Stars and Stripes:

The Army granted a West Point-educated officer a rare religious accommodation that will allow him to wear a beard and turban, requirements of his Sikh faith.

Capt. Simratpal Singh, 27, was granted the appearance waiver last week that will allow him to grow his beard and hair and wear a turban through at least Jan. 8, Debra S. Wada, the assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, wrote in a Dec. 9 letter. Singh is the fourth Sikh soldier in recent years to be granted such uniform exemptions.

Not to be outdone, the Marine Corps caved on females in combat after the pathetic Ashton Carter made it clear that the conclusion was done before the studies and bitching was ever started, and Commandant Robert Neller joined the chorus.

The top officer of the Marine Corps sent an unequivocal message to troops: It’s time to get behind the mandate to integrate women into combat units.

Gen. Robert Neller released a sternly worded video late Friday, a day after Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that all military jobs — including infantry and special forces positions — would be open to female troops by the start of next year.

The commandant tried to feign toughness when he said they are in danger of becoming Gucci gear people.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller is proving to be quite the quotable general.

His way with words was on display last week at the I/ITSEC (Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference) in Orlando, Florida, when he reportedly said, “We’ve allowed ourselves to become Gucci gear people.”

That was his way of saying that military gear has become overly complicated, according to Jen Judson, a reporter for Defense News who attended the show.

Blah, blah, blah, yawn, blah, blah blah.  Yea, that’s the problem and that’s the answer.  Gear.  And take it away and make them use second rate gear.  Good grief.  I’m unimpressed.

This ain’t your grandfather’s or father’s army or marines.  They’re a shell of what they once were, and destined to become worse.  And the Air Force is focused on how to stop their football team from praying before games.  If you had as your intent to destroy the armed forces of the U.S., what would you have done any differently?

The drill Sergeant and his discipline has no place any more.

Honestly, I enjoy shooting handguns more than I do long guns, except distance shooting with bolties and glass.  What I know about handgun tactics and techniques I have learned from the NRA, my oldest son Joshua who worked security at some very rough places, my youngest son Daniel (who despite not having had much handgun training in the Marine Corps, still had some), reddit/r/guns, gun forums, range rules for the many ranges at which I’ve shot, YouTube videos with Jerry Miculek, Travis Haley, Chris Costa, Hickok45 and others, and years and years of doing it and seeing what works and what doesn’t, and what’s safe and what isn’t.  This is something I would never do unless I was in the process of discharging my weapon (and by that I mean I’m in process, and the process is going to be completed because my life is in danger, as opposed to preparing to do it or stand down depending upon the circumstances). [As a sidebar, Daniel jaw-jacked a USMC officer when he was in the Corps when an idiot officer muzzle flagged others with his finger on the trigger, Daniel being range officer that particular day.  Daniel, a Lance Corporal, was supported by other officers for doing what he did and ended the day with accolades – the officer, not so much].

Despite efforts to address the problem, the risk associated with the new Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm “remains substantial,” according to the report by Los Angeles County Inspector General Max Huntsman.

“There is a continued risk that either LASD employees or civilians may be seriously wounded or killed by an unintended discharge,” Huntsman wrote.

He said further study and steps to mitigate the problem are needed “before a tragedy occurs.”

A handful of deputies have been injured in accidental shootings in recent years, according to the report. No suspects or bystanders have been hurt in the incidents.

We’ve dealt with weapon-mounted lights before, noting that the real problem isn’t a switch or trigger for the light, but officers thinking that they are operating the light rather than the gun.  The solution isn’t to remove the light.

I once was responsible for a relative’s home before we could work on it and sell it – the story is long and too involved to discuss, and it would bore you.  At any rate, I [only one time] used the pistol over forearm with left hand holding the light method to clear the house as I entered.  Here I must tell you that because the house was unoccupied during the week and given the fact that on the weekends I had to do work in the house alone, I cleared the domicile room-to-room the first time I entered the structure on the weekends, and carried a weapon on my person my entire time in the home, often with my Doberman Heidi with me (this is the gun sitting near her, not what I used for room clearing but great gun-porn nonetheless).  Partly this had to do with where the house was located and when I had to do the work, which was mainly at night, but I promised not to tell you the story so I won’t.

I say I used that method only one time.  I will never do it again.  It may look cool in the TV shows, but by the time you’ve done your last room, you’re exhausted.  Only once did I do this.  Then I got a weapon-mounted light.  It worked wonders for my attention to detail.  As I said above, the solution isn’t to jettison the weapon-mounted light.  It’s to train and ensure you don’t make the kind of errors that cops are making with weapon-mounted lights.  With my time in that house, it’s likely that I’ve had more time in training than most cops doing that drill, and I’m a nobody.

So leaving aside the issue of weapon-mounted lights, what does the report tell you about police handgun tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP)?  Note well.  This isn’t a cop-bashing post.  This is intended to elicit thought and pondering and mental labor concerning what cops in that neck of the woods are being taught versus how you [hopefully] are practicing handgun tactics.

Think about this.  A handgun is being blamed because of a light trigger pull, while doing police work.  Be educated.  Ponder on this a bit.  What does this tell you versus what you should be doing and how you should be training?  And ponder the fact that the first shot you will ever fire in self defense will probably be from a handgun.

Prior: Gun-Mounted Flashlights Linked To Accidental Shootings

Jonah Goldberg:

Smoking was, until recently, a very bipartisan habit. City mice and country mice alike would walk a mile for a Camel.

The universality of smoking made it possible to proselytize against it without unleashing a full-blown kulturkampf. Sure, conservatives and libertarians complained — often correctly by my lights — about lost liberties, but an attack on smoking, backed up by solid evidence, didn’t simultaneously feel like an attack on one cultural group by another.

Because nonsmokers knew smokers, the war on tobacco could be fought face-to-face in our homes, businesses, movie theaters, planes, trains, and automobiles. And when nonsmokers pleaded with their friends and loved ones to give up tobacco, they at least understood the appeal of smoking. Cigarette America wasn’t a foreign country. You can’t say the same thing about Gun America.

My wife grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, where gun ownership was nearly as common and natural as snow-shovel ownership. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and I never knew anyone who owned a gun. When my mother was an auxiliary mounted policewoman, she was not permitted to carry one. The absence of guns in urban liberal environments leads to a kind of Pauline Kaelism. Kael is — apocryphally — credited with saying she couldn’t believe Richard Nixon won the election because she didn’t know anyone who voted for him.

Likewise, many urban liberals only hear about guns when they’re used in crimes, and simply can’t imagine why anyone would want one. As a result, they’re tone-deaf in their arguments. Even worse than the tone-deafness is the arrogant condescension. In the 2008 campaign, when Barack Obama tried to explain why some rural voters were not supporting him, he infamously said that it was out of bitterness — a bitterness that caused them to “cling” to their guns and their religion. Obama has been trying to unring that bell ever since.

To urban liberals, guns are like cigarettes — products that when used as intended only hurt or kill people, and that are also low-class and crude. The Second Amendment, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wrote, is “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.” Such smugness doesn’t help, but the real reason the war on guns has been such an abysmal failure is that guns and cigarettes aren’t alike after all. You can’t hunt or, more importantly, defend yourself or your family with a cigarette. That’s why, in the wake of San Bernardino, millions of Americans didn’t think, “We’ve got to get rid of guns.” They thought, “Maybe I should get one.” I know I did.

This is only an excerpt, and Jonah spends a good deal of time setting up his argument.  I don’t mean to be unfair by my selection of the excerpt.  But something seems very wrong with Jonah’s analysis.

His argument at the beginning seems to me to be essentially this.  Smoking was ubiquitous and not restricted to a geographical location, economic strata, or political ideology.  Therefore, the war against it didn’t alienate any of those things.

But the contrapositive (I believe I have chosen correctly here) is that if more effete urbanites owned firearms just like us uneducated country bumpkins, a successful campaign could be prosecuted against guns just like it was against smoking.

But what Jonah misses is that while there may not have been a moral underpinning or ideological foundation for smoking, there is for gun ownership.  While there are a few progressive gun owners, they are few and far between, and (in my opinion) they aren’t being consistent with their ideology.

The constant thematic thread in the progressive mind is the hive mentality.  The state is supreme, and gun ownership is a threat to the state, which reaches its apogee when it has sole ownership of the power of force.  The offspring of hippies is Fascism, and the liberal mind never really liked guns and force in the hands of non-state actors, with the exception of groups like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground, or in other words, guns are good as long as we have them and you don’t.  The progressive mind is statist – it always was and will ever be so.

Guns were never really the issue.  It was always all about control, as it is today.  Guns give the power of self defense, against home invasion, muggings, beatings, active shooter situations, and yes, against tyrannical states.  Nuclear weapons (to answer the usual critic of this position), which no one knows where to detonate because enemy and friend are intermixed everywhere, are no match at all for fourth generation warfare in the neighborhoods, streets, hollows, valleys, highways and mountains of America.

Don’t ever underestimate the power of guns to hold tyranny at bay, and since the gun controllers don’t, they always try to change the subject to safety, righteousness, or anything else.  Jonah is on the right track, but he just isn’t quite yet there, and hasn’t quite completed his journey.

Jonah ends his piece with ponderings on the notion of empowerment to defend and protect his family.  Well enough, but don’t doubt for a second, more progressives owning some guns won’t change the idea that to the progressive, he doesn’t have that right.  There will always be disagreement between us because it is ideological and moral, running to the very taproot of the difference between right and wrong.  And we won the war on guns because we have the guns.

David Codrea:

A man was viciously assaulted and robbed on a St. Louis MetroLink train by “several young men” who held him, beat him and went through his pockets, KTVI Fox 2 Now’s “You Paid for It Team” reported Monday. The attack happened days after a student “was terrorized on the train.”

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?  No.  Only an idiot would think so.

Bruce Hanify laments pajama boy and misses the world of sergeants.  My father served in the 82nd airborne division between the Korean war and War in Southeast Asia, and I had four uncles who fought in WWII, while two of those were drafted again for the Korean war.  Today’s men play fantasy football and watch nighttime TV shows.

Paul Ryan on guns.

“People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings,” said Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, after the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., early this month.

I see.  So mental illness is the raison d’etre of the two shooters, not a committed and systematic belief in a death cult?  Good grief.  Ryan is a bad as the jackass he replaced.

Valets stealing guns.  Be careful out there folks.

Tip from reader Fred Tippens.

Houston Chronicle, with a piece entitled “biker melee shows challenge of wielding gun in self defense during a shooting.”

Perhaps the worst place for a shooting to break out is in the middle of a bunch of people with guns, who are flanked by police who have bigger guns and are already expecting trouble.

That is one of the scenarios regarding what happened at the Twin Peaks in Waco during a May melee that left at least nine bikers dead, about two dozen wounded, and 177 charged with engaging in organized crime.

Ballistics reports recently leaked to the Associated Press conclude that four of the dead were shot by rifle rounds that would be fired from the weapons carried by police. In the days after the shooting, there was a rumor that four had been killed by police, but as far as public proof went, it was a mystery.

There was no love lost between members of the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle clubs, and each of their supporters, as they came face to face in the parking lot outside the Twin Peaks restaurant.

By all accounts, a large percentage had guns, knives or other weapons either on them or in their motorcycles, cars or trucks. A number of the bikers also had permits to carry their guns, and some were veterans who had first hand experience in receiving fire.

As a fight of words quickly lead to at least one biker drew his handgun and fired it into another, and a whole bunch of other people pulled out their weapons to either defend themselves, go on the attack, or just try and stay safe while figuring out what was going on.

Making matters more complicated, the Cossacks and the Bandidos already had a few violent clashes, but they were usually fist fights and never gun fights.

Police may have faced a situation where they were unsure who was waving a gun as they intended to fire at others, versus who were just trying to defend themselves.

Terry Katz, a spokesman for the International Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association, compared what happened in Waco to what might happen if a gunman attacked a restaurant and people fearing for their own safety pulled out their own guns.

“You get there quickly, and it is an active shooter situation,” he said of what police would confront. “There are shots fired, bullets whizzing near you.”

“As to who got shot and how many people were shot by who,” he said, “it is going to come out.”

The title hints what the writer wants you to think.  Use of a gun in self defense in an “active shooter situation” (I hate that figure of speech and I think it’s useless) is a low percentage bet.  True to form, one comment reads thusly.

I’ve always wondered about the gun nuts that claim the killings in the Colorado theater would have been prevented if everyone present had been carrying a gun. How would anyone know for sure that there was only one shooter and not several planted in the audience? How would 100+ shooters be able to shoot the focal shooter and not injure or kill someone else? It just doesn’t make sense.

Seriously.  This isn’t parody.  Someone actually wrote all of the things above.  You simply can’t make this stuff up.  The writer (and commenter follows the writers lede) is comparing self defense any time to biker self defense using a handgun against the police lying in wait from a standoff position using long guns with glass, with the conclusion that self defense doesn’t work.

Again, you just can’t make this stuff up.  I think they’re a bit tactically confused.

Straight from Sweden via the U.K:

Uh huh.  “Allah the merciful.”  Prepare for this stateside.  If you think it isn’t coming, you’re a sucker and a fool.  Prepare now.

NYT:

The New York City public advocate on Monday asked federal regulators to investigate whether the gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson had made adequate disclosures in its financial statements.

In an eight-page letter, the public advocate, Letitia James, said the Securities and Exchange Commission should examine whether Smith & Wesson misrepresented or omitted information about how often its products are involved in crimes and what it has done to keep its guns out of the hands of criminals.

Shareholders would want to know whether Smith & Wesson faced heightened regulatory scrutiny or significant litigation risk, Ms. James said in the letter.

Nearly two weeks ago, a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., left 14 people dead and provoked a fresh outcry about gun violence in America. It also is the third anniversary of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

“With the increase in mass shootings, public concern about the proliferation of firearms has animated a national dialogue about gun control measures, interstate gun trafficking, and whether gun manufacturers should take additional steps to ensure that their products do not end up in the hands of criminals,” the letter says. “Smith & Wesson knows that it is at risk of grave reputational harm.”

Ms. James is opening a new avenue in her fight against gun sellers and makers. Earlier this month, she called on TD Bank, a big lender, to stop financing Smith & Wesson. This summer, she convinced the New York City Employee Retirement System, the city’s largest pension fund, to explore divesting itself of its holdings of gun retailers like Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Here is the letter, sponsored by the City of New York because it is hosted on a New York City web site.  Ms. James, who makes $165,000 per year at the expense of city taxpayers, and who is almost never on the job to do her job of public advocate, is using her salary, time and staff to fight legitimate, law abiding gun manufacturers by – you guessed it – regulating them to death at the hands of the *.us.gov.  What regulation, what law, what knickers-in-a-wad fabricated problem of the day, it matters not.  This is what community organizers do.  Regulators are the philosopher-kings, and we are the subjects.

No, she isn’t another Bloomberg apparatchik.  She is much more progressive than Bloomberg, and gave an anti-Bloomberg speech upon de Blasio’s inaguration so caustic that that even The New York Times berated it.  She is next-gen progressive.  And like the current administration, she doesn’t mind spending money she didn’t earn from the public coffers to battle what she perceives to be social justice warrior battles.

And we can all say with one voice, “Get a real job and mind your own damn business.  We don’t care what you think.”  I hope Smith & Wesson buries you.

This is one reason Neocons hate Ted Cruz.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says the United States is safer if we leave Bashar Assad in power in Syria.

The GOP presidential hopeful told the Associated Press that while Assad is a “bad man” who has “murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens,” toppling him would be “materially worse for U.S. national security interests.”

He faulted the Obama administration as well as one of his Republican rivals, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, for wanting to get rid of the Syrian leader.

“If President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Sen. Rubio succeed in toppling Assad, the result will be the radical Islamic terrorist will take over Syria, that Syria will be controlled by ISIS, and that is materially worse for U.S. national security interests,” Cruz said.

Cruz, who has been gaining some ground in recent polls, also said the United States should not have supported the overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, or even former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

“If you topple a stable ruler, throw a Middle Eastern country into chaos and hand it over to radical Islamic terrorists, that hurts America,” he said.

Neocons foolishly believe in the export of liberty.  But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us again, some people don’t want liberty.  They love their enslavement, and Islam is a prime example of the kind of Fascism that comes to dominate a man’s heart, soul and culture.  It cannot coexist with anything.  Only by overthrowing Islam can a country embrace liberty, and so the so-called Green movement in Iraq would have gone to war with the Iranian establishment had the U.S. supported it.  Instead we relegated it to a failing and sidelined movement, destined to perish like every other ideology that met the Mullahs head on.

In the case of Libya and Syria, Cruz knows what the Neocons don’t.  The dictator we know is better than the one we know will come to power in his place, and without the destruction of Islamism in Iran, it’s better to leave well enough alone.  Meddling has produced bad results, and so the meddling should stop.

But Cruz is hated for that and other anti-Neocon positions.  I listened to Brit Hume tonight on Fox News O’Reilly (Hume misspelled Cruz’s name), and Brit was all somber and insistent about Cruz’s upcoming month being an opportunity for the good folks of Iowa to find out what his “real” positions are, and they may not like them.  Positions such as Cruz’s opposition to the NSA spying program, which according to Hume, people may find that they want in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings.

Really, Brit?  Conservatives want larger government programs that enable the Leviathan executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens?  Really?  Is this the great dagger in the heart of Cruz?  Look, we know that the best bet to ameliorate terrorism in America is to close the borders, which runs directly contrary to Rubio’s position.  You won’t have any success convincing us that it’s best to leave the borders open and try to fight them when they get here.  That’s weak tea.  As far as we conservatives are concerned, leave the *.us.gov out of it except to close the borders, and leave our guns alone.  We’ll be just fine.  We’re unimpressed, but I will make a note of the fact that it sounds like you got your talking points from Karl Rove before coming on the air with O’Reilly, who was too stupid to interrupt you and tell you to go back to the drawing board.

Next up is Max Boot, who waxes emotional about Regan’s demeanor.

Like many of his rivals for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz has embraced the mantle of Ronald Reagan. He regularly cites the Gipper as an inspiration, and last week gave a foreign policy address at the Heritage Foundation that was laced with tributes to him: “As Reagan knew well, the best way to project America’s leadership is by protecting and promoting America’s strength and this principle should always guide our actions.”

You have got to be kidding me?  In Boot’s alternate universe, McConnell is a “staunch” conservative, and Boehner, old yellowstain himself, is somehow worthy of anything but our most robust disapprobation and insults.  And yet these two quisling traitors are responsible for much of the socialism, crony capitalism, indebtedness, and unfunded liabilities with which our nation is plagued today.

This is rich.  Boot begins with apparently his strongest condemnation of Cruz, which is that Cruz condemns socialism, crony capitalism and debt.  And Boot thinks that this is somehow going to be effective with conservatives.  Again, this is just rich.  But it is telling that it sounds like Boot got his talking points from Karl Rove.

Message to Hume and Boot.  Don’t hang around with Karl Rove.  It’ll prove to be your undoing.  And don’t be persuaded that those outside the beltway think like you do.  We don’t.  You lead the insular life of the effete, inner city dwellers, out of touch with just about everyone except those with whom you dine and discuss.  You should get out a bit more.

Oh, and none of the things Rove has planned for Cruz will change a thing.  Rove is a putz, and you can tell him I said so over dinner.

SandyDog, who comments:

Anybody with half a brain can out-think a dog, and rare indeed is the dog that’s so vicious that a treat and a few kind words won’t turn it into a friend. As most officers own dogs themselves, only a psychopath would want to shoot one and have it die in agony right in front of him.

Shooting the dog when it was already confined in a cage is the height of needless cruelty, and a clear sign of a twisted mind.