Machine pistol terror

My FOX DC is still parroting the "machine pistol" meme from the story earlier last week about the rapper pulling a semi-auto MAC-10 and shooting at a cop. Read on down to get your fill on the dreaded "gun show loophole," which is odd considering the scumbag didn't get the gun from a gunshow: the gun was purchased legally from a VA gunshop by an unidentified woman who passed the background check.

It's weird that the Tiahrt Amendment didn't stop the identification of the origin of the semi-automatic automatic pistol. No mention of that.

Can't imagine why that is either.

Tragic hunting accident

Near my AO, in King George county VA.

Prayers for this woman's family. I could not imagine that pain.

There are some real idiots in the comments section, but the sister of the girl killed sets things straight. This incident is under investigation, but it seems as though it was an unfortunate freak accident.

Light bloggage

Yesterday I was forced into ceding the right-of-way to a teenager on a back road, and the outcome was hitting a large ditch and several trees at speed in my XTerra. This morning I am waiting for the action of my insurance company to see if my axle is bent, as well as find out if the two front tires facing opposite directions will cause premature tire wear.

For now, you're not going to hear much from me.

One thing I would like to point out this morning is how much cooler TV was way back in the day. My kids are watching Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and I have to find Yukon Cornelius as the best character of the show, with his big knife and revolver on his belt. Unheard of by today's standards. Funny thing is that none of the reindeer notice the grips in his revolver are made of stag:

Speaking of weapon reliability

It looks like the little punk that shot at his teacher with a rifle at the Northern Virginia Community College didn't know how to use it. Armed Canadian has a rundown on why the shooting isn't getting wall-to-wall media coverage.

This might start a flame war, but all firearms are capable of jamming at some point, and if you shoot them enough they surely will. The young scumbag was using a bolt action 30.06 rifle without an optic, which is the epitome of simplicity when we're talking about guns, and it still jammed. I've jammed just about every bolt action, as well as pretty much any other type of gun that I've ever owned, and that is because if you shoot them a lot they will eventually malfunction. Man made things always do. Learning to overcome jams may just save your life, and can only be accomplished with practice.

MAC attack: the semi-automatic machine pistol menace

There are a lot of questions surrounding this story from a police shooting in NYC. The shooter, Raymond Martinez, was an aspiring rapper wanted for assault, and was selling CDs on the street. A uniformed officer approached him over "aggressive panhandling," or something like that, and Martinez decided to flight and fight.

It seems to me that the cop had a hunch that Martinez was a potential scumbag, and that he did pretty well on his approach to not get shot. From what I can gather, there was a foot chase leading up to the shots fired. The gun that Martinez fired at the cop jammed after two rounds, and was reported stolen in VA.

There is much focus in the article on the gun, as if the thing itself was the source of the violence, and not Martinez. The gun is reported like it possesses a margin of extreme violence due to it's menacing looks, its name - MAC-11 - and the fact that it had a magazine capacity of 30 rounds. It has been identified as semi-auto, not full auto, and thus is not a "machine pistol," but that is what the press is calling it because it sounds intimidating and makes the story much more interesting to some.

There is also much ado about a business card from a VA gun shop that was found on Martinez with a quote from a movie; something about cops and paddy wagons.

Overall I think that the cop accurately relied on his training and gut instincts, and the outcome of that was that he survived the shooting of a scumbag. From the standpoint of Martinez, and scumbags in general, I have to wonder why some of them are fascinated with carrying such a stupid weapon. I think MAC-11s are cool, I wouldn't mind having a real one for my collection, and they would probably work great for a home defense role or personal security detail if it were full auto and had a stock, but as for a weapon to be carried they are inferior to a standard handgun which has important things like ergonomics, light weight, and more reliability. For scumbags to be carrying MAC-11s, Uzis, TEC-9s and the like, semi-auto or not, shows that the current breed of scumbag is not as weapon savvy as scumbags of old.

It's the passing lane, silly

Linked by Drudge, this idea has some real merit.

People who cruise in the left lane piss me off to no end, especially when I'm driving around in Northern VA where it's rampant. For those who are staring dumbfounded at the screen because you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain.

The left hand lane of a highway is not the "fast lane," it is the Passing Lane. And when you are diddy-bopping down the road in this lane, jamming to your Flock of Seagulls album, with a line of angry drivers behind you wondering why you're such a dick, it's because what you are doing is illegal.

Clicky that turn signal thingy and get the hell out of the way. Or drive off a cliff. Pick one.

Now you have been advised on why drivers hate you. I just might order me one of these decals for my windshield, as soon as they make one that's profanity laced.

Crime guns: a look inside a gun free zone

A Monday night sweep of the D.C. Jail discovered several weapons, including a 9 mm Glock found in a pay phone accessible to inmates.

Several knives and cell phones also were recovered by corrections officer.

That's not even the surprising part! The gun is thought to be the same one used SIX YEARS AGO!!! THE SAME ONE!! Not only that, but the jail has had shootings in it before - from drug deals gone bad to inmate conspiracies to shoot one another and sue the jail for it.

What a perfect little world they live in. The most trusted guards in our nation's capitol can't keep guns out of a jail full of inmates.

I KNOW!! We should bring that style of safety to every American city!! Yay safety!!!!

Scaring the herd

In a scene reminiscent of other school shootings, a Northern Virginia Community College teacher spotted a weapon and ducked to avoid gunfire. Students ran from the classroom building while others barricaded themselves inside, piling desks in front of doors.

Thank God nobody was hurt. And by that I mean that God was the only thing standing in between a gunman and his prey.

I would ask why students and their families, cops, and campus faculty aren't screaming outrage from the rafters about how the only approved actionable recourse in the school's standard operating procedure for this type of violence is to collectively bury everyone's head in the sand and wait for guys with guns who are minutes away, but I think I know the answer to that already.

Students who attend college are still considered kids by all accounts that I'm aware of.

The shame of it is is that the school is busy patting itself on the back for a job well done, considering that their email system alerting everyone to cower in a corner actually didn't seem to fail this time. Just look at how orderly everything looks in that little 20 second video clip of students being calmly escorted out of the school by police, after the shooter had voluntarily given up I might add. If he had been firing down on them with his "high-powered" rifle (as opposed to a low powered one?) then things would have been different.

I am glad that nobody was hurt, but ultimately I don't think this ended as well as the school and the media would have you believe. When the hero of the day gets accolades for ducking when shot at and shouting out "RUN," you have to notice how low we're setting the bar.

Chuck Norris is in a cult?

Or is the cult in Chuck Norris? You be the judge.

(Found at HotAir)

"I don't want to kill him"

Posted at Ace of Spades is a 911 audio call of a woman killing a home intruder.

Truly awful, but it had to be that way. I couldn't imagine having to deal with that sort of violence. This gives you an idea of what to expect.

Good on that poor woman for successfully defending herself.

Crack coverage of non-machine gun machine gun shooting in Baltimore

Two men were hospitalized Sunday and three faced charges after a birthday party in a downtown Baltimore hotel ended violently, with one partygoer shot with a semiautomatic pistol and the suspect allegedly disarmed and badly beaten by others in the crowd.

The Washington Post corrected their earlier article calling the weapon an "Uzi submachine gun;" FOX News didn't. One news site calls it a "TEC-9 Uzi submachine gun." Awesome reporting. The weapon turned out to be a semi-auto TEC-9.

There's not much to say about the shooting itself other than that this type of behavior is par for the course in Baltimore. There was a fist fight before the shooting started, but then things got ugly when the armed scumbag - on parole I might add - started shooting. The hotel allegedly was sending their finest security guards - unarmed no doubt - up to break up the fight before shots were fired.

There are some pretty retarded things said in this article at The Baltimore Sun.

At first, police thought the weapon was an Uzi submachine gun, which caused news of the shooting to spread widely online. The gun was later identified as a TEC-9, also known as a DC-9 - a semi-automatic "assault pistol" that can be converted by owners into an automatic weapon. It looks like a miniature submachine gun, and police described it Sunday as about a foot-and-a-half long. It is not on the legal handgun roster maintained by the Maryland State Police.

Would a 19 year old gang member have a gun on the handgun roster? Does he even know if such a silly roster exists? If he does, does anyone in the MSP honestly think he cares? Also, the weapon is not "easily converted . . .into an automatic weapon;" that's a lie. Wanna bet that if it was, the scumbag that owned it would have converted it? Why do you think that he didn't? Because it's illegal? The hilarity of these notions provide me with much entertainment, and are the reason I started this blog.

Next up, we have a glimmer of something resembling accurate information, but then it quickly gets mixed up with stupidity:

"They're out there, but they're not common," said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. "How does someone who's 19 years old end up with a semi-automatic pistol?"

Do Baltimore Police ponder at length about how scumbags get guns? Does officer Guglielmi think that because handgun ownership in Baltimore is practically illegal that it provides those with no care for the law some sort of barrier from buying a gun from a fellow scumbag? I do agree with him though that TEC-9s are not common, much to the surprise of the idiots who write TV shows. Why would anyone want to carry a heavy, inaccurate, clumsy weapon with crap ergonomics anyways? I mean, does anyone even make a holster for it? The shooter probably thought that this gun was cool because he saw it on an episode of CSI, or while playing Grand Theft Auto, or maybe because he read about how easily it is converted into an automatic weapon by some clueless reporter at The Baltimore Sun.

The part of the article that had me shaking my head was when Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III. . .

". . railed in frustration against "idiots and morons" with guns they're ready to use in a fight. He declared that the police are doing what they can but said authorities need everyone in the city to "help us remove this scourge."

While I would initially side with him on the idiots and morons part, I can't help but point out that a scumbag on the streets of Baltimore would have to be an idiot or a moron to not be armed. Their profession, as misguided and immoral as it is, demands that they have capable weapons. The problem here is that there is an overwhelming population of scumbags in Baltimore, and disarming everyone else hasn't done anything to remedy that. How exactly is "everyone in the city" supposed to "help remove this scourge" when the bad guys have firearms and Baltimore residents do not? I thought the police had guns so that everyone else doesn't need them? So by your own admission, the police are doing "what they can", which isn't enough to stop a teenager from shooting up a birthday party. Remind me again why the citizens there continue to be disarmed by the BPD.

This last bit though crossed the line:

"This was not a random act of violence," Fowler said. "The incident says nothing about downtown. It says more about gun culture in our country and the need to lock people like this up."

There is no "gun culture" in Baltimore, and blaming this shooting on the tens of millions of non-violent firearms owners is offensive. That's just a pathetic excuse. What we are talking about here is the scumbag culture, which necessarily needs to be armed to survive, and much of the blame for this "scourge" lies with the failure of your department to catch them. A bonifide "gun culture" exists in my corner of this country, which is very close to yours, and there are not shootouts at birthday parties, and the crime rate is not seven times the national average. You can't throw a rock in a Wal-Mart here without hitting an armed citizen, and it's not at all unheard of to not have a single murder in this county in a years time. That you consider this type of violence the opposite of "random" is a problem of itself, and confirms why I do my best to avoid visiting any attractions in your city.

I'll take my gun culture over yours any day.

The worst part about this story is that two of the people at the birthday party took down the shooter, took away his weapon, and beat his face in with it - and guess who the BPD charges with attempted murder? There may be more to that story, and I'd like to hear it, but exactly what do you expect unarmed people to do to stop "the scourge" except take the gun away and beat the scumbag with it? Let him go again like you did? That didn't work out so well. Dare I excoriate these two on this blog for failing have their rat-tailed combs at the ready?

Landscaping becoming a dangerous career in North West DC

Nothing like the prospect of having your kids dig up a bottle of Lewisite in the back yard to drive property values up. If you're the kind of person who won't be digging around planting petunias in your backyard, I hear Spring Valley offers some lovely property!

Ahh, the sweet aroma of mustard. Just another reminder of all those days in the trenches in France. You can enjoy the privacy of 24/7 access to the conveniently located drop box at the investigation office trailer where you can anonymously drop off those old chemical mortar rounds that you hit with the lawnmower before heading off to work.

And personally, I prefer arsenic added to my drinking water to give it a bit of spiciness. Studies show that it helps with child development too! Perfect!

Seriously though, I understand that this massive government screwup happened like seventy something years ago, but I am stunned to believe that even back then people were so stupid as to randomly bury ordnance.

Dr. Vern - "Hey Bill, what the hell do we do with all these chemical warfare munitions? There's thousands of them!"

Agent Bill - "Man, I don't know. . . .that shit is super deadly. I don't want to touch em. Didga see what that stuff did to Bob? Melted his skin right to the bone!"

Dr. Vern - "I reckon the safe and responsible thing to do with them then is to go ahead and bury them in dozens of shallow unmarked pits."

Agent Bill - "Right! I'll cover them up with the ledgers as an added layer of protection; the American public shouldn't have to loose any sleep by knowing how much of this stuff we safely buried."

Dr. Vern - "Go ahead and throw in all those fragile glass beakers too! Might as well make those safe while we're at it!"

Agent Bill - "You're a genious Vern! Someday, many years from now, citizens of this city will thank us for our unbending commitment to providing safe government service by not gaffing off the disposal of all these deadly blister agent bombs! You can count on that!"

This sort of thinking seems to be rampant around the nation's capitol.

Carrying a concealed weapon can be a pain in the ass

This is just too funny to make up! Such a just life for a prison scumbag.

Be my bodyguard

So this My FOX DC piece on the uptick in female bodyguards seems pretty cool - I have no doubts that women bring some unique skill sets to the field - but for a good laugh, check out the video at the top.

I have no idea what school that is, or what their instructors smoke before getting started for a day of teaching, but there's some seriously silly stuff in there. My fav is the judo roll while in tiger stripe ghettoflage complete with tactical vest with empty pockets. I mean, when you "want protection without the obvious looming tall, hulking man standing next to them," there's nothing that says covert quite like a tactical vest and BDUs that came out of a bargain bin.

Who are they training to protect that would require highly trained stealth ninja operators? Swartzkoff? He had some real badasses, and even they didn't wear stupid vests with BDUs.

And how about that tactical assault balancing beam? Never know when you may have to shoot it out with the tangos while escorting Brittany across a treacherous log spanning a fast moving creek! It's like something out of Dora the Explorer.

Well hell, I might as well bury my plans on going to Gunsite since they don't offer balancing beams, ninja stuff, how to fight while climbing around in the rafters, big-guy-armed-with-m16-take-downs, and best of all - new and exciting ways to hold your chromed Beretta close to your face for that precision shot! I bet the Gunsite instructors would even laugh at my tiger stripe cammies or my use of a stripper pseudonym.

I see a pattern here

Everyone has heard about the scumbag who murdered four cops in Washington state, right? Well it seems that he was pardoned of a ton of crimes by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Way to go.

The thing that strikes me the most is that this guy has a past that is pockmarked with extreme violence, insanity, and sickness. At one point, the guy was serving almost fifty years while facing about one hundred and fifty more, but got paroled after only eleven. Why?

I understand that our justice system is designed to err on the side of caution, but dammit when you've got the right violent, delusional, kiddie raping degenerate in cuffs then fry his ass, or put him away for eternity if you don't have the stomach for it. Stop letting these people go so they can widow some poor cop's wife.

You would think this is common sense.

Sunday range report

I got to do some shooting at 350 yards today, and have pics to show for it.

My friend Aaron gave me a call last night asking for help finding a deer that he shot right before last light and couldn't find. He wanted to get at it when it got light out, and since I had been to this particular spot before and knew that there was about three hundred yards or so where we could shoot, I was more than happy to help.

Aaron is new to deer hunting with a rifle, but is an exceptional marksman. He said that the deer was at about three hundred yards judging with his well trained eye, about ten yards past an old telephone pole, and that he placed the crosshairs of the 12 power Leupold scope about an inch below the top of the deer's back and carefully pressed the trigger. We went to his exact spot and I lazed the telephone pole. . . 287 yards. Good eye.

He saw the deer bow up and disappear behind a hill before emerging about thirty seconds later and heading toward a tree line by the reservoir about four hundred yards to the right. There was a massive amount of blood where the deer was hit. Since blood tracking is hard in a grass field, we headed to the tree line to look for the deer's body, but did not find it after about two and a half hours. We headed back to the scene of the crime to try and track the blood, and ended up finding the deer about thirty yards from where it was hit. Unfortunately the deer had been eaten by a coyote, but we both felt relieved that we at least found it in the first place. Leaving a deer down in the woods somewhere is no good. The deer that Aaron saw running for the tree line was one that he hadn't seen and didn't know was there.

Anyways, after that we set up to shoot some cardboard that I had stapled to one inch pickets. We set one up at a hundred yards so I could verify my zero as I am using the Horus Hawk scope with a range compensating reticle; Aaron wanted to see how high his two hundred yard zero shot at one hundred. We also drove out to 350 yards and placed another target.

If you look close, you can see the long range target as a speck of cardboard on the hill to the right. The wind started to pick up from the South West, and we had a steady 5 mph wind with lots of gusts of up to 20 mph. Here's Aaron getting some work done with a Remington 700 Sendero in .270 Winchester on the one hundred yard target:

I also got some more through the reticle pics with the Horus H-425 ranging reticle:

The last one is more of what I see when I'm looking through it, as far as the size of the crosshairs. The clarity of the scope is way better than what you see here; the crappy Canon camera that I'm using can't focus correctly.

My groups ran about MOA at this range, with the horizontal spread much more than the vertical, which isn't terrible considering the wind. Aaron's rifle did better than mine once he stopped using no name handloads. The 130 grain Winchester Supremes shot into MOA or less with three shot groups. Neither one of us were pursuing bughole groups today, but were trying to get data points for shooting critters at distance. From the start, I ran into the bipod bouncing issue, so I took them off. The rest of the time we shot off of sandbags from the inside of the bed of a truck, which worked well. The bipods jacked up a perfectly good group from the 175 grain Federal Gold Medal Match rounds, stretching the group out vertically to .916 with the horizontal spread at .270. I will duplicate those rounds soon with some handloads.

Overall we both had a blast. Shooting at range is fun, and I can't wait until we get to stretch the range out to over five hundred yards or more.

Vetting The Military Channel

I just got done watching Ultimate Weapons on The Military Channel, and I have to say that this show was worse than most of their other ones. I love watching the channel, really, but so do millions of other people, most of whom are not military, and the amount of errors that this channel racks up is just ridiculous.

The first thing that I noticed was the suppressor noise from the rifle that made number ten, ***spoiler alert*** the M110 SASS. They had to do it, just had to add that "pfft" noise over the normal sound of the rifle. Not only that, they sometimes switched to the James Bond type "fweeep" noise instead of the "pfft" noise, and then sometimes they forgot to add it in altogether. Why go out of your way to be retarded? Why not just let the viewers hear what a suppressor really sounds like? Leave the fake special effects to Hollywood.

Also, they note that the M110 was developed by Eugene Stoner because the military needed a "7.62" round - which is captioned by the 7.62x39mm Russian round - so he up sized the M16. Eugene Stoner did not design the M110, because he was dead like ten years before it was designed. What they meant to say was that he designed the "7.62" AR-10 before he designed the AR-15 which fires the 5.56 NATO. Also, it's humorous that they distinguish Stoner as designing the M110 when they interview Reed Knight about the weapon.

Next, they highlight the Marine Corps M40A3 sniper rifle, but say it shoots the 6.5x47mm Lapua cartridge, and show it as having the Accuracy International folding stock.

Lastly, I'd like to poke fun at their rating system. The Accuracy International AS50 gets a full five points for being portable because it can be broken down in order for its tremendous size to be carried, and weighs 31 lbs according to the show, but a 16 lb bolt gun only gets three points despite it not needing to be carried in several pieces on the battlefield.

One would think that the show could fix these errors before viewing, especially since they have people like Ronnie Barret talk over several of his guns which made the show.

Hey Military Channel, how about a little accuracy?

What are the troops up to?

There's not a whole lot of stuff to blog about in the news today, so I encourage you to head on over to MilitaryPhotos.net to see what our Marines and Soldiers did for Thanksgiving.

Chicagoans gave robbers what they wanted

. . .and it didn't turn out so well for them. Fortunately, all the victims are going to be alright.

Cabbie discrimination

I saw this on FOX5 Washington DC last night, and decided to pick it up this morning.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - When you stick your hand out, you expect the cab to stop. But there’s a certain type of guy out there who feels like he’s always getting passed by.

So DC cabbies are biased; that's the gist of the story. Not surprisingly, black DC residents are pissed:

“I get upset when they don’t stop, but then, it’s hard to take a taxi when you’re black,” says Craig Brown from Southeast Washington.

Says the man from one of the most violent places in the country. More on that in a minute.

“It’s too hard to get a cab in D.C. because D.C. is biased,” says Man Thomas from Northeast D.C.

A growing number of black men in the District say an age-old problem is getting worse.

"You'll flag down and they go past you,” Brown says. “Then they'll stop down the street for a white person."

Now that we have the meat and potatoes out there, I wanted to point out something. FOX News sent two of their folk - one black guy and one white dude - out into the streets of Washington to find out if it's true. And what did they find? That cabbies do indeed pass the black guy in favor of the white guy.

To this I have to say. . . .Duh!!

Now, I'm no bigot, but I have to call foul here. FOX did allow this one teensy weensy little thing in there when they asked the cabbies why they favor white fares:

Price is the Chairman of the D.C. Professional Taxicab Drivers Association. He says many taxi drivers do discriminate because they’ve told him they’re afraid of being robbed.

If FOX News was really fair and balanced, they would not have ignored the elephant in the room. What do black men have to do with cabbies being afraid of getting robbed? Why are they making that sort of connection? The fact is that there are almost twice as many violent black felons than violent white felons, and there are a bonafide twice as many black murderers as white murderers in the US prison system, judging from data from 1990 - 2002. A group of people who make up 13 percent of the population committed 41 percent of the violent crime in that period, and 54 percent of the robberies.

So cabbies find that driving past a "certain type of guy" in the 54 percent category to pick up a white guy in the 17 percent category means better odds of not getting robbed? Simple math says that their odds of living through the day improve with this behavior, as horrible as that may sound.

Why has this not been addressed, and why is this not something that is being fixed?

It's a shame that cabbies are discriminating, and I'm not saying it's right, but I am saying that they shouldn't be getting the brunt of the anger when nobody has addressed the real problem: why is the violent crime rate so high amongst young, black males, and how can this be changed?

There has been pressure to make cabbies not discriminate with training, sting operations and the like - but it's not hard to point out that that could cause unintended consequences.

Cabbies don't wake up in the morning and decide "Gee, I feel like a racist today. I think I'll piss off the black folk because I'm such a hater." They also don't wake up one day and realize that what they do can get them hurt or killed. Maybe they have developed this dirty habit because they have been perpetually robbed by "a certain type of guy" who fits into a certain type of demographic that nobody wants to address because it's too hard. Perhaps someone at FOX News should survey cabbies to find out the demographics of the perpetrators who have robbed cab drivers. Perhaps someone at FOX News should cast a light on a root problem that is causing cab drivers to racially discriminate. That will add some weight to the other side of this story.