Category Archives: Don’t be THAT guy

When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have AA Guns

Well, what better poster child for outlawry than this guy?

Ri Yong Jin, a senior official at the education ministry, was sentenced to death after he fell asleep in a meeting being addressed by Kim.

After accidentally dozing off, Ri was taken into custody and interrogated where security agents found evidence of his disloyalty and disrespect towards Kim.

But where’s the joy in being executed alone? So Ri had his Ranger buddy with him at his appointed rendezvous with eternity:

According to South Korean newspaper Joongang Ilbo, Hwang Min, a former agriculture minister was also sentenced to death.

Hwang’s crime, according to the South Korean media, was to have developed a number of ideas to improve agricultural production.

These ideas were seen by the regime as an attempt to undermine Kim.

No wonder the Norks are starving. But the really North Korean twist is the way Ri and Hwang met the Maker their entire nation doesn’t believe in:

The JoongAng Ilbo said the two men were executed by anti-aircraft gun at a military academy in Pyongyang.

Welcome to Norkland, where “You’re Fired!” really has an echo.

(Yeah, we know that gun’s a long-range artillery piece, not an AA gun. We figure we did OK finding a shot of Baby Huey here with a gun. And anyway, he’ll probably use this next, if it’s real and not a Potemkin prop. -Ed).

Badge Stops Bullet — Twice in One Day

In two separate incidents Sunday, would-be cop killers were thwarted, not by body armor, Stingray mass-surveillance boxes, the FBI’s PR budget, perfect police training, or any of that jazz.

Their bullets ricocheted off the cops’ badges, leaving the cops safe at home at the end of the day despite the criminals’ kinetically expressed intent.

The outcome for the would be cop killers was a bit different. The guy who shot a Nevada Highway Patrol officer was killed by gunfire from backup officers, and the other guys from his car sit in cells; while the domestic-abuser-turned-cop-attacker from Anaheim, California let cops and Highway Patrol troopers on a merry 85-mile chase before losing control of his car — and burning to death in the wreck.

Good preparation for his eternity, that.

About once every five years, a policeman in the US is saved by his badge, when the badge deflects a bullet. The last time was in New York City in 2010, reporte the New York Times. Last night, however, it happened to two different policemen in two states.

In Huntington Beach, California, officers were involved in a high-speed pursuit when gunfire broke out. A 10-year veteran of the Huntington Beach Police Department had bullets shoot through his windshield and strike him. But his badge stopped the bullets. The suspect veered off the road, crashed his vehicle and died of his injuries.

That’s a very telegraphic version of the story. The Orange County Register has more detail, including these photos, some of which are HBPD handouts and some of which are OCR staff photos:

A hole in the windshield shows how a suspect shot at a Huntington Beach police vehicle, hitting an officer, but it deflected off his badge. “The round came through the front windshield of the officers car, struck the officers badge and deflected off,” said Jennifer Marlatt, a department spokeswoman.

If that doesn’t give you the creeps….

HBPD Statement:

Around 12:30 a.m. Friday morning, Huntington Beach Police initiated pursuit of a suspect for an unknown want.

He jumped in the car and fled from being arrested at a domestic violence situation, although the cops didn’t all know the “why” at the time they were chasing him.

During the pursuit the suspect opened fire on officers, striking one of the officers in his badge. Costa Mesa Fire was requested to evaluate the officer.

Apparently, Wife-Beatin’ Willie spun around in a U-Turn and fired at the approaching cops — that’s where he put the slug through the windshield and into the officer’s badge. Fortunately he was using a pistol and not a long gun with barrier blind ammo.

Officers lost sight of the suspect but were able to relocate the suspect as he entered the southbound 405 Freeway. The pursuit continued to the northbound 55 Freeway, Eastbound 91Freeway and then onto the northbound 15 Freeway where the suspect lost control of his vehicle and crashed down an embankment at Cleghorn Road, bursting into flames. The suspect was pronounced deceased at the scene. Huntington Beach Police and CHP are investigating. The pursuit lasted over an hour.

A Huntington Beach Police officer is checked out by Costa Mesa Fire after being shot in his badge during a vehicle pursuit of a suspect. The pursuit ended on the Northbound 15 Freeway when the suspect lost control of his vehicle at Cleghorn Road bursting into flames and killing him around 1:30 a.m. Friday morning in San Bernardino County.

They zoomed in on the badge:

HBPD’s badges are, unusually, made of steel, not bronze or aluminum.

You know, a fellow could get hurt doing that job. Of course, a fellow shooting at the people doing that job is almost certainly going to get hurt, and soon enough the suspect’s driving speed exceeded his driving skill, resulting in a rare literal crash and burn.

If there was ever a time cops were unenthusiastic about rescuing an MVA victim, this was the time.

Does anybody get paid enough to smell that smell?

The crispy critter remains identified, as far as we know, at press time.

In Las Vegas, a Nevada State Trooper was conducting a traffic stop when the suspect began to flee the vehicle. During a foot pursuit, gunfire broke out and the trooper was struck in the chest. His badge saved him. The suspect died in the gunfire exchange.

The NHP Tweeted out this picture of the struck badge.

Two other occupants of the Nevada shooter’s car are in custody.

via Cops Badge Stops Bullet in Separate Shooting Incidents in Nevada, California: Remarkable Coincidence! – Santa Monica Observer.

So, what are the lessons learned here?

It is better to be lucky than to be good.
It is ~~stupid~~ terminally stupid to shoot at the po-po. In case you haven’t noticed, they come in whole troops or precincts.
Maybe if you’re the reincarnation of Fireball Roberts, you can outrun the police car, but you can’t outrun the police radio, or the helicopter that the CHP had following the runner. These things usually end in the reincarnation of no-fireball-in-particular. QED.
Something has gotten into the water (or the media air), and lots of scroungy urban mopes and suburban wildsiders who would never have thunk of it, are down with firing up Officer Friendly in 2016. Is it the Black Criminal Lives Matter movement? The police “going fetal” in urban hellholes? The DOJ lining up behind the violent criminals? Hell, is it sunspots? Or does it even matter? It’s a fact out there.

Different Spanks for Different Ranks, #473

Why did Stefan Arzberger, 43, walk away from these charges in Manhattan court?

…strangling and nearly killing a tourist after he barged into her hotel room nude in a drug-induced stupor…

First, he blamed his rampage, not on the traditional bad ice cube, but on what is apparently New York City’s prime attraction in the post-Bloomberg era, a tranny whore named Jerry Neptune, aka Natalie Pros. No, seriously. We Are Not Making This Up.

Supposedly, Stefan’s Walk on the Wild Side with Jerry was derailed by Stefan getting so stoned that he didn’t notice when the he-she vogued out with Stefan’s iPad. And then, as the saying goes, his troubles began.

Later, a wild-eyed and naked Arzberger stumbled out of his room at the West 58th Street hotel and began mindlessly knocking on guests’ doors, prosecutors said.

When the North Carolina tourist opened her door, he wrapped his hands around her neck with so much pressure the blood vessels in her eyes allegedly popped.

He also, according to her testimony which the judge grudgingly took, tried to smother her. She was a 65-year-old lady, attacked and violently injured by a drug-abusing 43-year-old man. That’s a serious crime of violence in 49 other states. So why were a New York prosecutor and judge bouncingly eager to let Stefan Arzberger walk?

Because, in the corrupt courtroom of crooked judge Ronald Zweibel, with corrupt, crooked and conniving prosecutor Joshua Steinglass in attendance, what matters is not what you did, but who you is. In the words of that age-old New York parvenu’s refrain, “Do you know who I am?”

Zweibel and Steinglass (and for that matter, the New York Post’s Rebecca Rosenberg, who writes approvingly of the resolution of the case) know who Arzberger is. They’re cultured New Yorkers, or wannabes, and he’s a top concert violinist with the Leipzig String Quarter. He’s somebody. His victim? Tourist. From the flyover state of North Carolina. She’s nobody.

Decision made: Arzberger walks. And so he did.

It lets a couple of Manhattan shysters feel like they did something for culture. And, don’t forget, to strike a blow against the crime of being from North Carolina.

Survival Approach: Trust to Luck (and Rescue)

A couple set out on 17 August 2016 to travel from one tiny island (Weno) to another (Tamatam), in the vast Pacific, in an 18-foot open boat. They landed on another island entirely, an apparently nameless, uninhabited island in Chuuk State, Micronesia. And there they waited to be rescued… for a week.

Their survival today is living (literally!) proof of the old adage, “It is better to be lucky than to be good.” They survived for seven days before being found, first by a passing ship which saw lights on the uninhabited island, and then by a US Navy patrol aircraft, which saw the “SOS” they’d drawn in the sand. The Navy snapped these pictures.

From that point, the rescue of the two marooned people was assured, although it took two more days (from Wednesday, 24 August, to Friday the 26th) for them to be picked up and delivered to safety.

Twenty-four hours after the two and their boat neither returned to Weno nor arrived at Tamatam, the Coast Guard was alerted. A seven-day search of 17,000 square miles came up dry (no pun intended), and the good fortune of a ship passing, and the survivors having a flashing light for signaling, made the rescue possible.

It’s a lot easier to list the things that these people did wrong than what they did right, but they did do a couple of things right — bringing a means of signaling was one, and leaving word ashore about their route and intentions was another. (We’ve heard the Coasties call this a “float plan.”) But this adventure came within a hair’s breadth of being, instead, one of those missing-persons mysteries that the vast Pacific produces every year.

So learn from what they did right and what they did wrong, when you’re out in open water.

A Saga of Suckuppery

Eli Lake has a report in Bloomberg that should alarm anyone interested in Iran policy. He makes a strong case that the Administration was so fixated on appeasing the mullahs that command the terror state that it ordered the abandonment of pro-American activists — and even, a cut-off “burn notice” towards Iranians who risked their lives meeting with US intelligence. The article:

But Obama wasn’t just reluctant to show solidarity [with “Green Revolution” protesters] in 2009, he feared the demonstrations would sabotage his secret outreach to Iran. In his new book, “The Iran Wars,” Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon uncovers new details on how far Obama went to avoid helping Iran’s green movement. Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support.

Solomon reports that Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement’s supporters. “The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon writes. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

The US — even under Obama — supported other uprisings, both democratic ones in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, and the islamist-terrorist uprising in Egypt that overthrew longtime US ally Hosni Mubarak.

Iran though is a very different story. Obama from the beginning of his presidency tried to turn the country’s ruling clerics from foes to friends. It was an obsession. And even though the president would impose severe sanctions on the country’s economy at the end of his first term and beginning of his second, from the start of his presidency, Obama made it clear the U.S. did not seek regime change for Iran.

[I]t’s striking the lengths to which Obama went to make good on his word. As Solomon reports, Obama ended U.S. programs to document Iranian human rights abuses. He wrote personal letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei assuring him the U.S. was not trying to overthrow him. Obama repeatedly stressed his respect for the regime in his statements marking Iran’s annual Nowruz celebration.

His quest to engage the mullahs seems to have influenced Obama’s decision-making on other issues too. When he walked away from his red line against Syria’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, Solomon reports, both U.S. and Iranian officials had told him that nuclear negotiations would be halted if he intervened against Bashar al-Assad.

Did this all pay off for Obama and the USA? Yes, and no, respectively.

Obama eventually did get a nuclear deal with Iran. Solomon’s book shines in reporting the details of the diplomacy that led to the 2015 accord. …

Eventually, the Iranians wore down the U.S. delegation. At the beginning of the talks in 2013, the U.S. position was for Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure. By the end of the talks in 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry and his team “agreed that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint.”

Other U.S. red lines were demolished too. The final deal would allow the U.N. ban on Iranian missile development to phase out after eight years, and the arms embargo against Iran to expire after five. Iran would not have to acknowledge that it had tried to develop a nuclear weapon, even though samples the Iranians collected at its Parchin facility found evidence of man-made uranium.

Why such self-abasing appeasement?

In one particularly revealing passage, Solomon captures the thinking of Kerry, who engaged in detailed negotiations over the deal in the final months of the talks. …”War is the failure of diplomacy.”

Kerry’s diplomacy succeeded. But the Middle East got war nonetheless. “The Revolutionary Guard continues to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, including ballistic missiles inscribed with threats against Israel on their nose cones,” Solomon writes in the book’s concluding chapter. “Khamenei and other revolutionary leaders, meanwhile, fine-tune their rhetorical attacks against the United States, seeming to need the American threat to justify their existence.”

When did appeasement ever have an outcome other than war, in the long term?

Bubba Beautifies a Tokarev

Well, Bubba thought he was beautifying it. How about a two-tone hack paint job — black and candy apple red? Take it from the top:

If you look at the area around the rear sight, you’ll see that the paint job is not only gaudy, it’s also lousy and inept.

Same is evident from the bottom:

And, guess what? We just showed you this abortion’s two best sides. Look at the crappy job around the slide serrations, and the orange peel and bubbles in the paint on the slide:

Two other things about that picture… ask yourself, what’s wrong with that firing pin retaining pin? And where’s the clumsily added safety on all recent Tok imports?

Now, we’ll let you see the whole thing:

A coyote ugly Bubbafied Tokarev. And yes, he didn’t even use a crappy recent import job for his failed attempt to teach-yourself-cerakote. (Or more likely, “teach yourself Krylon”). He used a pre-68 import and/or GI bringback of a relatively uncommon postwar Tokarev. An all-matching gun, too.

But that’s not even the worst violation of this poor rape-victim of a pistol. Bubba had his way with the slide, too, in his inept attempt to, apparently, change firing pins.

He helpfully had TOKAREV TT-33 stamped on it, in case no one could recognize it any more after his close-enough-for-government-work ministrations. You know, where he milled the slide serrations off.

The current owner — who’s trying to sell this junker for $400 — suggests that Bubba might have been trying to get at the firing pin retaining pin. That’s as good an attempt to read Bubba’s mind as we’re likely to get, because that ol’ boy just don’t reason like the rest of us.

What he has done is blow it right past “gunsmith special” into “parts gun” land. It would take a lot of work on that gun to make it good enough to stink, and if Fyodor Tokarev Himself weren’t dead and pushing up whatever they decorate Soviet cemeteries with, this’d kill him.

Maybe we should take this page down, lest Russians who take pride in their achievements in the Great Patriotic War consider it a casus belli. In the meantime, you can always go see it (and the other Tok the guy is selling, a recent import in arsenal-overhauled shape) at this thread in the ARFCOM Equipment Exchange.

Remember that Slide? Yes, it was Real. Yes, the Army Flipped Over It.

Yesterday, we showed you this slide, which originated at the US Army WTF moments Facebook page. The question on everybody’s lips was: was it real, or was it Photoshop?

The answer is here: it was real. and now every knob-polishing, superior-stroking, i’up-sucking staff officer in the army — one thing the service has in plentiful supply — is trying to find and hang those responsible.

The Army Times has the story, but the bottom line is this: the slide has been pulled, the witch hunt for its creator is on, and the message is being sent to all hands: punishment for misconduct is strictly for lower ranks, and even references to misconduct by higher ranks now are a self-inflicted career threat.

David Petraeus, whose picture has been removed from the slide, is actually a federal convict who pled guilty to mishandling classified information. You would think that was worthy of discussion, or at least a reference, when the subject is information security and the insider threat. You would think. But because he is a former general and member of the senior executive service, and because he is affiliated with a political campaign at present, he is immune to criticism for his misconduct.

Knowing that, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out who else’s picture has been removed from the slide.

Naturally, they had no problem finding a career-first, self-serving, knob-polishing, up-sucking yellowstain of a major to quote in the article, clutching his pearls at the idea of lèse-majesté in the ranks.

So, are you still telling yourself that the people in charge of the military take their oath to the Constitution seriously? Nonsense. They stand ready to serve a government of men, not of laws.

Bottom line: the Army is like a Turkish water pipe: the more you suck, the higher you go. Case in point, David Petraeus.

Posted without Comment

Well, without much in the way of comment, anyway.

From US Army WTF Moments.

Petraeus, for his part, had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with Michael Hanlon saying that the readiness problem is all imaginary, and who are we going to believe, him or our lying eyes?

Exit question: shouldn’t Bowe Bergdahl be on this slide, too?

Usage: Open Carry Saves Her Life

Meet Frank Taylor. Don’t get too attached to him, because he’s a crumb, a violent criminal, and he’s already dead, dead, dead — where he can’t hurt anybody any more. Maybe he was a lovely guy 99% of the time, or maybe he was always prone to the kind of dyscivic activity that characterized the last hours of his life. We don’t know, although the fact that he already had a scowling mugshot on file is what intelligence officers call “an indicator.”

Moms Demand Action records his demise as a “gun death.” And it was, but not quite the way they mean.

As it happens, he took his chances on robbing a woman a fraction of his size (4’11″/85 lbs, aka 1.5m/39 Kg), and the gamble came up snake eyes for him, as he coughed out his last blood on an operating table soon thereafter. (We can just feel the groundswell of sympathy for the guy, all the way from Arizona).

Now, we’re not big fans of open carry, here. Why advertise? In summer months, when our service pistol would be hard to conceal in shorts and t-shirt, we downsize. (First Rule of Gunfights: Bring a Gun). But some people, like Carolann Miracle of Glendale, AZ, are built so lean that even a Baby Browning is going to print. You might as well carry the horse pistol, exposed, then.

A news channel tells part of the story:

The suspect, Frank Taylor , tried to bum a cigarette. She told him that she didn’t have one, and then seconds later, Miracle said, she could feel the barrel of the gun against her skin.

“He put the gun up to my neck and said, ‘It’s loaded, don’t move,’” Miracle said. ”I think he thought, ‘She’s a little girl. Maybe she doesn’t know how to use her weapon.’”

Miracle said, “I dropped my soda, released my gun from my holster and cocked it. I shot him and ran in the opposite direction.

She called the cops from home; meanwhile, others responded to the scene, where they called paramedics who transported Taylor to the ER, where attempts to save him — why? Not because he was worth saving, but out of sheer force of habit; it’s what they do — were unavailing.

“Every time you hear a peaceable carrier’s gunshot, a devil gets his bat wings.” Now Frank Taylor hangs, upside down, alongside his brethren in the Surprised Scumbag Hall of Infamy.

Carolann Miracle. From Dean's screen cap of a TV interview.

Carolann Miracle. (Note her Glock). From Dean’s screen cap of a TV interview.

Dean Weingarten has done some work on this story, and reached some conclusions we generally agree with:

Carolann’s father was a Marine. He taught her well. …

Carolann did many things right. The first was to instantly recognize the threat. Many become mired in the thought that “this cannot be happening”; “this is not real”. People who carry are much less likely to do that because they have considered the possibility of attack and prepared for it.

She did the right thing when she dropped her drink. Dropping things to access your weapon or to fight better is not an instinctive reaction. Many people instinctively hang on to useless things that impede their ability to fight. I taught my students to practice dropping things at the beginning of a fight so that they could draw their firearm, and fight more effectively.

She did the right thing when she fled the area in the opposite direction from the way the attacker was going. Many attacks, perhaps 50%, involve an accomplice. She purposefully made the decision, moved to safety, then called the police.

Carolann’s response is common. She did not want to kill her attacker. It was a consequence of what he forced her to do. She would have preferred that it never happened.

Indeed, if Frank Taylor decided to get a job framing houses or working in a car wash, he’d be ahead, not dead, and poor Ms. Miracle wouldn’t have his soul, blackened and crabbed though it may have been, on her conscience.

But he didn’t. He decided he wanted to be an urban predator — the U-Boat of the modern urban environment. If Carolann hadn’t gone home to her three-year-old, if it’d been her vapor-locking on that operating table, that probably wouldn’t have troubled Taylor’s atrophied conscience at all. But she wasn’t the complacent victim he expected. The only problem with the lesson he learned from running into a Q-Ship is that his ability to pass the message on is somewhat curtailed.

Dean has a lot more; go Read The Whole Thing™. (His whole site is excellent).

The Fall of Kathleen Kane, Anti-Gun Attorney General, is Complete

Korrupt Kathleen Kane was convicted Monday of all nine charges, including felony perjury and misdemeanor obstruction of justice. Her failure to take the stand in her defense was probably the last straw, but the fundamental problem, from her point of view, was that she was guilty, and the sort of redirection, obfuscation and tu quoque that was so effective with her allies and friends in the press had no grip in the courtroom. The jury spent a token 4½ hours deliberating before bringing back the across-the-board guilty verdict.

Now we can see why she and her mob lawyer, Mafiosi’s pal Gerald Shargel, fought the motions phase of the case so long and hard — a procedural victory was her only hope. Unfortunately for Kane, she ran out of delays and had to face a jury of her peers, six men and six women from a cross-section of citizens. There’s only so much even the Teflon Don’s lawyer can do for you, when the facts of the case scream “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Off with her head!”

Kane was released in her own recognizance, after promising to surrender her passport — a routine formality — and accepting a much less routine condition from judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy, who threatened her with immediate imprisonment if Kane attempts to retaliate against any witnesses. Where could the judge have gotten an idea that such a thing was a possibility? It must have come from the facts of the case, and Kane’s demeanor.

Kane may not have gotten the message. Kane coatholder and devotee Bruce Castor, now acting-jack AG, has hinted that he might charge witness Josh Morrow with perjury, in an attempt to avenge his fallen heroine.

After some consideration of brazening it out still further, prompting legislators to make impeachment noises, Kane resigned on Tuesday. (In PA, removal from office is automatic on sentencing, not conviction). What remains is sentencing. She will be sentenced on 24 October 2016. While she could receive seven years on the perjury rap — the other eight charges are misdemeanors — it seems unlikely that someone so well-connected will be sentenced to prison time, especially as Shargel will continue to appeal as long as she can pay him.

A previous attempt by legislators to remove her from office after her indictment was fended off by her fellow Democrats, who are grateful to her for spiking state corruption investigations (the investigations proceeded, though, in the hands of the Feds and the City of Philadelphia) and for her anti-gun activism.

Like Virginia’s similarly anti-gun Attorney General, Mark Herring, Kane singlehandedly erased most of the reciprocity agreements contracted by previous AGs, complaining that licensed handgun carriers were the cause of Pennsylvania crime. Unlike Herring, though, Kane wasn’t slapped down by the legislature, and eliminating reciprocity between Pennsylvania and other states — and driving national mandatory full faith and credit recognition forward — may stand as her one achievement.

As Attorney General, she redirected resources away from violent crime, and towards her two bêtes noirs: the state’s gun owners, and child abusers. Because of her inability to distinguish between actual, exploitative and vile obscenity, and mildly off-color cartoons and email memes, she was a complete failure on the kiddie-diddler front. (It was her predecessors who put Jerry Sandusky away, as Kane cast aspersions from the campaign trail). The same Manichean worldview that led her to demonize gun owners, led her to perjury and obstruction of justice in an attempt to settle a score with an attorney she saw as an enemy, top prosecutor Frank Fina.

Fun fact: Kane, during her tumultuous time in office, demanded that subordinates address her as “General.”

The “General’s” next stop should be “general-population” in one of the state warehouses for naughty girls. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving person. Instead, she’ll probably get some combination of probation and (gag us) “community service.”

Hasn’t she serviced the community enough?

WeaponsMan

Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery