The Regents Park Police recently proudly posted a photograph of the arms cache collected from a local charity shop, and destined for destruction so that they will not fall into the wrong hands.

I see a large number of undoubtedly dull used paring knives, a few old and cheap chef’s knives, a lowest quality used carving knife, several bread knives, two sharpening steels, two carving forks, a letter opener, a cheap tourist-trade replica barong, a cheap and inaccurate tourist version of a tanto, one fencing foil (these are all blunt), a cake frosting spreader, and a spoon (!).

Now, thank goodness, with that deadly spoon safely off the street, citizens of Regents Park can sleep safe in their beds.

National Gun Network:

People enjoying some hot wings the other day in Colorado Springs, CO got a front row seat to proof of the efficaciousness of a virtue-signaling gun-banning sign. Buffalo Wild Wings is a gun-free zone. It says so right on the sign on the front door in big, bold letters: “Buffalo Wild Wings, Inc Bans Guns on These Premises.”

The sign is highly effective 99.9% of the time. Just hope that you’re not there and unarmed for the 0.1% of the time when the place gets robbed, like it did the other day.

Two robbers, one with an “assault” rifle and one with a pistol, stormed into the restaurant and walked right past the sign that clearly bans guns.

Imagine how embarrassed they would have been if they had seen the sign! They probably would have turned right around. Maybe they couldn’t read, which led to their life of crime. …

The guy with the “assault” rifle didn’t even have to point it at anyone at Buffalo Wild Wings. He just held it and yelled at everyone to get back and stay down. To which they got back and stayed down, being civilized folks who had obeyed the sign on the front door banning guns.

The guy with the pistol was a bit more zealous with his crowd control measures, however. He pistol-whipped one person with his banned pistol, then grabbed the hostess in a choke-hold and held his banned pistol against her head until the register was emptied.

One of the civilized customers got down on the ground and crawled out the back door in a dignified manner, and then called the police. “They showed up in like 10 seconds,” she said. However, despite the rapid police response, the thieves got clean away with the cash.

It’s a good thing that no one was hurt! Well, except for the hostess who was choked and the person who got pistol-whipped and needed to go to the hospital.

The really good news is that Buffalo Wild Wings’ sign banning guns was almost totally effective. Aside from those two bad apples that robbed the place with guns, no one else in the restaurant had a gun! Compliance!

RTWT

This Wednesday the Oregon City Police Department posted a tweet (now removed) thanking the Benchmade Knife Company for helping destroy firearms.

The story hit the gun boards everywhere, and not surprisingly, the company’s Field Sports-oriented customer base was not amused to learn that Benchmade was proudly participating in chopping up turned-in guns in one of the classic liberal anti-firearms symbolic gestures. On Gun Feed, a poll response of 600 readers was indicating that 89% “will never again buy any Benchmade products.”

————————–

Benchmade tried some damage control, posting on its Facebook feed:

Benchmade is aware of the recent post from our local Oregon City Police Department.
–
We apologize for the confusion and concern that this post created. These were firearms that the Oregon City Police Department had to destroy in alignment with their policies. Oregon City Police requested the use of specialty equipment within the Benchmade facility to follow these requirements, and as a supporting partner of our local police force, we obliged the request.
–
Benchmade is a proud and unwavering supporter of both law enforcement and Second Amendment rights. These are commitments that we do not take lightly and will continue to support well into the future.
–
When asked for clarity from Oregon City Police Department, Chief Jim Band made the following statement: “When property is to be destroyed, it is the policy of the Oregon City Police Department to destroy property, including firearms, in accordance to our procedures and ORS. The Oregon City Police Department does not sell firearms.”

————————–

Angry gun enthusiasts looked around, and, what do you know? found Benchmade had given campaign donations to two anti-gun pols, one even out-of-state in New Mexico.

————————–

Jim Shepherd reports, that by Thursday:

[O]ther knife companies… checked in. Kershaw (“Our knives cut a lot of things but guns will never be one of them”), Zero Tolerance, Spyderco and others wasted no time getting in their licks or reaffirming their “unwavering” support of the Second Amendment.

And don’t start me on the “rant” videos or clips of people grinding up, breaking or otherwise destroying Benchmade knives. There are dozens of them, and more showing up almost hourly.

I own some, and I’ll never buy another Benchmade knife.

Flintlock rifle once owned by Louis XII, Carl Otto von Kienbusch Collection.

Guns.com reports that EU bureaucrats are proposing still further Draconian regulations, including requiring antique muzzleloaders in museum to be deactivated! Just weld up the barrel of that 17th-century wheel-lock with the royal provenance, please. Who cares if that destroys 6-figures of collectible value?

Besides further changes in magazine limits, requirements to join shooting clubs and restrictions on blank firing guns, some in the European Union want to lower the boom on replicas and black powder as well.

The Dutch Presidency, a 20 member assembly from the Netherlands that currently chair the EU ministerial councils, moved earlier this month to drastically change the alliance’s Firearms Directive in response to terrorist incidents in Europe including attacks in Paris and Brussels.

Among the changes would be to deactivate historical guns held in museums across Europe, ban the production of replica firearms to include reproductions of antique weapons, remove the entire class of Category D guns which includes most muzzleloaders, move single-shot long breechloaders with smoothbore barrels to a higher level of control, and other efforts.

The European Federation of Associations for Hunting and Conservation (FACE), the EUs most outspoken gun rights group, called the move draconian.

“Who will believe that the removal of the Category D and the prohibition of reproductions of antique firearms will effectively contribute to the fight against organized crime and terrorism?” reads a statement from the group. “No report highlighted that reproduction of antique firearms constitute a danger for security and society. Criminals using Kalashnikovs and arms dealers who supply terrorists on the black market will not be affected by these new constraints which exclusively hit honest citizens, legal owners of single-shot reproductions of antique firearms.”

As noted by the Prague Daily Monitor, Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka joined representatives from Slovakia, Poland, Austria and Switzerland in opposing the changes.

“The Czech Republic is very likely to express its negative position at the meeting of the council [for justice and home affairs] on June 10,” Sobotka said.

Besides the Dutch, the changes are supported by Croatia, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

Yale Alumni Mag:

If you were especially observant during your years on campus, you may have noticed a stone carving by the York Street entrance to Sterling Memorial Library that depict a hostile encounter: a Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American (top). When the library decided to reopen the long-disused entrance as the front door of the new Center for Teaching and Learning, says head librarian Susan Gibbons, she and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces decided the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” The Puritan’s musket was covered over with a layer of stone (bottom) that Gibbons says can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving.

HT: Instapundit.

The Telegraph:

One eyewitness, named only as Gerard, told the BBC: “I saw a geezer lying on the floor saying he’d been stabbed

“I saw these three Muslim guys run up and started stabbing this girl. They attacked her and stabbed another guy.

“They started running up the road, stabbed the bouncer at the Tavern.

“I was throwing bottles at them, pint glasses, stools, chairs, but I was defenceless.

“They were running up saying ‘this is for Allah’.

“They stabbed this girl maybe ten, 15 times. She was saying ‘help me, help me’.”

He claimed he had hit one of the attackers on the back of the head by throwing things at him, and was chased, but escaped unharmed.

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.

Kim Rhode

Shooting competitions used to attract mass audiences a bit over a century ago, not today. Today’s urbanized, emasculated, hoplophobic America prefers ball games, and current reporting associates firearms only with terrorism and mass shootings. It is additionally more technically difficult for television to cover the shooting sports, and NBC cannot be bothered to make the effort.

Kimberly Rhode, who shoots skeet, is the first woman to medal in six consecutive Olympic games, but no big corporate sponsor wants anything to do with her.

Bloomberg:

When Team USA’s Kim Rhode won a bronze medal in skeet shooting Friday, she claimed a piece of Olympic history: the 37-year-old Californian became the first woman to take the podium in six straight Olympics.

Landing a big-name sponsor might be the bigger feat. In the year leading up to Rio 2016, Rhode’s agent Patrick Quinn pitched her to around 20 companies that back the Olympics. None were convinced.

“The big mystery is how someone like Kim isn’t part of the Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and the Olympics sponsor push,’’ Quinn said by phone from Chicago.“It would be nice to have an Olympic sponsor recognize the magnitude of her accomplishment.’’

Coca-Cola Co. didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Procter & Gamble Co.’s spokesperson Damon Jones said in an e-mail the company receives hundreds of sponsorship requests so it must be selective. Rhode and other shooters on Team USA think the reason they’re passed over is obvious. The rise in gun violence and mass shootings in the US have attached a stigma to shooting as a sport, they say. So while companies like Winchester, Beretta and Otis Technology support Rhode, she doesn’t have a single sponsor from outside the firearm industry.

The same is true for USA Shooting, even though the sport has since 2000 been the fifth-highest medal producer for the US team at Summer Olympics. The very first gold medal for any sport awarded in Rio went to 19-year-old Ginny Thrasher, competing in her Olympics debut.

Politics may only tell part of the story. American television audiences don’t tend to watch shooting – or, for that matter, a number of other sports. “The biggest challenge is limited exposure,” said Peter Carlisle, head of the Olympic Sports and Action division at Octagon Worldwide. “If the sport itself doesn’t provide a consistent platform for the athletes to become recognizable and maintain relevance, there’s limited value to a sponsor.”

Read the whole thing.

The New York Daily News’ House Ballestician Gersh Kuntzman’s recent death-defying test-firing of the AR-15 has already become famous as an Internet meme.

Duffleblog has awarded him special honors.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A journalist from the New York Daily News has been awarded the National Defense Service Medal in recognition of his honorable service during a time of crisis, a Pentagon spokesperson announced today.

The recipient will also be eligible to receive disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs within the next decade.

Gersh Kuntzman, a veteran journalist of 30 years, put down the pen to take up the sword on Wednesday, traveling from New York to Philadelphia to experience the thrill of firing a military-grade weapon similar to the one used in the Orlando terror attack.

Kuntzman’s battle-weary, critically-acclaimed memoir, “What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing and very, very loud,” quickly gained widespread acclaim, including the notice of many active-duty service members, who lauded his steadfast heroics.

“We here in the Department of Defense are in awe of Mr. Kuntzman’s martial prowess and noble sacrifice to this nation,” said Lt. Col. Patricia Green, a Pentagon spokesperson. “Shooting an AR-15 is exactly the same as being in combat, as evidenced by Mr. Kuntzman’s self-diagnosed PTSD.”

The AR-15 assault bazooka is the civilian counterpart to the military’s M4A1 bazooka. The shoulder-fired weapon is renowned for its crippling recoil and deafening boom, leading many bazooka enthusiasts to train their children from an early age to develop the tolerance required to handle such a mighty instrument of destruction.

Whole thing.