If the politicians close one door, technology eventually finds another one and that plays specially true with guns. In 1969 the term Saturday Night special was coined and affixed to cheap handguns that could be afforded by those in a vert tight budget like the poor or minorities. Politicians went out of their way to make them look like metallic spawns of the devil and states and cities banned their ownership.

Truthfully they were cheap guns in both price and construction. sometimes even downright dangerous for the owner as they could sustain a catastrophic failure and you would end up being called Leftie for the rest of your life.

A great example of these guns of the past was the Rohm RG-10 revolver. Check this ad from 1960:

Now fast forward to the 21st century. I just got an email from Tombstone Tactical on a sale they are having. One of the guns is the Ruger LCP 380, a tried and tested small pistol that is several orders of magnitude above the RC-10 and its fellow cheap guns of the day.  Look at that price.

I went to the Inflation calculator and figured how much a Ruger LCP 380 at  $173.99 would have been in 1968 dollars.

Event though $20.56 was not peanuts, it was an acquirable sum in those days. And we are talking about today’s technology that produces a reliable small pistol that will go bang every time without fear of blowing up in the owner’s hand.

Then I went the other way around, how much an RG-10 revolver would cost today:

That would be a hard “pass!” for me anyway.

It does not matter how hard they try to contain the genie called guns, it will always find a way to escape and come back stronger and modern. May it be 3D printing a gun at home or pure capitalistic technology that allows a company to manufacture a high quality & low-cost firearm, that genie will never get back to the bottle.

This is a very important article to read and process.

 American policing today is in a state of slow-motion collapse, struggling mightily to attract new officers — no matter how low standards are dropped.
Under sustained assault by the City Council, pundits and self-styled civil-liberties advocates, a new generation of New York City cops is being conditioned to avoid showdowns with civilians, especially where coercion or force is called for. We could have saved the costly investment in body cameras by explicitly telling the cops two words: “Do nothing.”
…
In many parts of the country, the police have gone to ground.
…
In Chicago, the street cops’ ethos is “go fetal, stay fetal.” In Philadelphia, as murders soar, cops are the ones in prosecutors’ crosshairs. It is crystal clear what was long suspected: Costly Justice Department intervention in local police departments expedited the end of hands-on policing.
…
String together a series of adversarial videos, and almost every officer can find him or herself fast-tracked to trouble.
The new-era calculation for the police is: Conflict is the quickest path to extinction.
Some of this was wholly predictable when people who harbor disdain for the police and resent law enforcement are allowed to pose as reformers.

Why cops are standing down all across America.

I have seen this article referenced in other blogs under something we already know: You are on your own when shit hits the fan (A.K.A. You are your own First Responder.) We have known this for quite a while and it is a state of mind you should be prepared for or else you have been wasting your time.

But What I have not seen is the amazing political opportunity this presents for the Second Amendment. The same political wave that hates guns, hates the second Amendment and hates you enough to have you killed is the same wave of Leftie assholes that hates cops. You have read here examples of Moms Demand siding with Black Lives Matter and crapping on cops. Their hate for Law Enforcement is obvious.

We need to extend our hand  and have cops come to our side. And yes, there are people in our side that may have issues with the way certain departments conduct business and need to be changed. But to get that change, the old adage of attracting flies with honey apply here and even you take advice from those who are friendly to you than those who are openly hostile.

Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emmanuel said “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”  Let’s not be dumb and waste this crisis, a crisis created by our common enemies who wants both sides run to the ground.

I saw this ugly thing this afternoon.

After some in-depth search (I aske in Facebook if anybody had seen this animal before) I found out it is called Anhinga, also called devil bird, the snake bird or water turkey.

I checked some other pictures of anhingas and they don’t look that bad. In fact most of them look spiffy, smooth and come in two-tones.  This one looks like it just got up from bed and has not been to the hairdresser in months.  Actually looks like a junkie of sorts.

Meth, not even once 😀

I have no idea where this bastard has been. I know it was still alive because mom had seen him moving about, but he had not gone back to getting some rays in our lake stoop for months.

The problem is that he shows up wearing his orange on June 1st just like Mom Demands, Everytown, Brady Campaign and the idiots at NoRa.
Should I be suspicious? 🙂

Because stuff like this.

I like Criminal Minds and my wife is a total fan which translates into never missing a show come hell or high water no matter what I want. But even so, as adults we have long figured out that DNA results do not take 30 minutes and a piss break to come back and what TV writers know about actual police work is laughable at best and infuriatingly dumb most days. When was the last time you heard from any Law Enforcement source from the few states that have gun registration that a case was solved because they used records to trace the gun and found the shooter?

Guns are already traceable to first buyer. The way it was explained to me was that ATF has access to the gun manufacturers records which tells them what gun went where and to what FFL. The ATF then gets in touch with the FFL and requests that the records are looked to get the info of the person who bought the gun. That’s it.

The great untold secret is that tracing the gun owner that way does not solve a case. First, you have to recover a weapon which is not the usual happening (except in Criminal Minds where Computer Whiz Garcia tracks via hacked NSA satellite the isotopes of the burnt powder to the secret compartment in  truck doing 55 mph in I-95 south of Boston) and if you recover it, is usually with the guy who shot it attached to it or nearby, with possibly DNA and fingerprints.

I have not read the bill yet, but I am going to assume it is pretty much the same as similar bills in the past: an attempt to introduce Federal Gun Registration.

But go ahead and preach me how these kids are suddenly smarter and wiser than anybody in the world when it comes to “gun violence.”

Update: Over at Twitter, @GunOwner2 reminded me that tracing the gun that killed Customs and Border Patrol Brian Terry was done very fast. It took what? two or three hours to discover that the people responsible for that gun to land in the hands of Drug Cartels were the ATF and the DOJ in Operation Fast and Furious?  And seeing that nobody was punished for that colossal fuck up, what would be the point of a law for citizens?

Ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated by the excavations at Pompeii. It was a tragic event that has given us an in-depth look at the Roman Culture: from finding that graffiti was also an issue to the health of the average roman at that time.

I saw this picture a couple of days ago and I have to say with a bit of shame that my mind went straight to: “A human? Not  Wile E. Coyote?”

What else was I supposed to say?