Tag: Miscellaneous Gun Stuff

I’m No Longer Doing Business with Crossbreed Holsters

Crossbreed Holsters, as the name implies, makes some damn fine holsters. Although the religious connotations behind the name don’t really jive with me the company’s customer service and warranty are good enough that I’m willing to let it slide. At least I was. I just found out that the company is suing Alien Gear for violating its intellectual property. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I am against all forms of intellectual property so that’s the first strike. The second strike is against what the patent covers:

The abstract of the filed patent is as follows:

A concealable handgun holster is disclosed with a handgun encasement supported within clothing of a wearer by one or more attachment clips, the attachment clips being hidden “in plain sight” by decorative features that deceive an observer into thinking the clips are decorations rather than part of a holster. In preferred embodiments, the holster is a hybrid holster with a handgun encasement formed by a leather sheet attached to a rigid plastic cover, preferably made of Kydex.RTM.. The clips can be plastic or metal, preferably steel, and can be attached to the encasement by rivets, screws, or any other suitable fastening means known in the art. Decoration of the attachment clips can be by shaping of the clips, perforation of the clips with decorative shapes, engraving on the clips, printing on the clips, and/or attachment of decorative items to the clips.

Really? Crossbreed is suing because it has a patent on putting designs on belt clips that attach to holsters? That is right up there with Amazon’s patent on 1-click shopping and Microsoft’s patent on double-clicking.

Hopefully this patent gets shot down in the courts and Crossbreed is made to pay all of Alien Gear’s legal fees. Trying to take out competitors using the state’s intellectual property apparatus is low. It’s even more low when your patent is one something so glaringly stupid.

Not a Better 3D Printed Gun But a Better Bullet

The thing I like most about the 3D printed firearms community is their creativity. Developing a firearm that functions at all out of plastic is no small task. Developing one that can be fired multiple times without exploding is downright impressive. But a firearm that can only be fired a few times safely is still of limited use. Fortunately somebody is looking at improving 3D printed firearms by redesigning the ammunition instead of the gun:

Michael Crumling, a 25-year-old machinist from York, Pennsylvania, has developed a round designed specifically to be fired from 3-D printed guns. His ammunition uses a thicker steel shell with a lead bullet inserted an inch inside, deep enough that the shell can contain the explosion of the round’s gunpowder instead of transferring that force to the plastic body or barrel of the gun. Crumling says that allows a home-printed firearm made from even the cheapest materials to be fired again and again without cracking or deformation. And while his design isn’t easily replicated because the rounds must be individually machined for now, it may represent another step towards durable, practical, printed guns—even semi-automatic ones.

While it’s not a perfect solution it is promising. If the reloading community invested in this I’m sure it wouldn’t be long before somebody would begin mass producing the necessary steel shells. Another option may be to find an already actively produced steel sleeve that is close the to correct size and develop 3D printed barrels and bullets around that.

That Will Teach Him a Lesson

A woman wanted to teach her teenage son a lesson. Obviously you know where this is going. She talked to the dad and together they came up with a very clever plan that involved embarrassing their son slightly so he would learn to behave next time. Just kidding. What she actually did was plant a handgun into her son’s backpack and then reported him anonymously to the school:

A 28-year-old woman was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison for planting a pistol in a child’s backpack and anonymously reporting him to the school.

Heather Hodges, who pleaded guilty to unlawful carrying of a weapon on restricted premises in exchange for the dismissal of two lesser charges, was the live-in girlfriend of the boy’s father but they had struggled as a blended family.

Hodges wanted to teach 13-year-old James Bailey McKeegan a lesson for what she considered to be the mistreatment of her own children, ages seven and four.

So she took her boyfriend’s 9-millimeter Smith and Wesson handgun, replaced the child’s cologne and deodorant in his backpack, and then called Magnolia Junior High School from a nearby payphone to report him by name.

Yup, that sure taught him a lesson. Never trust a parental figure because they’re constantly plotting to get you into seriously trouble with the law. At least I’m assuming that was the lesson she was trying to teach the kid because I can’t see any other lesson that could have been taught from this exercise in stupidity.

Kudos go to the investigator for actually doing his job:

Retired MCSO investigator Mike Price said this was an important move, because of his experience as an interrogator, since it took multiple interviews to get Hodges to open up about what happened and her motives.

“It was very unusual,” Price said. “Initially, we wanted to know what was (McKeegan’s) intent with the pistol. Did he bring it to school to harm someone, or just to show to his friends? He kept insisting that he knew he brought a gun to school, but he didn’t realize it until the principal found the gun in his backpack. He was insistent.

“He was so consistent with his story and he came across so sincere, not just emotionally, but how he just stayed with his story and would not waver from it, that my position was that there’s something to this. I was the lone wolf at that point.”

Too many investigators would have crucified the kid regardless of his protests of innocence. Mike Price actually used his head and came to the conclusion that the kid was telling the truth. That kind of quality work is seldom witnessed this day and age and deserves to be acknowledge.

Temple Index

The shooting community has been relatively peaceful as of late. While brush fires from the Great Caliber Wars still still pop up from time to time and the debate over whether or not sport shooting will get you killed on “the street” has yet to be definitively decided there hasn’t been a good community-wide blow. Until now! Yes, somebody has decided to challenge the central dogma of firearms handling. Say hello to the temple index.

The temple index is the new hotness in firearms handling. When you want to operate like an operator in areas of operations you simply need to bring your handgun to the side of your head and point the muzzle to the sky. From this position you can… do things… and stuff.

I knew I heard about this technique somewhere then it hit me, Rory Miller wrote about temple indexing and, more importantly, it’s origins in Meditations on Violence. As it turns out temple index has a very specific purpose:

Rookie officers come to the academy believing that the right way to make a fast entry is with their weapons next to their heads, pointing at the sky. A technique that only existed so that a cameraman could get the star’s face and a gun in the same picture has become something that people who know better try to do. In real life, it is a matter of an instant for a bad guy to grab the barrel and shove it under the officer’s chin. A messy death.

Sgt. Rory Miller (2014-07-18). Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence (p. 29). YMAA Publication Center. Kindle Edition.

So remember when you need to look cool and have a picture of your face with a gun in it to prove you’re operating just temple index that hot rod handgun.

A Discriminatory Gun Range

I’m sure you’ve heard about the gun range that decided to ban Muslims from its property. If you want a writeup that includes the names of the range and its owner you can find a good one over at Gun Nuts Media. Needless to say I’m not going to provide the name of the range because I don’t want to give free publicity to a range operated by bigots. In fact I feel kind of dirty even bringing this up because I know the owner is reveling in the publicity stemming from this stunt.

As you know I don’t really care about the legality of this or what the courts might do. The state isn’t in my pantheon of gods so what it might do is irrelevant. What I will say is that this is the kind of shit gun control advocates love to read about. Here we have a story involving a gun owner being a bigot towards and entire group of people. Besides this being a propaganda wet dream for anti-gunners it’s also an example of how fucking gullible some people are.

If you’ve been watching the daily Two Minutes Hate, and I know you are all good citizens of Oceania so you have, you know that Emmanuel Goldstein is a Muslim and therefore we must all hate Muslims. Most of us who have enough intelligence to discern propaganda from reality give little heed to the Two Minutes Hate. But a lot of people, especially self-proclaimed conservatives, lap this shit up and ask for more. They’re probably working on designs for the arm bands they’re planning on making every Muslim wear as a demonstration of their hatred of Goldstein and his religion.

But the truth is that there are roughly 7 billion people on this planet and 1.6 billion of them are Muslim. That’s right, almost a quarter of the entire population of this planet are Muslim. If Islam really was a religion of violence a huge number of us would be dead. But Islam is just like any other major religion, it has some crazies mixed in with a vast majority of good people. So when idiots ban all Muslims from their shooting range they’re really performing an act of collective punishment against a vast number of good people for the actions of a handful of assholes. I really hate bigots and that hatred makes me hope that that shooting range will go bankrupt over this.

My Anachronistic Self-Defense Tools

When you discuss self-defense tools it’s inevitable that what you use is wrong. There is only one valid set of self-defense tools and that’s the set I personally use! At least that’s how the conversation usually goes whenever I see it crop up. A recent blog post explaining why the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) chose the 9mm has rekindled the defensive caliber wars. Once again we have the “Why carry anything other than 9mm” crowd arguing with the “Everybody should carry a caliber that starts with .4” crowd.

I got drawn into this conversation because, well, I like to troll. My daily carry gun is a Glock 30SF, which is Glock’s sub-compact .45 for those who don’t know. When I mentioned this in the conversation somebody asked why I’m stupid enough to “carry a 100 year-old round?” Setting aside the fact that the 9mm is older than the .45 I fully admit that my choice of defensive rounds is anachronistic. Resources for handgun ammunition research and development is predominantly going towards making a better 9mm. If you want the best modern research can provide in your handgun then you should go with 9mm. Combine this with the fact that handgun ballistics suck regardless of the caliber you use and it’s much smarter to have more small rounds in the gun than fewer larger rounds (to a point obviously, a .22 wouldn’t be my go-to defensive caliber).

So why do I carry a .45 when I admit that a 9mm would be a better choice? Because I like the .45. It’s that simple. And since I’m not constantly involved in gunfights or am likely to be in a situation where having 16 rounds instead of 11 rounds will be the defining factor in whether or not I survive I feel as though I can choose my caliber based heavily on personal preference. While the 9mm is a great handgun cartridge, one that I would argue is superior to the .45, it just doesn’t have that timeless feel, at least for an American like myself, as the .45.

The bottom line is I like anachronisms and combining old with new. I wear mechanical wristwatches, my go-to rifle is an AR chambered in .308, most of my code is written with command line tools, and my toothbrush isn’t electric. On the other hand my wristwatches are made of superior modern materials, go-to rifle is chambered in .308 but based on a more modern platform, code is written using a modern computer with a modern operating system, and manually operated toothbrush has been designed for superior plaque removal. Likewise I choose to carry a .45 but have it loaded in a more modern tactical Tupperware pistol (I like the 1911 but it’s heavier, more expensive, and has more sharp angles to dig into my side).

This justification throws most tactical Tommies into a fit of impotent Internet rage and that amuses me. I guess the fact that my defensive plan doesn’t revolve around what is objectively best and instead takes into consideration what I personally prefer is some kind of mortal sin. And admittedly my plan is unlikely to save my life if the Golden Horde invades the Twin Cities. But I’m happy with what I carry, like to shoot it and therefore practice with it regularly (huge plus side to carrying what I personally prefer), and am covered for a vast majority of defensive situations I’m likely to encounter. Life is too short to throw personal preference to the wind and one can strike a balance between the bestest tools evar and the tools they prefer for reasons unrelated to self-defense.

I also realize that this post, along with other self-defense posts I’ve written, will been seen as bad self-defense advise by many others. Let me make a preemptive rebuttal to those people. Nowhere have I ever claimed to be a good source of self-defense advice. I’m not a certified anything outside of the computer industry and have never claimed to be. The number of defensive situations I’ve been involved in can be counted on the fingers of a double arm amputee. And I’ve never claimed this blog to be anything other than a giant opinion piece. What I offer here is an insight into my thought process when developing a defensive plan in the hopes it helps others think about their defensive plan from a different angle (because the more angles you approach something from the better the overall plan is likely to be).

Shortsighted Firearm Access Control Technology

A lot of electrons have been annoyed by people such as myself writing about access control technologies for firearm (often erroneously referred to as smart gun technology). Advocates of gun control want to mandate access control technologies in firearms because it will increase the costs and make guns less accessible they claim it will decrease gun related deaths. Gun rights advocates are worried that other states will pass laws like New Jersey’s that mandate all firearms include access control technologies after the first such equipped firearm is released to market. I’m primarily interested in the technology itself (since I have no problem ignoring laws I disagree with the threat of mandating the technology doesn’t carry much weight with me).

Understanding that politics is an ineffective vehicle for creating change some people got together and founded the Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge, which awards grants to individuals who show promising developments in access control technologies for firearms. One of those prize winners is Kai Kloepfer, a 17 year-old who designed an access control system for firearms. First let me congratulate Mr. Kloepfer on designing such a system at a young age. He shows the potential to go far as an engineer. Now let me point out a major flaw in the system he designed:

The gun works by creating a user ID and locking in the fingerprint of each user allowed to use the gun. The gun will only unlock with the unique fingerprint of those who have already permission to access the gun.

Access control technology for firearms that rely on the user’s fingerprint aren’t viable. While people living in California, Arizona, Florida, or other southern states may be inclined to ask why I, as a Minnesotan, can point out the glaring error quite quickly: gloves. Those of us who live in northern states spend many months with our hands inside of gloves. When it’s 20 below zero outside you can’t have your hands exposed to the elements for very long and those finger saving gloves render fingerprint readers useless (as well as capacitive touchscreens). How am I supposed to unlock my firearm in the winter? Some will probably say “By taking off your gloves, dumbass.” Those people don’t live in Minnesota because taking off your gloves isn’t always an option, especially when you plan to grab onto a freezing cold piece of metal. Furthermore one is seldom afforded the time to remove their gloves in a defensive situation.

Finger and hand print readers are Hollywood’s go-to solution for firearm access control. In the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall, Bond is given a Walther PPK/S equipped with a hand print reader. If anybody other than James Bond is holding the pistol it won’t fire. Hollywood sure makes the technology look effective but Bond is also never wearing gloves. Still many people seem to get their inspiration from Hollywood movies and that must be the reason why manufacturers of firearm access control technology have such a hard-on for finger and hand print readers. Because it certainly isn’t for practical reasons.

“Smart” Guns Would Turn a Physical Fight into a Technological Fight

The Verge has a story about designers of “smart” guns being afraid to come forward with their designs because they believe us evil gun nuts will get them. While the story does attempt to make it appear as though their fear is well founded I’m betting their actual fear has nothing to do with gun rights activists and everything to do with criticism. Gun control advocates seem to think guns with built-in access control are the Holy Grail of restricting gun ownership. What they fail to understand is that baking access control into firearms turns a physical confrontation into a technological confrontation.

There isn’t an access control system on the planet that cannot be bypassed by unauthorized users. Access control systems are about raising the cost of gaining unauthorized access. If I put a shitty lock on my door the cost of bypassing it is pretty low but a quality lock raises that cost. But even the most effective of access control technologies, once unveiled to the public, falls under the onslaught of hackers. Access control technology for firearms is no different. Once it hits the market security experts will put it under a microscope and discover every way to bypass it. Some of the bypasses will allow unauthorized users to fire the gun and other bypasses will prevent authorized users from firing the gun.

Consider the Armatix iP1. It’s a .22 pistol that uses a wristwatch containing a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip to authenticate the user. Gun control advocates have touted the iP1 as the answer to the “smart” gun question. But there is a critical flaw in the pistol’s design: it relies on a wireless signal for authentication. Wireless signals are convenient but they suffer from a notably critical flaw when looking at self-defense tool, they’re susceptible to jamming. If you have a powerful enough transmitter you can flood specific radio frequencies with enough noise that it severely degrades or completely prevents the communication capabilities of devices using those frequencies. Imagine being a police officer tasked with instigating violence against currently peaceful protesters. You plan to fire a couple of rounds into the crowd in the hopes chaos ensues so you and your friends can justify wholesale slaughter. But the protesters are smart and have been flooding the radio frequency your gun uses to authenticate and thus renders your firearm inoperable. The previously physical conflict became a technological conflict.

One of the reasons I’ve been skeptical of current access control proposals for firearms it that the names working on the technology aren’t well known in the security community. Security is hard and failing to implement proper security for a firearm access control system would render it useless. Does the iP1 RFID setup utilizes strong encryption for communications between the watch and pistol? Many RFID access control systems, especially earlier ones, didn’t utilize any encryption so it was trivial to intercept the authentication code and load it onto your own RFID chip. If cloning the authentication code stored in the watch is easy then the entire access control system is useless. And even if the system uses encryption the question becomes if the encryption is properly implemented. Many systems can be manipulated in such a way as they give up credentials (just think of every database breach that resulted in user names and passwords getting stolen).

Police departments and the military understand this issues, which is why they haven’t been on the bandwagon to adopt access control technologies for their weapons. If they did adopt such technology it would sudden turn the physical fight, which they’re very good at, into a technological fight, which they’re not very good at. In all likelihood the current crop of people developing access control technology for firearms know that their designs won’t hold up under scrutiny and therefore don’t their names attached to the designs. It’s much easier to claim that the evil gun nuts will come after them then to admit their designs have not underwent a security audit from a recognized auditor.

Trunk Guns

I recently had a conversation with a fellow gun nut in which the topic of trunk guns came up. He asked me what kind of gun I have in the trunk of my car and I replied that I didn’t have one. This was apparently the wrong answer as I was informed that having a gun, namely a rifle, stored in my trunk is critical to my survival. Without a long gun sitting in my trunk there is no way that I will be able to survive major civil unrest such as rioting. And he topped it off with the famous line, “A handgun is for shooting your way to your rifle.” He must have attended the My School is the Only Valid School of Gun Fighting. I hear it’s quite popular but most of the instructors and students that I have met from that school are assholes, which has dissuaded me from seeking training there.

Instead of telling you what the one and true proper self-defense plan is I’m going to explain how self-defense plans vary from person to person based on criteria unique to each individual. I will do this by explaining why I don’t have a trunk gun and why I don’t feel as though I’m going to die a horrible death due to my lack of preparation. As always your mileage will vary. Your situation is almost certainly different than mine and therefore requires a different set of plans. Don’t take this post as me saying trunk guns are stupid and nobody should have one. What I’m trying to explain in this post are some of the criteria I use to develop some of my self-defense plans and why I have come to the decisions that I have.

It’s no secret that handguns, in general, suck when it comes to stopping power. To compensate for lack of stopping power most schools of self-defense recommend firing two shots into a target immediately and then assessing whether or not more are necessary. Seeing this it’s pretty easy to understand why military personnel rely on rifles for their primary weapon and have a handgun as a backup. It’s also easy to see why people would prefer a rifle over a handgun in a self-defense situation. Needless to say a rifle in your trunk is much closer than one in your safe at home.

Let me first say that I live in the Twin Cities, which is Minnesota’s largest metropolitan area. Obviously that has a lot to do with my situation and shapes my self-defense plan. The chances of me getting mugged are higher than somebody living in a rural area but the chances of me encountering a large (relative to Minnesota) animal such as a black bear are practically nil. Another factor worth mentioning is that periods of civil unrest in this area are rare. That brings me to my self-defense plan. Statistically the defensive scenarios I am most likely to be involved in are immediate in nature. Things like muggings, drunken assholes looking to start a fight, or getting stuck in the middle of two gang members’ relational issues. In these scenarios my ability to access defensive force must be immediate and if I’m able to get to my car I have most likely escaped the danger. And if I haven’t the time it takes me to access my trunk, retrieve my rifle, and continue the fight isn’t that dissimilar to enter my vehicle, start my car, and get the fuck out of there. For me the mobility my car offers almost always outweighs the firepower a rifle brings to the table.

But let’s discuss the primary justification for trunk guns: civil unrest. History shows that civil unrest in Minnesota, and the United States as a whole, is pretty rare. The chances of me being stuck in the middle of a civil unrest situation are much smaller than, say, my car being stolen or broken into in Minneapolis. A regular auto theft sucks but it sucks a whole lot more if the thief not only gets a car but also a loaded rifle. Furthermore, in a time of civil unrest, I believe you’re highest chance of survival comes from not drawing attention to yourself. There are two risks when you draw attention to yourself, which toting a rifle does in a metropolitan area, rioters and police. Rioters act in a slightly more random nature than police but as a general rule it’s best to not stick out if you want to avoid being targeted for violence. In fact it’s probably a better idea to attempt to appear to be a rioter when rioters are near than it is to be toting a rifle. Police, on the other hand, are less random. During a time of civil unrest they’re looking for people that appears to be rioting or otherwise acting dangerously. Carrying a rifle is likely to raise red flags with local police officers and those red flags will likely increase the chances of them shooting you first and asking questions about your innocence later. After all the words “office safety” justify almost any violent action taken by police and the fact that you were visibly in possession of a weapon during a riot will give them the ability to claim their safety was in jeopardy.

As I said earlier, the most common self-defense situations I am likely to encounter are immediate in nature. If somebody pulls a gun on me and demands my wallet I don’t have time to get to my car, pull my rifle out of the trunk, and shoot the mugger. Periods of civil unrest usually have a lead up time to them. Consider the events that occurred in Ferguson. Riots didn’t break out immediately after the shooting. There was a lot of news coverage of the shooting beforehand as well as signs that the local population was very upset by it. The best way to survive a period of civil unrest is to be elsewhere. Pay attention to your local news. If there are signs of impending civil unrest in an area make sure you’re not in that area. While I do understand that that’s not always possible in most cases it is. Being somewhere else will increase your chances of survival much more than being near the unrest with a rifle in your trunk.

There you have it, some insight into why I don’t have a trunk gun. Let the ridicule from the students of the My School is the Only Valid School of Gun Fighting begin (which is to say let the impotent rage flow through their keyboards)!

It’s Hard Being a Gun Nut and Technology Enthusiast

Do you know what’s difficult for gun nuts and technology enthusiast to do? Turn on the news. Most of the gunny readers of my blog are used to the glaring idiocy emitted by reporters when they attempt to talk about firearms. You get ridiculous assertions like the word magazine being interchangeable with clip, every rifle being an AK-47, every handgun being a Glock, and Uzis being high-powered firearms:

The girl was being shown how to use a high-powered Uzi sub-machine gun at an Arizona shooting range when the recoil caused her to lose control of it.

Emphasis mine. Unless there is an Uzi model chambered in .308 (and if there is please tell me, I fucking want that for reasons) it is not high-powered. Uzis, as far as I know, are commonly chambered in 9mm with a few other models available that fire other pistol calibers. Pistol calibers, no matter how you look at them, aren’t high-powered. In fact they’re usually considered anemic, which is why military personnel usually carry rifles.

When media outlets report on topics related to technology we get similar levels of stupidity. The news that nude pictures of several celebrities have been obtained form their compromised iCloud accounts has received wall to wall coverage from several media outlets. And with great coverage comes great stupidity. Here we have a CNN talking head speculating on the nature of 4chan:

In the wake of the massive leak of hacked celebrity nude photos now known as celebgate, CNN—the most trusted name in news—is on the case. The cable news pioneer put its best tech analyst Brett Larson on the job and he speculated in wildly unhelpful fashion on Tuesday about just who this 4chan guy is, anyway.

“He might be a system administrator,” Larson suggests.

I guess the top tier research team over at CNN couldn’t be bothered to do a Google search. If they had they would have gotten the website 4chan at the top hit and a Wikipedia article entry on 4chan as the second hit. In other words a few simple keystrokes would have informed anybody capable of reading (I know, that’s expecting a lot from the research team over at CNN) that 4chan isn’t a person, it’s a website.

Because of my interests in guns and technology I feel as through I’m receiving a double dose of stupid every time I turn on the news or open a news site. I can only assume that the media’s coverage of basically everything else is just as ill-informed.