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Yesterday was recoil therapy with Big Country.  He brought a collection of Enfields and a Springfield 1878 trap door in 40-70 which was great fun.  Another guy had a "Quigley" rifle = a Sharps 1874 in 45-120 (!).  That one kills on one end and maims on the other.

Many thanks to BC for participating in an experiment to see if going to the shooting range is effective in treating cancer.  Probably not, but I feel better already. 

There are plenty of weapon-mounted lights on the market. So when another one shows up claiming 1,000-plus lumens, that specification alone doesn’t necessarily get my attention anymore. The Olight PL X GL is different. Yes, we’re talking about a compact weapon light capable of producing up to 1,200 lumens. But after getting my hands on […]

Memorandum Opinion by U.S. Attorney-General:

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults Section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) of title 18, U.S. Code, is unconstitutional as applied to young adults between eighteen and twenty who seek to purchase handguns. The provision prevents young adults, who are members of “the people” to whom the Second Amendment applies, from owning “arms” in common use for self-defense. This places the burden on the government to show that the restrictions are consistent with the  Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation, which it cannot do. 

They cite me at pp. 43-44:

Pistols, though less common than other firearms, existed at the Founding and were a familiar article of early American commerce. See Clayton E. Cramer & Joseph Edward Olson, Pistols, Crime, and Public: Safety in Early America, 44 Willamette L. Rev. 699, 706–11 (2008) (outlining the prevalence of pistols at the time of the Founding).  

How important are such opinions? Apparently, pretty important. To quote from an Obama-era memo "MEMORANDUM FOR ATTORNEYS OF THE OFFICE Re: Best Practices for OLC Legal Advice and Written Opinions "

As noted above, OLC's central function is to provide, pursuant to the Attorney General's delegation, controlling legal advice to Executive Branch officials in furtherance of the President's constitutional duties to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." 

 Elite Precision Customs v. BATF (5th Cir. 2026):

Plaintiffs unsuccessfully sought a permanent injunction against several provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 922 that collectively prohibit the buying and selling of handguns across state lines.  The only issue is whether those provisions are constitutional under the Second Amendment.  They are not:  Under Bruen, they implicate the Second Amendment’s plain text, making them presumptively unconstitutional, and the government has failed to meet its burden to justify the provisions as consistent with the nation’s tradition of firearms regulation.  We reverse and render judgment for plaintiffs. 

The GCA68 provision that prohibited sale of handguns to persons not a resident of state of sale had a certain logic: in 1968, there was no national database (what's a database?) that allowed for a nationwide check to see if you were a prohibited person in some state. Some states had provisions for this, or at least pretended that they did. Even quite recently, some states considered mental hospital records as so private that they could not check for involuntary commitments. 

We now have the NICS database that allows dealers to check if a buyer is disqualified from purchase. This may well expand sales at gun shows of handguns.

 Climate change - This is the first summer that I can remember when we have ot had a hurricane in the Atlantic basin. I've lived here through 72 summers and can't remember a summer like this one.  NOAA bacs me up on this, and I am not complaining.

The hummingbirds are passing through and my feeders are totally engaged.  I'm going through sugar water at an enhanced rate.

Human migration - After watching Nick's video yesterday and thinking abut the lessons we can glean from it, I am wondering what the Atakapa people might think about it.  Or the Huron or Chippewa or Arisaka? The worst part is that the folks who defend illegal migration is that they probably don't know who the Chippewa or Atakapa people are.  We can learn from history.  How did hat work out for the Cherokee?

The AI Kerfuffle - Has anyone but me noticed that the AI democrats are making the same arguments that they used when trying to quell covid?  Trust the science... Flatten the curve... It's going to kill us all... My strongest argument is that Bernie Sanders hasn't been right about anything yet.  If Bernie says that it is an existential threat, we should probably ignore him. He ain't been right about anything yet.

This is Saturday and I have things to accomplish, so if you will excuse me.

A preliminary investigation found two men were attacking another with a knfie and a pole Thursday morning in the area of Decatur Avenue and Tennessee Street. A fourth man then stepped in to help the victim and shot one of the alleged attackers.

That person died. Police haven’t identified them yet.

The victim drove away and crashed nearby on a motorcycle. First responders took them to the hospital in stable condition to treat his stab wounds.

More Here 

 Nick Freidas is a conservative voice in the United States.  A proud veteran, he served with the US 1st Special Forces in overseas deployments.  Post military, he served in the Virginia legislature.  Now he is speaking out on a range of issues.

Nick put out a documentary on the problems of unrestricted immigration. It is a cautionary tale for US politics and social policy.

Viva Las Vegas, baby:

At Gunship Helicopters we offer:

• The only place in the world you can shoot full-auto belt fed from a helicopter as a civilian
• 71 acres of mountainside range space
• A truly authentic military experience

I was surprised that they have packages under $1000, but they get more expensive pretty quickly.  But things like this make me proud to be American.

The post America’s Do-It-All Naval Gun: The 5 Inch Mk12 on the USS New Jersey first appeared on Forgotten Weapons.

Slovakia map in public domain 

While researching bear/human conflicts, two more incidents were found where Slovakians used handguns to successfully defend themselves against European brown bears (Ursus arctos).  Slovakia is one of the central European countries which have adopted statutes so that people can legally carry handguns for defense of self and others. The area of both attacks is located about 20 km north of Banská Bystrica, just north of central Slovakia.

On March 30, 2024, a young man was searching for mushrooms in dense forest in the district of Žilina, near the village of Stráňavy. He was off the hiking trail when a brown bear charged him. Fortunately, he was carrying a handgun, and fired at the bear, stopping the attack. Members of the Slovakian State Nature Conservancy quickly investigated. They assembled a team including members of the local hunting associations and local police, and hunting dogs. The team was able to trace the bear involved.

During the search, the bear attacked the hunters, who were forced to fire at the bear. The Slovakian account does not specifically say if the bear was killed. The local account does not identify the handgun or ammunition used in the defense.

On October 29, 2025, two National Park workers were in the field inside the Great Fatra National Park, in the district of Ružomberok, near the village of Liptovské Revúce.  The two workers, a man and a woman were unexpectedly attacked by a European brown bear. The man was carrying a legal handgun. He fired several times at the bear until the bear fled the scene. The two park workers were not injured. The incident was immediately reported to the police and the official Team to investigate brown bear incidents. When the team searched the area of the attack, the found a dead brown bear. The bear was an old bear. It weighed about 290 lbs.

 Grizzly bear in mountains, public domain

Because of increasing bear numbers and bear attacks, Slovakia has proposed a cull of 350 bears out of a population estimated at 1300.  This would be about 27% of the existing bear population. Brown bears, ursus arctos, can increase their population by about 18% per year, if they have sufficient food supplies. In areas with significant human populations, access to human produced foods on farms and ranches supplies much more food than would be available in most untouched wilderness. Brown bear populations have been increasing over much of their range, from Europe to areas near Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the United States.

In 1972, a commission considered a population of 300-500 bears to be an "optimal" level for Slovakia. A paper published by the Slovak Wildlife Society and funded by the World Wildlife Fund indicated there were about 800 European brown bears in Slovakia in 2007. The bears are concentrated in the central mountainous region of Slovakia. The factors considered to arrive at the optimal level were not published. In 2015 a Slovak source published that genetic research from 2013-2014 indicated a population level of between 1000 and 1500 bears in Slovakia.

Brown bear populations have been increasing over much of their range, from Europe to areas near Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the United States. Along with the increases in bear populations, there have been increases in bear/human conflicts. Governments around the world are now facing the challenge of balancing local residents desires to be safe in the forest with international and urban pressure not to kill bears or reduce their populations. Japan has started to take aggressive action to limit bear populations in response to record numbers of people killed by bears in 2025.

©2026 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

Gun Watch 

COLERAIN, Bertie County — A Colerain man faces multiple charges after a homeowner caught him during an alleged break-in and held him at gunpoint until a Bertie County deputy arrived, according to the sheriff's office.

The Bertie County Sheriff's Office said a deputy was dispatched around 9:14 a.m. Tuesday to a home in the 200 block of Sally Freeman Road for a reported break-in in progress.

According to the sheriff's office, the homeowner had the suspect at gunpoint when the deputy arrived.

More Here

 I have three big AC units in the shop, and since June I have left one of them running even when we aren't in the shop  I have the thermostat set and it seems to help keep the place cooler, with a shorter cool-down time.

This mooring we awoke to milder temps, drier air, and the coffee on the patio was very pleasant.  When the dog and I walked out to the shop, I was pleased to see that the AC unit was cycled off.  It's cooler in here than it has been sine last May.

We still have a lot of summer left in subtropical Louisiana and we are in a drought with no relief in sight for the next week or so.  But, this morning gives me reassurance that milder temps are on the way. In another month, I might be able to make a gumbo.

Very soon, I'll be hauling propane bottles to the feed store to heat the place.

• The Nuclear (Again) Future


• You have no idea how weird some of the key people around the AI flagpole really are.


• China's oil stockpiling pays dividends.

9/17/26 CNN:

The bond market gave the Federal Reserve an ultimatum: Raise rates, or we will.

 So the Fed did the only thing it could do. Backed into a corner by rising Treasury yields and inflation, the central bank boosted its target interest rate Wednesday for the first time since 2023.

Americans have suffered from a persistent inflation problem for five years, and an interest rate hike is a powerful weapon that could help squash it. But it’s a blunt tool that comes with a nasty side effect: It can unintentionally turn the job market into collateral damage.

Still, for Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh & Co., this isn’t any ordinary inflation problem. It’s mainly a result of high energy prices caused by the war with Iran, and as my colleague Matt Egan noted in July: Warsh can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

So the bond market got its wish Wednesday, and the reasonably strong job market and robust consumer spending probably gave the Fed enough room for error.

But the Fed is playing with fire. Raising interest rates risks slowing down the American economy without anything to show for it.
‘Weak case’

Before the Fed decision, some prominent economists were already on its case.

Goldman Sachs economists suggested in a note to clients this week that the case for a rate hike was “weak,” based on the state of the US economy. They argued the economy wasn’t overheating, demand wasn’t excessive, and the supply shocks fueling inflation – namely high oil and fuel prices – would correct themselves once the war ended.

It’s not that the Iran war and Ukraine’s attacks on Russian diesel refineries are part of the problem; they are the problem – all of it, Goldman’s economists said....

The Fed typically “looks through” supply shocks because they’re temporary and rate hikes are ineffective at combatting them. And once they fix themselves, the Fed may find that interest rates now are too high, artificially raising borrowing costs for businesses and consumers without actually tackling inflation.

“The Fed cannot control energy prices,” said Michael Pearce, chief US economist at Oxford Economics. “The economy is solid and can withstand a few rate hikes, but the risk is higher interest rates begin to weaken the labor market.”

Other discussions of the hike are also interesting. 9/17/26 CBS News:

Warsh, who was named by President Trump to succeed longtime Fed Chair Jerome Powell earlier this year, has previously vowed to tackle inflation. But economists had been unsure of his commitment to that goal, given that he had also echoed some of Mr. Trump's views that the economy could benefit from lower interest rates.

What changed? Between the time Warsh was nominated in January and this week's Fed meeting, inflation has sharply accelerated, driven largely by the Iran war's impact on global oil prices.

In January, consumer prices were rising at an annual rate of 2.4%, within touching distance of the Fed's 2% target. But soaring crude prices have reversed that progress, sending the Consumer Price Index to a three-year high of 4.2% in May. While inflation has eased slightly since then, dipping to 3.4% in August, it's still far higher than Fed officials like.

"The plain fact is that inflation is too high, and has been for too long," Warsh said in a press conference after the Fed announced the rate hike on Wednesday, stressing that the Fed wants to take a "timelier" approach to curb price increases.

Those comments were interpreted as pointing to "higher rates for longer," Jaison Davis, economic research analyst at GlobalData, said in a report. "The bar for easing [rates] is now much higher, and it rests on clear evidence that inflation is heading back to target."
The Iran war is complicating life for the Fed

Warsh pointed to the impact of the war in Iran as one reason Fed officials were unanimous on the need to hike interest rates. The conflict, which has no end in sight, has severely reduced the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, while an escalation in fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen threatens another vital waterway.

Crude oil prices have jumped above $100 a barrel in recent weeks. The price increase has pushed fuel costs higher for Americans, who paid a record-high $6.40 per gallon for diesel on Thursday, a 73% jump from a year ago. Gasoline reached $4.44 a gallon, 38% higher than a year earlier, according to AAA data.

The Federal Reserve has spent more than five years promising the American public that policymakers will bring inflation sustainably back to the central bank’s 2% annual target. On Sept. 16 the Fed raised interest rates in pursuit of that goal.

John Cochrane, a prominent economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, thinks that higher rates are a short-term solution, at best. His research suggests that inflation will resume climbing unless fiscal policy also changes and the U.S. brings its borrowing and spending under control. Without more restrictive fiscal policy, he says, the Fed can only rearrange inflation in the face of a mountain of federal debt that recently surpassed $40 trillion. That’s because higher rates push up the government’s interest costs, leading to higher inflation in the long run.

Cochrane, previously a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has laid out these and other ideas in his popular blog, The Grumpy Economist He spoke with Barron’s on Sept. 11 about his economic research, the U.S. Treasury’s buyback of longer-dated debt, and the changes that Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is implementing. An edited version of the conversation follows.

All of this makes sense. The Fed is legally obligated to keep inflation and unemployment balanced. This is at best a "threading the eye of the needle" problem at best; the insane deficits make this nearly impossible. The big gorilla in the room on interest rates is federal borrowing. If the U.S. government cannot control its borrowing, it will push out other borrowers, raising interest rates. Somehow, Congress will need to address this problem. At some point, pursuing Medicare/Medicaid/COVID fraud will make a difference but not quickly. 

 Paterson, N.J. (1973)

03/18/1973: Police charged a man, 33, with beating to death his wife and their three small children with a hammer. He was later transferred to a state mental hospital for evaluation. Psychiatrists determined he was “insane at the time and unable to stand trial.” In 1975, he was “declared to be sane enough to stand trial.” He had attempted suicide by a pill overdose. He was later “declared sane enough to stand trial.”

Category: family

Suicide: no

Cause: mental illness

Weapon: hammer[1]

 9/15/26 Reuters:

WASHINGTON, Sept 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. ​poverty rate edged down to the lowest on record ‌in 2025, while median household income hit a record high, the Census Bureau said on Tuesday. There were 34.5 million people in poverty ​in 2025, the agency said.

The decline marked the second ​consecutive annual drop in the poverty rate and brought ⁠it to its lowest level since the bureau began tracking ​the measure. It came as policymakers debate the impact of ​federal spending cuts on safety-net programs.

9/15/26 Washington Post explains why this is not a basis for joy.

 Mill Valley, Cal. (1973)

Before 03/17/1973: “Police hunted today for a man in his early 20s seen leaving a burning home after a businessman, his wife and son were shot to death outside the hillside dwelling.” A neighbor saw the man leaving with a shotgun who rejected the neighbor’s poorly thought offer to help. “Go away,” was the response. Police found at least 22 shotgun shells.

At a subsequent trial of a man, 22, his defense attorney asserted that the murderer was paranoid schizophrenic and committed the murders because his friend, one of those murdered, “possessed supernatural powers which were bent of destroying [the murderer.” Also, “the Mafia was involved in his life and that Dan Shallock was involved and could not be killed, even by an H-Bomb.” “At one point he believed Dan Shallock was the devil, and to this day [the murderer] fear in his heart that Dan may come back.” The murderer had spent a month at Marin Community Mental Health Center, and in the days immediately prior to the slayings, his mother had been trying to persuade the youth to commit himself.”

It appears that the jury did not accept “not guilty by reason of insanity”; they convicted him of murder.

Category: family non-resident

Suicide: no

Cause: mental illness

Weapon: shotgun[1]

 Santa Cruz, Cal. (1973)

02/06/1973: Same killer and reasons as 01/25/1973: in this case, the victims were four “long-haired youths” who had built “a 10-by-12 foot, pyramid-shaped shelter constructed of pine saplings, branches, cardboard and plastic sheeting.”

Category: public

Suicide: no

Cause: mental illness

Weapon: firearm[1]