He doesn’t really give you a best (except to say that he still prefers bolt action), he surveys what’s out there.

Via reader Ned, who says a hunting cartridge can’t go in an ELR gun?  The trick is that it takes some time and expertise.

American Rifleman.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) released the 2020 edition of its Firearm Production Report to members this month, and among its findings is the fact that civilian interest and ownership of modern sporting rifles continues to skyrocket. Since 1990, according to the study, an estimated 19.8 million have been manufactured and put into circulation.

Forty-eight percent of all firearms produced in the United States or imported in 2018 were modern sporting rifles. Despite the manufacturing focus, inventories remained low across the nation, and this year’s firearm sales pace has left many retailers without models to sell.

There are approximately 79.2 million rifle magazines capable of holding 30 or more rounds in circulation—nearly all of them modern sporting rifle versions. The potentially lifesaving advantage of not having to reload during a criminal encounter isn’t overlooked by pistol owners, either. Roughly 71.2 million handgun magazines capable of holding more than 10 cartridges are owned by enthusiasts today.

Lots of luck trying to confiscate all of those guns.  That’s an impossible task.

However, there’s something that bears repeating, and it’s a point of second amendment logic brought up by David Codrea a couple of days ago.

And as few “gunpundits” seem to see, no matter how long you give them, “in common use” is not about popularity. It is about “every terrible implement of the soldier,” that is, “ordinary military equipment” capable of enabling citizens to prevail in “common defense” battles.  Were it otherwise, withholding new technology from We the People would be all tyrants would need to keep it forever out of “common use.”

Make sure to ponder the point he’s making, and focus on the last sentence of his paragraph.  If “common use” had to do with popularity contests, then the whole edifice of the second amendment collapses.

A tyrannical government could (illegally) keep them from being produced for or distributed to the public, and then claim in court (or the court of public opinion) that although our standing army has such weaponry, since they are not in common use among the public (from which the militia comes), the second amendment doesn’t apply to those weapons.

This becomes a “de facto” argument (which is a formal logical fallacy) by themselves nefariously ensuring the preconditions for waiving and cessation of the right.

Never forget what the founders really intended, regardless of the machinations of the lawyers – and ignore the dense gun bloggers who fail to point these things out.

The MSM is reporting that the recount in Georgia gives the state to Biden and calls him “president elect.”  Of course.

Meanwhile, this is Lin Wood on why none of this should matter.

So the question remains what is to be done with all of this?  The problematic thing for me is that Trump had four years to target the corrupt democratic cities, weed out the bad election software by the power of the DOJ, fire the deep state actors, and jail the deep state criminals.

He did none of that.  He spent his time tweeting.  So here we are, a banana republic with elections that mean nothing at all, a president who chose not to stop it, and a puppet of China getting ready to take office.

News from Michigan.

Things in Michigan took a dramatic turn Wednesday night when two Republican members of the Wayne County Canvassers signed sworn affidavits saying they were bullied and coerced into certifying the election. The four-member board voted to certify the election on Tuesday night. Originally, the two GOP board members voted no. Roughly two hours later, a unanimous vote came down certifying the results.

According to board chair Monica Palmer and GOP member William Hartmann, the county’s corporate counsel, Janet Anderson-Davis, advised the board members that their job was “ministerial” and any concerns they expressed were outside of the board’s authority.

“Late in the evening, I was enticed to agree to certify based on the promise that a full and independent audit would take place. I would have not have agreed to the certification but for the promise of an audit,” Hartmann said in his affidavit. “Vice-Chairman Jonathan Kinloch then assured us that if we voted to certify the election, a full, independent, and complete audit of Detroit’s election, would be undertaken. I relied on this assurance in coming to an agreement. Without this assurance, I would not have agreed to certify Wayne County on November 17th.”

[ … ]

Both members stated they still believe the election results for Wayne County should not be certified.

It’s too late now, you naive, gullible little children.  You listened to lawyers, and believed communists.  You couldn’t have done anything more stupid.

This is a different sort of video for Tim, who doesn’t do revolvers.  I do, and while it technically failed his test, it did better than he thought it would.  I have to confess that I hated to see a nice wheel gun done that way.

Via Matt Bracken.

David Codrea.

“In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows,” an exceedingly rare, honest analysis in The New York Times, of all places, revealed. How many of those fit the inconsistent definitions of “assault weapon” used by various states and gun-grabbing interests are unknown because such statistics are not known, but the obvious answer is a fraction of the 322, out of thousands of homicides.

Yet when you see a media outlet or a gun control group tweeting out their latest press release masked as news hysterically demanding semiautomatics and standard capacity magazines be banned and confiscated because they’re “weapons of war,” you see no “This claim is disputed” warning.

That’s because Twitter sucks and Jack Dorsey is a punk.  Twitter has become a replacement for serious thought by serious people, and is limited to whatever ten second sound bite someone can throw together.  It’s a venue for the attention-challenged.

One thing I do blame on Trump is that he stayed on Twitter after the election, lending credibility to that venue, forcing readership to go there, and empowering Jack Dorsey to levels far above what his stupid little empire warrants.

Trump should have let Twitter die the death it so richly deserves.

News from Texas.

The first case testing a Trump administration edict outlawing bump stocks failed during a brief federal bench trial in Tuesday in Houston.

A federal prosecutor withdrew the unique charge before the trial began for a Houston man accused of owning the device. However, the defense was prepared to call an ATF expert to testify that bump stocks, attachments that cause a rifle to fire more rapidly, do not render a semiautomatic gun a machine gun.

Senior U.S. District Judge Gray H. Miller convicted Ajay Dhingra, 44, on three remaining counts that he lied when he purchased a handgun, rifle and ammunition, and illegally possessed a weapon as a person who had been committed for mental illness.

Experts had conflicting views on the matter, said defense attorney Tom Berg. But Rick Vasquez, a retired ATF agent and firearms expert, would have told the court the bump stock did not meet the statutory definition of a machine gun. The prosecution dismissed case, he said, because the government couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt the bump stock was a machine gun.

Prosecutors don’t indiscriminately drop cases.  They do it if they think they have a bad case and a non-trivial chance of losing, coupled with high consequences of a loss.

This continues a pattern of cases where the ATF feels that continued prosecution of a case could possibly cause a loss in court and a restriction of their ability to enforce other regulations.

It’s good to see this loss, as the bump stock ruling should never have even seen the light of day.