I started this post quite a while ago, and then didn't get around to posting it. As things have moved on, and therefore some of the things I wrote about are easy to misinterpret, I've thought about shelving this post from time to time. Maybe I still will. Or perhaps not.
The AR Again
One of the interesting things that's come up in the past few days since the terrible recent tragedy is that for the first time in a very long time, perhaps since the 1960s, there's some real consideration going on in the shooting community about a common class of firearm, that being the AR15 in its many variants.
Actually, let me rephrase that. It isn't really on the AR15 per se, "in its many variants". The focus is really on the carbine variant of the AR15 that mimics or comes close to mimicking the the Army's M4 carbine. Having said that, there's a zillion tacticool versions of the AR out there. So much so, that when you come across somebody at a range firing a service match rifle version of the AR that is the same in configuration as the M16A4 or M16A5 they look positively boring. And outside of a single instance in a sporting goods store, you will not find the original version of the AR15 which was had the configuration of the M16 (not the M16A1) anywhere. I don't know what happen to them, but they must look sad and tired now and you just don't see them. Of course, the M16 and M16A1 were in fact rather sad compared to the M16A4 and A5.
Anyhow, the last time something like this happened was in the 1960s and trailing on into the 1970s. While its been generally forgotten now, when the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed into law it had the support of the leadership of the NRA at the time. There was really no Federal provisions regarding the sale of firearms prior to that, save for the National Firearms Act which regulated (but does not prohibit, contrary to widespread belief) fully automatic weapons. The Gun Control Act of 1968 brought in a Federal system of registration (yes, its' registration, also contrary to the widespread popular belief that there is no gun registration in the United States), restricted sale of handguns and handgun ammunition to those 21 and over, required that the retail sellers of firearms be licensed by the Federal government and prohibited sale by mail, amongst other things. As noted, the leadership of the NRA was for it.
Following that a rebellion broke out in the NRA. There had been state gun control bills prior to the 1968 and the NFA but a real fear broke out in some parts of the firearm community that the GCA would inevitably lead to some sort of more restrictive bills and perhaps even confiscation of some items. Indeed, during the 1970s, when the focus was on handguns, the majority of Americans supported their being made illegal, a very severe view indeed. Some states passed highly restrictive laws and ultimately a fight broke out in the NRA which lead to the old leadership falling and a new one, in the 1970s, coming in that had a no compromise on anything view.
At the same time a change in the views of the firearms owning community slowly came in about some things, as well as in the general public. Crime peaked out in the 1970s and began to decline and people became much less concerned about handguns. Sport shooting of handguns also picked up. An academic, John Lott, who was not a firearms owner or even fan studied the association of guns with crime and came out with the book "More Guns, Less Crime" which reflected his fairly unchallenged conclusions. A "right to carry" movement broke out across the US which reflected two separate philosophies, depending upon where it was permitted or unpermitted, but which had widespread success. There's very little concern in most quarters about handguns today.
However, and this is leading (really) up to the point, something also happened in the firearms community about which I wrote earlier in my long missive"
I speak of the AR15 rifle.Long winded vitriolic introduction
I've been repeating myself here a lot recently, so I'll avoid doing that here wholesale again, but there's something that I noted in that long post which is back in play now, and may remain in play and be a significant development.
Back in the early 1960s when Colt introduced the AR15, which it had just acquired the manufacturing rights for, the rifle was disdained by a large part of the existing firearms community, as I wrote in my earlier post. Serious shooters were not fans of the rifle. Indeed, while most of them opposed gun control, there was a widespread and deep feeling that Colt had crossed a line by offering the rifle to the general public and there was widespread discontent about it.
The original AR15 was generally regarded by serious riflemen as junk, and that view is not uncommon today. While military semi automatic rifle had gained popularity with some shooters, and were mandatory for National March shooters, who at that time shot the M1 Garand and the M14, the AR15 was viewed as being a crude weapon built for a single purpose. Marksmen who admire the mechanical and firing qualities of the M1 and M14, and even the FAL, were not impressed at all by the AR15 (or the M16 for that matter).
At that time, there was a widely heard view that Colt was betraying the interest of the firearms community as the AR15 was good only for killing people, and truth be known good only for killing people in the fetid swamps of Southeast Asia. Quite a few shooters thought Colt should discontinue offering the rifle. Bill Ruger, who entered the 5.56 (.223 Rem) field with a competing rifle, the Mini14, which was built much more conventionally didn't go that far, but even he, the owner of a firearms manufacturing company, testified in Congress that Congress should ban large capacity magazines. During his lifetime, to the ire of some shooters as thinking evolved, Sturm Ruger & Co. would not offer magazines that held more than five rounds to civilians.
Then something changed.
It's hard to say exactly how it came about, as it was subtle. But the AR15 managed to become something that had a degree of civilian following. It was still so small that in the mid 1980s none of the shooters I knew had one, and I can recall serious marksmen openly holding those who would admit to owning one in open disdain. But in that same decade civilian semi automatic variants of the Soviet AK series of assault rifles came into the market and picked up a big following fairly quickly.
The AK has no marksmanship virtues at all and is a highly inaccurate rifle. But its introduction into North American civilian sales (you could buy it in the US and Canada) meant that all of sudden there was a market for a cheap rifle that simply functioned. The AR, its' Vietnam War competitor, was much more accurate by comparison and started to pick up as well. In the same decade the Marine Corps redesigned the rifle to be much more accurate and then soon after that organizational body that controls National Match shooting mandated that the M16 type rifle take pride of place in those competitions, resulting in the phase out of the rifleman's M14 and M1 as the primary competition rifles in that class.
Soon after that, of course, came the "assault rifle ban" which was a negative gift of the AK rifles. When that was repealed the AKs never really came back, but the ARs did in spades.
Indeed, they did way too much.
Perhaps due to age or acclimation, the old voices that held the AR in disdain were silenced. Indeed, they were so silenced that when Jim Zumbo, a hunting and rifle writer, wrote against them in a sporting magazine, he lost his job. Not only did the old voices simply quit speaking, perhaps as they were resigned to the AR, or had grown used to it, but it actually became impossible to criticize it on philosophical grounds (however a steady rear guard criticism of the rifle, often by veterans, on its junky action has never stopped).
Indeed, somehow or another a virtual cult of the AR developed in which it literally sucked all the air out of the room. Truth be known it is simply not that good of weapon in any application. In its rifle, rather than carbine, form it is accurate, but the gas system has been problematic from day one and remains so. It's far from being the best military rifle around at the present time and it appears that the service only hangs on to it in anticipation of some sort of revolution in cartridges. The Army and the Marines have toyed with replacing it for years and the Marines actually are in the form of the M27, a weapon that looks like it but which has a piston gas system.
Nonetheless M4 carbine variants have somehow flooded the market and are everywhere. And with them is a seeming Tour Of Duty mentality in which it seems that many of those who buy the M4 imagine themselves in combat with the Taliban.
Some serious gun owners will tell you, if the room is quiet and there are no other ears, that there's very little reason for a person to own a M4 type carbine other than they're fun to shoot, which may be true. There are reasons beyond that, and in recent years a certain type of sport shooting based on the old police obstacle course has developed in which they dominate. And that type of sport shooting, or even just plinking with them, is fully legitimate and fine. But the endless articles that appear here and there on "home defense" and "tactical" use of the M4, which is what is always featured, have done real damage to the sporting community and ought to cease.
That is the manifestation of the very problem the old riflemen of the 1960s and 70s worried about. A lot of them had truly seen the elephant. Almost ever adult male I knew at the time had served in World War Two or the Korean War. They knew what combat was all about and most of them were not shy to voice the view that there was a time and place for it. But they didn't imagine combat in the streets of the United States even when, during the 1960s and early 70s, some of that was actually going on. They weren't in favor of banning these rifles, but they were of the view that a person didn't need to imagine themselves fighting the Battle of Hue in your own neighborhood and that if you wanted to act like a commando you should join the Army.
And while its a little late in the day now, part of what might need to occur is a return to the view that shooters and sporting goods stores had in the 1970s. (NOTE, I started writing this prior to the recent news from Kroger and Dick's that they are discontinuing the sale of AR15s) I can recall a local sporting goods store that had one AR15 in its rack that it basically wouldn't sell. As it stocked Colt firearms, it was required by Colt to have an AR15 on hand. It had one, but it priced it at a relatively high level and it actively discouraged people from buying it. . . and that's here in Wyoming where there's never been any sorts of support for gun control at all.
Now, any sporting goods store will order a rifle for you if you want one. But most don't stock the various military battle rifles, some of which have fully legitimate sporting uses, and if somebody wants one they order it. That means that most of the arms on the wall are not of this type. And that would be a good thing frankly. And the entire cult of the armchair commando that has so taken over in certain sectors ought to cease as well. Want to compete in a sport that requires the use of an AR type rifle? Fine, get one. But should every magazine have a "home defense" and "tactical" columnist? No. That sort of thinking leads people to be generally afraid of every semi automatic arm, and for that matter, to think poorly of firearms owners in general.
Well, it seems that maybe some people who were in the cult of the AR are in fact reconsidering and there's a minor movement of that type, in which some people who were in it are getting rid of or even destroying their ARs. I don't think they have to do that, but I do think that the entire concept in recent years that the AR is the only suitable rifle for anything was always off the mark. If people who are shooters would take a look at this and decide to purchase something else that better suits their firearms use (you really don't need an AR for big game and if you are using one, you chose poorly), good. If you need one for sporting use, okay. But if this means that the chairborne commandos who imagine Stalingrad in the Midwest stop and getting a little more realistic about the world, great. Of if you do feel that's for you. . . an Army recruiter is not far away.
One thing I didn't anticipate when I started this thread was the reaction of retailers to this last incident. It's growing too large to ignore. This too would have fit into that "we warned you" category that old firearms aficionados of the 70s would have warned about. As noted in my earlier post on ARs, stores actually used to be reluctant to stock them. Now all of a sudden some major retailers are refusing to. Beyond that, some retailers are taking it out even on companies that are diversified and manufacture firearms even if they, the retailers, don't sell them. REI, for example, has quit carrying products, such as the Camelback products, manufactured by a company that includes, in its product lines, Savage Firearms.
I frankly think that's a bit much and I thought, when I read that, it was particularly inappropriate as Savage, I thought, doesn't make a M4 carbine type rifle. In fact, it turns out they do. I associate Savage mostly with really nice youth model .22s but at some point they joined the AR parade. Sturm Ruger did too I'll note.
There's no telling where all of this will lead. The firearms manufacturers were doing well under the Obama administration but have been doing poorly under the Trump administration as panic sales dropped off. They're pretty vulnerable right now. On top of it market consolidation hasn't been kind to them at all and some very old companies that did well as stand alone companies have not been doing well as branches of larger entities. I frankly wonder to what extent some of that is due to the follow the leader type of thing we've been seeing going on. Remington, for example, has been around for 200 years and has always gone its own way on everything, but it was purchased by a larger entity and sure enough it joined the AR parade although all of theirs are clearly tailored for hunting.
I'm not wishing any of these companies ill. Indeed, I'm not even arguing that the manufacture and sale of M4s should stop. But the focus on them has been over the top and that needs to stop. The percentage of the sales that went to people who imagined fighting street battles in their neighborhoods has hurt everyone and that sort of thing needs to greatly diminish. It may be the case that the trend went so darned far the reaction by way of market forces will now be real.
But maybe this is just the disgruntled voice of somebody who has handled plenty of ARs in the M16 form and never liked them. Or the voice of somebody who has been to the nearby city range and found that its take up completely by ARs that are just burning through ammunition. But, that is the right of the owners of those, if they wish to do that. Indeed, my comments smack of the Col. Townsend Whelen elitist type, I admit.
Entertainment Hypocrisy
As I was sick recently, and still am, I've caught a lot of television. I also caught some of the Oscars.
People have said, regarding the current episodes, that "something has changed" in us. Something sure has. And one of those things is that since the mid 1960s the entertainment industry has just rocketed into complete non standards.
During the recent Oscars the Hollywood set went into a full court press to show us how enlightened they are. Well, they aren't.
One wag recently noted the irony when he noted that one of the hosts in the recent event was "the guy who hosted the breast-obsessed 'Man Show' " in order to "give awards to people who spent
decades doing business with Harvey Weinstein" and observed, satirically, "you know Hollywood has
gotten serious about sexual harassment."
Exactly.
Hollywood, to be followed by liberal elites, has worked for decades to make money off of what is in fact pornography combined with a pornographic depiction of violence. There's no two ways about it. While sick, I happened to click past, at one time or another,
The Boondock Saints, The Replacement Killers, Hell or High Water and
John Wick. No matter what you may otherwise think of them, each of them has a cartoon version of violence that glorifies it.
At the same time traditional values, and particularly Christian values, have been sidelined. The past Oscars were bold in their endorsement of views that were only recently regarded as morally depraved and demand that they be accepted.
This is part of what's going on. You can't, really, go around depicting all women as sexual toys and all violence as glamorous and then demand that powerful men not view women as toys and that those who are troubled not resort to violence. That has about as much credence as trying to start an Adolf Eichman branch of the Jewish Anti Defamation League.
One friend of mine sent me a link to a blog I otherwise don't know anything about, but the point was made there very bluntly, and there is one.
To those on the Left, shrieking for the government to make the pain stop by exerting more control
— you celebrities, politicians, editors, and yes, you goodthinkful
liberals that I know personally here in New York, many of whom I have
called friends — I’ll say this:
While you were, over the last half-century, systematically
destroying, displacing, denouncing, and dismantling the historic
American nation and its civil society — all moral norms, every basis
of public commonality, all respect for our history and heritage, public
expression of religion, the nuclear family, sexual restraint, and every
natural structure and category and hierarchy that held civilization
together and gave young people a framework within which to learn dignity
and duty and gratitude and belonging and meaning and self-control —
while you were doing all that, what did you think was going to
happen? And now you want to “fix” the moral and social wreckage you’ve
created by disarming us against your future predations upon our rights,
our culture, and upon the society we still hope, against hope, to
restore and preserve?
Go to hell. This sickness is your fault, not ours. You will not degrade us any longer. If you want our arms, come and take them.
Pretty blunt, but there is a point to it, no doubt.
Speaking of hypocrisy a bit, we now have a really weird set of ironies going on in regard to Dick's Sporting Goods. Dick's is widely noted to have discontinued the sale of AR15s when in fact they didn't offer them anyhow. Apparently a subsidiary store, Field and Stream, did, and they'll be discontinuing the sales. So in reality, Dick's isn't anything under its own name, but a company it owns and controls which is smaller is.
So be it, in my view. Stores can sell whatever they want, and as noted above I think the mass stocking of ARs of the M4 type is overdone. But while this move is lauded on the left it's interesting to note how the same groups don't really see the hypocrisy in their position Indeed, neither side does here. Some in the pro gun camp are really mad at Dick's, which they should not be. But on the left, if you think its nifty and keen that a retailer can vote with their cash register, shouldn't that right be universal? In other words, if you think it brave of a retailer to say "no" to AR money, why isn't it brave of a retailer to say no to same gender wedding cakes for which such a retailer would also be giving up some cash?
Of course, in the end, it's because most people are in for their positions as that's their position, not because they've thought the greater concept of those positions out. And that's the same reason that Hollywood can claim itself brave publicly but serve up a steady offering of violence and dimwitted easy moral tarts otherwise.
The NRA
One of the real risks when you are a successful powerful organization is overplaying your hand. People within the NRA but not within the hard core of it have worried about that for years.
The NRA does a lot of things other than act as a lobby, if it can legitimately be regarded as a lobby at all. It does a tremendous number of things in the are of gun safety and the shooting sports. It's a tremendously important and effective, and very sober, organization within the shooting sports. There are things that it does, indeed most of what it does, that anyone who is familiar with them would wholeheartedly agree with, whether or not they shoot at all. But the thing people know the most about the NRA is is absolute opposition to gun control.
I suspect that people who say "the NRA doesn't represent the voice of most gun owners" are a bit delusional. Probably the average firearms owner in fact doesn't agree with the NRA on everything, but most don't pay that much attention to 100% of the NRA's pronouncements. On average, I think the average gun owner generally agrees with the NRA most of the time.
Be that as it may, starting during the Obama Administration its hard not to conclude that the NRA began to overplay its political hand. For most of the Obama Administration the administration did absolutely nothing regarding firearms whatsoever, but to listen to the NRA the government was about to break down doors and take BB guns. That wasn't true. Finally in the last couple of years of his administration Obama began to make a few statements about gun control, vaguely. By and large, however, the Obama Administration was not hostile to gun ownership up until the last quarter of its existence. During that last 1/4, however, it turned hard left on a lot of things.
But in doing that you have to ask the question if President Obama got so little credit for being moderate in this area, as well as others, that he ultimately lost any incentive whatsoever to be moderate. If he had come out in a press conference with a Thompson submachinegun and argued for putting in a shooting range in Rock Creek Park the NRA would probably still have proclaimed him a real bastard. At some point, you will give up.
Indeed, when Trump ran the NRA went whole hog in favor of him and that has made a lot of people in the shooting community a bit queasy. That's strongly hitching your wagon to a single political horse and it's risky. His entire administration, however, they've been as strident as ever in their written text. A recent issue of their magazine states that the Democrats are Socialist and must be opposed for that reason.
That really strays from common sense. The Democrats are Socialist and there's really no reason to believe that Socialist are actually any more or less in favor of guns than anyone else. Francois Mitterand was a Socialist and was a huge Reagan ally. Trotsky was a duck hunter, probably the only thing about him that a person can really admire. Stuff like the Democrats are Socialist are over the top and at some point the NRA isn't going to be listened to just for saying things like that.
But then. . .
Banners proving the opposite point
One thing that the NRA can consistently rely up on for people in the other camp to come out as rampaging extremist in their own right.
It's well proven that gun control basically achieves nothing. If you are going to have any "gun control" that has any sort of impact, what you are really doing is adjusting along the margins, that's it. People who want to ban this or that are pretty ready to believe things which simply aren't true and which aren't going to do anything, and never had.
Recently as study, but a liberal entity, not a conservative one, came to the conclusion that Canadian and Australian gun provisions, much celebrated on the left, do pretty much nothing at all in the area of achieving anything.
That doesn't keep the press and banners from citing to these examples constantly. Nobody, I'll note, ever cites to Canadian actions which would amount to rampaging examples of unconstitutional restriction of free speech as something we wish to emulate, nor does anyone, curiously, ever cite to the Australian examples of immigration control, which would make American adjustments in that area look minor at best. The point is, that when these examples are cherry picked out they're out of context to start with and don't hold up overall, when closely examined.
The worst examples are when banners pick some example from a culture we don't really follow in this area and then cite it. I've seen, for example, citations to Japan's provisions which are wildly inaccurate. One claimed, for example, that in Japan only air rifles are allowed. No, spanky, you can own rifles and shotguns in Japan. It's not easy, compared to the United States, but it's hardly impossible.
Japan has a massive suicide rate and features mass knife attacks as well. That's rarely mentioned. Indeed, it's hardly ever mentioned that problems with violence in any one society tend to follow certain cultural norms that go very far back in their history. Asia tends to feature edged weapon attacks and has, well. . . forever. The Japanese culture favored edged weapons for certain things well after firearms became available and it still does. What's that mean? I don't know, as I'm not a student of Japanese culture, but it's part of the overall human picture.
Which gets us up to something already noted above. We've been enduring a fifty year assault on our own culture in some significant ways. By and large violence has declined everywhere world wide, but standards have evaporated and society wide moral guides are missing. That part of this story is one that needs to be addressed more than anything else.
But then
The Extremist Extremist
One thing that people who don't really follow this stuff likely don't realize, or at least that those who don't follow the firearms side of the argument likely don't realize, is that while people are likely off when they say "the NRA doesn't represent most firearms" owners is that, while they are probably wrong, some of the firearms owners who the NRA doesn't represent believe that the NRA is in bed with liberal left gun banners.
Yes, that's completely absurd, but it shows how extreme this argument has really become.
Spend any time around firearms fans and you'll eventually run into people who seriously believe that the NRA doesn't do anything at all to protect firearms owners. A lot of these people have really extreme ideas about what the 2nd Amendment means and pretty much feel that there should be no restrictions on anything at all.
I've basically covered these folks in a way on the discussion above about the AR, but folks who believe that regulations on bump stocks are to be opposed at all costs and if you don't oppose them you are a Communist are really, really detrimental to the public support of firearms. If significant controls ever come about, these people will be partially to thank/blame for that.
Likewise, there are people who pretty much think the world should be covered in nerf, beef should be banned, and everybody ought to be an urban tight pants wearing boring dullard. They wonder why their obviously, in their mind, superior view isn't adopted by anyone. Well, that's because anyone listening to them who is rational is repelled by their argument.
It was Barry Goldwater who proclaimed that "extremism in the defense of liberty is not vice." And he was right. Extremism for a well though out point isn't a vice either. But knee jerk extremism isn't a virtue. It is a vice.
21
It appears some various states will raise the age requirement for purchasing semi automatic rifles to 21 years of age.
I guess that might be a good thing. It seems well established that up until that age a lot of young men exhibit some rather poor choices. After that, people seem stabilized into things to some greater degree. The whole thing is rather spastic, however, in regards to "the age of majority". Why can you drive at 16, marry at 18 (and let's not get into the absurd press reports that "Americans can marry at 12!" or other weird exceptions to the rule), and have to register for the draft at 18. It's really strange.
Arming Teachers.
There's been a lot of discussion on arming teachers.
I've been blunt on this in the past, and will be here again. I think that people who think the police can handle everything are highly naive.
I've explained my views here before and I've tried not to be insulting to policemen, who I have a lot of respect for around here. I don't have nearly the same level of respect, I'll be quite frank, for the marksmanship abilities of east coast police forces.
Indeed, a very liberal friend of mine posted an item that policemen only hit their mark 16% of the time in average armed encounters, his point being that we should think of how bad citizens will be compared to these trained professionals. Well, if we take into account that a lot of those armed encounters are by big city policemen, I don't doubt that the hits are low. Many big city departments have policemen who are crappy shots.
This brings me back to my point on concealed carry and people who will engage in it. Most people won't, but of those who do, most are going to take the effort to train themselves. They'll be at least as good of shots as policemen are, I suspect, and chances are, probably better.
An aspect of this gets back, I'd note, into the left/right divide. When guys like Roger Moore were advocating for eliminating eons old definitions on what makes up a marriage, they'd like to say "if you are opposed to marrying somebody of your own gender for goodness sakes don't", completely missing the nature of the argument. Oddly, here, the same argument by the same crowed, which applies better, is never made.
If you are a teacher opposed to carrying a concealed weapon. . . don't.
That part of the argument is a real part. A lot of the argument here is treated as if some body is going to require armed teachers. Not hardly. The option is to allow those who would undergo the necessary training, etc., to so carry.
There's something at some point that's a little cowardly about not, at the end of the day, allowing concealed carry in some circumstances. The question is where to draw that line, but the arguments against allowing teachers to do so are mostly based on emotion or bad arguments.
The underlying problem
At least 19 people were killed and 26 injured in a stabbing spree at a
facility for disabled people west of Tokyo, making it one of Japan's
deadliest mass killings since World War II. Nine men and 10 women, ranging in age from 18 to 70, were killed in the attack.
From 2016.
At the end of the day there's something amiss with modern society. In all of the spilled ink on this topic there's next to nothing that notes this. I've come back to it again and again.
