Archive for the 'Guns' Category

I want one.

Jim Wilson writing for American Rifleman:

In some circles the pistol-mounted light has become quite popular as a personal-defense tool. The theory in the use of such lights is, of course, that you need to be able to identify the person as an actual threat before you employ deadly force. Further, we find that when we light up the target at night or in poor light, we can deliver our hits with much greater accuracy. However, there are some problems that can arise with the use of pistol-mounted lights that the defensive shooter should consider before making the transition.

Armed citizens often have two problems when considering carrying the defensive handgun. The first is that a suitable pistol, in a substantial caliber, often seems heavy, especially when one has been wearing it all day long. The other is that this same pistol can be more difficult to conceal. Unfortunately, mounting a light on the defensive handgun makes it even heavier. And it makes it more difficult to properly conceal the handgun.

Another potential problem that occurs when a person is using a pistol-mounted light is that he is tempted to use the pistol as a flashlight. I know of several cases in which the defensive shooter shined his light—and loaded pistol—on people and things that he had no intention of shooting.

We’ve dealt with this issue before of a light on the front of your handgun, and the lack of police officer discipline causing negligent discharges because of the trigger-like actuation of the light (pressure switch near the trigger guard, along with the fact that officers stupidly go around with their finger on the trigger of their weapons while pointing them at people and things).

Don’t do it this way, and keep your finger off the trigger.  Simple discipline solves that problem.  Lack of time, discipline and training also causes sympathetic muscle reflex responses like it did with poor Eurie Stamps (Jesus was that my rifle?).  But in general I am a huge fan of pistol-mounted lights for the right reason and under the right circumstances.

I think I’ve told the story about my purchase of one, but it bears repeating.  Before my wife’s grandmother passed away, I had to work on her house, oftentimes late into the evening on the weekends, and oftentimes not getting started until after dark.  The home was once in a great neighborhood, but it had turned for the worse because of gang activity, and it was in another town so we couldn’t be there except for me on the weekends.

There were also reports of ne’er-do-wells hanging around, and visual evidence of home entry when we weren’t there (along with electronic evidence such as unexplained power bills).  The home was left dark in order to minimize power bills, and every time I had to begin work after dark, I had to perform a sweep of the entire home.  Sometimes I had my Doberman, Heidi, and I was always safer and happier to have her.

But sometimes I didn’t have her with me.  The first time I ever did entry and sweep of the home, I did so using the hand over wrist method for holding a weapon in one hand and light in another.  The home had many rooms, many closets, multiple bathrooms and a garage as well as exterior structures.  I swore I would never use that method again.  It led to exhaustion and loss of fine motor skills associated with use of my hands and arms.

Before the next time I got a weapon mounted light and haven’t looked back.  I did entry, sweeping and room clearing using proper grip technique and without exhaustion.  I’ll grant the point that the handgun is unable to be concealed, and it’s a bit too heavy to carry without a rigger’s belt.  With a rigger’s belt and the proper holster it isn’t a problem, but you don’t usually carry a rigger’s belt, holster, firearm and weapon-mounted light to the grocery store (I wish we could all do that without people freaking out).

So my gun with the weapon-mounted light sits under my bed.  I’ll carry it in the car on trips, and sometimes I’ll carry it backpacking.  Otherwise, I do the classic routine of carrying a gun and tactical light (separately) with my other weapons.  You get something, you give up something.  No solution is perfect, and one size fits all doesn’t work with firearms.

I use this exact grip, but I find it natural and comfortable.  Others may not.  I also find .45 1911 natural and comfortable, while I do not find 9mm natural or comfortable (nor do I find double-stack magazine guns natural or comfortable compared to the 1911).  It may come down to choice if a shooter doesn’t come to terms with this grip, but it isn’t trivial that all the top competition shooters use this grip.  It does have a number of advantages.

Via WRSA, Max Velocity has this video.

Go read his comments on the engagement.  I sent this video to my former Marine, Daniel, who had this to say.

… if you have a team stopping behind a doorway for cover to shoot that creates a bottle neck, that’s what body armor is for.  Go in clearing the room with the bulk of your armor between you and the guy shooting at you and don’t stop moving, that way more guys filter in behind you clearing areas.

Everyone in the team has a very specific area in the room they cover.  You practice over and over again until it’s smooth and fast.  Did you see how long it took for that guy to actually start engaging the fighter?  By the time he started shooting from behind cover three guys could have filtered into … putting rounds in his chest.

The idea that a single individual in a team will clear the entire room is dumb.  So that basically means a team of 4 guys will clear the room 4 times. That’s what they need to do is clear an area and then more importantly keep that area covered and controlled.  So let’s say I am first in the door.  Everyone has to clear their front, but first guy always cleared left after the front is clear.

You clear your front by basically moving into the room – it is cleared by default.  So once the left is clear you keep side stepping left into the corner as you clear from left to right … the next guy is literally right on your ass behind you clearing his front by default and then immediately to his right.  Doing the same thing, side stepping to the right …

The next guy is going straight in forward.  You do it damn fast. This way you can get a entire fire team in a single room … I don’t know about you but 4 rifles is a lot better than one.

To which I replied this.

Okay, so in summary (a) they didn’t follow a protocol, (b) they didn’t act as a team, and (c) they didn’t go fast enough. But what if your family is in the structure, somewhere, you don’t know where, and there is a threat in the structure too, somewhere, you don’t know where, and you’re totally alone without a team?

Daniel.

Then you are forced to clear the whole house systematically room by room following a structured room clearing procedure and being consistent with it. Sometimes I had too [in Fallujah] because we were too spread out in different houses.  So you practice.  Main thing is If you can’t do it perfectly going at slow speeds, then how the hell are you going to do it fast? What I always told my Marines.  Even the hardcore team guys would practice the fundamentals at very slow and systematic speeds to fine tune.

Offered up for your edification.  He did it many, many times in Fallujah and lives to tell about it.

Breitbart:

The CT Post quoted Murphy saying:

In an era where anti-government positioning is a hallmark of the modern right, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that increasingly Republicans are absolutist in their views on the right of citizens to own guns. They want to preserve the right of revolution as a means of showing how much they truly hate the current government, administered by President Barack Obama.

Interestingly, Murphy has been bashing claims that gun rights are “God-given” for some time; this is not a new issue for him. In fact, when the Senate rejected new gun controls in the wake of the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, an angry Murphy reacted by assuring Second Amendment supporters that gun rights were not “God-given.” He told MSBNC’s Rachel Maddow, “The Second Amendment is not an absolute right, not a God-given right. It has always had conditions upon it like the First Amendment has.”

Breitbart is a strange animal indeed.  They have Milo Yiannopoulos as an editor, who wouldn’t have anything to do with claiming that rights of any sort are granted by God, but then they will post an article like this basing the right to own firearms on God’s law.  They can’t have it both ways.

It’s easy for me, and hard for them (or easy if they don’t care about logical consistency).  Murphy is confused, or simply a disbeliever in God.  God doesn’t simply grant the right of self defense to men, He commands it as a duty.  It is based on the Decalogue, and since that is based on His character, it is immutable.

The right of revolution doesn’t exists as some sort of perfunctory statement about how we feel about our current government, and Murphy is only saying that to insult men who believe in the second amendment.  The right of revolution is based on covenant law, eternal contracts, and the basis for this is to be found directly in the Holy writ.  It applies to all men, everywhere and in all times and epochs based on violations of agreements to live together under stipulations and within strict boundary conditions.  When the covenant is broken, it is no longer valid.

USA Today:

TAMPA — Police in Tampa said one man is dead and his cousin faces a manslaughter charge after the pair allegedly tested out a bulletproof vest to see if it worked.

Officers responding Saturday night to a call of a person being shot found Joaquin Mendez, 23, with a gunshot wound to the chest, WTSP-TV reported. In the house, they found blood and a bulletproof vest with a hole in it.

The cousin, 24-year-old Alexandro Garibaldi, initially told police he heard a gunshot, the Tampa Bay Times reported. But police said a witness told them that Mendez tried the vest on as he sat in a chair, wondering whether it worked.

Police said allegedly Garibaldi took out a gun, said, “Let’s see,” and shot.

Don’t do that.  There are all levels of Kevlar, and Kevlar degrades with time, and besides, just don’t do that regardless of whether you think you have the right Kevlar and it’s in good shape.  I want all of my readers to keep reading.  There aren’t many of you, so we would all feel the loss of just one of you.

Mother Jones has made a habit of removing my comments, especially when I’m winning the debate (which is always).  I rarely link them since they’re such a rag, but this case is special.  It’s breathless over-drama you could find anywhere about any profession, but this bit caught my eye.

But there were certain people who were difficult. At some point during the day, you would have a gun pointed at you. I had a guy with Parkinson’s, and he had severe muscle tremors. He can’t hold the gun properly, and it jams. He walks off the range, he’s pointing the gun at me, and he’s saying, “Hey, hey, my gun is jammed!” I sidestep the muzzle and say, “Let’s have a look, shall we?” All the while that I am handling it I am saying, “You really shouldn’t be doing that.” And the guy, without missing a beat, says, “It’s all right, the safety’s on the gun.” I pull the slide back and there’s a live round that ejects from the chamber. And I’m thinking, okay, I was a three-pound trigger pull away from getting shot.

[ … ]

There are some good bosses that run these ranges, but for the most part they willingly overlook the fact that this stuff is dangerous. And I’m not just talking about the guns. They’re supposed to properly train people for handling lead, which gets released in large quantities by spent bullets. There’s not really a safe level for lead in your body once you get above five micrograms per deciliter of blood. At the end of the day, you’ve got various things that you have to clean up: the brass shells, paper from the targets, un-burnt powder from the ammunition, little bits of atomized lead. Anything with high enough concentrations of lead is supposed to be put into a canister and treated as hazardous material, but that didn’t always happen.

We’d get tested for lead in our bodies maybe once or twice a year. They would kind of look sideways at you if you asked for the test results. I knew better than that. I just said, “The hell with it.” But the last test that I had, it came back high. I was contacted by the California Department of Public Health, and the guy said, “Uh, why is your lead level so high?”

Some RSO, huh?  He just admitted to contributing to an unsafe range where people muzzle flag others, not following procedure concerning hazardous material protocols, and a host of other problems.

Mother Jones thinks they’ve found some sort of ticking bomb on gun ranges.  Bad, bad places they are.  In reality, they may have done everyone a favor by outing a dishonest, incompetent worker for what he is.  He is a liar and mental pygmy.  Additionally, his managers were guilty of malfeasance.  I don’t go to any ranges like that (and I go to a lot of them).  Every one I go to is safe, clean, well-designed and well-maintained.  The authorities ought to consider putting this guy in prison.

Oh, and Mother Jones still sucks.

Courthouse News Service:

Gunmaker Remington has asked a judge to halt what it characterized as an unreasonable and unconstitutional demand by the Massachusetts attorney general for its customer information.

Remington Arms Co. filed the petition for injunctive relief on Aug. 29 in Suffolk County Superior Court, saying Attorney General Maura Healey’s civil investigation demand is “excessively burdensome” and tramples the Fourth Amendment rights of the company and its customers.

“The AG’s demand that Remington produce each of the Product Service files without redacting customer identifying information violates the privacy rights of its customers, chills lawful conduct in exercise of the Second Amendment, and substantially interferes with Remington’s business and customer good will,” the petition states.

Remington’s demand comes on the heels of a March 9 civil investigation demand by Healey, seeking a copy of each product service file Remington has for every one of its customers.

Cyndi Roy Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office, said the demand is part of an investigation into how often Remington’s guns had potentially dangerous defects.

“There are scores of public reports about defects involving firearms, including accidental firing, misfiring, overheating problems and low ‘trigger pull’ leading to horrific stories of accidental shootings by children,” Roy Gonzalez said in an email.

Lack of product-safety oversight in the gun industry makes demands like these critical, the spokeswoman added.

“Many years ago, the gun industry managed to exempt itself from federal consumer product safety oversight, resulting in no public access to consumer complaints about the guns they manufacture,” Roy Gonzalez said. “This lack of transparency is unlike nearly every other consumer product sold in this country. As the chief law enforcement office in Massachusetts, we are seeking that information to better inform our residents and to protect them from any safety or manufacturing issues with guns sold here. It’s unfortunate that these gun manufacturers have taken our office to court rather than comply with a simple request for consumer complaints and related information.”

Here is a test question for readers.  Where in the constitution of her state does it give SJW Healey the right to demand customer information over an investigation into product safety when no laws have been broken?  In case you missed that one, here’s an extra credit question worth 100%.  Where does the constitution of her state give the AG the right to spend taxpayer money to perform studies and inform citizens concerning her opinions on product safety, or to rank products according to her own criteria?

Every reader should have scored 200% on that examination.  It’s a shame that Remington has to petition the court for injunctive relief, rather than gathering some local gun owners, apprehending Maura Healey and using some hemp rope to hang her from the nearest lamp post as an example to other social justice warriors to mind their own damn business.

Prior:

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Attacks Gun Manufacturers

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s Crusade Against Guns

The State:

COLUMBIA – S.C. residents will have four chances this fall to weigh in on the state’s gun laws.

A special S.C. Senate committee has scheduled public hearings on “gun issues” for Greenville, Charleston, Hartsville and Columbia. The hearings start Sept. 15.

State Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington, the committee’s chairman, said the hearings could address a variety of gun-related issues, including expanding the waiting period to buy a firearm, currently three days.

Malloy and another committee member, state Sen. Marlon Kimpson, D-Charleston, unsuccessfully pushed to lengthen that waiting period during the 2016 legislative session. They say that change would give authorities more time to investigate potential red flags found in FBI background checks.

Malloy said he expects to hear plenty from both sides – 2nd Amendment advocates as well as gun-violence victims. Any legislation that can pass the GOP-controlled Legislature must balance the right of responsible residents to own guns and the protection of society from the dangerous and mentally unstable, he said.

Oh, there is a never ending stream of chances to do nefarious things to the rights and liberties of the people.  “Receptive to the issues of fellow South Carolinians” is shorthand for we want a bilateral committee to infringe on the free exercise of rights in the name of cooperation and collegiality.

Resist this temptation, folks.  Just don’t do it.  There shouldn’t be any more gun control laws.  No one elected you to infringe on their God-given rights and liberties, no matter what you were taught by your Marxist college professors.  Don’t try to be the family, church and state all wrapped up into one totem like Molech.  You cannot solve problems of morality by laws.  The state doesn’t have salvific powers.

But here is one bill we need to see come from your pens, as a committee, or individually, or from the pens of someone else in the Senate or House.  We need to see a bill legalizing open carry in South Carolina, like the vast majority of other states.  Reject that awful, racist, communist, Jim Crow legacy and finally bring South Carolina into the twenty first century.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is now known for fabricating gun control laws ex nihilo, just because she wants to, for no other reason than to be a bully.  So is Ms. social justice warrior finished?  Not on your life.  She’s just beginning, at least until someone punches back.

The Boston Globe:

Attorney General Maura Healey has launched a sweeping investigation into possible safety problems involving guns manufactured by at least two major companies, Remington and Glock, according to lawsuits filed by both firms, which are fighting Healey’s efforts.

The lawsuits reveal that this year, Healey invoked her powers under the state’s consumer protection law to demand that both companies turn over a wide range of documents, including safety-related complaints from customers and the companies’ responses.

The investigation is the second prominent battle Healey is waging against the gun industry. In July, she angered gun owners and manufacturers when she moved to bar the sale of military-style rifles that have been altered slightly to evade the state’s ban on assault weapons.

In her newly disclosed legal action, Healey argues Glock firearms are “prone to accidental discharge” and makes clear in court papers that she is concerned the company may have been warned about the problem and failed to act.

Responding to Glock’s lawsuit, she referenced news stories about a sheriff’s deputy accidentally firing a Glock pistol in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, a Los Angeles police officer who was paralyzed from the waist down after his 3-year-old son accidentally fired his Glock pistol, and a Massachusetts man who was dancing at a July 4th party when his Glock handgun fired while it was in his pocket.

The attorney general said her ban on so-called “copycat” assault weapons is clear, enforceable, and already working.

A Healey spokeswoman said the attorney general is asking gun manufacturers to turn over customer safety complaints because firearms are one of the only products not regulated by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“As the chief law enforcement office in Massachusetts, we are seeking that information to better inform our residents and to protect them from any safety or manufacturing issues with guns sold here,” Cyndi Roy Gonzalez said. “It’s unfortunate that these gun manufacturers have taken our office to court rather than comply with a simple request for consumer complaints and related information.”

Both Remington and Glock have sued Healey in Suffolk Superior Court, arguing that she is abusing her authority by casting a broad net for documents, including those related to accidental discharges, past lawsuits, legal settlements, and product recalls.

Glock Inc.’s lawsuit asks the court to quash Healey’s inquiry.

The company, based in Smyrna, Ga., points to statements Healey has made calling gun violence a “public health crisis” and an “epidemic” to argue the “true purpose” of her investigation is “to harass an industry that the attorney general finds distasteful and to make political headlines by pursing members of the firearm industry.”

Healey responds in court papers that Glock’s contention that she is politically motivated is “both incorrect and irrelevant,” given the concerns she has about the company’s handguns firing accidentally. She also says the state’s consumer protection law clearly gives her the authority to investigate safety concerns about products, including guns, that are available in Massachusetts.

Glocks can be sold only to law enforcement officers in Massachusetts, because consumer sales are banned under state law. As such, Glock argues, Healey is misusing her investigative powers “for the ulterior purpose of harassing an out-of-state company that does not engage in in-state consumer sales.”

But Healey says that, despite the state’s ban, 10,000 Glocks were sold in Massachusetts between January 2014 and August 2015, including 8,000 to buyers who do not appear to be law-enforcement officers. She said the handguns ended up in the hands of Massachusetts consumers “irrespective of whether the sales were made legally or not.”

“The investigation is appropriate,” Healey’s office writes in its rebuttal to Glock, because Glock may have liability under the state’s consumer protection law for “product defects, misleading marketing, and for failure to honor warranties.”

Remington Arms Co., based in Madison, N.C., contends Healey’s investigation is “unreasonable and excessively burdensome” because she is seeking product files from every state and country, even though fewer than 1 percent of the files relate to Massachusetts customers.

Because Healey’s office “has provided virtually no information concerning the subject or object of its investigation, one cannot imagine what possible relevance product service files from Hawaii or Manitoba, Canada, could have on the AG’s investigation in Massachusetts,” Remington states in its lawsuit, filed Monday.

Remington is asking the court to limit the scope of Healey’s investigation and allow it to remove customer information from the documents it turns over.

If customer information is not removed, the company argues, its customers’ privacy rights would be violated, conduct protected by the Second Amendment would be chilled, and Remington’s business would be harmed.

Healey has not yet responded in court to Remington’s accusations.

Healey’s court papers, however, indicate that Remington and Glock are not the only gun makers she is targeting. Both are “part of a larger series of similar gun safety investigations,” Healey’s office wrote.

Healey, a Democrat who took office last year, has made reducing gun violence a top issue — a crusade that has won her support from national gun-control advocates and the ire of gun owners and gun rights groups.

In December, she warned the state’s 350 licensed gun dealers that they must obey the state’s strict gun laws and began investigating several dealers suspected of selling illegal firearms.

In May, she led a dozen attorneys general in calling on Congress to allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study gun deaths as a public health issue.

A day later, she spoke at a White House gun violence summit, where she decried the legal immunity Congress has granted to gun makers.

“This is the only product of its kind for which Congress has given the industry extensive freedom from liability,” she said at the White House. “That’s not right. The gun industry should be held to the same liability standards as the manufacturers and sellers of other consumer products.”

In July, she drew national attention when she moved to bar sales of so-called copcyat assault rifles that had been modified slightly to evade the state’s 1998 assault weapons ban.

Gun enthusiasts snapped up the rifles in a buying frenzy, and then protested outside the State House.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, meanwhile, said it would challenge Healey’s ban in court, arguing it hurt gun dealers and “made potential felons out of tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens.”

So we are reminded of a number of things in this report.  She (Ms. SJW Healey) is a moron.  “Accidental discharges,” discussed so pointedly here on the pages of this web site, result from people putting their fingers inside the trigger guard and pulling the trigger.  A machine manufacturer, i.e., gun maker, cannot be responsible for people intentionally pulling the trigger and then blaming the gun for discharging a round.  It’s what the machine is designed to do.  It would be like blaming a car for accelerating when you depress the gas pedal.  If it didn’t accelerate, the automobile maker would be responsible for loss of life due to failure of the car to respond to input by the driver.  Similarly, gun makers would be responsible for loss of life if they designed guns that didn’t shoot when the trigger was pulled.  The simple solution to this problem is to teach people not to pull the trigger if you don’t want the gun to shoot.  This was all put in simple terms that the idiot SJW can understand.

Second, she is a bully of the highest order.  She probably shoved other little girls around on the playground, and when she couldn’t do it to the boys, she talked other boys into doing her dirty work for her.  You see, she doesn’t really hate guns.  She wants her Lieutenant bullies to have them.  She just doesn’t want people she doesn’t like to have them.  She isn’t calling for disarming the police, just peaceable men and women who want to protect themselves.  Ms. SJW doesn’t want people to be able to protect themselves.  She wants to be head bully, meaning that people have to come to her for protection.  She is a bitch.

Finally (and there are actually many more lessons from this sad affair), people like this will be bullies until someone punches back, very hard.  If Glock or Remington kowtow to this bitch, they deserve everything they get.  Seriously,  I will have completely lost respect for any company that cooperates with this bully, and I’ll never do business with any of them, ever again.  Gun manufacturers will find that there is a high cost associated with complying this communists like this.  I suspect that the cost will be more than they can bear.

Note to Remington and Glock.  Do not comply.  Tell her to go to hell.  And ditto that for any other gun manufacturer she tries to tackle.