This is an image of an original SAA hammer that has been reworked to have new sear surfaces. The geometry is exactly the same as on the original Colt SAA. This is the classic fixed firing pin. It is solid and does not move.

There are three notches that the trigger sear can rest in. The first is sometimes called “rebound”. It is the deepest of the three. You should not be able to pull the trigger in this position. When in this position, the firing pin is away from the primer. It can not go bang from a trigger pull nor from striking the back of the hammer. To cause the firearm to go bang you have to strike the hammer hard enough that it breaks parts of the trigger or sear surfaces.

This is the recommended hammer position if carrying with a round under the hammer.

If you pull the trigger and the hammer at the same time such as the hammer rotates back enough to clear the first notch but not enough to get to the second notch and let go of the hammer there should not be enough force to fire the gun. No bang.

The next notch is the half-cock notch. Again the trigger is locked in place. You can not pull the trigger without breaking something. Striking the hammer does not cause the gun to fire. Hitting the gun doesn’t cause the gun to fire as the first notch will catch the hammer before it strikes the primer.

The hammer in half-cock can not be made to fire the gun without breaking things. If the hammer is pulled back and the trigger is pulled and the hammer is released before it gets almost to the final sear the gun does not go bang. Again, you have to pull the trigger to allow the hammer to fall all the way and with enough force to ignite the primer.

The final notch is the actual sear. At this point the gun is fully cocked. Hitting the hammer or gun will not cause the gun to fire. The trigger spring (not shown) will push the trigger sear back against the hammer and the hammer will catch on the half-cock or rebound notches.

In order for the gun to fire you must pull the trigger.

The final possible position is with the hammer fully forward. In this situation striking the back of the hammer firmly enough will cause the gun to fire.

This is the type of hammer the gun Alec Baldwin used to kill the camera woman.

Here is a transfer bar system. This revolve has at least a full and half-cock notch. The big difference is that the front of the hammer is smooth. NO firing pin.

This is how many modern hammer fired firearms work. When the trigger is pulled a bar extends up to cover the back of the firing pin. The hammer is released as the sear is disengaged. The hammer falls and hits the transfer bar. The transfer bar strikes the back of the firing pin. The firing pin then impacts the primer igniting it.

When the trigger is released the transfer bar drops down. With the transfer bar down the hammer doesn’t touch the back of the firing pin. Hitting the back of the hammer just drives it into the frame. No bang.

This is a very safe arrangement. Even if the hammer was at full cock and the gun is dropped it will not fire as the transfer bar will be down.

It is “safe” to carry with a round under the hammer.

The issue with this style of SAA is it doesn’t look right to people in the know. That firing pin spur is very distinctive.

So which of these did Alec use? Neither.

He used a hybrid system. Instead of a fixed firing pin as shown in the top the firing pin is actually attached to a small spring and floats within the hammer.

When the hammer strikes with enough force the inertia against the firing pin causes it to continue forward to strike the primer hard enough to ignite.

This system has all the same safety features of the original SAA but with the added benefit that the firing pin does not touch the primer when the hammer is full down.

In addition this style requires the system to be more finely tuned. If the hammer spring is to weak compared to the spring holding the firing pin in place the gun doesn’t go bang. If the firing pin spring is to weak it is possible for the firing pin to touch a primer without the hammer falling from a full cock position.

It is also possible to fire this style with a strong enough strike to the back of the hammer in just the right angle.

What the FBI report said is that the gun was tested and the following was found.

The gun would not fire if the hammer was not all the way back.
The hammer would not drop unless the trigger was pulled.
The gun would not fire during normal drop testing. I.e. If the hammer was fully down, at half-cock or in the rebound notch it would not fire.

In order for this particular gun to go bang it would require that the hammer be fully cocked and the trigger pulled.

I have personally laid hands on all three of these types of SAA revolvers. With the revolvers I own I tested with a case with primer only in the chamber.

I believe that Alec killed that woman by pointing a loaded firearm at her, cocking the hammer, and pulling the trigger.

“Extreme Risk Protection Orders” ERPOs are designed to allow firearm rights to be removed from a person without the person having a chance to defend themselves in court. They can beg the courts to return their firearms and firearm rights after the fact, but a right delayed is a right denied.

The American Justice System is suppose to allow the accused to have competent representation, a chance to face their accusers, to know what they are accused of and to be judged by a jury of their peers. Red Flag laws turn that on its head.

For competent representation there must be an ability to have a lawyer. As the most recent gun legislation passed by the federal government says, you have the right to legal representation and the state can offer it to you, but the state doesn’t have to. You have to pay for that representation.

Due process is suppose to be protected by the a judge that signs off on the order. No judge is going to deny an request for an ERPO. If the judge gets it wrong and you are not a threat you are denied your rights for a time. Nothing bad happens to the judge. If the judge denies the ERPO and something happens to the person requesting the ERPO then the judge is going to be blamed. Humans are human and are going to act in their own self interests most of the time.

It costs the judge nothing to sign an ERPO thus they will.

If you want to hear a horror story, go visit Divemedic’s Blog regarding how he was falsely accused and had to deal with being a prohibited person for 3 weeks because of a lying ex. My story started with my estranged wife claiming she felt threatened because we were talking loudly and I took a couple of steps back away from her and put my hands in my pockets. Since she knew I carried a pocket knife she was afraid.

My case ended up in court and if I had taken the advise of council today I would be a prohibited person. I didn’t own firearms at that particular time.

Most ERPOs are granted ex-parte. The accuser is in the room telling their tail of horrors and you are just going about your business. You are not there, your lawyer isn’t there. There is nobody to stand up for your rights.

As they say, a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. It is much easier to get a judge to sign off on an ERPO.

You find out when the cops show up on your doorstep to server you with the ERPO and take your guns. More than one such raid has happened at O dark thirty. Just what a person in distress needs, to be waken from a sound sleep with load banging noises as people try to break into their home.

Red Flag laws, ERPOs are all about future crime. The idea is that by looking for indicators the people in power can decide who is going to commit a crime. Once they know that a crime is going to be committed, they can stop that crime by removing firearms from a person before the crime is committed.

That way you get stories of a man that bludgeoned a woman to death and then drove a car into a crowd killing one more person and injuring 17. Man charged with 2 counts of homicide after driving car into fundraiser, allegedly killing mom He didn’t use a gun so I guess this isn’t that big of a deal.

We all know the line “The suspect was known to law enforcement.” In to many of these cases if law enforcement had done the right thing the animal would have been a prohibited person just by being committed or other criminal record. Unfortunately, to many of these animals are given a second and third and fiftieth chance before they commit their evil final act.

The people that do get caught up in ERPOs are often just run of the mill people who pissed somebody off. With the legal system more than willing to punish gun owners it is easy. If the person was suicidal the removal of firearms isn’t going to stop them. If they are intent on doing evil, they will find a way.

After some asshole killed a bunch of people in Buffalo New York, Governor Hochul signed an executive order requiring the state police to use ERPOs more aggressively, to expand their use of ERPOs.

Surprising nobody the number of ERPOs filed in the last three months exceeds the total filed for 2021.

Numbers I would like to see:

1. How many ERPO applications were turned down?
2. How many ERPOs were rescinded when the accused was seen by the judge?
3. How many people were negatively affected by an ERPO?

The left is never interested in the consequences of their actions, all that matters to them is that they had good intentions.
— NYS sees major increase in use of protection orders filed under state Red Flag Law

A few years ago a raider (a person who has only prepared by buying guns and ammo, no life skills or other skills) was bragging about how he was building AR-15s. He was so proud to show me all this special tooling he had (A barrel nut wrench). He made it sound like a big thing. Gee, he was building AR-15s.

A few years later I became much more interested in firearms. I started watching Forgotten Weapons to learn something. I watched a couple of AR-15 builds before YouTube took them all down. It made me start to actually take an interested in how the firearms I owned actually functioned.

Think about this stupid little thing for a moment, how does pulling a trigger back cause a sear to move downward to drop the bolt on a simple blowback open bolt gun. There has to be a linkage of some sort. Is the sear in front of the trigger or behind it?

The linkage in an AR-15 is actually pretty simple, in keeping with the linkage used in a Colt SAA. Pressing the trigger causes the trigger to pivot. A bar at nearly right angles to the trigger towards the front then moves downward. The hammer has a sear that rests against that bar. As the bar is pulled off the sear, the hammer drops firing the gun.

Simple.

You might know all of that. You might have looked inside your firearm(s) to see how it works. I had not. I just opened an AR-15 to verify that I had all the parts right and the functioning correct.

It takes a bit of curiosity to bother to learn all of that.

At one point I had an opportunity to shoot a Colt SP-1. This was one of the first commercial AR-15s. It was an M-16 with two modifications. No auto-sear and the third hole was not drilled in the receiver. It had a full auto selector switch, the M-16 bolt carrier and all the other magic parts.

And here is the thing, if you switched the selector to full auto it could slam fire. The fix was simple, replace the full auto selector with a semi-auto only and it would no longer slam fire.

Slam firing is considered a “not good” event. Even though there are many firearm designs that are intended to “slam fire”, I.e. any firearm that has a fixed firing pin and fires from an open bolt. For higher pressure rounds there must be a full lock up before the round is fired.

So what about the AR-15 platform? Is it “safe” if it slam fires?

Yes, it is. Assume for a moment that the firing pin in your AR-15 got stuck in its forward most position. You drop the bolt, the bolt strips a round from the magazine and pushes it into the chamber. The bolt head is in contact with the base of the round.

The round comes to a stop against the shoulder in the chamber, the bolt face is now pushing up against the face of the breech. The firing pin should be indenting the primer. But it isn’t.

The firing pin does not extend past the face of the bolt until after the bolt has rotated and the chamber is locked.

With the firing pin stuck in its forward most position the rifle will slam fire but only after there is full lockup.

It is a design feature.

Learning those types of things about firearm design is amazing to me. Because of that I became much more willing to detail strip my firearms. To look at how they function. What does this lever do? Why is this cut here? Why did they do this little thing here?

As you do more you learn more and you begin to see where things might have gone wrong. As an example, a friend gave me a long term loan of a semi-auto shotgun. It didn’t work very well but it did go bang when you pulled the trigger. It was only the semi-auto functioning that was questionable. I cleaned it and put it back together. It worked better but wasn’t reliable.

Then one day I had it stripped down and was looking at the piston. The more I looked at it the sadder the O-rings looked. I decided I was going to replace them. So I got out my picks to remove the O-rings so I could measure them and get the right replacements.

As I started to pick the O-Ring out it started to crumble.

It was then that I realized, those weren’t O-rings. It was carbon build up. My friend had never cleaned this shotgun after he acquired it. The carbon build up in the grooves had gotten so bad it was interfering with the functioning of the firearm.

Once I got the grooves cleaned and everything lubed and put back together, it functioned flawlessly. I had fixed a broken firearm.

Since that time I’ve repaired a few firearms. Nothing particularly hard, just had to be done. Replacing sights is something I do myself now, I didn’t originally. It was something I would have a gunsmith do.

Sometimes the AR platform is called “Barbie for men”. You can customize it however you want. You can put lights and optics on. Flare launchers, lasers, sound systems, chainsaws, bayonets can all be attached to your AR.

Not only can you customize the outside, changing the furniture and accessories, you can also customize the inside.

At the top of this post is a picture of a $250 drop in trigger. Open up your AR, push out two pins and most of the guts of the lower receiver spill out on to your workbench. Slide this trigger into place, push the two pins back into place and you now have a beautiful trigger with a straight trigger and a 3 pound pull. Beautiful.

Or you can pay $35 for a complete fire control group, i.e. the two pins are included. This is suppose to be better than a mil-spec mil-issue trigger, but it is likely almost the same thing.

There are a hundred different options out there.

There are just as many options for pistols. Glock replacement triggers. 1911 replacement hammers. Some 1911s have solid hammers, some have a cut out. You can get different triggers. All of these are things that allow you to make your pistol yours.

A pistol my local gun store was selling had loose slabs. Turns out that the previous owner was a competition shooter. He had added weights under the slabs which required longer screws. The local gun store had taken the extra weights off the gun but didn’t notice that the screws were too long. A simple set of replacement screws and the slabs are nice and tight again.

For the residents of Washington DC, they are soon going to be unable to buy replacement parts because of a judgement by D.C. Superior Court Judge Ebony Scott. She was appointed by Biden. Her previous career was as with the D.C Office of Human Rights. Then she went to work for the Mayor’s office. There were five judges sworn in at the same time. They all had their official swearing in pictures taken. In her picture she, the Chief Justice and the person holding the bible are all masked. There are no masks in any of the other swearing in images.

It appears she has all the right qualifications to make law from the bench.

No judge gets to decide what is and is not a firearm. That is decided by congress. And congress has made that law. A judge can say that according to the law as set out by congress something is a firearm, but that is based on the actual pieces of that are being evaluated. Not on her opinion of a companies speech.

Scott cited “Polymer80’s alarming belief” that the sale of its firearms is legal in the district as part of the reason the court granted the plaintiff’s request for a permanent injunction.

The law of intended consequences. Three times is enemy action.

Judge rules ‘ghost guns’ are firearms and bars Polymer80 from selling them to D.C. residents

Another week and things are stabilizing a bit more.

J.Kb. is back in the grove for the time being and Miguel is pushing out content as well.

Sorry for the delay in getting Friday’s Feedback out there.

I’m looking for a couple of songs for Tuesday Tunes. Feel free to recommend stuff down below.

If you have any topics you would like us to research or talk about, feel free to let us know that.

We did get an early link to the FBI labeling us all extremists. By the time I had some spare cycles to write about it everybody else already had. I might still throw up the images just for history’s sake.

Anyway, feel free to comment all you want.

Thanks again for your support.

Things that make you go “hmmmmmm?”

Earlier, two law enforcement sources said a man armed with an AR-15-style rifle got inside the FBI building and fired a nail gun toward personnel before he fled in a car.

Ohio State Highway Patrol spokesman, Lt. Nathan Dennis said that officers fired less lethal munitions at the suspect before the suspect raised his gun. The officers then shot the suspect dead.

And just so you know, the suspect is one of those extreme right wingers, he was at the January 6th rally!

And again, we have that unusual situation of a “extremist” that supposedly has an AR-15, the deadliest of weapons, and yet he attacked the FBI office with a nail gun.

Hmmmm, it is almost as if they aren’t telling the whole story. Or they are manipulating it so that the narrative stays the same. Right == bad, Left == good.

As a wild ass guess, the dude was upset, went into the visitors center, popped off his nail gun a few times before leaving with the cops chasing him. He then committed suicide by cop by pointing the nail gun at the cops. Until we see video of it, the odds of there being an AR-15 involved are pretty small.

Jan. 6 Protestor Accused of Attacking FBI Office in Cincinnati

Many of the articles on this event highlight a January 6th connection and all of them mention an AR-15.

EDITED: Original stated that the suspect raised his “guns” when the actual quote was raised his “gun”

Everybody has their hot take on this. We’ve heard what Trump has to say. We’ve heard what J.Kb. with tinfoil hat has to say. Garland has his take and so do you.

Of course the media is going to do what the media always does, make you and I the bad guys.

Many on the right believe that the 2020 election was fixed. Not necessarily on election day but in the months leading up to it. The Wisconsin supreme court recently ruled that the drop boxes used in 2020 were not constitutional. PA did similar election hijinx.

On January 6th a bunch of people from the right showed up to protest and to let their voices be heard. They new the rules. The rules had been shown to them through the months of “Mostly Peaceful Protests”. Media showed how it was ok for protesters to push back, to throw things at law enforcement, to protect yourself, to spray mace and bear spray and many other things.

These were the established rules of engagement.

They were not. Those rules of engagement only applied to the left. This is why we had Rittenhouse arrested and prosecuted for defending himself. The man who was pushed and shoved and hit who finally responded with lethal force being arrested and charged. An Uber driver that had an AK pointed at him responded with lethal force. He too was punished by the law.

Lawfare is real. “The process is the punishment.”

Donald Trump made a big mistake when he entered the White House. He treated taking over as president the same as he treated taking over a company with a hostile take over. When the deal is done you find the good people and you keep them. They are the people that get things done. They are the ones that are loyal to the company, the fact that there is a new CEO shouldn’t change that.

We’ve all had times when our boss changed. We know that things will change. Some bosses are good, some are bad. Most of the time you keep right on going because you like your job and you like what you are doing. You know that you will be able to train your boss to be good sooner or later.

And Trump had that mindset. We know that because he didn’t clear house as he entered office. Having delayed when he did start firing people the media immediately sided with the Left. Trump was horrible. He didn’t know what he was doing. The only thing that was going to save the country was these loyal government employees that would keep him in check.

Government employees are like all of us, some are good, some are bad. Many are lazy. It is much easier to be lazy with a government job. The scientists and researchers and techs I worked with when I was supporting a government research facility were all incredible people that worked more hours than they got paid for and got some amazing results.

The admin staff? Not so much. If we had to do something after hours we would just stay late to do it. We had our normal duties and after hours work was just part of the job. If an admin person had to stay past 1630 they didn’t show up until late in the day. And when their 8 hours were up, they were out the door.

Just a few more minutes to complete something? Nope. Out the door, we’ll schedule another after hours next week.

That is the gist of it. Trump knew there were going to be bad apples. He didn’t know just how bad. He also didn’t expect it at the top. He didn’t expect it from his “inner” circle. Nobody was expecting the FBI to show up during the transition looking to entrap people like Gen. Flynn.

The Trump team didn’t know you never talked to the FBI without White House counsel with you.

Trump has been fighting the Left leaning bureaucracy (hey, it is only a 75 degree list to the port) since before he entered office. It has continued ever since.

The latest is of course the FBI raid on his home.

Showing up with that number of agents makes it a raid. There was no reason. I might be proven wrong, but I doubt it. You use a warrant and a raid when you have reason to believe that evidence might be destroyed or not turned over upon request.

Yes, we know that Hilary broke the law. We know she should have been arrested and charged. She wasn’t because she is one of the chosen ones. It doesn’t matter what she did or did not do. It doesn’t matter what the FBI did or did not do to her.

What matters is rule of law.

What we will find is that the warrant was issued legally. At some point in a decade or two we might find out that people lied to get it. But it will all be legal.

But that isn’t where this is right now. This is about you.

If you haven’t watched the video at the top, please watch it with the sound on.

January 6th was a big deal to the left as it let them paint every one of us as “extreme”. This raid is causing thousands and thousands of people to comment.

“lock and load”, “Civil War V2” and so on and so on. This raid kicked a hornets nest. People chatter. People make statements.

What you and I might read as a warning “If you do X I’ll do Y.” they see as a threat.

How many times have we heard some Lefty crying in the media about “death threats”. They don’t show them. When they do it turns out to be things like “If you want to take them, YOU stack up.”

Years ago as a child I was being bullied by a group of children my age and a bit older. I picked up a baseball bat and was ready to take as many as I could if they attacked. They were the ones trying to flank me. They were the ones advancing. I was preparing to defend myself.

My actions were a threat if and only if they initiated the attack. They didn’t. The bat did its job. It told them I was a hard target.

So look at this action. It is an enemy action. Once is an accident. Twice a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action. We are way past the third time.

Make sure you are prepared. Make sure you stand on the moral high ground. Make sure you are ready for whatever decisions you choose to make. Watch what is happening to your neighbors and watch for strange silences.

Don’t be the one to start the fire.

In June of 2021 the Hon. Roger T. Benitez ruled on the Miller v. Bonta in the California Assault Weapons Ban (AWCA). In his ruling he eviscerated the state of California. He ruled that AWCA was unconstitutional. Either this ruling or one of his other rulings resulted in “Freedom Week” when 10s of thousands of standard capacity magazines flowed into California.

Of course the state of California appealed the case. It was heard by a panel of 3 judges of the 9th circuit court. The three judges upheld Benitez’s ruling. Everybody involved knew that the state would appeal again for the case to be heard by a full panel instead of just the three judges.

One of the judges on the 3 member panel went so far as to write the ruling of the en blanc panel. Basically saying that the full circuit court would find for the AWCA.

He was right. Miller then appealed to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did not grant certiorari but did not deny it either. It was put on hold pending the Bruen opinion. This was done for a number of cases. In addition a number of cases at the circuit court and district court levels were put on hold pending SCOTUS ruling.

Bruen was decided on a Thursday and on the following Monday the court “granted certiorari, vacated the judgement, and remanded back to the circuit court” (GVR) a number of cases, including Miller v Bonta.

At this point the 9th Circuit Court should have ruled that the AWCA was unconstitutional and the case would be done. They could, instead, have punted it down to a 3 judge panel. The thing that would take the most time was what they chose to do. The remanded the case back to the district court for Benitez to rule again in light of Bruen.

This is absolutely ridiculous as Benitez’s original ruling is directly in line with Bruen. Regardless, this is just a delay tactic on the part of the 9th Circuit.

Judge Benitez was read. According to reports he had his order ready to go out on August 2nd and released it on Aug 8th.

Pursuant to the decision of the court of appeals vacating and remanding the case to this court, both parties are ordered to file briefs addressing New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass ‘n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S._ (June 23, 2022), and to do so withing twenty days of the date of this Order.
— Case No.: 19-cv-1537-BEN (JLB) via FPC

This means that the parties must respond by the 28th of August. This is blazingly fast for the US court system. It would not surprise me if Benitez has his ruling out before the end of the year.

At that point the state of california has to make a decision on whether they will appeal the ruling. My bet is that they will not.

If they appeal and lose the 9th Circuit will have to rule and they will have to follow the Bruen decision. If the 9th Circuit Rules that AWCA is unconstitutional that means all such weapons bans will be overturned within the 9th Circuit. I.e. any district judge can look at an AWB and rule it unconstitutional and appeals are unlikely to be granted.

If on the other hand they do not appeal then Benitez’s ruling in Miller only applies to California.

We’ve seen this happen in a couple of other cases over the years where the states have taken an “L” rather than allowing presidence to be set.