Gun Free Zone

You are just finding this out? Many states, especially in the South had laws against mask (other than Halloween and such) dating back the Reconstruction because of shit-stains like the Klan and assorted brigands and had to be modified or ignored when Fauci and Company of Thieves brought forth the “Mask-Or-Die” dogma.  And we have people believe that the criminal element youd not take advantage of what their fellow counterparts in the “medical” profession created? Those believers are also known as “predictable victims.”

First, if you have not read OldNFO’s Grey Man series, go do so. JL Curtis Amazon Web Page

What is a “gray man”? He is the man or woman that you don’t notice. He is the man you walk by every day and he is just part of the background. He doesn’t stand out in anyway. He isn’t overly loud in voice, character or looks. He is equally comfortable in his Dickies work pants with grease under his fingernails as sitting in a fine restaurant, dressed correctly for the place.

He is the guy sitting at the bar, nursing a drink and paying no attention to anybody or anything that hears everything that is said and notices all that happens around him.

He is the unnoticed.

It is difficult to be that person. Sometimes you want what is comfortable and not what is gray. Sometimes you want to be tacticool or the gal that wants to be in the 3 in heels looking like a million dollars with every eye focused on her.

Sometimes it is difficult to understand that gray doesn’t mean the color. You would stand out much more at a beside the street in “gray” clothing than wearing a high vis safety vest and hardhat.

The gray man is able to walk into a secured dorm because he feels like just another student in the rush of students going in. The backpack on his back is a student like backpack. He walks into the office building and nobody notices because his computer bag is just a computer bag. His briefcase is just that.

His lunch bag doesn’t attract attention either.

How do you become a gray man? You start by shutting your mouth and listening. You open your eyes an observe.

If you want to be noticed, stare at somebody. Learn to watch somebody without focusing on that person. Don’t stare. The last thing you want to hear is “Are you looking at me!?!? What are you looking at old man/runt/pussy?” Or “Are you looking at MY girl?”

Learn to observe.

Keep your ears open. If you are sitting at the bar or in the dinner or restaurant, what is the conversation going on around you? Are they talking about the amazing touchdown that happened or are they talking about something else entirely?

Learn to sit where you can observe yet not be seen observing. You don’t sit in the back corner. You sit near the back. You sit with your back angled towards the wall. You choose where you sit so that your firearm is protected yet you can still reach it.

For high speed low drag people, have you ever tried to draw your weapon while sitting at your kitchen table? How about when you are sitting on the sofa or in the easy chair? When was the last time you sat in a chair with arms? The chair arms at many dinning room tables will interfere with your ability to draw your weapon. That appendix carry is nice, how about when you are sitting? Are you carrying in the small of your back? Can you reach your gun with out drawing attention to yourself?

Driving down the streets of my town, one in five vehicles is a pickup truck. 3 out of five are four wheel drive. One in 100 is a sports car. One in 1000 might be an expensive sports car.

The guy in the Ford Crown Vic with tinted windows stands out. Panel vans on the street stand out. Dark Suburbans with dark windows stand out.

In DC, a pickup truck stands out. A Prius does not. There are more four door sedans rolling around than you can shake a stick at.

What you drive needs to be gray. In NYC, for the longest time, the best gray vehicle was a bright yellow cab.

What you wear needs to be gray. If you are walking into an office building where they wear suits and ties, wear a suit and tie. If you are walking into places that require a hardhat, wear a hardhat. It use to be that the most invisible man in the building was the guy with a hardhat on and a clipboard.

Stay away from the tacticool clothing. You are carrying an IFAK, make sure it is not obvious. Ankle kits are a good choice for not showing your IFAK.

Your EDC firearm needs to be concealed. If what you are wearing doesn’t allow a full size weapon, then don’t be all mocho and refuse to carry a smaller gun. A little 7 shot 9mm pistol in a pocket holster is a good start.

If you carry a knife, make sure you carry two. One that doesn’t freak the mundanes. My boss once stopped at my desk and asked me to open a box that had just arrived. I was busy and just took my primary and did the wrist flick thing and a 3 1/2in blade was suddenly in my hand. It sort of freaked my boss.

I have a very practical swiss army knife that I should have used.

My briefcase is a Hazard 4 “Ditch” laptop/soft briefcase with the Removable flap. It is a little tacticool but not so much that people notice. It has a main compartment which has a hook and loop holster for a full size firearm. It has a hook and loop where I have a first-aid kit. It has all the little pockets along the side for spare mags and other things. There is a couple of tetra paks of flavored tuna. Along with a Ka-Bar “spork”. There is a full size padded pocket that holds my laptop.

With the flap closed and latched you can open a zipper and gain access to the side compartment to pull out the laptop. Push to quick release buckles and the flap is free and you can then gain access to the double zippered main compartment.

It has places for moral patches, and I do have some on my bag. But they are silly things. Like “Rub dirt in it, sooner or later everything stops bleeding”. Them’s that know can guess there is a first aid kit in that bag.

For my Truck Gun I went with a NC Star Vism Discreet Carbine Case.

It is designed for a 16″ AR-15 broken down. All of the separators and tie down loops can be moved around. With a little bit of fiddling there is room for a Glock in a OWB holster, the PC 9 Carbine and easily a dozen mags. I’ve also used it with a broken down AR-15, that same glock pistol, three AR 30 round mags, one 20 round AR mag, 6 Glock mags

When closed it looks like a slightly oversized laptop bag. Given the size of laptops today, it gets no attention.

My family has doctors, nurses, EMTs and other medical professionals in it. I am well aware of the process of medical internships and rotations. I was going to write something about it but then DiveMedic did a much better job.

B.L.U.F.

Unlike engineers, doctors are expected to make diagnosis and medical decisions that require them to have good working knowledge of the human system right now. Engineers can wait till the morning to ask an expert in a different field.

JKB over at gunfreezone asks why medical training requires doctors to do rotations in specialties that are not their own, pointing out that engineers in one field don’t have to also do internships at a civil engineering firm, a mechanical engineering firm, a structural engineering firm, and a chemical engineering firm. He states that it looks like a complete waste of the student’s time. The reason that medicine does that is actually pretty simple, so let me give a simple explanation.

It isn’t likely that a mechanical engineer will do something that will have a direct effect on a chemical engineer’s job. That chemical engineer isn’t likely going to have an issue with avoiding the problems that a structural engineer is having. Imagine if a mechanical engineer tightened a screw a quarter turn, and this caused the hydraulic fluid to become acidic and then the building collapsed. Not so in medicine. Sure, people in medicine tend to specialize, but the human body is a complex system, and changes to one system have profound effects on the others.

Let’s say that I am in cardiology and I have a heart failure patient who is in fluid overload. There are a number of drugs that one could choose from to get rid of those fluids. I could try furosemide, or perhaps bumetanide. Perhaps torsemide, or even hydrochlorothiazide. Any of those medications would likely solve your patient’s issues, but which one of these is going to be detrimental to the patient’s kidneys? Do I want to choose a potassium sparing or a potassium wasting diuretic? How will that react with the patient’s preexisting autoimmune dysfunction? I could consult a nephrologist, an endocrinologist, and an immunologist, but doctors largely don’t stand around most of the time having huge arguments. That only happens on TV shows, not because there are no egos involved, because there are. Medical people are just too pressed for time to keep doing that, so wouldn’t it be easier if I already knew?

So for that reason, most in medicine learns a little about every system and specialty before going on to gain a deep understanding of their specialty. Nurses, doctors, PAs, NPs, all of them.

The first comment on that post complains about sterile fields and how they are “superstition.” Sterile fields are there to prevent post procedure infections. You can’t see infectious agents. Perhaps you didn’t touch anything. Or maybe you bumped into something that was covered in S. aureus and didn’t notice. How do you know? Can you be sure? If you are wrong, you will know in couple of days when your patient goes septic. You can’t bet a patient’s life on “the ten second rule.” Certain behaviors are high risk, so procedures get written in to the process to reduce or eliminate those higher risk behaviors. That includes treating everything that “breaks field” as though it was covered in an infectious agent- because it might be, and there is no way to know for sure. So you toss the offending object aside, and use one that you KNOW is sterile.

As an example, the most common cause of hospital caused infections is a CAUTI (Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infection). It’s caused by a catheter introducing a pathogen into the urinary tract. That can affect the kidneys. It can cause Acute Kidney Injury. In some cases, that can cause Chronic Kidney Disease and ultimately kidney failure, or it can cause septicemia (a blood infection), which leads to death. Because of this, there are procedures that need to be followed when inserting, caring for, and ordering indwelling catheters. Can you violate that procedure and get away with it? Sure. A few times. Maybe only once. But one thing is sure, you will eventually wind up with a septic patient. So the procedure is there to prevent that.

My grandfather on my father’s side was a union organizer.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was in the union.

My wife is in a union.

The unions of my grandfathers’ time were creating a better working environment than existed. They were creating a balance. They did create a balance between speed and profit against health, safety, and wages.

When I was in high school I got a chance to read the longshoreman’s contract. The one thing that got me was that a longshoreman got paid even if he didn’t work. If he was at the hiring hall on time all five days and he did not get at least 40 hours, the difference between the hours he did get and 40 were “made up” to him.

At the time a longshoreman that didn’t work was bringing home more money than my mother as a degree nurse.

The scam part of it was that most jobs were handed out by 0730, 0800 was pushing it. You were “on time” if you were at the hiring hall by 0900.

Now I was never a member of the longshoreman’s union. I was a kid and I might have misunderstood what I read, but that is what I came away with.

Today that is what unions do, they push for higher wages, less work, for example less students per teacher, and better benefits.

But they came into existence because there was not balance. A company had all the power. Striking was difficult and dangerous.

It was possible to be born into a mining town, be down in the mines by the time you were 10, work until you could no longer work, from health issues or crippling injuries, or death. For the entire duration of you work life, you were forever in debt to the company.

On your first day of work they company gave you your gear. They set the prices and every payday you had to pay some of it back, to pay for the equipment they gave you on credit. Your equipment wore out and you had to replace it. On credit.

The company owned the home you lived in, you were paying for it from your paycheck.

The food you purchased at the company store was bought on credit. And you paid for it out of every paycheck.

It wasn’t uncommon for a man to come out of the mines at the end of the week and owe the company more money after paying his entire wages back to the company, than he owed at the start of the week.

Tennessee Ernie Ford brought that story to life:

A modern take:

What is in that frigging icing? Napalm?

His mind is no longer based on reality.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Last year, officers shot 256 bullets in 26 incidents with suspects. But cops’ missed their target in half of those incidents, according to NYPD data. When cops don’t hit their target, they are likely to fire more shots, police said.

Now, after field tests at the NYPD firing range at Rodman’s Neck in the Bronx, police believe that officers fire more accurately with a 9mm handgun that has a trigger pull — meaning the pressure required to fire a bullet — of five pounds.

For more than 100 years, the NYPD has used firearms with 12-pound trigger pulls.

The 457 recruits who were tested, most of whom never fired a weapon before, had an average score of 93.7 with the lesser pull and 88.7 with the 12-pound pull, police said.

Accuracy tests showed that 129 officers already working the streets also scored better with the lighter pull.

NYPD will issue easier-to-shoot guns to new recruits (nydailynews.com)

Institutional inertia is an amazingly stupid characteristic to have, but one that is firmly embedded. NYPD has known for a long time that a heavier trigger results in less accurate shooting, hell, anybody six months shooting any kind of pistols or revolver knows it, the companies know this which is they on average go for a 7-pound trigger pull.

This is from the NYPD’s Annual Firearms Discharge report of 2010.

But the fact that NYPD is finally figuring out and implementing a change that the average civilian shooter has known since JMB was sitting in his workshop is a sign of improvement.

Now back to Ladd. What is with this “white world” shit? Is he suddenly identifying himself as Black? Is he trying to pull a Dolezal or a Talcum X? Somehow, I don’t see him on the streets, marching with his left fist high up and shouting “BLACK POWER!” or “BLACK LIVES MATTER!” convincingly.  Maybe he got by accident on the mail a Race card, and it is trying to use it before it gets cancelled.

As for the second part, I believe Bruen will be blamed for pretty much everything. From new COVID variants to climate change, Ladd will manage to insert somehow that the Bruen decision is to blame.

Hat Tip Royko

Back in February of 2019 Miguel posted I made the decision on a Truck Gun & Travel Combo..

His post got me to thinking about the elusive truck gun.

What are the characteristics of a good truck gun for me?

• It has to fit in the truck
• It has to be unobtrusive when in the truck and going to and from the truck
• The weight of the ammunition can’t exceed the my limits
• It can’t be another exotic caliber
• It has to be easy to handle
• It has to be low maintenance
• It has to be accurate at urban ranges
• It has to pack enough punch

Well the PC 9 was mentioned. It meets most of these criteria. It lives in a gun bag that doesn’t look like a gun bag. It looks like an oversized briefcase. It is gray. It doesn’t have any tacticool stuff on the outside. Inside it holds the PC 9 broken down, a pistol an a boat load of magazines. The ammo and mags weigh more than the pistol and rifle combined.

Nobody ever left a fire fight saying “I wish I had less ammo.”

Right now it has just iron sights. I did have a red dot on it, but that got moved to another rifle. It is light, carbine length rifle. It is easy to put round after round in the 10 ring from urban distances. It is ambidextrous.

It has been very reliable. And it fires 9×19.

So the cons. It is a Ruger which to me means that it is overly complex to break down and clean. It is simple blowback so it gets dirty, fast. If you take it down far enough to clean the receiver properly you have springs that want to go that away.
The magazine release is on the left side instead of the right side.

Still it is fun to shoot and it is my truck gun. Being able to sling the bag over my shoulder and walk out of the parking lot and nobody give you a second glance is wonderful. The nosy neighbors know every time I go to the range because it is pretty damn obvious what’s being loaded into the truck. But this? nobody notices.

I’ve had conversations with cops with the bag hanging off my shoulder without them twigging. Of course it does make for a sort of weird dynamic…

I’ve got my EDC on my person. I’ve got the EDC bag which happens to have IFAK and another firearm (and spare mags and boxed ammo), and then I’ve got a bag slung over my shoulder with another pistol plus a rifle. And all I’m doing is driving to work…

The reality is that the EDC bag is also my computer bag. People see me pull my laptop out of it all the time. People have seen me pull my first aid kit out from time to time. At no time has anybody seen the rest of what is in that bag. You can take the laptop in and out without even opening the main compartment where the IFAK+ is stored.

When things are not overly stressful, i.e. before “mostly peaceful protests” became a thing, I didn’t feel the need for a truck gun. So it was just the EDC bag and the EDC on me.

One of the selling points of the PC 9 is that it uses a compatible magazine. Since it takes Glock mags it means that a single magazine can be used in both a side arm or the rifle. The ads talk about taking the mag from your pistol and putting it in your rifle. I don’t see that as happening. But being able to carry spare magazines that fit both is a big win.

So that bag also holds a holster. If it is time to bogie and I have gone to “needing a rifle” mode, I’m going to switch out the .45 on my belt for the Glock in the bag. Yes, I know they shot differently. I practice with both so I hit where I want with both.

It isn’t my go to rifle. Depending on what is going bump in the night determines what I pick up. A LBV with IFAK, 180 rounds of ammo and my ready rifle if it seems to be two legged bumper. Or a 30-30 lever action for something with four legs. This is a rifle with a particular niche and in that niche it does very well.