David Codrea

Most Recent Smart Gun Fail Illustrates Continuing ‘Journalism’ Fail

January 24, 2022 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

We’re sorry; we are unable to complete your call as dialed. Please check the number and dial again, or call your operator to help you. (LodeStar Works/Facebook)
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “During a demonstration to share holders last week, the operator clicks the key pad on the side of the 9mm smart gun,” self-described “AP & Emmy Award winning journalist” Christie Ileto of Philadelphia’s ABC 6 Action News tweeted. “Once unlocked, the smart gun is operable.”

To prove her point, she embeds a video from Lodestar Firearms demonstrating its gun being test-fired. Thing is, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends upon what the meaning of the word “operable” is.

The operator clearly confirms he intends to fire “two rounds.” He fires one shot. Enlarging the video to full screen appears to show him squeezing the trigger a second time with no results.

During a demonstration to share holders last week, the operator clicks the key pad on the side of the 9mm smart gun. Once unlocked, the smart gun is operable. @Lodestarguns @6abc https://t.co/gVzML0sARg pic.twitter.com/c8O8zNbp6i
— Christie Ileto (@Christie_Ileto) January 18, 2022

Ileto introducing that by saying “the smart gun is operable” is one of those moments in journalism equivalent to NBC “reporter” Kelli Stavast telling viewers that a NASCAR crowd yelling something completely different was chanting “Let’s go Brandon!” It’s reminiscent of CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez assuring his audience that he was reporting on “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” as flames arose behind him.
Who are you going to believe? The DSM or your own lying eyes and ears?
“Our team believes in the Second Amendment and an individual’s right to choose any legal firearm,” Lodestar claimed in 2018. “We are making personalized guns a safe, viable option for U.S. gun owners.”
The assertion would carry more credibility if they weren’t being cheered on by Washington Ceasefire, as committed a group of gun-grabbers as you’ll ever come across, spouting out such inanities as “2021 Election is a Big Win for Gun Free Zones.” So forgive me if Lodestar’s assurance evokes recollections of familiar Democrat boilerplate responses to gun-owning constituent inquiries that begin “I believe in the Second Amendment” followed immediately by them revealing their big “buts.”
And the “right to choose any legal firearms” leaves a hole big enough to drive CS gas-firing tanks through. Gun prohibitionists making what they had in mind perfectly clear is what caused such an uproar from the gun community over so-called “smart gun” in the first place:
“New Jersey tried to largely ban traditional handguns once smart guns became a reality, and many blame the dearth of smart guns today on that looming prohibition. One national headline called it the ‘New Jersey Law That’s Kept Smart Guns Off Shelves.’ Lawmakers changed course in 2019. Now state statute only requires sellers to stock smart guns once they meet ‘performance standards.’”
It’s not that gun owner advocates oppose “smart guns” because we’re are against the idea of choice— it’s that we’re against having no choice. Especially if you’re a person of limited means and there’s a substantial add-on cost to tack on “stupid electronic doodads” designed to interfere with a gun’s primary function– to fire when needed.
Does anyone doubt California will start culling its “Handguns Certified for Sale” roster whenever it thinks it can get away with it? And that any challenges will be decided by activist judges who then rule selective gun bans don’t violate the Second Amendment?
And, of course, once legislation mandating electronic gun technology is coercively “normalized,” it doesn’t take too much imagination to see what the next “commonsense gun safety” demand will be: Consider this recent headline:

“BIDEN INFRASTRUCTURE BILL: MANDATED KILL SWITCHES COMING TO CARS IN 2026”

Some of us have been warning for many years against mandatory “shutoffs” for guns that “authorities” would then use to effectively disarm the “law-abiding.” No one thinks criminals would be fools enough to so arm themselves, do they?

The technology already exists:

“Tech Company Demonstrates Remote Disabling of a ‘Smart Gun’”

There’s something else we’ve been warning against, a concept that evidently eludes either LodeStar founder Gareth Glaser or at least the “reporter” who gave him free startup publicity a few years back:
“‘It’s really important that Americans trust the reliability of this gun and we believe if a major city police department or law enforcement organization adopts these guns it will go a long way toward acceptance,’ said Glaser. They’ve already met with New York City Police Department officials, departments of correction in New York and the Seattle Police Department.”
That’s great, Gareth. You got some noncommittal nods from politically dependent administration lackeys. Now tell us what the rank-and-file and their unions will say when you tell them they’re going to be required to deploy with guns that go dead after one shot under perfectly set up investor demonstration conditions.
He also made a big deal about suicides, as if thinking that smart guns would stop owners from committing them is anything but dumb. Thinking that it would make a statistically significant impact on those who take other peoples’ guns to kill themselves is even dumber.
But back to “Let’s go Christie!” she put out another tweet elaborating on how LodeStar works:
“EXCLUSIVE look at @Lodestarguns ’ smart gun that has technology like a smart phone. Biometric finger print and an internal blue chip for authentication via a phone app, are some of the ways to verify the users identity.”
As for biometrics, “smartphones” have been around a lot longer than “smart guns,” and a simple search shows hinky fingerprint readers are not problems you want to have to troubleshoot in a gunfight. Do you really want to risk your life — and the lives of those depending on you — on that? And as for phone apps, who doesn’t have personal experience where a wifi or Bluetooth connection experienced a signal loss or took a while and multiple attempts to establish?
Who among us hasn’t pointed and clicked a “mostly” reliable TV remote control or garage door opener and had nothing happen?

About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.

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Feuer Going for More Gun Laws Hides Failure of L.A. Government

January 21, 2022 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

And if we can’t take the rabidly anti-gun L.A. Times’ word for it, whose can we take? [Mike Feuer/Facebook)U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer on Tuesday, Jan. 18, announced an eight-point plan to address increasing gun violence in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Daily News reported Tuesday. “Feuer — who is running for mayor this year — submitted a plan calling for an inter-jurisdictional response to gun violence to Mayor Eric Garcetti, the City Council, the Board of Police Commissioners, Police Chief Michel Moore, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon.”

The very first sentence is an admission of the utter failure of every fraudulent infringement Feuer — and the L.A. government he has been a prominent part of for decades — have mandated by diktat in the name of “gun safety.” Not only has the state of California attained the highest “gun laws” grade from both the Brady Campaign and the Giffords gun-grab groups but Feuer and every person he submitted his latest citizen disarmament scheme to has built a powerful political career on Second Amendment subversion.

If their edicts really did work, why is there “increasing gun violence”? Isn’t proposing new prohibitions not only a masked admission that none of them have, and that the violence monopolist will never have enough until they have it all? And what do we call those whose control is total?

Looking at Feuer’s “new” plan, the first thing that becomes apparent is there’s nothing new about it. This stuff has all been tried and failed before, in lots of high-violence places, including in L.A.
He wants a cross-jurisdictional collaboration, which is another way of saying he wants to put together a commission that does nothing but come up with new pretexts to ban more citizens from owning guns. He also wants more “city/county collaboration.”
So he wants more collaborators. And we might ask what the hell the Joint Regional Intelligence Center has been doing all these years and if taxpayers can get their money back.
“Feuer also called for the city to add resources to the LAPD’s Gun Unit to help it address the 136% increase in unserialized ghost guns that were recovered in 2021 compared to 2020,” the report continues. Without knowing numbers, that is, how many had been used in crimes of violence, who the firearms were “recovered” from, and how that compares to all of the guns confiscated, that percentage is pretty much a meaningless figure thrown out to spook the herd. And how having a serial number in the first place helps trace a gun to a “prohibited” perp who is outside the data stream and then prevent anything is a magic trick that has yet to be explained.
Feuer also wants “more gun buyback programs,” because after all the ones they’ve been having all these years, “gun violence” — by his own admission — is “increasing.” Perhaps he and his fellow collaborators never read the National Institute of Justice’s “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies” which concluded:
“Gun buybacks are ineffective as generally implemented. 1. The buybacks are too small to have an impact. 2. The guns turned in are at low risk of ever being used in a crime. 3. Replacement guns are easily acquired. Unless these three points are overcome, a gun buyback cannot be effective.”
But I guess it’s only “commonsense gun safety” to entice widows who may not have a clue on how to safely clear a gun to handle and transport one, with a high probability of being in violation of California law when they do. Still, it does make for “good press” to see LAPD trot out an inert tube while a gushing media lauds the “Only Ones” for saving them from a rogue rocket launcher! Except when someone besides the “real reporters” notices the gun collectors endangering themselves and the public by having their booger hooks on the bang switch…
That’s some “commonsense gun safety.”
“To address neighborhoods that have persistent gun violence, Feuer’s plan calls for the creation of a Neighborhood Solutions Program that brings representatives from city departments and elected officials together to identify priority problems and work across jurisdictional lines to address the issues,” the report continues. Again, this is just so much babbling to cover the reality that, rather than provide solutions, “progressive” urban wealth transfers have instead perpetuated and enabled violence.
Notice we aren’t given any verifiable specifics on those “intervention programs that have been proved to work.” A prominent one I remember didn’t:

“Hector ‘Big Weasel’ Marroquin, 51 — who founded the one-time city-funded group ‘No Guns’ in 1996, purportedly to work against gang and gun violence in the inner city — is charged with the sale of an assault rifle, a machine gun, two pistols and two silencers…”
And Feuer noting that “gun violence declines when sources of blight are cleaned and high-crime neighborhoods are beautified” ignores that cleaning up for and after someone hardly provides the same incentives for continued maintenance that people taking care of their own turf provides. “Give” something and don’t be surprised to see more stories like:
“The new $18.6 million Gold Line Bridge, designed as a piece of public art, was defaced with significant graffiti over the weekend and the cleanup could force an eastbound lane closure at least one night early next week.”
Instead, we see crime going unpunished in Los Angeles, with “authorities” scrambling to prove who is most “woke” at distancing themselves from accusations of “overrepresenting” minorities in the criminal justice system. It’s no wonder we see rampant “smash and grab” robberies, freight trains looted “with impunity,” and much, much worse:
“LAPD identifies Brianna Kupfer’s ‘killer’ as a career criminal with dozens of arrests who was out on $1K bail as they tell public not to approach ‘armed and dangerous’ suspect.”
Naturally, one of Feuer’s plan recipients is DA George Gascon, another in a line of government functionaries beholden to George Soros, whose latest outrage was allowing a no-jail wrist-slap sentence for a child molester. Except apparently, if I mention Soros I’ll make myself vulnerable to accusations of antisemitism (despite years of working with Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership to help them promote the only credible way to say “Never again!” and mean it).
As for Feuer, I’ve been responding to this political wretch’s obsessive hatred of his countrymen’s rights for years, certainly for longer than I’ve been chronicling his obnoxious attacks over at The War on Guns blog, which was started in 2005.
I’m reminded of an emotionally satisfying little project I conducted at one of the “ATF Night” dinners we used to hold when I lived in Southern California. Then-councilthing and domestic-enemy-in-training “Der” wanted the city to mandate thumbprints for ammo purchases. I brought a piece of paper and an ink pad, and a bunch of us signed and stamped it under a note telling him we were giving him a fingerprint instead of a thumbprint, and inviting him to guess which one we’d used (and past second-guessing over that story compels me to point out it was hardly the same level of risk as what some better men who came before us took, there comes a time to put such fears aside and stand, and aside from some natural deaths in the intervening years, we’re all still here).
When Angelenos vote for Feuer for mayor, they’ll get exactly the government they enable. And exactly the results.

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Mexican Fast and Furious Warrants Ignore Roles U.S. Government Played

January 19, 2022 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

(Note: This report includes several links to stories published a decade or more ago on a website that no longer exists except via web crawls on the Internet Archive “Wayback Machine.” As such, those links may load slowly.)

The same lies that were told before “Project Gunwalker” was exposed are now being told again — and for the same reasons.
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Mexico issues arrest warrants in ‘Fast and Furious’ gun trafficking case,” Reuters reports. “A Mexican judge has issued seven arrest warrants related to a decade-old cross-border arms trafficking sting, including for the country’s most notorious drug lord and an ex-security minister…”

“The Mexican attorney general’s office announced the warrants Sunday, naming three of the targets, including drug kingpin Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán,” The Hill elaborates. “The other two targets named were Genaro García Luna, who served as Public Security secretary under former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, and Luis Cárdenas Palomino, a close collaborator of García Luna’s and former head of intelligence for Mexico’s now-defunct Federal Police.”

So, it was a “public/private partnership”? Conducted by higher-ups in the virulently anti-“lax U.S. gun laws” Calderón administration while El Presidente was demanding a renewed U.S. “assault weapons ban” and the usual gang of domestic useful idiots was cheering him on…? At the same time, his military guard was leaking secrets to the cartels?
I never did get an answer to my tweet. And it does raise questions into how much corrupt Mexican functionaries knew about “gunwalking” while those tasked with officially coordinating such information were being restrained from doing so by higher-ups. As if U.S. semiautos being walked across the border was the real source of supply for cartels that got military-grade weaponry from their Mexican government partners (who got them from “authorized” U.S. exports) and from shipments coming across its southern border.
The ubiquitous “botched gun sting” characterization mentioned in the lede is a good indication that the public is once more being steered toward a narrative parroted by a “mainstream press” that had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the story in the first place.
How can you have a “sting” if you allow the guns to cross the border and escape into the wild, making no attempt to track them? And how can you attempt that with the Mexican government kept in the dark? That at least is the official story and attempts to pierce the U.S. government’s veil of obfuscation have been successfully deflected so far.
Colleague Kurt Hofmann came up with an apt analogy showing the “sting” model was every bit as ridiculous and unbelievable as South Park’s “underpants gnomes” business model:
Phase 1: Allow guns to “walk,” Phase 2: ? and Phase 3: Take down the cartels.
How do you get from here to there?
Chillingly, it looks like Phase 2 was “Count on guns being recovered next to bodies at Mexican crime scenes.” And it looks like phase 3 was really “Use that to trick the public into demanding more U.S. gun laws.”
And an incontrovertible fact remains: Either ATF engineered this violation of Arms Export Control Laws into a sovereign foreign nation and either left Hillary Clinton’s State Department in the dark or it didn’t. Why has Congress, with House Oversight and Senate Judiciary running tag team investigations, and the “independent” Office of Inspector General report, never definitively resolved that? Why are a handful of motivated citizens with extremely limited resources the only ones asking, like Kent Terry, brother of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose murder was the beginning of ATF’s unraveling?
We know part of the answer was so that ATF management could treat Gunwalker crimes as personnel policy violations. And we saw how that worked out in the case of one of the key players, with a lucrative double-dipping “sweetheart deal” (that also got him out of the country) courtesy of the Bureau’s credit card provider (which also “just happens” to financially discriminate against “companies that make military-style weapons for consumers”).

And when things started getting too hot for the DOJ, the Fifth Amendment came into play. It shows how unjustifiably optimistically wrong I was when I speculated:
“This could be huge: The monolithic front presented by the administration is crumbling. Career law enforcement personnel are in fear of being charged as criminals and are looking to protect themselves. That could mean ultimately implicating higher-ups, as opposed to falling on their swords and taking one for the team.”
That never happened (you’ll have to ask the Republicans why), so nothing to see here, folks.
Back to the present, what’s happening now may as well be labeled “lather, rinse, repeat.”
“DEA says cartels are arming themselves with military-grade weapons coming from the US,” San Antonio’s Fox 29 claims. “The Mexican government says 70% of crimes committed with guns in Mexico are linked to guns that came from the U.S. and of those, more than 40% come from Texas alone.”
They’re using the same old lies they used to prime the public for more citizen disarmament until that got interrupted by Fast and Furious being exposed. First, it’s not military-grade weaponry, and second, the percentages are being deliberately misrepresented: It’s not “crimes committed with guns in Mexico,” it’s gun information submitted by the Mexican government to ATF for tracing. The ones they didn’t submit are for obvious reasons.
With this as the backdrop, the domestic agents of a foreign entity over at the Brady Campaign are partnering with the Mexican government in its $10B lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers to try to do through the courts what they can’t get accomplished through legislation – destroy the firearms industry, disarm the citizens and undermine what the Founders knew as “being necessary to the security of a free State.”
It would seem the wrong people are on trial for seditious conspiracy.
And I don’t suppose controlling the border might be an option to reduce the flow of guns, or is the flow of future Democrats more important to the people who want us disarmed?
Afterword:
On Saturday, I discussed much of this with Lies of Omission producer T.L. Davis on his Texas TL in Exile podcast:

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Washington Post Throwing Stones Brings to Mind Cautions about Glass Houses

January 14, 2022 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

When self-styled Beltway pundits start calling Georgians who question election integrity “big liars” while ridiculing their guns and their ways, it’s time to wonder just how desperate they and the people they write for are getting.
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Brian Kemp atones for his anti-Trump heresy by lurching right on guns,” a Wednesday opinion piece in The Washington Post by “columnist” Paul Waldman hyperbolizes. “That state will be the white-hot center of the 2022 elections, with close races for Senate and governor, and even a high-profile race for secretary of state, where Brad Raffensperger, who refused to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump, is being challenged by a Trump loyalist.”

Gun Prohibitionists Hacks Going All-In to Disarm the Legally Innocent ~ VIDEO

January 11, 2022 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

Guilty until proven innocent? Really?
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Fairfax County wants people to know they can prevent gun violence through its red-flag law,” a free advertisement opinion piece for a wannabe gun-grab group presented “courtesy” of The Washington Post claims.

Without Gaslighting and Projection, Gun Prohibitionists Have Nothing

January 3, 2022 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

Without Gaslighting and Projection, Gun Prohibitionists Have Nothing, iStock-602335156
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Down the barrel of a gun,” a USA Today headline begins. “How Second Amendment activism can be a gateway to extremist ideologies.”

Philadelphia’s Emphasis on ‘Gun Laws’ Guarantees Violence Will Continue

December 31, 2021 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

Just blame the record homicides on citizens buying guns to protect themselves from the predictable results. (Larry Krasner for DA/Facebook)
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “A rising tide of stolen guns helps fuel Philadelphia’s gun violence epidemic,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. “A surge in new gun owners and a spike in gun thefts from cars are contributing to the city’s gun violence crisis, police and experts say.”

L.A. Elites Trying to Escape Consequences They Impose on the Rest of Us

December 28, 2021 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

Wealthy Democrats outsourcing birthrights to hirelings while denying the rest of us the means of effective defense is no way to run a Republic. IMG NRA-ILA
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “High-Profile L.A. Crimes Spark Rush for Bullet-Proof Cars, Rolex Replicas and Safe Rooms,” The Hollywood Reporter observes. “Security agencies say wealthy clients are increasing protective measures: ‘They want someone who knows how to get them out of any situation.’”

‘May Issue’ Permits Make Discriminatory ‘Pay-to-Play’ Concealed Carry Inevitable

December 23, 2021 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

Campaigns cost a lot of money and based on experience, Santa Clara County’s top “Only One” knows how to produce results. (Sheriff Laurie Smith/Facebook)
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “A Santa Clara County civil grand jury accused Sheriff Laurie Smith of corruption,” NBC Bay Area reports. “The sheriff is accused of multiple counts of “willful and corrupt misconduct in office.” Six of the seven counts are connected to allegations of trading coveted concealed weapons permits for contributions to her re-election campaigns.”

Oxford Murders-Inspired Gun Storage Bill Can Have Fatal Consequences

December 22, 2021 by contrib1 Leave a Comment

If by “gun sense” they mean all the predators who have been stopped by responsible armed children would have instead prevailed, then yeah, they’ve got themselves a champion. (Moms Demand Action/Twitter)
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich … announced plans to introduce legislation requiring secure firearm storage in homes with children,” Fox News reported. It’s a direct response to the Oxford school murders, following Rahm Emanuel’s “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” political template.