Archive for the 'Featured' Category

UPDATE 3/29

A few links, a few comments about those links, and then a link dump.

Current trajectory of Covid-19.  I’ll update the curve fit as often as I’m able to.

Coronavirus Could be Chimera of Two Different Viruses, Genome Analysis Suggests.

In December 2019, 27 of the first 41 people hospitalised (66 percent) passed through a market located in the heart of Wuhan city in Hubei province. But, according to a study conducted at Wuhan Hospital, the very first human case identified did not frequent this market.

Instead, a molecular dating estimate based on the SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences indicates an origin in November. This raises questions about the link between this COVID-19 epidemic and wildlife.

[ … ]

On 7 February, 2020, we learned that a virus even closer to SARS-CoV-2 had been discovered in pangolin. With 99 percent of genomic concordance reported, this suggested a more likely reservoir than bats.

However, a recent study under review shows that the genome of the coronavirus isolated from the Malaysian pangolin (Manis javanica) is less similar to SARS-Cov-2, with only 90 percent of genomic concordance. This would indicate that the virus isolated in the pangolin is not responsible for the COVID-19 epidemic currently raging.

[ … ]

… these genomic comparisons suggest that the SARS-Cov-2 virus is the result of a recombination between two different viruses, one close to RaTG13 and the other closer to the pangolin virus. In other words, it is a chimera between two pre-existing viruses.

This recombination mechanism had already been described in coronaviruses, in particular to explain the origin of SARS-CoV. It is important to know that recombination results in a new virus potentially capable of infecting a new host species.

For recombination to occur, the two divergent viruses must have infected the same organism simultaneously.

Two questions remain unanswered: in which organism did this recombination occur? (a bat, a pangolin or another species?) And above all, under what conditions did this recombination take place?

That’s what I want to know.  And I’m still waiting.  I will wait patiently until something believable comes along.  A wet market in China is so far unconvincing to me.

Covid-19 transmission hypothesis.

It’s being spread in the medical environment — specifically, in the hospitals — not, in the main, on the beach or in the bar.

When Singapore and South Korea figured out that if as a medical provider you wash your damn hands before and after, without exception, every potential contact with an infected person or surface even if you didn’t have a mask on for 30 minutes during casual conversations with others (e.g. neither of you is hacking) transmission to and between their medical providers stopped.

Note — even if you didn’t have a mask on and were not social distancing in the work environment, which of course is impossible if you’re working with others in a hospital, you didn’t get infected.

And guess what immediately happened after that?  Their national case rate stabilized and fell.

The hypothesis that fits the facts is that a material part of transmission is actually happening in the hospital with the medical providers spreading it through the community both directly and indirectly.

[ … ]

This also correlates exactly with the explosive spread in nursing homes where many residents are incontinent.

I don’t know enough to confirm or deny this hypothesis.  I do know that the medical community recommends masks, and I sent my daughter to work with an N95 mask one night.  The hospital management objected and stated that she could only wear hospital issued masks.  She said, “Okay, give me one.”  They said, “Oh, we’re all out so you can’t have one.”

Can Lysol or Clorox kill the Coronavirus?

Lung damage seen in recently asymptomatic Coronavirus patient.

New treatment in Italy, ventilators combined with laying patients on their stomach.

China supplied faulty Coronavirus test kits.  Who’d a thunk it?  There’s a reason that most manufacturers of quality machines don’t rely on parts from China (and few rely on parts from anywhere in the far east).  They’ve never learned to handle and abide by QA requirements.  If you doubt this, ask why the NRC doesn’t allow parts made in China to be installed in American nuclear power plants?

CPAP machines as ventilators.  It’s complicated.  See especially the comments section for details from the doctors.

UPDATE 3/23

Breitbart.

Yesterday, I reported the existence of three studies, all claiming that chloroquine phosphate had proved effective in treating the COVID-19.

This has since been confirmed by a more recent open-label non-randomised clinical trial in France by Didier Raoult​ M.D/Ph.D et al, completed just days ago. The sample was small but the results were convincing.

As the summary reports:

100% of patients that received a combination of HCQ and Azithromycin tested negative and were virologically cured within 6 days of treatment.

In addition, recent guidelines from South Korea and China report that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are effective antiviral therapeutic treatments for novel coronavirus.

But the story gets more extraordinary still. It turns out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has known since at least 2005 that chloroquine is effective against coronaviruses.

In 2005, Martin J Vincent et al published a study in Virology Journal titled ‘Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread.’

[ … ]

It ought to be no surprise that chloroquine is effective against both SARS and COVID-19. After all, they are both coronaviruses and COVID-19 has often been described in medical and research sources as SARS-2.

Chloroquine works by enabling the body’s cells better to absorb zinc, which is key in preventing viral RNA transcription – and disrupting the often fatal cytokine storm.

As at least one person has noticed, the implications of this are enormous. If the medical establishment – including CDC – has been aware of the efficacy of chloroquine in treating coronavirus for at least 14 years, why has it not been mass produced and made available sooner?

Here, you might have imagined, is the dream solution: a stop gap treatment for coronavirus which could save many lives and obviate the need for this global lockdown which is destroying our economies.

Why isn’t the solution being shouted from the rooftops?

One possibility, as I suggested yesterday, is that there is no money in it for Big Pharma. Chloroquine is a generic drug. That’s why Big Pharma’s lobbyists have worked hard to persuade governments that there can be no acceptable solution till a patented vaccine is brought on to the market.

Even if there is nothing nefarious about this (e.g., the Covid-19 virus is too different to surmise the applicability of a specific drug until it has been tested), the optics are very, very bad for big Pharma.  Very bad indeed.  It took French researchers to push hydroxychloroquine as a therapeutic.  Why?  Why not American doctors?

As I said before, the CDC and the NIH bear a huge amount of responsibility for all of this.  Dr. Anthony Fauci should be canned as soon as possible and replaced with someone competent to do the job.  America was caught too unprepared for my tastes.

On another front, based on one source, I can report that a local hospital has taken the following position concerning hydroxychloroquine.  “It will only be administered by infectious disease doctors, and then, only as a very last resort, i.e., as “rescue adjunctive therapy” and only after development of ARDS.”

But what if the patient is too ill to recover at that point?  Why wait this late?

An updated graph is shown below.  The doubling time is now at 2.32 days.

UPDATE 3/22

Ingenuity.  Need more of that these days.  Necessity is the mother of invention.

Obama can be held responsible for the shortage of N95 masks.

We previously discussed how the Vanderbilt University Hospital has repurposed its parking garage for a triage area for potential Covid-19 patients.  This is a picture of the same garage at a different time.

It was built by Hardaway construction.

It does raise an interesting question, though only somewhat related.  I had discussed the tents being set up throughout North and South Carolina hospitals as a triage area for potential patients with my daughter (an NP), and while she surmised they would be negative pressure like with their TB patients, I assert that the exhaust air (required to keep a negative pressure) has to go somewhere.

I discussed this with one of my state’s emergency planning officials.  This exhaust air is either (a) unfiltered, and thus very efficient at spreading the virus around, or (b) has HEPA filters and charcoal beds, which is unlikely because of availability.  Moreover, for the most part, such ad hoc installations will not have been tested and balanced by qualified engineers (I know something about testing HEPA filters and charcoal beds because I’ve done it before).  Qualified engineers aren’t a dime a dozen.  Activated charcoal is produced by charcoaling green coconut shells, and mainly comes from Sri Lanka.  From the standpoint of engineering, health and safety of the public, and industrial hygiene, this kind of epidemic just hasn’t been war-gamed well enough and America wasn’t prepared.  We’re not even close.

Consider your logistics train for the HEPA filters and activated charcoal.

UPDATE 3/21

Scientists are working hard to find therapeutics for Covid-19.

This is a picture of preparations for Covid-19 in a hospital garage in Tennessee.

This is an account inside a hospital in Louisiana.

As of Friday, Louisiana was reporting 479 confirmed cases of COVID-19, one of the highest numbers in the country. Ten people had died. The majority of cases are in New Orleans, which now has one confirmed case for every 1,000 residents. New Orleans had held Mardi Gras celebrations just two weeks before its first patient, with more than a million revelers on its streets.

I spoke to a respiratory therapist there, whose job is to ensure that patients are breathing well. He works in a medium-sized city hospital’s intensive care unit. (We are withholding his name and employer, as he fears retaliation.) Before the virus came to New Orleans, his days were pretty relaxed, nebulizing patients with asthma, adjusting oxygen tubes that run through the nose or, in the most severe cases, setting up and managing ventilators. His patients were usually older, with chronic health conditions and bad lungs.

Since last week, he’s been running ventilators for the sickest COVID-19 patients. Many are relatively young, in their 40s and 50s, and have minimal, if any, preexisting conditions in their charts. He is overwhelmed, stunned by the manifestation of the infection, both its speed and intensity. The ICU where he works has essentially become a coronavirus unit. He estimates that his hospital has admitted dozens of confirmed or presumptive coronavirus patients. About a third have ended up on ventilators.

“I have patients in their early 40s and, yeah, I was kind of shocked. I’m seeing people who look relatively healthy with a minimal health history, and they are completely wiped out, like they’ve been hit by a truck. This is knocking out what should be perfectly fit, healthy people. Patients will be on minimal support, on a little bit of oxygen, and then all of a sudden, they go into complete respiratory arrest, shut down and can’t breathe at all.”

[ … ]

“Typically with ARDS, the lungs become inflamed. It’s like inflammation anywhere: If you have a burn on your arm, the skin around it turns red from additional blood flow. The body is sending it additional nutrients to heal. The problem is, when that happens in your lungs, fluid and extra blood starts going to the lungs. Viruses can injure cells in the walls of the alveoli, so the fluid leaks into the alveoli. A telltale sign of ARDS in an X-ray is what’s called ‘ground glass opacity,’ like an old-fashioned ground glass privacy window in a shower. And lungs look that way because fluid is white on an X-ray, so the lung looks like white ground glass, or sometimes pure white, because the lung is filled with so much fluid, displacing where the air would normally be.”

This video comes from Italy.

This is the most recent curve fit.  The doubling time is currently 2.4 days using the same calculation given below.

UPDATE 3/20

President Trump is eyeing a two week national quarantine, with only grocery stores and pharmacies allowed to be open, all enforced by the National Guards of the respective states.  Here’s an interesting question.  I’ve pointed out before when the N.G. deploys to the border how difficult it is to arm the troops, with necessary rifle qualifications, lawyers having to write rules for the use of force (RUF)/ rules of engagement (ROE), etc., etc.  Arming orders have to be issued.  Rarely is that done stateside, not even for the Southern border.  Will N.G. troops be under arming orders, or will they have empty magazines?

Companies Teva and Mylan to jumpstart production of hydroxychloroquine to fight Coronavirus.  Opinion: You see the doctors with the FDA, NIH and CDC being pessimistic concerning the effectiveness because, in my opinion, not only are they being cautious, but because they aren’t the center of attention.  I’ve said before that the signal pathology of controllers is the desire to control others and be the center of attention.  It’s okay to have parlor talk about Covid-19.  It’s not okay with them for the peasants to actually know the names of the drugs and use them in common parlance, see the studies that have been done abroad, and conclude that the red tape and bureaucracy isn’t serving the interests of the American people.

The generation that wasn’t spanked.  I dropped by GNC today to purchase a male multivitamin/multimineral supplement, and the youngster behind the counter and I began discussing the current state of affairs.  In a remarkably unusual moment of candor for me when talking with someone I don’t know, I blurted out, “You know, the ones likely spreading this the worst are the college age kids who want to go out to bars and drink themselves into a stupor to ‘have fun,’ oblivious of the consequences to them or others.”

To my surprise, he responded, “Yep, that’s my generation – the generation that wasn’t spanked.”  In related news, 29% of American patients sick with Coronavirus are Millennials.  In other related news, out of control teens are intentionally coughing on grocery store produce in Harris Teeter stores and posting their videos on YouTube.

Also, recall that I pointed out the inconsistency of the FedGov complaining that citizens are buying N95 face masks stating on the one hand that they aren’t effective in stopping a virus, and on the other hand, complaining that the more we took, the less would be available for the health care system.  Well, this video session with an infectious disease expert explains it all.  According to him, the amount (or magnitude) of “inoculate” inhaled affects how sick a patient will become.  N95 masks do have something to do with that.  He even mentions an example of a health care worker forgetting to put on an N95 mask.  Begin about 10-12 minutes into his presentation.

Finally for tonight, I’ve updated the curve fit of confirmed Covid-19 cases in America with data through 2100 hours.  It’s a mess now, I strongly suspect, not because the actual doubling time has changed, but rather, because as I’ve mentioned before, there is a lead-lag function that I don’t know, and test availability and administration has changed.

Doubling time is at 2.42 days, although I’m not suggesting that the significant digits mean anything.

UPDATE 3/19

Californians ordered to stay home.  Also Politico.

Trump eyes grounding jets, halting stock trading, and ordering shelter in place.

The FDA approves Hydrochloroquine as prescribed by provider.

Look inside hospital in Italy.  Vimeo won’t allow me to embed the video but it’s worth watching if for no other reason than the shock value.

Here is an updated curve fit.  It’s rather a mess at this point, I surmise due to test availability and frequency of testing.

ORIGINAL POST

It seems to me like a good time to update my featured post.

Rather than posting little by little on this topic, I intend to roll this into a single post, and do my best to keep this post updated from time to time with related information.  I cannot devote my life to this analysis and I’m certainly not paid to do so.  As readers see fit, send new information, news reports, or your own analysis to my email account.  Revisit this post from time to time to see if there are any additions.  I’ll set the rules up front.

1] Updating this post won’t necessarily be a daily affair.

2] I can make no commitment as to how long I can keep this post updated.

3] Any additions will be made up front, not at the end of the original (or succeeding) updates

4] All analyses and information are correct to the best of my knowledge for the time it is written.  I make no warranty as to its correctness or usefulness beyond the minute it is posted.

5] My intent is to make perform clinical and unemotional analysis, not to engage in hyperbolic exaggeration.

So let’s begin.

I’ve been tracking the Johns Hopkins data for more than nine days now.  During this time I’ve had curve fits of the value for confirmed cases in America.  I have done nothing with world-wide confirmed cases.  The curve fit of confirmed cases versus tracking days follows.  Day 0 (zero) begins just above 600 confirmed cases, as that’s where I started tracking the data.

The curve fit, performed by EXCEL, is below.

y = 679.27e^0.2723x

Where y = Confirmed Cases, and x = Tracking Days.  The value of 679 is there because I didn’t begin tracking cases at time = 0.

I would rather use TableCurve-2D, and I’ll have to switch to another curve fit eventually because this one won’t last.  It won’t last because it will reach an upper asymptote and turn over.  There are those who won’t get it, there are those who get it, recover and are never tested, or perhaps virtually all of us will get it.  But the curve will turn over.

I won’t bother you with the mathematics, but in order to compute time to double the confirmed cases, this calculation is correct (using the value above).

ln(2) / 0.2723 = 2.55 Days

Doubling time is 2.55 days.  It’s been close to this value for as long as I’ve been tracking the data.  The curve fit has a very high correlation coefficient (R²) of 0.9951.  Doubtless, the Federal Government has this same kind of data and analysis.  This is nothing new to the CDC and state health departments.

This is why the Federal and State governments are so concerned about this.  Within a month more than two million Americans will have this virus unless we suppress the curve.  If we don’t have a vaccine within 30 days or thereabouts, there is no point and they may as well focus on therapeutic treatments.  Currently, the strategy employed by the government is [a] suppress the curve to prevent overwhelming the medical system, and [b] flood the country with cash to prevent a massive recession.

A word about mortality rate is in order.  You’ve heard values over the news with high variance, and it’s not because they are misleading you, either intentionally or unintentionally.  It’s because the value has a high variance.

It is INCORRECT to divide deaths by recovered cases and call that mortality rate.  That approach will massively over-estimate deaths.  Don’t do that.  It is likely also incorrect to divide deaths by confirmed cases because that will under-estimate mortality.  Don’t do that.

We don’t know at this time how long it takes for patients to fully shed this virus, and there is the further problem of the definition of recovery.  There is a lead-lag function that must go into this analysis to get a correct value, and you don’t have that.  Neither do I.

Moreover, there are many, many people who have already gotten this virus with no ill heath effect other than merely feeling crappy for a week, with full recovery.  They will never have been tested, and any future testing will be invalid.  This subset of data may very well be the largest subset in the larger set.

You will never know true mortality rate.  I will never know true mortality rate.  The only one who knows true mortality is God.  He won’t know it in the future.  He already knows it.

Performing epidemiological studies this way is not how any of this works.  There are thousands of studies that have been conducted on health effects of worker exposure to say, benzene or isocyanates, and those studies go into limits after being combined with other studies of the same thing, with uncertainty being combined using “pooled” variance.  What the CDC and state health departments is doing with Covid-19 is “flying by the seat of their pants.”

A word about the CDC.  They are the biggest disappointment in this whole ugly affair.  While they should have been studying epidemiology and infectious diseases, they were studying gun “violence,” racism and other irrelevant wastes of time.  This caught them by surprise.  They failed to see the effects of having America’s supply of pharmaceuticals rely almost exclusively on the very cause of this epidemic, China.  They acted too late to control it in America, they failed to ensure that there were enough medical supplies nation-wide (such as face masks) for an epidemic, and they’re simply holding on for the rough ride now, along with the rest of us.

A word about therapeutics.  My wife heard about a study over the national news (on one of the networks) where a controlled study had been conducted in France using the drug Hydrochloroquine.  40 out of 40 patients with Covid-19 underwent a full and complete recovery.

My wife stated that no one is talking about this.  That’s correct because they’re all taking pictures of toilet paper shelves in stores.  But I knew it.  This is the (non-peer reviewed) paper that describes the use of Hydrochloroquine as a therapeutic.  I mentioned this to my daughter and she said, “Hmm … that’s what we give for malaria.”  She’s right, and it’s cheap and effective for Covid-19.  There is also promise with the drug Remdesivir.

Now the question is this.  Has the FedGov stepped up production of this drug in America, or are we relying on China to sell it to us?  Ponder that question for a moment.  You are about to get the best witness and indication you’ve ever had in your lifetime whether the FedGov really cares about the health and safety of its citizens.  The mortality rate can be much lower than with the common flu, if only America’s resources are put to good use, and immediately so.

A word about root causes is in order.  I was taught in “Management Oversight and Risk Tree” analysis (MORT), that there is never one root cause.

China is one root cause.  Their failure to supply good information quickly was a problem from the beginning.  Their involvement in virtually everything that is manufactured and used in America is also a corollary to this.  Globalism is one large reason we are where we are with Covid-19.  The failure of the CDC to think proactively is another problem.  This was all war-gamed months ago and no one did anything about our vulnerability.  Finally, idiotic teens and college age kids who can’t stop going to bars and drinking themselves into a stupor is one reason why the spread of this virus won’t stop.

Again, there are a lot of root causes, every one of which was preventable.

A word on guns and ammunition.  I have plenty, but I felt like topping off my supply so I dropped by Academy Sports.  They have a limit of three boxes of ammunition per customer.  If you waited this late to find means of self defense, you waited too late.

As I said above, I’ll try to keep this post updated with relevant information.

“There are no socialists in the bush” – HPS

All of my physical training only barely prepared me for the difficulty of the Weminuche Wilderness (pronounced with the “e” silent).  It’s National Forest land, not National Park.  The Department of Agriculture no longer prints maps of the area, so we relied on NatGeo for the map, and it’s good, but not perfect.

We have a lot of ground to cover, including traveling with firearms, the modification I made to one of my guns for the trip, the actors in the event, the plan, and how and why the plan got modified on the second day.  I have many observations of things I knew but forgot, knew but was reminded are important, and things that I didn’t suspect would be as important as they are.  So let’s get started.

The Actors In The Event

HPS:

As you can readily determine, it makes no sense to include many photos of me on this blog.

Joseph, my dear second son:

Joseph is the “Eveready Energizer Hiking Machine.”  He has two speeds – flat out go and stop.  He was my motivation during the trip, as he is in so much of life for everything else when I ponder just giving up.

Abraham Gonzalez:

Abe is cool and easy to get along with.  He makes heads explode in Austin, where he and Joseph are from, by telling people that he’s Hispanic, legal, grew up in America, is a Christian, believes abortion is sinful, voted for Trump, and wants illegals to be returned home without delay.  He’s also a good hiker.  We get along well.

The Plan And It’s Modification

We left from the Thirtymile Campground trailhead, but unfortunately didn’t leave until around noon.  That proved to be important in the plan, which was a four day, three night backpacking trip through the wilderness.  We were limited by my schedule and the schedules of my two partners.

This area is rough.  You must travel through Creede, Colorado, from Denver to get there, and some of the travel is gravel road.  The trip takes almost five hours.  There is no cell phone coverage anywhere near this area.  This is untamed wilderness, and the only other things you’ll see are a few backpackers who have braved the area like you.

The hike in is sustained uphill beginning at around 9000 feet elevation.  We ended the first day when we knew we were soon going to lose light and where we had a source of water.  I’ll speak more about water later.

After our first night, there was a long, moderate but sustained uphill trek to begin our slog up the Continental Divide Trail (CDT).

The beauty of the area is difficult to describe in words.  Perhaps impossible.

A hard right after this long, sustained uphill takes you up the CDT, towards “The Window.”

The difficulty of the uphill on the CDT is difficult to describe.  It’s the longest, sustained uphill at high elevation (10,000 feet – 12,000 feet) I’ve ever done.  It includes rocks, boulders, scree, downed trees, a little bushwhacking, natural gravel, undulations, loss of the elevation you just gained, only to have to regain it, river fordings, creek crossings, and on and on.

Eventually the hardest uphill begins towards Ute Lake.  This is where we’d been at one point.

This is where we were going.

And there was much more after that as we’d find around the next turn.  This hike covered more than five miles of the most intense backpacking I’ve ever done, climbing from 10,000 feet to around 12,000 feet.  During the hike I was burning through 1 Liter of water every 30-45 minutes.

It’s funny how water controls your thoughts and forces your decisions.  Every decision is based on sources of water.  Every one.  The temptation is to face-plant in the nearest stream you come across, but we resisted that temptation and filtered every time.

We passed some other backpackers who told us that the climb from the trailhead to Ute Lake was two full days.  We had tried to turn two days of climbing into 1.5 days, and it wasn’t working.  I was the holdup, as I’m convinced Joseph and Abe could have made it to Ute Lake, but I couldn’t.  We had crossed as much water as we were going to find before the lake, and had to make it there for our final water for the day and night.

Joseph made the decision to turn around and lose elevation to the nearest stream, and it turned out to be a wise move.  Over the course of the day, between uphill and downhill, we moved around eight miles, gained around 2000 feet, and lost around another 1000 feet over the same scree, boulders, and downed trees we had just crossed.  It might be the roughest day I’ve ever had on the trail.  All of this was done carrying 45-55 pound backpacks on our backs, depending on the amount of water we had at the time.  Water is heavy.

Part of what makes this area rough is the thin air, and the heavy breathing only accelerates the water loss.  We consumed an incredible amount of water, but only pissed once per day right before climbing into our sleeping bags.  Orange.  It was literally impossible to stay hydrated no matter how hard we tried.

The third day we made the decision to make our way out to the trailhead, another eight miles, once again never having to stop to piss.  The drove back into Denver for the night, and on Friday we made a day-hike in the Rocky Mountain National Park to Lake Haiyaha.

Once again, it’s beauty is difficult to put into words.

Lake Haiyaha in the rain.

Dad and Son

Joseph, the hiking machine.

Let’s discuss lessons learned from this adventure, as well as recommendations for equipment and training.

The Gun

I wanted to carry one of my 1911s, but decided that I wanted something more powerful than .45 ACP.  We’ve discussed 450 SMC before (Short Magnum Cartridge), which is the .45 ACP with a rifle primer, leaving more room for powder.  Most guys who shoot the 450 SMC out of 1911s seem to be using a 22# spring rather than the 18# spring that is typical for the 1911, so I ordered a 22# and 24# spring from Wolff Gunsprings.  I also ordered some 450 SMC ammunition, as no gun store anywhere near me carried it.

I wanted to go by Hyatt Gun Shop and talk with Woody before doing this.  Woody knew exactly what I was doing, recommended the 22# spring, and told me I’d be just fine with the ammo in that particular 1911.  “It’s a good gun, it’s all stainless steel, and the rounds are similar in ballistics to the 460 Rowland.  Just hit what you’re aiming at,” he said.  I replied that I’d field stripped it and wasn’t so sure it didn’t already have a 22# spring in it.  He cycled the slide once, and said, “It has the 18# spring in it.  It’s difficult to tell by looking at it.”  Sure enough, it did.

I field stripped my gun, installed the 22# spring, and inserted a 10-round Wilson Combat magazine for ten rounds of 450 SMC.  The 22# spring makes it slightly stiffer to cycle the slide.  We saw plenty of deer, Chipmunks, and other assorted wildlife, but no bear and no moose.  There were times when my partners went on ahead of me and I solo-hiked, but I would have been fine with that setup when in any danger.

Travelling With Firearms, And The Stupidity Of The TSA

We don’t have any complaints against the TSA in Austin, TX.  They seemed relaxed and not too puckered about guns, and used to seeing them.

Charlotte, no so much.  The airline employees who used to check firearms now “feel uncomfortable” doing it, so call a TSA representative.  The TSA employee who checked my gun actually seemed to know something about guns (he remarked that I had a chamber flag in the gun), but he was a bit puckered for my tastes.

He tried to pry open the box, got it a centimeter or two open on one end, and told me it didn’t meet TSA standards because the gun could be taken out of its box.  I doubt it.  I think he was exaggerating.  Fortunately, I had a cable and another lock, so I wrapped the cable around the handle and locked it where he couldn’t pry it open at all.  If I had not had the extra cable and lock I would have missed my flight.

Denver is just downright stupid.  Checking a gun means having a airline employee take your luggage at a glacial pace to another room where it gets put through an X-Ray machine.  She then asked if the gun was unloaded and locked, to which we said “yes,” and then she lets the same airline employee take your luggage back to a conveyor.  At this point he slams it down on the conveyor and walks away leaving the luggage there unattended.  Joseph and I decided to stay with our luggage until the belt started a little later moving our luggage behind the wall.  We weren’t going to walk away until we saw that our luggage had disappeared.

I would have loved to ask the TSA lady what she thought she was looking for.  If this is like every other airport, every piece of luggage is X-Rayed.  But what she accomplished besides the typical X-Ray every piece of luggage gets is beyond me.  All she did was ask us questions the airline employee could have asked.  Our luggage was never opened, the gun was never inspected.  Not, by the way, that I think the TSA regulations make any sense or it’s necessary for the gun to be in any certain configuration or inspected at all.

Let’s face it, folks.  Since we are dropping off the luggage and we are picking it up, the only necessity for the luggage to be locked up is what happens behind the wall.  The only good of locking up the gun is theft by airport employees.  We know it, the TSA knows it, and the airlines know it.  It’s the truth.  None of this has anything to do with security.  It’s all about airport theft by airline or airport employees.

From there we went to the Denver security checkpoint.  One TSA employee was running up and down the line, up and down the line, up and down the line, back and forth, to and fro, with a dog (presumably a bomb-sniffing dog) stopping whenever the dog wanted to stop.  One lady turned to me and said, “It makes me so scared to go anywhere these days.”

I responded, “I’m not scared.  This is all theater, designed and built to make you think certain things.”  She gave me a puzzled look and moved on.  When asked for my driver’s license, I showed it to the TSA employee, who then said “take it out of your wallet” (it had a window).  I rolled my eyes, which apparently he didn’t like.

He said, “Always take it out.  How we ‘posed to know if it’s paper or not?  Rememba ‘dat.”  My immediate thought was “How are you ‘posed to know whether any information I’m presenting to you is real rather than a complete fabrication, you imperious imbecile?”  I didn’t say that as it would have caused me to miss my flight.  I pick my fights.

Lessons Learned (And Relearned)

The temperature varied between 40 and 70 degrees F, and we ran into some rain.  I cannot say enough about the best parka I have been able to find, which is made by a fishing company.  My particular parka is no longer made, but one similar to it is.  It’s expensive, but it was worth every penny.  I like to buy mine “blousy” to fit fleece or other clothing underneath it.

Put my water filter in an attachment bag on the outside of my backpack.  It drips water just a little and I don’t like the contents of my backpack getting wet.

From the picture above you can see that I carried my gun in a Hill People bag on my chest.  This works for a while but after three days it began to bother me.  In the future I’ll rig up a holster to my backpack belt with zip ties or some other method for carry.

I carried a tactical light.  In the future I won’t.  When ounces matter, aluminum light housing and batteries are at a premium for weight.  It’s a big commitment to carry that weight, even if the light is fairly small.  There is no point in using a tactical light in camp.  It’s so bright that it’s blinding.  Headlamps and small lights are fine for camp, and the only need for a tactical light is on your gun rail with a single 123 battery (like my Streamlight).

Don’t go cheap on important equipment like a hydration pack.  Joseph and Abe had good ones.  I didn’t, and I suffered for it.  Water (and the ability to get to it) is everything.

The importance of trekking poles.  Joseph and Abe didn’t use trekking poles, but I did.  I couldn’t have made the hike without them.  My triceps doubled for another set of thighs.

Equipment.  We are all experienced backpackers and hikers.  We all have either Keen or Oboz boots.  There may be other good ones out there, but I advise against experimentation.  Get the best.  Many of my readers like tactical equipment.  But mostly, tactical equipment sucks.  The civilian backpacking community has more money to spend, has done more research, and has invested more time and energy into making better equipment than the military community.  Dump your combat boots and get Keen or Oboz.  Keen for a slightly wider foot, Oboz for a more narrow or normal foot like mine.

All three of us were running Osprey 50L backpacks.  Dump your tactical packs, folks.  They’re no good.  No one who does this carries tactical packs.  No one.  No one on the trail has something like that.  If you’re running combat boots, you’re destroying your feet for no good reason.  If you’re running tactical packs, you’re destroying your spine for no good reason except that you’re unable to break with the community that trained you.  The community that trained you gave you equipment that sucks.  Accept that, and change.

Teamwork.  The slowest man holds everyone up.  I know that.  I was the slowest man.  In camp, everyone has to pull his own weight.  There are no slouches on the trail.  There’s too much to do.  Making camp means processing wood for a fire, filtering water, setting up tents and/or tarps, preparing food and a host of other things.  We divided responsibilities and got busy when we dropped our packs.  There are no socialists in the bush.

Because it means hard work, responsibility and productivity, meeting obligations and learning to survive, every man who is capable should do this with their sons.  What?  You didn’t think that Marines are made by the US Marine Corps, did you?  That’s completely false.  Marines are made by fathers.  The Corps just sharpens the blade.

Carry multiple means of fire starter on different parts of your body or kit.  If one gets wet, you have another.  That happened to me on this trip.

Physical conditioning is everything.  To prepare for this trip I hiked, biked, worked out in the gym three or four days a week, and swam.  My preparations seemed endless.  For a 58 year old man with rheumatoid arthritis, I did okay.  But I was equivalent to other hikers on the trail.  In other words, I couldn’t turn what most of the hikers know to be a two day climb into a one and a half day climb.  The rocks, boulders, scree, streams, rivers, downed trees and thin air worked too hard against me.

A moment of honesty is in order.  Some folks in the patriot community talk about wearing body armor, whether soft or plate.  Don’t even discuss that, don’t even consider that, if you can’t strap on a 50 pound pack and make a climb, perhaps not this difficult, but one like it.

You might be able to shoot 1 MOA, but if you’re injured or dead, you’re no good to anybody.  Every part of my body hurt – triceps, hips, thighs, back, everything.  When you’re exhausted, you make moves that aren’t supported by the muscles, and twisting moves especially can cause real problems for your frame.  Get in shape, or drop the notions of suiting up in armor.  It won’t help you if you can’t carry it. Muscle strength is good, and while I used to be on the powerlifting team in college, I’ve lost some of that muscle mass.  Fitness can partially make up for loss of muscle mass over the years, but nothing can make up for lack of fitness.

Gloves.  I wore Mechanix Impact gloves, and as I had to pound and hit the boulders more than once to keep my balance, it saved my hands.

Finally and again, the TSA is an irredeemable clown show.

Conclusion

“For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills … And everything that moves in the field is mine … For the world is mine, and all it contains.”

God is the maker of all I saw, of everything I admired and everything that astonished me.  He has made it for His glory, and for my edification.  He had made the world to give it over to mankind for his own dominion according to His holy law.

What men may think about where this all came from is of no consequence to God, who scoffs at His detractors.  Our opinions only have consequences for us and will be our judgment.  I am thankful to the Almighty for giving me this opportunity to honor and worship Him in this way.  He is the God of the universe, and my personal Lord.  Even if he slays me, yet will I serve Him.

We’ve been addressing the issue of a new front in the war on guns, specifically as it relates both to gun manufacturers being squeezed by banks and shareholder actions concerning gun companies.  It’s tempting to see this as a spurious set of events.  The anti-gun lobby sees something that happens to garner attention, and decides to do it again to see if it garners the same attention or effect.

It’s not spurious.  This is all part of a coordinated strategy within the gun controller community.  The Brady Campaign lays it out for us.

As companies have taken positions on climate change, anti-discrimination, anti-harassment, family leave, and other socially responsible causes, it has helped to both place these issues in the forefront of the media and pressure other public and private industry members to adopt the same policies. In recent months, corporate attention has turned to America’s gun violence problem as a recognized public health epidemic that kills 96 Americans and injures another 200 or more each day.

[ … ]

An increasing amount of business leaders, investors, and corporate board members are not only cognizant of the toll of gun violence, but are also determined to lead by example. Dick’s Sporting Goods, Citigroup, Bank of America, Kroger’s, and L.L. Bean, among others, have announced policies that address this uniquely American problem.

Here we see corporations not as products of hard work, innovation, or even skilled workers who need to earn a living by the sweat of their brow.  Corporations are tools and agents of social change, regardless of what it does to the company itself or the value built by hard work over time.  Companies approached by the gun controllers should heed this warning.  The Brady Campaign has told you in no uncertain terms that they don’t care about the health of your company – the only value you add is your assets to be used for the purposes outlined by the controllers.

Aurora. Sandy Hook. San Bernardino. Pulse. Sutherland Springs. Las Vegas. Parkland. For how different these mass shootings were, they all have one thing in common: the shooters chose assault weapons. Shooters are purposefully outfitting themselves with the latest and best military-grade weapons and accessories …

Of course, this was all written prior to the recent shooting in Texas where the shooter used a shotgun and wheel gun, but that won’t change a thing concerning their strategy.  After mentioning Dick’s Sporting Goods, The Brady Campaign outlines some of their recent successes.

Walmart, another major gun retailer, ended its sale of assault rifles in mid-2015, citing low customer demand for weapons of this nature at their stores. Likewise, REI has suspended orders of certain products where the manufacturer is affiliated with a company making assault rifles.

And it’s not just retailers that are making significant changes to their policies on assault weapons. In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. Bank of America announced it had engaged in “intense conversations” with gun manufacturers, and determined it would cease lending to any companies that make assault weapons for civilian purposes. Additionally, payment processing companies facilitating transactions like PayPal, Square, Stripe, and Apple Pay have all pledged to disallow their services for any firearm sales.

They also mention Blackrock, Citigroup, Fred Meyer, LL Bean, Kroger and other stores who have implemented what they call “gun reform” policies concerning who they do business with.

They go on to outline their proposals for “gun reform,” including [a] a renewed assault weapons ban, [b] an increase in the legal age for purchasing guns, [c] universal background checks, [d] “securing the supply chain,” and [e] advocating publicity for legal “reform.”

They don’t stop there.  They advocate the power of shareholder participation in corporations as well as legal pressure to force gun manufacturers and FFLs to conduct reporting on their political lobbying, their investments in so-called “smart gun technology,” and amusingly, this: “Report on their factual basis for advertisements that suggest guns are effective for personal protection compared to risks associated with gun ownership.”

If it’s easy to see the recent actions by Sturm & Ruger shareholders and Bank of America as spurious, it’s also easy to be dismissive about these efforts.  But make no mistake, these efforts are well funded, and moreover, the controllers have a nexus in the leadership of corporations.  Much of the upper level management, as well as HR and legal departments, has been steeped in collectivist ideology for their entire educational career.  Their world and life view are similar, if not the same.

It’s also easy to respond that “we can buy stock too,” as well as to claim that we or gun manufacturers can function in a bank-less society.  As to those claims, concerning buying stock too, it’s one thing to make boasts, and another to spend the money.  As to the ability to function in a bank-less society, it isn’t readily apparent what form this would take or how it would work.

If more odious gun laws are a direct frontal assault on God-given rights to firearms ownership, this whole effort is a well-coordinated, well-rehearsed, determined and organized enfilade assault.  This is a flaking maneuver, and it’s not apparent that gun owners or even gun manufacturers see this assault or are prepared to defend against it.

Sun Tzu recommended that in war, we “know our enemies.”  Listening to them when they divulge their strategy is certainly part of this.

Prior:

Remington Exits Bankruptcy

Response From Ruger CEO

Henry Repeating Arms On Dick’s Sporting Goods

Analysis Of Ruger Shareholder Vote

The Next Installment Of The War Between Amalgamated Bank And Ruger

Amalgamated Bank Pressures Ruger To Support Gun Control Measures

Please, Please Buy This Gun Company

Bank Of America Simply Hasn’t Shown Enough Contrition For The Gun Controllers Yet

Mossberg And MKS Break Ties With Dick’s Sporting Goods

It’s A Multi-Front Banker War On Gun Owners

Every time a new contract is issued for weapons and ammunition, the typical cacophony of comments follow.  Those who think that the FedGov has too many guns and too much ammunition weigh in, and invariably (perhaps some of them are trolls or paid commenters?) some people weigh in with support.

Terrorism.  Bad people.  Every agent with a gun needs range rounds and personal defense (PD) ammunition (JHP or whatever).  Think of how many rounds you shoot per year, and multiply that times the number of agents, blah, blah, blah.

The commenters yammer and yak and go on about how we need to support law enforcement, not understanding the deeper meaning of things.  That was true of the recently released contract on behalf of the DHS.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently awarded Federal Premium a major ammunition contract. Starting delivery in 2018, the contract provides for up to 180 million rounds of .40-cal. Tactical HST duty ammunition to multiple Department of Homeland Security law enforcement components and other federal agencies for up to five years. This contract will provide the organization’s agents and officers with .40 cal. duty and training ammunition.

“Law enforcement and federal agencies put it all on the line for our safety and freedoms,” said Mike Holm, said product director at Federal Premium.” They should expect nothing less from their ammunition.”

Notice the sleight of hand?  “Multiple Department of Homeland Security law enforcement components and other federal agencies.”  While wrapped in a patriotic cloak of border security, this contract so hidden as to its real import that you have no idea what’s in it or who receives the ammunition or for what purpose.

I suspect various commenters will come to the rescue of the FedGov on this one as well (I’ve seen it every time something like this is announced), but the fact remains that 180 million rounds is a lot of PD ammunition.  Note: this isn’t range ammo – it’s duty ammo.  I have faced the usual suspects before, like “Well, the FedGov has to protect the American nuclear facilities.”

No, I reply, go back and try again.  Commercial nuclear power plants owned by utilities in America must provide their own security, and sometimes they are utility employees, while sometimes they are contract workers.  But always, the FedGov has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Next up, “Well, FedGov must supply security for our nuclear weapons facilities.”  No, try again, I reply.  The real shooting in any incident effecting our nuclear weapons facilities will be done by Marine Corps FAST teams, and if you’re stupid enough to perpetrate an incident against such a target, you’re likely to be staring down the barrel of a Mark 19, operated by men who, as the Gunny would say, are “Ministers of death, praying for war,” and just waiting on someone like you.  I know some of them (or at one time I did).

Finally, the commenters always mention our national laboratories, and I’ve visited multiple labs on multiple occasions.  Most of the security is done by contract employees, and doesn’t get counted in any of the weapons or ammo purchases made by FedGov.

It is against this backdrop that this insightful report must be read.

In the aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack, many Washington politicians tried to shift the conversation to the Second Amendment and called for an assault weapons bans. But former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, our Honorary Chairman, had another idea. In this interview on CNBC, Coburn said we should improve our system of background checks, but said it was IRS officials and non-military federal personnel who should be subject to an assault weapons ban, not the general public.

This week, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com released our findings in an editorial at The Wall Street Journal that quantified the growing federal arsenal. The number of non-military federal officers with arrest and firearm authority (200,000+) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). Spending on guns, ammo and military-style equipment at 67 federal agencies – including 53 regulatory, administrative agencies amounted to $1.48 billion between 2006-2014.

The IRS gun-locker is an example  of this growing federal firepower. Nearly $11 million was spent on guns, ammo and military-style equipment for 2,316 ‘special agents’ during this period. The IRS stockpile includes pump-action and semi-automatic shotguns with buckshot and slugs; and semi-automatic AR-15 rifles (S&W M&P 15) and military-style H&K 416 rifles. (See the OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – The Militarization of America.)

The recent growth of the federal arsenal begs the questions: Just who are the feds planning to battle?

In 1996, the Bureau of Justice Statistics officially counted 74,500 federal officers who had arrest and firearm authority. By 2008, the Bureau quantified over 120,000 such officers. Newly updated counts were supposed to publish by this July but the Bureau now admits that over 80% of federal agencies ignored or stonewalled responses to their latest survey. What are they trying to hide?

Even though our organization at OpenTheBooks.com estimated the number of non-Department of Defense federal officers at 200,000+, the current number of non-military federal officers and security personnel could be much larger. Here’s why:

• The feds refuse to disclose the number of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers, claiming a national security exception.
• The growth of officers within the 53 administrative, regulatory agencies since 2008 is uncertain. Our officer count estimate used a no-growth figure of 30,000 – the same count as in 2008.
• Likewise, the count within the Department of Homeland Security is unclear. We found conflicting sources citing figures at 70,000 and 63,000. We used the more conservative figure for our analysis.

At Health and Human Services (HHS), it’s also unclear just how many ‘special agents’ are currently employed. Yet, research uncovered a multi-million-dollar program for HHS ‘Office of Inspector General Special Agents’ that used a sophisticated military-style weapons platform with Special Forces contractors training the agents on domestic special operations.

Today, HHS is operating from a brand new “National Training Operations Center” within the Washington, D.C. area they describe as “an operational readiness, emergency response, crisis room and command post for HHS headquarters and staff.” That’s serious business for an agency supposedly preoccupied with “health” matters.

The author, Adam Andrzejewski, goes on, and you can read the entire report at Forbes.  But the founders were opposed to standing armies for good reason.

So if America’s founders would be disappointed in the United States today, how much of that disappointment, if any, might be directed at the military and what has come to be known as national security affairs? It is a question especially worthy of our attention, since the American people have repeatedly said in polls that, of society’s major institutions, the military is the one they most trust.

Let us start with the Preamble to the Constitution. Whatever the framers’ intent, however aspirational the wording, and notwithstanding the fact that national security wasn’t part of the vernacular of the day, the Preamble stands as America’s enduring security credo.

Its importance is essentially threefold. It lists providing for the common defense (in lower-case letters) as merely one — not the first, not the most important — of the national aims the governing apparatus called for by the Constitution seeks to achieve. Semantically, it captures the normative essence of military affairs as self-defense (not aggression, not power projection). And it thereby implicitly cautions against purchasing defense at the expense of these other strategic priorities — national unity, justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, liberty.

[ … ]

Madison famously provided one of the most powerful statements ever on war:

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Today, we live in a state of constant, potentially endless war — always, without exception, undeclared; invariably by choice (rhetorically disguised as necessity); frequently in secret (to increase the license to act, while minimizing oversight and accountability); often labeled war (to engender fear and urgency), but just as often labeled something other than war (for reasons of expediency, convenience and legal circumvention); initiated and prosecuted by a now permanently imperial presidency, largely devoid of congressional consultation and consent before the fact, sometimes even with minimal congressional notification after the fact.

Such concentration of executive power, such abrogation of legislative authority and responsibility, such marginalization of popular consent would seem to be the ingredients of tyrannical government the founders said the people had the right and the duty to overthrow.

It’s instructive and expedient to understand the FedGov and its actions under 3P’s: [1] Protect, [2] Perpetuate, and [3] Promote.  It isn’t by accident that the FedGov wants a disarmed population and continually presses gun control (supported all the way by the court system up to and including the SCOTUS).  A disarmed population is a corollary and a couple to government control and subjugation of the people.  An armed population cannot be subjugated – and thus the population must be disarmed.  It all works together, and without each part none of it works.

But in America that’s difficult, so one answer to the difficulty is to arm the FedGov better and with more.  Note well that the rulership has created a caste system of peasants who will protect the FedGov because it’s their livelihood.  Too old and not in good enough shape to join the military, and not desirous of the decrease in income, there is nothing much else a gun toting agent can do except work for the government.  Family support is a strong motivator, and provision for wife and children can cause all sorts of word twisting and reinterpretation of oaths and vows.  The job of this peasant class is to keep the other peasants in check.  It is to protect the rulership.

The rulership by its very nature perpetuates itself by patronage and largesse to its families, friends and allies.  This is the value of high taxation and federal ownership of land.  Finally, promotion of the FedGov and rulership occurs via the public education system where willing subjects are molded, and also through the MSM where willing “journalists” parrot talking points.

There are those who say that the constitution contained in it the seeds of this despair and destruction.  And there are those who say that we need a new constitution because the last one failed.  While I am no defender of the notion that the constitution was infallible or perfect, I don’t subscribe to this being the ailment or the proposed remedy.

If I’ve tried to teach anything in these last years, it’s that men are to blame.  The constitution is a covenant, or agreement with the appurtenant blessings and cursings for obedience and disobedience, respectively.  It is nothing more, and nothing less.  We don’t get rights to ownership of weapons from the second amendment – we get them from the very fountain of rights, the Almighty Himself.

But America has broken covenant with the Almighty.  After this, everything else is duck soup.  It’s easy to break covenant with men when you have no fear of God.  Blaming the constitution for the malfeasance of men is like blaming the marriage covenant for an adulterous spouse, and demanding a new marriage covenant because the last one let your spouse engage in infidelity is demanding more of the same and expecting a promise to mean something to an adulterer.

To answer the question posed by the author, “Just who are the feds planning to battle?,” the answer is that the answer is crystal clear for those who would see it.

Prior Featured: AR-15 Ammunition And Barrel Twist Rate

There are a lot of articles and discussion forum threads on barrel twist rate for AR-15s.  So why am I writing one?  Well, some of the information on the web is very wrong.  Additionally, this closes out comment threads we’ve had here touching on this topic, EMail exchanges I’ve had with readers, and personal conversations I’ve had with shooters and friends about this subject.  It’s natural to put this down in case anyone else can benefit from the information.  Or you may not benefit at all.  That’s up to you.

This is a discussion about 5.56mm ammunition and barrel twist rates (and later, about the shooter and ammunition quality).  If you wish to debate the effectiveness of the 5.56mm round generally, or wish to disparage the choice of the Eugene Stoner system, I’m sure there are forums for you.  This is not it.

In the real world, ammunition isn’t concentric, and even if it is almost precisely concentric, pour density can be slightly different throughout the ball, and voids can develop.  This causes gyroscopic stability problems with bullets, even in the best manufactured ammunition. But much ammunition would not be considered the “best manufactured ammunition.”  Ammunition will only be as good as the QA under which it was made.

When center of gravity is off-axis it can cause bullet lateral throwoff, yaw and a host of other problems with bullet trajectory.  In order to overcome these problems, rifling twist achieves this gyroscopic stability for the bullet, thus negating the effects of the manufacturing process (at least in part).

Overstabilization can occur with a barrel twist rate that is too high.  There are incorrect commentaries out there on this subject.  This writer explains that higher twist rate is virtually always better.

Conventional wisdom taught us that slower twist rates wouldn’t properly-stabilize a bullet, causing it to yaw. On the other hand, faster rates could over-stabilize lighter bullets, causing similar problems. This is correct in theory—however, modern ballisticians have pretty much de-bunked the over-stabilization theory as a practical matter. All things being equal, it is better to have too much twist than not enough.

While his statement is a bit imprecise, there is something very precise about it.  It is precisely wrong.  Yet there are much cleaner and simpler explanations of why high twist rate is not always good.  One commenter at this discussion thread summed it up well.

You can certainly overstablilze (sic) a bullet if you spin it so fast it doesn’t nose over at the top of its trajectory … Best thing to do is not spin bullets any faster than what’s needed for best accuracy.

Correct.  If a bullet is overstabilized, it tends to stay pointed along its axis of rotation, even on the final (downward) part of its trajectory.  This can cause keyholing, odd aerodynamic effects (flying sideways through the air) and even bullets to wildly spin off trajectory.

Above it was noted that displaced CoG can cause gyroscopic stability problems, including “lateral throw-off.”  This figure is given to us by Paul Weinacht in his paper for the U.S. Army (Army Research Laboratory, ARL-TR-3015) entitled Prediction of Projectile Performance, Stability, and Free-Flight Motion Using Computational Fluid Dynamics (Figure 9).

Or if you wish to visualize what this might look like in 3D … Dean and LaFontaine, Small Caliber Lethality: 5.56mm Performance in Close Quarters Battle.

Bullets from rifled barrels eventually achieve stability by yawing back and forth, while undergoing a larger revolution about the major axis of the trajectory.  So quite obviously, it’s necessary to spin the bullet, and to spin it enough to give it stability, while protecting the need to nose over on the final part of its trajectory.  Getting this twist rate and spin right has been a matter of much testing, internet fights, and lot of engineering study and heavy spending by the taxpayers.  I know that my guns perform well, and so I decided to contact my manufacturer for his opinion on the matter.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have two Rock River Arms rifles, one Elite CAR A4 with a 16″ Barrel, twist 1:9, Quad Rail, and another competition gun with a muzzle brake and 18″ SS barrel with a twist rate = 1:8.  I have recommended RRA rifles to my readers before, but there are many good guns on the market.  Your probably have one.  I sent a list of three questions to RRA, and Steve gave me these responses (the question isn’t included because it wasn’t forwarded back to me, but it’s apparent what I asked except for the first question, which was basically does RRA warranty their 1 MOA for both M193 and M855.  This is Steve’s response.

Herschel,

Thanks for your questions.  I’m going to take them in reverse order.

3.  1:9 is adequate for many, but not all rounds typically used in an AR platform.  Between .223 Remington and 5.56mm NATO, there are rounds from 45 to 90 grains (that I am familiar with) and I know of, but have never shot, lighter and heavier rounds.  No single twist is going to handle all of them.  1:9 is adequate for a sizable number of them, however…including the two most commonly available, in bulk and at reasonable prices…55gr FMJ (M193)and 62/63gr FMJ (M855).  It is not ideal for rounds lighter than 50gr nor those over 68 or 69 grains, which is why there are other twist rates commonly available…including from RRA. We offer a 1:12 24” bull barrel for our Varmint hunters who prefer to use the lighter bullets for prairie dogs and other targets, and both 1:7 and 1:8 barrels in a variety of configurations for those who want to shoot heavier bullets…up to and including the newer 77gr loads and 80gr VLDs.  We’ve also run custom twists for a limited number of contracted purchases.

2.  Yes.  1:9 does well with both M193 and M855.  Different barrels perform differently, but 1:9 generally stabilizes both weight/length bullets fairly well,  It neither over nor under spins either and does not produce key holing.

1.  The hardest question to answer.  Neither M193 nor M855 are notoriously accurate rounds.  They meet military, not match, requirements.  Our accuracy claims are the rifle’s capability…but the shooter and ammo have to do their parts.  There are loads that are commercially available and claimed to be “M193” and “M855” equivalents that clearly aren’t, and they aren’t  capable of  ”minute of bad guy” at 100 yards, let alone the .75 to 1.5 MOA claims that we make for our different rifles.  That is no reflection on our rifles or barrels, or the shooters…unfortunately there is some real crappy ammo on the market today, which will not perform well out of any barrel, of any twist rate.

Thanks.

Steve/RRA

This is a good response, but let’s not stop here.  While perhaps not recalled by some, American Rifleman has given us a fairly comprehensive look at 5.56mm ammunition and barrel twist rates in an article entitled Testing The Army’s M855A1 Standard Ball Cartridge.  It is rich with history on how the Army fielded the M855A1.  Ignore the issue of the M855 versus the M855A1 for a moment and consider the background.

Accuracy cannot be assessed without addressing the rifle barrels’ twist-rates. In the early 1980s the M855’s 62-grain bullet was developed for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). For purposes of interoperability, the same load was adopted as the M16A2 rifle’s standard ball as well. A February 1986 U.S. Army study noted that the M855’s bullet required a “1:9 twist [which] would be more appropriate for the M16A2 rifle, improving accuracy and reliability.” Multiple studies confirmed the 1:9-inch twist requirement.

But then a problem arose. The U.S. military’s standard M856 5.56 mm tracer round was longer, heavier (63.7 grains) and slower than the M855 ball, and simply would not stabilize with a 1:9-inch twist barrel. Thus, despite it doubling M855 group sizes, the M16A2 (and later, the M4) specified a 1:7-inch rate-of-twist barrel to stabilize the tracer round. It remains so to this day. Therefore, M855A1 was test-fired with both 1:7- and 1:9-inch twist barrels, and it was verified that this new cartridge is consistently more accurate in the latter barrels-as was its predecessor.

Don’t slip past these paragraphs, because they explain why “Milspec” is 1:7.  It isn’t because 1:7 shoots M193 or M855 more accurately.  It’s because of the weight of tracer rounds.  As we’ve discussed before, the term Milspec doesn’t mean better, or worse, or anything at all except that it precisely meets the specifications outlined in the purchase order(s), excepting whatever variance notifications they might make on a given batch of guns.

The M855A1’s developers have described it as yielding “match-like” accuracy, which most rifle shooters would define as one minute-of-angle (m.o.a.), or groups measuring no more than 1 inch at 100 yards. While the new ammunition has proved more accurate than the green-tipped load it replaced, testing did not yield match-like accuracy, especially in the standard 1:7-inch twist-rate found in today’s M4s and M16s. At 100 yards, the best group with a 1:7-inch barrel was 1.62 inches (1.6 m.o.a.). At 300 yards. it similarly fired 1.6 m.o.a. (4.9 inches) and widened to 1.8 m.o.a. (7.5 inches) at 400 yards. At these same distances, firing the M855A1 through a 1:9-inch twist barrel reduced group sizes by approximately half.

The tests demonstrated that 1:9 twist produced better accuracy, approximately twice as accurate.  Now take note what the testers found with the newer M855A1 regarding repeatability.

On average, the new ammunition produced one flyer in roughly each five rounds, which, it can be argued, exaggerated the group sizes. Since the Army announced that, “On average, 95 percent of the [M855A1] rounds will hit an 8×8-inch target at 600 meters,” each group’s most errant bullet impact was discarded and group sizes recalculated. Statistically they improved, but not enough to place 95 percent of rounds so close at 600 meters, at least when using the standard 1:7-inch barrel-which may explain why accuracy was less than expected.

There is one “flyer” in every five rounds.  This seems to me to be a significant problem with this ammunition combined with the barrel twist, and the commenters don’t seem to like it very much either.  Finally, this.

When U.S. Army shooters twice fired public demonstrations of the new round, they did not employ standard 1:7-inch twist M16A2s or M4s, but accurized, match-grade, stainless-barreled rifles from the Army Marksmanship Unit (AMU). I contacted the AMU and learned that these rifles did not have standard-issue 1:7-inch barrels, but most likely 1:8-inch twist, which probably accounts for their “match-like” accuracy.

Isn’t that rich?  The Army made claims of “match-like accuracy,” and proved the rounds shooting out of different barrels than are deployed with Soldiers, using 1:8 twist, not 1:7 twist.

The American Rifleman article goes on to discuss in some detail the performance of the M855A1 with slim-profiled targets like malnourished tribal fighters in Afghanistan (so-called “ice picking” the target without fragmentation), performance at barrier penetration (concluding that it is better than its predecessor), and its lethality once it does penetrate barriers.  I recommend this reading to you.  It’s well worth the time.

So to summarize what we know, remember some basic things.  First, the bullet has to be spun to give it gyroscopic stability.  This spin needs to match the bullet (including mass and length), and care must be taken not to over-stabilize the bullet.  If you shoot typical .223 ammunition (55 gr.), or M193 or M855, a twist rate of 1:9 is probably just about ideal.  You’ll probably lose some accuracy with a higher twist rate.

This loss of accuracy is likely not significant for a lot of shooters.  If you shoot much heavier ammunition (and there is a lot on the market), you probably need to consider a twist rate of 1:8.  Finally, none of this matches the value of good ammunition or good shooting.

That’s the good news.  Most guns can outperform the shooter, and I know that’s the case with me.  I’m a decent shooter.  Not great, but decent.  I’ve taken my Tikka T3 .270 bolt action rifle and literally put rounds through the same hole at 100 yards (with slightly more tearing of the same hole in the paper).  On the other hand, this is with a good scope, no wind, a cool and comfortable day, all day to work my craft and thus no time pressure, no one else to be concerned about, lots of coffee to wake up, and a full belly.

But if I had kept records, it wouldn’t have happened again exactly like that since, theoretically, even with perfect ammunition, considering barrel harmonics and that physical processes like this are a heuristic phenomenon, if I had continued to log my shots this way, it would have doubtless shown a standard distribution (distance between each shot and mean).

But regardless of the details, you’ve done it before.  Control breathing … get good sight picture … back out of the shot if you’re not mentally right … know where your trigger breaks … and so on.  You know the drill, since you’ve done it many times.  It’s perhaps the purest pleasure a shooter can have.

Now throw in simple annoyances like a whining partner at the range, losing daylight and time pressures, hunger, and any of the other 100 possible nuisances that can sap your accuracy.  Then your accuracy goes to hell, doesn’t it?  Now, combine that with wearing heavy gear and being shot at, and I’m sure it diminishes your control over your weapon.  Thankfully, I only have the experiences of my former Marine son conveyed to me.

The good part of this is that regardless of your barrel twist rate, if your AR-15 is reliable, even if it’s not top of the line, it can probably outperform you.  That means getting better isn’t a matter of getting a new rifle or barrel with a different twist.  It means practicing with your rifle, sometimes under duress.  It also means buying good ammunition.  Steve at RRA is right.  The shooter and ammo have to do their part.  I object to cheap ammunition just like I object to cheap engine oil.  I’m trying to develop the discipline at the store or online to buy better ammunition.

Right, I’ve got it.  I feel your objection.  Good ammunition (e.g., Hornady $2 per round .270 for my Tikka) hurts.  This is my wealth, and it’s hard to part ways with it since it’s hard to earn it.  But using bad ammunition at the range makes it hard to impossible to assess your practice.  Use of my value pack Federal .223 at the range means that my accuracy is irrelevant if I’m using the same reticle holdovers I would for 5.56mm since the muzzle velocity is different (and very slightly lower than the 5.56mm).  You’ve got the picture.

The best way to get better accuracy is probably not to get a better gun.  It’s to practice with the one you’ve got.

Here is a related video I found interesting on gyroscopic stability.  He’s wrong about the math being incomprehensible, but it is rather difficult if you’re involved with partial differentials or worse, the Navier-Stokes equations in CFD.  You need some specialized training in mathematics in order to tackle that.  You don’t have to know any of that in order to understand the basics of shooting.

This discussion probably won’t end the debate on barrel twist rate, and it certainly won’t end the fight between the Army and Marine Corps (who doesn’t want to deploy the M855A1).  But I hope it was helpful to you.

Prior:

Considerations In Selecting AR-15 Ammunition

Army And Marines In No Rush To Chamber A Common 5.56mm Round

A New Cartridge For The Army?

Army And Marine Corps On M855 Ammunition

AR-15 Animation

Why I Abandoned The AR-15

Does AR-15 Barrel Length Matter?

$3000 Versus $1000 AR-15

Eugene Stoner And Jim Sullivan On AR-15 Engineering And Design

What Length AR-15 Barrel?

Several examples of Christians opposing all violence and means of self defense have been in the news lately, and I can’t deal with all such examples.  But three particular examples come to mind, and I first want to show you one example from Mr. Robert Schenck in a ridiculously titled article, Christ or a Glock.

“Well, first of all you’re making an immediate decision that if someone invades your home, they are going to die,” Rev. Schenck replied. “So you are ready to kill another human being in your home. That brings about a big ethical question for the Christian. And we’re told in the Bible, we’re even to love our enemies.”

“Even a potential intruder? Someone who’s been coming into your home to hurt you?”

“Absolutely. Is it always God’s will that I survive a violent confrontation with another human being? I’m not sure that’s always God’s will.”

Before we address this tangled web of confusion, let’s bring up another example from Mr. Benjamin Corey who has a commentary up at Patheos entitled The Serious Problems With Using Ecclesiastes 3 To Justify Christian Support Of War & Violence.

I thought I had addressed all of the counter arguments over the years, but a new one is emerging and being used more and more frequently: the use of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 to justify the Christian’s support of war and violence.

[ … ]

So, here’s how this is starting to be used in Christian discussions about guns, war, and violence: When Christian A puts forth the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, Christian B retorts by posting this passage in reply. The inferred argument is, “Jesus couldn’t have really meant that, because Ecclesiastes says there’s a time to kill and a time for war.”

First, it ignores Jesus! The act of rebutting Jesus using other passages of Scripture should be a major red flag in the mind of any believer. If Jesus is the living Word of God and the Wisdom of God, then we begin with what Jesus taught us. This is what makes us Christians instead of Biblicists– we follow the teachings of our Lord and Savior. When one rejects the face value teaching and example of Christ in favor of other passages or people in Scripture, it’s a good indication that such a person may like Jesus the Savior but not Jesus the Lord– and unfortunately, this thing is a package deal.

Let’s expand on Benjamin’s views on guns in a previous commentary entitled Some Serious Questions I Have For All Those Good Guys With Guns.

So, you’re a good guy with a gun. I get it. I’ve seen the bumper sticker, heard the slogan a million times, and I even used to be one of you. I’m retired military, was an expert marksman, and was even awarded the Bronze Schützenschnur by the German army.

I was a bonafide good guy with a gun for most of my adult life thus far. But even in my most pro-gun days, the entire American motif of a good guy with a gun made me ask some hard questions– and left me feeling less and less comfortable with the whole concept.

I appreciate the basic sentiment of it all, really. I want my family to live in safety as well, and my desire-meter ranks precisely zero for how badly I’d like to die while standing in line at the deli.

However, this idea that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun is really over-simplified. In fact, I think it is dangerously over-simplified and should really invite some hard questions for those would-be good guys with guns.

The first question this invites is, where will you keep it? Studies show that the presence of a gun in the home increases the likelihood that someone will get shot. Further, we have a growing problem in America of toddlers shooting people with guns they stumble upon. Will you at least keep it locked up in a gun safe where kids can’t access it?

I hope you’ll be that reasonable. But, if you do keep it locked up in a safe because you don’t want your kids getting their hands on it, that invites another question: What good would that do you in an emergency? I mean, having it inconveniently out of reach under lock and key sorta defeats the entire point, no?

But let’s say you resolve that issue– perhaps you’ll be one of those good guys with a gun who carries it everywhere. You strap it safely to your hip, have a hollow point in the chamber, and you’re locked and loaded. That too invites a whole additional line of questioning.

Perhaps the biggest question it invites is this: What qualifies you to be a good guy with a gun who is ready to end a human life at a moment’s notice? Is there some special qualification, or is the mere fact that you think highly of your personal character all the qualification you need?

Some states (like my home state of Maine) require no training at all to be a good guy with a concealed gun, while others require some sort of basic gun safety training. Let’s say you took one of these basic courses: Does a few hours or even a few days of training qualify you to be making life or death decisions in a split second while shopping in Walmart?

If it does, why do the military and law enforcement constantly train? Why not give our professional good guys a few hours of training on a Saturday, hand them a gun, and call it good?

Let’s give the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and consider that you’re an expert on gun safety and an expert marksman. That still leaves a bigger question: Have you taken “kill or no kill” training? Like, lots and lots of it where you decide if someone lives or dies, on the spot and in less than a second? Because that’s what you’ll have to do in real life as a good guy with a gun.

It’s one thing to be a decent person who owns a gun and is trained on the mechanics of how to use it, but what about split-second judgement calls when a human life is in the balance? This is why professional arms bearers repeatedly take kill or no kill training– it’s not enough to be ready to shoot, one needs to have the ability to decide if to shoot at all.

Let me ask you a hypothetical: let’s say you’re standing in the movie isle at Walmart and you hear gunfire and people screaming. You quickly remember that you’re a good guy with a gun, so you draw your weapon and run to the end of the isle. Once you get there, you see a guy with his own gun drawn, and is pointing it in the opposite direction as you.

Do you kill him while you have a clean shot?

Oh my.  The confusion with Benjamin is neck deep, and it’s going to take some time and effort to sort this out.  Before we begin, I know that I have a number of readers who aren’t Christians.  That’s great, and I’m happy to host you in my small and humble home.  This may be a bit boring to you, but you should care anyway.  Men like this not only influence public policy, but they effectively disarm much of the Christian public with their advocacy, this disarming have the effect of making them vulnerable to literally anyone who comes along armed.  Witness the kidnapping of those poor girls at the hands of Boko Haram, or the extinction of Christianity in Mesopotamia, a sad but gradual catastrophe I have watched ever since OIF began.  A large segment of the population that cannot defend themselves is of concern to you, whether you are a Christian or not.  And if you hang on with me, you’ll learn some things about what Jesus thought of unbiblical laws banning weapons.  With that said, let’s begin.

Mr. Schenck says, following Christ, to “love your enemies,” and asserts that this is a big “ethical question” during a home invasion.  Next, without any exegesis or explanation fleshing this out, another leaky bucket is put with the first one, where Mr. Schenk invokes the will of God.  “Is it always God’s will that I survive a violent confrontation with another human being? I’m not sure that’s always God’s will,” he says.  Here Mr. Schenck has said too much and destroyed his own argument, and it will require some explanation to explain what I mean.

Mr. Schenck is acting like a Calvinist, but I seriously doubt he has the deep and abiding commitment to Calvinian theology that I do.  Mr. Schenck is relying on ignorance of the masses for the force of his argument.  Classic Calvinian theology divides the will of God into two distinct categories: (1) preceptive, and (2) decretive.  God’s preceptive will pertains to His precepts, His laws.  What does God wish to happen, or how does He wish mankind to live?  The second category pertains to His decretive will, or what He has decreed to come to pass.

Isaiah 46:10 says “I am God and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’ ” (Isaiah 46:9-10).  Ephesians 1:11 says ” … having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will.”  Again, all things.  This suffices for many hundreds of passages that teach the same thing.  God decrees, and no one stays His hand.

Furthermore, He tells us that the later category is not only unknown to us, it is off limits.  Deuteronomy 29:29 says “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.”  We are responsible for knowing and obeying His law, not the outcome, nor the flow of times and epochs that result from our choices and actions.  That’s in God’s hands, and we are not to question it.

Mr. Schenck is questioning God’s decretive will, apparently in need of knowing it so that he can attempt to effect it.  But it makes no difference.  Mr. Schenck can no more bring it to pass nor prevent it from coming to pass than he can move the moon or keep it from moving.  And we have just said that it is none of his business anyway.  Mr. Schenck is either a poorly informed and badly educated Calvinist, or he invoked the doctrines of God’s will in an attempt to confuse people, or merely as another objection to self defense.  I suspect it’s the later rather than the former.

In either case, we’re left with only his first objection, his notion that Jesus was a pacifist, Bohemian hippie flower child.  But he has supplied no exegesis of Matthew 5:44 to make us think that Jesus intends for us to allow others to kill us in His name.  In fact, the problem lies not in the words of Jesus (who was dealing with personal grievances, not public threats, see here John Gill’s and Matthew Poole’s exposition), but rather Mr. Schenck’s lack of hermeneutical self-discipline.

The Holy writ is a unity, with Christ as the scarlet thread running throughout.  The words of the O.T. are no more in contradiction with Christ than the balance of the N.T.  There is progressive revelation and development of the covenant, but there isn’t any embarrassing contradiction.  We needn’t turn to obscure passages or tangential concerns to justify Biblical self defense.  As we’ve noted before, the basis for it is found in the Decalogue.

I am afraid there have been too many centuries of bad teaching endured by the church, but it makes sense to keep trying.  As I’ve explained before, the simplest and most compelling case for self defense lies in the decalogue.  Thou shall not murder means thou shall protect life.

God’s law requires [us] to be able to defend the children and helpless.  “Relying on Matthew Henry, John Calvin and the Westminster standards, we’ve observed that all Biblical law forbids the contrary of what it enjoins, and enjoins the contrary of what it forbids.”  I’ve tried to put this in the most visceral terms I can find.

God has laid the expectations at the feet of heads of families that they protect, provide for and defend their families and protect and defend their countries.  Little ones cannot do so, and rely solely on those who bore them.  God no more loves the willing neglect of their safety than He loves child abuse.  He no more appreciates the willingness to ignore the sanctity of our own lives than He approves of the abuse of our own bodies and souls.  God hasn’t called us to save the society by sacrificing our children or ourselves to robbers, home invaders, rapists or murderers. Self defense – and defense of the little ones – goes well beyond a right.  It is a duty based on the idea that man is made in God’s image.  It is His expectation that we do the utmost to preserve and defend ourselves when in danger, for it is He who is sovereign and who gives life, and He doesn’t expect us to be dismissive or cavalier about its loss.

And concerning John Calvin’s comments on this subject:

We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden.  There is no one who doesn’t concede this.  That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment.  Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned.  But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify.  For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice.  We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds.  Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so.  Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).

If you’re willing to sacrifice the safety and health of your wife or children to the evils of abuse, kidnapping, sexual predation or death, God isn’t impressed with your fake morality.  Capable of stopping it and choosing not to, you’re no better than a child molester, and I wouldn’t allow you even to be around my grandchildren.

Turning now to Benjamin, the confusion becomes even more chaotic with less hermeneutical self-discipline.  First of all, he’s tried to tackle too much.  Without going into the details of his argument, Professor Darrell Cole has written a very good article at First Things entitled Good Wars.  His closing paragraph summarizes his thesis.

The most noteworthy aspect of the moral approach to warfare in Aquinas and Calvin is that it teaches (contrary to today’s prevailing views) that a failure to engage in a just war is a failure of virtue, a failure to act well. An odd corollary of this conclusion is that it is a greater evil for Christians to fail to wage a just war than it is for unbelievers. When an unbeliever fails to go to war, the cause may be a lack of courage, prudence, or justice. He may be a coward or simply indifferent to evil. These are failures of natural moral virtue. When Christians (at least in the tradition of Aquinas and Calvin) fail to engage in just war, it may involve all of these natural failures as well, but it will also, and more significantly, involve a failure of charity. The Christian who fails to use force to aid his neighbor when prudence dictates that force is the best way to render that aid is an uncharitable Christian. Hence, Christians who willingly and knowingly refuse to engage in a just war do a vicious thing: they fail to show love toward their neighbor as well as toward God.

If Robert or Benjamin haven’t interacted with Cole’s analysis, you may safely ignore what they have to say on this issue.  They haven’t really tackled the hard issues yet or dealt honestly with violence, federal headship or the fallen state of mankind.  To that extent, their exposition is cowardly.  It never helps your case to beat up on straw men or weaklings.  You have to step into the back yard and run with the big dogs before people will respect you.

Second, Benjamin acts as if the only justification for violence is found in Ecclesiastes 3.  I’ve never even seen such an argument in print, and I certainly wouldn’t make it (not from the so-called “wisdom literature” of Scripture).  But beating up on Ecclesiastes 3 doesn’t justify his next move, which is to disconnect the balance of Scripture from the person and teachings of Christ.  He says “If Jesus is the living Word of God and the Wisdom of God, then we begin with what Jesus taught us. This is what makes us Christians instead of Biblicists– we follow the teachings of our Lord and Savior. When one rejects the face value teaching and example of Christ in favor of other passages or people in Scripture, it’s a good indication that such a person may like Jesus the Savior but not Jesus the Lord– and unfortunately, this thing is a package deal.”

That’s right, Benjamin.  It’s a package deal, and I have no need of setting one passage off against another because I follow the commonly accepted rules of Biblical hermeneutics.  It’s a package deal, and that means I see all of Scripture as a whole, with progressive revelation, development of the covenants, unity of purpose, and divine sanction and inspiration of the authors.  For the best study on this, see Inerrancy, edited by Norman L. Geisler.  I have no need of ignoring Jesus’ words – in fact, I cherish every one of them.  I just make sure to appropriately understand and contextualize them.

For the third example, as for the oft-quoted Luke 22:36, Preston Sprinkle dismisses this passage out of hand as justifying anything at all, to the point that he doesn’t even interact with this passage.  He continues his missive, and I have to say that I’m not at all impressed by his “scholarship.”  He doesn’t any more honestly deal with issues than the two authors we’ve already examined.  I find his snarky manner very off-putting, and his lack of honesty in dealing with the Scriptural data very revealing.

But regarding his dismissal of Luke 22:36, which I presume he treats as some sort of spiritualized metaphor, remember that Christ wasn’t just commanding His disciples to get swords (for the purpose of self defense, or the purpose of ensuring that they would later be guilty of breaking the law, or whatever, it doesn’t matter).  He was commanding that his disciples become criminals.  It was against the law for them to have those swords.  “During the Roman occupation of Judea, Jews were forbidden to own swords, spears or any implements of war.”  Jesus commanded them to ignore laws controlling weapons.  While I reject the theological approach taken by Dr. Martin at Yale University, he has supplied us with good data on this question.

… for some evidence, see Digest 48.6.1: collecting weapons ‘beyond those customary for hunting or for a journey by land or sea’ is forbidden; 48.6.3.1 forbids a man ‘of full age’ appearing in public with a weapon (telum) (references and translation are from Mommsen 1985). See also Mommsen 1899: 564 n. 2; 657-58 n. 1; and Linderski 2007: 102-103 (though he cites only Mommsen). Other laws from the same context of the Digest sometimes cited in this regard are not as worthwhile for my purposes because they seem to be forbidding the possession of weapons with criminal intent. But for the outright forbidding of being armed while in public in Rome, see Cicero’s letter to his brother relating an incident in Rome in which a man, who is apparently falsely accused of plotting an assassination, is nonetheless arrested merely for having confessed to having been armed with a dagger while in the city: To Atticus, Letter 44 (II.24). See also Cicero, Philippics 5.6 (§17). Finally we may cite a letter that Synesius of Cyrene wrote to his brother, probably sometime around the year 400 ce. The brother had apparently questioned the legality of Synesius having his household produce weapons to defend themselves against marauding bands. Synesius points out that there are no Roman legions anywhere near for protection, but he seems reluctantly to admit that he is engaged in an illegal act (Letter 107; for English trans., see Fitzgerald 1926).

Christ commanded them to possess and bear arms, even in violation of the law.  This is a fact, and no amount of spiritualizing, Scripture twisting or hermeneutical machinations can get around it.

If we have learned absolutely nothing – and I do mean absolutely nothing – of any import or value on the Scriptural data concerning violence or self defense from the three authors cited here, it seems that it’s time to move on to the mundane and trivial.  Benjamin wants to know all about how we keep our guns.  But here I find my own attention floating to something else, i.e., how Benjamin parks his cars, where he does so, whether they are put into a safe condition when he isn’t around them, where he keeps his keys, how well he controls the kitchen knives, cleaners, soap, gasoline for power tools, electrical outlet covers, and cabinet locks, and whether all of his circuits are up to current code with GFCIs in the bathrooms, garage, porches and other places they need to be?

In fact, I’m wondering how I know that Benjamin is actually qualified to be a husband and father?  But this sort of meddlesome, control freak, brooding mother hen, nanny mentality tires me and seems repulsive and grody, so I think I’ll just leave it to Benjamin seeing that it’s none of my business anyway.  Grok that, Benjamin?

As for this notion that cops receive all of this ninja warrior training, it just isn’t so.  One friend who recently retired as captain of one of the largest police departments in America, told me that most gun owners’ self training far exceeded what most cops get, mostly who just qualify on the range once a year and then never unholster their weapons after that (thankfully).  Otherwise, we would have no answer for all of those examples of stupidity, overreaction, dead dogs, negligent discharges, fellow officer shootings, hundreds of rounds discharged in rolling gun battles inside the inner city, and SWAT raids gone bad.  You see Benjamin, if we civilians unholster our weapons, we’re charged with brandishing and we get to talk to a judge and get our rights taken away.  If we point our weapons at someone, it’s called assault with a deadly weapon (which includes perceived intent), and we get to go to prison for an extended stay.  When the LEOs do it, it’s called being “heroes of the community.”  Perhaps, Benjamin, when you pose your shoot / no-shoot scenario, you should be talking to LEOs.

It doesn’t take an experienced law enforcement professional to know that ordinary folks with weapons can and do save lives, every day, all over the world.  That’s not the problem or the question.  You see, by invoking the police, Benjamin has said too much.  He isn’t really a pacifist, he doesn’t really want to perish at the hands of criminals, and he doesn’t really take the teachings of Christ as seriously as he claims.  He just believes in the same thing all progressives do – monopoly of force.  The ugly little truth of progressives, including Christians who have progressive tendencies, is that they haven’t yet been able to turn away from the state as savior and protector, judge and jury, lawyer and arbiter.  They are statists, and their reflexive tendency is to attempt to reconcile their statism with the Holy writ.  To them the state is supreme – otherwise they wouldn’t believe in a monopoly of force.  The real Scripture twisting is done by them, not the millions of Christians around the world who either know better and dismiss their antics as misguided or who are [unfortunately] misled by them.

There are many more steps in this process, including pointing out that the American revolution has its roots in the covenant theology of continental Calvinism (taught by my former professor Douglas Kelly), and that thousands of pastors fought in the war of independence.  For now it is enough to observe that the objections the detractors offer up are like ten leaky buckets.  All of them leak, and putting ten of them together no more ensures that you have a viable container than a single leaky bucket.  They float from one idea to the next, and don’t seem to spend any time on core objections because that tactic doesn’t work and they know it.  They haphazardly throw everything up but the kitchen sink, hoping something will stick.  Quantity is favored over quality because none of the objections are compelling.

They hope something will stick not because of the Biblical data on self defense, gun ownership and war, but because of the philosophical presuppositions they bring to their study of the Scriptures.  Unless this issue is honestly addressed, their prose will not be honest.

UPDATE: Thanks to WoG, SSI and WRSA for the links.

Prior:

Philosophizing With Guns

Guns In Church In Mississippi

A Touching And Heartwarming Story Of Violence And Revolution

Jihadist Shooter Was Going To Target A Church

Pistol-Packin’ Christians

The Idolatry Of Security

They Believe The Angels Will Protect Us

Woe To The Nation Whose Religious Teachers Have Become Workers Of Wickedness

Should Christians Own Guns?

A Desperate Cry From Iraq’s Christians

The PCUSA On Guns

Dear Christians With Guns

Concerning The Nigerian Christian Girls

Guns: Think Of The Children

Does Jesus Shoot An AR-15?

Baptist Forum Does Gun Control

Who Would Jesus Shoot?

The Golden Calf Of Gun Control

Faith And Firearms

Guns And Religion

When Christians Discuss Guns

Christians, The Second Amendment And The Duty Of Self Defense

We all knew it would happen one day, this final divorce from the political scene.  It’s been building for a long time, but before I get ahead of myself, let me explain how I got into politics.

I’ve never really been in politics, per se.  I’ve never run for office, I’ve never been an active part of a party, but I have donated, worked hard to persuade others of my views, and diligently voted, as well as followed the political scene very closely.  It all began my final year at Clemson University.  I recall being in Johnston Hall in a small dormitory room (are there any other sizes?), along with about twenty other guys.  We were packed in, and all watching Jimmy Carter debate Ronald Reagan.  Reagan handed him a resounding defeat, and at that time we were all Reagan supporters.  The entire campus, it felt like, thought like we did.  There couldn’t be found a single student on campus who supported Jimmy Carter, or if there could, he didn’t say so out loud.

In addition to studying engineering into the late hours every night, we were carefully and diligently following every particular, every detail, of the political scene, and understood fairly well the theoretical and philosophical basis of the choices the candidates made.  Those were heady days – from Calculus and engineering mechanics to political theory and theology and the Bible and back again to physics and chemistry (Even then, the humanities department was infected with progressives, and if we wanted to learn we had to teach ourselves.  I’m reminded of a friend studying philosophy at another college who had to ignore his classes and read Frederick Copleston to learn philosophy, but that’s another story).  The Reagan revolution was strong at Clemson in those days, and we survived on caffeine and late night snacks.  More than a few pots of coffee were made in that horrible kitchen in Johnston Hall at midnight.

We won, and it wasn’t that we won, so much as our ideas held sway.  I do wish that Reagan had been a little more into the details of things, because I hold these four things against him: (1) the first amnesty, (2) Sandra Day O’Conner and Anthony Kennedy, (3) The Hughes Amendment, and (4) deploying the Marines to the barracks in Beirut, only to withdraw them after attack by Hezbollah.  Every one of these things have been shown to have deleterious effects on America (including the Hughes amendment which has caused a lack of investment and design engineering in weapons for our military).  Those are four big failures, but still, we knew that the unborn had a champion, small government had an advocate, and that the danger of “near peers” wouldn’t be underestimated.

Over the course of time, compromise began to occur.  Deals were made, and the mantra of electing the “conservative” who was most electable replaced principled conservatism.  As the democratic party moved more to the left, republicans moved with them in order to stay “relevant.”  The same disease afflicts the American church, leading to the defenestration of doctrine in favor of relevancy.  Whereas the church used to talk about the vicarious atonement, the sovereignty of God and the Council of Nicea, it now focuses on racial reconciliation, nuclear weapons, and gender identity.

We all knew this would happen one day.  By not stopping the diminution of the party, we fed the monster of big government, largesse, entitlements, debt, money printing, high stakes gambling on Wall Street, corporatism, open borders to feed low wage labor, hospital emergency rooms functioning as primary care clinics all paid for by the middle class (so that those low wage workers can work for the corporate masters), crony capitalism and its attendant involvement in the drafting of millions of pages of law, regulation and federal register notices to ensure that the corporations “get theirs.”

I wasn’t surprised at the revolution of the voters this election cycle.  I suspected that it would occur.  What did surprise me was the popularity of Donald Trump.  South Carolina broke my heart, and I knew it was over for Ted Cruz at that point.  Here was the perfect chance to elect someone who would come as close as possible to taking us back to the Reagan revolution, and perhaps even do better than that, in Ted Cruz.  He is a champion of the unborn, has an even stronger position on work visas than Donald Trump, is against the imperialistic military meddling in the affairs of other states and has said so quite clearly (the effect of this position in alienating him from the likes of George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and the rest of the neocons, has been underestimated and is ripe territory for study), has always been a strong supporter of the right to bear arms, has successfully argued before the Supreme Court and understands its machinations well enough to appoint reliably constitutionalist jurists, favors a flat tax, has tried his best to shut down funding for Obamacare (with no help from his senate colleagues), and has sworn to overthrow the single payer health care system.

I have relayed what I heard Louie Gohmert say regarding the meetings between Cruz, Lee, Brat, Gohmert and Duncan, among others, in Cruz’s office, to overturn support for the “gang of eight” bill.  Cruz was hated inside the beltway for very good reason.  While Jeff Sessions was telling us that only Trump would “bust up the Oligarchy” in Washington, Cruz was doing just that.  Busting up the Oligarchy is sure to make the Oligarchs mad.  It doesn’t bother me at all that Cruz was hated by others in Washington.  I would have been even more his supporter if Cruz had advocated an old fashioned lynching of most of the Senators and Representatives, or perhaps tar and feathering.  No one is angrier than I am over the devolution of things in Washington.

And yet the people have chosen Donald Trump.  A man who mocks the handicapped, who considers free speech a disgrace, who triangulated a position so nonsensical on North Carolina’s bathroom law that no one knows what he means, who is a proven hypocrite on foreign workers and immigration, who wants to increase the lands owned by federal government rather than decreasing federal power and turning over the lands to the states, who has never asked anyone for forgiveness, most especially God, who only recently triangulated his position on gun rights when previously supporting an “assault weapons” ban, who supports abortion, who believes that Maryanne Trump Barry (who supports infanticide) would make a fine supreme court justice, who criticizes women for their appearance, who calls people disgusting because of pictures taken of them while they eat, and who believes in a single payer health care system.

It’s like watching an awful reality show or perhaps an interstate wreck at high speed.  Donald Trump is an obscene, narcissistic, self serving, hateful, vengeful, grotesque, moral monster who hates anything that isn’t rewarding him for being him.  He is the post-modern man, evolved past Sartre and Camus and (I suppose, finding emptiness) circling back to the pinnacle of self indulgence, Marquis de Sade.  He is an awful man.  I’ve repeatedly heard that Ted Cruz was born in Canada or wherever, or that he took a loan from such-and-such bank.  The former issue never got any traction with me, and as for the later issue, so taking loans is now illegal or immoral?  I have a loan on my house.  So what?  And as for Trump’s bankruptcies?  That’s okay, because sadism is all about self indulgence at the expense of someone else.

I get the revolutionary flavor of the current political scene.  But instead of supporting the only real revolutionary, the GOP voters have collectively dropped their drawers and mooned God and everyone else in a protest of the preceding years.  It’s a sad thing to watch.  They chose the wrong symbol of protest, and will end up getting what they most loathe, as they become what disgusts and repels them.  The people have raised their fist to God and shouted, “give us a king like all the others.”  And the Lord has said, “very well.”  Suck it up folks, because you’re getting ready to reap the rewards of your choice.

Voting for the least bad candidate is partly what got us here.  Oh, I blame the GOPe, the establishment, 100% for this debacle.  This is a protest vote.  The voters are burning it all down because of your corruption, and the sad, sorry truth is that you still don’t get it.  But it doesn’t stop there for me.  I also blame the voters, 100%.  It isn’t either-or with me, it’s both-and.  No one held a gun to your head and forced you to vote this way in the booth.  You could have chosen to be thinking men and women, but you didn’t.  You became an unthinking mob.  So we are where we are.

And for me, that means that I’ve cast my last vote.  I am bidding farewell to voting.  I am now a disenfranchised conservative Christian, and if a third party opens up for me, I might decide to rejoin in the struggle, but I’ve won’t vote GOP again for the rest of my life.  The GOP has left me – establishment and voters.  It’s no longer my party.  I have no party.  But if I ever vote for an upstart party that is true to my conservative, constitutional ideals, I won’t cast my vote because I think politics will save us.  I don’t.  As John Adams has observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

If we are to be saved, no piece of paper or parchment will do it.  Thus, I sympathize with my friend Claire Wolfe on our sad state of affairs.

In part it’s because I see so many angry people putting so much hope in Trump — a man who, should he manage to buy his way into office (or tumble in by default after Hillary gets indicted) will betray them even worse than than the poltroons of 1994 betrayed We the Hopeful Fools.

But also because, horrible as the prospect of either President Trump or President Clinton the Second is, it’s a relief not to feel hope.

Or despair, for that matter. Horrible as the prospects are, it’s glorious to know how very little it really matters. For freedom. For anything that counts. Oh sure, either pretender to the throne has the potential to make a ghastly mess of things — up to and including World War III (unlikely, but someday somebody’s going to do it). Or building a wall to keep us all in. Or decreeing that all guns must Go Away Now, So There, I Have Spoken. More likely not much happens except the routine bad getting routinely worse. And millions ignoring whatever “the most important leader in the world” says, decrees, promises, etc.

And those poor hopeful fools losing hope. Been there. Done that. It hurts. It burns. It makes you want to go postal. (That was the state of mind I was in from about February 1995, when the betrayal became obvious, to late 1996 when I took my life back, laughed, sat down, and wrote 101 Things to do ‘Til the Revolution.)

Yeah, it hurts. But it hurts like growing up and learning that Santa didn’t really put those presents under the tree.

To be sure, while Cruz called out Senator Mitch McConnell for being the liar he is, I fully expect to see Trump rubbing shoulders with McConnell, Paul Ryan, and so on.  He will cut deals with them.  He said so.  Have you ever heard Trump attack McConnel, Ryan, Eric Cantor, or any of the other creeps that helped to get us here?  No, you’ve only heard him attack fellow candidates.

But unlike Claire, I never expected government to work right any more than I believe presents come from Santa Claus.  I’ve always treated my vote as a precious gift from God whether I effect change with it or not, a power over which I had stewardship and for which I will one day answer to the most high.  I have always voted based on principle rather than pragmatism, or at least I have tried to, and because of principle I am now out of the process until a third party develops that is true to my beliefs.

As for the voters, enjoy what you have created.  When you build you house on sand, don’t be surprised when the first heavy rain knocks it down.  I bid you farewell.  Oh, I’ll poke fun on occasion and remind you of your choices, and I’ll get a good chuckle out of all of this.  But I’m out of the political scene.  I won’t be voting for Donald Trump.  As for my mockery of the situation, I’ll see you over the transom.

At WRSA there is an interesting discussion on the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Here is a snippet.

I recognized that, despite the cries of today’s Constitutionalists about the Divine inspiration of the US Constitution and the accompanying Bill of Rights (USC/BoR), both of the foundational documents of American governance were drafted by mere humans based on the political accommodations necessary at the time (e.g., chattel slavery) and had no effective provisions for enforcement when violated.

I realized that, even if one does not fully accept the “intentionally fraudulent from the beginning” premise of Royce’s Hologram of Liberty, the institutions established by the USC/BoR have failed in preserving individual freedom and American sovereignty.

It should be remembered what John Adams said to us.  “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  The only perfect text is the Holy Writ because it has both human and divine authorship – no text that is exclusively human can be free of flaw.  But that isn’t the problem with failure to preserve our liberties.  The problem comes from the heart of man.

It’s called federal headship [of Adam] and original sin, and it extends to every man, woman and child, to every corner of the globe, and to every part of the moral and physical constitution of mankind.  Take for example the second amendment.  We’ve discussed before how “The second amendment discusses the right to bear arms and be free of federal interference in the context of the states’ desire to keep that interference from happening.  That is the historical milieu in which it was written.  The founders only needed one excuse to prevent federal government interference with the states on firearms, and they chose the most likely and obvious choice, i.e., the militia.  The second amendment is not a treatise on the foundation of liberty.

It’s an illogical jump to cast that as the only reason for the right to own and bear arms.  If you had discussed regulation on the right to own and use a tool of their trade to protect their families, hunt, and ameliorate tyranny with a colonial man, he would have buried you under the remotest prison.  God gave us our rights based on man being created in His image and the expected duty to work and subdue the earth to His glory.  The militia was a convenient excuse for a certain clause in one part of the constitution.  Limiting our rights to our understanding of that clause is a mistake.”

As elaborated by one commenter, “All the rights in the BoR are subsidiary, or appurtenant, rights. That is, appurtenant to the fundamental rights of Life, Liberty, and Property. The 2d Amdt is an agreement as to the practical, real-world way in which a people protects its fundamental rights, and which any just government must guarantee if the citizenry’s fundamental rights are to be protected.

It could be worded a thousand different ways (and the 2d always seemed poorly worded), but the underlying fundamental rights — and the necessity of a practical means of ensuring them — does not depend on the wording, nor upon whether there is any wording at all.  The rights exist. They cannot be overridden, taken, bargained away, or lost … especially not by appeal to legal or linguistic “precedent.”

Yes, but why?  I no longer appeal to anything in the constitution for my rights, as readers might be able to tell (or if I do, the appeal is short and for the purpose of connection with my readers).  I see the constitution as a covenant, with attendant rights, responsibilities and punishments.  Surely, if all parties are in collusion with the wickedness, there is no punishment for violation of the provisions of the constitution.

But the furniture is there to effect such punishments, e.g., impeachment, withholding of funding, and corporal punishments up to and including imprisonment and death.  The college of gargoyles, demons and pit vipers inside the beltway won’t hold anyone accountable because many of them are part of the problem.  The neutered politicians at the state and county level won’t because they have rendered themselves eunuchs by choice.

So the furniture is there, the volition is absent.  Our constitution is intended only for a moral and religious people.  It cannot function for any other.  And if you are one of those individuals who wants to find moral absolutes, framework for society, and rules upon which you can entrust your future in any document written by mankind, or any system of ethics absent God, your project is doomed to abject failure, just as Bertrand Russell couldn’t establish morality without God in his debate with Frederick Coppleston, or Gordon Stein in his debate with Greg Bahnsen.

One writer editorialized about the second amendment (in Heller) that “there was never any risk of the court adopting the gun movement’s more exotic premises, such as the notion that gun rights are “God-given,” a view handed down by National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre in his colorful sermons.”  I don’t know anything about sermons by Wayne, or NRA position papers on this topic, nor do I really need to know any of that.  The interesting thing about this writer is that he considers the notion that our rights are God-given to be exotic.

To the post-modern pawn, the constitution is as good as anything else given that appeal to the masses based on the emotion of the moment will certainly bring random ethics to bear.  They may as well twist the words of the agreement (constitution) to mean what they want them to mean – that way, at least they have a chance of winning.  But to those whose God is the Lord, it’s much clearer given that the only sovereign has declared beforehand the boundaries, times and epochs of His creatures.

Men must decide how they will live together.  If their eyes are firmly fixed on God, they will endeavor to live together in peace and liberty.  To the degree to which they worship themselves, no paper or parchment can save man, regardless of the provisions contained therein.

Self defense isn’t just a responsibility, it’s a duty based on the image of God in man.  This self defense doesn’t stop with personal safety, but extends to family safety and even further.  There is nothing natural about rights, and the foundation of liberty itself is based on the God of the bible.

The reference to “natural laws” and what nature may teach us is quaint and amusing, but philosophically outdated and meaningless.  Nature confers upon us nothing, and certainly not rights of any sort.  What may be obvious to us is contrary to the pronouncements of others who look at the same “nature.”  To John Dewey, John Stuart Mill and in more drastic form the communists, whatever works the best and achieves the greatest good for the greatest number is “good” (whatever that means).

But under this rubric many men and women have perished, a fact that is acceptable to the communists.  Under this rubric many millions of unborn infants in America have also perished, a fact that is wholly acceptable to the pragmatists and utilitarians.  The tribes in Ethiopia engaged in the practice of killing healthy baby boys whose top teeth came in before his bottom teeth.

America has for a long time found acceptable the idea of theft through taxation and inflation (both of which steal wealth), because that’s what the majority say.  If one turns to “nature” for values, whatever that means, perhaps the best source for ethics and morality would be watching male lions kill the cubs of females so that they come into estrus, or watching other animals as they steal kills.  Again to emphasize the point, nature cannot reveal a system of laws and turning to natural law means that you haven’t thought things through.

For those who have taken courses in apologetics or philosophy (and also for those who haven’t), a world view requires a system of categories working together, including metaphysics, ontology, ethics, epistemology, and so forth.  All of it is usually seen to be based on epistemology, as that category of philosophy describes and explains your source of truth.

It also requires that you posit your presuppositions beforehand.  Arguing that you want “reason” instead of “faith” belies ignorance (and the failure to take courses in math and philosophy).  Recalling the advice of Gordon H. Clark, you need to take a class in geometry.  All logic is governed by rules of deduction, but based on presupposition, axiomatic irreducibles.  If it can be demonstrated it is a pronouncement of your syllogism, not a presupposition.

With the right presuppositions you can demonstrate that the moon is made of green cheese.  You must state yours, and we get to examine them, along with your syllogisms.  What is your source of truth?  You see, these things are necessary before your system can amount to anything.  Otherwise, you’re an infant trying to read a calculus textbook.

Politics is ethics.  It is part of a larger system of philosophy, and it cannot be posited in a vacuum without being void of compelling argument.  You must explain how you know what you know in order for us to judge it, and all of your system must show itself to be consistent with the rest.  This is what philosopher Gordon H. Clark shows so well in “Religion, Reason and Revelation.”

I’m not disappointed in the founders, and I don’t think they intended failure of the republic.  I know that mankind is fallen, and that covenants must be enforced at points in history, that is, the punishments of the covenant.  The founders knew it too, and in fact if you read them carefully, they used their covenants with the King to justify their actions, legally speaking, but philosophically they appealed elsewhere.

If your appeal for liberty is to the constitution, you’re robbing yourself of the surety and certainty that comes from knowing the truth, denuding yourself of the very cloak of righteousness you will need to move forward in uncertain times.

I have certain incorrigible views of covenant and sovereignty that have their genesis in my Calvinian theology, and it is always interesting to observe and study how men relate to one another and to God.  But before we get to that, let’s begin with what’s happened in the narco-trafficking world.  This analysis promises to be lengthy and perhaps even tedious, so if you intend to make it through a sweeping panorama of violence, revolution and covenant, get a strong cup of coffee and a hard back chair.

There was a time, the story goes, when if a local collided with a drug trafficker’s car on the streets of Culiacán — a bastion of the infamous Sinaloa cartel — the narco was likely to hop out to check that everything was ok.

“They’d say: ‘If you have any problems call this doctor and I’ll pay,'” says journalist Javier Valdez, who specializes in delving into the entrails of drug trafficking culture in Sinaloa. “Not anymore. Now they’ll get out of the car with a pistol. Not only will they not pay you; they’ll beat you, threaten you, or kill you.”

Such tales of shifting mafia etiquette are part of the legend of the underworld in Sinaloa but, close observers like Valdez say, there is also truth to the idea that the newer generations rising up within the Sinaloa drug trafficking scene are more violent and impulsive. And none more so than the one emerging to take control right now.

Few in Culiacán dispute Chapo’s status as a ruthless and bloodthirsty operator, but many credit his generation of Sinaloa traffickers with ensuring the cartel is still considered less wholeheartedly exploitative and sadistic than some other Mexican groups, such as the Knights Templar or the Zetas. While the point is often overstated, the Sinaloa cartel leadership has traditionally limited the expansion of side-rackets, such as extortion and kidnapping, at least on its home turf.

[ … ]

At other times the cartel has prospered because Chapo and his peers have maintained strong relationships with the impoverished communities where they grew up, Valdez says. The writer also emphasized that such leaders have often shown themselves to be been smart enough to know when to negotiate with enemies, including rival cartels, politicians, state security forces, and even the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA. This may not be the case, he says, with their more impetuous offspring.

“This generation does not have this sense of belonging, they’re more violent, more dangerous,” Valdez warns. “Their ascendency could put the stability of the cartel at risk.”

Those fears have proven true enough, as the current cadre of Hispanic and Latino crime lords have been known to behead, torture, and engage in inflicting pain and violence merely for the pleasure they see in it with no intended tactical advantage.  I have long said that I don’t believe in the war on drugs, but that without such a misinformed and misdirected campaign the cartels would still exist because they are warlords and shouldn’t be considered “drug” cartels per se.  Just as the Tehrik-e-Taliban engage in extortion, kidnapping, and mining of precious metals and gemstones, the Hispanic and Latino cartels aren’t restricted to drugs.

They have expanded into timber harvesting, and this has caused enough problems in one area of Mexico to catalyze the violent overthrow of the government and cartels altogether.

CHERÁN, MEXICO — Silently in the mountainous deep green of southwestern Mexico’s ancient pine and oak forests, volunteers armed with automatic weapons press forward on patrol.

They aren’t hunting insurgents or drug smugglers, common here in Michoacan state. And they aren’t part of any army. These self-appointed guardabosques — forest guards — are defending the land from illegal clear-cutting by regional organized crime cartels.

In doing so, they illustrate a determination not to succumb to despair in the face of violence — a commitment Pope Francis urged on Mexicans during a visit to Michoacan earlier this month.

Few people interviewed here last year would give their full names out of concern over retaliation. But they were undeterred nonetheless. Jacinto, from a neighboring village, explained what happened: “The trouble began in 2008. That’s when the federal officials came in with the gun registry lists and went house to house. They took our guns away.”

That disarmament effort, to which locals ascribe to nefarious motives, left them with only antiquated single-shot weapons for hunting vermin. These were of little use when the cartel loggers came over the mountain in 2010.

In his cowboy hat and black-and-white plaid shirt, Don Santiago, a 62-year-old wiry, soft-spoken resin farmer of the Purhépecha tribe, said organized criminal syndicates have entered into the large-scale forest destruction business. “We couldn’t go to the police,” he said. “The police were in the pay of the gangsters.”

The main criminal cartels in Michoacán are known as The Michoacán Family, known as La Familia for short, and the Knights Templars, or Templares.

Tension rose as the people of Cherán found their treasured forests being leveled closer to home. Huge, noisy lumber trucks tore through town to haul out the logs, seemingly around the clock. With police and elected officials unwilling to help, a small group of local women, led by a diminutive, five-foot firebrand affectionately known as Doña Chepa, rose up to take their forests back.

“The breaking point came on April 15, 2011,” said David, a big, animated Purhépecha tribesman. “It was Holy Week. The women came to stop the clear-cutters.”

About 15 women piled rocks on the roads as barricades. With the trucks immobilized, the women used rocks and fireworks to chase the cartel raiders away. A church bell clanged an alarm for citizen reinforcements. When the police arrived, the women directed their fireworks on them, pushing them back. “We surrounded all the exits to the town,” David said.

Nothing like this had happened before in Cherán. Energized locals directed their rage at the politicians who had done nothing to stop the deforestation. Armed with their obsolete hunting rifles and shotguns, families converged on the town center. Using one of the abandoned logging trucks as a battering ram, citizens stormed the town administration building and police station and overthrew the local government. The police abandoned their posts — and their weapons.

Mexico’s militarized police, even in small towns, often carry AR-15 assault rifles. Now those weapons were in the hands of the townspeople. “Then we started the rondas,” David said, referring to the armed citizen patrols.

The townspeople created a provisional government and banned political parties so that no candidate for public office would be beholden to outside political forces. They invented an electoral system to eliminate vote-buying and ballot-stuffing. All candidates for public office had to stand in the central square, with their supporters lining up behind them to determine who would win. Gangsters sent agents into the villages to burn cars and homes, and hunt down the guardabosques. In the course of the next three years, 18 of Cherán’s defenders, including Don Santiago’s brother, would be killed, and five more disappeared before the organized crime operations were shut down.

Cherán is a tidy little town that’s closed to outsiders. Heavily armed uniformed guards man checkpoints at every entrance and exit, questioning people whose faces or vehicles they don’t know. Hand-painted graffiti, in neat lettering, tells outsiders what the locals really think: “Leave us alone.”

To save face while recognizing reality, the Mexican government officially accepted Cherán’s new autonomous status. It deputized the checkpoint guards and guardabosques as the de facto authority to protect the forest lands. It issued them uniforms as “community police,” without attempting to take away or even register their newfound automatic weapons.

Federal police in shiny black twin-cab pickup trucks, wearing black tactical gear and armed with M4s and an occasional roll-bar-mounted machine gun, patrol the clean superhighways and the potholed back roads of rural Michoacán. The locals generally welcome the federales, sent in last year by President Enrique Peña Nieto to crush the cartels. The federales don’t interfere with Cherán’s guardabosques, and keep in contact with them by radio.

The checkpoint guards, young men in their late teens or early 20s, wear blue uniforms bearing embroidered seven-point stars and custom-made shoulder patches.

This is truly great investigative reporting, the kind we don’t often see any more.  I applaud the folks in this little corner of the world.  But will it last, and can it expand?

The article concludes with this. “Our whole way of life is in these forests,” said Don Santiago, the soft-spoken tribal elder. Tapping the resin from highland pines is a way of life, and an art, he inherited from ancestors who can be traced back to the Aztec empire. An individual pine tree can be tapped for up to 80 years for resin sold as raw material for industrial and food products.  “The pines have faces,” said Don Santiago, reflecting the mysticism of his people.”

Their way of life is tied up in the forest and protecting it’s health and viability.  But what if instead of cartel violence, they employ another strategy?  What if they get to several of the mothers and tell them, “We’re here to help you.  Here is a million dollars for each of you, take your family across the border, enroll you children in American schools and universities, and live a much better life than you could here?”  Will they break, or are they committed to a world view that can sustain them against the advances of their enemies, come what may?

At WRSA there is a salient question being posed concerning the American constitution and body of constitutional law.  It isn’t worth a duck’s fart, concludes the analysis, because it admits to, among other things, abortion on demand.  True enough, abortion is murder against the innocent, and whether you are a conservative Christian like me, or a committed libertarian (in which case abortion is unjustified aggression against an innocent party), a country that sacrifices its young won’t long last as a viable entity.

I’ll give you the premise of the article, as long as you give me the following stipulations.  The American constitution is the best that man has come up with so far, by a long ways, as long as you consider what John Adams said about it.  “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Implemented by gargoyles, demons and bloodthirsty tyrants, the constitution is like the Book of Church Order for Presbyterians.  It becomes merely a system of protection of those in charge, regardless of what those in charge do.  It can be twisted to say anything you want as long as you see the world through the eyes of evil.  And thus we are back to world and life views.

My own views on this are fairly well known, and I have rehearsed them before.  The views of my teacher, John Calvin, are the very basis of the American war of independence.  Douglas Kelly, my former Systematic Theology Professor (along with C. Gregg Singer), observes the following.

Their experience in Presbyterian polity – with its doctrine of the headship of Christ over the church, the two-powers doctrine giving the church and state equal standing (so that the church’s power is not seen as flowing from the state), and the consequent right of the people to civil resistance in accordance with higher divine law – was a major ingredient in the development of the American approach to church-state relations and the underlying questions of law, authority, order and rights.

[ … ]

It was largely from the congregation polity of these New England puritans that there came the American concept and practice of government by covenant – that is to say: constitutional structure, limited by divine law and based on the consent of the people, with a lasting right in the people to resist tyranny.

When the rulers break covenant, as they did in the case above in Mexico, and as the King did against Americans, revolution is not only just, it is covenantally necessary.  Covenant, to be proper, has two parts: promises and curses, the later applied for breaking covenant.  These beliefs for me are, to use the words of philosopher Alvin Pantinga, incorrigible.  There is never a time when I will not believe these propositions.  Similarly, I don’t care one iota about the second amendment.  As I’ve explained before, my rights are issued by divine decree, not a piece of parchment.

I have come by these beliefs the hard way.  And I am concerned that the bases we claim for our liberties is founded in chaos, anarchy and whatever seems to be popular that particular day.  But these things will not sustain you and your family in difficult times.  Anarchy is the mother of tyranny because you aren’t the baddest person around.  There is always somebody badder than you are.  Into the void will always step a ruler more despotic than the last one.  Ideas that float away with the wind will tire and disappoint you.

The most significant revolutions in the history of Western civilization are the reformation and the American revolution, both of which have their basis in the protestant reformation (and Calvinian theology).  The Brothers of the Common Life taught the reformers everything – Luther was their student, and Calvin was deeply influenced by them.  These men taught the reformers logic, letters, languages, mathematics, and everything else they needed to develop a coherent and powerful world view.

The reformation didn’t proceed and finalize without bloodshed, and lots of it.  Swords were necessary, but the most important part was a world view that sustained the generations who fought this conflict on the European continent and on the British Ilse.  Similarly, the men who founded this nation believed things that sustained them and their families in spite of the horrible losses they suffered.

I am an educated man.  I hold an engineering degree – albeit Bachelor’s degree – from Clemson University.  Clemson isn’t among the top tier schools like RPI or Cal Tech (which is unquestionably the toughest engineering and physics school in the nation), but it’s up there with NC State, Georgia Tech, Ohio State, University of Texas, and so on.  I know fluid mechanics, strength of materials, statics and dynamics, differential equations, and so on.  And I’ve had all of their stupid liberal arts courses, from their revisionist history classes to the English course where the professor couldn’t go a single class without sexual innuendo or double entendre.  Oh, and don’t leave out that ridiculous sociology course where we studied everything from prostitution to poverty, all along the way rejecting the student’s demands that we solve these “problems” because we were just studying them, only to get to the issue of race in America with the professor starting the class that day with “How are we going to solve this problem?”  When I brought up the logical inconsistency with the class heretofore, I was savaged by the other students for being a prejudiced bigot.  A bigot I’m not, a lover of consistency I am.

If you think this is a discussion on how smart I am, you have it all backwards.  In my opinion I left college a dullard and ignoramus.  My real education began in graduate level seminary under Dr. C Gregg Singer, who assigned reading in Francis Turretin, “Institutes of Elenctic Theology.”  I was left on my own with Turretin to self-instruct, as with all graduate level courses.  It was my first introduction to the so-called scholastic writers.  I was overwhelmed and dumbfounded.

Reading through these volumes required lots of coffee, a hard back chair, and lots of time.  I got such severe headaches trying to study these volumes that it made my stomach upset.  I usually couldn’t get more than one or two sentences without having to stop and rehearse what I had read, how it related to the sentence before it, and ensure that I understood his points.  When I shared my experience with my colleagues, they had the same experiences I did with Turretin.  Mine wasn’t unique.

Horrace Mann has done his job well, yes?  I only home schooled my children their final years in High School (I wasted money on Christian education for much of their previous years), and I wish I had home schooled all four of them all twelve years.  The dumbing of the American child has been virtually complete, and combined with common core, the product of the public school system will be truly atrocious (and culpable to be manipulated).  At another time I will share a horrible school experience with one of my sons, but that is saved for later.

By all means, have your AR-15s.  Get your comms gear and learn how to use it.  I don’t begrudge learning how to conduct small unit combat maneuver warfare, patrolling techniques, perhaps satellite patrolling, make and break contact drills, carbine and handgun target acquisition drills, and so on.  I’m not sure that it will be used, but I am certain that any future conflict will be fought in the shadows (more on that later).

But more than AR-15s with optics, good handguns and lots of ammunition and comms gear, you need a world view.  You need an ideology that will sustain you through thick and thin, through life and until death.  I cannot tell you how to craft yours.  Most readers get annoyed or offended when I try to do that.  I know mine – it is incorrigible.  There are worse things than death.  I will meet God face to face one day, and death doesn’t mean that my body cools to ambient temperature and that’s the end.  I have been predistined to whatever God commands, and my life and death are in his hands.  Thus shall my world view honor Him and remain unchanged by the winds opinion.

What about your world and life view?

Prior: I Do Not Fear Terror Because I Am Redeemed, And I Have Been Predistined To This War

There is a plethora of articles, discussion threads and other resources that presume to give advice on the issue of floor loading with heavy gun safes.  Some of them even provide professional engineering counsel, even if they don’t say so.  For instance, some articles I have seen mention the typical and customary floor design loading limit of 40 pounds per square foot (PSF) and then opine something like “but even though the load for a safe is concentrated in a small space, since the total floor surface area is much larger than the surface area the safe occupies and that isn’t loaded with the same weight, the gun safe load should be just fine,” or something like that.

I won’t say much more about those articles, except that it is extremely ill-advised to follow such ridiculous counsel, and unless it was crafted by a registered professional engineer specifically for your situation, you should ignore most if not all such articles.  While I am a registered PE, what follows doesn’t constitute engineering advice for your specific situation or any specific situation for that matter (see the disclaimer below), but it might be instructive and beneficial for education to demonstrate and explain what I did to ensure my home was protected both from catastrophic failure and deleterious deflection and sagging of floor joists over time.

While some articles appear to downplay the significance of floor joist loading, I have been inside homes and seen sagging floors (that had not – or had not yet – catastrophically failed).  While I considered the so-called “heavy load path” for transporting the gun safe inside the house, perhaps the more significant issue has to do with floor loading over time.

In order to provide the necessary background to understand the plans, the gun safe weighs in at just over 600 pounds.  The measurements are 20″X33″X59″, so the floor loading significantly exceeds the design floor loading of 40 PSF.

The home is a new home built with pier and girder, with “engineered” joists.  Engineered joists can span a much longer distance that traditional joists, and have no bracing or blocking.  The joists sit either on girder (for spans) or ledger strip (at the edges).  It obviously mattered to the builder that this large piece of granite in the kitchen:

Exceeded the allowable floor loading of 40 PSF, so this girder sits underneath the large rock.

The kitchen shown above is in the Northerly direction, and the picture of the garage wall below looks East.

This is the hallway down which the safe was moved from the garage to the room on the right.  The girder also sits under the hallway about three feet from the doorway to the garage, minimizing joist span for the move.

Right behind the garage wall is a room that has a closet, this closet being the intended final resting place for the gun safe.  The floor joists are oriented East-West, and the support girders are oriented North-South.  Placing the gun safe in this closet (which is centered at the North end of the room against the hallway wall, directly to the right as you stand in the picture above), means that I will be sitting the safe cantilevered along a joist several feet from the ledger strip.  Furthermore, if I was going to position the safe facing East-West, the aspect ratio means that I could sit it along two joists (recall that the joists are 16″ on center).  But I intended to position it facing South.  Thus in my judgment I needed to construct a girder North-South, directly under the safe.  Ron Hiatt, PE, helped my draw up the plans, although the plans as implemented have slight modifications compared to what was originally conceived.

The first step was to measure and lay out the girder, including plumb lines showing where I needed to dig my footings.

This picture shows the wall separating the garage and room which will house the gun safe.  The door to the left is the door to the hallway shown above, and a right turn takes me into the room which contains the closet which has the safe.

Plumb lines showing intended location of footings.

Cut a hole in the vapor barrier and dig footings, this step being especially difficult with limited room under the house.

Each of the three footings were at least 1 cubic foot in volume.

The footings were slightly deeper than 1 foot.

These are used to anchor the 4″X4″s, placed directly into the concrete, flush with the top of the finished concrete and directly under the plumb line.

I had to use 300 pounds of concrete, which I mixed right in the holes (requiring slightly more water than the bags called for).  Use shims to ensure that the 4″X4″s are plumb, and then anchor the column with a 1″X2″ brace attached with a drywall screw to the joist above it.

Attach two ten foot 2″X6″ girder pieces to the 4″X4″s using carriage bolts, aiding with drywall screws.  I like to use screws since they can be installed cleanly (pre-drilled, avoiding cracks and splits), and use of a nail gun might have knocked the 4″X4″ out of plumb.

Use metal shims where you can, as has become commonplace with new home design between pier and girders.

Here is another picture of shimming.

In other places, use standard wood shims depending upon clearance.

The final girder looks like this, running North-South and with additional 1″X2″ bracing because I had the additional wood.

The safe in its final resting place in the closet looks like this, sitting directly on top of the new girder and against the hallway wall.

During the move, the safe at all times (a) was directly over the girder, or (b) directly over doubled-up joists (two engineered floor joists at the load bearing walls), or (c) not more than approximately three feet from the girder or doubled-up floor joists.  The total time in transit from the garage to the closet was approximately two minutes.

The total investment in components and parts represents approximately $150.  This is a small fraction of the cost of the home.  Guns and safes represent a significant investment of time, money and energy.  Don’t do them haphazardly.  Homes represent a much larger investment.  Don’t destroy either one with a safe that is too heavy for the design.  Think.  Plan.  Execute.  Hope is not a plan.

Disclaimer: This article does not constitute engineering advice.  The plans shown and discussed above are not necessarily adequate or appropriate for all or even any specific circumstances.  There is no warranty, express or implied, in the plans discussed herein.  The liability for any application or use of said plans rests solely with the user and not with the author.  In any use of said plans, or any plans based on, analogous to or any modification thereof, the user specifically indemnifies the author and understands that he is alone responsible for any and all damage.  The author doesn’t assume responsibility for any damage – catastrophic or gradual – to any structures, systems or components resulting from these plans.