Gun Free Zone

You know hearing those kinds of arrogant and insipid remarks from — for a large measure of a government that is as corrupt as that of Mexico. It’s really irritating and then to hear a U.S. attorney general match up with his counterpart in Mexico, lamenting the Second Amendment, I mean these are two despicable statements by two men who should be acting responsibly in their positions and there seems to be no — no real protest. But the idea that Eric Holder would talk about the Second Amendment being jeopardized to the convenience of the Mexican government, which is at best incompetent and at worse corrupt.

Lou Dobbs, Aired March 2, 2009 – 19:00ET, CNN.

‘Nuff said.

You have to give it to the Obama Administration: let’s try a new wrinkle to ban those Evil Black Rifles. Attorney General Eric Holder is calling for the renewal of the Assault Weapons Ban (The ban that never was) under the excuse that we, Bad Americans, are fueling the Mexican Drug War.  According to the State Department’s travel advisory of Feb. 20, 2009 “Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades,” even though no full automatic weapons are sold in the US without heavy Federal control and I don’t recall the last time I saw live grenades being sold at any local gun show. And strikes me as strange that the State Department would use the Mexican Army as a source knowing full well that we are talking about the military that escorts drug runners across our borders and shoots at our Border Patrol Agents to protect drug shipments.

AG Holder’s words are insulting in more ways than one. First he is trying to perpetuate the falsehood of equating machine gun and drug dealers with Law Abiding American that own long guns. It is despicable at best but par for the course. Let us not forget that he worked under Janet Reno of the Waco Massacre fame and Holder was involved in the mass presidential pardon spree during the last days of the Clinton Administration so lying and cheating are a normal thing for him.

But what really really pisses me off is that the Attorney General of the United States would knowingly destroy the Constitution by using as excuse the self-induced plight of another country. The corrupt Mexican Government has been in deep intercourse with the drug cartels and yet, somehow, I am responsible for the shootings south of the borders because I may own an “assault Weapon.” I would not be surprised if the Drug Wars in Mexico are related to just plain turf war between government-protected cartels (and yes, using Mexican Army resources) and independent cartels. For that we are supposed to scratch the Second Amendment and surrender our rights for Mexico. During the Clinton Years was “Let’s Do It For The Children” but in the Obama Age is “Let’s Do It For Mexico.”

What Mr. Holder should so do is create its own little infomercial like we see in late night TV. Instead of sponsoring an impoverished child in a slum of Rio, Mr. Holder will show ask us to relinquish our Second Amendment Rights to help a Drug Dealer.

According to the FBI Director Robert Mueller, the possibility of a Mumbai-style attack in the US could be replicated seems to have the Government in somewhat nervousness. I work in the Hospitality Business and I am here to tell you that I am more than a little worried, I am scared shitless about the issue. By definition, hotel corporations are reactive in nature. They don’t want to change unless change falls on them like a mastodon in heat and then they will cry and complaint all the way to court. In a Hotel Security trade magazine a less than stellar article was written about the Mumbai attack and the genius writer came to the conclussion that the reason the attack was successful was because the terrorists gained access through a kitchen entrance thus laying the blame to an unlocked door. Are you frigging kidding me? A terrorist sporting an AK 47 and a backpack full of grenades has pretty much all the tools required to do an entrance anywhere in the hotel and using pretty much any door including the main entrance of the hotel.

Some less stupid and more insightful articles in different military and police website reveal that the first targets of the attack were anybody that looked like security. 99.99% of security officer that work at a hotel are unarmed and they may only have a radio for “defense” but still they were mowed down so the terrorist could have a wonderful time spreading the will of Allah via 7.62×39.

More and more people are now carrying a concealed weapon and although a sidearm is a poor match against a rifle, it beats being unarmed. If you spend any time in a hotel, you must now add to your list of security concerns the probability that a horny jihadist will decide that your trip to the latest amusement park off state or a business opportunity is a good time to crate mayhem.  Create a plan, be ready and be deadly if necessary. Again, do not depend on the hotel for your protection since we are trained only to be “good witnesses” and nothing else.

As for me, I’ll just bow my head and mumble quietly the Secret Service prayer: “Dear Lord. Not on my watch.”

I am sure you have a friend who is the official sender of funnies and assorted pictures by email. Most of the time it might be a joke or cute & funny kitty videos or the dumb kid with a skateboard slamming a hard object or the weird picture of a guy showing his butt crack. Most are OK, some are downright funny but some miss the mark and leave a bad taste in your mouth.

As I was trying to sip my morning coffee, I opened my email and found a the following picture from a friend in Gun Free Venezuela, my country of origin.

For those Spanish-Impaired, allow me to translate.

Attention Robbers

I have no Credit Card and I only carry enough cash for lunch.
I don’t have jewelry and I am a pedestrian.
I have no cell phone and I am unemployed.
If you still decide to rob me, please do it without violence. I promise not to call authorities until 15 minutes after you are gone.
Thanks in advance for your goodwill.

I still don’t know what upsets me more: the T-Shirt or the smiling face of the moron holding it. But this is what giving away your rights looks like. This is an example of people buying into the The Government Will Take Care Of You bullshit. This is what being unarmed looks like. This is what giving up your freedoms looks like.

Sad, pathetic, depressing.

Allow me to quote myself from the previous entry:

She goes on to quote Mayor Manny Diaz and Police Chief John “I drive a free SUV” Timoney crying about the increase of murders and how easy is now for the gangs to obtain the Evil Black Rifles. However crime numbers from the FDLE website reveal that after Chief John Timoney took office in January of 2003, crime shot up in Miami Dade and the Assault Weapons Ban did not expire until September of 2004. So it seems more a question of ineffective Police leadership that guns after all. Maybe the true mass murderers are not those of us with Evil Black Rifles but the Major and the Police Chief with the tactical support of Journalistic Whores.

So what really do we have here? Is it really that assault weapons are widespread and mowing down innocent people or something else entirely? The sad truth is that Chief Timoney has been a failure curbing crime in the county and more specifically in Liberty City and Brownsville where these attacks happened. These are black impoverished areas under the control of local drug gangs that pretty much do whatever they want to do with little opposition from the Police. The rank and file cops, who want nothing more than to take on the criminals on the street are ticked out of their minds (a study done in 2007 shows that almost 70% of the officers under Timoney have serious complaints about his tenure), but the powers that be have not done enough to bring confidence the community and this has created a huge vacuum between the community and Law Enforcement where criminals thrive. Maybe it is too hard to commit resources to what them might consider a lost zone or lost group of people. Maybe Chief Timoney is too busy traveling abroad in conferences and junkets to be paying attention to dopers shooting each other and their communities or just plain racism.

People in these communities are double hostages: First of the criminal element doing plying its deadly trade and also hostages of a Mayorship and a Police Chief caught in their own web of political correctness but incapable of doing the right thing for fear of catching hell… or maybe afraid to break a sweat. It is much easier to blame inanimate objects that face the reality of their failures so the Evil Black Rifles get blamed for the tribulations of the poor Black Neighborhoods. Not the useless Mayor, not the corrupt Chief of Police, not even the Black Leaders that place the race card but do not have the testicles to tell the community the hard truth of being responsible for their lives and doing the right thing. It is my AK the one at fault for the collapse of cheap Social Engineering.

Rubbish!

Myriam Marquez is a columnist for the Miami Herald which is my local rag. She published her column today regarding those evil assault weapons that are murdering tons of people in the Miami Dade County area.  How Ms. Marquez ever got a job at the Miami Herald as a writer is amazing and indicative of the level of desperation that the editorial board must be feeling although it is more likely a case of political correctness run amok because they needed a woman in the column section.

Ms. Marquez starts her rubbish by painting a horrifying picture of a “massacre” that happened recently in Liberty City. Apparently an AK 47 all on its own sprayed a group of people playing craps outside some apartment complex and it is suspected that the same or similar AK 47 (again on its own) was involved in a shooting in Brownsville. These Zombies AK 47 have become a curse because they don’t need human intervention to do their mayhem.

She tries to make up after that Horror Movie introduction with the snappy comment :

Oh, excuse me. Weapons don’t kill people. People do. Except the weapon that criminals use can make the difference between death and survival.

OK, we are doing better now. It seems that after all, there was somebody actually behind the AK 47s. For a second I was actually worried that we were being invaded by possessed rifles. But then she makes the first of her really incendiary comments, an insult to millions os law abiding Gun Owners:

Assault weapons are meant to do the dirty on cops.

For the last couple, three years and thanks to the impositions at work, I had my shooting skills lapse somewhat. Not that I was any good from the beginning (far from it) but they were at such a low that I was actually embarrassed to shoot at my local IDPA matches. I am back to standard in my mediocre pistol skills but I had not shot rifle in a long long time till last Tuesday when I had the chance to attend a South Florida Defensive Carbine Club match. SFDCC is the bastard child of Rob Sloyer of TacticalYellowVisor, curmudgeon extraordinaire and a new writer for SWAT Magazine.  SFDCC is basically a group of South Floridians gathering to practice and run matches with Evil Black Rifles. The gamut of participants run from the very lousy (yours truly) to some very gifted and trained individuals shooting from AK Klones to tactically pimped ARs .

During the SFDCC match, I was an absolute mess. I forgot about holdover costing me two failure to neutralize targets on just one simple vanilla stage. The fact that I wanted to be fast and slick also added to the clusterfuck and eventually general piss poor attitude when I reached the next stage.  This stage (a handgun to rifle transition)  was shot better and slower although one of the steels was set to be knocked down by a S&W 500 only so my 9mm couldn’t knock it down and I gathered another Failure To Neutralize. The last stage was a rifle to pistol transition which again I took slowly and managed to shoot clean although you could have timed me with an hourglass.

What were the lessons learned? Lack of practice will screw you up. Shooting is a perishable skill that requires practice and more practice to keep fresh. In a situation, you do not have time to stop and think what you are doing wrong and carefully deduct what you must correct. You either do it right from the start or you will end up with assorted new holes that were not there the day you came into this world. So lots of dry fire are in my future. Also I will need to get some sort of reliable mag pouches but the pickings for AK mags are slim still. I was using a modified soviet block 2 magazine belt pouch, but the crappy canvas material gives too easy and made for a lousy reload. The craze nowadays is chest rigs but I am not very fond of them. I see them as clumsy unless you have a flat stomach or are slim which I am neither. I must also look for a new sling or figure out a better way to use the Specter Gear AK CQB sling since it gets in the way of my reloads.