Month: January 2023

The story of Marlin you have never heard

Mad Ogre spent last week on Twitter praising the new Marlin rifles produced by Ruger displayed at SHOT.

If you read the internet, the consensus is Marlin was a great company that made great guns, Remington bought them and destroyed them, Ruger bought Marlin from Remington after Remington went bankrupt, and the Ruger ones are great.

There is a lot more to that story.  I’ve been sitting on it for a while and it’s time it gets told.

Everyone loves their Connecticut-made Marlin rifles.

The Connecticut-made guns were some of the last, probably the last, gunsmith-built guns in volume production in the country.  Marlin rifles were assembled by men with gray beards, sitting at workbenches with files, fitting the guns together to make them work.

That may have worked well back in the day, but that’s not how modern guns are manufactured.  Go to a modern firearms manufacturing facility, it’s like any other manufacturing facility, parts come off machining and finishing and go to assembly, where they are put together.

None of the automotive manufacturers are having workers hand-fit components during assembly.  That’s not how it works.

It’s just not profitable to have skilled people hand-fitting parts at high wages.  The gun companies that do sell hand-fit guns do so at low volume and high prices.  They are custom or at least semi-custom guns.  Not production guns.

The way Marlin built guns was the way they built guns when they first started building these new models in the 1970s (the Model 1985, for instance, was named for the original 1895 but was designed in 1972).  Much of the equipment was dated to that same era.

That was one of the big problems.  The old men with gray beards who did that were retiring or dying.  They couldn’t train younger people to build guns like that at assembly wages.  An assembly tech is not a gunsmith.  Marlin, on its own, didn’t have much of a future under its business model.  They just couldn’t meet demand building guns the way they did.

The goal in the acquisition of Marlin by Remington was to turn Marlin into a modern production gun company so that it could be cost-competitive.

Henry rifles are not hand-fit.  They are assembled from parts made to spec on modern CNC equipment and designed with GD&T (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing) to work.  They will tell you that during their factory tour.

When Remington got hold of Marlin, nobody knew just how much work needed to go into a Marlin rifle to get it to run reliably.  Remington moved production out of Connecticut and it didn’t go smoothly.

The job of turning Marlin from old-school, making parts and fit at assembly, into a modern machine and assemble production fell onto Remington R&D.

When Remington R&D got the old prints from Marlin and plugged them into AUTOCAD, quite often, the CAD software spit them back out for being over-dimensionalized, under-dimensionalized, having no or bad datums, etc.

I’ve written about the NASA Artemis before.  Why NASA was asked why they were creating a new rocket instead of just building the Saturn V again.  Their response was that they couldn’t.  Each Saturn V was fit at assembly.  They didn’t know what was done by the engineers between what was off-print and what they did to make the engines work.  Most of the engineers who made Saturn V were dead and they took their tribal knowledge to the grave with them.  It was easier to start over with CAD than try to decipher the old prints and handwritten notes and put them together into a working engine.

Well, Marlin was exactly like that, except Remington couldn’t start over because people wanted the guns they knew.

There were other problems as well.  Many of the old Marlin vendors (companies that made small parts like screws and springs) had gone out of business.  The old companies often made parts that worked but were different from the prints, because years ago they tweaked something at the request of Marlin but never noted it.  Parts made by newer vendors using old prints didn’t function.

Remington R&D started with the premier gun, the Model 1895 in 45-70, and effectively re-invented the inside of that gun with all-new GD&T.  At some points old guns that were made to work were reverse-engineered to figure out what corners were broken, what surfaces filed down, what had been changed from print to get the guns to work.

After the Model 1895, the Model 336 was next, then the Model 1894, and so on, until every gun in the Marlin lineup had been fully modernized.

Herein lies the problem.

While R&D was doing this, a process that took years, Remington was still building Marlin rifles and trying to get them to run in production.  The decision was made, for better or worse, that production of Marlin was not going to be stopped during the refresh.  The idea was if Marlins were not on the shelf during that time, Henry would just come along and eat Marlin’s lunch, take its market share, and Marlin would never be able to get its ground back after disappearing from store shelves for a few years.  As a result, there were Marlin rifles of less than stellar functionality that went to consumers.

Later year Remington made Marlins, the ones produced from the new prints created by Remington R&D are great guns.  They work well, but that is eclipsed by the reputation Remington made Marlins developed in the early years of production.

Everyone knows what happened next, Remington went bankrupt and Ruger bought Marlin.

They didn’t just buy the name, however, they bought all the work done by Remington R&D.  The new prints, the new specs, the new G&D, the designs designed to be manufactured on modern CNC equipment and put together at assembly that work without hand-fitting.

There is a lot more detail and complication in the story of why Marlin had quality issues than just “Remington made shit.”

Much of it has to do with prints that were a half-century old, designed to be made on equipment that was half a century out of date, and a style of manufacturing that was obsolete by half a century, and the engineering challenges of trying to modernize a legacy product while simultaneously trying to produce it.

Ruger Marlins work and they work well, but that’s not all just Ruger.  It was years of work put in by Remington R&D engineers behind the scenes and it was a labor of love for all involved with it.

That’s the truth the internet has never told you.

Having THE talk with the kids

No, not that one about the birds and the bees, the one about firearm safety.

In the best of all worlds, every child would be exposed to gun safety from a very early age with refresher courses throughout their years. If adults have to have mandatory yearly classes on how to handle classified materials, then it makes sense that children will need refresher courses as well.

In my opinion, the best way to deal with firearms training for children starts with Eddie Eagle style instructions.

  • Stop!
  • Don’t Touch!
  • Run Away
  • Tell A Grown-up

Besides instructions on what to do if your child finds a gun, I also teach the four safety rules.

  1. Treat every firearm as loaded until you have personally verified that it is unloaded
  2. Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy, even if you have personally verified that it is unloaded
  3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot
  4. Always identify your target, and what is beyond it

This is what I taught my children.

There was one other rule, if they ever wanted to see or handle one of my firearms I would stop what I was doing and bring the firearm to them. And we would then safely examine that firearm.

This last is designed to remove the curiosity part of firearms. If a firearm is something that is hidden in your sock drawer, you can darn well be sure that your kids have already found it. If it is a “secret” and “dirty” then it is the case that they will want to play with it.

Remove the temptation by giving them good instructions and guidance and then be willing to make removing their curiosity a priority for yourself.

When I got my pistol safe I had 2 of my own children living with me and 3 step children. I gathered all five of them and showed them the box. I then put a $50 bill in the box and put the box on the coffee table. I told them that if they could get the box open without damaging the pistol safe in the next 48 hours that the $50 would be theirs. They failed and I got to keep the money.

It also meant that they had no interest in trying to open the pistol safe, if they wanted to see anything in it, all they had to do is ask. And all they would be was frustrated if they just tried to open the safe.

While my children were younger and while my grandchild visited, all of my firearms were keep under lock and key. Since my youngest children are “old enough” and my grandchild doesn’t visit very often, like once every couple of years, I no longer have that always locked requirement.

This means that I can have some firearms out of the safes and displayed.

And then something weird happened, my son brought his girlfriend over.

And this lead to The Talk

I’m not particularly concerned about my son over at her house. He is anti-alcohol and anti-drugs, and firearm safe. Her parents are watchful so I really don’t have a concern.

On the other hand, she is now coming over here and I just put up a display stand for an Mrs. Pink, the AR-15 in our bedroom. Son and GF are put in our bedroom as it is downstairs where we can keep an eye on them for those pesky teenage hormone issues.

But that means she is in the same room as a rifle that is displayed.

So I took the two of them to the table and gave her The Talk. We went over the four firearm safety rules. We went over them until she could repeat them correctly.

I demonstrated that you can drop the magazine from a firearm and it is still loaded.

That first rule is so very difficult for most people. “Treat every gun as if it is loaded…” is hard. They “know” that it is unloaded. They just observed you unload it. You just showed them the empty chamber. Of course it is unloaded.

I broke my son of that by making my pistol go bang three times after he told me it was unloaded.

Once when he assumed I had brought it to the range unloaded, when it was hot.

The second was when I dropped the magazine and showed him all the cartridges in the mag.

The third was after the first two and I had shown him how to verify that a semi-automatic pistol was unloaded. I dropped the slide, asked him if it was loaded, he said it was unloaded. I pointed it down range and pulled the trigger to a bang.

I had cheated, thank you Lazarus Long, I had palmed a round into the chamber after he had verified that it was empty.

From that day forward he has always treated a firearm as being loaded.

It’s an awkward conversation, but you have to talk to other parents about guns, experts say is an okay article from CNN.

The problem is that it has just enough “off” that it makes it a hard read, and it has that leftist “I know better than you” attitude in it.

The author got her story from talking to Johanna Thomas, a member of Moms Demand. So you can expect it to go sideways from the start.

The first thing that Johanna does is to assume that she has the right to demand to know if the house her kid is visiting is gun free. This is because she has not trained her child to be safe around firearms. If her kid was trustworthy, then there wouldn’t be any issues as her kid isn’t going to pick up a firearm that they find.

Of course they have to have the irresponsible gun owner “The girls mother told [Johanna] that the family didn’t have any [guns] in the home but did have one in the car that was kept under a seat”.

Now I have had to put a firearm under the seat a couple of times. When there was nobody else in the vehicle, the vehicle was going to be locked and I had to go into a government mandated legal gun free zone. I know people that commonly place their carry weapon under the seat when they have to go into places that are gun unfriendly.

I don’t know any responsible gun owner that just leaves their gun rattling around loose under their seat.

I won’t give Everytown the link but they have a program that they call “S.M.A.R.T.”

  • Secure all guns in your home and vehicles
  • Model responsible behavior around guns
  • Ask about the presence of unsecured guns in other homes
  • Recognize the role of guns in suicide
  • Tell your peers to be S.M.A.R.T

As always, the leftist has decided it is YOUR responsibility to keep her children safe. My firearms are secured. I believe that Everytown would have a cow because I don’t have all of my firearms disabled with ammunition in a separate secure storage container.

I do model responsible behavior around firearms.

And the only times I ask about other people’s firearms is in the context of “what cool guns can we shoot?”

The S.M.A.R.T. program is all about intruding into the lives of others and subtle painting all gun owners as dangerous.

Of course there has to be scare numbers “In a five year period leading up to 2021, there were 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18”. Hmm, that’s 414 unintentional shootings per year, on average. According to the CDC there were 53,220 deaths caused by conditions originating in the perinatal period, 27,734 accidental deaths, 8,526 assault(homicides), 8,472 suicides, 7,714 by malignant neoplasms, 3,585 by heart disease, 2,024 by influenza and pneumonia, 1,395 by Septicemia, 1,393 by cerebrovascular diseases, 1,156 by chronic lower respiratory diseases, 824 by in situ neoplasms.

And finally we have 765 by unintentional gun shoot. Note that the “unintentional gun shoot” is reported out of Everytown, not from the CDC.

All of this means that there are many many more issues that lead to childhood deaths and injuries other than “unsecured firearms”.

The problem really is that every such unintentional death by gun of a child is horrific. As it is almost always preventable.

One of the common themes going through the gun rights infringement community is to treat firearm related violence as a health issue. We find many direct allegations of this. From people claiming we have an epidemic of “gun[related]-violence” to having the CDC study it as a health issue.

Language also plays a part in it.

Talking about gun safety when it comes to your kids and community doesn’t need to be a political issue, said Cassandra Crifasi, associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. It may feel uncomfortable, but the focus can stay on minimizing the risk of exposure.

Somehow there is a gun right infringement group at Johns Hopkins, a world renowned medical school, labeled “Bloomberg School of Public Health”. They talk about “minimizing the risk of exposure.” I’m very sorry, but I’ve never seen anybody die because they were “exposed” to a gun.

Then she goes and blows my mind by saying this:

“We can protect kids, we can reduce a lot of gun violence, just by normalizing the conversation around firearms,” Thomas said.

Then I realized that “normalizing the conversation around firearms” means her people getting to lecture us about how we should store our firearms. For them, guns should always be stored in a locked safe and unloaded. By that they mean with no loaded magazines as well.

As an aside, the State of Maryland considers a magazine with one round in it to be a “loaded firearm”.

Johanna then gives some manipulative language to use to get other parents to divulge if they have firearms. She makes it clear that the only way she thinks it is safe to store a firearm is in a locked safe, unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate safe.

Yeah, just what you want to do when you hear an animal in your house (or on your porch), go to the rifle safe, unlock the safe, pull out the rifle, close and lock the safe, go to the ammo safe, unlock it. Take out a box of ammo, put rounds in to the magazine, ready your firearm and proceed.

No, I think I’ll use different methods.

Listen to J.Kb. talk about actually securing firearms. He has written a number of very good articles. Upto and including anchoring a job box to the floor of the garage and then storing firearms in that.

Of course we get to the final line:

In order for my child to come to your house, do you have a way you can secure those firearms that would be unloaded and locked in a safe?

“Do it my way or I will destroy your child’s friendship with my child.”

Attempted murder by cop whitewashed by press

This is practically murder:

 

The man and woman were in bed, apparently asleep.  They were woken up by the police loudspeaker.

The cops tossed a robot into their home, which must hast been transmitting video to the police from inside the house.

The police should have seen that he just got out of bed and that he was holding the robot when they shot him in the front door of the residence.

He wasn’t acting aggressive.

He wasn’t barricaded.

He was a man woken up by a ruckus.

Now let’s see what the police had to say about the shooting.

That’s some bullshit.

They had the robot in the residence.

They could have seen there was no hostage situation and that the man was asleep.

What is the point of the robot?

Oh yeah, it was a toy to buy and not a tool to use, I forgot.

And you can see there was no verbal altercation.

This is what the media reported:

SWAT team members shoot man who confronted officers in Murphy, NC, sheriff says

A man from Murphy, North Carolina is now recovering in a Chattanooga hospital after SWAT team members were forced to shoot him after he confronted officers, according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.

The man, later identified as 41-year-old Jason Harley Kloepfer, ‘engaged in a verbal altercation with officers and emerged from a camper trailer and confronted officers,’ the post says.

That’s when members of the Cherokee Indian Police SWAT team shot and wounded him.

He was taken to Erlanger hospital in Chattanooga, and at last word he was in stable condition.

The post says Kloepfer is charged with communicating threats and resist, obstruct, and delay, and that more charges may follow.

The cops tossed a robot into where he was sleeping, woke him up, them gunned him down.

Every one of them should be fired, then sued, then sent to prison.

I think at this point if you hear cops outside, don’t go outside.  Call 911 and find out what the fuck is going on first, because of you open your door they will blast you.

I wonder why…

Shot:

 

Chaser:

 

Not just didt they get rid of someone who is clearly useless to the company, but they can get rid of the overhead associated with that office and all the free perks.

Lessons in situational awareness

The wife showed me this thread.

I don’t know who this person is, she’s apparently some sort if actress.

I really don’t care about her politics at the moment, this thread is chilling for any parent.

 

 

That absolutely sounds like the man was trying to set up an abduction, probably for sexual trafficking.

The girl seemed to do everything right, given the situation, not giving out and information or letting her picture get taken.

You have to consider how much worse it would be for a young woman who is not an employee.   Confronted like this in a place without security cameras.  Possibly followed as she tried to leave the area.

This girl was lucky in that as an employee, she was not going to leave that area for several hours and it’s doubtful that guy would hand around for that long.

Another girl who got spooked and walked out could be followed.

This is why we hammer home the idea of situational awareness.  Teach it to your children, especially your daughters.

As our judicial system breaks down under the weight of anarcho-tyranny incompetence, these people are getting more brazen.

I’ll tell you, absolutely 100%, if that was my little girl I’d go  commit a murder.  I have a couple of friends I could call on route that I know would be happy to join me in a posse.

I have a jumper cable and a spare 900 cold cranking amp battery, and I’m going to find out how much amperage it takes to make a set of testicles glow like Christmas lights.

Duty to Retreat

Hagar was asked to write about the duty to retreat and why so many on the left feel it should be a requirement. Her answer was something like “2 to center of mass” She does not believe in the duty to retreat and it is not a topic she engages in when with her more leftist friends. They find her opinion on self defense to be “right wingnut extremist”.

In the 90’s there was a story in the Maryland press. A young man and was going to jail for murder. The press played it up as a “good job” by the jury.

The facts of the case were:

  • Young man was over at his girlfriend’s apartment
  • Girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend showed up at the apartment
  • Ex was told to leave
  • Ex starts banging on the door trying to get in.
  • Girlfriend calls 911
  • Boyfriend announces that he is armed
  • Ex breaks down the door and starts to enter
  • Girlfriend and boyfriend retreat into the bedroom
  • Ex breaks down that door
  • Girlfriend is on the call to 911 the entire time.
  • Boyfriend points gun at Ex and warns him to leave.
  • Ex advances on them
  • Boyfriend fires multiple rounds (but not too many)
  • Ex gets “reach room temperature” achievement
  • Police arrive.
  • Police arrest boyfriend for murder

At trial the prosecution and defense get all of the above into evidence. The defense gets the additional information that they were in a second floor apartment (10 to 12 feet from bedroom window to the ground).

The prosecution argued that the couple had a duty to retreat because the drop from the bedroom window wasn’t that much, they could have escaped.

With jury instructions, the boyfriend was found guilty of first degree murder.

Maryland has no castle doctrine. In Maryland there is always a duty to retreat.

Most states have some sort of duty to retreat, with exceptions.

You have a duty to retreat in all cases. If you can retreat you must make every attempt to retreat as judged by Monday night quarterbacks. Maryland for example.

You have a duty to retreat if you can do so safely. With safety is in the eye of the prosecutor.

You have a duty to retreat everywhere except your own home when you have nowhere else to retreat within your home.

You have a duty to retreat everywhere except your own home.

You have a duty to retreat outside of your home except where you can not do it safely.

You have a duty to retreat except when you are legally allowed to be where you are doing what you are doing. “Stand your ground” type laws.

The leftist mindset on duty to retreat can be exemplified by opinions of the left after 9/11. The opinion pieces constantly harped on the fact that Bush did not order the 2nd, 3rd and 4th hijacked planes shot down. If he had just shot down those 3 planes he would have saved so many thousands of people.

When it was pointed out to them that if he had done that, the left would be screaming for his head as a murder because he couldn’t be sure those hijacked planes were really going to fly into other buildings.

It is the same mindset we hear from the left when the scream about a rape victim murdering her rapist. According to the left, the rape victim should have called the cops, the cops would have then arrested the rapist, and the rapist would have had a trial before a jury of his peers and if he was found guilty by the jury, then and only then could punishment be handed out. But not the death sentence.

Here is the thing that they don’t get, a jury has a very few tasks. Their primary task is to evaluate the evidence presented and decide on the facts of the case. Was a crime committed? Was this the person(s) that committed the crime within the definitions of the crime.

In order to reach those conclusions, the jury evaluates each piece of evidence to see if that evidence is believable and actually implicate the suspect. There isn’t much more a jury does.

When some animal has his cock in a woman and she is able to blow him away, there is no jury required. That is the person committing the crime. They are in fact committing a crime.

There is no need to ask the Jury, “is this the person that raped her?” That fact is easily determined at that instant.

In order to understand this mindset, you need to remember that to the left, the government is the answer. You are never as good at making a decision as the government.

They have this mindset because so many of those that are not NPCs truly believe in what passes for a heart that they know better than others. That their opinion is better than yours, in every case.

If a wild animal is attacking my child I’m going to shoot it dead. I don’t have to have the government give me permission, the animal is attacking my child. That makes it dangerous. That is the end of the discussion.

The left operates from the point that “you could be mistaken”

Worse, the left feels that there are excuses that mitigate the actions of dangerous animals.

In the novel, play and movie “Les Misérables” the “hero” is in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. He excuses himself because he was hungry.

In San Francisco, heck in all of California, stealing less than $1000 worth of goods at one time is not a crime, because people were “shoplifting” in order to feed themselves and their poor hungry children. Would you really want a baby to go without diapers?

This is normal for them. When somebody does something wrong or evil, there is always a cause and that cause is never their own bad actions.

If a woman is being raped then the animal that is doing it that she shot and killed must have been driven to it. Did she bring it on herself? Was she being a tease? Always and forever it is victim blaming. If only she had not stopped to get cash out of the ATM he would still be alive. She didn’t have to shoot him.

When a young man was chased be a mentally deranged man that attempted to take his rifle from him. That young man shoot and killed that mentally deranged man. That child was found guilty in the court of leftist opinion. If he hadn’t been there two men would still be alive today. It is his fault.

If he hadn’t decided to play soldier and bring his assault weapon to a peaceful protest, those men would still be alive. He was looking to kill somebody when he brought a gun to a protest.

And because that young man fired those shoots, two men died, a third almost lost his life, and a forth man had his arm destroyed.

When everything is said and done, the left looks on an armed person as a person that has decided that they have the right to be judge, jury and executioner, all in one. They feel that you are not wise enough to make that determination. They feel that only the government should be allowed to make the decision and only the government should have the right to met out punishment.

You are the Jury as an armed person. You are making a judgement call. You are determining if there is cause for you to use deadly force. You are the Judge. You are deciding if the situation is within the legal boundaries that allow you to use deadly force. And you are the executioner. If you fire that shot you are either a good executioner or a poor one, but you have made the decision to kill another living animal.

If you haven’t looked into your soul and found peace within for making that decision, you might want to rethink carrying a firearm for self-defense.

Be well out there. Be safe.