Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Breitbart:

Writing on Facebook, Jefferies said he believes many people will argue that the hostage situation proves that gun control–of which Australia has plenty–does not stop criminals. But Jefferies believes the hostage situation proves just the opposite.

Jefferies wrote:

I don’t know what the end result of this stand-off will be, but I do know this, he will only shoot that shotgun once before the police will be in there. This is a piss weak terrorist at best.

If this had happened in the USA the guy would have semi automatic weapons and hand guns that could easily kill many people in a short period of time. It seems to me that gun control in Australia is working better than ever.

And as for that one time, well, if it’s you I guess he’s sorry, but you’re not important enough for him to relinquish his collectivist views.  To this Newsweek article, the comment thread is interesting.

Harold Rosenbaum

You can’t take people’s guns away if guns are still in the hands of others. I wonder what would have happened if someone had a gun in the purse or on their person.

Better to sacrifice one or two schmucks than to allow the whole lot of them to be killed , or so goes the thinking in Australia.

David Codrea:

Democratic Virginia State Delegate Joe Morrissey “is on a leash,” Henrico County Sheriff Michael Wade told CBS 6 in a Tuesday report on the jailed politician’s work release arrangement. Morrissey, 57, was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and sentenced to 12 months in jail with six months suspended for “an inappropriate relationship” with a 17-year-old administrative staffer in his legal office who is now reportedly pregnant … So when Morrissey attacked the right to keep and bear arms in 2013 by bringing an AK-style rifle onto the floor of the House of Delegates “in a wild stunt aimed at rallying support for tougher gun laws …

Hey, laws and morality are for the peasants.  Otherwise, what good is an election anyway?

Kurt Hofmann:

Among “progressives,” it’s an article of faith that gun rights advocacy and racism are inextricably linked. One writer goes so far as to argue that broad recognition of gun rights in the U.S. causes cops to shoot black men … No matter that American “gun control” has its roots in a desire to keep African-Americans disarmed and thus powerless

Here in my state we still have laws that require the approval of the CLEO to purchase handguns, laws that have historically been used to prevent those horrible Negros from getting their hands on things that can hurt the good folks.  Hey, what good is a Jim Crow law if it can’t be used to generate revenue whilst encoding bigotry in the law books?

Uncle:

A man who can’t use his arms was in a car with others. The police pulled them over. The police found a gun in the car. And are charging the man who can’t use his arms with possession.

Hey, it’s New Jersey.  If the cops and prosecutors can’t be stupid there, what the hell is happening to this great country?

Kansas City opinion pages, weapons force difficult decisions for police officers.  Hey, if they would just follow the same rules I have to, the decisions would be much easier for them.

NYT:

Soon after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama made mental health care a major part of his plan to curb gun violence. And this week, following the two-year anniversary of that crime, Rep. Tim Murphy is calling for federal legislation he believes would help stop mentally ill people from becoming violent. “I remain firmly convinced we can make tremendous legislative strides in preventing mass tragedies involving someone with a serious mental illness,” he writes at The Guardian.

But according to one recent analysis, mental-health screening may not be the best way to prevent mass shootings — and expecting psychiatrists to identify potential shooters may do more harm than good.

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.”

The editorial goes on to pose the salient question as follows.

Dr. MacLeish believes psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners should have a role in the national discussion around guns — just not the role of telling authorities which of their patients will become violent. Rather, “there needs to be a new politics to how psychiatry engages with the gun debate.” As it stands now, he said, that debate isn’t really addressing questions like “why do people feel like they need guns” and “what are the implications of being surrounded by guns in people’s daily lives.”

The question has an easy answer.  Number one, to prevent or otherwise answer or ameliorate tyranny and those who would try to enslave us, and second, for self defense (which is just another form of enslavement, just personal and individual).  Thus the answer(s) finds its roots in the prevention of enslavement.  These are issues we investigate and plumb every day.  They are welcome to join the discussion – it isn’t a new one – but the Psychiatrists may be late to the conversation.  Better late than never.  I welcome the opportunity to persuade others of our position.

But the interesting thing about this editorial is that it continues the theme we’ve noted for a long time (even the NYT is catching on, even if their solution is to employ “mental health professionals” for the purpose of larger gun control efforts), and it is that mental health has nothing whatsoever to do with gun violence or any other kind of violence.  As reader menckenlite has noted:

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.

There isn’t one iota of difference between the role Tim Murphy wants “doctors” to play and the role of doctors in Nazi Germany.  It all has to do with control for the benefit of the state.  Can Psychiatrists stop gun violence?  No, any more than they can stop any other kind of violence.  But they also shouldn’t allow themselves to be duped into being willing rubes on behalf of a totalitarian state.

Prior:

The Link Between Mental Health And Gun Violence

Guns And Mental Health Bigotry In California

The Myth Of Mental Illness And Gun Violence

ATF Rulemaking On Adjudication As Mentally Defective

Mental Health And Guns: Mentally Defective Because You Believe In The Second Amendment

Guns And The Mentally Ill: A Professional Assessment

Fusion:

Philip Alpers, a professor at the Sydney University School of Public Health, said that’s not likely to change. He said most Australians would still agree with Howard, the conservative former prime minister who instituted the gun laws.

“There are only a handful of Australians who might suggest that having more guns inside that café would have made the situation less dangerous,” Alpers said. He added that if anyone suggested more guns were the answer, “he’d be howled down and become a laughingstock across the country.”

This file photo taken on September 8, 1996 shows Norm Legg, a project supervisor with a local security firm, holding up an armalite rifle which is similar to the one used in the Port Arthur massacre and which was handed in for scrap in Melbourne after Australia banned all automatic and semi-automatic rifles in the aftermath of the Port Arthur shooting. (William West /AFP/Getty Images)

Mr. Alpers may be whistling past the grave yard if Australians want their country back and, but it remains to be seen.  If he’s right, thus continues the enslavement of the Australians to their collective.  Never underestimate the ability of the totalitarians to get slaves to advocate and go along with their captivity.

Mike Vanderboegh:

You know the Founders were as suspicious of unrestrained democracy as they were of absolute monarchy. Both can be tyrannical. Both can be deadly. Both are threats to life and liberty and property. This is why they crafted a constitutional republic. The Founders knew that the mob could be manipulated by cynical elites to rob other citizens of their liberty, their property and their lives – cynical elites, wealthy men, powerful men, with unceasing appetites for more and more power …

Tyranny as you have now experienced with I-594 can be voted into existence by a majority. This does not make it right. This does not make it legitimate. Indeed it is a violation of natural law and natural rights derived from God …

This is one of Mike’s best, and I’ve been thinking about freedom, slavery and God-given rights over the last few days.  Slavery in all of its forms is evil.  To be sure, forced labor for the benefit of others is theft.  Forced relocation is kidnapping, and forced sex is rape.  But as heinous as these things are, they are byproducts of the main focus of the evil behind slavery.

Slavery is an interdiction and attempted thwarting of the main institution and building block in God’s economy – the family.  When I say “economy,” don’t think money and finances, although that would certainly be included.  Think of the role of the family in education, self determination, living location, choice of labor, value system, religious proclivities, and every other aspect of life.  Think God’s administration of His created order.  The family is central, it is essential, it cannot be harmed without both adverse natural consequences and God’s divine punishment on people, individually and corporately.

Whether it is a totalitarian state that sucks bank accounts dry through taxation, Boko Haram who steals girls from their families for sex, ISIS who beheads teenagers who refuse to relinquish their Christianity and swear allegiance to a false religion, diktats which govern what guns can be owned by whom and when, or whatever the form, it all steps in between the head of a family and his wife and children, a man’s work, a man’s calling before God, a man’s ability and freedom to say how his family will live and how he will care for and protect them.  Thus it is an affront to the laws of God, sinful, a cosmic crime against the most high.  It is all (what the Bible calls) high-handed sin (Numbers 15:22-31).  It is perpetrated by men who raise their fists to God and say they will not bow their knee to His laws.

Men who engage in this high-handed sin might be so bold as to kidnap girls for sex, or they might be so surreptitious as to sell their ideas to the stupid public as for their own safety and protection, such as gun control in the form of dictating what can be owned by whom and what one must do to placate the state if he engages in bartering.  Or, in the case of entitlements, it might take the form of “assistance” to families which ultimately destroys the family like it has with minorities in America.  But make no mistake about it, it is all high-handed sin, and God will judge it, now and in eternity.

Control over weapons is the final step and the signal accomplishment of a state which seeks to enslave its people.  Thus is disobedience to these evil measures a righteous calling.

David Codrea:

The noncompliance with gun laws pledge was backed up with acts of civil disobedience throughout the afternoon, as various activists “transferred” firearms to one another without going through any government oversight checks. For their part, the Yes on 594 Twitter account has argued that handing off a gun is not a violation, claiming without further clarification when challenged, that “law enforcement agencies have been clear for months: that’s #NotATransfer.” That contention of an exception is not supported by the Ballotpedia description of “the effect of the … measure.”

Because they didn’t plan for disobedience.  They planned for willing sheeple who wouldn’t cause trouble.

Barrett Firearms inks a deal.

KIEV, December 12 (Sputnik) – The Ukrainian state-run defense concern Ukroboronprom said Friday its subsidiary Ukrinmash had signed a deal on small arms delivery with US Barrett Firearms.

“The representatives of company Ukrinmash – the leading exporter of the Ukroboronprom state concern – signed a contract with Barrett Firearms. Weapons will be delivered for the needs of Ukraine’s Security Service and National Guard,” Ukroboronprom said on its website.

Good for Barrett, and good for The Ukraine.  To the minions of the shirtless, metrosexual megalomaniac tyrant Putin, may a .50 round from a Barrett blast open your skulls.

News from Iraq:

Four young Christians were brutally beheaded by ISIS in Iraq for refusing to convert to Islam, according to a British reverend forced to flee the country.

Canon Andrew White, known as the Vicar of Baghdad, told the horrifying story how of the youths, all under 15, were murdered for standing up to the jihadists.

The vicar of the city’s St George’s Church, the only Anglican church in the whole of Iraq, has had to leave the country for Israel amid constant threats on his life by Islamic State.

In a harrowing interview with the Orthodox Christian Network, he said ISIS had killed ‘huge numbers’ of believers in Jesus.

‘Islamic State turned up and said to the children, “you say the words that you will follow Mohammad”’, he said, his voice cracking with emotion.

‘The children, all under 15, four of them, said “no, we love Yesua; we have always loved Yesua; we have always followed Yesua; Yesua has always been with us”.

‘They [ISIS] said, “Say the words.” They [the children] said, “No, we can’t”.

‘They chopped all their heads off. How do you respond to that? You just cry.

Here’s how you respond to that.  You take a rifle and blow a hole through their skulls before they ever invade your home, or if they’re already in your home, you blow a hole in their belly or groin with a 230 grain .45 fat boy.  Any more questions?

Don’t be sheeple.

In 1961, curious about a person’s willingness to obey an authority figure, social psychologist Stanley Milgram began trials on his now-famous experiment. In it, he tested how far a subject would go electrically shocking a stranger (actually an actor faking the pain) simply because they were following orders. Some subjects, Milgram found, would follow directives until the person was dead.

The news: A new Milgram-like experiment published this month in the Journal of Personality has taken this idea to the next step by trying to understand which kinds of people are more or less willing to obey these kinds of orders. What researchers discovered was surprising: Those who are described as “agreeable, conscientious personalities” are more likely to follow orders and deliver electric shocks that they believe can harm innocent people, while “more contrarian, less agreeable personalities” are more likely to refuse to hurt others.

The methodology and findings: For an eight-month period, the researchers interviewed the study participants to gauge their social personality, as well as their personal history and political leanings. When they matched this data to the participants’ behavior during the experiment, a distinct pattern emerged: People who were normally friendly followed orders because they didn’t want to upset others, while those who were described as unfriendly stuck up for themselves.

“The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial — disagreeableness — may actually be linked to ‘pro-social’ behavior,'” writes Psychology Today‘s Kenneth Worthy. “This connection seems to arise from a willingness to sacrifice one’s popularity a bit to act in a moral and just way toward other people, animals or the environment at large. Popularity, in the end, may be more a sign of social graces and perhaps a desire to fit in than any kind of moral superiority.”

Another unnecessary rescue story.

Most were out Black Friday shopping or recovering from Thanksgiving feasts on Friday morning. Jason Hodges headed out for a hike. What started out as a leisurely walk through the woods turned into a 13-hour ordeal and rescue mission involving more than a dozen Rabun County volunteers and emergency personnel.

Jason headed to Patterson Gap around 10 a.m. with his father’s dog, Peaches. The avid hiker was visiting his parents at Lake Burton for the holiday and intended to return to his family by lunchtime. He decided to go to the top of the mountain, heading off the trail and down animal paths. After enjoying the vista, he headed back on what he thought was the Appalachian Trail.

The College Park man and his canine friend circled the mountain several times. Then Jason decided to head straight down to find his parked truck, wading through dense thickets of mountain laurel. With no food or water, he and the dog stopped to take a drink from a nearby stream. Nearly three hours had passed.

“Everything just started to look the same,” he said.

It was then that Jason realized the worst — he was lost.

Meredith Hodges received a call that any wife would dread. She said it’s not unusual for her husband to get lost while hiking …

Good grief.  Learn to navigate.  Take maps.  Take a compass.  Know the terrain.  Wear good boots, take a day pack, a parka, a Mylar survival blanket, a knife, a gun, a protein bar, water, 550 cord, a rubberized poncho for a ready-made tent (using the 550 cord and two trekking poles), a high lumen tactical light and fire starter.

It’s so simple.  Don’t be that guy.

NYT:

SYDNEY, Australia — Armed police officers surrounded a cafe in Sydney’s central business district Monday morning after one or more gunmen took hostages and displayed a black flag with Arabic script in white in the cafe window.

A police spokesman confirmed officers were called to the Lindt Chocolate Cafe, in Martin Place, a major shopping and pedestrian thoroughfare, at around 10 a.m.

A commercial television network, Channel Seven, which has a studio near the cafe, showed footage of people, wearing Lindt uniforms, pressed against the cafe windows, displaying the flag.

Reports say anything from 20 to 40 or 50 people are being held.  You mean that the police weren’t able to anticipate it and stop it before it happened?  You mean the police being armed isn’t enough to keep people safe?  You mean that there are 40-50 people now in Sydney, Australia who wish they were concealed handgun carriers?

BBC:

Things were just starting to improve when the firm was hit by Western sanctions.

With Russian military stores full of the famously durable Kalashnikovs, and dwindling orders from abroad, the company had turned its attention to civilian firearms markets.

In January it finally secured a foothold in the biggest of them, sealing a lucrative deal to supply up to 200,000 rifles a year in the US.

But in July, Kalashnikov was placed on a US list of eight arms manufacturers sanctioned for Russia’s role in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine. The deal was halted with under half the initial order delivered. It was added to an EU list in September.

“Of course I was upset, because I didn’t understand why we’d been sanctioned,” Kalashnikov director Alexei Krivoruchko told the BBC, arguing that the firm was no longer wholly state-owned since he and another Russian businessman had invested in a 49% stake.

Also, he points out, it primarily produces firearms for the civilian market.

“The US was a key market for us, one that we planned to develop,” Mr Krivoruchko says. “It’s a big loss, there’s no point saying otherwise.”

There are now some 200 models of Kalashnikov, still produced at the original factory in Izhevsk, two hours’ flight east of Moscow.

So let me explain it to you Mr. Krivoruchko.  Your government did indeed foment big trouble in the Ukraine, but that has nothing to do with the sanctions.  You see, you’re a Russian capitalist businessman, while our President, Mr. Obama, is an American communist and doesn’t want his people to have guns.  Do you understand now?

Readers have known for a long time that I am no fan of the Kalashnikov design.  I hate to hear and feel the clank … clank … clank … rattle … rattle … rattle … when I shoot an AK.  And I don’t like to miss.  But it’s much more reliable than the Eugene Stoner design, you say.  Wrong.  I know all about the presumed failures of the M4 at Wanat and Kamdesh, and I still claim (like I did at the time) that the failure there had to do with ensconcing too small a force without good force protection, control over the terrain, good air support, and a clear mission.

I have never had a single failure with my AR-15, and for those of you still unconvinced, Uncle sends us to Gun Nuts Media, who gives us this.

KAC SR-15 MOD2 Sand Dump Test AFTER 15,000 rounds without cleaning… from Ballistic Radio on Vimeo.

And thus we speak the name of Eugene Stoner with hushed reverence around these parts.  And if you own an AR-15, it’s likely that you’re much happier with your rifle than German Soldiers are with the H&K G36.  Then again, you know how I feel about H&K.

Gaston Gazette:

Sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Sapienza suspects the men who attempted to break into his Gastonia home Thursday night thought he would be an easy target because he’s disabled and uses a walker.

But after scaring away the would-be thieves, Sapienza taped a note to his door, in which he attempted to make it clear that his trigger finger works just fine.

“(If) you try to break in my house again, I will be waiting on you,” reads the note, which was still there Friday afternoon. “Enter at your own risk.”

Sapienza, a Marine Corps veteran who served four years in Vietnam, was watching television in his bed at 7:42 p.m. at his home on Davis Avenue. He heard someone prying off the lock and pulling the nails to the latch out of his front door.

He grabbed his .45-caliber handgun, put it in a holster on his walker and began shuffling toward the sound. He flipped a hallway light on, yelled out to announce he was armed, and yanked open the door to see two men wearing ski masks.

They jumped off his porch and practically tripped over one another trying to flee, Sapienza said.

“It was like a keystone cops scene,” he said. “When they saw the .45, one ran one way up the street, and the other went the other way.”

This is truly a heart-warming story, like sitting on a late evening in front of the fire with a glass of fine liquor beside your dog.  Now let’s hear from the anti-gun nuts.  “A gun in the home is no protection …”

David Codrea:

GOA stood alone among national gun rights groups in November, warning that passing the bill will result in giving Congressional Democrats control of Congress for the next 10 months, as the “so-called ‘long-term CR [continuing resolution]’ … would set policy and spending until the end of the fiscal year (September 30, 2015).” Their solution was to call instead for “a ‘short-term CR’ into January, February, or March. This would allow the newly elected Republican Congress to set spending and policy for the federal government for most of next year.”

And that’s exactly what has happened.  The Democratic party is evil, but the GOP is a cowardly shell of humanity, without even so much as a thread of dignity or character left.  But the reason I lifted this quote from David’s article is that it reminds me of a comment left here at TCJ when we discussed this.

seriously ? they think the lame duck Senate can pass gun control ? so far the GOP House has stopped everything … quit crying wolf … this is just a fundraising stunt …

Yea, not so much, huh?  Read all of David’s piece at Examiner.

If you’re a machinst and live in or near Huntsville, Alabama, Remington wants to offer you a job.  If I was a machinst and lived in Huntsville, Alabama I’d take it.

The Texas Legislature is flooded with proposed gun legislation.  The legalization of open carry is a no-brainer and shouldn’t take any more than a minute or two to pass, after a couple of hours to craft the law.  We’ll see just how smart or stupid the Texas Legislature is.

Nullification works.  Of course it does.  It just requires the heart, character and stomach to stand up to the federal government.