Look carefully. Click on image for larger version.

CNN:

Judges on the UK Court of Appeal once again ruled against 23-month-old Alfie Evans’ family.

Wednesday’s ruling rejected new arguments intended to overturn a decision by the High Court on Tuesday that prevented the terminally ill toddler from leaving Britain for medical treatment, said Roger Kiska, a lawyer with Christian Legal Center and part of the legal team representing Alfie’s parents.

USAToday helpfully yesterday provided a video on Twitter illustrating allegedly possible modifications to the AR-15-style rifle used by the Texas Church shooter. The video included the above.

Hilarity and mockery, naturally enough, ensued. Twitter now has a special hashtag category: #USATodayAR15Modifications for satirical take-offs.

Example:

How many rounds does it take to cut a telephone pole in half?

Not a very pretty lower receiver

Andy Greenburg tried making his own completely-unregistered AR-15 lower receiver (the part that the BATF counts as the gun) in a backroom of WIRED’s San Francisco offices.

He found that making one using a drill press and one of those 80% receiver kits out there was beyond his own slender mechanical abilities.

He also tried the 3-D Printing approach, winding up with another receiver rejected by his gunsmith as needing several more hours of clean-up work.

Defense Distributed‘s software and Ghost Gunner $1500 CNC mill worked much better. And with roughly $700 of added mail-order parts, Greenburg had a working unregistered AR-15.

Naturally, as soon as he assembled it, fired it to prove that it worked, and wrote up his feature, breathing heavily with excitement all the way, he went right over to a San Francisco police station and turned in all three (two duds, one working) lower receivers.

The moral? Unregistered AR-15s are awfully expensive. Greenburg’s three efforts cost: $1334 for the failed drill press kit version, $3604 for the 3-D printed version (including printer), and a mere $2272 for the Ghost Gunner version. You can go out and buy a more powerful, more accurate used bolt action sporter for $400-500. You can buy a Ruger Ranch Rifle semi-auto in the same .223 caliber for $650-750.

So why do you need an unregistered AR-15 anyway? Only goofy metrosexual libtards think that the crucial essence of firearms ownership and usage has to do with the ability of the authorities to identify some particular firearm and to trace its ownership.

In reality, after a crime has been committed, it is frequently perfectly obvious that the firearm that was used is that one there, the one lying on the ground. And the provenance of a particular firearm after it has already been used criminally is generally not all that interesting. Commonly, the perp just bought it legally.

Liberals all seem to be living in some odd old-fashioned Agatha Christie mystery in which the identity of the criminal and his motives are completely bound up with the chain of possession of the weapon he used. If Inspector Poirot can find out exactly which pistol was used to dispatch Colonel Mannering in the library, only thus can it be demonstrated that the butler did it, it being the butler’s gun!

Myself, I was over at my local gunsmith’s shop recently, and on the counter were several piles of AR-15 lower receivers. The prettier ones (much nicer than Greenberg’s) were selling for $49. There were less attractive ones for $39. (They would have been registered at the time of sale, of course.)

I thought of buying one, but reflected that I would then need to buy the better part of a thousand bucks worth of barrel, stock, upper receiver, sight, handguard, and trigger group, and came right back to my senses and concluded that I did not need any $49 paperweight.

Gersh Kuntzman undoubtedly looks just like this.

Gersh Kuntzman, reporting for the hoplophobic New York Daily News, wound up psychically-scarred with a bruised shoulder and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome after test-firing an AR-15.

What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing and very very loud.

It feels like a bazooka — and sounds like a cannon.

One day after 49 people were killed in the Orlando shooting, I traveled to Philadelphia to better understand the firepower of military-style assault weapons and, hopefully, explain their appeal to gun lovers.

But mostly, I was just terrified. …

I’ve shot pistols before, but never something like an AR-15. Squeeze lightly on the trigger and the resulting explosion of firepower is humbling and deafening (even with ear protection).

The recoil bruised my shoulder. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary case of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.

Read the whole thing.

I will grant Mr. Kuntzman that ARs are noisy, but Goodness Gracious, Mercy Me! they shoot the .223 cartridge, a minutely-modified version of the old .222 Remington, a center-fire cartridge introduced in 1950 as a less noisy groundhog shooting cartridge offered as a less-powerful alternative to the .220 Swift and the .22-250 Remington.

Kuntzman ought to try shooting an African big game rifle sometime, or one of those super-handguns custom-made by John Linebaugh that fires the equivalent of an elephant round from a standard-size revolver. The last time I fired my .500 Linebaugh I found a large lump had developed at the base of my thumb. I wondered at the time if it was going to be a permanent souvenir, but it gradually went away.

Back in the old days, when men were men and not metrosexual bed-wetters, Sir Samuel Baker was renowned for using a black-powder 2-bore rifle on dangerous game. The 2-bore designation means that the gun fired a ball weighing a half pound of lead.

Kuntzman (2016) shot an Ar-15 firing a 63 grain .223″ diameter bullet at 900+ feet-per-second.

Samuel Baker (1866) used to shoot a two-bore firing an 8 ounce, 3500 grain 1.326″ diameter bullet at 1500 feet per second. So much has humanity declined in a century and a half.

Sir Samuel Baker, KCB, FRS, FRGS (1821-1893)

It isn’t easy making a case in favor of the second (the Japanese Arisaka comes in first) least desirable military rifle from the first half of the last century, but Endo-Mike does a great job here.

AR-15: You can melt it with a magnifying glass.
AK-47: Under a magnifying glass, you can see the ingrained dirt.
Mosin-Nagant: Under a magnifying glass, you can see the soaked-in BLOOD. …

AR15: Built with custom parts, nice trigger, all the bells and whistles $1500+
AK47: Modified with aftermarket and 1,000 rounds of ammo not even $1500
Mosin-Nagant: Stock, with 1,000 rounds maybe $300, meaning you get $1200 to spend on more beer …

AR15: Lots of fancy optics available
AK47: You can bolt some stuff to the side
Mosin-Nagant: Who cares about optics when the barrel is long enough to smack the enemy over the head without even leaving your foxhole. …

AR15: Invented 50 years ago by a consummate engineer
AK47: Invented 60 years ago by wounded tank sergeant
Mosin-Nagant: Invented 117 years ago by two drunks on a budget.

Read the whole thing. It’s long, but funny.

Hat tips to Bookworm via Karen L. Myers and to Vanderleun.

Metrosexual Bryan Schatz, reporting for the red rag Mother Jones, impersonated a normal male American and attended a “build party.”

Build parties seem to be a California phenomenon (the only ones I can find reference to were advertized on the Calguns.net forum), in which people get together, in accordance with currently existing federal gun regulations, to complete personally the lower receiver (which is the element of modern semi-automatic rifles that is legally regarded as constituting the firearm as which is consequently the only part whose sale and transfer is regulated) and then assemble the complete AK or AR rifle using a parts kit.

A build party offers the opportunity to legally manufacture your own contemporary military-style semi-automatic-only rifle, which since you made it for your own use, has no serial number and need not be registered. Beyond that, a build party saves the prospective gun-owner at least a portion of the cost of a fully-assembled semi-automatic contemporary military-style rifle.

Schatz is your typical liberal pussy, who is intentionally milking for journalistic purposes all the shock and awe of actually handling, and even assembling, mechanical instruments that look war-like and can go boom! when you pull the trigger. These sorts of people always bask in the transgressive romance and machismo of it all.

Many kits come from stockpiles in former war zones. “I can guarantee you this one has bodies on it,” says one of the hosts as I peer down the barrel of a Yugo RPK. It’s lined with grit and soot. My host says the AK I’m building is an Egyptian “Maadi” that came to the United States via Croatia, likely having been shipped there during the Yugoslav wars. He tells me some wooden stocks come with tally marks notched in them.

But never for very long. Schatz quickly moves on to worrying about the absence of Big Brother monitoring all this. Since these build party guns are neither numbered nor registered, his liberal heart begins leaping with terror over the fact that they are “not traceable.”

Liberal efforts at gun control always begin with the fundamentally bogus idea that finding the perpetrator of a crime of violence is always, or even often, a question of identifying the actual weapon used or tracing its chain of ownership. In reality, the identity of the culprit is almost always determined from witnesses, motives and opportunity, or by the criminal’s subsequent actions, rather than by tracing ownership of the weapon.

Countless millions of unregistered guns, guns going back to the Beretta-manufactured wheel-lock that John Alden brought over on the Mayflower, are already out there. There are lots of Americans just as handy as the Afghan bazaar craftsmen who can make an entire AK-47 with hand tools in mud shack, and we are presently entering the age in which you can print out that lower receiver (or an entire gun) with a 3-D printer. The Canadians tried registering all of their guns, spent billions on the project, and finally concluded that gun registration, after more than a decade had never actually played any role in solving any crime.

The truth of the matter is that gun registration, keeping track of serial numbers and ownership, is not about solving crimes at all. It is really just a way of injecting friction and cost and potential legal jeopardy into firearms transfers and owndership, with the end goal being confiscation.

In the end, Schatz proves his liberal bona fides, naturally, by deliberately destroying the AK he had fun assembling and shooting. It would be wrong to own such a thing. After all, it might climb out of your closet and go on a killing spree.

I never knew that rational people actually read Mother Jones, but Schatz’s commenters really kicked Schatz’s nonsense around the block. The comments are a lot better than the article.

Build parties sound mildly intriguing, and I have actually begun to see the point of owning so-called “assault weapons.” That lower receiver is just the platform to which you can attach an extraordinary variety of optional barrels, stocks, and accessories, making it, in essence, a Swiss Army Knife-style shooting platform. Still, even with a build party, the cost of upper receivers and barrels, stocks, and accessories inevitably add up. Start with a few hundred for the lower receiver and the party, and add in the rest, and that black rifle plinking toy is always going to cost pretty close to a thou. It can easily cost more.

You can buy some awfully nice classic old-fashioned rifles for that kind of money. Who’d want a plastic semi-auto plinker, when for the same kind of money you could buy, for instance, a pre-WWI classic sporter? The way I figure it, if we ever get into a state of civil unrest in which one really seriously needs an AR, I can always just shoot some representative of the tyrannical government and take his, which will have full-auto too.