Gun Free Zone

Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.

.......

I am conflicted.

Feb 7, 2020 Miguel.GFZ 8 comments

This… I want this so bad.

But as Latino, the idea of spending $85 on a machete is a bit shocking, specially since you can probably find one regular machete in Calle Ocho for $10.

And the price is also 2 Palmetto State Armory AR 15 stripped Lower.  Seriously, it does not make sense. I must be Spock logical, but my brain is whispering “Yeah, be like him during Pon farr!”

Spread the love
.......

They do not think like us – tampon theft edition

Feb 7, 2020 J. Kb 9 comments

This was spotted on the internet:

https://twitter.com/oonskie/status/1222509293204844545

I’m a law and order conservative.  I believe in property rights.  I believe that theft is bad for the community and that laws against theft should be enforced.

I don’t care that the retailer is a big corporation, if their products get stolen they will pass the cost of that loss onto the rest of us who do pay for them, or they will stop selling those products, and possibly go out of business meaning consumers will have no access to any products they sell at all.

If they close, jobs will be lost and the local community will suffer.

Theft, even from a box corporation, is not a victimless crime.

None of that matters to the Progressives who replied to this threat.  Nearly every reply was in support of theft, and most of them tried to justify it.

(Yes, I know the Tweet is from England, but most of the comments are from the US.)

Just allow all theft, regardless of the consequences.

Of course for the Communist, theft is fine, having some sort of law enforcement protecting property rights is dangerous.

It doesn’t work like this.

I’ve seen that too. It’s necessary.

They don’t.

“Hero” and “criminal” are not synonyms.

The paragon of virtue.

This is what male feminists do to get laid when they are too weak to be rapists.

Here is the reality.  If there is one good thing that California Prop 47 did, it totally blew away the Leftist notion that people shoplift just what they need because they are too poor to buy it.

As reported by Fox News:

Del Seymour, founder of the non-profit Code Tenderloin, told Fox News that fencers – often from Mexico and Guatemala – set up shop in the middle of the day and night around the city’s United Nations Plaza area. He said he’s also noticed that the stealers and dealers have gotten bolder by the day. The retail heists taking place, he said, aren’t some small-time operation but instead a sophisticated network of international dealers who cross the border to buy stolen goods. What’s worse is that a majority of the handoffs happen in view of San Francisco’s City Hall.

Seymour believes San Francisco is stuck in a cycle and, until it’s able to pull itself out, the problem will continue. Drug addicts, who are often homeless, need money for a fix so they walk into a store, steal merchandise, sell it for half the value and use the money they made to buy more drugs. 

As reported by KPIX CBS San Francisco:

“We’ve heard of cases where they’re going into stores with a calculator so they can make sure that what they steal is worth less than $950,” said Robin Shakely, Sacramento County assistant chief deputy district attorney.

Every human being makes cost/benefit decisions all the time.

If the punishment for theft of $950 in goods is non-existent there is no cost.

If a person steals $950 of merchandise per day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, that is $237,500.  Selling those stolen items for half price is an income based on theft of $118,750 per year, in cash, no taxes.

And that, or something close to it, is what we are seeing.  People making a living on shoplifting, taking advantage of the high costs of living in California.

I’ll agree, diapers are expensive.  It’s not some poor woman stealing one box of diapers because she needs them.  It’s shoplifters stealing hundreds of dollars worth of diapers to sell for fifty-cents on the dollar to other people who have no scruples against buying stolen goods.

And then it’s you and I that pay for this when the prices of the goods we buy go up.

Progressives are facilitating a massive criminal enterprise that destroys business and puts people at risk, because they think they are helping poor people stick it to the corporations.

I’m just curious what the people of San Francisco will do when the last store in the city shuts down and their Amazon Prime grocery delivery is stolen off their porch?

 

Spread the love
.......

A dead five year old and what that means for us is why I am the way I am about locking up your guns

Feb 6, 2020 J. Kb 17 comments

I have a buddy who reads my post,s and then does what he is not supposed to do on the internet and reads the comments as well.

Then, he lets me know his opinion.

I have to agree with him (and I know Miguel says this too), sometimes law-abiding gun owners are our own worst enemies.

For those of you who understand what I am trying to say, this post doesn’t apply to you.

For those of you who felt the need to argue with me when agreed with Brady just a little bit, the rest of this post is for you.  I’m going to spell it out very clearly.  If you get offended, well, this is my opinion and Miguel has very graciously given me room to voice it.

From AL.com

5-year-old killed in accidental shooting in Madison County

My son is five years old.  This already is heartbreaking.

The victim of a deadly accidental shooting in Madison County has been identified as a 5-year-old boy.

The fatal gunshot wound to the head was accidentally self-inflicted, according to the Madison County sheriff’s office. The child, whose name wasn’t released, was inside the family’s parked vehicle at a home on Berry Creek Drive in Harvest when the shooting happened Sunday afternoon. A parent found the child and the authorities were notified.

“It’s obvious it was just a horrible, horrible accident,” he said. “It’s just a horrible thing.”

At the scene on Sunday afternoon, emergency medical workers attempted life-saving measures, authorities said, but the child was declared dead after being taken to Madison Hospital.

I’ve checked other news outlets but no other information has been released.  No charges are expected to be filed but that is little more than thinnest silver lining on what is probably the darkest possible cloud in these parents’ life.

Given that, this is probably a case of a CCW owner who left an unsecured gun in his car and the boy in the car found it.

These accidents do happen when little kids find unsecured guns.

When it comes to politics, I don’t want the government all up in my shit.  Part of that means that I have to behave in a way the doesn’t give the government, or someone else, a reason to get up in my shit.

For gun owners, that responsibility to behave in such a way to not invite people up in our shit is collective.

So let us take this hypothetical but very realistic scenario.

Family A, they are not gun owners.  They might not be totally anti-gun but are definitely not pro-gun.

Family B.  They own a handgun for home defense, it’s hidden in a nightstand.

Kid A goes to Family B’s house to play.  Kid A finds the gun and kills himself.

Family A decides “there needs to be a law.”  That law REQUIRES everybody store their gun safely.  Bloomberg and Watts get a whiff of this shit and decide that in order to get a gun permit, the police have to verify you have safe storage with an inspection.  That’s how they do it in England, Australia, New Zealand.  I know Canada has safe storage laws, but I don’t know if the police are required to inspect the safe storage.  In the US, inspected safe storage also applies to FFLs, so there is some precedence there too.

The law gets named after dead Kid A and Hogg and his bunch march around demanding it be passed or else politicians have blood on their hands and faces.

So now in a number of states, to get your FOID, FID, Firearm Safety Certificate, or handgun permit, the police have to inspect your safe storage.  That means they have to make sure it’s big enough to hold all of your guns, so now they get to see all of your guns.  If you buy another gun, they have to right to make sure your safe storage can accommodate the new gun, so they get to see all your guns again.

Now, do you see how bad this can get very quickly?

And what will be the argument made by the anti-gun activists?

“Do you want more kids to die from gun accidents?  What sort of monster are you?”

So what do we do to prevent this?

Lock up your fucking gun so that Kid A doesn’t find it and shoot himself.

No accidental dead kids takes the bloody shirt away from the bloody shirt wavers.

And what do we get, besides less government all up in our shit?

Fewer accidental dead kids.  Seems like a win-win to me.

If that’s not enough of an argument, how about this?

When your kids were little, did you put a latch on the cabinet under the sink where you kept the drain cleaner?

Do you think that a 9mm is more or less dangerous than a spray bottle full of bleach?

Then lock up your fucking gun.

And lastly.  For those of who have made the argument “but I need my gun in a heartbeat if someone kicks in my door and I won’t have the presence of mind when just woken up to the sound of my alarm to punch in a four or six-digit combo into my handgun vault or wave a finger over the biometrics.”

Guess what?

If you are too uncoordinated and bleary-eyed to work your gun box open, you are way too uncoordinated and bleary-eyed to be running that fucking gun.

Will, you properly identify your target?  Will you be able to line up your sights and hit it?  Or will you get your gun out of your nightstand in a wink and put a bullet through your teenage kid sneaking in after curfew?

Besides, if you are anything like me and most of the people I know who use their cellphone as an alarm clock, I have to punch in a code to unlock my phone to shut off my alarm, so I’m sort of used to having to punch in a code within the first 20 seconds of waking up from a sound sleep.  I do it 6 days a week.

If you don’t have kids, and you don’t have kids that come over, and you don’t worry about your nightstand gun being stolen, fine.

But for every other law-abiding gun owner in America.  Lock up your gun so it isn’t used by some kid to accidentally hurt themselves.  If not for the kid, as a courtesy to the rest of the gun-owning community that doesn’t want mandatory safe storage laws thrust up our asses.

Spread the love
.......

Florida Gun Rights 2020 – CS/HB 1347 – Fixing Church Carry – GOOD BILL – Voted Favorably by Education.

Feb 6, 2020 Miguel.GFZ 2 comments

General Bill by Criminal Justice Subcommittee and Williamson and Trumbull (CO-SPONSORS) Andrade; Byrd; Donalds; Drake; Hill; Roach; Sabatini; Stone; Yarborough
Safety of Religious Institutions: Authorizes church, synagogue, or other religious institution to allow concealed weapons or concealed firearms licensee to carry firearm on its property for certain purposes; specifies property owner who allows church, synagogue, or other religious institution to use his or her property may prohibit church, synagogue, or other religious institution from authorizing person to carry firearm on property

Read the Text of CS/HB 1347

I just finished watching the live streaming and it was interesting. Let me begin with pubic participation: there were 5 people who were against the bill and one of them was the representative of Moms Demand who actually addressed the committee. More on her later.

There were two people in favor! They did not speak in front of the committee but declared their support for the bill. I am going to guess they were a couple with the last name Dubois and just thank you, thank you thank you for being there.  If any of the readers know them, please extend our collective gratitude to them.

Back to Mommy Demanding: She was taken to task with what we know is their weak spot: the truth. She tried to paint how dangerous it is to carry next to kids insinuating that those allowed now by law (something that she denied it existed earlier, but was chastised for) were shooting kids accidentally all over the state, but that lasted only as long as one of the Representatives asked her to mention ones single case in Florida and she made excuses that she needed to check her laptop. She was asked by Rep Fine if she believed that people should have to Pay to Pray at their houses of worship and she was confused and said she did not think that had to do with the bill. It was not a fantastic presentation, but at least she was there with 5 others.

After the public part of the session was over, the debate began: There was one opposition to the bill and very mild, And then came Rep Fine explaining how he had seen his synagogue protected by the local Sheriff with a deputy or two and initially he thought it was a nicety from the Agency but he was told they were paying for the off-duty deputies to keep an eye around, thus it was a Pay to Pray which goes against the First Amendment. No picture of the face of the Demanding Mommy was shown.

But what really knocked me on my ass was that two Democrat Representatives came out with full force in favor of the bill. Rep Bush is a minister and Rep Daniels is a pastor of her church and If I heard Rep Bush right and I know I heard Daniels say it, both have Concealed Weapon Licenses.  To make a long story short, both have dealt with funerals from gang-related activities and have their houses full of gang bangers. And as Rep Daniels said, this bill cannot be for the weekend because a church never sleeps and people live and work there all week.

The vote was taken and the bill passed if not unanimously then it was with a huge majority (there were a couple of voice votes I am not sure about).

Where is the bill headed now? No idea. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: The voting was 15 Yeas, 1 Nay and 2 missed.

Spread the love
.......

Start using Simpson’s memes

Feb 6, 2020 J. Kb 4 comments

In response on Nancy Pelosi’s antics to the SOTU, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent this Tweet:

Bill Oakley was a writer and producer for the Simpsons.  He decided to Tweet this:

https://twitter.com/thatbilloakley/status/1224923864452354048

That’s not how art works, douche bag.

You don’t get to decide who gets to like or look at or enjoy the art you put out into the world.  Considering that a meme like this is most likely protected as fair use, this is just Oakley being petulant.

Considering that Oakley, who was with the show for the 7th and 8th of the show’s 31 seasons believes that he is the arbiter of which people of what political bend can watch or reference a show that has become a part of the American pop culture is so hubristic that all it makes me want to do is have Pompeo and Trump send one Simpsons meme Tweet per day, every day, for the rest of his Presidency, just to annoy the fuck out of Bill Oakley and make him cry at his inability to do a God damned thing about it.

So if you are a Conservative on Twitter, send Simpsons memes to troll the Democrats just to put Oakley in his place.

Spread the love
.......

Scott “the Cold Sore” Israel

Feb 6, 2020 J. Kb 3 comments

Disgraced former Sheriff Scott Israel is like a bad case of herpes, he just refuses to go away.  The Broward Democrat Party is so infected with him, he just won’t stay gone.

Remember that he was suspended by the Governor by executive order.

He challenged that order, it went all the way up to the Florida Supreme Court, which upheld the suspension.

Then it went to the Florida State Senate which voted to not reinstate him.

That’s strike one, two, and three.

Keep in mind, each and every time he’s been shot down, the evidence of his failures as both Sheriff and as a human being are reentered into the record.

Not just at Parkland mind you, but his total bumble-fucking of the Fort Lauderdale Airport shooting the year prior.  That was a consistent argument against him.  That he totally mishandled the airport shooting and made all the same mistakes again at Parkland.  He failed to learn from his first failure and make any substantive changes to his department.

At some point, you’d expect a man who had been cut down by the Governor, the State Supreme Court, and the State Senate to crawl under a rock for a while and lay low.

If he’s hurting for money, he could probably find a job as a consultant or talking head for CNN or MSNBC.  He has the right credentials, i.e., a hard-line Democrat with an anti-gun agenda, and the perception of being a victim of an illegitimate Republican witch hunt.

He might even be able to take his show on the road and fail upward in a state like California.

But he is done in Florida.  The only one that doesn’t seem to understand this is Scott Israel.

Governor, Florida Senate president seek to quash Scott Israel lawsuit
Attorneys for ousted Broward County sheriff claim client deprived of due process without ‘factual and evidentiary support’

That mother-fucker.  I am truly astounded by the unbelievable hubris of this pile of human garbage.

[Attorneys for Israel] claim DeSantis and the Florida Senate deprived Israel of due process, compromising the will of Broward County voters and ignoring a special master’s recommendation that he be reinstated.

DeSantis suspended Israel in January 2019, citing “neglect of duty and incompetence” during two mass shootings in Broward County — at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in January 2017 and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Valentine’s Day 2018.

Special Master Dudley Goodlette, a Republican and former state lawmaker, wrote in his 34-page report that DeSantis failed to present any evidence to support the Republican governor’s position.

You know what?

Fine.

Let that fucker sue.

Then the Governor’s lawyers should exhume the bodies of every kid shot on the third floor, wheel the open caskets into the courtroom and say:

“This is every child shot after your deputies had ample time to respond but didn’t, because they were too busy pissing themselves hiding behind trees and relaying bad information, or setting up a perimeter keeping out Coral Springs PD, which wanted to go in and kill that fucking son-of-a-bitch Cruz, which is what the SOP is for every law enforcement agency in the country responding to an active shooter since Columbine, except for yours, the Coward’s Sheriff’s Office, you piece of shit.”

He needs to be so thoroughly embarrassed before a federal judge that he loses the case, goes home, and gives his service weapon a blowjob.

 

Spread the love
.......

The non gun safe gun box

Feb 6, 2020 J. Kb 23 comments

I left a comment on my previous post that I thought I might as well turn into a full post.

I’ve talked about UL RSC (Underwriter Laboratory Residential Security Container) standards and double eye-locking before.

I am a nut for gun safes.  When you own a lot of guns, proper storage of those guns is important.

In long-range shooting, they say you should spend as much on the optic as the gun.  Why buy the most accurate rifle made, if you are going to mount a crappy scope with shitty rings and mounts?

I have a similar thought about safes.  Why spend $10,000 dollars on guns and then leave them sitting in a closet where they can get stolen?

$10,000 in guns deserves $2,000 dollars in safe to store them in.  A high-quality Browning or Liberty safe from Cabela’s is going to cost you that much.

Especially because most home insurance companies will only insure guns up to a specific dollar amount.  Ask, I did, and I was shocked that my upper limit was $2,500.

I have two safes, both are custom made by Fort Knox and are as overbuilt as I could get them.  Double-layer steel, outer body that is 1/4 inch thick, extra thick plate door, etc.

Yes, I am a security nut.

But let’s say that you don’t have an amazing shitload of guns.  Just a couple of handguns and maybe an AR or shotgun.  Or you don’t have the money to invest in a big fancy gun safe, but you want to keep your guns secured and locked up.  What do you do?

Here is my recommendation.

Do not buy a shitty made in China gun safe from Harbor Freight or Sam’s Club.  I do not for one instant trust the locking mechanisms on those.  I’ve had too many made in China LED flashlights die to trust shitty made in china circuit boards.  The last thing I want is my digital combo safe (they are all digital now) to die and lock me away from my guns.

I went nuts last Christmas during the Home Depot post-Christmas blowout and bought a great set of DeWalt 20V max tools.  Then I realized I had more than a grand worth of tools just sitting in my garage.  That’s like leaving a pair of 1911’s on my workbench, it’s a stupid thing to do.

I did some searching and I found a Ridgid portable storage chest.  Kobalt has one that is identical called a portable jobsite box.  I really love the locking mechanism on these, the padlock is very secure.

With all my coupons and sales stacked up, I bought mine for just over $100.00

It’ more than large enough to hold all my DeWalt tools, including my 20V chainsaw with the 12 inch bar.

It would be plenty large enough to told some pistols in their boxes as well as ammo, and even a few AR-15s if you broke them down and took the receiver halves apart.

But how do you stop some asshole from just hauling the whole box away.

The solution is two Redhead half-inch drop-in anchors, two half-inch eye bolts, and a Kryptonite U-shaped bike lock.

What I did was sink the two drop in anchors into the concrete with a rotary hammer (a hammer drill will work, but it takes longer and was an excuse to buy a rotary hammer) and a 5/8 inch bit.

I spaced the anchors so that they were on either side of one of the feet, which are metal loops welded to the bottom of the box.

I then screwed in the eye bolts and aligned them so the U-shaped bike lock would pass through two feet and both eyes and lock.

By doing this, the eyes can’t be unscrewed from the anchors without the bike lock removed.  There is about 20,000 pounds of holding force in the anchors, so it would be hard to pull it out with a pry bar.  And someone would have to cut both eyes, both feet, or the Kryptonite bike lock to free the box.

Altogether, the box, locks, anchors, and eyes cost me less than $200.

My handy-dandy Mitutoyo digital caliper (what, you don’t have a digital caliper in your arsenal of tools?  get one, it’s great for precision sight adjustment) the box is made from 14 gauge steel, which isn’t great, but is the same thickness as the body of most lower end gun safes in the $500 – $700 range, and thicker than the steel of those Stack-On gun cabinets (I have some of those too, but I installed shelves and use them for ammo storage).  The box feels pretty solid.

As a bonus, if you use one of these for gun storage, it doesn’t scream “gun storage.”

I have mine in my garage because it holds tools, but it’s small enough that it could be mounted into the floor of a closet using this same technique on a slab floor or using properly sized lag eyes into joists.

Again, this is only my recommendation for a low costs option.

I personally wouldn’t store in $20,000 in guns in a large Job Box, but if all I had was a pair of Glocks and a budget-priced AR-15, this might be a cost-effective way to store them against theft.

Update:

I want to make this point crystal clear when it comes to any advice I provide on gun storage or security.

All security can be defeated. It is a matter of time and effort. You just have to make the time and effort to defeat the security not worth the investment of time end effort to the thief.

I’m data driven. Most home burglaries take a few minutes and are done by guys who want stuff they can sell or trade for drugs. They would rather spend three minutes lifting your TV’s off the wall and stuffing your wife’s jewelry into bags than trying to pry open safes and lockboxes.

The best thing you can have is an alarm.  That automatically limits the criminals’ time the have to take your stuff and they will prioritize easy over hard.

I put a lot of security into my guns because they have meaning for me.  I have no emotional attachment to my TVs.  I will be very pissed if my guns are stolen because I put time into customizing them and loving on them.  If my TV is ripped off the wall, I’ll get a new one from Best Buy.  The most upsetting thing about that is the deductible.

I want the thief who breaks into my house to say “I have three minutes, I’m not going to fuck around with his Fort Knox safes, I’m going to help myself to his electronics.”

I have made personal decisions as to the cost-benefit analysis of how much some of my stuff is worth and how much I am willing to spend to secure it.

If you chose to have a higher or lower security cost to item value ratio, that is entirely up to you.

I’m only telling you what I see as reasonable.

Spread the love