Let’s Play Follow Ups and Snippets

Weapons Themselves that Deserved a Post but…

Why don’t the SEALs use Glocks, then?

Here’s one that spent an unknown amount of time in a river, and then two years in a cop evidence locker without any maintenance. Then, they threw it in a Hornady sonic cleaner. As Hornady posted to Facebook:

“This Glock 27 was found in a river here in Estes and we had it in property hold for two years. We recently purchased the Hornady sonic cleaner and the idea came up to try and clean this gun, after three cleanings here are the results. Although not tested our firearms instructors say it will fire! We are sending it to the Glock Co. for evaluation.” -Cmdr. Eric V. Rose-Estes Park Police Department

It looks pretty good, considering. Most guns look better than Blocks, but not after periods of immersion and neglect. Of course, you wouldn’t want to try this in brackish or salt water.

Best smart ass comment, Brian Kurzynski: “Somebody probably got tired of this thing throwing brass back at their face.” Ow! (We have not had the brass-in-face, but we’ve seen it. There seems to be an undocumented stealth recall for G4s with this problem).

This is the wrong reason to change calibers

A small Georgia PD is trading in some pistols for new Glocks in 9mm. They’re stepping down from .40 to .35, that is, 9mm. Why?

“Over the past year we have had serious … difficulties finding .40-caliber ammunition,” said Senoia Police Chief Jason Edens. “We have been experiencing anything from six to eight months lead time” on getting access to both practice and duty ammo.

“It’s not obtainable by any department, not just ours,” Edens told the council.

As the Newnan Times-Herald reports, the shortage of .40-caliber ammo is due to the fact that the U.S. Military has begun using the round.

We’re big believers in 9 > 40, but it’s because the rounds are equivalent from a terminal ballistics POV, and the .40 is unpleasant to shoot, so most guys and gals shoot better with a 9. Of course, Chief Edens mentioned that, too: “[The 9] is performing as well as, if not better than, a .40-cal.” He’s quite right. A lot of departments are looking at doing the same thing. Only hits count, and it’s not like average cops are President’s Hundred shooters.

And Glock made them, as usual for LE agencies, a very good deal (But he probably should stockpile a year’s worth of training and duty ammo for his patrol officers).

We had the opposite experience over the last couple years. The Parabellum round was considerably harder to come by than .40 or 10mm.

Follow Ups

She’s Still Outa Dodge, and Still Happy

Remember Judy Aron, who wrote to the Hartford Courant about how glad she was to have left the Unconstitutional State of Malloystan behind? Well, the Courant’s usual lovely readers sent the paper plenty of hate mail directed her way, the main axis of which seemed to be she was no longer invited to be in their Highly Superior Gun Haters Club. Aron ripostes:

I truly do not care what the hateful anti-Second Amendment crowd in Connecticut had to say… in response.

As far as I am concerned, they are no different from the folks that supported tyrannical leaders and police states throughout history, and clearly do not understand what the Second Amendment is for. And furthermore, if they are so sincere in their wanting to help me pack, why didn’t they all pool their money and buy my house when it first came on the market? That would have saved me a year’s time waiting to move.

She sums it up: “I am glad to be gone from Connecticut.” Heh. Welcome to New Hampshire, Judy. You have friends here already.

(Added in an update): Prison Prevented for Pill-Popping Patrician

Kerry Kennedy beat the rap for driving stoned, colliding with a truck, and fleeing the scene (a Kennedy tradition, that). This is a good day not to drive in the Northeast, she and numberless dozens, of hopped-up Kennedy cousins, will be breaking out vodka, crack pipes, heroin, and her 10-plus-year habit, Ambien. And then hitting the road.

With impunity. A nation of ranks, not of laws.

Weapons Employment For Good or Ill

On the cowardly cop…

Who lost his cool and shot a dog in Filer, Idaho.

The town has lawyered up and is hiding the cowardly cop, Tarek Hassani. Protesters demand his firing. The town council and mayor want to hear no comments about its internationally-famous coward, and they really mean it. Rick Clubb, the owner of the canine victim has lawyered up, too. (But unlike Hassani, he talked to the reporter). The last time Hassani shot somebody, he fired blind through a tinted window and miraculously hit the suspect.

The reporter, Jon Alexander, who broke the story by requesting the dashcam video that exposed Hassani’s cowardice is now ambivalent about it. He recognizes the power of the video…

Sure enough, that video went viral. It’s gritty, brutal and powerful. Hassani’s .45 caliber hollow-point drives the poor animal into the ground as if it was hit with a sledge hammer. You watch the dog slink away to its death.

The video shows him explaining after the shooting that he had been bitten before. He kicked and thrashed at the dogs that surrounded his car when he rolled up to owner Rick Clubb’s home. His aggression made the situation worse, and ended it with a pull of the trigger.

But now he regrets ever having posted it.

I can’t seem to shake a guilty ache in my gut, a sickness that’s slowly built but exploded after seeing that little girl [who had a poster with a drawing of Hassani, and the legend “Stop Terrorizing Filer”.

To thousands, maybe millions, Officer Hassani is no longer a man who simply made a few very bad moves. He’s the target of a public lynching and it’s all my doing.

If the police chief had done the right thing and fired Hassani, there would have been no protests.

Reporter Aishah Hasnie channels Fox Butterfield

Butterfield was famously flummoxed by more people being in prison even as crime was declining, proving that you can get a degree from a top university and be hired by a rather snobby newspaper, without ever being exposed to the mighty power of the law of cause and effect. Hasnie reports that 8 murders in half a day in Indianapolis was “a span of violence,” and something about the victims shocked her:

According to IMPD, 89% of the suspects who police have identified this year have a criminal history. What’s surprising is that 71% of the victims did too. In fact, every single person murdered on Thursday had a previous run-in with the law. 27-year-old Michael Whitefield had been arrested more than 30 times before he was shot to death in a home on the 2400 block of Stuart Street.

Yep, she was amazed that the vics were 8 for 8 in having a mugshot in the system. Well, she’s young. It sure wasn’t a surprise to the homicide investigators. (Hat tip: Tam)

News flash: people who hang around doing crime with other criminals tend to get whacked. Write that down.

Not Another Florida Shooting Case.

Yep, another one. This one is the theater shooting case. We’re Florida’d out. Check out Guns Save Life and Legal Insurrection for the skinny (although Andrew is kind of busy with the Maryland off-duty cop case). Most of the media are making this about Stand Your Ground (not implicated in this case) and about licensed carriers, but both the Floridian (a retired cop) and Maryland (out-of-state cop) cases deal with people who would have been legally authorized to carry under Federal law, due to their LE status. You know, the same people the media and lefties (Department of Redundancy Department) say should be The Only Ones to carry guns!

Unconventional Warfare

From Blowing Folks Up to Merely Screwing Them Over

What happens to murdering terrorist bombers? Well, some of them wind up as professors at the University of Chicago (Bill Ayers, we’re lookin’ at you). And some wind up as Obamacare navigators. The Alpha and Omega of the Obama legend? Anyway, on her way to helping people get uninsured, Rasmieh Yousef Odeh blew up a supermarket and a British consulate, and killed two and wounded 10. How do you top that? You have to go work getting cancer and cardiac patients killed, apparently.

Ukraine

More developments than can be reasonably watched part-time. Armed men (possibly Russians) have seized several airports. The Sudeten comparison is not far off, then. The Guardian (UK; left-wing; inclines pro-Russian) is live-blogging it. Yanukovych speaking in Rostov-on-Don, willing to go back as a quisling for Russia. Denies having ordered the mass killings by his police, says they’re all self-defense.

Apparently Yanukovych had stashed a large, ill-gotten fortune in Austria and Switzerland, and those European nations have frozen the funds. Even the stuff he’d laundered by stashing it in his grandson’s name (which has him very upset).

Here are the Russian helicopters (Mi-8s and -24s) that delivered the commandos that seized the airfields:

The US would be powerless (given the relative distances) even if we weren’t led entirely by people who reflexively oppose any friend, support any foe, reject any hardship, and shrug off any burden to prevent the survival and success of liberty.

Walter Russell Mead has an essay on this powerlessness in The American Interest, which is rather more in-depth that the mentions we’ve made of it here.