A Forced Reset Trigger
It's Saturday afternoon, May 24, 2025, 13:48 and I've updated this Web page a little bit with the link to the archives on WBAI.ORG and with Pickles of the North's piece about comic book ads from the past. There may be another update. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ On this episode of Back of the Book we talked about Donnie Bonespur
Trump's bribery exploits with getting a plane from a foreign government, getting suckers to buy his meme coin and making it a contest where those who bought to most of his meme coin got to personally lobby him for favors. We also talked about the Justice Department announcing that they are allowing an item called forced reset trigger
to be sold in the United States of America. They essentially turn a semi-automatic rifle into an fully automatic rifle, like a light machines gun. And these days even the penny is under attack. I may be able to write some more up here, so it might be worth your while to check back for updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday June 11, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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Makeshift machine guns may be coming to a neighborhood near you. The ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is part of the Department of Justice, is dropping it's challenge to the legality of a device called a forced reset trigger
which replaces the regular trigger in semi-automatic rifles and allows them to keep firing for as long as you hold the trigger, or until you run out of ammunition. This is a part of Trump's support of right-wing gun nuts. Previously the ATF had classified such modified weapons as machine guns, effectively making them illegal. But on Friday, just before we recorded this program, the ATF said that it was settling the court case which clears the way for these devices to be sold and used. I'm reading that Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that under the terms of the settlement, forced reset triggers
will remain legal so long as their manufacturer refrains from developing similar devices for pistols and enforces its patents to stop copycats. I'm sure that making these things legal for hand guns will follow soon. It's interesting that when in February 2018, after the Parkland shooting, President Trump instructed the ATF to issue regulations to treat bump stocks as machine guns. Bump stocks are much cruder devices to make semi-automatic rifles shoot a lot of rounds very rapidly. At that time Trump blamed former President Barack Obama for having legalized bump stocks,
which he then said was a BAD IDEA.
Of course neither President Obama nor his Attorney General Eric Holder had anything to do with it because the administration did not possess the legal authority to ban the sale of the devices. The National Rifle Association of America even was in favor of banning bump stocks.
In fact it was a lawsuit named Garland v. Cargill in 2018, where the Supreme Court, yes that Supreme Court, ruled in a 6 to 3 decision that bump stocks were not machine guns for purposes of the 1934, National Firearms Act.
I haven't had much time to examine these forced reset trigger things on-line but it's something that replaces your regular trigger mechanism in a semi-automatic rifle, like at AR-15 or similar weapon.
This effective legalization of what is obviously a way to make a semi-automatic rifle a machine gun was announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi. When she was Florida's attorney general in 2018, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, mass murder in Parkland Florida she supported more restrictive gun legislation in the wake of the deadly Parkland school shooting. Bizarrely, Attorney General Bondi said yesterday of the settlement of the lawsuit, This Department of Justice believes that the 2nd Amendment is not a second-class right.
She added, And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.
These people are both irrational and delusional.
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Donnie Bonespur
Trump is after the penny now. He ordered the Department of the Treasury to stop minting them after they're done with the current run of the smallest denomination of money in the United States of America. I'll miss the penny. I also wonder how we'll pay for things in change. Will all prices be marked up to the nearest nickel? That'll be a drag. Or will cash soon be completely abolished? In that case the 100th part of an American dollar will still exist bit it, as with all other forms of currency, will only exist as a virtual construct? Well, given how the environment is being destroyed we may not have any need of money in the not too distant future.
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Pickles here! R.Paul and I talked a bit about how COVID-19 vaccine access will be limited starting this fall, leaving millions of people unable to get the new booster, despite no change in the data for SARS-CoV-2 and its health impact on people of all ages, or how anyone, including those who have asymptomatic COVID-19, can still end up with Long COVID. This is part of the anti-vaccine and general anti-science policy of the current administration's Department of Health and Human Services and it puts all of us in danger, especially coupled with the muscle removed to have children vaccinated against childhood diseases. This is a policy of chaos and cruelty toward the most vulnerable members of society enacted by people who are misguided crackpots or who just don't give a rat's ass about the consequences of their actions.
As a breather in between the chaos, we looked at the ads in a 1979. comic book. X ray specs, smoke pellets, spy kits! A lot of stuff that promised much, but oh boy, would disappoint a kid when they received it in the mail. Then there were the ads that promised maps to find buried treasure, worth billions! You'd be better off ordering the plastic dog poop!
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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