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?

Alabama Primary

The Trace is setting up the Alabama Senate primary as an epic struggle of NRA against NAGR and GOA, given that NRA is backing Strange and NAGR and GOA are backing Moore. It’s been said, “If you don’t like Trump, you really won’t like what comes after Trump if the establishment succeeds in tearing him down.” I’m betting Moore is a taste of that.

As I get older, I’m starting to believe that the SoCos have a point on some issues. But where I part will them, and will continue to part with them, is believing that government can erase the SoCos’ cultural losses. Culture leads politics, not the other way around. The left understands that very well, but the right never has.

Nonetheless, it’s a seller’s market if what you’re selling is populism, so I think there’s a good chance Moore pulls off an upset.

Surprise, Surprise – The Empire Strikes Back

From SilencerCo:

Upon launching the Maxim 50, SilencerCo received several immediate legal challenges from authorities and lawyers in the states of New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California. Since we have no desire to place any consumer in a situation where they may get arrested and charged with a felony because their state defines a firearm differently than the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), we have placed orders from those states on hold and are refunding customers pending legal confirmation. We will update our customers as soon as we have multiple source verification.

So not quite 50 state legal after all. I sure hope that shot of the Maxim 50 overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge was green screened. For everyone in America it’s true… you can order these without going through an FFL. I hope they sell a lot of them. But there’s already a lot of misinformation out there about what’s legal and not legal. About 1/3rd of my club members are residents of New Jersey, and I hear stories. I will say I’m shocked more people don’t end up in prison for being ignorant of the law.

Point-Counterpoint on SHARE

It’s a disappointment that we don’t have too many articles in the media anymore that are just chock full of good old fashioned disdain for shooters combined with an unbelievable ignorance of the hobby. As a citizen, that’s probably a good thing. But as a blogger, I weep. Dana Milbank in the WaPo last week has in spades what I’ve been missing.

It’s not the same with most stories. As Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes once said “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” That’s right there is what’s taken the fun out of it. Your average reporter spouting Bloomberg talking points is a nobody. And what fun is it going after a know-nothing nobody? But Dana Milbank is not a nobody.

Consider Title XV of the sportsmen’s bill, also known as the “Hearing Protection Act,” which makes it easier for gun owners to buy silencers for their weapons. The uninformed might suspect that silencers are used by people who want to fire weapons without being caught by cops or observed by witnesses. But more and more hunters are finding that conventional earplugs and muffs are not adequate for today’s weapons — for example, quail hunting with an M777 howitzer or grouse hunting with an FIM-92 Stinger missile launcher.

People who’ve never been around gunfire often do not really grasp how loud it is. I expect a 27 year old millennial with a journalism degree to be mostly clueless about the world. The reason going after people like Milbank is so much more fun is they are respected, but often times they don’t know any more than Ben Rhodes’ 27 year old ignoramus.

Chris Cox notes in the Daily Caller:

Milbank’s article, about a new piece of pro-sportsmen legislation, the SHARE Act, is littered with misleading and incorrect terminology to describe even the most basic firearms classifications, revealing how little he actually knows about guns.  His contempt for hunters, NRA members and gun owners in general is made clear through his condescending tone and misrepresentation of the facts.

Back to Milbank:

Among these recreational enhancements: […] Allowing people to bring assault guns and other weapons through jurisdictions where they are banned.

I think most everyone can agree that there’s no public good created by locking up generally law-abiding people in prison, ruining lives and families. I am particularly tuned to these concerns because I live in a gun friendly state that’s surrounded by states that are very hostile to shooters. I literally have the scour my car before I go into New Jersey because a single hollow nose .22 that’s escaped from my range bag can get me 5 years. I’ve had this happen.

Whether Dana Milbank wants to accept it or not, ownership of “assault weapons,” is very common outside of the jurisdictions that ban them. Even in those jurisdictions, in New Jersey, this is an assault weapon. There are still thousands, possibly tens of thousands of these in closets and safes throughout the Garden State, their owners completely unaware they are a heart attack and a 911 call away from possibly spending 5 to 10 years in New Jersey State Prison. This is not some fanciful hypothetical: it has happened.

People have been arrested and jailed for transporting ordinary firearms through New Jersey and New York. Again, not some fanciful hypothetical: it’s happened, multiple times to multiple people. We’re not talking gang members or drug dealers here. These are people much like Dana Milbank, but who happen to enjoy shooting, and are not trained lawyers who understand all the ins and outs of legally owning firearms in this country.

People like Milbank should explain why they think it’s a public good for good people to rot in prison and suffer felony raps for technical violations of laws that have very little effect on people who engaged in other criminal activity.

The Liberal Gun Club

Gets a profile piece over at Bloomberg funded gun control site “The Trace”. This bit stuck out at me:

Despite the group’s name, politics are mostly absent from its discussion boards. Members instead use the forum to discuss reliability, accuracy, and cost of firearms, and to get advice.

Then what good are you? Those kinds of gun owners are a dime a dozen. I can find them everywhere. I’m actually rather sympathetic to the idea of a pro-gun insurgency on the left, and in the Democratic Party in particular. But you’re not going to be any kind of insurgency if all you do is talk about guns and look the other way while your members vote for gun banners. So I ask again, as someone who has never been entirely comfortable in the “conservative” movement (whatever that means these days), what good are you? Providing puff pieces for Bloomberg?

What Happens When Non Gun People Design Gun Accessories

Does this winning smart holster really put a bar through the trigger guard? Seriously? That’s not how retention should work. Leave this stuff to gun people!

I give them credit for understanding that the smarts should be outside the gun rather than in it. I’ve been saying that for a while. But that holster is dangerous. Because the person who designed it likely knows nothing about guns or gun safety. Ironic, don’t you think?

The problem is, no gun person would waste their time on this because it’s not a product the market wants.

Suppressors Should Be No More Regulated than Pencils

Apparently the anti-gun groups are having a right fit now that the SHARE Act is moving in Congress. The silencer part of the bill seems to be what they are particularly hysterical about. What the hell is the big deal? Without a gun, what are you going to do with it? To me it makes about as much sense regulating optics. It is an accessory, and not in itself a potentially dangerous tool.

Look, I get the antis are going to argue up and down that firearms aren’t regulated enough in this country, but there’s just nothing particularly dangerous about silencers. That’s a fact. But suppressors would make a huge difference to the community in terms of saving hearing and cutting down on noise emitted from gun ranges. They should be no more regulated than pencils, because a pencil can be sharpened and used as an improvised weapon. A suppressor? Maybe you could throw it at someone and put a big knot on their head.