The Gunner's Blog

Bookmark this blog entry if you are a Smith & Wesson revolver kinda guy. Review the video before you go shopping for a used Smith; it might save you time and money. You might also find the video useful when it is time to function check a gun you already have. I do a thorough check periodically just to make sure that things are still in good order. And... if you need accessories, parts or tools, Mr. Potterfield will be pleased to help you out at Midway USA .

From the Miami Herald: Jorge Bagos, who also worked out with Vargas, told the Associated Press that Vargas had mentioned exercising as a way to release his anger. Bagos said Vargas complained of bad experiences with women, and blamed his hair loss on steroid use. Although police said Vargas asked for his girlfriend while speaking with a hostage negotiator in his final hours, neighbors and associates never saw Vargas with a woman or heard of him having a girlfriend. Hair loss from steroid use? Problems with anger? Fantasy indistinguishable from reality? That paints a picture, doesn't it!? Other details about Vargas emerge in the Herald's background piece, and I encourage you to read the whole thing if you are following the case, but those who have seen guys abuse steroids and start to lose touch with planet Earth probably have the crime figured out already. So we have, sadly, another spree shooting apparently attributable to the shooter's twisted mental state, the...

Yet another reason why magazine capacity limits are stupid: It took sixteen shots to drive off the the attacking bear, which later died. Fortunately the outdoorsman attacked was not a New Yorker, limited to seven round magazines, or a Coloradan, limited to fifteen. Alaska man kills charging bear with assault rifle | Fox News : 'via Blog this'

The Daily Caller has a good piece about Orwellian use of language by the gun ban leftists. Translating 10 anti-gun propaganda phrases into English | The Daily Caller : 'via Blog this'

We have long had laws against deranged people keeping and bearing arms. That must be counted as a reasonable limitation. It may be that we do too little, sometimes, to limit the gun rights of disturbed people; recent mass shootings have their common denominator in mental health issues. But there is a fine line there, open to abuse by the authorities. They may go too far in the other direction. I do not think the following case is an instance of abuse, for the judgment seems reasonable, but it gives us a look into a grey area. Gun rights advocates are right, I think, to be concerned about a possible future in which nearly everyone is deemed a bit too strange, or minor peculiarities are used arbitrarily to abridge the gun rights of some. The comments below the presentation are interesting because of their variety. The Volokh Conspiracy » The Right to Keep and Bear Arms and People Who Appear to Lack “Emotional Stability” at a Court Hearing : 'via Blog this'

The political crap storm going on these days has led me somewhat astray from my intended topic of arms and their use. Here, though, is something that I think will interest the readers who don't care about politics, but who like weapons, tactics and history. The video is brought to you by YouTube user The Digital Implosion (H/t). On my monitor, at least, the video shows up a little bit dark. I see more detail if I punch up the brightness a notch. YMMV.

From John Lott's Website -- President Obama vs. state Senator Obama on Stand Your Ground laws : "Illinois is one of the states that don't demand that people retreat as far as possible before defending themselves. Little did I know that Obama was one of the people who helped push for this change to become law." Wow. I said previously that as a lawyer, Obama ought to know that he is misrepresenting the law in this matter. Turns out I was righter than I thought. For those new to the subject, "stand your ground" is legal shorthand for no, or very limited, " duty to retreat ." When you hear the one you should think of the other, for they are paired concepts. Imposing a duty to retreat whenever someone is attacked raises more problems than it solves, in rendering fair judgement later, which is why most states and federal precedent too have some or other recognition of the "stand your ground" principle. As  Justice Oliver Wendell Holme...

"Trayvon Martin could have been me, thirty-five years ago." Somehow I don't think so. Obama is a child of privilege, Martin was not. There is more difference between the two people than Obama credits in his remarks. Indeed, the difference is greater than any skin-deep similarity. Let's see... Obama was schooled at Punahou, Occidental and Harvard and somehow became a political insider rather quickly... The above picture is being circulated on Twitter as a photo of Obama being profiled 35 years ago. The tragedy of Trayvon Martin's death is overshadowed and cheapened by using it for political grandstanding. Obama's full remarks:  http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin The President said some high-toned and thoughtful things, brought out some well worn and reliable platitudes about race, and even said some things that I agree with. But he slipped a poison pill in amidst the Skittles: I know that ther...

I have in mind, here, two contrasting news stories. The first is the IRS targeting of Obama's opponents. The second is the inexplicable matter of Holder's Justice Department dropping the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers. If you line them up side by side the contrast is clear. If you are against Obama, we'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too. If you are for Obama, you get a free pass. Evidently, some people are more equal than others. More examples could be found where justice has been shaded by politics, the truth hidden for the sake of expediency. Allegations and denials of voting irregularities have been going on for a long time, and it is one side, not the other, that works vigorously against measures to clean things up. Makes you think. Notice, for example, this vituperative and non factual attack on voting reform: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=trueview-instream&v=FIDUFwzNZNY   If there is a good case to be made here, why ma...

This picture is making the rounds of the Interwebz. I find it creepy, in a Big Brother kind of way. I conjecture that it was 'shopped together to bolster the identification of Obama with Trayvon Martin, an identification Obama has fostered and encouraged, first by saying Trayvon was like his son, then by saying Trayvon could have been him 35 years ago. Oh, it bolsters all right. It is a powerful symbol. Look into Trayvon's hoodie, see the prez looking back out at you. See the U.S. Department of Justice For Trayvon single out George Zimmerman with an informant tip line of his very own. See a tragic but hardly singular event in Florida turned into the new national centerpiece for race grievance politics and a new drumbeat for gun control. See the news media's attention instantly diverted from numerous scandals surrounding the administration. Here, of course, is the iconic photo of Trayvon that is the basis of the above Photoshop job. See the resemblance? No? Me neit...

"Justice for Trayvon" has been done. If you don't like the verdict, that does not mean it wasn't justice. I waited until the verdict was in before commenting on George Zimmerman's trial for killing Trayvon Martin. I have been on a couple of juries and know that a lot goes on in a courtroom that isn't well reflected in news reporting. In this case, I further felt that left-leaning news outlets were whipping up the story , playing on racial tensions and politically correct memes, and in general being a bunch of jerks. I figured I would have a clearer picture of the case after the jury spoke. It looked to me like Zimmerman was not guilty of what he was charged with. He looked guilty of first degree stupidity maybe, not murder, but I was not sitting in the jury box. The media circus was the least of it. I sensed, or suspected, a political overtone to the prosecution. If  the case was as insubstantial as it appeared to be, then it looked to me as if the defen...

I direct your attention to David T. Hardy's very fine article over at reason.com, " Why Gun Owners Are Right to Fight Against Gun Control ." The history of the anti-gun contingent shows that compromise measures aren't really what they want. A compromise needs two sides to it. See also my own look at what it is we are being asked to "compromise," in " What is infringement? " There really can't be dialectic around bedrock principles, unless the idea is to dig up the bedrock.

Any time you are carrying a lethal weapon you should have a less-than-lethal one as well. This whole affair would have ended much better, for everyone, if Zimmerman had successfully used a stun gun, or pepper spray, or a kubotan or what have you, instead of his pistol. He was clearly outclassed in the fistfight; when that happens and all you have is a gun, the outcome is always going to look bad, whichever outcome that is. One possible outcome is that the person beating you up takes your gun and shoots you with it. That did not happen in this case but has happened numerous times in the past. In this case the unarmed fellow got shot, and would that he had not. The incident has stirred up a storm of ill will that now even involves the highest levels of government. I may have more to say later about the social activism aspect of the case and the political climate that permits it to go on and on after Zimmerman's acquittal. For now I thought I would point out a short lesson that all...

I previously critiqued Sir Richard Francis Burton's A New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry . In that posting you can find links to his book, free online and in print for money. There is much that I do not like about Burton's system, but some parts of it stand out as meriting further attention and the honest form of flattery, imitation. I here offer what I think are improvements to the method Burton published back in 1876. Burton wanted to scrap the old and well-proven method of teaching soldiers to use their sabers, in favor of something quite different. The sturdy old system of five parries (or a few more) did everything that was asked of it, for as long as men wore sabers, cutlasses and hanger swords. It is still in use in today's sport of saber fencing. This fine old method, which Burton sought to replace, is good because it is defensively oriented. The parries are the main things; it is then a matter of discovering practical ripostes from these very secure pa...

No surprise, of course, that it is. Ramirez is perhaps the most perceptive political cartoonist of this present unfortunate era.

Infringement of the right to keep and bear arms I define in these categories: 1. The citizen cannot buy, in lawful commerce, weapons suitable for Second Amendment purposes. The purposes in view of the Amendment are your personal defense, defense of your home and hearth, participation in a defense force (a county posse or a state militia) when lawfully summoned to serve, and resistance warfare against a hypothetical tyranny. Weaponry includes, obviously, all the things needed to make weapons effective, such as magazines of suitable size, spare parts and effective ammunition. On the matter of magazine restrictions, of course the right to effective arms includes the right to load them, and load them in a way that is consistent with their purposes and design. 2. The citizen cannot keep suitable Second Amendment arms he lawfully obtained before, because of a confiscation or buyback order from the authorities. A 'no transfers' provision in law serves a similar purpose: He ma...

Sir Richard Burton (not the actor, the other one) was hardly the first man to discover something clever and mistake it for something profound, and surely not the last.  So then we need not blame him very much, but would be better and more charitably advised to learn from his mistakes. When closely analyzed, his "semi-moulinet" technique, which forms the heart of his saber system, consists of a clever flip of the wrist, allowing whiplike snap cuts to be made promptly from any parry, and a parry to be made at once, following any cut. There are some advantages that are worth knowing about in this scheme, but the method brings along with it some difficulties and disadvantages that Burton does not fully acknowledge. Burton's cuts. Cuts 1 and 2 are the same as 3 through 10, except for their height. The   New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry ,* published in 1876, radically simplifies the foundation of saber fencing, reducing it to just two guards and what amounts to...

This is quaint. People used to teach and learn this method. There are good reasons why they stopped. Better methods are now available. This video teaches you all about the "FBI crouch", a pistol technique that involves violations of safety rules  two and three and firing without looking at the sights. H/t to Youtube user nuclearvault for this bit of nostalgia. There are noticeable similarities between this ex-FBI method and the  Fairbairn-Sykes shooting method . While I am unaware of any formal connection between the training programs, Fairbairn's and Sykes' ideas were popular and widely known in the early post-WWII era. My own opinion on using the sights is that I like to. At the very least, I like to see the front sight. Very fast shooting can be accomplished by holding the gun slightly lower than you would for normal aimed fire, so that the front sight is seen standing proud of the rear sight. Then you use the front sight as you would a shotgun's bead....

Senators Ask if NSA Collected Gun Data Potential to construct gun database, senators say | Washington Free Beacon : Interesting story. Because no one who knows anything is forthcoming about secret projects, no one else is sure just how far this business of scooping up everyone's private data extends. 'via Blog this'