My Private Live.. and Guns

June 19, 2013 contributor No comments

We have a justifiable fear of our private actions being made public.  I don’t want the government to know where I go to church or if I have a gun.  Given the audience likely to read this, the concern would be properly phrased, I don’t want the government to know how often I go to church, how many guns I own and where I hide keep them.  It’s none of the government’s business.  So what should we do about widespread government spying?

The government doesn’t need to monitor my phone calls and listen to every word to know I’m a gun owner and gun advocate.  The government doesn’t need to hack my computer because lots of people could figure out I own a gun.  My credit card company knows I own a gun.  So does my bank.  All  they have to do is look at where I do business.  My phone company knows because I make calls to shooting ranges and gun shops.  My internet service provider knows that I browse gun auction sites, and my online search engine knows when I shop for gun parts.  My computer knows I have a gun because of the records it keeps about where I’ve browsed the internet.  That is why those advertisements for sporting goods stores pop up on my computer screen.flirty business man appearing on laptop

My gun ownership is not a secret.  I’ve left a very visible trail that covers my local gun shops and shooting ranges, online retailers, and the US mail.  Depending on where I buy ammunition, even the UPS delivery driver and the clerk at Walmart know I own a gun.  They know without using electronic eavesdropping.  I practice safe computing and check my credit records, but the government does not need a federal gun registry to figure out I own a gun.

I am not telling you to give up and simply trust the government.  On the contrary; you are out of your mind if you trust a Chicago politician.  My point is that we leave a large trail that doesn’t start or stop with the internet.  Even my car knows I own a gun because of that black box recorder onboard, the GPS in my car, and emergency monitoring systems like OnStar.  Suppose I never take a single cell phone call, yet my phone company knows I own a gun because the cell phone towers show I was at the shooting range every Saturday morning.  Those records are not secure.  My profile of gun ownership is exposed without having to show probable cause and get a court order from a judge to tap into my phone or computer.

Technology isn’t the problem.  We face a political problem rather than a technical one.  We are concerned today because our government has broken its contract with the citizens.  Secrecy and retreat are not the path to our security.   The path to liberty is through an increase in political activity, so don’t cut up your credit cards and check book just yet.   For our own safety, we must demand that even a disfavored minority has full and complete civil rights.  That culture of freedom is our best defense.  That is why gun owners need to be politically active rather than reclusive.  That is particularly true today.

Besides, being politically active is more fun than living in an unregistered cave.

~_~_

Rob the activist

Please comment.

June 15, 2013 contributor No comments
Assaulted ps
Link to “Assaulted”

The movie “Assaulted- Civil Rights Under Fire” is not the last word about guns in America, but it is an excellent place to start the conversation.  The conversation they chose is about rules and rulers.  The right of self-defense exists to protect us from our government as well as against criminals. “Assaulted” shows us where the government violates civil rights to suit those in power.  The film showed a dozen embarrassing examples, spanning the whole of American history.

The government wrote discriminatory gun laws after the Civil War so freed blacks could not defend themselves.  It is one thing to know this as a historical fact.  It is another to see pictures of a city street filled with men dressed in white sheets and black men hanging from trees as ordinary citizens look on.  I wish that were unthinkable now.

More recently, the behavior of the government during Hurricane Katrina broke the social contract between the government  and the people.  Politicians seemed ineffective during the emergency.  The politicians ordered law enforcement officers to disarm honest citizens who needed firearms for their own protection from looters.  The politicians protected their image in the news media  and sacrificed public safety.

There are dozens of examples in between, and they’re not easy to watch.  “Assaulted” is not politically partisan.  Neither political party can sit comfortably on its record.  The producers deliberately avoided the polarized claims of battling statistics over crime rates.  They showed incontrovertible examples where the government denied the inalienable rights of citizens.

Yes, it happened in America.  It happened in my lifetime.  It could happen again when the government serves itself and ignores the rights of the minority.  You could argue that it happens now in Chicago and Detroit.

The way to avoid repeating the past is to learn from it.  “Assaulted” includes short pointed examples of politicians and infotainment-journalists demanding that citizen be disarmed.  According to these self serving celebrities, only government is trustworthy.  Yikes.  Some of us learn from history and some of us refuse to learn.

Go see the movie.  You can find out where it is showing by going here and clicking on the Theaters link.  Bring your friends and plan on talking after you’ve seen the movie.  Start the conversation.

Disclaimer- I tossed about 200 dollars into the Assaulted KickStarter project.. and drank with two of the producers.  I also got to meet interesting people at the screening party.

~_~_

Rob the movie critic

Please comment

“Gun Free Zone” Fails. Murder at Santa Monica College

June 10, 2013 contributor One comment

Santa Monica Shooter III

California forbids guns on campus.  Therefore the only defensive weapons on school grounds are police weapons, which are always several minutes away.  This politically-created arrangement gave the Santa Monica College murderer several minutes to kill at will.  The murderer was a young ex Santa Monica College student.  As usual, this murderer had a history of mental problems.  He murdered his family and set fire to their home moments before he went to campus and murdered three more people.  I’ve read conflicting accounts that the murderer was shot by police or may have shot himself once confronted by police.  He chose the school on purpose.

no_guns_allowed_4Students didn’t stand a chance.  California gives county sheriffs the discretion to issue concealed carry permits.  Many sheriffs do.  Some choose to keep citizens disarmed instead.  Santa Monica is in Los Angeles county, a county which refuses carry permits to its honest citizens.  In addition, Santa Monica College is a “gun-free school zone” under California’s Penal Code 626.9.  The “gun-free school zone” exists in name only: a plastic sign won’t stop a nut job or a determined criminal.  The posturing of politicians left students and staff unprotected.. as it has many times before.

Anti-gun politicians blame the gun.  Anti-gun politicians blame ammunition.  They blame everyone and everything but themselves and the laws they created.  None of their laws, old or new, would prevent this from happening again.

The murderer used a semi-automatic rifle.  That type of gun was invented 128 years ago.  Ammunition is even older.  What is new is the political fantasy that helplessness makes citizens safer.

That point of view, so common in California, is not a political accident.  “Helpless” citizens turn to the Santa Claus politician who can bestow all things as gifts from the government.  When helplessness fails, the politician again proscribes more of the same.gun-allowed-zone  They prescribe more disarmament each time disarmed citizens are shot.

California politicians never learn because California voters never hold them accountable.  The fault is ours because we leave these politicians in office.  That means the voters of California can stop mass murder on campus.  More dead students are an unacceptable price for politicians failed fantasies.

~_~_

Rob the realist who lives in California

armed

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Teaching Them A Lesson

June 5, 2013 contributor No comments

A string of recent news stories depicts the terror of guns and violence in our public schools…or does it?

A Baltimore 7-year old is suspended for two days for chewing a Pop Tart into a gun shape and allegedly saying “bang bang.”  Eek!

A 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania is suspended for 10 days (later reduced to two days) and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation…for suggesting she and a classmate shoot each other with a Hello Kitty soap bubble gun.  The horror!

In Massachusetts, a 6-year old brings a 2-inch long plastic Lego gun onto a school bus.  He had to serve detention and write letters of apology to those “affected” by the so-called incident.  I think I’m getting the vapors!

Someone to be feared? Or just a little boy?

Someone to be feared? Or just a little boy?

Now…do you really believe that any teachers, students, or other school officials were truly frightened by any of this?  Do you believe that any person, child or adult, actually fears any of these things?  I’m not buying it.  To characterize this as fear of guns does not pass the common sense test.  It makes no sense whatsoever that even a marginally intelligent human would find anything at all threatening about a Pop Tart, no matter what it is shaped like.

But what does make sense is that an ever expanding Federal government benefits greatly from a submissive, dependent population…especially when it comes to gun rights.  Who cares what right the 2nd Amendment protects if no one wishes to exercise it?  If you can condition a generation of Americans to believe that even a symbolic representation of a gun is abhorrent, then there is little chance that they will grow up demanding 2nd Amendment freedoms.

I’m reminded of the scene in the movie Braveheart, where King Edward I complains that, “The trouble with Scotland is that it’s full of Scots…if we can’t get them out, we’ll breed them out.”  This situation is much the same.  If the progressives in this country can’t get gun culture out by passing laws…then they’ll teach our kids that guns are icky, and that even pretending to like them results in punishment.  Point your finger and say, “pew pew”…and you’re suspended from school.  Bring cupcakes with plastic Army men (with guns) for your classmates, and your parents are getting a phone call.  Soon we have a generation conditioned to shrink reflexively from even the idea of a gun, and the 2nd Amendment is moot.

The counter is simple.  Share positive gun culture with your kids, and challenge schools which use hoplophobia as a smokescreen for the ideological indoctrination of our youngest citizens.  Schools should be teaching children how to think, not what to think.

Image by Oleg Volk

Image by Oleg Volk

Civilians are Safer than Police

June 4, 2013 contributor 4 comments

I respect my friends in the gun culture, but gun-control politicians sure don’t.  These politicians put the police on a pedestal when it suits them.  These politicians write gun laws that often exempt the police or demand that civilians match the standards set for police.  I don’t know what is so special about law enforcement officers that civilian gun owners should imitate them.  A badge doesn’t suddenly make people more responsible or better shots.  I think the gun grabbing politicians have it backwards.  Civilians with a concealed carry license are more responsible and law abiding than cops based on the data!  These civilians obey laws in general, and firearms laws in particular, better than the police.  Said another way, society would be safer if the police were able to match the record set by civilians with concealed carry licenses.  That isn’t what politicians tell us.

Civilians, not the police, are the usual targets of crime.  Everyday civilians are violently attacked a few million times each year.  We could save thousands of victims if we make civilians even slightly safer.  The average criminal leaves a long wake of citizen-victim’s before the criminal finally meets a police officer.  Most criminals commit twenty to thirty crimes before they are arrested.  Stated precisely, civilians have many more contacts with criminals, and therefore the necessity to defend themselves, than do police.  Armed civilians don’t shoot criminals very often despite the vast number of contacts between them.  That makes sense and is an important point.  It is true that each policeman meets more criminals than the average civilian, so law enforcement officers give us a good point of reference about self-defense.  Policemen are very glad they can protect themselves with a firearm even though they will probably never have to shoot someone during their entire career.  That brings two things to mind.  First, I want law enforcement officers to have the tools they need for their own safety.  Second, I’m glad the police seldom have to use lethal force.

Civilians deserve the same range of options, particularly since they encounter criminals twenty to thirty times more often than the police.  Fortunately for the armed citizen, criminals are consistent in one regard.  Few criminals press their attack when they face an armed victim just as most criminals stop when faced by an armed police officer.  For the civilian, presenting a weapon in the face of an immediate violent threat is enough to stop most crimes.  Gun control politicians ignore that fact and tell us we would be safer if we were helpless victims.  Fortunately, most Americans are not helpless.

Because armed citizen’s encounter so many criminals, over two million each year, civilians also shoot and kill more criminals than do the police.  This is astounding because civilians and police have very different roles and training.  The police want to apprehend a criminal while the citizen simply wants the criminal to go away.  Permit holders and police are trained differently; police are trained to control the encounter while civilians are trained to retreat and diffuse a potentially violent situation.  Even though lethal encounters are rare, civilians are forced to defend themselves with lethal force more often than police because of their very large number of criminal contacts.  It is the ordinary civilians who live on the cutting edge of self-defense, not the police.

It is a strong testament to human nature and good firearms training that armed civilians do the right thing so often.  The licensed concealed carry holder is much less likely to shoot the wrong person compared to the police.  The trained law enforcement officer is over five times more likely to shoot the wrong person than a concealed permit holders, 11 percent versus 2 percent. 

The gun control politician doesn’t talk about that.  They don’t mention when the police shoot an unarmed and innocent hostage.  They don’t mention when the Philadelphia police shoot seven people in a week and kill four of them.

Some states and the District of Columbia propose that gun owners must carry firearms liability insurance.  The price of that insurance should be much higher for police officers than for CCW holders.  I’ll argue that permit holders should be paid since they reduce the overall level of crime more effectively than the police.

Yes, CCW carriers are more law abiding than police.  They have a lower rate of conviction for alcohol, firearms or battery than police. 

LEO rates

Link to Data

Note in this graph civilians are several times more law abiding for sexual assault and homicide.  The crime rate for police is very similar to the general population for other crimes.  In contrast, permit holders in North Carolina commit violent crimes with a firearm 82 percent less often than the average citizen and are convicted of a DUI 85 percent less often than the general population.  I can’t find data for every state, but  Texas permit holders are much safer too.

It matters.  Unarmed civilians are shot in Washington, DC (video) where civilians are not allowed to carry firearms in public.  Hundreds of citizens are murdered in Chicago each year (video).  The laws that gun-grabbing politicians and some law enforcement executives want to spread across the US will lead to more deaths.  That is wrong.

We should save lives instead.  I have no tolerance for gun-grabbers who lead us to more murders.

~_~_

Rob, the life saver.

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Bringing A Knife To A Gunfight

May 24, 2013 contributor 3 comments

We’ve all heard that joke about bringing a knife to a gunfight…a universal metaphor for making a really big mistake.  But the murderers of a British soldier earlier this week did not need to fear making such a mistake.  Indeed, they seemed to fear nothing at all from the toothless citizens of London, who had little option but to watch helplessly as the wolf came to town and butchered one of their fellow sheep.

It made me sick to my stomach, and not just because of the savage and bloody nature of the killing.  Equally nauseating was the sight of hundreds of British citizens milling about impotently, doing nothing to stop the murderers, and little more to provide aid.  To be fair, what could they do?  While the killers did not need to fear bringing a knife to a gunfight, Londoners found on Wednesday that they had brought empty hands to a knife fight.

Would a gun have saved that soldier?  Perhaps, though it is impossible to know with absolute certainty.  I will be the first to admit that carrying a gun, or any other defensive tool, will not guarantee your safety.  The world is a chaotic place, and outcomes in violent confrontations are never certain.  In fact, we cannot say with absolute certainty that that British soldier would have been saved if there had been a fully armed detachment of Navy SEALs standing there with him.

But effective personal defensive tools can at least give one a fighting chance.  It can tip the scales in our favor, and maybe help us get home at the end of the day.  What IS certain, however, is what happens when a law-abiding citizen is deprived of personal arms, and forced to face savagery empty handed.  We witnessed it on a bloody London street.

British woman simply walks past London murderer Photo by ITV News

British woman simply walks past London murderer
Photo by ITV News

Why I Carry, Why I Fight

May 22, 2013 contributor No comments

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”  — G.K. Chesterton

I am a former Army officer.  I am a former police officer, SWAT officer, and police firearms instructor.  I have been a recreational shooter so far back that I have no memory of the first time I shot a gun.  I say this so that you understand that guns have always been a part of my life, as both vocation and avocation.

But it has only been in the last 10 years that I came to embrace concealed carry as a way of life.  Even when I was a police officer, I rarely carried off-duty; it was not required or even encouraged in my department.  I even knew other officers who ridiculed those who did carry off-duty as paranoid, and the more religious someone was about off-duty carry, the more disdain they tended to receive.  I ended up leaving that organization after a few years, and it was for the best.

Still, I credit my education as a cop for eventually waking me up:  As a police officer, I learned that there are truly bad people in the world, and they do bad things to good people, every day, everywhere.  Living in a good neighborhood is no insurance.  The bad people are more than happy to come to you, and denial of this fact provides no protection from it.

With that in mind, I was forced to look at my life.  While I have no children of my own, my sister is a single mother, whose ex has basically fled the area and left her to raise two daughters on her own.  As I live very close by, I took up a very active role in helping her out, and found myself with two young girls in my care on a pretty regular basis.

I asked myself, “If something bad were to happen while these two children were in my care, am I prepared to protect them?”  At that time, I did not carry, and realized that the honest answer was, “No.”  The obvious follow-up question was, “Could you live with yourself if you were unprepared, and one of these children were hurt, or worse?”  The even more obvious response to that question was an unequivocal, “No.”  I knew that in such an eventuality, where my nieces were harmed while my gun was sitting at home, I would also be destroyed.  Denial was no longer an option.  I made a decision to change.

I got my concealed carry permit, and started carrying.  I didn’t carry all the time at first, but eventually my education as a street cop resurfaced.  I knew that violence could happen anywhere, anytime…and thus I knew I had to commit fully and carry at all times.  I made that commitment, and I honor it every day.

My nieces are older now, but we still spend time together.  They know I carry, and they know why.  As teenagers, they might think I’m a little weird, but I think they understand down deep inside that they are just a little bit safer when I’m around.

You probably have a similar story.  You probably carry to protect those you love, or to protect yourself so that you can be there for the ones you love.  We have all chosen to make the gun a part of our lives out of love, not hate.  The anti-gun forces don’t understand this, and I’m not sure I have the words to convince anyone who cannot grasp this simple truth.  What I do know is that because of my love for my family, I place the highest value on the right and the freedom to arm myself as I see fit to insure their safety.  No police officer, no member of Congress, no president or sawed-off tyrant of a mayor will take responsibility for them…but I will.  So as I see it, when you try to strip that right from me, you diminish my ability to protect those I love.  You are threatening them…and my response will be just what you would expect.  That is why I carry.  That is why I fight.

Original image by Oleg Volk

Original image by Oleg Volk

Punching the Clown

May 13, 2013 contributor One comment

Get your mind out of the gutter.  I’m talking about Congress…which of course is a gutter all its own…but I digress.  Remember those inflatable clowns from when you were a kid?  Punch one in the face, and it would go down, but then the darn thing would pop right back up.  Then you had to punch it again…and again…and again.

Sound familiar?  It ought to.  First, the Senate rolled out three clowns…Chuck Schumer, Joe Manchin, and Pat Toomey to push “universal” background check legislation with S. 649.  We got to punching, and beat them back a bit.  The Toomey clown seems to have deflated, but the Manchin clown appears to be determined to wobble back up for another sock in the kisser.  Of course, the Schumer clown never, ever stays down.

But we now have H.R. 1565, introduced in the House of Representatives by the latest clown, Representative Peter King (R-NY).  This bill is essentially a photocopy of S. 649, and as such deserves the same beating.  I know, I know…it realistically has even less of a chance of making it through the House than it did in the Senate.  I know that the House is Republican-controlled, but notice that H.R. 1565 was introduced by a Republican, and has other Republican co-sponsors.  A clown with an “R” after its name is still a clown.

But regardless of party politics and majority advantages, we should not limit our activism to playing defense.  We should not reserve our energies for holding the line.  We should be seeking opportunities such as this to expose those who would bargain away our 2nd Amendment rights, and punch them right in their clown face.  Whatever this bill’s chances in Congress, this is another opportunity to remind our clowns what will happen any time gun control pops up.  Get your gloves on…

clown66

[Disclaimer: Any references to punching elected officials are not intended to be taken literally. DO NOT go out and punch anyone in the face, no matter how satisfying it may sound. If you get yourself arrested, you are on your own, genius.]

How Long Should We Wait for Our Rights?

May 11, 2013 contributor One comment

Wait right there.  I’ll be right back with your application.

Wait right here. I'll be right back with your application.

“I only want to regulate your rights.  I promises, it is for the public good and won’t cost much at all.”

Yeah, that is how it starts.  Then the government raids the “dedicated funds” and uses them for other purposes.  Next, it slow-walks the permit process.  After all, the agency claims to be short staffed because they don’t have the money to pay needed manpower.  Then they propose new fee increases.

That is what they did with firearms permits in California,  Illinois,  New Jersey,  New York1 and New York 2 and Washington, DC.  A New York CCW permit can take 2 years.  An Illinois FOID card takes more than two months.  Adding a name to a FFL in California takes several months.  This is an old complaint of mine, but I hate to see history repeat itself.

The power to regulate is the power to politicize and control.

~_~_

Rob

Please Rate, Like, Share and Comment because I need the attention.

Can You Build a Plastic Gun?

May 11, 2013 contributor One comment

liberator-plastic-gunThe State Department told Defense Distributed to stop releasing plans for its plastic gun made with a 3D printer.  That is silly.  Any competent mechanical designer could build, and any third world dictator could buy, a weapon that can’t be easily detected by X-ray machines or metal detectors.  The weapon could be detected by advance imaging techniques and pattern recognition equipment, but small airports don’t have those machines.  None of this is news.  The latest action by the US government is simply more security theater.  The real question is how much money does a terrorist group want to spend to get a weapon past security.  The World Trade Center was brought down for a few thousand dollars and $3 box cutters.  Even today, the aircraft cleaners and baggage handlers steal I-pads and don’t make much money.  They are often uncleared and working for third-party contractors.  They can be bribed or blackmailed.  Why do we see this episode of security theater at this time given those facts?

We pretend that we can control violence by controlling the tools of violence.  The recently publicized case of the 3D printed plastic gun is noteworthy because 3D printing demands so little technical knowledge.  What took a competent first-world engineer $50k can now be done almost anywhere in the world for $30k.  The first gun is $30k; the next one is $40.  It would take more money to design non-metallic ammunition, where the primer/percussion cap is the hard part to solve.  I’m not going to go into details here, other than to say it can be built by conventional means rather than using 3D printing.

It is not difficult to design a one-shot firearm and we use 3D printers every day.  You won’t stop a dedicated designer by outlawing 3D printers.  Gun free zones were always a joke to the average machinist or student of history.  Now they are a joke to everyone else.  Printed weapons are not good guns, but they work for a few shots.

What is involved in building such a weapon?  You would design a non-metallic gun rather than execute the design of a metal gun in plastic.  The hobbyist uses plastic because the 3D printer is versatile.  The terrorist chooses plastic because some plastics don’t show on conventional x-ray machines.  Ignoring the ammunition, you can easily build a smooth-bore gun.  You can also build an accurate gun that spins the projectile by using polygonal rifling and polygonal bullets.  It was done a hundred years ago.  Let’s look at the problem of an undetectable gun and home-made gun one piece at a time.

  • Likely candidates for the frame are molded or machined epoxy with Kevlar or carbon reinforcement.  The glass in fiberglass shows up slightly with rays, but there are alternatives.   You could almost use wood and epoxy if you’re a green terrorist, but plastics are less visible by X-rays.
  • Use machined nylon or polycarbonate plastic for the internal components.
  • Springs can be made from laminated carbon fiber/epoxy or polycarbonate plastic.
  • The hammer can be cast from silicon-carbide in epoxy.
  • The firing pin could be an alumina rod or silicon-carbide/carbon fiber tube.
  • The barrel could be a polycarbonate/ fiber composite.  The liner is an engineering plastic with an over-mold of tensioned carbon fiber/Kevlar.  The high-tech version is rifled with a twisted hexagonal internal diameter.
  • You don’t need a cartridge if you build a muzzle loading firearm.  You could use an engineering plastic to machine your custom cases if you want cased ammunition.
  • Projectile can be made from epoxy molded silicon, silicon-carbide or alumina.  It is easier to use a silicon-carbide slug if you’re using a smooth bore.  Coat the bullet with Teflon.

The real cost is not for the firearm, but to bribe a third-world airport officials so you can get a test-look and see what your weapon looks like on airport scanners.  The recent political theater is for the new media and the low information reader.

Designing a semi-automatic firearm is harder.. but could be done.

Tell me again you believe in gun control.

Printed
Printed

~_~_

Rob the design engineer

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