Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

ABC News:

Police say a man charged in a mass shooting at a Tennessee church was armed with two semi-automatic handguns and had two more firearms in his car.

Emanuel Kidega Samson is charged with the fatal shooting of one woman and is expected to face several more charges following the rampage at the Burnett Chapel Church of Christ in Nashville that left six others wounded.

Police spokesman Don Aaron said Monday that Samson fired 12 rounds from a .40-caliber handgun and had another clip attached to a tactical vest. He was also allegedly carrying a loaded 9 mm in the church and had a .22 caliber pistol and military-style AR-15 in the car he had left running outside the church.

But Aaron says police found no AR-15 ammunition on the scene.

This church is very blessed that the shooting wasn’t much, much worse than it was.  My counsel stands.  Keep your head on a swivel, and your hand ready to present.

And is it too much to ask that folks be as armed as their possible assailants could be?  Is it too much to ask that church security teams all around the country think through this issue, and that they demand that the men of the church be ready to defend themselves, their families and other congregants?

Washington Post:

NASHVILLE — A gunman wearing a ski mask stormed into a Nashville-area church on Sunday, shooting seven people, including the pastor, before attacking a church usher who ultimately subdued him with a personal weapon, Nashville police said.

The shooting — which left a 39-year-old woman dead — occurred shortly before noon at Burnette Chapel Church of Christ in Antioch, Tenn., about 12 miles southeast of downtown Nashville. Police identified the shooter as Emanuel Kidega Samson, 25, of Tennessee, a Sudanese native who they said is a legal resident of the United States and apparently had attended worship services at the church in recent years. Police said Samson will be charged with murder and attempted murder.

Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said Samson drove up to the church and shot and killed a woman who was standing near her vehicle in the parking lot. The shooter — who police said was armed with two handguns — then entered the church through a rear door, shooting and wounding six people inside.

At some point, the gunman also pistol-whipped a church usher, causing “significant injuries” to the man, Aaron said. The usher, 22-year-old Robert “Caleb” Engle, confronted the gunman, police said, and during a struggle, Samson was wounded by a shot from his own gun. The usher then ran to his car and retrieved a handgun, police said.

Aaron said the usher ensured the gunman did not make any more movements until officers arrived. “It would appear he was not expecting to encounter a brave individual like the church usher,” Aaron said.

Police Chief Steve Anderson praised Engle for intervening: “We believe he is the hero today.”

Authorities on Sunday did not release a motive for the Antioch attack. But in a statement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville said it had opened a federal civil rights investigation.

“The FBI will collect all available facts and evidence,” said David W. Boling, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “As this is an ongoing investigation we are not able to comment further at this time.”

If I was the Sheriff I would have told the FBI to get the hell out of my jurisdiction and never come back or else they’ll face immediate arrest by my deputies.  But I’m not, and he won’t.

This is all very sad, and I’ve pointed out before that in church you are in the most vulnerable position you’ll likely ever face.  Your attention is focused in one place, likely with your back to the sole points of ingress and egress, you’re pinned in by physical features and people, you’re sitting (most of the time), and there is a significant volume of sound occurring that would mask any threats.

Don’t ever go to a worship service unarmed.  Don’t ever do that.  Please.  I don’t.  One of the saddest parts of the report involves the usher who had to go to his car to retrieve his handgun.  I don’t know the details and they may have been blessed in this particular instance that more people didn’t die.

It could have been that going to fisticuffs with the shooter stopped the gun fight and thus no more people died.  In that case, it was indeed a blessing.  It may not have occurred that way on another day, and it may not occur that way in your church.  The shooter should have been met with guns in his face as soon as he presented his weapon.  Going to the car to retrieve your gun isn’t the way to keep your family or friends safe.

Keep your head on a swivel and hand ready to present.

Popular Mechanics:

The Army’s program to replace the M4 carbine with a larger, harder-hitting rifle is dead, canceled after just under two months. But now that the Interim Combat Service Rifle is dead, what’s next?

The Interim Combat Service Rifle was proposed as a means of countering the new generation of cheap, highly effective body armors likely to be worn by America’s enemies . Countries such as Russia are now issuing body armors that can allegedly stop a .30-06 armor piercing bullet. Experts inside and outside the Army believed that the Army’s current issue 5.56-millimeter bullet would not be able to penetrate new armor, and that a larger, heavier bullet that transfers more energy to the target is necessary. Like everything else in the domain of military weapons, it’s an arms race between measure and countermeasure.

Seriously folks, who shoots armor piercing .30-06?  No, really.  This isn’t rhetorical.  What army shoots the Springfield round?  And how much body armor would be necessary to stop an armor piercing .30-06?  Think through this for a moment.  They would be like the Pillsbury dough boy, just with York 45 pound steel plates attached to their front and back.  They wouldn’t be able to move, much less fight.

The M4 doesn’t need to be replaced.  Via TCJ, there are good suggestions for making your AR run like a gazelle.  Do it.  Aim for heads and hips.  Make sure you have other kinds of weapons such as .308 or 6.5mm Creedmoor, and remember that when you get something, you always give up something.  Weapon selection is always a balancing act.  Also, for the Army in particular, learn to shoot before considering replacement of your rifle system.

Finally, you do realize that even the arms manufacturers who gave us the AK-47 no longer shoot the 7.62X39, right?  All of those rifles have been replaced by the 5.45X39.  No major land army on earth now shoots the larger bore cartridges except as DM and sniper rifles.

Via SOFREP, I had missed this tip by John Lovell.  I like John and not only does he make useful videos, he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, unlike some of the trainers out there.  At any rate, he makes use of height-over-bore to show you how to zero your carbine when you don’t have access to a 100 yard rifle range at that particular time.

Reuters:

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia on Tuesday unveiled a statue of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle that became by some estimates the most lethal weapon ever made and the best known Russian brand abroad.

Perched atop a pedestal in a tiny square on Moscow’s busy Garden Ring thoroughfare, the statue of Kalashnikov, who died in 2013, has him dressed in a bomber jacket and clutching an AK-47 in both hands.

“I created a weapon for the defense of my fatherland,” runs a Kalashnikov quote hewn on the pedestal. At the unveiling ceremony, a Kremlin guard of honor stood to attention as Russia’s national anthem played.

“This weapon is Russia’s defense. It’s one of Russia’s symbols. Alas, for life to continue, for lovely children to grow up, for beautiful women in Russia, there must be a weapon,” the monument’s sculptor, Salavat Shcherbakov, told reporters.

Kalashnikov actually didn’t work alone, nor did he begin with an unknown cartridge.  His cartridge was already designed, he began with the German Sturmgewehr assault rifle design, and also had features of the M1.  He was aided by Aleksandr Zaitsen.

Eugene Stoner was also the chief engineer over the design of the AR line of rifles, with designers / mechanics Robert Fremont and Jim Sullivan.  It’s mostly Stoner we remember, just like it’s mostly Kalashnikov we remember.  I much prefer the exquisite engineering and tight tolerances of the AR design to the clunkiness and rattling of the AK.  But that’s just my preference.

The U.S. ought to erect monuments to John Moses Browning and Eugene Stoner.  But we won’t.  We aren’t Russia.  Russia has fighters.  We have PowerPoint presentations on workforce diversity and workplace harassment.

So tell me again who won the cold war?  Russia erects monuments to weapons designers, and American universities have professors who fill the minds of idiot-youngsters with poison.  I’m not feeling victorious for some reason.

Would The Alaskan say this is enough 12 gauge for a grizzly?

Dean Weingarten at Ammoland.

On May 6th, 2017, an armed man was sitting on his front porch in the 400 block of Glenburnie Drive in Houston, Texas. He had a concealed carry permit. His brother says that he goes to the range often. He was on his porch and had another firearm with him. An AR-15 type rifle.

Three men attacked him in a drive-by shooting at about 2:15 a.m. He fired back, hitting all three. They car they were in crashed, and all three left the vehicle to continue the attack.

The homeowner kept up his defense, shooting back and hitting all three men again. Two died, one at the scene, one at the hospital. One of them was in critical condition.

Over 40 shots were fired, but the home defender was not hit. Not once.

Those who wish a disarmed population tell us that AR-15 rifles and other modern sporting rifles are not useful for self-defense.

Here is the report.  No one actually believes that use of an AR-15 is unnecessary or ineffective for self defense.  They’re lying if they say that (unless the conversation is buried in details of long range threats where you need something like an AR-10).  When a person says that, he means that he doesn’t believe that you should have access to AR-15s and that only the state has a righteous monopoly on the use of force, even if you’re defending your life or the lives of loved ones.

Just as we saw in the case of Mr. Stephen Bayazes, who killed one home invader and sent two others to the hospital, he found a reliable semiautomatic rifle with a standard capacity magazine an indispensable tool of self defense.

In another episode of semiautomatic rifle use, an attacker in Hawaii found that no one was capable of effecting self defense.

Hawaii police officers are continuing their search for a suspect who fired an assault rifle at a group of people standing outside a club in Waikiki, killing one and seriously injuring others.

Hawaii News Now reports (http://bit.ly/2xrcAAB ) the shooting happened Saturday morning near Club Alley Cat. Police say a man fired about 10 rounds at the group. A 22-year-old man was taken to the hospital in critical condition and later died. Two other victims, a 27-year-old man and a 31-year-old man, were taken to a hospital in serious condition.

The report says “assault rifle,” and of course it wasn’t a legitimate assault rifle with select fire, and perhaps it was an AK design rather than an AR design.  Who knows, certainly not the reporter?  Either way, the people he attacked didn’t even have a pistol for self defense, or if they did, it was being carried legally.  Not in Hawaii.

Hey, how’s that gun control stuff working out for you, Hawaiians?

The Daily Caller.  1) .300 Win Mag (M91A2), 2) M4A1 with SOPMOD Kit and M203, 3) M14, 4) MP5, and 5) Sig Sauer P226.

Eh, you can have the Sig.  I don’t want it, and I don’t shoot 9mm.  My 1911s do just fine, and John Moses Browning is still comfortable in his superiority to the Sig designer.  I would buy 9mm if I had an MP5 though (I would rather have an M3 .45 “grease gun”).  As for the M14, I suspect that’s going to go the way of the Dodo bird.  This experience seems a little dated, but what do I know.  I am not a Navy SEAL.

In the world of precision shooting the 6.5mm Creedmoor (and 6mm Creedmoor) have completely taken over.  The .308 isn’t being shot any more because of the superior ballistics of the Creedmoor.  I suspect that the military will catch up (there are also some nice semi-automatic guns now in 6.5mm Creedmoor in the AR platform, and for affordable prices.

I’ll also take the grenade launcher.  That would be a nice addition to my gun safe.

Salon:

Silencers are seen by the gun industry as a great way to recruit new customers, because the devices make guns less scary to children.

“For new or younger shooters, using a silencer means being able to focus on marksmanship fundamentals and enjoy the overall shooting experience with considerably more comfort,” the 2017 catalog for Advanced Armament Corporation explained.

Donald Trump Jr., who is a big fan of silencers, concurs. Last year, in a video interview with Joshua Waldron, the CEO of a silencer manufacturer, Don Jr. said that silencers were great at getting “little kids into the game.”

Yep.  That’s what it’s all about – revenue.  It isn’t really about a less dangerous shooting experience, one that protects your hearing.  It isn’t about getting a better cheek weld on the butt of your rifle because you don’t have to knock your head into those idiotic ear muffs.  It’s all about money.

There are several things that we should point out about this simpleton’s article.  First of all, she doesn’t believe in the market.  If something doesn’t live up to the hype, it will die off in the marketplace.  If it isn’t wanted by the public, it won’t continue to be manufactured.  But not according to her.

Second, she believes that you are idiots.  She believes that whether you need something or not, you will buy it with a little coaxing by somebody – who knows – the NRA, the gun manufacturers (who do not fabricate suppressors anyway, other companies do that), or whomever.  It’s all just a revenue stream to them.  You will throw away your hard earned money on trash because somebody else has a scheme to rob you with worthless products.

So she is there to protect you.  The market works because you will buy it, but the market doesn’t work because you can’t discern the difference between needful products and those that aren’t.  It is not a needful product because you have ear plugs and ear muffs.  But it is needful because it might make the shooting experience more enjoyable and entice kids to learn to shoot.

And the main objection she has is that it’s just a revenue scheme.  Or if you continue reading, that it will make the jobs of police harder because it will fall into criminal hands and cause mass shootings.  Or that it will prevent you from hearing the sound of gunfire and running away.  Or something.

Good Lord.  Do they have editors over at Salon or has this just become a total trash bin of word salads for the gun haters?  At any rate, such is the confused thinking of the collectivists.

Shooting Illustrated has a very informative article on revolver disassembly and cleaning.  It’s worth reading in full, and it’s also worth sending this link to yourself and referring to it later with an email search (which is what I do).

It has very good pictures (I learn visually) and also recommendations for revolver tools.  I’ll be using this advice in the future.  If anyone has additional counsel for revolver disassembly, maintenance or cleaning, please fill in the details in comments.