Beyond State Control: Improvised and Craft-produced Small Arms and Light Weapons

Improvised and craft-produced small arms account for a sizable proportion of weapons seized in domestic law enforcement operations in several countries. In the  UK, some 80 per cent of all guns used in crime in 2011 and 2012 were improvised,craft-produced, or converted;1 in São Paulo, Brazil, 48 per cent of the sub-machineguns recovered during the same period were homemade; and in Indonesia, 98 percent of the guns confiscated from robbery suspects in 2013 were homemade.

One of Those Crimes We Are Told Would be Common After Shall-Issue

Frankfort, Ky. (1900)

1/16/1900: A longstanding dispute between a former member of Congress and an army officer who had served together resulted in a gunfight in an unprovoked gunfight in a hotel lobby.  Three people died, four were wounded (one in danger of death at press time).  Several of those killed or wounded were prominent public figures; several were bystanders.

Category: public

Suicide: no

Cause: quarrel

Weapon: pistols[1]

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[1] “Settledin Blood,” Saint Paul [Minn.] Globe, Jan. 17, 1900, 1.

Of course, Kentucky was not even may-issue at the time. 

Tragedy, but compared to the family mass murders of this period, positively sunny.

Interesting Virus?

My wife's PC and my phone run speedtest.net and report 50 Mbps download.  My PC reports typically about 3.7.  It appears that some virus is stealing my bandwidth for who knows what nefarious purpose.  (Nt the only person to have run into this.)  AVG and MalwareBytes find nothing.  GeekSquad online could not find it because it was impairing their remote ability.  I have an appointment with GeekSquad in Nampa Saturday.  Not having to work through my crippled Internet connection may help.

In TaskManager, I  looked at Ethernet usage tab, and folund no anomalies.  A well-hidden virus, of course, will not show up.  GeekSquad attempted to download and run the eset antivirus program, but it failed to download.  I was able to download it, and I am waiting for it to finish downloading its updates (which is happening VERY slowly).  Any of you have this same experience?

Apparently not what it appears.  At BestBuy, no loss of bandwidth.  My office seems less than optimal; my cell phone reports 19.4 Mbps compared to 2.6 on my PC.  At the router, my PC get a very respectable 50.  My wife has a newer Lenovo farther from the router, and gets 50.  Is it just that my older PC does not have a sensitive enough wifi receiver?  I tried using a wifi repeater, and the results were even worse.  I hate to buy a new PC, with the unavoidable reinstalling of software, only to find out it has some other cause.

Found it: my wife's PC's wifi is ac, mine is a/b/g/n.  I am guessing that there are ac wifi USB devices. Found one in the garage: 10.83.  Still not wonderful, but it explains the problem. Connected to the repeater: 12.85.  Now 16.7.  I ordered an ac1200 Mbps USB.

1944 tax return

Pro-Gun Control Writer

The Daily Signal:

These policies come down partly from pressure from the Obama administration Department of Education, partly from outside social justice activist groups, sometimes, and partly from state bureaucrats.

It’s framed as a social justice thing, right? Like lower suspensions because we’re trying to reduce bias and everything will get better. And if you’re a school board member or a superintendent, it’s very easy to want to believe these things, to believe these things.

But if there are parents who are coming to you consistently and saying, “Hey, this might have sounded nice, but my kid says that he was assaulted and that your principal did nothing,” or, “My daughter says that she was harassed and told the assistant principal and they didn’t do anything.” If the people who run schools at a local level hear that from parents, they’re in a position to actually address it.

I think part of the tragedy of Parkland is that, as I said, it was the most avoidable mass murder in American history.

Everything that could’ve gone wrong went wrong, all for a reason, all at the local level, and it immediately became subsumed into a big, national political fight that distracted from what really went wrong.

Really Falling in Love With the New House

The guy that had the house built was a Boeing engineer.

The counters are made of Silestone, an artificial form of granite.  They melt quartz and add various colored rock fillers, and melt and cast it.  Our old house has it for the kitchen and bathroom counters.  It is gorgeous, and unlike Corian, you cannot damage it with a hot pan.  (Well, your crucible for melting steel might.)  This is a subtle color, unlike the green and black stuff we used, so at first we thought it was Corian.

Just about every room has an Ethernet connector.  So what, is not everything wireless now?  100 Mbps Ethernet is inferior in speed to the modern wireless standards.  But looking in the datacomm closet, the connector panel is CAT5e.  This works with gigabit Ethernet.  I have a gigabit router and I think some of my networked devices have gigabit Ethernet.  This means much faster backups.

Like my old house, all the doorknobs are levers, so you can open doors with the edge of your hand, when both hands are occupied.  Of course, our canine delinquents have figured this out.

Why Trump Will Splatter Any Democrat in November

From a progressive Democrat:

You might not think of the knitting world as a particularly political community, but you’d be wrong. Many knitters are active in social justice communities and love to discuss the revolutionary role knitters have played in our culture. I started noticing this about a year ago, particularly on Instagram. I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it. But it was impossible to ignore after roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep in their ideology. Knitting stars on Instagram were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for seemingly innocuous offenses. One man got mobbed so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital on suicide watch. Many things were not right about the hatred, and witnessing the vitriol coming from those I had aligned myself with politically was a massive wake-up call....

But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything. I started making a proactive effort to break my echo chamber by listening to voices I thought I would disagree with. I wanted to understand their perspective, believing it would confirm that they were filled with hate for anyone who wasn’t like them.

That turned out not to be the case. The more voices outside the left that I listened to, the more I realized that these were not bad people. They were not racists, nazis, or white supremacists. We had differences of opinions on social and economic issues, but a difference of opinion does not make your opponent inherently evil. And they could justify their opinions using arguments, rather than the shouting and ranting I saw coming from my side of the aisle.

And s9ome of the comments proved her point.