Archive for the 'Guns' Category

David Codrea:

Internet trolls have learned to exploit our over-militarized police. It’s a crime that’s hard to stop — and hard to prosecute

Read the rest of it for context and the Dallas PD’s response.

Texas Monthly also has a long article dedicated to preparations for open carry.

The law passed without the provision as it should have.

Honestly, I enjoy shooting handguns more than I do long guns, except distance shooting with bolties and glass.  What I know about handgun tactics and techniques I have learned from the NRA, my oldest son Joshua who worked security at some very rough places, my youngest son Daniel (who despite not having had much handgun training in the Marine Corps, still had some), reddit/r/guns, gun forums, range rules for the many ranges at which I’ve shot, YouTube videos with Jerry Miculek, Travis Haley, Chris Costa, Hickok45 and others, and years and years of doing it and seeing what works and what doesn’t, and what’s safe and what isn’t.  This is something I would never do unless I was in the process of discharging my weapon (and by that I mean I’m in process, and the process is going to be completed because my life is in danger, as opposed to preparing to do it or stand down depending upon the circumstances). [As a sidebar, Daniel jaw-jacked a USMC officer when he was in the Corps when an idiot officer muzzle flagged others with his finger on the trigger, Daniel being range officer that particular day.  Daniel, a Lance Corporal, was supported by other officers for doing what he did and ended the day with accolades – the officer, not so much].

Despite efforts to address the problem, the risk associated with the new Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm “remains substantial,” according to the report by Los Angeles County Inspector General Max Huntsman.

“There is a continued risk that either LASD employees or civilians may be seriously wounded or killed by an unintended discharge,” Huntsman wrote.

He said further study and steps to mitigate the problem are needed “before a tragedy occurs.”

A handful of deputies have been injured in accidental shootings in recent years, according to the report. No suspects or bystanders have been hurt in the incidents.

We’ve dealt with weapon-mounted lights before, noting that the real problem isn’t a switch or trigger for the light, but officers thinking that they are operating the light rather than the gun.  The solution isn’t to remove the light.

I once was responsible for a relative’s home before we could work on it and sell it – the story is long and too involved to discuss, and it would bore you.  At any rate, I [only one time] used the pistol over forearm with left hand holding the light method to clear the house as I entered.  Here I must tell you that because the house was unoccupied during the week and given the fact that on the weekends I had to do work in the house alone, I cleared the domicile room-to-room the first time I entered the structure on the weekends, and carried a weapon on my person my entire time in the home, often with my Doberman Heidi with me (this is the gun sitting near her, not what I used for room clearing but great gun-porn nonetheless).  Partly this had to do with where the house was located and when I had to do the work, which was mainly at night, but I promised not to tell you the story so I won’t.

I say I used that method only one time.  I will never do it again.  It may look cool in the TV shows, but by the time you’ve done your last room, you’re exhausted.  Only once did I do this.  Then I got a weapon-mounted light.  It worked wonders for my attention to detail.  As I said above, the solution isn’t to jettison the weapon-mounted light.  It’s to train and ensure you don’t make the kind of errors that cops are making with weapon-mounted lights.  With my time in that house, it’s likely that I’ve had more time in training than most cops doing that drill, and I’m a nobody.

So leaving aside the issue of weapon-mounted lights, what does the report tell you about police handgun tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP)?  Note well.  This isn’t a cop-bashing post.  This is intended to elicit thought and pondering and mental labor concerning what cops in that neck of the woods are being taught versus how you [hopefully] are practicing handgun tactics.

Think about this.  A handgun is being blamed because of a light trigger pull, while doing police work.  Be educated.  Ponder on this a bit.  What does this tell you versus what you should be doing and how you should be training?  And ponder the fact that the first shot you will ever fire in self defense will probably be from a handgun.

Prior: Gun-Mounted Flashlights Linked To Accidental Shootings

Jonah Goldberg:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Codrea:

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

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

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

Paul Ryan on guns.

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

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

Valets stealing guns.  Be careful out there folks.

CheaperThanDirt.com:

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

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

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

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

Chicago Tribune:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who could ask for anything more out of concealed carriers?

“He makes my feet like hinds’ feet, and sets me upon my high places.  He trains my hands for battle, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.  Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation, and thy right hand upholds me; and Thy gentleness makes me great,” Psalm 18:33-36.

The New York Times has published a call for gun control in the wake of the Islamist actions in San Bernardino.  An excerpt follows.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

The Washington Post has a pitiful, confused and yet halting agreement with the editorial, as if the writer, in terrible fear for her life, doesn’t know what else to do.

Then, there are those matters that are beyond practical political reach. Suffering, death, danger and maltreatment aside, a policy solution to these problems simply has no real path, no viability at all.

And in this moment, it would seem that any and all policy related to guns would belong in that third group. Gun control — or any discussion of a coordinated effort to stem the tide of gun deaths that set this country apart from almost every other industrialized nation — is going nowhere. It’s a reality we acknowledge regularly on this very blog, most recently on Saturday morning, the day the New York Times saw fit to devote its first front-page editorial in 95 years to gun control.

There are numerous reactions to this editorial, most of them edging towards the “this means war” sentiment.  I want to take a different approach to this call for more gun control, and all of those like it across America.

It’s tempting to take the approach of commenter Mike Bishop at WRSA, who says “The Manhattanites have about as much relevance in my personal, local, life, as a rookery of penguins.”  Mike is right, and such gun control will never obtain, but it goes much deeper than relevance.

There is a war between light and darkness, and it has been advancing since the very beginning.  Statism and Islam are different facets of the same stone (there are other facets), and they are merely the societal manifestations of the struggle between light and darkness.  The war occurs individually and corporately, and while men see the consequences and effects of the war, and get brief glimpses into the deeper things, in large measure we don’t truly see the battle in the heavens.

Angels and demons are warring in the heavenly places, and there is war within the souls of men.  God isn’t barely victorious, nor does be barely win.  Nay, He sits and the heavens and scoffs at the rulers of the world.  It will all end as He has said it will.

“For I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not yet been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’,” Isaiah 46:9-10.

As for individual men, there are those who are lost.  The New York Times editorial board is lost.  No, not collectively, but individually, each and every one of them.  The war is over in their soul, or better, it never occurred.  There are those men who have been given a taste, and who know the truth, but who suppress it in unrighteousness.  They will never find peace or rest, not now and not in eternity.

But there are those who would be lost if left to their own devices, who know their sins, but who have been awakened by the sovereign hand of Almighty God, who reaches down in His kind providence and bestows His love on them.  They are saved by grace and through faith, not of their works, lest they should boast.

For this last category, God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world … He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself … according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will,” Eph 1:4,5,11.

If the former believes that upon death their bodies cool to ambient temperature and then get planted or burned, and that’s the end, they are merely observers to the great war, not even pawns.  They are worse than irrelevant.  They see the effects, but cannot effect change.  For those of us who believe, there are no volunteers to this war.

We were created for it, and we were drafted to this army.  Our volunteering occurred simultaneously with our being called, and upon being called, we had no other choice.  The sheep know their master’s voice, and only follow Him.

Oh, to be sure, I won’t give up my weapons, not a single one of them, and I will defend myself and my family as we are threatened, whether by the state or other actors.  I will do so because I have been taught by my master that I must do so.  But it goes deeper than a few guns.

I know that the New York Times editorial board, for all their bluster, isn’t relevant to this war because they don’t even know there is one.  Looking for peace, they may as well slash their wrists and bleed before Baal for fire to come down from heaven as to look to the state for a solution to evil.

I have been called with a heavenly calling, like all of His people, not of themselves, but of His great mercy and from before the foundation of the world, to fight this great war.  The war is present everywhere and all of the time, whether visibly and by implements of fighting, or in our souls for our devotion and affection of the divine.

It has become commonplace to charge people carrying weapons with cowardice.

PARIS—For most of the last two centuries, Europeans have been puzzling over their American cousins’ totemic obsession with guns and their passion for concealed weapons. And back in the decades before the American Civil War, several British visitors to American shores thought they’d discerned an important connection: people who owned slaves or lived among them wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile, but often shot each other, too.

In 1842, the novelist Charles Dickens, on a book tour of the United States, saw a link between the sheer savagery of slave ownership and what he called the cowardly practice of carrying pistols or daggers or both. The author of Oliver Twist listened with a mixture of horror and contempt as Americans defended their utterly indefensible “rights” to tote guns and carry Bowie knives, right along with their “right” to own other human beings who could be shackled, whipped, raped, and mutilated at will.

Charging us with sin is the devil’s game, and in my corner as defender is the Son of God who has paid the price, past, present and future.  I’ll just let Him handle it.  I am unaffected by the game.  Since I am a warrior in the great war of all time, how can any man say that I am a coward?

Coward if left to his own devices, sinner, and even worthless worm.  But saint by the shed blood of the lamb, warrior in the great war, at battle ever since being called, at battle until the end of my life, servant of the most high king.  My days are in His hands.  I will live all of the days to which I have been ordained, and will not perish until it is time that I meet my savior and master.  Who can understand this except those who have been called?

“You will not be afraid of the terror by night, or of the arrow that flies by day,” Psalm 91:5.

David Codrea:

… his defense centered on the protest that in New York politics, everybody does it.

That’s probably true, and no doubt goes a long way toward explaining why criminals are so concerned about making sure everyone but they and their enforcers are disarmed. No one has been more rabid about that than Silver, abusing his influential political position to betray his oath of office and subvert the rights of his constituents, and not just the ones dumb enough to trust him with power over their lives.

I’m certainly not surprised.  Collectivists aren’t keen on recognizing or defending the rights of others, but certainly quick to leverage their position to increase their own standing.

Speaking of which, Ray Kelly, I don’t support more guns.  Of course you don’t.

Via Uncle, who says we don’t need to carry guns to church?

The TSA on how to fly with firearms.  Except that I’ve been told by American Airlines to put the ammunition outside the locked container where my gun is, contrary to what the TSA is saying here.  You know, because someone doesn’t have their act together, perhaps the TSA, or perhaps the airlines, or perhaps both.

Breitbart.com:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The couple was not hurt.

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

David Codrea:

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

[ … ]

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

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

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

David Codrea’s thanksgiving essay is here.

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

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

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

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

Gateway Pundit:

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

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

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

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

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