I am disturbed at the nature of the comments associated with the blog lately.  Certainly, some of my posts are very negative, but if your impression is that the nature of the posts and the fairly open comment policy means that I’m simply giving you an opportunity to write protracted gripes, you’ve misunderstood my sentiment.

I write what I do in order to chronicle the decline of America, to educate my readers (and me), to enable and encourage us to prepare for the worst, and to make us better men and women.  For instance, chronicling the influx of immigrants doesn’t mean that readers need to ramp up the gripes and moans, but rather, be about our business preparing.  This isn’t going to last for long.  Chronicling the infringements on our God-given RKBA doesn’t mean that readers are invited to lay out threats against anyone.  It means that we need to understand the times, resolve never to be disarmed, and prepare for the worst.

I also have a certain religious viewpoint, and I’ve tried to make that abundantly clear on numerous occasions.  So for instance, rather than engage in hate towards ethnic groups, we should all understand the following from the WCF.

Section 3.) They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed,(1) and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation.(2)

(1) Ge 1:27,28; Ge 2:16,17; Ac 17:26; Ro 5:12,15,16,17,18,19; 1Co 15:21,22,45,49 (2) Ps 51:5; Ge 5:3; Job 14:4; Job 15:14

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Section 4.) From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good,(1) and wholly inclined to all evil,(2) do proceed all actual transgressions.(3)

(1) Ro 5:6; Ro 8:7; Ro 7:18; Col 1:21 (2) Ge 6:5; Ge 8:21 ; Ro 3:10,11,12 (3) Jas 1:14,15; Eph 2:2,3; Mt 15:19

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Thus, the focus of my efforts won’t be to hate an ethnic group, because in the absence of that group, whatever it is, there will always be another to take its place.  The total absence of central banking only means that there will be a white dictator to take its place, or an Idi Amin or Pol Pot.  If you think that evil is ensconced in a race, you have entirely missed the point of the Gospel, and you believe a lie.

Thus, from now on I intend to deal with comments without hesitation or remorse.  If you don’t like that, you can find another place to comment.

1] I do not intend to become embroiled in endless pedantic debates with readers.  I’ll end the debate by deleting the thread.

2] I do not intend to allow readers to hijack discussion threads, thus trashing the hard work I’ve put into the articles.  I’m not paid one penny for doing this – I won’t turn this site over to ne’er-do-wells who want to make it look like 4Chan or reddit by posting trashy things anonymously.

3] If you intend to make threats, e.g., “hang all pols, make a list and check it twice and get ready for war, war, war, give me violence NOW …,” you can expect to have your comments deleted without prejudice.  You won’t be returning to TCJ.  I do find it amusing and ironic that most commenters don’t use their real name, but rather, a nom de guerre, and then proceed to use this blog to lay out vicious comments about others, while I am the one who uses my real name rather than a nom de guerre and bear the brunt of whatever comes my way as a result of those comments.

Per counsel I’ve sought, I possibly bear some legal liability for comments like that, and I certainly suffer reputation when I give platform to such things.  And I also know that not a single reader is going to do anything about the comments he’s making to make a step change in society without God’s sovereign blessing upon the nation.

It isn’t true anyway.  You understand that, right?  Not all pols are evil.  Some are good.  Not all Latinos vote for progressives.  To render racial judgments based on the actions of a few, or many, is a formal logical fallacy.

4] If you engage in Jew-hate in the comments, you can expect to have your comments be deleted forthwith.

5] If you engage in any other kind of race-hate in the comments, you can expect to have your comments be deleted forthwith.

6] If you get into fights with fellow commenters, you can expect to see the entire discussion thread deleted.

I have never promised that I read all comments, and I’m not promising that here.  I simply cannot review all comments – at the present, I have over 35,000 comments on the site.  But as I catch them, I’ll deal with them appropriately.

Next, we’ve dealt with this thing of incrementalism before.  I advocate it, and you know that.  Readers have commented that the progressives have mastered the art, while we’ve been left in the dust (or maybe the dustbin of history).  But then those same readers reject out-of-hand the notion that any victory, however small, means anything.

I find it patently absurd that anyone thinks that we’re going to reverse course in America in a step change by doing anything.  You want lawlessness and lack of government?  Okay.  Then 99.99% of you will die an ignominious and meaningless death without being able to bequeath either your wealth or your heritage to your children or children’s children.  Prepare yourselves for Kosovo on steroids.

You want to reject incrementalism?  Okay.  Sit on your couch and lose to those who believe in it.  You want to try to do everything in your own power?  Okay.  Hold your fist up and engage in “high-handed sin.”  Tell God you don’t need Him.  Tell me how that goes.

Americans have no one to blame but themselves.  We have allowed the deaths of innocent victims through abortion, we have allowed the fleecing of widows and orphans by the taxation of men who are trying to do well by “leaving an inheritance of their children’s children.”  We have invited Hollywood to send smut into our homes at its whim.  We have sent children to schools of communist indoctrination, where they learn that there is no God, there is no family, and the only entity is the state.

Is it any wonder we are where we are?  Why would anyone believe that we could avoid God’s curse?  There is a way to recover America, but it doesn’t involve a step change in anything except a return to God’s Holy law.  Doing that isn’t likely to happen without re-educating children, home schooling them, and engaging in what Rousas J. Rushdoony called “Christian Reconstruction.”  The enemy has incorporated incrementalism, and it’s absurd to think that it’s going to be made easy on us at this point by rejecting that approach.  Horace Mann took a very long time to accomplish his goals.  It will take us equally long to undo what he did, or longer.

By way of final comment, you are helping no one with gripes and moans, not even yourself.  You are helping everyone when you make comments that encourage fellow readers, bolster their belief, and make practical suggestions for how to live in troubling times.  It’s okay to say “thank you” to the host of this web site from time to time.  It’s also okay to say “thank you” when a reader makes a good, educated, measured, intelligent comment that benefits you.  I like to see comments from measured men who speak intelligently and with an eye to history and philosophy.  Be that kind of commenter.

Savage Arms has been sold.  Providing further news and perspective on this sale, American Rifleman.

More than a year after Vista Outdoor raised eyebrows by placing its Savage Arms business unit on the block, completion of the sale was announced July 8. Press releases from Vista listed the total purchase price as $170 million and said that the buyer—Long Range Acquisition LLC, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing—is a “group of investors headed by Savage President and CEO Al Kasper.”

When Vista’s intentions regarding Savage became known last spring, some pro-gun commentators reflexively feared that the Minnesota-based conglomerate was abandoning the firearm industry amid a wave of craven corporate virtue-signaling in the wake of the Parkland tragedy. As it turned out, the Savage divesture was part of a larger, ongoing strategy by Vista to reduce debt by selling assets outside of its core business of ammunition, optics and other shooting and hunting accessories. At the time, newly arrived Vista CEO Chris Metz told American Rifleman, “I’m a big believer that new products are the lifeblood of our industry, that the reason someone goes out and buys a new 20-gauge shotgun or .30-‘06 hunting rifle is probably not because they truly need one, but because whatever is new is news. All of our brands are vying for funds to feed product innovation. We sat down, took stock and strategically laid out which brands and which businesses we think we can invest in and grow.”

It makes no difference to me whether Savage Arms is owned by Vista Outdoor or someone else, as long as that someone else doesn’t do what was done to Remington (unload debt, suck off the resources via “financial engineering” tactics).

It sounds like this might be a good move if the Savage President and CEO heads the group, but we may have to wait and see.

I consider Savage to be one of the best large firearm manufacturers left.  I’d like to see them stay strong.

John Lovell gives a tutorial.  I still consider the Magpul “Art of the Tactical Carbine” to be the best.  However, John provides some helpful tips.

Finding the “small of he shoulder” is difficult if you lift weights.  What happens is that the butt always lands on the pec.

Also, the thumb-over-bore grip is cool, but my son said what John did.  My son conducted room clearing for hours and days, and the only grip that works for that long is a much closer one.

David Codrea:

Or as lead researcher Dr. Kate Allsopp concludes:

“Although diagnostic labels create the illusion of an explanation they are scientifically meaningless and can create stigma and prejudice.”

Liberty advocates concerned about due process-denying gun confiscations empowered by “red flag laws” should see the danger of this, when even the experts can’t agree on the basics.

As we’ve noted before, the number of psychiatric experts we can trot out to show that the various mental “diagnoses” don’t correspond with propensity to violence is virtually limitless.

Or as reader Menckenlite observed concerning guns and mental health?

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.

But there is no shame among pols who trot out red flag laws.

American Rifleman:

Heckler & Koch (H&K) is gearing up to deliver between 5,000 and 6,000 complete rifle weapon systems to the U.S. Amy, which plans to deploy them as M110A1 Squad Designated Marksman Rifles (SDMR). The rifle will be a variant of the 7.62×51 mm NATO G28/HK417, and will be manufactured by H&K in Oberndorf, Germany, before arriving at the H&K-U.S.A. facility in Columbus, Ga., in early 2020. There, scopes and mounts purchased under a separate agreement will be installed, as well as accessories from 12 other U.S.-based manufacturers. H&K will additionally provide spare parts, support and training.

Because presumably there aren’t any manufacturers in American that know anything about building firearms.

NYT:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — More than 150 gun owners turned in semiautomatic weapons and gun parts to the police in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Saturday, the first day of nationwide gun buyback events after the government banned most such firearms in the wake of a terrorist attack on mosques in the city.

Mike Johnson, the commander of the district’s police department, told reporters that gun owners would be paid a total of close to $300,000 for the 224 now-illegal weapons handed over during the five-hour event.

[ … ]

“They were surprised that they were not able to leave with their firearms when they heard the prices and were not happy with them,” she said.

The most amusing thing about this is that it is reported as a success, but it involved only a few hundred gun owners.  What do you reckon word of pissed off gun owners will do to the coming swarms of people ready to turn in guns?  In related news, changes have come to New Zealand.  A national Islamic call to prayer was issued back in March.

What?  They couldn’t trust the government?

Resolve never to be disarmed.

To The Supreme Court.

There are, after all, substantial reasons to doubt that these ever-evolving developments will actually moot this case, as it is not at all clear that the City has foresworn the power to control where its residents may transport their duly licensed handguns or that there are no continuing effects from past violations of licensing restrictions that the City has consistently maintained are consistent with the Second Amendment. As for the state legislation to which respondents point, it is not even clear that it will ever take effect, rendering the question of what effect, if any, it will have on petitioners’ claims manifestly unripe.

Moreover, a party asserting that its own actions have mooted a case has “the ‘heavy burden of persua[ding]’ the court that the challenged conduct cannot reasonably be expected to start up again.” Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Slater, 528 U.S. 216, 222 (2000) (alteration in original) (quoting Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs. (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 189 (2000)). That heavy burden should be heavier still where, as here, a defendant’s about-face is unabashedly motivated by a desire to deprive this Court of jurisdiction to review the defendant’s actions. See Knox v. Serv. Emps. Int’l Union, Local 1000, 567 U.S. 298, 307 (2012) (“Such postcertiorari maneuvers designed to insulate a decision from review by this Court must be viewed with a critical eye.”). There are particularly strong reasons to doubt the sincerity of any claim that the City has forever changed its errant ways here given respondents’ declaration that they have no intention of taking any position before this Court on the constitutionality of the rules that they have changed. Indeed, the procedural irregularity of respondents’ actions to date makes plain that their goal is not just to try to moot this case, but to do everything they can to avoid ever having to take a definitive position on those issues. It is hard to understand why respondents are so reluctant to take any position on the questions on which this Court granted certiorari if they have no intention of resuming the challenged conduct or materially similar conduct in the future.

I have in on good authority that in legal circles, they call that the “slamma-jamma body-cramma.”

Prior: New York City Lawyers Argue To The Supreme Court That It Should Dismiss Case Against City’s Weapon Transportation Ban.

Via Codrea, this absurdity.

However, despite the case between Timbs and Indiana making it to the United States Supreme Court last year — and the SCOTUS unanimously ruling with Timbs — the state of Indiana is still trying to argue that even the most petty instances of breaking the law can result in civil asset forfeiture.

According to Reason, that includes a situation involving a vehicle that was stopped for going five miles per hour over the speed limit, if you ask Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher.

“This is the position that we already staked out in the Supreme Court when I was asked by Justice [Stephen] Breyer whether a Bugatti can be forfeited for going over five miles over the speed limit,” Fisher said last week during oral arguments before the Indiana Supreme Court.

“Historically, the answer to that question is yes, and we’re sticking with that position here.”

Ooooo … a lawyer “staked out a position.”  So I guess we’re all supposed to genuflect.  Even though it’s morally and legally wrong, if he’s staked out the position, well then, it must be enforceable even though the highest court in the land said no.

Because progs like the courts when it suits them, and they ignore the courts when it doesn’t.  So put that in your ecumenical pipe and smoke it, Justice Roberts.  Or stick it somewhere else.  He doesn’t give a rat’s ass what your court said.

David Kopel.

Early in the 18th century, rifle-makers from Germany and Switzerland began settling in Pennsylvania, in the Lancaster area. America was attracting skilled craftsmen immigrants who wanted to set up their own businesses, free from the repressive controls of the homeland.

In the UK or Germany, gunmakers usually had to belong to a trade guild. Entry into the guild was constricted. Guilds, as with other limits on suppliers, create oligopolies that reduce supply to consumers and increase profits to the limited number of suppliers. But in guild-free America, gunmakers could manufacture affordable arms for as many customers as they could find. The absence of guilds was one reason for the prevalence of guns in the American colonies.

It’s interesting to learn of the role liberty itself played in the proliferation of firearms in America due to the absence of oppressive guilds.  David continues in an explanation on when fighters preferred smooth bore guns versus rifled guns.  Then there is this interesting bit.

While European rifles generally had a caliber (interior bore diameter) of .60 or .75 inches, Americans preferred a smaller caliber, usually around .40 to .46, and sometimes as low as .32. A smaller caliber meant smaller bullets. One pound of lead will make 16 bullets for a .70 caliber gun, and 46 bullets for a .45 caliber. With the smaller caliber, a person on a hunting expedition that might last for weeks or months could carry a greater quantity of ammunition.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, yes?  Today the M-16 family of guns continues to be the staple of American fighting because of the smaller, lighter, higher velocity round it shoots.

I truly learn something every time I read Kopel.

Prince Law.

Late yesterday, I received an email from an individual containing a letter from ATF which was a response to a correspondence requesting the correct method to “measure a firearm with a ‘stabilizing brace’ and folding adaptor.” It was explained that the correspondence was sent in the form of an email over a year ago and that the person had received a response via email shortly after it was sent. This letter was unsolicited and came over a year after the original request and response.

[ … ]

Based on the letter, ATF is taking the position that because a stabilizing brace is not an integral part of the firearm, it is not relevant to the overall length measurement. Why does this matter? A number of individuals have been building AR pistols or other similar pistols that have utilized a stabilizing brace. Some have opted to add a vertical foregrip. However, based on this interpretation, those people may find that they have manufactured an “AOW”, which is subject to the restrictions of the National Firearms Act (“NFA”).

[ … ]

ATF has taken the position that once a vertical foregrip has been added to a firearm, it is no longer designed to be fired when held in one hand, removing it from the definition of a pistol, even though ATF previously lost this argument before the Ninth Circuit in U.S. v. Fix, 4 Fed. Appx. 324 (9th Cir. 2001).

Further, ATF has consistently held that the overall length of 26 inches is the breaking point for concealability. Put another way, if the firearm has an overall length of less than 26 inches, it places it into a category of arms that could be considered to be regulated by the NFA depending on their other characteristics. If it has an overall length greater than 26 inches, it could remove it from those class of firearms, again, depending on their characteristics.

Law-making by memorandum.  Any time you change your mind, just write a new note.

Related.