Marine experiment finds women get injured more frequently, shoot less accurately than men
This will never do. Time to give men less accurate optics . . .
Women in a new Marine Corps unit created to assess how female service members perform in combat were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield, according to the results of a long-awaited study produced by the service.
The research was carried out by the service in a nine-month long experiment at both Camp Lejeune, N.C., and Twentynine Palms, Calif. About 400 Marines, including 100 women, volunteered to join the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force, the unit the Marine Corps created to compare how men and women do in a combat environment.
“This is unprecedented research across the services,” said Marine Col. Anne Weinberg, the deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office. “What we tried to get to is what is that individual’s contribution to the collective unit. We all fight as units… We’re more interested in how the Marine Corps fights as units and how that combat effectiveness is either advanced or degraded.”
Hackers Made a Gun That Can Be Fired With a Raised Eyebrow
Armed self defense is for everyone . . .
Over the last four years, a small group of assistive technology hackers has been developing a remote-controlled gun that can be fired using just the muscles in the shooter’s forehead. Last week, 37-year old Floridian Michael Phillips put the shooting assistant to the test at a local shooting range and probably became the first person to ever fire a gun with their eyebrow.
Phillips lives with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a genetic disease that results in the loss of voluntary muscle movement. When he was born, doctors gave Phillips less than a year to live, but nearly four decades later he’s still crossing items off his ‘Things to Do’ list. Although he describes himself as “ultra-liberal, anti-NRA, anti-all things Trumpian,” Phillips still included a visit to a shooting range to “fire a gun with a switch” on his to-do list.
How Self-Defense And Suicide Are Changing The Conversation On Guns In The West
A fairly balanced panel discussion . . .
Guns have always been a part of life in the West. Forty-two percent of Utah residents own a gun, according to a 2017 Salt Lake Tribune-Hinckley Institute of Politics poll. The number of Utah women who own guns has surged in the last five years.
States in the Mountain West have some of the most permissive gun laws in the country. But many of these states struggle with the same problem: suicide. Utah has one of America’s lowest homicide rates and one of the highest suicide rates.
Nearly 90 percent of all gun deaths here are suicides – and half of suicides involve a gun. How do Western states square an affinity for guns with a rising suicide rate? And what can be done to save more lives?
Let the Firearms Tracing Center Do Its Job
What could possibly go wrong? . . .
When law-enforcement agents seek information on guns found at crime scenes, they call the firearms tracing center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Agents at the tracing center, in West Virginia, then try to establish a chain of custody based on the gun’s serial number, manufacturer, distributor and retailer.
The agents pursue this task in the most inefficient, wasteful and time-consuming manner imaginable, manually searching records — about 800 million of them — because federal law purportedly prevents the center from organizing them into a searchable digital database.
This absurd prohibition needs to be lifted.
The Gun Cultist as Horror Movie Villain
The entertainment industry demonizes gun owners at every opportunity . . .
One of the qualities of the Horror Movie Villain that makes him so creepy is his sociopathic narcissism. Such villains give us chills, not because they twirl their mustaches and rub their hands at being eeeeeevil, but because they simply do not see their victims at all even when they are looking right at them.
This is the mark of the Gun Cult. A Gun Cultist, I say again, is not somebody who owns or shoots guns. A Gun Cultist is marked rather by his total, obsessive, self-absorbed narcissism. When confronted by the spectacle of slaughter in an elementary school, the normal person automatically responds, “Dear God in heaven, what can we do to make sure this never happens again!” It is the normal response of any psychologically well-adjusted human.
In contrast, the sole response of the Gun Cultist is “I didn’t do it! Screw you! Don’t touch my gun!” He may elaborate on this primal selfishness with more crazy, such as, “This was a hoax perpetrated by Obama! The parents of those ‘dead kids’ are in on this!” or some variation on these themes. But at the heart of the response is this: when push comes to shove, the Gun Cultist would rather see every single child in the US have his or her head blown off than consider even the tiniest change to our gun regime.