This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Poetrooper

  • Why not a .22LR?

    Want to start a gun fight? Just state on the Internet that the 9 millimeter is the best self-defense handgun round available and likely within seconds, most certainly within minutes, you’ll have a pack of .45ACP and .40S&W aficionados burying you in studies on one-shot stopping power, muzzle velocities, foot-pounds of energy on impact and bla, bla, bla. But there’s a curiosity which appears in almost all those studies and data tables to determine which ammo round is the best for personal defense, and that curiosity is the lowly .22 Long Rifle caliber.

    There’s a very good reason that the .22LR is usually included in those studies even while being the smallest of the standard pistol rounds, and that is that it frequently outperforms other larger calibers like .25ACP and .32 calibers in both one-shot stopping effect and lethality and may equal even larger calibers. I’ve always wondered how that’s possible, yet federal statistics on gun homicides tend to support it. Skeptics would sneer, “That’s only because they’re so common!” to which I would respond, “Well, yeah, but they still kill those large numbers of folks.” Then I’d usually follow up with, “If you think a .22LR is just a pea-shooter, would you want to be shot with one? If someone pulls a .22LR on you, are you going to challenge them anyway because the gun isn’t a serious weapon in your opinion? Of course the answer is always no, and as it turns out I was onto something regarding the relatively high number of one-shot stops for the .22LR.

    Writing in NRA’s Shooting Illustrated, Richard Mann explains in his article, “.22LR for Self Defense?” that a critical reason for any gun’s one-shot stopping power is psychological; by shooting the perp the first time, you have put him on unmistakable notice that you are armed with a gun and that continued advancement on his part means he is about to be shot again. At that critical moment, his brain is not calculating the caliber with which that is about to happen only that he does not want to be shot again and therefore, retreat is the preferred option. That explanation, coupled with the widespread ownership of the .22LR would appear to answer that long debated question.

    As to the relatively high lethality data regarding the .22LR, Mann, as do others, attributes that to the ability to place follow up shots on target more easily and more rapidly due to lower recoil. With some .22LR pistols the recoil is so minor that the sights rarely leave the target during firing so that there is no necessity to reattain the sight picture as with larger caliber handguns. This will of course allow faster trigger pulling and more rounds fired accurately in a shorter time interval. Mann and friends tested this hypothesis and found it held; I was unable to find any data to support it but it does make sense.

    Do not misunderstand me; I’m not advocating one caliber over another here. Of my several handguns, only one, a Ruger SR22, is a .22LR caliber which occasionally goes with me from the house. But the go-to guns in my cars and by my bed are all 9 millimeters loaded with personal defense ammo. However, for many women who need a smaller handgun and prefer it to have less “Kick,” a .22LR is a better choice than no gun at all. So, would I bet my life on a .22LR? You bet your life I would if it were the only gun available.

  • Lightning bugs the NORKs

    Was it the January introduction of Lightnings that perhaps bugged the blustery North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to rein in his threats of nuclear annihilation for possible targets ranging from Seoul to San Francisco? I refer to the deployment of a squadron of Marine F-35B aircraft from Yuma Marine Corps Air Station in Arizona to MCAS Iwakuni, Japan back in January of this year. North Korea has long been under the watchful eye of two squadrons of Air Force F-16 Wild Weasels out of Misawa Air base in Northern Japan, planes designed to swoop in at the outset of a conflict and destroy the enemy’s ground-to-air radars and missile defenses and thus deny the enemy any further ability to defend against succeeding attacking air forces.

    Those Weasels were a serious strategic threat prior to the arrival of the F-35s. Now, because of the F-35’s incredibly advanced sensor packages that bring their highly enhanced defense and attack capabilities to the fight, as well as their ability to communicate all that targeting data to the Weasels, those F-16s at Misawa represent nothing short of the certain death of North Korea’s air defenses, including her Soviet-era air force. From undetectable standoff positions, the Marine F-35s would be able to provide all manner of aerial defense as well as enhanced target selection for those Air Force Weasels as they chew their way through North Korea’s air defense assets like a bunch of…well, mad weasels.

    It’s not as though the Weasels would be the only American air forces streaking in if Kim should go ballistically stupid. Far from it: F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, and other aircraft from bases in South Korea and Japan, as well as from America’s carrier strike groups, would all be vectored in on what is actually a fairly small target, equal in size to a slice of coastal California from Marin County to San Diego going inland a little over ninety miles to include Sacramento.* That’s not much area when you’re able to muster an air armada of that size. And we haven’t even mentioned our strategic bomber forces that would be targeting Kim’s massed infantry, artillery, and armor, which would quickly become defenseless, with their air defenses seriously degraded and their air cover utterly destroyed on the ground and in the air.

    The F-35s, communicating with many of those squadrons of other U.S. aircraft, would enhance the performances of many of those older weapons platforms. And the F-35s are able to strike important targets themselves. With their futuristic target acquisition capabilities, these F-35s can locate and strike any objective in North Korea without Kim and his high-hatted marshals ever knowing that death and destruction are on the way until they’re vaporized. North Korea’s air force, while large, is essentially an outdated, outmoded force that will require some luck to outlast Saddam Hussein’s if we go in after it. The addition of the F-35 Lightning to that battle plan just makes the reality of such swift destruction all the more certain.

    I think, perhaps, that young Kim has noticed the flickering Lightnings on his narrowing horizons. If not, he will at some time in his future likely experience the Lightning’s strike, blasting, burning, and roiling his country into senseless rubble. Unfortunately, that decision is his. Kim has shown some past ingenuity in killing those who anger him, by anti-aircraft gun or feeding them to starving dogs. Rather than yield his absolute power, he just may decide on a novel method of suicide: by Lightning.

    So be it…

    *No, it’s not possible to get the commander-in-chief to consider that option, no matter how desirable it may be.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Something stinks about Charlottesville

    Evidence is turning up from, of all places, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as Breitbart and others, that this character, Jason Kessler, who organized the suspicious and supposed Alt-Right demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. that blew up in everyone’s face, is a cunning lefty holdover from the Occupy Wall Street movement and a former Barack Obama supporter. I smell Soros money, sabotage, and Democrat dirty tricks here.

    I’ve been suspicious of the nature of the violence at this supposed Alt-Right demonstration since the news first began breaking. It is no secret that radical elements in the Democrat left have been routinely utilizing violence when it suits their purposes. We also know via secret tapings by Project Veritas that the Democratic Party has a semi-official director of dirty ops, Dick Creamer, who hires, trains, and emplaces professional disruptors to encounter, engage, and infiltrate conservative demonstrations to foment violence, assuring that the demonstrations then become the targets of negative media attention – naturally, against the conservative side. Creamer was caught on videotape boasting about his nefarious capabilities when he thought he was in friendly company.

    So here we now have another blown supposedly conservative demonstration, where violence erupts and people are killed, and guess who just happens to be a ringleader of the various ultra-right to Alt-Right organizations ranging from KKK and neo-Nazis to the kind of patriotic folks who might go to a Flag Day celebration! Um, that would be our vaporous political will o’ the wisp, Jason Kessler, whose Occupy activities may well have put him in operational cahoots with high-level Democrat operatives. And owing to the leniency of Virginia open carry laws, too many of Jason’s followers just had to parade their personal armories in all their camo combat gear, showing off their minuteman firepower. My first reaction at seeing those clowns strutting down the street like they were in Mosul was, like that of many of my fellow NRA members and military veterans, shaking my fist and yelling at the TV, “No! No! No, you idiots! No!” And that kind of award-winning stupidity makes me wonder if the head planner for the event, Jason Soros…er, Kessler, didn’t have that firepower demonstration all lined up and ready to go precisely to make those right-wing tools look just like the fools they were being, while scaring the bejeezus out of the lefties, blacks, and MSM twerps.

    There’s still not enough evidence on the actual violence, other than the schizophrenic kid who ran over the woman, to make any kind of assessment as to who did what in the confrontations between the right-wing demonstrators and the surprisingly strong counter-demonstration. I have to wonder if this Kessler fellow, strong Barack Obama-supporter that he is, had a hand in making sure his Alt-Right marchers were clearly guaranteed to encounter a strong crowd of riled up counter-protesters as well. The reporting of Kessler’s background, as well as that of Charlottesville mayor and Democrat activist Mike Signer and Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, has convinced me that Charlottesville was a Democratic Party black operation, planned, organized, and carried out to its successful conclusion, to make the media portray all these conservative whites as stupid, racist, and violent. I believe that it was done by this soulless young man, who succeeded in selling himself to the dumb-bunny right-wingers as one of them.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Whaddaya get when…

    Whaddaya get when…

    You cross Cindy Sheehan with an Army first sergeant? I submit you get the same damned, brain- dead, fool-tool of the anti-war Left with approximately the same authority to speak for our nation as the screeching Cindy once thought she had due to her Gold Star Mother status, but with master sergeant stripes to hide behind. Cindy did in fact get her fifteen minutes of fame, thanks to a very compliant liberal media, but ask yourself, “When was the last time I heard her name in the news?

    This new iteration of Cindy comes in the form of this supposedly authentic Army first sergeant whose bio indicates she was initially an Army oboe-blower who graduated to recruiting at some point, specializing in healthcare recruiting, neither being career fields that usually involve ground combat. I’ve strained my old brain as hard as possible and, for the life of me, I do not remember a single time in Vietnam hearing a call go out for band members or healthcare recruiters to conduct a recon patrol or a night ambush.

    So here she is, this oboe-blowing retired first sergeant, who feels confident like Cindy that she has the tactical and strategic creds to direct the military affairs of the nation. Her piece at Daily Caller is reminiscent of a 1960’s disarmament screed where America should just keep reasoning with that little Nork dork, placating him until one of his scientists stumbles on to a way to keep a ballistic missile in the air long enough to deliver a dirty nuke warhead onto South Korean or Japanese soil. It’s just more leftist propaganda to further the advancement of world socialism. First Sergeant Bua should be too shamed to show her face among her fellow veterans.

    Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, well, actually that happened a long time ago, but as an old combat veteran it chaps my butt to hear an Army band member/career recruiter speak out as a strategic authority based on the fact that she’s a retired first sergeant. That’s like having Barney Fife be a law enforcement spokesman on mass shootings. What she is doing is obvious: She’s using the color of Army rank to lend her moral authority, much as Cindy shamelessly stood on her soldier son’s grave and spouted the words fed her by the leftist propagandists until they needed her no more.

    I’ve always believed that young man would have been so ashamed of his mother’s self-serving betrayal.

  • The silencing of Germany’s lambs

    Even in the worst days of WWII for Germany, when Allies and Soviets were closing in on Berlin, the men fought desperately to protect their women and children. With the Americans, it was more a matter of preventing hungry frauleins from being lured into casual prostitution with cigarettes, nylons, and Hershey bars. With the Russians, it was a different matter for the Germans – a primal fear of a primal force that was sweeping over them and targeting Germany’s women and girls as sexual victims in the waning days of history’s greatest conflict. Stalin’s armies brought to the middle of the 20th century the same inhumane brutality as that of the terrible Khans who had swept in from the East many centuries before. In the face of that brutality and those overwhelming odds, German males, like their Teutonic forebears, fought to protect their nation’s wives and daughters from the rapacious Russians, frequently in futility and at the cost of their lives.

    Today, we should contrast that courage with the complete surrender of physical courage demonstrated to the world by Germany’s supposed warrior-males in Muslim-occupied towns and cities where their wives, daughters, mothers and grandmothers are easy targets for rapacious Muslim outlaws who scoff at silly Western values and morality. If you think I exaggerate, consider this response of a German mayor dealing with angry citizens complaining of verbal sexual assaults and harassment, and fears of worse, against pre-teen girls:

    Grandfather: My granddaughter, she’s under ten – and it also happened in a nearby town.

    Citizen: That’s right!

    Grandfather: The girls have been harassed by the “refugee children” … the asylum seekers … and they get harassed from the windows of the shelter and things like that. How will this be in the summer, when the school girls wear less clothing?

    Mayor: That’s easy. Just don’t provoke them and don’t walk in these areas.

    No stiff-spined Prussian leader, that mayor. Don’t provoke them? With what? Simply being your natural German selves? Parts of your town are now proclaimed off limits by Mid-Eastern invaders – off limits to you, direct descendants of those who founded it an eon ago? You mean by living within our traditions, by our very presence in a town that was occupied and repeatedly defended by our forebears for more than a thousand years until your government surrendered large swaths to swarming hordes of young Middle Eastern males, who have no logical reason for being here? For the simple reason that your feel-good liberal government picked our town to draw the short straw? Is that what you mean by “don’t provoke them” and “don’t walk there”? That sounds like what an African mother would tell her child about riverbanks and crocodiles. Is that the level of our culture now?

    Where the hell are Germany’s men in towns such as this one? Where are the grandsons and great-grandsons of those Wehrmacht soldiers, who fought bravely for a terrible cause and an even worse leader in WWII, but even so with great courage? Has the lemming-cliff liberalism of the European Union so withered the balls of German males that they will meekly surrender their women and daughters to the caliphate? Why on Earth was it a grandfather up front there defending his family? Where was that girl’s father? What neutered you German fathers: Allah, or your own pallid political correctness? Will you Teutonic Tootsies of warrior age simply turn your backs and mince away from these Merkel-motivated Muslims, and ignore the pleas of your daughters?

    Until they go silent…like ill-fated lambs?

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • F-35 Lightning gets foreign orders

    F-35 Lightning gets foreign orders

    Hidden in all the late-breaking political hoopla Friday afternoon, when the media was in another Trump feeding frenzy over White House musical chairs, was an announcement by the F-35 Joint Program Office that a $3.69 billion contract for the F-35 Lightning had officially been awarded to Lockheed-Martin for its 5th generation fighter. Interestingly, around two-thirds of that order went to foreign buyers:

    Most of the money, $2.2 billion, goes to buy one British F-35B, one ItalianF-35A, eight Australian F-35As, eight Dutch F-35As, four Turkish F-35As, six Norwegian F-35As aircraft, and 22 F-35As for Foreign Military Sales customers.

    I say interestingly, because when I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about how my own assessment of this aircraft was changing after reading how awed pilots are who actually have flown the plane in simulated air combat against ground anti-aircraft defenses and aggressor air forces, our own in-house Wikipedia, Hondo, expressed some sincere doubt that the foreign buyers would come through on their agreed upon  acquisitions. Those purchases, he correctly noted were going to be needed to drive down the overall unit cost of the F-35 which, in excess of $100 mil per copy has been the primary criticism of the aircraft. If the numbers published by Breaking Defense are correct, then it looks like the foreign purchasers are getting their birds for less than $50 million a copy. Of course that $2.2 billion could represent partial payment. It also includes no Israeli aircraft and that country has said it alone will purchase fifty F-35’s in its various iterations with other countries saying they’ll order almost twice that number if the price comes down.

    Whatever, it’s a good sign for the American taxpayer that plenty of foreign governments are buying in on the Lightning. For a complete account on planned total purchases by country, go here:

    Look Who’s Buying Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Now

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • If you want to see a real liberal Jerk in action…

    Watch this video of a San Diego middle-school teacher who staged and picked a fight with the US Border Patrol at a border checkpoint in New Mexico just north of the border. She had her kids in the car and it appears she had one of them video the confrontation that occurred when she refused to say whether she is an American citizen. The reason I can identify her politics as liberal becomes quite evident if you watch far enough into the video.

    Just think, this immature asshole is teaching someone’s kids…

  • Military robots: Who’s going to call the shots?

    Military robots: Who’s going to call the shots?

    There’s a debate being waged within the upper echelons of our government as to whether or not and/or to what extent, America’s military forces should retain control on that ultimate aspect of waging war: taking human life. Through advances in Artificial Intelligence, armed robots are becoming so effective that they are now fully capable of autonomous, deadly combat according to multiple sources. That venerable Russian arms manufacturer, Kalashnikov, a company which has probably accounted for more gunshot deaths than any other arms manufacturer in history, with its series of AK rifles, most notably, the AK-47, has announced its plans to unveil such a fully autonomous robotic weapon system at their upcoming Army-2017 show.

    Meanwhile, Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs, General Paul Selva, recently testified to Congress that we must never give AI robotic systems such full control over taking human life lest we lose contol of them and create uncontrollable killing machines. So what do we do? Do we allow our enemies to gain the battle advantage by restricting ourselves with rules of engagement similar to those that have so often hamstrung our forces in the past? Or do we loose these digital dogs of war to roam and fight, unimpeded by human masters? Must our binary beasts fight muzzled by microprocessors awaiting digital approval from human controllers while a free ranging robotic enemy force ravages the battle area unconcerned with such moral niceties as inflicting collateral damages or covering behind human shields?

    And it’s not like we have decades to decide this thing; as the Russian announcement makes clear, robotic combat is upon us and if the Russians can actually back up their boast of putting a fully autonomous robotic fighting machine on the battlefield in the next year or so, we’d best have a national discussion soon to develop a national policy to determine:

    Who will, quite literally, call the shots?

    Crossposted at American Thinker