Vedder Holsters Daily Digest: A Poor Metric, A Change of Heart and the New Normal in Vegas

Do tell . . . Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence

So mass shootings become a symbol of gun violence in general. The deaths of dozens become a window into the death of one, and a separate one, and a different one over there.

This, of course, has already happened with the mass shooting on Sunday in Las Vegas that left at least 58 people dead and hundreds more injured.

And this is a problem. What we know about mass shootings suggests that they are different from the everyday deaths that happen at the end of a gun. The weapon is the same. So much else is different. And the distorted image we get by using one as a lens through which to view the other has consequences for our understanding of the problem and the policies that might address it.

And that might explain . . . Why mass shootings rarely change the paralyzed politics of guns

In the cultural and political standoff over the role that guns should play in American society, the sides are so starkly drawn that groups such as the NRA don’t really need to jump into action when a traumatic event such as the Vegas shooting takes place.

“The NRA doesn’t need to send out their troops immediately after these shootings, because they’ve already trained people to believe that these incidents will lead to a crackdown on gun ownership,” said Jeff Nugent, a former chief executive of companies such as Revlon and Neutrogena and brother of rock star Ted Nugent, who serves on the NRA’s national board.

You can almost hear the sound of the scales falling from her eyes . . . I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.

When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

The new normal in Vegas? . . . Guests Scanned at the Wynn in Glimpse of Las Vegas’s Future

At entrances to the Wynn resort in Las Vegas on Monday afternoon, guards scanned visitors with metal-detector wands and inspected their bags, creating a 10-minute wait to get inside. The new security protocol, put in place after Sunday’s mass shooting nearby, is likely to become the norm on the Strip and possibly beyond.

Casinos and entertainment venues are going to have to take a more holistic approach to security, thinking about rooftops and other potential shooting perches — considering the possibilities for an attack from all angles, said David Shepherd, a former FBI special agent in counterterrorism who later was the security director for Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s Venetian resort.

Figuring The Wind with Ballistic

While velocity and bullet drop can be calculated fairly easily with the proper numbers, how wind affects bullet trajectory must be determined through years of experience, unless using the Wind Kit available with the Ballistic App Advanced and iPad Editions.

The Ballistic Wind Kit uses the JBM ballistic engine’s wind capabilities to allow shooters to account for nearly any possible wind situation. In fact, the wind kit allows users to quickly program the most complex wind scenarios.

Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. Announces the Repurchase of 243,423 Shares of Its Common Stock in the Third Quarter of 2017

Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (RGR) announced today that during the third quarter of 2017 the Company repurchased a total of 243,423 shares of its common stock in open market transactions at an aggregate cost of $11.3 million. The average price per share repurchased was $46.33. These repurchases, which accounted for 1.4% of the outstanding shares of the Company’s common stock as of July 1, 2017, were funded with cash on hand.

At the end of the third quarter, $88.7 million remained authorized and available for share repurchases and 17.4 million shares of common stock remained outstanding.

Yeah, don’t hold your breath . . . Dear Jimmy Kimmel: Stay Out Of The Gun Debate If You Can’t Be Honest

Maybe  you’re okay with innocent Americans losing their constitutional rights because they’ve been placed on an unaccountable secret government list for no reason. Most people aren’t, however; even the American Civil Liberties Union agreed with the NRA on this. You owe it to your audience to tell the truth about the matter. . . .

The American gun debate is a very critical one, Mr. Kimmel. It involves issues as diverse as civil rights, civil society, self-defense, an independent citizenry, public safety, and political power. We should be able to count upon public figures to provide factual, well-reasoned arguments on one side or the other regarding this crucial topic. If you are not capable of doing so, then for goodness’s sake, please, keep your mouth shut and let the people who do understand these things discuss them.

This is why we can’t have nice things . . . Bump stocks — Legal in NJ, but even this gun shop owner wants them banned

Joe Hawk, the owner of Guns and Roses gun shop in Toms River, said he doesn’t sell bump stocks in his store — and believes they shouldn’t be sold at all.

“There’s no reason for it. There’s no need for it. It’s only for someone who’s trying to increase their rate of fire,” he said. “The only reason you would use something like an increased rate of fire would be in a war zone.

“The only reason that you’d want to do that is to put yourself on a battlefield, and American streets and American communities are not a battlefield.”

Incandescent stupidity . . . If Only Stephen Paddock Were a Muslim

What happens when the killer was only a disturbed American armed to the teeth with military-style weapons that he bought legally or acquired easily because of us and our crazy lax gun laws?

Then we know what happens: The president and the Republican Party go into overdrive to ensure that nothing happens. Then they insist — unlike with every ISIS-related terror attack — that the event must not be “politicized” by asking anyone, particularly themselves, to look in the mirror and rethink their opposition to common-sense gun laws.