I have a love/hate relationship with hunting season. I love it because I enjoy hunting but, I hate it because I live in an area where lots of weekend warriors come to hunt. Every year I see hunters that always remind me of Fred Bear’s 10 Commandants of Hunting. Fred Bear was certainly experienced enough to write them.
I nearly have them memorized as a local gas station with odd hours had them posted on aged yellow paper to the side of the deli portion that served fried chicken way too early in the morning. I wish everyone grew up reading these commandants, and maybe I’d be less jaded by visiting hunters.
Fred Bear was a legendary bow hunter and a pioneer of the sport. Believe it or not, in the 1940s and fifties, bow hunting wasn’t common. In fact, most states didn’t have a set bow hunting season, and some didn’t even permit bow hunting. Efforts by Fred Bear spread bow hunting across the United States. He had a storied career, to say the least, and in his wake, he left us 10 Hunting Commandments.
Fred Bear’s Ten Hunting Commandments
While it’s easy to apply these rules to just bow hunting, I think they are applicable to most of all hunting. (Except for dog hunting, but that’s not real hunting anyway.) I’m sure my dad saw that yellowed piece of paper every day we went hunting, but I don’t know if he ever paid that much attention to them. Yet, at the same time, these are nearly the same rules or commandments Papa Pike imprinted on me while hunting. Maybe that’s why I remember them so fondly.
1. Don’t step on anything you can step over.
It’s pretty simple. Don’t make unnecessary noise, and disturb an area as little as possible. Let as little scent, noise, and destruction in your wake as possible.
2. Don’t look for deer, look for movement (and remember it’s what they’re looking for, too.)
Animals tend to be naturally camouflaged in their environment. Seeing a brown deer in the fall can be tough, so don’t just rely on seeing the deer, pig, or squirrel. Watch for their movement, and they’ll reveal themselves.
I can still hear my dad say the words “sit still” in his quiet whisper. If you’re moving, you might as well be shouting.
3. Always approach downwind. In the cool of the day, move uphill; in the heat of the day, move downhill.
Noise, movement, and your scent are all dead giveaways. With all the modern tech we have, it’s superbly easy to know which way the wind will be blowing in the morning and evening. Admittedly northwest Florida isn’t very hilly, but moving up and down hills depending on the temperatures allows you to approach the animal from an advantageous angle.
4. The best camouflage pattern is called, “Sit down and be quiet!” Your grandpa hunted deer in a red plaid coat. Think about that for a second.
I don’t think Fred Bear was anti-camouflage. In fact, I know he wasn’t. This is my favorite commandment, and I think he was basically saying the highest-tech camouflage doesn’t replace discipline. (As a side note, I killed my first deer in blue jeans and a grey jacket.)
5. Take only the gear to the field that allows you to hunt longer, harder, and smarter.
This is a great fieldcraft skill for anyone. The message conveyed then is the same as it is now. Does the gear allow you to succeed in your mission? If not, it’s dead weight.
6. A rainstorm isn’t a reason to quit the hunt. It’s a reason to stay.”
Animals move differently depending on the weather, and that might be the best reason to get a little wet. I admittedly didn’t understand this commandment until recently. To me, we stayed in the woods because all the weekend warriors would leave, meaning fewer people to deal with, and vehicles moving would scare them off the dirt roads and, hopefully, to us.
7. Camouflage your appearance, your sound, and your scent.
I told you Fred Bear wasn’t anti-camouflage. Animals tend to be sensitive to their environments, skittish, and anything out of the ordinary can scare them off. You are out of the ordinary, and so is your movement, noise, and Gain laundry detergent. Be smart, think natural, and be scentless, soundless, and still. Mosquitoes are a test you just gotta pass.
8. Be sure of your shot. Nothing is more expensive than regret.
If you’ve hunted for a bit, you know that the biggest buck you’ve ever seen is going to approach you from the worst angle possible. Eventually, you’ll be forced to try and shoot, or maybe for a more advantageous position.
9. Hunt where the deer actually are, not where you’d imagine them to be
Have you ever found a nice, dry piece of dirt with great angles of fire that seems mosquito free? It’d be great if deer passed through that area. However, if you can’t find any tracks, scat, rubbing, old antlers, or any other sign, then maybe you should keep looking.
10. Next year’s hunt begins the minute this season’s hunt ends.
I certainly didn’t understand this commandment until I became an adult and planned my own hunts. Nowadays, I know that scouting and learning are a continual process. Ensuring your skills with your chosen weapon stay sharp and you have ammo to boot ensures you aren’t scrambling when fall sets in.
The Commandments
Fred Bear’s Commandments remain relevant to this day. Adhering to these commandments will make you a better hunter, and if you’re a new hunter, it’s wise to remember and understand these commandments. It gives you good footing to be successful. If you’ll excuse me, I’m headed to the stand.
All three of the boys are back this week discussing the aftermath of SHOT Show and then veering off into the topic that’s on everyone’s minds, the ATF’s ban on pistol braces for guns that definitely aren’t rifles but kinda are.
I was fortunate enough to appear on the Primary & Secondary 6th Annual Airing of Grievances, and one of the things I shared was my perception of how out of balance some people can get in regards to their various skills and abilities.
With the proliferation of shot timer aps and various dry practice tools, it’s now easier than ever to improve our technical shooting for relatively nominal investments of time and money.
This is doubly appealing because the related gear gives us immediate feedback and a very clear roadmap to improvement.
The siren’s song of measurable performance standards can unfortunately distract people from the other facets of defense craft that aren’t as quantifiable.
Mark Luell of Growing Up Guns has a great diagram called The Path that highlights the various disciplines that go into being a well rounded practitioner.
The Path
Other than Strength & Conditioning, where you’re measuring resting heartrate, squat/deadlift/bench press, BMR, various body measurements, etc., it’s hard to put a number on the performance of the other areas like combatives, medical (aside from the Lone Start Medic par time for tourniquet application), and so on.
The problem as I see it is that someone’s shooting performance is only relevant if a situation degrades into a defensive shooting, at which point virtually everything has gone wrong.
Aside from some rather hand-wavey lip service to “situational awareness”, there doesn’t appear to be nearly the focus on the proactive side of the equation (Left of Bang) vs. the reactive (after the beep, as it were).
PHLster recently aired a great interview between Jon Hauptman and Craig Douglas on this subject of what happens “Before the Beep” that I encourage everyone to go watch.
Now don’t misunderstand me. At no point am I saying that technical skill doesn’t matter. The more skill you have, the less net effect degradation will have when you’re performing under duress (another concept highlighted by John Hearne in his “Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why” lecture.
My point is simply that it’s easier to work on technical shooting, and the mechanisms to do so are readily available.
I just caution people to not let their skills get so out of balance that the only arena in which they’re truly competent is a gunfight, otherwise they may miss all the opportunities up to that point to avoid one all together.
If you’ve ever used the wagon-wheel style competency chart, the ideal goal is for all the relevant skills to form as close to a circle as possible. Having a nice tight circle with one big spike that looks like an ice cream cone should highlight what areas may warrant more focus than trying to get splits down from .20 to .17 (as an arbitrary example)
DISCLAIMER: This is all predicated on the assumption that the topic of discussion is self defense and personal protection. Obviously the priorities will differ for those in an armed profession, avid competitive shooters, etc.
One of the more interesting rifle-related things unveiled at SHOT Show 2023 was also one of the most interesting Foxtrot Mike products available yet: an AK AR hybrid called the Mike-102. The Foxtrot Mike Mike-102 is a hybrid AR 15 and AK 47 rifle with some HK influences forged in. That may or may not appeal to some folks, but you can bet it will to many others.
Why? Because we can. ‘Merica.
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Foxtrot Mike Products: the Mike-102
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AK AR HK Hybrid?
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The FM Mike-102 is an AR15 platform chambered in .223 Wylde that feeds from AK magazines. It utilizes the Foxtrot Mike compact DI system, features a folding stock, and sports an HK-style forward charging handle.
This is an intriguing combination that provides AR handling, the use of rock-and-lock AK mags, and the option of using the “HK slap” to drop the bolt.
Maybe we’re shallow, but we like that.
Here are some other FM Mike-102 things to know:
• Production testing was at least partially conducted during KalashBash and Red Oktober.
• It’s a bufferless system (i.e., no buffer nor no buffer tube).
• Some have a non-reciprocating side charging handle; others have the “slap mod”.
• The “slap mod variant” echoes HK charging handles.
• You can lock the bolt to the rear.
• It takes AK102 compatible magazines in 5.56×45
• Will be available in sizes ranging from a 9-inch pistol all the way up to a 16-inch rifle.
• A 13.9 pin and weld model will be inbound soon.
• So will a 7.62x39mm version.
Via Atlantic Firearms
Foxtrot Mike describes the Mike-102 as a “…modern AK-Hybrid, designed for the modern shooter to use a wide variety of AK 5.56/223 magazines and offer the familiar Rock N Lock magwell. The 102 is lightweight, accurate, and modular, much like an AR-15, but with the added benefit of using most AK magazines. It uses a simple direct impingement operating system that is simple and reliable.”
An old joke is that the hundred dollar bill and I have a lot in common. We aren’t what we used to be. It is quite true. A thousand dollar target gun was once a superb handgun capable to the finest accuracy available. Today we have some of the finest handguns in the world that will outshoot anything available in the past. They are also proportionately quite pricey. A handgun priced below one thousand dollars that performs like much more expensive race guns is the SAR K12 Sport. This pistol will get you into the shooting sports and serve will until you have outpaced its ability and need something superior. That may be a long time.
This isn’t a concealed carry pistol by any stretch but a purpose designed target pistol. It would be a fine home defense and small game pistol based on its handling reliability and accuracy. If you are not a competitor just the same you will enjoy firing this handgun. The SAR K12 Sport features modest recoil even with the hottest loads. The SAR K12 sport is based on the CZ 75 pistol. SAR has manufactured standard CZ 75 clones in the past and it wasn’t a stretch to manufacture a target grade CZ type pistol. The CZ design has been re-designed and modified into compact handguns as well as long slide pistols and the type has proven versatile with the many versions successful in a given role.
Sarsilmaz of Turkey (SAR’s full name) is a respected maker of service grade weapons. They have well over on hundred years experience. The K12 Sport in SAR’s own words is their Crown Jewel. This is a bold statement and one that fits the pistol. This is a full size CZ 75 styled pistol. The pistol features a locked breech short recoil system. The K12 locks the barrel into the slide on the barrel hood and unlocks with angled camming surfaces. The majority of the pistol is stainless steel. The safety and slide lock as well as the sights are nicely blue finished. The handles are aluminum stocks. They offer and excellent balance of adhesion and abrasion. Both the front strap and the rear strap are nicely checkered. This pistol sets solid in the hand and doesn’t squirm at all- with the strongest 9mm loads. The pistol is modified from the original double action first shot format to a single action only trigger. The ambidextrous safety operates in a manner different from the CZ 75. The safety when activated keeps the hammer locked. The slide isn’t locked in place however. The safety may be applied with the hammer down and in this position the slide is locked in place. An advantage of the single action safety is that the pistol may be loaded and unloaded with the safety applied. The pistol is supplied with a two seventeen rond magazines. The rear sight is a sturdy fully adjustable unit. Windage and elevation adjustments were positive and precise. The front sight is a solid post.
In common with the CZ 75 the K12 features a low riding slide. The slide rides inside the frame rather than mounting over the frame in conventional designs. This results in greater contact between the slide and the frame and a lower bore axis. A trade off is that the slide is more difficult to rack due to the design but this isn’t difficult to deal with. The long dust cover helps provide balance in a heavy pistol. The barrel is 4.7 inches long. The slide lock magazine catch and safety are positive in operation. The pistol features a target grade magazine well that makes for excellent speed in reloading. Sliding a tapered magazine into this magazine well quickly doesn’t require much practice. The trigger is clean and crisp breaking at 5.9 pounds at the end of the test period. The trigger requires acclimation. I recommend considerable dry fire before you attempt the best results the same as with any target grade handgun.
The handle is comfortable for average size hands despite its size. The pistol is heavy at 44 ounces. Recoil is inconsequential. Muzzle flip is subdued. After firing the pistol for several hundred rounds over the past few months there have been no failures to feed chamber fire or eject. Like most quality handguns the K12 prefers one load to the other in terms of absolute accuracy but no loads were not accurate some were simply stand outs. The Remington 115 grain jacketed load is among the cleanest burning and accurate ‘generic’ loads. I have fired the Remington/K12 combination extensively with good results. When clocking loads and firing for accuracy I determined most loads generated 40 to 50 fps more velocity over the typical 4 inch barrel service pistol. As for absolute accuracy I have fired the pistol from the MTM Caseguard K Zone shooting rest with good results. I have averaged five shot groups of an average 2.25 inches with a variety of loads. The smallest five shot group has been 1.85 inch while the largest has been around 3.0 inch, certainly my fault. The pistol is accurate enough for most chores.
SAR K12 Sport 9mm specifications
Overall Length: 8.5 inch
Barrel Length: 4.7 inch
Action: Single Action
Caliber: 9mm
Capacity: 17
Weight: 44 ounces
Thanks to SARUSA for photo support.
There are many SAR variants each offering good performance.SAR offers a high grade X version of several of their handguns.Fit and finish are excellent.The author’s K12 has been a reliable and accurate handgun. The only trace of wear is a slight burnishing of the barrel hood.
There are many parts that make up a 10/22 rifle, and each one of them plays an important role. However, the most critical component of the Ruger is the bolt.
The trigger may be what initiates every shot, but it’s the bolt that’s responsible for the shot-to-shot operation.
A high-quality bolt affects more than just reliability. The bolt face, its consistency, and how the firing pin strikes the bullet significantly contribute to the rifle’s accuracy.
Faxon Stainless Steel Bolt Assembly for 10/22
Whether you’re building up a new gun or keeping an old favorite running, the Faxon 10/22 Bolt Assembly is the best choice.
Compatible with the OEM receiver, trigger group, charging handle, and bolt stop pin, the Faxon 10/22 bolt is fully assembled and ready to drop into your Ruger 10/22.
Specs
Material: 17-4 PH Stainless steel, H900
Hardness: HRC 40 – 47
Round Firing Pin
Sharp Extractor
Why Upgrade a 10/22 Bolt?
Upgrading the bolt improves reliability and accuracy on any 10/22 rifle.
A high-quality bolt such as the one from Faxon Firearms is properly radiused and polished to enhance the reliability of the cyclic action.
Additionally, the Faxon 10/22 bolt has the proper head spacing in order to improve the reliability of the bullets feeding from the magazine into the chamber.
Lastly, proper firing pin protrusion ensures optimal striking of the rimfire case.
For these reasons, upgrading your 10/22 bolt does have its advantages.
All these small gains add up to overall reliability, consistent performance, and improved accuracy.
Does The Ruger 10/22 Have a Bolt Hold Open?
Out of the box in the stock configuration, the Ruger 10/22 does not have a last-round bolt hold open feature.
To add the bolt hold open feature, you need a third-party upgrade such as the CST Auto Bolt Stop.
What is a 10/22 Bolt Buffer?
A bolt buffer replaces/upgrades the bolt stop pin in your 10/22 receiver. The OEM bolt stop pin is made from steel, whereas the bolt buffer is made from a polymer material.
Over time the steel bolt stop pin can cause micro-cracks in the receiver due to repeated impacts of the bolt during shooting. The bolt buffer mitigates that and several other issues by being manufactured out of a polymer material.
There are three main benefits of replacing the bolt stop pin with a bolt buffer.
It reduces the sound when the bolt slams rearward during the cycling action during shooting. This is also a benefit when shooting suppressed as it greatly reduces the noise signature even more.
The 10/22 blowback action is less shaky because of the dampening of the recoil and bolt cycling vibrations.
It can prevent cracks in the 10/22 receiver resulting from prolonged usage, high round count shooting, or the added stress of high-velocity ammo.
The Ruger 10/22 bolt by Faxon includes a bolt buffer to replace the OEM bolt stop pin. If you’re interested in learning more, check out more on the Ruger 10/22 Bolt here.
The big bore era of defensive pistols has come and passed, but in its wake, we have countless stories, guns, and calibers. One such caliber, and by extension numerous guns, is the .44 Special. In the day and age of black powder firearms, the big-bore revolver reigned supreme. If it didn’t have four in the name, it must be made for pocket carry. The most famous being .45 Colt, but that’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of other .45s and .44s.
The .44 Special is descended from the rounds of this era. Specifically, it came from the .44 Russian. The .44 Russian is an already interesting design. It was a black powder, center-fire metallic cartridge. It was the first caliber to use an internally lubricated bullet. The Russian nomenclature comes from its development for the Russian military by S&W. The .44 Russian took advantage of new and better metallurgy, and S&W amped it up.
The .44 Russian cartridge launched a 246-grain cartridge at 750 feet per second. That’s not that far from the 45 ACP, even though it was designed in 1870. The projectile was actually a .429 projectile, and they reduced the diameter by adding lubrication grooves to the base.
Aren’t We Talking About the .44 Special?
Yes, but we really have to establish where it came from. Fast forward from 1870 to 1907, and S&W we still in the early 1900s. S&W decided to take advantage of that fancy smokeless powder and designed the Smith and Wesson .44 Hand Ejector 1st Model New Century. They weren’t fans of short, catchy names. This gun became known as the Triple Lock. The name comes from the third locking lug on the cylinder crane.
This new lock allowed the gun to fire the hot and heavy .44 Special cartridge. Alongside this new revolver, S&W had taken the .44 Russian and turned it into the .44 Special. The case was lengthed a bit, and of course, it’s a smokeless powder round. This new cartridge and revolver succeeded and did well for itself.
Elmer Keith declared it the finest revolver ever made. That’s high praise from a man considered to be one of the foremost firearm experts and revolver shooters at the time. S&W’s cartridge was capable of throwing a 246-grain projectile at 750 feet per second. We are getting fairly close to 45 ACP territory and speeds.
That was just the factory loadings. It wasn’t long before hand loads became the legacy of the .44 Special. The factory loadings were good, but the hand loads went hot and heavy. Handloading this round improved its overall performance and helped prove the versatility of the round.
The .44 Associates
A group of shooters, including Elmer Keither and Skeeter Skelton, formed a loose collective known as the .44 Associates. These men would experiment with hand loads and share tips and tricks. Writers in the group penned articles and reloading data. Sometimes they blew up a revolver, but that was the nature of the beast. The .44 Special had grabbed hold of the American revolver shooters. This popularity would eventually effectively kill the popularity of this round.
Elmer Keith is well known for two things, revolvers and magnum loadings. He helped create the .357 Magnum cartridge by continually pushing the limits of the .38 Special cartridge. He eventually started to do the same with the .44 Special. He loaded it heavier and heavier and reached .44 Magnum levels.
He was getting this magnum performance from the .44 Special. Eventually, Remington decided to develop this hot loaded cartridge into the .44 Remington Magnum. They did lengthen the case by .125 of an inch. This wasn’t necessary to reach those magnum levels, but Remington’s rationale was one of safety. These hot loads weren’t appropriate for all .44 Special revolvers.
You likely didn’t want one slipping into a 1907-made Hand Ejector.
The Birth of the .44 Magnum
Thus the .44 Magnum was born. Its power quickly outshined ye olde .44 Special, and the round declined in popularity. It chugged along, and in the 1970s, the Charter Arms Bulldog produced a more modern .44 Special revolver. It became one of the best-selling revolvers of the 1970s and 80s, giving a reinvigoration to the round. After that slight bump, the round has somewhat faded to a niche loading.
This fourty-four shares the same relationship with the .44 Magnum as the .38 Special does with the .357 Magnum. If you own a .44 Magnum, you can drop a .44 Special in it and safely shoot the cartridge. It tends to be lighter recoiling but doesn’t seem to be much cheaper than standard .44 Magnum food.
Finding ammo isn’t tough. Underwood makes a load that hits 950 feet per second. Federal makes a .44 Special loading in their Punch lineup that’s a bit light at 180 grains and moves at 815 feet per second. Plenty of companies still produce the cartridge in seemingly small batches, and I found a couple of boxes in the first gun store I walked in.
The .44 Special delivers some big bore fun without big bore recoil, and what’s not to love with that? As the owner of a Charter Arms Bulldog, I’ve long enjoyed this dose of big bore It might not be the bee’s knees in 2022, but it has an interesting history. It came from one innovative round and became another.
The Senate’s usual suspects wasted no time getting in their token efforts to appeal to the gun control voters. With the House in Republican hands for the next two years at least they won’t even have to see the consequences of passing it, they can simply sit and bemoan how the Republican’s hate children and that the 2nd Amendment wasn’t a suicide pact (their latest bit of Californication) and reap the social capital.
It’s genuinely disheartening how often this is the play, and it makes sense… it works on the low-info rubes of the world who are busy with other things. I don’t blame those people for the priority they take on things like this when it isn’t a day-to-day like it is for me. I blame congress critters for using a cheap trick to do less work and not damage their social standing. This is best for all of them if it never passes and continues to be argued about. If it passes then they have to experience the fallout, again, and they can’t use it as a recruiting, fundraising, and campaign button anymore.
Here’s the statement out of Chris Murphy’s office,
WASHINGTON—U.S. Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) this week introduced a pair of bills to protect communities from assault weapons. The Assault Weapons Ban would ban the sale, transfer, manufacture and importation of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and other high-capacity ammunition feeding devices. This includes the gun used by a shooter on January 22 to kill 11 people and injure 9 more at a Lunar New Year’s celebration in Monterey Park, Calif. The Age 21 Act would raise the minimum age to purchase assault weapons from 18 to 21, the same requirement that currently exists in law for handguns.
“It’s no coincidence that almost all of America’s deadliest shootings – including this weekend’s tragedy in Monterey Park – involve a military-style assault weapon. These are firearms designed with the sole purpose of killing as many people as possible and should not be sold to the public. Period,” said Murphy. “The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act proved there is growing consensus that we should require greater scrutiny for buyers under 21. If we don’t have the votes to ban assault weapons altogether, we should start by making sure that no one under the age of 21 is able to get their hands on these killing machines.”
“As used by the Lunar New Year’s shooter only days ago in Monterey Park, assault weapons have only one practical purpose – to kill or injure human beings,” said Blumenthal. “These military-style combat weapons – built for the battlefield and designed to maximize death and destruction – have brought bloodshed and carnage to our streets and continue to be the weapon of choice in countless mass shootings. Guns don’t respect state boundaries, which is why we need a national solution to restricting the ownership and use of assault weapons. Now is the time to honor gun violence victims and survivors with this common sense action.”
“We were tragically reminded this weekend of the deadly nature of assault weapons when a shooter used one to kill 11 people and injure 9 more at a Lunar New Year celebration in California,” said Feinstein. “The constant stream of mass shootings have one common thread: they almost all involve assault weapons. It’s because these weapons were designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible. They have no business in our communities or schools. It’s time we stand up to the gun lobby and remove these weapons of war from our streets, or at the very least keep them out of the hands of young people.”
The Assault Weapons Ban:
Bans the sale, manufacture, transfer and importation of 205 military-style assault weapons by name. Owners may keep existing weapons.
Bans any assault weapon with the capacity to utilize a magazine that is not a fixed ammunition magazine and has one or more military characteristics including a pistol grip, a forward grip, a barrel shroud, a threaded barrel or a folding or telescoping stock. Owners may keep existing weapons.
Bans magazines and other ammunition feeding devices that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, which allow shooters to quickly fire many rounds without needing to reload. Owners may keep existing magazines.
Requires a background check on any future sale, trade or gifting of an assault weapon covered by the bill.
Requires that grandfathered assault weapons are stored using a secure gun storage or safety device like a trigger lock.
Prohibits the transfer of high-capacity ammunition magazines.
Bans bump-fire stocks and other devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire at fully automatic rates.
Exemptions
The bill exempts by name more than 2,200 guns for hunting, household defense or recreational purposes.
The bill includes a grandfather clause that exempts all weapons lawfully possessed at the date of enactment.
The Age 21 Act:
Under current federal law, an individual is required to be at least 21 years old to legally purchase a handgun but only 18 years of age to legally purchase an assault rifle such as an AR-15.
The legislation would create parity in federal firearms law by prohibiting the sale of assault weapons to individuals under 21.
U.S. Representative David Cicilline (D-R.I) will introduce a companion version of the Assault Weapons Ban in the House of Representatives.
“Once again, on Sunday morning, Americans woke up to the tragic news of another massacre perpetrated with an assault weapon. It is far past time to reenact an assault weapons ban and get these weapons of war out of our communities,” said Cicilline. “We passed the assault weapons ban in the House last year with bipartisan support, which was then blocked by Senate Republicans. We need to come together to enact this commonsense, effective, and proven policy to reduce gun violence and save lives. I thank Senator Feinstein for her partnership in this fight and look forward to introducing the House companion bill in the coming weeks.”
So yeah, we’ll see what noise the Senate makes on this.
If the reading of that title leads you to believe that Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed (the set armorer) being charged with their negligence is going to be subverted into a discussion about America’s ‘gun’ problem, you would be correct. After three paragraphs covering how the family wanting Alec to face the consequences anyone should face for involuntarily killing and injuring people by negligence, and not get a pass for being rich and famous, because.. yeah, that is normal expected behavior, we get this point.
At that point, surely, we need to stop and ask ourselves: are we not missing a much bigger point? Is all that talk about what happened on that set distracting us from something far more dangerous — namely some Americans’ utter obsession with firearms, and the nation’s collective failure to properly regulate those weapons?
No, it isn’t. The coverage out of California should be proof of that.
It should also be proof of something else, since there were three shootings that are being discussed to extremely different degrees.
Dance club shooting, Monterey
Media: All High Capacity Assault Pistol! All The Time! This has been the common theme in the reporting
Illegal in California (probably, its a really old design so may actually have been legal to acquire)
Very poor reporting on the suspect. Described as 30’s, was 72.
Immediate Anti-Asian motive alleged. Suspect was Asian and known to the studio as a patron.
Suspect now known as deeply suspicious, distrusting, and often alleged people talked behind his back.
Half Moon Bay
Media: Another Mass Shooting in America!
More quiet about it being California, again…
Another elderly Asian perpetrator, is this an angle we can take? No, no we probably shouldn’t.
Weapon? *Crickets*
Legally owned handgun
Oakland
Media: “Oh, Oakland? No that makes sense. Never mind that place.”
But let’s circle back to the point, whatever one there may be and not harp on media biases in coverage where semi-auto 9mm scary is the headline they’re rolling with and pointing out that every semi-auto 9mm is.. well.. a semi-auto 9mm, with the same approximate lethality, would be unproductive.
Paragraph 2 after the pivot,
The plain truth is, people don’t get shot dead on films set. Or at least, they do very occasionally, such as in the case of Hutchins, and Brandon Lee, who died after being struck by a stun gun while filming the movie The Crow in 1993.
Immediately contradict your own point, bold play.
And to revive a middle school era phrase for this weird point, ‘no duh’. Of course shootings rarely happen on movie studio film sets, there are layers, upon layers, upon layers of protections in place that, when followed correctly, will prevent the vast majority of probable preventable incidents. Paying special attention to the most probable in a given scene, like checking firearms props because we’re going to be pointing them at people, is the normal work environment, not the exception to it.
There are other fatalties, and non-lethal accidents, while makiing films. Yet these tragedies are not common, so much so that when, in the aftermath of Hutchins’ death, the Associated Press was forced to search back decades for a piece on other notable set accidents.
Yes, both the spelling errors are from the original. Whatever, I make them too. All this paragraph says is film safety folks are usually good at their jobs.
Far more common are shooting deaths in America’s streets and schools and grocery stores, where people are routinely shot and killed, almost always by young men who feel aggrieved or left out or depressed.
People are most often murdered in frequented locations and by people with motive and opportunity? Not accidently killed on a movie set? Shocking revelations here in the hot pocket take on American firearms.
Far more common too, are the suicides or attempted suicides that can lead to devastating injuries that can maim and harm for life.
People die on purpose, theirs or someone else’s, more than they die by accident in an environment that employees professional safety staff and whose goal is to shoot entertainment and not each other? Jesus, the profound profoundries of this work are limitless.
A few weeks ago, there was brief outcry when a six-year-old boy took a gun into his school in Newport News, Virginia, putting it in his backpack as casually as one might pack their lunch. He shot his 25-year-old teacher, Abby Zwerner. Thankfully, she lived.
I remember that. There was a great deal of noise made that ‘if the child had been Black, the headline would read different’… The child was Black, the headlines read what they read. The child had also been quoted as wanting to set the teacher on fire. His home life must be great.
That incident was not alone. In 2021, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley shot and killed four student at his high school in suburban Detroit with a gun his parents had bought for him.
We seem to be shifting focus here to tragically stupid parenting decisions, which is tangentially related since it is being argued in court that Crumbley’s parents are guilty of negligent homicide for arming their teen and ignoring concerning behaviors up to that morning at the school.
Others get caught up in random shootings.
Can we stop with the random shooting nonsense, very very few shootings are random. None in fact, if we want to get into the weeds about it. But I’ll allow that things like people shooting into the air in celebration, or just because others are, or just because they felt like shooting their gun in a rather inappropriate place and time are all reasonably the random category.
Someone catching a bullet during an ambush or gunfight that wasn’t meant for them isn’t random, its collateral damage during the commission of a crime.
Every day, America is rocked by such horror, from large headline-grabbling incidents such as the massacre at Ulvade, Texas, or the El Paso Walmart, to numerically smaller, but no less individually tragic. These are the stories that fill the local news.
If it bleeds it leads.
It is estimated there are 400 million firearms in America, more than one for every single person, and they are used to devastating effect.
Yes, they are. That just doesn’t mean what you believe it does and the association you are trying to insinuate is undermined by the very volume of firearms the United States public has. If firearms volume were really the factor it is insinuated to be, repeatedly by unqualified sources, then no other nation could possibly be as blood soaked and body strewn as we are.
Top nations sorted by actual murder count, the rate, region, and guns per 100 residents also listed.
We own between 9 times (South Africa) to over 281 times (Ethiopia) as many firearms per capita as any of the 13 nations who have more murders than we do. We are also the 3rd largest nation on the planet by population, Only China, number 12 for murders, and India, number 2 for murders, have more.
Both of those nations only have about 4% of the firearms ownership the United States does, yet India’s murder rate is almost 4 times that of China, nearly matching the US in rate and tripling it in volume. How? When guns are so much less prevalent in these places.
In 2020, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were 19,384 gun murders, the most since at least 1968. A further 24,000 people killed themselves with guns, according to statistics from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yes. Those are the CDC numbers.
Here’s the FBI’s
Since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, the FBI discourages ranking locations or making comparisons as a way of measuring law enforcement effectiveness. Some of this data may not be comparable to previous years because of differing levels of participation over time.
The cautionary statement by the FBI is well taken.
Just think about it: at least 44,000 Americans were killed in a single year, and with honorable exceptions to the activists and community groups who fight on incident after horrific incident, most of us do nothing about.
Oh? So the armies of social workers, hotlines, support groups, friends, family, rehab centers, medical professionals, police officers, and so forth, to say nothing of the people and money spent from my industry specifically on education and prevention, are all just sitting around with their thumbs up their asses?
It’s just David Hogg and the really demanding moms against the evil pile of inanimate objects?
Instead, we have politicians such as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott bragging about protecting the second amendment even as the bodies pile up.
Trump banned bumpstocks. Didn’t that help? Oh wait, it didn’t, nobody cared, and it was thrown out by the 5th circuit. Trump doesn’t get to brag, honestly at least, about protecting the 2nd Amendment. Cruz and Abbot, more so. I notice we picked Texas here.
You have situations where people seeking elected office argue that any American aged 18 or over should have access to the safe weapons as the military to protect the people against the alleged “tyranny” of the state,
Thanks to your typo there, yes. We want personal weapons at least as safe and effective as the military’s personal arms, kinda why we like the AR and 9mm’s so much.
Last year, Joe Biden and his supporters patted themselves on the back for signing a piece of gun safety regulation. It was feted as the most significant for 30 years, and yet everyone knows it was all but without teeth.
Thank you, finally someone on the other end calling the BSCA out for the anemic nothing burger it is. Just bureaucratic noise that won’t do anything.
America’s real Wild West is not the film sets of westerns, it is our schools and streets and shops and places of worship. It is the playing fields close to the Capitol, where members of Congress got shot and perilously wounded.
I mean, DC is really bad on their homicide rates but its mostly stuck in highly impoverished and crime ridden locations where violence is a currency. The weirdo looney who thinks shooting at congress while they’re playing baseball is a capital idea (pun intended) is at the least arguably more right in their utter wrongness than the one who shoots up a classroom full of elementary children for attention and/or to die.
It is clear this ought not to be a one thing or the other situation. America can work to address the way it thinks about guns and making them safe, while also improving standards on film sets and holding those responsible to account.
Ah, the tie in. We’re back to Baldwin’s blunder. We can do both!
So, all credit to the family of Halyna Hutchins for pushing for justice in the case of their loved one. Let’s hope the case proves that nobody is above the law.
Hunter Biden, please double check your 4473. Hunter Biden, Form 4473 please.
But if America is going to address its real gun problem, it needs to engage with a cold sharp dose of reality.
Reality of what?
That the three top states for mass shootings the past 4 years are always Illinois, California, and Texas, with New York coming in 4th for 2020 and 2021 (only 10th in 2022, good job NY!).
That Texas was only 1st in shootings in 2022 with 36, down from 2021 like everyone was thankfully, while Illinois took top “honors” the two previous years with 69 in 2020 and 80 in 2021?
That only one of those four states has permissive and ascribed ‘problematic’ gun laws?
That the common allegation that ‘permissive gun laws make states more dangerous’ falls apart if you look at Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire along with New York, Illinois, and California?
If you claim ‘Those aren’t valid comparisons’, you’re right but neither is the original claim.
That most ‘mass shootings’ (4+ injured or killed in any combination, not including the shooter) went unsolved these last 4 years (55-75%)?
That among the known perpetrators of these mass shootings, never more than 45% known also, 68-75% of them in any given year are of a particular demographic?
That the two larger demographics, who make up 75.8% of the total population vs. the of note demographic’s 13.6%, account for only 12% to 15% each of the mass shooters in any given year
The largest combined percentage (2022) of these two larger demographics coming it at 29% of the year’s mass shootings vs. the smaller demographic’s 71% portion?
That mass shooting occurrences dropped 43% in 2022 over 2021?
Despite more states than ever legalizing carry without a permit
The Bruen decision
Millions more first time gun owners
Millions of more AR type weapons than ever before in history
Is that enough cold sharp dosing of reality for you?
Bump stock ban? Wasn’t that a million years ago? We know it can be difficult to remember a time before 2020, but we assure you it was there. Look back with us through the mists of history to 2013, a time beyond imagination, with Joe Biden in the White House. A time when Democrats in the executive and legislative branches were fervently calling for a new Federal AWB, state-level background check laws were all the rage, and two Colorado state senators got tossed out in recall elections as a result. Ok so maybe it’s not actually all that different, but one thing that stands out, (and links back to the topic in the headline, we promise) is the passage of the SAFE Act in NY, and CT’s copycat bill.
Requiring registration of “assault weapons”, which especially in NY’s case included damn near anything designed after 1890, was to be the end of gun violence in New York. Certainly once everyone who legally owned a weapon that fell under this law was on a list maintained by the police, violence and hate itself would evaporate from the souls of all New Yorkers. Well, fortunately we’ll never know if that’s how it works because essentially nobody obeyed. Per Hudson Valley 1, 3 years after the passage of NY’s SAFE act less than 5% of the estimated 1,000,000 people who were supposed to be registering their newly minted Assault Weapons actually did so. CT had similar results, with both landing squarely in the ~95% civil disobedience zone. This pales in comparison to the rate at which Americans at large ignored the bump stock ban, but give the blue states some credit.
So now, when we see that the ATF’s own report detailing that, and let me bold this for emphasis, less than 0.2% of estimated bump stock owners obeyed Trump’s unconstitutional bump stock ban, are we meant to be surprised? Given that NY and CT both have 50% or more of registered voters listing their party affiliation as Democrat, how are we meant to imagine that something like a federal AWB would actually go over? 1/3 adults in CT consider themselves Republicans, and the gun laws enacted there were ignored despite being LESS draconian than the ones being proposed for the entire country. I realize this isn’t a humor column, but take a moment to imagine how deep red states like AL, TX, MS, GA, OK, FL, SC, MT, ND/SD, etc would react to this given the massive failure in powder blue New England. How is the near universal noncompliance with the bump stock ban not instructive to antigun lawmakers?
Lastly, with the recent overturning of the bump stock ban that nobody obeyed, the SCOTUS Bruen decision -and all of the evolving downstream state and federal court impacts thereof- and the general annihilation of anti-gun momentum that has accompanied that, is anyone taking the pistol brace ruling seriously? Looking at the record of such things, the answer is almost certainly “no”, but if you try to run a Form 4 in spring, let us know what the wait time is.
This GI gun is reliable but not as desirable for all around use as the Mil Spec.
It is an understatement if I say the 1911 is a very popular handgun. It is also fair to say that the majority are of recreational value only. I would never trust most makes for personal defense. There are pistols in the middle range from Springfield, Colt, SIG and Ruger I find reliable enough for personal defense. The 1911 offers a combination of emotional attachment, history, and deadly efficiency in the right handgun. Prices range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. While you may not need a Les Baer or Wilson Combat pistol you do need a reliable handgun. Springfield recently introduced the Garrison to replace the Mil Spec pistol. There are still plenty of Mil Spec 1911 handguns for sale. One local shop had three on hand. I don’t usually have the reader running about looking for older guns. Usually there are better guns to be had brand hammer new. In this case you may wish to grab a Mil Spec!
The Mil Spec is a reliable and useful handgun.GI sights, left, compared to the superior Mil Spec units, right.
Most Mil Spec 1911 handguns are parkerized. A very few are stainless steel. Some are two tone although I have seen only photos. Some are olive drab. The parkerized gun seems the majority finish. The pistol features a lightweight firing pin and heavy duty firing pin spring for safety. The action, then, is a Series 70 or Mil Spec without a firing pin block. Yet the lightweight firing pin and heavy duty firing pin spring make the pistol drop safe. A lowered ejection port and high profile sights separate the Mil Spec from GI handguns. GI guns are OK while the Mil Spec is more useful for most shooting chores. The pistol features a short trigger and arched mainspring housing. I find this set up superior for fast combat shooting versus target shooting. Before firing the Springfield Mil Spec 1911A1 .45 lets look at the specifications.
Specifications:
Barrel Length: 5″
Weight: 36 ounces
Overall Length: 8.625″
Trigger Pull Weight: 6.2 pounds.
Recoil Spring & Guide Rod: Standard GI
Sights Fixed: 3-dot
Safety: Slide lock and grip safety
Magazines: 7 round- compatible with all 1911 magazines.
The front sight measures .12 wide as far as I am able to measure. An .11 inch rear notch makes for a good sight picture. There is very little lateral play in the slide to frame fit. Barrel to slide and barrel to bushing fit isn’t tight but snug as it should be. There is room for foreign material and powder ash but enough tolerance to ensure reliability. The slide lock safety is tight and indents properly. The grip safety should release its hold on the trigger about half way into compression. The Springfield requires the grip safety be ‘mashed’ nearly to the frame so be certain you have a good hold on this 1911.
The Springfield is a useful base gun for custom work. This one features Novak Sights.Springfield 1911 handguns are useful personal defense pistols. This one has been to Novak’s Gun Shop.
Firing test went as expected. I fired fifty rounds of Black Hills Ammunition 230 grain full metal jacketed ammunition at 7, 10, and 15 yards. The pistol comes on target quickly. Good hits were easy enough. I have a lot of time in with the 1911. I ate the X ring out at 7 yards and made good groups at 15 yards. A steel frame .45 doesn’t kick that much. The pistol is controllable and handles well. The sights are leagues ahead of a GI .45 but certainly are not Novak sights. I find the Springfield Mil Spec well suited to personal defense. The final and least important test was firing for accuracy from a solid bench rest using the MTM Caseguard K Zone firing rest. I used three loads. These included the Black Hills Ammunition 230 grain FMJ loading, the Black Hills 185 grain JHP and the new 135 grain Honey Badger.
Results: Black Hills Ammunition 5 shot group in inches
230 grain FMJ 2.6 in.
185 grain Jacketed hollow point 2.8 in.
135 grain Honey Badger 2.5 in.
Note wider deeper ejection port, top, of the Springfield Mil Spec compared to a GI type gun, below.
The pistol’s sights are well regulated for the six o’clock hold at 25 yards with the 230 grain load giving a dead on hold at about 50 yards. The 135 grain load struck 2.3 inch low. The Springfield Mil Spec is a great shooter for the money. It is well worth your hard earned money.
As someone always looking to learn, I’ve been looking at common platforms that I’m not that experienced with. The AK is one of those platforms. I love the classic Cold War AK, but admittedly I’m stuck in the stone age. I’ve begun to look at the world of the AK and what’s new and great within that field. That leads me to the JMAC Customs KeyMount muzzle device.
I’m fairly familiar with the idea of a 14.5 M4 barrel using a pinned and welded muzzle device. These permanently attached devices bring the total length to 16 inches and stay out of the realm of the NFA. I had no idea people did the same thing with their AK rifles.
JMAC designs a KeyMount muzzle device to do this and one for more standard 16-inch barrels. Keep in mind that the two models are different, and you don’t want to purchase the model intended for a 14.5-inch barrel for a 16-inch barrel and vice versa. Other than that, what sets the brake apart from the rest of the AK Muzzle devices?
The Humble AK and the KeyMount
My experience with AK muzzles is limited to the old slant muzzle device, the Krinkov style flash can style device, and at one point, a Tapco Razr. I know, but I was young, and it looked cool. I haven’t tried anything too modern, so this was a new experience. The KeyMount muzzle device isn’t just a brake but acts as a means to attach a Dead Air Silencers suppressor to the gun.
I don’t have one, but now I kind of want one, if only to make the best out of a 135-dollar investment. The brake is 2.82 inches long, but 1.32 inches of that sleeves the barrel. The additional length is only 1.5 inches added to the gun. In that 1.5 inches, we get four ports for recoil reduction. It’s made from 17-4ph Stainless for blast-proof strength and weighs 3.5 ounces.
At the Range
AK rifles aren’t shoulder bruisers by any means, but they do have some noticeable recoil when compared to other intermediate-caliber rifles. The 5.45 variants have much less recoil than the standard 7.62 models. That’s why everyone loves the 5.45, weight savings and better effective range.
However, the 7.62x39mm remains a hammer when it comes to hard cover. If you want to keep that hammer-like prowess without the recoil, then the JMAC KeyMount brake is for you. It takes a 7.62 AK and makes it feel like a 5.45 AK. It’s an impressive degree of recoil reduction.
You always expect some, but then sometimes you get absolutely blown away. I was blown away by how well this thing worked. It cut out recoil but also didn’t provide any noticeable increase in flash. I’m not firing under NVGs, but for standard daylight shooting, it’s perfectly fine. There is a lot of noise, and you wouldn’t make friends at an indoor range.
The KeyMount Brake delivers as promised. It’s an impressive showing and an effective way to convince me to try suppressing my AK.
After the gun registration amnesty window closes what happens if the application gets denied because an @ATFHQ bureaucrat doesn't complete the background check on-time? (Denials are automatic after 88 days) A common bureaucratic denial could make compliant gun owners into FELONS! pic.twitter.com/P03KDqv8tk
GOA is raising alarms that the ATF’s ruling on pistol braces, and the resultant pistol brace amnesty and registration period may not be as benign as it seems. In case you’ve missed it, this week the ATF released an administrative ruling that pistol braces -which they have specifically allowed the sale and use of for a decade- placed on a pistol as intended by the manufacturer constitute the construction of an unregistered NFA device. They have graciously offered a 120 day grace period in which some of the 40,000,000 people who bought braces can register their braced guns as SBRs, without the usual $200 fee.
While this pistol brace amnesty period, and waived fee sound pretty great, there has been some understandable skepticism in the gun and legal communities surrounding the details of how this might actually shake out IRL, and they’ve raised some frightening and accurate points. The FBI often, for administrative reasons, fails to complete NICS background checks, to the tune of between 2-3% of the total. After 88 days those checks are purged, and any paperwork or progress simply vanishes, incomplete. It’s like the check was never initiated. Over a 5 year period, the number of such cases was over 1 million.
Now consider, (and this has been proposed by a GOA lawyer and confirmed by an ATF employee which must assume know their stuff) what might happen if you send in an application for what is legally an unregistered SBR, providing a photograph of said unregistered NFA item, along with all of your personal information to take advantage of this pistol brace amnesty. Say you got a late start, and took a while with the paperwork but still got your application in with two months to go before the pistol brace amnesty ends. But you wind up one of those >2% whose application falls off the back of a truck, and 88 days later, is purged. The ATF now knows that you are, under the law, a felon. Not only that, they know everything about you from where you live, to what you and your unregistered SBR look like. Per GOA Attorney Stephen Stamboulieh, ATF representatives @ SHOT 2023 confirmed they would prosecute in such a case.
The consequences of this are functionally life-changing -with up to a decade in federal prison, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and a federal firearms felony on your record- so it’s not without cause that the circumstances of the pistol brace amnesty are drawing attention. Notably the entire ruling is in question after a Federal Appeals Court overturned Trump’s similarly overreaching, contortionist logic bumpstock ban, but in the meantime, gun owners shouldn’t be afraid of a Federal LE Agency ruining their lives for simply attempting to comply with new regulatory decisions.
“After the gun registration amnesty window closes what happens if the application gets denied because an @ATFHQ bureaucrat doesn’t complete the background check on-time? (Denials are automatic after 88 days) A common bureaucratic denial could make compliant gun owners into FELONS!”
“This happens ALL THE TIME and it is UNACCEPTABLE that an @ATFHQ representative @NSSFShotShow told GOA attorney@Stambo2A that they would take enforcement action against a gun owner wishing to comply with this unconstitutional gun registration scheme.”
“The new rule creates background checks for up to 40 million firearms, and if the FBI statistics on not completing 2.2% of them stay the same, that means up to 880,000 new felons with a regulatory stroke of the pen & a bureaucratic screw up.”
Vaultek came to light recently when SIG Sauer launched their Rose line. This line invites women to be apart of the firearms community without the intimidation. The kit includes a custom SIG P365 Rose, dummy rounds, training program from Lena Miculek, and a Vaultek Lifepod. The fact that a new firearms owner can immediately own something that is very important to owning a firearm safely is great. A Vaultek Lifepod allows users to safely store their firearm yet retrieve it quickly with the touch of a button.
This year at SHOT Show Vaultek showed us this and a couple of other great products that include biometrics, humidity control, and a clock. Crazy right?
DS2I Smart Station
Price:$479.99
Features
Fits one full size pistol and one compact
Entry methods include biometric scanner, smart sense keypad, backup keys, and vaultek nano key
automatic and silent opening drawer once entry method is complete
internal light and soft padded insert
digital touch display that shows time/temp/humidity
wireless charging, micro-usb, and usb-c ports for additional chargers
anti theft features such as the ability to tether it to your wall, tampering detection, and sleep move if wrong codes/fingerprints are entered
The DS2i Smart Station features multiple ways to charge your phone including wireless, micro-usb, and usb-c. The display shows status of the vault, the time, and temperature info.The inside of the DS2i features a protective cushion insert and internal light. When entry is made into the vault this drawer will automatically open up quietly and quickly.
LifePod
Price: $109.99 Special Edition Price: $139.99
Features
4 digit backlit key pad showing lock pad, status of the vault, and battery left
meets TSA guidelines
micro-USB port for back up power if battery dies
backup key access, two manual keys are included in the package
anti-picking feature can be engaged to prevent lock picking
anti impact latch
high density foam interior
tether attachment point
airtight and weather resistant storage
floats
On the left, the custom Lifepod for the SIG Sauer Rose. On the right, the Lifepod 2.0. This is a larger version of the Lifepod 1.0.
LifePod Micro
Coming April 2023 but Accepting Pre-Order Now
The LifePod Micros give you everything that the Lifepod already does but in a smaller size. Though not available until April 2023, pre-orders can be placed by calling Vaultek.
For more information on each product or to place a pre-order for a LifePod Micro visit vaulteksafe.com
Brandon Tsay (left) wrestled the shooter, eventually getting the gun away from him and pushing him off. The shooter retreated and took his own life
Images are screencaps from a video shared by @FiftyShadesofFDE, who appears to be shadow banned for his trouble.
While the California Governor was crying about the 2nd Amendment being a suicide pact and a 2nd mass shooting occurred in his state as his legislative and regulatory nonsense failed again, resulting in 7 deaths and perpetrated by another elderly Asian male, new details have emerged about the Monterey Park shooting.
The young man in the photo, wearing the white sweatsuit and jacket, has been identified as Brandon Tsay and he wrestled away the shooter’s gun at the 2nd dance studio, Lai Lai Dance Studio in Alhambra, and then fought with the assailant some time more until the much older man gave up and left. The man then took his own life in a vehicle that was being approached by police.
Mr. Tsay showed extraordinary courage. I’m sure a few viewers of the video may be critical of Tsay, wondering why he didn’t shoot back once he had the weapon. To this I will point out a few things. We don’t know if the barrel shrouded MAC10 (or similar) pistol was in a condition to be fired, that Tsay had any notion how to operate the 60ish year old weapon design, and Tsay is fighting a man old enough to be his grandfather. That last part, harming a senior member of your community, is a violation of ancient taboos and not to be considered and judged against lightly. Ultimately what Tsay did worked, he stopped the attack and the last person to die was the attacker.
Still more have started to don their tin foil apparel, and honestly I can’t be too critical of them for it because of the timing, and point out how “obvious” it is that these two attacks were staged to push gun control. This has been a popular conspiracy online, fired by coincidence that is easily explained with detailed analysis and the application of Occam’s Razor, but on the surface look suspicious. Before these latest two shootings in California, moving the conspiracy trope to elderly Asian male perpetrators, it was popular to farcically suggest gun stores should not sell Daniel Defense rifles and EOTech sights to very skinny young white men, as they had been present at more than one recent shooting. Theorists went so far as to publish a whole series of memes suggesting these young men were stoked to violence by the FBI. I don’t believe that, but the Federal government’s record on actions similar to that aren’t exactly spotless either.
Federal enforcement and operations have not shown themselves to be anywhere like beyond reproach. Instead their past actions invite the public and judiciary to use the most extreme scrutiny on all of their actions.
Brandon Tsay wrestles the shooter, eventually getting the gun away from him. Screencap.
Media Response
Now that we’ve given Mr. Tsay his well earned praise, let’s go back to the media, the CA Governor, and all the other fools who’ve contributed to the line “Semi-Automatic Assault Pistol with an Extended High Capacity Magazine.” which would score about a D in any middle school English paper for redundancy. Way to aim for journalist excellence, CNN and friends.
Tsay keeping the attacker away from the MAC10 type pistol. The shooter (dressed in dark clothes and a a hat) continues to try and get it back.
In a time where a large segment of American gun owners are being attacked by the ATF (threatened with felony conviction) over pistol braces, people where terrified the shooter had used a braced gun. Especially with the media description, this seemed like ammunition in gun controllers magazine.
Instead we have an old man shooting an old gun. The MAC10/11 series were designed in 1964, produced in the 70’s, and have been cloned/copied here and there by other companies. They are large, blocky, heavy pistols that came with a barrel shroud to emulate the suppressor they were originally designed with. They had a 30 or 32 round magazine, depending on caliber, cost only $120 at the time, and an effective range of 50 or 70 meters.
I don’t know which model or clone the shooter used (Vox has reported Corbay M11, 9mm), but it is not any variant of a modernized rifle caliber and it wasn’t braced. This firearm could have been purchased any time in the last few decades, there was even a AWB compliant version made during the 94-04 Clinton Assault Weapon Ban called the PM11/9. It had ‘safe’ 10 round magazines and couldn’t accept the super dangerous thread on barrel extender, flash suppressor, handgrip, or a suppressor. None of which material alter the physics of a bullet, many of which make the gun more awkward to carry, and one of which is already NFA controlled (meaning the owner is registered and known to the ATF).
The descriptor tells us it was a semi-auto model. It looks to be a closed bolt model too, making it a post 80’s of some variety as the ATF considers the open bolt ones machine guns, even if semi-auto only (see, making things up is an ATF tradition).
The 72 year old attacker continues to try and retrieve his cold war era pistol.
None of the age or blocky awkwardness of this cold war relic come through in the CNN fearmongery, and that feels deliberate. It probably is deliberate. Never let a good tragedy go to waste. We can’t use any of the usual lines about ‘weapons of today being so power’ since this isn’t a weapon of today, this thing may have been built before I was born. We can’t say modern high power ammunition because all the calibers this thing could be in are about a century old.
It fails all the sniff tests of the scary terms thrown out by the inept and thwarted elites who drive the gun control debate because they refuse to accept that they cannot control human free agency, they cannot remove motive, and therefore there isn’t diddlyshit they can do to stop gun violence.
Vox opines, that is unclear if the elderly shooter acquired his ‘probably illegal’ pistol through legal means. But here’s the kicker, what if he did? What if he bought this when it was legal? What then? What if he didn’t get it through legal means and just bought it from someone who did after the CA or Federal AWB? What then?
Both of these scenarios are equally adept at proving, again, gun control doesn’t work. It requires voluntary compliance that they will not receive and you need only look at the brace ban commentary, the ATF still hasn’t published it to the federal registry by the way, to get an estimate of just how well modern and past compliance are working out. That rule is likely to be stomped out in court like the bumpstock one, the ATF does not possess law making authority and assault weapons bans nationwide are in the line of fire too.
Media sources around the nation are going to elevate this tragedy to something we could have prevented without giving us even the slightest hint how a new rule would have prevented the tragedy. That continues to be a fatal flaw in their logic, [X] rule wouldn’t prevent this or other attacks but we need [X] rule in order to prevent attacks… okay, which ones?
In conclusion, hyperbole, fearmongering, exaggeration, and criminally negligent wishful thinking continue to be the order of the day for gun controllers. Disappointing.
But men and women like Tsay, Fierro, and Dicken give me hope. People willing to step up and act in the moment when the laws have failed, as they will always have the potential to do and will continue to, will continue to save lives through their actions. People who aren’t going to lean upon the ghost of an argument that ‘the thing happening is illegal’ or that ‘these things shouldn’t happen’ and simply deal with the fact that they are happening. Billions of things shouldn’t happen every single day that do, they happen anyway due to nature, negligence, misunderstanding, anger, accident, and occasionally pure cruelty.
We can’t write any of those things out of existence with a law. We should stop trying. Stop believing people who say we can, too. They are only delusional, or lying, and I couldn’t tell you which is more harmful in the end right now.
