"I'm Doing MY Part!"

Of Arms and the Law: GunFacts is fundraising:

Right here. Guy Smith, its central person, hopes to expand efforts toward pro-gun Youtube messages and undertake other projects. "To continue this winning streak, we need your help. We want to continue educating the masses, like we did last year when we:
• Broke the code on why some polls show gun ownership steady while others show it declining.
• Showed that "lax law" states are not the source of crime guns, but that "strict law" states are.
• Launched a YouTube channel with snappy 60-second videos for you to share.
• Showed why "universal" background checks are not universal, and why they make no difference in gun crime

Geezer Central

Who says Old Pharts can't handle a gun?

[HT: Never Yet Melted]

(Thanks to CLAIR for providing links to the oh-so-smarmy  ORIGINAL ARTICLE)

"Need More Bulletts" - Pro and Con

CON:

 Newtown activists on Thursday helped introduce the first gun safety bill in this Congress, officially kicking off the gun control debate on Capitol Hill.
The bill would ban large capacity ammunition clips for everyone but military members and law enforcement officers. It was introduced by Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-5th District, in the House and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., in the Senate.

Well, we can certainly understand their concern that criminals with "high-capacity magazines" have the capacity to kill and injure more innocents with their evil high-capacity magazines which allow them to kill more people without reloading.   Did we mention "evil"?  A law restricting access to evil "high capacity magazines" makes sense.  It would keep them from killing and injuring many people, because when they run out of ammunition they can't .. kill and injure so many people.

Why would anyone need a "High-Capacity Magazine" (except for the military, because they are designed to kill people!) anyway?

 What about a private citizen who was trying to keep home invaders from killing her?

I  know ... the Liberal Press says that (almost) "Never Happens".

But "Almost" is not the same thing as "absolutely never happens".

Case in point:

PRO:

Woman Shoots Suspect, Runs Out of Bullets, Plans to Buy 'Another Gun' - Breitbart:

 According to CBS DFW, the woman grabbed her gun when she heard the suspects in her home. Upon seeing them, she opened fire, shooting one in the stomach but emptying every bullet in her gun without hitting the second suspect. She surmises that the suspects heard her gun as it began to “click” and realized she was out of rounds. At that point, the uninjured suspect allegedly began to beat her, leaving the woman with “a concussion and her face was covered with cuts and bruises.”

But she kept the almost-never-happens "Home Invaders" from killing her, even though she was not immediately able to drive them off because ... hey!  Criminals and other socially-unreconstructed victims of the Republican Mean-ness are angry and disenfranchised, so they deserve the recognition of White Privilege which makes them Killer Bees.

Or ... something.

Do you know what she said, when the whole thing was over (and she was alive, because she kicked their ASS!)?

"I got to get another gun".

The one she has ... doesn't hold enough bullets.

Nobody is going to tell HER that "High Capacity Magazines don't have a societal value.

And when it's your ass against the buck-wahs breaking down  your door, Liberal Doofs, you're going to want "as many rounds as it takes" in your home-defense gun, too.

Don't tell me you don't own one.

Nobody wants to have strangers barge into their home and beat your wife, leaving the woman with “a concussion and her face was covered with cuts and bruises.

Introduction to USPSA: Administrivia

This is such a mundane topic, I hesitate to even mention it.

But it's important, because I'm running a one man show when I schedule students for my "Introduction to USPSA" class at ARPC, and the training is sometimes less complex than registering students.

"Professional" trainers (those people who get the Big Bucks for running a class) are probably aware that scheduling classes and registering students are activities which potentially take more time and effort than actually running the class.

I'm not a "Professional".  I'm an "Amateur".  I've taking courses in training in the business world, but there are few classes for Firearms Training outside of the NRA, which I can afford.  And nobody is going to pay me to take a NRA INSTRUCTOR class, so I fall back on my native ability and previous professional (including military) training.

Here's the deal!

I have a link from my home-club website to my personal email address, where people who wish to pre-register for my "INTRODUCTION TO USPSA" class can let me know that they plan to attend.  Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't.  That's life.

But one thing I absolutely insist upon is that I know who is so determined to take the training, they will pre-register.  That performs two functions:  (1) I know who has already committed to the class, and (2) I know how many people I will be training.

That last part is important, and (2) supports (1).

If attendees just "show up" without pre-registering, I may have too many people in the class to allow sufficient time for each attendee to work through the Live Fire Exercise portion of the course.  That is the most important, because the 'Lecture' portion only tells the students what is expected of them.

The Live Fire portion of the course is where the students have the opportunity to demonstrate their (relative degrees of ) gun-handling expertise.

Realism Reveals Incompetence:

You may not believe it, but when I tell students that their score on a test depends on being able to perform basic functions of gun-handling under the pressure of time, they sometimes get so flustered that they are unable to perform even the simplest demonstration of gun-handling expertise.

Pugil Stick Fighting in Army Basic Training

When I was drafted into the army, in 1969, I was the oldest man in the platoon at 23 years old.  Also, I was the only married man (I got married six days before my report date!) so my platoon cadre chose me to be the "Platoon Guide", which is an honorary position; it means that I was responsible for anything BAD that happened in my platoon.  I had no actual power, except that I would assign platoon members to all the shit details that were assigned to my platoon.  This did not make me the most popular guy in the platoon.

The Cadre made the appointment before we showed up for Basic Training at Fort Lewis, Washington (just outside Tacoma), so they didn't actually know that I was a physical weakling, and total wimp.  They only knew I was a college graduate, old, married, and they assumed I had something going for me.

They may not have noticed that I only weighed 126 pounds, and that I was 6' tall.

Which was not all that bad a thing, because I was able to accomplish administrative tasks remarkably well.

But I didn't know how to fight.

Then came the day when they introduced us to PUGIL STICK TRAINING.

Not On My Watch!

Gun shop owner thwarts possible mass shooting at Ohio University | cleveland.com:

ATHENS, Ohio — A Hocking County gun shop owner may have prevented a mass shooting at Ohio University in Athens, authorities said. John Downs, owner of a Logan gun shop, refused to sell a gun to 25-year-old James Howard. Howard passed a background check, but he made statements that indicated he may want to harm himself or others,

H/T: Massad Ayoob

Local police think Downs may have prevented a disaster.

Three Ways Alito Defends the 2nd Amendment

The NRA is not perfect, and sometimes they are just a little bit too sensitive.  It's not "A Guy Thing",
so their opinion is often subject to some other opinions.  Which I'm happy to provide.

NRA-ILA | High Court Opinion Hardly the “Stunning” Reaffirmation of Heller Some Portray It to Be:

Significantly, Justice Alito’s opinion not only argues that the Massachusetts stun gun ban is clearly unconstitutional under Heller, it does so in a way that defeats the reasoning of prior lower court decisions upholding so-called “assault weapon” and “large capacity” magazine bans.  He states, for example, that “the relative dangerousness of a weapon is irrelevant when the weapon belongs to a class of arms commonly used for lawful purposes” and that if “Heller tells us anything, it is that firearms cannot be categorically prohibited just because they are dangerous.” Alito also admonishes that a state cannot use relative numbers to establish that a weapon is “unusual” when large numbers (in the case of stun guns, “hundreds of thousands”) are already in use by private citizens for defensive purposes. Finally, Alito preempts the argument that some popular arms can be banned as long as others remain available: “the right to bear other weapons is ‘no answer’ to a ban on the possession of protected arms.”

I don't understand what the NRA had in mind when they posted this , but I think I disagree with the NRA analysis, because I believe they haven't evaluated Justice Alito's opinion in a "practical" context.   Here's how I interpret Justice Alito's opinion:

(1)  Guns are dangerous.  They were conceived, designed and built to be dangerous.  To consider guns as anything less than a 'dangerous weapon' is to relinquish them to the trash-heap of errata.

Here, Justice Alito acknowledges the lethality of guns, accepts it as a fact of life, and dismisses any arguments that firearms should be considered in any other context.

(2) Given the first argument, it logically follows that when anyone attempts to define one class of firearm as 'more lethal' than another, it is a fallacious attempt to impose restrictions based on trivial issues.

Is one gun capable of making a person more dead than the next gun?  Although he is too polite to say so, Alito dismisses such arguments as pompous pedantry.

(3) Alito accepts and affirms that the Second Amendment is not limited, and that attempts to limit its scope are antithetical to the Constitution.

When the argument is that 'okay, we will let you have flintlock pistols, because the Second Amendment says we have to give you SOMETHING .. but we won't give you automatic pistols because we don't have to .. nanny nanny wa wa and go screw yourself!'  Alito says that this is juvenile justice and puerile pedantry.     Essentially, Alito is saying that ... 'if you're going to allow the common man to possess arms for whatever purpose, it's insanity to force his descent to the 'least common denominator'.  Rather, allow him access to firearms which are at least equal to the foes against which he might find himself'.

Okay, I made up all the quotes ...

... but I think that the interpretations might have been a small part of the factors which encouraged Judge Alito to rule as he did.

We who live by the Constitution do still have a friend in court.

It's chi-town

Violence Surges in Chicago Even as Policing Debate Rages On - The New York Times:
By MONICA DAVEYMARCH 28, 2016

I didn't even bother to read this story.  I've read it a hundred times already.  And so have you.

Oh, did I mention the mayor *you know who* has (and I'm extrapolating from previous, similar incidents) promised to "do something about this" in a time frame which "has not yet been completely determined"?

Sorry.  I forgot.

White House shooting

Reports of shots fired cause lock-downs at White House and Capitol Hill – Rare:

A shooting at the Capitol Visitors Center on Monday afternoon caused a lock down to be issued at the Capitol and the White House. In a press conference following the incident, Capitol Hill Police Chief Matthew Verderosa said that the incident was “an act of a single person, who has frequented the Capitol grounds before.” 

Sounds familiar ...