The before and after when the Army shaved our heads! Grumpy
Month: October 2022
I used to be an Army pilot, and I maintain a small plane today. In early August of 2019, one of my adult kids and I flew to Dayton, Ohio, to spend the weekend walking around the Air Force museum. Theirs is likely the greatest collection of vintage warplanes in the world. As quality time with the family goes, it was epic.
In the evening we went into Dayton for dinner and a movie. These were the days before Covid, so we could just wander about taking in the sights without worrying about contracting some ghastly disease. Ohio enjoys concealed carry reciprocity with my home state so I packed a nice carry gun, in this case a Springfield Armory Hellcat charged with fourteen SIG SAUER 147-grain V-Crown 9mm hollowpoints. The trip was great, and we made it home without incident.
One Week Later…
One week after we had been strolling around the Oregon Historic District in Dayton, Connor Betts was hanging out in a nearby bar with his 22-year-old sister Megan. He had been texting a former girlfriend earlier in the evening and seemed to her to be fairly normal. After a couple of hours in the club, Betts disappeared. He returned in short order wearing body armor and some kind of creepy mask while carrying an AR15 pistol.
For reasons that are not well understood, Betts then opened fire on the revelers in the street outside Ned Peppers Bar. In thirty seconds he fired forty-one rounds. In that half-minute, he killed nine people and injured another seventeen. One of the dead was his sister Megan. One of the severely wounded was his best friend Chace.
At the first sounds of gunfire, the partiers in the streets fled indoors through any handy doorway. People streamed into establishments around the neighborhood trying to avoid Betts and escape his rampage. Betts made a beeline for Ned Peppers, now packed with terrified people.
There were several Dayton police officers nearby when Betts opened fire. They responded immediately, running to the sounds of battle. Miraculously, the cops engaged Betts a mere 32 seconds after he fired his first shots. An autopsy determined that Betts had been hit by thirty rounds fired by police. He collapsed at the threshold of Ned Peppers and died at the scene.
The Gun
Much hay has been made over the details of Connor Betts’ firearm. A no-frills Anderson Arms AR15 pistol with an 11.5-inch barrel and unremarkable round forearm, the gun featured a flat top upper and a red dot sight. Betts fed his gun via an imported 100-round drum magazine. Betts’ AR also included a Shockwave Pistol Stabilizing Brace (PSB).
Betts had no criminal record and bought the gun legally from a supplier in Texas. The weapon transferred to him via a local FFL. When Betts was gunned down by the Dayton cops he dropped a thirty-round magazine onto the ground.
PSB’s are curious things. Initially developed by Alex Boscoe of SB tactical to aid disabled shooters in running heavy handguns one-handed, these accessories have spawned an entirely new genre of firearms. By including a PSB on an otherwise unremarkable AR or AK pistol, these short-barreled weapons become easier to operate despite their stubby barrels. These weapons also transfer like regular handguns rather than heavily regulated short-barreled rifles. PSBs have subsequently been fitted to shotguns and pistol-caliber weapons like the CZ Scorpion EVO and SIG MPX as well. There are estimated to be in excess of four million brace-equipped handguns in circulation in America. At the time of this writing, Connor Betts’ shooting was the only example I could find of a PSB having been used in a crime.
One subsequent headline screamed, “Dayton Shooter Used Gun That May Have Exploited an ATF Loophole.” The presupposition on the part of the less durable members of society that a guy who would willingly undertake mass murder might somehow inexplicably be motivated to adhere to gun laws seems utterly bewildering to me. However, in the aftermath of the Dayton shooting the loudest voices on the Left were screaming not about the psychopath Connor Betts but rather for enhanced restrictions on firearms. There was relatively little furor over what might have been practically done to stop the deranged shooter himself.
The Shooter
Connor Betts never was quite right. A bully in high school, Betts was bipolar and carried a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He also admitted to hearing voices, though apparently he had not been formally diagnosed with schizophrenia at the time of his crime.
Betts took rejection poorly. While at Bellbrook High School he kept a list of girls who had spurned him and anyone else he perceived to have slighted him in some way. He told friends he intended to rape the girls and kill the boys on his list as the opportunities arose. He also told fellow students he intended to shoot up his school. Betts was suspended for a year as a result in 2012 and subjected to a police investigation. He worked at a local gas station as well as Chipotle.
Betts was an avid supporter of Antifa and regularly retweeted posts espousing extreme left-wing, anti-police views. He was a vocal supporter of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He was tepid toward Kamala Harris based upon her historical connections to Law Enforcement. On his Twitter bio he described himself as a “Metalhead Anime-fan Leftist.” He wrote, “I’m going to hell and I’m not coming back.” He often used the hashtag #HailSatan.
Betts was the lead singer in a pornogrind metal band called Menstrual Munchies. His lyrics orbited around violence, gratuitous gore, and necrophilia. His music glorified sexual violence.
A former classmate of Betts had this to say about him, “Connor Betts was a psychopath…I remember when he threatened to shoot up our school and had a hit list of people that he wanted to kill. I’ve worked with him, too, and he scared the employees on a daily basis.
“Everyone who knew him knew he had issues. I would tell people all the time to just stay away from him because he’s threatened to kill people. When the customers didn’t tip him, he would threaten to go to their house and kill them. I thought he was just all talk but then I would be at work by myself with him and hear him chanting things that sounded like he was worshiping the devil. I would be calling his name for him to stop and he wouldn’t answer.”
Ruminations
This devil-worshipping Antifa loser exhibited all the hallmarks of a dysfunctional mass shooter from an early age. He was aggressively investigated by Law Enforcement fully ten years prior to his murder spree. He was being treated for serious mental health issues and was the lead singer in a band that screamed about killing women and then copulating with their corpses. And the primary problem is that he had a pistol brace on his firearm? As a society could we really be that naïve?
Hating the cops is both in vogue and in the news these days. However, Connor Betts’ final moments were captured on surveillance footage from outside the Ned Peppers Bar. The Dayton PD simply could not have been any faster. They were on-site and engaging less than a minute after the first shots were fired. They killed this guy literally seconds before he made it into a bar packed with terrified humanity.
When Betts was shot he presumably had 59 rounds left onboard his weapon and carried his next 30-round magazine ready to go. I think this may be the finest example of tactical police work I have ever seen. It is literally impossible to determine how many lives were saved by the bravery and selflessness shown by Dayton’s finest that fateful evening. And yet the Left persists in denigrating police in general while minimizing the importance of the services they provide.
I was walking these same streets with my child a week prior to this event. But for the grace of God, we weren’t there when Connor Betts detonated. There are some 400 million firearms in America. If all guns were outlawed tomorrow under pain of death, psychopaths like Connor Betts would still be armed a century from now.
I don’t carry a gun to prove anything. If I’m doing it properly nobody will ever know. I carry a gun because my family and I share the world with anarchist Satan worshippers who are lead singers for pornogrind bands that celebrate murdering people and then desecrating their corpses. Some people study the Dayton shooting and see a desperate need for more gun control. I narrowly miss experiencing the same thing and give thanks that I live in a place where I don’t have to walk among such predators unarmed. Had I been there that fateful night I likely would have been killed along with the rest of them. However, I would have nonetheless had the means, the skill, and the will to fight back.
Categories
Is the 6.8 the “New” 6.5
SPRINGFIELD, VA -(Ammoland.com)- When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) told Representative Michael Cloud’s (R-TX) office that it held nearly one billion out of business records, Gun Owners of America (GOA) called it an illegal gun registry. The legacy media newspaper, USA Today, issued a “fact check” stating that the claim was false. Now thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by GOA and Gun Owners Foundation (GOF), we know how much of a role the ATF played in determining the rating.
Last January, the ATF answered an inquire by Rep Cloud’s office stating that it held nearly one billion records in its Out of Business Office in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The vast majority of the records were digitized, and the ATF’s Firearms Trace Center had access to the documents. Although the ATF claims the records are not searchable by anything other than the former federal firearms licensee (FFL) name, by just selecting a few options in the software, those records could be usable by using optical character recognition (OCR).
A new FOIA request by GOA and GOF shows the communication between the USA Today fact checker, ATF’s former Chief of the Public Affairs Division, April Langwell, and former ATF Associate Deputy Director Thomas Chittum. Mr. Chittum has left the ATF to work for ShotSpotter. Ms. Langwell also recently left the ATF to work as the Director of Communications for the United States Marine Corp (USMC).
In the exchange, the unnamed fact-checker asked about the alleged registry. Ms. Langwell and Mr. Chittum denied the existence of the gun registry. Mr. Chittum replied that there was no firearms registry and handed off the conversation to Ms. Langwell. Ms. Langwell repeated the claim that the database is only searchable by FFL name. She stated that the ATF doesn’t consider the digitally scanned records to be a gun registry. The fact checker did not follow up on how easy it would be to turn on optical character recognition. The fact checker seemed to accept Ms. Langwell’s claims at face value.
The issue the fact checker overlooked is that according to the email exchange, the records are stored in PDF format. The PDF file format is the product of Adobe. Adobe Acrobat is needed to read the documents in the file format. The ability to OCR documents is built into Adobe Acrobat and can be applied to a PDF in as little as two clicks.
The ATF also told USA Today that all records had been digitized as of 2017. This claim contradicts what the ATF told Congressman Michael Cloud (R-TX). The fact checker did ask Ms. Langwell about the discrepancy. The ATF repeated the claim to the fact checker that the ATF completed the move to a digital format in 2017. The fact checker never followed up on why the ATF told USA Today something different than what the Bureau told Congress. Someone received the wrong information from the ATF, and it is unclear who has the incorrect information.
GOF and GOA were deeply troubled by USA Today’s “fact checking” methods. They point out that the paper discounted the mountains of evidence and the ATF’s own statements on the matter.
“ATF openly admitted to USA Today that ‘scanning out of business records began in 2005’ and now ATF ‘processes an average of 5.5 million’ records containing private gun and owner information into its database per month,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs, Gun Owners of America. “We are disappointed that this ‘journalist’ simply reported ATF’s denial of an illegal gun registry as truth, without any critical thinking whatsoever.”
USA Today did not respond to AmmoLand’s request for comment.
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, or at www.crumpy.com.
Categories
Have a meaningful Yom Kippur
To all my Tribe Readers: G’mar Chatimah Tovah.
For us non-Jews: it’s about Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which starts at dusk today.
Categories
The US Army “Grease Gun”
My Dad had one in Korea
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God, I was stupid.
By now, we know some of the hinky stuff the FBI has done recently, but it seems there’s more.
It seems the bureau misled a judge in order to seize $86 million worth of private property from a private vault in Los Angeles
The privacy invasion was vast when FBI agents drilled and pried their way into 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at the U.S. Private Vaults store in Beverly Hills.
They rummaged through personal belongings of a jazz saxophone player, an interior designer, a retired doctor, a flooring contractor, two Century City lawyers and hundreds of others.
Agents took photos and videos of pay stubs, password lists, credit cards, a prenuptial agreement, immigration and vaccination records, bank statements, heirlooms and a will, court records show. In one box, agents found cremated human remains.
Eighteen months later, newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it.
They omitted from their warrant request a central part of the FBI’s plan: Permanent confiscation of everything inside every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.
The FBI’s justification for the dragnet forfeiture was its presumption that hundreds of unknown box holders were all storing assets somehow tied to unknown crimes, court records show.
So they just assumed everyone who used what amounted to a safe deposit box was doing so for illicit reasons? They thought the private vault company was shady and suspect it of being involved in criminal undertakings, but it’s clear they acted as if literally everyone who used it was criminal as well.
“But Tom, this is a Second Amendment site. What does that have to do with guns, gun rights, or gun control?” you might ask; quite fairly, to be honest.
My point in bringing this up is simple. If the FBI honestly thought they could get away with something like this by apparently and essentially lying to the judge, why would anyone believe law enforcement wouldn’t lie to a judge to, say, get a red flag order issued?
Similar to how the order in this case was issued, red flag orders don’t require the judge to talk to the individual. All police really have to do is tell the judge that you’re a threat for whatever reason and poof! There go your gun rights.
Oh, you might get them back, but how long will you have to wait? Why should you have to wait?
Look, I still remain convinced that most law enforcement just wants to catch actual bad guys. However, sometimes they get fixated on the wrong things, and sometimes those who go into law enforcement are the bad guys. They’re human, with all that entails.
If they’ll lie to essentially steal $86 million in private property and claim they just might be involved in some unknown criminal activity, why should anyone trust any of their rights to a system that could yank them away just as easily?