20040214

Legislative Proposal: Civil Immunity for Hosts of Armed Citizens Act of 2004

Colorado law provides for businesses, churches, and other such entities to exclude concealed-carry from their premises. We are ambivalent about the law granting such rights very broadly, in spite of the private-property aspect that these rights imply.

Businesses in Colorado are posting, or considering posting against CCW, more so now that the CCW law has been changed to shall-issue. They aren’t all doing so because they have any particular animus towards armed citizens (surely some do but all do not); they’re doing it because of the threat of liability. They are worried, reasonably, that they will be sued if a lawfully-carrying citizen has to draw and fire on their premises. Given the urban legends of frivolous lawsuits, we can understand but we cannot sympathize with businesses who are posting to protect themselves from such liability. We gun owners are responsible people and we insist that responsibility be not laid at innocent feet.

In that spirit, we propose the following Colorado law:

No enterprise engaged in lawful commerce or other entity hosting a peaceable assembly on premises located in the State of Colorado shall be found liable, jointly or severally, in civil proceedings for pain, suffering, injury, or death inflicted upon any person on, entering, or leaving said premises by a person armed in accordance with the laws of the State of Colorado.


We are not lawyers so we may have missed some term of art or exactitude. We will not accept any hits for run-on sentences. Note that we don't want to rule out Vermont-style carry should that ever be attempted again (ohhhh, it will).

20040210

The projectile is the weapon

so we start our description of Fûz's Thumper with caliber and cartridge.

Jeff Cooper originally recommended .44 Auto Mag, made by cutting down, blowing out straight and reaming a 7.62mm (.308 Winch) cartridge case to acccept a .429" bullet. This was back in the day when AutoMags were big, all-stainless, custom rotating-bolt pistols of a unique design. Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry had an AutoMag as a SHTF gun in Sudden Impact. We can recall no other movies featuring this rare pistol.

You can form your own cases and load your own ammo---in fact you have to. Reportedly the guns themselves were finicky and would feed reliably with only a few loadings. A 180-grain bullet at almost 1800 fps from the muzzle would be devastating.

The AutoMag is now a collector's item, but the .45 Winchester Magnum seems to be around to stay. A firm briefly offered an M1 Carbine rebarreled and otherwise modified to fire this cartridge, but we don't hear from them anymore.

That cartridge would suffice, we suppose, but we add some criteria:
  • we'd rather have a shoulder to headspace against
  • we want a hard crimp to make the chamber pressure more consistent from round to round, and make the ammunition more tolerant of the recoil banging it around as it climbs the magazine towards the chamber.

We want a case with a shoulder. It doesn't have to be much. We'll give a little on bullet diameter to get one.

So we propose a case of 33mm length, just like the .44 AutoMag, with a tiny shoulder and outside neck turned if needed so it takes the .410" bullet. Load the same weight to the same velocity, with a jacketed truncated cone bullet. This is no new invention, it's the .41 Jurras Magnum Pistol cartridge, for which we can find no URLable load data.

This cartridge, if OAL is managed, will fit in the M1 Carbine's magazines.

Not enough, you say? Put the same treatment to the .45 Win Mag case instead. Then you have the .41 Avenger. It will have greater propellant capacity, and tolerate higher chamber pressures, but it will be more expensive to manufacture and supply because it relies on a less-commonly available component. Fûz's Thumper will not require special feeding if we can avoid it.

20040209

RMBR

Another Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup, this time at Matthew Edgar's place. Please go read what the Rockies have to offer.

We were sniffed today, and about damned time

As we pointed our urban assault vehicle on to the I-25 today, a big van was parked on the shoulder with traffic cones around it. The driver was dismounted, fiddling with a tripod upon which a little aluminum box was mounted, pointed at tailgate level of the cars descending the ramp. Right where cars would naturally be stepping on it to merge with three lanes of traffic climbing a hill with a legal limit of 75 mph.

The van's markings identified it as an automotive emissions remote testing system. About damned time.

Your humble blogger published the following lettitor in the Centre Daily Times in September of 1994:
Imagine a device about the size of a piece of luggage. It can sense pollution in automobile exhaust by the way light passes through it. The device can be placed along a busy roadway, and will flag the one car out of one hundred that pollutes too much. The device senses real exhaust in the real world, in any weather, in real driving conditions, maybe even at night.

The other 99 cars, and their drivers, pass by without inconvenience; their engines are in tune and their drivers keep them that way. Drivers from other parts pass through, and if they pollute, the device catches them. If they don’t, they go about their business.

Imagine that this device costs about as much as a car. Almost every county in Pennsylvania could afford one.

Now for the hard part: this device exists. It was field tested in California (notorious for clean air standards) two years ago. It could be a regular production item this year if enough states ordered them.

Unfortunately, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is committed to a system of centralized, stationary auto emissions testing centers. Blair and Centre county cars must be tested. Cars from neighboring counties, where emissions aren’t tested, may pollute here. Our cars may not.

Regardless of how well you maintain your car, the emissions testing center requires you to make an appointment, maybe even take off work, to submit your car to testing. You pay for the test.

The testing center also tries very hard to simulate real-world driving conditions, and doesn’t quite cut it. All that simulation isn’t cheap either. This emissions testing center costs a lot more than a car; it costs more like what a small bridge costs. Something’s wrong with this system.

Ask yourself which you’d rather have. Then call our Governor and ask him: why not "passive remote" auto emissions testing?

It shouldn't have taken them ten years to prove me right. I'm beginning to suspect that they don't want to.

20040208

Gratuitous baby pic



Toad at 4 days, belly full, taking it all in.