T. L. Davis: The Barrel Will Be Hot

I've warmed up to the blogging of T. L. Davis, TL In Exile. His message is urgent and resolute, and yet never crosses over into wild-eyed Alex Jones territory. I would call him clear-eyed rather than wild-eyed, and he's written several books, so his message is delivered with precision and succinctness. I've purchased The Constitutionalist on Kindle and look forward to reading it.

Here are some excerpts from his latest post, The Barrel Will Be Hot.

The federal government, particularly Barack Obama and Eric Holder might want to pay attention here. They are losing the PR battle when it comes to the Second Amendment. Instead of making the supporters of the Second Amendment look like nuts who just want to kill people, they are convincing the other half of the nation that the government is full of nuts who just want to kill people.

It wasn't so long ago when those of us in the patriot/liberty community spoke about resistance we were shrugged off. When we spoke of unconstitutional laws we were ignored. When we called out the President and the Attorney General as Marxists who wanted to disarm the American people to force their collectivist policies on people we were shouted down as unreasonable and delusional.

That isn't happening now. People are reading stories of excessive laws like those which have ensnared Nathan Haddad and Keith Pantaleon and recognize that something is wrong. When Chicago produces a higher body count than Afghanistan day in and day out with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, the charge that more gun restrictions will lead to safety fall on ever more deaf ears.

The traitorous media refuses to print the daily instances where guns have saved lives and it rises to the millions in a given year. In Atlanta a student shot a 14-year-old at a middle school before an armed volunteer overpowered him. Not the police, somebody at the scene. A Sandy Hook was averted by the presence of a gun in a school and it just slipped by unnoticed except on the Drudge Report and The Blaze.

The equal division of the nation's people is being forged by the Obama Administration and I would like to think it was an error in judgment on the part of the President, but I have seen too many instances where division and strife were exactly what he wanted to achieve. So he has his divided society between "rednecks" and sycophantic liberals. He has driven a wedge between federal law enforcement and local law enforcement.

This last is an astute observation. That's why we can't start flipping out in our actions or our rhetoric. That would be handing political ammunition to the gun control crowd. And just because most of the mass killers of recent times have been on the left, that doesn't mean people on our side can't flip out and do something horrible. And lately I've been worrying about some of the "open carry" proponents; they seem to more concerned about making a point than self-defense as I've noted before.

We are there and we are ready to fight, because we are ready to die. The people know deep down that these threats to regulate, register and confiscate our weapons is the last item on the agenda leading to absolute despotism. They are the prelude to everything our fighting men have died to oppose over the past centuries. There is something just un-American about it and they can't stomach it.

Mr. Davis is eloquent and I think the readers here would appreciate him. We're all in exile, by the way, in case any of you have forgotten.

Richard Barrett shreds on a six string

My "Don't Confirm Hagel" Email to Senators

If you go here, you can automatically send an email note to your Senators telling them to just say NO to confirming Hagel as Sec Def. I sent mine to Ohio Senators Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman. Standard text is provided by the website, but I modified the text in mine slightly, adding an extra paragraph, which I highlighted in bold below.

I am asking you---not only as your constituent but a concerned citizen---to vote "No" on the confirmation of Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense. Chuck Hagel's confirmation would send a dangerous signal to Iran and other radical Islamic elements which would make our country and our allies less secure. Senator Hagel has made it clear that he would not use strength to prevent the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons. He has also sought to distance the United States from Israel, and refused to stop efforts to end terrorist attacks on Israel.

As my representative in the United States Senate you swore to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic." I firmly believe there are more qualified persons to serve as our next Secretary of Defense.

For all these reasons I have been opposed to Hagel being confirmed as Secretary of Defense for some time now. But listening to audio of the confirmation hearings today, I have another concern. Mr. Hagel's halting, hesitating responses when he was asked several difficult questions--which he assuredly knew he would receive--made me wonder if he is mentally competent to serve in this high pressure position. Upon observing this I remember thinking that I wouldn't be surprised if he had unknowingly suffered a stroke, or has some other malady of the brain which makes him slow on the uptake. Please consider this before you confirm a man with an impaired mind.

I deliberately avoided the use of the word retarded which, though the most accurate word I can think of to describe his feeble-minded responses and speech impediment, I deemed to possibly be construed as a bit disrespectful by the staffers who are forced to read these correspondences.

Nathan Haddad: Guilty of self-defense

Nathan Haddad had some nice magazines, got arrested for it.

Send him money by going HERE. I just did.

Highlights from David Mamet's excellent article

Please read this entire article. David Mamet is a really good writer, and stating that fact is sort of like saying that Mozart was a really good composer. Mamet brings his writing brilliance to the topic of gun rights versus gun control policy and ties it philosophically to the big picture of individual rights and freedoms versus overbearing government. I'm merely going to excerpt highlights here with short commentary.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

Any one using the phrase "one-size-fits-all" to describe wrongheaded, liberal, big-government policy immediately scores check marks on the good rhetoric clipboard. People who switch from being on the left to being on the right, like Mamet and others such as David Horowitz, realize that the enshrinement of egalitarianism eventually hurts everyone, even those they claim to be trying to help. As soon as you realize that one size does not fit all, you are on your way toward the individual rights camp.

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”

Ah, yes, the kind of diversity the left thoroughly dislikes, the kind which has components of intellect and will involved and not just one based on skin color or other accidental features. Diversity based on viewpoints and knowledge and reasoning capabilities—in other words, diversity based on essential human qualities—is the only really interesting kind to people interested in fixing real societal problems. One person likes the city, another likes the country, one likes to work outdoors, another prefers office work, one likes a steady paycheck, another likes to trade options, etc. Is there any way for democratic society to deal with such diversity of opinions other than absolute freedom on these non-moral issues? Of course we have seen the left espouse intolerance of actual diversity of thought for years now—one quick example. Mamet includes churches as beneficiaries of this type of essential diversity; St. Paul appears to concur.

The Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach them that power corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George. The American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of power: “He has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made Judges dependent on his will alone … He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat out their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has] fundamentally altered the forms of our government.”

This is a chillingly familiar set of grievances; and its recrudescence was foreseen by the Founders. They realized that King George was not an individual case, but the inevitable outcome of unfettered power; that any person or group with the power to tax, to form laws, and to enforce them by arms will default to dictatorship, absent the constant unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and their severe untempered insistence upon compliance with law.

I don't have much to add to this observation. Except maybe... BOOM.

Many are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their opposition comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.

Two good points. These 2 million instances of good news gun stories are pretty much unreported unless you read NRA magazines and other pro-gun publications. One reason has to do with the liberal agenda of the media, but another I believe is the non-newsworthiness of the "incidents" to the reporting industry. For example, something like a burglar hears a shotgun pump action and falls out of the first floor window and runs usually doesn't make for good copy, especially if the would-have-been victim isn't photogenic. Whereas an accomplished athlete named Plaxico has a gun accident and it's national news. It's what they can use to sell soap and underwear that creates newsworthiness. "If it bleeds it leads" explains why normal excessive drinking and idiocy on the part of celebrities doesn't make headlines as well as the effective defensive use of firearms which doesn't produce a corpse or a drastic injury of some sort.

Walk down Madison Avenue in New York. Many posh stores have, on view, or behind a two-way mirror, an armed guard. Walk into most any pawnshop, jewelry story, currency exchange, gold store in the country, and there will be an armed guard nearby. Why? As currency, jewelry, gold are precious. Who complains about the presence of these armed guards? And is this wealth more precious than our children?

Apparently it is: for the Left adduces arguments against armed presence in the school but not in the wristwatch stores. Q. How many accidental shootings occurred last year in jewelry stores, or on any premises with armed security guards?

Why not then, for the love of God, have an armed presence in the schools? It could be done at the cost of a pistol (several hundred dollars), and a few hours of training (that’s all the security guards get). Why not offer teachers, administrators, custodians, a small extra stipend for completing a firearms-safety course and carrying a concealed weapon to school? The arguments to the contrary escape me.

We are all for that.

Don't forget to take the snap poll while you're reading Mamet's piece. It was 84-16, in the right direction, last time I checked. That's encouraging.

Feb 23 (.223) is the Day of Resistance

Here's the main page where you can sign up for updates.

Here's their volunteer page on Facebook.

RIP Sugarfoot Bonner

Say what??


Ever notice that music dudes who wear a lot of clothes at one time are usually accompanied by women who barely wear any?

Red flags

Thanks, Pauli, for letting me post here.  Hope I can make an occasional worthwhile contribution.

So . . . here I am, a handgun owner (at the encouragement and nudging by my son – imagine that), wondering why the recent gun control “conversation” is bugging me more than many things these days. Something doesn’t seem right about it, beyond the obvious that this was going to be the type of conversation in which they tell us what is going to be done and we are going to listen.

I guess it is because there are all these red flags popping up.  We have horrible evil perpetrated on innocent children, and much to-do that something has to be done, even “if it saves only one life”, but what we get are proposals that have little to do with solving the stated problem. 

If the solutions being trumpeted don’t solve the stated problem (esp. in a high profile case like this), you can be sure that there is another agenda in mind.   

Another red flag is the perversion of fundamental principles that has sadly become a habit with our current ruling class.  They refer to the free exercise of religion as ”freedom of worship” (culminating, so far, in the HHS mandate).  We saw it writ large in Obama’s second inaugural address, asserting that our unalienable right to liberty requires “collective action”. There has been a constant drip of this attitude, giving us the “sense that those who played by the rules and did well have instead done something wrong, or at least are under suspicion — and it is now time for their government to seek atonement from them”.

And on the gun issue, Obama tells us that he has “profound respect for the traditions of hunting”, and Biden tells us how many rounds hunters need.  This is a perversion of our natural right to defend our lives against an aggressor and the moral obligation to defined the lives of innocent others, as Pauli ably stated, not to mention our natural right to self-government rather than tyranny.

These red flags tell us that the current “gun control” proposals are not so much about “guns”, but are instead about “control".  The ruling class is demanding that we cede to the State at least part of our natural right to self-defense and our moral obligation to defend others, for our own safety, of course.  (Or not.)  But as the Declaration asserts, and as we Catholics especially know, we cannot cede our natural rights or our moral accountability – we remain obligated and accountable to protect innocent life.  A government that applies its power to take for itself our God-given rights and responsibilities violates the natural rights of man, and offends human dignity.  More on that topic here.

So yes, something ought to bug me.  This is a defining issue, IMO, masquerading as something happening on the edges.  We must resist this attempt, saying so based on principle rather than because we are specifically affected by the details. Why do we law-abiding citizens need high-capacity magazines? Not because I want one, but because we don’t want a fair fight if we must defend ourselves from an aggressor (or multiple aggressors), as is our right and obligation. Why do we fight a federal requirement to do a background check when we sell (or give) a weapon to our good friend down the street? Not because I don’t want the hassle, but because the federal government has no power over that transaction (nope, not even the commerce clause). Why do we law-abiding citizens need “assault” rifles? Not because the definition is a sham or because it is the best tool for what I want to do, but because “… we are not serfs. We are a free people living under a republic of our own construction. We may consent to be governed, but we will not be ruled.”. 

We live in an era of government-by-anecdote, in which every non-optimal event fitting the narrative turns into a call for federal action. Even if we avoid this current threat, some day there will be another bad result simply because evil and human imperfection exist. Like Pauli said, we need to take whatever "equal time" we can get to repeat those principles necessary to argue and defend against the creeping tyranny of "something has to be done" when the next bad event happens, as it necessarily will.

* More disclosure – I sold my second .45 to a friend of mine this weekend (don’t need two guns shooting the same round, especially at 50 cents per).  Don’t worry – I didn’t launder it through a ridiculous “buyback” nor sell it to a street thug or lunatic.  I sold it to a good friend who is on our parish pastoral committee, as a matter of fact.

Get 'em while they're still legal

Speaking of bump-firing these slide stocks make it easier to bump fire and you can do it while holding the gun in a regular aiming position. That way you can see what you are utterly destroying. Check it out:



Of course, these are mainly for fun, or for revolution if that's yo thang. But Diane Feinstein no likey so much. So buy a few now while you still can.

Safety First: Choosing a handgun safe

A big concern for people considering buying a handgun is balancing safety and accessibility. The top dresser drawer is not a good idea, especially if you have kids, but a good combination safe used for documents and whatnot is sometimes a pain to have in your bedroom, and not the fastest thing to open.

The solution I’ve found is to get one of these specially designed electronic pistol safes. It’s called a MiniVault and it opens upon entering a combination of rubber buttons which you can set and program. There are four buttons and the sequence can include multiple buttons at a time. There’s also a key entry if you forget the combination, or if you let the battery die, etc. It’s very ergonomic and your hand, right or left, fits nicely on the keys.

It takes about 2 or 3 seconds to punch in the combination and pull out my Glock. I keep it with a magazine in it, but no chambered round. It’s on the way to my bedroom door, so in about 2 more seconds, I’m in between the staircase and the entrance to all the kids’ bedrooms with a round in the pipe and 8 more in the magazine. So it passes the speed test from my point of view.

Don’t let the manufacturer’s list price of $159.99 freak you out. You can usually pick up this model for around $99.00 at a place like Meijer, for example. I think I saw one somewhere for even a little less. There are even cheaper models, and obviously key safes are cheaper, but then there is the whole "where is the key?" issue which I confess I have a problem with at least once a week for my other keys. I got my safe at Gander Mountain for a little over $100.00. They are built very durably and I think purchasing a used one would probably be acceptable. Maybe not sight-unseen, though; the electronics should obviously be tested. You just need to practice with it just like everything else, and test the batteries once a month.

I should also mention that you can bolt this safe down. There are 6 mounting holes on the bottom, and it comes with four or so large wood screws. That’s a good idea; with gun prices so high currently, handguns have become commonly stolen items.

Video: Choosing A Handgun For Home Defense

Everything this guy says is worth considering. He is really knowledgeable, and gives proper consideration to the familiarity factor.


Love how he ends it: "Remember, shoot straight on the range and in life."

Some people say "Just get a pump action shotgun (like this Mossberg) for Home D." Good idea, but I would suggest getting one in addition to your sidearm. They only cost a couple hundred, and the sound of the pump action will put the fear of God into some garden variety burglars. But in a life or death situation you can't call time out to reload. So it's nice to have the magazine load option. Even a revolver can be speed loaded with these suckers, so it almost as simple as magazine switching, and can probably be just as fast with practice.

Plus there is the factor of being able to hide more easily with a handgun than with something possessing a long barrel.

I used to (15 years ago) have an S&W "hand cannon" revolver like the one he shows, and I configured it the same way, i.e., kept it loaded with 38 special plus P hollow point rounds inside a combination safe. I sold it on a time, and sort of regret it now. (Hmmmmm....)