Guns – Page 93 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Carry Your Guns, People!

This is a lengthy article from Foreign Policy about the terrorist attack on the Westgate MallÂ in Nairobi in September of 2013, but I’d suggest it ought to be required reading for gun folks:

Far from a dramatic three-day standoff, the assault on the Westgate Mall lasted only a few hours, almost all of it taking place before Kenyan security forces even entered the building. When they finally did, it was only to shoot at one another before going on an armed looting spree that resulted in the collapse of the rear of the building, destroyed with a rocket-propelled grenade. And there were only four gunmen, all of whom were buried in the rubble, along with much of the forensic evidence.

We’re fortunate that our military and police forces are far better than armed looters, but that’s not to say you can be guaranteed a quick and competent response if the situation goes extremely pear shaped.

During the roughly three-and-a-half hours that the killers were loose in the mall, there was virtually no organized government response. But while Kenyan officials prevaricated, an unlikely coalition of licensed civilian gun owners and brave, resourceful individual police officers took it upon themselves to mount a rescue effort.

Well, that kind of destroys the narrative for the gun control crowd, doesn’t it? When the shit hit the fan, it was armed individuals who stood up and got the job done. Of course, they and their ilk are doing everything they can to ensure something like that can never happen in this country.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 15

We here in and around Philadelphia are anxiously awaiting the popeocalypse. Being non-catholic, I have no plans to go into the city to engage in any pope watching. The way the media has been portraying it around here, you’d think it’s going to be mass hysteria, hence why people have adopted the popeocalypse hash tag. My prediction is everyone will be scared away by predictions of chaos, and the crowd will be much smaller than expected. With that out of the way, let’s get to the news:

Pope Frances once again gets on his arms manufacturer bandwagon. I should remind you that the pope has an armed guard who use guns that were manufactured by someone. It was this gun, this gun, and this gun that helped take down Hitler. Pope Francis strikes me as a naive figure, in a way that John Paul II assuredly was not.

This proposal from the City of Missoula, Montana almost certainly violates the state preemption law. They are trying to find whatever hole they can to bring back the idea of local regulation of firearms. That way, gun owners, who can’t possibly know thousands of local laws, can more easily be imprisoned where people like Bloomberg think we belong.

Mike “the gun guy” is looking at the bright side of the Heller III ruling. I don’t think anyone on our side claimed it was a victory. I personally don’t think registration or training should be allowed as a prior restraint on purchasing a firearm, and registration should be flat out unconstitutional. As I said, partial win. The court rightly saw gun rationing for what it is, at least.

Half of all Americans think the government is a threat to freedom. I guess we’re all insurrectionists now, or at least half of us are, by CSGV’s standards.

There’s often a lot more to these stories of victimhood if you dig.

Trump’s policy position on guns isn’t too bad.

NRA endorses State Senator John Edwards in Virginia. This is the guy CSGV lead a pathetic protest against. Well, let’s see you deliver some hurt, CSGV. The game is on. Can you hurt Edwards where it counts? At the ballot box?

NRA is being investigated in Connecticut after anti-gun group complains. NRA maintains they have followed the law on this matter.

A win for knife rights in New York.

New Jersey lawmakers fail to override Chris Christie’s veto of a gun control bill.

Lawsuit over campus carry in Missouri tests how far strict scrutiny can go. They recently passed an enhancement to the RKBA provision demanding the courts apply strict scrutiny.

More radical nonsense from Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. I’ll join with Bob’s reiteration that their coalition partners should be aware of what they are doing. This is not mainstream, Â this is a crazy train position this group is taking, and CSGV is far from the only one.

Florida isn’t processing as many new applications for gun permits. Better reciprocity is probably also contributing to this. Florida only gets me about 3 more states than my PA license does, but since Delaware is one of them, I hold on to it.

The recall petitions for Oregon legislators who voted for gun control have failed. Generally speaking, you’re going to get some signatures dismissed. Groups usually collect at least 20% more than they need. Perhaps they were running out of time. Gun control groups are saying this shows the tide us turning in their favor.

Campus Carry is on the move in Florida.

SayUncle: “On lights and guns”

RPG v. bullet proof glass.

Elizabeth Price Foley: “The House GOP would be well advised to stop fighting its own base, listen to them, and select someone from the House Freedom Caucusâ€“which has been fighting Boehner tooth and nailâ€“who would unify the party with its own voters. Someone like Raul Labrador, Mark Meadows, or Jim Jordan.” Don’t count on it.

Why gun control isn’t at the heart of Black Lives Matter: “Stricter gun laws could do more harm than good to poor, black communities, experts and activists say.” The left have been conspiring to screw poor minority communities out of their Second Amendment rights for years, and then turned around and tried to convince them they are better off for it. I’m glad to see people waking up.

Townhill: Toomey walks the high wire on gun control.

The Cleaning of the Glock

Did what I should have done last night, and broke down the Glock to clean and lube it, and went beyond my usual field-strip, toothbrush the slide assembly and snake the bore, drop a little lube and call it done. (Given that the usual advice seems to be to break down the slide assembly for cleaning every 3K rounds or so, I don’t think I was being that neglectful).

Took apart the slide assembly. The firing pin was pretty clean (I mean, it left some dirt behind when I wiped it down, but nothing bigger than some dust), and most of the rest of the slide assembly was the same. The extractor, though, had collected a bunch of gritty-lookingÂ nastiness, and the firing pin safety had a small collection of its own. Didn’t appear to prevent function (I never had any failures to extract), but I cleaned it all up anyway. Found an empty rattling around the safe in the process, (from a previous range session, I didn’t have any open containers with me at the firing line this time, and there was no brass in my pocket either), and compared the striker impact to the photos of the duds, and the empty was definitely a center hit and showed a faint rectangular outline around the main impact point, so whoever it was that had “light off-center strikes” in the pool wins a no-prize. It’ll probably be a couple of weeks before I can make it out to the range again to test-fire (and make sure I got the extractor in right).

I’d say “why only those three rounds,” but the answer is probably somewhere around “tolerance stacking.”

Another Northampton County Club in Trouble

I wrote not long ago about Stockerton Rod and Gun Club being in troubleÂ over accusations that rounds were leaving the range. Now it seems another ther club in the area is coming under scrutinyÂ over errant rounds. This time it’s Belfast Edelman Sportsman Association. The local news stationÂ reports:

Not all complaints against gun ranges represent anti-gun or NIMBY sentiment. People who build or buy houses next to ranges should expect to live with noise, but bullets leaving a range at dangerous velocities and trajectories are a different beast entirely. The setup of Belfast Edelman looks similar to Stockerton. I decided to Google the club’s location, start up street view, and “drive” down the road downrange of the club. Sure enough, I found the house in this report right where I worried I’d find it:

She’s about 1000 yards downrange, which is close enough for bullets to strike her house at sufficient velocity to maim or kill. A 7.62x51mm (.308 Win) round would still be traveling in excess of 1000ft/sec at that range, and with about the muzzle energy of 425ft-lb. This woman isn’t exaggerating. If she’s being hit by the kinds of rounds typically used for hunting, it is as big a deal as if someone fired a 9mm into her house from the street.

The club made the right decision to close their range. Hopefully they have the funds to make needed safety improvements. If you’re ever involved in a club that ends up in a situation like this, NRA does offer range consulting to clubs in trouble. They can also offer grants and whatnot to make the needed safety improvements so that struggling clubs can stay open. I’m very sympathetic to clubs that end up in this kind of trouble, but residents do have a right to expect clubs will maintain safety standards such that rounds will not leave the range in a dangerous manner such as this.

Bang, Bang, Click?

I finally made it out to the range for the first time in (mumblemumble). Had fun, but of the 100 rounds of 9mm Remington UMC expended, I had 3 failure to fire. The weird thing is, they all happened out of the same string in one magazine (of the 10 rounds loaded, 7 went bang, 3 went click), were not adjacent, and the next 10 rounds out of the same magazine were fine. I recovered the rounds and took a picture.

Since I’m actually somewhat inexperienced at actually shooting, I figured I’d ask here: did I just get unlucky, or is there something I did or failed to do here?

Pistol is a G17L, with probably somewhat less than a thousand rounds down the pipe since I’ve owned it, and it was allegedly new when I purchased it. I’ll run a boresnake after a range session and usually take the slide assembly apart and scrub the places the book says I should – range sessions are 100-150 rounds. It’s sat unfired for a couple years since last session. Magazine is OEM 10-round.

I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that the ATF made this determination

(With my best Capt. Renault impression).

So, the ATF went and sent a letterÂ (PDF link) to the manufacturer of Can Cannons that said their product was not a firearm, but that attaching it to a rifle receiver made the rifle a Short-Barreled-Rifle, or attaching it to a pistol receiver made the pistol an AOW. Cue Internet Rage(TM).

As you might have gathered, I’m not at all surprised by this determination. This device does not, after all, stop the receiver from being a “firearm,” being basically a variation on a blank-firing-adapter. And it’s shorter than 16″ (short-barreled), and a smoothbore (AOW for pistol). This is a consequence of the Can Cannon being a accessory to what is legally a firearm. If they had instead built it as a complete unit, completely unable to fire conventional ammo, things might be different. As it is, though, an AR-15 doesn’t stop being a firearm when you mount a Can Cannon on it.

This is just another reminder of how mind-numbingly stupid the patch to NFA’34 to allow handguns, but still effectively ban anything that could be considered a handgun but isn’t actually a handgun. (That sentence hurt just as much to write as it does to read, I assure you, but was the only way I could express how I understandÂ the history of the Act.)

On the other hand, I am a little surprised they didn’t just rule the assembled weapon as a Destructive Device (that bore is way bigger that 0.50″)

EDIT: The ATF Determination Letter

Shooting the LARC M19-A

In the last news links post, I mentioned having fired an LARC M19-A BB-machine gun, linking to an article about it in Small Arms Review. My friend and sometimes co-blogger Jason still has the one I fired, and offered to take some video of it in action. It’s a lot of fun. If the anti-gun folks like calling semi-automatic rifles a bullet hose, this is about the closest you’ll come to one, except it shoots BBs. Watch it tear up this empty anti-freeze bottle:

Jason told me that the regulator on his air compressor struggled to feed the beast enough air, but there’s one good satisfying burst.

Kathleen Kane Now Ineligible for Office?

It seems like there’s now a question over whether Attorney General Kathleen Kane is, as of today, now ineligible to hold the statewide office. Why? Because the state Supreme Court just suspended her law license.

Yes, the woman who Mike Bloomberg spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect, can’t even represent one of Mike’s Illegal Mayor allies who held a man hostage with a gun.

Oh yeah, and just because I try to remind the voters in the central part of the state who voted their football allegiances over gun rights every time that Kathleen Kane is in trouble – elections have consequences.

Interesting News on New York Employment Law & Handguns

Eugene Volokh has a great post up on the Nassau County District Attorney’s office policy that forbids employees from owning handguns at home.

While he does first address the Second Amendment constitutional rights, I found the second part of the post the most compelling. There’s actually a law in New York that forbids employers from discriminating against employees or candidates for employment based on their lawful hobbies that in no way impacts their work (no compensation, no use of work equipment, not done on premises, etc.). I had no idea that such a statute was on the books in their Labor Code, but it seems like one that gun owners in New York might want to keep in mind.

Volokh only makes the case that this protects handgun collecting, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t also protect a competitive shooter. Sports are listed as a protected leisure time activity. Regardless, this was a very interesting tidbit that could come in handy should an anti-gun boss decide to take an extreme action against a New York gun owner – like the DA’s office has apparently decided to do in Nassau County.

Partial Win in DC Circuit

A 3 judge panel has struck down some of DC’s gun laws. In the Heller IIIÂ case. The Court threw out their gun rationing scheme, which is good news. The panel struck down the requirement that gun owners re-register every three years, appear in person, but upheld registration and training in general. The full opinion can be found here:

For the reasons set forth above, the district courtâ€™s final order is AFFIRMED with respect to: the basic registration requirement as applied to long guns, D.C. Code Â§7- 2502.01(a); the requirement that a registrant be fingerprinted and photographed and make a personal appearance to register a firearm, D.C. Code Â§ 7-2502.04; the requirement that an individual pay certain fees associated with the registration of a firearm, D.C. Code Â§ 7-2502.05; and the requirement that registrants complete a firearms safety and training course, D.C. Code Â§ 7-2502.03(a)(13). The district courtâ€™s order is REVERSED with respect to the requirement that a person bring with him the firearm to be registered, D.C. Code Â§ 7- 2502.04(c); the requirement that a gun owner re-register his firearm every three years, D.C. Code Â§7-2502.07a; the requirement that conditions registration of a firearm upon passing a test of knowledge of the Districtâ€™s firearms laws, D.C. Code Â§7-2502.03(a)(10); and the prohibition on registration of â€œmore than one pistol per registrant during any 30-day period,â€ D.C. Code Â§ 7-2502.03(e).

Mixed bag, really. I’d probably not want to file cert on this case unless there’s a change on the Supreme Court that would make it stronger on the Second Amendment. It would be risky taking a case challenging these issues forward.

h/t Dave Hardy