Dean Weingarten.

Thirty-three percent is very far from that 98 percent efficacy rate so widely cited. And it’s an especially problematic number if we accept that firearms can be demonstrated to have a success rate of between a 76 percent (in a worst-case scenario, as presented in “Efficacy of Firearms”) and 96 percent (as is the case in Alaska’s DLP data or that compiled by firearms writer Dean Weingarten).

The Government of Svalbard, Norway,  has strict requirements for protection against bears. People are not allowed to leave the town without adequate protection, because of the large number of polar bears in the vicinity, and the constant potential for attack. The governor of Svalbard does not recommend bear spray. The governor of Svalbard prohibits the use of bear spray as a protection against polar bears. The Governor requires people to have appropriate firearms in their group.

And as Dean points out, this is different from the advice and counsel of the government of Montana.  Wonder why?

You make your decision, I’ll make mine.  When in the bush, I’ll carry a large bore handgun at a minimum.

News from Colorado.

Projectiles were still lodged in the walls. Glass and wooden paneling crumbled on the ground below the gaping holes, and inside, the family’s belongings and furniture appeared thrashed in a heap of insulation and drywall. Leo Lech, who rented the home to his son, thought it looked like al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s compound after the raid that killed him.

But now it was just a neighborhood crime scene, the suburban home where an armed Walmart shoplifting suspect randomly barricaded himself after fleeing the store on a June afternoon in 2015. For 19 hours, the suspect holed up in a bathroom as a SWAT team fired gas munition and 40-millimeter rounds through the windows, drove an armored vehicle through the doors, tossed flash-bang grenades inside and used explosives to blow out the walls.

The suspect was captured alive, but the home was utterly destroyed, eventually condemned by the City of Greenwood Village.

That left Leo Lech’s son, John Lech — who lived there with his girlfriend and her 9-year-old son — without a home. The city refused to compensate the Lech family for their losses but offered $5,000 in temporary rental assistance and for the insurance deductible.

Now, after the Leches sued, a federal appeals court has decided what else the city owes the Lech family for destroying their house more than four years ago: nothing.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit unanimously ruled that the city is not required to compensate the Lech family for their lost home because it was destroyed by police while they were trying to enforce the law, rather than taken by eminent domain.

The Lechs had sued under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which guarantees citizens compensation if their property is seized by the government for public use. But the court said that Greenwood Village was acting within its “police power” when it damaged the house, which the court said doesn’t qualify as a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment. The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whomever is damaged by their actions along the way.

“It just goes to show that they can blow up your house, throw you out on the streets and say, ‘See you later. Deal with it,’ ” Leo Lech said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday. “What happened to us should never happen in this country, ever.”

Leo Lech said he is considering appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court. Police must be forced to draw the line at some point, he said — preferably before a house is gutted — and be held accountable if innocent bystanders lose everything as a result of the actions of law enforcement.

In a statement to The Post, a spokeswoman for Greenwood Village said the city never refused to help the Lechs, saying the family was “very well insured” and refused the $5,000 assistance for out-of-pocket expenses before insurance kicked in. The spokeswoman, Melissa Gallegos, applauded the 10th Circuit’s ruling.

“The house was being used as a barricade, and the damage done to it was to remove the barricade and get the gunman out without any loss of life,” Gallegos said. “That is not a use of another’s property under eminent domain, but a use of another’s property during a police emergency.”

In June 2015, the standoff at Lech’s suburban Denver home captivated and alarmed the public, as their house at the end of the street, one located by a baseball field complex and a park, suddenly turned into a quasi-war zone.

The suspect, Robert Jonathan Seacat, had stolen a shirt and a couple of belts from a Walmart in neighboring Aurora, Colo., and then fled in a Lexus, according to a police affidavit. A police officer pursued him in a high-speed chase until Seacat parked his car near a light rail station, hopped a nearby fence leading to the interstate, and then crossed five lanes of traffic on foot. He climbed the fence on the other side — and then, shortly thereafter, came upon the Lech residence.

A 9-year-old boy, John Lech’s girlfriend’s son, was home alone at the time, waiting for his mom to return from the grocery store, Lech said. He told police he was watching YouTube videos in his room when he heard the alarm trip, according to the affidavit. He emerged to find a man walking up the stairs, holding a gun. “He said, ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to get away,’ ” Lech said. Minutes later, the boy walked out of the house unharmed.

Seacat then began searching the house for car keys. But by the time he got in the car parked in Lech’s garage, police had pulled into the driveway. Seacat fired a shot at them through the garage, the affidavit says.

Thus began the 19-hour standoff.

“They proceed to destroy the house — room by room, by room, by room,” Lech said. “This is one guy with a handgun. This guy was sleeping. This guy was eating. This guy was just hanging out in this house. I mean, they proceeded to blow up the entire house.”

SWAT officers attempted to enter the home on one occasion but retreated after believing they heard Seacat fire several rounds. After other tactics, including tear gas, robots and police negotiations, repeatedly failed, SWAT officers tried again to enter the home at 8:21 the next morning. They found him holed up in a bathroom with a stash of drugs, where he was disarmed and arrested.

When the Lech family was allowed back on the property to retrieve their belongings, they were aghast at what they found.

John Lech, his girlfriend and her son moved in with Leo Lech and his wife, who lived 30 miles away, requiring John to change jobs. The $5,000 offered by the city “was insulting,” Leo Lech said.

His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.

“This has ruined our lives,” he said.

Gallegos stressed that any large expenses Lech incurred are because he chose to do more than necessary, and chose to “repour the foundation that wasn’t damaged, and [build] a bigger better house where the old one stood.” Lech insisted starting from scratch was necessary.

Previously, police have defended their actions during the standoff.

“My mission is to get that individual out unharmed and make sure my team and everyone else around including the community goes home unharmed,” Greenwood Village Police Commander Dustin Varney said in 2015, KUSA reported. “Sometimes that means property gets damaged, and I am sorry for that.”

I think you’re a liar.  I don’t think you’re really sorry.

But take note, dear readers.  You’re never in more danger than when the cops are around.  And remember, they aren’t out to protect your safety.  They only care about making their arrest and going home safely at the end of their shift, regardless of what happens to you.

I consider John Moses Browning and Eugene Stoner to be the two premier weapons designers in American history, and certainly, Browning much more prolific.

It’s been a season of loss for me.  First, my job at the end of 2018.  Then my beloved dog of ten years, on New Year’s eve.

Today I lost my precious father, who passed away at 5:15 pm.  But the great thing is that he knew the Lord, so I will see him in heaven.  I will be posting, but it will be light.  I must focus on other things.  As always, talk to each other in the comments.

The “Extreme Defender” did very well.  I thought it would, and had blogged on this in the past.  The nose flute is designed, combined with the spinning bullet, to cause localized hydrostatic shock with velocities lower than that caused by bullet velocity alone would with a FMJ, whether pointed or flat nose (which is somewhere near 2200 FPS).

The Trace.

Mexican authorities were outgunned by criminal cartels in two notable incidents this month. In both cases, the criminals were armed with high-powered .50-caliber firearms. First, on October 13, in the state of Michoacan, a police convoy was ambushed with .50-caliber sniper rifles, leaving 13 officers dead and nine wounded. Four days later, in the state of Sinaloa, the government was forced to abandon an operation to arrest the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, after his henchmen assaulted the authorities with both sniper rifles and truck-mounted machine guns.

“We are seeing a full-out criminal insurgency in Mexico right now,” said Robert Bunker, an international security expert who teaches at the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and has written about the use of .50-caliber rifles by Mexican cartels.

Often, the weapons come from the United States, where civilian sales of high-caliber sniper rifles are unregulated in all but three states.

Oh.  So we’re going to do this again?

Okay.  It might be just a wee bit interesting if it really meant anything.  And if it did, the only thing it would mean for me is that the FedGov needs to close the border.  I mean really close it.  To all traffic, both human and vehicular.

But that’s not what this is about.  The Trace wants you to think that if we just have more gun control we might be able to help the Mexican government, something I couldn’t care less about and isn’t even on my radar screen.

But where to weapons in Mexico really come from?

Ever wonder where Mexican drug cartels are getting all their weapons? After all, since 1972, the most power rifle that you can buy in the country is a .22 caliber weapon. Yet, Mexican drug cartels have grenades, grenade launchers, and fully automatic guns. We have been collecting some quotes on where Mexico gets its guns.

1. “Most cartels buy in bulk, and the weapons are coming from places like Nicaragua and other South American countries. Also Asia and some from the Middle East,” a Tijuana-based police authority who requested anonymity explained. “And, another factor is the CNC machines making uppers in clandestine shops in Mexico.”
2. “These kinds of guns — the auto versions of these guns — they are not coming from El Paso,” [Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with the U.S. Border Patrol] said. “They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don’t get these guns from the U.S.”
3. Fox News: The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

So there’s that.  But don’t confuse them with the facts.

News and views.

Do  you remember when Obama started purging the upper echelons in the Pentagon, sometimes under cover of law, sometimes under cover of darkness? After the pullout from Iraq, Obama had a little list of those people he didn’t want to see serving anymore in America’s military. Some he fired outright. Others he treated so shabbily that they had no option put to leave.

Just in the first five years of his presidency, Obama fired almost 200 military officers:

[W]hat has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture. We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham. He was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.

Rear Adm. Chuck Gaouette, commander of the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group, was relieved in October 2012 for disobeying orders when he sent his group on Sept. 11 to “assist and provide intelligence for” military forces ordered into action by Gen. Ham.

[ … ]

Retired Army Major General Paul Vallely: The White House protects their own. That’s why they stalled on the investigation into fast and furious, Benghazi and Obamacare. He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.

I know some readers have brought this up in the past, but it’s good to see some folks have gone public with Obama’s treachery.

One interesting factoid for me is that I’d never seen in publication before that General Carter Ham was relieved because he disagreed with the decision not to mount a rescue.

Benghazi is on the Obama administration’s shoulders.  God will hold them accountable in eternity.  They are murderers.

Guns.com.

A federal judge last week dismissed a claim from bump stock retailers who sued the government for damages they incurred after having to destroy their inventory.

The plaintiffs include two companies as well as two individuals who in all lost 74,995 bump stocks to the ban which took effect in March. The case, filed in a Washington, D.C. federal court, argued that the ban’s requirement that bump-stocks be surrendered or destroyed within 90 days, with no opportunity for registration, violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment which states that private property can’t be taken for public use without compensation.

The court didn’t see it that way.

“The law is different in this case because the government, as the sovereign, has the power to take property that is dangerous, diseased, or used in criminal activities without compensation,” said Senior Circuit Judge Loren A. Smith in his nine-page ruling. “Here, ATF acted properly within the confines of the limited federal police power.”

Smith, appointed to the federal bench in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, said the $500,000 claim under the Tucker Act would be different “if the government confiscated a gun legally possessed by a person not committing a crime,” but argued that “machine guns,” which was how bump stocks were reclassified, are not protected by the Second Amendment.

First of all, machine guns, since they are used for military purposes, are absolutely protected by the second amendment.

Second,this is called “begging the question.”  I hate it when writers misuse the term “begging the question.”  It doesn’t mean that something necessarily brings up a question, as many writers assume.  It is a formal logical fallacy.  It’s circular reasoning, or proving the presupposition.  Bump stocks were declared machine guns.  Now that they have been declared machine guns, they can be regulated as such, so argues the judge.  That’s like declaring your skin to be green, and for proof reverting back to my declaration.

That’s not the issue.  The issue was and is whether the FedGov ever had the right to declare bump stocks to be machine guns in the first place, and then do they have the authority to take it without compensation.  So much for “judges.”  So much for Reagan.  So much for the constitution.

The constitution, which is merely a covenant, is unimportant to these people.  The FedGov can declare anything they want to be illegal, take it, and ignore appellations in court.  The constitution is a dead document.  The covenant has been broken.  It is null and void, like when a spouse cheats.

David Codrea.

In it we learn how “the public health establishment threw science into the wastebasket, confusing microbiology and pathology with sociology and politics.” Faria shows us how the corrupt “public health model” of “gun violence” is really social engineering, not science, how to spot and debunk fraudulent “studies,” and how the American Medical Association has discarded the scientific method to instead push partisan politics.

Doctors need to focus on the healing arts, the amelioration of pain, and the care of individuals.  National policy is best left to others.  We don’t need or want their help.

Via reader Joe, this terrible report.

Last Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued a memorandum to all U.S. attorneys, law enforcement agencies and top ranking Justice Department officials announcing the imminent implementation of a new “national disruption and early engagement program” aimed at detecting potential mass shooters before they commit any crime.

Per the memorandum, Barr has “directed the Department [of Justice] and the FBI to lead an effort to refine our ability to identify, assess and engage potential mass shooters before they strike.” The Attorney General further described the coming initiative, slated to be implemented early next year, as “an efficient, effective and programmatic strategy to disrupt individuals who are mobilizing towards violence, by all lawful means.” More specific information about the program is set to follow the recent memorandum, according to Barr, though it is unclear if that forthcoming document will be made public.

Barr also requested that those who received the memorandum send their “best and brightest” to a training conference at FBI headquarters this coming December where the DOJ, FBI and “private sector partners” will prepare for the full implementation of the new policy and will also be able to provide “new ideas” for inclusion in the program.

Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the memorandum is Barr’s frank admission that many of the “early engagement” tactics that the new program would utilize were “born of the posture we adopted with respect to terrorist threats.” In other words, the foundation for many of the policies utilized following the post-9/11 “war on terror” are also the foundation for the “early engagement” tactics that Barr seeks to use to identify potential criminals as part of this new policy. Though those “war on terror” policies have largely targeted individuals abroad, Barr’s memorandum makes it clear that some of those same controversial tactics will soon be used domestically.

Barr’s memorandum also alludes to current practices by the FBI and DOJ that will shape the new plan. Though more specifics of the new policy will be provided in the forthcoming notice, Barr notes that “newly developed tactics” used by the Joint Terrorist Task Forces “include the use of clinical psychologists, threat assessment professionals, intervention teams and community groups” to detect risk and suggests that the new “early engagement program” will work along similar lines. Barr also alludes to this “community” approach in a separate instance, when he writes that “when the public ‘says something’ to alert us to a potential threat, we must do something.”

As I’ve said before, “Ouija boards, palm readers, witches, warlocks, carnival fortune tellers, tribal witchdoctors, and “small changes that might foretell violence.”

It’s all the same thing to me, and if you have any sense at all, you too.  The Bible clearly says that those guilty of divination will not inherit the kingdom of heaven, and that the Lord hates such people (Galatians 5:19-21, Leviticus 19:24-32, Deuteronomy 18:9-15, Jeremiah 27: 9-19, Exodus 22: 18-19, 1 Samuel 15:23, Isaiah 2:5-8).”

God will not bless these designs.  No, I’m not saying they won’t catch a person here or there they think might have done something had it not been for the cops on their doorstep.  If you’re vision is that short-sighted, you need spectacles.

I’m saying something much deeper and more extensive.  When a country sacrifices it’s unborn, arms the state, tries to disarm it’s people and render them incapable of defense, and allows forcible conversion of children to Islam in its schools, God has turned His back on that people.  That brings a whole host of awful things down.  God is sovereign, the only lawgiver.  He will not be mocked.

We are at the end of an era.  America is “storing up wrath” for itself (Romans 1:5), and that means the righteous will suffer earthly pains in the wake of God’s judgment on the wicked.  Those who have a salvific relationship with Christ will face the doom of earthly judgment (even if not heavenly judgment) along with everyone else.

We’re all headed for hard times, folks.

And just to make sure you’ve got this, William Barr is Donald Trump’s AG.  Trump managed to implement red flag laws without red flag laws.  He said he would do it, and the plans are in place.  This is your president.  He owns this.  You don’t think Barr is acting on his own, do you?