Houston.com:

I’ve traveled through airports in Charlotte, Jackson Hole, Dallas, Phoenix and Albuquerque in the past year with firearms.  Virtually everything he said is wrong.

Or at least, if it isn’t wrong, it’s inconsistent with the way TSA dealt with me, and the TSA representatives with whom I dealt all did things differently.  No kidding, they are completely out of control and don’t know what they’re doing, not just at one or two airports, but nationally.

So let’s begin at the beginning.  First of all, lock your case while transporting your gun in the checked luggage, no matter what he said.  Declare your firearm at the ticket counter.  The airline will call for TSA.  From here things get confused, like Barney Fife is doing the work.

I’ve had TSA agents ask me to open my case (which is why I keep the keys to the lock handy).  I’ve had TSA agents look at the weapon, look at the form I completed asserting that the firearm was unloaded, ask me to lock my case, and then (almost always) throw the form down on top of the case, NOT inside it (the airlines insist that your form be visible inside the luggage but not inside the gun case, and they usually request that I simply place it on top of the gun case).  Luggage handlers and TSA agents need to be able to see that there is such a form, and if it’s inside the case, they can’t.  I have always had TSA and the airlines insist that ammunition be inside the luggage, but not inside the gun case.

I’ve also had TSA agents swipe the inside of the case (as if looking for residue of some sort, and there will always be residue inside my gun cases), and then ask me to lock my case.  Not once have I ever had an agent verify that my firearm was unloaded.  Not that I think that’s important anyway, and not that it’s important for transport (or carry through the airport, given the presence of a concealed handgun permit).

Once (Denver) the TSA sent my checked luggage through an X ray machine (for what reason I don’t know), and not do another single thing with it.  Once I had TSA stop me at the door to a room, never request that I open the case and never verify that I even signed the form testifying that the firearm was unloaded, and yet open the rest of the luggage and remove items (toiletries, clothing, etc.), look at them, fondle them, and then stuff all of the items back into the luggage in chaotic fashion (Phoenix).  The form I signed got stuffed in with the rest of the clothing.  She never looked at the firearm and didn’t seem to care that I had one.

I could go on about other experiences.  They don’t know what they’re doing.  There is no consistent procedure, or they aren’t trained on it, or both, or some other combination of failures.  It is the most random, confusing, nonsensical thing I’ve ever witnessed and would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.  Commercial businesses would shut down if we operated that way.

I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but this counsel above is not really very wise, and I don’t do what he said.  Your experience may vary depending upon the airport, time of day, and whether the TSA agent had an argument with their spouse that morning or too much to drink the night before.

But I’m not really surprised by any of this.

The Trace:

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s top trade group, is partnering for the first time with the country’s leading suicide prevention organization. The ambitious goal of the collaboration: averting nearly 10,000 deaths over the next decade.

The program, initiated by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, will strive to educate people on the risk factors and warning signs of suicide, and provide guidance on how best to talk to someone who may be considering trying to end his or her own life, says Robert Gebbia, the chief executive of AFSP.

Notably, the program will also recommend blocking family members who are suicidal from accessing firearms by, for example, emphasizing the importance of securely locking guns away. It is not clear whether the AFSP guidance will include specific suggestions about how to remove weapons from potentially suicidal people. The NSSF, which represents thousands of gun dealers and manufacturers, provided input into the program and is also promoting it.

Gun groups have traditionally been reluctant to acknowledge that the presence of a firearm poses an increased risk to people who are considering taking their own lives. Gebbia says buy-in from the NSSF is especially important in persuading people that blocking gun access in certain situations is about saving lives, not depriving people of their rights.

“This isn’t giving up the firearm forever. It’s during that crisis,” Gebbia tells The Trace. “This is not a Second Amendment issue. It’s a way to make sure that people at risk of suicide shouldn’t have access to any of the means,” he says.

“Any of the means.”  So let’s see.  Does that mean that an NSSF representative is going to escort potential suicide victims 24 hours per day to ensure that they don’t walk out on any bridges?  Because he said, “any of the means.”  And that means any of the means, because that’s what he said.

Or perhaps the NSSF should focus on national shooting sports, since their focus is supposed to be on national shooting sports, not playing doctor or filling in for missing or irresponsible family members.

If you have two brain cells you’ve been watching the devolution of civil society in Venezuela.  Now we learn that the collectivists are going after guns.

Amid social and economic strife that threatens to topple the regime of Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan government is employing a favorite tactic of tyrants the world over, further gun control. Last week, Reuters reported that Venezuela Interior Minister Nestor Reverol is ramping up efforts to disarm the populace through a program of confiscation and gun turn-ins. The government also plans to mark and register all ammunition.

In June 2013, Maduro signed the “Act on the Disarmament and Control of Arms and Ammunition,” which severely curtailed the civilian ownership of firearms and ammunition in Venezuela. The legislation was reportedly an initiative of previous Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

The law grants licensing authority to the Venezuelan military, restricts the possession of most types of firearms, and only permits civilian ownership in narrow circumstances subject to government approval. Those found to be in illegal possession of a firearm face up to 20 years in prison. Describing the restrictions in 2013, National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello said, “Any arm that is confiscated will be destroyed immediately … the sales of weapons and ammunition also ends.”

There are a number of important lessons from this.  First, leftists have always been about control, no matter what the hippies tried to tell you, always, only and forever.  Control.  They are control freaks.

Second, the ruling collectivists are more concerned about otherwise peaceable men and women than they are the criminals and warlords.  They know the warlords can be co-opted, but the peaceable men generally have scruples.

Third, the collectivists will do it to the people at the worst time, i.e., when means of self defense is needed most.  They will do it because they are more concerned about staying in power than they are the safety and health of the people.

Fourth, they do it when they think they can get away with it.  In this case, the people of Venezuela are effectively disarmed anyway, the peaceable ones, that is, and the military has been filled with sell-outs.  In this case, they probably will get away with it.

The reader is invited to fill in the blanks with more lessons learned from this horrible situation.  But think about it, learn from it, watch the events, and position yourself  based on what you learn.  The people of Venezuela won’t get their guns now, including those who always had intentions to do so but waited for whatever reason.  That window has closed.  It is closed.

Do you understand?

This is what the view looks like at Chestnut Knob Lookout on a partly cloudy day.

First there was Operation Red Wings, which as I have stated I believe to have been cocky, arrogant, chaotic, ill-conceived, ill-planned, badly executed, badly supported, poorly coupled with any other branch of the service, and ultimately bad for morale.

Next, there is this from The New York Times.

Britt Slabinski could hear the bullets ricochet off the rocks in the darkness. It was the first firefight for his six-man reconnaissance unit from SEAL Team 6, and it was outnumbered, outgunned and taking casualties on an Afghan mountaintop.

A half-dozen feet or so to his right, John Chapman, an Air Force technical sergeant acting as the unit’s radioman, lay wounded in the snow. Mr. Slabinski, a senior chief petty officer, could see through his night-vision goggles an aiming laser from Sergeant Chapman’s rifle rising and falling with his breathing, a sign he was alive.

Then another of the Americans was struck in a furious exchange of grenades and machine-gun fire, and the chief realized that his team had to get off the peak immediately.

He looked back over at Sergeant Chapman. The laser was no longer moving, Chief Slabinski recalls, though he was not close enough to check the airman’s pulse. Chased by bullets that hit a second SEAL in the leg, the chief said, he crawled on top of the sergeant but could not detect any response, so he slid down the mountain face with the other men. When they reached temporary cover, one asked: “Where’s John? Where’s Chappy?” Chief Slabinski responded, “He’s dead.”

Now, more than 14 years after that brutal fight, in which seven Americans ultimately died, the Air Force says that Chief Slabinski was wrong — and that Sergeant Chapman not only was alive, but also fought on alone for more than an hour after the SEALs had retreated. The Air Force secretary is pushing for a Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award, after new technology used in an examination of videos from aircraft flying overhead helped officials conclude that the sergeant had killed two fighters with Al Qaeda — one in hand-to-hand combat — before dying in an attempt to protect arriving reinforcements.

Good Lord!  Whatever happened to no man left behind?  This is really dark, and is surely a blight on their reputation, with the reputation questionable in my opinion anyway.

Now there is something that apparently I’m late to, perhaps because I wasn’t watching closely enough.  It pertains to Marcus Luttrell.

If Marcus doesn’t understand the problem with universal background checks, then he is part of the problem rather than the solution.  If he can’t fathom an overextended federal executive infringing on God-given rights and liberties, then he needs to study history and philosophy before opening his mouth again.  This is the problem with making more of military heroism than is there.  He is a military hero.  He isn’t a political philosopher, theologian or veteran of the war of independence (which began over gun control as much as anything else).

Why am I not feeling the love for the Navy SEALs?

Time:

As General Stanley McChrystal noted in the New York Times: “In 2014, 33,599 Americans died from a gunshot wound. From 2001 to 2010, 119,246 Americans were murdered with guns, 18 times all American combat deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Nightclubs have become battlefields.

Schools have become combat zones.

Movie theaters have become theaters of war.

This should anger us. It should make us want to do better. And we can.

While our gun-violence crisis is complex, there is no doubt that our weak, gap-ridden gun laws help fuel the violence by making it too easy for dangerous people to access firearms.

Right now under federal law, felons, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill have the option of buying a gun without a background check and with no questions asked. Even people who are considered by the the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be a known or suspected terrorist can pass a background check and legally buy a gun.

Extremist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS have long urged their followers to use our country’s weak gun laws to acquire deadly weapons and commit active shooter terrorism here in America.

So why has Congress refused to act to address these loopholes and to keep guns from falling into the wrong hands?

Congress in the grips of the Washington gun lobby.

There is a better way forward.

Earlier this year, I joined the Advisory Committee of the Veterans Coalition for Common Sense, a national initiative of distinguished veterans from all branches and ranks of the military who are committed to advancing commonsense solutions to gun violence here at home.

Some of us are combat veterans. Some of us are gun owners. All of us were trained in the responsible use of firearms and to have respect for their incredible power. All of us swore an oath to defend our Constitution and to defend the homeland. And we all agree on this: our country is in the grips of a gun-violence crisis.

We know there is no single policy that will prevent every gun tragedy here on our home soil, but we cannot afford to let perfect to be the enemy of good—not when innocent lives are at stake.

The policies we support—closing the loopholes in our background check system and prohibiting known and suspected terrorists from legally buying guns—are not controversial.

So apparently Chiarelli has joined the ranks of the gun controllers, or more probably he was always in their ranks and is of that particular ilk.  He invokes the emotional “terrorist watch list” card, but he knows that there shouldn’t even be any such thing as a terrorist watch list since it is concocted out of whole cloth by the unaccountable federal executive based on suppositions and conjecture.  He knows.  He just doesn’t care.

He has clearly aligned himself with the murderer Stanley McChrystal and adulterer David Petraeus.  Of these two I have made my own position clear.

… the irony is that McChrystal, who issued the most restrictive rules of engagement ever promulgated on American troops, waxes know-it-all on what it takes to keep our people safe.  He can micromanage the campaign, release a bunch of inept, bureaucratic, PowerPoint jockeys into highly protected mega-bases to command the troops under fire in the field, turn so-called general purpose troops into constabulary patrolmen, and become a laughingstock when his juvenile staff turned party-animal with Rolling Stone.  But he didn’t manage the campaign in such a manner as to keep our children in uniform safe in Afghanistan.  If he didn’t do that, why should I care what he has to say about anything else regarding my safety?

This is what happens when media stars think they know something about policy.  So here is a suggestion for Mr. McChrystal.  You go read the lamentations at this article from the families and widows of SFC Kenneth Westbrook, Gunnery Sgt Aaron M Kenefick, Corpsman James Ray “Doc” Layton, and others in the Ganjgal engagement.  You know the one I’m talking about, even if others have forgotten.  You and I will never forget.  The one where they left our men to perish without fire support because of your rules of engagement.  You sleep with this reality, if you can, you ponder on those men and their lives morning and night, and you lament with the widows and families.  And then you tell me why I should give a shit what you have to say about anything, much less what it takes to keep my children or loved ones safe?

… McChrystal, with his ROE, is a murderer.  I don’t give a shit what he says about anything.  As for Petraeus, he is an adulterer and that during deployment when men under his charge were suffering and dying.

I’m glad those are the best two men this ungodly bunch could come up with.  Those two men should be embarrassments to the gun controller crowd.  It gives me amusement and pleasure to have them as enemies.

Chiarelli is now part of the cool kids gang along with all of the other statists.  I’m glad to have him as an enemy.  But if he rationalizes his own adultery towards his oath to the constitution right after reminding us that he did in fact take such an oath, he makes matters worse by telling us that he has no respect whatsoever for those who served and suffered.  He invites veterans to break their oath as well.

My suspicion is that the ranks of veterans isn’t fertile ground for Chiarelli and his gang of cool kids.  But it should be enough that he thinks no more of you [veterans] than to surmise that you might be an oath-breaker just like him, and he would sooner see you sent to hell than lose his political fight to control other people and take their liberties.

What contemptible trash.  How sad that men such as him were in charge of any campaign at all.  They are all as bad as the corrupt politicians they serve, and dear veteran, if you side with them, you’re no better than they are.

PoliceOne:

We, as law enforcement officers, need to adopt the same mindset as that of the Marine Corps when it comes to job titles. In the Marine Corps, everyone, regardless of rank, is a rifleman first and foremost. The “job” he does in the Marines comes second. We’re civilian law enforcement, so our “job” to protect and serve comes first, but we need to have the mindset that each and every one of us is also a rifleman. We need to be equipped and trained as such.

You can feel free to peruse my category on the U.S. Marines as long as you wish.  I know a Marine, and you’re no Marine.  The last thing I want is for a cop to see himself as first and foremost a rifleman.  Because he’s not, and because he shouldn’t be, even if he has the skills.

What Mr. Rayburn wants to see is every cop carrying a patrol rifle at all times, and instead of raising a handgun or shotgun at people, he’ll have a rifle to make urban situations and CQB much worse due to increased range and muzzle velocity.

It’s sad, really.  All of that gun control hasn’t helped a bit, has it?  And that open border policy and family-destroying welfare have made matters much worse, haven’t they?

But I’m certain that Mr. Rayburn doesn’t support peaceable men like me openly carrying rifles with them everywhere they go, else he would have said so.  His solution is to super-arm the cops rather than address the situation at its root cause.

Because cops are just like us, only better, and more elite, with more rights and latitude.  Well Mr. Rayburn, if you want to be a U.S. Marine, join up, take the training, and fly across the pond.  On the other hand, with the way things are now in the Army and Marines, I’m not so sure I’m saying much compared to what it would have been ten or even five years ago.

The saddest part of all is that cops apparently listen to this goober.  It’s a long way and a lot of water over the dam since the days of peace officers, yes?  Steel yourself for what’s coming, folks.

The view in Wilson Canyon, Sedona, Az.

News from the great Northeast:

A New Jersey mother is demanding answers from the Newark Police Department after her 10-year-old son was chased by police with shotguns.

Patisha Solomon says her son, Legend Preston, was playing basketball outside their home when Newark PD officers mistook him for a 20-year-old armed robbery suspect.

Police approached Legend with guns drawn. At that point, Legend says, out of fear, he ran into an alleyway.

“I ran because they thought that I rolled the ball into the street on purpose, and they were just holding shot guns at me trying to shoot me,” Legend told ABC New York.

Neighbors who saw the commotion, quickly yelled for the police to stop — one neighbor reportedly “threw themselves in front of the guns to protect” Legend.

“He’s only 10 years old, how you all chasing him? He’s only a kid,” Jackie Kelly, a neighbor of the Solomon family told ABC News.

Goobers with guns.  It’s what they do, ma’am.  They’re dangerous to everything and everyone around them, including themselves.  You know, it might have been easier and more efficient if they had walked up to the kid and talked to the him.

The Trace:

The government takes making gun records difficult to search quite seriously. A Government Accountability Office report released August 1 concluded that in two data systems, the ATF did not always comply with “restrictions prohibiting consolidation or centralization” of records. The GAO, which is entrusted with ensuring that federal agencies follow the law, was essentially chiding the ATF for making it a bit easier for its hundreds of investigators to do their jobs.

Alarmed headlines from conservative publications followed. A Fox News pundit falsely claimed the report found the agency had “a list of every gun owner and every gun owned.”

Congress imposes conflicting directives on the ATF. The agency is required to trace guns, but it must use inefficient procedures and obsolete technology. Lawmakers in effect tell the agency to do a job, but badly.

Investigators scan and save them as digital image files. They are like online piles of paper, or PDFs, arranged by one field only.

Trick question: The system can’t really be considered a database. (There is a reason the ATF uses the phrase “data systems” instead). There is no ability to search the text of a file, and no effort is made to tag files with identifiers that could later be used to sort and search. “We compare it to an electronic card catalog system, where records are digitally imaged, but not optimized for character recognition,” ATF spokesman Corey Ray says.

The only thing better than obsolete technology would be nothing at all – no records, no cards, no PDFs.  Because, “shall not be infringed.”  Besides, one can quite easily turn this into a system capable of OCR.

I say trash all of the records in a gigantic fire, with celebratory partying and great fanfare.