Last week we posted about the killing of Nigerian Christians.

Nigeria was recently removed from the CPC list by the Biden Administration.

Linked here is an effort to reinstate Nigeria to the list. While that’s a nice gesture, Nigerian Christians need to take up arms and form local militias.

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Last year on November 15th, 2021 the Biden approved the removal of Nigeria from the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list. The CPC list was established under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 and Frank R Wolf International Religious Freedom Act of 2016. The criteria for the CPC list includes (1) Torture, (2) Prolonged detention without charge, (3) Forced disappearance, or (4) Flagrant denial of life, liberty, or security of purpose. Nigeria meets ALL of these criteria for their brutal treatment of Christians.

Nigeria is the most dangerous country in the world to be a Christian. Last year 4,650 Christians were martyred by Islamic terrorist groups and over 3,000 were kidnapped. 13,000 churches have been forced to close or have been destroyed and burned to the ground. Radical Muslim clerics have called for the immediately killing of any Christians who blasphemes, without exception, even if that person repents, stating that they should “kill now” and let “Allah sort it out.”

Christians that are kidnapped are often beaten, raped, sold as slaves and girls, typically young teenagers, have been forced to marry older Islamic men. Christians are often arrested on false charges of blasphemy while the Muslim persecutors of Christians are almost never charged.

American Christians need to plan for the day when they have to take group defense seriously.

There’s more at the link, including a video.

Outdoor Life.

The .45/70 outperformed everything else in penetrating brush and delivering a bullet that’s still flying straight and true—something that will surely inflate the egos of its contemporary fans. I expected the .45/70 to yield the best results simply because of the mass of the bullets, but it exceeded my expectations substantially. With extensive enough testing some other big-bore cartridges might outdo the .45/70, but when it comes to common and available brush rifles today, the .45/70 wins.

The best brush bullet in my testing was the 325-grain, .458-inch Lehigh Defense Extreme Defense bullet. It was in Black Hills Ammo’s Honey Badger factory loads, traveling at 1900 fps. These are solid copper machined bullets with a nose that’s fluted and resembles a Phillips screwdriver. The bullet is designed for zero deformation, and to penetrate deeply. The fluting at the tip is designed to cause cavitation and a wound channel like expanding bullets. I’ve seen bears shot with them, and they are formidable. This load had an average deflection of only 0.63 inches, without a single key-holed bullet in 15 total shots.

You can see all of his testing protocol at the link, but the bottom line is that it’s the venerable 45-70 for the unqualified win.

Outdoor Life.

Chase Watson shot the biggest buck he’s ever killed two weeks ago while hunting from a treestand on his family’s farm in Arkansas. The buck dropped close by, but as Watson climbed down the tree to make a follow-up shot, the strap on one of his climbing sticks broke and he fell roughly 17 feet to the ground. He fractured a bone in his right leg, along with three vertebrae in his back, and instead of retrieving the deer, Watson went straight to the hospital.

[ … ]

In hindsight, Watson says the buck was probably dead after the first arrow passed through. But in the moment, after making a good shot on the biggest deer he’d ever hunted, he was focused on finishing the job.

“So I went ahead and let the bow down to the ground, climbed over and onto the climbing sticks,” he says. “I unhooked from the rope attaching me to the safety harness, and I made it two steps down. That’s when the strap on the stick broke.”

Watson doesn’t remember the 17-foot fall. But he was so full of adrenaline that when he did hit the ground, he picked himself up, walked over to the downed buck, and put another arrow in him. He says that at first, he thought he was good enough to walk himself out, but after trudging back uphill past the stand, he started feeling the pain and sat down to call his dad.

Guys, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever NOT to use your safety equipment.  None.

Use your safety equipment at all times during the sit and climb.  Never … NEVER … NEVER … untether from the tree.  My daughter treats deer hunters who have fallen every fall and winter, many of them suffering pelvic fractures, almost all of them suffering broken ribs, if they live at all.

Use a harness.  No, don’t use those traditional hunter’s harnesses that tether at your back like you see in hunter safety courses.  Those designs are stupid.  If you fall you hang facing away from the tree where you can’t do anything to help yourself, and the harness will cut blood supply to your legs.

Get a rappelling harness.  I use a Black Diamond harness.  It’s designed not to cut off blood flow, and it hooks you up in front.  Hook your tree tether to the harness.  Wrap your tree tether around the tree, and never detach it until you’re out of the tree.  Use the tether while sitting and while climbing.  Use it at all times while elevated off the ground.

This is easy.  A climb and sit in a tree stand is safe if you get the right gear and use it at all times.

Source.

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Hawaii County has issued 19 concealed carry licenses so far and another 58 are pending approval, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that eased gun rules.

West Hawaii Today reported that some police officers are concerned they aren’t getting proper training for when they encounter license holders.

The Hawaii County Police Department said training was implemented last week. But, West Hawaii Today said it mostly consisted of a short PowerPoint presentation and a quiz.

One un-named officer told the paper that the training did not address real life situations.

There are now 19 CHPs that have been issued.  Why not 19,000?

Source.

A federal judge based in Mississippi has released a scorching order expressing frustration with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment opinion issued last summer and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

The opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations. Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Carlton Reeves – who is considering a case concerning a federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms – said he is not sure how to proceed.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote in an order released last week.

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

The Bruen decision, he said, requires him to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

Well if you haven’t been looking to the historical context, what have you been doing with your decisions?  And don’t conflate your own ignorance with that of the Justices.

So here are some suggestions for you.  Read the primary source literature – such as the writings of the founders themselves, and also the newspapers of the era.  I think you’ll find that free men were allowed to possess firearms, that rapists, murderers and kidnappers were punished with death (as they should have been), and that there wasn’t generally a belief in the rehabilitative power of imprisonment.  So a man who is convicted today of assault and battery with intent to kill, for example, is likely to have been put to death in Colonial times even if he would be released today.  Much of this is a problem of our own creation.

Then after studying the primary literature, study the secondary source literature.  You can learn all about American history, like you should have done in your “education.”

Then maybe you won’t be a dummy.

Catholic Evangelizes repentance from sin and proselytizes spreading the Gospel; the church apologizes.

'Sin leads to hell'

This sermon led to an apology from the Bishop of Kerry

What are your thoughts? pic.twitter.com/pBXVtjb5PG

— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) November 1, 2022

I didn’t know Catholics evangelized the souls of men. Sheehy got in trouble, and the church apologized. So, no, Catholics don’t, in fact, evangelize for Christ?

In a statement, Bishop Ray Browne apologized to “all who were offended,” adding “the views expressed do not represent the Christian position” and the message was not appropriate for a “regular weekend parish Mass.”

We agree the views expressed in the clip don’t represent the Christian position. And that’s the problem. We might have worded it differently, but what Sheehy said is Bible 101. We’re offended that he didn’t receive a standing ovation.

Browne’s Monday statement was released to appease parishioners who were outraged by Father Seán Sheehy’s homily delivered to mass-goers in Listowel on Sunday.

Watch a clip from Sheehy’s now-viral sermon for yourself: ‘Sin leads to hell’

This sermon led to an apology from the Bishop of Kerry

Bishop Browne needs to apologize to Christ! Are there any Catholics here who can explain, from the church’s position, why what he did is wrong? Is it wrong?

David Kopel debunks a stupid set of claims with a made-up set of indices that proves nothing, all promulgated by the idiots at Duke University (among others).  We’ve run into these dummies before.

The authors, one at Duke, and one at Wesleyan University (who has probably never shot a firearm in her life), should read Kopel’s analysis and be ashamed for the poor “research” and bad analysis and writing they did.

Anyway, if you want to read all about this stupid notion of the lethality index, read Kopel’s analysis of what these writer claim.  I found the most interesting part of Kopel’s article to be these few paragraphs.

Miller and Tucker write:

The Founders lived in a period when they could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because the basic flintlock hadn’t really become significantly more lethal in the previous 150 or so years. If the Constitution had been written in the middle of the nineteenth century, instead of the 1780s, the Founders would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. (p. 2511).

This is incorrect. The American colonists from Europe who arrived in the early 17th century came mainly with matchlocks. In a matchlock, pressing the trigger lowers a smoldering hemp cord to touch the gunpowder in the firing pan. Over the course of the century, Americans shifted to the more expensive flintlock. In a flintlock, pressing the trigger causes a sharpened flint (held in the gun’s “jaws”) to fall forward. The flint strikes a piece of metal, and the shower of sparks ignites the gunpowder in the firing pan.

Unlike matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept always-ready. There is no smoldering cord to give away the location of the user. Flintlocks are much more reliable than matchlocks, and all the more so in adverse weather.

Americans made the shift from matchlocks to flintlocks sooner than did European armies or European civilians, because the flintlock was so vastly superior for use in the dense woods of the eastern seaboard, and for Indian fighting, which was very different from the rigidly organized, linear tactics of European warfare. For the same reasons, American Indians greatly preferred flintlocks to matchlocks. The TLI of a 17th century musket is 19 and the TLI of an 18th century flintlock is 43. So the transition of firearm type in the American colonies more than doubled the TLI. There is no reason to believe that the American Founders were ignorant of how much better their own firearms were compared to those of the early colonists.

Besides, the men who penned and approved the 2A had spent their lives and fortunes on overthrowing tyranny, which is the singular point of the 2A.  It would be idiotic to believe they would have written the 2A any other way based on a “lethality index” created by ne’er-do-wells in the twenty first century.

I like his choices, and especially his paint job.

First, Here Kitty Kitty,

Bend police shoot, kill cougar in NW Bend neighborhood after deer-kill site found in a backyard.

“The cougar was exhibiting behaviors consistent with being a public safety risk, including showing no fear of humans in extremely close proximity, hunting in a heavily populated area and returning to the kill site,” the police spokeswoman said.

Sounds like hunger. People won’t’ hunt the dear, so Lions do. Reality is a hard lesson; somebody will get attacked pretty soon. The suburbs of America are now full of deer. The grazing is good; those deer face no human threat and are fairly docile, prime targets for predation by an apex hunter. These “rare” incidences will likely increase.

After setting up a containment area and ensuring the location was safe, officers shot and killed the cougar, Miller said. ODFW took possession of the animal and later reported it was a 1- to 2-year-old, 77-pound female.

Beth Quillian, a public information officer for ODFW, says the cougar was shot instead of tranquilized because of the threat it posed to the community.

“Tranquilizing animals like a cougar can be pretty tricky,” Quillian said. “It’s not always as easy as tranquilizing the animal and it’s down.”

Miller says it was a hard, but necessary decision.

“We don’t take this decision lightly, we care a lot about wildlife as well — but our role is the safety of our community and our neighbors,” Miller said.

And there was this “rare” Mountain Lion recently captured in a Los Angels neighborhood.

Next, Hunter Shoots Himself in the Leg While Fighting Off Grizzly Bear

“firing a gun in a grizzly bear encounter is rarely the right decision.”

That bit of expert advice sounds like the punchline from a standup skit.

After Francis shot himself, his son activated his SOS device to get help, according to the news release. Then, he provided first aid to help control his father’s bleeding. With darkness approaching, they worked out a plan with emergency responders through the SOS device.

Francis’ son, unnamed in the news release, got his father on a horse and led him toward nearby Water Dog Lake. Search and rescue workers caught up with the pair at about 9:20 p.m. and administered first aid. They extracted Francis by UTV to Flying A Ranch, the news release said, and then flew him via helicopter to the University of Utah Hospital for treatment.

A search and rescue official also accompanied Lee’s son and horses back to the trailhead.

His son, whose age was not mentioned, did a very good job. Fill your mind with useful knowledge, practice those skills, carry the tools you need in the bush, and don’t go alone.

Wyoming game wardens have begun an investigation and will try to locate the grizzly bear that Francis told police attacked him.

Western Wyoming officials said the incident marks the second grizzly bear attack in the area this month. On Oct. 15, a grizzly attacked two college wrestlers outside the town of Cody.

Wait, we were assured, attack after attack, year after year, that these encounters are “rare.”

Such incidents have become more common in Wyoming, where grizzly bears have made a comeback, especially around Yellowstone National Park. As a result, Wyoming leaders have asked the federal government to remove grizzly bears from the Endangered Species Act. If approved, the bears could once again become legal game animals.

[…]

Wildlife officials continue to recommend bear spray as the preferred method of dealing with grizzly bears. According to the National Park Service, it’s actually more effective than firearms for defending yourself in a bear attack. Not only that, but it’s also a better move from a legal standpoint.

That last highlighted link in the embedded article provides zero data and no evidence of the assertion that bear spray is more effective. It’s just a bunch of government propaganda about how it’s always best to be a disarmed slave, even in the wilderness.

Chuck Baldwin just preached Revelation Chapter Seven this past Sunday. It’s an interesting, wide-ranging (beyond Revelation 7), and worthwhile video study. He also spends time laying some foundation for future messages on Revelation.

Reading this brief post first by Ken Gentry will help as background.

The 144,000 saints represent Jewish converts to Christianity who dwell in Israel. Note the following evidence:

1. The text expressly refers to the twelve tribes of Israel: “I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred and forty-four thousand sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel” (Rev 7:4; cf. vv 5–8). John later calls this body of 144,000: “first fruits” (Rev 14:4). Christianity’s first converts hail from Israel (Ac 1:8; 2:5–12, 22–24, 36–42; cp. Ro 1:16; 2:9–10). They are the remnant of Israel that forms the seed of the new covenant church.

2. John distinguishes them from “the great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues” (Rev 7:9). John is careful to make this strong distinction between the two groups.

We find ourselves in good company in this, as Baldwin also agrees with the distinction between the 144,000 and the “great multitude, which no man could number.” (7:9)

1. The Old Testament source from which John draws his imagery is Ezekiel 9:4, which clearly specifies they are from Jerusalem: “The LORD said to him, ‘Go through the midst of the city, even through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations which are being committed in its midst.’”

2. God protects them in “the Land” which is being judged (Rev 7:1; 14:3). The Greek phrase he ge in Rev often means “the land,” i.e., the promised Land of Israel. This fits well with the previous action occurring in Israel.

3. Such a designation comports well with Christ’s warning his followers to flee Jerusalem before its final overthrow (Mt 24:15–16; Lk 21:20–24). He promises that those who heed his prophecy will be protected (Lk 21:18–19).

4. We must always remember that Revelation’s events are to occur “shortly” because the “time is near” (Rev 1:1, 3; 22:6, 10). This fits perfectly with the historical flight of Jewish Christians from Jerusalem prior to its fall.