Well, more than mud.  Sand, dirt, water and mud.

It did well.  I knew it would before I watched the video.  It’s a fine gun, based on my experience.  Tim Harmsen does a good job with the video.

David Codrea:

The walk commenced with troopers leading the way, crossing the street to enter the main campus. There, “counterprotestors” began converging, walking quickly, looking for all the world like stalking predators preparing to attack. I saw black hoodies and bandanas. The troopers picked up the pace.

Funny that.  When I’m openly carrying, no one has ever rushed up to me wearing a hoodie or bandana.  This would be the wrong place for that anyway.  This is not welcome terrain for such foolishness.  Something might go down that’s not to your liking.

David did a nice job of covering the event.

Reuters:

When Missouri Senate Bill 656 was introduced in 2016, it was relatively modest legislation that proposed capping the amount county sheriffs could charge for a concealed handgun permit.

By the time it passed, with both houses of the state legislature overturning the governor’s veto, it had become one of the most expansive gun-rights laws in the country.

The gun lobby fought hard to pass the bill. The group some lawmakers credited with providing crucial momentum was not so much the National Rifle Association, the powerful national lobbying organization, but rather the Missouri Firearms Coalition, an aggressive grassroots operation founded in 2015.

With major gun-rights legislation stalled in Washington, much of the action has shifted to the states, where self-described “no compromise” groups such as the Missouri Firearms Coalition have mobilized activists in favor of pro-gun laws, according to Reuters interviews with gun-rights groups in more than a dozen states, lawmakers and NRA supporters.

These groups have become increasingly active in promoting a pro-gun agenda in many states, unafraid of alienating lawmakers who waver on gun rights. In many cases, they say they would rather lose a legislative fight on principle than compromise and support a watered-down bill.

At times, this can put local groups at odds with the NRA, which some see as too willing to give ground on the most aggressive pro-gun laws in state legislatures, said Greg Pruett, president of the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance, which formed in 2012.

“It’s always kind of interesting when you see a lot of people in the gun control community talk about how radical the NRA is,” said Pruett, whose group organized an email and telephone campaign to pass a 2016 Idaho law allowing people to carry concealed handguns without a permit, also known as “constitutional carry.”

“There’s an entire movement on the other side of the NRA … We’re done compromising,” he said.

Missouri Firearms Coalition political advisor Aaron Dorr says the NRA fought against constitutional carry for years, considering it too much of a longshot, and only came on board once passage was certain. The Missouri law not only authorized constitutional carry, it made Missouri a “stand your ground” state, extending the right to lethal self-defense outside the home, even when retreating is an option.

“It was the Missouri Firearms Coalition that was on the ground first with this,” said Jered Taylor, a Missouri state representative. “Eventually the NRA came on board, but the Missouri Firearms Coalition was the one that pushed it.”The NRA contended that it supported Senate Bill 656 from start to finish. The NRA assesses legislation across the states and sometimes opts for incremental victories, spokesman Lars Dalseide said.

“While the all or nothing approach may sound noble, the fact is you usually end up with nothing,” Dalseide said. “The other groups may have called for the passage of these bills in the past but they are largely fundraising organizations … None of these legislative initiatives moved an inch until the NRA got involved.”

[ … ]

The most uncompromising among them say the NRA has become too timid and too willing to back measures such as removing firearms from people deemed dangerous.

“I call it pre-emptive concession,” said Paul Valone, president of Grass Roots North Carolina, which has helped expand concealed carry rights and a “stand your ground” law.

That the NRA would trot out a spokesman who would say something like that, making them sound like crying little girls, says more than anything the spokesman could ever do or say to harm the NRA.

The NRA has harmed not only gun rights in America (with its support for the GCA, the NFA, the connection of mental health to crime, and the bump stock ban), but they have marginalized themselves in the process, becoming nothing more than a money grabbing organization.  It’s a shame, really, as it could have been different.

But it’s nice to see people waking to this reality and working at the state and local level.  As they do that, it can always be expected that the NRA will claim the credit for it.  As I’ve said before, I consider the NRA to be the largest, most well funded and well connected gun control organization on earth.

Via WoG, the Ohio Supreme Court has gotten pissed off at God and decided they would do better at the job.

The Ohio Supreme Court has proposed rule changes that would disarm and force those subject to a civil protection order to surrender firearms, ammunition, and concealed handgun license to law enforcement. This seizure would take place even if there is no “sufficient nexus,” specifically evidence that a firearm was threatened to be used, used, or brandished.

The Supreme Court drafts proposed rule changes. The proposed rule changes are put out for public comment.

To comment and demand that these proposed changes not be enacted, email objections to: diana.ramos-reardon@sc.ohio.gov Include your full name and mailing address in any comments submitted by e-mail.

The legislature wasn’t doing what the court wanted them to do, so they stepped in and make themselves the only sovereign potentate, the most high god.  Able to calm the seas and change the winds.

Of course, there is always an answer for tyrants like this, and it involves oak trees and hemp rope.

PJM:

When the Spanish Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella recaptured Granada on January 2, 1492, they ended almost eight centuries of jihad ravages (described by Bertrand in 1934, and in 2016 here) — massacres, pillage, mass enslavement, and deportation — and the grinding imposition of Sharia by Spain’s various pious Muslim conquerors, and rulers. Bertrand’s unsparing narrative describes the bitter, chronic fate of Spain’s Christians under Islam, both those fully subjugated and the populations never entirely subdued in the semi-autonomous northern regions:

The Christians of the interior were mastered. They had lost their leaders and their principal centers of resistance. The armies of the Caliph, the Arab and Berber chieftains, had massacred them, burned them out and pillaged them to the best of their ability. Thus decimated and humiliated, they nevertheless continued to exist, in a furtive and more or less precarious way of life …The Christians of the North scarcely knew the meaning of repose, security, or any of the amenities of life. They were continually at war with their Musulman [Muslim] neighbors. It was the fatality of that Arab conquest, a superficial and hasty conquest, never carried through to the end, that it had divided the country into two irreducible camps: that of the replete, and that of the hungry; those who held the best soil, and those who were relegated to the mountains or to desert plains…[The Muslims] interposed a desert between themselves and the Christians, and made a waste of the region which lay on the left bank of the latter [Duero] river. This was what they called “the Great Desert.” …

To keep the Christians in their place it did not suffice to surround them with a zone of famine and devastation. It was necessary also to go and sew terror and massacre among them. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, an army sallied forth from Cordova to go and raid the Christians, destroy their villages, their fortified posts, their monasteries and their churches, except when it was a question of expeditions of larger scope, involving sieges and pitched battles. In cases of simply punitive expeditions, the soldiers of the Caliph confined themselves to destroying harvests and cutting down trees. Most of the time they took the field to win booty. A district was allowed to re-people itself and be brought under cultivation; then it was suddenly fallen upon. Workers, harvesters, fruits and cattle were seized.

The religious Islamic jihad motivations for this devastation, and related “pious,” sadistic savagery of their triumphal execution, were underscored by Bertrand:

If one bears in mind that this brigandage was almost continual, and that this fury of destruction and extermination was regarded as a work of piety — it was a holy war against the infidels — it is not surprising that whole regions of Spain should have been made irremediably sterile. This was one of the capital causes of the deforestation from which the [Iberian] Peninsula still suffers. With what savage satisfaction and in what pious accents do the Arab annalists tell us of those at least bi-annual raids!A typical phrase for praising the devotion of a Caliph is this: “he penetrated into Christian territory, where he wrought devastation, devoted himself to pillage, and took prisoners. After that he brought the Musulmans back to Cordova safe and sound and laden with booty.” Abd er Rhaman [r. 912-961 A.D.], in the course of a campaign in Navarre, “did not fail, whenever a Christian retreat was to be found in the neighborhood, to carry destruction there and deliver the surrounding countryside to incendiarism, so that the Christian territory was ravaged by the flames to an extent often square miles.”

The same Caliph, when he laid siege to Toledo, began by destroying everything in the rich plain which surrounded the town. “He commenced by doing the rebels unimaginable harm. He remained there for thirty-seven days without ceasing his devastation cutting down the trees, pillaging and ruining the villages, destroying all the crops.” And again: “the strongholds of this region were reduced to ruins. Not one stone was left upon another…, The suburbs were surrendered to the flames, the harvests and all the property in the neighborhood were utterly ravaged and laid waste.”

Bertrand also chronicled the 11th and 12th century North African Berber Muslim Almoravid and Almohad invasions of Spain. These renewed jihad campaigns wrought not only further ravages and persecutions of Spain’s Christians, but massive population transfers:

From the outset of the Almoravid invasion the destruction of Christian churches had begun. … The faquis [Muslim clerics] commenced to persecute the Christian Mozarabs [dhimmis] so intolerably that they begged the King of Aragon, Alfonso the Warrior, to come and deliver them. The Aragonese did not succeed in taking Granada. When they retreated, the faquis avenged themselves on the Mozarabs in the most merciless fashion. Already ten thousand of them had been compelled to emigrate into the territory of Alfonso to escape their enemies’ repression. The remainder were deprived of their property, imprisoned, or put to death. Many of them were deported to Africa. They were established in the neighborhood of Sale and Meknes, where oppression of all kinds compelled them to embrace Islam.Ten years later there was a fresh expulsion. The Christians were again deported to Morocco en masse. Here, then, were cities and whole districts depopulated by massacres and proscriptions. This corresponded with a plan drawn upon in advance, a systematic course of action. “Sultan Yousouf,” writes [Muslim historian] Marrakeshi, “never failed to repeat at every one of his audiences: ‘To rid the [Iberian] Peninsula of the Christians that is our sole purpose … ’” Accordingly, after having expelled the Christians, he replaced them by Berbers. “To combat our enemies,” said Yousouf himself, “I shall fill Spain with horsemen and footmen who think nothing of repose, who do not know what it is to live softly, whose sole thought is to groom and train their horses, take care of their arms, and hasten to obey their orders.” The Almohads devoted themselves no less ardently to repopulating the South of Spain by filling it with Africans and Arabs.

From WiscoDave, this:

Bloomberg reports that the $40 million is on top of $431 million Wells Fargo has issued to gun manufacturers since the December 14, 2012, Sandy Hook attack. This means Wells Fargo is not only bucking the corporate gun control trend in 2018 but has also withstood the firearm divestiture campaign that launched following Sandy Hook.

On April 15, 2018, Breitbart News reported that Wells Fargo stemmed the tide of the push for new financial restrictions on gun makers and sellers by stressing that it is not a bank’s job to set U.S. gun policy.  Reuters quoted Wells Fargo chief financial officer John Shrewsberry saying, “The best way to make progress on these issues is through the political and legislative process. In the meantime, Wells Fargo is engaging our customers that legally manufacture firearms and other stakeholders on what we can do together to promote better gun safety in our communities.”

Wells Fargo’s refusal to place new restrictions on gun manufacturers came shortly after Citigroup and Bank of America caved to the gun control push. On March 23, 2018, Breitbart News reported that Citibank issued new requirements whereby customers who own gun stores must stop selling long guns to anyone under the age of 21 and to quit selling “high-capacity” magazines as well. And Bank of America made clear they will no longer loan money to manufacturers that make “military-style firearms.”

But even though Wells Fargo hasn’t buckled yet, things are not so nice in banking land.

APOPKA, Fla. – Representatives from Fifth Third Bank visited Spike’s Tactical, a Florida-based firearm manufacturer, last Tuesday to inform them that the bank was discreetly planning to exit the banking sector for gun-related businesses.

According to Spike’s Tactical co-owner Angela Register, the bank representative informed her and their chief financial officer that their business line of credit would not be renewed and encouraged them to find a new bank to hold their accounts, even mentioning that their commercial mortgage should be transferred or it could potentially be called early.

The war continues, and all is proceeding just as I had foreseen.  Actually, it’s all proceeding just as the controllers said it would.  I just told you what the controllers said.  At some point, they’re going to come directly after owners as well.  Their intention is to drive manufacturers out of business from being unable to make payroll and enable their lines of supply and logistics.

The large manufacturers will have a difficult time of it, especially with the controllers buying up stock.  The small manufacturers, i.e., those who aren’t subject to public stockholders and whose employees own the company, and who enable their lines of logistics without the help of the large banks, will flourish.

I suspect Spike’s Tactical will come out of this okay if they can find a small bank who will take the mortgage.

Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), a component of the Department of Justice, for 1,900 pages of records about a proposed reclassification that would effectively ban certain types of AR-15 ammunition as armor-piercing (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-02218)).

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the agency failed to respond to a May 14, 2018, FOIA request for the 1,900 documents about the Obama administration’s AR-15 ammo ban efforts. The documents include ATF talking points about the “Armor Piercing Ammunition Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” and other records discussing ammunition classification.

The lawsuit is the latest development in Judicial Watch’s more than three-year effort to obtain documents from the ATF. Judicial Watch discovered the document cache in separate litigation on the ammo ban issue.

In March 2015, more than 200 members of Congress wrote to former ATF Director B. Todd Jones to express their “serious concern” that the proposal to reclassify the ammunition types as armor-piercing may violate the Second Amendment by restricting ammunition that had been primarily used for “sporting purposes.” The ATF’s move “does not comport with the letter or spirit of the law and will interfere with Second Amendment rights by disrupting the market for ammunition that law abiding Americans use for sporting and other legitimate purposes,” the letter said. The ATF subsequently halted its efforts.

The precise statutory definition of armor-piercing ammunition can be found in 18 U.S.C. §921(a)(17).

“Simply put, the ATF refuses to comply with federal open records law,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “The ATF has withheld records for over three years concerning the Obama administration’s shady attempt to institute gun control by restricting ammunition instead of guns.”

To begin with, civilians should have access to everything the military has, including armor-piercing ammunition, under our second amendment rights and duties.

Second, M855 (“Green Tip”) is not armor piercing ammunition.  That’s enough said.  If I have to say any more about that, I may as well try to teach calculus to my dog – I’ll probably have more success and I’m sure a more receptive audience.

Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch is doing Yeoman’s work on just about everything imaginable.  I’m on their email list and see what they’re engaged in, and I simply can’t link it all, and I certainly can’t intelligently comment on it all.  If you’re not on their distribution, you need to get on it right of way.

As I said before, most of the ATF employees were there under Holder and at least complicit in the abuse of American citizens.  That’s who they are, it’s the way they think.  Tom had to push this hard for success because what’s in the collection of documents is embarrassing to the ATF.  You can count on it.

And also as I’ve said before, for me (who cannot afford to file a lawsuit every time I turn around), the FOIA is essentially worthless.  The FedGov has ignored virtually every one of my requests (I’ve had success only once).  The power of the purse is what the Congress has over the heads of the bureaucratic tyrants.  They won’t use it.  Thus there is no check on their power.

Josh Wayner at Ammoland:

I tested theses loads for velocity over my Oehler 35P chronograph and they came in exactly the same at average of 2165fps, which is very close to the stated velocity from the manufacturer (Hornady lists the 2200fps from a 20” barrel, mine is 16”) and was very consistent. The accuracy (after I figured out some issues) came in at 1.5” for five shots at 100 yards.

The Buffalo Bore loads are very new on the scene as of this year I received three different loads to test: the 300gr JHP, 250gr JHP, and 275gr XPB Barnes Lead Free. These loads are all a far cry from the original .450 offerings and two of them have conventional rounded pistol bullets in them as opposed to a pointy rifle bullet.

The claimed velocity for the 300gr JHP load is 1950fps. My rifle fired this load at a five-shot average of 1920fps. This load generated the most recoil out of any .450 load I fired and it also showed the most drop of any load, falling about 14” at 200 yards from a 100 yard zero. It was quite accurate considering the bullets used and generated 5-shot groups of 2.9” at 100 yards.

The next load, the 275gr XBP, has a stated velocity of 2000fps. My rifle fired it at 1922fps and averaged 2” for five shots at 100 yards. This was a very low-recoil load and it was very comfortable to shoot. I noticed that it appeared to also be slightly lower pressure judging by a rounded primer flatness and smooth, easy ejection of cases.

The final Buffalo Bore load is the 250gr JHP. The manufacturer says this is a load designed for deer hunting and has a bullet designed to expand at pistol velocities. At a claimed velocity of 2250fps and matching speed of 2249fps from my rifle, this load certainly was faster than pistol velocities, and produced the fastest speeds of any round I tested among this group. It was acceptably accurate at 2.5” for five shots at 100 yards.

He has a number of other observations, including what it takes to get reliable feed with this large cartridge.  I see the attraction of this – essentially, this is the one shot knockdown that the SpecOps folks were searching for in the 458 SOCOM.  That’s important for the two-legged threats, but it’s also important for threats of the four-legged kind in the bush.

Not coincidentally, it’s good for hog and deer hunting within 250 yards.

NBC:

Here’s a new Rocky matchup for you: It’s Rocky the dog versus the bear!

Pictures snapped by the dog’s owner show the tense moments between a pet and the wild animal in Wolcott.

Animal control says they’ve never seen anything like it in town until now.

“Rocky tackled the bear. The bear was on his back, paws up and Rocky was on top of him,” Wolcott resident Laura Canby explained.

Her 60-pound pit bull named Rocky is nursing some wounds after taking on a several hundred pound black bear.

“I was very scared. He wasn’t listening and coming back. He was too busy protecting me and the girls,” Canby said.

Canby said it all began when she heard the garbage cans bang outside her home yesterday. As she walked out all of a sudden Rocky darted through the yard after a nearby bear, just as the school bus arrived to drop off Canby’s older daughter.

“I freaked out and grabbed a shovel and started yelling at the school bus driver to keep the baby on the bus, don’t let her off,” Canby said.

That driver also called animal control.

While the bear could have won the fight if it had gone long term, it looks as if the bear decided it didn’t want to tangle with that dog any more.  No meal from a trash can is worth that.