And everywhere else.

Amei Francesco-Folsom arrived home on a Thursday afternoon to find blood all over the streets in her Palm Springs neighborhood. Her husband, Greg, informed her the blood was from neighborhood ducks and she subsequently called her town’s maintenance department to have it cleaned.

However, she soon discovered it wasn’t there by accident. The Lakewood residential community is removing ducks — violently.

In late November, men dressed in dark blue, carrying guns and orange buckets started walking through the neighborhood. They work for Allstar Animal Removal, a licensed wildlife removal company contracted by the homeowners association. It is not clear what type of guns were used.

Their job is pretty straightforward: shoot and remove the Muscovy ducks — a nonnative species from Central and South America with black and white feathers and red waddles.

“I came home and saw blood everywhere,” Francesco-Folsom, who has lived in Lakewood since 2003, said. “I’m beyond upset about this situation.”

So I assume that you would rather your children walk around in feces and contract awful diseases?

That sounds like a tautology, yes?

“From a licensed firearms dealer” is the crux. Anyone who believes a determined individual can’t obtain a firearm from other sources needs to explain recent headlines from Baltimore or Chicago.

The inescapable truth is anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian. There are plenty of other ways to mass kill. g

What are they going to do, certify folks buying fertilizer at Lowe’s or Home Despot?  Um … wait, I’d better not give them ideas.  It’s just something else for the controllers to control.

It just isn’t the right one.

Shareholder advocacy is nothing new for the Episcopal Church. With an investment portfolio worth about $400 million, the church has long used some of those investments to influence companies based on Christian principles and General Convention resolutions that set church policies and priorities.

What’s new is one of the investment tactics the church plans to implement in the new year to address gun violence.

General Convention passed a resolution in July that calls on Executive Council’s Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility to research investing in gun manufacturers to give the church a new voice in how those companies do business. The goal: “to minimize lethal and criminal uses of their products.”

“We’ve never purposely gone out and bought [shares in] what we’d consider a bad actor in order to press the company to change behavior,” said Brian Grieves, the outgoing chair of the committee, which oversees the church’s shareholder advocacy.

The resolution, B007, was proposed by Western Massachusetts Bishop Douglas Fisher, a member of Bishops United Against Gun Violence, who will take over for Grieves as committee chair in January. Fisher’s diocese is home to the headquarters of Smith & Wesson in Springfield, and in March he participated in a rally outside the gun manufacturer led by high school students in the wake of a deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Fisher acknowledged a “sense of frustration” among anti-gun violence advocates in response to Congress’ inaction. “The federal government is doing nothing about the public health crisis of gun violence,” he said. “So where can the church engage this big issue?”

Here’s how.  Believe first in Jesus, that He is the only begotten Son of the living God, in His birth, death, burial and resurrection, His vicarious atonement, in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the infallibility of His Word, and then you’re more likely to get your politics right.

Focus first on leading people to Christ, and then preach good doctrine.  But since you don’t really believe in anything any more, you’re nothing but a vapid, vacuous and boring social club, and no one listens to you or comes to your “services” any more.  So no one will listen to you on this either.

I understand that you’re just following the lead of your masters, but you’re small potatoes, dude.

With a stabilizing brace.  I confess I had no idea.

GAO:

The 20 federal law enforcement agencies in GAO’s review reported spending at least $38.8 million on firearms, $325.9 million on ammunition, and $1.14 billion on tactical equipment—at least $1.5 billion in total—from fiscal years 2010 through 2017, based on data agencies provided to GAO.

And Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution comes to mind.

Josh Wayner writing for Ammoland has the scoop.  A couple of comments.

First, I notice that the Buffalo Bore does the best concerning muzzle velocity.  Second, if you shoot the Sig Sauer 240 grain at 1213 FPS, that doesn’t give you much advantage over the 450 SMC (Short Magnum Cartridge) which I carried to Colorado in a 1911 with backup magazines, and which I’ve discussed before (230 grains at around 1120 FPS published muzzle velocity).

Second, what I’d really like to see is Josh cover the Performance Center Model 629 V-Comp with the compensator (or muzzle brake).  I find that to be a very appealing and aesthetically pleasing gun with a nice finish and very smooth edges.

We Are The Mighty:

In the wake of World War II, the United States of America commanded over 30,000 overseas bases, marshaled over half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, and owned two thirds of the world’s gold stock. In 1949, the Greatest Generation proposed a strategic solution: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

N.A.T.O. was created in response to failing relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, especially in the case of the reconstruction of Germany. The countries of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal banded together with the United States as its chief architect.

[ … ]

Under the persuasive guidance of the United States, N.A.T.O. slowly standardized armaments best suited for American designs than those resembling the Soviet 7.62mm. Who else could argue the case to finance, produce, and export on a scale to rival the Russians? By the 1980s, the 5.56x45mm was adopted as the standard.

From the sands of the Middle East to the deep jungles of South America, the 5.56mm played an integral role in shaping modern warfare. Decades of proxy wars and economic down turn brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Mikhail Gorbachev, President and leader of the Soviet Union, resigned and declared his office extinct on Dec. 25, 1991.

America had triumphed.

The 5.56mm never got the chance to sing in the halls of the Kremlin, but it was the round that destroyed an empire.

His point is that the 5.56mm can be mass-produced for relatively cheap, and thus mass quantities can be made available.

True enough, what’s so for the U.S. military is so for anyone else.  You can buy more, shoot more, carry more, and store more 5.56mm than you can 7.62mm.

I don’t go a day without seeing another article on how the U.S. military is going to a caseless 6.8mm round and thus the 5.56mm round is dead.  I’ll believe it when I see it.

And rarely is the issue of body armor and the penetration capabilities of the bullet determinative for the outcome of conflicts.

Buy what you want, shoot what you want, and don’t limit yourself to any one cartridge for a all purposes.  And remember: heads and hips.

News from the Northwest:

King County Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht has agreed to update her department’s use of force policies and pay a man $65,000 in damages after one of her department’s detectives drew his gun on an unsuspecting motorcyclist in a video that went viral last year.

The settlement, which was shared with me by the motorcyclist, states that the sheriff has agreed to implement an order classifying aiming a gun as a “use of force” and requiring that the department to track every single time an officer points their gun at a person. This is already standard practice for many law enforcement agencies across the country, including the Seattle Police Department.

Alex Randall was waiting on his motorcycle for a light to turn green in August of last year when King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) Detective Richard Rowe approached him from behind with his gun drawn. Randall had his helmet camera running at the time and captured the tense exchange.

In the widely-viewed video, Rowe can be seen quickly approaching the man from behind with his firearm drawn and without clearly identifying himself as an officer. Randall, surprised by suddenly seeing a gun pointed at him, responds by saying “Oh shit, what are you doing to me?” to which the detective responds “You’re fucking driving reckless. Give me your driver’s license or I’m going to knock you off this bike.”

Rowe has received three road rage or driving complaints against him in the last five years and was placed on administrative leave after Randall posted the video to the Internet, according to reporting by former Stranger writer Sydney Brownstone. In April of this year, Johanknecht suspended Rowe for five days without pay for a lack of courtesy in his conduct.

An internal investigation unit determined last December that the detective had violated some internal policies during the incident but he had not used excessive force because “no actual force was used.”

We had covered this earlier but I hadn’t followed it to conclusion.  This is it, I guess.  The cop is left in the workforce.  He should have been fired and then flogged in the public square, and then put in prison.

The $65,000 is an award paid by the citizens, with the culpable Sheriff and officer bearing no responsibility for what happened.  This isn’t the way to bring accountability.  This kind of settlement will keep encouraging illegal behavior by cops.

Note what the Internal Investigation Unit found: “No actual force was used.”  If you or I had done this, we would have been found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon.  He should also have been tried and found guilty of false arrest, violation of the fourth amendment, kidnapping and threats against a person.

NBC News:

A sheriff’s sergeant who died during a firefight during the Borderline Bar and Grill mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, last month was killed by friendly fire, officials said.

Sgt. Ron Helus was hit five times by gunman Ian David Long at the bar but was ultimately killed by a sixth shot from a California Highway Patrol officer’s AR-style rifle, Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub said at a press conference Friday.

“This news is extremely difficult for all of us to process and understand,” Ayub said.

Helus was wearing body armor during the shooting but the rifle shot penetrated the vest and struck his heart, according to the medical examiner.

“I can tell you that most body armor worn by municipal police in this country is not capable of stopping rifle ammunition,” Ayub told reporters. “It’s a matter of comfort as well as fatigue for officers to wear heavy armor, day in and day out.”

The highway patrol officer who fired the fatal shot was a 9-year veteran of the department and has voluntarily taken time off, according to a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.

“The mere thought of something like this happening is devastating to all of us and underscores the difficult and dangerous circumstances law enforcement faces, often with only mere seconds to react,” California Highway Patrol Commissioner Warren Stanley said in a statement.

I grok that is “devastating,” and that it’s “difficult to process and understand.”  Let me ask you a question, Bill.  Is this as “devastating” as news of LEOs under your command threatening to shoot dogs for no good reason, or worse, when LEOs under your command shoot unarmed people?

Or is this only devastating to you when a LEO shoots another LEO?