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Friday, August 17, 2018

August 17, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Max Talk 035: Survive a Gunfight: Use of Cover"--Max Velocity Tactical (25 min.)
The title of this video is self-explanatory. MV begins, though, on addressing some criticism of his video on why the lone wolf will die (fire and movement), and why he didn't make more use of cover. You can listen to MV's explanation, but I think it is pretty plain: MV was teaching that if you are on your own, rapidly trying to move from one position to another in order to break contact (i.e., retreating) you will have to run which means turning your back toward the enemy, during which time you can't employ suppressive fire. This is true whether you are moving from an open firing position to another, or moving from a place of cover to another. That was the lesson for that video--not how to use cover. 

      In any event, the article is mostly about Correia and his philosophy toward self-defense, but it also has some comments from Correia boiling down certain points he has learned from his study of defensive shootings, including:
  • He used to carry more than one gun on his person, plus a spare mag in case he needed to reload. But in his study of violent encounters, he has seen zero emergency reloads and zero uses of a backup gun (or bug, in gun lingo), so he seldom carries extra mags anymore and has stopped carrying an extra gun altogether. He replaced them with a first-aid kit—which he has used twice, once to save a life—and pepper spray, which he has used twice to defend himself against stray dogs.
  • Overwhelmingly, the lesson of his videos is to avoid violence in the first place. “The answer to most social violence is: Check your ego,” he told me. Give up your valuables. Don’t kill to save your car, and don’t die to save your wallet. Don’t play “the monkey game,” an escalating display of dominance, often but not always between two drunk men. Many of the videos take place at ATMs or in what he calls “transitional spaces,” such as convenience stores and parking lots. He enumerated for me his “rules of stupid”: “Don’t do stupid things with stupid people at stupid times.”
  • I've posted this before, but it seems to fit here as well and is a good reminder: "Analysis of Five Years of Armed Encounters (With Data Tables)"--Guns Save Lives. This 2012 article reports on an analysis made of incidents reported in 1997 – 2001 in the "Armed Citizen" column of American Rifleman. It summarizes certain facts to be gleaned from those reports, including the location, type of crime, number of shots fired, number of assailants, and so on. Sort of in line with what Correia reported, this study indicated: "Reloading was required in only 3 incidents. One of those involved killing an escaped lion with a .32 caliber revolver, which was eventually successful after 13 shots." Another point:
Incidents rarely occurred in reaction time (i.e., ¼ second increments). Most commonly, criminals acted in a shark-like fashion, slowly circling and alerting their intended victims. The defender(s) then had time to access even weapons that were stored in other rooms and bring them to bear.
The shark analogy is interesting because I have noted something similar in many videos, especially when you have a group of unarmed assailants attacking a person. Although, to me, it reminds me of how wolves or dogs will circle prey, dart in and out of range, until one can get a hit on the victim.
  • For the firearms history buff: "The Complete History of the AR-15 Rifle" by Sam Bocetta at the Small Wars Journal.
  • "Holsters for Self Defense: A Guide to Carrying Concealed"--Ammo.com. This is a fairly comprehensive article describing types of holsters, characteristics of good holsters, tips for selecting a holster, comfort tips, retention, and special considerations for women, people with range of motion limitations or chronic pain, and tips for carrying when you are around children.
  • "Eluding Dog Tracking Teams"--LDS Gunsite. The author notes that most anything you will see on TV to elude a tracking dog and team will not work in the real world. An excerpt:
       One of the most important things you can do is to get distance between you and the trackers. I know that seems pretty obvious, but some think they can double back or hide and that is a good way to get caught. Travel through difficult terrain. The idea is to tire the dog and handler out. Most handlers aren’t young guys. They are seasoned officers with maybe a few more years (and pounds) than the average rookie. Dogs are not built for endurance. They are also not very good climbers. Taking rocky, up-hill or mountain routes can aid in getting distance between you and your trackers. Crossing water does not do any good. Unless you have found a way to cross a larger, unpassable water source, water won’t help you much. It’s not your odor the dog is tracking, it’s your dead skin. We are almost constantly shedding skin cells. That is what the dog smells.
           One trick could be coating the body in petroleum jelly so as to not leave any skin cells for the dog to trace.
             Another trick would be to get a small bucket of water that you have washed your skin with, create a small drip hole in the bottom and attach it to a moving vehicle or a small raft made with sticks to throw the scent off.
              Remember that the dog has great senses, but it’s the handler that makes decisions. Make several sharp and large direction changes causing the handler to doubt his dog and call off the search. It’s easier to fool the human rather than the dog.
          He has some other tips, so read the whole thing.

          "Testing GYROJET Rocket Guns - Why were they a commercial failure?"--TAOFLEDERMAUS (23 min.) This is worth watching just for the fact that they actually shoot some Gyrojet rounds.

                   You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse.
                     I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it's easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that's quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.
                It seems to me that Anne Frank wrote something like this before the Nazis hauled her family and her off to a death camp. The problem is that, even if most people are kind or good at heart, there are enough that are not--some even enjoying hurting other people--that you cannot go through life with your eyes closed, trusting everyone all the time. Yes, not everyone is an ax murderer or monster, yet there are ax murderers and worse. And, unfortunately, you cannot easily tell who is what. 
                • Speaking of monsters: "The Catholic Church’s Rotherham"--National Review. The title is a bit misleading because Rotherham involved far more children over a much shorter period of time. In any event, this is another article on the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic church. I'm not going to speak on the specific allegations, other than to note that this is another example of how evil men can, through their secret combinations, infest and cripple a good institution. And, it is an example that predators generally try to be around their prey.
                  The way people match up varies according to how many partners they sense are available—no surprise there. And the number of men, and especially quality men, is declining relative to the number of women, especially for those of college age, when people are primed for pairing off, in the moment and as they march through post-college life.  
                    Note that the decline isn't in men, but in "good" men, where "good" is defined as being in college and seeking degrees. Of all the virtues that women could look for in a man, status and earning capacity ranks at the top. Tellingly, the article notes that with a gender imbalance, women have to compete more, which leads to lots of plastic surgery and slutty behavior. On the other hand:
                      It’s when males are in short supply that men turn promiscuous and spawn babies out of wedlock, and male violence rages: Male-male homicide rates go up; so do sexual assault rates. Men muster little energy for finding a mate and, preferring casual sex, happily engage in multiple relationships, University of Utah anthropologist Ryan Schacht reports in a recent issue of Royal Society Open Science.
                        Yet no discussion of the law of supply and demand.
                                 This mysterious bubble marks the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space and provides a marker for the edge of the sun's influence.
                                   According to the latest findings, the barrier is actually a vast amount of trapped hydrogen atoms caught up in the solar wind of our star.
                                     These produce waves of ultraviolet light in a very distinctive way, which have been detected by the sensors aboard the New Horizons interplanetary space probe.
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