Articles by Herschel Smith

As you know, other states have stepped up to offer troops to secure the Texas border. That’s a good thing since Abbot has a habit of folding like a cheap suit under pressure.

Instapundit links an analyst who says it isn’t as clear as folks are making it out to be that the SCOTUS has given the final word on anything.

“The Court’s order vacated an injunction previously entered by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that had prohibited the Government from damaging or destroying Texas’ wire. The Supreme Court’s order has been the subject of widespread and sometimes fiery commentary. However, the press and commentators are misanalysing the order. Governor Abbott and Texas are still free to prevent the feds from cutting their wire. The Supreme Court’s order does not forbid that. The press is misleading you. . . . The reason that the press and other commentators and critics are incorrect is that they apparently fail to understand the limited effect of vacating an injunction. After the Supreme Court’s order vacating the injunction, the status quo was the same as it was prior to the TRO ever being entered: There is no court order prohibiting the Government from taking down the wire AND there likewise is no Supreme Court order or opinion saying that the Government had a right to take down the wire. Nor is there an order by any court that Texas cannot protect its own property, namely the concertina wire.”

I don’t think it much matters. Either Texas will fold or they will hold fast. As for the SCOTUS, I expected nothing different from them. With AWB laws being enacted nationwide by the blue states, the SCOTUS has been running from semi-automatic weapons ban cases for months now. The two establishment women on the court – Barrett and Roberts – will nearly always side with the progs as we have now seen. The lower courts are running roughshod over Heller and Bruen and the SCOTUS doesn’t seem to care enough to stop it.

If that’s true, then why should Texas listen to the SCOTUS on this matter? The FedGov only wants control over this area in order to facilitate the foreign invasion.

As for the NG troops, here’s a warning. Be armed or go home. And that means be under arming orders, with weapons an ammunition and the authority to use them.

Read it at All Outdoor.

Here is Rossi’s image of their gun.

I chose the 20″ version because that’s the one I would get. I like the looks of the gun – I consider it to be aesthetically pleasing.  Now, they just need to incorporate this same updated design into their .454 Casull model and I’d buy it. I think their current model looks awful.

I also question the depth of the drop of the comb.  Perhaps the .454 Casull model has such a deep drop because of the lack of a pistol-grip design.

Having said all of that, their price point is right in the pocket for market competitiveness.  Never having owned a Rossi USA, I have no idea about reliability and good performance.

If they would send me one I’d be happy to review it.

Watch the entire video. First of all, Stephen is and friend and one of the best second amendment attorneys out there so we should show him some support. Through GOA and his own firm he has shown resilience and class in dealing with the FedGov, and has achieved a good degree of success in his cases.

Second, after this video, you might be interested in the second one.  A defining and signal characteristic of communist societies is that they hire incompetents and promote the lazy.  Communism isn’t just for the central bureaucracy.  It’s for the distributed bureaucracies too.

As long as you’re incompetent but support the status quo, as long as you don’t rock the rulers’ boat, and as long as you make income for the elitists, you’re welcome in the bureaucracy administrating a lack of justice to the peasants.  If you work for the government, you might be a peasant too, but you’re their peasant.

Stephen is a prime example.  He’s a good and hard working attorney. He could never work for the FedGov and be happy.

Codrea.

“I admired Wayne LaPierre 20-30 years ago,” a comment left on The Captain’s Journal, a blog I frequent admitted. “Yes, he screwed up and started living high off the hog on the members’ dime… But there were some great victories… during his tenure, particularly the proliferation of shall-issue CCW and constitutional carry…That was all grassroots NRA lobbying.”

“Yes, they were wrong for supporting NICS and some other things, but I think it is unfair to tag Wayne’s tenure with some of the Fudd [stuff] the NRA supported in the past, like the NFA,” the poster continued. “The NRA once had the loyalty of a LOT of Democratic members and Democratic politicians… The NRA now has ZERO influence in places like New York, California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts… Wayne deserves to be held accountable… by the Board of Directors and the members, not by Letitia James or any… so-called court of ‘law.’”

Such sentiment is not unique among gun owners. Unfortunately, it’s also not correct.

Read the rest at Firearms News.

I’m sure that SHOT show just around the corner has nothing to do with the timing.

It’s a nice looking gun, but polymer furniture and currently only in .44 magnum.

There is a very much nicer version of this in what looks to be AAA fancy walnut, but of course, for $3499, and it’s a limited edition which means it was a limited run of inventory.

Nice job. Now do a less expensive walnut version of your lever gun, and do .454 Casull.

CNN.

Police in Elyria, Ohio, deployed exploding flash-bangs while raiding a home last week while a toddler on a ventilator was inside, newly released body-worn camera footage shows, and the mother says her child was harmed during the incident.

Yeah, I’ll bet.

Footage from eight officers’ body-worn cameras was released Tuesday by Elyria Mayor Kevin Brubaker’s office, which has requested an outside investigation into the January 10 incident and how the search warrant for the home was obtained.

Police believed stolen guns were also taken to the residence where the toddler and mother were staying, and the officers were searching for the weapons, the report said.

Later that day, officers entered the home with guns, a battering ram and flash bangs, according to bodycam footage.

“It was very fast-paced,” the mother, Courtney Price, told CNN on Wednesday. “I didn’t have time to process anything.”

Price was alone with her son when she first heard a knock at the door, and she thought it was her uncle, she said. But as she approached the door, she could see police officers through the glass.

“All I seen was lights flashing and smoke coming into the house,” Price told CNN affiliate WOIO.

Redia Jennings, Price’s aunt, told WOIO she and her husband have rented the home for the past year, and the person police were looking for has not lived at the residence for more than a year. His family now lives down the block, Jennings told the station.

His hearing is likely irreversibly damaged.

Here is the team.

Fat boys, kitted up for playing soldier-boy, after having conducted an ill-conceived raid, the ill-conceived warrant having been obtained from an immoral judge. But hey, at least they’ll be able to go home and tell mommy they “got some” today just like the Georgia cops who threw a grenade into a crib and almost killed an infant.

These sorts of raids are immoral. How long with the American public tolerate them being legal?

I guess just like the ATF hates dogs, cops everywhere hate babies.

Prior:

Another SWAT Raid, Another Flash-Bank Thrown at a Baby

Grand Jury Recommends No Charges In Georgia Police Raid That Severely Injured Toddler

Tim Thurley.

Gun control groups had gotten most of what they’d wanted. That wasn’t surprising. They had actively participated in drafting legislation and worked directly with senior bureaucrats. Allan Rock’s policy advisor called their contributions “very instrumental.” In 1995 Heidi Rathjen of gun control group PolySeSouvient said, in response to Pierrette Venne’s question about what the group would do if Bill C-68 came into effect, that “…if [Bill C-68] is passed as it was tabled, without major amendment, then, as far as we are concerned, after what we’ve presented today, we will no longer fight for a federal legislation.” No major amendments were made. In 2015 she essentially re-endorsed their 1995 position, and blamed their continued activism on Harper-era tweaks and the post-1995 invention of “new” “assault weapons” — though many of the “assault weapons” her group wanted banned were on the market decades prior to C-68, were not prohibited by it, and remained legal until 2020.

C-68 was touted as the “end of the struggle to strengthen gun control in Canada.” While some advocates pledged to continue a push for a total ban on the remaining murkily-defined “military assault weapons,” the compromise was set. Subsequent Liberal and Conservative governments accepted the core philosophy and most core elements. The 2004 Conservative manifesto retained all of the central components except for the controversial, expensive, and ineffective  registration of hunting guns, a position eventually supported by Trudeau the Younger.

Gun-control groups used to be realistic about the scope of their goals and the Canadian way of life. They acknowledged hunting and sporting use, the importance of having “a supply of ammunition in the home” for predator defence in rural areas, and maintained that the Chief Firearms Officers should have discretion over license issuances or revocations when a person has been rehabilitated, a policy which C-21 would abolish. They didn’t even push for a total ban on handguns. In turn many gun owners came to see licensing as a point of pride. They saw it as a badge of honour indicating they belonged to the safest and most trusted citizens, clearly set apart from the criminal class and even safer than the general public.

[ … ]

These groups consider removing firearms from society an unalloyed good, yet consumer demand shows plenty see it differently. There are 2,300,000 licensed gun owners in Canada who rely on firearms for needs as diverse as agriculture, sport, wilderness protection, trapping, investment, heritage and hunting. Fifty thousand jobs and billions in GDP rely on them. Loss of livelihood is bad enough, but we also cannot ignore the loss of life that economic harm entails or that every dollar we spend or lose here could be spent on a nurse we do not employ, a soldier without proper equipment, or a diversion program for an at-risk youth.

For fun, I once roughly estimated the building costs for central storage units using comparable public contracts. It came to just over $600 million, before any operational costs. Six hundred million bucks is a lot of money in any scenario, but here’s the kicker: that’s for only 20,000 guns, in just the Northwest Territories. Where guns are critical to food security. Canada has about 12.5 million firearms. There’s a reason almost no serious comparator uses central storage, even in far smaller countries.

No one, especially the central government, is going to foot the bill for central storage of firearms, and especially not locked down and manning those storage locations with guards and stewards.

Rather, the goal is just to make all firearms illegal.  His work to compute the cost was a waste of time.

Notice how proud gun owners were of their licensure – and notice how earnestly and honestly gun owners negotiated the new laws.  But there will never be “end of the struggle to strengthen gun control in Canada.”  Governments don’t care one whit about “sporting” applications of firearms. They are trying to protect and ensure the survival of government, of the elitists, of the rulers, not a way of life or the ability to defend home and hearth. That’s why self defense with a firearm in Canada is illegal.

Negotiation and compromise is the road to hell.  Just don’t do it.  Ever.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/577/411/

Funny, that.

Samuel Alito argued that several hundred thousand stun guns meant they were in common use.

If someone had asked me to make observations about this issue, I would have said “No one can credibly argue that teachers shouldn’t be armed,” or “No one can credibly argue that schools need multiple, unlocked points of ingress,” or “No one can credibly argue that cops have the right to, under the color of law, prevent honorable and brace men from entering a premises to save their child.”

There are so many intelligent things to say.  These are only a few of them.  However, Jennifer Mascia is somehow able to find the most idiotic thing to say.

Americans as so stupid, ignorant, stolid and uneducated. How could this ever have been in question? Most of the men who fought the loyalists at King’s Mountain were of average age of 14 – 15, and were men enough to travel there from “over-mountain.”

The founders knew what they were doing. All rights in the bill of rights are individual, including the second amendment. In order to make sure everyone knew why they were writing the 2A, they explicitly stated it. Every individual must be able to muster, so they have the right to keep and bear arms. Stay way from our ability to call an army of our own if we want to. For no other reason than we want to, but there’s good enough reason given the nature of man to rule badly over others.