Friday Tour d’Horizon, Week 39

This week’s Tour d’Horizon is where we dispose of a week’s worth of open tabs, or try to.

Guns

I don’t wanna work, I just wanna bang on my gun all day. We’re a bit light (and late) this week.

 ex-SAMCO Mausers are, As Suspected, Crap

SAMCO Global was a major importer and seller that had a warehouse full of, essentially, 10,000 unsalable crap Spanish and South American Mausers, along with some quality small lots of decent firearms, and . SAMCO’s owners got into a pissing contest and the resulting lawsuit plunged the company into bankruptcy court. The entire assets of the company were auctioned off and were bought by Century for $1.24 million, beating out Forgett Trading (at $1.235).

It seems that Century is selling these Mausers, most of which have extensive rust, mismatched parts, or are simply barreled actions, as “good” condition. They’re not even close. They are in a condition somewhere on the low side of “parts gun” or “gunsmith special,” and are probably better described as “tomato stakes.” Or “firewood and scrap iron.” Moreover, many of them don’t headspace. So they have no collector value and are not safe to shoot. That’s why SAMCO never sold them.

Ian Got His RSC-1917

Ian unbuggered his non-working French WWI semi with a good cleaning. Short-stroking no more! Pretty amazing that 100-year-old springs still worked, but here’s proof.

View post on imgur.com

And yeah, that seems to have been Karl in this image, and last week’s also.

Legal Guns or Legal Ganja: Pick One

Pennsylvania is getting ready to legalize marijuana for “medicinal purposes,” to the delight of the burnout users and gang-affiliated dealers of the state. But Federal law continues to criminalize wacky weed, and treats it as a DQ for gun use.

That means even patients accessing the medicine from state-licensed dispensaries on a doctor’s recommendation would run afoul of federal laws banning marijuana users from buying or possessing guns or ammo.

“It is a concern because they’re basically usurping our Second Amendment rights by telling us we can’t do what our state is saying we can do,” said Luke Shultz, an organizer with Campaign for Compassion, a group that advocated for Pennsylvania’s program.

Dope, guns, or criminality: the choice is yours. We’re guessing “criminality” wins.

Poly-Ticks: Gun Ban Groups Spend Big on their Allies

In a USA Today story, the false-flag Democrat gun-ban group Americans for Reponsible Solutions and its figurehead Gabby Giffords get a long tongue-bath from USA Today reporter (and fellow Democrat and gun-ban propagandist) Heidi M. Przybyla. Przybyla uses the ban groups’ focus-grouped euphemisms for gun bans and gun control: “gun safety” for bans and “background checks” for Federal licensing and registration. In the past, the extreme “Americans for Responsible Solutions,” now funded and controlled by Bloomberg, has supported all of those plus outright bans on “assault weapons,” all semi-autos, pistols, and concealed-carry licenses.

Przybyla did not seek an opinion or report a position of anyone opposed to ARS’s extreme positions, except to recount strawman versions of that opposition as presented by ARS.

Suggesting pre-debate collaboration, she reported that Mark Kelly, head of ARS, had hoped to place a pro-gun-control question with debate moderator Lester Holt. Holt did ask Kelly’s question, although he didn’t identify its source.

Meanwhile, on top of his spending on local, state and national races this year, Michael Bloomberg, Wall Street billionaire makler and dilettante politician, is pouring $300 million into his pseudo-academic arm, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, which produces anti-gun studies on command.

Poly-Ticks (sorry, that season): Another Anti-Gun Gun Writer

“I got Charlie in my own strike force!” In this case, the quisling is Jorge Amselle. He told David Fortier that he was supporting an anti-gun candidate, and didn’t care about the 2nd Amendment, much. Fortier mentioned it on ARFCOM. Then, David Codrea picked it up.

Two well-known trainers, Grant Cunningham and Rob Pincus, attacked David Codrea for his (entirely factual) report. Cunningham backed Amselle, and called Codrea “despicable.” And both of them smeared Fortier as “unknown.” Cunningham said he was “someone hiding behind a code name.” Really? Apparently, they didn’t know that his AR-15 handle “gunwritr” has long, if not always been associated with his real name, and he’s been published in most of the major magazines (currently he’s in Firearms News a lot). In addition, in his original report, Fortier identified five other persons present who would corroborate his statement.

Knowing that Jorge Amselle is a dedicated Hillary supporter puts Amselle’s authorship of this article at Daily Caller, “Gun Owners, Hillary Will Soon Say ‘If You Like Your Guns You Can Keep Your Guns’”, in quite a different light. Amselle writes that article as if he’s pro-2A and anti-Hillary, but the thrust of his article is to suggest that maybe she’s not that bad. It seems to have been sheer dishonesty on his part.

You’re much more likely to read a Fortier article than an Amselle article (there are more of them, and they are better), but Amselle has written following book (no link. Wouldn’t want anyone to buy it):

Gun Digest’s Shooter’s Guide to Concealed Carry

He is currently employed by Athlon Outdoor Group (ex-Harris Communications) which is writing for Personal Defense World and Tactical Life, and his editors apparently are comfortable with his anti-2A activism. Athlon is owned by the militantly antigun publisher AMG/Parade. He has written for most of the Athlon and Harris titles.

Exit question: Does anyone read “Tactical Life” except for mall ninjas, anyway?

Usage and Employment

The hardware takes you only half way. The wetware in your brain housing group is what makes your weapons work. 

It Can Happen Anywhere

Preparation counts. Nobody was prepared at the Townville Elementary School in the generically-named burg of Townville, SC, this week when a 14-year-old kid shot up the playground. The shooter was not a student there, he was homeschooled, and would have been a middle or junior high school student had he been in public schools. He was stopped by a responding firefighter who used no weapons, and at press time we do not know further details.

Two six-year-old kids were wounded. One of them was critically injured. A teacher was also wounded, and police visiting the home of the shooter found his 47-year-old father shot to death in the home.

Good response by that bold firefighter; pity there wasn’t a school resource officer or armed citizen handy, but the situation could have been worse. Prayers for the wounded.

The lesson for the rest of us is the Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared!”

Cops ‘n’ Crims

Cops bein’ cops, crims bein’ crims. The endless Tom and Jerry show of crime and (sometimes instantaneous) punishment.

Pointing a Gun at Cops is Dumb, III

Yeah, we had this same headline last week, and the week before. but another guy did it this week, in El Cajon, east of San Diego. He didn’t have a gun but seems to have simulated one with something, in a possible suicide by cop. This produced the same predictable first- and second-order results as last week’s gunplay in Charlotte, NC.

The subject paced back and forth while officers tried to talk to him. At one point, the subject rapidly drew an object from his front pants pocket, placed both hands together and extended them rapidly toward the officer taking up what appeared to be a shooting stance.

First-order result: an El Cajon cop shot him dead (another one simultaneously Tased him), and second-order: Black Criminals Lives Matter organized riots (with the help of the local hand-out-seeking The Reverends). Predictable, although the El Cajon riots haven’t risen to the level of looting yet, and are just blocking traffic. So far.

Third-order result: the press and the usual Beltway suspects are screaming for the cop’s head on a platter.

The people in California think they don’t want cops. Policemen there should give them exactly what they’re asking for.

Update

The El Cajon suspect extended a vapor-inhaling gadget towards the police, with a flat area roughly corresponding to a pistol grip in his hand, and a tube looking like a barrel towards the cop. Good shoot.

To Understand Chicongo

Well, there are options. You can:

1. Read a thumbsucker from the Associated Press, all about teen gang culture;
2. Watch a BBC video about teen gang culture, or read an analysis of it;
3. Look up the latest butcher’s bill on HeyJackass.com;
4. Or check out a real cop’s point of view at Second City Cop.

If you do the last of these, we recommend two posts to you. One mentions a recent violent crime, and quote Chicago’s best columnist, John Kass, about the gang-tatted murderer of a tourist:

 Pagan, police said, had been arrested 39 times, had four felony convictions and had pointed a gun at people twice during arguments. He was wanted on a warrant for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Gee, why is crime off the charts in Chicongo? Gotta love that revolving door. And the other shows that they finally caught a chick that was straw-buying Glocks for gangbangers, and…

according to sources, she’ll get…..probation! For violations of Federal firearms laws. When ten years per count is the norm and might actually deter others from, you know, dealing in firearms.

Of course she gets lightest of wrist taps. Those serious sentences are held in reserve for the Great White Defendant. And they can’t put her in jail longer than any of the 39 times they locked up Paul Pagan, can they?

Too Dumb to be a Cop

A young policewoman, hired part-time in one PA town and a probationary full-timer in another, posted a snapchat selfie of herself in uniform, with the message, “I’m the law today, nigga.” Not any more she isn’t.

The Perils of Kathleen: What, Her Again? Edition

Here’s where we chronicle ongoing meltdown of the paranoid, vengeful and extremely anti-gun now-former Pennsylvania attorney general, Kathleen Kane. It’s almost over at long last.

• 28 Sep: The Porngate Report will be Released. Ah, but in an edited version, says acting-jack AG Bruce Beemer. While the report was strong on “porn” allegations, most of the on-official-addresses emails for which Kane tormented her political opponents seem to have been merely off-color jokes. But former AG (and convicted felon) Kane spent, it turns out, over $1 million investigating the case, in hopes of deflecting other prosecutors from her own wrongdoing.
• 26 Sep: Kane Horseholders back. We reported last week that Kane flunky, Blake Rutherford, was inexplicably rehired by Beemer. Now Chuck Ardo, the Baghdad Bob of her long flight from prosecution, is back in office, too. Even though his integrity, or lack of the same, was a perfect match for Korrupt Kathleen’s, his experience lying for his boss makes him an indispensable spokesman for Beemer and the transition team. Late in Kane’s decline, Ardo flipped on Kane, like Himmler and Göring trying to negotiate behind Hitler’s back. Unlike those worthies, Ardo seems to have pulled off a successful effort to save himself. Given his legacy of lies, nobody with any sense will ever trust him again, but does a payroll patriot like Ardo care? Nah, he just wants the money and perks. Now he has them ($10k a month!).

One day, Kane will be out of the headlines, and in prison. Roll on sentencing, 24 October.

Unconventional (and current) Warfare

What goes on in the battlezones of the world — and preparation of the future battlefields.

ACLU Supporting & Defending NY/NJ Bomber

Of course they are. They’re the Atheist Criminal Lovers’ Union. It’s what they do:

Rahami’s family spoke with his doctors on Monday for the first time after numerous requests since the ACLU got involved, said Udi Ofer, the New Jersey chapter’s executive director. Ofer didn’t disclose Rahami’s condition, but ACLU attorney Alexander Shalom said law enforcement officials have informed the ACLU he remains unconscious.

Federal judges last week denied requests by public defenders to be appointed to represent Rahami, agreeing with prosecutors’ arguments that he had not officially been arrested by federal authorities.

Shalom said in a filing that Rahami’s father and wife requested the ACLU represent him until he is appointed a federal public defender or other lawyer.

Ofer said denying Rahami’s right to a lawyer “violates the Constitution and needlessly sacrifices civil liberties in the name of national security.”

“It is outrageous that Mr. Rahami has been in custody for a week yet has been denied the right to have an attorney visit him to confirm his condition and protect his constitutional rights,” Ofer said.

No. It is outrageous that Mr. Ofer and Mr. Shalom side with Mister Rahami, and not the 31 people that he wounded and crippled with three bombs built to al-Qaeda and ISIL plans. But then again, they are the ACLU. It’s what they do.

President Vetoes Bill Exposing Saudi Terror Sponsors to Lawsuits; Congress Overrides

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act has passed the Congress over the President’s veto. It wasn’t close; while 77 members of the House of Representatives, all Democrats, voted with the President (and the Saudi terror sponsors), most Democrats and all Republicans supported the bill. In the Senate, only one Senator voted with the Saudi terror sponsors, retiring (and lobbyist-income-seeking) Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV. 97 of the 100 Senators supported the override. Two other Democrats didn’t vote either way (one of these Profiles in Courage was VP candidate Tim Kaine, whose motivation was probably also the Saudi lobby money that he’ll be prospecting for if he doesn’t win in November).

Meanwhile, seven other Afghans went over the hill in the USA

The sleeping policemen of Homeland Security are the only thing standing between you and the clump of afghans that were in the United States for military training, and are now considered AWOL.

Three of the Afghan military trainees fled from a Pentagon training program two weekends ago during the bombing spree in New York and New Jersey by Afghan-born bombing suspect Ahmad Rahami, raising concerns among security officials that the missing Afghan students may be linked to terrorism or plans for attacks in the United States.

Two of the missing Afghans had been training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and one was training at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

An Army source said the Afghans who left the weekend of the New York area bombings appeared to be part of a coordinated effort. The three men are being probed for possible connections to Rahami. “Initial assessment is that there is not relation and the timing is coincidental,” the source said.

Four other Afghan military trainees fled over the Labor Day weekend, two from Fort Benning, Georgia, one from Fort Lee, Virginia, and one from an Army facility in Little Rock, Arkansas.

A defense official said two of the Afghans were accounted for and suggested the two men may have fled the United States.

Hey, they’ve accounted for two out of seven. At DOD they probably grade that an A-.

Navy Has Some New Priorities

The Navy has marked a new milestone in the integration of women into combat units, when one of its sailors wound up in sick bay… with contractions. Hours later, she was delivered of a 7-pound girl, and some unspecified time after that, mother and baby were medevaced ashore.

…the main focus for the U.S. Navy, the ship and its crew is the safety and well being of the baby and the mother,” Cmdr. Bill Urban, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command spokesman, told The Virginian-Pilot.

The sailor was reportedly unaware she was pregnant, something that occasionally happens with morbidly obese mothers.

That’s today’s Navy for you. Ray Mabus is passing out cigars in the E-Ring.

Meanwhile, the Marines have seen fit to gag all commanders about issues around Women in Combat. Only Marine brass in Washington are allowed to speak on the issue — they have no trust in their field commanders’ ability to follow the twists and turns of the Party Line.

Update

The Marines threw a guy out with bad paper. What’d he do? Made a recruit sing.

The Marines’ Hymn. We are not making this up. Apparently the only approved tune under Ray Mabus is In the Navy by the Village People. Don’t drop the soap!

Veterans’ Issues

Is it time to disband this thing yet, and letting all its bloatoverhead seek its own level in the Dreaded Private Sector™?

Suicide Hotline Workers Routinely Drop Calls, Leave Early

You know, if you wanted to prevent or reduce veteran suicides, the best thing to do probably would be to task the jeezly VA with promoting or increasing them. Because every attempt to get VA to accomplish anything, crashes on the shoals of VA’s toxic and veteran-hostile culture. Case in point:

More than one-third of calls to a suicide hotline for troubled veterans are not being answered by front-line staffers because of poor work habits and other problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to the hotline’s former director.

Some hotline workers handle fewer than five calls per day and leave before their shifts end, even as crisis calls have increased sharply in recent years, said Greg Hughes, the former director of the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line. Hughes said in an internal email that some crisis line staffers “spend very little time on the phone or engaged in assigned productive activity.” Coverage at the crisis line suffers “because we have staff who routinely request to leave early,” he said.

Out here in the Dreaded Private Sector, if you abuse requests for time off, you get more time off than you could possibly use – they fire your ass. Of course, it doesn’t work that way for your lords and betters at the VA.

Is it time to disband this thing yet?

Choose VA and Die

It happened to several veterans among scores or hundreds — the VA OIG[.pdf] was not able to substantiate a whistleblower claim of 300 — of veterans whose positive colorectal screening tests were ignored by the VA in New Mexico, or were only followed up months later. (VA’s own loose and sloppy standard is 60 days, but there was no attempt to meet it. For example (edited for brevity):

This patient was … found to be FIT positive in 2014. ….A facility staff member contacted the patient in early 2015, 8 months after the positive FIT, to offer a colonoscopy, and the patient accepted. A colonoscopy was performed and a large rectal mass was found. Pathology testing confirmed the mass was cancer …. During the surgery, he was found to have unresectable metastatic disease and died a few months later

The reason for the missed follow-ups seems to be that the computer system, designed as usual at much higher expense than its civilian equivalents, throws so many alerts at the attending physician, PA, or NP, that it’s easy to miss the “better call, he might die from this and time counts” alerts among all the trivial popups.

But hey, no VA employees or contractors were harmed, and that’s what matters to the DVA.

Anybody else hear a clock ticking?

Hat tip, the Free Beacon.

VA Sets a Record

And naturally, it’s not a record anybody would want. 

VA said the agency “takes veteran privacy and the privacy of medical or health records very seriously.” But despite its “very” serious approach to patient privacy, VA tied CVS for the most privacy complaints that resulted in corrective action plans or “technical assistance” from US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2011 to 2014.

DisabledVeterans.org asks:

How can we continue to believe VA when it continues to have problems in protecting veteran privacy?

Guys, if you believe anything coming out of a VA spokesman, your disability might just be other than physical, if you get our drift.

Time? Is it time yet?

VA Spends $100 Million in Illegal Payments to Prisoners

They’re so careless that they’ve paid out $100M to guys who, even if they are vets, are locked up in jails and prisons. But it’s worse than that. Reading the article, they’ve done nothing to fix the problem, and they’re on track to bump that number up another $100M in the next four years.

It’s not like they’re supposed to show up and do their jobs. It’s government work!

Their brilliant solution? Send bills to the jailed vets, and hope they pay the money back.

If it isn’t time to disband this thing now, what would it take?

Should VA Lease Facilities?

This is an interesting report of Congressional-VA back-and-forth on the issue. While in most of these things, the VA is pretty patently in the wrong, the VA’s rep in this instance makes some good points. Congressmen charge that leasing costs more money, but given the inefficiencies the VA imposes on the facilities it constructs (like the treble-budget treble-schedule white elephant in Aurora, CO), it’s not really clear it does. The VA counters that it wants to lease new facilities so as not to be stuck with obsolete facilities 20 years down the road — something it says it has many of. (So why hasn’t it dumped them?). In any event, it’s interesting, the VA may be right about this, so go Read The Whole Thing™.

Of course, they wouldn’t have to build or lease if we just disbanded the thing now.

Even After they Died, the VA Kept Screwing ‘Em

This happened in Chicago, where everything’s a straight as a spirochete to begin with.

[A]t least two unclaimed vets sat inside the morgue for at least 30 days this summer, allowing the bodies to badly decompose.

U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois complained to the VA secretary… “I have personally called Secretary McDonald and asked him to fire Christopher Wirtjes, the Chief responsible for this shameful treatment of our veterans’ remains. Bureaucrats at Hines should spend as much time helping veterans as they do covering up neglect and abuse.” 

Yeah, lots of luck with that. Covering up neglect and abuse is pretty much the job description of a VA manager these days. 

Another vet only got buried because a funeral home heard about him and stepped up and did it — no thanks to VA.

Is it time to disband this thing yet?

Heartless, Crooked Manager Suing for Job Back

Sharon Helman, the former Phoenix VAMC manager who came up with the use of dual waitlists that condemned dozens of neglected vets to death while sluicing unearned bonus cash on herself and her cronies, was fired in 2014. Not for the wait-time scandal, which for the VA is just business as usual, but for taking bribes from contractors. She considers that terribly unfair and is suing VA for firing her.

If her lawsuit is successful, it will overturn the law that allows the VA to fire criminals and other substandard employees, guaranteeing all VA jobs forever to their incumbents, without regard to conduct. (In other words, not a very big change from the status quo).

Numerous veterans’ organizations have joined the suit on the other side now. The Department of Justice and the VA itself have generally taken Helman’s side; the VA has refused to use “fast-track” firing authority granted by Congress, and the DOJ has argued that the jobs are entitlements and that firing employees like the heartless, crooked Helman is somehow unconstitutional.

All the more reason to disband this thing now.

What “Disband” Might Look Like

After recounting some VA horror stories, Philadelphia area practitioner Craig M. Wax, DO, notes one of the causes of VA inefficiencies:

…costly, bloated, inaccessible, and red-tape-ridden VA facilities that many veterans have come to despise and fear.

And suggests an alternative:

Although I am not a VA-employed doctor, I still see many veterans who receive Tricare, which is essentially military health insurance. This allows those veterans to receive care wherever they want, whether it’s at the VA or from a private physician like me.

Why not enroll every veteran in Tricare, no exceptions?

Here’s how this plan would work. Every veteran would have major medical insurance that they could use at their discretion. ….Any veteran could find the physician or facility that best serves their unique needs, rather than being forced onto wait lists at their nearest VA facility.

Ain’t gonna happen, Dr Wax. Not enough opportunity for graft, not enough SES positions with six-figure salaries, six-figure benefit packages, and six-figure moving allowances any time you feel like a change of scenery.

The VA hasn’t run for the benefit of veterans for a very long time. It runs for the benefit, literally, of its own senior managers.

But it is time to disband it now, and this is how it could be done without punishing the vets or rewarding the VA drones who have grown rich and powerful by exploiting them.

Lord Love a Duck!

The weird and wonderful (or creepy) that we didn’t otherwise get to. 

Reporter Fabricates Gunshop Bias, Gets Caught

As everyone who’s been in a gunshop in the last five years knows, the fastest growing demographics in firearms ownership are minorities and women. Outreach to women especially but also to other previously underserved markets is just good business, and every savvy shop manager and trainer does it these days. So imagine the consternation of Wisconsin women when TV reporter Mark Leland with WLUK Fox-11 Green Bay reported that Badger Gun Sales owner Perry Sarto…

…won’t sell a handgun to a woman without her first getting trained.

There was only one problem. Leland didn’t have that comment on camera, or even on audiotape. He didn’t have it at all because Sarto never said it. Leland made it up to fit his prefab narrative of gun culture hostility to Sainted Womanhood.

Yes, he fabricated the quote. So he’s fired, right? Of course not. This is TV news. This is 90% haircut and 0% journalism. WLUK doesn’t care if he made the whole thing up, and got around the vile smear of Sarto by attaching a mealy-mouthed non-apology non-correction to the online version of the fabricated report: “We apologize if such an inference was made.“

Jenn Jaques at BearingArms compared the WLUK report to her own interviews with Badger Guns personnel and customers, and wrote about it. The fabricator, Mark Leland, then called Jaques and left her a voicemail with even more lies in it.

Jenn now has the story about the story, and she did something that the lying fabricator Mark Leland and his equally dishonest editors and producers did not: she sought out women customers and asked them about their own experiences with Sarto and the store.

Read The Whole Thing™. And never talk to the press — the best of them are snakes in the grass, and they go downhill from there.