Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:
- First up, Jon Low has published another Defensive Pistolcraft newsletter, so be sure to check it out. A few items that stood out in particular:
- Jon links to a piece from John Farnam titled "Apex Predator?" which is a reminder to those who go out into the forest and field that there are plenty of animals out there that are more than capable of crippling or killing an unarmed human. The key word, of course, is unarmed.
- And another John Farnam article, "Mobs!", discussing mobs and the modern euphemisms like "flash mobs" or "teen takeovers". Farnam urges that "[t]his summer, when you see people, on-foot and/or in vehicles, coming-together in one place suddenly, it is time to exit without delay, while you still can!" Jon also relates a personal incident:
Pay attention to crowds forming and immediately leave.
If you don't, you may end up as I did in Printer's Alley in Nashville, TN refilling an ATM with cash while 50 youths started throwing tables and chairs around. Not willing to turn my back on them, to close and lock the ATM, I stood facing them with my pistol out. Not pointing at anyone, just watching. You bet they were watching me. Tens of thousands of dollars in 20's, an armed guard in uniform with a pistol in a two handed low ready. I was surprised no one was taking pictures of me. Maybe they were.
In a few minutes they all left. But I know I came very close to a lethal force incident.
If I had been paying attention, I would have locked up and left when they started congregating. Should have had two guards on such jobs, but company policy was one man.
- Another interesting piece was this from Revolver Dispatch: "Lessons From Argentina’s Collapse--What American Survivalists Still Get Wrong." A couple points raised in Jon's excerpt were (a) most of the violence was due to criminals, not the military, so you needed to be armed at all times; and (b) gold was impractical for day-to-day survival. As the author of the Revolver Dispatch noted: "You cannot shave a few dollars’ worth of gold off a coin to buy bread, fuel, medicine, or diapers." I will note that FerFal, writing about his experience in Argentina's collapse, noted the usefulness of junk gold, such as common jewelry--it could be sold for cash as needed for much smaller amounts than the cold coins or bars. Of course, there is a use for gold coins (or Rolex watches) which is to bribe officials, which might be important when trying to get on that last flight out of some third world revolution.
- Jon links to a few articles discussing shooting faster, but offers his own thoughts on the danger of shooting too fast or hurriedly, using the analogy of driving a car:
... You learn to drive a car, you practice by driving everyday, eventually you are able to drive with automaticity. Pushing yourself to do things more quickly than automaticity (not speeding on the highway), as starting the car and pulling out of the parking space, does not serve you well. Because you will naturally go as fast as you can safely go, as fast as you can comfortably go, as fast as you can competently go, as fast as you can confidently go.
To push yourself to go faster, risks going faster than you can see (faster than you can process visual information), faster than you can think. [Out running your head lights. (Running past the target in a match and not shooting it because you didn't see it. Hitting the deer at night because you didn't see it in time.) Out running your GPS. (The GPS tells you to take exit 26, but you've already passed exit 26.)]
Operating faster than you can think is not safe. And the older you get, the slower you go. A person has got to know their limitations. If you shoot faster than you can think, you could easily shoot the wrong person.
Or as Jon comments later in his newsletter: "Never shoot faster than you can see. Never shoot faster than you can think."
The reality is that our reflexes and ability to process information is not instantaneous--there is a lag. It shows up sometimes when a defensive shooter shoots a criminal in the back. The general situation is that the criminal turns to flee, but because of the lag time in seeing, processing, and stopping from pulling the trigger, the criminal will have turned before the defensive shooter is able to perceive the changed circumstances and not fire the weapon; with the result being the criminal is shot in the back.
- This was interesting: the Crime Prevention Research Center a poll of voters and found that "[t]hirty percent of likely voters report carrying a permitted concealed handgun at least occasionally, while 13.2% say they carry all or most of the time. Even in Constitutional Carry states, where a permit is not required, a substantial share of voters carry concealed handguns: 34% report carrying, and 21% report carrying with a permit."
Jon has a lot more, so be sure to check it out--I can assure you that you will find many useful links, tips, and advice.
Some thoughts on an after-action scan. I actually favor the technique taught by Craig Douglas. Instead of merely looking by turning the head or turning your back on your attacker, MOVE. Imagine the battlefield as a clock. You are in the center of the clock. The down bad guy is at 12 o’clock. You need to see behind you (six o’clock). By aggressively moving to either nine o’clock, or three o’clock you will be able to see both the bad guy and the area previously behind you.
- An article on "The Allure of Accuracy" which begins by noting:
We should teach shooting in four distinct parts: what is important(safety and manual of arms), how to hit the target (accuracy and precision), how much time it takes (speed and efficiency), and what is meaningful (novel
or complex context). Unfortunately, many shooters only receive the
first two lessons—or choose to ignore the last two—focusing on safety
and accuracy while avoiding the tension between time and information.
- From an article discussing some of the downsides of AIWB carry:
It saddens me that the gun community has developed its own form of “cancel culture” where a person can no longer express an opinion without being shouted down. It seems social media has brought out the “ugly” in people. These attacks go beyond the opinion itself and attack the person, in some cases trying to ruin their reputation. At a minimum, if you are in my age bracket, you are called a “Fudd” regardless of your training, experience and background. Name calling is easy when you don’t have to face the person, and it’s a tactic often used by folks who lack real experience or who can’t articulate intelligent counterpoints. Let’s just say, I won’t be surprised if it happens to me after this article.
I have to admit that once I hear or read the word "Fudd" from someone, I tend to be more dismissive of them out because it merely underscores that they are the type of person to tear down a fence without understanding why it was there in the first place.
- Greg includes a link to an article on flashlight skills, which is more than just being able run your flashlight with your handgun.
- A detailed article on what types of construction or objects in or around a house can stop a bullet. Less than you might think.
Unfortunately, we humans would be powerless against a rare giant
projectile many miles in diameter. Unlike the dinosaurs, we might well
see the approach of a six-mile-wide killer asteroid, like the one that
collided with Earth 66 million years ago. However, stopping it or
deflecting its course is out of the question: It would be like trying to
stop an oncoming truck by throwing ping-pong balls at it. And although
we’ve discovered the vast majority of near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger
than about two-thirds of a mile across, finding that none are on a
collision course with Earth, astronomers could very well discover an
enormous comet next week that will crash into the planet in a few years’
time. And again, there’s nothing we could do to stop it.
If we do
want to protect ourselves from cosmic impacts, we need to focus on
medium-sized objects, ranging from about 100 yards to about a half a
mile. These are relatively numerous, and they can easily cause many tens
of millions of casualties. Earth is hit by a 400-yard asteroid on
average once every 100,000 years. If the collision occurs in Europe, a
country like France will disappear completely from the map, and the
entire continent will become an unimaginable disaster area. Such an
impact is, in theory, preventable, so we would be crazy not to explore
the possibilities of doing just that.
[snip]
When it comes to protecting Earth from a fatal collision, there are a number of ideas currently under consideration, ranging from good to bad to very bad.
For example, blowing an asteroid up with an atomic bomb, as happened in “Armageddon,” is not a smart idea. It is an option that Edward Teller, known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” proposed long ago, but it simply wouldn’t help. The numerous fragments created in such an explosion would still be moving through the solar system in more or less the same direction and at the original high speed. As a result, Earth would then have to endure not one big impact but a whole series of smaller ones, with all the attendant consequences.
A more practical solution would be to slightly deflect the approaching celestial body so that it passes close to Earth rather than colliding with it. Particularly if you can see the impact coming many years in advance, a small nudge can be enough to avert disaster. When astronomers discovered the 1,100-foot-wide near-Earth object Apophis, which for a while looked as if it would wreak havoc on Earth in 2029, they were already calculating that a minimal change in speed of just a few micrometers per second would be enough to prevent that anticipated catastrophe. Luckily, in the case of Apophis, there’s no need to intervene: The asteroid will safely fly by the Earth on April 13, 2029, at a distance of some 20,000 miles.
In the annals of Deep State WTF-ery, is there a stranger case than CIA officer David Rush turning up with $40-million in 303 one-kilogram gold bars, plus $2-million in cash, plus a stash of 30 mostly Rolex watches? Well, yeah, the stranger story is how the guy got hired by the CIA in the first place.
Rush was arrested on Monday, May 18, by an FBI SWAT team at his home in Loudoun County, VA. Agents searched the house all day long and found the stash. Rush is currently charged with theft of public money and allegedly falsifying his military and academic credentials to obtain federal employment benefits, including roughly $77,000 in improper military leave pay. He’s scheduled to make a federal court appearance in Alexandria today.
Rush first applied for a job at the CIA in March 2006. He claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in math from Clemson University and a master’s from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He was rejected. He reapplied later that same year. Bumped again. He reapplied again in 2009, adding a new credential: that he’d been a US Navy test pilot and flight trainer. This time, he was hired.
But as Kunstler goes on to relate, Rush's background was a fabrication: his college credentials were fake; he had never been a pilot for the Navy. So how did he pass the rigorous vetting process needed to be hired and given a security clearance? Rush was hired at the start of the Obama Administration when Leon Panetta was the newly appointed director of the CIA. Panetta, if you remember, was one of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed an October 2020 Public Statement on the Hunter Biden laptop falsely claiming it was Russian disinformation in order to interfere with the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election. So is this evidence of more Deep State shenanigans?
Beginning with the stimulus of a cup or two of strong coffee, fifteen-year-old Columbia College sophomore George Templeton Strong started a diary in 1835. He continued to make entries until his death in 1875, toting up to around four million words, an extraordinary document of life in mid-century America as seen from the commercial and cultural capital of New York. Especially for the terrible years of the Civil War, Strong’s job as Treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a charity dedicated to fighting the “third army” of disease, gave him a wide perspective on the war, making his diary one of the most visceral portals into understanding the destruction of American slavery.
