Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 26 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Dick’s Sporting Goods Looking to Exit Guns

They’ve been taking a beating, and are looking to exit the business. How stupid is Dick’s CEO? Let’s say you’re in a business where part of your business is regulated in such a way that emerging players like Amazon can’t easily compete with you. Lets also say you have some good economies of scale over mom and pop businesses that are your other main competition in that area, and can move product more efficiently and offer lower prices. Do you:

Make every effort to stay in the regulated space and keep those customers happy with your brand, so give your brick and mortar business a business line Amazon can’t touch?
Decide, in the same of Social Justice, to anger your customers in your regulated business and piss it away, leaving you to compete directly against Bezos, who eats brick and mortar stores for breakfast, in markets he finds much more favorable.

If you went with two, you’re about as stupid as Dick’s CEO. Angering gun owners and pissing away that business was about the dumbest things Dick’s could have done. You had a strong presence in a protected industry. Are you nuts?

New Shiny Thing: Mk.262

At my club, 200 yards is the max I can reach out to, so the regular old 55 grain FMJ-BT is my bullet of choice. These days what powder I use depends on where I can get some for a very low price or free. Since I’m still going through powder I have scrounged from various sources, I’m not all that familiar with the wide array of choices. I generally have been sticking to Varget, H322, IMR4895 and I just came across a few pounds of Varmint and IMR4198.

I know a couple of guys who occasionally head to a 600-yard range near Atglen to do some long-range silhouette shooting. I haven’t really shot Silhouette in years, because it’s honestly about as much fun as watching paint dry if you’re not getting better. I don’t have the time, patience, or desire to master the sport. Those Silhouette guys helped improve my shooting a lot, but there came a point where it had done everything it was going to do for me without devoting more time to the game than I was willing to give.

But turn it into a precision rifle event with half-scale animals at ridiculous distances? You once again have my attention. That’ll be fun even if I’m missing a lot, and it gives me an excuse to tinker, which never gets old.

However, the most precisionist rifle I have is my AR, which isn’t anything to write home about. I bought it during the height of the ban almost 20 years ago by this point and it’s 100% stock, save the bayonet lug and birdcage flash suppressor I put on after the ban. It has regular old A2 furniture. A few weeks ago I uncased at the club and had some young guy say, “Wow. That’s old school!” It seems like just yesterday it was me saying shit like that to grey haired shooters. I resisted the urge to come back with, “You know, back in my day, we didn’t have any of these free-floatin’ barrels and fancy-dancy ACOGs with illuminated reticles.”

Old school or not, I’m thinking of slapping a halfway decent optic on it, and taking it out to see how I do at that distance with so-so equipment. But no way I’m taking my regular 55 grain load. I’m interested in the capabilities of the Mk. 262 round for reaching out to 600 yards. For those of you who may not be familiar, the Mk.262 is a 5.56x45mm round developed by SOCOM for longer range work. It uses a 77-grain Sierra Match King bullet. It is about as decent a round as you can get and still be able to stuff them into a magazine. I want to work with a practical round and not with loadings that have to be single-loaded into the rifle.

The trouble is, I’m not used to working with bullets that heavy in this chambering, and I’m paranoid about overpressure. A few months ago, I ran into a supply of 75gr HPBT bullets, and I am starting with those. That bullet with 22gr of H322 driving it isn’t yet a compressed load at 2.26″ OAL. Hodgdon says that’ll push out at about 2785ft/sec with 48,100 CUP from a 24″ test barrel. For a 77gr bullet, 21.8grs of H322 pushes 2,721ft/sec a 50,900 CUP. Black Hills seems to get close to 2900ft/sec out of a 20″ Colt AR barrel, so I’m guessing they have to be loading over the SAAMI spec and closer to the NATO spec on chamber pressure, which is about 10,000CUP higher. Anyone have any experience trying to replicate this load to get the same performance as the factory Black Hills load?

The Consequences of Swalwell’s Redneck Snuff Fantasy

Larry Correia has an article well worth reading that takes apart the current memes suggesting the 2nd Amendment is obsolete.

The confiscators donâ€™t live on base. They live in apartment complexes and houses in the suburbs next door to the people you expect them to murder. Every time they go out to kick in some redneckâ€™s door, their convoy is moving through an area with lots of angry people who shoot small animals from far away for fun, and the only thing they remember about chemistry is the formula for Tannerite.

In something that I find profoundly troubling, when Iâ€™ve had this discussion before, Iâ€™ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesnâ€™t apply, because â€œwe kept the gloves onâ€, whereas fighting Americaâ€™s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held backâ€¦ Holy shit, Iâ€™ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.

If we have another Civil War, and the military is as divided as our society on its loyalties, we won’t have room for all the bodies it’s going to generate. It’s going to be ugly. And that’s even before our foreign rivals use the chaos to take what they can. Remember, the last time we had a Civil War, we didn’t have to worry about the rest of the world as much because the British Empire mostly had that under control, and they weren’t going to intervene on behalf of a CSA avowing to preserve slavery. We won’t have that luxury this time around. If we have another go, you can expect everyone and their brother to make a play for any asset they think they can get.

I suspect in that case we’d need to have an accommodation with both sides in the Second Civil War that control of the nukes stays in neutral hands, maybe military leaders both sides trust, where our policy would be to nuke any power making a grab for US assets like Guam, Hawaii, or Alaska and use the nuclear umbrella to secure things while we killed each other like civilized people. That would really be the only option.

Turn ‘Em In Or We’ll Nuke Ya

I don’t much concern myself with what clowns say, and make no mistake: Eric Swalwell is a clown. But this should serve as notice that confiscation is no longer a fringe issue. It never has been. Don’t think just because the Senate is in Republican hands we’re safe from this. Be worried about deals on larger bills and be ready to start flooding phone banks.

One thing they want to go after is home gun smithing. This is a smart move for them. I would do this if I were them. You want to separate out and extinguish the true believers and evangelists from the casual gun owners who don’t do things like home build ARs. You’d be looking for issues where you can get the strongest believers without much protest from the average believer.

If your goal was to extinguish a religion or culture, you wouldn’t want to go after all the adherents. You go after the people who most strongly identify with and spread it. After you get them, you work on the casual people. Because you’ve gotten rid of their leaders, you have the option to either wait them out, assimilate them with your preferred culture or religion.

In any other context this would be considered a monstrous evil by the left. But not this one. Hating on gun culture gets a pass from the same people who would cry foul if we were colonizing Lebanon, and trying to convert everyone there to Christianity and American culture. But if you’re from New York City and decide to engage in a little cultural imperialism on Lebanon, Pennsylvania, well, that’s just fine.

UPDATE: He’s still digging:

Fair question. Rifles. Theyâ€™re more powerful and cause more carnage when used with a pistol-grip. See @ScottPelley @60Minutes piece. To reduce semi-auto pistol deaths Iâ€™d have universal background checks and mandatory reporting on mental health.

â€” Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) November 16, 2018

Heller and McDonald largely put handgun bans out of the realm of legitimate discourse. Even though Heller wasn’t as strong as it could be, the Courts largely took handgun bans off the table. What we need is a strong ruling protecting rifles and accessories too.

The Grand Realignment

Salena Zito has an article out in the Washington Examiner that’s worth your time. The whole notion that “The Republicans have lost the suburbs” is way overstated. If that were true, the Dems blue wave would have materialized as they expected, rather than being a historically ho-hum midterm performance for the party out of power. But that’s not to say I think the Republicans are playing all the right moves. The Dems are doing a far better job of selling to wealthy suburbanites than the GOP is doing of selling to working class voters. What you’re seeing now is wealthy suburbs shifting hard for Democrats, while working class suburbs that have been traditionally democratic are shifting more slowly.

The GOP will find its home not necessarily just with blue collar workers: there’s whole classes of educated, middle-class voters out there who are working professional jobs, but aren’t rich enough to afford the wild redistributionist schemes of the progressive left. We aren’t going to pay for universal health care and free college by taxes on the wealthy. You and I will pay for those things, and if you think they’re expensive now, wait until they’re free. If I were running the GOP, here’s what I’d tell them:

Forget the Chambers of Commerce. Let the Dems have them. A lot of the small business people are in that “not quite rich enough” category, so you’re not going to lose them by telling the chambers to piss off.
Forget free trade. Smacks of globalism, and whether you like it or not, Trump has positioned the GOP as a nationalist party that believes in borders and trade agreements that benefit the American worker.
You’ve lost the rich to the Dems, so why promote corporate friendly policies and tax structures that benefit them? They are begging to pay more in taxes. So have it!
Use the immigration issue to crack into the black working-class vote. You might also find that latinos who are already here aren’t keen on wage competition with new arrivals either. You want to break tech workers away from their oligarchical overlords? Run on ending the H1B program. Sure, your donors will squeal, but you need votes more than donors.
Front candidates who are talented at retail politics, and who get what that means in the 21st century. You can win elections on the cheap if you know what you’re doing. The great conceit of all the consultants is that they can take the most Quasimodo of political candidates and make them winners. That is an exhausted model that takes a lot of money, which needs a lot of donors. You can get donors by kissing ass to wealthy elites, but at the cost of votes from your base. Trump defeated Hillary on a shoestring budget. Sure, Hillary had more money to showcase the country how awful she was, but that’s not to say Trump didn’t do a lot of things right.
Religious, but not too much. The wear your religion on your sleeve model of politicking is as dead as a doornail. This will vary from region to region, but if you want the rust belt states, you’ll scare them with too much overt religiosity. Trump should have shred to pieces the notion that you can’t win the Jesus vote without praising Jesus publicly and loudly.

I’d note that a lot of these aren’t my preferred position: if you’ll notice, economic libertarianism is the loser in this realignment. But it’s not like it really had a home before. This is where I see all this going. The overall realignment, and not just here but globally, is between nationalists and globalists. Globalism will probably win in the end, but the fight is going to be over whether globalism happens democratically, with nation-states in voluntary cooperation, or whether we continue creating international institutions controlled by the wealthy for their own benefit.

Where do guns end up in all of this? The ruling classes have never been in favor of the peasants being able to shoot back. Unfortunately, I do not see the Democratic Party coming back to gun rights any time soon. Our home will be with the Republicans for the foreseeable future. What we have to hope for is that even when the Dems take control, they can never take enough control to really push the worst. We’re also playing the court game very well, and that could provide a firewall against the Dems’ worst excesses.

What will the Dem coalition look like? A party of wealthy elites is a losing party. The Dem coalition will be between the wealthy and urban and suburban poor. You see this in California. The wealthy will provide the money, from both themselves, but also from their political opponents in the working class, to provide benefits for their poor coalition members.

Is Anyone Really Surprised?

The new Dem house is going to make gun control a priority. Here are the stakes: next time the Dems control everything we’re getting gun control out the ass. A new and worse ban on “Assault Weapons” is almost a guarantee. And yes, this will give the GOP an excuse to take us for granted and not do anything for us.

We’re back on the defensive, folks. How do you people who laughed Bloomberg off feel now?

For those of you in Montana: have you lost your minds? We can’t afford a state like Montana having a guy like John Tester in the Senate. I can’t believe Montana has been californicated to that degree. You can do better. Now we have six years before we get another shot at him.

Everyone was cheering the meme that “The blue states are losing population! Worst thing ever for the Dems!” Yeah, maybe that would be true if they were leaving the country, but that’s not what’s happening. They are moving to other states and ruining those places too.

Challenging Doctors Was a Smart Move

Whoever thought to do this at NRA deserves some credit for smart populism, getting people talking about the issue, and forcing their opponents to engage in a never-ending stream of elitism:

Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves. https://t.co/oCR3uiLtS7

— NRA (@NRA) November 7, 2018

I think the controversy that has ensued sums up the debate nicely. I like things that work on many levels. As Glenn Reynolds notes: “The thing is, doctor’s ‘special insight’ into the gun issue is the not-exactly-genius-level observation that being shot is bad for you.“

Key Elements of Fitz’s Victory

I’m seeing a lot of articles pointing to our Congressional race as the rare GOP hold in a district that went for Hillary.

By contrast, look at the few districts where House Democrats fell short of expectations. Despite Democratic domination in the Philadelphia suburbs, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick was one of the few Clinton-district Republicans to prevail. He was running against Scott Wallace, a wealthy self-funder with tenuous ties to the district who held out-of-the-mainstream views on law enforcement and foreign policy.

The other suburban districts all fell to the Dems. This is mostly due to the Dem-controlled PA Supreme Court gerrymandering those districts to favor Democrats. But it’s worth taking a look at Fitz, and understanding the key elements of his win.

The PA Supreme Court decided to preserve the tradition that Bucks County must be contained within a single Congressional district. To make the numbers work, we’ve always had a small part of another county added to us. Once it was part of Philadelphia. Then they remove part of Philly and added a few Montco exurbs to make it a little safer for Republicans. The PA Supreme Court, to make the district lean more Democratic, moved the part of Montco that completes our district in closer to the city to make it more Dem leaning. But Bucks County is now the most red of the ring counties, so they didn’t have the free hand to completely rewrite the political map that they had with other congressional districts. It went from slight GOP lean to slight Dem lean.
His opponent was a loon, and he wasn’t. The Bucks County Dems have usually made the mistake of running loons against the incumbent. All they had to do this time was not be crazy, and they couldn’t even manage that. Fitzpatrick might be a squishy RINO, but he’s not crazy.
Fitz embraced more traditional Democratic positions than may Republicans in the area. He won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO. I probably don’t want to know what he had to promise to get that, but it was a smart move on his part to woo the unions.

Understand that in the ring counties (and I include Chester County in this even though it’s not technically a ring county), the upper to upper middle class hoity toity were the loyal base of the Republican Party. That loyalty has flipped, and the GOP isn’t getting them back. But too many of the GOP candidates and leadership around here don’t get that: they stick to the old messaging and act as if the coalition hasn’t changed. They want to blame Trump for their losses, but aren’t looking at the coalition that brought Trump to power and how different it looks than the one they think is still viable.

For the foreseeable future, the GOP has lost the hoity toity, and they need to find voters to replace them with. There’s no path forward for the GOP here that doesn’t involve seducing the working class vote, which you aren’t going to do by embracing hoity toity issues like gun control. I only have two NRA endorsed candidates left in the area, and both did better than the candidates that did not carry endorsements. My state rep won with a comfortable margin. Tomlinson, my State Senator is holding on to a razor thin margin, and he’s probably going to a recount. It’s a squeaker, but he’s in the lead as of now. He had a strong challenger.

I’ll be honest, as long as Nancy Pelosi is taking the gavel, I couldn’t have cared less of Fitz lost his seat to a nutty Dem. We might have a chance at unseating a nutty Dem in a better year for Republicans, but I don’t see things getting better for Republicans around here with the current crop of dopes and dinosaurs that are running the party.

Lame Duck Session

Seeing a meme go around social media about passing National Reciprocity or SHARE in lame duck, just like Obamacare. Facts:

National reciprocity already passed the House. The House was never our problem. The Senate is our problem. The Senate is now less of a problem because we flipped at least one “no” vote (McCaskill) to a “yes” vote, but we don’t get that Senate until Nancy Pelosi takes back the gavel.
Obamacare did not pass in lame duck session. It became law in March of 2010, well before the midterms where Dems took a “shellacking.”
SHARE could pass the House in lame duck, but the problem is still the Senate.

For the foreseeable future, our agenda at the federal level isn’t going anywhere. Bloomberg has successfully halted our momentum and pushed us back to a defensive position. What we have to hope for are judicial confirmation, lots of them. I also have to say, I wish RGB a full recovery, but maybe it’s time for her to retire and look after her health. I know I wouldn’t still want to be working at 85.

Irish Bobby Will Be Back

I agree with Miguel’s co-blogger on this count: we haven’t seen the last of Robert “Beto” O’Rourke. The Dems never really had a chance of flipping a Texas Senate seat, but they came closer to Cruz than they had any right to. O’Rourke is a phenomenal fundraiser and strong campaigner: probably too good at fundraising for the Dems in this year’s Senate races. He sucked a lot of Dem donor money into a lost cause. But he’s a personality to keep an eye on. I said the same thing about Obama when they first put him in front of a national audience, and I was right about him too. He’s not going away. Not by a long shot.