The Rutherford Institute

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.

It’s all documented, too.

This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.

Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.

[…]

Just recently, for example, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation comes in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military has been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users.

Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

We’ve argued this before, but about NSA spying on foreign nationals and countries. What the DoD is doing here is legitimate in the national security interest as it stands today. The problems are not this program or the US spying on enemies or potential enemies; there are two problems with this. There is no declared war, and the DoD has been permanently funded to wartime levels for 80 years now under continuing resolutions. It’s silly to argue against this spying while funding the spies like we’re at war. Will all of this be turned against us, surely, and probably already is? But as it stands right now, this is a legitimate use of the funds allocated by Congress for this purpose. We were warned against a standing army, and congress used to have power over that.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

[…]

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

Read the whole thing.

According to a Sept. 24 report compiled by the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office, Slaughter and a deputy responded to a complaint that a man at the Montana Expo Park was acting suspiciously by taking photographs of vehicles. According to the fairgrounds director, the man was driving around the property in a black SUV with Canadian license plates, but never entered the show.

After a discussion under the fairgrounds’ grandstands, Slaughter “informed them they had to leave, to which they did.”

[…]

“I don’t know what their investigation was, it’s important that you print that,” Slaughter said, noting again the two investigations he was told about; looking for Canadians smuggling guns to the north, and investigating an American who was not licensed to sell firearms.

Slaughter said that had the federal and Canadian agencies contacted his office prior to Saturday’s incident, he would have been able to call off questions of who the agents were, or what they were doing, allowing the investigations to proceed.

BLUF: Probably so.  It removes the offending piece.

We’ve covered this in previous posts.  I still believe this is all a gigantic trap.  It’s a way for the ATF to come to your door, demand your firearms, measure them, take data on them, log your serial numbers, and then make up their minds depending on the capricious “decision of the day.”  The entire point is to expand the gun registry.

Also see Tim’s discussion.

Also make sure to drop by David’s piece on this.

Outdoor Life.

It’s been a tough year for Chris Landers. The 30-year-old hunter from Strathmore, Alberta underwent four ocular surgeries at the beginning of 2022 to fix a detached retina, the result of a work accident during which some metal shavings flew into his eye. He hunted in 2021 before realizing the retina was an issue and successfully harvested an elk and a black bear. He was hoping to have similar success with his 2022 elk season, but things wouldn’t go as planned.

Landers and his buddies were hunting in the Spirit River valley north of Grand Prairie in the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 15 when disaster struck. As they followed after a bugling elk, some thick brush knocked an arrow out of Landers’ quiver. Somehow, the arrow stuck into the ground with the broadhead pointing up. Landers didn’t see it in time and stepped right into the razor-sharp blades. The broadhead gouged into his shin, soared up behind his knee, and plunged into the back of his lower thigh.

The blades severed his peroneal nerve and nicked an artery. This not only turned his left leg into a fountain of blood, but also rendered it practically immobile and without any sensory function. Extreme damage to the tissue and cartilage around his knee joint only got worse as he fell to the ground.

“[The arrow] went right beside the bone, almost halfway up my leg,” Landers tells Outdoor Life from a hospital in Calgary. “It went past my knee and snapped off somewhere. We found the bottom half of the arrow and another small chunk where it broke, so about 10 inches of arrow were in my leg.”

His hunting partners Devon Spencer and Jared Manuel immediately sprung (sic) into action. They were miraculously in the only spot of cell phone service they’d seen in the two days they’d been hunting, so they called in emergency services.

“We stopped the bleeding so that it wasn’t crazy bad, and I just tried to calm myself down a little bit,” Landers says. “We had STARS Air Ambulance flying overhead about an hour and a half later. They nosed down and one of the nurses came down and put a tourniquet on. She couldn’t get an I.V. in because I was in shock, so she had to do an [intraosseous infusion] and had to drill a hole in my leg to put meds in through my shinbone.”

Pictures at the link.  They were initially using a belt as a tourniquet.  Even if the IFAK contains nothing more than a tourniquet and Quik Clot, carry one in the bush with you.  Virtually anything can happen.

Here is a fully account of the follow-on antics.

Late Friday, the walleye fishing world was sent reeling after a cheating scandal was exposed in front of God, country, and a mob of justifiably furious walleye fishermen. Two guys – we can no longer call them fishermen without smearing the 99 percent who play by the rules – were exposed for what appears to be the most nefarious, blatant, and outrageous case of cheating that tournament walleye fishing has ever experienced.

Since we live in this drunkenly litigious climate, I will have to use every qualifier necessary – allegedly, reportedly, apparently – to relay this story, but when you have video captured from dozens of cell phones, it will be hard to build a case that their reputations have been unfairly tarnished.

I won’t use the terms apparently, allegedly or reportedly.  The video is right there.

When tournament director Jason Fischer sliced open the gullet on one of the fish that Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky had turned in, lead weights were exposed. Next fish – same thing. Next fish – lead weights and pieces of walleye fillets.

The duo had apparently, allegedly, and obviously, dropped these objects down the throats of their “catch” to enhance the weight and thus, improve their standing in the tournament. Fischer, a police officer in the Cleveland suburbs and a guy with an unassailable reputation in the Lake Erie walleye tournament ranks, was furious and threw them out of the tournament with a gesture reminiscent of the home plate umpire ejecting former New York Yankees manager Billy Martin.

Only the arrival of on-duty police officers likely saved Runyon and Cominsky from the assembled mob of “real” fishermen, many of whom had, behind the scenes, voiced their suspicions the duo had cheated in the past.

This story gets much messier. Since Runyon, of Cleveland, and Cominsky of Hermitage Pa., have already claimed the first-place prizes and considerable amounts of money in several LEWT events, including the 2021 season-ending championship, what happens now?

Legal eagles tell me that this apparent cheating in this weekend’s tournament constitutes fraud and is a felony. But the pair also took the top money in this past spring’s Rossford Walleye Roundup, and the huge payout in the 2021 Walleye Slam.

The duo weighed in the apparent top catch in last year’s Lake Erie Fall Brawl and made claim for the more than $100K attached to that finish, but then were disqualified. When the tournament director at the time offered no explanation or clarity other than to say one of them had failed the polygraph, the tournament lacked the transparency it so desperately needed.

Runyon went to great lengths to proclaim, repeatedly, that they were innocent and had caught their fish by following all of the rules. He secured legal counsel and has been trying to sue the Brawl to claim their so-called winnings.

Imagine that even after being caught red-handed, you were so eaten up with pride and greed that you hired legal counsel and argued that you “caught [their] fish by following all of the rules,” when that’s not even the point in question.

There is a lot of winnings and sponsorship money at stake.  Thieves and dishonorable men will go after that money.  But God doesn’t change His mind on the eighth commandment because of a lawyer.

Really?

WAILUKU — With the defense citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision confirming that the right to carry handguns for self-defense extends outside the home, a judge dismissed firearms charges Wednesday against a Paia man who said he had a gun for self-protection when he was arrested on a trespassing charge.

“The way the Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment has caused all of us — criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges — to rethink our gun laws,” said Deputy Public Defender Ben Lowenthal, who represents Christopher L. Wilson. “I hope that prosecutors, when charging these cases, are mindful of this interpretation of the Second Amendment.”

If he was trespassing, he should be charged as such.  But the judge made the right call.  In this source we learn that the prosecutor initially argued that the defendant lacked standing to argue that Bruen protected him.  I think they’ve got it backwards.

The defendant isn’t involved in a lawsuit against the state.  He was charged by the state.  His lack of attempt to obtain a permit is precisely the point in question.  In other words, saying that he lacks standing to argue Bruen begs the question because it presupposes the consequent.

I wish lawyers took classes in logic.

Every once in a while, reddit/Firearms has a good question come up.  It isn’t often, but sometimes one will catch my eye.

Can they be cleaned or are they disposable?  Just asking so I don’t wind up buying mops every time my 22 or shotgun turns those fibers black.

To which he gets this reply.

I reuse mine. I just hose it down with canned gun cleaner or non-chlorinated brake clean.

I like bore mops and use them heavily when cleaning.  They’re far more efficient than running a patch through the bore 1800 times.

However, I would suspect that repeated application of a solvent to clean the mop would begin to disintegrate the mop fibers.

AllOutdoor.

Before accuracy testing, I swapped out the 16-pound factory recoil spring for an 18.5-pound extra power recoil spring and extra-power firing pin spring. Those +P loads from BuffaloBore are pretty hot and can take a toll on a standard recoil spring.

There were no malfunctions of any type in all my shooting. Accuracy testing was from 25 yards over the hood of my SUV, with the gun resting on a sleeping bag. In all, I probably fired more than 300 rounds in my testing. Group size ranged from 2 to 3 inches, depending on the ammo and my abilities that day. I got the best overall accuracy from the Buffalo Bore 200-grain JHP +P load, which is fast becoming a favorite of mine.

The MC Operator retails for close to $1400.00. Is it worth it? To me it is. It’s as close to a custom 1911 as you’ll find in a non-custom model. They are hard to find, so expect to pay close to retail if you find one in a gun shop.

Over the years, I’ve owned some custom 1911s from big name custom builders and I’ve built more than my share of custom 1911s myself, but none impressed me more than the MC Operator did. Yeah, you can pay more for a custom gun or another brand of 1911 with the same or similar features, but I don’t think you’d be getting more gun for your money.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that it actually is a custom gun, i.e., that SA sends this model out to a contracted 1911 builder to be fitted.  But I wouldn’t be able to prove that.

The picture at AllOutdoors is a dated model.  The one advertised over their web site looks like this (with updated grips).

I would have probably put a 22# spring in it to handle +P loads.  The only thing it needs is a slide cut for an optic.

SA is always welcome to send this gun for our review.

Pat always seems to have some fun shooting.  He’s sporting the Henry Long Ranger in .223 (they also make this model in at least 6.5 Creedmoor, and maybe others).

Although I confess I don’t understand why, if the rifle was zeroed at 50 yards, it would be shooting 1.5″ high at 100 yards.  It should be right on at 100 yards, while if it had been zeroed at 25 yards, it should be on at 200 – 250 yards.

Source:

Despite a new research paper by two Clemson University economists proving that black lynching decreased with greater firearm access, North Carolina still clings to its Jim Crow pistol permit. The state remains the only former Confederate state with the pistol permit law enacted here in 1919.

Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a repeal of the Jim Crow law in 2021, despite support for repealing the law by the N.C. Sheriffs’ Association. In the past, the state Sheriffs’ Associations opposed repeal, but updates to the national instant background checks make the law redundant and a hassle for residents.

Pistol permits emerged as popular legislation in the segregated South by using subjective denials by law enforcement, such as “good cause,” to keep handguns out of the hands of black state residents. To this day, blacks in North Carolina are denied access to pistols at a rate nearly three times as high as the white population.

We’re not sure why he wanders off of North Carolina to cite a Georgia case. We left that part out; you can read the whole thing at the source.

Gun purchases are way up with many non-traditional firearm owners and minorities, particularly black and Hispanic women. They, too, are entitled the same Constitutional protections as every other law-abiding citizen. More than five million people became first-time gun owners during the pandemic, and many new gun owners identify as politically liberal.

Woke district attorneys and city governments are proving to many that the government is not equipped to protect the populace but may not even have a desire to protect residents. Naturally, rising crime is creating a greater demand for armed protection in the absence of the rule of law in many urban areas.

Not every North Carolinian has a desire to train to receive their concealed carry license. Some want a constitutional carry system – which is now law of the land in half of U.S. states. Given universal federal background checks, the pistol permit system is not fair or just for those who want to purchase a handgun as a collectible, self-defense, or target shooting.

Other Southern states clearly cited racism as a reason to repeal this law, so North Carolina no longer has a valid excuse to cling to Jim Crow’s past. Most importantly, governments should do a better job of treating all free citizens as free, while punishing violent criminals and all those who misuse firearms harshly.

Constitutional Carry in North Carolina is overdue.