I feel safer already. https://t.co/xg8hRb8STW
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) September 13, 2018
[As we all should.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Michael Graham
Democrats are caught on the horns of their own dilemma. They can either propose useless laws that would have virtually no impact on potential mass shooters; or gun confiscation which has very little support among the electorate and would be a massive turnout magnet for Republican voters.
Michael Graham
May 21, 2018
Commentary: The problem with “common-sense” gun laws
[And many Democrats know this. Yet the Democrat platform for the election this year is heavy with gun control.
There is a reason for this. It’s not their intent to reduce violent crime. Most of them know better than that. Increases in violent crime serve their purposes better. When society around people has a high percentage of violent predators a common instinct is to demand more government intervention of private life. This gives more power and money to those in government. It’s a rare and principled person who would advocate against their own personal interest even when it is to the benefit of society as a whole. Those sort of people are seldom drawn to political life.—Joe]
I made QOTD!
Quote of the Day: 12 September 2018
See also this tweet.
The idea is certainly not mine. And similar expression of it is not unique. It may be a little bit more succinct than most. So, “Standing on the shoulders of giants…” is applicable here. I wish I could find the quote from Tam who said something along the lines of, “I don’t care if every gun owner on the planet killed someone yesterday. I didn’t. So you don’t get to take my guns from me.”
Update: NJDave found the Tam quote I was thinking of:
Where the hell do you get off thinking you can tell me I can’t own a gun? I don’t care if every other gun owner on the planet went out and murdered somebody last night. I didn’t. So piss off.
Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb
A state cannot legislate political correctness at the expense of a fundamental, constitutionally-delineated civil right.
Alan Gottlieb
Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President
September 11, 2018
FED. COURT ENJOINS PART OF CALIFORNIA PENAL CODE IN SAF-SUPPORTED CASE
[Additional context:
A federal district court has ruled that a section of the California Penal Code is unconstitutional and has issued an injunction against enforcement of a prohibition on the display of handguns or handgun placards that may be seen from the outside of a store in a case supported by the Second Amendment Foundation and two California gun rights groups.
The state of California is expected to appeal the decision. They don’t want us to be able to exercise our First Amendment rights either. The state of California mindset appears to be the same as that of Stalin.—Joe]
Cost/benefit of reloading
The Gun Feed linked to my post about the double charge with the link text of “Reloading Kaboom: All costs savings is lost when your gun blows up…”
At first thought you might agree. But it depends on how many rounds you reloaded before you lose a gun and the cost of replacement or repair of the gun. Assuming my gun is a total loss, I doubt this is true but lets go for worst case, I will have to have saved about $3200 to break even.
My worst case reloading cost (buying once fired brass) of .40 S&W is practice ammo. This is $0.24 per round. The ammo I use for matches is $0.19 per rounds. If I reuse my own fired brass then the cost drops to $0.19 and $0.14 per rounds. Let’s go with worst case reloading costs…
Getting the cheapest brand I recognize from Midway USA in one case (1000 rounds) lots results in $0.329 per round after shipping.
Hence by reloading I’m saving, at least, $0.089 per round. In order to pay for a new gun I would have to reload $3200/$0.089 rounds. This works out to about 36,000 rounds.
I have actually reloaded and fired about 84,000 rounds in .40 S&W. So by reloading, even if I have to buy a new gun, I still have saved nearly $4,500.
Plus, having learned the lesson of how a can get a double charge with this load I can either change loads to completely avoid this or modify my quality control procedures to reduce the chances.
This was using the worst case cost for reloaded ammo. It also doesn’t take into account that my reloads are lower recoil than factory loads and result in less wear on the gun. My actual savings is quite a bit greater than the calculations above indicate. Hence, in this case, the headline writer for The Gun Feed is wrong.
Quote of the day—Bob Menendez
If Brett Kavanaugh joins the Supreme Court, the gun industry will have new ammunition in their war to overturn common sense gun safety laws aimed at protecting our children, keeping our streets safe, and stopping deadly firearms from falling into the wrong hands.
Bob Menendez
U.S. Senator from New Jersey
September 3, 2018
Senator Bob Menendez Speaks in Paterson Against Appointment of Supreme Court Nominee Based on ‘Dangerous Views on the Second Amendment’
[All freedoms are “dangerous”. And that is why some of the most important ones are specific enumerated rights.
And you notice, as frequently is the case, this anti-gun person speaks in terms of “the gun industry” being the driving force rather than there being a market for common sense defensive tools. They pretend to believe that only evil capitalists and criminals could possible want or need to own guns. The truth is that only political tyrants and criminals could possibly want or need to restrict gun ownership.
I would like to suggest Senator Menendez and his ilk get on the winning side soon or risk prosecution in the future.—Joe]
Quote of the day—USAGoneBlue!
Could all you gun rights fools either get penis enlargement surgery or just fucking shoot yourselves so the rest of us can live in peace?
USAGoneBlue!
August 20, 2018
Comment to This Hawaiian Veteran’s Win For Gun Rights Would Be A Perfect Movie
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
Via email from Steve O.
Typical. This guy has insults and death wishes. We have Supreme Court decisions.—Joe]
Double charged
Yesterday I invited people to guess what this was:
chiefjabboby, using some rather flowerily language, got it right. Drew Rinella was more straight forward with a more complete, and correct, answer.
Below, on the left, is a normal primer which has been fired. The primer above is in the middle below. Most of what is left of the case is on the right. The rest of the case is stuck in the chamber of my STI DVC Limited (chambered in .40 S&W).
I strongly suspect I got a double charge in one of my reloads. I didn’t think it was possible. It’s true, as I told myself when I started using this load, that a double charge would not allow the bullet to be fully seated. But I didn’t actually try it.The bullet compresses the double charge and the powder pushes the bullet part way out. But it’s only about 0.040 over the usual overall length (OAL). So, it’s quite possible I overlooked this during my final inspection.
The magazine was blown out of the gun and forcibly disassembled. This was essentially all I could find of the pieces. Note the spring is all crooked. What doesn’t show up is that the feed lips are quite a bit wider than a normal magazine.
There was some damage to the gun. I had to hammer it to get the slide open and the ripped apart shell casing out. I suspect the slide is beyond repair. The ejector pins were sheared off but it’s possible they were broken before the incident. The extractor was loose in the slide and the metal below the head of the extractor was pushed down and slightly torn:
I was not hurt but there were strange smoke patterns on my hands where gases came out of all the gaps between the slide, frame, and grip:
My face got peppered with tiny bits of something and stun for a few minutes but it did not break the skin. I had a slightly shadow on my face around my safety glasses giving me a bit of a raccoon appearance.
I disassembled the gun to examine everything carefully. Here is what a mostly disassembled STI DVI Limited looks like:
I plan to reassemble it and ship it off to STI to see if they can repair it. And before I use any more of that ammo I’m going measure the OAL on every cartridge (I think I can use a case gauge). I have a backup gun which I used at a USPSA match today. And I expect I will be using is for a quite a while. STI is notoriously slow in turn around time and I may have to buy a brand new gun. And the last time I checked the wait times were quite long for new guns.
I put about 45,000 rounds through it. This is more than the approximately 40,000 rounds I got out of my STI Eagle 5.1 before it had a serious failure and became my backup gun.
It’s probably time for me to buy another gun regardless of whether the DVC Limited can be repaired or not. Heavy sigh…
Quote of the day—Gregg Popovich
The obvious elephant in the room is the guns, weapons of war, the magazines.
The real discussion should be about the Second Amendment.
Is it useful?
Gregg Popovich
San Antonio Spurs head coach
March 27, 2018
San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich sounds off on Second Amendment after loss
[Via a tweet from Firearms Policy Conference:
Yes.
Next question?—Joe]
Guess what this is
I won’t have time for a full blog post on this topic until late tomorrow sometime.
In the mean time, guess what this is:
NO on I-1639 Grassroots Organizer
Contribute to the fight against I-1639:
Please use the form and map below to report and locate firearms retailers, ranges, clubs, or other shops that have SOS | NO on I-1639 handouts, and also the NRA NO on I-1639 handouts and or campaign materials.
Also, please indicate if the store is out or refuses to post or make materials available.
You don’t know what I-1639 is about? Here is the text.
Of particular interest is this definition:
25) “Semiautomatic assault rifle” means any rifle which utilizes a portion of the energy of a firing cartridge to extract the fired cartridge case and chamber the next round, and which requires a separate pull of the trigger to fire each cartridge.
Hence, all semiautomatic rifles are “semiautomatic assault rifles”. Ruger Mini-30s, Ruger 10-22s, and even Remington Model 750 with four round magazines:
Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you no one is after your hunting rifles.
And the cute rifle you might get as your daughter’s first gun will be included:
If I-1639 passes your daughter won’t be allowed to possess it until she turns 21, and then she will have to take “a recognized firearm safety training program”. The gun must be register to her. And:
The chief of police or sheriff, or the designee of either, shall check with the national crime information center, including the national instant criminal background check system, provided for by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (18 U.S.C. Sec. 921 et seq.), the Washington state patrol electronic database, the health care authority electronic database, and with other agencies or resources as appropriate, to determine whether the applicant is ineligible under RCW 9.41.040 to possess a firearm.
Yes, law enforcement gets to look at your daughter’s medical records to see if she is unfit to possess an “semiautomatic assault rifle”, also known as a Ruger 10-22 or Remington Model 597.
Just say NO!
Progressives don’t want you to read this
I haven’t read this yet. It sounds interesting:
An elementary mathematical theory based on “selectivity” is proposed to address a question raised
by Charles Darwin, namely, how one gender of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with
greater variability than the other gender. Briefly, the theory says that if one sex is relatively selective
then from one generation to the next, more variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to
prevail over those with lesser variability; and conversely, if a sex is relatively non-selective, then less
variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with greater variability. This
theory makes no assumptions about differences in means between the sexes, nor does it presume that
one sex is selective and the other non-selective. Two mathematical models are presented: a discrete-time
one-step statistical model using normally distributed fitness values; and a continuous-time deterministic
model using exponentially distributed fitness levels.
If I had seen this without much other context I probably would have read the abstract and moved on. Interesting, but not worth much more time. However…
The context in which I ran across this was Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole, an peer reviewed paper, approved and published, was removed from online archives:
Colleagues I spoke to were appalled. None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?
I save banned CAD files for 3D printing. I buy banned books. And I publish banned academic papers.
Quote of the day—Chip Bergh
As a company, we have never been afraid to take an unpopular stand to support a greater good.
…
I’m convinced that while some will disagree with our stand to end gun violence, history will prove this position right too.
Our country has faced seemingly intractable issues like this before, but together we’ve overcome them. We can do it again. Together we can put an end to the gun violence epidemic in America.
Chip Bergh
September 4, 2018
Levi Strauss CEO: Why Business Leaders Need to Take a Stand on Gun Violence
[Not anywhere in the article does he even hint there is such a thing as justified violence. He says he is not suggesting we repeal Second Amendment but he doesn’t acknowledge that it protects the rights of individuals to own firearms.
He speaks of ending “gun violence” and “the greater good”. He apparently doesn’t realize that in almost all cases the greater good is achieved by respecting the rights of individuals. Because of this disrespect of our rights tens of millions of individuals will fail to respect his decision and spend their money elsewhere.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Eric Raymond
The people who had the most extreme, negative, lying-bastards model of what “gun-control” activists had been doing turned out to be correct.
One of the people radicalized by this realization was me.
Eric Raymond
June 20, 2018
Comment to The critical fraction
[I didn’t really have any models presented to me. I had to make my own model from the available evidence. And, as you well know, the only model that fits is the “most extreme, negative, lying-bastards model”.—Joe]
Quote of the day—L.B. Zumpshon
Until we can get comprehensive education and deal with toxic masculinity head-on, and/or the U.S. gets some sensible gun control laws in place, I believe the only solution is for a law to be passed that only lets women buy and own guns.
L.B. Zumpshon
September 4, 2018
We Need Man Control as Much as Gun Control to Stop Mass Shootings
[What she conveniently ignores:
- The percentage of mass shooters who are leftists is close to that of those who are men. Using the same logic one could concluded that all leftists or leftist men should be banned from gun ownership.
- Rights belong to individuals. Just because everyone else in a group abuses a right does not justify the infringement of that right for individuals who have not abused it.
But, as has been known for many decades, in every socialist/communist utopia there are always some animals which are more equal than others.—Joe]
This could never be abused
Five-Eyes nations to force encryption backdoors
The governments of Australia, United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand have made the strongest statement yet that they intend to force technology providers to provide lawful access to users’ encrypted communications.
…
As part of that, the countries that share intelligence with each other under the Five-Eyes umbrella agreement, intend to “encourage information and communications technology service providers to voluntarily establish lawful access solutions to their products and services.”
…
While the statement says the five countries “are committed to an open, safe and secure internet”, it also calls for the tech industry to develop solutions that prevent illegal and illicit content from ever being uploaded.
Where there has been a failure to prevent uploads of undesirable material, tech vendors should develop capabilities to execute urgent and immediate takedowns of such content.
Human and automated systems should be developed to seek out and remove legacy content, the Five-Eyes nations said.
Capabilities to counter foreign interference and disinformation are also to be developed.
Great timing. Government repression of how to build legal products are a sensitive topic right now.
And about the “disinformation” topic. One can be fairly certain this is not aimed at, or be enforced against, those lying anti-gun people. Who does history tell us these tools will be used against? Minorities and those who are out of political power.
If they go down this path it will not end well for anyone. Regarding my encryption keys… molṑn labé.
Vote No on I-1639 poster
Via Sebastian:
Quote of the day—Hannah Shearer
Kavanaugh’s illogical claim was that public safety should play no role in determining the constitutionality of public safety laws.
Hannah Shearer
September 4, 2018
Brett Kavanaugh’s extreme beliefs on gun control ignore the concerns of most Americans
[Wow.
“Illogical”? I don’t think that word means what Shearer thinks it means. But then it’s clear, that to Shearer, words mean whatever she wants them to mean. Apparently she expects people to forget that if there needs to be some exception carved out of the Bill of Rights there is an amendment process for that. The constitution doesn’t give Federal judges the power to rewrite the constitution.
But, again, she doesn’t want to acknowledge the judges don’t have the power. She appears to thinks the constitution means whatever she wants it to mean.
Ms. Shearer, please get yourself a copy of the constitution, the Bill of Rights, and a dictionary. Words mean something and you, and especially judges, don’t get to redefine them to suit your whims.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Abbie Vetger
Only one in five gun owners belong to the NRA, so we think there is something else going on than just the NRA when it comes to mobilisation.
Abbie Vetger
September 2, 2018
Gun owners are more politically active, study finds
[The naiveté and lack of rigor here is astounding. Were they paid money to do this “study”?
Vetger and her colleagues need to check their work. A very simple check would have revealed the following:
Most estimates of gun ownership are between 20 and 40 percent of people in the U.S.. And this assumes all gun owners admit they own guns when they are asked by a pollster. It may be much higher than this.
The population of the U.S. is currently about 330,000,000. This means there are between 66 and 132 million gun owners in the U.S.
The NRA claims a membership of about 6 million people. Hence only about one in 11 to one in 22 gun owners belong to the NRA. Unless, you hypothesize the NRA is telling the world they have far fewer members than they actually have. For them to have such a motive escapes me.
Simple arithmetic shows any influence gun owners have must be far beyond the members the NRA influences.Assuming all the NRA’s 6 million members vote and vote as a block for the NRA agenda in an eligible voting population of about 241 million people is only about 2.5%. Sure, some political races are as close or closer than that but that isn’t enough to make a big difference and the assumption they all vote as a block is almost for certain false.
So… if the hypothesis that the NRA is the source of power is of questionable validity how about the hypothesis that gun owners a group independent of NRA members being a source of election strength? 60 to 126 million out of 241 million is about 25% to 50%. Now you are talking about some real power!
Therefore the timid conclusions reached by Vetger can be arrived at, and stated with far more assuredness, with a few minutes of searching on the Internet without going through the grant process and publishing a peer reviewed paper.
I wonder if Vetger and company were among those making projections that Hillary Clinton had a 95% chance of winning the 2016 election. If not then I expect she at least rode the same short bus to school with them.—Joe]
Political violence in the U.S.
I recently finished a book where I found eerie parallels to the current left-wing violence in America (Days of Rage):
Probably the most time in the book was spent on the Weather Underground (also known as Weathermen). But there was also the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and others. The author interviewed many of the leaders and participants of these violent “revolutionaries” in the writing of the book which was published in 2015. They set off thousands of bombs, robbed dozens of banks and armored cars, broke people out of prisons, and engaged in murder and kidnapping.
What I found most interesting was the white middle class students who formed the Weather Underground, for the most part, had never held jobs, and were incompetent at many basic tasks such as organizational structure, simple electrical wiring, and fixing cars. This held true when they started building bombs and blew up the house they were living in. The home was owned by the parents, away on vacation for a few weeks, of one of the members. They did know how to riot and have orgies, so, they weren’t total incompetents.
Their political philosophy and manifestos were non-sensical to most of America. In several cases people came together because they all “knew” a violent revolution was necessary because the the oppressive U.S. government had to be overthrown. They then sat around trying to figure out what cause they were taking up to rebel about. Most of the groups which where primarily white decided they were rebelling because of racism. They would have participated in the revolution because of the Vietnam war but when the U.S. pulled out they needed to find another cause. The Weather Underground political philosophy ultimate morphed a Marxist/Leninist view of utopia.
The primarily black groups thought unfair police treatment of blacks was a good cause but didn’t want much, if anything, to do with the white groups unless they had black leaders. They did allow a few white women into their groups which were useful. The women could go places and do things (for example, place bombs inside buildings) which would have drawn attention if a black had tried to do the same thing.
As is the case now, these young, naïve, idealists were financed by wealthy individuals who were sympathetic to their cause. The Weather Underground got most of their money from radical left-wing lawyers.
Also interesting was that the leaders of the Weather Underground, such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, lived in nice homes and ate well while “underground” but their followers lived lives of crushing poverty. One guy, at a meeting at Ayers home, opened the refrigerator and saw butter. He became enraged. He couldn’t afford biscuits to put butter on and this guy had butter. Ahh… yes. Under communism some animals are always more equal than others.
Interviewed decades after their revolutionary days they marveled at how naïve they had been. With hindsight they could see it was folly that they believed their revolution could succeed. But at the time, they just believed it.
I think there are lessons for many people of many political persuasions in this book. Political revolution requires a change in the culture of the society. If you can change the culture you don’t need the violence component. If you can’t change the culture the violence has a high chance of failure. The political left learned this in the 60s and 70s and it is long past time for others to learn this lesson too.