The US Concealed Carry Association supports gun control.  Via reddit/firearms, this screen capture:

Remember that.  If you do not present a danger to yourself or others and are acting lawfully, there should be no reason to be concerned.

Unlike, say, if you lawfully defend yourself and the prosecutor wants to put you in prison anyway because the system is abused, necessitating a high-powered second amendment lawyer paid for by your USCCA dues.  That’s the only situation where abuse happens.  Or perhaps they know there will be abuse, and it’s another chance to score membership dues from the sheeple.  People will need those high-powered lawyers to get their guns back when they’ve been falsely accused of something.

What a bunch of hypocrites.  Hey, USCCA.  If you’re not careful, you’ll take up the mantle from the NRA as the most well-connected and well-financed gun control organization on earth.  Would that make you proud?

News from the UK.

A FATHER and son who were caught with a vintage Smith and Wesson pistol and stored it in a Tranmere storage unit have been sent to prison for a total of three years.

Philip Williams hid the 100-year-old weapon in a lock-up in Oakenholt, Flintshire, Wales and claimed he forgotten about it after unearthing it in a crate he was left to look after by an unknown farm worker.

But Mold Crown Court heard he moved the gun around to another storage unit in Tranmere and painted the handle to prevent it from rusting.

Meanwhile his son, Daniel Williams, posed for a selfie holding the gun on one of the two occasions he came into contact with it.

Possession of a firearm carries a minimum sentence of five years imprisonment, but the Judge Niclas Parry heard arguments for exceptional circumstances in both cases and reduced the men’s jail terms.

He jailed Philip Williams, 64, for two years while Daniel Williams, 34, received a one-year custodial sentence.

He told the pair: “It must be understood that the rationale and reason for what appears to be harsh sentences is due to the need to deter gun culture and the use of guns.”

Williams Snr said he did not own the Smith and Wesson and it fell into his arms after he agreed to look after some crates for a man he knew only as “Patrick” who worked at a farm in Bodfari where he was living at the time.

He claimed it was only after when he learnt that the man had died while on holiday when he discovered the weapon buried in one of the crates given to him by Patrick.

But instead of handing it over to the police, he kept it for two-and-a-half years, storing it in a lock-up in Tranmere before then moving it to the unit at Oakenholt, police paid a visit on March 10 last year.

Barrister Michael Whitty, prosecuting, said police executed a search warrant at a unit at Pandy Garage after receiving information and found the 0.22 calibre gun wrapped in a tea towel hidden under the wheel arch of a caravan.

Since it’s a hundred years old and a .22, I’m guessing it’s a revolver.  So two men went to prison for a total of three years for having a .22 S&W wheel gun.

“It must be understood that the rationale and reason for what appears to be harsh sentences is due to the need to deter gun culture and the use of guns.”

Because, you know, Pakistani child grooming gangs are okay with the crown, but you can’t have guns.  That might be a danger – to the elitists.

First of all, watch this video in its entirety.  I think John conveys a lot of wisdom in his talk.

This dovetails with a lot of what I have been thinking about the concept of the “bugout” philosophy.  I greatly admire folks like James Wesley Rawles, who made the decision a very long time ago to ensconce in the Northwestern redoubt, although I partial to the Appalachian redoubt being more in my backyard.

Folks like that made a huge decision to leave where they were, plant roots, create a life and lifestyle, make a family, and never leave.  But the problem is that most other people have deep roots too, wherever they are.  Elderly parents need help, children are part of your life, grandchildren need raising by grandparents, friends and family cannot simply be left by the wayside to “bugout” when the going gets tough.

I have a friend who once told me the reason he didn’t “prep” was that he knew where all the preppers in his area were, those who had ammunition, food, and so on, and he had guns and knew whose house to go to in order to find what he needed.

Note well.  He was telling me he would become just like a feral animal whenever the time arose, taking what he needed from his neighbors and leaving trusted folks to suffer in his place.  Now, I know the heart of the man who said this to me, and I know that he would never do that.  So if that man is reading this now, I know that it was all a lot of bluster.  How do I know that?  Because I know you.  You were just giving me excuses for not planning and preparing.

Any bugout bag you build is inadequate.  Do you have a pistol with a few magazines?  Good.  What is you need a CQB carbine?  Do you have that?  Good.  What if you need a longer range standoff rifle?  Do you have that, with all of the ammunition you’ll ever need?  Do you have enough food for you, your family, your neighbors, and your friends?  Can you get to where you’re going in one trip, or at all?  Can you survive without generators or solar power?  Do you have all of the medical supplies you’ll ever need?  Do you have access to professional medical care (you will surely need it at some point).

If you have a designated place to go, do you know that it’s secured until you get there?  Can you secure it when you do get there?  Do you have neighbors and trusted friends there that you’ll need for long term survival?  There are so many questions, issues and considerations attending an event like this that it’s unlikely you’ve thought through them.

The better option is to plan, prepare, purchase, pre-deploy, and practice.

My point is that like John, I don’t believe you’re going to go anywhere.  It may be true that there isn’t a perfect solution to hard situations like we’re posing, but just like it matters how a man lives, it also matters how he dies, and death isn’t the end anyway.  Most people reading this aren’t the kind of people who would run off and leave loved ones, family, friends, and neighbors to suffer if you can help it.  If you are, then you’re the kind of person from whom the rest of us are defending our loved ones, families, friends and neighbors.

Pacific Standard:

“Whoever touches that gun, he’ll die at some point … because it acts on you,” explained a 37-year-old man who lives in the poor neighborhood of Bel Air in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I have worked as an anthropologist since 2008. Kal* was talking about a specific Smith & Wesson .38 special caliber revolver, long the standard issue gun of American police and United States-trained security forces in Haiti. After being purchased for $75 from a former army soldier, this gun passed through the hands of three men: a young father, Frantz; Papapa, a young man; and Henri, another new father.

[ … ]

When I asked Belairians why these deaths occurred, they often surmised that the gunmen fell victim to maji, or “magic.” In Haiti, magic refers to an unethical use of spiritual power, distinct from ceremonial forms of Vodou, which call on ancestors to heal and protect the family. (Vodou is the preferred spelling, rather than Voodoo, which some practitioners view as derogatory.) This form of magic entails engaging with secret powers that allow a person to advance at the expense of another. To many, the men died because the occult forces they had been using for unethical gain had ultimately turned against them—opening them up to conflict and failing to protect them.

Yet when neighbors relayed how the deaths happened, they offered explanations involving a different kind of occult transformation: the supernatural potency of the .38 to change people into unethical agents. With each subsequent death, lore intensified around the gun, with people surmising that “touching” this gun could portend death. “Ever since they touched the gun, those poor young boys were not the same,” said one community member. Residents spoke about the gun as if it were an amulet that could change otherwise good people and what they did in the world.

It would be shortsighted to dismiss these claims as the misguided logic of a “superstitious people.” That racially inflected trope, long used to marginalize and demonize Haitians, among others, blinds observers to the way in which guns do exhibit a power akin to magic: the power to create a change in someone’s state of mind.

Taking seriously the supernatural effects of guns has broad relevance for understanding and addressing gun violence globally. In the U.S., gun advocates tend to view the gun as a value-neutral tool. As they say: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” On the other side are gun control advocates who argue that guns do indeed kill people: Without their lethal power easily at hand, as in other countries, far fewer deaths occur. But the anthropological lesson from Haiti is that the truth is more complex. It isn’t just the technological lethality of guns that makes them dangerous: They also exert a power on human agency. They change us. It is both the technology and the symbolism of a gun that can encourage someone to shoot.

The author, Chelsey Kivland, is as superstitious as the Haitians.  An inanimate object, note well, has power over human agency, the power to make a human engage in acts of evil, superseding whatever that person would or would not have done otherwise.  Forget that effects of bombs and the availability of fertilizer at Lowe’s and Tractor Supply, it’s the object itself that literally exercises power over human volition.

This is the new temperance movement.  My former professor, C. Gregg Singer, taught extensively on social Darwinism, the temperance movement, Hegelian philosophy in America, and the liberal progressive roots of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

At the time it was alcohol, and to them it was the “moral ruin which it works in the soul, that gives it the denomination of giant wickedness.”  It isn’t that mankind is wicked to begin with due to the federal headship in Adam, it was an external object, and thus smarter men and women can seek the perfection of mankind by eliminating those elements which encourage evil.

It is superstition in the Haitians that underlies this notion, it was superstition in the temperance movement that does the same, and it’s no less ignorant superstition in Ms. Kivland which causes her to see the world and man this way.

Reuters:

The FBI on Saturday said it had arrested Larry Hopkins, the leader of an armed group that is stopping undocumented migrants after they cross the U.S.-Mexico border into New Mexico.

[ … ]

“We’re not worried about it, he’s going to be cleared,” said Jim Benvie, a spokesman for the United Constitutional Patriots (UCP), blaming his arrest on political pressure from Lujan Grisham.

Hopkins is the “national commander” of the UCP, which has had around half a dozen members camped out on a rotating basis near Sunland Park since late February.

This came after the New Mexico governor said this.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday lashed out at members of a militia group who are stopping migrants at the border, declaring “regular citizens have no authority to arrest or detain anyone.”

Because they’re actually detaining and arresting them, rather than letting them go at bus stops in San Antonio and other cities like Customs and Border Patrol.  We can’t allow anyone to actually enforce the law.

In other news, the Mexican military disarmed a couple of U.S. troops on the U.S. side of the border.

Armed Mexican troops disarmed two United States soldiers while they were on the American side of the border, U.S. defense officials have said.

U.S. Northern Command said in a statement that “five to six Mexican military personnel questioned two U.S. Army soldiers who were conducting border support operations” this month. The U.S. soldiers were in an unmarked Customs and Border Protection [CBP] vehicle near the southwest border near Clint, Texas.

Officials confirmed that the Mexican troops were armed with what seemed to be rifles. They raised their weapons when they saw the two U.S. soldiers, and then took a pistol from one and put it in the CBP vehicle. According to officials talking to CNN, the two Americans obliged “in an attempt to de-escalate a potential volatile situation.”

That’s why they don’t want the U.S. Marine Corps on the border.  Those Mexican troops would be dead now.

But since no one in power wants to stop immigration – not the big business president, not the senate or house (the republicans in the pocket of big business, the democrats wanting more voters), and not Mexico, it won’t be stopped.

If you ever believed that immigration would come to an end at some point, disavow yourself of that notion right away, at least until the costs of covering the immigrants with medical care becomes so extreme that FedGov has to confiscate retirement accounts and 401Ks to pay for it all (they’ll “nationalize” it all, and promise to take care of everyone).

I confess I had never thought of something like that.  Tim Harmsen of The Military Arms Channel answers the question, as well as one more.

NextGov:

The FBI still has not assessed whether its facial recognition systems meet privacy and accuracy standards nearly three years after a congressional watchdog—the Government Accountability Office—raised multiple concerns about the bureau’s use of the tech.

Since 2015, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have used the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System, which uses facial recognition software to link potential suspects to crimes, pulling from a database of more than 30 million mugshots and other photos.

In May 2016, the Government Accountability Office recommended the FBI establish checks to ensure the software adhered to the Justice Department’s privacy and accuracy standards, but according to a report published Wednesday, the bureau has yet to implement any of the six proposed policy changes.

And they won’t.  If you have a Facebook account or a federal compliant driver’s license, you’ve already given them your photograph.

On a related note, do you recall this scene from Sicario, where he says, “The CIA can’t operate within U.S. borders without a domestic agency attached?”

So how does the FBI, local law enforcement, state law enforcement, and the CIA all cooperate “within the law?”  This may not be a surprise to my readers, but it’s called the JTTF, and the field implementation involves a network of cameras that would put the U.K. to shame, all managed out of field offices called “Fusion Centers.”

It’s not the stuff of conspiracy theory.  It’s real, today, right now, and they track you everywhere you go.

News from AP:

The cathedral’s rector said a “computer glitch” may have played a role in the rapidly spreading blaze that devastated the 850-year-old architectural masterpiece.

[ … ]

Paris police investigators said they believe an electrical short-circuit most likely caused the fire. It’s believed to be one of multiple leads being investigated.

Um … what?  A “computer glitch” isn’t an electrical short.  The two are very different things.  So if you think this is all from a “computer glitch,” send the coding our way.  I have readers who understand C++, and I can code in FORTRAN.  I think we can help.

I’m not getting that good warm fuzzy feeling that they’re taking this seriously and being forthcoming and honest about it.

He is risen indeed!

News from New Zealand:

Critics of the Government’s gun law changes say a loophole means that a lower-powered version of the assault rifle used by the Christchurch mosque shooter remains legal.

Police have confirmed that an AR15 WMR .22 semi automatic with military-style features does not fit the definition of a prohibited firearm under the new law, provided it is fitted with a magazine holding 10 rounds or less.

The mosque shooter used a more powerful, centrefire version of the AR15, with large capacity magazines, during his rampage, which left 50 people dead.

He had bought his weapons on a standard firearms licence and illegally converted them to military-style with easily obtainable parts.

The Government banned all centrefire “military style” semi-automatics, but less powerful rimfire .22 semi-automatics remain legal for people holding a standard firearms licence.

Those weapons range from rifles that use standard .22 long rifle (LR) ammunition to a cartridge more than two times as powerful – the .22 WMR (Winchester Magnum Rimfire), also known as the .22 MAG.

Northland man Michael Beckett said he warned the select committee considering the changes that the .22WMR would become the weapon of choice of AR15 owners and become a threat to the public.

He was surprised it had not been covered in the amended law and feared it was a loophole that would be exploited.

Beckett said the standard .22LR was more than sufficient for pest control on farms – he described the .22 MAG as a “double deadly cartridge” with 2.6 times the muzzle energy of .22LR.

Oooo … a “double deadly cartridge.”  Damn.  Must get one of those.

To my readers in New Zealand (I know I have some), don’t be satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the master’s table like a dog.  Not that I have anything against the nice little .22 WMR (Kel-Tec makes a .22 WMR carbine), but a rimfire cartridge will always be a rimfire cartridge.  It’s dirtier and less reliable than a centerfire cartridge.

You have a God-given right to what you have sitting inside your gun safe right now, and more.