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Category: Cops
Looks like Big Brother is doing his usual stupid thing again. According to Public Intelligence:
A joint bulletin issued in early August by the Department of Homeland Security and FBI warns state and local law enforcement agencies to look out for people in possession of “large amounts” of weapons and ammunition, describing the discovery of “unusual amounts” of weapons as a potential indicator of criminal or terrorist activity.
Citing the example of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who reportedly “stockpiled approximately 12,000 pounds of precursors, weapons, and armor and hid them underground in remote, wooded locations,” the bulletin instructs law enforcement to look for “large amounts of weapons, ammunition, explosives, accelerants, or explosive precursor chemicals” that “could indicate pre-operational terrorist attack planning or criminal activity.” Weapons do not have to be “cached” in remote locations to meet the standard for suspicious activity. According to the bulletin, weapons could be stored in an “individual’s home, storage facility, or vehicle” and may include common firearms such as “rifles, shotguns, pistols” as well as “military grade weapons.” The illegal possession of large amounts of ammunition is also listed as a potential indicator of “criminal weapons possession related to terrorism.” While the bulletin never clarifies what constitutes a “large” or “unusual” quantity of weapons or ammunition, it does say that such a quantity would “arouse suspicion in a reasonable person.”
There’s more at the link.
The photograph of a ‘weapons cache’ accompanying the article shows a mere five long guns (rifles and shotguns) and seven handguns, for a total of twelve firearms. I could multiply that total a couple of times before running out of the contents of my gun safe, and I don’t have a particularly large collection. Some of my friends could out-do me by an order of magnitude! Consider, for example, these photographs of private – yes, private – gun collections borrowed from this thread on AR15.com (click over there to see many pages of similar pictures – it’s a feast for the eyes of any firearm hobbyist!).
So tell me – are those collections “potential indicator[s] of criminal or terrorist activity”? If not, then my much smaller and lower-quality collection can hardly be considered to be so . . . unless you’re an unthinking, knee-jerk-reacting bureaucrat, I suppose!
As for ammunition – what precisely do they mean by “the illegal possession of large amounts of ammunition”? It’s not illegal to possess ammunition unless you’re a convicted felon – and there are no federal restrictions whatsoever on the quantity of ammunition one may have in one’s possession. (There may be local restrictions such as fire regulations, etc., but these will be area-specific.) To merely say that the quantity would “arouse suspicion in a reasonable person” is ridiculous. For a start, define ‘reasonable’. What does it mean? What’s a reasonable quantity of ammunition to me, as a rifle shooter, might seem alarmingly large to someone who doesn’t shoot at all, or appear ridiculously inadequate to someone who owns one or more machine-guns in the same caliber as my rifle. He might consume a one-year supply of ammunition for me in only a few minutes of firing! Witness last April’s Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot:
I know a few private individuals who each currently have more than a million rounds of ammunition in their storerooms. (Two of them are friends of mine.) They happen to shoot several hundred thousand rounds per year, so they don’t consider such stocks unreasonable – but the average suburban soccer mom who doesn’t shoot at all would probably have hysterics if she knew they were stored in her neighborhood. (I don’t know why, because it’s no threat to her; but logic usually doesn’t enter into the calculation for such people.)
I try to buy ammunition in case lots – 500 or 1,000 rounds at a time. That quantity will last me for anything from a few months to a few years in the calibers I shoot. I buy it in bulk because it’s cheaper that way. I’m a retired pastor and retired law enforcement officer. Does my buying ammunition in bulk, and possessing a few thousand rounds of it, suddenly render me suspicious to the authorities? If so, I have a few words for them . . . none of them polite!
This is yet another bureaucratic overreach. Perfectly normal activities are now classified as potentially suspicious – and don’t let that word ‘potentially’ fool you. In practice, it means that some law enforcement officers and/or agencies will claim that your possession of large quantities of firearms and/or ammunition is automatically grounds for suspicion, and that you’re therefore automatically to be regarded as a potential terrorist, or criminal, or whatever. Don’t tell me that doesn’t happen. It does. I’ve seen it far too many times before – and the more bureaucratic and unthinking the officer or agency, the more likely it is to happen. Constitutional safeguards are all too often ignored in the process.
It’s long gone time we tossed out of office the politicians who approved the ‘security state’, and dismantled the ‘security bureaucracies’ that do nothing whatsoever to keep us safe – except consume our tax dollars in ever-increasing amounts, and put out such inane ‘alerts’.
Take a timer to the range and see for yourself, says Mas.
You don’t necessarily have to draw to be in a ready position. Police work being a dangerous profession, cops often have to draw their guns proactively. Some “police reform” advocates are demanding cops write a report every time their pistol clears the holster.
The NC Charlotte Observer reported in 2020, “Charlotte Mecklenburg Police will start tracking every time an officer draws a weapon and points it at someone. The additional reporting is enabled by a new sensor — sometimes called a holster monitor — which automatically turns on an officer’s body-worn camera when a firearm is removed from its holster…. CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings said all officers have now been outfitted with the new ‘signal sidearm’ sensor.
Officers will also be required to report why they drew the weapon and what they did with the weapon after it was drawn — including whether it was pointed at anyone, he said.”
That is over the top. Here are some thoughts on reducing the number of draws and avoiding the onerous process.
“Hand on a holstered gun” is one of several viable ready positions.
Drawn Gun Disadvantages
First, recognize there are many times when a two-hand hold of a drawn duty pistol gets in the way of other things an endangered cop, or, for that matter, an armed citizen, might need to be doing with their hands.
You may have to be manipulating a communications device or illumination device. In the dark, on unfamiliar floors or broken or slippery ground, there is always the possibility of a fall: The result can be a handgun knocked out of battery, its muzzle plugged with snow or mud, or a lost gun. If a situation goes rapidly to “hands-on-suspect,” getting the gun put away quickly becomes an issue. If jumped in the dark, that drawn gun may be the target of a snatch attempt.
Allen Davis comes from low ready with a Hellcat Pro 9mm. He was only about half a second slower, starting with his hand on the holstered gun.
“Hand on Gun” Technique
As a young patrolman in the ’70s, I got into the habit of mostly keeping my hand on a holstered weapon with the retaining device released. Jim Lindell taught me handgun retention in Kansas City and I knew “hand on holstered weapon” was the single strongest position for the “Good Guy” when a struggle began.
If you let go of the pistol, today’s uniform duty holsters, such as the Bill Rogers-designed Safariland, will activate the retaining device as soon as your hand leaves the holster. If ready to draw, your thumb will have already deactivated the release mechanism. You only have to worry about the effect on speed and accuracy if you need to shoot.
Speed And Accuracy
How much speed are you losing with the “hand on a holstered gun” instead of already drawn?
I took a timer to the range with my S&W 1911 .45. Starting cocked and locked at low ready from 10 feet, my time to react and fire averaged 0.64 seconds with all center hits. Starting with the hand on the holstered pistol, the average time was 0.916 seconds to react, draw and fire from a two-handed stance. Going for speed, I dropped a few points: 84% hit value as opposed to the 100% from low ready. The time difference had been only a little more than a quarter of a second — 0.276 seconds.
I went to the range with three good friends and repeated the test using Springfield Armory Hellcat Pro striker-fired guns with iron sights from an open-top Kydex. Smarter than me, they went for accuracy instead of speed, and all got 100% hit value from both low ready and starting with “hand on a holstered weapon.”
IDPA Five-Gun Master John Strayer averaged 0.686 seconds from low ready and 1.068 seconds from hand on a holstered gun, an average difference of 0.382 of one second. Retired state investigator Allen Davis averaged 0.564 from low ready and 1.024 from hand on a holstered gun, a difference of 0.46 of one second. The average overall was 0.67 from low ready and 1.178 from hand on a holstered gun — a difference of 0.508 of a second.
If you have an immediate identified threat, you want the gun up and out to start, but for less critical situations, a quarter to a half a second isn’t much of a price to pay for the advantages of “hand on the holstered pistol.”
And in Charlotte-Mecklenberg, you won’t have to write a report, which the cop-haters will use to say you’re gun-happy. Slowing down for the “speed’s fine, accuracy’s final” advice that has stood the test of time from Wyatt Earp to Bill Jordan doesn’t cost you that much.
Try it yourself: What works for you is what’s important. Keep your mind open and your hand full. Having a hand on a holstered gun is the optimum “ready” for some situations.
It was 0500 on a Monday. The young man who clerked the local minimart was in the back corner of the store straightening up the milk jugs. His partner, a local teenaged girl, was in the restroom. The man walked into the store quietly wearing a long black raincoat. It was both too warm and too dry out for a raincoat.
The minimart was located within spitting distance of the front gate of the local Army base. However, this early the PT (Physical Training) crowd was not yet cranked up. The minimart, its associated parking lot, and the surrounding neighborhood had not yet awakened for the day.
There wasn’t a bell on the door, so the clerk arranging the dairy products did not hear the man come in. According to the surveillance video reviewed later the man feigned interest in a magazine long enough to get a feel for the store. He then quietly made his way to the distracted clerk.
Once within a few feet of his target, the man swept his long black Army-issue raincoat aside to expose a wicked-looking cut-down 12-gauge shotgun. The young clerk still had no idea there was anyone else in the retail portion of the store. The man then calmly rotated the gun up, oriented it on the back of the unsuspecting clerk’s head, and squeezed the trigger.
The clerk was dead before his body hit the ground. The noise of the heavy short-barreled shotgun discharged within such a confined space must have been deafening. Regardless, the man regained his wits in short order and made his way to the cash register.
The teenaged girl heard the gunshot, locked the door to the restroom, and stood atop the toilet. She remained in this position throughout the whole sordid episode. The newly-minted murderer not twenty meters away never knew she was there.
The man, his ears undoubtedly still ringing mightily from the shotgun blast, replaced his shotgun underneath his raincoat and addressed the electronic cash register. He studied the device for a few moments before timidly trying a button or three. Alas, this machine demanded some kind of code to operate.
He had just precipitously retired said code along with the unfortunate young clerk vicinity the refrigerated beer cooler. Just as the man was becoming frustrated the door opened and a local businessman walked in unawares.
The business guy was obviously an early riser, and he had a habit of picking up a local newspaper at the minimart as he made his lonely way to work. This morning he did not recognize the face of the skinny guy behind the counter, but these teenagers came and went.
He grabbed his paper, smiled, and dropped a quarter on the counter before turning to leave. He never noticed the cooling corpse in the back of the store.
Stunned, the armed robber-turned-murderer dropped the quarter into his pocket before returning his attention back to the register. Once the business guy was clear of the parking lot he retrieved his shotgun, reversed it, and bashed the keypad with its butt. By now he was getting worried. He was running out of time.
In desperation the man hefted his shotgun, jacked the slide, and pointed it at the register. He stroked the trigger and unleashed a charge of birdshot into the machine at near contact range. Shredded keys blew across the store, and the LED display disintegrated. The cash drawer, however, remained closed. In fact, the shotgun blast had effectively peened the thing shut for the rest of time.
Realizing that this operation was now doomed to failure, the dangerously inept murderer replaced his shotgun underneath his coat and fled the scene. Once a decent period of time passed the young woman carefully peeked out of the restroom. These were the days before cell phones, so she grabbed the store phone and called the cops.
The Gun
David Fenimore Cooper was purportedly the first person to use the term “shotgun” in print. British Redcoats were known to charge their Brown Bess muskets with a combination of shot and a standard musket ball to form a “buck and ball” load. With a barrel diameter of three quarters of an inch, this smoothbore flintlock musket packed an impressive payload. This puts the Brown Bess close to a modern 10-gauge from the perspective of pure geometry.
The shotgun as we know it really came into its own in the middle of the 19th century. Scatterguns were fairly widely used during the American Civil War.
Doc Holliday purportedly wielded a short-barreled 10-gauge side-by-side coach gun during the famed gunfight at the OK Corral. Holliday was an Old West legend who was likely responsible for shedding a great deal of blood. However, Tom McLaury that fateful day in Tombstone was supposedly his only historically verified kill.
Modern shotguns number in the tens of millions and are found around the globe. The fact that shotguns are commonly used hunting arms typically makes them the last to fall victim to gun bans. However, the determined miscreant can still conjure a superb concealable close-quarters weapon out of your typical sporting scattergun.
The peculiar gauge system used to identify a shotgun bore is an English contrivance. The number reflects the number of pure lead balls of a certain diameter that make up a pound. Therefore a lead ball that perfectly describes a 12-gauge bore weighs one-twelfth of a pound. That’s the reason smaller numbers mean larger bores.
A theoretical one gauge shotgun would fire a one-pound projectile. This is, incidentally, the same diameter as a golf ball. For whatever reason, a .410 bore is an exception to this rule and is actually 0.410 inches across.
A typical slide action shotgun sporting a pistol grip and a shortened barrel is a devastating close-quarters tool. Longer barrels will always produce superior performance, but the gaping maw of a cut-down 12-bore is invariably attention-getting.
Transforming a typical Remington 870 sporting gun into such a tool requires a hacksaw, a rasp, about 20 minutes, and a total disregard for federal gun control law.
A side-by-side shotgun also makes an effective and concealable close-quarters gun once properly pruned. I have legally shortened three shotguns by means of a BATF Form 1. Each iteration requires its own $200 transfer tax, fingerprints, and interminable wait, but the transformations can be undertaken easily with simple tools.
The pistol grip on my side-by-side took a little trial and error, but remounting the front sight beads required nothing more than a drill press, a hand tap, and a little patience.
The Rest of the Story
The shooter was a young enlisted soldier posted to the nearby Army base. Nobody really knows where he went after the shooting but it wasn’t to PT. Once he missed the Monday morning formation he was reported absent, and the military admin wheels began turning.
This sordid episode took place in the early nineties, before 911, and airport security was unrecognizable from what it is today. The modest local airport offered regional service to the larger hubs, but you didn’t have to pass through a metal detector to board the plane. That’s hard to imagine today, but it was not unusual back then.
The soldier boarded the airplane with his shotgun tucked inside his carry-on. He changed planes in Dallas and made it aboard the second plane still with his shotgun in tow. By the time the sun set on the day, he had killed his first man, and then he was back home with his mom.
He didn’t bother telling his mother he had blown an innocent man’s head off in a botched robbery that morning. She was just pleased with an unexpected visit. Moms the world over are generally excited to see their kids and might not be inclined to ask too many questions.
There was still no connection to the shooting, but federal authorities nonetheless made a phone call to the young soldier’s home of record looking for the guy. Once they found out he was there somebody someplace put two and two together. The feds took the idiot kid into custody without a fuss. They seized his illegal shotgun as well.
The motive was simply money. As near as anyone could tell the shooter and the victim had never before met. Army Privates don’t get paid much, and this one had undoubtedly overextended himself. In my experience of supervising such knuckleheads, it likely involved an exorbitant car payment, a cheap girlfriend with expensive tastes, or some overpriced stereo equipment. For such as this an innocent man died.
I lost track of what happened to the murderous idiot soldier. He’s likely still locked up someplace. If rank stupidity was a capital offense he would be at the front of the line to the gallows. Throughout it all his take was a whopping twenty-five cents, and that for a newspaper he nominally sold.
This cluster f*ck still maked my Blood Pressure go up ! Grumpy
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.