Tour d’Horizon is more honestly a tour of open tabs that have been annoying and irritating us.
Guns
I don’t wanna work, I just wanna bang on my gun all day.
Glock Protests M17 Contract Award
No details at present, but the protest showed up on 24 February at this GAO link that should also show any other protests of this contract as they develop.
Protests are a fairly routine activity in defense contracting, nowadays. That does not mean that Glock has no chance to win their protest, but it also doesn’t mean a win is probable. If they were to win, it is unlikely the contract would just go to Glock (or to another protester). Instead, it would require the Army to take some action or other to address the complaint, for example, a partial retest of some part of the competition. Then, the result of that decision may be protested.
If you look at it as a system designed to produce weapons, it’s abominable. But if you look at it as a system designed to transfer as much of the defense budget as possible into the pockets of Washington lawyers and lobbyists, it’s brilliant.
Layoffs at Colt
The extent of them is unclear, but there are some details in a post by Nathaniel F. at The Firearm Blog. If you go to later posts in the pistol-forum thread Nathaniel cited, the situation is still fluid but not as severe as it originally was. Either way, it looks like America’s most drama-prone gun company is on stage again.
Market Correction?
In that same PF thread, someone says a distributor has told him the amount of product they’re moving is down 30% relative to Q1 2016. If that’s the case, we can expect to see prices soften and perhaps some consolidation. The way to get through a downturn is by having more attractive products or prices than competitors, so any manufacturers that don’t have compelling new products in the pipeline are going to be looking at price cuts, promotions, and any other way to differentiate their stuff from Brand X.
One thing several retailers have told us lately: they can’t keep cheap guns on the shelves. They could move every $150 pistol they can get their hands on. Food for thought, designers.
Gun Stocks update
Anyway you want it: we have the table, our analysis, and the popular chart.
Gun Stocks since the Election
Week Ending
RGR
SWHC
AOBC
VSTO
11/8/16 (pre-election)
64.40
28.45
38.94
11/18/16
53.20
24.13
40.02
11/25/16
52.50
23.82
41.05
12/2/16
50.25
21.10
39.66
12/9/16
51.90
21.07
38.62
12/16/16
53.45
21.59
36.81
12/23/16
54.05
22.11
38.03
12/30/16
52.70
21.08
36.90
1/6/17
54.15
21.00
38.08
1/13/17
51.35
20.60
28.70
1/20/17
50.65
20.13
27.78
1/27/17
51.90
20.58
28.33
2/3/17
50.05
20.12
26.18
2/10/17
50.15
21.08
21.58
2/17/17
49.70
19.22
20.89
2/24/17
49.85
19.45
20.72
3/3/17
48.75
18.83
20.47
Everybody’s down this week, and the funny thing is, they were all up at Thursday’s close. The biggest hit was taken by Ruger, probably as a result of some negativity by analysts; the Motley Fool, for instance, suggested that the days of the Ruger dividend may be numbered. (The numbers don’t really seem to support that idea, but people do pay attention to analysts).
Next month, we’ll probably add Olin to the mix. Unlike all these other firms, the maker of Winchester brand ammunition has seen its stock rise steadily during this period.
Certainly, Olin apart, the Street seems to be pricing a downturn into gun stocks. Is the Street right, or is this a buying opportunity? Unfortunately this is one of those real-life deals where you take the test first and get the lesson later.
Disclaimer: Your Humble Blogger holds RGR, bought at about 56.40 on 9 Nov 16. It bottomed in the 40s later that day before rebounding a little by close, but it hasn’t recovered since.
Gun Poly-Ticks
The Moral Turpitude of Gun Control Proponents, Proof #7682
California state legislative leader Leland Yee never met a gun-control measure he didn’t like. Why? Well, he said it was for public safety, to prevent gun crime. Meanwhile, all along, he was plotting to run guns to Chinese Tongs in the Bay Area. He finally ran out of appeals and started his sentence in Club Fed a year ago this week. We just checked, and he’s still making bed-check daily. Inmate number 19629-111 is expected to get out sometime in 2020.
Of course, strict gun controls mean an arms smuggler can charge his criminal customers more. Whether that’s a factor or not, we can’t say, but like every politician, he got stinking rich on an upper middle class salary. We could ask, “How ever do they do that?”, but we have a pretty good idea.
Yee was also beyond soft on crime, at one time proposing a bill to roll back young offenders’ life sentences for murder to a maximum of ten years.
Usage and Employment
The hardware takes you only half way. Nothing this week.
Don’t Go Stupid Places With Stupid People and Do Stupid Things, I
Or, from gadfly to jailbird. A confrontationally-inclined amateur journalist in Oregon crashed a Black Criminal Lives Matter demonstration, intending to video them. They assaulted him. He drew in self defense.
The local prosecutors who are in cahoots with the protesters steered the case to a crony lefty judge, and the former gadfly is now convicted and looking at fifty years. Is it a miscarriage of justice, as Mark Walters at AmmoLand sees it? Probably. But did he “go stupid places, with stupid people”? He just bet his liberty on the answer being, “no,” and rolled snake eyes.
People, do not go where you might well need your gun. Everybody understands that the world would be a better place if, instead of just brandishing his Glock, Mike Strickland had plugged a few of the Black Criminals’ Lives Matter gang. Who knows how many future rapes, murders and assaults he’d prevent with each one brought to room temp? But then he’d be looking at spending the rest of his life in prison…
… oh, wait. He still is.
If you want to help Strickland, this page has background, many links, and a couple of ways to donate to him.
And if you’ve been thinking about any kind of business, tourism, or hunting and fishing in Oregon, stop and consider Alaska instead. Oregon is not safe; Alaska is.
Once is Happenstance, Twice is Coincidence?
Initial reports had two negligent discharges by a French policeman. The police “sniper” (scare quotes… well, you’ll see why) was providing overwatch for a speech by lame-duck President François Hollande. He decided to reposition and picked up his weapon by the trigger. Needless to say, he did not have the safety on. Needless to say, he was not paying attention to the position of his muzzle.
The single negligently-fired round nailed two people, a waiter and an attendee of Hollande’s speech.
Don’t Go Stupid Places With Stupid People and Do Stupid Things, II
Quick, how stupid is this: walking into a police station, rifle-armed and masked. With a buddy similarly attired.
Baker and Vreeland tried to argue with officers while holding weapons apparently held in a low-ready position in which they could have immediately opened fire. …. The officers showed incredible restraint in this incident.
Yes, they are lucky they were not subjected to kinetic perforation. Yes, they are charged with a bunch of felonies.
There’s open-carry as a practical means to transport a firearm, and there’s open-carry because you’re a troll or some other species of attention whore. Well, Bob Owens, who restrains himself and only calls these two Michigan mongs “morons,” has the whole story on these assclowns.
Cops ‘n’ Crims
Cops bein’ cops, crims bein’ crims. The endless Tom and Jerry show of crime and (sometimes instantaneous) punishment. Lots of Cop Was a Crim this week.
Remember What ‘Non-Profit’ Means?
It doesn’t mean nobody’s getting rich. It means no owners or stockholders are getting rich. Various insiders can be getting rich, which is perfectly legal in the light of laws written by the social and economic peers of the characters enriching themselves. Still, there’s a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be the Moneychangers In The Temple. Wrong way:
Sonja McQuillar, the former director of health and information management at Northern Children’s Services, created phony invoices … and pocketed the money herself.
She helped herself to over $600k over a dozen years of unsuspected embezzlement. Now, if she’d simply paid herself an additional $50k/year in salary, or contracted business to a for-profit direct-mail fundraising firm that she owned, that would have been perfectly legal. The orphans or foundlings or depraved-on-account-a-they’re-deprived, whatever the PC term is today would still be screwed, because this result wouldn’t have changed:
[T]he agency’s financial struggles prompted officials there to issue public pleas for help in funding repairs to a broken boiler, which had rendered some facilities on their Ridge Avenue campus in Wissahickon unusable during the winter.
Administrators have since said that some of the money taken by McQuillar might have been used to fund the necessary maintenance.
But she wouldn’t be going to the State Pen.
If they don’t care enough about your donations to check to see if they’re being embezzled, for a dozen years, then you might want to factor that into your giving plans.
You Never Know Who’s In That Car You Cut Off
Posted without comment.
The Perils of Kathleen: Time for Accounting
We have had a spate of Kane-related news this week, much of it bad, at least to the PA taxpayers who have to pay for this never-ending clown cavalcade.
Item 23 Feb: Direct Dollar Costs of $3.6 Million is new AG Josh Shapiro’s first cut at what Kane’s crime wave cost the Commonwealth — not including the opportunity costs in having the entire office caught up in trying to frame Kane enemies or defend Kane cronies, or the money wasted on paying a salary to an AG that didn’t even come in to the office as the water levels rose and the band played Nearer My God to Thee. Shapiro seems shocked by the numbers: $1.8 million for a crony law firm to review emails, $877k defending the office from lawsuits, $791k settling those and other lawsuits, $191k for criminal lawyers for other AG employees during the Kane trial. (Note that these numbers actually round to $3.7 million. Numeracy is not a lawyer thing, is it?)
Item 22 Feb: Different take on the same story, Shapiro calls the bills “extraordinary.”
Item 28 Feb: Kane crony Patrick Reese’s appeal failed and he’s closer to spending a short stint in state lockup. He violated a court order in order to feed back grand jury testimony about her own case to Kane. All along, he’s also been collecting a fat tax-free disability pension, a benefit that is apparently untouched by his final conviction. There are many other stories, here, here, and here, for example. (Update: Reese is going to spend more of that tax-free money from his phony disability on lawyers: he intends to appeal to the State Supreme Court).
Item 3 Mar: BREAKING: Kane’s First Appeal Fails. The trial judge, Wendy Demchick-Alloy, explained her evidentiary rulings and defended Kane’s trial as fair, and the verdict just, in a 104-page ruling issued today. Now Kane appeals to Superior Court (which must take her appeal), and if defeated there, Supreme Court (which need to take the appeal). If she fails in both appeals, as expected, she’ll report to prison in just over two years. Stories: Philly.com; PennLive.com; TV-6 ABC; Bucks Co. Courier-Times; Main Line Times.
Everybody thinks his own state is the most corrupt one, but Pennsylvania isn’t about to give up its quest for the title. However, so far, politician or not, Shapiro seems to be focused on trying to repair the damage the pol before him — Kane — did to the office.
Shorts
It’s amazing just how big organized crime is in trademark fraud and counterfeit products. All the profits of drugs, none of the 0530 warrant service. And the bogus Coach bags and Air Jordans both support and are supported by a vast quantity of other crimes.
Unconventional (and current) Warfare
What goes on in the battlezones of the world — and preparation of the future battlefields.
SF Invades the Oval Office
Well, it was less an invasion than an invitation. As part of their specialty training, the phase in the SF Q Course where the communicators are beating their heads against wave propagation, the medics are sweating trauma lab and the weapons men trying to learn the ins and outs of mortar FDC, one of the things the O’s do is take a field trip to several places in the national capital area, including the Executive Branch’s foreign and military policy shop, the National Security Council. One recent class got a surprise that’s not usually on the schedule — a chance to meet with President Trump. And then the President made a suggestion. (Of course a presidential suggestion carries considerable weight with the
“Halfway through the discussion, [Trump] said, ‘Hey — we’re not supposed to do this but follow me, and he brought them all into the Oval Office, took a group photograph around the Resolute desk, and then — throwing the schedules into a bit of a tizzy, said OK that’s not good enough,’” [NSC Aide Sebastian] Gorka told Breitbart News in an interview.
“He said, ‘everybody stand in the corner.’ They all stood in the corner, and one-by-one we took photographs they can take home to their family with each future Green Beret next to the president at the Oval Office desk,” Gorka said.
Gorka noted that he didn’t think such a thing had been done by the prior President. Special Forces itself, though, was plucked from obscurity by one President long ago — John F. Kennedy. There are several intertwined JFK/SF stories in SF lore, passed down through the years.
Veterans’ Issues
Is it time to o disband this thing yet, and letting all its bloatoverhead seek its own level in the Dreaded Private Sector™? Just shorts this week, or we’d never get the post up….
Shorts
Item 28 Feb: Drug Theft Impunity. VA’s payroll patriots go unpunished for losing or stealing controlled drugs in 97% of cases, and drug diversion is a real problem. Second story.
Item 3 Mar: Neglected Vet Lay on Floor for Hours. Other vets lolled around. 
The Durham, NC VA initially denied neglecting the vets, and now says they asked them, and most of the guys hunched over, and the one who slid out of his seat to lie on the floor, said that they had no beef with the wait times. And maybe they didn’t: after all, at least none of them died waiting like they do in Phoenix. Who you gonna believe, anyway? The VA, or your lying eyes?
Item 3 Mar: VA Facilities in VA, NC, Still Falsifying Wait Times. Finding by the VA Office of Inspector General. Second story.
But back on 1 Feb, new VA Secretary Dr David Shulkin rejected the idea major changes were required.
Is it time to disband this thing yet? (To Shulkin’s credit, every time he speaks, he asks for more authority to fire bad employees, for the sake of the good employees as much as for the vets; so maybe it’s not time yet).
Health & Fitness
Nothing new.
Lord Love a Duck!
The weird and wonderful (or creepy) that we didn’t otherwise get to.
The Patron Saint of Handgunners?
Well, he isn’t officially, but if there was one it would be Saint Gabriel Possenti, who disarmed bandits and then used their revolvers to hold them at bay. Monday was his feast day.
I, for one, welcome our new robot entertainment lords…
Minitaur was made by a university robotics lab (we think, Penn). Here it deals with rough terrain for a little ‘bot:
And here’s a little more background on the critter:
You can definitely imagine these things in a science fiction movie. Probably a dystopian one.
New Rules of Engagement?
Neca eos omnes. Deus suos cognoscen. We could get behind that.
It’s from Chris Muir’s daily, mostly political, cartoon, Day by Day. We’ve been reading it since the beginning, when there were only four characters, and it was obvious to everyone except the characters that they were destined to form two couples. We’ve also supported the strip when possible, and visited Chris in his home studio, in a unique house designed by his father, who worked on the space program in its first great days.