Yes, it’s possible…maybe even preferable . . . A firearms retailer builds a customer base without using Google and Facebook

When two primary digital advertising channels are off limits, an online retailer has to track down other ways to gain customers and drive sales. That’s what 1800GunsAndAmmo.com is doing, and owners say business is thriving despite not having access to Google and Facebook Inc. advertising.

The site’s parent company, Webycorp, No. 703 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000, generated $25 million in web sales last year, according to CEO and co-founder Mikhail Orlov, despite having its guns and ammo marquee site barred from advertising on Google and Facebook.

Because Chicago . . . Elmhurst police: There will be no guns at concealed carry class

Safety concerns raised over a planned firearms class qualifying people to carry concealed weapons in Illinois are baseless, according to Elmhurst police chief Michael Ruth.

“It’s strictly a classroom environment,” Ruth said Wednesday. “There’s no weapons, there’s no firearms, there’s no ammunition. There’s none of those things.”

Social media activity on a couple of Elmhurst Facebook pages had raised the specter of armed students coming to the Sept. 23 and 24 classes being offered in the Knights of Columbus Hall at 537 S. York St.

At long last . . . Fed OKs sale of Cabela’s bank, paving way for merger

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday signed off on the sale of Cabela’s World’s Foremost Bank, paving the way for the company to complete its merger with Bass Pro Shops.

The Fed released a 23-page order Wednesday afternoon that said it concluded the sale of the bank to Columbus, Georgia-based Synovus Financial “would not have a significantly adverse effect on competition or on the concentration of resources in any relevant banking market.”

Synovus, which joined the deal in April after Capital One ran into regulatory issues, plans to take over $1.2 billion in assets from the bank, keep certificates of deposit and sell the credit card assets to Capital One.

Don’t be that guy . . . Video: Man Pulls Gun at Miami Gas Station During Hurricane Irma Rush

“I saw that guy pulling his gun out on the other driver,” Melanie says. “They were fighting over some gas!”

The armed man in the fanny pack apparently realized he’d gone too far, though: Melanie says he quickly put away his weapon and sped out of the lot.

“The guy was mad and impulsive and pulled out the gun, immediately regretting it afterwards,” she says. “He drove away speeding.”

No, they’re not joking around . . . Inside Texas’ Active Shooter Training Simulations

For his ongoing series Run, Fight, Hide, Spike Johnson shadowed cops, firefighters and other first responders participating in Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training in Texas. The gritty, black-and-white images resemble surveillance feed stills, with cops busting through doors, taking down shooters and carrying the victims to safety. The goal is to make it as real as possible. “They’re not joking around,” Johnson says. “It’s really serious.”

ALERRT is an FBI-endorsed program at Texas State University, training more than 105,000 police officers and 85,000 civilians since 2002, including Fort Hood responders Sergeants Kimberly Munley and Mark Todd. Former police and military officers teach classes around the country as well as on ALERRT’s 40-acre campus just outside of San Marcos.

You don’t say . . . CNN Pushes More Fake News About NRA’s Loesch

Media trade group Digital Content Next (DCN) is targeting the NRA for a video released in April featuring spokeswoman Dana Loesch. In the piece, titled “Taking on the Times,” Loesch slammed The New York Times as a dutiful shill for the Left and put the newspaper on alert. “We’re going to laser-focus on your so-called ‘honest pursuit of truth,’” she promised of their media bias. “In short, we’re coming for you.”

In a letter to Loesch, DCN took exception to her “incendiary language,” saying it was “un-American to threaten journalists.” They then proceeded to explain to Loesch the concept of the free press (which, presumably, also includes the right of the people to criticize that free press). When the letter was “leaked” to the press, CNN was all too glad to publish it—because nothing says “news” like a five-month-old video—and jump on the Loesch-bashing bandwagon.

The vast majority of urban violence is gang-related . . . Teen gun violence ‘a way of life’ in Savannah and Syracuse

On the surface, Savannah, Georgia, and Syracuse, New York, don’t have much in common beyond their size; both are smaller cities with populations hovering around 145,000 people. Yet their streets share a grim reality: Teenagers are being killed or wounded by firearms at rates far higher than in most U.S. cities, according to an Associated Press and USA TODAY Network analysis of shooting cases compiled by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

From 2014 through this past June, 57 youths aged 12 to 17 in Savannah and 48 in Syracuse were killed or injured in gun violence. The cities’ rates of teen shootings per capita are more than double those seen in the vast majority of U.S. cities with populations of 50,000 or more.

A blunder down under? . . . What Happened When My Husband Unexpectedly Went to Prison

I know it sounds naïve now, but I never thought twice about Patrick getting into trouble — he was a goody-two shoes. He had always done everything completely above board.

On that night in 2012, the police weren’t able to tell me what Patrick had been charged with. He was locked up overnight and I next saw him in court the morning after he was released on bail.

Patrick was charged with possession of a slingshot, two crossbows, one unregistered rifle and three metallic objects. He also had agreed to sell the unregistered rifle to an undercover police officer in his shop and had assembled the crossbow for the officer — both crimes in New South Wales, where we live.

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44 COMMENTS

  1. That bodega in the picture about the urban gun violence is awesome – Natty Daddy and Natural Ice, 25 oz. cans, only $1 a piece?

    It’s also too bad about that anti-gun sign, I guess it must not be working. They should put another up. Two signs might work.

  2. Going to stop shopping at Cabelas after reading this. I went to the big Bass Pro shop here in Denver when it opened just to see the place. I asked them where their reloading equipment was and they stared at me like I just landed from Mars. Cabelas in the past always had the goods that the American west needed. Bass Pro as near as I can figure it is good at fishing in the southeast. They sure don’t know much about trout fishing. Time to spend more money at Sportsmen warehouse.

  4. As far as avoiding Google for the rest of us goes … I for one am finding duckduckgo to be just about as good for 90%+ of what I look for regularly.

    Anyone got a good alternative to Gmail?

    • I used to use Army Knowledge Online for email until the kicked all us retirees to the curb. Now I use Yahoo, for email only. They seem to be the best (least dangerous) of the lefty siliconeheads. I haven’t used facecrap in over a year.

    • If you’re concerned with security and privacy, have a look at ProtonMail. Their free plan isn’t unlimited, but they respect your privacy and don’t put ads in your mail. Zohomail is another good free option.

      Remember when Google used to make a lot of noise about their “Don’t be evil” motto? I guess those days are behind them.

    • Look at protonmail.com. Encrypted mail with good privacy. They have free accounts available.

      Oops got beaten to punch 🙂

    • Yahoo mail still resembles a classic email app. Gmail (I have both) is painfully awkward to use (what’s with the two inboxes? One for new mail and one for all the other new mail Google has decided isn’t spam but you don’t really need to see unless you look for it by clicking the ‘all mail’ link.)

      Yeah, I’ve recently made DuckDuck my default search engine. Google can go f*ck themselves.

    • Tangent to alternative cloud / hosted search, mail or whatever … privacy-respecting domain and hosting products for non-techies are all over the place now – browser-based dashboards for admin; your own domain, site n URL; authoring SW if you want a landing page; email accounts; file storage; some security and throttling; all priced in the low $10s / month. Some bundle with ISP and Mobile providers. Some have partners (often with investors in common.) Some just provide a list as a service. They’re as retail as “Go Daddy”, but provide services you want.

      Fred Wilson covered some of this earlier this year on his “VC in NYC” blog. He likes TuCows, which I’m pleased to see is still in business. (They bundled and distributed freeware and shareware back before the interwebs, when finding and getting stuff took more work. “Back in the day” enthusiast pubs like PC-World, Byte or Dr. Dobbs would index all the examples of this or that. These days, we go to search engines, which get their money from advertisers looking to sell to the people who get the lists, not the people who want the lists. I wonder who their list selections serve?)

      Anybody nerdy enough to snark about .9mm Glock brand Glocks (with folding things that go up) can navigate this tech in half an hour.

    • web browser = Epic Privacy Browser
      search = startpage.com
      email = protonmail

      I recommend the above when it comes to ungoogling your life and keeping out the spying apparatus.

    • In the classroom? I hope so!

      The NRA bans students from taking guns and ammo into the lecture portions of their classes.

    • Illinois cc classes usually have no guns in the classroom during the first day of lecture. Guns are used, obviously, during qualification. BTW, the police were questioned about the course, given by civilians, by the local press. It was not an edict by the police.

  6. Dunno’ what the he!! they are blathering about in Elmhurst. Lots of CC classes all over Chicago’s burbs. Yeah they even have guns in Elmhurst😆It is NOT even in Cook County…poor dumb Aussie. Prison for that stupid shite. Oh and I like Cabela’s. Pretty much but all my ammo there and have bought a couple guns. Bass is pathetic. I hope they don’t close my local store…

    • It’s not the city of Elmhurst, is is someone who is running to the Chicago Tribune (a wealth of gun knowledge) and the city and trainers having to explain everything to the reporters. I took my class in Chicago before the law was even in effect. Day Two (I was exempt from day one) the students brought their pistols and holsters and we spent about 45 min doing basic holster draw exercises (no ammo). And after the range qualification, I would say about 75% were not exactly “gun” people (or least did not have much experience with handguns)

  7. “…and three metallic objects.”

    I’ll bet that every single Australian is guilty of the “crime” of owning metallic objects. What the fuck is going on down there?

      • Yeah there were a few we faught to kill communism and that didn’t turn out so well. We kept the brit tyranny at bay for a while and now we have the commie globalists trying to turn our beautiful country into the ussr. The old crown isn’t looking so bad right now.

      • It wasn’t always that way, but just like in the UK, the people made the mistake of electing a couple of Progressive administrations and since then even when a conservative regime gets into power, they can’t seem to undo the damage. As time goes on, tyranny becomes the accepted ‘new normal’.

        • When the entire premise of your “government” is to steal from one group of people to give to another group of people then you inevitably end up with what we have all over the place as “western democracy”. Left or Right, Liberal or Conservative are just two sides to the same coin.

          The only difference is from whom is going to get stolen, how much and to whom is the money going to go. Liberals like to give your money and mine to other people whom they’ve identified as victims. Conservatives like to give it to large companies and in turn go bomb foreign countries. These are both just generalities of course, there is much overlap as it is the same coin after all…

    • They did the same thing california is doing. They turned the law abiding into felons. Government loves doing that in CA. I’ve, so far, been unable to find an LEO who actually knows the gun laws. They just enforce what they think they are and let the DA dismiss or charge based on political whim.

    • According to the case transcript from the appeal the “metallic items” (quoted incorrectly as objects in the article) were in fact “bow[s] fitted transversely on a stock” so as to fall within definition of crossbow in Weapons Prohibition Act 1998. (yeah legal speak always looks like a non-english speaking toddler got left alone with a dictionary and a typewriter) Those 3 objects were the assembled crossbows it was illegal for him to own or sell in NSW.

      You can tell that whoever this journalist was they sympathised with the wife otherwise as per our regular news reports of anything firearm or weapon related they would have been listed as “precision, high powered almost semi-automatic assault death launchers that resembled a Glock style M-16 lever action assault shotgun that can fire 8 shots in 8 seconds”.

      The idiot admitted he knew what he did was illegal and that he figured no one would find out. Ultimately he found out that when you play the game and roll the dice then the house always wins in the end. In relation to other crimes committed in NSW he was handed a manifestly excessive sentence but people around here always talk about stupid people doing stupid things that win stupid prizes…

  8. Have bought some stuff at local Cabela’s – One rifle that was on clearance and some ammo and reloading components. There is a Bass Pro on the other side of Atlanta from me and I did go in once; that was enough.

    That Aussie guy got screwed by his own government, of course their entire government sucks even worse than Commiefornia. He should have kept his mouth shut and his guns hidden….First rule of gun club (Australia) is don’t talk about gun club.

    • First rule of gun club australia is don’t try to sell your unregistered guns to a bloke in your shop. Do it at the pub like all the sensible people… /sarc

      The laws are asinine but simple ones like register your guns and sell them through legal channels are not hard to comply with. The cops make it pretty easy to follow the law as it it written (even if you disagree with it).

      We do have slightly less retarded laws than California but like in the US it is a patchwork of different crap across the different states.

  9. That last story has me scratching my head a bit – what’s the penalty for a ‘metallic object’ in Oz, anyway?

    • According to the case transcript from the appeal the “metallic items” (quoted incorrectly as objects in the article) were in fact “bow[s] fitted transversely on a stock” so as to fall within definition of crossbow in Weapons Prohibition Act 1998.

      According to the current version of that act there is a 14 year maximum sentence for possession AND a 14 year maximum for sale of a prohibited weapon so the muppet involved could have gotten 28 years technically for just those 2 acts. That being said you can get a prohibited weapon permit for not much money so the guy is triply stupid?

  10. What happens if you forget to charge your identilock? I ask because I’ll never own one to find out for myself.

  12. 1800gunsandammo and universalmania are my two go to stores for gun supplies these days – sorry Primary Arms and Midway USA – lower your prices! Huge inventories, low prices and fast shipping (free at universalmania!).

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