Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Kurt Hofmann:

It’s more than plausible that of the portion that would not be shipped overseas, at least some would end up in killers’ hands here in the U.S., available for appalling mayhem. Why, after all, would an arms smuggler just sit on the weapons, which would thus not be making him any money, and would instead just expose him to the risk of arrest and prosecution?

Does anyone think that had that indeed happened, Yee would not attempt to exploit the ensuing carnage as justification for more “gun control”?

Well, it seems to be the collectivist’s modus operandi.

David Codrea:

Case in point, since OSHA is mentioned as a possible catalyst in Thursday’s Bozeman raid by other agencies, this column warned back in 2009 that Obama’s pick to head the agency, David Michaels, was strongly anti-gun and committed to using regulatory schemes to get his way. At the time of his nomination, this column advocated organized opposition, including scoring confirmation votes against gun group ratings and contacting the appropriate Senate committee, even reminding readers of Michaels’ organizational connections with George Soros (himself a backer of draconian international citizen disarmament efforts).

I’ve warned you about the executive branch of the government and legislating by federal register notice.  This is a corollary.  They send the regulators in and fine you, shut you down, and make it impossible to do business.  They may even send an armed team after you for breaking the rules they wrote without the consent of the Congress.

Visit Mike Vanderboegh’s Crisis City for a view of where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

PTR makes its first rifles in South Carolina.  If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times.  Smith & Wesson, Rock River Arms, Remington, Mossberg … what are you waiting for?

Some genius named Rachel Stella is asking about Georgia’s new law, and whether it’s okay to have guns on God’s property.  I’m in favor of guns on God’s property, and oh, by the way, the posing of the question assumes a chasm between the sacred and secular.  The Psalmist says that the “cattle on a thousand hills belong to God” (Psalm 50:10), or in other words, we’re just stewards.  He owns everything.  So that about covers it for me.  Guns everywhere.

WSJ Law Blog:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday bolstered federal efforts to keep guns away from domestic abusers, ruling that even a misdemeanor conviction involving minimal force can trigger a ban on firearm possession.

A Tennessee man argued that his misdemeanor conviction for causing “bodily injury” to the mother of his child shouldn’t bar him from keeping guns because it wouldn’t qualify as a violent crime under other federal statutes.

The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the nature of domestic violence justified stricter efforts to prevent conflict between intimate partners from turning deadly.

“’Domestic violence’ is not merely a type of ‘violence’; it is a term of art encompassing acts that one might not characterize as ‘violent’ in a nondomestic context,” she wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Justice Department documents say most forms of domestic violence are “relatively minor and consist of pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping, and hitting,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. While those might not be serious offenses in other situations, things are different in the home, she continued.

“The accumulation of such acts over time can subject one intimate partner to the other’s control,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. Moreover, she observed, traditionally battery was defined as any “offensive touching,” whether or not it caused physical injury.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote separately, agreeing with the outcome in Wednesday’s case but calling for a narrower definition of “physical force” that excluded “the slightest unwanted touching” and similarly minor offenses.

Does anyone else consider it rather creepy that the SCOTUS justices are writing things down about “unwanted touching?”  You’d better mind your p’s and q’s in the future if your children go to any of the public communist schools.

One report about a spanking might bring the SWAT teams down on your home.  And I’m sure that no man will feel like he is being targeted just because he is a man.  That certainly won’t happen.  And I’m sure false reports won’t be filed.  And I’m sure the local courts will be more than amenable to vacating bad judgment on the part of the local LEOs.  After all, they’ve always been on our side in the past, no?

Remember when I asked this question?

When will you be adjudicated mentally defective because you believe that being armed is the surest way to ameliorate tyranny in America?

Now we know the answer.  Via Uncle, The Washington Post:

[Plaintiffs allege that, as] of February 3, 2011, Plaintiffs possessed FOID cards, owned firearms, and kept their firearms in their home. At some point before February 3, 2011, David expressed “unpopular political views … about his support of Second Amendment rights” to “a locally elected official.” That official, somebody in that official’s office, or one of the individual defendants falsely construed David’s comments “as evidence that [he] had a mental condition that made him dangerous.” On February 3, 2011, [Illinois State Police] Lieutenant [John] Coffman wrote a letter to David revoking his FOID card under § 8(f) of the Act based on the false and unreasonable assertion that David had a “mental condition” within the meaning of that provision.

On February 5, 2011, with Lieutenant Coffman’s approval, Agents Pryor and Summers entered Plaintiffs’ home without a warrant or consent, conducted a search, and seized Plaintiffs’ firearms, which Plaintiffs used for personal protection, hunting, investment, and enjoyment …

Simply because local LEOs wanted to, the Plaintiffs had their weapons confiscated, and the LEOs ignored constitutional protections regarding illegal search and seizure.  The case has to do with residents of Illinois, but it could be anywhere.

Now someone spend the time and expend the effort to explain to me how mental health checks are going to keep guns out of the hands of “dangerous criminals.”  Go ahead.  I’m listening.

AJC.com:

The content of HB 60, the omnibus gun bill passed by the Legislature last Thursday, is finally available online and in hard copy at the state Capitol.

Two areas are likely to spark some controversy. First, there’s a requirement that holders of concealed weapons permits must have that license on their persons when they carry. Which is immediately followed by the caveat that cops aren’t allowed to stop anyone solely to check for that permit:

(a) Every license holder shall have his or her valid weapons carry license in his or her immediate possession at all times when carrying a weapon, or if such person is exempt from having a weapons carry license pursuant to Code Section 16-11-130 or subsection (c) of Code Section 16-11-127.1, he or she shall have proof of his or her exemption in his or her immediate possession at all times when carrying a weapon, and his or her failure to do so shall be prima-facie evidence of a violation of the applicable provision of Code Sections

(b) A person carrying a weapon shall not be subject to detention for the sole purpose of investigating whether such person has a weapons carry license.

Howard Sills, sheriff of Putnam County, noted the language as the bill passed last week:

“Then there is one sentence, and it destroys everything, ” Sills said.

That one sentence says police may not detain anyone to demand to see a weapons permit. That means, Sills said, that if someone is walking down the street late at night with a pistol stuck in his waistband, police may not stop him and ask to see his weapons permit.

I don’t have much to say about this except notice the sleight of hand by the CLEO.  What the proposed law says is that you must have your permit with you, and then they made it clear that there will be no “stop and identify” authority.

As it is now, Georgia is a stop and identify state (with some form of law intended for loitering).  They are undoing that.  That has no bearing on the issue of permits, and the CLEO knows it.  He knows that he told a lie when he said one sentence “destroys everything.”

Uncle discusses a judge discussing the ATF making crime their mission instead of doing their job:

The time has come to remind the Executive Branch that the Constitution charges it with law enforcement — not crime creation. A reverse-sting operation like this one transcends the bounds of due process and makes the Government the oppressor of its people.

To LEOs, I told you so.

It’s what Mike Vanderboegh calls losing the mandate of heaven.  At one time in our history, constables were respected and admired.  Children wanted to talk to them, show them respect, and even be like them.  Nowadays, with enough rifles pointed at women and children while screaming obscenities, with enough dead animals, with enough abuse and danger from cops, it may not be long before the people turn on cops.  If you’re a cop, you don’t want that to happen.  Believe me.  You don’t want that to happen.  You want to maintain the “mandate of heaven.”  If you lose it, you’ve lost everything.

Mike Vanderboegh believes that Chris Christie is playing Russian Roulette with his presidential aspirations with this potential magazine ban.  I don’t think so.  Wait until Chris Christie attempts to play his loud mouth, overbearing, schoolyard bully routine down South, say in South Carolina or Alabama, where we don’t get into meddling jerks bossing us around.  Chris Christie will never be president, regardless of what he does in New Jersey.

Mike Vanderboegh relates RI state senator Josh Miller winning friends and influencing people.  To gun owners, he says, Go fuck yourself.

Kurt Hofmann:

Perhaps surprisingly, in 2005, both chambers of the Illinois legislature introduced HB 477/SB 44, the “Gun-free Zone Criminal Conduct Liability Act,” and this legislation was far from toothless …

There’s no “perhaps.”  I’m shocked, really.  If someone would have asked me when Illinois would have a provision like this, I would have said “not in my lifetime.”  I would have been wrong.

In what must certainly make her parents proud, Hannah Sparks recently wrote Guns are bad, m’kay?  There isn’t time enough to address all of the inconsistencies and misrepresentations in the commentary, but one egregious error stands out.

Run-of-the-mill governmental corruption aside, the gun lobby wields its power in more insidious, blatantly harmful ways. One of its worst tactics is stymieing government research into gun violence from a public health perspective. The lobby’s first target was the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was conducting important data collection on gun violence in the mid-1990s.

Members of Congress allied with the gun lobby altered funding for the CDC in a way that explicitly prevented it from advocating for gun control. Recently, the National Institutes for Health has gotten similar treatment from Congressional Republicans for similar research. Funding for studies by public institutions like these is all but dry, and private researchers just can’t do the same kind of work as the CDC and NIH do.

Idiot Representative Keith Ellison sings the same tune in his recent interview with idiot Bill Maher.  We’ve discussed this before, the notion that the gun lobby is preventing anything from happening concerning studies.

All the gun lobby managed to do is prevent your and my tax dollars from going to such research.  The country is broke and we certainly can’t find a better way to cut wasteful spending.

As for the fact that “private researchers just can’t do the same kind of work as the CDC,” that’s just too damn bad.  If there is a market for it, private industry or private individuals will find a way to fund it.  Either way, you have a right to tax me for the common defense and building roads and bridges to enable interstate commerce.  Beyond that, I see no constitutional basis for confiscation of my wealth for any government program.

For Hannah, don’t use words like m’kay in the title line.  It evokes visions of stupid, gum-chomping girls.

Fox Carolina:

CLEMSON, SC (FOX Carolina) – A photo of a sign that hung inside a Clemson bar telling customers guns are not allowed has sparked outrage online because of the wording on the sign.

The sign read, “No concealed weapons. If you are such a loser that you feel you need to carry a gun with you when you go out, I don’t want your business. D-bag.”

The owner of Backstreets Pub and Grill, who did not want to be identified because of the backlash, said it has all been blown out of proportion.

“I just used the wrong wording,” he said.

Since the photo was shared, he took down the bar’s Facebook page and the Yelp profile has been slammed with negative reviews because of the sign. The sign was hung up after South Carolina legalized concealed weapons in bars earlier in 2014. The law does not allow people legally carrying to drink.

“There’s no reason in a college town to bring a gun into a college bar with college kids and that’s just what I was trying to get passed,” he said.

The owner said the sign is not about taking away customers’ second amendment rights. He also has his own permit.

“I’m a gun owner, I got a right to carry permit when they first came out,” he said.

But when asked why he typed up the sign, he said he was frustrated following the law.

“I was just frustrated, I had one more thing to worry about,” the owner said.

No reason, he says.  So college students don’t have a right to self defense?  Yea, he does have something to worry about.  College kids getting killed because they can’t defend themselves in his establishment.

Prior: Do You Carry A Gun?  Are You A Douche Bag?

David Codrea:

“ATF carried out these storefront sting operations across the country, from Oregon to Florida, and utilized deplorable tactics including exploiting mentally disabled individuals to generate business and later arresting them, setting up storefronts near schools, and even losing high-powered firearms … “It is surprising that failures such as Operation Fearless in Milwaukee occurred despite this enhance oversight from ATF leadership”

I would rather have thought that it was specifically because of this enhanced leadership that these things occurred.  Of course, this feature of the system isn’t a bug.  It’s by design.

Kurt Hofmann:

There is perhaps a compromise to be found here for people living under such laws. Defy those laws, obtain the “illegal” guns–even if you have to make them yourself in order to do so. Don’t register them (obviously)–perhaps even convert the registration forms into atmospheric carbon, just to get the “progressives” still more hot under the collar. But also maintain at least one “legal” AR-15, even if doing so requires odd gadgetry like the ARMagLock and the “SAFE Act”-compliant stock–just to let the other side know that however many gun ban laws they come up with, they’re still being outsmarted, and people are still buying AR-15s (which can, after all, be quickly converted to full capability).

Kurt cites me and I appreciate the attention.  Let’s be clear.  When I referred to the silly modified AR-15 as an abomination, I did so because it mocked Eugene Stoner’s intent to prevent a couple about the firing hand when it is used by placing all of the force on the same axis as the chamber.  I do hate it so when Mr. Stoner turns in his grave.  I admire him so, and feel his pain when he hurts.

Maybe Kurt has something, and I don’t mind ways to insult silly rules and keep our freedoms.  But take note.  One compromise here, another there, and the anti-gun zealots won’t be mollified.  They’re just emboldened.

WRSA has a great quote by C.S. Lewis that is a must read.  Sometimes I don’t think commenters understand what’s being said.  One implies that Lewis was a conventional conservative, statists who “mean well” but ending up harming us.  Not so fast.  Read a little deeper man.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals.

Lewis isn’t pitying the statists because they’re screw-ups who are trying to do good.  He is saying that their world and life view is different, leading them to different value judgments.  Their whole concept of good and bad, right and wrong, is different that yours or mine.  Or to cite Alvin Plantinga, their very of what’s logical is different than mine because of differences in world view.  This leads to different value judgments.

Go read Mike Vanderboegh’s latest letter to the legislatures of New Jersey and Rhode Island.

The firearm owners of your respective states tell me that you are busy men and women with short attention spans so I will try to make this brief …

Some things are just priceless.

As seen at Backstreets Pub and Deli, Clemson, South Carolina.

I’ve had a Kel-Tec PMR-30 for a while now, and wanted to do a review of it.  But I had decided that I wouldn’t publish on this gun until I felt that I had a feel for what it did, why it did it, and how to operate it properly.  This is a unique gun for a number of reasons, and proper operation and maintenance isn’t intuitively obvious, even to an experienced gun owner like me.

The Kel-Tec PMR-30 is a .22 WMR (or .22 magnum) pistol that fits 30 rounds into the magazine.  It is light, very narrow framed, and odd in its parts and manipulation.

Below I show the Kel-Tec alongside a Smith & Wesson 1911 E Series pistol in order to show that the PMR-30 has a long barrel (both of these guns have a five inch barrel).  But in spite of the double stack magazine loading, the frame is still so narrow that the form and fit is different, requiring time at the range in order to accustom yourself to it.

It disassembles into an assortment of parts that looks different than any other polymer frame pistol (e.g., my XDm or my M&P), and certainly different than the 1911 pictured above.

But the PMR-30 is a finicky weapon, and one of the parts that failed on me after about two years of shooting is what I’ll call the slide retaining pin, pictured below.  The one that failed is pictured alongside the replacement from Kel-Tec, and as you can see, there is a stress concentration point in the design of the pin half way across the width of the slide.  This pin goes through the slide and holds it in place.  You can see the residual gun oil on my wife’s antique furniture, so perhaps she isn’t reading this article.

Another failure occurred about a year and a half ago with what Kel-Tec calls the “recoil spring guide lock ring.”  Once after shooting I attempted to disassemble the gun for cleaning and ended up having to force the slide off of the frame, with the result being that this ring elongated and became essentially a straight pin sitting on my kitchen floor somewhere (this happened because the ring had seized between the recoil spring guide rod and springs for some reason unknown to me).

After sweeping the kitchen, finding what was once the lock ring, and doing my own gunsmithing and reforming and reinstalling the ring, it worked fine and has worked ever since then.  The lock ring is shown below in what is admittedly a poor picture.

The PMR-30 has both a good and bad reputation within the gun community, good because it is a remarkably fun gun to shoot, and bad because it is remarkably finicky and picky.  I have suffered my share of failures to feed, failures to eject, and strange little parts failures with this gun.

That said, I have landed on what for me has made the difference in a horrible little bitch to shoot and a delightful partner at the range.  It all comes down to ammunition and magazine maintenance.

Pictured at the very top is nothing but personal defense ammunition in .22WMR.  I don’t shoot common .22 magnum ammunition any more in the gun, and I have had no failures since shooting high quality ammunition.  Rimfire ammunition is notoriously unreliable and dirty ammunition anyway and requires careful cleaning of the weapon after use.  Use of high quality ammunition makes the experience much more reliable with the PMR-30.

As for the magazine, it has a polymer follower combined with a polymer magazine frame, and the two don’t slide against each other very reliably unless I use a little oil in between the follower and magazine just prior to shooting.  I have not had any so-called “rimlock” failures, and I find that it’s relatively easy to load the ammunition.

I don’t want to repeat the other PMR-30 reviews out there, and there are a lot of them.  I also don’t want to repeat the ballistics gelatin tests of .22WMR ammunition (and there are plenty of them).  You don’t need me to perform Google and YouTube searches for you.

Basically, the .22WMR goes a full 14 inches or more into ballistics gelatin, and cavitates along the way.  The PMR-30 has a reputation for extreme muzzle flash, and I can vouch for this.  The round leaves energy in the barrel because of the slower burning rimfire load, but it still manages to achieve some 1375-1400 FPS muzzle velocity.

Readers know that I am a fan of .45 ACP, and this is my choice of personal defense weapons and ammunition.  Would I recommend carrying .22WMR for personal defense?  You’ll have to wait a moment to find that out.

The negatives of the PMR-30 include the polymer magazine, and I would willingly give up a little weight to have more reliable feeding of ammunition with a stainless steel magazine.  Also, if you are going to have reliable rimfire ammunition, you need to purchase high quality round, these being expensive enough to roughly compare to 9mm.  So if you’re going to shoot for training or carry a smaller defensive round, why would you choose .22WMR rather than 9mm?

The positives of this weapon and .22WMR are numerous.  First of all, I like the fiber optics sights.  Next, the .22WMR round has so little recoil that I can shoot it and retain or regain my sight picture with no effort.  This allows me to lay rounds on target much faster than I can with say .45 ACP or .40S&W.  I always end my range time with rapid fire of at least a couple of magazines, and no matter how much range time I put in, .45 is a hairy chested, big boy round, with a lot of powder pushing 230 grain fat boys.  That’s why I like it.  But it is difficult to maintain accuracy with rapid fire.  With the .22WMR it is effortless.  This means that for every two rounds of .45 I can put on target, I can put five or more .22WMR on target.  This means something, including in personal defense situations.

The magazine is long, and can hold up to 30 rounds.  I rarely put 30 rounds in, but whether it’s 20 or 25, this is a lot of rounds before reloading.  Would I carry .22WMR for personal defense?  I consider that to be an illegitimate question.  Hypotheticals don’t matter in personal defense.  The question is, “Have I carried the PMR-30 .22WMR for personal defense before?”  The answer is yes.

I carry different firearms at different times for different purposes and under different circumstances.  I would also recommend this round as a good backup round (say in an ankle holster).  Is it what I consider the premier personal defense round?  Of course not.  My choice for premier personal defense round would be a tossup between .357 magnum and .45 (both of which I have shot extensively).

But you may not have access to your premier round when you want it, or you may find it uncomfortable or unwieldy to carry.  I would certainly rather have this gun than not, especially given that I can lay so many rounds down range so quickly and accurately.

This gun is not a good recommendation for a single personal defense firearm for those who can only afford one weapon.  This gun is an extremely fun range toy, good for training purposes, capable of accurate rapid fire, and acceptable for personal defense in the absence of whatever you consider your premier personal defense round or as a backup weapon.