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Good Guy With a Gun: Greenwood, IN UPDATED

Around 1800 on Sunday some asshole went into the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana. He was armed with a rifle and multiple magazines.

Unfortunately he was able to kill 4 females. Two others were wounded and are being treated at a local hospital.

His shooting spree was ended by a good guy with a gun. A licenced CCW holder used his carry weapon to end the shooting.

No information is given on the asshole so my guess is that he is one of the protected classes. We’ll find out in the coming days. Also unmentioned is the type of rifle used. So that means it is unlikely to be an AR-15.

For the Democrats this is another fortuitously timed event as the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021 is going to a vote on the house floor this week.

4 dead, 2 wounded in shooting at Greenwood Park Mall; police said ‘good Samaritan’ shot and killed shooter
3 dead, 2 injured in shooting at Greenwood Park Mall, suspect killed by armed citizen

H/T to one of our readers for the Fox 59 link

UPDATE: The articles quoted have been changed. The article now reflects coroner reporting that there were two male victims and one female victim and one male asshole.

It is also being reported that the mall is marked as guns for criminals only. The hero choose to ignore the sign and carried.

Right Facts, Wrong Conclusion

When an article contains the following:

The new measure, containing 21 pages of carefully drafted verbiage, provides for pre-licensing background checks, mental health, social media screening and training in the use of a firearm, all of which will probably pass muster.

But the act also designates much of the state as a “sensitive location” where legally permitted guns will be legally prohibited. Sensitive locations must be “clearly and conspicuously identified with signage.” What makes a sign “clearly and conspicuously identified” will keep lawyers and judges busy for a decade.

You know you are in for a roller coaster ride of twisted logic.

The author is obviously looking at the new bill through the lens of a pre-Bruen decision. There is nothing in the text or tradition of the second amendment to allow for the sort of screening put into this bill. Nothing to allow for training requirements. The only place they have any hope is in the “sensitive locations”, but since they went overboard and made NYC a sensitive place, it is highly unlikely it will survive a judicial review.

He laments that there are so many different sensitive places it will be difficult to move through the city:

The six conservative justices have not thought it through. The court’s decision is virtually impossible to administer. The practical problems are enormous. If I can legally carry a revolver in my pocket and capriciously decide to approach a “sensitive location,” what do I do with the gun before entering?

And, if I can legally keep a gun in my apartment, and legally carry it on the street, how do I legally carry the weapon through the halls and public areas of the building without violating the law? The law says no guns on private property unless the landlord says OK

Finally we get to his real concern, his concern for the police.

And what of the burden on the police? It used to be that an officer, seeing someone with a bulge in his pocket in a high-crime area late at night, could “stop and frisk” the suspect for unlicensed weapons. But how does the cop distinguish between a licensed bulge in the pocket and an unlicensed one? Erased is the requisite “reasonable suspicion” that a crime is being committed.

The author is studiously ignoring the reality of the new law. The new law is not concerned about the burden on the police because their is no burden. If a gun owner manages to get a permission slip to exercise his right of self-defense there is no way to safely navigate through the waters of NYC. Everywhere he turns there is another mark on the map “Here be a felony”.

The law isn’t a burden on the police because it is a slap in the face of the Supreme court and every gun owner in the country. Having been told they must issue permits the state of New York has made it impossible to exercise the right to carry.

Is it any wonder that gun rights organizations are filling lawsuits left and right? How does somebody look at the fact pattern and decide that this is a burden for the police and not citizens?

— The Hill Is New York about to become the Wild West?

Blog Status

Well we’ve made it a full week on the new server with the new versions of software and things haven’t totally failed yet.

The site seems to be responsive and we haven’t had any great issues yet:

For those of you that want to send in tips and links for J.Kb, Miguel and AWA to consider, hit us up at gunfreezone (at) troglodite.com

We should be starting the roll out of some changes for the comment section shortly. These will be a link next to the reply links to allow people to login or signup. We will also be putting a mark for our comment snipers. It won’t do anything right away but it is the first step.

We had a member request that we use “usernames” instead of signup names. We are going to take a look at the membership roll and see what can be done.

Next Friday we are going to roll out a Friday Feedback post that will have open comments, no membership required, for everybody to be able to give us feedback.

Thank you again to everybody that has signed up to be a member, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Gun Violence Prevention, Really

We are so use to the headlines screaming about “Gun Violence Prevention”. It almost always means that somebody is calling for restrictions on people that didn’t do anything. “To prevent gun violence we must ban assault weapons”. “To prevent gun violence we have to ban 18, 19 and 20 year olds from buying firearms.” “To prevent gun violence we must only allow criminal guns into sensitive places.”

It is always the same, these groups always have another rule to apply to you and I. They never focus on the criminal, they never focus on education, they never focus on safety. They always focus on restricting our gun rights.

One of the questions that sometimes gets asked of the groups claiming to be “gun safety” groups is to ask “How many gun locks have you given out?” “How many safety classes have you run?” “How many gun safes have you given out or discounts on gun safes?”

The answer for most is “None.”

From New Orleans comes a different story. A story of people trying to actually prevent accidental shootings.

In response to a two-year old shooting himself after finding his brother’s firearm a group is giving away gun safes. The brother’s firearm happened to be stolen so it is unlikely that any law would have prevented this tragedy.

Thanks to funding from the Centers for Disease Control, the program is partnering with the city’s health department to start giving away gun safes for free, trying to prevent more incidents like the one at Costco.

“You can buy a biometric lockbox that your fingerprint is the only thing that opens it, it might have a backup lock, for about $100, that’s small enough to fit in your car and I think that’s a little bit about education and just having more access to it,” Fleckman said. “We’re seeing it as a really big need now.”

Those gun safes will be offered starting next week only for patients at University Medical Center who are there for a gun related injury.

Later next month, there will be about 300 to give away to the general public. Locations and times are still in the works. Eyewitness News will bring you updates on how to get one when we receive them.
Free gun safes available soon through Tulane’s Gun Violence Prevention Lab

Unintended Consequences: Smart Thermostat version

We are a power hungry country. We use so much power and we are not even aware of it. The numbers can tell us exactly how power hungry we are.

The computer I’m using right now has a 1000W power supply, that’s because the original 500W supply wasn’t big enough. That doesn’t count the other computers that are part of the overall system, just this one computer. Let’s assume we are only using 750W of power.

This is 1HP. My knee mill uses a 1HP motor. My lathe uses a 1HP motor. My recut bandsaw uses a 1HP engine. These are big metal monsters. My computer is a 1HP computer. This should be mind boggling.

Our home has a 100A feed, it is rather old. Many new homes have 200A feeds. My grandparents home had 4 circuits and a 40A feed.

Our power consumption keeps going up.

And all that power has to come from somewhere. And it has to get to us.

The power grid does that. When politicians push electric vehicles they are adding to that pull on the grid. There isn’t enough power in the grid to charge the EVs that they want us to use. There aren’t enough transformers on the poles or big enough transformers on the poles for that sort of power pull.

But there is another part of the power grid that is sort of amazing. During times of lower demand they push less power into the grid. During the night people use less power and thus there is less need to push that much power into the grid. As people get up in the morning and start their morning routines they start to use more power and the power plants start to push more power into the grid.

Which brings us to this article:

Smart thermostats, which the paper said were present in around 40 percent of US homes in 2021, are programmed by default to have different night and day modes. In hundreds of thousands of homes across the US that means a sudden jump in electricity use right before residents wake up – if people aren’t changing default settings, which the paper suggests is the case.

Those hundreds and thousands of smart thermostats, typically configured to switch to day mode around 6am, “can cause load synchronization during recovery from nightly setpoint setbacks, increasing the daily peak heating electrical demand,” the paper said.
Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

Yep, all those smart thermostats have clocks that are often very accurate and they all want to start at the same time. Thousands and thousands of homes all kicking in at exactly the same time.

Mass Shootings Are Because of… Men?

But curiously enough, no one ever seems to consider, much less interrogate, the neon thread woven through it all. Meaning that pronoun, “he.” Always, “he.” We take it for granted. It hardly even registers. But maybe it should. In a government- funded study of 172 mass shootings since 1966 — defined as a shooting in a public place where four or more people were killed — The Violence Project, a nonpartisan and nonprofit anti-violence think tank, found that just four of the shooters were female. That’s a little more than 2%.
— Trib Live Leonard Pitts Jr.: What is wrong with American men?

According to Leonard Pitts the reason there is so much violence in America and so many mass shootings is because of men. He obsesses with the issue of gun violence being a man issue. And more than that, American Men. “Other countries have men — and for that matter, private gun ownership. Yet they don’t have the random gun violence this country does.”

At issue is the cherry picking of data, of manipulating the data, of ignoring data. We see this in his use of the term “gun violence”. This term is used by gun rights infringers to conflate actual violence committed with firearms with suicides and justifiable homicide.

These United States have an intentional murder rate of 6.2/100,000 This is 59th in the world. This isn’t great but it does include all of the Democratic controlled murder nexuses in cities.

But for Leonard it is American Men? Why?

The first thing we see is the changing culture. While he talks of “Men” he doesn’t talk of the environment these men come from. They come from single parent homes.

When we look at the violence in the cities we find a culture of fatherless children. The term use to be “latch key children.” The children that came home from school and had their own key to the house as there was nobody else home.

It takes good role models to create good people. Watch the following video and decide what sort of role models these young children have:

Men aren’t the problem nor are women. The problem is a culture. A culture of victimhood. A culture of irresponsibility. A culture of refusing refusing to work for rewards but instead expect them to be given.

A culture where participation awards are the standard. Where “keeping score” is forbidden.

If Leonard Pitts wants to find a cause for the evil that grows in our society he might find it looking out from his mirror.

National Reciprocity

Senator Steve Daines(R-MT) has introduced S.4501 which is a national reciprocity bill. It is highly unlikely that it will go anywhere but with the midterms coming up and lots and lots of people upset with the gun bans, this might get some legs.

S.4501 – A bill to amend title 18, United States Code, to provide a means by which nonresidents of a state whose residents may carry concealed firearms may also do so in the State

If the text is not yet available at congress.gov, here it is on the Senator’s page:
Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act