Dean Weingarten has a good find at Ammoland.
Judge Eduardo Ramos, the U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York, has issued an Opinion & Order that a ban on stun guns is constitutional. A New York State law prohibits the private possession of stun guns and tasers; a New York City law prohibits the possession and selling of stun guns. Judge Ramos has ruled these laws do not infringe on rights protected by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Let's briefly…… [read more]
A group of Detroit police officers executing a narcotics search warrant knocked on Nikita Smith’s door on January 14, 2016. The only fact that both Smith and the officers agree on after that point is that, a short while later, Smith’s three dogs were all shot dead.
What really happened in the moments between could be a costly question for the city of Detroit. In a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in May, Smith says the Detroit police executed her three pit bulls, Debo, Mama, and Smoke, without provocation. Essentially, they acted as a “dog death squad.”
According the lawsuit, Smith tried to tell the officers she was putting her dogs away, and placed two in the basement and one in the bathroom. As the officers burst into the house, Debo slipped back upstairs. The officers shot it as it sat down by Smith. Next, they charged into the basement and shot Mama, who was pregnant and backed into a corner. Finally, they moved onto the bathroom, where Smoke was closed in.
One of the officers cracked the door open, peeked inside, and closed it again. “Should we do that one, too?” the officer asked, according to the lawsuit, before two of them fired through the closed door, killing Smoke.
In the police version of the story, told through reports filed after the raid, the officers received no response when they announced their presence and forced entry into the house. Inside, they encountered a “vicious grey pit bull” that charged at them. It was shot eight times. In the basement, they encountered another “vicious white pit bull” that charged toward them. It was shot five times. According to police reports, the third dog charged out of the bathroom toward the officers and was shot.
ESTERO, Fla. — A passerby shot and killed a person who was fighting with a Lee County Sheriff’s Office deputy on Interstate 75 Monday morning.
Deputy First Class Dean Bardes, a 12-year-veteran, was working a crash at mile marker 126 when the suspect came upon him, causing Bardes to pursue him at high speeds, according to multiple sources.
Bardes and the suspect exited their vehicles at the Corkscrew Road exit and a fight started, sources said. The suspect was armed, Bardes told his supervisors, according to sources.
The passerby, who had a Concealed Weapons License, exited his vehicle and told the suspect he’d shoot him if he didn’t stop beating the deputy, sources said.
After noncompliance from the suspect, the passerby shot the suspect three times, sources said. The suspect later died.
First of all, to appeal to the sense of personal affection of CLEOs for their officers, one has to wonder how long the good people of America will continue this sort of assistance when LEOs are brutalizing citizens in the manner shown above. This is something you really want to think about if you’re a CLEO. At some point, the good people of America will begin to think of you as enemies, and if that happens you’re doomed.
But back to the issue of LEOs who have a predilection for the kind of brutality you saw above. If a LEO joins the force wanting to participate on a SWAT team, that means he wants to perpetrate acts of violence against American citizens. You may summarily conclude that he is pathological and you should refrain from hiring him.
As a CLEO, if you want to have such a force at hand in order to perpetrate acts of violence against American citizens, you are pathological and should resign your post immediately. You and your officers are a danger and immediate threat to life and liberty.
Even a cursory reading of Exodus 23:5 and Deuteronomy 22:4-7 teaches us that the good man has regard for the life of his beast. And not only that, he has regard for the life of other beasts. That’s why hunters focus so much attention on taking ethical shots in order to prevent the needless infliction of pain.
If the good man has regard for the life of his beast, the wicked man does not. A fortiori, if he must have regard for beasts in order to be good, he must have that much more regard for the life of humans. Any man who doesn’t meet this requirement is unfit for constabulary work.
There’s no question – the AR-15 doesn’t look like your daddy’s deer rifle. Of course, the Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle your granddad used doesn’t look anything like his father’s Hawken, either.
However, we see progress all around us. The smartphone is nothing like the rotary phones I grew up with, and if my grandpa stepped in my pickup truck, he’d think it was a spaceship.
The American hunter is experiencing this same thrust into the 21st century. While it might not have the lure, feel and warmth of walnut and blued steel, performance matters over nostalgia. I’m not suggesting you trade in your old .30-30 on an AR, or regulate your bolt rifle to the closet for all eternity. What I hope you will do is consider the many factors that make the AR-15, and its bigger brother the AR-10, ideal for deer hunting.
We’re living in a brave new world and the AR is the hunting rifle of the new millennium – and here’s why.
He goes on to describe a number of things my readers already know about the AR that make it a good choice, including man-machine interface, modularity and adjustability, reliability, etc. Then there is this.
There does exist more powerful options for those who demand it. Nine of the 41 states permitting centerfire rifles for deer hunting prohibit the use of the .223 Remington. If you hunt in one of those states, the 6.8 SPC or .300 Blackout are an option, as is the new .25-45 Sharps, which duplicates the performance of the old .250 Savage. If you want to stretch your range or just think you need more power, you can step up to an AR-10 and choose a cartridge like the .243 Winchester, 6.5 Creedmoor, .308 Winchester, and in some cases even magnum cartridges.
The semi-automatic AR-15s that shoot anything but the 5.56/.223 or 300 Blackout are non-existent to my knowledge, and the AR-10s that shoot anything else can be very pricey (except for .308). Or in other words, designer cartridge black guns are very expensive – even the AR style bolt action guns.
But I do like the idea of the 300 Blackout, where I can swap out an upper receiver quickly and easily and have a larger round, slightly slower muzzle velocity, but better long range ballistics than the 5.56/.223 (while I would also assert than the 5.56/.223 is ideal for many situations that don’t suit the 300 Blackout).
So in summary I would say to the old time hunters with puzzled looks at the kids bringing out the new fangled black guns, you need to welcome them and perhaps even learn something. They are carrying on a proud tradition. To the Fudds who refuse to accept it, I would say get over it. Your opinions don’t matter.
But here is a word of caution for the AR hunters. Know you rifle, know your round, and know your limitations. Make ethical shots. Only make ethical shots.
Incumbent Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, target of the Obama Justice Department for his stand against the administration’s goal of culturally terraforming the Republic through illegal “immigration,” has been defeated in his bid for reelection by challenger Paul Penzone. Actually, it might be more accurate to say Arpaio was defeated by “dual citizen” Hungarian-American George Soros.
That’s because globalist billionaire Soros, a proponent of reshaping the world to his will, spent $2M on ads and mailers to defeat Arpaio …
Read the rest here. I have two thoughts. First of all, Soros is a wicked man who has destroyed the currencies of entire nations in order to turn a profit. He meddles in the affairs of countries like a cat playing with a mouse, and he ought to be arrested for his criminality. Or if his actions aren’t criminal, they should be. There is no sympathy for Soros here, and I’ll celebrate with a glass of good wine the day he passes from here to hell when he breathes his last breath.
But in addition to blaming Soros, I blame the voters who don’t know enough or don’t care to know what they’re doing (or prefer wicked government). We get the government we ask for, and throwing out a man who is arguably the best Sheriff in America (but Sheriff Chuck Wright is a pretty stand-up guy too) is not only stupid but will bear long term consequences. Maricopa County might just regret this decision, and I strongly suspect they will. How sad for you.
This subreddit thread, while being a complicated read, full of surprises and ins and outs, with caveat, qualifier and stipulations, demonstrates that Google appears to be actively removing “spirit cooking” conversation and censoring search results. As I said, the issue is complicated and you can study this discussion thread yourself, and to be fair, the allegation is also directed at Reddit, not just Google.
Now, I’ve always had a good working relationship with Google, and I truly hope that continues. I have always gotten good service from you, and I have made good use of your search engine. But I see that Google has taken steps to censor news and views based on political proclivities.
Google plans to prohibit fake-news websites from using its ad-selling software, a move that could crimp revenue at those sites.
Google said Monday that it is updating its policies to ban Google ads being placed “on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose” of the website. The policy would include sites that distribute false news, a Google spokeswoman said.
[ … ]
Google has long prohibited AdSense from being used on sites that promote hate speech or include pornography and violent content. Its policies previously didn’t include language about sites that spread false content. A spokeswoman said the change to the policy was imminent, and that it follows existing Google policies that ban advertisements that misrepresent what they are marketing.
Oh dear. This is a bad move for Google. Listen to me, on the outside chance that there are any Google executives or high level managers who are reading this, this is a very, very bad move on your part. This isn’t something you want to happen. Don’t test these waters. This is your Bermuda triangle.
As I was reading from one commenter at one subreddit, “We are now the new underground.” You see, the cool kids already think you guys are a bunch of gray hairs, and telling them you’re going to get into bed with the establishment will be the last straw. You will look back and regret getting into bed with the establishment by censoring sites.
This is how it’s going to work. You won’t really get to make this decision – the consumers will. They will tell you by their patronage whether they approve of your behavior. I hadn’t said anything about it, but using your tool Google Analytics, I have been fairly closely watching sources of my traffic over the last year or two.
I am beginning to get a non-trivial amount of traffic from Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. I haven’t changed. My coverage and commentary hasn’t changed. Google hasn’t changed much over the last year. What has changed is that people are beginning to use other search engines, and Facebook stock is dropping like a rock.
You would do well to consider these things. You don’t want the “cool kids” to think of you as another arm of the fedgov. The cool kids run things around here.
Facebook swayed the presidential election — but he acknowledged that the social networking site has work to do when it comes to hoaxes on the platform.
The Facebook CEO wrote a post on his page Saturday regarding the site’s role in this year’s election after people began blaming Facebook for allowing fake news to be distributed on the site, perhaps contributing to Donald Trump’s surprising victory.
“Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” he said.
But after continued backlash, Zuckerberg took to Facebook to share his thoughts on the site’s role in disseminating news, writing that the company will “continue to work on this to improve further” but must do so cautiously in order to avoid bias. Identifying what’s true and what’s not is “complicated,” he said, and even mainstream news can get it wrong sometimes.
The 2016 presidential campaign is finally, mercifully, nearing its completion, but there’s still time for a little more absurdity. Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in the Washington DC neighborhood of Chevy Chase, is much more than a pizzeria. It’s the center of a Clinton-operated sex ring, according to alt-right conspiracy theorists on Reddit, 4Chan, and across the rest of the internet.
The title of the article is “Internet Crazies Think this DC Pizzeria Is The Center Of A Clinton Sex Ring.” Crazy, you are. Not just that, you’re an internet crazy. I suppose that’s worse, but I’m not sure.
Of course, there is this with which to contend. One might ask what kind of “family friendly” pizzeria (as it’s advertised) has drag shows (Caution: NSFW).
And remember that Mark Zuckerberg wants to figure out what’s true and fake news so they can censor it from Facebook. I no longer have a Facebook account, having deleted it long ago.
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump — who said he has a concealed carry permit — called for the expansion of gun rights Friday, including making those permits applicable nationwide.
In a position paper published on his website Friday afternoon, Trump called for the elimination of gun and magazine bans, labeling them a “total failure.”
“Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own,” Trump wrote.
[ … ]
Trump said in the paper he has a concealed carry permit. The permits, which are issued by states, should be valid nationwide like a driver’s license, Trump said.
“If we can do that for driving — which is a privilege, not a right — then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege,” Trump said.
[ … ]
Trump said the current background check system needs to be overhauled because “very few criminals are stupid enough to try and pass a background check” and get their guns illegally. Trump said that criminal and mental health records also must be included in background checks.
Well, health records were a feature of my CHP, but I object because (a) this is still a government permission slip, and (b) I still claim [rightly] that mental health maladies have nothing to do with propensity to violence.
But for the time being, I’ll take what I can get. Of the possible revisions to the federal law and code on guns, I am most in favor of the following.
First, a national carry law.
Second, removal of the SBR from the NFA items list.
Third, removal of suppressors from the NFA items list.
A powerful south Florida state senator who repeatedly sidelined popular gun rights legislation lost his seat Tuesday, opening the door for campus carry and open carry in the Sunshine State.
Florida State Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami, chairs the Senate Criminal Justice Committee and in 2015 refused to hold hearings on a bill to allow legal concealed carry on public colleges and universities. Diaz de la Portilla was also a fly in the ointment when it came to derailing an emergency concealed carry bill the year before and in 2016 was key in killing bills on campus carry and open carry, refusing to even meet with advocates.
However, even though he was supported by a $85,000 ad campaign paid for by Everytown, state Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez, a Democrat, beat Diaz de la Portilla in this week’s election.
While the loss of his seat was balanced out in the Senate by Democratic Sen. Dwight Bullard’s defeat by Republican Rep. Frank Artiles, sustaining the GOP with a 25-15 majority in the chamber, gun rights advocates argue the vanquished lawmaker simply reaped what he sowed.
“Senator Diaz de la Portilla broke is word,” Marion Hammer, executive director of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida and a former National Rifle Association president, told Guns.com Wednesday. “He betrayed gun owners and bragged about it. People know not to trust a man who not only breaks his word but then brags about being deceitful. He engineered his own defeat.”
Well good. We had discussed this particular politician and his cocky arrogance before. I’m glad he’s down for the count. Remember when we issued the beat-down to S.C. State Senator Larry Martin? Yep, he went down too. His replacement, whomever that is, would do well to remember Larry’s fate. We’ll do the same thing to him … and the next guy … and the next guy … until we get what we want.
The other thing we saw Tuesday is that Astroturf-funded state measures are the wave of the near future. The formula: Pick a “blue” state; throw in a ton of money from New York City and Silicon Valley; hire the best propagandists money can buy; rely on media allies to amplify the signal and demonize gun owners; spook the useful idiot herd; and steamroll over grassroots volunteers who enjoy neither the money, the media savvy, the contacts nor the reach.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
That’s what happened in California. Proposition 63 passed:
The initiative outlaws the possession of ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, requires background checks for people buying bullets …
I detest that terrible state for what they are doing to gun owners. David rightly points to the need for state and local activism in addition to what we accomplished at the national level.
But I have to admit that I am of two minds on this and I welcome your thoughts on this as well. Lee made significant errors at Gettysburg. He didn’t listen to the counsel of his own generals, he occupied the low ground, he began the battle too late, he shouldn’t have been so far from home to begin with, and he used antiquated tactics, techniques and procedures to prosecute the battle. He should have moved his forces in the middle of the night in order to prevent hardened formations from developing and attacked at or even before dawn. Instead, he marched his forces into a killing field after two thirds of the day was gone.
We have to be thinking men and women. I don’t want to give the gun controllers one inch, and I know the NRA has taken up this case for California. But at some point we have to recognize the need to retreat, reform, and ensconce in a free state. Why do gun owners still live in California?
Is California worth saving? I’m asking the readers. Is it worth spending effort on that place?
These are two very instructive videos, the first one fairly well known, but the second in my opinion is much more useful (watch them both, I understand that one has to build upon the other). I encourage them to continue this series on tips.
I do have one comment on the first video. Remember that the thumb of the left hand (if you’re a right handed shooter) must be low enough on the frame that you avoid interaction with the slide. Most of us have had our thumb get caught in between the slide and the frame as the slide cycles. That’s a horrible pinch point and you have to avoid it while also stabilizing the gun mainly with the left hand. If you get caught in that pinch point, that’s a big yeooow!!
Election night was an interesting thing, yes? It was an enlightening thing to watch neocons George Will and Charles Krauthammer lament the passing of true conservatism, as if conservatism = corporatism. The American worker is smart enough to know that he is competing with workers who don’t live under the same EPA and OSHA regulations as he does, and even a hit dog is smart enough to know if you accidentally or intentionally kicked him. The workers are smarter than the neocons give them credit (another way of saying it is that Will and Krauthammer’s disdain for the intelligence level of the American worker is on full display by even suggesting that they don’t understand what true conservatism is). It was also a wonderful thing to see the collectivists weep.
My former Marine Daniel was out and about today and was listening to liberals wail on the uneducated, mean Christians who voted for Trump. Mean, we are. Just mean. Mean enough that this person has never met anybody meaner than Christians. Daniel interrupted and said, “You know, that’s funny. The meanest people I’ve ever met were Iraqi and Syrian Muslims. Have you ever seen the body of a man who was literally skinned while he was still alive?” The collectivists are smarter than we are, know more than we do, are educated beyond comprehension, want to take our money, want to redistribute it according to their own dictates, tell us where to live, how to live, what do to, where to do it, and what to think. And Christians are the ones being mean. In reality, Christians see the government as no more a legitimate power to enact tyrannical laws than Russia has a right to boss the Ukrainians around.
Many collectivists, and even some on the right, are too stolid to understand that as long as you don’t want to murder infants or follow my grandchildren into the bathroom, if you want the free exercise of your legitimate rights, I’m your best friend and biggest ally, because being Christian is the exact antithesis of being a statist. If you want small government, we’re your folk. Christians voted for Trump because of the horror of the alternative. The MSM media couldn’t come to grips with this, and their own disdain for religious voters was on full display in their assumption that social issues exclusively define the religious right. Trump voters of all stripes were insulted on election night, and yet the election was still a rebuke to political correctness, government run health care, meddling in the affairs of other nations, and corruption from the highest levels of government to the lowest. My son Joseph in Travis County, Texas, tells me that the progressives there are savaging Trump voters as ignorant hillbillies. Well, if it takes courses in the liberal arts to be smart, I’ll stick with my differential equations any day. As to being a hillbilly, some of the best men I know could be identified as such. I consider it an honor to be named among them.
The election of Donald J. Trump to the office of president of the U.S. is a good thing compared to the only other alternative. I claimed that it would be, and it will be. Let’s rehearse for a moment what we could have been facing.
First of all, I have linked and commented on the evils of The Clinton Foundation, John Podesta and his ring of pedophiles, and how the Clinton’s are at the epicenter of this abominable, wicked cabal. But just for good measure, I’ll do it again. This Reddit link documents the wickedness of The Clinton Foundation, this Reddit link documents the first of many such threads at Reddit on Podesta and his ring of child rapists, and this Reddit link follows up the initial thread with more details concerning the expanse of this child molestation.
It’s awful reading, and if the country had a soul left we would march on their homes, remove them and hang them all in the public square. Another one of the many things we learned in this election is that the MSM is way past dead, and a few tens of thousands of Redditors with computers, video cameras, time and motivation, can do a better job of journalism and investigation that the MSM and the FBI put together. They can literally take down the most powerful and corrupt political machine in world history, the Clinton Foundation.
But it isn’t just the illegalities and immoralities associated with this horrible reality that you should consider. Take for example this talk that Hillary gave not too long ago.
Let me explain what she’s saying to the crowd in pseudo-coded language so that bored listeners won’t understand it. She has gone on record saying she will destroy the SCOTUS decision in Citizens United in order to control the narrative. She believes your views must change. They must change. It isn’t just your practices or your actions. Your very views must change. To wit, she will use the power of the law to force compliance with her views.
This includes churches. She has no problem forcing churches to provide abortion coverage in health care, and presumably under the fairness doctrine she would have no problem forcing the church to hire atheists or Planned Parenthood operatives. After all, everyone deserves equal time, even at church. Presumably also, blogs and alternative media would face the same sort of requirements under the fairness doctrine, which the FCC has hinted at for quite some time now. I had strongly considered simply shutting down this web site if such things came to pass. I don’t need it. I won’t give equal time to gun controllers. Were preachers prepared to shut up about things with which they disagree? Or perhaps go to prison? Were blogs, news outlets and commenters prepared to give equal time to detractors?
Finally in this truncated list of awful things, Hillary would have backed it all up with multiple SCOTUS appointments to firmly ensconce this all into legal precedent. The doctrine of stare decisis would have been the ammunition the progressive senators needed to keep out any justices who would reverse such awful rulings.
This isn’t all the damage she could have done. She would have gone after semi-automatic weapons, enacted a magazine ban, required licensure for ammunition purchases, forbid person-to-person sales, and the list goes on.
But as I said before, electing Trump isn’t the end of our problems. We are still a nation whose economic system is based entirely on debt, with unfunded liabilities large enough to sink the entire world economy, and a nation deeply divided over ideology. Half of the nation looked at Hillary’s predation, corruption, pedophilia and vulgarity and decided to vote for her anyway. Let that wash over you again. Half of the country is committed to communism, and doesn’t care if that means killing a few or more people or the election of corrupt leaders.
I find my world and life view in the Scriptures, others elsewhere. But make no mistake about it, your worldview dictates how you see things. It colors your world like lenses change your perception. You may think your right to own weapons emanates from the second amendment. I do not and couldn’t possibly care less about this amendment except as it pertains to being a covenant, the violation of which is grounds for permanent separation. The progressives think that a piece of paper defines my rights, and that they can change it as they see fit to conform to their plans for social engineering.
And as regards to the constitution, I find it somewhere between slightly amusing and pitiful that there are those who talk of a constitutional convention, or even a complete rewrite of said document, as amelioration for the tyranny of recent years – as if a new document can persuade, coerce or compel men who haven’t followed it in the past to follow it in the future.
The problem isn’t with the constitution, it isn’t with the men who wrote it, and it isn’t with the difficulty of forging a new agreement or covenant. John Adams said “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In the main, this is no longer a moral and religious nation.
And to quote a former friend and pastor, “The heart of the problem is the problem with the heart.” That won’t be corrected by new documents, new agreements, or new politicians. It needs a different remedy. With all due respect to Donald Trump and his finely tuned political sensibilities, jobs for everyone won’t fix our problems. Cambodians had jobs at the height of the killing fields under Pol Pot’s regime. Until the ideological divide is repaired, there will be no peace. America is too divided to be at peace.
But there is much to be gained from having been through this exercise. First of all, we have more time, and will have a supreme court that to a greater degree will recognize our liberties more than if Hillary had been elected. Second, this has been a hair-burning, gut-wrenching drill. How did you perform? Do you have enough guns and ammunition? Do you have only range ammunition or do you have fighting rounds too (M855 for your long guns and PD rounds for your handguns)? How much have you trained recently?
Do you have enough food prepared and put away, and enough water or purification capabilities? Have you had the necessary conversations with neighbors and made plans with them yet? How about fungible cash on hand? I recently moved out of a larger city into a much smaller community about a year and a half ago, and I have made effort to learn the individuals, learn their likes and dislikes, and even learn something about the world and life views of each of them so that when the time comes, I know what I need to about the people around me.
It was worth doing whatever you could to prevent the demon-worshiper and her band of occultists and child rapists from becoming even more powerful, even if the new president does absolutely nothing of import and fulfills none of his promises. But the drill itself was difficult because it was real. It just didn’t end as badly as it could have.
I appreciate having the time to prepare better. I intend to use it wisely.
