The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that an average of 232,400 firearms are stolen each year, based on data from 2005 through 2010. Eighty percent are never recovered
If, on average, each gun was used in only two crimes before being disposed of the criminal market could easily supply those needs from the guns never recovered.
Does anyone really think the criminal who steals a gun is going to do a background check on anyone before they use it in violent crime or sells it to someone who uses it in the commission of a violent crime?
“Universal” background checks of gun sales are for people who believe in Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and The Tooth Fairy. The resources spent on such foolishness should be used on something that has a chance of working..
Our city will be a better place when we realize that our overwhelming access to guns and penchant for violence will only be mitigated by supporting our men and women in blue, realizing they must not be left to address this crisis alone.
Jumaane D. Williams, New York City Council Member Vanessa L. Gibson, New York City Council Member Eugene O’Donnell, Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice A Holistic Approach to Reducing Gun Violence [So they think the police need to reduce access to guns? And how can they do that and still respect the Bill of Rights? The Supreme Court has very clearly said the 2nd Amendment means what it says, “… The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Either these people are saying they have no intention of honoring the U.S. Constitution or they are saying they completely out of touch with reality.
That gives people only two options on how to deal with them:
Prosecute them for conspiracy to infringe upon the rights of the people.
Insist they get treatment for their mental health problems.
In either case they have no business holding the positions they do.—Joe]
I’m unable to determine if this is a true story about someone else or some sort of joke webpage. But as applied to me the conclusions presented are absolutely true:
Presidential bid by Joe Huffman unlikely
Lack of name ID, fundraising hurdles are practically insurmountable for Huffman
The 2016 campaign for President is heating up, but Joe Huffman is likely to spend this race on the sidelines.
Based on the field of would-be Presidential candidates, it appears Huffman is already too far behind to mount a credible campaign, and for that reason would be unlikely to jump into the fray.
“Joe Huffman simply doesn’t have the name identification of Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush or any of the other top-tier candidates. And can Huffman raise a billion dollars of campaign cash in the next 18-months? Frankly, I’m skeptical. I say this all with due respect for Huffman and their family.”
Joe Huffman’s net worth would need to be competitive with that of Clinton or Bush, or they would need to have many wealthy, generous supporters to finance a credible presidential campaign.
Opposition researchers investigate all candidates’ backgrounds, hoping to find negative potential issues like an arrest, divorce, bankruptcy, affairs, girlfriend / boyfriend, mug shot, etc. If there were such issues for any potential candidate, that would be a challenge to overcome. For example, George W. Bush overcame the disclosure of an arrest for driving while intoxicated (DUI or DWI) in 2000 and was elected President.
While some may discount the possibility of Huffman jumping into the 2016 Presidential race, there remains a path Huffman could follow should they decide to run.
I’m sure there are many people who will be quite relieved. Why? We have to keep our priorities straight. I wouldn’t have time for Boomershoot next year if I were seriously campaigning.
Joe Huffman … died Monday … morning after he was taken off life support following a ruptured aneurysm on Sunday, according to Norm Tindell. Service arrangements are pending.
I understand that in the context we live, in which there are many criminals with guns, it may be unfair to stop people from owning them legally. But this is because of the problem of having too many guns in the first place. It seems to me that we should try to find some way of decreasing, over time, the number of guns floating around out there.
Or perhaps the best solution would be to limit the number of bullets produced and make them more expensive.
But I think something needs to be done in the direction of less guns as opposed to more. Can we agree that in the long run this will lead to less gun deaths?
clam_dude May 13, 2015 A thought on gun control [They “dude” is incredibly naïve, simpleminded, or went on a magic mushroom trip and never made it all the way back.
Decreasing “the number of guns floating around out there”? And how would he suggest someone do that? Forbid the manufacture of them then going door to door and asking nicely? I don’t think you have a clue how that might turn out. A reduction in “gun deaths” would not be what history would record for that little exercise.
And the same thing with the ammunition supply.
If this “Einstein” thinks any of his ideas would work then why not try them with recreational drugs and see how that works out. Oh! That’s right. They have tried those sort of things are. Any high school drop out can get whatever recreation drug they want within an hour or two, 24x7x365.
So the answer to his question is, “No!” Now shut up. The adults are talking.—Joe]
This is a huge victory that will save lives in Oregon by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people who will no longer be able to exploit the vast ‘Internet loophole’ to buy guns for cash in back alleys without a Brady background check. Lives will be saved as a result.
How do I know that Gross knows this is a lie? Look at the careful wording of their media release:
The Brady Campaign recently released a report highlighting the success of the Brady Law, while making the case for why Oregon needs to expand Brady background checks to all gun sales. The report shows that Brady background checks work, and that expanding them in Oregon will save lives. In 2013, Brady background checks blocked 2,215 prohibited sales in Oregon; an average of six every day.
Here they measure success by the number of sales blocked. Not the number of lives saved. If they blocked all sales they would claim an even greater success.
They go on to say:
States with expanded Brady background checks see 46 percent fewer women murdered with guns by intimate partners; 48 percent fewer law enforcement officers killed by guns; and 48 percent fewer gun-related suicides, according to a recent report by Everytown for Gun Safety.
Here they measure success by reduction in the number of people murdered or committed suicide with guns. They don’t tell you if the total number of people murdered or committed suicide went down or perhaps went up. They don’t want to talk about violent crime rates. They only to talk about “gun deaths”.
There is a reason for that. They know that gun control does not save lives. They have a cultural of lies and deception. And whatever their motivation is for advocating gun control they are willing to lie to advance their agenda.—Joe]
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]
