I hate the NRA, but this type of information and certifying firearms courses and instructors really is what they should focus on, leaving rights advocacy to the adults.

We hear this term bantered about a lot when it comes to ammunition. But what exactly does it mean, and how does it affect your success in the field or for self-defense?

Terminal performance is how a bullet or other projectile reacts, and the ability of it to stop a human threat or take down an animal. In other words, hunters rate a bullet’s terminal performance in how quickly a projectile kills game animals. Soldiers, law enforcement officers and responsible citizens in self-defense situations rate terminal performance on how quickly a projectile neutralizes a threat. It all relates to how deeply a bullet penetrates to reach the vital organs and cause tissue damage.

Terminal performance is often referred to as “knock-down” or “stopping” power. It is not whether the bullet kills, but how quickly and consistently. Terminal performance has a lot to do with bullet design and the ballistics of the cartridge.

Target shooters are not as concerned with terminal performance as they are in punching holes in paper. They are looking for consistent bullet placement in a tight grouping where they are aiming. Those who use a gun for hunting, and those who carry a gun to defend freedom—like our soldiers, men and women in blue, or citizens who carry for personal protection—are concerned with the terminal performance of a bullet. Remember, if you use a firearm, you have the potential to use deadly force. Using a firearm should be your last resort if you have no other option and it is either you or the assailant. Stopping a threat, whether human or animal, is done in two ways: by causing severe damage to the vascular system and interrupting or stopping the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain; or causing severe damage to the central nervous system in the brain or cerebellum.

There are three things that a bullet needs for terminal performance: bullet expansion, bullet penetration and bullet velocity. All three are related to bullet design and all must work in concert to get the required performance.

The article doesn’t present charts or graphs, which is disappointing since visuals are both a handy reference and increase learning retention. More details are at the link.

After you “just get a Glock,” what handgun do you use?

What’s the deal with single action vs double action handguns? Well, it’s all about the trigger and exactly what happens when it’s pressed. The only thing the trigger of a single action (SA) handgun does is release a cocked hammer to fire the gun. With a double action (DA) handgun, pressing the trigger cocks and releases the hammer. We could leave the explanation there, but as they say in calculus class, it gets complicated. It gets complicated because both revolvers and pistols come as either single or double action, and because within these two distinctions there are variations that require some explaining. So, here is a full breakdown of single action vs double action handguns.

I don’t care for DAO only pistols. The article covers double action, single action, and DAO pistols and revolvers. It’s good for understanding and teaching the basics; the rest is at the link.

Well, except for the balancing act she alluded to in her decision, she got it all right.  Because she’s honest and did what she was supposed to do – follow where the superior court led.

Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito and Kavanaugh would have maintained the vacatur Judge Reed O’Connor put into place rather than issue the stay, while Roberts, Barrett, and the others made the decision to issue the stay.  So in other words, all of the women on the court sided with the government.  Who is surprised by that?

Anyway, parts kits aren’t the only way to enjoy your 2A freedoms.

Recoil has given us a complete step-by-step guide for AR-15 lower receivers – with pictures.  He begins with tools.

Good tools are hard to find these days, but thankfully there are still a few options out there.

If you’re looking to do this as cheaply as possible, just get whatever crap is the lowest price on Amazon and call it a day. Honestly, it will probably be good enough for one build, but very likely only one.

If you think you might do this more than once, or you just don’t want to make yourself suffer while you build, invest a little more money and get tools from reputable firearm brands like RealAvid and Wheeler.

Personally, RealAvid is normally my go-to pick. Full disclosure, they’ve sent me a number of products to review over the years, including most of the ones from them in this article.

But I also put my money where my mouth is, I’ve spent a lot of my own money on their tools over the years because I like the product.

If you want a one-stop option, RealAvid’s Armorer’s Master Kit is pretty amazing but pricy. And it’s totally overkill for just one lower. If you want to go hard and build a lot, it’s worth it.

Ouch!  That is pricey.

My must-have tools are pretty simple, a Bench Block, a hammer and punch set, and an armorer’s wrench.

The bench block can be just about any model. The Smart Bench Block is simple, and I’ve been using mine for about 5 years, love it. The Master Bench Block is the one I used for this article, and it’s pretty nice but not a must-have over the normal block.

I really, really recommend a punch set that is designed for guns, especially the AR-15, since those sets are normally sized right, and some include punches built for the bolt catch – they make life easier and make not scarring your lower a lot easier.

RealAvid’s set comes with all the punches you need, a small hammer, and a nice case. Wheeler’s set is decent for most guns but doesn’t have the AR-15 bolt-catch punches. The AR-Stoner set I owned broke the first time I used it. YMMV.

The wrench is the tool I care the least about; literally, anything off Amazon will be fine. I’ve used the $5 one for about 4 or 5 lowers, and it’s fine. Wrap the handle with a shop rag for a better grip. If you want something a bit fancier, Magpul, RealAvid, Tapco, Brownells, and Wheeler, all make good options.

I disagree with that part.  If you don’t have a good wrench you’ll tear up your parts.  Magpul makes good AR wrenches.

So this is a good URL to tuck away.  I’ll return to this in time.  After reading it I wanted them to have done one on upper receivers.  At the end they say this.

We’ll do another guide soon for building an upper, but those require some more tools.

I’ll pass along the next article on lower receivers.

This video provides an excellent exposition of Romans 1, which starts at about the twenty-four-minute mark. Where I agree wholesale is that all of civilization hangs in the balance. Dr. Baldwin excels in doing expository teaching as here. The beginning of the video is also good; he starts in Genesis 1, briefly setting God’s revealed purpose for His pinnacle creation. Dr. Baldwin’s continual use of the term Natural Law is somewhat distracting, but he explains it well in the context of the verses.

However, there is nothing to so-called natural law that is not written in revealed law. We’ve covered this section and verse 20 similarly; in our nature, made in God’s image, we can see His creation in us and all around us and therefore have a sense of what nature demands as right and wrong for men and women.

Romans 2:14-15 shows again what Dr. Baldwin calls natural as being revealed law written in God’s holy law. Natural Law is not unique or additional revelatory knowledge of God apart from His Law-word. And Dr. Baldwin also states that he doesn’t think the State should be in people’s bedrooms, but don’t tell him Jefferson’s Virginia criminally (not civil law) forbade such acts in the Commonwealth. This remained true as recently as my lifetime when I lived there.

This video is not available on Youtube because it violates the blasphemy laws of the New Religion. But it’s available on Libertyfellowshipmt dot com and Bitchute if this won’t run for you.

Congratulations Trump.  Amy Coney Barrett votes with the communists.  Yet another failure.  You could have chosen Judge Don Willett instead.  This is on you.

LA Times.

A conservative panel of federal judges ruled Monday that a 30-year ban on butterfly knives in Hawaii is unconstitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court’s new “history and tradition” standard for reviewing the legitimacy of gun and other weapons laws nationwide.

“Hawaii has not demonstrated that its ban on butterfly knives is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of regulating arms,” Judge Carlos Bea wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The ruling, which may be appealed, has implications beyond Hawaii, including in California and other states that also ban or severely restrict butterfly knives, which have been targeted by lawmakers because they can be easily concealed and flipped open.

California bans “switchblades” — which include butterfly knives — when they have blades 2 or more inches in length. A separate lawsuit challenging that ban is pending.

The decision reflects the growing reach of the Supreme Court’s pro-gun rights decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen, in which the nation’s highest court ruled that restrictions on people’s 2nd Amendment right to bear arms are constitutional only if they are deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition or analogous to some historical rule.

Since then, trial and appellate judges have found themselves sifting through century-old state statutes to determine the legality of hundreds of modern weapons restrictions in states all across the country — including on knives and billy clubs, assault weapons and ammunition magazines, and on the possession of guns by certain classes of people, including adults under 21 and people who are subject to restraining orders.

Bea wrote that Hawaii’s 1993 ban on butterfly knives did not meet the criteria because nothing like it existed around the historical benchmarks chosen by the Supreme Court as relevant for such analyses: 1791, when the 2nd Amendment was passed, or 1868, when the 14th Amendment was passed. The latter amendment prohibits states from depriving people of property without due process of law.

Although the Bruen decision specifically addressed firearm regulations, Bea wrote that was only because the case in Bruen was about gun regulations in New York. The same “framework” applies to knives, which are also “arms” under the 2nd Amendment, he said.

[ … ]

Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who focuses on 2nd Amendment law, said the 9th Circuit’s decision “is emblematic of what’s happening across the nation right now.

“Courts are striking down regulation of arms left and right.”

Winkler said the Supreme Court “has put states in the impossible position of showing that any law that regulates weapons for public safety [has] clear analogues in the 1700s and 1800s,” which he added “just leaves courts to draw analogies to laws that were designed for a different society.”

“It really makes no sense,” he said.

[ … ]

Hawaii put forward several such laws, dating back to 1837, including laws that banned or regulated bigger blades such as Bowie knives and “Arkansas Toothpicks,” daggers, brass knuckles, canes concealing swords and knotted ropes with metal weights at the end called “slung-shots.”

An 1837 law in Georgia — which the court called Hawaii’s “best historical analogue” — said no one shall “keep, or have about or on their person or elsewhere … Bowie, or any other kind of knives.”

Bea wrote that the Georgia law didn’t clearly include “pocketknives” — which in his decision would include butterfly knives — so it wasn’t necessarily relevant. And anyway, he wrote, “one solitary statute is not enough to demonstrate a tradition of an arms regulation.”

[ … ]

“The court has to provide more clarity and direction for the lower courts,” Winkler said, “because the Bruen test has proven absolutely unworkable and unpredictable.”

It makes no sense to fisk this decision completely because it’s the right decision.  However, I do have some thoughts on it.

First, men should be able to carry swords if they choose to.  Silly debates on the mechanical operation of knives makes these judges look like school children, and besides, none of them ever used a knife anyway unless it’s an electric powered knife for cutting turkey because their wife told them to.  Their wives could probably have done a better job of cutting the turkey.

Seriously, most of these judges are so effete that they wouldn’t know how to use fire starter, tie a bowline or taut line hitch, build a campfire, or be able to open a box with a knife without cutting themselves.  They certainly wouldn’t know how to operate a 1911, and yet they’re adjudicating laws for the rest of us.

Next, notice the silly Adam Winkler and his hand wringing over this sort of thing.  He says, “impossible position of showing that any law that regulates weapons for public safety [has] clear analogues in the 1700s and 1800s,” [which he added] “just leaves courts to draw analogies to laws that were designed for a different society.  It really makes no sense.”

It makes perfect sense, and it’s clear enough to you and me.  Winkler just doesn’t like it.  He adds to our understanding of his frustration by emoting “the Bruen test has proven absolutely unworkable and unpredictable!”

The test is completely workable.  The test is to find analogues from the time of the signing of the constitution, or at the latest the lives of the founders (while they were still here on earth).  Can’t find an analogue?  Too bad.  You fail the test.  There is no reason to search any more.

There were no analogues on the carry of knives from the time of the founding.  Even as children the founders carried long guns to school with them to be able to hunt on the way to and from school to fill the dinner table.  And that stupid “analogue” on Bowie knives from 1837 from Georgia is no analogue at all.  It’s too late.

All this searching they’re doing is to try to force fit later laws and regulations into the framework of the Bruen test.  There was also no law or regulation of firearms serialization at the time of the founding either.  They can pull their hair out as far as I’m concerned.  In fact, the more time they waste on trying to convince the court that they’ve actually found something when the law is too late to meet the Bruen standard is time they don’t have to spend on wrecking the lives of other people.

The only downside for us is that this all slows the process down.  It would be better if they just gave up and understood that they can’t meet the Bruen test.  In absence of that, I’ll take a waste of their time.

Finally, why do writers go to silly men like Winkler to assess the facts of these cases, when they’ve got real scholars like David Kopel, Dave Hardy, Stephen Halbrook, Mark Smith and so many others?

Winkler doesn’t like the Bruen test.  That’s fine with me inasmuch as I don’t care what Winkler thinks.  That’s a much different thing than saying that it’s unworkable and unpredictable.  The test is entirely workable and quite predictable.  Winkler gets an ‘F’ from The Captain’s Journal on class participation today.

As you likely know, Justice Alito has given the federal government until Tuesday, or in other words, extended the stay on Judge’s Reed O’Conner’s vacatur of the new ATF rule to serialize incomplete lower receivers.  Of course, we don’t know where this is all headed.  The SCOTUS could remand this for decision consistent with Bruen, or sustain the vacatur for parties involved, or they have other options.  Since this emergency appeal by the DOJ has been accepted by the SCOTUS, doing nothing is now not possible.  They will do something, but we’ll have to wait until Tuesday to find out (or perhaps Wednesday).

Below, professor Mark Smith does a service by reviewing the history of firearms serialization in both the U.K and America.  There is basically no history of serialization in America, and certainly no history of requiring firearms to be serialized at the time of our founding.  In other words, there is no analogue law to which the DOJ and ATF can turn.  It isn’t enough to say that firearms loaned to the militia by the government were serialized.  That was for a different purpose, i.e., tracking government property.  The ATF rule pertains to privately owned firearms.

Watch all of Mark Smith’s presentation.  But before you get to that, remember that the founders toted long guns to school with them in order to hunt on the way to and from classes.  Those were either purchased from a smith (with no serialization) or self-made (of course, with no serialization).  The founders would have opposed such schema.

In 1 Samuel 13:19f, we read this.

Now no blacksmith could be found in all the land of Israel, because the Philistines said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears.” So all Israel went down to the Philistines, each to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, and his hoe. The charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares, the mattocks, the forks, and the axes, and to fix the cattle goads.

This is considered by commentators to be a great evil.  Matthew Henry comments, “See how politic the Philistines were when they had power; they not only prevented the people of Israel from making weapons of war, but obliged them to depend upon their enemies, even for instruments of husbandry. How impolitic Saul was, who did not, in the beginning of his reign, set himself to redress this. Want of true sense always accompanies want of grace. Sins which appear to us very little, have dangerous consequences. Miserable is a guilty, defenceless nation; much more those who are destitute of the whole armour of God.”  In Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, we read this.  “Now there was no smith found throughout … Israel—The country was in the lowest state of depression and degradation. The Philistines, after the great victory over the sons of Eli, had become the virtual masters of the land. Their policy in disarming the natives has been often followed in the East. For repairing any serious damage to their agricultural implements, they had to apply to the neighboring forts.”  John Gill remarks “this they did to prevent their having arms, and the use of them, that they might not rebel against them, and fight with them, and overcome them; it was a piece of policy to keep them subject to them.”

Subjection of others is always the goal.  As I’ve observed before, the desire to control others is the signal pathology of the wicked.  Men who would become the almighty desire to steal the power and authority of the most high God to themselves, and the result is always tyranny.  Those rulers are always fake, a ghost of righteousness, a phantom, unreal, a vapor in the wind.  There is nothing righteous about tyrannical rulers, but the history of tyranny is dark.  In the twentieth century, some 212,000,000 souls were lost at the hands of tyrannical governments across the globe.

The firearms serialization schema is sinful, and points to deeper problems of the soul among those who call for such control over other men.  Control over other men never leads to righteous results.

Never compromise with this wickedness.  Oppose it at every turn.  Take names and hold grudges.

Prior: The American Tradition of Self Made Arms

Source.

FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) – Fargo is suing the state of North Dakota over a new law that bans zoning ordinances related to guns and ammunition, continuing a clash over local gun control.

The state’s biggest city has an ordinance that bans people from selling guns and ammunition out of their homes. The Republican-controlled Legislature passed a law this year that limits cities and counties from regulating guns and ammunition. The law, which took effect Tuesday, also voids existing, related ordinances.

The city’s lawsuit says the “stakes are much higher” and gets at whether the Legislature can “strip away” Fargo’s home rule powers. Fargo voters approved a home rule charter in 1970 that gave the city commission certain powers, including the power to zone public and private property.

“As it relates to this present action, the North Dakota legislative assembly is upset that the City of Fargo has exercised its home rule powers to prohibit the residents of the City of Fargo – and no one else – from the home occupation of selling firearms and ammunition and the production of ammunition for sale,” the lawsuit states. “Effectively, the City of Fargo does not want its residents to utilize their homes in residential areas as gun stores.”

The city successfully challenged a similar law two years ago.

North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley told The Associated Press his office will evaluate the complaint. Fargo city spokesperson Gregg Schildberger said the City Commission will discuss the lawsuit on Monday during a regular meeting.

Bill sponsor and Republican state Rep. Ben Koppelman told a state Senate panel in April that the issue came to greater attention in 2016 when, because of the ordinance, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives refused to renew the federal firearms licenses of Fargo dtealers who sold out of their homes.

“What is at issue is whether we want local governments creating gun control or whether we want gun regulations to remain a state-controlled issue,” Koppelman said in April. “Without this bill and in light of the (2021) court opinion, I think local political subdivisions could propose all sorts of local gun control, and based on the anti-gun track record of the City of Fargo Commission, I think we could expect it.”

It’s difficult for me to ascertain where this is for ND and the city of Fargo.  I’m not sure if the article is implying a likelihood of success because of prior protocol (lack of a preemption law), or screwed up judges.

In any case, it’s difficult for me to see any option other than ND law overriding Fargo ordinances.  Cities seem to always be a hotbed of controllers, Karens and HOA committees who like to tell other people what to do.

I support this preemption law as long as the state of ND honors the rights under the 2A.  I oppose any preemption law from a state that strips away rights under the 2A.

I see nothing inconsistent with my position.  Always press towards maximum liberty as long as property rights and noise ordinances aren’t infringed.

Virtually every copper bullet we’ve seen tested performed magnificently.  They seem to hold together well (they don’t explode in tissue), and they have good expansion.  Thus, they appear to be very good hunting bullets.