Nothin

As of Friday while I am writing this, I have nothing for you today. I am spending the day on Saturday with my grandchildren and won’t have time to write a post for Sunday. So I will leave you with a dad joke:

I once dated a girl with a lazy eye. I broke up with her because I found out she was seeing someone on the side…

Reichstag Insurrection?

More than 1,000 people have been arrested and charged for supposedly trying to overthrow the government on January 6. The FBI has left no stone unturned in identifying every single person who participated that day.

What is curious about this wide ranging investigation is that five men gathered on the National Mall directly in front of the Capitol and erected a gallows, with one of them making a coffee run during its construction to a coffee house blocks away, located directly across the street from the headquarters of the FBI. I am sure that the HQ of the FBI has security cameras on it, yet not one photo of any of these men has been circulated, and not one attempt has been made to identify any of them.

Why not? If the FBI is so fired up about identifying a grandmother whose only crime was walking into the Capitol, looking around, then leaving, why aren’t they making an effort to locate the five men who threatened to kill members of Congress with their material act?

My theory is that the FBI isn’t looking for them because the FBI already knows who they are. They haven’t been prosecuted because they are FBI agents or informants. Read the article at this link, watch the video you will find there, and tell me what YOU think…

Warning

Prioritize ammo if you haven’t. You have to wonder if this is a coincidence or not.

EDITED to add:

Rifle Projects

Thanks to everyone that posted comments to my request for proposed ideas for my next rifle project. I want to take a minute and point out that this is for a build project. Thanks for some of your thoughts on buying M1As, SCARs, or LaRue rifles, but I am not looking for suggestions on BUYING a factory made rifle.

I am building one using what was an 80 percent lower*. I have a number of lowers that have been machined already, and are thus already legally owned firearms. They are waiting to be outfitted with parts and accessories. Building rifles has become a bit of a hobby in itself. Here are the posts on my last build:

This will result in an off paper, one of a kind rifle that I built myself. Since this is a build on an AR10 receiver, I am looking at a Faxon barrel and a good scope. Trying to play with some other pieces/parts to get a 2 MOA rifle. The last build is hitting 4 MOA with factory ammo. Maybe I can get 2 MOA with the one I have, if I get some better ammo. My direct supervisor at work is a precision shooter that builds his own rifles and handloads. He is hitting 4 inch groups at 700 yards and has said he will give me some of his hand rolled .308 to try out. That should tell me if it’s an ammo issue.


*Note to the fellas at the ATF: This was an 80 percent lower that was purchased and machined prior to you changing the law. As of the date that you passed the ban on homemade lowers, this was already legally a firearm, according to your own definitions. Since ex post facto laws can’t be made and they were legal to create at the time, I am within the law.

So don’t even think about killing my dog, my son, or shooting my wife in the face. Likewise, please don’t come and set fire to my house with everyone inside.

Legal (not Justice) System

Imagine that you are convicted of a crime that you didn’t commit and then sentenced to life in prison. Twenty years after your conviction, changing technology makes new ways of analyzing evidence possible, proving your innocence. The DA for the state still, knowing that you are innocent, manages to use the legal system to keep you in prison for another decade. He even does so far as to hide the fact that the only witness in the case had died.

Mr. Lott tried vacate his conviction in 2018 based on exonerating DNA results, but former District Attorney Paul Smith opposed the motion. Instead, on the eve of Mr. Lott’s evidentiary hearing, the DA offered only to modify Mr. Lott’s sentence, which would have released him from prison but kept the conviction on his record. Mr. Lott accepted the agreement on July 9, 2018. In doing so, Mr. Lott was freed after spending 35 years in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit- with 10 of those years being served AFTER the legal system knew that he didn’t commit the crime. That’s a legal system, not a justice system.

“Former District Attorney Smith’s opposition to the irrefutable evidence of Mr. Lott’s innocence was a blatant miscarriage of justice,” said Barry Scheck, Innocence Project’s co-founder and special counsel. “This unwillingness to acknowledge the truth in addition to the systemic factors at play in Mr. Lott’s wrongful conviction cost him 35 precious years — and have plagued other wrongful conviction cases in Ada for decades.”

It’s cases like this that force me to oppose the death penalty. The cops, the prosecutor, the judges, they all work for the same employer. It is virtually certain that some people have been executed for crimes that they didn’t commit. If we as a society execute one innocent person, we are all collectively guilty of murder. That is why I remain opposed to the death penalty- the system is flawed, designed to reward those employees of the government for convicting people of crimes, whether or not the convicted person actually committed them.

In this case, they took his life from him, or at least the part that counts, nearly as certainly as if they had killed him.

Looking

Looking at my next rifle upgrade. I am thinking about an AR10 with this scope on it. I would like to be able to hit a 10″ circle consistently from 500 yards or more with factory ammo. My last AR10 project resulted in what I call a lightweight skirmish rifle. This rifle shoots 4″ groups at 100 yards with factory ammo.

This time I want something that can get reliable, accurate hits from distance while still being something that you can carry in the field. I need to double the accuracy with this new build, meaning 2″ groups at 100 yards, to get 10″ at 500 yards.

Opinions? Thoughts?

War is Ugly

There are many who are horrified at what has been happening in Israel. How could anyone kill women and children, they ask. Everyone who asks that doesn’t understand warfare. For too long in the west, people have viewed war as if it were some kind of sporting event where a score is kept and there is a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’. That isn’t how reality works.

In war, there are no rules. There are no good guys or even bad guys. There is simply your people, opposed by their people. The winners are both the ones who are left, and the ones who get to write the historical account of what happened. That’s why the bad guys never win the war, because they are the ones who get to write the history books.

The conflict in Israel is a complex one. I try to put myself in the mind of both sides, and this is how I view it:

On the one hand, you have the Palestinians who think that Israel is sitting on stolen land. Imagine if one day, a group of people was resettled on your land, and you were told that you just had to live with it. On the other side, you have the Israelis, who think that they are fighting against animals that are killing their children. Depending on your perspective, they are both right. And both wrong. It’s a war, and war is like that.

As far as killing noncombatants, that’s how war works. The side that is willing to be the most violent is the one that will win. This applies to us here in the US as well. Imagine the coming conflict here in this country. Do you think for a moment that the left would hesitate to kill you and your kids? Would they use DCF to take your children away from you, simply because of your political beliefs? If you say no, look at these two photos and tell me if you still believe that.

War is an ugly business. The supposed rule that noncombatants are off limits is nonsense. Ask the residents of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nanking, or the Confederate populations that were starved and killed in the first civil war. You either have the fortitude to use every tool, tactic, and weapon at your disposal, or you take the chance of losing when the other side doesn’t follow the rules that you have decided to hamstring yourself with.

War isn’t a sporting event with rules, referees, and a scorekeeper. It’s a bloody fight for survival. The side that is willing to do whatever it takes to win is the side that has an advantage. That is why war is not to be entered into lightly. We here in this country have been the exception- war hasn’t come to our shores in more than a century. That is about to change.

What are you willing to do in order to defend yourself and your family. Think about it now, so you will know the answer when the time comes to either do what needs to be done, or calmly climb into the boxcars to be reeducated.