Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Salon:

Imagine you’ve volunteered to participate in a study on a college campus. You arrive to find the lab somewhat cluttered: There’s a badminton racquet and some shuttlecocks on a table. The researchers tell you to ignore that stuff — it’s for a different study. They hook you up to a machine that administers electric shocks, and hand the controls to another participant like yourself. He zaps you. Repeatedly. (He’s secretly part of the research team, following specific instructions — but as far as you know he’s just being a jerk.) Now it’s your turn to zap him. How many shocks will you administer?

Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage repeated this experiment with 100 male students at the University of Wisconsin, sometimes replacing the badminton equipment with a revolver and shotgun (or no stimulus at all). They found that participants administered more electric shocks when in the presence of guns. According to Berkowitz and LePage, the weapons were “aggressive cues.”

A later study at the University of Utah refined our understanding of the weapons effect. Psychologists watched the behavior of drivers stuck at an intersection behind a truck that wouldn’t budge when the light turned green. Sometimes there was a gun displayed in the truck’s rear window and sometimes there wasn’t. The researchers observed that people honked more often when they saw the gun.

Recent experiments have shown that even when nobody has been tormenting you with electric shocks or inciting your road rage, you’ll react to a gun differently than you’d react to other objects in your environment. You’ll automatically see the gun as a threat, without even realizing it.

“The ‘threat superiority effect’ is the tendency for people to be able to pick out very quickly in their environment things that might pose a threat to their security — anything that might be dangerous,” explains Isabelle Blanchette, a professor of psychology at the University of Quebec. “People have a tendency to be able to see these things before they see other things.”

When I read this article I didn’t imagine at all that I volunteered for a study.  What I did imagine is a world in which psychologists have to train in something useful and worthwhile to mankind and get a real job that earns a living doing something good and productive with their time.

But it was all just a day dream.  The “threat superiority effect.”  There you have it.  I assume that there were some government dollars in their somewhere.  And that’s what you’re promulgating to the world when you openly carry a weapon.  Threat superiority.

Okay.  If they say so.

David Codrea:

Against armed sociopaths, unarmed protection is severely limited, and New Jersey gun laws ensure the advantage goes to the predators.

Like I discussed here, you can contrast that with shall issue states.  The picture is stark and self explanatory.  Gun control laws are unsafe.  They prevent people from doing their duty of defending themselves and their loved ones.  Thus they are all evil.

David  Codrea:

What is immediately noticeable is a total absence of anyone even remotely sympathetic to an individual and uninfringed right to keep and bear arms having a position of influence in the seminar. While some with an eye toward safeguarding America’s unique intended protections may attend to keep apprised of the latest developments, others with a less tolerant and patent view of meddling internationalists plotting to undermine their rights …

I’ve covered their meddling here.  To me this is simple.  If I won’t allow the U.S. federal government to steal my firearms, I certainly won’t allow foreign bodies – armed or not – to do the same.  Case closed.  If you want conflict, bring it.  ‘Nuff said.

Kurt Hofmann:

Comparing gun control to the Holocaust is one of a number of faulty and offensive analogies the gun rights movement has used to illegitimize [sic] gun reform measures.

Kurt is covering the progressive Jewish reaction to the use of the holocaust to assess gun control measures.  I saw this too and hadn’t commented on it, and Mr. Abraham Foxman says to us, “No matter how strong one’s objections are to a policy or how committed an organization is to its mission, invoking the Holocaust to score political points is offensive and has no place in civil discourse.”  Well, let me respond by saying that a hit dog always yelps, and if the comparison is valid, I’ll make it any time I want.  Oh, and don’t tell me what to do, Mr. Foxman.

Uncle notes that Mayors against guns merges with Moms Demand Action.  I see this as a sign of weakness rather than strength.  Sort of like when Ansar al Sunna merged with al Qaeda in Iraq when both began to lose to the U.S. Marines deployed in the Anbar Province.  Did I just really make that comparison?  I guess I did.  So be it.

David Codrea:

“He has given his life to the community,” Owens said in court. “I’m not sure how much more punishment is actually appropriate.” [More]Maybe you could find instances where someone without a badge has “accidentally” shot a cop and that would give you a pretty good benchmark…

Gave his life to the community?  You mean to tell me that he didn’t get paid for his work all of those years?  He did it all for free?

Star Tribune:

A northeast Minneapolis man interrupted an armed and bloody robbery at a corner market in his neighborhood, saying he sent the two suspects fleeing when he drew his handgun from his holster and had it “at the ready.”

Store owner Mohamed S. Ahmed, 41, had the “back of his skull split open pretty good” from being pistol-whipped by one of the suspects, said Matt Dosser, who came upon the unfolding crime scene and cared for Ahmed until police arrived.

Police said Wednesday that the armed citizen, who said he has a so-called “permit to carry,”  acted with honor and probably saved Ahmed’s life. But, they added, holding such a permit does not mean having the same law-enforcing rights as a police officer.

[ … ]

Dosser said he was out for a walk and the two people, possibly in their late teens, “were pounding on the window of the store. … They seemed really agitated, super agitated.”

At first, “nothing made sense, then I saw the gun” that one of the two had, Dosser continued.

The gunman “turned around and looked at me,” Dosser said. “He stared at me. I had my weapon up. I didn’t point the gun at the person. I had it at the ready, out of the holster.

In 2003, Minnesota’s so-called “shall issue” permit law took effect, making it easier for residents to carry loaded weapons in public.

Police spokesman John Elder said that what Dosser did “was a noble thing. He acted honorably. Did this person possibly save [Ahmed’s] life? Absolutely.”

However, Elder continued, “The permit system is different, obviously, than having a police officer’s license. … When people get a permit to carry, they are instructed not to intercede into a crime that is occurring. It’s solely for personal protection.”

Leave it to the police to throw a wet blanket on the honorable act by setting themselves apart from citizens, just so that you know.  It’s important to them that you know they are special.

He’s lying anyway (see Castle Rock v. Gonzales).  Regarding the incident above, the man’s life was probably saved, and even if not, he got medical assistance sooner than would otherwise be the case.

In contrast, folks in Newark, New Jersey are facing an epidemic of crime.

Short Hills, New Jersey (My9NJ) – The two suspects wanted for the recent shooting of a young lawyer in front of his wife during a carjacking gone terribly wrong at Short Hills Mall, are still at large.

The couples’ stolen SUV was found the following day abandoned in Newark and New Jersey’s largest city ranks among the top in the nation for vehicle thefts.

There are about 400 carjackings a year in Essex County alone. While Los Angeles and New York rank high in carjackings, Newark takes the cake.

In fact, people in Newark are known for posting videos of stolen cars doing drag races, donuts and drifting in the streets. Often times, in the videos, you can see cop cars chasing the reckless divers on the city’s main streets.

Perhaps the motorists need guns for protection, and I’m willing to lay good money on the notion that the carjackings would stop if several of these criminals got shot during the act.

Er … oh yea.  New Jersey isn’t a shall issue state.  And Chris Christie – presumed candidate for the highest office in the land in several years and who made his fame pushing gun control – was unavailable for comment.

History News Network:

David Codrea:

Heated divisions among activist gun owners have surfaced with a December 2 announcement on Facebook by Brandon Webb, a former SEAL and author, that he is considering running for the National Rifle Association Board of Directors. Webb’s statement and reactions to it were noticed by The Patriot Perspective, which took him to task for, among other things, his assertion that the NRA was “not willing to compromise and create gun legislation that makes sense.”

David continues to explain what Webb has said, and laments the lack of involvement of gun owners in deciding NRA leadership and policy.  I do too, and I don’t know what more I can do.  I’ve made calls to the NRA, and I blog until I’m too tired to go on.  I do have a day job that gets in the way of blogging.  Gun owners need to do more.  And as for compromise of any sort, recall what I said just recently.

… there is no grand bargain on guns.  There is no compromise.  There is no cooperation.  There is only war between us as long as the collectivists want to enforce their will upon us.  There will never be peace.  That’s a promise.

I don’t need to hear more of his positions.  I call for political and ideological battle, not compromise.  I would rather hear a call to arms than speechification and pontification on the politics of liberty – as if I need a lesson in philosophy, theology or politics from this guy.  Sorry buddy, but you’re trying to “teach your granny to suck eggs,” as the saying goes.  Been there, done that.  I can pontificate with the best of them.

Kurt Hofmann:

Ah . . . “to ‘effectively‘ convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns,” with “effectively” in this context basically meaning “not really.” What they are referring to here are “bump fire” stocks …

One might inquire about the three gun competitors, some of whom (at the professional level) get so good that they don’t need either fully automatic or bump fire, having to modify the bolt mass and buffer springs of their weapons to keep up with the rate of fire they can accomplish with their fingers.

But it isn’t really about rapid fire.  It’s just another way to go after liberty.  This is just one more front in the progressive war on guns.  It will be interesting to see what Amazon does with this.  I’ll keep my eye on this – and I would ask Kurt to follow it too – in order to modify my shopping practices if Amazon folds like a cheap suit.

Mike Vanderboegh has a number of interesting posts today, but this one caught my eye from Rolling Stone.

All over America, communities are failing. Once-mighty Rust Belt capitals that made steel or cars are now wastelands. Elsewhere, struggling white rural America is stocking up on canned goods and embracing the politics of chaos, sending pols to Washington ready to hit the default button and start the whole national experiment all over again.

But in Camden, chaos is already here. In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a “food desert” by the USDA. The place is literally dying, its population having plummeted from above 120,000 in the Fifties to less than 80,000 today. Thirty percent of the remaining population is under 18, an astonishing number that’s 10 to 15 percent higher than any other “very challenged” city, to use the police euphemism. Their home is a city with thousands of abandoned houses but no money to demolish them, leaving whole blocks full of Ninth Ward-style wreckage to gather waste and rats.

It’s a major metropolitan area run by armed teenagers with no access to jobs or healthy food, and not long ago, while the rest of America was ranting about debt ceilings and Obamacares, Camden quietly got pushed off the map. That was three years ago, when new governor and presumptive future presidential candidate Chris Christie abruptly cut back on the state subsidies that kept Camden on life support. The move left the city almost completely ungoverned – a graphic preview of what might lie ahead for communities that don’t generate enough of their own tax revenue to keep their lights on. Over three years, fires raged, violent crime spiked and the murder rate soared so high that on a per-capita basis, it “put us somewhere between Honduras and Somalia,” says Police Chief J. Scott Thomson.

“They let us run amok,” says a tat-covered ex-con and addict named Gigi. “It was like fires, and rain, and babies crying, and dogs barking. It was like Armageddon.”

Not long ago, Camden was everything about America that worked. In 1917, a report counted 365 industries in Camden that employed 51,000 people. Famous warships like the Indianapolis were built in Camden’s sprawling shipyards.

Part of the problem is corrupt police and the police union.  Another part of the problem is that – as engineers like me know all too well – large scale steel manufacturing and ship building is no longer done in the U.S.  It is outsourced to Japan and China, neither of which culture understands QA and none of which can produce the quality of American products.  Nonetheless, it allows corporations to hire overseas workers, or better yet, hire Mexicans at facilities in Canada or the U.S., where the ratepayer and taxpayer picks up the tab for welfare, food stamps, medical care and other expenses, which is a form of corporate welfare.

Another part of the problem is corrupt people who revert to killing and harming each other when times get tough, lacking any values because the country has rejected God.  The prescription is multifaceted and difficult because no one will implement all of the cultural changes that need to be made.  This is why folks who understand aren’t sanguine about the future.  America as you have known it is dead, and it isn’t coming back – at least in the same form.  It will need to be multiple countries very loosely coupled, and states will have to become the true laboratories of democracy, uninhibited by the federal government so that there is immediate and unmistakable feedback when the state goes adrift.

NYT:

The owner of the Freedom Group, the gun manufacturer whose Bushmaster rifle was used in a deadly Connecticut school shooting nearly a year ago, is planning to give other investors in the company a way to cash out as an attempt to sell it has stalled.

Freedom’s parent, the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management, plans to unveil the proposal on Monday, a person briefed on the matter said on Sunday.

The shares of other gun manufacturers have recovered from a brief but steep dip following the shooting last year, prompted by fears of tougher gun laws that failed to clear Congress. Shares in Smith & Wesson have risen 28 percent since then, while those in Sturm, Ruger & Company have climbed 50 percent …

But Cerberus and its advisers at the investment bank Lazard have struggled with an auction process that has not yielded any acceptable bids so far, this person said. A number of potential buyers, ranging from leveraged buyout firms to fellow gun makers, have expressed interest. These would-be bidders ran into trouble for different reasons, including an inability to secure adequate financing.

[ … ]

Let investors in its funds — including those eager to wash their hands of the firearm industry — sell their holdings. Among the most vocal of these have been public pension funds like the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or Calstrs, and New York State’s comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli.

Concerning the value of gun stocks, Breitbart notes:

While the White House and Senate Democrats hammered guns and gun rights during 2013, investors put their money into gun company stocks and garnered “incredible returns.”

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch, “those who bought [stock in] Smith & Wesson in the aftermath of [the heinous crime at Sandy Hook Elementary] have made profits of more than 60 percent.”

Those who bought Sturm, Ruger & Co. stock have made profits of “nearly 80 percent.”

These investments beat “the overall stock market by more than two-to-one.”

As Breitbart News reported on December 6th, these gains have not been lost on mutual fund companies like Vanguard and Blackrock. They too have broadened their investments in various firearm companies over the last year, as have financial firms like Capital Research and Management.

Even Mother Jones acknowledges in a headline that “The Producer of Bushmaster Assault Rifles Has Made a Killing Since Newtown.”

This is just rich.  Guns are still the hottest commodity in America.  At a time when cities across America are staring bankruptcy in the face due to the ridiculous deals they cut with the unions, the progressive California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the state of New York have a chance to put their money where their mouth is.

Will you divest yourselves of the best money making stocks you own because they make those evil guns?  Here’s your chance.

David Codrea:

The paid staffer who heads anti-gun billionaire and outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns revealed the strategy the group will use to advance its demands across the nation, a report by the Associated Press documented Wednesday.

David goes on to discuss the statist threat that Bloomberg is, and what 2014 might portend for gun owners and our rights.  Bloomberg is a threat indeed, but this only heightens the diligence we must bring to bear on opposing every piece of his agenda, even when (and perhaps especially when) it comes under the rubric of cooperative efforts with the gun community (here for example, think NSSF).

Kurt Hofmann:

Dr. Ben Carson, considered by some a potential “conservative” candidate for President in 2016, stumbled badly back in March, at least among gun rights advocates, when he blithely told Glenn Beck on Beck’s The Blaze radio show that the right to own semi-automatic firearms is contingent on where one lives.

This is a very good article by Kurt.  Go read the rest of it to find out what Dr. Carson believes concerning the fountain of our rights.  I’ve said it here and here in great detail, but I’ll sum it up again.  God grants our rights.  The states (formerly colonies) recognizes them, and to the degree to which they infringe upon them, those administrations deserve to be overthrown.  The second amendment stipulates that the federal government has no right whatsoever in the making or enforcement of any gun law of any kind at any time.  All federal gun laws are unconstitutional.  And to remind you of what you already know, Dr. Carson is no conservative and won’t protect your rights.  I like it best when candidates talk before their handlers get hold of them.  The truth generally comes out then.

A Grand Bargain On Guns?

A year ago, in the days after 20 schoolchildren and six adults were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., it seemed for a moment that something had changed in America’s long-running cultural debate on guns. A new kind of national conversation — even some consensus — seemed possible. But that was then. Today the voices on both sides of the gun policy debate are back to being as shrill as ever.

Los Angeles Daily News:

“There’s a gun here, and here and here,” 5-year-old Thomas Glover said, pointing at translucent Legos sticking out from various points of the spaceship he built in his Michigan home. “There’s even bullets!”

The words “gun” and “bullets,” are taboo in his family, but he used them enthusiastically, without any worry that he’d be punished – mostly because his mother was out of earshot.

His mother Alicia, a native of Australia, despises guns and the gun culture that surrounds her family in Rochester Hills. She lives in a suburb north of Detroit – one of the most violent cities in the United States.

Intense feelings on both sides of the gun rights debate have caused her to lose friends and question her family’s decision to live in the United States.

“Suburbia shouldn’t be a war, it should be laughter and fairy floss,” Alicia Glover said. “People [here] think that it’s OK to shoot someone.”

She and her American husband, Jeff, met in 1999 while working together at a restaurant in Australia.

When they married and moved to the U.S., shortly before Thomas was born, they made a commitment to raise their children with dual cultures – American and Australian – with the hope of one day returning to Alicia’s homeland.

In the Glover household jackets are called jumpers, diapers are called nappies and the closet is a cupboard. Jeff has even picked up a bit of an Australian accent, easily recognizable to non-family members.

They also follow another Australian tradition: no guns.

Alicia, a naturalized U.S. citizen, finds herself in a distinct minority in her adopted nation. Despite a string of recent mass killings, including the massacre of 20 students and six adults in Newtown, Conn., a year ago, fewer than 50 percent of all Americans believe that gun laws need to be tightened, according to a Gallup poll taken in October. Twenty-six percent of respondents believe private handgun ownership should be banned – a record low.

Alicia has taught Thomas and his younger brother, 4-year-old Callum, that guns are bad, guns kill and guns are not allowed in their home – not in thought, word or deed. Toy guns, real guns, water guns and even fingers pointed like guns – are all forbidden.

“It’s the thing I hate about living here,” Alicia said. “I hate that the gun culture is so strong here.”

Perhaps Alicia isn’t considering the recent home invasion in Sydney, or the attack in a cinema in Sydney just two months ago, or the recent drug related gun violence in Melbourne, or that High School students in Australia are being recruited as drug runners by international drug syndicates.

Alicia thinks that suburbia should be “laughter and fairy floss.”  Alicia doesn’t want to think about the sinfulness of man or how her vision of what Australia was like is false.  Alicia lives in a fantasy world, and the saddest part is that her husband won’t teach her the truth about the world and refuses to protect her and the children.

NYT:

A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.

Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.

Even when a gun makes sense in principle as a means of self-defense, it may do more harm than good if I’m not trained to use it well. I may panic and shoot a family member coming home late, fumble around and allow an unarmed burglar to take my gun, have a cleaning or loading accident. The N.R.A. rightly sets high standards for gun safety. If those unable or unwilling to meet these standards gave up their guns, there might well be a lot fewer gun owners.

Guns do have uses other than defense against attackers. There may, for example, still be a few people who actually need to hunt to feed their families. But most hunting now is recreational and does not require keeping weapons at home. Hunters and their families would be much safer if the guns and ammunition were securely stored away from their homes and available only to those with licenses during the appropriate season. Target shooting, likewise, does not require keeping guns at home.

Finally, there’s the idea that citizens need guns so they can, if need be, oppose the force of a repressive government. Those who think there are current (or likely future) government actions in this country that would require armed resistance are living a paranoid fantasy. The idea that armed American citizens could stand up to our military is beyond fantasy.

These objections are a red herring.  Guns can be owned and handled safely and the shooters can learn to shoot and observe the rules of gun safety.  It’s done every day all over the world by millions of safe gun owners.  This is written by someone who has never owned a gun – which speaks poorly of the NYT that they would approve opinion pieces on issues of which the author has no knowledge whatsoever.

But notice how quickly he turns the conversation on the notion that we need to check our firearms in to a state-approved armory, even as Mr. Gutting drives his automobile down the road and risks far greater and more frequent injury to innocent people than me with my guns.  This is called hypocrisy.

Finally, take note of his position on the idea that we need to own firearms in order to ameliorate tyranny.  Without so much as blinking, he assumes like the good collectivist that he is that the armed forces would put down citizens in armed revolt over gun confiscation orders.  Posse Comitatus being the law of the land means absolutely nothing to Mr. Gutting.

Furthermore, Mr. Gutting is apparently not the scholar he is made out to be, and knows nothing of the history of insurgencies.  Easy, it will be for the army – or so he thinks.  Oh, they may be outnumbered a thousand to one with every insurgent melting away into the woods after shooting.  But surely the army would “win,” whatever win means.

In spite of the difficulty of Iraq and impossibility of Afghanistan, Mr. Gutting is sure of the simplistic, bloodless nature of an American insurgency.  But he feels that he will never be in a position to need a weapon for self defense (perhaps he would stand around and watch if his wife was being raped by gangsters?).  It is Mr. Gutting who is firmly ensconced in fantasy land.

David Codrea:

Proving once more that unintended consequences of “gun control” actually increase dangerous crime, The Detroit News reported Thursday that “Guns are being stolen from vehicles downtown, in part because nightclubs and the NFL ban firearms.”

Unable to bring their firearms into venues that ban them, many gun owners are nonetheless unwilling to travel to and from such locations without the means of defense, and are opting to have their firearms with them as long as they legally can, then storing them in their cars.

So instead of allowing gun owners to bring them into the stadium to keep them safe, they’re requiring that gun owners turn them over to criminals.  They’re doing this for the children.  Consider the children …

Kurt Hofmann:

Apparently believing that the American public had not yet been subjected to enough ridiculous fearmongering over the supposed “undetectability” of firearms printed from plastic, ABC’s Katie Couric ran a short segment on her show, “Katie,” last week, titled, perhaps not surprisingly, “The Dark Side of 3D Printers.”

Who is Katie Couric?

Here is the NSSF on smart gun technology.  I said before that Daily Caller annoys me, and increasingly so.  Notice that NSSF doesn’t have any prima facie objections to smart guns, but they point out that they might be unreliable.

Pfft!  I object to smart guns because they’re unreliable too.  But I also prima facie object to smart guns because of government interference and potential usage in gun confiscation or registration shenanigans.

Uncle links this post on revolver science, entitled why heavy, slow bullets hit higher than light, fast bullets.  Okay, since the original author starts the science lesson, I’ll finish it.  He’s dealing with the gun and bullet as a system rather than individually, considering the affects of recoil on the trajectory.

But rather than titling the post about heavy bullets, he should have stayed on point about the overall system.  It isn’t an enigma why heavy bullets and light bullets have the same drop given the same velocity, or another way of saying it is that he should have left out the discussion of heavy and light altogether and stuck with velocity and the affects of recoil on the pivot point of the firearm.

If you take a bullet of 180 grains and one of 230 grains, and hold them the same height and drop them, they will land at the same time due to the acceleration of gravity, which is the same and constant regardless of mass.  Alternatively, drop a marble and bowling ball from the third floor of the stairwell of your college physics building, and they’ll land at the same time (remove people from the stairwell before attempting this experiment).

Of course, I’m leaving out a complex discussion of aerodynamic drag, from which I could explain why it’s better for folks with trucks like my F150 to leave the tail gate up instead of down, but I’ll save this for another lesson.

This is why BDC is a function of muzzle velocity (and aerodynamics for such rounds as hollow points), but not bullet mass.  Okay, is that clear to everyone?  This is basic physics, and everyone should understand this, especially shooters.  If you have to adjust BDC for your rounds given different bullet masses, it’s because of different muzzle velocity due to mass (and because lower velocity rounds won’t go as far), not because heavy objects drop faster than light objects.  Heavy bullets do not drop faster than light bullets.  Finally, in order to get an idea how quickly your bullet is hitting the ground, hold it at the height of the gun you’re shooting, drop it, and time it.  When it hits the ground, it would have hit the ground if you had shot the bullet out of the barrel of your gun, just some hundreds of yards away.