Category: Born again Cynic!
GUNCRANK DIARIES
Love. It’s the glue that binds humanity together. True love is selfless. True love is sacrificial. True love overlooks faults. One chaotic evening in the emergency department, I saw for real the indomitable power of true love.
Our heroine was 29 years old. She arrived by POV (Personally Owned Vehicle) attended by her boyfriend. He was doting and attentive. The fact she was conscious and conversational shocked me. She had been shot in the head.
She was sitting up when we met, a scant dribble of dark blood tracking down the side of her face. Her left eye bulged monstrously. Bullet wounds are almost mystically sinister up close, like the blackness of an evil man’s soul. This one seemed about the diameter of a pencil and was centered on her left temple.
Miracle Of Misfortune?
I don’t know why, but we always asked what happened. It’s not that it really much matters. The type of firearm is germane to a degree, but the psychosocial events leading up to the shooting not so much. However, I just never could resist. I always wanted to hear the story.
It was the boyfriend who provided the details. He said he had come in from whatever it was he did and was unloading his daily gear — a trim little .380ACP pocket pistol part of his daily loadout. He told me he slipped the little gun out of his pocket and set it down sideways on the top of the dresser.
He had no idea how it happened. He strongly suspected the gun was defective and explained he might have a lawyer review the issue. Somehow, when he set the gun down, it went off.
Bullets are the very embodiment of physics. They describe a path based predominantly upon their orientation and initial velocity. Projectiles fall to earth driven by the constant acceleration due to gravity. Like everything else in the universe, they continue in motion until affected by outside forces. The boyfriend explained the evening’s sordid outcome was pure unvarnished random.
His girlfriend had been standing across the room inquiring as to the nature of his day. When the gun went off the little bullet had traversed the bedroom and, as foul luck might have it, struck the hapless women in the temple. After quite a lot of frenetic chaos as well as a trip screaming across town to the ER here we were.
The Truth Hurts
It was indeed a compelling tale. However, this was not my first gunshot wound. When I examined the thing closely, I noticed charred flesh with ample powder stippling fanned out from the point of impact. There was even a little tearing of the skin around the wound.
As anyone who has ever watched one of those criminal forensics TV shows might attest, you can ascertain a great deal from an entrance wound. A bullet fired at a distance just punches a hole. The same thing at contact range will tattoo the surrounding skin with unburned powder and carboniferous ick. This was definitely the latter sort. Compelling story notwithstanding, this guy had clearly put his gun to this young woman’s temple and stroked the trigger.
The lady in question was doing shockingly well, considering. The anemic little bullet had transected her left optic nerve, deflected downward through her maxillary sinuses, and come to rest behind her rearmost right upper molar. I cleaned her up and found a maxillofacial surgeon who popped the spent projectile right out.
I waited until the moment was right and got a pal to remove the boyfriend for a while. Once it was just her and me, I explained my concerns regarding the nature of the wound and how it didn’t seem to jive with the boyfriend’s story. I assured her we could keep her safe, and if he had indeed shot her intentionally, then we would need to deal with that.
Throughout it all she stuck religiously to the tale. The gun went off when he set it down. He loved her, and she loved him. There’s nothing he would ever do to harm her intentionally. I pushed as much as I was comfortable, but then let it drop.
The cops did the same, but when the victim swears it was an accident, there’s just not a lot left with which to work. They had likely rehearsed their stories en route to the hospital. I discharged her the following day, now irrevocably half blind, in the company of her boyfriend. He was as attentive and affectionate as ever.
The year was 1985, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was tired, sweaty, and filthy. I stood in formation with a large number of my peers in a similar state, the summer sun beating down equally upon us all. We gripped rubber ducks, our derogatory term for our indestructible fake M16A1 training rifles. Our rubber ducks consisted of a real M16A1 upper receiver somehow grafted onto a cast rubber lower assembly. Mounted on the end of my dummy rifle was a very real M7 bayonet. We had our scabbards secured in place over the cold steel blades to keep us from inadvertently stabbing each other.
Table of contents
Our instructor was a grizzled Vietnam veteran who had logged three combat tours as a grunt. He was the hardest man I have ever known. In quiet moments we would hit him up for war stories. One of the more compelling involved the time he killed an NVA soldier in a trench on Hamburger Hill with a Ka-Bar knife. He said that took longer than he had expected.
Training With Cold Steel
On this day this chain-smoking beast of a man stood before us and shouted, “What is the spirit of the bayonet?”
We responded in thunderous unison, “To kill, Sergeant Major!”
The Smadge just stood there and stared at us, the glint in his eye looking plenty lethal from my point of view as an impressionable young teenager. Normally leading bayonet training would be beneath a soldier of this man’s station, but he enjoyed it.
Once we had mastered the details we lost our sheaths and took out our frustrations on the bayonet dummies. The superb comedy film Stripes has a genuinely funny sequence that orbits around this fundamental aspect of infantry combat training. At the end of the day, I was exhausted but fairly good at it. I could parry, smash, and stab quickly and with authority. I was eighteen years old. It would be another three years before society would trust me to drink a beer or buy a handgun, but Uncle Sam had already taught me how to kill a man efficiently and effectively with a bayonet.
The Dark Reality of Soldiering
Soldiers have the coolest toys on the planet. Whether we admit it or not, it still really is all about the toys.
However, the nitty gritty reality of soldiering is unspeakably horrible. As we can see on the newsfeeds coming out of Ukraine, war is young men–and now women–voluntarily ripping the very lives out of each other for a cause. War is the very embodiment of inhumanity. Even in the Information Age, the most inhuman aspect of this most inhuman pursuit has got to be the bayonet.
We have all become so adroit at it. This is to be expected given our astronomical investment in the enterprise. During World War 2, the combined combatant nations produced enough small arms ammunition to shoot every human being on the planet forty times. If you took every dollar spent on national defense in America from the end of WW2 through the end of the Cold War you could raze and rebuild every manmade structure in the country. Ours is such a lamentably self-destructive species. However, despite truly extraordinary advances in killing technology, there yet remains something viscerally motivational about the prospect of having one’s entrails rearranged by cold steel affixed to the end of a combat rifle.
Old Blood and Guts Loved Cold Steel Bayonets
George Patton, arguably the most audacious general officer the United States has ever produced, had this to say about the bayonet, “Let’s keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.” 
George Patton was a lifelong professional soldier. Soldiering was the only thing he had ever done; it was the only thing he was ever good at. Patton wanted so desperately to take the fight to the Russians once the Nazis were beaten. He had dispensed death many times and narrowly avoided it himself. George Patton seems a reliable source of wisdom on the subject of intimate killing.
He once opined, “Few men are killed by the bayonet; many are scared of it. Bayonets should be fixed when the firefight starts. Bayonets must be sharpened by the individual soldier. The German hates the bayonet and is inferior to our men with it. Our men should know this.”
A Hard Day in Afghanistan…
In October of 2011, British Corporal Sean Jones of the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Regiment, was second in command of a combat patrol operating in the vicinity of Kakaran Village, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Their mission was to locate and engage insurgents who had been emplacing IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). These cheap infernal contraptions are the bane of modern counterinsurgency warfare. Corporal Jones’ enemies were little more than cavemen with Kalashnikovs, but they were driven, hard, and cunning.
As Jones’ small patrol made its way across a broad open field they were engaged with heavy and effective small-arms fire from nearby concealed positions. Jones, a professional soldier with two small children at home, later said, “We were about to wrap up the operation and head back to the checkpoint. We were crossing a ditch when the shooting started. I was just coming out of the ditch and most of the fire was coming at me. I hit the deck immediately…I have been shot at quite a few times and could tell the enemy was close. Gravel and dirt were flying up all around me from the bullets.”
Dire Circumstances Require Cold Steel
Jones and his mates were caught in the open in a near-ambush, one of the most dire circumstances in which a modern grunt might find himself. Initially unable to advance into the withering fire, the Brits dropped into the water-filled ditch and began throwing bullets. However, this was Helmand Province, and these were seasoned Taliban fighters. The insurgents began to fire and maneuver to overrun their position.
With heavy fire coming in from three directions and unwashed Taliban maniacs moving ever closer, Corporal Jones executed some of that insane military leadership everybody talks about all the time. He unlimbered an M72 LAW rocket to set the tone and then directed three of his nearest mates to fix bayonets. Snapping his steel blade in place on the muzzle of his L85 bullpup assault rifle, Jones leapt to his feet and shouted those timeless words, “Follow me!”
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going…
Jones and his motley mob of maniacs screamed across eighty meters of bullet-swept open ground, charging directly into the face of the Taliban ambush. Amidst the chaos, Jones outpaced his troops and had to pause once they reached a nearby structure to let them catch up. Once out of the immediate kill zone, Jones directed his men to put accurate fire on the Taliban positions. Jones prepped a grenade but then changed his mind when he realized there might be noncombatants in the building as well. In the face of such an audacious response, the Taliban insurgents abandoned their positions and fell back.
The Afghan people know nothing but war. The last time an invading army marched across my hometown was 1864. By contrast, every Afghan citizen in the country was born, raised, and lives amidst unfettered violence. That is adequate to make people skeptical. As a result, firm and decisive action is the only thing they respect. The locals were watching this horrible little engagement. Corporal Jones and his mates earned their respect that fateful day in Helmand.
Goodwill from Chaos
In the aftermath, the locals came to appreciate that the Brits were hard soldiers who could give just as well as they took. Corporal Jones’ restraint with his grenade and use of the bayonet proved that, unlike most of the foreign armies that had ravaged their land in years past, the British could be counted upon to respect the lives of noncombatants even at the peril of their own. For his efforts, Corporal Jones was awarded the Military Cross, the third-highest decoration for valor in British military service.
Of their subsequent interactions with the locals, Jones had this to say, “We built good relationships, chatting to them on patrols, kicking balls around with the children. They knew the Taliban could no longer enforce curfews on them and things got much better with their way of life.”
A Point of Personal Privilege —
What were we thinking when we elected this guy?
And then it was gone. Of all the egregious affronts to logic that we have seen flow forth from the White House in recent years, none is so horrific as our insane route from Afghanistan. The United States lost 2,462 lives defeating the Taliban. In the year before our chaotic flight from that accursed place, there had been precious little violence directed at coalition troops. With a stabilizing force of some 13,000 American troops in-country, the Taliban seemed to be behaving themselves.
Afghans voted in elections, girls went to school, and terrorists had to find other places to call home. And then on the 20th anniversary of our involvement in Afghanistan, Joe Biden precipitously pulled American forces out just so he could say he shut the door on a nice round number. This resulted in countless loyal allies being abandoned and desperate people falling to their deaths off of fleeing airplanes. American citizens remained trapped there some two years later. I am sickened to think of it.
Maybe! Grumpy
Categories
1944 Battle of Kansas
President Trump should help destroy the ATF
It’s time to end the ATF before they kill another law-abiding American.
by Lee Williams
President Donald Trump’s election victory was made possible by millions of gun owners who are still angry about the treatment they received from Joe Biden and his antigun ilk in the ATF.
Biden and whoever was actually calling the shots targeted legitimate gun owners and gun dealers like it was cool—like it was a game. Biden even allowed these illegitimate forces to establish an antigun office right inside his White House. They met regularly with senior members of the antigun industry.
This civil rights abuse was totally ignored by the mainstream media because the “journalists” themselves were all antigun and totally on board with Team Biden.
The ATF has a long and blood-soaked history. In addition to the more than 80 lives lost at Waco—which includes 20 children—a Deputy U.S. Marshal and Randy Weaver’s wife and son were killed during ATF’s Ruby Ridge fiasco. The ATF’s “Fast and Furious” scheme resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican nationals, who were killed by the weapons ATF allowed to walk straight into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels. The ATF has never fully addressed or apologized for these needless deaths that its agents caused.
Nowadays, there are scores of examples of ATF crews laughing and joking with each other as they tear apart the homes of law-abiding folks who had done nothing wrong. The latest was Mark “Choppa” Manley, who along with his wife and children is lucky to have survived an early morning ATF search warrant that found nothing wrong. All of Manly’s firearms were legal and complied with both state and federal law.
Thankfully, Manley recognized that armed ATF agents were taking tactical positions outside his home and put down his handgun right before they beat down his front door, threw two flashbang grenades and stormed inside. Bryan Malinowski never had that opportunity. The Arkansas airport director assumed that criminals had entered his home during the early morning hours of March 19, 2024. Malinowski grabbed a pistol and fired several rounds. ATF shot and killed the 53-year-old, who had absolutely zero prior criminal history.
For decades, the gun community has talked about dumping the ATF, but the agency still exists, and its unlawful and deadly actions continue to this day. Under Biden, the agency actually got much worse.
Their deadly and loathsome raids add further proof that the ATF can never be trusted again. It has become more dangerous than the criminals it allegedly tries to target. Thankfully, Congress has a bill in the works to dump the agency. Representatives Eric Burlison (R-MO-07) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO-04) recently introduced H.R. 221, legislation that is simple and succinct: “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is hereby abolished.”
According to its FY2022 budget, the ATF had around 5,000 employees, a little more than half were armed special agents. The rest were Industry Operations Investigators, who make life hell for gun shop owners, and other clerical and professional staff. They operated on a budget of $1.5 billion taxpayer dollars.
Years ago, there were ATF agents who supported guns and our gun rights—older agents who didn’t let their administrators push them into breaking the law. But after four years of Biden and his chosen joke of an ATF director, these agents are mostly gone. They were replaced by younger antigun bureaucrats.
If President Trump truly wants to take historic action, he will help end the ATF immediately, before another American is needlessly shot and killed, which is guaranteed to happen.
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And thats how the world works
In a move that has absolutely nothing to do with prior preparation, California Governor Gavin Newsom has unveiled detailed, fully realized plans to rebuild Los Angeles following the devastating fires that, by sheer coincidence, wiped out the exact neighborhoods marked for redevelopment by the WEF.
“These fires were an unforeseen tragedy,” Newsom said during a press conference held on the ashes of a once-thriving community. “But in the spirit of California resilience, we have immediately mobilized a plan for a greener, shinier Los Angeles.”
The 3,000-page blueprint, complete with architectural renderings, zoning adjustments, and the signature of a mysterious consultant named “I.M. Fireproof,” envisions a utopia of luxury high-rises, eco-friendly tech hubs, and artisanal oat milk cafes. “We certainly didn’t expect to have this ready so soon,” Newsom said, flipping through the bound and laminated plans.
Critics have questioned the timing of the fires, which exclusively targeted older homes and small businesses while sparing nearby high-value properties. However, Newsom dismissed these concerns. “We can’t let conspiracy theories distract us from progress. California is about moving forward, even if we have to use controlled burns—I mean, nature’s burns—to get there.”
The new redevelopment zone, which had been stalled for years by “pesky renters” and “sentimental landmarks,” now offers a clean slate. Newsom assured residents that the original homeowners would be “welcome back anytime,” provided they can afford the $3.5 million penthouses or secure one of the five subsidized micro-units that will be raffled off annually.
When asked why the development plans were dated two months prior to the fires, Newsom laughed nervously. “That’s a typo. Don’t worry about it. Focus on the renderings—they’ve got rooftop gardens!”
The governor concluded the event by planting a symbolic sapling and announcing a new task force to study fire prevention strategies—tentatively titled the “Let’s Not Question the Coincidences Committee.”