Month: April 2013

Quote of the Day – Gun Control Edition

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The Toomey-Manchin amendment admirably attempted to carve out certain protections for gun owners, but today’s carve-outs are tomorrow’s loopholes. The current ‘gun show loophole’ was itself once considered a legitimate carve-out that protected certain private sales.

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The amendment also took an incremental step toward universal background checks, which, as a Justice Department memo written earlier this year suggested, are effective only when coupled with a national registration system.

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After all, you cannot track all gun sales without tracking all gun owners. But the government has no business monitoring constitutionally protected activity, like gun ownership, any more than it has any business tracking what books Americans read or how often they attend church.

Sen. Mike Lee, R – Utah

Edited to add: Former Rep. Adam Putnam once said,

Government does only two things well: nothing, and overreact.

Yesterday it did the first, rather than the second. Let’s hope it keeps this up.

What Happened to Britain?

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The other night my wife and I were watching Top Gear, and she asked me if Jeremy Clarkson did any non-car shows, like Richard Hammond and James May do.  I didn’t know.  Turns out, he does.

Here’s a corker of an episode about a battle I knew nothing of:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s?rel=0]

“Greatest Generation” on both sides of the Pond. How far they have fallen…and us.

What Takes 55,000Hp Just to Run the Fuel Pump?

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The mighty F-1 engine of the Saturn V rocket – recently reverse-engineered.


Interesting excerpts from an engineering perspective:

Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was “good enough.”

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“Because they didn’t have the analytical tools we have today for minimizing weight, everything was very robust,” noted Betts, when I asked what they found as they tore down the engine. “That’s apparent in really every aspect of the engine. The welds—”

“Oh, the welds!” interrupted Case. “The welds on this engine are just a work of art, and everything on here was welded.” The admiration in his voice was obvious. “Today, we look at ways of reducing that, but that was something I picked up on from this engine: just how many welds there were, and how great they looked.”

“You look at a weld that takes a day,” he continued, “and there are thousands of them. And these guys were pumping engines out every two months. It’s amazing what they could do back then and all the touch labor it took.”

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An engine like the F-1 is sort of like two separate rocket engines: one small, one large. The smaller one consumes the same fuel as the larger, but its rocket exhaust is not used to lift the vehicle; instead, it drives the enormous turbopump that draws fuel and oxidizer from the tanks and forces them through the injector plate into the main thrust chamber to be burned.

As with everything else about the F-1, even the gas generator boasts impressive specs. It churns out about 31,000 pounds of thrust (138 kilonewtons), more than an F-16 fighter’s engine running at full afterburner, and it was used to drive a turbine that produced 55,000 shaft horsepower. (That’s 55,000 horsepower just to run the F-1’s fuel and oxidizer pumps—the F-1 itself produced the equivalent of something like 32 million horsepower, though accurately measuring a rocket’s thrust at that scale is complicated.)

Fascinating article.

As I’ve noted previously, my father worked for IBM on the Saturn V Instrument Unit – the rocket guidance system. I got to see all of the Saturn launches as a child growing up on Florida’s Space Coast. I don’t think I’ll ever see anything that impressive again in my lifetime.

Boston

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As others have said elsewhere, nobody knows anything yet except the body count, and I won’t speculate.  My thoughts are with the victims and their families, as I hope yours are.

Go Ahead, Pull My Other Leg

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“We never decide what to cover for ideological reasons, no matter what critics might claim. Accusations of ideological motives are easy to make, even if they’re not supported by the facts.” — Martin Baron, Executive Editor, Washington Post on why the Post had not covered the trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell

I am reminded of “The Narrative,” a QotD by author Stephen Hunter from his book I, Sniper I posted back in November, 2010:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
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The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we will tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up…. Cheney’s a devil. Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
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And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question that….

If you haven’t already, I invite you to read my January, 2008 essay The Church of MSM and the New Reformation.

Bullet Hose Patrol Carbine

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Back in 2003 the Violence Policy Center produced a “study” entitled Bullet Hoses: Semiautomatic Assault Weapons—What Are They? What’s So Bad About Them? in anticipation of the 2004 sunset of the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban (that wasn’t). Here are the “10 Key Points” from that paper:

1. Semiautomatic assault weapons (like AK and AR-15 assault rifles and UZI and MAC assault pistols) are civilian versions of military assault weapons. There are virtually no significant differences between them.

2. Military assault weapons are “machine guns.” That is, they are capable of fully automatic fire. A machine gun will continue to fire as long as the trigger is held down until the ammunition magazine is empty.

3. Civilian assault weapons are not machine guns. They are semiautomatic weapons. (Since 1986 federal law has banned the sale to civilians of new machine guns.) The trigger of a semiautomatic weapon must be pulled separately for each round fired. It is a mistake to call civilian assault weapons “automatic weapons” or “machine guns.”

4. However, this is a distinction without a difference in terms of killing power. Civilian semiautomatic assault weapons incorporate all of the functional design features that make assault weapons so deadly. They are arguably more deadly than military versions, because most experts agree that semiautomatic fire is more accurate—and thus more lethal—than automatic fire.

5. The distinctive “look” of assault weapons is not cosmetic. It is the visual result of specific functional design decisions. Military assault weapons were designed and developed for a specific military purpose—laying down a high volume of fire over a wide killing zone, also known as “hosing down” an area.

6. Civilian assault weapons keep the specific functional design features that make this deadly spray-firing easy. These functional features also distinguish assault weapons from traditional sporting guns.

7. The most significant assault weapon functional design features are: (1) ability to accept a high-capacity ammunition magazine, (2) a rear pistol or thumb-hole grip, and, (3) a forward grip or barrel shroud. Taken together, these are the design features that make possible the deadly and indiscriminate “spray-firing” for which assault weapons are designed. None of them are features of true hunting or sporting guns.

8. “Spray-firing” from the hip, a widely recognized technique for the use of assault weapons in certain combat situations, has no place in civil society. Although assault weapon advocates claim that “spray-firing” and shooting from the hip with such weapons is never done, numerous sources (including photographs and diagrams) show how the functional design features of assault weapons are used specifically for this purpose.

9. Unfortunately, most of the design features listed in the 1994 federal ban—such as bayonet mounts, grenade launchers, silencers, and flash suppressors—have nothing to do with why assault weapons are so deadly. As a result, the gun industry has easily evaded the ban by simply tinkering with these “bells and whistles” while keeping the functional design features listed above.

10. Although the gun lobby today argues that there is no such thing as civilian assault weapons, the gun industry, the National Rifle Association, gun magazines, and others in the gun lobby enthusiastically described these civilian versions as “assault rifles,” “assault pistols,” “assault-type,” and “military assault” weapons to boost civilian assault-weapon sales throughout the 1980s. The industry and its allies only began to use the semantic argument that a “true” assault weapon is a machine gun after civilian assault weapons turned up in inordinate numbers in the hands of drug traffickers, criminal gangs, mass murderers, and other dangerous criminals.

And the summation:

The plain truth is that semiautomatic assault weapons look bad because they are bad. They were designed and developed to meet a specific military goal, which was killing and wounding as many people as possible at relatively short range as quickly as possible, without the need for carefully aimed fire. In short, they are ideal weapons for war, mass killers, drug gangs, and other violent criminals.

So, to emphasize the VPC’s assertions and conclusions:

1. There is no difference between semi-automatic and fully-automatic versions of the same weapon, except somehow the semi-automatic civilian versions are “are arguably more deadly than military versions”. (Someone should inform the Pentagon. And Congress. We need the 1986 ban on new machine guns lifted, since they’re safer than semi-autos.)

2. The sole purpose of these weapons is “killing and wounding as many people as possible at relatively short range as quickly as possible, without the need for carefully aimed fire”

3. There is “no place in civil society” for these weapons.

So why does pretty much every police officer in the country have one in his vehicle?

photo Patrol_Rifle.jpg
I saw that this morning at the Circle K. From the looks of it, not only is it one of those eeeeevil “bullet hoses,” but it’s a short-barreled bullet hose, one that we mere civilians cannot own without jumping through a bunch of legal hoops. I couldn’t tell if it was one of the less-lethal fully-automatic bullet hoses, as the safety was obscured by the locking mechanism that keeps it secured to the motorcycle, but I wouldn’t doubt it.

I don’t get it – if bullet hoses and high-capacity magazines are so damned dangerous, why don’t we restrict our police departments to six-shot revolvers? I mean, if they really need something terrifyingly lethal, why not follow Joe Biden’s advice and get a double-barreled twelve gauge shotgun?

“There’s a reason education sucks…”

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“…and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, ever be fixed.”  – George Carlin

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI?rel=0]

George is pretty close, but it’s not just the “greedy rich.”  No, it’s the people who don’t make anything but laws – for your own good, you know.  This is why those rich people spend billions of dollars lobbying – THEY KNOW WHERE THE POWER IS.

I am reminded once again of C.S. Lewis’ warning:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

A tyranny of people who want to tell you what to eat, how much to drink, what job you’re allowed and how to do it in minute detail – even though they’ve never done that job or anything like it in their entire lives, what car you can own, and where and how fast you can drive it, how much money you can earn and what you can do with it, that your children aren’t really yours, they belong to the Collective (resistance is futile, you will be assimilated!). People who want to “fundamentally transform” the nation, to heal the planet and slow the rising of the oceans. People who believe that the purpose of Rule of Law is “human redemption.”

No, I’d rather be tyrannized by the rich and greedy. The rich and greedy can only hire a few people with guns to make people do things. The Uplifters are convinced they’re saving our souls (often while denying such things exist), and have military and police forces to impose their will on us.

Bleg!

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My favorite Merchant O’Death has asked for my assistance, and I’m passing on the request:

I have a friend who is looking for an AR barrel (NOT an upper) chambered in 5.45X39, that also has the PROPER BORE DIAMETER. He recently purchased an AR in 5.45 and after a trip to the range (and a 16″ group at 100yds) discovered that, while the chamber is 5.45, the bore diameter is 5.56mm. I figured you might have an answer or two. I would greatly appreciate any info you are willing to pass along.

I couldn’t find anything in stock anywhere. Any ideas?