Uncategorized

Uncategorized

Elizabeth Warren Is More Native American Than I Am

December 14, 2018 by 7 Comments

I got my results back from Ancestry.com DNA and despite what my cousin Van led me to believe I am not more Native American than Elizabeth Warren. I know that was a low threshold. My cousin had led me to believe that our great-grandfather on my paternal and his maternal grandfather’s side of the family had some Cherokee blood.

According to the results shown below I am 64% Irish and Scots and 36% Welsh and English. Given I know that three out of four great-grandparents on my mom’s side of the family were born in County Cavan, Ireland, this makes sense. Moreover, my Grandma Richardson’s maiden name was Morgan which is a good Welsh name.

I really did want to have more Native American blood than Elizabeth Warren just to say I did. Oh, well. Our ancestors are our ancestors and there is nothing one can do to change that.

Uncategorized

“Murphy Mags” And How To Avoid Arrest In New Jersey

December 13, 2018 by 8 Comments

As of Monday, December 10th, if you possess a standard capacity magazine that holds more than 10 rounds in the state of New Jersey, you could be found guilty of a Class 4 Felony, spend up to 18 months in prison, lose your voting rights, and be subject to a lifetime ban on firearm ownership. Your options were to destroy the magazines, turn them into police, or remove them out of state. There was no grandfathering under the law nor was there any compensation for what arguably is a taking.

Gun rights attorney Evan F. Nappen is the acknowledged authority on New Jersey gun law. He has just written a guide on what to expect from the police and prosecutors and how to protect yourself.

Here are the action steps he encourages all New Jersey gun owners to take:

Action Items:

  1. Make sure that your friends and family are aware of this potential threat.
  2. Make sure that your friends and family are aware of the implications of talking with the police and consenting to searches.
  3. Make sure that you do not have in your possession any Murphy Mags or other prohibited items.
  4. Make sure that you, your family and your friends have the mindset to stand on your rights!

 While he thinks police raids are not likely to occur and that police will use other means such as computerized databases, demand letters, and the like, there are scenarios and reasons, in his opinion, where a police raid, with or without a warrant, might take place.

  1. Some highly publicized mass shooting occurs, and the knee-jerk, politically expedient reaction is to go after Murphy Mag possessors.
  2. Murphy’s failure to aggressively enforce his ban, gives his political challengers the opportunity to call him out on it. There is already pressure on Murphy to explain how he intends to enforce the ban. Breitbart News also reached out to Murphy’s press secretary, Daniel Bryan, about enforcement of the ban. He confirmed that the Governor “…had not ruled out house-to-house enforcement of the ban either.”
  3. New Jersey has a computerized database of registered gun owners & their registered handguns which includes make and model. Many of these handguns came with Murphy Mags. For example, 15 round magazines came standard with the Glock Model 19, Beretta Model 92 and SIG Model P226, just to name three commonly possessed handguns.
  4. New Jersey has a long history of abusing gun owners, creating “gun law victims” (destroying people’s lives with arbitrary gun laws) and undermining Second Amendment rights.
  5. New Jersey has a liberal news media which actively acts as the propaganda arm for the anti-gun-rights movement.
  6. New Jersey law enforcement will obey orders and enforce the law, rather than lose their jobs & pensions.

I suggest reading Evan’s entire guide posted to his website. Moreover, if you live in New Jersey, I suggest studying it carefully, plan your response in advance, and make your family including kids aware of the family plan. As Michael Bane said on his podcast today, the law isn’t enforced until is. Don’t be that guy who Murphy uses as the example to cow the rest of New Jersey gun owners into compliance.

Uncategorized

Sanctimonious Enviromentalism

December 12, 2018 by 1 Comment

I am all for conservation and the wise use of resources. I turn off the lights when I leave a room, I repair my leaky faucets, I reuse cardboard boxes or give them to small businesses who can, and I try to recycle most of the junk mail that comes into our house. That said, I don’t wear this on my sleeve as some environmental badge of honor. It is just part of my frugal nature given I was raised by parents who came of age during the Great Depression.

That is probably why the sanctimony of the owner of a Chevy Volt electric car with this license plate ticked me off.

That car is no more solar powered than my Honda Pilot. Electric cars like the Volt depend upon power generation plants that are powered primarily by fossil fuels. In our region, Duke Energy is the electric utility providing power. Other than a few hydro plants with minimal megawatt capacity (most in the single digit megawatt capacity), power is supplied by coal fired plants in Asheville and Cliffside. The Asheville plant is converting to natural gas but that still is a fossil fuel. The coal ash remnants are a sore spot for Duke Energy and have been a source of fodder for Democrat politicians.

Your car may put out no exhaust but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pollute. The moment you hook that Chevy Volt up to an electrical outlet, you are entering a pollution creating system. I’m not going to even get into a discussion of the heavy metals in the batteries in that car nor the power that was used in its manufacture of the Volt.

UPDATE: Thanks to the comment from BAP45, I found this clip from South Park’s Smug Alert episode. It was from Season 10, Episode 2. I haven’t watched South Park in years and had forgotten how wonderfully subversive it was.

Uncategorized

A Day That Will Live In Infamy Plus 77 Years

December 7, 2018 by

Today marks the 77th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is also marks the first time that a surviving member of the crew of the USS Arizona will not be in Hawaii to commemorate the event.

From the news reports:

No one who survived the bombing of the USS Arizona battleship will be in the audience.


“This is the very first year,” said Daniel Martinez, historian with the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.


Health issues and doctor’s orders prevented Lou Conter from coming.


“She said you cannot go. You better cancel out,” he said in telephone interview from his home in California.


Conter is 97. The handful of survivors of the battleship’s sinking are all in their 90s…


About 300 USS Arizona sailors survived Japan’s surprise attack.


Only five are alive: Conter, Don Stratton, Ken Potts, Lonnie Cook and Lauren Bruner.

The hatred and enmity between the two countries is in the past. Now you have survivors who fought on each side coming together in ceremonies like the Blacked Canteen ceremony which celebrates peace and reconciliation.

Uncategorized

What Caliber For Yeti?

December 7, 2018 by 4 Comments

window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag(‘js’, new Date());

gtag(‘config’, ‘UA-115029161-1’);

If the weather models are correct and the hyperbole from local TV and the Weather Channel is not hyperbole, Western North Carolina is about to be hit with a snow storm that will rival the Blizzard of ’93. Hospitals are implementing emergency management plans, bread is getting hard to find even as far east as Charlotte, and people have started testing their generators.

This all leads to the obvious question:  what caliber for yeti?

Can you get by with 5.56 in your AR or will you need to up your game? Does it require a purpose-built caliber like .358 Yeti from Mad Dog Weapon Systems or is that overkill?

If you have suggestions, please post them.

Uncategorized

These 62 Had The Courage Of Their Convictions

December 6, 2018 by 5 Comments

window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag(‘js’, new Date());

gtag(‘config’, ‘UA-115029161-1’);

Do you have the courage of your convictions with regard to the Second Amendment? Would you go to the mattresses to use a term from The Godfather?  Would you put your job at risk or would you just quietly suck it up?

62 former employees of Dick’s Sporting Goods and their Field and Stream subsidiary did have the courage of their convictions. After Dick’s CEO Ed Stack not only changed the company’s policy on selling modern sporting rifles and raised the purchase age to 21 for all firearms but fully bought into the gun control agenda, these 62 resigned their jobs.

From the Pittsburgh Business Times:

According to CEO Ed Stack, 62 employees quit working for Dick’s Sporting Goods over the retailer’s decision to stop selling assault-style weapons, announced in February….



“We anticipated that there would be some people that would leave. We’ve got 40,0000 employees, and 2,500, or 2,6000 (sic) people working at our corporate headquarters,” said Stack, of the Findlay-based company. “We’re a cross-section of the country. We knew people would be upset.”

His comments came in a Wall Street Journal CEO Council interview. An excerpt of that interview is below.

Stack says it is OK to have differing views and he is correct. However, it is one thing to have differing views on whether the Steelers or the Eagles are the better team and a whole another thing to have differing views on working to suppress a right enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

What Stack did not say was who they were and what jobs they held. Some, like the clerk he mentioned, probably held low level jobs. Other I’m guessing held higher positions. While I don’t have any confirmation of it, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Jack Barnes who is the new VP for Commercial Sales for Sig Sauer was one of those 62. He had developed and implemented the concept of the Field and Stream stores for Dick’s.

These 62 former employees put skin in the game and stood for the Constitution when the head of the company they worked for decided it was politically expedient to trash it. They are to be applauded. If I owned a company in the firearms industry I’d be looking for these 62 as they would be the kind of employees I’d want.

Uncategorized

The Evolution Of The Magazine Pull

December 4, 2018 by

Magazine pulls or those attachments used to facilitate pulling a magazine out of the ammo pouch have certainly undergone quite an evolution.

It started with some soldier or marine who had the idea to use flattened 550 paracord to fashion an easier way to pull their magazines out of their Alice-clipped mag pouch.

Somewhere along the line, it advanced to making “e-pulls” using three pieces of flattened paracord along with duct tape. The center section was fused together using a household iron.

I don’t know if it was the first or second iteration that gave Richard Fitzpatrick the idea to create the original MagPul or not but create it he did. An entire company and industry followed from that.

The Magpul Ranger Plate in its many variations followed about five years later. It traded out the magazine’s original floor plate for a new one which incorporated the loop or pull. They are now made for a variety of magazine styles including the original aluminum GI mags and, of course, all the variants of the PMag. Other variations include the MagPod (not made by Magpul) which turned the Ranger Plate in a “foot” providing stability when shooting.

Just like as with immigrants where the first generation worked as laborers and each succeeding generation moved further and further away from manual labor, so, too, it is with magazine pulls. A Japanese airsoft company, Echigoya Guns & Military Hobby Shop, has created an “interesting” variation on the first-gen MagPul. It is the perfect fashion accessory for your tacticool AR.

As best as I can tell – given I don’t read Japanese – these sell for ¥1,000 – ¥1,200 or about $8 to $10 US at current exchange rates. Echigoya does have a website and they do take credit cards. These might make the perfect accessory to go with your Kalashnikitty t-shirt (if you can still find one).

Uncategorized

Well That Explains It!

December 3, 2018 by 2 Comments

If you have ever taken a firearm apart for cleaning or tried to assemble your own AR lower, you have had a part or two that flew off and was damn near impossible to find. We have all experienced it at some time or another.

Today, I read the best explanation as to why these small parts like a detent pin and detent spring are impossible to find after being launched into near space from your kitchen table or workbench. It has nothing to with their size but everything to do with Einsteinian physics.

The reason those parts that go flying are almost never found – because a
spring is causing the flying, they accelerate rapidly. In fact they reach
a very high speed, almost the speed of light. At the speed of light, time
shifting starts to occur. So those parts are time traveling. Sometime the
parts aren’t there yet when you look for them. Maybe try next week…

Brian in MI

Time traveling parts. Well that explains it. I guess I need to move my thought processes beyond that of Newtonian physics.

Uncategorized

Last Chance For Constitutional Carry In NC

November 28, 2018 by

Permitless concealed carry passed the North Carolina House of Representatives over a year ago. Since then it has been bottled up in the State Senate and has not gotten a hearing nor a vote. Now that the Republicans have lost their supermajority in the General Assembly, any action on permitless concealed carry has to happen now. There is not a chance in hell that Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) won’t veto it and there is also no way for it to get passed without the Republicans sticking together and overriding that veto.

Grass Roots North Carolina is asking North Carolinians to contact Senate President Phil Berger and demand that a vote be taken. Their alert is below:

PERMITLESS CONCEALED CARRY

CAN HAPPEN—RIGHT NOW
There is a season for everything. A time to pass HB-746, while a Governor’s veto can still be overridden, is upon us. . . 

Senate Leadership’s Past Inaction
In recent months, North Carolina’s Republican senate leadership disappointed us with their inaction. Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger’s ostensibly pro-Second Amendment party had the numbers necessary to override a governor’s veto. To pass HB-746 (Permitless Concealed Carry and more), the NC Senate certainly had the support of the people. In fact, North Carolina gun owners, and other pro-civil rights citizens, were not only supportive of the bill, they downright demanded it. Yet, Senator Berger and Senate Rules Committee Chair, Senator Bill Rabon, didn’t deliver. They decided not to shepherd this excellent pro-gun bill through the NC Senate (it has already passed the NC House).

The Future Looks Freer
Fortunately, today is a new day—the past is the past. Rather than lamenting Senator Berger’s and Rabon’s past missteps, it’s time we offer solutions for a brighter future, and we at GRNC see Permitless Concealed Carry headed this way.

At this point in time, until January, Republicans still maintain a veto-proof majority in the NC Senate, just as they do in the NC House. Any perceived impediments to making HB-746 the law in our state are just that: perceived—but not real. At this moment, no obstruction is solid, and none can stand in the way of HB-746. Only Republican leaders themselves can stop it. Of course, the clock is ticking…
Senators Berger and Rabon must act
now to make this happen

Preparing for Future Victories
Should Senator Berger, Rabon and other senate leaders once again fail to act, it would only be another demonstration of the behavior that caused the loss of their veto-proof majorities (starting in January). Becoming squishy on gun rights, inaction and half-measures—these are the things that cause voters to sit home on Election Day, and this surely influenced the lackluster election results. Bold action, adhering to campaign rhetoric, and sweeping advances of the people’s rights—these are the things that victories are made of, and we can only hope that Senator Berger and others have learned this lesson, and have already started preparing for future victories. (Hint: passing HB-746 would be a good start). 

Demand the NC Senate Pass HB-746
Below, you’ll find information about how you can urge senate leader Phil Berger to act fast, pass HB-746 and then override the governor’s likely veto.  There is no reason this can’t be done, and it absolutely should be.

The only politicians who can stop
HB-746 are NC Senate Republicans  
 
 
Immediate Action Required!
  • PHONE NC SENATE PRO TEM PHIL BERGER: Use this number, (919) 733-5708, and the short text provided below to leave a message with staff (or on voice-mail). Suggested phone message:
 
Hello, my name is ____________, and I am calling to insist that Senator Berger utilize the veto-proof majority that Republicans still maintain in order to pass the omnibus gun bill, HB-746, and then override the governor’s likely veto. In the recent past, senate leadership disappointed voters on this bill, and on gun rights in general. However, Mr. Berger and other leaders now have a golden opportunity to make up for this and stand for gun rights. Of course, the clock is ticking on the supermajorities, so please tell Mr. Berger to act now, pass HB-746, and override the Governor’s likely veto. Thank you.

  • EMAIL NC SENATE PRO TEM PHIL BERGER: Use the email address and the copy/paste text provided below, under ‘Deliver This Message,’ to send a strong message about advancing our civil rights at every possible turn.
DELIVER THIS MESSAGE
Email to: Phil.Berger@ncleg.net
Suggested Subject: “Pass HB-746 While You Still Can”  
Dear Senator Berger

I am writing to insist that you utilize the veto-proof majority that Republicans still maintain in order to pass the omnibus gun bill, HB-746, and then override the governor’s likely veto.

In the recent past, senate leadership disappointed voters on this bill, and on gun rights in general. However, you and other leaders now have a golden opportunity to make up for this past disappointment and stand for gun rights. At this point, there is nothing to lose, and any perceived impediments to making HB-746 the law in our state are just that: perceived—but not real.

Of course, the clock is ticking on the Republican supermajorities, so please act now, pass HB-746, and override the Governor’s likely veto.

I will be monitoring your actions on this matter through alerts from Grass Roots North Carolina.  

Respectfully,