Eagle

I don't have to look it up. I'm very familiar with the group, and with their "statistics." The Gun Violence Archive is one of the groups that dramatically inflates the statistics by claiming all sorts of things as "mass shootings" that aren't really mass shooting. They and Moms Demand Action have no credibility with anyone who has actually investigated their claims. Let's take just one as an example. At random, I chose as my first pick a "mass shooting" on Feb 20, 2020, in Caldwell, Idaho. Look up the details, and you find that it was a police officer-involved shooting, in which at least one of the dead was a criminal perpetrator who was shot by the police. One of the injured was a police officer. You can argue all you want that, by the numbers, it qualifies as a "mass shooting," but when the average person on the street hears "mass shooting" they aren't thinking police shooting bad guys, they immediately envision a mall shooter or a school shooter.

I can't figure out whether you're joking or you're serious, so I have to point out that this is incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AR-15_style_rifle https://www.ammoland.com/2016/04/ar-15-rifle-historical-time-line/ https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-complete-history-of-the-ar-15-rifle

To you. Other folks may have different priorities.

There's a big difference between "stock" and "period correct." The two terms are not mutually inclusive.

Wheels are bolt-on and don't alter the vehicle. Run whatever you think looks good. To a purist, "stock" is what came on your vehicle from the factory -- which, for you, would be those steel rims. If you ever entered it in a car show that would be judged on originality, that's what you should have on it. Otherwise, pick any Jeep wheel you like. The "correct" factory option for your year would be the 10-spoke turbine wheels. Allow to give you an example. As I have mentioned on occasion, before the XJ and MJ existed I was into AMC Javelins and AMXs. Went to a show once and the contest for best-in-show easily came down to two AMXs. The deciding factor? The '68 Javelin and AMX didn't have a sunshade over the instrument cluster, the '69 did. One of the two was a '68, but the owner had installed a '69 dash cowl because otherwise you couldn't read the instruments on a sunny day. Completely bolt-on modification, could have been reversed in five minutes. But he left the '69 dash cowl on the '68 AMX, and that's what tipped the scale. He lost. My '87 Comanche came with steel wheels. I'm running it with '90 5-spoke Jeep alloys at the moment. When it's back on the road, I'll get new tires on proper 10-spoke alloys and run those. They're correct for the year and model, but they were an option on Pioneers and mine didn't come from the factory with that particular option. Close enough for me, and can be reversed easily (if you can find a set of the 9-slot steel rims with the stainless trim rings in good condition.

Once again, read Lawdog's blog (to which I posted a link). Gun owners have been whacked with one "compromise" after another since 1934. The anti-gun side hasn't given up anything. Each and every time they impose "just this one" anti-gun law, as soon as it makes it into law they're on television saying "It's a good first step." And next year they're back, looking for the next incremental restriction on a Constitutional right that says in its own test that it's not supposed to be restricted. (What did you think "Shall not be infringed" means?)

The problem, however, is not "evil" guns. The problem is evil, crazy people. But the political impetus remains focused on attacking the inanimate objects (guns) that are used as tools by the evil, crazy people who commit evil, crazy acts. Look around the world. What happens in Europe, where guns are not as prevalent as in the U.S. -- people who want to kill other people continue to do so, but they do it with bombs, or cars, or trucks. A number of years ago there was an attack by a lunatic on a school in Germany. It wasn't a mass shooting, however, because the weapon of choice was ... a home-made flamethrower. Closer to home, one of the earliest school massacres in the U.S. was Bath Consolidated School in Bath Township, Michigan. The date was May 18, 1927. The toll was 44 killed and 58 injured. This was NOT a mass shooting. The weapon of choice? Dynamite. The assailant (who had the decency to also kill himself) mined the school with dynamite. The number of deaths and injuries would have been much higher except that he wasn't especially adept with dynamite. The school had two wings. He mined both wings, but only the charges on one side went off. Fast forward to Columbine, the first and best-known of the "modern" school shootings. April 20, 1999. 15 people killed, 21 people injured. Pretty bad, wasn't it. Guess what, folks: the guns were Plan B. The two losers at Columbine had planted propane tank bombs around the school, and their initial plan was to blow up as many people as possible, then sit on a hill overlooking the school and shoot as many bomb survivors as possible. Fortunately they, too, were lousy bomb makers and their bombs didn't go off, so they resorted to just shooting people. Experts who examined the bombs estimated that, if they had gone off, the death toll would have been in the hundreds. So let's ban the guns. Banning the guns is not the answer, because evil, crazy people who want to kill other people will find ways to do it. The issue is that evil, crazy people are the problem, and our politicians don't have the courage and the conviction to address that. I'm old enough to remember that in the 1960s and 1970s the federal and state governments went on a big push to de-institutionalize a lot of people who had been confined to mental facilities. I served for a number of years on the board of directors of a mental health halfway house. Our facility existed purely because the state was closing down two major mental hospitals and pushing the residents out into the world -- and they weren't prepared to exist in the world. Those two mental health hospitals have never, as far as I know, been repurposed. The buildings are still there, mostly empty and deteriorating. The problem isn't the guns. You can argue all you want that the solution is to keep guns away from crazy people. I submit that the solution is to keep crazy people away from guns. And you DON'T do that by taking guns away from people who aren't crazy.

Maybe because your statistic is so wildly inflated that it would make even Moms Demand Action blush. They claim 223 mass shootings from 2009 through 2019. My numbers show 81 legitimate mass shooting incidents in that time period. And you claim there is -- on average -- one mass shooting EVERY DAY? For eleven years that would be 4,018 mass shootings. Didn't happen. Responsibility? How am I responsible because a whacked out kid murdered his mother and stole her guns to go shoot up his elementary school (Sandy Hook)? How am I responsible because Broward County cooked up a deal between the school district and the sheriff's office to systematically under-charge and under-report criminal activity in the schools in order to make it appear that the schools were cutting down on crime (Parkland)? How am I responsible because the Air Force failed to report a courts martial conviction that should have prevented a nut job from buying a firearm (Sutherland Springs)? How am I responsible because a guy who had NO criminal history or record and NO record of psychiatric problems decided to shoot a bunch of people from a hotel window (Harvest Festival)? I had nothing to do with any of those. There is nothing I could have done to prevent any of them. At least two of them (Parkland and Sutherland Springs) might well have been prevented if various governmental entities had done their jobs. But they didn't. It's questionable whether or not Sandy Hook could have been prevented, and it's NOT questionable that Las Vegas could NOT have been prevented. So what's MY responsibility? Why should I be punished for things over which I had no control or influence, while those who DID have some control failed miserably in doing their jobs in two (maybe three) of those four incidents? It's widely stated (but I don't know how accurately) that there are over 80,000 gun laws in this country. How can any sane person think that passing one MORE law, that makes something that's probably already in violation of three or five or ten of those existing laws, even more illegal is going to solve anything? There's a law that makes it illegal to lie on the federal BATFE Form 4473 that everyone has to fill out when buying a gun from a dealer. I don't have the numbers at hand but, a few years ago, the Attorney General was asked why only about 2 percent of the known cases of people lying on that form were followed up and prosecuted. His answer was "We don't have the resources." So the government doesn't have the resources to enforce the laws we already have -- the laws that are intended to accomplish just what you want to accomplish -- but that same government thinks that another law (that they obviously don't have the resources to enforce) will magically solve the [alleged] problem. That's what we call insanity.

Even one is one too many, but it's impossible to prevent ALL criminal or ALL evil acts. But the question arises: how many bullets are you referring to? What's your source of data? According to one of the [alleged] grass roots "gun safety" (i.e. anti-gun) advocacy groups, there have been 223 mass shootings in the United States since 2009. That sounds like a lot ... but it isn't really true. To most of us, a "mass shooting" means an incident wherein a shooter (or multiple shooters) randomly attack(s) a large venue and shoots people unrelated to the shooter(s), mostly for the purpose of killing as many people as possible. This would include school shootings, mall shootings, nightclub attacks, and disgruntled employee attacks. But I've been tracking such events, and there aren't anywhere near 223 of them in the U.S. since 2009. I believe the current definition of a mass shooting is an incident in which four or more people (excluding the shooter) are wounded or killed. According to my data (which may be missing one or two incidents, but I'm pretty close) shows that, since (and including) 2009 and through 2019 (to match Moms Demand Action's time frame) there have actually been 81 mass shootings. Why the discrepancy? Because they conflate data. They include gang shootings. They include police officer-involved shootings. They fudge the data. They do the same thing to inflate the number of school shootings. They have included as "school shootings" incidents such as a single .22 bullet (probably a stray) that shot a hole in the window of a school -- at night, when the building was unoccupied. They have included as "school shootings" incidents in which police officers have fired at suspects while on school property -- but the incidents didn't involve students, weren't in the school buildings, and no students were injured. And they complain that the pro-gun side won't have a "dialogue." It's hard to have a constructive dialogue when one side is an idealogue. They talk about "compromise," but compromise is supposed to mean that each side gives up something. In the gun control debate, the anti-gun side wants gun owners to do all the giving up, while they give up nothing. That's not compromise. There's a law enforcement officer in Texas who explains this far better than I can: https://thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-repost.html If we're honest, we should acknowledge that drunk drivers kill and injure orders of magnitude more people every year than mass shooters and school shooters together, yet there's no hue and cry to ban automobiles. And people who drive drunk continue to be "punished" with a slap on the wrist in many courts around the country. If the gun control advocates are really interested in saving lives, why aren't they going after drunk drivers? Why aren't they proposing bans on "assault automobiles"?

Nope. The anti-gun activists are in it for the long game. Their approach is "creeping incrementalism" -- divide and conquer. They regard AR-15s (and their ilk) as the low-hanging fruit. Those are easy to fool lots of people about -- they look like military rifles, so we'll call them "assault weapons" (a made-up term that has no consistent definition), and ban those first. Once those are gone, they'll come after something else next. And then something else. In the end, if we're lucky we might be allowed to own a single-shot .22. "Assault weapons"? The now-expired federal assault weapons ban defined a, "assault weapon" as having a detachable magazine and one other feature from a list. One of the items on the list was a protruding pistol grip, so that was it for AR-15s. That led to the so-called "post ban" AR-15s, which had no bayonet lug (gotta cut down those drive-by bayonettings), no flash hider, no threaded barrel, no folding or telescoping stock, no vertical foregrip. Many states copied that definition; my home state of Connecticut was one of them. Connecticut didn't repeal their assault weapon ban when the federal ban died, so we were stuck with post-ban configured AR-15s. Until the Sandy Hook school shooting. In the aftermath, New York state passed their "SAFE Act," and Connecticut revised the definition of an "assault weapon." The new definition is: To cut that down, it means that (in addition to adding a LOT of firearms by specific name, including handguns, the list of "evil" features constituting an "assault weapon" was reduced from two (detachable magazine plus one other) to one -- period, full stop. An AR-15 has a detachable magazine, so ALL AR-15s instantly became "assault weapons" when the governor signed the bill. All the formerly legal, not-an-assault-weapon "post-ban" configured AR-15s were suddenly "assault weapons." Then look at the bill that's being proposed in Arizona right now. Their proposed definition of "assault weapon" includes ALL semi-automatic rifles (yes, the Ruger ranch rifle and the Ruger 10/22), and all rifles with a fixed magazine capacity exceeding 10 rounds (hello, Winchester 9422 and Henry H001 lever action .22s). Arizona's proposed ban has a grandfather clause -- you can keep "assault weapons" you already own, but they have to be registered, and you would have to pass a new background check to keep the guns you already legally own. AND ... te registration would have to be renewed every year, with another background check for every annual renewal. When the definition is subject to change based on the whims of the political bloc in power, it's not a definition. What's happening in Arizona shows clearly that the end game isn't just scary-looking, evil black, AR-15s and other guns that look like (but aren't the same as) military weapons. The end game is all guns in civilian ownership. When you pick it up? Seriously, look at England. People have been prosecuted for using things like a steak knife for self defense when their homes were invaded.

Except that the sale to civilians of new machine guns was stopped entirely. Today we can only buy machine guns that were made prior to the cutoff. There aren't many "average citizens" who can afford the price of an actual Thompson "Chicago Typewriter." The $200 tax is a drop in the proverbial bucket.

The only reason there are firearms we cannot legally own is that the laws saying we can't own them have not yet been tested in court. As I posted above, until the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934, any American could buy any type of firearm he or she wanted. Including fully-automatic machine guns, and beyond. The language of the Second Amendment didn't change in 1934.

The celebration is premature. The proposed bill has NOT been defeated. It was not voted down. It was not voted at all -- the vote was to table it for a year and look at it again next year (which will, conveniently, be after the elections). Hmmm ...

An AR-15 cannot be converted into a full-auto M16 without replacing the entire fire control group and (I believe) modifying the lower receiver. It's like saying you can convert a half-ton pickup into a deuce-and-a-half ... all you need is enough replacement parts. It depends on what you're hunting, and whether or not you're good enough that you'll absolutely never EVER need a follow-up shot. However, as Jeep Driver and others have pointed out, the Second Amendment is not about hunting. The limits on what arms are protected by the Second Amendment are only beginning to be explored by the courts. A strict reading of the Second Amendment clearly says that there are not supposed to be any limits ... "Shall not be infringed." And, until 1934, there were no limits whatsoever. Anyone (who wasn't in prison at the time) could buy a machine gun, a mortar, a howitzer, or whatever he or she wanted. The concept that "Shall not be infringed" could be limited is relatively new in U.S. history. The militia is the People. The original Militia Acts date to 1792, and there is still a version on the books in federal law. Under the original Militia Acts of 1792, the law established that each militiaman had to supply his own firearm, and the law went on to specify what caliber that had to be (for uniformity, which is what "well regulated" meant.). That's functionally the equivalent of today requiring every able-bodied male to own an M16.

For a 4.0L swap, you also need at least the complete engine room wiring harness, and the ECU (under the hood in a '91 or newer, under the dashboard 87-90). You also need the high pressure fuel pump. For a 3.4L swap, there are multiple ways to go. You can leave everything as it is and run the 3.4L using the 2.8L ignition and carburetor (although it's a lousy carburetor); you can upgrade to a Weber carburetor setup; or you can grab the GM fuel injection for the 3.4L and run that as a stand-alone injection system.

In case you misunderstood ... he's not joking. Your grille IS upside down.

It's as much or as little an upgrade for the XJ as it is for the MJ. I've just never found the braking of any of my early (pre-HO) XJs or MJs to be so horrible that it was worth going through the aggravation of doing this purported "upgrade."

What engine? I assumed it's a 2.8L V6, but it could be a 2.5L I4 (That's "eye-four," not "fourteen")

Also, you would have to change the transmission, and the bellhusing, and very possibly the transfer case. Tip: For an '86, the better swap is to a GM 3.4L V6 out of a rear-wheel drive car like a Camaro or Firebird. It's the same basic block as the 2.8L that Jeep used in 1986, but it's a much more refined and improved version of the engine. It'll produce more power, run smoother, and isn't likely to punch a connecting rod through the side of the block if you look at it corss-eyed. The good thing about the 3.4L swap is that you get to keep your existing transmission, drive train, and accessories. You will need to add an external, electric fuel pump, but that's a worthwhile upgrade anyway. If you use the flywheel off the 2.8L, it has an eccentric weight because the 2.8L is externally balanced. The 3.4L doesn't need that eccentric weight, so you either use the 3.4L flywheel, or you have the 2.8L flywheel neutral balanced at an automotive machine shop.

You could measure the shocks and compare the mid-travel length with the mid-travel length for stock. That's a clue, but I wouldn't consider it conclusive. You can run 31x10.50 tires on factory wheels on an XJ with no lift at all. Same on an MJ. My '88 XJ is in the drveway with 31s on zero lift right now. Why? You "should" do it only if you can enumerate some specific benefit you'll achieve by going through that rather than just fixing the stock brakes. Bleed the clutch hydraulics. Pretty much the same.

Okay, I'm a bad person. No, make that I'm an evil person. Whatever. That there is funny!

To expand on this: The black wire you have is the only wire you need. The circuit is powered up, but has no ground for the relay. The horn button closes the ground circuit, actuating the horn relay.

Why does the speedometer read 20 MPH in this photo but it read zero in your first photo? Answer: Because you pulled the needle off and screwed it up. Why did you pull the needle? YYou DON'T need to pull the needle to "clock" the odometer.

You can't find a 5-speed Cherokee 4.0L in 4WD anywhere?

Yeah ... a.k.a. "Plug ... and play around"