I haven’t mentioned the FLDS situation for a couple of reasons.

1) Anytime you mix church compounds, law enforcement raids, and accusations of child molestation together I start thinking “Waco” and then I say stuff I probably shouldn’t.

2) The former church leader has been convicted of crimes against children, so there’s probably some validity to the government’s claims.

So, I held off until now.

Let’s recap real quick: Texas officials get an anonymous tip that there’s some child molestation going on in that there compound. Raid ensues, eventually upwards of 460 children are taken out on buses. Mothers have a hard time getting in touch with their children and the men are just shit out of luck.

Then we find out the anonymous phone call wasn’t from a 16 year old girl in the compound. It’s more likely from a woman in her 40′s off in Colorado that tried the same stunt in Arizona when the FLDS folks setup camp there. Arizona didn’t act on it because apparently that’s really not a good reason to seize children. Ya think?

Today I see this:

On Tuesday, six “girls” were deemed adults, including 27-year-old Leona Allred, whose lawyer insisted CPS knew from the beginning that her client was an adult.

“My client showed them the same documents they showed them from the beginning: a valid Arizona driver’s license and a birth certificate,” Andrea Sloan said.

That’s now 10 of the “children” that have been found to actually be adults. Fine police work there, folks.

Now, from the same article we find this:

One of those girls, now 19, was ruled an adult by the courts but not before she said in a conference call to the court that she could have been no older than 16 when her daughter was born on Aug. 19, 2005.

And in another courtroom, information gleaned from the records of a 17-year-old indicated she had to have been 15 when her first child was born.

OK, that sounds like a pretty awful thing. We’ve got a bunch of girls rounded up because they might be being sexually used by church elders and that right there shows something fishy is going on, right?

Maybe not. Let’s think about this. Check out the US teen pregnancy rates. The latest data from 2002 says that 75 out of 1000 teen girls (15-19) have been pregnant. That’s 7.5%. When you look at the FLDS compound they’ve now got 2 out of 450 children — that’s 4.4% and I’m totally ignoring any teen girls that might have once lived in the compound but later moved on when the became adults. Granted, there might be more teenage pregnancies being discovered in the near future.

I’m just saying, it’s possible that there’s a chance these young pregnancies might be the fruits of a little teenage hanky-panky in barn when nobody was looking. If abstinence only sex-education is a total failure (which I’d bet is the education those kids got) we should be seeing some rather alarming teen pregnancy rates, not half the national average; but that’s not my point. My point is that if there’s systematic sexual abuse of teenage girls going on in that compound we ought to be seeing a higher teen pregnancy rate than the “noise” that exists outside the system where things like birth control and condoms are available.

I think the Texas CPS has managed to blow any credibility they’ve got with the public on this one. I predict a massive failure in their ability to actually prosecute anybody. Maybe they’ll snag a guy or two but that’s about it. To achieve that they’ve rounded up every child from what amounts to a small town and disrupted the lives of everybody in it. I do not find that acceptable and I can’t imagine many Texans are to keen on their antics either.

Some dogs mauled a 7 year old to death in Texas.

That’s horrible, I don’t mean to make light of it, but I’m mentioning it for another reason. From the article:

A 7-year-old boy died after he was attacked by pit bulls while playing outside near his rural home, authorities said.

I’ve made this point in comments on other pro-gun blogs, but I figured I’d reiterate it here: I do not trust a reporter, or the police, to properly identify a dog’s breed.

It’s not easy to spot a pit bull. Take the test, see if you can do it.

If you’re reading this blog you probably know the difference between an AK-47 clone, an SKS,and an AR-15, but how many times have we seen the news agencies goof that one up? We see nonsense like “Glock revolvers” or “40mm Glocks” all the time in the gun world. I’ve even seen a news report evolve from an initial report an AK-47 being used in a shooting into a .45 caliber pistol. How do you muck that one up? Remember the nutter on a college campus in New York with a “50 caliber rifle”? Yeah, it was a muzzle loader. Yet we still saw news agencies running with pictures of Armalite .50BMGs for their graphics, even after the ID’d the rifle as a Wolf Muzzle Loader

About the only thing you can be sure of when you see a “pit bull” attack in the news is that there was a dog involved weighing between 20 and 120 pounds.

Remember the other day when I opined as to the original manufacture date of my Henry .22LR? Yeah, that’s still on my mind. I put put a thread on THR on it but got nothing better than “Call Henry” which is valid, but I try not to bug people with stupid questions if there’s a guide online somewhere.

So, tonight I start hitting Google. I think “henry serial number” was my first search.

My second:

Seriously, Google? WTF?! You inflate my ego and cock-punch me at the same time.

Why can’t I quit you?

The topic has been covered by a slew of other gun bloggers, but Sebastian uses it to bring up a good question:

If I can’t have it, because it’s not useful for self-defense, then it’s not useful for police self-defense either, right?

I find myself in agreement with him there. If some SWAT team needs machine guns to raid my neighbors house, where they have the advantage of numbers, certainly I should be entitled to the same weapons when I’m the sole person defending my home against an unknown number of attackers.

Then again, we’re not talking about SWAT teams here, we’re talking about patrol officers. All they’re doing is driving around in the same neighborhoods that we live in. What about the people that live in those areas that are surrounded by the very same criminal element that would visit violence on a police officer?

I say they should be armed equally.

Not that I’d actually want an M4 for my home defense rifle. I tend to favor the Make-Big-Holes school of thought so I either keep an 870 with 00 Buck handy or a Marlin 1894C stoked with some .357 loads from Buffalo Bore.

The above video shows the muzzle blast of a .50BMG rifle blowing out the taillight of a truck. The bullet didn’t impact that taillight, contrary to what it looks like on the video. You can see a discussion of this actual shooting here which is a board for gun guys and the dude that actually shot the video is also a member. The fourth comment was really funny:

Guys-

I know who that is.

Really.

So do y’all…..

Later the dude in the video (Jamz) shows up.

There’s a bit of a myth surrounding the .50BMG that it’ll vaporize guys if it even comes close to them. I heard this last repeated by my own father (not a gun dude) and he got that from a Marine Reservist that works for him. It’s not true, and it only took 10 seconds of explanation for him to understand the whole matter.

I can’t help but wonder if such videos contribute to the myth. It sure looks like that bullet vaporized the taillight when it passed by but what actually happens it the muzzle break directs gasses, at the muzzle, that would usually push back on the shooter, off to the sides at a backward angle. If the muzzle was 6″ behind the taillight nothing would have happened to it.

They’re tremendously powerful rifles, but they aren’t capable of transforming a .50 caliber projectile into a 3 foot cylinder of death.

Ryan Horsley brings attention to some new software intended to help FFLs out. The EZ 4473 software he mentions is interesting to me.

The first thing I thought of when I saw it was: Why didn’t I think of that?!

The second thing was: Good luck keeping up with 4473 changes. In the 7 years that I’ve been buying guns I’ve dealt with 3 different versions of the 4473 if my memory serves me correctly. The older “yellow form” 4473′s wouldn’t have fit well in a typical PC printer. I’d wager that’s a big reason something like this didn’t come out earlier. The ATF moved the 4473 onto standard 8.5″x11″ paper sometime late in 2005. If they ever to back to something different customers of EZ 4473 might have a few issues.

Now, the reason software such as this is needed is because you want to ensure that the customer fills in the form properly. A clerk can sometimes miss the obvious mistakes, like the customer writing “Y” into a field instead of “Yes.” While a monkey could be trained to understand that they’re functionally identical, the BATFE won’t stand for such violations.

STI, largely known for their high-end 1911′s, are going to introduce the GP6, a polymer framed 9mm pistol, reports Michael Bane.

You may or may not remember that STI gave California the finger when they passed their microstamping bill which is a good thing.

For a while now I’ve considered Huckabee to be my #3 choice in the Republican Primary, but that’s only because of his stance on the 2nd amendment. Fred Thompson comes in at #2 simply because he doesn’t appear to be a totalitarian nutjob like Romney and Guiliani do. Tancredo and Hunter are even further long shots than my #1 pick of Ron Paul so I can’t really consider them viable.

Anyway, onto Misha’s take on Huckabee:

Wow. What’s not to love?

He’s not merely a functional illiterate with less knowledge of U.S. history than your average EUroweenie fucking 2nd grader [Justin: reference to his knowledge of Cuba], he’s also a self-admitted opportunistic liar! Combine that with his hatred of his fellow citizens, calling them “racist and nativist” when they don’t agree with him that every single illegal immigrant in the country should receive for free, on the spot, what millions are waiting in line for decades and paying through the nose for, his tender heart when it comes to pardoning rapists and murderers, his love of raising taxes and his philosophy that we should deal with mentally unstable psychopaths like Ahmadinnerjacket according to the Golden Rule and it’s a wonder that he’s not ahead in the polls by 60 percent.

If he were running as a Democrat, that is.

At this point, all I can say is that the polls showing him way ahead as the potential GOP nominee in ‘08 had better be doctored by the MSM.

Ayup.

I personally believe that the best we can hope for in the Republican Primary is a knock-down drag-out brawl between Paul and Thompson.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership releases a screed on private gun sales and, to nobody’s surprise, it contains misleading facts in it.

Sebastian comes through and compares their facts to reality.