Archive for the ‘Guns’ Category

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And speaking of grits…

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

…the breakfast kind, that is, we learn by way of Mr. Henson and the Waco Tribune Herald that there’s an auction this weekend that includes some of Bonnie and Clyde’s guns.

We don’t have that kind of money to throw around, but we are intrigued by the event. The Waco paper’s writing is a bit sloppy; when they refer to “a fine Colt Fitzgerald revolver”, we’re pretty sure they mean a Fitz Special. But we’d really like to know how one of those wound up in Clyde Barrow’s hands; our understanding is that the Fitz Specials were all custom orders for law enforcement, and it is hard to imagine J.H. FitzGerald building one for Barrow. We wonder if there’s a Colt factory letter on that gun…

Posted in Clippings, Guns, History | 2 Comments »

Maybe they should have done “Gaslight” (and more random notes for September 25, 2012)

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

Ben Sprecher is a theatrical producer. Most of his work has been off-Broadway, but he’s trying to put on a Broadway musical version of “Rebecca”. (I know what you’re thinking, but according to the NYT, this was done in Vienna in 2006, and played well.)

Anyway, Mr. Sprecher estimates that he needs $12 million for this. Mr. Sprecher had an investor – a man named Paul Abrams – who was putting up $4.5 million. That’s a lot of money for one person to invest in a Broadway show. But wait, it gets better!

Reports in August of his sudden death in Britain of malaria — yet no obituaries, no death notices. A representative for the Abrams estate surfaces, a person identifying himself only as “Wexler” who refuses to speak by phone and uses an e-mail address created just last month.

But wait, it gets even better: Mr. Sprecher never met or spoke to Mr. Abrams at all. There are questions as to whether Mr. Abrams ever even existed.

“I’ve never heard of a situation where you didn’t at least meet the person raising 30 percent of your show budget,” said Robert E. Wankel, president of the Shubert Organization, one of the big three Broadway landlords and a six-figure investor in “Rebecca” as well as the owner of its intended theater, the Broadhurst.

Mr. Sprecher is trying to raise money to fill the gap. But if he fails and the musical doesn’t open, he’s on the hook to his other investors.

Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, bat cave!

Obit watch: Edwin Wilson. Remember Edwin Wilson? Former CIA guy? Convicted of shipping plastic explosives to Libya? Spent 20 years in prison?

A federal judge threw out his conviction in 2003, ruling that prosecutors knowingly used false testimony to undermine his defense.

Yeah. That guy.

Debacle? That seems strong. But I didn’t watch the game. “Debacle” may not be strong enough.

Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do? Well, they can register domains. But Donuts, Inc. has close ties to Demand Media…

Industry watchdogs have long criticized Demand Media as a leading provider of services to spammers and a host to sites that commit “cybersquatting.”…
Garth Bruen of the industry watchdog group KnujOn said Demand Media has not replied to any of the many spam complaints he has submitted to the company.
“They are looking the other way,” he said. “I’ve sent them tons of information. They never respond. They have this one address, legal@enom.com, and you never get a person.”

The current theory on convicted sex offender and fugitive from justice Prakashanand Saraswati seems to be that he’s in India now, having been spirited out of the country by his followers. And the US Marshals don’t have an office in India.

Maybe they could send some BATF guys from Reno to India.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Guns, Law, NFL, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Some random stuff for the morning of September 20, 2012.

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

There hasn’t been much in the news the past couple of days, and I’ve been depressed and upset for various reasons that the readers of this blog won’t care about.

I don’t have a lot to say about the DOJ report on “Fast and Furious”. I haven’t had time to go through the report myself, and I’m expecting that a lot of people who are smarter than I am will have smarter things to say than I do, once they’ve had a chance to go through it.

The Astros have crossed the 100 loss barrier, and are still on track for 110 losses. Woot.

Today’s NYT has two articles I found kind of interesting. One is about problems with the United Network for Organ Sharing and kidney allocation:

…many experts agree that a significant number of discarded kidneys — perhaps even half, some believe — could be transplanted if the system for allocating them better matched the right organ to the right recipient in the right amount of time.

Story number two is about the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota:

The man who plays Santa Claus here is a registered child sex offender and a convicted rapist. One of the brothers of the tribal chairman raped a child, and a second brother sexually abused a 12-year-old girl. They are among a number of men convicted of sex crimes against children on this remote home of the Spirit Lake Sioux tribe, which has among the highest proportion of sex offenders in the country.

And:

Federal agencies, however, have sought to minimize the extent of the problem, including disciplining employees who have spoken publicly about sexual abuse and questioning the competence of others, according to federal and tribal officials.

And the mayor of Central Falls, Rhode Island, resigned yesterday. He’s also agreed to plead guilty on federal charges that “he took illegal gratuities from a friend and political supporter who received lucrative work from the city boarding up abandoned buildings”.

Some homes were boarded up even though people were still living there. Others were re-boarded by Bouthillette at Moreau’s direction, even though the owners had already had their own contractors board the building.

“Some homes were boarded up even though people were still living there.” In completely unrelated news: gee, I really miss Buddy Cianci.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Loser, Rhode Island, Sports | Comments Closed

Score!

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

This weekend was the grand opening for the new Half-Price Books in Round Rock.

As they usually do, Half-Price was distributing coupons: 40% off one item on Thursday, 30% off on Friday, 20% off on Saturday, and 50% off on Sunday. (I heard one clerk complain that those coupons were only supposed to apply to the Round Rock store, but they made them valid for all the stores in error. I think that clerk was full of it, but that’s just my opinion.)

Anyway, I picked up a few interesting things Thursday through Saturday, including a copy of An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies (at 40% off of half cover price) and Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (which I didn’t burn a coupon on, as the copy I found was marked down to $4.99).

Today was 50% off day. I had some things I was thinking about picking up, but then I got lucky. Fortunately, I had two coupons…

The new (2010) of Bill Warren’s magnificent book, Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, The 21st Century Edition, complete with Howard Waldrop introduction. Cover is $99, so take half of that, and then take 50% off of that with the coupon…

Hoglegs, Hipshots and Jalapenos, the other collection of Skeeter Skelton’s work from Shooting Times. Some of you may remember me mentioning I found a copy of Good Friends, Good Guns, Good Whisky in a Las Vegas bookstore last year and paid (mumble mumble) for it. This was in a locked glass case at HPB and I nearly walked past it; I’m glad I didn’t. I won’t say how much I paid, but with the coupon, it was about half of the (mumble mumble) price I paid for volume one in Vegas, and nowhere near the asking prices on Amazon.

Squee!

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Movies | 5 Comments »

How many rules were broken here?

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

The Saturday evening mock cannon fight was meant to simulate the spectacle of a historic battle on the high seas. This year, however, a crew member inadvertently veered from the script, which called for the Amazing Grace to fire blanks at the schooner Bill of Rights.

(Insert obvious joke about shooting at the Bill of Rights here.)

Onward. According to the LAT, one of the crew members accidentally “grabbed a box of buckshot ammunition after the Amazing Grace ran out of blanks”.

Two people were injured, apparently not critically.

So off the top of my head:

This appears to be the Amazing Grace’s website. I was trying to figure out what kind of guns it had, and how they worked; it kind of sounds like they may use commercial shotgun cartridges, instead of muzzle loaders like you’d see in the movies. The site isn’t helpful, but the “Ship’s Log” is good for a chuckle.

It sounds like this was part of the Toshiba Tall Ships Festival. “Back by popular demand again this year, children can take part in Cap’n Jack’s School for Scallywags. Watch as your young buccaneers learn to walk, talk, and sing like a pirate!” That sounds like it would get annoying. Fast.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Safety | 1 Comment »

Good taste: you can’t afford it.

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

Ramiro Pozos Gonzalez, a “founding member” of the La Resistencia drug gang, has been captured.

Ordinarily, I don’t note the capture of every cartel member that comes down the pike. But the HouChron article includes a charming photograph of Mr. Gonzalez’s gold-plated “AK-47”, which was also captured with him.

I can sort of, vaguely, understand plating the gun. But the magazines? That’s just a waste of money. Magazines are disposable items. You should be prepared to trash them if they don’t feed; gold-plating them just makes the decision that much more difficult.

(Previously.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

“I like to do it like the Boss Tweed way.”

Monday, September 10th, 2012

I’m sure it comes as no great shock to anybody that California isn’t the only place in the country where corruption runs rampant.

The mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, Tony Mack, has been arrested on charges of “conspiring to obstruct, delay and affect interstate commerce by extortion under color of official right”.

Also arrested were the mayor’s brother, Ralphiel, and Joseph Giorgianni, described as a “sandwich shop owner” and “convicted sex offender”.

U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said at a news conference Monday that the city-owned land for the garage was assessed at $271,000. He said Mack and Giorgianni agreed to accept $100,000 for the land for the city coffers — as long as the purported developers paid a bribe of $100,000 to be split between the two alleged conspirators.

It appears that Giorgianni was the bagman for the mayor, and that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. The “Boss Tweed” line above is a direct quote from Giorgianni. Other great quotes:

Giorgianni complained at one point that Mack, 46, could not take bribes because he was being watched so closely, the documents said. “It’s sickening,” he told one of the informants, according to the court papers.

More:

He was also caught on tape telling one of the informants: “One thing about the Mack administration — when I say that, it’s me and Mack — we’re not greedy. We’re corruptible. We want anybody to make a buck,” and “I’m there to buffer the thing where, you know, take the weight … going to jail’s my business. It ain’t his.”

“We’re not greedy. We’re corruptible.” That’s got to be a quote of the year right there.

One piece of evidence they offer is that Giorgianni referred to money by code — calling it “Uncle Remus” — when he spoke with Mack, and that Mack seemed to know what he was saying.

And by way of the awesome Jay G., we learn that the not greedy, but corruptible, Mayor Mack was also a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. So he’s for gun control, but apparently had no problem with Giorgianni, who…

…went to prison in the 1980s on charges of carnally abusing and debauching the morals of a 14-year-old girl in the back of his shop.
The case gained notoriety because of weight-related health problems that got Giorgianni, a steakhouse owner who once claimed to tip the scale at over 500 pounds, released and led a prosecutor to charge he “ate his way out of jail.”

(Giorgianni and some other folks (not including the mayor and his brother) are also charged with selling oxycodone, and Giorgianni is also being charged with “weapon possession by a convicted felon”, speaking of illegal guns.)

(I’m linking to the WP rather than the Trenton papers, because I looked at the two Trenton newspaper sites that came up in Google, and their coverage wasn’t good.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Morning random notes: September 4, 2012.

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Would you pay $18 for a 40-minute vinyl record of previously unreleased Charles Manson songs?

Yeah, I wouldn’t, either.

The album’s title, a vulgarity that means wasting time…

I want to come back to this later and elaborate on the idea some, but I’m getting more than a little tired of the mass media being coy in their reporting. (See also: Russian punk bands.)

Vasquez turned to the funding website Kickstarter to raise several thousand dollars to pay to have the album cover printed and 500 copies of the record pressed.

This kind of bothers me, too, but I’m not sure I can articulate why.

Headline in the NYT:

Gotham: A Summer of Easy Guns and Dead Children

First paragraph:

In Harlem, Paula Shaw-Leary talks of her youngest, Matt, who got his college degree in May and was accepted to graduate school…

Matt’s death is tragic, but a 21-year-old man who has been accepted to grad school is not a child.

(Gee, doesn’t NYC have strict gun control laws?)

I don’t think I ever saw anything Michael Clarke Duncan was in, and I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of his work. But 54 is just too young. (NYT. LAT. A/V Club.)

The Frank Lloyd Wright archive is moving to New York City. This sounds like a very good thing:

The models will live at MoMA, which has extensive conservation and exhibition experience. The museum will display them in periodic presentations and special exhibitions. The papers will be housed at Avery, whose librarians will make them available to researchers and educators starting at the end of next year.

(Well, a very good thing for everyone except Mike the Musicologist, who hates NYC.)

Headline from something called “The Root”, linked from the WP site:

Few African Americans at Burning Man

“Word Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit”.

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns, Law, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes, September 3, 2012.

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

Workers of the world, unite! Dyslexics of the world, untie!

In 2009, the two-year-old Southern lifestyle magazine [Garden and Gun -DB ] lost financial support from its first publisher. Its employees, many of whom had relocated from New York City to work here, were left with dwindling buyout packages and the promise of freelance pay. Real estate developers could no longer afford to buy advertisements, and some new prospects said they would not give a cent to the magazine until the owners took “gun” out of its title.

Oh, yes. Garden and Gun. I remember them. I was considering subscribing: that is, until they refused ads from the NRA. Now they can die in a fire, as far as I am concerned.

In other news, the NYT wants you to know that you should be careful buying art online.

My big question for the day: now that Reverend Moon is dead, how long will the Washington Times be around? I’ve gotten the distinct impression that it has survived that long purely because he wanted it that way, and his successors are not as wild about the paper as he was.

Mike Nesbitt has resigned as offensive coordinator at the University of Houston. That would be two days after the season opener, which they lost 30-13 to Texas State.

I’ve been kind of tied up the past couple of days and haven’t had a chance to blog the Austin Police Department acting as agent provocateurs to Occupy Austin story. I don’t really know what to make of it, so instead I’ll refer you to the Statesman story above, and the coverage from Grits for Breakfast here. (The other problem I have with this story is that much of the coverage comes from sources I don’t read and don’t trust.)

Speaking of Grits, he also has an interesting followup on the Texas Highway Patrol Association and other similar scam organizations.

Posted in Art, Austin, Clippings, Cops, Guns, Law, Media, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Rule One, you jackass!

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012

Judge Vincent A. Sgueglia of Tioga County Court (Tioga County is in “upstate New York”) has been censured by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

Why?

…the landmark courthouse in Owego, N.Y., was probably not the best place to repair a revolver with a faulty firing mechanism.

Yes. Judge Sgueglia decided to work on his revolver (described by the NYT as a “.38-caliber Smith & Wesson”) in his chambers, and…you see what’s coming, right? Negligent discharge, bullet into wall, nobody hurt thank the Lord, Judge Sgueglia embarrassed and now censured.

Noted: Judge Sgueglia says he didn’t realize the gun was loaded. To which I say: WTF? WTFF? It’s a Smith and Wesson revolver! You didn’t swing out the cylinder and check the chambers before starting work, you idiot? Checking if a Smith and Wesson revolver is loaded is the easiest thing in the world! It takes two freaking seconds! And that’s if you’re clumsy like me!

Also noted: Judge Sgueglia wasn’t just censured for the negligent discharge, but also for approving his own gun permits. He got his first permit in 2005, “listing three weapons”, and approved it himself. (“The commission said it was ‘inappropriate’ for Judge Sgueglia ‘to take judicial action on his own pistol permit application and that he should have consulted with court officials to arrange for another judge to handle the matter.'”) Between 2006 and 2010, “the judge submitted 14 amendments to his gun permit, covering 17 other pistols”.

Some credit is due to the judge, though: at least he had the gun pointed in a safe direction when it went off.

(Edited to add: I assumed all of my readers are familiar with the Four Rules of Gun Safety. However, on second thought, that may not be a reasonable assumption, so here they are.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns | 2 Comments »

Hondo Harrelson, call your office, please.

Monday, August 27th, 2012

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating whether members of its elite SWAT unit took advantage of their assignments to purchase large numbers of specially-made handguns and resell the weapons for steep profits, according to a report released Friday by the independent watchdog overseeing the department.

The LAT suggests that this “could be a violation of federal firearm laws and city ethics regulations”. I am unfamiliar with ethics regulations in LA, so I will refrain from comment on that. I am not sure what federal firearm laws would have been violated, since private sales between individuals are not illegal under federal law. (They may be under California law; I am also not an expert on California gun laws.) The LAT is also apparently unclear on what regulations and federal firearms laws were violated:

Regardless of whether the LAPD has a policy governing gun sales by officers, [Inspector General Alex] Bustamante noted that “the purchase of firearms with the intent to immediately transfer the weapon to a third party may violate city ethics regulations and federal firearm laws.” The report did not specify which regulations and laws may have been violated.

But getting back to the story, this isn’t the first go-around at this particular rodeo.

Suspicion about the guns first arose in 2010, when the commanding officer of the LAPD’s Metropolitan Division, which includes SWAT, ordered an inventory of the division’s firearms, the report said. The officer responsible for conducting the count discovered that SWAT members had purchased between 51 and 324 pistols from the gun manufacturer Kimber and were “possibly reselling them to third parties for large profits,” according to the report.

“between 51 and 324”? Could you be a little more vague in your count? In any case, LAPD SWAT, according to the LAT, only had about 60 members.

Kimber sold the guns, which bore a special “LAPD SWAT” insignia, to members of the unit for about $600 each — a steep discount from their resale value of between $1,600 and $3,500, the report said. The unique SWAT gun branding was first made several years earlier, when the department contracted with Kimber for a one-time purchase of 144 of the pistols.

$600? Daymn! I know Kimber’s had issues in the past few years, but you offer me one for $600, and I’ll be on that biatch like an anaconda on blood orchid serum.

(We watched that over the weekend. Two word review: annoyingly competent.)

(Also: “between $1,600 and $3,500”? That’s a $1,900 difference there, Sparky. If the comments in the LAT and Kimber’s website are to be believed, the pistol in question is the Custom TLE II, which has an MSRP of $1,054 without the LAPD SWAT markings.)

Neither the officer relieved of duty, the others suspected of being involved, nor the person who conducted the inventory were interviewed for the investigation, and no attempt was made to determine how many guns had been purchased from Kimber, Bustamante wrote. In the end, the department concluded that it had no policy governing such activity, and so closed its investigation, according to the inspector general report.

So that’s the first investigation, which the LAT makes sound half-assed. Bustamante’s investigation is the second one:

Because the initial investigation was so lacking, little is known about the gun sales. Bustamante’s report, which will be presented to the L.A. Police Commission on Tuesday, was based on the initial, substandard inquiry and so could not answer basic questions about the allegations, including how many officers were involved, the number of guns sold and when the sales were carried out. 

And:

The department’s poor job investigating the alleged SWAT gun sales was all the more notable, Bustamante wrote, because of the way it treated the officer who uncovered the gun purchases during the inventory. When one of the SWAT team members under suspicion accused him of improperly discussing the investigation with others, the department opened a separate inquiry into the claim, producing a 257-page report that dwarfed the 39-page file on the gun sales. The officer was suspended for five days.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cops, Guns, Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Request.

Friday, August 24th, 2012

If there are any of my readers who are active in the gun blog community and carry on a regular basis, but don’t read Lawrence’s Battleswarm blog: he has a post up asking for advice on a carry gun. I’d appreciate it if you’d go over and weigh in.

Posted in Guns | Comments Closed

Random notes: August 24, 2012.

Friday, August 24th, 2012

I have some things I want to say on the Lance Armstrong front, but I also want to take some time and write a longer, more thoughtful post, rather than dashing something off first thing in the morning. I’ll try to have that up later today. In the meantime, for you out-of-towners, here’s the Statesman coverage.

In other news: gee, when you try to pass new laws that threaten someone’s business, they might possibly consider moving to a more friendly jurisdiction. Who’d thunk it? Apparently, not the NYT.

A while back, I noted the ongoing issues in Patton Village, what with the mayor trying to disband the police department while she was under indictment. It turns out that the mayor has some additional problems; she’s now been charged with “tampering with government records”. (Edited to add: now including linkage.)

The really odd thing is that this charge has nothing to do with using cop cars as loan collateral.  Back in 1979, the mayor pled guilty to charges that she plotted with a co-worker to rob a Jack in the Box she was managing. She got four years probation, but the conviction was on a felony charge. Texas law bars people convicted of a felony from running for elected office, and the mayor stated on the forms she filled out to run for mayor that she hadn’t been convicted of a felony. (She hasn’t been granted any kind of pardon/restoration of civil rights, as best as anyone can tell.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Is it just me…

Friday, August 17th, 2012

…or does P90X sound more like a product of FN (probably a bullpup chambered in .250-3000) or a Volvo sport-utility vehicle than an exercise program?

Posted in Cars, Guns, Wondering | Comments Closed

And the bait is taken.

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

Today is the 35th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.

Say what you will about the man and his music, but he had good taste in guns. I think that Savage 99A is pretty nice, though I’d have to start reloading .250-3000.

I want to say that Storied Firearms has a Field King for $650 (not listed on their website). That one has a Volksquarten trigger and barrel, if I’m remembering correctly.

And it looks like the going rate for a nice Python is around $2,000.

Posted in Elvis, Guns, Music | Comments Closed

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