This is the craziest thing I’ve seen in a while:
It has more kinetic energy at the muzzle than a 20mm Vulcan, and far more kinetic energy downrange, although the Vulcan is carrying an explosive payload (chemical energy).
Go take a look. Madness!
Category: Guns
The Latest Fast and Furious Deflection
The whole scandal never happened! The tale being woven starts thusly:
The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws.
Given that it starts with this patent falsehood, you know you’re going to be in for a doozy. I’m sure this will be news for criminals chilling in the federal pen right now for, well, firearms trafficking. The act of buying guns for criminals is a 10 year federal felony. The act of smuggling guns across the border is as well. Conspiracy can be used to reach people who knowingly further these activities.
Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
This is such a naked attempt to make this story goes away it defies credulity. The story is also a naked attempt to smear the whistleblowers in the case:
The prosecutor had told Dodson that an assistant U.S. Attorney “won’t be able to approve of letting firearms ‘walk’ in furtherance of your investigation without first briefing the U.S. Attorney and Criminal Chief.”
It was the first time Voth learned that Dodson intended to walk guns. Voth says he refused to approve the plan and instead consulted his supervisor, who asked for a proposal from Dodson in writing. Dodson then drafted one, which Voth forwarded to his supervisor, who approved it on May 28.
If Dodson was really a rouge, irresponsible agent, why wouldn’t the politically expedient thing to do be to throw those responsible under the bus, come clean to Congress, produce all the documentation, and move on. But that’s not what is happening. The Administration is hiding something.
Winning the Culture War
Ian Argent has more indications that gun rights are going mainstream. They are appearing in mainstream advertising:
I’m going to suggest this ad is going to make many of our opponents in the gun control movement throw up their Moons over My Hammy, which is the best reason in the known universe to go to Denny’s. 9mm is now as American as Apple Pie.
UPDATE: Even more.
Latest from Lucky Gunner Labs
They wade into the 5.56×45 vs .223 debate. Some of the data they have discovered will surprise you.
Another Deflective Tactic for Fast and Furious
The other deflection seems to be to try to tie Mike Vanderboegh around the neck of Fast and Furious and hope it sinks. The most telling example of this comes to use courtesy of Rachel Maddow (h/t Kurt Hoffman), who would have you believe that this scandal was cooked up in Mike’s tinfoil hat, and was latched on to by the Republicans in Congress. In Maddow’s world, there was never whistles blowers. There were never mainstream media outlets that found Fast and Furious to be credible. Maddow isn’t the only example of this tactic, however. It can also be found in the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times.
The idea that this whole scandal depends on the credibility of one person is, well, incredulous. There have been whistleblowers, there have been documents that point to other documents that are not in possession of Congress as they should be. It’s been no big secret that Vanderboegh and I are not exactly fond of one another, but the media really is reaching quite a bit with these ad hominem attacks on him to attempt to discredit the scandal. His role in this, of connecting whistleblowers to media contacts and Congressional officials, discredits the scandal exactly how?
These people in the media, who are ordinarily just soooo concerned about “gun violence”, seem perfectly willing to make excuses for our government actively facilitating it, rather than trying to prevent it, in the name of getting Obama re-elected.
RMGO Loses Its Tax Exempt Status
I’ve often been pretty critical of Dudley Brown and the National Association for Gun Rights, but it’s looking like another one of Dudley’s outfits, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, has lost its tax-exempt status from the IRS, because they have not filed tax returns for three years. I wonder how long it will take the inevitable fundraising letter to go out, talking about how the Obama Administration, through his Internal Revenue Service, is trying to silence the voice of gun owners, and surely won’t you donate some money to fight Obama.
To be fair, most any tax-exempt political organization is pretty shameless when it comes to fundraising, but I’ve always thought Brown’s organization was an extra shade of shameless. I’ve also never really understood what they are really contributing. From what I’ve been able to find, NAGR doesn’t even have a lobbyist registered on the Hill.
Rahm Backs Down
As I had speculated last week,, it would appear the City of Chicago has decided to revise its ordinance rather than appeal. I didn’t think Mayor Rahm would be making noise about protecting Chicago’s gun laws if he wasn’t planning a strategic retreat. The proposed ordinance revision will bar anyone from a gun license who has a violent misdemeanor conviction in the past five years. I would imagine the courts would uphold temporary prohibitions on violent misdemeanants, but that’s not completely certain. It will take some time, to bring cities like Chicago and New York into compliance with the Bill of Rights, but it’ll be a bit, metaphorically, like sculpting marble. We will make precedent one hammer strike at a time, hopefully without striking poorly and having to start all over again.
The Lame Deflections of the Anti-Gun Crowd on Fast and Furious
A common deflection by our opponents in the gun rights movement is that we Second Amendment supporters are making a big ado about nothing, considering Fast and Furious only represented a fraction of the overall number of guns trafficked into Mexico unlawfully. Let me take this analogy to another form of crime, and show why the anti-gun groups are phony baloney when they speak about their desire to reduce gun violence (rather than just wanting to reduce gun ownership).
Let’s take this to another form of crime, and to a smaller scale. Let’s talk about a neighborhood that has a problem with home break-ins. The community is small enough that people have a pretty good idea of who the bad apples are, and the local police have worked with the hardware stores in the town to ensure that they don’t crowbars or other burglary tools to the bad apples in town until they solve the rash of home break-ins. The local police catch a few burglars, all of which got in with crow bars, but the burglaries generally continue.
Let’s say that the state police then decide to sweep in, and announcing this is all part of a much bigger burglary ring, not only tell the hardware stores they should sell as many crowbars to the bad apples as they can, but actively encourage them to do so, so that they can infiltrate the ring and bring it down. So the only result is that burglaries in town shoot way up. This raises the question:
- Are the citizens of the town correct to be angry at the state police?
- Would it be paranoid and unreasonable to suggest the state police might have had selfish reasons, like boosting their own budgets, to inflate the crime problem?
- Because burglars still get a hold of crowbars, is it correct to blame the hardware store?
- Is it correct to blame the manufacturer of the crowbar?
- Would you say citizens that are concerned greatly about the police facilitating a rise in crime are just misdirected from the overall problem of burglars getting crowbars? Or the fact that hardware stores sell them?
Smuggling guns to Mexico is illegal. Buying guns from federal dealers to smuggle guns into Mexico is illegal. We expect the police to catch people who are doing it. Aside from disagreements we may have with anti-gunners about mutli-sale reporting requirements, of gun show loopholes, etc — is it not rational and healthy, when the police are found to be facilitating an illegal activity, to apparently no rational end, to be outraged and demand answers? What The Brady Folks, CSGV, and other anti-gun people are disingenuously suggesting, is that because we care about law enforcement not facilitating crime, that means we don’t care about crime. This is a ridiculous leap in logic, even for our opponents. Their reaction to Fast and Furious is further evidence the whole gun violence shtick is just that. If you have a situation where law enforcement is facilitating crime, if you’re interesting in fighting rime, the first order of business is to get the government to stop facilitating crime. Then we can talk about what to do next.
Quote of the Day
From a TN Count of Appeals:
There is no economic sliding scale for the right to engage in constitutionally protected activities. The richest and poorest among us, as well as those individuals in-between, all have the same rights under the constitution.
 This was in a First Amendment context, which caused SayUncle to ask the obvious question.
The Theory That F&F Was a Pretext for Gun Control
“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”
Of course, evidence that they used Fast and Furious to make the case for the multi-sale reporting requirement is not evidence that the entire purpose of the operation was to gin up support for gun control. It’s hard for me to see why they’d request wiretaps if the sole purpose was driving up trace numbers. I think when all is said and done, we’ll discover that driving trace numbers from Mexico was just the icing on the cake. If I had to take a wild eyed guess on what the President is hiding, it’s probably evidence of perjury, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a some talk about how the higher trace numbers will just provide more evidence to support gun control efforts, whether the multi-sale requirement or a new assault weapons ban. Was the purpose of F&F only to make a case for gun control? Who knows. It wouldn’t surprise me, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this literally was an underpants gnome strategy of an investigation.
- Let straw purchasers traffic lots of gun to Mexico.
- ???
- Take down cartel kingpins!
I mean, it’s ridiculous, but it’s also Government. But if all this was is a botched operation, the politically sensible thing to do would be to throw a few people under the bus and come clean about it. This was obviously something bigger, or none of the coverup makes sense. But what is the White House hiding? It’s hard for me to understand how people on the left aren’t interested in that question. If this was still the Bush Administration, I’d sure as hell be curious, and would want answers.