After way to long I’ve got the discourse server back up.

Feel free to join the conversation at https://discourse.gunfreezone.net

Just the music:

H/T my wife

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.”

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.

At this time there are dozens of lawsuits in play by many different players fighting for our Second Amendment guaranteed rights. These are cases being run by some of the best lawyers in the country. Some of those lawyers are admitted to the Supreme Court bar.

Legal costs add up in a hurry.

My wife did a stupid a few years ago, a traffic violation. Nobody was hurt. It had nothing to do with being impaired while driving. It was a moment of inattention followed with some serious brain not engaged stupid.

She was guilty, she wanted to plead guilty. We still got a lawyer involved. For a simple traffic case with nobody trying to do anything and not arguing, just negotiating for the least punishment, it cost us over $3000. That was for a good local lawyer.

Right now the Oregon Firearms Federation as a suit field in the district court. The case is being argued by Attorney John Kaempf. His rates to the OFF are $500/hour for attorneys’ work and $250/hour for paralegals’ work. This appears to be at some sort of discount as other lawyers in the area are charging more.

At this point OFF has racked up more than $126,000 in legal fees. They have already paid $60,000 of that but have not been able to pay the December bill.

This case is going to cost a boat load of money to fight. OFF doesn’t seem to have the money right now. It would be shitty if the case failed for lack of representation.

Now the GOA and FPC have cases against Measure 114 happening as well. Those cases are racking up legal fees rapidly too.

Take a moment to consider joining or making a donation to any of the groups that are fighting in court for all of us.

Join Gun Owners of America – Gun Owners of America

Second Amendment Foundation

What is the Second Amendment Foundation policy on refunds? The Second Amendment Foundation has a 30-day “no questions asked” policy. If you want to cancel your donation or membership for any reason, Second Amendment Foundation will refund the full amount. Simply use our contact form here.

And the full story on the legal issues that OFF is currently having.

Oregon Firearms Federation owes thousands in legal fees for challenge of Measure 114, lawyer says in suit

Attorney John Kaempf this week filed a lawsuit against the nonprofit federation in Clackamas County Circuit Court, alleging it failed to pay $66,161.82 in legal fees.

This could not have happened to a more deserving man. Unfortunately, the armorer is also being charged.

They are up for 2 counts of involuntary manslaughter at 18 months for each count and an special circumstances of it involving a gun for 5 years. This means that they could each be facing up to 13 years in prison.

Why Santa Fe district attorney decided to charge Alec Baldwin over ‘Rust’ shooting | CNN

Actor Alec Baldwin will be charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the Western movie “Rust,” as will the armorer who oversaw all weapons used in the production.

Alec Baldwin will be charged with 2 counts of involuntary manslaughter in ‘Rust’ shooting

Baldwin’s attorney says they “will fight these charges, and we will win.”

Alec Baldwin to be charged in fatal 2021 “Rust” shooting

Actor and producer Alec Baldwin is being charged with involuntary manslaughter in the deadly 2021 shooting on the set of the Western film “Rust,” prosecutors in New Mexico announced on Thursday. The film’s weapons specialist, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, is also facing involuntary manslaughter charges. Kr…

Alec Baldwin Charges Spur Debate on Responsibility for Guns on Set

The prosecutors who decided to bring criminal charges in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer said Mr. Baldwin should have ensured his gun was safe. Some armorers questioned that.

Alec Baldwin and weapons handler to be charged with manslaughter in deadly ‘Rust’ shooting

More than a year after “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot on the film’s set near Santa Fe, star-producer Alec Baldwin and the movie’s armorer are being charged in her death.

Alec Baldwin to be charged with involuntary manslaughter in fatal shooting on Rust film set

Film’s armorer overseeing weapons, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, will also be charged with involuntary manslaughter in 2021 shooting

Alec Baldwin to Be Charged With Involuntary Manslaughter in Fatal ‘Rust’ Shooting

Prosecutors plan to charge the actor in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on a movie set in New Mexico in 2021. The film’s armorer will also be charged.

Alec Baldwin & ‘Rust’ Armorer To Face Criminal Charges Over 2021 Fatal Movie Shooting, Santa Fe D.A. Says

Alec Baldwin and armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed will face criminal charges for the October 2021 fatal shooting of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the film’s set, the Santa Fe District …

Alec Baldwin to be charged with involuntary manslaughter in ‘Rust’ movie set shooting

Alec Baldwin will be criminally charged in the fatal on-set shooting of “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Alec Baldwin charged in ‘Rust’ movie set shooting that killed Halyna Hutchins

Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died shortly after being shot by actor Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal on the set of the Western movie “Rust” on Oct. 21, 2021.

From last week, I am looking at 2A cases happening in the second circuit court. I’m likely to pony up for a PACER account and hope I don’t burn down my bank account in the first few days of access.

The great news is that the wheels of justice turned and Alec Baldwin has been charged.

We have the great bitbull debate going on. My two bits? Keep your dog away from my kids.

We had one neighbor who let his dog get free and it attacked and killed one of our chickens. He apologized, offered to pay for the chicken. He called the cops and self reported.

Two days later he was at our house again. He was in tears. He had just put down his dog because it had attacked our chickens again.

The ATF announced their pistol brace ruling. The did a “take back” and screwed millions of firearm owners. I had considered SBRing on of my ARs so that I could have a 14.5 (IIRC) barrel to match the barrel of the M4 Carbine. If I did that, I had planned to pick up a stabilizing brace to have as a “it is just a pistol” until such time as the ATF approved the SBR.

I’m glad I didn’t.

There are a number of cases filed against the ATF over this ruling. There is an opinion out of SCOTUS in 1994, Staples v. United States that I’m researching. Mark Smith mentioned it as a good starting point in battles regarding ATFs new SBR rules. I’m not sure I agree, I have to read this a few times.

What subject would you like Hagar to write about from a left leaning perspective?