November 2011 – Page 6 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Misplaced Grief

Joan Peterson talks about rude gun guys. I’m sympathetic in regards to running into rude assholes on the Internet. I can believe it. We have a lot of bozos in the gun movement on the Internet, same as any movement that generates real passion. But I have to take serious issue with this:

There were a lot of claims about concealed carry permit holders and the inconvenience of not being able to carry their guns into every state in the nation. I’ll tell them about inconvenience. My family was inconvenienced when we had to plan a funeral for my sister, shot to death on an August day. The inconvenience of sneaking to the back of the church in a rented bus to avoid the press shouldn’t have to be, but it was. It was inconvenient to watch my mother deal with the death of her first born child. It was inconvenient to watch my own children deal with the awful death of their favorite aunt. It was inconvenient to watch my sister’s grown kids and step children deal with each other and with their grief. So really, I just don’t feel sorry for these guys who can’t carry their guns everywhere they go.

My mother died an untimely death at 43 when I was 20. I spent most of my adolescent childhood watching her slowly die. I am not unsympathetic to what a family goes through when they lose a loved one in an untimely manner. My aunt (her sister) still has a lot of difficulty with it, and my grandmother did as well until she died too eight years ago. We all had to go through that, and still have to go through that together. You never get over it, you just learn to live with it, as best you can.

But I am absolutely not able to understand the sentiment expressed in Joan’s quote above. None of the people reading this post had anything to do with what happened to Joan’s sister. In fact, none of the many millions of individual who have concealed carry permits from the 41 states that issue them do either. So I quite seriously question Joan on this issue.

Why take your grief out on all these individuals who, quite frankly, have nothing to do with your sister’s death? I’m really not trying to be cold or callous. I really want to understand this. You go on further:

Do they care about victims? Are their gun rights more important than the public’s right to be safe from shootings of family members or friends? Are their rights to carry their guns more important than jobs, health care, housing, and other pressing needs? I believe that most Americans know the answer to this.

This is a horrendous accusation to make against your fellow citizens. If we lived in world where drivers’ licenses weren’t universally recognized by all states, and your sister was killed by a drunk driver, would you suggest that folks who just want to be able to drive freely in other states didn’t care about drunk driving? This is not a rational argument.

People don’t take kindly to being made to own up to the sins of the insane and criminal, and accept collective punishment. We want to be able to freely travel in other states while exercising our Second Amendment rights. Making those of us who feel this way somehow responsible for the death of your sister is insulting. When you insult other people, is it so surprising some of them decide that lashing out is the best course of action?

Can We Dispense With This “States Rights” Nonsense

I really only ever hear about “states rights” from history books, and when the media drags out the specter in an attempt to convince the American public there’s hypocrisy afoot. The term I often hear used by actual conservatives and libertarians is federalism, which is distinct from “states rights.”

For the most part, the media hasn’t been engaging in a whole lot of hysterics about the passage of HR822 in the house. The exceptions are in the anti-gun states like California and New Jersey. It shouldn’t be a surprise that we have two articles from those very places yammering on about states rights. First from New Jersey:

There is nothing in the Second Amendment prohibiting states from regulating who can carry a concealed weapon. That isnâ€™t being debated. The issue is whether the gun regulations of one state must be recognized by another.

Funny, I thought the whole keep and bear part was pretty clear. It’s amazing such a simple phrase has been so twisted around by people who just don’t want to accept the plain language. Now the LA Times in California:

It’s no surprise that highly urban states susceptible to gang, drug and gun crimes tend to put more restrictions on firearms than more rural states. When the streets of cities such as Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland are flooded with guns and the blood of gun-violence victims, there is a strong public interest in regulating firearms, an interest that is far weaker in states such as Utah and Montana, where guns are used mainly for hunting and self-defense.

And guns aren’t used for self-defense in big cities? Just doesn’t happen, eh? States rights simply are not a concern here. The concern is the right of individuals to enjoy their fundamental right to have arms to protect themselves, both in and outside the home. States have no more a power to restrict that than they do to suggest out of state individuals obtain a publishing license before printing books, or have the power to demand whites and blacks drink from separate fountains, or use separate bathrooms.

An Armored Personnel Carrier, Really?

Not a fan of the #occupy movement. Yesterday at #OccupyPhilly, they decided to block the Market Street Bridge. While most of them dispersed when the cops started getting out the handcuffs, about 24 of them decided to lock arms and continue blocking traffic. This made me wonder whether you get a 24 for 1 taser deal when you taser one of a group of 24 hippies locking arms. I don’t know, but if the experiment was tried, I’d like to know the results.

Regardless, back to the title of this post, it would seem that the Tampa police decided they’d drag out the Armored Personnel Carrier to break up the Occupy folks. Really? We need to bring out military equipment to clear out a bunch of hippies camping in a park?

Survival Bags

Over at Shooting Illustrated. Some of them have provisions for off body carry. Pretty neat.

FAA Cutting off Free Access to Charts

I’m subscribed to a number of aviation newsletters. One today pointed this bit of Crony Capitalism in my direction that’s certainly going to have an impact on the Flight Sim community in a big way. Basically, they are cutting off public access to aeronautical charts:

Industry officials told Aviation Consumer that the market will likely reject significant increases in cost for apps and online products. Smaller providers and free websites may simply go out of business. Larger companies may try to keep their subscribers but with higher subscription prices. The pervasive fear in the industry is that this could lead to only one or two entities controlling the market for the distribution of government-produced information that is essential for flight safety. Aeronav spokeswoman Abigail Smith told Aviation Consumer the agency is determined not to let that happen but the new fees, whatever they are, will have to be enough to cover costs.

I understand trying to cover costs, so less taxpayer money is required to fund this part of FAA, but why not just charge for individual access, rather than routing access through a handful of vendors with contracts? By making some buyers more equal than others, the large players are guaranteed to be the primary beneficiaries.

With the lot that’s running the country now, you have to wonder if someone is getting paid off. It’s the Chicago Way.

Educating Hunters…. On Suppressors

NRA-ILA’s hunting policy division is busy trying to educate hunters on something that might surprise you: the usefulness of suppressors. As many of you are well aware, suppressors, or silencers, have been regulated heavily by the federal government since the 1930s, and are subject to the National Firearms Act. The popularity of suppressors is soaring, to the point where ATF has been complaining in legal seminars I’ve attended that they are having a hard time keeping up with all the NFA paperwork, especially as Trusts are quickly becoming the preferred mechanism for papering Title II firearms and accessories.

I was surprised when NRA did a Facebook post after a victory legalizing suppressorsÂ that there were a number of people expressing discontent, and blathering ignorance that’s been drilled into people’s heads by decades of Hollywood movies and unfamiliarity. It’s looking like NRA is trying to address that. Does this mean we’re close to being able to push some legislation to deregulate them? I don’t know. It’s difficult to get Congress to act, and our Republican friends tend to act on the gun issue more out of political benefit than true love. But I think we’re moving in that direction.

While Our Opponents Were Distracted …

… getting all hysterical about HR822, and starting a dog and pony show in the Senate,Â It looks like another victory is afoot in Congress:

Cox pointed to three provisions in particular that would be made law under the minibus: language that would prohibit the Justice Department from consolidating firearms sales records, from electronically retrieving the records of former firearms dealers and from disclosing information on people who have passed firearms background checks.

The bill includes a host of one-year gun protections and new language barring the Justice Department from requiring imported shotguns to meet a â€œsporting purposesâ€ test. The legislation also bars the use of funds to transfer the functions of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to other agencies and to promulgate or implement any rule requiring a physical inventory of any licensed firearms business.

I’m particularly happy about the part I bolded there. I’m guessing this is a funding rider that prevents ATF from spending money to enforce this provision. That effectively renders the sporting purposes test meaningless for shotguns. This prevents ATF from implementing its plans, which we discussed with John Frazer of NRA-ILA here.

SWAT Magazine Looks at Rimfires

Our Opponents’ Double Standard

It looks like the feds are going to charge the guy who took pot shots at the White House with attempting to assassinate the President. From the article:

Authorities suspect Ortega has been in the area for weeks, coming back and forth to the Washington Mall.Â Before the shooting, he was detained by local police at an abandoned house. U.S. Park police say Ortega may have spent time blending in with Occupy D.C. protesters.

Apparently the Secret Service raided the Occupy DC folks looking for this guy. If this had been a tea party, I can promise you that it’d be all over CSGV’s insurrectionist timeline. In fact, if this guy had even a hint of being right wing, I can promise you Brady would be all atwitter about another dangerous nut with a gun.

But since the left-wing occupy movement has embraced this guy as one of their own, he’s going to get a pass from these groups, who apparently only care about some kinds of gun violence. If you want to understand why Bloomberg is the future of gun control, this is why. It’s really hard to take them seriously anymore. I follow CSGV, Brady, VPC and ProtestEasyGuns because it’s worth a laugh, not because I’m worried about what they are going to do next.

CNC machining an AR-15 lower

The following is a post by my friend Jason, who is not a regular contributor, but has posted in the past on our 3D magazine printing project. I thought this would be an interesting addition, and a demonstration of how technology is making gun control a virtual impossibility. Below is his post.

-Sebastian

I’ve been meaning to try this for a while now (using the AR-15 lower receiver solid model fromÂ http://www.cncguns.com/downloads.html), but I wanted to do it using all open source software, and was having trouble finding something that could generate tool paths from the AR-15 model. PyCAM seemed to be the best bet, but whenever I tried it on very complex model it would very quickly use up all the memory (8GB of ram plus 8GB of swap) and bring the computer to a screeching halt.

I recently had a project at work where I needed to make a much simpler part, and not wanting to go back to using BobCAD under Windows, I gave HeeksCAD and PyCAM a try. It worked out pretty well, and in the process I discovered and fixed a memory leak in PyCAM

PyCAM is still horriblyÂ inefficient in its memory usage, but with the memory leak fixed and a new computer with 16GB of ram I was finally able to generate decent toolpaths for the AR-15 lower.

The equipment/software:

A small Taig desktop CNC mill.Â http://www.microproto.com/MMDSLS.htm
EMC2 for controlling the mill.Â http://linuxcnc.org/
HeeksCAD for model manipulation.Â https://github.com/Heeks
PyCAM for toolpath generation.Â http://pycam.sourceforge.net/

So now I’m all set to give this a try, but I can’t find the block of aluminum I had intended to use. But I did have a block of Delrin left over from an earlier project, and Delrin should be strong enough to handle a .22 cal upper. So I’m trying to make a delrin lower first for use with a .22 cal upper, and if that works I’ll order some aluminum and make another lower for use with a .223 upper.

Note that I’m not an expert in material properties (nor aÂ machinist) so don’t take the above statements to mean that its safe to fire an AR-15 made of Delrin. Do at your own risk.

The original block of Delrin.

After a first pass rough cut with a 0.25″ diameter end mill.

After a second pass using a 0.125″ end mill and a much smaller grid size.

After a finishing pass with a 0.125″ ball nose mill.

Now things are going to get a little complicated. I’m going to have to make some sort of jig to hold the part in place while I machine the other side.