Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

New York Upstate:

TABERG, NY – Don Hall was sitting in his living room watching TV with his girlfriend about 9:30 p.m. earlier this year when he was startled by flashing police car lights in his driveway.

Hall met the Oneida County sheriff’s deputies in the driveway, worried that they were bringing bad news about a family member.

Instead, the deputies produced an official document demanding that Hall, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran who is a retired pipefitter, turn over his guns to them on the spot. On the document Hall said he was described as “mentally defective.”

When Hall told police he’d never had any mental issues, Hall said, deputies told him he must have done something that triggered the order under the New York state’s SAFE Act.

The deputies left that night with six guns – two handguns and four long guns.

Hall, who lives in the Oneida County hamlet of Taberg, hired a lawyer and secured affidavits from local hospitals to prove he hadn’t been recently treated. At one point, he was told he’d have to get some of his guns back from a gun shop.

Eventually, his lawyer convinced a judge that authorities had him confused with someone else who had sought care and that his weapons should never have been seized.

To this day, no one at a hospital or the state and local agencies involved in taking Hall’s guns has admitted to Hall that a mistake was made, explained what happened or apologized. A county judge did acknowledge the mistake and helped him get his guns back.

Hall said the ordeal was frustrating.

“I was guilty until I could prove myself innocent,” Hall said. “They don’t tell you why or what you supposedly did. It was just a bad screw-up.”

Under what legal authority Hall’s guns were confiscated is in disagreement.

Hall and his lawyer said they are convinced his guns were taken as a result of a report under the NY SAFE Act. The New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act was adopted in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newton, Conn.

The law includes, among other things, a provision for health providers to report patients that they believe are a risk to harm others or themselves.

The state Office of Mental Health, however, found Hall’s case was reported through a system set up by the federal Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, said James Plastiras, a spokesman for the state mental health office. That law, adopted in 1993, is named after James Brady, who was shot by John Hinckley Jr. during an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

The federal law includes a provision that requires a hospital or medical facility to report anyone who is involuntarily committed or has been ruled mentally defective by a court or similar legal body.

A hospital reported to the state Office of Mental Health that a person had been involuntarily admitted to a mental facility, Plastiras said. That information was passed onto the FBI for inclusion on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, he said.

[ … ]

Once the state Office of Mental Health is alerted through either law, the staff checks records held by the state Department of Criminal Justice Services to see if the person has any guns.

Any matches go to the state police to verify that the identity of the person matches the identity of the gun owner. Once confirmed, the state police takes the case to a local judge who issues an order to confiscate the person’s weapons. Local police usually are dispatched to confiscate the weapons.

One thing the state and Hall and his lawyer agree on is the misidentification that lead to Hall’s guns being seized appears to have started when Hall was confused with some other patient at risk.

The day after Hall’s guns were seized in February, he called the gun licensing office in Oneida County. When he told them his guns were wrongly taken, he was told he could attend a hearing in a few weeks.

Instead, Hall called lawyer John Panzone, who advised him to get depositions from every local hospital stating he had not recently been treated. Panzone hoped the affidavits would prove Hall couldn’t be the person initially reported to be at risk.

Hall said he and his girlfriend, Connie Heidenreich, spent the next day visiting three Utica-area hospitals to get the statements.

Hall said the only time he had been a patient at any of the hospitals was four years ago when he had a sleep apnea test at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.

At St. Elizabeth’s, Hall said a clerk looked up his name and read him a Social Security number. He said it was slightly different than his. “She turned white as a ghost,” Hall recalled.

Panzone believes another patient from Oneida County with Hall’s name was treated at the hospital and flagged for a mental health issue. Somehow that man’s Social Security number got mixed up with Hall’s, thus creating the error, the lawyer said.

The YouTube video of this report can be found here.

First of all, I don’t want to hear another word about how oath-taking LEOs will respect the constitution and refuse to obey unconstitutional orders.  The confiscation order was clearly unconstitutional and immoral and yet the LEOs enforced it upon command.

Second, I don’t care that the person who made the screw-up was a hospital employee.  She was an organ of the state when she made the reporting, and if I had that job I would resign.  When you do things like this you are in effect a government employee.

Third, consider what has happened in this report.  A man who is a war veteran had his weapons confiscated because someone submitted his name as having an admission to a local hospital for a mental malady.  Now listen closely.  Even if this was correct (and we know from the facts of the case that it wasn’t), we’ve already demonstrated conclusively from the reports of mental health professionals that mental illness has no relationship to propensity for violence, and that violent behavior cannot be predicted by mental health professionals because of this.

The case is closed.  There is no longer any debate on this issue.  Moreover, we know from scientific studies that limiting access to firearms of the mentally ill does not reduce suicide deaths.  For some progressives who simply want to worship the totem pole of mental health and behavioristic psychology, and who are well intentioned, they refuse to listen to the science behind their incorrect perceptions of the world.  They want to bow down and worship at the altar of the local witch doctor, or the psychiatrist, as if he knows how to make everything better.

But for most people, they know better than to believe that violence is related to illness rather than moral maladies and evil, and yet they throw out the red herring of mental illness anyway in order to cover over their real intentions, which is yet another gun control and confiscatory scheme.

That’s what happened here.  The SAFE act is anything but safe, because it protects no one and places peaceable, law abiding men in harm’s way.  But there are hundreds like it around the country, where guns cannot be purchased unless LEOs sign off on forms that include mental health information, or send out confiscation orders upon command from their superiors over anything from family problems to alleged abuse by some pissed off spouse.

Those LEOs will confiscate guns just like the LEOs in this report.  Don’t doubt it for one minute.  Be prepared.  And if you believe in God, family and the second amendment, and especially that the second amendment is about amelioration of tyranny, you are in danger of being judged mentally incompetent.  There are thousands of Soldiers and Marines who served faithfully who are in the NICS today because someone said they have PTSD.

Finally, note that every time the government – local, state or federal – involves themselves in a program, they are a fuck-up.  They cannot get anything right, except for running a military, and most of the time they don’t even do that well.  A lot of bad men make it to staff and flag officer level, and if you think we have thinking men running the show at the Pentagon, take a look at the two campaigns of “armed social science” we had in Iraq and Afghanistan, believing that we could force Muslims to accept liberty and freedom with COIN tactics, men who love tyranny and the yoke of oppression more than life itself.

And the progressives want to put the government more fully in charge of your health care.  Think about that for a moment.  Let that wash over you.  Incompetent fools and clowns like the ones described above want to make decisions on health care for your families.

The Firearm Blog:

In addition to being a tasty beverage, Coca-Cola is indeed a good choice for cleaning rust if there are no purpose made cleaners available, thanks to its mild acidity and carbonation. “Every three days I and my gun – I call it “grinder” – every three days, I clean it. If I shot it, if I did not shoot it – does not matter. Gun is sacred,” Yuzkovich said in the video. “What is a gun? It’s not a wife, it’s a lover. The wife will bear with it, the lover – whew, and she is gone. The same is with the guns. We use everything: toothpicks, ear picks, toothbrushes. Reaching everywhere we can. Dirt, everything is cleaned off. Some people said we used sand or something, it’s nonsense.”

Hmm … sounds like a good way to cause acid-induced stress corrosion cracking to me.

Recoil:

The issue is multifaceted. First, there’s the ability and willingness of many production sources, mostly in China, to create knockoffs. This readiness to create counterfeits, though, is bolstered by unscrupulous people here in America willing to knowingly trade in them.

While United States Customs officials and other protection agencies catch millions of fakes destined for American markets, enough slip through to create genuine concern.

[ … ]

Counterfeiters make some convincing copies of Magpul’s popular slings and sights. At first glance, the fakes look just like the real thing. But differences you might not see include the use of inferior polymer materials that may fail unexpectedly …

Liptak explained there actually was a time when Magpul licensed some cheaper components for the airsoft market, intended to make Magpul-branded pieces available for use on airsoft guns at lower prices. These licensed Chinese clones weren’t supposed to create confusion about their lower quality compared to components made for actual combat or law enforcement. But they did.

“We shut that deal down a few years ago. It was potentially confusing in that something from overseas that was marked MAGPUL was actually legitimate,” Liptak said. Now, he added, people are counterfeiting the former PTS products. All real Magpul products are made domestically. This makes it easier for U.S. Customs to stop anything coming into the country.

“An even larger issue, and a safety issue, and something we’ve raised in litigation is that someone may be putting these counterfeit products on a firearm they’re trusting their life to — whether it’s a law enforcement or military firearm or a civilian firearm trusted to defend hearth and home. It’s not going to perform to the same standard as the Magpul product they thought they were getting. Not good,” he declared.

Liptak says most Magpul knockoffs are sold online. Ebay is a common venue. Even Amazon sometimes sells counterfeits. Liptak advises to always check where an item ships from and who’s selling it. Beware some of the purported consumer reviews on online retail sites. Many can be fake fluff.

[ … ]

John Enloe is Aimpoint’s manager of marketing and technical support. An 11-year veteran of the company, many fakes come across his desk, some sent in for warranty work.

“They’re sold all over the internet and at gun shows. It’s startling because there have been times when professionals, people who’ve been overseas in combat, send sights to repair after they’ve used them for a couple weeks, reporting the sight “crapped out.”

Aimpoint military equipment models are the most frequent knockoffs. He said most Aimpoint knockoffs are airsoft toys. The airsoft community likes to call them “military simulators,” Enloe said. Many fakes are products for which Aimpoint has substantial military contracts. These include the COMPM4 optic, the 3X magnifier, and the entire line of micro series optics, mainly because of the popularity with the Special Operations community.

“The companies manufacturing these things are in direct infringement. They’ve got our logos on the products. They’re mainly building them for airsoft toys, and less scrupulous people are importing them into the country, and then trying to pass them off as the real thing to defraud people.” Enloe sees rampant problems at gun shows.

Brad Romines, Trijicon’s export compliance manager, says his company has also seen a noticeable uptick in counterfeits with optics and riflescopes the past few years. They’re even finding counterfeiters selling directly at U.S. tradeshows, including SHOT Show and a major consumer show, the Great American Outdoor Show. Trijicon knockoffs are being sold throughout the European Union, the United States, and even the Middle East, he said. China is almost always the country of origin.

Read the entire article at Recoil.  And be careful what you buy and how you buy it.  I know Amazon has been caught selling fake products before, or more correctly, they put people in contact with companies selling fake products.

I have a problem with this not only because the products are inferior and may fail, but also because it’s intellectual property theft, and China is the master of it.

We all hate paying big prices for things, but if you don’t like it enough, then you’ll design something better for cheaper, and when you do, that intellectual property belongs to you, not China.

Here’s a tip for you – put this on a mental index card and file it away the next time you think about buying an important product from China.  China still doesn’t get the QA process.  They don’t have the culture to sustain such a thing.  The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) doesn’t allow U.S. nuclear power plants to procure structures, systems or components from China, and for good reason.  Nothing they build can be trusted.

What does that say to you?  Is your own safety any less important to you than the safety of your local nuclear power plant?

Firearms Policy Coalition:

In today’s Wrenn v. District of Columbia decision (a related case, Grace v. District of Columbia, was consolidated with Wrenn on appeal), a lawsuit helmed by civil rights attorney Alan Gura and backed by the Second Amendment Foundation, the Court held in relevant part that D.C.’s “good-reason” handgun carry ban laws were unconstitutional:

Of course, the good-reason law isn’t a “total ban” for the D.C. population as a whole of the right to bear common arms under common circumstances. After all, it allows some D.C. residents—those with a special need—to defend against threats both common to everyone and specific to themselves.

But the ban on ownership struck down in Heller I also made “minor exceptions” for certain sorts of owners, who could then defend their homes to the hilt. 554 U.S. at 570 n.1. That made no difference to constitutional review of the ban, see id., for a simple reason: the point of the Amendment isn’t to ensure that some guns would find their way into D.C., but that guns would be available to each responsible citizen as a rule (i.e., at least to those no more prone to misuse that access than anyone else).

So if Heller I dictates a certain treatment of “total bans” on Second Amendment rights, that treatment must apply to total bans on carrying (or possession) by ordinarily situated individuals covered by the Amendment. 

This point brings into focus the legally decisive fact: the good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on most D.C. residents’ right to carry a gun in the face of ordinary self-defense needs, where these residents are no more dangerous with a gun than the next law-abiding citizen.

We say “necessarily” because the law destroys the ordinarily situated citizen’s right to bear arms not as a side effect of applying other, reasonable regulations (like those upheld in Heller II and Heller III), but by design: it looks precisely for needs “distinguishable” from those of the community.

So we needn’t pause to apply tiers of scrutiny, as if strong enough showings of public benefits could save this destruction of so many commonly situated D.C. residents’ constitutional right to bear common arms for self-defense in any fashion at all.

Bans on the ability of most citizens to exercise an enumerated right would have to flunk any judicial test that was appropriately written and applied, so we strike down the District’s law here apart from any particular balancing test. 

***

So our approach, briefed by all the parties, is also urged by Heller I and coheres with Heller II. It’s narrower than any other basis for decision but not ad hoc.

And it would avoid suggesting what Heller I implicitly denies: that some public benefits could justify preventing people from exercising the law-abiding citizen’s right to bear arms for self-defense given the risk and needs typical of, well, law-abiding citizens. 

We pause to draw together all the pieces of our analysis: At the Second Amendment’s core lies the right of responsible citizens to carry firearms for personal self-defense beyond the home, subject to longstanding restrictions. These traditional limits include, for instance, licensing requirements, but not bans on carrying in urban areas like D.C. or bans on carrying absent a special need for self-defense.

In fact, the Amendment’s core at a minimum shields the typically situated citizen’s ability to carry common arms generally.

The District’s good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on exercises of that constitutional right for most D.C. residents. That’s enough to sink this law under Heller I. 

***

To watch the news for even a week in any major city is to give up any illusions about “the problem of handgun violence in this country.” Heller I, 554 U.S. at 570. The District has understandably sought to fight this scourge with every legal tool at its disposal.

For that long struggle against gun violence, you might see in today’s decision a defeat; you might see the opposite. To say whether it is one or the other is beyond our ken here.

We are bound to leave the District as much space to regulate as the Constitution allows—but no more. Just so, our opinion does little more than trace the boundaries laid in 1791 and flagged in Heller I. And the resulting decision rests on a rule so narrow that good-reason laws seem almost uniquely designed to defy it: that the law-abiding citizen’s right to bear common arms must enable the typical citizen to carry a gun. 

We vacate both orders below and remand with instructions to enter permanent injunctions against enforcement of the District’s good-reason law.

Circuit Judge Karen Henderson dissented, arguing in a footnote that:

Although I assume that the Second Amendment extends to some extent beyond the home, I am certain the core Second Amendment right does not. The application of strict scrutiny—let alone my colleagues’ application of a categorical ban—is, in my view, patently off-base.

I’ve always thought that Scalia left much undone in his Heller decision, and the appeals court is doing his work for him in this ruling.  Perhaps Heller is all he could get the Supremes to agree to.

Unfortunately, however, this won’t be the end of it.  D.C. will come up with something equally unconstitutional, and I’ve noted before that similar federal courts have ruled in favor of “may-carry” laws in states such as New York, Massachusetts and Hawaii.  There is much more to come, and all of this confusion could have been avoided by a more robust Heller decision.

In the mean time, how dark for a person like Henderson, whose world and life view distinguishes between “to some extent” and “core.”  How sad and abusive towards other women who are left defenseless in the face of assault by her vacillation.

Glenn Reynolds also provides some links.

Komonews.com:

PHOENIX (AP) — Gun-friendly Arizona is trying to avoid deadly encounters between police and people behind the wheel by teaching armed drivers how they should handle themselves when they are pulled over.

Arizona, which allows residents to carry weapons without permits, recently changed its rule book for the road in a bid to avoid confrontations such as the one that killed Philando Castile. The Minnesota man, who had a gun permit, was fatally shot during a 2016 traffic stop after telling an officer he was armed.

Arizona is among a small number of states instructing drivers on what to expect during traffic stops. It appears to be the first to use its driving rules to address situations in which motorists are armed.

Democratic state Rep. Reginald Bolding said Castile’s death inspired him to seek changes to the state’s driver’s manual. He said the revisions were necessary because Arizona does not require gun permits and some owners have not been trained to handle firearms.

“The goal was to create a set of standards,” Bolding said.

The new edition of the driver’s manual, published about a month ago, advises drivers with guns to keep their hands on the steering wheel during traffic stops and tell officers right away that there’s a firearm in the car.

It also tells drivers not to reach for anything inside the vehicle without getting permission first. And officers can take possession of guns, for safety reasons, until the stop is completed. The firearms would be returned if no crime has been committed.

“For safety reasons.”  And lawmakers and judges are just stupid enough to think there is something to that.  Safety first, we are all taught to believe.  But if that’s true, if this was all being done for safety, LEOs would never, ever actually touch another person’s gun.

That is the stupidest thing I can possibly imagine.  It risks negligent discharges, as well as misunderstandings.  A LEO cannot possibly know what he’s attempting to pick up – a semi-automatic, a pistol caliber carbine, a revolver, a double action semi-automatic, a round chambered or not, a 1911 with a traditional safety, safety on, safety off, a grip (beaver tail) safety, no safety at all, pistols with owner modifications, pistols with light trigger pull modifications, and on and on the list goes.

The author of this policy decision is an idiot.  This does nothing to ameliorate risk, it only increases it, and for no good reason.  If a gun owner informs a LEO that he has a firearm because that’s what the law stipulates, he isn’t the kind of person who will harm the officer with a firearm in contravention of an even greater law against murder.  A criminal will wait until there is no other option, and he won’t inform the LEO that he has a firearm.

This is simply myth-making on the part of LEOs.  Here is some advice for gun owners and LEOs as well.  Leave the gun alone.  Don’t handle the gun.  Don’t touch the gun.  Not anyone.  Don’t touch the gun.  Don’t touch the gun.  Don’t handle the gun.  Don’t touch the gun.

Understand?

The Spokesman-Review:

Kimber Wood was lying in bed almost asleep Monday morning, with the TV on low-volume in the background, a handgun lying on the pillow next to her, when a faint sound reached her ears.

She heard the living room screen door swing open, hardly unfamiliar in a house where both cat and dog had learned to open the latch, she said in an interview Tuesday. But then she heard the door close. That trick, she said, her pets had not yet learned, and Wood knew something was wrong.

There had been warnings, she said. Her boyfriend, who lives in her family’s home in a rural neighborhood in the Wandermere area, had called Wood’s mother to let her know that he saw several police cars in the neighborhood on his way to work. Wood’s mother, Tina, passed a similar message on to Kimber and her father, Lenny. That’s when the family decided the 17-year-old should have her father’s gun, a .22-caliber Ruger revolver, with her while home alone.

Hasitly, Wood grabbed her dad’s gun and hid behind her vanity, to the side of her bedroom door, she said. She called her dad and whispered, “Please tell me you’re messing with me or something.”

He wasn’t. He was at work, he said. What was wrong?

Wood told him that there was an intruder in the house. Her father put his cell phone to his left ear and called emergency dispatchers with his work headset in his right ear. As he did so, Wood listened to what sounded to be a man going upstairs and then coming back down. He even went to the basement, she said, where her friendly boxer-mix, Max, was sleeping.

“It’s clear” she said she heard him say when he got back to the main level, seemingly to himself. She said she listened as the intruder left the house briefly, then returned. She said she believed he had taken his mother’s keys from her purse, but that they would have done him no good since his mother had taken her vehicle earlier that morning.

The intruder then re-entered the house, she said, and came toward the one closed door he hadn’t checked yet: Wood’s room.

The last thing Wood heard her father say was that the police were on their way. When the intruder reached the door, she said, Wood stood up and asked who he was.

He immediately ran, so Wood threw her phone on her bed and chased him with gun in hand, repeatedly asking who he was, she said.

The intruder ran back to the screen door and around the wraparound porch to the back of the house, where he was fenced in by the guardrail on the back deck.

Jumping the rail, he ran through a stand of fruit trees to a metal wire fence, Wood said. Wood was about 15 feet behind the man and fired a shot at the space between them moments before he hopped over the fence.

Over the next few days, as Wood’s story proliferated through social media, some commentators speculated that Wood “missed her target.” But Wood disagreed, saying it was never her intention to kill the alleged intruder. She described the shot as a warning to scare him away.

“I refused to be a victim,” she said.

You mean to say that she hadn’t been trained in all of that tacticool super Ninja warrior stress control training, and she was still able to defend her life with a firearm?  This means massive narrative fail on the part of the controllers.  They won’t be happy.

In fact, in order to maintain the narrative and effect their designs for a defenseless utopia, they would rather she have been raped, or killed, or both.  Everytown and Bloomberg have already told them to try to change their names from controllers to “gun law advocacy groups.”  They’re very concerned about their image these days.

However, I would recommend in the future that she not shoot at fleeing people unless she wants huge trouble with the prosecutors and courts, and for heaven’s sake, don’t fire warning shots.

Dave Hardy at Of Arms and the Law links a very in depth and insightful commentary and analysis of the National Firearms Act (NFA).  Dave comments concerning SBRs.

In 1934, they were treated as gangster weapons, although I don’t ever recall hearing of gangsters using them. They tended to have their fights at pistol or shotgun range, not at 100+ yards. Originally the minimum barrel length was 18″; then the government discovered it had sold millions of M-1 carbines as surplus, and they had 16.5″ barrels. So the minimum length was reduced to 16″. Which did a nice job of showing how arbitrary it was.

If you follow the link you’ll get to the scholarly paper (PDF), and I highly recommend it to you.  It would be nice if my readers would tackle this document and make some salient points.  There are a lot of observations I could make but just don’t have the time or energy.

One thing I will observe is that on PDF pages 500 and 521, it’s noted that a “pistol” is defined as follows.

[A] weapon originally designed, made, and intended to fire a projectile (bullet) from one or more barrels when held in one hand, and having (a) a chamber(s) as an integral part(s) of, or permanently aligned with, the bore(s); and (b) a short stock designed to be gripped by one hand and at an angle to and extending below the line of the bore(s).

While some shooting instructors may invoke off-hand or one-handed shooting as a small part of their efforts because of possible hand-to-hand combat situations, reaching for reloads, attempting to keep an attacker from taking the slide out of battery, or other reasons, this is usually what we might call “beyond design basis.”

No instructor in his right mind today would actually teach that it’s appropriate or preferable to shoot a pistol or revolver with a single hand.  That’s how much the science has evolved since passage of the NFA.

It’s an old, antiquated, worthless, useless, tangled, self-contradictory, laughable abomination, and the more the Congress and Senate (and by extension, the ATF) hang on to this ridiculous document, the more absurd they look.

As usual, reader remarks concerning the study are welcome.

No, not you.  I’m talking to Jeff Sanders writing for PJM.

I have just completed the ALICE training course on dealing with an active shooter situation. If your business has not gone through this, you need to get them on board. Immediately. This is simply some of the best training I have ever been through. And it does not involve using firearms at all.

We have all heard about the tragedies at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora, and Virginia Tech where an active shooter massacred people. Sadly, this sort of thing is probably not going away any time soon. How should people caught in this situation respond? Not everyone is going to carry a gun. (I am a concealed carry weapons instructor and strongly support the 2nd Amendment. But let’s face it, many people simply are not going to carry, and many should NOT carry a firearm.)

Very, very few people will dedicate the necessary amount of time and training to be able to shoot an attacker without accidentally shooting innocent people. And even if you are armed and trained, it would be incredibly difficult to react fast enough and track down the killer and eliminate the threat. There is training, however, that uses our natural God-given abilities that even children can use, and it’s in the ALICE training seminars.

“ALICE” is the acronym for a series of responses: Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate. You do not need to do all of these responses, or in the order spelled out in the acronym. You do whatever your situation demands at the moment.

Oh good Lord!  I’m so tired of hearing this claptrap I don’t know what to do except call it out for the bullshit it is.  It’s effective bullshit for the masses, just witness the comments at the linked article, or the link that sent me there to begin with.  Let me explain what this is all about.  Security contractors know that the progressive heads of corporations won’t allow their employees to carry firearms for self defense, but those same employees also know that run, hide and fight is ridiculous and sets them up to be sheep led to the slaughter on the altar of those progressive dreams of utopia.  What to do?

Enter, “Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.”  It sounds so much better, right?  Except there is no difference since employees are unarmed and helpless.  The money quote is this: “Very, very few people will dedicate the necessary amount of time and training to be able to shoot an attacker without accidentally shooting innocent people. And even if you are armed and trained, it would be incredibly difficult to react fast enough and track down the killer and eliminate the threat.”

That’s a lie and the writer knows it, as does every security contractor who purveys this bullshit (or if he actually believes it he has poor judgment).  We’ve seen otherwise, from the young lady who had a gun to her head, reached down, unholstered her firearm, and shot the assailant.  Or consider the elderly folk who have acted in self defense, most of them essentially untrained.  I’m not advocating getting no training.  What I am advocating is that it’s possible to defend your life without the supposedly super Ninja warrior stress control training that infantry goes through.

And the notion that the police are trained to that standard is absurd.  Most police never discharge their weapons in self defense.  Neither, for that matter, do Soldiers and Marines who aren’t infantry.  That is a myth.  The bottom line is that if you are left unarmed by your employer, you are left as sheep to be slaughtered on the altar of the progressive utopian dream.

And every security contractor who teaches corporate security knows it.  Every … single … one.

Newsday:

Head of the Harbor Village officials are considering allowing researchers to use dart guns to treat deer in an experimental contraception program intended to shrink the population there.

Residents have complained the roughly 600 deer living in and around the densely wooded North Shore village feast on gardens and treat expensive landscaping like “an open salad bar,” as one person wrote in response to a village survey on residents’ experiences with the animals. Residents also worried about deer colliding with vehicles on the village’s winding, unlit roads, and the animals’ role as hosts for the ticks that carry Lyme disease.

New York State’s preferred method of deer population control is hunting, which many village residents reject as inhumane. So trustees decided last year to pursue nonlethal means of population control and contacted researchers from the Humane Society of the United States and Tufts University exploring use of porcine zona pellucid, or PZP, a substance derived from pig ovaries that uses an animal’s own immune system to prevent pregnancy in wildlife populations.

Head of the Harbor would become the second community on Long Island, after Fire Island, to host the work, which researchers estimate will cost $242,215 and take place over six years. The money would come from the village, foundations and private donors.

Eric Stubbs, a member of the village’s Deer Management Advisory Committee and an economist who commutes by train to New York City, said he sees deer on his morning drive to the station about once a week. “They’re a significant presence,” he said.

Most of his neighbors are eager for the project to start, he said. “It has implications not just for us, but for towns all over Long Island . . . It’s one of the few things where you can get majority support,” he said.
Researchers use dart guns to dose female deer with PZP or sedatives so they can be injected by hand with the substance.

“What we’re hoping to do long-term is offer a solution for wildlife managers to use for areas where hunting or lethal means are not feasible or kosher with the community,” said Kali Pereira, HSUS senior wildlife manager.

HSUS dart guns – Pereira called them dart projectors – are similar to paintball guns and powered by carbon dioxide, she said. Only trained researchers use them, she said.

But the same law that effectively outlaws hunting in Head of the Harbor could keep the researchers from their work. It bans discharge of most projectile weapons including those, like the researchers use, that are gas- or air-powered.

“The activity they’re seeking to import into the village does not comply with their own local law,” said Assemb. Tom McKevitt (R-East Meadow), a lawyer who specializes in municipal law.

No-discharge laws are common across Long Island, he said. Although Head of the Harbor’s code makes exceptions for police and for non-officers who discharge a weapon “provided it is reasonably necessary for the protection of life or property,” McKevitt said it would be “a stretch” to apply that clause to the defense of perennials from hungry deer. Violators face fines of up to $250 and jail time.

You Yankees are so janky.  You’re planning to spend a quarter of a million dollars to neuter deer in order to do what hunting has done for decades so well – control the herd population.

Oh well, since money grows on trees this is a viable option for you, I guess. And hey, at least you aren’t sending the king’s men into the king’s forests to cull the population because no one else is good enough to do that.

It sounds juvenile even to be asking the question.

The question has been asked: Is the 1911 an effective defensive platform?

Well, yes it is. The pistol may not be the PERFECT defensive pistol, but it is a workable platform for those who choose to carry it; workable if you train properly.

Two of the biggest knocks against the 1911 are the light, single-action trigger and the frame-mounted thumb safety. Some people say the light trigger is the cause of negligent discharges with this type of pistol. Others claim the safety is a problem in a gunfight because, under stress, one will forget to disengage said safety and therefore get killed.

Seriously?  Someone has actually raised the objection to the 1911 that it isn’t designed with double action?  I find the infatuation with cheap plastic guns almost amusing if it wasn’t so sad.

Look, if you want to be sure that you have a ready weapon, chamber a round and put the safety on.  Or don’t.  My holsters guard the trigger anyway.

It’s easy to practice sweeping the safety down as soon as you unholster the weapon.  And John Basilone says hello.