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]
Sanders’ idea of the “middle” would also ban semi-automatic, detachable magazine-fed rifles–popularly, if inaccurately, referred to as “assault weapons”–and the “high capacity” (gun ban zealot-speak for “standard capacity”) magazines that feed them. This is the “middle”? Sending people to prison for buying the most popular class of centerfire rifles in America is his idea of respecting the rights of gun owners? Prison time for buying an 11-round magazine is the “compromise” he wants to sell us? Outlawing the most useful arms for defense of one’s home, one’s life, one’s family, and one’s liberty is part of the give-and-take he proposes?
Here’s the key. He is “proposing” it. When hundreds of thousands perished attempting to enforce such a ban, he would have to reverse course. The mistake they make is assuming that we will go quietly into the night and give up our rights. There isn’t the slightest chance of that happening.
It would help if we knew what protections equivalent to those provided in a jury trial that will provide. Specifically, will decisions rely on those who may have biases of their own, as can currently be the case, with ATF’s “clarifying the term ‘adjudicated as a mental defective’ to mean a determination by a court, board, commission or other lawful authority,” and with some states applying even broader “standards”?
Yea, but it would help even more if Cornyn were to fall off the face of the earth.
The latest on the sex and death cult called Islam. Well, it’ll keep happening until someone puts a .45 230 grain fat boy into their belly and watches them bleed out. And then does it to all his buddies too.
The U.S. Marine Corps is sticking with its Vietnam-era, M40 sniper rifle series, despite complaints from scout snipers who say they need the modern, longer-range weapons used by special-ops snipers.
Marine scout snipers are considered to be among the best snipers in the world, but many are frustrated at the limitations of the current M40A5 sniper rifle. The A5 is based on the Remington M700 short-action design that’s chambered for 7.62x51mm NATO, like the original M40 Marines used in Vietnam.
Seasoned scout snipers are deadly accurate with the A5 out to 1,000 meters.
Elite special operations units use sniper rifles chambered in more potent calibers such as .338 Lapua Magnum, a round that allows snipers to reach out to 1,600 meters.
U.S. Special Operations Command is currently in the final stage of selecting its new Precision Sniper Rifle for all of its sniper teams. USSOCOM awarded contracts to Remington Defense and another company in 2013 to make two different versions of the PSR – a multi-caliber sniper rifle that allows operators to choose .338 Lapua Magnum, .300 Winchester Magnum and 7.62mm NATO by simply changing barrels assemblies.
The U.S. Army has watched the PSR program, but for now, it is sticking with its Remington M2010 sniper rifle chambered for .300 Win. Mag., a round that allows snipers to engage enemy targets out to 1,200 meters.
Currently, only the most elite Army and Navy special operations units use the MK21 Precision Sniper Rifle chambered for .338 Lapua Magnum.
The Corps will be upgrading the fifty-year-old M40 to the A6 version, which appears to be little more than a stock upgrade. Don’t get me wrong; the M40A6 will be a fine platform for inside 1,000 meters, against unarmored targets.
But we simply don’t live in a world where that is is “enough gun” for either anti-material or anti-personnel use, now that so many of our opponents are issuing body armor that can stop the 7.62 NATO round at point-blank range, much less at preferred sniping distances.
Why are the Marines being stuck with using the same short-action cartridge in a military sniping landscape now dominated by magnum-class cartridges?
Money.
Factory match-grade ammunition for the 7.62 NATO/.308 Winchester family is cheap to manufacture, and the military already has tons of it contracted. Upgrading the M40A6 to even another short-action cartridge with better range and down performance such as the 6.5 Creedmoor would cost more than the meager Corps budget allows. Upgrading to a .338 Lapua Magnum, where both the gun and the ammunition cost more?
[ … ]
But snipers only destroy enemy soldiers and equipment, wreck their morale, cripple their battlefield leadership, and take out key infrastructure while providing a protective overwatch for our Marines on the ground and vital real-time intelligence for our commanders. They don’t create post-retirement jobs for generals, nor line the pocket of defense contractors, or contribute to the reelections of politicians.
The Marines on the ground will be forced make do, as they always have, with outdated equipment.
Thanks, Congress.
And of course, that’s just how the Marine Corps wants you to think about the issue. Thanks Congress! The problem is that this isn’t the whole story. When the U.S. Marine Corps deployed the 25th MEU to the Persian Gulf in 2008, they deployed several Scout Snipers, one of whom I know. He deployed with a .50 “Sasser.” The Marine Corps armory is full of a broad array of weapons, including not only the .308 rifle for DMs, but the .50 Barrett as well. If a Scout Sniper is qualified to the .50 and chooses to, he can carry it on deployments. Be warned. It has to be taken apart and carried on your back, but you can carry it.
As for the venerable .308, Carlos Hathcock made many of his kills with a .30-06 Winchester Model 70 (albeit not a .308). and only used a .50 (modified M2 for his longest kills). Considering the traditional tactics of stalking, shooting and egress, Hathcock is still the most prolific sniper in U.S. history. The ballistics data shows that there isn’t much difference between the .308 and .30-06, and if I was going to chose a new round to shoot as a Scout Sniper (and it wasn’t going to be the .50), I would probably choose the .300 Win Mag. Of course, none of these compare to the effect of the .50 in range, power or capability against armor. Suffice it to say that if the Marine Scout snipers cannot accomplish kills with their .308 rifles, they can with the .50, and they certainly have access to the large caliber rifle if they want it and are qualified to it. They aren’t left wanting when it comes to firepower.
As for the Marine Corps’s decision to train exclusively with the M4 rather than the M16A2 or M16A4 (via Mike Vanderboegh), it must be remembered that the difference between them in muzzle velocity is negligible. In fact, I cannot imagine having deployed my son to Fallujah, Iraq, in 2007, with anything but his SAW or M4 (he was a SAW gunner who sometimes used an M4 if the specific mission called for it). Again, I cannot imagine him having to swing an M1A or M14 through a doorway clearing rooms. It would have been a reprehensible thing to issue something like M1As or AR-10s for CQB (the .308 being much slower to recover sight picture).
The Marine Corps always makes the decisions they need to make to support the mission. When I deployed my son in 2007, his entire Battalion went with M4s, SAWs, M4s with M203 mounted, or Scout Sniper rifles of some sort. The M16s were nowhere to be found. So what’s all this stuff about the Marine Corps leaving the M16 for M4s?
It’s propaganda. The Marine Corps want everyone to think that they are the poorest of the poor, when in reality they threw billions away on the ridiculous EFV (Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle), pretending that we are actually going to perform a land invasion from the sea with full armor capabilities like we did in the South Pacific. They Marine Corps has wasted enough money (every MEU is a waste of money) that you shouldn’t feel too sorry for them when it comes to sniper rifles, Owens and his views notwithstanding.
When it comes to the M1A, you should spend some time watching these M1A torture tests.
Finally, you’ve seen about AR-15s in sand, mud and operating bone dry. For the final twist, see them operate with Twinkies installed inside the moving parts. Yes, Twinkies.
Backed by the National Rifle Association, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican leader is introducing legislation that would reward states for sending more information about residents with serious mental problems to the federal background check system for firearms purchasers.
[ … ]
Jennifer Baker, spokeswoman for NRA legislative affairs, said the bill took “meaningful steps toward fixing the system and making our communities safer.”
By law, federally licensed gun dealers must conduct background checks on firearms purchasers.
Among those barred from buying guns are people legally determined to be “mentally defective” and those who have been committed to mental institutions. But states are not required to send those records to the background check system, which is run by the FBI, and its database is spotty.
Cornyn’s bill would increase grants under the government’s main law enforcement program by up to 5 percent for states that send the federal system at least 90 percent of their records on people with serious mental problems. States providing less data could see their grants from a broad range of justice programs penalized by the same amounts, at the attorney general’s discretion.
This asshole has tried this before. But I don’t believe for one moment – I am not even tempted for a nanosecond to believe that maybe, maybe, just perhaps there is some way – that this will have any effect on crime whatsoever. And when is the last time you witnessed empowerment of the federal government with anything have good consequences or result in greater recognition of rights?
We’ve discussed how mental health (however that happens to be defined at the moment) has no correlation at all to violent behavior, and how mental health professionals simply cannot use their pseudoscience to be a predictor of violent behavior. We’ve shown this again, and again, and again, and again.
Furthermore, I’ve warned former military never to engage the services of so-called mental health professionals. You’ll never get your gun ownership rights recognized again. As for those who believe in the so-called mental health “sciences,” you may as well believe in voodoo and bow down and worship totem poles or cut your wrists like the prophets of Baal for a god who isn’t there. The mental health “sciences” is the refuge of collectivists and scoundrels.
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.
Crime happens because of evil, not “mental health” issues. As for Cornyn, you see what voting GOP has done for you, just in case you had any last thoughts about voting your way out of this mess. As for the NRA, does it surprise anyone that they support this bastard of a bill?
Earlier this year, the International Business Times ran this bewildering headline: “El Salvador to Become Deadliest Peace-Time Country in the World.” It’s an odd turn of phrase; something about it doesn’t quite scan. Perhaps, given the context of life in El Salvador, it’s best to reëxamine what we mean when we say “peacetime.” Consider this: since the collapse, early last year, of the truce between local gangs and the government, the murder rate has risen by a staggering fifty-two per cent. Or this: El Salvador, with a population of a little over 6.3 million, registered more than six hundred murders in May, the most since the end of the civil war. (For comparison: despite its reputation for violence, Chicago, with a little under half the population of El Salvador, had forty-eight murders that same month.) Or this: more than thirty-five police officers have been killed so far in 2015. Everyone has been touched, directly or indirectly, by the chaos, and Salvadorans of every social class have learned to cope with the constant sense of insecurity. One friend likened returning home from abroad to being splashed with boiling water—and he wasn’t referring to the heat. If this is peacetime, one shudders to think what a war would look like.
I was in San Salvador two weeks ago, when El Faro, a local online newspaper, published an explosive investigation into a killing at a farm just a few hours from the capital. The article was entitled “Police Massacre in San Blas,” and it re-creates, through eyewitness testimony, the examination of forensic and ballistic reports, and private social-media postings by police who were present, the events of March 26th of this year, when eight alleged members of the gang Mara Salvatrucha were killed at a coffee plantation.
[ … ]
I met with one of the authors of the story, Óscar Martínez, the night before it went live on the Web site. Óscar is best known in the United States for “The Beast,” his 2013 chronicle of life on the harrowing migrant trail through Mexico. He’s always a bit manic, but that night, Óscar seemed unusually jittery, even anxious. He and his co-authors were all preparing to leave the country the following morning, for their own safety. This extraordinary measure says a lot about the kind of backlash that El Faro was expecting. As the violence has increased, the debate about what exactly should be done about it has become even more poisonous. Thus far, President Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s populist response has been to disown the truce that held for the better part of two years, and instead confront the gangs directly. No politician wants to be seen as soft on the gangs, which are rightly seen as a scourge. The public, for the most part, supports this strategy. For El Faro to criticize the police is to risk being seen as defenders of the gangs that everyone despises. Óscar had already received death threats for an earlier story about police misconduct.
[ … ]
One young woman, soft-spoken, exceedingly polite, detailed her life in a gang-ridden neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital. It was one terrifying encounter after another, each delivering the same dispiriting lesson: she was helpless in the face of the gangs and their malevolent power. She had done everything she could to avoid them, and still they found ways to control her life. Her father was forced to pay extortion money to one of the gangs—she wouldn’t say which one. By the end of our conversation, she was almost weeping with fury. “I’m a Christian,” she told me, “but those people aren’t my brothers. I would burn them all.”
Fill in the blanks and read the rest at The New Yorker. Caught between brutal gangs and just as brutal police. And coming to a neighborhood near you, through open borders courtesy of the Democrats and the GOP. But hey. All of that cheap labor is the bomb.
I wouldn’t worry about purchasing guns and ammunition. The police will serve and protect you.
The shooting looked bad. But that is when the professor is at his best. A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket. The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead.
The driver was unarmed.
Taking the stand at a public inquest, William J. Lewinski, the psychology professor, explained that the officer had no choice but to act.
“In simple terms,” the district attorney in Portland, Ore., asked, “if I see the gun, I’m dead?”
“In simple terms, that’s it,” Dr. Lewinski replied.
When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Dr. Lewinski is often there to defend their actions. Among the most influential voices on the subject, he has testified in or consulted in nearly 200 cases over the last decade or so and has helped justify countless shootings around the country.
He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers on how to think differently about police shootings that might appear excessive.
[ … ]
Many policing experts are for hire, but Dr. Lewinski is unique in that he conducts his own research, trains officers and internal investigators, and testifies at trial. In the protests that have followed police shootings, demonstrators have often asked why officers are so rarely punished for shootings that seem unwarranted. Dr. Lewinski is part of the answer.
Dr. Lewinski said he was not trying to explain away every shooting. But when he testifies, it is almost always in defense of police shootings. Officers are his target audience — he publishes a newsletter on police use of force that he says has nearly one million subscribers — and his research was devised for them. “The science is based on trying to keep officers safe,” he said.
[ … ]
A former Minnesota State professor, he says his testimony and training are based on hard science, but his research has been roundly criticized by experts. An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work “pseudoscience.” The Justice Department denounced his findings as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.” Civil rights lawyers say he is selling dangerous ideas.
Hmm … let me see. He got his doctorate from a diploma mill (you do the research), engages in pseudoscience (which has as its stated outcome keeping cops “safe”), trains cops, always testifies in their defense, and by virtue of the fact that he is the one being called as an “expert” witness, becomes the one who is called to testify as an “expert” witness in future cases, a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy.
Yea. You know what else might become a self-fulfilling prophesy? People knowing that police are going to discharge weapons as a matter of first recourse, and then act accordingly.
A study of the growing Hispanic immigrant population declares that the country is on the verge of the “Latinization of the United States,” a “browning of America” that by 2050 will be 29 percent Latino — and politically influential.
Published in the authoritative journal “Ethnicities,” the immigration analysis by two California experts noted that while big states such as California and Florida are home to most Hispanics, there has been a recent growth surge exceeding 300 percent of mostly Mexicans to Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Arkansas.
[ … ]
“By the sheer force of numbers, the kinds of adults that Latino students become will dramatically shape the future history of this country, as the former white majority becomes a minority population, at least in terms of number,” said the study provided to Secrets. It sits behind a paywall.
“Latinos have become more than an electoral voting bloc, emerging as strategic actors in major processes of democratic social transformation,” they added.
Gosh. I sure am glad that this doesn’t effect SNAP payments, taxes, medical care, social security, emergency room protocol, or especially gun rights. The government is in charge, so I’m sure everything will be okay.
A Washington DC “Democrat media consulting firm” affiliated with Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (and a host of anti-gun politicians) is offering Oregon gun dealers $1,500 to allow them to film an on-location “public service announcement,” Oregon Firearms Federation announced Friday. The filmmakers need a gun store as a backdrop for an actor to tell viewers how “easy” it is to comply with form requirements …
Following the recent fatal shooting of four Marines and a sailor in Tennessee, Defense Secretary Ash Carter is ordering the military services to consider new policies that would enhance security for troops at home, including potentially arming more personnel.
In a memo released Thursday, Carter urged top military officials to “develop action plans to improve the security and force protection of DoD personnel.”
His memo noted that current Defense Department policy authorizes the arming of additional “qualified DoD personnel (not regularly engaged in law enforcement activities) based on the threat and the immediate need to protect DoD assets and lives.”
Carter also urged military officials to “consider any additional protection measures including changes to policy and procedures that protect our force against the evolving threat,” according to the memo.
Another key aspect of the “action plans” should be identifying ways to “improve off-installation site security, including practical physical security upgrades and procedural improvements.”
Carter’s memo also calls for a new assessment of “mass warning notification systems and regional alert systems” to identify any problems or gaps.
Well, perhaps. It isn’t clear that the DoD will authorize weapons in recruitment centers. They still work for the current administration, after all, and the administration is as anti-gun and anti-personal defense as any we’ve had in our history.
This whole debate reminds me of the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. It split the conservative community. Fight terrorists wherever they are, said some. Others, like me, said don’t ever allow the President or anyone else the authority to kill citizens. This power can be turned on gun owners and patriots of all stripes (or anyone else who happens to be out of vogue). The debate would be muted if we actually trusted the government.
For the record, I advocated allowing Marines to arm themselves with personal weapons, although not issuing arming orders for them on U.S. soil. This simple solution would, if adopted, solve all of the issues. But I also pointed out the current Marine Corps Commandant orders via a MARADMIN that prohibits even personal weapons in personal homes of Marines except under very strict conditions (which would prevent their actual use in an emergency).
This question of arming Marines is a fake problem created by the gun controllers (some of who live in the military), which has real world consequences. Solution: let the Marines arm themselves. They’ll do a fine job. They don’t need your help.
Retired Gen. Russel Honore’, Louisiana’s most well-known 21st Century military hero, said America is mired in a state of denial about its gun culture that’s harming the country.
“As a country we’re in a state of denial because we’ve confused the right to bear arms with the right to carry arms all the time anywhere or anyplace you want,” Honore’ told Gannett Louisiana on Monday. “We have to have a different kind of conversation in America and be prepared to speak about the politically unspeakable.”
Honore’ said the string of recent mass gun murders — culminating with the tragic movie theater shooting in Lafayette Thursday in which two victims died — should provide a wake up call.
“It breaks my heart to see that happen in my home state or anywhere in America,” he said. “We’ve got a problem in this country, and at some point the politicians have to get down into the community and find some answers to this problem.”
Honore’ had considered running for governor this fall but decided against making the race earlier this summer.
The retired army general, best known for his role leading the Hurricane Katrina recovery in New Orleans, said during his time in the military soldiers “were required to clear their weapons and turn them in as soon as they came in from the field.”
“The best place for weapons when you’re not in the field is to be locked up in the garrison,” Honore’ said. “Our biggest problem before Desert Storm was (soldiers) accidentally firing their weapons, and they’re trained.
“I’ve been around guns all my life, but when I was growing up they were locked in the cabinet unless you needed them for hunting.”
Honore’ also said he disagrees with those advocating for military men and women at recruitment offices to be armed. Some armed civilians have taken it upon themselves to stand guard at recruitment locations since the mass shooting at a Tennessee office this summer.
One such civilian accidentally fired a round at an Ohio recruitment office last week. Nobody was injured.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to arm military at the recruitment offices or to have civilians there with guns,” Honore’ said. “That’s the job of law enforcement. On our bases, yes, we guard our gates and our bases, but not at the recruitment offices.”
Field training with weapons owned by the armory and civilians with personal weapons. I think he is conflating very simply different issues. Moreover, if his Soldiers were “accidentally firing” their weapons, it was no accident (we’ve learned on the pages of TCJ that there are no accidents and that negligent discharge is a much better phrase), and they apparently weren’t well trained as he is claiming.
But his uneducated, simpleton ideas aside, take note of the claim. He is perhaps Louisiana’s most well known war hero of the 21st century. The Times-Picayune also has information on Honore.
“We’ve got to rethink and re-set our thoughts about guns,” said Honore who played a key role in post-Katrina recovery. “We have to focus less on ideology and more on practicality.”
Aside from the civil war he wants to start, there’s that assertion again: ” … who played a key role in the post-Katrina recovery.”
My intention was not only to learn this information (the merit of such knowledge is obvious), but use it to lead to other information, such as who issued the order to confiscate personal weapons from civilians post-Katrina? The courts slapped down such unconstitutional antics, but it was a long time before everyone recovered their weapons.
Who issued the arming orders for General Honore, and who ordered the general to confiscate weapons? Is this something he did of his own volition, or does the chain of command go yet higher in culpability?
General Honore knows something, and I have not yet given up on finding the truth, even though the government never intends to honor my request or federal law concerning the FOIA. And if the reporters who wrote all of this about the general cared about real reporting rather than just parroting collectivist talking points brought to them by the handlers, they would help me find the truth.
