Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – Page 10

Power Tools

Serendipitous! I spent the morning out in the desert practicing with my handguns. When I logged on afterward I found that Bill Keezer had referred me to an entry entitled Power Tools by Malcolm Pollack in which the latter quotes Col. Jeff Cooper. I want the quotation for my files:

Weapons are the tools of power. In the hands of the state, they can be the tools of decency or the tools of oppression, depending on the righteousness that state. In the hands of criminals, they are the tools of evil. In the hands of the free and decent citizen, they should be the tools of liberty. Weapons compound man’s power to achieve whatever purpose he may have. They amplify the capabilities of both the good man and the bad, and to exactly the same degree, having no will of their own. Thus, we must regard them as servants, not masters–and good servants of good men. Without them, man is diminished, and his opportunities to fulfill his destiny are lessened. An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.

I haven't been able to find a source. As you know, I do not like unsourced quotations. It's the scholar in me. Paging Dave Lull! If cyberspace has a Head Librarian, Dave is the man.

"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."

You are free to live unarmed, and for some this will be a wise course. A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training, and you will need to throw thousands of (aimed!) rounds down range before you can consider yourself competent.

These are trying times. The thuggish elements among us are on the rise, and they are enabled by those in positions of authority. The wise hope for the best, and work for the best, but prepare for the worst. You might want to think about that as well as ask yourself: Which side am I on, and who is on my side?

Related: Colonel Jeff Cooper's Situational Awareness Color Codes. Very useful information along with commentary by me that is sure to cause snowflake melt-down.

Should Liberals Buy Guns?

UPDATE (5/20): Dave Lull sends us here, where you can find more Jeff Cooper quotations (unsourced) as well as a daughter's tribute to her father.

UPDATE 2 (5/20): Malcolm Pollack's follow-up post.

Should Liberals Buy Guns?

It might not be in their best interest. Buy guns and ammo and the accessories and you support those industries and the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association. The NRA, however, played a key role in getting Trump elected. The NRA takes decidedly anti-leftist stands on crime and the nanny-statism liberals hold dear.

This puts liberals in a delightful bind. Delightful to us, that is. Fearing 'fascism,' they are now buying guns as numerous news stories have reported, but in so doing they shoot themselves in the foot, figuratively speaking.

Do you liberals really want concealed-carry reciprocity? Trump is for it and so is the NRA.

There is a parallel here with liberals' new-found love of federalism. As William McGurn has recently noted,

For both historical and philosophical reasons, federalism runs counter to the progressive instinct. Those on the left like government, and their preferred legislature is the Supreme Court. (Brilliant! Emphasis added.)

Fearing Trumpian 'fascism,' our liberal pals are now getting excited about states rights despite their long-standing mendacious insinuation that all talk of states rights can only mean a return to Jim Crow and the lynching of blacks.

UPDATE 3/24. A Friendly Warning to Liberals

A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training. In the course of this training and numerous trips to the shooting range and gun stores for ammo, etc. you will find yourself associating whether you like it or not with rednecks, country folk, blue collar types, cops, ex-cops, military, ex-military, church-goers and other subspecies of the people Obama derisively referred to as "clingers" and Hillary as "deplorables."

The danger here is that you will learn that, in the main, these are decent people. Your liberal bigotry fueled by hate and ignorance will stand refuted by experience. This may cause such painful cognitive dissonance that you may no longer be able to remain a bien-pensant librul.

You have been forewarned.

The NRA’s Role in Electing Trump

Fred Barnes argues, very plausibly, that the National Rifle Association played a "critical role" in putting Trump over the top. Of course, the foolish and mendacious Hillary was very cooperative:

"I respect the Second Amendment," she [Hillary] said in the second debate. In the third, she went further. "I also believe there is an individual right to bear arms." But she quibbled with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld that right. She would gut the right by mandating that guns in homes be kept in pieces "to protect toddlers."

The stupidity of this beggars understanding. Apparently, for Hillary, the only safe gun is a useless gun, an instance of what philosophers call a scattered object:

Colonel Jeff Cooper’s Situational Awareness Color Codes

Here is a good article on the topic addressed to law enforcement officers, but useful for the ordinary citizen.

Under ORANGE below read 'if possible' for 'if necessary.'

Condition White is fine while in your house, assuming your house is well-secured. The minute you step out your door you should move to Condition Yellow, whether you are carrying or not. Train yourself to stay in Yellow as long as you are out and about.

I came close to being mugged in New Orleans' French Quarter in '90 or '91. I was there to read a paper at an A. P. A. meeting. Early one morning I left the hotel to sample the local color and grab some breakfast. Striding along Bourbon street, I noticed a couple of black dudes on the other side of the street. I was wearing a beret, which may have suggested to the loiterers that I was a foreigner and an easy mark. One dude approached and commented on my shoes in an obvious attempt ti distract me and throw me off my guard. My situational awareness saved me. That, my stern mien, height, leather jacket and purposeful stride. I gave the punk a hard look, increased my pace, and blew him off.

Profiling is part of situational awareness. Profiling is just common sense, which is why liberal fools oppose it. A couple of black youths loitering in a touristy area are probably up to no good. If common sense makes me a racist, then we should all be racists, including decent black folk.

Do Fascists and Other Totalitarians Support the Gun Rights of Citizens?

Not that I know of. So Donald Trump, who supports gun rights, must be a very special sort of 'fascist.'

Maybe we need to give 'fascism' a chance. After all, we have had eight years of 'communism' under Obama and how has that worked out?

A Liberal’s Notion of a Safe Gun

Mike Valle at Big Sticks

Mike Valle and I got together the other day at the premier cigar lounge in the East Valley, Big Sticks, to discuss Grundlagen des Marxismus-Leninismus, chapter 1, Der Philosophische Materialismus. Mike has read the entire stomping 800+ page tome. It is an outstanding manual of Soviet scholasticism. Originally written in Russian and published in 1960, near the height of the Cold War, it appeared in German in the same year in Dietz Verlag, Berlin. Mike acquired two copies and kindly gave me one.

I had him pose with the cigar store Indian for the following shot. No day without political incorrectness, as I always say. And that reminds me of the Seinfeld "Cigar Store Indian" episode. TRIGGER WARNING! This smokin' excerpt may cause snowflake meltdown.

Guide for Liberals Suddenly Interested in Gun Ownership

A lot of you delusional liberals out there who think that Trump is a 'fascist' are suddenly getting interested in gun ownership. But before you go off 'half-cocked' and shoot yourself in the foot either figuratively or literally, or end up on the wrong side of the law, I recommend that you do a little research.

Larry Correia knows what he is talking about and I recommend his Guide to you. Being a liberal, you probably won't be offended by his 'lively' style of exposition.

My Gun Permit

It is called the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Issue date: 15 December 1791. Expiration date: Never.

Motto: Fear the government that fears your guns.

On this Thanksgiving we have much to be thankful for, including the defeat of the mendacious Hillary Clinton who, while paying lip service to the Second Amendment, had every intention of undermining it.

Hillary on Heller: She Lied

So what else is new? That the sky is blue? The trouble with Trump is that he doesn't know enough about the issues to punch back effectively when Mrs. Clinton lets loose with one of her whoppers. He let her escape several times during their third and final debate. Sean Davis:

In her answer to a question about her views on gun rights, Clinton said she opposed the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, which recognized the constitutional right for individuals to own and carry firearms, because it was about whether toddlers should have guns.

[. . .]

So what was the Heller case really about? It was about whether Dick Anthony Heller, a 66-year-old police officer, should be legally allowed to own and bear a personal firearm to defend himself and his family at home.

[. . .]

If Clinton opposes an individual’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms to protect his or her family, she should just come out and say so instead of blatantly lying about the Supreme Court’s decision on the matter. But it gets better: after claiming that the Heller decision was all about toddlers, Hillary then claimed that the Constitution guarantees a right to partial-birth abortion, a practice that requires an abortionist to rip an unborn baby from the womb, stab or crush her skull, and then vacuum out her brains. Because Hillary Clinton’s top priority is protecting innocent children from violence.

Hillary is a stealth ideologue who operates by deception. This is what makes her so despicable. If she were honest about her positions, her support would erode. So not only are her policies destructive; she refuses to own them. She is an Obamination both at the level of ideas and at the level of character.

Russian Roulette With a Semi-Automatic Pistol

This seems to be becoming an Internet meme. It comes with the implication that certain death will be the result. (See graphic below.) Let's think about this, just for fun.

Strictly speaking, one can play Russian Roulette only with a revolver. But surely something analogous to Russian Roulette can be played with a semi-automatic pistol with a non-zero probability of surviving.

Here is one way. Have 'a friend' load the magazine randomly with live and dummy rounds. Insert the magazine and rack the slide, thereby chambering a round. Point the gun at your head and press the trigger. If you hear a click, then the hammer fell on a dummy round. Congratulations! You are not dead. Care to press your luck? Then press the trigger a second time.

Here is a second way. Pick up a semi-auto pistol and remove the magazine. Point at head, pull trigger. If there is a live round in the chamber, you're a goner. A dummy round or nothing in the chamber and you survive to be a fool another day. Unlike Terry Kath.

Remember him? He was the blazingly fast guitarist for the band Chicago. In 1978, while drunk, he shot himself in the head with an 'unloaded' gun. At first he had been fooling with a .38 revolver. Then he picked up a semi-automatic 9 mm pistol, removed the magazine, pointed it at his head, spoke his last words, "Don't worry, it isn't loaded," and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for his head, there was a round in the chamber. Or that is one way the story goes.

Such inadvertent exits are easily avoided by exceptionless observation of three rules: Never point a gun at something you do not want to destroy. Treat every gun as if loaded, whether loaded or not. Never mix alcohol and gunpowder.

Perhaps I should add a fourth: Never mix dummy rounds with live rounds. Variant: Dummies should stay clear of guns, loaded or unloaded, and ammo, live or dummy.

Uncle Bill has a fifth rule for you: Never try to cure someone's hiccups by pointing a gun at him or her. A Fort Hood soldier availed himself of this method to cure a fellow soldier's hiccups, but ended up 'curing' him of life itself. (A cock to Asclepius!) The soldier, who was drunk at the time, said he thought the gun was loaded with dummy rounds. And now for the graphic, from Diana West via Bill Keezer.

Does Trump Incite Violence?

Yes, but only in the febrile 'mind' of an Hillarious liberal.

You have to realize that when Trump is 'off script,' he talks like a rude New York working man in a bar. He does this in part because it is his nature to be rude and vulgar, but also because he realizes that this helps him gin up his base.

Let me try to put his point in a more 'measured' way. His point was not that Hillary's bodyguards ought to be disarmed so that she could more easily be 'taken out.' His point is that if guns cause crime and have no legitimate uses, then why are her bodyguards armed to the teeth with the sorts of weapons that she would like to make it illegal for law-abiding citizens to possess and carry?

If guns are never the answer, why are they 'the answer' for government agents? If law-abiding citizens cannot be trusted with semi-automatic pistols and long guns, how is it that government agents can be trusted with them?

The graphic makes the point very well. Trump was not inciting violence. But if you say he was then you are slandering him and his supporters. Be careful, the Second Amendment types may 'come after you.' Politically.

UPDATE (9:25 AM). Here is what Trump said:

She [Hillary] goes around with armed bodyguards like you have never seen before. I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm. Right? Right? I think they should disarm immediately. What do you think? Yes? Yes. Yeah. Take their guns away. She doesn’t want guns. … Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, okay? It would be very dangerous.

Reading Now: Gun Control in the Third Reich

Author: Stephen P. Holbrook

Subtitle: Disarming the Jews and the "Enemies of the State"

Essential reading on the eve of the disaster that is a Hillary presidency.

"Gun Control in the Third Reich, Stephen Halbrook's excellent history of gun control in Germany, shows that, motives notwithstanding, removing weapons from the general population always disarms society vis a vis its worst elements. In Germany the authorities tried to deal with the Nazi and Communist mobs that were shaking society's foundations indirectly, by disarming ordinary people. But their cowardice ended up delivering a helpless population to the Nazis' tender mercies. Halbrook's richly documented history leads Americans to ask why those among us who decry violence in our society choose to try tightening the vise on ordinary citizens' capacity to defend themselves rather than to constrain the sectors of society most responsible for the violence." —Angelo M. Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Boston University; author, Informing Statecraft, War: Ends and Means (with Paul Seabury), The Character of Nations, and Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History.

"What good would private arms do against a totalitarian state? That won't remain an unanswerable rhetorical challenge for readers of Stephen Halbrook's calm, detailed scholarly book, Gun Control in the Third Reich. As Halbrook shows, Nazi leaders went to great lengths to extend the gun control laws they inherited from the Weimar Republic. They were obsessed with disarming Jews and other designated public enemies. Potential resistance was not only physically disabled. It was morally and psychologically disarmed. Evil then became irresistible in Germany, not because it was fueled by fanaticism but because shielded by fatalism." —Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law

"Even a defense with small arms against a tyrannical regime, if known, can galvanize public opinion which is the ultimate source of all political authority. That is why, as Halbrook authoritatively shows in Gun Control in the Third Reich, the Nazis-despite their massive military force-went out of their way to confiscate even small caliber weapons in Germany." —Donald W. Livingston, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Emory University

Read reviews and order at Amazon.com

Patrick Toner on Concealed Carry

Our friend the philosopher Patrick Toner has a very interesting and highly unusual article entitled Catholics, Chesterton, and Concealed Carry. If nothing else, it should infuriate liberals, which can't be a bad thing. I leave it to you to think it through.

Now some thoughts of my own.

Suppose a Christian lives alone, without a spouse to look after and without dependents. Should he defend with deadly force against a deadly attack, in a home invasion, say, or should he let himself be slaughtered? I go back and forth on this question.

But suppose you are pater familias with a wife and children to protect. Should you respond to a deadly attack with deadly force? Absolutely. I would argue that such is not only morally permissible but morally obligatory. But then you must prepare for such an eventuality by becoming proficient with firearms. Whence it follows that you must oppose Hillary the Gun Grabber and her destructive ilk.

This is another important reason to vote for Trump. If Miss Mendacity gets in, it could well be curtains for your Second Amendment rights.