Guns, Cars, and Tech

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  • Felon tries to make political statement about why you shouldn’t own guns, winds up in jail

    Here’s the slightly misleading headline:

    Man banned from Stones River Mall for offensive t-shirt

    That offensive t-shirt read “Has your gun killed a kindergartner today?”

    He was asked to remove the shirt, turn it inside out, or leave. He chose to do none of those things, and was arrested. Bryce Myszka is a pretty unique name, so I googled him.

    The first thing that caught my attention was a dismissal order in his lawsuit against some jailers in Rutherford County. That order doesn’t say why he was in jail, and I haven’t nailed that down yet, but the Tennessee Inmate Locator says he’s a convicted felon who’s been out of prison since May of 2008.

    I love being called a murderer for engaging in lawful activity by someone who’s already been to prison.

  • Here we go

    White House endorses banning private firearm sales (which the Newtown Nutjob didn’t use) and normal capacity magazines.

    Let’s see if the GOP has any backbone. I’m not hopeful.

  • Deterrence is not prevention

    Yesterday, the President said this:

    We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law—no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society.

    But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we can do better than this. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that—then surely we have an obligation to try.

    There is one step we can take. We know it works every time.

    We know the formula these shootings follow. They stop immediately when met with armed resistance. It happens every time.

    We know it works. It’s an easy step. It’s laid out right in front of you.

    In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens—from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators—in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this. Because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

    Making sure it’s harder for me to protect myself, my family, and random strangers who might be in the area from lunatics and psychopaths who are not deterred by “gun free zones” is the only thing that makes me “powerless in the face of such carnage.”

    I am disempowered by fiat. Remove the limits on me protecting myself and these things will cease happening.

    What people like Dianne Fienstein et al are proposing are “deterrents” to ownership by people who wouldn’t do this sort of thing in the first place. They do nothing to prevent these shootings. They didn’t work in Germany, or Britain, or Norway, or Mumbai.

    You can’t stop crazy.

    You can, however, change how you react. If more of these guys were put down by good guys before the body count hit double digits, two things would happen:

    1: The “glory” of high body counts would cease to be a motivating factor.

    2: Fewer people would die

    Isn’t that the goal? Don’t we want the same thing?

  • Note to self…

    Gun auctions can be dangerous things.

    If you need me, I’ll be in the dog house.

  • I think my AR just jumped the shark

    In the winter of 2005-2006 I bought a Rock River AR, used, for about $700 from a dealer at a show. I’d always wanted one for two reasons: I spent about 15 minutes in the Army, so I trained on the M16 and Democrats had told me ARs were evil.

    Now, at the time, I didn’t know much about guns. I sure thought I did, and I’m sure seven years from now I’ll say the same thing about something I buy this year. I didn’t know–or bother to ask–that the rifle was used. I probably could have gotten it cheaper, but it’s treated me very well. It was exactly what I was looking for at the time.

    Flattop upper, M4 stock, heavy barrel (because, I kid you not, I thought the 16″ barrels with M4 notches looked stupid), flash suppressor, railed gas block, and standard plastic handguards. I’m fairly certain it came with no sights but its been long enough that I may have forgotten taking them off and tossing them. Basically, it looked just like this:

    Well now it looks like this:

    I swear it weighs 40 pounds now (actually, my bathroom scale says 10). I’ll try to recap how this tragedy happened.

    First thing I did, I believe, was put a crappy red dot sight on it (similar to this one). And by crappy, I mean “battery wouldn’t last through one range session” crappy. You’d have to turn the brightness up to 11 if you were at an outdoor range, and 20 minutes later the dot would be too dim to see. It took one coin cell which, if you replaced it with a brand new one after it died at the range, would be dead by the next time you went to the range.

    After that happened three or four times I was fed up. In Summer of 2007, I replaced that with this:

    The venerable EOTech 512. Love that thing. New shooters love it, too. Point and click. Cheek weld? We don’t need no stinkin cheek weld!

    I believe at this point I had also put one of those handguard mounted rail thingies and a vertical foregrip* on it. I know I had that setup for a while.

    Eventually I “came to my senses” with the handguard rail thingy, and…got railed handguards:

    Note, these are NOT free-float. I got them because, er, rails make you faster? They have speedholes? I have no idea. Around the same time as this idiocy, I got this three point sling (remember those?) which I still don’t understand how to properly use it, if there is such a thing as “proper use of a three point sling.” You can still see one of the fabric loops for that sling affixed to the M4 stock today.

    Now, the very first time I ever went to the range with Oleg, I had a terrible calamity befall me. A couple, actually. First was my horrific embarrassment at being the only one without a suppressor. Another was that my Eotech wasn’t working. The alkaline batteries I had left in there for, oh, two years had exploded! And I still had no iron sights.

    Having your battery-powered optic explode is bad. Not having backup sights is even worse. At the time, Magpul had just come out with their MBUS backup sights, so I looked in to getting some. What I learned was that while the Magpul MBUS Folding Rear Site would work just fine and dandy, the front sight would not. Why?

    Because when I paid extra to get the rifle with no front sight, I severely limited my front sight options. The rail height on a gas block is much lower than the rail on an upper or free-float handguards. That, and apparently the MBUS front sight has been known to warp when mounted to the gas block.

    So I bought a YHM Gas Block Mounted Front Flip Sight. Pay extra to have no front sight, pay even more to put one on. Genius, this guy.

    Okay so now I have sights. And I was able to repair my Eotech after the battery mishap (and yes, it has lithiums now). But now I have a Magpul part. And I know who Chris Costa and Travis Haley are.

    BAM! Off goes the vertical grip, on goes the AFG. I also ditched the sling because I found it was getting in my way.

    The rifle stayed like that for a while, until I put a cheapie weapon light on it back in July.

    Now we’re starting to get just a wee bit ludicrous.

    The rail covers are starting to rot. They’ve always been a bit large for what they do, so I’m looking at alternatives. The rifle as a whole has a more bulky feeling than I’d like, but my use case is as a barricade weapon, not a house-clearing gun. Stay in place, let the bad guys come to me. My house layout isn’t conducive to room clearing with a rifle.

    Well, then a friend at work tells me she bought a bunch of “backpacking” stuff from a Marine, and “there’s some rifle part in there.” As she’s describing it, I realize it’s a Redi-Mag. She asks me if I want it, and of course I do because TRAVIS HALEY.

    So that’s how I got here. I’m probably going to take the Redi-Mag off because (and I don’t know if I just installed it wrong or what) it makes it really hard to push the mag release.

    Maybe I’ll take some Christmas money and buy a free float handguard. Maybe I’ll build a new rifle with light weight in mind. Maybe I’ll keep it the way it is, and continue into self-parody when the new suppressor comes in.

    I don’t know. I just felt like–confessing.

    *Oddly enough, I now view vertical foregrips as a “oh, he must be new at this” marker. They probably always were.

  • So… umm… yeah…

    So, all across the gun blogosphere, people have been talking about Bob Costas’ anti-gun comments in response to Jovan Belcher’s murder-suicide where he shot his girlfriend and then himself.  Costas is apparently under the firm opinion that if Belcher didn’t have a firearm, they would still be alive.

    I don’t know the exact details of the case.

    Heck, the only details I know of his career is what I read at wikipedia for this post.

    I do know that we do have a shining example of what can happen when a highly athletic man that’s taken more than his fair share of hits to the head (I go ahead and assume any veteran linebacker falls into this category) decides to do such a thing.

    Chris Benoit was a wrestler who decided that time had come.  He strangled his wife and child before hanging himself.

    I guess Costas would have rather seen Belcher strangle his girlfriend instead of shoot her?  Maybe that’s the more civilized thing to do?

  • Photographic evidence that Zimmerman was uninjured the night he shot Trayvon Martin

    Right here.

    And I’m sure his nose always looked kinda purple.

  • Stupidity at the gun range

    I went with a couple buddies to the unregulated state run range yesterday, and had to deal with a little more stupidity than usual.  Mostly from the same group of guys.

    First off, they were the “hunters sighting in their rifle” types.  Which means they’d take three shots, then immediately want to go cold so they could go check their targets.  This just pisses me off from a courtesy point of view.  Just because you’re done with your giant string of 3 shots in less than a minute, doesn’t mean the rest of us are.  Hell, there were several times when they called out to go cold just as either I or one of my buddies had just raised our rifle or pistol to shoot.

    Oh, and going hot?  Apparently they just assumed that if everyone is back at the firing line that they didn’t have to say anything.  There were several times that I had to ask “so, you ready to go hot?” as they were loading a round into their rifle.  Granted, they were the only ones shooting at 100 yards (the other folks there were either shooting at the 50 or 25 yard berms), so it’s a pretty safe bet that if they were ready, the rest of were too, but still.  This did cause some confusion, and I know of a few shots fired by these guys or another group when I thought the range was cold.  Oh, and they thought the range was cold at one point when everyone else thought it was hot.

    Annnnnd then there’s protection.  I was asking one of the guys a question and noticed that he had no ears on (he had prescription glasses, or else those probably would have been missing as well).  His response “eh, I left them at home.”  He thanked me when I offered some cheap earbuds from my range bag and stuck those in.  Later, when I walked away for a minute and found the guy’s 10 year old son hovering over my guns that were sitting on the bench (He was obviously bored and was honestly just looking, but still, that’s another thing…).  I noticed that he didn’t have eyes or ears either!  I quickly handed him some plugs and told him to put them in.  I probably would have asked him to go ask his dad if it was ok for him to try one or two of my .22 rifles, but I don’t let folks shoot without both eyes and ears.  The dad should have known better, but is an adult and it’s his choice if he wants to go deaf.  The kid not having eyes and ears made me want to punch the father in the face.

    Oh, and notice how I keep referring to “rifle” when talking about this group?  Best I can tell, there were two guys, and one of their sons there, but only the one rifle.  Which the kid wasn’t shooting.  No wonder the kid was bored and wandering around to see what trouble he could find.

    I won’t say it was entirely them, though.  One of my buddies brought a friend that seemed like a long time shooter.  Early on in the session, I went to set up a target, turned around, and saw him inspecting a Glock.  Guess where it was pointed while he was handling it?  Yep… right at me.  As he turned it, I could see that the slide was locked back, but we had a friendly “chat.”  At first he was wondering why I was upset that he was handling guns while the range was cold, when I told him “you had it pointed at me,” he responded that he had no idea that he was doing that.  I replied “that’s why we don’t handle guns when the range is cold.”  I’d like to think that it’s a sign of great restraint that I failed to either threaten or attempt great bodily harm on him.

    So, to sum up… I had a gun pointed at me during a cold range, there were shots fired during a presumed cold period, folks without standard safety equipment, and lack of consideration to others.  Oh, and one of my buddies recounted a recent trip where he witnessed a guy trying to clear a jam by frantically working the slide while his finger was on the trigger.  Showed up where the guy blew a hole in the concrete doing it, too.

    No wonder Naienko won’t go to that range again, and it’s not terribly surprising that a kid got shot there a little while ago.

  • Posted without comment

    Here is a picture of a T-shirt sporting the American flag (incidentally, sold around the 4th of July) from a company called Faded Glory and made in El Salvador.

  • Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

    It’s even dumber than you might think.