A young man, Peter Mielke, 19, was an employee at a pizza parlor in Bellaire, Texas, and was shot and killed during an armed robbery.  The news report says that Peter complied with the robbers demand for money and then was shot multiple times.  The murderer’s identity is as of yet unknown and police are asking for help from anybody that might know something about the crime.

This is a sad story.

Moms Demand Action managed to make it worse.

“Help us fight our nationa’s lax gun laws and ‘guns everywhere’ culture, which endangers our families.”

Um… WTF!?!  When MDA screeches about “guns everywhere culture” they are usually talking about concealed carry.  Even when ranting about open carry in Texas, that still requires the carrier to have a permit, which in the state of Texas involves a fingerprint background check.  So it MDA going out on the limb that the murderer who robbed a pizza parlor was a CCW permit holder?  Color me skeptical on that one.

I don’t think Texas’ lax gun laws or “guns everywhere culture” are responsible for this one.  Why?  Because New York City has some of the toughest gun laws on the books and virtually no concealed carry, yet a quick search of the NYC CBS local news shows that armed robbery is a pretty common occurrence there.

This murder isn’t the product of Texas’ love of guns.  This is the result of a bad guy engaged in criminal activity.  If there is a culture responsible for this, isn’t not the one where loving families go to the range and target shoot together.

The Georgia Legislature is pushing forward with a campus carry bill.

The anti-gun Georgia establishment whipped out the dog-eared old script of anti-gun, anti-carry platitudes.

“Persons have to be trained to use a weapon in a matter to fight back. Georgia doesn’t do any kind of training to allow you to carry even if you have a permit. It doesn’t guarantee that you will protect anyone or that the law is going to work.” – State Sen. Harold Jones II, D-Augusta

Concealed carriers are all dumb amateurs. Check.

“We’re putting (students) in volatile situations with alcohol and hormones.” –  State Rep. Virgil Fludd, D-Tyrone

Kids will get drunk and start shooting each other. Check.

“You have people who walk around and they become vigilantes. Someone can be upset with someone and they immediately pull out the weapon, so the police force becomes ineffective.  You also have people who show up to campus who are up to no good, who now know that people are now carrying, who shoot first and ask questions later.” – Clark Atlanta University President Ronald Johnson

Shoot first/blood in the streets/OK Corral histrionics. Check.

Not to be outdone by the politicians, Moms Demand Action had to get into the fray.

“When we’re talking about even 21 year old kids, there’s issues with academic pressure, with drug use, alcohol abuse and putting kids in that type of situation and allowing guns is not a common sense law.” – Lindsey Donovan, MDA Chapter Leader.

Nothing more than a rehashing of same BS, but at least she got the age thing right.

The bill gets elevated and the governor steps up to the plate.  What did he say?

“We heard all the hype that we’re now hearing about campus carry, all the predictions of tragedies. All the predictions that we were going to open our state up to a Wild West scenario.  Those earlier fears don’t appear to have come true.  So, therefore, to use those kind of arguments with the campus carry discussion, I think lacks validity.” – Governor Nathaniel Deal

BOOM!  Mic drop!  I don’t know anything about any of his other positions, but on concealed carry, the man does not lie.

I’ve visited Georgia Tech and other big state schools (U Penn, UF, etc.) .  They are so integrated into the cities they are in, sometimes it’s impossible to tell you’ve walked into campus.  Why should someone who is licensed to carry a gun in downtown Atlanta suddenly find him/herself in violation of the law by crossing a street and finding him/herself on campus?  This is as illogical as the rationale behind gun free zones, that the difference between safety and danger in an arbitrary and invisible line in the ground.

What additional risk does this place on students?  None, and it seems like the Governor gets that.  In regard to those engaged in what-if hand-wringing, the governor’s repose was “I think they should be concerned about making sure that those students are taught and educated.  That’s their responsibility. The law will take care of the rest of it.”  Well said governor.

Rather, countries passed big packages of gun laws, which overhauled the nation’s firearm code fairly broadly, which all tended to share similar features. According to Santaella-Tenorio, they generally included:
Banning “weapons that are actually very powerful,” like automatic weapons.
“They all implemented background checks.”
“They all required permits and licenses for purchasing guns.”
South Africa’s comprehensive Firearm Control Act, passed in 2000, contained all these measures. One study found that firearm homicides in five major South African cities decreased by 13.6 percent per year for the next five years. “Reductions in nonfirearm homicides were also observed,” Santaella-Tenorio et al. note, “although not as pronounced as the ones observed for firearm homicides.”

Source: A huge international study of gun control finds strong evidence that it actually works – Vox

1. The homicide rate in South Africa did not begin to go down in 2000 but in 1995. And The rates have been going up again since 2012.
2. If Gun Control is your objective, something weird happened in South Africa: “As Masuku points out, the graph below shows that “murder decreased by 18% in the past seven years and by 2% in the past 12 months” (p.19. FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE: South African crime trends in 2002). This decrease needs to be considered critically. Masuku points out that “it is unusual for murder rates to decline while other forms of violent crime are increasing, and this trend is particularly striking because the percentage of murders committed with a firearm has increased.”
3. While it is true the South Africa’s murder rate halved between 1994 and 2014, the same thing happened with the US during the same period but with a much higher percentage of guns on private hands and overall liberalization of gun laws across the nation.

Sorry Skippy. Your study just won’t wash. Do you know what reduces violent crime? Going after violent offenders. My guns are behaving quite well and you do not need to go after them.

Mind your own business, thank you.

I get that the .Gov does not want bad weapons or fully auto out there, but to settle for scrap metal prices what could bring some better prices in the open market in regards of pieces like flash suppressors, stocks, pistol grips, hand-guards, etc is just fiscal irresponsibility.

Via MHI Facebook Page.

The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize sites containing chemical or biological weapons: rocket balls. These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno. The makers call them “kinetic fireball incendiaries.” The Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about them, but published documents show that the fireballs have undergone tests on underground bunkers.

Source: Secret Rocket Balls Target WMD Bunkers | WIRED

Tell me that this is not the first thing that came to mind.