Category: You Can’t Make This Up

NY’s Door-to-Door Crusade Against Homemade Guns Backfires, Unintentional Masterclass in Ghost-Gunsmithing

New York State declared war on citizens making their own firearms. To crack down on privately manufactured firearms (PMF), the New York State Police (NYSP) are showing up in force at people’s doors. The reason for the informal visit seems to be an inquiry related to purchased pistol parts from the website eBay. Ammoland News has learned from Law Enforcement Sources that the New York Police Department released a “ghost gun” handbook explaining PMFs and how to identify them.

Two weeks ago, NYSP “Ghost Gun” Team members began visiting citizens in the New York City area requesting information about parts purchased from eBay. The parts were purchased from multiple sellers across the auction platform.

Most disturbing, the officers had printouts of everything purchased by the individuals from the website, leading to the question of how the State Police came into possesion the item list.

AmmoLand News spoke to several of the residents that the State Police visited. None of the individuals allowed the police to inspect their firearms. The officers would state, “We know what you have.” When the residents still refused to hand over any information, the State Police let them know they could turn in anything violating New York law to the State Police. None of the residents we spoke to were threatened with legal action, and the interactions were between five and fifteen minutes.

Could eBay be handing over private transaction information to the police?

Since the task force had a complete list of the items purchased on eBay, eBay is the most likely source for the information. AmmoLand News reached out to both the New York State Police and eBay, but neither would confirm or deny what information was shared.  All interactions AmmoLand News was able to track down are from the greater New York City area. We also have not identified any visits within the city’s five boroughs.

At the same time the New York State Police are going door to door, the New York Police Department (NYPD) released a handbook to identify “ghost guns.”

This guide was leaked to AmmoLand News but is now being widely circulated across the internet.

Ghost Guns: Past, Present, and Future NYPD Intelligence Division Major Case Field Intelligence Team
Ghost Guns: Past, Present, and Future NYPD Intelligence Division Major Case Field Intelligence Team

The guide lists a gun’s parts and gives an example of a lower receiver. According to the guide, “all lower receivers need to be serialized” because the federal government considers them firearms. Next to this statement is a picture of an 80% AR-15 receiver. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Final Rule on frame and receiver is very clear on this topic.

The ATF has never and still does not consider 80% AR-15 receivers to be firearms.

The document also incorrectly states that all lower receivers must be serialized under federal law. Once again, the document is incorrect. The ATF says a frame or receiver must only be serialized when transferred. According to federal law, it is legal to have an unserialized firearm unless it previously had a serial number. Many are concerned that these inconsistencies between the law and the guide could lead to false arrests. AmmoLand News contacted the individual contacts listed in the document to see if the misinformation would be corrected, but none responded.

In addition to those retailers, the guide also covers the Ghost Gunner. The Ghost Gunner is a tabletop CNC machine that allows users to mill a firearm. It also lists the sites that sell the device and shows a picture of the founder of Ghost Gunner and Defense Distributed, Cody Wilson. The document references Defcad, which is another Defense Distributed project.

AmmoLand News spoke to Cody Wilson, who found the New York Police Department handbook to identify “ghost guns” document hilarious. He believes it is an excellent advertisement for his company.

“New York has produced the best getting started guide on the market,” Wilson said. “We will be emailing it to all of our customers.”

The document also explains how to 3D print a gun. It breaks down the printers needed, including the Creality Ender 3, and lists the filament types. It also gives an overview of the most popular slicing software. A current bill in the New York Legislature would require background checks to purchase a 3D printer.

The document also lists the most popular sites for downloading “gun CAD” files. Even if someone were to download the files, they would be unable to turn that 3D-printed model into a working firearm without certain parts. Fortunately for the building community, the NYPD documentation lists the parts and links to sites selling everything a person could use to finish the homemade firearm.

Oh No! Crypto!

The documentation touches on Glock switches purchased off of Chinese sites. These are auto sears and turn a regular Glock into a machine gun. In addition to auto sears, the document also worries about importing solvent traps to make suppressors.

The handbook also states they will attempt to get postal data to track shipments. The NYPD will also try to get Micro Center and Amazon data to track 3D printers and supply purchases. The police attend gun shows in other states to follow the selling of firearms parts.

The document also states that many who print guns are involved in cryptocurrency. The NYPD points to several gun-part retailers that accept BitCoin as a payment option. Many non-gun sites accept cryptocurrency as payment.

It also lists items to look for when executing a search warrant. These include packages, pre-paid credit cards, invoices, gun parts, storage locker keys, 3D printers, flash drives, cell phones, and micro SD cards.

The NYPD will offer a one-hour class to officers to help them identify PMFs. The content of the class has yet to be released, but when made available by the department, AmmoLand News will publish it.

Neither the NYPD, NYSP, nor eBay responded to requests for comment for this story.

LEAKED: Ghost Guns: Past, Present, and Future NYPD Intelligence Division Major Case Field Intelligence

“known to the goobermint….”
It’s not like it’s a bug, but a feature. and it is awful convenient

Attorney Mark W. Smith of Four Boxes Diner on YouTube:

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All your printers are belong to us

Background checks for printer purchases

New bill intro by Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar, A-8132, Requires a criminal history background check for the purchase of a three-dimensional printer capable of creating firearms; prohibits sale to a person who would be disqualified on the basis of criminal history from being granted a license to possess a firearm.

From the bill memorandum:

Three-dimensionally printed firearms, a type of untraceable ghost gun, can be built by anyone using an $150 three-dimensional printer.

Three-dimensional printed guns are growing more prevalent each year. There were 100 taken off the streets of New York City in 2019. That number skyrocketed to 637 in 2022.

Concurrently, ghost gun shootings have risen 1,000% across the nation. Currently, three-dimensional printers allow people to make, buy, sell, and use untraceable guns without any background checks.

This bill will require a background check so that three-dimensional printed firearms do not get in the wrong hands.

‘Green’ EV Battery Factory Uses So Much Energy, It Needs Its Own Coal Plant to Power It

In order to keep up with the demands for Democrat President Joe Biden’s green agenda, a coal-fired power plant is being expanded to cope with the energy needs of an electric vehicle (EV) battery factory.

The $4 billion Panasonic EV battery factory is being constructed in De Soto, Kansas. The new factory will help satisfy the Biden administration’s efforts to get everyone into an EV. It also will help extend the life of a coal-fired power plant.

The Evergy Power Plant was slated to be decommissioned as part of the push to eliminate fossil fuels. Plans were in place to transition fossil fuel-burning units at the plant to natural gas.

However, plans have now changed as the power plant will now be used to provide energy for the new battery factory. The plant will now be dedicated to burning coal to provide energy for the battery factory. It will also be expanded to cope with the extra demand.

Panasonic broke ground on the facility last year. The Japanese company was slated to receive $6.8 billion from the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act.” The legislation has been pouring billions into electric vehicles and battery factories as part of its effort to transition America away from fossil fuels.

The Kansas City Star reports that the factory will require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity to operate. That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city.

In testimony to the Kansas City Corporation Commission, which is the state’s equivalent of the Wyoming Public Service Commission, a representative of Evergy, the utility serving the factory, said that the 4 million-square-foot Panasonic facility creates “near term challenges from a resource adequacy perspective,” according to the newspaper.

As a result, the utility will continue to burn coal at a power plant near Lawrence, Kansas, and it will delay plans to transition units at the plant to natural gas.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, are not happy about that. The situation reflects an ignored fact about EVs — they require enormous amounts of energy to produce. Aside from production, the vehicles themselves also require vast amounts of electricity to charge.

A 15-pound lithium-ion battery holds about the same amount of energy as a pound of oil. To make that battery requires 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals that go into that battery. The average EV battery weighs around 1,000 pounds.

All of that mining and factory processing produces a lot more carbon dioxide emissions than a gas-powered car. EVs have to be driven around 50,000 to 60,000 miles before there’s a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

So, as more factories are built in the U.S. to supply EV manufacturers, there will be higher demands on the grid for power.

Yes, there does actually seem to be people this dense and ignorant.
“…shared cultural norms…”

What’s Arabic for “chutzpah?”

Rep. Ilhan Omar demands ‘protection from the international community’ for Palestinians following Hamas attack on Israel.

Rep. Ilhan Omar shockingly called for international protections and support for Palestinians after their fundamentalist terrorist group Hamas carried out a brutal terrorist attack on Israel.

The progressive Minnesota congresswoman expressed her compassion for the people in the Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip amid widespread criticism for her and her colleagues’ response to the violence.

‘Reminder, Gaza doesn’t have shelters or an iron dome and to please pray for them,’ Omar wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. ‘May peace prevail in the region and move us towards a moral awakening to care about the human suffering we are seeing.’

‘Palestinians are human beings who have been in besieged and are deserving of protection from the international community,’ she added.

Omar is one of the two first Muslim women to be elected to Congress – joined by Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who has remained noticeably silent on the recent terrorist attack.

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Largest EV Charging Station In World Powered By Diesel-Powered Generators.

The Harris Ranch Tesla Supercharger station is an impressive beast. With 98 charging bays, the facility in Coalinga, California, is the largest charging station in the world. But to provide that kind of power takes something solar can’t provide — diesel generators.

Aerial photo of supercharger Tesla station at the Harris Ranch in California.

The Harris Ranch Tesla Supercharger station is an impressive beast. With 98 charging bays, the facility in Coalinga, California, is the largest charging station in the world.

In 2017, Tesla CEO said that all Superchargers in the automaker’s network were being converted to solar.

“Over time, almost all will disconnect from the electricity grid,” Musk posted on X, formally known as Twitter.

Superchargers charge vehicles up to the 80% sweet spot in as little as 20 minutes, but to provide that kind of power for nearly 100 bays takes something solar can’t provide — diesel generators.

Investigative journalist Edward Niedermeyer discovered that the station was powered by diesel generators hidden behind a Shell station. Reporters at SF Gate tried to find out how much of the station’s electricity was from the generators, but couldn’t get a response from Tesla.

The station isn’t connected to any dedicated solar farms, which means that absent the diesel generators, the station is powered by California’s grid.

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Never, ever place any trust in “The Internet of Things” “IOT”

BLUF
If we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we control are really on loan as a means of controlling us.

The Man Amazon Erased.

On Thursday, May 25, Brandon Jackson, a software engineer in Baltimore County, Maryland, discovered that he was locked out of his Amazon account. Jackson couldn’t get packages delivered to his home by the retail giant. He couldn’t access any files and data he had stored with Amazon Web Services, the company’s powerful cloud computing wing. It also meant that Jackson, a self-described home automation enthusiast, could no longer use Alexa for his smart home devices. He could turn on his lights manually, but only in the knowledge that Amazon could still operate them remotely.

Jackson soon discovered that Amazon suspended his account because a Black delivery driver who’d come to his house the previous day had reported hearing racist remarks from his video doorbell. In a brief email sent to Jackson at 3 a.m., the company explained how it unilaterally placed all of his linked devices and services on hold as it commenced an internal investigation.

The accusations baffled Jackson. He and his family are Black. When he reviewed the doorbell’s footage, he saw that nobody was home at the time of the delivery. At a loss for what could have prompted the accusation of racism, he suspected the driver had misinterpreted the doorbell’s automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?”

Submitting the surveillance video “appeared to have little impact on [Amazon’s] decision to disable my account,” Jackson explained on his blog on June 4. “In the end, my account was unlocked on Wednesday [May 31, six days later], with no follow-up to inform me of the resolution.” By now, many months later, Amazon’s investigation into the matter appears to have concluded though the issue remains far from resolved. Contacted for a response, the company wrote: “In this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again.”

It was only Jackson’s technical skills and particular automated home setup that saved him from what could have been a larger lockout. “​​My home was fine as I just used Siri or [a] locally hosted dashboard if I wanted to change a light’s color or something of that nature,” he explained. His week of digital exile amounted to a frustrating inconvenience only because, as a tech-savvy user and professional software engineer, he had the ability to set up his own locally hosted network that acted as a failsafe. But Jackson’s experience is a warning to the vast majority of Alexa users and smart home dwellers who, lacking his particular skills and foresight, are increasingly at the mercy of the tech they have embedded into their lives and bedrooms.

“I came forward,” Jackson told Tablet, “because I don’t think it’s right that Amazon could say, ‘I know you bought all these devices, but we think you are racist. So we’re going to take [you] offline.’” On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; others said his criticisms of Amazon implied that he didn’t support a company protecting its employees. “People missed the main point,” he said. “I don’t really care who you are, what you do, or what you believe in. If you bought something, you should own it.”

Jackson’s story of being temporarily canceled by the tech behemoth spread across the internet after it was discussed in a YouTube video by Louis Rossman, a right-to-repair activist, independent technician, and popular YouTube personality. Right to repair, or fair repair, is a consumer-focused movement advocating for the public to be able to repair the equipment they own instead of being forced to use the manufacturer’s repair services or upgrade products that have been arbitrarily made obsolete. In the early 20th century, fair-repair advocacy began with automobiles and heavy machinery, but its tenets have spread as computer chips have come to undergird contemporary life.

Following Rossman’s initial video about Jackons’s case, Amazon alleged that Rossman had abused its affilate marketing program and placed restrictions on the YouTuber’s business account, leading him to speculate in a follow-up video that the corporate giant was retaliating against him for covering Jackson’s travails. Rossman alleges that this was the first time Amazon made any allegation against him of abusing its affiliate marketing program since he enrolled in the marketing program 7.5 years ago.

Jackson’s experience is a warning to Alexa users and smart home dwellers who are increasingly at the mercy of the tech they have embedded into their lives and bedrooms.

The number of households adopting smart home devices in the United States is expected to reach 93 million by 2027 and most consumers rely on cloud services for their daily online use. But the cloud is not just a metaphor to explain a connected network; it describes the complete reorganization of digital life under the power of remote centralized databases. Light switches, lightbulbs, locks, thermostats, coffee makers, air conditioners, speakers, exercise equipment, and virtually every other piece of equipment you can find in the average home can now all be operated as interconnected pieces of a single digital network, run by an outside host, such as Amazon, which operates the massive server banks that make up “the cloud.” For consumers, this arrangement offers convenience and optimization. You can turn on the heat in your house from another state, or reorder a household good with a simple voice command. But the cost of that convenience is that consumers no longer independently control how their tech—or their homes, since the two are increasingly integrated—is operated. As Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and another right-to-repair activist put it, “Who really owns our things? It used to be us.”

Brandon Jackson

Brandon Jackson

Alexa’s terms of use includes a clause stating that Amazon is permitted to terminate “access” to Alexa at the company’s discretion without notice. Jackson was told by a customer relations executive over the phone that he needed to assure the company that he would not ridicule or put future delivery drivers in harm’s way. Nearly a month later, Amazon admitted no wrongdoing, only apologizing for “inconveniences.” Given absolute power over its users, there is no pressure on Amazon to explain its decision. Indeed, the company used the same statement Tabletreceived for an earlier June Newsweek article regarding Jackson’s lockout.

Amazon’s claims of being concerned about the safety of blue-collar workers strain credibility. According to a 2021 article published in Vice, when minority delivery drivers faced violent threats and racial harassment, the company’s penchant for efficiency took priority over worker safety. Unsustainable demands from delivery drivers have translated to drivers peeing in bottles and defecating in garbage bags, a problem Amazon internally acknowledged even as it publicly denies the allegations. Inside its “fulfillment centers”—the term the company uses for its warehouses—workers suffer 5.9 serious injuries for every 100 workers, an 80% greater injury rate than competitors. Indeed employee turnover is so high in these facilities that a leaked company memo from 2022 warned that the company was on track to deplete its number of available workers by 2024.

Amazon’s intrusion into Jackson’s life, then, should not be understood within the context of protecting workers—which might begin by giving them adequate time to use the restroom—but rather as part of an emergent regime of technological control. The culmination of years of debate about political and civic norm moderation on social media and in public discourse has created a new normative standard in which “innocent until proven guilty” is now viewed as an oppressive and antiquated relic. As the new unelected masters of public discourse, tech giants like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, have been encouraged to execute summary punishments of users for mere accusations of racism or “disinformation.”

Amazon’s enormous power in the global economy and ubiquitous presence in the U.S. supply chain and cloud computing sectors allows the company to take the power of surveillance and cancellation even further. Unlike purely social media companies like X (formerly known as Twitter), Amazon’s suite of smart home gadgets and services gives it a direct physical presence inside of people’s homes. That means that when Amazon wades into cultural issues, or decides to punish people based on offensive speech, its political values are mapped onto objects and processes used in the real world.

In Jackson’s case, in order to regain access to things he had already paid for, he was forced to submit the surveillance video from his home to Amazon to prove his innocence. Somehow, in the new cloud-based networked world these corporations are building for us, the solution to every problem always involves individuals handing over more of their private data.

Debates over censorship, free speech and its limits typically revolve around social media use. But Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, suggested to Tablet that Jackson’s case shared a similar architecture to conversations around content moderation. Companies can choose not to allow certain forms of speech, but in doing so they can no longer be treated as neutral platforms. Tsukayama argues that social media users are offered a recourse, even if the process is stacked against them. “If [Amazon] is going to look at customer behavior as being part of the terms of service,” she said, “they [should] make that clear and set up a process that’s perhaps not unlike what we see at Facebook, YouTube or others who deal with content takedown.”

But, of course, we now know that millions of social media users had their accounts censored or banned without explanation or recourse for posts, including many that were classified as “disinformation” at the time of the alleged offense but contained statements that authorities later acknowledged as true. In that light, placing more trust in a content moderation model seems like a dangerous gamble. It could also lead to even more surveillance online as companies like Amazon claim a need to monitor their customers’ every move so they can judge them “fairly.”

Like many digital technologies, the smart home offers connectivity at a steep price—it makes individuals passive subjects of the products that surround them, including the things they own. Few of us have any real understanding of the “terms of service” on the devices and services that we rely on. Consider how streaming services replaced physical media and how the arrival of smartphones, with all their wonders, also meant that the owners of such phones became incapable of replacing their own batteries, SIM cards, and physical storage. If we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we control are really on loan as a means of controlling us.

Navy Puts The Kibosh On Digital Recruiting Program After Discovering Enlistees Aren’t Into Drag Queens

The U.S. Navy confirmed on Tuesday it has discontinued an online recruiting initiative featuring an enlisted drag queen that was aimed at bringing new sailors into the service.

In May, The Daily Caller revealed that the Navy brought on Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley — an active-duty drag queen who goes by the stage name Harpy Daniels and identifies as non-binary — to be a “Navy Digital Ambassador.” The Digital Ambassador Pilot Program, which ran from October 2022 to March 2023, was reportedly “designed to explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates” for military recruitment.

In a letter sent to Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Tuesday, Erik Raven, the under secretary of the Navy, confirmed that the branch’s Digital Ambassador Pilot Program “will not be continued.”

“The Navy learned lessons from the pilot program that will inform our digital engagement and outreach going forward,” Raven wrote. “Our digital outreach efforts will maintain the important distinction between Sailors’ official activities and their personal lives.”

Tuberville — who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee — previously sent a letter to Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, in May, demanding to know the identities of the officers tasked with funding and promoting drag queen shows aboard naval vessels. The letter was sent the same day the Alabama senator and his Republican colleagues submitted a separate communique to Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro on the branch’s embrace of Daniels and whether Navy leadership is encouraging its “digital ambassadors” and public affairs personnel to use TikTok — which the Pentagon banned its members from using on government-issued devices — “on their personal devices” in order to skirt the agency’s prohibition.

In his Tuesday letter to Tuberville, Raven claimed the Navy followed existing guidelines restricting the use of TikTok and that while some sailors partaking in the digital ambassador program “had [a] personal social media presence on TikTok,” the branch did not issue government devices for purposes of participating in the venture. Raven further contended the branch will “continue to communicate” to its members the “national security risks associated with their use of TikTok on personal devices.”

The Navy’s embrace of Daniels — which generated backlash among many military veterans — comes amid the branch’s failure to meet existing recruiting targets. On Thursday, acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti confirmed that the Navy is expected to miss its fiscal year 2023 recruiting goals by roughly 7,000 sailors. The revelation came days after the Air Force announced it would miss its “active-duty recruiting goals for the first time since 1999.”

The U.S. Army and Coast Guard are also expected to miss their respective fiscal year 2023 recruiting targets.

 

‘Battle of Sacred Cow Groups’ Begins in MI After All-Muslim City Council Bans Pride Flag on City Property.

BLUF:
“We welcomed you. We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”

Though Democrats have blamed conservative Republicans for the growing outcry from the Muslim community over the radical LGBTQ agenda being forced on children in public schools, the belief still exists among woke leftists that if they continue to play nice they can coexist with—and win over—devoutly religious, socially conservative Muslims who have become disaffected with Democratic Party.

It’s almost an understatement to say that theory has been put to the test in one city in Michigan, which saw an all-Muslim city council and mayor unanimously vote to ban the Pride flag and some other flags from being displayed on city property, a vote they held during ‘Pride Month’:

 

From the Washington Post‘s report:

And last year, a Muslim who emigrated from Yemen as a teenager became mayor — the city’s first leader in nearly a century with no Polish roots — alongside what is believed to be the nation’s only all-Muslim city council.

Many residents in this tiny enclave just north of downtown Detroit saw these changes as a sign of the Hamtramck’s progressiveness. The Muslim community that had previously experienced discrimination, including voter intimidation and resistance to mosques’ public call to prayer, had finally taken its seats at the table.

Yet the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that made Hamtramck something of a model is being put severely to the test. In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.

“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”

The only flags that can be displayed on city property, per the WaPo‘s report, are “U.S., state, city and POW/MIA banners.”

My first thought when I read this was “What the heck did they expect?” My second was to remind myself that the far left always expects mindless subservience from their core voting blocs.

Though there seemed to be general agreement from Twitter conservatives with the vote to only allow the American flag and related flags on city property, some other observations were made about the widening political rift in Hamtramck which ranged from serious to downright hilarious:

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