Most of the time I find their videos informative. In this case I already knew much of this, but this is what surprised me. Listen carefully to the rules of engagement (or rules for the use of force) the Texas Rangers were operating under.

What other country on earth makes their people follow such rules of engagement for fear of being dragged before criminal courts in the nation which is hosting the invasion?

How screwed up is America right now?

So here is the scoop.  A police officer, specifically a deputy, heard an acorn drop on the roof of his car, and dumped two magazines into his own patrol car.

He is an army veteran of ten years, attended West Point, and then was an officer in Special Forces. He has never seen combat, and I guess that hasn’t change unless you count acorns.

I wonder why he never saw combat?  He says it was because he was an officer, but I doubt that because officers are still in combat they just don’t receive combat awards for it like the enlisted do (above a certain rank).

Anyway, here is the full report.  Remember folks, they are “the only ones” who can safely handle weapons, serve the community in life or death situations, and protect men and women from harm.

And in reality as we’ve observed so many times before, you’re never in more danger than when the police are around, and no situation is so bad or desperate that it cannot be made worse by the presence of the police.

You are your own best defense. As always.

LOL

The cop was hit by a falling acorn and went full parkour and then transitioned to mag dumping his own car.

I am deceased. https://t.co/5rxWgThKk3

— T_p_tio 🎈 (@Txp_RBI_Xctuxl) February 13, 2024

Via Wisco.

Jonathan Turley fisks the Hawaii supreme court decision on guns.

On Wednesday,  in State v. Wilson,  Justice Todd Eddins wrote the decision dismissing the appeal of Christopher Wilson, who was arrested in December 2017 for publicly carrying a .22-caliber pistol in his “front waist band.” Wilson insisted that he carried the gun while hiking for self-protection.

Under Section 134-25 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes,  “all firearms” must be “confined to the possessor’s place of business, residence, or sojourn.” The only exceptions are for transporting guns in closed containers, hunting or target shooting, and for those with a license.

Wilson argued that “prosecuting him for possessing a firearm for self-defense purposes outside his home violated his right to bear arms” under the Second Amendment. While the trial court rejected his motion, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) and Circuit Court Judge Kirstin Hamman dismissed the charges with prejudice.

Justice Eddins wrote that the Hawaii Constitution “does not afford a right to carry firearms in public places for self defense.” Eddins notes that “Article I, section 17 of the Hawaii Constitution mirrors the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.” However, “we read those words differently than the current United States Supreme Court. We hold that in Hawaii there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public.” He then adds:

“The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities. The history of the Hawaiian Islands does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others.”

Ponder that for a moment. He even admits that the proper usage of firearms is to combat the deadly aims of others. They don’t want it, they said. While parroting stupid words about peace and tranquility, they still know that there will be deadly aims, but say that men cannot defend themselves.

They say this: “A ruling by Hawaii’s high court saying that a man can be prosecuted for carrying a gun in public without a permit cites crime-drama TV series “The Wire” and invokes the “spirit of Aloha” in an apparent rebuke of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded gun rights nationwide.

“The thing about the old days, they the old days,” the unanimous Hawaii Supreme Court ruling issued Wednesday said, borrowing a quote from season four, episode three of the HBO series to express that the culture from the founding of the country shouldn’t dictate contemporary life.”

I’ve seen a number of analyses of this, from stupid, to ignorant, to childish (which of course it is), to uneducated.  Here’s the thing I think most folks are missing.

This is all by intent, and the Hawaii supreme court is doing the bidding of their masters, whomever that is. This is all being done in the Fourth Circuit, the Third Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, the Fourth Circuits, as well as numerous appeals courts before that.

Courts everywhere are daring the SCOTUS to act, and as I have said before, they are so far running like scare rabbits at the inferior courts, who are winning the day.

They have a chance to act and bring and end to all of this with a new appeal Bianchi, but will they? If they don’t, they have become irrelevant since no inferior court will listen to them on any future decision since any decision won’t carry the weight of precedent. They must be willing to stand on the 2A, censure judges, and remove judges.  Otherwise, no one will care what they say.

So will they continue to run from Bruen, Heller, Caetano and McDonald? Hawaii, New York Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, California, Washington and other states and courts are telling the SCOTUS to go away. What will SCOTUS do?

Wild boar tries to steal some snowboards pic.twitter.com/tT3s4GdnhK

— Crazy Clips (@crazyclipsonly) February 7, 2024

They attack out of pure meanness, or spite, or just because they can, or for no reason at all.

And the hog doesn’t seem to me like it’s having any problem at all dealing with the cold and snow.

And just imagine – some folks want to keep them around, idiot rewilders, they are.

A reader sends this from the SHOT show regarding my wondering which optics are made in the USA.

I followed through at SHOT Show like I said I would.

I spent about 25 minutes speaking with Joshua who told me, obliquely, that all the high end stuff was CNC’d in Colorado. Everything else came from Philippines or Germany though their Steiner division but was made on machines they had designed and built.

It looks to me like interesting optics, including one or a couple that have reflex red dot optics mounted on LPVOs.

It would still be nice to know which models are built in the US.

We’ve discussed the contradictions, confusion and befuddlement in the rewilding movement before.  From the destruction of dams in California in an attempt to save the river fish, only to introduce beavers who then build dams, to the massive solar farms that divert water and kill plant species making for essentially dead deserts, they can’t seem to make their minds up about much of anything except that they hate humans.

The reintroduction of wolves into Colorado has peaked the interest of rewilders everywhere. In fact, it’s practically romantic.

“It was so perfect. You could look around, and it felt like at any moment John Denver was going to show up. It was ‘Rocky Mountain High’ in every direction,” said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecology and conservation biology professor at University of Colorado Boulder and director of the American Canid Project. The stars rolled up last: five wolves, silent in their crates but omnipotent in the waft of their musky aroma. It smelled like the wild, Lambert observed.

But why would they care? Well, you see, they think it’s better for the environment.

The study was conducted by scientists at CSU’s Warner College of Natural Resources, focusing on the effects of three apex predators: wolves, cougars, and grizzly bears in Yellowstone. These carnivores, positioned at the top of the food chain and not preyed upon by other animals, had populations that were depleted over time.

The return of wolves to the park in 1995 was concurrent with the natural recovery of cougar and grizzly populations. Their absence for nearly a century had significantly altered the park’s landscape and food web, transforming regions rich in willow and aspen along small streams into grasslands due to intense elk browsing.

Too many Elk, they say. But they didn’t think that way when they were throwing bales of hay over the fences to the Elk when they thought they needed feeding in particularly harsh winters, causing the Elk not even to return to Yellowstone (when you’ve got a handout, why leave?).

But why are grasslands bad? The rewilders believe that trees are a more productive means of carbon reduction. But is that correct?

Forests have long served as a critical carbon sink, consuming about a quarter of the carbon dioxide pollution produced by humans worldwide. But decades of fire suppression, warming temperatures and drought have increased wildfire risks — turning California’s forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

Well, we’ve discussed the stupidity of fighting forest fires before, but let’s continue.

A study from the University of California, Davis, found that grasslands and rangelands are more resilient carbon sinks than forests in 21st century California. As such, the study indicates they should be given opportunities in the state’s cap-and-and trade market, which is designed to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

So if the rewilders are wrong, does it matter? Not to them. It’s an evolving religion, you see.  And even the most absurd claims can be made on behalf of carbon sinks and the environment.

An unscientific bias against “feral” or “invasive” animals threatens to undercut one of the great stabilizing trends making ecosystems healthier, a new paper argues.

Introduced species such as feral pigs, horses, donkeys and camels represent a powerful force of “rewilding”  — the reintroduction of wild animals into ecosystems where humans had eradicated them — according to a study published Thursday in Science.

The study argues against widely held beliefs about whether invasive species are harmful — or what Lundgren described as the quasi-religious perception that some species inherently belong in a given landscape and others don’t.

That belief is the driving force behind a wave of expensive and often futile campaigns since the 1990s that eradicate species including feral hogs in Texas, wild horses across the American West and donkeys and camels in Australia.

We’ve discussed feral hogs at great length here on these pages.  Feral hogs adversely affect water quality, attack pets, destroy the environment they are a part of, dig up crops, spread diseases and parasites that only they can carry,

What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?

Oh, not much. They just eat the eggs of the sea turtle, an endangered species, on barrier islands off the East Coast, and root up rare and diverse species of plants all over, and contribute to the replacement of those plants by weedy, invasive species, and promote erosion, and undermine roadbeds and bridges with their rooting, and push expensive horses away from food stations in pastures in Georgia, and inflict tusk marks on the legs of these horses, and eat eggs of game birds like quail and grouse, and run off game species like deer and wild turkeys, and eat food plots planted specially for those animals, and root up the hurricane levee in Bayou Sauvage, Louisiana, that kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the eastern part of New Orleans, and chase a woman in Itasca, Texas, and root up lawns of condominiums in Silicon Valley, and kill lambs and calves, and eat them so thoroughly that no evidence of the attack can be found.

And eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “‘Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.

Feral hogs have run farmers in Georgia and Texas completely out of business.

But if rewilding is your newfound religion, you can make any claim whatsoever and it’s okay, because mother Gaia.  Or something.

But remember what I told you about mother Gaia.  “The problem with mother Gaia is that she’s a silent nag, a cruel and uncommunicative bitch.  She hasn’t authoritatively spoken like my creator.  So while she may expect you to worship her, she won’t tell you how or why.  So the advocates of carbon-free footprint, depopulation, and rewilding, just make it up as they go, spending massive sums of money on things that end up doing more harm than good.”

Prior:

Canadian Super Pigs Poised to Wreak Environmental Havoc and Spread Disease in Canada

Can Whitetail Managers Take Back Feral Pig Country?

How You Know That Dummies Are Making Suggestions About Containing The Feral Hog Problem

Hogs in Houston

Hogs Are Running Wild in the U.S.

Feral Hogs in Canada

Woman Killed by Feral Hogs Outside Texas Home

Houston-Area Suburbs Now Suffering from Feral Hogs

Hog Apocalypse in Texas

Save the Planet – Buy an AR!

Yes, you heard that right, as stupid as it sounds. While I discussed the recent actions in the S.C. Senate, I didn’t read the amendments. But thankfully someone did.  NARG.

So basically with the amendments, the S.C. Senate passed a new bill that requires a permit to carry in any fashion, open or concealed, and tacked on some additional stuff. But that’s the situation now – open or concealed carry with a permit, or permission slip from the state.

This is legitimately wicked. They’ll go home and tell their constituency that they “did something,” and support the RKBA, knowing full well that they did nothing at all good.

Liars one and all, at least the ones who voted for it.

They listened to the LEOs, didn’t they? The LEOs don’t like you carrying without their approval and power to check you out to see if you have their approval. No they don’t. They’re not “special” then.

This is quite a backwards view of things by someone named Dominic Erdozain who apparently teaches at Emory School of Theology.

Tyranny is not too strong a word. Guns have begun to define the American experience, from small decisions about where you might travel to the massacres that haunt the news cycle like the visitations of a malevolent deity. Sold as freedom, they have created the very conditions that the liberal state was designed to prevent.

The singular idea behind the emergence of democracy was the protection of life from arbitrary power. What is liberty? wondered John Adams. Freedom from “wanton, cruel power”—from “imprisonments, whipping posts, gibbets, bastenadoes and racks.” Kings shed blood with little emotion, wrote Benjamin Rush, because they believed they governed by divine right. Republican governments spoke a different language. They taught the absurdity of the divine right of kings and asserted the sanctity of all life. This was not achieved through individual force but by collaboration and consent. In a democracy, power is diffused, and layers of restraint are placed between the restless will of the individual and the capacity to harm others. That was the “social contract.”

[ … ]

Unlike today’s gun advocates, who think of danger as other types of people, the founders understood tyranny as a universal propensity—a problem larger than monarchy or the more obvious villainies of history. The hard truth was that violence lurks in every heart, and “all men would be tyrants, if they could.” Such was the foundation of American constitutionalism and the elaborate checks and balances that defined it.

[ … ]

Everything in the American system—from bicameral legislatures to nervous protections against “standing armies”—reflected this shrewd and skeptical psychology. Power was dangerous and always looking to expand its franchise. The virtue of a representative, as opposed to a direct, democracy was that it was broken up, shared, and delegated.

This was the principle behind the well-regulated militia named in the Second Amendment. A militia placed “the sword in the hands of the solid interest of the community,” not the burning will of the individual. The militia was to defense what trial by jury was to justice: safety in numbers. It was protection against anarchy, insurrection, and the “hand of private violence.” The notion that, in providing for a militia, the founders were also providing for that hand of violence reveals a profound misunderstanding of their philosophy. Gun laws, as we now know them, enable the very brutalities that the political process was designed to contain.

So you can read the rest of this silly, trivial missive for yourself if you want to. For the founders, who had just spent their fortunes and risked their own lives and the lives of their wives and children to take on a tyrant, and who used guns to do it, he turns the whole affair around to be fear of tyranny by the individual rather than the king. Only someone who graduated from Oxford and Cambridge with no history or understanding of the American system or cultural milieu could manage such a thing.

So let’s rehearse this one more time. The term well-regulated, in common parlance of the day, meant that the gun functioned correctly, the sights were set and zeroed at the appropriate distance, the machine ran “like a clock,” as it were, and the shooters knew how to shoot. It had nothing to do with words in the code of federal regulations, which didn’t exist then.

The very revolution to which he is referring was precipitated by British gun control. He needs to read David Kopel more carefully. He isn’t the scholar he things he is. Kopel is a scholar.

On the whole, his essay is such a mess that it would take a day of writing to fisk the errors. Suffice it to say that he needs to go back to the drawing board and answer this question: has he fully addressed the number of innocent men, women and children who were disarmed and then killed by their own governments in the 20th century? See also here. Stephen Halbrook has a higher number.

The answer might shock him. If it doesn’t and he is already aware of all of this, he’s advocating for the extermination of innocent people at the hands of wicked governments, and he knows it.

That’s the point of the second amendment – not disarming individuals. Finally, whatever theological excuses he has for his advocacy of gun control, I’ve answered all of them. If he wants to give me new ones, I’ll gladly answer those too.

We did open carry with a permit (if you recall, I listened to and reported on the entire floor debate in the S.C. senate that day). And I told you that we needed to embrace incrementalism. Now it’s time to do more.

A bill passed in the South Carolina Senate on Thursday would allow gun owners to carry their weapon in public without a concealed carry permit and would provide free firearms training.

The bill was approved by a 28-15 vote after nearly two weeks of debate surrounding concerns from some lawmakers and law enforcement officials over the open carry aspect. The addition of free firearms training is what led to a compromise and ultimately ended the debate.

The proposal now returns to the House, where representatives will need to agree to the Senate’s addition of the free firearms training, and other changes, in order for the bill to make it to Gov. Henry McMaster’s desk.

If signed into law, South Carolina will join 27 other states – including nearly every one in the Deep South – that allow open carry without a permit.

[ … ]

Law enforcement leaders have expressed worry over people carrying guns without training or experience, and the possibility of encountering armed people at a shooting scene and not being able to determine who is a threat and who is trying to help.

Oh, you know law enforcement is going to be against it. When it came attached to a permitting scheme, they didn’t want to waste their power because they knew it was going to pass.

Now, they’re inveighing against it.  I would suspect that SLED is especially against it, including that corrupt, awful head of SLED, Mark Keel, whom we’ve discussed at length.

Source.

The Defend Our Borders from Armed Invaders Act was introduced by Republican Rep. Morgan Luttrell of Texas, a former Navy SEAL who served in the Navy for 14 years.

In the last year, there have been multiple instances of migrants crossing into the U.S. carrying weapons, with some brandishing rifles like the AR-15.

And as the Biden administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott clash over border security policies, this bill, Luttrell claims, will enable the National Guard to better protect the U.S. by using ‘any means necessary’ to stop armed migrants.

I didn’t know that Marcus had a brother.

Anyway, eh, I’ll be convinced when I see them under arming orders and shooting live rounds.

And I’ll be convinced when I don’t see things like this.

Everyone needs to watch this video! #Texas @Allenma15086871 @11DarkKnight11 @AtRealBen @WeAreWoke1776_3 pic.twitter.com/i8ZN4lY7B6

— TestDummy (@TestDummy04) January 27, 2024