Sounds Like a Crank

The first shots I saw in a video were about 10 seconds of very regular fire… something that you’d expect from an honest-to-God machine gun. But people have reported that some video sounded like a crank fire mechanism to them, like you’d find on a gatling gun. I have to say, I agree after seeing this video:

This guy must have done extensive planning for this to have this much hardware staged and ready to go. But what’s his beef?

UPDATE: Here we go. I’m not aware of a cranked firearm ever being used in a crime before, but that’s not going to stop attempts to reclassify them. Is it possible the shooter used a bump stock as the article mentioned? Sure. But it strikes me as rank speculation. Not that I’m not doing a lot of that here, but I’ll admit it’s rank speculation. The media won’t.

More Useful Than a Gun?

It occurred to me this morning that a drone or two with a tear gas grenade might have been able to change the situation in Vegas faster than a SWAT team ultimately did. Fly one or two through the shot out windows, and at least it might stun and delay the shooter long enough to save lives and give the police better odds on entry. Might also make the dirt bag off himself ahead of schedule.

Too late now, but maybe something police should consider for future high-profile, target rich venues. Drones are cheap and relatively easy to fly these days. My club now has a cadre of drone pilots who spend the weekends using our ample open space to practice.

Police departments wouldn’t have too much trouble training officers on drones. Keep a few on standby and ready to go, or actively in the air. I would have issues with drones being armed with lethal force, but I’m OK with less-than-lethal force like tear gas or a flash bang. The problem with something like this is that it just gave a new template to the next whack job looking to go out with his name becoming a household word, and people hanging on learning every detail of his life.

Almost Getting it Right

This is a lot better than I would have expected from “fact checkers” only a few years ago. It’s mostly right.

Journalists often mistake the “AR-15” semi-automatic rifle, sometimes referred to as an assault weapon, for an automatic weapon. It is a much smaller caliber version of the military and fully-auto M-16. The AR-15 is also highly accurate at a long distance.

Same caliber bullet, same cartridge. The only difference is the AR-15 is not capable of fully automatic or burst fire. There’s a difference in the receiver and the internal bits to make this so. The accuracy of an AR-15 is the same as the M16 when it’s set to semi-auto.

Gun opponents have lobbied for decades to make “high capacity” magazines illegal. Generally, they are talking about magazines that load more than 8 rounds. An experienced shooter can easily reload with a fresh magazine in a few seconds.

Generally they are talking about magazines that load more than 10 rounds, because I suppose they feel like that is a nice, round number.

But I’ll give the author credit for mostly getting it right. Years ago this stuff was often wildly off the mark.

Well, That Didn’t Take Long

Via Ace of Spades, a CBS legal exec:

“If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” Geftman-Gold wrote on Facebook. “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country fans often are Republican gun toters.”

Yeah, and we’re the horrible people, right?

Despite Bitter’s brother narrowly escaping, this won’t change our opinions on firearms. I can’t speak for Bitter, but to me this is plane crash and lightning territory. It’s a rare event, and not something that necessarily calls for “something” that “must be done.” The only way you can stop someone with a clean record who is very motivated to get a firearm from getting one is to make them flat out illegal, and even if you did that, it still won’t stop people who are determined. Gun control is and always will be a fool’s errand. It’s an easy answer for people who want there to be easy answers.

I Agree, This is Highly Weird

David French at National Review:

This was the University of Texas tower attack on steroids, conducted out of nowhere, with meticulous planning and at great expense, from a person who doesn’t seem to fit any normal profile of a mass shooter. There is much we have yet to learn, but for now, this is one of the most chilling and mysterious events I’ve ever seen.

In a decade of blogging, I’ve followed a lot of public mass shootings, and this busts the profile for sure. I’m glad there are people out there relieving ignorance about the legal status of machine guns.

I’m still going to stick with my initial speculation that this guy lived in a 400k house, had two planes, and a clean record: he fits the profile of someone who could have afforded a legal machine gun. I’m not going to be surprised if that turns out to be the case.

Las Vegas Shooting

Much like Virginia Tech, where Bitter had a cousin on campus that day, this mass shooting hit close to home. Bitter’s brother is in the music business and his act was on stage when the shooting started. We have gotten word that he is OK.

Initial reports are almost always wrong, but having seen video, it does indeed to appear to be some kind of fully automatic rifle. The cyclic rate didn’t sound fast enough to me to be a 5.56 machine gun, so I’m guessing something larger. The cyclic rate sounded consistent, so I’m guessing not a crank [UPDATE: I’m seeing a lot of speculation about cyclic rate being inconsistent, but it sounded pretty damned consistent to me. In the one video, you can hear the sonic boom of the bullet a half second or so before you hear the report. I think that’s being mistaken by some people as two separate firearms. Other videos have echoes which mask the consistency.] I’m doubtful of a bump mechanism, since he was landing hits.

He was firing for a good 9-10 seconds based on some video I saw. A 75-round AK drum should be empty in 7.5 seconds. What did this guy get his hands on? It’s not like there’s a huge black market for belt feds. Whatever he had, the nut job apparently planned the attack in great detail. One article I read suggested he had put up cameras to detect when the police were closing in. With enough planning and motivation, he could have gotten anything. This guy doesn’t appear to have been a whack job, by all accounts. So what motivated him? What made him snap?

I don’t know, and we probably won’t know for days, but one thing I can promise you is that you and I will be blamed for this in the media. We will be the ones held to account and the ones punished.

UPDATE: I’m seeing that this shooter apparently was a pilot and owned two planes. He also lived in a $400,000 house. This means he was in a socioeconomic bracket where he could reasonably afford legal machine guns. He also had a clean record. Be ready for that possibility.

Fiber Optics Bleg

It’s been some time since I had anything to do with fiber optic cabling, and my experience years ago was with Gigabit Ethernet over good old fashioned OM1 with no run greater than a few hundred feet. Back when I started with that, companies were just getting settled on 100Base-T for their LAN drops and there wasn’t yet any Cat6. Gigabit was something new and exciting.

So here I find myself years later looking to wire up my gun club for cameras, property-wide WiFi, and an access card system.

I know I’ll get people who will say “microwaves!” but we have large berms separating parts of the property, and I’d have to trench a good bit of new cable and clear a good bit of brush to get a clean line of sight to the places I need to go. Plus, I like wires. You can’t jam wires. I don’t have to worry about clearing and maintaining brush with wires. I can also get full GigE speed with wires.

The convention wisdom has been, and if you search the Internet still seems to be: “Multimode for short distances, and single mode for long distances.” Why? Well, cost, and MM is easier to terminate and more tolerant of poor field terminations.

As best as I can tell, the cost difference between a good quality OM3 or OM4 multimode fiber and OS2 single-mode fiber is trivial. Additionally, the SFP transceivers for 1000Base-SX and 1000Base-LX are not terribly different from the vendor I’m looking at. I’m also not planning to do any field terminations: there are plenty of vendors who sell pre-terminated fiber, and I was careful to measure the obsolete or non-functioning copper cables I pulled out of all the runs.

My question to anyone out there who’s well-versed and current with fiber: why would anyone use multi-mode fiber for campus length runs when there’s little price difference? Keep in mind I have a few runs that push the limits of multi-mode fiber at 1Gb/sec (550m) and would be right on the very edge with OM4 multi-mode fiber for 10Gb/sec (400m). So why not use single-mode? I can go 10km with single-mode, and 10Gb/sec is no problem. Am I missing something? It seems that maybe multi-mode has advantages if you’re looking to do field terminations, but the price advantage it might have once had isn’t’ really there anymore.

Addendum question: There are a handful of vendors out there selling pre-terminated cables. Price differences seem to be substantial. Are there any vendors to prefer? To avoid?

Her Choice or the Colorado Dems?

Shannon ain’t running. For all the folks at Everytown: I’m sorry. Looks like you’re stuck with her now. I realize this was a prime opportunity to dump a problem onto the Democratic Party of Colorado, but apparently they even realize the issue of nominating a candidate who has an establishment background and then picked up gun control as an issue, which, despite efforts, even Dem voters don’t really give a shit about.

But there’s always hope for Everytown: maybe she’ll run to replace Hickenlooper when his term is up.

But I’m Told This Never Happens

Concealed carry permit holders never stop mass shootings, right? That’s what the anti-gun folks keep telling us any time we bring up the topic. I noticed local media covering this fact, but not national media. USA Today? Nothing. The WaPo? Someone confronted the shooter, and he shot himself. Bloomberg’s propaganda outlet:

A young church usher confronted the gunman, who accidentally shot himself in the chest during the altercation.

They omitted the part the Tennessean actually reported:

Engle confronted Samson after he entered the church. Samson pistol-whipped Engle. After Samson shot himself, Engle went to his vehicle, got his own weapon and held Samson at gunpoint until police arrived, police said.

It would have been more useful had it been on him instead of in the car, but I’ll take it. There shouldn’t be any reservations about carrying in church. Churches are targets.

Now You Can Be Sure the Bloomberg Talking Point Are Out There

As I’ve said before, when you see a pattern, it means it’s a coordinated campaign, and folks, we’re seeing a pattern. Same talking points as Milbank, to a tee.

Is it Title II, which eliminates liability on any shooting range built or operated with federal funding in whole or in part — if for example a deranged person commits a mass shooting on that firing range? The shooting range is free of liability in all cases, even if it knew a dangerous person was using the firing range and did nothing to alert the authorities.

Are people really committing mass shootings at firing ranges? Is this really a problem? I also LOVE this juxtaposition.

Is it Title I, which prohibits the entire federal government from addressing lead poisoning caused by ammunition or fishing tackle? Even though waterfowl hunters switched to non-toxic ammunition decades ago, and even though lead poisons people and wildlife alike, and even though there are non-toxic alternatives, this legislation would forever preclude the government from taking action.

Yes, there are very expensive and less effective non-toxic alternatives. There could be cheaper non-toxic alternatives, but …

And then there are the provisions eliminating all restrictions on the purchase of silencers, eliminating restrictions on armor-piercing bullets, and eliminating restrictions on carrying firearms across state lines.

 

There we are with the armor piercing bullets again, and you guys don’t see the articles I choose not to link, so you can expect this is a key Bloomberg talking point right now. You can’t, on one hand, tell us that we have to adopt alternatives to lead ammunition, and then, on the other hand, outlaw those alternatives. That’s what the “armor piercing” ammunition law currently does.

Let me just re-establish for those of you who might be new to this: the armor piercing ammunition issue is bullshit. Let me go over a brief history of this issue.

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when this fake issue was turned into a full on scare by the media and Hollywood, people were demanding that “something must be done.” So politicians started drafting bills which were “something,” and therefore “must be done.” Early attempts by Ted Kennedy to draft a bill based on the ability to penetrate soft body armor would have banned most rifle ammunition. Nearly all centerfire rifle ammunition will penetrate body armor typically worn by police. Not just scary “assault weapons.” Not big bad .50 BMGs. The .30-30 Grandpa shot deer with for years will slice through soft body armor like a hot knife through butter, no matter what the bullet is made of. Why? Rifle bullets travel at two to three times the speed of handgun bullets, and speed is what gets you through kevlar.

Banning all rifle ammunition not being politically feasible, politicians looking for that “something” that “must be done” started focusing on handguns that could shoot bullets that were capable of penetrating soft body armor. That’s a much smaller class of ammunition, because nearly all handgun rounds except very powerful ones are stopped by soft body armor (I know, I know, it depends on the level of the vest, but for simplicity’s sake here). Still, a performance based criteria would ban large swathes of popular handgun ammunition. That was just fine by people who were in favor of banning handguns, so there was a real chance this could happen.

As a compromise, instead of focusing on performance, legislation could focus on the materials the bullet was made from, and based on whether or not it was designed to be fired from a handgun (basically it had to be a lead bullet). This would only ban a very small subset of ammunition that didn’t see much civilian (or law enforcement, for that matter) use. It was “something” that the politicians could take to their hysterical constituents demanding that an armor piercing ammunition bill “must be done.” And so it was done.

But lawmaking by Congress is only ever part of the equation. Federal bureaucrats have enormous leeway to make rules to implement a particular law. Under both the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration that’s exactly what happened. Suddenly, it wasn’t “designed to be fired from a handgun” it was “can be fired from a handgun.” The new rule became if there was a pistol that could fire the ammunition, that ammunition became subject to the armor piercing law and could be banned. This was used to great effect to ban cheap 5.56x45mm and 5.45x39mm ammunition during the Obama Administration. What SHARE would do is to set the rule back to what it was intended to be, and eliminate the mechanism by which two hostile administrations have used to warp the law into something it was never meant to be. It was meant to be a meaningless feel good measure that didn’t really ban much of anything. It was NEVER intended to be a mechanism to ban large categories of rifle ammunition. But that’s what it was turned into.

But hey, why write an article on that? Why take the concerns of shooters seriously? Why try to learn something before just writing up an op-ed from Bloomberg’s talking points?