Monthly Archives: January 2012

Laser Guided Bullets

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We had radar proximity fuses in use in AAA rounds during W.W. II, and they of course used vacuum tube technology.  One of the members of our local ham radio club worked on that project in the ’40s.  One of the challenges for his team was developing tubes that could withstand the 10s of thousands of Gs at launch.  Ouch.

Now we have this, via an e-mail from my nephew.  I find it fascinating, funny, and a little disturbing all at the same time.  Ordinary rifles spin a bullet at 2K RPM?  They missed that one by an order of magnitude or two.  A rifle chambered for the 5.56 NATO round for example rotates the bullet at around 300,000 RPM, more or less depending on barrel length, rifling twist and bullet weight.  But as I often say; what’s an order of magnitude (or two) between friends?

It is very telling, if not entirely predictable, how they smear the general public in the article– government = good, whereas regular citizens = dangerous or at least troubling.  They of course have it entirely upside down and backwards in that department.

Damning evidence

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David Hardy has the story on virulently anti-gun lawyer, Dennis Burke, who has been working on anti-gun projects since at least 1989. He was a driving force behind the “assault weapon” ban of 1994. Operation Fast and Furious was secretly launched just one month after his appointment as U.S. attorney was confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Burke predicted, “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to straw purchasers of assault weapons. Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby.”

I say we should try him for treason and every single illegal gun purchase. When we are done with him extradite him to Mexico and let them try him for all the violations of Mexico laws he is implicated in.

A hint

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Drones may be a significant threat:

It allows truly scalable global coercion:  the automation of comply or die. 
 
Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn’t that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).
 
Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

…

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them.  When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

Drones also need to be built, communicate with people on the ground, refueled and rearmed. And if they are using your cell phone for tracking and terminal guidance that phone doesn’t need to remain in your possession. It might just be that a vehicle supplying the drone base could use an old cell phone for a few days.

Quote of the day—Scott Z.

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I too dream of that utopian future when we all get along, I really and truly do.

Until then, I’ll be stocking my gun cabinet.

Scott Z.
January 30, 2012
[From the guns discussion list at work.

The thing is there are some people that advocate unilateral disarmament. That too is a utopian fantasy. Unless there is some semblance of power equality very few relationships are stable. That is true at nearly every level from individual to international.

A good example of  this at the international level is Switzerland. The Swiss have not been in a state of war  internationally since 1815 yet they are well armed and have used those arms upon occasion to keep their neutrality and freedom.

At the individual level you only have to look how the smallest kid in grade school gets picked on unless he receives protection from the adults.

The Gun is Civilization and has been called a Peacemaker for a very long time with good reason.—Joe]

Standard Deviation = 1

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Never heard of it, though mnaybe y’all are getting it all the time and haven’t told me.  The first time I thought is was a fluke.  20 shots from a G20 pistol with SD of one foot per second.  During the string I thought something was wrong with the chrono, because shot after shot it displayed the same number.  Then there’s the saying; if you test your velocity once, you’ll know it.  If you test it a second time, you’ll never be sure again.  Though I never got any error readings, I discarded the data.

So I went out a second time on Saturday with the same load.  The CED chrono was unwilling to get any readings from the 30-30 loads I really wanted to test.  It’s like that sometimes, even with the IR LED screens.  But it took readings from the slower, bigger 10 mm bullets just fine.  I only measured ten shots this time, so a SD is of little meaning, but the extreme spread was 6.  It might correlate to a SD of 1.  I don’t know about anyone else, and the ammo manufacturers rarely say anything about it, but I’ve thought I was doing pretty well in the past if the SD was 12 or so.

This is a light load for the ten, getting barely under 1100 fps.  More like a 40 S&W.  It’s 9.6 gr. Blue Dot (checked against a check weight) with new Starline cases, 180 XTPs and a CCI 300, just going by the dimensions in the Hornady manual.  Nothing special.  This was my starting load, but it may end up a keeper.  We’ll see.  At the moment it’s my carry load, with 43 rounds on board.

I know – handloaded ammo for self defense, blah blah.  Don’t care.  I can practice a lot more with this stuff because I can afford a lot of it, and practicing with the same load you carry makes sense.  That’s what I’ll tell the lawyers– I can shoot this load more accurately and therefore more safely, etc., because it’s exactly what I use for practice.  I tried some of the hot Double Tap 200 grain FMJ stuff.  It’s affordable for practice, and while I’m sure it’s fine ammo for some guns, my Glock did something with it that it’s never done before.  The fired case would stick in the chamber (that’s what you call a pressure sign, right there) the extractor would strip off over the case head, and a fresh round would feed into the back of the fired case.  Yikes that’s some hot stuff, but no thanks.  Two stoppages or so per magazine is more than a deal killer.  If your 10 mm can cycle it properly, it would make a good deep penetrator though.

The crimp has to be a touch under the case diameter just below the crimp though, whereas I went with “about equal”.  A couple of these XTP handloads (2 of about 150) did fail to lock up all the way – something else that’s never happened with this gun.  I’m sure it’s the crimp, and maybe that I need a new slide spring as this one is the original from the early 1990s and has been cycled umpteen thousand times.  A gentle “forward assist” on the back of the slide was all it took.  Yes; more crimp.

Quote of the day—1justguy

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Wearing them in public is like a 10 year old walking around wearing his cowboy hat and six-shooter. It invites trouble as you are daring anyone to pick a fight with you which a lot of people do. If you want/need to carry a weapon/gun on you get a CWP and then you don’t have the need to show that yours are bigger than anyone else’s and you still have your “protection”.

1justguy
Comment to Starbucks’ “Pro-Gun” Policy Prompts Gun Victims’ Advocate Group to Launch Nationwide Boycott on Valentine’s Day 2012
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

John Hardin unintentionally lead me to this guy.

Also worthy of note is that technically 1justguy’s claim of people picking a fight with people who are open carrying is factually unsupported. But my hypothesis is that he is not only incorrect but he has the wrong sign on the correlation coefficient.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mark Glaze

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For our mayors, the tired debate about gun control is over and beside the point. Now that we know the answer, we can sort of put aside the tired debate at the extremes and focus on how you respect the Second Amendment and the rights of law-abiding owners and keep the guns out of hands of people who shouldn’t have it.

The sweet spot is letting law-abiding citizens buy the guns they want. While tightening the background check system to make sure the next Jared Loughner, the next Virginia Tech massacre doesn’t happen.

Mark Glaze
January 22, 2012
TN gun laws, or lack thereof, under attack
[As Glenn Reynolds said about the first sentence above, “What he means by that is, they lost.”

Yes, they lost but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still trying. Background checks are teetering on the edge of firearm and/or owner registration which is totally unacceptable. The ability with which a background check system could be turned into a registration system is scary easy. And since there is no evidence background check improve public safety I am of the opinion the system should be scrapped.

But what I find most interesting about this quote is that Glaze is willing to concede “letting law-abiding citizens buy the guns they want.”

Other anti-gun people and groups need to have that pounded into them in public debate. No “assault weapon” bans and stop the whining about “.50 caliber sniper rifles”.

Removing restrictions on suppressors are next and full-auto firearms are just over the horizon.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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In some states if two (or more) criminals engage in a felony and someone dies as a result then the surviving criminal(s) can be charged with murder. This can result in strange cases where the intended victim successfully defends themselves with deadly force and a criminal is charged with the death of another criminal. This happens even though the criminal not only didn’t inflict the deadly injury they had no injurious intent against their criminal comrade. They could have been 100 feet away driving the getaway car and yet they are charged with the murder of the masked guy with the gun in the bank.

But how are those numbers tallied in the stats? Will that justified homicide show up as a murder? Will it show up as both a justified self-defense killing and as an illegal murder? Or will it count as a justified homicide?

Does anyone know? Does anyone know how to find out?

This could make a (probably small) difference in some of the statistics we use when defending the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.

Quote of the day—Ken

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The peasants who told the fairy tales were superstitious people who were not critical thinkers, and it shows in the stories. Joan Peterson is like that: you expect at least a pseudo logical argument, but instead you get the weird ramblings of a woman with the critical thinking abilities of an 18th century peasant.

Ken
Comment to That is what I am afraid of.
[If the lack of critical thinking skills was something that common it makes me wonder how we ever made it out of the dark ages. And much more important is the answer to this question, “Is the prevalence of Peterson Syndrome evidence we are headed into dark age?” Freedom and enlightenment may have been just a short twinkle in the big picture of human history.—Joe]

That is what I am afraid of

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Joan Peterson writes, “Rights of gun owners will be placed right along side of the rights of Americans to be safe from senseless shootings.”

You have zero rights “to be safe from senseless shootings” or be safe from someone beating you with a baseball bat, or be safe from someone cutting your liver out with a sharpened credit card.

What you can reasonably expect is such criminals will be punished by our legal system.

Peterson thinking is so scrambled that I don’t think she even understands the concept of a right but this time I think she said something refreshingly honest and almost profoundly revealing. She wants people to have same right to own a firearm as “to be safe from senseless shootings”. That is saying she wants you to have no right to own a firearm.

Thank you Brady Campaign Board Member Joan Peterson for finally saying what we have long claimed and you and your organization have long denied.

Update: Mostly off topic but I left the following comment on her post. I post it here out of fear she will not allow it to be seen on her blog.

Last September at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous I spent many hours talking to Paul Barrett and have continued discussions with him via email since. And he will be attending a shooting event I am hosting in April. He readily admits he is a novice in the field of firearms and still has a lot to learn.

He has also agreed with me with there is no data to indicate a legal limit on the capacity of firearm magazines would result in a net increase in safety of the public. And even in his book he states that efforts to pass such a law would fail and would hence be a waste of time and effort.

Quote of the day—Anonymous St. Louis Woman

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I told you if you came back, I was gonna kill you.

Anonymous St. Louis Woman
January 2012
Self-defense shootings to get closer scrutiny
[And she did kill him. She will not be charged.

From reading the article I am strongly inclined to conclude that while her actions were probably within the letter of the law she violated the spirit of the law, and acted immorally.

On the other hand if the backstory been that it was my daughter and she had been beaten by him for years (from the story above this is not known to be true), finally kicked him out, and had a restraining order against him at the time he broke in I would have been strongly inclined to handle it differently. Rather than giving the gun to the woman as the guy in this case did I would have had a strong urge to tell her, “I can shoot better than you. Close your eyes and plug your ears.” Then I would have done my best to empty the gun into him before he dropped to the floor. At close range 18+1 rounds should take on the order of 3.8 seconds and leave a hole on the back side that you could hide a basketball in.

Then the daughter would call the cops (she is the one still be able to hear) and tells them nothing but there has been a shooting and they should send an ambulance. Then she would then call a lawyer who will answer all questions from the police.

Regardless of what really happened in the case above it appears to me this woman made some serious errors. Others should learn from those mistakes.—Joe]

This is what they think of self defense

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Via email from Brennan at work we get this story from “an award-winning writer”. As Brennan pointed out, “Like all good gun-grabbers the writer knows that there is no such thing as a justified shooting, only ‘extreme self-defense tactics’, ‘settling scores’, ‘vigilantes’ etc.”

Here is a sample:

What didn’t grab the headlines, though, was that more citizens are settling their own scores with criminals.

…

The unabated crime spree even has more residents resorting to extreme self-defense tactics. In 2011, Detroit reported 34 justifiable homicides, according to Fox2 News Reporter Charlie LeDuff – a whopping 80 percent increase over the previous year.

…

This rush to arm and self-administer justice would not be encouraged or condoned under normal circumstances. But in the current lawless environment, it is easy to believe these options have broad public support.

Many residents are apt to nod their heads in approval, glorifying potential victims who get off the first deadly shot against a predator. More than a dangerous precedent for society…

…

The chief’s optimistic crime report does little to restore public confidence in his less than vigilant crime-fighting commitment. So don’t be surprised that frightened, increasingly vigilante-minded residents continue to send the message to City Hall that safe neighborhoods will be restored by any means necessary.

In the comments Sean Sorrentino does an awesome job concluding with, “The writer may be an award winner, but he is clearly incapable of the most basic distinctions between lawful self defense and murder. No one who is that confused should be taken seriously.”

But what really drew my attention in articles was this:

Protection of human life and safety and making neighborhoods safe is the first duty of government.

As pointed out by Frank Clarke in the comments, “Not according to scores (if not hundreds) of cases from every circuit as well as SCOTUS. The police have NO duty to protect any individual before the fact of crime. Their duty is to draw a chalk line around your supine form.”

Furthermore this “award-winning writer” (I keep thinking of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead when I read this line) should be encouraged to look up the dates of when cities first hired full time police officers and compare those dates to when we first had governments. A study of Federal and State constitutions for “the first duty” of governments might prove enlightening to him as well.

But with all the evidence presented in just this one article I’m nearly forced to conclude he has crap for brains and is incapable of being enlightened.

Quote of the day—John West

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It’s not scary looking guns that frighten me, it’s the thought of an unarmed citizenry at the mercy of a tyrannical government that makes be toss and turn at night.

The one thing that all slaves have in common, they don’t own guns.

John West
January 2012
Comment to RCMP to seize more ‘scary-looking’ guns before registry dies.
[Nor do slaves own weapons of any type.

I have nothing further to add.—Joe]

Shame on NSSF and Glock

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I received an email from author Paul Barrett (my review of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun is here) this afternoon with a link to this article. The most interesting thing I found was the following:

Apparently, the executives at Glock Inc., the Smyrna, Ga., subsidiary of Glock GmbH are worried about the book’s look behind the scenes at the company. So Glock Inc. forced the National Shooting Sports Foundation to rescind my press credentials for the 2012 SHOT Show expo floor. Talk about disrespect for First Amendment free speech rights!

What?

Okay, so the First Amendment doesn’t always apply to non-government actors attempting to silence or restrict your access information. But even if it isn’t actually a First Amendment issue there are some principles involved here.

I can understand Glock being miffed at the revealing of some unsavory insider details in the book. But this is shutting the barn window after the horse has left, found a mare or three, and established a herd on the open plains.

I could see Glock employees refusing to talk to Barrett and maybe even asking him to leave their booth. But putting pressure on NSSF to rescind his press credentials? That’s way out of line. It was also stupid. Can you say, “Streisand Effect“?

And NSSF went along with this?

Shame on both of them.

Blind faith

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I’ve met and talked to a lot of anti-gun activists. With perhaps one exception I always got the impression they were generally nice people. Misguided, sometimes ignorant, and frequently not very bright but they were nice and I wouldn’t have minded having one of them as a neighbor or socializing with them if the topic of guns didn’t come up.

That said we sometimes ascribe evil intent to the anti-gun people. In the case of certain politicians such as Chuck Schumer, the Clintons, and President Obama (none of which I have ever met or talked to) this may be true. But generally there is something else going on. The people just aren’t the “evil type”.

But of course just because someone is a “nice” person doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t inadvertently advocate for and enable something terribly evil all the while believing they were doing good. Like I said, a lot of these people aren’t that bright.

Lorne Gunter said something on this topic that struck me as highly likely (emphasis added):

There are around 340,000 violent crimes reported to police in Canada each year. Just over 2% of those (around 8,000) involve firearms. (There’s another reason to question the initial wisdom of the gun registry: Why was Ottawa expending so much time, effort and taxpayer money on such a tiny percentage of violent crimes, while doing comparatively little to prevent the 98% of murders, robberies, kidnappings, rapes and beatings not committed with a gun?)

Typically, gun crime is committed by street criminals using stolen or contraband weapons. The gun registry never had any effect on this class of thug. Some of the 8,000 violent gun crimes no doubt were committed by licensed owners using registered guns — people who might be tracked or even deterred using a registry system. But since no one in Ottawa ever had any idea how many people are in this latter group, they had no way of determining the usefulness of the registry.

A cynic might say that not knowing was the point all along. Backers of the registry knew it would produce very little impact, so they deliberately didn’t bother collecting data that would confirm the database’s uselessness.

I think the truth is less conspiratorial (and far more arrogant): Backers were so sure the registry would produce tangible benefits, they never thought they might need to show proof. After all, they were experts and they had thought it up, so how could it not work?

…

It was purely on blind faith that supporters of the registry — police chiefs, victims’ rights groups, women’s shelter operators and grandstanding politicians — assumed that making Canadians register their guns would magically cut down on violent crime.

Faith, in this context, means believing in something without, or even in spite of, evidence. It was, and is, blind faith motivating these people to continue advocating for gun control. As I have pointed out before and some of them have even agreed, they do not know, or care, how to determine truth from falsity.

As an engineer this is abhorrent to me. When I design a filter using an op-amp, a couple capacitors, and resisters I can predict the frequency response within a fraction of a decibel. But I still test it because it’s possible I made a mistake someplace or a part doesn’t meet the vendor’s specification that I used for the design.

When I design an algorithm for estimating the location of a phone based on the presence of visible Wi-Fi access points and cell towers I know pretty darned close what the accuracy is and how long it will take to do the calculations. But I still test it and there is a test team doing their best to shoot my design and implementation down.

I recognize that human behavior is far more complex and less predictable than electronics and software algorithms. But that just screams that tests have to be done on social experiments. Yet, these people are so stupid (or, granted, in some cases malicious) they not only don’t even bother trying to predict the results or think to do tests but cannot imagine why tests would be needed.

These people deserve all the “respect” of a cargo cult or Heaven’s Gate followers.

Unfortunately this faith is not confined to just gun control. It is my hypothesis that this same blind faith template would match most U.S. government program of the last 100 years.

Quote of the day—Kurt Hofmann

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“Project Gunwalker” was not a “botched” operation–it was a massive crime, perpetrated by our own government, to justify attacking our Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human rights.  And now is the time to hold those responsible to account.

Kurt Hofmann
January 23, 2012
Brady Campaign underpants gnome Dennis Henigan missing the news?
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Starbucks appreciation

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I was a big proponent of patronizing Starbucks after the Brady Campaign attempted to intimidate them two years ago:

I don’t like coffee and haven’t spent all that much at Starbucks recently but wife Barbara does like coffee and visits them sometimes. It appears one of our activities for Valentines Day this year will be to visit Starbucks again to show our appreciation for not submitting to the pressure from the anti-gun groups.

The reason is because a one-day boycott of Starbucks is being advocated by an anti-gun group and our response is a “buycott”.

Other blog posts on the February 14th event:

Quote of the day—Dave Hardy

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With all the permit holders, it’s getting to where violent crime isn’t safe anymore.

Dave Hardy
January 23, 2012
CCW customer kills robber
[I’ve been listening to another economics book by Thomas Sowell. He gave many examples where criminals were entirely rational and responded to “economic” pressures. Sowell’s definition of economics is “the study of allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses”. When a violent criminals scarce resource is their body and that it might be reallocated by someone else as worm food most probably come up with the correct answer when they ask themselves the question, “Do I feel lucky?“

That violent crime is going down and the murder rate is at it’s lowest level in 50 (I think, I don’t want to bother looking it up right now) years could be because of the dramatic increase in CCW and the number of gun owners in general.

I may just be that the anti-gun people were wrong and the NRA, SAF, CCRKBA, JPFO, GOA, etc. was right (again).—Joe]

Quote of the day—Vic Frasier

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It’s like having a .60 caliber penis in your pants. Only you can kill a person with it.

Vic Frasier
June 21, 2009
Five Guns That Are Clearly Compensating for a Tiny Penis
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

And if he thinks .60 caliber is a large for a human penis then he needs some anatomy lessons as well as psychological help.—Joe]