Well here's a big surprise.

Criminals Pretty Much Avoid Buying Guns Legally, Says University of Chicago Study

Bad news, worse weekend.

Late Friday I got a hurried phone call from the nurse practitioner of the UAB liver cancer doc on the preliminaries of my MRI scan. Limited by what she could say, she merely passed on the firm instructions of the doc that I immediately begin taking the Gleevec again and then informed me that they were kicking me back to my original oncologist. This is an ungoodness thing. I will get the detailed interpretation from him next week, but it seems likely that the cancer is not only growing in my liver but is spreading to other organs. Obedient to orders, I began taking the Gleevec and it is kicking my ass. I have been off the computer for more than a day now and if I feel better tomorrow as the body adjusts to the Gleevec, I'll try to have some posts up. Sorry. Keep me in your prayers. It could be that Kerodin's death-wishing friends ("may you painfully rot quickly from cancer") like Bill Nye may indeed get their wish.

"Watch This Absolutely Bonkers Chinese Video of a Simulated Attack on the U.S."

The question is, who made this crazy thing? CFR says it originated from the People's Liberation Army (China's military), but Foxtrot Alpha says that the tech company Tencent could have created the video game-like clip. We only know for sure that it's out of control.

Fast & Furious Whistleblower Says Put ATF on Trial for Brian Terry’s Murder

“My hopes are that the trial judge will deny the United States motion to hide the known connection between ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious and Brian’s murder,” whistleblower and retired ATF agent Jay Dobyns told The Truth About Guns following a News 4 Tucson report that federal prosecutors are trying to keep details about Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” out of the murder trial of two men accused of killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry . . .

Anti-prepping 101: The top unpreparedness skills to master now for the coming collapse

(Skill #1) Standing in line for 12 hours at a time

‘Religious Leader’ Bears False Witness against Oath Keepers

That’s hardly a surprise for those of us who have come to understand that for “progressives,” every day is Opposite Day. It explains why, rather than embracing the true power sharing made possible with the right of the people to keep and bear arms, fake egalitarian Wilson instead advocates for a state monopoly of violence and the totalitarianism, mass human enslavement, suffering, misery and death that enables. That’s some ‘reverend.” It does make it fair to wonder the nature of the “god” she serves.

Prison ain't gonna be easy for this guy.

ATF Task Force officer charged with theft of gov’t money

Army’s New Handgun Program is About Ammo, Too.

"The winning contractor will have to be able to ramp up to delivering 2.8 million rounds of ball ammunition per month within three years and 1.6 million rounds of special-purpose ammunition per month within three years, according the RFP”

That’s per month. So after the Army picks three finalists, it will ultimately select a winner to produce more than 280,000 full-size handguns and 7,000 compact versions, and the other services may buy another 212,000 systems, according to the article. And on top of that, the winner will also be supplying the bullets. It’ll be interesting to see how the gun-makers and ammo-makers respond to the request.

The "Injustice Collectors": How to Understand Vester Flanagan’s Grievance-Filled Manifesto

Flanagan was a classic "injustice collector." Retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, who is widely regarded as one of the smartest people alive on these cases, described Flanagan as such on an appearance on CNN last week. And it was an easy call — Flanagan could be the case study. O'Toole published a primer on injustice collectors in the journal Violence and Gender last year, and many of her descriptors could be lifted right out of this case: "nurses resentment ... accumulating real or imagined slights, insults or putdowns ... could not get along with his co-workers ... disproportionate and aggressive response." Collectors magnify petty "injustices" and perceive them as intentional and purposeful. Over time, he forms a worldview of himself as victimized, bullied, discriminated and disrespected.

File this under: Nothing new under the sun. Subheading: failure to subordinate ego and poor leadership resulting in mission failure leads to another schism in the liberty movement.

I've known about this developing situation for months and tried my best to get the parties to reconcile their differences. I have my own opinions on who and what is responsible for this, but I will keep them to myself for now. As certain folks have seen fit to begin the self-justifying character assassination (waged quite openly on Facebook) that usually comes out with such donnybrooks, the only thing I can do is shake my head at the folly of conduct that I have seen far too many times in the liberty movement since the 90s.

Kit Lange on "The Concept of Innocent Until Proven Guilty in the Patriot Movement."

"Under Xi, China Prepares for Modern Warfare."

While Xi touted China’s commitment to peaceful development and promises to “never seek hegemony or expansion,” the V-day cavalcade painted an entirely different picture. China now possesses much of the hardware and capabilities of any other modern military power. Without Xi’s planned restructuring, however, this cutting-edge hardware will be wielded by a bureaucracy stuck in the 1950s. The stakes are high for President Xi: with domestic challenges increasingly prominent, the military component of Xi’s “Chinese dream” needs to be realized in order for Xi to continue to maintain credibility, party legitimacy, and leadership of the Chinese armed forces.

What our would-be tyrants risk with their appetites. "Beyond anger lies fury... and beyond that ... lies the region of cold and utterly uncaring indifference."

"I have seen war as it actually is, and I do not like it. But I will go on fighting." -- Audie Murphy.

Art imitates life. Audie Murphy recreates his berserker moment in To Hell and Back.

There is a scene in Audie Murphy's autobiographical film, To Hell and Back, recreating his actions after his best friend Lattie Tipton (referred to as "Brandon") was killed by Germans faking a surrender in Southern France in 1944. In his rage at the Nazi treachery, Murphy takes his revenge on as many of the Germans he can reach, using a captured MG-42.

Murphy recalled later: "I remember the experience as I do a nightmare. A demon seems to have entered my body. My brain is coldly alert and logical. I do not think of the danger to myself. My whole being is concentrated on killing." He was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions, but that couldn't bring Lattie Tipton back to life.

I thought of Murphy when I ran across this passage in Alistair MacLean's South By Java Head, a twenty cent library sale paperback I picked up for my insomniac reading list the other day:

Beyond anger lies fury, the heedless ungovernable rage of the berserker, and beyond that again, a long, long step beyond the boundary of madness, lies the region of cold and utterly uncaring indifference. When a man enters that region, as few ever do, he is no longer himself, he is a man beside himself, a man outwith all his normal codes and standards of feeling and thought and emotions, a man for whom words like fear and danger and suffering and exhaustion are words that belong to another world and whose meaning he can no longer comprehend. It is a state characterized by an abnormally heightened clarity of mind, by a hyper-sensitive perception of where danger lies, by a total and unhuman disregard for that danger. It is, above all, a state characterised by an utter implacability. -- page 234.

This is what our would-be tyrants risk with their insatiable appetites for other people's liberty and property and lives -- creating a generation of implacable foes who will not stop until the tyrants and their appetites are food for worms. Something they should consider now, before going down that road.

LATER, MBV Note: MacLean, who also wrote Where Eagles Dare and the Guns of Navarone, was a keen student of men in battle. Here is one of my favorite quotes from The Guns of Navarone:

“There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he too is brave and afraid like the all rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.”

But my favorite line from MacLean, or rather, through MacLean, is this quoted Gaelic prayer:

“As the rain hides the stars, as the autumn mist hides the hills, as the clouds veil the blue of the sky, so the dark happenings of my lot hide the shining of Your face from me. Yet, if I may hold Your hand in the darkness, it is enough. Since I know that, though I may stumble in my going, You do not fall."

These guys need a new sheet of music. They're boring the rest of us.

("Man, this ain't no lullaby but it sure is boring.")

"Now the time (sic) to fight tooth and nail for stronger, more intelligent U.S. gun control."

My reply:

Don't look now, but despite your reflexive collectivism, the paradigm has shifted beneath your feet and made such tyrannical bleating moot. Let's start with "universal background checks" which is another way of saying "firearm owner registration." Not even King George the Third was so grasping and you may recall what happened to his ambitions.

Your demi-god of citizen disarmament Mike Bloomberg bought himself a background check law recently in the state of WA. What happened? He managed to provoke a movement of armed civil disobedience. A couple thousand WA firearm owners met on the steps of the state capitol (having been denied a permit, as if that was going to keep them away) in defiance of the state law, transferred firearms one to another and dared the state authorities to do anything about it. They did nothing. Then they held a "background check free" firearms expo in Yakima. Again the authorities did nothing. Indeed, the "authorities" there don't know whether to defecate or go blind. All Bloomberg can do is tear his hair and rend his expensive suits in frustration at the wastage of his millions.

The same thing is happening in neighboring OR, as well as in all the states that passed tyrannical laws in the wake of Sandy Hook -- NY, CT, MD and CO. Armed civil disobedients are flouting those laws with impunity, grimly determined, growling "We Will Not Comply." Again, the authorities, having passed a law, are at a loss to know how to enforce it upon hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of newly-created felons who refuse to act like criminals. So you want to take our armed civil disobedience movement and make it national? Cool. Thanks for the help in organizing. You obviously have never heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

To "stop gun violence" by provoking a bloody civil war seems an odd way to go about it, but then you collectivist proto-tyrants never did make much sense to the rest of us. So kindly stop bleating "disarm the law-abiding" every time some evil criminal murders an innocent. We will not surrender our essential liberty upon the altar of your alleged good intentions. Until you have the courage of your alleged convictions and use state-sponsored violence to work your will upon us, just do us the favor of shutting up. You're boring the rest of us.

Mike Vanderboegh, Pinson, AL

http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com

Gun control groups accused of ‘swatting’ open-carry permit holders, putting lives at risk

“This practice is exactly what they [Coalition to Stop Gun Violence] are doing,” said Erich Pratt, spokesman for Virginia-based Gun Owners of America. “It’s one thing if someone is using a gun in an illegal or unlawful manner. No one is questioning that. But this clearly sounds like swatting.”

See also: In 2010, 38-year-old Erik Scott was shopping in a Las Vegas Costco while legally concealing a firearm. A Costco employee noticed the concealed gun and called the police to tell them there was a man with a gun inside the store. The store was evacuated once the police arrived and Erik Scott was executed in front of swarms of Costco customers. Scott, a Westpoint graduate, was a former Army officer. It’s a miracle that only one person was murdered as this unfolded.

When you introduce deadly force into a situation there is no telling what might result. People are on edge, people with deadly weapons are on edge — it’s a powder keg. These horrible gun-control monsters do not care how these situations might escalate — and escalate they will when the police are informed someone has a firearm and innocent people are “in danger” and they show up to control a potentially violent situation.

If any of these zealots call the cops on a law-abiding citizen and a deadly confrontation results, they should be named as an accessory to murder.

A big step up from the old SKS. Fabryka Broni unveils full MSBS-5.56 rifle family.

Polish small arms manufacturer Fabryka Broni unveiled its entire Modular Small Arms System calibre 5.56 mm (MSBS-5.56) assault rifle family, currently on order for the Polish Armed Forces, for the first time at the MSPO defence exhibition in Kielce. Equipped with a quick-release barrel, the MSBS-5.56 is small arms system chambered in 5.56x45 mm with a unique feature: a common upper receiver for both classic and bullpup configurations.

MBV Note: And if they think about it, the Poles had better hang onto to those SKS rifles for their militia as well, for when the neo-Soviets come calling. Or, hey, they could sell 'em to us recalcitrant American firearm owners along with some cheap 7.62x39 military surplus to fund their new acquisitions. Sigh. Remember the good old days when SKS's were $69 a piece and Chinese steel core in tuna cans was pennies on the round? It scared the bejeezus outta the Clintonistas, I can tell you that.

Rotten Olive Branch Offered after Roanoke Murders

Besides, if those demanding it are really interested solely in background checks, and nothing else, they’d be pushing something like BIDS, the Blind Identification Database System, instead of NICS. That would identify firearms-disabled persons without creating any kind of transaction record that could then be used for registration purposes, and without compiling records of innocent gun owners. For reasons that should be clear by now, I’m not endorsing such a system, even though it would inarguably be an improvement. I merely point to its utility as a “poison pill” to prove those who say they only want background checks would be lying if they objected to BIDS, and to note all the major gun rights groups have been aware of – and deliberately ignored – this much less intrusive alternative for years.

Report and reflections on the strange not-peace.

Thanks to the generous readers of this blog, our A/C was fixed this week. Don't ever let anyone tell you that God doesn't answer prayer, for He certainly does. It turned out to require a new fan motor, among other things. Without it, this week would have been a greater struggle than it was, and it's been plenty challenging. I did finally get the MRI done yesterday morning, so I'm waiting to find out about those two pesky liver tumors. My anemia continues to dog me, but not to the point where the docs can justify a blood transfusion. Mostly I'm treading water on the other issues. The aggravating thing is that it has gotten in the way of continuing the fight on a number of fronts.

Events crowd in, threats to the cause of liberty multiply and I'm not the only one who believes that all of our times in this strange not-yet-war-but-not-peace -- in our country and the world -- are coming to an end more evil than we have seen in 70 years.

Yet, I am painfully aware that I'm closer to the end of my personal fight than the beginning, and I'm frustrated that the fronts grow in number even as my ability to assist in them decreases. I begin to feel hopelessly inadequate to the task at hand. I can't say that I've ever considered it that way before, even when they told me I likely wouldn't make it through the stomach surgery three and a half years ago. I've always had a deep belief that God wasn't through with me yet. I still feel that way, but I am afraid that I'm letting Him -- and you -- down by not accomplishing more with the time I have.

That said, I feel even more strongly that I have neglected my family in the process. Why Rosey has stuck with me these past thirty years with all the threats that I have invited into our lives is beyond me. I ache when I consider that I haven't even seen my son's new family in Germany and may never do so. I ache that Matt's first wife has largely prevented my oldest grandson from seeing his father and his grandfather, raising him without reference to his history, his blood -- breaking that mystical tie in a selfish bid to erase us from her own guilty memory. Rosey and I sit and talk nights about how we'll get out of this hole that my disabilities, physical and economic, have dug for us these past 15 years, about our dreams of leaving behind this ramshackle house and moving up to Chandler Mountain, to raise goats and keep bees, knowing all the time that events intrude and we're likely not going to make it.

But these are the trade-offs that I have made with my eyes wide open. Looking back on the years since Waco, there are things that I would have done differently, mistakes that I made that I wish I could unmake, but not the one decision that mattered then and still matters today.

The murder of the Branch Davidians and all their kith and kin by a feral federal government was evil of the sort that any thinking being with an ounce of moral feeling had to fight. I may regret some of the steps I took, but not the road I set out on. I could not do otherwise and look myself in the mirror. Even now, when I do look myself in the mirror, cognizant of my serial failures, it is with the sense that for all the costs I have not done enough.

And the tax-paid murderous criminals of Ruby Ridge, of Waco, of Oklahoma City and Katrina, of Fast and Furious and the perpetrators of the other wholesale depredations of liberty in the past three administrations have gone unpunished, hardly even inconvenienced by the evil they committed. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," and I believe that. But when I look at the even bloodier, ghastlier evils that are rolling inexorably downhill at us now, at innocent people who just want to be left alone to live their lives, to love and work and raise their families in peace, I cannot help but despise the tyrant wannabes who start the stinking wars with their own insatiable appetites for other people's liberty and property and lives. I despise them at the same time I chafe at the poor showing I have made in trying to oppose their designs. Always we fight, a despised tiny minority of us, with inadequate resources, against an enemy far more powerful, it seems, than we have any hope of successfully opposing.

And yet.

And yet, we do what we can with what we have, for God commands us to stand. He doesn't command us to win, but he does expect us to fight. In the end, He will do the fighting and the winning of the ultimate victory. So, in the words of my son, quoting a maxim of his beloved 101st Airborne, we "drink water and drive on," through whatever the future brings until God calls us home. In the end, perhaps, my family, my friends, and you, my readers, will forgive my failures if I continue to try to do my best. I hold onto that thought. For your support, in your prayers, with your advice and your contributions, I thank you all. Please keep me in your prayers as I thankfully keep you in mine.

And we STILL won't help the Kurds.

'Mad Max' battle buses and tanks built by Kurdish fighters to repel ISIS soldiers in Syria -- Peshmerga troops converted old tractors and lorries into military vehicles. They are badly out-gunned by ISIS who seized weapons from the Iraqi army.

U.S. trying to keep Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal out of slain agent's trial

The U.S. government is fighting to keep details of how its own federal gun agents let Mexican drug cartels buy rifles in Arizona illegally out of an upcoming murder trial in which two men will be tried for the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry who died after he ran into men carrying those same illegal guns. In a court filing Monday, prosecutors are trying to keep some details about the guns found at the slain agent’s murder scene away from the jury.

#BlackLivesMatter Costs Black Lives.

Both Flynn and Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett are gun-control activists, and Barrett has explicitly blamed Wisconsin’s liberalized concealed-carry laws for the spike in murders, saying they’ve “put more guns on the streets of the city of Milwaukee.” There’s no evidence, however, that concealed-carry permit holders are responsible for any of the crime increase, much less the bulk of it. At the same time, Maryland has extraordinarily strict gun-control laws, including a new round of restrictions passed after the Sandy Hook massacre that include “fingerprinting and licensing requirements for handgun buyers.” Whereas Wisconsin recently liberalized its gun laws and Maryland tightened them, Missouri’s gun laws haven’t been materially changed in almost a decade. Milwaukee, Baltimore, and St. Louis have all seen dramatic increases in murders despite three distinctively different gun-law regimes. What do they have in common? They’ve all been at the center of the radical critique mounted by #BlackLivesMatter.