David Codrea:

There’s a real simple way for those in the gun rights community who wish this issue to go away to get those of us who keep bringing it up to stop: Provide credible evidence — not anecdotes and platitudes, but something that can be independently validated — that refutes and puts to rest the concerns. If injecting millions of anti-gun voters dependent on Democrat “entitlements” into the electorate will not result in an unbeatable “progressive” super-majority, having a disastrous effect on politicians elected, laws passed, judges confirmed, and decisions upheld, all they need do is share with us how they know that.

Good on David for not dropping this issue.  I’ve tried to be diligent as well.  But I’m not even willing to put it in terms of an “unbeatable “progressive” super-majority” (although that’s what it will be).  No, I’m not willing to accept a single immigrant unless it’s in the best interest of the country.  Immigration shouldn’t be decided based on compassion – this conflates state with church (it is the duty of the state to administer justice, not compassion, and much of the trouble in our progressive system comes from the confusion of a state trying to administer both justice and compassion at the same time, which cannot be done).  As to anyone bringing forward evidence that we won’t be inundated with an unbeatable “progressive” super-majority, they won’t because they can’t.

Kurt Hofmann:

And come home to roost they some day most assuredly will. Our nation’s friendly creditors are not going to eternally continue to offer us a bottomless credit card, and indeed, when the suspension of disbelief in our ability to ever pay off the debt is no longer sustainable for even the most incurable optimists, Americans will face a darkness like we have never known.

In that time of rioting, looting, starvation, and disease–all on a scale too massive for most Americans to even imagine, it will be up to private citizens to secure their lives and liberty–and their families’. And if DeLauro has her way, those private citizens will have handed the best means of providing that security over–for two-thousand now valueless dollars.

Read this quote again, and then read it again once a day for the next year.  Kurt has issued salient warnings as to the future of our system (something that cannot go on forever won’t) and what it will take to secure yourselves and your families.  And Kurt has pointed out evil men and women who would prevent you from securing your families.  Don’t listen to them, don’t heed their counsel, they mean you harm rather than good.  God wants you to defend yourself.

Via Mike Vanderboegh, women still being defenestrated from the Marine Corps infantry officer course.  Of course they are.  I talked to a Marine Corps officer last week, and he pointed out something to me that most of you will never hear.  Most (it sounded like all, but I’m hedging my bets here) of the women who have attempted the infantry officer course at Quantico were diagnosed with pelvic fractures.  Of course they were.  Because in case you weren’t watching when you grew up, men and women are created differently.

From MackH, this, with Mack commenting:

“A combination of poor infrastructure development, Luddite hatred of power generation, slavish prioritization of dubious ecological initiatives over agricultural realities, and a general religious taboo against desalinization plants are all overlapping each other in a multi-dimensional Venn Diagram of Horror, and nobody in the state government apparently wants to tell the radical ecologists that it’s time to start building more dams and reservoirs.  But the state government can tell people to cut their water intake by 25%, and by gum they will do precisely that.  Welcome to California: Lake of Fire of their own making.”

Yes, good point.  You can cry out to God and believe in His Son and He will save you now and in eternity.  But He doesn’t undo the affects of our earthly choices in time.  He forces us to learn from them and praise Him anyway.  For the poor people of California, I don’t hate you, and I don’t ridicule you.  I pity you, whether it has to do with water or gun control.  The reality the collectivists have created is awful.  Welcome to dystopia.  I wish I could help you, but it seems to me the best option for you is to leave California.

Grocery theft?  Hey, call out the SWAT team.  BB gun threat?  Hey, call out the SWAT team.  Methinks this is a little silly.

I have a right to worry about guns going off when I don’t want them to.  Yes, you do.  But you don’t have a right to affect my life because of your worries.

He should have shot the alligator when it was perpetrating its evil, but since he apparently didn’t have a gun with him, I have a suggestion.  Shoot the damn alligator.  And start carrying a gun.

SunwolfNC:

Hah. That author has no intention of ever questioning LEOs’ ability or The System at large. That article clearly demonstrates where she is in their caste system. She is fully entrenched and a willing minon. To her anyone who wants to think and act on their own within the framework of the Constitution, is clearly a knuckle dragging potential murderer who should be arrested and jailed immediately (sic).  Isn’t the ‘party of tolerance’ great?

Great comment!  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but then again that’s why I have great readers – to point out great things to me.  Opponents of open carry, who themselves support open carry for LEOs, believe in and defend a caste system within America.  There is no other way to look at it.  Such thinking is clearly prejudiced, bigoted and entrenched in ancient and indefensible tiers of privilege.

Freakout in Maine:

The gun lobby makes the facile claim that since carrying a gun openly is legal, why should concealing the gun make any difference? Well, I suppose carrying a gun openly tends to attract the attention of bank guards, convenience store cashiers, police officers on patrol and the rest of us trying to keep our distance from kooks. And most gun owners recognize that carrying a gun openly does look a little foolish.

This is perhaps an accidental use of the word facile (or at least, he didn’t know what he was doing).  He charges the “gun lobby” (whomever that is) with a facile argument, and then proceeds to offer up what we might consider a facile argument himself for why there is a difference between open and permitted concealed carry.  But I notice that he doesn’t charge police officers with looking “a little foolish” for the open carry of firearms.  Perhaps he should explain why he thinks there’s a difference between police officers and anyone else openly carrying weapons.  Tennessee versus Garner clearly stipulates that police officers can only discharge their firearms in self defense or defense of someone else, which is also clearly the stipulations under which we all operate.  So I expect that to be the next subject the author tackles in an article that doesn’t engage in facile argumentation.

Freakout in the great Northwest:

As I strolled through Target the other day, feeling as safe as can be among the wondrous outlay of products available for purchase, I passed the furniture department where a man and woman shopped for a shelf.

Strapped to the man’s belt was a handgun in a hard-plastic case. I understand that in the gun community, such a weapon makes the carrier feel safe; however, it had the opposite effect on me. How was I to know that the person carrying that gun was someone I could trust? Would he, at any moment, misread a stranger’s comment or movement, pull his gun and blast him/her away?

I tell you, I didn’t breathe normally until I’d cleared the doors of Target and was heading to my car.

In other news, there was another wrong-home police raid in New York, a North Charleston cop just shot a man in the back for a minor traffic stop, the Watertown reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing involved “officers arriving on scene near the conclusion of the firefight fired weapons toward the vicinity of the suspects, without necessarily having identified and lined up their target or appropriately aimed their weapons,” an officer in Texas “accidentally” fired his gun on a junior high school campus, cops are still shooting their guns in town hall, and a quarter of a million dogs are shot each year by cops, often (always?) needlessly.

The writer offered up no explanation as to why she trusts cops carrying guns openly but no one else.  Perhaps that will be covered in a future article.

He discharged eight shots from his sidearm, with time to aim, with a pause between the seventh and eighth shots, all eight shots taken in the direction of the victim’s back while the victim was running away.

A white North Charleston police officer was arrested on a murder charge and the FBI opened a civil rights investigation Tuesday after video surfaced of the lawman shooting eight times at a 50-year-old black man as he ran away.

Walter L. Scott, a Coast Guard veteran and father of four, died Saturday after Patrolman 1st Class Michael T. Slager, 33, shot him several times in the back.

The video footage, which The Post and Courier obtained Tuesday from a source who asked to remain anonymous, shows the end of the confrontation between the two on Saturday after Scott ran from a traffic stop. It was the first piece of evidence contradicting an account Slager gave earlier this week through his attorney.

[ … ]

The three-minute clip of Saturday’s shooting starts shaky, but it steadies as Slager and Scott appear to be grabbing at each other’s hands.

Slager has said through his attorney that Scott had wrested his Taser from him during a struggle.

The video appears to show Scott slapping at the officer’s hands as several objects fall to the ground. It’s not clear what the objects are.

Scott starts running away. Wires from Slager’s Taser stretch from Scott’s clothing to the officer’s hands.

With Scott more than 10 feet from Slager, the officer draws his pistol and fires seven times in rapid succession. After a brief pause, the officer fires one last time. Scott’s back bows, and he falls face first to the ground near a tree.

After the gunfire, Slager glances at the person taking the video, then talks into his radio.

The cameraman curses, and Slager yells at Scott as sirens wail.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the officer shouts before he handcuffs Scott.

As another lawman runs to Scott’s side.

Scott died there.

[ … ]

Slager said earlier this week in the statement from his attorney at the time that his encounter with Scott had started Saturday morning as a routine traffic stop.

His department said he pulled over Scott’s Mercedes-Benz sedan near Remount and Craig roads because it had a broken brake light. But at some point, Scott ran away with Slager in pursuit on foot. Scott’s passenger stayed with the Mercedes.

During the foot chase, Scott confronted Slager, according to the lawyer’s statement. Slager got out his Taser to subdue the man, but Scott took the device during a struggle, the statement said. That’s when the officer fired at Scott several times because he “felt threatened,” it added.

Now listen very carefully.  We all know how abused and overused the idea is that an officer can “feel threatened” and thus discharge his weapon at anything and everything.  But this doesn’t even rise to the level of abusive policy.  The officer had the temerity calmly to walk back to the scene of the struggle, pick up the taser, and casually drop it next to the now-deceased body.

What’s the lesson?  The officer didn’t know a video of his actions would be produced.  It was going to be his word against a dead man’s word, and we all know how that would have gone down.  He reflexively turned to the best, surest, most trusted and well-worn defense cops use: “I felt threatened.”  There is the first tier of concern with this incident, that is, a shooting in the back that violates the constitution.  But the second tier of concern pertains to coverup of the shooting.

And as long as that defense exists and is reflexively accepted by a gullible public and a willing judicial system, “I felt threatened” will keep being used and cops will continue to perpetrate this sort of thing.  But the fifth amendment clearly doesn’t allow this officer to kill the unarmed man running away, who is no threat to the officer, by the way, and who hadn’t shown himself to be a threat to anyone else (he was stopped because of a minor traffic violation).

In this silly article, the author cites someone parroting that ridiculous line again that the best defense against a bear is bear spray.  But the following quote caught my eye.

“In the case of grizzly bears, the only time you can shoot … is in defense of your life or someone else’s life,” he said. “You can’t just shoot because it’s in your yard and killing your chickens.”

Manley added that he would never recommend shooting at bears to scare them away.

That list of suggestions by Sean Albrite, a firearms salesman at Snappy Sport Senter – “Bang pots and pans, yell at them from a safe position or set off you car alarm with a remote” – is highly irresponsible.  If a bear is in the vicinity of you, your family, or your beasts, you should grab a .45, a .357 magnum, or better yet a rifle (not .22LR), and prepare for self defense.

As to the notion that “You can’t just shoot because it’s in your yard and killing your chickens,” that’s just like saying that you can’t just shoot a felony intruder just because he’s in your yard and threatening harm to your children.  Only a progressive (who doesn’t believe that man is made in God’s image or that beasts who our property warrant defending) could come up with such an obscene idea.  And how could anyone seriously defend the proposition that a bear should be any more protected than my dogs or chickens?

Prior: Man Who Shot Grizzly Bear Defending His Family Gets Fined

Boston.com:

A newly released report by local authorities details the response of law enforcement following the Boston Marathon bombings.

The full report is available here.

The report says that during the early morning shootout in Watertown on Friday, April 19, 2013, the first officers to arrive “practiced appropriate weapons discipline while they were engaged in the firefight with the suspects.” But it added that “additional officers arriving on scene near the conclusion of the firefight fired weapons toward the vicinity of the suspects, without necessarily having identified and lined up their target or appropriately aimed their weapons.”

After the firefight, one officer fired upon plain-clothes officers in an unmarked Massachusetts State Police vehicle that was wrongly reported as stolen, according to the report, which also cites lack of weapons discipline by law enforcement during efforts to apprehend Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when he was hiding in a boat behind a Watertown home.

Via WRSA, WeaponsMan also has an analysis of the report.  But focus for a moment on these takeaways from the report.  First, “officers arriving on scene near the conclusion of the firefight fired weapons toward the vicinity of the suspects, without necessarily having identified and lined up their target or appropriately aimed their weapons.”  This is very serious, with LEOs shooting wildly at nothing and everything, innocent victims in danger of being shot, and LEOs held completely guiltless in the lack of discipline, even if they had killed someone.

Second, the officer who shot at the vehicle violated Tennessee versus Garner in that he didn’t make the shot in self defense.  If you or I did someone like that we would be in prison today.  And the sadly ignorant, “sheeple” public trusts the LEOs and fears peaceable concealed or open carriers.  It just boggles the mind, honestly.

Stars and Stripes:

Surveys find that men in U.S. special operations forces do not believe women can meet the physical and mental demands of their commando jobs, and they fear the Pentagon will lower standards to integrate women into their elite units, according to interviews and documents.

Studies that surveyed personnel found “major misconceptions” within special operations about whether women should be brought into the male-only jobs. They also revealed concerns that department leaders would “capitulate to political pressure, allowing erosion of training standards,” according to one document.

Some of those concerns were not limited to men, researchers found, but were found among women in special operations jobs.

Dan Bland, force management director for U.S. Special Operations Command, said the survey results have “already driven us to do some different things in terms of educating the force.”

Well, there you go.  If the force believes that women can’t do the job, the only recourse is to educate them differently, because surely, surely, surely they must be wrong.  Otherwise the advocates of gender homogeneity would be wrong, and that couldn’t be the case because command says so because the administration and God-hating, elitist, Marxist liberal arts colleges around the nation say so.

Dan Bland responded the way he did because he has lost his soul and joined the dark side.

See category Women in Combat.

David Codrea:

What Hollis won’t do, if the suit prevails, is rescind the National Firearms Act of 1934, including registration and transfer tax requirements. What it would do is invalidate the absurd prohibition that says you can own a machine gun made before May 19, 1986, but if you possess an identical firearm made after that arbitrary date, you’ll be a felon in for a world of hurt. And the other thing it would do is create all kind so interesting market repercussions that have kept the prices of pre-’86 machine guns at artificially inflated (and then some) prices.

To anyone capable of grasping basic logic, acknowledging the ludicrousness of the cutoff would seem cut and dried. But when descending into the bizarre and often contradictory world of ATF rulings and judicial interpretations, a happy resolution is anything but a slam dunk.

Read David’s entire piece.  I sure would like to see the arbitrary cutoff go down in flames.  As I’ve argued before, this arbitrary cutoff also has other nefarious affects on the American arms industry, like preventing the development of fully automatic weapons technology.  Why do you think the only squad automatic weapon fielded today in the Army and Marines is made by FN Herstal?  Wouldn’t it be wise to invest in open bolt technology in order to have better weapons ourselves?  Sorry, can’t do that, because there isn’t enough money to develop weapons that may or may not be contracted by the U.S. armed forces.  Weapons like this need a civilian outlet in the case of rejection by the Army and Marines to make them financially feasible.

David Codrea:

“It is not believed that members of the various shooting clubs and organizations would concern themselves over a curtailment of highly-powered firearms,” Hoover opined, probably not altogether incorrectly considering the indifference of many who to this day still place sporting interests over rights. “Additional penetration is of no value to target shooting, and it is logical to assume that organizations promoting this sport would be in hearty accord with legislation curtailing high velocity bullets in an attempt to insure their members the continued use of target pistols.”

How interesting.  David has a great find on history of the .357 magnum cartridge and Hoover’s opinion of civilian ownership of weapons that can handle the cartridge.  He (Hoover) uses the word “insure” rather than the correct word “ensure,” a pet peeve of mine, so I think he was an idiot, and I would have slapped him around for it.  See David’s link to the document.  Between David’s research and what Jerry Miculek lectured and demonstrated, we are learning more about the .357 magnum.  And the more we learn, the more I like it.  I’ve always liked shooting it.

Handgun permitting by CLEOs may be done away with in North Carolina, like it should be.  Personally, I think it’s a pain in the ass in addition to being an infringement.  It’s a reversion to Jim Crow laws.  But look for CLEOs to fight it because they would lose revenue, control and justification for staffing.

See this billboard courtesy of Mike Vanderboegh.  This is a great billboard, in addition to being a very nice piece of art work.  I’d like to see a few in every state, or as many as we can get, with people all over this nation asking, “What’s this I’m seeing about III%?  What does it all mean?”

Tulsa World:

A 73-year-old reserve deputy who shot and killed a fleeing suspect Thursday during an undercover operation believed he was holding a Taser, not a gun, when the shooting occurred.

The reserve deputy who shot the man is Robert Charles Bates, a Tulsa insurance company executive who was working undercover Thursday as a member of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Task Force.

Bates confirmed in a phone interview with a Tulsa World reporter Friday that he shot and killed Eric Courtney Harris the previous day.

“It was me,” Bates said during the interview. “My attorney has advised me not to comment. As much as I would like to, I can’t.”

The Sheriff’s Office on Friday evening released Bates’ name and said he received his reserve status in September 2008.

The release states that Bates was assigned to the Tulsa County Violent Crimes Task Force and had received specialized training in homicide investigation, meth lab identification and decontamination, and other specialized training.

Bates had also spent time with the Tulsa Police Auxiliary and then as a full-time police officer, according to the release.

Gosh, I hate it when that happens to me.  I remember the last time I pulled a gun on a dude and thought it was a taser instead.  It was all in good fun, but I used the fact that he was high on drugs to argue he deserved it anyway.  It kept me out of too much trouble with the law.

This is a very educational video, with Jerry going over the history of the .357 magnum round and demonstrating what it can do.

Like I said, a great video.  But still, a .357 semi-auto?  Hmm … I don’t know.  I love me a .357 magnum wheel gun.  Love me one.  I’m just sayin’.  Love.