Category: Well I thought it was neat!
Above: Colt Model 1892 New Army Revolver. Photo by NRA Museums.
Pistols used in the National Matches started out in a pretty straightforward manner. Until 1911—actually until supplies of M1911 pistols became available—competitors in the National Individual Pistol Match used either of the two revolvers prescribed for U.S. Military service. Those were the several variations of Colt “New Army” and “New Navy” revolvers of 1892 (including the follow-on models of 1894, 1895, 1896, 1901, and 1903) and Smith & Wesson’s .38 Hand Ejector, Model of 1899—known from the outset of production as the “Military & Police” (M&P).
Gen. William P. Hall.
The only controversy came about in 1905, when Army Brig. Gen. William P. Hall declared that, “No Pistol with a barrel over six-inches in length will be allowed to used in the National Pistol Match …” Hall was the Military Secretary of the United States Army and the officer detailed to take charge of the 1905 Matches.
The decision was his to make, and he made it in response to a request from a National Guard State Adjutant General concerning the eligibility of revolvers of military pattern that had barrels over six-inches long. The gun in question was the M&P (a variant known to collectors as the Second Model, First Change, made from 1903-06) that was offered in 4-, 5-, and 6 1/2-inch barrel lengths.
Thus, states’ National Guards that purchased service pattern revolvers from Smith & Wesson in those years bought revolvers with 6 1/2-inch barrels. So too did members of both the regular and militia establishments who purchased Smith & Wesson revolvers for personal use.
Hall’s decision was reported in the appropriate journals—among them Shooting and Fishing magazine. Editor John Taylor Humphreys, who happened to have been the only civilian to compete in the 1904 National Pistol Match, pointed out that Gen. Halls decision did not take into account that 6 1/2-inch barrel revolvers had been permitted in 1904.
But Humphreys noted that, “The ruling of General Hall is in accordance with Government regulations, and being promulgated at this early date [Shooting and Fishing for June 22, 1905], should prevent any misunderstanding at the time of this year’s match.”
The early promulgation of Gen. Hall’s decision probably did not prevent misunderstanding, but it did not prevent the wails of potential competitors who wanted whatever advantage and extra one-half inch of barrel offered (presumably the familiarity with a particular revolver). In the August 10 edition of Shooting and Fishing there appeared the text of three sets of correspondence—two between Gen. Hall and procurers of military equipment and a letter to Humphreys.
Brig. Gen. William Crozier, Army Chief of Ordnance, responded to Hall’s query to the effect that barrels of revolvers issued to troops were of six-inch length. N.E. Mason of the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance informed Hall that the Navy had purchased S&W revolvers, then in storage at the New York Navy Yard, and that those revolvers had six-inch barrels.
Finally, Hall responded to a letter from Humphreys dated July 26, 1905, citing correspondence with Crozier and Mason, and stating unequivocally that, “… only the model [revolver] as described in the Firing Regulations for Small Arms—1904, and issued to troops will be admissible.” To make his point clear, Hall noted that the newly introduced Colt small-frame .38 caliber revolver (the Police Positive) would not e allowed and neither would S&W revolvers with 6 1/2-inch barrels. And that was that, except …
Perhaps to pour oil on troubled waters, NRA Secretary Albert Jones ruled that in matches sponsored by the NRA and the New Jersey Rifle Association, revolvers with 6 1/2-inch barrels would be allowed. Smith & Wesson helped too, with a long run solution to the problem. The S&W Second Model, First Change became, in rather short order, the .38 Hand Ejector, Military & Police Model 1905, First Change, and the 6-inch barrel length was returned to the product line.
Not everything that goes on in a place like this orbits around fixing people.
Unsplash photo by the National Cancer Institute.
The young woman walked into the labor and delivery suite of the University hospital unannounced. She carried a big red biohazard bag with the top tied in a knot. I inquired what we could do for her.
She reported that she had undergone an abortion that morning at a local clinic. Afterwards the doctor had given her the bag and told her to come see us. He had not told her why. She reported a little abdominal pain but otherwise felt fine. She seemed confused by the whole affair.
We made her comfortable in a labor room while we tried to sort this all out. A fellow resident and I took the bag into another room, put on some gloves, and opened it up.
Inside we found a dismembered baby. Amongst a little extraneous goo were two perfectly formed arms, two similarly perfect legs, and a miniature torso. It was a little boy. There was no head.
We reported all of this to our attending physician, a highly experienced gynecologist. He just sighed. He suddenly seemed very old.
“If you’re not willing to go all the way you shouldn’t be doing the job,” he said with resignation.
I asked him what he meant by that.
Is this a human being? It’s an important question. Think it through. A lot is riding on the answer. Unsplash photo by Jill Sauve.
This man had been the city’s sole abortionist for many years before he came to work at the university. He explained that he had performed the procedure more than five thousand times. He said that not infrequently when you are extracting the fetus it comes into pieces. It must be accounted for on the outside to ensure nothing was left behind that could serve as a nidus for infection. In this case the doctor who had performed the procedure had recovered what was in the sack but had been unable to retrieve the baby’s head.
I asked what was to be done at this point. He dispassionately explained that you prep the patient in the OR, dilate the cervix, and crush the head so that it will pass through more readily. He likened it to an egg. He said there was a tool designed specifically for that purpose.
This isn’t some grandiose moral or political statement. It’s not Left or Right. This isn’t Sunday School or church. I’m just telling you what abortion looks like up close. Make your own value judgments. Most folks marching and screaming haven’t actually seen what they’re screaming for.
Unlike most of the activists in this debate, I have diagnosed pregnancy in a twelve-year-old. I’ve seen the fear in those eyes. I appreciate both points of view. I really do. However, the contents of that sack changed me. Nothing could ever justify that.
There is literally nothing more innocent and defenseless than a human child.
Unsplash photo by Filip Mroz.
I knew some hard men when I was a soldier. One proper warrior killed a man with a knife in Vietnam. I served with a Blackhawk door gunner who had unlimbered his M134 minigun, the electric-powered Gatling gun used as defensive armament on Special Operations helicopters, on a crowd in Somalia. I met quite a few soldiers who had done their share of killing. I never knew anybody who had taken life on the scale this physician had.
What most shocked me was that at some point some doctor did that and called it medicine. As I beheld those little arms and legs I just couldn’t comprehend how anyone could not think that was anything but a chopped up little baby. I still frankly don’t understand it.
Killing is meant to be viscerally objectionable. However, packaging is everything. The Air Force pilot commanding a Predator drone can sit in an air-conditioned building in Nevada and launch a hellfire missile over Afghanistan while readily distancing herself from the practical results of her actions. The Army Ranger who shoots a terrorist in the chest at bad breath range while clearing a building is a great deal more emotionally involved. Regardless, both of those people are comparably dead. There are parallels here.
It is easy to pontificate about rights and injustice over coffee late at night in a dorm room or on the street corner during a protest. It is another thing entirely when you are physically sifting through the remains of what is clearly a dismembered headless human child. Even that seasoned physician, the veteran of more than five thousand abortions, cannot completely convince himself that what he did was not somehow innately wrong. The emotional baggage was patently obvious.
“If you’re not willing to go all the way you shouldn’t be doing the job.” Indeed.
The last bomb to his Arizona, penetrated the deck in the vicinity of the forward magazine. Its possible the bomb actually went into the magazine itself. We don’t know for sure and never will. Know why? When the magazine exploded it obliterated the forward 3rd of the ship. It blew out the sides of the hull and destroyed all the supporting structure down to the keel. So much so that the deck just forward of the number 1 turret to just aft of the number 2 turret collapsed on the now missing decks underneath it.
The ship was in no condition to salvaged. It would have broken apart more in any attempt to raise it.
Logistically there were also problems. The bottom of this section of Pearl Harbor is very soft mud. As soon as Arizona sank to the bottom, and it didn’t take long as the water was maybe 6 feet deep under the keel, its mass sank several feet into the mud. If the water were deeper, raising portions of Arizona might have been possible.
In reality salvaged does not mean what you think it does. The correct term would be refloated, like USS Nevada and put back into service. As far as salvaging, Arizona did have considerable salvage work. Much of Arizona’s equipment and superstructure was removed and recycled even if only for the metal.
I know this is hard to believe, but I wasn’t necessarily the most popular kid in High School. I ran track briefly just to check the block for military pursuits that were to come later, but a jock I was definitely not. I was kind of a cerebral kid who got along with everybody. However, there was never any real threat that I might win Most Handsome or be nominated to escort the Homecoming Queen.
Throughout it all, I was pretty comfortable in my own skin. School violence back in my day was restricted to two rednecks fighting with their fists over something stupid and soon forgotten. Kids brought guns to school all the time, but we left them locked in the trunks of our cars for hunting and shooting excursions afterward. In the days before the Internet, nobody really thought to take things any further.
At some point between then and now something fundamentally changed. The World Wide Web connected folks with weird proclivities in ways we never might have imagined. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, a Florida man named George Frandsen has the largest collection of privately-owned fossilized turds in the world. As of 2016, this 36-year-old owned some 1,277 samples of coprolite or fossilized excrement. He even operates an online Poozeum to show off his crap. You can find it here.
Before the Internet, George Frandsen just would have been some harmless guy with a curiously strange hobby. Now this deep into the Information Age, however, Mr. Frandsen can connect with like-minded poo collectors from all over the world. While collecting fossilized turds is, in reality, indeed fairly harmless, the Net takes some other people to much darker places.
Nothing brings out your inner victim like connecting with like-minded lost souls. The dark subject of our discussion today is Scott Beierle. Scott self-identified as an Incel, or part of the Involuntary Celibate community. Distilled to its essence these are most typically hetero males who define themselves as being unable to obtain or maintain a romantic partner despite wishing they could. Theirs is a curious online subculture frequently characterized by self-pity, self-loathing, and a sense of entitlement to sex. Such stuff can also cross a little invisible line to become quite terribly dangerous.
The Guy
Scott Paul Beierle was born in October of 1978. According to his Facebook profile, he was a military veteran, but I couldn’t find many details about his service. After leaving the military he taught Social Studies and English in the Anne Arundel County Public School System. He also served as a substitute teacher at surrounding schools but was oft disciplined for performance problems.
In one case, Beierle was fired from a substitute position for touching a female student on her abdomen and asking if she was ticklish. In 2012 and 2016 he was officially charged with battery for groping women’s buttocks. Over time this disturbed young man came to view all women as the impetus behind his many manifest problems. His online activity reinforced this twisted vision.
Beierle was active on social media. He posted several YouTube videos that allowed him to vent over his sordid state. In one 2014 video, he described himself as an Incel and voiced support and empathy for Elliot Rodger, a mass shooter who also projected his personal shortcomings onto women in general. Rodger ultimately killed seven people and injured another fourteen. This twisted guy posted an online screed just before his attack titled, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution” wherein he verbalized his hatred towards women for rejecting him and sexually active men because he envied them.
Beierle also hated African-Americans and got seriously tooled up over interracial relationships. Illegal immigration set him off as well. He wrote song lyrics that glorified the torture and murder of women. He titled one of his videos, “Dangerous Diversity.”
It Has a Name
The textbook definition of a misogynist is, “A person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women.” Not unlike woke or gaslighting, this is one of those obscure terms that no one really paid much attention to until lately. Scott Beierle took it yet further and earned the title “Misogynistic Terrorist” from the ICCT.
ICCT stands for International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. It was founded in 2010 and is based in The Hague. Per Wikipedia, “The ICCT is an independent think tank devoted to providing multidisciplinary policy advice and practical support focused on prevention and the rule of law as it relates to combatting terrorism. ICCT’s work focuses on themes at the intersection of countering violent extremism and criminal justice sector responses, as well as human rights-related aspects of counter-terrorism. The major project areas concern countering violent extremism, rule of law, foreign fighters, country and regional analysis, rehabilitation, civil society engagement, and victims’ voices.” I have no idea what all that really means, but the ICCT really doesn’t like people like Scott Beierle.
The Event
November 2, 2018, was a Friday. At 5:37 PM, Scott Beierle walked into Tallahassee Hot Yoga carrying a 9mm Glock 17 handgun. For those of you who, like me, might not get out much, hot yoga is apparently the act of performing yoga in an artificially torrid environment.
Hot yoga began with someone named Bikram Choudhury. The mission is to replicate the heat and humidity of India, where yoga first was born. The goal is to sweat a lot and, in so doing, “prepare the body for movement and remove impurities.” Whatever. That all sounds pretty miserable to me. However, it does reliably attract women.
After dissecting his digital footprint in retrospect, investigators found that Beierle had been planning his attack for months. He briefly masqueraded as a yoga student before opening fire on the folks in the studio. A lot of stuff happened fairly quickly at that point.
Patrons in a bar across the street reported people streaming from the yoga studio. A man in a badly-bloodied white t-shirt then ran into the bar and claimed that he had attacked the shooter in an effort to buy time for the other patrons to escape. Other survivors backed up his claim.
Beierle ultimately shot six people, killing two. The dead victims were a 21-year-old student at nearby Florida State University named Maura Binkley and a 61-year-old physician named Nancy Van Vessem. Binkley was due to graduate the following year. Dr. Van Vessum worked as the Medical Director for a health insurance company.
The man who resisted Beierle’s attack fought back with whatever he had handy. At first, this was a vacuum cleaner and later a broomstick. Though he wasn’t shot, Beierle did beat him severely with his handgun. Tallahassee Police Chief Michael DeLeo later applauded the students who, “fought back and tried not only to save themselves but other people.”
The Aftermath
The cops arrived onsite three and one-half minutes after the first shot was fired, which is frankly pretty amazing. However, by then it was all over. Binkley and Van Vessum were already dead, and the loser Beierle had taken his own life.
There were subsequently tributes aplenty to the innocent victims of this egregious rampage. The following day an instructor at Tallahassee Hot Yoga led a yoga class specifically intended to heal the community in the middle of a nearby street. The following year, Maura Binkley’s parents sued Tallahassee Hot Yoga and the property owners for failure to provide adequate security measures.
Ruminations
There is always ample blame to go around in horrible situations like this. There are those who will immediately attack the gun, but this example is even more tenuous than is typically the case. This wasn’t an “assault weapon”–whatever that actually is–or some uber-deadly implement of war. It was just a pistol. Even hypothetical magazine capacity restrictions wouldn’t have touched this one. Scott Beierle was just a really horrible person.
The owners of the yoga studio got sued for what exactly? I could post some scary-looking guy with a black rifle at the front door of my business, but I doubt that would do much to enhance my patient flow. Scott Beierle is the reason I carry a gun every time I’m not asleep or in the shower. When seconds count the cops are often only minutes away. Their response was, per usual, absolutely incredible. It is simply that bad stuff like this typically unfolds very quickly.
I would assert that Scott Beierle is not the problem. Scott Beierle is a symptom of the problem. When I was a kid, stuff like this never happened. Now it seems to happen all the time. What exactly changed?
A point of personal privilege–the absence of light is dark. Similarly, the absence of God is godlessness. Our culture has ejected God from our public spaces and embraced a pervasive depressing nihilistic humanism.
If we persist in raising our kids to believe that life doesn’t matter and that sex is the ultimate end-all then we should not be surprised when the Incels of the world become convinced they have nothing to live for and take it out on the rest of us. Jesus is the only thing I have found that reliably displaces the darkness, even such darkness as Scott Beierle.
