A Quick Run Around The Web (4/20/2020)

"357 Magnum vs 44 Magnum Carbines"--Paul Harrell (24 min.)

For you lever action fans out there. I think it is with these cartridges, and the .45 Colt, that it makes the most sense to pair a handgun with a carbine of the same caliber. I'm not saying that it doesn't make sense to do the same with a 9 mm, .40 S&W, or .45 ACP, but the increase in performance with the .357 Mag., .44 Mag., and .45 Colt is so great that it is just natural to have a carbine and revolver in the same caliber. For instance, let's go to Ballistics By The Inch, and just pick the 9 mm and .357 Mag. as examples. Rather than average it out, I'm just going to pick a standard defensive cartridge for the 9 mm--Federal 115 gr. JHP. A 4-inch barrel gave a velocity of 1094 fps; a 16-inch barrel gave a velocity of 1295: a 201 fps gain, which is nothing to sneeze at. But looking at .357, and selecting a typical load and weight for self-defense (Federal 125 gr. JHP), the 4-inch barrel gives a velocity of 1511 fps, versus 2051 fps for a 16-inch barrel: a 540 fps difference. Even typical self-defense loads in .38 Special see around a 300 fps increase in velocity from a 16-inch barrel over a 4-inch barrel, and equal or exceed the velocity of 9 mm from the 16-inch barrel.

• "Florida Home Invaders, Armed Response Caught on Camera [VIDEO]"--The Truth About Guns. Basic facts are that three intruders of the usual description bust open the door to an apartment, rush in, shots are fired, and they all quickly leave the apartment (one of them wounded). All the action was caught by the Ring doorbell system. Obviously this video shows the efficacy of an armed response. However, I was more interested in the failure of the door. Unfortunately, the angle was wrong to see lock set up or the extent of damage to door jam or lock(s). But having seen videos of how difficult it can be for even trained firemen and police to break down a properly secured door using tools, I suspect that the door on this house was using a substandard lock and plate that were not properly anchored. Many times, you will find hinges and plates secured with only 3/4-inch screws (or shorter!). Replace these screws with two- or three-inch ones. Also, the deadbolt should extend at least 1-inch past the door. If you are in an apartment where you can't make upgrades to the locks or the screws, there is another option: a door bar like this one from Lowe's. My wife and I started using one after an incident while we were in student housing and a repairman let himself in while my wife was in the shower and without having called ahead. These slip under the door handle and wedge the door shut and don't require any modification to the door.
• Like me, Mason Dixon Tactical has taken note of the number of localities from states down to individual neighborhoods that have not taken kindly to people trying to bug out to their location: "So You’re Gonna Bugout To Your 'Retreat' Huh?". He observes:

       While watching coverage of the many issues with different levels of Quarantine that have been implemented around the country and the world, I have noticed a disturbing trend that is taking hold in many locations. This is in regards to people that are not year round residents, but own property in other locations.

      This trend has locals, whether Government or civilian, telling someone that actually owns property in their State or County (and pays the taxes on it) that they shouldn’t or can’t come to their property, and if they do get there, they are going to be restrictions on their movement.

After discussing the unfairness of it, he continues:

       If you have a property elsewhere, are you even going to be able to “Bugout” to it when things get serious? What about checkpoints? They have them in a number of places for the Quarantine, one of them being Florida. Pictured below is a checkpoint on I-10 in Florida.

      What are they checking for? “Proof of Residency”? What’s the temperature of everyone in the car? Are you carrying any firearms?  See where this can go? This post isn’t about the “Right” or “Wrong” of what the Federal and State governments are doing to “Fight COVID-19”. This is about understanding some of the hurdles you might face down the road during a “Bugout” if your plans include going to a “Retreat” in another State.

It actually shouldn't be all that surprising as there are examples of this from history and in the "prepper literature." For instance, in Lucifer's Hammer, the main protagonists find shelter in a valley whose residents have shut down access to the valley except to residents and those that possess valuable skills. In The Walk by Lee Goldberg, which takes place after "the Big One" hits the Los Angeles basin, the main character finally reaches his home neighborhood, in a gated community, and finds himself locked out until identified as a resident. In the short story, "The Postman" by David Brin (later expanded into a novel and them made into a film), the protagonist, who has scavenged a mailman's uniform and bag of letters from a wrecked vehicle, is only allowed shelter in a community after he is able to prove he has a letter mailed to a survivor in that community. 

• "Is the Primary Arms GLX 2x the Best Value in Low Power Prism Optics?"--The New Rifleman. The author says "yes." Per the review, "First, it has a bold, eye-catching reticle. Second, it has an etched reticle with user-controlled brightness… And third, it has an adjustable diopter." He goes on to explain why he likes each of these features and what they bring to the table.
• Only the police can be trusted with firearms: "Protected & Served VI"--Loose Rounds. It reports: "An off-duty Edinburgh [Indiana] police officer accidentally shot a woman Wednesday evening while cleaning a handgun, according to police. ... Investigators determined an off-duty officer, with three years of service, didn’t realize there was a live round in the chamber when he was cleaning his personal handgun, [Police Chief] Little Jr. said."
• No, really! Only the police can be trusted with guns: "Top. Woman. You mess with my man, you gets tha blam blam!"--Loose Rounds. From the article:

      West Precinct officers responded about 11:51 p.m. Friday to Birmingham’s Germania Park after the city’s gunfire detection system, Shot Spotter, alerted them to shots fired.

      When they arrived on the scene, they found a 43-year-old woman inside a vehicle who had been shot multiple times. Police determined that vehicle was an unmarked Birmingham police vehicle. Police identified the victim as Kanisha Nicole Fuller.

     Fuller was taken to UAB Hospital’s Trauma Center where she was pronounced dead early Saturday. ...

     Smith said Fuller was in the unmarked police vehicle with a male Birmingham police detective, who was not on duty at the time. He was not injured.

      Investigators quickly identified the suspected shooter as 39-year-old Alfreda Fluker, also a Birmingham police detective who was off-duty at the time of the deadly shooting. She has been with the department for 15 years and was assigned to the Crime Reduction Team.

• "Holster Roundup: the Back Pocket Holsters"--GunsGunsGuns.net. I've never carried this way, but I can see the appeal if you just need to pop down to the corner grocery or drug store. I have carried in a front pocket and used several different holsters. My biggest complaint of pocket carry is that unless you have loose pants with capacious pockets, there is a very noticeable bulge, and since many pocket holsters are not very good at concealing the grip of the handgun, the bulge may very well be in the shape of the handgun--especially when seated and the material is stretched tighter over the handgun. For a while I was carrying a Sig. 238 (an excellent gun, by the way) with a holster that had an attached square piece of leather to mimic the look of a wallet. But I discovered over a period of several months daily use that the leather over the area below the barrel and ahead of the trigger guard began to curve inward and again a bulge vaguely like a gun would appear. I think this could be corrected if there was a spacer in that area that was roughly the same thickness as the gun.
• "An Absolute Train Wreck Is Coming Straight At Us as the Economy Dies"--Modern Survival Blog. 
• "Ripples in the Fabric of the World: What happens next?"--Wilder, Wealthy & Wise. An excerpt:

       That’s where we are today – the global impact of what’s going on isn’t the equivalent of a boy throwing rocks in a river, instead, it’s the equivalent of a still-ongoing earthquake, with the tsunami waves yet to hit the rest of the world.

      In 2008-2009, the Fed did everything they could to mash money into the system to deal with the mess of the Great Recession in the United States.  In addition to the collapse of oil prices, the result of the Great Recession and the Fed’s intervention was eventually, as it always is, inflation.  Since the dollar was the world currency and no one can buy American wheat using currency made from papyrus and hope, the result was much different in Alexandria, Egypt than in Alexandria, Virginia.  If you live in Alexandria, Virginia, if the price of bread doubles that means you still buy a loaf if you even notice that the price doubled.  Where’s the Nutella®?

       If you live in Alexandria, Egypt, if the price of bread doubles, you might not eat.

Read the whole thing.

       One thing to keep in mind is that in Matthew 24:14 Christ stated that the Gospel would be taught throughout the whole world before the end shall come. If we look back at the horrible events (particularly wars) of the 20th Century, many have been followed up by loosening of restrictions on missionary work in areas that previously forbid them. Much of the world became more open to missionary work following the two world wars as the hold of state religions loosened; Korea and much of the far east opened up after the Korean and Vietnam wars; although the East bloc nations had begun to loosen up their restrictions on foreign religions and missionary work prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Soviet Union vastly accelerated that work. Our Middle-Eastern adventures over the last two decades have cracked open the door to the Middle-East because of the presence of Western troops and their worship needs (with the result that a temple was announced for Dubai), but China, India, Israel, and most Muslim countries are still mostly off limits. Events happening now and into the near future will not only chastise the nations, but result in further opportunities for the Gospel to be spread.

• "Self-Defense, Soviet Style"--Slate. A 2018 article that looks at the history and surging interest in the Systema ("System") hand-to-hand combat system developed by the Soviet Union. From the article:

     ... Precise details in the long evolution of Systema are hard to come by. But more recently, its development owes much to the work of two men: Viktor Spiridonov, a former officer of the Imperial Russian army, and Vasili Oshchepkov, a black-belt judoka who would later die in the gulag following one of Stalin’s purges. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the pair set themselves the task of creating the most effective style of hand-to-hand combat.

      During the 1920s, they studied and synthesized various martial arts and wrestling techniques from around the world. This resulted in SAMBO, a Russian acronym standing for “self-defense without weapons” (SAMozashchita Bez Oruzhiya). Promoted as a national sport and adopted by military and secret police units, it offered Soviet authorities a new cultural practice that could unite the hundreds of disparate peoples living across the USSR.

       As the Cold War intensified in the 1960s, Aleksey Kadochnikov—a former Soviet army officer regarded as the grandfather of Systema—further developed the Russian style of fighting. Drawing on the martial prowess of Russia’s ancient forebears, he began teaching his distinctive and dynamic style of close-quarters combat to military personnel at the Krasnodar garrison in southern Russia. Students were taught not to respond to force with force, but to thwart an opponent by absorbing strikes and deflecting blows with a constant gyration of the body. By turning an opponent’s strengths into weaknesses, it is not unlike judo. Russian President Vladimir Putin, of course, is a committed practitioner of that Eastern martial art, apparently drawing on its tenets not only when fighting on the mat but also while ducking and diving in the global political arena.

      When the Iron Curtain lifted, Systema emerged from the shadows. Spearheading its dissemination were Mikhail Ryabko, a former special-ops commander with the Russian army, and his colleague Vladimir Vasiliev, who in 1993 founded a Systema school in Canada, the first one outside his native Russia.

       “Systema is the modern branding, if you like,” says Matt Hill, a former officer with the British army’s elite Parachute Regiment, and now a Systema instructor who studied under Ryabko and Vasiliev. “Before them, it was known as the ‘Russian fighting system’ or ‘Russian martial art’, which goes back to ancient times, when the monasteries were guarded by warriors. Compared with Asian martial arts, it was very versatile and freestyle, and not coded by techniques or nomenclature.”

• "How to Escape a Chokehold Using a Simple Folding Knife"--Ballistic Magazine. Basically, in this technique for escaping a rear naked choke hold, you slip the knife blade into the crook of the elbow and cut the tendons. The initial objection to this method is the potential of cutting yourself, but since you would have to cut extremely deep into your neck to cause an immediately lethal wound, the risk would probably be worth it. 

• Related: "Standing Rear Choke Escape"

• Related: "Officer Take Down Using A Choke Hold"

• "It Happened To Me: 400-Round Firefight in Wisconsin"--Tactical Life. This 2015 article describes a March 31, 2008, incident when Richland County Sheriff’s Office deputies were attempting to serve civil papers on a recalcitrant homeowner. From the article:

       Before the deputies even reached the Bayliss property line, Bayliss fired 15 rounds from a high-powered rifle at them, sending the deputies scampering for cover. Thus began one of the most prolific law enforcement gun battles in Wisconsin history since the Purvis-Dillinger bout of 1934 at Little Bohemia.

      In an effort to break the stalemate, a Richland County deputy who had established a rapport with the angry loner over the years hopped into the front passenger seat of a BearCat armored vehicle. The deputy planned on establishing contact with Bayliss to convince him to come out peacefully. As the BearCat rumbled toward the bunker, Bayliss fired his high-powered rifle and the round struck the window of the BearCat directly in front of the face of the deputy. That round was followed by more rounds that ricocheted off the sides of the armored vehicle. The driver soon disengaged.

      On April 3, 2008 at 4:52 p.m., a tactical plan was put into motion. As three BearCats moved into position, Bayliss brought more fire upon law enforcement officers. Officers returned fire, concentrating on and around the windows Bayliss was shooting from. As the armored vehicles moved closer, Bayliss began lobbing homemade explosives out windows at them. A sustained and continuous exchange of gunfire lasted for 12 minutes. One officer present later said, “It was like a war zone.” Meanwhile, SWAT grenadiers launched 50 canisters of non-burning chemical munitions into the structure in an attempt to make Bayliss’s continued resistance untenable.

      It is believed that during this exchange Bayliss dropped one of his homemade firebombs, starting a fire, which spread through the small fortress quickly. Officers watched helplessly as the negotiators pleaded over bullhorns for Bayliss to save himself and come out.

     When everyone thought Bayliss must certainly be overcome, he suddenly popped out a window and climbed onto a roof. The wannabe-cop-killer made it across the roof and onto a ladder he had put in place before the standoff. As Bayliss climbed down the ladder, officers could see his hands were empty, but they noticed he still possessed a holstered handgun. One loudly warned others, “He’s got a gun on his hip!”

       Another called out, “Look out boys! He’s going to hit the ground shooting!”

      A resounding chorus rang out from officers covering the suspect, “Drop the gun!”

      One officer, armed with a shotgun loaded with less-lethal munitions, sounded off, “Less lethal, less lethal, less lethal!” These words were instantly followed by a shotgun popping twice.

      Bayliss grimaced from two perfectly placed thigh hits and stopped a few rungs from the ground. With his fingertips on the butt of his pistol, he carefully slipped it out of the holster and tossed it. With that done, he gave up the fight and followed the directions of the arrest team. The raging gun battle was over—without a single casualty.

The article also noted this interesting tidbit: "Bayliss had prepared for an armed confrontation by reinforcing sections of his walls with steel plating, which were shell-pocked but intact."

• "Start your food storage on $10 a week"--Backwoods Home Magazine. Never too late to start.
• "4 Best Places to Store Firearms for Safety and Home Defense"--The Truth About Guns. The author not only suggests avoiding using a large gun safe for your defensive weapons, but suggests that the most useful places to store firearms in smaller cabinets or lock boxes:

       Master Bedroom – While the data suggest this is the worst room to store valuables, it is also a room where you spend a great deal of time sleeping. Store one to two firearms in a lightweight safe under your bed. No more than necessary.

      Kitchen Pantry – This is a great location for a small gun cabinet as thieves are not typically interested in the kitchen. This is also a room where people spend a lot of time during the day. In the event of a home invasion, if you are in the kitchen, you will have quick access to a firearm. Also, most homes have an exit near, or from, the kitchen. This allows you to arm yourself and then evacuate the home. Your goal always should be to avoid confrontation.

     Closet Near the Front Door – This is a great location for securing firearms. Thieves ignore these closets. If someone you do not recognize knocks on the door, you refuse to open and they start trying to kick it in, you’ll have very fast access to a gun.

     Guest Bedroom – If your home has a guest room with a closet, this is a good location for additional gun storage. Thieves will typically ignore guest rooms.

"Shape of the Cosmos | The Local Repeller/Attractor"--Suspicious Observers (7 min.)

Discussing the recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is not uniform.

"Shape of the Cosmos | Tricksters of the Universe"--Suspicious Observers (4 min.)

A follow up to the video immediately above.

• It's not too hard to figure out from my blog that I'm a fan of H.P. Lovecraft and, particularly, his Cthulhu Mythos stories. I've mentioned before that Lovecraft's works, as well as many other old (i.e., public domain) horror stories are available in audio format from Horror Babble. Through May 11, they are having a sale for 80% off (use the code 80HB2020 at checkout). 
• This could be fun: "Researchers open-source state-of-the-art object tracking AI"--VB. 

      A team of Microsoft and Huazhong University researchers this week open-sourced an AI object detector — Fair Multi-Object Tracking (FairMOT) — they claim outperforms state-of-the-art models on public data sets at 30 frames per second. If productized, it could benefit industries ranging from elder care to security, and perhaps be used to track the spread of illnesses like COVID-19.

      As the team explains, most existing methods employ multiple models to track objects: (1) a detection model that localizes objects of interest and (2) an association model that extracts features used to reidentify briefly obscured objects. By contrast, FairMOT adopts an anchor-free approach to estimate object centers on a high-resolution feature map, which allows the reidentification features to better align with the centers. A parallel branch estimates the features used to predict the objects’ identities, while a “backbone” module fuses together the features to deal with objects of different scales.

Build your own fire-and-forget missile. Just kidding!!!

• "Open Source Rocketry"--Starving the Monkeys. The article begins:

       I recently stumbled across some fascinating videos by amateur rocketeer Joe Barnard, whose BPS.space YouTube channel is chock full of interesting projects. Armed with a 3D printer, model rocket components and some fairly simple custom electronics, he has created some amazing results. One interesting video series is his model rocket silo project (more video links given later in the article), including the launch of a fin-less vectored-thrust rocket from that silo that reminds one of a submarine-launched ballistic missile.

       What really caught my eye, though, was his three-engine vectored-thrust Falcon Heavy model, shown to the right in mid-flight (the center engine did not ignite during this flight). In that pic (taken from a video linked far below), the thrust vectoring for this fin-less model is clearly visible, particularly with the right-most engine. Other test flights show more dramatic vectoring, more on this later. To his credit, Joe doesn’t filter out his failures, but instead documents his process, warts and all, including crashes, flameouts, fires, control losses and so on.

Seriously, I was just kidding.

• Good question: "Why does India have so few Covid-19 cases and deaths?"--Quartz. 

There are four possible explanations:

1. The epidemic may have struck later than in other countries. Since epidemics have exponential growth at the start, a small delay can have massive effects on the number of cases.
2. India’s 21-day lockdown may have successfully suppressed the epidemic. Physical distancing is one of the best ways to slow the epidemic and, if anything, many have criticized the lockdown for being too draconian in that regard.
3. India has not been able to test enough to count all cases and deaths. Without sufficient testing, many deaths may not be labeled with Covid-19 for official statistics, leading to an underestimation of the severity of the crisis.
4. India may have protective characteristics against Covid-19. Researchers have proposed that the low share of elderly in the population, the high temperatures and humidity in India, widespread BCG vaccination for tuberculosis, or resistance to malaria have helped India escape the brunt of the pandemic.

• "2nd Wave of Virus Outbreak Erupts in Northern Chinese City of Harbin"--Epoch Times. 
• The Golden Hordes: "How to explain the 'un-Australian' behaviour"--Adam Piggott. 

      This virus is exposing the cracks in the mulitculti facade. The reason for all the un-Australian behaviour is because Australia is chock full to the brim with un-Australians. Our elected leaders and unelected bureaucrat classes have been importing them en masse for 20 years. So when Morrison declares that this is not who we are as a people, he is absolutely spot on but not in the manner in which he intended.

      There have been many first hand accounts of groups of “Chinese-Australians” appearing in country towns and besieging unsuspecting supermarkets. They strip the shelves in front of disbelieving locals and they care not one bit for their behaviour and how it will be perceived. This is their cultural mentality and it is what we have imported in simply massive quantities. Flush with all of their purchases they pile them up in the caged trailers attached to their vehicles and speed off to the next target, finally completely the journey in one of the major cities where the goods are stockpiled for unloading at massively inflated prices.

Or, just as likely, shipped back to China. This same story has been repeated in a macro context where Chinese companies bought up tons of medical supplies in March to ship back to China (see, e.g., here and here). The same thing happened in Canada, where members of the Chinese diaspora, under influence from the Chinese government, also bought up quantities of medical supplies to ship to their mother country. Or as The New York Times so mendaciously put it: "Through February, civic-minded entrepreneurs and aid groups visited pharmacies in affluent countries and emerging markets alike, buying masks in bulk to send to China."

• Related: This April 6 article--"China forces Italy to buy same coronavirus supplies it had donated to Beijing a few weeks ago"--Fox News. "After telling the world that it would donate masks, face guards and testing equipment to Italy, China quietly backtracked and sold the Mediterranean country desperately-needed medical equipment, according to a report. What's worse is that the personal protective equipment (PPE) China forced Italy to buy was actually the same PPE Italy donated to China before coronavirus rushed its own shores and killed nearly 16,000 people."

• "The Lockdown Is Loosening Whether Government Likes It Or Not"--The Federalist. 

      The purpose of the lockdown was made very clear a month ago. It was to flatten the curve of cases in order to ensure that our hospitals were not overrun. That has been achieved, makeshift hospitals and the USS Comfort have thankfully turned out to be precautions we didn’t need. In a story that will disappear from the news media faster than a cockroach under kitchen lights, the Trump administration was proven correct about having the ventilators the nation needed. We achieved the goal at catastrophic economic expense to millions of Americans, and now Americans know it is time to start the return to our new normal.

      The country has reason to be proud of its response to the Wuhan virus. If not for the fact that much of our corporate media sees its entire job as trashing Donald Trump and his administration, there would be a more celebratory feeling about this shared success. But even though a well-deserved moment of national pride is probably impossible, the American people know the tide is turning and they are anxious to get back to their lives.

      Over the next week or two this balance between the power of the government and the will of the people will continue to shape the coronavirus response. But that balance is beginning to shift in favor of the population, this is America, and it is Americans, not our government that will ultimately decide when this cloud lifts. That is as it should be, and thankfully leaders like Trump and Cuomo understand this. The United States began in earnest with the words “We the people.” The coronavirus lockdown will end as a result of that very same authority.

• "Overall U.S. death rate is at a multi-year LOW"--Behind the Black. Robert Zimmerman writes: "Despite the panic over the Wuhan virus, it now appears that the overall U.S. death rate this winter season is at a multi-year low, no worse than 2014, 2016, and 2019, and far better than 2015, 2017, and 2018 (when we were hit with one of the worst flu seasons in years)."
• Hmm: "Nobel Prize Winner Violates the COVID Narrative"--Gates of Vienna. French virologist Luc Montagnier, who headed the team that isolated the HIV virus, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008, has stated his belief that the COVID-19 virus is the product of a laboratory. As he explains in an interview, there is no other plausible explanation for the HIV gene sequences that have been inserted into the RNA of the virus. Video of the interview with English subtitles at the link.
• Gun control in action: "At least 18 people are dead in Canada shooting rampage that spanned 12 hours"--USA Today. The article reports:

       At least 18 people are dead after one of Canada's worst mass shootings, in which a gunman dressed as a police officer went on a more than 12-hour killing spree, authorities said.

      The suspected shooter, who is also dead, donned a police uniform and drove around in what appeared to be a police cruiser as he set fires to homes and went on a gun rampage starting in the small rural town of Portapique in Nova Scotia.

      A police officer was among the dead in the assault that began Saturday night. Authorities said the gunman may have targeted his first victims, then attacked randomly.

The article continues:

      Before the weekend's shooting, a rampage at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique college in 1989 was the worst mass shooting in Canada in modern history.

      After a gunman killed 14 women then himself, the country overhauled gun-control laws. The country requires training, personal risk assessment, references, spousal notice and a criminal background check to purchase a firearm. Unregistered handguns and rapid-fire weapons are banned, too.

     Trudeau vowed Monday to renew efforts to ban assault-style weapons across Canada that was interrupted amid the coronavirus pandemic. "We have every intention of moving forward on that measure and potentially other measures when the parliament returns," Trudeau said.

The shooter was Gabriel Wortman, 51, a denture maker who "allegedly had an obsession with law enforcement and an affinity for refurbishing old police cars[.]" He apparently had no prior history of violence or arrests. Notwithstanding former-drama-teacher Trudeau's attempt to never let a crises go to waste, after perusing numerous articles, I have not seen any news articles that described what weapons that Wortman used, other than early on he apparently shot and killed an RMCP constable and thereafter used her weapon. Certainly nothing indicating that he used an "assault weapon."

• "A Shot In Hell"--New Republic. The author of this piece, Adam Weinstein, suggests that semi-auto rifles should be regulated out of existence much like machine guns were. He observes:

The NFA didn’t ban machine guns outright, as some states subsequently did—but it made them nearly impossible to obtain, especially if you weren’t squeaky clean. To remain legal, every full-auto gun now had to be serial numbered and registered with federal revenue agents. They could only be sold by or through federally licensed dealers, and each transfer had to be accompanied by a $200 federal tax payment, what would be nearly $4,000 today. In the 1930s, the fee doubled the cost of a new tommy gun. The expense, and the government registration requirements, were steep enough to scare off most would-be buyers. Overnight, the market for machine guns shrank to police, military forces, well-heeled collectors, and virtually nobody else.

The NFA took the militia out of the Second Amendment. As anyone with even a passing familiarity with modern warfare knows, small unit combat is dominated by the machine gun and various explosives (e.g., mortars, grenades), backed by additional explosive delivery systems (artillery and aircraft). Both the machine guns and explosives were severely prohibited by the NFA, preempting any modern repeat of Lexington and Concord. And with the Bonus Army and food riots fresh on the minds of Congress, the NFA, of course, passed with nary any opposition. 

• Worse than Cthulhu: "How the Obamas could easily win eight more years in the White House"--New York Post. Michael Walsh warns:

Here’s how it would work:

• In the next month or so, Biden would announce Michelle Obama as his running mate. With a little reverse engineering of the Obama-Biden bumper stickers of 2008 and 2012, they’re good to go.

• Michelle would immediately attract the undying worship of the national press corps. With the country still in lockdown, she can wave to Andrea Mitchell & Co. from the front door of her residences in Washington, DC ($8.1 million purchase price), Martha’s Vineyard ($11.75 million) or Chicago ($1.65 million).

• Barack Obama, who manfully supports his wife in all her endeavors, would joke about being the First Husband and cite his familiarity with the White House as a qualification.

• Nov. 3: With the black vote and the Bernie Sanders wing of the party solidly behind them, the Biden-Obama(s) team would defeat Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and North Carolina and winning both houses of Congress.

• Jan. 20, 2021: Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States.

• Jan. 21: On live television, Joe and Dr. Jill Biden tearfully announce that the 78-year-old president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and that under the 25th Amendment, he’s resigning. Michelle Obama is now president of the United States and will not only fill out Biden’s term but will retain her eligibility to run again in her own right in 2024 when she will have turned 60.

• Jan. 22: President Obama announces her choice for vice president …

However unlikely, it’s the smart play. How could the Republicans ever counter it?

• How the rest of the world works: "DRC's male and female rape survivors share their stories"--Al Jazeera. From the article:

       Doctors estimate that nearly one in four men in eastern DRC has been raped. It is also thought that one in three women has suffered from sexual violence, according to aid workers interviewed for this article.

       These people suffer twice - from the act itself, and from the social discrimination they endure as a result of it.

* * *

       This is precisely why rape is such an effective weapon of war and is used as such so widely.

      According to the latest UN report on sexual violence in conflict, published in March 2019, rape is used as a weapon in 15 countries around the world, mostly in Africa and the Middle East.

      In addition, past sexual violence - used as a means of warfare in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Ivory Coast - continues to take a toll on victims.

• Back in the United States: "New Unsealed Documents Show Planned Parenthood Profited From Aborted Baby Body Parts"--The Federalist. 

When senior Planned Parenthood officials were caught on tape in 2015 by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) discussing the illegal trafficking of aborted baby body parts, Planned Parenthood denied the allegations, claiming they were only reimbursed for the “cost to transport tissue.” Now, newly unsealed invoices confirm Planned Parenthood Mar Monte charged the tissue procurement company StemExpress $55 per “usable” organ — not for transport fees.