Tom Brokaw at NBC:

I am a gun owner and have been since I was 12, growing up in South Dakota. I still have an assortment of shotguns and rifles, all used for sporting purposes.

My son-in-law, a New Yorker, loves to come to our Montana ranch and with Doug (our expert marksman manager) target shoot a variety of legal weapons.

During the hunting season Doug provides a wide variety of game for the ranch menus.

But, in recent years, my favorite gun store in Big Timber, Montana, began stockpiling the ever-more-popular military-inspired weapons alongside those used to hunt game and defend livestock. They sell the AR-15, modeled on the military version — except that it is configured for semi-, not full, automatic fire.

But Google “convert AR-15 to automatic” and you’ll find all kinds of ways of altering a semi-automatic weapon to fire more rapidly — and it appears that’s exactly what Stephen Paddock did in Las Vegas by purchasing and using “bump-stock” devices.

And while Congress is now considering whether to make bump-stocks illegal, it’s not enough to make the conversion illegal. Who will catch the change artists?

The larger question we need to be asking ourselves is: Why do we have all-but-military-grade weaponry available to civilians in the first place?

Yeah, Yeah: The Second Amendment. But the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to bear any arms you please. Fully automatic weapons have long been illegal to buy, as have bazookas and artillery pieces our troops take to war.

All of our rights have conditions. That’s how we maintain a civil society.

I am a journalist, protected by the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law,” it says, except that all journalists know they cannot, among other acts, deliberately libel a person or falsely shout fire in a crowded theater without legal consequences.

It is time for civility to reign — and madness to be snuffed out.

It isn’t enough for these statists to go after bump stocks, which action I oppose, by the way (i.e., making them illegal).  They have to go after “military grade” weapons as well, meaning modern sporting rifles.

Did you catch the reference to “sporting,” and hunting, and supporting the second amendment with limitations?  The only thing he left out was being a life NRA member.

How disconnected can these guys get?  Doesn’t he know that the gun rights folks will lampoon his idiotic essay as written by a Fudd?  Instead of Googling “convert AR-15 to automatic,” why don’t you Google “Fudd,” Tom.

And you can come after our modern sporting rifles and all-but-military-grade weaponry whenever you feel froggy.  I’m waiting.  We’ll see how civil your society is when you try that.

Reading National Review Online has become drudgery, with their never-Trumpism and pseudo-progressivism just remarkably wearisome.  Most times I almost can’t stand it.  But occasionally something comes across my desk that needs to be addressed.

Beltway boob Robert Verbruggen waxes know-nothing on bump stocks.

There is no good reason to make fully automatic weapons or their equivalents generally available to the public. The Second Amendment doesn’t require it: The Supreme Court’s Heller ruling took care to explain why it didn’t apply to weapons that are “dangerous or unusual” or not in “common use,” including “M-16 rifles and the like.” This is strongly supported by previous Supreme Court precedent (the “common use” standard comes from 1939’s U.S. v. Miller). It is also consistent with history: The Heller Court explained that there is a strong tradition of prohibiting the carrying of especially dangerous weapons, and that “the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty.” There may be an argument that the Court got it wrong — that the people are to be allowed any kind of firearm that exists, all the better for resisting tyranny — but few constitutional rights are so broad in scope as to completely override any threat to public safety they pose. And, if nothing else, imposing such a broad interpretation is a good way to get the Second Amendment repealed.

Self-defense is not a compelling reason for bump stocks to be easily available, either. Outside of a war zone, one would not fire a fully automatic weapon at an intruder indoors or carry one in the streets late at night. Full autos are also not hunting weapons, or tools suited to pinpoint-accurate target shooting. About all that can be said for them is that they’re fun to shoot, at least for those who can afford the copious amounts of ammunition they burn at dramatically reduced accuracy. That would be enough if the case against them were weak, but it’s not. Weapons equipped with these devices let off far more rounds, far more quickly, than do the semiautomatic weapons commonly used for hunting and self-defense. Unleashed on a crowd, even from hundreds of yards away, they can produce unprecedented casualties.

The second amendment was written by men who risked their livelihoods, their wealth, their fortunes, their lives, and the lives of their families to overthrow the government under which they lived.  They used cannon when they had them, and would have been quite happy to have used semi- or fully-automatic weapons.  To argue differently is idiotic, with the founders who wrote the very amendment under debate having seen the bloodshed, lose of life, loss of limb, and pain they had witnessed during the war of independence.

Public safety wasn’t the apex of their concerns, and in addition to being a war against England, the war of independence was a civil war.  In fact, it was primarily a civil war, and would have been over in a month had all of the colonists been patriots.  As far as the “unprecedented casualties, if the shooter could have gotten fertilizer byproducts into the hotel – and one may conclude that he could have given the large cache of weapons and ammunition we carried to his rooms – he could have caused significant casualties, and even more than his shooting if he had been able to get explosives and shrapnel under the stage or in or near the concert that night.  Moreover, I have argued and will continue to argue that if he had used semi-automatic fire and aimed with good optics, the casualty count could have been much higher.  So others argue as well who know more than I do.

What if the Fedgov going to do, outlaw fertilizer?  Bump fire stocks can be mimicked with rubber bands, a fact that beltway boob apparently doesn’t know since he likely doesn’t even know anyone who owns a gun, much less make it to the flyover states to learn about the people anywhere besides the beltway.  Are we going to outlaw rubber bands too?  Dismissing rubber bands, since that is a silly alternative to either slide fire stocks or fully automatic, is he going to outlaw people like Jerry Miculek who can fire (accurately, mind you) virtually as fast as fully automatic with his finger?  Many professional 3-gun competitors can do that.

My own son Daniel has said to me many times that he never needed automatic capabilities in the Marines (he was a SAW gunner, but carried an M4 on occasion).  The Marines had shot so many rounds down range, and in close quarters battle training, that they could put three rounds into an enemy as fast as the three-round burst on the M4.  Beltway boob is just looking for someone or something to blame, and it doesn’t bother me one bit that the progressives are after my rights.  My rights come from God, not the second amendment, and I’ll defend them as such.

Now on to a more daffy commentary today at NR by Michael Brendan Dougherty.

Alert readers (and listeners) will know that on a philosophical level, I’m a squish on the gun stuff. I find it embarrassing that the United States is “exceptional” in the amount of violence its people inflict on one another, and themselves, with handguns. And I’m skeptical about the utility of an unqualified right to acquire weapons of such lethality. My colleague Kevin Williamson says that the right to bear arms makes us citizens and not subjects. And I agree, up to a point …

[ … ]

Sometimes people put Schermer’s argument more baldly. They ask something like this: “Do you really think Bubba in camo gear hiding in the forest is going to take on the U.S. military? The U.S. military has nuclear weapons!”

Who exactly do you think has stymied the U.S. in Afghanistan for 16 years? The Taliban is made up of Afghan Bubbas. The Taliban doesn’t need to defeat nuclear weapons, though they are humiliating a nuclear power for the second time in history. They use a mix of Kalashnikovs and WWII-era bolt-action rifles. Determined insurgencies are really difficult to fight, even if they are only armed with Enfield rifles and you can target them with a TOW missiles system that can spot a cat in the dark from two miles away. In Iraq, expensive tanks were destroyed with simple improvised explosives.

He goes on to discuss the moral costs of such warfare against its own citizens.  But this all misses the point, and while the U.S. military goes about its business preparing for fifth generation warfare, they do so because they haven’t learned how to win fourth generation warfare and are planning their next engagement being a near-peer.

Do you suppose this would look like great land armies getting into formation at the edges of great fields of battle and marching towards each other?  What do you think such a messy civil war in America would look like?  Bubba would be wearing a Ghillie suit, shooting a bolt action rifle, or a modern sporting rifle, and after the shot you will never hear from him again – until the next one.  And you’ll never catch him.  Police will have to decide what side to take, and if they take the wrong one, they will be dealt with in the middle of the night when they take their dogs out to pee in the backyard.

Insurgent will be mixed with progressive statist, and there will be no SEAL teams or nuclear weapons to which you can turn because you won’t know one from another.  There will be nowhere to target a nuclear weapon, and nowhere for a SEAL team to raid.  All of their close quarters battle preparations will be for naught when their own families are in peril due to civil warfare.  These aren’t Afghan tribesmen you’re dealing with.  These are engineers, mechanics, fabricators and welders, chemists, and the world’s best machinists.  If you think Afghanistan was rough, wait to see what civil war would look like in America.

If you have ever said something like, “You can’t win because the government has a land army and nuclear weapons,” here is the moral of the story for you.  You are an idiot.  You haven’t thought through this well enough, and you need to see the second amendment for what it really is.  It is the best guarantor of peace because tyranny is mutually assured destruction.  The statists know that, or else America will suffer the consequences.

However, given the insular life of the metro-riders inside the beltway, I wouldn’t expect anything else out of National Review.  Behind, out of touch, and out of commission.

TPM:

“You said earlier that you would be willing to allow a clean bill in Congress that bans or regulates bump stocks without requiring more, broader gun control to be attached to the bill,” Jake Tapper said. “Is universal background checks, closing the so-called gun show loophole, requiring background checks for private sales, is that the next step for people in your philosophical camp and Senate?”

“It should be the next step, in large part because it is the most popularly accepted change. And it has the biggest effect,” Murphy said. “So yes, that would be the clear next step. That should be our North Star as we try to figure out how to proceed.”

Never forget they want you in a registry.  It’s their “North Star,” their “touchstone,” the penultimate inflection of their control desires.  Just before illegality.

Chicago Tribune:

In the early 1930s, with gangsters like John Dillinger mowing down his enemies with machine guns on the streets, Congress held hearings on a sweeping proposal to severely restrict firearm sales.

The testimony of one man — now totally forgotten — stood out.

“I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” said Karl T. Frederick, according to a transcript of the hearings. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

Well then, thank goodness he’s dead and unable to effect his gun control schemes any more.  Remember this?

In the colonies, availability of hunting and need for defense led to armament statues comparable to those of the early Saxon times. In 1623, Virginia forbade its colonists to travel unless they were “well armed”; in 1631 it required colonists to engage in target practice on Sunday and to “bring their peeces to church.” In 1658 it required every householder to have a functioning firearm within his house and in 1673 its laws provided that a citizen who claimed he was too poor to purchase a firearm would have one purchased for him by the government, which would then require him to pay a reasonable price when able to do so. In Massachusetts, the first session of the legislature ordered that not only freemen, but also indentured servants own firearms and in 1644 it imposed a stern 6 shilling fine upon any citizen who was not armed.

The earlier NRA didn’t agree with the Christian heritage of our country, which was to carry all the time, everywhere.

The Alaskan remarks thusly.

Had he been a precision sniper, given the target rich environment and the ability to follow up shots in such an environment, his gruesome tally would’ve been much deadlier, I believe.

The manner in which he carried out his mission seems to have been weighed more heavily towards the political sphere and the “shock” of it all, than the actual “targeted” killing of individuals, as would have been the the case if optics and precision shooting had been the tactic.

Bump stocks just aided in his mission of “shock and awe,” which really seems to have been his motive to his madness.

I believe so too, and that’s just the point made by Mark Quimby (via Codrea).  I believe that this is the Mark Quimby here.

News from South Dakota:

That Wednesday morning began with a gruesome discovery: a bloodied goat lie dead on the ground behind Streff’s house, 10 miles south of Custer near Pringle. The owner of Black Hills Goat Dairy, single mother of six, and grandmother to nine, soon discovered it was one of the young bucks she keeps pastured behind her home.

For better than a decade, Streff has milked 38 others, as well as eight dairy cows, making deliveries to Custer on Tuesdays and Rapid City on Fridays. But this was the first animal she had lost to a hungry mountain lion.

“We can see the goats right off the back porch, and we saw one lying on the ground back there,” she said on Tuesday. “We went right out and looked, and it was dead. We also saw a trail of destruction from the chicken coop with a dead cat, a dead duck and a bunch of chicken feathers.”

Streff said she feared the mountain lion would return for more.

“It’s unnerving because I really have a smorgasbord of animals here,” she said. “It’s like Golden Corral. If you don’t stop it, you’ll be at the mercy of the lions. I also have grandchildren out back occasionally, and I was worried.”

Read the rest at Rapid City Journal.  I think’s its awesome that this young man is home-schooled.  I also think it’s awesome he got the dangerous critter.  A man can’t let a dangerous animal destroy his belongings and endanger his family any more than he can let a man do it.  Despite the title of the article, I don’t think this has a thing to do with revenge.

As for fancying himself a hunter, I don’t think so.  This young man has guts, and a lot of patience to boot.  He doesn’t fancy himself a hunter, he knows he’s a hunter.

David Codrea:

“We’re going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily — given the political realities — going to be very modest. . . . [W]e’ll have to start working again to strengthen that law, and then again to strengthen the next law, and maybe again and again. Right now, though, we’d be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal — total control of handguns in the United States — is going to take time. . . . The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition-except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors-totally illegal.  — Richard Harris, A Reporter at Large: Handguns, New Yorker, July 26, 1976, at 53, 58 (quoting Pete Shields, founder of Handgun Control, Inc.)…”

It’s what they want, it’s part of who they are.  This is from a write at Daily Kos, cited by me over four years ago.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

Which is why we opposed universal background checks.  It’s easy to say, “Come and get my guns when you’re feeling froggy.  I’m waiting.”

It’s another thing entirely to work hard to oppose the incremental changes the progressives want to make.  But incrementalism is their game, a game they’ve played successfully for a very long time.  We need to be better at our game, and adopting incrementalism ourselves would mean supporting removal of suppressors from the NFA items list, even if the NFA is left basically intact.  We would like to dismantle the NFA, but the absence of that doesn’t mean we can’t support incremental changes that make things better.

However, it doesn’t mean we have to support things like national reciprocity if that means we give the FedGov power over permitting, training requirements, or national lists of any kind.  We have to be smart about this.

Fox45:

Ohio (WKEF/WRGT) – The Buckeye Firearms Association has come out against a potential ban of bump stock devices that investigators in Las Vegas say Stephen Paddock used to modify the semi-automatic rifles to fire rapidly into the crowd.

The device fell under scrutiny after videos of the mass shooting started a debate about the rapid gunfire heard.

An association spokesperson said because they don’t change the actual functionality of the gun, they should not be banned.

“With a bump stock or a slide fire you hold your finger still and you move the rifle back and forth to fire it,” said Joe Eaton, region leader for the Buckeye Firearms Association. “So it really is the same thing each press of the trigger results in one bullet being fired, does not change any of the mechanics.”

The announced stance from Buckeye Firearms came one day after the National Rifle Association (NRA) said bump stocks should be “subject to additional regulations,” after lawmakers proposed a ban of the device.

“Since they don’t change the function of the firearm it is still a semi-automatic, one bullet with one press of the trigger, there would be no reason to have them outlawed,” Eaton said.

Semi-automatic weapons are legal to sell and buy.

Eaton said while the bump stock changes the action it takes to fire a bullet, it remains a semi-automatic weapon.

“I guess the only advantage I could see is by moving your finger a bunch of times it could get fatigued after a while, where the bump fire stock would eliminate that fatigue,” Eaton said.

Eaton also said he doesn’t think a bump stock ban wouldprevent a similar attack.

“The fact that this time he chose a semi-automatic rifle and he happened to choose another accessory for it again, unfortunately is just more noise in the talk about what needs to be the talk in why is there this much violence out there,” Eaton said.

Good for Buckeye Firearms Association.  I agree that this introduced more noise, and it’s not noise that we need to coddle by stipulating agreement with it.  The NRA chose poorly.

As I’ve also said, “I cannot be convinced that the shooter who landed all of this crap in our lap would have been less effective if he had aimed and fired in a controlled manner than with the bump fire stock, if in fact such a device was used.”

Reddit/r/firearms has a discussion thread on Hickok45 coming out in defense of the NRA in their apparent statement that bump fire stocks need further regulation.

I’ve seen a precipitous drop in prices for both Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms products since their apparent siding with the gun controllers in Illinois.  Gun owners never forget, and seldom forgive (S&W might be an exception, but even then not for some).

Hickok45 talks about potential haters who won’t like his defense of the NRA, and I’m no hater.  I will continue to check his videos every now and then.  But I’ll remark that it would have been just as easy for him to have stayed silent on the matter and let this blow over.  The redittors don’t like the fact that they came to his defense when Google tried to demonetize and even ban Hickok45 from YouTube, and they feel that he let them down on this one.

Or Slide Fire stock.  Hey, the dude can hardly hold onto that M203.  Hey, I suddenly want a slide fire stock if it comes with a free grenade launcher.