patrick.net

I thought as much. The only silent gun I know of is a British military weapon that has a barrel that is the size of a small muffler and shoots a subsonic round. I do not see how a silencer on a normal supersonic round weapon can stop the sonic crack when the bullet leaves the gun.

Unless that bottom gun is fully auto (illegal), that gun and the gun above have the same rate of fire.

And standard capacity in 9mm is 17 or 18 rounds, iirc. I still don't get his choice of caliber.

I was shocked when I first found out that for centuries, Catholic laypeople were not allowed to read the bible. Only priests were allowed to read it.

Patrick says

I was shocked when I first found out that for centuries, Catholic laypeople were not allowed to read the bible. Only priests were allowed to read it.

The lay people were illiterates in their own language, let alone being able to read Latin.

I was shocked when I first found out that for centuries, Catholic laypeople were not allowed to read the bible. Only priests were allowed to read it.

Having a religion where members are all but required to be literate to read the Book is a big advantage.

Some of Oregon's trans and queer gun supporters are worried that a new state law will prevent them from buying firearms.

The law, Measure 114, grants county sheriffs and police chiefs discretion to determine who qualifies to purchase a firearm under a new permit-to-purchase program.

But Measure 114 lacks criteria clearly defining what disqualifies applicants, details on what makes someone a threat and what data can be used by law enforcement in making that decision. That's a problem for activists who have critiqued law enforcement....

https://notthebee.com/article/great-news-it-is-now-legal-to-carry-a-gun-without-a-permit-in-fully-half-of-the-united-states

Joe Biden wants to "ban the number of bullets that can go in a magazine" 🤔

ATF just made felons out of 40 million Americans with their reclassification of pistol braced guns as SBR's.

Not just for years but for decades I have been perplexed by the fact that American Jews are overwhelmingly anti-gun. Now they are not just indifferent to guns as they were when I was growing up 60 years ago, but today they are genuinely hostile to them. They are both in leadership positions of the movement to ban private ownership of all firearms as well as at the grass-roots level individually in favor of gun bans by over 10 to 1. After much thought I have arrived at what appears to be the explanation for this cultural aversion to firearms by most American Jews, and since I have never seen anything like this explanation in print anywhere, I thought it worth writing the following essay describing what for want of a better term I refer to as "the shtetl mentality." ...

Before the existence of the state of Israel ever since the diaspora Jews have lived in small areas of other people's countries. Among American Jews this now typically means great grandparents who lived in shtetls or ghettos, segregated, isolated rural or urban areas in Europe. One of the major hazards of this situation was that occasionally a few Cossacks would get drunk, ride over to the nearest shtetl, rape a few women, maybe murder a man who protested rather than begging for his life and then ride off into the sunset, big fun... for the Cossacks.

It had to be inescapably clear to these Jews that there were dozens if not hundreds of them, able-bodied and sober, surely a match for 8 or 10 drunk Cossacks. It would have been easy, even for people not trained in arms, to kill them and bury them someplace, but it is obvious why they did not. If they had done so, all the Cossacks would have come to the shtetl fully armed for battle. They would have massacred every Jew in this shtetl and every other one within 100 versts. Defense was just not an option, not a survival trait. The women raped and the men murdered had to be seen as the price Jews paid for living, for surviving as a people. Since no Jew ever even remotely considered the possibility that without some major provocation someday the Cossacks would try to kill them all, it seemed like a reasonable if awful compromise.

Such a compromise must have taken a devastating and horrific psychological toll on the people forced to make it. Sooner or later someone among our traumatized ancestors had to make the following rationalization to justify this situation: "We are better than those people because they are violent and we are not. They handle weapons, and we do not." In order to maintain self-respect people in such a condition had to explain it as the result of something that made them better than their oppressors. This was the notion that they voluntarily (rather than of necessity as was the actual case) eschewed the use of weapons of any sort because they understood that violence was evil while their tormentors did not. It was the key to survival, self-respect and eventually the shtetl mentality which American Jews, far removed from the shtetl, still carry with them despite the fact that it has long since lost its utility. ...

The Jews who remained in Europe lived through the Holocaust. This caused the ones who survived and emigrated to Israel to see that the rules had changed. They saw that not all violence was wrong, that violence could be used to preserve the Jewish people and that the defensive use of weapons was necessary for the survival of the group. This led to a greater acceptance of individual use of weapons for personal defense. American Jews only observed this from afar. They did not live it so they did not adopt this new insight as valid for themselves even if most grudgingly accepted it as necessary for Israeli Jews.

The shtetl mentality has led to the Jewish Plan A for what to do in case seriously bad things begin to happen to Jews in America. Under such circumstances Jewish leaders plan to yell "Holocaust" as loudly as they can. They plan to use their not insubstantial resources and assets in the media to do this in hopes that the rest of Americans will rise and protect them from whatever new Cossacks have emerged. While this is a most reasonable Plan A, the fact that if this fails there is no Plan B is at the heart of what is foolish and stupid about the shtetl mentality. We have learned, or we should have learned, that there always must be a Plan B, a Plan B based on the notion that for a Jew the phrase "assault rifle" is a misnomer. The correct term, once the shtetl mentality has been transcended, is "Jewish defense rifle."