Sometimes you just have to go with the feel good news of the day.
It is being reported in multiple sources that CNN has canceled “Reliable Sources” and that Brian Stelter is leaving or was let go.
Without Trump to drive ratings up during the hourly two minute hate, CCN’s overall ratings have gone down and down and down.
Brian Stelter made it his business to breathlessly report every misstep, misspeak or to blunt thing that President Trump did or said.
Without Trump driving the two minute hate CCN is looking for other things to report. Mostly that consists of blaming everybody right of Mao as “Right Wing Extremists” and lamenting how they can’t shutup other people’s opinion.
So we close our week with a small bit of good news.
In the Bruen case the dissenting justices appealed to emotions to justify why they didn’t want to follow the law.
Justice Thomas put it just right: The two step process is one step to far.
Previous to the Bruen decision the courts in gun rights unfriendly areas would start with “We’ll stipulate that the law violates the 2nd amendment BUT…” at which point the second amendment goes away. These courts always found that the state had compelling reasons to abridge and infringe on our rights.
In order for those emotional appeals to actually work, there have to be enough horrible stories to touch people. You need stories that allow the people to connect with the evil and heartbreak. “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.
Where to get those number? Those stories? Those scary numbers?
“There have been more mass shootings than days in 2022!!!!”
Only when you use the “right” definitions and the right sources.
When the CDC was advocating for gun control they did studies and the numbers were cooked. Even so they couldn’t hide the fact that the number of DGU was way higher than the number of people killed with firearms. So when they were no longer able to advocate for gun control, they stopped studying violence involving guns.
The gun grabbing media and politicians had to turn to other sources. They turned to people like the Giffard’s and Everytown and Moms Demand and Brady. The problem was that nobody trusted these sources. If you can’t use the numbers from the NRA you can’t use the numbers from people with this much conflict of interest. It didn’t stop them, but it slowed them down.
Thus enters the Gun Violence Archive. This is a group of people, it started with just one person, that started looking in media reports for any and all incidents involving guns. They then made a record of that incident and reported it.
Suddenly there were hundreds of incidents. The only problem was that it didn’t match the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics.
What it was good for is scare numbers”
“Since the start of this year (2022), there have been 277 reported mass shootings — an average of more than one per day. See Gun Violence Archive,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in June in the opening paragraph.
In other words, the GVA is not at all scientific, its data is hand picked and questionable. Anybody that actually looks at their individual incidents soon finds multiple errors. And they use their own definitions and play loose with those definitions.
All to get those “Scary numbers”
The media and the politicians eat it up because it matches their confirmation bias. So much so that Supreme Court Justices feel comfortable quoting GVA numbers. It is sick.
Just remember, when Obama told the CDC to study violence involving guns after a couple of years the CDC came back with numbers that were so bad for the gun grabbers that they quietly buried the report.
Gender dysphoria has been a known mental illness for a while now. The earliest treatments were done at Johns Hopkins. The procedure took many years, required extensive therapy and living as the opposite gender for a significant time before anything irreversible was done.
I know of multiple people that firmly believed they were the wrong gender. They went to Johns Hopkins and when everything was said and done, they were not even allowed in to the early stages of the process. The therapy part was enough to show that the individual wasn’t suffering from gender dysphoria but had other issues.
Over time the doctor that started created the original gender reassignment procedures came to believe that it was wrong. He stopped performing reassignment surgeries.
Confirmation bias is when we expect to find something and because we expect to find it we do find it. This is the gambler that finds a pattern at the craps table or roulette table. He expects there to be a pattern so he finds it. Those processes are random so there isn’t a pattern.
Scientist are not immune to confirmation bias. A good scientist designs their experiments such that it should eliminate confirmation bias. Good scientists will have others examine their research to look for confirmation bias and to help them remove that bias from their research.
One example of confirmation bias is in temperature samples. Some climate scientist expected to see certain patterns in global temperature measurements. When they didn’t see what they expected they decided that the data was bad. Not their findings, but the data. They then applied “corrections” to the data in order to get the results they wanted to see.
We see it with all of the climate alarmist. It is hot that means climate change is real. It’s cold, climate change is real. There is too much rain, there isn’t enough rain, there is too much snow, there isn’t enough snow… No matter what the weather event it always means “climate change!” to those with that level of confirmation bias.
Social contagions are syndroms that seem to be contagious when there should not be any contagine. In the 80’s there was the “Satanic Panic”. The word spread that there were satanic rituals taking place involving children. People were on the lookout for these satan worshipers doing evil to children.
And they found it. They found it and suddenly they had children telling adults about horrendous events. One group of children from a daycare facility described eating a baby.
It was all imagination. The children quickly learned that the more outrageous their stories the more praise they received from the investigating adults. The adults were feeding answers to the children, often without even realizing it.
The current social contagion is “transgender” or “non-binary”. Here’s the thing, it clumps. Once one child comes out and is praised for being “brave and beautiful” others follow. Those that do this are often willing to believe that a social contagion exists but it doesn’t apply to them. It is those others. They are the real deal.
Today trans people are treated with kid gloves and our entire society is being bent to accommodate these people. Why does my technical support person have their pronouns in their signature block? Why does my bank teller have their pronouns pinned to their shirt? Because they are afraid of offending somebody. Worse, they want you to be afraid of offending them.
…including some sympathetic to Turban’s political mission, wondered whether his research reflected scientific curiosity and discovery or confirmation bias and an axe to grind. Throughout his career, Turban has authored studies which conclude that there are great benefits and minimal risks to providing gender-confused minors with “gender-affirming care,” a medically cryptic way of saying hormonal therapy for puberty suppression, reconstructive surgery, and social and behavioral re-conditioning.
Dr. Jack Turban found his research niche in the treatment of pediatric gender-identity disorders nearly a decade ago and quickly rose through the ranks of the discipline. In a prestigious fellowship at Stanford Medical Center following a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he focused on child and adolescent psychiatry with an emphasis on transgender youth, or facilitating sex change through surgical, medical, and social interventions.
In February, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) updated its service guidelines for children and youth with gender dysphoria, citing “uncertain science” and “no definite conclusions about the effect and safety of the treatments” as reasons to conclude that “the risks outweigh the benefits at present.” Multiple Republican state legislatures, recognizing the unknowns and moral and ethical uncertainties, have limited access to the treatments.
It is highly unlikely that this trend towards mutilating children will stop anytime soon. The amount of damage being done to our children is alarming, even if it is only at a mental level. Movies and shows are pushing and affirming transgenderism.
At some point our children’s children’s children will look back at this and label this time “The crazy years.”
Until that time this is a small step in the right direction.
Free speech is a bedrock of a free society. Without it bad things are driven into the darkness and good things never see the light of day. Free speech means defending people saying things you disagree with.
A common saying years ago was “I disagree with you but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Today we have more and more people defining “hate speech”. Speech that must be regulated. “Hate speech isn’t Free Speech”.
Hate speech is exactly what Free Speech must protect. It isn’t the things that are easy to listen to that need to be protected. It is those things that you don’t want to hear.
So many of today’s leftist institutions strive to limit speech in some way. “Misinformation”, “disinformation”, “fake news”, “hate speech”, and whatever term they choose to use tomorrow. All of these are just ways of saying “Shut Up!”
Everyone of these rules or regulations or policies is premised on “safety”. Generally “For YOUR safety you shouldn’t hear these things.” or “For YOUR safety you shouldn’t say these things.”
There is a Ren Faire in New England that might not survive because of “hate speech”. Not that anything was actually spoken, but because people were afraid something might be said. There was an incident where some people were found near the site of the fair that might have been actual racist. So in order to punish those people many vendors and performers decided not to attend.
This will likely kill the fair. All because people were afraid of hearing something “racist.”
In many places speech is called violence. If you were to call a black person N…. they feel that violence has been done to them which allows them to respond with physical violence. Giving offence via speech is considered violence by more and more people.
In Kenosha the prosecutors implied that showing a symbol, an AR-15, was enough to justify people attacking a young man. He didn’t even have to say anything. Just being in that location with an AR-15 was causing people to feel unsafe justifying their attack on the young man.
This is the debate now thundering into view. The correct response to the Rushdie outrage is not just to plead for freedom of speech, but to ask what it really means and how it is to be sustained – and regulated. That is not done through silence.
We need people to stand up for free speech in all of its nasty and mean and evil forms. Otherwise we will be lost.
You can tune in a radio station today and listen to most types of music. When you listen you’ll hear “cutting edge lyrics”. Pushing the limits of what is acceptable. Wet Ass Pussy (WAP) won a People’s Choice Award and was nominated for MTV’s “Best Song of the Summer.”
From the 80’s there was “Dancing in the Sheets” (Did you hear that as “dancing in the streets? I did.)
Every wanna be and published rapper can use the “N-Word” as often as they want.
Shock radio is no longer shocking. Comedy where the comic drops F-bombs every other sentence are no longer shocking.
This generation didn’t invent risque or crude lyrics. There are traditional folk songs from centuries ago that are very explicit. If you listen.
Steeleye Span does it in a folk rock style. Maddy Priors voice is still wonderful.
Damh the Bard does an acoustic version.
The song was collected by Frank Warriner around 1930 but there are references going back to 1856.
This is an image of an original SAA hammer that has been reworked to have new sear surfaces. The geometry is exactly the same as on the original Colt SAA. This is the classic fixed firing pin. It is solid and does not move.
There are three notches that the trigger sear can rest in. The first is sometimes called “rebound”. It is the deepest of the three. You should not be able to pull the trigger in this position. When in this position, the firing pin is away from the primer. It can not go bang from a trigger pull nor from striking the back of the hammer. To cause the firearm to go bang you have to strike the hammer hard enough that it breaks parts of the trigger or sear surfaces.
This is the recommended hammer position if carrying with a round under the hammer.
If you pull the trigger and the hammer at the same time such as the hammer rotates back enough to clear the first notch but not enough to get to the second notch and let go of the hammer there should not be enough force to fire the gun. No bang.
The next notch is the half-cock notch. Again the trigger is locked in place. You can not pull the trigger without breaking something. Striking the hammer does not cause the gun to fire. Hitting the gun doesn’t cause the gun to fire as the first notch will catch the hammer before it strikes the primer.
The hammer in half-cock can not be made to fire the gun without breaking things. If the hammer is pulled back and the trigger is pulled and the hammer is released before it gets almost to the final sear the gun does not go bang. Again, you have to pull the trigger to allow the hammer to fall all the way and with enough force to ignite the primer.
The final notch is the actual sear. At this point the gun is fully cocked. Hitting the hammer or gun will not cause the gun to fire. The trigger spring (not shown) will push the trigger sear back against the hammer and the hammer will catch on the half-cock or rebound notches.
In order for the gun to fire you must pull the trigger.
The final possible position is with the hammer fully forward. In this situation striking the back of the hammer firmly enough will cause the gun to fire.
This is the type of hammer the gun Alec Baldwin used to kill the camera woman.
Revolver with transfer bar
Here is a transfer bar system. This revolve has at least a full and half-cock notch. The big difference is that the front of the hammer is smooth. NO firing pin.
This is how many modern hammer fired firearms work. When the trigger is pulled a bar extends up to cover the back of the firing pin. The hammer is released as the sear is disengaged. The hammer falls and hits the transfer bar. The transfer bar strikes the back of the firing pin. The firing pin then impacts the primer igniting it.
When the trigger is released the transfer bar drops down. With the transfer bar down the hammer doesn’t touch the back of the firing pin. Hitting the back of the hammer just drives it into the frame. No bang.
This is a very safe arrangement. Even if the hammer was at full cock and the gun is dropped it will not fire as the transfer bar will be down.
It is “safe” to carry with a round under the hammer.
The issue with this style of SAA is it doesn’t look right to people in the know. That firing pin spur is very distinctive.
So which of these did Alec use? Neither.
He used a hybrid system. Instead of a fixed firing pin as shown in the top the firing pin is actually attached to a small spring and floats within the hammer.
When the hammer strikes with enough force the inertia against the firing pin causes it to continue forward to strike the primer hard enough to ignite.
This system has all the same safety features of the original SAA but with the added benefit that the firing pin does not touch the primer when the hammer is full down.
In addition this style requires the system to be more finely tuned. If the hammer spring is to weak compared to the spring holding the firing pin in place the gun doesn’t go bang. If the firing pin spring is to weak it is possible for the firing pin to touch a primer without the hammer falling from a full cock position.
It is also possible to fire this style with a strong enough strike to the back of the hammer in just the right angle.
What the FBI report said is that the gun was tested and the following was found.
The gun would not fire if the hammer was not all the way back.
The hammer would not drop unless the trigger was pulled.
The gun would not fire during normal drop testing. I.e. If the hammer was fully down, at half-cock or in the rebound notch it would not fire.
In order for this particular gun to go bang it would require that the hammer be fully cocked and the trigger pulled.
I have personally laid hands on all three of these types of SAA revolvers. With the revolvers I own I tested with a case with primer only in the chamber.
I believe that Alec killed that woman by pointing a loaded firearm at her, cocking the hammer, and pulling the trigger.
“Extreme Risk Protection Orders” ERPOs are designed to allow firearm rights to be removed from a person without the person having a chance to defend themselves in court. They can beg the courts to return their firearms and firearm rights after the fact, but a right delayed is a right denied.
The American Justice System is suppose to allow the accused to have competent representation, a chance to face their accusers, to know what they are accused of and to be judged by a jury of their peers. Red Flag laws turn that on its head.
For competent representation there must be an ability to have a lawyer. As the most recent gun legislation passed by the federal government says, you have the right to legal representation and the state can offer it to you, but the state doesn’t have to. You have to pay for that representation.
Due process is suppose to be protected by the a judge that signs off on the order. No judge is going to deny an request for an ERPO. If the judge gets it wrong and you are not a threat you are denied your rights for a time. Nothing bad happens to the judge. If the judge denies the ERPO and something happens to the person requesting the ERPO then the judge is going to be blamed. Humans are human and are going to act in their own self interests most of the time.
It costs the judge nothing to sign an ERPO thus they will.
If you want to hear a horror story, go visit Divemedic’s Blog regarding how he was falsely accused and had to deal with being a prohibited person for 3 weeks because of a lying ex. My story started with my estranged wife claiming she felt threatened because we were talking loudly and I took a couple of steps back away from her and put my hands in my pockets. Since she knew I carried a pocket knife she was afraid.
My case ended up in court and if I had taken the advise of council today I would be a prohibited person. I didn’t own firearms at that particular time.
Most ERPOs are granted ex-parte. The accuser is in the room telling their tail of horrors and you are just going about your business. You are not there, your lawyer isn’t there. There is nobody to stand up for your rights.
As they say, a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. It is much easier to get a judge to sign off on an ERPO.
You find out when the cops show up on your doorstep to server you with the ERPO and take your guns. More than one such raid has happened at O dark thirty. Just what a person in distress needs, to be waken from a sound sleep with load banging noises as people try to break into their home.
Red Flag laws, ERPOs are all about future crime. The idea is that by looking for indicators the people in power can decide who is going to commit a crime. Once they know that a crime is going to be committed, they can stop that crime by removing firearms from a person before the crime is committed.
We all know the line “The suspect was known to law enforcement.” In to many of these cases if law enforcement had done the right thing the animal would have been a prohibited person just by being committed or other criminal record. Unfortunately, to many of these animals are given a second and third and fiftieth chance before they commit their evil final act.
The people that do get caught up in ERPOs are often just run of the mill people who pissed somebody off. With the legal system more than willing to punish gun owners it is easy. If the person was suicidal the removal of firearms isn’t going to stop them. If they are intent on doing evil, they will find a way.
After some asshole killed a bunch of people in Buffalo New York, Governor Hochul signed an executive order requiring the state police to use ERPOs more aggressively, to expand their use of ERPOs.
Surprising nobody the number of ERPOs filed in the last three months exceeds the total filed for 2021.
Numbers I would like to see:
How many ERPO applications were turned down?
How many ERPOs were rescinded when the accused was seen by the judge?
How many people were negatively affected by an ERPO?
Timney Triggers AR-15 3 lbs. Competition Trigger, Straight – 667S-ST
A few years ago a raider (a person who has only prepared by buying guns and ammo, no life skills or other skills) was bragging about how he was building AR-15s. He was so proud to show me all this special tooling he had (A barrel nut wrench). He made it sound like a big thing. Gee, he was building AR-15s.
A few years later I became much more interested in firearms. I started watching Forgotten Weapons to learn something. I watched a couple of AR-15 builds before YouTube took them all down. It made me start to actually take an interested in how the firearms I owned actually functioned.
Think about this stupid little thing for a moment, how does pulling a trigger back cause a sear to move downward to drop the bolt on a simple blowback open bolt gun. There has to be a linkage of some sort. Is the sear in front of the trigger or behind it?
The linkage in an AR-15 is actually pretty simple, in keeping with the linkage used in a Colt SAA. Pressing the trigger causes the trigger to pivot. A bar at nearly right angles to the trigger towards the front then moves downward. The hammer has a sear that rests against that bar. As the bar is pulled off the sear, the hammer drops firing the gun.
Simple.
You might know all of that. You might have looked inside your firearm(s) to see how it works. I had not. I just opened an AR-15 to verify that I had all the parts right and the functioning correct.
It takes a bit of curiosity to bother to learn all of that.
At one point I had an opportunity to shoot a Colt SP-1. This was one of the first commercial AR-15s. It was an M-16 with two modifications. No auto-sear and the third hole was not drilled in the receiver. It had a full auto selector switch, the M-16 bolt carrier and all the other magic parts.
And here is the thing, if you switched the selector to full auto it could slam fire. The fix was simple, replace the full auto selector with a semi-auto only and it would no longer slam fire.
Slam firing is considered a “not good” event. Even though there are many firearm designs that are intended to “slam fire”, I.e. any firearm that has a fixed firing pin and fires from an open bolt. For higher pressure rounds there must be a full lock up before the round is fired.
So what about the AR-15 platform? Is it “safe” if it slam fires?
Yes, it is. Assume for a moment that the firing pin in your AR-15 got stuck in its forward most position. You drop the bolt, the bolt strips a round from the magazine and pushes it into the chamber. The bolt head is in contact with the base of the round.
The round comes to a stop against the shoulder in the chamber, the bolt face is now pushing up against the face of the breech. The firing pin should be indenting the primer. But it isn’t.
The firing pin does not extend past the face of the bolt until after the bolt has rotated and the chamber is locked.
With the firing pin stuck in its forward most position the rifle will slam fire but only after there is full lockup.
It is a design feature.
Learning those types of things about firearm design is amazing to me. Because of that I became much more willing to detail strip my firearms. To look at how they function. What does this lever do? Why is this cut here? Why did they do this little thing here?
As you do more you learn more and you begin to see where things might have gone wrong. As an example, a friend gave me a long term loan of a semi-auto shotgun. It didn’t work very well but it did go bang when you pulled the trigger. It was only the semi-auto functioning that was questionable. I cleaned it and put it back together. It worked better but wasn’t reliable.
Then one day I had it stripped down and was looking at the piston. The more I looked at it the sadder the O-rings looked. I decided I was going to replace them. So I got out my picks to remove the O-rings so I could measure them and get the right replacements.
As I started to pick the O-Ring out it started to crumble.
It was then that I realized, those weren’t O-rings. It was carbon build up. My friend had never cleaned this shotgun after he acquired it. The carbon build up in the grooves had gotten so bad it was interfering with the functioning of the firearm.
Once I got the grooves cleaned and everything lubed and put back together, it functioned flawlessly. I had fixed a broken firearm.
Since that time I’ve repaired a few firearms. Nothing particularly hard, just had to be done. Replacing sights is something I do myself now, I didn’t originally. It was something I would have a gunsmith do.
Sometimes the AR platform is called “Barbie for men”. You can customize it however you want. You can put lights and optics on. Flare launchers, lasers, sound systems, chainsaws, bayonets can all be attached to your AR.
Not only can you customize the outside, changing the furniture and accessories, you can also customize the inside.
At the top of this post is a picture of a $250 drop in trigger. Open up your AR, push out two pins and most of the guts of the lower receiver spill out on to your workbench. Slide this trigger into place, push the two pins back into place and you now have a beautiful trigger with a straight trigger and a 3 pound pull. Beautiful.
Or you can pay $35 for a complete fire control group, i.e. the two pins are included. This is suppose to be better than a mil-spec mil-issue trigger, but it is likely almost the same thing.
There are a hundred different options out there.
There are just as many options for pistols. Glock replacement triggers. 1911 replacement hammers. Some 1911s have solid hammers, some have a cut out. You can get different triggers. All of these are things that allow you to make your pistol yours.
A pistol my local gun store was selling had loose slabs. Turns out that the previous owner was a competition shooter. He had added weights under the slabs which required longer screws. The local gun store had taken the extra weights off the gun but didn’t notice that the screws were too long. A simple set of replacement screws and the slabs are nice and tight again.
Ebony Scott being sworn in.
For the residents of Washington DC, they are soon going to be unable to buy replacement parts because of a judgement by D.C. Superior Court Judge Ebony Scott. She was appointed by Biden. Her previous career was as with the D.C Office of Human Rights. Then she went to work for the Mayor’s office. There were five judges sworn in at the same time. They all had their official swearing in pictures taken. In her picture she, the Chief Justice and the person holding the bible are all masked. There are no masks in any of the other swearing in images.
It appears she has all the right qualifications to make law from the bench.
No judge gets to decide what is and is not a firearm. That is decided by congress. And congress has made that law. A judge can say that according to the law as set out by congress something is a firearm, but that is based on the actual pieces of that are being evaluated. Not on her opinion of a companies speech.
Scott cited “Polymer80’s alarming belief” that the sale of its firearms is legal in the district as part of the reason the court granted the plaintiff’s request for a permanent injunction.
The law of intended consequences. Three times is enemy action.
Another week and things are stabilizing a bit more.
J.Kb. is back in the grove for the time being and Miguel is pushing out content as well.
Sorry for the delay in getting Friday’s Feedback out there.
I’m looking for a couple of songs for Tuesday Tunes. Feel free to recommend stuff down below.
If you have any topics you would like us to research or talk about, feel free to let us know that.
We did get an early link to the FBI labeling us all extremists. By the time I had some spare cycles to write about it everybody else already had. I might still throw up the images just for history’s sake.
Earlier, two law enforcement sources said a man armed with an AR-15-style rifle got inside the FBI building and fired a nail gun toward personnel before he fled in a car.
Is this what he shot up the FBI office with?
Ohio State Highway Patrol spokesman, Lt. Nathan Dennis said that officers fired less lethal munitions at the suspect before the suspect raised his gun. The officers then shot the suspect dead.
And just so you know, the suspect is one of those extreme right wingers, he was at the January 6th rally!
And again, we have that unusual situation of a “extremist” that supposedly has an AR-15, the deadliest of weapons, and yet he attacked the FBI office with a nail gun.
Hmmmm, it is almost as if they aren’t telling the whole story. Or they are manipulating it so that the narrative stays the same. Right == bad, Left == good.
As a wild ass guess, the dude was upset, went into the visitors center, popped off his nail gun a few times before leaving with the cops chasing him. He then committed suicide by cop by pointing the nail gun at the cops. Until we see video of it, the odds of there being an AR-15 involved are pretty small.
