When it was released yesterday over the objection of law enforcement, I watched it and thought at the time it was a lot of nothing.

It took ZeroHedge pointing out to us that no broken windows were reported.  In fact, it’s really more than that.  It was positively asserted by one team member that there were no broken windows.

Make of this what you will, and fill us in with the comments.

In the mail from Springfield Armory, teamspringfield@springfield-armory.com.

GENESEO, IL, (05/03/18) – Springfield Armory is severing ties with Dick’s Sporting Goods and its subsidiary, Field & Stream, in response to their hiring a group for anti-Second Amendment lobbying.

This latest action follows Dick’s Sporting Goods’ decision to remove and destroy all modern sporting rifles (MSR) from their inventory. In addition, they have denied Second Amendment rights to Americans under the age of 21. We at Springfield Armory believe that all law abiding American citizens of adult age are guaranteed this sacred right under our Constitution.

It is clear where Dick’s Sporting Goods and its subsidiary, Field & Stream, stand on the Second Amendment, and we want to be clear about our message in response. Their position runs counter to what we stand for as a company. At Springfield Armory, we believe in the right and principles fought for and secured by American patriots and our founding forefathers, without question. We will not accept Dick’s Sporting Goods’ continued attempts to deny Second Amendment freedoms to our fellow Americans.

Good.  Let’s hope more follow, as well as more manufacturers refusing to sell to the State of New York.

Citizen Times:

“I don’t think we’ll take up gun legislation of any type,” said state Rep. Chuck McGrady, a Henderson County Republican first elected to the General Assembly in 2010, the same year Republicans established control of the body.

“To get to a different place on guns, you’d have to have a different mix of legislators — it’s a pretty conservative state,” McGrady said. “I do anticipate we’ll be putting some monies into the school safety issue.”

That would revolve around “hardening” schools — adding security, police officers and other physical measures that would make schools more difficult for a shooter to attack — not measures designed to make it harder to buy guns.

State Rep. Brian Turner, a Democrat who represents part of Buncombe County, said it’s unrealistic to expect the Republican-dominated legislature to impose rules making it harder to get guns when the body opens the 2018 session May 16.

“If we do see something, I would imagine it would probably be along the lines of the hardening of schools and adding additional resource officers,” Turner said. “I think the focus would be less around firearms specifically and more about deterrence and prevention.”

A gun owner and hunter himself, Turner is far from anti-gun. But restrictions on “Title 2 weapons,” such as short-barreled shotguns or suppressors, might make sense, he said.

While North Carolina elected a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, in 2016, it also went overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump, a Republican. On gun issues, the Tar Heel State is reliably conservative, according to Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University.

Cooper acknowledged Florida’s legislature raised the age to buy an AR-15 to 21 after the school shooting, as the shooter was 19, but he said “it’s unlikely we’ll see a lot of movement” in North Carolina.

“I think there was a policy window that opened briefly, but it appears to be closing,” Cooper said. “Florida had a little bit of movement, and people are talking about the issue, but I don’t think there’s a lot of persuasion going on. Even though people are talking about it more, I think both sides are drawing people more firmly into their own camps.”

Gun control legislation is “a particularly tough sell in North Carolina,” which has a strong tradition of hunting and gun ownership.

“We’ve looked to be to the left of some of the country on some issues, but gun rights is not one of those issues,” Cooper said.

Restrictions on suppressors might make sense to State Rep. Brian Turner because he is an idiot.  If he is a hunter like he says he is, he would understand the value of hearing and how much damage can be done to it.  So I think he is lying.  I don’t think he’s a hunter at all.

Moreover, hunting has nothing whatsoever to do with gun rights or the second amendment or the constitution of North Carolina.  So I think he just threw in hunting to bolster his creds thinking that we’d buy it.  I don’t.  I don’t buy any of his claptrap.  I wish people would stop mentioning hunting in the context of gun rights.  It’s stupid and it makes the person saying it look like an imbecile.

But what I do buy is that the NC legislature will do nothing to enact further restrictions on firearms freedoms without a huge fight.  For the sake of everyone, this isn’t a bridge Turner or anyone else wants to cross.  The only gun legislation I want to see is constitutional carry and repeal of the CLEO permitting process.

CNBC:

Another community group, Majority Action, is organizing retail investors to push big fund companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, Sturm Ruger’s biggest shareholders, to assert their voting power. The group organized about six weeks ago, seeing now as a crucial moment for changing the gun industry.

“We were looking at how you enable everyday investors to access the levers of power when it comes to holding companies accountable,” said James Rucker, its co-founder, who is on the board of directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But even before these recent demands, controversy was certain to erupt at Sturm Ruger’s meeting, scheduled to take place May 9 at a resort in Arizona thousands of miles from its Connecticut headquarters. The company has a factory in the area.

Wednesday’s vote will be the first test this year of a proposal by a faith-based shareholder group urging the nation’s gun industry to act after recent extreme examples of gun violence.

Specifically, that proposal, backed by the Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment, asks gun makers like Sturm Ruger to prepare a report about the financial and reputational risks associated with their business. The coalition plans to introduce a similar proposal on the proxy of American Outdoor Brands, which typically holds its meetings in the fall.

Two major shareholder voting advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, have thrown their support behind the coalition’s proposal, Sturm Ruger’s board, on the other hand, is advising shareholders to vote against it. “We believe that firearms safety is a laudable and appropriate goal,” it said in the proxy. “However, we also believe that adequate safety practices and procedures are available.”

BlackRock said in a note to clients in March that it is time to take action on gun violence, adding it could use its position as a large shareholder to vote against boards and management and back shareholder proposals management doesn’t like. But it won’t comment about how it plans to vote its 2.8 million shares next week.

Several companies connected to the gun industry have changed their policies in recent weeks in response to the upswell of protests after a shooting in a Florida high school in February left 17 people dead. Major retailers such as Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods put limits on gun sales, and banks like Citigroup said it would restrict gun sales by business partners.

Fund managers like BlackRock and State Street said they would start a dialogue with gun makers about what they are doing to promote safety. BlackRock has even rolled out new funds that specifically remove stocks of gun makers and sellers.

Amalgamated wants the gun maker to publicly endorse universal background checks, funding for government to to crack down on illegal distribution, and funding for government research into gun safety and public health. They also want a commitment to responsible distribution contracts, monitoring of distribution chains and investments in gun safety technology and commercialization.

Froman, 68, is a lawyer and long-time gun industry supporter. The Southern Poverty Law Center found her name in a 2014 member directory of a secretive ultra-conservative group called the Council for National Policy. Tax forms from 2015 and 2016 filed by that organization list her as treasurer.

The year she became president of the NRA, the gun lobby won a crucial legal battle in the form of a new law limiting liability claims against gun makers. That same year, a donor program for the NRA launched and, as reported by Bloomberg in 2012, took in nearly $15 million from gun-related companies.

Froman has pointed to Smith & Wesson’s decision in 2000 to voluntarily comply with certain gun safety measures as its downfall. Grassroots gun supporters forced the company into bankruptcy after it made that “deal with the devil,” she has said.

“The grass roots is a powerful force that the government can’t control and can’t fight,” she said in a speech in 2011 to a group that supports knife ownership. “Just look at what’s happened with the rise of the Tea Party movement. Most of the battles that NRA has won have been won by sheer political power.”

Oh, okay.  Things make a little more sense now.  The Southern Preposterous Lie Center is after her, and for very good reason.  She believes that S&W made a “deal with the devil.”  Because they did, and she’s right.  She stands in the way of forcing Ruger to make that same sort of deal, although to be quite honest, I think the other board members as well as 100% of Ruger employees see things the same way she does.

The article is lacking in detail just like all preceding articles on this – we still don’t learn the relative shareholding power of these gun controller forces within Ruger stock.  But it sure will be interesting to follow this through and see how well or poorly the controllers do with this effort.

Prior: Amalgamated Bank Pressures Ruger To Support Gun Control Measures

Greenville News:

A bill that would allow lawful gun owners to carry their firearms without a permit has been removed from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s meeting agenda, and the chairman is not saying when it may return.

Its removal came as lawmakers and political candidates have debated what should be done to combat school shootings, and it came just days before a bill related to school safety receives a Senate hearing on Wednesday.

The bill’s sponsor and members of the committee questioned this week by The Greenville News said they were not aware of the bill’s removal.

Sen. Luke Rankin, a Horry County Republican and chairman of the committee, said the bill was pulled by him to “to give full attention” to an abortion bill that was debated and passed by his committee Tuesday.

He said he did not know when the gun bill might return to the agenda but said its absence was not due to the recent school shooting in Florida.

Asked why he did not know when it might return, he said, “It was not on the agenda today. That is the answer.”

The controversial bill had been debated briefly at the last meeting of the committee two weeks ago, but no action was taken.

The so-called “Constitutional carry” or “open-carry” bill, sponsored by Sen. Shane Martin, a Spartanburg County Republican, would not do away with concealed weapons permits for those who wanted to carry their guns to other states.

[ … ]

On Wednesday a Senate judiciary subcommittee will hear a bill by Rep. Sandy Senn, a Charleston Republican, that would create the crime of threatening, soliciting or conspiring to threaten to use a firearm to cause injury, death or damage at a school, college or university.

This is news from February that I had missed because I wasn’t watching closely enough.  State Senator Luke Rankin is dismissive and haughty because he doesn’t care about gun rights.

I’ve made it clear not only that gun control has its roots in wickedness, but gun control also to do with how a many bears his arms.  Forcing a man to conceal his weapons is an act of shaming him and making him behave like a criminal.

But, he claims, they can’t chew gum and walk at the same time.  They want to focus on an abortion bill.  Good.  We’ll see if anything comes of that.  Meanwhile, they have the time to debate a bill that makes it a crime to engage in “threatening, soliciting or conspiring to threaten to use a firearm to cause injury, death or damage at a school, college or university,” or in other words, make something that is already a crime, a crime.

I think Senator Rankin is a liar and weasel.  I think they can chew gum and walk at the same time, and I think he is being coy and dismissive in order to hide something.

What is he trying to hide?  What does he believe about gun owners and their manner of carry that he isn’t telling us because he is cowardly and doesn’t want us to know?

I also think it’s time to Larry Martin Mr. Rankin.  Mr. Rankin, you now have a target on your back.  You’re next, so look for something to do with your time other than be a state senator.

WTOP:

Another company, this one among the largest ammunition makers in America, is distancing itself from firearms following the massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High in February.

Vista Outdoor Inc. has been pressured for months by retailers that sell its other goods like Bell bicycle helmets and CamelBak water carriers, to stop manufacturing firearms.

The Utah company said Tuesday that it will be seeking buyers for its firearms manufacturing business, and will focus on products for outdoor enthusiasts. It will continue to sell ammunition, its biggest core businesses.

REI, the national outdoor retailer, suspended all orders from Vista in March after it refused to say if it would continue to manufacture weapons. REI said it’s aware of Vista’s announcement, but did not say if it would resume doing business with the company.

During a conference call Tuesday, Vista CEO Cristopher Metz said that the company was already moving in the direction of shedding its firearms business, “way before any of the noise came about eight weeks ago.”

[ … ]

Vista last year had revenue of $2.5 billion. It is looking for buyers for its Savage and Stevens firearms brands, and other product lines not related to firearms.

They’ve made noises of keeping the gun community as patrons though.

The firm will stop manufacturing guns but will continue to produce ammunition, which the company described as being its “largest core business.” Vista will also focus on its outdoor products.

“An increased focus on our heritage ammunition business will manifest itself in more innovative and breakthrough new products introduced over the next few years,” Vista Outdoor CEO Chris Metz said in a release.

I bolded the words “innovative and breakthrough new products.”  I’m not stupid.  I expect ammunition that has a higher muzzle velocity, expands better (for PD ammo), has a higher ballistic coefficient, has higher and better QA, more consistent and reliable bullet CoG and gyroscopic stability, and that no one else has.

Or else I’ll call you a crapweasel, liar and douchebag.  I’ll remember this conversation, Mr. Metz.  You said these things, I didn’t.  You said innovative and breakthrough.  You need to get the best engineers in-house immediately to make that happen.  You’re going to have to dump a lot of money into this project.  In the mean time, I’m sorry for Savage.  They make good guns and I hope they land on their feet.

I said this.

As for Hornady, I suspect they will benefit immensely from this decision.  If you are a firearms or ammunition manufacturer, straighten up and pay attention.  This is how you do it.  This is how you pay your dues and earn the trust and respect of the community.  The community rewards such trust and respect.

As I would expect, the NRA is late to the game writing about this, and utterly failed to line up other manufacturers or even hint that the entire industry should do the same thing.  But what interests me is one comment at the article.

Hornady, we love you!!! Let’s see how long it takes before the cops have to point their empty pistols at a BG and yell “STOP or I’ll yell BANG.”

I hope every ammunition manufacturer out there has the balls to tell New York to go to hell. How ironic, liberals getting a taste of their own medicine: the infamous boycott.

Told you so.

The author focuses on the major unforced errors in precision shooting.  Sports Shooting:

1)  Poor wind calls

Mirage is the best indication of wind. Focus on the target and back off parallax until you start to pick up mirage. Mirage laying over at a 45 degree angle is about 5-7 mph. If it’s flowing more flat then that is 10-12 mph.

• If you can’t get on glass prior to your target engagement, then start with your parallax ring at 100. As you turn it to focus on the target at the correct yardage you will see mirage in front of the target. This is a good thing to do if you have time as a final check of conditions before breaking the shot.
• Be sure to have a wind plan. Use your Kestrel to determine wind deflection for each target and write it down. Take a mental note of what the wind feels like as you are taking readings. Wind felt light on your face is 3-5 mph. As speeds pick up during the Course of Fire, you can quickly adjust on the fly.

2)  Shooting by the seat of your pants

• Run through the stage in your head. Set up, movements, when to dial, when to hold, and wind plan.
• Turn down the magnification. Typically, shooters will run the magnification much too high. There is no magic bullet for what to do here as conditions will drive this but the idea is to see every hit or miss. Practice recoil management.

Turn down your magnification?  Well, this is something I have trouble doing.  If I have more scope power, I tend to want to use it.