Some people have an understanding of how and why it’s important. Then there are others who just don’t give a damn.
Let me explain something to everyone. This isn’t a joke and this is deadly serious. There are a few fruit cakes out there that had the gall to call the men who place their lives on the line gutless.
Let’s get something straight. It doesn’t matter which party is in office, their job is to keep their mouth shut when necessary. Accomplishments tied to national security are not to be flaunted in public in the view of everyone.
I have many friends in the engineering professions who do work specifically tied to national security. There is nothing specific on their resumes about what they’ve done. Most of the information listed on any accomplishment is done in a non-nondescript manner where the end use isn’t discernible.
This man however has ripped the veil off of material that should not be seen by the public. When you make it public, that means our enemies can see it as well. Only a moron who has no concept of the sacrifice and danger these men take on their shoulders would dare claim they were acting within partisan interests by posting this message.
If you are fine with this behavior I suggest you go enlist and head down range. Then you might understand exactly what it is this man has done by ripping the veil off.
There are people who hate the United States and we struck back at the man responsible for September 11th, 2001. Anonymity w as the biggest defense to protect the men responsible for striking back. Our fearless leader, in an effort to extort political capital on the sweat of these men’s backs, removed that anonymity and exposed them to danger and attack.
We had no need to know which service, which group, or which team was responsible for taking out evil and laying a solid blow. Without that information those men were merely a few in a sea of thousands, the pool becomes unbelievably large if you consider that depending on the release we may not have even known it was a special operations group.
My dad served his country and we know there were stories we never heard. Not because they were painful, but because there was no reason we needed to know. There were a few we finally heard after the Soviet Union fell, even then it was obvious that parts were left out. When I signed my name on the line I wasn’t looking for recognition, and I knew that depending on where I went I may very well end up with stories that I carried silently until I died.
I feel ashamed at times I never made it all the way through to my commission, metal rods in both legs when they’re turning people away left and right limited my options. Could I have fought harder, probably, in the end though I now know what my dad meant when he said the following, “I left the Navy after 16 years because any country willing to elect Jimmy Carter as president doesn’t deserve to have me serving in their armed forces.” As much as I wanted that commission I am pleased I didn’t have to suffer through the Obama Administration while in the service.
That thought bugs me no end, however I did not sign on that line so a politician could use my work, my service, and my commitment for their own political gain. While I may have never “served” and that disappoints me. I am glad that I haven’t been able to be used and manipulated in such a manner. It wouldn’t matter which party was in office, it’s the behavior of the man and how he respects and leads those who have signed on the line to serve. Obama’s respect and leadership of those who serve is lacking. I had a choice, though many had no choice in the matter.
You don’t go doing work tied to national security looking for fame or fortune. You do it because you know it needs to be done and it needs to be done well. You don’t talk about it, you don’t advertise it, you just work on it behind the scenes. When someone asks you what you do, you don’t provide details, you provide the mundane, they have no need to know. Some can’t handle that, they want to be patted on the head and told good job. They want to brag to show how awesome their job is.
Other’s just silently continue on, content in the knowledge that what they do keeps their family safe at night. That the tools they design will be used by men doing violence on their behalf. It’s a job that has to be done. They know and take solace in the fact that what they are doing does matter and it makes a huge difference, no matter if anyone knows or not.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
So Sebastian made a post about the idiot in Sparks that decided to carry a pocket gun without a holster. Can we all guess how that ended? How many of you think that it went bang?
If you thought it went bang, well you were right. This folks as Sebastian said is why you need to carry your gun in a damn holster.
I only bring that up because Nicholas Dropped a comment which I’m going to re-post here (emphasis is mine):
Very true. We have morons at our shooting club. Who are questionably not safe. At USPSA matches they are shooting over the berm and into the hill behind it. Our berm is an aluminum sheet with rubber tire bits as a back stop. Very fine for pistol. But shooting over it is unacceptable. As well as keeping their finger on the trigger when they mag change or move to the next target. Really unsafe people. And when you bring it up to them they get all defensive. why do these people not think of being safe? It is the most paranoid thing I do at the range.
To which I replied:
Why are they not immediately DQ’d by the RO. All of those things listed there are explicitly stated in the rules as an immediate DQ.
See rule 10.5.8 and 10.5.10 explicitly on the booger hook bang switch problem while moving.
See rule 10.5.9 explicitly for the booger hook while reloading problem.
See 10.4.1 for shooting over the berm.
As for why they don’t think of being safe often it’s because this is how they have always done it and don’t see a reason to change. They do not understand or comprehend how their actions are unsafe.
If you see that happen at a match, notify the RO. At minimum they should be warned if the RO didn’t see it. If the RO did see it they need to get the boot for the rest of the match. The rules exist to protect everyone. The RO isn’t kicking them out, they kicked themselves out by breaking the rules.
Wow, all that time spent reading the USPSA rule book actually made the crap stick. As I read his post I immediately recognized each of those instances being an immediate DQ, with explicit rules to cover every instance. Of the rules listed above there were probably secondary rules they broke as well.
The fact is the RO needs to boot them, period. I don’t care how you play around in your sandbox at home, but if you walk onto a range at a USPSA event those rules exist for my safety as well as everyone else at the event.
I know there are a lot of people who would hesitate to drop the axe and DQ someone. Thankfully I haven’t had to do that, though I know one day it will come. My biggest fear is having to drop the axe on a new shooter. Which is why as an RO I will give verbal reminders about the booger hook if things start to look questionable with new shooters.
Kevin Imel said it best though during our RO training.
When the day comes when a competitor is DQ’d under your watch, you didn’t DQ him, he did that to himself.
He’s right. Because honestly it benefits neither the club, nor the shooter to just let him get by with the mistake. Some mistakes have to be punished in such a way that you NEVER want to repeat them again. Telling you to pack up your guns for the rest of the day is a good way to do exactly that.
If you see unsafe gun handling, STOP it immediately. Even if the RO didn’t see it. The RO’s word is final and it’s his choice to issue the DQ, but at a minimum the issue needs to be brought to his attention.*
*For the most part other observers cannot really see what’s going on so this is mute. If you are the RO running the shooter your eyes should be focused on that gun and his gun handling. If you’re looking where he’s shooting you’re looking in the wrong spot. Your score keeper should also be helping to look for penalties as well.
Letting people get away with unsafe gun handling is bad juju. Especially if they take it to an area match. Saying “Well I do it all the time back home,” isn’t going to cut it as an excuse.
So as I was saying, it’s probably a good thing they made me damn near memorize that rule book. It’s also a good thing Kevin gave that speech saying drop the axe if it happens.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
Do you use gloves when shooting guns? If so, what kind?
And, more specifically, do you use gloves when cleaning your guns? If so, what kind?
For me the answers flow like this. While shooting I normally do not wear any gloves. Worrying about soot and lead residue is the last thing on my mind while shooting. My rule is no drinks and food unless I wash/wipe my hands. What I do use religiously is D-Lead wipes. I have a package in my range bag as well as a second in the tool box of my truck.
They’re honestly worth their weight in gold. The few times I do wear gloves it is unbelievably cold out here, read that as single digits or teens at most. Then I am wearing military style flight gloves.
While cleaning, yes, yes, and yes. Here’s the trick through, buy two different types, seriously. Vinyl, Latex/Nitrile all react differently to the different solvents and other things used to clean firearms. If all you’re using is standard Hoppe’s No. 9 as a solvent you can get away with just using Latex/Nitrile.
In my experience though Barnes CR-10 chews up Latex and Nitrile but the Vinyl handles it well. Butch’s Bore Shine eats up the Vinyl making it brittle. Further if you use things like brake cleaner to strip the oils and grease it will go through the vinyl. I recommend using a wire to hold the object and avoid your hand in general in that case. The active ingredient in Brake Kleen for example will absorb through the skin and take anything with it it’s stripped off. Gloves will help prevent or slow it but that little bugger of an ingredient as it likes to go through your skin.
Wearing gloves while cleaning is important. While growing up I mainly just cleaned with No. 9 and didn’t really bother with the gloves. Again you can probably get away with it but I look back on it now and it was stupid. Your skin is porous and absorbs whatever is on it. Honestly I don’t want it absorbing any of that crap.
Butch’s Bore Shine I think is the biggest lesson in, “Wear Gloves!” There is a warning label telling you not to use it bare handed, use of it bare handed can allow the chemicals to be absorbed and they have been known to cause liver failure.
Gloves are cheap, your body is not, when cleaning your guns at least wear latex or nitrile and expect to change them often as they break and die from the solvents.
As for cleaning my rifles I use a mix of No. 9, CR-10, and Butch’s. CR-10 and Butch’s both get used on the barrel. The CR-10 is much better at getting out heavy copper fouling, the Butch’s does a fantastic job at getting any lead and powder out and leaving the barrel in a pristine state. Butch’s takes out the copper too, it just takes forever if you have a lot of it.
The No. 9 I use on my pistols and actions to clean out the gunk and other crap that has collected up. Oil and lube it all back up and put it back together.
So yes, wear gloves when cleaning, don’t worry so much about shooting. Just make sure to wipe down and wash your hands after and you’ll be fine.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
Initially I was going to just leave it at the comment I made over at Caleb’s place. Then there was this incident brought to my attention by Lyle. That gave me the inkling to do a post, then Weer’d posted the video of what exactly happened in the FPS Russia incident. After watching the video I had to pick my jaw up off the floor at this idiocy.
First a note, do not recreate anything in this video, if you survive it will be either because of blind dumb luck or because God has a soft spot for you and your idiocy.
If you want to skip to 4:46 to save yourself 4 minutes and 46 seconds of pure garbage.
Does anyone see what he did wrong there? Anyone? Bueller?
He violated the first rule of explosives. He placed something between him and the explosive. You see when you detonate an explosive inside of something it propels the surrounding material out at extremely high velocity. This is the basic principle behind a pipe bomb. The pipe itself becomes extra shrapnel in the explosion.
This is why when we Idaho Stress test an object we ALWAYS place the explosives in front of the target. We never place the object in front of the explosive, that is how you take shrapnel to the face.
This is serious and this isn’t a joke. That camera man is lucky he isn’t dead or more seriously injured right now. Just because the object is larger in size doesn’t mean that it’s safe. What is a safe distance then? Lets use the 2008 toilet as an example.
We shot that toilet from approximately 400 yards away. When I say we in this case, I mean the entire shooting line. We found pieces of that toilet well over 100 yards away. Note we found them in a field meaning they had to be big enough to be easily seen above the grass.
I know we had approximately 6 lbs inside the large pumpkin in the second video. We found chunks, not bits, 125 yards away. Many of those chunks were also relatively light in weight and had a lower B.C. In that case we were shooting from about 30 yards, however it should be noted the object was not metal or dense in nature. Metal merely rips and turns in to shrapnel which is nothing more than a knife flying through the air.
Given those above examples, I honestly wouldn’t blow anything up that had metal in it from within 200 yards, and due to my love of cushion, I’d double it to 400 for extra safety.
Joe, Ry, and I all almost made this fatal mistake by accident. That is a wonderful example of how much power and force there is behind explosives and why you really need to pay attention. So please, if you want to go out and play with explosives, pay attention and pay heed to the first rule:
Never Place Anything Between You and The Explosive.
Remember to be careful out there and use your head. Sometimes well all forget to think things through, but the more you think about it, the better off you’ll be in the long run.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
So, this is actually a kind of old incident but given new information I feel like classifying it as a state sponsored criminal. Who is this criminal, Major Nidal Hasan, the man animal responsible for the Fort Hood shooting.
Since I’m sure most of you are familiar with the shooting I won’t reiterate details. What is interesting is the following:
So let me get this straight, you ignored him and let him walk on by because of Political Correctness. Did I understand that right there sparky? Here’s the thing, you guys are more than happy to brew up your own terrorist cells, arm them, and then use the material to scare the public. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, watch this, I don’t feel like digging up every associate link.
As horrible as this sounds, and it is purely conjecture, what’s to say you all didn’t just look the other way to increase panic and fear, thus causing the American people to want to surrender more freedom and liberty thus giving you more power. Seriously, someone explain to me how this could be allowed to pass purely under the guise of “Political Correctness?”
At best this was negligence, except this had to be willful. People knowingly did nothing and the worst part of it all is the man still hasn’t be tried and many are still claiming this was not an act of terrorism. Evidently the DHS has now released a new requirement that to qualify as a terrorist you must be a white Caucasian male, since you know they run in screaming “Allah Akbar” while shooting at every Christian in the joint.
Seriously, how is it the American public can allow the government and American media to look the other way and play down exactly what happened that day? How is the American people can believe this was anything but an act of terrorism. I know many don’t, but they sit idly by and do nothing while this administration plays the PC game to get this terrorist off the hook. All the while the DHS redefines terrorist’s so broadly myself along with many others fit the description with not a stretch of their definition which doesn’t even relate to the actual definition of terrorist and terrorism. Yet a man who obviously committed an act of terrorism and had ties to known terrorists under the traditional definition was just suffering PTSD. Doesn’t that just seem a little wrong?
The reason this happened is obvious, the state willfully allowed it to happen for political capital. He was a state sponsored terrorist that they allowed to complete his plan to reign terror on American soil. Every person associated with allowing him to walk free should be hung for treason along with him. Someone should have blown the whistle, even if it meant the end of your career. Just because it hurts, doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing to do.
I hate sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but seriously this is just too damn stupid. The long complicated plot is trying to believe that political correctness allowed this to happen as opposed to people willfully looking the other way in an effort to gain more power.
State Sponsored Criminal and Terrorist 277: Major Nidal Hasan
Because real terrorism isn’t terrorism, it’s the result of PTSD, and all those libertarians that just want the nanny state to leave them the hell alone, they’re the real terrorists.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
Comments Off on Surviving An Active Shooter – A commentary
So I saw this in passing last week but didn’t really have time to watch it or talk about it. Alan posted it today and well it gave me the urge to comment. So to start off with watch the video.
First off is with its emphasis on running and hiding the immediate thought was of Bert the Turtle and if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Here is an educational video from on how to survive a nuclear attack, like the above, this one is made by your government.
At least with Bert it made a little bit of sense because you couldn’t do anything to change or alter the damage from a nuclear weapon.
Amazingly though this video does give some insight that we can all take home. The first notable item is that the attacker plainly and clearly ignored a gun free zone declaration on the door, this can be seen at 1:00. Attackers do this to know their victims cannot fight back. Attacks frequently happen within gun-free zones, including the most recent one. Secondly it guarantees the outcome discussed and noted at 4:20, specifically:
Improvise Weapons
It’s pretty hard to improvise a weapon equivalent to firearm, doubly so when you know the attacker has one.
Even the agency which put this video together admits what the pro-rights side of the argument has said from the beginning. A criminal intent on doing harm will not be effected or restrained by law. The intended victims of the attacker however will be left without the most effective means of self-defense.
Next up are the comments about first responders at 4:40. Let this be a lesson to everyone because it is correct. They are not there to evacuate you, they are not there to give you medical aid, they are there to stop the threat and secure the area so that medics and other emergency personal can do that. Just because the Johnny Law has shown up doesn’t mean you are safe, that you are clear, or will receive immediate medical attention. Let me translate this for people who still may not understand.
You are still on your own!
Emergency services will arrive on scene when they can, there is no guarantee for the response time for either medical personal or police to show up with their guns since this particular location wouldn’t let you have yours.
Hopefully the gun grabbers are crying in their beer because even the educational videos on surviving mass shootings emphasize the lack of rationality in their logic. Can you say “Winning?”
*Overall I think the video was actually well done and decently educational. I am not going to go running through an area looking for the shooter, but if I see him and have an opportunity I will fight, I will not run. Running just serves to allow others to become victims or allow him a chance to shoot me in the back.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
I will state this up front. TMW and I received a free pair of ESS frames and lenses with no attachment to them. They were ours to keep and use. I have worn them constantly since I got them at Boomershoot this year. So while I did get free stuff, there was no request for a review, and I was not compensated for this. In other words, the following is entirely my opinion and no one paid for any of this so the FCC can go suck an egg.
My previous eyewear was no slouch however they left something to be desired, doubly so since I was spending considerably more time with ear muffs on. For those who haven’t spent all day wearing hearing protection while wearing sunglasses, let me enlighten you. There is the frame which runs back behind the ear. Your ear muffs sit around your ear attempting to create a tight seal.
Two things happen because of that frame. Extra pressure is applied from the muffs pinching your head between your frames and a decrease in noise reduction from the hearing protection. Enter ESS’s Cross Series.
I have two of the three frames, the Cross Bow and Suppressor.
The Cross Bow frames are your everyday frames and I have worn them every day since Boomershoot and they have been amazingly comfortable. The rubber pads maintain the comfort while also helping to keep them from sliding off your head. I also use these when working in the shop doing things that don’t require hearing protection. That includes cleaning the toys, I just swap out for the clear lenses.
Every part of the series in individually replaceable. Scratch or destroy the lenses order new ones. Break a frame, order a new frame. Break a nose piece, order a replacement.
Now the Suppressor frames are why I fell in love with ESS, plus a little story I’ll get to here in a minute.
Notice how thin the ear pieces are on the frame? They are unbelievably flexible and well are wide and thin to help distribute pressure. Not only do they solve the pressure problem but the fact they are thin helps hearing protection form a good seal around your head. In other words they solve the two main problems you find with most safety glasses. The visibility while shooting with the copper lenses I might add is amazing. The rear strap effectively keeps the glasses in place while you’re not wearing hearing protection.
The comfort and visibility are quite nice. With most glasses if there is a gap anywhere I can see out, I will most often find myself using that to look, completely defeating the purpose of the safety glasses. These however I just look as I normally would, my peripheral vision remains while I cannot effectively look through gaps to try to skirt around the glasses.
These have become my go to glasses for yard and shop work where I need hearing protection. Even my father-in-law, who is a machinist, is going to be ordering a prescription set that he can use at work. My mother-in-law is getting a pair as well. I’m going to get a complete kit to toss in my range bag so I know I’ll always have a set with me when going to the range.
As a FYI for how much use these things see for those who haven’t met me, I am actually unbelievably anal when it comes to eye and hearing protection around tools and equipment. I know growing up with many 4th of July’s I’m sure I’ve done a decent amount of hearing loss. To top that off I enjoy my weekends by spending time shooting guns and blowing up explosives. I regularly wear plugs on top of wearing muffs specifically because I’m around such loud impulses.
It has become such a habit I wear hearing protection if I’m going to be around loud noises, it’s just easier to wear eye and ear protection than to buy hearing aids and hope the doc can repair my eyes… which brings us around to the story.
The Story
You see, your humble host has spent so much of his time around explosives, entertainingly close is entertaining for me. For many it’s terrifying but I’ve been around explosives enough that as long as you remember the cardinal rule I’m not that afraid. In other words a box on the ground with nothing between me and it doesn’t cause me discomfort being close.
Sometimes you just end up turning your clothes a nice shade of brown. So now you’re asking yourself, where is all this going? Well Tango got my earlier entertainingly close excursion on video.
Now, towards the end, the video doesn’t show it too well but I was easily with 10-15 feet of a bunch of those boomers. If you don’t understand how close that was, let me say, I should have been wearing my Carhartt jacket. What do you mean I hear you ask, well let me show you.
That wasn’t from the mud, that was from the ammonium nitrate prills. There were more injuries on the other side of my arm too. That peppering occurred during one of the last couple shots. So at this point I found my limit of how close I was willing to go.
But you see, your humble scribe often acts before the page fault has allowed all the necessary data to be returned to memory for the correct decision. Even more than that, often the page fault doesn’t occur until after the fact where the event itself causes the page fault.
Can you guess what happened? I’m sure you can, especially since this is a post about eyewear. Well let me set the stage for you.
It is the last day of Boomershoot. Everyone but staff has left and we are rounding up piles upon piles upon piles of explosives. There were so many explosives I said, and I quote,
You know something is horribly wrong with you when you’re finding it tedious and exhausting to set off hundreds of explosives.
If you’ve never been there for staff cleanup and haven’t worked the days preceding the event you just can’t really fully understand it. I seriously don’t know how Joe does it but I’m grateful that he does.
So I’m tired and exhausted and we’re tailing down the end of a very long week.
Continuing on though, we have to look for boxes of Boomerite that may have skipped over the berm, while walking behind the berm I discover an ant hill that is by no means small. Well to demolish said ant hill we place a couple of targets of Boomerite on it. I place them in such a manner as to give me the maximum distance without placing anything between me and it.
We start shooting explosives. We shoot more explosives. We shoot three waves of explosives most of us extremely tired and exhausted by the end. We call the range safe after the “last” boomers go off and we start cleaning up. Then as someone walks behind the berm, “TMM, we forgot the ant hill.”
Frick, Joe is already up on the hill in the direction I was originally going to shoot, well I only have one other option. I move about 120 degrees to give myself maximum distance from the target. Without realizing it though I have now inadvertently broken the cardinal rule. Parts of the anthill are between me and some of the explosive.
I squeeze off that round and immediately I’m encased in a cloud and my left hand, arm, and face feel like they’re on fire. It freaking hurts. I start falling off the top of the berm and immediately drop the muzzle and flip the safety on. Tango is behind me and I take off the rifle and hand it to him asking him to clear to make life easier. I probably could have cleared it, but at the time I was wanting to do it one-handed. One handed hand off is easier. I didn’t need to compound this with shooting myself or someone else.
Again for those who don’t know, my pain scale is screwed up compared to most people. There is a reason for that and I have done serious damage and then showed up to the doctor 2 day’s later with him saying “WTF!?”. I would take my pocket knife and dig out glass from my arm and hand when I would find it. In this case my arm felt like I had just take it to a belt sander with 120 grit on it.
I had a high number of pain exceptions and overloaded the system. It took a visual inspection to clear the faults. My brain registered a high number of impacts, thankfully only a few broke the skin, the two most notably.
You can’t really see it but the spot I’m bleeding out of on my knuckle is a ripped open scar, (it’s bigger now), and my lower arm and hand are both bright red from being peppered with smaller spots bleeding. The hit below my left eye was a solid hit, I washed some crap out of it when we got back to the hotel. Inspection of the ant hill after the fact indicated that I was also blowing up a stump. Also not visible in the picture was dirt and marks from larger debris that had obviously impacted the glasses.
I am extremely grateful I wasn’t any closer, given the few major cuts I had along with the peppering of bleeding I was on the hairy edge.
At the time I wasn’t so sure I was going to document my stupidity. I realized though now it actually is one of those things that speaks well for ESS. The glasses didn’t really end up with any pitting and they did their job. I will say I wish I had been at least wearing my flight gloves to save my hand.
So in closing a big thank you to the guys at ESS, especially Steve Dondero and Ari Drougas from ESS.
*Also I forgot to mention, there were a couple of folks shooting next to Shelly and Anette, and thus next to the ESS guys, who were shooting without eye protection. Yeah the ESS guys tried to give them free suppressors to wear but they turned them down. I’m of the mind that an extra 50 bucks in my pocket won’t make a lick if difference if the time comes my glasses have to do their job. In fact, I’ll probably wish I had sprung for the more expensive set.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
Emily Miller gives us a nicely detailed guide on what it takes to exercise a Constitutionally guaranteed right in our nations capital. Here’s a nice excerpt, I would highly suggest reading the whole thing.
I’ve been writing this guide bit by bit from the day in Oct. 2011 when I first went to the District’s firearm registration office and said, “I want a gun.” Back then, I expected it to take a few weeks and cost $60 to have a firearm at home. I was off by a few months and $375. Also, I believed that documenting the process for the newspaper would mean a few stories about long lines and frustrating bureaucrats. I was far off the mark.
When I started, there were 17 steps to getting a legal gun in Washington. However, as my series exposed the particularly burdensome requirements to gun ownership, the city council moved to remove some of those barriers. Now there are 12 steps that take much less time and the cost has decreased by $262.
Even with the improvements I still say its way too much. Especially considering one should be allowed to vote without showing ID, but look at the barriers to gun ownership.
These barriers are numerous and the biggest is a financial hurdle that many may not be able to overcome. Imagine adding a $125 transfer fee plus an extra $48 dollars in asking the police department for permission to own a firearm.
Not to mention the additional 10 day waiting period which does nothing but make sure that someone who may legally own a firearm isn’t able to purchase one when they really need it.
Name one single other right that has these types of bars against their exercise. There is no waiting period on free speech. If someone says something bad about you, you are not prohibited from writing about them for 10 days while your blog registration application comes through. You are not required to pay a fee to the state for the permission to create a blog or computer, or network connection to run your blog. You are allowed to write freely in defense of your character.
Contrast that to firearms where an abusive-ex can threaten you, and you are now stuck waiting for 10 days. You have a pile of fees to pay both to a monopolistic FFL and the police department for the permission to have an effective tool of self-defense. A right guaranteed by the US Constitution and stated as applying to the individual in the McDonald decision is subject to fees and limitations of its exercise. The consequences in this latter case though can be lethal for the person whose rights are being violated.
Instead of allowing free exercise, they create a maze of bureaucracy to be followed, which does nothing but ease the government in their efforts to infringe a right while appearing to allow for free exercise.
If your laws need a guide in order explain to people how to exercise a right, there is something grossly wrong with the design of the system. It is obviously designed and engineered with the intent of stopping people from exercising that right. The politicians and people responsible should be run up on 18.242.
I applaud Emily Miller for her efforts in correcting this wrong. While she has made considerable advancement as can be seen, there is still a long way to go. I doubly appreciate that she created that wonderful guide to aid others through the bureaucratic nightmare that are D.C.’s gun laws.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
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