I deliberately waited until the furor over the Cambridge incident had died down before discussing it here, now. I figured a lot of folks would assume I was the guy with time wearing a police uniform who would automatically side with the cop.

Nope. It ain’t that.

From President Obama on down, folks saw it as a “racial incident.” I honestly don’t think it was. I don’t even see it as a cop-versus-citizen thing.

This reviewer’s two cents worth is: it looks like a “class” thing to me, in more than one sense of the word.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who happens to be black, comes home to the nice house he has earned the hard way, in a hired limo. The front door is stuck. He and the limo driver try to push the door open. A neighbor sees two men shouldering a door inward, looking for all the world like a break-in, and calls the police. She does not mention the skin color of the men involved: she can’t see that in the dim light. She’s just a good neighbor reporting what looks like a burglary in progress.

Police respond with alacrity. “Contact” officer James Crowley, who happens to be white, asks the professor for his ID. The Prof offers only his Harvard ID: after all, being a Harvard professor is where his ego is invested. Now, no one has ever shown us in the rest of the world a photo of that ID, but I’ve never seen a college ID that had a residential address on it. A driver’s license with his picture and his address that said “Hello, this is MY house, I LIVE here” would have been nice. Something that merely says, “I’m an important, prestigious person from an important, prestigious place” does NOT say that.

The cop, who was a designated instructor in race relations and racial sensitivity, had HIS ego invested in keeping his community, himself, and his brother officers safe. Put yourself in his place. You are the officer called to the scene of a potential burglary (or even home invasion) in progress. The obvious suspect refuses to cooperate and merely screams at you that you’re a racist cop. You KNOW that if you just take his word that he lives there and you leave, and an hour later the legitimate homeowner calls your chief and says “My neighbors told me that the cops were right there with the guy that broke into my house, but the burglar said he was me, and the cop just took his word for it and left!” your badge will grow wings and fly away.

Professor Gates made a career of studying racial hatred, and of fighting it. He can be proud of that. But if his own powers of critical thinking equal the intellectual horsepower that fueled his career, he can’t be proud of the knee-jerk reaction that made him shout “racist cop,” and “I’ll see your mama outside!”

The Cambridge cop, on the other hand, managed his end of things with professionalism and dignity. HE is not the one who automatically defaulted to racial stereotyping, as the Professor did…and as, sadly, the President did.

Race, my butt. It was about status, and societal “class.” The Harvard professor was accustomed to being the alpha in his world, and was not prepared to obey an appropriate command from a lower-class, blue-collar member of society. Yes, face it: the blue collar is at its bluest on a police uniform shirt. And if the most prestigious members of Boston/Cambridge society didn’t follow a “caste system,” they wouldn’t have become known as “Boston Brahmins,” would they?

Beers in the Rose Garden? Barack Obama’s brilliant sense of media manipulation pulled a rabbit out of the hat on that one. But let’s face reality: this was about a privileged member of the liberal elite, who not only knows the President but mentored him, overbearingly “pulling rank” on a public servant who was trying to keep the professor’s home safe. It’s about a member of the Urban Elite who lacked the “ordinary folks’ common sense” to realize he had just done a very convincing imitation of a burglar.

The deepest of my sympathy in this whole cluster-coitus goes to the black Cambridge officer who was publicly excoriated as an Uncle Tom for being honest enough to speak up for a brother cop who did the right thing. Of the players who got the most coverage, my hat is off to the Cambridge cop who made the controversial arrest. He was the same man who helped the physically handicapped professor down the stairs (see photo below) after the brewskis and the media moment were done … as President Obama strode ahead, leaving both the Cop and the Professor more than symbolically behind him.

In the end, it was the cop who showed “class,” in the best sense of the word.

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A few entries ago, you were promised that as soon as we got our hands on the latest new Ruger rifle, you’d hear back. Well, we muckled onto three or so of ‘em this past week, so here we go.

We toured the production cell at the Newport, New Hampshire plant. Ruger’s switchover to “lean manufacturing” has changed the look of the factory dramatically in the last few years. SR556s were literally flowing off the production line.

But, enough of that: how does it SHOOT?

The subtle feel of the mechanism as it cycles is different from your usual Stoner-type AR15, because the Ruger entry works of a piston design, specifically a proprietary two-piece piston. One of my fellow shooters said, “It feels like a whoosh, not a sproing.” That about describes it, even if it ain’t engineer terminology.

My buddy Russ Lary threw a 6.5-20X variable power Leupold Tactical scope onto his T&E SR556, and cranked it all the way up. Twenty power magnification ain’t much for sophisticated bench rest shooters, but for us meat n’ potatoes riflemen, think “Hubble telescope with crosshairs.” At about 100 yards, he found sub-one-inch groups easy, with Match grade 69 grain and 77 grain loads from Black Hills Ammunition shooting the tightest.

The piston system does indeed run cool. I could race a pair of 30-round magazines through it as fast as I could pull the trigger, and the carrier (bolt) was still room temperature to the touch. I’m told by folks I trust at Ruger that this thing has gone 20,000 rounds without a malfunction OR a cleaning in factory torture-testing. In the several hundred rounds of 5.56mm and .223 Remington that we’ve run through it, we didn’t have any malfs either.

It’s early yet, but I’m likin’ this rifle!

Russ Lary discovers that the SR556 is accurate…

…Gail Pepin discovers that the SR556 is reliable…

…and Mas discovers that the SR556 is fun.

On the SR556 production line.

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While teaching in Arizona last week, I heard from friends at Gunsite Training Center that Jack Weaver had passed. The retired lawman was eighty.

Back in the 1950s when Jack Weaver was a young deputy at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, he attended the gunfight simulation matches developed in California by the legendary Jeff Cooper. The paradigm then was quick draw, one-handed shooting, but one also had to hit the target to win. Weaver experimented and discovered that he could hit fastest by drawing swiftly, taking a two-hand hold on the gun, and bringing it to eye level to rapidly aim. It proved to be the winning strategy. John Plahn analyzed the biomechanics of the isometric stance Weaver had worked out for himself, and Cooper adopted and promulgated it, naming it after Weaver. You can read the details here and here, in the excellent work of a fellow writer at American Handgunner magazine, Jeremy Clough.

The rest, as they say, was history. The paradigm changed completely: for police, for military, for armed citizens. We’ll never know how many good people survived criminal violence because they used the steadier, more accurate and controlled Weaver stance, or other two-handed stances for which the Weaver technique paved the way. I’ve heard that Jeremy’s article had made Weaver so popular that the old gentleman felt he was being treated like a rock star for the last year of his life. He well deserved it.

It is my loss that, though I knew Cooper, I never got to meet Jack Weaver. He changed a long-established paradigm. Weaver’s work undoubtedly saved untold lives.

The man Made A Difference.

These Lethal Force Institute students fire from what LFI calls the Classic Weaver stance in their final qualification at Phoenix Rod & Gun Club.

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The time between Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s is called by some “President’s Week.” It’s the perfect time to reflect on the character of our nation’s top leaders.

George W. Bush left the office with grace and dignity. As this comparison shows, he and his whole first family was most gracious to his, and their, successors in the White House.

Our last President made decisions that earned some hatred, but decisions that also earned respect in some surprising quarters, as seen below, in the comments.  Being the grandson of Arab-Americans who immigrated to this country more than 110 years ago doesn’t make me an expert on contemporary Arabic culture or anything, but it does give me a little better handle on such things than your average brie-and-chablis Yuppie. Arabs respect strength and have contempt for weakness, and they prize that subjective thing called “character” very highly. George W. Bush showed them that he had both strength and character.

He showed it to his own countrymen, too. In two elections, Democrats assailed him as a fat cat who would leave a gigantic carbon footprint on the world, and urged us to vote for them instead to preserve “green values.” Yet this gives us an idea who among the contenders actually put his lifestyle where his mouth was in terms of energy conservation.

No general can keep secrets from his valet, it is said, and no President can keep secrets from his bodyguards. When I met George Bush in the picture shown here, he had not yet been elected, or even nominated, and did not have Secret Service protection yet. His bodyguards, since he was Governor of Texas, were Texas Rangers. I spoke with them at length. They told me he was a sincere guy who respected cops and all the people who worked under him, and to a man they would have been honored to take a bullet for him. (Secret Service agents assigned later to the First Family detail seemed unanimous in saying the same thing about Bush.) In speaking with the then-candidate, I found that Bush actually listened, and solicited opinions. When I asked him about certain police issues and, yes, gun owners’ civil rights, he was on top of the issues and answered knowledgeably.

This is the corner of Backwoods Home where we talk about gun stuff. Yes, some gun owners never forgave him when he said he’d sign a renewal of the “Assault Weapons Ban” after its sunset, if it passed. They didn’t know that Bush already knew that it wasn’t going to pass. No harm, no foul, no hurt to us in eight years of his Presidency.

The recent 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln reminded me of my favorite quote from that great President: “We cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”

It was something that George W. Bush understood, lived by, and led by for eight years.

I have to respect that.

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Things are tough all over. Municipal, county, and state budgets are facing critical shortfalls that could cause severe limitation of ability to deliver emergency services in a timely fashion. A brother officer recently sent me a whimsical photo that says it all: a police K9 car with a Chihuahua in the back seat.

In Hawthorne, Florida, the police department was disbanded because the community couldn’t afford it anymore. Hawthorne will presumably pay the county for sheriff’s deputies to take up the slack. The same has happened with other municipalities in the area.

The Washington Post reports that “Philadelphia officials are leaving 200 police positions unfilled and cutting back on overtime…And police in Atlanta are shouldering a 10 percent pay cut after all 1,770 employees and the police chief agreed to a furlough of four hours per week.” This gives a broader view of the problem.

Our nation is veering toward an economic depression. Poverty breeds crime. More crime demands more cops, but there are going to be fewer.

Meanwhile, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel offers this story on the current, acute ammunition shortage due to panic buying. True, a lot of that comes from public fear of pending legislation under the new Administration.

But could that simple formula of more poverty, more crime, and fewer law enforcement officers just have a little bit to do with ordinary American citizens feeling a need to be more prepared for crisis than usual?

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