More on the service Ruger

I mentioned before about the 5,000 units of the Ruger P95 being ordered by the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command of Rock Island, IL. There's another brief mention of this in the June 2005 issue of Guns & Ammo. It mentions that each pistol is shipped with 10-round magazines. What the...? Why aren't they being issued the standard 15-rounders, I mean, they're in the military. (Yes, for this model of pistol 15 rounds is standard capacity. Ten-round magazines are low capacity. Anything that makes the magazine stick out past the butt of the grips is high capacity, if you feel that you still need that category for any useful purpose). Another funny thing in this article is that they are still shipped in the regular Ruger plastic box, just like for civilians, complete with the "safety" locks. Of course, the soldiers have no use for the locks, so they have become quite popular as bicycle locks among some Iraqis. Unfortunately, all the locks use the same key.

I still say that if they were going to give them Rugers, they should've gone for the P97 or the newer P345.

Massachusetts man loses concealed carry license because of his zipper

Sticking to their guns is an article from the Daily News about Joseph Landers, who had his license revoked because his coat blew open, momentarily revealing his legally carried firearm.

Landers' coat was not entirely zipped up that day, and when the wind blew it open, a Dedham Police officer across the street zoomed in and noticed the gun. Upon request by the officer, Landers produced a valid five-year license issued in 1995 to carry the gun. But the problem was, state law required that he keep the weapon concealed.

While the officer let Landers go without an arrest, the Adams Street resident soon after received notice from Dedham Police Chief Dennis Teehan that his Class A license to carry firearms had been revoked due to the incident.

And...

"I have always erred on the side of caution when issuing a license to carry firearms," Teehan said in a 2001 letter reaffirming his denial. "For this reason, I find it necessary to deny your request for a license to carry."

What is to err here? His coat blew open. He has no criminal record. He had followed all the rules. There was no arrest. This is just arbitrarily jumping on this poor guy by an obviously anti-self-defense chief of police. But then, it's Massachusetts, so I guess he should be glad he's not in jail just for possessing a firearm at all.

Concealed carry in North Carolina

A permit to pack is an article from the News-Record of North Carolina (all emphasis mine):

While experts debate the merits of concealed handguns, this much is known: a News & Record analysis of thousands of state records shows proponents made at least one accurate prediction -- those who receive permits follow the law.

One-tenth of 1 percent of all permits issued since the law's inception have been revoked. Though the State Bureau of Investigation declined to release what led to revocations, local law enforcement officials say most weren't because of crime.

And those who carry hidden handguns may surprise you.

They're teachers and electricians, salon owners and factory workers, bus drivers and university accountants.

"As we like to say, a concealed-handgun-permit holder is the only certified law-abiding citizen that a law enforcement officer is likely to meet," said Paul Valone, president of Grass Roots North Carolina. "The people who have concealed handgun permits by and large are very ordinary people. They come from all walks of life."

There are also some lines from the victimization folks, like:

But she said the expansion of the law -- allowing permit holders to purchase guns without a sheriff's direct knowledge -- sets a dangerous precedent.

I haven't noticed any dangerous problems here in Texas. I don't see why NC would be any different. Also:

"In some states, almost anyone can get a concealed-carry permit."

Well, I would say almost anyone you meet is a law-abiding citizen, so why shouldn't almost anyone be allowed to carry concealed?

A couple of differences between the Texas and NC laws. They qualify with their handgun at 21 feet, which apparently in NC is "the maximum distance allowed under law for shooting an attacker in self-defense." That's kind of scary. How in the heck under that kind of stress are you going to be able to tell if they're within the "legal to shoot" zone? Besides, I don't see any criminals waiting to make sure they're within 21 feet before they start shooting at me. I'm glad TX doesn't have that restriction, and I think the NC gun folks should start some lobbying on this nonsense, if they haven't already.

The other difference I noticed is that the woman profiled used a .22, assuming this report is correct. No one should seriously expect to use a .22 for their standard personal defensive weapon, and they should qualify with something closer that what they actually plan on using. In Texas, you must qualify with a minimum of a .32 caliber firearm. Originally a minimum .38 caliber was necessary, but they changed it later on. What type of .32 is not specified, but of course I suppose they are referring to the .32 ACP.

I find this requirement kind of funny, because it means that you can legally qualify with your little .32 ACP Kel-Tec, but you would not be allowed to qualify with the vastly more powerful and difficult to handle CZ-52, because the CZ uses 7.62x25mm, which is technically only .30 caliber.

And I finally received my certified law-abiding citizen card in the mail yesterday. I messed around and waited so long that I was not able to legally carry for about 6 weeks. It's nice to have a license in my wallet again.

I once wrote some fiction...

deleted

If you repeat a lie often enough...

I consider it way outside my purview to comment on the Tony Blair election, but NPR has been whipping this idea to death recently: that he won but he really lost. Chrenkoff has some very good comments on this, with numbers to back it up.

Saturday Night Special #3

This week's link collection are all for various holsters and carry gear.

Michaels of Oregon -- All kinds of holsters for all kinds of guns.
Welcome to The Wilderness -- Slings, holsters, belts, lights, and other tactical accessories.
Excalibur Enterprises Survival and Emergency Preparedness Supplies -- Holsters, fanny packs, optics, and other tactical gear.
Concealed carry handgun holsters by PagerPal -- Holsters mainly for smaller guns disguised with a fake pager. I don't know, a Bravo Plus pager these days would look pretty suspicious to me. (But then, I'm an ex-pager tech).
Pocket Holsters -- Hand crafted holsters for small handguns and derringers, carried in the pocket.
Action-Direct -- Holsters and carry gear, plus knives, sights, and other accessories.
Passport Holsters - Concealed Carry Holsters and Unique Handgun Concealment Products -- Holsters as well as briefcases, purses, etc., all designed for concealed carry.
Holsters from Fobus USA -- Fobus USA.
DeSantis Holster & Leather Goods
Holsters.com - SAFARILAND Holsters, Duty Gear, and more
Comp-tac [www.comp-tac.com] -- Maker of a "tuckable" holster for the XD40 that I am going to get pretty soon.

Unarmed security guards are useless

An opinion piece in the San Antonio Lightning has so many quotable quotes that I can only recommend reading the whole thing, but it boils down to this one quote:

There is a simple lesson here. Unarmed security officers can't protect themselves let alone others from armed killers.

I spent a very brief time as a security guard at the Texas Department of Child Welfare Services in San Antonio. There were usually 3 or 4 guards on duty, as well as one armed police officer. As you can imagine, a place that looks out for child welfare often involves protecting that child from his/her biological parents. I saw a lot of scumbags coming through that door. But get this: the guards were at the front entrance, supervising the entry of every single person (employees and "clients") into that building. The armed officer was about 100 feet down the main hallway, closer to the center of the ground floor. Due to the "security" design of the entrance, there was basically no way to escape if a violent person had come in through that front door. On the other hand, the officer on duty would have been easily able to hear the gunshots that would be dispatching us and be able to react in some way. It wouldn't have done us, or the receptionists, one bit of good. We would all be deadmeat.

Fortunately during my time there, we had no such people come through the door. I couldn't even get away with carrying concealed, because the security guards had to be scanned in as well. I couldn't even keep my Swiss Army Knife on me while on the job. My personal defensive weapon was safely (and distantly) stowed in my vehicle, which may have given me a chance if I happened to be the one patrolling the parking lot when something went down. I fully understand where this commentor is coming from.

category:advocacy

Friday Night Ramble

Not much exciting this week, work-wise. Spent all week delivering notices, no meter reading. Thursday and Friday were deliveries out in the "country," very low volume (50 one day and 29 the next), very high mileage driving all over the eastern part of Bexar County. Dogs were no problem. As a general rule, country dogs are a lot less crazy than city dogs, probably because they get to roam on a lot more range, and are more free to socialize with each other. A dog kept apart from all other dogs for it's entire life gets somewhat whacko after a while. I did encounter a trio of Dobermans today, but one was scared and the other two were friendly as all get-out. I have encountered very few vicious Dobermans.

I wanted to mention that I realize very few people read this blog regularly, occasionally someone comes through and leaves a comment, but probably doesn't ever come back. If I ever saw my number of subscriptions go up to "2" on Bloglines I think I would probably faint. Yeah, I have subscribed to my own blog (you don't see it on the blogroll because it's marked as "private"), but it's not because of some big ego or anything. I do it so that I can see how my articles look when they come out on Bloglines, in case I need to tweak the formatting. I also do it to see how long it takes an article to show up after I've posted it (usually a matter of minutes). And there's that number of subscribers. A lot of the blogs I read have very few Bloglines subscribers, but I know that lots of other people read them "straight," without using any kind of news aggregator.

Something that I don't want anyone to do is to put me on their blogroll merely because their blog is on my blogroll. This "courtesy blogrolling" is not for me unless you feel that I actually am worth checking into occasionally.

By the way, the free web statistic tracker that I use shows that the one blog that sends most people over here is Lest Darkness Fall. A lot of other folks have come through here due to my occasional posts regarding the Minuteman Project. Also by the way LDF, you have 2 subscribers who use Bloglines (one besides myself). Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has also been sending a few hits my way.

I occasionally see that someone has been here by Googling certain search terms that I have mentioned. If you come through here only to find that I have just mentioned something in passing, please feel free to leave a comment asking for more information. If I can add anything to it, I will. For example, yesterday someone came here after Googling "sp 101 ruger concealed carry." This was something I just mentioned briefly, but now I feel that I should add more detail to it.

This week I had a couple of article titles that might be too obscure to make sense to anyone. The time-traveler post made a reference to John Titor. I'm not going to try and explain it, but if you're curious, just go to johntitor.com. The other one I will explain ("Okay, Rockford, throw out the BB gun...). It was an old episode of The Rockford Files, in which Jim Rockford was holed up in a house with a woman while a gunman waited outside to kill him, occasionally firing shots into the house. Rockford asked the woman if she had a gun, and she replied, "I have an old pellet gun that I shoot gophers with." Rockford says, "Well, you better get it out." He eases the barrel through a crack in the window and takes a potshot at the bad guy. The pellet richochets off the hood of the BG's car and stings his cheek. After recoiling slightly, he realizes what happened, and yells, "Okay, Rockford, throw out the BB gun." Among people who know me, I am semi-famous for having a wealth of useless, trivial data in my memory. This is just one of those bits of trivia.

The book by Bob Dole has been very gripping, and hard to put down. Books by people who were actually there seem to be better than books by scholars who have only studied something. I'll probably comment more on the book when I finish it, which will probably be tomorrow.

Amen.

A swift, deft dissection of a popular factoid at Insane Troll Logic:

The Pelopenesian War? Economic motives
The Trojan War? A woman
The Napoleanic Wars? Land
The Revolutionary War? Land/freedom
The Crimean War? Who the Hell knows
The American Civil War? Federalism/economics/slavery
World War I? Strange alliances, land
World War II? Land, alliances
Korean War? Civil War, ideology
Vietnam War? Civil War, ideology
The Persian Gulf War? Alliances, land, oil

Dirty Harry should've had one of these

Very cool picutres of Kim du Toit lighting up a S&W .500 Magnum. Now that's a hand-held howitzer.

Paging John Titor...

A student at MIT is hosting a time-traveller convention. More power to you, Amal.

Philippine police to allow journalists under threat to carry guns

AP has this article about how tough it is to be a journalist in the Philippines.

Sixty-seven journalists in the Philippines have been killed since 1986--23 of them in the past three years alone, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, or NUJP, said. The mostly unresolved deaths prompted the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists to describe the Philippines as the world's "most murderous" country for reporters.

So...

Bataoil said the police will issue permits to journalists who are licensed gun owners to carry firearms outside their residence only if they prove there is a "verified threat" on their lives.

However...

Gun owners have to undergo neuro-psychological and drug tests plus a gun safety seminar before they are issued licenses.

I have no objection to a gun safety seminar, but I would be interested to see what kind of neuro-psychological test they are subjected to. It reminds me of Superintendant Fowler's attitude on the Britcom The Thin Blue Line: "Anyone who thinks they need a gun is obviously too unbalanced to own one." That's a paraphrase, I don't remember the exact words, but then, it's only a TV show.

Nobody wants poor Bobo the Ratdog

Bobo the ratdog chihuahua that I mentioned last month, has now apparently been outcast by his owner(s). So I assume that unless someone jumps forward to save him, it's only a matter of time for poor Bobo. This must be one bad-a#$ chihuahua. Maybe they should have tried some chihuahua sauce.

More Anti-Self-Defense Nonsense from Florida

An article in the Miami New Times drips with sarcasm. And, as usual, at least one glaring error:

Zapata's arsenal consists of a nine-millimeter handgun and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, the hand-held howitzer popularized by Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character.

Can't these guys even pay attention to movies? Everyone knows it was a .44 Magnum, doofus.

Sarcastic & condescending, I say? Read this excerpt and decide for yourself:

How do you get a license?

First, you'll have to submit an application to the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is charged with the constitutional duty of arming Florida's citizenry. But handling a concealed firearm is like downing twenty shots of José Cuervo tequila: With great power comes great responsibility. So you have to be at least 21 years old to apply for one. You'll have to drop $75 the first time you apply for the license, which runs for five years, and an additional $42 for fingerprint processing. You'll have to fork over another $70 each time you renew it. You must provide your full name, address, place and date of birth, and occupation. If you're pimping hoes or selling crack in the Magic City, just write down "entrepreneur." But always remember that state licensing officials use your fingerprints to run Florida Department of Law Enforcement and FBI criminal background checks on you. So if you're one of Miami's many convicted felons, celebrity or otherwise, you're scarred because the state will not issue you a license. The state will also deny a license if you have been committed to an insane asylum, sent to a drug rehab clinic, or convicted on a drug-related misdemeanor within the last three years from the date of your application.

It's nice to know that my own S&W .357 is a hand-held howitzer. That means I should be able to demolish a house from several miles away. It's this kind of language that makes me immediately discount said person's opinion as meaningless. Just try, Francisco, to get your facts straight before gracing us with your boundless wit.

National Dog Bite Prevention Week, May 15-21, 2005

Yeah, that's right. This gimmick was created by the Postal Service, whose poor babies are stupid enough to let themselves get bitten even though they constantly tempt fate by wearing those goofy-looking grandpa shorts, and even though they never have to climb a fence into someone's backyard that's overgrown like a Congo rain forest in July and spend 15 minutes digging through the brush for a gas meter that's been covered up intentionally because it just doesn't look very chic, all the while watching their six to make sure the family Cujo doesn't dash in for a quick nip. Even though they're never more than 5 minutes walk from their mailmobile. Even though they have time to take a whole hour for lunch, sitting on their fat butts in a southside taqueria, and daring to stop me to ask stupid questions about meter installation when I'm obviously not in the mood to slow down for anyone and I obviously don't have a truck full of meters, tools and other gear like the installation guys do. Even though they spray dogs that aren't a threat in the first place because it yips at them a few times, just to make sure I have a tougher time of it next time I have to go read the meter.

My heart bleeds for them all.

Good news in St. Louis

A snag in Missouri's concealed weapons law was fixed on Tuesday, so that now law-abiding citizens of St. Louis (city and county) should be able to carry:

Legislative supporters said the bill eliminates any legal wiggle room for counties to continue to refuse to issue the permits.

'It ends all the Supreme Court challenges, all of the objections that the chief law enforcement officers have,' said Sen. Jason Crowell, R-Cape Girardeau, an attorney who handled the bill.

The Senate passed the bill 29-3. The House passed the same bill 142-7 in March.

Because it contains an emergency clause, the bill will become law as soon as Blunt signs it, instead of on the state's traditional Aug. 28 start date for new laws.

tnx to Alphecca

Meanwhile, in Idaho...

Garden City police officers need to put in some range time:

According to insurance claims filed with both departments by residents, shots fired by four officers in pursuit of 39-year-old Harlan Hale hit doors, windows, window moldings, garage doors, an all-terrain-vehicle and a clothes dryer. No one was injured in the March 9 chase.

But seriously, this sounds really bad for the police. If the report is true (heh) they fired 22 shots at a fleeing man. No indication if the man was armed, only that he was fleeing, because he had been accused of shooting at two other officers back in February. Hmm...

Okay, Rockford, throw out the BB gun...

Man, 79, Pulls Gas Pistol on Firefighters from AP. Gas pistol? Well, okay. I guess that's technically correct. Who knew pellet guns could be such a deterrent?

The weapons are powered with CO2 cartridges that shoot projectiles, unlike conventional guns that use bullets or shells.

Makes them sound almost dangerous. Firefighters in full gear probably wouldn't even notice a pellet if it did hit them.

Prediction

I think we'll be seeing more and more of this kind of thing coming from England:

A British school teacher jailed for six months because she fired an airgun at the ground during a stand-off with a group of youths was freed by London's Court of Appeal Wednesday.

Those Brityouth must be a bunch of wimps if one woman with an airgun could stand them off.

Despite Finger, Body Parts in Food Rare

I don't have anything to say about this, I just love the headline.