Author Archives: Joe

Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech

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It’s obvious that classic American liberalism is dead. It has morphed into a radical leftism which has found its standard bearer in Barack Hussein Obama, a rigid, cold-blooded leftist whose end-game is the complete dominance of American politics by a single political party. This is to be achieved using classic Socialist* tactics: making a majority of citizens dependent upon the state, either through jobs (shuffling paper, torturing fellow citizens with endless rules and regulations) or through welfare (redefined as a human right).

The revelations of political repression by the IRS against Conservatives should send chills up the spines of every American. For this is how tyrannies gain traction.

And under Obamacare, the IRS will have even more power.

…

*Socialist: noun \ˈsō-sh(ə-)list\— a Communist who has not yet picked up an AK47.

Robert J. Avrech
May 13, 2013
It Can’t Happen Here
[Not only can it happen here. It is happening here. People who have lived in “those other places” are experiencing déjà vu and we need to undo the damage done.—Joe]

Quote of the day—sandbagger

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The President and his advisors are behind calculated and concerted efforts to use the power of the Executive Branch to intimidate and silence their political opponents. Or the Federal Government is populated with rogue civil servants who abuse their authority coincidentally in support of the President and his Party’s agenda and the President and his advisors are powerless to stop them.

sandbagger
May 16, 2013
Comment to Words That Should Not Be Strung Together In America, “IRS Building Largest Government Database”
[I suppose there is at least one third option; the Executive Branch quietly rewards those that do it’s dirty work while maintaining plausible deniability.

In any case I can’t think of any options that are very flattering to the integrity of the Obama administration.

There are more than one way to deal with this as someone opposed to the current administration. One is to let them remain in power and exploit their weakness like what Sebastian is saying. Another would be to try and remove them from power. I’m not sure which would be best. “President Biden” does not have a pleasant ring to it but having Obama impeached would be satisfying. I’m just not sure the rewards are worth the effort. A “radioactive” Obama may be better long term than “cleaning house” when you can’t purge the site of the entire toxic waste pit until 2016 anyway.—Joe]

Hmmmm….

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This video refers to FM 3-39.40 (Internment and Resettlement Operations).

I did a quick scan of the document and I’m a more than a bit skeptical. There’s the whole “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” aspect but there is also this notice:

DISTRIBUTION RESTRICTION: Distribution authorized to the DOD and DOD contractors only to protect technical or operational information from automatic dissemination under the International Exchange Program or by other means. This determination was made on 8 December 2008. Other requests for this document must be referred to the Commandant, U.S. Army Military Police School, ATTN: ATZT-TDD-M, 320 MANSCEN Loop, Suite 270, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri 65473-8929.

DESTRUCTION NOTICE: Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.

That isn’t the proper notification used with restricted documents.

On the other hand a lot of work went into creating the document.

When I can see aerial photos of the camps on U.S. soil I’ll be a lot more susceptible to being convinced it’s real.

Quote of the day—Richard Horton

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The NRA’s use of the “war” metaphor is an illegal incitement to violence and should be prosecuted.

Richard Horton
Tweeted on May 4, 2013
[I find it telling that Horton, editor of Lancet, wrote a book with “war” in the title: Health Wars: On the Global Front Lines of Modern Medicine.

The “war” referred to by the NRA is a “culture war” and is no more violent than Horton’s “Health War”.

Horton is not just an hypocritical anti-gunner but an elitist anti-freedom advocate. After we finish liberating the U.S. we should liberate Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

H/T to Col. Milquetoast for the email pointer and Snowdon for more background information on Horton.—Joe]

SAF LAUNCHES EDUCATION, AWARENESS EFFORT

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From the Second Amendment Foundation:

For Immediate Release:   5/15/2013

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation will launch an ambitious three-week public education and awareness effort on nationally-syndicated talk radio programs, and XM Sirius radio to explain its legal and educational efforts and encourage public support.

SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb said a series of advertisements will air on “threats to firearms rights and SAF’s response through litigation against unconstitutional gun laws.”

“We will highlight legal abuses of constitutional rights, and explain how we challenge such laws in the courts to protect our liberty,” Gottlieb stated. “We’ve secured tens of thousands of dollars in advertising time over the next three weeks.”

Radio spots will air on radio programs hosted by Michael Savage, Mark Levin, Lars Larson, Laura Ingraham, John Gibson, Tom Sullivan and Fox News broadcasts on XM Sirius radio. The effort is expected to reach millions of listeners, many who may be learning of SAF and its legal and educational programs for the first time.

“If additional funds can be raised as a result of this advertising effort,” Gottlieb said, “we will hopefully be able to continue and expand the campaign beyond the initial three weeks.”

Gottlieb said the education effort was made possible by SAF supporters who have already contributed to the organization.

“I want to personally thank all of those donors who made this possible,” he said. “It is important that the public have a clear understanding about existing and proposed laws that can seriously impair their right to keep and bear arms.”

The Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest tax-exempt education, research, publishing and legal action group focusing on the Constitutional right and heritage to privately own and possess firearms. Founded in 1974, The Foundation has grown to more than 650,000 members and supporters and conducts many programs designed to better inform the public about the consequences of gun control. In addition to the landmark McDonald v. Chicago Supreme Court Case, SAF has previously funded successful firearms-related suits against the cities of Los Angeles; New Haven, CT; New Orleans; Chicago and San Francisco on behalf of American gun owners, a lawsuit against the cities suing gun makers and numerous amicus briefs holding the Second Amendment as an individual right.

Quote of the day—Tam

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We Americans do love our killin’. Lots of dead bodies, one or three at a time, every day… Of course, Europeans like their killing, too, but they tend to do it every twenty years or so, and by the millions. Personally, I prefer the Etsy model to the Wal-Mart model. I mean, when you think about it, our killing is more European… artisinal. To say nothing of the carbon offsets you’d need to buy to run a mass crematorium these days.

Tam
May 11, 2013
Overheard in the Office…
[I have said that Tam is no longer eligible for QOTD because she would dominate nearly every day but I’m making an exception in this instance. Genocide is high on my list of things to know about and prevent.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mike Adams

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3D printing is a technology of liberty, and its rise is now unstoppable. The control freaks in Washington will, of course, try to ban certain types of data or criminalize certain types of CAD plans (i.e. criminalizing data), but their efforts will be useless. They are obsolete. 3D printing turns information into physical reality, and information is ridiculously easy to smuggle anywhere at the speed of light.

Mike Adams
May 10, 2013
Fabrication power to the People! Why no government can stop the 3D printing revolution
[Adams and many others exaggerate the liberty aspect.

Yes. Information is extremely easy to smuggle. But there are a lot of limitations to what can be built. I also believe there are ways governments could essentially put an end to the untraceability of printed guns.

I expect that within a year or two governments will attempt forbidding the sale of printers that do not have a means to trace parts back to the printer. With 4473 type “registration” the government could then trace a printed item back to the purchaser of the printer.

There could even be attempts at full blown registration of 3-D printers. The current excitement on both sides of the gun control issue will then be considerably dampened.

From talking to people that have connections into the industry it appears the industry is aware of such potential and as a group tend to have high end tailor-made Wookie suits. This could make things more challenging for the government.

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Boomerite packaging test

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On Saturday Barron and I did a simple test on the Boomerite packaging. It was hypothesized that the heat from heat shrinking the plastic wrap was causing evaporation of the ethylene glycol. We put a thermocouple temperature sensor just inside the cardboard box and applied the heat shrink plastic bag as normal. There was less than 1 degree F rise in temperature.

We applied heat until the plastic melted. The temperature just barely raised. That means it’s not the heat.

There are two remaining hypotheses:

  1. The additional thickness of the shrink wrap caused compression of the Boomerite when we squeezed the same number of boxes into the crates. I’ll have to order some more boxes and heat shrink bags to test this hypothesis.
  2. The slight change in mixing order changed things. Last year when we had exceptional good detonation rates someone, not me, had the bright idea of mixing the potassium chlorate with the secret ingredient before mixing in the ammonium nitrate and ethylene glycol. They told me they were doing it and I had sort of a nagging feeling about there being a reason not to do that but my brain wasn’t working well at the time* and I okayed it. A day or two after the event I figured it out. They were, in essence, making “flash powder”. The EG goes in first to eliminate the dust and static electricity during the mixing process.

It will probably be the middle of June when I go back to Idaho to do the tests.

*Just two weeks before I had served papers for legal separation on my wife of 35+ years. This year I was feeling much better and one guy told me that I looked terrible the year before and that this year I “looked ten years younger”. He also asked, “Is the new woman you are with (Barb L.) just as smart as you? I confirmed his suspicion that she is a smart cookie.

Quote of the day—Richard Burgess

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The only focus and obvious intention of releasing the search warrants is to focus the narrative on the firearms instead of the actual legitimate questions about the murderer and his history and things that can actually be evaluated and fixed without endangering the rest of us in the process.

But this did not stop the media from talking about a ‘startling arsenal’ which consisted of only a few firearms and a mediocre amount of ammunition.

The media has apparently once again changed the definition of ‘arsenal’ to be 6 firearms, since that is all that was found. 1 shotgun, 3 rifles (two of which were bolt action) and 2 pistols. If this is an arsenal, than just about every gun owner in the state possess an armory.

Already we have reporters talking about ‘hundreds’ of rounds of .22LR ammunition, when .22LR ammunition is most commonly sold in its smallest divisions in 550 round boxes. In actuality, there were only 1026 rounds of center-fire rounds of ammunition, spread across 7 different types of firearms, 161 of those were shotgun shells.  Over 300 rounds of the ammunition were calibers that there was not even a matching firearm for, and therefore they had no way of utilizing.

This is hardly an ‘arsenal’ or shocking. In fact, most shooting sports enthusiasts would go through this amount of ammunition in a normal day at the range, although it would likely be a short day at the range.

Richard Burgess
President
Connecticut Carry, Inc
March 28th, 2013
Newtown Massacre Search Warrants Released — Governor Malloy uses redacted, pointed release to further his agenda
[I carry over 1000 rounds of center-fire pistol ammo to the range in a small can for a typical practice session. I probably won’t shoot it all in one session but 1000 rounds, even of center-fire ammo, just isn’t that much. The smallest quantity of components for reloading I purchase is on the order 2500 to 5000 depending on the component.

The media outlets that report things this way either have crap for brains or an evil agenda to trample on the rights of gun owners. Having dealt with some of them I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now and call it crap for brains.

The complete irrelevance of the mainstream media can’t come too soon for me.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sandra Cunningham

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We needed a bill that was going to confiscate, confiscate, confiscate.

Sandra Cunningham
New Jersey State Senator
May 9, 2013

[H/T Sebastian who said,

You know what would help prevent gun owners from always being paranoid that gun control activists and politicians were after their guns? Not actually being after our guns.

There is a reason why I have conditions whereby I might be persuaded to visit New Jersey.—Joe]

Quote of the day—My Lawyer

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After looking at the letters you pointed to I would recommend that you take down any files you have posted and let the commodity jurisdiction request process take its course.

My Lawyer (who wishes to remain anonymous)
May 9, 2013
In regards to the files linked to in this post.
[It’s an interesting state of affairs when lawyers don’t want it to be known they are involved.—Joe]

Faceless bureaucrats, not blue helmeted elk

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I spent some time investigating ITAR in regards to the files for 3-D printing of weapons. It’s interesting stuff. The implications are huge.

I am not a lawyer although one or more of my sources for this post are. But none claim expertise in this area because it is such a specialized field. One source did claim “I know something about this”. The following may be a too broad interpretation of the law and the legal experts in the field will have to give us a more factual read.

The U.S. Department of State Directorate of Defense Trade Controls is the agency we have concerns about. Their mission is stated as:

The U.S. Government views the sale, export, and re-transfer of defense articles and defense services as an integral part of safeguarding U.S. national security and furthering U.S. foreign policy objectives. The Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), in accordance with 22 U.S.C. 2778-2780 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (22 CFR Parts 120-130), is charged with controlling the export and temporary import of defense articles and defense services covered by the United States Munitions List (USML).

The documents of particular interest in figuring out the implications appear to be these two:

  1. SUBCHAPTER M—INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS: PART 120—PURPOSE AND DEFINITIONS
  2. Title 22: Foreign Relations: PART 121—THE UNITED STATES MUNITIONS LIST

One of my sources ran up against ITAR due to being an NRA Firearms instructor. The NRA recently sent out a notice to instructors telling them not to provide training to foreign students. This is because, according to the first document above:

§ 120.9 Defense service.
(a) Defense service means:
(1) The furnishing of assistance (including
training) to foreign persons,
whether in the United States or abroad
in the design, development, engineering,
manufacture, production, assembly,
testing, repair, maintenance,
modification, operation, demilitarization,
destruction, processing or use of
defense articles;
(2) The furnishing to foreign persons
of any technical data controlled under
this subchapter (see § 120.10), whether
in the United States or abroad; or
(3) Military training of foreign units
and forces, regular and irregular, including
formal or informal instruction
of foreign persons in the United States
or abroad or by correspondence
courses, technical, educational, or information
publications and media of
all kinds, training aid, orientation,
training exercise, and military advice.
(See also § 124.1.)

In the last few months the Department of State is taking a much broader interpretation of this and other sections of U.S. code and applying it to gun owners, manufacturers, and instructors. There are two hypotheses for the change. One is that John Kerry is driving the change. The other is that is part of what Obama was talking about when he said he was working on gun control “under the radar”. The failure to get any gun control through Congress could have inflamed him enough that he sent out the word to find ways to punish us for our success in blocking him.

The law was intended to apply to people selling and providing real militarily useful products and training to our Cold War enemies. Things like night vision equipment and training on tank warfare or repairing high performance jet engines were valid things to be concerned about. And even though rifles that were particularly well suited for winning NRA High Power competition and training for doing better at USPSA matches could have military application the people at the Department of State ignored that. They were concerned with the nation states of the world that declared us their enemies rather than the “right-wing NRA domestic terrorists” who taught Home Firearm Safety classes a few times a year.

The law was written before the Internet and personal computers existed and some of the concepts that made sense then are absurd now. In the mid ‘90s we had the battle over encryption technology being declared an export restricted munitions. This was ultimately decided in favor of freedom under the First Amendment (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Bernstein case and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Junger case). I don’t see why the present issue wouldn’t fall under the same protection and it might. But being right and being able to fight it to the end in court are two different things.

My sources seem to think the biggest concern is that all firearms instructors, “Mom and Pop” FFLs, and of course libertarian college students with a mischievous streak (borrowing and mangling a phrase from Paul Barrett) will be required to pay the $2000+/year license fees to register with the Department of State. This would be even though there was no technology, products, or training being exported. Just that you’re “in the business” could make you subject to the restrictions and require that you register with the Department of State and pay the annual fee. The government wouldn’t have to directly “stop the signal” in it’s entirety. There a million different signals and they only have to make examples of a few people and most others would want to avoid the hassle and “would lead more compliant lifestyles”. There is very little profit to be made in being a martyr for the cause. The 3-D printer issue could just be noise and a distraction to a much bigger concern.

Ultimately the courts and Congress can probably get most of this straightened out on the side of freedom. If they don’t freedom will be lost to faceless bureaucrats not “blue helmeted elk” that you can shoot at as they go door-to-door confiscating your guns.

In the mean time an enraged narcissist who didn’t get his way with the legislature could conceivably apply the regulations to people posting YouTube videos on how to grip your pistol.

Quote of the day—Zelman and Stevens

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Never be so trusting of a government to protect you that you give up your own means of self defense. A good government will never try to render its citizens defenseless—an evil government always will.

Aaron Zelman and Richard Stevens
2001
Death by “Gun Control:” the Human Cost of Victim Disarmament

[Via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Can’t stop the signal with crypto hashes

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Following the lead of Robb and Barron I’m hosting the files to produce firearms on a 3-D printer.

One of the risks to “the signal that cannot be stopped” is that the signal could be subtly corrupted without the possessor knowing. Therefore I am computing and including the hashes of the files so that you can verify it has not been corrupted. Of course someone could corrupt the hashes posted on this blog post to match the corrupted files but I have saved copies of the hashes in a secure location for later comparison. Contact me if there is a concern the hashes have been tampered.

To compute and verify the hashes I used File Checksum Tools (free and quite functional).

The Defense Distributed file pack is here (removed upon the advice of My Lawyer). Hashes:

  • MD5: F4784E3C4C6B6D851C3F2CFD8579B2A6
  • SHA-1: 3B733B62D8D3B08DE9BFFB94CDD308C18BF09BB0
  • SHA-256: 8B3247FE5145E87ABA5B91A6DFCA26193E5472C60AF279223CE5A92611A24D31

The Liberator is here (removed upon the advice of My Lawyer). Hashes:

  • MD5: 26DE1E830AC58C078650B69C4D34602E
  • SHA-1: AA33BC73264B80B87D21FF8D56DE02EAECDA3574
  • SHA-256: 763927D34CE89B550A118E3522181FC434632D6D6188CB82E1612096A613C4AA

ATF on 3-D printed guns

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The ATF just Tweeted a link to a Q & A .PDF about 3-D printed guns.

I put a copy here.

The short version is:

Yes, it’s legal without a license as long as it is not an NFA item. If it does not have a rifled barrel then it might be classified as ‘Any Other Weapon” which is an NFA item.

Summary of who can and how to get a license to manufacture.

It seems a reasonable response once you suspend disbelief enough to allow that the ATF is more constitutionally permissible than a BRAS (Bureau of Religion, Assembly, and Speech).

Update: There are some questions (and this is why I was deliberately vague above) about what constitutes an AOW. From 26 USC § 5845:

The term “any other weapon” means any weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive, a pistol or revolver having a barrel with a smooth bore designed or redesigned to fire a fixed shotgun shell, weapons with combination shotgun and rifle barrels 12 inches or more, less than 18 inches in length, from which only a single discharge can be made from either barrel without manual reloading, and shall include any such weapon which may be readily restored to fire. Such term shall not include a pistol or a revolver having a rifled bore, or rifled bores, or weapons designed, made, or intended to be fired from the shoulder and not capable of firing fixed ammunition.

It is my NON-LAWYER reading of this that since neither the current nor WWII Liberator fires a shogun shell they do not qualify as an AOW even though the barrels are not rifled.

Quote of the day—Barry Snell

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To my fellow citizens who are anti-gun I say: So long as you deny our humanity, so long as you malign our dignity, intelligence and wisdom, so long as you seek to shade us under a cloud of evil that we do not partake in or support, so long as you tell us that because we own guns we are terrible people, you will prove yourselves absolutely right in that we won’t come to the table to talk with you.

And there will be no hope for resolution but through victory by force initiated by one side or the other, God help us, for we will not plow for those who didn’t beat their swords into plowshares.

Barry Snell
May 3, 2013
Snell: Waking the dragon — How Feinstein fiddled while America burned
[Via son James.

Nearly every paragraph of this editorial could be a QOTD. It’s very good.

Kevin has more here and here.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sen. Richard Blumenthal

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There is nothing celebratory about the fact that two brothers suspected of planting bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon a few weeks ago were able to get a gun without a proper permit. This gun was used to kill a police officer.

Despite these morbid realities, the NRA is still celebrating this weekend in the Lone Star State, slowly but surely consigning itself to irrelevance as Americans continue to pressure Congress to do something about gun violence weeks after the Senate’s failure to pass the gun violence prevention bill.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal
May 3, 2013
There’s Nothing To Celebrate: NRA’s Celebratory Atmosphere At National Conference Is Disgusting
[Proper permit? Perhaps legislation should be passed that requires “a proper permit” before high school students can purchase recreation drugs like beer and cigarettes. Blumenthal is a blooming idiot if he does not understand the realities of economics and black markets in a quasi-free society. Or alternatively he is desirous of implementing a tyrannical police state. I can see no other alternatives. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and declare him an idiot.

Would it be disgusting if the NAACP and ADL celebrated defeating legislation that would required background checks before their members could get permits to be on public streets after dark? Surely it’s just “common sense” that we don’t want people like that “on the streets” unless they have permission from the government. Right?

Wrong. We are talking about specific enumerated rights. Requiring government permission to exercise a right is to deny that it is a right. And the thing that is disgusting is that we had to even have a debate, let alone a fight, about recognizing that right.

It’s Senator Blumenthal and the anti-freedom people he supports that are consigning themselves to irrelevance. Over 86,000 people showed up at the NRA annual meeting and the NRA has a membership of over 5,000,000. How many show up at the gun control annual meetings? About 50 to 100 for the nations largest anti-gun group. The entire email list of the Brady Campaign is only about 50,000. The Brady Campaign doesn’t even have “members” in the sense that the NRA does.

No matter how you look at what Blumenthal has to say it’s clear he is unfit to hold public office. Instead he should be on the street corner handing out free copies of CPUSA newsletters. It would be more philosophically in alignment with his politics than being a member of the U.S. Senate.—Joe]