Beretta’s having a sale for Black Friday – get your guns and gear while the getting is good!
Boycott HS Precision
As I mentioned in the show summary post, last night a disturbing development was brought to my attention: namely that HS Precision, a manufacturer of high-end rifles had printed a glowing endorsement/recommendation letter from Lon Horiuchi. Here’s the actual back cover of the HS Precision catalog, complete with the letter. Click the image to make it larger.
Now, HS Precision is free to run their business as they want, and to receive endorsements or pay people to endorse their products, no matter how I feel about it. It’s their right to conduct their business as they please.
Going hand in hand with that is my right to say that printing an endorsement from Lon Horiuchi, the sniper who managed to shoot an innocent woman holding her baby in the face – the same Lon Horiuchi who Jeff Cooper wanted charged with murder – is a poor business decision, and a business decision that guarantees that I will never buy a rifle from HS Precision.
Honestly, I think this is in incredibly poor taste – no matter what you think about the guy, he’s controversial enough that a ringing endorsement from him is going to go a long way towards damaging your credibility amongst the pro-gun community.
I’m very disappointed with the lack of judgment from HS Precision – and I can assure you that if I’m in the market for a good rifle, it won’t be an HS Precision rifle. If they were to print a retraction and run away from this endorsement, then I would change my tune, but until then – buy FN Herstal.
I’d like to thank TD and Ry Jones for bringing this to my attention.
Update: David Codrea confirms that this is definitely not a hoax.
This entry posted at the Gun Nuts Blog under “Boycott HS Precision“.
Gun Nuts Last Night: Epiphanies and HS Precision
Last night’s show was great. Click the link to listen to the show; and you won’t be disappointed. We started the show a little off topic, because I had received an email from TD about HS Precision printing a ringing endorsement of their rifles from Lon Horiuchi. Yes, that Lon Horiuchi. I’ll post more details on that in a follow-up post, but please click the show link to listen to the discussion.
After that, we talked about “ah-ha” moments in shooting and politics – those moments when it all came together. Whether it was about politics or the shooting sports, having our listeners call in and share their moments with us is always a pleasure. As usual, you can listen to the show in the embedded player, or click this link to download the .mp3 file of the show.
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We’re real excited about the upcoming weeks on Gun Nuts, as we have quite a few good shows in the pipeline. You should really check out last night’s show though, I feel like in terms of content and callers, it was one of the best.
Thank you, NRA
I just received an email from Tom Hughes, the NRA Bianchi Cup coordinator – and I want to publicly say “thank you” to him for responding to my venting about my struggles with NRA’s website.
I will personally make sure that I voice your concerns to the NRA Webmaster, and do everything that we can to make it easier for all to use the Website. Until that happens, feel free to contact me directly, I will make sure I give anyone any information they need. The only way we can make this sport and all competitions improve and grow is for ALL of us to step up to the plate, and put our minds and experience together.
Like I said, I feel very strongly about the shooting sports, and about making sure that we get more and more people into the shooting sports. This kind of prompt response from NRA is the sort of thing that makes me feel very good about the future of our sport.
Tonight on Gun Nuts: Lightbulb moments
Have you ever had that moment as a shooter when the lightbulb just “went on”? When you realized something that you were doing that could make you shoot better? Or maybe it was when you realized that you wanted to carry – tell us about your lightbulb moment.
You can listen live tonight at 9pm Eastern time – just visit www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts to join the conversation. You can sit in the chat room that runs with the show, or you can call in and share your shooting epiphany live on the air at (347) 539-5436. Again, that’s tonight at 9pm Eastern at www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts!
Blackwater USA Shoot House
Because I can only take so much of Robb’s goading, here is my run through the shoot house at Blackwater USA.
I was able to get a screengrab of the best shot in that video, where I’ve got two brass in the air – I played with it in photoshop to give it just the right “comic book” look.
It’s kind of interesting watching that playback, because a bunch of stuff happens on that video that I don’t even remember. Around 40 seconds, I lose a bunch of time because I muff a reload, and then the gun didn’t go all the way into battery, because I screwed up the reload. Really didn’t remember that at all.
It is nice being able to watch yourself shoot – you can see all the bad things that you’re doing and make mental notes to correct them with more practice in the future. Of course, my big problem is shooting hostages.
Dear NRA Action Pistol Coordinator
This weekend, I was looking up information on NRA Action Pistol, specifically I was trying to find information on the different competitive classes – Open, Metallic and Production. I was intensely frustrated by this, as the information on the website at www.nrahq.org is obtuse at best, and irritating at worst. As an example, to find the rulebook for the game, I first click on “Competitive Shooting” and then on NRA Action Pistol, which seemed like a pretty logical path. Unfortunately, the page I landed on, while descriptive of NRA Action Pistol to a small extent, did not contain a link to the competition rules.
Next, I tried clicking on “Getting Started”, and then on the Action Pistol Shooting link on that page. While the resulting page was more descriptive than the previous Action Pistol Shooting page that I had landed on, it still didn’t fully explain the difference in competitive classes in such a way that a new shooter could know what gear and guns to bring to their local club match and be allowed to shoot.
Finally, I clicked on Rule Books and Scoring Materials, which I will confess is a logical place for the action pistol shooting rulebook to be kept, and I was right, because there it was: a link to the .pdf file of the rule book, which I gleefully clicked. Much to my dismay, this opened an index .pdf with references to other .pdf files which when you click on the index returns the error of “file not found”. Finally, to find the information I wanted, I had to deduce from the “file not found” error what the URL of the .pdf file I was looking for was, and manually type it into my browser. Needless to say, this was a tremendously frustrating experience for me, and I can only imagine how frustrating it would be for someone who isn’t extremely interested in Action Pistol.
It would have been extremely simple to alleviate my frustration by placing a link to the full .pdf rulebook on either of the pages labeled “NRA Action Pistol Shooting”, and not having to hunt and peck through three different categories to find the info I need. Now, I’m not trying to rip you guys here – obviously I was extremely frustrated when I was searching for the info, but I really do feel strongly about web sites being user friendly. As a comparison, it took me all of five seconds to find the rulebook for USPSA, and about the same to find the rulebook for IDPA.
Now, I have a big ol’ soft spot for NRA Action Pistol and the Bianchi Cup, which is why I’m disappointed to see how difficult it is for new shooters to get information on the sport. I do love pistol shooting, and it’s important to me and the future of our sport to see that more people pick up pistols and get out and shoot some courses of fire. That’s why I really feel strongly that this information should practically be sitting in the laps of the casual shooter who sees an episode of Shooting USA and thinks that “that Bianchi stuff” looks fun.
This entry has been crossposted at Gun Nuts: TNG under Bianchi Cup and Shooting Sports – check out the Gun Nuts Blog for the latest info on the action pistol games, from IPSC to Airguns.
National Shooting Sports Foundation Blog
Our friends at NSSF are taking some technological steps to fight media bias and inaccurate reporting, which we’ve been seeing a lot more of lately than usual. One of their steps was to create a media resource on so-called “assault weapons”, which is a pretty handy reference guide to use if you’re trying to explain to someone the difference between the mythical assault weapon and an actual fully-automatic weapon. Obviously, with the potential for a new assault weapons ban, it’s important to be able to educate people on what an “assault weapon” really is, and why a ban on an imaginary and loosely defined class of weapons is a largely ineffectual and emotionally based gesture.
The second item from NSSF is the new blog that they’ve started – called Aiming for Accuracy. One of the authors is a friend and all around good guy. I hope that the NSSF blog will grow into a valuable resource for gun owners, shooters, and hunters to use to help educate our fellow gun owners as well as the all important “middle ground” demographic.
One of the things that excites me about NSSF starting up these pro-gun and informational resources is that so far, NSSF hasn’t been demonized in the media like NRA has. While you and I know that NRA isn’t some evil right-wing lobby trying to put guns in the hands of 8 year-old children, you wouldn’t know that from watching CNN or MSNBC. I once in a political discussion cited a fact I had pulled from NRA’s website, and crosschecked on my own. To my shock, my liberal friend/opponent said “that’s from NRA, I don’t believe anything they say” and then simply refused to hear any further discussion. Now, while that’s obviously a sign of a close-minded person, the media demonization of NRA is something that we have to deal with on a regular basis. For the record, I’m not saying that NRA isn’t a valuable resource – they’re the most effective political organization at protecting our right to keep and bear arms, and they have been and remain my primary source of information on 2nd Amendment issues. NRA has and is doing a fantastic job out there, and I want them to keep up by all means necessary.
But that doesn’t change that I’m glad to see NSSF stepping in and providing these resources; the message is the same, but at least until the media decides to crucify NSSF as well, the messenger is a little different – and I’ll take any advantage I can get.
You might be a gun nut if
You pop open your glove compartment in your car and find a loaded up magazine for your Beretta Jetfire, and your reaction is “I thought that was in the other car”.
What I did instead of shooting
As previously mentioned, I went to the Purdue/IU game, which Purdue won by 52 points (awesome). Here are the highlights in pictorial. Click any picture for the fullsize version.
Here we are getting ready to leave for the game. It was 7am, and I was on my 2nd cup of coffee. 10,000 Terror Points for the horrible rictus.
It was pretty cold at the game. How cold, you ask? Well, at 9am when we got there, it was about 25 degrees.
Most of us were pretty well bundled up, as evidenced by the next couple of images.
That’s our buddy from college, Dan. Dan was not as cold as I was.
That’s my foot. Like I said, cold.
Now, without comment, some action shots from the game itself.
Final score? 62-10, Purdue.
Hot dogs eaten? 3. Cups of coffee consumed: too many to count.