Should be mandated by OSHA

This is just a good practice:

Pro-Gun Representatives Introduce Hearing Protection Act to Reform Outdated Suppressor Laws

Contact your representatives to urge them to support his bill.

Misplaced emphasis

Of all the...

Hillary Clinton wants to hold ME accountable for the actions of criminals.

"Hillary supports sensible action to address gun violence, including comprehensive background checks, cracking down on illegal gun traffickers, holding dealers and manufacturers accountable when they endanger Americans, and keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and stalkers."

Despite the fact that several times as many people are killed in automobile accidents, Hillary doesn't hold car dealers accountable for negligence or criminal activity.

Despite the fact that many more children drown in pools and hot tubs than are killed with guns, Hillary doesn't hold the local pool and spa dealer accountable for that.

Despite that fact that most "children" involved in firearms homicides are actually teenagers actively engaged in criminal activity, got their access to firearms illegally, and never purchased them from a dealer, Hillary wants to punish me for their lack of civilized upbringing.

Despite the fact that gun control advocates LIE about the statistics on "children" being killed, including people up to 25 years of age in some cases, and all teens and people under 21 in most studies.

Despite the fact that through out the history of humankind, before and after the invention of firearms, the vast majority of all interpersonal violence was perpetrated by males age 14-25 in unstructured environments, somehow guns are to blame for the "epidemic of gun violence" even violent crime is down, consistently decreasing over the last 20 years, even as concealed carry restrictions have eased in almost every way.

Despite the fact that clinical errors by doctors and nurses kill hundreds of thousands of people per year through direct negligence, Hillary doesn't want to hold them more accountable.

Despite the fact that 85%-90% of all homicide 'victims' and their killers are both known to the police before the homicide.

Despite the civil right to self defense and resistance to tyranny being written into the very fabric of our country, Hillary wants to limit your effective toolkit to do so. And make you apply for permission and register for potential confiscation with the few tools she's willing to allow you to hold on to.

"Support legislation to stop domestic abusers from buying and possessing guns. Although federal law generally prohibits domestic abusers from purchasing or possessing guns, this protection does not apply to people in dating relationships or convicted stalkers. Hillary will fight for legislation to prohibit all of these domestic abusers and stalkers from buying guns."

This is a lie. Any conviction for domestic abuse triggers the federal provision. You can be convicted for domestic abuse against anyone you live with or have a familial relationship with, not just a spouse. The definition of domestic abuse is defined by the states, but results in loss of firearms rights at the federal level.

Make straw purchasing a federal crime. When an individual with a clean record buys a gun with the intention of giving it to a violent felon—only so that felon can avoid a background check—it should be a crime. Hillary will fight to make so-called “straw purchasing” a federal crime.

This is already a crime. Do we really want someone so ignorant of current law as to spend time and resources to establish a policy website with erroneous information? But then, the problem isn't so much Hillary's ignorance as it is her compulsion to lie and deceive and control.

18 U.S. Code § 922 - Unlawful acts

(a)It shall be unlawful—

(6) for any person in connection with the acquisition or attempted acquisition of any firearm or ammunition from a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector, knowingly to make any false or fictitious oral or written statement or to furnish or exhibit any false, fictitious, or misrepresented identification, intended or likely to deceive such importer, manufacturer, dealer, or collector with respect to any fact material to the lawfulness of the sale or other disposition of such firearm or ammunition

There's more, but the bottom line is simple. Gun control is not about safety, it's about control.

Licensing guns like cars

There are a lot of people ignorantly re-posting a meme about licensing guns like cars. In some ways, many of us in the know would say, "Hey, that's a great idea!"

After all you can:

-Drive a car in public by yourself at 16
-Buy any car you can afford at 18
-Drive anything you want, as fast as you want on your own property with or without a license or training
-No federal license required
-You don't have to register a vehicle that stays on your own property
-You don't need a background check to buy a car
-You can buy a car in another state
-Car Mufflers are mandatory in public
-Car dealers don't have to get both a federal car dealers license AND a state/local business license
-Every state must recognize the license of any state, or even international licenses
-You only lose your license to drive based upon driving offenses, not random lists of other actions, misdemeanors, and long-ago mis-judgements. Even felons who used a get-away car aren't banned from driving for LIFE.
-If you lose your driver's license, you can still drive a farm vehicle on private property.
-There are hardship exemptions for people who need vehicles in remote areas that allow for underage or otherwise ineligible people to drive

But, they'll say: "You have to get trained to be in public, and pass a test. You have to carry insurance. There are rules of the road to adhere to."

Well, yes. Particularly if you're going to drive/shoot professionally for pay, I would agree to mandatory minimum proficiency standards. And when it comes to the "rules of the road" for guns, I submit that the pro-gun crowd is far more qualified to comment than the anti-gun crowd.

And mandatory insurance has its pitfalls when trying to actually make an equitable system rather than simply implementing a barrier. Besides, in most states, you can carry a bond rather than insurance. But what we're really talking about there is a barrier, not a remedy for negative externality, because the externality is really being imposed by criminals, not by the law-abiding, so mandatory insurance would not solve anything.

Advice from a Local Sheriff: Re-posting.

Washington County Sheriff Pat Garret's Advice:

If Someone Starts Shooting in Public, Should I Take Action?

Concealed Carry and Other Considerations

One way to process events like the shooting in Roseburg is to run through the scenario in your mind.  How might you react?  What if you are with your family?  Planning and thinking through various scenarios is a healthy way to give yourself peace of mind and to live safer.  If you already have a plan, improve it.  If you don't, start today.

We cannot endorse any action during an active threat event, but we can share important considerations that may help you decide whether or how to respond if you are in such a situation. 

Watch: Run. Hide. Fight.

Before making the decision to use your weapon, you should strongly consider if that is the right decision. Exercising your right to carry a firearm does not mean you are required to act during a crisis. Depending on the circumstances, you could aggravate or complicate the situation.  

Also, do not assume that simply pointing your firearm at an active threat will stop them or even slow them down. If you choose to confront an active threat, you must be prepared to use your firearm.

Our firearms and tactical experts offer the following considerations for people who carry concealed, but their guidance can be helpful to get others thinking as well.  Keep in mind that an active threat may have a gun, a knife, or even a vehicle as a weapon.  Not every threat will be a shooter. 

If at all possible, call 9-1-1 immediately.

Assess the situation.  How many threats are there?  Are you in a position of tactical advantage, or are you already cornered?  You need to be able to assess the backstop behind your target, and to see who is between you and the threat.  How comfortable are you firing your weapon, and do you have extra ammunition with you?

Position yourself for concealment.  If possible, choose a position behind an object or structure that both conceals your location and provides a barrier before engaging the shooter. 

Separate from other people.  You may want to consider separating from your family or others.  Once you engage, the threat's focus will turn to you and those around you.  If the threat comes to you, you may have to take immediate action.

Consider Physical Responses to Stress.  Under high levels of stress, we know a threat's field of vision will narrow to some degree, often to pinpoint vision.  They may lose the ability to see peripherally and suffer diminished hearing.  It may feel like the threat is in slow motion.  This may also happen to you, depending on your experience.

Are you prepared to engage the threat?  This is the toughest part of the plan.  Are you prepared to take the threat's life to save the lives of others?  The threat has already made the decision to kill people.  Have you ever considered this scenario?  Is it part of your mental plan?

When shooting stops, make it clear you are not a threat.  If you took action and successfully engaged the threat, you need to understand that you may be presenting to police as an armed and unknown threat (or possibly to other well-intentioned armed citizens).  If you continue to display your weapon, when police encounter you, there are only fractions of a second when life or death decisions are made.  After you engage a threat, our trainers recommend you ensure your empty hands are plainly visible.  Either re-holster or put down any weapons, depending on the environment, situation, and proximity of police.

It is highly unlikely that you will ever find yourself involved in an active threat situation; however, if you do, and you have a concealed carry license, it is good to be prepared.  Practice with the gun you carry.  Practice regularly drawing from a concealed carry position using the holster you will be wearing. 

Practice until you are proficient with your gear.  Be aware of your surroundings.  The first time you think about how you will respond to an active threat situation should not be during an active threat event. Plan ahead.

Sincerely

 

Sheriff Pat Garrett   

Qualified Opinions

If you're not at least passing familiar with the NFA of 1934, and why Miller lost his case,  can't tell me what the GCA of 1968 changed, if you don't know what the Lautenburg Amendment is and you can't state the arguments both pro and con for all of the above, don't know how the NICS works, aren't familiar with the concept of BIDS, and have never had a background check done on you...

Then you have no business commenting on gun control in America. Go take your place at the children's table. Come back when you're finished your broccoli. Your opinion is no more valid on this topic than on nuclear physics. If you haven't done the work to understand the situation and concepts before spouting off at the mouth (or keyboard) then you are the epitome of the aphorism: “Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one and it's full of shit.”

Note that it takes no particular quality, education, privilege, class, or sexual orientation to inform yourself. It simply takes intellectual honesty and a little reading comprehension and effort.

Democrats selling guns

It's funny. Obama and the Democrats have caused more first-time gun buys than the NRA.

I personally have just heard of two people saying they're joining or re-upping with the NRA because of the Democratic debates the other night. I didn't watch, but apparently when asked who their biggest enemy was, the majority of the Dem candidates said it was the NRA. Collectively, they made more than a dozen mentions denigrating the NRA or 'bragging' about poor ratings from the NRA.

Conspicuously absent from any mention of enemies of Democracy were ISIL/ISIS/Daesh. Civil Rights groups espousing responsible training are apparently a much more serious 'enemy'.

Policing our own

So this is what happens when a legitimate shooter does something wrong. They get critiqued, chastised, and punished as necessary.

The thing is, as responsible gun owners, we don't excuse bad behaviour. Unlike so many on "the other side" we KNOW we are responsible. When someone makes a bad call, or isn't sufficiently trained, we don't cover for them, or make excuses. We don't have a police union, a collective bargaining agreement, or qualified immunity to cover us; we can't afford to make mistakes.

We're going to discuss it, take lessons from it, and broadcast them so others learn from the mistake.

Shoplifting and thievery are not capital crimes. If no innocent person is in immediate jeopardy of serious bodily injury or death, deadly force or force that has a likelihood of causing death or serious bodily injury is NOT justified against the perpetrator.

End of lesson.

Judicial Activism

A friend asks:

You have hit on one of my big questions lately: what is so freaking wrong with looking at judicial opinions from other countries? or any other social ideas? if something is a good idea, does it matter where it comes from? i'm not saying adopt other laws/judicial ideas wholesale, but to outlaw ANY inspiration from any outside source? that seems unnecessarily harsh, and even a little short-sighted.

To which I reply:

Nothing- if the legislature does it. The reason for this is obvious: the legislature is elected by the people and serve subject to the public pleasure, therefore they reflect the will of the people (and any 'evolving standards of public decency'). The Supreme Court (and some other judges) are appointed, and in the case of the Supreme Court sit on the bench until they choose to leave (subject to impeachment, a difficult process to remove someone.)

Our law proceeds from our constitution, unique in the world for being the first and most lasting of its kind, which has specific requirements built into it that provide a web of protection for individual states' rights as well as individuals (not just a specific and unique instance of trying to make a point in an individual case, but an integrated context). This ensures that our country accepts a variety of community standards, each of which is an experiment in social order running in parallel with all the others, but all congruent with the greater principles of democracy and liberty because they are subject to one basic law of the land. If we start making exceptions to the basic principles of our constitution, it becomes meaningless and all those protections and inter-dependencies collapse.

Also, many other countries have high-sounding sentiments in their laws, but that doesn't mean they actually live by them. If they don't live by them, how do we know that they actually work as social practices?

Anyway, the court's place is not to enact law, merely to interpret and apply it. This principle is clear, with only the most basic understanding of the 'checks and balances' system. And yet it is more and more accepted to legislate from the bench, and to twist the intent of the Constitution and the law by the most tortured of grammatical constructions and twisted logic, as well as feel-good 'consensus opinions'.

If public standards evolve, the way to account for and acknowledge that is through the legislature. If the Constitution is outdated or wrong, there is a process to amend it and any other way of 'getting around it' is illegal, unethical, and just plain stupidly short-sighted.

The genie is out of the bottle

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/10/04/the-genie-is-out-of-the-bottle/

Guns can be made with tools and materials that already exist in half the garages in America. We have consumer level 3D printing.

You're not getting rid of them. Ever.

Guns to Africa

I wrote this a bit over ten years ago, and I still don't see a reason to change my mind:

I've been thinking about what we can do to help Africa, and I think the best thing we could do is probably to export more small arms to them. Weapons are probably the most useful thing we could give them. With weapons they could stand off the raiders while having the chance to keep what they earn through their own hard work. "Big Men" in uniforms wouldn't find it as easy to take aid shipments away from the intended recipients quite as easily if the weapons weren't overwhelmingly one-sided.

Some people will of course, argue that we would just be prolonging conflict by increasing the number of weapons available to said conflicts.

However, I imagine everyone in the Sudan who is not a Muslim Arab (Janjaweed militia) would probably greatly appreciate prolonging the conflict, maybe even escalating it, since the only other option is to be dead. Well, to be positive about it, I suppose being a starving, displaced refugee is slightly better than being dead,

Risk Management

I originally wrote this on another blog about 4 years ago:

I continually train myself. I find opportunities to learn new stuff as I am able, even when it's not directly applicable to my current job.

In aid of this, I've been reading this website:

http://emergency.cdc.gov/

I'm going to quote a bit and paraphrase a bit:

Hazard is the seriousness of a risk from a technical perspective. Outrage is the seriousness of a risk in non-technical terms (in terms of how people respond to the risk).

Experts view risk in terms of hazard. Unprepared people view it in terms of outrage. This latter doesn't produce a single positive result, and until you can get beyond that stage, you will be subject to greater (objective) harm when something unexpected or undesirable happens.

Get over your outrage at the unfairness of the universe. It doesn't pay to anthropomorphize and rail against injustice (including conspiracy theories). But fortune does favour the prepared mind. Taking responsibility for your own reaction to external events, especially before they happen, makes you stronger.

What he said...

Larry Correia fisks "27 Ways to Be a Modern Man"

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/10/02/fisking-the-new-york-times-modern-man/

(Alternate Title: Does the Touch of a Woman Confuse and Frighten You? 27 Ways to Avoid Girl Cooties.)

Gun Spree Zones

The usual suspects are already out calling for more control over this shooting in Southern Oregon even though at least one person qualified and capable of resisting the bad guy was made greatly less effective by lack of having his own gun. 

Reports vary between 10 and 13 dead, around 20 wounded. Witnesses say the perp had time to "huddle people together and hold dialogues on their religion" and the rest of us with any common sense or experience are flabbergasted that no one shot him while he was monologuing. Tellingly, the people most directly involved aren't calling for more victim disarmament.

 As a trainer for DHS on Law Enforcement Active Shooter Emergency Response, the thing that was hammered in over and over is that the longer we take to neutralize the bad guy, the longer he has to hurt and kill people. We KNOW that the encounter will end in one of three ways.

1. The perp will kill himself.
2. He will surrender, or
3. Someone (either LE or bystander) will use enough force to disable or kill him.

About half the time, the perp kills himself at the first sign of effective resistance by anyone before LE even gets on scene. This is not the fault of LE. Simply displaying a handgun worked in the Clackamas town Center shooting.

Time to end victim disarmament. No more "gun free zones" becoming "gun spree zones".

8-and-a-half out of 10 ain't bad

10 Things You Learn by Carrying a Gun Every Day by Tom McHale - Monday, August 24, 2015

I've got no problems with most of the "lessons" he mentions. He's spot on with most of it. However, I do have to take exception to the phrasing on this one:

5. Bending over can get you in trouble—in more ways than one.

A number of carry methods can cause printing dysfunction if you’re not careful. Most belt holsters, inside or outside the waistband, can cause the gun grip to press against the back of your shorts or cover garment if you lean forward too much. If you carry a gun daily, you quickly learn how to reach low things by bending your knees and keeping your back straight.

Here's the thing. You are NOT going to "get in trouble" for "printing" or exposing your firearm.

Open Carry is perfectly legal in almost all states, although a handful do require that you have a (concealed)  permit to open carry. An incidental exposure of your firearm cannot be illegal, if blatantly, obviously open carrying your pistol is not illegal. It is absolutely AMAZING how many people get this wrong: well-intentioned, not-stupid people get this wrong ALL THE TIME. I just had one in my concealed class for Oregon and Utah a couple weeks ago insisting to me that it is illegal to open carry or accidentally expose your firearm while concealed carrying in Washington State. Fortunately, he was also open-minded enough to take in new information- we've had some who weren't.

On the other side, people automatically assume that Texas has had people open-carrying their 6-shooters everywhere. Couldn't be further from the truth. Texas will START to allow open carry in January of 2016. 

Bottom line: don't think you know, if you haven't checked a real source. Sometimes the problem is not what we know, it's what 'we know that ain't so'. To be fair, a LOT of trainers are still passing on this bad information (that once you get a concealed permit you are required to conceal), either because they don't know better or they believe their own preferences for how you carry are more important than factual correctness and open honesty. There's no good excuse for a trainer to include information that they have not verified in their courses, or to not know. Sometimes things change and we can be behind the times, but we have a duty to seek out updated information if we're representing ourselves as experts.

Now, opinions vary on whether it's a good idea to open carry. But I submit that police officers open carry for a reason, and it doesn't sacrifice a tactical advantage (concealing would be more of a strategy than a tactic). I think it varies with circumstances. A young lady wearing skimpy clothing absolutely has the right to be in a dark alley on the wrong side of the tracks at 2 am. Doesn't make it a good idea, or safe. 


6. How many other people carry concealed.


Once you start carrying, you tend to look for other people who are also carrying. Trying to spot other concealed carriers is a great way to pass time. Better yet, make this activity a self-improvement drill. If you can spot others carrying, consider what tipped you off to their armed status, and don’t make the same mistake yourself. For example, my daughter spotted a motorcyclist on the highway the other day using an inside the waistband holster covered by a long shirt. Cruising along with the wind in his face caused his shirt to ride up to his chest, leaving his gun exposed for all to see.

Half-right on this one. Yes, you certainly start to notice "tells" like a gambler looking for a bluff over a big pot. And this is a good thing- anything that helps you to be present and aware of your environment is a good exercise. But what problem precisely, do we have with the man on the motorcycle who is doing nothing illegal? Acting all shocked and titillated by it like someone who spotted some celebrity side-boob doesn't seem like a worthwhile expenditure of energy.

Brandishing a firearm is another thing. That's going to get you in trouble, sure. States have specific definitions for that, though. It typically has some element of objectively warranting alarm, not just someone getting a case of the vapours because they have a hoplophobic fear of firearms in general. Actions are not illegal just because the observer doesn't approve. There generally needs to be an actual harm to someone, and certainly real justice would require that element.