Remember I recommended hunting hogs to save the environment?  In Texas, a man is not only helping the environment, he’s making things safer for himself.  From the Longview News-Journal.

A Union Grove man says he bagged the “big daddy” feral hog that was wreaking havoc on his property — all 416 pounds of him.

The Gregg County Game Warden’s office posted photos on Facebook this week showing Joe Clowers’ kill.

“This pig had been terrorizing his property for years — five or six,” said Game Warden Todd Long. “So every time he went hunting, he took a little extra firepower in case it showed up. Well, this time, it showed up.”

Clowers used a .223-caliber AR rifle to kill the pig.

The hog had preyed on the fawns in the area, and Clowers said he always stayed armed when visiting his deer feeders in case the hog in question charged him.

“My property lays between some populated areas, and I try to maintain an environment like a sanctuary or nursery for the deer to raise fawns,” Clowers said.

“He was the big daddy. I called him the ‘bush beast.’ “

This is a big hog to take down with an AR-15.  I had wondered first of all where he shot him (was it a head shot?), and second, what ammunition he used?

Did he use standard 55 or 62 grain FMJ rounds, did he use 55 grain soft point rounds, or did he use heavier rounds such as the Hornady 75 grain or Sierra Matchking 77 grain?  I suspect there are a lot of folks who would like to know.

I ended up talking to the Upshur County game warden via telephone, and he thought that the hog was taken with a standard round, at which I commented that it must have been with a head shot although I couldn’t tell anything from the pictures.  He agreed and said that he believed it was taken with a head shot.

Congratulations to Mr. Clowers.  Nice shot.  Nice hog.

PJM:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has broadened his investigation, originally focused on Donald Trump’s ties with Russia, to a major Hillary Clinton bundler who worked for Ukraine’s Party of Regions, a political group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, also worked for this party.

Recent reports have implicated Mueller in an alleged FBI cover-up. The FBI had been investigating the Russian firm Rosatom for years before the Obama administration approved its acquisition of 20 percent of U.S. uranium in the Uranium One deal. The FBI kept the investigation secret, even when it could have prevented such a monumental purchase.

At the same time, Hillary Clinton (who was on the very board which approved the Uranium One deal) stood to benefit from the deal, as a Russian bank promoting Uranium One stock had paid her husband half a million for a speech (and directed millions to Clinton Foundation-linked companies). At the same time, the FBI acted quickly to bust a Russian spy ring because it got too close to Clinton.

Mueller — who as head of the FBI seems likely to have known about the Rosatom investigation and covered it up, just as the FBI switched into overdrive to protect Hillary Clinton — has broadened his investigation of Trump-Russia into a line of questioning that might finally implicate the other side of the 2016 election, Clinton herself.

On Monday, NBC News reported that Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group are now the subjects of Mueller’s federal investigation. NBC News cited three unnamed sources, who may have leaked the information on Mueller’s orders — in order to suggest impartiality after these recent stories implicated Mueller.

The Podesta probe grew out of Mueller’s inquiry into Manafort’s finances, NBC News reported. Manafort had organized a public relations campaign for the non-profit European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU). The Podesta Group also worked on that campaign.

Mueller’s investigation into Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group has been a long time coming, and it is heartening to see the special counsel turn his eye toward the Russian connections of some prominent Clinton backers for once.

None of this frees Mueller from the stain of the FBI keeping the Rosatom investigation secret during the Uranium One deal, however. It is not enough to merely expand the Russia investigation into actors on Clinton’s side — he needs to fully investigate Russia ties on both sides of the aisle.

No, he doesn’t need to expand anything.  The notion of special counsel and special prosecutor are unconstitutional.  He needs to be fired for corruption and malfeasance in office.

As to this idea that Tony Podesta is under investigation, what if his office finds nothing?  Then what will you say?  That Tony Podesta is clean, just like his brother?

This entire thing is a leak designed as misdirect and bait.  Mueller is attempting to deflect attention away from his own role in all of this, and one of the best ways to do it is to get some GOP senators and congressmen in his corner cheering for him.  Once his enemies have said publicly that his office and efforts are legitimate, they cannot later undo that statement.

I’m not cheering.  I haven’t changed my mind from what I said earlier.

Twice last week I got visits from FBI criminal justice to exactly the same page.

You see that, don’t you?  They are interested in you and what you’re doing.  What they should have been interested in is this.

My words for you, chattering class and politicians, is that you are all a bunch of bitchy, cowardly, whiny, scared little chicken shits who would sell their own mothers, wife and children into slavery if it meant being accepted by the elitists.  You disgust me, one and all.  Furthermore, you DoJ and FBI employees who knew all about this, I feel the same way about you.  You disgust me, one and all.

Not only will this effect this nation’s access to important nuclear material for weapons, it will also effect the supply of fuel for commercial nuclear reactors used for peaceful, clean, reliable energy for your children and children’s children.

The FBI has foolishly squandered its moral authority.  It has none left.  And yet like the pigs in Animal Farm, it wants information on you.  And more of it, and more of it, and all it can get.  They have no interest in rehearsing their own malfeasance, and no particular problem with their moral turpitude.

And if the information we discussed here isn’t enough for you, you can read all about Bill Clinton’s meetings with Vladimir Putin, how Robert Mueller tried to entrap an acquaintance, how a U.S. consulting firm tied to the Clintons lobbied on behalf of Russian companies, about the DoJ blocking an FBI informant from testifying about the Uranium One deal, and how they all conspired to cover it up.

The abscess festers, and the cancer runs deep.  But the DoJ and FBI have lost moral authority, and when they speak now, it is only as the mouthpiece of the evil one.

Forbes:

1) The 2,300 Special Agents at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are allowed to carry AR-15’s, P90 tactical rifles, and other heavy weaponry. Recently, the IRS armed up with $1.2 million in new ammunition. This was in addition to the $11 million procurement of guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment procured between 2006-2014.

2) The Small Business Administration (SBA) spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to load its gun locker with Glocks last year. The SBA wasn’t alone – the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service modified their Glocks with silencers.

3) The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a relatively new police force. In 1996, the VA had zero employees with arrest and firearm authority. Today, the VA has 3,700 officers, armed with millions of dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition including AR-15’s, Sig Sauer handguns, and semi-automatic pistols.

4) Meanwhile, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agents carry the same sophisticated weapons platforms used by our Special Forces military warriors. The HHS gun locker is housed in a new “National Training Operations Center” – a facility at an undisclosed location within the DC beltway.

5) Loading the Gun Locker – Federal agencies spent $44 million on guns, including an “urgent” order for 20 M-16 Rifles with extra magazines at the Department of Energy ($49,559); shotguns and Glock pistols at the General Services Administration ($16,568); and a bulk order of pistols, sights, and accessories by the Bureau of Reclamation whose main job is to build dams, power plants, and canals ($697,182).

6) Buying Bullets in Bulk – The government spent $114 million on ammunition, including bulk purchases by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ($66,927); the Smithsonian ($42,687); and the Railroad Retirement Board ($6,941). The Social Security Administration spent $61,129 on bullets including 50,000 rounds of ammunition plus 12-gauge buckshot and slug ammo.  The EPA special agents purchased ammunition for their .357 and 9mm revolvers and buckshot for their shotguns. While Bernie Sanders claimed that the biggest adversary to the United States was climate change, the EPA stood ready to fight in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

7) The DOE (Department of Education) is armed and ready with 88 law enforcement officers possessing arrest and firearm authority. They’ve purchased buckshot for their shotguns and 40-caliber ammunition for their Glocks. DOE special agents dress in body armor. Their spending on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment was up 25 percent during the last two years under the Obama Administration. Yet, in 2016, it took a pair of armed U.S. Marshals to arrest a man for his unpaid $1,500 student loan!

He goes on, with the Department of Interior, Department of Agriculture, etc.

FedGov is arming up.  You can take guesses why, and post them in comments.  They are the standing army that the founders feared so much.  And for very good reason.

Marc Thiessen:

Congressional Republicans are backing away from legislation banning “bump stocks” – devices used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock that effectively turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns – and are turning to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to ban them by executive action instead.

“We think the regulatory fix is the smartest, quickest fix, and then, frankly, we’d like to know how it happened in the first place,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., said in a news conference last week.

Ryan is wrong. Empowering ATF to ban firearms devices without explicit authorization from Congress is a far greater threat to the Second Amendment than any legislation Congress could pass.

In 2010, under President Barack Obama, ATF ruled that “bump-fire” stocks were legal under current federal law, declaring in a letter to manufacturer Slide Fire: “We find that the ‘bump-stock’ is a firearm part and is not regulated as a firearm under the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act.” This was a proper, limited reading of our gun laws.

So far so good.  He’s right, of course.  Asking the ATF to ban bump stocks is asking the ATF to take the fall for infringement of the second amendment, an action that neither the Congress nor the NRA wants to be responsible for.  That’s why both have asked the ATF to do their dirty work for them.

Now Republicans want ATF to simply overturn its 2010 determination that bump stocks are legal – effectively banning them by executive fiat. Do conservatives really want to set the precedent that ATF can ban firearms or firearm devices without explicit authorization from Congress? Imagine what Hillary Clinton would have done with that power as president.

If ATF takes such action, it could set a precedent for other executive action on guns without explicit congressional authorization. A future Democratic president could use this precedent to have ATF reclassify all semi-automatic weapons as machine guns. They would argue, correctly, that you don’t actually need a bump-fire stock to produce a bump-fire effect. It can be accomplished with rubber bands or a belt loop, or even without any external device by a skilled marksman.

So, gun-control advocates could argue, all semi-automatic weapons are really in fact automatic guns – and thus banned under the 1986 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act. They could use an ATF ruling banning bump stocks as precedent for a back-door reimposition of the so-called assault weapons ban.

For the party that railed against Obama’s unlawful executive actions on immigration and other issues to now urge President Donald Trump to take unlawful executive actions on guns that even Obama refused to take is stunning.

The better option is to pass limited, carefully crafted legislation to ban these devices. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and 38 Senate Democrats have introduced the Automatic Gunfire Prevention Act that would “ban the sale, transfer, importation, manufacture or possession of bump stocks, trigger cranks and similar accessories that accelerate a semi-automatic rifle’s rate of fire.” According to Feinstein, the bill “makes clear that its intent is to target only those accessories that increase a semi-automatic rifle’s rate of fire.”

Oh, well if she said it, it must be true.  The progressives really don’t want to target anything else beyond bump stocks.  And of course, Marc Thiessen was the former Bush speech writer.  Neither Marc nor Bush are conservative, any more than the “conservatives” he criticizes in his commentary.

And it’s no accident that you see a former Bush speech writer aligning himself with a proposed bill by Dianne Feinstein and other Senate democrats.  But we should thank Marc for the commentary.  At one and the same time, he demonstrated both the cowardliness and the traitorous spirit of “conservatives” in America.  Afraid to do what they want, and wanting to infringe on the only covenant that binds the nation together.  What a loathsome bunch.

This is a bracing video, via JB’s Sanctuary.

Outdoor Life:

Gunsite Academy teaches that once you’ve reloaded your handgun, you should point your thumb toward your chest and grasp the slide between your thumb and all four fingers. Then you should forcefully pull the slide to the rear and release. This will disengage the slide stop, and as the slide goes forward, it will chamber a cartridge from the new and fully loaded magazine you’ve just inserted. Instructors who advocate using the slide stop as a slide release argue that it’s faster. It probably is. Others, like those at Gunsite, who teach releasing the slide by pulling it to the rear, suggest that pushing down on the slide stop with your thumb is a fine motor skill, and that fine motor skills can deteriorate when you’re under stress. They can and do.

I’m sure it depends upon what you’ve learned and practiced your whole life.  That said, when I first began shooting pistols I used the slide stop / slide release to chamber the new round.  I found that I didn’t like the movement of the pistol when I did that, and that in order to move my thumb around to get good contact with the slide stop, I had to change my grip ever so slightly, loosing “purchase” on the gun.

I almost never use the slide stop now.  I grab the slide and cycle it.  And for whatever reason, I hate the phrase “rack the slide.”  I prefer the phrase “cycle the slide,” although it’s not a complete cycle when it’s merely released from the stop.  So maybe I should use the term “release the slide” if it’s not a full cycle.

What do readers do?

As always, John is a nice guy and knowledgeable to boot.  I do have two comments about the video though.

First of all, I’ve run pistols with fiber optic sights for a long time, and I’ve never once seen them crack, fall out or break.  I give them much more credit than he seems to.  Plus, I really do like the way the optics jump out at you when you present.  And I couldn’t really care less what police in America use.

Second, I’ve also presented in the dark with use of a weapon-mounted light before, and the argument that “if you have enough light to properly identify the target, you can see you pistol sights,” doesn’t hold water with me.  The pistol sights are behind the light.  You can always point-and-shoot, but that’s an inferior option to aiming.

I have no experience with red dot pistol sights.  If some company wanted to send me one (Trijicon?), I would be more than happy to give it a review.

Sebastian:

Joan Peterson’s shout out in frustration should be exhibit A for why nothing changes after public mass shootings:

The cynical and evil leadership of the NRA suggested that they may be able to support a ban on bump fire stocks. NOT. Not even that very small measure will pass muster with this group of disingenuous group of guys who represent the industry that sells these things.

There’s not even an acknowledgement that perhaps your side has drafted something that’s very broadly worded, and sweeps up far more items than merely bump stocks. Some will no doubt argue the broad language is done out of malice rather than out of ignorance. But whichever way it goes, the language of these bills is unacceptable. Show me some acceptable language, and we can make a deal. But with this? No deal. They honestly can’t help themselves:

So Speaker Ryan and Republicans in control of our country- what say you? Shame on them all. We need much more than a ban on bump fire stocks.

What we need is a comprehensive bill to make America safe again, including a ban on bump fire stocks, a reduction in the number of bullets in an ammunition magazine, a ban on certain types of assault rifles and the accompanying features that can be added to make them more deadly, universal Brady background checks, research into the causes and effects of gun violence, adequate funding for the ATF, stronger straw purchasing and gun trafficking laws, mandatory training before owning or carrying a gun, mandatory secure storage of guns, child access prevention laws, gun violence protection orders, limiting who can carry a loaded weapon around in public, and yes, perhaps even a system of gun registration.

Remember what I predicted in the beginning? A deal will be offered. The deal with be rejected, because whatever X is offered isn’t what the other side really wants. It will force them to show their hand, it will fire our people up and they will get nothing in the end.

After Sandy Hook, gun folks put out an initial offer on universal background checks, that would have provided a technological means for private parties to conduct them. That offer was rejected, and they overreached, got defeated, tried to put together that last-minute awful compromise in the form of Manchin-Toomey, and by that time the issue was so toxic, the only thing that could be agreed on was nothing.

So I predicted the same thing would happen this time. The gun control people were offered bump stocks, because we don’t really care that much about them and we have a stalled agenda we really do care about. But they aren’t interested in bump stocks. They want the whole kit and caboodle, and they can’t get it, they’ll take their ball and go home.

Well, we’ll see what happens.  The GOP is weak and spineless, along with having no moral constitution, scruples or coherent world view.  But in my estimation it’s always wrong to compromise on a right.

I don’t recall there being any discussion about whether the gun owning community at large likes or dislikes a particular product being the basis for our rights, or whether we think it can be used accurately to shoot anything.  Likes, dislikes, accuracy and functionality – these are all the things of free market capitalism, not law.

I doubt Sebastian would be so willing to compromise on something he cherished that others didn’t particularly like, just because they didn’t feel the same way he did.

WKTV:

Ilion Mayor Terry Leonard tells us he received word Wednesday from the plant manager that Remington will enact involuntary furloughs due to market conditions and high inventory levels. Leonard says days will be taken out of the production schedule.

It’s hard to see how Remington pulls out of this slump.  Many manufacturers are hurting at the moment, but Remington is dealing with (a) declining quality [so I am told, I have no Remington firearms], (b) the Walker Fire Control System, and (c) union labor.

The best thing I could recommend is to close up shop in New York, move the entirety of their operations South, and focus on quality.

Oh, and as for that ridiculous Sandy Hook lawsuit that just won’t go away, fight it, but rather than expend legal fees, stay out of the state and never sell another product in Connecticut, which is what they want anyway.  Hell, I wish every firearms manufacturer would refuse to sell in Connecticut, starting with the police.

By the way, we’ve yet to see even a single death certificate for any alleged Sandy Hook shooting victims.  Remember that.