Articles by Herschel Smith

Always informative, always educational. Always fun.

Hmm …

I wonder if sticky fired casings is one challenge with making a 500 S&W lever action rifle? I don’t care. I still want one, Smith & Wesson.

Dean Weingarten.

Vitaly Aleksandrovich Nikolayenko was a prominent Russian brown bear researcher (Asian version of the American brown or grizzly bear) who routinely and closely approached bears without a firearm. He did this for 33 years, from 1970 to December 2003. In December 2003, he followed a bear that had come out of hibernation in the winter until the bear attacked him, killed him, and ate him. His use of bear spray had failed to stop the bear.  His was the first recorded fatal failure of bear spray. The killing was the culmination of several lucky escapes over the years of his association with brown bears.

It won’t be the last either. Dean also recounts the life and philosophy of Timothy Treadwell, a sorry excuse of an adventurer because he went into the bush with naivety.

At American Hunter.

While I profess to know a lot about firearms, I didn’t know there was a 10mm magnum round, which is different from the 10mm round. I would probably spring for this wheel gun, except for the price: $3,309.

That’s enough for a nice custom 1911, or two thirds of that will get you a Springfield Armory TRP full size 1911. To me, after looking at the tested results for the ammunition, I just don’t see that much to be gained over the .45 ACP+P, and in fact, I don’t see anything at all to be gained over the 450 SMC from Double Tap.

To each his own. If you like 10mm and are willing to spend the money, this may be a nice field option for dangerous game defense.

Fractional reserve banking also happens when a bank loans money to another bank, and that bank loans it out in smaller chunks, and so on, until a given amount of money is loaned out so many times that it can’t be covered if it defaults. More money has been loaned out than exists in the bank, or the collective banks who have loaned it. To be specific, 10% is cash reserve, or it used to be.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

James Wesley Rawles at Survival Blog has a very good discussion on fractional reserve banking and how it came to America. It’s worth you time to read it.

Judge: "Constitutionally protected resource like bears."

Me: Where in the constitution does it mention bears?

Alaska Judge Halts Bear Cull Program, Calls It Unconstitutional https://t.co/Mal83wDTDR

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) April 3, 2025

David Codrea has a great find on a recent petition for writ of certiorari before the supreme court concerning D.C.’s limit on magazine capacity. Here is the document.

But by rewriting Heller’s “in common use” test to add a dangerousness element, lower courts have continued to interest balance under a different name. At bottom, lower courts have decided that criminal misuses of firearms (as in mass shootings) justify complete bans on certain arms. They then use questionable analogical reasoning to justify that result. Both Heller and Bruen already rejected that sort of “subjective dangerousness” reasoning, and the Court should do so again here. And while the majority below said that the plus-ten magazine ban was comparable to laws that addressed weapons capable of unprecedented lethality, it could only get there by limiting the Second Amendment solely to individual self-defense. Viewing the Second Amendment through the correct lens—that it protects the right to bear arms for community defense, too—the historical analogues the majority relied on below fail.

The decision here shows that analogies under Bruen are helpful only when courts have an underlying theory about how to identify the relevant similarity. Unfortunately, many courts still don’t grasp the underlying principles of the Second Amendment.

[ … ]

By adding a dangerousness test designed to override the “in common use” test, courts have adopted “the very sort of means-end scrutiny that Bruen explicitly forbids courts from applying in the Second Amendment context.” Bianchi, 111 F.4th at 479 (Gregory, J., concurring). Nothing has changed except that courts now “cloak[] interest balancing under the guise of ‘tradition.’” Duncan, 2025 WL 867583, at *47 (Bumatay, J., dissenting) (comparing Ninth Circuit’s analysis pre- and post-Bruen and noting “little” change). Worse, “even the regulations that failed in Heller or Bruen would survive” the lower courts’ dangerousness test. Id. at *52 (VanDyke, J., dissenting).

Even if analogies were necessary here, they weren’t used correctly. To analogize well, courts need to know the Second Amendment’s purpose. Heller confirmed that the Second Amendment “guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” 554 U.S. at 592. Although Heller clarified that the Second Amendment covers individual self-defense, it noted other lawful purposes for keeping and bearing arms, such as preserving the militia and hunting. Id. at 599. But after Heller and Bruen, courts have narrowed the Second Amendment to protect only keeping and bearing arms for individual self-defense against crime.

This petition is very well written. I wish it had been written for AR-15 bans and they had petitioned the court to hear Snope.

I commend this for your reading today. It smashes the “in common use” test as applied only to individuals. It specifically states what we all know and need to be addressed. The court either recognizes the role of militia or it doesn’t. If so, then good. If not, then they will have completely given up any legitimacy to caring what the words of the 2A say.

Britain is lost. Past tense. Without so much as firing a shot. It's over for them. Thankfully we fought a war and won to ensure we didn't answer to them. England could never have won against frontiersmen. They were doomed the second they set foot on American soil.

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) March 30, 2025

Cowboy News Daily.

A North Carolina man took a creative and goofy approach to bear deterrence —stepping out of his house in a bear suit to spook away a black bear that had plunked down on his lawn.

It worked for Rodney Clark of Asheville, North Carolina, as evidenced by media interviews and a video making the rounds on news outlets and social media.

However, some Wyomingites said trying that tactic on a grizzly bear would probably get a person mauled, possibly killed — or perhaps even worse — molested by the bear.

[ … ]

In an interview with “Inside Edition,” he said that the bear costume has proven effective in pushing bears off his property.

He told “Inside Edition” that bears sometimes “stop and pause and look back. They’re not really sure what that is.”

What happened to a Marlin 45-70 lever action rifle? What was this man thinking?

This is an ill-advised strategy, regardless of what kind of bear.

New York Court Holds Stun Gun Ban Not Unconstitutional, in Contravention of Caetano.