The Bureau of Land Management is planning a truly boneheaded move, angering some conservationists over the affects to herd populations and migration routes. From Field & Stream.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently released a draft plan outlining potential solar energy development in the West. The proposal is an update of the BLM’s 2012 Western Solar Plan. It adds five new states—Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—to a list of 11 western states already earmarked…… [read more]
Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney (D) addressed the shooting death of Temple University police officer Christopher Fitzgerald and made clear his view that one cannot claim to back the blue if they do not back gun control.
Breitbart News reported that Fitzgerald was shot and killed while investigating a carjacking Saturday night. The alleged cop killer, 18-year-old Miles Pfeffer, was arrested Sunday morning without incident.
The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Kenney reacting to the slaying, saying, “There’s too many [guns] and they’re too easy to get.”
Kenney added, “You can say you back the blue, but if you don’t back gun control and gun availability, you don’t back the blue. We owe it to them to do everything we can to stop this nonsense and stop this tragedy.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen decision (issued June 23, 2022) was a pivotal ruling. Following up on the District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and the McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) decisions, Bruen reaffirmed private gun rights, quite solidly. Up until those three decisions, the Supreme Court had conspicuously ignored taking up any Second Amendment cases, for more than 50 years. But now, the highest court has made it quite clear that the right to keep and bear arms is nigh-on absolute.
I’ve mentioned the Bruen decision before in SurvivalBlog. But today, I’d like like to examine it more closely.
The majority opinion for Bruen was written by one of my heroes, Justice Clarence Thomas. He had previously lamented that the Second Amendment had been treated as “a disfavored right.” But in the 2022 decision, Justice Thomas set things write. He forthrightly wrote that the only gun regulations that can be deemed constitutional are ones that don’t infringe on conduct that is plainly covered by the text of the Second Amendment and that are “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition.” This part of Bruen means that any gun law enacted at any level must have a demonstrable parallel in regulations that were in place at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights — meaning circa December, 1791. Thus, Bruen sets a very high bar for legislators to hurdle. If lawmakers cannot cite a similar law that existed after the War of Independence but before December, 1791, then any statute pertaining to arms of any description would be unconstitutional!
It’s an interesting rehearsal of some little known history, and with Bruen, history matters. In light of the decision, one has to ask by what authority does the F exist in ATF? Read the rest.
Gun control advocates have long sought ways to circumvent theProtection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a federal immunity law that shields the gun industry from liability. State lawmakers in Democratic strongholds across the country contend they have achieved that feat through the passage of “public nuisance” gun laws.
In New York, New Jersey and Delaware, gun manufacturers, sellers and distributors can now be sued for endangering the public’s health and safety — or creating a “public nuisance” — through improper marketing or sales practices.
The new statutes mark the latest round in a long-running battle between gun control advocates and firearm manufacturers over the federal immunity law. And this time the issue could land before the Supreme Court, according to legal experts, as several Democratic-led states take a more aggressive approach to restricting firearms.
The gun manufacturing industry is fighting back hard and contends the new laws are unconstitutional and in no way in compliance with the 2005 law.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, is leading the challenge.
Here’s where the legal fight stands between the NSSF and the states that have enacted these “public nuisance” laws:
New Jersey: A New Jersey federal judge sided with the NSSF last month when he blocked the state’s law from being enforced, noting that it “is in direct conflict” with federal law. New Jersey has appealed the ruling.
New York: The NSSF has appealed the dismissal of their New York lawsuit by a district court to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Delaware: A hearing for the NSSF’s district challenge in Delaware will be held Feb. 28.
California: The group also plans to sue California later this year when its version of the law goes into effect.
Gun control advocates and legal experts who focus on the Second Amendment said the NSSF’s multistate approach bears all the hallmarks of how a special interest group can maneuver to give itself the best chance to bring a case before the Supreme Court, particularly one that may be viewed favorably by the majority.
The NSSF says its goal is simply to challenge the new laws in every jurisdiction where they are being implemented.
“There’s no grand strategy,” said NSSF senior vice president Lawrence Keane. “We are simply responding to the threat to our industry that is occasioned by these statutes being passed at the behest of these gun control groups.”
But gun control advocates are skeptical the industry is not angling for a date with the Supreme Court.
Esther Sanchez-Gomez, litigation director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said she believes the NSSF and other gun industry groups could be trying to manufacture circuit splits by filing several lawsuits across the country.
Good. I hope they’re able to “manufacture circuit splits.” I don’t care whether that’s their strategy or not – I hope it redounds that that end.
I don’t much like Larry Keane. He’s always been neck deep in NRA shenanigans. But that doesn’t matter for this purpose. The only other thing to do if the supreme court doesn’t take this up and then knock it down is for manufacturers to stop sales of all firearms to citizens in those states who enact such laws including and most especially law enforcement.
That would be financially harmful to the firearms industry, but less so than lawsuits that cause bankruptcy.
As I’ve said, I could listen to Ryan Muckenhirn talk about boiling beans for hours and never get bored. I watched every minute of the video (it’s a long one). But lever actions guns are almost always unique, are historic, are a distinct part of Americana, come from a much better time in history, were designed by the very best mechanics and craftsmen America had to offer, are still viable and useful today, and still (in many cases) carry the wood stock and beautiful furniture you would like to turn over to your children and grandchildren. Jim said it near the end when he said he got into lever guns when he sat back and thought one day when he hands his children his weapons, “Here, offspring, here is this really special firearm …,” and then thought, I have no special firearms. So he bought lever guns.
They’re beautiful, classic, nostalgic, fun to operate, can still put meat on the table, and it’s no wonder there is such a resurgence in interest in lever actions guns and the cartridges they shoot.
I’d like to have a much larger collection of lever action guns than I do. I’ll tell you someone who had a gigantic collection of lever action guns: Jeff Quinn of Gunblast, whom I miss.
Hint: The solution isn’t politics; it’s you. Source:
There are the solutions we should use, the solutions we could use, and the non-solutions that politicians have used already. Let me bring you up to speed in a hurry.
The bad news is that we built this problem of mass-murder and celebrity-murderers. The good news is that we can fix it. Society changed in significant ways over the last 5 decades. We destroyed families so many young men grew up without fathers. No one taught these young men how to control their strength and their anger. We closed our mental-health facilities and put mentally ill patients out on the street. Recently, we refused to prosecute, convict, and incarcerate violent criminals. Each of those factors certainly contribute to our problem of mass-murder today.
We can disagree about what we meant to do as we changed our public policies but there is no argument about the resulting outcome of increased mass-murder in the last several decades.
Each of those are contributing factors, but they are not the main cause of the increase. We have to address the elephant in the room.
Something else changed in our society. We’ve read the journals and the interviews of mass-murderers and they told us exactly why they kill. They are willing to die so that they can be famous. The biggest problem is the dozens of 24-7 news channels who now give each mass-murderer a 10-million dollar publicity campaign if the murderer kills enough innocent victims. Those are not my words, but theirs. You don’t have to believe me but you should believe them. We created celebrity-murderers, and we should demand that the news media stop turning these mass-murderers into instant celebrities.
The media isn’t the source of the problem. Is there insufficient evidence that “News” is simply government propagandist information of questionable validity and almost zero usefulness? If the government and its media wanted to censor mass shootings and broadcast 24/7 every self-defense firearm use, they could. But that wouldn’t help the long-term plan of keeping people in fear, so they support civilian registration and disarmament.
It isn’t obvious yet, but we are closing the chapter on the brief history of mass-murders in the United States.
We stopped them. Ordinary people like you and I stopped mass-murderers. We learned to attack the murderer if he attacks us in a bar where we are disarmed. We learned to shoot the attacker if we are armed. We found out that shooting back works really well.
Where we are allowed to go armed, ordinary armed civilians stopped attempted mass-murderers over 104 times since 2004. An armed citizen isn’t there at every attempted mass-murder. If he is there, the armed citizen doesn’t choose to intervene every time. In the last few years we were effective at stopping mass-murderers 94-percent of the time when we tried. We stopped more than half of the attempted mass-murders where we were allowed to go armed.
Other than the gradual expansion of carry rights, the people are fighting against mass murder without any establishment support whatsoever. He offers many points, good details, and plenty of data. Read the rest.
Related: Not surprisingly, there is more than one gun news story out today about Chicago residents fighting back against gangs and other criminals with their own firearms. Good for them.
I’ve never shot the M60 though I wanted to the first time I saw one, which was in a Navy unit I briefly served with. The M2 is another story. The readers here probably know some interesting details about the weapon.
Photo found without attribution. Appears to be news stock, Vietnam Era.
The M60 is one of the enduring symbols of the American firearms industry. Born out of a fusion of two WWII-era German designs, the original M60 had several engineering flaws that lead to its replacement by the M240. But in 2014, Denmark adopted the M60E6 as the standard light machine gun of its armed forces, and the design continues to be manufactured and sold today. How did the M60 go from its rushed original design to the gun it is today?
The story of the M60 begins right after the end of WWII. During WWII, U.S. soldiers faced down the advanced MG42 machine gun and FG42 automatic rifle. While some may say the MG42’s rate of fire was too high, the weapon was far more suitable for infantry use than the American M1919A6, with superior ergonomics and lower weight. They also faced the FG42, an advanced box-fed automatic rifle that was lighter and more flexible than the American M1918A2 BAR.
Both of these weapons impressed American evaluators, who ordered Saginaw Steering Gear Division of General Motors to produce a version of the MG42 in the American .30-06 caliber. This did not go so well, with many engineering errors such as making the receiver too short. The final gun was highly unreliable, and the project was canned.
The U.S. Ordnance Corps then investigated the possibility of converting the FG42 into a belt-fed machine gun. A variety of prototypes were made. The T44 was a relatively standard FG42 converted to use the MG42’s belt feed, but the basic FG42 barrel proved too light for sustained automatic fire. The T52 came later, incorporating a heavier barrel. Later iterations of the T52 added a quick-change barrel and a new gas system.
The Army also began development of the T161 around this time, which was a variation on the T52 design, but modified for mass production. The T161 and T52 competed with each other throughout 1953 and 1954. In 1954, both guns were adapted for the new 7.62x51mm NATO round and M13 belt link, though they were not called that at the time. The T161 eventually won and went through several iterations before its final field trials as the T161E3 in 1955 and 1956.
The results of the T161E3 trials were impressive. Soldiers preferred the gun over the M1919-series of guns as it was far easier to maneuver, aim, move, and maintain. The gun weighed almost ten pounds less than the M1919A6, tipping the scales at around twenty-three pounds. The T161E3 was adopted as the M60 on 30 January 1957.
The M60 would see its first combat use in the Vietnam War in 1965 with the U.S. Marines. While it served well for many soldiers, providing heavy, accurate firepower, it also revealed many more flaws in the design.
In the door gunner role, M60s could fire upwards of 5000 rounds a day, laying down constant suppressing fire onto landing zones before helicopters came in. This caused the lightweight receivers to stretch and even crack, and gages were issued to armorers to determine when replacement should occur, which usually happened around 100,000 rounds or so. In contrast, the heavier M240 has been known to go for upwards of two million rounds without receiver repair.
More at the source.
Here’s one going for six figures at auction. That price is entirely the NRA’s fault under the NFA; its members covet control of high prices for their automatic rifle investments. The video source is Rock Island Auction, 2023 Gun Prices and Trends, which details many collectibles for this coming year.
Discover Financial Services, a provider of credit cards, told Reuters it will allow its network to track purchases at gun retailers come April, making it the first among its peers to move ahead with the initiative aimed at helping authorities probe gun-related crimes.
The decision came after the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which decides on the classification of merchant categories used by payment cards, approved in September the launch of a dedicated code for gun retailers.
Proponents of the move, including gun control activists and Democratic politicians, say it will allow financial institutions to better assist authorities in investigating crimes involving gun violence in the United States.
There has been uncertainty around the implementation, with Visa Inc, Mastercard Inc and American Express Co yet to disclose a timetable for adopting the change. Although the codes will not show specific items purchased, some Republican politicians have spoken out against the move, arguing it could violate the privacy of U.S. citizens lawfully buying guns.
Isn’t that nice? The ISO wants to know what you’re purchasing with your wealth. The ISO, an international organization – although I’m sure that U.S. banks were all too willing to comply and the ISO is just a straw man.
If you have a Discover Card, be aware that this change is coming and make appropriate arrangements.
The citizen disarmament lobby only bellows about “home rule” for counties and municipalities when preemption blocks their attempts to infringe. At the same time, the effort continues to impose gun bans at the federal level binding on the whole country.
“What works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne,” Barack Obama feinted when trying to justify localities ignoring “the supreme Law of the Land.” Left unsaid was exactly what the hell it is that works in Chicago.
Yeah, they only care about home rule when it comes to infringing on gun rights, killing babies and allowing illegals to cross the border and stay, consuming important medical and financial resources.
David concludes, “By posturing as their moral superior and characterizing them in his legal opinion as de facto enemies of the state, this Egan character, sounding for all the world like an Antifa street thug, has shown himself to be the bigot relying on divisiveness and hate.”
Hatred is what binds the controllers together. It’s the darkness of heart that is the common element in their worship of the state.
