Gun Free Zone

The other day, I analyzed an Amicus Curia brief by the “Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence”.

Sounds good, but what have they done to actually advance “gun safety”? Their entire shtick is to take guns away from The People.

Compare that to this educational statement:

In states that haven’t gone gun stupid, good things still happen.

Not bad. The Bexar Country Commissioners Court purchased 3,800 portable handgun safes and 1,000 handgun cables for $140,000. The money came from the American Rescue Plan Act.

I was checking my Blog reads just now and found this over Wirecutter’s:

HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) – A combination of schools out for summer and a TikTok challenge has law officers in Hendersonville on heightened alert after a number of car break-ins, vandalism, and auto theft incidents.

Police said the thieves appear to be trying to steal Hyundais and Kias as part of a TikTok challenge that has been going around.
…
“These cars recovered, not only is there damage caused from breaking in and the steering columns being torn down, but most are wrecked, it’s not their car. They don’t care. They are hitting things, ramming into things, and in some cases these kids are not even old enough to have a driver’s license. They don’t know how to drive,” Sgt. Chris Gagnon said.

And right on my morning news reads, I was treated to this:

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — It’s been less than a month since the last day of school in Montgomery County, but Clarksville authorities have already responded to more than 200 calls involving minors, including several minors who ended up being arrested for violent crimes, like homicide.

Between Wednesday, May 24 and Friday, June 16, the Clarksville Police Department (CPD) said its officers were dispatched to 249 calls involving juveniles.

As a result, 43 minors were charged in connection with nonviolent criminal activity, such as curfew violations, vehicle burglary, joyriding, criminal impersonation, and traffic violations, according to officials.

In addition, police said six teenagers have been charged for more violent offenses, including a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old for criminal homicide, a 17-year-old for aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, a 17-year-old for aggravated domestic assault, and a 14-year-old for aggravated burglary.

40+ minors charged with various crimes since school year ended: Clarksville, TN police (wkrn.com)

And you guys know how this movie ends: On of the “yutes” is going to encounter somebody with no patience for criminal tomfoolery and a gun and we are going to end up with mom and sisters sobbing in front of the cameras claiming that just because little choir boy aimed the gun, he truly didn’t mean to and it was awful for the person to kill the little angel.  That will be followed by an editorial lecture on how gun violence in this country is killing more 21 -year-old toddlers than Ebola and demand not one but two special sessions so we can pass more of the same gun control legislation that solved nothing in the past.

And yes, we need more pride flags for Peaces in the classrooms.

B.L.U.F.Matthew Hoover and Kristopher Ervin thumbed their noses at the ATF, daring the ATF to do something. The ATF did, they arrested both of them for multiple counts of conspiracy to sell a “combination of parts” that would convert a gun into a machine gun. Both were found Guilty. They have not been sentenced yet. Having been found guilty, both are asking for the court to acquit them.

Hard cases make good law. There is so much tied up in this case that it is hard to dissect. This might be such a case.

History

Matthew Hoover was a YouTuber who created gun content. I had watched some of his videos, but his content wasn’t of significant interest to me. His content would be recommended to me from time to time. At some point, he started advertising the “Auto Key Card” and it was obvious that he was selling this card.

The “Auto Key Card” was a dimensionally correct etching on a stainless-steel card of a “lighting link.” A lighting link can convert an AR-15 style platform from semi-automatic to full-automatic, i.e. a machine gun.

But what does it do? It is both complicated and simple at the same time.

On the AR-15 platform, when you have charged the rifle, you have cocked the internal hammer. The hammer has a small notch in it called a sear.

When you press the trigger, the arm in front of the trigger rotates down. As it does, it clears the sear on the hammer. The hammer then moves forward to hit the firing pin and fire the weapon.

The bullet flies down the barrel, as it passes the gas port some of the gas is diverted into the gas tube. That gas flows back towards the receiver, where it acts on the bolt carrier to shove the bolt carrier towards the rear of the gun. The bolt carrier pulls the bolt out of the chamber. It also pushes the hammer back down.

This happens so fast that you do not have time to release the trigger. As the bolt carrier is shoved forward by the recoil spring, the hammer rides down the back of the bolt carrier and may or may not drive the firing pin into the next round, firing git.

The disconnector interrupts this process. The hook at the front of the disconnector catches the hook on the back inside the hammer and keeps the hammer from following the bolt forward.

When the trigger is released, the nose comes up and is ready to catch the hammer. As the trigger is released more, the disconnector is pulled back out of the hook on the hammer and the hammer starts forward, only to be stopped as the sear catches on the nose of the trigger.

We are now ready for the next trigger press.

In a full auto AR-15 platform, we add one more piece and modify some of the other pieces. The first piece of interest is the selector switch. This will push down on the back of the disconnector, so its hook will never catch the hammer hook. If this was all that was happening, the hammer would ride the bolt carrier back down and the firearm might slam fire. But this is not controlled and might not actually happen.

What we want to have happen is for the hammer to stay back until the bolt is in battery and then for the hammer to fall, picking up speed, until it strikes the back of the firing pin. This is where the auto sear comes into play.

When the bolt carrier to the rear, the hammer is down and the auto sear is rotated such that it catches the hook on the back of the hammer. This holds the hammer down as the bolt carrier moves forward, driving the bolt into battery. As this happens, the back of the bolt carrier catches the rear of the auto sear and rotates it. This releases the hammer, allowing the gun to fire a second time.

The thing that makes an AR-15 receiver a “machine gun” is the little hole for the auto sear pivot pin. Without that hole and the auto sear, it is not a machine gun.

Before 1986, people were manufacturing “drop in auto sear” This was a block of milled steel with the auto sear and pivot pin integral to the unit. When put into a receiver with a correctly milled shelf for the auto sear and when the rest of the fire control group had the right type of disconnector, trigger, selector switch, and hammer, the drop in auto sear worked just like a normal auto sear.

If that little chuck of metal was properly serialized and registered before 1986, it is legally a machine gun. They sell for thousands of dollars.

A cheap version of the drop in auto sear was the “lighting link”. This was a much simpler device made from a couple of pieces of thin stamped metal. It performed the same function. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very reliable. They had to be carefully tuned to fit a particular receiver and even then, it couldn’t be trusted the same way a real M-16 and drop in auto-sears could.

Dimensional draws of the lighting link are available on the internet and in some old tyme books.

All of this brings us back to the Auto Key Card. The Auto Key Card is a dimensional drawing of a lighting link. The card is made from stainless-steel and is laser etched. That is all it is.

The Question

Read More

I love a bit of good news.

Minnesota youth trap shooting explodes — with help from the NRA

On opening day of the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League championship, the Alexandria Shooting Park sounds like a very loud batch of popcorn. Squads of five teammates, lined up in a row, fire shotguns at blaze-orange discs streaking across the sky. “Pop!” “Pop!” “Pop! Pop! Pop!” The nine-day event, which has more than 8,000 competitors, is billed as the largest trap-shooting tournament in the country.

Clay-target shooting, a longtime Olympic sport, includes four disciplines, of which trap is most popular. Though it’s an individual sport, shooting in teams has a social aspect. “It’s like golf only louder,” says John Nelson, who oversees the tournament as president of the Eagan-based USA Clay Target League and its Minnesota chapter.

USA Clay Target League is the largest youth clay-target shooting organization in the country, with more than 46,000 members in grades 6-12. Roughly 12,000 of those participants are in Minnesota, which has teams in about 350 of its 500 or so high schools. (Football, the state’s largest high-school sport, has around 20,000 participants; boys and girls hockey has 8,000)

In just two decades, clay target has become one of the country’s fastest-growing high-school sports. And Minnesota is, arguably, the epicenter of youth trap’s nationwide boom.

Students say they develop skills and friendships through the sport. But they aren’t the only ones benefitting from the league’s explosive growth. Retailers sell more firearms and ammunition (league participants go through 350,000 cases annually) — and conservation groups get a cut of the tax on those purchases.

More controversially, the National Rifle Association stands to bolster its ranks with youth trap shooters by donating millions to the sport, unnerving advocates of gun-violence prevention.

The league gave schools the playbook for bringing together students, coaches, a gun club, safety certification, and insurance. It also facilitated “virtual” competitions (teams shoot independently at gun clubs and compare scores). “Our approach was: We want this to look and smell and taste like a high-school sport,” Nelson said. “We want kids to letter. We want kids to be recognized in the yearbook.”

Minnesota became the first state to have its high school league endorse clay-target shooting, which lent the sport credibility among wary school administrators. “If you go in and say, ‘I have a program that’s gonna involve kids and guns and schools,’ you get a lot of doors closed on you,” Nelson recalled.

John Nelson, president of the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League, said ”Our approach was: We want this to look and smell and taste like a high-school sport.”John Nelson, president of the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League, said ”Our approach was: We want this to look and smell and taste like a high-school sport.”

The kids are enjoying trap shooting.

They are outside, playing a sport, an Olympic sport, building skills and making friends.

They are learning gun safety and responsible sportsmanship.

This exactly what youth sports are all about.

I really hope more states develop programs like this.

This is how we win, by demonstrating to the next generation that the shooting sports are fun and safe.

I saw this on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Dead_like_you/status/1669949884101787649?s=19

Allow me to explain.

You will see ranges like this in the Midwest.

They are public municipal ranges on land managed by a law enforcement agency like Fish & Game, or in this case, the Department of Natural Resources.

The bureaucracy hates the range but for various legal reasons, can’t shut it down.

Instead, they make the range inconvenient to use, with capricious rules.

They don’t want people to shoot here, so they geared it towards hunters who might shoot a few rounds to zero their hunting rifle for the season then leave.

So yes, it’s a Fudd range, run by Fudd bureaucracy.

If you have been doing competitive shooting for certain amount of time, you find out soon enough that other than 1911 magazines, the shooting accessory that fails the most is the cheap gun range bag. I went through 3 of them till I decided to forego bullcrap and invest in a Competitive Edge Dynamics range bag which has stood the test of time and my mishandling.

The great thing about the bag is that you can pack a lot of stuff you may need for a long day of shooting at a remote range. It is comforting to reach inside and either bring out your pistol, the mags, ammo, country ham sandwich, suntan spray, bug spray, emergency poncho, gunsmith tools or anything else you need.

But, the bad thing is that as you get old and you just want to do a quick trip to the local range to practice, that is a humongous thing to carry around. Smaller range bags tend to be built cheaply and you end up wasting money again, but it was the wife that came up with the great solution of getting me my first tool tote when I got into “tactical” rifle with my AKlon.

Plain old tool carriers you can buy at your local Big Box hardware store, not too expensive and overbuilt to withstand mistreatment by almost anybody.

I have acquired a couple of extra items in the same vein, including a small tool bag for simple and quick trips to the local range.

The Husky bag a top of the CED range bag carried my Eye and Ear protection, a couple hundred rounds of 9mm, spare mags for the PC9 plus 8×8 targets and tape. I went to the range without looking like a packing mule and got my shooting done in comfort. They come in different sizes priced between $15 to $25 IRRC.

OK, I am outta here. I must go out with the missus.

I saw Miguel’s post on this, and I thought I’d give my perspective.

Biden: “Down in Philadelphia and New York, areas I know well, like up here, you’d see a truck pull up, pull to the curb and selling weapons, selling guns, selling AR-15s.”

pic.twitter.com/KDdt1ViFlR

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 16, 2023

If you know anything about Leftist rhetorical tactics, you know they try to make arguments by conflating two things.

For example:

They will say something about how “immigrants actually commit crimes at a rate lower than native born Americans” and then go on to defend illegal immigrants.

It’s misdirection by conflating.

It’s true that legal immigrants who entered America on visas and with background checks do commit crimes at a lower rate than legal immigrants.  Our system selects good people, and the legal immigrants know that if they break the law, they will be deported.

Illegal immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than native born Americans. Arguably, a rate of 100% if you count the initial act of illegally crossing the border to begin with.

The Left knows this, but can only “win” their argument defending illegal immigrants by conflating crime statistics about legal and illegal immigration.

In the gun world, for decades, the Left talked a out the “gun show loophole.”

They would conflate a dealer with a booth who had to run NICS checks on buyers, with the lone private citizen who was selling one personally owned gun. Thats not a loophole, thats the law. They can’t be honest and explain that or their fear mongering falls flat.

So what is Biden talking about here.

I used to live outside of Chicago. Chicago has a terrible problem with illegal guns.

You cannot own a gun in Illinois without a permit called a FOID. So how do all those criminals without permits get guns?

The black market. There are guys who deal in illegal goods, guns and drugs most frequently.

Their two major sources of illegal guns are guns stolen from people’s homes (lock up your guns), or straw purchases from dows state or out of state.

So yes, you can buy a gun in Chicago from the trunk of a car.

That guy is a criminal, he’s always been a criminal, and the biggest problem is that those guys rarely were every prosecuted adequately for illegal arms trafficking.

So here is Biden conflating fences and black marketeers with FFL dealers.

I don’t know if it’s because he’s a senile old man with pudding for brains, he’s a Leftist lying by conflation the way Leftist do, or both.