Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 242 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

The Ryan Budget Deal

This is veering off topic, but while I have the makings of another tab-clearing news link, everyone is all atwitter about the Ryan budget deal. I haven’t been able to get all that worked up about it, to be honest, because it seemed another case of the grassroots conservatives wanting to fight on every front all of the time rather than picking battles carefully. I see this quite often in the gun issue. A lot of people got worked up over UFA renewal, but it’s the wrong battle to fight at the wrong time. The bill has nearly zero impact on every day gun rights, and for a lot of reasons I think it’s fine to kick that fight ten years down the road for now.

Megan McArdle wrote an article today I think is correct in term of analyzing the Ryan deal.

But if they do nothing at all, many reason, they get all the sequestration cuts. Why trade them away?

To avoid another showdown. Though I, too, would like government to shrink, I think this is the right policy trade-off; shutdowns are making it harder and harder to talk about rational budget policy in this town. And tactically, I think this is a clear win for theÂ Republican Party. The last thing they need right now is to take the focus off the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and revive Obamaâ€™s flagging poll numbers with an ill-timed budget battle. Their best shot at a budget they really like is, after all, to retake the Senate in 2014.

RTWT. From my reading of it, the Ryan deal is meant to avert another government shutdown, which the Democrats have been preparing to do. Another shutdown would be a disaster for the GOP, because as Megan says, it would take the focus off the flaming train wreck that the ACA is turned out to be. That’s why the Dems would love to precipitate another shutdown in order to distract the low-information voters from their own failures and focus everything back on how awful the GOP is.

Of course, the GOP won’t say that, because they would rather piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining, and that, I think, pretty much sums up the GOP’s problem, which is messaging and communication. That gets back to what Glenn Reynolds noted:

I think thatâ€™s right. I think the problem is that a lot of the grassroots donâ€™t trust the GOP leadership to do that. The leadership might want to think about what it can do to build such trust.

No one trusts them because a) the 1994 revolution turned into a non-revolution, and b) the GOP sucks at communicating. The Ryan deal may be necessary, but the GOP leadership would rather kick the grassroots in the teeth and offer platitudes than talk to them like actual adults. Want to understand the popularity of Chris Christie? Because he communicates, and treats voters like adults. Corbett, by contrast, just hiked my gas taxes and then has the nerve to send me a fundraising letter bragging about how he eliminated the retail gas tax (failing to mention that he accomplished this through a massive hike in the wholesale gas tax). Maybe we had to hike the gas tax. Maybe that was the only way to get a transportation bill funded. But don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Level with me. The GOP might be playing a bad hand the best they can right now, but you’d never know it, because they have no idea how to communicate to voters. If you ask me, that’s the GOP’s number one problem.

CNC 1911 Mostly Finished

The 1911 frame I made on the CNC machine has been sitting on my workbench for way over a year now. I decided that over Thanksgiving vacation I would finally finish the gun. I only had a couple of small machining operations to do on the top of the frame and then it would be finished. When I made my own AR-15 lowers, once I finished machining the lower receivers according to the CAD model it only took 10 minutes or so to install the parts. I figured I would be able to finish up the frame on Friday, and by Sunday, I’d be ready to go to the range.

It turned out to be not so easy.

The first problem was that the slide didn’t fit. The slots in the frame weren’t deep enough. After milling out the slots a bit, I was able to fit the slide.

Next, I tried fitting the barrel. With the barrel and associated hardware installed, the slide wouldn’t move. Â As the slide is pulled back, the barrel wasn’t lowering enough for the upper barrel lugs to unlock from the slide. I needed to remove some material from where the bottom barrel lugs hit the frame. From what I can tell, this is normally done going in from the front of the frame with a really long end mill. I don’t have an end mill that long, nor is there enough clearance on my mill to use one on a 1911 frame. But since I had made a two piece frame I was able to unbolt the halves, lie them flat, and go in from the side with a small end mill.

The trick was to remove enough material so that the barrel would go low enough, but not so much that the barrel’s rear motion is stopped by the barrel link. Now the slide and barrel move like they should.

But, with the chamber all the way closed, the slide sits a little forward.

Either the slide, barrel, or frame is slightly off somewhere. I can’t think of an easy way to fix it. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to affect the operation any, so I’m going to leave it as is.

Next came the trigger, which, like the slide, didn’t fit at all. I had to widen the trigger area, again made easy by the fact that the frame can be split into two halves.

After the trigger came the magazine catch, which also didn’t fit. I had to hand file the hole until the magazine catch would drop in. I then discovered that the CAD model I used was missing the slot for the magazine catch lock. I also don’t have any undercutting end mills, so having the slot in the model probably wouldn’t have helped anyway. Since the magazine catch lock is always held against one side of the slot by the spring, I decided to cut a notch from the inside of the frame down to the depth of the slot.

It’s at the point that I almost ruined the frame. I was making the cuts “manually” by using the keyboard to control the mill. While doing so I brushed against the touchpad that I use for a mouse. What I hadn’t realized before is that the touchpad was configured for tap-to-click, so the touch registered as a click, and the mouse pointer happened to be sitting on the feed rate slider. So the feed rate suddenly went from 0.3 in/min to 60 in/min, and the mill went all the way through the frame and almost into the mill table.

Luckily the place where I drilled through isn’t where the tab on the magazine catch lock normally sits, so while the hole doesn’t look all that nice, the magazine catch is still functional.

With the magazine catch installed, I tried to insert a magazine, but it didn’t fit. I had to widen the magazine well.

Now, it was time to install the sear and disconnector. The sear was too wide to fit in the space for the fire control group, so the frame is split and back on the mill again to widen that area a bit.

With the fire control group area widened out, the sear, disconnector, and hammer all fit nicely. The leaf spring and main spring housing also went in without problems, so now I had a functioning trigger. I then tried to fit the thumb and grip safeties and discovered another problem with the CAD model, which I probably would have noticed earlier if I had ever assembled a 1911 before. The hole for the thumb safety doesn’t go all the way through the frame like it should. So back on the mill to drill out the hole.

I also had to use a hand file to widen the hole where the thumb safety interacts with the hammer and trigger. Then I discovered with the full fire control group installed the slide won’t go all the way back.

The hammer hits the top of the grip safety. It appears that the parts kit I ordered came with a mismatched hammer and grip safety. There are other style hammers that fit fine with that grip safety, and other style grip safeties that will fit with that hammer, but the ones I have don’t go together. I bought the parts kit over a year and a half ago, so its probably to late to do a warranty exchange. But a little work with a grinding wheel on the top of the grip safety and…

Next was tapping the holes for the grip screw inserts, which of course had to be some oddball-sized tap that I didn’t have, so I had to order a tap.

The grips themselves and the plunger tube fit with no issues. The last piece that needed to be attached to the frame was the ejector. Here, I discovered a third problem with the CAD model. One of the holes for the ejector was only half as deep as it should be. So back on the mill one more time.

Now, with the ejector attached to the frame, the firing pin and extractor installed in the slide, and the slide and barrel back on the frame, I have a completed firearm.

Everything seems to function correctly, and the headspace looks good. (I don’t need to buy a chamber reamer. Yay!) All that’s left to do is to decide how I want to “permanently” join the two frame halves. Currently, they are held together by just two bolts near the center of the frame. My original plan was to use an aluminum brazing rod to weld the two halves together, but looking at the finished frame I think if I add one more bolt in the top front of the trigger guard, and use a bolt instead of a pin to hold in the main spring housing it would work fine without welding.

How’s That Registration Working Out for Ya?

Connecticut officials are warning of dire consequences for failure to comply. After all, where to gun owners belong if not in jail?

Mr. Lawlor, like most government officials, seems to think he and his buddies have invented policy out of whole cloth, and that the population has no choice but to shuffle along and obey. But weapons registration laws have a historyâ€”a consistent history,Â as I’ve written, of noncompliance and defiance.

They know we won’t comply. And to them, that’s just fine. Because then, in their minds, you’ll end up where you belonged in the first place. Really, if you think about it, if you were an owner and a gun was stolen, are you going to call the cops about it? So how do these laws really help things? They don’t. They just make it more likely gun owners are going to be uncooperative with police when it comes to enforcing laws.

The Gun Battle in the States

Reuters notes that the gun control battle is shifting to the states, with a slight edge going to pro-gun bills. The New York Times does a summary of the issues, which show that it’s considerably more than a “slight edge.” It also shows that a number of those bills that were passed, that are in the pro-gun control column, are minor bills like NICS improvements…. hardly a big win on their parts.

MAIG Mayor Purposefully Puts the Poor in Danger

Imagine a situation where an armed robber breaks into your home, but maybe you do or don’t have a means to defend yourself. What you do have is a phone with access to 911, and let us pretend for a moment that the local cops can get there in time to save you. What would keep you from using the phone in that situation?

Well, thanks to the efforts of Bloomberg-ally and MAIG Mayor Tom Leighton, you might lose your home if you call the police. You may face permanent eviction if you dare call the police while in danger. If you live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t afford another place to live, then maybe you hide in the closet and hope for the best instead of calling the police.

See, this MAIG mayor has instituted a â€œone-strike ordinanceâ€ that allows his city to shut down any property for up to six months (without a hearing or notice) if the property is ever the site of a single gun or drug crime.

Another town instituted a similar rule that, instead of shutting down a property, fines the landlords as punishment, and a victim of domestic violence was threatened with eviction after the police were called to help her. When the boyfriend showed up again and stabbed her in the neck, she was too fearful of losing a roof over her young daughter’s head to call the police. Even as she was bleeding from her wounds, she pleaded with her neighbors not to call the police on her attacker because she and her daughter would be the ones punished and left without a home.

That case has resulted in litigation, and despite seeing the impact of this rule on a domestic violence victim, MAIG Mayor Leighton stands by using the one-strike ordinance, even if the ultimate result is to punish the poor for calling police when trouble lurks in their neighborhoods.

By supporting efforts to disarm citizens, Leighton forces them to rely on police. Now he’s punishing those who do rely on the police and who cannot afford to move if their landlords evict them because they dared call the police while in danger.

Politics in Law Enforcement Procurement

The mayor of Jersey City is mandating a gun control survey be completed by every vendor bidding on firearms or ammunition contracts for the city. The answers to the survey will be considered as much as price, safety, and other specs of the firearms and ammunition.

Assuming that they get any gun control surveys back at all, the likely result in this will not be pretty for the actual officers in Jersey City whose lives may well depend on their firearms and ammunition. Their guns will no longer be selected based on meeting needs of the officers, but on willingness to support select political agendas.

Of course, that assumes that the police will even find vendors willing to support gun control in order to win the contract of one department. The reaction of the consumer market will not be pretty if it is announced that a particular manufacturer responded to the survey with enough anti-gun remarks to win support of the Jersey City mayor and his Bloomberg-backed allies in MAIG.

A Desperate Move by the Antis

The latest move is to head on over to Europe to lobby those European gun makers to enact gun control. Because surely those European gun makers will be more enlightened, because they’re all so Euorpeany.

They want the European gunmakers, for example, to refuse to allow their weapons to be sold through unlicensed gun dealers. They also want the manufacturers to renounce political meddling in the U.S. through contributions to lobbying groups like the National Rifle Association.

It demonstrates how little they know about how the gun industry works. Manufactures don’t make shipments to unlicensed gun dealers. That would be illegal. They will sell to their US division, who are federally licensed to import. That importer will sell to a licensed distributor, who will sell to a licensed dealer, who sells to the general public. How exactly is, say, Berretta, supposed to control what happens to it after the point of retail sale?

Also, gun industry money is a fraction of NRA’s total contributions. Most of NRA’s money is raised in small increments from its members through traditional fundraising. While losing industry money would certainly hurt a little, it would far from cripple NRA, and you can bet if they were successful in doing this (which they won’t be), NRA would have a fundraising letter out next week talking about how anti-gun forces are bullying manufacturers into cutting off funds, and won’t you pretty please donate 25, 50, 75 or 250 dollars to help NRA make up the short fall.

And before the fundraising letter would even hit the mail, any cooperating European manufacture will have their US market share destroyed by our grassroots. The manufacturers are will aware of this, so all this is doing is costing the anti-gunners money. Though I’m sure they will enjoy the European Vacation on their organization’s dime.

A Subversive for NRA Board?

Caleb has been alerting the community about someone running for NRA Board who aims to make the organization more reasonable, as in to support gun control. This is not really much of a concern, because the Board is carefully engineered to avoid any uppity faction from being able to place members on the Board. There are often times when I think the Board’s size and structure is a bug, but in this case it’s a feature.

Brandon Webb has two paths to a board seat. He can be nominated by the nominating committee, which is about as likely as the snowstorm overhead right now heading down to Miami and covering Miguel rather than me. The other option is to be nominated by petition, which if I recall requires the signatures of 250 voting NRA members, which is lifers or people with 5 unbroken consecutive years of annual membership. That’s not an impossible mountain to climb, but that’s just to get on the ballot.

I can recall only one petition candidate successfully winning since I’ve been following this stuff, and that’s Maria Heil, and she managed to win only through very dogged campaigning on a personal level. In short, I don’t think Webb stands a chance of even getting on the ballot, let alone actually winning. But it’s worth it to point out that there’s a subversive with interest in running, so I would check out Caleb’s post.

One last thing is that this idea has been floated before, but never gone anywhere. Webb is just the first person to think of it who isn’t absolutely on the other side.

Brady Campaign Continues to Deny Reality

The Brady Campaign and LCAGV continue to live in an alternate reality where recalling not just one, but three Colorado politicians doesn’t really mean anything.

â€œThereâ€™s been disproportionate attention paid to the Colorado recall, where the corporate gun lobby was able to create the perfect circumstances for a handful of extremists to carry the day,â€ saidÂ Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign.

What I really don’t understand about their “logic” here is whether NRA did it, or it was largely spontaneous grassroots organizing, three enemies of the Second Amendment still lost their seats by voting for gun control. At the end of the day, I think that reality matters more than who really deserves credit. Gross is trying to spin his way out of the fact that the Colorado recall efforts likely spooked the Democrats into being a lot more skeptical of the bridge he’s and his allies are trying to sell them.

Tuesday News

The snow is falling again, and our office is closed. It’s the wet, heavy stuff this time that i the bane of conifers everywhere. But my office is always open, so I don’t get out of doing work. There might actually be enough going on for two link posts in as many days:

The Firearm Industry Consulting Group is filing a comment for 41P, the changes in NFA trusts, that is very detailed. They are preparing to sue over any rule change ATF may implement.

Clayton Cramer summarizes the UConn School of Law Symposium on the Second Amendment.

I think at this point George Zimmerman should seriously consider the monastic life.

New York won’t release SAFE Act compliance numbers. As Uncle says, know what it leads to. Don’t register if you want to keep them.

An affordable 3D metal printer? Looks pretty crude, but does it work? Something like that isn’t going to lay down quality metal, but even pot metal beats plastic.

Someone needs a refresher in how rights work. Seeking medical treatment is a right too. You just don’t have a right to demand someone else provide it to you, any more than you have a right to demand I give you one of my guns.

Remember, if you think people are out for your guns you’re a paranoid wing nut.