As best as I understand the appeals court ruling for Hawaii open carry, they determined that open carry cannot legally be prohibited if concealed carry is also prohibited.  Of course, if I had made the ruling, I would have determined that no man can legally or morally dictate to another man how or where he can carry his weapons.  But Hawaii is appealing that decision.

The state and Hawaii County filed a petition today asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a three-judge panel’s ruling that Hawaii’s legal requirement for getting a license to carry a firearm in public violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to bear arms for self-defense.

The three-judge panel of the court handed down a 2-1 opinion in July in the case of a Hilo man’s lawsuit against the state and the Hawaii Police Department. George K. Young Jr. sued in 2012 after then-Hawaii Police Chief Harry Kubojiri twice rejected his application for a license to carry a firearm.

State firearm laws prohibit carrying a firearm in public except to transport it to and from places where it can be purchased and used legally, such as from a gun shop to your home or to the police department for registration. The firearm must be unloaded and in an enclosed container.

The chief of police of each county is responsible for handling firearm registrations and issuing firearm licenses. The law allows for the chief, in exceptional cases, to grant a license to carry a loaded revolver or pistol to an applicant who shows reason to fear injury to himself or his property.

The 2-1 opinion said the exceptional case requirement impinges on the right of a responsible, law-abiding citizen to carry a firearm openly for self-defense outside of his home.

According to the state and county’s joint petition, the panel’s ruling is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Hawaii law. The panel, it says, invalidated Hawaii’s law on the ground that it limits open-carry license to security guards and other people whose jobs require protecting life and property.

“But that is just wrong,” the filing says. The law makes open-carry license available to any qualified individual who “sufficiently indicates” an “urgency” or “need” to carry a firearm and who is “engaged in the protection of life and property.”

Hawaii Attorney General Russell Suzuki has issued an opinion that clarifies that the law extends to private individuals as well as security officers and that it advises the police chiefs that victims of domestic violence, anyone who faces a credible threat of armed robbery or violent crime may be eligible for open-carry licenses.

But attorneys for Young said today that the reality is that the state rarely issues any open-carry licenses — only four in the last 18 years.

“The bottom line is that the state doesn’t issue permits,” attorney Alan Beck said.

Let’s be clear.  Everyone faces a credible threat because of the sinfulness of mankind.  Anyone, at any time, in any location, may be the victim of a crime against their person.

They know that and don’t care.

To satisfy these requirements, an applicant must demonstrate, among other things, that he or she has a need for protection that substantially exceeds that held by ordinary law-abiding citizens.

“Substantially.”  Not by a little, but substantially.  Note that most of the folks who hold this view believe in the protection of various animal life and the environment.  Humans aren’t good enough for protection.  So says the communists in Hawaii.  And no, the police aren’t there to protect you.  That’s just a children’s fairy tale.

The Federalist:

… the Nazis were firmly on the left. National Socialism was a collectivist authoritarian movement run by “social justice warriors.” This brand of “justice” benefited only some based on immutable characteristics, which perfectly aligns with the modern brand. The Nazi ideal embraced identity politics based on the primacy of the people, or volk, and invoked state-based solutions for every possible problem. It was nation-based socialism—the nation being especially important to those who bled in the Great War.

The Nazi charter published a year later and coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect. It calls for “equality of rights for the German people”; the subjugation of the individual to the state; breaking of “rent slavery”; “confiscation of war profits”; the nationalization of industry; profit-sharing in heavy industry; large-scale social security; the “communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low costs to small firms”; the “free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility”; the abolition of “materialistic” Roman Law; nationalizing education; nationalizing the army; state regulation of the press; and strong central power in the Reich. It was also racist and anti-immigrant.

In some areas, the Nazis followed their charter faithfully. They treated children as property of the state from the earliest age and indoctrinated them at government schools and clubs. The individual had limited rights outside the volk. German lives were for the betterment of the people and state. One’s group identity determined his rights and social hierarchy.

[ … ]

When told of Schutzstaffel (SS) Chief Heinrich Himmler’s flirtation with the occult, Hitler fumed: “What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave…”

[ … ]

“Once I have settled my other problems,” he occasionally declared, “I’ll have my reckoning with the church. I’ll have it reeling on the ropes.”

It wasn’t only theoretical. Hitler repeatedly praised Marx privately, stating he had “learned a great deal from Marxism.” The trouble with the Weimar Republic, he said, was that its politicians “had never even read Marx.” He also stated his differences with communists were that they were intellectual types passing out pamphlets, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun.”

The Nazis were statists of the highest and worst caliber.  Of interesting note, Richard Spencer said this.

“No individual has a right outside of a collective community. You have rights, not eternally or given by God, or by nature.”

I don’t align myself with men.  I don’t join clubs.  I don’t join movements.  I don’t call myself by names, except Christian.  And everyone who believes in the collective doesn’t believe in God.  And vice versa.

Funny.  I’d never even considered adjusting my point of aim for flinching.

Shooting Illustrated:

Lubricating is where many shooters make mistakes. The old adage, “more is better,” does not apply. Yep, Grandpa used a half-can of 3-in-1 Oil on his rusted fence pliers or his shotgun, and your father probably believed in the liberal application of WD-40 on any moving metal part. With firearms, however, too much is not good. In fact, according to Moore, you should “lightly lubricate.” The technical terminology he frequently uses is, “one drop.” He also warns to not lubricate the firing-pin channel, chamber, bore or magazines, because lubricants often allow debris to stick, and you don’t want stuck debris in these areas.

Some of his advice on cleaning frequency disagrees with what we studied earlier from Shooting Illustrated.

I’m neither concurring nor disagreeing with the bulk of the article – just sharing.  I did find it interesting that this bears on a comment thread we recently had here on whether it’s possible to over-lube a gun.

I have to disagree with one aspect of this advice.  I always oil my chambers, and always will.  If it gets dirty because of that, I’ll clean it again.

It’s been light posting lately and will likely continue to be into the following days.

It’s been a long haul to prepare for the hurricane.  The power company estimates that between two and three million people will go without power for some unspecified period of time.

The generator has oil and gas, I’ve had to think about a tarp for the machine (they don’t like to run in the rain), we’ve got batteries and flashlights, battery powered fans, protein drinks and bars, extra gas, the truck is topped off with fuel, I’ve bought isobutane canisters for my camping stove for morning coffee without power, and on and on the preparations go.

In addition to that, my company expects me to come into work for a twelve hour shift for “emergency operations” over the weekend, so my wonderful neighbors will handle running the generator for my wife.

I might make a few short posts, but I’ll try to return to normal posting on Monday if we don’t lose power.  If we do, then talk amongst yourselves.

On September 10th I brought up the Leland, North Carolina, prohibition of weapon transport or carry during hurricane Florence.  On September 11th, the Firearms Policy Coalition and Firearms Policy Foundation sent a demand letter that ended with the following statement.

Leland’s State of Emergency Notice should immediately be amended to strike the offending language creating this unlawful and unconstitutional weapons prohibition. Should the Town fail to do so, and/or attempt to enforce the same against any resident, it stands exposed to civil actions for declaratory and injunctive relief as well as monetary damages.

But while Leland issued a modified edict via Facebook (how laughable is that?), the damage had been done.  It essentially said that the prohibition applied only to those who were already prohibited.  In other words, that which was already illegal was “more illegaler and bader.”

Nothing explains the initial choice to violate state code by the initial edict, and nothing can undo the fact that the edict was criminal on its face.

I will continue to follow this.  This isn’t a resolution.

In a filthy firearm.

As a young Marine captain, I was the new officer on a rifle team and remember asking the grizzled old salts who had shot in many an inter-service championship or Camp Perry what the proper cleaning interval was for those incredible Quantico-built National Match M16s. The answers varied from daily on one end to at the end of the season on the other. There didn’t seem to be any real testing to support any given answer, and I accepted that you punched the bore whenever it seemed right.

I recently thought back on that experience as I finished up an endurance test on a Bravo Company Manufacturing (BCM) upper receiver. Over the course of a little more than three years, I had logged the lubrication intervals using FireClean to see how far the AR would run as it got dirtier and dirtier. At the end of the test, I was in possession of a barrel through which I had logged 10,000 rounds and had never cleaned in any manner. In shooting the last thousand rounds or so, I had noticed that the rifle seemed to be still shooting quite well and thought it would be interesting to do a formal accuracy workup. I borrowed a Bushnell Elite 4.5-18×44 LRTS riflescope to give the barrel every chance to succeed, and grabbed some quality ammo.

All firing was done from the prone position with the rifle supported by a Harris bipod in the front and some bags under the toe of the stock. The rifle had a Geissele Super V trigger, which is an excellent duty and snap-shooting unit, but not normally associated with group shooting. The BCM wore a free-floated KeyMod aluminum KMR-A rail and the barrel was a basic government profile 16” with a mid-length gas system and a 1:7” twist.

I fired a couple of sighters to get the LRTS on paper and then the very first five-round group of Hornady Steel Match clustered five .224-cal. holes into a tight .84” group that could be covered by a nickel. That was pretty close to prophetic, as the average of all five groups with the Steel Match ran .89 from the filthy barrel, with the series tallying .84, .85, .86, .72, and one lonely group over one minute of angle at 1.17.

That performance wasn’t an outlier. After 10,000 rounds, the BCM barrel grouped Federal Varmint hollow points into just barely over 3/4 m.o.a. on the low end and averaged just over an inch due to one “large” 1.5” group that pulled the average over one MOA.

Black Hills 69-gr. Sierra Match Kings clustered together consistently, poking holes in a tight knot while maintaining polite separation for each hole at just under a minute on average with .79, .82, .90, .92, and 1.25” groups.

[ … ]

I was somewhere between pleasantly surprised and mildly shocked for the barrel to do this after 10,000 rounds and never had as much as a boresnake, brush, or patch run through it.

I’m not surprised.  Eugene Stoner engineered a fine system.  Of course, I wouldn’t recommend doing that – this was a stress test of sorts.  Increased fouling and friction will only increase wear and metal fatigue.  But it’s nice to know that the delivered wisdom may not be so wise after all.

It’s funny how old myths die hard.  My son never had any complaints with the weapon system so I never came into it with predisposed prejudice.

NRO:

Renowned Second Amendment lawyer Stephen Halbrook detailed this history in a 2012 article for the Fordham Urban Law Journal. And now, in his book Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, he explains how French gun policy evolved over the centuries — and the consequences it had under the Nazi-puppet Vichy regime during World War II. A sequel of sorts to Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich, the book drives home the important lessons that gun control is a key element of the oppressor’s toolkit, that guns are incredibly useful for those resisting oppression, and that even the most draconian gun-control measures are far from perfectly effective.

It cannot prove, of course — and doesn’t purport to — that a stronger French tradition of gun rights could have radically altered history, or that America’s more libertarian gun policies strike the right balance among all the relevant priorities. What it does do is force readers to entertain a simple question: When a hostile and brutal power takes over, do you want your countrymen to have guns at hand, or not? Certainly this question weighed heavily upon the minds of the American Founders, and certainly its answer counts for something.

Going into World War II, the French citizenry was not particularly well-armed. An 1834 law had banned “war” weapons, essentially restricting civilians to shotguns, hunting-caliber rifles, and some handguns. In 1935, amid violent political upheaval, the government required the registration of non-hunting guns. Meanwhile, a French hunting organization estimated that there were about 3 million hunting guns in the country in 1939, when its population was something like 40 million.

Germany occupied the northern half and Atlantic coast of France in 1940, making short work of the French armed forces and taking 2 million soldiers prisoner in the resulting armistice. In France as elsewhere, the Nazis made it a priority to disarm the population when they arrived, hanging signs threatening harsh punishment — up to and including the death penalty — for those who refused to turn in their guns.

Of course they did.  Just like ISIS did when they captured new territory.  All gun controllers are like Nazis and ISIS.

WWAY.com:

Effective at 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, the transportation or possession, or the sale or purchase of any dangerous weapon or substance, while off one’s own premises, is prohibited, the town says.

H/T reddit.  According to the NC DOJ, “Pursuant to North Carolina’s Emergency Management Act (Chapter 166A of the General Statutes) local governments may impose restrictions on dangerous weapons such as explosives, incendiary devices, and radioactive materials and devices when a state of emergency is declared, but may not impose restrictions on lawfully possessed firearms.”

Furthermore, “Upon the possession, transportation, sale, purchase, storage, and use of gasoline, and dangerous weapons and substances, except that this subdivision does not authorize prohibitions or restrictions on lawfully possessed firearms or ammunition.”

The mayor of the city is a criminal, and so is the CLEO if he enforces this edict.  This isn’t over – this is just beginning, and this hurricane will be over at some point.  We’ll push on this until we get satisfactory answers or resolution.  It’s simply not acceptable to have Katrina style gun prohibitions.  Never again.

Matt Bracken on diversity being out strength, multi-culturalism, political correctness and social media.