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An Inconvenient Truth
The Right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
It’s pretty straightforward, but it sure is inconvenient. I mean, not for us since we’re the “people” in question; but rather for those that would like to see Americans dependent on the government’s handouts. Which is for me what gun control really comes down to; a dependency issue. The people in positions of power don’t want to just take away your guns, they want to take away your ability to choose pretty much anything. They have to start with your guns because it is damn difficult to tell a man with a rifle what he can and can’t do.
It really is an issue of control. I have often said that of late, the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is what aspects of your life they want to control. I am obviously not okay with this, as I am a semi-intelligent adult, I feel as though I’m capable of making my own decisions. For instance, national health care? Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather choose the care provider that I go to. Yes, I know my choices are limited by my health insurance, but I still get to pick. Social Security? Like that’ll be around when I’m ready to retire. How about you give me the money I’m pissing down the drain on SS, and let me invest in something else, like an IRA? Gay marriage? Who fucking cares? Let ’em get married, it’d probably be good for the economy anyway; all those queens would have lavish weddings at expensive hotels. Smoking bans? Don’t want ’em. I quit smoking a while ago, and I still hate smoking bans. Let the market determine where you can smoke and where you can’t. You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I hate the anti-smoking Gestapo as much as I hate the gunbanners.
The point of all the above ranting is quite simple. I’m rather tired of the government telling me (and people like me) that some things are too dangerous for me, or that I’m not smart enough to save my money, that certain people can’t marry, or that my rifles and handguns are a threat to safety.
After all that ranting, I really wish I had a whiz-bang conclusion for this, but I sadly don’t. I see the government infringing more and more on the individual’s ability to live his or her life as they damn well please, and it concerns me. It also frightens me, as more and more people cry out for new laws and more protection from the Almighty Nanny State.
And while the Nanny State is trying to pass silly-ass laws about imaginary “Assault Weapons”; or writing resolutions in the House to call the President a doody-head, our borders are porous, we’re at war, and there are bigass potholes in a lot of our roads. If the government would stop worrying about maintaining their own power and controlling my life; and would start worrying about things that actually matter who knows? We might actually accomplish something.
How would John Wayne Shave
Nice blog over there at the Pirate King’s place. I think I’ll be adding him to my blog-roll.
New additions
To my slowly growing blogroll. I’ve got Cowboy Blob, whose caption contest made me spew coffee on my keyboard, and Anthroblogology. Even though his blog’s name is impossible to type on the first try, he’s a good read.
And he likes the Colts.
Get your jollies
I found it on some other blogger’s site, I just don’t bloody remember who it was. So to whomever I’m ripping off, I’m sorry.
The satirical piece did make me thing of something though. I have some friends who are in favor of gun control, but what me to take them shooting. Of course I will as I’m hoping to change their opinions. They’re sort of like the real version of the person in the story – while they’re not a fan of guns in general, they’re fascinated by the concept of firearms and curious about what draws me to them.
People like that are an opportunity to create some new shooters. Especially if you give them something cool to play with.
Wisdom of the Duke, Feb 23
Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk too much. – John Wayne
Choose your words carefully. “Even the fool when he is quiet is considered wise”.
Also, by following this advice it gives you plenty of mental prep time if you ever need to deliver a pithy “James Bond-style” one liner.
Musing on the new AWB
While I desperately hope that this new AWB (HR 1022 – oh the irony) will not pass into law; I just read the text for the first time and I was struck by a number of odd provisions on things that will become illegal.
- My Walther P22 – since it wasn’t purchased in Kalifornistan, it has a threaded barrel. Illegal.
- A Broomhandle Mauser – as it accepts a magazine in somewhere other than the pistol grip.
- All AR style pistols, including the Kel-Tec pistol. Same problem as the Mauser.
- Due to some interesting language, they managed to nail the SKS without actually nailing the SKS. And you certainly can’t modify it to get detachable magazines.
- The folding stock mod for 10/22s. There isn’t any language in the bill that says “Oh yeah, this doesn’t apply to your .22s.”
- This bill even would affect C&R collectors, as it nails basically any semi-automatic rifle designed for “military purposes”, and even includes the Dragunov (bastards!).
That’s all that really jumped out at me. I’m going to go the opposite route of everyone who is stockpiling ARs and hi-caps – I’m going to stockpile military bolt actions and ammo. Because you know that “Sniper Rifles” are next.
Silly little bullets
“A .22 in the eye beats a .45 in the forearm” was the response that I was given by a 20+ year Coast Guard warrant officer when I had the cojones to ask him about the relative stopping power of the 9mm that we were using. What he was saying to me was that shot placement was the critical factor in puttingbadguys where they belong.
I love it when people talk about “stopping power”; it’s one of the subjects in the gun world where thousands of pages have been written and yet very little has been said. I’m not an expert on stopping power, and I’m certainly not going to say that “bullet X stopsbadguys better than bullet Y”; that’s just asking for trouble.
Ambulance Driver’s post on the Mechanism of Injury got me thinking about how a handgun bullet actually kills a person (I’m leaving rifle bullets out of this one). You’ll note I said “kill” and not “stop”; while everyone agrees that the purpose of a defensive shooting is to “stop” the fight, the most efficient way to “stop” someone is to make them DRT. Plus, saying “kill” as opposed to “stop” is so delightfully un-PC that it makes me a wee-bit happier than I should be. However, I should note that “killing” your assailant does you no good if he dies from slowly bleeding to death after clubbing you into oblivion with a 2×4. So, if I say “kill” I mean “Kill dead right there”.
The question of how a handgun bullet kills someone is best looked at by examining the human anatomy. The body is an extremely efficient machine for moving oxygen to the brain so the brain can send nervous signals to the body. Disrupting the Central Nervous system (spine, brain) will generally produce a stop. The brain cannot operate without a steady flow of oxygenated blood cells, which are supplied by the heart and lungs. Additionally, hits on major arteries (such as the femoral) produce rapid blood loss, which will eventually shut down the brain.
Based on the above, it’s a relatively safe assumption that the most efficient way to produce a DRT badguy is to hit either the heart, lungs, spine, or brain. This is the basis for the primary target zone on human assailants being “center of mass” – this also happens to be where the heart, lungs and part of the spine is located. We’ll temporarily remove theheadshot from the equation, and consider only COM shots for now.
To reach one those vital pieces of tissue, you must have a bullet that penetrates enough. If your round won’t go deep enough (sometimes through arms, leather jackets and other mediums), it’s not going to get the job done. So…penetration is important. Of course, even if you penetrate deep enough, you need to hit something important – the best way of increasing your chances to do that would be to use a larger diameter bullet. If you have two bullets: Bullet X is .32 inches indiamter , and Bullet Y is .45 inches in diameter, and each bullet penetrates tissue to a depth of 10 inches, (assuming a perfectly tubular cavity) then Bullet Y is going to be a better choice. It crushes a wider diameter of tissue for each inch of penetration, thus increasing your chances of putting a hole in something valuable.
So, it would seem that I’m advocating using the biggest bullet you can that penetrates deep enough to get the job done. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I’m saying. But I’m going to add the caveat that it doesn’t matter how big your bullet is if you can’t hit a goddamn thing with it.
Which brings me to my final point, and if you’ve read my blog before it’s a familiar drum for me to beat. Practice. Practice. Practice. If you’re going to carry a gun for self-defense, practice with it. Get some training. ShootIDPA . Shoot cans. Shoot shoot shoot shoot. If you’ve got a different gun for home defense than you do for carry, practice with them both. Practice your draw. GET TRAINING. In the off chance that you actually do need to deposit some high-velocity particles into a person’s main deck, you need to hit them for it to count.
John Wayne carried a .45, and thank to the magic of movies, he rarely missed. In Big Jake, he gives his “grandson” a Remington O/U Derringer. What would John Wayne do? He’d use the biggest gun that he could to place accurate hits onbadguys.
58 Remington in .45 Colt
I have a few firearms. I enjoy shooting all my guns; simply because the act of squeezing a trigger and sending rounds downrange makes me happy. Doesn’t matter if it’s a .22 or a .45, I’ll shoot it. It’s no lie to say that I enjoy some guns more than others, for instance my Walther P22 gets shot a lot, as does my Taurus Tracker .357. Today I’m going to talk about one the guns that just gives me a very unmanly case of the giggles every time I haul it out to the range. That gun is my Cabela’s purchased <a href=”http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templates/product/standard-item.jsp?_DARGS=/cabelas/en/common/catalog/item-link.jsp_A&_DAV=MainCatcat602007-cat20817_TGP&id=0006195210082a&navCount=2&podId=0006195&parentId=cat20817&masterpathid=&navAction=push&catalogCode=UG&rid=&parentType=index&indexId=cat20817&hasJS=true” title=”’58 Remington clone, fitted with a Kirst Konverter. The Kirst allows me to fire .45 Colt out of the revolver instead of the traditional loose powder and ball you’d have to normally run through the pistol.
Some folks like to remove the black powder loading lever, replace it with an ejector rod, and then cut a loading gate into the powder shield on the frame so that you can load and unload the revolver like a single action Colt. I was going to do that, until I saw Pale Rider for the first time in a while. If you haven’t seen it, Clint uses a ’58 Remington cartridge conversion, which he reloads by dropping the empty cylinder and placing a fresh cylinder in the frame. I figured “If it’s good enough for Clint Eastwood, it’s good enough for me.” So, to reload the ’58, I have to partially lower the black powder loading lever, put the revolver at half-cock, pop the cylinder into my hand, and dump the empties. It sounds more complicated on paper than it actually is. While it’s not SUPER DUPER FAST, it takes me less time to reload the ’58 in this manner than it does to shuck the empties out of my SAA clone.
Now, all of the above makes the gun fun and interesting from a historical/western fanboy point of view, but what makes it so fun to shoot? I am rather glad you asked. The first time I rolled the gun out to the range, I was marginally worried that the Kirst Konverter was going to blow up in my face (it didn’t); I was also pretty sure that the pistol wouldn’t group worth a damn.
I was wrong on all counts. Not only did it not blow up, but it groups fantastically well.
Link to image of group (warning – huge image!)
As you can see from the above photo; it groups really well at 10 yards. It also has hardly any recoil to speak of, the long barrel and plow-handle grips really do quite a bit for compensating the pretty mild buck of the .45 Colt cowboy loads. I’d love to try it out with some decent .45 hollowpoints, but I’m only supposed to use it with “cowboy” loadings, and I don’t really feel like blowing up one of my favorite guns.
All in all, it’s a gas to shoot, makes a lot of noise and smoke, and better yet? It shoots right where I want the bullets to go.
Oh, and it’s hell on marauding pumpkins.
Survival Airguns
This is the 2nd from last in my series of Survival Long-guns. I’m going to do survival pistols later, but I wanted to cover the last sort of long arm that you could use in a survival situation.
This weapon is the lowly (even lower than the .22LR) air rifle. Now, this is where people start looking at me like I was just released from the loony bin, because I did advocate an air rifle for survival. I’m going to qualify that statement though, so don’t start beating down my door with the torches and Frankenstein rakes just yet. For survival, the high-power air rifle has a very useful, if limited roll. It would certainly not be adequate for defense against varmints of the two legged variety; however even the lowly Wal-Mart model Crossman air rifles are more than capable of dropping a jackrabbit. That is of course to say nothing of the the models that push a .177 caliber pellet up to 1500 FPS.
As stated above, the air rifle has a limited purpose for survival. It would be strictly regulated to a hunting weapon, useful for filling the pot with small (jackrabbit and below) game with a minimum amount of noise and cost. For self-defense, you’d probably be better off with a thick tree bough instead of an air rifle; despite any British histrionics about them, they’re not generally lethal on adult humans.
So what are the advantages of an air rifle in a survival situation? Well, I’m glad you asked. Before I continue, the entire article from here on out presupposes that your air rifle is not one of the $40 Wal-Mart Specials; but rather one of the “serious” air-rifles that pushes a pellet out in the 1000fps range. I generally use Gamo as an example because their products are the ones with which I’m the most familiar.
Advantages
- Noise signature – as I mentioned in the entry on rimfire rifles, the ability to kill food without making a whole lot of noise would be valuable in a survival situation for a multitude of reasons. You won’t spook other animals, or if you’re worried about bipedal varmints, you’re less likely to give your position away.
- Ammo weight – .177 caliber pellets hardly weigh anything; you could easily pack thousands of rounds for your air rifle for the express purpose of adding rabbits to dinner.
- Maintenance – an air rifle requires even less maintenance than your average .22LR. Basically, keep dirt and crap out of your rifle and you’re fine.
- Save other ammo – In a survival situation, your supply of “other” ammo is going to be a precious resource. If you can avoid having to blast rabbits and squirrels with it, that’s a good thing.
Now, I’m not saying that you should leave your AR15/AK/SKS/SMLE/10-22/Carbine at home and take an air rifle, because it’s completely a niche tool. What I’m saying is that if you’ve got the time and the room to take one, it’s not going to hurt you. Sort of an afterthought, if you’re evacuating with your family, you could quite easily issue one of the children the air rifle; it’s light and your offspring isn’t likely to accidentally kill you/themselves with it.