Proof that demoncrats are too ignorant to be entrusted with writing gun legislation

[Beetlegeuse]

One of their very best and brightest (you can tell because they're condoning her campaigning for the office of POTUS46) wants to outlaw the ammunition used in AR-15s. The shit-for-brains in question is known as Marianne Williamson,.

Off the top of my head, there are off-the-shelf AR-15s available in the following cartridges:

.17 Mach2, .17 HMR, .17 WSM, .22 LR, .22 WMR, .17 Mach IV, .17 Remington Fireball, .17 Remington, .17-223, .20 Practical, .204 Ruger, .222 Remington, .22 PPC, .22 Nosler, .224 Valkyrie, .224 Kritzeck, .223 WSSM, .243 LBC, .243 WSSM, .25 WSSM, .25-45 Sharps, .277 Wolverine, .30 Carbine, .30 Remington AR, 30 American, 300 OSSM, 300 AAC Blackout, .300 Whisper, .350 Legend, 358 Yeti, 375 SOCOM, .40 S&W, .45 ACP, .450 Bushmaster, .458 SOCOM, .50 Action Express, .50 Beowulf, 5.45×39mm, 5.56×45 NATO, FN 5.7×28mm, 6×45mm, 6.5mm Grendel, 6.8mm Remington SPC, 7.62×37mm Musang, 7.62×39 Warsaw, 7.62×40mm Wilson Tactical, 7.92x33mm Kurz, 9mm Para, 10mm Auto and 9x39mm.

That comes to 50-odd cartridges she's proposing to extinct simply because she doesn't know her twat from a hole in the ground.

[almostgone]

The Democratic party needs a new name...I can think of several. My wife and I ( we're both in the 50+ year old club) were recently talking about how this liberal think tank calls themselves Democrats, but they are a complete 180° from the Democratic party that was around in our parent's time.

And then you have the 4 horsewomen .....ah screw it, I'm not going to get riled up and fvck up my weekend.

[Beetlegeuse]

A poster at Free Republic who has access to raw satellite news feeds claims that he saw a segment in which Sheila Jackson Lee -- that glittering jewel of colossal ignorance who asked NASA scientists if the Mars rover was going to take pictures of the flag the astronauts left there, and the only black congresswoman named after TWO Confederate generals -- is joining shit-for-brains Marianne Williamson in calling for a ban on AR ammunition. Only she wants the highly popular 5.50 caliber ammunition banned.

Unless somebody invented it while I wasn't looking, I'm pretty sure there's no such cartridge as a 5.50 caliber (for that matter there's no such thing as a 5.56 caliber either) but it sounds mighty interesting, being as that works out to about a 140mm rifle. Praise the Lord and pass the recoil pad.

[Remington]

While I do agree the idea of sopping just that round from reaching the American market is insane, something needs to be done.
Clearly she knows nothing about firearms, but at least something is being said.
Conversely---Mitch McConnell is doing nothing, and it's proof how much the NRA controls him with their million dollar "contribution"

[Beetlegeuse]

The NRA has been in existence since 1871. How do you explain the fact that they failed so miserably in their role of promoting mass murders for the first 100 years of their existence? Do you think it took them that long to figure out how it's done?

Proposing to reduce mass murders committed with firearms by banning a particular cartridge is as asinine as proposing to end drowning by banning water. The very proposition makes a mockery of the legislative body they purport to be members of and in suggesting it they are self-identifying as ass clowns. Which immediately reduces the entire discussion to a carnival sideshow. Nobody will take anything they say seriously again, except maybe their inbred, microcephalic, mouth-breathing, and rabidly hoplophobic constituents. They're performing parlor tricks to pander to the mentally defective among their voting base so they can keep their phoney-baloney jobs, to hell with the governance of the nation.

So despite what you might think, their involvement won't advance the cause of public safety one fucking iota. And if they think it will, they're every bit as stupid as they appear.

And speaking of McConnell, what would you have him do, ...shit a pill that cures mental illness? There is no silver bullet that will fix this problem in no small part because the demoncrats have spent decades trying to shift the responsibility for gun crime away from the criminal and on to the gun. Because going after criminals with guns would diminish the number of borned-and-bred demoncrats who are eligible to vote, which would undermine their power base.

There's an old saying, bad news makes worse law. If the preventative were that obvious, it probably already would have been enacted. The knee-jerk reaction that instinctively follows any tragedy is primarily an emotional response and almost always ends up doing nothing to prevent a repeat occurrence but it does (with equal certainty) chip away at the liberties of the law-abiding citizens who had sweet-fuck-all to do with the event.


Did you ever hear of a handgun cartridge called the .45 Hirtenberger Patronen? I would be surprised if you had, it's so obscure it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. Hirtenberger is an Austrian company that manufactures firearms, among other things. Some years ago they decided there was a market to be exploited in countries that do not allow civilians to own any firearm in chambered .45 ACP (Mexico and Italy, for two). What they did was simply shorten the brass cartridge case of a .45 ACP by 1mm (one millimeter), re-brand it as the .45 Hirtenberger Patronen (also variously called .45 HP or .45 Italian or the .45 Automatic Short) and have it "standardized" by the Commission Internationale Permanente pour l'Epreuve des Armes à Feu Portatives (CIP). Once CIP 'standardized' it, by European law it became a cartridge separate and distinct from the .45 ACP and not subject to laws governing .45 ACPs (Glock hoped their .45 GAP cartridge would find an expanded market in those countries for the same reason). And all gun manufacturers needed to do to manufacture a handgun chambered in .45 HP to do was ream the chamber in a .45 ACP barrel shallower by that same 1mm (to create the proper headspacing). The exact same tooling as the .45 ACP, just bore the hole 1mm shallower. Easy-peasy.

That's how easy it is to skirt the vast majority of targeted gun laws because the assholes who propose them are woefully ignorant of what they purport to be defending us from. Because you can't become substantially knowledgeable about firearms without realizing the folly of such laws.

Consider all the jurisdictions that tried to ban ARs by outlawing its 'cosmetic' features, like the pistol grip. To which AR manufacturers -- who did in fact know something about firearms -- responded thusly:







Not a pistol grip in sight. And don't you feel safer now?

[almostgone]

The NRA has been in existence since 1871. How do you explain the fact that they failed so miserably in their role of promoting mass murders for the first 100 years of their existence? Do you think it took them that long to figure out how it's done?

Proposing to reduce mass murders committed with firearms by banning a particular cartridge is as asinine as proposing to end drowning by banning water. The very proposition makes a mockery of the legislative body they purport to be members of and in suggesting it they are self-identifying as ass clowns. Which immediately reduces the entire discussion to a carnival sideshow. Nobody will take anything they say seriously again, except maybe their inbred, microcephalic, mouth-breathing, and rabidly hoplophobic constituents. They're performing parlor tricks to pander to the mentally defective among their voting base so they can keep their phoney-baloney jobs, to hell with the governance of the nation.

So despite what you might think, their involvement won't advance the cause of public safety one fucking iota. And if they think it will, they're every bit as stupid as they appear.

And speaking of McConnell, what would you have him do, ...shit a pill that cures mental illness? There is no silver bullet that will fix this problem in no small part because the demoncrats have spent decades trying to shift the responsibility for gun crime away from the criminal and on to the gun. Because going after criminals with guns would diminish number of borned-and-bred demoncrats who are eligible to vote, which would undermine their power base.

There's an old saying, bad news make worse law. If the preventative were that obvious, it probably already would have been enacted. The knee-jerk reaction that instinctively follows any tragedy is primarily an emotional response and almost always ends up doing nothing to prevent a repeat occurrence but it does (with equal certainty) chip away at the liberties of the law-abiding citizens who had sweet-fuck-all to do with the event.


Did you ever hear of a handgun cartridge called the .45 Hirtenberger Patronen? I would be surprised if you had, it's so obscure it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. Hirtenberger is an Austrian company that manufactures firearms, among other things. Some years ago they decided there was a market to be exploited in countries that do not allow civilians to own any firearm in chambered .45 ACP (Mexico and Italy, for two). What they did was simply shorten the brass cartridge case of a .45 ACP by 1mm (one millimeter), re-brand it as the .45 Hirtenberger Patronen (also variously called .45 HP or .45 Italian or the .45 Automatic Short) and have it "standardized" by the Commission Internationale Permanente pour l'Epreuve des Armes à Feu Portatives (CIP). Once CIP 'standardized' it, by European law it became a cartridge separate and distinct from the .45 ACP and not subject to laws governing .45 ACPs (Glock hoped their .45 GAP cartridge would find an expanded market in those countries for the same reason). And all gun manufacturers needed to do to manufacture a handgun chambered in .45 HP to do was ream the chamber in a .45 ACP gun shallower by that same 1mm (to create the proper headspacing). The exact same tooling as the .45 ACP, just bore the hole 1mm shallower. Easy-peasy.

That's how easy it is to skirt the vast majority of targeted gun laws, because the assholes who propose them are woefully ignorant of what they purport to be defending us from. Because you can't become substantially knowledgeable about firearms without realizing the folly of such laws.

Consider all the jurisdictions that tried to ban ARs by outlawing its 'cosmetic' features, like the pistol grip. To which AR manufacturers -- who did in fact know something about firearms -- responded thusly:







Not a pistol grip in sight. And don't you feel safer now?

Well, I still see bayonet lugs.

[kelkel]

Absolutely fascinating knowledge of firearms!

[Beetlegeuse]

Another case in point, the Mexifornia bullet button.

The Mexifornia branch of the Hoplophobes of America sought to deprive all EBRs (evil black rifles) of the ability to be reloaded quickly so they decreed that the magazine release on all ARs had to be gimmicked so it could not be manipulated without the use of a special tool. Which had the added benefit of inconveniencing any thief who might nick your AR (at least until he could get to the nearest gun store and buy one of his own).

Then some wiseacre discovered that you didn't really need the bespoke tool, the pointy meplat on most AR bullets would serve to operate the button, now dubbed the "bullet button."



Next AR-Magnet.com creates a bullet button tool that is magnetic and with a top shaped like the typical mag release button.

This simple magnetic tool is ergonomically designed and fits perfectly into the bullet button hole.

So you stick the tool onto your bullet button and the magnet holds it in place. Which means your AR's mag release button works exactly like it did before, even looks like it did before, it's just a but taller than it was.

Which gives the Mexifornia hoplophobes a conniption fit. Slow to recognize when they've been licked, they wrote still another new law requiring all ARs sold there to have non-removable magazines. No more detachable mags.

Done and dusted, right? Game, set, match, hoplophobes, yeah? I mean it's simply not possible to swiftly reload an AR if you can't unplug the magazine, right?

At least that's what the Mexifornians thought.

But someone truly worthy of the title "nukular rocket surgeon" at Mean Arms thought differently. He came up with the idea of a speed loader that will charge an AR magazine through the ejection port, without removing it from the rifle.



In the video above he's demo-ing using an AR-10 but I chose this video because it was the briefest one I could find on short notice. And it works exactly the same on an AR-15. If you'd like to see Mean Arm's (slightly longer) demo video (on an actual AR-15), it's here.


They can't win because neo-communist hoplophobe canon requires that they remain ignorant of the species. They can't possibly defeat the powers that know firearms intimately. In no small part because if they ever came close, they rest of us might be obliged to demonstrate the true purpose of the 2nd Amendment.



I recently undertook to write a history of the terms "magazine" and "clip" as relates to firearms and how they've come to mean what they do in an effort to convince some buddies of mine (who are moderately gun-friendly but almost entirely gun-ignorant) that they should stop referring to magazines as "clips" (because it makes them sound like idiots to people who know better). One step in the research to underpin that writing was to document the first handheld firearm that had a component that was termed "a magazine."

The answer to that question stunned me, and also spilled over into the argument of whether the "Founding Fathers" could have even understood the concept of an "assault rifle."*

Its origins are sketchy but the first Kalthoff repeating rifle ended up in the hands of the Kalthoff family in Denmark some time between 1630 and 1650. They aren't believed to have invented it but they ran an iron works and were gunsmiths as part of that business so it probably had been passed on to them to try to mass produce it and the identity of the inventor is lost to history.

I use the term "try to" build because the Kalthoff was exceedingly ...fiddly.





What makes the Kalthoff unique (and I mean truly unique, the very first of its kind) is what the gizmo that looks like a 'lever' does. The rifle had two internal storage chambers, one that contained musket balls and the other was filled with gunpowder. Push the lever forward and a series of gears and levers and springs and bell cranks and hamsters causes it to retrieve a musket ball from the musket ball chamber and deposit it into the breech. And pulling the lever back (restoring it to its original position) scoops gunpowder from the powder chamber, deposits that powder into the breech (behind the musket ball), cocks the hammer and even dribbles a little gunpowder into the flash pan. So the shooter could fire a follow-up shot as quickly as he could cycle the lever, reputedly 30-60 rounds per minute (except this particular version would only hold seven shots). This in an era when a bog-standard muzzle loader could fire 3-4 rounds a minute.

It was functional enough it played an important role in the Siege of Copenhagen (1658-59) but in general was too high maintenance and WAY TOO DAMN expensive to manufacture to ever come to common military use.

But back to the point of my history write-up. Even in the early 1600s the precedent was to call anywhere where gunpowder or the makings of firearms cartridges (including the early paper cartouches) was to be stored, "a magazine." So the Kalthoffs obligingly called those internal storage chambers "magazines."

And there's no profit in bucking precedent just to suit your own whim, and it's usually a better marketing strategy to go with terminology the consumer already is familiar with, so when Walter Hunt invented the lever-action rifle in 1848, guess what he called that tube thingie that hung beneath the barrel where it stored cartridges?

A tubular magazine.

In 12 years time, Walter Hunt's Volitional rifle got modified into the Lewis Jennings repeating rifle, which Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson transformed into the S&W Volcanic rifle, then Benjamin Tyler Henry modified that into the Henry rifle. Six years later, BT Henry tried to steal the company from its rightful owner (who was in Europe at the time) but the plot was uncovered in time for that owner, a wealthy garment manufacturer by name of Oliver Winchester, to get home before the plot came to fruition. Winchester fired Henry, took control of the company, renamed it after himself and went into production with the lever-action Winchester Model of 1866, still featuring a tubular magazine. Because the Kalthoff had magazines.


But I digress. The reason I've been prattling on about the Kalthoff and beyond is that no matter how much background research I do, regardless of the era, I find myself awestruck at the ingenuity of the people who design and manufacture firearms. Particularly before about the middle of the 1800s, there generally was no formal marketing research. Some random guy would just dream up an idea, then go into his workshop and build a prototype, tweak the design until it performed to suit him, then build a few to test their marketability. If it didn't sell, he'd dream some more and come up with another idea.

Beyond the sheer ingenuity, it is perhaps even more staggering what they could build with such primitive tools. No CAD-CAM, no CNC, no 3D-printing. Usually nothing that would look out of place in a blacksmith's shop (except maybe a barrel boring machine). And not just the anonymous inventor of the Kalthoff, just a few years after it came Michele Lorenzoni's repeating rifle (which operated similarly to the Kalthoff but used a dissimilar design) and by 1718 comes the Puckle gun, which at first glance resembles a primitive (flintlock) Gatling gun.

Back in that era, any "man of letters" worthy of the term was expected to dabble in all fields, Da Vinci-esque; inventing & manufacture, science & medicine, art and architecture. And firearms were thought to be a way to a better future. Because, as the saying went, God created men but Sam Colt made them equal. So striving to make better firearms was actually a lofty ideal. Richard Gatling thought his weapon of war was so horrific it would be the end of warfare.


But most of these piss-ants in Congress (particularly on the left side of the aisle) have no notable skills apart from hucksterism, self-promotion and rabble-rousing. As the case of the Mexifornia bullet button demonstrates, they simply lack the acumen to compete.



* The point is moot because it's certain the Founding Fathers never conceived of electrostatic printing or the electronic transmission of media, yet there's no one arguing that the First Amendment doesn't apply to the modern printing press or radio or television or the Internet.