and it’s price point is very reasonable.  I am interested in the newer Vortex Viper, but it’s price point is higher.

Here is a video that is a little dated, but still has some interesting information and perspective.

Also, Vortex explains first and second focal plane for us.

Please feel free to weigh in with comments explaining your choice of scope and why you chose it, along with price point.

HuffPo:

There were 60 assault-style rifles and ammo in the shipment that arrived at Rio’s international airport on June 1, 2017 ― 45 of them manufactured in the United States. And they were all almost certainly intended for the drug gangs fighting among themselves and against local police in Rio’s favelas, helping drive a sharp spike in violence across Brazil’s second-largest city. These were Brazilian turf wars, waged with weapons manufactured in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida.

The Verge:

In the days after the Parkland shooting, users flocked to Wikipedia to learn about guns. When users searched for “AR-15” — the style of gun used during the shooting — they were directed to the page for the “Colt AR-15.” The page was viewed more than 200,000 times on the day after Parkland, a hundred times its usual traffic. But those users didn’t find much information about mass shootings or political efforts. In fact, the Colt AR-15 page made no mention of gun control at all, instead spending over a thousand words describing the technical details of the gun’s various parts.

That focus on hardware was by design. For months, the “Colt AR-15” page has been largely edited by a group of gun enthusiast editors. They joined together under the name “Wikipedia Project: Firearms,” or “WP:Firearms” for short. Expertise groups are common on Wikipedia, and in some ways, WP:Firearms fits the mold perfectly: a collection of users with detailed knowledge of a specific topic, keeping a close eye on all the pages where that knowledge might be relevant. But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.

Much of the alleged bias comes from how the articles are structured. For months before Parkland, information on generic AR-15 models was relegated to the Modern Sporting Rifles entry, which detailed various models and after-market additions, but made no mention of mass shootings or other gun control efforts. When some editors tried to include those topics, the backlash from WP:Firearms was immediate.

“Mass-shootings already have their own articles, all relevant info is, or should be, in that page and not needlessly duplicated on other articles,” one editor wrote. “If we start adding info about just one shooting incident to one tenuously-connected article, we’ll be opening a literal Pandora’s box (figuratively speaking).”

Fighting a similarly proposed edit on the Smith & Wesson page, user Trekphiler went further. “There are millions of weapons in civilian hands, including thousands of AR-15s,” he wrote, “and none of them have harmed anyone. This is the usual gun confiscator garbage.”

When users tried to detail the gun control concerns in the Colt AR-15 page, where most “AR-15” searches were still being directed, they ran into another technicality. “Sorry, this is an article about Colt’s AR-15 ™ rifle,” one WP:Firearms editor responded. “This is not the correct article for information that is about AR-15’s in general. That section of the article should be edited to remove the references to crimes that were not committed with Colt AR-15 rifles.”

The fight over gun nomenclature goes far beyond Wikipedia. Gun enthusiasts see terms like “assault weapon” as imprecise, while concrete terms like “semi-automatic” are overly broad. Even the term “AR-15” is difficult to pin down: what was a once-specific trademark has metastasized into a trans-corporate branding tool. “Modern sporting rifle,” the term preferred by WP:Firearms, is seen by many as a public relations gambit by the gun industry to downplay how deadly the weapons really are. There’s no perfect term, but as long as the two sides are fighting over nomenclature, any proposed measures will get lost in a maze of conflicting terms. And on crowdsourced and managed Wikipedia, that means heated, arcane, and tautological debates, often driven by political and cultural biases.

The title of The Verge article is “How gun buffs took over Wikipedia’s AR-15 page.”  Adam Weinstein also bitches about the throw-down he is witnessing over guns.

The phenomenon isn’t new, but in the weeks since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a lot of gun-skeptical liberals are getting a taste of it for the first time: While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between the terms clip and magazine.

Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control.

It can feel infuriating, being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions between our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons. I know this feeling acutely, having covered gun violence critically for the better part of a decade and having just buried an old mentor, killed in the Parkland massacre.

“Gunsplained and harangued.”  Ooo … if you think this is tough, just wait until you try to take them from us.  That’ll really be the bitchin’ day!

Just go cry me a river boys.  Grow a set, and stop griping over the fight you asked for on guns.  Uh oh, here comes a flock of wah wah’s.

Foxnews:

The ever increasing costs of compliance has driven many gunsmiths out of New York and other states southward to more gun friendly states. Remington, in business here since the 19th century, recently relocated to Alabama. Beretta pulled out of Maryland for Tennessee. KAHR Arms moved to Pennsylvania. So far, Fargnoli is resisting.

“I have 11 grandchildren and one on the way. And I can tell you my wife’s not leaving them. So moving the business isn’t going to happen for me,” he said.

Then if you can’t move your entire clan, your business will suffer, possibly in the extreme.  Sorry, but that’s the way the market works.  Buyers reward loyalty, and they punish those who undermine their wellbeing, or even those who work with those who undermine their wellbeing.  Again I say, if you’re a firearms manufacturer, you need to think seriously about moving South like so many others.