XDA

68 years ago this week.

Labels: WWII History; European theater; Eastern Front; Liberation of Auschwitz

Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

President Obama, second inaugural speech

And war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

Labels: George Orwell; President Obama

Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper during WWII credited with 309 confrimed kills. She's using a Tokarev SVT-40 semi-auto rifle with a detachable box magazine carrying 10 rounds of 7.62 x 54mmR, the Soviet version of the 30.06. This is a rifle I've praised many times at this site. 10 round magazine, huh? Just think of how many Germans she could have killed had she used a 20 or 30 round magazine. Probably about 310 because with sniping magazine size makes almost no difference. The telescopic site is probably 3.5 power and it is attached to rails already machined on the gun. That's thinking ahead.

Labels: WWII history; European Theater; Russian Front; Lyudmila Pavlichenko; SVT-40

Some female Israeli Defense Force soldiers shooting two Belgian FN FALs and a Soviet RPD light machine gun, all probably .30 caliber. This photo has to be 40 years old because today they would be shooting an IMI Galil and an IMI Negev, despite the latter's using an underpowered 5.56 round.

My favorite planet indeed.

The kneeling position pictured was the one I used to shoot the latest elk, although I probably was more like the woman in the background than like the woman in the foreground, as my metal hip only bends so far. It's better than freehand standing.

Labels: FN FAL, Israeli Defense Force, RPD

Although Brit jerk Piers Morgan was less successful at bullying the former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (Piers and Newt? what's with first names nowadays?) than he was with the pro-AR 15 young women, he has revealed his and what we fear is the federal government's plan for overcoming the Heller and McDonald cases and rendering the 2nd Amendment as useless as the 9th and 10th have become. It's based on the Fabian Socialists. No, not the 50s singer, Fabian Maximus of the Roman republic. I mean the Fabian Society, socialists who wanted to change the British semi-capitalist market system into full blown socialism through incrementally small changes over time. This has been the blueprint of the successful leftward bending of the political trajectory in the United States. So it should work with gun control/increased federal government power. In a way, it already has.

Piers Morgan's tactic, in the larger strategy, is to ask if you're OK with the ban on fully automatic weapons. It's a bullshit question, because there is no such ban for 70,000 grandfathered weapons and an unknown number of "dealer samples," but I'm already too deep in the regulatory weeds here. The 1934 law (the National Firearms Act) required a $200 transfer stamp for legal ownership of a full auto weapon, etc., and a background check and, with personal not corporate ownership, the OK of the local police authority. When the law was passed $200 exceeded the value of nearly every gun the act regulated. This restriction, not ban, was followed up with a 1968 ban on importing any more foreign full auto guns; and then in 1986, the private ownership of any full auto weapon was banned unless grandfathered. Of course the police and sheriffs departments and apparently any branch of the federal government, can have as many new full auto guns as they (that is, we) can afford. That series of laws created a set number of ownable, transferable full auto weapons and the law of supply and demand has caused the price of these weapons to outperform gold, because the supply was limited but the demand, not so much.

So, there is no full ban. I'm OK with the '34 law now (there have been but two crimes committed with a transferable full auto weapon in the 77 plus years of the act--a successful program under anyone's definition of success); but I hate and wish they would repeal the '68 and '86 laws or declare them unconstitutional, which they are. But back to Piers and Newt. So Piers then sets the hook with a concession that the historical series of laws was OK because the weapons (the full autos--not the short shotguns and rifles, etc.) were so dangerous they needed controlling. And they were dangerous he asserts because of the rate of fire full auto weapons can achieve--between 4 and 20 rounds a second, and more than that with the M 61Vulcan and other modern Gatling style guns. Then Piers equates to the full auto weapons the semi auto weapons with large magazines which he says can achieve a one and 2/3s round per second rate of fire, a hundred rounds in a minute. The semi auto guns can have that rate of fire, but it is not only the mean looking military styled tame version of the actual military assault rifles that can do so, nearly all semi-auto weapons can do it. I'm not sure but I believe I can get off 100 non-aimed rounds from a Glock 17 (which would require 5 magazine changes) in a minute. I might be able to do it with a Walther PPK (which would require 14 magazine changes), one of the few semi auto pistols still legal in New York. Oops, once more in the weeds. So you have to be OK, says Piers, with banning that rate of fire because it is nearly the same as the OK-to-ban full auto weapons and besides you don't need that rate of fire for anything the 2nd Amendment actually protects. Not so, but this is getting long already.

But, as Newt points out to Piers, there is no logical reason to ban some semi-auto weapons for a 1.67 rounds per second rate of fire when nearly all semi auto weapons can achieve that same rate of fire. But Piers says semi auto pistols are OK, but the mean looking rifles are not OK. Newt suspects, as do all Patriots, that the proposed, illogical gun ban is merely a Fabian first incremental step, which it nearly certainly has to be.

Which is why we gun owners oppose any further banning, any further registering, any more bureaucratic an asking for permission of the government to exercise our 2nd Amendment rights and God given right to self defense. We've see the left use the Fabian strategy before. We know what's next.

My fervent hope is that this gun control nonsense causes another decimation of Senate and House Democrats in the next midterm elections, just as it did in 1994. Then gun ownership will be safe from further infringement for another generation.

UPDATE: Diomedes sent me an article praising the tête-à-tête between Newt and Piers as reasonable line drawing on both sides. D thinks I am costing the Republicans votes (like the pro-lifers) by being so rigid in my support of the true purpose of the Second Amendment (I think "being necessary to the security of a free state" is the real purpose, not sport shooting (as the President claims to do often) or self defense from criminals). D argues no reasonable person could countenance the private ownership of an atomic bomb (yeah, like the governments have been super good with their monopolies) and once you admit that, or any infringement, such as background checks (as I do), then it is merely a matter of where to draw the line between military only and civilian use. This line drawing he says is a political matter which can change with the times. I say no. Political decisions to alter our God given rights, or more particularly the Bill of Rights limits on the government, are unconstitutional and profoundly unAmerican. The rights cannot exist only at the emotional whim of the mob through their representatives. 

The First Amendment uses the word "abridge" regarding freedom of speech and the press. The Second Amendment uses the word "infringe." Which word carries the harsher prohibition? "Abridge" I submit, means to substantially change, as the abridged version of a book or article has been substantially changed, usually merely shortened, but censored in some way even if its only for the politically neutral effect of making it fit a time frame or fit on a set number of paper pages. "Infringe" on the other hand as a prohibition means don't even touch it, and it conveys the subtext that even the slightest change is an infringement. Funny how, historically, the First Amendment short list of speech and the press gets the kid gloves treatment while, until Heller, it was apparently OK completely to neuter the right of the people to keep and bear arms through outright bans on gun ownership. Well, maybe not so funny.

I'm with Barry Goldwater that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. If that makes me and the party I belong to unpopular (as it appears to have made Goldwater unpopular), then we'll be unpopular. I, however, seek to serve the truth--hang popularity. The federal government cannot prevent in any way my ownership and use of any firearm (not Atomic Bomb) I choose to own, because it is citizen ownership of the weapons we choose that is necessary to the security of a free state, that is the counterbalance to government oppression the framers included in the Constitution because of an unfounded (thank God) fear of the danger to liberty a large, standing military force historically presented.

Labels: Pier Morgan: Gun Control; Fabian Strategy

Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) announced two days late her bill for banning mean looking guns. I hope that the proposed infringements on our 2nd Amendment rights (and God given right to defend ourselves) are given the same standard of review that the First Amendment gets, namely, strict scrutiny. However, even if it's rational relationship (the least difficult standard for the governement to survive judicial review of a law), I'm not sure this bill would pass muster. Here's an example. The Ruger Mini 14 and Ranch Rifle are not banned by name, but the exact same working mechanism in a mean looking (black plastic) stock, the Mini-14 Tactical Rifle M-14/20CF is banned by name. The non-mean looking Mini 14 and the Tactical version put out the same round at the same speed and rate of fire from the same sizes of magazine (5 rounds to 40). They are identically capable of killing. Yet one is banned and the other is not, purely on cosmetics. How are cosmetics rationally related to the purported reason for the ban, that is, to save lives? It is not rationally related to that.

The silver lining is that this might merely be Kabuki theater for a bill that will not pass either house. That's a silver lining in a very dark cloud for freedom and the constitution.

Labels: Gun Control; Judicial Review. Diane Feinstein

Here is a long piece I wrote about sports writer Mike Lupica's jerk column a few weeks ago which was pretty much 100% invective against NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Here are come choice quotes from Lupica's public tantrum:

So now Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, who attacks the mental health system in this country even as he sounds like he needs to be in it, goes on “Meet the Press” and continues to double down on his notion that the only way to keep our schools safe is to put armed guards at the front door and the side door and in every home room in America and maybe on every school bus, too.

The other day there was a terrific Daily News front page calling LaPierre, the NRA’s executive director, the “craziest man on Earth,” and he was clearly referencing that Sunday morning, even as he continued to sound like just one more coward made brave and tough by a gun.
 

“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre said. “I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe.”

Of course, that is a lie from LaPierre, who also lies when he says any new gun control measures in this country are some anti-American attack on the Second Amendment, as if any parent or politician now calling for more gun control is going after the Second Amendment with the kind of assault weapon that Adam Lanza used to shoot up a principal and teachers and 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

See, to the enlightened left, everyone who disagrees with what they believe is crazy or a liar or both. So I wonder what Mr. Lupica makes of this?

President Obama proposed, inter alia, that more police "resource officers" be hired to help guard schools against mentally disturbed gunmen. I'm sure Mr. Lupica, when he stops praising ineffective New York state gun law changes (some of which are clearly unconstitutional), will jump on the President for the lie he's telling about added safety through additional armed officers at school and all the crazy, cowardly ideas that go with that proposal.

He'll probably write it tomorrow.

Labels: Gun Control; Ignorance and Lies, Mike Lupica

Labels: Wine, Women and Song

Here is an anti-tall magazine piece at politico, which I rarely read, by the DA of San Francisco. I thought the title here, "Time to Ban Assault Magazines," was either a result of ignorance (it's assault rifles or weapons and high capacity magazines) or perhaps it was a clever use of ignorance to make a point. No, just ignorance. Here's the money quote:

Law enforcement officers with experience in mass shootings confirm that, in a large number of cases, the shooters are subdued by nearby bystanders or law enforcement when they pause to reload. These devices simply give assailants more time to kill.

In "a large number of cases" of mass shootings the shooter was subdued by bystanders when he reloaded.
Really, then it should be easy to name one. He doesn't give a single name. I googled the phrase. Here is what I found.

1. Jared Loughner was subdued when he dropped the new magazine for his 9mm Glock 17  from his pocket. Had he not dropped the new one, he would have been reloaded in a flash and probably not been subdued. Technically a subdue during reload, but with a caution.
2. Colin Ferguson was wrestled to the ground by three commuters as he reloaded his 9mm Ruger P-89 for the third time. Again, technically a subdue during reload but only after two reloads were successful and no rushing the reloading shooter attempted.
3. That's apparently it.

In no rational universe is that " a large number of cases." No wonder the DA didn't name any. I'm all for talking about self defense and defense of others. I don't need to resort to lies when I'm doing it. The anti-tall magazine crowd, apparently, does.

Labels: Gun Control; Ignorance and Lies

Labels: Inca Lost Cities

The Horton brothers' Ho Vc, a flying wing with two pusher props facing rearwards. They made a jet version as well, but it had a bit of a tail.

Labels: WWII European Theater: German Aircraft

If you haven't already seen it, you can go here to see youthful looking, Harvard Law graduate Ben Shapiro debate hack Brit journalist Piers Morgan on gun control. Shapiro is good.

Here is a question Morgan asked and a lot of libs have asked: Why would anyone not in the military need an assault rifle (like an AR-15)? It's the wrong question, because no inherent right is based on need. It's not that we need a certain weapon (or a tall magazine), it's that we have the right to choose the weapon we want to keep and bear. Shapiro answers it by reference to the prime reason for the Second Amendment, to prevent our government becoming tyrannical. That's a good reason, but there is another.

Does anyone recall the North Hollywood shootout in 1997, when two weightlifter, bank-robbers donned Kevlar vests and were impervious to pistol and shotgun rounds (all the LA police had for a long time)?

If we're limited to handguns and shotguns, then a would be killer in Kevlar is immune to our attempts at self defense using a pistol or shotgun. We would need at least an intermediate round rifle, preferably one with a tall magazine in case we miss.

It seems pretty obvious to me now.

UPDATE: I guess there is anti-armor drill already (double tap to the chest, one to the head) but with a handgun you have to be pretty close and with a shotgun, within 30 yards, I think, to hit someone in the head reliably.

Labels: Gun Control:Piers Morgan; Ben Shapiro; North Hollywood shootout