In the swirling controversy of the tragic death of New York City Police Office Brian Moore who was shot last week in Queens, the gun used to take his life has been tied to a pawn shop burglary that occurred in Perry, Georgia in 2011. The incident has Georgia, and many other states, under intense scrutiny for their gun laws and ATF oversight.
A NYC police officer was shot with a stolen gun from Georgia four years ago and people blame the gun laws in Georgia for the shooting. What gun laws do they think would have made a difference?
Senator Chuck Schumer is not a stupid guy, yet:
U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer has since asked the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to expand their firearm trace program.
The gun was stolen! How does he expect the ATF to trace a stolen gun? He has to believe the general population has crap for brains.
It appears to be universal and not just in our country. An anti-gun person believes gun owners are so stupid we won’t notice and call them on how ignorant, and/or malicious, and/or stupid they are.—Joe]
Come up with the best caption for this image from Boomershoot 2015 in the comments and I’ll give you a free Boomershoot 2015 shirt, mug, or thong. Family and Boomershoot staff are welcome to participate but won’t be getting a free anything out of it.
My decision is autocratic, final, and may appear to be at random.
My thoughts are as follows:
Impressive stick throwing from 375 yards away.
You’ve proven yourself with the hastily constructed spears.Now try using lead projectiles to get detonations.
The BC of wood projectiles is too low to retain enough velocity for reliable detonation.
I know reloading components have been tough to come by recently but this substitute doesn’t have much future.
The starting point must be the Constitution, because, above all, we are a nation of laws and the foundation for our laws, or lack of same, is the Constitution. It is amazing to me how so many people pay lip service to the Constitution, yet set out to twist and distort it when it stands in the way of things they think ought to be done or laws they believe ought to be passed. It is also amazing to me how often our courts do the same thing.
For a long time, a whole bunch of Democrats and unfortunately even some Republicans have been passing laws in this body without even asking where the basis is in the Constitution, and I think the Constitution should be the starting point for everything Congress does.
I agree with the sentiment but the cancer has spread so deep into the fabric of our society that rapidly ripping out the tumors would result in massive hemorrhaging. A slow removal almost certainly result in the tumor metastasizing and changing form to embed itself even deeper and perhaps more threating to the “patient”.
I’m nearly certain there is “too fast” and “too slow”. But what is “just right”?—Joe]
This is very interesting to me. One could claim that men are more rational and see the benefit of killing one tyrant so that, perhaps, millions may survive. And furthermore claim women tend to see the murder of Hitler as morally wrong and are unable to see there are exceptions to the morality code against killing.
But there are lots of other ways to look at the results of the study:
Perhaps women tend to respect rules more than men.
Perhaps the social norms in this country are such that women are taught it is better to be a victim than an aggressor even against a villain.
Perhaps women have a greater tendency to weigh the many different possibilities and come to the conclusion that maybe it might have turned out worse had someone else come to power instead of Hitler.
Perhaps women have developed a tendency toward pacifism not developed by men. This would give them an evolutionary advantage by being less likely to kill their own children because the biological cost of them creating another child is much higher compared to the biological cost for a man to create another child.
This study would seem to have implications for self-defense as well.
Hasn’t he gotten the message that gun ownership is a specific enumerated human right in this country? Or was he hungry enough that he took a job working for the devil?
3-D printers mean an end to any gun control. The government is not going to be able to ban magazines for guns, or ban guns themselves, and the notions of background checks would be even more impossible to do. Anyone with access to a 3-D printer can make guns functionally and indistinguishable from a gun that can be bought in a store. I don’t know how the government will stop people from obtaining a printer.
Just look at the illegal download of television shows and movies. Millions of copies have been downloaded and the government has been unable to stop it. Why would the government be successful in stopping other information like these files from being downloaded?
John Lott May 7, 2015 Why Gun Control is Ultimately Doomed to Fail [Well… the government can ban magazines and guns but they can’t effectively enforce the ban. It will be incredibly obvious it is like banning alcohol in the 1920s. Or even banning sex outside of marriage. It will be trivial to supply the black market and people will mock those who attempt to support it.—Joe]
The Boomershoot 2015 fireball was very well done and impressive. Here are some of the details of the construction.
There were 15 seven-inch square targets, each containing 800 grams (about 1.8 pounds) of Boomerite arranged as shown below around a 50 pound bag of powdered sugar:
The target in the lower right with the two red dots was facing the audience and shooter. This is the initiating target which propagated the detonation to the rest of the targets.
In the picture below you see 19 gallons of the gasoline/diesel mixture in place on top of the explosives.
The job of the explosives is to lift the gasoline and mix it in the air. Usually we have a ratio of explosives to gasoline of about 1 pounds to 2 gallons up to 1 pound to 1 gallon. This time it is about 1.4 to 1.
In the picture above we have the people that designed and constructed the fireball (left to right: Mike, Matthew, Barron, and Ry) along with the road flares attached with rubber bands to rebar and wooden sticks. One or more of these flares ignited the fuel air mixture.
In Phil’s slow motion video below you will see the ignition start on the side opposite the shooter and propagate to the remainder of the fuel-air mixture.
In this frame capture from Ry’s video you can see the dust propelled into the air some distance from the explosion. I suspect this is from the shock wave traveling through the ground.
In the still picture of mine below you can see pieces of shredded milk jugs which have been propelled beyond the expanding “ball” of fuel and that most of the fuel has been ignited. The flares mounted on the rebar and sticks are entirely engulfed in the fireball.
The following pictures is one of the most interesting fireball photos I have ever seen. Usually it is mushroom shaped or even flattens out more than the picture above. But this ball of fire barely touches the ground and is a decent approximation of a sphere. I’m not sure what the white streamers coming out of the fire are. Perhaps pieces of burning milk jug or lumps of powdered sugar.
Here, a fraction of a second later, we have the ball of fire suspended in air on what is a probably a column of water vapor from the explosives:
Here, another fraction of a second later, we have the fuel still burning high up in the air and forming a smoke ring:
Watch Ry’s video and see the fire roll around in the sky. It’s amazing:
In the picture below, less than a minute after the explosion, we have Barron standing in the middle of the crater he created. But notice there is no fire on the ground. In years past there were patches of burning fuel on the ground. There was none this year. It all went up into the air.
Another thing, as pointed out by Ry this year and last (edited to add: Ry says the first time was 2011 or earlier), is that nearly all of the flares have been extinguished. Ry is the first person I know who has successfully extinguished road flares with gasoline.
Don’t try this at home. Come to Boomershoot 2016 instead.
There has been adequate documentation that the religious doctrines of the terrorists are accurately reflective of accepted Muslim doctrine. The accurate term for the “moderate Muslims” everyone talks about is “apostates.” Or perhaps “heretics.”
First I used a punch and drove the slide stop out far enough to get a finishing nail partially under it so that it was exposed:
Then brother Doug used an air powered cutoff tool to cut the slide stop almost in two and then pried the slide stop out:
The slide then easily came off. I then used a hammer (and other tools) to tap on the barrel to remove it from the slide.
The end result is that I was able to discover the barrel split about three fourths of its length:
As I looked at this barrel I remembered something. That flat spot on the bottom of the barrel was not there when it came from the factory. That was machined by an STI gunsmith so that a Recoil Master would fit. This would have weakened the barrel.
Kim Huffman-Scott Boomershoot Target Production Manager
May 2, 2015
[I put Kim in charge of target production this year. This is one of the best decisions I have ever made. It dramatically reduced my work load and stress level. But most of all she did an awesome job.
The production line is usually running for about 13 or 14 hours to produce the targets for Boomershoot. This time it was less than eight hours. Part of this was the enthusiastic “army of people” (as Barb describes it) there to help. But Kim figured out how to put them all to work and they listened to her.
Kim quickly identified bottlenecks and fixed them. This is a dynamic problem because it depends on which size targets are being produced and who is doing which job at the time. She also would anticipate when to change the line to a new target type. This is tough because the production line may have 10 to 20 targets in various stages of completion but you only have a good count of the number of actually completed crates. The following video gives you a clue of what it was like. It doesn’t show the people outside folding the boxes.
As the production crew cranked up the production rate it became more and more difficult to get a snapshot of completed crates and targets in production. This resulted in today’s QOTD. She told me this a few minutes after I took the video above.—Joe]
Police and prosecutors driven by politics or policy to seize and keep non-contraband property can always postulate about a theoretical risk that a prohibited individual might exert future control over transferred firearms. But absent evidence, theoretical speculation shouldn’t justify the forfeiture of someone’s valuable property, no matter what kind of property it is. At least when it comes to firearms, however, it seems like some lawyers or judges who perhaps don’t like guns generally feel that forfeiting them to the government is a desirable political end, justifying the use of unfounded theoretical future risk constructs as the means to expand the doctrine of constructive possession and thereby effectuate the politics of gun control.
Chuck Michel March 12, 2015 Gun Seizure and Government Corruption [There are many cases where the government has taken peoples guns and then refused to give them back or even let the owner sell them to someone else. This is now being challenged with moderate success in the courts but don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
From the participants viewpoint things are going quite well. The weather is good with moderately warm temperatures, no precipitation, and no to light winds. The Boomers seem to be detonating well if there are solid hits.
From the staff viewpoint things things are pretty good. The biggest hiccup was when the first thing this morning Barb’s rented car locked the doors automatically with the keys inside along with the cash box, wristbands, and the check-in list for the Precision Rifle clinic. This was 15 minutes before people were scheduled to check in. Barb was quite upset and I was almost unable to convince her it was going to be okay. She called the rental agency who had roadside assistance out in a little over an hour and unlocked her car. I set her up with my laptop and the electronic version of the check-in list. No wrist bands and the laptop was a little more awkward than crossing people off the list with a pen, but she got through it just fine.
Another minor issue was the private fireball didn’t work the first or second time. There was a combination of problems. Some of it was improper construction and some shooter problems as well. The third attempt at a fireball was acceptable:
There were some injuries. I twisted my ankle, Barb scraped her back a little bit, and we saw some moderately bad sunburns.
For me it is difficult to see anything but the flaws but I had several people tell me how much fun they were having and how great an event it is, and what I overhear and see on their faces confirm this. This is what makes Boomershoot worthwhile to me.
Sarah Hoyt — born in Portugal, naturalized to the U.S. — has seen this kind of thing before. It’s the old Stalinist-Marxist mentality which Sarah got to see up close and personal. It’s the mentality my former boss (who was a refugee from Soviet-era Poland) knew all too well, too. Frankly, any time I talk about the 21st century American fascination with political correctness, refugees from the Marxist countries recognize it instantly: the collective effort to control and dictate what is and is not permissible to say, or to think, or to feel, including who you can and cannot associate with; lest you be hauled before the commissars to be tried for guilt-by-association.
This mindset must not be allowed to dominate politics. The body count racked up by this mindset during the 20th century was in the hundreds of millions. We must prevent a repeat performance in the 21st century.
How can you tell which minorities it is proper to satirize? By whether they are likely to shoot you, apparently. Trudeau spent his career unfairly attacking Republicans, so he never had to worry.
