The View From North Central Idaho

Someone I know carries a Vz. 52 pistol OWB.  It hangs out in the open almost all of the time.  After several days of wet weather, the pistol was rusted.  Oops.  It looked horrific (sorry - no pictures).  Rust on the barrel, between the recoil spring and barrel especially, and rust on the outside where it contacted the holster.  Even some of the cartridges had rust on them from the magazines.  After taking it down, almost to the last pin and the last screw, it cleaned up very well.  Nothing serious this time. I'm sure the piece would have functioned, though metal oxides can be extremely abrasive.  It could get really bad if left in the holster for a longer time.

Be careful out there if you OC.  My pistol is almost always covered at least by a shirt and I've never seen signs of rust on it, so I've never thought much about it.  I have left a Winchester carbine in the vehicle for weeks at a time, and in very cold weather condensation can get between the metal and the gun case interior, causing rust at all the contact points.  So you have to take extra care.  The Parkerizing on the Colt seems to handle it much better, and the annodizing of course is already a hard metal oxide, but you want to be checking these things.

Implementation of SkyNet and the Terminator are a little behind the original schedule but progress is still being made:

"The team actually started out by building a retina and they came to me and said: 'Look, it responds to these optical illusions the same way a human does. They put another layer of cells behind that it started to find features, They put another layer, it started to find corners or oriented lines or something, another layer, it started to find patterns," Jacobs said.

"Today it tracks objects. It's actually not programmed, it's taught."

Jacobs laughed at the silence in the room, conceding he evokes images of "The Terminator."

SkyNet building blocks are falling into place as well:

The long term future belongs to optical interconnects, low power processors and new kinds of memory architectures, said Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs in a DesignCon keynote here.

Banerjee described the path to a terabyte/second optical bus as one step toward its vision of future systems architectures. Engineers need to embrace the new technologies to deal with the coming flood of digital data, he said.

“By 2020 your end customer will be living in a world where people access 50 zettabytes of data from 30 billion cellphones and 1.3 trillion sensors--and all that data will have to be analyzed by computer architectures you have to design,” he told a packed audience here.

If you haven't thought anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.

Sean
February 2, 2012
Comment to Unreasonable searches.
[Since it is from Sean you know it was sarcasm.

You also know it's coming.—Joe]

This time of year our school shooting team gets together, I bring several guns into our local school and teach the kids how best to participate in school shootings.  This year I had 15 boys and girls in class - a pretty good percentage of the total enrollment in our small town high school.

As part of the class, which consists in large part of excerpts from the NRA Basic Home Firearm Safety course, I ask them to state some of the various reasons one might own firearms.  One of the girls chimed in with, "Space alien invasion?!"

I like these kids.  I didn't bother to point out that their puny, crude, chemically powered kinetic energy weapons would be no match for the phase modulated space-time disrupters of the enemy.

Earlier, I had asked my daughter if she planned to join the trap shooting team this year, but she declined.  After last night's class, she asked me how it went, and now I get the impression that she is having second thoughts;  "But I can't shoot well enough."
"Well, you know I can teach you, and you'll be as good as most of the others after one day..."
"But now it's too late."  Which it is-- they need to have already passed their hunter safety class.

So next year I figure she'll be right in there.  We'll see.  Several of her friends are already avid participants in mass school shootings (some of the meets involve well over a hundred shooters, from several school districts).  I bet you don't see those trap meets covered in your local news station sports reports, do you?

ETA; The kids seemed to respond well to the variation; "Keep your booger hook off the bang switch".  I associate it with Uncle, but I don't know for sure where it originated.

Numerous individuals, known as straw buyers, were recruited to buy AK-47 like semi-automatic firearms. These firearms were then sent to Mexico for use by a drug cartel.

One of the firearms in the hands of the cartel was used in a shooting which resulted in the death of a U.S. law enforcement official.

Sound familiar?

Okay. Well this is probably something you haven't heard. The perpetrator, Manuel Gomez Barba, of Baytown, Texas, has been sentenced to 100 months for the exportation of the 44 firearms.

The ATF illegally exported something on the order of 2000 firearms to Mexican drug cartels. Does that mean those criminals will receive 2000/44 x 100 months (~380 years) in prison for their crimes?

I don't think so. Tar and feathers might also be considered appropriate but also have a near zero chance of coming to pass.

I claim retirement at full pay with bonuses will be the most likely outcome.

The administration that took military action in Libya without any authorization from force from Congress, that appointed czars with policymaking authority without Congressional confirmation, and that made ‘recess’ appointments while Congress was not in recess is invoking executive privilege to cover how the Department of Justice reacted when Congress began asking about a gun-trafficking operation that got U.S. law enforcement officers murdered by Mexican drug cartels.

All from a president who railed against a runaway imperial presidency when George W. Bush sat in the office he currently occupies.

Jim Geraghty
February 2, 2012
Eric Holder Should Become a Campaign Issue Today
[H/T to Say Uncle.

I've had admitted Marxist's tell me, "We just need to have the right people in charge." The problem is that power always attracts the people that can least be trusted with that power.

The only option is to not give anyone that much power. I don't understand why this lesson has to be taught again and again. People have understood this since at least 1776.—Joe]

I could see the day when the government attempts to get a search warrant for your thoughts:

A group of neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, reported they may have come up with a scientific way to read people’s minds.

They can already demand blood samples so why not connect you up to a machine to see if you have anti-government thoughts or knowledge of a crime?

Didn’t they fall to the ground?

Robert Mahler
Assistant Crown attorney in Ontario, Canada
January 31, 2012
Court adjourns homeowner’s self-defence trial to clarify confusing gun control law
This was referring to the shell casing from a .38 caliber revolver. Mahler was prosecuting a man for firing three shots to scare off masked men who were throwing "firebombs" (Molotov Cocktails) at his house.
[Not only is the prosecutor so ignorant of firearms that he believed revolvers automatically eject spent shell casings but the government initially attempted to prosecute him for defending himself and his home. The video of the three guys calmly walking around throwing the "firebombs" apparently was going to hinder the case of the prosecution so they dropped that charge. They then charged the victim with "careless storage of a firearm".

I am of the opinion the prosecutor should be charged with crimes against humanity. Everyone knows you have a right to defend yourself against a violent attack. For the prosecutor to use the force of government to intimidate people who exercise such an obvious natural right warrants an extremely harsh response. And for the prosecutor to base a significant portion of his case on the belief that a revolver automatically ejects it's shell casings qualifies him for a "Crap for Brains" mention.—Joe]

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.