Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

Asheville Citizen-Times:

Question: I know that you have to have a license to carry a concealed weapon in our area. But a friend told me that if you do not conceal the weapon and it is out in the open, with a few exceptions you can carry a weapon in public. Specifically, he said you can walk around downtown Asheville with a shotgun or a machete and it is legal. I’m having a hard time believing that. Could the Answer Man investigate and explain what the particulars of the law are? Where can and where can’t you carry a weapon openly in public? Is there any restriction on the type of weapon you can openly carry? Are there places you can’t carry a concealed weapon?

My answer: Nothing says “holiday cheer” like a question about open carry laws.

Real answer: This subject does get quite complicated, so the following is far from a comprehensive answer.

For starters, you can indeed openly carry a gun around in North Carolina, generally speaking.

“(The reader is) correct in that North Carolina generally allows the open carry of firearms, with a few exceptions,” said Asheville Police Department spokeswoman Christina Hallingse. “A private property owner may restrict the carrying of firearms on their property, whether they be concealed or carried openly. There are a number of statutes that could potentially apply, including ‘Going Armed to the Terror of the People.'”

In part that law says you’re guilty of this offense if you arm yourself “with an unusual and dangerous weapon for the purpose of terrifying others,” and you go “about on public highways in a manner to cause terror to the people.” The North Carolina Supreme Court states that a gun meets the definition of an “unusual and dangerous weapon.”

All sorts of private businesses have restrictions on carrying guns, generally communicated by signs that state in words or pictures that guns and knives are not allowed.

As you can imagine, North Carolina has a lot of regulations about firearms. Hallingse provided a helpful link to “North Carolina Firearms Laws,” a 46-page document on the North Carolina Department of Justice site you can find here: https://bit.ly/2EbdqWr

Generally speaking, you can’t carry a gun, concealed or otherwise, into a bar or other places selling alcohol if you are consuming alcohol. You also can’t carry a gun into banks, schools or governmental buildings such as courthouses. Under the section subtitled “Areas Where Weapons Are Prohibited,” the documents also lists “Events occurring in public places,” and “Areas of emergency and riots.”

As far as weapons that are banned altogether, even for law enforcement officers (in most cases), the state law lays out a couple of pages of them under the section of the aforementioned North Carolina DOJ document called “Restricted and Prohibited Weapons.”

SEE ALSO: Asheville calls for assault weapons ban; mayor says she would go further

Among them are:

• Any spring-loaded projectile knife, a ballistic knife, or any weapon of similar character

• Weapons of mass destruction, including bombs of all sorts, grenades, rockets having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, a missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, mines; and any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell of a type particularly suitable for sporting purposes) which will expel a projectile using an explosive or other propellant, and which has a barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch.

• Any firearm capable of fully automatic fire.

• Any shotgun with a barrel length less than 18 inches or an overall length of
less than 26 inches.

• A rifle with a barrel length of less than 16 inches or an overall length of less
than 26 inches.

• Any combination of parts either designed or intended for use in converting a device
into any weapon described above, and from which a weapon of mass death and
destruction may readily be assembled.

• Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction

• Teflon-coated bullets

I think this is a bad commentary because it’s misleading and incomplete.  First of all, MG are not prohibited – it’s just that you must have ATF approval for a Class 3 weapon.  I know folks in NC who legally own MGs.  The same thing goes for SBRs (he implies that it’s illegal to own an SBR in North Carolina).  It isn’t, as long as you have a tax stamp.

As for his snark about “Nothing says “holiday cheer” like a question about open carry laws,” I quite agree.  Open carry makes me cheerful, as it should.  As I’ve said before, I open carry “For the peace, good and dignity of the country and the welfare of its people.”

It would appear that from the questioner’s surprise, not enough North Carolinians are openly carrying.

Arkansas Online:

On leupold.com, Leupold issues a warning against purchasing Leupold-labeled optics from wish.com, ioffer.com, aliexpress.com, alibaba.com and many others. The most commonly counterfeited products, according to Leupold, mimic Mark 4 rifle scopes, VX-III rifle scopes, Prismatic rifle scopes, CQ/T rifle scopes, LCO sights and Deltapoint Pro sights.

The products are illegally imported from the People’s Republic of China, which is a profligate violator of patent and trademark rights.

Leupold’s warning says, “These fake products bear many of the trademarks and trade dress of current Leupold & Stevens rifle scopes, and are sometimes difficult to distinguish externally from authentic Leupold products.”

If I didn’t know any better I would swear that the Chicoms couldn’t care less about American laws or the American buyer.  Or honesty.  Or integrity.  Or good quality.  Or designing things themselves.

Paul Muschick:

The reaction to my recent column supporting Pittsburgh’s proposed ban on assault weapons, and calling for a similar ban statewide, was predictable.

There was a passionate and often vile backlash from gun owners who cited the Constitution’s Second Amendment and argued it forbids government from interfering with their right to own firearms.

I was called a traitor, a parasitic person, a shoddy hack, a fool, a Marxist, a leftist reporter, a libtard, a dumb $%& liberal and so on.

Several readers said an AR-15 does not meet the definition of an assault rifle, and that any weapon could be an assault weapon.

They raised a point worth a deeper look. There’s no question that any gun, and countless household objects ranging from knives to hammers, can be used to commit assault. So is it fair and accurate to use the term “assault weapon”? Just what does that mean?

Well, as you’d expect on a topic as touchy as firearms, there are multiple definitions. How expansive the definition is, and whether it includes an AR-15, depends on who is doing the defining.

I used the term because the proposed ordinance in Pittsburgh uses it, and that’s what I was writing about.

The legislation proposed in Pittsburgh defines an assault weapon as: “A selective-fire firearm capable of fully automatic, semiautomatic or burst fire at the option of the user or a firearm that has the ability to accept a large capacity magazine.”

The definition lists 36 specific “semiautomatic firearms” including “Colt AR-15.”

You can find the complete definition in the proposed ordinance on Pittsburgh’s website, pittsburghpa.gov. Look under “city info” and then “press releases” for the one titled, “Leaders Forward Package of Common Sense Gun Safety Measures.”

In April, a federal judge upheld Massachusetts’ law, ruling that assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are not protected by the Second Amendment.

“The AR-15 and its analogs, along with large capacity magazines, are simply not weapons within the original meaning of the individual constitutional right to ‘bear arms,’” U.S. District Judge William Young said in his opinion, according to the Associated Press.

Plenty of people disagree with that, so that debate never will end. Neither will the debate over what an assault weapon is, and whether to ban them.

As I said in last week’s column, bans won’t prevent all mass shootings, but they could make them harder to commit and minimize the damage.

I can live with being called a traitor, a hack and a parasite for suggesting that.

The above is just excerpts from the commentary.

It’s a silly law, almost as silly as this commentary.  The formal definition of assault weapon is as follows:

Assault rifles are short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachinegun and rifle cartridges … Assault rifles have mild recoil characteristics and, because of this, are capable of delivering effective full-automatic fire at ranges up to 300 meters.

The law contradicts itself in its very definition, from first calling it a “selective fire” weapon (which by definition excludes semi-automatic firearms), and then rolling in semi-automatic weapons.

But it’s important not to get too wrapped up in definitions because most readers, as do I, believe that citizens should be armed at least as well as the military.  So let’s don’t worry about what we call it.

Paul commits a formal logical fallacy, to wit, he assumes the accuracy of an opinion based on who believes it, or in other words, the genetic fallacy.  Judges in Nazi Germany believed it was right to send Jews and Christians to the gas chambers too.  The fact that a tyrant believes something is no more proof of its righteousness than my dogs opinion.

Moreover, he’s trafficking in myth-making.  The notion that a ban will make shootings “harder to commit” and “minimize the damage” is just something he made up.  There is no proof of this assertion, and criminals will find a way to perpetrate horrible things regardless of the obstacles in their way.  Some of the worst mass casualties in American history as from explosions intentionally done by the perpetrator (consider Andrew Kehoe and the Bath Consolidated School in Michigan in 1927).

Furthermore, we know that one underreported method to obtain weapons illegally is by targeting LEOs, a tactic frequently employed in Brazil.  The notion that only the LEOs will have access to these weapons is patently false.  Only LEOs and criminals will have access.  The use of such weapons for an individual redounds to self defense, something we know has been employed numerous times with semi-automatic weapons and standard capacity magazines.

There is also the false idea pervading these discussions that a bolt action rifle from a standoff location cannot be used to effect the same casualties, something Charles Whitman proved wrong, and something we know to be wrong from the history of warfare.

Before I close, I want to complain about one more thing.  A pet peeve of mine when people use the word “analog” when they really should have used the word “analogue.”  The two words don’t mean the same thing.  So much for the idiot, U.S. District Judge William Young.

Reuters:

A decade ago, Kentucky’s Anderson Manufacturing was a small machine shop that didn’t make firearms.

By 2016, it was making more rifles than Smith & Wesson, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Anderson’s big seller: assault-style rifles that cost up to $2,100 and require no lubrication. Anderson says it made nearly 454,000 rifles that year, or about 57,000 more than Smith & Wesson.

Anderson is the leader among a cluster of small, private companies that are taking market share from America’s biggest gun makers. They are doing so with catchy marketing or weapons that have, for example, more knockdown power for hunting wild pigs.

Some rifles made by companies such as Patriot Ordnance Factory and Daniel Defense fire larger .308-caliber rounds instead of the .223-caliber rounds more commonly used in AR-15s. Another firm, Kel-Tec CNC Industries Inc, makes the hot-selling Sub-2000 rifle – which folds up small enough to fit into a backpack. It costs $500 and fires popular 9mm handgun ammunition.

By contrast, America’s leading gun makers have struggled over the past two years, with the three biggest seeing their rifle market share slip to 44 percent in 2016 from 57 percent in 2011, according to ATF data. Over the same period, a cluster of about 30 small companies combined for 51 percent of overall rifle production, up from 37 percent.

Top rifle maker Remington Outdoor Company emerged from bankruptcy in May. Net firearms sales at Sturm Ruger & Company Inc fell 7 percent during the nine-month period that ended Sept. 30. And American Outdoor Brands Corp, parent of Smith & Wesson, saw shipments of long guns, including rifles, fall 32 percent in fiscal 2018, compared to the previous year.

Smaller players largely have sidestepped scrutiny about their products or their financing because activists have mostly focused on pressuring big retailers and gun makers with publicly traded stock or debt held by mutual funds. Excluding the big three, there were 28 companies that made 10,000 or more rifles in 2016, up from 20 companies in 2011, according to ATF data.

“The number of manufacturers was shocking to me,” said Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer for the $219 billion California State Teachers’ Retirement system, which this fall started a new effort to press gun makers and retailers on safety.

But small gun makers have plenty of options for capital outside of public markets. Smaller rifle makers get financing from community banks, credit unions and makers of metal-cutting machines, according to a Reuters analysis of firearms financial disclosures filed with more than a dozen secretaries of state.

“We’re not going to starve any of these companies of capital because there’s always someone” willing to lend gun makers money, said John Streur, chief executive of Calvert Research and Management. The Calvert unit, part of Eaton Vance Corp, has pressed big retailers to restrict gun sales.

Windham Weaponry in Maine received an $8 million revolving credit line and a $3 million term loan last year from Bar Harbor Bank & Trust, according to local real estate records. The company and the bank did not respond to requests for comment.

Anderson Manufacturing received financing in 2013 from The Bank of Kentucky as its rifle sales began to surge, according to financing reports filed with the Kentucky secretary of state. The bank has since been acquired by North Carolina-based BB&T Corp, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Clearly, the author and interviewees are befuddled at the proliferation of calibers for AR style rifles, from pistol caliber carbines (PDW) to the .450 Bushmaster.  It’s as if the AR was only ever good for 5.56mm.  Sometimes these articles can be amusing.

Equally amusing is that apparently no one in the controller movement understood that there are too many manufacturers now to tackle by squeezing their lines of logistics.  The key here is to [1] have employee-owned companies, [b] be serviced by small banks, [c] minimize debt, [d] keep your employees happy, and [e] make an excellent product.

Or in other words, run your business based on a Biblical model.  God will bless it.

Via WiscoDave, this unfortunate view:

A new magazine capacity restriction goes into effect today in New Jersey. The internet is on fire with cries of people, including many gun owners not in New Jersey, criticizing the law as unjust, unconstitutional, meaningless, unfair and worse. What is missing is much real practical advice for New Jersey Gun Owners. What should they do now? What should they do with magazines that have a capacity of over 10 rounds?

Unfortunately, while the law may eventually be found unjust and overturned, today it is the law. Second Amendment Organization is a staunch advocate of Gun Rights, but those rights are defined by our laws. We believe it is imperative that Responsible Gun Owners follow the law. In this case, that means the New Jersey Gun Owners should comply with the law… and fight it! Part of fighting it involved educating people about why these types of laws have little or no effect in regard to saving lives and why people might want or need large capacity magazines in the first place. 2AO is staunchly against magazine capacity restrictions, as stated in this set of Position Statements. Recommending that New Jersey residents comply with the law is not “compromise,” it is accepting the current reality.

Okay Rob, but what happens when it proves impossible to overturn that restriction?  Then what?  What do you answer to God when you’re incapable of properly defending your family because the criminals bust through your front door carrying standard capacity magazines while you have none?  It’s happened, you know.

This is the only amusing thing from this whole abomination.

Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said New Jersey’s newly implemented high capacity magazine ban endangers the lives of officers by also limiting their magazine size when they are off duty.

This week, Breitbart News reported that December 11, 2018, was the effective date for a New Jersey “high capacity” magazine ban that makes it a fourth-degree felony to possess a magazine holding more than ten rounds, even if that magazine was legally acquired.

Kerik is now tweeting a letter from the Bergen County prosecutor that says the ban also applies to off-duty officers …

Of course, he doesn’t answer how the ban can “endanger” the lives of cops while it has no affect on the more ordinary among us.  Nor does anyone say how they are going to enforce this ban.

Then there is also this.

We at 2AO would respect the intention and actions of anyone actually performing true civil disobedience. A group or individual heading to a gun range in New Jersey this afternoon with standard magazines of a capacity greater than 10 rounds and publicly, proudly and overtly using them as a public act of protest, for example. Obviously, those persons would be risking arrest but they would also obviously be following in the footsteps of other great Civil Rights Protesters. Sneakily keeping magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds in your home and hoping you never get caught is not Civil Disobedience, it’s just being a criminal.

I think Rob is tilting at windmills and [Sneakily] forcing a distinction without a difference.

David Codrea has thoughts as well.

With a stabilizing brace.  I confess I had no idea.

Josh Wayner writing for Ammoland has the scoop.  A couple of comments.

First, I notice that the Buffalo Bore does the best concerning muzzle velocity.  Second, if you shoot the Sig Sauer 240 grain at 1213 FPS, that doesn’t give you much advantage over the 450 SMC (Short Magnum Cartridge) which I carried to Colorado in a 1911 with backup magazines, and which I’ve discussed before (230 grains at around 1120 FPS published muzzle velocity).

Second, what I’d really like to see is Josh cover the Performance Center Model 629 V-Comp with the compensator (or muzzle brake).  I find that to be a very appealing and aesthetically pleasing gun with a nice finish and very smooth edges.

News from Oklahoma:

A Tulsa man shot and killed a man breaking into his house near 51st and South Lewis Tuesday morning. The same homeowner shot another burglar five years ago.

Police said the intruder’s name is Donald Stovall. The homeowner is Charles Sweeney and he said he did what he felt he had to do to protect himself.

Charles Sweeney said noises coming from his bathroom woke him up. The first thought that ran through his head was someone was breaking into his house.

I just have two quick observations.  First, home invaders are always armed.  They may have a firearm, or they may have a cutting tool of some sort, or they may have only their fists.  Fists can kill.  All home invaders are always armed.  It’s true, so assume it is so in every instance and for every circumstance.

Second, this guy shouldn’t have been yammering and yakking to the police.  He should have let his lawyer do the talking for him, and that should have been an immediate phone call.  No exceptions.  You have a right to representation and defense, and that’s what your attorney is for.

Just as he shouldn’t have been yammering and yakking to the police, he sure shouldn’t have been doing it to the television cameras.

Just stupid.  Shut up and let your attorney defend you from the outset of the event, not after stupid, exaggerated, incorrect and nonfactual things have been said in the heat of the moment.

Via WRSA, this article is a nice summary of what I take to be the delivered wisdom on the subject.  I’ll let the readers peruse the subject material and make comments, but this one graph is worth the work to develop it.

While Pete focuses on the fact that peaks out at about 20″ (and properly so), I’ve usually taken the popularity of 18″ barrels as evidence that there are tradeoffs, and those additional 2″ means added weight to the cantilever for very little increase in meaningful muzzle velocity.

At any rate, take note that your 16″ barrels (or shorter, 14.5″ with a pinned flash hider) are near a flatline in performance, and that the very short barrels on pistol ARs are meant only for CQB.

Each tool in its own shop.  They all have a purpose.