The Stars Came Back -075- Ambush

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Fade in

EXT – DAY – Harbin’s mortar pit

The dull rumbling drone of many quiet engines and big wheels dominate the background. It’s full daylight. Sabot is hunkered down in a corner, head down, asleep. Harbin is looking carefully over the edge of the pit. He slowly lowers his head down. He kicks Sabot’s boot gently. Sabot startles, pops his head up, looking around wildly for a moment, then settles down realizing where he is, then perks up at the sound. He looks at Harbin with a question on his face. Harbin nods. Continue reading →

Quote of the day—My Lawyer

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After looking at the letters you pointed to I would recommend that you take down any files you have posted and let the commodity jurisdiction request process take its course.

My Lawyer (who wishes to remain anonymous)
May 9, 2013
In regards to the files linked to in this post.
[It’s an interesting state of affairs when lawyers don’t want it to be known they are involved.—Joe]

Gun Song – Happiness is a warm gun – The Beatles (?!)

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I came across a Beatles song I’d never even HEARD of before. A gun song from The BEATLES?! Happiness is a Warm Gun, from the White Album. Hmmm… Looking at the lyrics, it’s clear they were pretty clueless about what they were singing about. Of course, being as it was released in 1968, perhaps not so surprising. There were a LOT of things done then in popular culture that made people say a all kinds of seriously weird and disjointed stuff. Can’t say they are not musically talented, and on a technical basis interesting. Also can’t say it’s a very good song as a song, IMHO, but here it is to you to make your own opinion of.

Hopefully, no-one needs much of an intro to the Beatles, but for the younger crowd, that was who Paul McCartney played with before Wings. For the whipper-snappers who don’t get that joke, never mind, just look them up.

Faceless bureaucrats, not blue helmeted elk

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I spent some time investigating ITAR in regards to the files for 3-D printing of weapons. It’s interesting stuff. The implications are huge.

I am not a lawyer although one or more of my sources for this post are. But none claim expertise in this area because it is such a specialized field. One source did claim “I know something about this”. The following may be a too broad interpretation of the law and the legal experts in the field will have to give us a more factual read.

The U.S. Department of State Directorate of Defense Trade Controls is the agency we have concerns about. Their mission is stated as:

The U.S. Government views the sale, export, and re-transfer of defense articles and defense services as an integral part of safeguarding U.S. national security and furthering U.S. foreign policy objectives. The Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), in accordance with 22 U.S.C. 2778-2780 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (22 CFR Parts 120-130), is charged with controlling the export and temporary import of defense articles and defense services covered by the United States Munitions List (USML).

The documents of particular interest in figuring out the implications appear to be these two:

  1. SUBCHAPTER M—INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS: PART 120—PURPOSE AND DEFINITIONS
  2. Title 22: Foreign Relations: PART 121—THE UNITED STATES MUNITIONS LIST

One of my sources ran up against ITAR due to being an NRA Firearms instructor. The NRA recently sent out a notice to instructors telling them not to provide training to foreign students. This is because, according to the first document above:

§ 120.9 Defense service.
(a) Defense service means:
(1) The furnishing of assistance (including
training) to foreign persons,
whether in the United States or abroad
in the design, development, engineering,
manufacture, production, assembly,
testing, repair, maintenance,
modification, operation, demilitarization,
destruction, processing or use of
defense articles;
(2) The furnishing to foreign persons
of any technical data controlled under
this subchapter (see § 120.10), whether
in the United States or abroad; or
(3) Military training of foreign units
and forces, regular and irregular, including
formal or informal instruction
of foreign persons in the United States
or abroad or by correspondence
courses, technical, educational, or information
publications and media of
all kinds, training aid, orientation,
training exercise, and military advice.
(See also § 124.1.)

In the last few months the Department of State is taking a much broader interpretation of this and other sections of U.S. code and applying it to gun owners, manufacturers, and instructors. There are two hypotheses for the change. One is that John Kerry is driving the change. The other is that is part of what Obama was talking about when he said he was working on gun control “under the radar”. The failure to get any gun control through Congress could have inflamed him enough that he sent out the word to find ways to punish us for our success in blocking him.

The law was intended to apply to people selling and providing real militarily useful products and training to our Cold War enemies. Things like night vision equipment and training on tank warfare or repairing high performance jet engines were valid things to be concerned about. And even though rifles that were particularly well suited for winning NRA High Power competition and training for doing better at USPSA matches could have military application the people at the Department of State ignored that. They were concerned with the nation states of the world that declared us their enemies rather than the “right-wing NRA domestic terrorists” who taught Home Firearm Safety classes a few times a year.

The law was written before the Internet and personal computers existed and some of the concepts that made sense then are absurd now. In the mid ‘90s we had the battle over encryption technology being declared an export restricted munitions. This was ultimately decided in favor of freedom under the First Amendment (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Bernstein case and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Junger case). I don’t see why the present issue wouldn’t fall under the same protection and it might. But being right and being able to fight it to the end in court are two different things.

My sources seem to think the biggest concern is that all firearms instructors, “Mom and Pop” FFLs, and of course libertarian college students with a mischievous streak (borrowing and mangling a phrase from Paul Barrett) will be required to pay the $2000+/year license fees to register with the Department of State. This would be even though there was no technology, products, or training being exported. Just that you’re “in the business” could make you subject to the restrictions and require that you register with the Department of State and pay the annual fee. The government wouldn’t have to directly “stop the signal” in it’s entirety. There a million different signals and they only have to make examples of a few people and most others would want to avoid the hassle and “would lead more compliant lifestyles”. There is very little profit to be made in being a martyr for the cause. The 3-D printer issue could just be noise and a distraction to a much bigger concern.

Ultimately the courts and Congress can probably get most of this straightened out on the side of freedom. If they don’t freedom will be lost to faceless bureaucrats not “blue helmeted elk” that you can shoot at as they go door-to-door confiscating your guns.

In the mean time an enraged narcissist who didn’t get his way with the legislature could conceivably apply the regulations to people posting YouTube videos on how to grip your pistol.

Can you say…

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… “Streisand Effect”?

I knew you could.

Details of the topic are here, here, and get it while it lasts here.

Update: Over 45% of my entry page views in the last hour have been for the 3-D printer files.

CantStopTheSignal

Quote of the day—Zelman and Stevens

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Never be so trusting of a government to protect you that you give up your own means of self defense. A good government will never try to render its citizens defenseless—an evil government always will.

Aaron Zelman and Richard Stevens
2001
Death by “Gun Control:” the Human Cost of Victim Disarmament

[Via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

I have nothing to add.—Joe]

The Stars Came Back -074- Dropping in

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Fade in

INT – DAY – Kat’s office in BLDG 1701

She sits at her desk, Councilor Darch on her computer screen. He’s a very thin, almost cadaverous, with intense eyes, perfect hair, and immaculate shirt and jacket. THe office behind him looks lavish and large. Continue reading →

Can’t stop the signal with crypto hashes

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Following the lead of Robb and Barron I’m hosting the files to produce firearms on a 3-D printer.

One of the risks to “the signal that cannot be stopped” is that the signal could be subtly corrupted without the possessor knowing. Therefore I am computing and including the hashes of the files so that you can verify it has not been corrupted. Of course someone could corrupt the hashes posted on this blog post to match the corrupted files but I have saved copies of the hashes in a secure location for later comparison. Contact me if there is a concern the hashes have been tampered.

To compute and verify the hashes I used File Checksum Tools (free and quite functional).

The Defense Distributed file pack is here. Hashes:

  • MD5: F4784E3C4C6B6D851C3F2CFD8579B2A6
  • SHA-1: 3B733B62D8D3B08DE9BFFB94CDD308C18BF09BB0
  • SHA-256: 8B3247FE5145E87ABA5B91A6DFCA26193E5472C60AF279223CE5A92611A24D31

The Liberator is here (removed upon the advice of My Lawyer). Hashes:

  • MD5: 26DE1E830AC58C078650B69C4D34602E
  • SHA-1: AA33BC73264B80B87D21FF8D56DE02EAECDA3574
  • SHA-256: 763927D34CE89B550A118E3522181FC434632D6D6188CB82E1612096A613C4AA

ATF on 3-D printed guns

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The ATF just Tweeted a link to a Q & A .PDF about 3-D printed guns.

I put a copy here.

The short version is:

Yes, it’s legal without a license as long as it is not an NFA item. If it does not have a rifled barrel then it might be classified as ‘Any Other Weapon” which is an NFA item.

Summary of who can and how to get a license to manufacture.

It seems a reasonable response once you suspend disbelief enough to allow that the ATF is more constitutionally permissible than a BRAS (Bureau of Religion, Assembly, and Speech).

Update: There are some questions (and this is why I was deliberately vague above) about what constitutes an AOW. From 26 USC § 5845:

The term “any other weapon” means any weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive, a pistol or revolver having a barrel with a smooth bore designed or redesigned to fire a fixed shotgun shell, weapons with combination shotgun and rifle barrels 12 inches or more, less than 18 inches in length, from which only a single discharge can be made from either barrel without manual reloading, and shall include any such weapon which may be readily restored to fire. Such term shall not include a pistol or a revolver having a rifled bore, or rifled bores, or weapons designed, made, or intended to be fired from the shoulder and not capable of firing fixed ammunition.

It is my NON-LAWYER reading of this that since neither the current nor WWII Liberator fires a shogun shell they do not qualify as an AOW even though the barrels are not rifled.

The Stars Came Back -073- Unconventional munitions

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EXT – DAY – North hill-top

A grassy hill-top with a some scrubby bushes. Hunkered down between and behind some of the bushes are six men in camo uniforms, small packs and equipment around them on the ground. One of the men has binoculars and is watching the refugee center.
Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Barry Snell

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To my fellow citizens who are anti-gun I say: So long as you deny our humanity, so long as you malign our dignity, intelligence and wisdom, so long as you seek to shade us under a cloud of evil that we do not partake in or support, so long as you tell us that because we own guns we are terrible people, you will prove yourselves absolutely right in that we won’t come to the table to talk with you.

And there will be no hope for resolution but through victory by force initiated by one side or the other, God help us, for we will not plow for those who didn’t beat their swords into plowshares.

Barry Snell
May 3, 2013
Snell: Waking the dragon — How Feinstein fiddled while America burned
[Via son James.

Nearly every paragraph of this editorial could be a QOTD. It’s very good.

Kevin has more here and here.—Joe]

Only 12% of those surveyed had a clue…

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…that gun homicides are down. Way down. Via theBlaze.

The majority of Americans apparently believe that “gun violence” is on the rise. This is because there are people in high places who want us to believe things that aren’t true.

But as Tam put it, and I paraphrase;
“Even if every other gun owner on the planet tried to murder someone last night, I didn’t. So leave me alone.”

The right to keep and bear arms is not conditional. It is based on sound, moral principles, which do not change with the weather or with any other circumstances as some would have us think.

Either way (that is to say; using their own false logic or using moral principle) the anti-rights forces lose the argument when people pay attention. The other takeaway here is that lies, even big, transparent lies, do seem to work somewhat, at least for a while.

My alternate quote of the day – Me

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In comments here;

“The bottom line is; we have authoritarians and anti-authoritarians living in the same society. Each is attempting to foster its separate, incompatible doctrine. Neither can afford to tolerate the other.”

It’s more like we’re living as separate societies in the same country, and that we have incompatible world views rather than “doctrines”. Neither world view can tolerate the other, because one example is often capable of poisoning, or infecting, a whole lot of people.

The authoritarian’s fantasy of a glorious regime can be highly threatened by one “upstart” who simply will not be intimidated or fall in line. The ideal of liberty in the minds of anti-authoritarians can be poisoned by the emergence of gangs as they infiltrate the political and media infrastructures.

So far in this post I’ve treated authoritarians and anti-authoritarians as separate but equal, but there is of course a major difference– The anti-authoritarian (libertarian) can best further his goals by being straight forward and honest, while the authoritarian must use deception, fear, anger and doubt.

One is honest and motivated by love while the other is a lying sack of shit motivated by hate trying to appear good and reasonable only as a means of getting its greedy way. One is honest with himself to the greatest extent possible while the other must avoid reality or be exposed and discredited. One builds and provides while the other is a deadly parasite, and yet one can be seen as mocking the other for its selfish goals.

Which are you? Most people are confused on the matter, believing themselves to be one when they are the other. Further; you can at times actually be doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Feints within feints within feints. What a tangled web we weave.

You can dress the conflict up in millions of words, appealing to various motivations and emotions, but it is still that simple, age-old conflict between love and hate, or liberty and tyranny.

Each sees itself as a liberator, too, and again it is because the mere existence of the other is a threat to its own existence. One is poison to the other and so it longs to be free of that poison.

How many ways can we say the same things? Millions and millions and millions. We fool ourselves into playing the same deadly game over and over.

The Stars came Back -072- Situation

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Fade in

INT – DAY – Kat’s office in BLDG 1701

She sits at her desk, Lag on her computer screen.

Kat: Nothing yet. They said they lost a bunch of surveillance assets about (glances at the clock) fifteen minutes ago. No good real-time in the area right now, but they are moving what they can – soonest is a couple of hours. Wait or risk it?
Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Sen. Richard Blumenthal

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There is nothing celebratory about the fact that two brothers suspected of planting bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon a few weeks ago were able to get a gun without a proper permit. This gun was used to kill a police officer.

Despite these morbid realities, the NRA is still celebrating this weekend in the Lone Star State, slowly but surely consigning itself to irrelevance as Americans continue to pressure Congress to do something about gun violence weeks after the Senate’s failure to pass the gun violence prevention bill.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal
May 3, 2013
There’s Nothing To Celebrate: NRA’s Celebratory Atmosphere At National Conference Is Disgusting
[Proper permit? Perhaps legislation should be passed that requires “a proper permit” before high school students can purchase recreation drugs like beer and cigarettes. Blumenthal is a blooming idiot if he does not understand the realities of economics and black markets in a quasi-free society. Or alternatively he is desirous of implementing a tyrannical police state. I can see no other alternatives. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and declare him an idiot.

Would it be disgusting if the NAACP and ADL celebrated defeating legislation that would required background checks before their members could get permits to be on public streets after dark? Surely it’s just “common sense” that we don’t want people like that “on the streets” unless they have permission from the government. Right?

Wrong. We are talking about specific enumerated rights. Requiring government permission to exercise a right is to deny that it is a right. And the thing that is disgusting is that we had to even have a debate, let alone a fight, about recognizing that right.

It’s Senator Blumenthal and the anti-freedom people he supports that are consigning themselves to irrelevance. Over 86,000 people showed up at the NRA annual meeting and the NRA has a membership of over 5,000,000. How many show up at the gun control annual meetings? About 50 to 100 for the nations largest anti-gun group. The entire email list of the Brady Campaign is only about 50,000. The Brady Campaign doesn’t even have “members” in the sense that the NRA does.

No matter how you look at what Blumenthal has to say it’s clear he is unfit to hold public office. Instead he should be on the street corner handing out free copies of CPUSA newsletters. It would be more philosophically in alignment with his politics than being a member of the U.S. Senate.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Ry stopped by my office this afternoon and shared this bit of knowledge with me:

When you are shooting into a fire a red dot sight is totally worthless.

It’s obvious in hindsight but neither he nor I thought of it ahead of time.

Still more on communications

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I got an e-mail today off our web site, complaining that we’re too hard to contact. He went on and on about it. He wants to spend money. He was asking several questions that are answered on the web site. His message did not include his phone number or address, just the e-mail.

My e-mail reply was bounced back to me by his mail server.

This reminds me of the woman who always hooks up with scum-of-the-Earth men, who abuse her, and she then ends up hating men, the Progressive who advocates massive restrictions on commerce and then complains about businesses colluding with politicians, and the gun control advocate who points to Chicago’s crime rate as a reason why we need more gun restrictions.

Methinks thy complaints be self fulfilling.

I can smell the hay

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Brother Doug was going through old photo albums and other stuff and came across this picture:

BlowingHay

He sent it to me and asked what tractor was used to power the hay blower and whether it was the ‘51 or the ‘53 truck in the picture above. The two people in the picture are our dad (in the truck) and me (on the ground).

I gave him my best answers. “I’m pretty sure that is the ‘51 truck” and “I think we might have borrowed a tractor to power the hay blower” (see the large, flat, belt leading off to the left of the picture?). Doug was able to confirm it was the ‘51 and found another picture of Uncle Alden’s tractor with a flat belt attached to it near the barn.

What is more interesting to me is that while I remembered putting up hay like this for several years the picture brought back surprisingly vivid memories. I can almost smell the hay, feel the rock salt in my hand from the rusty bucket at my feet (we added salt to dry out the hay and reduce the risk of spontaneous heating and fire), and hear the sounds the hay blower made as it pushed the hay up the pipe into the barn. It’s very, very vivid. It’s very close to real even though it was probably 45 years ago.

The next time I go back to Idaho with Barb L. I should take her on a tour of the barn in the picture. The hay blower is still inside.

Who will they punish now?

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Remember when the control freaks announced they wanted background checks for the sale of explosive powders after the Boston Bombing? This, of course, was aimed at gun owners. Not real terrorists because real terrorist could easily find substitutes. Gun owners could not.

We now know the explosive powder the villains used:

BostonBombersPowderSource

Yup. That’s right. They disassembled fireworks and put that powder in the pressure cookers.

So now I wonder… Who will the control freaks seek to punish now? Will they want background checks on anyone that buys fireworks?

Never mind. Those were rhetorical questions. The Boston Bombers (WeaponsMan calls them “Speed Bump” and “Flashbang”—I like!) were just an excuse. Gun owners are the real targets and it will still be the gun owners they seek to control.

The Stars Came Back -071- Paying Passenger

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Fade in

INT – Day – Officers mess

Helton, Lag, and Trask sit at the table.

Trask: I can’t just get dumped at the refugee center. WE can’t.
Continue reading →