Hope you had a lovely past week, starting off with the spicy memes of the lawyer couple in St. Louis and wrapping up with a long weekend celebrating the 4th. Let’s get straight to this week’s links.
This week’s links
Is full auto useful for home defense?
Lucky Gunner brings you this video, partly as an educational exercise and partly as an excuse to play around with an MP5. Not that you need an excuse for that.
“We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later.”
June was the highest month for gun sales ever.
The New York Times on black gun owners
As Jane Coaston notes in the linked tweet, “The right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed, regardless of race and regardless of reasoning.”
The truth about “assault weapons”
This handy video was made in 1989, just before California passed a state-level “assault weapons” ban — the first law of its kind. In the video, a mustachioed cop straight out of central casting patiently explains the kafkaesque silliness of the law. The tone is calm and reasonable, so (notwithstanding the heavy ‘80s vibes) it’s a useful video to share with fence-sitters.
@2Aupdates pointed out an interesting historical detail about the video: the police officer who made it, Leroy Pyle, was retaliated against by his police chief, getting suspended and then demoted. The New York Times wrote about the intradepartmental feud in 1990:
The fight between Chief McNamara, 55 years old, and Mr. Pyle, 48, is in a sense a fight between two competing American faiths. In Mr. Pyle’s view, guns are an honest citizen's last defense against the encroachment of evil - whether on the part of a common criminal, a foreign invader or a domestic tyrant.
He has decorated his home accordingly. Mr. Pyle, who moonlights as an instructor in self-defense, has rifles stacked in corners, cartons of tear gas on the floor and a tangle of computer equipment to swap information with other gun enthusiasts.
To Chief McNamara, guns are less likely to deter evil than to inflame it. Drawing on his days as a beat patrolman in Harlem, he favors stories about guns that turned ordinary quarrels into lethal ones.
The clash between the two men has helped each confirm his worst fears about the other side. Mr. Pyle says his N.R.A. work has brought him ostracism from colleagues who are trying to please their chief, a week’s suspension without pay, an order to visit the Police Department’s psychiatrist and a disciplinary transfer back to a patrol beat from his job as a police trainer. He has filed a suit charging violation of his civil rights and a grievance charging that Chief McNamara violated union rules on discipline.
Mr. Pyle cites what he calls his own persecution as a small example of the government tyranny that he says private gun ownership is intended to resist. “The Joe McNamaras of this world are the reason people have to have guns,” he said.
😍 “tangle of computer equipment to swap information with other gun enthusiasts” 😍
Merch
We have a merch store. There are nice and subtle t-shirts, a hat, and some archival gallery-quality gun art for your walls. It’s good stuff.
OSD Office Hours
If you’re a new gun owner, thinking about becoming one, or know someone who is, click here to come to OSD Office Hours. You get a 30-minute video call with an OSD team member to ask any and all questions in a friendly, non-judgmental space. For free. So come on by!