Concealed carry holder shoots attempted robber on Chicago’s NW Side

CHICAGO – A concealed carry holder shot one of two robbery suspects early Tuesday while being confronted at gunpoint on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

What we know:

The incident happened around 2:40 a.m. near the intersection of Montana Street and Laramie Avenue in the Cragin neighborhood.

Chicago police said the 39-year-old man was getting out of his vehicle when two men approached him and one of them pulled out a gun and demanded his belongings.

Police said the victim, who is a licensed concealed-carry holder, drew his own gun and fired multiple shots, striking one of the suspects in the legs. Officers took both suspects into custody at the scene.

The wounded suspect, a 23-year-old man, was treated by paramedics with the Chicago Fire Department and taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center where he was listed in good condition.

Area Five detectives are investigating.

Proposed WV House Bill Would Expand Castle Doctrine, Strengthen Self-Defense Protections

CHARLESTON, WV (LOOTPRESS) — A newly introduced bill in the West Virginia House of Delegates would expand the state’s Castle Doctrine laws, strengthening legal protections for people who use force — including deadly force — in self-defense.

House Bill 4878, introduced on January 28, would broaden when and where West Virginians may legally defend themselves, their homes, and others, while also shielding them from both criminal charges and civil lawsuits when force is lawfully used.

The legislation clarifies that a lawful occupant may use reasonable force, including deadly force, against an intruder or attacker inside a home or residence if they reasonably believe the intruder could cause death, serious bodily harm, or intends to commit a felony.

The bill also extends those protections beyond the walls of the home to include the curtilage — areas immediately surrounding a residence, such as yards, driveways, and porches — and removes any duty to retreat when a person is lawfully present.

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“Congress may carry on the most wicked and pernicious of schemes under the dark veil of secrecy. The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
– Patrick Henry

Know Your Gun: When you trust your life to a tool, you must know it inside and out.

We know that when we are faced with the threat of serious bodily injury or death, our focus will be on the threat. This is not so much a conscious effort as a fact that our natural survival system has taken over. For that reason, our manipulation of our defensive equipment must be practiced until its operation and deployment almost become subconscious functions. This is the main reason so many of us caution against the continual switching back and forth of that equipment—especially our daily-carry guns. While firing the defensive shot should certainly be a conscious decision, getting the gun into play should be a task that can be accomplished without thinking. To accomplish this, one really needs to know their defensive handgun.

The only negligent discharge with injuries I ever witnessed in a training class involved an older fellow who had carried a revolver in his law-enforcement career. Now, retired and working security, he had decided to carry a striker-fired pistol. The only trouble was that he had not taken the time to actually learn his new gun, and had real trouble keeping his finger off the trigger when the sights weren’t on the target. The double-action revolver trigger requires a significant amount of pressure, so this gross violation of the safety rules probably never resulted in a negative outcome for him, but that’s pure luck. With the lighter trigger of a striker-fired pistol, luck is less available. As you might guess, he shot himself in the leg while improperly reholstering his new gun.

Sometimes manufacturers make things difficult, like Smith & Wesson with its Models 39 and 59. Those were good, solid guns, but you pushed the safety up instead of down—the opposite of the single-action semi-automatics. If someone wasn’t really checked out on those, they might get a click instead of a bang or vice versa, either of which could create problems depending upon the situation.

So, it is critical for the armed citizen to totally familiarize themselves with their chosen defense gun. This means knowing how to safely load and unload the gun. It involves knowing the proper manipulation of all the various safety controls the gun might have. And, it involves knowing what the most common malfunctions might be and how to deal with them. All of these things are not going to be learned in a day, but take time and training. Once these things are learned, they must be practiced.

While the semi-automatic pistol is certainly the most popular defensive handgun, revolver shooters don’t get a free pass. Do you know how to keep your ejector rod from backing out? Do you know how to avoid having a spent cartridge get stuck under the ejector star? Finally, in the midst of a gunfight where you can only get a partial reload into your revolver, which way does the cylinder rotate? We know that Colts rotate clockwise whereas Smith & Wesson rotate counterclockwise, but what about the double-action Taurus or your Ruger SP101? You’d better find out.

Knowing the gun one carries is probably the main reason why many of the old-timers have stayed with guns of older design. It’s not that the new guns aren’t as good, it’s just that the older models are what these folks grew up with. They know them, know how they operate, know their shortcomings and know how to deal with any types of problems that might arise. That’s what knowing your gun is all about—the ability to effectively bring it into play without a lot of conscious thought.

By contrast, an old-timer of my acquaintance—a double-action revolver guy of long standing—advises that he is going to switch to a 9 mm for everyday carry. He has spent a good deal of range time and is satisfied with the function and accuracy of his new choice. Nonetheless, his next step is to attend a class at Gunsite with his new gun. All of which is part of the process of knowing your gun.

Finally, to end this piece on a lighter note, I would share this humorous—and probably apocryphal—story of a young man who just had to have a 1911. Obviously, he had never even fired one prior to his purchase. Within days, he was back in the gun store complaining that his new gun jammed. The in-house gunsmith checked it, cleaned and oiled it and reported that he hadn’t found any problem.

Sometime later, the young shooter returned, still complaining about his gun jamming. This time the gunsmith, after checking the gun, took the customer back to the shooting trap so he could witness the gun being fired. The gunsmith fired an entire magazine into the test trap and the slide locked back. “Look! It jammed again,” said the customer.

Know your defense gun. I mean really know your chosen defense gun. It is important.

 Are meat eaters really more likely to live to 100 than non-meat eaters, as a recent study suggests?

People who don’t eat meat may be less likely than meat eaters to reach the age of 100, according to a recent study. But before you reconsider your plant-based diet, there’s more to these findings than meets the eye.

The research tracked over 5,000 Chinese adults aged 80 and older who participated in the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, a nationally representative study that began in 1998. By 2018, those following diets that don’t contain meat were less likely to become centenarians compared with meat eaters.

On the surface, this appears to contradict decades of research showing that plant-based diets are good for your health. Vegetarian diets, for example, have been consistently linked to lower risks of heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes and obesity. These benefits come partly from higher fibre intake and lower saturated fat consumption.

So what’s going on? Before drawing any firm conclusions, there are several important factors to consider.

Your body’s needs change as you age

This study focused on adults aged 80 and older, whose nutritional needs differ markedly from those of younger people. As we age, physiological changes alter both how much we eat and what nutrients we need. Energy expenditure drops, while muscle mass, bone density and appetite often decline. These shifts increase the risk of malnutrition and frailty.

Most evidence for the health benefits of diets that exclude meat comes from studies of younger adults rather than frail older populations. Some research suggests older non-meat eaters face a higher risk of fractures due to lower calcium and protein intake.

In later life, nutritional priorities shift. Rather than focusing on preventing long-term diseases, the goal becomes maintaining muscle mass, preventing weight loss and ensuring every mouthful delivers plenty of nutrients.

The study’s findings may, therefore, reflect the nutritional challenges of advanced age, rather than any inherent problems with plant-based diets. Crucially, this doesn’t diminish the well-established health benefits of these diets for younger and healthier adults.

Older adults lifting light dumbbells.
Maintaining muscle mass in older age is important, and that requires protein. CCISUL/Shutterstock.com

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The Only Thing That Melted Was Al Gore’s Credibility.

…And Maybe His Beach House Value, But Who’s Counting?

You know how every summer a meteorologist screams “Category 5 apocalypse!” and the biggest storm we end up with is a light drizzle that barely ruins a barbecue?

After the tenth or so false alarm, people stop nailing plywood over their windows, keep hamburgers on the grill, and tune out the sirens.

It’s not denial; it’s pattern recognition. Cry wolf too many times, and eventually the villagers go back to binging Stranger Things.

Twenty years ago, Al Gore famously dropped An Inconvenient Truth like it was the final word from on high. The former vice president and Nobel laureate, and the man who invented the internet (or at least the weather forecasts), promised us the complete end-times package: vanishing polar ice caps, cities submerged underwater faster than you can say “evacuate Florida,” and snow becoming a fairy tale for kids.

Dissent? That was simply “denial,” or the moral equivalent of kicking puppies.

Settled science, folks: pay up or shut up.
Fast-forward two decades and ask yourself, how’d that work out?

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“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
–T.S. Eliot.

We’ve been able to do online sales for the past 40 years. (FOPA ’86)
At least for the time being, this is standard operational grandstanding that’ll go nowhere.

More Restrictions: Democrat Reps. Push Bill to Limit Online Ammo Sales

Reps. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) announced Friday their re-introduction of legislation to limit the online sale of ammunition.
A press release from Mfume’s office indicates the bill, called the Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act, “would require federally licensed ammunition dealers to confirm the identity of individuals who arrange to purchase ammunition over the internet by verifying a photo I.D. in person.”

The legislation would “also require ammunition vendors to report any sales of more than 1,000 rounds within five consecutive days to the U.S. Attorney General, if the person purchasing ammunition is not a licensed dealer.”

Rep. Mfume commented on the legislation, saying, “Since we last introduced this bill, the crisis of mass shootings has continued unabated. We’ve been living with this scourge of violence for so many years as assault weapons and enormous amounts of ammunition continue to fall into the hands of diabolical people.”

He added, “Mass shootings are not going to stop on their own, and we cannot keep waiting for the next one to occur.”

Rep. Coleman said:

Regulating online ammunition sales is a commonsense step to countering the number of mass shootings we see every year. This legislation closes the loophole that makes tragedies like these so unfortunately common. Public safety must come before convenience for an unregulated market: Americans send us to Washington because it is our job to protect them, not mourn them.

The online ammo sales gun control bill has 17 co-sponsors.

Stop Overthinking Self-Defense Bullets
Time to Move Past the Small Stuff
Written By Brent Wheat

The other day, I was unloading my handgun during retiree pistol qualifications at the police department when one of the instructors commented on the fact I was carrying, by his reckoning, a bullet that was designed sometime in the sixties — the 1860s.

I just laughed and then proceeded to shoot a perfect score, just to show those of us on “the senior tour” still remember how to use them newfangled shootin’ irons.

In truth, this exchange awoke a major pet peeve from among the thousands on my huge peeve ranch, one of the largest in the lower 48 states. Among this fine and well-fed herd of irritations, there is one which stands shoulders above the rest: all the incessant talk and debate around defensive handgun bullet design and performance.

I understand, really I do. It’s understandable when you consider the only actual physical connection between yourself, the heroic good guy (or gal), and the target is a bullet.

 

To have a good understanding of how a particular bullet performs when it reaches a target, you need to perform tests — lots of them! Most shooters and gun writers won’t invest the time and money needed to have the data on which to base an opinion.

 

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