Welcome back to the Scuttlebutt.
Sorry for missing last week, but work left me with absolutely no ability to do anything more intelligent than, well, than the sort of things AOC or that sorry Alzheimer’s victim above say on a daily basis… Which is to say I was about brain dead. I really wanted to do something other than politics this week, but alas, the amount of material that the yammering class has given me to work with is just too great.
And oh my, do I have things to talk about today. SO, pour something and let’s get to it. Let’s start with President Biden’s little tirade on firearms. First off, this is the same JACKASS that said you should get a shotgun, and if you feared that someone was breaking in, you should shoot through the door. (Yes, he said that in Feb of 2013 in an interview from Field and Stream Magazine) So this guy isn’t really an expert on Firearms or a good source for gun advice. Here’s a heavy hint, in almost any jurisdiction in America, if you fire a shotgun through a door, and you hit someone, you are going to be going to jail for attempted manslaughter at the very least. Just don’t do it. Nevertheless, he thinks he knows what he’s talking about on firearms…
Take for instance the fabled Ghost Gun that he wants to illegalize. The left loves to come up with scary sounding names for anything they want to vilify, remember “Saturday night specials?” That meant any firearm that a poor man could afford. Well, here’s the thing on “Ghost guns” you can’t stop that signal. A “ghost gun” is any firearm that you made at home. Making a Semi-Automatic rifle doesn’t take an “80% lower” and a milling machine, with a set of jigs… you can make one out of a shovel. Yes, that’s right, you can make an AK-47 rifle out of a simple spade and pieces you can buy over the counter because they aren’t weapons, they’re spare parts. See this website for how: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2012/11/26/turning-a-shovel-into-a-ak/
If they make barrels the part with the serial number (this is one of the “solutions” to the “dilemma” of 80% lowers: make the “upper receiver” the part that is “a gun”) you can use any high-pressure piping. Hell, rifling it is as easy as using a battery and some saltwater: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/03/02/diy-barrel-rifling-using-salt-water-electricity-3d-printed-jig/
Australia where gun ownership is now just about illegal has quite the collection of FULLY automatic weapons made in garages. See: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/homemade-sub-machine-guns-australia-video/
Simply put, a full auto weapon is easier to build than a semi-auto. Once ownership of firearms of a designated type (like oh say semi-auto rifles with magazines carrying more than five rounds) is made illegal, the bad guys, and any good guys that you have now pissed off to the point where in the words of the crew of “Firefly” have decided “Shiny, let’s be bad guys!” have no reason to not go full Monty and make the weapon they’re making fully automatic… after all, after the first felony, the rest are free, or at least reduced cost. This of course ignores the fact that for the last 20 years, semi-auto modern sporting rifles have been the top-selling firearm in the nation, and there’s probably enough of them in this country to arm the Chinese army five times over. So, this “ghost gun” shit is just that, SHIT. It’s a way to mess with people that President Biden doesn’t like, which is to say just about anyone outside the big cities and a fair number of those inside. The rest of his proposals are just as silly.
One of his favorite ideas is to “remove the immunity from liability, for gun manufacturers.” Let’s look at that for just a second before I get off this particular P. Gun manufacturers have no immunity from liability for manufacturing faulty equipment. If you buy a gun, and when you take it out to the range or the field, it blows up in your face, whoever made it is staring down the barrel of a huge settlement, in the lawsuit, and frankly will settle out of court, just to shut you up. That’s “liability” but that’s not what Biden wants.
He wants the manufacturer to be liable for the illegal use of the company’s products. This is a very novel legal idea, used only for firearms and drug companies. The states recently got to sue Purdue Pharma, for the way they marketed Oxycontin. The way they made the case was by proving that the company offered cash incentives to proscribe the drug to people that didn’t need it, and intentionally got them hooked on it. Trying to stretch that to firearms manufacturing is a novel idea at best. If they manage to succeed, I intend to sue Dodge for making the Hemi engine, which encourages me to go faster than the speed limit, thus endangering me. And I can prove that Dodge gives kickbacks to their vendors to sell more cars, makes a big deal of how fast their cars are, and so on… on second thought maybe I’ll go after Maserati instead…
Seriously though, if you can sue a gun maker for making a gun that is used in a crime, you can sue a car company for making a car used in a vehicular assault! After all, who needs a reinforced steel bumper and 700 horsepower if you don’t intend to run people over? Sound ridiculous? NOW YOU’RE CATCHING ON.
OK, on to the next P: Pharisee. According to my handy dandy Thesaurus that’s another word for hypocrite, which is a better-known word, but sadly doesn’t start with P. What am I prognosticating about you ask? Simply this: when the NYT (yes, my favorite whipping boy) editorial staff, along with several other well known left-wing rags, and including President Biden himself (or whoever has their hands up his ass moving his mouth) suddenly decide “hey, we need to finish that wall Trump started” (see among other articles, Bret Stephens column “Biden Should Finish The wall” as published in the NYT, the Seattle Times, and many other rags controlled by the same usual suspects, on April 7, 2021) you know that’s some prime hypocrisy! That wall, was the favorite punching bag for the left for four years… now suddenly they think it’s a good idea? Pharisees the whole lot of them! Or another word that my Thesaurus likes: Pecksniff!
On to the next P: Police. Oh, my aching ass, what is wrong with the idiots wearing badges these days? Now the gal in Minnesota, I can almost understand. Let me help you to:
When you’re a cop, you spend time (sometimes a lot of time, sometimes a little time) on the range. BUT you almost never spend time with both your taser and your pistol on your hip and have to choose between them. You spend a lot of time on “shoot don’t shoot” but almost no time on “at the gun range, pull out the taser and tase the bad-guy. Is this failure a bad idea? Bet your ass it is, but we’re not talking about what should be, we’re talking about what is. Please go back and read that section again, it’s that important to the point.
Finished? Good. Now for the next point. When we’re under stress, no matter who you are, and she was a 20+ year veteran cop who was a Field Training Officer, if you’re stressed enough, you revert to muscle memory. Your body goes with what it knows. This is important too.
Now you roll up and find a guy who just did something illegal, and when you run his plate, he’s got a warrant due to carrying concealed without a permit and running from the cops, plus a Failure To Appear. (FTA) Well that tells us that 1) he’s a runner, and 2) he’s likely armed. You go to put the habius grabus on him and he resists, breaks free, and dives back into the car. Your head is going “HE IS GOING FOR A GUN”.
According to the video she intended to tase him at that point. She shouts clearly that she is going to tase him if he doesn’t cooperate, draws and shouts “taser-taser-taser” which is our training for “I’m about to give this guy a shock, get your hands off him, so you don’t get hit too!” This was followed on the tape by a bang, and “SHIT I JUST SHOT HIM!” Yes, you should, (and almost have to, there isn’t room to do otherwise) you put the taser on the opposite side from your gun.
Yes, the gun and the taser don’t feel the same, and you should notice the difference the second your hand goes to it. Yes, she FUCKED UP. But at least it’s an understandable fuckup.
If she hadn’t had a taser on her hip that would have been a good shoot. She followed the rules of force, except for her intent to draw the taser and instead, drawing her service weapon. Based on his behavior, and his attempt to run cops over as he was driving away with a bullet in him, deadly force was authorized, and if it had been a black cop on a white guy, or a white cop on a white guy, it wouldn’t have made the papers.
Unfortunately, it was a couple of miles away from where the trial is going down and it was a white cop on a black man, so she’s already been charged with manslaughter even before the investigation is complete. Well, sucks to be her for sure. I’ve had to draw my service weapon a couple of times, and I had to draw a taser a couple of times, I never made the mistake she made… But maybe I was just never quite as scared as she was. Gods know it’s a tough time to be a cop, especially in Minnesota.
There’s another cop use of force though that I have absolutely no sympathy for. Caron Nazario was driving his new SUV home from his drill weekend, where he was a second LT in the Army Medical Corps. It was so new he still had the paper tag in the back, they didn’t have his license plates sent to him yet. And that made the rest of this possible.
A patrol officer seeing this new SUV with no tags, and “I can see he’s almost certainly a minority.” (This is on the body cam tape for Gods’ sake.) So, because a minority is driving a new SUV that the officer didn’t notice the temp tag on (it can be clearly seen by the bodycam) Officer peckerwood decides to “pull this boy over.”
What follows is every stereotype of bad policing you’ve ever heard of. Short of just shooting him, they stepped on their dick in every way known to man, all while Lt. Nazario has his phone on record, and their body cams are running, and he’s IN UNIFORM. They pepper-sprayed the shit out of him, threatened his life, called him names, told him that they were going to electrocute him, when he asked for their supervisor they proceeded to beat the shit out of him, and then, as the cherry on top of the shit sundae, they offered to drop their nonexistent charges if he would shut up about it, and not tell anyone. I would like these two to get a ten-year sentence in GenPop, with COP tattooed on their foreheads. As it is, the LT is suing for one million bucks. Should be a slam dunk.
Now for my final P: PRICK. Also Propagandist. I speak of the twits that run Facebook. So let me make something clear. If you think that the censors, the apparatchiks that run Facebook are concerned about “social mores” or the “community standards” let me set you straight. I just go 3 days cut off not just from posting, but from liking or IM-ing, because of something that I IMed to either my son, my daughter, or my sister by another mother and her husband. (those being the only instant messages that I had sent in several days.)
I think we can take it for given that none of them reported me for saying anything offensive. It’s not beyond belief that I might say something offensive, but if I had, any one of them would have said “DUDE, REALY?” or some variation on that, along with “Can you hear yourself? What the fuck is wrong with you?” and we would have had that discussion. What they wouldn’t do, is report me to the Stazi. So by process of elimination, they’re reading my mail. Which means they’re reading yours too. I had discussed making a rifle for pig hunting. Anyone who looks at my FB profile can see that I’m a hunter. When I say pig hunting, I mean shooting something with four hooves and a snout, that I can make into bacon, ribs, ham, and sausage. Whether they were offended by the “make a gun” piece, the “shooting pigs” piece, or just the very concept of hunting I don’t know because of course they never tell you what it was that you said that got their ire up.
What they did do was show for a fact that they’re reading your mail, and even if it’s private, and not visible to the “community” they’re still going to play the thought police role to try and force you to think and speak in a way that they find acceptable. Of course, Censors never get the results they expect. In all of history, censorship has never been effective in the long run. It will however drive those that don’t match your opinion underground. Having your opponents go underground is never a good idea. When your opponent is still talking, he’s trying to convince people of the rightness of his cause. When your opponent goes silent, he’s become your enemy, and he’s no longer thinking of converting you or convincing you. His plans are more likely to shift towards a more permanent solution. I’ll be shifting more and more of my presence to MeWe, and other methods of communication, Zuckerberg can kiss my fat ass.
Alright, I’ve done enough typing for the day. Stay safe, and keep your head on a swivel, it’s getting crazy out.
Until next time I remain,
Yours in service.
William Lehman.
Just don’t sugarcoat it Shipmate!! Love that photo!