Month: June 2016

Remember back in 2011, when the US credit rating was downgraded? Did you also know that the US Congress used its investigative and legislative powers to harass the rating company who did it?

On August 5, 2011, representatives from S&P announced the company’s decision to give its first-ever downgrade to U.S. sovereign debt, lowering the rating one notch to “AA+”, with a negative outlook. The government was furious. Two weeks after the August, 2011 S&P downgrade, SEC and Department of Justice announced that S&P was under investigation, and the CEO of S&P was forced to resign just 18 days later.

Three years later, filed a $5 Billion lawsuit against the company.

You can bet that no ratings agency will ever do that again.

Imagine carving an AR-15 lower out of styrofoam, and then using the method shown in this video to cast it out of aluminum. You have just made a ghost gun, completely untraceable and unknown to the government.

If there is a so called assault weapons ban, or an outright ban of all firearms, you might as well make a machine gun. After the first felony, the rest are free.

In a follow up to yesterday’s post…

The Gun Violence Archive is claiming to be a non-partisan repository of “gun violence” and also states that they are not taking sides, but want to encourage debate. They are being used to support the fantasy that the USA has had over 1,000 mass shootings in the past 1,260 days.

In order to have an unbiased discussion about mass shootings, it is helpful to agree on a definition. The Congressional Resource Service (pdf warning), an office of the Congress of the United States, uses the same definition as the FBI:
There are three categories of these types of incidents:

Mass Murder/shooting-
These are incidents occurring in relatively public places, involving four or more deaths—not including the shooter(s)—and gunmen who select victims somewhat indiscriminately. The violence in these cases is not a means to an end—the gunmen do not pursue criminal profit or kill in the name of terrorist ideologies, for example.

Spree killing/shooting-
A spree killer is differentiated by the shooter killing in multiple locations over a relatively short period of time.

Serial killer-
A serial killer is a spree killer who kills over a long period of time, ranging from days to even decades.

Let’s look at the accuracy of that claim and the accuracy of the data. Here is the “mass shooting page” of the Gun Violence Archive. The first few shootings are listed as:

June 22, 2016	Washington	Lacey	500 block of Dutterow Road	3	1	View Incident View Source
June 21, 2016	Kentucky	Louisville	2802 Rodman Street	2	2	View Incident View Source
June 19, 2016	Virginia	Roanoke	2328 Melrose Avenue	0	4	View Incident View Source
June 18, 2016	Virginia	Exmore	Fredrick Douglas Road	1	3	View Incident View Source
June 18, 2016	Georgia	Waycross	2625 Arnold Ct	2	2	View Incident View Source
June 18, 2016	Illinois	Chicago	East 79th Street and South Escanaba Avenue	0	4	View Incident View Source
June 14, 2016	Delaware	Wilmington	South Van Buren and Elm streets	0	4	View Incident View Source
June 14, 2016	California	Oakland	1301 Franklin Street	1	3	View Incident View Source

The first thing that we notice is that they are NOT using the same definition for “mass shooting” as the US Congress or the FBI. If I were to guess, I would suspect that they are using the much looser definition of the Bloomberg funded anti-gun groups, which are using the definition of “any shooting involving 3 or more people whether or not all of them are killed, or even shot.” In other words, they don’t get the desired results, so they move the goalposts.

Let’s look at the first incident on the list: It is a case where 4 people shot each other inside of a meth lab.

The second listed incident involved 4 family members in the same house. Another version of the same incident gives two of the victims’ names. I looked up the first name, and what do you know, he is a violent felon with a long history of arrests for drugs, violence, and firearms violations. I’m betting that drugs are involved. Even so, only two killed, not in a public place, victims not random= not a mass shooting.

The third shooting on the list occurred in Roanoke, Virginia. That location has had three shootings in the past few months. Still, no one was killed, so not a mass shooting.

The fourth shooting listed was a man who was targeting individuals over a large area. He drove around and shot 4 different people, but still not a mass shooting.

The fifth shooting on the list still isn’t a mass shooting, but one thing that I do want to note is from this story about the shooting:

A father of seven and a woman are dead after a weekend shooting at the Garlington Heights apartments in Waycross, Georgia.
Waycross police said Cameron Wilkins Jr., 21, and Felicia Williams, 32, were killed Saturday. The two people who were injured were not named.
Cameron was recently released from jail and was trying to get his life on track, according to his family.

Aren’t they always? These are not mass shootings. They are just criminals taking each other out over gang affiliations or drug turf.

The anti gun crowd knows that most people don’t care if one gang member or drug dealer takes out another. So, just like the confusion between machine guns and AR-15s, they hope to redefine the term “mass shooting” into something else, no they can mislead an uninformed electorate into voting for something that they don’t want.

There is a website calling themselves the Gun Violence Archive. They claim to be cataloging all of the gun violence in the nation without bias.

I did a brief search through their data, and I found this listing on the first page:

June 19, 2016 Arkansas Jonesboro 1300-block of Flint Street 1 dead 0 injuries

Clicking on the source link leads to this story:

JONESBORO, AR (KAIT) – One person is dead following a shooting late Sunday night in Jonesboro.
Brandon Edwards, 30, of Jonesboro was killed in the incident, according to Paul Holmes, public information specialist for the Jonesboro Police Department.

What was Edwards doing when he met his end? Not attending choir practice, that’s for sure:

Edwards and James Campbell were listed as suspects in an aggravated residential burglary at the same address, the incident report states.
The man living in the apartment has not been charged with a crime at this time, according to [Police].
The 33-year-old Jonesboro man told Officer Jonathan Wood he shot at Edwards [the decedent] and Campbell [the accomplice] saying, “I did it, but I had to shoot them,” according to Woods in the report.
Woods reportedly asked the man where he put his gun. An “AR-15 style weapon” was recovered and found loaded.
According to the man, Edwards and Campbell forced his unlocked apartment door open following an earlier phone conversation.
Edwards reportedly came in first with a rope telling the man “he was going to kill him.” Campbell followed behind holding a rifle or shotgun.

As clear cut a case of self defense as I have ever heard. Surely they can’t be blaming a homeowner for defending himself from an armed burglar? So, I clicked on the incident link, and this is how they categorized the shooting:

• Type: Victim

• Age Group: Adult 18+

• Status: Killed

• Type: Perpetrator

• Age Group: Adult 18+

• Status: Unharmed, Arrested

I also thought it important to note that an AR-15 was used for self defense. There is no better self defense weapon in your home than an AR-15, especially when you are faced with multiple armed attackers who are intent on killing you.

Another Democrat with a gun goes off the deep end while respecting a woman…

In comments to my recent test of firearms, a conversation began where I said this:

Selective fire means, under Federal law, machine gun. Having a variant that is a machine gun is not the same thing as being a machine gun. You are also incorrect, in that ALL of the weapons above have a select fire variant.
Pretty much every weapon (or its variants) were designed for military use, and that includes knives. My statement stands: Only two of the above weapons were never issued to a military for use by soldiers. Calling an AR-15 an M-16 is misleading at best.

In response, an anonymous poster said this:

The M1 Garand was NEVER produced for issue in a selective fire variant. The “selective fire M-1” was ether the BM-59 or the M14. Nether one is an M-1. The AR-15 IS NOT an M-16. 99% of all the firearms ever designed were made for civilian-not military- use. You really don’t know very much about firearms , do you?

1. I apparently know more than you. For starters, the M1 Garand had at least one select fire version:

U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30 T20E2
Operation: Gas, select-fire
Automatic operation: 700 rounds per minute
Rifle Weight: unloaded, without accessories: 9.63 pounds
20-round magazine weight: empty: .55 pounds; loaded: 1.69 pounds
Grenade launcher: .47 pounds
M1 Bayonet: 1.0 pound
Overall length: 44.88 inches
Barrel length: 23.7 inches,
Rifling: 4-grooves, right hand twist, 1:10

The testing and evaluation at the Aberdeen proving ground was completed, and the US ordered 100,000 of them for the invasion of the Japanese mainland, but the war ended before they went into production and the order was cancelled. The design was modified into what later became the M14 rifle.

2. I still stand behind the statement that pretty much every weapon (or its variants) were made for military use.

3. i never called the AR15 an M16, but other than the fire control group and bolt carrier, they are the same weapon. Due to restrictions on full auto fire control group parts, it is not easy to convert the AR15 into its full auto cousin, but there is a lot of parts commonality.

Name ten firearms that were designed from the ground up exclusively for civilian and not military use, and are not just a variant of a military design.

I compiled a list of the 19 deadliest attacks in US history. In compiling this list, I only included killings that were the result of a single event. In researching this post, I found that there were serial killers who carried out their crimes over years or months, and those were not included in this list.

1 On 9/11, there were 2,996 dead and over 6,000 injured. The weapons used were box cutters and airplanes.

2  October 31, 1999: Gameel al-Batouti cried out “I entrust myself to Allah” 11 times in Arabic as he deliberately piloted a plane full of passengers into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 217 people.

3 The Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995. There were 168 dead and over 680 injured. The weapon used was a bomb made from fertilizer and diesel fuel.

4 The Hartford Circus Fire. 167 dead, 682 injured. Weapon used: fire

5 The Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. There were 120 settlers killed when their wagon train was ambushed by Mormons. (I hesitated to include this one since it was a group of 20 Mormons who committed the killings, but if you are going to include 9/11, I figured you should include this one.)

6 The Happy Land fire of 1990: 87 are killed when a man sets a nightclub on fire.

7 The Pulse Nightclub shooting, 2016. 49 dead, 53 injured. The weapon was an MCX rifle.

8 The Bath School massacre of 1927: 45 dead, and 58 injured. The weapon used were a pair of bombs.

9 Pacific Air Flight 773 of 1964: 45 killed when a man murdered the pilot and copilot of an airplane, which subsequently crashed.

10 Continental Flight 11 bombing of 1955: A man blew up the plane with a bomb.

11 Pacific Southwest Flight Flight 1771 of 1987: 43 people were killed when a man shot and killed the pilot and copilot of the plane, which subsequently crashed.

12 New York Bombing of September 1920: There were 38 killed and several hundred injured. The weapon was a bomb.

13 National Airlines Flight 2511 of 1960. 33 people killed by a bomb on an airplane.

14 Virginia Tech massacre of 2007. 32 dead. The gunman was a South Korean student that had been showing signs of mental instability.

15 The Upstairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans on June 24, 1973 was an arson that was intended to kill the patrons of a gay bar. It worked, killing 32 and injuring dozens. It was started with a Molotov cocktail.

16 Newtown School shooting of 2012. 33 dead. The shooter used an AR-15 rifle that he acquired by murdering his mother.

17 Dorothy Mae Arson of 1982. 25 killed. The arsonist claimed he didn’t mean to kill anyone, and only set the fire because he was stoned on marijuana and angry at his uncle, who was in the building.

18 The Luby’s Cafeteria Massacre of 1991. A total of 23 people were killed by a spree shooter.

19 The LA times was attacked with a bomb in 1910, killing 21.

Murder weapon
Of the above 19 killings:
4 of them included an airplane as the murder weapon
6 of them were committed by people using a bomb
4 of them were committed by arsonists or people with an incendiary device
4 were spree shootings
1 (The Mountain Meadows Massacre) was committed by a group of people with multiple weapons, including gunfire, knives, and clubbing)

The fact is that guns have nothing to do with spree killings. In fact, 80 percent of spree killings were not performed by firearms.