Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Obviously I had let this issue slip my mind.  I lost attention to detail, a mistake I don’t like to make.  I should have cancelled my COSTCO membership when I found out that you wouldn’t let Erik Scott be – you had to call the police on him, ending with an unnecessary and thuggish cop shooting, and with Erik dead.  Do you feel good about that?  I hope not.  I hope that you feel responsible for it.

As I mentioned, I had let this slip my attention until today.  But David reminds me that you have been a busy bunch of folks.  First, you are removing D’Souza’s ‘America’ from the shelves.  Oh, I know that you’ve denied it has anything to do with your politics, but we both know that you’re lying.  Your co-founder is going to speak at the next DNC about his hero, Mr. Obama.  And my wife points out that you didn’t merely fail to make the book available, which she could have forgiven.  You made it available and then pulled it (wink … wink).  We all know what you meant to say by this action.

But then David reminds me that your policy is anti-gun.  My wife mainly does the shopping there, so I hadn’t thought much about it recently.  If I had wanted to carry inside COSTCO, I would have.  I couldn’t care less about your policy as it applies to me.  Your stupid policies won’t change my behavior one bit.  But I do want to reward those proprietors with whom I agree and punish those with whom I disagree.  You see, I have the ultimate power – that is, power over the purse.  I thought I would post my wife’s letter to you below, but before I do I wanted to mention one last thing.  I won’t patronize your store any more, but my AR-15 and those standard capacity magazines (what you might call “high capacity magazines”) sure look sexy in that gun safe you sold me, along with all of my other guns when I’m not shooting them or carrying them.  Let Mr. Obama know that you sold me a nice gun safe.

Now for my wife’s letter:

Dear Mr. Jelineck,

I have been a member of Costco since 2006 and I have always been a very satisfied customer.  However, I will not be renewing my membership.  Over the past few years I have observed how your political ideology has become more important to you than just simply supplying goods to a consumer like myself. I have always preferred Costco over Sam’s Club even though I have been aware of your political connection with the democratic party.  I have never let my political views get in the way of where I shopped until now. Your order to remove the book “America” from the shelves of your stores because you don’t like the subject matter is an act of controlling my right to “free speech” and I will not allow you to take away any of my constitutional rights.

Why couldn’t you just have agreed to disagree?

It is your store and you have the right to sell what you like but, in my opinion, your method of operating was deliberate.  You could have chosen not to sell the book at all but you waited until you had an audience so you could make your political statement.  Well, you have made your statement and I am making mine.

Publix is coming to my neck of the woods, and I like them better anyway.

Recall what I previously said about Remington trigger issues?

Remington 700 models have always had trigger issues, and it isn’t at all apparent that this recall is the same one that has caused Remington such problems in the past.

[ … ]

The most comprehensive and damning indictment of Remington and its trigger problems to date is still this article from Billings Gazette.  See especially this evidence in the margins of the article, and this evidence, and this evidence, and the rest of the evidence.

The original article discusses “Senior Engineers” with Remington.  I’m particularly partial to this work title, and I am a registered professional engineer.  Are these folks registered as PEs with the state?  If not, why?  We are rightly concerned about roads, bridges and buildings, power plants and their proper design.  Why not guns, and why shouldn’t these engineers be registered?

If they are, has the issue of Remington and the apparent internal evidence ever come to light with the state board of registration?  Why would senior engineers ignore evidence of improper function of machines they designed and manufacture?  Did these engineers consider it malfeasance to ignore such evidence, and if they didn’t see it or didn’t know the evidence existed, why not?

We have many more questions than we have answers.  It has been this way for a very long time with Remington.

I’m an engineer.  I simply won’t tolerate bad designs or professional malfeasance.  And it looks like Remington is making good on their design.

The Remington Arms Co. has reached a nationwide settlement of claims that most of its Model 700 bolt-action hunting rifles have a defective trigger mechanism – a settlement likely to include the recall of millions of the popular firearm.

Attorneys for Remington and the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit against the company did not respond Monday to requests for comment on a “notice of settlement” filed last week in federal court in Missouri.

Yet Richard Barber, a Montana man who’s been saying for a dozen years that many of the Model 700 are defective and should be recalled, indicated Monday that a recall is part of the settlement.

“It does accomplish what I want to accomplish,” he told the Lee Newspapers State Bureau. “I guess it’s safe to say, it’s better late than never. …

“As a whole, (the settlement) represents the best interests of the public. It will save lives, it will save limbs.”

The lawsuit says more than 5 million Model 700 bolt-action rifles have been sold since 1962.

Barber’s 9-year-old son, Gus, was killed by a Model 700 rifle in a 2000 hunting accident in Montana. The family says the rifle fired when Barber’s wife, Barbara, released the safety as she prepared to unload the weapon. The bullet passed through a horse trailer and hit Gus, who was standing behind the trailer.

For more than a decade, Barber investigated the rifle’s trigger mechanism, compiled company internal documents and worked as a consultant on lawsuits from Model 700 owners whose rifle fired without the trigger being pulled.

He concluded that a defect in the Walker Fire Control on the trigger mechanism led to the incidents, sometimes causing the weapon to fire when the safety was released or the bolt was opened or closed.

The Walker Fire Control has been installed on Remington Model 700s and some other Remington rifle models since the 1940s. The company introduced a new fire-control mechanism, the X-Mark Pro, in 2006.

Barber, contacted by telephone Monday, declined to discuss details of the settlement, saying he doesn’t want to harm discussions still under way between the plaintiffs and the company.

The settlement notice, filed last Wednesday, is in a class-action lawsuit filed January 2013 in U.S. District Court in Missouri, by Ian Pollard, who purchased a Remington Model 700 rifle in 2000 in Belle, Mo.

Pollard’s lawsuit, filed against Remington and two affiliated companies, Sporting Goods Properties and E.I. DuPont, said his rifle had fired three times without him pulling the trigger, twice when the safety was released and once when the bolt was opened.

“Defendants have known since 1979 that at least 1 percent of all Model 700 rifles at that time would `trick,’ allowing them to fire unexpectedly without a trigger pull,” the suit said. “(Pollard) contends that this percentage is vastly understated and that all Model 700 rifles are subject to unexpected firing without a trigger pull.”

Pollard’s lawsuit asked the court to declare all Model 700 bolt-action rifles with a Walker Fire Control to be defective and to order Remington to recall those models. It also asked for compensatory and punitive damages against the company.

Last week’s notice said a settlement agreement will be submitted to U.S. District Court in Missouri by Oct. 30, after which the court will decide whether to approve it.

There are other steps to take for Remington to regain their lost loyalty, like relocating manufacturing South and out of union territory.

David Codrea:

The Students for Concealed Carry Foundation, teaming with Ohioans for Concealed Carry, filed a civil rights complaint against Ohio State University, the student group announced Monday in a press release outlining the case.

Hmm … let’s see, what does the Ohio Constitution say: The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security.  That should settle it right there.  It probably won’t, and that’s grounds for impeachment of whatever judge ignores the provisions of the moral law of the land.

Watch Mike Vanderboegh’s Independence Day speech.

LAPD helps Obama to create dystopia on the West coast.

Via Uncle, a concealed carrier shoots an attacker.  Of course, to hear the Chicago Police Chief tell it, guns are responsible for all of the violence they have in Chicago.  I guess the guns just decide when to shoot all by themselves.

Finally, I sure and glad that “the only ones” got the right back to carry inside Ikea.  After all, they are the only ones.

Menckenlite:

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. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

And speaking of control freaks and their love for psychiatry, the State of South Carolina already drank the Kool Aid (probably because of communists like Senator Larry Martin).

A bill passed in May 2013 required state probate courts to report all cases where a person has been adjudicated mentally incompetent or involuntarily committed to a mental health facility. The reporting requirement began Aug. 1, 2013, and probate courts were given one year to report 10 years of backlogged cases.

With the Aug. 1 deadline swiftly approaching, Spartanburg County Probate Judge Ponda Caldwell said her office will not be able to comply.

“We are just doing what we can, as we can,” she said.

Of the estimated 9,000 mental health cases that had to be considered for reporting, Caldwell estimates there’s about 2,500 left to be reviewed. Not every case has to be reported, but Spartanburg County does not have the technology to sort the files digitally, making the task time-consuming and laborious.

“We have had to put physical hands on every file,” she said.

The mental health records are kept locked away in a small closet in the probate court. The documents are subject to federal laws pertaining to health care confidentiality, so Caldwell said she is very particular about who reviews the information. A trusted community volunteer was helping early in the process but had to stop because of family commitments. Since then, Caldwell herself has been handling the task, usually on weekends.

Oh, I’m sure this will work out real well, with no problems, no errors, and no overreach by the government.

Mike (who isn’t a gun guy at all):

A close reading of sources from the debates over the Bill of Rights makes clear that individual gun ownership represented the ability of citizens to protect and defend their political rights; rights to free speech, free assembly, due process and the like. But the argument for gun ownership advanced by the NRA today, Ollie North’s appeals to patriotism notwithstanding, is based on the alleged social value of guns to protect us against crime. The NRA would never argue that the Glock in my pocket should be used to stop cops from coming through the door, but they insist that the same Glock is my first line of defense when a bad guy breaks down that same door.

Waldman clearly understands that by using the Second Amendment to justify gun ownership as a defense against crime, the pro-gun community has successfully restated the history of the Second Amendment to buttress a contemporary social justification for owning guns. Neither will be readily undone as long as gun control advocates believe they can respond to this strategy by stating and restating the “facts.” Remember “it’s the economy, stupid”? Now “it’s the guns.”

I’m not sure whether Mike argues for or against his thesis, intentionally or accidentally, or even if Mike knows what he wants his thesis to be.

But assuming that he knows the second amendment is about being the surest defense against government tyranny – whether an army or its close cousin, a police state – if he has just figured that out, he can join the millions who already know that and intended it to be that way.

As for the NRA, they do what’s expedient, but Mike is stuck in a world in which large organizations develop talking points for idiots and the idiots vote the talking points.  The left operates that way, so they naturally assume that the rest of the world does as well.

But it doesn’t.  Katie Pavlich notes that at least half of the country believes ownership of a weapon is patriotic.  Try as they may like, the real intentions behind the second amendment cannot be hidden by the left, despite its reinterpretation and deconstruction.

As for the notion of gun ownership being a right because of the need for self defense, we’ve dealt with that before.  The second amendment was written within the context of everyone already owning guns because of the moral duty of self defense.

But the second amendment says nothing about self defense or hunting.  It says everything about tyranny.  My main intention here is to point out that whether the NRA recasts this issue or not, the context of guns in America cannot be undone or written out of the textbooks.  Men and women had them anyway, not armories or townships.  It’s ludicrous to argue that folks shouldn’t be able to bear arms individually because of the second amendment.  This misreads history, and badly so.

What the author is calling a “contemporary social justification for owning guns” is nothing of the sort.  God gives me the right to bear arms, not the state, the second amendment or any law or regulation.  The author only says the things he does because his understanding of history, theology and ethics is bankrupt and his thinking vacuous.

Chris Christie wants to be president.  He has vetoed the New Jersey gun bill.

Gov. Chris Christie today vetoed a gun control bill that would have reduced the permitted size of ammunition magazines, saying it would do nothing to reduce gun violence.

“This is the very embodiment of reform in name only. It simply defies common sense to believe that imposing a new and entirely arbitrary number of bullets that can be lawfully loaded into a firearm will somehow eradicate, or even reduce, future instances of mass violence,” Christie said. “Nor is it sufficient to claim that a ten-round capacity might spare an eleventh victim.”

Chris Christie made his fame in New Jersey as a gun controller.

Back then, Carroll was known for his staunchly conservative views (he’s a Civil War re-enactor with children named Benjamin Franklin and Robert E. Lee), which he often expressed in the opinion pages of the Daily Record. But today, Carroll is one of the four Republicans on the committee investigating Governor Christie over Bridgegate.

Christie and Merkt attacked Bucco and Carroll for what they called a “Guns for Votes” campaign, claiming they had a “radical plan to legalize assault weapons.”

It’s okay for people to change their mind or revisit issues, as long as they are serious about the change rather than doing it for political gain.  So what about the rest of Christie’s statement today?

But instead of a magazine size reduction, Christie proposed a new standard for involuntary commitment of patients who are not necessarily deemed dangerous “but whose mental illness, if untreated, could deteriorate to the point of harm.”

Christie also proposed new standards for recommending patients for involuntary outpatient treatment, “streamlining” patient transfers between inpatient and outpatient programs, new training programs for first responders likely to encounter unstable people with “modern techniques for de-escalation,” and to require people forced to undergo mental health treatment to demonstrate “adequate medical evidence of suitability” if they want to get a firearms purchase identification card.

Let that wash over you again.  Chris Christie is proposing what might be the most draconian mental health measures in the nation.  He wants to codify involuntary commitment of people who, in the estimation of someone approved by the state, deems that your mental health could deteriorate to the point of harm.

Furthermore, anyone who wants to carry a weapon must undergo forced mental health “treatment” to ascertain whether someone approved by the state deems you fit for your God-given duty of self defense.  Perhaps the belief that weapons are the best defense against tyranny would be reason enough not only to prohibit ownership of weapons, but also to involuntarily commit you to an institution.

Chris Christie, in attempting to shore up his credentials as a “conservative” candidate for president, has shown his true colors.  And we are the better for it.  Collectivists will be collectivists because that’s all they can be.  Can a leopard change its spots?

Prior:

Chris Christie’s Cowardly Dishonesty On Guns

Chris Christie Is A Gun Grabber

David Codrea:

The Mexican government has begun arresting armed “vigilantes,” desperate citizens in fear for their lives who can no longer wait for their compromised government to rein in ultra-violent cartels.

I knew it wouldn’t last, and especially since [at least some of the] citizens opposing the cartels took on uniforms and declared subservience to the state.  Like all good gun controllers, they don’t care about the safety and health of the people.  They care about their control.  Once again, folks.  Gun control is about … control.

Via David Codrea, GOA:

Once again, anti-gun Senators like Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mark Begich (D-AK), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and Mark Pryor (D-AR) are trying to trick gun owners into supporting them in their upcoming tough races for reelection in pro-gun states.

At the core of their slimy scheme is a do-nothing bill being pushed as the Sportsmen’s Act (S. 2363).  North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, who voted FOR the universal gun registry bill, is the chief sponsor.

Other chief cosponsors are Mary Landrieu (who also voted for universal gun registration) and Mark Begich and Mark Pryor (who, according to Harry Reid’s staff, would have cast the deciding votes for that universal gun registry bill, had their votes been needed).  It’s also cosponsored by anti-gun leader Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Read the rest at the link.  It gets more complicated – or not.  Here’s my take.  No more laws of any kind until the ones in place get repealed, and that means the Hughes Amendment, the Gun Control Act, The NFA.  If you want to stick national carry reciprocity in there somewhere, that’s fine with me.  Until then, block everything these communists try to do.  There.  That wasn’t too complicated.

Kurt Hofmann:

And then remember that the Obama administration has asserted (and indeed exercised) the “right” to use armed drones to assassinate suspected “terrorists,” without regard to their American citizenship. And people like Franchi accuse us of using “violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes”?

Subservience is for little people.  Power is for the philosopher-kings inside the beltway.

I’m glad that Mike Vanderboegh documented the damage to his computer this time courtesy of the TSA.  So the TSA doesn’t just feel up little girls, remove colostomy bags, look at naked pictures of people as they walk through machines, and push around the elderly.  They can also tear up computers.

The TSA is the lowest common denominator of our society.  Except maybe for SWAT teams.

The Strike One pistol is coming to America (I’m surprised that the ATF approved it).  Has anyone I know ever shot it before?

Vox:

America’s shooters have had around five years of trouble finding enough bullets for their guns. In the years after President Obama’s 2008 election, then again after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, with barely a lull in between, big-spending gun aficionados left manufacturers struggling to keep shelves full. Now, the shortage seems to be winding down.

Demand has remained high since 2008, in part because some gun owners, frightened that Obama would tighten gun control laws, went into panic mode. But that’s only one side of it. The problem is that supply never seemed to quite meet that demand. And that’s in part because even though they haven’t said so, skittish manufacturers don’t believe the panic will last long enough to make it worth the investment in costly new factories.

[ … ]

Whatever the numbers might be, there’s plenty of evidence that ammunition demand has been unusually high. According to one ammunition manufacturer, the shortage situation has been in effect nearly every year since September 11.

“Our company has been in a backorder situation since 9/11. There’s only been one year since 9/11 where we haven’t been working overtime,” says Kristi Hoffman, co-owner of Black Hills Ammunition in Rapid City, South Dakota.

[ … ]

he gun industry has acknowledged that politics drive gun-buying. Knowing that, manufacturers are reluctant to invest in lots of expensive new facilities when they’re afraid the political mania could vanish at any moment. But as Guns and Ammo reported last year, America’s ammunition manufacturers have been operating at or near capacity for a decade, and reluctant to boost that capacity.

many companies will only expand as far as their current workers and machinery will take them.

[ … ]

“Beyond that, you have to say, ‘How is my crystal ball here? Is this going to go on for the next 10 years so I can hire more people, I can build on to my facility? or is this going to be done in 6 months or 18 months?” says Hoffman. “Typically in our industry what people do — like us — you run as hard as you can with the people you have.”

It’s as I had suspected all along.  There has been crisis buying, but beyond that, the stocks have been depleted and are slow to recover.  Manufacturers are understandably reluctant to hire people and then have to lay them off later if demand subsides.  Good people in manufacturing don’t like affecting livelihoods.

Larry Hyatt (of Hyatt Gun Shop) and I were having a conversation recently, and he told me that his experience is that the gun control threat from the administration had caused crisis buying of guns and that peak has subsided, but that the trajectory is still upward.

Mike Vanderboegh once said, when asked what he was doing, “I’m trying to buy more time.”  Good.  We all need more time.  Prepare now for your needs in the future.  And don’t ever expect the ammunition stocks to completely recover.  Demand, like gun ownership, will be on an upward trajectory, while manufacturing will continue as is.

Miami-Herald:

A Sweewater police officer was recovering Monday after his holstered gun discharged and hit him in the leg while he was chasing shoplifting suspects at Dolphin Mall.

The officer, Joel Bosque, was responding to a shoplifting report at the mall when he was injured. He was taken to the hospital and is “doing fine,” police spokesman Jorge Fernandez de Lara said.

Bosque, who has been with the department for a year, will likely be placed on administrative leave while Miami-Dade police investigate.

The incident happened on Sunday after four suspects took off through the sprawling mall, 11401 NW 12th St., from the Burlington Coat Factory.

According to police, four men were spotted shoplifting in the store by a loss prevention officer. When the officer tried to stop them, they took off in different directions.

Bosque and another officer were able to catch one of the four. The three others are still at large.

Darius Brown, 18, was charged with felony theft, robbery and resisting without violence.

Bosque’s gun went off while it was in his holster, police said.

There should be no need to rehearse what we’ve said so many times before.  Guns don’t just “go off.”  More than likely (almost certainly) he had his finger on the trigger of his weapon and stumbled, causing his finger to squeeze due to sympathetic muscle reflexes.  See my description here for more details.

The real issue here is that the officer was reaching for his weapon and had his finger on the trigger while chasing a fleeing suspect.  Now go back and read the Supreme Court decision in Tennessee Versus Garner to see if he should really be doing that.  Fill in the comments section with your homework.

Prior:

Gun-Mounted Flashlights Linked To Accidental Shootings

Chicago SWAT Raid Gone Terribly Wrong

The Moral Case Against SWAT Raids

Forbes:

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.

In other words, advocacy for mental health checks and blame of the “mentally ill” for violence in the U.S. is not only unfair, it is a ruse intended to hide the real reasons for the advocacy, which is to intrude on civil rights and the moral duty of self defense.

It’s nice to see the recapitulation of things already said about this issue, in fact things I have cataloged.

Clinicians treating patients hear their fears, anger, sadness, fantasies and hopes, in a protected space of privacy and confidentiality, which is guaranteed by federal and state laws. Mental health professionals are legally obligated to break this confidentiality when a patient “threatens violence to self or others.” But clinicians rarely report unless the threat is immediate, clear and overt.

Mental health professionals understand that, despite our intimate knowledge of the thoughts of our patients, we are not very good at predicting what people will do. Our knowledge is always incomplete and conditional, and we do not have the methods to objectively predict future behavior. Tendencies, yes; specific actions, no. To think that we can read a person’s brain the way a scanner in airport security is used to detect weapons is a gross misunderstanding of psychological science, and very far from the nuanced but uncertain grasp clinicians have on patients’ state of mind.

What about diagnoses?

If mental health professionals were required to report severe mental illness (such as paranoid schizophrenia) to state authorities, it would have an immediate chilling effect on the willingness of people to disclose sensitive information, and would discourage many people from seeking treatment. What about depression, bipolar disorder, substance abuse or post-traumatic stress disorder, along with other types of mental illness that have some link to self-harm and impulsive action? The scope of disclosure that the government could legally compel might end up very wide, without any real gain in predictive accuracy.

Diagnosis is an inexact and constantly evolving effort, and it is contentious within the profession. To use a diagnosis as the basis of reporting the possibility of violence to the authorities would make the effort of accurate evaluation much more fraught. And what of the families and friends of the mentally ill? Should their weapons purchases be restricted as well? A little reflection shows how unworkable in practice any screening by diagnosis would be.

“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 ….

Perhaps most important, although people with serious mental illness have committed a large percentage of high-profile crimes, the mentally ill represent a very small percentage of the perpetrators of violent crime overall. Researchers estimate that if mental illness could be eliminated as a factor in violent crime, the overall rate would be reduced by only 4 percent. That means 96 percent of violent crimes—defined by the FBI as murders, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults—are committed by people without any mental-health problems at all. Solutions that focus on reducing crimes by the mentally ill will make only a small dent in the nation’s rate of gun-related murders, ranging from mass killings to shootings that claim a single victim.  It’s not just that the mentally ill represent a minority of the country’s population; it’s also that the overlap between mental illness and violent behavior is poor.

Whether folks engage in myth-telling because they believe in myths, or just want to mislead, the result is the same.  Communicating lies is both hurtful and sinful.  We are required to tell the truth, and the truth is that there is little to no correlation between mental health, whatever that is, and violence.