Rights, including the right to own firearms, do not need to explain themselves, and the bearers of rights do not need to justify the exercise of them. That is the very definition of a right. The burden of proof more properly rests on those who want to take rights away.
A. Barton Hinkle (@ABartonHinkle)
December 28, 2014
Opinion/Commentary: Gun-control advocates often lack firepower of facts
[Via email from Richard Feldman.
I have nothing more to add.—Joe]
Exactly one month ago, on January 6th, I reported on the number of rounds I have reloaded. Here is an update on the number total number of rounds:
223.LOG: 2027 rounds.
22LR.log: 0 rounds.
3006.LOG: 467 rounds.
300WIN.LOG: 1351 rounds.
40SW.LOG: 36840 rounds.
45.log: 0 rounds.
9MM.LOG: 18643 rounds.
Total: 59328 rounds.
The change is all in .40 S&W. Last month it was 34,941 compared to the 36,840 for a delta of 1,899 (I lost one primer). This compares to an average of about 250/month in the previous 18 years.
I’ll soon be running out of .40 S&W bullets and will then switch over to 9mm until I run out of powder. Then I probably will move on to .300 Win Mag while I search and wait for pistol powder.
GunBot Reloading Powder is my friend.
@homebuilderpa cant wait till you shoot your wife, or kids, or neighbors…@ZeitgeistGhost @DaliDager @JoeHuffman @NRA
Sue Cozza @suecozza
Tweeted on February 5, 2015
[Many anti-gun people want you and your family injured or dead. Don’t ever forget that.—Joe]
HR 131, recently introduced by U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.)
“Current federal law guarantees the right of law-abiding persons to transport firearms between two locations where they have a legal right to possessand carry them, regardless of state or local laws that would otherwise apply. The firearm must be cased or otherwise not readily accessible. Unfortunately, anti-gun local officials are using overly restrictive state licensing laws to harass and prosecute travelers who have made every effort to comply with the law, resulting in seized guns that are sometimes never returned, delayed travel, legal fees, and sometimes even unnecessary guilty pleas.
H.R. 131 would ensure the law has the effect Congress intended when it passed more than 25 years ago. Specifically, the legislation would make clear that transportation of both firearms and ammunition is federally protected, as well as expand the protections afforded to travelers to include “staying in temporary lodging overnight, stopping for food, fuel, vehicle maintenance, an emergency, medical treatment, and any other activity incidental” to the trip. Additionally, the bill would place the burden of proof clearly on the state to show that the traveler failed to comply with the law.”
Emphasis mine. So some state clowns have been flouting federal law in going after people who travel innocently through their states with gun.
Continue reading
Guns.com has a video report on smart guns (via email from the author). The bottom line:
Politics aside, there seem to be two major hurdles facing smart guns – funding for development and the potential prohibitive cost of integrating the safety technology. Armatix’s iP1, for example, is a .22-caliber pistol that retails at $1800, more than four times the cost of a regular small caliber pistol.
I think there are a lot more than two “major hurdles”. Examples include reliability, target market, and market acceptance.
In my continuing journey into become an expert on “smart guns” I offer you this report from the National Institute of Justice (original document here). I’ve read the first 25 pages of the nearly 100 page document (with 10 pages of footnotes).
The title is “A Review of Gun Safety Technologies”. I haven’t found anything really new to me in it yet. And there is certainly no technology that I would be comfortable having a government mandate even if I didn’t have some strong free market principles to overcome.
This image came from this tweet via a tweet from Linoge:
It’s a good example of Markley’s Law but what I found far more interesting was that the Twitter account it came from appears to be fake. I’m pretty sure this account is machine generated and the three tweets from that account are copied at random from the Twitter universe.
See also the followers of this account. I suspect they are all machine generated as well.
If I had the time and the interest I see what Twitter accounts they follow which are in common. I suspect it is a means of generating fake followers for some real account.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
1935
I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
[This observation applies to a great number of career paths but probably more so than any to those paid by organizations such as The Brady Campaign, The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Every Town For Gun Safety, and The Violence Policy Center.—Joe]
The entire Seattle Smart Gun Symposium video is on YouTube. But they have the video “unlisted”. It is embedded on the Washington Technology web page however.
Also, I had one person on a Smart Gun Symposium panel request I remove their name from my blog. It was very polite and they indicated they wished that we remain in contact in regards to technical issues with the technology so I complied with their request.
I find this all very interesting.
My previous posts on the Symposium are:
The title is of course misleading, as is all the speech of authoritarianism. Is it to protect the possession of responsible body armor? But an inanimate object can be neither responsible nor irresponsible. Is it to protect responsible bodies with armor? If so, why does it limit said armor? Is it to protect the responsible possession of body armor? How then would body armor be possessed in an irresponsible manner? Are there hoards of people possessing their body armor in some obnoxious fashion, say, wearing orange body armor with red clothing? One is given to wonder.
With all the Progressives pretending to be concerned, to the point of hyperventilating, about all the carnage carried out with guns, you’d think the one thing they’d want to see, besides a monopoly on gun possession for criminals, is more people wearing more effective body armor. Oh wait…
Authoritarians are of course insane, so in that sense there is nothing to see here.
One has to wonder what the authoritarian Republicans will do with this. My gut tells me they’ll be very much in favor of it, but will at the same time feel uncomfortable about letting their support be known. How that will manifest itself in their political actions I cannot guess. This sort of thing is an on-going problem for them (damn those liberty-minded little Hobbits!).
Please try to avoid getting caught up in the matter of the technical details of the various classes of body armor. This has nothing to do with any of that you know.
If the truth be known (perish the thought) this is one of many signs indicating that Congress is preparing for war with the American people. Many of them are no doubt blissfully unaware of that prospect, but it must be understood that blissful unawareness, and the vehement defense thereof, is a key component of such campaigns, right up to, and through, the the very end.
Via Dave Hardy and Kelsey Harkness, we have the December 8, 2014 Staff Report on Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Involvement in “Operation Choke Point”. It contains these key findings:
Because of this pressure by the FDIC private companies which create and sell compliance and risk management training software incorporated things such as:
The pressure was far from subtle. The official referred to in the following is Jim LaPierre, Regional Director of the Kansas City Region:
The official told the banker, “I don’t like this product, and I don’t believe it has any place in our financial system. Your decision to move forward will result in an immediate unplanned audit of your entire bank.”
This is what you get with government employees who believe they are masters rather than public servants.
A good start on the way to restore public trust would be to release the names of the scoundrels so they can be publically scorned. While I am sure there are many more here are some names from the report:
The public servants who “debated ways to ensure that bank officials saw the list and ‘get the message’” need to be sent a very strong “message”. They should be fired, prosecuted, and held personally responsible for the harm done to the business affected and the general public by their illegal and immoral actions.
I can find no excuse – zero, none – that someone running for office or training to be a police officer hasn’t found the time to peruse the operating instructions for our Republic.
Got Constitutional questions? RTFM.
Archer
December 16, 2014
Comment to Filed for future use
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
The January/February 2015 issue of Front Sight magazine has an interesting article on the statistics of making “power factor*”.
While I certainly had the background in statistics it never occurred to me to apply them to the chronograph data from my hand loaded ammunition to determine the chances of me failing to “make major” at a match. This is despite very nearly failing to make major in the 1998 Area One USPSA match.
Looking at my log files for the ammunition I made for that match I found the following data:
Mean velocity: 992.6 fps
Standard Deviation: 11.3 fps
Bullet Mass: 180 grains
Power Factor: 178.67
Back then you had to have a power factor of 175 to make major and for some reason I thought I had plenty of margin.
At the 1998 Area One match staff pulled eight cartridges at random from the magazines on my belt and tested them as per USPSA regulations. They pulled the bullet from a cartridge and weighed it. They fired three rounds and found I failed to make major. They, as per procedure, fired another three rounds, used the highest three velocities from the six rounds fired and found I was closer but still failed. They had one round left and, as per procedure, asked me what to do with it, “Fire it or weight the bullet?” I had them fire it and using the highest three velocities from the seven rounds fired I just barely made major power factor.
It wasn’t until I read the title of the article in Front Sight article, “The Power of Statistics How to Meet Power Factor with Confidence” that I felt stupid for my experience at Area One.
The bottom line is that your chance of failing the test procedure depends on how many standard deviations you are away from the velocity threshold for the power factor you want to meet.
Using my example from the Area One match the velocity threshold is 972.22 fps (175,000 / 180). My mean velocity was 992.6 fps or 20.378 fps above the threshold. With a standard deviation of 11.3 fps the ammo was 20.378 / 11.3 or 1.8 standard deviations (commonly called ‘Z’) from the threshold. Using a normal distribution table or the article you will discover my chances of failing were about 13%.
Update:
Using this table from the article you will discover my chances of failing were about 13%:
| Z | Chance of Failing Power Factor (per USPSA rules) |
| 2.5 | 5% |
| 2.0 | 10% |
| 1.9 | 11% |
| 1.8 | 13% |
| 1.7 | 15% |
| 1.5 | 21% |
| 1.4 | 26% |
| 1.2 | 36% |
| 1.1 | 40% |
| 1.0 | 44% |
| 0 | 50% |
This table is not a standard distribution table. It is a mapping from Z (number of standard deviations away from the mean) to the chances of failing the PF test under USPSA rules. This was obtained using a t-distribution because of the small sample size used by the USPSA regulations. It is assumed the shooter obtained the mean velocity and standard deviation with a sample size of eight.
End update.
I’m going to range today to measure the velocities of a new load I plan to use for competition. I’m going to make sure I’m about 2.5 standard deviations away from the threshold which would put my odds of failing to make major at about 5%.
* Power Factor is defined as the mass of the bullet in grains multiplied by the velocity in feet per second divided by 1000. Or:
Power Factor = bullet weight (grains) x average velocity (feet per second) / 1000
In many competitions your targets are scored differently depending on the power factor of the ammunition you are shooting. For example if you are shooting Limited Class USPSA you “make major” with a power factor of 165 or greater and “make minor with a power factor of 125. For major power factor ‘B’ and ‘C’ zones hit are scored as 4 points and ‘D’ zone hits are scored as two points. If you “make minor ‘B’ and ‘C’ zones hit are scored as three points and ‘D’ zone hits are scored as one point. If you don’t have ammunition which gives you a power factor of 125 or greater all zones are scored as zero. I.E. you aren’t participating in the competition.
This needs to be enforced and standard on all guns. Not only does it make sure we don’t have unintentional shootings with children, but also completely eliminates gun resales. Standardizing this technology and reinforcing background checks is part of the way to cure American’s gun problem.
Marc Lane
2014
Comment on this video:
[The stupid is strong with this one. Every single thing he said is wrong.
But what do you expect from an anti-gun person? Ignorance and stupidity is their currency.—Joe]
Now that the Republicans control both Houses, they’re asking for money to “fight” the Democrats. I get multiple pleas from them every day, asking for money.
I didn’t know it took a constant in-flow of money for a representative or a senator to do the right thing, that without said constant flow of money they’d…what?– They’d still be caving, capitulating, and expressing disdain and disgust toward their liberty-minded base? This is an interesting phenomenon. So money = courage, principled stands and moral fortitude? I did not know that.
It would be vastly more principled and honest of them to come right out and say, “We’ll support this specific bill and get it pushed through for this specific price. We’ve already received this percentage of our price, and so can you spare a hundred bucks? And by the way; if our price isn’t met, we’ll of course keep your money anyway and use it for things WE want instead.”
Or is it that they intend to buy gold with my donations, place gold bricks in a leather bag, and beat Democrats up ‘side the head with it? That would at least make some kind of sense, but then why not use a plain, clay bricks, or some rocks? Why gold, particularly? A hickory axe handle can work wonders, and it only costs a few dollars.
I have completed my report on the Seattle Smart Gun Symposium:
I’m going to now review the technologies and give you my semi-expert opinion on the technological future of smart guns.
Keep in mind there are two primary numbers associated with biometrics. False acceptance of an authorized user and false denial of an authorized use. The device can almost always be adjusted such that as one type of failure is decreased the other increases. Usually a single number is given such that these two failure rates are equal. But this might not be the appropriate thing to do for a gun. You might be comfortable with a one attempt out of 1000 failing to fire when a second attempt can be made a tenth of a second later when you use your gun primarily for four legged pest control. But you want the rate to be one out of 100000 when little Johnny found the gun while you were in the back yard working in the garden.
The first technology I want to discuss is the one from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). I have corresponded with a representative from NJIT who has been working on a “smart gun” for 14 years. They call it “Dynamic Grip Recognition”. The grip of the gun contains pressure sensors which authenticate the grip for every shot. Here is what I believe is their latest video describing the current status of their project:
In 2013 NJIT was invited to the White House for the “discussions on curbing gun violence”. They probably have the highest visibility in the technology space of “smart guns”.
After 14 years they still don’t have something would be accepted by the police for self-defense. They emphasis the potential to reduce children shooting a gun without authorization. They do not claim the existing technology will prevent a smart gun from being fired by someone who has just taken your gun away from you in a struggle. They do not claim the technology cannot be defeated by a thief with tools from your local hardware store.
They do not claim the technology is ready for commercialization. They want to build the next generation with more and better sensors in the grip.
From reading about their technology, my discussion with Allied Biometrix and the representative from NJIT it is clear they haven’t done the testing really needed. I’ll get into that in a moment, but first let me cover the testing which that probably have done a decent job on.
They have done testing of shooters under stress. It’s not real world with real bullets being fired at the person with the smart gun but with what knowledge I have of their algorithm and their test results I believe has a good chance of not being an issue.
They have done testing with shooters wearing “police issue needle stick gloves”. There was no difference in the results.
They have done testing with children versus police officers. Children, due to their smaller hands, are extremely unlikely to be able to fire gun that has been authorized for use someone with significantly larger hands.
What I do not believe they have done is compare the failure rate for children attempting to fire a gun which has been authenticated for adults with small hands. I remember that I was wearing the same size shoes as my mom when I was in the sixth grade. I expect my hands were just as large as hers too. And Mom was only slightly below average size for a Caucasian woman. What would be the crossover point for hand size of an above average male child and a small Asian woman? I’m guessing it could be 10 years old or younger.
The biometric data they have collected is from a very small number of adults. I asked about but did not receive a direct answer as to whether this data included a gun authenticate for the shooter firing in four different manners:
I did not receive any data on the failure rates as the number of authenticated shooters for a given gun is increased. I suspect these tests have not been done. As the number of authenticated shooters in increased and the number of grips is increased the failure rate for falsely authenticating someone to fire the gun may not a simple factor of the number of authenticated grips. It may much greater than that. This will be catastrophic for the acceptance of this technology.
For example, suppose the false authorization rate for gun programmed to accept one grip for one person is that one out of 10,000 random people*. If two people are authenticated, each with four different grips as noted above then it is reasonable to expect that failure rate will be at least eight times worse. This would be one out of 1,250 for each of these random shooters just attempting one natural grip. If they tried each of the four different grip styles it would be reduced by another factor of four bring the total factor to 32. Which yields odds on the order of one out of 312. This is the best that can be expected. My experience with biometrics leads me to believe that it won’t be a simple factor. It is more likely to be more likely to be something approaching an exponential. If it were an exponent of 2.5 raised to the 32nd power, instead of 1 raised to the 32nd power, then we have over a 50% failure rate.
In conventional use of biometrics this dramatic increase in failure rate with many people authorized for access to a given resource (building, computer, gun, etc.) is handled in a different way than is possible for a defensive gun. Biometrics in a many user environment are conventionally used for identity verification, not identification. That is, I claim I am Joe Huffman and my voice is used to confirm this. How would you do this with a gun in a way that couldn’t easily be defeated by a child? A switch for “shooter one, two, or three” followed up by gripping the gun doesn’t really work. The child will try all the switch settings.
It is a fair to point out that fingerprints are used to uniquely identify people. But “dynamic grip recognition” is far, far different than a fingerprint. Fingerprints are constant with time, contain a lot more information than grip patterns, and are not nearly as subject to deliberate attempts to defeat the technology as grip patterns are.
I have another email to NJIT about how fast their technology does the authentication. Will it limit the rate of fire to something below the mechanics of the gun? If so then this is a problem. I know people that out shoot their gun. Adding any delay beyond that of the gun is not acceptable.
My expectation is that dynamic grip recognition will never meet their goal of one error in 10,000 for false acceptance when you have someone deliberately attempting to defeat it. A random person using their natural grip is far different case from this and they can’t even achieve that goal now. As multiple users, multiple grips, and people deliberately trying to defeat it I will be surprised if they can do better than a combined false acceptance and false rejection rate better than one out of ten. Even one out of 100 is probably insufficient for it to be acceptable in the marketplace and I think this is unachievable.
I think that it can work for certain cases such as prevention of child accidents. If the gun is authorized for people with large hands then small hands will be very unlikely to defeat it. But if the adult has very small hands then the protection from child use will become minimal.
With such limited use cases any attempt to legally mandate this technology will be met with significant resistance in both the legislature and the courts.
* They do not currently claim such rates. They hope to achieving this with the next generation version so this is being quite conservative.
The “Stupid Party” of dickless hairlipped mongoloid mouthbreathers w no dick.
Donnie Brasco @D0NNIE_BRASC0
Tweeted on December 19, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from BFD @BigFatDave.—Joe]
See also Seattle Smart Gun Symposium part 1, Seattle Smart Gun Symposium part 2, Seattle Smart Gun Symposium part 3, and Smart Gun Symposium in the news.
Margot Hirsch
President, Smart Tech Challenges Foundation
Hirsch didn’t really say a lot but what she did say demonstrated she was generally knowledgeable about the technology. The only thing I thought she was off base on was she thought smart guns would protect against thieves. The other thing of note which she said was that the market for this technology were families.
The following information is from the bio given to participants:
Margot Hirsch is the President of the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation (STCF) a non-profit focused on reducing gun violence through the technology and innovation. The STCF was formed in 2013 with the mission of bypassing the political gridlock and polarizing debate around gun control versus person freedoms, by spurring innovation in technologies that serve to reduce firearm-related injuries and death. By awarding grants directly to innovators through the first-of-its-kind Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge, Margot is on the leading edge of inventive challenge philanthropy, finding market-based, entrepreneurial solutions to a social problem that claims over 30,000 American lives annually. She is responsible for the overall strategic direction of the foundation, running operations, board development and fundraising.
Prior to joining STCF, Margot was Regional Vice President of Blackboard, Inc. where she led international sales for the Connect division of Blackboard, a leading provider of learning solutions to the education market. With over 25 years of sales and business development in the technology industry, Margo has held business development and sales management roles at Smartforce/Skilsoft, eProsper, Angel Investors, Global Village and American Express.
More information about the organization and some of the people and technology they have given grants to can be found on their web site.
Mark Burles
Vice President, Penn Schoen Berland
Burles presented polling data from a recent survey they had done for Washington CeaseFire. One should be careful using their data. From their website:
What We Do
How We
Do It
1
DEFINE YOUR
COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGEWe measure a brand’s strength in context with its competitors to identify its assets, liabilities, & unique niche in the marketplace relative to the competition.
2
FIND YOUR
“BASE” & “SWING”
AUDIENCESOur model not only identifies a brand’s loyal customer base, but also uncovers persuadable consumer segments who can be taken from competitors to grow the brand.
3
CRAFT A
WINNING
MESSAGEPSB’s proprietary message development process delivers a clear roadmap of what to say, how to say it, and to whom to say it.
4
DELIVER A
PERSUASIVE
CAMPAIGN
In this instance their customer is Washington CeaseFire.
That said this is the data Burles presented to the audience:
Online poll of 800 respondents, representative of the US General Population. Margin of error is +/- 3.46 overall and larger for subgroups.
Questions:
- Is there currently a gun in your house (either owned by you or by someone else who lives with you)?
Definition: Smart guns are guns that can only be operated/fired by the owner or per designated individual due to technology or other constraints.- Would you consider swapping the guns currently in your home for new, safer “smart guns” when they come on the market?
- How strongly do you agree or disagree that guns dealers should be allowed to sell “smart guns”?
- How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Once the technology is commercially available, there should be a law saying that all firearms sold must be so-called “smart guns.”
How do they do an online poll without a self-selection bias?
31% of the people polled answered “Yes” to the question, “Is there currently a gun in your house (either owned by you or by someone else who lives with you)?”
40% of the gun owners said they would swap their current gun for a smart gun. But these numbers decreased with the age of the gun owner. If the gun owner was 55+ years old only 23% would swap their current gun for a smart gun.
66% of the public agreed that gun dealers should be allowed to sell smart guns.
Of those that agree 87% are gun owners, 75% are women, and 59% are women.
I don’t get this. Of those that agree, how can there be 75% men and 59% women? Surely they meant 75% the men agree and 59% the women agree. Right?
Over all 51% think there should be a mandate for “smart guns” if the technology is commercially available. But only 38% of gun owners agree while 62% of the general public agrees with a mandate.
I thank God there are no free schools nor printing. And I hope we shall not have these for 100 years. For learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both.
William Barkley
Governor of Virginia
1671
From Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History) by David Hackett Fischer
[One has to wonder if a similar attitude in our present government is the explanation for the poor quality of our schools.—Joe]
An advisory panel charged with looking at public safety in the wake of the deadly Newtown school shooting agreed Friday to include in its final report a recommendation to ban the sale and possession of any gun that can fire more than 10 rounds without reloading.
Associated Press
January 21, 2015
Newtown School Panel to Include Proposed Gun Ban in Report
[H/T to Kurt Hoffman and JPFO.
Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]