The Sacramento Bee:

Yes, the right to carry a gun is a civil liberty, constitutionally protected. But whatever their other uses, firearms also are a lot like liquor and pornography and tobacco.

“Guns,” he said bluntly, “are a vice.”

The majority of guns are being bought by a minority, just as a majority of porn is bought by a minority of users and a majority of cigarettes are bought by a minority of addicts. Only about 6 percent of Americans hunt, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, so these gun fans aren’t arming themselves to shoot groundhogs. Nor are they addressing some practical issue of public safety or government oppression; aside from all these mass shootings, this is one of the safest, most open democracies on the planet. So why are people hoarding assault rifles and military-grade weapons?

Why? What inner imperative is this accumulation of firepower serving? What imagined inequality is being compensated for?

I feel for those who need a gun to feel equal. Like smokers and winos and vaccine resisters, they can’t help needing that feeling they need.

My oldest son Josh sends this concerning the article above.

The juxtaposition presented by the reading of this article back-to-back with the one about the porosity of our southern border highlights the irrational, incoherent, emotionally derived worldview of these people.

“Ban guns! Keep the border open!”

But I just watched five Mexicans literally swim across the border and toss drugs into the back of an Explorer……

Also notice the incessant reflection on how things “feel,” and the continuing push to make all language and ideas equal, abusing and commandeering heavy concepts such as infringement of life and liberty. It’s the same thing these people are doing with the word “racist,” and pushing fat acceptance and gender identification. Now guns are a vice, being categorized as substance abuse. It’s insane.

These people are the products of the hippie generation. They are not thinking men and women.

That they are afforded the luxury of publishing their half-baked drivel for others to read exactly because many someones have picked up a gun and performed the killing of those needing it escapes them entirely.

These are not thinking people.

Concerning this same issue, reader Mack sends these comments by Dennis Prager.

The third reason for the left-right divide on guns is that the two sides ask different questions when formulating social policies. The right tends to ask, “Does it do good?” The left is more likely to ask, “Does it feel good?”

To liberals it feels good to declare a college a “gun-free zone.” Does it do good? Of course not. It does the opposite. It informs would-be murderers that no one will shoot them.

On gun violence, the left doesn’t ask, “What does good?” It asks, “What feels good?” It feels good to call for more gun laws. It enables liberals to feel good about themselves; it makes the right look bad; and it increases government control over the citizenry. A liberal trifecta.

One thing that would make incomparably more difference than more gun laws is more fathers, especially in the great majority of shooting murders …

You fill in with your own observations.

From the comments at Mother Jones.

Herschel Smith • 6 hours ago

I think everyone who advocates gun control should try to confiscate our weapons. All of them. Don’t leave even a single one behind. Come into our homes. That’s where they are. And be sure to join the SWAT teams who you’ll be sending to their deaths. If you really believe all of this stuff. I think you’re just blowing hot air and aren’t prepared for the bloody civil war that would ensue. Oh … you mean you’re just talking about sending OTHER PEOPLE to do the work? I get it now.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

Your move.

RickMeister Herschel Smith • 5 hours ago

…these are the kind of comments that make you the poster boy for people who should not own guns.

 

Herschel Smith RickMeister • a minute ago

So your proposition is that if someone believes in God-given rights to own self protection, or believes in the second amendment, he is disqualified from owning a weapon in your world. Or in other words, if someone doesn’t really care if he owns a weapon or not, and doesn’t care if the government confiscates that weapon, that is the only true qualification for owning a weapon in your world.

Or said differently, if someone disagrees with you, they should be disarmed. The only people qualified to be armed are the ones who agree with you. Thanks for self-identifying. It’s always easier when you guys out yourself rather than us having to drag it out of you.

Really, you need to make it harder. I feel like I’m fighting a man who has both hands tied behind his back. It only took one comment deep before you willing fell into the trap.

Thanks for playing. I’ll look for you on those SWAT teams to confiscate weapons from otherwise peaceable men. Or not.

UPDATE:  Comment below from Sean: Anyone notice that several of the replies on MJ’s site to Herschel have suddenly disappeared? Only one remaining currently (3:36pm PST 10/8) is Rick Meister’s.

He’s right.  There were comments to the extent that Rick’s criteria was just fine, i.e., disarm those with whom we disagree (I wish I had copied them too).  This is rich.  Mother Jones has been deleting comments – comments that call their readers out for who they are.  This “new conversation” they want to have on guns is a lie.  All they want is confiscation and disarming.

Thanks for playing Motherless Jones.  As I told Jennifer Mascia of Everytown – a Bloomberg apparatchik – who came into my back yard and used a nom de guerre of “Tommy Gnosis,” if you want to tangle with my commenters, you’d going to have to run with the big dogs.

UPDATE #2:  Here is one deleted comment.

Actually, tough guy, I’d be pretty happy to use those criteria. And reflect on your bravery when the bad men cuff you and take your guns while you cry out for your aunty-mama.

12:33 a.m., Thursday Oct. 8 | Other comments by Reboogity Amen

In Note To EOTech, I mentioned the issue of thermally induced setpoint drift in EOTech holo sights, relying on the post at Soldier Systems.

While there is a great deal of information in the SOUM, two glaring issues stick out. The first is the reliability of the HWS in extreme temperatures, referred to as “Thermal Drift”. The PMO has noted a +/- 4 MOA shift at -40 Deg F and 122 Deg F. Second, is the concern over the claim by EOTech that their HWS are parallax free which was the subject of a previous Safety of Use Message from the same office issued 16 March, 2015. In this case they noted between 4 and 6 MOA parallax error depending on temperature conditions. Despite the PMO working with EOTech to rectify the issues, they still have not been resolved.

I sent my article to EOTech and have yet to hear back.  Commenter Lina Inverse said:

This isn’t Amy’s fault or anyone else for that matter.  It’s the fault of EOTech management for failing to educate the gun-buying public on simple things.  And there is nothing wrong with the EOTech.  Let me explain.

Something seemed weird about the article when I went back and thought a bit about it, and I should have done my thinking before hitting publish.  Occasionally I screw up.  I asked Daniel, who used plenty of weapons sights in the Marines, including night vision, EOTech, scopes for DM rifles, and so on (as well as got certified in the sighting school for Scout Snipers), if thermally induced setpoint drift was a known issue with EOTech holo sights.  “Of course.  And not only that, you carry your rifle around on hikes and bang it, mounts come loose and things happen.  And we shot hundreds of thousands of rounds (recoil impact).  We were constantly re-zeroing our weapons.”

While I am a nuclear/mechanical engineer and not an electronics and computer engineer, they make all of us take courses in rival disciplines so that we will be minimally educated know-it-alls on most disciplines.  I recalled my course work, as well as what I know from ECEs where I work.  When electronics get hot, strange things happen.  Pumps can start and stop, and valves can change position without anyone taking action.  That’s why you keep electronics cool.

And that’s why you re-zero holo sights.  There’s a thermally induced current with diodes, and an EOTech holo sight is a two-wire, PN-junction LED.  As for that matter, so is an Aimpoint, and whatever thermally induced setpoint drift there is with an EOTech, there will be with an Aimpoint as well.  I don’t have to go into the field to prove the point.  I know what’s in the component, and I know that a diode controlling a setpoint will sustain drift with temperature increase.  Period.  No one has invented a diode that can sustain temperature increase without setpoint drift.  It’s impossible for there not to be setpoint drift.

As for EOTech, they need to explain this to their customers.  They need to make their literature match reality, and they need to update their web site with salient information.  As for those of us who have an EOTech, and I do, as well as a flip-to-side magnifier, we need to understand that our weapons are never maintenance-free.  We need to understand them, work them, maintain them, practice with them, and care for them.  You don’t do things once.  You do them again, and again, and again, and again.

So you don’t have to, I try to stay abreast of the latest silliness on Daily Kos, Salon, Balloon Juice and Mother Jones.  But it’s all so dreary, droll, boring and awful.  Seriously, the writers over these web sites at one time at least spoke honestly about their real intentions concerning guns.  But they don’t even do that any more.  It’s all prevarication, misdirects and smoke and mirrors – and it’s awful writing to top it all off.

The best model to understand their ilk is that the washed up hippie movement was never really about free love, peace, letting people do their own thing and libertarianism.  They were always statists, and they wanted guns and revolution right up to the point where they were in charge, and then to remove the liberty everyone else enjoyed.  They are control freaks, every one of them.  When they talk about gun control, they don’t mean gun control concerning the police – they want the police to be armed because the police preserve their state.  Hippies were only against cops when they were on different sides.

They’re hypocrites too, but this most recent instance is stunning.  Charles Kinnaird writing at Ameriblog preens moralistic about Americans sacrificing our children to Moloch.

And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of Ben Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Moloch; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination. – Jeremiah 32:35

Moloch was the ancient Phoenician and Canaanite god known in Deuteronomy for the practice of propitiatory child sacrifice. Apparently, the Hebrew prophets of old had a hard time convincing people that they should stop the practice. There are few images more horrifying to us modern folk than that of fearful people offering up their own children to be burned on the altar of a domineering death-making god. Yet we are seeing the fires of Moloch burning in 21^st Century America.

This week we have seen yet another disturbing incident of promising lives brought to a sudden end by gun violence — in keeping with our pattern of one school shooting per week. Once again there is talk of stronger gun control laws, yet we are impotent to make any changes. Even when we see students gunned down, and we know that there are steps we can take to make such incidents less likely in the future, we feel powerless to do anything. Our failure to act even in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre  in which 20 young children were killed, all of them 6 and 7 years old, demonstrated that we would rather sacrifice our beautiful preschoolers than do anything that might be perceived as a sleight against the Bill of Rights — they’re the price of our “freedom,” just ask Bill O’Reilly. Our words say that we honor American freedom, while our actions say that we live in fear and have so little regard for our children that we will willingly feed them to our modern day fires of Moloch.

In a country whose politicians love to shout “God Bless America!” at the end of their speeches, and whose people speak of faith in the public square and argue about putting the Ten Commandments on display, it is the ancient and brutal god Moloch who holds sway over so much of our public discourse. Indeed the fires of Moloch continue to consume our children while nothing is done to extinguish those flames.

That children can be and are killed with bombs, knives, clubs and fists is irrelevant to Charles.  And it’s also irrelevant to Charles that one the very reasons we have and carry weapons is to protect the children.  As I’ve explained before:

I am afraid there have been too many centuries of bad teaching endured by the church, but it makes sense to keep trying.  As I’ve explained before, the simplest and most compelling case for self defense lies in the decalogue.  Thou shall not murder means thou shall protect life.

God’s law requires [us] to be able to defend the children and helpless.  “Relying on Matthew Henry, John Calvin and the Westminster standards, we’ve observed that all Biblical law forbids the contrary of what it enjoins, and enjoins the contrary of what it forbids.”  I’ve tried to put this in the most visceral terms I can find.

God has laid the expectations at the feet of heads of families that they protect, provide for and defend their families and protect and defend their countries.  Little ones cannot do so, and rely solely on those who bore them.  God no more loves the willing neglect of their safety than He loves child abuse.  He no more appreciates the willingness to ignore the sanctity of our own lives than He approves of the abuse of our own bodies and souls.  God hasn’t called us to save the society by sacrificing our children or ourselves to robbers, home invaders, rapists or murderers. Self defense – and defense of the little ones – goes well beyond a right.  It is a duty based on the idea that man is made in God’s image.  It is His expectation that we do the utmost to preserve and defend ourselves when in danger, for it is He who is sovereign and who gives life, and He doesn’t expect us to be dismissive or cavalier about its loss.

And concerning John Calvin’s comments on this subject:

We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden.  There is no one who doesn’t concede this.  That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment.  Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned.  But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify.  For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice.  We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds.  Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so.  Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).

The real child abusers are Charles and his kind, who prefer to see them gunned down around him, or a bloody civil war trying to confiscate guns people intend to use to protect themselves and their children.  Either way, Charles wants to see blood and wants to project his blood-lust onto us.

And although he doesn’t mention it, one can bet how he and his kind see abortion – and here is the real hypocrisy.  As for children being sacrificed to Moloch, how many millions of babies have been killed inside and outside the womb as a sacrifice to Baal?  Have Charles or his co-writers said anything about that?  Of course not, because Charles is a hypocrite like all of his friends, concerning both abortion and guns.

We’re all bored with Charles now.  And so ends his stupid little sermon until he deals honestly with consistency.  It isn’t the hobgoblin of small minds.  It’s the stuff of life, and this sorry attempt by Charles to turn the tables on us only serves to highlight his own sins.  Come back when you have something, Charles.

Coming soon to a church, school, mall, place of work, or neighborhood near you:

The Texas DPS Director Steven McCraw expressed concern over the possible infiltration of ISIS through the border during a visit to Laredo this week. The comment came during the annual Texas Border Coalition meeting when a member of the audience asked the director if any suspected ISIS members had ever been apprehended on the Texas/Mexico border.

McCraw said: “Individuals that come across the Texas/Mexican border from a countries with a known terrorism presence and the answer to that is yes. We have individuals that we’ve needed to debrief in Pashto/Dari. Not a lot of Pashto and Dari speakers around. But you can’t think about the last attack; you have to think of the next attack and where our vulnerabilities are. So, we’re concerned about that.”

From the heart of the pre-historic world in the Hindu-Kush, where the only functioning machines were sold to them for drug or gem money because they don’t know how to build them, to the Texas border.  That’s quite a trip, yes?

Why?  Why do you suppose someone would do that?

David Codrea:

Basically, Clinton is dictating the terms of surrender to American gun owners and presuming they will just roll over and take it, and that she will have the power to go door-to-door and enforce her demands when a critical mass tells her to go pound sand. If a growing “I will not comply” movement has made an unenforceable dilemma for issuers of edicts in Connecticut, New York, and elsewhere, trying to impose the same thing that doesn’t work locally on a national scale seems the definition of insanity writ large.

Yes, and the civil war that ensues would be bloody.  But what the collectivists can indeed accomplish is to use their army of lawyers inside the beltway to add to those 50,000 pages of federal register every year with ever more onerous regulations leading to death by a thousand cuts.

David Codrea:

That’s because, in spite of what some gun-grabbers would have us believe, the PLCCA doesn’t protect all gun makers and sellers from being sued for reasons that include six exceptions to the civil immunity protections, loosely summarized as: Transferring a firearm knowing that it will be used to commit a crime of violence; Negligent entrustment or negligence; Causing harm by knowingly violating a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product; breach of contract or warranty; Responsibility for death, physical injuries or property damage resulting directly from a defect in design or manufacture of the product; and an action by the Attorney General to enforce the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act.

And at least its obvious to me that selling ammunition doesn’t fall into any of those categories.

Cuomo: Shut the government down over guns.  For once I agree with him.  Shut it down and don’t ever crank it up again.

Mike Vanderboegh:

Oregon Massacre: Part I

Oregon Massacre: Part II

Oregon Massacre: Part III

These are all well worth your time.

Oh go blow it out your ass O’Reilly.