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Month: January 2024
Hershel House, one of the preeminent builders of American Long Rifles and knives of the Long Hunter era, has died. He was a giant in the traditional field, and by all accounts a fine man. He was 82 years old and had a fine run, but his passing has left a hole in the world for many people.
Mel Hankla wrote a really fine piece on House for Muzzleloader Magazine years ago. Read it here.
Hershel Carmen House was born July 4, 1941 and needs no introduction to these pages. His work has been nationally known for the better part of four decades. Hershel and his younger brothers Frank and John are the progenitors of what is known as the “Woodbury School” in today’s contemporary longrifle society. Named for the small Kentucky town on the banks of the Green River in which they grew up. Products made by this family ingenuously express their personalities, exhibit varied artistic talents, and reveal a genuine way of life that has significantly influenced many aspects and countless members of today’s contemporary longrifle culture.
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Monk scouted up a novel to be released later this year titled Dark Frontier.
A thrilling historical western set in 1890s Oregon, from the author of the critically acclaimed Bernicia Chronicles. An English soldier turned policeman escapes to the American West for a new future, but life on the frontier proves far harder than he ever imagined…
A man can flee from everything but his own nature.
1890. Lieutenant Gabriel Stokes of the British Army left behind the horrors of war in Afghanistan for a role in the Metropolitan Police. Though he rose quickly through the ranks, the squalid violence of London’s East End proved just as dark and oppressive as the battlefield.
With his life falling apart, and longing for peace and meaning, Gabriel leaves the grime of London behind and heads for the wilderness and wide open spaces of the American West.
He soon realises that the wilds of Oregon are far from the idyll he has yearned for. The Blue Mountains may be beautiful, but with the frontier a complex patchwork of feuds and felonies, and ranchers as vicious as any back alley cut-throat in London, Gabriel finds himself unable to escape his past and the demons that drive him. Can he find a place for himself on the far edge of the New World?
I just discovered that the pulpy goodness that is Warrior had a third season in 2023. Lady Marilyn and I will need to catch up on that…
Set during the Tong Wars in late 1870s San Francisco, the series follows Ah Sahm, a martial arts prodigy who emigrates from China in search of his sister, only to be sold to one of the most powerful tongs in Chinatown.
Warrior came out of an old pitch by Bruce Lee and one of the men at the helm is Jonathan Tropper, who created Banshee (the Irish pub in Warrior is named The Banshee. Nice meta touch there.) We enjoyed the first two seasons on Cinemax, but the show got derailed by COVID and the demise of Cinemax original programing. HBO Max picked it up and delivered a third season last summer. That may be it, although I hear there’s a possibility of Netflix picking it up…
Warrior is pure pulp, but it is exploring a real, international frontier phenomenon.
I ran across a book in the library that takes on The Chinese Question across multiple 19th century frontiers.
How Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race.
In roughly five decades, between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over “the Chinese Question”: would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?
This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese people to the West and reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Drawing on ten years of research across five continents, prize-winning historian Mae Ngai narrates the story of the thousands of Chinese who left their homeland in pursuit of gold, and how they formed communities and organizations to help navigate their perilous new world. Out of their encounters with whites, and the emigrants’ assertion of autonomy and humanity, arose the pernicious western myth of the “coolie” laborer, a racist stereotype used to drive anti-Chinese sentiment.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and the British Empire had answered “the Chinese Question” with laws that excluded Chinese people from immigration and citizenship. Ngai explains how this happened and argues that Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global economy but an integral part of it.
This is outside my reading scope for The Ranger Project, etc., but I will mark it down for future exploration. The Chinese story is an important one, and it ain’t pretty. Oregon was the site of a terrible crime involving the massacre of some 34 Chinese gold miners in 1887.
The 2024 session of the Tennessee General Assembly is scheduled to convene in Nashville on Tuesday, January 9.
According to his personal website, Daniel Lubetzky was born in Mexico City in the late 1960s and came to the United States with his family as a teenager.
In 2004, Lubetzky is the founded the snack company Kind LLC. It was reportedly worth $5 billion when the company was sold to Mars Inc. in 2020. When the company was under his management, Lubetzky was named a Presidential Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship by former President Barack Obama and his administration’s Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker.
His foundation received its tax-exempt status in 2017, and a federal tax filing from 2021 indicates the Lubetzky Family Foundation has offices at 3 Times Square, also known as the Thomson Reuters Building, in New York. The Lubetzky Family Foundation spent nearly $3.5 million in 2021, when its eight highest-earning employees were each paid more than $100,000, and collectively were compensated $1,294,410.
Lubetzky’s involvement in Tennessee politics comes through a group called Citizen Solutions, which is a project of Starts With Us, which in turn is a project of the Lubetzky Family Foundation. Citizen Solutions seems to exist to spread awareness of the suggestions made by the Tennessee 11, a group of 11 Tennessee residents affiliated with Citizen Solutions.
The Tennessee 11 apparently met for the first time in September, when the group held a “solution session” in Franklin.
In October, the Tennessee 11 announced eight proposals for new laws, regulations, and initiatives they claim would contribute toward the prevention of gun violence. Among the proposals, according to a press release by Citizen Solutions, are calls for Tennessee to pass a red flag law, which would allow courts to order the temporary suspension of an individual’s right to bear arms, require Student Resource Officers (SROs) be trained in “mental health first aid” and “trauma-informed care,” and create “an incentives-first approach to gun ownership rights and responsibilities.”
Another proposal includes Tennessee investing resources to prevent traumatic childhood experiences that could potentially precipitate gun violence.
The Tennessee 11 also proposed laws or regulations requiring Tennesseans obtain a license or permit to carry a handgun, though the group noted, “the TN11 reached a majority but not unanimous consensus on this proposal and now asks the public for feedback.”
In November, the Citizen Solutions “opened a public feedback platform,” according to The Daily Beacon, which reported the activists “are encouraging [University of Tennessee] students to give feedback on the proposals” made by the Tennessee 11.
On the Citizen Solutions website, the activists claim their gun control proposals were drafted by “Tennesseans with very different perspectives.” Citizen Solutions also bills itself as “an ambitious civic experiment empowering Americans to counteract the extreme voices dominating media and politics by elevating the will of the people.”
However, several of the activists who comprise the Tennessee 11 appear to be partisan, and some worked for the Democratic Party or are former Democratic political candidates.
One of the Tennessee 11, Brandi Kellett, is an Associate Professor at Lipscomb University, and her “areas of scholarship focus on culture, memory and faith as a resistance to oppression in the African disapora across the Americas,” according to her university biography.
Arriell Gipson, a Memphis Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for Shelby County Clerk in 2022, is another member of the Tennessee 11. A profile for her campaign revealed she is “the committee chair for the Mayor’s Young Professional Council, Violence Prevention and Criminal Justice Reform Committee, First Vice President for the Shelby County Young Democrats, a graduate of Leaders of Color, Organizing for Action, New Memphis Leadership Institute, and The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology.”
Another member, former Tennessee state trooper Mark Proctor, wrote in a guest column for The Tennessean in August that “stricter gun regulations save lives.” The Tennessee 11 member specifically argued in favor of a “[s]trict permitting process” and new legislation to “[k]eep guns away from the wrong people.”
Therapist Adam Luke joined the Tennessee 11 from Columbia, Tennessee. In October, Starts With Us published a lengthy statement from Luke on social media. Luke lamented, “When we talk about guns, there’s so much division. Either we’re attacking traditions or we want people to be in harm’s way.”
He urged Tennesseans to “have that bigger discussion of recognizing that what you’re feeling is legitimate, but sometimes our feelings alone aren’t the only information we need to be taking in.” While Luke seemed hesitant to support a red flag law in his statement, the group’s proposal to “[a]llow courts to temporarily remove someone’s firearms if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others based on certain criteria showing they are at risk of committing violence” had the unanimous support of the Tennessee 11.
While Lubetzky funds the Tennessee 11 through his New York-based Lubetzky Family Foundation, he is also an Inaugural Board of Directors member for the controversial Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL notes Lubetzky is the recipient of awards from the World Economic Forum, Skoll Foundation, Conscious Capitalism, and Hispanic Heritage Foundation.
It remains unclear if Lubetzsky’s efforts will bear fruit after a significant push for gun control failed in 2023, when Democrats were joined by Governor Bill Lee (R) in calls for restrictions following the Covenant School shooting.
Red flag legislation was unsuccessful during the regular session in 2023, and though Lee called a special session for the Tennessee General Assembly to pursue gun control initiatives, the governor did not back a red flag law proposal for a second time. Ultimately, no gun restrictions were passed during the special session, and Lee recently signaled that he does not intend to push for red flag legislation in 2024.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Georgia Star News, The Virginia Star, and the Arizona Sun Times.
The .500/465 Nitro Express is one of several rounds (including the .470 Nitro Express, .475 Nitro Express, .475 No. 2 Nitro Express and .476 Nitro Express) developed as a replacement for the .500/450 Nitro Express following the British authorities’ 1907 ban of military caliber ammunition in India and the Sudan, all with comparable performance.[3]
Holland & Holland created the .500/465 Nitro Express by necking down the .500 Nitro Express 3+1⁄4 in.[4]
The .500/465 Nitro Express is designed for use in single-shot and double rifles.
