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This week was a good example of work interfering with blogging time. I had a two day out of town conference that was mandatory to attend and it was a very full two days. So I am now just catching up on the blog. I’ve bookmarked a number of things and will make this a tab-clearing of sorts.
The biggest news of the week is that San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore will not seek an en banc review of the ruling of the 9th Circuit in Peruta v. County of San Diego. Dave Kopel notes here that one of the judges on the 9th Circuit could still request a vote on an en banc review sua sponte.
It should be noted that there are two cases still pending in the 9th Circuit in which the oral arguments were made at the same time as the Peruta case. They are Baker v. Kealoha et al from Hawaii and the CalGuns/SAF case Richards v. Prieto.
Then there is the new (maybe) stamp from the US Postal Service honoring actor, activist, and NRA President Charlton Heston. Now it seems, that the USPS is denying that they definitely are going to have a Heston stamp, that it was just a suggestion, and that they will take into account opposition from the gun prohibitionists. Bitter rightly calls them out on their outright lies pointing out previous memos and announcements.
Speaking of gun prohibitionists, Bob Owens applies a well-deserved fisking to that Demanding Mommy (and formerly well-paid Democratic PR flack) Shannon Watts. I think calling her the Carrie Nation of the Gun Prohibitionists is spot-on.
On Wednesday, the Washington Times had a feature length article on the case of Lane v. Holder. The plaintiffs have appealed the decision of the 4th Circuit which dismissed the case for a lack of standing to the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs are petitioning for a writ of certiorari in the case. The article features one of the plaintiffs, Amanda Welling, and her challenge to the Gun Control Act of 1968 which prohibits residents of one state from purchasing a handgun in another and then taking delivery of it in the purchase state. Currently, while you can buy a handgun from an out of state vendor, it must be delivered to an in-state FFL who then completes the transfer.
In a blow to the anti’s argument that guns cause crime, the FBI released a report this past week which showed that crime actually went down as the sales of firearms went up. It is even more interesting to note that in the areas with the highest firearms ownership – the MidWest and South – crime went down even more than in areas with less firearms ownership – the NorthEast. Go figure. However, as Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal notes, “Not that gun-control zealots, who are so certain of a causal link between firearms and violent crime rates, care about such details.”
When it comes to firearms, state laws are often stricter than Federal laws. This is most evident in what firearms and accessories citizens of a state are allowed to possess, e.g, mag restrictions in New York, etc. However, these state laws may include disqualifying events that preclude a person from legally purchasing a firearm which are stricter than Federal law. Attorney Paloma Capanna has an interesting article up on these state prohibitors and their roll in NICS check denials.
The fallout in New York from the decision of Remington Outdoor Company to expand to Huntsville, Alabama continues. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in denial about the roll of the NY SAFE Act in Remington’s decision saying it was for “purely business reasons”. Other analyses say that the SAFE Act is one of the major reasons that Remington looked South.
Attorney Chuck Michel takes apart a study purporting to show that policies designed to reduce the number of firearms in the home, especially handguns, were instrumental in reducing the number of childhood gunshot wounds. The funny thing is that injuries and deaths involving children have declined as the number of firearms in circulation has increased dramatically. The old saw about lies, damned lies, and statistics would seem to be the case here especially since Chuck notes the author uses “non-traditional” data sources.
Nice to have you back!
Pierce Morgan quits CNN. I was out dancing on the balcony!!
Good ones, and win some, lose some… then there is NY… sigh
Apropos of nothing but..
Most preppers should be familiar with the ‘rule of three’ – this means having one main method of an important function and a backup for it and a backup of the backup. It doesn’t necessarily entail 3 versions of the same thing but distinctly different ways of accomplishing a priority task.
In the case of personal security arrangements, the main or level 1 version would be firearms within easy reach within a structure. These would be the primary weapons used for hunting and defense.
And while it’s been said that the time to hide weapons is the time to bring them out, the rule of three would dictate that a level 2 backup of the primary firearms should at least be considered. There are no guarantees as to the future but unknown threats such as governmental seizures or devastation of a structure must be considered in all plans and preparations.
Level 2 backups should be outside the immediate area but easily accessible in an underground or similar storage cache. The weapons should be set in waterproof PVC piping or the similar waterproof containers with additional scrap metal and scent distraction materials scattered about to foil determined searches. The presumption here would be that even with destruction of a home or bug out location or search and seizure operation a set of weapons would still be immediately available to the prepper.
Level 3 backups are a step removed from level 2 in that this backup is set at a distance and without a personal connection to the prepper. This means an underground cache on raw land unlikely to be disturbed in the near future. No personal connection means weapons purchased privately beyond the government’s prying eyes.
Advantageous level 3 locales would be places where the cache would likely remain undisturbed, has a ready supply of decoy material nearby and relatively accessible. Long lost junkyards or metal dumping grounds would a good choice as well as rural backwoods with their requisite amounts of discarded trash. Such places would readily discourage searches with metal detectors and in the case of rural road frontage be of such vast amounts as to make detection of the cache highly improbable. Weapons destined for level 3 caches should be of the lower cost realm and lacking a pedigree lest they be inadvertently discovered.
Just as an aside, when data is stamped in materials such as metal, the stamping process tends to place the molecules a fair distance beneath the data under stress. This stress can manifest itself in form of visual indications even after the data has been abrasively removed. Grinding the material down to remove the indications of the data leaves the stress in molecules below and certain chemicals – acids and the like can be utilised to determine what the data was while still present on the surface of the material. Given this interesting phenomenon, it would seem like applying additional stress on the molecules would cause this not to be the case. Writing over the data would scramble the stresses within the material while rendering the data unreadable. Hammering the data in the same region would not only remove the original data but also remove the original l data’s stress indications deep in the material. In most cases areas with a great deal of metallic debris would be less than ideal for searches of this attribute of the cache. By the same token, the inclusion of chemical propellant components should suffice the placement of similar component with similar chemicals in the surroundings. Several handfuls of spent casing from the local range should do the trick and would satisfy both decoy requirements.
In summation, it should be incumbent on the prepper to have 3 personal security backups as with every other functional task such as the procurement of water. For most preppers, firearms are a priority are a foundational basis on their survival. Loss of personal security arrangements renders all other preps useless.