Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Breitbart:

Police confiscated firearms from 74-year-old Ralph Gilbertsen, although he is not a felon or domestic abuser, and he has never been ruled dangerous to others because of mental illness.

Gilbertsen, who lives in Richfield, Minnesota, believes in Bigfoot and UFOs. And while he does receive treatment for a “mild” mental health disorder, the Star Tribune reports that a psychologist sent a letter to the judge in the case, stating that “Gilbertsen is compliant with his medications and poses no danger to himself or others.”

A former Marine, Gilbertsen is also a concealed carry permit holder, which means he passed the in-depth background check required to obtain such permit, and he was the proud owner of three handguns, until the police knocked on his door.

He came to the attention of authorities after individuals at his apartment complex reported that he constantly talks about the government watching him; he particularly voices concerns that the CIA is spying on him. The Hennepin Community Outreach for Psychiatric Emergencies (COPE) called police about Gilbertsen after his apartment managers expressed concern about a series of letters he had written on CIA spying. COPE handles roughly 13,000 cases–only a third of which are face-to-face–and they asked police to escort them to Gilbertsen’s apartment in 2015. His guns were subsequently confiscated.

Richfield Police Department spokesman Lt. Mike Flaherty said, “Officers are often forced to make snap judgments about an individual’s mental health.” He added, “The street cops nowadays have to be a psychologist. People don’t wear nameplates saying ‘paranoid schizophrenic.’ So the police have to go in there and make judgment calls.”

Lt. Mike Flaherty is a paid, professional liar.  Officers aren’t forced to do anything of the sort he mentions.  There is no law requiring police officers to make any kind of judgment concerning mental health, much less “snap” judgments.  Street cops don’t have to be psychologists – he is lying and he just made that up to sound intelligent and defend his officers.

No, people don’t wear nameplates saying anything, because that would be illegal and stupid.  Besides, mental health is not an indicator of propensity to violence – so says the mental health profession of which the officer fancies himself and his officers.  So I guess they aren’t such great mental health professionals after all.  Perhaps they should stick with policing rather than trying to add to their jobs by doing illegal things like confiscating property that isn’t theirs.

The victim isn’t a felon.  He isn’t a domestic abuser.  His property was stolen – stolen by the very people who are supposed to hunt those sorts of criminals.  Throw the cops in jail with the general prison population, give him his guns back, and fire all of his colleagues who helped him get away with this theft.

Jeremy Bryant makes a 420 mile trip through Oregon to his grandfather’s funeral open carrying a .357 Magnum, hitchhiking all the way.  This is well worth watching in its entirety.  And Jeremy has given me a brand new expression which I will shamelessly parrot until I no longer have breath.  “For the peace, good and dignity of the country and the welfare of its people.”

Tenth Amendment Center:

In “What Did “Bear Arms” Mean in the Second Amendment?” Clayton E. Cramer and Joseph Edward Olson provide solid historical context proving that the phrase was used repeatedly when referring to non-military individuals possessing weapons.

“Those who argue that the original meaning of the Second Amendment was only to protect a collective right, either of the states to maintain militias, or perhaps of citizens to jointly form militias, assert that “bear arms” refers exclusively or at least overwhelmingly, to the collective, military carrying of weapons,” they write. “If ‘bear arms’ referred only to the military carrying or use of arms, then the right protected by the Second Amendment would not be an individual right to possess or carry arms for personal self-defense. The right would be for a government organized militia, or at best, to exercise what the Tennessee Supreme Court acknowledged was a right to revolution.”

While pointing out that historical documents written at the time of the Second Amendment referenced by many scholars generally used the phrase “bear arms” to refer to military uses, Cramer and Olson say that this is due to a bias selection problem.

“Searching more comprehensive collections of English language works published before 1820 shows that there are a number of uses that are clearly individual, and have nothing to do with military service. Some of these uses are by authors and in contexts that give special weight to an individual rights understanding.”

Among their historical evidence is a law written in England during the reign of King Henry VIII making it unlawful for any Welsh resident to “bring or bear, or cause to be brought or borne to the same Sessions or Court, or to any place within the distance of two Miles from the same Sessions or Court, nor to any Town, Church, Fair, Market, or other Congregation . . . nor in the Highways in affray of the King’s Peace, or the King’s liege People, any Bill, Long-bow, Cross-bow, Hand-gun, Sword, Staff, Dagger, Halberd, Morespike, Spear, or any other manner of Weapon . . . .”

“The specific problem that the statute sought to correct was not even Welsh rebellion,” Cramer and Olson write, “but simple criminal actions interfering with the operation of the courts.”

Another English statue intended to disarm Scottish Highlanders also uses the term “bear arms” in referring to requirements for amnesty (emphasis added).

That from and after the time of affixing any such summons as aforesaid, no person or persons residing within the bounds therein mentioned, shall be sued or prosecuted for his or their having, or having had, bearing, or having borne arms at any time before the several days to be prefixed or limited by summons as aforesaid, for the respective persons and districts to deliver up their arms. . . .

This is a good essay.  While I do not ever advocate deference to international law or precedent, not even from our own English heritage, it is quite useful to understand the common usage of words and common practices of the times that led to the documents to which we are all supposed to live.

One can also see the nibbling around the edges of gun control, even in these words above, with the worst of it being gun control as a catalyst for the American war of independence.  Our forefathers fought against the notion of the divine right of kings and for the idea of covenant as seen in the light of continental Calvinism.

The National Association of Evangelicals (USA) has gone on record saying that there should be no religious test for “refugees.”

“Religion should not be a litmus test for receiving aid,” said Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). “Most evangelical leaders believe compassion and security can and should go hand-in-hand.”

While the NAE races down the road to irrelevance, take note of this news from Austria:

Austrians fear parts of Vienna are becoming no-go areas after a father was attacked by a ‘Sharia patrol’ when he told them to stop threatening his wife and daughter for not being correctly dressed.

As various factions of migrants stake claims to territory in the city, it has been reported that the self-styled Sharia patrols have been visiting clubs and bars in the Millennium City area to make sure Chechen women were properly dressed and acting appropriately.

However, when one Austrian man tried to step in to stop the patrol from hassling his Chechen wife and daughter, he ended up being hospitalised.

I’m not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice.  But if such a person comes up to me or my family in that manner, I’m going to say “I feel threatened, back off.”  If they don’t, I will shoot them (hopefully before they close the gap, which means we will be backing up to keep distance).  After I do that, I will never talk to the police.  That will be done by my lawyer.

You should make plans of some sort for dealing with aggression such as this.  And do not ever give up your guns to anyone, for any reason.  I’m not just talking about your modularized-up, tricked out AR-15, with the tactical light, pressure switch, reflex sight and flip-to-side magnifier, because you don’t carry that with you everywhere you go.  In fact, you rarely carry it anywhere.

When you go about your business every day, you carry a tactical knife and a handgun, perhaps a compact 1911 or a small airweight .38Spl revolver.  The best gun in your stable of firearms is the one you have with you when you need it.  I love the gun I carry, because it happens to be the one I am carrying at the time.

David Codrea:

That would seem to indicate that the issue isn’t “lax gun laws,” at all, as the majority segment of the population behaves remarkably peaceably around all those guns. The implication is what Michael Bloomberg articulated a few years back, when he advocated for cities to enact special race-based disarmament edicts aimed at “minority” males up to age 25.

I think the primary motive in gun control is simply control, including over peaceable and law abiding folk.  The next motive, and it can be seen everywhere there is gun control, has a race component, where one goal is to solve the problems created by progressive policies in the inner city.

Lost in the wilderness with only a single piece of gear.  I’m not sure my choice would have been a hand axe.  I would probably have chosen a fire starter.  If I get a choice of two pieces, the next would be a large, fixed blade knife.

Bob Owens on the Baltimore PD FN handgun issue.  I don’t do the Bob Owens scene where I blame striker fired pistols.  This isn’t new for Bob, having blamed Glocks in the past, especially for short trigger stroke and light pull force.  I tend to stick with the booger hook on the bang switch theory.

Bang Bang!  It’s the gun’s fault!

Herald-Mail Media:

Surrounded by law enforcement officials Thursday, Tomblin vetoed the bill over their safety concerns. He vetoed similar legislation last year.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to just look around this room for a moment, and see that law enforcement are concerned about this bill,” Tomblin said Thursday.

On Saturday, opponents echoed concerns that the Republican leadership was ignoring law enforcement’s worries.

“It’s a slap in the governor’s face, but it’s a slap in the State Police’s face, sheriffs, municipal police officers and the vast majority of our constituents,” said Sen. Corey Palumbo, D-Kanawha.

Proponents contended that the proposal would help people protect themselves through a constitutional right.

“This bill will help protect West Virginians, in addition to keeping West Virginians free, as guaranteed by the Constitution,” said Sen. Kent Leonhardt, R-Monongalia.

Well, they all deserved to be slapped in the face for opposing the free exercise of constitutional rights.  So I’m back to my original prediction.  “Nothing will happen.  The doomsday predictions the LEOs most assuredly made will not obtain.  There won’t be any discernible change in the number of firearms related crimes as a result of the elimination of permitting requirements.”

Someone remind me in about a year and we’ll go back and dig up statistics and data on this.  It’ll be fun and enlightening.

News and views from Baltimore:

BALTIMORE (WBFF) – There are two investigations centered on the gun almost all Baltimore County Police officers use as side arms. Crime and Justice Reporter Joy Lepola began investigating these guns more than 18 months ago. One of those guns went off inside a police precinct, while secured inside an officer’s holster.

On February 2, 2016, a Baltimore County police officer walks into the Pikesville Precinct when the jolt of a gunshot, stops him from taking another step. What’s unclear is how it happened.

According to reports FOX45 obtained from the county, the officer says the gun discharged while in its holster. Five officers gave statements saying they were nearby when they heard the gunshot.

The department says it is unaware of a holstered gun ever discharging until now. The department was warned it could happen.

In 2014, a FOX45 investigation uncovered serious safety concerns buried within hundreds of reports and inter-office emails. At the time, the county was in the process of buying new guns for every police officer, almost 2,000 .40 caliber pistols made by FN-America. In one complaint, an officer claimed a round went off without someone’s finger on the trigger.

Oh dear.  Okay, before we begin the “guns don’t just go off” routine, let’s stipulate right up front that there are three types of discharges.  (1) intentional, (2) negligent, and (3) due to mechanical malfunctions.  Number (3) does in fact happen, when there is a very bad design flaw, or perhaps in older firearms models if a firing pin got stuck and cycling the slide causes a “slam fire,” to name one specific malfunction.

Number (3) is also very, very unlikely, and a low probability scenario.  Furthermore, the notion of a gun discharging while sitting in the holster (with no human interaction) is ridiculous.  The officer likely put his finger on the trigger and caused a negligent discharge, was embarrassed about it, didn’t want to be reprimanded or lose his job, and fabricated a false story to hide the truth.

If a gun ever discharges without your finger on the trigger (think Remington 700 by cycling the bolt, a failure Remington documented dozens of time at their own facilities), go see a Gunsmith.  Don’t write discussion threads, don’t make allegations, don’t hide it.  Go see a Gunsmith.  Not an armorer, not a parts changer.  A Gunsmith.  If it’s a mechanical failure, it will be repeatable.  If not, you put your finger on the trigger when you shouldn’t have.

How safe are police service weapons?  Never.  It is a gun.  It isn’t safe.  Don’t ever treat it as if it’s inherently safe, any more than you would assume that you can drive an automobile just any way you wish and be safe because of the structure surrounding you.  It is a car.  It isn’t safe.  Sitting still on your bar stool at home isn’t safe because it may fail and send you to the floor, bruising or even fracturing your pelvis.  It is a chair.  It isn’t safe.  If you have to climb ladders, you engage in one of the most unsafe practices in America, often fatal (or leading to TBI) for men over 55 years old from any height.

But weapons are safer when people use them responsibly than when they don’t.

The Salem News:

CHARLESTON, West Virginia — The West Virginia Legislature has approved legislation allowing residents 21 or older to carry a concealed gun without first obtaining a permit or undergoing training.

The measure, passed on a bipartisan vote Wednesday, now goes to Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin for his review. He vetoed a similar bill last year.

Most states require concealed carry permits.

West Virginians between the ages of 18 and 21 could receive a provisional concealed carry permit and would be required to undergo training on proper use of guns.

Passed on bipartisan votes by both the state Senate and the House of Delegates, the proposed law includes a $50 tax credit for residents trained to carry a deadly weapon.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael, R-Jackson, said credit would cost the state $3 million.

The bill was opposed by the West Virginia Sheriffs Association and the West Virginia Association of Counties.

Of course the bill was opposed by law enforcement.  Of course it was.  Here’s a prediction for you (and if we can remember it a year from now and find adequate data on this, we’ll assess my prediction).  Nothing will happen.  The doomsday predictions the LEOs most assuredly made will not obtain.  There won’t be any discernible change in the number of firearms related crimes as a result of the elimination of permitting requirements.

Who wants to call me wrong on this?

By way of background for my readers, North Carolina has an antiquated system of laws for handgun purchases, based on Jim Crow era thinking, that requires the County LEO to pass judgment on the fitness of an individual to purchase a handgun.  For a concealed handgun permit, I had to submit to not only a background check, but also turn over my medical records to the County Sheriff (as if criminals will care about such nuisances if they intend to commit a crime with a handgun).  But with no fanfare, the NC Legislature slipped a new law past the citizens where a mere purchase of a handgun puts the individual through virtually the same hassle as a concealed handgun permit.  Thus we see reports like the following concerning the ridiculous effects of said law.

The Blaze:

Larry Hyatt, owner of one of the country’s busiest gun stores, has more than a quarter-million dollars worth of guns sitting in his store, just waiting for their prospective owners — and there’s a good reason.

Hyatt’s store is located in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina’s most populous county. The large number of firearms in “purchase queue” stems from a newly created firearms law passed by the North Carolina legislature in December requiring everyone who applies for a gun permit in North Carolina to undergo a mental health background check.

Larry Hyatt, owner of one of the country’s busiest gun stores, has more than a quarter-million dollars worth of guns sitting in his store, just waiting for their prospective owners — and there’s a good reason.

Hyatt’s store is located in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina’s most populous county. The large number of firearms in “purchase queue” stems from a newly created firearms law passed by the North Carolina legislature in December requiring everyone who applies for a gun permit in North Carolina to undergo a mental health background check.

Following the new law’s passage — and combined with December’s terror attack in San Bernardino — the number of gun permit requests in Mecklenburg County began to skyrocket. This put the county’s sheriff in an awkward position. That’s because the new law gave him only 14 days to approve or deny a permit request, despite the fact that it normally takes much longer than two weeks to thoroughly screen the mental health background of a permit applicant.

But according to WCNC-TV, the time constraint hasn’t stopped Mecklenburg County Sheriff Irwin Carmichael from erring on the side of safety and approving permits beyond the 14-day limit — even if it means he’s breaking the new law in order to arm people who are ultimately cleared to have the permits.

“So [the new law] kind of puts us in a dilemma,” he told WCNC. ”Do we go ahead and issue permits and let everyone know in 14 days or wait till we get all of this medical information back? I’m always going to err on the side of safety.”

Carmichael added, “We want to make sure the guns are in the right people’s hands and that’s why we have to have these checks.” According to WCNC, what the sheriff is really trying to say is that his department is breaking the new law in order to keep the public safe.

The Sheriff seems arrogant, perhaps even proud of the fact that he is making the choice to break the law because, in his own words, he wants to “keep the public safe,” as if it’s within the latitude of a law enforcement officer to decide which laws he will follow and which ones he will not.

But is this what happens with mental health checks?  Is that what the Sheriff is doing, and is this what the Legislature intended?  It seems all the rage now, to ensure that mental health screening is part of gun purchase requirements, along with forcing parties in separation or divorce proceedings to relinquish their firearms (to see a sad, depressing testimonial of the abuses of these regulations by multiple men, see this reddit/firearms discussion thread).

First of all, notice that the law is more onerous than previous, with increased regulation, more intrusion and more government interference in the lives of peaceable men and women.  And this was sponsored by a man with Republican assigned to his name in the Senate.  Is it any wonder that there is such upheaval in the current election cycle?  What has the North Carolina Legislature done recently to make gun laws, or any other laws, less intrusive and less malleable to an increase in government power?  Gun permitting, which by the way is still not the regulatory scheme in the majority of states, is a means to increase local government control, put in place an approval system that is susceptible to corruption, and create a revenue stream that didn’t otherwise have to obtain if we had a system more conducive to liberty and God-given rights.

But now see what the new law has done!  It has superimposed yet another regulatory scheme that cannot possibly work, isn’t sustainable, isn’t funded, and leads to County LEOs who don’t care about obeying the law.  This is an awful commentary on stolid, dense and inefficient lawmaking and thinking by the Legislature.  The only option you have now is to supply a revenue stream to fund a gigantic new government program, for the purpose of governing men and women who follow the law rather than targeting those who don’t.  I simply cannot conjure up a more stupid waste of time and resources for the Legislature.

But what of this issue of mental health checks?  Do they accomplish anything?  Do people who would trigger a warning from mental health checks commit acts of violence out of proportion to their percentage representation in the population?

Fortunately, we’ve answered those questions before.  Let’s rehearse those answers.

In a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish investigate a number of common beliefs about mental illness and gun violence, including the idea that “psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens.” They write that “legislation in a number of states now mandates that psychiatrists assess their patients for the potential to commit violent gun crime.” New York, for instance, “requires mental health professionals to report anyone who ‘is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others’ to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, which then alerts the local authorities to revoke the person’s firearms license and confiscate his or her weapons.”

However, they argue, asking psychiatrists to judge who’s likely to become violent may be the wrong approach. They cite research showing that most gun violence isn’t committed by people who are determined to have mental illness — and that most people with mental illness don’t commit violence. According to one study, “the risk is exponentially greater that individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness will be assaulted by others, rather than the other way around.”

There’s more:

Random gun violence is a terrifying fact of American life, because of both the violence and the randomness. Terror bred by violence does not really require comment; they are twinned. But terror bred by randomness does, especially when it leads people to accept as true a reasonable story that is false, when a myth functions as an explanation. And that is what is happening with the way we talk about mental illness and random gun violence. Thankfully, a just published report in the Annals of Epidemiology pulls together the facts we need to consider if we really want to adopt evidence-based policies to reduce random gun violence.

The article, “Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy,” is a comprehensive, critical survey of the available data (and it is surprisingly accessible and  well-written for an academic treatise). It concludes that “most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness.”

[ … ]

Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine and lead author of the article in Annals of Epidemiology was quoted in the UCLA Newsroom saying ”but even if schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression were cured, our society’s problem of violence would diminish by only about 4 percent.”

That is not very much. When people with mental illness do act violently it is typically for the same reasons that people without mental illness act violently.

“We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York, says Barry Rosenfeld, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in The Bronx….

A study of experienced psychiatrists at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time.

That’s a much higher error rate than with most medical tests, says Alan Teo, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.

One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently, says Steven Hoge, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. These include a history of violence and a current threat to commit violence ….

And finally this.

Jeffrey Swanson, a medical sociologist and professor of psychiatry at Duke University, first became interested in the perceived intersection of violence and mental illness while working at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in the mid-eighties. It was his first job out of graduate school, and he had been asked to estimate how many people in Texas met the criteria for needing mental-health services. As he pored over different data sets, he sensed that there could be some connection between mental health and violence. But he also realized that there was no good statewide data on the connection. “Nobody knew anything about the real connection between violent behavior and psychiatric disorders,” he told me. And so he decided to spend his career in pursuit of that link.

In general, we seem to believe that violent behavior is connected to mental illness. And if the behavior is sensationally violent—as in mass shootings—the perpetrator must certainly have been sick. As recently as 2013, almost forty-six per cent of respondents to a national survey said that people with mental illness were more dangerous than other people. According to two recent Gallup polls, from 2011 and 2013, more people believe that mass shootings result from a failure of the mental-health system than from easy access to guns. Eighty per cent of the population believes that mental illness is at least partially to blame for such incidents.

To see what Dr. Swanson concludes, you can read his conclusions for yourself.  I wouldn’t send you to the source if it didn’t substantiate my claims.  In summary, when it comes to predicting behavior, Psychiatry is mankind’s latest incarnation of the village witchdoctor.  People believe in it, but they don’t know why, and even the mental health professionals have told you that they have no hope of accurately predicting propensity to violent behavior.  It’s simply counterfactual to hold that a mental health screening can prognosticate or foretell acts of violence, an Orwellian tip of the hat to the awful movie Minority Report.  You’re making things up because it feels good to fabricate comfortable lies.

But we persist in the mistaken belief, and at what cost?  As pointed out by one commenter on these pages, “Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence.”

It feels neat and tidy to assign someone to be responsible for violence, like a mental health professional, or to blame it on inanimate machines, like guns.  But that just isn’t the way the world works.  When men are moral agents who can choose to commit acts of evil, the most dangerous assumption is the one that informs you that you can legislate control over those individual actions.  When the results of policies that ingratiate the inner city youth to the government and relegate them to fatherless families causes young men to search for leadership and meaning elsewhere, the most ineffective policy is the one that targets the law abiding and peaceable citizen.  And when the criminal can choose to violate the law in spite of your best intentions, the most dangerous place to be is a so-called “gun-free zone” (because we all know there is no such thing as a gun-free zone, don’t we?).

You have created a body of law surrounding handgun permitting that has its roots in bigoted Jim Crow law, that has no positive effect on violence (so says the mental health professionals), and that by nature and intent bypasses due process rights.  It is a means of social control without Due Process protections.

But you can choose to undo all of this, can’t you?

Sent to the following:

Rick.Gunn@ncleg.net
Andy.Wells@ncleg.net
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Tom.McInnis@ncleg.net
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Bill.Rabon@ncleg.net
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Bill.Cook@ncleg.net
Jim.Davis@ncleg.net
Don.Davis@ncleg.net
Trudy.Wade@ncleg.net
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Buck.Newton@ncleg.net
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David initially observed that there was a lesson to be learned, but what, he pondered, somewhat sardonically?  I goaded him into spelling it out, and he responded that “my basic thought was to note the irony of the demonizing “gangster gun” sentiment” reserved for when they’re possessed by anyone else.”

But it’s interesting how we all see different flavors depending upon, I don’t know, psychological differences?  Archer says:

The caption says it all (emphasis added): “Although British officers early on denigrated submachine guns as ‘gangster guns,’ when the Nazis were only 20 miles from their shores they gladly bought all the Thompson submachine guns they could get, including the M1 version (top) and the earlier Model 1928A1.”

Another possible “lesson” could be directed at “Fudds”: if/when tyranny comes knocking, you’ll wish you hadn’t allowed pushed for all the “scary” guns to be banned as “weapons of war that don’t belong on our streets”. When it comes to defense of life, limb, and family, you’ll want something proven more effective than your “sporting purpose” 3-shot (with the dowel) 12 gauge pump gun.

In other words, you’ll be kicking yourself for allowing the attacks on others’ rights when they come for yours and there’s nobody left to stand with you.

And yet when I saw the question, my thoughts were that while we should all endeavor to shoot like pros (which means careful shot selection with rapid target acquisition in single shot mode, it would still be good to have an area suppression weapon.  Not nice enough to spend $20,000 on it, now necessary since the Hughes amendment.

Then again, American Rifleman had this several months ago, the modern incarnation of the B.A.R. shooting 30-06 (hotter than the .308), with muzzle brake and upgraded with modernized features making it more amenable to modularization like ARs.  Ohio Ordnance makes it, calling it the HCAR.  You too can have this for just under $4400.  If someone wanted to donate this to TCJ, I would do a great review.

This ain’t no gangster gun, boy.  This is high dollar high power, to be sure.  I think this would suffice as an area suppression weapon, semiautomatic or automatic.