Washington Examiner:

David Hogg: “If you need an AR-15 to defend yourself you need more target practice because you’re a terrible shot.”

First of all, he’s a liar and doesn’t really believe this because he’s not advocating that the police be disarmed of long guns, and has never done so.  He just wants the state to have a monopoly on violence.  It’s always enlightening to run things like this through the grits mill in order to see the hypocrisy of their views.  If you advocate disarming people other than cops, then you’re just a communist.

Second, as for not needing an AR-15 to defend yourself, I think Mr. Stephen Bayezes would beg to differ when he used an AR-15 to defend against multiple assailants in a home invasion.  So would a number of other folks.

However, Hogg is right about one thing.  We all need more practice.  So let’s heed Hogg’s counsel and make sure not to neglect range day.  I think Jerry Miculek said in one video that he has shot somewhere around 7,000,000 rounds downrange in order to get as good as he is.  I know that my son shot well more than half a million rounds in his workup to deployment.

We’ve all got a little bit to go, I suspect.

News from Florida:

An experienced deputy accidentally discharged his firearm in a middle school cafeteria, which — thankfully — resulted in zero injuries. However some parents and the Florida Education Association are calling out the Florida House of Representatives for voting to move bill SB-7030 forward, which would authorize districts to arm teachers.

According to Pasco County deputies, no one was injured when a school resource officer at Thomas E. Weightman Middle School in Wesley Chapel, Fla. “incidentally discharged” his gun in the school’s cafeteria during the students’ lunch period on Tuesday.

“We want to again make it clear that the weapon discharged directly into the wall and no students were in danger,” the Sheriff’s Office shared in a Facebook post to the public. According to the post, an investigation has been initiated.

WFLA reports that the unnamed officer was “leaning against the wall when his holstered, duty-issued firearm incidentally discharged into the wall behind him.” Lt. Troy Ferguson with the Pasco Sheriff’s Office said that the gun involved was a Sig Sauer 9mm.

ABC Action News reports that the school resource officer involved in the incident has been placed on paid administrative leave, and his name will not be released until the investigation is complete.

“There are a number of features on the threat level 3 holsters that we carry with our firearms, so there are a number of dynamic factors that are involved with fine motor skills functions that would cause that to happen. So we have to really kind of dissect that,” Ferguson said.

Gosh I hate it when that happens to me.  But I never thought to call it an “incidental discharge.”  That’s a new one on me, and maybe I’ll use that one in the future when my goes just decides to “go off” by itself.

Leaning up against the wall.  Maybe the wall made him do it.  As for that dissection of the incident, let me know what you come up with.

But arming teachers is a bad idea.  Because.

David Codrea:

“It was brought to Hawaii Firearms Coalition’s attention during this year’s legislative session that not one single firearms owner has been entered into the service. However, for more than two years, the state has been requiring firearm owners to sign a waiver (of their constitutional rights) and collecting the fees associated with the FBI Rap Back service.”

The state’s position is that new firearm purchases are going to require fingerprints and coerced “consent,” if you don’t you won’t get a permit, you have to pay fees and to be unenrolled, “a registrant must show documentation that all of his or her registered firearms are no longer in Hawaii, or have been sold.”

We’ve known for a very long time that gun permitting was a way for CLEOs to raise revenue.  This is just icing on the cake for them.  Oh, and not to mention, infringement of God-given rights and registration with the FedGov.

In the spirit of this post at ZeroGov, The Federalist has some alarming news.

Adam Kilgore, general counsel for the Mississippi Bar, offered the following hypothetical to a group of experienced civil and criminal lawyers.

A man has been fired from his job. He is upset. He hires you as his attorney. You are of the opinion he has an excellent case and file a complaint on his behalf. You later discover he possesses a permit to carry a firearm. He also has a so-called enhanced carry license. While his case is wending through the courts, your client goes to a public area outside his former workplace. He displays signs that say he has been wrongfully fired. The man has no history of criminal activity, violence, or threatening anyone.

The instructor asked the class what actions, if any, a lawyer should take. It seemed obvious to me there was no reason to do anything except proceed with the client’s case. I (Jude) would also advise my client to avoid confrontations with anyone who worked for his former employer and what he might consider saying if approached by the media.

While I was forming an answer, many lawyers immediately said they would terminate the attorney-client relationship and contact law enforcement to report their client was potentially dangerous. The only reason offered was his firearm permits.

I have to admit, I was flabbergasted, for several reasons. First, I live in Mississippi, which is among the reddest of the red states. Second, the attorneys—let me call them gun-phobic—were proposing to violate the attorney-client privilege, which establishes one of the most sacrosanct confidential relationships. (American Bar Association “Rule of Professional Conduct” 1.6). As with most things, there are exceptions. They generally pertain to a client who is about to commit a criminal act or engage in fraudulent behavior.

The lawyers who proposed to call the police cited ABA Rule 1.6 (b)(1). It states “[a] lawyer may reveal information relating to the representation of a client to the extent the lawyer reasonably believes necessary: … to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm.”

To them their confidentiality agreement means nothing at all.  The fact that you even have firearms means that removing them from you is necessary to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm.

How easy do you think it would be to overcome such an indictment from your own lawyer in front of a judge?  And yet, it can happen with literally no warning, no basis in fact, and no regard for your God-given rights.

Be careful what you say, and to whom you say it.

New York Times:

By choosing to place Remington in a Southern state, Press was acknowledging how much the gun business had transformed. Historically, gun makers operated in the North, in New England’s “Gun Valley” or, like Remington, in upstate New York. Smith & Wesson and Colt were established in the 1850s by businessmen in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively. During the Civil War, arsenals in Massachusetts furnished huge quantities of firearms to the Union Army. But social mores had changed.  The year that Michael Press sent his letters, New York passed the SAFE Act, one of the nation’s most stringent gun-control measures. Battle summarized to me the message the law sent to gunmakers: “If you like guns,” he said, “then you need to go somewhere else.”

There was a secondary benefit. Composed entirely of “right to work” states, the South allowed employees in unionized shops to opt out of paying dues, effectively guaranteeing that any union encountered by Remington would be worse-funded, and therefore less powerful, than a counterpart in the North. At Remington’s factory in Ilion, N.Y., employees had health care and long-term contracts thanks to the United Mine Workers of America. They were difficult to fire, and they stuck together. In some cases, multiple generations of men in the same family had worked on the line. “That union,” a former Remington executive told me disdainfully, “had them by the balls.”

[ … ]

In exchange for tens of millions in incentives, Remington had only to commit to a few terms, laid out in a fat document called a development agreement. First, it had to hire enough employees every year so that, in 2021, it would have a local work force of 1,868. Second, starting immediately, it had to pay those employees a minimum average hourly wage of $19.50, rising to $20.19 in 2017. All parties signed.

[ … ]

The dream was lofty and ambitious, and Huntsville was only a piece of it. Cerberus had been trying for years to assemble a dominant American gun company. First, in 2006, it purchased Bushmaster, known for its AR-15-style rifles. Then it paid $118 million in cash for Remington and assumed the company’s debt. Other acquisitions followed, until by 2013, 18 businesses were rolled up together under Cerberus’s roof. One of Kollitides’s jobs was to oversee the necessary layoffs. In Ilion, where Remington has operated for 191 years on the same site — unfinished weapons had to travel from one brick building to the next — 231 people lost their jobs.  There were 160 layoffs at Montana Rifleman in Kalispell, Mont. The Advanced Armament Corporation, a manufacturer of suppressors and silencers, closed its plant in Georgia, and 68 people were let go from D.P.M.S. Panther Arms in St. Cloud, Minn.; 65 from Para USA in Pineville, N.C. What remained was to increase profit margins by combining all these scattered production lines into a single megafactory.

[ … ]

There was, however, a hidden, vaguely mysterious quirk of the company’s finances. In 2012, more or less in the middle of the best climate for gun makers in a generation, America’s oldest continually operating manufacturer abruptly, and for no easily discernible reason, borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars. When the company came to Alabama, it owed $828 million to its creditors. While this number, compared with the company’s earnings, represented a comfortable ratio on the balance sheet, it was nonetheless curious. The debt could conceivably have been explained by the cost of opening a new factory were it not for the fact that Remington got its factory free.

[ … ]

He was hired, the executive explained, as the plant was coming online, and he was tasked with wrangling together some scattered acquisitions. The business was, according to him, “in shambles.” It seemed that the companies Cerberus had moved to Alabama had been “bought and forgot.” He explained that he was “a realist” about business, a game in which not everyone gets “a shiny rose at the end,” but even so he sensed that something had gone deeply wrong. Executives were fired at a fast clip. Line employees came and went. Parts piled up on the factory floor. Most worrying, Cerberus, which was trying to integrate disparate brands — the father-son pastoralism of Remington with the urban-militia aesthetic of AAC, for instance — seemed to him miserly when it came to marketing. “The decisions were all about: Where can I save another dime?” he told me.

Despite all this frenzy, he was certain that Cerberus had somehow made a great deal of money on Remington even before opening the Huntsville factory. According to him, Cerberus had made “hundreds of millions of dollars” almost immediately. “They pulled out all that money up front, took as much cash as they could.”

“How?” I said.

He squinted cryptically. “They get their money.”

I realized he didn’t know. I went back and reread Remington’s public filings. It was obvious when the debt appeared, in 2012. What wasn’t clear was where the money went. I showed the filings to a professor of finance. He said it looked as if Cerberus had wound up in debt to itself. “Seems like they did something stupid,” he said. “But that can’t be right, because they’re not stupid.”

I asked Gustavo Schwed, a professor of private equity at New York University who spent 24 years in the industry, to help me review the documents. Schwed pored over the many years of financial data and located two separate debt transactions, one of which was so esoteric I would never even have known to look for it. Together, these transactions explained not just the mysterious 2012 loan but, indirectly, the way the deal finally unraveled.

In order to buy Remington, Cerberus, as most private-equity firms would, created a new entity, a holding company. Instead of Cerberus buying a gun company, Cerberus put money into the holding company, and the holding company bought Remington. The entities were related but — and this was crucial — each could borrow money independently. In 2010, Cerberus had the holding company borrow $225 million from an undisclosed group of lenders, most likely hedge funds. Because this loan was risky — the lenders would be paid only if Remington made a lot of money or was sold — the holding company offered a generous interest rate of around 11 percent, much higher than a typical corporate loan.  When the interest payments were due, the holding company paid them not in cash but with paid-in-kind notes, that is, with more debt. These are known as PIK notes.

The holding company now had $225 million in borrowed cash. Cerberus, meanwhile, owned most of the shares of the holding company’s stock, basically slips of paper they acquired when they created the holding company. The handoff happened next: The holding company spent most of the $225 million buying back its own stock, effectively transferring all the borrowed cash to Cerberus. Cerberus would keep that money no matter what. Meanwhile Remington continued rolling along as though nothing had happened, because Remington itself was not responsible for the holding company’s debt.  Remington was just an “operating company” that the holding company owned, something that allowed the holding company to borrow money, the way you would take a necklace to a pawnshop. These were garden-variety maneuvers in a private-equity buyout. In the trade, this is called “financial engineering.” People get degrees in it.

In April 2012, Cerberus did something fateful, which probably seemed smart at the time. It had Remington borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and use it to buy the holding company’s debt, effectively transferring responsibility for the principal and the interest payments onto Remington. America’s oldest gun company now owed the money that Cerberus had used to pay itself back for having bought the company in the first place. There were plenty of sensible reasons to do this. Gun sales were high, and the debt that Remington took out was cheaper to service than the paid-in-kind debt.

But there was a catch. Because the operating company borrowed the money with a normal loan — and not with PIK notes — interest payments were required in cash. Suddenly Remington was carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that, if it could not be paid, would cause the business to go bankrupt.

By the time the factory opened in Huntsville, the various players stood in vastly different positions. The private-equity firm had made back its initial investment and was playing with house money. Remington owed hundreds of millions that it hadn’t borrowed. And its workers, urgently, had to make a lot of guns.

[ … ]

For Cerberus’s executives, the predicament was like being bitten by a trusted pet. Cerberus has a habit of hiring power brokers from the United States government, many of them prominent Republicans. The former vice president Dan Quayle became chairman of Cerberus Global Investments in 1999; the former Treasury secretary John W. Snow joined Cerberus seven years later. The Republican donor William Richter is a founder. Since May 2018, Feinberg has been a member of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an independent entity created to advise the president on national-security matters. But if Obama was the best, Trump was proving to be the worst gun salesman of all time. Magnifying his negative impact, gun makers had already ramped up production ahead of Hillary Clinton’s expected victory: In 2017 the market was choked with surplus product, and Trump’s Second Amendment enthusiasm was dousing any hope of a panic buy.

Remington executives arranged a meeting with their creditors. They calmly explained the situation. Remington had been loaded with debt; now it couldn’t pay the interest. After listening politely, the banks made a proposal: They would exchange the money they were owed for an ownership stake in Remington, a so-called Chapter 11 bankruptcy or “debt-for-equity swap.” This arrangement would allow Remington to stay running, albeit under distant ownership, until a plan could be drawn up for its future, such as a sale or a liquidation of assets.

And that, folks, is how it’s done.  You hire the connected suits and elitists to the BOD, make shady deals, hide the debt, gamble on what’s going to happen in the future, and hope for the best.  When the best doesn’t happen, you shaft the working man, who has already shafted you by forming unions and making it too expensive to do business to begin with.

Because American has lost its soul.  It has exchanged the Puritan work ethic, the pride of working hard, making a good product or providing a needful service to others, and supporting your family through these means, for high stakes gambling where people get hurt and lives get ruined.

Gambling is a Luciferian project.  It’s wicked, because only God knows the future because He has decreed it.  He has ordered us not to engage in divination, prophesies, witchcraft, crystal balls, palm reading, tea leaves, astrology and other manner of superstition and paganism.  The Wall Street suits are just dressed up heathens with bones sticking through body parts, dancing around fires and bowing to totem poles.

It serves Ceberus right.  I’m sorry for the folks in Huntsville, Alabama.  They didn’t deserve this.

Wirecutter has this video up on barrel twist rate.  Go to his place to see it.

I don’t think the author of the video understands the basic concept and what’s going on here.  This is a screen shot of the video I linked on barrel twist rate.

Bullet tractability is the degree to which the nose of the bullet follows the trajectory.  In the screen shot above, it doesn’t.  This can indeed happen if the bullet is overstabilized, something we concluded in our assessment of this.

In the video (screen shot above) it is explained that this doesn’t usually happen at closer distances, but rather towards the end of the flight path.  In the case of the 5.56mm flight path, we’re looking at around 500 yards effective distance.

The author of the video Wirecutter gave us is shooting at 100 yards.  Basically, I’m saying he has proven nothing at all.  He’s a decent shot, but he hasn’t tested what he thinks he has tested.

And by the way, the twist rate, if you’ll remember, of 1:7 was meant to stabilize the tracer round.  But most twist rates for common ammunition should be fine.  The testing conducted by the Army on both older and newer 5.56mm ammunition involved 1:8 accurized barrels.

Prior: AR-15 Ammunition And Barrel Twist Rates

Fox News:

National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre charged the organization’s ad agency more than $240,000 for expenses related to trips he took to Italy, Hungary, the Bahamas and other locales without providing adequate documentation, according to a letter from the ad agency given to the group’s board last week and described by people familiar with the matter.

Some of Mr. LaPierre’s expenses were charged to one of the ad firm’s credit cards, the people said, and overall costs included a 2014 stay at the Four Seasons hotel in Budapest and expenses related to trips to Palm Beach, Fla., and Reno, Nev. The ad firm, Ackerman McQueen Inc., was reimbursed over time by the gun-rights group, these people said.

[ … ]

Mr. Brewer said certain fundraising and travel expenses were routed through Ackerman McQueen for “confidentiality and security purposes,” but the practice has since been modified. Mr. LaPierre didn’t return messages left at the NRA.

[ … ]

The Journal previously reported that Mr. LaPierre received more than $200,000 in suits and other clothing paid for by a vendor—which people familiar with the matter now say was also Ackerman McQueen. NRA officials have said the spending was justified because of his numerous speaking and TV appearances.

The Ackerman McQueen letter was given to the NRA directors last week by then-NRA President Oliver North, who called for a crisis committee of the board to probe the travel costs and other allegations of financial mismanagement.

[ … ]

In a statement Thursday, NRA director Marion Hammer said the travel-expense allegations were “part of the failed coup attempt” and have been properly vetted by the board.

[ … ]

The trip to Italy, one person familiar with the matter said, was tied to a short 2015 documentary feature on the Italian gun maker Beretta posted on NRATV. Mr. LaPierre’s wife, Susan LaPierre, appears in the video talking to a Beretta family member.

Marion Hammer is a horrible person and whatever she says should be dismissed.  As for travel expenses, I actually don’t have a problem with the corporation paying for that.  Virtually no one can afford that kind of travel, and as long as it’s on corporate business, the corporation should pay for it (excepting, of course, for Wayne’s wife).  In my opinion, time spent on trying to understand every little detail of travel expenses, except insofar as it requires receipts for accounting and tax purposes, is time and effort wasted by the board or its surrogate.

But what I do have a problem with is $200,000 for clothing.  The failure of the NRA isn’t a failure to keep receipts – that’s just in the details of internal management, even if it needs correction.  The failure of the NRA is in a failure to represent the gun owners of America, in fact, in its active attempt to undermine the gun owners of America.  That goes for Marion Hammer and the rest of the BOD too.

I’ll tell you what.  I would agree to that salary with one business suit per year, and I’ll promise not to pathologically retreat, surrender, give up, and equivocate on everything that comes up.

And in the end, the NRA would be better off.  So would gun owners.

John Richardson:

We’ve long said that if you want to make sure you get pro-gun politicians elected to Congress and the various state houses, we have to start pushing candidates at the local level. It is the rare candidate that starts out running for office at the state or national level. For every Donald Trump, there are thousands and thousands of other politicians that started with the school board, town council, or even just a town or county appointed committee.

Everytown has just made endorsements for three candidates at the school board or city council level. The fact that they are pushing gun prohibitionists at this level says a number of things. First, they are actually using Bloomberg’s money to start building an actual grassroots. Second, they recognize that candidates start local and then move up from there. Third, it is an expansion of their efforts from the state level to the local level since they have no had success (so far) at the nation level.

Well, it depends upon whether you believe red flag confiscation laws are a local or a national success for the controllers.  In some sense they’re national, given that the NRA gave them cover and Trump reassured them it was the thing to do.

It may also be said that a true grass roots movement isn’t really about the people in charge so much as the people who put them there.  In other words, what’s really important is what the people think, not the politicians.

On the other hand, they are educating the future electorate, and in that they will be profoundly successful.  This is Horace Mann’s communist project bringing fruit.  I see Bloomberg and Mann in the same mold, just with Bloomberg being stupider.

In FOIA Response From The ATF: No Bumpstocks Used In Any Crime To Date, I conveyed an ATF response to a FOIA request.  This request was made on behalf of Len Savage, and Len sends me this initial letter making the request.

Obviously, they had trouble getting anything out of the ATF.  Len also sent some other email exchanges between him and the ATF which I will eventually post.

In the mean time, David Codrea had this to say.

Herschel has some thoughts. [More]

To reiterate, it’s not “us” creating “conspiracy theories”: Mr. Stamboulieh, Mr. Savage and I are simply repeating what the government is saying, and if that results in inferences and conclusions, they are the ones who can clear it all up — and won’t.

I received the Chisolm letter from the principals the other day along with the document that prompted this response. There’s more to say, which I will in a day or so when I finish some other stuff I’m working on first.

The main “spoiler” I’ll give away is that the government attorney is being cute here, and I don’t think the federal judiciary is going to appreciate that.

Stay tuned.

Okay, I’m a bit out of the loop on this and both Len and David know more than I do about what’s going on.  I’ll try to stay in better touch with both of them on this.

I accept David’s observation that the government is trying to be “cute.”  But I’ll throw in that they’re also being very careful.  I’ve worked with FedGov lawyers before, and they don’t like putting documents out containing material false information.  If any licensee of any kind sends information to FedGov that causes them to repeat it in such a manner that the FedGov owns it, e.g., it ends up in the federal register or other archived government documents, they get really pissed and come after you.

They don’t like material false information because for one, it’s illegal to communicate it (either to or on the part of FedGov), and two, it’s unethical.  If it can be demonstrated that the material false information was knowing and intentional, that can mean disbarment (for a lawyer) or even imprisonment.

I’m sure they’re being “cute.”  I am also sure they are being very, very, very careful.

Fox News:

“Do you think if those people had guns there would be anything but more chaos, more violence and more death?” Williams asked. “Let me ask you, New York City, you think if you have a gun you could stand up to the New York City Police Department, much less the state National Guard or the U.S. military?

“I think if the American people are armed to the teeth,” Watters responded.

“Get them more guns!” Wiliams said in disbelief.

I don’t watch television, so when something like this little debate happens I have to read about it or I don’t know it existed.

This is instructive, yes?  Juan is arguing that the citizens should be willing to accept the chaos and death that is occurring now in Venezuela – from APCs running over people, to starvation, to death and disease from overcrowded medical facilities, to heat stroke because of no electricity, to extreme poverty because of the corruption of socialism – just in order to prevent even more problems.

Or in other words, there is never any justification for stopping governmental abuse, governmental corruption, or death by government (which in the twentieth century alone totaled 170 million souls).  This is a remarkable defense, but you should always remember that this is the way progressives think.  They never have your best interest at heart – it’s always some perceived betterment of a social engineering construct as determined by the central planners, even if the central planners are murderers.

Now, one more time, let’s dispense with this mythos that an insurgency cannot tangle with a uniformed army.  Juan (as most people who offer up this objection) has an overblown view of what a uniformed army can accomplish.

There simply aren’t that many infantry battalions in the armed forces.  A full 80% of enlisted and commissioned people are logistics, intel, transport, maintenance, engineering, and administration.  Furthermore, we’ve seen what an insurgency can do to a uniformed armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although we’ve been through this before many times, let’s do it again.  The MultiNational Force reported years ago at the very height of the insurgency in Iraq that the total number of foreign fighters (the main ones doing the nefarious work) never exceeded approximately 20,000.  Ponder: 20,000 poorly trained and poorly equipped and supplied insurgents fought the entire U.S. military to a virtual standstill in Iraq.

Ultimately, areas of Iraq were pacified, but it came at a tremendous cost, with saturation of Marines in Fallujah in 2007, and other tactics employed that aren’t long term, serving only for temporary pacification because we decided not to stay and work the politics for the purposes of U.S. interests.  Similar results were achieved in the Malayan emergency by the British forces, but it involved brutal tactics and saturation of troops, and was only temporary.

A counterinsurgency is extremely difficult even with a very small insurgency.  An insurgency isn’t about great armies lining up in fields of battle and walking towards each other while shooting.  Insurgent and government live in the same neighborhoods, beside each other, wear the same uniforms, go to the same schools, work the same jobs, and walk the same streets.  In such conditions, it’s impossible to tell insurgent from government.  Juan has watched too many movies about old style warfare.

Talking heads and pundits still don’t understand what 4GW would involve, nor how difficult it would be to stop.  The U.S. armed forces now focuses on 5GW (F35, Milstar uplinks to do everything, etc.) because they never figured out how to win 4GW and believe they’ll never be in one again.

Finally, isn’t it ironic that the very pundits who purvey this crap are the ones who wouldn’t propose allowing citizens to have fully automatic weapons (what do you think Juan would say about repealing the Hughes amendment?), but do want the police and military to have such weapons?  That shows they haven’t come to terms with their own arguments.  They don’t really even believe what’s coming out of their own mouths.