Weekend Reading #72

Some longer or more involved reading:

•  Greg Ellifritz of Active Response Training has a new Weekend Knowledge Dump posted with links to interesting stuff and some commentary too. Several that I found notable:
• An article on the difference between social aggression (e.g., the "monkey dance," "educational beatdown" and similar) and asocial violence (violence that does not serve a social function such as to reshuffle the pecking order). 
•  A look at whether a light trigger assists in accuracy and it can (certainly an overly heavy trigger can degrade accuracy as anyone who has ever shot a double action handgun can attest). 
• An explainer on the different FEMA search markings and what they mean. The author also raises a couple cautions about trying to utilize a fake marking after a major disaster.
• A discussion of the pros and cons of using the high ready position with a rifle. But as Greg points out:

    There are way too many egos involved in the shooting industry.  Each claims that their methodology is the one true way.  It’s all bullshit.  Let’s stop being dogmatic. 

    We want to point our weapons in the safest direction we can in every different location.  Sometimes that is up.  Sometimes it is down.  Lighten up a bit. 

 And an excerpt from the article:

 

    Now observe 3 or 4 shooters in a straight line (one behind the other) and have them flow through a doorway, peeling off on alternating sides and driving their muzzles to the corners of the room. What you will notice, as they pass through the door and turn towards their corner, is that they will lean forward to be able to drive the gun. You will actually see a gap created at head level as they peel off left and right before you see a clear space below torso level into the room. This gap, or “Cut,” is what is being exploited by using the High Ready.

    Instead of waiting for the last part of a person’s body to move out of the way with the Low Ready, assaulters found that it was much faster to hold their rifle muzzles up and just drop the rifle down in the torso/head gap (created as the guy in front of them started peeling off left or right). This method proved faster than coming up from Low Ready, where you’re waiting on the lower body to clear. The increased speed of dropping down from High Ready can only be measured in fractions of a second, but in close quarter battles, that is a lot of time. 

•  An article that looks at clues you can pick up from empty shelves and missing items at the grocery store. The author notes that you should be looking not at a single item, but categories of items, particularly if it persists over several days or weeks. For instance, empty canned vegetables on one day might just mean a missed truck or a stocking crew running late; but persistent lack of items, cheaper products disappearing, or being replaced with other items is probably a signal of a breakdown in the supply chain.
• A piece from John Farnham with defensive tips should you find yourself stuck in a car at a drive thru as some found themselves at the recent In-N-Out shooting in Idaho.  
• An article about carrying with an empty chamber and its downsides, to which Greg adds the following comment:

     And speaking about the Idaho active killer attack, one armed citizen attempted to intervene, but he was carrying a pistol with an empty chamber.  He took a round into his primary gun arm before he was able to draw his gun.  When he eventually got the gun out, he was unable to chamber a round due to his injury.  How would you like to be that guy right now, knowing you could have stopped the killing, but you didn’t do so because you were unwilling to get enough training to feel comfortable with your loaded carry pistol?

    If you don’t feel it’s safe enough to carry a chambered striker fired pistol, you need more training.  If you are unwilling to seek training to become competent, you should be carrying a revolver.

    But none of the chamber-empty carry folks will ever carry a six-shooter, even though it’s a far more capable weapon than a chamber-empty semi-auto.  A revolver doesn’t look cool enough.  What does that tell us about a person like that? 

    They are unwilling to take a couple of days worth of training to be comfortable carrying a semi-auto with a loaded chamber.  They are unwilling to carry a revolver with a heavier trigger that is less likely to be accidentally pulled.  Those folks just want to feel like a badass carrying a gun. They don’t have either the mindset or ability to use the gun to save lives.   The gun for them is some kind of a magical talisman that prevents evil acts from occurring in their proximity.   They are more concerned with appearing capable than actually being capable.  I find those folks to be worse than worthless in an emergency.  Contemptible, actually.

•  John Wilder's "Liberty Without a People, a Border, or a Moral Center Is Just a Corridor" which I mentioned this morning, which is mostly a critique of libertarianism (but also socialism and globalism). An excerpt:

    Libertarianism fails because it calls collective self-defense “collectivism” when America is being assailed by collectives of Indians and Mexicans and moslems and other groups that all have a collective strategy to protect themselves at the expense of the rest of society.  If you try to get a job in certain sectors of the economy, if you don’t speak Spanish, aren’t a Brahmin, don’t bow to Allah, or don’t go to synagogue, well, you’re never going to get that job.  They’ll pick people more like them.

    Markets really are the main engines of prosperity, but random, chaotic markets aren’t the predictor of economic success, it’s the people.  In Sweden, all adopted (non-European) foreign children perform well below the norm on IQ tests.  Except the Koreans.

    Go figure.  People make a difference.  I’d rather live in socialist all-Dane Denmark than in multicultural Johannesburg.

    Libertarianism fails because it cannot generate or defend the particular social order that limited government requires.  Full stop.  The Founding Fathers didn’t spring forth from a Libertarian Eden.  Nope.  They were forged in plain-old British values. 

•  Rod Dreher: "Demon On A Plane? Jonathan Cahn’s Story. And: The Aztecs Really Were Unspeakably Evil." You may have seen news stories about the crazy plane passenger that had to be duck taped to his seat. Well, Cahn was the passenger seated next to the crazy guy and discusses how the guy went from normal to crazy at the flip of the switch, like he was possessed, when he realized that Cahn had written a Christian based adventure novel called The Altar Of Pergamon. And the topic of that alter led Dreher to ruminate on the evil that was the Aztek Empire. He included this excerpt from a review of a book about the Azteks (aka Mexica):

That empire was not gentle. Few empires are, but even by the sad standards of human history, the Mexica were extreme. I’m not speaking here about their legendarily creative and inventive ways of humiliating subject peoples,² I’m speaking about the human sacrifices. No, these were not exaggerated by the colonizers, as some revisionist historians would have you believe.³ If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it. The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play:

The killings were not remote top-of-the pyramid affairs. If only high priests and rulers killed, they carried out most of their butchers’ work en plein air, and not only in the main temple precinct, but in the neighborhood temples and on the streets. The people were implicated in the care and preparation of the victims, their delivery to the place of death, and then in the elaborate processing of the bodies: the dismemberment and distribution of heads and limbs, flesh and blood and flayed skins. On high occasions warriors carrying gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of their captives ran through the streets, to be ceremoniously welcomed into the dwellings; the flesh of their victims seethed in domestic cooking pots; human thighbones, scraped and dried, were set up in the courtyards of households — and all this among a people notable for a precisely ordered polity, a grave formality of manner, and a developed regard for beauty.

The scale of it boggles the mind. The Mexica record with pride a single festal occasion on which over twenty thousand victims were sacrificed, the blood rolling in a slow curtain down the steps of the pyramids as four lines of manacled slaves trudged along the great processional ways towards their doom. It was the job of special priests to greet the captives as they entered the city and to explain in detail the honor that was to await them. And it was always human beings. Many primitive cultures have practiced forms of animal sacrifice. The Mexica were neither primitive, nor interested in animals. There was also no “othering” at work here. The Mexica knew that they were killing people who thought and felt and dreamed and loved as they did. Indeed, that was the entire point of it. They constructed an efficient and well-run machine that had as its sole purpose delivering living, breathing, conscious and informed human beings to the killing-stone or the furnace. A whole battery of sophisticated psychological techniques were employed to ensure the compliance of the victims to the end.⁴ Yes, the Spaniards lacked the vocabulary to describe it, but we who live in the aftermath of the twentieth century do not.

Read the whole thing.

• And in light of the actions and words from the female Lindsay Clancy jurors and their supporters: "The Return of Witchcraft, Part One: Understanding the public reappearance of hexing" by Tara Thieke. 

Here is an army willing to do battle against any moral restraint on itself. Copycat killings emerge; the TikTok goddesses pursue their line of thought without remorse. The Sisterhood rebukes the concept of examination of conscience, preferring therapy which validates one’s grievances. It is a massive, massive cultural shift imbuing all human relations, even the mother to child, with its conflation of any self-giving with persecution (both Clancy and her copycat killer described their small sons as being “the antiChrist” or “devil”). The rise of this Sisterhood in tandem with the growth of the “women can do no wrong” belief has life or death repercussions.