Category: that’s too bad”
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DOGE vs ATF
Top honors for “Human Projectile Of The Month” go to an as-yet-unidentified dude who, we’re told, is also a serious contender for the annual Darwin Award. That prestigious prize is given — posthumously — to the person who does the human gene pool the greatest service by removing himself from it in the most extraordinarily stupid fashion. Well, the Darwin folks might see it that way, but we consider it a gallant, if not brainless, form of ballistic research.
Troopers from the Arizona Highway Patrol got involved with this historic event after motorists reported some mysterious scorched and blackened scars on a stretch of deserted highway. The more officers found, the stranger the case got until they pulled back, regrouped, and launched a full-scale investigation.
Here’s what they kinda “pieced” together: JATO units are basically huge canisters of solid rocket fuel used to achieve “Jet Assisted Take Off,” typically lifting big transports into the air from rough-ground short runways or shooting overloaded planes from the decks of aircraft carriers.
They were not, repeat not, designed to augment the inherent boost factor of a 1967 Chevy Impala. But we guess — let’s call him “Zippy”— didn’t know that when he hooked one up to his ride.
Ol’ Zip apparently chose his runway carefully, selecting a nice, long, lonely piece of straight-as-string highway in good repair. Not guessing he might need a bit more than five miles of zoom surface, Zippy’s test track had, that far down the strip, a gentle rise on a sloping turn.
Anyways, the Zipster kicked the tire, lit the fire, and ran his Chevy up to top cruising speed. And then he hit ignition!
Investigators know exactly where this happened, judging from the extended patch of burned and melted asphalt. The pocket-calculator boys figure Zip reached maximum thrust within five seconds, punching that Chevy up to “well in excess of 350 mph” and continuing at “full burn” for another 20 to 25 seconds.
Early in that little sprint, at roughly the 2.5-mile mark, the Human Hydra-Shok stood on the brakes, melting them completely, blowing the tires and rapidly reducing all four ’skins to liquefied trails on the pavement.
Remember that gentle rise on the turn? That’s where Zippy concluded his land-speed record attempt and went for aerial honors, ultimately reaching an altitude of 125 feet and still climbing when his flight was abruptly terminated. We’ll never know how far and how high The Big Zip might have gone. A cliff face of solid rock kind of got in the way, posing a serious violation of the laws of physics vis à vis two chunks of matter attempting to occupy the same space at the same time. Zip gave it hell though, blasting a three-foot deep crater in the terra-very-firma.
The best modern forensic science could do was ID the car’s make, model, and year. As for Zip, only trace evidence was found of bone, teeth and hair in the crater, and splinters of fingernail embedded in what is believed to be a piece of steering wheel. If there ain’t room for this one in the Guinness Book of World Records, there damn sure ought to be an honorable mention in Weatherby’s.
Answers
A. Be on a boat in the middle of a large river in Burma during WWII.
B. Go up against Bill Slim’s 14th British Army who REALLY hates you for some reason. Like you not taking any prisoners & making them live in that Hell Hole that is Burma in the 1940’s.
C. Not having control of either river bank. Always a BAD thing
D. Having NO air support around
E. Having some really good small arms & mortars coming to bear on you (Steel on Target) AND having the RAF Ground Support on call.
F. I am sure that the Forward Observer is also calling in Arty on you too. (British Artillery has always had a pretty good reputation BTW)
All of which is going to add up to one really bad day for the members of Imperial Japanese Military on those boats. As their wounded usually wound up suffering a really horrible death. What with no medics or drugs nor any kind of medical support available. So usually your officers would eventually kill you iffen you didn’t die quick enough.
Plus there were cases of Cannibalism too. Since there were no supply lines for your army back then. Nice huh?
So for all those who might wind up one day in command. Try to remember the 6 Pees, Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance! That & I hope that you have better luck than those Bastards! Grumpy
In One Dog Night, the leopard pauses momentarily before slipping through the open tent flap, and then, with unbelievable speed, seizes the unfortunate dog and vanishes into the night.
As the light turned to dark, a male leopard cautiously followed a well-worn path in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. The cat had been here before, perhaps as recently as the previous night. As he slipped in and out of the long grass, the leopard passed the dimly glowing lights from a nearby manyatta (village), then continued on his seemingly purposeful mission, stopping frequently to sniff tracks and check out his surroundings with his superb nighttime vision.
Native voices, possibly herdsmen, faded away as the leopard crept along, now closer to the ground. It stopped and crouched even lower, peering through the grass to watch the comings and goings of people in a tented camp. The big cat waited patiently until the strange voices were silent. Then, beneath a bright, cold Africa moon it started to sneak toward the camp.
The leopard approached one tent and circled it silently before its attention was drawn to another. Still creeping low and undeterred by the flickering light of the campfires, it picked up its pace and, with the brazen audacity common only to leopards, it rushed through the open flap of the tent and in a flash, stole away with its chosen prey.
The year was 1903; the place was German East Africa (later Tanganyika, now Tanzania). The camp was that of two hunters: Kalman Kittenberger, a young Austro-Hungarian sporting gentleman, and an old African military man, a corporal at the Moshi Garrison.
The men, who had pitched their tents about 100 yards apart, had arrived to hunt elephants in the area, which was soon to be a protected reserve. Their tents were pitched adjacent to two separate trails that each hunter would scout separately the next day.
That night Kalman had visited the old African’s tent and had drank and talked well into the wee hours. The old African owned a bulldog named Simba, perhaps for its tenacity, but a strange choice of dog in this climate. The breed’s short nose and breathing passage makes it hard for the dogs to stay cool, and it would probably have had suffered much discomfort in the days to come. The bulldog is also prone to suffering from heatstroke. But the old African loved his dog and it went everywhere with him, usually sleeping under his bed. On this night, however, his loyal companion was snatched from beneath him with unbelievable speed by the marauding leopard.
The African wasted no time in grabbing his 7mm Mauser and firing at the fleeing cat. The commotion brought his colleague rushing from his tent and the two hunters fired in the general direction of the escaping leopard.
Everything was silent as the hunters followed the predator into the inky blackness. Unlike lions, leopards have a habit of doubling back and attacking their pursuers at incredible speed. Knowing this, the two men proceeded with extreme caution, their eyes gradually adjusting to the dark. Intermittent clouds obscured the moonlight, making their task even more difficult. Listening for the leopard’s distinctive cough or the dog to whimper, the two men moved silently through the long grass. The only sound was from their pounding hearts.
After a short time the hunters stumbled across the dog’s body. Their shots had apparently missed, but at least they forced the cat to drop poor Simba. Like a ghost, the leopard had escaped to live and maraud another day.
There were many stories of man-eaters prior to World War I in East Africa, but lions weren’t always to blame. Leopards were, in fact, the bigger culprits, and stories such as this were not uncommon. Cattle and other livestock were in particular danger, but unbeknownst to most Europeans at the time, leopards also accounted for many human injuries and deaths. But their favorite prey was the dog. They snatched them from camps and villages, sometimes in broad daylight right in front of their masters. One has to realize that leopards were far more common than lions; indeed, they could be found almost everywhere on the African continent, but because of their secretiveness, they were seldom seen.
Opinion
Our alert last week described a recent NBC News article on rising gun ownership in America, which cited national polling numbers showing that “[m]ore than half of American voters – 52% – say they or someone in their household owns a gun.” This represents “the highest share of voters who say that they or someone in their household owns a gun in the history of the NBC News poll, on a question dating back to 1999.” The actual gun owner numbers are likely to be still higher, given that most people are unwilling to discuss their personal details with complete strangers.
Another sign that the American public is still keen on guns is sales data. This year’s Black Friday smashed the previous Black Friday record, with firearm background checks “up over 11,000, or 5.5%, from the previous record set in 2017.” The most recent Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics on the “top ten highest days” for National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) gun-related background checks has this year’s Black Friday as the highest “Black Friday” on record, and at third place overall.
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has just published its latest annual study on concealed carry permits. Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2023 (Nov. 30, 2023), authored by Dr. John Lott, Carlisle E. Moody and Rujun Wang, examines trends regarding concealed carry permits.
There’s good news here, as well.
Earlier, the CPRC’s 2022 study concluded that an estimated 22.01 million individuals in America had been issued a concealed handgun permit, a 2.3% increase over 2021. This was “the slowest percent and absolute increase that we have seen since we started collecting this data in 2011,” and the study attributed it, in part, to the 24 states at that time that had a permitless carry law in effect. The “number of permits declin[ed] in the Constitutional Carry states even though it is clear that more people are legally carrying.”
The CPRC’s newest study notes that, for the first year since its reporting began, the number of permits declined, albeit by a fraction of less than one percent (down 0.5% from 2022 figures). To put this in context, the number of permits overall has grown from 2.7 million in 1999 to “at least 21.8 million” as of the latest count.
Far from being an indicator of lessening interest in lawful concealed carrying, the dip is due to a change in applicable state laws, which allow qualified individuals to carry without application forms, fees, wait times, and other bureaucratic hoops. “A major cause of the marginal decline is that 27 states now have Constitutional Carry laws,” with Alabama, Florida and Nebraska most recently joining the states that allow permitless concealed carry. Significantly, the study notes that the 27 states with constitutional carry represent “65% of the land in the country and 44% of the population in 2022.”
With more than half of all states having embraced constitutional carry, “the concealed carry permits number does not paint a full picture of how many people are legally carrying across the nation … while permits are increasing in the non-Constitutional Carry states (317,185), permits fell even more in the Constitutional Carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states (485,013).”
For this reason and others, the study cautions that the numbers cited are an underestimate, and that “the scale of that underestimation is increasing over time” due to old or missing data on permit issuance in some jurisdictions, and the continued spread of constitutional carry laws.
The CPRC study provides valuable data on permit holders by state, ranks states by the percentage of permit-holders in each state (with Alabama, Indiana, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia as the top five), and lists the 2023 costs, by state, of getting a permit.
The study also breaks down data on permittees by race and gender for the jurisdictions that make that information available. “Seven states had data from 2012 to 2022/2023, and permit numbers grew 110.7% faster for women than for men.” As has been the trend in previous years, the concealed carry community remains increasingly diverse. “When permit data is broken down by race and gender, we find that black females have had the fast growth, especially during the pandemic. The rates of permit holding among American Indian, Asian, Black, and White females all grew much faster than the rates for males in those racial groups.”
The study points out that “there was a noticeable drop in the percent of permits issued [to] women and blacks after Constitutional Carry was adopted. It appears that both groups were relatively sensitive to the cost of permits.” Even in “shall issue” states, the application, training and other fees required to obtain a permit apparently present a real barrier to the exercise of Second Amendment rights, in many cases for the very people who are most vulnerable to crime and violence.
Another crucially important finding in the CPRC’s study is the relationship between crime and lawful carrying. Concealed handgun permit holders themselves “are extremely law-abiding,” and, [a]t the same time that there has been an exponential growth in permits, there has been a general linear decline in rates of homicide and violent crime offenses.
Except the extraordinary high rates of homicide offenses since the first year of the pandemic in 2020, the rate has dropped around 11% for the past two decades. Violent crime fell from 5.23 per 10 million people in 1999 to 3.81 per 10 million people in 2022, a 27% drop. Meanwhile, the percentage of adults with permits soared by five-fold. Such simple evidence by itself isn’t meant to show that concealed handgun permits reduce violent crime rates, as many factors account for changes in crime rates, but only that there doesn’t seem to be any obvious positive relationship between permits and crime.
In the meantime, the constitutional carry juggernaut presses on. The twenty-eighth state to go permitless is likely to be Louisiana. Republican Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s former Attorney General and new Governor, has made a commitment to secure the enactment of constitutional carry legislation in 2024.
In contrast, President Joe Biden – who has spent a significant part of his term down the gun-control rabbit hole – is running on a reelection platform of even more gun control. (The details are TBA as the “Joe’s Vision” tab, /joebiden.com/joes-vision/, at the official Biden/Harris 2024 website currently features a “Dark Brandon” error message and a graphic of a grinning Biden with two red blotches for eyes.)
Biden’s campaign is circulating a memo (“Trump’s America in 2025: More Guns, More Shootings, More Deaths”) that appears to build on the deceptive message that increased gun ownership means increased violence and crime. “More guns, not less. That’s Donald Trump’s plan to make us safe,” reads a statement from a Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson.
For those looking for reasons to disagree with the “more guns, less safety” narrative, look to the millions of responsible gun owners across America who know better.
About NRA-ILA:
Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess, and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution