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Many weapons parts are federally regulated like SBRs. Keep them safe with NFA trusts. A prevalent misconception exists among the general public, and the majority of gun owners, that silencers are illegal. Lump machine guns and short-barreled rifles into that questionable group, too. To the better informed, all the previously mentioned weapons can be legally owned by paying a $200 tax and filling out ATF Form 5320.4, also referred to as Form 4.

The most common manner in which to obtain restricted Class III weapons is to fill out the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) Form 4 and register the weapon as “individual” ownership. The second classification, “corporations,” allows incorporated entities to own Class III weapons. A third registration method is to assign your ownership to an NFA trust.

NFA Trusts Are a Popular Method to Own NFA Guns

Creating a trust to own Class III weapons has risen in popularity over the past two years, owing to a couple of reasons. As a part of the background check process, the chief law enforcement officer in the community where you live is required to sign off on the Form 4. NFA trusts are a popular option for those communities where that LEO refuses to sign off on the form. The second reason that trusts have become more popular is the belief that Class III applications registering ownership to a trust get approved in less than the two to eight months it has historically taken to get approval.

The popularity of creating a trust to take ownership of Class III weapons deserves a hard look to weigh the pros and cons associated with this choice. Keep in mind that I am not an attorney. For this reason, I am not making any recommendations that could be construed as legal advice. I am merely presenting the views of two knowledgeable attorneys on the subject, as well as other experts on the subject. Going beyond using a trust to own National Firearms Act (NFA) regulated Title 2 weapons, this method of ownership may be used in states where Title 1 weapons come under close personal scrutiny, too. (Title 1 firearms are the kind that you can go to Wal-Mart or the local gun shop to buy.) An attorney in your state should make that judgment, though.

Handy around barricades, short-barreled rifles are excellent competitors in 3-Gun competitions. Photo courtesy Matt Howard

Before diving into the issue of NFA trusts, let’s examine registering weapons under a corporation to help clear the air. Some of the pitfalls of using a corporation instead of a trust include registration of the corporation on an annual basis that require fees from state and local municipalities, filing taxes and maintaining a board of directors. If the corporation is dissolved, dealing with the assets, such as NFA items, can be difficult legally.

Legal Advice on an NFA Trust

A trust is an estate-planning document. A trust lives on beyond the life of the person establishing the trust. To get an idea of the benefits of creating an NFA trust, I spoke with David Goldman, an attorney from Florida. He established GunTrustLawyer.com, and created a network of lawyers who specialize in creating NFA trusts. “The biggest reason that people use trusts is that the chief LEO won’t sign off,” Goldman said. “One of our most frequent users for trusts is police officers—when budgets are tight and the officers want to arm themselves with short-barreled rifles, but their chief won’t sign off. Privacy is another matter.”

Sun Devil lower. Jeremy Clough photo

I don’t advocate allowing felons to own firearms. Certain legal judgments don’t take into account every case, though. And, with 50 percent of marriages ending in divorce, it complicates some gun ownership situations. “You don’t have to be engaged in criminal activity to be a prohibited person,” Goldman said. “I had a client injure a child in a helicopter accident and was convicted of child endangerment, which made him a ‘prohibited’ person. If his 12 machine guns hadn’t been in a trust, they would have been lost.”

Stories abound of false charges brought by angry spouses embroiled in divorce proceedings. “I had a client throw a cup of water and he was charged with spousal abuse, and became a prohibited person,” Goldman added.

“A person cannot purchase a machine gun without a background check just by using a trust. The gun or firearms trust merely prevents the local CLEO (Chief Law Enforcement Officer) from arbitrarily denying fully qualified individuals the ability to exercise their constitutional right to purchase a firearm. An NFA trust does not make it easier for a criminal to purchase machine guns, silencers, and SBRs because of the ease in which these items can be tracked back to the purchaser.

Photo courtesy SureFire

“Besides allowing individuals to protect their right to purchase firearms, these trusts provide protections for the families and friends of gun owners that are not available with individual ownership. Through the traditional purchase route, many individuals are at risk of criminal activity and prosecution for permitting a friend, spouse, parent or child use or have access to the items. In addition, individual ownership does not deal with important issues, such as incapacity or death of the firearm owner. Likewise, a gun trust addresses the transfer of these firearms to heirs that may not be eligible to receive them, such as children or people living in a state where Title II firearms are not permitted. As a gun trust lawyer, I have seen many individuals who were forming corporations, trusts, and LLCs that were generic in nature and did not address their needs. Due to these errors, they placed their families, friends and children at unnecessary risk—a risk that can be avoided with an adequate NFA gun trust.”

Jeremy Clough photo

More Aspects

After a long conversation with Mr. Goldman, I related my interest in setting up an NFA trust with fellow writer, shooter and attorney, Jason Wong. A couple months ago, at a camp house in Wyoming, Wong said, “You have to be careful when setting up an NFA trust. I’ve talked to several people who want to take ‘will maker’ software and create a gun trust. There are too many variables in state law to just create a trust in this manner. You run the risk of creating an invalid trust.”

Wong summarized his caution best in a recent article on Tactical-Life.com: “In some jurisdictions, local chief law enforcement officers will refuse to sign the Form 4 certification, and it can be nearly impossible to complete the form,” Wong said. “In these instances, some buyers have resorted to using corporations, limited liability companies, or a trust to avoid the law enforcement certification requirement. When a non-person entity (such as a corporation or trust) is used to purchase NFA firearms, the requirements for a photo and law enforcement certification are waived by the ATF.

“If the buyer is self-employed, he may have already formed a corporation or LLC. In other cases, buyers often form corporations and trusts solely for the purchase of NFA firearms. If a buyer lives within a jurisdiction where a law enforcement certification is difficult or impossible to obtain, he may wish to explore one of these options. Buyers should speak with a lawyer about potential advantages and risks when considering the use of a corporation or a trust. Potential risks include the loss of all firearms possessed by a corporation or trust if the formation and administrative procedures required of the entity are not followed properly.”

The real difference between a standard lower and one for legal SBRs is the BATFE registration. Jeremy Clough photo

“Depending on the state, it can be as easy as signing a piece of paper and have it witnessed and notarized,” Goldman said in regards to completing a NFA trust. “We participate in the fees for providing the information and federal guidance and the local attorney handles the state issues. It can take 24 hours to turn them around to another attorney, but it usually takes a week.”

Cost of Security

Checking on the cost of establishment, I find it common for estate trusts to run in the $1,500 range. “In most states, we try to find attorneys who will prepare the Gun Trusts for a total of $600,” Goldman said.

“There’s a rumor that trusts take half as long to get approval as individual applications,” John Hollister with Advanced Armament Corporation said. “It’s logical because it takes less time to review since no fingerprints are required. There are only 12 examiners who review NFA applications. On July 1, 2011, the NFA application examiners were reshuffled from categorizing based upon the first letter of the last name of the applicant to being divided by state of applicant.” Hollister went on to speculate that individual Form 4 approval would be faster in the near future, owing to the reorganization of application examiners.

If you are in the market to purchase a silencer, machine gun, short-barreled rifle or other NFA weapon, consider all the options carefully. If you choose to form a trust, ensure that you weigh carefully the do-it-yourself route. I’ll be using a local attorney to set up mine.

The post What Are NFA Trusts? appeared first on Tactical Life Gun Magazine: Gun News and Gun Reviews.

Tactical Life Gun Magazine: Gun News and Gun Reviews

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When one is responsible for promoting application development from Dev through the various environments such as QA, UAT, etc., through Production, it is often useful to ensure that configurations in test environments are comparable to the final production environment.  This is especially true with systems where a team of DBAs manage the servers.

Obviously, the difference in performance could be due to differences in hardware, storage, networking, software configuration, etc.  The question is how does one quickly and efficiently find the differences without having to run a lot of different commands and compare the output.  Fortunately, our Percona Toolkit has a couple of utilities that can make this much easier.  When you are tasked with supporting large numbers of servers, efficiency is paramount and this is where the toolkit can really help you!

You can find more information on the Percona Toolkit here: https://www.percona.com/software/database-tools/percona-toolkit

Let’s look at a few utilities that can help you spot differences in servers.  The first tool we will look at is pt-summary (https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/LATEST/pt-summary.html).

The pt-summary tool will give you a summarized view of the server hardware.  It runs a series of Linux commands and formats the output into an easy-to-consume format.  You will get details on the following:

• Operating System & Linux kernel
• Virtualization
• CPU (number of cores, speed, models, caching)
• Memory consumption, swappiness, etc.
• Mounted filesystems (mount points, size, usage, format, etc.)
• Disk schedulers
• Disk partitioning
• Logical Volumes
• RAID
• Network configuration
• Network traffic statistics
• Network connections
• Top processes
• CPU utilization

By running the same report on the servers, you can spot-check differences in the hardware and Operating System.

When you want to find out differences in MySQL configuration, the toolkit has the perfect tool for this.  It is called pt-config-diff (https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/LATEST/pt-config-diff.html).

This utility can connect to different servers and look at their configuration via MySQL Server Variables and then perform a “diff” on the values.  The tool creates a simple and concise output showing any differences between the servers.  Any differences will be immediately obvious.  Below is an example of the output:

2 config differences
Variable                  my.primary.cnf  my.replica.cnf
========================= =============== ===============
datadir                   /tmp/12345/data /tmp/12346/data
port                      12345           12346

Usage of these two utilities will allow you to quickly and easily find differences in either hardware or MySQL configuration between two or more servers.  These are the two tools that I always go to when I need to understand why two servers that are supposedly the same do not perform similarly.

Percona Database Performance Blog

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Buckeye Firearms Association

The wonderful thing about Laravel is that, if there’s something specific you need to accomplish, then there’s…Laracasts

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Like to share a shower with your sweetheart but hate fighting for warm water? Boona’s cleverly-designed dual shower head attaches to your existing water source and holds in place with a tension rod, distributing water evenly from both ends of your shower. Each head is adjustable for people of different heights.

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Dilbert Daily Strip

Access patterns intrigue me because it seems that everyone knows what they are and talks about them, but there’s also very little written about them—in MySQL literature, at least.
That’s why I set out to enumerate a list of access patterns (specific to MySQL).
Since there’s no apparent standard for access patterns, I cannot say how my list measures up, but after spending most my career with MySQL, I know this: it is necessary to consider these access patterns when evaluating and improving MySQL performance.
Simply put: you cannot ignore how the application accesses MySQL.

Planet MySQL

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How are climbing ropes made? What can they do? (Answer: incredible things.) How do they do it? GearJunkie digs in, video essay style.

As climbers, we routinely stake our lives on a few nylon fibers and seldom give it a thought beyond that.

Did you know that the machines that make climbing ropes use up to 48 different spools of material at once? What about that each meter of an Edelrid rope passes through human hands before it leaves the factory floor?

We didn’t know either, to be honest. We were always more wrapped up in what we (and especially other, bolder adventurers) could do with them.

Read on for an expository ode to climbing ropes, made possible by the Edelrid factory team and buoyed by cameos from the sport’s best.

But first, a whipper compilation.

(Skip to about 40 seconds in to watch GearJunkie correspondent Christian Black rip gear out of Indian Creek’s infamous “Fingers in a Light Socket” while riding a 40-foot fall.)

Natural Fear: Early Plant-Based Ropes

In the early days, “climbing ropes” were basically boat ropes. Braided cords of plant-based material were the norm.

Hemp was a common fiber choice, and climbers relied on hemp ropes as late as the 1950s. The plant is suitably robust (in tensile strength), but it’s cumbersome compared to modern rope materials and doesn’t stretch much. Its resistance to stretching limits its strength.

Almost all available evidence indicates risk tolerance was very different back in the day. Helmy and Fred Beckey’s second ascent of the South Face of Mt. Waddington (still a serious route today) in 1942 would undoubtedly have utilized hemp ropes.

Antique Gear List: Climbers In 1942 Were Tougher Than Nails

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Royal Robbins probably used hemp ropes on the first 5.9 in America, “Open Book,” in 1952. Climbers had first aided the route using wooden chocks (yes, 2x4s) the year before.

Robbins didn’t take any falls on the route, but similar ropes and gear held falls. Ignore the wannabe Ken Burns narration in this clip and hang with it for the first 20 seconds to watch a bonafide boat rope whipper.

Nylon Ropes Change the Game

In 1935, DuPont patented nylon, or synthetic polyamide, and changed the climbing world forever. The new fiber was mega-strong, stretchy, and lightweight — perfect for protecting climbers on the sharp end.

Nylon can exhibit different properties depending on its weave pattern. Some weaves, for instance, can make it pliable and stretchy; others can result in a durable, abrasion-resistant material.

World’s First Recycled Climbing Rope: Edelrid Reveals ‘NEO 3R’

The Edelrid NEO 3R 9.8mm will use 50% recycled material from cords the company would typically discard. Read more…

That dual applicability led to the “kernmantel” structure, which defines the market today. Edelrid introduced the idea in 1953. The company is German, and in that language, “kern” means core, and “mantel” means sheath.

Simply put, a kernmantel rope’s core gives it stretch and strength. The sheath protects the core from the elements. Both parts consist of nylon fibers.

Nylon climbing ropes can let humans do unfathomable things. The late Dan Osman arguably pushed climbing ropes closer to their limit than any other human before or since. Tragically, he also broke the limit dying while jumping on a single rope.

Osman’s specialties included free-soloing and the world’s biggest rope swings. Skip to 3 minutes to watch the “Sky Pilot” rope jump 1,000 feet off Yosemite’s Leaning Tower.

“Holy sphincter” is right, Dan-O.

How Climbing Rope is Made

GearJunkie found messaging with Edelrid’s rope manufacturing team similar to talking to any group of genius technicians: informative and often prohibitively technical.

In paraphrase, here’s how it all goes down.

Step One: Nylon to Filaments to Twisted Yarn

The first step in rope making is turning nylon into thin filaments. It’s melted, extruded, and then pulled out into strands. The strands combine to form nylon yarn, the primary material for any climbing rope.

Edelrid can achieve different rope characteristics by twisting the yarn together in up to five layers. It can also weave in materials like aramid and polyester to affect the rope’s elasticity.

To avoid curling and kinking, the manufacturer twists half the yarn to the left and half to the right. Edelrid’s technicians twist each nylon filament profusely — a meter-long segment contains between 100 and 140 twists.

After the twisting process, the yarn is ready for shrinking.

Step Two: Shrinkage

Properly shrunk yarn is integral to a rope’s dynamic qualities. Shrinking reduces its strength slightly, giving it the critical ability to stretch and rebound. Static ropes are made with unshrunk yarn.

Edelrid Head of Product Phillippe Westenberger said shrinking is critical in making a dynamic rope.

“Shrinking is the key process to give a rope its dynamic characteristics and make it a dynamic climbing rope. During this process, pressure, heat, and humidity shrink the fibers so that they can elongate later on again, for example, to catch a fall,” Westenberger explained.

“But not all shrinkage is the same, of course. Different materials and different intended rope characteristics demand different shrinking processes. Basically, performance then depends on the total time and how differently the three parameters are ramped up and down.”

Elongation and rebound are the main ingredients to a lead rope’s field performance. To visualize why, watch Sonnie Trotter take repeated 50-foot whippers off a classic Scottish trad route — apparently, all on the same cord.

To shrink the yarn, Edelrid weaves it into loose sheets and puts it into an industrial autoclave — essentially, a heavy-duty chemical reaction sauna.

Each raw fiber shrinks to about two-thirds of its original size and thickness.

Step Three: Braiding a Climbing Rope

After shrinking, Edelrid de-weaves the loose sheets and spins the sheath yarn onto bobbins. The bobbins sit aside until they’re ready to go into the braiding machine. The core yarn, meanwhile, gets its water-repellent treatment at this stage.

After that, the main event kicks off. Braiding machines work in a precise choreography: up to 48 bobbins can circulate, spin, and revolve around a single machine to make one rope. The bobbins mount on the machine’s “carriers.” Each one can carry a different yarn, and together, they spin the core and the sheath at the same time.

The general rule for sheath braiding is this: more carriers and thinner yarn make for the best rope characteristics. A rope’s sheath percentage increases with the number of carriers on the machine that braided it.

Intuitively, sheath percentage refers to how much of the rope is the sheath, measured by weight. Using thinner sheath yarn helps keep the rope’s weight down, and its surface slick.

“Generally, we can see a certain correlation of the higher the sheath percentage and the slicker the surface, the longer the rope will last,” said Westenberger.

He explained the utility in terms of handling and toughness. “Slickness of a rope decreases friction, so one can see the logical consequence of abrasion resistance. It also reduces rope drag when climbing and handling in belay devices.”

Trango Agility 9.8 Review: The Rope Most Climbers Need Most of the Time

The Trango Agility 9.8 is rated to 13 falls, making it a workhorse go-to rope for everyday crag or gym climbing. Read more…

Like every parameter of rope construction, Edelrid controls the braiding process tightly. They set the speed the machine pulls the rope through itself, and they set the angle the machines braid the yarn and the tension of each thread.

The size of the hole machine pulls the rope through is the final variable and probably the most relatable to the everyday climber. It determines, of course, the rope’s diameter.

Step Four: Practicality

Edelrid makes about 1,000 m of a given rope during a production run.

Once it has a fully braided rope, it runs it through one of its various dry treatments. Most are PFC-based, but Eco Dry treatment uses paraffin, a type of wax.

Believe it or not, each meter of every Edelrid rope then passes through human hands before it leaves the factory floor. Experts feel for stiff spots or any other irregularities resulting from braiding.

Custom(ish) Fit: Hestra’s Carefully Crafted Belay Glove Review

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Then another machine cuts the rope to length and stamps the middle mark. Workers finish the marks to make sure they’re distinct, and then manually melt and tape the ends. A final machine coils it for packaging.

Internal strength and break testing take place before Edelrid sends any rope to the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA) for certification.

How Strong Is Climbing Rope, Really?

The UIAA assumes a lot of responsibility (ethics and litigation) as the international certifying body for rope safety metrics. Consumers, by and large, purchase a lot of UIAA-rated climbing ropes around the world every day. Then, almost categorically, they go out into the world and abuse them.

All that considered, the organization generally plays it safe. Most field testing finds strength ratings reliable, and the “UIAA falls” ratings are thought to be conservative.

For entertaining, nonpretentious rope break testing that leverages professional lab technology, check out this clip from Hard is Easy. As a bonus, watch MC Ben rip an anchor out of his ceiling (in a somewhat improvised test from earlier days) about a minute in.

The team addresses plenty of field-applicable situations many climbers will be familiar with. “Should I cut the rope if I can squeeze a loop flat between my fingers? Should I worry about this fuzz?” And so on.

Tendon Ropes Factory Tour With … Wait, Who?

Curious to watch the whole modern rope-making process, one step at a time? Tour Tendon’s Bolatice, Czech Republic, facility with none other than “Tendon Top Employee Václav Nečesaný.”

Nečesaný knows what he’s talking about. And the results are in hand. If you take the video’s word for it, his ropes have helped world-class climbers pull off 5.15a/9a+ first ascents.

Rope Solo Rock Climbing: Understanding How It’s Done

With the recent influx of climbing media such as Free Solo, Dawn Wall, and The Alpinist, climbing jargon is spilling out into the general public. And the most common buzzword among climbing media is cause for some due confusion: Soloing. We discuss rope soloing here. Read more…

The post A Video Ode to the Nylon Climbing Rope appeared first on GearJunkie.

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