Washington Post:

NASHVILLE — A gunman wearing a ski mask stormed into a Nashville-area church on Sunday, shooting seven people, including the pastor, before attacking a church usher who ultimately subdued him with a personal weapon, Nashville police said.

The shooting — which left a 39-year-old woman dead — occurred shortly before noon at Burnette Chapel Church of Christ in Antioch, Tenn., about 12 miles southeast of downtown Nashville. Police identified the shooter as Emanuel Kidega Samson, 25, of Tennessee, a Sudanese native who they said is a legal resident of the United States and apparently had attended worship services at the church in recent years. Police said Samson will be charged with murder and attempted murder.

Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said Samson drove up to the church and shot and killed a woman who was standing near her vehicle in the parking lot. The shooter — who police said was armed with two handguns — then entered the church through a rear door, shooting and wounding six people inside.

At some point, the gunman also pistol-whipped a church usher, causing “significant injuries” to the man, Aaron said. The usher, 22-year-old Robert “Caleb” Engle, confronted the gunman, police said, and during a struggle, Samson was wounded by a shot from his own gun. The usher then ran to his car and retrieved a handgun, police said.

Aaron said the usher ensured the gunman did not make any more movements until officers arrived. “It would appear he was not expecting to encounter a brave individual like the church usher,” Aaron said.

Police Chief Steve Anderson praised Engle for intervening: “We believe he is the hero today.”

Authorities on Sunday did not release a motive for the Antioch attack. But in a statement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville said it had opened a federal civil rights investigation.

“The FBI will collect all available facts and evidence,” said David W. Boling, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “As this is an ongoing investigation we are not able to comment further at this time.”

If I was the Sheriff I would have told the FBI to get the hell out of my jurisdiction and never come back or else they’ll face immediate arrest by my deputies.  But I’m not, and he won’t.

This is all very sad, and I’ve pointed out before that in church you are in the most vulnerable position you’ll likely ever face.  Your attention is focused in one place, likely with your back to the sole points of ingress and egress, you’re pinned in by physical features and people, you’re sitting (most of the time), and there is a significant volume of sound occurring that would mask any threats.

Don’t ever go to a worship service unarmed.  Don’t ever do that.  Please.  I don’t.  One of the saddest parts of the report involves the usher who had to go to his car to retrieve his handgun.  I don’t know the details and they may have been blessed in this particular instance that more people didn’t die.

It could have been that going to fisticuffs with the shooter stopped the gun fight and thus no more people died.  In that case, it was indeed a blessing.  It may not have occurred that way on another day, and it may not occur that way in your church.  The shooter should have been met with guns in his face as soon as he presented his weapon.  Going to the car to retrieve your gun isn’t the way to keep your family or friends safe.

Keep your head on a swivel and hand ready to present.

Popular Mechanics:

The Army’s program to replace the M4 carbine with a larger, harder-hitting rifle is dead, canceled after just under two months. But now that the Interim Combat Service Rifle is dead, what’s next?

The Interim Combat Service Rifle was proposed as a means of countering the new generation of cheap, highly effective body armors likely to be worn by America’s enemies . Countries such as Russia are now issuing body armors that can allegedly stop a .30-06 armor piercing bullet. Experts inside and outside the Army believed that the Army’s current issue 5.56-millimeter bullet would not be able to penetrate new armor, and that a larger, heavier bullet that transfers more energy to the target is necessary. Like everything else in the domain of military weapons, it’s an arms race between measure and countermeasure.

Seriously folks, who shoots armor piercing .30-06?  No, really.  This isn’t rhetorical.  What army shoots the Springfield round?  And how much body armor would be necessary to stop an armor piercing .30-06?  Think through this for a moment.  They would be like the Pillsbury dough boy, just with York 45 pound steel plates attached to their front and back.  They wouldn’t be able to move, much less fight.

The M4 doesn’t need to be replaced.  Via TCJ, there are good suggestions for making your AR run like a gazelle.  Do it.  Aim for heads and hips.  Make sure you have other kinds of weapons such as .308 or 6.5mm Creedmoor, and remember that when you get something, you always give up something.  Weapon selection is always a balancing act.  Also, for the Army in particular, learn to shoot before considering replacement of your rifle system.

Finally, you do realize that even the arms manufacturers who gave us the AK-47 no longer shoot the 7.62X39, right?  All of those rifles have been replaced by the 5.45X39.  No major land army on earth now shoots the larger bore cartridges except as DM and sniper rifles.

Via SOFREP, I had missed this tip by John Lovell.  I like John and not only does he make useful videos, he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, unlike some of the trainers out there.  At any rate, he makes use of height-over-bore to show you how to zero your carbine when you don’t have access to a 100 yard rifle range at that particular time.

David Codrea:

Next up on the Mother Jones hit list is the somehow objectionable fact that opening up the market will create significant new economic opportunities. Horrors.

But that’s important to them.  They don’t want firearms or firearms accessories manufacturers to make money, and they are willing to use any and every means to shut them down.  That the constitution and free market allows them is irrelevant.  They know better.

Besides, this hit list is no different than the one crafted by Amanda Marcotte at Salon.  When nothing really works as an objection, throw in everything but the kitchen sink.  You can always tell it when the controllers themselves think they have a bad case.  They line up ten leaky buckets, hoping that the combination of them will hold water.  It doesn’t.

Puerto Rico today:

All of Puerto Rico has lost power after deadly Hurricane Maria swept through the island on Wednesday – with winds that blew the roofs off homes and flash floods that turned roads into rivers.

Leaving at least nine people dead in its wake across the Caribbean, Hurricane Maria blew ashore in the morning in the southeast coastal town of Yabucoa as a Category 4 storm with winds of 155 mph.

While the eye of the storm has since moved off the island and weakened to a Category 2 hurricane, it’s expected to continue lashing the island of 3.4million with life-threatening winds, storm surge and rain through this evening.

‘Once we’re able to go outside, we’re going to find our island destroyed,’ said Abner Gomez, Puerto Rico’s emergency management director. ‘The information we have received is not encouraging. It’s a system that has destroyed everything in its path.’

It looks like dystopia, doesn’t it?

Two weeks ago it was a hard week trying to prepare for Hurricane Irma.  We managed to find a Generac 5500 generator when almost all generators had been sent to Texas.  Gas lines were long and prices were elevated, and gas cans were triple the cost from a month prior.  And then they were gone.  So it didn’t matter whether you could buy gas – you couldn’t store it.

We had to think about batteries, perishable food, trying to get non-perishable food, potable water, dog food (have you considered your beasts in the event of something like this?), and on and on the list goes.  To some extent we had the non-perishable food situation handled, but not well enough for my future comfort level.

I lived through Hurricane Hugo, and was without power for two weeks.  I wasn’t prepared for it either.  At the time it rolled through I was preparing for the engineering PE examination.  The exam date in October wasn’t going to change because of the storm, so I had to redeem the time.

I lined my kitchen table with candles and worked PE review problems for two weeks by candlelight (old school, pen and paper).  But I wasn’t going to relive my Hugo experience unprepared, so we worked hard to prepare.  I consider Hurricane Irma yet another warning shot over the bow.

For the future, we need to be thinking about more than just guns and ammunition (although that’s first on the list).  We need to think long term survival in the form of food caches, freeze-dried foods, large scale water filtration rather than the small scale I currently have, and you could probably add endlessly to this list.  Feel free to do so in the comments.

I am of the considered opinion that a hurricane is the least of our worries when considering the ills that may befall us in the future.  Puerto Rico won’t rebuild for years, and won’t have power for more than half a year, if then.  Are you prepared for an attack on our electrical grid?  For civil strife and/or civil war?  For contamination of our water supplies?  For a run on the banks and a completely devalued dollar?

No, neither am I.  Not as well as I ought to be.

Via David Codrea, who has some followup information you will want to know.

Harless is an idiot.  He isn’t capable of bagging groceries well, much less interacting with the public.  The Canton, Ohio police must hire down, or in other words, hire the dumbest people alive to do the job.

Harless doesn’t speak well, he doesn’t present himself well, he seems incapable of reasoned, logical or complex thought, and it’s a wonder that he passed any of the written examinations to become a LEO (unless the examinations are designed to exclude the smart candidates).

More than that, he appears to have broken the law.  He appears to be guilty, according to the clear testimony of this video evidence, of assault with a deadly weapon, false arrest, verbal and physical harassment, threatening a citizen with bodily injury and even death, and conspiracy to commit crimes.

His partner, Mark Diels, is simply a nincompoop and a boob.  He is a goober.  He appears to have no morals or scruples, and he appears to have intentionally went along with the apparent crimes being committed, meaning that he is not only complicit in them, he appears to have been guilty of conspiracy to commit these crimes and cover them up.

Tell me again about how most cops are just good guys trying to do a good job?  Let me hear it again.

Reuters:

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia on Tuesday unveiled a statue of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle that became by some estimates the most lethal weapon ever made and the best known Russian brand abroad.

Perched atop a pedestal in a tiny square on Moscow’s busy Garden Ring thoroughfare, the statue of Kalashnikov, who died in 2013, has him dressed in a bomber jacket and clutching an AK-47 in both hands.

“I created a weapon for the defense of my fatherland,” runs a Kalashnikov quote hewn on the pedestal. At the unveiling ceremony, a Kremlin guard of honor stood to attention as Russia’s national anthem played.

“This weapon is Russia’s defense. It’s one of Russia’s symbols. Alas, for life to continue, for lovely children to grow up, for beautiful women in Russia, there must be a weapon,” the monument’s sculptor, Salavat Shcherbakov, told reporters.

Kalashnikov actually didn’t work alone, nor did he begin with an unknown cartridge.  His cartridge was already designed, he began with the German Sturmgewehr assault rifle design, and also had features of the M1.  He was aided by Aleksandr Zaitsen.

Eugene Stoner was also the chief engineer over the design of the AR line of rifles, with designers / mechanics Robert Fremont and Jim Sullivan.  It’s mostly Stoner we remember, just like it’s mostly Kalashnikov we remember.  I much prefer the exquisite engineering and tight tolerances of the AR design to the clunkiness and rattling of the AK.  But that’s just my preference.

The U.S. ought to erect monuments to John Moses Browning and Eugene Stoner.  But we won’t.  We aren’t Russia.  Russia has fighters.  We have PowerPoint presentations on workforce diversity and workplace harassment.

So tell me again who won the cold war?  Russia erects monuments to weapons designers, and American universities have professors who fill the minds of idiot-youngsters with poison.  I’m not feeling victorious for some reason.

Via Eugene Volokh.

Like Secretary Clinton, the supporters of the bills put before Congress to repeal PLCAA argue that no other industry enjoys the legal shield that the gun industry does — giving as counter-examples firms such as auto companies, pharmaceutical drug companies and even tobacco companies.

They are right to some extent …. [But] would there be widespread tort liability for gun companies were both PLCAA and state pre-emption laws all repealed?

The central argument I will put forward is that it is not easy to find good examples from other important industries of defendants being held liable for the sorts of cases that gun victim plaintiffs would like to win.

Take the motor vehicle accident problem. It is well understood that car companies make vehicles intended to be sold to ordinary drivers that are capable of going more than 100 miles per hour even though that is well more than the maximum road speed allowed. Surely the car companies know that some owners regularly drive faster than, say, 75 miles per hour and cause accidents because of their speeding. Product liability law today generally requires product makers to take into account foreseeable product misuse.

Does this make cars involved in very high speed crashes defectively designed? Although there is something appealing about this idea, I don’t see successful cases being brought on this theory, and given the record so far I’d be surprised if they were successful.

Next, I imagine that in today’s high-tech world motor vehicles could be engineered so that (perhaps absent an emergency) they could not be driven faster than the posted speed limit on the road on which they are currently travelling (and I assume that self-driving cars currently have and will continue to have this feature). Does the failure to include this speed-control function in all of today’s new motor vehicles make them defective so that the manufacturer would be liable in tort to victims of drivers whose speeding (at any speed) causes accidents? This too is an appealing idea, but I don’t see such cases.

It’s only appealing if you’re a nanny-state control freak.  As for cars engineered with governors, don’t give the progressives any more ideas for things they can regulate.

I’ll just remark one more time that the free-for-all hippie culture –love, peace and feel-good – which made its living complaining about signs and other such rules, believed in absolutely nothing and held to no morals or scruples.  Their empty minds became vessels for the poison fed to them, and within short order (one generation), the generation of free wheeling liberty became the cabal of controllers.

The sons and daughters of hippies are nanny-state, government-worshipping control freaks searching for the next thing to regulate so they can bring ubiquitous sameness and monolithic utopia to the world.

Dana Milbank:

The days are growing colder, and soon millions of American hunters will pursue a time-honored tradition. They will load their automatic weapons with armor-piercing bullets, strap on silencers, head off to the picnic grounds on nearby public lakes — and start shooting.

If you do not immediately recognize this pastime as part of America’s heritage, then you are sadly out of step with the current Republican majority in Congress. On Tuesday, a House panel takes up the “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act of 2017,” which promises “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing and shooting.”

Among these recreational enhancements:

●Allowing people to bring assault guns and other weapons through jurisdictions where they are banned.

●Rolling back decades-old regulations on the use of silencers.

●Protecting the use of armor-piercing bullets.

●Easing importation of foreign-made assault rifles.

●Protecting the practice of baiting birds with grain as they migrate and then mowing them down.

But more and more hunters are finding that conventional earplugs and muffs are not adequate for today’s weapons — for example, quail hunting with an M777 howitzer or grouse hunting with an FIM-92 Stinger missile launcher.

Hmm … Quail hunting with a Howitzer.  Poor, poor Dana Milbank.  Poor, metrosexual, hand-wringing, paranoid, bed wetter Dana Milbank.  Hey, I notice that you have a history of asking people to write your articles for you.  Did you get Jennifer Mascia or someone else at Everytown to write this one for you, Dana?

If you don’t know that it’s always time to enjoy the shooting sports in America, you’re not out of step with the GOP.  They couldn’t care less.  You’re out of step with most of the American public in “flyover country.”  You’re a chattering class resident of the beltway.  You eat the food that the dirt people grow, so you depend on the dirt people for your very life.

And if you don’t like the idea of killing geese, you can let them ensconce in your yard and foul it up.  They can’t walk two steps without shitting.  Mean, nasty critters.  I hate them.

NR:

“A propensity to violence is embedded in the core principles of Islam,” he writes, demonstrating how this propensity repeats down the centuries and across borders. Every time and everywhere the violence is a phenomenon of the faith, not a reaction to poverty or to some wickedness supposedly imposed by outsiders and unbelievers such as, for instance, Western colonialism. Terrorists, says President Trump, are “sick and demented,” while Mrs. May calls them “cowards.” Such opinions stem from Western ways of judging conduct, and are irrelevant in this context. Jihadis are committing mass-murder and self-sacrifice in the belief that Islam demands this of them.

That’s right, of course.  That’s why it’s always incorrect and historically inaccurate and irrelevant to say that people who do such things are “sick,” “mentally ill,” “mentally disturbed,” “cowards,” or whatever superlative you want to throw at them.

They see you as the enemy and fodder for the implementation of Sharia.  They won’t be happy until you worship in a Mosque, your women wear head cover and don’t go out of the house without you, and your sons fight for the cause of jihad.  That’s just for starters.

And there is only one historically accurate approach to Islam.  The Mosque, if you will remember from our previous conversations on this subject, is their armory, training center and logistics hub.  It all begins with the Mosque.

Got guns and ammunition?