OSD 52: Fun with landmines
Lots of quick hits this week, so let’s wrap up this long weekend right and get straight to them. Make it a great week everyone.
This week's links
Andrew Schulz has some fun doing tactical training
Some great normalization content on a mainstream channel.
Calibre Obscura
Great Twitter feed for weapon esoterica and anyone “interested in non-state groups in MENA/Asia”. Also puts out an awesome email newsletter, the most recent edition of which told “The Story of Baghdadi’s Gun”.
Refining the drawstroke
The Tactical Professor Claude Werner has a YouTube channel now, and kicked it off with this hyper-practical video about how to make sure you're not scooping on your drawstroke.
An oopsie with some militaria landmines
Some inert landmines from /r/gundeals were potentially a bit less inert than they were supposed to be. But relatively innocuously so, and hey — cover your ears, Fido — we’d pay good money for a not-that-inert landmine.
Thicc Boog Line
This shop announced this week that they're going to start shipping standard-capacity magazines to all 50 states. They’ve paused orders while working through the immediate flood of orders that came in, and they’ve got some payment processor issues now. It'll be interesting to watch. Civil disobedience is a balance between putting yourself at risk but not putting yourself into a position where you can no longer be effective for the community. And the gun community right now is constantly probing for where that edge lies.
“We didn’t win the American Revolution by beating the British Empire. We won by making it not be worth the cost to beat us.”
A timeless and often-forgotten lesson on the game theory of zero-sum disputes.
Michael Bloomberg making the case for stop-and-frisk a few years ago: “The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”
While it's non-obvious to lay people that this is where gun laws inevitable lead, if you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably already up to speed on that. But what we sometimes fail to appreciate is that people don’t have these ideas because they’re evil. It's worse: they have them because they believe they’re good.
C.S. Lewis put it like this: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
“Do not try this at home! Demonstration by the Kalashnikov Group experts.”
First part of the title checks out. Now the second part…
Guns are for everybody
This came up again in our OSD Slack this week, and it’s worth a repost here. Excellent photo essay from last summer on what gun owners look like.
Two big teachers unions call for rethinking student involvement in lockdown drills
More people are waking up to the needless fearmongering that school shooter drills put students through. And fair play to Everytown for stopping their support for these kinds of drills. The annual chance of a given child dying in a school shooting is the same as the chance of you dying from driving 15 miles in a car.
If someone says that you should be coaching kids to be afraid, take a second to think about what they’re selling.