I just saw the trailer for Highway Men, which appears to be the story of the two Texas Rangers who chased down and led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde.

This looks like a great gun movie.

Another great gun movie (albeit sort of long and boring at parts) was Public Enemies, starting Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.  The Internet Movie Firearms Database as great coverage of the guns of Public Enemies.

I love the guns of that period, roughly 1900-1934, it was in many ways the golden age of gun design.

Wikipedia defines the golden age of flight this way:

Sometimes dubbed the Golden Age of Aviation,[1] the period in the history of aviation between the end of World War I (1918) and the beginning of World War II (1939) was characterised by a progressive change from the slow wood-and-fabric biplanes of World War I to fast, streamlined metal monoplanes, creating a revolution in both commercial and military aviation. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the biplane was all but obsolete. This revolution was made possible by the continuing development of lightweight aero engines of increasing power.

The same thing could be said about gun design of first few decades of the 20th century.

That was when the first truly reliable and successful semi-autos hit the market, guns like the Remington Model 8, Remington Model 11/Browning Auto 5, Winchester 1907 and 1910, the 1911, and Thompson all came out.  Revolver design also improved from the single action and break-top to the guns like the Colt New Service and S&W Hand Eject.

Advances in metallurgy and heat treat, along with better machining improved the availability of high pressure center fire cartridges and ushered in the development of magnum handgun cartridges.

The old black powder and early smokeless powder cartridges that were designed on black powder principles were finally seeing their way out for the consumer arms market.

Early smokeless cartridges like the 30-40 Krag or 30-30 Winchester that were developed in the late 1800’s were still based around black power understandings of internal ballistics.  Shoulders were weak, bullets were heavy and round nosed, pressures were lower.  It was early 20th century cartridges that took cartridge and bullet design to modern style, like the 8×57 Mauser and 30-06 that popular.

One of the aspects of the golden age of flight was that there was little Federal regulation.  the FAA didn’t exist, the Air Commerce Act wasn’t passed until 1926 and the first Federal Pilot’s License wasn’t issued until 1927.  If you wanted to build a plane and fly it, you just needed a barn near a flat spot in southern California and could do what you wanted.

Likewise, there were hardly any gun laws during the golden age of guns.  A Mormon in a blacksmith shop in Utah could design half the world’s guns without the need for a license.  Anybody could order a Thompson sub machine gun from the Sears catalog.

The firearms industry hadn’t decided that Plastic Fantastic and the AR-15 were the only two center fire designs worth a damn.

It was a great time and great guns came from it.

I will be excited as a gun nut to watch this movie.

Jorge Ramos has been the principal sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome in Spanish-Speaking TV.   Freedom of Speech and safety to Hispanic was all but dead because the abuses of Trump.

But it seems today, Mr. Ramos got a dose how real tyrants operate:

“They robbed us of our work, they robbed us of our equipment,” Ramos told Univision by phone Monday night in a televised interview. “They don’t want the world to see what happens when their leader is questioned.”

Jorge Ramos And A Univision News Crew Were Detained After Interviewing Venezuela’s Embattled President

But ask him again in a couple of days and he will tell you without any shame that Trump is worse.
Fuck him. Maduro should have given him a week-long stay in El Helicoide.

I had some people asking in good faith if we weren’t too harsh on Benchmade. The fact that they were doing a favor to the local cops and being a good corporate neighbor and all that should be taken in consideration.

But my brain kept coming to a quote from John Ross’ book Unintended Consequences and I believe explains somewhat why we react when we see guns destroyed for no good reason.

“Our culture is important, and we’re willing to pay for it. We have above -average educations, above – average incomes, and almost nonexistent criminal involvement. We pay far more in taxes and receive virtually no subsidy payments. You’d think Washington would be happy, but instead they are doing everything they can to destroy our culture.
In the ’20s, soldiers sat on their bunks in the cold at Camp Perry, cleaning the handmade .22 target rifles they would compete with the next day. When the President proudly announces that today, seventy years later, he is ordering these same guns thrown into a blast furnace, we in the gun culture feel powerful emotions. They are the same emotions a Native American would feel if the President proudly ordered the destruction of war clubs and other sacred tribal artifacts. They are the same emotions that Jews felt watching newsreel footage of Nazi Sturmtroopen gleefully burning intricate copies of the Torah.
We offer to buy the government’s surplus guns, and instead they pay to have them cut up. We offer to buy their surplus military ammo, shoot it, sell the brass to a smelter, and give the government the proceeds, and instead they pay to have it burned.

And that is all I have to say about this subject.

I had called HB 175 the “Reversing all the Gun B.S. passed with SB7026” bill

Removes provisions authorizing seizure of firearms from persons in certain circumstances; removes prohibition on firearms ownership or possession until removal of firearm possession & firearm ownership disability; removes prohibition on persons younger than 21 years of age purchasing firearms; eliminates waiting period for purchases of firearms other than handguns; removes ban on bump-fire stocks; removes provisions providing for risk protection orders.

Last Event: Withdrawn prior to introduction on Monday, February 25, 2019 3:59 PM

And I do not see another bill similar anywhere else in the Senate. Who and why was this ordered withdrawn is unknown to me at this time.

I read the Open Letter From New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon that Miguel covered briefly in his post Your Sunday Cup of Schadenfreude.

Then I read Miguel’s post from earlier today Please Contact Your U.S. Representative and Ask Them to Vote Against H.R. 8 and H.R. 1112!

There was a sentence in the open letter from Robert Mujica that is every bit as important for gun owners as it was for economically minded New Yorkers.

“The seventy percent of New Yorkers who supported Amazon and now vent their anger also bear responsibility and must learn that the silent majority should not be silent because they can lose to the vocal minority and self-interested politicians .”

The push for gun control, like the push to drive Amazon out of NYC, is motivated by a dangerous combination of ignorance and ideology.

These people don’t know how guns work, what the current laws are now, and how new laws won’t make a dent in crime, but they reflexively hate guns and are going to do their best to ban everything they can.

The silent majority that supports gun rights might not be as high as the percent that supported Amazon – it’s hard to tell because the media is always trying to marginalize gun owners to make it easier to take away our rights – but the people pushing for radical gun control are like those who pushed out Amazon, a dedicated group of vocal activists and not anything grassroots.

We saw and mocked NYC for allowing a small group of hard Leftists to kick $27 billion in taxes and 25,000-40,000 jobs out of the city.

We must make sure that the activist hydra of gun control groups – all of which seem to be connected at Michael Bloomberg’s bank account – are not the loudest voice that gets listened to.

If a few hundred union members and activists can make Amazon back out of NYC than what do you think a few thousand kids, most of who are marching just to take a day off of school and know shit about gun laws, can do to our gun rights?

Let’s not learn this lesson the hard way.

Via NRA:

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee just passed H.R. 8 and H.R. 1112, and they have been sent to the U.S. House floor for a vote! These are Pelosi-Bloomberg gun control bills designed to score political points, and they won’t have any impact on crime or criminals, don’t address America’s broken mental health system and don’t address the underlying causes of violence.

H.R. 8 criminalizes the private transfer of firearms and targets law-abiding gun owners for persecution. It would make criminals out of law-abiding gun owners for simply loaning a firearm to a friend or some family members. This bill would not stop criminals from obtaining guns because criminals do not comply with the law. And the legislation would be unenforceable without federal gun registration.

H.R. 1112 would allow the government to arbitrarily delay firearm purchases for over 20 days and make it more difficult for law-abiding Americans to defend themselves and their families.

Click this link to email your representative. And no, having an Anti Gun Democrat as Rep is not an excuse for inaction. Even they need to know there is great opposition to the bill.

I have the African-American Rodeo Clown, Frederica S. Wilson (D). She got hers.

Via Active Response Training. Greg is going to sue me one day i steal so much stuff from his site. If you are not following him already, please do so. It is a no BS place and he will kill sacred cows as necessary.

FBI PISTOL QUALIFICATION COURSE, revised Jan 2019.  It’s fired on a QIT silhouette, and scored 2 points per hit.

-3 yards Draw and fire 3 rds strong hand only, switch hands and fire 3 rds support hand only, all in 6 seconds

-5 yards Draw and fire 3 rds in 3 seconds
-From the Ready, fire 3 rds in 2 seconds
-From the Ready, fire 6 rds in 4 seconds

-7 yards Draw and fire 5 rds in 5 seconds
-From the Ready, fire 4 rounds, conduct an empty gun reload, and fire 4 more rds, all in 8 seconds
-From the Ready, fire 5 rounds in 4 seconds

-15 yards Draw and fire 3 rds in 6 seconds
-From the Ready, fire 3 rds in 5 seconds

-25 yards Draw and fire 4 rds from Standing, drop to a Kneeling Position and fire 4 more rds from Kneeling, all in 20 seconds.

50 rounds total 100 points possible 90 or above is a pass for instructors.

It is an improvement. Anybody that has been doing competitive pistol shooting regularly will have no problem with this qual. I like that forces switching hands and to shoot faster and accurately. 4 rounds for slide lock, reload and shooting four all in 8 seconds may seem not enough time but it is a century if you have some practice under your belt.