Oh yes. Go read this, preferably now. And pay real attention to this: A former sergeant once called me into his office to order me to write
more traffic tickets. While he was telling me about my numeric
deficiencies, he made this statement:
“I
need you to write more tickets. It will make both of us look better.
Besides that, it gives you the chance to fuck with people. All cops
like to fuck with people.”
The sergeant certainly
liked to fuck with people, but I don’t. I have better things to do.
Thinking back on that moment caused me to realize that I might have
found the ultimate litmus test between “peace officer” and “law
enforcement officer.” Is the majority of your day spent
fucking with people and generating inconsequential “stats?” If so, you
aren’t a peace officer. You are a revenue generating cog in a political
machine. Your conduct will further undermine the public trust in our
profession. Stop it.
and general control freaks is that so many are so horrendously ignorant of what they're screaming about. We have McCarthy wanting to ban barrel shrouds
We have DeGette, who doesn't even know that magazines can be reloaded...
(you can skip ahead to 2:55 to get to that one)
and other such stupidities. They don't know squat, and I'm convinced that most of them do not WANT to know; all they care about is "These things are icky and dangerous, and I don't want them around!"
Yeah, that's gonna happen.
Connected to the 'magazines go away when they're empty' idea is "They'll all wear out soon, so if there aren't any new ones, they'll all be gone!"
Ok, let's play:
On the actual number of firearms in the US, the number that gets thrown around a lot is somewhere between 250-350,000,000, some go to 400m. And that's probably way low; borrowing from Chris, It is completely impossible to ban firearms in the United States
There are reportedly 350 million firearms in the U.S. according to FBI
estimates. Actually the number is likely far higher... I'd guess it may
be double that. Guns are durable. I personally own and shoot guns that
are over 100 years old, and which are just as good today as they were
when they were first manufactured. If they're properly stored, or
properly maintained, guns don't "go bad", or even wear out.
...And we make and sell somewhere between 10 and 20 million guns a year,
EVERY YEAR, in the U.S. (the number varies significantly year to year).
You could not possibly seize and destroy them all, or even a significant
percentage of them. And if you tried, you'd end up with a lot of dead
cops, and possibly a populace, and a military, in revolt against the
government.
... and even if "successful" you wouldn't get most of the guns, because people would just hide them.
... and it wouldn't be allowed anyway, because it's against the
constitution; and the supreme court has recently reaffirmed this several
times.
They can't even effectively ban guns in the UK or Japan which have had strict gun control for many years, AND ARE ISLANDS.
Thank you, Chris.
That 1917 I fired the other day? It's 99 years old, and shoots well enough to put some new stuff to shame. I've fired a Trapdoor Springfield that was made in 1884-1885; all original, and it still works flawlessly. Friend collects antique firearms; he's got stuff from the last 1800's that still work quite well*. I've had, or tried out, firearms near or well over a century old that still had all their original parts, and still worked. To get rid of all guns by seizure(which ain't gonna happen) and attrition, well, you're looking at a loooong time. And that would be IF you could prevent people from making them(or just replacement parts) and smuggling them. Which won't work(see Britain and Japan, among others). To even attempt to make such work would destroy any vestige of the US as a free country. For a bunch of the Democrats and progressive Republicans(damn both of them) who like the idea of "We just need to control the common people a bit more" it might seem worth it; the full-out socialists and communists would love it. Until they start being the targets of that 4th Generation Warfare that the Dutchman kept warning people about. And if it hits that point, I don't know how well the US could come back from that.
Throw in the flat-out haters: the people who insist "We need to have a conversation about guns in America!" but all they actually want to do is demand, and insult, and threaten. And then accuse the people they attack of 'being angry' and such. They either don't realize that that crap is NOT going to get the result they want, or they don't care; after all, if you don't agree with them you're a accessory to the murder of kids/uncaring bastard/racist/etc., so your opinion- and in the end, your life- doesn't matter.
So we've got a real fight on our hands to hold off the cake thieves, which isn't easy when so much of the(I started to write 'our media', but it definitely isn't) media is in their pocket.** But I think we can do it. Sooner or later, things like the abuse of traumatized teenagers for political purposes does tend to backfire, for one; for another having a bunch of 'progressives' abusing and threatening tends to blow up in their faces also. We'll see how it goes.
*only reason he doesn't shoot some of them is oddball ammunition. And if you really wanted to shoot them, that problem can be dealt with.
** see, for instance, places like HuffPo insisting 'Fewer people own guns!', despite the fastest growing groups of first-time gun owners being minorities and women.
Shot two groups using the Lee 405-grain hollowbase bullet over 26.0 grains of A5744 powder. No wad between powder and bullet, two five-shot groups. Target one,
Target two
Let's say I'm very happy with these. Recoil is mild, and this kind of accuracy is great. I'm going to make up some more of these.
Second, here's the 1917 I was able to fire
I suspect the owner did a bit of polishing on the trigger, as the second stage was light and clean. Between the sights, trigger, and it being so comfortable to fire with M2 ball, it was a real pleasure to shoot.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to do some dishes while I can still move.
If a mostly-naked Sandra Bullock walked in the door and whispered "Make me a women", I'd have trouble getting up much enthusiasm. Or anything else. I hate being sick.
Anyway, I had a chance to shoot something interesting today: a Eddystone 1917. If you're not familiar, short history:
The Brits didn't have enough rifles at the start of WWI, and had a couple of companies in the US making P14s for them: five-shot, aperture rear sight, ear-protected front, in .303. Then they got production up on #1Mk3 Enfields. About that time, the US got into the war, and it was discovered that Springfield Armory didn't have enough tooling and gauges to make enough 1903 Springfields for US troops. Someone had a bright idea, checked, and found that if you modified the bolt face to handle the rimless .30-06 cartridge, and bored & rifled the barrel for it, it worked quite well, and had better sights than the 1903. It became the 1917.
Anyway, besides being an interesting piece of history, this thing- firing standard 150-grain ball, yet- is downright pleasant to shoot. Much more so than I remember the 1903 bring.
Assuming I can, tomorrow I'll try to set up the pictures I took before the fever started and post them.
After ten minutes of CNN’s town hall “debate” I had already searched for gun safes, the closest firearms dealer near me, classes on gun safety, and an NRA membership. Whether that’s a sign the event was a rousing success or terrible failure depends on who you ask. But whenever the left talks about gun control, significant numbers of people who see value in the Second Amendment run out and purchase a gun.
That would be my response to Mexico bitching about a wall: "Why don't you try making your country less of a shithole, so people don't think walking across a desert or putting their kids on a train to get to the US is better than staying home?"
the right kind of books. Parton is the founder of Imagination Library, a nonprofit that started
out donating books in Sevier County, Tenn., and grew into a
million-book-a-month operation. Families who sign up receive a book per
month from birth to kindergarten. The singer donated her organization’s 100 millionth book to the nation’s library on Tuesday.
they won't sell standard magazines. And those evil bump-stocks they never carried anyway.
But that's not enough, oh no:
Screw this place. I'd bought a few things there in the past, but never again; they don't want to sell something, that's their choice; they decide to make themselves part of the enemy, then they should expect to be treated as such.
A note on why so many students are such idiots I started giving quizzes to my juniors and seniors before I even passed
out the attendance sheet the first day or the syllabus. I gave them a
10-question American history quiz and we started - even though I'm an
English professor not an American historian - just to see where they
are. And this has been true for seven consecutive years - the vast
majority of my students, I'm talking like nine out of ten in every
single class, 28, 29 out of 30 kids - they have no idea that slavery
existed anywhere in the world before the United States. And I've got
Christian kids, I've got Jewish kids. Moses, Pharoh, none of that. They
have none of it. They are a hundred percent convinced that slavery is a
uniquely American invention and that with the Emancipation Proclamation
slavery ended worldwide. They're convinced of this. How do you give an
adequate view of history and culture to kids when that's what they think
of their own country? That America invented slavery and and the whole
Black Lives Matter movement, which is taught as absolute history in
English classes and philosophy classes, in sociology classes and biology
classes and race identity classes, that's the new narrative, right?
That even though slavery ended in America it's still with us in the way
we oppressed minorities and so that's all they know. They know nothing
else.
Exactly. Liberals seem to think we care because “it’s our right” or merely
“because of the Second Amendment,” but this isn't the primary driver
behind our thinking. If it were, liberals might reasonably conclude that
we don’t care, and rightly feel they hold the moral high ground.
Their position is that safe schools should be valued over my gun. But
this isn’t just about my right to "keep and bear arms," whatever you may
think that phrase written into the Constitution in 1791 means in 2018.
Fundamentally,
this is about the government's responsibility to prove I have committed
a crime before taking away my rights. Let me explain.
For some reason Obama wanted no public reporting on this talk. Which included this horseshit: "We didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us," he said. The former
president admitted that his team made mistakes, but no massive
screw-ups.
So, that comfortable lying, or deluded?
Speaking of whoring out teenagers, Policy proposals aren’t the real aim of the anti-gun crowd. What they’re thinking is: We must strike a blow against gun culture. We must punish gun owners in general by doing something that annoys them. This
is the Democratic obverse of Trumpian bully culture: It’s public policy
reduced to public shaming. It’s insult theater. The politics of id. Is
America really going to be made safer by shaming the First National Bank
of Omaha into no longer issuing an NRA-branded Visa card? How is
forcing through an increase of from 2 to 10 percent on the price NRA
members pay for a United or Delta flight to the group’s annual
convention supposed to decrease gun deaths? These petty slights are all meant to redefine the NRA as outside the
mainstream, activists say on Twitter. It seems more likely that NRA
members, and gun owners in general, are going to perceive a concerted
attack on gun culture and vote accordingly. Progressives don’t have a
plan for stopping mass shootings. So they’re falling back on venting at
gun owners, and they’re using the children of Parkland to do it.
Let's say they didn't have cameras: they all decided "Screw kids dying, we can't go in with no cameras" and sat out there 'holding a perimeter'? We're supposed to believe all this crap?
And this... Ingraham also revealed that police "lost
radio transmissions" during the shooting, which also happened at the
mass shooting at Fort Lauderdale airport shooting last year, which is
also in Broward County.
They really need to start putting people under oath and seizing evidence. Before this 'sheriff' makes more disappear than he already has.
a woman suddenly lunged for the
audio equipment, pulled leads out indiscriminately, and knocked some of
the equipment to the floor. The microphones stopped working. Another
protester shoved a student volunteer into the door.
What caused this extreme reaction?
A bunch of farging idiots who think disagreeing with them is violence and shouldn't be allowed. Aided and abetted by idiot journalists ...After the incident, however, the disruption and violent misconduct were downplayed. Willamette Week,
a left-wing alternative newspaper, was dismissive: “[The Freethinkers]
expected controversy. They warned of violence. None arrived.” Perhaps
not the kind of violence that had been threatened, but there was
intentional “criminal mischief,” hundreds of dollars in property damage,
and unnecessary disruption lasting just over four minutes (not the 30
seconds the Willamette Week incorrectly reported).
who are sorry excuses for reporters. As Insty has noted, 'Consider them Democrat operatives with bylines'.
…a black teacher with a CCW after a school shooting.” Yes, someone actually made that argument as a reason for not allowing teachers who are licensed to carry to do so at schools. So, let me get this straight. Since the police are late (requiring
the armed teacher to intervene in the first place), incompetent
(incapable of doing threat assessment and differentiating between an
armed intruder attacking students and an armed teacher defending
them–hint: as a starter, look which way the gun is pointed) and racist
(else why mention “black”?) then the teachers should not be armed. Well, they might have a point with those arguments but far from being
an argument for keeping the teachers disarmed, it’s more one for
disarming the late, incompetent, racists. There's more. Lots more.
“I’d bite off the Beatles, or anybody else. It’s all one world, one
planet and one groove. You’re supposed to learn from each other, blend from each other, and it moves around like that,” the Grammy-winner said. ... “You see that rocket ship leave yesterday? We can maybe leave this
planet. We gonna be dealing with aliens. You think black and white
gonna be a problem? Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with
three or four dicks! Bug-eyed motherfuckers!” the 1997 Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame inductee said. “They could be ready to party, or they could
be ready to eat us. We don’t know, but we’ve got to get over this shit
of not getting along with each other.”
THAT attitude needs to get around more.
Back in December I tried using a new cleaner, Metcor 57 Bore Cleaner, and followed that up with Bore Shield, which is supposed to protect rust. To try that out I took an old knife blade, sanded it a bit to brighten it up, gave it a light coat of the Shield and left it out under the carport.
Brought it in this morning after more than two months outside.
There's not a speck of rust on the treated surfaces. So I'd have to say this actually works for the purpose.
House Democrats have introduced a bill banning semi-automatic firearms
in the wake of the Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.
Note that this is virtually ALL semi-auto firearms.
Rodman's Great Guns
Including some innovation on gunpowder: Perhaps even more important than his casting procedure was Rodman's development of
progressive-burning powder. When any gun fires, of course, the volume of the bore behind
the projectile increases as the projectile travels toward the muzzle. The normal
black powder grain, however, irregular in shape, burns from the outside, so that its
burning surface area continually decreases. Thus, in a normal black-powder piece,
initial breech pressure is the highest obtained; the forward traveling projectile
increases bore volume as the powder burns at a decreasing rate. Both occurrences reduce
interior bore pressure.
Rodman proposed powder pressed into hexagonal grains perforated with several
longitudinal holes so that as individual grains burned both inside and out, albeit almost
instantaneously, the burning surface of each grain actually would increase. Rodman's
powder didn't increase pressures--it simply maintained a higher bore pressure than normal
powder could, as the projectile traveled forward. The result, logically, was an increased
muzzle velocity of the projectile.
Do read the whole thing, here's the heart: If you come to me -- or your boss -- on a quiet afternoon and say, "I've
thought about it, and I don't think I can do the needful to save kids"
then all honour to you, and I wish you peace and happiness in another
profession.
But if you wait until the bangs and the stinks and the screams are in
progress to decide that you just can't do it ... you, sir, are a useless
oath-breaking bucket of squid chum, who is parasitising a position, a
uniform, and a salary that could be held by someone who can do the
needful.
And -- quite frankly -- if you wear a badge, and you hide behind a car
while children under your protection are getting killed, you should have
the common [deleted] decency to take your sidearm, find a quiet country
road somewhere, and Do The Proper Thing.
Nothing but the back of my hand to you -- all of you.
I knew you could. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel just admitted on Jake Tapper
State of the Union that he knew of reports Deputy didn’t enter school at
time of CNN town hall forum in which he mocked and berated the NRA and
Dana Loesch. Israel said he didn’t mention it during the forum because he was waiting for investigators to confirm the reports.
Translation: "I wanted to keep this covered up as long as possible."
The failure by the school and RSOs to actually do anything about this little bastard- and others- was planned and intentional. That 30-minute delay in the surveillance video? ♦ Secondly, the 27-minute tape-delay in the CCTV system is not an "accident", "flaw" or "mistake". It is entirely by design.
As
a standard Broward and Miami-Dade practice, when school law enforcement
need to cover-up or hide behavior, they need time (when that behavior
happens) to delete the evidence trail. As such, the school policy – as
carried out in practice – is more efficient with a 30-minute tape delay
affording the school officer enough time to deal with the situation,
then erase the possibility of a recording of the unlawful activity
surfacing.
Building
in a 30-minute delay on the CCTV system was one of those pesky add-on
items that happened a few years ago when the School and Law Enforcement
officials established the policy of intentionally not arresting students.
With
modern technology it's tough to hide criminal behavior, especially the
violent stuff, when it is being recorded. Duh. Ergo the tape-delay was
the best-practice workaround.
Throw in the EffingBI being too busy with important matters like chasing problems in college sports, and we get a bunch of dead kids.
'Missed warning signs' my ass, they were deliberately ignored. Including by that chickenshit sheriff who knew about all this, and then went posturing on 'the NRA
's fault!' on tv. Bastards. Disgusting bastards, all of them.
