A classic in more than one sense:
Via Kevin from the Lewiston Pistol Club email list.
New shooter report
My niece Lisa took a new shooter to the range:
Friday we went to the shooting range and taught my roommate Shannon how to shoot (she had never shot a gun before in her life). Mike did most of the “training” since he’s in the Army. We shot a .22 pistol, my .357 magnum revolver, and… a full-auto AR-15. It was fun to introduce someone new to shooting. Shannon loved it and wants to go shooting again! Luckily we found out that Thursday nights are “date night” and two people shoot for the price of one… can you say roommate date?
All violence or just “gun violence”?
As Daniel from work said in the email, “back to bows and arrows” and I would like to add knives and clubs:
A new technology called ShotSpotter enables law enforcement officials to precisely and instantaneously locate shooters, and it has been quietly rolling out across America. From Long Island, N.Y., to San Francisco, Calif., more than 60 cities in the U.S. have been leveraging ShotSpotter to make their streets safer.
…
ShotSpotter relies on wide-area acoustic surveillance and GPS technology to triangulate the source of gunshots. Sensors are fixed to buildings and poles to provide coverage over a fixed area. With audio-analysis software, it can identify whether a shooter is stationary or moving — meaning police officers can be equipped with information on the speed and direction of, say, a vehicle from which a shot was fired.
It can also “hear” the acoustic signature and distinguish between calibers and types of firearms. Similarly, it can hear different explosions and classify them, from vehicle backfires to fireworks to bombs.
The ShotSpotter Gunfire Alert system then relays the location and data to the police or a dispatch computer within moments, enabling a more rapid response time for both police and first responders.
The best part: ShotSpotter works. It’s accurate to 10 to 15 feet, and some police departments are reporting accuracy to within five feet. In Long Island’s Nassau County, gun violence was reduced by a whopping 90 percent at the close of this year’s first quarter.
It would be interested to see if the total violence and not just “gun violence” was reduced. I’m immediately suspect when careful wording such as that in the last paragraph is used.
A chapter is closed
A choir boy shot by a racist vigilante white guy in 1984 died on the 27th anniversary of the shooting:
Exactly 27 years to the day after Bernhard Goetz — famous in New York lore as the “Subway Vigilante’’ — shot four young men he thought were threatening him on a train, one of them killed himself by swallowing prescription pills in a low-rent Bronx motel, authorities said.
James Ramseur, 45, was found dead of an apparent overdose at 11:30 a.m. yesterday at the Paradise Hotel at 2990 Boston Road, law-enforcement sources said last night.
…
Ramseur had gotten out of prison only 17 months ago, after serving 25 years upstate for raping a young woman on a Bronx rooftop.
The shooting took place on Dec. 22, 1984, when Ramseur, 18, and neighborhood pals Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen and Troy Canty, all 19, were riding a downtown No. 2 train.
…
Cabey, who was paralyzed when Goetz shot him at close range, won a $43 million lawsuit. Goetz declared bankruptcy and hasn’t paid a dime.
Cabey, by far the most seriously injured, still is confined to a wheelchair and functions with the intellect of an 8-year-old.
Allen was convicted of robbery in 1991 and released from prison four years later.
Canty racked up a string of petty offenses and once served 18 months in a residential drug- treatment program.
The NY Times has more:
Mr. Ramseur was already incarcerated at the time of the trial, having been convicted of raping, sodomizing and robbing a young pregnant woman in 1986. He was conditionally released in 2002, but he returned to prison for a parole violation in 2005. He finished his sentence in July 2010.
I can only think that Goetz should have had more training and ammo so this particular chapter of history could have been closed much earlier.
Quote of the day—Jane Fonda
I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communist.
Jane Fonda
August 2002
[In the 20th Century about 100 million people were killed, mostly by their own governments, trying to implement communism. So, tell me Ms. Fonda, are you volunteering your body to be thrown on the pile in the 21 Century?—Joe]
Do as I say
If, as I have heard, pointing out hypocrisy is one of the most potent political weapons then this gun grabber just exposed himself big time. Via Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms:
BELLEVUE, WA – Mobile, Alabama Mayor Sam Jones has some explaining to do in the wake of a highly-publicized incident this week during which he held a burglary suspect at gunpoint, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
Jones, a Democrat, is a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an organization that has campaigned for stricter gun control laws that affect average private citizens.
But Jones is no average private citizen. According to published reports, Jones was returning home from an errand, driving his private vehicle. “His bodyguard, who drives the mayor’s city vehicle, was not on duty,” the Press-Register newspaper reported. And now there are questions about whether the mayor has an Alabama carry permit.
“Here is a municipal mayor who has a bodyguard, and believes it is okay for him to carry a gun, but he belongs to an organization that consistently works to keep everyone else from carrying,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “If the mayor is legally licensed, why does he belong to a group that has fought to prevent law-abiding citizens from exercising their self-defense right?
“If Mayor Jones doesn’t have a permit,” he continued, “then he is a poster child for the double standards that elites like Mayor Michael Bloomberg believe separates them from the citizens they serve. Either way, Mayor Jones owes it to his constituents to show them his carry permit, and to oppose any further attempts by Mayors Against Illegal Guns to prevent private citizens from exercising their constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms.
“It is no surprise that average American citizens are fed up with government officials at all levels,” Gottlieb observed. “We’re glad that Mayor Jones had the means and the willingness to protect his property, but we are stunned and disappointed that he belongs to an organization whose very essence is to make it virtually impossible for average citizens to do likewise.”
I have to wonder if Bloomberg will kick him out of the organization or if he will find nothing wrong with one of the anointed defending life and property with their own firearm.
Quote of the day—James Carville
I don’t think there is a Second Amendment right to own a gun.
James Carville
October 2002
[If there had been a period after the third word in that sentence I would have totally agreed with him.—Joe]
ATF standardizing on residency requirements
The DOJ recently concluded that, as a matter of law, applying a more stringent State residency requirement for aliens legally present in the U.S. than for U.S. citizens is incompatible with the language of the GCA. As a result, ATF will be revising the regulations in 27 C.F.R. Part 478 to conform to the DOJ’s conclusions by removing the separate 90-day residency requirement for aliens.
Gun rights jujitsu
This was a nice bit of verbal jujitsu for gun rights. The end result was the usual “Reasoned Discourse” but still it had to have stung for at least a little while.
How do we solve this problem?
To the best of my knowledge they do not back these conclusions up with data yet we have this from the American Academy of Pediatrics:
The best way to keep your children safe from injury or death from guns is to NEVER have a gun in the home.
- Do not purchase a gun, especially a handgun.
- Remove all guns present in the home.
- Talk to your children about the dangers of guns, and tell them to stay away from guns.
- Find out if there are guns in the homes where your children play. If so, talk to the adults in the house about the dangers of guns to their families.
Presuming there is no factual basis, which I’m virtually certain there is not or the CDC would have mentioned it, what is the best way to encourage them to recant? My guess it has to come from pediatric physicians but I’m open to suggestions.
A lot can happen in ten years
It was just a little over ten years ago the news was U.S. Handgun Production Dives 52%:
The American handgun market has dropped off so steeply that some industry experts worry that it may never fully recover.
Observers and critics cite a number of factors for the decline, including tougher rules for buying handguns, the revulsion caused by workplace and school shootings and the possibility that Americans already own all the guns they want.
The handgun business is “a dying industry,” said Cameron Hopkins, editor in chief of American Handgunner magazine.
Combined production for domestic and overseas handgun sales tumbled 52 percent between 1993 and 1999, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Industry experts foresee more rough going in the future for the country’s 50 handgun manufacturers.
Handgun imports also are way down, ATF figures indicate.
Of course a big share of the production “dive” was the boycott of Smith and Wesson the previous year. But still those were dark days for the industry and for gun rights.
We are “riding high” now but in ten years things could change again if we do not keep pushing as fast and as hard as we can in the proper direction. Liberty is always unfinished business.
See also Quote of the day—Tom Diaz from earlier today.
Quote of the day—Tom Diaz
I think the era of the mass marketing of handguns is going to end.
Tom Diaz
Violence Policy Center analyst
April 13, 2001
U.S. Handgun Production Dives 52%
[Lest anyone get too cocky about our current situation keep in mind this was just 10 years ago. A lot can happen in ten years.—Joe]
Common Wisdom
When loading black powder guns, you must always seat the projectile hard against the powder charge, no matter what. Never, ever, ever leave an air space between powder and bullet, or it could create a pressure spike and blow your gun to smithereens.
When loading smokeless powder, never, ever seat the bullet too deep, even if there’s a huge air space in there (38 Spl comes to mind) or it could create a pressure spike and blow your gun to smithereens.
You should never, ever use smokeless powder in a black powder gun, because it could create a pressure spike and blow your gun to smithereens.
If you’re loading smokeless powder in a metal cartridge case designed for black powder, to be loaded into a gun designed for black powder cartridges, it is not only OK, it is recommended, and universally used both by hand loaders and ammunition manufacturers. Using black powder in a black powder metal cartridge is a relatively rare, esoteric art. So rare in fact that the loading manuals almost never mention doing it. It will dirty up your gun, so always use smokeless unless you just want to make some smoke and be a show-off.
Smokeless will blow my percussion revolver to smithereens! Unless I install a cartridge conversion cylinder, in which case it will be fine with thousands of 45 Colt smokeless loads.
So can I take from all that, assuming it’s all true, that I can safely use smokeless powder in my 1858 Remington percussion revolver, using the percussion cylinder, so long as I observe loading data for, say, the 44 Russian cartridge, and be SURE to leave a sizeable air gap between powder and ball? Or is something in the above paragraphs not true? Surely it’s either/or.
Not that I intend to try it, or that I even want to try it, mind you, but to make a point about Common Wisdom.
Justice
Billy Beck wanted some discussion on the matter of Eric Holder a while back, but I didn’t see much of it.
While I agree with Beck’s sentiment, I question the idea of firing Holder’s ashes from a cannon into Mexico. It could be seen as an act of hostility toward Mexico, but then I wonder if that would be such a bad thing.
I’d be OK with the extradition of Eric Holder to Mexico (alive or dead) but only after he received justice here in the U.S. That is both our right and our grave responsibility.
But justice for the pawn is only the beginning, not an end. It would be a mistake to focus on the lieutenant to such a degree as to forget his commander.
Quote of the day—Jeff Knox
It infuriates me when I hear “reporting” and editorializing about “the powerful Gun Lobby” and “the intransigent Gun Lobby” and sometimes even “the evil Gun Lobby,” as if we were a handful of rich fat cats in safari shirts sitting in a mahogany-lined room full of leather, stuffed animals, and cigar smoke plotting how to increase our profits by increasing crime. We are the people! We are the 80 to 90 million people in this country who own guns and the tens of millions more who do not own guns, but fully support our right to do so.
Jeff Knox
December 17, 2011
I Am The Gun Lobby
[This excellent rant should become a classic. Please read the whole thing and remind those who refer to the NRA as “the gun lobby” that we are the gun lobby.
H/T Say Uncle.—Joe]
Xenia’s polar plunge
A month ago I posted about my baby daughter Xenia planning to jump into a frozen lake in Alaska. She survived and raised about $160 for Special Olympics:
She is the young woman on the far right.
The still pictures below were taken by fellow Army wife Amy.
They can’t hold a candle to a gun
As pointed out by Sebastian Bitter the Brady Campaign had a “big announcement”. While it’s overstating things a bit to say, “Yes, they want you to light a candle. Because candles will stop violence.” it’s not overstating it by very much.
It’s the Brady Campaign’s latest effort to dance in the blood of victims. And it’s a very pathetic effort too.
They literally say, “Imagine stopping a bullet before it kills a child. Impossible? Not with your help! All across America people are coming together to save lives from preventable gun violence. Will you join them, and the Brady Campaign, as we host a nationwide candlelight vigil to honor victims of gun violence?”
“Coming together to save lives” with candles? Saying “No” over the sights of a firearm works much better.
And many of the locations ban the use of real candles!
As pathetic as that is there is even more pathetic information between the lines on their web site.
They list a number of locations where you can join in a “National Candlelight Vigil”. The interesting thing is they only list 28 locations in 15 states. There are no events in many of the cities and states where they claim to have chapters. This includes the supposed chapter in Arizona! This state in particular is significant because the event date, January 8th, was chosen as the anniversary of the shooting of Tucson, Arizona shooting in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was severely wounded and six people were killed.
Here are the supposed Brady chapters that are not listed as participating in this “big event”:
- Arizona
- Colorado
- Delaware
- Florida
- Georgia
- Kentucky
- Maryland
- All three chapters in Michigan
- Three of four chapters in New Jersey
- One of two chapters in North Carolina
- Three of four chapters in Virginia
- One of two chapters in Washington
- Wisconsin
If those “chapters” can’t find enough people willing to show up and hold a candle for a few minutes then they don’t have the capacity to accomplish any real task. They are nothing more than specks of ASCII text adrift in the galactic Internet.
As an organization they are in the process of collapsing. This is good but we need to drive them into political extinction, organizational bankruptcy, and then mock, shame, and shun the individuals into the dustbin of history.
This is what happens in places without guns—Case XXV
From the U.K. New Jersey (Thanks ubu52, Barron said U.K. and I didn’t read my own copy and paste of the article, sorry about that) where guns are not allowed. Hence two young thugs can beat up on an old homeless guy without fear of meaningful self-defense or someone else defending their innocent victims:
A pair of cruel youths wished a bloody homeless man ‘Merry Christmas’ after brutally beating him and stealing his bicycle near the New Jersey shore.
Police tracked down and arrested 20-year-old Taylor Giresi and his 17-year-old cameraman after the boys posted a video of their crimes in two videos on YouTube.
The footage shows Giresi stalking through the woods in Wall Township, New Jersey, after declaring: ‘About to go beat up this bum.’
‘About to be a knockout,’ the 17-year-old responds with a laugh, according to an account by the Asbury Park Press.
Quote of the day—Robb Allen
Filthy cretins. They should be treated with all the respect of a Klansman. Well, I don’t want to insult Klansmen like that. At least with the KKK, they don’t go around trying to tell people they’re actually concerned about the rights of blacks.
Robb Allen
December 20, 2011
Not only do they lie about practically everything
[He’s referring to the Brady Campaign.
I think the problem is that they have lost control of their world. It used to be they could say anything and the press would repeat it far and wide. When it was published in a magazine or even a newspaper the ability of gun owners to respond was delayed by days or even months and the editors could easily suppress those responses or select the weakest response while pretending to be fair. In that world Handgun Control, Inc./The Brady Campaign was in the “drivers seat”. They controlled the message and whatever fantasy they wanted to believe became, in essence, reality.
With the presence of the Internet those days are gone. Reality isn’t optional for them anymore. They are being forced to deal with the facts and with the facts being incompatible with their view of the world they have a crisis on their hands. They could adapt to reality but that isn’t really an option for them. They have far too much invested in their fantasy world.
Imagine you have invested 20 years of your life in the belief in a flat earth or the moon is made of green cheese. You spread your word far and wide and you have been the darling of the media and many politicians all this time. Then astronauts land on the moon take pictures of a round earth and bring back rock samples of the surface. You have two options: 1) Change your beliefs and admit to the world you have been spreading falsehoods for decades; 2) Insist the trip to the moon was a hoax.
The “psychological cost” to admit an error of such magnitude is far greater than believing in a massive hoax. To protect the belief there was a hoax and to prevent followers from deserting the data must be suppressed. With the presence of the Internet that is nearly impossible except within a very small domain. Within the domain of control expect even the slightest deviation from their “true belief” to be dealt with as harshly as possible. It gives them back a small taste of the control of their world which they enjoyed for so long and have now lost. They know what it is like to have control and they yearn for it again.
This is why anti-gun people are so violent. If they had guns or even political power they would be extremely dangerous people. —Joe]
Grains by Volume
I’ve said before that some things are so simple they can’t be grasped. “Co witnessing” of iron sights is one of those.
“Grains by volume” is another. It started when Pyrodex, a black powder substitute, came out. People were accustomed to using a powder measure, used to charge a rifle or pistol with a consistent, known amount of black powder, back in the day when black powder was just “gun powder” simply because there wasn’t any other kind. As we do today when reloading metal cartridges, people way back then used a volumetric measure to easily charge a muzzle loader with powder, but of course someone needed an accurate scale to verify that the volume of powder they were dispensing was of the correct mass. Same thing with metal cartridges. Verify with a scale, then dispense time and again, easily with that volume so you don’t have to weigh each individual charge.
Same thing was done for hundreds of years in the field when using black powder guns– you pour from a flask into a measure that was pre-determined to hold a certain number of drams, or of grains, of black powder.
Then Pyrodex came along with their “volume equivalent” and few seem to have understood any of it since. Pyrodex is a substitute for black powder. It’s chemically different, safer to handle and ship (ostensibly) and doesn’t require the onerous licensing, confiscatory fees and demeaning inspections of premises associated with black powder. By design, Pyrodex will generate approximately the same results in terms of pressure and projectile velocity as the same volume of black powder. This makes it super easy to use the old way– you use the same measures that you always used for old fashioned black powder. Though Pyrodex isn’t nearly as dense, so if you were really meticulous and wanted to know precisely the “volume equivalent” grains of Pyrodex powder you’re using, you’d need to weigh real black powder from your measure. Dreaming up the “volume equivalent” was their way of making it easy to switch to their new powder. You didn;y have to think about– just use the same measure, made of brass or deer antler, etc., that your great great grand pappy used in the War of Northern Agression.
Totally, super simple, right? Use the same volume of Pyrodex you’d use of black powder. That’s it. No; shut up– that’s it.
But now it seems we can’t discuss even real black powder and real black powder alone without people (experienced people even) chiming in about “grains by volume” verses “grains by weight”. That would only come into play if substitute powders were somewhere in the discussion. Otherwise there’s no difference, which we all knew centuries ago (or would have known, had we been alive centuries ago).
“Sure; you verified your charge by carefully weighing it, but you might be off ’cause you’re using grains by weight instead of grains by volume.” I actually got a comment like that today, and I’ve seen it many times before.
Now maybe it would be simpler if Pyrodex loads, just like loads made up from dozens to hundreds of very different smokeless powders, were expressed in actual mass instead of “volume equivalents”. At least I wouldn’t have to explain things when someone tried to tell me that there is something out there called a “grain by volume” of black powder. Then I have to remember that we actually do have something very similar– the milliliter, which is the volume of one gram of pure water, which is what you get from a cube that is one centimeter on a side IIRC. Or was it the other way ’round? Something like that. I forget the actual starting point but last I heard it had been decided that we’d count a certain number of wavelengths from the emission from a certain energy state jump of a certain isotope of a certain element and call that a meter. Look it up and count wavelengths (somewhere in the yellowish range of visible light I think) to calibrate your measuring tape, but please don’t talk to me about “grains by volume” unless we’re discussing Pyrodex or other substitute-for-black-powder loads.