Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 60 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Pro-Gun Myth of the Day: False Flags

I have often seen articles like this presented as false flag operations by people on the pro-2A side of the debate, or at best that they are anti-gun activists trying to burnish their creds by pretending to be gun folks.

For decades I was a member of the National Rifle Association and had its conspicuous round insignia on my cars and trucks. I was even enrolled into the “National Rifle Association of America Millennium Honor Roll.” It wasn’t that I thought the NRA and its members had some ill intent when I decided to discontinue my membership; it was because of the evermore unlikeable image of the NRA to many people. An organization that used to mostly represented hunters and sport shooters, and even wildlife conservation has become a spokesperson for the manufacturers and marketers of military-like assault weapons. If you want to see this trend, just go to a gun show and see all the black and camouflaged semi-automatics that are replacing the aesthetically appealing guns with contoured fine wooden stocks and elegant inlays and engraving. These new quasi-machine guns have all sorts of unusual configurations and often are collapsible to be more easily concealed. The guns displayed at shows more and more like those in news photos of confiscated gang weapons.

But the idea that there aren’t people out there who think this is a myth. There are, actually, a fair number of them, though they are increasingly in the minority within the gun culture. Why? Because they are dying off. Look at the picture of the dude on the article? He’s almost certainly pre-Boomer. That’s the cohort you’ll find the largest number of this type in.

Call them Fudds, call them whatever, but they are real. The shooting sports went through a major transformational change during the past several decades, and the divisions that transformation created are, in my experience, almostÂ wholly generational.¹

There is significant anxiety among many older shooters about the new shooting culture, and that’s what you see expressed in the above paragraph. That’s why they always yearn for the good old days of “aesthetically appealing guns with contoured fine wooden stocks and elegant inlays and engraving.”

Make no mistake, this guy is not pro-gun, as it’s defined in the current movement. He’s more on the side of the Brady Campaign than NRA. But really, he’s only in favor of guns and shooting sports he likes. The rest of you who have different tastes can go to hell. If you spend enough time around gun people, you’ll run into this a lot more often than you’d be comfortable with.

¹ I’m making gross generalizations here. Of course there are exceptions. I know many more pre-Boomer shooters who “get it” than don’t. But you don’t find this attitude as much among younger shooters who actually shoot and participate in the culture in some meaningful way. Unfortunately, “I don’t like and am possibly scared of your shooting sport,” is common across the Board, even if there isn’t as much drive to go join the Brady Campaign or speak out about it in a newspaper.

What Happens When There’s no Sheriff?

Apparently Blair County, PA lost its Sheriff, and due to a lack of someone to sign LTCs, they just stopped issuing them. A judge has authorized the Chief Deputy to act in the Sheriff’s stead until a replacement can be confirmed. It looks, in this case, like the seat has only been vacated since April 9th, and Sheriffs have 45 days by statute to issue.

This kind of licensing scheme would never be allowed in any other context. There’s a movement now to let people vote without first having to register to do so. If we ever get judges willing to take the Second Amendment seriously, as opposed to judges who are fine with it being a second-class right, this kind of thing is what will eventually take down licensing regimes.

Down One Drive

Well, the fresh spring heat killed one of the drives on this server, so now we’re running on the spare. I’m debating if I order an SSD to replace the system drive whether I really need to do mirroring anymore? Like anything, SSDs can fail too, but is it an improbable enough event to justify the cost of a second disk and the write overhead of mirroring? But then again, if I had relied on a single disk before, we’d be offline until Amazon could get me another disk.

I have generally not bothered to mirror system drives if they are on SSD, believing they are reliable enough to use alone for non-write intensive applications. Or at least no less reliable than the other components in the server that you don’t have redundancy for. Fortunately, Linux has TRIM support for RAID1, so at least now I have the option. But should I bother?

The Media are Suckers? You Don’t Say

Forgive the lack of posting. Very busy. John Lott has an article in The Hill about “How gun control advocates play the mainstream media for suckers.” It’s good that an outlet like The Hill chose to run this:

Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 6.9 per 100,000 officers. For Florida permit holders, the rate is only 0.31 per 100,000. Most of these violations were trivial offenses, such as forgetting oneâ€™s permit.

The data are similar in other states.

The media is doing an injustice by inaccurately reporting about an issue with such immediate relevance to public safety.Â

John Lott has done a lot of good work on behalf of the issue. I only wish he had maintained the position as more of a detached academic, rather than embracing outright pro-gun advocacy. Not that advocacy doesn’t have its place, but our opponents are far better at passing off activists as detached academics than we are. Our side could stand to up our game here.

Is NRA in a Position to Exploit These Trends?

First being the increase in black gun owners. Some of John Lott’s research has backed up the anecdotal stories. The other trend is hipster hunters. Note that article is appearing in a lefty outdoor site, but they’ve bought the left’s take on NRA hook line and sinker. But what is NRA doing to dispel these myths?

There’s a hell of a lot of conservative branding and conservative outreach from NRA, and to some degree I understand that it’s easier fishing where there are a lot of fish. I am understanding that NRA will tend to reflect its members. But I do worry the organization is so far out in the conservative weeds, there’s no going back. If the Democratic Party is ever going to push gun control off of its platform, the impetus to do so is going to have to come from within. This is opportunity, and I fear it will be wasted.

Shannon Watts: “A Self-Promoting Tyrant”

Daily Caller has run an article about woes in the gun control movement. It looks like Shannon Watts is running people off:

â€œTwo beliefs unite nearly all gun control supporters: background checks save lives, and Shannon Watts is a self-promoting tyrant.â€

Fake News? Or someone leaked to conservative media, knowing there’d be deniability. Possibly a shot fired across the bow at Shannon Watts? A warning to mend her ways? If I were on their side I’d want to be rid of her because, as I’ve said many times, she’s just not very good at what she does. Starting with picking the wrong side if what she was interested in was self-promotion.

Ms Watts: if you were looking for opportunities for shameless self-promotion, you really can’t beat the pro-gun side. I would have suggested taking up IDPA or USPSA. Or maybe establish your own state group and intimidate your way to power and influence (far more, I might add, than you have as Shannon Watts, gun control advocate).

You’d have tons of attention. Don’t even get me started on the potential a YouTube channel might hold! You’d have thousands more followers than you could ever hope to have with Everytown. Additionally, you can’t swing a dead cat in the gun rights movement without hitting other shameless self-promoters. We’re used to it. We don’t complain much. And the opportunity for networking and perfecting that craft are far greater than anything you’ll find in the very tiny gun control movement. You know, it’s not too late, Shannon. I can guarantee you’ll rise to far greater heights as a chick with a gun than you will as a chick who wants to control them. So what do you say?

The Lead Issue Will Continue Dogging Us

This study on lead exposure, which was highlighted by Bloomberg’s propaganda mouthpiece “The Trace,” is more of a compilation than original work, but I have little doubt that people who frequent indoor shooting ranges have higher blood lead levels than people who don’t. Just because these studies are being pushed by people who would love to shut down every shooting range in the country doesn’t mean the issue is fake. Here are the facts we face:

There are no good alternatives for lead in bullets. There are other metals with similar properties, but they are considerably more scarce. It probably wouldn’t take the shooting community long to shoot up, for instance, all the bismuth that can be dug out of the earth, assuming we could even afford it.
Bullets with steel cores, and cores made up of other less malleable but more common metals are problematic because they can be classified as armor piercing under the law. Additionally, they will tend to tear up range equipment more readily than softer lead core bullets. Typically lead free bullets are made of copper and copper alloys, but copper is more expensive and doesn’t perform as well as lead.
There is currently no reliable alternative to lead styphnate and lead azide in primers. Well, there is one: good old mercury fulminate and potassium chlorate. But obviously mercury isn’t any better regarded for its environmental friendliness than lead, and these types of primers are corrosive. There have been advances in Non-Toxic (NT) primers, and they are getting better. The typical NT primers useÂ Diazodinitrophenol (DDNP) instead of lead styphnate or lead azide. The big issue with NT primers has been shelf stability and reliability.

Atomic lead is not nearly as dangerous as compounds of lead. The byproducts of primer combustion is vaporized atomic lead, and lead oxide. Lead oxide is readily absorbed by the human body and is mobile in soils. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever done a study to determine whether increases in blood lead levels or range contamination was primarily from primer byproducts, or from atomic lead found in bullets. I’d wager that most, and probably the vast majority of the lead exposure is coming from the primers. I think in the future it will be important to know because lead in primers is probably a solvable problem. Â The military is doing the bulk of the work trying to develop and study the performance of lead-free primers, and I expect in a few decades, there’s a good chance we’ll all be doing most of our shooting with NT primers, even if carry ammo still uses lead-based primers. The problem of elemental lead in bullets I believe can be successfully managed with good range practices. I suspect the primers are actually the bigger health and environmental issue.

Pete Brownell in the News

Pete Brownell is now NRA President, replacing Allan Cors. President of NRA follows a predictable pattern, so it was known that this was the order of things. The only time the order has ever been interrupted was for Charlton Heston back in the 1990s. Being a native Iowan, Pete Brownell did an interview with Radio Iowa.

I’m sure there will be those who will try to make hay of the fact that Brownells is “the evil gun industry,” but reality is if you shoot, it’s practically impossible to have never bought something from them.

Brownell is the youngest President of NRA, at age 48. I do not know him personally, but I have talked to him briefly, and was impressed. Every Brownell employee I’ve ever met has had the down to earth, working for a family business attitude you’d expect from Iowans. I think Pete Brownell will be a great NRA President.

The Reaction

Almost immediately upon hearing the news about Bob Owens, I knew three things were certain:

But I’m happy to say, for the most part, people on both sides are being thoroughly decent, and so far it’s just a small, loud contingent being pricks. Even though CSGV published something about it, and some of their folks had vile reactions, the most highly rated post on their Facebook page exhibited decency:

My sympathy goes out to his family. Male suicide by gun is very common after the age of 45 for men. Power doesn’t come from guns, it comes from being connected to our emotions and accepting feelings like sorrow, depression, fear. Lots of older men need healing.

I’ll forgive the straw man embedded there. It is discouraging to have been going at this so long that the reaction was as predicable as day and night. But it is good to see that outside the usual suspects, people are still able to remain decent human beings.

Horrible News

I met Bob Owens at an industry event, and usually saw him at the NRA Annual Meeting and exchanged pleasantries. I knew him, but not well. I was an admirer of his work as an amateur blogger, and also when he became a professional gun writer. I had no idea the demons he must have wrestled with. It seems like not many other people did either. Bob always seemed a jovial, outgoing person to me.

This is absolutely tragic, and a great loss to the community. It’s even more so to his family:Â he leaves behind a wife and two daughters, 10 and 17. I have to be honest, that’s very hard for me to understand and accept. I am fortunate that whatever demons I wrestle with have never driven me to thoughts of suicide. But I know that’s not the same for everyone.

If you’re out there struggling with life to that degree: please seek help. Talk with your friends and family. Even a stranger is better than the alternative. I have a standing order with my family that if for some reason I ever start getting squirrely, they should remove the firearms. There’s no shame in getting help and making arrangements to protect yourself and loved ones.

Someone has set up a Gofundme for his wife and kids. I will be donating. If you were a fan of Bob’s work, I think helping out his family is the least we can do.