Gun Free Zone

I swear it is a Pavlovian reaction by now.  Only the physical threats from the missus stopped me from dumping a couple of hundred on blemished receivers.

According to a CBS poll, 70% of Americans are pessimistic about the state of the country.

A Gallup poll has 80% of Americans pessimistic about the state of the economy.

The labor force participation rate is holding at the lowest it’s been since we started measuring it.

Everything is more expensive and people have lost real buying power from their money.

According to Biden last night, everything is coming up roses and he’s the best President in history.

Social media has “Dark Biden” trending, because apparently Biden is a badass.

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it … And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable…what then?”

Welcome to 1984 2023, where your eyes and your wallet lie to you, and The Party is always right.

From last night’s State of the Union Address:

"Ban assault weapons now! Ban them now! Once and for all."

President Biden acknowledged Brandon Tsay, the 26-year-old who wrestled a gun away from the shooter in Monterey Park, California, and urged Congress to ban assault weapons during #SOTU2023 pic.twitter.com/49V9Iws3A9

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 8, 2023

This on the heels of the pistol brace ban is going to drive everything to a head.

It’s time that the Supreme Court finally tackle the issue of assault weapons and possibly the NFA with it.

After Bruen, I’m confident that such a decision will rule in our favor.

But it’s time to stop beating around the bush and knock this shit out once and for all.

B.L.U.F. Some of the media understands that the NYS CCIA is an overreach that accomplishes nothing.

One of the great stupidities of New York’s current gun-law debate is that existing laws merely required a couple of tweaks for them to prove effective — nowhere more so than in the need for a license-to-carry rule based on objective criteria rather than bias and favoritism.

There are a number of pundits talking about knee-jerk responses by the different states. The states that created a spaghetti bowl of new laws to throw at the wall. The states that created “Kill carry” bills which make it easier to get a CCW but which makes it almost impossible to actually carry anywhere.

The responses are starting to fall into a few categories:

• Sensitive Places
• Good Moral Character
• Prove you are a responsible law abiding citizen
• Expanded training that isn’t available
• Costs increases.
• Attempting to flip who has to prove history and tradition
• That particular thing isn’t covered under the second amendment because it isn’t an “arm” or it is “exceptionally dangerous”

Nobody wants to hear it in the era of “decarceration” and “depolicing,” but one of the major problems facing crime-ridden Democrat-run cities is that many firearms offenses — short of murder — now go largely unpunished: In Philadelphia, 61% of gun cases are dismissed without charges or trial, up from less than 30% as recently as 2016.

Yep, right on target there. If you put the bad guys in jail, they aren’t going to be doing bad things to us.

Of the 4,456 gun arrests NYPD made in 2021, there was at last count one (not a typo!) conviction at trial and far more dismissals (983) than plea deals (698). Statistically speaking, the most likely thing to happen after an arrest for illegally carrying a gun in New York is … nothing.

Imagine that, nearly 4.5 thousand people were arrested in NYC for violating some part of their gun laws in 2021 (pre Bruen) yet only one was taken to trial and convicted.

It is highly likely that the poor saps that did end up being punished after a gun arrest were mostly law abiding, people that caught up by the police because ???.

It reminds me of the stories of construction workers being stopped and frisked. Their pocket knives were found. The cops then did a “flick test” where they attempted to open the knife one handed. If they were able to do so, they worker was jacked up on a weapons violation.

The problem with New York City’s license-to-carry law was never that it was too strict — it was that it was arbitrary and favored the connected. Celebrities such as Steven Seagal and Joan Rivers were issued licenses, but ordinary New Yorkers long found it nearly impossible to get one. This wasn’t a matter of responsible gun ownership — asked in 2003 about the concealed-carry permit he had secured during his mayoral candidacy four decades earlier, William F. Buckley Jr. replied: “I have my pistol permit in my wallet, and no one knows where the gun is.”

The problem with New York City’s license-to-carry law was never that it was too strict — it was that it was arbitrary and favored the connected. Celebrities such as Steven Seagal and Joan Rivers were issued licenses, but ordinary New Yorkers long found it nearly impossible to get one. This wasn’t a matter of responsible gun ownership — asked in 2003 about the concealed-carry permit he had secured during his mayoral candidacy four decades earlier, William F. Buckley Jr. replied: “I have my pistol permit in my wallet, and no one knows where the gun is.”

And here is our words echoed back to us:

The license-holders are not the problem. The criminals are.

A new solution for New York’s gun problems: Enforcement and punishment

As legislators reconsider New York’s concealed weapons laws, more thought should be given to both preventing crime and issuing licenses equitably.

 

Cocaine Cowboys: Reloaded (2014) –

While doing the post-surgery recovery, we have been watching alot of stuff and this documentary was the latest. We did not live there at the time, but they described the most violent murders with the addresses included and we kept going “We been there… we visited there… yes, been there too…. holy fuck that was near our house.”

And you know what? I have the feeling some locations in the US are about to feel the same pain Miami did back in the day.

But the best tidbit of information was about criminals being killed while engaged in a felony and knowing that almost half of the critters were taken down by armed civilians. Pretty much the Marielito crime element was tamed by Good Guys with Guns.

Reading media reports is driving me crazy. We’ve got democrats introducing new gun control everyday. We’ve got bad guys winning 2A cases.

We’ve got inflation going through the roof and our government taking victory laps because it isn’t as bad as it was last month.

Nothing but clowns and jokers everywhere you look in DC.

And as recorded:

In my last post on shaped charges, I was asked in the comments about explosive welding.  Why not?

Explosive welding is also known as explosive cladding.  It is a process by which a cladding material is explosively bonded to a backing material.

Why do it?  Besides that blowing shit up is cool as fuck.

Cladding is a process in which a layer of some material with desirable properties is laid over and bonded to a structural substrate.

People are often familiar with this as hardfacing.  A steel member, like an auger blade, die, teeth on an excavator, etc., is welded over with a hard, wear-resistant surface material.

Cladding is often done for corrosion resistance.  I was first introduced to is with alkalizer units in a refinery, which use almost pure sulfuric or hydrofluoric acid.  The tank is lined with tantalum.  Tantalum is very expensive, so it is clad onto steel which makes up the structural component of the pressure vessel.

Cladding is much thicker than plating, which is put on as an electrochemical process.  Platings are thin and do contain porosity.  For very harsh chemical environments, platings are insufficient to protect the substrate material.  This is where cladding comes in.

Quite often cladding is applied with a welder.  God only knows how many miles of hardface cladding I put on with SMAW when I was learning to weld.  Just facing conveyor rollers for a cement plant building up hours with a torch.

But there are times when that cannot be done.  The metals cannot be welded together for a variety or reasons.  Sometimes the two metals form brittle intermetallics, such as aluminum and steel. With tantalum, the melting temperature of tantalum is higher than the vaporization temperature of steel, so tantalum cannot be welded to the steel with fusion welding.

Explosive welding is a solid-state process that bonds the materials together mechanically.  There is no alloying of the two metals.

The metal to be clad is called the flyer plate.  It is placed over the base plate with small plastic pucks that give it a standoff distance.

The flyer plate is backed with explosives, and a detonator is placed in one corner.  The shockwave drives the flyer plate into the base plate, starting at that corner and radiating outward.

This is very similar to how a shaped charge works.  When the metal plates impact at thousands of meters per second, that same thin shear layer forms, and any surface impurities, oxides, and contaminates squirt out from between the plates as a jet.

The material softened by the impact but not squirted out as a jet ripple against one another and lock mechanically with what looks like ocean waves and hook together like Velcro.

The clad plate can then be assembled into a structure.

This process allows very dissimilar metals to be permanently bonded together without issues associated with the fusion welding of dissimilar metals.

The downside is you can only do large flat sheets.  It’s not a process that is conducive to complex geometries.

Usually, explosives are used for blowing things apart, but every once in a while they can be used to blow things together.

Also, because blowing shit up is cool as fuck.

–

Update:

Yes, the clad plate can be roll formed like other plates.

To make a tank, the plates are aligned and butt-welded together.  The steel backing plate can be welded to other steel backing plates on the back and the cladding is welded to other cladding on the front.

The welding is done a little more shallow to prevent the weldpool from penetrating through one layer into the next.

I should also add, this is where advanced knowledge of explosives it key.

Explosive welding is best done with low velocity explosives like ANFO, where shaped charges are best made with high velocity explosives like RDX and PETN.

The speed of the detonation and shockwave affects the thickness of that shear jetting layer.

A high velocity explosive will create a larger jet, great for armor piercing.

A low velocity explosive will create enough jet to clean the plates but will bond the together.

If you tried to explosive welding two plates with Comp B or Semtex,you won’t get a good plate but a huge shape charge.