Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

Jonah Goldberg:

Smoking was, until recently, a very bipartisan habit. City mice and country mice alike would walk a mile for a Camel.

The universality of smoking made it possible to proselytize against it without unleashing a full-blown kulturkampf. Sure, conservatives and libertarians complained — often correctly by my lights — about lost liberties, but an attack on smoking, backed up by solid evidence, didn’t simultaneously feel like an attack on one cultural group by another.

Because nonsmokers knew smokers, the war on tobacco could be fought face-to-face in our homes, businesses, movie theaters, planes, trains, and automobiles. And when nonsmokers pleaded with their friends and loved ones to give up tobacco, they at least understood the appeal of smoking. Cigarette America wasn’t a foreign country. You can’t say the same thing about Gun America.

My wife grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, where gun ownership was nearly as common and natural as snow-shovel ownership. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and I never knew anyone who owned a gun. When my mother was an auxiliary mounted policewoman, she was not permitted to carry one. The absence of guns in urban liberal environments leads to a kind of Pauline Kaelism. Kael is — apocryphally — credited with saying she couldn’t believe Richard Nixon won the election because she didn’t know anyone who voted for him.

Likewise, many urban liberals only hear about guns when they’re used in crimes, and simply can’t imagine why anyone would want one. As a result, they’re tone-deaf in their arguments. Even worse than the tone-deafness is the arrogant condescension. In the 2008 campaign, when Barack Obama tried to explain why some rural voters were not supporting him, he infamously said that it was out of bitterness — a bitterness that caused them to “cling” to their guns and their religion. Obama has been trying to unring that bell ever since.

To urban liberals, guns are like cigarettes — products that when used as intended only hurt or kill people, and that are also low-class and crude. The Second Amendment, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wrote, is “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.” Such smugness doesn’t help, but the real reason the war on guns has been such an abysmal failure is that guns and cigarettes aren’t alike after all. You can’t hunt or, more importantly, defend yourself or your family with a cigarette. That’s why, in the wake of San Bernardino, millions of Americans didn’t think, “We’ve got to get rid of guns.” They thought, “Maybe I should get one.” I know I did.

This is only an excerpt, and Jonah spends a good deal of time setting up his argument.  I don’t mean to be unfair by my selection of the excerpt.  But something seems very wrong with Jonah’s analysis.

His argument at the beginning seems to me to be essentially this.  Smoking was ubiquitous and not restricted to a geographical location, economic strata, or political ideology.  Therefore, the war against it didn’t alienate any of those things.

But the contrapositive (I believe I have chosen correctly here) is that if more effete urbanites owned firearms just like us uneducated country bumpkins, a successful campaign could be prosecuted against guns just like it was against smoking.

But what Jonah misses is that while there may not have been a moral underpinning or ideological foundation for smoking, there is for gun ownership.  While there are a few progressive gun owners, they are few and far between, and (in my opinion) they aren’t being consistent with their ideology.

The constant thematic thread in the progressive mind is the hive mentality.  The state is supreme, and gun ownership is a threat to the state, which reaches its apogee when it has sole ownership of the power of force.  The offspring of hippies is Fascism, and the liberal mind never really liked guns and force in the hands of non-state actors, with the exception of groups like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground, or in other words, guns are good as long as we have them and you don’t.  The progressive mind is statist – it always was and will ever be so.

Guns were never really the issue.  It was always all about control, as it is today.  Guns give the power of self defense, against home invasion, muggings, beatings, active shooter situations, and yes, against tyrannical states.  Nuclear weapons (to answer the usual critic of this position), which no one knows where to detonate because enemy and friend are intermixed everywhere, are no match at all for fourth generation warfare in the neighborhoods, streets, hollows, valleys, highways and mountains of America.

Don’t ever underestimate the power of guns to hold tyranny at bay, and since the gun controllers don’t, they always try to change the subject to safety, righteousness, or anything else.  Jonah is on the right track, but he just isn’t quite yet there, and hasn’t quite completed his journey.

Jonah ends his piece with ponderings on the notion of empowerment to defend and protect his family.  Well enough, but don’t doubt for a second, more progressives owning some guns won’t change the idea that to the progressive, he doesn’t have that right.  There will always be disagreement between us because it is ideological and moral, running to the very taproot of the difference between right and wrong.  And we won the war on guns because we have the guns.

David Codrea:

A man was viciously assaulted and robbed on a St. Louis MetroLink train by “several young men” who held him, beat him and went through his pockets, KTVI Fox 2 Now’s “You Paid for It Team” reported Monday. The attack happened days after a student “was terrorized on the train.”

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?  No.  Only an idiot would think so.

Bruce Hanify laments pajama boy and misses the world of sergeants.  My father served in the 82nd airborne division between the Korean war and War in Southeast Asia, and I had four uncles who fought in WWII, while two of those were drafted again for the Korean war.  Today’s men play fantasy football and watch nighttime TV shows.

Paul Ryan on guns.

“People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings,” said Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, after the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., early this month.

I see.  So mental illness is the raison d’etre of the two shooters, not a committed and systematic belief in a death cult?  Good grief.  Ryan is a bad as the jackass he replaced.

Valets stealing guns.  Be careful out there folks.

Houston Chronicle, with a piece entitled “biker melee shows challenge of wielding gun in self defense during a shooting.”

Perhaps the worst place for a shooting to break out is in the middle of a bunch of people with guns, who are flanked by police who have bigger guns and are already expecting trouble.

That is one of the scenarios regarding what happened at the Twin Peaks in Waco during a May melee that left at least nine bikers dead, about two dozen wounded, and 177 charged with engaging in organized crime.

Ballistics reports recently leaked to the Associated Press conclude that four of the dead were shot by rifle rounds that would be fired from the weapons carried by police. In the days after the shooting, there was a rumor that four had been killed by police, but as far as public proof went, it was a mystery.

There was no love lost between members of the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle clubs, and each of their supporters, as they came face to face in the parking lot outside the Twin Peaks restaurant.

By all accounts, a large percentage had guns, knives or other weapons either on them or in their motorcycles, cars or trucks. A number of the bikers also had permits to carry their guns, and some were veterans who had first hand experience in receiving fire.

As a fight of words quickly lead to at least one biker drew his handgun and fired it into another, and a whole bunch of other people pulled out their weapons to either defend themselves, go on the attack, or just try and stay safe while figuring out what was going on.

Making matters more complicated, the Cossacks and the Bandidos already had a few violent clashes, but they were usually fist fights and never gun fights.

Police may have faced a situation where they were unsure who was waving a gun as they intended to fire at others, versus who were just trying to defend themselves.

Terry Katz, a spokesman for the International Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association, compared what happened in Waco to what might happen if a gunman attacked a restaurant and people fearing for their own safety pulled out their own guns.

“You get there quickly, and it is an active shooter situation,” he said of what police would confront. “There are shots fired, bullets whizzing near you.”

“As to who got shot and how many people were shot by who,” he said, “it is going to come out.”

The title hints what the writer wants you to think.  Use of a gun in self defense in an “active shooter situation” (I hate that figure of speech and I think it’s useless) is a low percentage bet.  True to form, one comment reads thusly.

I’ve always wondered about the gun nuts that claim the killings in the Colorado theater would have been prevented if everyone present had been carrying a gun. How would anyone know for sure that there was only one shooter and not several planted in the audience? How would 100+ shooters be able to shoot the focal shooter and not injure or kill someone else? It just doesn’t make sense.

Seriously.  This isn’t parody.  Someone actually wrote all of the things above.  You simply can’t make this stuff up.  The writer (and commenter follows the writers lede) is comparing self defense any time to biker self defense using a handgun against the police lying in wait from a standoff position using long guns with glass, with the conclusion that self defense doesn’t work.

Again, you just can’t make this stuff up.  I think they’re a bit tactically confused.

CheaperThanDirt.com:

In October 2015, Winchester issued a recall and important safety notice for Winchester XPR rifles.

XPR rifles have the potential to fire an unintended round when the safety switch is manipulated. During continuous product testing, Winchester found that moving the safety switch on the XPR rifle “may cause movement in the trigger system that could result in unintended firing of certain XPR rifles.”

As such, Winchester is recalling all XPR rifles. Winchester is replacing certain trigger group parts in all Winchester XPR rifles free. Winchester requests all owners of XPR rifles send their rifles for retrofitting.

This is the right way to do it, the responsible and ethical way.  If you find a problem, recall it and fix it.  Unlike what Remington did with the Model 700 Walker Fire Control.

Chicago Tribune:

Authorities say no charges will be filed against an Uber driver who shot and wounded a gunman who opened fire on a crowd of people in Logan Square over the weekend.

The driver had a concealed-carry permit and acted in the defense of himself and others, Assistant State’s Attorney Barry Quinn said in court Sunday.

A group of people had been walking in front of the driver around 11:50 p.m. Friday in the 2900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue when Everardo Custodio, 22, began firing into the crowd, Quinn said.

The driver pulled out a handgun and fired six shots at Custodio, hitting him several times, according to court records.  Responding officers found Custodio lying on the ground, bleeding, Quinn said.  No other injuries were reported.

Authorities say no charges will be filed against an Uber driver who shot and wounded a gunman who opened fire on a crowd of people in Logan Square over the weekend.

The driver had a concealed-carry permit and acted in the defense of himself and others, Assistant State’s Attorney Barry Quinn said in court Sunday.

A group of people had been walking in front of the driver around 11:50 p.m. Friday in the 2900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue when Everardo Custodio, 22, began firing into the crowd, Quinn said.

The driver pulled out a handgun and fired six shots at Custodio, hitting him several times, according to court records.  Responding officers found Custodio lying on the ground, bleeding, Quinn said.  No other injuries were reported.

Now, go to Google News and search on Logan Square for any other reporting of this event.  There is none.  America has been saturated with reporting on gun violence and this administration’s call for more gun control, but nothing on the prevention of another mass shooting by a concealed carrier.

It doesn’t fit the narrative, does it?  And yet, he didn’t wait for the police (who would have been too late to do anything about it anyway), he didn’t run for cover, he didn’t go wild and shoot up the entire area and kill innocents, but instead he apparently ran towards the sound and laid his own safety aside for that of others.

Who could ask for anything more out of concealed carriers?

Read David Codrea’s piece on dismissal of the post-1986 machine gun ban challenge appealed.  A good candidate for comment of the week comes from Woody Woodward, who says:

Had the ATF been around in the early 1900’s Browning, Garand, and Williams would have been sitting in a federal prison and we would be speaking either Japanese or German today. ATF apparently adheres to the premise that, “The law is what we say it is, at any given time, and there’s nothing you can do about because we are a governmental agency.”

Bravo, Woody.  Bravo.  I’ve noted before that one side effect (unintended or otherwise?) of gun control laws is to weaken the ability of the U.S. to design, fabricate and service guns.  For example, when is the last time a U.S. manufacturer fielded an open bolt design for a light machine gun?  Who has the contract for SAWs for the USMC?

Via Mike Vanderboegh, Dave Workman:

Today is the one-year anniversary of the implementation of Washington state’s Initiative 594, a gun control and registration measure disguised as a “universal background check” that has – as demonstrated by headline after headline – been an absolute failure in crime prevention, according to the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

In a blistering news release late yesterday, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, who helped spearhead the opposition to I-594 last year, noted, “Despite public records requests to agencies around the state, we can find no record of any enforcement of this new law in the year since it took effect. The only discernible impact of the law has been to inconvenience honest gun owners and add more red tape to gun shows.”

Oh go cry me a river, Dave.  I don’t remember all of that “opposition” Alan spearheaded.  In fact, I recall just the opposite.  In what world do you live?

Via Uncle, cops are just like you and me, only better.  Retired cops exempted from magazine ban.

From reader Mack, this:

The theodicy of federal government seeks to defend the goodness of government in the face of tragedy.Progressives tend to believe that government — if made to have sufficient size, scope, and proper management over the affairs of man — will fix or at least seriously mitigate the problem of evil in the world. Conservatives tend to believe that human nature is flawed and inclined toward bad things.

Mack comments that Molly sounds a lot like me.  Yup.

Breitbart.com:

Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” French Ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud defend a tweet he had posted in response to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump immediately following the terror attacks in Paris earlier this month. Araud described Trump as a “vulture” for a tweet Trump had made earlier in the year following the January attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Araud acknowledged he deleted the tweet, explaining it was immediately as his home country was reeling from the attacks, but doubled down on the sentiment he originally conveyed, which was using a gun to defend themselves in such a situation is something “only in the movies.”

“Well, actually I received this message just as the moment we were under the shock of the attack,” Araud said. “So I am a fighter and I am a diplomat, so I decided to respond the way you did, but actually I erased the tweet I think 10 minutes later, saying it’s of no use.”

“But of course, I am supporting of the substance of it,” he continued. “It doesn’t makes sense. It was a theater, a theater hall. Imagine a theater hall and suddenly people enter with machine guns and are really killing people … It is only in the movies someone is using his gun to defend himself.”

Meanwhile, in Aiken County, a gun was used in self defense.

Authorities say a man trying to rob a couple who thought they were going to buy a car off Craigslist has been shot and killed.

Aiken County deputies said in a news release that officers are looking for the second robber after he ran away following the shooting Wednesday afternoon.

Investigators say the would-be robbers pulled out a gun and demanded money when they met the couple at an Aiken gas station where they planned to buy a car listed on the Internet site.

Deputies say while the gun was pointed at the man, his girlfriend pulled her own weapon and shot at the robbers.

Coroner Tim Carlton says 23-year-old Frank Frazier Jr. died at the scene of the shooting.

The couple was not hurt.

It’s always nice to have empirical data to substantiate your assertions when your assertions pertain to empirical data.

David Codrea:

True to form, and consistent with Rahm Emanuel’s advocacy to never let a serious crisis go to waste, citizen  disarmament swindlers and other totalitarian lobby shills have taken to social and “regular” media to lay blame for Friday’s Colorado Planned Parenthood murders on groups that stand in the way of their goals. Those include gun owners, right to life activists, Republicans, Christians, white males, and others “progressives” view as impediments and threats to their objective of total control.

[ … ]

… he may be a peeping tom/cruel to animals … [and apparently doesn’t understand gender differences].

See also Mike Vanderboegh’s comments.  Look folks, this is a broken record.  The next criminal who wields a gun is the justification du jure for more control over people who didn’t do the act, wouldn’t do the act, who could be reliably depended upon to stop people who do the act.  It matters not to the controllers, and it needs to matter not to us.  Molon labe.

I hope you had a blessed Thanksgiving.  I know I did.  I appreciate it as being not just some amorphous holiday to be thankful to who knows what or who knows who for whatever, but to a sovereign God to has favored us with His kind providence.

David Codrea’s thanksgiving essay is here.

Fast-forward to present-day Boston, a place of sacred tradition, the literal forge for our heritage of individual liberty. Except Boston is now a place where traditions have been betrayed. Its current overlords have succeeded in disarming the whole people in a way that General Gage could never have conceived possible.

So successful have these rulers been that the city that gave us Sam Adams and Paul Revere is now a city under siege, and this is fittingly ironic if you think about it, by wild turkeys. So helpless and hapless are Boston’s modern-day patriots, they can do little except retreat from the aggressive gobblers, escape, hole up and plead for rescue from the very authorities that enforce public impotence.

Read it all.  Well, my reaction is that I would be surprised if the king’s men don’t hunt them down, since it is, after all, the king’s royal forest and men can only hunt by permission of the king.

Mike Vanderboegh links Strategy Page on the proliferation of personal defense weapons.  I haven’t developed a strong opinion on the value of these guns (or for that matter, pistol-caliber carbines).  I would be interested in reader reaction and opinion.

Gateway Pundit:

Seventeen people, allegedly belonging to specialised committees of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, were arrested Friday on charges of planting two explosive devices and attempting to block rain drainage in Alexandria.

The Interior Ministry said, in an official statement, one bomb exploded near the Al-Atareen police station, but the other one was defused before exploding in the same area.

The statement added that defendants dumped a cement mixture into the drainage canals to block the water and cause floods, consequently causing the repeated flooding in the city. The cabinet allocated EGP 6bn to maintain drainage infrastructure in Alexandria and Beheira in a bid to contain the damages resulting from the floods.

The drying of concrete is an exothermic reaction, one that occurs chemically rather than thermodynamically.  In other words, the presence of water doesn’t stop the drying of concrete.  This is a clever ploy to cause damage and vandalize infrastructure.  See how easy it is to cause terrorism?  The existence of a relatively peaceful America is a consequence of it having been primarily a Christian nation, with men who observed Biblical law towards other men.

As John Adams observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  I don’t consider Muslims in that category “moral and religious,” since it is a political religion intended for domination over other men, crafted by a pedophile for keeping his band of warlords and fighters together.

David Codrea:

All that does is highlight the glaring truth that criminals break the law. It’s what they do. Astoundingly, at least, apparently, to some, prohibition of those prized commodities invites bootlegging, and the violent crime that goes along with it. Thank goodness we have “the newspaper of record” to clear that up for us!

And Australia sees a spike in gun crime despite an outright gun ban.  You mean gun control laws don’t work on criminals?  You mean that all of those prohibition laws made up by those morally preening Northern women didn’t actually cause people to stop seeking corn liquor?

Mike Vanderboegh: A crock of excrement, this is.  I agree.  I’m ashamed to be a North Carolinian.

“Grim relief” over Jihadi John strike.  Grim relief?  Seriously?  How about a glass or three of good wine, a thankful prayer to God for His kind providence towards, and a a little celebratory dancing?  I’m glad we could speed John’s entry to the lake of fire.  What the hell is wrong with the media?

Police seizure of guns.  Hmm … it doesn’t really matter to me that this guy is a celebrity of sorts (I don’t know who he is).  The moral of the story is don’t give the police permission to enter your home or take anything.  In fact, don’t talk to the police at all.

Westword.com:

Earlier this week, we shared new reports about the investigation into Noah Harpham, who police say shot and killed three people before dying in a gun battle with officers. A neighbor, Naomi Bettis, said she’d called 911 after seeing Harpham with a gun but was told there was nothing police could do owing to open carry laws; see our previous coverage below.

Now, the Colorado Springs Police Department has responded with a detailed account of what took place during the ten-minute period between the first 911 call and a second, during which Bettis revealed that a man, later ID’d as bicyclist Andrew Myers, was dead, and also released audio of the conversations in question. We’ve shared the links here.

The CSPD insists that the first report wasn’t shrugged off. However, it was initially given a lower priority because lives weren’t thought to be at risk.

Bettis’s first call came in at 8:45:40 a.m., with the department noting that it “reported a suspicious male walking into a building carrying gasoline cans and a rifle” on the 200 block of North Prospect Street in the Springs.

The emergency response technician, or ERT, speaking with Bettis initially classified the report as a “priority 3” — near the middle of its six-point prioritization system. (Priority 6 is the least threatening designation, priority 1 the most serious.) However, about one minute into the two-minute call, the ERT upgraded the circumstance to a priority 2 under the theory that Harpham might be planning to commit a burglary.

Regarding the open-carry mention, here’s the transcription: “Well, it is an open carry state, so he can have a weapon with him or walking around with it. But, of course, having those gas cans does seem pretty suspicious, so we’re going to keep the call going for that.”

To listen to the first 911 call in its entirety, click here.

And commenter John P. Koury blames open carry laws.

Was walking into Walmart on 8th, two guys right ahead of me strapped with handguns. Mentioned it to the clerk, who started quoting open carry laws and said that it was their God given right. I walked out.

How does anybody know if these guys were robbers, thugs, angry punks or just bad-looking so called “good guys”? Open carry is nuts. If you are so paranoid that you think you have to carry a gun wherever you go, you probably are too unstable to have one.

And if open carry had been illegal, the shooter, if he had in fact decided to perpetrate evil, would have used a pistol, or several pistols, or an SBR hidden under a coat.  The caller wouldn’t have called in because there would have been nothing to call about, and hence no one could have blamed open carry.  Said another way, if open carry had been illegal, the shooter wouldn’t have carried openly else he would have been caught before perpetrating his evil action.  Evil men aren’t mentally deficient and unable to reason – they are just evil

Do you see the point?  Let’s use Aristotle’s categories in metaphysics and ontology to help us.  Open carry is an accident of this event, not essential to it.  It was essential to the shooter to be evil and to have shot.  The mode of transportation for himself or his weapon was not essential.  Understand?

As for Johnny boy, he doesn’t get to decide whether my carrying a gun disqualifies me from carrying a gun (Johnny needs to study tautology a little better, no?).  Because … I have guns and can stop Johnny.  Understand?