2017 – Page 6 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Why My Preference is Usually Doing Nothing

I’m not one of these “something must be done” types. I’m perfectly OK with “shit happens” and that you’ll often do more damage trying to prevent it than just accepting that. Diane Feinstein has a bill already, and its awful:

Except as provided in paragraph (2), on and after the date that is 180 days after the date of enactment of this subsection, it shall be unlawful for any person to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, a trigger crank, a bump-fire device, or any part, combination of parts, component, device, attachment, or accessory that is designed or functions to accelerate the rate of fire of a semi-automatic rifle but not convert the semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun.

She’s not careful about how she drafts stuff because she doesn’t care. And neither Senator Feinstein nor her staff know anything about firearms.

What is a Trigger Crank? Can you define it? What is a bump-fire device? These things don’t have common meaning. If I get a lighter bolt carrier that goes into battery faster than a heavier one, is that “part, combination of parts, component, device, attachment, or accessory that is designed or functions to accelerate the rate of fire of a semi-automatic rifle?” What about if I have a buffer spring that’s a bit stiffer, and cycles the action slightly faster than another? Cycle time is the ultimate arbiter of how fast you can shoot a semi-auto. Note is says designed or functions, meaning if it does it, it’s illegal. Note that if you own it, even if you don’t have it installed, it’s illegal.

If Congress decided it did want to ban bump fire stocks, it has to meticulously define them, and not include language that will sweep in a lot of commonly possessed items that have nothing to do with bump firing, but do slightly affect the rate at which the action cycles. Any definition of “trigger crank” has to be careful not to sweep in historic gatling guns, or replicas thereof.

Nope. This bill sucks. She can go to hell. Banning trigger cranks is stupid anyway. You could 3D print one in an hour. It’s a dirt simple device.

The Media Darling

I can’t count how many article I’ve seen about Caleb Keeter (if you’re saying “Caleb who?,” join the club) in the media. I passed on most of them, since I’ve never heard of the guy, and I frankly don’t care what celebrities think. But this article from the Canada Free Press is worth reading:

Someone in Keeterâ€™s position will be assigned absolute moral authority on the issue because of what he went through in Vegas. You still oppose gun control? Oh yeah? Go through a shooting rampage and then come back and tell me that!

The many people who went through the same rampage and did not have their minds changed will presumably not be assigned the same absolute moral authority, for reasons I suppose are obvious. But authority is not what makes an idea good. Itâ€™s the quality of the idea itself. So letâ€™s examine Keeterâ€™s full statement explaining his change of mind …

As I said, this one hit close to home, but it didn’t change our minds. The article makes the very good point that although the very careful planning this mass murderer did made return fire an unrealistic option, there are plenty of other public mass shootings where someone with immediate access to a gun could and has made a difference.

Learn Your NFA Terms

Seeing gun owners try to explain to other people the laws around machine guns is painful, especially when they get terminology wrong. Let us go over briefly some terms.

The Federal Firearms Licensee

There are a lot of different types of FFLs. Let us review:

Type 1 – Dealer in Firearms (but not destructive devices)
Type 2 – Pawnbroker
Type 3 – Collector of Curious and Relics. I lot of you have this one, and so do I.
Type 6 – Ammo manufacturer
Type 7 – Firearms manufacturer (but not destructive devices)
Type 8 – Importer of firearms (but not destructive devices)
Type 9 – Dealer in destructive devices
Type 10 – Manufacturer of destructive devices.
Type 11 – Importer of destructive devices.

The Special Occupational Taxpayer (SOT)

You’ll often hear people refer to “Class 3 firearms” Ain’t no such thing as a class 3 firearm. Classes are Special Occupational Taxpayers. This is the license that allows an FFL to deal in NFA items.

Class 1 SOT – Importer of NFA firearms.
Class 2 SOT – Manufacturer and dealer of NFA firearms.
Class 3 SOT – Dealer of NFA firearms.

Title I and Title II

This refers to Title I and Title II of the Gun Control Act of 1968. This is how to categorize a firearm. Machine guns are Title II firearms. Rifles, shotguns and handguns are Title I firearms. Silencers are Title II items, but we’re trying to move them to Title I. The National Firearms Act regulates machine guns. It is part of the Internal Revenue Code. It was a 1986 Amendment to the Gun Control Act that banned any new machine guns from being registered to non-government entities, 18 U.S.C. 922(o). If you’re in possession of a Title I firearm illegally converted to a machine gun, you’ll be charged with violating 922(o), not violating the NFA. The government can’t prosecute you for failing to pay a tax it refuses to collect.

He’s Right, You Know

From Joe Huffman:

On the evening of 14 July 2016, a 19 tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, resulting in the deaths of 86 people^[2] and the injury of 458 others.

Planning matters a lot more than weapon choice. Nearly all mass killers plan their attack, but for some of them mental illness is limiting. The most dangerous killers are the ones who aren’t crazy, as it seems this guy was not.

Victims at the Four Seasons

Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer has an attention-grabbing headline: “For Bucks couple in Vegas, a horrifying view of the carnage.” With a headline like that, you click on it thinking that maybe they were in the midst of the crowd and saw things you can never forget.

And, let me tell you, I don’t think they will ever forget the horrifying view of an empty littered lot 35 stories below their posh Four Seasons room the morning after the shooting. The art deco-inspired wall papers and giant shiny silver mirrors to reflect the lights coming in from their floor-to-ceiling windows looking down on the Strip will remain forever in their minds against the backdrop of the litter below them.

The article says they heard some shots which the couple assumed to be fireworks with the concert they could just hear below them. But the article deliberately uses phrases that just acknowledge they saw the curtains blowing out of the neighboring hotel room the following morning and litter the next morning after there had been bodies previously. It doesn’t actually say they saw “carnage.”

The Inquirer does want us to know that the couple resting in their super comfortable Four Seasons bed has no intention of letting the gunman get in the way of their high end bridal conference business and that they will, in fact, be strong enough to stay the entire 4 additional nights they were planning to stay! #LasVegasStrong

When this couple reached out to the largest newspaper in their home region to tell their harrowing story, they made sure to pose for a photo in their posh hotel dressed in their most stylish clothes looking appropriately concerned for the little people below. Without it, I’m not sure we could have believed that they had survived such a tragic crime that happened to a group of completely unrelated people 1,600 feet down the Vegas Strip.

AP Says He Used a Bump Stock

According to the Associated Press, the gunman in Las Vegas used a bump stock. The legality of bump stocks is interesting, because they are legal or illegal depending. What a bump stock does is provide a channel for the receiver of the firearm to ride back and forth in. You place your finger in the trigger guard, then pull the receiver forward in the stock onto your finger which depresses the trigger and fires the rifle. The recoil forces the receiver back in the stock so that your finger releases the trigger and it resets. Pull forward again and you start the cycle over again. If you apply continued forward pressure, with a bit of finesse you can use the recoil of the gun to achieve a cyclic rate of fire very close to fully automatic fire.

ATF has concluded this is legal, because the law defines a machine gun as a firearm which fires two or more shots “with a single function of the trigger,” and in this case the shooter’s finger is pulling the trigger for each shot. You can do bump firing without a sliding stock, of course, but it’s more difficult to achieve.

However, if you put a spring in a bump stock, such that the spring pushes the receiver back into your finger, this is considered an illegal conversion and you’ll go to jail. The ATF considers the spring to be a machine gun. It’s a device pushing the trigger into the finger, not the shooter. So the shooter is only doing one function of the trigger, while the firearm is continuously firing because of the action of the spring. That is, legally, a machine gun.

I’ll be completely honest with you, if we could get SHARE and National Reciprocity through, I’d trade making bump stocks machine guns. But I don’t think we’ll have to do that. Our opponents will overreach, they will try to ban semi-automatics, our people will arise and push back, and they will end up with nothing in the end.

Now This is the Kind of Article I Expect from the Media

Granted, I had to go to inverse.com, and who has ever heard of that? We’re probably the only people who will actually read this crap.

Although restrictions do exist on buying, selling, and owning fully automatic weapons â€” also commonly referred to as machine guns â€” these firearms are technically still legal. Some advocates of gun rights, however, have claimed the opposite in arguments.

What I love is that he refers to the federal assault weapons ban later in her article. Was that a ban? Did that make “assault weapons” illegal? Because it did the same kind of grandfathering, only under much less stringent regulation. Look, for all but the wealthy collector, machine guns are effectively illegal. I can’t afford one. Most of you can’t afford one, or maybe you could if you gave up a car or a first born. A lot of people can’t get CLEO sign-off. They are not common.

Gun owners â€” those both with handguns and bigger rifles and shotguns â€” do not need a license to buy and own their firearms, and donâ€™t need to register their guns with the state, according to the National Rifle Association.

So Nevada has registration for smaller rifles and shotguns then? Where did you get that from?

Automatic weapons were also used in the attacks at Orlandoâ€™s Pulse nightclub in 2016, the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012, and Columbine High School in 1999, according to a report from anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety.

No, they were not. Those murderers used semi-automatic weapons: one shot for each pull of the trigger. The link to Everytown doesn’t even say anything about weapons used.

Sounds Like a Crank

The first shots I saw in a video were about 10 seconds of very regular fire… something that you’d expect from an honest-to-God machine gun. But people have reported that some video sounded like a crank fire mechanism to them, like you’d find on a gatling gun. I have to say, I agree after seeing this video:

This guy must have done extensive planning for this to have this much hardware staged and ready to go. But what’s his beef?

UPDATE: Here we go. I’m not aware of a cranked firearm ever being used in a crime before, but that’s not going to stop attempts to reclassify them. Is it possible the shooter used a bump stock as the article mentioned? Sure. But it strikes me as rank speculation. Not that I’m not doing a lot of that here, but I’ll admit it’s rank speculation. The media won’t.

More Useful Than a Gun?

It occurred to me this morning that a drone or two with a tear gas grenade might have been able to change the situation in Vegas faster than a SWAT team ultimately did. Fly one or two through the shot out windows, and at least it might stun and delay the shooter long enough to save lives and give the police better odds on entry. Might also make the dirt bag off himself ahead of schedule.

Too late now, but maybe something police should consider for future high-profile, target rich venues. Drones are cheap and relatively easy to fly these days. My club now has a cadre of drone pilots who spend the weekends using our ample open space to practice.

Police departments wouldn’t have too much trouble training officers on drones. Keep a few on standby and ready to go, or actively in the air. I would have issues with drones being armed with lethal force, but I’m OK with less-than-lethal force like tear gas or a flash bang. The problem with something like this is that it just gave a new template to the next whack job looking to go out with his name becoming a household word, and people hanging on learning every detail of his life.

Almost Getting it Right

This is a lot better than I would have expected from “fact checkers” only a few years ago. It’s mostly right.

Journalists often mistake the “AR-15” semi-automatic rifle, sometimes referred to as an assault weapon, for an automatic weapon. It is a much smaller caliber version of the military and fully-auto M-16. The AR-15 is also highly accurate at a long distance.

Same caliber bullet, same cartridge. The only difference is the AR-15 is not capable of fully automatic or burst fire. There’s a difference in the receiver and the internal bits to make this so. The accuracy of an AR-15 is the same as the M16 when it’s set to semi-auto.

Gun opponents have lobbied for decades to make “high capacity” magazines illegal. Generally, they are talking about magazines that load more than 8 rounds. An experienced shooter can easily reload with a fresh magazine in a few seconds.

Generally they are talking about magazines that load more than 10 rounds, because I suppose they feel like that is a nice, round number.

But I’ll give the author credit for mostly getting it right. Years ago this stuff was often wildly off the mark.