Free Republic

The rates of abortion in Detroit (and indeed in the US) among young black women is entirely consistent with their rates of STD infection, which are absurdly high. In order to require an abortion, sex had to come first, and the absurdly high rate of abortion, and especially repeat abortions, is simply a consequence of lack of planning, responsibility and adult behavior in sexual conduct that is indicated by the high rates of STD’s in the same population.

The precursor to irony here is the high rate of abortion in Detroit is easily surpassed by by the rates of abortions among black teens in Texas, who have over double the rate of abortions per 1,000 population.

The final irony is the perception that Texas is a “conservative” state. It might be fiscally, but where abortion is concerned, Texas is making the abortion mills in Michigan’s urban blight look like businesses run as a hobby.

I’ve heard all this before.

You’ll be one of the pious people praying for civil order when the money runs out and the welfare hoards you’ve allowed to multiply at the expense of the productive people decide to take the model of government they’ve perfected in Detroit and make it a national condition. Look around Detroit and tell me that you’ll look forward to that: fire and police response takes an hour to two. Areas of the city are now dark, because they cannot afford to keep the streetlights on. Houses in some areas of the city can be purchased for pennies on the dollar of valuation 25 years ago.

Detroit isn’t a one-off. It is what is coming to most of the large urban centers.

You pious people, who keep clutching your Bibles, spouting moral indignation, fire and brimstone, have lost not only the battle on abortion with your tactics, you’ve effectively lost the war for limited government, free market capitalistic enterprise and a cohesive American with your tactics, which have done nothing to achieve your stated goal: the preservation of life.

Why and how have you lost? Your tactics have created a huge base of voters who vote in lock-step uniformity for candidates who espouse left-wing policies and positions, especially abortion on demand. Your only hope for success now lies in depending on poor turnout among their numbers.

As de Tocqueville observed, the American Republic will endure until people discover that they can vote themselves money from the Treasury. Your tactics have created a swelling underclass who do and will do exactly that.

Congratulations.

By the way, there’s no way to force people to use contraception. Various schemes have been tried, and we’re following the usual litany of “sex ed,” “free or subsidized contraception methods,” etc.

Short of forced sterilization, which they perform in totalitarian regimes such as the PRC, there’s little that can be done.

The population of the inner cities of the US have made their choices how they’re going to conduct themselves. All the preaching, cajoling, etc isn’t going to change a thing at this late date. It is high time that conservatives quit trying to use morality and preaching to deal with this issue and admit that the moral argument is no longer viable.

All that now remains is a choice for our civilization: Are we going to allow our civilization to be crushed under a wave of welfare dependency that has been allowed to breed on the taxpayer’s dollar, or are we going to look at the hard, unflinching math of our budget(s) and say “Well, the fact that so many dependents are having abortions might be morally repulsive, but it is preventing the collapse of our civilization?”

That’s the choice we now have in front of us. As Maggie Thatcher famously said about socialist governments: “They’re always running out of other people’s money.”

We’ve now run out of money. Look at the data coming out of the BEA, BLS and Fed over the last five years and you can see the writing on the wall in big, red block letters. We’re broke, and the ability of our economy to generate well-paid jobs is broken. Republicans have no viable solutions to this problem, all they can seem to do is repeat that mantra from the 80’s (”cut taxes”). The other party just wants to accelerate our flight speed into the terra firma with talk of more social spending.

In light of this, I choose to say what needs to be said. It isn’t nice, it isn’t of “high moral stature” or anything of the sort, but it does make actuarial sense.

About 24%, if recent statistics on unwed motherhood in the US black population are to be believed.

Amend my earlier reply to replace “not” with “now,” viz:

“...they’re now debt slaves, consigned to paying off the largess of the current and past generations. This, IMO, is wholly inexcusable.”

All birth control requires a level of adult responsibility and judgement to use properly and effectively.

These people lack that judgement and responsibility. So they use abortion as retroactive birth control.

Yes, there is.

I think that we, the taxpayers of the US, should institute a wonderful enforced bit of birth control upon these “repeat customers:”

In the shop for a second abortion? Great news! We’ll throw in a tubal ligation for free. Done deal, future problems solved.

Yep.

I’m not a nice guy. I’m someone who looks at the truth and speaks it as it is.

The hard truth is that we, the US, are out of money. We’ve indebted the future living generations to an extent that they have no future of their own - they’re not debt slaves, consigned to paying off the largess of the current and past generations. This, IMO, is wholly inexcusable.

When I look at the fiscal state of the US, the grifters and welfare class are overwhelming the productive class. It is for this reason that I’m wholly and completely unabashed and unrepentant about cheering on the death of future generations of welfare recipients.

Reading it, I come away with a sense that Labour finally realizes that not just a few people, but a significant cohort of people, are really pissed off about the idiotic immigration policies of the UK.

The trouble for Labour now is that the only way to win those voters back is to start talking about clamping down on immigration, which the Labour Party simply won’t do. Ever. The LP depends on their pro-immigration stand with the business sector and with the immigrant activists for their power base.

The reason why is that the .44 Rem Mag is what everyone thinks they “need” in a .44.

The last thing I’d want to carry concealed is a .44 Mag. Lots of noise, flash and recoil that I don’t need.

The .44 Special, like the .45 Colt, is a grand older cartridge with nice low pressures, lots of flexibility and the ability to launch really heavy bullets. I think a 5-round, stainless revolver in either round would be the bee’s knees for CCW.

Sadly, everyone appears to be chasing the plastic semi-auto market these days.

Mmmm... no, not really... the margins depend on being able to control the ability of competitors to make a functionally identical weapon at a better price.

In economic terms, “rent seeking” is how Colt used to make money on the M-16/M-4. They held the rights to what is called the “technical package” on the M-16, all the specifications of how the gun was made, finished, tested, etc. The government didn’t set all the compliance data, the Colt technical package did.

As long as Colt could control that, they could control what the government paid for them, since Colt effectively gamed their way into being a single-source bidder on the contracts by requiring any competitive bidder to add $X to their bid on each gun to account for the cost of licensing the Colt technical package.

AR’s and M-16’s/M-4’s are now a commodity item. Everyone knows how to make them. Improvements are being made all the time, by a large (and increasing) number of vendors. Colt will never again achieve the level of margins they enjoyed throughout the 70’s to 90’s in making guns for the DOD on contract.

Margins for commercial long guns are good, depending on your market.

For example: Compete with Remington and Mossberg on a no-frill,s cheap-assed pump shotgun? Margins not so good.

Compete with the Italians on side-by-sides and O/U shotguns? Oh, there’s a nice margin in there for those who want to compete.

You’re absolutely right.

The 10mm was a riff by Jeff Cooper off the .41 Mag, which was Elmer’s fondest dream realized.

Both Elmer Keith and Jeff Cooper put too much emphasis on the idea of a cop taking long range (like 50 yard) shots with a handgun. Today’s cops can barely hit anything at seven yards, so equipping them with a long-range handgun just means that more people, animals and property downrange are in more substantial danger.

The 10mm and .41 are both excellent cartridges, but they’re really now consigned to the limited number of people willing to pony up the money for the high-end handguns to handle them, and the practice needed to use them competently.

Personally, I wish that S&W would put out a product in stainless that holds five rounds of .44 Special, with, oh, a 3” barrel. For me, that would be an ideal CCW revolver.

There is. I like the Ruger product line. It is a well-made product, and they get their prices down by extensive use of investment casting.

This is where I get a giggle out of the ‘forged vs. cast” endless debate by gun people. Ruger makes investment case guns. They finish-machine and polish the castings, and Ruger’s castings are hell for strong. Look at Ruger’s single action revolvers, as an example. They’re some of the strongest, most affordable SA revolvers out there. About the only thing stronger is the Freedom Arms product.

Ruger’s products are so strong that reloading manuals often call out loads specifically for the Ruger SA’s, especially in .45 Colt.

You’ve obviously never seen the inside of a Colt revolver, much less the fit and especially the finish on a Python.

The metallurgy of the Python doesn’t enter into the issue. The metals used in the 60’s are largely the same metals being used today in firearms, with some additional options offered in the stainless alloys. AISI 4140 was plenty good enough back then and is still more than good enough today. if you want to case or color case a firearm, AISI 8620 is what you’ll likely be using.

The problem for Colt in replicating the Python is twofold:

1. The “bank vault lockup” of the Python (and the tighter lockup of Colts in general) was the result of hand-fitting several critical components in the Colt DA revolver design. The rebound bar in the Colt design was where it all came together, in a multi-faceted boss on the right side of the rebound bar which possessed a number of angles that timed the lockup and rebound of the lockwork. This is where Colt revolvers get their reputation for “finicky” lockwork. S&W made it easier to achieve an adequately tight lockup more cheaply with machined-to-size components by splitting their revolver actions into two springs. Colt’s design, using only one flat mainspring to power both the hammer and trigger rebound in the revolver, makes the fitting of tenths of a thousandths of an inch rather critical.

2. The finish on a Python, the legendary “Royal Blue” blue job, required polishing that cannot be done by machine. It has to be done by hand, and skilled hands at that. The things that amateurs look for in a polishing job is “is it shiny enough?”

The things that professionals look for in a gun polishing job is “are all the features and corners still there when that level of polish has been achieved?” You can tell when a hack polishes a gun for a blue job, any blue job. The corners, features and edges are all rounded off. They went to town with a damn buffing wheel and they blew off all the stuff that they didn’t know someone was looking for. The result is a gun with washed-out features to (in an extreme) what I would call a “melted” appearance.

People who think that hand fitting and polishing can be replicated by machine are the same people who buy vastly over-priced guns, and then are disappointed when they learn what to actually look for in a high quality gun. Machines can’t get into the nooks and crannies, machine-finished guns aren’t finished on the insides, etc.

There’s a reason why the market of high-end guns is narrow - there’s just not that many people who know their ass from a warm rock when they’re looking at a gun. People who appreciate the highest levels of quality are looking for quality in very specific areas of a gun, and then they don’t see that quality and attention to detail, they won’t pay up.

Colt probably doesn’t have anyone on their staff that can do it, but they can be trained. There’s all manner of graduates coming out of gunsmithing programs across the country’s six or so schools of gunsmithing who would love to have their names attached to making something as nice as a Python.

And yes, they’d need to be paid.

No, and the reason why is how the cartridges headspace in their respective chambers.

Revolver cartridges headspace on the rim (or, more precisely, the front edge of the rim).

A semi-auto case like the .40 or 10 headspaces off the front edge of the case mouth. This means that the .40 has nothing but the ejector hook holding it from headspacing too far forward into a 10mm chamber.

The .40 killed the 10mm, mostly because the only difference between the 10mm and .40 is achieved by loading the 10mm to its real potential, which is well above what the .40 achieves, and high enough to cause some 10mm pistols to start developing issues like frame/slide cracks, etc. As a result of the ferocity of the full-house 10mm, the FBI down-loaded the round to give the ballistics of what became known as the “FBI load” in the 10mm, and that in turn fostered the .40 S&W when Smith noticed “hey, that load leaves all this unused space in the 10mm case, so why not just cut down the case, and we get a smaller grip size and we can double-stack it?” Lo, the .40 resulted.

The only solution (real solution) I would see to cycling a 10mm auto with a .40 S&W cartridge would be to obtain another un-chambered barrel for the 10mm auto pistol, and chamber it for only the .40, and then you’d be off to the races.

IF (and that’s a huge “IF”) Colt were to make the Python to the same level of quality it displayed in say, the mid 60’s to the mid-70’s, and they brought back the Royal Blue finish, then yes, they’d sell.

But, here’s the kicker: That level of quality in a revolver is going to cost some serious money - as in $2K and up.

In short, “yes” you can print springs with additive machining.

Can you print a direct replacement for the classic leaf or coil springs you’re used to seeing in guns? Well, mostly “no.”

3D printed springs, from what I’ve seen so far, need to be redesigned to achieve the required motion and spring coefficients with the metallic alloys they have in their inventories, and these springs can work well. They might not fit into the space dictated by a prior design assuming a classic high carbon steel spring, however.

We also need to close off the entitlement freebies.

Two reasons why the left-wing minimum wage nonsense doesn’t play well in Switzerland:

1. They have a very strong currency, and a sound economy. Part of the reason why their economy is so sound is that they have very tight immigration controls - meaning that there are jobs for their people because they don’t import “cheap labor.”

2. They have a pretty small national budget compared to the rest of Europe because of the immigration control and their isolationism. Isolationism has many benefits, chief among them that their military spending stays mostly in-country, yielding much higher benefits to their national economy than the kind of military spending the US does, where we’re pissing away rivers of money into foreign countries. eg, all the troops we have stationed in Germany - where are they spending their consumer dollars? In Germany, which benefits the German economy, not our economy.

The same vote held here would probably pass by a comfortable margin, because we have a Federal Reserve that is designed to devalue our currency over time. Therefore the impetus to raise the minimum wage is always there over a period of decades because the spending power of the US dollar has been shrinking over time since the inception of the Federal Reserve. The Swiss Franc? Pretty strong and stable by comparison.