Zombie Blog!

 After almost a decade, I'm considering resurrecting this blog.  I'm stopped blogging because I was worn out, working hard, and decided to focus on family and friends on social media.  Well now social media is awful and the kid is old enough to take care of himself so perhaps I'll be coming back here more often.  Only time will tell.

Weaponlights: Bad Advice that Sort of Isn't.

Most of the bad advice in this article is accurate, but I take some exception with the following:

1. A firearm light or laser will just give away your position! 

In real life, the benefits of seeing where and/or what you’re shooting at far outweigh any realistic disadvantages of “giving away your position.” One more thing, make it a point to tell the hundreds of thousands of military and law enforcement personnel who mount lights and lasers on their guns specifically for the purpose of fighting in the dark that this is a tactical blunder. What do they know anyway?

While the complaint about giving away your position is overblown, it's still kind of true. Also the articles response to the issue uses a ton of BS and employs a tactical strawman about tactical ninjas on chandeliers (which I did not quote). However on military and police:

1. The military is possibly the worst example you can use. The Army uses passive night vision devices wherever possible because they know lights and lasers will give away their position. Likewise the lasers that the military mounts on their guns are typically IR-spectrum and only visible with NVGs. Again this prevents them from giving away their position as much. The primary reason for the laser is that the goggles get in the way of using iron sights on the rifle. The military would like to go to weapon mounted night vision so they don't have use active laser illumination at all. They still use white light for room clearing because it gives them better field of view compared to NVGs. They think the tradeoff in visibility is worth giving away their position.

2. Cops typically don't care about giving away their position which is why they yell things like "Police Officer!" and wear clearly marked uniforms with hiviz reflective elements.  Any most people will actively run away from cops rather than engage them.

The problem is that these are really side issues for civilians because:

3. Most people who have weapon lights are planning to use them for self defense within their own homes. Except that you have practical illumination you can use for target identification (which also doesn't give away your position) keyed to wall switches all over your home. You know exactly where all of these are and a potential home invader does not. This make a weapon light unnecessary for pure threat identification.

4. Because if you plan to check out a bump in the night, using a weapon light to do so is not ideal. That bump might be a housepet or your kid stumbling around. In fact this is far more likely than a home invader in most places. You do not want to point your firearm at your kid or pet.  It's a safety violation. So you need to train to illuminate with the off-beam flood of your weaponlight, or carry a standard flashlight which is not mounted on a deadly weapon, or just employ your tactical light switches.

5. This is also why CCWing with a weaponlight is also of limited use. You don't want to have to draw your weapon (and by implication threaten lethal force), just to light up an alley because you think someone might be down there. Or because you heard something. That gun shouldn't leave your holster unless lethal force might be required in a clear and present way. You want a normal harmless flashlight for shining down alleys, etc. Which means the weapon light is kind of redundant for target illumination and becomes another thing to carry.

6. The primary reason the police and military use flashlights and weapon lights is because they don't know where the light switches are. They also don't know which lights those switches turn on. They also have to operate places without power and illumination. The military operates in third world areas without light switches a lot. Cop conduct traffic stops on the side of the road or respond during an emergency when power is out. The cops probably don't want to be using their weapons lights in those cases because 3 and 4. And cops can't afford NVGs.

Notice, none of the things in 5 really apply to civilian using weaponlights except that the power might go out.

Hitchens on Mamet

Christopher Hitchens' review of David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Culture had this to say:

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason.

That's funny because the same could be said of Hitchen's own book of atheist evangelism God is Not Great.

From Ace of Spades.

A Shooting Memorium

Stephen Camp died a few weeks ago at the age of 59 after a sudden brain aneurysm rupture. Camp was one of the foremost online authorities on the Browning Hipower and being fan of the gun, I had the pleasure of corresponding with him a few times about holsters and related gun accessories. He was a great, helpful, and humble guy. The gunblogosphere was much quieter about this than I expected. I'm guessing this is because Stephen was a gun board fixture not really a gun blog fixture.

Accordingly my hipower joined my buckmark at the range yesterday for my going-to-be-a-father's day shoot. I shot competently. That's the general word I'd use to describe most of my shooting. At 8-10 yards, I can easily cover the group from a single magazine with my hand. Unless it's the buckmark, then it's more like my palm. Not exactly precision target shooting, but not bad.

I wish I could say that inspired by Stephen Camp's memory, the 9mm was a veritable paper slaughtering deathray. Not especially, no. Having two different grain weights of ammo going through a fixed sight gun probably didn't help either. But I'm going to be naming the hipower Stephen nonetheless.

Constitutional Responses

According to the New York Times, Clarence Thomas is breaking with judicial ethics guidelines by supporting Federal historical conservation efforts related to the Gullah/Geechee peoples of the coastal south. Thomas is himself a member of that group. Althouse and Instapundit mention that the proper response to a Supreme Court Judge with inappropriate behavior is impeachment not passive aggressive editorials.

To put it bluntly, Democrats don't want to use the I word. Not when Obama is violating the War Powers Act in Libya. Obama's defense is that it's not a war. The Libyan's military is so inferior to our own that they are no threat to us. Try not to thing about that one too hard or you might wake up your pregnant wife in the next room yelling things like "Then why are we there in the first place!" at your computer monitor. You know, like I did.

Instead they're putting a bipartisan group together to sue Obama in federal court. Really? Look if he's breaking federal law and you think it's important, impeach him. If you don't want to impeach him, then pass a bill that revokes the funding appropriation for activities in Libya. Then dare him to cross that line. If you don't have the votes for that then make political hay. Just don't think that the last one is really doing much of anything.

Some Light Blogging

So I haven't written anything here in a few months. There are many reasons for this. My wife is expecting our first child in two months. All of the meaningful parts of Blogger's backend is blocked at work. I can't even comment on Blogger blogs. I've also changed teams at work so that I'm actually working with military systems I like, which greatly restrains what I can actually post on without causing myself problems. But attempts to restrict gun rights in a misguided attempt to reduce domestic terrorism over at SayUncles roused me from semi-retirement.

I've already covered why restricting an enumerated right using the no-fly list is a bad idea on this blog. My uncle-in-law basically doesn't fly anywhere anymore because his name is common and therefore guaranteed to be on the list.

But more importantly, the whole logic is flawed. Terrorists everywhere basically start with guns. They did in Iraq. They did in Afghanistan. In Iraq they quickly moved to explosives. Things appear to be going the same way in the 'Stan. Why? Because when they start shooting at our soldiers, they expose themselves to US Troops. Then our soldiers kill them. The US military is rather good at it.

The way to get the terrorists to stop shooting people is to make it possible to easily shoot them back. Which means letting their future targets, Johnny and Jane American, both keep and bear arms. It's a strategy that is even written in our earliest founding documents. Perhaps help them get training in how to use these arms and how to recognize these threats. Is this the plan the left is proposing? Of course not. We must restrict constitutionally enumerated freedoms and have nothing to show for it. Thanks lefties.