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

Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists

  • Tactical or Practical?

    Jonn asked that we post!

    In the wake of the Aurora shootings I’ve been re-appraising my own skill set. Toss in TSO’s trip down HIS memory lane and I realized there was room for some geezer ruminations here. And a question or three.

    First let me offer some background if I might. Been shooting since I was a very young teen, and used to do some hunting. First formal training was in The Boy Scouts (I think) and involved an M1 Garand chambered for .22 LR.

    Later on in the Navy I received formal training on what one would expect in the mid to late ’60s – .45, M1, M14, M16, MA Deuce, and an air cooled 30 cal MG (forget the name). Training was cursory… field strip, clean, and target shooting to “qualify”. Fired or crewed once or twice in real life situations ie small craft warnings, etc. And, for instance, standing watch in Da Nang harbor, or the like, with a loaded M1 and and/or a loaded .45. Some Navy types will be going Huh? Always wound up in the Weapons Division. Long story, but for another time. Got pictures!

    To be accurate I also was gun captain on a 5 inch mount, AND carried a chromed 03 with a chromed bayonet (GLakes Drill Team).

    –

    Forward in time to now. I have firearms, and a range on site. I can’t say I practice religiously (whatever that means), but I can plink with the best, if not as loud. Jonn likes hand cannons.

    Now for the questions… assuming you are NOT currently serving?

    How often do YOU practice? Do you wear ear/eye protection always? Have you compared your competency with or without such? I suspect it might matter? Indeed, that first flinch might be important.

    Lastly… I’m considering a visit to PFT. Might be a sort of pipe dream, but is it practical for a geezer who plinks regular, AND doesn’t get out much?

     

  • Dinguses in the weeds

    This is what really torques me off about the gun control discussion; The people who want to restrict gun ownership, don’t even know what they’re talking about. For example, The Mr. Wolf sends us this screen shot from the New York Times. See if you can spot the Glock in this picture;

    No, neither can I. I see what looks like some version of Colt’s 1911 with a scary-looking competition trigger that has holes in it, and a scary looking competition ramp sights, but, no Glock. It looks like NYT has taken the picture down, but regardless. Now dingus #2 doesn’t know what high capacity magazines are called, but he knows that he doesn’t like them;

    Yeah, if you can find me a magazine that fires a whole bunch of bullets at once, I want it, I don’t care what it costs.

    They can’t speak the language, and they’re not even sure what it is that they don’t like, just they know that if they call it “common sense gun legislation” people will line up for it, because of their emotion-fueled opposition to being shot by the millions of us who own guns and don’t shoot people.

  • If Only…

    Personal preface: I don’t watch TV news or the talking heads so I don’t share Jonn’s frustrations about the coverage of the Aurora shooting. I assumed it would be crap and ignored it. And the anti-gun rhetoric was easily foreseeable and as easily dismissed.

    Nope! Events like Flight 93 and “Let’s Roll!” kept intruding. Or Mr. Williams decision to take action seems extraordinarily fitting.

    –

    So I’m thinking that guns were peripheral (NOT trivial!) elements in that theater. I’ll posit that what was missing was a Sheepdog?

    Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said, “Thank God I wasn’t on one of those planes.” The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, “Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a difference.” When you are truly transformed into a warrior and have truly invested yourself into warriorhood, you want to be there. You want to be able to make a difference.  Lt. Colonel Grossman

    If only there had been just one person with that mind set?

    YMMV

    Update: See Russ’s post above. I can’t/won’t disagree with his emphasis, but…

  • That gun control thing

    Last night, after boycotting the news all day because of the steady stream of misinformation that was being called “news” in relation to the Aurora murders yesterday, I watched local DC news, specifically WUSA9, when my common sense was assaulted by the news reader who fired off a rant about how we’re so willing to defend our second amendment rights, that we caused the blood bath. The idiot went on to tell us how the murderer in question had amassed an AR15, a shotgun, two .40 caliber Glocks and 6,000 rounds of ammunition, and how could we allow that to happen.

    Yeah, it’s good thing the news reader can’t see inside my house or he’d crap his pants, because I have way more guns and ammo. Three rifles that he’d call assault weapons, seven handguns and about 10,000 rounds of ammunition. And about 400 rounds are already loaded in my high-capacity magazines. I own them all legally, I always carry one of them loaded – mostly because I can. My wife thought I was just being paranoid, but recent events have either made her just as paranoid, or brought her around to my way of thinking.

    So, news reader guy said we needed more laws to prevent people like the Aurora guy from owning guns. How, exactly. He was never diagnosed as being unbalanced, the media uncovered his single brush with the law – a traffic ticket. The only way he could have been prevented from his murderous attack was to stop all of us from buying guns. And that’s what news reader guy was trying to champion with his pointless rant. He wanted my guns.

    There are millions of gun owners who have never shot anyone, yet we’re target of the hand-wringing gun grabbers. James Holmes was a coward. When confronted by the police, despite his body armor, he meekly surrendered. If one person in that theater had returned fire, Holmes would have beat his chicken shit feet on the pavement.

    If all of the liberals can agree that the Supreme Court’s cure for the stolen valor outbreak is “more speech”, they have to agree that the solution to the gun violence problem is more guns.

  • The Gun

    A pal of mine posted this on FB and it rang the Liberty Bell in my head.

    “The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.”
    ? Jeff Cooper, Art of the Rifle

    I’d replace Rifle with Gun in every case, but I sure ain’t Jeff Cooper.

    Hat tip to Mr.  Williams.

  • Army reject kills five, self, in Seattle

    Ian Stawicki, a 40-year-old former soldier, shot five people in Seattle yesterday before killing himself as the Seattle Police Department closed in on him. He started his shooting spree in a cafe in the University District by shooting five people, one of whom survived, before heading downtown and killing a seemingly random woman in a car jacking. His family didn’t express any surprise and described him as having mental problems and “a lot of anger”. According to the local ABC News affiliate, KOMO, Stawicki did a brief stint in the Army in the early 90’s and was based at Fort Drum before being discharged as “unsuitable” for the military.

    When his identity first broke and before any history of his time in the Army came out KOMO ran the picture of him above, wearing a gray Army PT shirt. KOMO also went out of their way to mention that he suffered hearing loss from a grenade going off near his head during training, presumably to set up the narrative of Stawicki suffering from some sort of service induced PTSD. This narrative is already being diligently picked up on by some commentators. We’ll see if there’s any further attempt to beat this meme to death.

    And, in the tradition of never letting a good tragedy go to waste, Jonathan Golob and the always petulantly fussy David Goldstein, both of alt weekly Seattle paper The Stranger, used the “opportunity” to attack “right-wing propagandists” and the Second Amendment, quite literally while the bodies were still warm. Their solutions are, of course, right down the center of The Stranger’s extremist, left-wing Progressive statism, calling for a larger welfare apparatus (but not “inhumanly” institutionalizing crazy people) and restricting law abiding people’s access to guns. Stay classy, guys.

  • Bank of America hates guns

    Now, I don’t like Bank of America anyway. A few years back, they started offering checking accounts to illegal immigrants who didn’t have ID that other banks require people to have to prove who they are so they can conduct their business. Yet, when I had a tax refund check from the DC government written on BofA, it took me three visits to the bank to get the check cashed and they ended up fingerprinting me and my wife, just to cash a friggen check. So they’ve been on my shit list.

    But, anyway, Kelly D McMillan, the director of operations at the McMillan Group International writes on McMillan Group’s Facebook page the following encounter with BofA’s Ray Fox, Senior Vice President, Market Manager, Business Banking, Global Commercial Banking;

    He scheduled the meeting as an “account analysis” meeting in order to evaluate the two lines of credit we have with them. He spent 5 minutes talking about how McMillan has changed in the last 5 years and have become more of a firearms manufacturer than a supplier of accessories.

    At this point I interrupted him and asked “Can I possible save you some time so that you don’t waste your breath? What you are going to tell me is that because we are in the firearms manufacturing business you no longer what my business.”

    “That is correct” he says.

    I replied “That is okay, we will move our accounts as soon as possible. We can find a 2nd Amendment friendly bank that will be glad to have our business. You won’t mind if I tell the NRA, SCI and everyone one I know that BofA is not firearms industry friendly?”

    “You have to do what you must” he said.

    “So you are telling me this is a politically motivated decision, is that right?”

    Mr Fox confirmed that it was. At which point I told him that the meeting was over and there was nothing left for him to say.

    Frankly Opinionated writes to tell us that he verified that conversation and climate at Bank of America. The Bank of America hates the Second Amendment and guns – you know, the things the that keep us all from going into the BofA and taking their money away from them. I think it’s time that the Bank of America change their name to Bank of Liberalism or Bank of Anybody Except Americans. It’s obvious to me that they don’t really care about the America in their name, so they should change it to something more befitting their politics.

    They fingerprint real Americans to prove their identity, while allowing non-Americans to bank with them with no proof of their identity, and they don’t want to do business with legitimate and authentic American businesses. So if there is anyone left out there still doing business with BofA, you might want to consider doing business with an authentic American bank in your neighborhood, rather than these thugs.

  • Witness the unfolding campaign to strip your rights

    There’s a new angle in the campaign to strip you of your rights to defend your self with the Constitutional tools afforded to you. In the wake of the Martin shooting in Florida comes a recent op-ed piece by Tom Brown for Reuters masquerading as reporting the “case” being built for the deconstruction of so called “stand your ground” laws.

    On June 5, 2006, not long after Florida enacted the first “Stand Your Ground” law in the United States, unarmed Jason Rosenbloom was shot in the stomach and chest by his next-door neighbor after a shouting match over trash.

    Exactly what happened that day in Clearwater, Florida, is still open to dispute. Kenneth Allen, a retired police officer, said he shot Rosenbloom because he was trying to storm into his house.

    Rosenbloom told Reuters in a telephone interview this week he never tried to enter the house and was in Allen’s yard, about 10 feet (3 meters) from his front door, when he was shot moments after he put his hands up.

    Now living in Hawaii, Rosenbloom said he had been unaware of the growing outrage over last month’s shooting in Sanford, Florida, of an unarmed black teenager by a neighborhood watch captain.

    The language in the rest of the article only grows more grotesque. Then again this is the same agency which employs “journalists” to “embed” with insurgents in Iraq then has the audacity to complain when they’re caught in the cross fire.

    UPDATE:

    This morning the Christian Science Monitor ran an Op-Ed by NYU professor Jonathan Zimmerman, titled Where’s the Trayvon Martin petition about gun control?. It pretty clearly lays out, what I think will be, the strategy they’ll use going forward, race card and all.

    …we need to ask whether any private citizen should be carrying a concealed weapon, and whether “Stand Your Ground” measures make people trigger-happy. And most of all, we need to think about the most common victims of our lax gun laws: African Americans.