Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Informative video.  In the end, if you make it that far, I think they reach the right conclusion.  AR-15s (and their parts) have become so reliable that it makes little difference now.  The point of diminishing returns is reached very soon (the sweet spot is < $1500).

Fox News:

NEW CASTLE, Ind. –  An Indiana pastor is charged with threatening to shoot neighborhood children to keep them away from his church.

The (Muncie) Star Press reports (http://tspne.ws/2eh5K8T ) that 69-year-old Bobby Slagle of New Castle’s Calvary Baptist Church is charged with felony intimidation and misdemeanor resisting law enforcement

According to a police report, Slagle said he was frustrated about vandalism at his church in New Castle, 50 miles east of Indianapolis.

New Castle police say Slagle “advised the kids that if they did not get off his property he was going to shoot them.” Police say Slagle raised his shirt, showing the children a revolver in his waist band.

The report says Slagle struggled with arresting officers. He waived his right to an initial hearing. A judge entered not guilty pleas on his behalf.

Well, riddle me this, readers.  What’s the difference between ISIS destroying churches throughout Mesopotamia, and gang members destroying them in America?

Right, it looks very bad, and I wouldn’t have done it, and he shouldn’t have either.  It was a dumb move.  He’ll no doubt pay the price for his dumb move.

But listen to me on the implications of this, if you will.  Be prepared for more of this to come.  Muslims will come to be very militant in America, as gang members are now.  Perhaps even more so.

For those of you who are part of congregations who own church buildings, what are you going to do when your property is vandalized every week, or eventually burned down?  Do you put 24-hour security on the physical plant?  Are you going to be part of that security?  If so, what do you do when the property is threatened, and the gang members (I’m sure they weren’t “children”) figure out that comporting with the law you’re unwilling to use lethal means to stop the aggression, and there are too many of them to do anything except call the police and wait the fifteen minutes for them to arrive and find no one?

If this is the way it all works out, you may as well not have security.  Or church property.  Or for those of you who aren’t Christians but who own homes, perhaps your home is the same as that church property.

Such is life when society lurches towards dystopia.

Bearing Arms:

Uniformed security guards are hired by stores to provide peace of mind and serve as a deterrent to casual criminals, such as petty shoplifters and aggressive panhandlers. They are not law enforcement officers, do not generally have good training, and the physical and mental screening for security guards isn’t that high (which is perhaps why we’ve had two security guards go on terrorist killing sprees this year alone).

Aggressive predators are not deterred by either unarmed or armed security guards, but it is relatively rare to seen a criminal so callous that he would murder a guard just to acquire an additional handgun.

A man who would murder someone for a handgun would presumably have no problem doing the same with an open carrier who typically has even less training and general awareness than armed security guards.

We’ve noticed that there are generally only four kinds of open carry stories.

1. a group of people open carry as a form of political protest (generally without law enforcement involvement)
2. an individual open carries as a form of political protest (often with law enforcement involvement, including occasional arrests)
3. an individual open carrier who is oblivious to his surroundings has his/her picture posted to gun forums pointing out his/her utter lack of awareness and generally poor choice of gun and holster.
4. an open carrier is attacked for his weapon, with the criminal generally being successful.

We would love to report that open carry deters crime, but there is simply no data suggesting that this is a true statement. Folks, criminals laugh at open carriers. They view them as targets, no different than someone with a cash-filled wallet hanging out of their back pocket as they stand in the checkout line, nose buried in a smart phone and oblivious to the world.

I’ve seen Bob hate on open carriers before, but this is ridiculous.  This commentary is completely out of control (I hesitate to call it an “analysis” because nothing is being analyzed).

Bob doesn’t really know that all uniformed security is poorly trained.  He doesn’t know that open carriers are even more poorly trained than uniformed security.  He also doesn’t know that open carriers have poor situational awareness.

He doesn’t know that open carriers fall into only the four categories he lists.  He’s just referring (anecdotally, not analytically) to news accounts he believes he has read.

He especially doesn’t know that criminals laugh at open carriers.  In fact, I challenge Bob to supply me with one verifiable instance in public where a known criminal laughed at an open carrier.  I’ve open carried many times, and I’ve also been around people I knew to be gang members when doing so.  No one – no one – has ever laughed at me.  In one particular instance when multiple gang members were heading my direction on the sidewalk (it was four or five of them), they saw me open carrying and decided to cross the road, walk past me, and cross back over when they were clear of me.  They kept their heads down and studiously avoided making eye contact with me while walking on the other side of the road.

As I said, this commentary is completely out of control, and I simply have no earthly idea what Bob’s problem is with open carry.  There is no law requiring him to do it, so why the negative attention?  It’s legal, so what business is it of his to bash the practice?  How does a crime against uniformed security turn into open carry bashing?  I’m beginning to think this is a psychological issue that Bob has.

What is your malfunction, Bob?

News Miner:

“At least it’s sunny out,” Dybdahl recalled telling his hunting partner while the pair were waiting for a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter to find them.

Dybdahl, 30, knew he was losing a lot of blood, he knew that there was a chance the helicopter might not find him and he also knew there were more bears in the brush circling them. But none of that mattered. He had already made up his mind that he was going to live.

Sitting up in his hospital bed Tuesday, Hoonah resident Dybdahl went over the surreal mauling he had suffered just three days prior while on a hunting trip near Port Frederick bay with his friend Anthony Lindoff, 36. The two had taken a boat out to an area just 10 miles southwest of Hoonah to look for deer. As they were getting ready to make deer calls, Lindoff said, he heard something. He hoped it was a deer, but then he turned and locked eyes with a sow brown bear running straight toward him.

“It didn’t get the memo that it was supposed to bluff charge, this was serious,” Lindoff said. “It chased me first, and as I was running, backing away, I was trying to swing at it with my trekking poll because my rifle was in my sling on my backpack. I immediately thought that was the biggest mistake I could have made. . I felt like the worst hunting partner.”

Dybdahl threw off his pack and headed farther down the hill, trying to get his rifle in position to help out his friend. Unfortunately, Dybdahl didn’t know that the same direction he was moving in was where the sow bear had left two of her cubs behind. In what Dybdahl said seemed like a single moment, the bear changed direction and Dybdahl was on the ground. His rifle no longer in his hands, he screamed for his friend to shoot the bear as it pinned him down, and had its teeth in his flesh.

Dybdahl said he had never been more “in the moment,” able to see, hear, and smell everything so intensely. Everything he knew about bears went racing through his head. He realized quickly he was angering the bear more by moving and screaming. His body went limp and he was silent. But even though he made himself appear harmless, the sow didn’t stop. For the next 10 seconds, he said, his whole body could feel the bear’s ferocity and rage.

“When she bit down on my leg, my thigh, she ripped so hard. . I could hear everything,” Dybdahl said. “It sounded like paper ripping and she pulled my thigh. I felt my whole thigh muscle move away from my leg bone.”

[ … ]

Although he flinched when Dybdahl recreated the sound of flesh tearing, Lindoff was not as unsettled on Saturday. When he saw the bear on Dybdahl, he went through six motions in approximately 10 seconds, never skipping a beat. He slung his rifle in front of him, took the gun sleeve off, took off the scope cover, chambered a round, aimed and fired.

“I’ve never de-slinged my rifle that quickly,” Lindoff said.

Josh was very blessed.  If you’re going to be in the bush, carry your rifle in hand, regardless of whether it’s comfortable or not.  Or if you don’t want to do that, carry a sidearm for self defense.  I think most Alaskan’s will tell you to carry a wheel gun, .44 Magnum or .454 Casull.  That’s probably good counsel for the entire Northwest.  Down South here, carrying .45 ACP is just fine.

Kyle does a nice job with this.  I saw that Count Dracula concealed carry draw and thought it was rather goofy.

Via Daily Caller, KHOU:

HOUSTON- A good Samaritan with a gun stopped three suspects whom held Auto Zone employees at gunpoint during an attempted robbery on Friday night.

According to authorities, three males entered the Auto Zone on Jones Road around 9:00 p.m. demanding cash from the register. A customer who happened to be pulling up saw the men holding the employees at gunpoint.

The customer, a “LTC” permit carrier, pulled his gun and went inside the store. He made the suspects get down on the ground and drop their weapons.

Deputies said he held the suspects until they arrived. All three suspects were arrested.

Wait!  Ridiculous and impossible.  When anyone other than a trained law enforcement officer (all of whom are experts in super secret ninja warrior stress management techniques and operating tactically during tactical operations) tries to stop crime or engage in self defense or defense of others, guns take on a life of their own and rotate as if a windmill, firing uncontrollably and randomly, killing innocent women and children everywhere.  How could this happen?

But there is more.

Although deputies commended the customer for his actions, they don’t recommend this because they say it could have ended in a shootout and someone getting hurt.

Of course.  Could this have ended any other way than law enforcement telling others not to do this sort of thing and to leave it to the “experts?”

Todd Orr of Montana was attacked twice by a grizzly bear with cubs.  His tale can be read here.  The best report comes from Facebook, and if you don’t do Facebook (I don’t either), reddit/firearms has a more detailed account here.

Both links give video he took immediately after making his way out of the wilderness.  He did have a gun.  The bear knocked him around enough that it got dislodged and was too far away to be of any help.

He also has some simple but obvious and interesting things to say about gun control (he’s referring to the Hughes amendment).  He doesn’t often broach the subject of politics.

I had missed this in June from Bob Owens:

I’m also perplexed that FN submitted the Five-SeveN, as the gun’s 5.7×28 caliber has been thoroughly trashed by most defensive handgun experts as a niche round that fails to create adequate tissue damage to have significant immediate impact on targets.

The FN 5.7 won’t be the next Army handgun, but it doesn’t perplex me at all, and frankly I wouldn’t pay much attention to defensive handgun “experts” as they trash things.  And this is as good a chance as any to post a related bit of analysis I ran up on a few months ago.

The FN 5.7 pistol is constantly maligned or underestimated in many gun forums and articles, often by people who have never experienced shooting the pistol. Subjective comparisons with the .22 magnum or categorization as a sub-par .223 round create confusion about the effectiveness of the FN 5.7.

Enough time has passed after the terrorist attack at Ft. Hood. The shooter, Nidal Malik Hassan, has been arrested, tried and sentenced. The media has moved on. Now we can begin to analyze the impact of the FN 5.7 and address the question of lethality.

Using SS192 and SS197SR ammunition (common commercial 5.7×28 ammo), several 20-30 round magazines and an FN 5.7 (shooter also had a .357 revolver but did not use it), Hassan killed 13 and wounded 32 people.

Many armchair ballistics expert criticized this result as proof that the FN 5.7 platform is not lethal enough because of the proportion of the fatalities to the wounded. Others have proposed that had Hassan use another type of pistol, 9mm or .45, there would have been more fatalities.

If you look at this Wikipedia link and look at the list of casualties, one can come to a very eye-opening conclusion.
Fort Hood shooting – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1. 11 people were shot center-of-mass (COM), one was shot in the stomach and one was shot in the head. All 13 died. All 11 victims who were shot COM did not survive.
2. 3 of the 13 people who died, tried to charge Hassan, but he stopped them with COM shots.
3. The 32 people who were wounded were hit in the arms, legs, hips and shoulders. None of the wounded survivors were shot COM.

The following conclusions can be drawn:
1. The FN 5.7 is a very lethal round CQB because all 11 victims who were shot COM died. No survivors for those hit COM.
2. The FN 5.7 is a real stopper, because 3 tried to charge Hassan at close range and were stopped by COM shots.
3. One of the fatalities was shot in the stomach, and died. The fragmentation of the SS197R round can create a hail of metal shards that can cause serious internal organ damage and bleeding in the stomach.
4. None of the 32 people who were hit in the extremities, hips and shoulders were able to muster a counter-attack because the FN 5.7 must have shattered or broken bones. The high rate of wounded vicitms to fatalities was the direct result of the shooting ability of Hassan (or lack thereof), and not because the 5.7×28 round is not lethal.
5. Sgt. Kimberly Munley (base civilian police), one of the first responders, was immediately disabled with 5.7×28 bullet shrapnels to her wrist and a second 5.7×28 bullet broke her femur. The light 5.7×28 commercial ammo showed that it can shatter large bones due to its velocity
6. According to medical personnel, there was so much blood in the room that it was difficult to get to the victims because the floor became very slippery. One can conclude that the commercial 5.7×28 rounds can fragment or tumble, causing immense blood loss.
7. It took five bullets (which I assume was a 9 mm) from Sgt Mark Todd to stop Hasan. And he survived his wounds (no available info on where he was hit, except that one of the bullets paralyzed Hasan).

In conclusion:
1. The FN 5.7 is definitely a very lethal round. 100% fatality for COM shots.
2. The FN 5.7 is a man-stopper. Three military men tried to charge Hasan, and all three were stopped.
2. The FN 5.7 is a very incapacitating round, if extremities are hit, because it is powerful enough to break the femur (which is the largest bone in the body)
3. The fragmentation or tumbling effect of commercial ammo can cause a lot of blood loss.

The FN 5.7 is a very effective weapon. It is as effective as, or arguably more effective, than any military or civilian pistols in the market.

It is unfortunate that the jihadist Hassan used this weapon against U.S. soldiers.

And as it pertains to its penetrating capability, you can see these tests for yourself (note that none of these rounds are the steel core rounds, and perhaps for maximum tissue damage one wouldn’t want to use steel core rounds anyway).

The Hill:

Jack is walking down a busy sidewalk carrying a handgun in a holster on his belt. Someone screams, “He’s got a gun!” A nearby police officer sees the firearm, draws his weapon, and orders Jack to stop, show his hands, and lie down on the ground. The officer then handcuffs Jack, takes his firearm, and detains him for questioning about why he is carrying the firearm.

With more states legalizing the open carry of firearms, this kind of scenario has and will occur with greater frequency. Let’s assume the person with the firearm is not carrying in a prohibited place, brandishing the weapon in a threatening manner, refusing to follow police orders, or otherwise acting suspiciously. Does the mere carrying of a firearm openly in public give the police sufficient reason to stop the carrier and seize the firearm?

In an open carry state, in this instance the police have violated the constitution of their respective states (or the body of case law appurtenant to this), and the fourth and fifth amendments to the constitution of the United States.  So says the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio.

In such cases, the responsible officer(s) should be charged with violation of the state laws, violation of the fourth and fifth amendments to the constitution of the United States, disturbing the peace, illegal seizure of property, and reckless endangerment due to lack of muzzle discipline when he pointed his weapon at an innocent citizen.  He has absolutely no right to detain the individual, touch his property (including his firearm), or make a public spectacle of the detention.  Such behavior is thuggish and illegal, regardless of whether the courts allow them to get away with it.

What someone who needs their safe space or doesn’t know the applicable law feels concerning this is completely irrelevant.  “He’s got a gun” should be followed by “Ma’am, please be more specific concerning the law you believe to have been violated.”  Open carry isn’t brandishing.  The more we allow police officers to get away with this kind of behavior, the worse it will become.  They need to be reminded of the decision of the fourth circuit in the case of Nathaniel Black.

This is simple.  Teach police officers the law, expect them to obey it, and charge them when they don’t.  The title of the article at The Hill is “Open carry complicates police encounters.”  It only complicates matters when the police do illegal things.  Otherwise, this really is all quite clear and easy to process.