Category: Cops
It’s a pretty good bet that unless you live in or around Fargo, North Dakota you didn’t hear about the terrorist attack foiled by police there on July 14 this year. Rookie officer Jake Wallin was killed by Mohamad Barakat. Barakat wounded two police officers and a woman bystander before being killed by another officer, Zach Robinson. The spokesperson for the city known as the Gateway to the West is being mighty obtuse and cagey about Barakat’s motive for having 1800 rounds of ammunition in his car.
For most Americans, our sum total knowledge about Fargo is from the movie Fargo. Sheriff Marge Gunderson might have had a clue about Barakat’s motive, right? Especially given the clues.
Unless you are a clueless Attorney General, that is. Here is what North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley said in his press conference:
“That such events could transpire in the wake of a fender bender, a fender bender in Fargo, North Dakota,” said Wrigley.
Well, who would guess some rando with an SUV would cause a mass casualty event in Waukesha, Wisconsin at a Christmas Parade? Wake, the heck, up! Where on Earth do they find these nimrods?
That Friday afternoon in Fargo there was a Downtown Street Fair. There was a fender-bender in an area outside of the Street Fair. Barakat was, presumably on his way to the street fair, but was stymied by the minor car accident. We’ll let Fox 9 take the story from here:
When he came upon a fender bender last Friday afternoon, Barakat was armed with multiple weapons, explosives and grenades and had spray painted the back windows of his car.
“Based on the time and the direction he was going he was either likely to be taking a right when he got to main avenue going downtown and taking a left when he got to main avenue and going to the fairgrounds,” Wrigley said.
Video footage reveals he came upon the crash, circling and casing the scene for about 15 minutes before parking his car and opening fire, killing 23-year-old officer Jake Wallin and critically injuring officers Andrew Dotas and officer Tyler Hawes, as well as, civilian Karlee Koswick (who was involved in the initial car accident).
Barakat was eventually shot by officer Zach Robinson and later died at the hospital.
Back it up there, spray painted the back window of his car, wow, but let’s talk about the multiple weapons part. This guy was looking to take out a lot of people:
Once Mohamed Barakat was taken down, the bomb squad was called in for searches of the suspect vehicle and residence. Wrigley says the bomb squad K9 hit on the vehicle and at Barakat’s apartment. Investigators say the following items were found inside the vehicle at the scene of the shooting: 3 containers fill with gas, 2 propane tanks filled with homemade explosives, a homemade grenade, 4 semi-automatic handguns and 3 semi-automatic long rifles. The gun used to shoot the officers and civilian had a binary trigger.
A search warrant was obtained for Barakat’s residence and the FBI was on standby to execute the search of his apartment. Wrigley says they discovered two shotguns, a Remington deer rifle, a .223 rifle, handguns, live ammunition, a variety of grenade parts, several trail cameras, several phones and a computer.
Forensics experts with the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation say Mohamed Barakat has no social media presence and appears to have had very little interaction with people. Wrigley and the U.S. Attorney for the District of North Dakota both said, they have no evidence at this time that indicates a further threat to the community.
Many, many of the articles I read were hyperventilating over the binary trigger. Heck I might need a binary trigger
:What is a binary trigger? An aftermarket trigger for semi-automatic guns that allows one round to be fired upon the trigger pull and a single round to be fired as the trigger springs back AKA binary shooting or double tap. The binary trigger will enable you to shoot twice as fast with the same amount of work, making for a fun but short day at the range or shooting practice.
Many people are concerned that a binary trigger transforms their gun into a fully-automatic firearm. However, by the ATF’s definition of machine guns, this is not the case, and binary triggers are legal in most states (more on that later).
I might be overwrought by the FBI arresting Gradmas who violated the Capitol on January 6, but never seem to have these people on their radar? From PJ Media:
But why did Barakat want to carry out a “mass shooting event”? The Star Tribune says that “the motive for his actions remains unclear.” Mac Schneider, U.S. attorney for the district of North Dakota, said this past Friday that “if there was clear evidence of motive we would share it.” North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley added that “the shooting was not motivated by religious beliefs.”
Maybe not, but there is an extremely odd detail in the Star Tribune report: “Wrigley said a federal ‘guardian report’ was made some years back” about Barakat, “but it was not about a threat of violence. Schneider described a Guardian report as a way for the public to ‘engage local law enforcement.’”
That’s not exactly a full or honest description of what a Guardian report really is. As Twitter user ThunderB, who has been following this case closely and has an abundance of useful information on his or her Twitter page, points out, the Guardian system is officially
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Terrorist Threat and Suspicious Incident Tracking System.” In this context, a “suspicious incident” is clearly terror-related: “Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, three FBI field offices began using an application called the Terrorist Activity Reporting System to track and monitor terrorist threats and suspicious incidents.”
What was in the Guardian report about Mohamad Barakat? Why isn’t the report being revealed now? Would it reveal that officials have been lying about his not being on their radar, and demonstrate their failure to stop yet another jihadi as they intensify their hunt for “right-wing extremists,” that is, their efforts to stigmatize and criminalize legitimate political dissent?
A cop murdering, potential terrorist is dead. Good. I am peeved that the FBI, once again, let us down. The media doesn’t want to talk about this averted attack from a Syrian Nationalist, or the dead Muslim cop killer. The guy from the Religion of Peace who as searching the internet for information on mass casualty events as far back as 2018. Nothing to see here.
I do want to talk about the brave law enforcement officers who arrived on the scene:
Officer Zach Robinson who deaded the terrorist, was field training Zach Wallin who died. Wallin, who was cremated in his police uniform, served with the Minnesota Army National Guard and deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Robinson was a college graduate with a wife and child.
God bless our law enforcement officers and fie on those at the top who talk but don’t do or, worse, ignore the danger.
There’s quite a lot of science that goes into modern expanding bullets.
In the end they do exactly what they are supposed to do.
It still amazes me after all these years that I can speak so dispassionately about this stuff. Ours was a fairly large, extremely violent city, and I didn’t know many people. The possibility that a patient might be an acquaintance was small. This made it easier to depersonalize. An inability to depersonalize would disqualify you from service. Nobody could do this long-term otherwise.
The cops rolled in with the ambulance. Witnesses said this guy’s car veered off the crowded Interstate and onto the shoulder. The vehicle gradually lost speed until it came to an unceremonious but not unduly violent stop against an overpass abutment. The first bystander opened the door to find that the driver’s head had exploded.
That’s not hyperbole. The front bit looked quite normal. However, there was a defect to the right rear occiput, the back part of the skull, that would admit an adolescent tangerine. The skull was peeled outward, and a substantial volume of the poor guy’s personality was still back in the car someplace. Amazingly, when we met he was still breathing.
Of the literally countless things I found shocking about medical training, principal among them was just how tough it can be to kill a man. I’ve seen folks shot straight through the brain who kept on kicking and twitching for a quarter hour or more before their bodies finally got the memo. So it was here. There was clearly no happy ending to be had, but we still needed to go through the motions.
The physics behind guns and gunshot wounds can at times seem otherworldly.
When it was all done we put the guy in the Trendelenburg position. Modern medicine is so freaking stupid. Trendelenburg simply means you orient a person head down and feet up. Why we couldn’t just say “lower his head” or something similarly sensible escapes me. To make it worse, to orient a patient head up and feet down is called “Reverse Trendelenburg.” Please…as though the study of modern medicine were not sufficiently complicated already. We arranged a big garbage can underneath his nugget and let him be for a while.
I was just a medical student, but I spoke guns more fluently than anyone in the hospital. The cops literally had no idea what happened to the guy. There was no visible damage to the vehicle—no bullet holes or blown-out windows—and they could find no weapons in the car. He had apparently just been cruising down the Interstate when his head detonated. To exercise a tired cliché, the authorities were baffled.
I went back into the trauma room alone to study the guy for a while. Aside from being motionless and a little colder nothing was different. I donated a pen to the cause and started poking around the exit wound. A substantial piece of skull had been lifted loose and rolled back but was still attached to a flap of scalp. As I explored amidst the gore I saw it.
There was a circular scrap of gold-colored metal trapped between the skull fragment and scalp. I tugged it free, ran it under the sink, and studied it in good light. To the experienced eye it was clearly the base of a bullet jacket.
I moved around to the front and studied the dead man’s face. There just wasn’t anything out of the ordinary there. I then pried his mouth open and oriented the bright trauma room light so it would angle down his gullet. There back in the deepest recesses of his oropharynx I could see the beginnings of some powder burns. This was a suicide. The guy had shoved the muzzle back past the back of his tongue before he stroked the trigger.
I miked the bullet jacket on a piece of EKG paper at eleven millimeters. I then put it in a little bag and tracked down the cop who had come in with the guy. Our dude had killed himself with a .45ACP handgun. The pistol was still in the car someplace. They just hadn’t found it yet. The cop made a radio call.
They found the .45-caliber Glock deep underneath the passenger seat. Nobody had any idea the physics that could have put it there. The bullet core was lodged in the headliner and impossible to see if you weren’t specifically looking for it. I was just a lowly med student at a Level 1 trauma center, but that night everybody thought I was a rock star.
BOLINGBROOK, Ill. (WLS) — Police in Bolingbrook said two people are dead after a gun went off as its owner cleaned it Saturday evening.
Police said a preliminary investigation found 61-year-old Simeon Hendrickson was working on one of his guns inside his home in the 700-block of Dalton Lane Saturday around 5:45 p.m. when it accidentally discharged.
The bullet struck his wife, 60-year-old Laurie Hendrickson.
It was not clear if Hendrickson called 911, or if one of his neighbors heard the gunshot and called for help.
Hendrickson then took his own life with the handgun. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Laurie Hendrickson was taken to a local hospital for treatment, where she later died.
Police said the incident remains under investigation. No further details have been released.
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The ATF revoked the Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) of Morehouse Enterprises, a gun shop that after they sued the federal government over the now-defunct frames & receiver rule.
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The ATF cited 5 violations, including 2 paperwork errors & 2 more severe violations related to firearm transfers & background checks.
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Gun Owners of America (GOA) & Morehouse Enterprises claim that the ATF’s actions are arbitrary, vindictive, & a violation of due process & 1st Amendment rights.
VALLEY CITY, North Dakota — The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has revoked both Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) belonging to a gun shop that sued the federal government over the now-dead frames and receiver rule.
Morehouse Enterprises in North Dakota teamed up with Gun Owners of America (GOA) to fight the ATF’s attempt to regulate unfinished frames and receivers through bureaucratic Fiat. The ATF created a rule in response to a White House order to ban 80% firearms that President Joe Biden calls “ghost guns.” This lawsuit was the first case in the country to challenge the now-vacated rule.
Shortly after Morehouse Enterprises filed suit, the ATF launched an inspection of the gun shop. This ATF visit was the first inspection that the store ever received from the ATF. The Industry Operations Inspector (IOI), Jacob Temp, jokingly told the store owner that the ATF discussed whether the inspection would look like retaliation for the court case. The IOI said that the ATF originally would delay any inspection for at least three years, pending litigation, but the Bureau decided to inspect the store anyways.
IOI Temp said that the store did well on their overall level of compliance and expressed approval for the job the shop has done to ensure they followed ATF regulations. Every single firearm was accounted for. All 2700 guns that the store acquired were documented. So were the 2400 dispositions of firearms. The shop felt good about the inspection, but that was all about to change.
Then on March 6, 2023, the ATF issued a “Report of Violations.” The ATF found five policy violations, three of which or simple paperwork errors. The first violation was the store forgetting to record the return of a firearm to a customer that brought the gun in for gunsmithing. The second violation was the store accidentally writing a customer’s Social Security number in the NICS transaction number (NTN) box. A third clerical error was a number left off a NICS transaction number.
The store had two other more serious violations. The store had transferred a handgun to a Georgia resident. FFLs are not allowed to transfer handguns to residents of another state due to the differing gun laws surrounding handguns. In this case, Georgia law is not stricter than North Dakota law.
A second violation was allowing the customer to use a Georgia concealed carry permit in place of a NICS background check. The Brady law allows exceptions to background checks. One of these exceptions is if a state’s concealed carry permit meets or exceeds the same scrutiny as a NICS check. Georgia’s concealed carry permit does that, but it can only be used in lieu of a NICS check in the state of issue.
On May 23, 2023, the ATF informed Morehouse Enterprises of its intent to revoke both of the company’s FFLs, even though the second FFL did not have any violations. President Biden has pressured the ATF to shut down FFLs through his zero-tolerance policies.
FFL revocations are up 500% since Biden took office, but even under Biden’s zero-tolerance policy, the store’s violations do not rise to the level for revocation. Under the president’s policy, the violations only merit a “Warning Conference.”
GOA has once again teamed up with Morehouse Enterprises to defend the company against the ATF’s actions. The gun rights group claims the Bureau’s actions are “Arbitrary, Capricious, an Abuse of Discretion, and Not in Accordance with Law.” The plaintiffs also claim that the ATF is violating the right to bear arms by restricting the acquisition of guns.
The plaintiffs also claim that the ATF is acting in a vindictive manner. They claim that Morehouse’s due process rights have been violated via retaliatory prosecution. They also claim that Morehouse’s First Amendment rights have been violated because the ATF is interfering with the plaintiff’s right to sue the government.
Whether or not the ATF move was retaliatory because of the guns store’s lawsuit is up for debate and will be settled in a court of law, but the optics are not good for the ATF.
Trying to shut down the business of a company suing you looks retaliatory and vindictive regardless of the reason.
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.
Russell Fincher is a high school history teacher, a Baptist pastor, and a part-time gun dealer. He also coaches Little League in his hometown of Tuskahoma, Oklahoma, which has a population of around 151 souls.
Fincher, 52, has had a Federal Firearm License for three years. He has no brick-and-mortar gun shop. He’s what used to be called a “kitchen table FFL.” He sells most firearms at gun shows, including Wanenmacher’s Arms Show in Tulsa.
“Living in Southeast Oklahoma, if you don’t have a gun under $400, people ain’t buying it,” he said Thursday. “Rarely do people come to my house to buy a gun.”
In April, Fincher received a call from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They wanted to do an inspection at his home.
“I told them they were welcome anytime,” Fincher said.
Two ATF inspectors arrived a few days later. They spent three hours in his home. They took pictures of his 4473s with their cell phones, which Fincher has since learned is an illegal, although common practice.
“Honestly, they were way nicer than I expected,” he said. “They said I had some guns that had traces on them, which concerned them. It concerned me too.”
The inspectors returned two weeks later. They had some “concerns” involving Fincher’s penmanship, which they couldn’t read on several forms. They also found he had juxtaposed the model number of a firearm with the weapon’s serial number, which Fincher was attempting to rectify.
On June 16th, 2023, Fincher and his son were packing for a gun show in Tulsa when the phone rang. It was the ATF. They said they wanted to talk to him before he left for the gun show.
“We can come out to your house,” he recalls the agent saying. “I told them sure; I’d be home.”
That is when seven vehicles roared up to his home and disgorged a dozen ATF agents wearing tactical gear, armed with AR-15s.
“It was like the Trump raid. They called me out onto my deck and handcuffed me. My son was there and saw the whole thing. He’s 13 years old,” Fincher said. “They held me on the porch for about an hour. I was surrounded by agents. One by one, they yelled at me about what I was doing. In my mind I decided if they were going to beat me up over every little thing, I’m done. As soon as I said, ‘If you want my FFL, you can have it,’ one of the agents pulled out a piece of paper and said, ‘Well then sign here.’ He had made three copies in case I screwed one up. It was exactly what they wanted. I was shocked.”
As soon as Fincher relinquished his Federal Firearm License, the ATF began loading up his guns, including a Colt Commander, five Glocks, and a mint AK – a Polytech Pre-ban milled under-folder, which is worth thousands of dollars.
“They took more than 50 of my personal guns,” Fincher said. “I asked them why, and they said they were ‘evidence.’ I’d estimate they took $50,000 to $60,000 worth of guns.”
ATF Threats
After ATF’s SWAT team cleared Fincher’s home, they called the agent in charge of the raid – Special Agent Theodore Mongell – and told him it was “safe to come up.”
“You’re done. We have to shut you down,” Fincher recalls Mongell saying. “You tell all your FFL buddies we are coming for them. We are shutting the gun shows down.”
“One agent told me they hate home FFLs,” Fincher said. “He said if I wanted to sell a Browning shotgun to someone at a gun show with no paperwork, that’s no problem, but when I sell a Glock or an AR lower that’s a ‘gangbanger.’ I asked him where it said that in the regs. He said no gangbanger would be shooting people with a $2,000 Benelli. To me, that was one of the dumbest statements he could have made.”
Several agents accused Fincher of making too much money through his gun show sales. He told them at the last show he attended, he only sold $75 worth of ammunition, but spent $1,200 on hotels, tables, gas, and food.
“They said I was basically using my FFL to sell guns personally,” Fincher said. “They said I was going around the system, putting guns on the street that should not be.”
Fincher was told to load the firearms ATF didn’t want into the back of his pickup, which he later took to another FFL. Toward the end of the ordeal, Fincher asked Mongell about his guns they had seized.
“He told me, ‘If you’re willing to forfeit them, we can make a lot of this go away,’” Fincher said. “This sounds to me like a shakedown. They seized my guns as punitive damage. They knew how to get me, by taking all my guns. There was no rhyme nor reason to what they took. Honestly, they took the most expensive and rarest ones.”
ATF Response
The Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project contacted ATF Special Agent Theodore Mongell on his cellphone Thursday afternoon and asked him why he raided Fincher’s home and seized his guns.
“I can’t answer any questions,” he said. “I’m not supposed to do that, per my agency. Actually, I’m not supposed to talk to anyone until I get approval from my higher ups. I have to verify who you are, take down your info and go through my agency.”
Despite his promises, Mongell never called back.
Takeaways
There does not appear to be any justification for a SWAT team raid or such a massive show of force. After all, Fincher invited the ATF into his home.
After berating him for more than an hour, the agents never even told Fincher if or when he would be charged with a crime. He fears he would lose his teaching job if he’s charged with a felony.
“They have my life in the palm of their hands, and they have very little accountability,” he said. “I’m just trying to make a living and it takes three jobs just to make ends meet. Dealing as little as I have with the ATF, when you ask them a specific question, they’ll tell you it’s a grey area. Well, a grey area can send you to jail. I’m not Hunter Biden. I’m not going to get my weapon charges dropped.”
About Lee Williams
Lee Williams, who is also known as “The Gun Writer,” is the chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Until recently, he was also an editor for a daily newspaper in Florida. Before becoming an editor, Lee was an investigative reporter at newspapers in three states and a U.S. Territory. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a police officer. Before becoming a cop, Lee served in the Army. He’s earned more than a dozen national journalism awards as a reporter, and three medals of valor as a cop. Lee is an avid tactical shooter.
Yakima County Sheriff Bob Udell, a tell-it-like-it-is veteran lawman.Yakima County Sheriff Robert Udell is one of those rare public servants willing to speak to his constituents with the sort of candor most three-piece-suit politicians avoid like a tough interview.
Insider Online caught up with the 34-year law enforcement veteran, in his second term as the top lawman in his east-central Washington county (he ran unopposed last November), at a gathering recently during which he told the small audience that drugs, not guns — especially semi-auto rifles — are the real problem he and his colleagues face. Why liberal politicians stubbornly refuse to recognize this escapes him.
“Our liberal friends are so focused on semiautomatic firearms,” Udell said, “especially long guns of all types (which) kill so few people that, statistically — what are we, a nation of 340 million? — statistically it’s not that relevant.”
In any given year, Udell explained, there are fewer than 500 homicides reported that involve rifles.
“Every one is a tragedy,” he stressed. “If someone uses a rifle in a school shooting, that is horrific but that’s not the norm. It is so rare that any child in our school system has a greater chance of being killed in a car wreck than (by) violence in school.”
Yakima County, he said, is something of a hub for drugs and gangs. Udell said fentanyl is being trucked into his jurisdiction and it kills many times the number of people annually as firearms do. “There’s no match,” he observed, “it’s crazy.” Still, legislators seem blind to this, so they focus on restricting gun rights while going soft on drug users. That’s the difference between lawmakers and lawmen, one presumes.
“The border is nearly wide open,” Bob Udell lamented. “The fentanyl is coming up here literally in semi-trucks and it is a solid upward trend of people dying from it, and yet the same people that want to restrict our Second Amendment rights seem good with an open border and people dying.”
He estimates this year could end with at least 150 fentanyl overdose fatalities, while last year, his department investigated 37 homicides in his county, which spans more than 4,000 square miles.”
“Right now,” he said recently, “we are sitting at 20 (murders) and the vast majority are directly related to the drug culture.”
Sheriff Udell sometimes rides around in a rather stout 4X4 rig.
It can come in handy during the winter months.
While Udell says anti-gunners who support drug legalization suffer from “fuzzy thinking” (“It doesn’t make any sense at all; it’s lunacy,” he said), his own perspective is pretty clear, especially when it comes to private gun ownership. Funny how this seems to run strong in rural lawmen who support the Second Amendment.
He’s on his second SIG SAUER pistol. His current sidearm is a SIG P226 in .40 S&W. His first was a P220 in .45 ACP, essentially the same model my younger son owns. Josh came across it a few years ago at a gun show and brought it home. It’s a good shooter, and Udell gave his own P220 the same high marks.
“I still feel comfy using the 220,” he acknowledged.
He also confessed to occasionally packing a single-action sixgun on the job. However, the .40-caliber offers a few more rounds in the magazine, and the cartridge is a known fight-stopper.
Sheriff Udell carries his trusty SIG P226 in .40 S&W, though
he’s got a SIG P220 in .45 ACP for making bigger holes.
What’s on the horizon? Sheriff Udell doesn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel because the policy makers seem contentedly stuck in the dark.
“By ignoring why we have this issue (of drugs and violent crime), you’re not going to fix it,” he said.
So, like so many of his contemporaries in law enforcement — people serving in big counties or small towns — he just deals with the problem with the resources he’s got.
One of Dave’s favorite sixguns is this .32 H&R Magnum on a
Ruger Single Six frame with fixed sights. He’s on the hunt for a
good handload using Hornady XTP 100-grainers.
Small Caliber, Big Surprise
This next thing started with an email exchange I had with American Handgunner’s John Taffin back in mid-May. He’d written a piece on the .32-20, about which I complimented him because it was a good read, and the conversation reminded me I had a bunch of .32 H&R Magnum brass out in the workshop in need of reloading.
The brass had been tumbled months ago and many things got in the way of putting together fresh loads, but finally I stole part of a Sunday morning and got to work. Sometime last year, my brother found some 100-grain Hornady XTPs at a local gun shop and scooped them up. I’d been using 100-grain Speer JHPs ahead of 10.0 grains of H110, for a little more than 1,000 fps out of my Ruger fixed-sight sixgun on a Single Six frame with its 4 5/8-inch barrel.
Hornady doesn’t offer a comparable load recommendation for H110, but I did check out some interesting suggestions for other propellants including a promising one using 5.0 grains of Hodgdon’s HS-6 — the max recommended powder charge for this bullet — for a loading manual velocity of 1,000 fps.
The chronograph doesn’t fib. Dave’s top velocity over the screens
was noticeably less than the 1,000 fps listed in the Hornady manual,
but from a gun with a 6 ½-inch barrel. His shorter tube delivered less velocity.
However, my Chrony’s top recorded speed with the screens set up 3 feet ahead of the muzzle was 894.3 fps, which makes sense, since the loads listed in the Hornady manual were tested in a Ruger Single Six with a 6 ½-inch barrel. The load combination was definitely accurate at 10 yards (see the image), and good enough to put the hurt on small game at two or three times that distance.
This little reloading adventure did reveal something I’d talked about with a couple of guys at the recently revived Elmer Keith Invitational long range handgun match held this year in a large meadow several miles north of Spokane.
Dave discovered he had to trim his Starline .32 H&R brass to
1.065-inch, so out came the dial caliper for the final measure.
We were chatting about the need for precision loads in long-range shooting endeavors, and one of the guys brought up the need to trim straight-wall cases. As it happens, my empty .32 H&R brass had been reloaded a couple of times, so out came the dial calipers, set to the trim length of 1.065-inches and surprise of surprises, all but three cases needed some trimming.
Brass Tips
Not only should cases be trimmed, but our conversation also touched on the necessity to clean out the primer pockets for a snug, flush fit. I was using CCI 500 primers, with which I’ve always had very good luck, and my old Piggyback progressive press, built years ago by RCBS.
I checked the trim length after resizing, did the trim, chamfered the case mouths, and then cleaned out each primer pocket with a wire brush. I was using Starline brass, which is very good stuff, so every round was loaded as precisely as I could.
While he didn’t get the velocity, he did enjoy the accuracy.
Dave’s little Ruger always delivers the goods in this department.
For years I tumbled brass in corn cob media, but a few years ago I transitioned to wet tumbling with hot water and detergent, and thousands of tiny stainless steel pins. The result is a highly-polished case inside and out which looks just like new. I dry them in the greenhouse, where summer temperatures can reach upwards of 100-110 degrees.
So, what I had with this batch of reloads was ammunition as close to brand new as possible.
This might not seem important to casual plinkers, but for someone like me, who just might take a shot at game in the fall with a sidearm, churning out the best loads possible is important.
At the Keith shoot, I listened intently to veteran handgunner Al Fernandez about how he and his dad, Ace, used to meticulously clean and reload their brass when they first got into long-range shooting. Al’s advice would be very much like my own. Each cartridge must be loaded as carefully and consistently as possible for the best odds of connecting with the target, whatever it happens to be.
Years ago, I wrote how the bullet is the only link between you and the target. It is the bullet which seals the deal. A bullet launched from a poor platform may not make the connection, which could mean no meat in the cooler or no prize following a match, and no stories to tell back home.
That would make life pretty boring.
A man in San Antonio shot and killed two alleged robbers Friday afternoon at the ATM of a Chase Bank.
The incident occurred about 1 p.m., Fox News noted.
The man went to the ATM and saw two suspects approaching him and he believed they were trying to rob him, KBTX reported.
He shot both alleged robbers, killing them. Both suspects were in their 20s.
San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said, “It was a robbery that didn’t go well for the robbers.”
Breitbart News reported that a concealed carry permit holder in Chicago shot and killed an alleged rooftop burglar Thursday at 10:40 p.m.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.