Ohio State's new MRAP
The Department of Public Safety at Ohio State University has acquired an MRAP. For free. An OSU rep told The Daily Caller that some potential foreseen uses include “officer rescue,” “hostage scenarios,” “bomb evaluation” and active killers loose on campus. They’re removing the top turret, if that makes you feel any better. . .
 
Much like the open carriers in Texas that were featured in this space yesterday, an Illinois man who was discovered carrying a gun at a golf tournament was issued a citation for obstruction of justice because the police aren’t in the habit of just throwing up their hands and saying, “I got nothin’.” You see, due to the recent legislative and judicial flux in Illinois gun laws, while prosecutors want to charge him with felony weapon violations for possession of the gat, apparently they can’t figure out if they still can. Meanwhile, the supporting information for the obstruction charge? “He made up one or more stories for the officers to attempt to justify why he was carrying a gun.” So the obstruction isn’t because he was carrying a gun, it’s because he wouldn’t tell the officers why. Because that’s their business. Makes sense to me.

Customs and Border Patrol is issuing an RFP (Request for Proposal) for delivery of four million rounds of 12 gauge slug ammunition per year for an indefinite delivery contract. Half of that is to be of the “reduced recoil” variety. This is just normal day-to-day business, but certainly someone can come up with something suitably conspiracy-minded if they put their minds to it. So come on, surprise me.

A short diatribe from a Florida open carry advocate about how our side snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with regard to the recent Starbucks decision, describing it as a “fairly big loss that is almost completely self inflicted.” I think the guy’s preaching the gospel. But as big as a loss as it may appear, for we people of the gun, it really doesn’t change business as usual because until they hang signs, status quo remains. As one comment over there said, “it didn’t look to me like a ‘No guns’ policy, it looked more like they are requesting people to ‘please quit setting up your soapbox in our lobby’ policy.” [h/t: Dan M.]

Dugan Ashley, the genius behind the Carnik Con YouTube channel, put together a response over at Funny or Die to Sarah Silverman’s “Black NRA” video. If you’re not familiar with Dugan or Carnik Con, I recommend you check out their channel. Unless you don’t like fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbbwHsg2uE8

 

Urge California Governor Jerry Brown to VETO gun control bills here: https://www.firearmspolicy.org/the-issues/california/2013-2014/askbrown/

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77 COMMENTS

  1. The ST Department of Public Safety is taking requests for proposals for MRAP vehicles and HK defense firearms .My department specializes in optimized solutions to castle related defense solutions.

    Send bids C/O ST.

    • DisThunder Symmetrical Tactical Multi-Source HSLD Solutions Connection and Research Center is also interested in procuring surplus MRAPS. We would like to test them in real-world densely populated urban “driving to work” scenarios. We also have a division looking into applications for BLM-land improvised route “redneckin'” driving techniques.

  2. I sent the story about the MRAP to TTAG and Robert replied, “Don’t think it’s theirs. RF”

    WOOOOOW

    • Tips on the MRAP story have been coming in for over a week, and the first few (one of which was probably yours that RF responded to) all were referring back to a post on (I think) Reddit, which had a photo and a story from someone talking about “my school” that frankly could have been written by anyone and may or may not have been true. Because of that, it wasn’t really heavy enough for a full post. The Daily Caller article is the first time I’ve seen it written about by an actual journalistic source, and it has comments from someone affiliated with the school, so it had enough “weight” for me to run it as part of the digest.

      If your comment was simply complaining because you didn’t get credited with the hat tip, well, sorry. If something comes in from only one source, or one source well ahead of everyone else, then I’ll say something. But if ten different people send it in, I’m not going to put everyone’s name on it. The MRAP story was like the second example.

      • I was about to say, on r/justrolledintotheshop they had a pic of this with the commentary that they were asked to remove the turret. I’ve been to some crazy out of hand college parties…but never one that I thought needed an Urban Assault Vehicle…

        Well, there was always this urban assault vehicle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAU9YqBYrz4

  3. MRAP’s for the Ohio police? Crazy. Those things are very expensive and difficult to drive. They have a great tendency to tip over if not careful on a slight grade. I can’t imagine why any domestic police force could ever need such a thing. Their only benefit is protection from buried bombs and that’s not a problem when your population supports law and order. The militarization of police has undone the intent of the Posse Comitatus Act by making the police military since they can’t use the military as police.

    • I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s a Maxpro, so based on my experience, it’ll break a driveshaft before it leaves the parking lot. Seriously, it’s a piece of junk that’ll bleed the taxpayers in maintenance fees.

      Now the RG-31, that’s what your discerning police state uses!

      • I kinda wondered if it was refurbished, and that’s why they got it so cheap. As in, it was fixed, not necessarily fixed enough to send it back into IED-istan, but good enough for use as a cop toy stateside.

        • Yep, probably refurbished at depot-level maintenance, and since we’re no longer needing every MRAP we can get our hands on in theater, it would either get mothballed, sent to a training center, or handed off to DHS. I’m surprised they haven’t already taken off the turret, though, usually DRMO is pretty good about demil’ing gear like that before handing it off for civilian (yes, that means police too) use.

          I’m honestly caught on this one. I’d hate to see us waste all the gear we’ve paid billions for, but I don’t think it’s something that needs to be on American streets.

    • “for the Ohio police?”

      Well… sort of. But not even quite that. “The Department of Public Safety at Ohio State University”… it belongs to the campus police force now. They may or may not actually be sworn law enforcement officers of the State of Ohio…

      • Yep, I saw it on opening game day while walking to the stadium from my nephews apartment. Commented to my father about the military vehicle that the campus police now have. He was quite surprised. I was quite nauseated.

    • MRAPs are nothing. My county Sheriff’s department has a M114. It sits in the parking lot and rusts becauese there is no use for it.

  4. Ohio State University of all places! I was in high school in the late 60’s when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Viet Nam war, killing 4 and wounding many. Crosby Stills and Nash sang “4 Dead in Ohio” and I really believed the country would crumble. Give this to the city or county, fine. But giving military gear to the campus police? An insult to those who gave or risked their lives to stop an illegal war (police action my asterisk!), an unwinnable war, an immoral war! The stupidity and ignorance of this astounds me! God Help America!

    • What war are you calling unwinable? We had Vietnam won except the politicians and communist media insisted we toss it. Immoral? Preserving freedom is immoral? Apparenlty you don’t know, but 99% of the atroscities were done by the VC and NVA, not ARVN or US forces. Are you even slightly aware of what happened there after we pulled out when Jane Fonda’s friends gained control?

      • If it hadn’t been for the peace movement, we’d probably still be sending our young people to die in vain in that shithole.

        • Which shithole? Viet nam, Granada, Panama, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and how many more I’ve forgotton? The only folks with less success than the so called peace movement……. can’t think of any.

      • Sorry, but there was never even an idea of “winning” the Vietnam fiasco. I was in Southeast Asia (Thailand, in the USAF) when we got booted out in humiliation. At least Nixon was man enough to resign over that.

        Odd – the purported purpose of the Vietnam incursion was to “stop the spread of Communist aggression.” At the time that we lost it so miserably, I wasn’t particularly affected by it, other than we had to leave and give up the $10.00 hookers and the Thai Stick, but that was bearable, and no PTSD..

        Now, however, it’s really been driven home just how badly we lost the “war on Communist Aggressoin” when one of them got elected President.

        Twice.

        Now, I’m traumatized.

      • Not to mention it was the National Guard, not campus police.

        Kent state was also not the state deliberately trying to kill students. It happened because you had National Guard with M1 Garands trying to do riot control. The wrong tool for the job. Put some

        Let us make no mistake about this. This wasn’t peaceful protest. This was rioting. The town was under a state of emergency already 3 days prior due to bonfires, beer bottles thrown at police, vandalism, looting. More like the Rodney King riots or Watts than some hippie protest.

        The National Guard was requested after businesses and their owners received terroristic threats and there was fear over radicals actually carrying them out.

        Fast forward. The riotious and criminal malcreants people call “anti-war protesters” were approached by a patrol man who read them an order to disperse or face arrest. They responded by throwing rocks at him and forcing him to retreat. That is felony assault people.

        National Guard then went in with tear gas, but the winds made it ineffective. The criminals responded by throwing more rocks. The NG then marced with bayonets affixed. Many of these criminals fled, but others remained, and they continued assaulting the NG with rocks. It was at this point that some of the guarsdsmen fired.

        The tragedy there was that it was indiscriminate fire. The criminals were no longer closely congregated, and many students nearby had played no part in the so-called protest. One of the dead was actually an ROTC cadet. The tragedy could have been avoided has the guardsmen been properly equipped for riot control, with other less lethal options besides tear gas. Ultimately both the guardsmen and the student-criminals were to blame. The guardsmen for their undisciplined and indiscriminate shooting (at least) and the “protesters” for felony assault, rioting, etc.

        That said, you start lobbing rocks at me, and I may shoot you.

        • There was no “rioting” until AFTER the Nat.G. got there and started rattling their sabers. The most disgusting part is that they opened fire between classes, when every student was walking from one building to another, out in the open. Sitting ducks. It’s also disgusting that those shooters and their commander were never even charged with their crimes. They should be rotting in a cell to this day.

        • If you go to Kent State, they just opened an incredible museum and tour of the May 4, 1970 shootings. The video and voice recordings show that the Guard started shooting first. Students were killed for no reason other than someone got itchy.

    • How many gave their lives to stop that war? There are 58,000 names on the memorial. If we built a memorial for those on the front lines of stopping that war, how many names would be on it?

    • I thought that was the whole point of the 2nd Amendment, so we could collectively keep and bear arms in a militia, to slaughter Americans don’t ya know.

      /Derp

    • I find their videos to be extremely informative. I don’t think anyone has put out a more revealing video on the AK vs AR debate.

      • No self-respecting Somali warlord would put an armored turret on a technical. They would be laughed out of the warlord business for being p**ss**s.

        • Kansas, Russ. You survey flat fields in Kansas. I wouldn’t think armor of any kind would be needed to become master of it.

        • Actually, rolling hills and river valleys are not unknown here.

          The highest part of my land is 75 feet different to the lowest, the lake further back is another 75 down and the ridge to the northeast is another 90 up. The Kaw river to the south is 250 feet below the lake.

          I’m surrounded by grasslands, woods and an impenetrable patch of old forest with some very tall trees.

          Not exactly the Rockies, but varietal.

          One more reason for a Mosin, that. Hiding behind a tree won’t help.

          • Sounds like Heaven! I’m a native Iowanian, but we moved to Minnesnowta when I was too young to remember, so I consider myself a Minnesot’n. I grew up in the Minnesota woods. Now I’m living in sunny southern Mexifornia. What are rents and living costs like up in those parts?

        • Rents are middle of the road, but buying is cheap and homesteading still happens.

          The cost of living is fairly low, and the food is worth eating.

          The gun laws here are damned good and improving all the time, government tends to serve the people and save for two months of the year the climate’s quite livable.

  7. Something tells me that Sarah Silverfish is completely oblivious to the scathing criticism of her overtly racist agitprop.

    • Someone should do a video blaming the Black NRA for arming the DC shooter and calling its president Silverman a terrorist.

      • Go for it! All you need these days is a camcorder, some editing software, and a youtube account.
        (oh, and some clever writing would do no harm. 😉

  8. Surplus military gear has been handed out for generations for little or no money. When I was a youngster a lot of local agencies, not just cops, had jeeps and old 6by6’s. I spent many a boy scout outing sleeping in surplus tents.

    The government(us ever suffering taxpayers) built up a huge stockpile of gear during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Who even heard of an mrap before then? What do we do with this gear? Especially now that the military is downsizing? I wouldn’t be surprised if they painted them yellow and gave them to schools.

    Ever since ww2 surplus military aircraft have been used by forestry people to fight fires. Prior to the interwebz I never heard citizens fear these bombers in the hands of local government.

    The real question here is are the locals being forced to take this gear or are they asking for it. Mayors and city councils are elected officials. Get active in your local elections if you want the police militarization to stop. Remind them of Morse and Giron.

    • Yeah, I’m a generation behind you, but I remember the surplus stuff, too. The difference was that back then they didn’t give it all away, generally only the stuff that was old & worn enough to no longer be militarily useful. Everything else got stockpiled and mothballed until it was literally only of value for scrap. Now they seem to be giving away nearly new stuff — the quote from the OSU rep was “extremely low miles and is in nearly new condition” — and whether that will turn out to be more fiscally responsible (at least someone gets some use out of it) than stockpiling it remains to be seen. If it turns out there’s a need for the stuff again, and we don’t have it, then it will look pretty dumb. If it turns out that we don’t need it again within what would have been its serviceable lifetime, then it’ll be a good thing we didn’t just sit on it all and let it rust away. Check back in 10 years.

      • In my years with the feds after my military time I was given one job that bothered me from a fiscal point of view(I know, a lot of fiscal nonsense concerning the gubmint but this is one of those wasteful things that stuck with me). We were ordered to destroy a warhouse full of gas masks and footlockers. Each mask had to have the lenses shattered with a hammer and the carriers had to be cut with a box cutter before thrown away. The footlockers had to be busted up with a hammer before disposal.

        We couldn’t give this stuff away nor surplus it out for sale. Such waste always bugged me.

  9. The OSUPD needs the MRAP for two reasons. First: to combat the celebration riots that will ensue when OSU goes undefeated again this year. Second: to begin evaluating equipment for our eventual invasion of *ichigan.

    Third: to protect the next idiotic football player who gets a tattoo from being murdered by the student body.

    GO BUCKS!

  10. I hate OSU.
    I’d root for the Penn State Pedo Bears before I’d ever cheer for OSU.

    Once a year I pull for Michigan and you guessed it, against OSU (and I dispise Michigan).
    The new OSU football coach is just as dirty as the last OSU one they had…cheaters one and all.

    Smitty

  11. Jeez! What is it going to take before the American people sit up and pay attention to where their govt is headed, when the Parks and Recreation dept start buying M1 Abrahams “to rescue stranded rangers”?

    For those of us paying attention it becomes a vicious circle: the govt starts guarding it’s self, dare I say it, a la Shutz Staffel? We the people become less trustful, the govt becomes more paranoid and buys bigger and badder weapons to use on it’s own people.

    Mark my words, it will end badly.

    • I think it will end badly no matter what, now. We’ve gone past the point of no return when it comes to things ending up positively for anyone, government or citizen. We have accepted, and some times even begged for, an increasing encroachment on our natural rights as citizens of this country. I’m not excusing myself from voluntarily giving up my own rights – I stood along with many and accepted the terms of the Patriot Act and many other such liberty-killing legislation. Now, however, only a great deal of violence will ever restore the constitution to it’s rightful place. Mark my words. I only pray it may happen in my time, so that my children may have a chance at living in peace in the land of the free.

      • I did not stand quietly chewing my cud when the Patriot Act came on the scene. I fought it tooth and nail, albeit with zero effect.

        For my efforts, I was branded un-American, a terrorist sympathizer (by both left and right) and a liberal commie pinko fag0t (precise wording) and worse by Busheviks.

        I was fired, had vehicle windows broken and was threatened more than once with great bodily injury for speaking against the Wisdom of their latter day Messiah, “God in the White House.”

        When motivated by fear, most humans become herd animals and it is exceedingly dangerous to stand out from the herd.

  12. So I guess the drug lords in Mexico didn’t want them, eh? Eric must have been sad to see such good equipment go to waste.

    • He probably just couldn’t find some nice “assault shotguns” to go with the slugs. The government’a got their best men and women working on it to make sure this travesty doesn’t happen again.

  13. OMG! OMG! A campus PD has an MRAP? OMG! This is starting to sound a lot like the media and their fetish for the AR15. I suppose that having an armored vehicle could bring about the apocalypse, but more than likely it was just an apple that fell and hit chicken little on the head.

    • I don’t really care about agencies having stuff like this, but what I object to is having expensive, useless and unneeded stuff like this no matter how “cheap” it was to acquire. Why in God’s name would any sane manager saddle their budget with a useless pig of a money pit like this when, if the situation where it was actually needed arose, you could borrow one for fucking FREE from some other agency desperate to justify their expenditure.

      • Perhaps they intend to park it permanently and use it as an auxilliary classroom space?

        Or they could transfer it to the trades department and let future automotive types tinker with it in the hope that they’ll learn how not to design military equipment…

  14. I gots no problem with open carry.
    I detest confrontational open carry. They effed us in CA twice on that. Yeah, the GunGrabbers passed the laws, but the confrontationalists goaded that blackhead to the surface.
    I like my rights, I like exercising them. I can’t blame Starbucks. They sell coffee, not a platform for politics.

    • California gun rights were Eff’ed LONG before the open carry guys took their stand to make a point. The point to be made was to out the politicians as plain and simple gun grabbers. When things get too bad to actually exercise your constitutional rights and the electorate as a whole cannot seem to find any possible way to reverse the trend through the usual processes it becomes necessary to take your tactics “outside the box.”

      At this point I think the only possible thing that will save California gun rights is for them to overstep so far that their violation of Second Amendment rights can no longer be ignored by the federal courts. Only when that happens or conservatives take over the California legislature again (shortly after Hell freezes over) will the unconstitutional legislation be repealed.

      As uncomfortable as it may seem to those of you still willing to labor in the natural, civil and constitutionally protected rights denying state of California, the open carry movement may have given the rope to the currently over-confident liberal/progressive legislature and civilian disarmament groups with which they may eventually hang themselves on the Tree of Liberty.

  15. 12 gauge slug ammo…
    Matt, you have obviously not seen the size of the slugs we have here in the Pacific Northwest. By golly, it’s the state, um, not animal, um, it’s the unofficial state uh, slimy thing.
    So, the slug ammo is for killing slugs. Sheesh. Everyone around here knows that.

    • Slugs for slugs? Wimps. Back home we loaded rock salt in our shotguns for the slugs. Shoot them and listen to them scream and sizzle like bacon. Now that was sport.

      • Holy yikes! You must have some fast slugs where you live!! We used to walk right up and pour salt on them. Or collect them for bait. ;-p

        Did you know that plastic surgeons use real live leeches?

        • They weren’t fast. They were mean. Ambush predators without peer. An 8 bore loaded with salt blocks was the only sure way to stop a charge. Big, fvcking mean slugs.

          Might be just a coincidence, but we did live down stream from 3 Mile Island.

  16. Four million rounds of 12 gauge slug EVERY YEAR? Let’s see, that’s 10,959 rounds that must be fired every single day to use all that up, or 57 rounds every hour. Exactly how many agents do these folks have and what the hell are they shooting at?

  17. I sort of have sympathy for the border patrol. Underfunded, undermanned, and tasked with an almost impossible job and the need to be politically correct while doing it.

    Seems the border patrol would be better served with a shipping container full of .338 Lapua…..stop the problem before it’s a problem…..

    And for the MRAP, I wouldn’t worry. It’s probably just to protect the football team after their upcoming trouncing in Ann Arbor 🙂

  18. Doesn’t look like it will fit in a parking garage. I hope there are no officer rescues, hostages, or active shooter in the campus garages.

      • Gubmint grants. The school probably made a profit off taking this piece of junk. It’ll sit behind the maintenance garage or campus rotting down while the school diverts the funds the g allocated for it’s upkeep to another project. Something important, like the Dean’s hot tub.

  22. Removing the top turret!? That would be removing the one feature of that vehicle that LEOs might actually be in a situation to need an MRAP. Geniuses.

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