Archive for the ‘Guns’ Category

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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

Bring the NYT the brown trousers (and other random notes for August 1, 2012).

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

Last year, NYC sold 28,000 pounds of spent brass to Georgia Arms, which reloaded the casings and sold re-manufactured ammunition.

The sale of shell casings to Georgia Arms is perfectly legal and not uncommon; other police departments sell their used casings. And many of its “factory loaded” bullets, as the second-generation rounds are known, are sold in bulk to police agencies for use on their own firing ranges. They are less expensive than new ammunition.

Not surprisingly, the NYT has issues with this.

Meanwhile:

It is against that backdrop that Georgina Geikie, a 27-year-old English barmaid, will approach the firing line at the Royal Artillery Barracks here Wednesday. She is the first British athlete to compete in an Olympic cartridge pistol competition since 1996, and she will be doing something that is illegal for nearly everyone in the country — and until recently was illegal for her as well.

More:

Citing a regular and steady tally of gun fatalities in Britain that have not drawn as much attention as massacres like the one in Dunblane and a more recent rampage in Cumbria, [Chris] Williamson [Labor MP] says additional restrictions are needed, if not an outright prohibition on all guns. Among the rules he is pushing is a ban on keeping guns at home, more aggressive regulation of air guns and yearly mental fitness tests for gun owners.

“It’s not working! Do it harder!”

Interesting:

Austin’s two Sushi Zushi restaurants have temporarily shut down and might not reopen for a week or more after a number of employees reportedly walked off the job when they learned the business was the focus of a federal immigration audit, a company spokeswoman said.

This appears to be a breaking story:

Indonesia’s Olympic team leader says eight female badminton doubles players have been disqualified from the London Games after trying to lose matches to receive a more favorable place in the field.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Guns, Sports | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

“I am a martini man, myself. Over six weeks we used up forty-six bottles of gin and a little less than half a bottle of vermouth. I like martinis dry.”
—Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter

(In case you were wondering, 46 bottles over six weeks works out to seven and 2/3rds bottles a week, or a little over a bottle of gin a day. That’s split three ways, though: Ruark, his wife, and their guide. Figuring 750 ml bottles, that’s close to 9.2 ounces of gin a day each. Ruark mentions at one point that they kill the bottle with three drinks each, so that’s something like three ounces of gin per drink. Plus unknown amounts of beer and brandy.)

(I enjoy reading Ruark. I wish more of his work were still in print; I found Horn at one of those used bookstores in Vegas, and spent downtime during the trip reading it.

But I get a funny feeling whenever Ruark talks about drinking, like in the last two chapters of The Old Man and the Boy, or as he does a few paragraphs later in Horn: “I can drink two bottles of wine at lunch in Rome or Paris or Madrid, top it off with three brandies, and feel marvelous all day. A glass of wine at lunch, two glasses at dinner, in New York, would keep me in bed with the miseries for half a week.”)

(This is, of course, a man who would die at 49 of “complications of cirrhosis of the liver”.)

Posted in Books, Guns, Mixology, Ruark | Comments Closed

DEFCON 20 notes: day 3, part 1.

Monday, July 30th, 2012

The secret word for the day, boys and girls, is “routers”.

But first, a couple of pictures for my great and good friend Borepatch:

The Matt Blaze Security Bingo Card. (I hope folks can read it: I took that with a cell phone camera from the front row, so I didn’t have a great angle on it.)

And:

A gentleman in the hallway was kind enough to let me take a photo of his DEFCON Shoot shirt.

Speaking of Matt Blaze…

“SIGINT and Traffic Analysis for the Rest of Us” presented by Matt Blaze and Sandy Clark, and crediting a host of other folks.

For the past few years, Blaze and company have been working on APCO Project 25, or P25 for short. P25 is planned to be the next generation of public safety radio, and is intended to be a “drop-in” replacement for analog FM systems. Cryptographic security is built into P25: it uses symmetric algorithms and supports standard cryptographic protocols. All of this sounds great.

But there are a whole bunch of problems with this.

Encryption in P25 doesn’t work very well a significant portion of the time. There are user interface issues; on some radios, the “crypto” switch is in an obscure location, and the display doesn’t make it clear if encryption is on or off. Keys can’t be changed in the field; changing keys requires loading the radio in advance using a special device, or sending keys over the air (“Over The Air Rekeying”, or “OTAR”, which sometimes doesn’t work).

One important point is that the “sender” makes all the decisions: whether the traffic is encrypted, what encryption mode is used, what key is used, etc. The “receiver” doesn’t get to decide anything. If the “sender” sends in cleartext, either deliberately or by mistake, the “receiver” decodes it, automatically and transparently to the user. If the “sender” sends an encrypted message, the “receiver” first checks to make sure it has the proper key, then either decrypts the message or ignores it (if the “receiver” doesn’t have the key).

I feel like I am cheating a little here, but even Matt Blaze at this point in his talk recommended going and reading the group’s paper from last year, “Why (Special Agent) Johnny (Still) Can’t Encrypt: A Security Analysis of the APCO Project 25 Two-Way Radio System” for additional background.

But wait, there’s more! We have encryption, but do we have authentication? Do we know that the radios on our network are actually valid radios? Heck no! The radios transmit a “Unit ID” which is not authenticated, and which is never encrypted, even if the radio has encryption turned on. Just knowing the unit IDs lets you do some interesting stuff: you could, for example, set up two radios, do some direction finding on the received signals with the user IDs, and build a map of where the users are.

Even better: if you send a malformed OTAR request, the radios treat it like a UNIX “ping” and respond back with their Unit ID, even if they’re idle, and without the user ever knowing.

More: P25 uses aggressive error correction. But there’s a hole in the scheme; you can jam what’s called the “NID”, which is part of the P25 transmission, and render the transmissions unreadable. The Blaze group actually built a working jammer by flashing custom firmware onto the “GirlTech IM-Me”. (That was the cheapest way to get the TI radio chip they wanted to use.) You could use this to jam the NID in encrypted P25 traffic only, thus forcing cleartext on the users…

And even more: the basic problem with P25 and cryptographic security is usability. Every time an agency rekeys, someone is without keys for a period of time. Blaze mentioned the classic paper, ““Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0” and pointed out that many of the mistakes mentioned in that paper were repeated in designing P25.

How bad is the keying problem? Bad enough that agencies frequently transmit in cleartext, due to key management issues. (“NSA Rule Number 1: Look for cleartext.”) How frequently? Blaze and his group, for the past several years, have been running a monitoring network in several (unnamed) cites, recording cleartext P25 traffic and measuring how often this happens. About 20-30 minutes per day, by their estimate, of radio traffic is transmitted in unintended cleartext. And that traffic can contain sensitive information, like the names of informants.

Even if most of the traffic is encrypted, remember that the Unit IDs aren’t. So you’re getting some clear metadata traffic, which at the very least is useful for making inferences about what might be going on. (Zendian Problem, anyone?)

(If you’re monitoring P25 traffic, according to Blaze, the phrase you want to look for is “Okay, everyone, here’s the plan.”)

And what is the P25 community response to this? According to Blaze, the Feds have been very responsive and appreciate him pointing out the problem. The P25 standards people, on the other hand, claim Blaze is totally wrong, and that the problem is with the stupid users who can’t work crypto properly.

(This entry on Matt Blaze’s blog covers, as best I can tell, almost everything that was in his presentation. I haven’t found a copy of the actual presentation yet, but this should do to ride the river with.)

So it is getting late here, and I have to catch a plane early-ish in the morning. I think what I’m going to do is stop here for now, and try to get summaries of the three router panels up tomorrow while I’m waiting for my flight.

Posted in Cops, DEFCON 20, Geek, Guns, Law, Radio | Comments Closed

DEFCON 20 notes: Day 1.

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

If you asked people to explain DEFCON, what would they say? Some might say: for those who understand, no explanation is necessary, for those who don’t, no explanation is possible.

Others might say that DEFCON is a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, inside…

...an Enigma machine

(Not only did the National Cryptologic Museum bring that, they also were handing out (while supplies lasted) two really cool booklets: “The Cryptographic Mathematics of Enigma” and “Solving the Enigma: History of the Cryptanalytic Bombe”. The inside covers of both books claim they are available for free by sending a request: email me for the address, or try crypto_museum [at] nsa.gov.)

(I also got a kick out of the “NSA careers” cards they were handing out, mostly because it was the first buisness card I’ve ever seen with an embedded microfiber screen cleaner.)

Today’s schedule:

“Making Sense of Static – New Tools for Hacking GPS”: Pretty much what I expected from the description, but still a very good panel. The presenters have been doing a lot of work with systems that use GPS tracking, and they’ve run up against the limits of affordable off-the-shelf GPS hardware. There are all kinds of things you can’t do with retail GPS:

  • Experimenting with spoofing and jamming attacks is hard because you don’t have low-level hardware access to see what’s going on.
  • Implementing methods for dealing with poor signal environments, such as “urban canyons”, is also difficult.
  • You also don’t have access to the newer systems, such as GLONASS, Galileo, or Compass.
  • And it is hard to experiment with advanced positioning techniques.

Much of the presentation was devoted to a detailed account of exactly how GPS calculates positions on Earth, and what some of the limitations of those calculations are. If I were to attempt to summarize this, I’d be doing from memory and likely get much of it wrong, so instead I’ll point to the Wikipedia entry which covers the same material (including the use of Gold codes to distinguish each GPS satellite).

All of this led up to two products:

  • libswiftnav, which is a lightweight, fast, and portable set of tools for building a GPS receiver. The nice thing about libswiftnav, according to the authors, is that it will run on microcontrollers and other relatively wimpy hardware.
  • Piksi, a hardware implementation that uses libswiftnav and overcomes a lot of the limitations outlined previously: it can do highly accurate positioning, very fast updating, and supports other positioning systems.

The presenters have stated that their presentation should be available at the Swift-Nav site as soon as they have a chance to upload it.

I missed the “Not So Super Notes, How Well Does US Dollar Note Security Prevent Counterfeiting?” session simply because the clock got away from me. If I can find the presentation online, I will link to it.

I wasn’t able to get into the “How to Hack VMware vCenter Server in 60 Seconds” session for reasons of it being held in a room way too small for everyone who wanted to get in. This seems to be a version of the presentation from another conference. I’ve only given it a quick skim, but it looks very interesting indeed.

“Bypassing Endpoint Security for $20 or Less” wasn’t quite what I had expected, but it paid off. The basic idea behind this panel was that there’s an increasing emphasis on keeping people from walking out of the office with sensitive data on USB mass storage devices; some companies use software that allows only known and approved devices to connect over USB.

So how do you know if a device is known and approved? Much of the presentation dealt with specifics of how USB, and especially USB mass storage, works. The short answer is that everything depends on “endpoints” (which are sort of “virtual wires” for USB connections) and “descriptors” (which provide information about the device). USB devices identify themselves through a combination VID/PID as part of the protocol, so if you can spoof the VID/PID, you can pretend to be an already authorized device.

Which is what the presenter’s hardware does, for less than $20. I haven’t found the presentation online, but the presenter swears the hardware schematics etc. will be available on github under “usb-impersonator” as soon as he gets around to updating the repository (which he promises will be real soon now).

Edited to add 7/28: Two points in this presentation that I wanted to mention but forgot to last night.

  1. Windows doesn’t see anything but the first LUN on USB mass storage devices. So if you want to hide something on a flash drive from a Windows user, partitioning the drive is a good way of doing that.
  2. If you run modprobe usbmon (this may require running as root) and then fire up Wireshark, wonder of wonders, you get a whole bunch of USB bus devices available as Wireshark interfaces. This is something I want to play with more when I have time: I’ll probably post some Wireshark capture files showing what happens when a device is inserted.

Edited to add: Added link to Phil Polestra’s blog entry, which contains links to the slides and the code, 8/1/2012.

The last presentation I went to was “Safes and Containers – Insecurity Design Excellence”. This is one that’s already gotten a fair amount of attention: a friend of mine emailed me a link to this Forbes article by one of the presenters that neatly recaps the whole thing (including their videos).

Basically, many popular gun safes, especially ones made by the Stack-On corporation, are insecure and can be opened with paper clips, drinking straws, pieces of brass purchased at a hardware store,..or by just simply lifting up the safe and dropping it a few inches.

Why is this? The presenters argue that the people who make these safes don’t come from a culture that says to itself “Okay, I’ve built this safe. Now how can I bypass the mechanism and get in?” Quoting: “Engineers know how to make things work, but not how to break them.” Many of these safes are imported from China and are made as cheaply as possible, which complicates things even more.

There’s also an attitude of “my product meets the standards, so up yours”. The California Department of Justice has standards for gun safes, and these products all meet those standards. However, the CDOJ standards do not involve any kind of realistic tests of the product, such as turning it over to a five-year-old and telling him there’s candy inside.

My one issue with this presentation is that the authors seem to view gun safes as the most important part of protecting your kids from guns; thus they believe safes need to be stronger. I can agree with this, but as I see it, safes should be a last resort, not the primary means of protection. I grew up in a house with guns, and I was never tempted to mess with any of them because my parents raised me properly (and because I knew I’d be beaten bloody if I did mess with them). Age-appropriate training (such as the NRA’s “Eddie the Eagle” program) combined with appropriate physical security (what was that gun safe doing where a three-year old had physical access to it, anyway?), combined with safes that actually do what they’re supposed to do, constitutes a layered defense, and one that works better than just relying on cheaply made Chinese junk.

And so to bed. I’m tired, and stuff hasn’t been working right all night. Project e just shut itself down in the middle of this post, the Kindle’s battery was deeply discharged and I had to wait for it, and dinner was not that great. (More about that later on.)

Posted in DEFCON 20, Geek, GPS, Guns, History | 3 Comments »

0-day DEFCON 20 notes.

Friday, July 27th, 2012

I got in line for my badge around 7:30 AM. Registration opened at 8 AM, according to the schedule.

I got my badge at 9:30 AM. I have no idea how many people were in line, but it was packed. We were told that folks started camping out for badges at 10:30 PM Wednesday night.

But, hey! I got mine!

After what was (in my opinion) last year’s badge fail, they went back to an electronic badge this year, still tied in to a “crypto-mystery” game, but at least the badge does something useful.

Or perhaps can do something useful, would be a better way of putting it. The designer calls it a “development platform”: there’s holes for I/O pins at the top, and we were issued VGA (1) and PS/2 connectors (2) with the badge to attach ourselves. And remember my inquiry a while back about microcontrollers? The badge CPU is a Parallax Propeller.

(I haven’t been able to get the badge and Project E talking yet. I suspect a bad or wrong USB cable.)

I hit two panels today. Worth noting is that today’s theme was “DEFCON 101”: there was only one programming track, and the theme of those items was more “introduction to” rather than “deep dive.”

DaKahuna’s “Wireless Security: Breaking Wireless Encryption Keys” wasn’t quite what I expected, in that he didn’t do a live demo. (Though he did suggest that there would be systems available for practice in the Wireless Village.) Rather, this was something of a “view from 10,000 feet” presentation, giving a basic introduction to hardware requirements and tools for attacking wireless keys, along with explanations of how WEP and WPA keys work, and where the vulnerabilities are. A lot of this stuff I already knew from my academic studies, but then again, I wasn’t the target audience here, and I did pick up a few tips.

The presenters for “Intro to Digital Forensics: Tools and Tactics” sold me in the first five minutes by pointing out that:

  • Not everyone knows everything.
  • It would behoove the community to stop acting like dicks when people ask reasonable questions, like “What switches should I use for NMap?”.

The presenters then proceeded to give example usages for what they considered to be the top five tools for testing and exploration:

  • The Metasploit framework, which they sadly ran out of time while discussing.
  • Ntop, the network traffic analyzer.
  • Nmap, for doing port scans and OS fingerprinting. For example:
    #nmap -v -sT -F -A -oG 10.x.x.x/24
    What does this mean?
    -v turns on verbose mode
    -sT forces NMap to do a full TCP connection to each host
    -F enables fast scan mode
    -A tells NMap to do OS fingerprinting
    -oG tells NMap to output in a format grep can work with,
    10.x.x.x/24 tells NMap the range of hosts to scan.
  • tcpdump, which captures packets on a given network interface.
    tcpdump -i eth1 -n -x
    -i specifies the interface
    -n turns off /etc/services translation, so instead of displaying the service name (ftp, telnet, etc.) it just shows the port number.
    -x dumps hex output to the screen
  • Netcat, which creates TCP sockets that can be used for communications between systems. But that’s a little misleading. Let’s say we have two systems, our localhost and a machine at 192.168.1.128. On the .128 machine, we run:
    nc -l -p 2800 -e cmd.exe
    -l tells netcat to listen for a connection
    -p tells netcat to listen for that connection on port 2800
    -e tells netcat to run a command when a connection is made on that port: in this case, netcat will run cmd.exe.
    On the local system:
    nc 192.168.1.128 2800 connect
    which establishes a connection between our system and the remote system. The remote system will run cmd.exe, which (on a Windows system) should give us a command shell on the remote system that we can use from our localhost.

I took the rest of the day off to visit a couple of bookstores (both are still there, pretty much unchanged) and the Mob Museum.

My first thought was that $18 seems a bit stiff. Then again, the Atomic Testing Museum is $14, And the Mob Museum seems to have more people on staff, and may possibly be a little larger than the ATM. (I can’t tell for sure, but the Mob Musuem bascially has that entire building: all three floors.) ($5 for parking cheesed me off a bit, though.)

Anyway, while the Atomic Testing Museum is still my favorite Vegas musuem, the Mob Museum is well worth visiting, especially if you have an interest in organized crime in the United States. (Not just in Vegas, though that is a key focus; the museum also talks about organized crime in other areas, including NYC and Cleveland.) There is a lot of emphasis on Estes Kefauver, perhaps just a little more than I thought was warranted.(I admit, I chuckled at the “Oscar Goodman” display.)

Two things that surprised me:

  1. The number of families with small children at the Mob Museum. Parents, would you take your kids to a museum devoted to organized crime? (There’s some pretty graphic stuff, but the Museum confines it all to one section, warns you before you enter the section, and gives you an option to skip past it.) (And I feel kind of hypocritical saying this: if my parents had taken me to the Mob Museum when I was, say, 10, wild horses couldn’t have dragged me out of there.)
  2. The popularity among small children of the firearms simulator. Kids were having a lot of fun pretending to be cops, running through various scenarios (like a domestic dispute) and busting caps in bad guys. (I didn’t tell any of the kids that, had they actually been out on the street, they’d be dead before they got their first shot off. Do I look like an asshole?)

Tomorrow is when things start for real. Look for an update, but probably late in the evening.

(Oh, I did want to mention Chad Everett’s death yesterday, but I was using the Kindle to blog, which was a pain, and things got kind of sideways leaving LAX and arriving in Vegas, so consider this your obit watch.)

Posted in Cops, DEFCON 20, Geek, Guns, Law, linux, Museums, Obits, project_e, Travel | Comments Closed

Random notes: July 24, 2012.

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

Obit watch: Sally Ride.

Previously noted, but bears repeating: The Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research.

Noted without comment. (See also.) (See also.) (See also.)

Faced with a crippling combination of low revenues, high labor costs and decreasing funding from the state, El Monte is moving to declare a fiscal emergency and seek a tax on sugary beverages sold within the city.

More:

El Monte officials said they are not at the edge of bankruptcy but need the sugary drinks tax revenue as a protection against insolvency down the road.

I’m fascinated by the events in Anaheim, but I don’t know what to make of them right now. (More here.)

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Guns, Law, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

Guns, guns, guns!

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

(This is also partially an Olympic watch.)

We’re the only ones professional enough…to shoot ourselves while cleaning our weapons.

The HouChron has a nice profile of Sergeant Glenn Eller, of the Army Marksmanship Unit. Sgt. Eller is competing in the shotgun double trap competition in the London Olympics. This is his fourth time at the rodeo; he won a gold medal in double trap in 2008. And he’s had an interesting time of it:

  • In 2000, he got food poisoning from “an Australian ham salad sandwich” and finished 12th.
  • In 2004, he finished 17th “after being informed before the competition of what proved to be a false positive drug test”.
  • He won the gold medal in 2008, but the shotgun he used was stolen in 2011 while he was on his way to another competition. It took him a while to get used to the replacement gun, and he “…lost the automatic U.S. slot in double trap to his Army teammate, Staff Sgt. Josh Richmond, but won a place on the team when a second berth for the London Games opened up this spring.”

Worth noting:

Richmond, in turn, has picked up a few things that should contribute to a steady hand in London. After clinching the Olympic berth last year, he served three months in Afghanistan, instructing Afghan soldiers.
Eller said he requested to serve as well but was told it would interfere with his competition and training schedule; like the other members of the marksmanship unit, he spends about 200 nights each year on the road for exhibitions and instructional events.
“I would have loved to go over there and help train people how to defend themselves in their own country,” Eller said. “It gives you pride to be able to do that. Sgt. Richmond is going in the same year from a combat zone to an Olympic Games.”

You know, I like these AMU guys. It’d be fun to meet some of them and hang out. I wonder if the AMU will have a presence at next year’s NRA meeting?

(Joy! Also speaking of the AMU, Amazon says my copy of US Military Match and Marksmanship Automatic Pistols has been delivered!)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Guns, Sports | Comments Closed

“History can be well written only in a free country.”

Monday, July 16th, 2012

(Quote attributed to Voltaire.)

A while back, there was a meme going around the gun blogs, asking “Why do you carry?” Answers to that generally fell into a couple of categories: “to protect myself/my family”, “because I can”, “because f–k you, that’s why”.

A kind of related question that I haven’t seen talked about is “why do you own guns in the first place?” Many of the answers are the same: self defense, because we don’t like people telling us what we can and can’t do, and so on. But one answer I haven’t really seen people talk much about is “history”.

Since I got back from the S&W Collector’s Association convention in Boise, I’ve been thinking about history and guns, both together and separate. There were a lot of intersections in Boise with areas of my own personal history, and there are some other things are just simply curious or interesting.

I believe an argument can be made that weapons are actually one of the cheapest ways to establish a connection to history for the common man. You can collect cars, for example, but it takes a millionaire’s pocket to collect anything historically significant. If you’re lucky, you might see a vintage warbird at an air show two or three times a year, but good luck touching one, let alone sitting in the cockpit. And flying one, again, requires a millionaire’s budget.

But I think there’s more going on than just the money element.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Photography | Comments Closed

Kindle notes.

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

Thursday and Friday were kind of slow days at work. For various reasons (including a series of discussions with several co-workers) I ended up downloading the Shooter app, which does run on the Kindle Fire. (I find that slightly surprising, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.)

Since the Kindle Fire lacks GPS and Bluetooth, you do miss out on a few features, such as interfacing with the Kestrel and GPS-based weather station input. On the other hand, I think the interface on a Kindle Fire may be slightly more pleasant; since you can apparently do cloud-based syncing, what I suspect will work out well is to do data entry on the Kindle Fire, sync with Shooter on your smart phone, and use the phone at the range.

This, in turn, led to me consider .22 LR ballistics. In turn, my consideration of same led me to start poking around on Amazon for some things I’d seen previously, such as The Complete Book of the .22: A Guide to the World’s Most Popular Guns (available used at a good price) and Rifleman’s Guide To Rimfire Ammunition (a book I want, but the Amazon prices aren’t that good; I’d rather support my local gunshop).

One of the books I found while poking around is a quaint and curious volume called The Art of Rimfire Accuracy by a gentleman named Bill Calfee. From what I can tell, Mr. Calfee has forgotten more about .22 accuracy than most people ever knew; he’s somewhat famous in the community as a .22 specialist gunsmith. (One thing that particularly amuses me is that Mr. Calfee builds custom .22 benchrest guns based on the XP-100 action; when I was six years old, I thought the XP-100 was the coolest gun in the world. I still want one chambered in .221 Fireball, but a Calfee .22 conversion sounds like it would be a neat thing to own as well.)

My understanding is that the book is mostly a collection of Mr. Calfee’s writings for Precision Shooting magazine: the book is 700+ pages long.

Mr. Calfee’s book is published by Authorhouse, a POD publisher and one that seems popular in the gun community. (Authorhouse also publishes The Rifleman’s Rifle: Winchester’s Model 70, 1936-1963, a book I want badly but can’t justify the $90 price tag for.)

Anyway, here’s my point: Mr. Calfee’s book in paperback is $42.63 with Prime shipping. Interestingly, it is also available on the Kindle…

…and the Kindle edition is $9.99. I’ve only made through the first three chapters so far, but it doesn’t look to me like there’s any photographic or other detail lost on the Kindle Fire. Welcome to the future of publishing. Now if we could only get more gun books on the Kindle, like History of Smith & Wesson or The Rifleman’s Rifle or Hatcher’s Notebook or even Applied Ballistics For Long-Range Shooting, things would be hopping…

(I can even see a version of the Litz book that runs as an application, and allows you not only to read the text, but also to do ballistic calculations based on Litz’s equations interactively within the book itself, instead of using the supplied CD. Hey, a fellow can dream, can’t he?)

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Kindleing | 1 Comment »

Useless without pics.

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

Though given my expressed aesthetic opinion, perhaps the lack of pictures is just as well. This is also noteworthy as a possible exception to The Journalist’s Guide to Firearms Identification:

A former U.S. Marine from Southern California could face up to 10 years in federal prison after being convicted of illegal possession of a chrome-plated AK-47 machine gun that authorities say he smuggled back from a tour of duty in Iraq and may have belonged to Saddam Hussein’s guards.

Posted in Clippings, Guns | Comments Closed

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