Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Guns

  • Why Did it Have to be …Guns? by L. Neil Smith

    Why Did it Have to be …Guns? by L. Neil Smith

    Editor’s Note: This seemed timely, so we’re running it again.

    Why Did it Have to be … Guns?

    by L. Neil Smith

    lneil@lneilsmith.org

    Over the past 30 years, I’ve been paid to write almost two million words, every one of which, sooner or later, came back to the issue of guns and gun-ownership. Naturally, I’ve thought about the issue a lot, and it has always determined the way I vote.

    People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single- issue thinker, and a single- issue voter, but it isn’t true. What I’ve chosen, in a world where there’s never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician—or political philosophy—is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.

    Make no mistake: all politicians—even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership—hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it’s an X-ray machine. It’s a Vulcan mind-meld. It’s the ultimate test to which any politician—or political philosophy—can be put.

    If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash—for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.

    If he isn’t genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody’s permission, he’s a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

    What his attitude—toward your ownership and use of weapons—conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn’t trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

    If he doesn’t want you to have the means of defending your life, do you want him in a position to control it?

    If he makes excuses about obeying a law he’s sworn to uphold and defend—the highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights—do you want to entrust him with anything?

    If he ignores you, sneers at you, complains about you, or defames you, if he calls you names only he thinks are evil—like “Constitutionalist”—when you insist that he account for himself, hasn’t he betrayed his oath, isn’t he unfit to hold office, and doesn’t he really belong in jail?

    Sure, these are all leading questions. They’re the questions that led me to the issue of guns and gun ownership as the clearest and most unmistakable demonstration of what any given politician—or political philosophy—is really made of.

    He may lecture you about the dangerous weirdos out there who shouldn’t have a gun—but what does that have to do with you? Why in the name of John Moses Browning should you be made to suffer for the misdeeds of others? Didn’t you lay aside the infantile notion of group punishment when you left public school—or the military? Isn’t it an essentially European notion, anyway—Prussian, maybe—and certainly not what America was supposed to be all about?

    And if there are dangerous weirdos out there, does it make sense to deprive you of the means of protecting yourself from them? Forget about those other people, those dangerous weirdos, this is about you, and it has been, all along.

    Try it yourself: if a politician won’t trust you, why should you trust him? If he’s a man—and you’re not—what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If “he” happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she’s eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn’t want you to have?

    On the other hand—or the other party—should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries?

    Makes voting simpler, doesn’t it? You don’t have to study every issue—health care, international trade—all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it.

    And that’s why I’m accused of being a single-issue writer, thinker, and voter.

    But it isn’t true, is it?

    “Permission to redistribute this article is herewith granted by the author—provided that it is reproduced unedited, in its entirety, and appropriate credit given.”

    L. Neil Smith passed away recently – for folks who are unfamiliar with his writings, many are available at https://lneilsmith.org/   It’s worth checking out.  I’ve learned that few of these blogs live longer than a year past the author, and Neil Smith was worth reading.

  • Not Everyone Shoots Targets

    My thoughts drift back 45 years – I had a brand new Thompson Center Contender and an old grade school classmate.  Koocanusa was new, and Bob Herron was getting a maximum of fun on a still evening, shooting my new pistol and listening to the birdshot’s miniature splashes as they fell into the water.  I was raised to be frugal with ammunition – but Bob’s joy at the recoil of the 45/410 still makes those two boxes of 3 inch magnums one of the cheaper joys I have experienced.

    Bob loved recoil.  I remember his Hawes 44 magnum – so out of time that it spit lead as the bullet entered the barrel, sometimes to the left and other times to the right.  I remember explaining that a new bolt would solve that problem – but we had different perspectives.  Even then I was oriented to the firing line, while Bob enjoyed recoil.  He wasn’t alone – I recall a cop on the highline whose model 29 was badly out of time – but he had Clint Eastwood’s autograph on the butt, and was afraid he would ruin the autograph if he fixed the gun. 

    The bolt on a revolver is a term that goes back to Sam Colt.  It’s a spring-loaded part that pushes up into a milled hole in the cylinder to hold the cylinder in alignment with the barrel as the revolver fires.  Later, the term bolt gained a different meaning – but in revolvers the part still has the name Sam Colt gave it.  Bob’s Hawes, with a lifetime of heavily loaded 44 magnums, had simply shot loose.  My own revolver (marked J.P. Sauer & Sohn instead of the importer Hawes), in 357 magnum (backed with a 9mm cylinder) has had a lifetime of much lighter loads, and 50 years later is still perfectly in time.   Fixed sights, hits about an inch low.  Different purposes, different stresses.

    Some people like to use ammunition quickly – for them, the inaccuracy of a bump stock is not the problem it is for me.  I’m stuck with the desire to put one bullet as close to the X as I can.  As I age, that distance seems to be growing with each birthday.   Still, bump stocks have provided for folks who didn’t want to pay the transfer tax for NFA items.  The fact that I don’t want either doesn’t make me more virtuous – my perspective is just different.  I want bullet holes as close to the X as I can get them. 

  • Information Control

    Information Control

    The problem with gun control is that in the end, it turns out to be information control – and that isn’t easy.  Japan has some downright strict controls on firearms – but this thing got next to the former prime minister:

    No lathe.  No Mill.  A couple of pipes, home-made black powder, batteries to ignite the powder.  Looks to me that the most high-tech component of the gun build was a large roll of electrician’s tape.

    People have been making black powder for most of a millennium.  Charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur.  Charcoal is easy to obtain.  Saltpeter (potassium nitrate) might take a while – but you could use the Confederate Jno. Harrison’s method and get it from your own urine.  Push come to shove, I could extract sulfur from sheetrock – from drywall.  The Japanese assassin opted for electrical ignition – so I could do that with 9 volt transistor radio batteries. 

    The problem with keeping guns banned is that they are fairly simple tools – not so simple as an inclined plane or a lever, but still simple.  A tube that is open at one end and closed at the end that includes an explosive or propellant charge.  Basically a piece of pipe with an end cap.

  • A Well-regulated militia

    A Well-regulated militia

    As I listen to the comments about the need to do something to keep another Uvalde from happening, I’m hearing the usual comments that the second amendment is more to authorize a militia than the individual right to bear arms. 

    That I disagree is not an adequate reason to ignore the argument – scientific method pretty much demands listening respectfully to folks who disagree.  Fortunately, the internet gives me access to historical research that was confined to university campuses a quarter-century ago.  There is the problem of avoiding confirmation bias, but I can cope with that.

    Hartnation goes through the importance of the militias during the American revolution.  Remembering my long ago American History classes, I think George Washington expected a militia unit to be able to stand and fire 3 rounds, but not stand when the Brits closed with bayonets.  Hart described how dependent the Continental Army was on the local militias:

    At the beginning of American independence an immense task faced the colonial revolutionary. The English army, the best-trained, best-equipped military in the world, had served in the Americas, enforcing the will of the crown for many decades. American victory rested in the ability of the colonists to put together a viable fighting army. We know from history that the American Continental Army, commanded by George Washington, defeated the superior British army and expelled the rule of the crown from the colonies by 1783.

    . . . How much did the colonial militia contribute to enable the Continental army to defeat the British? I would posit that the militia movement was the driving force behind the Continental Army’s victory over the British because they were the main source of manpower, because they were already trained and armed with a 150 year harden tradition of defense to protect their own communities, and because the militia was made up of mostly  farmers and landowners, they stood to gain the most from independence giving them something tangible to fight for other than “liberty”.”

    battlefields.org

    Militias also provided the Continental armies in the field much-needed manpower, albeit on a temporary basis. When British commanders planned for their campaigns against the Continental armies in the field, they had to take in account the size of the militia forces operating in those same geographic areas. The British knew the militia were unpredictable, but they could not totally neglect their presence either. In some instances, militia units were the deciding factors in important battles. The war’s first battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts were fought mostly by militia with some minutemen units. At the Battle of Bunker Hill, outside Boston, militia dealt a deadly blow to the British. Later in the war at battles such as Bennington, Vermont, King’s Mountain, Cowpens, both in South Carolina and Guilford Courthouse, in North Carolina, the militia was crucial to American victories.”

    Reviewing those historical comments, I get the feeling that the militia at the time of the American Revolution could have been described (as in the quote misattributed to Admiral Yamamoto) as a rifle (or at least a musket) behind every blade of grass.  The better regulated, the better drilled and prepared, the more essential to the security of a free state.

    The Supreme Court  (Miller case) ruled that the Second Amendment did not protect weapon types not having a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia”.  This kind of invalidates the arguments against “weapons of war.”  That 1939 decision protects them.

  • Did I Prevent a School Shooting?

    It’s been years.  I really don’t know if I prevented a school shooting or not.  A guy walked into the school and I could see the print of his snubby – so I walked up close, smiled an engaging smile, and asked, “What are you packing there?”  His answer was “I didn’t come here to see you.”  When someone is wandering into your college with a sneaky little gun, that’s probably the most reassuring answer you can get.

    My answer was to bring him into my office, pour a cup of coffee, and reply with, “Now, tell me what’s up.”  I think he really did come in to see me – the tale was a bit unusual.  His wife, a student, had been into an amateur attempt at sex conversion therapy with another student, “a cute young gay man.”  It had worked to the extent that she was pregnant – and the guy with the sneaky little gun had gone through a vasectomy on his first marriage.  I think he mostly wanted to be able to talk to someone – so I listened, unloaded his Brazilian made revolver, stashed the cartridges, listened some more, and, after a half-hour or so, returned his revolver and sent him home with an empty cylinder.  I may have prevented a school shooting – but probably not.  I think it was just a case of an overpowering problem and a need to find an audience who took him seriously.  To this day, I don’t remember where I stashed the cartridges – but I’m willing to bet someone was really surprised to find them when I moved on.  I know I didn’t send the shells back home with his wife.

    My experience was with one man, emotionally charged, who wanted to be talked out of it, who really timed things so he could be defused.  We had no school shooting.  We had no police called.  I suspect that, even so, I’ve been closer to school violence with this one incident than most of the folks who are willing to tell us exactly what needs to be done.

    I don’t have the answers.  I developed a personal answer in 1989, when I read of the Montreal Polytechnique Massacre

    “On 6 December 1989, a man entered a mechanical engineering classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique armed with a semi-automatic weapon. After separating the women from the men, he opened fire on the women while screaming, “You are all feminists.” Fourteen young women were murdered, and 13 other people were wounded. The shooter then turned the gun on himself. In his suicide note, he blamed feminists for ruining his life. The note contained a list of 19 “radical feminists” who he said would have been killed had he not run out of time.” 

    My personal answer was simple enough: I will not leave my students. 

    There was always a secure feeling in a class where I had a Marine enrolled – probably a bit more than sailors or army.  That was a security that elementary and secondary teachers never will have – that if worse came to worst in the classroom, I had reliable backup.  I don’t believe that a teacher exists who hasn’t looked at the world, and already determined what he or she will do if Hell comes through the classroom door. 

    I’ve read of Sandy Hook – I have no doubt that Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach knew what they moved toward, and that their decisions were made long before Hell entered their school.  The wonderful thing is that such women lived – and that their actions and warnings protected others.  The sadness is that the only items they possessed to protect their students were their bodies.

    Perhaps I do have a small suggestion – I believe that most teachers have thought about what they will have to do if their classroom is invaded.  Perhaps if every police officer spends a bit of time thinking about how to respond, when Hell enters the classroom they might be a bit more effective.

  • Firearms and Marijuana

    An illegal combination, under federal law. Regardless of the legality at the state level, marijuana is still classified at the federal level as a schedule 1 prohibited substance. This means that possessing both is a federal crime, punishable by up to $10,000 and as many as ten years in prision.

    The Montana Free Press contacted the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms to confirm, learning that the Federal Gun Control Act prohibits anyone who uses a controlled substance from purchasing firearms or ammunition.

    Even if its medical? Yes. Even if it is medical, federal law still prohibits possession.

    While the possession of marijuana alone is still a federal crime, it carries only a $1000 and up to a year of jail time for the first conviction. Add a firearm to the mix, and the potential consequence is multiplied by ten.

    The state of Montana has an estimated 66% rate of gun ownership. Estimates suggest that about 20% of the adults in the state use marijuana, but those are probably low (given that using was illegal at the time of the survey, it seems very likely that people would under-report). Given these numbers, it is very probable that the two groups intersect. Federal law makes that risky.