Kurt Hofmann:

Ludicrous indeed, but one wonders if a Maryland police chief would have found it so ludicrous for a non-“Only One” to be similarly disarmed. The surprising–and somewhat disappointing–aspect of this is that judging by some gun rights advocates’ Facebook posts, Ikea’s actions were more offensive than other establishments’ “gun free zone” endeavors, by virtue of the fact that they dared disarm an “Only One.”

This correspondent would argue, on the other hand, that Ikea’s willingness to be consistent, and apply its “disarmed victim zone” rules to everyone, even those bedecked in the trappings of government authority, is the one thing they got right. Well, except for the fact that it didn’t last …

Here are a couple of the salient problems.  First of all, folks like Ikea don’t think enough about the moral implications of self defense.  Second, they don’t consider the legal implicatiosn of self defense.  Most people are too busy lapping up the scraps their government feeds them to  ponder things like the Supreme Court ruling in Tennessee Versus Garner.  The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement officers carry weapons for exactly the same reason as anyone else – for self defense.  They aren’t supposed to use them for any other reason.

So what Ikea is saying by recognizing law enforcement officers and their right to carry is that they have a right to self defense, but the rest of us don’t.  Consider that the next time you think about buying from Ikea.  Another report was filed by Emily Miller.  The D.C. police are getting new patrol rifles.

WASHINGTON – FOX 5 has learned that D.C. police are getting new, modern rifles. It is part of the department changes after the Navy Yard shooting last September.

The first officers who rushed into Navy Yard were First District officers — who only had old rifles too long to get through the doors and narrow cubicles where Aaron Alexis was hiding.

So special operations and other law enforcement agents took over the chase with shorter, modern rifles. But we have now learned that all police officers will be armed with the new rifles.

[ … ]

“If I come in with this rifle, it’s too long so I can’t enter the door without lowering the barrel, so it puts me at a tremendous disadvantage,” said Harris. “With the M4, it’s a much shorter weapon. I can keep the muzzle up, I’m on point and I can clear the room.”

So, D.C. police decided to replace the old guns with brand new rifles straight from the manufacturer. No more hand-me-downs.

According to Colt, the Metropolitan Police Department bought the model LE6920 rifles in February. They are 5.56 caliber and can only fire semi-auto.

Police have started training with them, but have not put it in the field yet.

The new Colt rifle which the Metropolitan Police Department bought is based on the M4.

I don’t buy the notion that a few inches of barrel length made any difference.  My son cleared rooms in Fallujah with his SAW.  The D.C. police are just incompetent.  But I also don’t begrudge them the right to have good patrol rifles, as long as they use them as discretely as I use mine (when I open carry, I don’t carry a long gun, and I wouldn’t buy Colt).  Also, without honoring the right to privacy and safety in our own homes from SWAT invasions, they should have all of their guns taken away from them like the out-of-control children they are.  But I do indeed begrudge them the right to have something that others cannot.  Oh, and a quick note to Emily.  5.56 mm is not 5.56 caliber (caliber is by definition the diameter measurement in inches).

In another article David Codrea notes a two-fisted approach by one manufacturer.

Well, while the right hand is providing American riflemen (albeit well-heeled ones, if you take a look at some of their prices) a chance to apply for one of their limited supply systems, the left hand is urging the government to adopt its patented technology for the Holy Grail behind the ultimate purpose of so-called “smart guns,” the ability for “authorities” to turn them off. Automatically.  “TrackingPoint patents technique to disable guns near schools and ‘gun free zones…’”

They can keep their gadgetry.  I like the idea of learning to use a rifle scope old-school.  On one hand, I’m glad this came up so that we know.  On the other hand, may the makers of Tracking Point live with bed bugs, lice and scabies, and may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits.

Related: Open Letter To COSTCO

The Small Wars Journal has a tradition of publishing white papers and opinion pieces on the relationship of counterinsurgency tactics to community policing, even advocating the use of regular U.S. military forces to couple with police in the States, and the latest is entitled Counterinsurgency and Community Policing: More Alike than Meets the Eye.

I won’t duplicate what ends up being a very long article here, since you can study it yourself.  But I will make several observations.  The first has to do with his MOS.  By training and trade the author is a LEO who apparently deployed as a Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer.  He wasn’t the pointy end of the spear as was my son and many others.

What you don’t get is the perspective of someone who had to engage in room clearing operations against people shouting Allahu Akbar, chopped boats and people to pieces with an M2 aboard a helicopter, who were boating across the Euphrates River after you had locked down Fallujah, or who constructed your FOB on your back handing sandbags over your head to the next Marine while you were being shot at.

I’m not recounting this brief history for fun – it wasn’t for my son.  I am mentioning it in order to explain what you do mainly get with this paper: happy face COIN, or the mythical story told to the masses in order to get them to support state-building across the pond.

The author sets up the article with this:

The term counterinsurgency has long been associated with military operations and soldiers.  It conjures visions of violent urban combat action, population relocation, social engineering, and a tool for dealing with foreign political emergencies.  These visions are not inaccurate as they represent some of the methods and strategies used in COIN operations throughout history.  But these methods and strategies do not encapsulate all aspects of COIN.  As COIN operations shift from combat to peace keeping and community-building they begin to resemble traditional community policing activities in which the public servant controls through education and raising ethical stature in communities.  It is in the transitional phase – when the soldier transitions into the policeman and community facilitator – that COIN and Community policing share the same strategies and tactics.

Part of the happy face is in his presentation of typical policing:

COIN is typically employed by uniformed soldiers, armed with assault rifles and supported by light and heavy armored vehicles and tactical air assets.  Community Policing is conducted by uniformed police officers, representatives of the community they serve, with a badge, a holstered pistol, and a number of less-lethal tools.  In COIN, soldiers control population movement and space through use of roadblocks, cordoning off, house to house search and clearing operations, and patrolling villages and neighborhoods in HUMVEE’s and Armored Personnel Carriers.  In Community Policing, police patrol neighborhoods in police cars, bicycles, foot beats, and horses, people are free to move about and there is no outward show of force.

He is intentionally ignoring the militarization of police in America, or perhaps better yet, he is attempting to show both the militarized presence and the so-called population-centric community building he believes police do.

He says “COIN and Community Policing are intrinsically linked,” and then makes this pregnant statement:

In addition to the non-kinetic imperatives mentioned above, similarities can also be found in traditional policing activities such as crime prevention, traffic control, crime investigation, and overall public safety.  In COIN operations powers of arrest are generally left to the police organizations of the host nation.  However, soldiers stand side by side with their host nation counterpart and provide assistance in the form of identifying and, when necessary, arresting insurgents.

As a successful COIN operation, he uses the British experience in Northern Ireland where British troops coupled with local police.  But it is important to get the thrust of his article in the alignment, or nexus, of tactics to achieve the overall strategy.  He ends with this:

Ultimately, the desired end state is a strategy that is seen as legitimate, employing social, political, economic, and security measures that meet the population’s needs, including adequate mechanisms to address the grievances that may have fueled support of the insurgency.

In his world, police become social planners, and employ various tools to meet the population’s needs and address grievances, while at the same time coupling with a more militarized presence to tamp down violence and insurgency.

This thinking isn’t foreign to American police.  They have been playing social planner and policy-maker for decades now, making better sense of the recent blame the Chicago chief of police laid with the availability of guns for violence in Chicago.

But heretofore, this thinking i.e., alignment of military with local police, was indeed foreign to military strategists.  With papers like this it is becoming more commonplace and when something becomes commonplace and worthy of consideration, it becomes easier to engage.

Take note of these things.  Not only are the police becoming more militarized, the armed forces is studying policy-making, trying to learn to employ the tools of social engineering and building human terrain systems, and talking about addressing grievances and meeting community needs.

It all continues a rich tradition of flirtation with treasonous theories at the SWJ.  After all, it worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan, why not try it in the United States?

Obviously I had let this issue slip my mind.  I lost attention to detail, a mistake I don’t like to make.  I should have cancelled my COSTCO membership when I found out that you wouldn’t let Erik Scott be – you had to call the police on him, ending with an unnecessary and thuggish cop shooting, and with Erik dead.  Do you feel good about that?  I hope not.  I hope that you feel responsible for it.

As I mentioned, I had let this slip my attention until today.  But David reminds me that you have been a busy bunch of folks.  First, you are removing D’Souza’s ‘America’ from the shelves.  Oh, I know that you’ve denied it has anything to do with your politics, but we both know that you’re lying.  Your co-founder is going to speak at the next DNC about his hero, Mr. Obama.  And my wife points out that you didn’t merely fail to make the book available, which she could have forgiven.  You made it available and then pulled it (wink … wink).  We all know what you meant to say by this action.

But then David reminds me that your policy is anti-gun.  My wife mainly does the shopping there, so I hadn’t thought much about it recently.  If I had wanted to carry inside COSTCO, I would have.  I couldn’t care less about your policy as it applies to me.  Your stupid policies won’t change my behavior one bit.  But I do want to reward those proprietors with whom I agree and punish those with whom I disagree.  You see, I have the ultimate power – that is, power over the purse.  I thought I would post my wife’s letter to you below, but before I do I wanted to mention one last thing.  I won’t patronize your store any more, but my AR-15 and those standard capacity magazines (what you might call “high capacity magazines”) sure look sexy in that gun safe you sold me, along with all of my other guns when I’m not shooting them or carrying them.  Let Mr. Obama know that you sold me a nice gun safe.

Now for my wife’s letter:

Dear Mr. Jelineck,

I have been a member of Costco since 2006 and I have always been a very satisfied customer.  However, I will not be renewing my membership.  Over the past few years I have observed how your political ideology has become more important to you than just simply supplying goods to a consumer like myself. I have always preferred Costco over Sam’s Club even though I have been aware of your political connection with the democratic party.  I have never let my political views get in the way of where I shopped until now. Your order to remove the book “America” from the shelves of your stores because you don’t like the subject matter is an act of controlling my right to “free speech” and I will not allow you to take away any of my constitutional rights.

Why couldn’t you just have agreed to disagree?

It is your store and you have the right to sell what you like but, in my opinion, your method of operating was deliberate.  You could have chosen not to sell the book at all but you waited until you had an audience so you could make your political statement.  Well, you have made your statement and I am making mine.

Publix is coming to my neck of the woods, and I like them better anyway.

As a followup to Dystopia On The Southern Border, we have this report from Katie Pavlich:

An internal Border Patrol executive summary obtained by Townhall confirms that at least 16 unaccompanied illegal minors (those under the age of 18, according to U.S. government policy), are members of the brutal El Salvadorian street gang Mara Salvatrucha—or MS-13.

Gang members left graffiti on the walls of the Nogales Border Patrol processing center, which suggested they had ties to the organization.

“Border Patrol Agents (BPAs) and Customs and Border Protection Officers (CBPOs), assigned to The Nogales Placement Center (NPC), discovered that 16 unaccompanied alien children (13 El Salvadoran males, two Guatelmalan males and one Honduran male) currently being held at the NPC are members of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). The MS-13 gang members admitted to their gang associations following a discovery of graffiti at the NPC.

You are buying guns and ammunition aren’t you?  You are making other preparations, aren’t you?

Recall what I previously said about Remington trigger issues?

Remington 700 models have always had trigger issues, and it isn’t at all apparent that this recall is the same one that has caused Remington such problems in the past.

[ … ]

The most comprehensive and damning indictment of Remington and its trigger problems to date is still this article from Billings Gazette.  See especially this evidence in the margins of the article, and this evidence, and this evidence, and the rest of the evidence.

The original article discusses “Senior Engineers” with Remington.  I’m particularly partial to this work title, and I am a registered professional engineer.  Are these folks registered as PEs with the state?  If not, why?  We are rightly concerned about roads, bridges and buildings, power plants and their proper design.  Why not guns, and why shouldn’t these engineers be registered?

If they are, has the issue of Remington and the apparent internal evidence ever come to light with the state board of registration?  Why would senior engineers ignore evidence of improper function of machines they designed and manufacture?  Did these engineers consider it malfeasance to ignore such evidence, and if they didn’t see it or didn’t know the evidence existed, why not?

We have many more questions than we have answers.  It has been this way for a very long time with Remington.

I’m an engineer.  I simply won’t tolerate bad designs or professional malfeasance.  And it looks like Remington is making good on their design.

The Remington Arms Co. has reached a nationwide settlement of claims that most of its Model 700 bolt-action hunting rifles have a defective trigger mechanism – a settlement likely to include the recall of millions of the popular firearm.

Attorneys for Remington and the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit against the company did not respond Monday to requests for comment on a “notice of settlement” filed last week in federal court in Missouri.

Yet Richard Barber, a Montana man who’s been saying for a dozen years that many of the Model 700 are defective and should be recalled, indicated Monday that a recall is part of the settlement.

“It does accomplish what I want to accomplish,” he told the Lee Newspapers State Bureau. “I guess it’s safe to say, it’s better late than never. …

“As a whole, (the settlement) represents the best interests of the public. It will save lives, it will save limbs.”

The lawsuit says more than 5 million Model 700 bolt-action rifles have been sold since 1962.

Barber’s 9-year-old son, Gus, was killed by a Model 700 rifle in a 2000 hunting accident in Montana. The family says the rifle fired when Barber’s wife, Barbara, released the safety as she prepared to unload the weapon. The bullet passed through a horse trailer and hit Gus, who was standing behind the trailer.

For more than a decade, Barber investigated the rifle’s trigger mechanism, compiled company internal documents and worked as a consultant on lawsuits from Model 700 owners whose rifle fired without the trigger being pulled.

He concluded that a defect in the Walker Fire Control on the trigger mechanism led to the incidents, sometimes causing the weapon to fire when the safety was released or the bolt was opened or closed.

The Walker Fire Control has been installed on Remington Model 700s and some other Remington rifle models since the 1940s. The company introduced a new fire-control mechanism, the X-Mark Pro, in 2006.

Barber, contacted by telephone Monday, declined to discuss details of the settlement, saying he doesn’t want to harm discussions still under way between the plaintiffs and the company.

The settlement notice, filed last Wednesday, is in a class-action lawsuit filed January 2013 in U.S. District Court in Missouri, by Ian Pollard, who purchased a Remington Model 700 rifle in 2000 in Belle, Mo.

Pollard’s lawsuit, filed against Remington and two affiliated companies, Sporting Goods Properties and E.I. DuPont, said his rifle had fired three times without him pulling the trigger, twice when the safety was released and once when the bolt was opened.

“Defendants have known since 1979 that at least 1 percent of all Model 700 rifles at that time would `trick,’ allowing them to fire unexpectedly without a trigger pull,” the suit said. “(Pollard) contends that this percentage is vastly understated and that all Model 700 rifles are subject to unexpected firing without a trigger pull.”

Pollard’s lawsuit asked the court to declare all Model 700 bolt-action rifles with a Walker Fire Control to be defective and to order Remington to recall those models. It also asked for compensatory and punitive damages against the company.

Last week’s notice said a settlement agreement will be submitted to U.S. District Court in Missouri by Oct. 30, after which the court will decide whether to approve it.

There are other steps to take for Remington to regain their lost loyalty, like relocating manufacturing South and out of union territory.

David Codrea:

The Students for Concealed Carry Foundation, teaming with Ohioans for Concealed Carry, filed a civil rights complaint against Ohio State University, the student group announced Monday in a press release outlining the case.

Hmm … let’s see, what does the Ohio Constitution say: The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security.  That should settle it right there.  It probably won’t, and that’s grounds for impeachment of whatever judge ignores the provisions of the moral law of the land.

Watch Mike Vanderboegh’s Independence Day speech.

LAPD helps Obama to create dystopia on the West coast.

Via Uncle, a concealed carrier shoots an attacker.  Of course, to hear the Chicago Police Chief tell it, guns are responsible for all of the violence they have in Chicago.  I guess the guns just decide when to shoot all by themselves.

Finally, I sure and glad that “the only ones” got the right back to carry inside Ikea.  After all, they are the only ones.

Menckenlite:

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.

And speaking of control freaks and their love for psychiatry, the State of South Carolina already drank the Kool Aid (probably because of communists like Senator Larry Martin).

A bill passed in May 2013 required state probate courts to report all cases where a person has been adjudicated mentally incompetent or involuntarily committed to a mental health facility. The reporting requirement began Aug. 1, 2013, and probate courts were given one year to report 10 years of backlogged cases.

With the Aug. 1 deadline swiftly approaching, Spartanburg County Probate Judge Ponda Caldwell said her office will not be able to comply.

“We are just doing what we can, as we can,” she said.

Of the estimated 9,000 mental health cases that had to be considered for reporting, Caldwell estimates there’s about 2,500 left to be reviewed. Not every case has to be reported, but Spartanburg County does not have the technology to sort the files digitally, making the task time-consuming and laborious.

“We have had to put physical hands on every file,” she said.

The mental health records are kept locked away in a small closet in the probate court. The documents are subject to federal laws pertaining to health care confidentiality, so Caldwell said she is very particular about who reviews the information. A trusted community volunteer was helping early in the process but had to stop because of family commitments. Since then, Caldwell herself has been handling the task, usually on weekends.

Oh, I’m sure this will work out real well, with no problems, no errors, and no overreach by the government.

Mike (who isn’t a gun guy at all):

A close reading of sources from the debates over the Bill of Rights makes clear that individual gun ownership represented the ability of citizens to protect and defend their political rights; rights to free speech, free assembly, due process and the like. But the argument for gun ownership advanced by the NRA today, Ollie North’s appeals to patriotism notwithstanding, is based on the alleged social value of guns to protect us against crime. The NRA would never argue that the Glock in my pocket should be used to stop cops from coming through the door, but they insist that the same Glock is my first line of defense when a bad guy breaks down that same door.

Waldman clearly understands that by using the Second Amendment to justify gun ownership as a defense against crime, the pro-gun community has successfully restated the history of the Second Amendment to buttress a contemporary social justification for owning guns. Neither will be readily undone as long as gun control advocates believe they can respond to this strategy by stating and restating the “facts.” Remember “it’s the economy, stupid”? Now “it’s the guns.”

I’m not sure whether Mike argues for or against his thesis, intentionally or accidentally, or even if Mike knows what he wants his thesis to be.

But assuming that he knows the second amendment is about being the surest defense against government tyranny – whether an army or its close cousin, a police state – if he has just figured that out, he can join the millions who already know that and intended it to be that way.

As for the NRA, they do what’s expedient, but Mike is stuck in a world in which large organizations develop talking points for idiots and the idiots vote the talking points.  The left operates that way, so they naturally assume that the rest of the world does as well.

But it doesn’t.  Katie Pavlich notes that at least half of the country believes ownership of a weapon is patriotic.  Try as they may like, the real intentions behind the second amendment cannot be hidden by the left, despite its reinterpretation and deconstruction.

As for the notion of gun ownership being a right because of the need for self defense, we’ve dealt with that before.  The second amendment was written within the context of everyone already owning guns because of the moral duty of self defense.

But the second amendment says nothing about self defense or hunting.  It says everything about tyranny.  My main intention here is to point out that whether the NRA recasts this issue or not, the context of guns in America cannot be undone or written out of the textbooks.  Men and women had them anyway, not armories or townships.  It’s ludicrous to argue that folks shouldn’t be able to bear arms individually because of the second amendment.  This misreads history, and badly so.

What the author is calling a “contemporary social justification for owning guns” is nothing of the sort.  God gives me the right to bear arms, not the state, the second amendment or any law or regulation.  The author only says the things he does because his understanding of history, theology and ethics is bankrupt and his thinking vacuous.

Chris Christie wants to be president.  He has vetoed the New Jersey gun bill.

Gov. Chris Christie today vetoed a gun control bill that would have reduced the permitted size of ammunition magazines, saying it would do nothing to reduce gun violence.

“This is the very embodiment of reform in name only. It simply defies common sense to believe that imposing a new and entirely arbitrary number of bullets that can be lawfully loaded into a firearm will somehow eradicate, or even reduce, future instances of mass violence,” Christie said. “Nor is it sufficient to claim that a ten-round capacity might spare an eleventh victim.”

Chris Christie made his fame in New Jersey as a gun controller.

Back then, Carroll was known for his staunchly conservative views (he’s a Civil War re-enactor with children named Benjamin Franklin and Robert E. Lee), which he often expressed in the opinion pages of the Daily Record. But today, Carroll is one of the four Republicans on the committee investigating Governor Christie over Bridgegate.

Christie and Merkt attacked Bucco and Carroll for what they called a “Guns for Votes” campaign, claiming they had a “radical plan to legalize assault weapons.”

It’s okay for people to change their mind or revisit issues, as long as they are serious about the change rather than doing it for political gain.  So what about the rest of Christie’s statement today?

But instead of a magazine size reduction, Christie proposed a new standard for involuntary commitment of patients who are not necessarily deemed dangerous “but whose mental illness, if untreated, could deteriorate to the point of harm.”

Christie also proposed new standards for recommending patients for involuntary outpatient treatment, “streamlining” patient transfers between inpatient and outpatient programs, new training programs for first responders likely to encounter unstable people with “modern techniques for de-escalation,” and to require people forced to undergo mental health treatment to demonstrate “adequate medical evidence of suitability” if they want to get a firearms purchase identification card.

Let that wash over you again.  Chris Christie is proposing what might be the most draconian mental health measures in the nation.  He wants to codify involuntary commitment of people who, in the estimation of someone approved by the state, deems that your mental health could deteriorate to the point of harm.

Furthermore, anyone who wants to carry a weapon must undergo forced mental health “treatment” to ascertain whether someone approved by the state deems you fit for your God-given duty of self defense.  Perhaps the belief that weapons are the best defense against tyranny would be reason enough not only to prohibit ownership of weapons, but also to involuntarily commit you to an institution.

Chris Christie, in attempting to shore up his credentials as a “conservative” candidate for president, has shown his true colors.  And we are the better for it.  Collectivists will be collectivists because that’s all they can be.  Can a leopard change its spots?

Prior:

Chris Christie’s Cowardly Dishonesty On Guns

Chris Christie Is A Gun Grabber