The 'Justice' System of Philadelphia

Remember the bit in this post Friday on the guy who dared defend himself and girlfriend from a jerk who turned out to be related to cops? Well, it gets even worse:

Eight days later, on April 13, Westberry was surprised to see Eberhart and two special agents with the state Attorney General's Gun Violence Task Force at his front door. They asked to see his guns. An avid gun collector, Westberry had 40 guns, all legal, all registered and all locked up.

"I'm thinking they just want to verify the serial numbers, verify that everything I own is legit," Westberry said.

But they confiscated his guns and said that they had a warrant for his arrest.

Got that? His REGISTERED firearms were CONFISCATED as a result of this bogus arrest. Because the dude who sucker-punched him was related to cops, he was put through the ringer. And because his guns were registered, they were easy pickings for an overzealous cop with an axe to grind and a badge to hide behind.

And his chances of getting his stolen property(because realistically that's what it is) back? In MA? Probably about zero.

Note: corrected this, was pointed out I messed up in originally thinking it was in the PRM.

I'm going to ste- borrow a chunk of this from Correia,

because it's too good not to:
Al Gore screamed when he saw the evil snowmen rampaging. “They’re terrifying, what with their eyes made of coal. Coal is a leading cause of green house gases, just behind farting cows. However, I am glad to see that they are using biodegradable materials such as carrots for noses.”

Tim pimp slapped Al Gore. “Get a hold of yourself, man!” He thought better of it, and slapped Al Gore again, just because it was kind of fun.

“What can I do to help stop this terrible army of evil snowmen?” Al Gore asked. “Anything. Just please make them go away!”

“I need you to let global warming happen!” Tim said. “Rising temperatures will cause Stabby and his army to melt. We might not be able to save Christmas this year, but we can still save humanity. I’d rather be farming Greenland than impaled on a giant icicle.”

Al Gore grew quiet. “Uhm… well… that may be a bit of a problem…”

“What?” Tim cried. Outside the snowmen were building a siege engine.

“Yeah… that global warming thing. We… uh… we made it up… The data was all fabricated. I… uh… I just wanted to be important. And I used the money to buy a rockin’ private jet. You must have missed that thing with the e-mails.”

“But… but you won the Nobel Prize!” Tim gasped.

Al Gore laughed. “Are you kidding? Haven’t you been paying attention? They give those things out in Happy Meals now!”

***

From Chapter 7.

Sally Love-Interest screamed in terror as Tim stumbled into the mall. “Tim! You’re covered in blood!”

“Don’t worry, it’s from Al Gore,” Tim answered quickly. That Stabby sure lived up to his name.

Why I despise Bill Gates and some other hugely wealthy people

Because he makes speeches like this about why the death tax should be as high as possible, while
From all published accounts, Gates Sr. has it set up to give 90% of his wealth to a few pre-selected charities upon his death. The other 10% would go to individuals.

Now whether that remaining 10% would put any of those individuals over the $7M mark is unknown to me, but if he truly thought that giving the government 45% of the wealth you acquired throughout your life via the Death Tax, why would he have would he have his fortune split up like that?
Because he's one more fucking hypocrite like the late Swimmer Kennedy who thinks YOU should have to pay the death tax while HE'S busy hiding the money away in ways and places to keep it from being so taxed.

This just in: Sen. Nelson is an expensive whore,

just like Landrieu.

I hope this bastard gets hung by the short & curlies when he gets back to Nebraska.

About that mention of the wonderful 'pointing' in the Model M design

I mentioned a couple of days ago, here's the target in question:
The three big holes are from something else, ignore them(please!). The point of interest here is that tight cluster at the top of the 'shoot here' oval with two a little low. That's seventeen rounds at about ten-twelve feet, six of them fired as fast pairs from low-ready. In this case the light at the range was such I could get just a hint of 'bright' off the front sight, which helped.

Did I mention I really like this pistol?

Which brings me to something else. A while back Tam mentioned him, and it occurred to me that while I've read magazine articles and blog posts I'd never read any of Massad Ayoob's books. And I had a gift card for Borders. And they had a copy of Combat Handgunnery, so...

Very good book, but the part I want to concentrate on is his chapter that includes his advice on point-shooting. Two things here:
First, his advice is 'Don't'.
Second, an interesting difference from how he describes things and how I'd thought of it before.
I've mentioned before that the way I was taught(damn, that was a while back) was that at close range you had the piece close to you, moving it further out- and going to two hands as soon as possible- as range increased for greater accuracy, similar to what's shown in the pictures I posted here from Bill Jordan's book. I never thought of it as 'unaimed' fire, just 'fire without using the sights'. Ayoob, as I recall, described point-shooting as 'unaimed fire', with shots fired with the gun far enough forward that you can see it(especially the front sight), and reference it to the target as 'aimed fire'. Which got me thinking.

For all but the closest range- with the gun right at your hip- you can see it, way down in your field of vision(yes, I need pictures; later on, when I have someone to work the camera, I'll take some) which lets you reference it to the target, which by Ayoob's definition means you're aiming*. So I did a bit of messing with this: I started with a target about 5-8 feet out(this is a close-range thing), drew slowly and made a point of noting the pistol low in my field of view as well as the spot on the target I was aiming at, and fired. Repeat a bunch of times(I was using the .22 conversion for this to keep costs down, and also did a bunch of dry-firing).

Damn, working at it this way makes a difference! I could point-shoot fairly well before(when in practice at it, had been doing a lot less of it than in the past), but this made a definite improvement. By training to note the gun, it's position and the target when shooting slowly, you build the reflexes to do it without having to consciously think about it. Which means you're making aimed shots without looking with/over the sights at close range.** And my accuracy improved in this style of firing.

I do not argue, at all, Use The Sights. I do think that practicing point-shooting for very close and fast situations is something very good to do; having more tools in the box(tools that you've practiced using) is a Good Thing.

Something else: after reading Tam and others writing about the Super Kung-Fu Grip they learned from Jarrett, it rang a bell. Something I'd read about Jordan years ago popped up: a guy had a picture of him shooting on a timer pointed out that you could see the tension in his hand and arm, that his body was locked to support the shot(one-handed with a .357 Mag in something like 1/4 second, including draw!). Somehow, over time, I'd forgotten that. And in the book Ayoob makes specific point of the 'tight as you can' hold. So I started tightening up my grip; and yeah, that helps too. A lot, especially in rapid fire.


*Ayoob is very specific that you should always get the piece up far enough that the sights, mainly the front sight, is in your vision on the target. And I'm not arguing against that. I'm talking about close-up/low-light/fast situations.
**Repeating, whenever possible always use the sights, much better for a variety of reasons.

Doubletapper has a post on Chanukah

that contains this paragraph that strikes me very strongly:
When the Macabees went out to battle, they had no feasible chance of winning. Not only were the Jews fewer and weaker than the well-oiled Syrian Greek war machine, but amongst the Jews themselves, only a sparse few went out to battle under the command of Juda Macabee and his brothers. Thus the essential miracle of Chanukah was not the war victory, but rather the very fact that a few Jews realized that "things just cannot go on this way", they arose, and with immense faith in the Almighty, and in an act of incredible courage, declared war on the superpower of their day. Think of it like the movie the 300, except that the Jews didn't lose!*

The whole post is here.

*being picky, in real life the Spartans were, on the last day, fighting a holding action to give the rest of the Greek army time to retreat to fight another day, and they succeeded. It was a very real victory for which they paid with their lives. Which changes the point of the Chanukah story not at all, I just had to throw it in.

One of the dirtbag portions of the Health Care Takeover Bill

is the 'Cadillac tax' on, to put it plainly, 'insurance plans we think cost too much or benefit the holder too much'; with that decision, of course, being made by a bunch of corrupt politicians desperate to A: get more of our money and B: control our health care. Looking over at Megan McArdle's blog(I think she's a moron to want carbon taxes and that other crap, but that's another post) she has this post on these planned taxes. Among the things she points out.
The levy has been dubbed the Cadillac tax," but research shows it would likely affect a broad swath of Americans regardless of their income, which could indeed amount to the tax on the middle-class that President Obama promised would not happen under his administration. The tax is a growing source of anxiety for Huber and his co-workers, but also for Democrats in the House, who vow to strip the measure out of the bill in conference or consider bringing the bill down altogether.
'Amount to'? It IS one of the increased taxes- or in this case added taxes- Obama promised he would not enact. Which a lot of people said he was lying about when he made said promise(nice to be right, but-). But back to the point.

At the time, Obama said he did not want the tax to hit middle-class families, but when the proposal emerged from the Senate Finance Committee in September, it proposed charging insurance companies and a 40 percent excise tax for high-dollar, but not exactly gold-plated plans. The bill now calls for the tax to apply to plans exceeding $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for families, for the cost of combining health savings accounts, medical, prescription drugs, dental, vision, etc.. The tax is charged to insurance companies, but it is widely assumed they would passed it on to employers.
They will, because they don't have a choice; they can't simply swallow that. Oh, and for anyone who says "They make too much money, force them to eat it!", well, not only do their profits go down- a LOT- but every pension plan out there that has money invested in those companies, which means every man and woman in that plan, loses(You want to be the one informing those people "Your pension just lost 'X' in value because of the increased government taxes on the companies you're invested in" ? And just how do you think they'll react? Which is a different post).

And if they're not allowed to pass that cost on? They'll probably cut the plans for the next year, or do something else that reduces the benefits and/or ups the costs.

This next paragraph contains something that just pisses me off no end:
Despite the politically powerful unions that oppose it, the tax is enormously attractive to government economists because it both raises revenue -- $149 billion over ten years -- and should depress the rate of health care inflation by discouraging companies from offering more generous health plans. The Joint Committee on Taxation and the CBO credit the tax as the largest factor in "bending the cost curve" and cutting the federal deficit, as the Senate bill is expected to do.
Just what the HELL business is it of these bastards what insurance plan I'm offered at the place I work? Who the FUCK are they to say "This is too good a plan, so we're going to tax it" ? This is nothing but a means of forcing companies to either cut to crappy plans people will want out of or to force companies to drop it altogether, forcing people onto the socialized medicine plan.

If the place where I work considers its employees valuable enough to offer a really good health plan and is profitable enough to afford such, IT IS NONE OF OBAMA'S BUSINESS, it is none of Pelosi or Reid's business. Hell, they ought to be happy, IF their actual concern is simply the health of those people. But this tends to prove that that's not their real concern; their real concern is government control of all health care and to hell with the people it screws. This is nothing but a way to, again, steal more money from people under color of law and to FORCE people onto a government-run health care scheme.

Christina Romer, a senior economic adviser to the president, predicted in October that the tax would encourage, "both employers and employees to be more watchful health care consumers." But research released last week by Mercer, an employee benefits consulting firm, showed that in addition to considering lower cost plans, two-thirds of companies polled said they would also raise health care costs for workers through higher co-pays and deductibles, regardless of whether the employee is a CEO or a line worker at a factory.
You man that line worker that Obama promised would face no tax increases under his benevolent rule? Who now gets to 'choose' a crappier health plan because the God-damned politicians and bureaucrats want more of his money? Gee, that's a winning idea, isn't it?

"We have an agreement!(that doesn't actually

mean anything)

The Annointed One(funny how Chavez still says the President stinks of sulphur) was just heard on the radio announcing the 'agreement' from Copenhagen. Basically, "It's not legally binding, but it allows people to talk, there's no actual monitoring but it does move us forward" blah etc. freaking blah. Added: Ah, here we are!

So they decided they'd look like even bigger fools than they already do if they didn't come to SOME agreement. Especially The Obama couldn't come back from meeting the EUnuchs & Co. once more with no win. So the 'agreement'. I'm going to borrow a chunk from Roger Simon:
On the last day of COP 15, staring at a Jumbotron where Hugo Chavez was addressing the conference, something was nagging at me besides the obvious (that half the audience was enthusiastically applauding a maniac). I was trying to figure out what it was about the conference that so perplexed and disturbed. And then, before the Caudillo had concluded his tedious remarks and long before the “meaningful deal” between the world leaders was announced, I realized what it was. We had returned to the Middle Ages.

A high tech Middle Ages, of course, but still the Middle Ages. Forget the Renaissance, forget the Enlightenment, forget Spinoza, Locke, Galileo and everybody else, we had returned to our roots as gullible and idiotic human beings, as willing to believe in the primacy of anthropogenic global warming as we would in the sighting of the Madonna at a river crossing twelve kilometers south of Sienna in 1340.

And this even after the revelation of the Climategate emails and documents, not to mention the further revelations about the manipulation of Russian climate data with NOAA and NASA themselves complicit. No, the show must go on. The UN Pope had convened the College of Cardinals in Copenhagen. Everyone must attend, including the Princes of Macedonia and the President of Tuvalu.

Not that anyone believed it.

Except perhaps the earnest young woman from Mother Jones, I watched question, in a style reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, some Republican House Members at a press conference, demanding to know if they believed in man-made global warming.

The 'four horsemen'? Kerry, you are a freaking moron; doesn't matter how much money you have, that won't change.

China's saying "No, you can't monitor our pollution, we'll tell you what you need to know", Chavez and that moron who's murdering Zimbabwe are standing around saying "Where's our case, you dirty capitalists?" and the socialists are all agreeing "It's a wonderful agreement, since we don't have to actually do anything except have more meetings and I get paid for doing those and have the use of the jet and limo." Yeah. Hope and Change from the True Believers of AGW*.


*That is, the few who actually do; I'm just lumping in the power-grabbers along with the useful idiots.

Indianapolis imports a gun-grabbing 'public safety director' from

(ta-daaa!) New Effing York:
"My own personal perspective is we have way too many guns on the street and way too many people that own guns," Straub said, adding there is no clear national policy dealing with guns.

"The policy has to start at the federal level and then work its way down to the states and to the local level. Until we control the flow of guns between states . . . you have a problem."
Ah, yes, we need the feds decreeing who will be allowed to own how many guns; that'll work wonderfully!

I wonder how that asshat nanny Bloomberg ever let this one go?

Well, they were Sheriff's deputies; wider range of skills

than city cops, I guess:
Deputies spoke with the elk and they agreed to leave the roadway and not return.
Snork. "Ya'll are causing trouble with traffic. Now I wouldn't like to see you get hurt, but I do think you'd look awful good in the freezer."

On the 15-22 saga, got some information in comments from Bullseye

First, as many of you are very aware, the magazine of a semi-auto can cause more problems than sometimes believed: on that subject, this link has some information.

The ejection problem: he found this video showing one way to fix it yourself.

I've got one magazine that occasionally winds up with a round sticking up vertically with the rim stuck in the feed lips; the others have always fed just fine. Like with anything else, you can get a mag with a problem.

On the ejector, I thought of messing with it myself, but didn't for two reasons:
First, in case it was something unusual, wanted S&W to be aware of it(turns out that wasn't a problem), and
Second, the damn thing was new and this should have been caught before it left the factory, so I wanted them to fix it.
I should add one more: I could just see breaking the ejector and then having to return it...

I will warn that Bullseye's site is about as Unsafe for Work as you can get, so be warned; he's over here.

Remember when Germany was one of the countries calling for "More time for the sanctions

to work!" against Saddam & Co., while they were quietly violating the sanctions? And lots of German bigshots were getting bribes through the Oil For Food mess?

An "embarrassing affair," is how one German diplomat described it. The official could also have added: potentially damaging to trans-Atlantic relations.

In an operation reported on by SPIEGEL over the weekend, US soldiers entered the freighter Hansa India in the Gulf of Suez at the beginning of October and discovered seven containers full of 7.62 millimeter ammunition suitable for Kalashnikov rifles. An eighth container was full of cartridges suitable for the manufacture of additional rounds. The incident is particularly awkward for Berlin as the Hansa India is registered to the Hamburg-based shipping company Leonhardt & Blumberg.

Investigators suspect that the arms were part of an Iranian shipment bound for either the Syrian army or for Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group. US officials have pointed out that the delivery is in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747, which prohibits arms shipments either into or out of Iran.

It should be noted that Rep. Alan Grayson(Thin-Skinned Boob-FLJ)

has forgotten about some little things, like the 1st Amendment:
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), prone for throwing his own political bombs at Republicans, has threatened a local critic with five years in jail for creating the website “mycongressmanisnuts.com,”

The Orlando Sentinel reports that Grayson wrote a letter this week to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that the federal government imprison Republican activist Angie Langley for five years because of her website criticizing him.
He's also forgotten that holding elective office doesn't mean your tender damned feelings can be protected by throwing critics in jail.

"It's ok to be racist, as long as you're doing it for a protected species."

Sponsored by Senator Daniel Akaka, the bill would transfer a percentage of public-owned lands to a native Hawaiian government within the state of Hawaii. The legislation would collect some 400,000 ethnic Hawaiians scattered across the country into a newly affiliated tribe, eventually endowed with the powers of a sovereign state, including freedom from state taxes and regulations and separate police power.

Proponents say the plan would duplicate the legal scenario set up for Native Americans, but the Akaka bill carves out new territory. Unlike Indian tribes made up of tightly knit populations that have lived together continuously, participation in the new group would be available to nearly anyone able to trace their roots back to a Native Hawaiian ancestor, no matter where they now reside. U.S. Civil Rights Commission member Gail Heriot told Congress in June that, “If ethnic Hawaiians can be accorded tribal status, why not Chicanos in the Southwest? Or Cajuns in Louisiana?”
So let's hear it for hopey-changey PC racism!

Yeah, Obama's done made us all looooooved

around the world.

Y'know, while I still think a meteor strike on the Capital at the right time would do the country good, one on that hall full of watermelons and out & out commie tyrants and murderers would be pretty damn good, too.

In the continuing saga of the M&P15-22,

it did indeed arrive at S&W. Actually a day ahead of schedule; so tied up yesterday forgot to make note of it.

Now we'll see how long it takes to get to it and take care of the problem. Hopefully permanently.

To borrow from Uncle, He was probably compensating for the size of his wheelchair

A man in a wheelchair shot and killed an intruder Monday night inside his home, according to Marion County deputies.

Two things I'll note. First,
"Several people have called and told me I'm a hero, but I don't feel like a hero. A hero usually helps people, not shoots them," Wroblewski said.
Mr. Wroblewski, you may not consider yourself a hero, but you did something that far too few can or will do: you fought to protect yourself, and that's nothing to belittle. If nothing else, consider that if you hadn't stopped this guy, A: you may not have lived through it and B: who would he have gone after next?

Second,
Wroblewski said he had an uneasy feeling just before he grabbed his handgun and opened the door.

"I was suspicious. I didn't really want to open it, but I did," Wroblewski said.
A lot of people have pointed out over time, When you have a bad feeling about something, pay attention to it. One more case in point.

Now we're back to a new edition of Idiots in Black Robes: Judge Arthur Tilson

This time, it's legally-embattled Jon's turn to man the guns, and it looks like it's gotten him into hot water, per MyFoxPhilly.com's "Judge Bars Guns At Jon Gosselin House":

Judge Arthur Tilson issued the court order Thursday in Norristown, Pa., after Jon Gosselin was photographed on Wednesday in Wernersville, Pa., shooting a .38 pistol on his property.

The judge also ordered Gosselin to register his pistol at a new address in Pennsylvania within 90 days.

Some slight problems with the judges' order, like there is no registration law in PA. And other problems. And when he called the judge to ask what rationale or law authorized the order. I told the lady who answered the phone who I was and why I was calling, and she replied (drumroll):

"I'm sorry, I do not wish to comment on it."

Translation: "The judge is a moron and has no wish to further point out that he's a moron."

Read the whole thing.

Oh, bloody HELL, if this is how base commanders think

then the Army is screwed:

If I'm a Soldier exercising my Second Amendment right, I'm apparently now considered a terrorist by the powers that be.

Last time I checked military members are military members 24/7.

Last time I checked they should be proficient with their tools.

Last time I checked, firearms are the tools of a Soldier.

Last time I checked, Nidal Hasan walked onto a military base, carrying a weapon and killed a dozen Soldiers and civilians. His weapon wasn't registered. I guess we're allowed to call him a terrorist now? The PC ban on calling that camel fucking scumbag a terrorist is over?
Oh, of COURSE not; the politicians in uniform won't stand for that! But calling a serving troop who doesn't register a personal firearm a terrorist? Well, that's just fine!


Which makes the politicians in uniform fit right in with DHS and Napolitano



Pointed to by War on Guns

Something the major media will probably never mention,

since it doesn't fit the template:
As the man was firing shots, another citizen armed with a gun came around the corner and ordered the gunman to put his weapon down. The gunman dropped his weapon and ran into his father's apartment and barricaded himself inside.