Military Veterans and Patriots

Tag: Commentary

  • One Helluva fight or total capitulation!!!

    One Helluva fight or total capitulation!!!

    The choice we are facing is just this brutal!!  We either fight like hell, or we acquiesce which will bring down our Republic!!  If you think I am wrong, I don’t think you have been paying attention!!  The road map in front of us tells the story, for the American citizen to win against the globalists we must fight with all the intensity that drove young Americans to charge the beaches of Normandy!!  No matter how you cut it, it’s either fight or resign ourselves to defeat!!

    Our freedoms are the envy of the world; yet we have elected officials who are HELL-BENT on driving the American people to the point of irrelevance!  Is this what you want to see happen? Or are you ready for the political fight of our lives!  I for one am more than ready to fight the globalists with all the strength this old man’s body can muster!! Do I stand alone?  I certainly hope not as the choices are dark and dim for those we leave behind.  I have no wish to see my progeny living as serfs in what was once the greatest nation on earth.

    This fight must start with the defeat of any more Continuing Resolutions and Senator Langford’s immigration bill.  First is the CR, it must be that the government be SHUT DOWN or our southern border CLOSED!!!  As for the Senator from Oklahoma’s immigration bill; allowing 5,000 illegals a day entry into the country will bring a total of One Million, Eight Hundred Twenty Five Thousand illegals in just ONE YEAR!!  This is nothing short of INSANITY!!!

    Trump’s Iowa win last night may give us some comfort, but the Globalist Left will not give up.  They feel they must win in order for their agenda to come to fruition!!  They will throw everything they can think of at us.  More Plandemics, Climate Change, Illegal Immigration and any other devious and destructive action they can dream up in their twisted minds.

    To my dying breath I will fight for the continuance of our Republic!  I will use every legal effort available to me to this end.  My concern is that it may not be enough and it surely will not be enough unless ALL we Deplorables decide to FIGHT and STAND in the breach!!

  • Commentary From the Front Lines 10 July

    Commentary From the Front Lines 10 July

    It’s been about a month since the last update from the world of firearms retail. There honestly been little new to report.

    Ammo supply still remains tight. There are signs that it is starting to improve, however slow the recovery is. It’s still going to be a while before you see that box of your favorite oddball cartridge on the shelf, but the more popular loadings are starting to be more available. I’d also note that online prices seem to be coming back down. I don’t know if that’s due people balking at paying $1 a round for 9mm fmj or if there is more in the warehouses.

    A recent check of inventory at my place of employ showed we had around 400 guns in stock. That’s more than have been in the store for more than a year. And it is more than just cheap, turkish import home defense shotguns, which had been the majority of the stock last year. Our latest shipment included a wide variety of firearms, from .22’s to 12 gauge over/unders.

    NICS background checks have slowed some. June was the first month in almost three years that did not have a year-over-year increase in the number of checks. You have to go back to December of 2018 to find the last month that didnt show an increase over the previous year. All that said, there were still 3,054,726 checks performed in June. Keep in mind, last June was the start of the BLM/AntiFA riots across the country.

    Through the first six months of the year there have been more than 22 million checks run. If the trend continues, there will be well north of 40 million checks run for the year.

    It’s important to keep in mind the number of checks can’t be used as a one to one correlation for guns sold. A large percentage are run for purposes other than gun sales. The NSSF estimates that number to be around 40%.

  • Commentary From the Front Lines 3

    Commentary From the Front Lines 3

    It’s been exactly two months since I last shared my insights into the gun and ammo situation as I see it as someone who works at the retail end of the industry.

    Let’s start with the raw FBI background check numbers. NICS background checks have slowed some. There were 3,222,105 checks run in May. That’s down about 300,000 from April and around 1.5 million from the all time record month of March. It is important to note that those checks are not a one to one when it comes to gun sales. A large number, some estimates put it at half, are run for other purposes than firearms transactions. Many states, mine included, require a federal background check as part of initial pistol licensure and as part of the recertification process. Additionally, many buyers purchase more than one firearm per transaction.

    The gun situtation seems to be resolving. At my store we have a wider variety of guns than we’ve had for close to a year. We are also getting multiples of the same gun in. Some brands are still scarce, but overall, the supply of guns seems to be loosening.

    We’re still at the mercy of our distributors, and aren’t allowed to special order guns. Our gun buyers say that has to do with the lead times and overall availability of specific guns.

    There is mixed news on the ammo front. The president of Hornady said recently that his company is back-ordered 3 years. The president of Vista Outdoors, the parent company of CCI, Speer, Federal and Remington ammo, said his company was back-ordered 2 years. Additionally, he said that he didn’t expect primers to be commercially available for at least a year. There’s more bad news, deer slug manufacturer Lightfield announced that they were not restarting production. I don’t know the specifics of why, but they announced two years ago that they were moving, and as far as I know, they haven’t produced a shell since that date.

    All that said, it seems the ammo supply is starting to come back. I don’t expect to see some of the less popular calibers and loadings to be widely available for a year, but that has more to do with the manufacturing schedule than any shortage or the like.

    I’m going to digress for a moment here and explain the manufacturing scheduling process for ammo, and why I think its going to be a while before you see that box of .257 Roberts or 7-30 Waters on the shelf. Under normal circumstances, ammo manufacturers have a fairly rigid production schedule due to capacity restraints, maintenance scheduling, tooling changeover, etc. The schedule will typically have a single run of certain calibers, generally the less popular rounds, while more popular calibers will be produced in either a continuous run or in multiple runs. Once the scheduled amount of a particular caliber/loading is reached, that particular combination isn’t run again till the next year. With the onset of covid last march, and all the attendant knock-on effects, that schedule got blown up.

    Now, with things normalizing, the production schedule is back in place. It will take a full year to cycle through and for ammo to be back to the point it was in the before.

    Honestly, if I stopped seeing the same two dozen or so faces every day I think we’d have a decent supply in stock. Except for a few weeks in January, we got regular shipments of ammo. They weren’t huge, but we did have a regular supply.

    I’m also going to take aim (SWIDT) at everyone that’s price gouging right now. It isn’t just the small shops that are doing it now. Big retailers like Bass Pro have marked up their ammo 50% or more. How do I know? I know exactly what a box, flat, case and sleeve of all that stuff costs because I have access to our distributors sites. Our prices have gone up, but only because the distributors and manufacturers prices have gone up. I saw a box of 9mm the other day at Gander for $30+. The same box of ammo, same bullet weight, brand and all, is $20 where I work. I have to ask why? I don’t know about you, but I refuse to shop somewhere I know they’re gouging. People will remember this in the future.

  • Safety Lies Only in…

    Ben Shapiro: Safety Lies Only in Surrender…Or Resistance

     By Ben Shapiro | July 15, 2020 | 11:23am EDT

    This week, gadfly New York Times columnist Bari Weiss resigned her position at the so-called newspaper of record.

    She did so after years of fielding slings and arrows from her own colleagues and editors, who treated her as an ultra-conservative enemy — this despite the fact that her perspective on the world is an eclectic mix of social progressivism, skepticism toward regulation, and foreign policy hawkishness. (Personal disclosure: I, along with many people right, left, and center consider Bari a friend.) The pressure on Weiss from within the newspaper had reached extraordinary proportions: Excerpts of staff Slack chats revealed colleagues openly discussing why Weiss ought to lose her job, maligning her as a bigot, and suggesting publicly that she is a liar.

    So Weiss quit, and she burned the bridge behind her.

    “The lessons that ought to have followed the election — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned,” Weiss wrote in her resignation letter. “Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

    This is the nature of the game: Mirror the perspectives of de facto Times editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and her woke colleagues, or find yourself ostracized, publicly shamed, and pressured to leave. And the actual editors of The Times have caved to this nonsense time and again.

    As Weiss raged: “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.”

    Weiss is hardly the exception inside the bastions of leftist groupthink. At Vox.com, co-founder Matthew Yglesias was shamed into silence for suggesting — sin of sins! — that cancel culture is wrong. His co-founder, Ezra Klein, subtweeted Yglesias, even as Yglesias remained quiet. At Princeton University, professor Joshua Katz wrote an open letter decrying demands from fellow Princeton faculty that the university engage in open racial discrimination in favor of minorities. He was quickly labeled a threat to decency, with fellow professor Eddie Glaude complaining, “Professor Katz, at times in this letter, seems to not regard people like me as essential features, or persons, of Princeton.”

    The list goes on. And on and on.

    In fact, there is only one way to avoid the blacklist: to surrender, utterly and completely. Any sign of remaining dissent must be purged. Bow before Zod, or pay the price. Thus, Ben Howe (again — personal disclosure — a friend), an anti-Trump Republican who edited videos for the pro-Joe Biden Lincoln Project, found himself fired from the project for two- and four-year-old tweets. Thus, Gary Garrels, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was forced to resign his position after he insisted that the museum continue to acquire the odd piece from white artists. The mildest sign of unwillingness to become an “ally” in the Great Culture Purge of 2020 ends with your neck in the guillotine.

    Have we finally reached the glorious age in which Absolute Truth is known with such fulsome certainty that our cultural betters should be trusted to wish dissenters away into the cornfield? Of course not. We’re just watching the latest cultural revolution in real time. Which leaves those who wish to not be purged with two simple choices: Stand up together against this round of Maoist purification, or hang separately.

    Original-cnsnews.com-Safety Lies Only in Surrender or Resistance